Here's What You Need To Know About That Harper's Letter Criticizing Cancel Culture
On July 7, Harper's Magazine published an open letter entitled "A Letter on Justice and Open Debate." The letter, which touches on cancel culture and perceived stifling of free speech, immediately ignited fierce debates on the internet. Here's what you need to know about the letter and the reactions to it.
The letter itself is a brief argument in favor of tolerating divergent ideas and opinions and is against "ideological conformity":
The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion — which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.
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.
The letter's headline would suggest that the letter's purpose is to encourage "open debate," and some of the statements and language in the letter do follow suit. Many of these statements, though, transition into all but direct references to cancel culture, the recent resignation of the New York Times's op-ed editor James Bennet over the publication of Tom Cotton's inflammatory article to send in the troops to restore national order, and other institutional reckonings and online debates that have taken place in the wake of protests over police brutality and controversial opinions about transgender rights.
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 Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a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.
The response to this letter has been loud and vehement, with people praising the letter and its signatories and people expressing disdain for it and dismay with many of its signatories. People also take issue with the implication that this is one of the more pressing topics at this particular point in time. Perhaps more than anything else, it has struck many people as disingenuous to advocate for open discourse by complaining that one's public tweets on a public platform are being publicly disagreed with.
It's also worth looking closer at the list of people who originally signed the letter:
It is a somewhat surprising list — mostly for the particular combination of names appearing on one list together, but also because every single one of them belongs to a writer, journalist or academic who boasts a prominent platform of some kind, whether as a columnist for a renowned publication, as the author of a beloved children's series, as a very loud Twitter personality, or elsewhere.
It's important to note that these are the original signatories, because a number of signatories have since attempted to rescind or have otherwise apologized for signing it in the first place.
Which, yes, is a little confusing: if the letter is simply an entreaty to open debate, why would well-intentioned writers and thinkers who signed the letter in the first place seek to retract their endorsement upon learning of other people who endorsed it?
This is what's at the core of the arguments of people who have reacted negatively to the letter. To many people, it seems like there are motives underlying the letter that don't pertain to the fairly benign request for "open debate" — a theory supported by the fact that certain signatories want to redact their signatures because people they don't agree with also signed it. And although many of the signatories claim that the point of the letter is to speak for marginalized voices and not themselves, it seems like just as many of the signatories endorsed the letter in order to make a point in the personal battles they've been embroiled in on Twitter rather than to advocate for the freedom of expression for more marginalized voices.
In fact, the writer behind the letter's inception, Thomas Chatterton Williams — a journalist who writes for Harper's, The New York Times Magazine and The Guardian — spoke on this point with the New York Times for an article about the letter:
He said there wasn't one particular incident that provoked the letter. But he did cite several recent ones, including the resignation of more than half the board of the National Book Critics Circle over its statement supporting Black Lives Matter, a similar blowup at the Poetry Foundation, and the case of David Shor, a data analyst at a consulting firm who was fired after he tweeted about academic research linking looting and vandalism by protesters to Richard Nixon's 1968 electoral victory.
Such incidents, Mr. Williams said, both fueled and echoed what he called the far greater and more dangerous "illiberalism" of President Trump.
There's some other context around some of the signatories that's relevant here, too. Over the past few weeks, J.K. Rowling — yes, the author of the Harry Potter series; we wish there were another, better J.K. Rowling to talk about — has been increasingly vocal about her long-held views that gender is binary and the existence of trans women is an inherent threat to cisgender women. When the backlash predictably came, she took to her personal blog to explain her viewpoint in more detail, using unscientific and inaccurate information to bolster her arguments, and to bemoan the oppression she felt in voicing an unpopular opinion. Fact-checkers tore the blog apart, which contributed to her feeling oppressed and victimized by the response to her open transphobia.
There's Jesse Singal, who has written extensively about transgender issues and often advocates for more gatekeeping around gender-affirming surgery and treatment. It's worth noting that trans readers tend not to be fans of his work.
Another signatory is Bari Weiss, a writer and editor for the New York Times. Her best-known writing in recent years might be her article on the "intellectual dark web," a term she coined for a group of academics and intellectuals who feel themselves to be censored and barred from mainstream media and discourse. The intellectuals she writes about include bestselling authors Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris and conservative household name Ben Shapiro.
But some of the other signatories throw a wrench in the argument that the letter is just about a handful of controversial journalists banding together to complain about having their feelings hurt on Twitter. Noam Chomsky signed it, as did Margaret Atwood, who has been a vocal supporter of trans rights; neither of those two — among many other signatories — have recently complained about personal censorship online. The list of signatories is altogether too large and too diverse onto which to try and pin a given motive.
Which, frankly, is the purported point of the letter: that all of these signatories seek an environment in which thinkers with conflicting or unpopular opinions are allowed to coexist if not peacefully, then at least without real-life consequence.
