About 150 elite-considered thinkers signed an open letter published online by Harper's last week decrying the new punitive intolerance of disagreeing opinion. The signers then instantly ran headlong into some.
The signers were lofty authors, essayists, academicians, artists, and activists, including Noam Chomsky, Gloria Steinem, J.K. Rowling, Salman Rushdie, and Malcolm Gladwell. They included several African Americans as well as a few conservatives along with the usual liberal suspects.
Their letter decried the absolutism and illiberalism threatening our once-celebrated open liberal society.
These notable thinkers signed on to a statement declaring that the affliction they deplore was introduced years ago on the political right, but now takes strong hold among those committed to leftist views who have begun to insist with success that persons be punished--fired and ostracized--based on their expressions of political or cultural views.
Here's the heart of the letter: "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 Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a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."
Harper's posted the letter online on Tuesday, at which point Twitter blew up with disdain for tired old establishmentarians using dated clichés to try to cling to relevance in a new world.
Certain signers were especially assailed, most prominently Rowling, the Harry Potter creator, who has been widely demonized as "transphobic" for her recent entry on Twitter likening sexual-transition hormone replacement therapy to gay conversion therapy in terms of lingering harm on young persons.
One signer, trans activist and author Jennifer Finney Boylan, publicly apologized afterward for her signature. She said she had signed the letter knowing that she was aligning with Chomsky, Steinem, and Margaret Atwood, but not knowing of certain other associations, the acceptance of which she never wished to imply.
She was embracing tolerance only of views she agreed with and only from people she admired. And she was doing so perhaps without any sense of irony.
Gladwell, author of "Outliers" and "Blink," was then quoted as saying: "I signed the Harper's letter because there were lots of people who also signed the Harper's letter whose views I disagreed with. I thought that was point of the Harper's letter."
The case-in-point closest to Arkansas is of the recent forced resignation of the supervisor of the editorial and op-ed pages of The New York Times. It came after that editor permitted the publication of a guest column by U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton.
Our belligerently right-wing junior senator argued in that piece for the domestic police use of military forces with authority to do whatever it took to put down the recent violence and property damage of protests against racial injustice.
Cotton's essay provided grounds for vigorous criticism as reckless, ill-conceived, and probably unconstitutional. But it did not provide grounds for casting out the editor who allowed an extremist member of the U.S. Senate to espouse his extremist views.
Such publication is, or ought to be, an invitation for overpowering counterargument, not intolerance and punishment. Don't deny Cotton the right to be read. Give him instead the privileged experience of being countered masterfully.
Some argue that Cotton of course should be permitted his views generally, but that, specifically, The Times had the constitutional liberty and corporate right to choose from editorial discretion not to run his piece, and should have exercised that liberty and right, or at least edited the essay for inaccuracy.
Indeed, responsible editing is vital, and, if The Times had insisted on fact-based changes that caused Cotton to withdraw the submission, I'd side with The Times.
But ousting the editor because of angry reaction, including from newsroom staff members--that's the antithesis of the principle of an op-ed page. It's like calling this page "Acceptable Voices."
In responsible journalism, there are appropriate rules for accuracy, usage, taste, language, and libel. A good newspaper applies and enforces them. But to fire an editor for letting a U.S. senator have his offensive say ... alas, I'm reminded of the fellow who told me Donald Trump's worst damage was that he had driven crazy the once-great New York Times.
This column--the one you're currently reading--contains no reason to fire or silence me, or so I sincerely hope. Instead it's an opportunity for those disagreeing to say so and explain why. I can't imagine such disagreement, which is all the more reason to invite it.
Punitive intolerance destroys any art of persuasion. It devalues reason, logic, and dispassionate consideration of discomforting views.
And I'm going to stick with that conclusion even if people I generally disagree with come forward to agree.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.