By Alemayehu G. Mariam, 21
January 2013
Recently, Naom Chomsky,
MIT Professor of Linguistics and arguably America’s foremost public
intellectual, gave an interview to Al Jazeera on the social (ir) responsibility
of American academics and intellectuals. Chomsky, 84, has been raising hell for
over four decades, getting into the faces of the powerful and mighty and
whipping them with the truth. He recently excoriated President Obama as lacking
a “moral center” for using drone warfare to “run a global assassination campaign”.
Chomsky has been called a “left winger”, a “radical activist” and even a
“communist”, and has been on the receiving end of a few distasteful epithets.
But the firebrand octogenarian is undeterred and as strong, as plain-spoken and
outspoken as ever. He remains a relentless critic of capitalism, neoliberalism,
globalization, warfare, corruption, repression, abuse and misuse of power and
human rights violations in America and abroad. Along the way, he has continued
his scholarly pursuits in linguistics.
In his Al Jazeera
interview, “Noam Chomsky: The
Responsibility of Privilege”, Chomsky chafed at the social irresponsibility
of American intellectuals and denounced the greedy and rapacious elites for
using their power to disempower ordinary people, confuse and render them
intellectually inert, servile and defenseless.
Al Jazeera: Is it the
responsibility of academics and other intellectuals to be
engaged politically?
Chomsky: Or every other
human being. Responsibility is basically measured by opportunity. If you
are a poor person living in the slums and have to work 60 hours a week to put
bread on the table, your degree of responsibility is less than if you have a
degree of privilege.
Al Jazeera: If you have
privilege, are you more obligated to give back?
Chomsky: Yes. The more
privilege you have, the more opportunity you have. The more opportunity you
have, the more responsibility you have. It is elementary.
Al Jazeera: So why don’t
we see that in the U.S.? There has been so much talk about people getting
richer, many, many more people are getting poorer, and yet the rich are seemingly
resistant to giving more of their time, more of their wealth and talent?
Chomsky: For the most
part, that’s why they are rich. If you dedicate your life to enriching yourself
and those are your values and you don’t care what happens to anyone else, then
you won’t care what happens to anyone else. It is self-selecting. It is also
institutional. In its extreme pathological form, it’s Ayn Rand’s ideology: “I
don’t care about anybody else. I am just interested in benefitting myself and
that is just and noble.”
George Ayittey, the noted
Ghanaian economist and one of Africa’s foremost public intellectuals, has long
been chagrined by the social irresponsibility of Africa’s best and brightest.
He argued that Africa’s intellectual class is in bed with those who have built
“vampire states” to suck billions of dollars out of the pockets of their
impoverished people to line their own pockets. In 1996, he told
African intellectuals exactly what he thought of them: “Hordes of politicians,
lecturers, professionals, lawyers, and doctors sell themselves off into
prostitution and voluntary bondage to serve the dictates of military vagabonds
with half their intelligence. And time and time again, after being raped,
abused, and defiled, they are tossed out like rubbish — or worse. Yet more
intellectual prostitutes stampede to take their places…” Ouch! Ouch!
So why don’t we see more
Ethiopian intellectuals engaged in politics? Are they merely following in the
footsteps of their American counterparts? Could they be followers of Ayn Rand’s
ideology: “I don’t care about anybody else. I am just interested in benefitting
myself and that is just and noble.” Could Ayittey’s mordant criticism apply to
Ethiopian intellectuals?
In a June 2010 commentary,
I asked: “Where have the
Ethiopian intellectuals gone?” I had no answer at the
time, nor do I have one now; but I was, and still am, bewildered and puzzled by
their conspicuous absence from the public square and the cyber square. Their
absence reminded me of “the Greek philosopher Diogenes who used to walk the
streets of ancient Athens carrying a lamp in broad daylight. When amused
bystanders asked him about his apparently strange behavior, he would tell them
that he was looking for an honest man. Like Diogenes, one may be tempted to
walk the hallowed grounds of Western academia, search the cloistered spaces of
the arts and scientific professions worldwide and even traverse the untamed
frontiers of cyberspace with torchlight in hand looking for Ethiopian
intellectuals.” They are nowhere to be found. They seem to be shrouded in a
cloak of invisibility.
