Dissidents, Conformity, Intellectuals

 While not willing to go all the way with Noam Chomsky, I read him and respect him. I would go further if I thought anarchy was practical.

The Boston Review published Chomsky's The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Redux from 2011. He recites a history of intellectuals as political dissenters, which is of interest in itself, but then came this passage:

Since power tends to prevail, intellectuals who serve their governments are considered responsible, and value-oriented intellectuals are dismissed or denigrated. At home that is.

With regard to enemies, the distinction between the two categories of intellectuals is retained, but with values reversed. In the old Soviet Union, the value-oriented intellectuals were the honored dissidents, while we had only contempt for the apparatchiks and commissars, the technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals. Similarly in Iran we honor the courageous dissidents and condemn those who defend the clerical establishment. And elsewhere generally.

The honorable term “dissident” is used selectively. It does not, of course, apply, with its favorable connotations, to value-oriented intellectuals at home or to those who combat U.S.-supported tyranny abroad. Take the interesting case of Nelson Mandela, who was removed from the official terrorist list in 2008, and can now travel to the United States without special authorization.

De Tocqueville wrote somewhere about the conformity of American democracy. I read Henry David Thoreau as the American non-conformist - who had his mother doing his laundry! Such contradictions!

More than half my life ago, I coined a phrase, the conformist non-conformist. I think Chomsky describes my idea to a T.

I do not think of myself as an intellectual. Yes, I am educated. My own self-education - as seen on this blog - is irregular. I tried being a conformist while also having my non-conformist fun. That juggling of compartmentalized lives fell apart. I performed the most outrageous temper tantrum in the process of destroying myself. I did something that would destroy my reputation in such a way that I could not retreat to the life I wanted to shed.

But I did not die. I did return to Indiana. Before I returned, I took the time to look at what had been my life, and the choices made, and asked what I wanted for the remainder of my life.

What I concluded is in my different journals, some of which are already here and more will follow. I will say what I think, not what I think prudent to stay for the making of money. That is my route out of depression. 

And one thing that needs to be said, is that America is not great, has never attained its full measure of greatness, and will not attain its full measure of greatness except when it rises to its ideals. We need to give proper attention to our ideas. Even when they are critical of our sacred cows. To do otherwise is to be conformists, cowards, and cowardice kills.

 It seems to be close to a historical universal that conformist intellectuals, the ones who support official aims and ignore or rationalize official crimes, are honored and privileged in their own societies, and the value-oriented punished in one or another way. The pattern goes back to the earliest records. It was the man accused of corrupting the youth of Athens who drank the hemlock, much as Dreyfusards were accused of “corrupting souls, and, in due course, society as a whole” and the value-oriented intellectuals of the 1960s were charged with interference with “indoctrination of the young.”

In the Hebrew scriptures there are figures who by contemporary standards are dissident intellectuals, called “prophets” in the English translation. They bitterly angered the establishment with their critical geopolitical analysis, their condemnation of the crimes of the powerful, their calls for justice and concern for the poor and suffering. King Ahab, the most evil of the kings, denounced the Prophet Elijah as a hater of Israel, the first “self-hating Jew” or “anti-American” in the modern counterparts. The prophets were treated harshly, unlike the flatterers at the court, who were later condemned as false prophets. The pattern is understandable. It would be surprising if it were otherwise.

As for the responsibility of intellectuals, there does not seem to me to be much to say beyond some simple truths. Intellectuals are typically privileged—merely an observation about usage of the term. Privilege yields opportunity, and opportunity confers responsibilities. An individual then has choices.

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