The Groves of Academe

Somewhere along the line, the idea took hold that, to be an intellectual, you have to be against it, whatever it is. The intellectual is a negator. Affirmation is not in his or her vocabulary. It was not always so. Throughout the World War II era, when the stakes were high, American intellectuals signed on for the war effort. Our foreign policy enjoyed bipartisan support: As everyone fought fascism, liberal, conservative, moderate, even radical intellectuals and academics found common ground without fearing that they would be accused of betraying a lofty stance of dissent.

The Vietnam era broke this solidarity forever; indeed, the Vietnam War era opened up a fissure that transfixes us yet and freezes our thinking. At that time the old Cold War consensus broke up and former allies split bitterly. It became unfashionable, at least in some circles, to suggest that, although the Vietnam War was unjust and needed to be brought to a halt as quickly as possible, communism posed a real threat. Yet the historic record was clear: In the process of destroying freedom, including religious freedom, Communist regimes slaughtered millions of their own people. Although that was an empirical reality, many denied it. Even today, a nostalgia for the Soviet Union reigns in some circles, including portions of the academy. There is even a KGB bar in New York City. As one wag observed, it is difficult to imagine scholars or the literati flocking to a Gestapo bar, although Nazism and Stalinism were equally murderous ideologies propping up equally horrendous regimes.

So reflexive is the role of the intellectual as negator, so free from accountability, that the very meaning of dissent has been obscured. Hence in the wake of 9/11, those who disagreed with claims that America somehow brought the attacks on herself were said to be “stifling dissent.” But the true measure of dissent isn’t whether the vast majority of one’s countrymen and women agree with what one is saying but, rather, that one has the freedom to say it. The widely repeated notion that no space exists within American society to make contrarian arguments is risible. Less frequently heard, in fact, is intellectual assent from academic and intellectual circles to something the government is doing or that America is undertaking.

Consider the following. I was part of a group of 60 academics and intellectuals who, on February 12, 2002, issued a statement, “What We’re Fighting For: A Letter from America,” that outlined what we believe is at stake in the war against terrorism. We were concerned about the fate of five fundamental truths that, we insisted, “pertain to all people without distinction”: that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights; that the basic subject of society is the human person, and the legitimate role of government is to protect and help to foster the conditions for human flourishing; that human beings naturally desire to see the truth about life’s purposes and ultimate ends; that freedom of conscience and religious freedom are inviolable rights of the human person; and that killing in the name of God, or claiming that God has ordered the murder of noncombatants, is the greatest betrayal of faith. We stated that we were fighting to defend ourselves and to defend these principles.

We hoped that our statement would do two things. First, we wanted to demonstrate to our counterparts in other countries that American intellectuals and academics are not uniformly in the opposition where the war effort is concerned. We sought a dialogue with intellectuals in other countries who are ambivalent about or disagree with the American effort. Second, we hoped to offer a conceptual framework within which to assess critically America’s efforts.

The statement was almost completely ignored by the media in America, although we were front-page news in German and French newspapers. In the United States, those who did comment domestically rose up and vocally denounced the statement as a jingoistic pro-war celebration. There are, of course, many reasonable ways to debate these matters, including the argument that the United States, on prudential grounds, should not have committed itself to armed conflict. But to make a false claim about what happened—as, for example, the common claim that the United States “rushed into war” after 9/11—is not a legitimate point of departure for debate.

The same inflammatory rhetoric has been employed throughout the war in Iraq and its aftermath. Once again we hear it said that America is intolerant of political dissent. But if there is something missing from our public discourse, it is not the voices of those who—like Duke University’s Frank Lentricchia—argue that “America is threatened by the most powerful enemy in its history, the administration of George W. Bush.” Those voices are coming through loud and clear. What we hear far too little of is serious reflection on religion. Religion is epiphenomenal to Marxism and its various offshoots still powerfully influential in the academy. Religion is “false consciousness” par excellence. Osama bin Laden’s talk of infidels is thus a quaint rhetorical turn; the “real” reasons for his murderous ideology must lie elsewhere.

With many others, I am convinced that Islamism owes at least as much to the totalitarian movements and ideologies of the 20th century as it does to any version of Islam. But the religious claims are not just a cover for some deeper materialistic imperative. As a result of the suppression of serious discourse about religion in many activist circles, we grow less able to appreciate what is going on in the war on terrorism. Issues of religious liberty, separation of church and state, the possibility that one might have a secular state in a society in which religions flourish, the dignity and status of women—all these matters and more can be seen clearly only if we take religion seriously, on its own terms.

Jean Bethke Elshtain is Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago. This column is adapted from her book, Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World, recently published by Basic Books.