A paradigm shift of ethical proportions

A 21-year interval is not even the blink of an eye in a universe that is estimated to be 13.77 billion years old.

It might seem unlikely, therefore, that such a brief interval could represent change significant enough to qualify as a paradigm shift of ethical proportions.

Well, read on.

An event occurred in 2002 that passed unnoticed except in the music world: The publication by Yale University Press of Charles Rosen’s book, Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas. A Short Companion.

Rosen, who died in 2012 at age 85, was a virtuoso pianist, a university professor, and a prolific writer on music. His best-known book, The Classical Style, won the National Book Award in 1972.

I bought Rosen’s book on Beethoven’s piano sonatas primarily to read the analysis of the Opus 10, no. 3; specifically, its second movement, which I found puzzling because it seemed structurally unlike the second movement of his other piano sonatas.

I’m a big fan of Beethoven’s music, which has been the strongest influence on my work as a sculptor — a story for another time.

Alas, Rosen’s comments (pp. 139-40) were disappointingly brief. I’ll have to work out the structure of that second movement on my own.

What got my attention as I started reading, and led me to write this blog, is this comment on p. 4:

The Beethoven sonatas… betrayed none of the deplorably morbid and effeminate character of the works of the great Romantics, Chopin, Schubert, Mendelssohn and Schumann.

Now, the point is not whether Rosen was right that music by the composers named exemplified “a deplorably effeminate character.” Nor is it to the point whether he was entitled to his opinion. What is at issue from an ethical point of view is (a) whether a person ought to be free to choose the form of words with which to express an opinion; and (b) whether a publisher ought to respect that choice once a book has been accepted for publication.

Issue (b) was evidently not a problem in 2002. In the preface of his book (p. xii), Rosen thanked Robert Baldock, Malcolm Gerratt, and Kevin Brown of Yale University Press for “help and encouragement.”

Issue (a) was uncontroversial in 2002 because First Amendment protections against censorship were taken seriously, with clear ethical implications. 

That was then. What about now, a mere blink of an eye later, when (a) and (b) are no longer true?

A paradigm shift of ethical proportions can be said to have occurred.

• Today, a publisher who put out a book describing music as “deplorably effeminate” would incur the wrath, potentially violent, of alphabet wokesters and their media enablers.
• A book editor who failed to cross out such language would be summarily fired, never to work again in the publishing business.
• National Book Award administrators would withdraw Rosen’s 1972 blue ribbon; he’d be fired from his university job; and his recitals would be canceled.
• Consider issue (a) also in the context of what happened on January 6, 2021 and the indictments filed against President Trump.

In case you think I’m making too much of the Rosen case, here’s a related story in the July 31, Daily Mail:

• Vintage, a U.S. imprint of Penguin Random House, has inserted a “trigger warning” in Raymond Chandler’s 1939 The Big Sleep noting its “outdated language and cultural representations.”
• Penguin Random House is reissuing editions of classics by Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, and PG Wodehouse that will carry similar “trigger warnings.”    

It remains to be seen whether Yale University Press will reissue Rosen’s book with a “trigger warning” or pull it altogether.

A frequent contributor to American Thinker, Arnold Cusmariu is the author of Logic for Kids, available online at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Books-a-Million. An article in the Journal of Intelligence and Analysis describes his work for the Central Intelligence Agency. 

Image: Rijksmuseum