An attack on left-wing, literary ‘culture police’ displays the flawed thinking it aims to critique
- Written by Dan Dixon, Associate Lecturer in English and Writing, University of Sydney
Adam Szetela’s That Book Is Dangerous! makes the case that we exist in the “Sensitivity Era”.
According to Szetela, American literature – in particular literature for young people – is threatened by a scourge of self-appointed, self-righteous culture police. These moral auditors insist the representation of marginalised groups in books must be evaluated against a reductive set of criteria, which harmfully essentialise categories such as race, gender and disability.
Review: That Book is Dangerous! How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing – Adam Szetela (MIT)
Szetela, a literary journalist, argues this kind of left-wing censoriousness is dangerous because it encourages mob justice, drives potential allies to become conservative reactionaries, displaces more productive forms of activism and amounts to Orwellian censorship.
To show this, he draws on wide-ranging examples and interviews with writers, academics and publishing industry professionals.
The phrase upon which the book’s argument turns is “moral panic”. “Moral panics tend to arise in response to real problems,” Szetela writes. “Then they find scapegoats for those problems.”
Unwittingly, this description encapsulates the fundamental flaw of That Book Is Dangerous!. As a critique of moral panic, this book is unsuccessful; as a symptom of moral panic, it is exemplary.
This is unfortunate, because Szetela’s subject warrants thoughtful consideration and criticism.
The left can engage in misguided moral panics and futile cultural warfare, degrading the potential of its political project. The tendency of some artists, writers, readers, critics and academics to participate in swarming social media condemnations of fellow progressives they believe to have morally transgressed can be unsettling and harmful.
And the corporate hypocrisy of large publishers loudly proclaiming the value of representing diverse voices while prioritising profit over people, and publishing conservative authors who ridicule diversity initiatives, deserves attention.
Szetela considers all these issues, but his claims are repeatedly undermined by his habits of argument, style and conjecture.
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What Szetela fails to mention is that Sheng was removed from his course because he showed a version of Othello starring Laurence Olivier in blackface, about which Sheng had failed to warn his students.
Szetela also doesn’t mention that Sheng continues to work at the University of Michigan. One could debate whether Sheng’s transgression deserved dismissal, but to omit such crucial details is reason enough to question Szetela’s credibility as a reliable source of examples.
The triumph of rhetoric
While Szetela’s background is in literary studies, his arguments are shaped by the disciplines of social psychology and sociology. A habit of these fields is dividing our behaviour into narrow explanatory categories. The mind is thus comprehended as essentially robotic in nature, with actions attributable to common group dynamics rather than sophisticated inner lives.
A danger of this habit is that instead of using analysis as a jumping off point from which to consider the distinct nuances of specific experience, it writes off individuals as unknowingly irrational agents, vulnerable to the whims of their social conditioning. The method makes for excellent rhetoric but impoverished philosophy.
Szetela deploys many such categories including “virtue hoarding” and “moral entrepreneurs” (those who undertake a moral crusade purely to increase their status). He even coins his own: “militant fragility” – to condemn the conduct of his subjects.
This is not to say that, for example, moral entrepreneurs do not exist. Rather, that the application of this label, instead of provoking questions about the potential complexity of a person’s motivations, dispenses with the need for further inquiry. This kind of argument is especially effective if a scholar’s goal is to render their subject’s position absurd.
Szetela gives the game away when he describes social scientists and psychologists as “more serious researchers” than literary critics.
He cites a Princeton psychologist and political scientist who evaluated nearly 1,000 studies aiming to identify how prejudice is reduced, pointing out that “no intervention examined ‘the effect of literature on prejudice among general audiences.’”
Therefore, he concludes, we should spend our time “addressing the economic conditions” proven to increase prejudice.
But why must the pursuit of economic justice come at the cost of advocating for diversity in literature? And why dismiss the obvious social and cultural significance of literature simply because it resists being encapsulated by the extremely limited conceptual tools of empirical studies in the social sciences?
