That Harpers Open Letter

[_EAllusion]

Jessie Signal has a professional career that had led to him being one of the most widely published figures on trans issues in the entire country. His writing on trans issues is fairly bad, not infrequently misleading, and functions to promote harmful stereotypes people have regarding trans issues. Some people look at this situation and say, "Why is it that Jessie Singal is the one few people in the country being chosen by major publications with broad reach to write on trans issues? How is it that it gets to be him? Why not someone else? This represents structural transphobia in the media, and maybe I shouldn't buy these publications if this represents their values. " This is not that different than if one of the few major journalists on homosexual issues in the nation was a straight man who mostly spent his time writing about gay reparative therapy successes and gay suicide and people decided they're going to opt out of supporting that person's patrons because they don't like this situation.

This doesn't silence Jesse Singal. He can write whatever he wants and no one carrying weapons is going to stop him. And, as a matter of fact, he still has no trouble making boatloads of money writing on trans issues. This is people using their rights of freedom of association and expression to respond to someone else's. But let's say it does chill him because he likes he's job writing for major publications and is worried that boycotts will spook his gravy train. Coercion comes in many forms, and the moral basis for political respect for freedom of speech doesn't solely concern government functions.

Is this what we're supposed to be worried about here? The letter doesn't say so, but Jesse's name on the letter might say so to some people. But if the letter is saying that Jesse Signal should be one of the most promoted figures in the entire country on trans issues and rejection of this because his writing is bad or because someone else should get a turn is just chilling his freedom of expression, then I'm not sure everyone signing that letter is going to be on board with that. Now we're talking about something more specific that isn't an innocuous bromide about tolerance for diverse viewpoints. Because now we are talking about whose work should be deemed above social backlash and, by implication, whose shouldn't. And that doesn't sound so much like a debate over the value of free speech in of itself. It sounds more like "free speech" is being used as a defense against criticism. And maybe I notice that Malcolm Gladwell is right there too, and he's someone who aggressively cheers on destroying media he doesn't like, and so on and so on. Now maybe I'm even more convinced this isn't some generic statement about free speech, but rather it's a thin-skinned act of hypocrisy.

If the response is that the letter isn't literally saying that, then fine. I'm personally Ok with the sentiment of the letter, but I'm not convinced that this isn't a reasonable thing to expect people to come away with here. When I tell people that it's better to defend against bad speech with speech than government censorship, I don't want them to think this is a bunch of BS people say to keep prejudice above reproach.

[_EAllusion]

The Daily Beast recently published this criticism of the letter:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/Jenn Kamp-rowlin ... el-culture

The main takeaway is:

On Tuesday, Harper’s Magazine—the musty magazine of choice for musty magnates—published a ridiculous and delusional open letter signed by such luminaries as J.K. Rowling, Bari Weiss, David Brooks, Jesse Singal, and Malcolm Gladwell. The purpose of this screed? Ostensibly, to encourage “open debate.” But upon closer inspection, the upshot appears to be that writers and journalists should be able to advance whatever BS ideas they want without being held in any way accountable.

I personally think it sucks that is an entirely predictable response not because leftist mobs are at it again, because that's an easy thing to takeaway based on the context of who signed. Notice names being mentioned. Instead of ignoring this and making a fallacious appeal to, "nothing will ever be good enough for you!" maybe do what you decided to do with the letter and read the literal content of what is being said.

[_EAllusion]

Is the letter's reference to firing of editors for their publications a reference to James Bennett's long overdue ouster for soliciting and publishing (without reading!) a fascist op-ed advocating for turning the US military against peaceful protesters written by a US Senator? Or is it a reference to Ian Buruma's ouster for publishing Jian Ghomeshi's dishonest defense of himself, then downplaying the seriousness of rape in a catastrophic interview attempting to defend himself? Those firings were straightforwardly justified. Those jobs require you not to suck in certain ways. They have actual responsibilities. But maybe it's not referring to that. There's a world of examples to choose from and you can project into them what you like. If someone notices that Ian Burama is one of the people signing the letter, they might think that it's in reference to him or situations like his. That's a fairly natural thing to think. Then, it's no wonder that they interpret the piece as saying Ian Buruma shouldn't be fired for his BS. Which is unfortunate, because I'm not sure that's what other people signing the thing think, nor is that a worthwhile element of free speech defense against an overly censorious culture.

