Theocracy, technocracy and Chomsky's democracy

A letter from Rick Battams, Toronto 

Dear Editor,

With reference to Deterring democracy in Italy (an interview with Noam Chomsky by Domenico Pacitti): Chomsky, with whom I once corresponded many years ago, passionately believes in democracy, whereas I do not. My religious convictions make me a theocrat, not a democrat. One of the points I put to Chomsky was Freemasonry, which he said he didn’t know much about. He also doubted that Freemasons ever had the kind of power that some ascribe to them.

Frankly, I was surprised that Chomsky didn't know much about Freemasonry. I began studying, casually, Freemasonry about the same time as I began to learn about politics and Noam Chomsky. In fact, as a worshipper of Jehovah who doesn't believe in democracy (mankind's self-rule, independent of God), it was the title of one of Chomsky's books that caught my attention and marked the start of my political self-education. Deterring Democracy, I figured, would provide me with ammunition in my own efforts to teach others that democracy doesn't work. I was right, although Chomsky thinks that the problem isn't with democracy itself, but rather with how it's practised. He informed me that he doesn't believe in God, whose existence he says can't be proven. This strikes me as unreasonable, at least when it's coming from someone as thoughtful as Noam Chomsky. Can Chomsky prove that he has a mind? Then again, as I discovered from reading more of him over the years, he has a particular 'political' bias against the Christian Bible.

What struck me in Pacitti’s article on the University of Messina, Firm grip of corruption, was the mention of Freemasons, as having an undue 'in' in the University, when the environment is favourable to those who go along with or get involved with the Mafia. It would be interesting to have Pacitti’s further comments on this.

Some of your readers might be familiar with Peter Dale Scott's Deep Politics and the Death of John F. Kennedy. It was, at the time I corresponded with Chomsky, the top book in a Toronto Star review of the best 10 books on the death of JFK. I was only getting to know Chomsky's work and wasn't aware that he had written his own book dealing with the subject. Chomsky informed me that Scott’s representation of Chomsky’s own views was incorrect and put me onto his book, Rethinking Camelot. Scott's discussion of things like the Mafia and how so much of it (the label 'Cosa Nostra') was influenced by the CIA was positively intriguing. Although Scott’s book doesn’t read easily, it's a great reference work.

Scott's contention that deep politics reveals that the corruption in politics that is seen by everyone – namely the political nonsense that we can read about in the dailies – is not separate from corruption by conventional criminal organizations and elements is on a par, perhaps, with the revelation by Chomsky that the world's only superpower and ‘foremost champion of democracy’, is in fact deterring democracy (although I see things differently). In my view, Scott's revelation that the world (it's ruling classes, political 'and' criminal) is essentially one big criminal organization is quite correct.

This all turns out to be part of a bigger discussion – which people aren't having, except in roundabout ways, since people don't want to have this discussion. The issue of our time is 'democracy or theocracy?' And by 'theocracy', I don't mean a manmade version that clearly godless people (for example, those who don't behave in accordance with what Chomsky calls 'elemental moral standards of goodness as set out in the Gospels') call a theocracy. Such a theocracy is merely more democracy, according to my definition.

We can say democracy means this and that, of course, based on our experience of what we 'call' democracy, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a basic, dictionary definition. And it's interesting that people want to completely avoid the nitty gritty here and never discuss the basic, dictionary definition. (This avoidance is so strong, I wouldn't be surprised if it manifested in an academic effort to revise the dictionary definition!) They have no problem with arguing that socialism is no good and 'was' no good. And I'd agree. However, It wasn't exactly 'textbook' socialism that was no good. It was Stalinism that was no good, and Stalin wasn't interested in socialism as it was expressed by well meaning thinkers who wrote about it. The 'operational' definition of socialism, namely what it was in practice, clearly was something that good people can say they don't believe in. And it's the operational definition of democracy that I don't believe in. As if destructive capitalism, with it's IMF and World Bank demons, weren’t a religion.

