JM:
It's remarkable that, given the evidence of the ease with which people manage to deceive themselves with regard to their social and political motivations, to bond by exclusion, to succumb to racism and tribalism, and to cede their decision-making to leaders, to authority, and to power, you continue to maintain the optimistic view that a
democracy in which people make decisions on the full range of issues that concern them – especially economic issues – is still a live vital option. Are there reasons to maintain this or is it perhaps a matter of hope, or even of faith?[C]
NC:
It's not so much faith as hope – but there's plenty of empirical evidence for it too. It's true that people cede responsibility, become obedient, become racist, and so on. It's also true if you look at the historical evidence that they overcome it – that they struggle to overcome these things. There's been plenty of
progress in every one of these domains in recent years. Take, say, women's rights. [Earlier, people didn’t even consider the matter:] my grandmother didn’t feel oppressed – she didn’t know she was oppressed. My mother knew she was oppressed but didn’t think there was anything you could do about it: it's just the natural order. My daughters aren’t like that. They wouldn’t accept that kind of existence – they’re aware of it, and they wouldn’t accept it. And the society around them doesn’t accept it. That's moral progress; [and] that's progress in understanding our own nature. But it's been achieved. It's not an easy struggle and it's certainly not over. And it's just in our own recent lifetimes, so we can watch it.
The same is true in case after case. There is
slavery – there are maybe 30 million slaves in the world. But we no longer approve it, regard it as the natural order, or make up stories about how it's better for the slaves. Yet the arguments that were given for slavery – which were not insubstantial – were never answered; they were just rejected as being morally intolerable through a period of growth of moral consciousness. I haven’t heard a sensible answer to the main argument offered by slaveholders in the United States – it was a perfectly sensible argument, and has implications. The basic argument was
that slaveholders are more moral than people who live in a market society. To take an anachronistic analogy, if you buy a car and I rent the same car, and we look at those two cars two years from now, yours is going to be in better shape than mine, because you’re going to take care of it; I’m not going to take care of mine. Well, the same is true if you rent people or you buy them. If you buy them, you’re going to take care of them; it's a capital investment. If you rent people, they’re just tools; you throw them out when you’re done with them – if they can’t survive, who cares, you can throw them out on the dump yard. That's the difference between a slave society and a market society. In a market society, you rent people; in a slave society, you buy them. So therefore slave societies are more moral than market societies. Well, I’ve never heard an answer to that, and I don’t think that there is an answer. But it's rejected as morally repugnant – correctly – without following out the implications, that renting people is an atrocity. If you follow out that thought, slave owners are right: renting people is indeed a moral atrocity. It's interesting that 150 years ago, when there was an independent, free, labor-based press, it was just taken for granted – so fully taken for granted, that it was even a slogan for the
Republican Party, that wage labor is fundamentally no different from chattel slavery except that it's temporary, and has to be overcome.
JM:
That was a different Republican Party . . .
NC:
It was the Republican Party of Lincoln; and actually, there were editorials in the
New York Times
about it. It was just taken for granted around here, where the industrial revolution began [in the US]. The working-class press – which is extremely interesting – just took it for granted: of course wage
slavery is intolerable, and those who work in the mills are rented, and so on.
JM:
Why
hasn’t
wage slavery been recognized for what it is?
NC:
I think that that's part of our fundamental human nature – to recognize that – and it has been driven out of people's minds by massive propaganda and institutional structures. And I don’t think that it's very far below the surface. I’ve noticed that when I give talks to what are considered reactionary working-class audiences – you know, Reagan Democrats – when you begin to talk about these things, pretty soon, it seems entirely obvious to all. I think it's just below the surface, and that the system of this moral atrocity is sustained only by extensive efforts to divert people's attention from them, so they come to believe that it's a part of the natural order – just like my grandmother, or my mother, who believed that the oppression of women is the natural order, and that that was all there was to say.
