Here begins our journey back through the #unforgettableyear of 2020…
The drone-strike assassination of Qassem Soleimani on January 3rd, 2020 seems a long time ago now, but to our U.S. columnist Bull Moose it suggested a new phase in U.S. involvement in the Middle East. Who knows what would have happened in that region during an election year, if a certain respiratory pathogen hadn’t risen to such prominence.
In October last, I was at a Russian Circles gig in Galway. It gave me a much needed stark reminder of the power of live sound: washing over me, enveloping, reverberating my insides, shaking me out of an internal slumber. Requiring a medium to travel, the body is a conductor for sound. Filtering vibrations moving through it. Sound percolating in time through tissue and sinew, connecting, evading, resonating, confronting, decoding, making pliable.
I emerged from the show a renewed being: sensorially realigned, perceiving things afresh, and happy I made the effort to go. As Rumi says, ‘whatever purifies you is the right path’.
Hilary Woods, by the photographer Joshua James Wright.
Elsewhere Billy O’Hanluain seemed to have been preparing us for the joys of working from home, surrounding by unfinished tasks. ‘Procrastination is a very cunning mistress.’ he wrote, ‘She masquerades so expertly at being a muse; seducing me with an ever expanding array of tantalizing tasks that acquire greater urgency with her every whisper and sensual suggestion.’
On a less optimistic note, Frank Armstrong explored how increasing news fatigue had been orchestrated by the likes of Steve Bannon, who targeted followers of Jordan Peterson, who has earned the dubious distinction of being the first internet intellectual.
Meanwhile, featured artist Keshet Zur aspired to be a photographer but felt heartbrake in the digital era, now she engages with nature and social inclusion through Expressive Art Therapy.
Keshet Zur
Bob Quinn’s memoir continued with an account from the 1950s of teaching English in Pforzheim, Germany, where a student Trudie falls for his teaching charms
David Langwallner also continued his public intellectual series with an account of the life and times of Noam Chomsky, with reference to his works Manufacturing Consent, Public Intellectual, Media Control, Henry Kissinger, George Orwell.
Next there was Frank Armstrong’s Late Risers’ Manifesto 2020, in which he quoted the late great David Graeber to the effect that ‘The real question is how to ratchet down a bit more toward a society where people can live more by working less.’ Graeber further opined that the non-working poor may be ‘pioneers of a new economic order that would not share our current one’s penchant for self-annihilation.’
In fiction, Siberian Blue by Mick Sobyanin includes childhood memories of Prokopyevsk, Siberia inside the Soviet Union, dating from 1974, including insights into prevailing Russian attitudes towards Volga Germans.
Lastly we had a satirical poem from the irrepressible Kevin Higgins irreverently portraying the grant application process.
Say it to me if you have something to confess
I was born on the wrong side of the tracks like Ginsberg and Kerouac Bob Dylan, Key West (2020)
Notwithstanding my loathing for fundamentalisms of all strands, I have always preached from a gospel of love, or at least a form of reason that leads to moderation in the Public Intellectual Series.
Ideas about religion and the existence of God based on reason, such as that articulated by Thomas Aquinas, must yield to the facts as these emerge. The ideas contained in natural philosophy – with its harmony of the spheres – available to a medieval monk has been superseded by the discoveries of the Enlightenment that brought the hitherto unknown field of science. Yet, this yielded quantum physics that permits a layer of uncertainty, wherein the nature of an object may shift depending on one’s perspective.
The ‘uncertainty principle’ seems to have been anticipated by the Ancient Greeks, as Albert Camus explains in his essay ‘Helen’s Exile’ (1948):
Greek thought always took refuge behind the conception of limits. It never carried anything to extremes, neither the sacred, nor reason, because it negated nothing, neither the sacred nor reason. It took everything into consideration, balancing shadow with light.
This he contrasted with ‘Our Europe’ which:
off in the pursuit of totality, is the child of disproportion. She negates beauty, as she negates whatever she does not glorify. And through all her diverse ways, she glorifies but one thing, which is the future rule of reason.
We may find, therefore, an excess of reason breeding dogmatism that gives rise to unreason, or even scientism. Thus, the subtlety of the Greek mind, now reflected in the thinking of Jurgen Habermas, permits a space for religion in the public sphere, but certainly not the rule of religion, or a single moral vision.
