Writers on the Left are brawling yet again over whether people who express–or who had once expressed–an opinion that now appears racist, sexist, homophobic, antisemitic or the like should suffer severe consequences, including loss of job or career. Cases in point include a man caught yelling racist taunts on a video, a Boeing executive who wrote an essay decades ago opposing women in military, an editor of The New York Times who published a column by a U.S. Senator, and J.K. Rowling’s skepticism about gender transitions.
Evelyn Beatrice Hall: “… your right to say it.” (1906)
On July 7, 2020 Harper’s Magazine published an open letter signed by many academics, journalists, and noted cultural figures objecting to such “illiberalism,” to a “brand of dogma or coercion” “that tend[s] to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.” Fierce rejoinders followed, including at least one that included the phrase “Ok, Boomer.” (Ageism? Or cohortism?)
Here, I add my two cents in support of the Harper’s letter. Suppressing offensive viewpoints is historically and logically a right-wing tradition. For the Left, however, such suppression is self-negating, even in two “hard cases”–racial differences in IQ scores and Holocaust denial.
The Home of Cancel Culture
Conservatives ranging from National Review literati to Fox illiterati like Donald Trump are gloating and tsk-tsking about left-wing vigilantes and about employers firing non-PC employees. (In his July 15 Dilbert strip, cartoonist Scott Adams has an executive tell the office manager “I have to fire you because employees are saying you are a white supremacist.” “But I’m not,” replies the manager. “Doesn’t matter,” says the head man, “I care more about my career than your life.”)
Yet, it is the Right that has historically and to this day regularly shut down people for their opinions. Examples abound. For generations, business interests and their political allies have punished workers who speak up for unionization or against harmful workplace practices (think Amazon). The Trump administration has forced many truth-tellers out of their jobs. In mid-twentieth-century, red-baiting politicians hounded communists and their sympathizers, getting many, such as those on the Hollywood Blacklist, fired from their jobs. School boards suppressed evolution in the schools. (These days, teachers cannot displace evolution with creationism, but many still feel pressured to downplay evolution.) Back before the Civil War the Post Office blocked abolitionist materials from being delivered in the South and burned abolitionist publications. And for centuries, conservatives have sought to censor disruptive cultural expressions, from Huckleberry Finn to comic books and Lenny Bruce.
Such tactics suit social conservatism. If one highly values communal harmony, tradition, authority, and order, as in the medieval church and the patriarchal household, then it makes sense, it is perhaps even just, to silence voices disturbing that order, voices from Nicolaus Copernicus to Colin Kaepernick.
However, the DNA of the Left is quite different. Silencing disagreeable and dissenting voices fundamentally contradicts the Enlightenment values of liberté and egalité, free inquiry and free speech, open debate, and questioning power (even liberal power).
Yet silencing does happen on the Left, not only in the sorts of cases that have drawn attention, but in the self-censorship of many who work within institutions with liberal climates of opinion. And the level of purity demanded keeps rising. As the list of deposed idols grows from Confederate generals to Confederacy-defeater U.S. Grant and beyond to figures like John Muir, where will the cut off be? An advisory committee to the San Francisco school board has recommended removing from schools the names of Paul Revere, Abraham Lincoln, and many others who cannot meet their 21st-century standards. Even Fredrick Douglass, whose statue rightly stands in the Capitol, we should note, described Irish immigrants and Native Americans in what we would today call racist terms. Is he to be pulled down?
That employees of Trump’s Justice Department or EPA are intimidated into silence is, unfortunately, to be expected, but that should not happen in universities or newsrooms, even if the incidences are vastly fewer than you’d think from listening to right-wing wails.
Limits
As others have noted (e.g., Beauchamp), the cancelling debate becomes an issue of boundaries. Where is the limit of acceptable speech? Goading people to physically attack others would be, like yelling fire in the theater, beyond that limit. But should hostile statements–say, about “Jews who own the banks”–or reports of uncomfortable facts–say, that SAT scores vary widely by race–be beyond the limit of tolerance?
Another boundary issue is the punishment for false or harmful statements. Rebuttals, of course, should offered. But should the speaker be just ignored or shamed, or also harassed, fired, or doxed? When do challenges turn into retributions?
Hard Cases
The incidents that have gotten attention recently are, to my mind, mostly easy cases of over-the-top vigilante justice, such as the attacks on psychologist Steven Pinker. But what about much harder cases? One third-rail topic is the issue of racial differences in so-called intelligence tests.
I spent the good part of two years co-authoring a book, Inequality by Design (1996), to contest the notorious claim of The Bell Curve (1994) that poor people are poor because they were born with low intelligence and its even more notorious insinuation that black people are disadvantaged because they were born with low intelligence. (Co-author of The Bell Curve, Charles Murray, by the way, refused to debate us.) Nonetheless, I reject efforts to shut Murray down, as occurred most famously in 2017 at Middlebury College (reported here and here). Protesting, debating, and refuting, yes; silencing, no.
(Some have claimed that The Bell Curve “was . . . comprehensively debunked by scientists and critics” and cannot therefore be tolerated. Wrong; I would not claim such certainty even for my own book. Although The Bell Curve‘s claims continue to be undermined by research [e.g., here], there are scientists who defend them [see the journal Intelligence].The debate is almost never closed on scientific theories no matter how empirically suspect or morally offensive they are.)
Holocaust denial is another sensitive topic, especially for me. It, too, is a weak and offensive claim. (We have more and more direct evidence that the Holocaust was real than we have that George Washington was real.) But should people who misspend their leisure time denying the Holocaust lose employment or be threatened with harm? Declaiming on the Holocaust–or on racial inferiority–in work hours contributes to a hostile work environment; that requires correction. Acting aggressively on such beliefs, say by discriminating or by setting fires, violates the law. But dumb blog posts are another matter. Tolerating offensiveness is part of the American Left tradition.
Other western democracies police “hate speech” much more tightly than we do (Germany does, with good reason). But they are generally much more communitarian societies than ours, ones in which, for better or for worse, internal harmony and conformity across a range of issues are valued more than they are here, even if at the cost of suppressing some individual expression. Their cultures are not classically liberal in the American vein.
Consequences
There are practical, as well as philosophical, consequences to cancelling on the Left. One is to energize the popular and political backlash against “political correctness” that the Right is trying, with some success, to stir up. Another is to inhibit wider discussion of issues by making even liberals worry about wandering too closely to the latest boundary line. Human gender differences, for example, are amazingly complex. They are overwhelmingly socially constructed, but should researchers shy away from exploring the genetics and biology of gender for concern about being canceled?
On the other hand, can a discursive community move the consensus about values and about appropriate comment without cancelling the laggards? Are the PC casualties the distasteful but necessary cost of, say, freeing the sexually nonconforming from stigma and pain or getting colorblind application of the law? I think not. Much progressive change has happened without it, including, for examples, the widespread acceptance of same-sex relationships and the expansion of health care. A loss of progressive momentum, as well as a loss of principle, looms with too much censorship on the Left.
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Update (Aug. 12, 2020):
A survey on Americans’ anxieties about their political speech (conducted by YouGov and sponsored by the Cato Institute) is here.
Update (Aug. 28, 2020):
Paul Berman’s thoughtful column with a historic perspective is here.
MADE IN AMERICA 