A Letter on Justice and Open Debate

[Mark Thibodeau]

i dunno... the list of signatures is actually kind of small, in my opinion.
Small enough that I don't consider the lack of Pynchon's name (or
Delillo's, or Vollmann's, or Price's, all of whom have actually contributed
pieces to Harper's in recent years) to be particularly noteworthy.

For what it's worth, I agree with the general sentiment of the letter AND I
wear antifa t-shirts tees (figuratively... I don't actually own any
sloganwear),

Cheers!
yer old pal Jerky

On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 6:24 AM Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
wrote:

>
> 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/
>
>
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>