a "Case Against Open Letters" at The Atlantic could have been more succinct

If you have, by chance, read this ...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/against-open-letters-all-open-letters/614143/

Graeme Wood's piece is succinct in its way but it would have been more succinct.   Then again, readership for The Atlantic can't trade on presumed familiarity with the open letter precedents of the Christian blogosphere/dark web. I sent up the internet open letter genre with a pre-planned general purpose open letter suitable for probably any evangelical or progressive American Christian platform a few years ago.

http://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2011/01/pre-written-all-purpose-open-letter-for.html

But there is a bit more that could be said ...

We may live in an era in which committees of scholars and scholarly consensus often agree that Isaiah was the end result of a committee effort (different Isaiahs at different times with different agendas whose works cohered via editorial and redaction processes to produce the Book of Isaiah)  But Isaiah was canonized well before the committee theory of authorship was developed and our probably still post-Romantic collective hearts can't quite shake the idea that prophetic activity by committee just doesn't seem very prophetic.  Some single person making an acid, electric, confrontational point about what is wrong with humanity today is something we can expect of a prophet, or a school of prophets, but we're culturally conditioned, even if we're in what Francis Schaeffer called a "post-Christian society", to think of prophetic challenges to social and political problems as something that is better challenged by virtually any other literary means than the form letter.

Take John McWhorter, who wrote a review of White Fragility recently (at The Atlantic, no less!), anyone who knows anything about his likes and dislikes and his passions in scholarship and politics will not get the slightest sense of what makes him tick from signing the Harper's letter. If you read any of his essays about anti-racism as a new religion that posits an original sin of whiteness that makes too lightly about how much progress in race relations we've seen in the last hundred years you couldn't have guessed that's what energizes him to write from his having signed that Harper's open letter, form letter as form letters can be.

We may be in what some like to call a secular  age, but prophetic wrath at the wrongness of things wrong, no matter what perspective you're coming from, seems to lose all of the potency of wrath if committed to the public view in committee-written terms.

And in the case of the signers, when the signatures come from people spanning the range of people who have had access to public discourse options across the spectrum for decades the prophetic voice via form letter just seems even more anodyne than might otherwise be.

We want our prophets
to have more to say than just
"listen to prophets!"