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The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

The Bully Pulpit

Tag Archives: Noam Chomsky

How Will Future Historians Appraise the American Experiment?

20 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, Interview, Political Philosophy

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America, American History, Conversations with History, democracy, Empathy, Freedom, Harry Kreisler, interview, morality, Noam Chomsky, Norman Podhoretz, Patriotism, Philosophy, Wisdom

Norman Podhoretz “People are free to choose whatever view they wish to hold. If it were up to me, all intellectuals would be defending our kind of society. Let me add to this: I think American civilization, as a socio-political system, is one of the high points of human achievement. I compare it to fifth-century Athens. Not in the cultural sense; though we have not done too badly in the creation of artistic monuments, we don’t rank with fifth-century Athens or sixteenth-century Italy or Elizabethan England; but as a socio-political, democratic system we will be seen — if there is a future and there are future historians — as one of the highest points of human achievement, because we have created a society in which more people enjoy more freedom and more prosperity than any human community ever known to human history. And that is not nothing, to put it mildly. I wish everybody recognized that. Many people still don’t.”

__________

Norman Podhoretz, former editor of Commentary, speaking in an interview with Harry Kreisler as part of his “Conversations with History” series. You’ll find more substantial reflections like this in Podhoretz’s political memoir My Love Affair with America: The Cautionary Tale of a Cheerful Conservative.

This statement comes toward the tail end of Podhoretz and Kreisler’s hour-long conversation. The interview covers a lot of ground, and I recommend giving the whole thing a listen, though the next reflection, which wraps up their talk, has a special poignancy. Podhoretz is asked to summarize a lesson for his grandchildren in the context of his own strange intellectual journey from Marxist to founding neoconservative. He replies:

I hope that they would first of all learn to place the kind of value on this country that I think it deserves. Secondly, I hope that they would learn to understand how important ideas are… I would hope that they would also understand the idea that was most eloquently expressed by George Orwell who said something like this: the truth to which we have got to cling as a drowning man to a raft is that is possible to be a normal decent human being and still be fully alive. And I endorse that view with all my heart. I would hope my grandchildren would learn to endorse it as well.

Update: I emailed this excerpt to Noam Chomsky last night, with a question about how to square Podhoretz’s patriotism with Chomsky’s hypercritical posture towards American society and government. He replied:

No society deserves “gushing patriotism.” In terms of material prosperity, the US ranks fairly high. In the 18th century the colonies were probably the richest part of the world, and the US has incomparable material advantages, at least after the indigenous population was exterminated or expelled. Huge resources and territory, incomparable security, etc. One can debate how well the society has done considering these incomparable advantages. Similar questions arise in other dimensions. A true patriot doesn’t gush about how marvelous we are, but evaluates successes and failures and seeks to overcome the failures.

If you liked that, you’ll like these:

  • One of my all-time favorite speeches: Douglas Murray’s ten-minute defense of Western values
  • David McCullough’s perfect answer to the question Why study history?
  • What was the Founding Fathers’ view of human nature?

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In a Real Democracy April 15th Would Be a Day of Mass Celebration

13 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Political Philosophy

≈ Comments Off on In a Real Democracy April 15th Would Be a Day of Mass Celebration

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April 15th, Class Warfare: Interviews with David Barsamian, David Barsamian, economics, Noam Chomsky, Personal Finance, political philosophy, Tax, taxation, taxes

Noam Chomsky

“Look at our political institutions. You have, say, the New Hampshire primary. In a democratic society, what would happen is the people in a town in New Hampshire would get together in their own organizations, assemblies, groups, whatever they are, and take off a little time from whatever careers or other activities that they’re engaged in and say, ‘Alright, let’s work out what we would like to see in the next election.’

And they’d come up with some sort of program: we’d like to see this. Then, if some candidate says, ‘I would like to come to town to talk to you,’ they would respond, ‘Well you can come if you want to listen to us.’ And the candidate could come and they would explain to him what they want…

What happens is totally different.

Nobody meets in the town. The candidate and his media representatives announce that he or she is coming to New Hampshire and they gather people together. The people sit there and listen to the candidate saying, ‘Look how wonderful I am, I’m going to do all these great things,’ and nobody believes a word and then they go home. Well, you know, that’s the opposite of democracy.

In fact, we see it all the time. Take, say, April 15th. In a functioning democratic society that would be a day of celebration, the day you hand in your taxes. You would be saying: ‘Alright, we got together, we worked out some plans and programs that we think ought to be implemented and we’re now participating in providing the funding to get these things done.’ That’s a democracy. In the United States it’s a day of mourning. It’s a day when this alien force, you know, the government, which comes from Mars or somewhere is arriving to steal from us our hard earned money and use it for their own purposes, whatever they are. That’s a reflection of the fact that the concept of democracy is not even in people’s minds anymore. Now, I’m exaggerating. It’s not quite this sharp, but it’s pretty close.”

__________

Noam Chomsky, speaking in ‘Part IV: Political Institutions’ of The Chomsky Sessions on ZNet. You can find extended interviews with Dr. Chomsky in the always challenging Class Warfare: Interviews with David Barsamian.

In the United States, April 15th is statistically shown to be the second most stressful day of the year, as 56% of American adults say the tax-filling process is “stressful” and 18% say it is “very stressful.” (Data from a Zogby poll shows peak tornado season to be the most stressful day of the year.) Three quarters of Americans say money is “a significant cause of stress in [their] lives,” leaving us unsurprised that the day a large stack of that cash is handed over would be an especially anxious one. You are also far more likely to be injured in a car accident on April 15th and 16th, given each sees statistically significant spikes in incidents of road rage (Super Bowl Sunday is the second most dangerous day to be on the road, according to The Journal of the American Medical Association).

