Earlier this month Harper’s magazine published a 532-word “Letter on Justice and Open Debate” signed by more than 150 well-known writers and journalists. It began by welcoming the “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.” Then it struck a note of caution, warning that the passions of the moment had “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.” It urged that “resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion.”
What followed was proof of how entrenched America’s “culture wars” remain, half a century after that term was first used to describe the political rifts of the Vietnam era. The online pushback was instant and widespread. Wasn’t it hypocrisy to have some of the country’s most successful writers complain, in a prestigious publication, that they feared censorship? Hadn’t some of the signatories leveraged the “cancel culture” they decried? A counter-letter picked apart several of the incidents alluded to in the original statement and argued that few reached the threshold of cancellation. It contended that the true scandal, tellingly absent from the first statement, was how easily less well-known journalists from racial and sexual minorities can be harassed, marginalized, and silenced by nondisclosure agreements, or through fears of losing their jobs, and other forms of workplace censorship.
Shortly afterwards the New York Times columnist Bari Weiss penned a pointed resignation letter to her boss, complaining that although “Twitter is not on the masthead of the New York Times … [it] has become its ultimate editor.” She described a hostile workplace in which her “work and character were openly demeaned” and colleagues “publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot” as senior management “stood by while simultaneously praising me in private for my courage.” As with the first letter, critics quickly noted that Weiss’s righteous indignation would have meant more if she had not spent much of her early career silencing critics of Israel and branding them, de facto, as anti-Semites. Her resignation came just a few after the newspaper had ousted its senior Op-Ed editor for publishing a controversial argument by Sen. Tom Cotton in which he considered arguments for deploying the US military to restore calm in cities with violent protests.
These incidents reveal tensions that run deeper and wider than many non-Americans may appreciate. Comparable passions were evident in a letter to the Linguistic Society of America calling for the removal of Steven Pinker – a distinguished Harvard academic – “from both our list of distinguished academic fellows and our list of media experts” largely because of “behaviour [that] is systematically at odds with the LSA’s recently issued statement on racial justice.” In June the National Book Critics Circle went through three waves of resignations after its board fell apart while arguing over the draft of a statement in support of Black Lives Matter.
As is often the case in highly polarized questions, there is often merit on both sides of these incendiary questions. While there is, undeniably, a Maoist quality to some of the calls for deplatforming and dismissal of people with “unacceptable” opinions, we are also, equally undeniably, at a cultural crossroads in that cultural elites are losing their gatekeeping power. Attempts to strike a balance will likely exasperate those who feel the stakes are too high for compromises, but that is inevitable when such provocative issues are being discussed.
Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik wisely concludes that “much of the liberal panic about new ostensibly corrosive phenomena such as populism or post-truth politics is really old panic about the incursion of new forces into elite domains.” She adds that “what is really unfolding is a cohort of established influencers grappling with the fact they are losing control over how their work is received. Something old, threatened by something new.” That is undoubtedly so, but it doesn’t make the ancien regime’s warnings about weakening or dispensing with the norms of civil debate any less relevant or true. For, as the liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill memorably wrote, more than 150 years ago: “If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”
