THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH vs. DAVID L. SCHALK

The BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#8, JUNE-AUGUST/2013

David L. Schalk has authored two profound and rigorous works of intellectual history, The Spectrum of Political Engagement and War and the Ivory Tower, and is Kenan Professor of History, emeritus, at Vassar College.

Brotherwise Dispatch - Two of your books deal specifically with questions of intellectual ‘engagement’. Just what does it mean for an intellectual to be ‘engaged’ or ‘committed’?

David L. Schalk - This is a deceptively simple and straightforward question, but in fact it is immensely difficult, controversial, and, I believe, not susceptible to a precise answer, certainly not susceptible to an answer that would satisfy readers who come from varying political positions and from different countries. The matter of definition is crucial also. So much ink, including a bit by yours truly, has been spilled searching for a satisfactory definition of "intellectual," which, we should remember was only invented, first in France, at the end of the 19th century, becoming popular during the Dreyfus Affair.

And "engagement" in its modern sense, referring to political involvement, usually by members of the intellectual class, can be traced back to 1932, again to France, a moment, of course, of intense political conflict and social disruption, not to mention economic crisis, just a few month before Hitler's coming to power across the Rhine.

Sandy Vogelgesang's definition is as good as any, and quite flexible: "Intellectuals are men and women of ideas who explore and challenge the underlying values of society. Theirs is a normative function: to prescribe what ought to be." And intellectuals will become engaged when external conditions in their surrounding society, reflecting those "underlying values," become so skewed, so distorted, so contrary to their ideals, to their vision of a just society, that they make a freely willed decision to descend from their ivory towers into the rough and tumble of socio-political conflict.

This loose definition of "engagement" works for a number of historical moments in the relatively recent past: the Dreyfus Affair in France, 1894-1906; the 1930's, peaking probably at the moment of the Spanish Civil War, "the last great cause," July 1936-March 1939; again in France during the Resistance to the Nazi Occupation, 1940-1944; in France during the Algerian War, 1954-1962; and in the United States during the peak period of our involvement in the Vietnam War, 1964-1973. And then we could examine the relative lack of intellectual engagement during the Iraq War, beginning in 2003. But we would still understand its parameters, and be able to relate them to past cases, had it happened.

But what about now, 2013? The situation is much more murky. Becoming "engaged" may mean something quite different for an intellectual today. Perhaps focusing on one cause, like environmental reform, racial justice, gender equality, to cite three possibilities among many. Or the current intellectual generation may look upon engagement as a lost hope, a utopian dream from the past, so unreasonable and outlandish in the context of our technological modernity, our more and more business-like university system, the crowding out and apparent disappearance of groups like the famous "New York Intellectuals" of the 1940s and 1950s, that we would need to change your question to: "what did it mean for an intellectual to be "engaged" or "committed"?

But I have studied, read, written enough history to know how often the unpredictable emerges, the role of surprise. Conditions may be shifting imperceptibly; even as I write, change may be occurring in unexpected areas, something could trigger a new wave of engagement, new forms of activism, once the move out of the ivory tower has taken place, but still centered in the intellectual's primary responsibility, so beautifully and succinctly articulated by Noam Chomsky in 1967, "to speak the truth and expose lies."

BD - In your book The Spectrum of Political Engagement you mention that “by 1978” intellectual elites in America and in Europe had become “passive”, “totally quiescent” and dominated by a new professionalism more concerned with “uncertainty over career possibilities than political or ideological engagement”. Do you regard that intellectual climate of passivity as a deliberate retreat from progressive responsibility or as an incidental consequence of a changing era? Why?

DLS - This is a brilliantly posed and very difficult question. But then I'm not surprised, knowing the questioner. What I'd like to do is circle around it a bit before attempting an answer.

First, a word about context. We should keep in mind that in 1978 only three years had elapsed since the last helicopter left the American Embassy in Saigon, April 30, 1975, that the Vietnam Syndrome with the strong desire for amnesia that it produced, was very powerful, that Jimmy Carter was President, and that it was before a diversity of crises, including the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afganistan, and that very same year, the hostage taking at the American embassy in Teheran. And later, in the 1980s, there was to be, belated to be sure, but worthwhile nonetheless, somewhat of a resurgence of engagement of American intellectuals and students, apprentice-intellectuals, in protest against Apartheid.