Don’t agree with Noam? You’re still in some good company:

  • Calvin Coolidge puts forward a simple definition of when taxes are tyrannical
  • Philosopher Robert Nozick succinctly argues that taxes are a form of slavery
  • One of my absolute favorite recent rants: Stefan Molyneux tells a story about the tragedy of taxes — namely, that only the fruits of virtue can be taxed

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What Can the Lottery Teach Us about Marijuana Legalization?

06 Thursday Feb 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Freedom, Interview, Political Philosophy

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Alcohol, Alexander Cockburn, Chomsky, Drug Legalization, Drugs, Government, interview, libertarianism, Lottery, Marijuana, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Pipes, politics, Pot Legalization, Prohibition, Public Policy, Q&A, Should Drugs Be Legal?, Should Marijuana Be Legal?, Smoking, tobacco, ZNet

Noam Chomsky

Questioner: There was a recent article written by Alexander Cockburn in which he wondered if prohibition was 100% bad. In it, he mentioned that there were some public health benefits [to prohibiting alcohol]. I was wondering if you think that’s irrelevant, or–

Noam Chomsky: Well prohibition cut down on the use of alcohol, and alcohol’s very destructive. I mean it’s much worse than marijuana.

Questioner: So then do you think marijuana or other drugs should be legalized?

Noam Chomsky: I don’t think there’s an obvious answer. I think these are things you have to be cautious about and experiment with. So take, say, marijuana: I think there’s a reasonably good case for decriminalization…

Last time I saw figures – five or ten years ago – they were listed as 60 million marijuana users, with no overdoses. That’s not too bad a record. It’s certainly not good for you beyond some very limited use. But the same is true of everything. It’s true of coffee; it’s true of tobacco; it’s true of red meat.

But overwhelmingly in these instances the right answer is education. Edifying the populace. I think that’s just obvious. Tobacco is a very striking case in the United States.

[Points to questioner] I suspect that not many of your friends smoke cigarettes.

I haven’t seen a student come into my office wanting to smoke for twenty years. It’s just not done among wealthy, educated people anymore. It’s still prevalent among older people who didn’t shake the habit, and it’s very common among younger people who are poor…

Tobacco use in the U.S. became very sharply class-based, just on the basis of education.

And the same has been true of other things. So take, say, red meat. There’s no criminalization of red meat, but consumption is going way down among most groups, simply because of education – people learning some about the potentially harmful effects of it.

And I think that’s true of everything. Take, say, the lottery.

The lottery is a highly regressive tax… You take the towns in Massachusetts, and you ask how much money people spend on the state lottery: the answer is predictable based on levels of education and income. The lower the education and income, the more they spend on the lottery.

I mean, in the town where I live nobody would waste a cent on the lottery. It’s like giving your money away; that’s what the state lottery is. But poor and uneducated people do it.

So what it amounts to is a highly regressive tax. That’s why there’s a ton of advertising for it — it’s a terrific way to soak the poor.

Well, should you make it illegal? Well… I don’t think it should be legal to advertise it, frankly, any more than you should allow ads for marijuana on television. But I don’t think you should criminalize it, either.

What I think you ought to do is exactly what’s done in every sector of educated people: get people immediately to understand that you’re throwing your money away, that this isn’t good for you. If you want to throw your money away, throw it in the ocean.

When people understand that, there’s not going to be any lottery anymore. And I think the same is true of every way of harming yourself…

If there are people who want to experience or do this stuff, alright, well they ought to be allowed to do it. On the other hand, it should be a rational decision – something that people are in a position to make a reasonable choice about. And that requires understanding, and education, and recognition of the consequences, and so on.

I mean, that’s ultimately the answer to drugs.

__________

I’ve transcribed these comments from a press conference with Chomsky that took place on March 4th, 1997. Watch this section below.

In the summer of 2008, I sent the following email to Noam, with whom I’ve communicated pretty regularly since I was 14. (His answers are bolded.)

Sent: Friday, July 04, 2008 10:40 PM

Dear professor Chomsky,

1. What do you do or ponder during independence day? What do you think about the idea that we should adhere to morality over country?

A day like all others. Morality should come first. That’s even written into the law (following illegal orders, etc.). Of course, general principles like these cannot be absolutes. One can always conceive of exceptions. 

2. Do you think marijuana’s tendency to inspire subversive attitudes would be another reason for government opposition to it? Do you think it will be decriminalized?

I don’t think marijuana inspires subserve attitudes. Rather, passivity. Government opposition has a long history. Like prohibition generally, it’s been contrived to control “the dangerous classes.” Some day I presume it will be decriminalized, as it becomes a norm for the educated and privileged classes. 

3. Have you ever tried marijuana? If not, why not?

Never tried, never was tempted. Just not how I live my life.

A few years later, in the Spring of 2010, I asked him the following as part of a larger discussion:

3. I know it’s a personal question but I am interested in the answer: do you, or did you ever, smoke tobacco or drink alcohol?

I did smoke a pipe a long time ago. I often take a drink in the evening.

Looking at it now, I like that answer about the pipe. It, like the phrase “take a drink,” strikes my ear with the tenor of a certain generation of mid-20th century academicians — a group which is sadly dwindling in number.

Someday I plan on publishing the rest of my exchange with Noam, barring he tells me I shouldn’t. All in all, it’s a staccato conversation stitched together over hundreds of emails traversing nearly every subject matter about which I’ve ever been curious. In retrospect, it’s one of the most valuable mentorships I’ve had, despite the fact we’ve never met.

Below: NC in his pipe-smoking days.

