Humanism and Democratic Criticism Book

I've read many of Edward Said's books over the years and he, like Noam Chomsky, is exemplary for his commitment as an intellectual to telling the truth about things that matter to a community that can do something about the injustices of our world.

According to Said's prescriptive view, intellectuals ought to be fully engaged and critical with their society (and, I might add, one's church, synagogue or mosque). Said believed that "[t]he intellectual's role is dialectically, oppositionally, to uncover and elucidate the contest I referred to earlier, to challenge and negate both an imposed silence and the normalized quiet of unseen power wherever and whenever possible. For there is a social and intellectual equivalence between this mass of overbearing collective interests and the discourse used to justify, disguise, or mystify its workings while also preventing objections or challenges to it." Being in the middle of an occupation/quagmire/grave crime in Iraq, we must refuse such "normalized quiet." Our task as writers, thinkers, teachers, and intellectuals is to de-legitimate, uncover, and de-mystify the prevailing discourse that democracy is being served, that we only have the interests of the Iraqi people at heart, and that Americans are incapable of committing war crimes.

In Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Said is broad-minded, practical, and cunning when he urges that we need "intellectual performances on many fronts, in many places, many sites that keep in play both the sense of opposition and sense of engaged participation." Elsewhere, he is specific: "Think of the impressive range of opportunities offered by the lecture platform, the pamphlet, radio, alternative journals, occasional papers, the interview, the rally, the church pulpit, and the Internet, to name only a few."

Much of Said's work in this book is about recovering a viable form of humanism, linked, really, to classic philology, how to read carefully, critically, and as the word means, lovingly. As I read Said's book, I thought of liberation theology as a kind of humanism, a radical humanism that was marginalized by the recently deceased pontiff because it made a serious and costly preferential option for the poor. Here's the secular (though raised Christian Protestant) Said: "Humanism, I strongly believe, must excavate the silence, the world of memory, of itinerant, barely surviving groups, the places of exclusion and invisibility, the kind of testimony that doesn't make it onto the reports but which more and more is about whether an overexploited environment, sustainable small economies and marginalized peoples outside as well as inside the maw of the metropolitan center can survive the grinding down and flattening out and displacement that are such preeminent features of globalization." This again brings me back to "dangerous memories," resistance that takes the form of solidarity (with torture victims, with the victims of our occupations), and a utopian defiance that doesn't grant the last word to corporate globalization, the empire's latest guise. While some have claimed that liberation theology is finished, I recall that Jon Sobrino, a theologian from El Salvador, once offered that as long as oppression exists, there will be a liberation theology in resistance to that very oppression, a liberation theology that summons counter-testimonies to the triumphalism of the United States and its allies.