Dear Harper's Letter people
Let's all get together and make bullying kill itself.
Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second. The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.
The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, 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. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. 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. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. 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.
Click here if you’d like to see who signed it.
Here’s my answer.
Dear Liberal colleagues;
These cultural institutions you defend are the problem. They created you. These institutions have frozen discourse in a framework that ultimately seeks only it’s own validation and justification. You have confused the institutions themselves with truth.
Human progress will be not halted by the dissolution of Harvard Law School. Free speech is not dependent upon The New York Times staying in business. Scientific progress will not disappear if Stanford University becomes Snoop Dogg’s first Hip-Hop theme park.
This system that you regard as so essential to human progress is failing humanity. That has never been more clear. How do you defend it? If this system worked so well, Obama was arguably history’s most skillful advocate for it, how do you explain the 45th President of The United States of America? This is your idea of success?
But, you’re shocked, shocked, that those whose voices have been systematically excluded from power for centuries now can find so little respect for your norms and standards? You’re surprised that after generations of being silenced, both by threat of and actual death, subjected to institutionally-enabled injustice, abuse, theft and deception by the very institutions and system of Liberal discourse you defend, that those denied a voice by this system are finally utterly unable to concern themselves with protecting your license to say whatever you want to say?
What have you learned?
Sincerely,
Richard.