Indispensable dissident
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Collection of Noam Chomsky’s essays offering a comprehensive overview of his philosophy
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Shelley Walia
THE ESSENTIAL CHOMSKY: Edited by Anthony Arnove; Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Enclave, New Delhi-110017. Rs. 499.
No history of any anti-war movement is complete without taking into account the dissident voices of Howard Zinn, Tariq Ali, Omar Pamukh, and more so of Noam Chomsky whose writings and lectures on the U.S. wars in Vietnam, Central America and the Middle East form a corpus of literature on the cause of peace.
His main works from Manufacturing Consent to Hegemony and Survival, from Failed States to Perilous Powers have challenged the deceptions of media reportage and of the devious agendas of Western regimes over half a century. As Edward Said emphasised some years ago, “Noam Chomsky is one of the most significant challengers of unjust power and delusions; he goes against every assumption about American altruism and humanitarianism.”
Insightful
And now he is 80 and to honour him Anthony Arnove has compiled a collection consisting of some of his most provocative and insightful essays on language and the brain, on the responsibility of the intellectual towards influencing a nation’s foreign policy, on 9/11 and the planning of global hegemony. The book presents a comprehensive overview of Chomsky’s thought. As it becomes clear from his various arguments, his main focus is that “...citizens in a democratic society should undertake a course of intellectual self-defence to protect themselves from manipulation and control, and to lay the basis for more meaningful democracy.”
Though Chomsky does not follow any particular theoretical framework for his political writings, he does not completely rule out the existence of theory behind any kind of activity: “… there is no such thing as an ‘absence of theory’, I mean, you always have a commitment to some set of beliefs, gods and visions and so, or to some kind of analyses of society. That is true whether you are expressing your views on torture, on freedom of speech, or in fact any issue beyond the most utterly superficial.”
Dissidence
Chomsky is aware of the procedures of knowing which are constantly mediated by history and the very institutional framework in which we look for truth. He takes into consideration the polemics between individual and society which are as old as history. It is clear that this conflict is at the back of any epistemic violence, or enhancement of knowledge that takes place in society. State intrusion always results in either the resistance of the individual or submissive conformism that marks the bourgeoisie set-up. Society’s methodical and systemic ideals stand challenged wherever individual freedom is put under any restraint. Disagreement with the interference of the state embodies individualist tendencies that are often non-conformist and essential to the extent of never stooping to knowledge that emanates from the centre. Chomsky’s philosophy of dissidence bases itself on individualism that differs from collectivism in claiming that the welfare of the individual is of the utmost value and that each individual exists as a unique end, with society serving only as a means to accomplish individual requirements. As Eduardo Galeano points out, “Chomsky’s fierce talent proves once more that human beings are not condemned to become commodities.”
Involvement
What human history is witness to is the authoritarian desire of the state to completely obliterate far-reaching ideas refusing to allow any oppositional combative stance. Implicit in Chomsky’s writings is one significant question: How can an individual then be unbiased or non-partisan? You cannot be free of ideology that somewhere or the other seeps into your thoughts as you engage in social interchange. Thus all writing is political.
Establishments such as the American breed individuals who go along with the state ideology; survival through pro-establishment views and love for the status quo is a political expediency. Opposed to such a class of people, are activists like Edward Said or Noam Chomsky, who belong to the discipline of comparative literature or linguistics, but do not vacillate to step outside the boundary of their professional area, and write extensively with utter involvement in world politics. Chomsky maintains that he has as much qualifications to comment on international affairs as any other expert, which implies that you really do not need any specialisation. He explains that “those areas of inquiry that have to do with problems of immediate human concern do not happen to be particularly profound or inaccessible to the ordinary person.” You do not have to be an expert to know that consensus in society has a false assumption of being the general ‘truth’ which has the power of a discourse that puts across a make-believe world of international ethics. It is not difficult to understand the subterraneous agenda of crass imperialism which is given the camouflage of the “white man’s burden.” To set the historical record right, Chomsky describes this delusion: “In the United States, the prevailing version of the ‘white man’s burden’ has been the doctrine, carefully nurtured by the intelligentsia, that the United States, alone among the powers of modern history, is not guided in its international affairs by the perceived material interests of those with domestic power, but rather wanders aimlessly, merely reacting to the initiatives of others, while pursuing abstract moral principles: the Wilsonian principles of freedom and self-determination, democracy, equality, and so on.”
Is it possible to conceive of a society where such lies go unnoticed? Can dissidence ever be eliminated? It is, rather paradoxically felt, that silencing the dissident voice is a solution to all problems. Banning of dissident literature or imprisoning the critics of state policies cannot put an end to the views of those intellectuals who are disgruntled with it. Chomsky reprimands the intellectuals who remain silent and lack the courage to rise against authoritarianism.
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