Chomsky—Politics of Accommodation

Noam Chomsky
American Power and the New Mandarins
(1967)

[9] By entering into the arena of argument and counterargument, of technical feasibility and tactics, of footnotes and citations, by accepting the presumption of legitimacy of debate on certain issues, one has already lost one's humanity. This is the feeling I find almost impossible to repress when going through the motions of building a case against the American war in Vietnam. Anyone who puts a fraction of his mind to the task can construct a case that is overwhelming... In an important way, by doing so he degrades himself, and insults beyond measure the victims of our violence and our moral blindness. There may have been a time when American policy in Vietnam was a debatable matter. This time is long past. It is no more debatable than the Italian war in Abyssinia or the Russian suppression of Hungarian freedom. The war is simply an obscenity, a depraved act by weak and miserable men, including all of us, who have allowed it to go on and on with endless fury and destruction—all of us who would have remained silent had stability and order been secured.

...

[10] I suppose this is the first time in history that a nation has so openly and publicly exhibited its own war crimes. Perhaps this shows how well our free institutions function. Or does it simply show how immune we have become to suffering? Probably the latter. So at least it would seem, when we observe how opposition to the war has grown in recent months. There is no doubt that the primary cause for this opposition is that the cost of the war is too great, unacceptable. It is deplorable, but nonetheless true, that what has changed American public opinion and the domestic political picture is not the efforts of the "peace movement"—still less the declarations of any political spokesmen—but rather the Vietnamese resistance, which simply will not yield to American force. What is more, the "responsible" attitude is that opposition to the war on grounds of cost is not, as I have said, deplorable, but rather admirable, in keeping with the genius of American politics. American politics is a politics of accommodation that successfully excludes moral considerations. Therefore it is quite proper—a further demonstration of our superior acuity—that only pragmatic considerations of cost and utility guide our actions.

A crucial fleshing out of Stephenson's broad thesis, e.g., to observe as Chomsky does here the peculiar relationship (the lack of a simple relationship?) between pragmatic considerations and moral ones in our beloved American politics.

Namely,

the conceit to being pragmatic or practical has built right into it an element of what Stephenson calls "social control," the element, in fact, which most reliably compels social agents to temporarily act against their deepest-held values or "internalizations." Be practical about it, says your parent or spouse or teacher or manager; meaning, don't do what you would normally do; resist your moral sense.

Certainly it is fair to lament this, fair for all the reasons Chomsky finds in the war du jour. But also, there is a serious complication with any refusal to enter debate, no matter how righteous this refusal may be.

Namely,

moral bedrock is not good ground on which to fight opponents either for compromise or for outright disavowal of a competing position on a political issue. It well be the worst, actually.

This is a limitation too of Lasch's admonition to enter democratic debate with the understanding that one's own mind may be changed, and indeed should be changed, if confronted with a more compelling argument from one's opponent. I tend to think Stephenson is correct in theorizing that only certain areas of the self are amenable to any change at all, whereas others (whether or not they are truly "early internalizations" in the sense that he used that term) are "bound to remain untouched" almost no matter what.

The notion of a politics of accommodation which excludes moral considerations is a rhetorically powerful, eloquent, and incisive point, but moral bedrock is not susceptible to any rhetoric, any eloquence; if it is so susceptible, then it is no longer moral bedrock. There's no accommodat[ing] bedrock moral differences. The advent of the Culture Wars, of Wedge Issues, of the Divided Nation, the Politicization of COVID, etc., etc., all of this is unsightly, it is unpleasant, it leaves little hope for unity on the scale of millions or billions. All of that is true. But what is most pernicious of all about it, I think, is that it has made us unable to distinguish between calculated rhetoric and genuine belief. We have accumulated many more techniques for explaining away genuine belief than we have techniques for accommodating it. We then find it literally unbelievable that someone could hold a certain view sincerely, and so we instead sling accusations of denialism or false consciousness or perhaps dementia if the person is on the older side. Not that I get out much, but I am not encountering too many of these -isms or -ists in daily life. Their absence has only become more noticable over time, against the backdrop of an ever-escalating chorus of psychologistic accusations such as the above. With COVID in particular, I'm led to think that the charge of denialism has been leveled much too facilely and too widely; rather, people are moved or unmoved to varying degrees by others' suffering, they are terrified or they are cavalier or they are merely calculating (I would like to think that I myself fall in the third rather than the second category) when it comes to their own wellbeing. In other words, denialism (and paranoia too) is superfluous when our moral senses are all over the map. Some of our divergent moral senses cannot be accommodated by any politics, so widely do they diverge; and so once again pragmatics carry the day. I think I have met many pragmatists and few if any denialists.

