• China lends Nigeria Dollars 2bn in exchange for oil talks. • Ft com site : China oils Nigeria talks with loan

Elshtain: Let me just add that in fact this is a principle that the United Nations has accepted. It's now called the responsibility to protect, RTP for short. And the argument has emerged out of a commission convened to look into the grounds for intervention. The commission report, which is now widely circulated and discussed, held that if there is systematic, continuing and egregious violations of humans rights, in accordance with the universal declaration of human rights, then there are grounds for intervention. And if the UN as a collective doesn't intervene, it is incumbent on a neighbor state or states to do so in order to stop what's happening - not to conquer, not to take over, but to stop these violations. And I think that if we don't accept precisely what we just heard from Levy, can't put ourselves in the shoes of people from other places and other cultures and recognize a common fundamental humanity that isn't particular to any culture, then I'm not sure what kind of world we're living in.
Barber: I agree that we need criteria to distinguish among different kinds of wars and also to help us to think about intervention. My problem is that the idea of black holes seems to me almost useless as a category in making these distinctions. I'm also not sure that the fact that women and children get burned and killed and humiliated means very much either as a criterion for differentiating between good and bad wars. Women and men and children get burned alive in every war. 30,000 - 100,000 civilians at the least have been burned to death in Iraq in the last three years in the name of a struggle whose proponents speak of the need to stop Saddam and make democracy. So we can't say that the gruesome deaths of innocents is itself a criterion because that happens in every single war.
I'm also not persuaded by the argument about grand narratives. World War One? That was a war with almost no narrative that makes very much sense. Talk about a war about nothing but theft and violence and you're in World War One, where the lines hardly moved, millions were slaughtered and nothing much changed for the better on the European continent except that the way was paved for fascism and totalitarianism. On the other hand, the genocide of the Jews was underwritten by an eloquent, very grand narrative indeed. But it was not therefore a less terrible genocide. So too with the American Civil War, which had several narratives and was, not incidentally, the bloodiest war we ever fought. Lincoln said the only narrative that made any sense was that it was God's punishment for the sins of the American people in respect to slavery. But does that narrative give the war any meaning that would make us feel better about it? The little wars you talk about have their own narratives. Even nihilism is a kind of narrative. The meaningless slaughter of people is also a kind of narrative. I don't see how the term black hole really helps us to distinguish between the devastation caused by the U.S. in Iraq and other kinds of devastation. I don't see how the black hole and the narratives associated with it, or not associated with it, can help us get very far in making the moral distinctions we need to make as politically aware citizens.
Lévy: Number one, genocide is not a war. The genocide in Germany was not a war between the Nazis and the Jews.
Barber: So Rwanda was not also a war?
Lévy: Of course not. It was not a war. You don't, or should not, call it war when armed killers attack unarmed civilians. Genocide is not a war.
But leaving semantics aside, let me say that the fact that there is in some places a narrative does not mean that in those circumstances the war is an ok war. I never said that. I do not believe that. Nor do I believe the reverse. I said explicitly in my opening remarks that it is impossible to say which is worse. A war with narrative or a war without narrative. A bloodbath with or without. Camus said that with the narrative it is worse because ideology is a machine to multiply murder. I don't say that.
Number three, what I say about just and unjust is that sometimes you have wars which are just. Antifascist wars, wars fought in order to stop a bloodbath, these may have a justification. But how do you apply the criteria? It is not enough to say that a war is just when it is stopping fascism or enough to say that a war is just when it dethrones a dictator. The war in Iraq would be just if that were the case, since it kicked out Saddam Hussein. But it is not just. Why? Because there are also political criteria to consider. When you begin to speak politically, then you have to invoke Immanuel Kant and ask whether your war increases or decreases the quantity of evil in the world. If your aim in Iraq was to have less tyranny, less terrorism, less conflict between civilizations in the world, then you should have seen that an American war there would very likely produce civilizational conflict and more violence. And you should have seen a coming civil war which would bloom at the moment the American troops began to withdraw. My point is that politics always play a big role in thinking about just and unjust wars.
Barber: That's very helpful. But let me just add one brief comment. I would argue that we don't need reason to slaughter one another. We do it. It's the human way. This was Hobbes's view of the world. It's a war of all against all, all the time. We need reasons not to slaughter each other; that's what we need our narrative for. I only know of two broad narratives that allow us not to make war on one another. One is a political narrative: constitutionalism, democracy, republicanism. The other is the religious narrative. The ethical narrative. It is true we do often make war in the name of religion. Nevertheless, the religious narrative is ultimately about why we shouldn't kill each other, and I don't know any religion in which killing is mandated by the holy book or by god. The religion can be made to seem to authorize murder or holy war by clerics and interpreters, and in such cases, as with the Islamic world today, the only thing that can insulate Islam from fascism is Islam itself. It's the corruption and misuse of Islam that lead to contemporary jihad.
Lévy: As you know, Hobbes was not in favor of the war of all against all. He believed that inside Christianity there was a war of civilizations, between the fundamentalists, so to speak, and the secularists. Of course. Between those who believed that the truth had to be imposed by violence and by force, and those who believed that the truth can never be legitimately imposed by force because we can never be sure that we have the whole truth.
Barber: Hobbes said war is our nature and politics is the artifice by which we overcome war.
Lévy: Exactly. We agree on that.
Session 2: Witnessing Evil, Against Forgetting
Carolyn Forché: Our topic in this session is "witnessing evil: against forgetting." I would like to begin with a brief personal disclosure about my relationship with this subject. I am a poet who as a child read avidly the literature and survivor testimony of the Shoah, and later the literature of the survivors of the Soviet Gulag. Later, as I was awakening politically, there was the civil rights movement and also the American war in Southeast Asia, and of course there was a literature responding to those events that many of us devoured. In 19781 received an invitation to come to El Salvador. I had been translating the work of a Salvadoran poet named Claribel Alegria, and her relatives came to visit me and suggested to me that a war would ensue in El Salvador in a matter of a few years, and so they were interested in having poets, journalists, and historians come to their country, so that they could begin to learn about the conditions which were giving rise to what they perceived to be an inevitable war. They wanted to educate us so that we would understand, and so that when the war began we would be able to explain it to our fellow Americans. I said that I was a poet and not in a position to speak to Americans, let alone explain anything to them, and they said, well, you must change that situation. Poets must speak to the Americans.
And so, because I had been given a fellowship to spend my year in El Salvador translating literature, I rapidly found myself becoming a documentarian of human rights abuses in a period of very intensive death squad activity. My experience in this work lasted about two years and led me further into other places, among them Guatemala, Belfast, Beirut, and South Africa during the last years of the apartheid regime. Something happened along the way to the introspective poet I had been. My new work seemed controversial to my American contemporaries, some of whom argued against the rights of a North American to contemplate or, as they often put it, pronounce upon such experiences in her work. In attempting to come to terms with the question of poetry and politics, a question that was raised last night by Bernard-Henri Lévy, I found myself assembling a repository of what I came to regard as the poetry of witness written by those who had endured conditions of extremity in the 20th century. Poetry dealing with forced exile, house arrest, banning orders, forced labor, military occupation, imprisonment, torture, and warfare. My thought was informed by the legibility of suffering in language itself, regardless of the ostensible subject matter or the degree in which such suffering was explicitly disclosed. Such poems as I assembled bear the trace of extremity within them. For 13 years I compiled this poetry into a volume I finally titled Against Forgetting: 20"1 Century Poetry of Witness, which begins and ends with mottoes of Brecht. "In the beginning, in the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing about the dark times." And in the end the book closes with, "This then is all. It's not enough, I know. At least I'm still alive, as you can see. I'm like the man who took a brick to show how beautiful his house used once to be."
