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.

Laying the groundwork for the unfurling of his various verdicts, Szetela admiringly quotes James Carville’s exclamation that, “Wokeness is a problem and we all know it.” (Carville, a former Bill Clinton advisor, has a patchy record when it comes to diagnosis, having written in October 2024 that “Ms. [Kamala] Harris will be elected the next president of the United States. Of this, I am certain.”)

That Book Is Dangerous! sits squarely within the recent tradition of literature anxious about cancel culture as a central social and political challenge.

Those making this kind of argument often exaggerate the stakes of the crisis in order to justify their political urgency. Yet they fail to properly contextualise it against the usually more successful conservative campaigns to determine the battlefields where contemporary culture wars are fought.

Szetela preempts this criticism, but unconvincingly, writing:

At a moment when people are focused on the right’s moral panic over literature, it might seem strange that this book focuses on the left’s moral panic over literature. After all, right-wing panic has had more influence at the legislative level. That is true. But left-wing panic has had significantly more influence inside publishers, agencies, and other corners of literary culture.

There are numerous problems with this defence. First, the campaigns of both sides are most usefully discussed in relation to one another, because each reacts to the other as an existential threat. A more worthwhile book would compare the duelling political forces, assessing the reality of the problems to which they are responding.

Second, as Szetela openly admits, the US publishing industry does indeed have a diversity problem and what he describes as a “left-wing panic” is often an authentic response to this problem.

Szetela cites a Publishers Weekly study that found 84% of publishing professionals........

© The Conversation