Young Noam Chomsky

As a short postscript to those words on Chomsky, I think it’s worth linking to a recent interview with Norman Finkelstein which was published last week on Znet. Though Finkelstein isn’t my favorite source, he nevertheless is spot on in this description of why Chomsky is so admirable.

You’ve mentioned Professor Chomsky a few times in this interview — a man I intend to interview in the future. I know he’s been a good friend of yours for many years. What do you most admire about him?

Everyone admires his brilliance but that’s a commonplace. And also, that’s the throw of the dice, God was very generous to him when it came to his mental capacity. Though of course… Professor Chomsky is a perpetual motion machine. He is an indefatigable worker. But that’s not what I admire most about him, that as I said is discipline which of course I respect, the throw of the dice which is fortune.

The thing that I admire most about Professor Chomsky is he is an absolutely faithful person, he will never betray you. He’s constitutionally incapable of betrayal. To the point that he will defend friends even though I think he knows they’re wrong, but he won’t ever betray you. And he has a sense of moral responsibility that’s just kind of breathtaking…

Check out more from Chomsky, this time talking about some more personal matters, in the link below:

Noam ChomskyChomsky on Education, Children, and the Value of Work

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Chomsky Confronts 9/11 Conspiracy Theorists

01 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Politics

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

9-11 Truth, 9/11 Truth, conspiracy theory, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush, Government, Inside job, Loose Change, Noam Chomsky, politics, September 11th, September 11th Truth movement

Noam Chomsky

Several weeks ago, after giving a talk at the University of Florida, Noam Chomsky was confronted by a ‘9/11 Truther’ during the Q&A period. The questioner asked Chomsky what he thought about the evidence that 9/11 was the product of a government conspiracy. He specifically noted the large groups of people (in particular a society of ‘Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth’) that believe World Trade Center Building 7 was demolished in a controlled explosion.

I’ve transcribed Chomsky’s reply below.

NC: Well, in fact you’re right that there’s a consensus among a minuscule number of architects and engineers – a tiny number – and a couple of them are perfectly serious. But they’re not doing what scientists and engineers do when they think they’ve discovered something.

What you do, when you think you’ve discovered something, is write articles in scientific journals, give talks at the professional societies, go to the civil engineering department at M.I.T. or Florida or wherever you are, and present your results. And then proceed to try to convince the national academies, the professional societies of physicists and civil engineers, the departments in the major universities – and convince them that you’ve discovered something.

Now there happen to be a lot of people are around who’ve spent an hour on the internet and think they know a lot of physics – but it does not work like that, and it never has.

There are reasons why there are graduate schools in these departments. So the thing to do is pretty straightforward: do what scientists and engineers do when they think they’ve made a discovery.

Now when the ‘9/11 Truth’ movement is brought up in talks I give, there are always one or two minor articles cited. Like there’s one article that appeared in an online journal, in which someone claims to have found traces of nano-thermite in Building 7. Now, I don’t know what that means. You don’t know what that means. But if it means anything, bring it to the attention of the scientific community.

So, yes, there’s a small group of people who believe this, and there’s a straightforward way to proceed… 

World Trade Center 7

However there’s a much deeper issue, which has been brought up repeatedly, and I have yet to hear a response to it.

Whatever one thinks of Building 7, and frankly I have no opinion: I don’t know as much about science and engineering as the people who believe they have an answer to this. So I am willing to let the professional societies determine it if they get the information.

There’s just overwhelming evidence that the Bush administration wasn’t involved. Very elementary evidence; you don’t have to be a physicist to understand it. You just have to think for a minute. So let’s think for a minute.

There are a couple of facts which are uncontroversial. One fact that is uncontroversial is that the Bush administration desperately wanted to invade Iraq – that’s a longstanding goal, there’s good reasons for it. It has some of the largest energy resources in the world, right in the middle of the world’s energy producing region.

So they wanted to invade Iraq.

Second uncontroversial fact: they didn’t blame 9/11 on Iraqis. They blamed it on Saudis mainly. And that’s our major ally. So they blamed it on people from a country which is a major ally, not on the country that they wanted to invade.

Third uncontroversial fact: unless they were total lunatics, they would have blamed it on Iraqis. That would have given them open season for an invasion of Iraq. Total international support. A UN resolution. No need to concoct wild stories about WMD’s or contacts between Saddam and Al-Qaeda, which of course quickly exploded, discrediting them…

The conclusion is pretty straightforward. Either they are total lunatics, or they weren’t involved. And they’re not total lunatics. So whatever you think about building 7, there are other considerations to be concerned with.

September 11th

__________

Noam Chomsky, speaking at the University of Florida on October 18, 2013.

Two footnotes:

1. Chomsky underestimates the sustained popularity of 9/11 conspiracy theories. Numerous surveys show that skepticism towards the official story is prevalent around the world. A 2008 poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes found that only 9 of the 17 countries studied featured majorities that held al-Qaeda responsible for the attacks. In the U.S., some 15% of people believe allegations of a controlled demolition to be credible.

2. In vehemently expressing skepticism about the official story, or in directly charging the United States government for the attacks, you are also vindicating the criminals who hijacked those aircrafts and killed thousands. The allegation of a conspiracy is not merely an intellectual position, it is a moral one. Watch Chomsky below.