[_EAllusion]

James Bennet, accurately depicted here, was forced to step down from his position because he published an editorial from Senator Tom Cotton arguing in favor of a martial crackdown against black lives matter related protests in the country. Tom Cotton was solicited to pen this editorial by NYT, and there was a major breakdown in the process for publishing it. James Bennet did not even read it. This caused a furor because it is, in fact, not good to amplify the voice of politicians calling for military violence against US citizens exercising their first amendment rights. One might even say that this does not promote free speech. It quite literally put people in danger. This furor was not located exclusively on Twitter or by leftists and it included a revolt among NYT's own employees. The furor was likely in part fueled by the background discontent that especially under Bennett's leadership, the op ed section was routinely amplifying bad opinions for controversy and "debate" but with invisible guardrails around who got the privilege to publish bad takes for the sake of presenting an artificial diversity of opinion. The mission to challenge the preconceptions of readers got twisted into the mission to get hate-clicks. But he lost his position because he didn't do his job and in the process engaged in bad journalistic ethics and harmed the brand he's supposed to advance. He was in dereliction of duty.

Is this what the letter says we should be concerned about? Because I'm not concerned. It is the most prominent recent example of an ousted editor out there and the letter does talk about editors being fired for running controversial pieces. The letter doesn't name this story, though. It's open-ended. Maybe even coy. So if I have a more obscure story in mind, and I do, then it doesn't seem so bad to me. Yeah, we shouldn't fire editors just because they offend some leftwing group's orthodoxy. More is needed than that. That doesn't mean all bets are off and newspaper editors are above criticism or have a right to have everyone pay them to read their paper. There are boundaries around socially acceptable conduct and appropriate social response. Speech is in fact still a solution to bad speech. You don't have to buy what you disagree with. I'm not interested in the notion of free speech being warped into the idea that powerful voices should be treated as above any meaningful social consequence. It's Ok to want a paper you read to have editors that don't suck at their job.

The both fortunate and unfortunate thing here is that the message is muddled. One of the signatories penned a piece explaining what she meant:

It’s been a long day, and a difficult one, full of productive conversations and difficult reckonings. I’m not sure I have any answers, either to my own questions or those of others, but I do have some thoughts.

It wasn’t until the publication of what is now being referred to as That Letter that I saw a full list of signatories, and reading over it was a roller-coaster of an experience. On the one hand, there are some people I greatly admire on that list, whose writing first helped me understand the potential of the written word, and of my place in the world. On the other hand, there are people whose names made me blanch. Why had some people most recently known for their avowal of transphobic positions joined their names to what had been, to my eyes, a statement about the importance of disagreement and debate in political and educational spheres?

True to form, I was naïve, leaving me disappointed both in myself and in the missed opportunity for good this could have been. Someone on Twitter rightly, I think, diagnosed That Letter as a Rorschach test, one generic enough that everyone who signed it probably thought it stood for whatever most mattered to them. (Some would take this as a virtue, a site of common cause; others would take this as vagueness, as a symptom of weak thought.) My reason for signing was a real concern about the state of political discourse today, especially as it affects what happens in the classroom. It’s not concern for the careers of celebrities, or for the rights of hateful people to target individuals, that made me sign. It’s because of the students of all backgrounds and opinions who fall quiet in class and stop joining conversations, of students dropping out and transferring because their peers don’t just disagree with them on intellectual or political or affective points: they target them. It’s because of administrative emails sent out in recent weeks that create hierarchies of disciplines and methodologies, messages making it clear to students that some disciplines are worth study, and others are not.

For me, the statement was about the importance of everyone having a voice and being able to use it to exchange ideas, both in the classroom and in the wider world. I asked one of the authors about the timing, about the necessity of such a statement, and both by their argument and by my personal experience found myself agreeing that yes, this needed to happen now. When I asked to know who the other signatories were, the names I was shown were those of people of color from all over the political spectrum, and not those of people who have taken gender-critical or trans-exclusionary positions. Should I have asked to see more names? Possibly — some would say absolutely — though that would seem incommensurate with my agreement with the statement itself. In what seems to have been a failure of imagination, a trans-exclusionary attitude didn’t even strike me as a possible interpretation of the text, let alone a likely one.

