THEY ‘WOKE’ AMONG US
The remarkable thing about the Harper’s letter signed by 153 public intellectuals is that a statement in support of freedom of speech would be considered so remarkable; that a principle that just about everyone not so long ago assumed everyone else reflexively supported, especially all good liberals, is now apparently under such attack as to require defense, and that the defense is so rare that it makes headlines.
Perhaps even more remarkable is that enough men and women of letters on the political left in these days of pervasive cowardice on the political left could finally stiffen their spines sufficiently to issue a statement that they knew was sure to provoke the anger of the leftist mobs that now rule our public discourse.
Apparently, “cancel culture” has now become so chilling in its effects that even Noam Chomsky is concerned.
And sure enough, right on cue, along came the little totalitarians to prove that the warnings about the little totalitarians were justified; indeed, nothing reveals the nuttiness of the nuts in our midst more than when they try to use their freedom of speech to suppress the freedom of speech of those who point out that they are nuts.
Indicative in this respect was Emily VanDer-Werff, who rebuked editor (and otherwise lefty in good standing) Matt Yglesias for making her “feel less safe at Vox and believe slightly less in its stated goals of building a more diverse and thoughtful workplace” because his name was appended to a letter supporting the expression of diverse opinions and thought.
How, precisely, signaling support for the marketplace of ideas can make anyone “less safe” at their place of work was left unexplained.
That the harsh response to the Harper’s letter was even more informative than the letter itself was also reflected in the bizarre behavior of some of those who signed but then retracted their support when they realized they had stepped out of lockstep and risked expulsion from the kingdom of woke.
In a pitch-perfect parody of what Kevin Williamson has called junior high cafeteria “cootie politics,” New York Times writer Jennifer Finney Boylan recanted with the explanation that she didn’t know who else had signed the letter; insisting that she thought she “was endorsing a well-meaning, if vague, message against Internet shaming” and was in good company because “Chomsky, Steinem, and Atwood were in.”
Put differently, she withdrew her support not because of any disagreement with the content of the letter per se but because she didn’t want to be seen by her woke friends consorting with the uncool kids in the lunchroom (which presumably consisted of the smattering of centrists who signed on, including David Brooks and Francis Fukuyama, and a writer who’s gotten a bit crossways with the LGBT crowd lately but likely has a somewhat bigger readership than Boylan, J.K. Rowling).
It occurs, in considering all this, that our political polarization has reached such a degree that some impressively credentialed but poorly educated people no longer understand that the purpose of an “open letter” is to persuade those who read it by amassing a sufficiently diverse array of signatories on behalf of a shared position on an important issue (such as the virtues of free speech), regardless of the amount of disagreement among them on others.
The Boylan recantation also contains within it a principle — that woke can only make common cause with woke, all of whom must think the same way about everything — that will inevitably lead to the collapse of wokeness.
Indeed, if being woke requires everyone to think exactly alike but the woke party line inevitably zigs and zags in unpredictable fashion, missteps (like that of Boylan) will become more common, more and more extensive purges will be necessary, and the herd will gradually but surely shrink to scraggly bands of lonely stragglers cut off from each other and society as a whole.
The woke will also have to progressively abandon position after position, regardless of their respective merits, as soon as someone who is unworthy (defined as unwoke) embraces them — as a number of commentators pointed out, when you evaluate arguments and things purely on the basis of who else makes or values them, you end up allowing Hitler to discredit vegetarianism and Stalin to discredit Mozart piano concertos.
As National Review’s Jim Geraghty pointed out, the “critics of the Harper’s letter have to be the most dangerous and unhinged — OK, second-most dangerous and unhinged — bunch of critics that Salman Rushdie has ever encountered.”
One can perhaps quibble, per Geraghty, over who wins the “unhinged” prize, but what can’t be denied is that the so-called liberals who condemn freedom of speech (and those defending it) have about as much relation to genuine liberalism as the ayatollah’s minions did.
Bradley R. Gitz lives and teaches in Batesville, Arkansas.