Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

  WOMAN: But I want to point out that you’ve told us about a number of books this weekend which support some of the contentions you’re making: you would not know a lot of these things if you hadn’t read that material.

  That’s right—but you see, that’s a reflection of privilege, not a reflection of intellectual life. The fact is that if you’re at a university, you’re very privileged. For one thing, contrary to what a lot of people say, you don’t have to work all that hard. And you control your own work—I mean, maybe you decide to work eighty hours a week, but you decide which eighty hours. That makes a tremendous difference: it’s one of the few domains where you control your own work. And furthermore, you have a lot of resources—you’ve got training, you know how to use a library, you see the ads for books so you know which books are probably worth reading, you know there are declassified documents because you learned that in school somewhere, and you know how to find them because you know how to use a reference library. And that collection of skills and privileges gives you access to a lot of information. But it has nothing to do with being “intellectual”: there are plenty of people in the universities who have all of this stuff, and use all of these things, and they do clerical work. Which is perfectly possible—you can get the declassified documents, and you can copy them, and compare them, and then make a notation about some footnote referring to something else. That’s in fact most of the scholarship in these fields—take a look at the monographs sometime, there’s not a thought in people’s heads. I think there’s less real intellectual work going on in a lot of university departments than there is in trying to figure out what’s the matter with my car, which requires some creativity.

  WOMAN: Okay, let’s accept that the auto mechanic is an intellectual—then I think on the other side, we also have to accept that those people who deal with books correctly, and aren’t the clerical workers, are also intellectuals.

  Well, if by “intellectual” you just want to refer to people who use their minds, yeah, okay. But in that sense, I don’t think that people are anti-intellectual. For example, if you take your car to a really hot-shot mechanic who’s the only guy in your town who can ever figure out what’s wrong—the guys in the car manufacturing place can never do it, but this guy’s just got a real feel for automobiles; he looks at your car, and starts taking it apart …

  WOMAN: She …

  Or she, or whatever—you don’t look down on that person. Nobody looks down on that person. You admire them.

  WOMAN: But people do look down on people who read books.

  But look, this guy may have read books—maybe he read the manual. Those manuals are not so easy to read; in fact, they’re harder to read than most scholarly books, I think.

  But I’m not trying to disagree, I just think that we should look at the thing a little differently. There’s intellectual work, which plenty of people do; then there’s what’s called “intellectual life” which is a special craft which doesn’t particularly require thought—in fact, you’re probably better off if you don’t think too much—and that’s what’s called being a respected intellectual. And people are right to look down on that, because there’s nothing very special about it. It’s just a not very interesting craft, not very well done usually.

  In my own view, it’s wrong if a society has these kinds of differentiations. My own early background was in a kind of Jewish working-class environment, where the people were not formally educated and they were workers—like somebody could be a shop-boy, or a seamstress or something like that—but they were very literate: I would call them intellectuals. They weren’t “intellectuals” in the sense that people usually talk about, but they were very well-read, they thought about things, they argued about things—I don’t see any reason why that can’t be what you do when you’re a seamstress.

  Spectator Sports

  WOMAN: Could you talk a bit more about the role that sports play in the society in de-politicizing people—it seems to me it’s more significant than people usually assume.

  That’s an interesting one, actually—I don’t know all that much about it personally, but just looking at the phenomenon from the outside, it’s obvious that professional sports, and non-participation sports generally, play a huge role. I mean, there’s no doubt they take up just a tremendous amount of attention.

  In fact, I have the habit when I’m driving of turning on these radio call-in programs, and it’s striking when you listen to the ones about sports. They have these groups of sports reporters, or some kind of experts on a panel, and people call in and have discussions with them. First of all, the audience obviously is devoting an enormous amount of time to it all. But the more striking fact is, the callers have a tremendous amount of expertise, they have detailed knowledge of all kinds of things, they carry on these extremely complex discussions. And strikingly, they’re not at all in awe of the experts—which is a little unusual. See, in most parts of the society, you’re encouraged to defer to experts: we all do it more than we should. But in this area, people don’t seem to do it—they’re quite happy to have an argument with the coach of the Boston Celtics, and tell him what he should have done, and enter into big debates with him and so on. So the fact is that in this domain, people somehow feel quite confident, and they know a lot—there’s obviously a great deal of intelligence going into it.

