Fair Use Blog

Here’s the rules:

1. Pick a quote of one or more paragraphs from something you’ve read, in print, over the course of the past week. (It should be something you’ve actually read, and not something that you’ve read a page of just in order to be able to post your favorite quote.)

2. Avoid commentary above and beyond a couple sentences, more as context-setting or a sort of caption for the text than as a discussion.

3. Quoting a passage doesn’t entail endorsement of what’s said in it. You may agree or you may not. Whether you do isn’t really the point of the exercise anyway.

Here’s the quote. This is from Henry Mayer’s masterful biography, All On Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery. I was re-reading it recently because of an interesting debate over the Ron Paul campaign on LeftLibertarian2, in particular some interesting comments by Brad Spangler, who has been beating the anti-electioneering drum for some time, to the effect that he thought support for Ron Paul represented progress in people who would be otherwise be state liberals or state conservatives, but that the real shame was when radical libertarians, who ought to know better got sucked in to the same constitutional-statist song and dance.

Garrison agreed with [Abby Kelley and Stephen Foster] that the allure of the presidential campaign threatened the movement’s identity. Abolitionists should not bow down to the house of Rimmon, alluding to the parable (2 Kings 5:18) illustrating the dangers of false worship and conformity with outmoded rituals and reprehensible customs. The first duty of abolitionists, he concluded, was to avoid becoming Republicans. To the Fosters’ intense annoyance, however, he argued that the amount of conscience in the party and the sectional basis of its opposition to the slave power made it a political entity that the movement had to take seriously. Kelley conceded that the party may be the work of our hands, but she insisted that such progeny, like other children, required a great deal of reproof to bring it up in the way it should go. Garrison agreed, but sweetly added that, as in child-rearing, it was important to praise the party when it tried to do good work, as it had on the issue of nonextension.

That Garrison accorded the Republicans a measure of respect he had never conceded to the Liberty Party remnant should come as no surprise. He always had more interest in politicians who lifted themselves toward an acknowledgment of moral principles than he had in moralists who lowered themselves into partisan activities. For the Republicans to support and elect candidates willing to condemn slavery as wrong would be productive agitation, for it created something where nothing had previously existed. For Gerrit Smith to advance himself as a presidential candidate was ludicrous, in Garrison’s view, for he had no practical organization and demeaned himself in the futile process of making one. For Frederick Douglass to make persistent attacks on Garrisonian abolition as passé—as a phase of moral education through which the movement had inevitably traveled en route to more enlightened forms of practical agitation—was more than a continuation of their personal feud; it was the old Liberty Party idea that a token candidacy offered a greater opportunity for moral agitation than did the prophetic apostleship of Garrison. While the Republican nonextensionist approach had the virtue of exposing the constitutional compromises that prevented abolition, moreover, the Smithites continued to dwell, Garrison believed, in the realm of constitutional fantasy. They tried to claim the Framers as architects of an antislavery politics and advanced all sorts of schemes—a congressional repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law, a reconstruction of the federal judiciary through the appointment of antislavery judges, the fixing of a date certain for abolition in the states and federal control of states in default—that had no chance of peaceably breaking the national political deadlock and, far from saving the Union, would make a military confrontation inevitable. Theirs was an oblique disunionism that masked itself behind the facade of constitutional interpretation. For Garrison the special work of abolition lay not in adopting the model of politics, but in creating a redemptive vision. We see what our fathers did not see; we know that they did not know.

Powerful organizations never espouse great reforms, the editor told a December 1855 meeting called to celebrate the desegregation of Boston’s public schools after a decade-long struggle by abolitionists of both races. Social reform, he said, begins in the heart of a solitary individual and grows strong among humble men and humble women [who], unknown to the community, without means, without power, without station, but perceiving the thing to be done … and having faith in the triumph of what is just and true, engage in the work…. He always regarded the abolitionists as a saving remnant who would create the preconditions for reform. Theodore Parker compared such non-political reformers either to the windlass that raises the anchor while the politicians haul in the slack or to the spinners and weavers who make the material from which politicians cut their clothes, but Garrison found the humblest metaphor of all in the baking of bread. By and by, he said with the apostle Paul, the little leaven leavens the whole lump … [and] this is the way the world is to be redeemed (1 Cor. 5:6). The most popular metaphor for the progress of reform in the 1850s, however, drew from both mechanics and nature. The world moves, people said, having found a shorthand way of remarking social change that evoked at once the lever of Archimedes and the stubborn faith of Galileo that the earth itself revolved in obedience to higher laws.

—Henry Mayer (1998), All On Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery, pp. 456-457.

Here’s the rules:

1. Pick a quote of one or more paragraphs from something you’ve read, in print, over the course of the past week. (It should be something you’ve actually read, and not something that you’ve read a page of just in order to be able to post your favorite quote.)

