Signed by any number of literary luminaries and public intellectuals (and I wholeheartedly endorse it myself, for what that’s worth):

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. The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.

The 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. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a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.

This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. 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. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.

A Letter on Justice and Open Debate | Harper’s Magazine

Study co-author Gregory M. Cochran says: “History looks more and more like a science fiction novel in which mutants repeatedly arose and displaced normal humans – sometimes quietly, by surviving starvation and disease better, sometimes as a conquering horde. And we are those mutants.”

https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2007/12/we-are-all-mutants-now.html

…by revolutionary, I’m trying to draw at least a partial contrast between what I think Bernie Sanders was trying to do in his socialist campaigns for the presidency and what I suspect is going to come out of the current moment now. That distinction rests on my sense that since the 1960s and 1970s America has generated a kind of mass upper class who have combined a kind of rhetoric of pseudo-radicalism — the semi-hostile posture to the edifices of white patriarchy or something — with a socioeconomic system that constantly ratifies and shores up their own privilege, so when I use the word revolution, I’m suggesting that a real revolution would be something that dramatically threatened the class privilege of these folks…we’ve ended up crafting our upper class where the upper class is very comfortable speaking a certain kind of language of social justice so long as speaking that language sort of works with maintaining their own economic privileges.

Ross Douthat, from an interesting new episode of the podcast “The Argument”, with Jamelle Bouie and Michelle Goldberg (edited slightly to remove filler words)

Opinion | Whose Statue Must Fall? – The New York Times

The Atlantic has been a fairly consistent bastion of sanity when social justice outrage goes too far.

First, these incidents damage the lives of innocent people without achieving any noble purpose.

Second, such injustices are liable to provoke a political backlash. If a lot of Americans come to feel that those who supposedly oppose racism are willing to punish the innocent to look good in the public’s eyes, they could well grow cynical about the enterprise as a whole.

Third, those of us who want to build a better society should defend the innocent because movements willing to sacrifice justice in the pursuit of noble goals have, again and again, built societies characterized by pervasive injustice.

One of the core tenets of liberal democracy is that people should not be punished for accusations against them that are unsubstantiated, for actions that are perfectly reasonable, or for offenses that were committed by others. No matter how worthy the cause they invoke, you should not trust anyone who seeks to abandon these fundamental principles.

Source: Stop Firing the Innocent

This whole essay is very much worth reading. This is something I worry about a lot (as I’m sure is obvious to anyone who’s been reading my blog over the past couple of years).

Without rehashing at length, my argument against the left’s illiberal style is twofold. First, it tends to interpret political debates as pitting the interests of opposing groups rather than opposing ideas. Those questioning whatever is put forward as the positions of oppressed people are therefore often acting out of concealed motives. (Even oppressed people themselves may argue against their own authentic group interest; that a majority of African-Americans oppose looting, or that Omar Wasow himself is black, hardly matters.) Second, it frequently collapses the distinction between words and action — a distinction that is the foundation of the liberal model — by describing opposing beliefs as a safety threat.

Working from these premises, many reactions by the left that might seem bizarre to somebody unfamiliar with this world (say, an older or more moderate person who doesn’t work in academia or the progressive movement) can make perfect sense. Since criticism of violent protests is racist, and racism obviously endangers black people, an act as seemingly innocuous as sharing credible research poses a threat to safety.

The Still-Vital Case for Liberalism in a Radical Age

Regarding (above) “[Leftist illiberalism] tends to interpret political debates as pitting the interests of opposing groups rather than opposing ideas,” see also Scott Alexander’s 2018 piece on Conflict Theory vs Mistake Theory.

This opinion piece from Ross Douthat is part of the widespread debate within journalism about the NYT’s decision to publish and then step back from an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton. I’m posting it not because of its relevance to that particular debate, but because he makes an interesting argument that “the force transforming Western liberalism” — ie the social justice movement ie woke culture — is, for better or for worse, no longer a flavor of liberalism but a separate ideology. His particular take on that comes from an unsurprisingly conservative perspective, but I think the core idea is a fascinating one that I’ll be mulling over for a long time.

The surge of feminist and #MeToo activism in the last decade, for instance, has advanced a longstanding and admirable liberal goal — the right of the individual to be free from rape, assault and unwanted sexual aggression. But at the same time it has generated new disciplinary structures, primarily on college campuses, that point us toward a post-liberal system of sexual regulation — a bureaucratic supervision of intimate life, often built on the presumption of male guilt rather than due process.

The same duality exists with the advance of gay and transgender rights. In their liberal form, these causes seek an individual right to live one’s life without facing unjust discrimination. But when other constitutional rights long considered essential to liberalism — freedom of speech, freedom of religion — come into conflict with the movement, it’s assumed that the old rights must inevitably give way. And the movement’s vanguard increasingly rejects debate entirely, expanding its definition of a “transphobe” to encompass anyone with doubts about the widespread use of puberty blockers or the movement’s ideologically freighted view of sex and gender.

