So, we the responsible men have to make decisions for them. They like to see themselves as running the show. During the Kennedy and Johnson years, the technocratic and meritocratic elite, my colleagues from Harvard and MIT, were flocking down to Washington to show how the world should be run. Well, in Vietnam, we saw what came of that. It was not unpredictable. Those of us in the streets were warning of it all along. Now, it is the same.
It was totally predictable. To give you just one example, you may have seen it, but a couple of months ago the RAND Corporation did a detailed study trying to determine how much wealth was transferred from the working class and middle class to the superrich during the 40 neoliberal years.
Meanwhile, the top 0. Take a look at the effects: the majority of the population gets by paycheck to paycheck. Real wages have stagnated for 40 years. The gains of productivity growth concentrate in very few pockets. This leads to what you mentioned before — unfocused anger. Is it surprising? Instead, they are told that it is immigrants, Blacks, some pedophiles from outer space, if you believe QAnon.
Anything but what is actually happening. The job of people like you, activists on the streets, people who are trying to change the world for the better, is to dismantle all of this stuff. It is to get people to see what is not that far from right in front of their eyes. None of it is very profound. You can talk about it to high school students. They often understand it better than graduate students at major universities, who have been more indoctrinated.
As we discuss in the book, this is a point George Orwell made. Something that not many people read but should is the introduction to Animal Farm. Animal Farm is seen as safe, because it is a satire of the totalitarian enemy.
The introduction, which was not initially published, is addressed to the people of England. Orwell warns not to feel too self-righteous, because in free England, unpopular ideas can be suppressed without the use of force.
It is funny the way it works. A couple of days ago I had a talk with a group of Latin American activists. They were from all over Latin America. Well, just for fun, I read for them a column that appeared in The New York Times that day by one of their top foreign affairs specialists. It was about how the United States has been committed to the rule of law, human rights, and democracy. They just burst out laughing. What happens to you?
He drank the hemlock, not the people who were not asking the questions. Go back to the biblical record. There were people who were condemning the acts of the evil kings, and calling for justice and mercy for widows and orphans. What happened to them?
They were imprisoned, driven into the desert, bitterly condemned. He was called before King Ahab, who was the epitome of evil in the Bible. This runs through history. We honor the Dreyfusards, but not then.
Zola had to flee France for his life. How dare you criticize the august state? Everyone makes mistakes. It is perfectly legitimate to question our tactics, but then there are people who have the audacity to question our objectives and motives: Wild men in the wings.
Like the Dreyfusards, like Socrates in classical Greece. This is a much freer country, of course. To go back to your question: What does a genuine intellectual do? Tell the truth about important things to the people who have to hear it, and expect to suffer the consequences.
Intellectuals were teaching courses in the labor movement. They were writing books for the general population — books like Mathematics for the Million , written by a very good mathematician. Science for the People is that type of organization.
It was part of the task of the intellectual to be part of the activist, working-class movements. We still have things like that, but much less so now. Science for the People is still active, but through no fault of their own, they have much less reach in our society than they did during the activist periods. A large part of the reason was the labor movement. The labor movement was virtually destroyed in the s.
The United States has a very violent labor history. To a large extent, the US is a business-run society. By the s, the labor movement was crushed, but it revived in the s. As a kid, I could see it. My own family was first-generation immigrant, mostly working class.
It was a big part of their lives. My aunts, for example, were seamstresses working for the garment industry. That was part of a rich life. It was also cultural activities, social activities, a week in the Catskills.
It was life. In that context, you had intellectuals deeply involved. The Democrats, basically, gave up on the working class in the s. The last gasp was the Humphrey-Hawkins full employment bill of It is now changing. So, they all switched on a dime. As governor of California, he signed one of the strongest bills protecting it. He then became a passionate opponent of abortion.
George H. Bush, who was supposed to have had some character, did the same. It became the mantra of the Republican Party. In fact, what the party platform is doing is increasing abortion, and they know it. When you undermine family planning, block contraceptives, cut health care, defund Planned Parenthood, then you increase abortions, especially illegal and dangerous ones. That was their first big breakthrough. Nixon was a terrible racist himself, and he realized that by not so subtly advocating racism he could pick up the Southern vote.
Reagan, who was a dedicated racist, just did it as second nature. Now, take guns. The whole gun culture in the United States is mostly manufactured. It is PR. Trump has been tearing every piece of it to shreds. It has to be ratified by next February. If Trump wins the election or refuses to leave office, it will be gone by February.
The other major threat to human survival in any recognizable form is environmental catastrophe, and, there, Trump is alone in the world. Most countries are doing at least something about it—not as much as they should be, but some of them rather significant, some less so. The United States has pulled out of the Paris Agreement; is refusing to do any of the actions that might help poorer countries deal with the problem; is racing toward maximizing the use of fossil fuels; and, at the same time, just opened the last major nature reserve in the United States for drilling.