Also, in 1978 the memories of the truly extensive engagement of the 1960s and into the early 1970s, that is documented in my War and the Ivory Tower and many other books on the activism of those years, were still very fresh. Hence the post-1973, and, even more striking, post-1975, passivity may have seemed more shocking to me and others than it did fifteen or twenty years later. When I gave a paper in France in 1999, asking the question, which I shall translate here, "Are Intellectuals a species in the process of disappearing?", none of my auditors found the question strange or misplaced.

Looking back after thirty-one years, I have not abandoned my conviction that individuals in an advanced, relatively free society, not just intellectuals, but all adult individuals who have control of their faculties, who possess a reasonable intelligence and are not mentally ill, are fundamentally free, responsible for their choices and their actions. Hence I do indeed believe, to quote your excellent formulation, that the "intellectual climate of passivity [was] a deliberate retreat from progressive responsibility..." Of course it cannot be, in a real and complex world, completely yes or no, and so to a much lesser degree, very partially, I could accept that in certain conditions intellectual disengagement was and is "an incidental consequence of a changing era."

Now you ask why... Seriously addressing that "why?" could of course become a book, and of the many works on the subject I especially like Russell Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe. I have already given hints of how one might begin to frame a possible answer. One would want to examine, for example, the decline if not disappearance of public intellectuals and the gradual loss of their audience, thus their source of livelihood. One would also look at changes in the structure of academia, the decline in prestige if not the complete marginalization of the professoriate, the impact of new media, the extreme, if not actually violent anti-intellectualism present in many corners of American society. Then one would weigh these and many other factors, which would tend to suppress intellectual engagement, against the relative freedom of the press, against the relative freedom in intellectuals to speak out and to protest, to organize demonstrations and marches, to gamble away a potentially comfortable future, with tenure in the groves of academe, and work in the trenches for social, economic, political justice. It's clear where I stood on this in 1978, and it is where I still stand. I continue to believe, as Noam Chomsky did in his famous 1967 essay, in "The Responsibility of Intellectuals."

BD - You also mentioned and described J.P. Nettl’s contribution in coming to a better understanding of intellectual ‘engagement’. What situation within the university is Nettl referring to when he writes that “mandarins and intellectuals live uneasily together and dislike each other intensely”?

DLS - Again, as I wrote some time ago about an earlier inquiry, this also is an incredible question. You have the ability to "dénicher" as our French friends say, to uncover or unearth, to pull out from a mass of possibilities, a question that is brilliant and demanding.

The first point we need to remember is Nettl's tragic death in a plane crash in October 1968. His superb article, "Ideas, Intellectuals, and Structures of Dissent", was posthumously published in 1970 in the book On Intellectuals edited by Philip Rieff. One can only guess how Nettl would have responded to changes in the structure of academic and cultural life in the U. S. and Europe after such a dramatic year. It is worth noting in passing that a number of wise individuals of my acquaintance, whether intellectuals or mandarins, have impressed upon me their belief that 1968 was the traumatic year that American society came closest to falling apart, exploding if you will, at least since the Civil War, if not in our entire national history.

Going back and re-reading Nettl's article I am struck again by his brilliance and his prescience, and his gift for the pregnant phrase, as in insisting that the true intellectual seeks to "structure himself in a crevice of disagreement," and may find himself ( I am sure that by the mid-1970s he would have added "or herself”), "sliding helplessly down a glass-smooth surface, crying but not gripping." And I still agree with his 1968 view that solitary dissent is not adequate, dissenters need a "suitable social structure to fulfill the role of intellectuals..."

And I still agree, if regretfully, with Nettl's conclusion that "for therapeutic reasons, if nothing else, personal dissent, however socially ineffective and unstructured, is better than none." Actually, since the core of his essay was probably drafted before the truly intense and to some degree mass intellectual engagement of 1968-1970, Nettl by the end of 1968 might have become a little more hopeful that a "suitable social structure" was emerging around Resist and other antiwar organizations. But then of course when things calmed down after 1973, with the large-scale return of intellectuals to the ivory tower, and especially after April 30, 1975, and the formal end of the Vietnam War, his views regain relevance.

Actually, I have been, perhaps artfully, evading the focus of your question, which is to describe the situation within the university per se. I found the passage you cite above from Nettl amazingly perceptive. Certainly I intuitively sensed something similar going on in the localized university environs I was involved in during the Vietnam war era. [Mostly M. I. T. between 1963 and 1968, and Vassar after 1968, but I had close contacts with a number of institutions, including a large public university (Iowa) plus Tufts, and Mount Holyoke.] I truly believe that an "intense dislike", a kind of intuited visceral antipathy, between mandarins and intellectuals, was present in the universities from about 1966-1973. But it eased and faded with the general decline of engagement, and also socio-economic changes, the huge surplus of Ph.D.'s in the 1970s for example, that inevitably had a dampening effect, and the general decline in prestige and influence of academics and intellectuals, which if I am right began in the 1970s and continues today.