Any kind of
activism – say, women's rights – the first step you have to take is what's called consciousness raising: get people to recognize that there's
nothing natural about domestic abuse, for example. Until very recently, it wasn’t considered an issue; it's just right – it's the way things work, so what is there to say? Women are property owned by their husbands, and if they want to smack them around, it's ok. That doesn’t work anymore. It doesn’t work because there was at first a step of raising the consciousness of women at least to see that this is not the natural order. It takes work to get to where we are; I don’t think you would ever have convinced my grandmother. After some progress in reaching those affected, similar efforts in the rest of society come. And finally, your true moral nature does emerge. Now, domestic abuse is not officially tolerated: I mean, it happens a lot, but it's not acceptable any more. Well, those are striking changes, and I think the same is true of wage
labor. It's accepted in the way domestic abuse was accepted by women, and it requires a period of consciousness raising to get us back to the level of understanding that was standard a century and a half ago. There's been regression on this, and the regression has to do with quite clear and definite institutional structures and, often, conscious propaganda. A tremendous part of the propaganda system is directed to that, and pretty consciously. If you read the literature of the public relations industry – the main propaganda industry – they’re fairly conscious of what they’re doing.
JM:
Imagine someone like
Foucault who might respond: well, it seems that the other guys are winning now. It's not so much that a basic, intrinsic human nature is coming to be revealed [through consciousness raising and action], it's rather that the small guys are beginning to win
.
NC:
Whether this was Foucault's position or not, I frankly don’t know, because I don’t understand most of the stuff that he wrote. But in the one interchange that we had (Chomsky & Rajchman
2006
), it was very clearly his position . . . I have to say that he struck me as the most amoral human being I have ever met. Also, I think it [his position in the interchange] is intellectually incoherent. If it's just a battle of who's stronger than anyone else, why do we have any judgments at all about right and wrong? My impression, from reading his other work, is that he thought that torture in prisons is wrong. But I really don’t understand why.
JM:
When you debated Foucault in the seventies, you claimed against his view that the concept of justice tracks power and authority, that, in fact,
justice – and presumably the other concepts of human moral and political virtue – are universal, lodged in a fixed human nature. You haven’t changed your views on this matter, have you?
NC:
[I claimed it] namely, for a very elementary reason. If that weren’t true, then none of us in any culture could acquire the conceptions of that
culture. There's something deeply incoherent about Rorty-style
relativism (cf. Chomsky
1998
), which says that this culture does it this way, and that culture does it that way. The question is how does any culture get established in an individual? It's not by taking a pill. It has to be acquired by an individual by the same means as other forms of
cognitive growth. And – like other forms of growth – you can acquire the
norms of that culture only if you are predisposed – in a very restrictive fashion – to select those norms from the data around you, and not different norms. And now you’re back to strong innatism; so the whole position is just incoherent. As soon as you ask the first question about it, it collapses.
JM:
Why are people attracted to plasticity theories and to empiricist accounts of human
nature and the mind?
NC:
Different reasons for different people, undoubtedly, but I think there is one strain in modern intellectual history that is not insignificant – I don’t want to say that it is everybody. This is an extremely convenient doctrine for managers. I mean, if people have no intrinsic nature – which is incoherent, but let's assume it – then there is no moral barrier to controlling them. You can say to yourself that you’re controlling them for their own good, even though that's incoherent. [It makes it seem that] there is no moral barrier against it. Well, what are intellectuals? They’re managers. They’re economic managers, political managers, doctrinal managers. That's basically their role; we call certain kinds of managers “intellectuals.” We don’t call corporate executives intellectuals, but that's just terminology. Public intellectuals are just other kinds of managers. We happen to use the word
intellectuals
for them, and not for economic managers; but they’re all basically trying to control actions, attitudes, beliefs, and so on. And for people in a managerial role, it's highly convenient to think there's no moral barrier to controlling people. In fact, it's morally appropriate to do so. If you look through the intellectual history of this, it's very striking. Somehow,
we
’re exempt from this. Whoever is writing or speaking [holds], “I’m not part of this formless mass of people who have no character or nature; I have a nature, and I know what's right – they don’t. I’m a different creature and it's proper for me to intervene to help them, to control them.” Well, this goes right back through intellectual history.
