We risk losing our cultural legacy if we constantly cater to changing sensibilities

Finally someone has said it. Friends – the beloved coming-of-age sitcom – is “problematic”. A host of Generation Z cultural critics have decided the show’s lack of diversity, fatphobia and homophobia renders the TV programme ill-suited to modernity.

Harmless, right? Social mores – just like clothes – come in and out of fashion. Of course, the sensibilities of the late ‘90s are not all reflected in 2023. And our cultural consumption merely reflects this changing trend cycle. If teenagers don’t like Friends then they don’t have to watch Friends – thankfully there is no mandate. The market ebbs and flows and this is just part of the ecosystem.

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Except, there is one problem with the self-appointed vanguards of taste. There is no logical end point to their project. Friends may lose ratings, big deal. But in recent months we have seen Roald Dahl’s novels edited, inelegantly stripped of adjectives like “fat” and “ugly”; Agatha Christie’s books have had terms like “Oriental” and “native” removed; the April reissuing of the James Bond series will reportedly see the books sheared of their most antiquated elements.

On a case-by-case basis this might all seem perfectly fair. Agatha Christie’s books are – in places – actually quite racist. Friends is a lot more harmless, but if it upsets people we are in no position to tell them they are wrong.

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The trouble with the contemporary ethos is that almost by definition it is liable to change – it always has been. And then what? Is it time for a second reappraisal of Roald Dahl? How about a third, or a fourth? How many attempts would it take to force James Bond into a perfectly modern whole, totally immune from the biases of the past? And this line-by-line relitigation of old texts will inevitably come to reflect new values, that are equally vulnerable to falling out of fashion as the ones they replace.

Censorship is a serious accusation. Perhaps iconoclasm is fairer. Whatever it is, it ought to outrage liberal sensibilities, but somehow has become a point of pride. Compliance with contemporary mores is now posthumously demanded of authors. And those who demand it are held up as guardians of social propriety; more perceptive than anyone else.

I can’t help but think that all of this comes bearing an end-of-history style arrogance, as though the values we have arrived upon today are good, proper and never going to be replaced with new ones. The past is treated like an artefact that can easily be tampered with and the present is treated as though it is totally and unerringly stagnant.

It seems that these iconoclasts may end up litigating the past out of existence. Perhaps James Bond does not cohere with our modern idea of a hero. But the books are a handy primer on the uninhibited misogyny of the 1950s. Changing the language of Ian Fleming’s novels won’t do anything to ameliorate that. But it will remove our ability to access it, to learn about it.

This is not a new phenomenon. The whole concept of censorship hails from the Censor – an ancient Roman statesman responsible for moulding public morality

That is perhaps the most direct and tangible damage wrought by this practice. Just behind it, however, is the humourless sanitisation of the world. Jennifer Aniston, star of Friends, explained that comedy has become an increasingly tricky terrain to navigate, as comedians were now “not allowed” to “make fun of life”.

We might query her use of the word “allowed”, but otherwise Aniston is right. So long as the classics can be reworked to fit modern-day sensitivities, new cultural products will be made with an eye to that. Why make a risqué joke now in the knowledge that it will – like all things do – age and fall out of step with cultural norms? Adapting the past is not just confined to the past. It changes the way we are now.

This is not a new phenomenon. The whole concept of censorship hails from the Censor – an ancient Roman statesman responsible for moulding public morality. The Nancy Drew series of mystery novels was revised in 1959. But simply because something is an age-old practice – obviously – does not mean it is beyond reproach. The cries of those who simply claim that none of this is a big deal, that it has been happening forever, do not hold water.

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What we can hope for is that this mode of iconoclasm will fall out of fashion. The Dahl controversy has hauled the practice into the spotlight – leaving people to rightly query the right of any self-appointed tastemaker to change the work of a dead man. And, the unashamed arrogance of the project has been exposed to a sceptical audience.

But, even though the editors, the publishers, and the supporters of the project may soon realise their mistake, their work will not be undone and their impact not totally erased. And what we are left with is a period of cultural production that cares little about artistic legacy and a lot about catering to contemporary anxieties. We are all poorer for it.