Some people I have encountered in recent years: a liberal, pot-smoking, pro-choice girlfriend who believed it is everyone's "duty" to have children; a bandleader who has never and will never use tobacco or alcohol but rails against smoking bans as unforgivable infringements upon liberty; a beach lover and surfer who cannot abide the campaign to reduce plastic waste because "You're messin' with someone's job" that way; a self-professed socialist who exalts the finding that elderly chimps live longer when abandoned to fend for themselves than when fed and cared for by the pack; etc., etc.

It gives me no comfort to have made up my mind, finally, that these are not instances of hypocrisy, cognitive dissonance, or Freudian psychic conflict. What they are, I think, are constellations of genuinely-held belief which cut across the reductionist binary choices of donkey-and-elephant politics, the dreaded politics of accommodation of which Chomsky writes above.

I do think the fact that these are conventionally rendered as two-sided conflicts rather than many-sided ones is more meaningful (that is, more essential and less contingent) than the great quietist majority can admit to itself. I think we are basically dualistic thinkers. But even if the role of the Echo Chamber is thereby seen to have been overstated, the end result we are left with is no less tragic and no more amenable to the too-obvious remediations proposed and re-proposed so many times over by the quietists. The only way for people with such deep-seated moral differences to accommodate one another is to break up with each other. Failing that, a morally pluralistic society will always involve a few extra doses of "social control," with some group(s) doing more than their share of the doling out and other group(s) more than their share of taking the punishment.

As a result, the controlled will find, as did Stephenson, that

the self so put upon us is to a degree false—a façade only,

and that

The person has to be what custom or status demands of him,

e.g. via code-switching,

while the

Convergent selectivity

which comprises an

opportunity for the individual to exist for himself,

this now finds itself thrust into a heightened role, the role of self-styling, for which it is not always well-suited; and moreover, it has become a privilege rather than the right that it properly ought to be. In other words, I am proposing that this reservation of personal authenticity only for the privileged is a result not merely of historical and structural factors, though I do not wish to deny those, but also/especially an unintended consequence of pluralism itself. Hence an unthinkable thesis: could dialing back pluralism actually reduce oppression?

I'm not yet properly read up on the thornier aspects of structural politics, but tentatively: the left-wing fear of a lurch back toward "states rights" is increasingly a fear that I do not share, and one of the few things I would say I have truly changed my mind on. Not that I look forward to half the country becoming a theocracy; but I would look forward to a new accommodation of divergent moralities under a federal charter which, despite its many flaws, still has some strong points too. I am secure enough in our common humanity, elusive as it may sometimes seem, to be willing to test its limits in a new way. More cynically, I fail to see how this could be much worse than what we have now. Pending further study of course.

[17] The reaction to the suffering of oppressed minorities at home is not very different from the brutal apathy towards the misery we have imposed elsewhere in the world. Opposition to the war in Vietnam is based very largely on its cost, and on the failure of American power to crush Vietnamese resistance. It is sad, but nonetheless true, that the tiny steps to bring freedom to black Americans have been taken, for the most part, out of fear. We must recognize these facts and regret them deeply, but not be paralyzed by this recognition. Anger, outrage, confessions of overwhelming guilt may be good therapy; they can also become a barrier to effective action, which can always be made to seem incommensurable with the enormity of the crime. Nothing is easier than to adopt a new form of self-indulgence, no less debilitating than the old apathy. The danger is substantial. It is hardly a novel insight that confession of guilt can be institutionalized as a technique for evading what must be done. It is even possible to achieve a feeling of satisfaction by contemplating one's evil nature. No less insidious is the cry for "revolution," at a time when not even the germs of new institutions exist, let alone the moral and political consciousness that could lead to a basic modification of social life. If there will be a "revolution" in America today, it will no doubt be a move toward some variety of fascism. We must guard against the kind of revolutionary rhetoric that would have had Karl Marx burn down the British Museum because it was merely part of a repressive society. It would be criminal overlook the serious flaws and inadequacies in our institutions, or to fail to utilize
[18]
the substantial degree of freedom most of us enjoy, within the framework of these flawed institutions, to modify them or even replace them by a better social order. One who pays some attention to history will not be surprised if those who cry most loudly that we must smash and destroy are later found among the administrators of some new system of repression.