Truth be told, I was once
a member of that invisible empire of Ethiopian intelligentsia– disengaged,
silent and deaf-mute. I was forced to uncloak myself when Meles Zenawi’s troops
slaughtered 196 unarmed demonstrators, and shot and wounded nearly 800 more in
the streets after the 2005 election in Ethiopia. I suppose there comes a time
in a man’s or a woman’s life when s/he has to step out of the shadows of
sheltered anonymity and silence, remove the veil of smug indifference and
proclaim outrage at tyranny and crimes against humanity.
But there are tens of
thousands of Ethiopian intellectuals who have chosen, made a conscious
decision, to take a vow of silence and inhabit the subterranean recesses of
anonymity. When they see elections stolen in broad daylight, they become
afflicted by temporary blindness. When they hear innocent people being arrested
and convicted in kangaroo courts, they become stone deaf. When they witness
religious liberties trashed and the people crying out for freedom, they don’t
try to stand with them or by them; they assuage their own consciences through a
ritual of private grumbling, moaning and groaning. Above all, they have made a
virtue of silence. They live a life of silent anonymity.
It is rather difficult to
understand. Could it be that they are silent because they believe silence is
golden? That is to say, if you want to be given the gold, stay silent? Do they
not know “oppression can only survive through silence”? Could they be thinking
that their silence is a manifestation of their contempt against those they
consider ignorant and barbaric? Is it not true that “the cruelest lies are
often told in silence” and the cruelest acts overlooked in silence? Is
their silence a practical expression of Ayn Rand’s ideology: “I don’t care about
anybody else. I am just interested in benefitting myself and that is just and
noble.”
But silence is not golden;
silence is a silent killer. Pastor Martin Niemöller expressed his silent
outrage over the silence of German intellectuals following the Nazi rise to
power:
First they came for the
communists,
and I didn’t speak out
because I wasn’t a communist.
Then they came for the
socialists,
and I didn’t speak out
because I wasn’t a socialist.
Then they came for the
trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because
I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for me,
and there was no one left
to speak for me.
As Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr. admonished, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but
the silence of our friends.”
The Social Responsibility
of Ethiopian Intellectuals?
It is said that the voice
of the people is the voice of God (vox populi, vox dei). But silence is no way
to communicate with oppressed people. The intellectual is to privileged to
think, to speak, to imagine, to create, to understand and to envision. But
silence is never the privilege of the intellectual. Silence is one of the few privileges
of the oppressed, the persecuted and the victimized. Silence is the ultimate
survival technique of the weak, the powerless and defenseless.
The intellectual has the
moral responsibility to speak up for the silenced. S/he does not have the
privilege to stand by idly and shake her head in dismay or mumble complaints
under one’s breath. Those who have been privileged to study, to think, to
write, to innovate and to create have the duty to give back to the people,
particularly those people who have been dispossessed not only of material
things but also their human dignity.
The silent Ethiopian
intellectuals are missing the point. It is a privilege, not a burden, to be a
voice for the downtrodden. It is a distinct honor to be the voice of the
voiceless. It is a priceless gift to speak truth to power on behalf of the
powerless.
The silent intellectual —
without a sense of moral commitment or obligation to something other than the
pursuit of happiness through greed or without some sacrifice of personal
interest — is merely a well programmed robot of higher education.
Nietzsche once remarked that all higher education is “to turn men into
machines”; they did not have robots in his day.
I believe the intellectual
has the responsibility not only to make a moral commitment but also to act on
them. In other words, when one commits oneself to a cause, one must accept the
fact that the pursuit and fulfillment of that cause will involve a measure of
sacrifice of one’s self-interest. Many Ethiopian intellectuals have professed
moral commitment to human rights but they are not willing to speak, write or do
anything meaningful about exposing human rights abuses or defending against
abuses of power. Some are timid, others are downright fearful. So they speak
and sing in the language of silence.
In 1967, Chomsky wrote, “It is the
responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose the lies of
governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often
hidden intentions… It is the responsibility of the intellectual to insist
upon the truth” and not to “tolerate the deceptions that will be used to
justify the next defense of freedom.” It seems to me that Ethiopian
intellectuals must shoulder the same burden. It is their responsibility to
challenge not only those in power but also each other. It is their
responsibility to critically think about issues and problems facing Ethiopian
society and to offer and imagine better alternatives and braver futures. It is
their highest moral duty to fight tyranny with the power of ideas. History
shows that an idea whose time has come cannot be defeated; it cannot be
stopped.
