(Pt2) Noam Chomsky interview | Late Night Live

I asked you with this years and years and years ago but it suddenly go I can't quite remember the answer but I think there was a time when there was a cluster of languages that you were finding a bit recalcitrant a bit hard to sort of fit in and those were some at least some of the aboriginal languages in Australia well there was one of the early appointments in our department Kenneth Hale who became very close friend he died a couple of years ago he was one of the founders of Australian linguistics in fact a lot of the people working here now are students of his and so on and he did a lot of he did a lot of work with Aboriginal languages of Australia with Native American languages later others and some of them seemed to have properties which looked quite different from familiar Western languages actually I should say so did Japanese at the time looked quite differently one of the basic differences appeared to be and right through the 1970s this was widely assumed that they didn't that they were kind of they had free word order basically yeah kind of like Latin you know you could put words and all sorts of orders whereas a language like English it's got to be pretty rigid so it was assumed that there's a property it's called a parameter technically a distinction among languages whether they're word order free or rigid word a fairly rigid word order over the years that's there's been a lot of chipping away at that it now appears that first it was shown for Japanese and others that just wasn't true that would that basically the same structures a few differences but not these and finally that came to be shown for every language it's known including the ones that appeared to have extremely free word order one of the main one was well buried one of the languages that Ken studied but more intensive study showed that if you looked more closely they had pretty much the same principles that their differences but small differences fact it's kind of interesting that the same development has taken place within biology so if you go back to the 1950s in the study of language it was pretty widely assumed that the languages can I'm quoting virtually that languages can differ from one another arbitrarily almost without limit and that when you approach a new language you should approach it without any assumptions about what the structure of language should be that's sometimes called the Bosnian tradition after the great anthropologist Franz boas a biology the same was assumed it was assumed that organisms can vary from one another virtually without limit and they develop the way they do just by the accidents of natural selection over long periods both of these ideas are pretty much well in biology it's gone by now it's so far gone that there are even proposals taken seriously even if not totally accepted that there may be a universal genome that all complex sort multicellular organisms develop roughly half a billion years ago Cambrian explosion and they're all fundamentally the same from bacteria to humans they have slight difference that what's been found is conservation of genetic mechanisms which is extremely deep and the way it was put back in the 1970s by one of the great figures who initiated this development also as a cub was that great French biologist Nobel laureate that as he put it the difference between say an elephant and a fly is just a slight differences in the arrangement of a regulatory mechanism everyone could say that it's right but and this went in parallel with similar developments and linguistics not unrelated incidentally we all knew each other and there was influences but what an exhilarating time a mr. Baine falls quite exciting yeah by now what seemed very exotic in the early 50s for many not for everyone by any means but for at least people in a pretty wide sector of study of mind seems kind of routine yeah is other studies in linguistics plateauing or are they exhilarating is there still a hell of a lot more to know well it's like the other sciences the more you learn the more you know that you don't understand anything in fact it's very characteristic of the sciences take a look at early mop this is kind of like early modern science which is instructive so if you go back to say Galileo there was a general assumption in the sciences that they sort of basically understood everything so to take something which we now know is complex but was then considered very simple as suppose I'm holding a ball let's say and I I suppose i'm holding a cup with boiling water in it and it's covered if i take the cover off the cup the steam rises if i let go to cup the cup falls so why does the cup fall but the steam rises well there was an answer that was accepted for several millennia the Aristotelian answer they're going to their natural place so that explains it game over so we understand everything Galileo and others of early 17th century we're willing to be puzzled by it the ability to be puzzled by simple things as quite a significant kind of intellectual achievement and the Galileo questioned he's the famous one others too why that happens and as soon as beyond a question that it turned out not only that it's not trivial but that one's intuitions about it are all wrong so the sort of intuition is if you have a heavy ball and a big ball in a small bowl you know the big drop faster okay turned out not to be true they drop the same rate and it turned out that the rate of fall didn't depend on distance meant that so on and so forth but added out of that puzzlement comes modern science and as you proceed in modern science the more you learn the bigger the gaps are it's like kind of like mountain climbing you you climb a hill you think you think you've made it to the top when you get there you see there's a bigger peak you didn't know about you know over the years I've lost count of the scientists to sequi your city and who have confidently told me that the theory of everything was just generally the way that the equation was going to give up on that blackboard you know physics for example has some slight problems like finding 90% of universes and that's what the CERN accelerators for trying to find some particle that's supposed to be there but if it isn't there there's a big mystery about 90% of the mass energy in the universe I've had the pleasure of reading your speech for the Sydney Peace Prize while under embargo and needless to say I thoroughly enjoyed it and let me now do a segue into this whole issue of your political life you make the point powerfully and endlessly that we voice great moral indignation about other people's atrocities but we are blind to our own that's pretty much a cultural Universal I think when you look back over history you find many examples of this but a very little of a willingness to sort of look into the mirror every almost every culture I know of has a fringe of people who do it and they're usually persecuted so one of them drank the hemlock and classical Greece you have to go to the biblical prophets the same period roughly the prophets is what we would call dissident intellectuals and they were very badly treated one of them famous case elijah was