2. Avoid commentary above and beyond a couple sentences, more as context-setting or a sort of caption for the text than as a discussion.

3. Quoting a passage doesn’t entail endorsement of what’s said in it. You may agree or you may not. Whether you do isn’t really the point of the exercise anyway.

Here’s the quote. This is from Yael Tamir’s essay, Siding with the Underdogs, in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, an anthology based on the title essay by Susan Moller Okin.

Why do group rights serve best the interests of those members of society who are powerful and conservative? To begin with, the notion of group rights as it is often used in the current debate presupposes that the group is a unified agent. Rights are bestowed upon the group in order to preserve its tradition and defend its interests. Identifying the tradition and the interests of the group becomes a precondition for realizing these rights. Consequently, internal schisms and disagreements are perceived as a threat to the ability of the group to protect its rights. Group leaders are therefore motivated to foster unanimity, or at least an appearance of unanimity, even at the cost of internal oppression.

Attempts to achieve unanimity are particularly dangerous in those communities which lack formal, democratic decision-making processes. Under such circumstances it is the elderly of the tribe, members of councils of sages, who determine the groups’ norms and interests. Members of such bodies are commonly men, who endorse a rather orthodox point of view. Social norms and institutions place these individuals within a dominant position, and group rights consolidate this position even further. Granting nondemocratic communities group rights thus amounts to siding with the privileged and the powerful against those who are powerless, oppressed, and marginalized, with the traditionalists (often even the reactionary) against the nonconformists, the reformers, and the dissenters.

The conservative nature of group rights is reinforced by the justifications adduced in their defense. The group is granted rights in order to preserve its culture, language, tradition. These are described, by most defenders of group rights, in nostalgic, nonrealistic terms. They are depicted as authentic, unique, even natural. Those who attempt to consolidate the conservative way of doing things are therefore portrayed as loyal defenders of the group, those who strive for social transformation and cultural reformers are perceived as agents of assimilation who betray the group and its tradition. The former are depicted as virtuous individuals who dedicate themselves to the common good; the latter are suspected of being motivated by narrow self-interest—of giving priority to short-term preferences for personal comfort and prosperity over long-term commitments to the welfare of the community.

Agents of social and cultural change are portrayed as feeble-minded individuals who are tempted by the material affluence of the surrounding society, as those who sell their soul to an external devil in exchange for some glittering beads. It therefore seems legitimate to criticize, scorn, even persecute them. This is the fate of Reform Jews who are often portrayed by the Orthodox establishment as irresponsible, weak-minded, pleasure-seeking individuals who wish to escape the burden of Judaism in order to adopt a less demanding lifestyle. Reform Jews, Orthodox argue, are swayed by the external (and superficial) beauty of Christian architecture and ceremonies. The reforms they offer are seen as grounded in mimicry, as an attempt to be like the Gentiles rather than as a call to reevaluate Judaism and offer ways in which it can answer the needs and challenges of modernity. Reform Judaism is therefore portrayed as a threat to the survival of Judaism rather than as an attempt to save it.

The use of the term survival in the context of the debate over group rights is common, yet alarming. It misdescribes what is at stake, intensifying the cost of change and fostering the belief that any violation of social and religious norms, any reform of traditional institutions and the group’s customary ways of life, endangers its existence and must therefore be rejected.

Moreover, it intentionally obscures the distinction between two kinds of communal destruction: the first results from external pressures exhorted by nonmembers; the second, from the desire of members of the community. It is clear why we ought to protect a community and its members in cases of the first kind, but should we protect a community also against the preferences of its own members? Is it just, or desirable, to allow those who aspire to preserve the communal tradition—often members of the dominant and privileged elite—to force others who have grown indifferent or even hostile to this tradition to adhere to that tradition?

Obviously, defenders of group rights who use the term survival to denote cultural continuity tend to give priority to this end over and above individual rights. Charles Taylor’s discussion of the Canadian case demonstrates this order of priorities: It is axiomatic for the Quebec government that the survival and flourishing of French culture in Quebec is a good …. It is not just a matter of having the French language available for those who might choose it …. Policies aimed at survival actively seek to create members of the community, for instance, in their assuring that future generations continue to identify as French speakers.

It should be clear by now that in the Canadian case, as well as in the debate between Orthodox and Reform Judaism, the term survival refers not to the actual survival of the community or its members but to the survival of the traditional way of life. It is used to justify the taking of extreme measures, including disregard for individual rights and forceful suspension of internal criticism, for the sake of preventing change. But is there a reason to prevent a particular way of life from undergoing change? Should one protect a community against cultural revisions or reforms, even radical ones, if these are accepted by its members? The answer to the above question depends on the motivations one may have for protecting cultures or traditions.

An approach that is grounded in the right of individuals to pursue their lives the way they see fit must support individuals who wish to reform their tradition and change their lifestyle as much as it ought to support individuals who wish to retain their traditional way of life. It must be attentive to the kind of life plans individuals adopt and pursue, without prejuding in favor of conservative options. It should therefore defend individuals against pressures to conform and protect their choices to reform their tradition or even exit the community altogether. The opposite is true for an approach that is motivated by the desire to defend endangered cultures. Such an approach must favor conservative forces over reformist ones, even at the price of harming some individual interests. Obviously multiculturalism that is grounded in the former approach is friendly to feminism, while that which is grounded in the latter is not.

—Yael Tamir (1999), Siding with the Underdogs, in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?

Here’s the rules:

1. Pick a quote of one or more paragraphs from something you’ve read, in print, over the course of the past week. (It should be something you’ve actually read, and not something that you’ve read a page of just in order to be able to post your favorite quote.)

2. Avoid commentary above and beyond a couple sentences, more as context-setting or a sort of caption for the text than as a discussion.

3. Quoting a passage doesn’t entail endorsement of what’s said in it. You may agree or you may not. Whether you do isn’t really the point of the exercise anyway.

Here’s the quote. This is from Chapter 5 of Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh’s recently published book on the underground economy in the Southside of Chicago, Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor.

When Mayor Richard J. Daley died in 1976, Chicago’s black leadership saw clearly an opportunity to mobilize for greater electoral power. Their hope was fulfilled in 1983, when African American congressman Harold Washington was elected mayor of Chicago. A victory for African Americans, Latinos, and progressive whites, Washington’s election was also a clear indication that the political machine now dominated by whites could be effectively challenged. In the first flush of victory, churches buttressed a powerful citywide organizing initiative, built around voter education and registration and led by progressive Chicagoans, that helped defeat the machine candidates. Black clergy labored to enfranchise the black community; this movement—as its leaders liked to call it—spanned all levels, from the grassroots to the middle and upper class. Temporarily, at least, it appeared that Chicago’s South and West Side black communities were politically unified and in line with liberal whites to successfully deflect the white vote.

A different and largely ignored outcome was the effect of Washington’s political mobilization within poorer communities like Maquis Park. Johnnie Xavier’s Milky Way description seems like an exaggeration. His view that black leadership continually capitulates to predominately white machine bosses does not make total sense, particularly given that the city had just elected an African American to the city’s highest office. However, black clergy had not been key spokespersons for African American interests. Political unity among black leaders did not necessarily mean political parity. There remained an enormous gap between the cathedrals and the storefronts in terms of their capacity to procure resources and effect social change. As with all political movements, in the efforts to elect Washington, there was a double-edged quality to the organizing initiative: namely, either join or be cast aside. One scholar writes, In Harold Washington black people had drafted a standard-bearer with the credentials and progressive orientation to be their candidate for mayor. Community leaders from all sections of Black Chicago were forced to keep step with this new electoral upsurge or be cast aside. At the least, one must conclude that Johnnie Xavier’s candy bar analogy proves accurate in its allusion to the persistence of some long-standing cleavages within the black clergy.

In the campaign itself, some of the disparities among clergy could be discerned. At one point, Xavier and Wilkins met with Minister Brantley Martin, perhaps the most powerful member of the Maquis Park clergy. Martin had the capacity to mobilize thousands of voters, and it was rumored that if Washington won, Martin’s success in getting out the vote would be reflected in an appointment as a high-paid city commissioner and numerous contracts for firms owned by his congregants. Xavier and Wilkins said they threatened Martin, telling him that they would take the votes of their congregants to another candidate if they were not told exactly what they would receive in return for supporting Washington. Martin recalls what happened when the two walked into his office:

I told them if they took their votes away, I’d see to it that they couldn’t stay in the community no more, said Martin. Simple as that. I would perceive their behavior as a destructive force, no more, no less. They were injuring the livelihood of the people who walked into their place every day for help. That’s how important the Washington campaign was for black folk.

That’s a pretty amazing statement, particularly from a member of the clergy, I said.

You wanted the truth. These guys just didn’t trust anybody. I mean, I gave them hundreds of dollars. I sent my people over to fix their church, I bought them a new roof. I mean, to come in here and say I was not helping them. I had had enough.

The storefront clergy’s awareness of their limits relative to the preachers with larger congregations may not always have been displayed so dramatically, in such direct confrontation. It could simply have manifested itself in differences in perceptions, with powerful people understanding fairly clearly what Washington’s election could bring about and the grassroots clergy being only cautiously optimistic. A director of a storefront church in the eighties, Pastor Barnes, said, It was just that you knew everyday that you were hoping that you would get something for what you were doing. Those guys never worried, they always knew what they were getting.

