Noam Chomsky, J.K. Rowling, Margaret Atwood + others sign Anti-Cancel Culture letter

[Raze]

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

Quote

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 Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a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.

Recently Noam Chomsky refused to sign a petition by students to remove Steven Pinker from the linguistic society for tweets, J.K. Rowling got attacked for tweets called transphobic, and a few years ago Atwood was criticized for criticizing #metoo.

[Boethius]

There are some people who have already started to retract their signature from this letter.

[Hansu]

2 hours ago, Boethius said:

There are some people who have already started to retract their signature from this letter.

Have they given a reason? Are they afraid of being cancelled?

Edited July 8, 2020 by Hansu

[Raze]

38 minutes ago, Hansu said:

Have they given a reason? Are they afraid of being cancelled?

Found one, it's because J.K. Rowling signed it

 

[Boethius]

Kerri Greenidge (on twitter) simply said that she "does not endorse" the letter, which many people found to cryptic. Her twitter account is now unavailable. From what I can tell, Twitter absolutely blew up yesterday over this letter. So this is very controversial, which makes sense because there is very little "context" for people to make sense of it.

[commie]

Cryptic?!? What context could one possibly need?

Forget the letter and its tired defense of unearned privilege and authority. The "good company" tweet is amazing in its shamelessness, and shows what the actual problem is. The context that some people were missing wasn't needed to make sense of the letter but to determine what team one would align oneself with by cheering or booing.

[Hansu]

@Raze@Raze Lol, what a cancel culterous idea. Someone you dont like signed it, so the meaning of the letter has to be negative.

[Boethius]

@commie It is crytpic because she signed the letter but then her name was removed after saying that she does not "endorse" the letter, leaving unanswered why (or even whether) she signed the letter in the first place. Then in response to a huge number of tweets pointing out this discrepancy (tweets I myself was reading earlier today) she shuts down her twitter account.

And as far as "unearned privilege and authority", I'm not sure I understand. Are you saying someone like Fareed Zakaria (one of the letter's signers) has authority that is unearned? Does he not deserve to be host of the CNN show of which he is the host? Are you implying with your comment about "teams" that he is a secret Trump supporter or a member of the alt right?

[Nak Khid]

.Saagar Enjeti: " I'm somebody who hates Steven Pinker because I always hear libertarians cite his book about
how we're living in the greatest age of modern history so this is my first put out there
but you know don't want to see him lose his job or anything like that" 

 

Edited July 8, 2020 by Nak Khid

[Hank Galaxy Brain]

Oh man, this is great. @Raze  I've never understood why "TERF-ism" (trans exclusionary radical feminism) was so off limits. Like those feminists aren't radical enough for you? They actually have some really good points, and it's crazy they're not allowed. Even if they turn out to be totally wrong, they're clearly trying.

Really glad these people are ruffling some feathers. As a sane person who often shares far-left and progressive views, it's been a long time coming.

*Grabs popcorn*

[commie]

45 minutes ago, Boethius said:

@commie It is crytpic because she signed the letter but then her name was removed ...

So, once again, this isn't about the letter at all.

44 minutes ago, Boethius said:

Are you implying with your comment about "teams" that he is a secret Trump supporter or a member of the alt right?

Of course not, that would be insane.

[Nak Khid]

 

Petition Letter by students to remove Steven Pinker

( including images of Steven Pinker Tweets) 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/17ZqWl5grm_F5Kn_0OarY9Q2jlOnk200PvhM5e3isPvY/edit

 

____________________________________
first paragraph:

Dear Linguistic Society of America,

This is an open letter by members of the linguistics community calling for the removal of Dr. Steven Pinker from both our list of distinguished academic fellows and our list of media experts. We, the undersigned, believe that Dr. Pinker’s behavior as a public academic is not befitting of a representative of our professional organization, that the LSA’s own stated goals make such a conclusion inevitable, and that the LSA should publicly reaffirm its position and distance itself from Dr. Pinker

Edited July 8, 2020 by Nak Khid

[commie]

5 minutes ago, Nak Khid said:

MUST READ 

Why?

[Leo Gura]

It's a letter condemning the excesses of stage Green mob mentality.

The letter is right, of course. Green is starting to get a bit excessive in certain areas.

[commie]

5 minutes ago, Nak Khid said:

I think it is important to look at both sides of the argument.

It's generally a good idea to look at both sides of an argument you care about. But I'm not sure why I (or others here) should care about that particular argument. The letter is quite clear: it's not about that ("Whatever the arguments around each particular incident ...").

Of course it's fine if you care about something other than the thread's topic. Only I don't understand what's important about why some people want to oust Pinker from some association I never cared about. But if you were a linguist for instance, I'm sure you'd feel different.

[Boethius]

@commie

1 hour ago, commie said:

So, once again, this isn't about the letter at all.

Of course not, that would be insane.

Yes, the responses I have seen are not about the actual contents of the letter. And yes, it would be insane for you to have implied as much (though I realize now that I misread your original response, sorry).

I myself am in broad agreement that something like this is required, just as I am in broad agreement with the Chicago Principles for academia. I guess my point here would be that I don't see this letter doing more than polarizing people even more on the topic of "free speech" and open expression.

 

[commie]

12 minutes ago, Boethius said:

(though I realize now that I misread your original response, sorry).

Thank you. Well then it may be worth explaining "unearned privilege and authority". I do indeed figure than that in most cases, the people threatened do not deserve the privileges and authority they enjoy. That's because the standards in their fields are very low and the game always was about ideological conformity and cliques. So many journalists, scholars and so forth have been driven out of their fields or reduced to poverty and obscurity by this overprivileged bunch that I am firmly unmoved by their tiresome whining. The ones who are any good will keep swimming in well-deserved money and recognition regardless of how many honorifics are stripped from them anyway.

[Boethius]

7 minutes ago, commie said:

That's because the standards in their fields are very low and the game always was about ideological conformity and cliques.

Yeah, I have definitely seen that with certain sectors of the academy and I can see it to an extent with journalism. I can't really say I have great empathy for any one individual who has been "cancelled" either, but I do believe that ideological conformity's greatest casualty is the chilling effect it has on the speech (and maybe even the thinking) of average people. Like I myself am very careful in what I post to social media, even though I don't have a platform of any real size, and I imagine I am far from alone in that.

[commie]

5 minutes ago, Boethius said:

I do believe that ideological conformity's greatest casualty is the chilling effect it has on the speech (and maybe even the thinking) of average people.

Yes, but it's hardly a novelty, is it? That this nefarious power is to a small extent decentralizing is not necessarily regrettable. In any case, I will reserve my empathy and concern for the "cancelled" outside of academia and corporate media. Indeed the main problem I foresee with the crowdsourcing of censorship is that it's not going to be primarily aimed at afflicting the powerful or average people for that matter but at independent artists and writers who have raised themselves ever so slightly above the crowd.

[Robi Steel]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

Green is starting to get a bit excessive in certain areas.

A bit, LUL