The accusation that literary studies is unserious seems to depend on its failure to rely on quantitative data from which conclusions can be drawn. Yet the quantitative data Szetela does use often has no bearing on his conclusions whatsoever.
For example, Szetela crows over the fact that Quillette, a vocally anti-woke online publication, has more Twitter followers (the book never acknowledges Elon Musk’s role in transforming or renaming the platform) than left-wing outlets such as The New Republic or The Baffler, as if this alone signals greater influence or quality.
Elsewhere, he derides two books on race and American literature as being irrelevant due to their lack of Amazon reviews. (At the time of writing, Szetela’s book had only 13, which, by his own metric, is hardly a sign of excellence.)
Especially outrageous is his use of data to criticise sensitivity reader’s pay rates. Sensitivity readers – specialist editors who read manuscripts to evaluate the representation of a particular marginalised group – are perhaps this book’s most frequent target. Szetela takes issue with this relatively new profession for having “eroded the idea that expertise is something a person attains, rather than something a person self-declares.”
Read more:
Friday essay: I work as a sensitivity reader – and racism is harder to spot than you'd think
But a potentially productive critique is once again ruined by feeble analysis. Extrapolating from data he proffers showing sensitivity readers charge between half a cent to one cent per word, he calculates that a sensitivity reader reading 250 words an hour for 40 hours a week would earn between US$156,000 (A$233,250) and US$312,000 (A$464,493) per year. This is ridiculous and unscholarly.
As any freelancer proximate to the publishing industry knows, maintaining 40 hours a week of consistent work across a year (without taking a single holiday, per Szetela’s calculations) is unheard of. Additionally, Szetela’s unjustly monied sensitivity reader only reads, having no time for selling their services, note-taking, or providing the actual feedback.
Less than generous
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This discrediting hyperbole is in keeping with Szetela’s authorial voice throughout, which is sometimes gleefully sneering, adopting the least generous reading of its subjects.
Describing staff at Penguin Random House trying to stop their employer from publishing Jordan Peterson’s Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life, Szetela reports that, “In a meeting, some of these adults cried.” In the acknowledgements section of his book, he takes another needless swipe at these people who became emotional in their workplace.
Attributing his own resilience, oddly, to his history of wrestling injuries (including “wrestling with concussions”), he proudly pronounces he
can’t imagine a situation in which I would break down crying, like the employees at Penguin Random House, because somebody wrote a book that I’m not interested in reading.
Szetela’s book is punctuated by telling, unnecessary snark. For instance, he needlessly describes a trans professor he admires as someone who “does not ‘police’ what people call him”, as if trans people who prefer to be known by their actual name are simply excessively precious victims of his Sensitivity Era.
He is right to point out that if we reduce literature to questions of representation we risk abandoning the irreducible moral and aesthetic complexity reading makes possible.
He is right to recognise that social media and the sometimes hysterical rhetoric it fosters can have an out-sized influence on decisions across the publishing industry. And he is right that identity politics should not be the exclusive frame through which to judge literary value.
It is also the case that in 2026, literary culture is threatened by, among other things, corporate monopolies, falling literacy rates, artificial intelligence, actual government censorship, the gutting of humanities departments, and austerity across the publishing sector. Szetela nods to many of these challenges, but does not satisfactorily account for them.
Art cannot account for every individual response and sometimes it will hurt people. Yet we all expect art to be sensitive to its audience. We just struggle to reach consensus about what constitutes an acceptable level of sensitivity. By declaring that we inhabit the Sensitivity Era, Szetela raises the non-trivial question of how we should reach this consensus.
A thoughtful examination of this issue would recognise the complexity and variety of what we want from literature. It would acknowledge, too, that our judgement depends on an intricate patchwork of aesthetic and ethical values differing from person to person. This book lacks the intellectual self-awareness and moral rigour to do so.
Authors: Dan Dixon, Associate Lecturer in English and Writing, University of Sydney
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