YOUR
COMMENTSThroughout his entire life, Noam Chomsky has
used his knowledge, skills, and stature as a public intellectual
to advocate for a radical change in societies that have failed
to live to the promises and ideals of a radical democracy. Chomsky
has made clear that intellectuals, artists, educators, and other
cultural workers have a responsibility to use education to address
grave
social problems such as the threat of nuclear war, ecological
devastation, and the sharp deterioration of democracy. And he
has done it by communicating in multiple spheres to diverse
audiences. His academic work and public interventions have become
a model for enriching public life and addressing staggering
forms of economic inequality, needless wars, and class and racial
injustices. He has worked tirelessly to inspire individuals
and social movements to unleash the energy, insights, and passion
necessary to keep alive the spirit, promises, and ideals of
a radical democracy. He models his own work on the responsibility
of intellectuals by drawing from a wide variety of disciplinary
fields and in doing so embraces a notion of education that turns
intellectuals and cultural workers into border crossers and
refiners of the moral imagination. This talk is dedicated to
his courage and relentless spirit of resistance.
Across the globe,
democratic institutions such as the independent media, schools,
the legal system, certain financial institutions, and higher
education are under siege. The promise, if not ideals, of
democracy are receding as right-wing populism and an updated
version of fascist politics are once again on the move subverting
language, values, courage, vision, and hope for a more just
and humane world. In the current historical moment, we are
witnessing a crisis of education, consciousness, civic imagination,
and democratic values. Education has increasingly become a
tool of domination as right-wing pedagogical apparatuses controlled
by the entrepreneurs of hate attack workers, the poor, people
of color, refugees, immigrants from the south and others considered
disposable. In the midst of an era when an older social order
is crumbling and a new one is struggling to define itself,
there emerges a time of confusion, danger, and moments of
great restlessness. The present moment is once again at a
historical juncture in which the structures of liberation
and authoritarianism are vying for shaping a future that appears
to be either an unthinkable nightmare or a realizable dream.
The dark times
that haunt the current age are epitomized by a new crop of
authoritarians who echo the politics of a totalitarian past
and have come to rule in the United States and a number of
other societies. These architects of a new breed of fascist
politics increasingly dominate major cultural apparatuses
and other commanding political and economic institutions across
the globe. Their nightmarish reign of misery, violence, and
disposability is legitimated, in part, in their control of
all sorts of knowledge producing settings that construct a
vast machinery of manufactured consent. This reactionary educational
formation includes the mainstream broadcast media, digital
platforms, the Internet, and print culture, all of which participate
in an ongoing spectacle of violence, the aestheticization
of politics, the legitimation of opinions over facts, and
an embrace of a culture of ignorance. For instance, in the
United States, Donald Trump’s shaping of political culture
has become in many ways more toxic and damaging than his public
policies given his undermining of the civic fabric, rule of
law, and democracy itself. He normalized racism, state violence,
hatred, and disinformation by not only bringing it to the
center of power, but also by deeply embedding a toxic, death-dealing
politics deep into American consciousness and culture. Trump
used the term fake news as an instrument of power to disdain
the truth and call the press the enemy of the American people.
Anti-intellectualism and a hatred for the truth became the
new normal in American culture. Under such circumstances,
the growing reign of authoritarianism and right-wing popular
movements waged a war on critical forms of education, regarded
the truth with disdain, and disparaged the very presence of
critical judgment in any sphere where civic literacy asserted
itself. This plague of ignorance and culture of lies took
place in the midst of a death dealing pandemic accelerated
by a bungling mode of governance that disdained scientific
evidence, played down the seriousness of the virus, offered
no national plan to deal with the pandemic, and confused science
with pseudo-science. As infections rose and deaths skyrocketed,
the United States turned into a funeral home. Trump’s
response was to focus relentlessly on the bogus claim that
he won the presidential election while relentlessly attempting
to legitimate and circulate a range of bizarre and utterly
delusional right-wing conspiracy theories.
It is hard to
imagine a more urgent moment for taking seriously the call
to make education central to politics. The rule of authoritarianism
is imposed less and less by military coups than it is through
elections subverted by the force of oppressive forms of education
that extend from the schools to the social media and other
cultural apparatuses. The educational force of the cultural
sphere is now amplified by the merging of power and new instruments
of culture that have produced powerful sites of struggle in
an effort to normalize and legitimate dominant ideas, values,
and social relations. Making education central to politics
means that any viable notion of education has to address the
cultural forces shaping policies and society so as to create
a formative culture in the service of democratic modes of
agency, desires, and identities. If education is going to
work in the service of democracy, it needs a new vision and
language in which the call for real change resonates with
the concrete needs, desires, values, and modes of identification
that working-class people of every stripe can understand and
relate to critically. As Stuart Hall, once pointed out without
a politics of identification, there is no hope for education
in the service of creating critically informed agents. At
stake here is the notion that education is a social concept,
one rooted in the goal of emancipation for all people. Moreover,
this is an education that encourages the acquisition of forms
of human agency that are not content to enable people only
to become critical thinkers. They should also be engaged individuals
and social agents willing to intervene in the shaping of society.
This is a pedagogy that calls us beyond ourselves, and engages
the ethical imperative to care for others, dismantle structures
of domination, and to become a subject rather than an object
of history, politics, and power.
If we are going
to develop a politics capable of awakening our critical, imaginative,
and historical sensibilities, it is crucial for educators
and others to create a political project infused with a language
of critique and possibility, informed by the crucial notion
that there is no substantive democracy without informed citizens.
