Lionel Shriver on the Triumph of Totalitarianism, 23 October 2023
My Response to Rules I Don’t Accept is to Break Them By Lionel Shriver This is the text of the Roger Scruton Memorial Lecture delivered by Lionel Shriver at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford on October 23rd 2023, titled ‘When Cowed Creatives Capitulate: Conformity and Bad Art’. We’re all weary of the word ‘woke’, and I’ll try to keep my usage of the tiresome thumbnail to a minimum. After all, even its mocking variations—wokerati, wokismo, woking class — are no longer amusing. Still, I’ve been struck by how difficult it is to address contemporary cultural conflicts and not employ that word — so pervasive, and invasive, has this rigid, joyless, tyrannical gestalt become. Like children piping up from the backseat, “Are we there yet?” countless audience members at events like this one have implored me to predict when this corrosive, killjoy ideology will be over. Because most of us are not nearly as sick of the word as we are of wokeness itself. For me, a big disappointment of our dreary