A Letter on Justice and Public Debate

A Letter on Justice and Open Debate

July 7, 2020

Originally Posted in: Harper's Magazine

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

Author: See the signed list at the end of the original text

Translation: rubble

Our cultural institutions are facing testing times. The vigorous struggle for racial and social justice has led us to call for belated police reform, while calling for greater equality and inclusion in all sectors of society, not just higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this much-needed awakening has also reinforced a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments aimed at weakening our norms of public debate and tolerance of difference in pursuit of ideological coherence. We applaud the first development, and at the same time we must speak out against the second. Illiberalism is gradually gaining strength around the world, as well as a powerful ally in Donald Trump. He represents a real threat to democracy. However, we cannot allow the resistance movement to rest on self-produced dogma or coercion – which has long been taken by right-wing luminaries for their own benefit. The democratic inclusion we want can only be achieved when we speak out against a climate of paranoia that is gaining ground in all camps.

The free exchange of information and opinions, the lifeblood of a free society, tightens day by day. We're used to seeing the radical right do this, but nitpicking has become more widespread in our culture: intolerance of opposing views, fashion for public shaming and exclusion, and a tendency to incorporate complex policy issues into deafening moral absolutes among. We support sound, even harsh words of resistance in all sectors. But now, it’s the norm to demand a swift and harsh response to what you feel offended by words and thoughts. Even more worrying is that the leaders of the system, in the spirit of panic damage control, are carrying out not deliberate reforms but rash and disproportionate punishments. Editors fired for publishing controversial text; books removed for being accused of being inaccurate; journalists blocked from writing on certain topics; professors investigated for citing texts in class; a researcher just because Circulation of a piece of peer-reviewed academic research is dismissal; leaders of many organizations are pushed back, sometimes for careless mistakes. Regardless of the arguments in individual incidents, the result has been a progressive tightening of the boundaries of "speech that is not subject to retaliation." We've already paid the price for writers, artists, and journalists, who are afraid of losing their livelihoods by straying from consensus, or even simply because they lack enough praise, to be more proactive in avoiding danger.

This suffocating atmosphere will eventually harm the most important mission of our time. Restrictions on debate, whether from an oppressive government or a society that lacks tolerance, will inevitably harm the powerless and undermine everyone's ability to participate in democracy. The way to beat a bad idea is to expose it, argue it, and persuade it, not try to silence it, or pretend blindly. We reject any false choice between justice and freedom. Justice and freedom go hand-in-hand with each other and cannot be separated from each other. As writers, we need a society where we can experiment, take risks, and even make mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith debate without putting our careers in serious jeopardy. If we are unwilling to defend the very things on which our jobs depend, we should not expect the public or the regime to defend us.