Ανοιχτή επιστολή 150 προσωπικοτήτων κατά της «μόδας της δημόσιας ταπείνωσης»
diastixo.gr
Η επιστολή δημοσιεύτηκε στο περιοδικό Harper’s Magazine και οι υπογράφοντες παρατηρούν, μεταξύ άλλων: «Αρχισυντάκτες απολύονται για αμφιλεγόμενα άρθρα, βιβλία αποσύρονται με πρόσχημα την έλλειψη αυθεντικότητας, σε δημοσιογράφους απαγορεύεται να γράφουν για συγκεκριμένα ζητήματα, καθηγητές είναι υπόλογοι επειδή αναφέρουν αποσπάσματα από λογοτεχνικά έργα την ώρα του μαθήματος, ένας ερευνητής απολύεται επειδή δημοσίευσε μία ελεγμένη ακαδημαϊκή έρευνα και επικεφαλής οργανισμών απομακρύνονται με αφορμή ένα αδέξιο λάθος».
Αναγνωρίζοντας ότι «οι ισχυρές διαδηλώσεις υπέρ της φυλετικής και κοινωνικής δικαιοσύνης οδηγούν σε ώριμες απαιτήσεις για μεταρρύθμιση της αστυνομίας, παράλληλα με ευρύτερες εκκλήσεις για μεγαλύτερη ισότητα και ενσωμάτωση στην κοινωνία μας», η επιστολή καταγγέλλει «μία νέα σειρά τρόπων συμπεριφοράς και πολιτικών δεσμεύσεων που τείνουν να αποδυναμώσουν τις νόρμες του ανοιχτού διαλόγου και της ανοχής των διαφορών υπέρ της ιδεολογικής ομοιομορφίας».
A Letter on Justice and Open Debate
July 7, 2020The below letter will be appearing in the Letters section of the magazine’s October issue. We welcome responses at letters@harpers.org
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.[.......]
https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου