by Noam Chomsky
My own view is that you should save the negative freedoms, defend strongly the negative freedoms, but then try to make them positive freedoms. If the goal is to achieve positive freedom, it doesn’t help to destroy negative freedom—like, giving the state the power to determine what people can say does not improve the position of people who are now powerless. And those are really the only choices you have.
I mean, to attain the negative freedom was a big achievement, I think. When the Supreme Court struck down the Sedition Act, it didn’t grant anybody positive freedom, that’s true. But it was a very important victory for popular movements—because that kind of law strikes right at the core of protest and dissidence. I don’t think you expand those victories by assigning more power to the state authorities to control speech. And there is no other way to control it: if speech is controlled, it’s controlled by police power.
WOMAN: Acknowledging that, I still have two concerns. One is, don’t we have an obligation to the victims of free speech?
Sure …
WOMAN: The second is, what about people who are saying speech that they know to be false, but are hiding behind “free speech” to promulgate their own interests?
Well, that’s what they’ll say about you. Look, ultimately the question is, who gets to make that decision and enforce it? And there is only one independent structure that can do that, that’s the state, that’s state power, government power, the police, you know, the cops, F.B.I. They can make that decision, nobody else can. So the question is, do you want them to be in a position to decide what speech is acceptable? That’s essentially what it comes down to. And I would say, no, we don’t want them to have any right to make any decision about what anybody says. And of course, that’s going to mean that a lot of people are going to say things that you think are rotten, and you’re going to say things that a lot of other people think are rotten.
As to the obligation to the victims, sure—but that’s a matter of building up and extending the positive freedoms. In fact, here’s a case where I think the left is off on really marginal issues. Take the question of pornography: I mean, undoubtedly women suffer from pornography, but in terms of people suffering from speech in the world, that’s hardly even a speck. People suffer a lot more from the teaching of free-trade economics in colleges—huge numbers of people in the Third World are dying because of the stuff that’s taught in American economics departments, I’m talking about tens of millions. That’s harm. Should we therefore pass a law that says that the government ought to decide what you teach in economics departments? Absolutely not, then it would just get worse. They’d force everybody to teach this stuff.
MAN: What about things like shouting “Fire!” in a movie theater, or commanding people to assault somebody? Don’t you think there should be a limit there?
Well, the people who attack free speech rights typically say, “Look, speech is an act”—which is true, speech is an act. But therefore it ought to be treated like other acts. I mean, let’s agree, speech is an act, it certainly is. But then let’s treat it like any other act. For example, if you throw a bomb into a crowded theater, yeah, that’s a crime, somebody ought to stop you. And if you participate in the act of somebody else throwing one, even if your participation is with words, somebody also ought to stop you. Like, if you and I go into a grocery store with the intent to rob it, and you have a gun, and I’m your boss, and I say “Fire!” and you kill the owner, that’s speech. But it shouldn’t be protected speech, in my opinion—because that statement is participation in a criminal act.
MAN: What about things like sexual harassment?
That’s a different story. See, there are conflicting rights. Rights aren’t an axiom system [i.e. where there are no contradictions], and if you look closely at them, they often conflict—so you just have to make judgments between them in those cases. And like freedom of speech, another right that people have is to work without getting harassed. So I think laws against sexual harassment in the workplace are perfectly reasonable, because they follow from a reasonable principle—namely, you should be able to work without harassment, period. Sexual or any other kind. On the other hand, sexual harassment in the streets is another story, and I think it has to be treated differently.
Look, in the real free speech discussions, there is nobody who’s an absolutist on free speech. People may pretend to be, but they’re not. Like, I’ve never heard of anybody who says that you have a right to come into my house and put up a Nazi poster on the wall. Well, okay, blocking you from doing that is an infringement on your freedom of speech, but it’s also a protection of my right to privacy. And those rights sometimes conflict, because rights do conflict, so therefore we just have to make judgments between them—and those judgments are often not easy to make. But in general, I think we should be extremely wary about placing the power to make those determinations in the hands of authorities, who are going to respond to the distribution of power in the society as they carry them out.
MAN: In my university, we had an architecture professor who in the course of his class was telling people that if they wanted to buy a camera they should bring a Jew with them, all sorts of racist things like that. People were wondering if they should censor him or not.
Yeah, it’s a hard question. For instance, I was an undergraduate right after the Second World War, and I happened to have a German class taught by a guy who was a flat outright Nazi—he didn’t even hide it. There were a lot of war veterans around in those days, so guys were ready to kill him and stuff, because these things were very live in people’s minds. But should the university have fired him? I didn’t think so. I think it’s dangerous to impose such constraints on what people are allowed to say. There are other ways of dealing with it.
MAN: You might say that someone else in the classroom has a right not to hear it, though.
