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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.