The Internet has been the
great equalizer in the struggle between the practitioners of tyranny and
champions of liberty. The Internet helped end the winter of discontent for
millions of disenfranchised peoples in the Middle East and ushered in a
glorious summer which continues to simmer. Mubarak, Ben Ali, Gadhaffi, Gbagbo
and many others were simply no match for the ideas of freedom that had
penetrated deep into the psyches of their citizens. Despite the complete
monopoly over the press, telecommunication services and electronic radio and
satellite jamming technology obtained at great cost, the tyrants in Ethiopia
have not been able to censor the truth or filter out ideas they do not like
from wafting into the ears, heart and mind of any Ethiopian interested in
alternative perspectives. But Ethiopian intellectuals have not been able
to take full advantage of this ubiquitous medium. As a result, the Internet is
used by the younger generation mostly to seek cheap thrills and entertainment
and conduct mindless chatter on social media.
Ethiopian intellectuals
have the responsibility to be the vanguard of social, political and scientific
change. They must use this burgeoning medium to provide real education to the
young people and as a forum for serious discussion of the major issues facing
the country. The real struggle against tyranny is for the hearts and minds of
the young people (70 percent of Ethiopia’s population), and the irresistible
weapons in this struggle are not guns and tanks but new and creative ideas.
Until Ethiopian society, its economy and politics become knowledge- and
ideas-based and its intellectuals play a guiding role in the process, that
country will have great difficulty escaping from the clutches of a benighted
dictatorship.
Ethiopia’s intellectuals
should focus their energies and invest their efforts on Ethiopia’s young people
(the Cheetah Generation). They should pitch new ideas to the younger
generation; plant and cultivate the seeds of critical thinking in thier minds;
promote free thinking and inquiry; encourage them to always be skeptical of not
just authority but also themselves; preach against hatred, herd mentality and
groupthink; give young people the intellectual tools they need to examine
themselves and their beliefs; encourage them to change their minds when
confronted by contradictory evidence; help them look at old problems in a new
way; teach them (after learning it themselves) to admit mistakes when they are
wrong, apologize and ask forgiveness; urge them to speak the truth, defend what
is right and stand for human rights. They should inspire them to be all they
can be.
The examples the
intellectuals are setting today are disappointing and discouraging, to put it
charitably. The message they telegraph to the younger generation is
unmistakable: When confronted by abusers of power, be a conformist and remain
silent. When faced with the arrogance of power, be submissive and obedient.
When you can ask questions, seal your lips. When faced with the truth, turn a
blind eye and deaf ears. When the opportunity for free thinking is available,
be dogmatic, doctrinaire and obdurate. When you can speak truth to power,
forever hold your peace.
In my June 2010
commentary, I urged Ethiopian intellectuals to act in
solidarity with the oppressed. Since I wrote that piece, the silence of
Ethiopian intellectuals has been deafening. I wish I could close this commentary
with a more heartening message; but restating the last paragraph of that
commentary still captures my disappointments and hopes:
As intellectuals, we are
often disconnected from the reality of ordinary life just like the dictators
who live in a bubble. But we will remain on the right track if we follow
Gandhi’s teaching: ‘Recall the face of the poorest and the most helpless man
you have seen and ask yourself whether the step you contemplate is going to be
of any use to him. Will he be able to gain anything by it? Will it restore to
him a control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to
Swaraj (independence) or self-rule for the hungry and spiritually starved
millions of your countrymen? Then you will find your doubts and yourself melting
away.’ Let us always ask ourselves whether our actions (and words) will help
restore to the poorest and most helpless Ethiopians a control over their own
life and destiny.
As I point an index finger
at others, I am painfully aware that three fingers are pointing at me. So be
it. I believe I know ‘where all the Ethiopian intellectuals have gone’. Most of
them are standing silently with eyes wide shut in every corner of the globe.
But wherever they may be, I hasten to warn them that they will eventually have
to face the ‘Ayittey Dilemma’ alone: Choose to stand up for Ethiopia, or lie
down with the dictators who rape, abuse and defile her.
To whom much is given,
much is expected.
Professor Alemayehu G.
Mariam teaches political science at California State University, San Bernardino
and is a practicing defense lawyer.
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