Showing posts with label chomsky. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chomsky. Show all posts
Thursday, April 16, 2015
Saturday, April 4, 2015
Friday, April 3, 2015
Chomsky: On Institutional Stupidity
Articles
Noam Chomsky on Institutional Stupidity
In January Noam Chomsky received the Philosophy Now Award for fighting stupidity.
Rick Lewis’s Introduction:
Welcome to the 4th Philosophy Now Award for Contributions in the Fight Against Stupidity. I’m delighted to say that we’re giving this year’s award to Professor Noam Chomsky.
Stupidity comes in many forms. Generally it is easier to spot when other people are being stupid and harder to notice when we ourselves are being stupid, in the sense of relying on unexamined assumptions, entrenched mental habits or poor reasoning. Yet we’re all guilty of these sometimes. Trying not to fool ourselves in these ways is central to philosophy.
So how can Chomsky help us with this? One of the world’s best-known intellectuals, he first gained fame for his work as a linguist, and in particular for his theory that we have an in-born or ‘innate’ grammar that underlies all of the world’s natural languages. He has gone on to do important original work on many other topics, including machine translation, logic, philosophy, and the nature of the media. A tireless social commentator, he also does a great deal of highly controversial political activism.
We want to give the Against Stupidity Award to Noam Chomsky not for his activism, for Philosophy Now does not take positions on political issues, nor for his fascinating early work on innate grammar, but mainly for his work on the structure of the media, and for his continual incitement to independent critical thinking. In their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky and his co-author Edward S. Herman examined various institutional biases that affect the media worldwide. Chomsky followed this up with related work such as his 1991 book Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda.
Immanuel Kant said our experiences depend not only on the nature of the external world but also on our perceptual apparatus and our mental categories. There is the phenomenal world, the world as we experience it, and there is the noumenal world, the external world as it actually is, which we can never fully know.
Chomsky’s project is in some ways reminiscent of Kant’s. It examines how we gain knowledge of the social and political worlds. The world is very big, so you can’t be an eyewitness to most of what goes on in it and instead have to find out about it through intermediaries, in digested form. It’s because they are intermediaries that we call them the media. But in reporting the news they first have to decide what is newsworthy, and how to report it. In authoritarian countries this process is subject to censorship that is often obvious and sometimes brutal. Chomsky argues that news reporting is shaped by powerful interests in capitalist democracies too, though in ways that are far less apparent. In Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky and Herman argue that the selection and presentation of news in the West is subject to five ‘filters’. The first is ownership (the giant conglomerates that now own much of the world’s media have wide commercial interests and tend to discourage reporting that will undermine those interests). Secondly, they rely on selling advertising, and will tend to exclude reporting which conflicts with the ‘buying mood’. Thirdly, given finite editorial resources they all rely on news stories from outside organisations including the press departments of government and commercial bodies, and are often unwilling to alienate those sources. Fourthly they are constrained by the desire to avoid ‘flak’, in other words hostile reactions to news stories. Fifthly, they operate under ideological constraints – in the past, anti-communism, and now the war against terror. Chomsky and Herman also present statistical analysis of the reporting of different kinds of stories, to test the validity of their model. If we take the news we read at face value without considering the forces that shape it, we may be fooling ourselves. If we understand those mechanisms, then we can also take them into account and maybe gain a clearer understanding of the world itself.
Chomsky as a social critic constantly questions public policy and the presentation of the news. He asks hard questions and even when you disagree with him, forces you to justify your thinking about society and values. For these reasons he is a very worthy winner of this year’s award.
Noam Chomsky’s Response:
Naturally I am very pleased to be granted this honour, and to be able to accept this award also in the name of my colleague Edward Herman, the co-author of Manufacturing Consent, who himself has done a great deal of outstanding work on this crucial topic. Of course, we’re not the first people to have addressed it.
Predictably, one of the earlier ones was George Orwell. He’s written a not very well known essay that is the introduction of his famous book Animal Farm. It’s not known because it wasn’t published – it was found decades later in his unpublished papers, but it is now available. In this essay he points out that Animal Farm is obviously a satire on the totalitarian enemy; but he urges people in free England to not feel too self-righteous about that, because as he puts it, in England, unpopular ideas can be suppressed without the use of force. He goes on to give examples of what he means, and only a few sentences of explanation, but I think they’re to the point.
One reason, he says, is that the press is owned by wealthy men who have every interest in not having certain ideas expressed. His second is a interesting point, that we didn’t go into but should have: a good education. If you go to the best schools you have instilled into you the understanding that there are certain things it just wouldn’t do to say. That, Orwell claims, is a powerful hook that goes well beyond the influence of the media.
Stupidity comes in many forms. I’d like to say a few words on one particular form that I think may be the most troubling of all. We might call it ‘institutional stupidity’. It’s a kind of stupidity that’s entirely rational within the framework within which it operates: but the framework itself ranges from grotesque to virtual insanity.
Instead of trying to explain it, it may be more helpful to mention a couple of examples to illustrate what I mean. Thirty years ago, in the early eighties – the early Reagan years – I wrote an article called ‘The Rationality of Collective Suicide’. It was concerned with nuclear strategy, and was about how perfectly intelligent people were designing a course of collective suicide in ways that were reasonable within their framework of geostrategic analysis.
I did not know at the time quite how bad the situation was. We have learnt a lot since. For instance, a recent issue of The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists presents a study of false alarms from the automatic detection systems the US and others use to detect incoming missile attacks and other threats that could be perceived as nuclear attack. The study ran from 1977 to 1983, and it estimates that during this period there were a minimum of about 50 such false alarms, and a maximum of about 255. These were alarms aborted by human intervention, preventing disaster by a matter of a few minutes.
It’s plausible to assume that nothing substantial has changed since then. But it actually gets much worse – which I also did not understand at the time of writing the book.
In 1983, at about the time I was writing it, there was a major war scare. This was in part due to what George Kennan, the eminent diplomat, at the time called “the unfailing characteristics of the march towards war – that, and nothing else.” It was initiated by programs the Reagan administration undertook as soon as Reagan came into office. They were interested in probing Russian defences, so they simulated air and naval attacks on Russia.
This was a time of great tension. US Pershing missiles had been installed in Western Europe, with a flight time of about five to ten minutes to Moscow. Reagan also announced his ‘Star Wars’ program, understood by strategists on both sides to be a first strike weapon. In 1983, Operation Able Archer included a practice that “took Nato forces through a full-scale simulated release of nuclear weapons.” The KGB, we have learnt from recent archival material, concluded that armed American forces had been placed on alert, and might even have begun the countdown to war.
The world has not quite reached the edge of the nuclear abyss; but during 1983, it had, without realizing it, come frighteningly close – certainly closer than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The Russian leadership believed that the US was preparing a first strike, and might well have launched a preemptive strike. I am actually quoting from a recent US high-level intelligence analysis, which concludes that the war scare was for real. The analysis points out that in the background was the Russians’ enduring memory of Operation Barbarossa, the German code-name for Hitler’s 1941 attack on the Soviet Union, which was the worst military disaster in Russian history, and came very close to destroying the country. The US analysis says that was exactly what the Russians were comparing the situation to.
That’s bad enough, but it gets still worse. About a year ago we learned that right in the midst of these world-threatening developments, Russia’s early-warning system – similar to the West’s, but much more inefficient – detected an incoming missile strike from the US and sent off the highest-level alert. The protocol for the Soviet military was to retaliate with a nuclear strike. But the order has to pass through a human being. The duty officer, a man named Stanislav Petrov, decided to disobey orders and not to report the warning to his superiors. He received an official reprimand. But thanks to his dereliction of duty, we’re now alive to talk about it.
We know of a huge number of false alarms on the US side. The Soviet systems were far worse. Now nuclear systems are being modernised.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists have a famous Doomsday Clock, and they recently advanced it two minutes. They explain that the clock “ticks now at three minutes to midnight because international leaders are failing to perform their most important duty, ensuring and preserving the health and vitality of human civilisation.”
Individually, these international leaders are certainly not stupid. However, in their institutional capacity their stupidity is lethal in its implications. Looking over the record since the first – and so far only – atomic attack, it’s a miracle that we’ve escaped.
Nuclear destruction is one of the two major threats to survival, and a very real one. The second, of course, is environmental catastrophe.
There’s a well-known professional services group at PricewaterhouseCoopers who have just released their annual study of the priorities of CEOs. At the top of the list is over-regulation. The report says that climate change did not make it into the top nineteen. Again, the CEOs are doubtless not stupid individuals. Presumably they run their businesses intelligently. But the institutional stupidity is colossal, literally life-threatening for the species.
Individual stupidity can be remedied, but institutional stupidity is much more resistant to change. At this stage of human society, it truly endangers our survival. That’s why I think institutional stupidity should be a prime concern.
Thank you.
Questions From The Audience:
How could we overcome media propaganda and improve the media? Through education?
This is an old debate. In the US it has been debated for over a century within the framework of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which bars government action from preventing publication. Notice that it doesn’t protect freedom of speech, nor block punishment for speech.
There weren’t really many cases dealing with the First Amendment up until the Twentieth Century. The American press were very free previously, and there were a wide variety of all kinds of media: journals, magazines, pamphlets. The Founding Fathers believed in the freedom of information, and there were many efforts to stimulate the widest possible range of independent media. Freedom of speech, however, was not strongly protected.
Decisions on free speech began to be made around the First World War, but not by the courts. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the US established a high level of protection of freedom of speech. Meanwhile in the interwar period there was extensive discussion within the framework of what has been called ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ freedom, after Isaiah Berlin, of what the First Amendment implies about freedom of expression and of the press. There was a view sometimes called ‘corporate libertarianism’, which held that the First Amendment should concern negative freedom: that is the government can’t interfere with the right of media owners to do what they want. The other view was social democratic, and came out of the New Deal after the Depression and the early post-WWII period. That view held that there should also be positive freedom: in other words, that people should have the right to information as the basis for a democratic society. That battle was waged in the 1940s, and corporate libertarianism won. The US is unusual in this respect. There’s nothing like the BBC in the US. Most countries have some kind of national media which are as free as the society is. The US whacks that to the margins. The media were basically handed over to private power to exercise their capacities as they choose. That’s an interpretation of freedom of expression in terms of negative freedom: the state can’t intervene to affect what the private owners decide to do. There are a few restrictions, but not much. The consequences are pretty much a control of ideas as Orwell describes, and Edward Herman and I discuss this in great detail.
How do you overcome it? One way is education; but another way is by returning to the concept of positive freedom, which means recognising that in a democratic society we put a high value on the right of citizens to have access to a wide range of opinions and beliefs. That would, in the US, mean going back to what was in effect the earliest conception of the founders of the Republic, that there should be, not so much government regulation of what is said, but rather government support for a wide variety of opinions, news-gathering and interpretation – which can be stimulated in many ways.
Government means public: in a democratic society, government ought not to be some Leviathan making decisions. There are major grassroots projects that are trying to develop a more democratic media. This is a big battle because of the enormous power of the concentrated capital that of course tries to impede this in every possible way. But it’s a battle that has been going on for a long time, and there are fundamental issues at stake, including the issues of negative and positive freedoms.
Do you have any thoughts about the impact of search algorithms and search bubbles on the individual’s attempts to find information in their attempts to subvert Big Media?
Like all of you, I use search engines all the time. For people who are sufficiently privileged, the internet is very useful; but it’s usefulness is roughly to the extent that you do have privilege. ‘Privileged’ here means education, resources, a background ability to know what to look for.
