I am making two contentions: that those with progressive impulses tend
to be more inhibited politically when defining their professional identity
than are conservatives despite the preponderance of liberal opinions
in most university faculties; that conservatives are rewarded while
progressives are punished within university communities, and by the
society as a whole, for playing public roles and taking activist stands.
The most fundamental explanation of this unevenness in treatment arises
from the structure of wealth and power in the wider society.
The second inscription is above all
a celebration of the necessarily dialogic character of engagement in
the lifeworld at any given historical moment. As scholars, unless we
speak to the reality of our world and times we cannot learn how to be
human, that is, how to live together well, as Derrida expressed this
elusive pursuit of the human. We cannot learn by turning away, or even
by various practices of detachment or silent meditation. We need to
speak and to listen to others speaking, and by entering into conversations
about ‘what is going on in the world’ we discover our human
nature. Such discovery is always an element of responsible scholarship,
but assumes a spirit of urgency in ‘dark times,’ which by
their effects are dehumanizing if not resisted. We need to speak at
such moments, then, to recover our claims to be human, and not just
words, but truthful, and often painful words that dissipate the darkness,
providing glimpses of light. The responsible scholar carries a lantern,
but does not withdraw from the darkness.
As teachers we should encourage our
students as much as colleagues to join with us in conversations among
equals. The teacher needs to acknowledge the darkness more by way of
witness and interrogation than dogma. The public intellectual is likely
to go further, speaking as clearly as possible while carrying the lantern
beyond the classroom into arenas of public discourse. Cursing the darkness
can make a public intellectual resemble an Old Testament prophet, lonely
cries in the wilderness that seem shrill to those custodians of scholarly
propriety who seek above all else not to appear foolish or unreasonable.
The prophetic demeanor generally embarrasses the academic community,
and tends to be ignored or derided.
The post-9/11 mood is suggestive. Established scholars such as David
Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott have raised serious questions about
whether the official version of events on that fateful day can possibly
be correct. Their views, rather than studied and debated, are derided
as ‘conspiracy theory,’ which is to say that they should
be put aside, removed from responsible debate.
What has been most disturbing is the
anti-conspiracy fury of the moderate left, with among the strongest
discrediting attacks being mounted in such places as The Nation
or Counterpunch. I would not pretend to understand the issues
well enough to determine whether the suspicions of these responsible
scholars about governmental complicity is justified, but I am confident
that their arguments deserve scrutiny and substantive response rather
than derision and neglect.
A similar attitude of dismissal was
associated with academic work in the area of international relations
that did not subscribe to the realist paradigm; it was derided as ‘utopian,’
which was the realist way of saying that it was a waste of time, signaling
young scholars to ‘keep out.’ Such was the fate of ‘world
order studies’ in the 1970s and 1980s, which represented a serious
attempt to find a way out of the seeming dead end of Cold War geopolitics
that was seemed fused to the menacing technologies of apocalyptic warfare.
I would contend that one of the challenges
posed by truly ‘dark times’ has to do with the inadequacy
of the prevailing knowledge paradigms to find ‘light,’ and
the need to assess reality from standpoints that depart from such a
paradigm. In IR - international relations - this has seemed true for
the last half century with respect to ‘realism.’ In a certain
perverse sense, the neoconservative breakout during the Bush presidency
can be commended as an acknowledgement of the crisis of global governance
that cannot even begin to be addressed within the realist paradigm,
much less resolved. What the neoconservatives aspire to achieve, an
American global empire, is both unattainable and distasteful, but it
is a coherent recognition that world order can no longer be sustained
by reliance on the Westphalian template of interacting sovereign states
shaping the future by calculations associated with power, interests.
The more sophisticated forms of realism
could accommodate liberal calls for cooperation among states, institutionalized
in regimes and institutions because liberals did not question reliance
on Machiavellian ethics of statecraft or the role of power. But from
my perspective, scholarly analysis that proceeds on this basis instances
‘irresponsible scholarship’ as it tries to overcome anomalies
of realism with a reliance on realism.
Each dark time has its own distinctive features, and ours will be considered
later in this article. It is also the case that each scholar/teacher
is challenged to provide a personal response to the mandate to engage
in ‘responsible scholarship,’ which in this usage combines
writing, speaking, and teaching, or any part thereof.
The only general claim is that the mandate assumes urgency in dark times,
which in effect means that scholar/teachers should ponder whether they
are ‘fiddling’ while Rome burns!
But this certainly does not insist
that even in dark times all of us have to assume the mantle of public
intellectual. There are a multitude of other responsible paths in academic
life, as well as in the correlative domain of engaged citizenship.
