It appears there's some work to do:
I regret taking so long to write you an email expressing my regrets and frustration about how you have been treated by many of your colleagues lately. I have been trying my best to ignore it since I am on the market this year with very much to do and can't afford to let myself be so upset by the disturbing eagerness with which so many people (which included some of my friends, who are good people) seem so eager to jump on the leiter-bashing bandwagon. It is hard not to view it as largely the kind of group-think, social-signaling moralistic aggression that I still am apparently naive enough to be shocked and angered by when professional philosophers engage in it en masse. It saddens me to think of a large section of my colleagues as the "public" in Rushdie's famous quote from “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers”:
"We, the public, are easily, lethally offended. We have come to think of taking offence as a fundamental right. We value very little more highly than our rage, which gives us, in our opinion, the moral high ground. From this high ground we can shoot down at our enemies and inflict heavy fatalities. We take pride in our short fuses. Our anger elevates, transcends."
This isn't to say that none of your critics have any valid points, or that I agree with everything you say... What galls me is the eagerness with which so many people want to signal their superior moral status by means of shooting down at you from their ostensibly greater moral heights, when in reality, few if any of your loudest critics have done as much for academic philosophy, or issues relating to the academy more broadly (freedom of speech especially) as you have. Or so it seems to me. I am surely biased since I read your blog more than others.
Again, I'm sorry it took me so long to write you, but I clearly should have earlier, not only for whatever sense of support you might get from it, but because I feel a lot better now too having finally expressed some of these thoughts. In the current climate, I do not feel at liberty to express my opinions on this subject in public. I would feel much safer publicly posting criticisms of U.S. or Israeli state terrorism than I would expressing support for you--or much worse, criticism of some of your critics. That in itself is a very sad state of affairs for the discipline, especially since the people I would be most wary of are many of those who make the loudest demands for (their approved forms of) inclusivity.
An interesting perspective, though I think the salience of social media amplifies what is actually a minority kind of censoriousness and priggishness masquerading as the moral high ground. Just as we can be confident that I won't stop enforcing my legal rights or calling out charlatans and hacks, we can be confident that it is quite a bit more risky to be a vocal critic of Israel than it is to to be a vocal supporter of me against a minority of web-savvy wrongdoers.
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