Born in Germany in 1929, Etzioni escaped the Nazi regime and dropped out of high school to fight in Israel’s war for independence. He went on to earn his doctorate at Berkeley, teach at Columbia University and Harvard Business School, and advise presidents. “As far back as I can remember, I wanted to make a mark on the world,” he writes. “A big one would be great, but a small improvement was a hell of a lot better than none.”
Etzioni, 74, spends a good part of his memoir outlining the many marks he’s so far made. Influential communitarian academics, legal experts, sociologists and politicians (from Jimmy Carter to Bill Bennett) have embraced Etzioni’s calls for sacrifice and a “moratorium on the minting of new rights” so citizens can turn their attention to service. Now a University Professor at George Washington University, he says his work is far from done. Etzioni recently spoke with NEWSWEEK’s Brian Braiker about his latest book (he’s written more than 20) and his controversial life as a public intellectual still striving to make his marks.
NEWSWEEK: What’s the significance of the title of your memoir?
Amitai Etzioni: I’m having misgiving about every single line in my book except the title. The title really captures this idea that in the Old Testament the Lord asks Cain where Abel is, and he says ‘am I my brother’s keeper?" It adds insult to injury–he killed his brother, now he’s lying to the Lord. Today if you say to somebody “I’m not my brother’s keeper,” they’ll say “that’s right, we should not be judgmental. We should not interfere.” This relativism and some shades of political correctness have really undermined any notion that I can come to you in the name of the common good and say “You ought to X.” Of course, you can be morally active without being judgmental but this has been marginal.
Within that framework, you touch on everything from HIV testing to business ethics to NASA to human rights. Do you ever worry about spreading yourself a little thin with all the topics that you cover?
There are really two themes that speak to all of those. I was teaching ethics at Harvard Business School and my class [agreed] that Americans charged with a crime have a right to demand to bring the charge before a jury of their peers. But when they were asked to serve in a jury, they simply said “find somebody else.” This disjunction between [demanding] entitlements, but not being willing to shoulder the responsibility became one of our major themes. Then I saw it every place: Americans want less government and more government services; they want a war but they don’t want to pay for it.
Then there came the second theme. That is what I would call the moral infrastructure. We kind of tore down the old codes [with] the whole liberation movement of the 60s, sexual and the minorities. They all basically took down the old regime, which is fine with me. But you can’t live in a moral vacuum. The question is what are the new rules? In my most serious writings these two themes–rights and responsibilities, and how we get the new moral infrastructure–that really cuts through most of my work.
A lot of the aspects of communitarian thinking–giving up individual rights for the greater good–have been called naive and counter to not only American culture but human nature.
I think there is a consensus now that the United States was never simply a country centered around rights with no sense of republican virtues. The colonies and the first states were so religious, they lived in such tight communities, you could not be an individual boarder. You had to live in someone’s home so they could keep track of you. Then what happened over the next 200 years, slowly rights have expanded because they’re in very short supply–the right to vote, the right to run for office without property, women’s rights, de facto African-American rights. You can tell the story of American history as a story of ever more rights. [Now] we’ve got all kinds of artificial claims to rights: Somebody sued Macy’s for the right to play Santa Claus. Then came the point that we started to talk about republican virtues because now they’re in short supply. If this is naive, then American history is naive.
As to human nature, people are not driven only by self-interests and the desire to maximize themselves. They are conflicted creatures. Yes, in part they are seeking self-interest and happiness and profit and everything else. But there is another half that makes them donate god knows how many billions each year to causes, that makes them volunteer in the United States more than any other country.
After fighting in the war for Israeli independence you conclude that “violence is the ultimate degradation.” More recently you’ve been voicing support for war on terror, which has brought bombing on Afghanistan and the ousting of Saddam Hussein. Do you see any contradiction in those stances?
I’m not a pacifist. I’m very distressed that we have to react to 9-11. I very much agree that you should exhaust all other ways to deal with the problem. That doesn’t allow you to hit back in self-defense, but in defense of others. I hate violence and the world would be much better without it. But when somebody does that to you, you have no choice and you morally are completely qualified to hit back. Iraq’s a different question. For me democratizing Iraq is not enough justification because obviously we’ve promoted all kinds of non-democratic regimes all over the place. If you accept this as a rationale, you have to go invade Saudi Arabia, first of all. If there were weapons of mass destruction and there was a possibility they were going to give them to terrorists, then it would be justified. But at the minute we don’t know. Terrorism, yes. Bin Laden, yes. I’m not sure about Saddam.
You’ve lamented that globalization has so far been largely an economic and technological force as opposed to a social, political and moral one. President Bush certainly couches his foreign policy pronouncements in social and moral rhetoric.
