Yesterday, PZ Myers asked “What exactly do you want, Jonathan Chait?”
Since I’ve read Chait’s piece at New York Magazine, and I’ve read Myers’ blog for many years, it seems obvious exactly what Jonathan wants from PZ and his horde of commenters. Here follows a highly abbreviated bulleted list, in hopes of clarifying which particular steps Chait believes would improve our overall level of discourse:
- Stop treating “even faintly unpleasant ideas or behaviors as full-scale offenses.”
- Stop trying to “regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate.”
- Stop launching “hashtag campaigns and . . . petitions in response to the slightest of identity-politics missteps.”
- Stop making it “taboo to request that [an] accusation be rendered in a less hostile manner.”
- Stop disallowing the “possibility that [an] accusation may be erroneous.”
- Stop “endlessly litigating the fraught requirements of p.c. discourse.”
- Stop promoting the “growing left-wing tendency toward censoriousness and hair-trigger offense.”
- Start living out the ideal that “social progress can continue while we maintain our traditional ideal of a free political marketplace where we can reason together as individuals.”
Seems straightforward enough.
I fully expect, of course, that none of this sound advice will be taken on board.