Responsible
Partisanship
‘Responsible’ behavior has a somewhat different resonance
for academicians as ‘scholars,’ as ‘teachers,’
and as ‘public intellectuals.’
In the scholarly mode responsibility
is almost reducible to integrity, that is, dealing truthfully with evidence
and argument, acknowledging error and divergent views, not converting
contingencies into certainties, and not disguising sponsorship or compensation.
As a teacher, integrity is also a crucial
component of responsible behavior, but so also is the importance of
allowing students space for voicing disagreements and dissents without
fearing retaliation, or even embarrassment, and more than this, a willingness
to nurture affirmative impulses toward learning and engaged citizenship.
It is entirely appropriate for a teacher to disclose her passions and
partisanship, thereby conveying the important message that ideas and
action matter, and that neutrality in the face of perceived error or
wrongdoing is not a constructive pedagogy.
It is certainly not expected that most scholar/teachers will act as
‘public intellectuals.’ It depends on temperament, historical
circumstances, capacity, and the relevance of scholarly interests to
issues subject to debate in public space. For instance, it is only in
recent years that the issue of immigration policy has become controversial
within the setting of high profile politics, which has led academicians
to turn their scholarly attention to such matters, and has created a
demand by the media and on the lecture circuit for specialists to address
various facets of immigration from partisan policy perspectives in public
arenas.
Another recent instance of history
‘creating’ public intellectuals is connected with the torture
debate that has been provoked by approach taken by the Bush presidency
to security in the aftermath of 9/11. Those who devoted their attention
to topics that might be described as ‘purely scholarly,’
of little interest to the citizenry, were drawn to enter the public
discussion of torture because of revulsion due to a series of horrendous
detention practices of the United States Government.
A public intellectual is morally and
politically motivated to speak out on particular topics, more as a citizen
than as a scholar or a teacher, although making use of a reputation
derived from such roles that lend an aura of authority to positions
taken and may facilitate access to high visibility media outlets.
Harsh attacks and campaigns against scholars, teachers, and public intellectuals
come generally from the far right, and from a domain that seems highly
ideological in the sense of expressing intense hostility toward viewpoints
that seem to favor taking steps to make life better for previously victimized
and vulnerable peoples. If one looks at such defamatory attacks mounted
against Ward Churchill at the University of Colorado, or more broadly,
against the 101 dangerous professors in David Horowitz’s Dangerous
Professors or Denish D’Souza’s The Enemy Within,
the consistent theme of this barrage of complaints has to do with individuals
who have voiced their dissent toward positions taken by the U.S. government
that are seen to be sympathetic with either ‘enemies’ of
this country, with constituencies at odds with the legal, political,
economic, and cultural status quo, such as gays and lesbians, and with
the Palestinians in their struggle against Israel.
In the present period, hostility toward
progressive public intellectuals on the left is particularly intense
when the concern is Israel or U.S. foreign policy as the onslaught against
such an eminent and consistently moderate public figure as former President
Jimmy Carter because he dared to suggest that Israel was confronted
by a crucial choice for its future between apartheid and peace. Always,
campaigns against academic freedom are historically situated. The McCarthyism
of the 1950s was an opportunistic effort to turn Cold War anti-Communism
into an anti-left witch hunt.
The present campaign is less focused, although it arises at a time where
the religious right is making its own set of demands that are linked
with an anti-Muslim spin given to ‘the clash of civilizations’
that supposedly resulted from 9/11.
There are also public intellectuals on the right whose views generate
strong criticism within progressive circles, but this rarely receives
mainstream attention. Perhaps, most notable targets are Bernard Lewis,
Fouad Ajami, Alan Dershowitz, and Samuel Huntington. None of these individuals
is formally perceived as part of the neoconservative entourage surrounding
George W. Bush, but each has been useful to neoconservative hegemony
in recent years, influentially articulating strong ultra-conservative
positions in prominent places.
As earlier suggested, there are two
features that distinguish public intellectuals on the left from those
on the right: Those on the left mainly publish only in relatively obscure
places, often enjoying their largest following outside of the United
States; the exact opposite is true for the right: publishing in the
mainstream outlets, invited as guests on important network TV talk shows,
and not stimulating much interest overseas.
Even public intellectuals on the left
as significant as Noam Chomsky and the late Edward Said rarely gained
access to mainstream arenas of opinion. Both Chomsky and Said, as eminent
scholars in their academic fields, and as legendary teachers, enjoyed
a certain charismatic stature, but even so, were viewed as ‘polemical’
and were only interviewed by the alternative TV, internet and print
outlets.