Obviously, and I'm sure he would have admitted this, Nettl was constructing ideal types, and I expect that he would admitted that many mandarins and many college deans and presidents, whom I would lump together in this context, had a bit of the intellectual in them, and vice versa. Hence Alan Simpson, the President of Vassar (who was ardently opposed on many issues by many faculty who might have earned the sobriquet of "intellectual", myself included), despite the fact that he had been an officer in the British army, came out strongly against the Vietnam war. Alan Simpson joined, to his great credit, in at least one peace march. I know that he also addressed the entire Vassar community, gathered in the chapel, and said "this war must come to an end." I am quoting him from memory after 40 years, but I'll swear I am close to verbatim.

BD - Your book War and the Ivory Tower covered intellectual ‘engagement’ in France during the Algerian war, and America during the Vietnam war, describe and define what you observed as actual ‘cycles of engagement’ in each war?

DLS - Your first question addressed the issue of what does (or did) it mean for an intellectual to be “engaged” or “committed”. This one asks me to take a look back at the specific cases of intellectual engagement I discussed in War and the Ivory Tower, first published in 1991, reprinted in 2005 with new prefaces and introduction. The brutal and long-lasting wars in question, separated by a decade (1954-1962 for the Algerian War of Independence from France, 1964-1973 for the direct American military involvement in Vietnam), both elicited intense reactions from the intellectual classes in the home countries.

I wanted to know whether there were similarities in actions taken against the two wars, especially on the part of engaged intellectuals, and whether the Americans drew any lessons of value from the French experience. My research led me to conceive of these two cases of intellectual engagement in terms of varieties, then as patterns, and finally as cycles - cycles that were remarkably similar, if not identical.

The view of history as cyclical goes back a long way, at least to the great Italian Giovanni Batista Vico (1668-1744). My own training and thinking had always been linear and progressivist, and it was difficult to accept what I was discovering, but the evidence, at least for the period from 1954-1973, is very strong, even if it should prove true that the sequence of cycles has now ended and that we are in a period of steady disengagement for the foreseeable future.

During Algeria and Vietnam, the cycles operated in the following manner: once the move out of the ivory tower began, there were three stages, or levels, each of which can be quite precisely delineated. The first was composed of calm, rational, frequently scholarly presentations, in an effort to persuade the leaders of the governments in question of the errors of their ways. I called this stage “pedagogic”. Under the pressure of events, it was transformed gradually into a second stage, which I term simply the “moral”: a condition of outrage, distress, shame, and a sentiment of confusion and impasse - and uncertainty as to the form that engagement must now adopt.

By the third year of full-scale American military involvement in Vietnam - 1966 - a large percentage of the American intelligentsia had moved to the second level, as had their French compatriots in response to the Algerian situation, exactly a decade earlier.

The third level of engagement, which I term “counter-legal” in my book, was reached in France in 1957 and in America in 1967. It led in both cases to an invocation of the precedents established by the Nuremberg Trials, and the personal acceptance and public advocacy of a variety of “illegal” (in the eyes of the governments in question but not in the eyes of the intellectual activists) means in an effort to end wars which many had come to view as leading fatally to genocide.

In both countries there was a wide range within the spectrum of “counter-legal” activities. There were bitter and sometimes even vicious debates between those who insisted upon a non-violent approach, such as pouring blood on draft files or burning them with home-made napalm, and those who accepted violence and even aid to forces which were de facto enemies of France and the United States, if not de jure, since it is important to remember that both wars were never formally declared. It took a vote in the French Chamber of Deputies and Senate, followed by the signature of President Jacques Chirac, for the Algerian conflict to be officially recognized as a war. The vote was in 1999, 37 years after the signing of the Evian ceasefire accords in March 1962.

Finally, the cycles draw to a close, and at the end of both wars we observe a rapid return to what appears to be the ordinary life of academics, if not all intellectuals - the calm and comfort of the ivory tower.

After 1991, In several publications and lectures, including the new introduction to the 2005 edition of War and the Ivory Tower, I have circled back to the question of whether we really have reached the end of engagement, even the end of the intellectual class as it has been understood and defined at least since 1898. The last time I tried to address this question, which had been nagging me for a long time, so that I would not let go of it nor it of me, was in a lecture given in French in Algiers in 2009. The audience very much accepted the notion that there were indeed cycles of engagement in the earlier cases, but pushed me courteously but very hard to explain why the cycle had not resumed after the Iraq war in 2003, why the American intelligentsia never went beyond the pedagogic stage, with some movement toward the moral level, after the disclosures in the spring of 2004, of the tortures committed by American forces in the Abu Ghraib prison.

