Well hey Toby Young liked it
Lionel Shriver wrote a thing in the Spectator a few days ago – a sadly prolix, bad-tempered, sneery, predictable thing, one that could have been written by anyone of that Tendency – Steve Bannon, Jordan Peterson, Grumpy McGrumpface, anyone. It’s a “what’s all this fuss about diversity you stupid snowflakes” piece, and it’s every bit as interesting as it sounds.
I’d been suffering under the misguided illusion that the purpose of mainstream publishers like Penguin Random House was to sell and promote fine writing.
Stop right there. That’s the very first sentence and already we’re in trouble, because that’s a crock, and she only said it for the sarcasm. The purpose of mainstream publishers is first of all to remain solvent; they want fine writing if they can get it without repelling buyers, but what they want ahead of anything else is writing that people want to buy.
And it’s all like that – stuffed with clichés and lacking actual thought and precision and clarity. The result, ironically, is pseudo-fine writing as opposed to the real thing. Kind of wannabe Mencken or Hitchens but actually just Milo.
A colleague’s forwarded email has set me straight. Sent to a literary agent, presumably this letter was also fired off to the agents of the entire Penguin Random House stable. The email cites the publisher’s ‘new company-wide goal’: for ‘both our new hires and the authors we acquire to reflect UK society by 2025.’ (Gotta love that shouty boldface.) ‘This means we want our authors and new colleagues to reflect the UK population taking into account ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social mobility and disability.’ The email proudly proclaims that the company has removed ‘the need for a university degree from nearly all our jobs’ — which, if my manuscript were being copy-edited and proof-read by folks whose university-educated predecessors already exhibited horrifyingly weak grammar and punctuation, I would find alarming.
Etc etc etc. You know what it says without having to read it. She may have a ghost of a point, in that publishers and others shouldn’t focus on demographic markers to the exclusion of substance, but then again that’s probably not what Penguin has in mind in the first place, is it, and Shriver probably knows that, doesn’t she.
Drunk on virtue, Penguin Random House no longer regards the company’s raison d’être as the acquisition and dissemination of good books. Rather, the organisation aims to mirror the percentages of minorities in the UK population with statistical precision. Thus from now until 2025, literary excellence will be secondary to ticking all those ethnicity, gender, disability, sexual preference and crap-education boxes. We can safely infer from that email that if an agent submits a manuscript written by a gay transgender Caribbean who dropped out of school at seven and powers around town on a mobility scooter, it will be published, whether or not said manuscript is an incoherent, tedious, meandering and insensible pile of mixed-paper recycling. Good luck with that business model. Publishers may eschew standards, but readers will still have some.
Blah blah blah ha ha ha except that’s a caricature, and too broad and sloppy to be really amusing.
The BBC reported on this item and got a response from Penguin:
A Penguin Random House spokesperson said: “Our company-wide goal is driven by our strong belief that the books we publish should reflect the diverse society in which we live.
“After all, books shape our culture, and this should not be driven only by people who come from a narrow section of society.
“We acquire all our writers on talent, first and foremost.
“However, in setting this goal we recognised that we needed to do more in actively seeking out talented writers from communities under-represented on the nation’s bookshelves.”
It’s a matter of seeking out, and of correcting the unconscious tendency to prefer people more like Oneself. It’s not a matter of Shriver’s snide parody.
The Guardian reports today:
Lionel Shriver has been dropped from the judging panel for a writing competition run by magazine Mslexia, after the author slammed publisher Penguin Random House for its diversity and inclusion policies.
Debbie Taylor, editorial director and founder of Mslexia, said that Shriver’s comments in a piece for the Spectator magazine were “not consistent with Mslexia’s ethos and mission” and would “alienate the very women we are trying to support”. Consequently, Shriver would no longer be a judge on their annual short story competition, she said.
At first blush that looks like punitive censorship, but then again if you were entering a writing competition would you want Shriver judging your entry? Would you suspect she would apply criteria that had more to do with snobbery than with quality? Or to put it another way that snarly piece comes across as just mean first of all, as childishly insulting, as hostile. Trumpish. Hostility might not be the best quality for a writing contest judge.
Shriver’s comments were widely condemned over the weekend – one author called the piece “deeply embarrassing” – but gained support from journalist Toby Young.
Ah yes, Toby Young – well he’s another, isn’t he, another of those sneery types who aren’t as clever as they think they are.
It takes a lot of talent to be a good curmudgeon. There aren’t many of them.
For some reason, whenever people (publishers, employers, college admission boards…any people who make decisions about other people) talk about diversity, the usual suspects always jump up and down to shout and scream about “standards”. The unstated, but obvious, assumption is that there are no people who can meet the same standard and fit the diversity requirements.