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A Newspaper Is A Business Out To Make Money

05 Tuesday Nov 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Journalism, Literature, Politics

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

Apology for Smectymnuus, cynicism, Edward S. Herman, free press, Government, Harlan Potter, John Milton, John Steinbeck, John Updike, Manufacturing Consent, Mark Twain, mass media, media, news, newspaper, Noam Chomsky, NSA, Philip Marlowe, Philip Roth, politics, press, Raymond Chandler, Somerset Maugham, The Long Goodbye

Raymond Chandler by Ida Kar, vintage bromide print, early 1950s

“‘We live in what is called a democracy, rule by the majority of the people. A fine ideal if it could be made to work. The people elect, but the party machines nominate, and the party machines to be effective must spend a great deal of money. Somebody has to give it to them, and that somebody, whether it be an individual, a financial group, a trade union or what have you, expects some consideration in return. What I and people of my kind expect is to be allowed to live our lives in decent privacy. I own newspapers, but I don’t like them. I regard them as a constant menace to whatever privacy we have left. Their constant yelping about a free press means, with a few honorable exceptions, freedom to peddle scandal, crime, sex, sensationalism, hate, innuendo, and the political and financial uses of propaganda. A newspaper is a business out to make money through advertising revenue. That is predicated on its circulation and you know what the circulation depends on.’…

‘There’s a peculiar thing about money,’ he went on. ‘In large quantities it tends to have a life of its own, even a conscience of its own. The power of money becomes very difficult to control. Man has always been a venal animal. The growth of populations, the huge costs of wars, the incessant pressure of confiscatory taxation — all these things make him more and more venal. The average man is tired and scared, and a tired, scared man can’t afford ideals. He has to buy food for his family.

In our time we have seen a shocking decline in both public and private morals. You can’t expect quality from people whose lives are a subjection to a lack of quality. You can’t have quality with mass production. You don’t want it because it lasts too long. So you substitute styling, which is a commercial swindle intended to produce artificial obsolescence. Mass production couldn’t sell its goods next year unless it made what it sold this year look unfashionable a year from now. We have the whitest kitchens and the most shining bathrooms in the world. But in the lovely white kitchen the average American housewife can’t produce a meal fit to eat, and the lovely shining bathroom is mostly a receptacle for deodorants, laxatives, sleeping pills, and the products of that confidence racket called the cosmetic industry. We make the finest packages in the world, Mr. Marlowe. The stuff inside is mostly junk.”

__________

A monologue from the multimillionaire Harlan Potter, speaking to detective Philip Marlowe in chapter 32 of Raymond Chandler’s 1953 novel The Long Goodbye.

Like many of the best novelists, Chandler can effortlessly slip canny and credible observations like this into the mouths of characters who inhabit an otherwise plot-driven story. John Updike, Philip Roth, Somerset Maugham, and John Steinbeck are some of the other modern novelists who, at least according to the top of my head, possess this same subtle gift.

I would, however, suggest a small addition to the above monologue. After the hinge sentence, “A newspaper is a business out to make money off of advertising revenue,” there should be a declarative phrase: “Nothing more, nothing less.” The reason: I think there’s a crucial corollary to the fact that a free press within a market economy will run on advertising revenue (and to a lesser degree, private donations or public subsidies). If there is consumer demand for news which is superficial, trivial, and tawdry, then that is the content which will generate the most advertising revenue — and will therefore be supplied. If enough consumers demand exhaustive coverage of the new NSA infrastructure in Cyprus — instead of, say, Ms. Cyrus —  then the former will quickly flood the airwaves as the latter recedes. In this sense, the Harlan Potters (and Rupert Murdochs and Ted Turners) of the world are not completely deserving of our condemnation, or at least may not be the first to blame for our ignorance and delusion en masse. No, what might first deserve indictment are the skewed economic incentives themselves, the educational system and cultural institutions which make us unreceptive to sober journalism. Perhaps, most fundamentally, the responsible party is the one hardest to hold accountable — ourselves.

One beef I have with the thesis of Noam Chomsky’s and Edward Herman’s famous 1988 analysis of the American mass media, Manufacturing Consent, is that it incriminates elites for the sensationalism and superficiality of most U.S. journalism and network news. Of course these issues have been reconfigured by the advent of the internet, but according to my take, a different premise — that I the consumer is ultimately driving what passes as “content” — is what obtains. If we crave insubstantial and easy-to-digest news coverage, then, like junk food, that’s what we’ll be served. Milton famously declared that, “they who have put out the people’s eyes, reproach them of their blindness”; in our case, if we’ve lost the ability to see, we may have no one to blame but ourselves.

As Twain would later observe, “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.” Surely there is enough blame to go around — but who’s most fundamentally at fault?

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Sidney Morgenbesser’s Sense of Humor

10 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Humor, Philosophy, Psychology

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

B.F. Skinner, Categorical Imperative, cleverness, Columbia University, comedic, comedy, epistemology, ethics, General Philosophy, Heidegger, humor, Immanuel Kant, irony, J.L. Austin, jokes, Kant, lecture, Moses, Noam Chomsky, philosophy of science, police, political philosophy, psychology, Robert Nozick, Sidney Morganbesser, wit

Sidney Morgenbesser

Sidney Morgenbesser was a prominent figure at Columbia University throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. As the University’s John Dewey Professor of Philosophy, he taught classes on epistemology and the philosophy of science which were consistently packed with students eager to hear him lecture — but not because of his academic prestige or reputation as a generous grader.

Morgenbesser was widely known as one of the wittiest men of his age. His caustic irreverence and razor-sharp tongue produced an unmistakable — and inimitable — sense of humor. Through freewheeling intellectual banter that could be compared to sportive Socratic dialogues, he influenced generations of students, among them the philosopher Robert Nozick, who once claimed that he “majored in Sidney Morgenbesser.”

Harry Frankfurt, professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton, struggled to find the words to describe Morgenbesser, resorting to an image from nature: “You don’t ask what the wind does. It’s just power and self-sustaining energy.”

Noam Chomsky called him, “One of the most knowledgeable and in many ways profound thinkers of the modern period… a philosopher in the old sense — not so much what’s on the printed page, but in debate and inspiring discussion.”

