The Women's Freedom Network Newsletter July/August, 2003;  Volume 10, No. 4. Interview With Jean Bethke Elshtain by WFN Staff

Jean Bethke Elshtain is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago. The author of hundreds of published essays, she was a contributing editor of The New Republic. She has written many books, including Women and War (Basic Books, 1987), Public Man, Private Woman (Princeton University Press, 1981), Democracy on Trial (Basic Books, 1995), and Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy (Basic Books, 2001). Her new book, Just War Against Terror, has been called a "sophisticated primer on political ethics" by critics. In May, WFN hosted an Achievement Award Reception for Elshtain, in recognition of her scholarship and influence on public policy, and to celebrate the publication of her new book. We talked again to Professor Elshtain in July. This article summarizes that interview.

WOMEN'S FREEDOM NETWORK:  In your new book, Just War Against Terror, you make a vigorous argument for more clarity in debates about the war against terrorism and take to task many of your colleagues in academia for the intellectual sloppiness of their response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. What do you think explains the disdain many academics seem to have for their own country and why are they hesitant to label terrorists such as Osama bin Laden and regimes such as Saddam Hussein's evil?

JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN:  I try to explain the disdain of so many intellectuals for their own country in, "The Academy Responds to Terror," Chapter 5 of my new book, in which I note that, at some point in the Cold War era, with Vietnam as a critical turning point, the very idea of the "intellectual" became equated with "dissent" and that "dissent" was often against the government, or "the establishment," including the liberal establishment. For it was liberal policy makers who were the focus of the most bitter attacks of protestors in the 1960's. There is something far less newsworthy, less 'sexy,' about being for something, about affirming rather than negating.

Newer intellectual trends also accentuate the "negation" dimension of intellectual life. I recall giving a talk way back in the early 1980's, or perhaps the late 1970's, in which I discussed some promising trends in political life, some of them spearheaded by women fighting in their communities for better schools, safer streets, and drinking water, and I was told in no uncertain terms that this was a form of "false negativity," in other words, "false consciousness." This means the women I discussed didn't know any better and were deluded enough that they actually believed they were helping to bring about changes for the better.

"There is something far less newsworthy, less 'sexy,' about being for something, about affirming rather than negating."

"False consciousness" is one of the most damaging concepts to come out of Marxist ideology and its effects linger yet, whether the intellectuals in question consider themselves Marxists or not.

One also wants to be fair: many horrible things have been done in the name of patriotism. Identification with one's country must also be scrutinized critically. But to equate the American government, or this administration in particular, to plotters of attacks aimed at killing as many civilians as possible simply because they are "Americans"-- and it doesn't matter if they are male or female, children or elderly-- all are slated for destruction-- to equate that to a response that attempts to minimize civilian casualties even as one fights against unrestrained terror is not only intellectually bankrupt, it is morally bankrupt. As to "evil," that word comes out of a religious lexicon and as such is suspect. Many also seem to think that "evil" is just a label someone applies and that it has no objective meaning, so to speak. Another falsehood, but a very common one.

WFN:  Your thinking on these matters grows out of the tradition of Christian realism and Christian ethics. Many observers have commented on the media's and academia's hostility to religious belief. Even the liberal Protestant publication The Christian Century fretted about President George W. Bush's use of religious language to describe events in Afghanistan and Iraq. "To hear President Bush speak of late you might think he was mounting a pulpit, not a podium," one editorial noted. What are your thoughts on this suspicion of religion?

ELSHTAIN:  Suspicion of religion has venerable roots dating, certainly, from the Enlightenment-- and I'm not calling the Enlightenment the culprit here-- but it was in those centuries designated ones of 'enlightenment' that a bogus split emerged as between "faith" and "reason." Religion was thrown into a bin with superstition, and even childishness-- infantilism. The religious believer was one who didn't have what it takes to be a rational adult. Some religious leaders contributed to this, too, by representing faith as if it were some sort of leap into the darkness, relying on God's grace alone. This is called simple fideism. The dominant strains in Christianity, however, see faith as serving reason-- Augustine's famous credo ut intelligam, "I believe in order to understand," or "Faith seeking understanding." If, to this, you add the notion that emerged and became congealed over time that religious belief was somehow "private" and should not be brought into the "public" arena-- an injunction that, if carried out strictly, would have shut down Martin Luther King Jr. and many other great citizen-activists before they even got started-- it adds up to the reaction, or overreaction, you note. There are fanatics who do what they do in the name of religion, true. But more common by far are the many millions of American citizens whose faith prompts them to serve their neighbor in a variety of ways: in care for the elderly, the poor, the homeless, the distraught, the drug addict, the pregnant, frightened teenager.

There is also just a lot of partisanship going on where President Bush is concerned. Former President Clinton mounted the pulpit all the time. He spoke of evil when the World Trade Center Towers were bombed in 1993 and also after the Oklahoma City disaster. He even asked a group of pastors for forgiveness in a publicly televised prayer breakfast! Where were the protests and negative comments then?

