This week, Harper’s magazine published “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate.” The letter contains a reaffirmation of liberal values: a commitment to open debate, a refusal to ostracize others over disagreements and an endorsement of the value of tolerating diverse ideological stances. It is also a public lament at what the letter’s authors see as illiberal trends in society.
“The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted,” the letter opines: “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 need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences.”
This seemingly benign, even vague, letter was signed by 153 of the most renowned scholars, authors and artists of our time, including Noam Chomsky, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, and Malcolm Gladwell.
A controversy ensued. And it has been as incomprehensible as it is ridiculous.
Some critics oppose the contents of the letter, claiming that no illiberal restraints on free speech exist, and that cancel culture just means holding people accountable for inappropriate behavior. Another set of critics do not think it appropriate to co-sign a letter with those of an unsavory ideological bent.
For example, Jennifer Finne Boylan has offered a public apology for having signed a letter alongside J. K. Rowling, Bari Weiss and Matthew Yglesias. The presence of these names, according to some critics, is evidence that the letter contains bigoted dog-whistles and coded attacks.
But signing an open letter merely establishes agreement with the contents of that letter, not with all the past and present beliefs of the other co-signatories.
Historian Kerri Greenidge also recalled her endorsement of the letter, and even been granted her request to retract her signature.
So, did Greenidge voluntarily sign something she disagreed with? It seems more likely that her recent actions were the result of social pressure because her name was included among those of the ostracized. This kind of social pressure, ironically, proves the need for the letter itself.
Greenidge and her entourage have claimed that she was misled as to the nature of the letter, and that her name was added without her consent. But leaked emails have shown that not only was Greenidge aware of the contents of the letter, but she thought that it “reads well.”
Her sister apparently still maintains that Greenidge did not consent to providing a signature.
The absurdity didn’t stop here—even Noam Chomsky has not escaped censure. Many have called him a traitor to his politics, and accused him of raising a false flag.
But the fact that Chomsky’s name appeared underneath the letter, next to Deirdre McCloskey’s does not suddenly establish Chomsky as a born-again libertarian. Nor does Margaret Atwood share J. K. Rowling’s views on gender. Just as someone who defends freedom of expression may not necessarily endorse all the ideas that are expressed, signing an open letter is only an endorsement of the content of the letter, not of all the ideas held by the other signatories.
This important distinction “has been understood outside of fascist circles since the eighteenth century,” as Chomsky himself has put it. We might wish to debate the worth of open letters, and we may disagree on whether or not people should sign them in the first place, or on the contents of this particular open letter. But, instead, there has been a rush to condemn those who dared to sign alongside the ostracized.
It is a hopeful sign that some of our most important thinkers are still courageous enough to sign a public letter in favor of open debate. It may seem like a small step, but in our current moment, it might prove a massive breakthrough for those of us who would like to skip past the age of the cultural commissars and their political litmus tests.
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I was listening to Joe Rogan the other day, and his guest (Lindsay was the last name, don’t remember the first name) made a pretty good point: “Woke” people appear to themselves be racist, which they know is wrong and they’re battling their inner demons. This manifests in the form of them trying to aggressively stamp out anything that even appears to be racist, even when there isn’t any known connection to racism. He compared them to Calvinists, who were doing everything they could to stamp out sin, which eventually lead to witch burning. In other words, people being so caught up in their crusade against their own inner demons that they see their own inner demons in other people, and they do irrational things without asking themselves whether this is all in their heads.
Right now this is just a moral panic, but who knows how far it will go. For the time being, words are the witches that they’re burning. It is expanding into the territory of saying that somebody is either racist or anti-racist and that there can’t be anything in between (which is ridiculous) with anti-racism being that you must be on a crusade of your own to find and stamp out racism in otherwise benign things (like master bedrooms.) I’d be a bit concerned when people start getting excommunicated (fired from their jobs) for not being able to prove that they’re anti-racist as that can cause real economic harm. So long as vaguely defined things like hate speech aren’t criminalized, there shouldn’t be any burnings, though that doesn’t preclude lynch mobs. And no, lynch mobs weren’t just a racism thing, they also targeted witches. You know, torches and pitchforks.
The guest’s name is James Lindsay. And he has a website called New Discourses, which is very good.
AREO MAGAZINE IS ANTI ISLAM. HELEN PLUCKROSE IS AGAINST MUSLIMS, SHE IS A RACIST. I WILL HAVE THIS WEBSITE CLOSED DOWN. I HAVE EMAILED AREO’S DOMAIN HOST. ME AND MY MUSLIM BROTHERS WILL BE MESSAGING ALL OF AREO’S TWITTER FOLLOWERS. I WILL NOT STOP UNTIL I CLOSE THIS WEBSITE.
ALLAH IS REALITY
A-B-D L-O-M-A-X
AREO MAGAZINE IS ANTI ISLAM. HELEN PLUCKROSE IS AGAINST MUSLIMS, SHE IS A RACIST. I WILL HAVE THIS WEBSITE CLOSED DOWN. I HAVE EMAILED AREO’S DOMAIN HOST. ME AND MY MUSLIM BROTHERS WILL BE MESSAGING ALL OF AREO’S TWITTER FOLLOWERS. I WILL NOT STOP UNTIL I CLOSE THIS WEBSITE.
ALLAH IS REALITY
A-B-D L-O-M-A-X
“Did you hear that?”
“No, I didn’t hear anything.”
“Exactly, it must be a dog whistle.”
How is that mindset not utter paranoia?
“No, I didn’t hear anything.”
Liar! Of course you heard it, you’re just pretending you didn’t because you don’t want anyone to stop the coded message from getting out. You’re just like folks holding ‘all lives matter’ signs — we know what that really means and when they protest that their signs just mean what they say, they are only making dumb so as to be left alone to do their Nazi work. There is no paranoia! There is just vigilance.
If it’s full of dog whistles that supposedly signal the bigoted in=crowd, how come the leftwing media can hear it?
The irony in all this is a detail. Those who signed the letter, which in a passage quotes Donald Trump as “supporter” of illiberalism, say he is fighting against threats to freedom that you see were only created by liberals. This disgrace of the “culture of cancellation” is a tactic by radical liberals and now moderate liberals now have to be silent or apologize if they do not follow the dogmas of the “Church”. When the victims were conservative, everything was fine, right? Lack of warning was not, for years this cancer affects the culture.
I am not a defender of Trump, although it seems (not that I see badly in those who defend it, it is democracy), but one thing is clear to me, even with a toxic culture launched by the liberals, this authoritarian culture they insist on mentioning only president as the greatest threat. He alone is the threat even when the letter is a “resistance” to radical liberal ideas not to him.
Any government can be a threat and the government of Biden if it wins will be no different, especially Biden being held hostage by authoritarian policies proposed by these radical liberals. Without being in “power” they do damage to freedom imagine with power in hand. The point is, both Trump and Biden are a threat, but only Trump is singled out. But as I said
Now a closing question: Would most people have signed the letter if a criticism of Trump was not there? I got that question in my head. But it doesn’t matter, it seems that not even criticizing Trump was enough to diminish the complaints of the “cancellers”. To say that Trump is a threat to liberal democracy and not to see risks on the other side is to underestimate people too much.
Sorry if there are mistakes, because I’m just a Brazilian still “amateur” in the English language, I counted on the help of the translator. I hope friends here will understand the comment.
HELEN PLUCKROSE IS AN ANTI MUSLIM LADY
I WILL HAVE HER WEBSITE AREO SHUT DOWN. THIS PLACE IS PUBLISHING TRASH AGAINST MUSLIMS.
A-B-D L-0-M-A-X