JK Rowling among 152 celebrities to criticise ‘cancel culture’ in open letter
JK Rowling, Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie are among 152 public figures across the political spectrum who have signed an open letter warning that the spread of “censoriousness” and “cancel culture” has led to an intolerance of conflicting views.
The letter, published in Harper’s Magazine, hit out at how a “panicked damage control” is leading to the delivery of “hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms”.
The 152 signatories of the letter, including major figures Noam Chomsky, Malcolm Gladwell, Gloria Steinem, Martin Amis and Steven Pinker, said they “applaud” recent protests for equality, but added that a cultural “reckoning” has diluted tolerance of different opinions in favour of “ideological conformity”.
Rowling, whose outspoken opinion on transgender rights has lost her large swathes of Harry Potter fans in recent weeks, said she was “proud to sign this letter in defence of a foundational principle of a liberal society: open debate and freedom of thought and speech”.
She compared the current “cancel culture” to McCarthyism in the late 1940s and 1950s — a period of intense anti-Communist suspicion which saw accusations of subversion without substantial evidence.
“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,” the letter read.
“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 also denounced the forced resignation of several editors and academics, who have been fired in recent months for “running controversial pieces” and “quoting works of literature in class”.
“This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time,” the letter added.
Several signatories of the letter have faced strong opposition for expressing their views on social media in the past.
Rowling was met with huge backlash from the transgender community last month after she described hormones and surgery for transgender people as “a new kind of conversion therapy”.
Margaret Atwood, Canadian author of The Handmaid’s Tale, faced a deluge of criticism in 2018 when she expressed concerns about the #MeToo movement and called for the diligent review of a former university professor accused of sexual misconduct.
The open letter pointed fingers at US President Donald Trump, who signatories said “represents a real threat to democracy”.
American journalist and historian Anne Applebaum, who also signed the letter, told BBC Radio Four today: “We’re worried about pressures that come at the moment from both the right and the left.
“In the United States we have a President who denounces by names the owners of newspapers and seeks to restrain them and seeks to actually use tools of government to stop them.”
She added: “At the same time we have the phenomenon of social media panics and Twitter mobs that seek to silence people who veer from one orthodoxy or another. These are both very important restraints on freedoms of speech and also on people’s sense of risk aversion.”