The assumption that affirmative action means “hire unqualified women” because, of course, a woman won’t be able to be as qualified as the man that “should have” had the job. “hire unqualified minorities” because. of course. you won’t be able to find any that are qualified. So now, “publish untalented [fill in the blank here]” because of course there are no talented…women…people of color…disabled individuals…LGBTQ….etc etc etc
iknklast @1,
Agreed. Another unstated assumption is that the status quo recruiting process is perfect at (1) soliciting applications from the best candidates; and (2) selecting the best candidate from the applicant pool.
We know that (2) is false. There’s all sorts of studies that show that hiring decision makers who would all swear to you (no doubt sincerely in most cases) that they “don’t have a racist bone in their body”/”have a daughter”/”some of my best friends are LGBTQ”/etc. nevertheless demonstrate bias against minority candidates.
If (2) is false, it stands to reason that (1) is false as well, and there may well be evidence on that front as well, I’m just not as familiar with it. But it’s sufficient for my purposes to say that (2) is false, and therefore it is possible to improve diversity and not just maintain, but actually improve quality — and that’s without getting into the inherent benefits of diversity itself.
Anti-diversity types want to portray the issue as a conflict between themselves, as the valiant defenders of standards and fairness, and diversity proponents, who are so soft-hearted that they are willing to sacrifice standards (but not honest enough to admit it!). But it’s the supposedly rigorous defenders of truth and fairness who are denying the evidence. (Possibly out of some emotional need to believe that the process that put them on top is self-evidently a good and fair one.) Well sorry, but as they like to say, “facts don’t care about your feelings.”
This is appalling. I never had any particular positive feelings about her or her work, but I thought she was on the right side of thoughtfulness and scholarship–how can anyone with an intellectual reputation to protect be both so ignorant and so nasty in print? There aren’t even any ‘gray areas’ or ‘open to interpretation’ here–both common sense and research indicate that ‘affirmative action’ to increase the representation of previously-underrepresented demographic groups improves the quality of whatever you’re recruiting for, by reducing the number of poorer-quality candidates in the overrepresented group.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047272714001480
It’s worth remembering that there’s strong evidence of a diversity crisis in scientific peer review. It’s not uncommon these days for authors’ names to be removed from the copy sent to reviewers.
It’s worth noting because peer review is supposed to be the ultimate in objective quality assessment (it’s not, it’s really not) but exactly the same old biases come out in studies.
“University-educated predecessors”? Have copy-editing and proof-reading really been jobs that, historically speaking, required a university degree? That seems unlikely to me. It’d be interesting to see the posted requirements for those positions from the ’90s, ’80s, or earlier. If my guess is correct, I wonder if there is any evidence that books published “back then” had significantly higher error rates than now.
Karellen
Now you say it, you’re probably right. I know five people who do proof-reading freelance and they are all librarians or ex-librarians or have librarianship degrees. I happen to know quite a lot of librarians because reasons. I’ve only spoken to one about how she got that gig and she certainly didn’t have to send in a CV or a sample of her writing or…well… anything much.
As it happens, she has a PhD but she didn’t need it to get that gig. I’m interested now, I’ll ask the others.
Ward Churchill, Helen Demidenko, Asa Earl Carter, Daniel Lewis James, James Frey. Hell, even Rachel Dolezal. There IS a point to be made about bogus authenticity.
Of course, a more diverse vetting and editing process would have had a much better chance of catching all of these much sooner. REAL Cherokee, Ukrainians, sober alcoholics etc. would be more likely to smell a rat.
Please do not diss librarians. The degrees they receive are rigorous and exacting. They are master’s degrees, and the recipients usually have an undergraduate degree in some other academic field (my husband already had a masters in history when he got his MLA). Librarians are as highly educated as any other individual with a master’s degree.
I also know some editors, as a function of the fact that I am a writer. One of the busiest editors I know just started her undergraduate degree at a local community college. She began editing in high school.
Are you kidding me? I did the opposite of dissing librarians.
OK, perhaps I did not express myself well. My point was that I happen to know some people who professionally proof-read and they all happen to be librarians. I think they are excellent people to do that job, but their employers don’t seem to agree.They pay them fuck all and they treat them with contempt.
I’ve worked with librarians on several projects and have nothing but respect for their skills.
But, Inklast, my point was that qualified people such as librarians are not hired *because* of their qualifications. That’s all, not dissing librarians. Jesus.
My bad. To be clear, two of my jobs and about 1/3 of my publications required librarians.
No no, you weren’t dissing librarians.
Sorry, I over react.
We love you anyway.
Well, you love Fortran. She is back from the vet with certain difficult to apply medications.
Well then sit still like a good boy and let her apply them.
Okay, latsot, understood. When you said Karellen was probably right, I sort of thought the rest of your post was implying librarians did not have university degrees…and that’s such a common misunderstanding among many people, even university educated people, that I just had to respond. Most people think “librarian” means the woman (usually a woman) who checks out your books at the public library or the K-12 library. They have no idea what happens behind the scenes. And yes, most people I know with advanced degrees feel the same thing…my librarian husband has been dissed by many friends who assumed I married “below” myself (okay, technically my Ph.D. does exceed a masters, but really? Get real).