Noam Chomsky, “Intervention in Vietnam Central America ...



Noam Chomsky, “Interviews” (From various occasions)

Interviewer in “Manufacturing Consent”: What was the most definitive moment of your life?

Chomsky: I remember when I was about six, there was the standard fat kid who everybody made fun of. In the schoolyard, a bunch of kids started taunting him. One of the kids brought over his older brother, and he was going to beat him up. I remember going up to stand next to him. I did for a while, but then I got scared and went away. I was very much ashamed of it afterwards. I felt - I'll never do that again. That's a feeling that stuck with me. You should stick with the underdog.

James Peck: If you are not able to participate in the political system in meaningful ways, if you are reduced to the role of a passive spectator, then what kind of knowledge do you have? How can common sense emerge in this context?

Chomsky: Well, let me give an example. When I'm driving, I sometimes turn on the radio and I find very often that what I'm listening to is a discussion of sports. These are telephone conversations. People call in and have long and intricate discussions, and it's plain that quite a high degree of thought and analysis is going into that. People know a tremendous amount. They know all sorts of complicated details and enter into far-reaching discussion about whether the coach made the right decision yesterday and so on. These are ordinary people, not professionals, who are applying their intelligence and analytic skills in these areas and accumulating quite a lot of knowledge and, for all I know, understanding. On the other hand, when I hear people talk about, say, international affairs or domestic problems, it's at a level of superficiality that's beyond belief. …

And I think that this concentration on such topics as sports makes a certain degree of sense. The way the system is set up, there is virtually nothing people can do anyway, without a degree of organization that's far beyond anything that exists now, to influence the real world. They might as well live in a fantasy world, and that's in fact what they do. …

There are questions that are hard. There are areas where you need specialized knowledge. I'm not suggesting a kind of anti-intellectualism. But the point is that many things can be understood quite well without a very far-reaching, specialized knowledge. And in fact even a specialized knowledge in these areas is not beyond the reach of people who happen to be interested. … It requires the kind of normal skepticism and willingness to apply one's analytical skills that almost all people have and that they can exercise. It just happens that they exercise them in analyzing what the New England Patriots ought to do next Sunday instead of questions that really matter for human life, their own included.

James Peck: Do you think people are inhibited by expertise?

Chomsky: There are also experts about football, but these people don't defer to them. The people who call in talk with complete confidence. They don't care if they disagree with the coach or whoever the local expert is. They have their own opinion and they conduct intelligent discussions. I think it's an interesting phenomenon. Now I don't think that international or domestic affairs are much more complicated. And what passes for serious intellectual discourse on these matters does not reflect any deeper level of understanding or knowledge. …

My own personal experience is perhaps relevant. As I mentioned earlier, I do not have the usual professional credentials in any field, and my own work has ranged fairly widely. Some years ago, for example, I did some work in mathematical linguistics and automata theory, and occasionally gave invited lectures at mathematics or engineering colloquia. No one would have dreamed of challenging my credentials to speak on these topics -- which were zero, as everyone knew; that would have been laughable. The participants were concerned with what I had to say, not my right to say it. But when I speak, say, about international affairs, I'm constantly challenged to present the credentials that authorize me to enter this august arena, in the United States, at least -- elsewhere not. It's a fair generalization, I think, that the more a discipline has intellectual substance, the less it has to protect itself from scrutiny …

Man in audience at a public lecture: Mr. Chomsky, I'm wondering what specific qualifications you have to be able to speak all around the country about world affairs?

