No Moral High Ground

THE RECENT EXERCISE in one-upsmanship exhibited by the Salient editors is all too easy to ridicule. The substantive point of the majority opinion is actually quite correct--Harvard divestiture from companies doing business with the USSR would indeed most likely prove an empty, even a foolish, gesture. Where the majority falls down is where the divestiture movement always falls down: If divestiture cannot be justified on purely moral grounds, it cannot be justified at all, because its results are impossible to predict; and if it can be justified solely on moral grounds, then there is every reason to support the Salient, and indeed to divest from firms operating in scores of nations, perhaps the U.S. included.

The majority attempts to depict South Africa as a place where divestiture can "work," presumably in the sense of producing a more just and perhaps even democratic society there, and to depict the Soviet Union as a nation where U.S. economic pressure can do no good. But no hard facts support the positive effect of economic pressure on South Africa (indeed, the opposite may actually be true), whereas U.S. sanctions against the USSR have sometimes, albeit rarely, produced small positive results. The increased emigration of Jews in the late '70s under the pressure of the Jackson-Vanik amendment is only one instance described in the Salient.

The Salient has admirably shown how the South Africa divestiture movement occupies no moral high ground, and at the same time exhibits the foolishness of divestiture from any nation simply because it's impossible to predict the results.