Ultimately, it would be Harold Washington’s death, in 1987, that showed just how fragile political relations were among Chicago’s black stakeholders. His passing shed light on who might be cast aside if viewpoints became too difficult to reconcile. But even as Washington came into power four years earlier, it was possible to discern signs of discord, or at least differing and perhaps irreconcilable perspectives, within the black leadership. Part of the fragility arose from the movement’s having been built around Washington’s charismatic power as mayor—he was famously able to quickly mend cleavages as they arose—rather than through a more deliberate attempt to inculcate leadership and participatory democracy at all levels, so that the death of a leader might be survived by the appointment of a successor. As William Grimshaw has observed,

concern with elite self-interest points to the basis for the inability of the Washington coalition to survive his death. Washington’s inclination was to win over opponents rather than to exclude and punish them in the machine tradition… Washington’s reforms were not institutionalized as much as personalized. When he died, therefore, the reforms were put in jeopardy and promptly undermined by the very elements he had tolerated and left in place.

The tenuous nature of such alliances was reflected in the black clergy. Churches that brought out the black vote for Washington were a varied lot, with differences in denomination, political orientation, size, and relationship to local residents. They may have been unified in their response to racially based discrimination, but their interests could diverge considerably. Those in poor communities struggled with unemployment, poverty, and drug addiction in a way that black middle-class churches did not; conversely, the black middle class now demanded a fair share of city patronage and contracts, two issues that were very low on the list of priorities of an unskilled, jobless population living in substandard housing.

An important subgroup within the Southside black clergy were those who felt unable to advance their concerns in the Washington administration. Pastor Wilkins’s feelings represent frustrated clergy in Maquis Park who, after Washington came into power, grew at odds with him.

We said [to him], We need jobs, we got people with drug problems, we got people who need help, who need housing. What we got back, and I mean this is coming from black folk! We were told, We have to be careful because we can’t be seen as the poor people’s mayor. On one side of their mouth, they were for the people, but they were afraid to give the people what they wanted, because they would look soft. Giving of your heart. If that’s soft, then the Lord is soft. It was very frustrating not to get money for places to help people with their problems.

Father Michael Wilson, a white Southside progressive priest who supported Wilkins, remembers that eventually a segment of mostly black grassroots and storefront clergy began splitting off from the Washington agenda. Wilson deemed their return to servicing communities with noncity resources the embrace of a self-help agenda.

I really felt for Pastor Wilkins, Brother Patterson, Minister Hortons, and those folks. See, when Washington was mobilizing, you had a real neat group of what I will call grassroots and storefront ministers, priests—basically preachers who were really at the roots of the African American community. Daley never gave them attention, and, for that matter, neither did their own leadership. They did things for themselves, they responded to people with very minimal resources. Washington’s election was going to change that, at least that was the public promise made to them: he was going to build housing in those poor areas, he was going to give schools better classrooms, more medical clinics. But really, none of that happened, or at least not enough. So Minister Hortons, well all those people really, they all went back to helping themselves. Self-help I call it, because they must be given the credit for working by themselves with very tough problems around poverty and addiction. And then, then the gangs came, and well, you know the rest. I mean after that, that’s when you really had a separate, disenfranchised group. And I don’t mean just the people, but also the clergy. That’s when hope dissolves, when the clergy are not brought into the center.

When asked about his own view of ruling black leaders and the turn to self-help, Pastor Wilkins recalls a pivotal meeting in 1986 that he convened with clergy who were much closer to Mayor Washington—the so-called big preachers who were generally thought to be the most powerful figures in the Southside black community. Along with Brother Patterson, Johnnie Xavier, Minister Hortons, Father Michael Wilson, and others, he approached the big preachers—Minister Kevin Ashland, Minister Brantley Martin, Pastor Harold Brusser, and Reverend Calvin Lamar—to forewarn them of increased social problems in the black community. We asked them for specific kinds of help, Wilkins recalls. Brother Patterson, who joined in the conversation, listed the demands.

I can remember it like it was yesterday, said Brother Patterson. Down in Woodlawn, at First Baptist, sitting across a long table, like we was coming to the altar! The five [big preachers] sitting there, stone-faced, look like they lost even their hearts. We said, help us build housing, help us get medical care, help us stop police from beating on us like we were dogs, help the soup kitchens because we have homeless, meet with the gang leaders and hear what the youth are saying. What else, I can’t remember?

Then, Pastor Wilkins continued, They told us they were not sure what they could do. That’s when I realized we had a whole new boss system in Chicago. Black preachers! It was like being down South. They got what they wanted, wasn’t interested in helping everyone. Just taking care of themselves. That’s when I threw up my hands. I knew then, I knew then…

What he’s trying to say, Brother Patterson interrupted, is that that’s when we knew we were doing the right thing, but that we were going to be alone. Like we were before Washington came. There was nobody who was going to hear these cries. No one was really going to take that hard look, in themselves and in the community, seeing what was going on. That’s when we all got back together and said, Okay, let’s just do this, do it with our hearts and what we have. ‘Cause we ain’t getting no more, at least not from these so-called preachers.

