Harper's, bizarre

A blog post about a letter about free speech and open debate

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an open letter in support of free speech and in possession of 153 signatures must be in want of a small but dedicated cadre of absolutely vitriolic haters. Or, I mean: isn't it?

I apologize in advance for what is probably an annoyingly inside-baseball post about media bullshit. It’s just: it has been four years since this ding-dang thing was published (official title: The Harper's Letter on Free Speech and Open Debate), and while I can't speak for the rest of the signatories, I for one did not anticipate that it would have such a long resentful tail on it. As noted on a recent Feminine Chaos episode, the letter was a statement of principle, yes, but also a product of a particular moment, one in which the public discourse had flown so far off its hinges that even my 70 year-old parents were like, "Is it just me, or is shit getting wild right now?"

Do you guys remember what the summer of 2020 was like? This was the moment when anarchist cosplayers had set up a lawless commune-within-the-city in Seattle, like something out of The Dark Knight Rises except more nude; al fresco diners were having their appetizers held hostage by megaphone-toting protestors who wouldn't let you eat one single calamari until you swore a fealty oath to Black Lives Matter; and in the absence of any alternative (live events and professional sports alike being cancelled), the nation woke up every day to engage in our sole remaining national pastime, which was recreational Karen-hunting. 

I did not have the kind of platform then that I do now, but I was nevertheless writing semi-regular articles which were not, but could have been, titled “Perhaps We Should All Calm Down.” When someone emailed me asking if I'd like to sign the Harper's letter, it struck me as a chance to say the thing I'd been saying, just with the added oomph of a hundred other people saying that same thing at the same time — and if any Harper's letter-haters happen to be reading this, I regret to inform that this was the beginning and end of my association with any of the other signatories with whom I did not already have an existing relationship. (Trust me, no one is more disappointed than me that I have not been summering at one of J.K. Rowling's various castles all this time, or even just eating hot dogs with Jeffrey Eugenides. Jeff, if you’re reading this, I'm such a fan! Call me!) 

I mention this because even now — again, four years later — people still make snide references to "the Harper's letter crowd" as if this is a coherent category of person. As if we are all hanging out in a room together, all one hundred and fifty three of us, like the Avengers except nowhere near as muscular, eating Chipotle and playing Texas hold 'em and waiting for some sort of alarm to go off that signals the onset of a free speech emergency, which we frankly hope will happen soon because Noam Chomsky has been eating barbacoa for five straight days and the shared toilet can only take so much abuse. 

The funny thing about these critiques is not just that they're annoying, but also that they're almost invariably wrong, since a fair few of the signatories actually do diligently weigh in on basically every free-speechy issue that crosses the transom (maybe there is a room with a bat signal, and I just wasn't one of the chosen few?) But they (the critiques) also tend to conflate supporting speech on principle with supporting the content of said speech which, as the meme goes, is not how any of this works. There's a famous quote about disagreeing with what you say but defending to the death your right to say it: some people say this was Voltaire, and some say it was someone else, but whoever said it, this was in fact the animating principle of the Harper's letter. You can tell, because if you look closely at their publicly-available writings, you will find that the signatories are agreed on the importance of preserving "a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes," but not on much of anything else. 

Not that this matters to the type of person who uses the phrase "Harper's letter crowd" unironically — and who of course hardly ever means the crowd as such, but rather whichever highest-profile signatory they personally detest. My partner in podcasting has written the best thing on this, but the tl;dr is that Bari Weiss could save a basket of puppies from a burning building tomorrow and people would still find a way to mock her for it, the way they mock her for everything else. It's the whom, not the what. 

But also: I think it is sometimes the what. Not what the letter said, necessarily, but what it represented, especially now that so many of the most avid architects of that punitive, gleefully malicious culture are now finding themselves under the wheels of the machine they built. I imagine it would be comforting, if you were one of these people, to say, Look, maybe we got a little carried away, but nobody could have foreseen it would end like this— only somebody did foresee this, and said so, and that's both inconvenient and not a little embarrassing. 

You know that saying, about how there are no prizes for being ahead of your time? This is true, but also: some people will never forgive you for it.