Noam Chomsky - Powers and Prospects

NNOOAAMM CCHHOOMMSSKKYY
POWERS AND
PROSPECTS
Reflections on Human
Nature and the
Social Order
© Noam Chomsky 1999
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ESSENTIAL CLASSICS IN POLITICS: NOAM CHOMSKY
EB 0007 ISBN 0 7453 1345 0
London 1999
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Powers and
Prospects
Reflections on Human Nature
and the Social Order
NOAM CHOMSKY
Pluto Press
London
Classics in Politics: Powers and Prospects Noam Chomsky
4
First published in the United Kingdom 1996 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
Copyright 1996 © Diane Chomsky Irrevocable Trust
The right of Aviva Chomsky and Eric F. Menoyo, as trustees of the Diane
Chomsky Trust, to be identified as the owners of this work has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library
ISBN 0 7453 1107 5 hbk
Classics in Politics: Powers and Prospects Noam Chomsky
5
Foreword
by Agio Pereira
rofessor Noam Chomsky is not a single issue activist. His range of
influence transcends the boundaries of campaigns for social
justice and self-determination, the field in which the East
Timorese have been forced by war to learn and to become specialists.
It was with great honour that a small team embraced the gigantic role
of coordinating the visit of Professor Chomsky to Australia in January
1995. Gigantic, not only because it was the first visit to Australia from a
man with the stature of Professor Chomsky, but also because of the
timing of the visit itself—it took place in the usual period of ‘summer
holidays’ of the mainstream Australian media. It also coincided with the
visits of Pope John Paul II and the visit of the Microsoft tycoon, Bill
Gates—you could say Chomsky completed the trinity
The consolation for us was that, at an early stage, it was clear that
the focus of Professor Chomsky’s visit to Australia was to be the issue of
East Timor. It was therefore a litmus test for the support the Australian
people have been lending to the 20-year-old struggle of the Timorese
people to conquer their piece of freedom.
Having a controversial person like Noam Chomsky in Australia
associated with yet another controversial issue such as East Timor, no
one could foresee exactly how everything was going to play out. There
were many people speculating about possible outcomes, but a clear
picture was far off from even the most experienced organisers of public
P
Classics in Politics: Powers and Prospects Noam Chomsky
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events. However, no one could have predicted the enormous response to
his visit.
Being Timorese, as a matter of tradition, we pay tribute to those who
support and respect us, by making sure that our role as hosts becomes
as effective as possible to the point where when a guest departs, the
feeling of returning is stronger than that carried in their arrival.
The first I heard of Professor Chomsky was in the late 1970s when
I’d heard he paid from his own pocket for some Timorese refugees to fly
to the USA to speak out about the tragedy of the people of East Timor.
I was later very delighted when I learnt that he presented a paper in
the first session of the ‘People’s Tribunal’ for East Timor, held in Lisbon
in 1981. That was the time when the Resistance of East Timor was
going through extremely difficult times. The deaths of charismatic
leaders such as President Nicolau Lobato, Vicente Sahe and many
others, brought the morale of the Maubere Resistance to a very low
point. This was at the time when Kay Rala Xanana Gusmao was
reorganising the struggle. At that time of ‘soul searching’ Professor
Chomsky lent his undeniable support for the people of East Timor.
On meeting Professor Chomsky for the first time at the Sydney
International Airport, his humbleness was so familiar to me that I felt we
had known each other for many years. His approach to human
interaction was as Maubere as one can reach, and this made our task
much easier.
As the program of public addresses and media work was
implemented, we learnt that the Chomsky factor and East Timor were a
deadly combination. The Chomsky factor was critical in the sixties and
still is critical today for those who search for basic explanations of the
increasingly sophisticated machine of manipulation of public opinion.
East Timor after 20 years has become a thorn in the conscience of those
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in the world who struggle for fundamental justice and values of human
beings.
In this struggle, both Professor Chomsky and East Timor are Davids
against Goliath. The combination of the conscience of the people of East
Timor and Professor Chomsky has proved to be too powerful for those
who tried to defeat us.
Perhaps it was this sense of being in the same trench and defending
fundamental justice that made us feel that Professor Chomsky is part of
us; and that was a turning point in the way we perceive Chomsky.
Because, in the end, our sense of being hosts of a special guest was
replaced with a much bigger one: that our home was richer with the
sense of freedom Chomsky’s visit helped us reach.
Even though Noam Chomsky is no longer in Australia fighting for the
people of East Timor, we do rely on his support. We know that wherever
he is, he will fight for the freedom for our people. That was the
impression he left not only with the 16 000 or more people he spoke
directly to during his visit, but also with those he reached through the
media, and I hope now through this book.
This book testifies to how dedicated Professor Chomsky is to the
issues he embraces in his active pursuit of freedom and fundamental
justice.