It’s like a library. Suppose you decide ‘I want to be a biologist’, and so you join the Harvard Biology Library. Everything is in there, so in principle you can become a biologist; but of course it’s useless if you don’t know what to look for, and don’t know how to interpret what you see, and so on. It’s the same with the internet. There’s a huge amount of material out there – some valuable and some not – but it takes understanding, interpretation and background even to know what to look for. That’s quite apart from the fact that the Google system, for instance, is not a neutral system. It reflects advertiser interests in determining what’s prominent and what isn’t, and you have to know how to work your way through this maze. So it’s back to education and organisation enabling you to proceed.
I should stress that as an individual, you’re pretty limited in what you can come to understand, what ideas you can develop, how to think, even. So if you’re isolated, that highly restricts your ability to have and evaluate ideas, either in becoming a creative scientist or a functioning citizen. That’s one reason why the labor movement has always been at the forefront against information suppression, with workers education programs, for example, which were once extremely influential in both the UK and the US. The decline of what sociologists call ‘secondary associations’, where people come together to search and inquire, is one of the processes of atomisation which lead to people being isolated and facing this mass of information alone. So, the net’s a valuable tool, but as with all tools, you have to be in a position to be able to use it, and that’s not so simple. It requires significant social development.
How might it be possible to make institutions less stupid?
Well, it depends on what the institution is. I mentioned two: one is the government in control of a nuclear capacity; the other is the private sector, which is pretty much controlled through rather narrow concentrations of capital. They require different approaches. With regard to the government situation, this requires developing a functioning democratic society, in which an informed citizenry would play a central role in determining policy. The public is not in favour of facing death and destruction from nuclear weapons, and in this case we know in principle how to eliminate the threat. If the public were involved in developing security policy, I think this institutional stupidity could be overcome.
There’s a thesis in international relations theory that the prime concern of states is security. But that leaves open the question: Security for whom? If you look closely, it turns out it’s not security of the population, it’s security for privileged sectors within the society – the sectors who hold state power. There’s overwhelming evidence for this, which unfortunately I don’t have time to review. So one thing to do is to come to an understanding of whose security the state is in fact protecting: it’s not your security. It can be tackled by building a functioning democratic society.
On the issue of the concentration of private power, there’s also basically a problem of democratisation. A corporation is a tyranny. It’s the purest example of a tyranny you can imagine: power resides at the top, orders are sent down stage by stage, and at the very bottom, you have the option of purchasing what it produces. The population, the so-called stakeholders in the community, have almost no role in deciding what this entity does. And these entities have been granted extraordinary powers and rights, way beyond those of the individual. But none of it is graven in stone. None of it lies in economic theory. This situation is the result of, basically, class struggle, carried out by highly class-conscious business classes over a long period, which have now established their effective domination over society in various forms. But it doesn’t have to exist, it can change. Again, that’s a matter of democratising the institutions of social, political, and economic life. Easy to say, hard to do, but I think essential.
Thursday, November 14, 2013
Chomsky: Who Owns The World?
NOAM CHOMSKY: When I was thinking about these remarks, I had two topics in mind, couldn’t decide between them—actually pretty obvious ones. One topic is, what are the most important issues that we face? The second topic is, what issues are not being treated seriously—or at all—in the quadrennial frenzy now underway called an election? But I realized that there’s no problem; it’s not a hard choice: they’re the same topic. And there are reasons for it, which are very significant in themselves. I’d like to return to that in a moment. But first a few words on the background, beginning with the announced title, "Who Owns the World?"
Actually, a good answer to this was given years ago by Adam Smith, someone we’re supposed to worship but not read. He was—a little subversive when you read him sometimes. He was referring to the most powerful country in the world in his day and, of course, the country that interested him, namely, England. And he pointed out that in England the principal architects of policy are those who own the country: the merchants and manufacturers in his day. And he said they make sure to design policy so that their own interests are most peculiarly attended to. Their interests are served by policy, however grievous the impact on others, including the people of England.
But he was an old-fashioned conservative with moral principles, so he added the victims of England, the victims of the—what he called the "savage injustice of the Europeans," particularly in India. Well, he had no illusions about the owners, so, to quote him again, "All for ourselves and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind." It was true then; it’s true now.
Britain kept its position as the dominant world power well into the 20th century despite steady decline. By the end of World War II, dominance had shifted decisively into the hands of the upstart across the sea, the United States, by far the most powerful and wealthy society in world history. Britain could only aspire to be its junior partner as the British foreign office ruefully recognized. At that point, 1945, the United States had literally half the world’s wealth, incredible security, controlled the entire Western Hemisphere, both oceans, the opposite sides of both oceans. There’s nothing—there hasn’t ever been anything like that in history.
And planners understood it. Roosevelt’s planners were meeting right through the Second World War, designing the post-war world. They were quite sophisticated about it, and their plans were pretty much implemented. They wanted to make sure that the United States would control what they called a "grand area," which would include, routinely, the entire Western Hemisphere, the entire Far East, the former British Empire, which the U.S. would be taking over, and as much of Eurasia as possible—crucially, its commercial and industrial centers in Western Europe. And within this region, they said, the United States should hold unquestioned power with military and economic supremacy, while ensuring the limitation of any exercise of sovereignty by states that might interfere with these global designs.
And those were pretty realistic plans at the time, given the enormous disparity of power. The U.S. had been by far the richest country in the world even before the Second World War, although it wasn’t—was not yet the major global actor. During the Second World War, the United States gained enormously. Industrial production almost quadrupled, got us out of depression. Meanwhile, industrial rivals were devastated or seriously weakened. So that was an unbelievable system of power.
Actually, the policies that were outlined then still hold. You can read them in government pronouncements. But the capacity to implement them has significantly declined. Actually there’s a major theme now in foreign policy discussion—you know, journals and so on. The theme is called "American decline." So, for example, in the most prestigious establishment international relations journal, Foreign Affairs, a couple of months ago, there was an issue which had on the front cover in big bold letters, "Is America Over?" question mark. That’s announcing the theme of the issue. And there is a standard corollary to this: power is shifting to the west, to China and India, the rising world powers, which are going to be the hegemonic states of the future.
Actually, I think the decline—the decline is quite real, but some serious qualifications are in order. First of all, the corollary is highly unlikely, at least in the foreseeable future. China and India are very poor countries. Just take a look at, say, the human development index of the United Nations: they’re way down there. China is around 90th. I think India is around 120th or so, last time I looked. And they have tremendous internal problems—demographic problems, extreme poverty, hopeless inequality, ecological problems. China is a great manufacturing center, but it’s actually mostly an assembly plant. So it assembles parts and components, high technology that comes from the surrounding industrial—more advanced industrial centers—Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, the United States, Europe—and it basically assembles them. So, if, say, you buy one of these i-things—you know, an iPad from China—that’s called an export from China, but the parts and components and technology come from outside. And the value added in China is minuscule. It’s been calculated. They’ll move up the technology ladder, but it’s a hard climb, India even harder. Well, so I think one should be skeptical about the corollary.
But there’s another qualification that’s more serious. The decline is real, but it’s not new. It’s been going on since 1945. In fact, it happened very quickly. In the late 1940s, there’s an event that’s known here as "the loss of China." China became independent. That’s a loss of a huge piece of the grand area of Asia. And it became a major issue in American domestic policy. Who’s responsible for the loss of China? A lot of recriminations and so on. Actually, the phrase is kind of interesting. Like, I can’t lose your computer, right? Because I don’t own it. I can lose my computer. Well, the phrase "loss of China" kind of presupposes a deeply held principle of kind of American elite consciousness: we own the world, and if some piece of it becomes independent, we’ve lost it. And that’s a terrible loss; we’ve got to do something about it. It’s never questioned, which is interesting in itself.
Well, right about the same time, around 1950, concerns developed about the loss of Southeast Asia. That’s what led the United States into the Indochina wars, the worst atrocities of the post-war period—partly lost, partly not. A very significant event in modern history was in 1965, when in Indonesia, which was the main concern—that’s the country of Southeast Asia with most of the wealth and resources—there was a military coup in Indonesia, Suharto coup. It led to an extraordinary massacre, what the New York Times called a "staggering mass slaughter." It killed hundreds of thousands of people, mostly landless peasants; destroyed the only mass political party; and opened the country up to Western exploitation. Euphoria in the West was so enormous that it couldn’t be contained. So, in the New York Times, describing the "staggering mass slaughter," it called it a "gleam of light in Asia." That was the column written by James Reston, the leading liberal thinker in the Times. And the same elsewhere—Europe, Australia. It was a fantastic event.
Years later, McGeorge Bundy, who was the national security adviser for Kennedy and Johnson, in retrospect, he pointed out that it probably would have been a good idea to end the Vietnam War at that point, to pull out. Contrary to a lot of illusions, the Vietnam War was fought primarily to ensure that an independent Vietnam would not develop successfully and become a model for other countries in the region. It would not—to borrow Henry Kissinger’s terminology speaking about Chile, we have to prevent what they called the—what he called the "virus" of independent development from spreading contagion elsewhere. That’s a critical part of American foreign policy since the Second World War—Britain, France, others to a lesser degree. And by 1965, that was over. Vietnam was—South Vietnam was virtually destroyed. Word spread to the rest of Indochina it wasn’t going to be a model for anyone, and the contagion was contained. There were—the Suharto regime made sure that Indonesia wouldn’t be infected. And pretty soon the U.S. had dictatorships in every country of the region—Marcos on the Philippines, a dictatorship in Thailand, Chun in South—Park in South Korea. It was no problem about the infection. So that would have been a good time to end the Vietnam War, he felt. Well, that’s Southeast Asia.
But the decline continues. In the last 10 years, there’s been a very important event: the loss of South America. For the first time in 500 years, the South—since the conquistadors, the South American countries have begun to move towards independence and a degree of integration. The typical structure of one of the South American countries was a tiny, very rich, Westernized elite, often white, or mostly white, and a huge mass of horrible poverty, countries separated from one another, oriented to—each oriented towards its—you know, either Europe or, more recently, the United States. Last 10 years, that’s been overcome, significantly—beginning to integrate, the prerequisite for independence, even beginning to face some of their horrendous internal problems. Now that’s the loss of South America. One sign is that the United States has been driven out of every single military base in South America. We’re trying to restore a few, but right now there are none.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, moving on to just last year, the Arab Spring is another such threat. It threatens to take that big region out of the grand area. That’s a lot more significant than Southeast Asia or South America. You go back to the 1940s, the State Department recognized that the energy resources of the Middle East are what they called "one of the greatest material prizes in world history," a spectacular source of strategic power; if we can control Middle East energy, we can control the world.
Take a look at the U.S-British coup in Iran in 1953. Very important event. Its shadows cast over the world until today. Now that was—it was a pretense that it was a part of the Cold War; it had nothing to do with the Cold War. What it had to do with was the usual fear: independent nationalism. And it wasn’t even concerned with access to oil or profits. It was concerned with control, control of the oil resources of Iran and, in fact, of the region. And that’s a theme that runs right through policy decisions. It’s not discussed much, but it’s very important to have control, exactly as State Department pointed out—advisers pointed out in the ’40s. If you can control the oil, you can control most of the world. And that goes on.
So far, the threat of the Arab Spring has been pretty well contained. In the oil dictatorships, which are the most important ones for the West, every effort to join the Arab Spring has just been crushed by force. Saudi Arabia was so extreme that when there was an effort to go out into the streets, the security presence was so enormous that people were even afraid to go out. There’s a little discussion of what goes on in Bahrain, where it’s been crushed, but eastern Saudi Arabia was much worse. The emirates totally control. So that’s OK. We managed to ensure that the threat of democracy would be smashed in the most important places.
