25/09/2026
I've been thinking about the controversy surrounding Greta Gerwig's forthcoming adaptation of C.S. Lewis's Narnia. Meryl Streep will voice Aslan, the explicitly male lion who stands at the theological center of Lewis's universe and functions as its representation of Christ, because of course we have to take things the way they were and make idiotic changes for no reason. Maybe Gerwig will surprise everyone and the series will be wonderful. I hope so. But the decision already raises more interesting questions for me: Why does so much contemporary woke / progressive culture seem determined to express itself through somebody else's creations? Why are they so incapable of making their own art?
That got me thinking that there is a significant difference between the traditional Left and what we now call the woke Left. The traditional Left has always had a powerful creative streak. While conservatives tend to be more left-brain analytical, the artists, the emotional, the unconventional, and imaginative all tended to be solidly on the Left. I disagree profoundly with much of its politics, but culturally it has often been an enormously productive force. It created new music, literature, cinema, aesthetics, and entire countercultures. In that respect, it has even complemented the more ordered and analytical temperament traditionally associated with conservatism.
What strikes me about this new woke Left, however, is how frequently its cultural instinct seems not to be creation, but criticism, revision, and outright vandalism of someone else's work. Even its academic vocabulary reflects the impulse: critical theory, critical race theory, critical studies. It begins with something that already exists and interrogates it, deconstructs it, exposes its supposed power structures, and reconstructs it according to a different worldview. Increasingly, the same instinct seems to characterize its ventures into popular culture.
So we get Disney rewritten, Tolkien rewritten, and now C.S. Lewis reinterpreted. Rather than create new worlds, characters, mythologies, and stories embodying their own worldview, contemporary cultural progressives repeatedly inherit worlds somebody else created, retain the names, characters, settings, mythology, and enormous reservoir of public affection attached to them, and then retrofit those creations to make them their own.
And no, this is not the same thing as saying that Tolkien borrowed from Norse mythology, or that Shakespeare borrowed plots, or Lewis combined the Bible with children's stories. All art has influences. Tolkien took elements of existing traditions and synthesized them into something astonishingly new in Middle-earth. That is creation. But taking Middle-earth itself, keeping its name, its characters, its mythology, and the audience Tolkien created for it, and then changing what those things mean is something fundamentally different.
Some of this is undoubtedly corporate cowardice. Hollywood loves established intellectual property because an audience already exists. And adaptation can obviously be great art. But there is nevertheless something peculiar about a cultural movement that regards so much of the inherited Western canon as morally suspect while remaining so dependent upon its imaginative achievements.
The old Left didn't merely demand admission into somebody else's imagination, it built an imagination of its own. A genuinely creative counterculture does that. If you believe the old culture is exhausted, corrupt, or morally inadequate, then surpass it. Create your own Narnia. Create your own Middle-earth. Create characters so compelling that people are still telling their stories seventy-five years from now. But what we see now is a telling lack of imagination from those very people who claim to have a superior imagination of what our world should be.
