I was tempted to quote the same block of text. Who could have been paying attention the past 4 or 5 years and thought "the way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion"? This shit has been thoroughly warped into the "both sides" fallacy. It turns out people as whole are pretty terrible at assessing the merits of ideas. Or the values of facts. There's been freakin' studies on that.
Look - this jawbreaker included... some stuff. The book that won the Pulitzer is Rousseau and Revolution. It's 1092 pages, or 57 1/2 hours. And I sat through the whole book hating Rousseau and wanting the Revolution to come and cut off the heads of all these fuckers. And then it ends right as Louis 16 abdicates and you have to read The Age of Napoleon to get to The Reign of Terror and it's so much worse than you thought it could be that you just want to hug your kid. Americans don't learn much about The Terrors. It would be instructive if we did so; what we learn is that the French, inspired by the Americans, threw off the yoke of tyranny. What we don't learn is that the yoke of tyranny threw itself right back on again, and then they threw it off again, and then they threw it back on again, and Salem catches a lot of shit for witch trials. Two hundred accused, 20 executions. The British burned 500 witches over a hundred year period; fuckin' German tribes burned 25 thousand over the same period. The Germans? Most of that was warring tribes taking a town and burning everyone that burned their "witches" the year before last. All becomes attrition and reprisal. That was after the thirty years' war had depleted their stocks so much that the Church OK'd polygamy. The instinct behind this is fear. It's not fear of being liberal, or fear of being conservative. It's fear that you're in charge, and those who are in charge when the rules change tend to suffer the worst. For the past 80-90 years, rich white people have been confident that they will remain rich. They have been confident that they will face no consequences from upholding a system that rewards them from being white. That's changing. Superiority reduced to equality is a reduction nonetheless and when we all judge ourselves relative to our fellow man, raising our fellow man means diminishing ourselves. The Terrors were about the petty bourgeoisie taking down the aristocracy, and then the aristocracy taking down the petty bourgeoisie, and then the petty bourgeoisie taking down the aristocracy forever and ever amen. There's a lot of historians in that list and they've got to smell something on the wind. So they're writing an angry editorial to Twitter.Who could have been paying attention the past 4 or 5 years and thought "the way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion"?
History is fundamentally one long litany of rich people being fuckers to poor people, of aristocrats fucking each other over every chance they get, of the little guy being crushed in the wheels turned by the big guys.
There are also quite a few legal scholars whose opinions about directed change vs. mob rule ought to be taken seriously (and that fucking Canadian fascist Margaret Atwood). It's actually a shame they let David Brooks sign it, because it just gives the internet mob some cheap lols and an easy way to write the whole thing off. It's a pretty facile essay, but as a editorial to Twitter (nice phrase, btw!) it's a down right magnum opus.
I guess manufacturing consent makes more money than Manufacturing Consent
In his defense, taken at face value this letter can read pretty harmlessly (if one does not read too close), and certainly not all its concerns are unfounded. On the other hand, he should know better than to read this at face value, goddammit. The letter, ironically, uses the same tactic that cancel culture does. In the same way that one can go from "so-and-so ships two underage characters" to "so-and-so is a sexual abuser and a pedophile", so here we have "so-and-so is vocally opposed to uncritical support of police violence" becoming "so-and-so is taking away freedom of speech".
One might be inclined to ask, if these reforms are overdue, and if we've been enjoying a set of moral attitudes and political commitments that espouse strong norms of open debate and tolerance of differences, to what extent the "needed reckoning" and the "moral attitudes" it has intensified are separable. If the extant politics of liberalism are truly good, why have they been incapable of bringing such a reckoning against our political systems? This is a really good point: hasty damage control is not what the protesters are calling for and will not satisfy them. What they're calling for is for institutional leaders to examine their own power and the contribution of their institution to the current state of things, and many of them do not expect those leaders to deliver those considered reforms voluntarily. And yet, as people are vocally demonstrating injustice and oppression, rather than picking up a hammer and trying to build something better, the signers use this moment to hand-wring about debate.Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has 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. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second.
More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms.
We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other.