Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Noam Chomsky on Jordan Peterson, Post-Modernism, Foucault and Ali G

Episode Date: July 2, 2020

In this inaugural episode, we speak to Noam Chomsky about his views on Peterson, anarchism, postmodernism, Foucault, and even touch on Ali G. Interview conducted by Peter Glinos and Curt Jaimungal, for a documentary Better Left Unsaid http://betterleftunsaidfilm.com

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All lowercase, that's shopify.com slash theories. The establishment left has just dropped entirely. So the Democratic Party, whatever that is, abandoned the working class a generation ago. Okay, let's get straight into the questions. That all right? Oh, yeah. Okay, so Peter, you can mute your mic if you don't mind. Got it.

Okay. Okay, so what I wanted to know is, first I wanted to define the left, and essentially the way that I'm going to do that is by asking you, what are the traits in the left, the left, political left, in the past century that have changed, and what's remained the same, as far as you can tell? What's remained the same, as far as you can tell? Well, of course, the left has moved consistently to new issues that weren't even noticed before. So if you go back a century, while there were elements of the left that you could call, say, feminist, calls a feminist. It's nothing like the dominant element in left politics that exists today. You go back 20 years ago, there was very little concern about the environment. Now the left recognizes that it's an existential problem. On the other hand, and so

there are many cases in which there's been progress in understanding and dedicated work, there are other cases in which there's regression. So go back not very far, a couple of decades, labor organizing was a major issue for the left. It was recognized and understood that the driving force in any social and political economic change is going to be an organized working class. That's been, well, it depends what you call the left, but the establishment left has just dropped it entirely. So the Democratic Party, whatever that is, abandoned the working class a generation ago, handed it over to their class enemy. Activists on the left have become engaged justifiably with issues that are sometimes called identity

politics. Those are real issues, have to be dealt with. But class issues have been subordinated, marginalized, and they're very real. That's a deficiency that has to be overcome. All of these things interact. When people talk about intersectionality, yes, they're right. But it's been more of a slogan than an actual achievement. So I think if you look across the board, there's progress and regression. What is your opinion on identity politics?

The issues are significant. They have to, they cannot, each type of identity politics cannot dominate a commitment of an organized lift that hopes to achieve things. They have to interact, be mutually supportive, and they have to crucially bring in the class issues that have been subordinated. Actually, the most active extreme form of identity politics is white nationalism. Something I'm trying to determine with my research is, when does the left go too far and when does the right go too far, politically speaking? I wanted to know what your opinion is on that. Just to pick the issues.

The right at this point is simply suicidal. It's not a question of going too far. The right is committed to destruction of organized human society. Is that an extreme statement? Maybe, but it's correct. Just take a look at the Republican Party. What is the Republican Party committed to? It's committed to destroying human life, and not in the long term. The Paris Agreements, a couple of years ago, they weren't fabulous,

but they were something at least. Their original effort, intent, was to create a treaty in which there would be verifiable commitments to some measures to avert the huge threat of global warming. Couldn't get a treaty. It had to be a voluntary agreement. Why? Republican senators wouldn't accept it. Take the Republican primary in 2016. Every single candidate, without exception, either denied that global warming is taking

place or else said, maybe it is, but we don't care. John Kasich, who is the governor of Ohio, who is considered the real moderate of the group, said, yeah, we recognize that global warming is taking place and it's serious, but we in Ohio are going to use our coal and we're not going to apologize for it. That's the moderate Republican. Then you go over to the White House, you have total maniacs, people who say, we don't care. I said, we'll destroy the world, but we'll have profit tomorrow and are leading the way towards destruction consciously aware of what they're doing

no secret about it easy to demonstrate how far to the right is this there's no words for it one question what about the left when does the left go too far it's not a matter of going too far

it's a matter of making tactical decisions that are incorrect. It may be that some of the goals are debatable. We can talk about that. But insofar as they're the kinds of goals that, say, we think we can support, you have to ask whether the tactics that are used are well designed to meet those goals or else undermine the goals. So let's take concrete cases. As you know, I was very active in the anti-war movement, resistance movement during the 1960s. I had contact with Vietnamese. distance movement during the 1960s, had contact with Vietnamese.

