Description
World Order Ki Haqiqat (Urdu translation of Powers & Prospects ) is based on various talks MIT linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky gave in Australia over the course of a week in January 1995. This occasional origin is evident in the text, which is a collection of essays on language and politics. The essays retain much of the character of the spoken public lectures from which they are derived, and share no over-arching thematic structure. In his brief preface, Chomsky offers a minor point of continuity. 'These are hardly happy times for most of the world, apart from a privileged few in narrowing sectors. But it should also be a time of hope and even optimism. That extends from the topics of the opening essays, which discuss some prospects, which I think are real, for considerably deeper understanding about at least some aspects of essential human nature and powers, to those of the final chapters'. Suggesting that his essays are bound together by their optimism, Chomsky here also implies an intrinsic, albeit prospective, continuity in this passage. His hope is that the human sciences, considered in the first two chapters on language, can identify elements of a human nature capable of serving as a foundation for the political concerns he examines in the remaining six chapters on various political issues. However, as is suggested by his qualification-which I think are real-he acknowledges that this is as yet an unrequited hope.One can identify an over-arching theme in Powers & Prospects if one sets aside Chomsky-the-linguist to consider Chomsky-the-activist. In chapters three through eight, Chomsky makes the case for intellectual activism, and can be seen in the act-the talks on which these essays are based were given to a cumulative audience of 16,000 or more people (on the estimate of the author of the foreword). In the third chapter, Chomsky gives the question of 'Writers and Intellectual Responsibility' a simple 'the intellectual responsibility of the writer, or any decent person, is to tell the truth'. Or 'the responsibility of the writer as a moral agent is to try to bring the truth about matters of human significance to an audience that can do something about them. That is part of what it means to be a moral agent rather than a monster'. In subsequent analysis, Chomsky applies this dictum to cases of U.S. complicity in atrocities. Here, the metaphysical and highly contestable language of responsibility and agency gives way to the more practical argument that the important thing is to bring the truth of atrocity and governmental complicity in it to people, who then can, must, and will act to end it.Chomsky's analysis of media distortion and his two-step program for overcoming it encounters difficulties characteristic of ideology critique; for if the desire to take this step is itself prevented by the manufacture of consent by powerful institutions, then there is no reason to expect people to take political action to actualize true democracy. Organization and action for change would have to precede the enlightenment he sees as a necessary precondition to it; however, the conclusion that one is the dupe of a media controlled by state and corporate power is an uncomfortable one, unlikely to win broad support. Moreover, although many are quite likely to acknowledge the partiality of the media to corporate and state power, the stronger claim that their own consent could be and is manufactured is likely to strike them as implausible.
About the Author
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science
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