Good day.
Two very different writers —
and — have come down on the same side of an issue, and I agree with them. By now you all have heard about the Fascists on Substack problem, the Richard Katz response to it, and so on. It’s maybe useful to have someone from the more militant sector of the Left respond, albeit in way that doesn’t require deep commitment or long-term engagement, which is really time wasted when much more important things must be urgently addressed. Besides, I think we all passed through the core of these issues a long time ago, probably five years or more, once it became clear that Trump’s victory would signal the rise of his online normie-hating keyboard warriors. What they made clear to many of us were the clear limitations of the 19th-century liberal position associated with Mill, i.e. the old professorial notion that the marketplace of ideas is sometimes a bumptious and rude place, but that both soft and hard forms of paternalistic exclusion do more harm than good to both public life and public reason. Peter Pomerantsev’s book This is Not Propaganda remains a solid real-world guide through the problems of this sort of logic in its online form: it indicates very clearly that the stupidest and most risible of lies aren’t eliminated at all. In fact they proliferate. Like I said, I feel like we know this already, and that we’ve moved well beyond the position of Tocqueville and Mill, the so-called “harm principle” and all the rest. Good riddance.Where does that leave us? Sherman Alexie likened the Katz position to a call for writers to serve as a kind of cultural/political nightwatchman for what appears and doesn’t appear here on Substack. As someone who is almost constantly encouraged to take on new administrative responsibilities — some of which involve forms of monitoring and even policing behaviors, writing and even identity (!) — I am encouraged to agree with him: No thanks! So: we reject the naïvete of the Mill/libertarian position that all views are welcome “for the sake of a vibrant marketplace of ideas” on the one hand, and yet we also refuse to serve as agents of surveillance. There is surely a bit of bad faith in this of course because we *already* survey and surveil the work of others: it’s called critique! Critique must be ruthless! But we also have to be aware of the way that it intersects with both state and corporate power: we can’t be providing comfort to the cops and administrators of the world.
I think of this responsibility, for example, in light of recent events in occupied Palestine. As much as I have loved and respected my Zionist friends and colleagues, it’s my obligation to critique their commitment to a position that has led to genocide. A break has happened. Critique at this point cannot be subtle. I’m sure it’s painful (it’s meant to be painful). We are already in medias res, we are already analyzing, we are already engaging in critique, but we are not thought police. My intent is not to silence those who continue to advocate for the genocide of Palestinians and the imposition/expansion of settler-colonialism in the West Bank. This is what the IDF does to its critics.