Democratic Individuality
Why do pre-schoolers have more academic freedom than Harvard students?
I am an activist against “’white’ supremacy” and misogyny, starting in the Freedom and anti-Vietnam War movements of the 1960s and 70s, and extending, last spring, to speaking twice to the heroic multiracial encampment at my school about the depravity of the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Yet the corporate media “whites out” protesting Jews like me as well as many of the students. Instead, a lying government/corporate placard “the Israel-Hamas War” descended abruptly over tv broadcasts after the Hamas crimes – the killing and kidnapping of civilians – on October 7 and now 11 months later – a minimum of 40,000 dead Palestinians including 16,000 children, Gaza and the West Bank ravaged, aggressive military actions in Lebanon and unheard of assassinations of leaders who might negotiate a ceasefire - remains farcically in place. This is an Israeli murderousness many times the criminality of October 7th with the stated intent by leaders to destroy domestically – wipe from memory - “the Amalekites.” It is armed and cease-fire negotiations blocked from October 9th on by the United States. I salute Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, and others like Lily Greenberg Call who have stood up for decency – Not in Our Name - and join the people of the world, led by South Africa and now the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, to indict Israeli brutality.
Between 2009 and 2018, I published democratic individuality, a blog named for my book Democratic Individuality (Cambridge, 1990). In a situation where American decency and democracy hang in the balance, with the potential for a broad renewal under Kamala Harris and Tim Walz (sadly undermined so far by her failure to break from Biden’s criminal arming of the genocide) and in solidarity with the people of Gaza and with the students and faculty who bravely supported them this past spring and again now, I am renewing these essays and poems.
“Chalk of the Town: Professors Colorfully Protest Harvard’s New Campus Use Rules”
Harvard Crimson, September 2, 2024
Five Harvard professors wrote messages in chalk in Harvard Yard Tuesday in protest of the University's restrictions on the use of campus spaces. By Julian J. Giordano
Why do pre-schoolers, the chalkers ask, have more academic freedom than Harvard students?
I will publish about 8 times a month. As you will see from my first posts on the boomerang of US support for Israeli fascism toward the Palestinians back into the United States in the name of a fantasized “danger of Iran” and the brutalization of nonviolent American students from Columbia to UCLA to Harvard protesting the genocide, my writing learns profoundly from others, but mostly arises from democratic activism from below and philosophical – I admire Sokrates - and historical questioning. I ask today: in a democracy, aren’t students and professors supposed to think for themselves, question, even engage in nonviolent protest against the powerful?
I was a national leader of the lengthy campaign – several years - against ROTC in SDS at Harvard – outlined a democratic strategy for this movement in New Left Notes and The Old Mole – and will, in an early post, spell out parallels with the current campaign for divestment. In contrast, the powers-that-be often haul out police against peaceful demonstrators – at the University of Michigan already this week… - and Trustees dismiss menacingly the “impossibility” of student demands (except for the President of Wesleyan, most authorities are not “into” free and honorable discussion…). But in fact, the anti-ROTC campaign nationally, inspired by the Harvard strike and coupled with later protests by gay and lesbian students, resulted in the banning of officer recruitment for anti-democratic US military interventions at Harvard – most such aggressions, unfortunately, save for Obama taking out Bin Laden and recently, Biden’s aid to Ukraine - until 2011. The campaign against ROTC broadly parallels the student demand for University divestment from longstanding Israeli oppression and today genocide in the West Bank and Gaza and several posts will illuminate the power of long-term resistance.
More broadly, my book Democratic Individuality advanced an historically based moral argument about a decent life for humans, marked by discoveries about a free and cooperative life for individuals as represented especially by most Indigenous communities, the Greek democracies which, also, however exploited slaves and women and those dominated by their empires, and the long struggle to see that that life and conscience of each of us, immigrant as well as citizen, deserves protection and the opportunity to thrive. At its best, that would be in an ideal democratic regime, based on the equal basic or human rights of each person, or the participatory regimes of many tribal nations.
