In September 2018, the eDutch writer and historian Ian Buruma he resigned as editor of the American magazine The New York Review of Books. And he did it in the midst of a controversy unleashed by his decision to publish an essay by the Canadian musician and former speaker Jian Ghomeshi, entitled “Reflections from a hashtag”, about his journey from being accused by twenty women of sexual harassment and physical abuse, until his acquittal. The article and issue of the magazine called The fall of men came amid the rise of the #MeToo movement and immediately sparked controversy.
Upon leaving the magazine, Buruma lamented the prevailing “general climate of denunciation” and defended itself against the publication. “Like anything good and well-intentioned, it can have undesirable consequences,” he said in an interview on the Slate site. But his words only intensified the discussion. Since then, he focused on his academic career as Professor of Journalism and Human Rights at Bard College in New York, until the week before last appeared among the signatories of the letter against the so-called “culture of cancellation”, signed by a long list of intellectuals with a broad ideological spectrum, and which included figures such as Noam Chomsky, Mario Vargas Llosa and JK Rowling.
The letter ensures that the free exchange of information and ideas has been increasingly restricted, both on the right and on the left. Why do you think this is happening today?
I think there are several different reasons. Donald Trump has fueled public debate in the U.S., rudely and dangerously appealing to the fears of whites who feel threatened by an increasingly diverse society, which can elect a black man as President. This has sparked a strong backlash, fully justified in its goal of fighting racism. But the fight against racial and social injustice is also generational. There is a conflict between the young and the older generations. Young activists consider themselves strict ideological guardians of the concepts of racial, gender, and social justice, and of the language in which these issues are discussed. The application of ideological purity can become intolerant. It is not a matter of disagreeing with certain opinions, but people suspected of being skeptical or ideologically dissenting should be erased from public discourse. This has sometimes been used as a weapon to evict older people from positions of power. Anyone who expresses an opinion that does not conform to the new orthodoxy on social justice becomes vulnerable.
Do you think that the culture of political correctness has become a type of religion that has finally ended up promoting intolerance?
The ideology of social justice is like a moral dogma in a secular age. Again, this does not mean that their goals are evil or immoral (after all, the goals of many religions, including Christianity, are also laudable). But it bears some resemblance to the way in which religious dogma was enforced. Those who do not comply are treated as heretics.
The letter rejects the false choice that is made today between justice and freedom. Today the presumption of innocence no longer seems to exist. Why do you think this is happening?
Many reasons. One of them is the nature of the internet and the effects of social media. People can mobilize very quickly to denounce others and damage their reputation and even their careers. In social networks, unlike a court of law, the presumption of innocence does not apply.
You were also a victim of that climate with what happened in The New York Review of Books and the #MeToo movement. What is your reflection today about what happened?
It was no different than what has happened to other publishers since then. Several staff members, backed by the power of social media, pressured the publication’s owner to replace one editor with another, who was more in tune with his ideological convictions. The main assumption is that journalism should be a tool to promote certain ideas about social justice, mainly related to gender and race. This collides with the notion that journalism (or indeed art) must have freedom and leave room for diversity of views and expressions, some of which can be provocative.
Do you think that liberal democracies, as Russian President Vladimir Putin said some time ago, are in crisis?
Yes, but not for the reasons cited by Putin. Democracies become vulnerable when people no longer want to defend them. The number of people, both right and left, who believe liberal democracy is worth defending, is shrinking, either out of complacency or because many people are tempted by authoritarianism or revolution. The word “liberal” in a liberal democracy is crucial. Those who defend the direct government of “the people”, through a referendum or strong charismatic leaders, are illiberal and hostile to representative democracy. For liberal democracies to survive, people have to defend liberalism as much as democracy, and I’m not talking about liberalism in the classic sense of laissez-faire economics.
Among the values that guided liberal democracies, freedom of expression was one of the most important. Do you think that the defense of freedom of expression has lost importance in the new generations?
I think some members of the younger generation have a different idea about the nature of public expression. Freedom of individual expression is considered less important than the issue of representativeness: it is less about what people say than who says it. The focus is on power, who is supposed to have it, and who is believed not to have it. From this perspective, all opinions are expressions of relative power. This makes all the opinions expressed by individuals associated with some kind of privilege, be it class, gender or skin color, suspicious. And instead, the views of those who are supposed to represent the powerless are promoted, whether by class, gender, or skin color.
Can we compare what is happening in the world today with another moment in history? Are the parallels with the 1930s valid in Europe?
We have to be careful with those comparisons. There are too many differences, but what is similar to the 1930s is the increasing polarization in democratic societies. Liberals are being pressured by extremes, both right and left. The Weimar Republic was not destroyed only by Nazis or Communists, but by the fact that very few people were prepared to defend it. But we are not at that stage yet. It seems that enough people in America will vote for Joe Biden, a typical liberal, to defeat Donald Trump. This, assuming that the choice will be fair.
Racial protests in the United States sparked worldwide reactions and led to the demolition of several statues of historical figures. What do you think is the limit of this historical revisionism? Are there differences between criticism of General Lee and criticism of Christopher Columbus?
If the statues are still politically toxic, if they still influence opinion in a detrimental way, then there is a good reason to remove them. I would argue that the statues of Columbus, whether or not he is a hateful person, are politically harmless, but the statues of the Confederate generals are not. In the southern United States, these figures still represent political visions opposed to democratic ideals, which guarantee equal rights for all citizens.
In his book Year Zero, a 1945 story, he writes about Europe immediately after World War II, a world that had to rebuild trust. What lessons can be drawn from what happened then?
The main lesson from a catastrophic world war was the need to build national and international institutions that would make another world war impossible. Those institutions are now under pressure, in part because people, including many of our most powerful leaders, have forgotten how bad the last world war was, and they don’t care that a similar or even worse disaster happens again.
Do you think the world order that emerged after World War II came to an end?
The United States-led international order that emerged from World War II is over. This process was inevitable. Nothing lasts forever. And many people in South America, especially, have little reason to mourn him. The question is what will replace the Pax Americana. I still hope for a democratic world in which the European Union and other democracies around the world can establish an international order that is not so dependent on the United States.
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