The Vietnamese were appalled by some of the tactics that were being used. I remember meetings where the Vietnamese would plead with American activists not to do things like what the weathermen are doing. The weathermen, a lot of young people, many of them I knew, were perfectly sincere. They thought that the way to end the war is to smash up windows on Main Street. It's not the way to end the war. That was the way to enrage construction workers and others so they'd be more pro-war than they were before. The Vietnamese didn't care whether Americans felt good. They cared whether they could survive. So what they advocated were measures so mild that a lot of the war movement would just laugh at them. But that's the kind of choice that has to be made

all the time. I can give you many examples today. So going too far, I think the way we should rephrase that is picking tactics that are going to undermine the perhaps legitimate and just goals that you say you're advocating. On the discussion of the left and the right in terms of their differences and their similarities. Oftentimes, the left are characterized as being pro-government and the right is characterized as being pro-corporation. And you have written about the revolving door between the two, between regulators and the regulator in your book, like Manufacturing Consent. Now, does this blur the line of what it means to be a left-winger and a right-winger? Do the left and the right still exist? Do they ever exist?

I mean, let's take being pro or anti-government. That's not a general position of the left. That's a tactical choice in particular circumstances. So when you have a state like the United States that's largely dominated by private tyrannies with very little public voice, in that particular circumstance, the option available to you to overcome this is governmental action, which at least to some extent is responsive to public opinion. In other circumstances, when you're trying to construct a really libertarian left participatory society, you might want to dissolve governmental structures

as illegitimate authority. There's no right or wrong answer to that. So for example, let's take, say, media. The United States is unusual. It's different from other developed societies in many respects. One respect is it doesn't have public, barely has public media. Okay. Media are privatized, overwhelming. It's kind of a little tiny fringe on the left, nothing like, off the fringe, you know. So nothing like the BBC or anything like that. We can look at why this happened. Certainly not implicit in U.S. history, like the founders of the country, the framers, believed they interpreted the First Amendment very differently than the way we do. They thought it meant that the government ought to take an active role in sponsoring a free and independent press. That's why we have the post office, for example.

In its early years, the post office was almost totally devoted to providing cheap, free, basically subsidies to a wide variety of journals and newspapers to encourage a varied, free, independent press. Over the years, the power, private power in the United States, which is quite unusual, managed to privatize radio, television, and more recently, the Internet. But that's, and yes, in those circumstances, it would make sense to call for a public voice. Under other circumstances, you might want to have local-based, worker-based, community-based media.

And there's many other such questions. You're a self-described anarchist, and I'd like to know, what is the difference between your beliefs and contemporary libertarianism? Well, first of all, what's called libertarian in the United States is some ultra-right advocacy of private tyrannies. Nothing like anything that was libertarian traditionally. But if you're talking about left libertarian, it covers quite a range, just as the term anarchism does. But there is a kind of a core at the center of it, I think.

The core running through the whole tradition, with many variations, running through the whole tradition with many variations, is the recognition that there are certain structures in social, political life, economic life, that have to justify their own legitimacy. They are coercive, authoritarian. There is hierarchy, domination. Somebody gives the order, somebody takes them. All of those structures have to be, none of those structures are self-justifying. They have a burden of justification. If they can't meet it, which is almost always the case, they should be dismantled.

I think that's the core principle. And my own view is that once you get to the basics, almost every normal person is a anarchist in this sense. But then you have to ask how it applies. So do you have a job somewhere? Well, if you have a job in a business corporation, let's say, you're living in a tyranny so extreme that no totalitarian dictator ever dreamed of it. So for example, Stalin didn't tell people that you have 10 minutes to go to the bathroom every couple of hours. You have to wear these clothes, not some other clothes. You're not allowed to stop to talk to a friend for a minute.

You're monitored, say, at an Amazon warehouse, so that if you don't pick up enough things fast enough, maybe you stop to breathe or something, you get a demerit. There was no totalitarian dictatorship like that. That's most of people's lives. Well, is that a legitimate structure? Is the labor contract legitimate? Actually, traditional classical liberals didn't think so.

Abraham Lincoln didn't think so. The Republican Party didn't think so. The Republican Party's slogan in the mid-19th century, early Industrial Revolution, was that wage labor is indistinguishable from slavery, except that it's supposed to be temporary until you become a free person again. Well, okay, those ideas have been driven out of people's heads, but I don't think they're very far below the surface. They can emerge even. And that would be authentic left libertarianism, just one aspect, crucial aspect. So it seems like you overlap with regards to free exchange of speech and ideas. And I remember a while ago you defended a Holocaust denier,

and I wanted to know if you still stand by that. Defending a Holocaust denier? I mean, defending his freedom of speech. Sure. I mean, this is just standard classical liberalism. There's two choices. Either some form of power and authority, typically the state or other,

