NEW YORK, NY July 16 (DPI) – Comment boards of NYTimes.com this week reflected common-sense support for free speech and open academic discourse, amid recent pushback against the take-no-prisoners woke orthodoxy of the American left.
More than 150 prominent artists and academics – all self-professed liberals – signed a letter that appeared on Harpers.org warning of the “intolerant climate” beginning to dominate academe, the media and publishing. An excerpt from that letter:
“The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted,” the letter declared, citing “an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.”
“We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other,” it continues. “As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes.”
The NYT’s participation and promotion of intellectual intolerance created an awkward situation: Readers expressed greater concern about free speech than did the paper, whose publisher last month fired the op-ed editor because the paper published the right-wing views of an Arkansas Senator. The most popular comments attached to the NYT’s coverage of the Harpers letter:
Thank God some critical thinkers banded together and did this. I hope it sends a powerful message to all of the institutions that we desperately need to continue to be bastions of free thought and discussion— including this very newspaper.
As one of the leading signatories wrote: “What does it say when a completely generic endorsement of free speech and open debate is in and of itself immediately diagnosed as anti-progressive, as anti-left?”
Having lived in three different continents for more than 15 years, including an 8 year stint in liberal-leaning cities such as nyc, boston, chicago, philadelphia, and san francisco—in the last city i was a fellow in a social scientific research institute whose past fellows include nobel laureates—i can tell you that i have never experienced such a powerful herd mentality, intellectual extremism and one-sidedness, and moral righteousness as i experienced among the left-leaning folks i hung around with in the u.s. What was badly missing was nuance, irony, modesty, self-awareness of one’s own flaws, and the awareness that reality is more complex than your mental representation of it. It seems these people had no notion of the middle ground: it was all or nothing at all. It was truly intellectually depressing and stifling.
I read the letter. I would sign it. The people who want to back out because of who else signed—a ridiculous defense, really—should be ashamed to be so easily cowed. It means the ideas they agree to are now subsumed by personality and fear of controversy.