In contrast, Lewis and Ajami, while
well respected as scholars within their specialized fields, were also
undeservedly treated as ‘the wise men’ of the culture, and
were rarely presented as partisans which they certainly were.
Can we conclude that left public intellectuals
were more responsible than those on the right? I think the answer depends
not on their recommended policies, but on the degree to which their
views reflect an appropriate ethos of responsibility. In my view, most
of the blame should be directed at the biased and corrupted institutions
that skew debate on such controversial issues as the rights of the Palestinians
by giving only one side of what should be treated as a two-sided.
The NY Times has been guilty of ‘leaning
to one side,’ excluding the relevance of international law to
policy debate whenever it does not coincide with US foreign policy.
For extensive documentation see Howard Friel & Richard Falk, The
Record of the Paper: How the NY Times Misreports U.S. Foreign Policy.
Hannah Arendt on Intellectual Responsibility in Dark Times
Writing of the German Romantic literary figure, Lessing, Arendt writes
“His attitude toward the world was neither positive nor negative,
but radically critical and, in respect to the public realm of his time,
completely revolutionary. But it was also an attitude that remained
indebted to the world, never left the solid ground of the world, and
never went to the extreme of sentimental utopianism.” (DT, 5).
Such a description of the coordinates
remains helpful in the greatly altered circumstances of our situation
here in America. Arendt offers a more general comment that has a direct
bearing on what it means to think and act in the present situation:
“History knows many periods of dark times in which the public
realm has been obscured and the world has become so dubious that people
have ceased to ask any more of politics that it show due consideration
for their vital interests and personal liberty.” (DT, 11).
She goes on to observe that “[t]hose
who have lived in such time and been formed by them have probably always
been inclined to despise the world and the public realm, to ignore them
as far as possible, or even to overleap them and, as it were, reach
behind them - as if the world were only a façade behind which
people could conceal themselves - in order to arrive at mutual understandings
with their fellow men without regard for the world that lies between
them.” (DT, 11-12)
This option does not seem responsive
to the currently enveloping form of dark times. In contrast, we need
to act bravely now to do our best to avoid the public realm becoming
obscured and unavailable; the political consequences of privatization
or resignation are likely to be a scary slide deeper into conditions
of pre-fascism at which point such choices cannot even be discussed.
In reflecting upon the absence of any room for political maneuver in
the Third Reich, Arendt writes of ‘inner emigration’ as
the only way to preserve human solidarity. Commenting on this adjustment
to the darkest of times Arendt notes that “..inside and outside
of Germany the temptation was particularly strong, in the face of seemingly
unendurable reality to shift from the world and its public space to
an interior life, or else simply to ignore the world in favor of an
imaginary world ‘as it ought to be’ or as it once upon a
time had been.” (DT, 19).
It is usefully chastening to consider
extreme circumstances, if only to remind ourselves that we should not
take access to the public realm for granted. I recall that during the
2004 presidential election campaign in the United States many liberal
friends would strike a posture that indicated an impulse to remove themselves
from the scene if Bush was victorious, moving toward the exit as an
expression of their feelings of hopelessness about the future of America.
More aptly interpreted, this reaction exhibited despair in the face
of the unwillingness of the American electorate to repudiate the Bush
presidency in favor of the alternative being offered by the Democratic
Party.
It was mainstream despair, and as such,
failed to explore whether the deeper issues of adapting to the 21st
century could be solved within the mainstream political paradigm (that
is, climate change, the dysfunction of war, energy squeeze, and responsibility
to protect). Without challenging this mainstream political paradigm
there will be no escape, and moving to Canada and Sweden may mitigate
the immediate discomfort, but it will only aggravate the longer term
need for fundamental adjustment.
Again reverting to Arendt in relation to her praise for the philosopher,
Karl Jaspers, who she regards as ‘unique’ because he is
affirming the importance of the public realm as a philosopher. In her
words, Jaspers’ orientation “springs from the fundamental
conviction underlying his whole activity as a philosopher that both
philosophy and politics concern everyone.” (DT, 74) In the darkest
of times, that is, during the Nazi era, such a posture did imply a temporary
abandonment of the public realm: “..without representing anyone
but his own existence he could provide assurance that even in the darkness
of total domination, in which whatever goodness there may still remain
becomes absolutely invisible and ineffective - even then reason can
be annihilated only if all reasonable men are actually, literally slaughtered.”
(DT, 76)
Arendt also contrasts the statesman
who “is in the relatively fortunate position of being responsible
only to his own nation” with Jaspers who in his writings after
1933 “has always written as if to answer for himself before all
of mankind.” (DT, 75; and see essay, “Karl Jaspers: Citizen
of the World?” DT, 81-94).
