Noam Chomsky on Language, Left Libertarianism, and Progress | Conversations with Tyler

hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with Tyler today I'm chatting with Noam Chomsky who needs no introduction gnome welcome good to be with you if I think of your thought and I compare it to the thought of Wilhelm van Humboldt what's the common ontological element in both of your thoughts that leads you to more or less agree on both language and Liberty but Humboldt was first of all the great linguist who recognize some fundamental principles of language which were rare at the time and are only beginning to be understood but in the social and political domain he was he was not only the founder of the modern research University but also one of the founders of Classical liberalism is fundamental Principle as he said it's actually a epigram for John Stuart Mills on Liberty is that the fundamental right of every person is to be free from external illegitimate constraints free to inquire create pursue people to pursue their own interests and concerns without arbitrary Authority if any sort restricting and limiting them now you've argued that Humboldt was a platonist of some kind that he viewed learning as some notion of reminiscence are you in the same regard also a platonist well leibniz pointed out that Plato's theory of reminiscence was basically correct but it had to be purged of the error of reminiscence in other words not an earlier life but rather something intrinsic to our nature enlightenments couldn't have proceeded as we can today but now we would say something that has evolved and has become intrinsic to our nature for people like Humboldt what was crucial to our nature was what is sometimes called the Instinct for Freedom basic fundamental human property should lie at the basis of her social and economic reasoning and it's also the critical property of human language and thought this was recognized in the early Scientific Revolution gonna do blood nuts a little later people like Humboldt in the Romantic area the fundamental property of human languages this a unique capacity to create unboundedly many new thoughts in our minds and even to convey be able to convey to others who have no access to our minds their innermost workings Galileo himself thought the alphabet was the most spectacular of human inventions because it provided a means to carry out this miracle Humboldt's formulation was the language enables language and thought which we're always pretty much identified the language it enables what he called infinite use of finite means we have a finite system we make unbounded use of it those conceptions weren't very well understood until the mid-20th century with the development of the ory of computation by Kurt curdle Ellen Turing other great mathematicians 1930s and 40s but now the concept of finite means that provide infinite scope is quite well understood in fact everyone has it in their laptop by now was it the distinction between natural and artificial language that led Rousseau istray on politics so you're left libertarian Rousseau is in some ways almost a totalitarian right Rousseau is a very mixed character he's not a systematic thinker you can find all sorts of things in Brazil so if you look at the second discourse on inequality it's highly libertarian deriving from basically Cartesian principles about the uniqueness of and creativity of human thought and language onto a fairly libertarian conception of social organization that's one or so you can always also find a very different one why are you skeptical of evolutionary approaches to language I'm not I'm skeptical of mistaken a misunderstandings of evolution which lead to all sorts of errors in thinking about how language evolved so in the modern period 20th century mainly under the impact of behaviorism some other modern tendencies a misunderstood version of Darwinism it was has generally came to be believed and still is believed in many quarters that human language and the language thought first of all the language was not was the tradition from Classical Greece up through the 19th century was that language is fundamentally an instrument of thought so it is what is generated by language language generates thought they're intimately related if not indistinguishable language was described as an audible thought need not be horrible we know now 20th century change day it under behaviors influences came to be thinking of languages basically an instrument of communication which evolved from animal systems every animal about the bacteria has some kind of communication system even trees communicate so the assumption is well language is just a more developed human language it's a more developed form of communication I think we have it's controversial but my own view is that recent work shows that the tradition was quite right that that's not the way human language and thought evolved at all they evolved in quite a different way which is completely consistent with the actual theory of evolution not the uh naive version that often believed so it may be for example that natural selection played very little or almost no role in the evolution of language and thought but that's quite consistent with the theory of evolution many of the things happen in evolution beyond the natural selection and in fact it's pretty good evidence for the we have the thread only fragmentary evidence from the archaeological record but it's pretty clear by now that humans appeared on Earth very recently modern humans two to three hundred thousand years ago it's nothing an evolutionary time we now have genomic analysis pretty sound that shows that these small modern Homo sapiens groups that emerged very quickly began