How sanctimony sold out
“Goodness is the only investment that never fails,” said Thoreau. This week seemed to prove him wrong, though, with the news that the self-described Good Literary Agency has run out of funds. This “social enterprise literary agency” had been aimed at increasing the presence of underrepresented groups in the publishing industry. But despite receiving £1.3 million over seven years, it seems co-founders Nikesh Shukla and Julia Kingsford could not make it profitable and are now shutting up shop.
“We couldn’t represent everyone we wanted to,” Shukla admitted, citing “a culture war or two” and “an industry that assumed itself to be doing the work” as relevant explanations for the company’s failure. But even leaving aside the growing backlash against DEI practices, his analysis seemed incomplete. For there was also the folly of calling a business “The Good Literary Agency” (TGLA), a strategy surely so hubristic that they were bound to come a cropper eventually.
But then again in 2017, the year the TGLA launched, we were also blessed with the pompously named The Good Law Project — a company also now ailing — so perhaps there was something in the air. After all, it was the early days of the first Trump presidency: many histrionic Guardian op-eds were being written and pussy hats knitted. It was easy to feel good about yourself in contrast to the evil orange one: to sail into work, your lunchbox stuffed with Innocent smoothies, Kind protein bars, and JUST water cartons, feeling you had moved one step closer to canonisation simply by turning up. And every day offered opportunities for new acts of righteousness: writing bits and pieces of moral cant for the company website; putting pronouns at the bottom of emails; signing various petitions to get your colleagues sacked, and so on.
But still, in retrospect, announcing your company as “Good” in its title does seem particularly daft when you work in the literary world; a place that tends to demand that writers “show, don’t tell”, traditionally holding lazy topline descriptions in some contempt. Equally, novelists have wrestled for centuries over what makes a man good, kind, innocent, or just, but rarely have they concluded that his self-identifying as these things is a reliable sign. That original ‘umblebragger Uriah Heep keeps telling us about his defining virtue, but Dickens knows it is all fake news. “I am not fond of professions of humility,” says wise David Copperfield, “or professions of anything else.”
To be fair to Shukla and Kingsford, in naming their agency they presumably were inspired by the success of Shukla’s 2016 edited collection The Good Immigrant. But whereas that title wore its sardonic irony on its sleeve, the later business name came across as painfully straight-faced. Perhaps they told themselves that the branding would hover playfully between “we are good at our job” and “we are good people”, but the accompanying piety seems to have eliminated useful ambiguity from the start.
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Clearly, they were not just saying they were good, in the way a baker, estate agent, or an arms dealer might be — namely, by performing their stated commercial function well. Rather, they were Good with a luminous capital “G”, putting the gospel of diversity and inclusion into practice. In her own Bookseller exit interview, Kingsman made this explicit, describing people like them as “hopeful change-makers” and saying: “So much good has been done across the industry since 2016, but for those of us at the coalface it feels like we are at a high risk moment where the danger of complacency, of a feeling that enough has been done, that we don’t need to keep pushing for more change, is beginning to creep back in.”
This fluently sanctimonious style has become emblematic of progressive ventures over the last decade, barely even noticeable in a field so crowded with proselytising. How anyone ever got taken in by the posturing is still a headscratcher, but it seems many did. Ascertaining someone’s morals is traditionally supposed to be a complicated business, requiring close and prolonged attention to the interaction of character traits, intentions, behaviour, and outcomes. Yet somehow, about a decade ago, we got to a point where explicit boasts about personal ethical achievements acted more like subliminal messages in adverts, inserting a conviction in the hearer that he must be in the presence of spiritual purity, though he wasn’t exactly sure how the thought had got in there.
The flipside of being so mesmerised with superficial markers of virtue is that you are also shallow and credulous about what counts as vice. And so we find adults who genuinely think it plausible that a tech billionaire, well known for his enthusiastically awkward gestures, would deliberately perform a Nazi salute at a post-inauguration Presidential rally, as the latest stunt of those subtle intellects at Led By Donkeys suggests they do. Or we get the sort of people who interpret “Jewish” as identical to “Zionist”, and “Zionist” as identical to “genocidal maniac” without noticing any moral variations under those first two headings — as a former Save The Children staffer did in a TikTok video this week, to her cost. And on the other side, we also get those who automatically equate “Pro-Palestinian protestors” with “hate marchers”. Obviously, there can be deliberate political strategy behind a particular decision to lump certain categories rather than split them, but equally, it sometimes seems that the art of fine moral discernment is just generally dying out.
“The flipside of being mesmerised with superficial markers of virtue is that you are shallow about what counts as vice.”
Maybe part of the underlying problem is a mania for thinking of yourself and those in your tribe as belonging to the good people, a childish mental construction which both requires a contrast class (the bad people, over there) and some vaguely plausible-looking fellow travellers. There is a hint of this in Shukla’s plaintive “we did the best we could”: and it’s there every time someone falls back on the excuse of having had good intentions, ignoring well-known observations about pavement arrangements on the road to hell. It’s also there when you extend similar excuses to those with whom you feel some kinship, as if you know that whatever bad-looking things they do could only be the result of well-intentioned misreadings of the situation; as if there were no really bad people on your side of the fence at all, but only unfortunately foolish ones. Needless to say, such a concession is rarely made to opponents.
But in fact, just as there is no particular reason to trust myself on how good a person I am, there is equally little reason to trust me about the goodness of my intentions, or about those of people I like and presume to understand. It is true that there is a limited sense in which most or all intentions are “good” — meaning only that whatever action you chose, that action seemed to you to have some attractive aspect at the time. Philosophers sometimes describe this as acting sub specie boni; alternatively, acting “under the guise of the good”. In the same fairly trivial sense, Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost said “Evil, be thou my Good” but it didn’t make him any less satanic.
For my intentions to be “good” in a more full-blooded sense, relevant to moral assessment, depends on whether they stem from attitudes like benevolence, love, courage, or kindness; or alternatively from self-interest, hate, cowardice, or cruelty. It’s hard to admit that it might be the latter, even to yourself. And such things are even harder to discern in others, based only on a superficial glance. In the case of the now defunct Good Literary Agency, the still active Good Law Project, and other Good enterprises, it should go without saying — but apparently doesn’t — that uninformed onlookers have no actual idea what sorts of intention motivate their founders, whatever the holier-than-thou branding. They might actually be good people, or they might not. Still, I’m with Davey Copperfield: the fact they keep saying so should make us highly suspicious.
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