Such a language is necessary to enable the conditions to forge
a collective international resistance among educators, youth,
artists, and other cultural workers in defense of not only
public goods, but also a democracy with the guarantee of not
only civil and political rights, but also economic rights
that ensure both dignity and a meaningful sense of agency.
Such a movement is important to resist and overcome the tyrannical
fascist nightmares that have descended upon the United States,
Brazil, Hungary, India, and a number of other countries in
Europe plagued by the rise of right-wing populist movements
and neo-Nazi parties. In an age of social isolation, information
overflow, a culture of immediacy, consumer glut, and spectacularized
violence, it is all the more crucial to take seriously the
notion that a democracy cannot exist or be defended without
informed and critically engaged citizens.
Education must
be broadly understood as taking place in multiple sites and
defined, in part, through its interrogation on the claims
of democracy. As Ariel Dorfman argues it is time to create
the cultural institutions and pedagogical conditions in multiple
sites extending from the mainstream press to the online digital
world in order “to unleash the courage, energy, joy
and, yes, compassion with which rebellious millions [can]
defy fear and keep hope alive in these traumatic times.”
As Pierre Bourdieu has argued, “important forms of domination
are not only economic but also intellectual and pedagogical
and lie on the side of belief and persuasion [making it all
the more] important to recognize that intellectuals bear an
enormous responsibility for challenging this form of domination,”
This is an especially crucial demand at a time when the educational
and pedagogical force of the culture works through and across
multiple sites. Schooling is only one site of education, while
movies, television, books, magazines, the Internet, social
media, and music are incredibly significant forces in shaping
world views, modes of agency, and diverse forms of identification.
What this insight suggests is that academics, artists, intellectuals,
and other cultural producers bear an enormous responsibility
in addressing social problems, educating a broader public
in ways that allow them to think critically and act with conviction
and courage. They also need to support those institutions,
public spaces, and cultural apparatuses where public issues
can be debated, power held accountable, and intellectual inquiry
is give the full range of its imaginative and critical possibilities.
The responsibility
of public intellectuals also points, as C. W. Mills argues
in The Sociological Imagination, to the work of translating
private issues into larger systemic considerations, and to
speak to people in ways that are accessible, awaken their
sense of identification, and illuminate critically the conditions
that bear down on their lives. As intellectuals, it is crucial
to remember that there is no genuine democracy without the
presence of citizens willing to hold power accountable, engage
in forms of moral witnessing, break the continuity of common
sense, and challenge the normalization of anti-democratic
institutions, policies, ideas, and social relations.
In a time when
truth has become malleable and Americans have been told that
the only obligation of citizenship is to consume, language
has become thinner, and more individualistic, detached from
history and more self-oriented, all the while undermining
viable democratic social spheres as spaces where politics
brings people together as collective agents willing to push
at the frontiers of the political and moral imagination. Americans
have forgotten their civic lessons, and in doing so cede the
ground of history to the purveyors of lies, militarism, and
white supremacy. Trump’s support for the ideals of the
Confederacy makes clear that language is a doorway that can
lead to normalizing the horrors of the past. Risking the failure
to learn from history, we fail to see elements of a horrendous
past re-emerging as “an early warning system.”
Making education
central to politics suggests that as artists, researchers,
and academics we ask uncomfortable questions about what Arundhati
Roy calls “our values and traditions, our vision for
the future, our responsibilities as citizens, the legitimacy
of our ‘democratic institutions,’ the role of
the state, the police, the army, the judiciary, and the intellectual
community.” Education has the task of creating the conditions
in which people develop a collective sense of urgency that
prompts a desire to learn how to govern and rather than learn
merely how to be governed. Education for empowerment means
creating informed and critically engaged social movements
willing to fight the emotional plagues, economic inequality,
human misery, systemic racism, and collapse of the welfare
state caused by neoliberal capitalism and other forms of authoritarianism.
Democracy’s survival depends upon a set of habits, values,
ideas, culture, and institutions that can sustain it. Democracy
is both fragile and always unfinished and its fate and future
are not only a political issue but an educational one as well.
In the end, there
is no democracy without informed citizens and no justice without
a language critical of injustice. Democracy should be a way
of thinking about education, one that thrives on connecting
pedagogy to the practice of freedom, learning to ethics, and
agency to the imperatives of social responsibility and the
public good. In the age of nascent fascism, it is not enough
to connect education with the defense of reason, informed
judgment, and critical agency; it must also be aligned with
the power and potential of collective resistance. We live
in dangerous times. Consequently, there is an urgent need
for more individuals, institutions, and social movements to
come together in the belief that the current regimes of tyranny
can be resisted, that alternative futures are possible and
that acting on these beliefs through collective resistance
will make radical change happen.
Noam Chomsky’s
work is infused with the notion that history is open, and
that it is necessary for people to think otherwise in order
to act otherwise, especially if we want to imagine and bring
into being alternative democratic futures and horizons of
possibility. Chomsky’s importance in developing a vision
infused with a mix of justice, hope, and struggle has never
been more important than it is today. Moreover, in the face
of the emerging tyranny and fascist politics that are spreading
across the globe, it is time to heed his call to merge a sense
of moral outrage with a sense of civic courage and collective
action. At the very least, education is central to politics
because it provides the foundation for those of us who believe
that democracy is a site of struggle, which can only be engaged
through an awareness of both its fragility and necessity.
What we cannot do is look away. Goya was right when he warned,
“the sleep of reason produces monsters.”