This question takes us beyond what Brotherwise asked me to address. I will note simply that I managed to conclude my last public lecture, in Algiers, March 2009, as follows, translating from the French:

… I think that the silence of the American intellectuals between 2003 and 2008 (except for the historians, who were somewhat more active, forming the group “Historians against the War,”) their lack of any sustained engagement against the war in Iraq, was the result of a particular mixture, and without historical precedent (thus difficult to get a grip on, to understand), of historical, diplomatic, economic, political and social factors. This silence is not, in my judgment, the result of a structural change, of a profound alteration in the essence of intellectuals, of their intimate nature. Nor is it a total abandon of the role of national conscience, which this class has sometimes assumed in several countries, since the Dreyfus Affair, or even earlier. In 2009, I would still claim that there is something in the very nature of our work, of the subjects we examine, in our manner of thinking and dealing with ideas, in the sociability of the lives that we lead, that continues to prevent us from becoming completely submissive, ready to accept the yoke offered us by those who govern. And one could still affirm today, as the eminent sociologist Edward Shils claimed in 1958, that there will always be “a tension between the intellectuals and the powers.”

BD - After either forgetting, repressing, dismissing or ignoring the memory of the torture many French citizens endured during WWII under the Nazi occupation, French authorities, both civil and military, endorsed tactically, if not explicitly, the use of torture in France’s colonial war against Algeria.

How did the Algerian war in general, and the situation of Henri Alleg and his book The Question, in particular as it relates to torture, reveal the inherent limitations of Camus’ intellectual ‘engagement’ as a “colonizer of goodwill”?

DLS - This question once again poses immense difficulties to the respondent, and any attempt to answer it has to be tentative, because Albert Camus died in an automobile crash in January 1960, two years and three months before the end of the Algerian War. We can at best make educated guesses as to what he would have said and done after the signing of the Evian Accords in March 1962, had he taken the train back to Paris instead of accepting a ride with his friend and publisher. (An unused ticket was found in his pocket.) Would the side of his nature which can fairly be termed “unrepentant neo-colonialist,” have come to the fore, or would his powerful humanity, his unremitting struggle against the death penalty, his personal revulsion against torture, have predominated? We’ll never know.

And it is important to remember that since 1958 Camus had been silent, refusing to speak out in public on issues, controversies, and debates pertaining to the terrible struggle ravaging the land of his birth. Hence in fact he was dis-engaged for the last 18 months of his life. True, one can follow Paul Nizan and argue that abstention is a form of choice, but this leads us in other directions.

Still, there a couple of key points that can be made with a fair degree of certainty, because we have some excellent historical documentation. I review this material in War and the Ivory Tower and update it in a 2004 article entitled “Was Algeria Camus’s Fall?” My fundamental argument was that Camus, for all his nobility and brilliance and courage, was the wrong model for American antiwar activists during the Vietnam era, who had drawn upon him extensively as an inspiration for their own engagement. That argument was based on a careful review of his own positions and activities, as elucidated in his journalism and essays, in response to the brutal and bloody struggle that had been devastating the land of his birth since the first outbreak of violence in the countryside on November 1, 1954.

I also made a close examination of two cases where Camus refused engagement, when I believed, and still believe in 2013, he should have done so, to remain faithful to the principles articulated so beautifully in his often-cited Nobel Prize address of December 10, 1957,

The writer's function is not without arduous duties. By definition, he cannot serve today those who make history; he must serve those who are subject to it.

Whatever our personal frailties may be, the nobility of our calling will always be rooted in two commitments [deux engagements in the French original] difficult to observe: refusal to lie about what we know and resistance to oppression.

The first episode occurred just eight days before Camus delivered that speech, and five days before he left Paris for Stockholm. This was the unprecedented defense of Maurice Audin's doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne in absentia, and we now know posthumous. Audin, a young mathematician on the faculty of the University of Algiers, and a member of the Algerian Communist Party, as Camus himself had been from 1935 to 1937, was arrested by the paratroopers in Algiers on June 11, 1957, and disappeared forever. It was later revealed that after enduring severe torture Audin was accidentally murdered by an enraged officer. A false escape was staged and he was secretly buried.