Chomsky: None whatsoever. I mean, the qualifications that I have to speak on world affairs are exactly the same ones Henry Kissinger has, and Walt Rostow has, or anybody in the Political Science Department, professional historians -- none, none that you don't have. The only difference is, I don't pretend to have qualifications, nor do I pretend that qualifications are needed. I mean, if somebody were to ask me to give a talk on quantum physics, I'd refuse -- because I don't understand enough. But world affairs are trivial: there's nothing in the social sciences or history or whatever that is beyond the intellectual capacities of an ordinary fifteen-year-old. You have to do a little work, you have to do some reading, you have to be able to think but there's nothing deep… In fact, I think the idea that you're supposed to have special qualifications to talk about world affairs is just another scam -- it's kind of like Leninism [position that socialist revolution should be led by a "vanguard" party]: it's just another technique for making the population feel that they don't know anything, and they'd better just stay out of it and let us smart guys run it. In order to do that, what you pretend is that there's some esoteric discipline, and you've got to have some letters after your name before you can say anything about it. The fact is, that's a joke. …

Women in audience at a public lecture: What's been the point of the arms race, Dr. Chomsky?

Chomsky: Well, there are a lot of things, it's served a number of crucial functions. Remember, any state, any state, has a primary enemy: its own population. If politics begins to break out inside your own country and the population starts getting active, all kinds of horrible things can happen--so you have to keep the population quiescent and obedient and passive. And international conflict is one of the best ways of doing it: if there's a big enemy around, people will abandon their rights, because you've got to survive. So the arms race is functional in that respect--it creates global tension and a mood of fear. …

The arms race also plays a crucial role in keeping the economy going--and that's a big problem. Suppose that the arms race really did decline: how would you force the taxpayers to keep subsidizing high-technology industry like they've been doing for the past fifty years? Is some politician going to get up and say, "Alright, next year you're going to lower your standard of living, because you have to subsidize IBM so that it can produce fifth-generation computers"? Nobody's going to be able to sell that line. If any politician ever started talking that way, people would say: "Okay, we want to start getting involved in social and economic policy-making too." In fact, that danger has been very openly discussed in the business literature in the United States for forty or fifty years. Business leaders know perfectly well what every economist knows: that spending for civilian purposes is maybe even more efficient, more profitable than spending for military purposes. And they also know that there are any number of ways to have the population subsidize high-technology industry besides through the Pentagon system--business knows that perfectly well, and it also knows the reasons against it. They remain what they always were.

If you take an economics course, they'll teach you, correctly, that if the government spends n dollars to stimulate the economy, it doesn't really matter what it's spent on: they can build jet planes, they can bury it in the sand and get people to dig for it, they can build roads and houses, they can do all sorts of things--in terms of stimulating the economy, the economic effects are not all that different. In fact, it's perfectly likely that military spending is actually a less efficient stimulus than social spending, for all kinds of reasons. But the problems is, spending for civilian purposes has negative side effects. For one thing, it interferes with managerial prerogatives. The money that's funneled through the Pentagon system is just a straight gift to the corporate manager, it's like saying, "I'll buy anything you produce, and I'll pay for the research and development, and if you can make any profits, fine." …

The other point, which is probably even more serious from the perspective of private power, is that social spending increases the danger of democracy--it threatens to increase popular involvement in decision-making. For example, if the government gets involved, say around here, in building hospitals and schools and roads and things like that, people are going to get interested in it, and they'll want to have a say in it--because it affects them, and is related to their lives. On the other hand, if the government says, "We're going to build a Stealth Bomber," nobody has any opinions. People care about where there's going to be a school or a hospital, but they don't care about what kind of jet plane you build--because they don't have the foggiest idea about that. And since one of the main purposes of social policy is to keep the population passive, people with power are going to want to eliminate anything that tends to encourage the population to get involved in planning…

Man in audience at a public lecture: But you could say that "to truck and barter" is human nature - that people are fundamentally materialist, and will always want to accumulate more and more under any social structure.

Chomsky: You could say it, but there's no reason to believe it. You look at peasant societies, they go on for thousands of years without it - do those people have a different human nature? Or just look inside a family: do people "truck and barter" over how much you're going to eat for dinner? Well, certainly a family is a normal social structure, and you don't see people accumulating more and more for themselves regardless of the needs of the other people. …

Man in audience at a public lecture: What's the difference between "libertarian" and "anarchist," exactly?

