The Harper's 'letter' proves we need to have a serious talk about free speech
- The letter published by Harper's defending the broad principle of "the free exchange of information and ideas" has sparked both praise and ridicule.
- Cosigned by more than 150 artists and writers, the letter also demonstrated a huge gulf in attitudes over the value of free expression, even among hardcore free-speech advocates, some of whom argue that free association is overlooked in this debate.
- Some free-speech diehards need to remember it doesn't mean freedom from consequences or that criticism is necessarily "censorship."
- There are also those who believe free speech has outlived its usefulness and serves mostly the powerful.
- Free-speech skeptics should clearly articulate what their vision of justice looks like in a world in which they're the censor.
- This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
On Tuesday, Harper's published what has become known as "the letter," a document cosigned by more than 150 artists, writers, and academics defending the broad principle of "the free exchange of information and ideas," which they refer to as "the lifeblood of a liberal society." It has sparked both praise and ridicule.
But more than anything, it's demonstrated why an honest debate, even a fight, over the value of free speech needs to be had.
The letter, a vaguely written, even anodyne statement that reads as if it's been stepped on by too many writers, opens with a message of support for the recent protests and "wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society." It then laments the "swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought" that the cosigners argue is taking place in institutions ranging from academia to media to everyday workplaces. Its main thesis appears to be "We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences."
There are those who see free speech as a concept that benefits only the powerful, and then there are those staunch free-speech advocates — myself among them — who view free speech as the most effective tool available for marginalized voices; no meaningful positive social change could occur without it.
It took millennia to establish the norm that you can piss people off, especially the powerful, with your speech and it should generally be tolerated. If it's jettisoned in the name of a certain definition of justice, what happens at the next injustice? You can't use free speech to fight it anymore.
Critics of 'the letter' weigh in
For some critics, the focus was on the letter's signatories — who included the feminist icon Gloria Steinem, the socialist academic Noam Chomsky, and the jazz legend Wynton Marsalis and was spearheaded by the Black writer Thomas Chatterton Williams. Despite being cosigned by people who are diverse in race, gender, religion, sexuality, age, and politics, the number of wealthy, older, white cosigners nullified the letter's message for many.
Others pointed to certain signatories such as JK Rowling, the "Harry Potter" author who has recently made polarizing statements about transgender people, and the writer Jesse Singal, whose choice to write about people who stopped identifying as trans was vilified by some on the left. For some critics, the inclusion of such people automatically rendered the letter a moot point.
One signatory, the writer Jenny Boylan, apologized for having her name listed beside certain people (though she didn't name anyone). The Black writer Malcolm Gladwell tweeted in response: "I signed the Harpers letter because there were lots of people who also signed the Harpers letter whose views I disagreed with. I thought that was the point of the Harpers letter."
The most interesting criticism I came across was from Ken White, the civil-libertarian lawyer who also blogs and tweets as "Popehat." White is often my go-to legal-splainer on First Amendment issues, so when he criticized the letter, my ears perked up.
I spoke with White about the concept of the "preferred first speaker" conundrum. Put simply, it's the idea that there should be few limits on speech but substantial limits on the response to such speech.
"Sometimes I feel that criticisms of 'cancel culture' amount to an attempt to impose civility codes on the marketplace of ideas, sometimes by the same people who otherwise would be objecting to such civility codes applied to the first speaker," White told me.
He added: "Calling a group of people a 'mob' is a way to avoid addressing their argument. It deprives them of agency, assumes they are taking their position out of groupthink or rage rather than because of values, and implicitly suggests that their proposition is less credible because too many people are sharing it."
If you want to get rid of free speech, just own it
The socialist writer Freddie deBoer wrote Tuesday of some of the progressive responses to the letter: "You want to argue that free speech is bad, fine. You want to adopt a dominance politics that (you imagine) will result in you being the censor, fine. But just do that. Own that."
I'd agree. If you think that free speech has lost its value and we've reached the pinnacle of all human understanding and that the correct parameters of what may be said are now perfectly understood and must be locked in place for all time — let's have that argument.