An awareness of the limitation of reason, or really any one individual’s capacity to reason in a divinely inspired way is not, however, to dismiss the true nature of objective facts in a given situation. As Karl Popper (‘On the Sources of Knowledge and of Ignorance’ (1962)) points out:
belief in the possibility of a rule of law, of justice, and of freedom, can hardly survive the acceptance of an epistemology which teaches that there are no objective facts; not merely in this particular case, but in any other case; and that the judge cannot have made a factual mistake because he can no more be wrong about the facts than he can be right.
Therefore, dogmatism of all kinds – especially couched in religious terms – should be excluded, but we must also accept facts insofar as we are capable of ascertaining these, using the intellectual tools inherent in science and history that have served public intellectuals through the ages.
Extremism of Our Times
Where divine revelation is treated by true believers as factual is truly dangerous. Thus moral philosopher Professor John Finnis assumes the existence of one God ‘the Almighty’ to be self-evident, leading to a fixed moral view that does not allow for diversity, or even mild eccentricity, within our private lives.
In recent writings, Finnis illustrates a dominant extremism of our time. Marriage is for him exclusively between a man and a woman. Therefore, gay marriage is not a good. Furthermore, marriage involves sexual congress, which has as its aim the production of children. Not sex for the sake of having sex, but only for conception. Thus, Finnis considers homosexual congress and sex outside marriage as intrinsically shameful, immoral and harmful.
Some argue that he derives such normative conclusions about homosexual relationships from factual premises of heterosexual physical contact. Moreover, in the civilised world, many of the practices Finnis sanctions are considered by homosexual and heterosexual couples both within and outside of marriage as part of normal sexual congress and behaviour.
The issue highlights how sexuality has warped contemporary Christianity, negating more important issues around the real suffering of human beings in this world, a concern that Pope Francis is at least beginning to address. In his latest encyclical Fratelli Tutti (‘All Brothers, 2020) Francis condemns, ‘a concept of popular and national unity influenced by various ideologies … creating new forms of selfishness and a loss of the social sense under the guise of defending national interests.’
Shaming Culture
The advent of shaming culture as opposed to a justice culture, involves the demonisation of others and is a reversion to social primitivism, akin to burning witches at the stake, or René Girard’s idea of the reconciliatory victim or scapegoat. It is allied to a rise in Populist hysteria and religious mania.
The leading contemporary Jewish philosopher in the U.K., Jonathan Sacks, in a balanced way seeks to exonerate religious belief from its critics. In God’s Name (2016) is a defence of religion in terms of the values it produces. Sacks rails against extremism, a theme he revisits in Morality (2020), where he outlines positive religious values, including a focus on dignity, associative levels of responsibility, community and a sense of public service and the common good.
Jonathan Sacks
Christian jihadism encompasses such forays as the invasion of South America by Spanish Conquistadors and the Crusades, leading to mass slaughter and the destruction of indigenous civilizations. In modern times the Blairite justification, couched in Christian terms, for the war on Iraq was also used to mask narrow self-interest in oil.
Sacks equates altruistic evil with the thinking within the neoconservative group, wherein we are considered good and those outside our group are evil. This leads to the arrogant assumption that we are doing it for ‘their’ own good, killing multitudes will pave the way for democracy.
Crusades, whether modern or ancient, are invariably cloaked in the garment of religious ideology, but are really about resources and the ruthless pursuit of self-interest. They also still permit mass murder. The connection between religion and unbridled capitalism has long been evident, and is, alas, woven into the fabric of institutionalised religion.
All of these examples are truisms historically about the search of the Church and its believers or fellow travellers for gold and money – the Kingdom of Mammon, as opposed to the Kingdom of Heaven.
Both Christopher Hitchens, and indeed Richard Dawkins, have written extensively about the new forms of religious extremes we are witnessing, with the finger of blame primarily being pointed at Islam. That religion of course provides graphic examples of brutal beheadings, mass executions, stoning to death for adultery, planes hitting the Twin Towers, as well as the murder of journalists. All of this is unconscionable, but much of the rage can be traced to neo-imperialism in the Middle East, culminating in the invasion of Iraq. Christopher Hitchens’s greatest intellectual error was to support the Bush-Blair invasion of Iraq.
Power Vacuum
So what is the root cause of Islamic extremism and Evangelical and Catholic extremism?