I've thought for many years about poetry of witness and have identified certain of its features, and even so I find it difficult to sequester such works within the realm of literary art. Or to make claims regarding its resonance or efficacy. When asked what a poet of witness is, I find myself telling this story: in 1944 Miklos Radnotti, one of the foremost Hungarian poets of his generation, was sent to do forced labor in what later became and once was Yugoslavia, along with some 2000 other men. When it was clear that they were to be defeated the Germans decided to evacuate the labor camp and force march these 2000 workers back into Hungary. Among them was the poet Miklos Radnotti. 22 marchers survived, among them the poet. Once in Hungary the soldiers found themselves unable to find a place for these prisoners. A hospital just inside the border refused them entry. And so they were taken to a clearing in the forest where they were executed and buried in a common grave. After the war, the poet's widow, Fanny Radnotti, who I think is still alive in Bucharest, went with her fellow villagers to the burial site where they exhumed the graves by hand, laying the corpses in the field. Whereupon Fanny went from corpse to corpse until she found her husband's body. She went through his pockets and found a small notebook, in which he had written his last ten poems, as well as a brief message that he wrote in Hungarian, Croatian, German, French and English. Fanny opened the notebook and dried the pages in the sun, and these poems were entered in the collection "Against Forgetting." Radnotti's final poems were written during his imprisonment and survived not only the poet's death, but also their burial with his corpse for 20 months. And this is what I mean by a poet and poetry of witness.
Of course there are many ways to think about witness, and it has been variously interrogated within the disciplines. In Holocaust studies we consider survivor testimony, in critical legal studies we examine the logic of evidence, and so on. We find ourselves now in circumstances where, quite clearly, we are called upon to respond as writers and intellectuals, understanding that we will be called upon in the future to answer for our involvements and complicities during these years, to answer both for what we did and what we failed to do.
Lévy's book on War, Evil and the End of History raises important questions about witness, suggesting that one may set for oneself the impossible task of registering the existence of souls consigned to oblivion. In what he calls forgotten and meaningless wars we can undertake to supplant philosophical writings with reportage conceived as a political act in its own right, written by one who commits himself to becoming a diagnostician of the present. Such writings ask us who we are in our time. Levy also examines some of the darker motivations of those who set out to bear witness, beginning with those who are sometimes rightly accused of voyeurism or of having a compulsion toward, "a taste for chaos, the extreme curiosity of the advanced westerner faced with images of confusion and disaster," persons with a "taste for playing with death. A taste for outwitting it." We are reminded of a question regarding Che Guevara. Did he love revolution at the risk of dying for it, or was revolution a pretext for his love of death?
And so, I ask this panel to consider the situation of the writer or journalist. Diagnostician of the present? Nobly endangering herself for the sake of truth? Or filthy voyeur who must walk on the edge of experience out of some inner compulsion? Can witness be invoked as an opportunity for people who take themselves to be intellectuals to strike fine postures and to present themselves in ways that are fundamentally specious or dishonest? Or are there genuine ways to bear witness, to commit ourselves in the most serious sense? What does witness require by way of active intervention, and what constitutes a failure to act on behalf of those who suffer? To what do we bear witness? What are unmistakable tokens of evil in the world?
Boyers: Thank you, Carolyn. Bernard-Henri does, as you suggest, rightly speak about the impossibility of bearing witness to the sufferings of innumerable persons. About the difficulty all of us face when we wish to participate in some way as witnesses to the sufferings of people very far removed from our own experience. And yet we acknowledge, I think, the obligation which both you and Bernard-Henri identify, that we want our response to be genuine. Bernard-Henri notes that there is a difference between saints-he does use that word-and the rest of us. The saints presumably have this extraordinary capacity for sympathy and compassion and affinity with everyone. But we don't; most of us don't. And that seems to me in some ways to name at least an aspect of the problem we confront when we think about witness, and intervention.
Michael Massing: As I wrestle with these questions I can't help thinking of New York Times columnist Nick Kristof, who is performing the role of witness more than any single journalist I can think of in his coverage of the Sudan, and has been criticized for his latest round of exchanges with Bill O'Reilly, where he challenges him to take the lead as a Christian and go to where there's a real war going on, where Christians should be involved. Kristof has written a number of columns on this, and some people say, well, this is a gimmick to get people to raise money for Sudan relief and so on. But I mean Kristof, gimmick or not, has been effectively keeping this issue alive. And I have to say, these columns do force me to ask what I am doing about what's really in front of us right now while we're letting it happen; but I also have problems with the columns because I often don't find them interesting. Maybe that's because I feel that they try so hard to make us feel guilty. It's an important question. Maybe there are other kinds of writing more appropriate to the task than journalism. And yet I ask what can be more important than the kind of journalism Kristof has been giving us?
Elshtain: I agree with Bob and with Michael that there are problems in witness writing that has, you know, what are called palpable designs on us. And voyeurism, too, is also an important question, though you don't want to deny that there are obviously possibilities for deep and genuine identification and compassion when you're confronted by the kind of writing Carolyn cited. At the same time, you don't want to so thoroughly identify with those who are suffering in conditions of extremity that you utterly efface the gap between your position as witness, which is often one of relative safety, and what it is the sufferers are going through. So you've got these very delicate balancing acts to manage.
Lévy: I want to say first of all that I was deeply moved by the remarks of Carolyn Forché. For me the question of what it means to be a witness is absolutely central, for all of us, for our generation and for our world. If you go on a philosophical level to this question of witness, I think you find that there are three risks, obstacles to avoid. Number one of course is the danger of voyeurism. I recall scenes which were very important in my life. I was in Bangladesh 34 years ago. After the liberation of Bangladesh there was a crowd in one of the central squares. Two or three guys had been made prisoners for collaborating with the Pakistani media. I remember that their hands were bound and that they were displayed to the crowd. At the front of the crowd were several western photographers, T.V. reporters, and myself. The crowd began to shout, the photographers began to aim their cameras, the journalists began to take out then- pads and write. In front of us the guards began to make thrusting movements with the bayonets of their guns, and they killed the prisoners. In front of us. The photographs made a tour of the world, and you have there the very embodiment of the risk of voyeurism, the risk that witnesses, reporters, people who risk their lives to cover conflicts like the Bangladesh war will somehow provoke murder. Discussion of voyeurism is essential. And others are working now to show the limits of humanitarianism, and the politics of human rights. Of course I have met many who are involved in humanitarian tasks: fighting against hunger, trying to rescue people, but so often you can feel, you can smell in their behavior, in their ways of taking care of the bodies they hope to rescue, that voyeurism. As if these desolate places in the world were laboratories of humanity. How does a human being atone or react in extreme conditions? You have that question before you when you read sometimes in the eyes of those great humanitarians the will to save, but also the will to observe, to record.
Second, there is the risk that the witness will help to generate the sentiment of martyrdom. You know that witness in Greek etymologically means martyr. Being witness and producing martyrdom are expressed in the same word. But the witnessing applies not only to the observer but to the observed, to the victim, who is the witness of something which is bigger than he is. This sense of history, this sense that victim and observer are both witnesses to a sort of great process of truth, a truth written on the body of the martyred victim, can look like a great accomplishment. The temptation to martyrdom is a great risk, I think.
