by Noam Chomsky
If you’re interested, there’s been some very interesting work done on this; the guy who’s done the best work is David Noble—for his sins he was denied tenure at M.I.T., and now he’s teaching in Canada. He wrote a book called Forces of Production, which is a pretty specialized technical analysis mainly of the development of numerical control of machinery, but he’s also got a good popular book out, called Progress Without People: In Defense of Luddism. Unfortunately, this is the kind of book that’s published like in Katmandu or something—it’s published by a very small anarchist press in Chicago. But it’s very interesting, didn’t make him too popular in the Faculty Club and so on. 53
One of the things he discusses there is Luddism [a movement of English workers who wrecked industrial machines, which began in 1811]. See, the Luddites are always accused of having wanted to destroy machinery, but it’s been known in scholarship for a long time that that’s not true—what they really wanted to do was to prevent themselves from being de-skilled, and Noble talks about this in his book. The Luddites had nothing against machinery itself, they just didn’t want it to destroy them, they wanted it to be developed in such a way that it would enhance their skills and their power, and not degrade and destroy them—which of course makes perfect sense. And that sentiment runs right throughout the working-class movements of the nineteenth century, actually—and you can even see it today.
Well, if economics were like a real field, these are the kinds of things they would be studying. None of it is very complicated—like, everybody knows why cotton was cheap, for instance: everybody who went to elementary school knows why cotton was cheap, and if it hadn’t been for cheap cotton, there wouldn’t have been an industrial revolution. It’s not hard. But I’d be very surprised if anybody teaches this stuff in economics courses in the United States.
I mean, sure, there are some market forces operating—but the reality is, they’re pretty much off around the edges. And when people talk about the progress of automation and free-market “trade forces” inevitably kicking all these people out of work and driving the whole world towards kind of a Third World-type polarization of wealth—I mean, that’s true if you take a narrow enough perspective on it. But if you look into the factors that made things the way they are, it doesn’t even come close to being true, it’s not even remotely in touch with reality. But when you’re studying economics in the ideological institutions, that’s all just irrelevant and you’re not supposed to ask questions like these: you have all the information right in front of you, but these are simply not matters that it is proper to spend time talking about.
A Revolutionary Change in Moral Values
MAN: Noam, given an intellectual culture like the one you’ve been describing—can you find any “honest” intellectuals in the U.S.?
You can find them, but like I say, usually they’re not inside the institutions—and that’s for a very good reason: there is no reason why institutions of power and domination should tolerate or encourage people who try to undermine them. That would be completely dysfunctional. So typically you’re going to find major efforts made to marginalize the honest and serious intellectuals, the people who are committed to what I would call Enlightenment values—values of truth, and freedom, and liberty, and justice. And those efforts will to a large extent succeed.
MAN: Who are those people? I mean, you make the whole situation look very bleak—who would you say are the intellectuals that are going about things in the right way?
Well, very often they’re the people who have done things to make a real change in the world. Take the S.N.C.C. [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] activists, for example—they were serious intellectuals, and they made a big change. Or take the people in the 1960s who did the work that’s led to so many of the improvements we’ve seen in the country over the last twenty years—and “work” didn’t just mean running around the streets waving signs, you know, it also meant thinking about things, and figuring out what the problems were, and trying to teach people about them and convince them. Despite what you always hear, that was not elite intellectuals: the liberal intellectual community in the United States was always strongly opposed to the people who protested the American aggression in Indochina on principled grounds, they were not the ones assisting the popular movements. Well, those people were serious intellectuals, in my view.
So you see, there is sort of an “honest” left intelligentsia, if you like—meaning intellectuals who are not serving power as either a Red Bureaucracy, or as state-capitalist commissar-equivalents. It’s just that most of the time they’re outside the institutions—and for almost trivial reasons: you’re not going to find a militant labor activist as Chairman of the Board of General Electric, right? Yeah, how could there be? But there are people all over the place who are honest and committed, and are thinking about the world, and trying to change it—many more today than there were thirty years ago, in fact.
I mean, it’s standardly claimed that there’s less of a left intelligentsia around today in the United States than there was in the Fifties and Sixties—but I don’t believe a word of it. I think the opposite is true, actually. Just take a look at the people who they’re calling the big thinkers of the 1950s: who were they? They were intelligent people, like Edmund Wilson’s an intelligent person—but left intellectual? Or Mary McCarthy: yeah, smart person, wrote some nice novels—but not a left intellectual. In fact, what you have now is much more serious activists all over the place, people who are thinking carefully about important questions, and who understand a lot.
I travel around all the time giving talks, and throughout the 1980s I was amazed to go to places and see it. Take the Central America solidarity movement, which was a pretty dramatic development—I don’t think there’s ever been anything like it in history, in fact. I’d go to a church in Kansas, or some town in Montana or Wyoming or something, Anchorage, Alaska, and find people there who know more about Latin America certainly than the C.I.A., which isn’t very hard actually, but more than people in the academic departments of universities. They’re people who’ve thought about it, and who’ve understood things, and brought a lot of intelligence to the issues—I can’t even tell you their names, there are too many of them.