to separate and quickly again in evolutionary time maybe 50 000 years we know that they all share the faculty of language and thought there seems to be no distinction among living humans in this regard including the descendants of those who separated maybe 150 000 years ago with that indicates that these capacities were already in place before the separation well if you look in the archaeological record prior to the appearance of modern humans there's almost no evidence of any more than very superficial symbolic activity not not just on a bone or something like that not long after the appearance of humans you start getting extremely rich records of uh in of advanced creative activity of the cave paintings for example which are pretty remarkable I was lucky enough to be able to get into this code before it was sealed and it's astonishing you can understand why Picasso when he saw it and we haven't learned anything in tens of thousands of years well let's go is fairly recent 30 maybe 30 000 years ago but no it goes back to maybe 80 000 years these seem like long numbers but in evolutionary time these are well what does all this suggest suggests that something happened along with the appearance of modern humans namely the emergence of these capacities that we're talking about that amazed together on both and others and nothing's changed since there's been no uh no change that we can detect in the uh nature of these cognitive capacities which seem to be species properties of humans in the technical sense meaning common to all humans apart from extreme pathology and completely unique nothing like them anywhere in the animal world will misunderstandings of darwinian evolution lead you to think that this is inconsistent with it so if you're quite consistent with the modern theory of evolution I mean Darwin did have a famous statement saying that all evolutionary changes have to be very small even said if this turns out not to be true my total Theory collapses well it's now known that that's just not true there are of major changes that take place suddenly a lot is known about this one of them may well have been seems to have been whatever happened pretty much along with the appearance of modern humans which provided these capacities which again have no analog in the animal world that are common to the species now you've been very critical of large language models there's a recent essay by Stefan Wolfram where he argues the success of those models is actually evidence for your theory of language that they must in some way be picking up or detecting an underlying structure to language because their means are otherwise too limited to be successful what's your response to that view he's a brilliant scientist I've spoke to him sometimes I think this is partly true but partly misleading the large language models have a fundamental property which demonstrates that they cannot tell you anything about language and thought very simple property it's built-in principle can't be modified namely they work just as well for impossible languages as for possible languages it's kind of it's as if somebody came along with a new periodic table of the elements which included all the elements and all impossible elements and couldn't make any Distinction on them but tell us nothing about about chemistry that's what large language models are you give them a data set that violates all the principles of language will do fine doesn't make any distinction what the systems do basically is scan and astronomical amount of data find statistical regularities string things together using these irregularities they can make a pretty good prediction about what word is likely to come next after a sequence of words a lot of very clever programming a lot of massive computer power and of course extra unbelievable amounts of data but as I say does exactly as well with impossible systems as with languages so therefore in principle it's telling you nothing about language there is some like all organisms we have innate capacities there's something about her genetic endowment that determines that the embryo grows arms not wings and there's something about the genetic endowment that says that an infant a newborn infant can instantly pick out parts of the noise that surrounds it and say to itself those parts are language and I'm going to not consciously of course it's all totally reflexive these parts are language I'm going to pursue the course of maturation will determine course of maturation which means that by about two or three years old I've basically absorbed the fundamentals of language that you can take the smartest chimpanzee or the dogs under my desk they can listen to this noise forever they have no idea there's anything there but noise well that's a fundamental property if humans built in it's the reason why you and I can be having this discussion now but uh Trope of chimpanzees can't be do you think your critiques of media and the idea of manufacturing consent in any way spring from your underlying views on language more from my Fusion social and political structure uh in fact the phrase manufacturing consent was not mine I borrowed it from Walter lippman's as you know the leading public intellectual of the 20th century good liberal the Wilson Roosevelt Kennedy liberal he was a member of the of Woodrow Wilson's propaganda machine Wilson [Music] uh I don't want to tell you this you know it better as well as I do but for the record Wilson was elected in 1916 on a pacifist program I'm going to keep you out of war the U.S population didn't want to get into the European War uh very quickly he decided that the United States should enter the war on the Allied side and had a problem how do you turn a