Democracy Matters (23 page)

In our next meeting, Summers was cordial, at ease, and clearly eager to get the matter behind him. We talked movingly about my upcoming surgery (I had cancer at the time) and his courageous experience as a cancer survivor himself. He thanked me for not playing the race card. His major fear in the incident was clearly that he would be pegged as a racist—a charge already leveled at him during his years at the World Bank. I replied that in America the whole deck was full of race cards; I just felt that other issues were also at stake. He said we’d had a mere misunderstanding and apologized—more than once—to me. I replied that he had authorized every xenophobic and conservative or neoliberal newspaper writer in the country to unleash pent-up hostility toward me. And still the media distortions continued.

The next day, a story on the front page of the
New York Times
reported that Summers had not budged an inch, had held his ground against me, and had refused to apologize. I could not believe what I had read and immediately called him and asked him whether he had not in fact apologized—more than once. He said of course he had and that the story had simply gotten it wrong. Unbelievably, I was later to find out that when a contact of mine asked the reporter about the story, and whether Summers had apologized to me, the reporter said that in an interview Summers had strongly insisted that he had not apologized and would never do so. I then knew just what an unprincipled power player I was dealing with. In my next interview I called Summers the Ariel Sharon of American higher education—a bull in a china shop, a bully in a difficult and delicate situation, an arrogant man, and an ineffective leader. Needless to say, more hell broke loose. Charges of anti-Semitism were heard from New York to Tel Aviv—charges I had encountered before, given my support of the Million Man March led by Minister Louis Farrakhan, as well as my staunch opposition with my friend Rabbi Michael Lerner to Sharon’s repressive policies against the Palestinians.

The whole ugly incident reflects the crass level to which the university world has sunk; it has become a competitive, market-driven, backbiting microcosm of the troubles with American business and society at large.

My disappointments were threefold. First, how little interest the Harvard faculty and the press had in waiting to ascertain the truth—
veritas
, the very motto of Harvard—as opposed to relishing
the swarm of rumor and misstatements. University professors are all too aware of what a backbiting world academic life has become, and yet they showed so little concern about academic freedom and respect for a fellow colleague. This attitude is so representative of a spinelessness in the academy that is antithetical to the important role universities should be playing in holding up standards of truth and integrity and working to impart faith in those standards to our youth.

Second, I was amazed at how parochial and personal the issue was perceived to be. It was viewed as a mere local clash of personalities, with the president upholding standards and refusing to give in to an undeserving and greedy professor. What was missed was the larger issue—a debate about the vision of the national university in the age of American empire. A well-established professor—already tenured at Yale, Princeton, and Harvard, with more publications than 95 percent of his colleagues—was told to tame his fire, limit his audience, and do what he was told in the academy by a Harvard president with a technocratic vision and bullying behavior. Universities are meant to be sanctum sanctorums of robust debate, not institutions run by dictatorial mandate. President Summers has every right to his views about affirmative action, Iraq, hip-hop culture, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a living wage for workers at Harvard. And so do I, and I should have had the right to oppose him and insist on reasonable debate without being subjected to slightly veiled threats and overt disrespect. None of these issues about the integrity of academic freedom surfaced in the worldwide frenzy over the incident. Only a subtle article by Sam Tanenhaus in
Vanity Fair
(June 2002) raised these issues.

Third, the delicate dilemma of black-Jewish relations was boiling beneath the surface of our controversy, yet only Rabbi Michael Lerner had the courage to address it. The first Jewish president of Harvard—an institution with its own history of anti-Semitism and racism—not only comes down on a high-profile African American professor but also challenges the merits of the premier Afro-American Studies Department in the world. The tensions between blacks and Jews are so volatile and our national discourse regarding difficult issues is so stunted that thoughtful dialogue is nearly impossible. Now there is little sensitivity to and awareness of the legacy of that tension at the country’s leading university.

The larger message of my sad encounter with President Summers is that it reflects a fundamental clash between the technocratic and the democratic conceptions of intellectual life in America. Summers revealed that he has a great unease about academics engaging the larger culture and society—especially the youths of hip-hop culture and democratic movements of dissent and resistance. My vision of academic engagement embraces his academic standards of excellence yet also revels in overcoming the huge distance between the elite world of the universities, the young people in the hood, and the democratic activists who fight for social change. As one who is deeply committed to the deep democratic tradition in America and to engaging youth culture, I have no intention of cutting back on my academic and outreach activities, because the effort to shatter the sleepwalking of youths who are shut out of the intellectual excitement and opportunity of the academy is such a vital one for our democracy.