denounced by the evil king the epitome of evil in the Bible King Ahab as proper translation should be a hater of Israel it's usually translated troubler of Israel you know because he was criticizing the evil king so he must hate Israel the the evil king like all totalitarians associated himself with the culture of the society the people and so on and if you take a look through the biblical record the people we honor who were honored centuries later as prophets were treated extremely badly after all one was crucified you know but and that's that's a good a historical pattern that replicates itself through the ages so there's typically some fringe of critics who say look we should look at ourselves I'm gonna read the prophets they were saying we should pay attention to our crimes it was put in theological terms you know God's gonna punish us for violating his laws but we're the ones who are sinning but whenever you raise this issue you are immediately categorized as anti-american mind you of course answer that's the classic technique ISM and Americans an interesting concept notice that it's used almost only for the United States so if someone in Italy let's say condemns Berlusconi he's not called anti Italian the very concept is a totalitarian concept it means that if you're criticizing say state policies you must be opposed to the society the culture the tradition and so on which is a typical totalitarian concept in the old Soviet Union for example the dissidents were condemned as was called anti Soviet in the Brazilian military dictatorship they were anti Brazilian you know and it's kind of striking that I think the United States is about the only concept where the only society where the term is used and primarily of course used by the right I wouldn't call them totalitarian but are reflecting a totalitarian conception that if you're a critic of the policies of the state you must hate the country but you're leaving you're an even-handed critic of the United State you you'll never been great enthusiast for the the Ray but right of the Republican Party but you're no great fan for example of Obama's first of all I think the two parties barely tiffer they're just famous sociologist see right mills but what a great writer yeah two branches of the business party yeah but if you go to a journalism school in the United States you're taught a concept of objectivity objectivity means you tell the truth about debates going on within the Beltway you know and in the Washington framework if you object to that framework your subjective biased you know emotional or whatever it may be that's it that again I don't wanna exaggerated it has a totalitarian element to it we use sympathetic to Ralph Nader's candidacies his campaign yeah as when he ran for the presidency I mean I like Nader I think he's done very interesting things but we had a personal sharp disagreement about this I don't think it makes a lot of sense for an individual to set himself up and say I'm running for president if he was running as part of a an incipient political organization which was trying to establish itself and become a voice in national affairs say the Green Party and he was picked as its candidate then I think you could give some justification for it but when it's a personal campaign it doesn't make any sense if for one thing something never gonna get anywhere but it's also the wrong idea it's not individuals going to you know change the world it's a popular movements can change the world they may yield spokespersons who may be influential or significant but they're they're not gods what what do you make of the Occupy move the Occupy movement yeah I think it's quite an exciting movement in fact in many ways inspiring there's got a lot of in a lotta a lot of pitfalls a lot of problems but it's the first organized popular response to very significant changes that have taken place in the United States but in fact other societies roughly the last generation the period of what's sometimes called neoliberal globalization which I think has been very destructive everywhere it's been applied the concepts differently in different countries but in say in Egypt where the policies were applied they led to economic growth and wealth concentration of wealth but a very harmful to the general population and led to a lot of resistance a lot of a militant labor action which has finally crystallized itself and you know the Arab Spring if you go to a rich society like the United States the policies were not identical but somewhat similar in character and they've been again that would there's been economic growth but it's gone into very few pockets and for the majority of the population it's been something like stagnation even decline that's a big shift in American history remember since the 18th cent of the early British colonists came it was a developing society it was industrializing developing it wasn't very pretty I should say it would meant exterminating the indigenous population and slavery all sorts of horrible things conquering half of Mexico but fact of the matter is whatever your judgment about the methods it was a growing developing society you know not a hundred percent there setbacks but and it was also a hopeful Society you could expect that things are going to be better for your children that went on until the 1970s at that point it reversed it's quite a significant historic and it's not just the Occupy movement also it's also the Tea Party in the movement is expressing similar it's based on similar resentments and anger but it's a totally incoherent movement for one thing it's it's not real popular movements actually quite small there are a lot of sympathizers but people are angry about everything but their position is internally incoherent in an interesting way the united states are a heavily pulled society we know a lot about people's opinions but when you look at the study of attitudes which are carefully done polls are well well done often you know CBS and others pew pew yeah if you look at them they're quite interesting so there there are studies of people who we think of as Tea Party adherents people who say you know get the government off my back that kind of thing small government let us alone market if you look just at those people and you look at their attitudes turns out they're social democrats like they think yeah we want to get rid of the government but what about spending on health should go up spending on education should go up spending on help for say poor women who have to take care of children yeah should go up what about welfare no that's a down that's because welfare has been demonized but even on things like foreign aid and a very standard and attitude this is a long time in the United States is we give way too much away to the undeserving poor then if you ask people what do you to estimate what they think foreign aid is they give an estimate which is way higher than it is when you ask them what they think it ought to be the answer is much higher than it actually is and in fact across the board what you have is these kind of vaguely done formulated sort of roughly social democratic attitudes connected with a doctrine that says get rid of the government