Blame is rightly attached to the misguided and illegal wars in Iraq, and going all the way back to the 1920s, the creation of client regimes in the Middle East. The unintended consequences of the occupation of Iraq led to a power vacuum in Syria, which gave an opportunity to well organized religiously inspired militants.
This, however, was the culmination of long-term trends within Islam, wherein successive generations had been radicalized by preachers who exploited a loss of identity in the face of Western consumerism, segregation and enduring poverty.
In Marxist terms, religious fundamentalism can be traced to growing disparities of wealth and structural inequality, as well as a lack of opportunities to gain a rounded education, with all too great an emphasis on technical or scientific education for economic advancement, as opposed to a broad liberal education that inculcates critical thinking.
Primarily, however, this extremism speaks of a need to belong to a cause, leading to belief in something ethereal, no matter how ludicrous. Belief in an afterlife defines people’s existences and justifies, as far as they are concerned, even self-immolation.
But the secularist response in France especially – under the aggressive application of laïcité – to ban or regulate the wearing of the burka or nijab, upheld in the European Court of Human Rights in the SAS case, only appears to inflame the issue. This is really little more than a sideshow to a wider collapse in values.
A Group of Women Wearing Burkas. Afghanistan women wait outside a USAID-supported health care clinic, Afghanistan, 2003.
As the wheels come off the economic system as we know it, and where people are searching for words and expressions to convey their understanding of the withering of societal bonds, extremist Christianity has stepped into the void to provide solace.
In the United States, at least, we are seeing an unholy synergy developing between Evangelical Christians and right-wing Catholicism. Far-right demagogues, led by Trump, have articulated a view that ‘our’ country is being overrun by immigrants and that the dominant ethnic group must ‘take back control’ from a phantom intellectual Marxism, liberal elites, or straight socialism – all emanating from the decadence of the mixed race cosmopolis.
This a descent into the racist abyss, where those we disagree with are scapegoated and targeted. It is a product of a dangerous dualistic mode of thinking, which Sacks identifies with a need to define God in relation to the Satan residing in others. This is the demonisation of those we disagree with, which is also evident in social media vilification.
Real Suffering
The suffering expressed through religion is the genuine sigh of oppressed creatures. In Marxist terms, the abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
In a world of poverty, of diminishing resources and human degradation the appeal of an afterlife is obvious. What the Christian far-right in the United States and elsewhere offer is the establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, which involves a veneer of protection against the unbelievers. This leads to isolation of the righteous few in gated communities, segregating the chosen people from the disaster they have inflicted on others.
The pandemic has led to the recrudescence of a millenarian ethos and sense of doom that is creating a society not dissimilar to that found in Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, enforced against men and women alike.
The philandering Donald Trump is merely a front man for larger interests, who control the puppet on the chain. He dances to the beat of the dark money of the Republican Party, appointing the Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court was his parting gift.
End of Days
Another hallmark of the present distorted religious influence of the neoliberal world order is the denial of climate change, and the employment of post-truth reasoning – the denial of objective facts underpinning the rule of law as Karl Popper saw it – to justify this.
The Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli, in his simple and illuminating Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, closes his account, with a reflection on how centuries of discoveries affect an understanding of ourselves. While generally positive, one stark passage stands out for its relevance to the challenge of addressing climate change.
I believe our species will not last long. It does not seem to be made of the stuff that has allowed the turtle, for example, to continue to exist more or less unchanged for hundreds of millions of years; for hundreds of times longer, that is, than we have even been in existence. We belong to a short-lived genus of species. All of our cousins are already extinct. What’s more, we do damage. The brutal climate and environmental changes which we have triggered are unlikely to spare us. For the Earth they may turn out to be a small irrelevant blip, but I do not think that we will outlast them unscathed – especially since public and political opinion prefers to ignore the dangers which we are running, hiding our heads in the sand. We are perhaps the only species on Earth to be conscious of the inevitability of our individual mortality. I fear soon we shall also have to become the only species that will knowingly watch the coming of its own collective demise, or at least the demise of its civilisation.
Carlo Rovelli
This exemplifies the difference between a man of science and objective facts, and those of a fundamentalist bent that place mankind atop the pyramid of Creation.
More terrifying than where Ravelli places us in the grand scheme is the end of days preacher who cannot countenance that we may indeed be just an irrelevant blip on this Earth, but instead sees the Earth as something created for us to plunder and exploit.