From linguistics to the Middle East, from foreign affairs to the role of
the media, from intellectual responsibility to East Timor, Noam—as he
asked us to call him—refuses to accept complexity and imperfection as
an excuse to violate fundamental principles of human beings.
Agio Pereira is the executive director of the East Timor Relief
Association, and an adviser to the National Council for Maubere
Resistance (CNRM).
Classics in Politics: Powers and Prospects Noam Chomsky
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Contents
Click on contents to go to page
Foreword..................................................................................... 5
Preface ..................................................................................... 11
1 Language and Thought: Some Reflections on
Venerable Themes...................................................................... 14
The First Cognitive Revolution ................................................... 15
The Second Cognitive Revolution............................................... 28
The Language Faculty .............................................................. 30
Unification Problems................................................................ 36
Knowledge of Language............................................................ 41
2 Language and Nature .............................................................. 55
Naturalism and Language–World Relations: Weak
and Strong Theses................................................................... 55
The Materialist Orthodoxy......................................................... 65
The Externalist Orthodoxy......................................................... 75
Language as a Natural Object ................................................... 85
3 Writers and Intellectual Responsibility....................................... 87
4 Goals and Visions.................................................................. 107
Goals versus Visions ...............................................................108
The ‘Humanistic Conception’....................................................114
‘The New Spirit of the Age’ ......................................................117
Voices of Resistance ...............................................................127
‘Tough Love’..........................................................................133
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5 Democracy and Markets in the New World Order...................... 139
‘Enduring Truths’....................................................................139
Markets in the Real World .......................................................148
Democracy: ‘Containing the People’ ..........................................158
‘Free Market Conservatism’......................................................174
Towards the End of History: the Utopia of the
Masters.................................................................................185
6 The Middle East Settlement: Its Sources and
Contours ................................................................................. 191
‘What We Say Goes’ ...............................................................191
The Strategic Conception.........................................................197
‘Stalemate’ ............................................................................207
‘Victor’s Peace’: the Oslo Agreements........................................212
Terror and Punishment............................................................222
Development Programs and Plans.............................................227
‘Human Dust and the Waste of Society’.....................................231
7 The Great Powers and Human Rights: the Case of
East Timor............................................................................... 241
Forbidden Territory .................................................................241
Asian Values..........................................................................246
Western Values ......................................................................248
‘The Welfare of the World Capitalist System’ and
‘The Problem of Indonesia’.......................................................265
The Problem Solved................................................................275
The Problem of East Timor ......................................................281
8 East Timor and World Order................................................... 289
The Rule of Law.....................................................................290
International Responsibilities....................................................297
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Pragmatism and National Interest.............................................307
Endnotes................................................................................. 313
Chapter 4..............................................................................313
Chapter 5..............................................................................315
Chapter 6..............................................................................318
Chapter 7..............................................................................323
Chapter 8..............................................................................329
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Preface
n January 1995, after efforts that go back almost 20 years, I was
finally able to arrange a week’s visit to Australia, something I have
long wanted to do but had not been able to work into a very
demanding schedule. The immediate impetus was a suggestion by an
old friend, José Ramos-Horta, that I visit under the auspices of the East
Timor Relief Association (ETRA) to speak about the issue of East
Timor—always urgent, but at that moment of special significance
because of the impending World Court case on the Australia–Indonesia
Timor Gap treaty and the 20th anniversary of the Western-backed
Indonesian invasion a few months later, in December. ETRA had
planned a six-month initiative to bring all of these matters to public
attention, and I was more than pleased—more accurately, delighted and
honoured—to be able to take part in the opening days of this project.
Other events happened to converge on the same moment of time,
among them, the publication of some of the fine essays of another old
friend, Alex Carey, who pioneered the inquiry into one of the most
significant and least-studied phenomena of the modern era: corporate
propaganda. Again, I was more than pleased to be able to be present
when the University of New South Wales Press launched the long-
awaited publication of these essays, the first of many such volumes, I
hope.
During far too few days in Australia, I had the opportunity to give
talks in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra on a variety of topics. These
serve as the basis for the essays presented here, which are reconstructed
I
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from informal notes and transcripts, and updated in some cases to
include material from following months. Chapters 1 and 2 form more or
less an integrated unit, concerned with problems of language and mind,
based on lectures at the University of New South Wales and the Science
Museum in Sydney, respectively. Chapter 3 is based on notes for a talk
at the Writers’ Centre in Sydney; chapter 4, on notes and transcript of a
talk at the Visions of Freedom conference of Australian anarchists, also
in Sydney. Chapter 5 is reconstructed from notes for the Wallace Wurth
Memorial Lecture at the University of New South Wales and a lecture
sponsored by Deakin University, updated with some material from
following months. Chapter 6 is based on a talk at the Middle East Centre
of Macquarie University, also updated. Chapters 7 and 8 again form a
natural unit. The former is based on talks at the town halls in Sydney
and Melbourne organised by ETRA as part of the launching of their
campaign; chapter 8 on a talk at the National Press Club in Canberra.
