Category: Literature

Harper’s Magazine has invited America to a season of national self-examination. The cultural struggles we are going through now are signs of progress. They are necessary if we are to continue to grow toward justice. But such changes are not supported by bumper sticker philosophies. They are nuanced and complex, and the following letter is an invitation to open debate about how wisely we guide these changes.

A Letter on Justice and Open Debate

July 7, 2020
The below letter will be appearing in the Letters section of the magazine’s October issue. We welcome responses at letters@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 Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a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.

Institutions are listed for identification purposes only.

Years ago, in the spring of 1989, I was reading a new book I’d just bought  by one of my favorite historians, Peter Brown, Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University, and scholar of Late Antiquity. I was reading, The Body and Society, Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, and I’d just begun the book, still in the introduction, when I came upon the following lines:

“After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain knowingness . . . and not, in one way or another, . . . in the knower’s straying afield from himself? There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on thinking and reflecting at all.”

The quotation is from the philosopher and historian of ideas, Michel Foucault, whose writings and theories addressed, in part, the relationship between power and knowledge.

At that time in 1989 I’d just finished my novel, Mercy, which would come out the next year, and I was taking a breather from work, catching up on neglected reading which always piles up when I’m in the middle of writing a book. The entire quotation leaped off the page. I underlined it. I put an asterisk by it. And I wrote it in my journal.

Over the years, I’ve come back to it again and again. I use it to question and re-examine my prejudices. To question the way I think about everything, and as I get older, to wonder if I am still capable of “thinking differently than I think”. This is important to me, because I’ve often wished others did, and if I wish it for them, I can not avoid wanting it for myself as well.

In our present era of polarization in politics and culture, when all of us seem to be gnashing out at each other from our lairs of dark and selfish prejudices, wouldn’t it be valuable for us to learn to think differently than we do, to perceive differently than we see? Wouldn’t it be valuable for us to TRY, at least?