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Subject: Chomsky's Other Revolution (fwd)


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Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2000 14:44:03 -0700
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Subject: [smygo] Chomsky's Other Revolution

Chomsky's Other Revolution

An Interview with Noam Chomsky

The Weekly Wire

By Steven Robert Allen

FEBRUARY 21, 2000:  Love him or hate him, few
people have had as great an impact on 20th century
thought as MIT linguist, activist, and political
dissident Noam Chomsky. Regardless of how
mainstream history comes to view Chomsky's radical
critique of Western capitalism, that his work as a
linguist has had a profound and lasting influence
on all the cognitive sciences cannot be denied.

It's often been said that Chomsky is to
linguistics what Einstein is to physics. His 1957
treatise, Syntactic Structures, initiated the
so-called Chomskyan Revolution; in that book,
Chomsky proposed a new linguistic theory which
defined language as an innate human faculty
hard-wired into our brains. Consequently, in
Chomsky's view, there is a kind of "universal
grammar" underlying all languages. Imagine that an
alien came to Earth and observed the way we humans
communicate with each other. According to Chomsky,
this alien would perceive all languages on Earth
as pretty much the same, with only superficial
variations distinguishing, for example, English
from Chinese.

Chomsky singed his name on the pages of
intellectual history by proposing that the goal of
linguistics be to discover and describe this
universal grammar. Because of his central position
in the field, however, Chomsky has the additional
claim to fame of being the most attacked linguist
of all time. Yet because of the overwhelming
prominence of his work, successive generations of
linguists have found themselves obliged to present
their new ideas in decidedly Chomskyan terms,
whether agreeing with his theories or not.

Linguistics aside, though, what lifted Chomsky to
the level of cult figure is his political
theorizing and relentless activism in defense of
the victims of U.S. foreign policy. Politically,
he embodies a rationalist, anti-authoritarian
strand of leftist thought positioned in sharp
contrast to Marxism and Leninism, which he calls
libertarian socialism.
[This is a traditional synonym for anarchism. --
DC]

The Alibi recently had a rare opportunity to speak
with Chomsky about the IRC, mass media, world
trade, the Internet, and the future of our sad,
crumbling Western civilization.


AN AMERICAN DISSIDENT

Alexander Cockburn once wrote, "Chomsky's greatest
virtue is that his fundamental message is a simple
one." Chomsky's central belief is that propaganda
plays the same role in a democracy as violence
plays in a dictatorship. In the United States,
therefore, you need to be less afraid of the
National Guard and more afraid of the manipulation
of information by governmental, corporate and
academic sources. According to Chomsky, the elites
who control and benefit from the American
political system preserve that system by
marginalizing alternative political views,
selectively reporting on the consequences of
United States foreign policy, and creating
political apathy among the general populace by
encouraging them to watch professional sports and
TV sitcoms rather than actively participate in the
political process.

Chomsky is fond of quoting John Jay, the president
of the Constitutional Convention and the first
Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, who
expressed the conviction that, "The people who own
the country ought to govern it." In Chomsky's
view, that's exactly what has happened. Due to
enormous corporate control of both national media
and government, true participatory democracy
doesn't have a chance in hell of flourishing in
the United States of America.

THE TREND TOWARD OLIGOPOLY

Recent reports of mega-mergers in the information
industry, such as the one between AOL and Time
Warner, make Chomsky's political theories all the
more poignant. But according to Chomsky, it's not
just consolidations of media corporations that we
have to worry about. "There's a general tendency
for the whole system to move toward oligopoly, a
small number of huge corporations which dominate
one or another area and usually interact," Chomsky
says. "The same is true in all the corporate
system. The pharmaceutical corporations are also
getting enormous public subsidies, and they're
moving towards monopoly."

For Chomsky, though, there are particularly grave
implications for democracy when narrow private
powers control the distribution of information to
the populace. "The media are using public
property," he says. "It's the public who owns the
airwaves, and [the corporate media] are basing
themselves on publicly created technologies like
the Internet. So we're living in a system of
massive public subsidy for private tyrannies that
are moving toward oligopoly. I think it's
dangerous everywhere, but particularly in the
media information systems."

The reason for this is that Chomsky believes that
private corporations skew the information they
present to the public to prop up a system which
protects their vested interests. Since the
institutional structure of this country leads to a
kind of integrated system of brainwashing,
individual reporters working within the mass media
may not even be aware that they are presenting an
unbalanced view of the world to their audience.
The end result is that atrocities are often not
reported in the national media -- or are
under-reported or given a favorable or neutral
slant -- if they are committed by dictators who
are friendly to American business interests. This
was true, for example, of media reporting on East
Timor and several Latin American states ruled by
pro-U.S. dictators.

WHAT TO DO

When asked what we should do about this disturbing
state of affairs, Chomsky says, "I don't think
these institutions even have a right to exist. So
the question is where we go between undermining
particular forms of tyranny ... and constraining
or limiting them, which is a narrower objective.
The more restricted moves are the ones on the
immediate agenda, but the long-term moves should
not be far from our minds."

According to Chomsky, one long-term goal should be
to transform the media into public instruments, as
opposed to tools employed by private power. "Back
around 1930," he says, "there was a major conflict
over whether radio -- which was just then coming
along -- should remain in public hands as a device
for interaction, information, education and so on,
or whether it should be handed as a gift to
commercial, private power."

Ultimately, radio was handed over to private power
in the U.S., but this wasn't true in other
countries.  "In every other major industrialized
country," Chomsky says, "radio remained primarily
public, which means that it was as free as the
country was. So, if it's a dictatorship, it's not
at all free. If it's Canada or England, it's
reasonably free. The United States was essentially
alone in handing it over to private power."

When television came along about 20 years later,
it automatically went over to private power
without discussion, while in other countries it
remained public. "And ever since then," says
Chomsky, "private power has been chipping away at
it. They don't stop. They want to buy it up. Just
like any tyrannical system, it wants to expand,
and if the public doesn't resist, that will
happen."

That's why the mass media in the U.S. exhibits a
much narrower range of ideological opinion than
that of other free societies. Since huge private
corporations have absolute control over the mass
media, it shouldn't surprise anyone, says Chomsky,
that the ideologies expressed therein generally
tend to reflect the interests of the business
world.

Yet Chomsky would be the first to admit that the
system of indoctrination he describes is not
monolithic; he simply believes that his
description holds true in most cases.

ORDINARY PEOPLE

"Most people go to work and don't ask a lot of
questions about what they're doing," Chomsky says.
"They don't look very far beyond their desk or
tomorrow's job prospects." He believes that there
is a great effort made by this country's elites to
keep people complacent and out of touch: The
rabble has to be kept in line. "That's the ideal
of the business world, the public relations
industry, the advertising industry and so on," he
says, "to separate people from one another,
because they're dangerous when they're together.
They get ideas. They start to do things. Much
better for them to be working very hard -- the
U.S. has the longest work week in the industrial
world -- and when they come home, exhausted, to
turn on the tube and get brainwashed."

The sad result of this institutional structure,
says Chomsky, is that people who might challenge
the nastier outcomes of U.S. policies at home and
abroad are turned into consuming automatons of
"invented wants" who don't have the time or energy
to contribute to the shaping of our society. "The
apologists like to talk about how there's no
alternative. You know, it's just kind of like
cosmic forces pushing us, but it's not true. There
are specific decisions made by particular
institutions. It could be different decisions made
by different institutions. It's all a matter of
choice."

DEMOCRACY IN NAME ALONE

Even if the Bill Gateses of the world believe that
what they're doing is for the good of humanity and
that free market capitalism is the best system
we've got, Chomsky says this doesn't matter. The
results of their voracious desire for more and
more of the world's natural and human resources
are global violence, economic inequality and tight
restrictions on the ability of ordinary people to
shape the world in which they live. "Ask who's
making the decisions and who's making the gains,"
says Chomsky. "And you'll notice a remarkable
correlation. It doesn't mean that they wake up in
the morning and say, 'Look, I'm going to rob
everybody.' Even Hitler, I presume, had some
system of justification. You can convince yourself
you're a nice person. That's not hard to do.
Everybody does that in their ordinary lives."

Chomsky doesn't have a lot of faith in the
electoral process to change our society for the
better, arguing that ties between government and
big business are simply too tight. "There are big
barriers to overcome," he says. "As things now
stand, the electoral process is a matter of the
population being permitted every once in a while
to choose among virtually identical
representatives of business power. That's better
than having a dictator, but it's a very limited
form of democracy. Most of the population realizes
that and doesn't even participate. ... And of
course elections are almost completely purchased.
In the last congressional elections, 95 percent of
the victors in the election outspent their
opponents, and campaigns were overwhelmingly
funded by corporations."

THE SHADY SIDE OF GLOBALIZATION

On Feb. 26, Chomsky will come to Albuquerque to
give a speech called "Taking Control of Our Lives:
Freedom, Sovereignty and Other Endangered
Species," marking his first-ever presentation in
New Mexico. The speech is part of the 20th
Anniversary celebration for the IRC, a foreign
policy think tank with offices in Albuquerque and
Silver City. In cooperation with the Institute for
Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., the IRC
produces a series of publications on a wide range
of foreign policy issues and also maintains an
extensive database on issues related to the
U.S./Mexican border. Chomsky has been involved
with the IRC since the early 1980s, when various
issues related to Central America were just
heating up.

"I'm going to speak on a broad range of topics,"
Chomsky says. "I'll be talking about the current
version of globalization and economic organization
that's been imposed by state corporate planning
over the past 20 to 25 years, ... what it has to
do with freedom and democracy and economic
welfare. The kinds of issues that came up in
Seattle, for example."

In his books, articles and speeches, Chomsky
doesn't typically present a very cheery view of
the world in which we live, but bright moments
such as the WTO protests give him hope. "They
brought together an unusually broad range of
people, interests and backgrounds ... groups that
rarely get together and find common ground. ...
There were constructive proposals that came out of
various segments. I don't agree with all of them.
They certainly need to be developed. But it's a
basis for a constructive form of globalization, a
popular globalization, where people who are
concerned with the same values and interests work
to protect and expand them. And that's quite
contrary to the agenda of the World Trade
Organization."

One aspect of the WTO protests that Chomsky found
particularly heartening was the role of the
Internet in bringing various activists together.
"That's why Seattle took place," he says. "If you
had to have communication through the mass media
there never would have been protests in Seattle.
... The same is true on other things. ... You can
do good things with the Internet. The question is
whether it will still be possible to do those good
things after it falls totally into the hands of
private power. They certainly don't want it to be
used that way."

Though heralded as a new tool to enhance democracy
just a few years ago, there are numerous signs
that the Internet is being taken over by
commercial interests. "In the early years of it,
the term 'Information Highway' was the buzz word,"
Chomsky says. "That's been dropping and now the
word 'e-commerce' is the buzz word. That makes a
lot of sense. The Information Highway is exactly
what corporate power doesn't want and e-commerce
-- meaning you're glued to the tube and they try
to sell you things -- that's exactly what they do
want."

Yet Chomsky doesn't see a corporate takeover of
the Web as inevitable. "Nothing is inevitable," he
explains. "The idea of keeping the Internet as a
real means of communication and interaction and
democratic organizing and so on -- that can be
done. After all, it's public property." In other
words, the Internet doesn't have to go the way of
radio and television. Chomsky believes that the
fight to maintain public access and control over
the Internet has become a central issue for those
who value democracy in America.

CRITICIZING THE CRITIC

It's not at all ironic that Chomsky's political
ideas have been marginalized in the U.S. He is
still treated  as intellectual royalty in Europe
and Japan, where he's frequently featured as a
talking head in the mass media. In this country,
though, when his political views are considered at
all (which is almost never), he's generally
portrayed as a ranting conspiracy theorist.
Critics have accused Chomsky of founding arguments
on highly selective samplings of evidence, of
overstating and exaggerating his case, of
descending into a kind of moral relativism that
favors left wing thugs over right wing thugs, and
of failing to provide adequate, practical
alternatives to replace existing institutions.

To be fair, Chomsky has said repeatedly that no
one should automatically accept his analysis of
Western capitalism. He merely suggests that people
should discover for themselves, through rational
inquiry, whether his description of the world is
accurate. What his critics call a conspiracy
theory, Chomsky calls "institutional analysis." In
dozens of books, he has meticulously documented
the historical development and specific abuses
that have led to the bastardized
corporate-controlled democracy Americans currently
enjoy.

Agree or disagree with his political theories,
Noam Chomsky always stimulates the kind of lively,
outside-the-box debate that we just don't get
enough of in this country. At the core, he is a
child of the Enlightenment, a radical democrat and
humanist who believes wholeheartedly that freedom
and democracy not only improve our lives but may
actually be essential for the survival of our
species. His personal conviction is that any
society based entirely on profit-mongering and
acquisition is destined to self-destruct. It's a
conviction that -- regardless of where you stand
on the political spectrum -- might be worth giving
some serious consideration.

For an excellent summary of Chomsky's ideas rent
the documentary Manufacturing Consent. You can
also browse through the Chomsky archive at
www.zmag.org/chomsky/. Recommended introductions
are The Chomsky Reader (Pantheon Books, paper,
$18) and What Uncle Sam Really Wants (Odonian
Press, paper, $8.50).

[I would suggest Milan Rai's book _Chomsky's
Politics_ for a fairly comprehensive summary of
Chomsky's views and work. -- DC]

--
---------------------------------------------------
Dan Clore

The Website of Lord We˙rdgliffe:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/index.html
The Dan Clore Necronomicon Page:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/necpage.htm

"Tho-ag in Zhi-gyu slept seven Khorlo. Zodmanas
zhiba. All Nyug bosom. Konch-hog not; Thyan-Kam
not; Lha-Chohan not; Tenbrel Chugnyi not;
Dharmakaya ceased; Tgenchang not become; Barnang
and Ssa in Ngovonyidj; alone Tho-og Yinsin in
night of Sun-chan and Yong-grub (Parinishpanna),
&c., &c.,"
-- The Book of Dzyan.


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