Rowling and Atwood warn: 'vogue for public shaming is threatening liberal society'
The “vogue for public shaming” is stifling liberal society, according to an open letter by a group of authors including Sir Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood and JK Rowling.
The authors said they were speaking out against “the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides”.
Martin Amis, John Banville and Noam Chomsky were also signatories to what was billed as “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate”, published by Harper’s magazine in the US.
It referred to the ‘cancel culture’ which, amongst other things, has seen Rowling denounced on social media and abandoned by many of her fans after she voiced her opposition to the trans movement.
“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,” the letter said.
“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.”
The Booker Prize Foundation has been criticised for abolishing all honorary positions after Baroness Nicholson, an honorary vice-president, was accused of homophobia and anti-trans sentiment.
Removing people from their posts because they have expressed controversial views has resulted in a narrowing of the boundaries “of what can be said without the threat of reprisal”, the letter said.
“This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time… 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.”
Sir Salman Rushdie is a long-time defender of free speech. In 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa over his “blasphemous” novel, The Satanic Verses. He spent more than a decade in hiding under police protection.
