ONLY A CULTURE OF TOLERANCE CAN SURVIVE, WRITES KEITH C. BURRIS
Have you heard about the open letter published in Harper’s? Some academics, writers and journalists — mostly liberal ones — wrote the most modest of letters to that venerable old magazine, citing the need to renew our commitment to open dialogue and debate as we seek to renew America.
The letter asserted that it is a basic precept of free speech and thought, and of academic freedom, that you don’t cancel people for thoughts you disagree with, or thought that upsets you.
Seems almost indisputable right?
The reaction was ... outrage and recrimination.
We were told that this letter was just a bunch of clueless people of privilege spouting off about what they can never understand: injustice.
Oh, and some of the wrong sort of people signed the letter. So some signers recanted as if they were before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s: “I did not understand what I was doing.” “I did it for a friend.” “And I certainly didn’t know she would be a signatory.”
She would be J.K. Rowling, who is said to be unenlightened and outspoken about trans people. She is therefore persona non grata, possibly evil. She thinks the wrong things! Worse, she will not back down. Even worse, she is too big to destroy.
We have managed to define the ad hominem argument down — applying it ridiculously broadly and unfairly.
If someone says something you dislike, label him, call that person a name.
And after you have named that person — “privileged,” a “white nationalist,” a “misogynist” a “loser” (our president’s favorite) — the label, assumed to be self-evidently true, becomes grounds for dismissal, cancellation, silencing.
There is also, along with the ad hominem labeling and subsequent exile and nonpersonhood, the boomerang critique: If you dare to say that free speech has been forgotten, your right to free speech will be rescinded. Just as, if you say calling people racist is the new McCarthyism, you will be called a racist.
This is precisely why more people did not speak out against Joe McCarthy at the peak of his powers. They knew that saying someone was not a communist and did not deserve the label would get them labeled as communist.
McCarthyism was not conservatism. And we are learning that leftism is not liberalism.
We have a war against free thought and freedom of association being waged in this country today, just as surely as we had such a war in the 1950s.
Is it actually necessary to get approval from the PC police before one signs a letter?
Is it necessary to know who else is on the letter before you sign?
We once banned foreigners with anarchist views from our shores. (Most were poets.) Shall we ban J.K. Rowling next?
You think she is wrong? Fine. Let her speak.
Let speech answer speech. The “Shut Down Wrongspeech” impulse has now moved from our campuses to our newspapers. Amazingly, free speech and
thought — individual, original and unpopular — is no longer championed by the press. Groupthink, and received leftist pap, is defended and upheld rigidly instead.
And we will no longer let the dead speak to us, however imperfectly. Not Washington, and not Jefferson.
We will call Washington and Jefferson College Miscellaneous U, I guess. And Washington and Lee Southern School.
It’s not hard to make fun of wokeness, which Barack Obama called a circular firing squad.
But wokeness is not, finally, funny because it is itself relentlessly humorless.
The humorless are intolerant, and vice versa.
You cannot live and let live, which in some sense is what America is about, if you are an authoritarian prig.
You cannot have empathy, sympathy, compassion, which to a
great extent is what we are about, if you decide that some fellow Americans are incapable of these feelings. Or forbidden even to aspire to them.
In a society in which empathy is forsaken, or thought a bridge too far, a Black man and a white man can never be friends. A gay man and a straight man can never be. A conservative and a liberal can never be.
This is not Martin Luther King’s America.
It is its opposite.
Yet there is still, I believe, the unaligned and independent American who thinks. And when he finds his fellows they form an American center — the vital center, committed to moderation and compromise in our politics. They forswear the tribes and the mobs and, maybe, they will even stand up to them.
They know that the universities and press and our leaders have failed to do so.
These are the people who trust the New Testament and the Psalms, and distrust the profoundly illiberal and shallow New York Times.
They know that the best school in the nation is probably not Harvard but West Point.
They know that our best citizens are the seekers, not the anointed and the Twitter mob.
They are for building, not wrecking.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan said: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”
There is more in that paragraph than a shelf full of political science and political theory texts.
Our politics, even government,
can change lives and sometimes even culture, though it must be competent, rational and limited to do that.
But this is a cultural moment. Any new social movement that is primarily performative, lacking in practical goals or closed to many is in danger of destroying itself.
Only a culture of tolerance, in which free thought and compassion are the predicates, can survive.