A review of That Book Is Dangerous! How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing by Adam Szetela; 288 pages; MIT Press (forthcoming August 2025) and The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech by William Deresiewicz; 368 pages; Holt Paperbacks (February 2022).

Seventy years ago, in 1955, Olympia Press published Lolita, the Russian émigré novelist Vladimir Nabokov’s scandalous masterpiece. Olympia was a small Paris-based publisher, which specialised in erotica but also brought out avant-garde literature such as Samuel Beckett’s trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable, and William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. Nabokov initially had trouble finding an American publisher for his book in the cautious and conservative 1950s when many American publishers were under the pall of McCarthyism. But the industry also featured courageous, progressively minded editors like Walter Minton, president of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, which issued the first US edition of Lolita in 1958. Minton’s bet paid off. Lolita sold 100,000 copies in just three weeks; moreover, unlike James Joyce’s Ulysses and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, it was never officially banned in the United States.

Times have changed. In a meticulously researched new book on the ills of contemporary literary culture, Adam Szetela cites editor Dan Franklin of prominent publisher Jonathan Cape, who admits that he would not risk publishing Nabokov’s masterpiece today. “Regrettably,” Szetela writes, “a novel ranked by Time as one of the hundred best English-language novels published since 1923” would likely be destined for the slush pile under the censorious new regime that prevails in publishing.

In what Szetela calls “the Sensitivity Era,” fictional narratives and characters alike must demonstrate the appropriate virtue quotient—with points awarded for marginalised identities. In this safety-obsessed milieu, Lolita’s protagonist Humbert Humbert, a white European aesthete and a confessed paedophile, triggers every moral panic alarm imaginable. In this context, even minority or underprivileged fictional characters are under scrutiny, reviewed by sensitivity readers to ensure authenticity and prevent offence. Some books receive the attentions of small armies of these “experts,” each with a particular niche focus. One publisher Szetela mentions

has a coalition of readers who consult authors on issues as different as African American culture, fatness, familial homophobia, conception via sperm donation, rural queer experience, Chinese American culture, furry fandom, interracial relationships, Contemporary Jewish culture, mental abuse by a parent, traveling while black, Hinduism, ableist physician experiences, Iroquois culture, men who survive rape, LGBTQIA2+ representation, and witchcraft.

Some agents and publishers require authors to hire their own sensitivity readers before a manuscript is reviewed. As Szetela remarks, this requirement squeezes aspiring writers financially while perpetuating the bizarre notion that “there are ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ ways” to portray a character from a minority background or to be part of a minority oneself. In short, “the Sensitivity era treats identity as the precondition for well-written literature”: a view so plainly at odds with truth that it is hard to imagine how it ever took hold.

Szetela has a theory about this: fights over identity are usually centred on interpersonal and intergroup status. This explains their prevalence in literary subcultures, where recognition is scarce and often fleeting, and competition is fierce and unrelenting. Szetela suggests that many online cancellations are manifestations of what the philosopher George Santayana called the “passions grafted on wounded pride.” The most ardent cancellers are often people who experience perceived slights to their status as forms of narcissistic injury that call for retribution through mob justice. Szetela cites the example of the self-styled “sensitivity expert” Lorena Germán, who encouraged an online pile-on after writer Jessica Cluess criticised one of Germán’s social media posts in support of the #DisruptTexts movement Germán cofounded, a movement to ban supposedly outdated classics that might be propagating bad values. The social media mob accused Cluess of the usual sins of “harm,” “violence,” and “racism” and, as is typical, the author ended up issuing a grovelling apology in an effort to regain her standing with her peers.

According to the Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, writing in 1755 amid an earlier era of moralistic sensitivity, one basic condition of social existence is believing that we are entitled to the consideration of others: “As soon as men had begun to appreciate one another and the idea of consideration had taken shape in their mind, everyone claimed a right to it, and one could no longer deprive anyone of it with impunity.” The same right often extended to collective affiliations; an insult to one’s kin group or nation becomes a personal affront, a form of disrespect that requires repayment in kind. According to Rousseau, we may respond to perceived offence by depriving the offender of their right to esteem in the eyes of others—in other words, through public shaming. (This was an enlightened improvement on the previous means of obtaining retribution: through duelling.)

Why We Should Read Rousseau

It is certainly the case that Rousseau was not an unambiguous friend to the liberal Enlightenment.

QuilletteMatt McManus

Shame is a highly contagious emotion: perpetrators of shaming crusades often become victims in their turn. According to Szetela, shame spreads through online literary communities with the virulence of a parasite attacking an ant colony. Even prominent publishers and reviewers often have to carefully hedge their bets to avoid guilt by association. Szetela notes how the literary magazine Kirkus Reviews, for example, has often retracted or rewritten book reviews under pressure from social media users. Fear of the online tantrums of aggrieved actors incentivises  performative repudiation. As Szetela writes: “No one wants to be associated with a writer who was accused of insensitivities.” Agents and publishers shun authors “who have been, or who may become, targets of the internet mob.” Most actors in the online shame economy seem naively convinced of their moral righteousness—until they too are cancelled.

More actively devious players undertake self-promoting campaigns of moral entrepreneurship aimed at raising their status—cue Ibram X. Kendi, whom Szetela accuses of having aggressively monetised “antiracism” as a personal brand. To be fair, Kendi has notable scholarly credentials and a compelling backstory and is perhaps less likely to be merely a moral entrepreneur than some of Szetela’s other examples, such as professional sensitivity reader Kosoko Jackson and New York Times columnist Roxane Gay. Moral entrepreneurship manipulates the social capital of communities that have developed dense cooperative networks based on shared norms. As the ultimate in specious virtue signalling, moral entrepreneurship bears the same relation to morality that televangelism does to piety.