Chomsky: There's no difference, really. I think they're the same thing. But you see, "libertarian" has a special meaning in the United States. The United States is off the spectrum of the main tradition in this respect: what's called "libertarianism" here is unbridled capitalism. Now, that's always been opposed in the European libertarian tradition, where every anarchist has been a socialist …

The American version of "libertarianism" is an aberration, though-nobody really takes it seriously. I mean, everybody knows that a society that worked by American libertarian principles would self-destruct in three seconds. The only reason people pretend to take it seriously is because you can use it as a weapon. Like, when somebody comes out in favor of a tax, you can say: "No, I'm a libertarian, I'm against that tax" - but of course, I'm still in favor of the government building roads, and having schools, and killing Libyans, and all that sort of stuff.

Now, there are consistent libertarians, people like Murray Rothbard - and if you just read the world that they describe, it's a world so full of hate that no human being would want to live in it. This is a world where you don't have roads because you don't see any reason why you should cooperate in building a road that you're not going to use: if you want a road, you get together with a bunch of other people who are going to use that road and you build it, then you charge people to ride on it. If you don't like the pollution from somebody's automobile, you take them to court and you litigate it. Who would want to live in a world like that? …

Peter Jay: … You wrote, in one of your essays, that "in a decent society, everyone would have the opportunity to find interesting work and each person would be permitted the fullest possible scope for his talents." … But it still needs to be explained, I think, why the kind of work which people would find interesting and appealing and fulfilling to do would coincide at all closely with the kind which actually needs to be done, if we're to sustain anything like the standard of living which people demand and are used to.

Chomsky: Well, there's a certain amount of work that just has to be done if we're to maintain that standard of living. It's an open question how onerous that work has to be. Let's recall that science and technology and intellect have not been devoted to examining that question or to overcoming the onerous and self-destructive character of the necessary work of society. The reason is that it has always been assumed that there is a substantial body of wage slaves who will do it simply because otherwise they'll starve. However, if human intelligence is turned to the question of how to make the necessary work of the society itself meaningful, we don't know what the answer will be. My guess is that a fair amount of it can be made entirely tolerable. It's a mistake to think that even back-breaking physical labor is necessarily onerous. Many people, myself included, do it for relaxation. Well, recently, for example, I got it into my head to plant thirty-four trees in a meadow behind the house, on the State Conservation Commission, which means I had to dig thirty-four holes in the sand. You know, for me, and what I do with my time mostly, that's pretty hard work, but I have to admit I enjoyed it. I wouldn't have enjoyed it if I'd had work norms, if I'd had an overseer, and if I'd been ordered to do it at a certain moment, and so on. On the other hand, if it's a task taken on just out of interest, fine, that can be done. …

I said we first have to ask to what extent the necessary work of the society -- namely that work which is required to maintain the standard of living that we want -- needs to be onerous or undesirable. I think that the answer is: much less than it is it today. But let's assume there is some extent to which it remains onerous. Well, in that case, the answer's quite simple: that work has to be equally shared among people capable of doing it. …

If it turns out that these are really tasks which people will find no self-fulfillment in. Incidentally, I don't quite believe that. As I watch people work, craftsmen, let's say, automobile mechanics for example, I think one often finds a good deal of pride in work. I think that that kind of pride in work well done, in complicated work well done, because it takes thought and intelligence to do it, especially when one is also involved in management of the enterprise, determination of how the work will be organized, what it is for, what the purposes of the work are, what'll happen to it, and so on -- I think all of this can be satisfying and rewarding activity which in fact requires skills, the kind of skills people will enjoy exercising. However, I'm thinking hypothetically now. Suppose it turns out there is some residue of work which really no one wants to do, whatever that may be -- okay, then I say that the residue of work must be equally shared, and beyond that, people will be free to exercise their talents as they see fit. ...

Peter Jay: Not compelled to do it, but they might agree to do it voluntarily because they were paid an amount which they felt made it worthwhile.