The outcome of the meeting, according to those present, was that Wilkins and his colleagues realized that they would not be able to call on the mayor to address their constituents’ needs. What Brother Patterson calls the big-ticket items in Maquis Park, like high unemployment, gang crime, and housing shortages, were not going to improve appreciably in the immediate future as a result of rising black power in City Hall. But it was not entirely clear that the preachers’ alternative self-help program would be a viable means of addressing community concerns. In fact, there was no such self-help strategy in place, says Pastor Wilkins, only a feeling that whatever was going to happen was going to be coming from us—but no one knew what to do. By the mid-1980s, the only clarity the preachers had achieved was the recognition that City Hall would provide them only limited help.

The view from City Hall did not necessarily coincide exactly with the perceptions of Wilkins, Barnes, and the other modest Maquis Park clergy. Bill Owens was a senior advisor for Mayor Washington, in charge of liaising with Southside Chicago communities. He says that many of the storefront clergy could not adequately articulate their demands; they were angry, and even when they discussed specific issues like unemployment, their demands were abstract (Deal with the youth who are unhappy and turning to gangs) rather than rooted in specific programs, and therefore were not helpful to the city administration.

They would come into my office and start spouting on about how the community was going down the drain. Crime, gangs, drugs, people dying. And then they’d say that Harold Washington was responsible! They would just moan and never say exactly what they wanted. I’d say, okay, we’ll get you each ten jobs for the summer for kids. They’d say, Ten is nothing, we have thousands of people who are hopeless. I’d say, true, but let’s reduce that by ten and then we can move on.

Owens went on to say that the smaller clergy often lacked the organization to receive assistance from the city. They did not have a staff and did not have the capacity to build affordable housing (which the city might fund). Some did not have a charter or were unincorporated, so they were unable to receive money from many external parties, like foundations, charities, and city departments that contracted with local organizations to provide social services to families.

Minister Kevin Ashland, one of the big preachers and a critic of Pastor Wilkins at the time, openly described the hostility of the powerful religious bosses toward Wilkins and other storefront clergy members. In particular, he points to one of the specific self-help initiatives the storefront clergy developed to reduce crime: instead of working with police, around 1985, he says, the grassroots ministers worked directly with gangs and other criminals to solve crimes and restore order.

Black people in Chicago, then and now, have only been as powerful as the preachers around them. You know what political bosses are, right? Well, we were religious bosses. There were probably ten of us on the Southside, maybe two or three in Maquis Park. I fought long and hard to get at the table, I could do things for my parishioners: I could call the mayor and say, We need more money for this school, we need a new traffic light. These are not small things. Did the other ministers need to get our permission before they went and got in the mix with the gangs? Well, some would say no. I would have hoped that we would have been consulted, at the very least, because, well, there are consequences.

If you’re working with a beat cop, then I can’t work with him—or his commander. If you’re helping gangs smooth out their business, I can’t get the police to get them to stop. There are consequences. The white folk downtown, all they see is that there’s some crazy preacher trying to help gangs deal drugs or pimps get money from their prostitutes. Now we were trying to control what information got out [of Maquis Park]. We didn’t want to hurt our own ability to get things done. And I don’t know if there weren’t long-term problems. You help the gang leader, he becomes more powerful. Then what? He’ll kill you.

But what about the argument that you [religious bosses] were not doing anything to help people day to day? I mean, didn’t someone have to help keep order?

I’d call what they did messing about. And you see what happened. We grew apart for many years. A lot of the friendships? Well, they can’t be repaired now. And who was hurt? The people. For many years, all these preachers, if they wanted something, it’s the gangs they call, not us. Now the gangs are in jail and they’re calling us. Of course, we’ll help, but not all the time, and not without some recognition of what they did. So that’s what I mean when I say there were consequences. There’s a real divide now in the community. I’m a man of faith, but I’m not so sure it can be healed.

Ashland’s link between the clergy and street gangs points to some of the long-term consequences of the kind of self-help being developed by Wilkins and other storefront clergy. Namely, in terms of the kinds of issues they were taking up, there was a chasm growing between those at the elite churches and those working at the grassroots. As a result of citywide political transformations, a social cleavage in the black clergy had risen beyond the level of backroom griping. Pastor Wilkins and his colleagues were losing hope that participation in the Washington movement would bring about desired improvements in quality of life for local residents.