The New York Times called him, “Socrates with a Yiddish accent”; I suggest Groucho Marx with a PhD in philosophy.

Here are some of his most famous rejoinders:

  • In the early 1950′s, the esteemed Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin came to Columbia to present a paper about the structural analysis of language. He pointed out that, in English, although a double negative implies a positive meaning (i.e. “I’m not unlike my father…”), there is no language in which a double positive implies a negative. “Yeah, yeah,” scoffed Morgenbesser from the back of the auditorium.
  • In the 1970′s, a student of Maoist inclination asked him if he disagreed with Chairman Mao’s saying that a proposition can be true and false at the same time. Dr. Morgenbesser replied, “I do and I don’t.”
  • Morgenbesser became something of a legend at the time of the 1968 student uprising for being beaten up when he joined a human chain protesting the police. When confronted about the incident, Morgenbesser was asked whether he had been treated unfairly or unjustly. His response: “It was unjust, but not unfair. It’s unjust to hit me over the head, but it’s not unfair because everyone else was hit over the head, too.”
  • Once during a heady philosophy lecture, Morgenbesser was asked to prove a questioner’s existence. He shot back, “Who’s asking?”
  • A colleague once challenged Morgenbesser’s tenure at Columbia, saying he had not published enough material to deserve a tenured position. Morgenbesser responded: “Moses wrote one book. Then what did he do?”
  • Morgenbesser was leaving a subway station in New York City and put his pipe in his mouth as he was ascending the steps. A police officer told him that there was no smoking on the subway. Morgenbesser pointed out that he was leaving the subway, not entering it, and hadn’t lit up yet anyway. The cop again said that smoking was not allowed in the subway, and Morgenbesser repeated his comment. The cop said, “If I let you do it, I’d have to let everyone do it.” Morgenbesser replied, “Who do you think you are, Kant?” Due to his accent, the word “Kant” was mistaken for a vulgar epithet and Morgenbesser was hauled off to the police station. He won his freedom only after a colleague showed up and explained the Categorical Imperative to the unamused cops.
  • In response to Heidegger’s ontological query “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Morgenbesser answered “If there were nothing you’d still be complaining!”
  • A central subject of Morganbesser’s investigations was the independence of irrelevant alternatives. Once while ordering dessert, Morgenbesser was told by the waitress that he could choose between apple pie and blueberry pie. He ordered the apple pie. Shortly thereafter, the waitress came back and said that cherry pie was also an option; Morgenbesser responded: “In that case I’ll have the blueberry pie.”
  • When asked his opinion of the philosophy of pragmatism, Morgenbesser said, “It’s all very well in theory but it doesn’t work in practice.”

__________

I found several of these quips and many other gems in Jim Holt’s stunningly clever and often very funny book Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes.

Sidney Morgenbesser

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The School of Affliction

12 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

Abigail Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Afterlife, American History, Bixby Letter, founding fathers, friendship, John Adams, Kazuo Ishiguro, loss, Mortality, mourning, Noam Chomsky, personal letter, Ravelstein, Saul Bellow, Thomas Jefferson

Thomas JeffersonMonticello, November 13, 1818.

The public papers, my dear friend, announce the fatal event of which your letter of October the 20th had given me ominous foreboding.

Tried myself in the school of affliction, by the loss of every form of connection which can rive the human heart, I know well, and feel what you have lost, what you have suffered, are suffering, and have yet to endure. The same trials have taught me that for ills so immeasurable, time and silence are the only medi­cine. I will not, therefore, by useless condolences, open afresh the sluices of your grief, nor, although mingling sincerely my tears with yours, will I say a word more where words are vain, but that it is of some comfort to us both, that the term is not very distant, at which we are to deposit in the same cerement, our sorrows and suffering bodies, and to ascend in essence to an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved and lost, and whom we shall still love and never lose again. God bless you and support you under your heavy affliction.

Th. Jefferson

__________

Thomas Jefferson’s letter to his friend and political rival John Adams, upon hearing that Adams’s wife Abigail had died. You can find it along with more the best letters in American history in The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence.

I finished graduate school at Georgetown a week and a half ago, and have now found myself, for the second time in a year, living in my childhood home, as a graduate, idling away a brief but ambiguous stretch of days before moving on to the “next stage” of life. Twelve months ago, I had just finished four undergraduate years at the University of Virginia, and had lugged home a bag of dirty clothes to wash and suitcase of books to read.

One of those books is Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein, which I inhaled last July and have since picked up off the shelf and re-read in the past week. The novel (Bellow’s final book, published when he was eighty-five) is a roman à clef and thinly disguised paean to his friend and colleague Allan Bloom. Bellow speaks through the narrator, Chick, as he recounts his long friendship and final months with the renowned academic Abe Ravelstein (re: Bloom) as well as the erotic and intellectual conversations they rehearse as the undercurrent of impending mortality slowly submerges their long-developing friendship. Bellow gives voice to these anxieties with a quivering, careful solemnity that I haven’t encountered elsewhere. His text simultaneously affirms Martin Amis’s claim that Ravelstein is a masterpiece without analogue, while flouting Kazuo Ishiguro’s suggestion that no great novels are written by writers who have matured beyond the class of quinquagenarian.

Bellow’s voice is inflected with the ambiguities and uncertainties of one who is aware of his limited earthly future yet wary of traditional immortality narratives. Chick defers to Ravelstein’s afterlife-agnosticism for much of the book, until its final scenes, wherein the two old pals are overwhelmed by a sensation that Ravelstein’s deathbed is not — and perhaps cannot — be their final meeting place. This impulse is rendered and pondered beautifully by Bellow:

“I wonder if anyone believes the grave is all there is… This is the involuntary and normal, the secret, esoteric, confidence of the man of flesh and blood. The flesh would shrink and go, the blood would dry, but no one believes in his mind of minds or heart of hearts that the pictures do stop.”

