A Letter on Justice and Open Debate

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

So many smart people signed this necessary letter, --- Pynchon didn't.
Was he just too lazy? Didn't they ask him? Or does he really wear 
'antifa'-t-shirts?

+ 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pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are 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. +


https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/