An Interview with Stanley Hauerwasby Scott McLemee
The first issues of THE SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY tested the limits of "academic liberty," as it was called at the turn of the twentieth century, with essays challenging Southern racial policies. It is much harder to get a violent intellectual argument going, nowadays. But this fall's special issue of the journal, published by Duke University Press, certainly tries.
DISSENT FROM THE HOMELAND: ESSAYS AFTER SEPTEMBER 11, edited by Stanley Hauerwas and Frank Lentricchia, criticizes American policy from a variety of perspectives. Among the contributors are sociologist Robert Bellah, Catholic priest and activist Daniel Berrigan, essayist Wendell Berry, and several theologians, including Hauerwas, a Christian intellectual known for his two-fisted pacifism. A professor of theological ethics at Duke Divinity School, Hauerwas is often cited as one of the most influential contemporary religious thinkers.
Scott McLemee writes about the humanities for the Chronicle of Higher Education, where a shorter version of this interview appeared in the issue of September 6.
Q: How would you characterize the gist of this issue?
A: I think the most important argument in the issue is made by Rowan Williams, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, when he says, "Things went wrong as soon as the word 'war' was used." Because this was a crime; we ought to have kept it in that descriptive range, which means you try to arrest, you don't try to destroy. B-52s are pretty crude policemen. Michael Howard, the great military historian, says, "In Britain, we would have used the language of emergency, not the language of war." You begin to see how quickly language takes us down the wrong path, if you aren't careful with it. In some ways this issue is an attempt to discipline language about these matters. I mean, how do you know when you "win" the "war on terrorism"?
Q: A number of contributors speak from within religious traditions. Is that going to be disconcerting to the secular-minded reader?
A: The great agony of America is that we won the cold war; what in the hell do we do now? We need to hear from people who somehow find themselves standing outside the "normal" reaction that Americans have to these matters. And "to have a stance outside" means having a different kind of community -- which is what I think the church is. But that also means that some of the debate is internal. The essay by Mike Baxter [an assistant professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame] makes clear that the Catholics haven't done well on [responding September 11], except for individual voices
Q: Given that, it seems odd to find an essay by Jean Baudrillard, the postmodern theorist, who interprets September 11 as the Twin Towers committing suicide. Did you have a quota for nihilists?
A: I didn't cotton to his essay very much, quite frankly. Obviously you include people like that because of who they are -- to find out what they say, in the face of an event like this. And what you find out is that they have nothing to say!
Q: The issue includes some stunning images from New York, showing the immediate aftermath of the attacks.
A: That's the work of James Nachtwey. He calls himself an "after-war photographer." He did a book called INFERNO, with pictures he took in Rwanda, Romania, Somalia, Vietnam. I said, "Jim, how can you look at this much suffering and not want to kill somebody?" I mean, I'd want to kill somebody. But he doesn't. When Time magazine came out after 9-11, I saw that his photographs were in it, so I called him up. He lives two blocks away [from the WTC]. He'd heard it and ran out with his camera and started taking photographs. They're haunting. We wanted those images there to show that we're not unaware that people died, that this is a wound, and you've got to talk about the wound.
