Can we be wrong without being cancelled?

Is there a path to engage on issues where we may get it wrong?

Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

I have noticed a strange phenomenon occurring in myself over the last several months as my subscriber count here grows. While I am infinitely grateful to everyone who reads my work, I have also become increasingly more wary of addressing difficult topics that require a willingness to engage in nuanced conversations about complicated issues and where I would not consider myself an expert, for fear of cancellation. It’s a strange way to feel about a space that I created for myself, and where I am prosecution, defence, judge, and jury for what is sent out each week. While I still try to approach difficult conversations with as much balance as I can muster, such as the ongoing dispute around the Pride Allegiance at Yeshiva University, Desmond Tutu’s legacy, or even the legal perspective on Roe v Wade, I have found myself gravitating away from the very controversial things I feel we need to talk about and towards lower hanging fruit. 

I have written before about the things I choose not to write about, and again, I find myself at an impasse. There have been issues and dialogues going on in my life that I want to take the time to discuss here, topics like Israel right now, but have real hesitation. Part of what I am grappling with - that I think a lot of others are struggling with right now - is a fear of being on the wrong side of history.

One of the things I was able to rely on when I was deeply involved in advocating against Antisemitism on campus was that I was on the right side of history, and I remain firm in the belief that years from now, I will be able to look back at the stance I have taken in advocating for Jewish students on campus as having been the right thing to do. But not every issue is like that. 

When I was in first year university, my school was experimenting with how grading of in-class participating was going to be done. This somehow resulted in a brief window of time where in a Socratic seminar, you were graded down for giving an incorrect answer to a question or simply saying “I don’t know.” While it makes sense to give a lower score for a wrong answer on a test, getting things wrong is part of the learning process that we are preparing to be tested on. Penalizing that part of the learning process created a culture of fear around participating in conversations unless you were absolutely certain. Stepping into controversial conversations these days feels very similar to that window of failed experimental grading. 

One of the big differences between what is happening now and that grading experiment is that when I get a math question wrong, we can all agree that it’s wrong and look for where things went off track. We don’t have certain answers to social, cultural, and international issues that are quickly developing and changing. In fact, I would be wary of anyone who does present themself as having a definite answer. It is in these circumstances, more than perhaps any other, that we need the freedom to have conversations that we will hopefully one day be surprised we needed to have, but with the understanding that they are part of a process.