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Powers and Prospects: Reflections on human nature and the social order

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Powers & Prospects is based on various talks MIT linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky gave in Australia over the course of a week in January 1995. This occasional origin is evident in the text, which is a collection of essays on language and politics. The essays retain much of the character of the spoken public lectures from which they are derived, and share no over-arching thematic structure. In his brief preface, Chomsky offers a minor point of continuity. "These are hardly happy times for most of the world, apart from a privileged few in narrowing sectors. But it should also be a time of hope and even optimism. That extends from the topics of the opening essays, which discuss some prospects, which I think are real, for considerably deeper understanding about at least some aspects of essential human nature and powers, to those of the final chapters" (p. xi-xii). Suggesting that his essays are bound together by their optimism, Chomsky here also implies an intrinsic, albeit prospective, continuity in this passage. His hope is that the human sciences, considered in the first two chapters on language, can identify elements of a human nature capable of serving as a foundation for the political concerns he examines in the remaining six chapters on various political issues. However, as is suggested by his qualification-"which I think are real"-he acknowledges that this is as yet an unrequited hope.
One can identify an over-arching theme in Powers & Prospects if one sets aside Chomsky-the-linguist to consider Chomsky-the-activist. In chapters three through eight, Chomsky makes the case for intellectual activism, and can be seen in the act-the talks on which these essays are based were given to a cumulative audience of 16,000 or more people (on the estimate of the author of the foreword). In the third chapter, Chomsky gives the question of "Writers and Intellectual Responsibility" a simple answer: "the intellectual responsibility of the writer, or any decent person, is to tell the truth" (p. 55). Or again: "the responsibility of the writer as a moral agent is to try to bring the truth about matters of human significance to an audience that can do something about them. That is part of what it means to be a moral agent rather than a monster" (p. 56). In subsequent analysis, Chomsky applies this dictum to cases of U.S. complicity in atrocities. Here, the metaphysical and highly contestable language of responsibility and agency gives way to the more practical argument that the important thing is to bring the truth of atrocity and governmental complicity in it to people, who then can, must, and will act to end it.
The importance and goodness of such efforts to inform seems uncontentious, raising the question of why, following Chomsky's compelling (though contestable) reading of events, people do not, for the most part, make such efforts. Chomsky answers this question in the fifth chapter, "Democracy and Markets in the New World Order," by reference to a set of unfalsifiable "`enduring truths'"-chiefly, the intrinsic goodness of the market and the government-which are taken to be true "by definition," and which are manufactured by the mainstream press in complicity with the moneyed interests which control the state. Therefore, in order to restore respect to the ideals of human rights and freedom, outlined in the fourth chapter, "Goals and Visions," "the first step is to penetrate the clouds of deceit and distortion and learn the truth about the world, then to organise and act to change it. That's never been impossible, and never been easy" (p. 131).
Chomsky's analysis of media distortion and his two-step program for overcoming it encounters difficulties characteristic of ideology critique; for if the desire to take this step is itself prevented by the manufacture of consent by powerful institutions, then there is no reason to expect people to take political action to actualize true democracy. Organization and action for change would have to precede the enlightenment he sees as a necessary precondition to it; however, the conclusion that one is the dupe of a media controlled by state and corporate power is an uncomfortable one, unlikely to win broad support. Moreover, although many are quite likely to acknowledge the partiality of the media to corporate and state power, the stronger claim that their own consent could be and is manufactured is likely to strike them as implausible.
Recognition of the produced character of consent, which could allow people to begin to recognize deceit and distortion, is unlikely in the face of the widespread, unquestioning acceptance of another, more deeply embedded, "`enduring truth'": the free will. Given a political-cultural predisposition to understand one's choices as proceeding from an essential kernal of the self preceding and genetically unconnected to the relationships of power in which it is implicated, there is little chance that democratic people would question the legitimacy of their own consent. Although he acknowledges that people's tacit background conceptions concerning human nature are "inchoate" and "shallow," the product of "intuition and experience, hopes and fears" (p. 70), he does not pursue this as a possible source of distortions in democracy. Chomsky's political analysis and strategy are flawed, because his cultural critique-ideology critique-is likewise shallow.
For Chomsky, the distortions he identifies are opposed to "democracy" by definition. He invokes "democracy" as if its meaning were self-evident, and in a way that suggests that he understands it to be synonymous with freedom. Chomsky, like Alexis de Tocqueville, notes that the "mainstream" is more powerful in democracies than in non-democratic regimes; however, because he understands democracy as opposed to power, he can see this only as a bitter irony. Although Chomsky approvingly cites de Tocqueville's critique both of Americans' hypocritical rationalizations of their treatment of native Americans in their westward expansion, and of the dehumanizing character of industrial capitalism, he has apparently missed de Tocqueville's analysis of the invisible and non-hierarchal power of the mainstream over thought. This analysis of the very constitution of the democratic individual calls into question Chomsky's too simple opposition of responsible moral agency and monstrosity, and suggests that democracy itself is indecent and monstrous.
Chomsky presents his work as part of a struggle to overcome "`enduring truths'"; but he too begins with unfalsifiable truths. Inattentive to the relationships of power constitutive of the responsible individuals with which his analysis begins, Chomsky can see the prevalence of distortion only as a sign of deceit, and the complicity of the academy and the press only as a sign of the duplicity of paid servants of power. This is unfortunate, because Chomsky's critics will continue to be able to dismiss his alarming and compelling studies of silence and distortion in the media as the rantings of the wacky conspiracy theorist he appears to be when he seeks to explain the findings of his studies in terms of a power understood to proceed from the top down. Such dismissals are unwarrented, as Chomsky compellingly demonstrates in thoughtful examples, throughout Powers & Prospects, and, in particular, in the last three chapters, based on talks concerning Middle Eastern peace (Chapter 6), and East Timor (Chapters 7 and 8).