He has to make sure that we maximize the use of fossil fuels, race to the precipice as quickly as possible, and eliminate the regulations, which not only limit the dangerous effects but also protect Americans. Step by step, eliminate everything that might protect Americans or that will preserve the possibility of overcoming the very serious threat of environmental catastrophe.
There is nothing like this in history. Can you think of anyone in human history who has dedicated his efforts to undermining the prospects for survival of organized human life on earth? In fact, some of the productions of the Trump Administration are just mind-boggling. What leading figure in human history has dedicated policy toward maximizing the use of fossil fuels and cutting down on regulations that mitigate the disaster?
Name one. But, with Trump, it seems like perhaps his personal desire for money is driving American foreign policy now. Not at all. For example, the one real legislative achievement is the tax scam, which was just a giveaway to the very rich and the corporate sector. We can go right down the list. Take a look at the last Davos conference, in January. There were three keynote speakers. The first, of course, was Trump. But when he spoke, they gave him rousing applause.
For example, we just went through two of the quadrennial extravaganzas, the Conventions. Lots of coverage of them. Did you hear a phrase about the threat of nuclear war? Maybe somewhere. Did you hear anything about his being the worst criminal in human history? Yes, he was trying to destroy lots of lives but not organized human life on earth, nor was Adolf Hitler. He was an utter monster but not dedicating his efforts perfectly consciously to destroying the prospect for human life on earth.
A couple of years ago, you may recall the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration published a several-hundred-page analysis. Any climate scientist will tell you that. And they drew a conclusion from it. We should not put restrictions on automotive and truck emissions. We should limit the restrictions. Can you find a counterpart to that in human history? Please tell me. Well, I can think of one thing that maybe comes close.
The Wannsee declaration, in , where the Nazi party put the finishing touches on the plans to wipe out all the Jews and kill tens of millions of Slavs. Pretty horrifying. Is it as bad as that publication I just mentioned? The policies are clear; the understanding is clear. He had to kill people as a means toward this end. Take, say, Henry Kissinger. Do I care? To return to a previous point: the left has often described Trump as a symptom of American decline or American bad behavior, and said that the real threat to American democracy is all of these things that have been true about us for a long time.
The center-left has often described Trump as a uniquely malignant figure, who is threatening a democracy that was working better than some people on the left thought. You were seeming to come down on the latter side of that debate—which, given your status in the American left, I thought was interesting.
I think [American] democracy, first of all, was never much to write home about. Do you really want to talk about it? They were committed to reducing democracy. The general population wanted more democracy. Their picture was more or less that of John Jay: the people who own the country ought to rule it. If anything, evolutionary theory can explain too much. Chomsky's evolutionary perspective has also convinced him that our ability to understand nature, including human nature, is limited.
He divides scientific questions into problems , which are at least potentially answerable, and mysteries , which are not. Before the 17th century, Chomsky explained, when science in the modern sense did not really exist, almost all questions appeared to be mysteries.
Then Descartes, Newton and others began posing questions and solving them with the methods that spawned modern science. Some of those investigations have led to "spectacular progress," but others have proved fruitless. For example, scientists have made no progress investigating consciousness and free will. All animals, Chomsky argued, have cognitive abilities shaped by their evolutionary histories.
A rat can learn to navigate a maze that requires it to turn left at every second fork but not one that requires it to turn left at every fork corresponding to a prime number.
If humans are animals--and not "angels," Chomsky added sarcastically--then we, too, are subject to these biological constraints. Although language allows us to formulate and resolve questions in ways that rats cannot, ultimately we face mysteries, too.
In linguistics "there's a lot of understanding now about how human languages are more or less cast in the same mold, what the principles are that unify them and so on. Descartes, for instance, struggled to comprehend how we use language in endlessly creative ways. In Language and Problems of Knowledge , Chomsky stated: "It is quite possible--overwhelmingly probable, one might guess--that we will always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology.
The science-forming capacity is only one facet of our mental endowment. We use it where we can but are not restricted to it, fortunately. The success of science, Chomsky suggested to me, stems from "a kind of chance convergence of the truth about the world and the structure of our cognitive space.
And it is a chance convergence because evolution didn't design us to do this; there's no pressure on differential reproduction that led to the capacity to solve problems in quantum theory. We had it.
It's just there for the same reason that most other things are there: for some reason that nobody understands. Modern science has stretched the cognitive capacity of humans to the breaking point, according to Chomsky.
In the 19th century, any well-educated person could grasp contemporary physics, but now "you've got to be some kind of freak. That was my opening. Does the increasing difficulty of science, I asked, imply that science might be approaching its limits? Might science, defined as the search for comprehensible regularities or patterns in nature, be ending? Suddenly, Chomsky backpedaled. But when you talk to young children, they want to understand nature. It's driven out of them.
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