determines what's true and punishes any deviation from what it claims is true, or else you allow views to be expressed that you don't like. In fact, if you really believe in freedom of speech, the only issues are, do I allow speech that I don't like? Hitler and Stalin had nothing against speech they liked. Nowadays there's this trans rights versus free speech debate. I want to know what you think about that. Where do you lie on that? Let's talk about Holocaust

denial for another minute. Holocaust denial is the norm in Western society. So just to take an example, a couple of years ago, an article appeared in the New York Review, the major journal of left liberalism, in which the author, good, decent left liberalism, in which the author, good, decent, left liberalism, was reviewing a book by a major American historian. He said in his review, he was interested to learn that when the early explorers came to the Western hemisphere, there were only about a million people from the tropical forests to the frozen north. He was off by about 60 or 70 million who were wiped out.

Is that Holocaust denial? Did anybody say he should be imprisoned? Did anybody even notice? I mean, these things happen all the time. It's a particular form that we don't like, that somebody doesn't like, that's considered, that has to be suppressed. And that's worth keeping in mind when you talk about Holocaust denial. So it seems like you have some similarities with Jordan Peterson on this issue. And I know that you haven't talked much about

Jordan Peterson. And I wanted to know if you had any disagreements with what he says. Frankly, I pay very little attention. But if you want to know about Jordan Peterson, I think the best thing I can refer you to is an article by Nathan Robinson, a very sharp, acute critic in his journal Current Affairs. It's called something like The Intellectual We Deserve or something like that. I think that that's basically my answer. Other than that, I don't pay any attention. I mean, there's some issues on which I probably agree with Hitler. No, it doesn't mean much.

On that subject, I think it's Aristotle, right, who says that people get the governments they deserve. Is this kind of the line? Aristotle said that people get the governments they deserve. Is this kind of what you're implying, but for intellectuals? No, I don't think people get the government they deserve. Is this kind of what you're implying, but for intellectuals? No, I don't think people get the government they deserve. They get the government that power systems impose. That's quite different. On the systems of power, you had mentioned in Manufacturing Consent, the idea of the principle of bureaucratic affinity, the idea that large-scale bureaucracies will

ally with other large-scale bureaucracies to sort of maintain a status quo and to aid each other, and that when a company like, when a media company, for example, tries true journalism, these large bureaucracies, be it either the government or corporations, These large bureaucracies, be it either the government or corporations, will give the media company flack and sort of cease to work with them. My question for you is, does the principle of bureaucratic affinity apply to educational institutions like large universities? To a varying extent. Depends on the university, depends on the time and the era. In our current situation, current circumstances, with all their flaws, universities are one of the last bastions of relative freedom of expression and research,

even of worker self-government to a certain extent. A faculty at a university has a degree of control over their working lives, which is very rare in the existing socio-political system. So, I don't think you can answer a simple yes or no. By comparative standards, they're relatively free, they have flaws. So, for example, if you take a look at the American university system, well, about just a few years ago, you couldn't find a Marxist professor anywhere. Any other country in the world, they'd be all over the place. Not here.

May I ask, what do you attribute that to? In past, you had mentioned how academics maintain a sort of status quo, as opposed to being the sort of radicals that they display themselves as. Do you find that still true? Or do you find that academics are changing? Well, and there's a kind of an ebb and flow. I think it's less true than it was 50 or 60 years ago, but it's more true than it ought to be. And it's not just academics, it's intellectuals generally. You look over the whole history of intellectuals for a couple of thousand years in fact, and you find that overwhelmingly they tended to support power systems. There are a few who don't, and they're usually treated pretty

harshly. In fact, just take the term intellectual in its modern sense was first used at the time of the Dreyfus trial in France, late 19th century. Most of the intellectuals, the prestigious intellectuals, the ones of the French Academy and so on, bitterly condemned the Dreyfus arts. How dare these writers and artists question the majesty of our army, our state, and so on. And there were a few, like Emil Zola, a couple of others who stood up against it. They were persecuted.

And we may honor them today, but not at the time. Emil Zola had to flee France. That's the record in one form or another all through history. So, in fact, shortly after this, since the First World War came along. It was very dramatic to see what happened to the intellectual classes during this, including the left during the First World War, in every single country, Germany, France, England, the United States, the intellectuals lined up almost 100% in passionate support of their own country. The ones who didn't, many of them ended up in jail.