If you’re going to move to an international arrangement that is not based on might, then you do need to have some global institution building. I have no trouble bringing moral language to the table. But it cannot be a one-sided moral language. Communitarianism is based on the fact that other people will acknowledge and accept your cause. What he did is the opposite. It’s not enough to say “I have a moral claim.” Moral claims have to be validated by other people. As most of the world does not see as legitimate what we did, that’s a very unsubstantiated moral claim. I think in this case you need to do these things within the framework of international law and international institutions.
But doesn’t validating moral claims through a majority of opinion open the door to moral relativism?
You’re very up on the most subtle points of philosophy. You can have 100 percent consensus and be dead wrong. When I say you validate a moral claim, that’s a very controversial philosophical statement. There are certain universal virtues we all recognize and we use those as the criteria, for example, the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This is now accepted as a universal truth. Even countries like Singapore and China do not deny its validity. They come up with excuses. They say “we first need economic development, we’re doing it gradually.”
There’s a tension throughout your memoir between your academic and your public life. By the end of the book you seem to have resolved that tension.
Well, resolved, no. But I’m less concerned, and I’m even happy I didn’t yield to the demand that I be only an academician. At the end of the day I find that these two halves of my life, while they’re sure to create tensions and subject me to a fair amount of abuse and criticism, they enrich each other. I was not aware of that initially. There are things as a public intellectual I would not have seen or understood. And I did less esoteric things as an academician because the other half of me had the other foot in the real world.
Yet throughout your career you have been accused of indulging more in moral exhortations than intellectual rigor.
All public intellectuals–look at Carl Sagan, Jay Gould, Cornel West, Kenneth Galbraith–you will not find a single public intellectual who has not been accused with the same words: popularizer, non-academically rigorous. It’s absolutely standard. What I try to do is in my non-public work, my academic work, is to maintain the standards. Here’s the good news for me, after I published the New Golden Rule, which is my academic justification of the communitarian thesis, this criticism didn’t disappear, but it became much less. By now there are 100, roughly, scholars who have taken on what I laid out and elaborated on and criticized it, but treated it as an academic justification of the communitarian thesis.
You spent the Cold War railing against nukes. They’re back and they’re scarier this time around. Do you feel vindicated?
Yes. It’s not exactly the same as it was in the ’60s and you’re right, since you have rogues states, it’s become worse. Here I think is where our next test comes. The place most likely where you will have a nuclear war where a lot of people can get hurt is in Pakistan and India. I think that’s exactly where we should go. We should call them in and the governments of Russia, China and I don’t care where else, and we should sit them down. We have no interest–if they want to kill each other we may be distressed, but our oil is not going to stop flowing. We sit them down and say “Let’s talk. Let’s talk about dividing Kashmir. Then you, Pakistan, feel that you need protection because the Indian army is much larger and you cannot match it. We’re going to put peacekeeping forces on the border, but we want both of you to cash in your nuclear weapons.” We should use all the points we can to encourage them to do so, because it’s for their sake.
Your work has put you in the company of strange bedfellows–from Jimmy Carter to Bill Bennett to Joe Lieberman to Bill Clinton. What does this mix of people say about communitarianism?
I think the ultimate center, especially if we don’t talk about economic issues but moral issues, we’ve been adamant against coercing people to be moral. So any notion of the right that you should ban abortion, you should ban homosexual activities, we buy none of that. We think people should live up to their moral commitments and to live up to them because of community fostering, but not because of coercion. The real right will not accept us.
Bill Bennett is interesting–I think there are two Bill Bennetts, before the gambling. Bill Bennett talked to these issues. People didn’t like the way he did it, people thought he was too sanctimonious. But he acted like a national moral preacher. He spoke to people’s guilt or sense of better self. I see nothing wrong with that. One of the interesting things he did that I don’t see that often mentioned. He chided Republicans for dumping on gays and not speaking about divorce. That is, I think, to his credit. There is a pit bull Bennett that can be extremely partisan and nasty. You work with people who share half your agenda, you don’t wait for people to be perfect. I won’t deny for a second that there is part of him which is communitarian. Let, above all, those who never sinned cast the first stone.
The cover photo of your book shows you on the lookout for Jewish refugees coming into Palestine. Is that the first moment that you’re literally acting as your brother’s keeper?
Exactly right. That’s where I got my taste for activism. There’s a special high when you do something good. It’s not satisfying in the sense of a good steak or a good roll in the hay. It’s a different sense of satisfaction, but there’s something wonderful to it. That was when I was about 16, and it never left me. I’ve been looking forever to recapture it.