Inevitably, a belief in and commitment to the importance of people having voices means that sometimes they will say awful things, sometimes by those of whom you expected more, at other times by people whose opinions are utterly unsurprising. When I was younger, when it was a current political issue, I was always surprised by arguments that homosexuality or queerness were unnatural, were abominations to be corrected. Claims that marriage could only take place between men and women struck me as being as ignorant as claims about the unnaturalness of interracial marriage made earlier in the twentieth and previous centuries. But — and again, I stress that it seems I am a naïve person — I never felt threatened by those opinions. They were so strange, so twisted, that it seemed to me that the obvious truth — that gays and bisexuals and queers existed, and that marriage was as natural a kind of union for us as any other person, deserving of the same protections — would inevitably win, and that any poorly reasoned attacks on our humanity and our rights would inevitably be exposed and accepted for what they were. I existed, therefore they were wrong.

Understanding these opinions in that way meant that I never felt threatened by those words; at the same time — and this was not something I realized when I was younger, but have come to realize — those words and positions could be kindling to violent actors, people for whom speech was not enough, and who tried to scrub our very physical presence from the world. Standing up to violent, physical aggression and abuse was not hard for me in those moments, because challenges like that usually make me want to fight, not to run; it was less easy, I understand now, for people who didn’t have big cities to go home to, communities to fall back on, people who didn’t present in a gender-conforming way.
But would I, on those grounds, deny the rights of people to state their opinions, as long as those opinions don’t target individuals by name? Whom should we hold responsible for what thoughts, and through how many interpretive removes? My inclination is to say that open debate is vitally important to an open society, even as I argue with myself that even one life lost is too many, that we must protect and stand for those crushed by institutions and individuals, whose voices have been robbed from them. My inclination is here to use a standard more rigorous than that set by the First Amendment, to say that opinions that deny people’s personhood based on an identity are no opinions at all.

This inclination is because I believe words have consequences: I’m an English professor, and know that words make our world as much as they reflect it. They matter, materially, substantially. I spent last week drafting an essay on the importance of the idea of the common and the individual, and strategies to foster the former in public discourse while simultaneously engaging and valuing the latter. This morning, reading Osita Nwanevu’s timely essay in The New Republic, I found him stressing the same idea under the wonderfully apt label of “associative freedom,” offering it as a rebuttal to what he has diagnosed as the illiberality of most critics of identity politics. He is right that we must turn to the common, to what we share, to make political change, and also right that political debate tends at its core to be about opposing interests rather than only opposing ideas.
Is it possible to value the open exchange of ideas and think that ideas should be evaluated on their own merits, while at the same time feeling disappointed that people you don’t respect, or like, or endorse, value those same principles for different reasons? I would like to think that the answer to that question is Yes; it’s how I’m feeling today, though I don’t know that it’s a coherent feeling. I also know that others would disagree with me here, viewing those different reasons as cause for a reevaluation of the original idea. I’m not sure I can agree with that position, but am trying to think about it, considering its logical extensions both good and bad.

Trans women are women, women who deserve the same safety and respect as all other women, as all other people. Whether cis or trans, no one ever deserves to be misgendered. Trans youth deserve to be protected, and all trans people deserve the right to quality medical care provided with the same respect and dignity as anyone else. The right to life of trans people, as trans people, should be no topic for debate. Is that a coherent position for me to take, given my own indifference to hearing people debate my existence? Probably not, but I also try to value and believe what people tell me is true about their own experience.

I know these thoughts won’t be enough for some people. For others, they’ll be too much. For the rest, they’ll be incoherent. I do still think it’s important to guard against institutional intolerance and protect open inquiry. (And yes, I do know where and when speech is constitutionally protected, what the boundaries of those protections are, and the important difference between free speech and academic freedom.) What can I do ethically, and not hypocritically, to use my voice for good without disavowing what I believe about open speech and its importance? I can keep listening, keep speaking, and insist that I keep engaging critically and honestly with good-faith challenges to important and difficult ideas.

https://medium.com/@luciamv/trying-fail ... 6e6a9f1f83

And sure, that seems perfectly fine. I find the letter innocuous because this is the kind of thing that comes to mind too. On the other hand, I'm 100% certain this is not what other people thought they were saying with their signature. And this is a problem insofar as this is supposed to be a persuasive defense of free speech norms.

[_honorentheos]

I guess that's one way to pretend like you're having the conversation you wanted to have but no one else was playing along.

[_EAllusion]

I guess that's one way to pretend like you're having the conversation you wanted to have but no one else was playing along.

Shouldn't you be writing angry emails to Doritos for fomenting a reign of terror for making their chips too spicy or something?

