denunciation of American war crimes was scarcely apt. I dare say that this last observation would have seemed paltry or worse to Chomsky. Anyway, at the close of one such exchange, and wearying of it a bit, I changed the subject and asked him if his co-author Edward Herman, who was then taking positions that made the names “Serbia” and “Yugoslavia” almost interchangeable, was to be regarded as his “co-thinker” on this, too. (In order to be clear: to say that the United States was bombing “Yugoslavia” seemed to me false. To say that a dictatorial and expansionist Serbia had been bombing the rest of Yugoslavia seemed to be true.) Professor Chomsky replied loftily that he did not really regard anyone as his co-thinker. This was his absolute right, but I felt that my reasonably direct question had received a rather shifty answer, and this from the man who so highly esteemed truth in language. I experienced the dismal feeling of a steep diminution of esteem on my own part, along with the premonition that this might not be the end of it.[91]
Susan Sontag was an admirable example of what it means, if it really means anything, to be a “public intellectual.” She most certainly wasn’t a private one. She was self-sustaining and self-supporting, and though she did like to follow fashion and keep herself updated, she was not a prisoner of trend. She was beautiful and dramatic, with the most astonishingly liquid eyes. She wanted to have everything at least three ways and she wanted it voraciously: an evening of theater or cinema followed by a lengthy dinner at an intriguing new restaurant, with visitors from at least one new country, to be succeeded by very late-night conversation precisely so that an early start could be made in the morning. I consider myself pretty durable in these same sweepstakes but I once almost fell asleep standing up while preparing her a sofa bed in Washington after a very exhausting day of multiple meals and discussions: she had vanished to begin the next day long before I regained consciousness. She had some of the vices that attend this voracity, becoming easily impatient and sometimes making one begin all over again to try for a plateau of intimacy that one felt had already been attained. The reactionary critic Hilton Kramer once wrote, whether with deliberate or unconscious absurdity I do not know, that her beloved son (and my esteemed friend) David Rieff would not develop until he left “the Sontag circle.” This seemed like rather a lot to ask. Ridiculing Kramer at the end of a dinner, she and David and I clinked glasses to my toast: “May the circle be unbroken,” and later embraced on the sidewalk. Next time we met, she put me in the wrong about something where I quite possibly had been gravely wrong, but still…[92]
One always had to forgive her, because whether it was the AIDS plague—the initial nightmare of which we have now chosen to forget—or politics, she could call upon both moral and physical courage. And she did not just defend AIDS victims as a “category,” but generously drew upon her own struggles with carcinoma to help and advise individuals. Nobody human is ever consistent, but Susan showed herself prepared to follow where logic might compel her to go. I don’t say that she did this in a straight line, but then it would be boring if it were otherwise. I now understand that my first confrontation with what was to be the rest of my political life came when I watched her address the celebrated meeting “Solidarity with
The usual duty of the “intellectual” is to argue for complexity and to insist that phenomena in the world of ideas should not be sloganized or reduced to easily repeated formulae. But there is another responsibility, to say that some things are simple and ought not to be obfuscated, and by 1982 Communism had long passed the point where it needed anything more than the old equation of history with the garbage can. Even Susan, though, felt that she might have gone a burned bridge too far. As someone who had spent much of his life writing for
In the symposium that we eventually ran, a number of the Left intelligentsia made the abysmal mistake of saying, in effect, that while what Susan had said might be partly true or even plain true, she would still have been much better advised not to say it. I think she herself may have feared that she was somehow “objectively” helping Ronald Reagan. But whether her mind changed her, or she changed her mind, she manifested the older truth that all riveters of the mind-forged manacles most fear, and that I here repeat:
I add for emphasis that, within a decade, official Communism had imploded beyond all hope of repair, or else mutated into overt military dictatorship as in North Korea and Cuba—the last uniformed regime in Latin America— and that in Serbia the word “fascism,” or even “National Socialism,” would not have been much of an exaggeration. All that remained at that point was to stop temporizing, stop clinging to consoling hand-holds and dallying in halfway houses and call for NATO and the White House to abandon an ignoble neutrality and save the name of Europe. Which Susan loudly did, and today’s rescued Sarajevo has a street that bears her name.[94]
Hannah Arendt used to speak of “the lost treasure of revolution”: a protean phenomenon that eluded the capture of those who sought it the most. Like Hegel’s “cunning of history” and Marx’s “old mole” that surfaced in unpredictable and ironic places, this mercurial element did quicken my own short life in the magic, tragic years that are denoted as 1968, 1989, and 2001. In the course of all of them, even if not without convolutions and contradictions, it became evident that the only historical revolution with any verve left in it, or any example to offer others, was the American one. (Marx and Engels, who wrote so warmly about the United States and who were Lincoln’s strongest supporters in Europe, and who so much disliked the bloodiness and backwardness of Russia, might not have been either surprised or disconcerted to notice this outcome.)
To announce that one has painfully learned to think for oneself might seem an unexciting conclusion and anyway, I have only my own word for it that I have in fact taught myself to do so. The ways in which the conclusion is arrived at may be interesting, though, just as it is always
But I hope and believe that my advancing age has not quite shamed my youth. I have actually seen more prisons broken open, more people and territory “liberated,” and more taboos broken and censors flouted, since I let go of the idea, or at any rate the plan, of a radiant future. Those “simple” ordinary propositions, of the open society, especially when contrasted with the lethal simplifications of that society’s sworn enemies, were all I required. This wasn’t a dreary shuffle to the Right, either. It used to be that the Right made tactical excuses for friendly dictatorships, whereas now most conservatives are frantic to avoid even the appearance of doing so, and at least some on the Left can take at least some of the credit for at least some of that. It is not so much that there are ironies of history, it is that history itself is ironic. It is not that there are no certainties, it is that it is an absolute certainty that there are no certainties. It is not only true that the test of knowledge is an acute and cultivated awareness of how little one knows (as Socrates knew so well), it is true that the unbounded areas and fields of one’s ignorance are now expanding in such a way, and at such a velocity, as to make the contemplation of them
