Noam Chomsky Meets Robin Mathews

Both Noam Chomsky and Robin Mathews have spent much of their academic and public lives exposing the questionable rhetoric of the American empire. Both have seen Leviathan for what it is, and told all who would hear that the emperor and the empire have no clothes on. Chomsky has used the political principles of the empire to point out the chasm between rhetoric and reality. Chomsky has defended liberty, individualism, conscience and equality to one and all. He, in many ways, sees himself as the true patriot and defender of the American founding principles. Mathews has, like Chomsky, walked the extra mile to clarify and point out that the American empire has a predictable tendency to act a like a predator and bird of prey. Mathews, unlike Chomsky, has pointed out how many Canadians have been taken in by both American principles and American imperial ambitions, and, as such, have acted as dutiful colonials and compradors.

Chomsky has been a consistent critic of the state, and, as an anarchist has, much of his life, argued that society rather than the state is the best and finest way to bring in the good community. Chomsky has been most suspicious of the power that is invested in the state, and he has spent most of his days pointing out how such power is abused and misused. Chomsky has become a guru and mentor of sorts to the anarchist and protest left in both the USA and Canada. Many Canadians, who see themselves as radical, readily genuflect to Chomsky, and, in doing so, fail to see how they are welcoming a more subtle form of the empire into their midst. Mathews started a nationalist party in Canada (before Mel Hurtig), and he is a firm believer in the role of the state as a means of bringing into being the just society. Why do so many Canadians follow the cynical path of Chomsky and his view of the state, and fail to heed and hear the insights of Mathews when he urges Canadians to engage the state at the level of political parties? The liberty loving individualism of Chomsky and clan has, buried at its centre, a worrisome cynicism and skepticism. It is this cynicism that creates political paralysis at the level of formal party politics. Do Canadians truly want to hike down this dubious path? Is indifference and apathy in regard to formal party politics the wisest and sanest way to go? What are the limitations of anarchist and advocacy politics and what are some of the positives of the state? Until these sort of probes are sent out, we will be in danger of slipping into a comic book way of seeing and doing politics. Who, as Canadians, should we heed and hear? Chomsky or Mathews? Mathews or Chomsky? And, what does it say about us as Canadians when we turn to Chomsky to teach us how to be political?

There is no doubt that moral outrage, protest and advocacy politics have their place, but when formal political parties (and their role in guiding the ship of state) is seen only in a negative way, the very goal the idealists so long to attain are undercut and undermined. Mathews has never pitted society against the state in quite the same way Chomsky and many anarchists have. In fact, Mathews has argued, quite convincingly, in both Canadian Identity: Major Forces Shaping the Life of a People (1988) and The Canadian Intellectual Tradition (1997) that the delicate Canadian dialectic holds together both the role of the individual and community, and the society and the state. The individual and society can go astray and slip into individualism and splinter groups just as the state and community can slip into collectivism and the abuse of power. But, both society and the state, the individual and community can also do much good. Those who only concentrate on the negative role and function of the state distort social reality. Much good is brought about by the state, and, in Canada, as privatization and globalization continues to make insidious inroads, the only way to restore a shared and national sense of the common good is through a strong state. Those who perpetually badmouth and take shots at the state might just sink or cripple the very ship that can take them from one shore to another.

Mathews would agree with Chomsky that the American empire is an empire, and, as such, does need to be exposed for all its brutal deeds in various parts of the world. Mathews would, though, questions some of the American principles that Chomsky holds so near and dear. Mathews would ask Canadians why they are so keen and eager to embrace such principles when, in Canada, we hold high such notions as the common good and the positive role of the state in bringing about such a good.

The Canadian tradition has often held order in tension with liberty, the commonweal in tension with individualism, the organic nature of society with equality, tradition with conscience and the role of the state and society in bringing into being the True North. When we, as Canadians, snap the tension and turn to the reactive and reactionary American way as our north star, we become obedient colonials of the empire. Mathews has made this process quite clear in his challenging and razor sharp missives, Treason of the Intellectuals: English Canada in the Post-Modern World (1995) and Being Canadian In Dirty Imperialist Times (2000).