Cognisant of this threat, Noam Chomsky recently claimed that the Republican Party is the ‘most dangerous organization in world history’ He has deliberately corrected many interviewers who mistakenly stated that in fact he said it was the most dangerous organization in the world today.
Chomsky also mentioned in a BBC Newsnight interview that there has to be connection between the denial of science, and active attempts to undermine it, with the belief of nearly 40% of the American public that the Second Coming will occur by 2050.
Why would a deluded mind bother saving life and civilization, when it is prophesised that it will all be over soon? Christian End of Day’s logic, or lack thereof, is not so prevalent in agnostic Europe at present, but the breakdown of the social order through the austerity shock doctrine, and now the coup de grâce of the pandemic, leaves the continent exposed to those same forces, which may be articulated in an equally millenarian scientism that sees human beings as vectors of disease.
Loss of Meaning
In a 2004 essay Václav Havel foresaw much of what we now find in a piece called ‘What Communism Still Teaches Us,’ describing ‘supposed laws of the market and other invisible hands that direct our lives.’ There remains an abject lack of humanism in neoliberal politics and society, comparable in certain ways to Communist totalitarianism, not least in the brainwashing of the young through solipsistic social media.
With the loss of religious forms, however, many living in modern technocratic societies experience a loss of meaning, and even a moral void. The social structure of religions fostered close relationships and inculcated a sense of community, as well as charity, the protection of human dignity and a commitment to public service. The Bible injuncts kindness towards strangers, and to do unto others as you would wish them to do to you, which also derives from Aristotelian philosophy.
To rectify contemporary problem such as poverty and environmentaldegradation, undoubtedly we need to shift from a conception of ‘I’ to ‘we’ as Sacks argues.
In The Godless Gospel, Julian Baggini also calls for a form of religion shorn of hatred for our age, where we develop personal and social goods through deeds not pious words. Through this we may realise our best intentions and develop empathy and compassion, a commitment to personal humility and an obligation and commitment to the truth. Above all we should try and do as little harm as possible he asserts.
All of these are good values that Christianity may teach to those of a secular persuasion lacking in moral clarity.
Thus from a secular perspective, Jürgen Habermas understood how religion engenders social integration, and is the basis for communicative action. As far back as 1978 he argued, from an agnostic perspective, for the necessity of religious ideas to humanise society. Those of faith must learn to communicate reasonably, which means the renunciation of violence and extremism. We must learn to talk and communicate our differences, agreeing on facts to ground the rule of law.
Pope Francis
Pope Francis’s experiences in the barrios of Buenos Aires appears to have shaped an empathy towards those afflicted with extreme poverty and subjected to degradation. He preaches tolerance, engagement and social and economic justice. This has largely been stripped of the condemnation of sexuality and sexual expression evident in his predecessor John Paul II.
Let us hope the liberation theology that is intrinsic in Francis’s message is not tainted by the dark money of the Vatican, and he does not go the way of John Paul I, or ‘God’s Banker’ Roberto Calvi, found hanging from Blackfriars bridge in 1982, just outside the site of my Chambers.
Christian socialism is a potentially vital force if it reflects the values of what Philip Pullman calls that great man Jesus, but not the values, as he equally presents, of that scoundrel Jesus Christ. This latter is a distortion of New Testament values, dedicated to the accumulation of capital, a lack of compassion and political manipulation.
If inequality grows any further – amid ever-greater accumulations of wealth – then neoliberalism may well give way to neo-feudalism. Viewed in this regard it is easier to understand the potential for an alliance between church and capital in subjugating the masses. The Book of Genesis sanctions man’s dominion over the earth which has led to a scorched earth approach towards environmental regulations that will ultimately impoverish us all. For too long Christianity has married the exchange of goods with the exchange of gods.
Scopes Trial
In parts of American Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is accorded equal weight and validity as Creationism in schools. Children are taught that the world was created by God the Almighty in the space of seven days.
It’s been a long time coming. In the Scopes Trial of 1925 – where a High School teacher was put on trial for teaching Darwinism – the legendary American attorney Darrow anticipated what happens when a society abandons reason altogether.
Can’t you understand? That if you take a law like evolution and you make it a crime to teach it in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools? In addition, tomorrow you may make it a crime to read about it. Soon you may ban books and newspapers. Then you may turn Catholic against Protestant, and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the mind of man. If you can do one, you can do the other. Because fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy, and needs feeding. And soon, your Honor, with banners flying and with drums beating we’ll be marching backward, BACKWARD, through the glorious ages of that Sixteenth Century when bigots burned the man who dared bring enlightenment and intelligence to the human mind!