The trouble with that is that some of the signatories' opinions do have real-life consequences for many people. For instance, J.K. Rowling's arguments that trans women are a threat to cis women in women's restrooms and other women's space promote the idea that trans women are inherently dangerous — a broad, ungenerous and unfounded idea to promote, especially on such a significant platform as J.K. Rowling's.
A lot of the pushback from the people the letter addresses — the contingent of the left that allegedly desires utter ideological conformity — argues that to not want to engage with ideas that challenge people's identities or humanity isn't an anti-free speech stance, but rather, simply a choice.
An article in The New Republic that came out the day before the Harper's letter was published, uncannily enough, addresses exactly the issue that the letter raises: is anyone really being censored here in the first place? What obligation to our ideological rivals do we really have, in terms of either hearing them out or debating them?
Osita Nwanevu writes:
While public universities in America are generally bound by the First Amendment, controversial speakers have no broad right to speak at private institutions. Those institutions do, however, have a right to decide what ideas they are and aren't interested in entertaining and what people they believe will or will not be useful to their communities of scholars — a right that limits the entry and participation not only of public figures with controversial views but the vast majority of people in our society. Senators like Tom Cotton have every right to have their views published in a newspaper. But they have no specific right to have those views published by any particular publication. Rather, publications have the right — both constitutionally as institutions of the press, and by convention as collections of individuals engaged in lawful projects — to decide what and whom they would or would not like to publish, based on whatever standards happen to prevail within each outlet.
When a speaker is denied or when staffers at a publication argue that something should not have been published, the rights of the parties in question haven't been violated in any way. But what we tend to hear in these and similar situations are criticisms that are at odds with the principle that groups in liberal society have the general right to commit themselves to values which many might disagree with and make decisions on that basis. There's nothing unreasonable about criticizing the substance of such decisions and the values that produce them. But accusations of "illiberalism" in these cases carry the implication that nonstate institutions under liberalism have an obligation of some sort to be maximally permissive of opposing ideas — or at least maximally permissive of the kinds of ideas critics of progressive identity politics consider important. In fact, they do not.
Updates:
Since this blog was published, a number of articles about the Harper's letter have also come out. Here's a roundup of excerpts from some of the reaction pieces:
From Jessica Valenti for GEN:
At the end of the day, "cancel culture" is a term full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It's certainly not about free speech: After all, an arrested journalist is never referred to as "canceled" nor is a woman who has been frozen out of an industry after complaining about sexual harassment. "Canceled" is a label we all understand to mean a powerful person who's been held to account. It's a term meant to re-center sympathy on those who already have privilege and influence — a convenient tool to maintain the status quo.
[GEN]
From Gabrielle Bellot for LitHub:
Trans people are one of the implicit bêtes noires of the letter, for we are one of the very subjects some of the signatories would like the freedom to "explore" in debasing terms. How could we be included, really, when the letter is tacitly about the freedom for people to ask whether or not freaks like me should be allowed to transition, should be allowed in the women's restroom, should be allowed not to suffer the overwhelming pain of gender dysphoria? How could race be dealt with seriously in the letter, when one can only assume that one of the freedoms being requested is the freedom to ask, a la The Bell Curve, whether or not black people have lower IQs or whether or not black Americans are more prone to criminality than white Americans, or why we should consider believing women who claim to be the victims of assault years after they happened?
[LitHub]
From Mike Masnick for Techdirt:
There are few things more misunderstood than the distinction between speech and consequences. Indeed, all too frequently people argue that consequences from speech are attempts to stamp out free speech, and just as common is the idea that actual attempts to silence free speech (e.g., SLAPP defamation lawsuits) are just "consequences" of speech. Neither is accurate. Attempts to stop free speech are attempts to use state power (such as the courts) to stop people from being able to express themselves. But people saying your ideas are bad and venerable institutions shouldn't amplify them is not an attack on free speech or open inquiry. It's a recognition that not all ideas are equal, and not all ideas deserve the kind of escalation and promotion that some speakers wish they had.
[Techdirt]
From Hannah Giorgis for The Atlantic:
The letter denounces "the restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society," strategically blurring the line between these two forces. But the letter's chief concern is not journalists living under hostile governments, despite the fact that countries around the world impose draconian limits on press freedom. … To meaningfully acknowledge the political threat that many journalists face worldwide, or to name the violence and economic insecurity that disproportionately affect certain groups working in media, would require conceding that critical tweets are not censorship.
On July 10, a group of journalists, writers and academics published a letter in response to the Harper's letter. In the letter, they address the allusions to the intolerance of ideas that the Harper's letter brings up and provide their reasoning for why such arguments don't necessarily hold water.
Under the guise of free speech and free exchange of ideas, the letter appears to be asking for unrestricted freedom to espouse their points of view free from consequence or criticism. There are only so many outlets, and while these individuals have the ability to write in them, they have no intention of sharing that space or acknowledging their role in perpetuating a culture of fear and silence among writers who, for the most part, do not look like the majority of the signatories. When they demand debates, it is on their terms, on their turf.