pacifist problem population into railing anti-german maniacs succeeded brilliantly part of the device was a commission that Wilson set up called the Committee on Public Information which of course means disinformation Creole commissions it was called Walter Libman was a member of it another member of it was Edward Bernice who went on to be one of the main founders of the public relations industry both Wilson and vernais were very impressed with how what lippman called manufacturer's consent were nice called engineering of consent how these techniques could control the public shape opinion completely turn them into in this case a fanatic and a German people who want to kill everything German y have to say hot dog you have to kill those I mean change your name if you're German to something else also a huge attack on labor came out of it was very effective for the corporate sector they meant to smash the labor unions with all kind of claims of antipatriotism and so on will Lippmann in particular was very uh persuaded by this as Bernice was Litman called it a new art in the main in the practice of democracy it's important to understand that the both Littman and Bernice and adopted the standard liberal position that the population is stupid as the terms were stupid and ignorant they don't know what's good for them we the responsible men have to do the planning and the in the for their benefit of course and meanwhile we have to as Litman put it protect ourselves from the Roar and the trampling of the bewildered herd the very leninist Doctrine if you think of it very similar rhetoric that goes right up to the present distinction that was made in the Kennedy years between what were called the technocratic and policy oriented intellectuals the good guys and worked on policy and so on and the values oriented intellectuals the bad guys what matures Bundy called The Wild men and the wings who talk about ridiculous things like justice and rights and so on uh this is a very consistent property of the intellectual classes from way back pretty much independent of political commitment in any event manufacturer's consent was uh just to quote some more Litman uh they said the public have to be can be Spectators but not participants in action they are not supposed to take part in any of public affairs we do that they as Reinhold neighbor put it they have to be fed in necessary Illusions and emotionally potent oversimplifications uh well we take care of things for the common good one aspect of this was separating the economy from public affairs economists played a major role in this including liberal economists mainly liberal economists separate the economy which is just pure science we take care of the science public should have nothing to do with it all of these are major strains in modern modern thought they have much earlier Origins and in the book that Edward Herman and I wrote about Manufacturing consently developed selected these conceptions looked at the structure of the media and tried to show that in fact the institutional structure the media these conceptions of the nature of the intellectual world combined to yield a very effective propaganda system you seem to be relatively optimistic about the future but if human beings are so susceptible to propaganda why be so optimistic shouldn't you just think we're stuck in a continual illusory equilibrium where people Feed Us BS and we Just Keep On Believing it well there's first of all it's I mean I wish I could say that it was relatively optimistic if you look at the way the world is going today it's extremely hard to be optimistic I mean we are facing two enormous crises there's a reason why the Doomsday Clock of the bulletin of atomic scientists was recently moved to 90 seconds to midnight one is the growing threat of nuclear war which will be terminal War another is the failure to take the necessary and feasible steps to deal with the existential crisis of environmental destruction they're moving in the opposite direction on both and there's not a lot of time the leadership elements cross the across the board around the world very few exceptions are dedicated to racing to the precipice as quickly as possible that's not much grounds for optimism nevertheless there are grounds if you look over history people have organized resisted stood up overthrown repressive autocratic structures created a broader reign of freedom and justice plenty of awful things remain but if you look back at what used to be perfectly acceptable you can see we've come a long way even just in the last couple of decades so go back to the 1960s for example in the 1960s the United States had anti-miscegenation laws which are so extreme that the Nazis refused to accept them we had federally mandated housing segregation that meant that Afro-American black Americans maybe in the growth period of the 1950s and 60s black man could get a job at a decent job at an auto plant but he couldn't buy one of the homes in Levittown he couldn't and of course wealth in the United States for most people is property owning so the black population was cut out from this opportunity in the 50s and 60s to enter into at some level at least into mainstream American society by segregated federal federal laws which mandated segregation Less in the late 60s uh women's rights women were still in the 1960s under federal law not regarded as peers basically regarded as kind of property was until 1975 that the Supreme Court finally uh ruled that women have the rights of P of the right to serve on a federal jury for example to be peers all sorts of changes have taken place countries much more civilized than it was just 50 or 60 years ago well didn't happen by Magic it happened by lots of