Et tu, Chomsky?

I’ve always liked Noam Chomsky.

Sure, there are lots of relevant objections to the various positions he’s expressed over a very long period as a… Public intellectual, in lack of a better term. Especially from within anarchism. The argument that Chomsky functions as controlled opposition, shaping the discourse of political resistance by exemplifying acceptable topics and positions for the ostensibly extreme forms of dissent is also reasonable. Any centrist can concede most of his points, but go any further than Chomsky, and it quickly gets uncomfortable.

This notwithstanding, I owe something to the man. Aside from his valuable criticism of Skinner’s behaviourism, his work introduced me to radical political critique as such. It established the notion that power operates from principles often inimical to the precepts and values cherished by the official narratives of an open and democratic Western society. Well, this idea was of course seeded by the X-Files in elementary school, but still.

Given this distinct and identifiable key dissonance, a great many peculiar things in the world around me suddenly made sense. Or could at least be meaningfully interrogated.

I especially remember reading his On Power and Ideology way back when. This set of lectures so clearly spelled out, with vivid examples from recent events, that the larger patterns of history both were discernible, and strongly implied the presence of causal processes wholly different from those of any kind of deliberative democracy.

Particularly significant on top of this, I think, was Chomsky’s assertion that puppet states under hegemonic control were actually preferably “open” parliamentary democracies, not least because these are much more amicable to establishing the consent of the governed. Here’s the relevant quote:

In its actual usage, the term “democracy”, in U.S. rhetoric, refers to a system of governance in which elite elements based in the busness community control the state by virtue of their dominance of the private society, while the population observes quietly. So understood, democracy is a system of elite decision and public ratification, as in the United States itself. Correspondingly, popular involvement in the formation of public policy is considered a serious threat. It is not a step towards democracy; rather, it constitutes a “crisis of democracy” that must be overcome. The problem arises both in the United States and its dependencies, and has been addressed by measures ranging from public relations campaigns to death squads, depending on which population is targeted (Chomsky 1987, lect. 1).

While there’s little to disagree with here, this is of course a dated statement, whose specific context is Chomsky’s criticism of the Contra War and the US undermining of the Sandinista government in the 80s (incidentally, when I do a Google search on “contra war”, my first hit is a video game series whose premise is basically a regurgitation of the US propaganda narrative pertaining to the whole debacle). It is dated in the sense that there’s now not really any question of popular involvement in the formation of public policy. Not anymore. The reason for that is partly in the parenthesis above.

On those issues, the complex problems related to the nested propaganda apparatuses of modern mass society and the media’s authoritarian role in facilitating governance, Chomsky has also provided a good deal of useful analysis. The fruitful little phrase “manufacturing consent”, the title of his and Edward S. Herman’s 1988 book, aptly sums up their general indictment of the modern mass media spectacle and gives a good and still very relevant overview of its general political function in the context of the late Cold War.

To be sure, that title was taken from Walter Lippman’s 1922 work Public Opinion, which brings out in clear relief a Machiavellian machinery which already in this distant past had all but routed any prospect of functional self-governance within the framework of modern civilization:

A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power ... Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the old constants of our thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart (Lippman 1922).

In spite of Chomsky’s useful typologies of media influence and a very interesting set of arguments as to how normative positions and core values are incentivized and structurally reproduced, these weren’t exactly original discoveries. What’s more, Chomsky’s work doesn’t really regard the deep structural (technological and institutional) issues of power and influence in modern industrial societies that were front and center even in Marx’ and Engels’ terse 1848 pamphlet. It’s rather like Chomsky considers the situation one of a political struggle between various forces within the more or less neutral framework of modern society, where the dominant agents simply have co-opted useful tools to serve nefarious ends. In other words, the question of whether the system doesn’t actually work more or less as intended is absent.

I suspect this relative lack of a comprehensive critical analysis, which is also symptomatic of much of the contemporary left in general, at least makes up part of the explanation of how Chomsky now seemingly considers it reasonable to advocate for the corporate state to sequester and isolate the unvaccinated part of the population.

This is really astonishing, and needs to be unpacked a bit. Something like this would effectively mean the elimination of fundamental legal rights on part of the citizen, basically ending rule of law in the West. The act as such would have immense repercussions for public law in practice, and would erect a clear precedent for the state’s use of force against healthy individuals for refusing a medical treatment. A predicted limited social good would now literally be taken to justify such draconian means as imprisonment of a sizable minority of the population.

If we then take into account Chomsky’s general analysis of a liberal democracy essentially captured by powerful interest groups, it’s difficult to see precisely why we would want to cement this sort of biopolitical regime with well-nigh absolute power.

Following on this comment, however, Chomsky immediately received an enthusiastic response from the system’s loyal opposition as exemplified by “radical” progressive youtube leftists such as Vaush, who considers laudable the recommendation of imprisoning the unvaccinated - ostensibly because it is taken to protect the vulnerable, but also to some extent because these kinds of measures have been framed by the corporate media as the system’s use of violence against the political enemies of the left/progressive identity.

I have little sympathy for these kinds of people. They are the professional politicians of Max Weber’s analysis, unwitting propagandists representing and reproducing an official opposition narrative, while still believing themselves to be these virtuous and radical agents of change. That’s the whole point, of course.

And maybe we really ought to have placed Chomsky in that same category some twenty years ago, after he made it clear he didn’t think it mattered whether the 9/11 events were actually perpetrated by elements of a shadow government or not. His argument, I think, was that the machinery of empire would grind on anyhow - but surely exposing such immense corruption would at least have been a wrench in its gears however one squares it?

No, Threedog said it best. I didn’t want it to end like this, but…

Let’s go Chomsky.

References and literature mentioned

Chomsky, Noam, On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures, Boston: South End Press 1987

Chomsky, Noam, Herman, Edward S., Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, New York: Pantheon Books 1988

Lippman, Walter, Public Opinion, New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. 1922

Engels, Friedrich, Marx, Karl, The Communist Manifesto, 1848