By the tone of his letter to John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, who was an absolutely determined skeptic for his entire adult life, seems to have embraced some loose version of Bellowian death-survival. The body decays, Jefferson certainly knew that, but as it is eventually cast off, does the spark of consciousness continue to flicker elsewhere? Jefferson may not have really thought that — he may have merely been bowing to the grief of his good friend — or perhaps, like Bellow, he didn’t just want to believe it, he had to.

John Adams

As a side note: Last summer, in the throes of obsession with Ravelstein, I sent the above quotation to Noam Chomsky, to which I attached the question, “So Bellow intuited that life may go on after death — can you sympathize with, or make sense of, such a view?”

Chomsky’s response was typical in its sobering candor: “Bellow is clearly wrong in saying we all believe it.  I can sympathize with a young mother who hopes fervently to see her dying child in heaven, but not with someone like Bellow who chooses the same illusions.”

I didn’t push Chomsky to amend his answer in light of Bellow’s crucial use of the word “involuntary,” though I perhaps should have (or may even in the future). The whole point of the quote — and the related speculation about Jefferson’s view of the afterlife — is to suggest that there is something reflexive, something automatic about the human belief in immortality.

Finally, returning to Jefferson’s letter: does anyone know if his apposition of “loved and lost” in this context inspired Abraham Lincoln’s use of those same two words in his famous Bixby Letter?

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W.S. Merwin: Poems from the Outside

13 Thursday Jun 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ Comments Off on W.S. Merwin: Poems from the Outside

Tags

city, country, gardening, labor, Noam Chomsky, Poem, poetry, W. S. Merwin, Work

W.S. Merwin

Coming into the high room again after years
after oceans and shadows of hills and the sounds
after losses and feet on stairs

after looking and mistakes and forgetting
turning there thinking to find
no one except those I knew
finally I saw you
sitting in white
already waiting

you of whom I had heard
with my own ears since the beginning
for whom more than once
I have opened the door
believing you were not far

__________

“Late Spring” by W. S. Merwin, which you can keep on your shelf along with other greats from Merwin in his Collected Poems 1952-1993.

Watch a short video of Merwin below, which is taken from a recent profile of him in PBS’ Bill Moyers Journal. In addition to introducing and reading “Late Spring,” Merwin also describes his love of living in the countryside and working on the land.

When he was 54 years old, Merwin — who had lived previously in Majorca, London, Mexico, and the continental U.S. — moved with his wife Paula to the island of Maui. There he designed and largely built a home surrounded by acres of once-lush terrain which had turned toxic by decades of logging, poisonous agribusiness and erosion. Merwin then began the painstaking task of restoring the soil and surrounding land; and today, 31 years hence, it is considered one of the densest palm forests in the world.

Now 85, Merwin continues to live, garden, and write in Hawaii.

Yet while cloistered away from the American literary establishment, Merwin continues to garner his share of acclaim and awards. In 2010 he was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States, an occasion which the New York Times marked by writing, “The humans in Mr. Merwin’s poems take their bearings from the natural world, one that is often embattled… Mr. Merwin is a laureate for our times, and we look forward to his tenure.” Bill Moyers observed that Merwin seems to scorn leaving his life in paradise… except for those occasions when he has to return to North America to accept Pulitzer Prizes.

But Merwin takes a more humble approach. He says:

“I love the city, but I also love the country. And I realize that when I’m in the city I miss the country all the time, and when I’m in the country I miss the city some of the time. So what I do now is live in the country and go to the city some of the time…

Writing poetry has to me always had something to do with how you want to live. I guess I’ve done something that many of my contemporaries didn’t do. Many of them went into universities and had academic careers, and I have nothing against that. But I didn’t think I was made for it. I begin, after about a week in university, I begin to feel the oxygen’s going out of the air very fast and I have to go somewhere else.”

This love of the land and physical labor strikes a chord with me, not because I feel it too (I get anxious when more than five miles from a museum or concert hall), but because some of my family shares in Merwin’s obsession to an almost psychotic degree. At my family ranch in Texas, for example, my mom will often while away the afternoon hours by picking acres of weeds and incinerating them in controlled burns — an activity I am yet to find as entertaining as sitting by the lake.

Yet at 85, Merwin’s vitality and zest are attributes that all of us can aspire to, and they recall those of another, younger — although only by a year — thinker, Noam Chomsky, who mused about physical labor by saying:

“For me there was always too much that I wanted to do. I’m not sure how widespread this is – take, say, a craftsman, I happen to be no good with tools, but take someone who can build things, fix things, they really want to do it. They love doing it: ‘if there’s a problem I can solve it’. Or just plain physical labor – that’s also gratifying. If you work on command then of course it’s just drudgery but if you do the very same thing out of your own will or interest it’s exciting and interesting and appealing. I mean that’s why people look for work – gardening for example. So you’ve had a hard week, you have the weekend off, the kids are running around, you could just lie down to sleep but it’s much more fun to be gardening or building something or doing something else.”

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Prophets and Power

23 Saturday Feb 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, History, Interview, Philosophy, Politics, Religion

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Amos, Elijah, Hebrew, Israel, Judaism, Kibbutz, King Ahab, linguistics, Noam Chomsky, Old Testament, Palestine, ZNet

Noam Chomsky

Did you read Nivi’im, the prophets, with your father in Hebrew?