popular struggle you go back in history there's more and more examples of that and you can see it right now I mean I mentioned that the leadership class is racing to disaster but there's a lot of activism among the public mainly young people saying we insist on a better future you see it at the cop meetings you know the regular meetings cup 26 27. now there's actually two meetings going on uh they can Glasgow last time was Sharma Sheikh so it's so far away nobody could come but in Glasgow there was a meeting going on inside the Halls where the elegant ladies and gentlemen were doing nothing and outside in the streets there were tens of thousands of young people demonstrating saying we have to take steps to prevent a disaster that you all know is coming from heating the environment and we demand it and insist on it well there's one of those meetings is a reason for pessimism the other is a reason for optimism on nuclear war what has been your opinion of the doctrines of Thomas shelling it's okay I mean at an abstract level yes you can talk about these things fact of the matter is that even contemplating the possibility of nuclear war is insane literally insane there cannot be a nuclear war between major Powers the the the the country that launches a first strike will be destroyed even if there's no retaliatory strike just from the effects of nuclear winter there's a lot of casual talk about these things and you know showing can carry out his game theoretic analyzes and so on but the basic point is every step has to be taken to ensure that there is no possibility of this happening um there are people who understand that people like Former Defense secretary William Perry for example has been his whole life in the nuclear establishment in the state system he says he's terrified doubly terrifying terrified once because we're racing towards Disaster Day by Day doubly terrified because there's no attention being given to it sometimes it's just astonishing so the Pew polling agency a couple of weeks ago came out with they give regular studies of public attitudes on all sorts of things very valuable the latest one they gave people a couple of dozen choices of issues and asked them to rank them in terms of urgency nuclear war was not even on the list climate change was on the list it was ranked at the bottom of the 21 choices that's manufacturer of consent in a form which is going to destroy us all why does the hall left libertarian Tradition at least to me seem to be so weak today so if I mention Rudolph rocker to someone the chance they have heard of him is extremely small I'm sure you experienced the same maybe they've heard of him because they've read your writings but to have heard of him separately that hardly ever happens the new left of the 1960s mostly has vanished how and why did that happen I don't think it's true I think the new list of the 1960s which incidentally was a very brief period it's it's scattered splintered but it left a major imprint what I've just described was largely an effect of the new lift of the 60s chain its civilized the society in many ways things were just taken for granted in the 60s You couldn't possibly even say no well that's the effect of the activism of mostly young people what was called the new lift so it's not a movement but it's all over the place it's a change the way we see and think of things almost everybody it's uh the libertarian socialism anarchism of course they're not going to be popular we have a class-based Society rigid class-based Society the business classes the ultra rich or dedicated to class war they're basically vulgar marxists foot values inverted constantly fighting a harsh class war they control the resources control the institutions control the economy so yes ideas that they don't like you don't hear nothing novel about that and go back to George Orwell one of his essays he wrote about how in England it was said in free England unpopular ideas can be suppressed without the use of force just because of the class nature of the society and the subordination of intellectuals to power incidentally his essay was suppressed just to make it a little more dramatic found later in this unpublished essays if I think of some of the new Left critics of say the Cold War the revisionists you've seen more mailman Pentagon capitalism Sydney lands DF Fleming I'm sure you knew many or all of these people to me they sound if anything more like the trumpian right than say the Democratic party this been this odd inversion where foreign policy ideas fears of you know a deep State manipulating the system those have shifted to the trumpists what do you make of that how do you feel well the revisionists didn't talk about a deep state they talked about the existing public institutions uh the corporate sector which is overwhelming role in determining State policy the uh military industrial system which is a large part of the economy they you read people like the main writers at the time Gabriel kalka and others that's they were talking about how this determines the nature of policy and uh it doesn't sound at all like the new I mean the new rate has some of that rhetoric but it's a joke the right wing of the Republican party or uh just serval servile worshipers of the very rich and the corporate sector take a look at their legislative programs during the Trump years there was one major legislation what chose a state that's called the donor Relief act of 19 2017. a tax cut that was a gift to the super rich in the corporate sector at the expense of everyone else and take a look at their programs right now main programs are first of all guarantee that as a red line you cannot touch the huge Trump tax cut now what you have to do is