Gray Is Beautiful: Confronting the Retreat of Democracy from the Radical Center is a terrific collection of essays by Jeff Goldfarb, published this past January by Central European University Press.
For many decades Jeff, the author of numerous books and innumerable essays, has been a major practitioner of a genuinely public sociology. As the creator of Public Seminar and the convenor of Democracy Seminar, he has been at the center of a global network of academics dedicated to promoting democracy through a “politics of small things.” In this book, he reflects on some of the most difficult challenges of our time, from the ethics of collaboration to the practice of freedom in the face of authoritarianism. Written in the spirit of Hannah Arendt, each chapter presents a rich and engaging “thought train,” inviting readers to join Goldfarb in the process of “thinking what we are doing.” The book both confronts the current retreat of democracy, and contributes, in the “small ways” at the heart of Goldfarb’s vision, towards democracy’s defense and revitalization.
For over a decade Jeff has been one of my closest friends and indispensable colleagues and conversation partners. As an editor, back in 2016 he got me started writing—for many years at an insane pace—for Public Seminar, and then also engineered the publication of my 2018 book #AgainstTrump: Notes from Year One, as an experimental collaboration between the New School and OR Press. Over the years we have participated in many webinars, initiatives, and projects, and regularly share our writing and our life stories. I am not an impartial evaluator of Jeff’s work, and this is not a “book review” so much as it is an appreciation and an effort to call attention to this important new book of essays written by my dear friend.
As Jeff notes, his overall approach is heavily influenced by the writings and praxis of Adam Michnik, the former anti-communist Polish dissident who was imprisoned many times in the 1970’s and ‘80’s for his activism; who played a central role in the formation of Solidarnosc and in forging cross-border ties with East European dissidents elsewhere (most notably Vaclav Havel); and who has been a prominent defender of liberal democratic values ever since the fall of Communism in 1989. The title of this book is an obvious homage to Michnik’s widely publicized and influential 1996 lecture, “Gray Is Beautiful,” and the book’s central throughline echoes Michnik’s message in that lecture. As Jeff quotes him: “Democracy is a continuous articulation of particular interests, a diligent search for compromise among them, a marketplace of passions, emotions, hatreds, and hopes; it is eternal imperfection, a mixture of sinfulness, saintliness, and monkey business.”
But Jeff’s essays are not a simple reiteration of Michnik’s message.
One reason why is that Jeff has never been a simple commentator on Michnik. Indeed, as he explains in the book’s opening chapter, ever since the 1970’s he has been a colleague and a collaborator of Michnik’s, offering support during the trying times of the 1970’s and 80’s, and helping to create a transnational “democracy seminar” linking American intellectuals, primarily located at the New School, with anti-communist dissidents in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. Beyond those efforts, Jeff has played an important role in the activities of the New School’s Transregional Center for Democratic Studies, working closely with Director Elzbieta Matynia and Associate Director Lala Pop, and for many years teaching at the Center’s Summer Institutes in Wroclaw, Poland, and Capetown and Johannesburg, South Africa. More recently, he has served as both a University Professor and an adviser to the American University in Afghanistan (which, since the Taliban’s return to power, is no longer in Afghanistan). Jeff, in short, has always been himself a very engaged intellectual, going back to his early experiences as a New Left activist at SUNY Albany in the sixties.
All these experiences have been inextricably linked to Jeff’s role as a founder, convenor, and editor of both Public Seminar and Democracy Seminar, in which capacity he has reached broadly to bring together and to publish a wide range of authors (including me). Jeff, in other words, has always been much more than a commentator, and his extensive practical involvements, which he has pursued with extraordinary energy, have informed and grounded his writing.
The second reason why is that while Michnik, who endured real repression, has always, paradoxically, articulated his anti-moralism in a profoundly moralistic way—a position he comes by honestly—Jeff, working in a very different and less existentially challenging and engaging situation, has always been more jaundiced, and skeptical, in his position-taking. He expresses this, tactfully, in his Introduction, commenting on his own distinct experiences: “I have drawn from this, inspired by Michnik, an appreciation of the beauty of the gray. Yet, I also realize that that’s not enough, that there are different shades of gray, and that discerning the perfect shade is impossible. This is where free, open, public space is most relevant, where a democratic life resides. There must be a way that the less than perfect ways of proceeding can be opened up for discussion, considered, and judged.”
It is the shades of gray that Jeff illuminates in Gray Is Beautiful: Confronting the Retreat of Democracy from the Radical Center. Whether he is writing about the Israel/Palestine/Gaza conflict, or the role of art after Auschwitz, or the challenges of collaboration under Communism or under Trumpism, Jeff consistently identifies the limits of either/or thinking, and the need to open up, nurture, and protect spaces of real dialogue across differences. This is not because he believes that all positions are morally equivalent, or that dialogue is always possible. It is because he believes that even in those situations in which there are pretty clear dividing lines between right and wrong—for example between the former Communist regimes and their opponents, or between the Taliban regime and those subjected to its brutal repressions, or between the Trump administration and an opposition struggling to defend constitutional democracy—there are also complexities, both within evil or oppressive regimes, and within the oppositions to them.
This, it seems to me, is what Jeff means by “the radical center.” It’s a paradoxical idea. For “the center” is conventionally associated with the effort to strike a balance rather than the need to press hard against obstacles to freedom, and with moderation rather than radicalism. How can “centrism” be “radical?” And how can “radicalism” be “centrist?” These questions are serious, that deserve to be posed to Jeff’s formulation. And ultimately it is for him and not me to defend the idea. But, having known him for a long time, and having read this book but also its predecessors, I have a pretty good sense of the answer. And it goes something like this: however polarized the situation, and however righteous the cause, there is never a single way to act or to be. And so, there is always a need for there to be a space for thinking beyond oneself and one’s commitments, and for real dialogue—listening as well as speaking—as a constitutive feature of ethically justified action. That space is a kind of “center,” a space between. And, given the many sources of anxiety, outrage, polarization in our world, which generate forms of closure, the urge to keep that space open can itself be seen as “radical.”
Jeff is not a political philosopher, even if he has been profoundly influenced by Hannah Arendt. He is a sociologist and social theorist heavily indebted to the work of Erving Goffman and Arthur Garfinkel, which means he sees the social condition as comprised of manifold performances, and understands that all performance is intersubjective. Gray Is Beautiful: Confronting the Retreat of Democracy from the Radical Center is itself a collection of performances, in space and time, each intended to both perform and promote a political ethic centered on keeping open the spaces of reflection and dialogue. A self-styled politics of the “radical center,” it is above all a politics dedicated to defending and extending the core values of democracy itself. In these dark times, such a politics is indispensable.
