Here are some relevant excerpts from Anne Applebaum's 8-31-21 ATLANTIC article entitled "The New Puritans":
[T]he
modern online public sphere, a place of rapid conclusions, rigid ideological
prisms, and arguments of 280 characters, favors neither nuance nor ambiguity.
Yet the values of that online sphere have come to dominate many American
cultural institutions: universities, newspapers, foundations, museums. Heeding
public demands for rapid retribution, they sometimes impose the equivalent of
lifetime scarlet letters on people who have not been accused of anything
remotely resembling a crime. Instead of courts, they use secretive
bureaucracies. Instead of hearing evidence and witnesses, they make judgments
behind closed doors.
I have
been trying to understand these stories for a long time, both because I believe
that the principle of due process underpins liberal democracy, and also because
they remind me of other times and places. A decade ago, I wrote a book
about the Sovietization of Central Europe in the 1940s, and
found that much of the political conformism of the early Communist period was
the result not of violence or direct state coercion, but rather of intense peer
pressure. Even without a clear risk to their life, people felt obliged—not just
for the sake of their career but for their children, their friends, their
spouse—to repeat slogans that they didn’t believe, or to perform acts of public
obeisance to a political party they privately scorned [...].
[N]o one quoted here, anonymously or by name, has
been charged with an actual crime, let alone convicted in an actual court. All
of them dispute the public version of their story. Several say they have been
falsely accused; others believe that their “sins” have been exaggerated or
misinterpreted by people with hidden agendas. All of them, sinners or saints,
have been handed drastic, life-altering, indefinite punishments, often without
the ability to make a case in their own favor [...].
Many of these investigations involve anonymous reports or
complaints, some of which can come as a total surprise to those being reported
upon […].
Secretive
procedures that take place outside the law and leave the accused feeling
helpless and isolated have been an element of control in authoritarian regimes
across the centuries, from the Argentine junta to Franco’s Spain [...].
The censoriousness, the shunning, the ritualized
apologies, the public sacrifices—these are rather typical behaviors in
illiberal societies with rigid cultural codes, enforced by heavy peer pressure.
This is a story of moral panic, of cultural institutions policing or purifying
themselves in the face of disapproving crowds. The crowds are no longer
literal, as they once were in Salem, but rather online mobs, organized via
Twitter, Facebook, or sometimes internal company Slack channels [...].
No one—of
any age, in any profession—is safe. In the age of Zoom, cellphone cameras,
miniature recorders, and other forms of cheap surveillance technology, anyone’s
comments can be taken out of context; anyone’s story can become a rallying cry
for Twitter mobs on the left or the right. Anyone can then fall victim to a
bureaucracy terrified by the sudden eruption of anger. And once one set of
people loses the right to due process, so does everybody else. Not just
professors but students; not just editors of elite publications but random
members of the public. Gotcha moments can be choreographed. Project Veritas, a
well-funded right-wing organization, dedicates itself to sting operations: It baits people into saying embarrassing things on hidden
cameras and then seeks to get them punished for it, either by social media or
by their own bureaucracies.
But while
this form of mob justice can be used opportunistically by anyone, for any
political or personal reason, the institutions that have done the most to
facilitate this change are in many cases those that once saw themselves as the
guardians of liberal and democratic ideals. Robert George, the Princeton
professor, is a longtime philosophical conservative who once criticized liberal
scholars for their earnest relativism, their belief that all ideas deserved an
equal hearing. He did not foresee, he told me, that liberals would one day
“seem as archaic as the conservatives,” that the idea of creating a space where
different ideas could compete would come to seem old-fashioned, that the spirit
of tolerance and curiosity would be replaced by a worldview “that is not
open-minded, that doesn’t think engaging differences is a great thing or that
students should be exposed to competing points of view.” [...]
Students and professors, editorial assistants and editors
in chief—all are aware of what kind of society they now inhabit. That’s
why they censor themselves, why they steer clear of
certain topics, why they avoid discussing anything too sensitive for fear of
being mobbed or ostracized or fired without due process. But that kind of
thinking takes us uncomfortably close to Istanbul, where history and politics
can be discussed only with great care.
[I]f we drive all of the difficult people, the demanding
people, and the eccentric people away from the creative professions where they
used to thrive, we will become a flatter, duller, less interesting society, a
place where manuscripts sit in drawers for fear of arbitrary judgments. The
arts, the humanities, and the media will become stiff, predictable, and
mediocre. Democratic principles like the rule of law, the right to self-defense,
the right to a just trial—even the right to be forgiven—will wither. There will
be nothing to do but sit back and wait for the Hawthornes of the future to
expose us.
To read Applebaum's entire article, click HERE.