And also, of course, as we remember the texts of some of the great travelers, we remember that to witness may also be to disturb, to introduce a sort of virus into the society that is being observed. That may be the greatest risk. And yet I believe that the task of witnessing is the real task of an intellectual, of a full human being, and an obligation for privileged citizens of the West. Why do I believe this? First, as I said earlier, because at a time when it appears that there are many separate humanities divided into separate places and belonging to different stages of history, we have to plead more than ever for the sentiment of unity, find ways to genuinely feel brother and sister to the lost man or woman whose face is vanishing in Burundi or Angola.
Also, we are fighting against the danger of relativism. Relativism for me is one of the biggest evils in modern ideology. The idea that the same values are not values for everybody. For me, the excision of the clitoris of an African woman has, must have, the same meaning in Africa as it has in Paris. My belief is that we have to fight against the idea that such things can have different meanings.
I know that here, in America, the philosopher Levinas has at least a small following. The core of his thought is that what defines me as a human is my relationship to the other, and that this relationship is the more essential to my humanity the more the other is different from me, opposed even. Levinas has built the concept of an ethic which is defined by the excess of the other, by the domination of otherness upon me. I am exceeded by the other, by his otherness, says Levinas. If you take this to heart, you see that in important ways the duty of witnessing is the main duty of our times. That means, or includes, the duty to bear witness to the sufferings of others in places far from our own in ways that will seem unnecessary or foolish to many citizens of western countries.
Lears: I am not sure I can play in the same part of the pool here. I am impressed and humbled by the eloquence of Mr. Levy and by Carolyn's observations as well. No one, I think, can deny the force of these arguments about the centrality of witnessing and the importance of that, particularly for intellectuals. No one can deny the dangers of relativism and the importance of coming up with definitions of values that are indisputable, values we are willing to defend and fight for if necessary.
But I do think that the idea of witness inevitably leads into some thornier issues regarding the whole question of personal moral responsibility-what you might call the case of the starving stranger. We all know that any of us could hop on a plane this afternoon and go to one of those awful places in the world where people are starving and relieve someone's suffering somehow through some sort of direct action. And the question is, why don't we do that? Why don't we do that individually and en masse? We note that for all of the dangers of voyeurism and martyrdom, the humanitarian organizations are at least trying and demonstrating a sense of personal moral responsibility. Humanitarianism, after all, always depends on a large sense of personal responsibility, for strangers, for people who are distant from us, who we may or may not have ever laid eyes on. You can see this emerging in American political history at the time of the antislavery movement, among people in New England and from other parts of the country far from where slaves were still being held. There was a strong sense of identification, in which aspects of voyeurism may well have been present, but which led nevertheless to a politically effective movement that ultimately of course brought on the Civil War but also accomplished the aim of ending slavery and freeing a large portion of our citizenry.
So questions of moral responsibility inevitably come hard on the heels of the questions we raise about witnessing. And here I would call us back to what Ben Barber said about the dangers of intellectuals in politics. As much as I deplore relativism and its consequences, I think we also have to keep in mind the dangers of universalism, a kind of uncritical universalism. Remember that much of the rest of the world looks at U.S. foreign policies at the moment as a kind of expression of a universal mission that is in many ways deployed to distract us all from the actual aims of that foreign policy, to cloak it in the robes of righteousness which allow our leaders to pursue their aims however they please in the most destructive and murderous ways imaginable. But all under the cloak of a universal civilizing mission. It's not a new idea. We know this business is not peculiar to the U.S. but I think it is a very dangerous and disastrous procedure, and the use of humanitarian language to cloak murderous policies is, frankly, disgusting.
Schell: First one story from the history books that for me nicely represents the problem of relativism. In the 19th century the British set about stamping out the Indian practice ofSuti whereby widows of deceased husbands would be burned on pyres in order, I guess, to go join their husbands. Of course the Indians at that time said, who the hell are you to tell us what to do? It's our custom to do this. And so, a British commander responded, "well, we have a custom in England too: when people burn widows on pyres after their husbands die we set up gallows next to them and hang the people who do that." A familiar example, I know, but a vivid reminder about customs and universal values.
Regarding witness: whatever temptations and perversions that go along with humanitarian activity, it's absolutely necessary to have factual reports from the black holes of the earth. Whatever the motivation may be, however tiresome or unoriginal or voyeuristic, without witness we are all absolutely in the dark about what's going on elsewhere and very likely deluded about what is being done by our own country in our name. But I want to put a question to Carolyn that may help us to clarify further what we mean by witness. I know that she will agree that writing a poem is something quite different from being a reporter in Darfur. The difference is important, because many catastrophic events of the 20th century almost defy, almost seem to defeat the best efforts of the human imagination. Some people took the position not only that these events were indescribable but that it was inappropriate to write poems about such things. But my question, to someone who's thought about it probably more than anyone else on the face of the earth, is simply: what is it that a poem is doing, specifically, to bear witness?
Forché: It's a very difficult question, and often the witnessing has more to do with what is done in the poet's handling of language than in the recording of events or experiences. Primo Levi argued in his book, The Drowned and the Saved, that under Nazism the German language had been guttural and crude and harsh; in the camps especially German was mostly shouted at people. It was mostly a barking of orders. And it was this German that had to be learned, mastered, if one was to have any hope of surviving. It was also the language of those who perpetrated the annihilation and the genocide. After the Holocaust, of course, Paul Celan found himself, a survivor, a poet in this very language. So he had to walk around in the ruins of the German language and piece together a new language with which to make a lyric utterance, an utterance that would be cut into his soul as well as on to the page. Celan pieced together this German utterance the way that Walter Benjamin talks about it in his description of the translator piecing together a broken vase, assembling a language in another language so that the made thing will look more or less like the poem that has been translated, but this vase, says Benjamin, will never hold water. What Celan did was piece together chips and ruins, to install one little mosaic chip of lyric utterance against the horror he witnessed. Celan is for me the exemplary poet.
But I would say also that many of the poets I collected in my anthology didn't write directly about what they endured. And yet some record comes through. When Nazim Hikmet writes about spring coming he's looking through prison bars. You can sense this bar before his vision in almost every line. And so, if you really read closely, there's this kind of legibility, and if you listen to these kinds of poetic witnesses and read their descriptions of the black holes and murderous regimes, you become a witness. And then you become responsible for what you know, for what you've heard. And I believe that witnesses beget witnesses, as Levinas tells us when he says that our relationship to the other is infinite and inexhaustible.
Barber: I think we have to sharpen our distinctions about the different kinds of witnesses and witnessings. Levy's book, after all, is about the responsibility of intellectuals and the intellectual as witness. And it takes us to particular places where the author himself has gone in the role of witness, and opens up some of the paradoxes and difficulties we are trying to get into focus. Let's think a little about Levy himself as a kind of witness who, as his book demonstrates, goes off to all these places as a thinker, and who in France has a kind of moral authority and a reputation as a person of genius, someone who can go and do stories on places that have been ignored in the world, using his authority and reputation to accomplish things that, had Le Monde simply sent a journalist to do the job, would not have been possible. But that presents a difficult paradox, I think, which we can grapple with when we set beside Levy other comparably august writers and intellectuals from Susan Sontag to Norman Mailer and Truman Capote and even, perhaps, the Hemingway who went to Spain during the Spanish Civil War. What we can say about all of these witnesses is that they have a problem. The very qualities that make them the witnesses we need get in the way of their witnessing. They can't get out of their own way. Of course, if it wasn't Capote, or Sontag, or Levy doing the reporting, nobody would pay much attention to the events or places reported on, but because it's these very people doing the reporting who often make it more difficult to see what we need to see, so much do they play the role of attracting our attention to them and their moral authority and the event they're witnessing, all at once. We have, rightly, a great deal of admiration for Sontag and Capote and Levy, but at the same time we feel a certain uneasiness that somehow what such people take with them on their travels is not so much a microscope as a mirror. Maybe not a perfect metaphor, that, but suggestive, I think.
