Howard Zinn - Dissident, Teacher, Seeker of Justice

Howard Zinn - (August 24, 1922 – January 27, 2010)

"Why should we cherish 'objectivity,' as if ideas were innocent, as if they don't serve one interest or another?  Surely, we want to be objective if that means telling the truth as we see it, not concealing information that may be embarrassing to our point of view.  But we don't want to be objective if it means pretending that ideas don't play a part in the social struggles of our time, that we don't take sides in those struggles.

"Indeed, it is impossible to be neutral. In a world already moving in certain directions, where wealth and power are already distributed in certain ways, neutrality means accepting the way things are now. It is a  world of clashing interests - war against peace, nationalism against internationalism, equality against greed, and democracy against elitism - and it seems to me, both impossible and undesirable to be neutral in those conflicts.

"... I do not claim to be neutral, nor do I want to be.  There are things I value, and things I don't.  I am not going to present ideas objectively if that means I don't have strong opinions on which ideas are right and which are wrong.  I will try to be fair to opposing ideas by accurately representing them.  But the reader should know that what appears here are my own views of the world as it is and as it should be.

"I do want to influence the reader.  But I would like to do this by the strength of argument and fact, by presenting ideas and ways of looking at issues that are outside the orthodox.  I am hopeful that given more possibilities people will come to wiser conclusions.

"In my years of teaching, I never listened to the advice of people who said that a teacher should be objective, neutral, and professional. All the experiences of my life, growing up on the streets of New York, becoming a shipyard worker at the age of eighteen, enlisting in the Air Force in World War II, participating in the civil rights movement in the Deep South, cried out against that.

"It seems to me we should make the most of the fact that we live in a country that, although controlled by wealth and power, has openings and possibilities missing in many other places.  The controllers are gambling that those openings will pacify us, that we will not really use them to make the bold changes that are needed if we are to create a decent society.  We should take that gamble.

"We are not starting from scratch.  There is a long history in this country of rebellion against the establishment, of resistance to orthodoxy.  There has always been a commonsense perception that there are things seriously wrong and that we can't really depend on those in charge to set them right.

"This perception has led Americans to protest and rebel.  I think of the Boston Bread Rioters and Carolina anti-tax farmers of the eighteenth century; the black and white abolitionists of slavery days; the working people of the railroads, mines, textile mills, steel mills, and auto plants who went on strike, facing the clubs of policemen and the machine guns of soldiers to get an eight-hour workday and a living wage; the women who refused to stay in the kitchen and marched and went to jail for equal rights; the black protesters and antiwar activists of the 1960s; and the protesters against industrial pollution and war preparations in the 1980s.

"In the heat of such movements brains are set stirring with new ideas, which live on through quieter times, waiting for another opportunity to ignite into action and change the world around us.

"Dissenters, I am aware, can create their own orthodoxy.  So we need a constant reexamination of our thinking, using the evidence of our eyes and ears and the realities of our experience to think freshly.  We need declarations of independence from all nations, parties, and programs - all rigid dogmas.

"The experience of our century tells us that the old orthodoxies, the traditional ideologies, the neatly tied bundles of ideas - capitalism, socialism, democracy - need to be untied, so that we can play and experiment with all the ingredients, add others, and create new combinations in looser bundles. We now as we come to the twenty-first century that we desperately need to develop new, imaginative approaches to the human problems of our time.

"For citizens to do this on their own, to listen with some skepticism to the great thinkers and the experts, and to think for themselves about the great issues of today's world, is to make democracy come alive."

- From Passionate Declarations: Essays on War and Justice by Howard Zinn, Perennial, 2003.