An attack on knowledge and intelligence

By *Jomo Sanga Thomas

(“Plain Talk” July 19, 2024)

A guest column by Patrick Lawrence

“Not in my lifetime”, I used to think when contemplating America’s decline and fall — a decline and fall I eagerly anticipate as a prelude to remaking our crumbly republic such that it stands for the ideals it professes to uphold but unreservedly ignores. Blind justice, disinterested leaders and institutions, tolerance of others, freedom of thought and speech, respect for reason and knowledge.

Decline and fall. It is not pleasant to live in such a time as ours, but it is, interesting. Let us not, as we accept our fate, lose sight of the optimism within the apparent pessimism.

Last month, the House passed a bill that, broadly speaking, defines as “antisemitic” any criticism of Israel, or—heaven forbid!—disapproval of Israel as a “Jewish state”.  Soon after, as if to second the House’s intent, President Biden announced at an event marking the Holocaust Memorial Museum’s annual remembrance day, a series of new legal and administrative measures to counter the non-existent crisis of antisemitism that now overtakes the U.S. the way a Communist takeover did in the 1950s. 

This is an assault on reason, language, law — and even that highest of American “values” –common sense.

And then this, a letter 12 Republican senators signed and sent to the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, in response to the ICC’s plans to serve various Israeli officials, among them Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with arrest warrants charging them with war crimes in Gaza. You have to read this to believe it, “Target Israel and we will target you”, the letter reads. “If you move forward with the measures indicated in the report, we will move to end all American support for the ICC, sanction your employees and associates, and bar you and your families from the United States.” And then the much-remarked punchline: “You have been warned.”

This missive is an outright rejection of international law. There are only 12 signatories, Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio among them. The sentiments amount to, “thuggery befitting the Mafia”.

Those purporting to lead this nation are very little interested in what the rest of the world thinks of America — or even what Americans think of America. Power is all the late-phase imperium has left to rely upon. And power alone in any of its three principal forms — military power, coercion, and bribery — is not fated to define the era that is hard upon us.

The most startling events of the past few months concern what is now a prevalent effort to destroy America’s colleges and universities as independent institutions of higher learning. It is true that the confrontations on American campuses, and may they continue, are not to be taken as the main event. The main event remains the Israeli–U.S. genocide prompting students across the country — and the Western world at this point — to pitch tents and demonstrate in support of the Palestinian cause.

But with these developments bitterly in mind, we should recognise the meaning and gravity of the vicious responses — state and private — to the honourable displays of principle, integrity, and clear thinking we witness on American university campuses. In any imperium’s late phase, all institutions are required to serve the state and the reigning ideology.  We have already witnessed this coerced enlistment in the cases of corporate media, previously independent courts, nongovernmental organizations, and all manner of cultural institutions—book publishers, libraries, museums, and Hollywood studios. Now, it is the turn of the colleges and universities.

In this late phase of decline, no one or no entity is permitted to stand beyond the fence posts in the name of independent thought or free speech. The special gravity of this when tertiary education is the target cannot be overstated. Destroy colleges and universities as sanctuaries of uncircumscribed, purposefully exploratory thought and speech, and you are a good way along to destroy the nation’s intellectual dynamism and so the nation’s future.

What struck me last fall, and keeps on striking me now, are the intrusions of very wealthy donors into questions of academic freedom. This started among University of Pennsylvania graduates, when numerous of them either threatened to withhold donations, or did so because Penn administrators defended academic freedom instead of agreeing to suppress those at the university — students and faculty — who stood against a genocide and in favour of the Palestinian cause.

Wealthy donors declared they will stop supporting their alma mater,  if the school’s administrators negotiate with student leaders on the question of divesting endowment funds from companies profiting from Israel’s various atrocities.

We now have money people dictating how institutions of higher learning run themselves: what they teach, how it is taught, what can be said or thought and what cannot. It is beyond unconscionable.

Michael Massing, the writer and journalist, published “How to cover the one percent”, a brilliant piece on the fraud of ‘disinterested philanthropy,  in The New York Review of Books back in 2016. There is no such thing as disinterested giving, he argued with plenty of evidence. Leaving private wealth to support institutions in the public sphere — universities, museums, public broadcasting, what have you — is, at bottom, a way of controlling public discourse—and so a method of political, social and ideological control.

A few commentators remarked, as Israel–U.S. genocide proceeded that Israel would prove the downfall of the West. The principles by which it, the West, purported to live, its old, old claim to global superiority: backing the hideous apartheid state would leave all this a shambles. And now it is plain. Law, language, free thought, knowledge: In all such spheres, Israel is taking down what is called the liberal order. One cannot be altogether surprised: The state of Israel was an unworkable fallacy, founded on cruelty and intolerance from the start.

“But the utility of intelligence is admitted only theoretically, not practically,” Bertrand Russell wrote 102 years ago in “Free Thought and Official Propaganda”. “It is not desired that ordinary people should think for themselves because it is felt that people who think for themselves are awkward to manage and cause administrative problems.”

We should consider this as we think about the students and the attacks on them from many quarters, about the attempts to suppress and sabotage independent journalism, about the nonsensical laws moving through the House, about the corrupted language deployed in the antisemitism-everywhere routine, and about the attacks on institutions of learning. What is under siege in all such cases is our knowledge and our intelligence. We are not supposed to see and think about these things as they are. 

It is by far best that we do — to see and think, to guard our intelligence.

*Jomo Sanga Thomas is a lawyer, journalist, social commentator and a former senator and Speaker of the House of Assembly in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

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