As a consequence of the meeting, the grassroots and storefront ministries perceived that their work must be supported without resources from the now black-controlled city administration. Effectively, this meant they would have only limited access to city and state funds. They also could not build on patronage jobs as vehicles to increase donor contributions. And they stood little chance of reaching black middle- and upper-class supporters of religious causes; these patrons had risen in number and stature as a result of Washington’s mobilization, but they typically aligned with the larger Maquis Park churches that were embedded in the Washington coalition. Consequently, in 1987, at the height of the Washington administration, the preachers’ focus had grown inward. This meant that they were increasingly attentive not only to local issues, but also to local sources of manpower and funds as opposed to external resources from the municipal, civic, and philanthropic community. In an economically depressed Southside region, this meant a closer relationship with the underground economy.

—Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh (2006), Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor. 231–241.

Here’s the rules:

1. Pick a quote of one or more paragraphs from something you’ve read, in print, over the course of the past week. (It should be something you’ve actually read, and not something that you’ve read a page of just in order to be able to post your favorite quote.)

2. Avoid commentary above and beyond a couple sentences, more as context-setting or a sort of caption for the text than as a discussion.

3. Quoting a passage doesn’t entail endorsement of what’s said in it. You may agree or you may not. Whether you do isn’t really the point of the exercise anyway.

Here’s the quote. This is from the opening essay of My Sister, Guard Your Veil; My Brother, Guard Your Eyes, a collection of essays by Iranian writers, artists, and intellectuals. The essay is The Stuff Dreams are Made Of, by Azar Nafisi (known to you, perhaps, as the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran). Here she talks about women’s struggle in Iran, before, during, and after the Islamic Revolution, including some things that even well-meaning folks in the United States (let alone the bellowing blowhard brigade) tend to forget:

In the fall of 1979, I was teaching Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby in spacious classrooms on the second floor of the University of Tehran, without actually realizing the extraordinary irony of our situation: in the yard below, Islamist and leftist students were shouting Death to America, and a few streets away, the U.S. embassy was under siege by a group of students claiming to follow the path of the imam. Their imam was Khomeini, and he had waged a war on behalf of Islam against the heathen West and its myriad internal agents. This was not purely a religious war. The fundamentalism he preached was based on the radicla Western ideologies of communism and fascism as much as it was on religion. Nor were his targets merely political; with the support of leftist radicals he led a bloody crusade against Western imperialism: women’s and minorities’ rights, cultural and individual freedoms. This time, I realized, I had lost my connection to that other home, the America I had learned about in Henry James, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty.

In Tehran, the first step the new regime took before implementing a new constitution was to repeal the Family Protection Law which, since 1967, had helped women work outside the home and provided them with substantial rights in their marriage. In its place, the traditional Islamic law, the Sharia, would apply. In one swoop the new rulers had set Iran back nearly a century. Under the new system, the age of marital consent for girls was altered from eighteen to nine. Polygamy was made legal as well as temporary marriages, in which one man could marry as many women as he desired by contract, renting them from five minutes to ninety-nine years. What they named adultery and prostitution became punishable by stoning.

Ayatollah Khomeini justified these actions by claiming that he was in fact restoring women’s dignity and rescuing them from the degrading and diabolical ideas that had been thrust upon them by Western imperialists and their agents, who had conspired for decades to destroy Iranian culture and traditions.

In formulating this claim, the Islamic regime not only robbed the Iranian people of their rights, it robbed them of their history. For the true story of modernization in Iran is no that of an outside force imposing alien ideas or—as some opponents of the Islamic regime contend—that of a benevolent shah bestowing rights upon his citizens. From the middle of the nineteenth century, Iran had begun a process of self-questioning and transformation that shook the foundations of both political and religious despotism. In this movement for change, many sectors of the population—intellectuals, minorities, clerics, ordinary people, and enlightened women—actively participated, leading to what is known as the 1906 Constitutional Revolution and the effective implementation of a new constitution based on the Belgian model. Women’s courageous struggles for their rights in Iran became the most obvious manifestation of this transformation. Morgan Shuster, an American who had lived in Iran, even stated in his 1912 book, The Strangling of Persia: The Persian women since 1907 had become almost at a bound the most progressive, not to say the most radical, in the world. That this statement upsets the ideas of centuries makes no difference. It is the fact.

By 1979, at the time of the revolution, women were active in all areas of life in Iran. The number of girls attending schools was on the rise. The number of female candidates for universities had increased sevenfold during the first half of the 1970s. Women were encouraged to participate in areas previously closed to them through a quota system that offered preferential treatment to eligible girls. Women were scholars, police officers, judges, pilots, and engineers—present in every field except the clergy. In 1978, 333 out of 1,660 candidates for local councils were women. Twenty-two were elected to the Parliament, two to the Senate. There was one female Cabinet minister, three sub-Cabinet undersecretaries (including the second-highest ranking officials in both the Ministry of Labor and the Ministry of Industries), one governor, one ambassador, and five mayors.

