150 Writers & Academics Sign A Letter Defending ‘Open Debate’ Against Cancel Culture
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Quote:Harper’s Magazine has published a letter on “open debate” which is signed by 150 journalists, writers and academics, from Noam Chomsky to J.K. Rowling. The letter itself is relatively brief and takes plenty of shots at the right on the way to making a point about left’s growing fondness for cancel culture.
ou can read it all here. The letter praises “powerful protests” for social justice and then warns that “forces of illiberalism” (they name Trump as an ally of these forces) are “gaining strength.” The letter warns “resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma.” And that’s really the main point of the letter.
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.
Back in January I wrote about YouTuber Natalie Wynn who made a pretty good argument that there is a clear difference between social accountability and cancel culture. The former is about changing someone’s mind while the latter is almost always about punishing unorthodox views either socially or economically. The letter continues:
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 Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a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.
Some of the items mentioned in that list are ones we’ve written about in the past month or two. The firing of NY Times editor James Bennet over Sen. Tom Cotton’s op-ed. The progressive researcher fired for tweeting a study that said rioting hurt Democrats at the polls. Frankly, there are a lot more recent examples the letter didn’t mention, like that awful Washington Post piece about a random woman’s Halloween costume from two years ago. But the idea that we are narrowing the boundaries of what can be said seems pretty accurate.
The letter concludes by saying we need to maintain space for “good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences.” In other words, cancel culture is a bad idea and we need to stop it.
As mentioned above, Noam Chomsky and J.K. Rowling (who I wrote about yesterday) signed the letter. Other familiar names include academic Jonathan Haidt, NY Times columinst Bari Weiss, Vox’s Matt Yglesias, author Malcolm Gladwell, academic John McWhorter, author Jesse Singal, and author Margaret Atwood, just to name a few. Nicholas A. Christakis of Yale, who has experienced cancel culture first hand, is also on the list.
Despite all the throat clearing about the right, it’s really the popularity of this new cancel culture on the left that is the main target. The more the left tries to mainstream these ideas the more people on the left split off and criticize them for doing so. The first wave of people rejecting it became the Intellectual Dark Web. Now you have another, larger wave of people, most of whom are progressives, who are expressing concern about the recent rise of cancel culture.
But I don’t think cancel culture is going to stop. It has grown in parallel with Black Lives Matter and the identity politics that supports it. Now that White Fragility is a bestseller it seems likely the number of people who join the social justice cult will continue grow, giving them more power to punish even more people in the future.
What may be most noteworthy about this letter is how few people signed it compared to the number of people who are currently embracing BLM and identity politics.
Update: A TV critic at Vox who is trans has posted a letter she sent to her employers voicing disappointment that Matt Yglesias signed the letter signed by “anti-trans voices.” According to Emily VanDerWerff, “his signatiure being on the letter makes me feel less safe at Vox…”
The last paragraph is interesting. She claims she doesn’t want Yglesias reprimanded or fired but she’s clearly looking to have some kind of social impact, otherwise why publicize the objection? To be clear, I’m not saying she should feel obligated to remain silent. I’m saying she could have privately complained to HR or to Yglesias. But posting this on Twitter seems like a clear attempt to shame him in public which is just another form of punishment.
Also, the idea that this cost him nothing is pretty silly. He was clearly taking a risk and this response proves that. Remember, James Bennet didn’t resign from the NY Times because of the external reaction to the Sen. Cotton op-ed. He resigned because of the internal backlash from staffers arguing that he never should have allowed the Times to publish what it did.
Earlier she had said this:
Another point:
And another:
Two more critics from inside Vox, one telling Yglesias his decision “reflects poorly on us all.” It appears Yglesias has now deleted all of his tweets.
BTW, I really do think Yglesias has a better handle on cancel culture than some of his compatriots (comrades?) on the left. I recently wrote about media bias and pointed out that Matt Yglesias was able to see a problem with it that 60 Minutes journo Wesley Lowery could not.
What a surprise, liberals with the slightest criticism back out of a principled stand, thus proving the original point of the letter.
Quote:This reads like a satire from Jonathan Swift or George Orwell, and if it were a movie, it would be the film of our times. John wrote yesterday about the letter signed by 153 “prominent artists and intellectuals,” as the New York Times describes them, decrying cancel culture and defending free speech and open debate. They argued at Harper’s that the Left’s cancel culture had become “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.”
When the Left set about proving it, it didn’t take long for the signatories to start surrendering to the very phenomenon they protested:
The letter, which was published by Harper’s Magazine and will also appear in several leading international publications, surfaces a debate that has been going on privately in newsrooms, universities and publishing houses that have been navigating demands for diversity and inclusion, while also asking which demands — and the social media dynamics that propel them — go too far.
And on social media, the reaction was swift, with some heaping ridicule on the letter’s signatories — who include cultural luminaries like Margaret Atwood, Bill T. Jones and Wynton Marsalis, along with journalists and academics — for thin-skinnedness, privilege and, as one person put it, fear of loss of “relevance.” …
Amid the intense criticism, some signatories appeared to back away from the letter. On Tuesday evening, the historian Kerri K. Greenidge tweeted “I do not endorse this @Harpers letter,” and said she was in touch with the magazine about a retraction. (Giulia Melucci, a spokeswoman for Harper’s, said the magazine had fact-checked all signatures and that Dr. Greenidge had signed off. But she said the magazine is “respectfully removing her name.”)
Come on, man. Harper’s wasn’t just going to take someone’s word that the other 152 signatories put their names to the letter. Of course they checked it out. Greenidge simply quailed at the first sign of criticism and tried to construct a cover story. That certainly says something about cancel culture, but it says even more about Greenidge’s personal and professional credibility.
Others retreated after getting blasted for the company they kept rather than the principles they espoused.
Another person who signed, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in an effort to stay out of the growing storm, said she did not know who all the other signatories were when she agreed to participate, and if she had, she may not have signed. She also said that the letter, which was about internet shaming, among other things, was now being used to shame people on the internet.
Not everyone was anonymous about embracing their guilt-by-association conviction (via Twitchy):
It’s tough to know where to start with this explanation. Did Boylan not read the letter closely before signing it, just chiming in to hang out with Chomsky, Steinem, and Atwood? If that’s the case, it seems like the NYT is stretching the term “intellectual” to the breaking point. On the other hand, if Boylan really believed in the principle of free speech and open debate, and especially opposes cancel culture, then why does it matter who else supports those positions? That is why we adhere to principles rather than tribes. Or at least, that’s why we should.
Now that the progressive mobs have a couple of scalps on their belt over the Harper’s letter, don’t expect them to stop. Instead, they will be motivated to hunt down as many more as they can. Previous cancel-culture attack figures like J.K. Rowling probably will hang firm, but how many of those who have not experienced that kind of character assassination will do the same? Hopefully most will, but that appears pretty optimistic at the moment.
The point of the list was to show how broadly these principles are shared, the list’s creator told the New York Times. “We believe these are values that are widespread and shared, and we wanted the list to reflect that,” Thomas Chatterton Williams explained. Instead, its launch now seems ready to show just how shallow those commitments to those values really are among “prominent artists and intellectuals.”
Did I say it would be a great satire of our time as a film? More like a farce, really.
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[NEWS] 150 Writers & Academics Sign A Letter Defending ‘Open Debate’ Against Cancel Culture
