Tuesday 3.19: The Letter

A week or, I dunno, six weeks ago, Harper’s published a letter—signed by 100+ … let’s say “prominent intellectuals,” I guess—that, depending on how you read it, either defended the importance of free speech and civil discourse in the face of impending doom at the hands of “cancel culture,” or whined that “prominent intellectuals” have earned the right to say stupid shit about trans people on Twitter without retribution.

You probably caught wind of the whole debacle.

The letter begins its argument noting that recent protests against police brutality have “… also intensified 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.” Huh.

It was co-authored and copy-edited by a group of more than 20 of the eventual signers, so the language is no doubt careful and deliberate, and agonizingly vague. At the crux of this thesis, I think, is that “new attitudes and political commitments,” which I take to mean both a rejection of traditional capital-driven American neoliberalism and an increasing popularity of socialism and communism and Hot Girls For Bernie, are “weakening” norms of debate. Again, the signers could also just be upset about people calling them cucks on Twitter because in some circles (those in which joy and irony are still alive) it’s funny to baselessly insult people on the internet.

I question whether “weakening” is the right word, and whether ideological conformity is seen through the right lens: If I were to characterize the reckoning in which we’re currently engaged in terms of ideology, it’s one where the left is beginning to pressure test rights and core liberal values like free speech (see: Antifa). We’re looking at just how undemocratic our democracy really is, and we’re attempting to, perhaps dramatically, overcorrect to draw attention to the do-nothing platitudes and equivocations of this traditional liberal debate that ultimately, at least to my just semi-trained eye, seem to play out the clock in an academic trap defense that serves only to maintain the shitty status quo.

Again, let me note that this is all probably just about people being mean to writers on Twitter.

It goes on, and I took notes:

…resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting.

Read: your ideology isn’t good if it’s not a winning ideology.

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.

It is?

And but so I was done thinking about it, following an extended and somewhat cyclic text-argument with my Mom about the letter, which led (I think) both of us to understand that at issue was the ambiguity of the language, which allows readers to project any and all of their experiences, opinions, and anxieties about the subject onto the text itself: She, an older liberal working in a public position of relative visibility, is concerned about the fallout of the un-woke faux pas and so largely agrees with the position of the writers. I, hyperconscious about any projection of vanity and privelege stemming from a lack of thought and empathetic diligence, don’t want to go anywhere near a manifesto so dripping with woe-is-me pathos and back-in-my-day subtext.

It’s important to move on from these things, because these things are often very stupid.

But dude just had to tweet:

Three-name-having Thomas up there is the father of the letter. He’s a writer for a number of fancy publications, and if you haven’t heard of him, the joke is often made, he will be happy to staple his resume to your front door. Bari Weiss, for context (if you’re unaware), is an opinion columnist for the New York Times who has a reputation for being a jerk. When the Times opinion desk was going through some shit over that racist Tom Cotton editorial, she was live-tweeting her gripes through a staff meeting, which pissed off her coworkers. She’s difficult. She’s a self-described “ardent Zionist,” a complicated issue, sure, but a position that I don’t think endears you to many people except other ardent Zionists. She wrote that Kavanaugh probably raped that girl at the party, but it didn’t matter because he was 17 so it’s like whatever. That’s already too many words about Bari Weiss. You get the picture.

The main thing here is to contextualize Turner Classic Witticism a bit here, who is kicking people out of his house instead of changing the subject. And about that house. A couple of months ago, I read about 10,000 words about that house, to which he escaped, from Paris, at the beginning of the pandemic. I’m not going to link to it, because it still makes me so angry, but here’s a taste:

…over the course of the lunch and the contents of that bottle [of wine], my confidence faltered. Our friends, a French-American couple with two small children slightly older than our own, were planning to leave that same afternoon for a family home in a village in western France, just south of Brittany. They suggested we hunker down together. “Why are you doing something so drastic?” I asked them. They’d heard from a friend working in government that very soon—in the next day or so—there would be another announcement: total home confinement. “Yeah, right,” I laughed. “How long could that really last?” It stopped seeming like a joke when they told me it could stretch until May. I texted another friend who had worked for President Emmanuel Macron when he was the economy minister and who was now running for local government. “You should go,” he wrote back immediately. I glanced at my wife and children, trying to imagine the four of us in our apartment without respite for the next forty-five days, and booked four one-way train tickets for the following morning.

I want to know what it’s like to not only have the fucking balls to write that, but to somehow be completely unaware that you have those grapefruits dangling down by your knees. We were hundreds of thousands of deaths into the shit by the point this was published, and we’re getting this kind of slice of life bullshit from a guy who from there, predictably, goes into a superficial analysis of Camus’ The Plague, determining through some vague generalizations about the inherent fragility of human arrangements that life sucks, and it’s particularly tough for him because he’s an expat, so he knows a thing or two about existential exile. (WHAT.)

But back to the house. The country estate to which Tom escaped, Decameron-style (or, we can only hope, Masque of the Red Death-style), and from which he is apparently expelling critics of a known provocateur. The fact that he couldn’t forsee the backlash that would inevitably result from a piece that completely glosses over the fucking fact that he has a country home to which he can flee, following a warning from a politically connected acquaintance, that he somehow just misses the irony of all this speaking to the specific complaint that so many of the people he seems to think are trying to silence him are screaming in his face, that there are two fucking worlds, and you’re writing from the good one, telling everyone in the bad one to learn to behave.

I find the expulsion distinctly at odds with last week’s insistence on the importance of open debate and tolerance of differing viewpoints, and the connecting thread doesn’t have anything to do with policy or belief or even decency—it’s that question of status.

It reinforces the inherent classism in that fucking letter. That this literate, academic, accomplished class of cultural critics has earned the right to forgo the rigors of the very debate they claim to revere. Because just like Tom, Bari has some that all-important press credential that sets her apart from the rest of us. And for crying out loud, you threw someone out of your house? There are definitely lines that can be crossed to elicit that response, but I don’t think saying Bari Weiss is a jerk and a fraud, then not backing it up (because why should you have to? Imagine watching sports with this guy?), is one of them.

I dunno man, I don’t have a good ending. I just don’t think cancel culture is real and I'm sick of seeing these fucking people cry about it. I’ll leave you with this: