The following excerpts are from “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” signed by 153 academics, writers and artists and published in Harper's Magazine on July 7, 2020. This letter provides a decent summary of arguments for free speech and against the “censoriousness” of cancel culture.
The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.
Censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.
We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters.
But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.
More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms.
Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal.
We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.
This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation.
The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.
As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes.
We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences.
If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.
One response to “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” (aka “the Original Letter”), was “A More Specific Letter on Justice and Open Debate”, signed by 163 individuals in The Objective on July 10, 2020. This second letter (aka the Response) is described by the signatories as “a group effort, started by journalists of color with contributions from the larger journalism, academic, and publishing community.” The Response includes the following 12 points:
The Original Letter is signed by “prominent” writers and their letter was published in a “prominent” magazine (Harper’s).
Harper’s Magazine is “infamous for being anti-union, not paying its interns, and firing editors over editorial disagreements with the publisher”.
Many of the signatories of the Original Letter are “white, wealthy, and endowed with massive platforms”
The signatories of the Original Letter “argue that they are afraid of being silenced, that so-called cancel culture is out of control, and that they fear for their jobs and free exchange of ideas, even as they speak from one of the most prestigious magazines in the country.”
The Original Letter’s “greatest concern” seems to be that “Black, brown, and LGBTQ+ people — particularly Black and trans people — can now critique elites publicly and hold them accountable socially”.
Perhaps “even more grating to many of the signatories [of the original letter] is that a critique of their long held views is persuasive.”
“The content of the [Original Letter] also does not deal with the problem of power: who has it and who does not. Harper’s is a prestigious institution, backed by money and influence” that has bestowed its platform to influential people, not the marginalized.
“Ironically, these influential people then use that platform to complain that they’re being silenced.“
The Original Letter “reads as a caustic reaction to a diversifying industry - one that’s starting to challenge institutional norms that have protected bigotry”.
The writers of the Original Letter “use seductive but nebulous concepts and coded language to obscure the actual meaning behind their words”.
The Original Letter “seems like an attempt to control and derail the ongoing debate about who gets to have a platform.”
Their “words reflect a stubbornness to let go of the elitism that still pervades the media industry, an unwillingness to dismantle systems that keep people like them in and the rest of us out.”
What struck me by the Response to the Original Letter is its dismissive tone and mean-spirited psychologizing. It creates a narrative of powerful elites who pretend to be concerned about the erosion of free speech norms but “actually” just want to hang on to their privilege. Here’s the first posted comment to the Response, which pretty much captures my thoughts about the matter:
All of your "rebuttals" (most barely deserve to be called that) of the original letter ignore the fundamental point. That is, the true victims of cancel culture [are] not the signers as they are popular/wealthy/secure enough to weather the massive backlash they have and will receive (still, thank God for them).
It is for the multitudes of regular people that have and are suddenly finding themselves on the wrong end of this new and abhorrent cancel culture.