In Defence of the Harper Letter
Quick! Someone sound the unpopular opinion klaxon!
I wasn’t entirely sure what happened, but when I arrived her yesterday it felt like someone had thrown a hand grenade into Medium. There were lots of angry voices. Everybody had got into a terrible rage about something called the Harper letter. If you haven’t read it, I’d recommend doing so now.
What was it I wondered? What the hell has got people so wound up?
From the initial online responses it seems like a cadre of supervillains had stood up to announce that they want to drop newborn babies off skyscrapers. The outrage was palpable. The letter suggests that those who challenge the various societal ills, transphobia, homophobia, racism (et al) do so with
“moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favour of ideological conformity.”
Given the immediate backlash and explosion in vitriol, it seems they may have a point. I’ve read various back and forth arguments on this and have come to one conclusion.
Humanity. That’s me, you, and everybody else we know has gone insane.
The main argument against the letter states…. if you’re in a position that allows you to put your name to a letter of this magnitude then you’re already a person of influence and you already wield too much power. You shouldn’t be setting the rules about what should and shouldn’t be said.
If you manage to toe the line for the current arbitrary model of ‘good’…. then you can be tolerated to make the right sort of statements and allowed to have influence. If you stray into something that’s approaching ‘bad’ (As JK Rowling has done) then you are grossly abusing your power and deserve to be canceled.
The problem with constructing the world in this way is simple. The decisions about what constitutes ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are consistently shifting and sometimes do not have a friendly coexistence. You can put all your energy and focus into pushing society in a direction you think you want, only to have it wheel round and end up somewhere you don’t.
Groupthink is an arms race to be the fastest person to a stupid place.
Toxic Tolerance?
One of the arguments I have seen deployed against the letter is that in calling for ‘tolerance’, it asserts the rights of those with power over those who don’t. The argument is that tolerance is used by the state to demand oppressed groups recognise and respect the bigotry of bigots.
The state then decides which political views are tolerated and as a result can marginalise an oppressed group. It’s a compelling argument but one that is ultimately flawed.
Cancel culture is about the power of the group, asserting a dominant view over an individual that the group has deemed to have transgressed. It theoretically holds the powerful to account. That is how it is packaged and sold to the masses. You, an individual, by aligning yourself with a marginalised group, can talk truth to power.
You can continue to believe you are a superhero in your own narrative of You vs the World. Joining together like a team of Avengers, you can ‘cancel’ a prominent voice. In doing so you make the world a brighter place.
However society cannot deal with racism, transphobia and homophobia by blunt force and demagoguery on either the right and left. The human capacity for complex thought is limited when done in groups. There is little difference between mob justice and cancel culture when applied to individuals.
And that’s the level where cancel culture is most often applied. The individual.
Cancel culture isn’t being used to dismantle the institution of monarchy for example. If you’re looking to create an equal society and curb the power of historically racist institutions, you don’t have to look much further than the Queen of England and her family’s role in racism and inequality.
So where is the republican outrage? There isn’t any. It turns out she’s a lovely gentle human being, and she doesn’t voice any offensive opinioons. She just embodies them. We can’t cancel her because she hasn’t personally transgressed.
It doesn’t matter that she sits on top of a racist, sexist, classist pyramid as head of an institution that committed heinous acts of historical barbarism. The same justice warriors cancelling JK Rowling for being a TERF will go out of their way to line the streets at Windsor wave flags at Prince Harry’s wedding.
Most wouldn’t understand the irony of doing this.
But isn’t cancel culture just freedom of speech?
Sure. You could make that argument if you wanted. Cancel culture is arguably market forces operating on the ideas of people. Say something agreeable and you’ll be rewarded, say something disagreeable and you’ll be punished. Can we cancel cancel culture? No. Not at all.
But it is incumbent on those who adopt ‘cancel culture’ to apply a high level of intellectual rigour. If you’re going to yoke your world view to a movement in which the pre-requisite reading is a single tweet — then you are likely to be part of the problem you’re trying to solve.
Echo chamber activism lends itself very nicely to the Dunning-Kruger effect
We’re putting our loudest voices forward, not our best thinkers. Now that a group of some of our best thinkers have written a letter, we’re letting the loudest voices dominate our reply. Consider what that means.
Consider how dangerous a direction that is for society to take.
Why is it dangerous?
What the social justice movement fails to account for is how it will apply the brakes to cancel culture once the lines between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ become blurred. No individual has control of it, it’s simply a tool with which to hold the powerful accountable, it will then become a tool to hold everyone accountable to everyone else. Eventually it will become the de facto law.
Guilt will be assumed at the point of accustion. Don’t believe it’s already happening? There are articles on Medium that suggest that very thing.
We will have fallen into the trap that people like Orwell and Kafka warned us about. Our society will become the society of 1984 and it will have happened on our watch. And you, Mr or Ms Social Justice Warrior will not be safe.
Anyone who climbs high enough in this social contract will become a target. I’ll call it the Robspierre Principle. If you don’t know who Robspierre is or what happened to him, now might be a good time to check
And maybe the Robspierre issue it’s not a problem that you recognise yet… but it’s a problem that you’ll soon discover. As society moves ever more to external thought-puritanism, you’ll feel more and more guilty and anxiety about the things you’ve said and the things that you haven’t.
Have you been wondering why it seems everyone under thirty is anxious as hell? It has nothing to do with avocado on toast. It’s because they’re trying to view and shape themselves through the eyes of everyone else they know and everyone online they don’t know.
Ask any therapist for a list of things that cause anxiety and ‘mind reading’ is often top of the list. I
Mind reading the thoughts and intentions of others has become obligatory in the modern world. It will continue to be the case if ‘cancel culture’ becomes the norm. The desire ‘not to offend’ will permeate through every aspect of our lives without us ever questioning what ‘offence’ actually is or how it is being weaponised.
Future generations will wonder how we collectively whittled away our rights to say what we think without fear of retribution.
What next?
Once a society begins a process of dismissing intellectual thought and debate in favour of screaming ‘shut up’ at everyone who disagrees, we have quite a tricky problem on our hands.
Cancel culture, identity politics and KafkaTraps aren’t an intelligent way of rebalancing society, that’s just how they’re packaged for maximum effect. They’re simply a way of controlling the discourse, seizing the linguistic battlefield and launching a pre-emptive strike against individuals that the group has deigned ‘bad’.
The Harper letter is a rebuttal to cancel culture by people in a prominent position of their respective fields. They’re taken from a wide variety of political ideologies and have very little in common with each other. These aren’t reality TV stars and politicians, they are people whose voices have informed and shaped modern culture.
To create real change will means bringing our best minds forward and engaging in difficult conversations. It means addressing complexity without weaponising offence or ‘trying to win’. It means allowing people the space to disagree and compromise without that being seen as a competitive race to the bottom on who is the most oppressed
It means that you shouldn’t have to be an anonymous aquatic bird on social media to question the received wisdom of angry activists.
We can’t cancel cancel culture, not without generating a paradox. We can simply plead that those undertaking it understand the full implications of where it will lead. That’s the message of the Harper letter and I hope it’ll serve as a timely warning at a pivotal point in human social evolution.
I’ll leave you with the words of someone who was instrumental in shaping my world view (and who coincidentally signed the Harper letter.)
I’m all about balance. So if you’ve found yourself disagreeing with me on this, you wouldn’t be alone. Here’s a very excellent article by Alex Steullet. He has a very different take on the whole thing.
If you enjoyed my centre ground article you might also enjoy some of my other work. So here’s some, in no particular order…