Noam Chomsky · Politics
Chomsky’s 1967 essay on the moral duty of the privileged: because intellectuals enjoy freedom, training, and access to information that most people lack, it is their responsibility to speak the truth and to expose the lies of governments - a duty the era’s celebrated experts were busy betraying.
In February 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War, a linguist at MIT published an essay in The New York Review of Books that turned him into the most famous dissident intellectual in America. Noam Chomsky’s argument began from something he called almost a truism: that intellectuals have a responsibility to tell the truth and to expose lies. Why intellectuals especially? Because of their privileges. In the Western world they enjoy political liberty, leisure, training, and access to information that ordinary working people simply do not have - and with privilege, Chomsky insists, comes responsibility. The scholar who can find out what his government is really doing, and who is free to say so without being jailed, cannot plead ignorance or fear. He is exactly the person on whom the duty of truth-telling falls hardest. What looks like a platitude, Chomsky shows, is in fact routinely and comfortably betrayed.
The real target of Chomsky’s essay was not the ignorant but the learned - the ‘new mandarins,’ the technocrats and liberal scholar-experts who put their talents at the service of state power. These were the men who supplied the Vietnam War with its rationales, who dressed up aggression as pragmatic problem-solving, who treated the bombing of a peasant society as a technical exercise in ‘modernization’ and ‘counterinsurgency.’ Chomsky caught them in plain dishonesty: he noted, for instance, that the historian Arthur Schlesinger had admitted lying to the press about the Bay of Pigs invasion in the national interest - and had then been praised in the press for his ‘candor’ when he later confessed it. This was the betrayal in action: the intellectual using his prestige to launder the lies of power, and being rewarded for it. For Chomsky, such a scholar is not a neutral expert but a servant of the state who has abandoned the one duty that mattered.
Chomsky noticed a quiet trick in the language of public debate. The intellectuals who served power were described as the ‘responsible,’ ‘sober,’ and ‘sane’ men; those who opposed the war’s crimes were dismissed as ‘emotional,’ ‘irresponsible,’ and ‘extremist.’ In this vocabulary, ‘responsibility’ had come to mean loyalty to established power and willingness to work within its assumptions - so that the more faithfully an intellectual served the state, the more ‘responsible’ he was called. Chomsky reclaims the word. Real responsibility, he insists, is owed not to the state but to the truth and to the victims. The essay’s whole force lies in this reversal: the men celebrated as responsible were the ones betraying their responsibility, and the ‘irresponsible’ dissenters were the ones discharging it. To see this clearly is already to break the spell that the language of respectability casts over dissent.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Chomsky argues privilege creates responsibility: intellectuals, who have freedom and access to information, are duty-bound ‘to speak the truth and to expose lies,’ especially the lies of their own government - and that the ‘new mandarins’ who served the Vietnam War betrayed that duty. Explain the argu…
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