[Peace] Read the 'Harper's letter': it's right

[John W.]

On Fri, Jul 10, 2020 at 7:21 PM C. G. Estabrook via Peace <
peace at lists.chambana.net> wrote:

Much of what DiMaggio says is a bodily assault on a deceased equine.
>

What Carl means here is that DiMaggio is beating a dead horse.



> It's as if he’s just discovered the situation, and is shocked that it’s
> affected his career so much.
>
> Surely he can’t just be discovering that "U.S. media and educational
> institutions have never been committed to the free exploration of competing
> views, at least not for those who question corporate power. The sooner we
> stop pretending this landscape represents a free and open exchange of
> ideas, the better.”
>
> Who does?
>

Who engages in this pretense about the U.S. media and educational
instititutions being committed to the free exploration of competing views?
That the 'landscape' represents a free and open exchange of ideas?
Practically everyone.  Including, of course, the media, and virtually
everyone who makes his living in academia.



> Best, CGE
>
>
> > On Jul 10, 2020, at 6:50 PM, Karen Aram <karenaram at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I never said the letter was “wrong,” but Di Maggio’s statements taken
> out of context are those I tend to agree. I’m not an academic, but I didn’t
> like the letter as much as I should. My revulsion at those promoting it,
> not all, I like Chomsky, is related to the liberal assumption that Di
> Maggio refers to below:
> >
> >  “ I think it’s warranted to focus on the ways in which “free speech” is
> being weaponized in this case, and in contemporary American discourse, to
> empower reactionary voices, under the façade of a free exploration of
> ideas.”
> >
> > "One of the main problems with this sort of lofty rhetoric is that it
> misrepresents the severely deficient reality of American political
> discourse. We live in a period when the rise of neoliberal capitalism and
> untrammeled corporate power have cheapened “public” political discourse to
> serve the interests of plutocratic wealth and power, while assaulting
> notions of the common good and the public health. Idealistic rhetoric about
> exploring diverse views falls flat, and is a mischaracterization of reality
> to the deficiencies in U.S. political discourse under neoliberal corporate
> capitalism, when debates are perverted by political and economic elites who
> have contempt for the free exchange of ideas.”
> >
> > "The “let’s engage in a diversity of competing views” position sounds
> great until one realizes that we do not, and have never lived in, that sort
> of pluralistic democracy. We live in a political culture that, on its face,
> is committed to free speech protections for all, in which through the
> respectful exchange of ideas, we arrive at a better understanding of truth,
> to the benefit of all. But we don’t really live in that society. Ours is a
> reactionary culture, which celebrates ideas that service political and
> economic power centers. In this society, views that are elevated to being
> worthy of discussion include milquetoast liberal values that are
> sympathetic (or at least not antagonistic) to corporate power, apolitical
> content that’s aimed at mindless entertainment and political diversion, and
> reactionary authoritarian views that border on fascistic, but are vital to
> demonizing immigrants, people of color, and other minorities, and reinforce
> a white patriarchal corporate power structure. Radical lefties, or even
> progressive-leftists, need not apply to be included in this circumscribed
> discourse. Their views are routinely blacklisted from the mass media, and
> are increasingly marginalized in higher educational institutions.”
> >
> > "Despite complaints about a pervasive liberal bias in higher education,
> available evidence reveals the opposite. As I’ve documented <
> https://global.oup.com/academic/product/news-on-the-right-9780190913533?cc=us&lang=en&>
> through my own comprehensive analysis of hundreds of national opinion
> polling questions on Americans’ political and economic values, there’s
> virtually no empirical evidence to suggest that increased education in the
> U.S. is associated with increased likelihood of holding liberal attitudes.
> The reason for this non-link between education and liberalism is obvious to
> those leftists who have struggled to carve out a space in the increasingly
> reactionary American university: there’s very little commitment to
> progressive or leftist values in the modern corporate collegiate
> “experience”-oriented schooling system.”
> >
> > "Reflecting on my own experiences within this system, the very notion of
> academics serving as public intellectuals has been under systematic assault
> by the rise of a “professionalization” culture that depicts political
> engagement as “biased,” “unprofessional,” and “unacceptable.” Whatever
> lingering commitment to higher education as a public good was rolled back
> decades ago with the rise of corporatized academic “professional” norms.