Take a look at
John Stuart Mill's classic essay on what is now called “
humanitarian intervention”; it's read in courses in law school, and so on. His argument, which is utterly shocking, is that England is an angelic society – so angelic that other people can’t understand it. They attribute base motives to us because they can’t understand how magnificent we are. There's a debate about whether England should become involved in the problems of other
people – in India, or on the continent, etc – and there were some that said that it's none of our business, let's just pursue our own interests. And Mill takes a more ‘moral’ position. He said that, since we are angels, and they’re a different kind of creature, it is our responsibility to intervene to help them and to show them the right way, even though they’re going to attribute base motives to us and heap obloquy upon us, nevertheless; we have to face it and do it. And then he applies it in a particular case, the one that interested him – India. He knew all about India; he was Corresponding Secretary of the East India Company, just like his father, who was involved in it. He knew everything that was going on there. Besides, it was all over the press in England; there was a huge parliamentary outrage over British atrocities there, and so on. He was writing right at the point when Britain was carrying out its worst atrocities in India, right after what in England was called the “Indian mutiny,” meaning that Indians rebelled – from the British point of view, mutiny. They committed some atrocities – they killed some Europeans. And the British reaction was just ferocious. The population was actually reduced in several provinces. Mill was in favor of it; he said that we have to do it, because they are barbarians, we’re angels, and the barbarians need our guiding hand. So even if people are going to condemn us, we’ve got to go in and continue the process of conquering India, for their own good.
JM:
As I recall,
Marx argued in a similar way
.
NC:
Yes, in fact, this runs right across the intellectual tradition. Take Mill's article today and just change a few words, and it's the main literature on
humanitarian intervention. Is there any better basis than his? Take a look at the cases.
The argument is very simple, and it's the foundation of modern political science – that's Lippman, Lasswell, and the other influential founders of the public intellectual
tradition. Not everyone, of course, but it's a very powerful mainstream tradition, and it goes way back in intellectual history, and it's understandable. How do you justify it? Always the same way. We’re somehow different from them; they are malleable, or maybe they have barbaric instincts, or something; and for their own good, we have to control them. For their own good, we have to keep them from running across the street.
If you look at the way that this has been exercised, it's shocking. Take Mill
again. He's particularly interesting because it's hard to find a figure of higher moral integrity and intelligence. He was very knowledgeable. Why was
England trying to expand its control over India at that time? Partly just in revenge, because the Indians had dared to raise their heads, and they’re not allowed to do that. But in part it was because they were building the biggest
narcotrafficking empire in history. It's hard to imagine anything like it today. They were trying to gain a monopoly of opium so they could force their way into the Chinese market, which they couldn’t get into because their own goods were not competitive; and the only way that they could do it was try to turn it into a nation of drug addicts, by force. And they had to conquer large parts of India to try to gain that monopoly. This narcotrafficking empire was huge. It was the foundation for a lot of British capitalism and the British Empire. Mill wasn’t unaware of that. He was writing right at the time of the second opium war. Of course he knew; and it was being discussed all over the place in England. Interestingly, there were critics – the old-fashioned conservatives, classical liberals, such as Richard
Cobden: he thought it was horrendous. If you look today, Robert Byrd [who criticized the US invasion of Iraq] criticizes things [like this]; but [he and a few others are] relics of classical
liberalism. If you accept classical liberal principles, yes, it was horrendous. But that's on the margin of intellectual history, not mainstream. And for the mainstream – to get back to the original point – it's very convenient to think that humans have no nature and are malleable. I think this accounts for a lot.