Picking up/ at the pieces...

"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."
-Janis Joplin

One of the remarkable things about being in a university like this is the great clout it has to attract visitors and speakers from all over to this little town somewhat removed from the cultural centers of this country. Arthur Miller was here last year, Kofi Annan came in 1999, the Brown sisters (from Brown vs. Board of Education) were guests at our Martin Luther King Symposium, etc. So it wasn't a great surprise to me when Noam Chomsky came to U-M last week to speak at the Davis, Markert, Nickerson Lecture on Academic and Intellectual Freedom. This lecture series was established 14 years ago to commemorate three U-M professors who were suspended in 1954 for refusing to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities during the McCarthy era. Chomsky's lecture didn't address intellectual freedom per se, but more the whole notion of freedom in general, particularly the ability to use this freedom justly, honestly, and humanely. I thought it was rather uncanny that I watched the video today as America- at least 49% of America- are still grappling with the reality that they will continue to be led by a man who believes in America's freedom to exercise the right to pre-emptive action in the name of self defense, while maintaining that this right is not universalizable, but the sole perogative of this "enlightened state".

I think that Chomsky's over-arching argument was that the U.S. is probably one of the only placest in the world where freedom is a real and exercisable right, and yet it's in this same world that people so often squander/ exploit/ abuse this rare gift. In Singapore, people think of freedom as standing on a box in the middle of a park spouting whatever it is that seems anti-government and provocative; spraying graffiti is freedom; drinking your own pee as an expression of art is freedom. But it can and should be so much more.

Someone in the audience asked Chomsky how it is that information on the U.S.'s many "legitimate but illegal" acts were not made public even though that could have been easily done through institutions of higher education and/ or the media; Chomsky's answer was that the issue is not one of opportunity but of will. The large proportion of America truly believe that just by her sheer position as a nuclear powerhouse-cum-sole superpower, this country deserves to be exempt from international law.

This is more distressing under today's circumstances. The U.S. is led by a man who believes that through faith in the divine, or whatever moral values it is that won him this elections, he has access to the Truth, that all he does is legitimate because this Truth has guided his actions. Believing that you have an insight to some ultimate Answer is wilful and myopic- whether this Answer was bestowed to you through religion, patriotism, nationalism, etc.- any kind of ideology. It is comforting in a profoundly dangerous way because it puts all the complex little pieces of this world into neat categories, and purports to be THE world as it ought to be. It oversimplifies. Karl Marx said that "Religion is the opiate of the masses." No, ANY kind of ideology is a drug, communism not exempt. It paints the world in black and white, Truth and the Un-truth, In and Out. It is unforgiving, selfish and it offends.

I believe I'm religious- not evangelically so- but yes. But I also believe that people can separate their religious and spiritual commitments from social and political reality. I'm Christian, and I believe that stem-cell research can be useful; I would like to think that I have strong family values, and I believe that homosexuals have a right to marry and raise children too; I think of myself as moral, and I also think that abortion may be necessary under certain circumstances. But in the world of 51% of America, my beliefs make me dissolute, un-Christian and fundamentally immoral. And here I thought I was just human.