Skip the Icons and Gurus, Thanks
I’m reading Michael Bérubé’s What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts. John Holbo at the Valve sent it because they’re doing one of those Valve events on it in a few weeks. It is, to put it succinctly, very good. (That Alan Wolfe review is all the more irritating once one actually reads the book. It’s irritating independently of the quality of the book reviewed, because of certain qualities intrinsic to the review, but it’s also even more irritating because of the quality of the book.)
I thought I would share a bit with you, because it strikes me as being right on the money, and well worth saying. Pages 120-1. He’s been describing political affiliations among students – liberal, conservative, libertarian, and so on.
‘Another bunch, further off to the left, finds figures like Noam Chomsky so persuasive when it comes to American wickedness at home and abroad – not capriciously, either, for that wickedness is often real enough – that they become utterly indiscriminate about “dissent,” valuing even its most counterproductive forms. While I admire these students for informing themselves about the history of Central America and East Timor, I watch with dismay as they embrace the conclusion that practically any form of “resistance” to US world hegemony is worth their support, and the conviction that if the US takes up arms in a cause, any cause, the real cause is probably unuacknowledged and nefarious. This conviction has been borne out quite frequently in the past, and will undoubtedly be borne out again, but it is not axiomatic, and it disturbs me to find young people identifying with “the left” in such a way as to suspend their critical judgment about leftists who do take it as axiomatic. The wholly uncritical Chomsky fans seem to me to have abdicated some of the tasks of critical thinking in precisely the same way that the wholly uncritical Bush worshippers have done, and I wish the campus left, especially, could be a domain without gurus and icons – a domain of ideas, where every citizen is obligated to scrutinize every idea on its merits.’
Exactly. The conviction may be right, but it’s not axiomatic, and convictions need to be scrutinized on their merits, not assumed to be axiomatic. That’s important, and it’s why the cult of Chomsky gets increasingly on my nerves. And I too wish the campus left could be a domain without gurus and icons; gurus and icons are just the things not to have, just the things that impede careful thinking. Careful thinking, as Michael is indicating there, is not dispensable, not some sort of effete frill or ruffle, but pretty much the first thing that needs doing. Activism isn’t much help if it passionately and commitedly does the wrong thing.
Well, indeed. A – sort of – related thing that really gets on my tits (as we say around here) is when the media et al start banging on about some famous, or infamous, person being a ‘bad role model’. Rather, it is the whole ‘role model’ thing itself that is bad. ‘You don’t need to follow anyone!’ as Brian said.
Rather than following gurus, icons, role models and this week’s hip young groovy thing we should be teaching people to think for themselves (as Brian also said*), rather than being sheep led around by whoever ‘Baas’ the loudest.
*I think I learnt more from Monty Python than I ever did in school.
There is an interesting piece on gurus here (but not to be quoted):
http://www.dan.sperber.com/guru.htm
Evidence of guru-dom: its’s hard to criticise Chomsk for this in certain UK circles without being treated like a contemptable idiot before even making ones case…
Although at the activist end of the UK’s far left, where I hang out with various marxists and anarchists, Chomsky seems to have a lot less purchase than he does with people whose sole form of political activity is to read the Independent and shout at the telly. Those few who rate him who actually do things appear to do so with some reservations.
Perhaps it’s different in the US.
I’m not sure whether the situation is different in the US — that judgment would require more knowledge than I have. But I suspect that it is not very different.
At any rate, the main comment I wanted to make is that I find it very hard to think of any hypothetical instance in which the US would take up arms in a cause for other than nefarious and probably unacknowledged reasons. At least, until there are tremendous changes in our economic and power systems, so that the US government is no longer basically the enforcement arm of the mega-corporations. (Perhaps holding this viewpoint makes me a Chomsky dupe; I don’t know.)
“Perhaps it’s different in the US.”
It’s funny about that, because Neil and Padraig asked me exactly that on Little Atoms, only from the opposite direction. One of them said you find in bookstores in the UK that whole shelves are given over to Chomsky, and is it like that in the US? I said no, not really. I don’t think it’s like that here. He’s a guru to the people to whom he’s a guru, but only to them.
