Controversial is different from unspeakable--just because people get in trouble when they talk about something doesn't mean it's not spoken about. I read PG's essay as about something deeper.
To give an example in the present day: imagine you believed a gender or race was literally subhuman, in the sense that you had every right to do whatever you wanted to the Thing. That is something that was a widespread belief in the past but is now simply unspeakable. Note that we're not talking about race and IQ, which is still "allowed" to be spoken of, in the sense that people can and do talk about it, even if other people vociferously disagree with the person. But also note the framing the race-and-IQ folk themselves use when talking about it: they bend over backwards to claim that they think race has no bearing on whether a person has rights or equal moral status. It's always framed as a purely scientific statement which, although perhaps having policy implications, says nothing about the moral status of the person designated as more likely to have a low IQ. Someone arguing otherwise wouldn't be denounced but altogether written out of rational discourse.
When PG talks about the unspeakable assumptions and fashions of an age, that's what I read him as talking about. In general, I mean, not about race in particular. It also goes to show that just because something is a widely shared assumption of an age doesn't mean it's wrong.[1]
[1] But isn't it interestingly meta that I can reference universally shared moral assumptions and use the fact that they are universally shared as rhetorical evidence that they're good and useful?
To give an example in the present day: imagine you believed a gender or race was literally subhuman, in the sense that you had every right to do whatever you wanted to the Thing. That is something that was a widespread belief in the past but is now simply unspeakable. Note that we're not talking about race and IQ, which is still "allowed" to be spoken of, in the sense that people can and do talk about it, even if other people vociferously disagree with the person. But also note the framing the race-and-IQ folk themselves use when talking about it: they bend over backwards to claim that they think race has no bearing on whether a person has rights or equal moral status. It's always framed as a purely scientific statement which, although perhaps having policy implications, says nothing about the moral status of the person designated as more likely to have a low IQ. Someone arguing otherwise wouldn't be denounced but altogether written out of rational discourse.
When PG talks about the unspeakable assumptions and fashions of an age, that's what I read him as talking about. In general, I mean, not about race in particular. It also goes to show that just because something is a widely shared assumption of an age doesn't mean it's wrong.[1]
[1] But isn't it interestingly meta that I can reference universally shared moral assumptions and use the fact that they are universally shared as rhetorical evidence that they're good and useful?