Is There Something to Fight About?

Should we be fighting for something or is complacency our right? This question seems to be the framework we've been using in the recent campus debate over the goods and bads of apathy and activism.

Unfortunately, this is the wrong framework. Both sides, those who espouse "earned apathy" and those who express righteous indignation at them, have it wrong--the former because they think we should only be concerned about ourselves and the latter because they foolishly wish they had something tragic to fight about. The argument between the activists and the apathetics, if you will, is over the principle of action, and not action itself.

A majority of those who voted in the Undergraduate Council election chose Beth A. Stewart '00 on a platform of shuttle buses for student groups, cable television and universal keycard access. Their position is straightforward: narrowly focused self-interest. Thomas B. Cotton '98, a defender of student apathy, wrote in a Feb. 18 column on this page: "Despite the sanctimony of activists, most students see, or implicitly accept, apathy about political issues as a virtue." Cotton argues that we have the rest of our life to be activists, so there is little reason to fight for anything now.

This is clearly not the right attitude. If there really was something to fight for, it must be college students who speak out and storm University Hall. The reason is clear: we are the next generation, the people who will inherit the policies and practices of today's bureaucrats; we must vocalize our disapproval because no one will do it for us. History teaches us that this is true. When the Vietnam War threatened their lives, students burned draft cards; when blacks were fighting for their civil rights, students marched on Washington. And activism has not only been anti-establishment; when fascism threatened to dominate Europe in the Second World War, young people enlisted.

But what is the point of trying to make people care who simply do not? It is not worth energy and effort to convince people who don't give a damn to give a damn.

Beyond this, however, campus activists have their argument in a tangle. They call for activism for the sake of activism without taking the time to realize that for the time being, the world is free of cataclysm. Perhaps the best proof that there are no world-changing issues to fight for or against is that would-be activists spend their time attacking the apathetics and not acting.

In the past, when something truly threatened our freedom (McCarthyism, fascism) or our conception of ourselves as Americans (widespread poverty, Watergate), activists were too busy fighting their actual opponents to attack those who simply didn't care.

Arguing the World,a documentary film about Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe and Irving Kristol, four Jewish men from New York who began their lives as radical activist intellectuals, traces their development from their Trotskyist days at New York's City College to the present. In the movie, Kristol says of his youth, "Like most people with some political consciousness in the '30s, I thought the world was coming to an end." So they fought; they yelled on street corners, they rallied, they discussed the fate of their turbulent world in which Stalin was the successor of the Bolshevik revolution, Hitler was threatening to conquer Europe in a fit of anti-Semitic and racist rage and poverty in America was pervasive.

Thankfully, we have no equivalent evils today. As Andrew A. Green '98 wrote in a Feb. 3 op-ed, "The tenor of campus politics this fall revealed a pervasive ignorance and selfishness among undergraduates." Which worthy causes does Green lament have not been taken up? [W]e have no multicultural student center, junior faculty are almost never tenured, there is no ethnic studies department, the Core has not (really) been reformed and finals are still after Christmas." Each of these concerns is Harvard-centered, and with the exception of a multi-cultural student center and an ethnic studies department, is an insular (and yes, selfish) demand. Second, none of these is or should be critical enough to raise such indignation as Green musters or as has been aroused in Harvard's past. Activism can only be taken seriously when it is necessary.

Today, in a world in which democracy and the free market have come to take widespread hold, indignant would-be activists lash out at apathetics, who have always been and always will be apathetic, instead of picking up a bullhorn and a picket. In times of desperate turbulence like the '30s and '60s, the apathetics were never the enemy because there were more pernicious adversaries; the enemy was and always should be those fighting on the other side, and not those simply doing nothing.

Should we be upset that for the time being college campuses do not need angry activists as much as they once did? It degrades the real things people once had to fight for--civil rights, women's suffrage and the end of world war to name a few--to raise indignant voices at those who simply don't care.

What will always be important--and what apathetics will never care about--is the will to resist complacency and the conviction to raise our arms when inevitably, there really is something to fight about.

Daniel M. Suleiman '99 is a social studies concentrator in Leverett House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.