Letter Perfect
By: Joanna Cohen
Tags: Inspiration, Culture, Politics, Race, Self

Letter Perfect

Powerful voices on all sides come out against cancel culture

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

On July 7th, Harper’s Magazine published “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate.”

It was signed by 153 prominent artists, educators, journalists, and scholars from all over the creative and ideological map. Salman Rushdie, Gloria Steinem, Noam Chomsky, Atul Gawande, Bill T. Jones, David Brooks, Wynton Marsalis, J.K. Rowling, and many more.

No one who signed it is perfect, pure, or without flaws. But they came together, rose above their differences, and did something brave, powerful, and critically important.

Thomas Chatterton Williams, the writer and author who spearheaded the letter, told The New York Times, “We’re not just a bunch of old white guys sitting around writing this letter. It includes plenty of Black thinkers, Muslim thinkers, Jewish thinkers, people who are trans and gay, old and young, right wing and left wing. We believe these are values that are widespread and shared, and we wanted the list to reflect that.”

In essence, the letter is a warning, a giant flashing red light — to everyone — about the dangers of cancel culture.

“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,” the letter states. “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.”

Translation: The right is to blame big-time. But, in its reaction to the right, the left has over-corrected, creating an atmosphere in which, as the letter says:

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 Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a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

I’ve been writing passionately about this for months.

Trying to encourage those, particularly on the left, who feel shut down, cowed, bullied, and silenced to form a coalition and speak out on this.

Trying to warn “institutional leaders” that they need to slow their roll and think before they react out of sheer fear.

Trying to make the case that there are whispered conversations going on everywhere — including and especially on the left — about how the “resistance” has gone off the rails.

Trying to point out, as the letter so beautifully does:

“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.”

While I applaud this letter, cheer and cry hallelujah for it, the headline on Times story above is not encouraging: “Artists and Writers Warn of an ‘Intolerant Climate.’ Reaction Is Swift.”

Reaction is swift.

Lordy, Twitter mob, don’t you get it?

The whole point is not to respond immediately. Instead, take a moment to ponder, to examine, to understand and appreciate that the people who signed that letter are coming from a good place. A place of wanting to protect you from yourself:

“The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted,” the letter says, citing, “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.”

If you don’t believe me when I say there are a whole bunch of people on all sides who have been quietly worrying about this for a while, perhaps you’ll take the Times’ word for it:

“[The letter] surfaces a debate that has been going on privately in newsrooms, universities and publishing houses that have been navigating demands for diversity and inclusion, while also asking which demands — and the social media dynamics that propel them — go too far.”

As for how the letter came to be:

According to the Times, “There wasn’t one particular incident that provoked it. But [Williams] did cite several recent ones, including the resignation of more than half the board of the National Book Critics Circle over its statement supporting Black Lives Matter, a similar blowup at the Poetry Foundation, and the case of David Shor, a data analyst at a consulting firm who was fired after he tweeted about academic research linking looting and vandalism by protesters to Richard Nixon’s 1968 electoral victory.”

This is not the way, people. It is not the way.

May this letter be just the beginning. May the thousands of others — left, right, and center — who were too scared to add their name, for fear of losing their jobs or getting destroyed on social media, gain courage and come forward. May those who are having second thoughts about having added their name stay strong.

This is the hard part, but I believe reason will prevail. Because if it doesn’t, everything crumbles. We all fall down.

Speak out.

Stand up.

Sign on.