Swarthmore Reunion Talk
June 6, 2014
Morton Winston
Curveballs, Fastballs and Screwballs
“Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”
--- Karl Marx
I first heard this famous quote from Karl Marx while I was a philosophy major here at Swarthmore from 1966-1970. It is from one of his early works, “Eleven Theses on Feuerbach,” which is thought to have been written in 1845 as a preliminary outline for his book The German Ideology. The “Eleven Theses” was not published until 1888 after Marx’s death and the famous quotation from the 11th was chosen to be the epitaph engraved on his tombstone in London’s Highgate Cemetery along with the last sentence of the Communist Manifesto, “Workers of all lands, unite!”
My cohort of Swarthmoreans lived through very turbulent times that included the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and the death of Courtney Smith. The year I graduated, 1970, was the year of the first Earth Day; it was also the year of the Kent State and Jackson State killings; and it was the year that much of the faculty suspended normal classes and honors exams to protest the bombing of Cambodia and the escalation of the Vietnam war. My classmates and I were rather disruptive, and when we took our diplomas and left campus I suspect that many members of the faculty and administration were glad to see us go.
Those of us who came of age during the late 1960s wanted to change the world and we believed that we had a pretty good idea about what things about the world needed changing: we needed to have racial equality; we needed to have gender equality; we needed to end the war in Vietnam and prevent further stupid American wars; we needed to end environmental pollution and degradation; and we needed to fight for greater social and economic equality.
I personally embraced these causes, as did many of my peers. But in keeping with the baseball analogy that is being used to frame this discussion, there were some runs, hits and errors. Of the four major social movements that arose in the 1960s: the human rights movement, the environmental movement, the economic justice movement, and the peace movement. I would say that the human rights movement has been a qualified success (at least a double), the environmental movement was a single, but the peace and the economic justice movements have been strikeouts.
In the case of the human rights movement, the one in which I have been most active, we threw some hard curve balls at repressive governments (actually we threw boomerangs at them), and eventually we struck out apartheid and the Soviet empire. Not bad. We also made significant progress on racial equality and women's equality, and more recently, LGBTI rights issues. So I think the overall box score here is positive, despite failing to prevent or correct many human rights abuses in other cases (Tiananmen Square, Rwanda, Guatemala, etc.).
I do not recall framing social justice issues in terms of human rights during my time at Swarthmore. I really only discovered human rights as I was finishing my PhD and decided to attend a meeting sponsored by Amnesty International on the campus of Johns Hopkins university. After that meeting in September 1977, several of us decided to start an Amnesty local group in Baltimore, group 109. A few weeks later it was announced that Amnesty International had won the Nobel Peace Prize. I thought to myself, “Is this a great organization or what? All I had to do was attend a few meetings and I already won a Nobel Prize.”
The curve ball that I threw that turned out better than I expected was my human rights work against apartheid. I served as an Amnesty International USA Country Specialist for South Africa from 1985-1991 and was one of a small group of individuals who coordinated our campaigns and membership actions on South Africa during those years. When, after hundreds if not thousands of hours of dedicated volunteer work for this cause, I saw Nelson Mandela walk out of the gates of Victor Verster Prison on February 11, 1990, I cried. I could not quite believe that after all of the repression and cruelty of apartheid it was finally ending.
In my courses on human rights I introduce my students to the ideas of “boomerang throws” and the spiral model as developed in the work of scholars such as Audie Klotz, Margaret Peck, Kathryn Sikkink, Thomas Risse, Matthew Ropp, Daniel Thomas, and others who have demonstrated that human rights norms have had a powerful influence on state behavior in the decades following the Second World War. State repression is now greeted with intense international criticism from human rights groups like Amnesty and Human Rights Watch and this international solidarity empowers domestic human rights groups to resist and agitate for reform. State authorities who deploy policies of repression have those policies blowback right back in their faces, and repeated boomerang throws can move even some very authoritarian states along a predictable pathway that moves from repression, to denial, to tactical concessions, and then, in some cases, to prescriptive status and rule-consistent behavior. This is the power of human rights; it is the power of ordinary people who are resolute about justice to bring about major progressive political changes. So, we hit for at least two bases with the human rights movement. My own view is that when historians write about the late twentieth century one of the things that will stand out is the progress our generation has made on social equality and human rights.
But the other progressive agendas we had have not fared as well. We did not succeed in stopping the Vietnam War; the army of North Vietnam did that. Nor has the peace movement been successful in preventing other stupid American military adventures. We saw the Iraq War coming and swung hard, but missed. We did not get rid of nuclear weapons, and we still have the military industrial complex that is even more bloated than ever, and now, alongside it, the creation of an enormous and omnipresent national surveillance state. This was a fastball we did not even see coming.
On economic inequality we also struck out. As Thomas Piketty has shown, there has not been progress in reducing economic inequality; quite the opposite, inequality both in income and wealth has been increasing. The recent study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page that demonstrated that the United States is in fact an oligarchy whose policies conforms to the interests of the wealthy also came as no surprise. When organized money gets control of the democratic process, as it clearly has in this country, the power of social movements can be thwarted.
This is also quite evident with respect to environmental issues. While the environmental movement that sprang up following the first Earth Day in April 1970 had some early successes with the creation of the EPA and the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts, and then later with campaigns to save the whales and several other endangered species, it has been stymied on the biggest environmental issue of all, global climate change.
Big money interests clearly want to prolong the fossil fuel age as long as possible in order to extract all of the remaining profit, even if that means cooking the planet and dooming future generations to a much hotter and more unstable climate. We did not, I think, anticipate the lengths to which the fossil fuel interests would go to deny the growing scientific consensus concerning man-made global warming, and how twisted the politics around this issue would become. Climate change denialism was a screwball that we did not know how to handle.
Thus far, the social movements that have been trying to steer civilization onto a more socially just and environmentally sustainable path has been ineffective in breaking the combined power of big money and big politics to hold back change. Historians of the future will surely note this as well, when they assess the legacy of our generation. The final box score will probably look something like this: (show slide).
This cartoon is obviously paradoxical. The meaning depends on one’s point of view. Realists, those who see the world as it is, will say that they won because they scored more runs than their opponents. But idealists, those who see the world not as it is, but as it ought to be, will affirm that the final score is as it should be. In the words of Teddy Kennedy: “For all those whose cares have been our concerns, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”