Egypt is an interesting case. It’s an important country, not an oil producer—it is a small one. But in Egypt, the United States followed a standard operating procedure. If any of you are going into the diplomatic service, you might as well learn it. There’s a standard procedure when one of your favorite dictators gets into trouble. First, you support him as long as possible. But if it becomes really impossible—say, the army turns against him—then you send him out to pasture and get the intellectual class to issue ringing declarations about your love of democracy, and then try to restore the old system as much as possible. There’s case after case of that—Somoza in Nicaragua, Duvalier in Haiti, Marcos in the Philippines, Chun in South Korea, Mobutu in the Congo, over and over. I mean, it takes genius not to see it. And it’s exactly what was done in Egypt and what France tried to do, not quite with as much success, in Tunisia.
Well, the future is uncertain, but the threat of democracy so far is contained. And it’s a real threat. I’ll return to that. It’s also to—important to recognize that the decline over the past 50 years is, to a significant extent, self-inflicted, particularly since the '70s. I'll go back to that, too. But first let me say a couple of things about the issues that are most important today and that are being ignored or not dealt seriously—dealt with seriously in the electoral campaigns, for good reasons. So let me start with the most important issues. Now there are two of these. They’re of overwhelming significance, because the fate of the species depends on them. One is environmental disaster, and the other is nuclear war.
I’m not going to take much time reviewing the threats of environmental disaster. Actually, they’re on the front pages almost daily. So, for example, last week the New York Times had a front-page story with the headline, "Ending Its Summer Melt, Arctic Sea Ice Sets a New Low That Leads to Warnings." The melting this summer was far faster than was predicted by the sophisticated computer models and the most recent United Nations report. It’s now predicted that the summer ice might be gone by 2020. It was assumed before that it may be 2050. They quoted scientists who said this is "a prime example of the built-in conservatism of [our] climate forecasts. As dire [the warnings are] about the long-term consequences of heat-trapping emissions ... many of [us] fear [that] they may still be underestimating the speed and severity of the impending changes." Actually, there’s a climate change study program at MIT, where I am. They’ve been warning about this for years, and repeatedly have been proven right.
The Times report discusses, briefly, the severe attack—the severe impact of all of this on the global climate, and it adds, "But governments have not responded to the change with any greater urgency about limiting greenhouse emissions. To the contrary, their main response has been to plan for exploitation of newly accessible minerals in the Arctic, including drilling for more oil." That is, to accelerate the catastrophe. It’s quite interesting. It demonstrates an extraordinary willingness to sacrifice the lives of our children and grandchildren for short-term gain, or perhaps an equally remarkable willingness to shut our eyes so as not to see impending peril—these things you sometimes find with young infants: something looks dangerous, close my eyes and won’t look at it.
Well, there is another possibility. I mean, maybe humans are somehow trying to fulfill a prediction of great American biologist who died recently, Ernst Mayr. He argued years ago that intelligence seems to be a lethal mutation. He—and he had some pretty good evidence. There’s a notion of biological success, which is how many of you are there around. You know, that’s biological success. And he pointed out that if you look at the tens of billions of species in human—in world history, the ones that are very successful are the ones that mutate very quickly, like bacteria, or the ones that have a fixed ecological niche, like beetles. They seem to make out fine. But as you move up the scale of what we call intelligence, success declines steadily. When you get up to mammals, it’s very low. There are very few of them around. I mean, there’s a lot of cows; it’s only because we domesticate them. When you get to humans, it’s the same. 'Til very recently, much too recent a time to show up in any evolutionary accounting, humans were very scattered. There were plenty of other hominids, but they disappeared, probably because humans exterminated them, but nobody knows for sure. Anyhow, maybe we're trying to show that humans just fit into the general pattern. We can exterminate ourselves, too, the rest of the world with us, and we’re hell bent on it right now.
Well, let’s turn to the elections. Both political parties demand that we make the problem worse. In 2008, both party platforms devoted some space to how the government should address climate change. Today, the—in the Republican platform, the issue has essentially disappeared. But the platform does demand that Congress take quick action to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases. So let’s make sure to make it worse. And it also demands that we open the Alaska’s Arctic Refuge to drilling—I’m quoting now—in order to take "advantage of all of our American God-given resources." You can’t disobey God, after all. On environmental policy, the program says, "We must restore scientific integrity to our public research institutions and remove political incentives from publicly funded research." All that’s a code word for climate science: stop funding climate science. Romney himself says there’s no scientific consensus, so we should support more debate and investigation within the scientific community, but no action, except to act to make the problems worse.
Well, what about the Democrats? They concede that there’s a problem and advocate that we should work toward an agreement to set emissions limits in unison with other emerging powers. But that’s it. No action. And, in fact, as Obama has emphasized, we have to work hard to gain what he calls a hundred years of energy independence by exploiting domestic or Canadian resources by fracking or other elaborate technologies. Doesn’t ask what the world would look like in a hundred years. So, there are differences. The differences are basically about how enthusiastically the lemmings should march towards the cliff.
Let’s turn to the second major issue: nuclear war. That’s also on the front pages daily, but in a way that would seem outlandish to some independent observer viewing what’s going on on earth, and in fact does seem outlandish to a considerable majority of the countries of the world. Now, the current threat, not for the first time, is in the Middle East, focusing on Iran. The general picture in the West is very clear: it’s far too dangerous to allow Iran to reach what’s called "nuclear capability." That is, the capability enjoyed by many powers, dozens of them, to produce nuclear weapons if they decide to do so. As to whether they’ve decided, U.S. intelligence says it doesn’t know. The International Atomic Energy Agency just produced its most recent report a couple weeks ago, and it concludes—I’ll quote it: it cannot demonstrate "the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran." Now, that is, it can’t demonstrate something which cannot—a condition that can’t be satisfied. There’s no way to demonstrate the absence of the work—that’s convenient—therefore Iran must be denied the right to enrich uranium, that’s guaranteed to every power that signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Well, that’s the picture in the West. That’s not the picture in the rest of the world. As you know, I’m sure, there was just a meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement—that’s large majority of the countries in the world and representing most of the world’s population—a meeting in Tehran. And once again, not for the first time, they issued a ringing declaration of support for Iran’s right to enrich uranium, right that every country has that signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Pretty much the same is true in the Arab world. It’s interesting. I’ll return to that in a moment.
There is a basic reason for the concern. It was expressed succinctly by General Lee Butler. He’s the former head of the U.S. Strategic Command, which controls nuclear weapons and nuclear strategy. He wrote that "It is dangerous in the extreme that in the cauldron of animosities that we call the Middle East," one nation should arm itself with nuclear weapons, which may inspire other nations to do so. General Butler, however, was not referring to Iran; he was referring to Israel, the country that ranks highest in European polls as the most dangerous country in the world—right above Iran—and, not incidentally, in the Arab world, where the public regard the United States as the second most dangerous country, right after Israel. In the Arab world, Iran, though disliked, ranks far lower as a threat—among the populations, that is, not the dictatorships.
With regard to Iranian nuclear weapons, nobody wants them to have them, but in many polls, majorities, sometimes considerable majorities, have said that the region would be more secure if Iran had nuclear weapons, to balance those of their major threats. Now, there’s a lot of commentary in the Western media, in journals, about Arab attitudes towards Iran. And what you read, commonly, is that the Arabs want decisive action against Iran, which is true of the dictators. It’s not true of the populations. But who cares about the populations, what are called, disparagingly, the Arab street? We don’t care about them. Now that’s a reflection of the extremely deep contempt for democracy among Western elites—I mean, so deep that it can’t be perceived. You know, it’s just kind of like reflexive. The study of popular attitudes in the Arab world—and there is very extensive study by Western polling agencies—it reveals very quickly why the U.S. and its allies are so concerned about the threat of democracy and are doing what they can to prevent it. Just take—they certainly don’t want attitudes like those I just indicated to become policy, while of course issuing rousing statements about our passionate dedication to democracy. Those are relayed obediently by reporters and commentators.
Well, unlike Iran, Israel refuses to allow inspections at all, refuses to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty, has hundreds of nuclear weapons, has advanced delivery systems. Also, it has a long record of violence and repression. It has annexed and settled conquered territories illegally, in violation of Security Council orders, and many acts of aggression—five times against Lebanon alone, no credible pretext. In the New York Times yesterday, you can read that the Golan Heights are disputed territory, the Syrian Golan Heights. There is a U.N. Security Council resolution, 497, which is unanimous, declaring Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights illegal and demanding that it be rescinded. And in fact, it’s disputed only in Israel and in the New York Times, which in fact is reflecting actual U.S. policy, not formal U.S. policy.
Iran has a record of aggression. too. In the last several hundred years, it has invaded and conquered a couple of Arab islands. Now that was under the Shah, U.S.-imposed dictator with U.S. support. That’s actually the only case in several hundred years.
Meanwhile, the severe threats of attack continue—you’ve just been hearing them at the U.N.—from the United States, but particularly Israel. Now there is a reaction to this at the highest level in the United States. Leon Panetta, secretary of defense, he said that we don’t want to attack Iran, we hope that Israel won’t attack Iran, but Israel is a sovereign country, and they have to make their own decisions about what they’ll do. You might ask what the reaction would be if you reverse the cast of characters. And those of you who have antiquarian interests might remember that there’s a document called the United Nations Charter, the foundation of modern international law, which bars the threat or use of force in international affairs. Now, there are two rogue states—United States and Israel—for whom—which regard the Charter and international law as just a boring irrelevance, so, do what they like. And that’s accepted.
Well, these are not just words; there is an ongoing war, includes terrorism, assassination of nuclear scientists, includes economic war. U.S. threats—not international ones—U.S. threats have cut Iran out of the international financial system. Western military analysts identify what they call "weapons of finance" as acts of war that justify violent response—when they’re directed against us, that is. Cutting Iran out of global financial markets is different.
The United States is openly carrying out extensive cyber war against Iran. That’s praised. The Pentagon regards cyber war as an equivalent to an armed attack, which justifies military response, but that’s of course when it’s directed against us. The leading liberal figure in the State Department, Harold Koh—he’s the top State Department legal adviser—he says that cyber war is an act of war if it results in significant destruction—like the attacks against Iranian nuclear facilities. And such acts, he says, justify force in self-defense. But, of course, he means only attacks against the United States or its clients.
Well, Israel’s lethal armory, which is enormous, includes advanced submarines, recently provided by Germany. These are capable of carrying Israel’s nuclear-tipped missiles, and these are sure to be deployed in the Persian Gulf or nearby if Israel proceeds with its plans to bomb Iran or, more likely, I suspect, to try to set up conditions in which the United States will do so. And the United States, of course, has a vast array of nuclear weapons all over the world, but surrounding the region, from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, including enough firepower in the Persian Gulf to destroy most of the world.
Another story that’s in the news right now is the Israeli bombing of the Iraqi reactor in Osirak, which is suggested as a model for Israeli bombing of Iran. It’s rarely mentioned, however, that the bombing of the Osirak reactor didn’t end Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons program. It initiated it. There was no program before it. And the Osirak reactor was not capable of producing uranium for nuclear weapons. But, of course, after the bombings, Saddam immediately turned to developing a nuclear weapons program. And if Iran is bombed, it’s almost certain to proceed just as Saddam Hussein did after the Osirak bombing.
NOAM CHOMSKY: In a few weeks, we’ll be commemorating the 50th anniversary of "the most dangerous moment in human history." Now, those are the words of historian, Kennedy adviser, Arthur Schlesinger. He was referring, of course, to the October 1962 missile crisis, "the most dangerous moment in human history." Others agree. Now, at that time, Kennedy raised the nuclear alert to the second-highest level, just short of launching weapons. He authorized NATO aircraft, with Turkish or other pilots, to take off, fly to Moscow and drop bombs, setting off a likely nuclear conflagration.
