The Zinn Reader (72 page)

A rational and human view would balance one ethical principle against others. This cannot be done in the abstract; it can only be done by looking into the factual content of a specific situation. If there is a "right to protest," and a "right to an open campus," there is no way of deciding a conflict between them
on ethical grounds,
without inquiring more closely: who is protesting and how and at what cost to human life and liberty; who is recruiting, and with what consequences for human beings? The one sure way of evading a decision on ethical grounds, and thus saving the job of investigating the facts, is to make the decision on
legal
grounds. This is what Silber has done. This avoidance of ethical issues is expected from policemen, but not from philosophers. To rest on the law, one need not inquire into the history and current behavior of the Marine Corps, into the shattered villages, the burned bodies of the Vietnamese people.

Even inside Silber's legalistic framework, however, empty as it is of human and moral content, there is a troublesome discrepancy. If he is so concerned with "respect for the law," how can he ignore the fact that the Marine Corps is recruiting for an illegal war, a war carried on outside the Constitution by the President and the military, in violation of a halfdozen international treaties signed by the United States? The only difference between the Marines recruiting and Murder, Inc. recruiting (aside from the scale of their violence) is that the lawlessness of the Marines is "legal" in the sense that the authorities, involved themselves in the same crimes, will not prosecute. What hypocrisy there is in the injunction "respect the law!"

When John Silber was asked at a press conference whether he would allow Nazis to recruit on campus, he evaded the issue by talking about the right of Nazis to
speak.
But the distinction between free speech and free action is a very important one. By muddying the distinction, Silber is able to transfer to actions like recruiting for war that immunity from regulation that we all want for free speech. But while there are gray areas between speech and action, recruiting is not in that area: the fact that it is accompanied by speech makes it no more an exercise in free speech than a meeting by corporate heads to fix prices, or the instructions of Captain Medina to move into the hamlet of My Lai.

Freedom of speech should be virtually absolute; this is not because it is not subject to the idea that competing values must be measured against one another for their human consequences, but because in the case of speech the measuring is easy. Free speech is in itself a valuable social good, and it is extremely rare that the exchange of ideas—no matter how wrong or even vicious certain ideas may be—creates such an immediate danger to any person's life or liberty as to warrant regulating it. (The Supreme Court, however, in its patriotic fervor, has often found immediate danger in radicals and pacifists passing out their literature.)

Speech is one thing. Activities which affect the health or liberty or lives of others, including the activities of business organizations and military organizations, are another matter. John Silber has talked much recently about "civilization and barbarism." But is not war the greatest barbarism? Would not a civilization worthy of the name, while absolutely respecting the free exchange of ideas, halt the aggressive violence of the military? Would not a decent university, while maintaining a campus open to all ideas, take a stand for human life against those who have violated it on such a frightful scale (the dead in Vietnam number over a million)?

Those words against the war which John Silber delivered at his inauguration remain empty so long as he does not act against the war when he has an opportunity to do so. How small a gesture, and yet what a lesson in defiance it would be for 15,000 B.U. students, if Silber would say to the Marines: "Do your dirty work elsewhere." Cannot a university president match the courage of the young men who have said to the military: we refuse to be inducted—or the courage of the men in the military who have said: we refuse to kill? Those young people, those Gls, acted illegally, but honorably. If John Silber seeks the safety that legality affords, he can have it, but only at the price of dishonor.

Silber: "...students must be taught...that the real issue is not ideology but respect for law." Is it possible that Silber does not know the chief social function of law has been, in the United States as elsewhere, to maintain the existing structure of privilege and property? Does he not know that the socialization of young people in obedience to law helps keep within the most narrow bounds any attempts to create a truly just society? Does he not know that "the law" cannot be sacred to anyone concerned with moral values, that it is not made by God but by fallible, interest-ridden legislators, and enforced by corrupt prosecutors and judges? Does he not know that the law weighs heaviest on the poor, the black, the social critics, and lightest on the corporate interests, the politically powerful? Does he not know that the police commit assault and battery repeatedly, and the President of the United States is responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of people? Does he not know that the law will never take the biggest lawbreakers to task because they are the ones who control the law, and they will use it instead against anti-war priests and nuns, black militants, and student protesters? Does he not understand that "respect for the law" as a supreme value is one of the chief characteristics of the totalitarian society?

Silber does not talk about the right of civil disobedience. He insists, however, that it stay within the rules laid down by the authorities (of which he is one) when the very spirit of civil disobedience is defiance of authority. He acts surprised when students blocking the Marine recruiters do not walk voluntarily to the police wagons. He seems not to understand that not every advocate of civil disobedience shares his limited definition of it. He invokes Socrates as one who insisted on going along with his own punishment because he felt a basic obligation to Athens. But, in the spirit of free inquiry, we may ask if Socrates was not, in those moments of debate with Crito, absurdly subservient to the power of the state. Should we model ourselves on Socrates (that is, on Plato, who put the words in Socrates' mouth) at his most jingoistic moment, saying about one's country that one must "obey in silence if it orders you to endure flogging or imprisonment, or it sends you to battle to be wounded or to die."