And for those who are free-speech absolutists, the right of free association remains a tenet of the value. That's a sometimes difficult circle to square, so specificity is necessary. Perhaps the argument is of course you CAN fire someone because they said something that offended a colleague, but don't make that an action of first resort or treat every instance of offense the same. After all, there are certainly people in workplaces offended by progressive speech, and no progressive would argue that the reflexive response should be that their job must be placed in jeopardy.
Take one the thorniest of political issues: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On one side a person can claim to feel unsafe by a colleague's support of a brutal occupier state. On the other, a person can claim to feel unsafe by a colleague's support of the anti-Semitic theocracy Hamas.
If this seems ridiculous, it's not.
Just last month, David Shor, a progressive election data analyst, tweeted a link to a Black Princeton University professor's study that theorized rioting helped Republicans win elections. Shor was promptly dismissed from his job at Civis Analytics after colleagues expressed their offense at the tweet.
The company has every right to fire an at-will employee, especially if they'd rather not deal with the hassle. But what justice was served by Shor's firing? The only lesson to be gleaned is that data analysts need to be very careful about what data they tweet. Incidents like this are part of what inspired the Harper's letter.
To those who presume that denying a culture of open debate and free expression will lead to a permanent entrenchment of correct ideas, I'd like to know who sets the rules. Who is pure enough to have lived a life with no problematic associations or regrettable past expressions of speech?
Because if you want to make the case that free speech has outlived its use, let's be clear about the society you envision after it's been done away with.
Free speech as the greatest tool available for the oppressed
For many of the letter's signatories, the concept of censorship is not in the abstract.
Steinem spent her life protesting and agitating in the fight for women's rights. She knows what it is to express deeply unpopular speech and to have it censored by authorities. Chomsky, whose left-wing social-justice credibility is hard to seriously challenge, is a longtime critic of both government and corporate censorship, and he's been a victim of both.
Garry Kasparov, the chess champion and Russian dissident, offended the political orthodoxy of his country and now lives under permanent threat of assassination. So does the celebrated author Salman Rushdie, because he wrote a book that angered a theocracy over three decades ago.
Jonathan Rauch, a gay writer who was a signatory of the letter, wrote in 2014 of a US Army Map Service astronomer named Frank Kameny, who was fired from his government job in the 1950s explicitly because he was gay.
Raugh wrote: "As of 1954, homosexuals not only lived in constant fear of being fired, shamed, and beaten or killed; we were also prevented by our government from making our case. To practice same-sex love was a crime; but even to praise it was 'cheap pornography.' Something else I often find called on to emphasize to young people, at a time when college speech codes are usually justified as protecting minority rights, is that turnabout is not fair play. The problem is not that the bad guys were in charge of the speech rules in 1954, whereas the good guys are in charge now. The problem is that majorities, politicians and bureaucrats are very unreliable judges of minorities' interests."
Kameny fought the government over his firing all the way to the Supreme Court, and ultimately lost. But beginning a decade before the Stonewall riots and for the rest of his life, he challenged the government through his writing and activism, which was possible only because of the First Amendment, and the right to cause offense through speech. In 2009, late in his life, the Obama administration officially apologized for his firing. Four years after his death, same-sex marriage was legalized by the Supreme Court.
If the presidency of Donald Trump has taught us anything, it's that certain liberal norms must be defended, if only to keep people with tyrannical instincts — like him — from determining what should and shouldn't be acceptable forms of expression. If the worst could happen — and it always could — the right to express unpopular opinions is the best weapon available to beat back the tyrant.
This doesn't mean speech shouldn't come without consequences, or that criticism is necessarily "censorship," or that anyone is entitled to a job even if they've become more trouble to their employer than they are worth.
But for the unconvinced, I would ask for some consideration that the principles of open debate and free expression are not outdated reactionary platitudes.
And for those who believe free speech has outlived its purpose, I would ask for an upfront conversation about what comes next.