Yes, but see, if a student gets up and denounces him, the student has a right to do that, and then if the student is punished you’ve got a straight case—because the guy in authority has no right to do anything except sit and listen. But should you stop the teacher from talking about things? I think that’s tricky.
Even there, though, it’s not totally straightforward. Like, there’s a contractual arrangement when you go to a class: namely, you want to study chemistry or whatever it is, that’s why you’re there, and if the teacher starts talking about fundamentalist religion or something, you have a right to say, “He shouldn’t be paid, get rid of him, because I came here to study chemistry, that was our common agreement, and he violated that agreement—so throw him out.” On the other hand, if the teacher just says things you don’t like, that’s different.
Again, rights aren’t an axiom system, so there are conflicts between them, and people just have to make their own judgments. But my own judgment, at least, tends to be that a lot of leeway ought to be allowed. Often the cases are quite hard, though—because our moral codes simply aren’t clear enough to give answers in a lot of situations, and people come up with different ones.
MAN: You think there’s some ambiguity with sexual harassment, then?
Oh yeah, a fair amount of ambiguity. For example, sexual harassment by words in the streets—like if somebody makes a nasty crack about some woman’s dress or something—I don’t think they should be put in jail.
WOMAN: What about violence on television? Does that also conflict with other rights?
Violence on television raises quite hard questions, I think. But I don’t know: if you look at the literature on whether T.V. violence or pornography cause a demonstrable harm—you know, result in violence in the real world—it doesn’t show anything convincing. So maybe it’s too hard to study or something like that, but there are almost no probative results that I know of one way or the other: the facts just aren’t there. There’s psychic harm, that’s undoubtedly true, but that you can’t measure. As for the kinds of things you can measure, like increase in acts of violence—I mean, you probably get more acts of violen
ce coming after things like sports events; not huge amounts more, but there’s a notable increase in domestic violence, say, after things like the Superbowl. 15
Cyberspace and Activism
WOMAN: Mr. Chomsky, on a very different note, I’d like to talk a bit about some of the recent computer technologies like the Internet, and e-mail, and the World Wide Web and so on, and how significant an impact you think they are going to have on political activism and organizing in the future. Do you see the Internet as more of a force for democracy, or a force for diverting the population from engaging themselves politically in the world?
Well, my feeling is that the Internet is pretty much the same sort of phenomenon as radio and television were—or for that matter, as automation. Look, in most cases technology isn’t predisposed to help people or harm people—there’s very rarely anything inherent in it which requires that either of those things be the case, it just depends on who gets control of it.
So take radio, for example. You might ask why popular movements in the United States have to look to small community-controlled radio stations to get programming which addresses their interests and needs and goals, why doesn’t any mainstream radio do that? Well, the reason is, the United States just diverged from the rest of the world on this back around the late 1920s and early Thirties, when radio was first coming into existence.
See, radio has a limited frequency band, which necessarily has to be rationed—so the question is, how is that rationing going to be done? Well, in every major country in the world—and maybe in every country except the United States—radio was turned into a public forum to some degree, meaning it’s as democratic as the country is. Like, in Russia, it’s not democratic, in Great Britain, it’s as democratic as England is—but somehow it’s still in the public domain. The United States went the other way: here radio was privatized, it was put into private hands—and furthermore, that was called a victory for democracy here. 16 So now if you want radio that’s not under corporate control in the United States, you have to go to small local community radio stations—which are very important, but of course are on the margins, and have only extremely limited resources.
Or take television: when television came along in the 1940s, the same thing happened in the United States. In fact, in the case of television, there wasn’t even a battle about it—it was just completely handed over to private power at once. 17
Well, I think the Internet is going to be the same basic story: if it’s put in the hands of private power, like T.V. and radio were, then we know exactly how it’s going to turn out. In fact, they’ve been telling us about it constantly. So I remember an article in the Wall Street Journal about the wonders of all the new technology, and they described the great things that can be done because it’s “interactive”—you know, you don’t just have to be passive anymore, now you can really do things when you’re sitting there in front of the tube. Well, they described how it would work, and they gave two examples, one for women and the other for men.
For women, it’s going to be an incredible home-shopping thing: like, you’re sitting there watching some model, and she shows you some ridiculous object, and you figure, “Well, I’d better have that or my kid won’t grow up properly”—and now it’s interactive, you know, so you can just push a button and they’ll send it right over to your house. That’s the interaction for women. For men, the example they gave was of watching the Superbowl, which every red-blooded male is supposed to do. Well, today it’s passive: you just sit there and watch the gladiators fighting. But with the new technology, it’s going to be interactive. So what they suggest is, while the team’s in its huddle getting instructions from the coach about the next play, everyone in the audience—you know, the entire male population that’s alive—is going to be asked to make their own decision about it: like, should it be a pass, or a run, or a kick or something. And then after the play is run (which is going on completely independently of this, of course) they’ll flash on the screen what people thought the coach should have done—that’s going to be the interaction for men.