Such a widening of perspective as attributed
to Jaspers grasps the darkness of dark times in a more prophetic and
universalistic spirit that would be more fully responsive to the current
circumstance in America that is about more than Iraq and more than the
dangers to the republic associated with the pursuit of global domination,
although these immediate causes of distress demand responsible intellectual
behavior. And although the light may not be impressive, it does allow
meaningful participation in the public realm.
It is not helpful to contend that this
is a time of escape, whether inner or outer exile, at least not yet.
Noam Chomsky and Responsibility
Noam Chomsky (and Edward Said, Gore Vidal, Bertrand Russell) are excellent
examples of scholars who had gained original fame for their purely academic
achievements, but later entered the public realm in determined and sustained
ways that aroused widespread controversy, and in a certain sense, eclipsed
their earlier reputations.
In this sense, European figures such
as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus were public intellectuals from
the start, with their philosophic and literary efforts much admired,
yet linked in appreciation with their engagements as citizens with political
issues of the day. Sartre and Camus became known initially as heroes
of the French resistance during World War II, and so their main academic
work followed rather than preceded dark times, but generally the European
appreciation of intellectual life is such that many academic figures
(for instance, Habermas, Foucault) become public intellectuals almost
automatically because of the widespread interest in their ideas and
work outside academic circles. Said prefers to regard this public role
from the perspective of professional/amateur treating the work of what
I have referred to as falling in the domain of the citizen as constituted
by the efforts of the ‘amateur.’
(Said, Representations of the Intellectual, New York, Pantheon, 1994).
The American scene is definitely different from that of Europe in these
regards. Noam Chomsky had a strong reputation beyond his field of linguistics
in academic circles because his contributions were regarded as seminal
and transformative, but was not a known quantity politically except
among his friends and close colleagues. In this sense he burst upon
the scene politically when his widely discussed essay, ‘The Responsibility
of Intellectuals,’ was published in the initial issue of The New
York Review of Books on February 23, 1967, which was a revised text
of a talk given at Harvard a year earlier. (Chomsky, American Power
and the New Mandarins, New York: Pantheon, 1969, 323-366.) The
dark times that prompted this entry into the public realm was Chomsky’s
experience of the Vietnam War, which had turned him into an anti-war
activist locally long prior to this visibility nationally, and then,
globally.
For Said, the dark times were more
directly associated with his particular identity as a Palestinian, and
the sense that this could no longer be kept a private matter in the
aftermath of the 1967 War that resulted in Israeli occupation of Palestinian
territories. Said subsequently broadened his concerns to include post-colonial
imperialism, Middle East politics, and freedom of expression, while
Chomsky embraced an extraordinary spectrum of hot political issues from
the Palestinian struggle to the plight of East Timor under brutal Indonesian
rule, and many in between. He defended Holocaust deniers, disputed claims
of Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, and attacked media indoctrination
in a liberal society among the many, many concerns to which he devoted
his attention.
Chomsky places special emphasis on speaking truth to power, using professional
training, as a basis for examining evidence, exposing lies and deceit.
Chomsky repudiates the social science insistence of influential pundits
such as Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, and Zbigniew Brzezenski that intellectuals
should present their policy views on the basis of technical knowledge
as an expert, and should not attempt to exert influence on the basis
of a given value orientation. (Chomsky, AP, 348)
In the setting of the Vietnam War,
Chomsky was appalled by the obscenity of the war itself, as presented
in a highly distorted form, but also by the listless passivity of both
intellectuals and citizenry as the evidence of criminality was made
public. Perhaps, in somewhat hyperbolic language Chomsky writes, “I
suppose this is the first time in history that a nation has so openly
and publicly exhibited its own war crimes.” He adds, “[p]erhaps
this shows how well our free institutions work. Or does it simply show
how immune we have become to suffering?” (AP, 10)
Chomsky opts for the latter explanation,
and generally indicts American society in general, and the intellectual
community in particular, for its steadfast silence, arguing that only
the failure of the military campaign to achieve its goals at acceptable
costs to the United States sparked significant opposition. In his sharp
judgmental words, “[a]s for those of us who stood in silence and
apathy as this catastrophe slowly took shape over the past dozen years,
on page of history do we find our proper place?” (AP, 324)
The answer suggested harkens back to
World War II, both as in some way comparable to ‘good Germans,’
but also to the American unwillingness to own up to some responsibility
for “the vicious terror bombings of civilians perfected as a technique
of warfare by the Western democracies and reaching their culmination
in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, surely among the most unspeakable crimes
in history..” (AP, 323-4) Drawing his inspiration explicitly from
Dwight Macdonald’s series of articles in Politics, Chomsky suggests
that when there is a sense of the ethically intolerable then words alone
are not sufficient, but acts of resistance are required. Fortunately,
Chomsky has not yet been tested by the dark times of fascism, which
punish by death any show of dissent, even if purely rhetorical.
