An Entitlement to Attention: On the Harper's Letter (Time of Monsters, Part 2)

Harper’s magazine, a long-running journal about American culture, has always been a mechanism to shore up class power in America.

The magazine Harper’s – one of the more academically-respected magazines offering commentary on American and world culture – published an idiotic letter yesterday that was cosigned by a hundred and fifty journalists, authors, and academics. This letter was titled “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” and it will appear in the October print issue of the magazine.

You can read the letter for yourself, but if you want to stay here, that’s fine. It begins with the statement that:

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.

The letter then goes on to state that it is becoming harder and harder to exchange ideas, and cautions against the intolerance of opposing views, public shaming, ostracism, and “the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.” There is a brief (because, to be frank, the whole thing is fairly brief, clocking in at three paragraphs,) hand-wringing about how writers, artists, and journalists fear for their livelihoods, and how they’re already beginning to censor themselves for fear of the mob. The final paragraph begins by saying that:

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.

I will admit that I didn’t recognize most of the signatories. I did recognize some. Notably, it is signed by not only Noam Chomsky, Margaret Atwood, Gloria Steinem, and Salman Rushdie, but also Francis Fukuyama, Stephen Pinker, Malcolm Gladwell, and J.K. Rowling.

Some of these people have legitimate grievances: Rushdie lived in hiding for quite some time for fear of assassination after death-threats from the Ayatollah Khomeini. Being the subject of a credible death threat that directly resulted from institutional disapproval of something you wrote is indeed a very good reason to be anti-censorship. But many of the other examples they cite – listed here on the BBC – are frankly things that should have been stopped before they reached the public.

The signatories on this letter assert it is incorrect to deplatform someone calling for the mass murder of American citizens. Photo of Tom Cotton taken from Andrew Harnick and used in the New York Times for the editorial in question.

For example: the mention of “Editors are fired for running controversial pieces” in the letter refers to New York Times Opinion Editor James Bennet stepping down after a backlash over his publication of Senator Tom Cotton’s opinion piece “Send in the Troops” which called for the murder of anti-racist protesters. This is the same James Bennet who platformed Climate Change denier Bret Stephens in 2016 (source is Vox whose co-founder, Matthew Yglesias, is a signatory on the letter, which is noted to have created a hostile environment at that magazine.)

Then there is the case of “books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity” – which refers to a particularly graceless error, though not quite as horrific as platforming someone calling for the murder of American citizens, which is the publication of Jeannie Cummins’s novel American Dirt. I have not read American Dirt and I do not intend to, but I haven’t been able to avoid the discourse surrounding – needless to say that it appears, by all accounts, to be a tone-deaf and poorly researched story by a white author about a Mexican woman forced to immigrate to America. It was so egregious that 140 authors (originally 82,) signed an open letter to Oprah Winfrey asking her to reconsider her endorsement of the book.

For the record, that’s only ten less than this Harper’s letter against Cancel Culture – and the one sent to Oprah attracted additional signatories, while this one has had at least one person – Jennifer Finney Boylan – recant her signing of it. Ostensibly because she didn’t know who else had signed it.

Laurie Sheck, picture taken from Inside Higher Ed. The signatories of the letter in question believe she should not even have been investigated.

Another example brought up is “professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class” which refers to Professor Laurie Sheck’s use of a racial slur when quoting James Baldwin. The slur in question is present in Baldwin’s piece, but it can be referenced and understood without directly quoting the word in question. Oh, and in case it wasn’t clear: Sheck was cleared of wrongdoing – what these people are complaining about is that Sheck was investigated for doing this, not that she was punished.

In short: the text of this letter says nothing of importance.

The subtext says quite a bit.

It’s been commonly noted that when a system is imbalanced, a correction to that imbalance is often perceived by the previously favored group as oppression. What we have here isn’t the constriction of “[t]he free exchange of information and ideas” it’s a flood of ideas and thoughts from people who have previously been without a platform to voice them. No one’s oppressing J.K. Rowling, with her billions of pounds of wealth and her long-running book series about a wizard jock trust fund kid that grows up into a wizard cop, people are telling her that she’s wrong for the first time in decades (the post-publication revelation of her wizards canonically defecating in public should have gotten a bit of a tip-off, honestly.)

The discourse has evolved past these people, and many of them have written things that people still love – I’m a big fan of Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood, for example – but if they cannot keep up, perhaps they should just be satisfied with the millions that they have made thus far and let someone else have a crack at the culture.

Sorry, I’m just salty here.

But my point stands.

Let’s try attacking it from a different angle: it’s easy to read this as a meditation on cancel culture. We’ve already discussed that peripherally on this website with our discussion of Mark Fisher’s “Exiting the Vampire Castle” – which is a terrible essay by an amazing writer. However, what the signatories on this letter don’t seem to understand is that there is a point after which people can’t really be canceled.

Francis Fukuyama, pictured here contemplating new ways in which he can be wrong.

It doesn’t matter how mean people are to Stephen Pinker on Twitter, he’s still going to be a millionaire, and he’s still going to have a platform to be wrong on. The same goes for Malcolm Gladwell and Francis Fukuyama: they’re going to be rich and wrong in public until they die (I’m going to keep dunking on Fukuyama – he deserves it.)

This actually dovetails with one of my pieces from earlier this year, where I talk about class. I break from traditional conceptions of class found in Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, because I think that class is more about what indignities a person can be expected to suffer through than anything else, which dovetails with most other conceptions of class, but is a bit more process oriented, and can also explain why these signatories felt compelled to stand in solidarity – those who knew who they were standing in solidarity with, at least – with each other.

These are people who have largely insulated themselves from outside critique. Over the years, though, due to social media and the proliferation of publishing platforms, the volume on these outside critiques has gone up more and more, until it finally reached the point where they can hear it.

These people aren’t actually aware of what censorship is. They think it’s just people telling them that what they wrote is bad (image taken from Pan MacMillan.)

And because they are shocked at the loss of their insulation, the reasonable complaints they are being forced to listen to – “try not to use slurs”, “do research before writing a book”, “don’t give a platform to people calling for mass murder”, and “human rights are not debatable,” – seem to them to be the sounds of barbarians at the gates. So they respond, and they do so with tools developed in prior eras to combat legitimate oppression. They cry out “censorship” at people not giving them money, or complaining to their editors and publishers.

It communicates a certain view of the world: I am the Poet. I am the Writer. I am the Professor. I am the Journalist. I am the Thinker. I am entitled to this platform. How dare you try to take it away from me?

What this letter communicates is that they feel ownership of the public discourse, and they view its escape from their hands as an affront, and they are going to use the mightiest tool in their arsenal to hold on to it: a strongly worded letter that says nothing of any value.

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