The Bertrand Russell, the Rosa Luxemburg, Gene Debs. That's the pattern. Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble the more the wobble the more nicks cuts scrapes a bad shave isn't a blade problem it's an extension problem henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the international space station and the mars rover now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience by using aerospace grade cnc machines Henson makes razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair. The razor also has built-in channels that evacuates hair and cream, which make clogging virtually impossible.

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Just make sure to add them to the cart. Plus 100 free blades when you head to h-e-n-s-o-n-s-h-a-v-i-n-g.com slash everything and use the code everything. We're back. we're back. Peter, do you want to repeat the question? Super quick. This is my wife. Hi, thank you, thank you. Hello, Professor Noam Chomsky's wife.

Okay. The question in summary was, in manufacturing consent, you teach us that big media is allied with the government and corporate elites. And as a result, the framework of big media's discussion fits comfortably in a propaganda model, an acceptable framework on how to analyze problems and talk about issues. Well, if academia itself is allied with government and corporate elites, then wouldn't they also fit a propaganda model? And if not, what makes them so unique?

Well, for one thing, there are several things that are, to some extent it's true, but notice that the relation of media to, say, corporate elites is very different from the relation of universities to corporate elites. In the case of media, it's just that's what they are. The media are major corporations. Parts of bigger corporations flow in and out of government, very heavily subject to government edicts and so on. Universities have the same influences, but much less the relation of a university to corporations is, can I get a grant? You know, will I get a, will there be a donor who will be willing to build a building or something?

Will there be a donor who will be willing to build a building or something? That's very different from being part of the corporate system, which already allows a little flexibility. Also, we should not underestimate the fact that there is a sense of professionalism and intellectual responsibility. That's true in the media too. There are serious journalists, many of them who understand the system very well. They didn't have to hear it from us, and who try to find ways to combat it. And it happens. Now, in the media, they tend to be marginalized and eliminated, you know, sent to the police desk. You're not really ready for big-time work, you know, that sort of thing. And that kind of thing happens in the universities too,

but probably to a slightly lesser extent. And it depends also on the field. So many fields in the university are almost totally free from outside pressures. The physics department, for example. Some people have suggested that we should remove universities. And this is reminiscent, Jordan Peterson, for example, suggests to students, don't go to universities anymore because of the bias,

because of the unitary point of views. And this is reminiscent of anarchist Ivan Illich's desire to eliminate... Listen to what Jordan Peterson is saying. He's saying universities are dominated by the left. Now for him, the left is anybody to the left of Attila the Hun. In fact, universities are dominated by the right. He's so far on the right that that looks like the left end. But does it make sense to tell students not to go to universities? It's crazy. It's one of the places where you can... there's lots of things wrong, but there are resources and opportunities that simply don't exist anywhere else.

You can't... there are opportunities to become a free, independent, creative individual working with others that you just don't have elsewhere sorry I misspoke, I didn't mean that to suggest that he suggested to eliminate the universities, I'm more trying to convey the decentralizing of universities so for example an online school there's a lot you example, an online school.

There's a lot you miss in an online school. Your peers. One of the big parts of education is the students you're with, that those kinds of interactions are gone online. And they're very important for educating oneself. Anybody who's been through a school or university situation knows how you can learn more from interaction with your peers than from sitting in on a lecture. Even interaction with the faculty. So it's one thing to sit in a lecture class or watch a television screen. And it's another thing to be in an actual class where you're interacting with other

students and with the faculty. So yes, there are good things. I mean, I think it's good to try to extend the resources of a university elsewhere, but there's nothing to replace the direct face-to-face interaction. Not just when you're in class, but when you're doing something else, when you're sitting in a McDonald's and having a hamburger with your friends and talking. What are your thoughts on the Christian anarchist, Ivan Illich,

and his rise in popularity among social activists? An anarchist who believed in de-schooling society is popular work. I can sort of understand some of the motivation for it, but de-schooling society is taking away from people some of their major opportunities for individual growth and social interaction, and even general activism. I mean, it's not just pure accident that over the years, student activism has been typically at the forefront of many of the most important social movements. Partly it's just because young people are a period of their life when

they're relatively free, but it's also the fact that they're together. They can talk with one another. They can interact. That's something that's pretty much missing in atomized capitalist society. Then I'm running into a little bit of a confusion here. On the one hand, the history of intellectuals and academia sort of lines up with the status quo, in the sense that we were talking about Nazism and things before. But on the other hand, they're on the forefront of social change. How are these views compatible? Their participants are in the forefront of social change. How are these views compatible? Their participants are in the forefront of social change. The mainstream may be status quo and conservative, which it is.