Said is more ‘intellectual’ in his conception of ‘responsibility,’
seeking mainly to encourage truthfulness and a willingness to resist
cooption. As Said puts it, “the principal intellectual duty is
the search for relative independence” from the pressures exerted
by all institutional affiliations, including the academy and what he
calls the ‘professional guild.’ (Rep, xv-xvi) To Said, the
intellectual needs to achieve the self-consciousness associated with
exile and marginality, to embrace an identity as amateur, and become
“the author of a language that tries to speak the truth to power.”
(Rep, xvi).
In a more vivid way Said expresses
this special vocation of public intellectual: “It is a spirit
of opposition, rather than in accommodation, that grips me because the
romance, the interest, the challenge of intellectual life is to be found
in dissent against the status quo when the struggle on behalf of underrepresented
and disadvantaged groups seems so unfairly weighted against them.”
(Rep, xvii)
As with Chomsky, Said is extremely
hostile to those who argue that politics and ethics are being expunged
from modernity, and only the technical knowledge of the expert is usefully
provided by the intellectual. There is no doubt that Said believes that
the intellectual can honor the precious potential of his professional
identity only if he avoids the temptations of being an institutional
insider: “..the intellectual, properly speaking, is not a functionary
or an employee completely given up to the policy goals of likeminded
professionals. In such situations the temptation to turn off one’s
moral sense, or to think entirely from within the specialty, or to curtail
skepticism in favor of conformity are far too great to be trusted.”
He also cautions against illusions of independence, suggesting that
“many intellectuals succumb completely to these temptations, and
to some degree all of us do. No one is totally self-supporting, not
even the greatest of free spirits.” (Rep, 87).
In essence, Said is telling us that
speaking truthfully, as an amateur, requires an acceptance of an outsider
status in relation to institutional authority, and a constant striving
to sustain independence.
These reflections of Chomsky and Said
are not meant to do more than to consult with these exemplary figures
of public responsibility to seek some guidance. Their own views, over
extended productive periods, suggest both the substantive specifics
of speaking truthfully on particular issues, and the costs associated
with doing so, even in the setting of liberal democracies not deeply
threatened.
Coda
This inquiry into conditions of responsible scholarship in dark times
has affirmed the virtue of authenticity, not jeopardizing a fundamental
commitment to truthful utterance and behavior. Under conditions of totalitarian
repression this may require, as with Jaspers, a retreat into internal
exile, sustained by silence. In the liberal conditions of American society,
such silence is tantamount to acquiescence as Chomsky makes particularly
clear, and is inexcusable. For Said the challenge is to sustain maximum
independence, and be bold in speech as an amateur with the authority
that comes from concern with those who are being victimized by the powerful,
especially by forces that dominate our own public space.
For all of these public intellectuals, their surroundings are marked
as dark times. But America is not Nazi Germany, and the quality of darkness
is not as easily discerned as its intensity seems at the horizons of
awareness. Said as a Palestinian felt the darkness in a highly personal
manner, causing a permanent sense of being ‘out of place.’
Since 9/11 the darkness has moved dramatically
closer to the physical realities of many Americans, although the response
to the Iraq War eerily resembles the apathetic refusal to oppose that
was present for so many years in relation to Vietnam. And there is little
indication that if Iraq had ended in victory as initially seemed likely
back in mid-2003, there would have been more than whimpers of dissent
in American society.
The nature of dark times is presently multi-layered for American intellectuals:
the involvement in aggressive warfare against vulnerable civilian societies
(Iraq, Afghanistan); the reliance on torture as a counter-terror technique;
inaction in response to genocide (Darfur), and less immediate issues
associated with global warming and energy depletion.
The academic profession is challenged
to be responsive and responsible. Each of these concerns calls for a
defiant spirit of truthfulness that may entail some adverse consequences.
There are concerted campaigns afoot within the society to purge university
ranks of radical voices and to intimidate still further the rest of
the academic community.
It is a historical moment that is severely
testing the vitality and moral wellbeing of academic professionalism.
At this point, liberalism holds to the extent that there is little genuine
pretext for the sort of retreat from public life that could become necessary
and prudent in the event of a second 9/11 or the deepening of the neoconservative
grip on the reins of American imperial policy.