Consider, in this, Levy's account of the black holes, an account given by a very gifted philosopher who knows how to use his deep knowledge of Hegel, Kojève and Foucault to construct a theory about why there is no narrative in these dark places. A narrative about there being no narrative. Though, think of it, the black hole is itself in fact a narrative, a nicely constructed, invented philosophical proposition and in that sense perhaps less helpful than it might be for readers who hope to actually get at what's out there.
On the other hand, as others note, we have people like Nick Kristof, or the Vietnam era Frankie Fitzgerald who goes and writes Fire in the Lake, or the Bill Shriver whose Berlin Diary describes the rise of the Nazis-all of these journalists with a gift for getting at events in their own ways. They are not great moral authorities, or people of genius, or artists, but they have what Lévy rightly says we need, which is eyes and ears. But I guess what I want to say is that the imagination and the genius get in the way of the eyes and ears, constantly acting as a kind of filter for what's coming through. And while that can be powerfully interesting, it's at least potentially a problem. My own suggestion is that the intellectual is not ideally suited to be a witness, though by virtue of the sort of moral and intellectual authority Lévy has earned, he is obviously a wonderful source for challenging political authority. When in your letter to The Nation, Bernard-Henri, you challenge American intellectuals to challenge their own regime, that seems to me precisely what's wanted-that is, to inspire intellectuals to challenge the phony authority of a president or of a regime that is acting badly. That role is the role of the intellectual as subversive, or nay-sayer. But the intellectual as a subversive is not necessarily, not often, a good or fully reliable witness.
The intellectual as poet or artist is another matter. I don't think of the poet as a witness in the way I think of other witnesses. Poets, rather, are reconstructing reality for us in ways that provoke our imagination, maybe even move us to action, but they are not pretending to be reporters. They're not pretending simply to tell it like it is. Whatever else Norman Mailer did he never told it like it was, he told it the way Norman Mailer saw it, which was always very different from the way it was. And that's fine because the way he saw it was tremendously interesting, and his genius was actually an asset to his work. Whereas his genius didn't help him at all to be a reliable reporter. And so I've wanted here to open up a paradox we have to be aware of as another of the dangers we've tried to identify.
Elshtain: I have something to say in response to Ben's provocative comments, with which I am in essential agreement. I think that one of the things, Ben, that you've touched on is the way in which certain cultural celebrity really gets in the way when one thinks about the duty to witness. We know that the interests of the narrative will often overwhelm other types of concerns, as with Capote in In Cold Blood, where he really needs the two killers to hang in order for him to have the kind of narrative that he really wants.
But let me respond more pointedly to Carolyn's evocation of Levinas, and to Lévy's as well. He is undoubtedly a very powerful and moving philosopher, but I have to say I am absolutely stumped when he tells us that our moral responsibilities are infinite and inexhaustible. I have absolutely no idea what that means. I am as a human being-at least I take myself to be-very finite and exhaustible, and I just don't know what it means to have infinite responsibility. It's hard enough to do right by those to whom one is closest, to your own family, your own friends and colleagues, to be fair, to be decent, to try to do the right thing. Then you think of your responsibilities as a citizen, to vote, to pay attention, but when I think of the notion of infinite and inexhaustible responsibility, I feel overwhelmed, and I think that what it can lead to is that one isn't particularly responsible for anything, anywhere. The concreteness goes away, and you find yourself without a clue as to what genuine responsibility might mean in concrete practice. I think certain kinds of philosophers can open up a place for us, but they are not very much help when we think about what we want to do, and how we want to behave, as flesh and blood people living in a real world.
Philip Glotzbach: I want to respond to Benjamin Barber, who has, I think, misidentified what he calls a paradox. If we've learned anything from 20th century philosophy, it is that there is no such thing as doing science or writing or thinking without a perspective, that is, without a set of background assumptions. The person who is reporting while trying to stay out of the way is constructing a particular kind of narrative, adopting a particular kind of approach to language. This is not an approach without theory, and not an approach without assumptions, even where the assumptions tend not to be stated. And that's ok. Just so, you can't write poetry, it seems to me, without a particular set of assumptions, or write a narrative without adopting a perspective. Obvious, I know, but maybe important here to say in spite of that. What the intellectual does is to make the theorizing explicit. When Lévy talks about black holes he is, in fact, operating with a theory and making explicit the perspective from which he is trying to see these places. Far from being less able to witness what he's examining, it seems to me, he is bringing our attention both to these places and to a particular theoretical framework that he's actually exploring. So I don't think that there is a paradox here. Sure, celebrity can get in the way. The perspective of the writer like Truman Capote may tend to place undue emphasis here rather than there. Even so, his narrative can put us in touch with things otherwise not there for us. There may be other narratives we need for comparison. But the intellectual, in bringing the theoretical to the forefront, is playing a different kind of role, and that doesn't make him less a witness, and we're not going to get the whole truth of events mainly by relying on narratives that propose not to have any theoretical perspective at all. What we're talking about here are different ways of trying to understand.
Lévy: The paradox of celebrity might be expressed in another way. It might be considered as central to the very definition of an intellectual. At the end of the Algerian war in France, Maurice Blanchot was asked to define an intellectual. He said an intellectual is a celebrity, an artist who stops his work as artist, interrupts his novel, interrupts his painting, just to involve himself in the question of the city. And I think an intellectual is exactly that. A celebrity who decides to put aside his work for a while to sign the important manifesto and become involved.
About the paradox of the reporter: of course the reporter who is an artist or writer will affect and maybe also, in a sense, compete with the object which he pretends to be witness of. Of course. This was true for Capote and for Hemingway, but I think it is also true for a regular reporter. A regular reporter has his own opinions, his own civic involvements, his own way of being involved in the affairs of the city, and has his own sort of special light which he shines on the event. I would say that the positive aspect, with Hemingway or Susan Sontag or, more modestly, myself, is that you get the cards out on the table. The terms of the transaction are inescapable. And there you have what Phil Glotzbach tells us that modernity teaches, a conception of truth, a construction which is not a given truth, is approximate, at the best, so that you know you have to search, to go further. You know you get also the same paradox in the history of science, where the scientist not only modifies the object he studies but constructs it as he goes. A number of prominent historians of science tell us that is the paradox of the observer in the laboratory, and especially in modern science, as where they discuss the notion of negative mass, identifying laws in features that are supposed to be in nature but are not. So we are dealing here with a general paradox in the pursuit of truth. We have to admit that. And we have to admit that what the reporter does is in some sense what Susan Sontag does when she writes about Sarajevo, attempting to build and grasp the object of knowledge. The most we can ask for are other interpretations. Other attempts to approach the truth.
When I wrote my book about Daniel Pearl, of course my instincts interfered with the picture of him. Of course I proposed things which were completely hypothetical, the main one that Daniel Pearl was killed because he was at the edge of discovering the link between the Pakistani secret services and Al-Quaeda, and that this involved the question of nuclear weapons. This hypothesis was designed to provoke other inquiries, I admit this. I was issuing an invitation to go further.