Chomsky: Well, but you see, I'm assuming everyone essentially gets equal remuneration. Don't forget that we're not talking about a society now where the people who do the onerous work are paid substantially more than the people who do the work that they do on choice -- quite the opposite. The way our society works, the way any class society works, the people who do the unwanted work are the ones who are paid least. That work is done and we sort of put it out of our minds, because it's assumed that there will be a massive class of people who control only one factor of production, namely their labor, and have to sell it, and they'll have to do that work because they have nothing else to do, and they'll be paid very little for it. …

Peter Jay: Let me put that to you in another way. It seems to me that there is a fundamental choice, however one disguises it, between whether you organize work for the satisfaction it gives to the people who do it, or whether you organize it on the basis of the value of what is produced for the people who are going to use or consume what is produced. …

Chomsky: Well, there are some factual assumptions here, and I disagree with you about the factual assumptions. My feeling is that part of what makes work meaningful is that it does have use, that its products do have use. The work of the craftsman is in part meaningful to that craftsman because of the intelligence and skill that he puts into it, but also in part because the work is useful, and I might say, the same is true of scientists. I mean, the fact that the kind of work you do may lead to something else -- that's what it means in science, you know -- may contribute to something else, that's very important quite apart from the elegance and beauty of what you may achieve. And I think that covers every field of human endeavor. … So, it's by no means clear -- in fact, I think it's false -- that contributing to the enhancement of pleasure and satisfaction in work is inversely proportional to contributing to the value of the output.

Peter Jay: Not inversely proportional, but it might be unrelated. I mean, take some very simple thing, like selling ice-creams on the beach on a public holiday. It's a service to society: undoubtedly people want ice-creams, they feel hot. On the other hand, it's hard to see in what sense there is either a craftsman's joy or a great sense of social virtue or nobility in performing that task. Why would anyone perform that task if they were not rewarded for it?

Chomsky: I must say, I've seen some very cheery-looking ice cream vendors...

Peter Jay: Sure, they're making a lot of money.

Chomsky: ... who happen to like the idea that they're giving children ice-creams, which seems to me a perfectly reasonable way to spend one's time, as compared with thousands of other occupations that I can imagine. Recall that a person has an occupation, and it seems to me that most of the occupations that exist -- especially the ones that involve what are called services, that is, relations to human beings -- have an intrinsic satisfaction and rewards associated with them, namely in the dealings with the human beings that are involved. That's true of teaching, and it's true of ice cream vending. I agree that ice cream vending doesn't require the commitment or intelligence that teaching does, and maybe for that reason it will be a less desired occupation. But if so, it will have to be shared. However, what I'm saying is that our characteristic assumption that pleasure in work, pride in work, is either unrelated to or negatively related to the value of the output is related to a particular stage of social history, namely capitalism, in which human beings are tools of production. It is by no means necessarily true. For example, if you look at the many interviews with workers on assembly lines, for example, that have been done by industrial psychologists, you find that one of the things they complain about over and over again is the fact that their work simply can't be done well; the fact that the assembly line goes through so fast that they can't do their work properly. I just happened to look recently at a study of longevity in some journal on gerontology which tried to trace the factors that you could use to predict longevity -- you know, cigarette smoking and drinking, genetic factors -- everything was looked at. It turned out, in fact, that the highest predictor, the most successful predictor, was job satisfaction.

Peter Jay: People who have nice jobs live longer.

Chomsky: People who are satisfied with their jobs. And I think that makes a good deal of sense, you know, because that's where you spend your life, that's where your creative activities are. Now what leads to job satisfaction? Well, I think many things lead to it, and the knowledge that you are doing something useful for the community is an important part of it. Many people who are satisfied with their work are people who feel that what they're doing is important to do. They can be teachers, they can be doctors, they can be scientists, they can be craftsmen, they can be farmers. I mean, I think the feeling that what one is doing is important, is worth doing, contributes to those with whom one has social bonds, is a very significant factor in one's personal satisfaction. …

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