defund the Internal Revenue Service why because they go after tax cheats who are the wealthy and the privileged can't do that we have to protect them save them I mean meanwhile what Trump managed to do was pretty effectively is like a good demagogue is stand up with a banner in one hand that tells working people I love you well with the other hand you stab him in the back that's a very that's basically the policy when you look at foreign policy Tucker Carlson the risk to say we don't want to waste money in Europe but there's a bottom line to that we want to save our resources for a war against China it's insane I mean you're right about the Democrats they're in the their foreign policy a group is in the hands of basically old neocons neoconservatives uh that's true the grouper of Biden but the GOP is much more even more dangerous if I look back on someone like Susan Sontag she becomes it seems to be a maoist why is it that left libertarianism touches her and many others so little what's the appeal of maoism isn't that the opposite of left libertarianism and what you stand for there was a tendency in what's called among lift intellectuals late 60s early 70s to flirt with maoism they had no idea what it was it was a very mixed story uh I mean had very brutal harsh elements destructive elements there are also aspects of maoism which aren't discussed much here the scholarship is aware of them one of the things that the maoist policies did was save a hundred million people a hundred million people were saved from death and starvation as compared with Democratic capitalist India in the same years you look from 1979 1949 Liberation to 1979 compared to the demographics of the two countries there's a gap of a hundred million people killed in India as compared with China simply because of the lack of tearing out rural development and Healthcare programs there's no big secret about this it's discussed by some of the leading Scholars like a March Us in for example Nobel Laureate and Indian economics this is one of his main specialties hardly obscure but you don't hear about it that's manufacture of consent again but this is not why people like on people on the left flirted with maoism they had all sorts of confused ideas about maoism in fact if you want the most enthusiastic malice in the country his name happens to be Henry Kissinger he adored Mel he worshiped him if you wanna picture of this urge that you take a look at the very important scholarly work that just appeared Carolyn eisenberg's extensive detailed study of the Nixon Kissinger years using extensive archival material one of the things that comes out is Kissinger's starry-eyed adoration for Mao uh with he himself was a terrible sycophant but for Mao in particular which do you feel has seen a better trajectory if you compare the two countries Nicaragua which is experiment experimented partially with socialism and Panama which has been more capitalistic hasn't Panama just done much much better than Nicaragua and I've been to both countries in the last 10 years to me it doesn't seem close what am I missing you're missing what actually happened Nicaragua in the 1980s was the second poorest country in Latin America after Haiti the sundinista revolution in the early 80s began to change that began to Institute programs which were very much praised by the World Bank International financial institutions uh organizations like Oxfam which were finally doing something Nicaragua had been in the hands of the United States for since late 19th century it was a catastrophe likes to it every country in U.S ends it began to escape from this in the early 80s very successful well Ronald Reagan launched a war against Nicaragua the United States was actually brought to the world court and condemned for International terrorism technically on lawful use of force in its war against Nicaragua in order to pay substantial reparations uh the Oregon Administration and Congress responded by stepping up the war well the war had an effect destroyed the programs of development destroyed the hope restored Nicaragua back to pretty much U.S control it hasn't completely succumbed it's now dictatorial maintained some social programs but it's never been able to carry out the programs that were begun in the early uh in the early uh 1980s the Panama is totally different story it's a place for U.S investment capital investment parallel Canal is a huge income resource there's just no comparison between the two wouldn't Cuba be better off today much better off if it had gone the path of say Dominican Republic inviting a lot of multinational corporations have free trade zones special Enterprise zones Dominican Republics now one of the wealthiest countries in Latin America so let's take Cuba Cuba was a Cuba is the oldest issue in U.S foreign policy it goes back to the 19th to 1820s when the U.S intended to try to conquer take Cuba from Spain and turn it into another slave state well John Quincy Adams Secretary of State realized that can't do that now the British are too powerful they won't let us do it so we'll wait until as he put it Cuba falls into our hands by the laws of political gravitation we'll get stronger Britain will get weaker then we can take it over uh 1898 it happened Cuba was liberating itself from Spain U.S invaded on the pretext of liberating Cuba in fact it was for preventing Cuba's Liberation from Spain U.S turned Cuba into a virtual U.S Colony stayed that way it was a massive corruption Mafia brutal conditions horrible conditions for the working for most of the population 1959 cubic freed itself within a few months U.S planes from Florida were bombing Cuba March 1960 year later Eisenhower Administration formally determined to overthrow