To defy authority? Of course that is a task of the intellectual, but my dear Ben, once we have said that, we have still to ask, what then happens in Rwanda or in Burundi? To defy authority and to bear witness are not incompatible. I agree that today if you look at America you see that the foreign policy of the present government is a very bad one and should be defied. But there is another danger today, in my opinion, and you see it in the way opponents of the war in Iraq embrace a kind of isolationism, as if America had nothing to do with the rest of the world and would be better off to close its borders. So yes, we want to combat, as you do, the absurd, criminal behavior of this administration without withdrawing in the way conservatives like Huntington characteristically prefer. We can have nothing to do with that.
And about universalism: of course Jackson is right. There is always a danger of murderous universalism. The task of our generation might well be to save universalism from this caricature, which was the work of colonialism, of imperialism.
A final point: Jean asks what it means to have infinite and inexhaustible responsibility for the other. Rene Descartes said, I am a limited creature, but within my mind is the idea of infinity. This is the paradox of Rene Descartes. But what does it mean concretely? It means two things. Number one, that I can do a lot for my neighbor, but that I have no more reason to be close to my neighbor than to be close to others. Maybe in the circumstance of life I devote myself for years to my very closest relations and see that as my primary task, but there is no rational reason to be closer to the close than to the far away. Of course there are pragmatic considerations in every life. If you have a beloved wife who is dying, you will devote a lot of time to her, and you forget about those who are suffering far away. That is ok. But there is no metaphysical, ontological, anthropological reason that makes you more responsible for this one who is close than for these others who are far away.
Number two: inexhaustible means that you will never have paid your debts. Life is short. You will never do enough. You will never be discharged of your debts. This is what Levinas means, that we must think of this as an invitation to regard ourselves in this way as the very definition of being human. Like most other things, I like pleasure, I like life, I am not an angel, far from it. I have all the defects of the world, but a little part of me, as of Carolyn and Ben and all of us here, a little part of me feels that I will never be in the quiet comfortable way of thinking, "It's ok. I've done my job." What Levinas means is that man has never quite done his job.
Lears: There are lots of balls in the air and it's hard, I think, to keep up. But I wanted first to thank Jean for reasserting the demands of the everyday, and the difficulties of deciding where one's moral responsibility begins and ends. I do find Levinas an absolutely compelling moral philosopher. He has set the moral agenda in many, many ways. What I draw from his work, what is most compelling to me, is the emphasis not so much on the infinity of moral responsibility but on the intimacy of it, the encounter with the actual face of the other. There is a kind of ethics of grace there that I find profoundly moving. And that is what I take away from Levinas, and what points the way to the place where moral responsibility often ends up being embedded. And this is precisely where the question of witness comes up. How does one create that sense of intimacy with people in distant places that we may or may not have laid eyes on? That, I think, is where the role of intellectuals and artists comes in. I agree with those who have argued that in many ways artists can represent the realities of awful suffering and terrible events that we need to know about, and often without getting in the way. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, and I'm not sure that it's necessarily always a problem of celebrity. I am reminded of one of the great witnesses of the 20th century, George Orwell, who had a very naive conception of language. From a postmodern point of view, he had what we might call a literalist conception of language, or a commonsense realist conception of language. "Good prose is like a windowpane," he said. And it seems to me that, while we can all question the lack of theoretical sophistication in that remark, it's precisely that kind of ideal that made Orwell's writing so compelling. His political writing and his reporting were written in good prose, good in that English empiricist tradition he admired, and didn't read like a construction that we would sit back and admire.
Obviously Orwell's way wasn't the only way. We have different tasks that confront us, and we have to figure out what we can do best when we're confronted with these awful realities in the world that demand confrontation, witness, intervention, of various kinds. I think it's very interesting that the word intervention has acquired for many Americans the connotations of military intervention, and it's our job to see to it that that's not the only option on the table. Early on I learned to despise the word casuistry as something that scholastic philosophers did. But it does seem to me that the art of making fine moral discriminations is still very much with us and is still very much a demanding and necessary task. And I'll stop by turning back just for a second to the word isolationism, which is one of those words that deserves a long vacation. For one thing, it is constantly invoked by our president, among others, to disparage ideas with which he disagrees. And it does seem to me that isolationism can in fact be rooted not in the kind of blanket refusal to engage in the disorder and suffering in the world but instead in a kind of Burkean conservatism, a sense of universal human imperfection, that dissuades one, or at least gives one pause, when one is tempted to act on the basis of universal and abstract ideas. And it seems to me that a reflexive restraint is often more valuable and necessary than a reflexive tendency to intervene and hope to make things better.
Lévy: Why? Why is it better?
Lears: Because our history, the history of American foreign policy, in particular, is full of examples of unthinking intervention. Carried out in the name of high ideals, universal ideals that have turned out catastrophically.
Schell: Well, let me say first of all that I like the idea that the task of our generation is to conserve some conception of the universal, of the human. For my money the first step along that path would be to seek to divorce that cause from violent means. It seems to me that we get into trouble when we think we have to follow the armed prophet.
But what I really want to address again is the question of reporting and here I disagree with Bernard-Henri Lévy, who supports the notion that each observer builds the object he examines. I feel that the work of the reporter is to discover the object, and I think that those are two very different conceptions. Really, what goes on in the best reporting is a kind of disciplined observation where rules of evidence are respected, and it's possible to test and weigh what is there. The process starts with the acknowledgement that you don't know what's on the other side of the hedge. Right? A murder might be going on there, a saintly act might be going on there, but until you go out there and find out you don't know which it is, and your readers don't really know either, and it's your job to tell them. For me reporting is a process of submitting to the facts. Of course everybody has preconceptions. Everyone approaches a situation with some idea, true or false, but I think the key factor is readiness to let your preconceptions fall in the face of what you discover. This has very much, I think, to do with the whole idea of witnessing, because it seems to me that witnessing is an act of submitting oneself to what is actually there and what is observed. This is something so basic that I can hardly conceive of serious discourse, or life, or communication without it. So I resist, if I may put it this way, Bernard, the relativising of the truth that seems to me to be implicit in the idea that we build the object, that the reporter builds the object as he describes it.
Of course I wouldn't place any prohibitions on anybody going to write about black holes. Certainly intellectuals who have powerful ideas, and who want to see how the facts may reflect those, or alter them, should proceed, and that can be a very fruitful thing, as in the work that Sontag and Levy and others have done so well. Even if it's a movie star like Jane Fonda who is going out to bear witness I think that may well be fruitful. As Carolyn has said, perhaps there is no such thing as a person who is perfectly qualified for such a task.
Barber: I hear in what Jonathan is saying the essential humility. Humility, I think, is absolutely essential to the witness, to the reporter. That's what I mean about getting out of your own way, and I think, on the whole, intellectuals, whatever else they have going for them, do not always handle that very well. And here I speak for myself, certainly about myself, and I don't know if I speak for anybody else.