At the peak of the missile crisis, Kennedy estimated the probability of nuclear war at perhaps 50 percent. It’s a war that would destroy the Northern Hemisphere, President Eisenhower had warned. And facing that risk, Kennedy refused to agree publicly to an offer by Kruschev to end the crisis by simultaneous withdrawal of Russian missiles from Cuba and U.S. missiles from Turkey. These were obsolete missiles. They were already being replaced by invulnerable Polaris submarines. But it was felt necessary to firmly establish the principle that Russia has no right to have any offensive weapons anywhere beyond the borders of the U.S.S.R., even to defend an ally against U.S. attack. That’s now recognized to be the prime reason for deploying missiles there, and actually a plausible one. Meanwhile, the United States must retain the right to have them all over the world, targeting Russia or China or any other enemy. In fact, in 1962, the United—we just recently learned, the United States had just secretly deployed nuclear missiles to Okinawa aimed at China. That was a moment of elevated regional tensions. All of that is very consistent with grand area conceptions, the ones I mentioned that were developed by Roosevelt’s planners.
Well, fortunately, in 1962, Kruschev backed down. But the world can’t be assured of such sanity forever. And particularly threatening, in my view, is that intellectual opinion, and even scholarship, hail Kennedy’s behavior as his finest hour. My own view is it’s one of the worst moments in history. Inability to face the truth about ourselves is all too common a feature of the intellectual culture, also personal life, has ominous implications.
Well, 10 years later, in 1973, during the Israel-Arab War, Henry Kissinger called a high-level nuclear alert. The purpose was to warn the Russians to keep hands off while he was—so we’ve recently learned—he was secretly informing Israel that they were authorized to violate the ceasefire that had been imposed jointly by the U.S. and Russia. When Reagan came into office a couple of years later, the United States launched operations probing Russian defenses, flying in to Russia to probe defenses, and simulating air and naval attacks, meanwhile placing Pershing missiles in Germany that had a five-minute flight time to Russian targets. They were providing what the CIA called a "super-sudden first strike" capability. The Russians, not surprisingly, were deeply concerned. Actually, that led to a major war scare in 1983. There have been hundreds of cases when human intervention aborted a first-strike launch just minutes before launch. Now, that’s after automated systems gave false alarms. We don’t have Russian records, but there’s no doubt that their systems are far more accident-prone. Actually, it’s a near miracle that nuclear war has been avoided so far.
Meanwhile, India and Pakistan have come close to nuclear war several times, and the crises that led to that, especially Kashmir, remain. Both India and Pakistan have refused to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty, along with Israel, and both of them have received U.S. support for development of their nuclear weapons programs, actually, until today, in the case of India, which is now a U.S. ally.
War threats in the Middle East, which could become reality very soon, once again escalate the dangers. Well, fortunately, there’s a way out of this, a simple way. There’s a way to mitigate, maybe end, whatever threat Iran is alleged to pose. Very simple: move towards establishing a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East. Now, the opportunity is coming again this December. There’s an international conference scheduled to deal with this proposal. It has overwhelming international support, including, incidentally, a majority of the population in Israel. That’s fortunately. Unfortunately, it’s blocked by the United States and Israel. A couple of days ago, Israel announced that it’s not going to participate, and it won’t consider the matter until there’s a general regional peace. Obama takes the same stand. He also insists that any agreement must exclude Israel and even must exclude calls for other nations—meaning the U.S.—to provide information about Israeli nuclear activities.
The United States and Israel can delay regional peace indefinitely. They’ve been doing that for 35 years on Israel-Palestine, virtual international isolation. It’s a long, important story that I don’t have time to go into here. So, therefore, there’s no hope for an easy way to end what the West regards as the most severe current crisis—no way unless there’s large-scale public pressure. But there can’t be large-scale public pressure unless people at least know about it. And the media have done a stellar job in averting that danger: nothing reported about the conference or about any of the background, no discussion, apart from specialist arms control journals where you can read about it. So, that blocks the easy way to end the worst existing crisis, unless people somehow find a way to break through this.
Actually, a good answer to this was given years ago by Adam Smith, someone we’re supposed to worship but not read. He was—a little subversive when you read him sometimes. He was referring to the most powerful country in the world in his day and, of course, the country that interested him, namely, England. And he pointed out that in England the principal architects of policy are those who own the country: the merchants and manufacturers in his day. And he said they make sure to design policy so that their own interests are most peculiarly attended to. Their interests are served by policy, however grievous the impact on others, including the people of England.
But he was an old-fashioned conservative with moral principles, so he added the victims of England, the victims of the—what he called the "savage injustice of the Europeans," particularly in India. Well, he had no illusions about the owners, so, to quote him again, "All for ourselves and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind." It was true then; it’s true now.
Britain kept its position as the dominant world power well into the 20th century despite steady decline. By the end of World War II, dominance had shifted decisively into the hands of the upstart across the sea, the United States, by far the most powerful and wealthy society in world history. Britain could only aspire to be its junior partner as the British foreign office ruefully recognized. At that point, 1945, the United States had literally half the world’s wealth, incredible security, controlled the entire Western Hemisphere, both oceans, the opposite sides of both oceans. There’s nothing—there hasn’t ever been anything like that in history.
And planners understood it. Roosevelt’s planners were meeting right through the Second World War, designing the post-war world. They were quite sophisticated about it, and their plans were pretty much implemented. They wanted to make sure that the United States would control what they called a "grand area," which would include, routinely, the entire Western Hemisphere, the entire Far East, the former British Empire, which the U.S. would be taking over, and as much of Eurasia as possible—crucially, its commercial and industrial centers in Western Europe. And within this region, they said, the United States should hold unquestioned power with military and economic supremacy, while ensuring the limitation of any exercise of sovereignty by states that might interfere with these global designs.
And those were pretty realistic plans at the time, given the enormous disparity of power. The U.S. had been by far the richest country in the world even before the Second World War, although it wasn’t—was not yet the major global actor. During the Second World War, the United States gained enormously. Industrial production almost quadrupled, got us out of depression. Meanwhile, industrial rivals were devastated or seriously weakened. So that was an unbelievable system of power.
Actually, the policies that were outlined then still hold. You can read them in government pronouncements. But the capacity to implement them has significantly declined. Actually there’s a major theme now in foreign policy discussion—you know, journals and so on. The theme is called "American decline." So, for example, in the most prestigious establishment international relations journal, Foreign Affairs, a couple of months ago, there was an issue which had on the front cover in big bold letters, "Is America Over?" question mark. That’s announcing the theme of the issue. And there is a standard corollary to this: power is shifting to the west, to China and India, the rising world powers, which are going to be the hegemonic states of the future.
Actually, I think the decline—the decline is quite real, but some serious qualifications are in order. First of all, the corollary is highly unlikely, at least in the foreseeable future. China and India are very poor countries. Just take a look at, say, the human development index of the United Nations: they’re way down there. China is around 90th. I think India is around 120th or so, last time I looked. And they have tremendous internal problems—demographic problems, extreme poverty, hopeless inequality, ecological problems. China is a great manufacturing center, but it’s actually mostly an assembly plant. So it assembles parts and components, high technology that comes from the surrounding industrial—more advanced industrial centers—Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, the United States, Europe—and it basically assembles them. So, if, say, you buy one of these i-things—you know, an iPad from China—that’s called an export from China, but the parts and components and technology come from outside. And the value added in China is minuscule. It’s been calculated. They’ll move up the technology ladder, but it’s a hard climb, India even harder. Well, so I think one should be skeptical about the corollary.
But there’s another qualification that’s more serious. The decline is real, but it’s not new. It’s been going on since 1945. In fact, it happened very quickly. In the late 1940s, there’s an event that’s known here as "the loss of China." China became independent. That’s a loss of a huge piece of the grand area of Asia. And it became a major issue in American domestic policy. Who’s responsible for the loss of China? A lot of recriminations and so on. Actually, the phrase is kind of interesting. Like, I can’t lose your computer, right? Because I don’t own it. I can lose my computer. Well, the phrase "loss of China" kind of presupposes a deeply held principle of kind of American elite consciousness: we own the world, and if some piece of it becomes independent, we’ve lost it. And that’s a terrible loss; we’ve got to do something about it. It’s never questioned, which is interesting in itself.
Well, right about the same time, around 1950, concerns developed about the loss of Southeast Asia. That’s what led the United States into the Indochina wars, the worst atrocities of the post-war period—partly lost, partly not. A very significant event in modern history was in 1965, when in Indonesia, which was the main concern—that’s the country of Southeast Asia with most of the wealth and resources—there was a military coup in Indonesia, Suharto coup. It led to an extraordinary massacre, what the New York Times called a "staggering mass slaughter." It killed hundreds of thousands of people, mostly landless peasants; destroyed the only mass political party; and opened the country up to Western exploitation. Euphoria in the West was so enormous that it couldn’t be contained. So, in the New York Times, describing the "staggering mass slaughter," it called it a "gleam of light in Asia." That was the column written by James Reston, the leading liberal thinker in the Times. And the same elsewhere—Europe, Australia. It was a fantastic event.
Years later, McGeorge Bundy, who was the national security adviser for Kennedy and Johnson, in retrospect, he pointed out that it probably would have been a good idea to end the Vietnam War at that point, to pull out. Contrary to a lot of illusions, the Vietnam War was fought primarily to ensure that an independent Vietnam would not develop successfully and become a model for other countries in the region. It would not—to borrow Henry Kissinger’s terminology speaking about Chile, we have to prevent what they called the—what he called the "virus" of independent development from spreading contagion elsewhere. That’s a critical part of American foreign policy since the Second World War—Britain, France, others to a lesser degree. And by 1965, that was over. Vietnam was—South Vietnam was virtually destroyed. Word spread to the rest of Indochina it wasn’t going to be a model for anyone, and the contagion was contained. There were—the Suharto regime made sure that Indonesia wouldn’t be infected. And pretty soon the U.S. had dictatorships in every country of the region—Marcos on the Philippines, a dictatorship in Thailand, Chun in South—Park in South Korea. It was no problem about the infection. So that would have been a good time to end the Vietnam War, he felt. Well, that’s Southeast Asia.
But the decline continues. In the last 10 years, there’s been a very important event: the loss of South America. For the first time in 500 years, the South—since the conquistadors, the South American countries have begun to move towards independence and a degree of integration. The typical structure of one of the South American countries was a tiny, very rich, Westernized elite, often white, or mostly white, and a huge mass of horrible poverty, countries separated from one another, oriented to—each oriented towards its—you know, either Europe or, more recently, the United States. Last 10 years, that’s been overcome, significantly—beginning to integrate, the prerequisite for independence, even beginning to face some of their horrendous internal problems. Now that’s the loss of South America. One sign is that the United States has been driven out of every single military base in South America. We’re trying to restore a few, but right now there are none.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, moving on to just last year, the Arab Spring is another such threat. It threatens to take that big region out of the grand area. That’s a lot more significant than Southeast Asia or South America. You go back to the 1940s, the State Department recognized that the energy resources of the Middle East are what they called "one of the greatest material prizes in world history," a spectacular source of strategic power; if we can control Middle East energy, we can control the world.
Take a look at the U.S-British coup in Iran in 1953. Very important event. Its shadows cast over the world until today. Now that was—it was a pretense that it was a part of the Cold War; it had nothing to do with the Cold War. What it had to do with was the usual fear: independent nationalism. And it wasn’t even concerned with access to oil or profits. It was concerned with control, control of the oil resources of Iran and, in fact, of the region. And that’s a theme that runs right through policy decisions. It’s not discussed much, but it’s very important to have control, exactly as State Department pointed out—advisers pointed out in the ’40s. If you can control the oil, you can control most of the world. And that goes on.
So far, the threat of the Arab Spring has been pretty well contained. In the oil dictatorships, which are the most important ones for the West, every effort to join the Arab Spring has just been crushed by force. Saudi Arabia was so extreme that when there was an effort to go out into the streets, the security presence was so enormous that people were even afraid to go out. There’s a little discussion of what goes on in Bahrain, where it’s been crushed, but eastern Saudi Arabia was much worse. The emirates totally control. So that’s OK. We managed to ensure that the threat of democracy would be smashed in the most important places.