I believe in natural learning and teaching, as opposed to the horrible technocratic, business model learning and teaching that is now ubiquitous. And I believe that good teaching is both teaching 'and' learning, while good learning does not automatically exclude teaching. The critical ingredient, however, is humility. If you can't stand to be corrected, then unless you're perfect, you're not going to learn. John Ralston Saul, our (Canadian) political philosopher (and husband of our current Governor General, Adrienne Clarkson), wrote The Unconscious Civilization, a not large volume physically, but big in importance and relevance. Before I even read it, I was thinking very much along lines that Saul explores in his book (although my ideas are expressed very differently). Therefore, I couldn't help but enjoy it more than usual. Education happens to be a pet interest of Saul's, and so his thoughts on that are clear and he is able to talk intelligently and persuasively about it. Essentially, he explains that too many of us today are learning in the dark. We are learning, not naturally, but in a capitalist context. For example, he cites the government's withdrawal from funding public institutions, in accordance with the dictates of business community corporatism, which rushes in to fill the vacuum via privatization, and refers to that, and citizens' lack of alarm over it, as constituting a coup d’état in slow motion. See chapter 3, "From Corporatism To Democracy."

The technocratic way of looking at things and doing things started in the business schools, Saul notes, and then spread out into all areas of society, including our educational institutions. The goal of the technocrat, besides merely 'managing', as his boss requires, is to create economic security for himself and to defend the arrangement whereby he achieves that security, and that leads to perverse outcomes. I'm sort of giving this my own twist. Saul doesn't explicitly say (if memory serves me) that technocratic learning means learning 'within a capitalist context'. But that's what he explains, as others have noted. (See page 220 of Silent Coup: Confronting the Big Business Takeover of Canada by Tony Clarke, and page 164 of The Fight of My Life by Maude Barlow.)

"Dozens of other corporatist and market theorists toiled away through the thirties, forties and fifties [...]. What linked them was a religious devotion to the market and an inability to see government as the justifiable force of the citizen[...]. But what is the meaning of wanting to demolish everything rather than considering repair or consolidation? The meaning is ideology [...]. What I am describing is not a new problem. I've mentioned Dante, in the late thirteenth century, castigating the elites of Florence for being "all too intent upon the acquisition of money." In 1993 the retiring head of the French secret service (the DGSE) spoke to his assembled agents. He said the most dangerous situation they had to deal with was the "extraordinary rush for money in all its forms" and "the corruption of the elites." He said "the governing classes – political and economic – in much of the world, now treated money as if it had no odour," so that the clean is mixed with the criminal [...]. First there is the continual confusing of industrialization with capitalism with corporatism; the sort of confusion that ought to drive a modern economist crazy, but doesn't because all three fit together in a comfortable, flexible way. All three are interest oriented. They are about organization and capital." - John Ralston Saul

I don't always follow Saul, but that excerpt reveals his thinking somewhat. Also, and this sort of goes off in another direction; The ex-secret service person who Saul refers to doesn't know how prophetic his words were! Have a look at Lucy Komisar's investigative pieces for In These Times magazine, one of which is titled "Explosive Revelations." That's all about the findings, presented in a book titled Revelations (published in Europe, where it has caused a storm, but isn't available in ultra anti-terrorist U.S.A.), of a former financial clearinghouse (Clearstream) top official named Ernest Backes and a French journalist named Denis Robert. As the introduction to Lucy's April 15th, 2002 article notes, "The world's biggest banks and multinational corporations have set up a shadowy system to secretly move trillions of dollars – a system that can be exploited by tax evaders, drug runners and even terrorists. Ernest Backes exposed this dubious system and has launched a personal crusade for international oversight – earning him some high-powered enemies."