The word “prophet” is a very bad translation of an obscure Hebrew word, navi. Nobody knows what it means. But today they’d be called dissident intellectuals. They were giving geopolitical analysis, arguing that the acts of the rulers were going to destroy what was, even then, a flourishing Jewish society. And they condemned the acts of evil kings, which Israel was plagued with for so long before and after King David. They called for justice and mercy to orphans and widows and so on.

I don’t want to say it was all beautiful. Dissident intellectuals aren’t all beautiful. You read Sakharov, who is sometimes appalling. Or Solzhenitsyn. And the nivi’im were treated the way dissident intellectuals always are. They weren’t praised. They weren’t honored. They were imprisoned like Jeremiah. They were driven into the desert. They were hated. Now at the time, there were intellectuals, “prophets,” who were very well treated. They were the flatterers of the court. Centuries later, they were called “false prophets.”

People who criticize power in the Jewish community are regarded the way Ahab treated Elijah: You’re a traitor. You’ve got to serve power. You can’t argue that the policies that Israel is following are going to lead to its destruction, which I thought then and still do.

Did you imagine yourself as a navi, a prophet, when you were a child reading those texts alone in your room or on Friday night with your father?

Sure. In fact, my favorite prophet, then and still, is Amos. I particularly admired his comments that he’s not an intellectual. I forget the Hebrew, but lo navi ela anochi lo ben navi—I’m not a prophet, I’m not the son of a prophet, I’m a simple shepherd. So he translated “prophet” correctly. He’s saying, “I’m not an intellectual.” He was a simple farmer and he wanted just to tell the truth. I admire that.

Did religion play a role in the life of your home? Did your mother light Shabbat candles?

We did those things, but they were­—I don’t know how you grew up, but my parents were part of the Enlightenment tradition, the haskalah. So you keep the symbols, but it doesn’t involve real religious faith.

At the age of ten I came to the conclusion that the Hebrew God I learned about in school didn’t exist.

I remember how I did that. I remember it very well. My father’s family was super Orthodox. They came from a little shtetl somewhere in Russia. My father told me that they had regressed even beyond a medieval level. You couldn’t study Hebrew, you couldn’t study Russian. Mathematics was out of the question. We went to see them for the holidays. My grandfather had a long beard, I don’t think he knew he was in the United States. He spoke Yiddish and lived in a couple of blocks of his friends. We were there on Pesach, and I noticed that he was smoking.

So I asked my father, how could he smoke? There’s a line in the Talmud that says, ayn bein shabbat v’yom tov ela b’inyan achilah. I said, “How come he’s smoking?” He said, “Well, he decided that smoking is eating.” And a sudden flash came to me: strict Judaism is based on the idea that God is an imbecile. He can’t figure these things out. If that’s what it is, I don’t want anything to do with it.

Your father, Zev, was one of the significant Hebrew grammarians of the past century, and you did your early academic work on medieval Hebrew. Did something interest you about the structure of the language, or was it just available to you as the language in your home?

It wasn’t the language in the home. We spoke English. My parents would never utter a word of Yiddish, which was their native language. You have to remember there was real kulturkampf going on at this time, in the 1930s, between the Yiddish and the Hebrew tendencies. So we never heard a word—my wife either—of Yiddish. Hebrew was the language we studied. And then when I got to be a teenager I was immersed in novels.

You returned to Hebrew for your college thesis.

When I got to college, I had to do an undergraduate thesis. I was in linguistics then, so I figured, “OK, I’ll write about Hebrew. It’s kind of interesting.” I started the way I was taught to: You get an informant, and you do field work and take a corpus. So I started working with an informant, and I realized after a couple of weeks, this is totally idiotic. I know the answers to all the questions. And the only thing I don’t know is the phonetics, but I don’t care about that. So I just dropped the informant and started doing it myself.

My work was more or less influenced by the style of medieval Hebrew and Arabic grammar. It was historical analysis. But you can translate the basic ideas into a kind of a synchronic interpretation, a description of the system as it actually exists, and out of that came the early stages of generative grammar, which nobody looked at.

So your theory of generative grammar in its early stages came out of your study of medieval Hebrew and Arabic?

Yes. When I was maybe 10 or 11 years old, I was actually reading the proofs of my father’s doctoral dissertation, which was on David Kimhi’s Hebrew grammar, and then I read articles on the history of the language and Semitic philology. When I got to college I started studying Arabic. I wanted to learn Arabic, and I got pretty far.

It’s the same basic structure, but Hebrew is based on a root vowel pattern distinction, so there’s a root, which is neither a noun nor anything else, and it’s not plural or past tense or anything. It’s a root, typically a tri-consonant root, with a couple of exceptions, and it fits into any large array of different vowel patterns, which determine what its function is in a sentence. Is it a verb? Is it a noun? If it’s a verb, is it third-person plural, does it agree with some other nouns? The whole language builds up from that. And that’s how I treated it in my early work, which is kind of the way it was done in traditional grammar. Now people do it differently, rightly or wrongly.

Of course the modern Hebrew language is quite different. I have trouble reading modern Hebrew. In the 1950s I could read anything. I don’t know how much experience you’ve had with contemporary Hebrew. It’s quite difficult.

Were there any gentiles in your parents’ world?

Practically not. In fact there weren’t even Yiddish-speaking Jews. They lived in if not a physical ghetto then in a cultural ghetto. Their friends were all people deeply involved in the revival of the Hebrew language and cultural Zionism. I happened to have some non-Jewish friends, but that’s just from school.

Was that what motivated you to live in Israel?

My wife and I were there in ’53. We lived in a kibbutz for a while and planned to stay, actually. I came back and had to finish my Ph.D. We thought we’d go back.

When you think of the motivations of people like your parents or the people who founded those Mapam kibbutzim, you don’t think of those motivations as being inherently linked to some desire to oppress others?