and hand it all over to corporations and they hate the corporation as well as the Orthodox Paul's like pew there are the greasy poles which are run by you know the likes of Fox News and looking at those one is astonished on the side of the Pacific at the comings and goings in the Republic and sort of rat race for the nomination and I now a couple of days ago you were very concerned or perhaps more amused by the the prospect of Texas Governor Rick Perry getting the nomination now I know he has fallen back but isn't it funny that the Republican machine or the organism can produce someone as totally irrational this Barry Blackmun in fact of practically the whole of the Republican debates and if you followed them we do there's nothing in the history of parliamentary democracy that's anything like that I think they are totally irrational and very dangerous I mean one of the there's a kind of a catechism you have to sign on to if you want to be part of that system and some of it is not only irrational but extremely dangerous for example you have to be a global warming denier well you know that's spells doom for the species and you've also got to deny evolution they've had a design of this light and there's a reason for that yeah about you about roughly since Phil about the last thirty years the Republicans have gradually ceased becoming a traditional political party what are they what they are is they at the core they're just a an extreme faction of the very wealthy and the corporate elite tiny corporate elite but the point is you have to have a mass base you can't participate in a political system if your policies are just you know enrich the super-rich and then empower the super powerful you can't go to the population that way so they had to develop a mass base how do you do it they they appeal doesn't they're recognized around the early 80s that there is a mass base for that is based on precisely the kind of thing you're mentioning kind of religious extremism irrationality fear of the foreigners and that will fear of everything of everything and that face is quite large so for example in the United States I know what it's like here but in the u.s. about a third of the population believes in the literal truth of every word in the Bible that's why you get half the population not your thinking the world is created a couple thousand years ago about two thirds of the population expects the second coming soon and about a third expected in their own lifetime well in a much more agnostic country you know Australia we don't have these sort of mainly any other country has it there's been a lot of comparative studies why America this goes way back I mean whatever the reasons are it goes back very far I mean the the pilgrims even the first colonists were religious fanatics I mean they were waving the holy book when they were running baby lights yeah and and then they scotch-irish brought similar things anyway whatever the reasons maybe it perpetuated and the Republican strategists recognized that you can appeal to that mass base and still and get enough votes to put into office the people are gonna cut taxes on the rich no no given given that fear is rampant in the American political system and given the we'd prefer not to be fearful do you fear for the future of your country in the short term well if you fear for the future of the country is fearing for the future of the world so for example take say global warming again that's not a joke you look at the the way it's presented is there you know scientists who believe in gold of global warming then there's skeptics say there isn't any the scientists are like 98% and 2% of skeptics but that picture is incorrect there's another group of people who deny the scientific consensus those are scientists who say it's much too moderate now they say look it's a lot worse than you guys think so for example just take MIT where I am there's a climate change group very eminent scientists they are convinced that the truth is much worse actually that big study just came out from University of California which makes the same conclusion even the International Energy Association has recently warned we might be getting to a tipping point where there's not much you can do that it might be too late or right it may be but whatever it is it's very serious now if you have a country the most powerful and richest country in history which says it's not happening and furthermore we're gonna make it worse the species is in trouble the United States is not only not most countries just about every country is taking some kind of maybe halting move to do something about it the United States is going backwards under the impact of this right wing republicanism they are now dismantling the efforts that were made by Richard Nixon that's an indication of how the country how the parties changed when I say it's not a political party anymore I mean it you know it's developed a mass base based on fear and anger or irrationality but it's and has policies which are totally destructive and there are no longer any moderate Republicans I want to ask you one final question and then you could rest your poor voice in the Sydney Peace Prize address you asked the big big question can we proceed to at least limit the scourge of war can we if you look at history it's pretty hard to believe it I mean that's the UN in 1945 the founding document and we certainly haven't limited the scourge for I mean there has been one success in fact I mention it and that's a continental Europe Europe for centuries had been the most savage brutal place in the world you go back to the 17th century the 30 Years War killed maybe 1/3 of the population of Germany not small 20th century we know and it stopped and stopped in 1945 so Europe States don't go to war with one another anymore there's a thesis about this in the political science literature which I'm kind of skeptical about it's called the thesis of the Democratic peace democracies don't fight each other however there's another factor which you have to consider and I suspect its dominant that Europeans recognized by 1945 that if they play the traditional game of slaughtering each other anymore it's all going to be over they've developed means of destruction so extraordinary that you just can't do it anymore powerful states can't go to war so you attack the weak and since 1945 plenty of attacks on the weak and defenseless congratulations a lot the prophets and thanks for that marathon effort Noam Chomsky winner of this year's Sydney Peace Prize driving the right-wing commentary of crazing and institutional professor and professor emeritus of linguistic and philosophy at MIT hallowed be his name on our next I'll be talking to male friend Graham bond who you may know better as auntie jack and we'll also be looking at how modernity has affected our attitudes and approach to death stick around now for the news on radio National see you later

Channel: ABC News (Australia)

Views: 15,482

Keywords: noam, chomsky, late, night, live, phillip, adams, abc, radio, national, sydney, australia, 2011, peace, prize, LNL

Id: b-u9f5IJa1s

Length: 25min 47sec (1547 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 04 2011