“so that the US government is no longer basically the enforcement arm of the mega-corporations.”
It is that (I would say), but it’s not only that.
I don’t think the Kosovo intervention, or for that matter the Somalia intervention or the (botched, aborted) Haiti intervention were much in the interest of the mega-corporations. Maybe in some grand overarching way – that mega-corporations do better in conditions of peace and order where trade and consumption can flourish – but not in a slitty-eyed pipeline way. (And then, it’s hard not to notice that mega-corporations do better in conditions of peace and order where trade and consumption can flourish for reasons that depend heavily on the fact that so do human beings, and then it becomes hard not to want just the sort of conditions that mega-corporations want.)
Sadly, though, I think the interventions you mentioned were indeed in service of the military-industrial complex in the sense of promoting the concept of an activist, militarized U.S. role in the world. A role which has reached its apogee in Iraq.
Plus, isn’t it interesting how the consistently antiwar were right about Kosovo, i.e., that the KLA turned out (as predicted) to be a bunch of drug running totalitarian gangsters, that the Kosovo Albanians quickly engaged, under UN cover, in as equally vicious ethnic cleasning as the Serbs ever did, and that the collateral damage of the war is still not really talked about.
Haiti? Just another in a century long tradition of U.S. meddling. Do you really think installing folks with ties to the tontons macoutes was a humanitarian action? The profit levels derived directly from Haiti are probably minor, but having a (even flawed) leftist government in power that balked at following our directions too slavishly probably rubbed the current criminal gang in power a little raw. Thus, hustle Aristide on board the airplane.
Somalia? Astride major trade routes, including oil.
Sorry, I’ll go with JohnJ. And, as one can see, it’s not a Republican versus Democrat thing, either. Heck, the current “opposition” is perfectly ok with changing the law to retroactively allow for torture and war crimes.
Well, this is the crux, I suppose. Is “the concept of an activist, militarized U.S. role in the world” automatically a terrible thing in and of itself, regardless of what it’s in aid of, and regardless of (say) who is C-in-C at the time? I would say not necessarily. I would say it cautiously and with much misgiving, because of much recent history, but (because of the Balkans and Rwanda, if nothing else) I would still say it. I’m leery of US hegemony, but I’m even leerier of all these little genocides that keep popping up. I’d much prefer a UN that could prevent them, but if it’s the US or nothing – I’m not going to say genocide is preferable.
I meant the first, (more or less) pro-Aristide Haitian intervention, not the later ones.
“Astride major trade routes, including oil.”
So what?
That looks to me like just the kind of indiscriminate Chomskyesque suspicion that Michael is talking about. It looks desperate.
I would also note, Ophelia, that the type of mega-corporation currently in power (military-industrial complex) certainyl does do MUCH better during times of strife and chaos. And, because we are talking about struggling for the
Somalia is, geographically, in a position to raid passing shipping.
BUt
The incoming excuse for a government is sharia/islamist.
Like the Taliban.
Not a good idea.
Or are you prepared to have women and teachers murdered, as long as it isn’t done by the evil Shrub?
Brian “the consistently antiwar were right about Kosovo”. If taken in isolation, perhaps this is true, but it came after almost eight years of bloodshed across the Balkans, for which Europeans (especially Kohl and Major) were initially responsible, but whose outcomes had been bungled appallingly by the international institutions:
• The recognition of Croatia by EU despite dire warnings of repercussions in Bosnia. The EU and Un then oversaw and implemented (or failed depending on how you take it):
• No minority rights protection in Croatia when fascist Tudjman got in; this led to ethnic cleansing of Croatian Serbs which then gave Milosevic his alibi to get militantly nationalistic on the whole region. And he had enormous fire power in his control as the armed civilian police and the army themselves were closely concentric to Belgrade
• A first past the post system was set up instead of a far more robust tripartite system in Bosnia.
