Noam Chomsky on Language, Democracy, and Social Justice

by Peter McLaren

Noam Chomsky is widely held to be one of the twentieth century’s greatest luminaries. His genius, perhaps more than any other contemporary figure, epitomizes the ideal of social justice. He is considered to be among history’s most influential and impassioned critics of U.S. foreign policy and an outspoken opponent of the abuses of authority. Few scholar activists have exposed with such nuanced singularity the contradictions and limitations of liberal democracy and its culture of diminishing expectations of what it means to be human. A diversely talented polymath, Chomsky is a seminal figure in linguistics but is held in equally high regard for his scathing attacks on war, imperialism, and the illegitimate use of political authority. Perhaps no other contemporary scholar other than Bertrand Russell has stepped as far outside of political convention and displayed such contempt for society’s most powerful factions and institutions and the political orthodoxies that sustain them—and achieved international renown within his own lifetime for his forays into polemics—than Noam Chomsky. His knowledge of political history and geopolitics is without precedent and his book, Manufacturing Consent, is considered a paradigm of political criticism. Deploying a staggering knowledge of history that he can recall effortlessly, Chomsky has vigorously debunked the strategies and tactics of the world’s greatest terrorist states, including the United States. Of course, one of the primary means that the US security state can manufacture consent is through the use of the media. Citing the work of Barry Sanders, P. Ramesh (2003, para. 4) notes that television “does not stimulate the brain; ‘it feeds both stimulus and response into the infant-child brain as a single-paired effect.’ Even the video game does not have ‘active’ let alone ‘interactive’ participants, for the simple reason that ‘the rules of the game dominate as thoroughly as any totalitarian regime.’” Ramesh continues: “TV creates the most vicious of cycles: it makes a person more susceptible to manufactured images by diminishing that person’s ability to generate his own, a condition akin to the suppression of the immune system, a kind of electronic AIDS.” During the twentieth century human beings were slaughtered in wars at rates exceeding anything known in modern history. And our historical segue into the twenty-first century has shown little to convince us that the bloody history of humanity will be abated. Human beings have been reduced in the scientific worldview to inert statistics, and in religious worldviews to ‘terrorists’ or enemies of Christ. Sanders (2010, p. 3–4) writes:

How did we arrive at a state of affairs so catastrophic that fathers, sons, husbands, wives, daughters, lovers and friends—the rag and bone of human existence—could have collapsed so conclusively into images, pixels, ciphers, ghosts, gross numbers, into the palatable euphemisms of death? Why does virtually every loss of human life now resemble that frightening model of anonymity from the inner city, the drive-by random assassination, where, once again, victims do not die but get “dusted,” or “wasted,” “popped” or “blown away,” and nobody is responsible? Under every hoodie, we have begun to believe, lurks a hoodlum: a case of our own fear turning us into racial profilers at the level of the street. We walk our neighborhoods unarmed, most of us, but still feeling trigger-happy. We drive the streets feeling somewhat safe, most of us, but still shaking in our shoes. Ghosts haunt us in the airport and at the supermarket; they stalk us on the sidewalks and in the shadows. Just past the edge of our well-tended lawns, a clash of civilizations, a war of terror, rages endlessly. We live in fear, and come alive in anger. How did we lose our substance and our identities so immaculately? Where have all the human beings gone? In short, when did we stop caring?

Chomsky is one who has never stopped caring. As a renowned scholar whose political activism challenges all forms of media disinformation and falsehoods, including those spawned by society’s most powerful factions and their institutions, his aggressive disclosures have been discredited and his character impugned by reigning institution powers and his ideas rarely are voiced within the establishment media. And when they are voiced, the criticisms are mainly directed at the hallmarks of his presentation style which in the hands of the corporate media pundits can become crude caricature: a lack of expressiveness in his delivery, a biting sarcasm, a sweeping knowledge of facts, incessant finger-pointing at those whom he considers responsible for injustice, a withering repetition of the horrors of war and cruelty resulting in a desensitizing effect, and a tendency toward argumentative simplicity. These criticisms are to be expected of an iconoclastic activist who has arguably done more to educate readers worldwide about the perils of abuses of authority and the contradictions of liberal democracies than any other single person, bringing to mind such slogans as: “Whoever you vote for the Government gets in,” “If voting could change anything, it would be made illegal,” and “Guy Fawkes was the only person to enter parliament with honest intentions.”

Critical educators such as Pierre Orelus have consistently challenged the colonial matrix of power in an attempt to redress the crisis within the geo-culture of the modern/colonial world, and in doing so have challenged epistemologies of power and the social relations of production in which these epistemologies are forged. Professor Orelus is from Haiti, and his interest in learning more about the colonization of his homeland is what first led him to become interested in Noam Chomsky’s work. Very little is known among the public-at-large in the United States about the political history of Haiti. Haiti is often caricatured in U.S. popular culture as a land where zombies reign. In keeping with the popular emphasis on Haiti as one of the birthplaces of the zombie, specifically within Haitian voudoun, the other being the continent of Africa, I would like to use the figure of the zombie to emphasize the horror of capitalism and its casualties.

Capitalism was not given birth by a mad scientist in a Gothic cape whose laboratory is filled with the crackling electric currents of a Jacob’s Ladder, bubbling beakers, flasks, cathode ray oscilloscopes, and electrodes designed to reanimate dead tissue. Unlike a horror film, where there is always an imperfection in the makeup or the plot or the acting, the horror of capitalism is perfect. Even its imperfection is perfect. This horror is cleansed of any supplementarity, it rationalizes away all criticism, it is completely hygienic. It is beyond ideology. Capitalism delivers a measure of objectivity. It knows what it wants—surplus value at all costs and as such it devours all living labor—whether proletarian or cognitarian. The horror of capitalism severs all nouns from their corresponding verb forms: Alienation is never alienating, democracy is never democratizing, emancipation is never emancipatory. Every action or activity within the orbit of capitalism is turned into pure commodity. All of our heroes give capitalism endless chances to redeem itself, and we simultaneously look to capitalism to redeem ourselves.

The zombie represents the abject victim of all colonial encounters, the expelled worker from the capitalist plutocracy, whose agency is vomited up like a magmatic eruption; the naturalization of the unreal, the ghostly other of capitalism and colonial violence that returns to haunt the very process that created it. The vast indefiniteness that is the zombie thus must be put back into the service of capital as a perfect colonial ‘everyman’ whose cauterized brain removes the zombie from any form of protagonistic agency. In early zombie accounts (i.e., The Magic Island, the 1929 novel written by William Seabrook, the journalist who is often credited with importing zombies to the United States), we are compelled to treat the zombie as an enemy of colonial progress, and to restore the zombie to the status of willing, rather than unwilling, slave of capital.