How to justice and open debate
About that Harper’s Letter…
It’s titled “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate.”
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.
Hmmm. Has it? And if it has, has it in a way that we want to to frown at? If we think wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society are a good thing, then what kind of differences are we seeking more toleration for? Do we want a rearguard saying no no no let’s have less equality and inclusion across our society?
To put it another way…the let’s have less equality side has had its own way for a long time around here. The less equality faction has been in the driver’s seat all along. The people exploited and incarcerated and generally harmed by that arrangement may finally be getting a hearing for the “let’s stop that shit now” suggestion. Do we really need to hear more from the “less equality is good” team? Haven’t they had their say for the past four centuries?
I get it about the social media bullying, believe me; I’ve been there and sent the postcards. But then, I was a target for arguing about reality, about ontology, about epistemology. I wasn’t arguing for wellllllllll we’re not really all that racist are we?
In other words I agree when it’s about stuff I agree about and I disagree when it isn’t.
Good, glad we got that settled.
No but for real, I think that intro is…weak.
It gets better as it goes on though.
Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a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.
That I think is fair to say. Also I think well of the people who put it together because they asked Meera Nanda to sign. Also Katha Pollitt, Rebecca Goldstein, Claire Potter, J.K. Rowling right next to Salman Rushdie, Jesse Singal, Michelle Goldberg, Todd Gitlin, Katie Herzog, Adam Hochschild, Arlie Russell Hochschild, Sean Wilentz among many others.
When you have biology teachers at the college level hesitating before plunging into the discussion of the male and female chromosomes, and male and female reproductive structures (and not because, oh, a penis teehee, but because is that a girl penis or a boy penis), then yeah, we’ve got some problems. But to me the discussion about women’s rights is like the one about black lives matter – we should allow women and people of color the right to speak, even if we don’t agree with what they say. If we want to have a reasoned debate, it needs to be on something other than, oh, I feel like a woman, or but I’m so tired of hearing about BLM all the time. Those are not reasonable discussions.
“…toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.”
To me, that seems like a direct callout of the TRA lobby but I suspect that there are academic and publishing groupthink enforcers that I just don’t know about. The examples in the next paragraph all apply to women being threatend by the TRAs.
If greater equality means trans women are exactly equal to “cis” women and greater inclusion means they shouldn’t be excluded from anything “cis” women can do…then we need some open debate about that.
Aside from transgenderism vs. gender criticism (that one’s obvious), there’s critical race theory vs. critics who are anti-racism but think CRT is a crock. Identitarians vs. people who think identity politics are counterproductive.
But is that what the writer or writers of the letter have in mind?
As a lot of critics are saying, the letter is terribly vague.
Here’s a few semi-organized thoughts:
1. Legally speaking, “free speech” just means the right to be free from punishment by the government. You don’t have any legal right to be free from punishment by anyone else.
2. Still, it’s probably good for public discourse if we avoid punishing people for saying things we don’t like.
3. On the other hand, speech should not be free from consequences. People have the right to judge you based on the things you say, and treat you accordingly.
4. Those consequences shouldn’t generally include loss of employment. Threatening people’s livelihood is likely to be particularly chilling on speech, and should generally be avoided.
5. The word “generally” is doing a lot of work in (4).
(a) If your job is speaking, then your livelihood by definition depends on providing speech that draws sufficient interest/approval. If people find your speeches/essays/blog posts to be abhorrent, you can and should expect to lose your audience just as surely as if your speech was boring or badly written.
(b) Some speech reflects on your ability to do your job. You can’t reveal yourself to be incompetent, uninformed, temperamentally unsuited, or morally compromised, and expect to keep your job. Racism, sexism, and other prejudices are especially problematic because they compromise your ability to do a lot of jobs — if you can’t be trusted to deal with customers, clients, subordinates, or others fairly.
