The Ethic of Responsibility and Working on Antisemitism

A few days ago, I wrapped up work with several Nexus-affiliated colleagues on a white paper seeking to provide guidance to college administrators about how various Israel-related buzzwords (think "apartheid", "settler-colonialism", "anti-Zionism") do and do not intersect with antisemitism. It was a group effort, and while I was a contributor, I was not the lead author. But my name will be on the finished product.

The paper is good. It is not perfect. Now, typically when people write that, they're damning with faint praise. I'm being literal. It is the work of a committee, and that means it is inherently going to be imperfect by the lights of any individual member. As in any group project, there are choices I would have made that were not acceded to be others; no doubt there were choices I made that other group members would not have incorporated had they had their lights.

In many ways, though, a project like this is out of character for me -- and it has given me newfound respect for anyone who engages in institutional political work (legislators, bureaucrats, etc.).

I've written before about how I'm an "institutionalist non-joiner" -- that is, I believe deeply in established institutions, but I also have little interest in directly participating in them. The reason for my reluctance stems from a strong desire to be in control of my own message, paired with the knowledge that any large institution will necessarily not perfectly reflect my own sentiments. It's the same reason why I rarely sign petitions -- unless I wrote the petition, it probably isn't going to say precisely what I want to say. And I don't like being a position where my name is on something that I wasn't wholly in control of. What do you do when someone say "well what about X clause", and you're like "well, I don't agree with X, but the totality was good enough"? My general answer is to avoid the problem -- I have a job and a life where I'm privileged to mostly be able to speak entirely in my own voice, and that's great.

Which makes this Nexus project, honestly, somewhat unnerving -- more so because it cuts to the heart of my own expertise. When this white paper is released, any critic can seize upon any portion of it they find suspect and say "Oh ho! How do you defend endorsing this!" And it will read as a limp reply to say "well, I didn't necessarily like that part" or "I would have phrased it differently." My name is on the document; it is natural to hold me responsible for what I signed onto. And so some part of my public reputation on my main area of scholarly specialization falls partially out of my control. Outside critics, not bound by the strictures of operating within a group, can snipe from the high ground.

Why did I agree to participate in drafting this document anyway? Well, I thought the issue was important, and I thought my contribution would make the resulting product better. I could have let others write the paper and then upon completion write a solo "here's what it should have said" rejoinder -- preserving my own unblemished voice at the expense of allowing a worse product to go through. But for whatever reason (and against all of my natural instincts), I decided to make the trade: I would participate in the collective endeavor to improve the document, and in exchange I would sacrifice some of my ability to control my own message.

The aforementioned inherent imperfection of group work applies to any political document -- and the more people involved and the higher the stakes are, the worse the problem gets. Our white paper involved less than a dozen people and has no tangible import other than whatever suasive authority we can muster. If one imagines a piece of legislation voted on by hundreds, or an administrative rule crafted by staff across countless government agencies, the problem multiplies. That work is simultaneously far more important than what I do, and also necessarily far more the product of innumerable compromises. For them, too, the realities of getting collective support and sign-off undoubtedly result in edits and alterations that they'd struggle to defend "on the merits". For them, too, the outside critic has a huge advantage in pot-shotting the most vulnerable elements and asking "how could you"?

But if there is to be political change, people have to be willing to take that fall. The extreme version of this is the government official in the Trump administration who knew the administration was evil, who knew that history would view them as a collaborator, but genuinely felt that if they stepped out they'd be replaced by someone who would do yet worse. But my thesis is that this core problem is not extreme at all, it is in fact ordinary and ubiquitous. Legislators have to be willing to vote for bills they know are imperfect, agency experts have to sign off on regulations they know are compromised. This is why Max Weber says that a pure "Ethic of Conviction" is incompatible with actual governance. Every academic who spends time in government leaves a record which a critic can peck away at as incompatible with their professed convictions, and they'll be right -- but not because the academic is a hypocrite. It is because political action is an inherently compromised endeavor, that needs to occur anyway.

For the most part, I don't have the stomach for it -- hence why this Nexus project is really an exception for me. But having gotten a tiny taste, I have more respect for those that are willing to engage, in good-faith, in the compromised and imperfect practice of governance -- knowing that at every point along the way they'll be forced to take hits to their reputation that in many ways they will not be able to truly defend.

UPDATE: The document in question is out.