(Original Review, 1981-01-10)
By the time she died, few people probably remembered the casual Antisemitism of Agatha Christie's early books (try “The Secret of Chimneys”); the prejudice had ceased to be fashionable, and she'd stopped expressing it. Chesterton's antisemitism was deeper, and maybe he'd have kept it up longer; but his basic good sense and kindness would surely have ruled that odious tic out, in a different age.
I too have been re-reading or trying to re-read some old favourites. It is one good way to see how much the accepted norms of a culture change over time. I often muse as to what our culture currently finds commonplace but will be regarded as completely unacceptable in 50 or 100 years, or perhaps sooner. Eating other animals leaps to mind as a strong possibility. This may become taboo either because of the callous treatment of food source animals such as battery chickens or because of the heavy environmental impact of raising animals for food. If this does come about, I imagine contemporary cookbooks will be viewed, literally, as food porn. And film scenes in which the characters partake of a juicy steak - horrors! We are all shaped by our culture and are not responsible for, or able to bear the burden of, choices that are made by our posterity.
I read a lot of Enid Blyton and Agatha Christie years ago but the sentiments did not shape me either.
Past written books are fine; it's understood that they are old and should be viewed in the context of their author's time. It may be worth thinking that if these same authors were to write nowadays, their literature would be very different.
By the same token, some comments I’ve read are a step on the way to rounding up and 'disappearing' political dissidents. Fortunately, pointing this out is obviously nonsensical because it's such a tiny step, and there are so many other things that would need to happen on the way, and people are capable of taking decisions about each of those steps independently based on fuller criteria. What, criticising racist attitudes of the past leads inevitably to book-burning? Can you explain how?