Take a look at student activism. It's usually opposed by the administration and most of the faculty. But nevertheless, it takes place because this is a relatively free institution, which means that there are opportunities to break out of the doctrinaire system of attempted regimentation. We're not living in totalitarian dictatorships where if you say the wrong thing, you get sent to the concentration camp. We're living in societies with a relative degree of freedom, often infringed by authoritarian structures, but they don't have the kind of force they do if the SS troops are standing behind you. We shouldn't compare ourselves with that. In that case, what is an anarcho-syndicalist's take on education, on what it should look like and what needs to change from how it is now to how it should be?

Actually, the anarchist movement, not just the anarcho-syndicalists, were in the forefront of developing progressive education systems. So, for example, in Spain, where the 1936 revolution was the lead of the most in villages and towns everywhere, trying to create a free, liberatory environment in which students could find their own ways. Their creativity would be sponsored. They would work jointly with one another, very similar to progressive education tendencies of John Dewey and others, which I happen to benefit from as a child.

In fact, I'm familiar with and taught that way as well. So yes, anarchist education has been very progressive. There's also people like Paulo Freire who argued that it should be an interactive process where the teacher's learning from the students, not just students having an opportunity for freedom. I think that's the kind of direction that education should take, the course that it should follow and does in the better places.

Do you feel that if education is too centralized, these alternative platforms will be sidelined, neglected in the public sphere? Or, for example, in universities, that student participation would get minimalized? I don't think there's a simple answer. I don't think there's a simple answer. You could have a public education system which fosters individual creativity, freedom, student initiative, and so on. You could have a scattered system of charter schools which are business run and which impose discipline. It depends on the educational program, not whether it's central or not.

It depends. Okay. I have a question that either you would think are completely polar opposite or that they completely overlap. What were you thinking during your interview, your conversation with Foucault, and what were you thinking during your conversation with Ali G? With Ali G? I didn't hear the first one. With Foucault and with Ali G?

Well, it was quite different. In the case of Ali G, there had been a... I was not particularly interested in the interview, but I think it was the BBC or whoever was behind it that gave me a big song and dance about it. It was going to be a very serious interview and so on so I finally agreed as soon as he walked in I realized this is a joke and tried to be

polite but had a hard time with it I didn't take it seriously enough you mean to say you realized that it was a joke or you felt like the whole interview was a joke and you thought he was for real the whole thing was obviously some kind of an efforted comedy,

which I didn't want to be part of. And I was perfectly, I mean, I was on the tip of my tongue saying, look, this is enough, let's terminate it. But being polite, I went along with it for a while. Foucault is quite different. Actually, we had spent, Foucault and I had spent a large part of the day together. The interviews and debate was in the evening. I was just walking around the Dutch countryside, partly because we wanted to have a chance

to talk, but partly to see if we could get by with him talking French and me talking English. Would we be able to understand each other? Or should we have a translator? And we finally figured we could carry it off. I don't know much French. There's not much English, but it worked. And the debate was about issues that are fairly serious issues. So nothing before archaeology.

We disagreed about a lot of things. I was kind of appalled by some of his views. But it was within the domain of rational discourse. Okay, I know you're a busy person. I only have two more questions, and they're super quick. One is, what are your thoughts on postmodernism? What do you agree with and what do you disagree with? Well, for about a couple of decades, I've had a very simple question that I've been posing to my postmodern friends. Can you find something in postmodernism which is not either a triviality cloaked in polysyllables or is false? cloaked in polysyllables or is false. And nobody's answered it yet. So that's about all I can say.

Okay, and then my last question was, you're extremely prolific. You've written, I think, over 100 books, at least on politics, and then many more on other subjects. How do you structure your day? What's your productivity look like, your routine? structure your day? What's your productivity look like? Your routine? Right now, since my wife Valeria and I moved to Arizona, I'm not living in Cambridge anymore. My routine is to get up early in the morning, take our dogs out, play with them for a while, then read the newspaper and start looking at the huge quantity of email that piled up.

If I can get rid of that, get to work on serious things. Ah, but did you clean your room? I'm just kidding. I said, ah, but did you clean your room?

Clean my room. Jordan Peterson reference. There's very little oxygen in the room. It's mostly books and papers. It's not much clean. Thank you so much, Professor, and thank you. What's your wife's name? Valeria?

Valeria. Hi. Hi. Thank you so much. Thank you. I'll send you a link to this interview as well I'll give you a copy of the interview sure, please do I appreciate it, have a great day

go back to playing with your dogs and make sure you clean up your room because I think that's the most important I think that's more important than writing books