Sanford Levinson is the W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood Jr. Centennial Chair in Law, University of Texas Law School; Professor of Government, University of Texas at Austin; and Visiting Professor, Harvard Law School, Fall 2022. He is the author, among other books, of Constitutional Faith (2d ed. 2011) and Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies (2d ed. 2018).
Photo credit: Christina Murrey
This week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Michele Moody-Adams’ recent book: Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination, and Political Hope. See here for an introduction from Michele. Commentaries and replies will follow Tuesday through Thursday.
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Michele Moody-Adams’s Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination, and Political Hope is a remarkable book. It is best conceived as an extended meditation on the various issues instantiated in the social movements that are (and, for that matter, have always been) such an important reality of our polity. These include the comparative importance of rigorous appeals to reason—a traditional domain of philosophers—as against appeals based on “rhetoric” and “emotion” (often disdained by philosophers); the importance therefore of language in all of its forms, including art, in generating new perspectives; the willingness to compromise one’s just demands in the name of constructing a “beloved community” that necessarily has to include one’s opponents and perhaps former enemies; and the comparative importance of “hope” versus “despair” in energizing constructive movements. She seeks no “algorithms” (p. 258) to resolve any of the tensions that she identifies. Instead the book models what she most supports: a genuinely respectful attempt to generate conversation and reflection about the most important topics of mutual concern even when the interlocutors may have radical differences of perspective about the causes, and therefore, their possible rectifications. She focuses on “progressive” movements oriented toward achieving what she (and, presumably, most of her likely readers) would define as “social justice.” But she is fully aware that there are distinctly “non-progressive” social movements whose reality must be recognized and addressed. Are they simply the Schmittian “enemy”; or, on the contrary, should we envision them as fellow human beings, with their own suffering, to be engaged in as part of a grand effort toward “reconciliation”?
I must confine my remarks to 1500 words. I cannot do justice to the questions that she asks throughout her book. But let me identify several potential topics before spending the remainder of my comments on only one:
1) What ought the stance of social movements be toward “compromise” with their adversaries? Avashai Margalit has written a remarkable book, On Compromise and Rotten Compromise, exploring the ramifications posed by the tension between achieving “peace,” on the one hand, and “justice,” on the other. Must one ultimately choose between them and, if so, on what basis in what particular contexts?
2) How does one assess the role—and validity—of “arguments” that rely more on appeals to emotion or to the use of “rhetoric” rather than reliance on what might be termed the clear teachings of empirical evidence or undeniable moral truths? One of the most fascinating features of the book is the mixed role played within it by the eminent American pragmatist (and post-modernist) philosopher Richard Rorty. He is at one and the same time a great inspiration and yet cautionary example with regard, say, to his (in)famous declaration that philosophers can say nothing about the ultimate “truth” of any given argument since we are all embedded in our own prisonhouses of language and the perspectives imposed by any given discursive order.
3) Barack Obama famously campaigned on the “audacity of hope.” Our collective time had come, he appeared to be arguing, to realize Martin Luther King’s dream of helping to “bend the arc of history” substantially toward achieving greater justice. His famous declaration that we were not “red” or “blue,” but indeed “purple” suggested the possibility of a true coming together as the “more perfect Union” that the Preamble to the Constitution suggests is the point of the whole constitutionalist enterprise. Yet both his presidency and the post-Obama era have been characterized by ever-greater polarization and a foreboding sense among many reasonable observers that the country is closer to civil war than at any time since 1860. Even “secessionist” arguments (or fantasies) seem irrelevant in part because of the fact that our present polarization is far less purely regional and more of a reality within almost every American state. Pennsylvania, to take only one relevant example, is sharply divided between the “blueness” (or, if one wishes, the “progressivism” or “cosmopolitanism”) of its cities like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and the “redness” (or, if one prefers, the “conservatism” or “traditionalism” or “parochialism”) of the largely rural or relatively small-city demographics in between. And if one looks at the contemporary “deep South,” one finds the same deep divisions between cities and less urban areas. Consider my home state of Texas, where four of the eleven largest American cities contend with what can often be described as the hatred (which is largely reciprocated) of the bulk of the Texas population that disdains their cosmopolitan progressivism. How does one generate a plausible feeling of “hope” for the future and, as importantly, the overcoming of the mutual animosity of the two great contending wings of the contemporary Texas population?