In a period of declining belief in a broad liberal education, and where the art-repeneur has taken over from true artists, there is a desperation for something to cling on to, whether Creationism, neoliberalism or even scientism. We are living in an age of pervasive ignorance, which can be traced to our putative higher educational institutions, where students are taught to believe and comply. Or as Foucault would have it, punishment is becoming internalized through control vectors.
Lost in all of this is the message of Christian socialists such as Pope Francis, Sacks, and even their ideological fellow-traveller Habermas. This is a form of Christian decency that reflects the needs of human beings battling for survival in an increasingly hostile environment, where adequate nutrition, shelter, health care, education, housing and even dignity are denied.
Thus organised religions appear to be experiencing an existential battle between the neoliberals and Christian socialists. Exclusionary family values that are a hallmark of religious neoliberalism conceal a corporate existence and controlled sexuality. Its tenets are designed to diminish any radicalisation among the young.
But let us hope a new-found empathy with the Wretched of the Earth can emerge, in Catholicism at least under Pope Francis, and perhaps other Protestant more tolerant faiths. This would reflect the moderation and human decency of public intellectuals in this series such as Jürgen Habermas, Albert Camus, George Orwell and Edmund Burke, all of whom in their own ways rejected the moral absolutes that lead to human degradation.
No Time to be Making Enemies
On his deathbeds the great Enlightenment intellectual Voltaire (1694-1778) was asked by a priest in attendance to renounce the devil. Voltaire considered this advice, but approaching the pearly gates he decided against doing so: ‘This is no time,’ he said, ‘to be making new enemies.’
At this stage in our history it is important to be open to all belief systems, including Christianity in spite of its diabolical history. Christianity, and other religions, must confront a dark past, but can provide moral guidance in the face of a culturally dominant neoliberal cost-benefit analysis of life. Dogmatic secularist should concede that there are lessons to be drawn from religions. These may help generate a genuine brotherhood and sisterhood among human beings to confront the real evil in this world.
They who have put out the people’s eyes reproach them of their blindness.
John Milton, ‘An Apology for Smectymnuus with the Reason of Church-Government’ (1642)
Unfortunately I just missed out on meeting one of the totemic figures of our time in Noam Chomsky. In 1997, as a Boston-based Harvard student, I was taken to visit an unprepossessing office inside an apartment block, only to find the veteran M.I.T. professor and author had left the building.
What remains to be said about the darling of the radical anti-imperialist left?
In my previous account of Michel Foucault, I touched on Chomsky’s revulsion towards post-modernism and moral relativism, and his acute anticipation of the post-truth zeitgeist. He was the first I think to point out that Jacques-the-lad-poseurs such as Derrida and Lacan were saying little of substance, and what they were holding forth on was nonsense on stilts.
Chomsky anticipated how post-modernist mumbo-jumbo would be appropriated by neo-conservatives to sow a culture of disinformation. Perhaps a scientific background in formal linguistics armed him with the rigour to cut through the morass. He has frequently spoken of his dislike of deceit, and adherence to Cartesian common sense.
Chomsky shares with George Orwell – another of our public intellectual subject-matters – a commitment to the truth and an almost mystic-like perception of how propaganda operates. This leads him into a degree of bemusement at popular culture that may come across as elitist. But he understands how a spectator democracy and a free-fall in journalistic standards has lead to Populist demagogues.
Manufacturing Consent
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuwmWnphqII
The effectiveness of political propaganda is managed by hegemonic media and other vectors of public opinion, which undermine democracy and promote a corporatocracy. This brought us Donald Trump rather than Bernie Sanders.
It is what Chomsky has termed Manufacturing Consent, borrowing a term from Walter Lippmann, whose Public Opinion (1921), argued for democratic control through a specialised class or cool observers to control the agendas, manipulating public opinion by means of clever illusions and simplification.
Chomsky borrows this insight to demonstrate how the media works through diversion and dumbing down. Popular energy is dissipated and voters infantilised.
Interestingly, a recent highly critical account by Chris Knight called Decoding Chomsky (2016) points out that for much if not all of his career Chomsky’s science, eminently debatable, has been totally disconnected from his political engagement.