After the demise of the shah, many women, in denouncing the previous regime, did so demanding more rights, not less. They were advanced enough to seek a more democratic form of governance with rights to political participation. From the very start, when Islamists attempted to impose their laws against women, there were massive demonstrations, with hundreds of thousands of women pouring into the streets of Tehran protesting against the new laws. When Khomeini announced the imposition of the veil, there were protests in wihch women took to the streets with the slogans: Freedom is neither Eastern nor Western; it is global and Down with the reactionaries! Tyranny in any form is condemned! Soon the protests spread, leading to a memorable demonstration in front of the Ministry of Justice, in which an eight-point manifesto was issued. Among other things, the manifesto called for gender equality in all domains of public and private life as well as for the guarantee of fundamental freedoms for both men and women. It also demanded that the decision over women’s clothing, which is determined by custom and the exigencies of geographical location, be left to women.

Women were attacked by the Islamic vigilantes with knives and scissors, and acid was thrown in their faces. Yet they did not surrender, and it was the regime that retreated for a short while. Later, of course, it made the veil mandatory, first in workplaces, then in shops, and finally in the entire public sphere. In order to implement its new laws, the regime devised special vice squads, called the Blood of God, which patrolled the streets of Tehran and other cities on the lookout for any citizen guilty of moral offense. The guards could raid shopping malls, various public spaces, and even private homes in search of music or videos, alcoholic drinks, sexually mixed parties, and unveiled or improperly veiled women.

The mandatory veil was an attempt to force social uniformity through an assault on individual and religious freedoms, not an act of respect for traditions and culture. By imposing one interpretation of religion upon all its citizens, the Islamic regime deprived them of the freedom to worship their God in the manner they deemed appropriate. Many women who wore the veil, like my own grandmother, had done so because of their religious beliefs; many who had chosen not to wear the veil but considered themselves Muslims, like my mother, were now branded as infidels. The veil no longer represented religion but the state: not only were atheists, Christians, Jews, Baha’is, and people of other faiths deprived of their rights, so were the Muslims, who now viewed the veil more as a political symbol than a religious expression of faith. Other freedoms were gradually curtailed: the assault on freedom of htep ress was accompanied by censorship of books—including the works of some of the most popular classical and modern Iranian poets and writers—a ban on dancing, female singers, most genres of music, films, and other artistic forms, and systematic attacks against the intellectuals and academics who protested the new means of oppression.

In a Russian adaptation of Hamlet distributed in Iran, Ophelia was cut out from most of her scenes; in Sir Laurence Olivier’s Othello, Desdemona was censored from the greater part of the film and Othello’s suicide was also deleted because, the censors reasoned, suicide would depress and demoralize the masses. Apparently, the masses in Iran were quite a strange lot, since they might be far more demoralized by witnessing the death of an imaginary character onscreen than being themselves flogged and stoned to death …. Female students were reprimanded in schools for laughing out loud or running on school grounds, wearing colored shoelaces or friendship bracelets; in the cartoon Popeye, Olive Oyl was edited out of nearly every scene because the relationship between the two characters was illicit.

The result was that ordinary Iranian citizens, both men and women, inevitably began to feel the presence and intervention of the state in their most private daily affairs. The state did not merely punish criminals who threatened the lives and safety of the populace; it was there to control the people, to flog and jail them for wearing nail polish, Reebok shoes, or lipstick; it was there to watch over young girls and boys appearing in public. In short, what was attacked and confiscated were the individual and civil rights of the Iranian people.

—Azar Nafisi, The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of, in My Sister, Guard Your Veil; My Brother, Guard Your Eyes: Uncensored Iranian Voices (2006; ISBN 0807004634), pp. 2–6.

You know the rules. Here’s the quote. This is from Allan Bloom’s Giants and Dwarfs: An Outline of Gulliver’s Travels, as reprinted in Giants and Dwarfs: Essays 1960—1990. I add only an emphatic reminder of Rule 4, Quoting a passage doesn’t entail endorsement of what’s said in it. Sometimes I agree and sometimes I don’t. Whether I do or not isn’t really the point of the exercise anyway.

… And we may further suppose that Gulliver has certain hidden thoughts and intentions which are only to be revealed by closely cross-examining him. He indicates this himself at the close of his travels when he swears to his veracity. He uses for this solemn occasion Sinon’s treacherous oath to the Trojans, by means of which that worthy managed to gain admission for the horse and its concealed burden of Greeks.