Egypt is an interesting case. It’s an important country, not an oil producer—it is a small one. But in Egypt, the United States followed a standard operating procedure. If any of you are going into the diplomatic service, you might as well learn it. There’s a standard procedure when one of your favorite dictators gets into trouble. First, you support him as long as possible. But if it becomes really impossible—say, the army turns against him—then you send him out to pasture and get the intellectual class to issue ringing declarations about your love of democracy, and then try to restore the old system as much as possible. There’s case after case of that—Somoza in Nicaragua, Duvalier in Haiti, Marcos in the Philippines, Chun in South Korea, Mobutu in the Congo, over and over. I mean, it takes genius not to see it. And it’s exactly what was done in Egypt and what France tried to do, not quite with as much success, in Tunisia.
Well, the future is uncertain, but the threat of democracy so far is contained. And it’s a real threat. I’ll return to that. It’s also to—important to recognize that the decline over the past 50 years is, to a significant extent, self-inflicted, particularly since the '70s. I'll go back to that, too. But first let me say a couple of things about the issues that are most important today and that are being ignored or not dealt seriously—dealt with seriously in the electoral campaigns, for good reasons. So let me start with the most important issues. Now there are two of these. They’re of overwhelming significance, because the fate of the species depends on them. One is environmental disaster, and the other is nuclear war.
I’m not going to take much time reviewing the threats of environmental disaster. Actually, they’re on the front pages almost daily. So, for example, last week the New York Times had a front-page story with the headline, "Ending Its Summer Melt, Arctic Sea Ice Sets a New Low That Leads to Warnings." The melting this summer was far faster than was predicted by the sophisticated computer models and the most recent United Nations report. It’s now predicted that the summer ice might be gone by 2020. It was assumed before that it may be 2050. They quoted scientists who said this is "a prime example of the built-in conservatism of [our] climate forecasts. As dire [the warnings are] about the long-term consequences of heat-trapping emissions ... many of [us] fear [that] they may still be underestimating the speed and severity of the impending changes." Actually, there’s a climate change study program at MIT, where I am. They’ve been warning about this for years, and repeatedly have been proven right.
The Times report discusses, briefly, the severe attack—the severe impact of all of this on the global climate, and it adds, "But governments have not responded to the change with any greater urgency about limiting greenhouse emissions. To the contrary, their main response has been to plan for exploitation of newly accessible minerals in the Arctic, including drilling for more oil." That is, to accelerate the catastrophe. It’s quite interesting. It demonstrates an extraordinary willingness to sacrifice the lives of our children and grandchildren for short-term gain, or perhaps an equally remarkable willingness to shut our eyes so as not to see impending peril—these things you sometimes find with young infants: something looks dangerous, close my eyes and won’t look at it.
Well, there is another possibility. I mean, maybe humans are somehow trying to fulfill a prediction of great American biologist who died recently, Ernst Mayr. He argued years ago that intelligence seems to be a lethal mutation. He—and he had some pretty good evidence. There’s a notion of biological success, which is how many of you are there around. You know, that’s biological success. And he pointed out that if you look at the tens of billions of species in human—in world history, the ones that are very successful are the ones that mutate very quickly, like bacteria, or the ones that have a fixed ecological niche, like beetles. They seem to make out fine. But as you move up the scale of what we call intelligence, success declines steadily. When you get up to mammals, it’s very low. There are very few of them around. I mean, there’s a lot of cows; it’s only because we domesticate them. When you get to humans, it’s the same. 'Til very recently, much too recent a time to show up in any evolutionary accounting, humans were very scattered. There were plenty of other hominids, but they disappeared, probably because humans exterminated them, but nobody knows for sure. Anyhow, maybe we're trying to show that humans just fit into the general pattern. We can exterminate ourselves, too, the rest of the world with us, and we’re hell bent on it right now.
Well, let’s turn to the elections. Both political parties demand that we make the problem worse. In 2008, both party platforms devoted some space to how the government should address climate change. Today, the—in the Republican platform, the issue has essentially disappeared. But the platform does demand that Congress take quick action to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases. So let’s make sure to make it worse. And it also demands that we open the Alaska’s Arctic Refuge to drilling—I’m quoting now—in order to take "advantage of all of our American God-given resources." You can’t disobey God, after all. On environmental policy, the program says, "We must restore scientific integrity to our public research institutions and remove political incentives from publicly funded research." All that’s a code word for climate science: stop funding climate science. Romney himself says there’s no scientific consensus, so we should support more debate and investigation within the scientific community, but no action, except to act to make the problems worse.
Well, what about the Democrats? They concede that there’s a problem and advocate that we should work toward an agreement to set emissions limits in unison with other emerging powers. But that’s it. No action. And, in fact, as Obama has emphasized, we have to work hard to gain what he calls a hundred years of energy independence by exploiting domestic or Canadian resources by fracking or other elaborate technologies. Doesn’t ask what the world would look like in a hundred years. So, there are differences. The differences are basically about how enthusiastically the lemmings should march towards the cliff.
Let’s turn to the second major issue: nuclear war. That’s also on the front pages daily, but in a way that would seem outlandish to some independent observer viewing what’s going on on earth, and in fact does seem outlandish to a considerable majority of the countries of the world. Now, the current threat, not for the first time, is in the Middle East, focusing on Iran. The general picture in the West is very clear: it’s far too dangerous to allow Iran to reach what’s called "nuclear capability." That is, the capability enjoyed by many powers, dozens of them, to produce nuclear weapons if they decide to do so. As to whether they’ve decided, U.S. intelligence says it doesn’t know. The International Atomic Energy Agency just produced its most recent report a couple weeks ago, and it concludes—I’ll quote it: it cannot demonstrate "the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran." Now, that is, it can’t demonstrate something which cannot—a condition that can’t be satisfied. There’s no way to demonstrate the absence of the work—that’s convenient—therefore Iran must be denied the right to enrich uranium, that’s guaranteed to every power that signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Well, that’s the picture in the West. That’s not the picture in the rest of the world. As you know, I’m sure, there was just a meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement—that’s large majority of the countries in the world and representing most of the world’s population—a meeting in Tehran. And once again, not for the first time, they issued a ringing declaration of support for Iran’s right to enrich uranium, right that every country has that signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Pretty much the same is true in the Arab world. It’s interesting. I’ll return to that in a moment.
There is a basic reason for the concern. It was expressed succinctly by General Lee Butler. He’s the former head of the U.S. Strategic Command, which controls nuclear weapons and nuclear strategy. He wrote that "It is dangerous in the extreme that in the cauldron of animosities that we call the Middle East," one nation should arm itself with nuclear weapons, which may inspire other nations to do so. General Butler, however, was not referring to Iran; he was referring to Israel, the country that ranks highest in European polls as the most dangerous country in the world—right above Iran—and, not incidentally, in the Arab world, where the public regard the United States as the second most dangerous country, right after Israel. In the Arab world, Iran, though disliked, ranks far lower as a threat—among the populations, that is, not the dictatorships.
With regard to Iranian nuclear weapons, nobody wants them to have them, but in many polls, majorities, sometimes considerable majorities, have said that the region would be more secure if Iran had nuclear weapons, to balance those of their major threats. Now, there’s a lot of commentary in the Western media, in journals, about Arab attitudes towards Iran. And what you read, commonly, is that the Arabs want decisive action against Iran, which is true of the dictators. It’s not true of the populations. But who cares about the populations, what are called, disparagingly, the Arab street? We don’t care about them. Now that’s a reflection of the extremely deep contempt for democracy among Western elites—I mean, so deep that it can’t be perceived. You know, it’s just kind of like reflexive. The study of popular attitudes in the Arab world—and there is very extensive study by Western polling agencies—it reveals very quickly why the U.S. and its allies are so concerned about the threat of democracy and are doing what they can to prevent it. Just take—they certainly don’t want attitudes like those I just indicated to become policy, while of course issuing rousing statements about our passionate dedication to democracy. Those are relayed obediently by reporters and commentators.
Well, unlike Iran, Israel refuses to allow inspections at all, refuses to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty, has hundreds of nuclear weapons, has advanced delivery systems. Also, it has a long record of violence and repression. It has annexed and settled conquered territories illegally, in violation of Security Council orders, and many acts of aggression—five times against Lebanon alone, no credible pretext. In the New York Times yesterday, you can read that the Golan Heights are disputed territory, the Syrian Golan Heights. There is a U.N. Security Council resolution, 497, which is unanimous, declaring Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights illegal and demanding that it be rescinded. And in fact, it’s disputed only in Israel and in the New York Times, which in fact is reflecting actual U.S. policy, not formal U.S. policy.
Iran has a record of aggression. too. In the last several hundred years, it has invaded and conquered a couple of Arab islands. Now that was under the Shah, U.S.-imposed dictator with U.S. support. That’s actually the only case in several hundred years.
Meanwhile, the severe threats of attack continue—you’ve just been hearing them at the U.N.—from the United States, but particularly Israel. Now there is a reaction to this at the highest level in the United States. Leon Panetta, secretary of defense, he said that we don’t want to attack Iran, we hope that Israel won’t attack Iran, but Israel is a sovereign country, and they have to make their own decisions about what they’ll do. You might ask what the reaction would be if you reverse the cast of characters. And those of you who have antiquarian interests might remember that there’s a document called the United Nations Charter, the foundation of modern international law, which bars the threat or use of force in international affairs. Now, there are two rogue states—United States and Israel—for whom—which regard the Charter and international law as just a boring irrelevance, so, do what they like. And that’s accepted.
Well, these are not just words; there is an ongoing war, includes terrorism, assassination of nuclear scientists, includes economic war. U.S. threats—not international ones—U.S. threats have cut Iran out of the international financial system. Western military analysts identify what they call "weapons of finance" as acts of war that justify violent response—when they’re directed against us, that is. Cutting Iran out of global financial markets is different.
The United States is openly carrying out extensive cyber war against Iran. That’s praised. The Pentagon regards cyber war as an equivalent to an armed attack, which justifies military response, but that’s of course when it’s directed against us. The leading liberal figure in the State Department, Harold Koh—he’s the top State Department legal adviser—he says that cyber war is an act of war if it results in significant destruction—like the attacks against Iranian nuclear facilities. And such acts, he says, justify force in self-defense. But, of course, he means only attacks against the United States or its clients.
Well, Israel’s lethal armory, which is enormous, includes advanced submarines, recently provided by Germany. These are capable of carrying Israel’s nuclear-tipped missiles, and these are sure to be deployed in the Persian Gulf or nearby if Israel proceeds with its plans to bomb Iran or, more likely, I suspect, to try to set up conditions in which the United States will do so. And the United States, of course, has a vast array of nuclear weapons all over the world, but surrounding the region, from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, including enough firepower in the Persian Gulf to destroy most of the world.
Another story that’s in the news right now is the Israeli bombing of the Iraqi reactor in Osirak, which is suggested as a model for Israeli bombing of Iran. It’s rarely mentioned, however, that the bombing of the Osirak reactor didn’t end Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons program. It initiated it. There was no program before it. And the Osirak reactor was not capable of producing uranium for nuclear weapons. But, of course, after the bombings, Saddam immediately turned to developing a nuclear weapons program. And if Iran is bombed, it’s almost certain to proceed just as Saddam Hussein did after the Osirak bombing.
NOAM CHOMSKY: In a few weeks, we’ll be commemorating the 50th anniversary of "the most dangerous moment in human history." Now, those are the words of historian, Kennedy adviser, Arthur Schlesinger. He was referring, of course, to the October 1962 missile crisis, "the most dangerous moment in human history." Others agree. Now, at that time, Kennedy raised the nuclear alert to the second-highest level, just short of launching weapons. He authorized NATO aircraft, with Turkish or other pilots, to take off, fly to Moscow and drop bombs, setting off a likely nuclear conflagration.