More than a thousand people, crowded into and outside an amphitheater that could seat only one-third that number, attended the ceremony. It was an unforgettable if fleeting moment in the history of French education and the history of engagement, when in the words of the historian Jean-Pierre Rioux, a revitalized “spirit of resistance that would have been shared by a Bernard Lazare, a Zola, and a Péguy”, was present in the appeal to conscience and law. There was nothing to prevent Camus, who lived close by, from lending the immense prestige he had just gained by having been awarded the Nobel Prize, and appearing at an event that spoke eloquently in support of the goals articulated in his Nobel Prize address. But the only Nobel laureate in the audience was the Catholic François Mauriac.

There is a second, better-known, example of Camus's refusal to make an engagement that seems patently appropriate following his own guidelines. In his famous December 13, 1957 interview, given in Stockholm three days after he was awarded the Nobel Prize, Camus affirmed that despite regrettable press censorship in Algeria, there was a “total and consoling liberty of the mainland press”. Yet when that statement was confounded four months later, when he knew incontrovertibly that it was fallacious, he did not act upon that knowledge, he did not make a public refusal “to lie about what we know”, which would automatically have also been “resistance to oppression”.

In April 1958 he declined to join François Mauriac, Jean-Paul Sartre, André Malraux, and his good friend and fellow Nobel Laureate Roger Martin du Gard, in signing a “Solemn Address to the President of the Republic”, protesting the seizure, ordered and carried out in Paris and throughout mainland France by the government of the Fourth Republic, of La Question, Henri Alleg's painful and gripping account of the torture by French paratroopers he endured in 1957. Camus wrote a private letter to Jérôme Lindon, the publisher of La Question, stating that though “the objective was valid,” he had decided not to associate himself with any further public campaigns. This silence speaks very loudly.

Monsieur Alleg’s great work, which retains its power and its prescience today, was reprinted in 2006 in English in a paperback edition, with a new Afterword by the author, who until stricken by illness at the age of 91, was still actively campaigning for peace, justice and freedom, and of course, against torture, wherever practiced. Indeed he mentions Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo Bay in his 2006 Afterword.

I’d like to think that had Camus taken the train in January 1960, he would in 1962 have returned to his birthplace, fully accepting Algerian independence, and joined with Henri Alleg in co-editing Alger Républicain. It would have been a powerful example of historical justice, and given Camus’s immense literary and journalistic talent, what a great newspaper would have been published until 1965, after a military coup, in a terrible stroke of historical irony, it was banned yet again! That notion is not as naïve as it sounds. Camus had worked on the newspaper as a young journalist in 1937.

Alger Républicain was edited by Henri Alleg when it was shut down by the colonial authorities in 1955, which set in motion a series of events leading to his arrest in June 1957, and he was tortured for a month by the elite French paratroopers, who “won” the Battle of Algiers. He survived, miraculously, was sent to a regular prison, where his lawyer smuggled out on tiny pieces of paper the handwritten text of what became The Question. Eventually Henri Alleg escaped from prison in 1961, and in 1962 was welcomed back to Algeria by the leaders of the newly independent nation, and for three years resumed his post of editor of Alger Républicain

.

But no one can know, and it is just as possible that Camus would have refused to return to the land of his birth, would have remained in France, living comfortably off his royalties - his works have sold millions of copies in French alone. That he would have become angry bitter, and hostile, at best an unrepentant “colonist of good will,” to use the term first coined by the Franco-Moroccan journalist Albert Memmi.

I would rather give the last word to Henri Alleg, who has dedicated his long life to working toward the arrival of a world where there will be no need to reprint his great work, no need (and the need is crying!) to produce on the American stage a translated version of the hauntingly evocative play based on it, which had a very successful run in Paris in 2007. In such a world The Question would take its rightful place as a major historical artifact, instead of an immensely compelling reminder that torture, the ultimate human degradation, is still practiced in this Imperial Republic. Henri Alleg concluded his 2006 Afterword by reminding us that “… it is always useful for those who retain a belief in peace, and a hope for a better future, not to forget the lessons of the past, even when they are painful to contemplate.”

This has been another one of our BROTHERWISE FIVE interview series, during which The BROTHERWISE DISPATCH interrogates intellectuals, artists and activists with five probing questions to the delight of our readers.

On behalf of David L. Schalk and The BROTHERWISE DISPATCH,

Peace.

-A. Shahid Stover

(this interview of David L. Schalk for The BROTHERWISE DISPATCH was conducted by A. Shahid Stover through email correspondence from April 1st – June 11th of 2013)