Chomsky members:

Comments on the article?

F. Leon

-----------------------------

On the Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Crack

Reverend Eugene Rivers

Editor's Note: What follows is an open letter from Reverend Eugene Rivers.
Immediately addressed to the Boston-Cambridge intellectual community, Rivers'
letter speaks at the same time to a much broader audience: in fact, to anyone
interested in the fate of the urban poor in the United States. A pastor and social
analyst, Rivers works every day with poor women and children in Boston's
Dorchester and Roxbury neighborhoods. In their name, he asks us to reflect on
the moral meaning of intellectual life.

This debate continues in our January/February 1993 issue, when Henry Louis
Gates, Jr., bell hooks, Cornell West, and others continue to examine the "
Responsibility of Black Intellectuals."



Dear Friends:

In 1967, Noam Chomsky published an essay in the New York Review of Books on
"The Responsibility of Intellectuals." Written in the midst of national turmoil
surrounding U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia, the essay raised a number of
disturbing questions about the relationship of intellectuals to power and about the
moral and political requirements of the pursuit of truth. Chomsky was inspired by
a series of articles by Dwight MacDonald in the journal Politics. Writing some
twenty years earlier, MacDonald focused on the question of war guilt. "To what he
extent," he asked, "were the German or Japanese people responsible for the
atrocities committed by their governments?" He then turned the question back to
the American and British people. To what extent were they "responsible for the
vicious terror bombings of civilians ... by the Western democracies and reaching
their culmination in Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

Chomsky pushed MacDonald's question further: What, he asked, are the special
moral responsibilities of intellectuals, "given the unique privileges that intellectuals
enjoy" in Western capitalist democracies? His answer was that intellectuals have
a "responsibility ... to speak the truth and to expose lies" and a duty "to see
events in their historical perspective."

Chomsky's claims about the mandarin status of opinion-forming elites, and about
the elementary obligations that come with status, have lost none of their
relevance. But circumstances have changed, and those changes carry important
implications for the precise character of our current obligations. When I read
Chomsky's political and historical essays 21 years ago, I was a young Christian
intellectual struggling to understand the role and the responsibility of the
intelligentsia in an advanced industrial society. Chomsky focused on foreign
policy, and posed his questions to a predominantly white, elite, academic and
policy-based intelligentsia. At that time, I do not recall reading any significant
discussion or critical notice of the issues he raised in any of the major black
scholarly journals or books.

I want to suggest to you that Chomsky's points now apply with particular force to
the responsibility to tell the truth about the condition of the black poor. And that
responsibility bears especially heavily on black intellectuals at elite universities.
For, as a privileged minority, black intellectuals "have the leisure, the facilities,
and the training to seek the truth lying behind the veil of distortion ... ideology,
and class interest through which the events of current history are presented to us."

The remaining of the article is located at:
<http://www-polisci.mit.edu/BR17.5/rivers.html>