呼吁公正和公平辩论的公开信

2020年7月7日

我们的文化机构正面临审判的时刻。强力的种族和社会正义抗议活动，带来对警察系统改革的更多要求，以及对整个社会更大程度的平等和包容的广泛呼吁，这些呼声尤其出现在高等教育，新闻业，慈善事业和艺术领域。但是，这类重要的行动也同时加剧了一套新的道德标准和政治承诺的出现，这些倾向和态度在削弱我们对公开辩论和对分歧的容忍尺度，表现为要求意识形态的统一整合。当我们为前者的现象喝彩时，我们也同时反对第二种情况的发展。反自由主义的力量在全世界范围内不断增强，并在川普（Donald Trump）集团中拥有强大的盟友，这对民主构成了真正的威胁。但是，决不能允许抵抗力量把教条或强制性变成自己的品牌——而右翼煽动者已经在利用这些。我们必须通过反对任何一方出现的不宽容的现象，才能维护民主的包容。信息和思想的自由交换，本是自由社会的命脉，而现在每天都变得越来越受限。虽然我们早已知道极端的权利喜欢这些，但在我们的文化中，审查做派也越来越广泛地传播起来：不宽容反对的声音，将公开羞辱和排斥作为一种新时尚，以及试图用盲目的道德确定性去解决复杂的政策问题。我们曾经坚持维护来自各个角度的声音，包括那些大声的甚至是苛刻的反对。但是现在，那些呼吁针对不同言语和思想做出迅速而严厉的报复的声音，开始变得很普遍。更令人不安的是，一些机构的领导们，以弥补损害为出发，采取草率而过度的方式施行惩罚，而不是进行深思熟虑的改革。编辑因发表有争议的文章而被解雇；书籍因所谓的不真实信息而遭到撤回；记者被禁止发表某些话题；教授因为课堂上引用某些文学作品而被调查；研究员因传播一个被同行评审的学术研究而被解雇；组织负责人因偶然的笨拙错误而被赶下台。无论围绕每个特定事件的争论如何，其结果都是进一步缩小言论自由的范围，且不用担心被惩罚的后果。我们已经为规避风险付出了更多的代价，在作家、艺术家和新闻记者圈子里，他们担心如果自己偏离共识，甚至如果没有对共识表现出来足够的热情，就无法维持生计。这种令人窒息的气氛，最终将损害我们这个时代最重要的东西。无论是专制政府还是不宽容的社会，限制辩论总是首先会伤害到那些缺乏权力的人，并使每个人都减少民主参与的能动性。挫败坏主意的方法是通过曝光，争论和说服，而不是通过沉默或希望他们消失。我们拒绝在正义与自由之间进行任何错误的选择，而这些离不开彼此。作为作家，我们需要一种文化，让我们有进行实践、冒险甚至犯错误的空间。我们需要保留真诚分歧的可能性，且不会由此产生影响工作的严重后果。如果我们不捍卫我们的职业所依赖的这种生命线，那么我们就不要指望公众或国家替我们去捍卫。

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.This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, 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. 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.

联署此封信件的知识分子包括，哈利波特的作者JK Rowling，知名学者福山，美欧多所知名高校的大教授等等，一起超过一百多人。名单如下：