At the peak of the missile crisis, Kennedy estimated the probability of nuclear war at perhaps 50 percent. It’s a war that would destroy the Northern Hemisphere, President Eisenhower had warned. And facing that risk, Kennedy refused to agree publicly to an offer by Kruschev to end the crisis by simultaneous withdrawal of Russian missiles from Cuba and U.S. missiles from Turkey. These were obsolete missiles. They were already being replaced by invulnerable Polaris submarines. But it was felt necessary to firmly establish the principle that Russia has no right to have any offensive weapons anywhere beyond the borders of the U.S.S.R., even to defend an ally against U.S. attack. That’s now recognized to be the prime reason for deploying missiles there, and actually a plausible one. Meanwhile, the United States must retain the right to have them all over the world, targeting Russia or China or any other enemy. In fact, in 1962, the United—we just recently learned, the United States had just secretly deployed nuclear missiles to Okinawa aimed at China. That was a moment of elevated regional tensions. All of that is very consistent with grand area conceptions, the ones I mentioned that were developed by Roosevelt’s planners.
Well, fortunately, in 1962, Kruschev backed down. But the world can’t be assured of such sanity forever. And particularly threatening, in my view, is that intellectual opinion, and even scholarship, hail Kennedy’s behavior as his finest hour. My own view is it’s one of the worst moments in history. Inability to face the truth about ourselves is all too common a feature of the intellectual culture, also personal life, has ominous implications.
Well, 10 years later, in 1973, during the Israel-Arab War, Henry Kissinger called a high-level nuclear alert. The purpose was to warn the Russians to keep hands off while he was—so we’ve recently learned—he was secretly informing Israel that they were authorized to violate the ceasefire that had been imposed jointly by the U.S. and Russia. When Reagan came into office a couple of years later, the United States launched operations probing Russian defenses, flying in to Russia to probe defenses, and simulating air and naval attacks, meanwhile placing Pershing missiles in Germany that had a five-minute flight time to Russian targets. They were providing what the CIA called a "super-sudden first strike" capability. The Russians, not surprisingly, were deeply concerned. Actually, that led to a major war scare in 1983. There have been hundreds of cases when human intervention aborted a first-strike launch just minutes before launch. Now, that’s after automated systems gave false alarms. We don’t have Russian records, but there’s no doubt that their systems are far more accident-prone. Actually, it’s a near miracle that nuclear war has been avoided so far.
Meanwhile, India and Pakistan have come close to nuclear war several times, and the crises that led to that, especially Kashmir, remain. Both India and Pakistan have refused to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty, along with Israel, and both of them have received U.S. support for development of their nuclear weapons programs, actually, until today, in the case of India, which is now a U.S. ally.
War threats in the Middle East, which could become reality very soon, once again escalate the dangers. Well, fortunately, there’s a way out of this, a simple way. There’s a way to mitigate, maybe end, whatever threat Iran is alleged to pose. Very simple: move towards establishing a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East. Now, the opportunity is coming again this December. There’s an international conference scheduled to deal with this proposal. It has overwhelming international support, including, incidentally, a majority of the population in Israel. That’s fortunately. Unfortunately, it’s blocked by the United States and Israel. A couple of days ago, Israel announced that it’s not going to participate, and it won’t consider the matter until there’s a general regional peace. Obama takes the same stand. He also insists that any agreement must exclude Israel and even must exclude calls for other nations—meaning the U.S.—to provide information about Israeli nuclear activities.
The United States and Israel can delay regional peace indefinitely. They’ve been doing that for 35 years on Israel-Palestine, virtual international isolation. It’s a long, important story that I don’t have time to go into here. So, therefore, there’s no hope for an easy way to end what the West regards as the most severe current crisis—no way unless there’s large-scale public pressure. But there can’t be large-scale public pressure unless people at least know about it. And the media have done a stellar job in averting that danger: nothing reported about the conference or about any of the background, no discussion, apart from specialist arms control journals where you can read about it. So, that blocks the easy way to end the worst existing crisis, unless people somehow find a way to break through this.
Thursday, October 3, 2013
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
Thursday, July 4, 2013
Chomsky: Beyond Fascism
Noam Chomsky – “Beyond Fascism”
Interview with Noam Chomsky, conducted May 24, 2013, MIT, Cambridge, MA. Interview conducted by John Holder and Doug Morris.
Q: We asked some Middle School students to submit questions. We framed it around the idea that you are a philosopher. They can identify with what a philosopher does…think about the big questions. So, these are questions from kids…
NC: I was in California a couple weeks ago and my daughter-in-law wanted me to give a talk to a group of Cub Scouts; so I gave a talk to a bunch of eight year olds.
Q. How long was the talk?
NC: It stopped as soon as they got up and started walking around.
Q: Actually, the first question we have is from a seven year old.
NC: OK. I only talk to eight year olds.
Q: Beyond the seven year old, the questions are from Middle School students, 12, 13, 14, but I was talking with a friend’s seven year old daughter and I mentioned that we would be interviewing you, and tried to give her a little context, and I asked her, “If you were sitting down and asking Noam a question, what would you ask.” She said, “Hmmm…that is easy…I would ask ‘Why are we here?’”
NC: There are two views about that which go back to classical Greece, maybe before. One is we are here for the same reason that rocks and trees and grass are here. That is just the way the rules of nature worked out, and they happened to lead to us just like they led to other things. The other answer, which goes back to Aristotle actually, is that everything in nature has a purpose and a function. And the purpose of rain is to let crops grow. That is its essence, and so on for everything else.
And the purpose for humans is to be rational and thoughtful and to live “a considered life” thinking about how to do the right thing. And then Aristotle drew some pretty ugly conclusions from that. He said that is only true for educated Greeks. Others are not fully human. And for some, he said, their purpose is to be slaves. Their purpose is to serve the “real humans,” and therefore we should not deprive them from their function. So, to liberate slaves would be criminal…even the failure to enslave people, so they can fulfill their function as providing service to real humans, that would be immoral. But, we are here because the creator assigned us a function. Then there are variations of these.
The modern view among educated people who pay attention to what has been discovered about the world is the first one. We are here for the same reason that other things in the universe are here. It is the way the laws of nature work.
Q: And that would be the Chomsky view?
NC: Yes, that is my view.
Q: Along those same lines, should we assume that humans are more important than other animals on the planet?
NC: The fact of the matter is we do assume that. There is a kind of intuitive view that almost everyone has, even for people who do not believe it in the rational side of their minds. That is a view which is traditionally called The Great Chain of Being. There is a Great Chain of Being and at the top of it is God, the creator, and right below it is angels. Right below that are humans and then you keep going down until you get to worms, and plants, and the bottom of the Great Chain of Being.
You even see it in the sciences. For example, there is a lot of work in trying to teach apes the rudiments of language. Nobody tries to teach humans the rudiments of bee communication. It would seem ludicrous, what would be the point? It is just as ludicrous to try to teach apes bits of human language. We do it because intuitively we tend to think of the world in terms of the Great Chain of Being. So apes are kind of less evolved than humans, which is totally false. Just as bees are not less evolved apes. We’ve all evolved the same amount of time; we’ve just evolved in different ways. But this intuitive conception that somehow we are the ruling species…and then of course it differentiates further.
So, some of us are real humans, others are not real humans, or semi-humans, and a lot of ugly things come out of that. It is all pretty deeply engrained. Something like that is true of just about every culture that has been found. Maybe not with all of this differentiation…but something like it. It is completely irrational. It is kind of like our seeing the sun go around the earth. You can’t help seeing it even if you know it is false. We all know it is false, but you just see it; or, seeing the moon illusion; so the moon looks bigger on the horizon when it comes up. OK, rationally we know it is not any bigger, but you can’t help seeing it as bigger, and we somehow can’t help it…since it is cognitive rather than perceptual we can overcome it, but only with a great effort can we overcome the conception of the universe in terms of something like the Great Chain of Being. And it shows up all the time.
Q: So, you don’t really believe in inter-species communication?
NC: There is nothing to it at all. We are not any more evolved than protozoa, just in a different line. In many ways, they do a lot better than we do. Actually, if you take a look at this morning’s newspaper, there is a recent discovery that cockroaches have evolved in such a way as to overcome the main poisons that are used to kill them. The poisons are based on the idea that certain things are bitter and cockroaches keep away from them. Rapid selection has shifted their sensors around so that things that are supposed to taste sweet taste bitter, so they don’t go to them and therefore the poisons don’t work. So, they are doing better than we do. We can’t evolve that way.
Q: To take the Devil’s Advocate position for a second, suppose there are other sentient species on this planet besides human beings, and not to say that we are the best, or at the top of this chain, but you don’t see any value in trying to communicate with other species?
NC: Sure, you can communicate with your pet dog, and your pet dog can communicate with you, and does, and there is nothing wrong with it. But the idea of trying to compel apes to mimic in a rudimentary way what humans do is scientifically just as interesting as training humans to communicate in a rudimentary way the ways that bees do which nobody would ever dream of because we think of ourselves intuitively as somehow higher than bees, although they can do all kinds of things we cannot do, cognitively as well. Like you and I can’t navigate as well as an ant.
Q: So, this is from a fourteen year old living in a world in which they are constantly surrounded by tragedies, and the reality of human mortality, it is a simple but complex question: how do we make sense of dying?
NC: Well, it has been a big problem throughout reflective human life, probably all of human life. In most cultures and societies it is just understood as part of life. Whoever asked the question has to work it out for himself. I know the way I did. How old are they?
Q: 14.
NC: When I was that age I was terrified of dying. What struck me as terrifying was not that I would die but that this point of consciousness would die so the whole world would disappear. Because, after all, there is nothing out there except what I perceive and if that consciousness disappears everything disappears. What happens then? Over time you get to recognize that it is just part of life. As you get older, at least to me, it seems less of a problem.
Actually, just to illustrate, dramatically, last night I came very close to dying, closer than I realized. There was carbon monoxide. I’d forgotten to turn the car off and closed the garage. The garage is under the house and carbon monoxide was seeping into the house, you can’t smell it, it is odorless. Actually, I would have died except for the fact that Bev Stohl had put a battery into an alarm that I didn’t even know was there, and the alarm went off. And I managed to get the car off, but it was that close. So, if it had happened, it would have happened.
Q: But…that is tragic…if it would have happened.
NC: Well, you know, I don’t see it that way anymore.
Q: How do you see it then?
NC: It is just one of the things that happens in life. Life goes on for everyone else.
Q: What about the contributions you are able to make because you are here. For example, we would not be sitting here talking today. And that would be a tragedy.
NC: The same is true of everyone else. Everyone has contributions to make; every animal has contributions to make. OK, so the way the universe works is you have a fixed time on earth and then it is over. And it just doesn’t seem tragic to me anymore like it used to. Actually, my brother, who is a doctor, and does a lot with elderly patients, tells me that at the very end, constantly, they really fight for life, as much as they may have decided that they don’t think it matters.
Q: Do you think that has something to do with human consciousness?
NC: Have you ever seen a fly in a spider web? It is really fighting to get out. I don’t think flies are thinking about it much.
Q: Let us extend it a bit because this question came out of the context of young people looking out at a world that is constantly immersed in human tragedy. So I think in the background of this question, for young people, is “how do we make sense of a world in which we are constantly bombarded with tragedy?” For example, for most of human history, it seems, if a tragic event happened even fifty miles away you would never hear about it. Now, you turn on the radio in the morning and it is one tragedy after another…constant bombardment…
NC: Well, that is selection. I mean, you don’t see in the front pages of the newspaper that there is a happy couple fifty miles away who just had a lovely baby and they are just overjoyed because this wonderful creature just entered their lives and changed them totally, but that is not a news item. But that doesn’t mean it is not happening.