John Silber did not even seem to be embarrassed as he invoked the name of Martin Luther King, claiming that King "emphasized the importance of showing respect for lawfulness at the same time that he refused to abide by a specific law." That is a gross distortion. It is true that King went to jail rather than escaping, but it isn't at all clear that he did this out of any overall respect for "lawfulness" rather than out of tactical and dramatic motives, or simply out of lack of choice. I doubt that King would criticize Angela Davis or Daniel Berrigan, who carried their defiance of authority beyond that point of arrest, who refused to surrender to the government because they believed its activities did not deserve respect. It is true that King urged respect for his opponents and love for all fellow beings, but it is not true that he "emphasized...respect for lawfulness." I knew Martin Luther King, and was with him on occasions of civil disobedience, in Alabama and Georgia, and it is a disservice to his memory to twist his views so as to omit what was by far his chief emphasis: resistance to immoral authority.

Would Martin Luther King have equated the "violence" of sitting on the steps of the Placement Office (so much like the sit-ins of black students in segregated restaurants, which were also disruptive and illegal) with the violence of the government in war? When Silber said after the Placement office event, "We are not going to be intimidated by brute force and brute violence," he showed a shocking absence of that most essential quality of the intelligent, rational person: a sense of proportion. King was against violence, but he did have a sense of proportion. In his last years, he decided that he would not condemn the violence of black uprisings in the ghetto, before taking into account the record of violence by the United States government. Listen to him, speaking at Riverside Church in New York, April 4, 1967:

...I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.

How odd that a man whose own behavior that day at the Placement Office more closely resembled that of Birmingham's Bull Connor—replete with police dogs, hidden photographers, and clubwielding police—should invoke the name of Martin Luther King, who would have been there on the steps with the students.

The idea that one who commits civil disobedience must "willingly" accept punishment is an oft-repeated but fallacious notion. Silber repeatedly confuses "community" and "society" with government. He talks of "refusing to accept the penalties that go with violating the law" as showing "contempt for organized society." No, it is showing contempt for organized government, and that is justified when the government is behaving as badly as this one is. He talks of "the community...arresting and punishing them." It is not the community that arrests and punishes, but the legal authorities. The reason for showing contempt for government, for defying the law, is precisely because government and law show contempt for the lives and liberties of the community.

Silber talks of the "social contract" that we are supposed to have made with our government. Of course the government would like us to believe that such a contract exists, one binding us to obedience of the law and allowing the government to do as it pleases. It is as if Silber has not read, or has forgotten David Hume, back in the eighteenth century, who brought Locke back to earth and history by pointing out: "Almost all the governments which exist at present, or of which there remains any record in history, have been founded originally, either on usurpation or conquest, or both, without any pretense of a fair consent or voluntary subjection of the people." Silber talks as if we have some sort of obligation, based on a voluntary agreement, to obey the leaders who have taken us again and again into war, who have allowed a few to monopolize the enormous wealth of this country. Hume, a conservative but honest man, told it like it is: "Is there anything discoverable in all these events but force and violence? Where is the mutual agreement or voluntary association so much talked of?"

What Silber calls "civilization," what he thinks we have a "social contract" to obey, is the state and its agents. What he calls "barbarism" is the courage of those who resist the state. "It is important that civilization not acquiesce to barbarism...civilization doesn't abdicate before the threat of barbarism; rather it calls the police." When antiwar protestors represent "barbarism" and the Tactical Police represent "civilization," then we certainly need what Confucius suggested, a "rectification of names."

Here is Silber again (at the same press conference reported in the official
Currents,
from which the other quotations in this article are taken):

We had recourse to the police power of the state. Every civilized country in the world has found it necessary to rely on police power to protect itself against the use of force and violence by individual members of that community. When one calls upon the properly designated institution to exercise that force, it can certainly be an expression of civilization.

In Silber's inaugural address, on "The Pollution of Time," he deplored ignorance of history. But does he not know from history that the "civilized" countries have used massive violence against one another (Guernica, Dachau, Coventry, Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Budapest, My Lai) and the most brutal force against movements of protest and resistance inside their borders? Does he not know from history that the "properly designated" institutions have engaged in a thousand times more force and violence than any individuals or any social movement of opposition?

If the word "civilization" can be given some positive moral content, it should mean the attempts of man to create a society in which the violence of war, and persecution by class or race or sex, are resisted and restrained, so that they can be ultimately eliminated. By such a definition, students blocking the recruiting of soldiers to kill Vietnamese peasants truly represent civilization; those who attack them, and those who order the attack, represent barbarism.

Does John Silber—bright, well-read, articulate, energetic—not understand these points about history, about nation-states, about the law, about morality, about war, about social protest? We are always surprised when educated people don't understand simple, clear concepts, but that is because the brightest people strain their perceptions through a mesh of interest, position, role. It didn't matter that McGeorge Bundy was "brilliant" from elementary school throughout graduate school and beyond; his vision was distorted by his position in the Establishment, his closeness to power, and he ended up supporting the most stupid, as well as the most immoral of policies in Vietnam.

Silber came to Boston University with strong ideas about academic "excellence," and enormous drive, determined to make the University "first-rate." But education is not a technological problem; it is more a matter of human relationships and moral concern. Academic excellence, in a context of amorality, does not have much meaning. Mussolini made the trains run on time; but the importance of that petered out on the sands of Ethiopia. Boston University cannot be a place of
moral
excellence, if it is run by a dictatorship, however efficient that dictatorship is.

What would a truly free campus be like? It would give absolute freedom to the exchange of ideas, of all kinds. It would insist on its own freedom from the power of government, of donors and trustees. It would not bow to law and authority; not to the authority of the President of the United States or to the authority of the President of the University. Its academic decisions would be made by faculty and students; staff and maintenance workers would share in decisions about the allocation of the university's money. The president and deans would carry out the decisions, as administrators constantly accountable to faculty, students and staff. The university's courses would be open to anyone, whether they could pay or not.