Of course I didn't say anything about prohibiting anybody from doing their work. Of course poets should keep on writing their poems, and philosophers should keep on writing the metaphysical treatise and attempting in their own ways to witness. But I can't at all look at any of this as a postmodernist. I am not a postmodernist. I think it's a lot of crap, frankly, to say that because some claims or all claims are fallible, then no claims are better than other claims and every narrative is equal. There is a difference between Jane Fonda sitting on an anti-aircraft gun and saying things about the Viet Cong and Frances Fitzgerald going out to examine things scrupulously and writing a book. Don't tell me there aren't important differences there. Of course Susan Sontag inspired many people to think about events in Sarejevo during the Bosnian war, but if I want to understand what is happening in such places I'll turn instead to her son, David Rieff, a policy wonk and a serious reporter, not an artist. I'm with Jonathan in believing that we ultimately have to know what's going on in order to act. I like to keep in mind what the judge used to say about pornography: I'll know it when I see it. I know good reporting when I see it. I can't give you all the criteria and I can't tell you in advance what's certain to be a good and a trustworthy narrative; but I know that the people who rely unduly on their imagination often get it wrong. Norman Mailer relied on his instincts when he wrote about Jack Abbott in his book In the Belly of the Beast and never took responsibility for the serious and consequential errors of judgement he made. So I don't trust Norman Mailer when I want to make moral judgements and understand the world. I'd rather trust the modest, the humble reporter who doesn't have a lot going in the way of theoretical equipment but really is determined to suspend his preconceptions in order to see what is actually out there. I very much admire Bernard's way of dealing with all of this when he says that we all have prejudices and that as an intellectual he puts his on the table so we can see them and know what they are. In my own way I want to identify with that, though I would never claim to be as good a reporter as some of those I admire.
One more word on Levinas and the notion that there's no more reason to feel obligation to those near than to distant others. I disagree. I think there are very good reasons. We can't go into all of them now, but I think there is an argument to be made that moral obligation and moral compassion begin with those who are near and then spiral out to those who are far from us. I think there's a lot of historical and empirical evidence to show that the other view of the matter often leads to universalist kinds of oppression, if I can put it that way. Some who purport to love mankind hate their neighbors, and even do damage to their neighbors. Is that arguable or unnecessarily provocative? Maybe so. But I insist that there are very good reasons, philosophically respectable reasons, for believing that concern for those who are closest is morally essential and speaks to what is most real in us as human beings. I say this knowing that no one here would think to make, or has made, an either/or sort of argument.
Glotzbach: I think, Ben, that you've thrown the 8 ball at the devil. That's great, but I don't think the devil was there raising his hand. I don't think anyone here has defended the postmodern position that you have attacked. Certainly not. We all agree, I think, not only that reality is out there, and human suffering, but also that reality ultimately eludes our capacity to describe it. That doesn't mean that there's not a truth there or that the concept of truth isn't useful to us when we try to understand what is happening. Jonathan Schell talked about humility in the face of one's own presuppositions and in light of the facts, and that humility can be embraced also by those who operate from an elaborated conception of the events they want to examine. I don't think that anyone here has embraced what I would call relativism, and in fact Bernard-Henri Leévy has powerfully attacked relativism. To me, the question that we're faced with in these early years of the 21st century is, how do we maintain the robustness of concepts of truth? How do we maintain the concept of factuality now that we've understood that factuality itself is a very complicated concept? How do we maintain a concept of the universality of human experience and of the value statements that can be defended across different cultures? None of these questions requires that we proceed from a caricature of postmodernism, however attached to that perspective many of our academic colleagues may be.
Leévy: This is again very helpful. But I want also to come back to what Jackson says about intervention. I don't think you can point to examples and then just make a rule about putting restraints on every powerful government that may want to intervene. As I know, and as Jackson agrees, in front of Bosnia, in front of Rwanda, in front of Nazi Germany, the task was not to restrain but the task was to restrain our tendency to restrain, despite all the bad things which have been done in the name of interventionism. Even the idea of accepting universalisai but divorcing it from violence should not be put as a rule. We hate war and violence, but what are we to do when there is state-sponsored murder in Bosnia? Sontag in '92 and '93 and later saw that the only way to diminish the barbarity was to sponsor an intervention by violent means.
One final word-I promise-about the near and far. This is a discussion we had in France with the extreme right, when Jean-Marie Le Pen said, I am sorry, but I feel responsible for my daughter more than for my cousin, and my cousin more than for my fellow citizen, and for my fellow citizen more than for my American or Russian fellow. Empirically he's right. Of course we have empirical reasons to feel closer to our nearest. But I believe that to be human, to be faithful to humanity, means to resist these empirical reasons, to not consider them the final word on the human condition. I believe that the best things we have accomplished in our history we achieved because we were obedient to these unempirical principles. Think of the American boys who went and died on the French beaches in World War Two, many of them, surely, feeling that they were called to a sort of superior task, which was to liberate Europe from Nazism. Were they wrong? I don't believe anyone here believes that they were wrong. Empirically most of them had no immediate reason to adopt this task, but they allowed the empirical evidence to be corrected by this felt sense of ontological duty. That is a version, certainly, of what Levinas meant when he spoke about this infinite duty we are responsive to.
Session 3: The Press and its Audience
Michael Massing: This session is to be devoted to "The Press and its Audience," so it's going to be somewhat more prosaic than previous sessions, but I'm more used to talking about the sins of the press than about original sin and inexhaustibility.
The most immediate problem the press is going through is a decline in circulation that is extraordinary and is reaching crisis proportions. Obviously people in the press are trying to figure out its causes and what to do about it. The LA. Times in the past two years has shed ten percent of its circulation, gone from over a million to almost 900,000. The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Post, almost every paper (with the exception of the New York Times) has been suffering declines in circulation leading to huge cutbacks in the newsroom, which is having a major effect in terms of the ability of newspapers to continue to cover the world as they have. What is the cause of this decline? The most obvious culprit is the internet, where you can get for free what you might have paid for before. With the New York Times and Washington Post, in fact, while the circulation has stayed steady or slightly declined, the readership has ballooned because of the internet. In fact the Times has acquired, as a national newspaper, many times the number of readers it once had. But most papers are going down and so the revenues are going down. The newspapers are thus trying to find ways to cash in on the internet and make it a revenue producer so they still have the income that will support the reporting.
But there's a deeper problem related to the move to the internet, which is declining readership among young people. Now of course a lot of young people are moving to the internet; they're a lot more comfortable there than older people, and it's much rarer now to find a young person who actually will get hands duty with newsprint. But there is evidence to show that when young people are going to the internet they are not going for the news. They are going for everything else but the news, for instant messaging, downloading music, buying and viewing videos, podcasting and the like, but it's not news or information about the world that they're really seeking. And this is the thing that deep down has people in the news business terrified. And so publishers are experimenting with new ideas to try to make up for this. One of them, for instance, is youth-oriented tabloids. There's one in Chicago called Red Eye which has gotten a lot of publicity because it's an effort to bring in young people with a new form of news. The Wall Street Journal did a whole article on the front page recently about the decline in circulation and how newspapers are trying to get young readers. So they talked about how the Tribune company launched Red Eye, "the Chicago tabloid aimed at those aged 18-34." And they quote Chicago resident Alison Appleton, who is 29, who says she picks up Red Eye nearly every morning when she buys coffee. "It's an easier read than mainstream daily newspapers," she says. "It's much more visual. The front page is a gigantic picture instead of hitting you with a bunch of text immediately." So this is going on all around the country. When I talk at colleges it seems to be more the faculty that attends, but I like getting engaged in conversations with students about newspapers. The responses are not always encouraging.