From the outset of his career he has effectively relied on the promotion and funding of the military industrial complex, through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.).
Why? Well it seems they quite like the idea of an anti-establishment token radical on their payroll. It gives them a degree of legitimacy, at least as long as his voice is not heard too widely. Indeed, in other countries he might be regarded as a class traitor.
Moreover, his ground breaking hypothesis of human beings possessing an innate syntactical language of deep structure, contrary to the claims of behaviourism assisted the Pentagon in an ultimately fruitless search for a computer encoded Esperanto. They were seeking a common dumbed down language that could be used for commercial and corporate purposes: a precursor to the patois of social media perhaps.
It is important to recall that as an American academic he has had to navigate a snake pit of careerist in order to make his mark. One should recognise the constraints of working within a uniformly commercial culture that encompasses the universities.
Knight maintains that psychologically his ab initio common-language-from-nowhere linguistic theory, and advocacy, promoted isolation, and led to a form of cognitive dissonance that influenced his political beliefs. In effect, Knight alleges, he became a neurotic at odds with the rest of society. The accusation thus is one of hypocrisy, or like Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, he has been living an alternative life.
A Picture of Dorian Gray
Knight also maintains that when his critics maul his ideas on linguistics he reverts to ad hominem tactics, dogmatism, with counter evidence dismissed in favour of his own mystical vision, which is precisely the kind of self-evident-genius-argument I despise.
So I am certainly not fully persuaded by his linguistic theories but convinced indeed, unlike Knight, that the institutional support has brought him unique intellectual influence and responsibility – perhaps manipulated for his own ends – but for the good of humanity: as Chomsky is a principled man.
The Public Intellectual
One of his very early pieces, much modified, is brilliantly written on a theme close to my heart: the responsibility of the public intellectual.
Chomsky draws a clear distinction between the ever more prevalent academics who sing for their suppers, and parrot for promotion, and those who take the difficult path of what Albert Camus would call engagement.
Today, value-orientated intellectuals are likely to be dismissed as troublemakers in our short term universe of disposability. The generalist is lost in the mix.
Chomsky in fact is very conscious of how, ever since Jimmy Carter, right-wing, Christian conservatives in America have warned against the radicalisation of the young, and are now hell bent on purging radical thinkers from citadels of learning.
The universities and the media engage in self-censorship to suit corporate paymasters. The polite-paper-paradigm meets with incredulity at the nuclear explosion of true dissidence. I discovered this under martial law-like conditions when giving a Rule of Law paper in Trinity College Dublin. On offering robust opinions I was told there would be no circulation of the paper, and another invitation was unlikely.
In Manufacturing Consent (1988), Chomsky demonstrates how market forces and the neo-liberal agenda compel colleges and the media to select topics within defined parameters. This restricts debate and brings the nonsense of ‘balanced’ coverage, and the filtering of information with an over-emphasis on tone. Appropriate tone. Authorities fear upsetting corporate sponsors, leading to the rule of political correctness by the banal.
More to the point, Chomsky is attuned to the independent stance of public intellectualism, which we have all but lost.
Henry Kissinger
Chomsky has also written about Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, a dangerous war criminal still in our midst, and how he exterminated or was complicit in the extermination of East Timor, which was absorbed into Indonesia during the American-backed Suharto dictatorship, with tremendous loss of life and Crimes Against Humanity.
Still in our midst. Henry Kissinger.
In the documentary Manufacturing Consent, like George Orwell, Chomsky is attentive to the misuse of language to justify atrocities. Thus in East Timor the invasion was code-named Operation Clean Sweep. More sotto voce language distortions to justify ethnic-cleansing, itself a term sanitising Genocide that only came into being during the Yugoslav conflict of the 1990s.
The book Manufacturing Consent sets out clearly how American foreign policy, from Vietnam to the Bush wars, moulded the message and demonised the Other. Even if we are wrong we are right, and embedded reporters will exonerate any wrongdoing. If, like the claims of weapons of mass destruction used to justify the invasion of Iraq, the truth is damaging, we ignore it.
Thus a world is divided into worthy and unworthy, with the lenses of the powerful never turned on themselves. Enemies are reduced to vermin to be exterminated, and democratically elected socialists like Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 are, if necessary, removed from office. That’s because democratic socialism is contrary to American values. Better to have a son of a bitch, so long as he’s our son of a bitch. If our boys are engaged in terrorism, it is not really terrorism. If we murder vast numbers of civilians it is hardly Genocide.
