More often than not, cultural products such as novels, movies, paintings, photographs, and songs are open to multiple interpretations. At the same time, it’s not a case of anything goes. Intelligent, well-informed interpretation takes place against an understanding of artistic traditions and cultural contexts. Skilled interpreters of contemporary literature, for example, might disagree among themselves about the meaning and accomplishment of a particular work, but they share the same understanding of context, tropes, and techniques. By and large, these interpreters recognize which interpretations are legitimately arguable and which are based on ignorance, intellectual contrivance, or sheer bad faith.

Many works of art, literature, and music are inaccessible to a broad audience. In some cases, their likely meaning for the artist might be available only to people with special knowledge of the artist’s idiosyncratic life and ideas. More often, engagement with the work and its artistic intent is restricted to people with deep training in an esoteric tradition. By contrast, enthusiastic fans of popular forms and genres can often engage in complex and interesting conversation about the meaning and merits of particular works without immersing themselves in very much formal training. A bit of that might assist the fans’ appreciation, but they can develop a sophisticated understanding of art that they simply have grown up with and frequently discussed with well-informed people.

None of the above is meant to be surprising or controversial, and all of it might once have gone without saying. It could be expanded and illustrated at indefinite length by artists, scholars, and others with the necessary enthusiasm and erudition connected to particular traditions and forms. Through their individual and collective efforts, such people are cultural custodians. Many are also creators and innovators. They deserve recognition and honor for what they do and what they can teach us about our cultural inheritance and its current state of flux.

Admittedly, narrative art in particular often conveys banal, simplistic, and largely false messages, such as that wrongdoers will inevitably be found and punished, that good overcomes evil (at least with sufficient resolution, courage, effort, and ingenuity), or that romantic love triumphs over adversity. These messages give us hope, though all too often they are not true to life. But here, the merit of a worthwhile story can lie in the strength and complexity of whatever does not fit smoothly with the simple message and the conventional narrative elements communicating it. Brilliant storytellers often outrun, even when they don’t blatantly contradict or subvert, whatever popular messages might be implicit in their standard plots and iconography. This tension and excess of meaning are also open to analysis in any particular case.

Increasingly, however, such an understanding of art and its subtleties—and with it, a commitment to well-informed study and discussion of the arts—is under challenge.

Since Plato in classical Greek antiquity, ideologues and system builders of all kinds have always been suspicious of art, especially literature, preferring to subordinate it to their pet belief systems. Ideologues tend to judge art for its doctrinal orthodoxy or its merits as propaganda rather than, say, for its imaginative scope, technical virtuosity, or emotional impact. In relatively recent times, Christian moralists fought to prohibit works by James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and many other great novelists of the Modernist tradition. More recently still, radical Islamists attempted, through violence and terror, to suppress Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses. They failed to achieve that immediate goal, but it is unlikely that such a book would be published in the current environment of anxiety over so-called Islamophobia.

Today, the entire range of narrative fiction, from superhero comics to European arthouse films, is under assault from ideologues and propagandists. This applies to the attack on Laura Moriarty’s young adult novel American Heart because it could be categorized (superficially) as a “white savior narrative.” It applies, likewise, to the ongoing campaign against J. K. Rowling and her books because Rowling can be pigeonholed (unfairly) as transphobic. It applies equally to the campaign by right-wing ideologues against the French film Mignonnes, or Cuties, which can be interpreted—through a lens of fanaticism or bad faith—as somehow promoting pedophilia, although it is clearly, among other things, an expression of concern over current tendencies to sexualize prepubescent girls’ bodies.

Philistine and hyper-politicized attitudes toward art, and especially toward fictional narrative in all its forms, are now pervasive and inescapable in Anglophone countries that are supposed to be liberal democracies. We see new cases every week.

Furthermore, it appears that the liberal arts/humanities faculties of Anglophone universities are exerting little effort to reverse or improve the situation. Within the academy, criticism and study of cultural traditions—which can be a difficult and disciplined kind of academic inquiry—is often reduced to a form of left-wing grandstanding with a few arbitrary rules that can be changed as and when it’s expedient. When right-wing ideologues respond with their own even cruder version of the same tendency—as with their outraged reaction to Cuties in the United States—it should not surprise anyone. On both sides of politics, we now see a rise of philistines and increased hostility to good-faith, painstaking cultural discussion.

I hope I’m wrong, and I’d love to have a hopeful message, but I fear it’s too late to turn this ship around.