It is imperative that young people—of all classes and colors—see
that the older generation in the academy cares about them, that we take them seriously, and that we want to hear what they have to say. We must be relentless in our efforts to connect with youth culture in order to impart hard-won wisdom about life’s difficult journey—and keep our fragile democratic experiment alive in the future.

September 11 was a deeply traumatic event for us. It shattered our illusions of security and invincibility and shocked us about the degree of hatred the terrorists harbored for us. After a brief moment of national unity, disillusionment and division set in. Deep polarization resurfaced with more vengeance as we turned on one another with anger and frustration. The raw debates about Iraq, the Patriotic Act, tax cuts, gay marriage, and the down-and-dirty
presidential election of 2004 have left us feeling almost like two countries, disenchanted and, at times, in downright despair. The pervasive depression and disaffection of youth, the flight of so many adults into mindless escapism to combat loneliness and the lack of a sense of purpose in their lives, and the plunge into frenetic consumerism to offset our restlessness all reveal the fissures in our civic life. Neither a new president (though badly needed) nor a fresh administration will satisfy our democratic longings. The profound dismay with our democracy goes beyond the bounds of the current moment.

In our disillusionment with our politicians and plutocrats—and with our media watchdogs—we have focused on the corruptions of our democratic system and have lost our sense of connection to the vital roles played in any democracy by an enlightened and motivated democratic citizenry, and by the principled coalitions that can so effectively push for democratic change. Democracy is not simply a matter of an electoral system in which citizens get the right to vote and elected officials must compete for the public’s favor (or find ways to manipulate the public into favoring them, or rig the electoral system to limit competition, as is too often the case today in America). All systems set up to enact democracy are subject to corrupt manipulations, and that is why the public commitment to democratic involvement is so vital. Genuine, robust democracy must be brought to life through democratic individuality, democratic community, and democratic society.

In America, we have tended to underplay the crucial role of the foundational motivation of democracy. From the time of that first Athenian democratic experiment in the fifth century BC to the
birth of the American democratic experiment in the eighteenth century, the consolidation of elite power was the primary object of democratic revolt. This will to transform corrupted forms of elite rule into more democratic ways of life is an extraordinary force, though each new democratic result of the exercise of this will falls short of democratic ideals. This is why all democracies are incomplete and unfinished, and this is why American democracy is a work in progress.

We have seen that there are two opposing tendencies in American democracy—toward imperialism and toward democratization—and we are in a period of intense battle between the two. At this moment our imperialist elites are casting themselves as the defenders of our democracy. The Bush administration has subverted the public will in order to lead its war against terrorism in the way it wanted to—attacking Iraq and instituting the dangerous doctrine of preemptive strike rather than focusing on the real terrorist threat. Our business elites have cloaked themselves in the rhetoric of the unfettered free market and of the inevitable juggernaut of corporate globalization, justifying an obscene exacerbation of wealth inequality. It is in the face of such egregious misrepresentations of democracy that the example of the original Greek experiment with democracy—especially the witness of Socrates—is so relevant.

The historic emergence of Athenian democracy and the Greek invention of Socratic dialogue must instruct and inspire our practice of democratic citizenship in present-day America. Athenian democracy was created by the revolt of organized peasants against
the abusive power of oligarchic rulers. These peasants refused to be passive victims in the face of plutocratic policies that redistributed wealth upward—from the vast majority to the privileged few. The Greek conception of democracy elevated abused peasants into active citizens who demanded public accountability of their elected officials. Their democratic calls for land reform and the cancellation of debts to greedy elites produced an unprecedented experiment in self-government.

The move away from the rule of kings evolved gradually in Athens, with a crucial step being the separation of authority between the king and the new office of Archon, which assumed many of the operational responsibilities of the government. That reform may have been enacted as early as 1088 BC. In 594 BC, Solon was elected Archon and he responded to the power of organized independent farmers and wealthy nonnoble peasants by establishing legal reforms that incorporated these excluded Athenians into the highest government body (the council of the Areopagus) and into the juries of new courts. These reforms set in motion ideals of equality—of political and judicial equality—and notions of public life predicated on trust between conflicting classes and groups in Athenian society. As Demosthenes, the greatest public orator of his day, proclaimed regarding this democratizing motivation: