by Noam Chomsky
MAN: Noam, we’ve been discussing a number of activist strategies and problems—I’d like to talk for a moment about some of the reasons why people don’t get involved in activism. Suppose somebody convinced you, at the level of your belief in most things, that it was impossible to change the country, that the basic institutional structures we have now are going to remain in place for the next 200 years—you know, more or less adapted, but the same basic structures. I’m wondering, would you behave any differently?
Zero.
MAN: You would behave exactly the same way?
Same way. In fact, you don’t even have to make it hypothetical—when I first got seriously involved in anti-Vietnam War activity, I was a hundred percent convinced that absolutely nothing could be done. I mean, into 1965 and ’66, if we wanted to have an anti-war meeting in Boston, we’d have to find six topics—you know, “Let’s talk about Venezuela, Iran, Vietnam, and the price of bread, and maybe we can get an audience that’ll outnumber the organizers.” And that went on for a long time. It looked impossible.
MAN: So if you thought that the current situation was going to continue, just persist forever, you would still do it?
Yes.
MAN: Why, exactly?
Well, for a number of quite simple reasons. For one thing, if somebody convinced me of that, it would be because I’m totally irrational—there’s no way to convince anybody of such things rationally. Look, we cannot predict the weather two weeks ahead, and that’s something relatively simple, it’s not like human society.
MAN: It’s a hypothetical question, it gets to motivations—I’m sure none of us believe it, none of us believe you could prove it …
Not only could you not prove it, you couldn’t even say anything convincing about it.
MAN: But, nevertheless, because in fact a great many people not understanding that point do feel this way, or tend to feel this way sometimes, and get depressed at those moments—what I’m wondering is, anyway, in any event, what gets you up each morning to do the things you do? Is it that you think in terms of winning a little way down the road, or is it something else?
Well, it’s hard to introspect, but to the extent that I introspect about it, it’s because you basically have two choices. One choice is to assume the worst, and then you can be guaranteed that it’ll happen. The other is to assume that there’s some hope for change, in which case it’s possible that you can help to effect change. So you’ve got two choices, one guarantees the worst will happen, the other leaves open the possibility that things might get better. Given those choices, a decent person doesn’t hesitate.
MAN: But is it really true that a decent person will only go that one way? I’m remembering a friend of mine who was an activist in the Sixties and intended to move into a working-class neighborhood to do organizing, and finally he decided not to. Somewhat later he went back to graduate school and became a psychiatrist, and now I’m sure he has progressive values, but he’s certainly not involved in any significant way in political activity. But the choice he made back then was a very conscious one: he looked around and said, “The impact that I personally am going to have is so small, because I’m not So-and-so and So-and-so, that I feel it’s just not worth giving up what I think I’ll be giving up.”
I know plenty of people like that too. But see, that person now, let’s say he’s a rich psychiatrist somewhere—okay, he’s got a lot of options, he’s simply deciding at some point not to face them. They’re always there. For example, he’s got money: if he doesn’t want to do things himself, he can give money to people who do. In fact, movement groups have existed because people who were doing other things were willing to fund them—something as trivial as that. And you can go way beyond that, of course, and still live your elegant lifestyle and do the work you want to do. I know plenty of people who have in fact divided their lives that way.
Now, of course, it’s extremely easy to say, “The heck with it—I’m just going to adapt myself to the structures of power and authority, and do the best I can within them.” Sure, you can do that. But that’s not acting like a decent person. Look, if you’re walking down the street and you see a kid eating an ice-cream cone, and you notice there’s no cop around and you’re hungry, you can take the ice-cream cone because you’re bigger and just walk away. You can do that—probably there are people who do. But we call them pathological. On the other hand, if they do it within existing social structures, we call them normal—but it’s just as pathological, it’s just the pathology of the general society.
Again, people always have choices, so you can decide to accept the pathology—but then do it honestly at least. If you have that grain of honesty in you, say: “Okay, I’m going to honestly be pathological.” Or else just try to break out of it somehow.
MAN: For a lot of people, though, it appears that there’s an all-or-nothing choice—it appears that there’s the choice between being “normal,” pathological as you describe, but a normal member of society with its normal benefits and costs, having a reasonably average or perhaps elite existence, one that’s accepted. And then there seems to be the “all” choice. I think the reason why it’s so hard for people even just to take a leaflet, or to give a donation at a relatively low level which means nothing to them financially—which is less money than they’re going to spend on dinner Friday night when they go out—seems to me to be because there is this psychologically very powerful effect. At some level people know that it’s right, but they also know that to do it somewhat leads to doing it more—so they just close the door right at the very beginning. I’m not sure how as organizers we can manage to overcome that situation.
I think you’re right that just giving your contribution of a hundred dollars to the Central America Support Center or whatever is a statement that you know that that’s the right thing to do—and then once you’ve stated that it’s the right thing to do, the question arises, “How come I’m only doing this when I could be doing a million times more?” And it’s very easy just to say, “Look, I’m not going to face that problem, I’m just going to forget it all.” But that’s like stealing the ice-cream cone from the kid.
The reality is that there’s a whole range of choices in the middle, and all of us have made them—none of us are saints, at least I’m not. I haven’t given up my house, I haven’t given up my car, I don’t live in a hovel, I don’t spend 24 hours a day working for the benefit of the human race, or anything like that. In fact, I don’t even come close: I spend an awful lot of my time and energy just doing scientific work.
MAN: And you don’t feel guilty about that.
Well, that’s not so clear. But I certainly do devote an awful lot of my energy and activity to things that I just enjoy, like scientific work. I just like it, I do it out of pleasure. And everybody else I know does the same thing.
MAN: Do you fool yourself into believing that it increases your effectiveness as a political person somehow?
No, that’s ridiculous—it has no effect on that, And I certainly don’t do it for that reason. I do it because I like it, and I think it’s getting somewhere.
Look, you’re not going to be effective as a political activist unless you have a satisfying life. I mean, there may be people who are really saints, but I’ve never heard of one. Like, it may be that the political activities themselves are so gratifying that they’re all you want to do, and you just throw yourself into them. Okay, that’s a perfectly fine thing to be—it’s just that most people have other interests: they want to listen to music, they want to take a walk by the ocean, they want to watch the sunset. Any human being is too rich and complex just to be satisfied with these things, so you have to hit some kind of a balance.
Well, the choices are all there, but I think you’ve identified precisely why it’s psychologically difficult for people to recognize that—because once you’ve recognized that the choices are there, you’re always going to be faced with the question, why am I not doing more? But that’s just the r
eality of life: if you’re honest, you’re always going to be faced with that question. And there are plenty of things to do, and also plenty of successes to point to. In fact, it’s amazing how many successes there have been, if you really think about it.
For example, take the issue of East Timor, a big massacre. At the time that I got involved in that over a decade ago, nobody even wanted to hear about it—but after years of organizing by some pretty tireless activists, things finally got to the point where the U.S. Congress barred military aid to Indonesia. That’s a tremendous change—you could save hundreds of thousands of lives that way. How many people can look back and say, “Look, I helped to save hundreds of thousands of lives”? And that’s one tiny issue. So all of it was going on in secret, nobody was interested, everybody in power wanted to let it go on—but half a dozen or so people finally managed to break through.
MAN: I’m inclined to think that most of the people who are involved in that effort, instead of feeling elated, or at least feeling a degree of satisfaction over the accomplishment, rather view it as a horrendously long campaign with very little achieved over the years.
Suppose you’re on your deathbed: how many people can look back and say, “I’ve contributed to helping one person not get killed”?
MAN: I’m not disagreeing with you—but there’s just something about our culture that causes people on the left not to see the successes.
See, I’m not so convinced of this. If you go back to the 1960s movements, when a lot of the current ferment started, the people involved overwhelmingly were young people—and young people have a notoriously short perspective. That’s part of being twenty years old: you’re thinking about what’s going to happen tomorrow, not what life is going to be like twenty years from now.
So look at something like the Columbia strike, which was the big thing in 1968 [hundreds of students took over Columbia University buildings for eight days to protest war-related research and the school’s relations with the surrounding community]. If you remember what it was like back then, you’ll recall that the sense on the Columbia campus—quite literally, I’m not exaggerating—was: “If we close down Columbia and have fun smoking pot for three weeks, the revolution will be here, and then it’ll all be over and everybody will be happy and equal and free, and we can go back to our ordinary concerns.” Well, you waited three weeks, the cops came in and smashed you up, and nothing changed. And there were a lot of results from that. One result was just that a lot of people gave up, said, “Well, we couldn’t do it.” In fact, it’s rather striking that ’68 around the world is considered a crucially important date—but it was really the end.
So the fact that it was dominantly a youth movement in the Sixties had good and bad aspects, and one bad aspect was this sense that if you don’t achieve quickly, you’d might as well quit. But of course, that’s not the way changes come. The struggle against slavery went on forever, the struggle for women’s rights has been going on for centuries, the effort to overcome “wage slavery”—that’s been going on since the beginnings of the industrial revolution, we haven’t advanced an inch. In fact, we’re worse off than we were a hundred years ago in terms of understanding the issues. Well, okay, you just keep struggling.
“Human Nature Is Corrupt”
MAN: Noam, another view I frequently encounter lying behind people’s reticence to become involved in political activity stems from the idea that human nature is corrupt: egotistical, self-centered, anti-social, and so on—and that as a result, society will always have oppressors and oppressed, be hierarchical, exploit people, be driven by individual self-interest, etc. I often find that you can get agreement on the inhumanity of the system, or on the injustice of a war, or on some specific set of policies, but that people will refrain from becoming active about it because of a sense of hopelessness having to do with this view of human nature. Again, it may just be an excuse, a last line of defense against getting involved—but in order to deal with it as an organizer, you still have to address the claim. I’m curious what you would say to someone like that.
Well, there’s a sense in which the claim is certainly true. First of all, human nature is something we don’t know much about: doubtless there is a rich and complex human nature, and doubtless it’s largely genetically determined, like everything else—but we don’t know what it is. However, there is enough evidence from history and experience to demonstrate that human nature is entirely consistent with everything you mentioned—in fact, by definition it has to be. So we know that human nature, and that includes our nature, yours and mine, can very easily turn people into quite efficient torturers and mass-murderers and slave-drivers. We know that—you don’t have to look very far for evidence. But what does that mean? Should people therefore not try to stop torture? If you see somebody beating a child to death, should you say, “Well, you know, that’s human nature”—which it is in fact: there certainly are conditions under which people will act like that.
To the extent that the statement is true, and there is such an extent, it’s just not relevant: human nature also has the capacity to lead to selflessness, and cooperation, and sacrifice, and support, and solidarity, and tremendous courage, and lots of other things too.
I mean, my general feeling is that over time, there’s measurable progress—it’s not huge, but it’s significant. And sometimes it’s been pretty dramatic. Over history, there’s been a real widening of the moral realm, I think—a recognition of broader and broader domains of individuals who are regarded as moral agents, meaning having rights. Look, we are self-conscious beings, we’re not rocks, and we can come to get a better understanding of our own nature, it can become more and more realized over time—not because you read a book about it, the book doesn’t have anything to tell you, because nobody really knows anything about this topic. But just through experience—including historical experience, which is part of our personal experience because it’s embedded in the culture we enter into—we can gain greater understanding of our nature and values.
Discovering Morality
Take the treatment of children, for example. In the medieval period, it was considered quite legitimate to either kill them, or throw them out, or treat them brutally, all sorts of things. It still happens of course, but now it’s regarded as pathological, not proper. Well, it’s not that we have a different moral capacity than people did in the Middle Ages, it’s just that the situation’s changed: there are opportunities to think about things that weren’t available in a society that had a lower material production level and so on. So we’ve just learned more about our own moral sense in that area.
I think it’s part of moral progress to be able to face things that once looked as if they weren’t problems. I have that kind of feeling about our relation to animals, for example—I think the questions there are hard, in fact. A lot of these things are matters of trying to explore your own moral intuitions, and if you’ve never explored them, you don’t know what they are. Abortion’s a similar case—there are complicated moral issues. Feminist issues were a similar case. Slavery was a similar case. I mean, some of these things seem easy now, because we’ve solved them and there’s a kind of shared consensus—but I think it’s a very good thing that people are asking questions these days about, say, animal rights. I think there are serious questions there. Like, to what extent do we have a right to experiment on and torture animals? I mean, yes, you want to do animal experimentation for the prevention of diseases. But what’s the balance, where’s the tradeoff? There’s obviously got to be some. Like, we’d all agree that too much torture of animals for treating a disease would not be permissible. But what are the principles on which we draw such conclusions? That’s not a trivial question.
MAN: What about eating?
Same question.
MAN: Are you a vegetarian?
I’m not, but I think it’s a serious question. If you want my guess, my guess is that if society continues to develop without catastrophe on something like the
course you can see over time, I wouldn’t in the least be surprised if it moves in the direction of vegetarianism and the protection of animal rights.
Look, doubtless there’s plenty of hypocrisy and confusion and everything else about the question right now, but that doesn’t mean that the issue isn’t valid. And I think one can see the moral force to it—definitely one should keep an open mind on it, it’s certainly a perfectly intelligible idea to us.
I mean, you don’t have to go back very far in history to find gratuitous torture of animals. So in Cartesian philosophy, they thought they’d proven that humans had minds and everything else in the world was a machine—so there’s no difference between a cat and a watch, let’s say, just the cat’s a little more complicated. And if you look back at the French Court in the seventeenth century, courtiers—you know, big smart guys who’d studied all this stuff and thought they understood it—would as a sport take Lady So-And-So’s favorite dog and kick it and beat it to death, and laugh, saying, “Ha, ha, look, this silly lady doesn’t understand the latest philosophy, which shows that it’s just like dropping a rock on the floor.” That was gratuitous torture of animals, and it was regarded as if it were the torturing of a rock: you can’t do it, there’s no way to torture a rock. Well, the moral sphere has certainly changed in that respect—gratuitous torture of animals is no longer considered quite legitimate.
MAN: But in that case it could be that what’s changed is our understanding of what an animal is, not the understanding of our underlying values.
In that case it probably was—because in fact the Cartesian view was a departure from the traditional view, in which you didn’t torture animals gratuitously. On the other hand, there are cultures, like say, aristocratic cultures, that have fox-hunting as a sport, or bear-baiting, or other things like that, in which gratuitous torture of animals has been seen as perfectly legitimate.
In fact, it’s kind of intriguing to see how we regard this. Take cock-fighting, for example, in which cocks are trained to tear each other to shreds. Our culture happens to regard that as barbaric; on the other hand, we train humans to tear each other to shreds—they’re called boxing matches—and that’s not regarded as barbaric. So there are things that we don’t permit of cocks that we permit of poor people. Well, you know, there are some funny values at work there.