[Craic] Harper Mag Letter: Are we intolerant or are we open to debate opinions that we don't hold?

[Arthur Blomme]

This is a letter signed by among many: Noam Chomsky,  Margaret Attwood 
and surprisingly for me, David Frum.

Especially when it come to official pronouncements of the medical and 
political community there seems to be anger for those who hold opinions 
that are not part of the official consensus.

To test this thesis my next email to the group will be from a Nobel 
prize winner expressing a view that seems to be a political heresy.

Art


  A Letter on Justice and Open Debate

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*July 7, 2020*
/The below letter will be appearing in the Letters section of the 
magazine’s October issue. We welcome responses at letters at 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*
*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*
*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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