Resisting the Mourner’s Veto
3rd December 2020
Employees at Spotify threatened to strike if they were not given editorial control over the guests invited on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast. Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters was briefly removed from Target’s inventory following complaints, only to be quickly replaced following a backlash. And students at the University of Chicago have sought to have Professor Dorian Abbot publicly censured for criticizing the university’s diversity and inclusion initiatives and the censorious climate on campus. Numerous other examples abound in academia, publishing, news media, and elsewhere. Anxiety about this trend peaked over this summer and led a number of commentators to sign the Harper’s Letter in an effort to defend free speech and inquiry (an initiative that produced its own furious row).
These emotional attempts to suppress controversial or unpopular speech have increasingly made use of what I call the “Mourner’s Veto”—individuals will say that a speaker or a piece of writing has caused them to become distressed or sad or angry or frightened, and they will support these claims with allegations of “harm” or even threats to their “right to exist.” Reasonable debate and discussion then becomes impossible as activists make unfalsifiable but furiously emotive claims about alleged threats to their safety and wellbeing amid much weeping and claims of exhaustion and mental fragility. It is not healthy for the limits of permissible speech to be dictated by the most sensitive person in the room, nor to allow emotional appeals to supplant robust argument as the most effective strategy in a debate.