Treason of the Intellectuals is divided into five compact and challenging chapters. The "Introduction" lays bare and before the reader the problem many Canadian face in an all too frequent way. Most of our intellectual class have betrayed the Canadian way again and again. This comprador class, with their commitments to the USA, anarchism, or its first born child, postmodernism, have no sense of any common heritage, identity or nationhood. The underlying principles that shape and guide these prejudices are extreme notions of individualism, liberty and equality (all part of the American genetic code). What is fact seems to be a form of dissidence and radicalism is, if fact, a deeper and more worrisome attitude of Canadian capitulation to American founding principles and priorities. Chapter 1, "Political Lies, Canadian Cultural History and the Post-Modern" takes a surgical knive to the deceptions of much of cultural history and the postmodern way that can only fragment, divide and separate. Mathews has little interest in such a intellectual way of seeing things, and he blows the Ram's Horn on the failures and futility of the postmodern project and ideology. Chapter 2, "Regionalism; Imperialism in a Small Pond" continues the assault on the shaky and dubious foundations of the postmodern way. The turn, in Canada, to regionalism, Mathews argues, is a turn away from the larger vision of what Canada might and could be. Mathews is very much a poet and thinker of the large picture, of the epic vision, of the Canadian metanarrative. He has little patience for those who hide away in ever smaller and smaller views of what the common good might and could be if we had but the fullness of mind to see what we share in common. Chapter 3, "Iago in the Colony" turns to many Canadians who, like Iago, are driven by resentment and have no sense of Canada as being more than a colony to serve imperial interests and ambitions. Chapter 4, "The New Treason of the Intellectuals in English Canada" pulls no punches and refuses to capitulate. Our intellectual class have, again and again, betrayed us, and Mathews walks the extra mile to identify who such intellectuals are and how this betrayal process works (in crude, subtle and sophisticated ways). Treason of the Intellectuals is a must read for any Canadian who has lost their national way and realizes the implications of such a lostness. There is, in short, a way out of the dark, deep forest where light is thin and shadows many. It is to such clearings that Mathews points.

Being Canadian in Dirty Imperialist Times is a poetic manifesto that just will not quit. Mathews probes, in poem after poem, how Canadians are colonized, how Americans mesmerize and take captive the Canadian mind and imagination and what Canadians can do to resist the empire in its multifaceted ways of taken captive the Canadian ethos. Being Canadian in Dirty Imperialist Times draws together many of Mathews' earlier poems and adds a few new ones. The tract for the times is both a poetic magna charta and a historical overview of the Canadian journey. The initial poem, "Pre-history lesson" sets the stage for the drama that is about to unfold, and the final poem, "Marina: Saturna Island" brings the book to a fitting conclusion. Many is the poem between these two bookend poems that explore and unpack the way Americans just assume they have a right to shape and assimilate the Canadian way. The language Mathews uses is accessible, for and to the people and spoken in such a way that Canadians can see themselves caught in the dilemma they are in. The missive is thick with struggle and hope, critical of the empire (like Chomsky), yet capable of speaking with a Canadian voice (unlike Chomsky).

The publication of Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance (2003) tells much the same sort of tale that Chomsky has been telling for the last four decades. The USA is an empire, and, as an empire, it seeks to dominate the globe. Chomsky?s approach tends to be straight forward and stays on the same goat trail again and again. It is one thing, though, to expose the pretensions and violence of the USA. It is quite another thing to sort and sift through how Canadians are to respond to such a quest for global dominance. Chomsky does not know the Canadian tradition (most Americans suffer from the same problem), he has no real solutions for Canadians (most Americans don?t), and he has no real solution to the American empire (beyond a sort of thoughtful and probing anarchist solution). Why then do Canadians turn so dutifully to an American who knows little about the Canadian way? Why, in short, do so many turn to Chomsky and so few Canadians turn to Mathews?

Mathews has, in a variety of ways, been faithful and true to the Canadian nationalist tradition, but many is the Canadian dissident or self perceived radical that knows little about Mathews' yeoman's service in and for Canadians since the 1950s. It seems to me that if Canadians are ever going to get a serious and substantive sense of their own unique and vivid tradition. Those who think that protest and advocacy politics can bring down the American empire or resist and oppose the forward march and juggernaut of globalization are sort sighted and naïve. Canadians who bow and genuflect to Chomsky and the American anarchist way might just be paving the way for the weakening of the state and the undermining of such Canadian institutions as health care, education, the CBC, employment insurance and pensions. Those who turn to Mathews (and his more nationalist vision) might be the true radicals who are in the forefront of offering a serious and substantive challenge to the USA and globalization in a way that can, through national and institutional means, oppose such Goliaths in our time.

Should we, as Canadians, turn more to the American liberal and anarchist way of Chomsky (and his followers, kith and kin) as our north star? If so, are we just not perpetuating and deepening our colonial way of being? Or, should we, as Canadians, gaze deeper into our communal and collective tradition and see, in such a way of being, that we need not follow the American lead into the future. The choice, as ever, is ours. Anarchism (and its underlying principles of liberty, individuality, equality, anti-statism, conscience and a suspicion of the past ) or Nationalism (and its underlying principles of order, the common good, justice and a respect for tradition and the state). Canadians have, in their history, lived with the dialectic and tensions of liberty/order, individuality/commonweal, equality/ justice, society/ state and a respect for the accumulated wisdom of tradition and history. There are many ways Canadians have been and continue to be colonized. Those who uncritically bow to Chomsky perpetuate this worrisome process. Those who have taken the time to heed and hear Mathews might just see an old way, a way that is much older and nuanced than the American way, a way that is truly Canadian, a way that upholds and seeks to defend the best of the True North strong and free. It is by turning our ears to such a way that we truly might be able both expose the follies and pretensions, in thought, of the USA and globalization and, in deed, support the Canadian institutions that can fight the good fight and stay the course of opposition to such large and imposing forces. Canadians have done such things in the past. There is no reason we can not do such things in the present and future.

Ron Dart