I should like to suggest that this book is also such a container, filled with Greeks who are, once introduced, destined to conquer a new Troy, or, translated into the little language, destined to conquer Lilliput. In other words, I wish to contend that Gulliver’s Travels is one of the last explicit statements in the famous Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns and perhaps the greatest intervention in that notorious argument. By means of the appeal of its myth, it keeps alive the classical vision in ages when even the importance of the quarrel is denied, not to speak of the importance of that classical viewpoint, which appears to have been swamped by history. The laughter evoked by Gulliver’s Travels is authorized by a standard drawn from Homer and Plato.

Prior to entering directly into the contents of the book, I should try to make this assertion somewhat more extrinsically plausible. The quarrel itself is today regarded as a petty thing, rather ridiculous on both sides, a conventional debate between old and new, reactionary and progressive, which later ages have resolved by way of synthesis. Both sides lacked perspective; intellectual history is but one long continuous development. Moreover, the quarrel is looked on largely as a purely literary dispute, originating in the comparison of Greek and Roman poetry with French. Now this understanding is quite different from that of the participants, who, if not always the best judges, must be the first witnesses in any hearing. They understood the debate over poetry to be a mere subdivision of an opposition between two comprehensive systems of radically opposed thought, one finding its source in ancient philosophy, the other in modern philosophy. The moderns believed that they had found the true principles of nature, and that, by means of their methods, new sources of power could be found in physical nature, politics, and the arts. These new principles represented a fundamental break with classical thought and were incompatible with it. The poetic debate was meant, on the part of the advocates of modernity, only to show the superiority of modern thought based on modern talents and modern freedom in the domain where the classics were most indisputably masters and models. The quarrel involved the highest principles about the first causes of all things and the best way of life. It marked a crossroad, one of the very few at which mankind has been asked to make a decisive change in direction. The choice once made, we have forgotten that this was not the only road, that there was another one before us, either because we are ignorant of a possible choice or because we are so sure that this is the only road to Larissa. It is only by return to our starting point that the gravity of the choice can be realized; and at that crossroad one finds the quarrel. It is not, I repeat, a quarrel among authors as such, but among principles.

In his own way, Swift presents and contrasts those principles. He characterizes ancient philosophy as a bee whose wings produce music and flight and who thus visits all the blossoms of the field and garden … and in collecting from them enriches himself without the least injury to their beauty, their smell, or their taste. This bee is opposed to a house-building spider, who thinks he produces his own world from himself and is hence independent, but who actually feeds on filth and produces excrement. As the bee says, So, in short, the question comes all to this; whether is the nobler being of the two, that by a lazy contemplation of four inches round, by an overweening pride, feeding and engendering on itself, turns all into excrement or venom, producing nothing at all, but flybane and a cobweb; or that which by a universal range, with long search, much study, true judgment, and distinction of things, brings honey and wax.

This description is drawn from one of Swift’s earliest writings, The Battle of the Books. Gulliver’s Travels was one of his latest. Throughout his life Swift saw the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns as the issue in physics, poetry, and politics, and it is in the light of it that he directed his literary career and his practical life. The quarrel is the key to the diverse strands of this various man; his standards of judgment are all classical; his praise and blame are always in accord with that of Plato. He learned how to live within his own time in the perspective of an earlier one. Swift, the Tory and the High Churchman, was a republican and a nonbeliever.

Gulliver’s Travels is always said to be a satire, and there is no reason to quarrel with this designation. But it is not sufficient, for satire is concerned with a view to what is serious and ridiculous, good and bad. It is not enough to say that human folly is ridiculed; what was follow to Aristophanes would not have seemed so to Tertullian, and conversely. If the specific intention of the satire is not uncovered, the work is trivialized. Swift intended his book to instruct, and the character of that instruction is lost if we do not take seriously the issues he takes seriously. But we do not even recognize the real issues in the Quarrel, let alone try to decide which side had the greatest share of truth. In our time, only Leo Strauss has provided us with the scholarship and the philosophic insight necessary to a proper confrontation of ancients and moderns, and hence his works are the prolegomena to a recovery of Swift’s teaching. Swift’s rejection of modern physical and political science seems merely ill-tempered if not viewed in relation to a possible alternative, and it is Leo Strauss who has elaborated the plausibility, nay, the vital importance, of that alternative. Now we are able to turn to Swift, not only for amusement but for possible guidance as to how we should live. Furthermore, Swift’s art of writing explicitly follows the rhetorical rules for public expression developed by the ancients, of which we have been reminded by Professor Strauss. The rhetoric was a result of a comprehensive reflection about the relation between philosophy and politics, and it points to considerations neglected by the men of letters of the Enlightenment. Gulliver’s Travels is in both substance and form a model of the problems which we have been taught to recognize as our own by Leo Strauss.

—Allan Bloom, Giants and Dwarfs: An Outline of Gulliver’s Travels (1964), in printed in Giants and Dwarfs: Essays 1960–1990 (1990). 35–38.