So, the world is full of all sorts of things. What it should do, I think, is impel you to try to do what you can to mitigate the tragedies and pay attention to what we may have to do with the tragedies, which is often a lot, and see if we can do something about them so there will be more happiness and joy and promise for the future and less suffering and less tragedy.
We happen to be in a position where we can do a lot. Right here we are citizens of the most powerful state in human history. It has enormous potential for good and for harm and we can shift the balance if we try and we can make a lot of difference.
There are a lot of tragedies you don’t read about. So, for example, we read about the genocide in Rwanda. 800 days, 10,000 people killed every day. We don’t read about the fact that in Southern Africa alone, forget the rest of the world, just Southern Africa alone, about the same number of children are dying every day from easily preventable disease or malnutrition. They could be saved for pennies per day from the rich countries. But we don’t read about that because if we read about it we would have to do something about it, and we could. And that is only one case. That is Rwanda every day, and just in Southern Africa, and just children. We could do something about it. And that is only one case.
Q: In a way this points to the tragedy of last evening because if Noam Chomsky perished last night that would be one less voice in the world willing to have the courage to address what most people are unwilling to address.
NC: Then others should do it. It doesn’t take any special skill or talent or even courage. It doesn’t take any courage to say this.
Q: With all due respect, I think you are being overly modest.
NC: Well, I’ve got a lot to be modest about (laughter).
Q: We will slightly modify a question from a student. If we are the only sentient creatures on this planet, why are we destroying the environment?
NC: Probably for that reason. The fact is, we are a very unusual species. There is nothing like it ever through all of evolutionary history and in the world today. Animals, and plants of course, generally, typically live in the world that is presented to them. They are presented with a world that is fixed. They have internal ways of reacting to it, and that is pretty much it. To some minor extent they modify the world, but not much, and not voluntarily. We are different. We live in a world that we mentally construct.
So, yes, we react to the world but we also create mental images and thoughts and plans and intentions which allow us to deal with the world in a totally different fashion. Language is in fact a crucial factor. That is why paleoanthropologists, people who study human origins, typically think of language as the defining feature that separated humans from the rest of the organic world and sent them off in a very different direction.
Now, if we look at our history (and by “our history” I mean way back before there were humans), modern humans, before homo-sapiens, going back to our origins it is a very predatory and destructive species. So, back as far as we can trace it, where pre-humans, or proto-humans, where they spread, large animals disappeared, mega-fauna, big animals, because they were killed. A couple of hundred thousand years ago there were many different hominids, creatures like our ancestors, our ancestors were one of many groups…we are the only ones that survived. The only one, and the reason for that may be, nobody really knows, is we just killed the rest of them off.
Geologists break up the geological past into eras. So, there was the Pleistocene era from 2 ½ million years ago up to about ten thousand years ago. Then there is the Holocene which is ten thousand years ago up until now, except now they are introducing a new one called the Anthropocene which is on humans, the human era, which is from maybe 1750 until today, and that is the period when we began radically modifying the environment, so much that it is a new geological era, and we’re destroying it in fact.
But just take a look at these eras, and I could have gone farther back. As you go through the eras each one gets shorter. And the Holocene is very short, and the Anthropocene is like an instant of geological time and it may not last long because we may end it pretty soon. So, why are we doing it? That is the way we are using our intelligence, just as proto-human intelligence was used to kill big mammals. It is not a pretty picture. And we can control it of course, because we do have this capacity to kind of create the world in which we function, but it has to be understood and used.
And it is pretty striking to notice what is happening right now, before our eyes. There is no serious doubt that there is a very serious environmental crisis coming. You can debate details but the general picture is clear. There are people who deny it of course, but nevertheless it is extremely hard to deny if you are at all serious. And there are people reacting in different ways. There are some who are reacting by trying to do something about it and arrest the disaster or maybe save the prospects for a decent survival. And there are others who are trying to race forward towards disaster. It is quite interesting to see who they are.
The ones who are trying to save the species from disaster are the ones we call “primitive,” “tribal peoples,” “aboriginal,” first nations people in Canada, Adivasi tribal peoples in India, they are trying to save the planet, and in fact in places where they have a degree of power they are actually doing something about it. Bolivia happens to be in the lead in trying to do something. There the indigenous population is actually a majority, and by now there are even Constitutional provisions for what they call “rights of nature;” nature has rights we have to preserve which is an aspect of traditional societies that shows up in one way or another.
Ecuador, which has a large indigenous population, and an influential one, Ecuador is an oil producer, and right now they are trying to get assistance to keep the oil in the ground where it ought to be. They are trying to get assistance from the richer countries to enable them to do that which they probably won’t get. Well, that is happening all over the world, opposition to mining, to resource destruction, to fossil fuel use, everywhere.
Go to the other extreme, the richest and most powerful countries in the world, like the United States and Canada, particularly. We are leading the race to disaster. When the president and the political opposition are euphoric about what they call a hundred years of energy independence they are talking about a hundred years of race toward destroying the environment, because that is what it means. Of roughly a hundred relevant countries, the United States and Canada are probably the only ones who have no national programs for limiting fossil fuel use, no national conditions on renewable energy. We can’t say others are doing magnificently, but at least they are doing something. We’re not.
So, you have on the one hand a race to disaster, kind of like the proverbial lemmings going off the cliff, led by the richest, most powerful, most advanced, most educated, and supposedly enlightened sectors of the world, and on the other hand you have an effort to prevent the disaster, to mitigate it, to deal with it, coming from those we call primitive and uneducated. If there is ever a future historian they are going to look back at this period with amazement.
Q: You said that started around roughly 1750, this race to disaster, does that correspond to the growth of capital as well?
NC: Industrialization, which quickly became capital. The Holocene begins about the time of the rise of agriculture and the receding of the ice ages which coincided.
Q: It was announced recently that we have passed a dangerous climate threshold.
NC: Yes, 400 parts per million CO2. We have reached what has been regarded as a threshold from which there may be no return. It is a very serious finding. It’s been coming. There has been plenty of evidence for it. If you follow these things closely, every issue of a science magazine has some new serious warning. A couple of weeks ago there was a report in Science, the main science weekly in the United States, that there had been the first studies of 500 years of analysis of permafrost, of Siberian permafrost. And you can detect how climatic warming affected the melting of the permafrost. And according to the conclusions of this article, which are pretty dire, even the anticipated level of warming, not the projected ones, the conservative anticipated level, even that would be sufficient to melt the permafrost which means allowing the escape of enormous masses of methane which is even more destructive than carbon dioxide, and that sets off an escalating process that could just take off.
Q: From a 13 year old, and in some sense you’ve addressed this, but they ask it in this manner. You have mentioned that “the fate of the species is at stake,” and that might mean that our future as young people is at stake, so what can we do as young people to ensure that we even have a future?
NC: Well, I don’t want to be too alarmist about it. It is not that the species is going to die off. It will mean that the conditions for what we regard as minimally decent existence may sharply deteriorate. So, for example, all of Boston could be under water. Of course, for poor countries such as Bangladesh it is an utter catastrophe for hundreds of millions of people. In South Asia the glaciers are melting in the Himalayas. If that melting reaches a certain point, South Asia, with hundreds of millions of people, could become unlivable. These are really serious consequences. Humans will survive but in a very different world. So what can we do about it? We can do what the so called “primitive” people are doing, arrest it. You don’t have to lift every drop of hydro-carbons out of the earth. It could stay in the earth where it ought to be. And, we could devote our energies not to wasting as much fossil fuel as we can but to developing alternatives which will allow a survivable society. It is technically feasible, it is a matter of choices, and we have the choices. And young people, the questioner is exactly right, this generation may already begin to see it in a serious way…their children even more so.
Q: When you were addressing a roomful of eight year olds, what was the general topic of discussion?
NC: I talked about this in a way that I hoped was understandable to eight year olds.
Q: What was topical for them?
NC: What is topical for them, unless somebody gets them to think about it, is just what is immediate, like “can I get an iPad?”
Q: Or an ice cream?
NC: Probably an iPad is more likely. (laughter)
Q: Suppose they were sitting here, how would you take up these issues with eight year olds?
NC: Essentially what I just said, which you can say at any level. You can talk to graduate students in the sciences, or you can talk to eight year olds at one level or another. It is the same issues. I don’t know if I am the one to do it properly but you can try to do it. You can do it with your own children, which we did in fact.
Q: If someone suggested that the United States is moving more and more toward forms of fascism, would you find evidence that it is true?
NC: Oh yea, very striking evidence. In fact, I never really expected much from Obama, I thought it was mostly hot air, but one thing has surprised me and that is the intensity of his attack on civil liberties which goes beyond any rational explanation I can think of [unintelligible]… and it shows up in a lot of ways. Some of the ways are very dramatic and not having to do with the Executive Branch, it is the way the society and the economy are developing.
So, for example, a couple of weeks ago there was an article in the New York Times “Business Section,” maybe you saw it, on something called “Google Glass.” Google is manufacturing glasses, they may be on the market already, which have a small computer embedded in them, a tiny computer, which allows you to be on the Internet twenty-four hours a day. That in itself is such an indictment of modern society I don’t even want to talk about it. But, it is worse than that because this device also takes photographs of anything that is going on, and I presume either already or soon it will take recordings of everything that is going on. So everything that is going on around the person wearing this thing goes up on the Internet.
The reporter asked Eric Schmidt, one of the founders of Google, whether he didn’t think this was an invasion of privacy. And his answer I think may be the slogan of the coming age. His answer was “Well, if you are doing something you don’t want to be on the Internet then you shouldn’t be doing it.” I don’t know if fascism is quite the right word, it goes beyond that…this conception that anything has to be public, and to some extent I think that is seeping into the consciousness of young people. I don’t look at Facebook but people who do tell me the exhibitionism of young people is just frightening…anything has to be on the Internet, anything I do. And the conception that everything has to be public goes beyond anything that Big Brother ever thought about.
If you look at the technology journals, like the MIT Technology Review, you see more and more of it coming out. So there was a news item in a recent issue which said that corporations are beginning to be cautious about using computers with parts that are manufactured in China because it is now apparently technically possible to build into the components of a computer some device that detects everything the computer is doing, every keystroke and sends it back to “People’s Liberation Army Headquarters” in China. Well, they did not go on to say that if they can do it in China they can do it here much better. So that holds for every computer that is manufactured here or manufactured by a U.S. corporation, and if it isn’t happening now it could be happening and it may be soon which means that everything you do on your computer goes off to Big Brother into the huge database Obama is constructing in Utah. And, it gets worse.
There was just a report from one of the main robotics labs. They’ve been working for I think ten years trying to develop robots, meaning drones essentially, controlled robots the size of flies. The military has been interested in this because it could mean that you have surveillance of what is going on in your living room or your kitchen and you wouldn’t notice it because it is just a fly up there. That makes everything public. Well again, you can’t call it fascism because fascists never dreamed of it. Orwell never dreamed of it. It is beyond anything. And it is within reach and may be happening. And it is being accepted. We live in a surveillance society of a kind that really has not existed before and it is accepted. Some are more extreme than us, like Britain, cameras everywhere, recording everywhere. Chances are anything you do electronically at least can be picked up, maybe is being picked up by surveillance systems. And Eric Schmidt’s thesis, which he wasn’t criticizing, he said that is the way it ought to be, could well become the slogan of the coming age unless something is done to prevent it. There can be force behind it too. I’m just talking about the surveillance aspect. Once data is collected that tells you everything about a person, maybe including a lot of fabrication, which also happens, then there is a lot of control that can go along with it.
Q: What you are describing sounds like the worst aspects of a Philip K. Dick novel.
NC: Of?
Q: Philip K. Dick, the science fiction writer.