6. In applying 5, especially 5(b), it’s probably best if we try not to be reductive, or to follow every chain of reasoning to its theoretically logical conclusion. For example, I think that anti-choice views on abortion are rooted in misogyny. But I’m not prepared to say that every anti-choice person is therefore a misogynist, and therefore incapable of working with women, and therefore should be fired from pretty much any job. There are just too many logical leaps and generalizations there. Similarly, as we expand our notions of what constitutes racism, and acknowledge things like structural racism and unconscious racism, we should allow for more room between “person who holds a view I deem racist” and “person who holds a view that IS racist,” and “person who is A racist.” The former on the grounds on epistemic modesty — I could be wrong about whether the view is racist — and the latter on the grounds of allowing for some human flaws.
I could probably go from there, but this seems a good stopping point.
Toleration for those arguing for things with which we disagree, even those arguing for inequality? Yes, that is the point of the norm of free speech and open debate, as that which is popular or well received has no need for protection. One can never be certain that the right thing will be the popular thing, so there is no safe point to abandon the principle.
But also toleration for voices critiquing the excesses or methods of good intentions. The trans issue is a perfect example, but it is not the only one. (As a general case, consider Braess’s Paradox.) Even among those whose goals and values align, significant differences in methodology can exiat, and to shut down open discussion leaves us in a precarious epistemic situation. Since people can have good aims paired with bad solutions, there needs to be space for dissent about the latter without being construed as dissent about the former.
This is the problem with which we are currently faced. Women who speak up for their own rights are seen as being opposed to trans rights en toto. People who critique the “abolish the police” push are seen as supporters of violent white supremacy. And so on. We most certainly should frown on a trend that prevents the twelfth amgry man from speaking up to question the group consensus, because even when he’s wrong, he provides a necessary service.
Of course deciding how to deal with calls for less equality and inclusion is one issue. Another issue is establishing what constitutes a call for “less equality and inclusion” in the first place. Once again the Gender Wars is the perfect example. As I commented in another thread, it’s hardly ever about what the alleged TERF actually said. More typically it’s about what her words supposedly imply as seen through the distorting lens of a million unstated premises and unquestioned ideological assumptions, and only at the other end of a long train of impossibly sloppy inferences and extrapolations, circular reasoning, mind-reading etc. Yet when the liberal media report on the latest public pile-on they typically skip right past the unstated premises and unquestioned ideological assumptions and impossibly sloppy inferences and jump straight to the “supposedly implies” part as if it had already been firmly established such that the only question left for us to consider is how severe the punishment needs to be. If biological females and males who prefer to be called “woman”/”she” are making competing claims of discrimination, the claims of the latter are considered proven simply by virtue of being made while the claims of the former are dismissed out of hand.
It’s not limited to the Gender Wars either. We have seen something similar with claims of “Islamophobia” where people like Maryam Namazie and Taslima Nasreen have been lumped in with violent white supremacists like Anders Breivik. There are people for whom any criticism of the state of Israel and its policies vis-a-vis the Palestinians makes You an “anti-Semite”. Criticizing pimps and johns will inevitably get You accused of “whore-phobia”*. The mere suggestion that there’s anything even remotely problematic about men getting off on violating and humiliating women – even to the point of putting their lives in danger – will get You accused of the new hate-crime of “kink-shaming”. And I haven’t even began to look into the bottomless pit of toxic waste that is the “manosphere” and its various claims of “misandry”**.
So while I agree that we don’t have an obligation to listen respectfully to people who advocate “less equality and inclusion”, I do think the bar for making such accusations in the first place needs to be significantly higher,
* By the same logic, I guess the abolitionist movement was guilty of “slave-phobia”.
** From what I have gathered, the definition of “misandry” boils down to “anything that doesn’t discriminate against women”.
In case you haven’t seen this, Helen Lewis has an absolute barn-burner of an article about “woke capitalism” and other topics that I think is relevant here.
https://helenlewis.substack.com/p/the-bluestocking-woke-capitalism
The case for the classical-liberal value of engaging in rational discussion rather than trying to silence opponents, even if you think them reactionary, is that you never know when your own views will be labeled similarly, as gender-critical people know well. The opposing value of “free speech for me but not thee, if I think thee wrong” doesn’t work well when you find yourself on the wrong side of it, which you can never be sure you won’t no matter how progressive you think you are.