Also, I’m not even sure the word “left” is the right word for them: a lot of them were probably Christian conservatives, but they were very radical people in my view, and intellectuals who understood, and who did a lot. They created a popular movement which not only protested U.S. atrocities, but actually engaged themselves in the lives of the victims—they took a much more courageous stand than was ever done in the 1960s. I mean, the popular resistance that took place in the Sixties was important—but there was nobody back then who even dreamt of going to a Vietnamese village and living there, because maybe a white face would limit the capacity of the marauders to kill and destroy. That wasn’t even an idea in your head. In fact, nobody even went to try to report the war from the side of the victims—that was unheard of. But in the 1980s it was common: plenty of people did it—in fact, people who were coming out of religious groups like Witness for Peace were doing that by the thousands and tens of thousands. And the people who were doing that are serious left intellectuals, in my view. 54
Remember, what will be labeled “left” in the general culture and given publicity is going to be something that’s ugly enough so that people can be rallied to oppose it. So books are coming out now about “left intellectuals” in France who were Stalinists—and look at the awful things they did. Okay, that kind of “left intelligentsia” is allowed to have publicity and prominence, in fact the elite culture will give them as much prominence as it can. Or people will say “the left” is things like the Spartacist League, or the Socialist Workers Party or something—little sectlets, the kinds of groups that anybody who’s been involved in movement activities knows are the people who hang around your offices and your talks trying to see if they can disrupt things. That’s not the left, that’s parasit
es that undermine the left—but to show how lousy the left is, the elite press will say “Oh, the Spartacist League doesn’t have a lot of members”: yeah, big excitement. 55 On the other hand, the real left they don’t talk about—like they don’t talk about the thousands and thousands of people involved in this, that and the other cause doing serious work.
So if by “left” you mean people who are struggling for peace, and justice, and freedom, and human rights, and for social change, and elimination of authority structures, whether in personal life or in the institutions—if that’s what the left is, there are more of them around than I can remember in my lifetime, at least. A lot more.
MAN: There really has been a big change in the culture.
Yes. If you take almost any area you can think of in life, whether it’s race, or sex, or military intervention, the environment—these are all things that didn’t even exist in the 1950s, people didn’t even think they were issues, you just submitted. And people don’t anymore. I mean, if I just look at pictures from the early Sixties, I can hardly believe how disciplined everything was, how deep the authority structures were—even just in personal relations, and in the way you looked and talked when you went out with your friends. Younger people may not always realize it, but life’s a lot easier than it was forty years ago: there’s been a big change, there are a lot of successes to point to.
Look, a lot of this stuff got started over the Vietnam War. Well, in terms of official ideology, all of us who were opposed to the war just lost, flat out: within the mainstream institutions, the only question today is, have the Vietnamese done enough to compensate us for the crimes that they committed against us? That’s the only question you’re allowed to discuss if you want to be a part of the educated culture in the United States. So George Bush can get up and say, “The Vietnamese should understand that we bear them no permanent grudge, we’re not going to make them pay for everything they did to us; if they finally come clean, you know, devote their entire lives and every last resource they have to searching for the remains of one of those people they viciously blew out of the sky, then maybe we’ll allow them entry into the civilized world”—and there won’t be a single editorial writer or columnist who either falls on the floor laughing, or else says, “This guy is worse than the Nazis.” Because that’s the way they all are: the only issue is, will we forgive them for the crimes that they committed against us? 56 I mean, among the educated sector of the population in the U.S., there is overwhelming opposition to the war—but it’s only on what are called “pragmatic” grounds: namely, we couldn’t get away with it. So: “We tried, we made blundering efforts to do good, but it was a mistake.” Well, at that level, we’ve just lost the entire discussion.