So I now turn to the topic of my roughly 600 remaining words: Abraham Lincoln. He is relevant to at least two different issues. First, what was the nature of his argument against secession? Is it necessarily convincing as against the abstract arguments made by Confederates (bracketing out, of course, the specific cause of their secession, which was the indefensible maintenance of chattel slavery)? Imagine that the secessionist arguments were being made, say, by William Lloyd Garrison, who had burnt the Constitution (a “covenant with death and agreement with Hell”) and called for “no Union with Slaveholders.” To be sure, in his first Inaugural Lincoln offered what might be called “legal” arguments against secession, but the Confederates had offered legal arguments supporting their actions. Both, ironically or not, valorized the Declaration of Independence, with the white Southerners paying special attention to “government by consent of the governed” and the presumptive right to emulate the American colonists themselves who had violently seceded from the British Empire. But Lincoln’s most fundamental argument is found in the final paragraph, where he appealed to the “mystic chords of memory” that purportedly bound all Americans together in an unbreakable Union. Whatever kind of argument this is, it seems hard to classify easily as “rational.” To be sure, if the empirical evidence supported the proposition that (almost) all “Americans” had internalized, perhaps because of civic education and celebration of the Fourth of July—though see Frederick Douglass’s famous address on the meaning of the Fourth of July to American Blacks—such “mystic chords,” then one might be simply mystified by the willingness of white Southerners to sunder them. But are appeals to such “chords,” even if they exist empirically, truly “rational” arguments, or can one always argue that they are indeed merely the product of a decidedly propagandistic process of socialization and should be vulnerable to relentless critique?
But Lincoln also comes up with regard to his memorialization, particularly in a statue dedicated in Washington in 1876 that evokes his status as the “Great Emancipator” by depicting a grateful African-American kneeling before him and accepting the gift of freedom presumably granted as a gracious gift by Lincoln. This “white savior” narrative—and Moody-Adams has extremely interesting things to say about the importance of narratives both as constituting social movements and as objects of their demands for reform—has understandably been subject to criticism. But so what? Does this justify the demands of some that the statue should be removed from its place of public honor? She thinks not. Frederick Douglass, who gave the chief speech dedicating the statue, both praised Lincoln and, at the same time, emphasized that he was, ultimately the white-man’s president; his most fundamental loyalties, at all times, were to preserving the Union and therefore taking account of the demands and interests of the predominantly white population.
So how does one engage in memorialization and public honor in an ever more pluralistic society that has become far more inclusive politically than might have been imagined even in 1960, before the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the transformative immigration reform act the same year? Moody-Adams attractively calls for more respectful dialogical engagement among the contending groups within the plural order. But how does one achieve that where, as the saying goes, one person’s terrorist (call him John Brown or Nat Turner) might be another’s freedom fighter (call him John Brown or Nat Turner)? In my own book on public monuments, Written in Stone, I refer to the fact that the Little Bighorn National Monument in Montana now has monuments both to George Armstrong Custer and his Union soldiers and to the Sioux who, I was taught as a youngster many decades ago, had “massacred” them (rather than simply engaging in an attempt to defend their ancestral homelands). But consider the existence of a monument as well as to the Crow, allies of Custer in opposing their own traditional enemies, the Sioux. A complex narrative indeed.
These are necessarily limited reactions to a splendid book. But what I really wish is that I could sit down for a long dinner with its author, because there are so many interesting questions to talk about, and her own style invites extended conversation rather than mere submission to (non-existent) “knock-down” arguments based on unquestionable philosophical premises.