> Scholars are now primarily concerned with publishing in esoteric,
> jargon-laden journals that no one reads, and almost no one cites, while
> elevating a discussion of the methods of how one does research over a
> discussion of the political and social significance of our work. In this
> process, there’s been a suppression of any commitment to producing active
> citizens who see themselves as having an ethical or moral responsibility to
> be regularly politically engaged.”
> >
> > "The reactionary “professionalization” that’s celebrated in the ivory
> tower is relentlessly promoted at every step of the process through which
> academics develop and are socialized: in the graduate school experience, in
> the job hiring, tenure, and promotion processes, and in the process of peer
> review for academic publications. Those who don’t get with the program are
> filtered out at some point in this process. Very few who are committed to
> challenging professionalized academic norms make it through PhD programs,
> and fewer still obtain tenure-track jobs and tenure. It is a rare to find
> academics who learn how to effectively hide their political values in grad
> school, and who then actively draw on those same values in their
> scholarship once they’ve secured an academic job.”
> >
> > "In my more than two decades in higher ed, I can say there’s no such
> thing as a fair hearing for the progressive-radical left when it comes to
> academic publishing. Thinking of my own research, I see zero interest in
> elite academic publishing houses – the Oxfords, Princetons, and Cambridges
> of the world – in making space for openly leftist frameworks of analysis,
> let alone for the sort of applied Gramscian and Marxian empirical research
> that I do on media propaganda, hegemony, indoctrination, and mass false
> consciousness. Neither do any of the reputable journals in most social
> science disciplines express interest in this sort of research.”
> >
> > "Considering the research I do focuses on social movement protests,
> media propaganda/fake news, and inequality studies, one might think these
> timely topics would draw a large number of requests for university speaking
> engagements. These are, after all, defining political issues of our time.
> But this isn’t at all the case. The academy remains as reactionary as ever
> in terms of sidelining and blacklisting leftist ideas and frameworks for
> understanding the world. There’s little interest in prioritizing
> high-profile campus speaking events for such topics in the neoliberal
> corporate academy. Considering the utter contempt for such scholarship,
> it’s difficult for me to focus my limited time and energy lamenting campus
> attacks on authoritarians like Milo Yiannopoulos, or whatever other
> reactionary pseudo-intellectual flavor of the week who has been disinvited
> from paid speaking engagements that I and other leftist scholars couldn’t
> dream of receiving in the first place.”
> >
> > "I won’t shed a tear for reactionaries who seek to appropriate dwindling
> university resources for their own personal publicity and
> self-aggrandizement, considering that their ideology actively supports
> gutting the very institutions that they so shamelessly take advantage of.
> The reality of the matter is that there’s no First Amendment “free speech”
> right to be invited to numerous campus engagements, to be paid a generous
> speaking fee, or to have campus security resources devoted to protecting
> arch-reactionary authoritarian speakers in light of the large student
> protests that are mobilized against these campus events.”
> >
> > "We should recognize that the recent wave of laments against PC “cancel
> culture” from the right reinforce a specific power dynamic in American
> society. It is one in which reactionaries have initiated an assault on what
> little remains of independent and critical thinking within the media and
> higher ed. They have done so by draping their contempt for free and
> critical inquiry in the rhetoric of “free speech.” But U.S. media and
> educational institutions have never been committed to the free exploration
> of competing views, at least not for those who question corporate power.
> The sooner we stop pretending this landscape represents a free and open
> exchange of ideas, the better.”
> >
> >
> > On Jul 10, 2020, at 16:28, C. G. Estabrook <carl at newsfromneptune.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> Yeah, I read DiMaggio’s piece in CP this morning. CP has published him
> fairly often, but I never particularly liked his stuff.
> >>
> >> But “Ideas aren’t responsible for the people who believe in them,”
> right?
> >>
> >> In this case, if I have to choose between his ideas and those of the
> Harper’s letter, I’ll take the latter.
> >>
> >> That’s what we should be talking about.
> >>
> >> Where, specifically do you think DiMaggio is right and the letter is
> wrong?
> >>
> >>
> >>> On Jul 10, 2020, at 6:19 PM, Karen Aram <karenaram at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> True, but look what I just came across: An article supporting my
> instincts of aversion in reference to the “Letter.”