On the other hand, let’s go to the general population: to this day, after twenty-five years of this endless, unremitting propaganda to which no response is ever tolerated, 66 percent of the American population still disagrees with the elite culture—that tells you there’s been a victory at another level. I mean, if two-thirds of the population still says in polls, after all of this brainwashing, that the war was “fundamentally wrong and immoral,” not “a mistake,” well, something got through. And remember, everybody who’s choosing that answer is choosing it all by themselves—because that is not what they hear in the mainstream culture, certainly not from educated people. 57
And the thing we have to keep in mind is, the people in power know it: they might not want us to know it, but they know it. In fact, it’s even clear from their own documents that they know it. For example, a very important early Bush administration planning document on Third World intervention was leaked to the press and published on the day of the ground attack in the Gulf War—by Maureen Dowd, incidentally, who’s basically a gossip columnist for the New York Times. It was an inter-agency study on the general world situation, prepared by the C.I.A. and the Pentagon and others during an early stage of the Bush administration, well before the Gulf War. And it had a section on U.S. military intervention, and what they said was: in the case of confrontations with “much weaker enemies”—meaning anybody we’re willing to fight—we must not only defeat them, but we must defeat them “decisively and rapidly,” because anything else will “undercut political support,” which is understood to be extremely thin. 58
See, their belief is, maybe we can frighten the domestic population and get them to huddle under the flag for a couple days, but unless we get the intervention over with quickly, it’s hopeless—people are going to start to rise up and pressure us to stop it. These people recognize that there can’t be classical interventions anymore—you know, U.S. soldiers slogging it out in Vietnam for years and years—it has to be either clandestine warfare, as in Peru now, where not one American in ten thousand knows there are U.S. troops, or the Panama/Iraq game, with enormous propaganda about the enemy ready to destroy us, and then a quick victory without any fighting. 59
Well, that’s just a radical difference from the Kennedy period—and that difference reflects major changes in the culture. Powerful people here understand that they do not have the option of carrying out foreign interventions anymore, unless they carry out decisive, rapid victories over totally defenseless enemies, after having first gone to great lengths to demonize them. They certainly recognize that—and that’s a tremendous victory for the left.
And anybody who’s my age or even a little bit younger must also realize that it’s a very different country today—and a much more civilized one. Just look at the issue of the rights of indigenous peoples. When I was a kid, I considered myself a radical-anarchist-this that and the other thing—but I was playing “Cowboys and Indians” with my friends: you know, shoot the Indians. That’s like playing “Aryans and Jews” in Germany—you go out and try to kill the Jews. Well, that lasted for a very long time in the United States, and nobody even noticed anything curious about it.
I mean, just to tell you another story: I live in Lexington, a mainly upper-middle-class professional town near Boston, which is very liberal, everybody votes for the Democrats, they all give to the right causes, and so on. Well, in 1969—the year’s interesting—one of my kids was in fourth grade, and she had a Social Studies textbook about the early history of New England, called Exploring New England; the book was centered on a boy named Robert, who was being shown the glories of colonial New England by some older man or something. Well, one day I decided to poke through it, because I was curious about how the authors were going to deal with the colonists’ extermination of the native peoples here. So I turned to the point in the book where they got to the first really major act of genocide in New England, the Pequot Massacre of 1637—when the colonists murdered the Pequot tribe. And to my surprise, it was described quite accurately: the colonists went into the village and slaughtered all the men, women and children, burned everything down, burned out all the Pequots’ crops. Then I got to the bottom line. The bottom line had this boy, Robert, who’s being told all of these things, say: “I wish I were a man and had been there.” In other words, it was a positive presentation. That was in 1969, right after the My Lai massacre was exposed. 60
That would be inconceivable today—because there have been very important changes in the culture, and a real increase in civilization. And those changes are largely the result of a lot of very significant activism and organizing over the last couple decades, by people that I would refer to as “honest intellectuals.”
In fact, I think all of this screaming about “Political Correctness” that we hear these days in the elite culture is basically just a tantrum over the fact that it has been impossible to crush all of the dissidence and the activism and the concern that’s developed in the general population in the last thirty years. I mean, it’s not that some of these “P.C.” things they point out aren’t true—yeah, sure, some of them are true. But the real problem is that the huge rightwing effort to retake control of the ideological system didn’t work—and since their mentality is basically totalitarian, any bre
ak in their control is considered a huge tragedy: 98 percent control isn’t enough, you have to have 100 percent control; these are totalitarian strains. But they couldn’t get it, especially among the general population. They have not been able to beat back all of the gains of the popular movements since the 1960s, which simply led to a lot of concern about sexism, and racism, and environmental issues, respect for other cultures, and all this other bad stuff. And it’s led to real hysteria among elites, so you get this whole P.C. comedy.
I mean, right now the universities are all flooded with Olin Professorships of Free Enterprise [endowed by the conservative Olin Foundation], there are glossy right-wing magazines handed out free to every student—and these are not just right-wing, but crazy right-wing. Meanwhile, everybody’s screaming about how the left has taken over. And that’s all just out of hysteria that they haven’t gotten back total control—in fact, they’ve probably lost most of the population by now. And there’s no reason to think that those changes have ended—I think there’s every reason to think that they could go a lot further, and ultimately lead to changes in the institutions.
Again, people just have to remember: there is nothing in the mainstream culture that is ever going to tell you you’ve succeeded—they’re always going to tell you you’ve failed. I mean, the official view of the Sixties is that it was a bunch of crazies running around burning down the universities and making noise, because they were hysterics, or because they were afraid to go to Vietnam or something—that’s the official story, and that’s what people always hear from the intellectual culture. They may know from their own lives and experience that that’s not what really happened, but they never hear anybody saying it: that’s not the message the system is always pouring into you through television, and radio, and newspapers, and books, and histories, and so on and so forth. It’s beating into your head another story—that you failed, and that you should have failed, because you were just a bunch of crazies.