This is a collection of some of Chomsky's recent essays rather than a single argument (to accuse an essay collection of incoherence etc is therefore wide of the mark). What is valuable here - as elsewhere - in Chomsky is the ability to think outside the received terms in which politics and economics are discussed. MOreover, Chonsky shows conclusively that such received terms are to be understood as ideology rather than knowledge. If you really look at the world and you find its terrible injustices, its inequality and endemic poverty and immiseration pleasing or a matter of indifference then Chomsky will be of no interest to you. (Having said that, it is curious how Chomsky exercises a strange fascination for certainservants of the ruling class, who seem to resent his mastery of several different disciplines, and who get themselves very excited listening to their own garrulous invective.)

Noam Chomky's books are very important, scientifically, politically, economically and morally. The 8 essays in this volume are a proof of the depth of his analyses as well as of his moral integrity.

As committed anarchist, his `Goals and Visions' are actually to defend some state institutions (!) against the massive assaults on democracy, human rights and even markets. At the same time, he would open those institutions to more meaningful public participation and ultimately, in a much more free society dismantle them.
In (`Democracy and Markets in the New World Order') he unveils clearly the fear and hatred of democracy in elite circles, who (try to) impose nationally and internationally James Madison's policies of `protecting the minority of the opulent against the majority' and for whom `the rights of property have priority on the rights of persons.'

One of the means to bring more freedom, justice and a better world is to give better information to the many. In `Writers and Intellectual Responsibility', Chomsky sets the minimum standard for journalism as follows: `It is a moral imperative to find out and tell the truth as best as one can about matters of human significance to an audience that can do something about them.'
But, the media are kept from the public domain and handed over to a few huge private corporations (`private tyranny equals freedom'). Journalism is turned into mere servility and cowardice. Journalist are gagged and silenced (e.g. the genocides in East Timor and Indonesia, see `The Great Powers and Human Rights: the Case of East Timor' and `East Timor and World Order') or fundamentally biased (`The Middle East Settlement').
For Chomsky, the moral culpability of those who ignore the crimes that matter by moral standards is greater to the extent that the society is free and open.

Economically, he points out that the US has been `the mother country and bastion of modern protectionism', imposing now free trade on the Third World.

His scientific work is ground-breaking (`Language and Thought' and `Language and Nature'). He proved that language is a biological process. To question `innate' knowledge is the same as to suppose that the growth of an embryo to a chicken rather than a giraffe is determined by nutritional inputs.
Behavior and texts are of no more intrinsic interest than observations of electrical activities of the brain. A computer program that beats a grandmaster in chess is about as interesting as a bulldozer that wins the Olympic weight-lifting competition.
The only thing that we can say about language is `that we use it for expressing or clarifying our thoughts, inducing others whose language resembles ours to do likewise.
Language doesn't represent the world (Frege) and the content of expressions and of thought is not fixed by properties of the world and society (Putnam).

This is a book written by a formidable free mind.
A must read for all those interested in the future of mankind.

The book comprises of musings on diverse items in the popular press, but what stands out in this book is its sophisticated, although easily misinterpreted scholarly research.
Where Chomsky asserts: "After four straight years of double-digit profit growth, profits - now at a 45-year high - are expected to continue their 'stunning' growth, while real wages and benefits are expected to continue their steady decline." Chomsky might be misunderstood as saying that profits were rising by at least 10% a year. Obviously profits themselves are at an all-time high, what Chomsky is describing the increase of the officially measured profit growth, which at the time of writing was indeed at a 45-year high.

Noam Chomsky is the most important living intellectual today. That is a fact. Whether speaking on linguistics--he shredded Bloomfieldian linguistics and is the genesis of practically the entire discipline today--or political theory, in which his ideas are equally revolutionary, Chomsky's words simply cannot be ignored. This quality is, perhaps, the reason that so many people who seem to disagree with his ideas continue to buy and read his books. For that which is without value is ignored, but that which is truly dangerous to the current system is attacked relentlessly, i.e., Noam Chomsky.

This book is meant to enlighten citizens about the real prospect of power (domination) in so-called democratic societies. And as Mr. Chomsky illustrates in Powers and Prospects, democracy is much different in practice than it's idealized percepts as expressed in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, which adorns the hallowed halls of the White House. It's ironic that his critics say that his ideas are irrelevent and trite, while at the same time going through considerable pains in an attempt to discredit them. But, if he is irrelevent why does he have so many critics--enemies would be a more appropriate term.

What is more close-minded and intellectually shallow than taking a single line from an individual essay and attempting to use it to refute an entire book. Of course, this vacuous methodology speaks for itself and is about as subtle and insightful as Pliny's Histories. However, for those who still have the ability to think for themselves, Chomsky lays it all out, in a clear and easy to read stlye that just cannot be refuted logically. Read Power and Prospects for yourself and experience one of America's most profound thinkers. And while you may not agree with everything Chomsky says, you cannot come away from this book unmoved.