> >>>
> >>> JULY 10, 2020
> >>> Free Speech Fantasies: the Harper’s Letter and the Myth of American
> Liberalism <
> https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/10/free-speech-fantasies-the-harpers-letter-and-the-myth-of-american-liberalism/>by
> ANTHONY DIMAGGIO <https://www.counterpunch.org/author/anthony-dimaggio/>Facebook
> <https://www.counterpunch.org/#facebook>Twitter <
> https://www.counterpunch.org/#twitter>Reddit <
> https://www.counterpunch.org/#reddit>Email <
> https://www.counterpunch.org/#email> <
> https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/10/free-speech-fantasies-the-harpers-letter-and-the-myth-of-american-liberalism/print/
> >
> >>>
> >>> Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
> >>> Harper’s Magazine’s July 7th “Letter on Justice and Open Debate <
> https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/>” is making its
> rounds in popular political discourse, and takes aim at the “PC” “cancel
> culture” we are told is being fueled by the most recent round of Black
> Lives Matter protests. This cancel culture, we are warned, is quickly and
> perniciously taking over American discourse, and will severely limit the
> free exploration of competing viewpoints.
> >>>
> >>> The Harper’s letter signatories run across the ideological spectrum,
> including prominent conservatives such as David Brooks and J.K. Rowling,
> liberals such as Mark Lilla and Sean Willentz, and progressives such as
> Noam Chomsky and Todd Gitlin. I have no doubt that the supporters of the
> letter are well meaning in their support for free speech. And I have no
> interest in singling out any one person or group of signatories for
> condemnation. Rather, I think it’s warranted to focus on the ways in which
> “free speech” is being weaponized in this case, and in contemporary
> American discourse, to empower reactionary voices, under the façade of a
> free exploration of ideas.
> >>>
> >>> The ideas established in the Harper’s letter sound just fine in
> principle, and when examined in a vacuum. The supporters embrace norms of
> “open debate” and “toleration of differences,” and opposition to
> “dogma[s],” “coercion,” and “intolerant climate[s]” that stifle open
> exploration of competing views. The letter’s supporters celebrate “the free
> exchange of information and ideas,” which they deem “the lifeblood of a
> liberal society,” contrary to a rising “vogue for public shaming and
> ostracism and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding
> moral certainty.” The letter elaborates <
> https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/>:
> >>>
> >>> “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.”
> >>>
> >>> Appealing to Americans’ commitment to civic responsibility for open
> dialogue, the Harper’s letter warns, “restriction of debate” “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.”
> >>>
> >>> One of the main problems with this sort of lofty rhetoric is that it
> misrepresents the severely deficient reality of American political
> discourse. We live in a period when the rise of neoliberal capitalism and
> untrammeled corporate power have cheapened “public” political discourse to
> serve the interests of plutocratic wealth and power, while assaulting
> notions of the common good and the public health. Idealistic rhetoric about
> exploring diverse views falls flat, and is a mischaracterization of reality
> to the deficiencies in U.S. political discourse under neoliberal corporate
> capitalism, when debates are perverted by political and economic elites who
> have contempt for the free exchange of ideas.
> >>>
> >>> Numerous passages in the Harper’s letter create the impression that
> U.S. political discourse is characterized by a vibrant and open exploration
> of diverse and competing views. The letter includes <
> https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/>:
> >>>
> >>> + A lament that the emerging “cancel culture” threatens to “weaken our
> norms of open debate and toleration.”
> >>>
> >>> + The claim that the “free exchange of information and ideas, the
> lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.”
> >>>
> >>> + The assertion that American discourse is characterized by
> institutions that “uphold the value of robust and even caustic
> counter-speech from all quarters.”
> >>>
> >>> + The call “to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement
> without dire professional consequences.”
> >>>
> >>> All of these claims are romanticizations of American life. They
> obscure the reality that progressive left and radical dissident views are
> routinely blacklisted from “mainstream” political, economic, and social
> discourse by the media and by mainstream academic institutions.
