Response to A Letter on Justice and Open Debate
There’s been much ado about a letter than appeared in Harper’s today.
It seems everyone just loves the idea of free speech — even Nazis — as long as one doesn’t say precisely what one is talking about.
I certainly hope the signatories to the letter will read some of the Twitter threads responding to it. Many Tweeters are making excellent points, some of which overlap with parts of what I say here.
One issue here is that knowledge is power. “And it must follow, as the night the day”, that transparency and clarity are then parts of power. The letter might be said to take away some of our power as readers, because it is neither transparent nor clear. The authors of the letter are muddying the waters — perhaps intentionally, perhaps not. I expect that the signatories have varied motivations. Some of them may not suspect what sort of endeavor they’ve gotten drawn into, because the ideas are stated abstractly, without examples.
Why do I say the letter isn’t clear? Because there are no specifics. For example, when someone made a joke on Twitter about Bret Stephens being a “bedbug”, was that “cancel culture?” Or free speech? What about when Stephens wrote to the guy’s boss and tried to get him fired? Cancel culture? Or free speech? Perhaps each of these are seen as examples of one or the other, but by different signatories. The different signatories may actually agree on nothing, once the discussion gets specific.
What about the recent occurrence where a group of writers of color and their allies at New York Times risked their jobs by speaking out against NYT’s publication of Tom Cotton’s editorial. Was that free speech? They spoke out because of Cotton’s call for increased use of force by police or military against BLM protestors. They feared this could possibly get reporters injured or killed while covering the protests. Was that an example of freedom of speech?
Was it cancel culture and a denial of free speech, when the editor got fired over this — the editor who didn’t bother to read the article, much less check it to see if it contained inaccuracies, before publishing it?
Again, I’d bet a substantial sum of money that some signatories saw the newsroom revolt as free speech — and that others saw the firing of the editor as a denial of free speech — and that those two groups of signatories don’t overlap much at all.
As with all important issues, the Devil is in the details. And so is the angel. It’s not possible to tell if the signatories of the letter are making a case for justice and virtue, for injustice and evil, or for nothing in particular — without details. It’s what some refer to as virtue signaling — trying to show in your words that you’re a good person — though not necessarily trying to communicate anything else.
The signatories are against “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.”
Again we need examples of the attitudes and commitments and their concrete effects — or else this is rather meaningless.
There’s a relevant issue of “freedom of association” here — whether NYT owes Cotton a platform, whether universities own a platform to Neo-Nazis who wish to speak on their campuses etc. Here’s a great article being cited by many on Twitter today about that.
“The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.”
Without examples, by that “on all sides” comment, one could guess that maybe the authors are singing the praises of “both sides” journalism, where one assumes that both sides are equally credible and virtuous, or equally evil, even if there is obvious evidence they are unequal. Both sides journalism is dangerous, not laudable.
How Mainstream Media Destroy Truth and Democracy through Both Sides Reporting
The signatories are concerned about “ 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… 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.”
Again, more examples are needed. If the head of an organization is fired for saying “All lives matter”, and then realizing this was insensitive and apologizing, this is different from being fired for promoting white supremacy.
It’s easy for someone rooting for one party in a dispute to mis-characterize a situation to make it seem like a denial of freedom of speech. If an editor gets fired for not bothering to read an editorial containing inaccuracies, this may seem like “cancel culture” if he’s your buddy. But if you are a person who thinks it’s reasonable to expect an editor to read articles before publishing them, this may not seem like cancel culture.
“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.”
At the risk of repeating myself interminably, this cries out for examples. Some of the signatories are said to have histories of bullying people or trying to get people fired for saying things the signatory didn’t like. Those people who could have been fired might be wondering exactly whose free speech is being valued here, and whose is being devalued.
“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 people who say the signatories tried to get them fired, had less power than the signatories. So if this letter is advocating for more power for the signatories, then the reverse of the above quote is the true. Promotion of more power for the already powerful is what is hurting those who lack power.
In contrast, if the above quote is complaining about “restriction of debate” by disallowing platforms for COVID-19 science deniers, or climate science deniers, then the signatories are just wrong.
