After the obligatory swipes at President Trump and the ideological right, the signatories offer the most anodyne condemnation of our current "cancel culture" they could possibly have crafted. Here's the heart of it:
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 Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a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.
Many on the left are appalled that an endorsement of the Enlightenment values of free speech and thought would be endorsed by the signatories, some of whom are themselves leftists. The letter is seen as anti-progressive and anti-left because it endorses the freedom to express unfashionable opinions without the fear of losing one's livelihood. This is too much for progressives who believe that opinions with which they disagree must be silenced and people who transgress the leftist consensus must be fired or otherwise deplatformed.
This is, of course, the same pattern of thinking that prevailed in Hitler's Nazi Germany and during Stalin's reign of terror in the U.S.S.R., Mao and his successors' reign of terror in China, the Kim family's ongoing reign of terror in North Korea, and Castro's ongoing reign of terror in Cuba. It's how fascist and communist totalitarians always treat freedom - which they despise - and it has led invariably to mass slaughter and dehumanization ever since the French Revolution in 1789.
It's perhaps the paramount evil of our age, and it's rearing its grotesque head once again in the form of "cancel culture."
Perhaps the best response to those who are upset that freedom and liberty would actually be endorsed in America is Fredrik deBoer's who writes this pithy reaction:
This is, of course, the same pattern of thinking that prevailed in Hitler's Nazi Germany and during Stalin's reign of terror in the U.S.S.R., Mao and his successors' reign of terror in China, the Kim family's ongoing reign of terror in North Korea, and Castro's ongoing reign of terror in Cuba. It's how fascist and communist totalitarians always treat freedom - which they despise - and it has led invariably to mass slaughter and dehumanization ever since the French Revolution in 1789.
It's perhaps the paramount evil of our age, and it's rearing its grotesque head once again in the form of "cancel culture."
Perhaps the best response to those who are upset that freedom and liberty would actually be endorsed in America is Fredrik deBoer's who writes this pithy reaction:
Please, think for a minute and consider: what does it say when a completely generic endorsement of free speech and open debate is in and of itself immediately diagnosed as anti-progressive, as anti-left? There is literally no specific instance discussed in that open letter, no real-world incident about which there might be specific and tangible controversy.
So how can someone object to an endorsement of free speech and open debate without being opposed to those things in and of themselves? You can’t. And people are objecting to it because social justice politics are plainly opposed to free speech. That is the most obvious political fact imaginable today. Of course Yelling Woke Twitter hates free speech! Of course social justice liberals would prevent expression they disagree with if they could! How could any honest person observe our political discourse for any length of time and come to any other conclusion?
You want to argue that free speech is bad, fine. You want to adopt a dominance politics that (you imagine) will result in you being the censor, fine. But just do that. Own that. Can we stop with this charade? Can we stop pretending? Can we just proceed by acknowledging what literally everyone quietly knows, which is that the dominant majority of progressive people simply don’t believe in the value of free speech anymore?
Please. Let’s grow up and speak plainly, please. Let’s just grow up.
Amen.