> >>>
> >>> The “let’s engage in a diversity of competing views” position sounds
> great until one realizes that we do not, and have never lived in, that sort
> of pluralistic democracy. We live in a political culture that, on its face,
> is committed to free speech protections for all, in which through the
> respectful exchange of ideas, we arrive at a better understanding of truth,
> to the benefit of all. But we don’t really live in that society. Ours is a
> reactionary culture, which celebrates ideas that service political and
> economic power centers. In this society, views that are elevated to being
> worthy of discussion include milquetoast liberal values that are
> sympathetic (or at least not antagonistic) to corporate power, apolitical
> content that’s aimed at mindless entertainment and political diversion, and
> reactionary authoritarian views that border on fascistic, but are vital to
> demonizing immigrants, people of color, and other minorities, and reinforce
> a white patriarchal corporate power structure. Radical lefties, or even
> progressive-leftists, need not apply to be included in this circumscribed
> discourse. Their views are routinely blacklisted from the mass media, and
> are increasingly marginalized in higher educational institutions.
> >>>
> >>> I don’t draw these conclusions lightly. My understanding of how the
> mass media operates is based on extensive personal experiences, and those
> from countless left intellectuals I know. Many of us have struggled (and
> mostly failed) to break into “mainstream” discourse because of the limited
> space in corporate news devoted to marginalized perspectives. With this
> marginalization comes the near erasure of critical views, including those
> seeking to spotlight record (and rising) economic inequality, repressive
> institutions that reinforce racial, gender and transphobic systems of
> repression, the corporate ecocidal assault on the environment, the rise of
> unbridled corporate power and plutocracy, the rising authoritarianism in
> American politics, and the increasingly reactionary and fascistic rhetoric
> that has taken over the American right.
> >>>
> >>> Despite complaints about a pervasive liberal bias in higher education,
> available evidence reveals the opposite. As I’ve documented <
> https://global.oup.com/academic/product/news-on-the-right-9780190913533?cc=us&lang=en&>
> through my own comprehensive analysis of hundreds of national opinion
> polling questions on Americans’ political and economic values, there’s
> virtually no empirical evidence to suggest that increased education in the
> U.S. is associated with increased likelihood of holding liberal attitudes.
> The reason for this non-link between education and liberalism is obvious to
> those leftists who have struggled to carve out a space in the increasingly
> reactionary American university: there’s very little commitment to
> progressive or leftist values in the modern corporate collegiate
> “experience”-oriented schooling system.
> >>>
> >>> Reflecting on my own experiences within this system, the very notion
> of academics serving as public intellectuals has been under systematic
> assault by the rise of a “professionalization” culture that depicts
> political engagement as “biased,” “unprofessional,” and “unacceptable.”
> Whatever lingering commitment to higher education as a public good was
> rolled back decades ago with the rise of corporatized academic
> “professional” norms. Scholars are now primarily concerned with publishing
> in esoteric, jargon-laden journals that no one reads, and almost no one
> cites, while elevating a discussion of the methods of how one does research
> over a discussion of the political and social significance of our work. In
> this process, there’s been a suppression of any commitment to producing
> active citizens who see themselves as having an ethical or moral
> responsibility to be regularly politically engaged.
> >>>
> >>> The reactionary “professionalization” that’s celebrated in the ivory
> tower is relentlessly promoted at every step of the process through which
> academics develop and are socialized: in the graduate school experience, in
> the job hiring, tenure, and promotion processes, and in the process of peer
> review for academic publications. Those who don’t get with the program are
> filtered out at some point in this process. Very few who are committed to
> challenging professionalized academic norms make it through PhD programs,
> and fewer still obtain tenure-track jobs and tenure. It is a rare to find
> academics who learn how to effectively hide their political values in grad
> school, and who then actively draw on those same values in their
> scholarship once they’ve secured an academic job.
> >>>
> >>> In my more than two decades in higher ed, I can say there’s no such
> thing as a fair hearing for the progressive-radical left when it comes to
> academic publishing. Thinking of my own research, I see zero interest in
> elite academic publishing houses – the Oxfords, Princetons, and Cambridges
> of the world – in making space for openly leftist frameworks of analysis,
> let alone for the sort of applied Gramscian and Marxian empirical research
> that I do on media propaganda, hegemony, indoctrination, and mass false
> consciousness. Neither do any of the reputable journals in most social
> science disciplines express interest in this sort of research.