It was a great pleasure to meet old friends, some of whom I knew
mainly or sometimes only from extensive correspondence; and many
new ones, too numerous to mention, as are those whom I should thank
for organising a most exhilarating and rewarding visit. I am particularly
grateful to the many wonderful people I met from the Timorese
community, several of whom I can hardly thank enough for ensuring that
an intense and complex schedule proceeded with remarkable facility (for
me, if not for them): Ines Almeida, Agio Pereira, and many others. I am
no less indebted to other friends, old and new, among them Peter
Slezak, Peter Cronau, Scott Burchill, Peter McGregor, and Wilson da
Silva. To Peter Cronau I owe an additional debt of gratitude for the
efforts he has undertaken to arrange and implement publication of these
essays. For their help in organising the visit, I would also like to thank
Ceu Brites, Benilde Brites and Arianne Rummery. It was also a great
Classics in Politics: Powers and Prospects Noam Chomsky
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pleasure to be able to meet again—or in some cases, at last—people
whose work and activities had long been a source of inspiration and
understanding: José Ramos-Horta, Shirley Shackleton, Jim Dunn,
Stephen Langford, Ken Fry, Brian Toohey, Michele Turner, Pat Walsh,
Tom Uren, and many others.
These are hardly happy times for most of the world, apart from a
privileged few in narrowing sectors. But it should also be a time of hope
and even optimism. That extends from the topics of the opening essays,
which discuss some prospects, which I think are real, for considerably
deeper understanding about at least certain aspects of essential human
nature and powers, to those of the final chapters. Quite apart from the
critical importance of their own struggle, the remarkable courage of the
Timorese people, and the growing numbers of Indonesians who are
supporting them and demanding justice and freedom in their own
country, should be an inspiration to all of those who recognise the urgent
need to reverse the efforts to undermine fundamental human rights and
functioning democracy that have taken such an ugly and ominous form
in the past few years, and to move on to construct a social order in
which a decent human being would want to live.
Noam Chomsky
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Language and Thought
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1
Language and Thought: Some
Reflections on Venerable
Themes
he study of language and mind goes back to classical antiquity—
to Classical Greece and India in the pre-Christian era. It has often
been assumed over these millennia that the two inquiries have
some intimate relation. Language has sometimes been described as a
‘mirror of mind’, so that the study of language should then give unique
insight into human thought. That convergence, which has been repeated
over the centuries, took place again about 40 years ago, at the origins of
what is sometimes called the ‘Cognitive Revolution’. I will use the term
intending you to hear quotes around the phrase ‘cognitive revolution’,
expressing some scepticism; it wasn’t all that much of a revolution in my
opinion.
In any event, however one assesses it, an important change of
perspective took place: from the study of behaviour and its products
(texts, and so on) to the internal processes that underlie what people are
doing, and their origin in the human biological endowment. The
T
Language and Thought
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approach to the study of language that I want to consider here has
developed in that context, and was a significant factor in its emergence
and subsequent progress.
The First Cognitive Revolution
Much the same convergence had taken place in the seventeenth
century, in what we might call ‘the first cognitive revolution’, perhaps
the only real one. This was part of the general scientific revolution of the
period—the ‘Galilean revolution’, as it is sometimes called. There are
interesting features in common between the contemporary cognitive
revolution and its predecessor. The resemblance was not appreciated at
the outset (and still is hardly well known) because the history had been
largely forgotten. Such scholarly work as existed was misleading or
worse, and even basic texts were not available, or considered of any
interest. The topic merits attention, in my opinion, not just for
antiquarian reasons. My own view is that we have much to learn from
the earlier history, and that there has even been some regression in the
modern period. I will come back to that.
One element of similarity is the stimulus to the scientific imagination
provided by complex machines. Today that means computers. In the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it meant the automata that were
being constructed by skilled artisans, a marvel to everyone. Both then
and now the apparent achievements of these artefacts raises a rather
obvious question: Are humans simply more complex machines? That is a
topic of lively debate today, and the same was true in the earlier period.
It was at the core of Cartesian philosophy—but it is worth remembering
that the distinction between science and philosophy did not exist at the
Language and Thought
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time: a large part of philosophy was what we call ‘science’. Cartesian
science arose in part from puzzlement over the difference—if any—
between humans and machines. The questions went well beyond
curiosity about human nature and the physical world, reaching to the
immortality of the soul, the unchallengeable truths of established
religion, and so on—not trivial matters.
In the background was ‘the mechanical philosophy’, the idea that the
world is a complex machine, wh...