Restriction of debate by failing to publish flat earthers, holocaust deniers, Q-Anon conspiracy believers etc. is perfectly reasonable. People are not owed a platform on which to present false and destructive ideas that have been disproven, some of them decades ago.
“ 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.”
On the face of it, that’s easy to agree with — unless you have examples of what they’re referring to, in which case it may be easier to disagree.
In summary, I’d like some of the signatories to give concrete examples. Then and only then will we have any idea of what the letter means to them.
Last but most important, the context in which this letter is occurring, is one in which the Right Wing has firm control of our national political narrative. Because of this, in 2016 Donald Trump and two Republican-dominated Houses of Congress were elected.
It’s a situation of asymmetric polarization — where both sides are not equal. There there is significantly more lying, and significantly more hate mongering and fear mongering from Right Wing media and politicians than from the Left. That asymmetry needs to be kept in mind when discussing freedom of speech and justice.
Our society is immersed in Right Wing propaganda. One third of the country lives in the Right Wing media bubble universe of “alternative facts” — that is, lies. They cast their votes and make their health decisions on the basis of lies. This is the cause of our most severe problems in the U.S. today.
To read that letter without taking this context into account, would be to deny our most basic political realities.
The government we now have is the result of our allowing Right Wing TV, radio, Internet sites, social media and local newspapers to lie, hate monger and fear monger. Those lies and the associated emotions, persuaded voters to elect con artists.
The Banality of Lies: When We Let Media Lie in News, We Enable Corruption
The last thing we need to be doing in this situation is promoting the kind of “open debate” that gives massive platforms to Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, holocaust deniers, Q-Anon promoters etc. The human brain is not designed in such a way that it can orient itself to reality effectively, if it lives in an 80%/15%/5% atmosphere. That is, brains don’t work well in an atmosphere of 80% disproven lies — lies that people push into the debate because the lies bring them political advantage. The 15% entertainment and 5% facts don’t change much here. Unreality heavily predominates in such a person’s perception of the world in which they live. Our big problem currently is that many people live in such an environment.
These are important limits to the values of “free speech” and “open debate.”
Vagueness is another problem for the human brain — in this case, being vague about what “free speech” actually is. If the letter in Harper’s isn’t clarified, that leaves its authors or others free to claim that all the signatories agree with them in some future situation in which they define “free speech” in a way that promotes their own agendas.
To the authors and signatories on this letter: You weren’t clear. But I don’t want to cancel you. All of us are unclear sometimes. Please clarify the letter with some examples of what you mean.
I also hope to hear more continued discussion on Twitter and elsewhere, by us peons who aren’t famous enough that we were invited to be signatories to the letter.
I would love to hear more examples of events, along with explanations of why this or that behavior is “free speech or is “cancel culture” — and whether such behaviors are destructive or constructive for our society and why. As long as discussions are in good faith, without lies being promoted for political advantage, that’s my idea of a useful open debate.
Update 7/9/20
Some people are using the vaguely worded Harper’s letter to support harassment of people by Right Wingers and to justify their views. The problem here is that denial of free speech is a small problem on the Left that ought to be addressed. It’s an enormous problem on the Right that they won’t address. Because, to them, denial of free speech to those they disagree with is a feature, not a bug. Furthermore, when the Right cries “free speech”, it’s often for the purpose of harming or silencing people with whom they disagree , or requiring those people to supply Right Wingers with a platform — not to further free speech for all.
Right Wingers often act like the boy in the Aesop Fable, The Boy Who Cried Wolf — except that when they cry wolf, they point to the powerless sheep — not to the powerful wolf — in order to protect the wolf.
It’s unfortunate that in our current Trumpian environment, we need to ask ourselves about statements we think we approve of, not just “Is this true?” but also, “If this statement were goal oriented speech, not truth oriented speech, how might Right Wingers use these words to advance their agenda?”
This is a fact of life in a nation swimming in Right Wing propaganda — one result of which is that the Right Wing controls the presidency, the Senate and numerous state offices and legislatures. Propagandists use goal oriented speech, not truth oriented speech like most of the rest of us do.
Propagandists and con artists are running our lives during the Trump administration, so we have to deal with them, whether we like it or not. Trump got elected because we allowed Right Wing media to persuade voters to elect con artists — based on lies and hate and fear mongering.
