J.K. Rowling signs shortsighted, obtuse letter condemning cancel culture

J.K. Rowling and other prominent figures have signed an open letter condemning societal restrictions on free speech, but it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

The other day, Harper’s Magazine published an open letter signed by several academics, journalists and other public figures decrying “a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.” In other words, some people are mad about cancel culture.

There’s a lot to unpack here, but first, let’s look at what the letter says. The signatories — which include folks like Fareed Zakaria, Noam Chomsky, Malcolm Gladwell, Margaret Atwood, Wynton Marsalis, Salman Rushdie and Gloria Steinem — confirm that they support the calls for racial and social justice that have been getting louder over the past several months, but are concerned that “[t]he 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. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought."

To start, I’m not sure you can advocate for “robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters” and expect some people not to take it too far and engage in “calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.” The internet, for better or worse, is a place where everybody has their say, and if you really want to open the floor to anyone who has an opinion, it’s a touch naive to expect them all to adhere to polite rules of decorum. People can and will make arguments in ways you’re not expecting. If all the people currently calling for changes to policing had done things “the right way” instead of pouring into the streets to show their anger and power, we wouldn’t have several cities earnestly talking about defunding the police. And the signatories are in support of these sorts of movements…right?

And of course, there’s the matter of whether those “transgressions of speech and thought” are indeed just “perceived” or very real and cause for alarm. The letter outlines some of the instances where it thinks cancel culture has gone too far:

"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."

Okay, first of all, would it kill them to provide their sources? I realize they’re not writing a term paper but some links would be nice; otherwise we have to guess at what they’re talking about.

Maybe they don’t want to specify exactly what incidents they’re referencing because the specifics could muddy up their argument. The first bit (“editors…fired for running controversial pieces”) seems to be a reference to James Bennet resigning as the head of The New York Times editorial page after running a column written by Republican Senator Tom Cotton. That editorial called for deploying federal troops to end protests sparked by the death of George Floyd (again, the same protests the signatories claim to be in support of) and spread misinformation about the nature of the demonstrations.

Especially in hindsight, with the protests calming on their own and hopefully leading to positive change, that editorial does seem pretty vile and fear-mongering. And it wasn’t the first time Cotton had come under fire. So was this an example of free speech being stifled, or a decision made by a business after one of their employees proved bad at his job?

We could chase down the other examples, but my point is that what one person sees as a refusal to tolerate “opposing views,” another sees as someone suffering consequences for doing something stupid. And I can’t help but think that the line separating the two is pretty self-serving. For example, remember the guy at the Costco who screamed at an elderly woman who asked him to wear a mask?

This dude has since been fired from his job at an insurance agency, and somehow I doubt the signatories to this letter are too broken up about it. But they’re upset that James Bennet resigned from The New York Times. These two examples are pretty far apart, but what if it’s a closer call? When is someone receiving their just desserts and when is it cancel culture run amok? I imagine the answer is far more subjective than this letter makes it sound.

“Cancel culture doesn’t exist”…nah

All that said, I agree with the signatories that some folk on the internet — let’s say on Twitter, which is where a lot of canceling happens — do have a yen for “public shaming,” “ostracism,” and boiling down complex issues to unhelpful certainties. Whenever this topic comes up, some people raise the argument that cancel culture “doesn’t really exist,” and I can’t agree with that. It’s definitely out there.

To use a fairly benign example, just last week, people were up in arms over an errant quote about director Christopher Nolan, the guy behind The Dark Knight and Inception, not allowing chairs on set. A lot of the responses were pretty light-hearted, but there were also people earnestly criticizing the director for mistreating his employees.

The issue was that the no-chair thing wasn’t true. People jumped to conclusions, which happens all the time on the internet.

But things can get way more serious. Take the example of porn star August Ames, who was bullied online after tweeting homophobic comments in 2017. After engaging with her attackers for a few days, she committed suicide.

