Comment by tptacek
5 years ago
You are as free to stick up for Pinker (and Murray) as I am to condemn them, which is the beauty of the system. Nobody is, or should be, immune to "public shaming". But those are the plain words the letter uses! It's a bit rich, coming as it does from people like JK Rowling, who have threatened to sue strangers for their Twitter opinions.
(I strongly disagree with your take on Pinker and Murray! But that's neither here nor there as far as my argument goes.)
The claim is not that anyone should be immune to public shaming. The claim is that as a culture, we are reaching for public shaming far more often than we should.
Imagine there are two college campuses. On campus A, when students disagree, the students in the majority say they felt unsafe, demand that the students in the minority be expelled, and on occasion succeed. On campus B, when students disagree, they... talk about the issue at hand with each other.
There is free speech on both campuses - after all, the government isn't involved here. Yet I think it's safe to say that orthodox thought (whatever it happens to be at the time of lock-in) is more secure at campus A than campus B. And I think it's reasonable to talk about the difference between the cultures, and advocate for one over the other.