NC: I don’t know him. But this is worse than any science fiction I know of, and it is real, straight out of the technology journals. It is not science fiction.
Q: What about the psychic effect of knowing that you are living in a society where you understand that you are under constant surveillance, even in terms of the impact on the activist community?
NC: What I think is most worrisome is what I’ve been told at least about children and Facebook, that they are accepting it as legitimate, that you should expose everything to the public.
Q: So, in other words, from our perspective, based on our age, we see that there should be limits, there should be some privacy, but these kids are not seeing that?
NC: That is the impression I get. As I say, I don’t investigate it myself, but I have friends who basically try to monitor their children on Facebook and a lot of them are just appalled by what they see. Things that you and I would never have dreamed of making public. This idea that you somehow have to be in touch with anything that is happening in the world shows up in all kinds of ways.
You may have seen over the winter, there were reports in the press, maybe the Boston Globe, a strange epidemic that was spreading among teenage girls in Boston, and they could not figure out what it was, but there was a lot of illness. They finally traced it. It was fatigue. It was fatigue because the kids were going to bed with their cell phones in their hands so that in case, at three o’clock in the morning, somebody you know had a sandwich you have to know about it, and you can’t let it go so therefore they were not sleeping.
Q: You have got to be joking?
NC: I don’t think it is a joke.
Q: This applies to another question a student asked. On the one hand life is sort of a hyper-spectacle, but then the student asks “Why is school so boring?”
NC: That is a very good question. School doesn’t have to be boring. School can be the most exciting experience you ever had, and it sometimes is. If schools are boring it is because decisions are made to make them boring, and some of these decisions are at a federal level, and some at a state level, but they are decisions. So the conception of teaching to tests is designed to make education as boring, and stupid, and stultifying as possible.
In a place like MIT, a research oriented institution, the idea would be outlandish. You are trying to encourage people to question, to challenge, to create, to think for themselves. You can use tests but only as a monitor, you know, let’s see how well things are going, or see the things we are missing. But the idea of making the goal teaching to tests is grotesque. Actually, this goes back to the Enlightenment.
If we go back to the Enlightenment, hundreds of years ago, there were debates…this was the beginning of thinking about large scale education, not just for the aristocracy. And there were kind of two models that were presented. This is hundreds of years ago, eighteenth century. In one model, the image that was used was thinking of education as pouring water into a vessel. That is teaching to tests. You pour water into a vessel then it is returned to you. Anybody our age, or who has been through school, has had plenty of experiences where you had to study for an exam in some course you weren’t interested in, and you studied and you learned everything you had to learn, and you passed the exam and a week later you forgot what the course was about. That is pouring water into a vessel.
The other model, the image that was used by one of the founders of the modern higher education system [Wilhelm von Humboldt], in the eighteenth century, was that education should be like laying out a string along which the student progresses in his or her own way. There is some structure, you are trying to achieve something, but the idea is to encourage individual inquiry, and the joy of discovery, and of challenge, and maybe moving the string, because it should have gone some other place.
One of the great modern physicists who taught here, Victor Weisskopf, was famous for a comment he would make to freshmen classes, he taught freshmen physics, if students asked him “What are we covering this semester,” he would say “It doesn’t matter what we cover, it matters what you discover,” because then you will learn how to discover, and you will learn how important it is, and if he didn’t cover something, fine, you will do it yourself after you know how to learn. There is a lot of discussion about this, particularly in science education where you just have to have constant challenging and questioning. You know, pressing the boundaries or the field is going to die. So there the idea of teaching to the test is really anathema, but that is now the national program.
Q: Why impose such a boring project of education on a whole population of youngsters?
NC: You can speculate about the reasons, but I should say this was discussed in the 19th century here, right here in fact in Massachusetts, when the beginnings of mass public education were starting which was a positive development. It is important to have mass public education and the U.S. was a kind of pioneer in that. But Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote at the time that he sees that powerful people are favoring mass education and when he asks them why they say, “Well, it is because millions of voters are coming along, people are gaining the right to vote, and we have to make sure to educate them to keep them from our throats.” In other words, educate them for passivity and obedience and not for thinking and questioning for themselves, because then they are going to come after our throats. They are going to say “we don’t want to be subordinated to your power.”
These are concerns that go way back in history. So, in the 17th century in England were the first modern democratic revolutions. And it was during the English Civil War. The English Civil War pitted parliament against the king, but there were also itinerant preachers, activists, pamphlets, a lot of popular organizing which was pretty radical democratic. And the gentry, the rich guys were afraid of it. And they lamented that they hear people saying, and I am quoting here, “We don’t want either king or parliament; we don’t want to be ruled by gentlemen, knights and gentlemen who but oppress us. We want to be governed by countrymen like ourselves who know the people’s sores.” Well, that is dangerous and you have got to make sure that you have an educational system that drives any thoughts like that out of people’s heads. The rabble is not allowed to think for themselves.
These thoughts run right through to the present. They enter into the public relations industry, into liberal intellectual thought about how democracy ought to work, and into the educational system. Whether this is the reason for trying to dumb down the education system or not, well you can speculate, but there certainly is a history that goes far back and it is intelligible.
Q: Wasn’t there an incentive for the business class to train the public so that way they would have useful workers in the factories and so forth, but now that is no longer the case?
NC: Oh, it is. Actually, if you go back to the origins of the mass education system in the United States, a large part of the goal was to take independent farmers, who tended to be pretty radical, and to turn them into tools of production in a disciplined factory setting. And people resisted it enormously, but that was a large part of the education system. But you still need it. You may not need people to turn screws and so on but they want a service population. They need people who are going to make the world work, not just be predators on Wall Street eating away at and destroying the social order while they pour money into their pockets. Somebody is going to have to do the work of the society.
Q: Given the world that you’ve been describing, when you’ve been asked over the years what people can do to fight back, typically you begin by saying people have to learn how to organize. Do you think that organizing in 2013 calls for some different tactics and strategies than organizing in the 1930s or 1960s?
NC: Sure, there are different issues. There are a number of issues that are very striking now that weren’t or at least we didn’t know were fifty years ago, for example, the things we have talked about. Fifty years ago I, and others, didn’t understand how dire the environmental crisis is. Now we know, so we should be organizing about that. We did know, and didn’t do enough about it, how dire the threat of nuclear war is, and that is maybe even growing. It is still very serious.
The changes in the economic system in the last forty years have raised new dangers. If you go back forty years ago the banks were basically small institutions in which you put your excess funds and they lent them to somebody to buy a car or something like that. That has changed enormously. By now what are called banks are investment firms and are close to half of the economy and they are mostly destructive. Some estimates coming from the International Monetary Fund are that practically their entire profits come from the government insurance policy which is huge. It is not just the bailouts that people see; that is just the froth on the top. They have a lot of consequences, the “too big to fail” policy; credit ratings improve, you get cheap money in all kinds of ways, and it adds up to huge profits. It is mostly destructive to the economy.
Economists don’t study it very much, which is interesting because it is an enormous phenomenon. But the few who do suggest that it is probably pretty harmful. In fact, probably the leading financial correspondent in the English speaking world, the most respected one, is Martin Wolf of the London Financial Times. He describes the modern financial institutions as like a larva that eats away at its host from the inside and destroys it. The larva being the market system. It is a pretty potent image and he has got a lot to suggest it. So that is a new topic. And that leads to all sorts of specific issues like say a financial transactions tax, breaking up the big banks, ending the government insurance policy…I mean all kinds of things…turning the huge resources that are available into productive work.
If you take a look at the society today it is really kind of surreal. You’ve got over twenty million people in the United States looking for work, many more who have simply given up looking, and many more than that who are underemployed, either part time or way below their skill level. It is a huge human cost. I mean these people are kind of destroyed, and it is just a straight economic course. There is a lot we can do; there are resources that aren’t being used. It is not that there is nothing to be done. You just take a look around the country and you can see the immense numbers of things that ought to be done. And it is not because there are no resources. Corporations have money coming out of their pockets. They don’t know what to do with it, higher profits than ever. The financial institutions are bigger and richer than ever to do more destruction.
So, you have got this situation in which there are a huge number of idle hands wanting to work, eager to work, you have a huge amount of work that needs to be done, you have enormous resources to do it, and the system is so corrupt it can’t put these things together. That is kind of an astonishing situation. And it is not because of laws of nature. These are just the way the institutions are structured. They can be changed. Actually, we are doing better than Europe. It is not that we are at the bottom of the pile.
Q: We just passed the 10th anniversary of the U.S. led attack on Iraq and subsequent occupation. Thousands died, and by one account perhaps more than a million people were unnecessarily killed. Unless I missed it I did not see any arrests, any trials, or any prosecution of the people in this country responsible for these deaths.
NC: It is worse than that. It is bad enough, yes, hundreds of thousands died, perhaps more, there were maybe four million refugees, millions of them displaced out of the country, probably forty percent of the intellectual class, the educated class is gone, the cultural system is destroyed, it was practically at first world standards, the most advanced in the Arab world…devastated. The society is barely emerging from the destruction. You read the newspapers there are bombings every day, struggles every day. Apart from the destruction the invasion triggered an ethnic conflict, a Sunni/Shiite conflict which had not existed before and became extremely bitter and brutal in Iraq, but furthermore has now spread all over the region. That is the heart of the destruction in Syria for example. It is developing regional conflicts which could be enormously harmful. All of these are consequences of the invasion.
Now there are some principles which maybe we don’t like to think about but they are there and we created them, we established them. Those are the founding principles of modern international law which comes straight out of the Nuremberg Tribunal, and they can’t be repeated too often. The Nuremberg Tribunal which led to the hanging of German war criminals declared that “aggression is the Supreme International Crime differing from other war crimes in that it includes all of the evil that follows,” all, like everything I just described. And another comment made by Robert Jackson, Justice Robert Jackson who was Chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg, he addressed the tribunal and said that “we should understand that we are handing the defendants here a poisoned chalice by killing them and if we sip from it ourselves we must have the same judgment or else we must concede this is just farce, victor’s justice.”
This was as clear a case of aggression as you can imagine. It meets every criterion for aggression, so all the rest follows. And what also follows it what you just said. Not a word about it.
Q: U.S. supported Guatemalan General Rios Montt was found guilty of crimes against humanity, and a few days later he was freed. Do you think it was pressure from the U.S. to release him so as not to create a precedent?
NC: I suspect it is from the Guatemalan elite. But when you speak about the Guatemalan elite you have to ask the question of why they are there. How come this vicious group of Europeanized elite elements is running the society? There is a reason for that. It goes back fifty years and everything since.
Fifty years ago there were the beginnings of a democratic revolution in Guatemala. The United States would not tolerate it. It is actually sixty years, 1954. And the U.S., under Eisenhower, carried out a military coup which eliminated and destroyed the rising democratic system which would have increased popular power and reduced, maybe eliminated the voracious, destructive Europeanized elite. We put them back in power, instituted military dictatorships which have been tearing the country to shreds ever since with constant U.S. support, including the period of Rios Montt’s genocidal acts in the highlands, strongly support by Ronald Reagan. Congress put some limited restrictions on it, so he turned elsewhere, primarily to Israel to provide the weapons and the training and so on which were used to implement the virtual genocide, but it actually goes beyond.
To this day, Mayans are fleeing to the United States, trying to cross the border in Mexico to get away from the destruction that we are responsible for. Do you see any talk about that? You do see reports about the immigrants and what a big problem it is, and you see some reports about the Rios Montt trial, and sometimes you see a report saying that Clinton apologized. OK, nice. Did the Nazis who were hanged at Nuremberg apologize? No. But putting it all together? Try to find that!
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doug morris ( dmorrisscott@yahoo.com ) works at Eastern New Mexico University; John Holder ( holder@hartford.edu ) works at the University of Hartford.
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