> >>>
> >>> Considering the research I do focuses on social movement protests,
> media propaganda/fake news, and inequality studies, one might think these
> timely topics would draw a large number of requests for university speaking
> engagements. These are, after all, defining political issues of our time.
> But this isn’t at all the case. The academy remains as reactionary as ever
> in terms of sidelining and blacklisting leftist ideas and frameworks for
> understanding the world. There’s little interest in prioritizing
> high-profile campus speaking events for such topics in the neoliberal
> corporate academy. Considering the utter contempt for such scholarship,
> it’s difficult for me to focus my limited time and energy lamenting campus
> attacks on authoritarians like Milo Yiannopoulos, or whatever other
> reactionary pseudo-intellectual flavor of the week who has been disinvited
> from paid speaking engagements that I and other leftist scholars couldn’t
> dream of receiving in the first place.
> >>>
> >>> I won’t shed a tear for reactionaries who seek to appropriate
> dwindling university resources for their own personal publicity and
> self-aggrandizement, considering that their ideology actively supports
> gutting the very institutions that they so shamelessly take advantage of.
> The reality of the matter is that there’s no First Amendment “free speech”
> right to be invited to numerous campus engagements, to be paid a generous
> speaking fee, or to have campus security resources devoted to protecting
> arch-reactionary authoritarian speakers in light of the large student
> protests that are mobilized against these campus events.
> >>>
> >>> We should recognize that the recent wave of laments against PC “cancel
> culture” from the right reinforce a specific power dynamic in American
> society. It is one in which reactionaries have initiated an assault on what
> little remains of independent and critical thinking within the media and
> higher ed. They have done so by draping their contempt for free and
> critical inquiry in the rhetoric of “free speech.” But U.S. media and
> educational institutions have never been committed to the free exploration
> of competing views, at least not for those who question corporate power.
> The sooner we stop pretending this landscape represents a free and open
> exchange of ideas, the better.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>> On Jul 10, 2020, at 16:09, C. G. Estabrook <carl at newsfromneptune.com>
> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> I used to say on News from Neptune, “Ideas aren’t responsible for the
> people who believe in them.”
> >>>>
> >>>> I think that’s true - and I don’t disagree with you about the people
> you name from the list of signers.
> >>>>
> >>>> But the important thing is what the letter says. And I think it’s
> more or less right. That’s what we should be debating.
> >>>>
> >>>> Hope you’re keeping well in the current craziness. —CGE
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>> On Jul 10, 2020, at 4:37 PM, Karen Aram <karenaram at hotmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Carl
> >>>>>
> >>>>> I’m very fond of Harpers, given I read their publications monthly
> during the late sixty’s and seventy’s, they were the one publication
> offering sanity at the time, and still do. However, this letter, excellent
> it is, nonetheless has signatories that are as duplicitous as Trump, only
> much more professional, polished and knowledgable. That does not however
> make them any less guilty of the crimes of war they supported with lies and
> propaganda, during the Obama Administration.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Anne Applebaum, Anne Marie Slaughter, David Frum, Fareed Zakaria,
> Francis Fukiyama, the list goes on, all contributed to where we are today
> with the Trump Administration and certainly would not be on my list of
> those demanding/urging truth in US institutions or government.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Anne Marie Slaughter urged a fly zone over Libya to support the
> “rebels,” against Jeremy Scahill’s sound advice, given we didn’t know who
> the rebels were, they likely are ISIS, and a fly over zone means bombing
> everything in the area, a very large area.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Anne Applebaum, who once deleted you from her website conversation,
> represented a particularly egregious organization/NGO/ fomenting a color
> revolution in one of the nations in Africa, now writes for the Washington
> Post. Sorry, I’m weak on details, given I’m writing from memory.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> I didn’t mention David Brooks, who sometimes is good given his
> specialty is “culture,” but is another one with a hidden agenda.
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>> On Jul 10, 2020, at 12:05, C. G. Estabrook via Peace <
> peace at lists.chambana.net> wrote:
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> _______________________________________________
> >>>>>> Peace mailing list
> >>>>>> Peace at lists.chambana.net
> >>>>>> https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace
> >>>>>
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> Peace mailing list
> Peace at lists.chambana.net
> https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace/attachments/20200710/e06acbdd/attachment-0001.htm>