It's not just young people, though. When I take the subway in New York it seems the publication I see people reading the most is Us Weekly. It's one of the new generation of slick, gossipy, entertainmentoriented, Hollywood publications. People Magazine is almost highbrow compared to these publications. Young people have been nourished by T.V., by Entertainment Tonight, and Access Hollywood, Extra and so on, and the whole world of gossip and celebrity and fashion and reality T.V. just seems to be more and more spreading and taking over people's mental space. Even the New York Times has sort of made a necessary bargain to support the twenty-odd bureaus that they support. To keep a bureau in Baghdad, which is very expensive, and other bureaus throughout the U.S., they are devoting huge amounts of space to style and fashion. You know, there was the Sunday Styles section, but now you have Thursday Styles, and you have articles on handbags and fragrances and escapes and homes in the country. The culture coverage is also more and more geared towards celebrities, including Puff Daddy, Paris Hilton, Oprah, Donald Trump, and so on. It seemed for a while that every day there would be an article about their doings. And that is another way editors are trying to get young readers, the hip type of coverage that the Times has calculated that it needs to keep going. And in fact that might be the primary reason their circulation is not falling.
To me, the key that captures where our country is at right now is the morning TV. newscasts. I'm speaking of the Today Show, Good Morning America, and so on. What you get there in two hours is about 20 minutes of news. Mainly these newscasts amount to one giant product placement. When you watch the evening newscasts you find they're not much better, with their special features on what Americans eat and so on.
Of course the changes made are based on a lot of market research. Profits get maximized at CBS, NBC and ABC when you get an emphasis on entertainment and lots of happy talk. But there are other factors out there in the environment affecting the production and reception of news. For example, there have been changes in the political climate of the culture since 9/11. I'm speaking of the level of tolerance for dissenting viewpoints, for debate. Susan Sontag created a firestorm when she published remarks about the attacks on this country in the week after 9/11, but that was not the isolated event some have thought it was. The White House has waged a very definite campaign to clamp down on the news and to marginalize reporters. Dana Milbank, in October of 2002, wrote an article in which he said the president had misrepresented the truth in three different areas. One of them was a report about Iraq's nuclear activities that turned out to be totally false. The president said that the international atomic energy agency had put out a report claiming that Iraq had had an active nuclear program and had evidence of that. There was no such report. Milbank was virtually the only reporter in the country to write about this. And when he did, the White House condemned him, called up his editors and said that he should be removed from the White House, and no other reporter came to his assistance. This, I believe, had a huge effect on the rest of the media. I've written about how the press really fell in line after that. Of course there were exceptions. Knight-Ridder was one of the few places that actually looked at the weapons of mass destruction claims of the administration and really tried to show that those claims were dubious. Nobody knew for sure, but most of the coverage didn't report that.
Of course earlier presidents have tried to block the press. Just read David Halberstam and you see how President Johnson would call up editors of newspapers and start cursing at them. But what we have now is an incredible echo chamber that those presidents did not have. Bush has Fox News, of course, though conservatives will argue that they didn't have a voice before, so it's good that there's an outlet to carry their message. But if you watch Bill O'Reilly, you see that the media is one of his major whipping boys. Bill Keller, the executive editor of the New York Times, counted up to sixty references in one year from O'Reilly denouncing the New York Times. And then you add Rush Limbaugh. I don't know how many people here ever listen to him. I did it as sort of an anthropological exercise not long ago and found that the guy is very funny, very witty, smart, a great debater. But it's scary. He summed up his view at one point when some caller said, you know, don't you think that we should criticize the president for some things, and Rush said, "what you're forgetting is that this is war. We are at war with the liberals and we cannot admit weakness. We have to push our agenda if we want to win this war." And then, in a similar vein, there's Ann Coulter going around calling people traitors. I did a study on the Washington Post op ed page in 2002, and there basically you got to choose between Jim Hoagland, Charles Krauthammer, George Will, Robert Novak, and Richard Cohen, who was a liberal who ended up coming out for the Iraq war. When Colin Powell gave his speech for the U.N., the Washington Post had an editorial that called the evidence irrefutable, and even Mary McGrory, may she rest in peace, said she was persuaded. Not a single alternative voice was heard even in the Washington Post, and that should really tell us about the new climate in the press, whatever the exceptions. In fact, the conservative Brent Scowcroft became the principle voice of dissent in the whole debate over Iraq. And that realist view of his was virtually the only alternative voice that could get out there. Consider that the whole issue of oil and its role never got raised in a sustained way before the war. And so, virtually everyone ends up adopting what's out there, what's acceptable, and the mainstream of opinion that is shaping our thinking is a very powerful force which works even on those of us who try to resist it.
The upshot of all this is that most people are largely uninformed about what is going on and, to an incredible degree, unconcerned about anything that does not directly affect them. If you ask people under twentyfive years old to name the winners of the latest American Idol, they can run them down, but if you ask them to name Supreme Court justices, most can't name a single one. This is not just a left or right issue, but a question about an informed citizenry. And I must say, in closing, that I don't have any good answers.
Elshtain: As you know, Michael, trust in journalists, a belief that they are reliable and that we can count on them, had already plummeted well before Bill O'Reilly came on the scene. This was but one aspect of a loss of confidence in many of our most basic institutions. And this has happened not just in America, as you know. I was just in the U.K. recently, in Scotland. I saw some of the same phenomenon there, the same political ignorance that you lamented. Often, I think, we look at this and lament what the new foundations and right-wing think tanks have done, and how conservatives have taken over part of the press, but these are what Americans do when they want to change things, and it does no good to complain. I know you've written, Michael, about the particular ways in which things have been done and about the promotion of ideology on the right. But I want to remind us that the big liberal foundations also have huge sums of money at their disposal, and that Rockefeller and Ford have engaged in ideological activities, though in a curious kind of way. Often, in fact, they have aimed at changing the international educational programs of universities, and with a definite ideological aim in mind. And it strikes me that there they have enjoyed great success in sponsoring multicultural programs and in promoting a progressive agenda, though they've had less success, obviously, in the wider society. My point is that a lot of political mobilization of an ideological cast has been taking place, and there are many ways of thinking about why so many of our citizens are woefully uninformed or unable to hear a point of view different from what they have been fed.
Glotzbach: Just a quick comment here. You know it's quite true that the American academy is and has been for some time a great source of ideas on the left. And so it's not surprising that there is an assault on the academy and the integrity of the academy, and that this assault has been orchestrated by significant political groups. In recent developments having to do with federal reauthorization of the higher education act, there have been efforts to place provisions drawing upon David Horowitz's student bill of rights, which really would have been an imposition of a certain kind of political structure on the American academy, stipulating that we have to make sure and report what kind of hiring we're doing and certifying that all political positions will be represented on the campus and so on. Anyone who knows what this is about knows that, in the first place, it is not only leftist ideas that get represented on campuses, and second, that you can't have legislatures and other branches of government telling colleges and universities what to teach and whom to hire.
Lears: I endorse what Phil just said, but want to return to Michael's argument about the current administration's efforts to control the press. I really believe that what we're dealing with here is, not to put too fine a point on the matter, a gang of thugs who are interested only in power. That's a word too often carelessly thrown around, and of course anyone can use it. But I do think it's a great mistake to see the present conflict as simply an ideological debate or conflict over values, when really it's about a seizure of power. There was, in the first place, a massive electoral fraud, abetted by a compliant media, which has brought us to the point of a real constitutional crisis in this country, in spite of Ben's fairly optimistic view about the strength and the durability of the separation of powers in our constitution, which seems to me to be profoundly under attack as never before. Certainly we've been looking at a sort of permanent state of emergency post 9/11, which is being used to justify an apparently infinite expansion of executive power, and a disregard for any kind of checks from the legislative or judicial branches. So I think this is a bipartisan issue, and I don't think it's only about ideology. I think true conservatives actually ought to be rallying to the cause of the Constitution and the balance or separation of powers. The separation of powers embedded in our constitution is in fact based on a set of principles that are beyond partisan debate in this country. Or ought to be. And when they were last threatened this way in the early 1970's by Nixon and company we did have people rising above partisan politics and finally embracing the constitution, and rejecting the illegitimate seizure of power. And that, it seems to me, is what we have to look for now and what we're not seeing, at least not sufficiently.