  Actually, it reminds me in some ways of things that you find in non-literate or non-technological cultures—what are called “primitive” cultures—where for example, you get extremely elaborate kinship systems. Some anthropologists believe these systems have to do with incest taboos and so on, but that’s kind of unlikely, because they’re just elaborated way beyond any functional utility. And when you look at the structure of them, they seem like a kind of mathematics. It’s as though people want to work out mathematical problems, and if they don’t have calculus and arithmetic, they work them out with other structures. And one of the structures everybody has is relationships of kinship—so you work out your elaborate structures around that, and you develop experts, and theories, and so on. Or another thing you sometimes find in non-literate cultures is developments of the most extraordinary linguistic systems: often there’s tremendous sophistication about language, and people play all sorts of games with language. So there are puberty rites where people who go through the same initiation period develop their own language that’s usually some modification of the actual language, but with quite complex mental operations differentiating it—then that’s theirs for the rest of their lives, and not other people’s. And what all these things look like is that people just want to use their intelligence somehow, and if you don’t have a lot of technology and so on, you do other things.

  Well, in our society, we have things that you might use your intelligence on, like politics, but people really can’t get involved in them in a very serious way—so what they do is they put their minds into other things, such as sports. You’re trained to be obedient; you don’t have an interesting job; there’s no work around for you that’s creative; in the cultural environment you’re a passive observer of usually pretty tawdry stuff; political and social life are out of your range, they’re in the hands of the rich folk. So what’s left? Well, one thing that’s left is sports—so you put a lot of the intelligence and the thought and the self-confidence into that. And I suppose that’s also one of the basic functions it serves in the society in general: it occupies the population, and keeps them from trying to get involved with things that really matter. In fact, I presume that’s part of the reason why spectator sports are supported to the degree they are by the dominant institutions.

  And spectator sports also have other useful functions too. For one thing, they’re a great way to build up chauvinism—you start by developing these totally irrational loyalties early in life, and they translate very nicely to other areas. I mean, I remember very well in high school having a sudden kind of Erlebnis, you know, a sudden insight, and asking myself, why do I care if my high
school football team wins? I don’t know anybody on the team. They don’t know me. I wouldn’t know what to say to them if I met them. Why do I care? Why do I get all excited if the football team wins and all downcast if it loses? And it’s true, you do: you’re taught from childhood that you’ve got to worry about the Philadelphia Phillies, where I was. In fact, there’s apparently a psychological phenomenon of lack of self-confidence or something which affected boys of approximately my age who grew up in Philadelphia, because every sports team was always in last place, and it’s kind of a blow to your ego when that happens, people are always lording it over you.

  But the point is, this sense of irrational loyalty to some sort of meaningless community is training for subordination to power, and for chauvinism. And of course, you’re looking at gladiators, you’re looking at guys who can do things you couldn’t possibly do—like, you couldn’t pole-vault seventeen feet, or do all these crazy things these people do. But it’s a model that you’re supposed to try to emulate. And they’re gladiators fighting for your cause, so you’ve got to cheer them on, and you’ve got to be happy when the opposing quarterback gets carted off the field a total wreck and so on. All of this stuff builds up extremely anti-social aspects of human psychology. I mean, they’re there; there’s no doubt that they’re there. But they’re emphasized, and exaggerated, and brought out by spectator sports: irrational competition, irrational loyalty to power systems, passive acquiescence to quite awful values, really. In fact, it’s hard to imagine anything that contributes more fundamentally to authoritarian attitudes than this does, in addition to the fact that it just engages a lot of intelligence and keeps people away from other things.

  So if you look at the whole phenomenon, it seems to me that it plays quite a substantial social role. I don’t think it’s the only thing that has this kind of effect. Soap operas, for example, do it in another domain—they teach people other kinds of passivity and absurdity. As a matter of fact, if you really want to do a serious media critique right across the board, these are the types of things which occupy most of the media, after all—most of it isn’t shaping the news about El Salvador for politically articulate people, it’s diverting the general population from things that really matter. So this is one respect in which the work that Ed Herman and I have done on the media is really defective—we don’t talk about it much. But this stuff is a major part of the whole indoctrination and propaganda system, and it’s worth examining more closely. There are people who’ve written about it, Neil Postman and others—I just don’t feel enough acquaintance with it to say more. 69

  Western European Activism and Canada

  MAN: Professor Chomsky, I’m wondering whether there are any lessons about activism that you think we should learn from Western Europe—they seem to he very far ahead of us in terms of political organizing and strategies.

  No, I don’t agree—we’re always looking for a savior somewhere, and there isn’t any. I mean, there are a lot of things that have developed in the United States which have not developed in Western Europe, and the popular movements here are much healthier in many respects than the European ones—theirs are very ideology-ridden: they’ve got “texts,” and “theories,” and all kinds of stuff that we don’t have, which we’re lucky we don’t have. There’s really been a lot of very successful organizing here over the years.

  MAN: But there are mass demonstrations there.