the government of Cuba Kennedy came in launched an invasion failed initiated a major terrorist war against Cuba that was a long time ago right Cuba's had plenty of time to grow and recover and it's done terribly Cuba has been under Savage attack for 60 years it's astonishing that it's even survived well it survived barely it has better health statistics than the United States it's though it it's developed the biomedical system which is one of the wonders of the world despite U.S sanctions which are so strict that if Cuba wants a uh something you know something to use for vaccines from Sweden they can't get it the United States is a very violent and brutal country when the United States imposes sanctions they are third party sanctions every country in the world has to accept them the world is overwhelmingly opposed look at the United Nations the votes are 184 to two United States and Israel total opposition everybody obeys the U.S sanctions out of fear of the most violent country in the world the fact that YouTubers even survived is an astonishing thing and if you look at things like health statistics uh quality of life and so on it's one of the best in the hemisphere even better than ours that the European Union can trade with Cuba right and a lot of the health statistics have been revealed to be fraudulent Latin America can trade with Cuba you can fly from Mexico the European Union tries to trade with Cuba the U.S threatens it with throwing it out of the International Financial system the European Union obeys the U.S sanctions who's the Thinker on the left say in the last 20 years whom you admire the most fine the people I admire most are the young people in the streets who are on the front line of trying to save the world from disaster there are a lot of very good people but not up to me to rank them but as a writer who is it you learn from you look forward to their next book you try to meet with well I found recently that the in this day and age the easiest way to write and Reach people is through the internet so because a lot people don't read books much anymore so I've been doing regular books of interviews and discussions uh several have come out in the last year and others others are in the works we'll be out soon who's the Thinker on the right whom you've admired the most over say the last 20 years that's the same point there are people I mean I read plenty of good work from what's called right to left but it's the quality of the work that counts not the person I don't rank people a few questions about the Noam Chomsky production function how have you stayed so mentally vital so late in life just the incentive of so much to do of such enormous significance uh I don't see any way to stop both Sunday in both of the areas that we've been talking about I try to maintain and to maintain a lively commitment to intellectual work a lot of new work there but the issues of human concern or just overwhelming I mean we have to face the fact that we are in a unique moment of human history nothing like this has ever happened in a couple hundred thousand years that humans have been on Earth we now have to decide within a couple of decades whether the human experiment is going to continue or with it will go down in in glorious disaster that's what we're facing we know answers at least possible answers to all of the problems that faces we're not we're not pursuing them we're going in the up the leadership is going in the opposite direction how can anybody relax under these circumstances do you think it's genetic that you're still going or just essentially voluntarist nobody knows a thing about it but it's you and Henry Kissinger right who would have thought they would be the two of them mystery why do you answer every email because I take people seriously I think people deserve respect two final questions first what's the biggest misperception people have about you depends what they read people reading uh Newsweek for example they'll have the assumption that I think we shouldn't we should hand Ukraine over to the Russians sure that's the way manufacturer's consent works in the ideological journals if people read what I say or they'll have a different opinion final question what is it that you will do next well the thing I'll do next in 10 minutes is have a long discussion at a major conference and uh happens to be in Texas on social and political issues uh annual conference that takes place there after that go back to the regular work of the two sides of my brain social and political issues intellectual contributions and in your in your career where do you feel it is that you've been most wrong there are a lot of things that have been wrong so for example take the Vietnam War I was very much involved in it in fact was my whole life for a couple of years but I got involved much too late I got seriously involved in the early 60s when Kennedy sharply escalated the war it was almost nobody concerned with it at that time but the time to have gotten involved was 10 years earlier I didn't know it at the time you know now when uh the government made the basic decisions early 50s that set the stage for what became the most hideous crime of the 20th century that was the time to get involved not when I did many other things like that there's so much that should be done that I haven't managed to do right now you can say the same thing the Holocaust isn't the most hideous crime of the 20th century the late 20th century our late 20th century Noam Chomsky thank you very much thank you

Channel: Mercatus Center

Views: 21,773

Keywords: Economics, Policy, Philosophy, Podcast

Id: Sk2pVd9Wdiw

Length: 52min 27sec (3147 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 14 2023