WFN:  Your book also argues for a form of American imperialism that pursues responsible nation-building and justice throughout the world. How well are we pursuing this policy in postwar Iraq?

"If what we are doing in toppling republics of fear, Afghanistan and Iraq, is imperialism, it is, as Michael Ignatieff has put it, the kind of imperialism you get in an era of universal human rights."

ELSHTAIN:  I don't really call for a new "imperialism." I call for America to embrace its responsibility as a super-power. I'm not sure that calling this imperialism is that helpful. As we are talking, Liberia is begging for American soldiers to come in to stop the blood-letting. If we do so, is this imperialism? If so, it sure doesn't look like historic imperialism. We aren't setting up permanent proconsuls, as did Rome. We aren't colonizing, as did Great Britain, and ancient Athens centuries before. If what we are doing in toppling republics of fear, like Taliban Afghanistan and Saddam's Iraq, is imperialism, it is, as Michael Ignatieff has put it, the kind of imperialism you get in an era of universal human rights. But I'm not convinced that imperialism is the best word to use here. I'm struggling with how best to formulate what is going on. I just finished a piece for the journal "Ethics and International Affairs" on this very issue and readers might want to look for it.

WFN:  In the afterward to your book, Public Man, Private Woman, you note the growth of "identity politics" and its unfortunate effect-- that "those who disagree with one's 'politics,' then, become enemies of one's identity. Civility is lost. Citizenship-- a public identity not reducible in the first and last instance to one's biography-- is lost." The "politics of personal destruction" was invoked often in the political culture of the 1990's. Do you think identity politics is here to stay?

ELSHTAIN:  I'm afraid that "identity politics" is here for a long time but, hopefully, not to stay. It leads to civic fragmentation and to an overly personalized approach to politics. It militates against building broad-based coalitions that bring peoples with all sorts of backgrounds-- racial, religious, regional, etc.-- together. It helps to create the politics of personal destruction, in fact, because you aim to destroy a person rather than to argue against an idea-- as identity is pitted against identity. This goes much beyond any reasonable and completely defensible politics of recognition, as it has been called, in which persons who have been left outside standing on the periphery of civic life clamor, rightly, to be let in. Something else identity politics does is to pit 'minorities'-- and almost everyone becomes a minority of one type or another in this sort of world-- against one another. I've seen this happen in some professional organizations of which I am a part in which the African American caucus and the Hispanic-Latino/Latina caucus and so on vied more against one another than they did on anything else.

WFN:  You've offered a related critique of radical feminism's romance with the notion that "the personal is political." In the post-Clinton, post-feminist world, do you think this will remain an effective rallying cry for radical feminists?

ELSHTAIN:  There is something disarmingly seductive and beguiling about "the personal is political." It means we don't have to do anything but think about ourselves and, voila, we are being political. Or we think the political world should respond to every shift in our internal barometer. It makes it more difficult for us to depersonalize a bit, step back and see things from the other fella's (and gal's) point of view. Harder for us to appreciate that not everything is about me, myself, and I, as my Mother liked to say. Of course, political life and personal life intersect and relate in a variety of nuanced ways. But these are complex, not the simplistic identity the slogan suggests. But it will continue to appeal. In an era in which people daily spill their guts on national television, how could it not?

WFN:  You've written about social reformer Jane Addams (1860--1935) and the profound influence her ideas about class, democracy, and women's social responsibilities have had on her own time and ours. Any thoughts on Hillary Rodham Clinton's new memoir?

"I don't have any thoughts on Hillary's memoir, but I believe its function, from what I have read, is not as a testimony to a time and a place so much as a campaign manual"

ELSHTAIN:  Jane Addams's great capacity was to avoid self-pity and to draw attention, always, to the great projects in which she was involved. She was a person of extraordinary integrity who tempered personal ambition with a powerful set of ethical requirements--norms she had internalized. She insisted that the goal wasn't the only thing to focus onthat the way you got there was equally important. You couldn't separate the two. Her classic of American autobiography, Twenty Years at Hull-House, is a classic because the writing beautifully captures an entire, extraordinary, conflict-ridden era in American history when this country became host to an unprecedented-- in the history of the world nothing like this had ever been seen-- flow of millions of immigrants to this new world. I don't have any thoughts on Hillary's memoir, but I believe its function, from what I have read, is not as a testimony to a time and a place so much as a campaign manual cast as a memoir. The book was also ghostwritten, apparently, and went through many hands. So it couldn't possibly present the integrity of the singular vision of a Jane Addams. And I don't believe Mrs. Clinton intends it to. I think she is positioning herself for the future more than she is taking a reflective look at the past. That's her right, of course, but I'm not overly fond of "committee-written" books-- never have been. They read like reports, not like works of literature.