Likewise with anti-racism and Black Lives Matter. Many of the people participating in this month’s George Floyd protests have goals that are meliorist, reformist, liberal — demilitarize police departments, weaken police unions, change police tactics, hire and promote more minority officers. (Many of these are goals that libertarians and conservatives support as well.)

But part of the anti-racism movement is seeking much more than just changes to policing. It’s interested in spiritual renewal and consciousness raising — something evident from the revivalism of so many protests in the last week — and its capacious definitions of racism imply, in the end, not reform but re-education, not interracial dialogue but strict white deference, not a liberal society groping toward equality but a corrupt society being re-engineered.

Opinion | Ross Douthat: The Tom Cotton Op-Ed and the Cultural Revolution – The New York Times

You have to install the Serial Box app (or read them in your browser); it wants an email address but doesn’t require any permissions to work.

One of the debates currently taking place over various creative spheres of social media is when it’s appropriate to write stories about coronavirus—now, in the middle of it, or once we’re through it? While both sides—allowing writers and readers the necessary space to either process the pandemic or compartmentalize for their emotional well-being—are valid, Serial Box’s new short fiction collection proves that it is possible to craft engrossing fiction in this time of crisis. How We Live Now invites ten authors—Madeline Ashby, Steven Barnes, L.X. Beckett, Tananarive Due, Brian Keene, Usman T. Malik, Sunny Moraine, Malka Older, Kelly Robson, and Catherynne M. Valente—to document their feelings from the first few weeks of the coronavirus crisis through the lens of sci-fi and speculative fiction. That means quarantine and self-isolation, yes, but also zombie rats and government-mandated Blooms and sex robots.

What’s most compelling about this collection is that each story is, as Valente put it, “a snapshot of a moment.” They are individualized, highly personal responses that nonetheless manage to fulfill the aim of all great SF and spec-fic: to look ahead to possible futures (many surprisingly hopeful, all things considered) while still commenting on the present.

Best of all, the stories are all available with a free Serial Box account (sign up here or via the Serial Box app). Below, get more information on each of the ten shorts, as well as the authors sharing their various inspirations and how cathartic it was to consider the topic of “How We Live Now.”

Serial Box Releases Pandemic-Inspired Collection of SFF Stories: How We Live Now | Tor.com

Direct link to the stories on Serial Box

I think this is both true and important.

The Covid-19 pandemic has tested our society in countless ways. From the health system to the school system, the economy, government, and family life, we have confronted some enormous and unfamiliar challenges. But many of these stresses are united by the need to constantly adapt to new information and evidence and accept that any knowledge we might have is only provisional. This demands a kind of humble restraint — on the part of public health experts, political leaders, and the public at large — that our society now finds very hard to muster.

The virus is novel, so our understanding of what responding to it might require of us has had to be built on the fly. But the polarized culture war that pervades so much of our national life has made this kind of learning very difficult. Views developed in response to provisional assessments of incomplete evidence quickly rigidify as they are transformed into tribal markers and then cultural weapons. Soon there are left-wing and right-wing views on whether to wear masks, whether particular drugs are effective, or how to think about social distancing.

New evidence is taken as an assault on these tribal commitments, and policy adjustments in response are seen as forms of surrender to the enemy. Every new piece of information gets filtered through partisan sieves, implicitly examined to see whose interest it serves, and then embraced or rejected on that basis. We all do this. You’re probably doing it right now — skimming quickly to the end of this piece to see if I’m criticizing you or only those other people who behave so irresponsibly.

Some very basic assumptions have had to be adjusted in the course of this spring, in all directions, and everyone has found it difficult. Early on, some argued that we would see nothing more than the equivalent of a bad flu season, and the virus quickly proved them wrong. In early March, Dr. Anthony Fauci spoke for many public health experts when he told an interviewer that “people should not be walking around with masks,” which would only really be of use to health workers. Within a few weeks, the same experts (including Fauci) were recommending that we all wear masks in many settings.

[…]Our polarized political culture has reflexively approached the pandemic as just another culture-war drama of this sort — demanding that we each prove our loyalty to our team and express exasperated outrage at the other. This has left us clinging to various strategies rooted in provisional hypotheses (about re-opening the economy, for instance, or enforcing lockdowns, or using hydroxychloroquine), insisting that evidence against our view does not exist, and unwilling to change our minds when new facts emerge.

Tribalism Comes for Pandemic Science

This related piece in The Atlantic is more narrowly focused, but also excellent.

The Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics says that you can have a particle spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time – until you look at it, at which point it definitely becomes one or the other. The theory claims that observing reality fundamentally changes it.

The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster. I don’t subscribe to this school of thought, but it seems pretty popular.

The author goes on to give several thought-provoking examples.

The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics