2020-07-08
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Quoting the whole letter from:
https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate
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A Letter on Justice and Open Debate
July 7, 2020
The below letter will be appearing in the Letters
section of the magazine's October issue. We welcome
responses at letters@harpers.org
Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of
trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice
are leading to 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. But
this needed reckoning has also 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. As we
applaud the first development, we also raise our
voices against the second. 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. 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pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged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.
Elliot Ackerman
Saladin Ambar, Rutgers University
Martin Amis
Anne Applebaum
Marie Arana, author
Margaret Atwood
John Banville
Mia Bay, historian
Louis Begley, writer
Roger Berkowitz, Bard College
Paul Berman, writer
Sheri Berman, Barnard College
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Neil Blair, agent
David W. Blight, Yale University
Jennifer Finney Boylan, author
David Bromwich
David Brooks, columnist
Ian Buruma, Bard College
Lea Carpenter
Noam Chomsky, MIT (emeritus)
Nicholas A. Christakis, Yale University
Roger Cohen, writer
Ambassador Frances D. Cook, ret.
Drucilla Cornell, Founder, uBuntu Project
Kamel Daoud
Meghan Daum, writer
Gerald Early, Washington University-St. Louis
Jeffrey Eugenides, writer
Dexter Filkins
Federico Finchelstein, The New School
Caitlin Flanagan
Richard T. Ford, Stanford Law School
Kmele Foster
David Frum, journalist
Francis Fukuyama, Stanford University
Atul Gawande, Harvard University
Todd Gitlin, Columbia University
Kim Ghattas
Malcolm Gladwell
Michelle Goldberg, columnist
Rebecca Goldstein, writer
Anthony Grafton, Princeton University
David Greenberg, Rutgers University
Linda Greenhouse
Rinne B. Groff, playwright
Sarah Haider, activist
Jonathan Haidt, NYU-Stern
Roya Hakakian, writer
Shadi Hamid, Brookings Institution
Jeet Heer, The Nation
Katie Herzog, podcast host
Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth College
Adam Hochschild, author
Arlie Russell Hochschild, author
Eva Hoffman, writer
Coleman Hughes, writer/Manhattan Institute
Hussein Ibish, Arab Gulf States Institute
Michael Ignatieff
Zaid Jilani, journalist
Bill T. Jones, New York Live Arts
Wendy Kaminer, writer
Matthew Karp, Princeton University
Garry Kasparov, Renew Democracy Initiative
Daniel Kehlmann, writer
Randall Kennedy
Khaled Khalifa, writer
Parag Khanna, author
Laura Kipnis, Northwestern University
Frances Kissling, Center for Health, Ethics, Social Policy
Enrique Krauze, historian
Anthony Kronman, Yale University
Joy Ladin, Yeshiva University
Nicholas Lemann, Columbia University
Mark Lilla, Columbia University
Susie Linfield, New York University
Damon Linker, writer
Dahlia Lithwick, Slate
Steven Lukes, New York University
John R. MacArthur, publisher, writer
Susan Madrak, writer
Phoebe Maltz Bovy, writer
Greil Marcus
Wynton Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center
Kati Marton, author
Debra Mashek, scholar
Deirdre McCloskey, University of Illinois at Chicago
John McWhorter, Columbia University
Uday Mehta, City University of New York
Andrew Moravcsik, Princeton University
Yascha Mounk, Persuasion
Samuel Moyn, Yale University
Meera Nanda, writer and teacher
Cary Nelson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Olivia Nuzzi, New York Magazine
Mark Oppenheimer, Yale University
Dael Orlandersmith, writer/performer
George Packer
Nell Irvin Painter, Princeton University (emerita)
Greg Pardlo, Rutgers University – Camden
Orlando Patterson, Harvard University
Steven Pinker, Harvard University
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Katha Pollitt, writer
Claire Bond Potter, The New School
Taufiq Rahim, New America Foundation
Zia Haider Rahman, writer
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, University of Wisconsin
Jonathan Rauch, Brookings Institution/The Atlantic
Neil Roberts, political theorist
Melvin Rogers, Brown University
Kat Rosenfield, writer
Loretta J. Ross, Smith College
J.K. Rowling
Salman Rushdie, New York University
Karim Sadjadpour, Carnegie Endowment
Daryl Michael Scott, Howard University
Diana Senechal, teacher and writer
Jennifer Senior, columnist
Judith Shulevitz, writer
Jesse Singal, journalist
Anne-Marie Slaughter
Andrew Solomon, writer
Deborah Solomon, critic and biographer
Allison Stanger, Middlebury College
Paul Starr, American Prospect/Princeton University
Wendell Steavenson, writer
Gloria Steinem, writer and activist
Nadine Strossen, New York Law School
Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., Harvard Law School
Kian Tajbakhsh, Columbia University
Zephyr Teachout, Fordham University
Cynthia Tucker, University of South Alabama
Adaner Usmani, Harvard University
Chloe Valdary
Lucía Martínez Valdivia, Reed College
Helen Vendler, Harvard University
Judy B. Walzer
Michael Walzer
Eric K. Washington, historian
Caroline Weber, historian
Randi Weingarten, American Federation of Teachers
Bari Weiss
Sean Wilentz, Princeton University
Garry Wills
Thomas Chatterton Williams, writer
Robert F. Worth, journalist and author
Molly Worthen, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Matthew Yglesias
Emily Yoffe, journalist
Cathy Young, journalist
Fareed Zakaria
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