Reply to Levinson: Rhetoric and Memory in the Social Imaginary
A social imaginary, as Charles Taylor defines it, is the collective understanding that underwrites a society’s common practices and its sense of its own legitimacy. It is “an imaginary” not because it isn’t real, but because it is embodied in images, symbols, stories, and legends. Making Space for Justice presumes that any effort to comprehend how a particular social imaginary has been shaped can illuminate the role of imagination in any polity, especially if the collective understanding under scrutiny frames the public life of a complex, historically influential polity. It is in this spirit that I consider Sanford Levinson’s provocative questions about Abraham Lincoln’s ‘proper’ place in the American social imaginary. Levinson asks:
1. Should we be wary of Lincoln’s rhetoric in the First Inaugural Address (1861) that responds to the secession crisis that threatened dissolution of American democracy?
2. Can we produce a genuinely collective national imagining (through civic art of remembrance) for any figure, including Lincoln, whose legacy generates divisive debate?
The first question reflects Levinson’s concern that the rhetoric of Lincoln’s fundamental argument against secession makes non-rational appeals to non-rational phenomena. Consider the concluding lines of the First Inaugural:
“Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart … will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
Yet while some theorists follow Plato in denigrating rhetoric, I argue in Making Space for Justice that the imaginative use of language in political rhetoric can be a critical complement to discursive rational argument, and an important alternative when discursive rational argument fails to persuade. Aristotle recognized the value of “deliberative rhetoric” in shaping political decisions. Iris Young convincingly echoes this stance in Inclusion and Democracy.
We must also acknowledge that any human capacities can be put in service of morally problematic or indefensible aims. Defenders of chattel slavery often sought to justify it with rational arguments. The capacities that allow us to form such arguments are just as susceptible of misuse as capacities that allow us to reshape public life through the imaginative use of language.
In addition, as Making Space for Justice argues, social movements discerningly anticipated the views of Charles Taylor and Benedict Anderson, who contend that political societies are constituted and stabilized by imagination. Indeed, Anderson claims that political communities depend upon a “deep horizontal comradeship” that is best explained as the effect of imagination, not rational argument. This suggests that Lincoln plausibly presumed that political societies are communities of memory unified by imagination.
Of course, Lincoln appeals to “mystic chords of memory” that united most white Americans in accepting a way of life that allowed de jure segregation, and then persistent de facto discrimination, long after abolition. But one of the ironies of Lincoln’s presidency—deftly explained by Frederick Douglass, in his 1876 oration at the dedication of the Freedmen’s Memorial—is that if Lincoln hadn’t been perceived as sharing racial prejudices “common to his countrymen,” and if he hadn’t been presumed to care more about preserving the Union than about abolishing slavery, it is doubtful that he could have ever succeeded (however tardily) in bringing abolition about. Yet although Douglass believed that Lincoln was the “white man’s president,” he always insisted on honoring Lincoln’s role in emancipation.
Levinson’s second question reminds us that it is difficult to produce collective imaginings of any figure or event generating intense disagreement. Yet monuments and memorials virtually always generate disagreement. Making Space for Justice notes that most commemorative projects in modern democracies are commissioned by committees whose members disagree about the projects’ goals, and created for communities likely to disagree about whether the finished products successfully embody public values. Democracies should thus protect forums for constructively debating the value of any instance of civic remembrance—whatever its subject.
These debates will often be about how projects of remembrance might promote future realization of democratic values, and not just how satisfactorily they commemorate the past. Efforts to commemorate Lincoln have often been at the center of such debates. But Making Space for Justice shows that their outcomes sometimes reveal the power of imaginative reinterpretation to constructively alter a monument’s meaning. One of the best examples is the process by which Marian Anderson’s 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial transformed that structure from a symbolic expression of the North’s intention to tolerate Jim Crow segregation to a powerful symbol of racial equality. To borrow from the title of Professor Levinson’s wonderful book, even a message that seems to be “written in stone ” can be revised through the power of imagination.[i]
Notes
[i] Sanford Levinson Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies. 20th Anniversary Edition (Duke University Press, [1998] 2018).