• The utterly useless UN ‘protection’ of all Safe Zones, including Srebrenica, where an act of genocide occurred that all but Chomsky disputes.
• The un-prevented daily Serb incursions into no fly zones (several thousand reported in the European Journal by March 1996) across the Balkans, thousands of casualties each month.
The Nato response to Kosovo was supported by large parts of the British left who then applauded our actions in West Africa but finally deplored and declaimed Iraq as loudly as possible, and formed anti-war groups.
I cannot read this narrative as an act of US exploitation, covert or overt. It’s more like a dumb international political action that happened because congress – you are correct in that Republican and Democrat alike voted on this – would never allow Clinton to mobilise ground troops in the Balkans.
Instead we saw appalling blanket bombings, but following the serial Balkan wars (for which we were all responsible as Europeans) – for once – at least a yank had the sap to ante up and actually do something good. (The stench of sour complacency in Whitehall over the entire period was nauseating.)
Interestingly, most of the barbarism had occurred under the useless UN and EU, Nato became the de facto saviour for many south Balkanites. Our efforts with regard to your complaint about gangsterism have been appalling I’ll admit; after twelve years of Serb apartheid those b@stards got the support of every Kosovan Alabian who’d tried to get a job or go to university; and I’ll admit aside all this is the tortuous question of sovereignty.
Political stability of the region is given the once over occasionally (British troops are still out there), but no-one gives a stuff sbout minority rights. But give Clinton a break – for this instance at least, US hands are relatively clean.
my crap grammar – Chomsky disputes the term genocide in relation to Srebrenica.
I guess I was part of the consistent antiwar left back in ’99. I felt that the attack on Yugoslavia was criminally stupid – and I suspected at the time that it was motivated by internal concerns, notably the coherence of NATO, rather than by either economic or humanitarian ones. I changed my mind about the latter. Clinton and Blair were probably sincere about their humanitarian motives (Albright is a different story). Which is no excuse. It’s quite possible to do the wrong thing for the right reasons.
On the other hand, all of that is not too relevant for what should be done now. Just as my opinion that the invasion of Iraq was a stupid thing doesn’t mean I support the immediate withdrawal of troops. What at the time I often had difficulty realizing – and which Nick S pointed out well – is that the culpability of say Germany in creating the Balkan mess, or the ulterior motives of the Bush administration wrt Iraq, does not automatically lead to a given political solution with regard to contemporary issues.
As for Kosovo – the longer you wait with reversing an ethnic cleansing, the bigger the possibility that you end up with undoing one injustice by another, and merely lay the basis for the next round of slaughtering. The Serbs have been ethnically cleansed from everywhere except their holdouts in the north, and there’s no way for them to return anytime soon. Best solution would seem to be to give Kosovo its independence with Mitrovica etc. having the ability to remain in Serbia instead.
Merlijn – Thanks for that – I’d probably get called a war-mongering neocon on certain other sites !
I suppose that having researched the Balkans for a dissertation on the Europe’s Foreign Policy, Instituations and the Future Role of Nato in 1995-96, I may well have been ‘Kate Aidie-d’ by the sheer gruesome amount of video footage I watched (18hours plus) of the serial wars of former Yugoslavia. In other words, I became emotionally involved, and very pro-interventionist when I’d seen what the ineffectual alternatives had meant.
Having spoken to some serving SAS and Paratroop officers afterwards I also realised this: what small units of specials from the British Army were achieving off-radar to most observers in the UK, was worth a thousand UN light-arms-mandated blue helmets. Lives were saved, villages’ infrastructures remained intact, and rampant aggressors were contained.
The dumb bombing of Serbs was quite predictably disastraous for Serbs, and I’ll admit a callous and blinkered example of clean-hands interventionsism of Blair and Clinton, but I guess I felt it necessary to stop any further Milosevic incursions almost at any cost. A balanced view ? Probably not – almost definitely not.
And I totally agree with your pragmatism about differentiating between how we got to “A” and what we should now do about “A”… life ain’t that simple.