As Chomsky reminds us, democracy has to be subverted to purge the average citizen of consciousness, and the critical faculties necessary for it to function.
‘Socialism is contrary to American values.’
Hegemony and Survival
Another crucial text, Hegemony and Survival(2003) demonstrates how the elite regard democracy as, in effect, a spectator democracy. To paraphrase Alexander Hamilton, the ordinary person must be deemed irresponsible and kept within strict confines. He should not be allowed to vote in his interests, or even consider them.
From Vietnam to the present day U.S. Imperialism has dismissed unworthy races. Those who are not a part of the twenty percent who control the planet are to be excluded and disempowered. A culture of dissent is expurgated.
In Hegemony and Survival he sees clearly the beginning of what Stieglitz called The Great Divide (2017), and development of a lunatic neo-liberal hegemony. That divide now has led to the destruction of the middle class, and the cartelisation of wealth into ever decreasing hands
The corporations control the press, leading to self-interested non-reportage by job preservers, reporting beyond the neo-liberal straightjacket is not permitted. The Irish Times in Dublin is a totemic exemplar of the decline of independent media.
As he mentions in his book on propaganda Media Control (2002) state propaganda is used and supported by the educated classes in order to exclude those less fortunate from the discussion. The responsible people, which Yannis Varoufakis would call the Adults in the Room, exclude the herd from infecting their decision-making. Thus people are atomised, segregated and alone. Scholarship becomes conformist and lies beget and compound lies. Scholars who show an independence of spirit are de-frocked.
That which the media excludes is dictated by corporate ownership and advertising paymasters, bringing stories that focus on less central issues, or infomercials masquerading as news.
Thus the thinking public á la Cambridge Analytica is fed disinformation, dictating and influencing popular misconceptions, problems and prejudices.
Ten facts about media control
Chomsky summarises the ten facts of media control which I further synopsis:.
Distraction: compel the public to focus on irrelevance and chatter in our Brave New World. Overload them with nonsense. Press control from Murdoch to social media augments this.
Generate Problems that do not exist and do not need solving: Bail out the banks to enforce fiscal stabilisation and impose austerity on those who have no responsibility for the mess. Reinforce the message, TINA (there is no alternative) but fiscal stabilisation.
Gradualism: Brexit is likely to lead to the slow death of the NHS. First deny it to non-nationals, then to the socialists… Once the British public is conditioned to the idea, pull the plug out altogether and fully privatise.
It will be better in the long run if you take your medicine now. The short sharp shock of austerity. No it will not.
Kill people’s critical faculties and infantalise them. The Greeks and Irish are merely children anyway. Appropriate adults in the room, in the form of the IMF, have arrived to tell you what to do.
Appeal to Emotion, frenzy, hysteria and not rationality. Thus our world is being torn apart by mob orators pulling at the heartstrings.
Disinform and create a sideshow. The public are being fattened up by bread and seduced by circuses of the absurd, causing us to lose sight of the real point.
Pander to bland consumerism. Assure people constantly that they have never had it so good. Brexit will create unlimited prosperity. Drug people with disinformation like soma from A Brave New World.
If we have acted criminally and are powerful then it is your fault and your responsibility. You are derelict because we are criminals, but we never acknowledge that.
Play the person not the ideas. Then if the person is troublesome go after their relationship structure, or just make them disappear.
Chomsky cuts against the salon culture of the Enlightenment, championed by Jürgen Habermas. The challenge lies in counteracting the disconnected memes and silo bubbles of self-interest that the world’s elite direct at us.
Data retention
Orwell’s idea of double speak from Nineteen-Eighty-Four dovetails with Chomsky’s significant observation that it is much more important to have less data, but to have greater understanding or indeed comprehension of what we do hold on to.
That requirement for nuance, judgement and perspective is dissipating rapidly. We are addicted to useless information and data retention, not comprehension or understanding. We are now bombarded with a deluge of superfluous information by social media. More to the point the useless data and bricolage condition our judgment, as it must in order to survive.
How many now join up the dots as Chomsky has and bring them into common sense utterance in simple plain speech and with social engagement? Very few. Very few from the academic community at least. Chomsky is right that the time servers and corporate drones of academia are deliberately or intellectually missing the Big Picture.