...

[23] In a recent essay, Conor Cruise O'Brien speaks of the process of "counterrevolutionary subordination" which poses a threat to scholarly integrity in our own counterrevolutionary society, just as "revolutionary subordination," a phenomenon often noted and rightly deplored, has undermined scholarly integrity in revolutionary and postrevolutionary situations. ...
[24]
Senator Fulbright has developed a similar theme in an important and perceptive speech. He describes the failure of the universities to form "an effective counterweight to the military-industrial complex by strengthening their emphasis on the traditional values of our democracy." Instead they have "joined the monolith, adding greatly to its power and influence." ...

The extent of this betrayal might be argued; its existence, as a threatening tendency, is hardly in doubt. Senator Fulbright mentions one primary cause: the access to money and influence. Others might be mentioned: for example, a highly restrictive, almost universally shared ideology, and the inherent dynamics of professionalism. As to the former, Fulbright has cited elsewhere the observation of De Tocqueville: "I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America." Free institutions certainly exist, but a tradition of passivity and conformism restricts their use—the cynic might say this is why they continue to exist. The impact of professionalization is also quite clear. The "free-floating intellectual" may occupy himself with problems be-
[25]
cause of their inherent interest and importance, perhaps to little effect. The professional, however, tends to define his problems on the basis of the technique that he has mastered, and has a natural desire to apply his skills. Commenting on this process, Senator Clark quotes the remarks of Dr. Harold Agnew, director of the Los Alamos Laboratories Weapons Division: "The basis of advanced technology is innovation and nothing is more stifling to innovation than seeing one's product not used or ruled out of consideration on flimsy premises involving public world opinion"—"a shocking statement and a dangerous one," as Clark rightly comments. ...

These various factors—access to power, shared ideology, professionalization—may or may not be deplorable in themselves, but there can be no doubt that they interact so as to pose a serious threat to the integrity of scholarship in fields that are struggling for intellectual content and are thus particularly susceptible to the workings of a kind of Gresham's law. ["Bad money drives out good." -Google] What is more, the subversion of scholarship poses a threat to society at large. The danger is particularly great in a society that encourages specialization and stands in awe of technical expertise. In such circumstances, the opportunities are great for the abuse of
[26]
knowledge and technique—to be more exact, the claim to knowledge and technique. Taking note of these dangers, one reads with concern the claims of some social scientists that their discipline is essential for the training of those to whom they refer as "the mandarins of the future." [Ithiel de Sola Pool, "The Necessity for Social Scientists Doing Research for Governments" (1966)] Philosophy and literature still "have their value," so Ithiel Pool informs us, but it is psychology, sociology, systems analysis, and political science that provide the knowledge by which "men of power are humanized and civilized." In no small measure, the Vietnam war was designed and executed by these new mandarins, and it testifies to the concept of humanity and civilization they are likely to bring to the exercise of power.

Of course the role of philosophy and literature in humanizing and civilizing can now be seen to have been greatly exaggerated. Appealing to social science in this capacity does seem to get further away from rather than closer to remediation; and so the question remains as to what, if anything, might actually humanize and civilize. Is it not something like...Practice? ...Praxis? ...Living?

[27] what grounds are there for supposing that those whose claim to power is based on knowledge and technique will be more benign in their exercise of power than those whose claim is based on wealth or aristocratic origin? On the contrary, one might expect the new mandarin to be dangerously arrogant, aggressive, and incapable of adjusting to failure, as compared with his predecessor, whose claim to power was not diminished by honesty as to the limitations of his knowledge, lack of work to do, or demonstrable mistakes. ...

In general, one would expect any group with access to power and affluence to construct an ideology that will justify this state of affairs on grounds of the general welfare. For just this reason, Bell's thesis that intellectuals are moving closer to the center of
[28]
power, or at least being absorbed more fully into the decision-making structure, is to some extent supported by the phenomenon of counterrevolutionary subordination noted earlier. That is, one might anticipate that as power becomes more accessible, the inequities of the society will recede from vision, the status quo will seem less flawed, and the preservation of order will become a matter of transcendent importance. The fact is that American intellectuals are increasingly achieving the status of a doubly privileged elite: first, as American citizens, with respect to the rest of the world; and second, because of their role in American society, which is surely quite central, whether or not Bell's prediction proves accurate.