Abominations: Selected Essays from a Career of Courting Self-Destruction

by Lionel Shriver

Indeed, searching for hidden offenses has become social media’s updated version of the Easter egg hunt.

The whole apparatus of delivering literature to its audience is signaling an intention to subject fiction to rigid ideological purity tests, unrelated to artistry, excellence, and even entertainment, that miss the point of what our books are for. Let’s see a little more courage, people—in the work and in the world.

Standardized lefty catchphrases are now routinely employed to test allegiance and to exclude people who fail the test. Boyers notes that cherished left-wing concepts like identity and inequality are now used “to label and separate the saved and the damned, the ‘woke’ and the benighted, the victim and the oppressor,” thereby “yielding not significant redress but a new wave of puritanism and a culture of suspicion.” This moral division of wheat from chaff sows confusion about the difference between “sponsoring injustice and simply living more or less modestly in an imperfect world.”