What Ames tweeted may have been inappropriate, but she certainly didn’t deserve to die for it. Of course, internet dog-piling isn’t always going to result in so extreme an outcome — each case is different, and Ames had her own issues she was dealing with — but it’s an example of the worst that can happen when cancel culture gets out of control.

Basically, I think cancel culture is especially harmful for people who, like Ames, don’t have a lot of institutional power, and who are marginalized in some way. The open letter even makes this point. “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.”

But you couldn’t describe any of the signatories as lacking in institutional power; you couldn’t even describe the people in their vague examples that way. We’re talking about people who can use their platforms to say and do pretty much whatever they want secure that even if they receive pushback, they’re going to be fine. Signatory J.K. Rowling is a millionaire hundreds of times over, and no amount of Twitter callouts is going to change that.

J.K. Rowling and the trans-exclusionary essay

Yes, it’s time to address the elephant in the room: Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, who has lately been embroiled in controversy over her anti-trans statements, signed this letter, which complicates things. According to the letter, “[t]he democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.” But apparently it doesn’t occur to the other signatories that Rowling, at least, is very active in fostering an intolerant climate against trans people.

To summarize, Rowling recently wrote at length about her trans exclusionist beliefs: she’s misgendered trans people, implied that they’re dangerous or confused, and generally peddled in fear-mongering stereotypes that are disproven with a glance at the research or just by talking to trans people about their experiences.

Having Rowling as part of this letter undercuts what it’s trying to say, because it implies that the beliefs she’s promoted are due respect when they are not. What kind of “intolerant climate” is the letter against? The one J.K. Rowling supports when she promotes bigotry to her millions of followers, making life harder for people already on the margins of society? Or is it targeting the people who try to hold her to account, labeling them “intolerant” for criticizing her bigoted views?

“The way to defeat bad ideas,” the letter insists, “is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.” Again, I can’t help but think this is naive. Should we live in a society where people are allowed to say what they want? Yes. Is everything they say worth arguing with as if it’s a legitimate idea? Very much no.

Say a talk show hosts a debate between a social justice activist advocating on behalf of marginalized groups and a white nationalist who believes America should be a homeland for white people, and that all other folks should be deported or worse — and yes, that is a real philosophy. By hosting this debate, is the talk show simply enabling free speech by airing both sides of the issue? Or is it presenting a dangerous, hate-based worldview as something that deserves as much respect as any other, therefore helping to normalize ideas that, if they catch on, could result in hatred on a large and terrifying scale?

There’s even a name for this: the tolerance paradox. If a society values free speech as an absolute, it tolerates ideas that are fundamentally intolerant, and that can eventually result in the quashing of the very norms it was trying to protect in the first place:

The truth is that some beliefs don’t deserve to be cordially debated, and I count Rowling’s among them. She should be allowed to endorse them if she wants, but those who push back aren’t breaking some kind of social contract that must be adhered to if we are to live in a society that values free speech. As the cliche goes, freedom of speech isn’t freedom from consequence.

This isn’t to say that people can’t go overboard. Death threats, for example, are never okay, and should be discouraged and condemned, legally or otherwise. But then we circle back to whether that kind of overkill is inevitable in a society that really does allow free speech. Surely the signatories wouldn’t want censorship, right?

At least one of the signatories to the letter, author and transgender activist Jennifer Finney Boylan, seems to have realized she’s joined with the wrong crowd and disavowed her participation:

Overall, while I think some of the sentiments in the letter are nice and that it means well overall, it’s guilty of what it accuses cancellers of doing: boiling a lot of the nuance out of a complicated issue.

And frankly, the timing is suspicious. The letter comes out soon after Rowling, the most prominent signatory, was criticized for promoting bigotry. I don’t know when the letter was put together, but intended or not, it seems less like a call to recognize the dangers cancel culture poses to marginalized people, and more like a group of influential individuals coming together to defend one of the most prominent, successful people on Earth.

This has been a long one. What do you all make of this?

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