Inside the Ivory
Tower, a Painful Hesitancy
October 2001
It is no secret that academics are often slow to recognize a new idea or changed
circumstance. Sometimes that is a good thing: knowledge should not shift wildly
with every small change in the wind. Sometimes it is neither good nor bad. Journalists
write the first draft of history, and scholars write the second or third, and
all drafts are useful in their own way.
Sometimes this tardiness to accept change is nothing less than a betrayal of
the best possibilities and deepest hopes of scholarship. Inside America’s
universities, we are staring just such a moment in the face. On September 11th,
everything changed, and nothing changed.
What changed is that a new ethical and political equation was written in fire for every scholar to see plainly. What did not change is our responsibility to solve that equation honestly. So far, some academics prefer instead to believe that they already know the answer, which is to repeat worn arguments forged in another fire, another age.
After the 11th, some academics have been silent, either because they feel that
now is not the time to speak, or because they hesitate to say what they are
thinking for fear of how old friends and treasured colleagues will react. The
voices that have been heard are mostly those of the usual suspects who jump
to the call for action against racism, against apartheid, against oppression,
against every sin of commission and omission committed by the United States.
I have been one of those usual suspects more often than not. After September
11th, I still oppose oppression. I still want to work for the expansion of human
freedom and justice. In other words, I endorse President Bush’s declaration
of war.
I have been saddened and confused by the reaction of colleagues around the U.S.
Many have renounced all violence, though they recently embraced or at least
accepted the just and proportionate use of force to remedy injustice. Suddenly
they believe that it is so important to see the world through the eyes of those
who commit evil that they believe it is impossible to act against those people
or even to judge them. They did not feel the same obligation to the men who
ruled South Africa under apartheid, nor to the American officials who prosecuted
the Vietnam War. Suddenly they believe that the dispassionate analyses of the
causes of terrorism must completely outweigh--even negate--the need for meaningful
condemnation of terrorist acts.
My entire professional life has been devoted to seeking to understand how other
people see themselves and their actions. I still believe in that mission. But
I also believe that it is precisely this effort that makes it possible to pass
judgment upon the actions and beliefs of others. Nothing human should be alien
to me, but once I understand the humanity of others, I am not required to accept
all that comes with it as legitimate. If my knowledge is coupled with wisdom,
I am required to recognize evil when confronted with it, and to act against
it if I can--or to endorse the good faith efforts of others to act.
It is evil to kill thousands of innocent people, to use other innocent people
as a weapon of war, to answer small wrongs with a great one. I do not understand
why so many academics regard it as ridiculous to use to word evil to describe
these actions. It is immoral to believe, as one small and very distinctive fraction
of fundamentalist Muslims do, that their salvation requires the destruction
or subjugation of all who think and live differently than them. Most Americans
know these basic ethical facts. Strikingly, some American academics do not seem
to.
I wish to continue living. I believe in the way that I live. I believe in the
trivialities of my culture, in the excesses of my society, in our crucial and
absurd rights and privileges: the right to have sex with whomever we wish, the
right to say whatever we are thinking, however blasphemous or upsetting it might
be to another, the right to watch “Survivor” or “Jackass”,
the right to worship what we please, or not to worship at all. The thunder of
the World Trade Center crashing to the ground was a warning of a coming storm
against those rights, against our way of living and our individual lives.
This is a war against particular organizations and the philosophies that they
promote. It is not a war that can be won with solely or even mostly with military
might, though the careful use of force has had and will continue to have an
important part to play. Careless bombing or unrestrained force would be the
equivalent of the US Navy deciding to sink all its own ships just before D-Day.
Mistaking this for a fight against Islam or against Arabs or any similarly general
target would be a greater evil than the one committed against the United States
on September 11th. This is a war that will be fought with money, with intelligence,
with diplomacy, and yes, perhaps most crucially, with a thorough reconsideration
of how the United States relates to other societies around the world.
It is a war that will be fought with ideas and philosophies. I am not much good
with rifles, but I know my way around an idea or two. I hope other academics—particularly
those who have stood so vocally against oppression and injustice in the past—come
to feel the same.