[_honorentheos]

I guess that's one way to pretend like you're having the conversation you wanted to have but no one else was playing along.

Shouldn't you be writing angry emails to Doritos for fomenting a reign of terror for making their chips too spicy or something?

Sounds very angry Twitter. So, your thing.

[_EAllusion]

Sounds very angry Twitter. So, your thing.

Not enough accusations of Robespierre in this post. Like very serious, reasonable people do.

Hey, should Blake Neff have been forced to resign from his job writing Carlson's show seeped in white supremacist advocacy because he had some controversial takes on race and women? Are we silencing the voices of debate here? Now that the nefarious forces of cancel culture at Fox News has struck a blow against him, I wonder if you think this is what the letter is warning about? Do you think what everyone who signed the letter thinks the letter is about? Do any of them think that's what the letter is about?

These are questions, it turns out, that are hard to answer just by looking at the letter because the letter is too vague. Are they talking about David Shor or Blake Neff? Or both? We do know people say things like what the letter says both to criticize campaigns to get someone removed from a teaching post at a liberal arts college for having offended the sensibilities of a freakishly irrational left-wing group and to criticize not giving Blake Neff's slots on prime time TV to talk to the American people no matter what Blake Neff's have to say. And the letter presents itself with signatories that puts them under a giant umbrella. Doesn't seem too helpful here for persuading people of anything. It certainly presents itself as open to the motte and bailey argument with the bailey being, "what happened to David Shor undermines the norms that buttress free speech" and the motte being "don't criticize Fox News for giving Blake Neff a platform."

[_honorentheos]

Hey, should Blake Neff have been forced to resign from his job writing Carlson's show seeped in white supremacist advocacy because he had some controversial takes on race and women? Are we silencing the voices of debate here? Now that the nefarious forces of cancel culture at Fox News has struck a blow against him, I wonder if you think this is what the letter is warning about? Do you think what everyone who signed the letter thinks the letter is about? Do any of them think that's what the letter is about?

These are questions, it turns out, that are hard to answer just by looking at the letter because the letter is too vague. Are they talking about David Shor or Blake Neff? Or both? We do know people say things like what the letter says both to criticize campaigns to get someone removed from a teaching post at a liberal arts college for having offended the sensibilities of a freakishly irrational left-wing group and to criticize not giving Blake Neff's slots on prime time TV to talk to the American people no matter what Blake Neff's have to say. And the letter presents itself with signatories that puts them under a giant umbrella. Doesn't seem too helpful here for persuading people of anything. It certainly presents itself as open to the motte and bailey argument with the bailey being, "what happened to David Shor undermines the norms that buttress free speech" and the motte being "don't criticize Fox News for giving Blake Neff a platform."

As is typical, the fault you find is in the letter not being exactly the thing you would do or say. The underlying issue being your own sense of virtue and rightness which, yes, is what attracts applying the Robespierre mantel.

As to the letter itself, my belief is it's real intention was to show companies and other institutions that the outrage on Twitter and the like doesn't represent everyone. Like the famous Milligram experiments, having dissent and respectable, diverse voices involved warning that there is danger in the direction things are going can be the thing needed for everyone to take a breath and exercise their own judgements rather than get carried along by the momentum of a moment.

You would hold everyone's hands, tell them right from wrong, who is virtuous (for now) and who needs to climb the stairs for the good of the revolution which you are uniquely qualified to judge.

[_EAllusion]

As is typical, the fault you find is in the letter not being exactly the thing you would do or say.

Yeah, that's not the fault I'm finding here.

As to the letter itself, my belief is it's real intention was to show companies and other institutions that the outrage on Twitter and the like doesn't represent everyone.

Wow. It's like Rorschach test for you. Interestingly, of the people I've read who signed the letter and wanted to explain themselves, not a single one thought that's what they were endorsing.

You would hold everyone's hands, tell them right from wrong, who is virtuous (for now) and who needs to climb the stairs for the good of the revolution which you are uniquely qualified to judge.

So, that's a no on Blake Neff then? Is terminating him an assault on the norms of free speech that we should be worried about or not? The letter is ostensibly about not threatening the jobs of writers, artists, and journalists for expressing controversial opinions justified by respect for tolerance of differing points of view that that allow for the free exchange of ideas and form the cultural support of free speech.

Do you have some blinding moral certainty regarding Blake Neff that is making you feel uncomfortable here?