Take Ken Silverstein's very interesting Mother Jones magazine article, titled "Trillion-Dollar Hideaway," which you will find archived on the Mother Jones magazine website. Experts estimate that something like 5 trillion dollars (American) sits untaxed in offshore tax havens, which are havens that the United Nations said really only exist for the purpose of enabling their users to evade paying taxes. Meanwhile, neoliberal politicians are telling the people whose public institutions are being taken over by capitalists that they can't afford to fund those institutions! In fact they can, even with this kind of fiscal, financial mismanagement happening! (Canadian journalist Linda McQuaig's recent August 18, 2002 Toronto Star article, "Deficit of goodwill keeps surplus locked away," looks at a Conference Board of Canada report, recently released, that tells us to expect very large federal budget surpluses for years to come. The report by this private research company was commissioned by the provinces and will not get, as you can imagine, much mention in the mainstream press, let alone by the neoliberal politicians.) But imagine what governments could do if they were governments of and by and for 'all' of the people, and they made everyone pay their fair share of taxes.

Or consider Mark Schapiro's May 6th, 2002 The Nation magazine article, "Big Tobacco: Uncovering the industry's multibillion-dollar global smuggling network." The editorial introduces the special report with: "It's hard to imagine a tale of corporate mischief that would shock veteran observers of the US tobacco industry. But even the most jaded reader may raise an eyebrow at the allegations reported on page 11 that major American tobacco companies smuggled cigarettes and laundered money on a vast scale, defying US and foreign law and defrauding foreign governments of hundreds of millions in tax revenues before engineering a rewrite of the USA Patriot Act last fall to shield themselves from international liability. For this special report, the result of an investigation by The Nation, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and NOW With Bill Moyers – with support from the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute – journalist Mark Schapiro travelled to Colombia, whose state governments are suing the companies in US court, to assess the charges and to inspect the scene of the alleged smuggling operations [...]. The Bush Administration ought to cooperate with authorities in Colombia and other countries in their efforts to hold US corporations accountable[…]."

Back to technocracy. So everyone's in their own little cubicle, doing specialist work and developing impenetrable jargon that outsiders – potential competitors for our jobs – can't grasp. The technocrat (The word, Saul explains on pages 109 & 110 of his other book, Voltaire’s Bastards, is not related to 'technology', which is a "relatively new" word, but to the root meanings of 'techne' and 'kratos', or, respectively 'skill' and 'power', which yields 'the skill of power') controls information that flows through his or her cubicle, and will speed or slow it's flow depending on his (his = his 'and' her) personal agenda, particular moral code, etc. Here, in this, we see one big reason why our civilization (the same one Gandhi looked upon) is dysfunctional.

One example (my own) of how such learning leads to perverse outcomes can be seen in the incident (which I believe can easily be found on the net) involving (former, I guess) Toronto Hospital for Sick Children's Doctor Nancy Olivieri, who was studying a drug called deferiprone, belonging to a company called Apotex. Had she said that everything was okay, the drug was great and so on, she would never have had to fight for six years to keep Apotex from penalizing her for telling the public that the drug was bad. As she recently told Rachel Ross (See "Boundless biotech," Toronto Star, June 10, 2002), "Most of the drug testing in this country is financed by drug companies [...]. Those are the companies that will profit from the drug, so it really is against their best interests to explore any side effects."

In other words, technocratic learning leads to the hoarding of knowledge, which is the very opposite of the kind of behaviour that a healthy and thriving civilization's members would exhibit. Money means life, and so does knowledge, all the more so since we have, in the advanced capitalist states, entered into 'information economies'. While I acknowledge that capitalism doesn't have to be the extreme, brutal neoliberal kind that we see today (which makes it sort of a reversion to brutal 18th century capitalism), it is my belief that capitalism will naturally end up this way. I believe we are simply seeing capitalism's true colours. Others, social democrats, believe the system is reformable. I believe that money exists for one reason only, namely so that some can have more of it, and more of what that brings, than others. Capitalism appeals to the greed and egotism that human imperfection allows to surface. That is why capitalism cannot be a good thing. Still, I would be delighted if the social democrats got their way and we could reign in capitalism – while it's still with us. Less oppression and exploitation is always preferable to more.

I have a saying: Learn, not to know, but in order to know what to think.

Note: This letter was published by JUST Response on September 16 2002.

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