Tom Lewis: I want to bring us back to the issue of the press and our need to know-including our need to know that there has been in some respects a seizure of power in the U.S. and the violation of certain principles with little attention paid by the press. At the same time, I want to point out that, if you study the coverage of some of the black holes that BernardHenri has described, you find that the conflict in Burundi, for example, was actually covered in a number of reports in the New York Times. That these reports do not seem to most Americans to have much "relevance" to our immediate condition in the U.S., and thus do not seem terribly compelling, is another matter, I think.
Lévy: You are right. The American press did cover Burundi at a time when there was not any report about Burundi in the French press. Is this proof that despite all that has been said, the American press is not so bad? Maybe it is better than the European one. About these wars seeming to have no relationship with us and so on: absolutely. As Benjamin has said, it is not because we don't see that we don't care; it is because we don't care that we don ' t see. That is perfectly right. We have the feeling that the disappearance of Burundi, its disappearance, would not change anything important to us. We have the feeling that if the Angola war lasted an entire century it would not affect our growth, our GNP, and so on, which is true.
But I wanted to speak a little about American policy, even though I am a foreigner. There is talk here, not surprising to me, about oil and about power. It is said that the conservatives want power. Of course they want power. What a discovery. They all want power. Clinton wanted it. Kennedy wanted it. This is not peculiar to the conservatives. Neither, I'm sorry, is the concern with oil peculiar to conservatives. But don't you think, seriously, that if the only reason for the war in Iraq had been oil there would have been another way to get it? Even if you did not have any clever people in the Bush administration, but it was in bed with the oil crowd, wouldn't they have gone to Saddam and said, let's make a deal? We lift the sanctions, we lift the punishment and you agree to sell your oil at an advantageous price? Maybe the war was not necessary to get Iraqi oil? I raise the question at least. Maybe Saddam Hussein would have been very glad to escape war and to have the sanctions lifted. Maybe underneath or behind Bush's war there are some ideas. Some ideas with which you and I disagree, but ideas.
On the subject of the left, I confess, I am always a little shocked when to explain our insufficiencies we evoke the others, or blame our lack of money. The others do what they want. They have done their job, built the America and the presidency they want. Good for them and too bad for us. But that does not explain the lack of initiative on the left. That isn't about money. I think that you have a genuine problem on the left with respect to ideas and with respect to conviction and initiative. Sure, people have sentiments. They can get aroused about bad things. But they don't act. Not often, not enough. Look, one of my American friends is the journalist Katarina Vanden Heuvel. Just a few days after the intervention in Iraq we happened to meet and I said, why don't you launch a campaign for the impeachment of George W. Bush? After all, Nixon was nearly impeached because of spying and because of lying; Clinton was nearly impeached because of a little lie about a blowjob; what about this guy who makes the biggest lie possible about weapons of mass destruction and nothing happens? We had this discussion and she agreed with me. But she did not do anything about it until two years later, when she ran a cover story in The Nation. So late! Why? Because there is, I feel, a lack of energy, a lack of spirit, a lack of ideas in so many parts of the American left. This is the thing that has to be explained. A campaign for impeachment could have been launched if the left had been in the shape it was in in the 60's. I'm sure of that. Look, the reasons for impeachment were huge!
I could go on about other disappointments. Why isn't there more willingness today to really fight against intelligent design, and especially against the persons responsible for it? The theory of intelligent design is much worse, after all, than creationism and the theories expounded in the monkey trials. You know, you have today a new situation where crooks disguise themselves as scientists. A century ago you had science on one side and creationism on the other, each putting the cards on the table. You knew that in front of you you had some crooks. Today the crooks are allowed to represent themselves as scientists. They have diplomas, and they have accredited universities. And the real party of science does not move. Does not do anything. There is protest, of course, and articles in the New York Times, but I would not call this an insurrection. I don't see the rebellion of the enlightenment spirit against the crooks who pretend to be enlightened. So there is a semi-comatose situation, for which responsibility lies unfortunately on the left more than on the other side.
Barber: You might want to reconsider what you just said, Bernard, because I agree with you. There really has been a tendency on the left, not just here, in Europe also, to blame the other side, and to assume that they've done something terrible because they've won. There are two issues here. The part on which we might not agree is the part about the left getting it wrong because the right has it right. They actually get America better than we do. At least there are some things about America that the right gets that we don't get. And this goes back actually to Tocqueville. Tocqueville understood that America was not merely an Enlightenment nation, or, if you prefer, a post-enlightenment nation. We are a deeply religious nation, for better or for worse. A Gallup poll done a couple of years ago said that 80% of Americans agree with the statement "God loves me." 90% say they pray. 95% say they believe in God in some form, though only about 40% go to church or synagogue, but those are figures way above the figures in Europe. So we remain a deeply religious country with a post-enlightenment left that has never fully understood that. There are Americans who care about poverty, who care about the environment, who care about a lot of issues dear to us but are disturbed by what they see as the atheism of science, and scientists, and our disrespect for their beliefs. Most Americans, 75-80% of Americans, support gay civil rights, but by the same number they do not support gay marriage. We have to acknowledge that; whatever our own sentiments, religious convictions play a role in American life and can't be ignored. Things are not hopeless here, but people who want to shape the politics of the country need to know where the American public is.
There are other aspects of American life we need to examine in a way that makes them clear to Americans who might actually read a newspaper. The Washington consensus today is built around the market model, the idea that markets are great, individualism is great, that choice is great, and that politics is about consumerism, as citizens are consumers and clients of government. Within such a model, students are consumers or clients. Students say: "my dad pays your salary and I'm your customer and you're not giving good service to me, and so I am going to protest the goods I'm getting," and so forth. That model has become deeply popular, and it has led to what in the 30's Dewey was already worrying about as an eclipse of the public, the commonwealth, the terms and concepts associated with citizenship. All of that is in radical withdrawal, and the language of consumerism is instead ascendant. This leads to the notion that when we are spending our dollars at the mall we are actually exercising our citizenship, and this idea is not only part of the capitalist song, but an idea that government puts out too. I cringed when President Clinton would say "you hired me to do a job." We didn't hire him to do a job! We elected our president. And of course Bush uses the same language, says he's here because he was hired to do a job. We use the language of markets, and that is a powerful model for which the left has not found an answer. It's a particularly powerful model in the international realm, where markets dominate and where there are no democratic authorities, no states. In the international realm there is no public. There is no global public realm, so that markets are the natural entities there, and everyone more or less buys into the notion that markets are how you accomplish things. If you talk about globalizing democracy or democratizing globalization, as I do, people look at you like you're some old time tree hugger or world federalist who just doesn't get it. So I say we have not got an answer for the market model. And what the left does when it puts forward its models is come up with essentially chauvinistic and protectionist ideas, which pit the American steel worker against the French steel worker, against the