Kamala’s campaign has this promise. But as Biden’s arming of and bizarre diplomatic protection of Israeli genocide in Gaza as well as the corporate US and European media’s utter devaluing of the humanity of each Palestinian child highlights, it is a long way up from here…
In academia, it is widely though falsely believed that ethical values are relative and none – even the prohibition of murder or rape… - is superior to the opposite. That holds among many in philosophy and in social science which espouses a putative “value-freedom.” Hilary Putnam and Amartya Sen have also long argued against this…
Now avoiding bias is important. But we only know bias because we know things that are true. It is true that the United States was a “Protestant” “’white’ supremacist” and misogynist regime built on genocide against Indigenous Americans and bondage for Blacks; that the US waged aggression against and seized half of Mexico, as Thoreau and Lincoln underlined in protest, and that the elite treated all Catholic and Jewish immigrants as “inferiors.” It is also true that many fought these oppressions from below.
Further, seeking the truth is a value. Does value-freedom mean that ideology – what most bosses like Schultz at Starbucks mouth - is as good as the truth about working conditions? That plagiarism is as justified as doing your own work…?
Moral relativism, as I show in the book, at its best, hopes to avoid ethnocentrism, but becomes self-refuting (if someone exclaims “I do not exist,” not as a joke…); it then alleges that the misogynist bigotry of Hitler, Putin and the KKK is of “equal epistemological value” with respect for each person, and assumes – without argument - that no one can give a rational and evidence-based argument to the contrary. If one can listen to Trump or Vance (“childless cat ladies,“ “21 gun-toting grandmas”) and believe this – a murderous revulsion against decency and the future – good luck…
As a political philosopher/activist, this substack will provide essays with a different and liberating perspective against corrupt corporate media discourse. In addition, I write poems, and the substack will, again, contain roughly 8 entries per month. People can receive and share the essays freely, but if you want to support this effort, please subscribe for $7 per month (or $70 per year).
Subscribers get to join the discussion – possibly including occasional zoom calls - as well as access to essays on the history of “’white’ supremacist” misogyny and the surprising resistance to it. These are part of a long book draft with startling photographs on Murderous Bigotries: “’white’ supremacist misogyny and resistance focused on the history of the University of Denver and Colorado from the Sand Creek Massacre at its founding through the rule of the KKK in the 1920s – every state office-holder and the police… – and the teaching of “eugenics” by at least 6 of 21 Liberal Arts faculty at the University into the 1940s - mirrored in the rise of fascism and “’white’ supremacist” and misogynist violence now…
A similar story could be told historically of any institution or city in the United States, Germany, England or France – what happened in Colorado spreads or interlocks widely. For instance, American states sterilized or castrated a minimum of 60,000 “defectives” before their widely admired Hitlerite successors surpassed them…
This story also probes the - I must say shocking even in this context! - American and European skull collecting post-mass murder of Indigenous and colonized peoples by nearly all Museums, the return of skullsfor burial barely beginning as of late 2022…Last year, Pro Publica and the Washington Post both did fine investigations of genocide in the American “West.” But the story has greater depth and international scope. I salute the Zimbabwean movement in London: Bring Back our Bones! and have written a draft of a separate book entitled Skull Collecting, Genocide and the Delusions of “’white’ supremacy”: the Smithsonian, Paris, London, Strasburg, Chicago, Berkeley and Denver. I welcome conversation, thoughts and advice…
As you will see from the first posts, however, discussions will range over many current crises of democracy with questions/insights about their historic background and the actual issues raised by them.
I welcome students and will discuss a lower rate if you need this. I respond to student emails, including on the substack and you can reach me at Alan.Gilbert@du.edu.
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I am also the author of Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War of Independence (University of Chicago Press, 2012), cited at the Smithsonian Museum of African-American History as one of 5 books or essays to read about the centrality of Black soldiering in the American Revolution, and on a list, by Daily History of the 10 best books about the Revolution
Plato’s Severed Lovers: Alkibiades and Sokrates, Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard, Washington and Athens, 2022, https://chs.harvard.edu/read/platos-severed-lovers-alkibiades-and-sokrates/
Must Global Politics Constrain Democracy? Princeton University Press, 1999
and Marx’s Politics: Communists and Citizens, Rutgers and Martin Robertson, 1981, pb. Lynne Rienner, 1981.