One point he has not addressed is how the current neo-liberal rewarping of human identity is creating social atomisation and political disconnection. We are now so embroiled in what we do that we hardly ever question it or fully understand the machine behind it. We no longer have time to consider what we are doing.
Chomsky quotes Robert McNamara in Manufacturing Consent to the effect that all the power brokers are interested in is quiescent serfs dedicated to personal wealth maximisation, not a culture of dissent.
McNamara, a brilliant but non-deviant character, was an ultra-competitive and narrow-minded technocrat which made him complicit in the carpet bombing of Tokyo and the Vietnam war. He even acknowledges that had he been on the losing side he could have been prosecuted for war crimes. If only McNamara had slightly wilder college days.
So the masses are duped by propaganda and caught by a Social Darwinist cult that Chomsky despises. Paradoxically, Chomsky is himself a survivor in that world, and has had to make his compromises, as we all do. ‘You’re going to have to serve somebody,’ as Bob Dylan sang.
Optimism Over Despair
Nonetheless, as Chomsky argues in his new book, we need Optimism Over Despair (2017), perhaps a social-democratic New Deal, checking unbridled capitalism.
As creatures of bounded rationality in an increasingly over-specialised world the Big Picture is a luxury perhaps, reserved for a corporate- and military-funded former M.I.T. Professor. He now operates from a salubrious post-retirement position in Arizona – the greatest quality of life retirement home in America – which is not to be in the least dismissive of Chomsky’s staggering achievements.
Chomsky rightly regards the U.S. as a terror state that acts without restraint, while accusing others of the same crimes. Thus the labels of terrorism and counter-terrorism conceal a multitude of agendas and doublespeak, while permitting the basest acts.
I am unconvinced by the evidence for a common nascent language of universal and deep structure. Chomsky has never explained adequately the idea of recursion, a kind of infinity of deep structure, and thus the linguistic ideas appear counter-intuitive and perhaps fundamentally incorrect. But I claim no expertise in this domain. Nonetheless, I cling to the belief that there is a common universal of pragmatic compunction, though varying in context and time.
Of course none of that is to gainsay or contradict the clear speech of his inter-subjective and all-encompassing journalism and political tracts, for which he deserves great praise.
Responding to Chomsky
Here I summarise the injunctions I have gleaned from Chomsky’s work:
Think independently and do not buy into the mass media consensus. Remain acutely vigilant to doublespeak technobabble. Hearing euphemisms such as ‘politically impossible,’ ‘fiscal stabilisation,’ ‘military intelligence’ or ‘known unknowns’ should sound off alarm bells.
Question how implausible nonsense is considerable acceptable, and campaign, if at all possible, for freedom and justice.
Assert the importance of historical memory, as Milan Kundera emphasised. In laughter all evil is compacted as Friedrich Nietzsche wrote. If we fail to remember, we’re sure to repeat the same obscenities.
Oppose fascism in all its current incarnations, including corporate fascism. Do not sympathise with your captors or enemies.
Recognise true hypocrisy for what it is. The hypocrite is someone who applies to others standards they refuse to apply to themselves, of which American foreign policy is a paradigmatic case. Remain flexible and non-puritanical however.
Understand that the definition of terrorism is manufactured by a terrorist corporate and state elite. Just as the French tortured in Algeria, the Americans did the same in Guantanamo Bay. Yet both claimed the high moral ground. Terrorism is only what they do to us.
Resist the rise of moral relativism, which is part of a triage of evil (joining post-truth and neo-liberalism) that Chomsky identifies in the U.S. Republican Party, which he has singled out as the most dangerous political organisation on Planet Earth.
Acknowledge how the cost-benefit analysis of neo-liberalism is turning us into homo economicus, making us lose compassion for one another, besides generating environmental catastrophes.
Embrace the educational tools necessary to defend oneself, and develop communities of resistance within rapidly atomising societies.
Interrogation carried out in Guantanamo Bay.
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Perhaps the most disturbing idea that comes through in Knight’s book about Chomsky does not apply to him directly, but relates to how the political ground has moved so far to the right that Richard Nixon, who supported environmental initiatives, Keynesian economics and state-funded medicine, might now be labelled a Communist.
If Chomsky manipulated the corporatocracy to achieve and advocate his political views I would tend to applaud rather than condemn him. To penetrate the orifices of the establishment and to subvert from within is surely a great achievement in itself. It’s always better to be pissing out than pissing in, for as long as you can anyway.