  Yeah, but we’ve had mass demonstrations too—we just had one in Washington a couple days ago [in support of abortion rights]. We know how to do that stuff; it’s not very hard. I mean, there are no big secrets about any of this: there are very few lessons to transmit, so far as I know. Look, people have been involved in very successful organizing in the United States: the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-war movement, the ecological movement, the feminist movement, all of these things have been very successful developments.

  MAN: What about all the West European social-welfare policies, though?

  It’s true, they have a lot of social-welfare programs we don’t have—but that’s true of Canada too, you don’t even have to go all the way to Europe. For instance, they have a functioning public health insurance program in Canada, which we don’t have here in the United States. But see, that has to do with the extreme power of private capital here, and with the fact that the capitalist class in the United States is extraordinarily class-conscious, while the working class is very diffuse and weak. So the result is, we don’t have a lot of things that by now are pretty much taken for granted in every other industrial country: we have more homeless and less health.

  Now, you can look at the specific historical particularities in the United States that have made it that way—and that’s worth doing—but really it’s not a big secret how to go about getting those kinds of programs. And if you want to understand what a reasonably rational national health care program would look like, you don’t have to go very far. There’s a good start, at least, right across the border.

  MAN: Why does Canada have programs like that, though?

  Well, there you have to look at the history: you have to ask, how has the history of Canada been different from the history of the United States? And there have been a lot of differences. For instance, one difference had to do with the American Revolution—in the American Revolution, a large number of people fled to Canada, lots in fact. And a lot of them fled because they didn’t like the doctrinaire, kind of fanatic environment that took hold in the colonies. The percentage of colonists who fled in the American Revolution was actually about 4 percent, it was probably higher than the percentage of Vietnamese who fled Vietnam after the Vietnam War. And remember, they were fleeing from one of the richest places in the world—these were boat-people who fled in terror from Boston Harbor in the middle of winter to Nova Scotia, where they died in the snow trying to get away from all of these crazies here. The numbers are supposed to have been in the neighborhood of maybe a hundred thousand out of a total population of about two and a half million—so it was a substantial part of the population. And among them were people from groups who knew they were going to get it in the neck if the colonists won—blacks and Native Americans, for example. 70 And they were right: in the case of the Native Americans, it was genocide; in the case of blacks, it was slavery.

  And actually, that wasn’t the only big migration to Canada which contributed to some of the differences—there was also another major one around the turn of the century, coming out of the American Midwest after the Populist movement collapsed [the Populists were a political movement that formed out of agrarian protest in the 1880s and broke apart after 1896]. The Populists were the last gasp of large-scale popular democratic politics in the United States, and they were mainly centered in the Midwest—radical Kansas farmers and that sort of thing. And when they were finally defeated and the Populist Party dissolved, a lot of them just left. I don’t know the numbers in this case, but a fair number of them went to Canada, and in fact they became part of the basis for the Canadian social-democratic movement which developed after that, and was responsible for pushing through a lot of the social-welfare programs in Canada. 71

  Apart from that, there are a lot of other things that have made Canada different. For instance, the United States has always been a much more advanced capitalist country, by far—corporations in the modern sense were an American invention, and ever since the beginning of the industrial revolution, corporate America has always been much more powerful than its Canadian counterpart. This was a much richer country; we kept trying to invade Canada; Canada’s much more sparsely settled and much less populous than the United States; it was part of the British Empire; they have the French-English split, with Quebec there; and so on. So there are a lot of historical and other differences between the two of them, and I think it’s a good question to look into in more detail. But the fact is, there are advantages and disadvantages to the two countries. A lot of things have been won in the United States that are good, and are a model
for other places—and as far as organizing is concerned, it’s the kind of thing you can do relatively freely here, free of the fear of very much direct state repression. So there are things you can learn everywhere: you can learn things from Nicaragua, you can learn things from Vietnam, you can learn things from Western Europe, and you can learn things from Canada. But if you want to go somewhere for salvation, you’re not going to find it.

  Dispelling Illusions

  WOMAN: Noam, in general, how would you say ordinary people should go about trying to dispel their illusions about the world—what’s the best way to start?

  Well, you don’t sit in your room somewhere and dispel illusions—very few people are capable of doing that. I mean, some people are capable of doing it, but most aren’t. Usually you find out what you think by interaction with people, otherwise you don’t know what you think—you just hear something, and maybe you accept it, or you don’t pay any attention to it, or something like that. You learn about things because you’re interested in the topic, and when it’s the social world, your interest in it often involves—ought to involve, at least—trying to change it, it’s in that context that you learn. And you learn by trying out ideas, and hearing reactions to them, and hearing what other people have to say about the topic, and formulating programs, and trying to pursue them, and seeing where they break down, and getting some experience, and so on and so forth.