And that’s probably the way it’s going to go in general: it’ll be used as another technique for control and manipulation, and for keeping people in their roles as mindless consumers of things they don’t really want. Sure—why should the people who own the society do things any differently?
But of course, none of these technologies have to be used like that—again, it just depends who ends up controlling them. I mean, if the general public ever ended up controlling them, they could be used quite differently. For example, these information-processing systems could be used as methods by which working people could come to control their own workplaces without the need for managers and bosses—so every person in the workplace could have all the information they need in order to make all the decisions themselves, in real time, when it counts. Well, in that kind of circumstance, the same technology would be a highly democratizing device—in fact, it would help eliminate the core of the whole system of authority and domination. But obviously it’s not just going to develop like that on its own—people will have to organize and fight to make that sort of thing ever happen, in fact fight very strenuously for it.
As to the effects of all of this on activism, I think it’s a complicated story. I think we can be certain that there’s a lot of thinking going on about whether to even allow things like the Internet to exist—because from the point of view of power, it’s just too democratic: it’s very hard to control what’s in it, and who can gain access to it. For example, I have a daughter living in Nicaragua, and during the U.S. contra war in the 1980s it was impossible to telephone or send letters there. The only way I could stay in contact with her was through the ARPAnet, which is basically a Pentagon computer system I was able to get access to through M.I.T.—so we were corresponding thanks to the Pentagon. Well, that’s the kind of thing that happens on the Internet, and a lot of powerful people obviously don’t like that aspect of it.
And they don’t like the fact that you can get the text of the G.A.T.T. [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade] treaty, and the latest news that doesn’t appear in the U.S. newspapers, and so on—in fact, if you look around on the Internet, you can find virtually everything I talk about somewhere in there. And on some issues, like say, East Timor, it’s also been an invaluable political organizing tool—because most of the information about what happened there was simply silenced by the U.S. press for years and years. Well, those are all bad things from the perspective of private power, and they surely would like to stop that side of it.
On the other hand, it has a number of other advantages for power. For one thing, it diverts people, it atomizes people. When you’re sitting in front of your tube, you’re alone. I mean, there’s something about human beings that just makes face-to-face contact very different from banging around on a computer terminal and getting some noise coming back—that’s very impersonal, and it breaks down human relations. Well, that’s obviously a good result from the point of view of people with power—because it’s extremely important to drive human sentiments out of people if you just want them to be passive and obedient and under control. So if you can eliminate things like face-to-face contact and direct interaction, and just turn people into what’s caricatured as kind of an M.I.T. nerd—you know, somebody who’s got antennae coming out of his head, and is wired into his computer all the time—that’s a real advantage, because then you’ve made them more inhuman, and therefore more controllable.
Another thing I’ve found is that there’s a kind of degraded character to e-mail messages. People are just too casual about them—they send you any half-baked idea they haven’t even thought through yet, whenever the impulse hits them. And the result is, it ends up being a tremendous burden even to read everything that comes across, let alone to answer it—so that can easily end up being all you do with your time. And people do put huge numbers of hours into it. In fact, there are friends of mine whose quality of work I think is
seriously declining, because of their overwhelming involvement in e-mail interactions. It’s extremely seductive just to sit at the computer screen and bang at it all day.
Furthermore, I think there are still other aspects to it which are very threatening to popular movements. For instance, one thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of activists have been dropping subscriptions to left journals recently. Why? Because they can get them through the Internet. Now, see, if I was in the C.I.A. or something, right now I’d be saying, “Look, let’s encourage this—it’s true it has the negative effect of allowing people to get more information, but it also has the positive effect of destroying alternative institutions. So let’s let it go on—because when all these people stop paying their subscriptions to, I don’t know, Z Magazine or something, that is going to destroy those institutions, and that’s going to separate and fragment the left even more, and maybe even destroy it.”
Well, I doubt that anybody in the C.I.A. has this much brains, but if they had enough brains, I think they would just want the whole thing to go on, because it’s probably going to destroy the dissident organizations—and it’ll destroy them because we’re so anti-social that we don’t even see the point of supporting popular institutions. Remember, even if you’re an activist on the left, what you’ve constantly been taught from childhood, and what you’ve still got ingrained in your head is: “I’m just out for myself, and therefore if I can get the information for nothing, why should I help to build an institution?” Well, that’s obviously a very anti-social attitude—but you find it’s very hard to break out of: we’ve just got it. So there are a number of aspects to these technologies that are highly dangerous, in my view—and I hope people will soon start to recognize and resist those aspects of them.