Why cancel culture should be canceled

This open letter on open debate is signed by a wide range of notable people including Steven Pinker, Gloria Steinem, Fareed Zakaria, John McWhorter, Jonathan Haidt, Olivia Nuzzi, Noam Chomsky, Matthew Yglesias, Michelle Goldberg, David Brooks, Caitlin Flanagan, Emily Yoffe, Dahlia Lithwick, Michael Walzer, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Katha Pollitt, David Frum, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Deirdre McCloskey, Coleman Hughes, Jonathan Rauch, Wynton Marsalis, J.K. Rowling, Francis Fukuyama, and Salman Rushdie:

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: 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.…

[I]t is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms.

Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes.

Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal.

We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.

This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.

We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other.

As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.