By then I was old enough to separate from my parents. I’d been on my own intellectually since I was a teenager. I gravitated toward Zionist groups that were not in their milieu, like Hashomer Ha’tzair.

My father grew up in Hashomer.

I could never join Hashomer because in those days they were split between Stalinist and Trotskyite, and I was anti-Leninist. But I was in the neighborhood. It was a Hashomer kibbutz that we went to, Kibbutz Hazore’a. It’s changed a lot. We would never have lasted. It was sort of a mixed story. They were binationalists. So up until 1948 they were anti-state. There were those who gravitated toward or who were involved in efforts of Arab-Jewish working-class cooperation and who were for socialist binationalist Palestine. Those ideas sound exotic today, but they didn’t at the time. It’s because the world has changed.

But there was an element of oppression I couldn’t get around. If you know the history, you know that most idealistic anti-nationalist settlers insisted on a closed Hebrew society, you can’t hire outside labor, that sort of thing. You could see the motivation. They didn’t want to become what the first settlers were: landowners who had cheap Arab labor. They wanted to work the land. Nevertheless, there’s an exclusionary character to it. Which then led into the policy of the state and became quite ugly later. So it was kind of an internal conflict that was never resolved.

In your work, there are two separate things that you’ve written that touch on the political question of anti-Semitism and that I look at together and try to reconcile. The first was the introduction you wrote to a book by Robert Faurisson, who became notorious for writing two letters to Le Monde denying that the gas chambers existed and claiming that the suggestion that they did exist was part of a Jewish plot or hoax.

No, I didn’t, actually that’s propaganda. That’s utter propaganda. Are you asking why I would support Faurisson’s right of freedom of speech?

Freedom of speech is one thing. Denial—

Freedom of speech is the whole issue for me. I happen to be an anti-Stalinist and an anti-Nazi, so I don’t think that the state should be granted the right to determine historical truth and to punish people who deviate from it. That is the one and only issue. The so-called introduction was a statement I was asked to write. It’s called “Some elementary remarks on freedom of expression.” That’s what it’s about: Freedom of expression.

You were simply concerned about the attempt of the French state to censor Faurisson, and you didn’t care what he wrote?

It’s more than censoring. It’s determining historical truth. The issue at that time, if you actually read the title of his memoir, it said, “Memoir in defense against those who accuse me of falsification of history.”

When you speak about Israeli crimes, do you feel that you have a special responsibility to speak out as someone who comes from a specific Jewish tradition, or do you simply speak as an American?

There are many factors, as always. A sufficient factor is that the United States is responsible. But of course there’s a lot more. Background. Childhood. Emotional connections. Friends. All sorts of things. But they’re kind of irrelevant to the fundamental issue, those personal things. The fundamental issue is quite simple: Every U.S. taxpayer is responsible for what Israel does. Their policies… they can’t carry them out without the decisive military, economic, ideological, and diplomatic support of the United States.

The United States destroyed Iraq. Of course that should be harshly condemned. In fact I do it much more than I talk about Israel. In the case of the Vietnam war, we basically destroyed three countries. They’ll never recover. Same with Nicaragua. Same with Cuba. Go on and on. Same with Chile. That’s what we ought to be concentrating on. Israel happens to be a subcase of a larger problem. And yes, for me personally, it’s additional things.

Those additional things—namely, your parents, your childhood memories, your sense of emotional connection—

It’s all there. You can’t get out of your skin. But when we get down to the moral issue, it’s independent of one’s personal background.

__________

From Noam Chomsky, in a recent interview on ZNet.

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Is There a Universal Human Nature?

22 Friday Feb 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Philosophy, Psychology

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Axel Schiøtz, Bach, Charlie Chaplin, cognition, evolution, free time, human nature, Noam Chomsky, Pablo Casals, psychology, Work

Noam ChomskyYou have argued that any stance one takes on political, economic, social or even personal issues is ultimately based on some conception of human nature. Why is this?

Any stance we take is based on some conception of what is good for people. This conception will tacitly presuppose a certain belief as to the constitution of human nature — human needs and human potential. You might as well bring them out as clearly as possible so that they can be discussed.

According to your view of human nature, all human beings possess certain biological functions endowing them with common mental capacities. How do you defend this position against postmodernist critics who argue that there is no such thing as human nature, and that all attempts to define it are guilty of reading other cultures in the light of Western perceptions and values?

Not even the most extreme postmodernist can seriously argue that there is no such thing as human nature. They may argue that the exact properties of human nature are difficult to substantiate — this is certainly correct. However, it is impossible to coherently argue that an intrinsic, universal human nature does not exist. This amounts to the belief that the next human zygote conceived might just as well develop into a worm or a crab as a human being. Postmodernists might limit their assertion to denying any effect of human nature on our mental make-up — our values, our knowledge, our wants, etc. This also makes no sense.

The postmodernist will argue that a child growing up in New York will develop a certain way of thinking, and if that child had grown up amongst Amazon tribes people she would have developed a completely different way of thinking. This is true. But we must then ask how a child could develop these different consciousnesses. In whatever environment it finds itself, the child will mentally construct a rich and complex culture on the basis of the extremely scattered and limited phenomena it is exposed to. That consideration tells us (in advance of any detailed knowledge) that there must be an extraordinary directive and organizational component to the mind that is internal. We can begin to see human nature in terms of certain capacities to develop certain mental traits. I think we can go further than this and begin to discover universal aspects of these mental traits which are determined by human nature. I think we can find this in the area of morality.

For example, not long ago I talked to people in Amazon tribes and I took it for granted that they have the same conception of vice and virtue as I do. It is only through sharing these values that we were able to interact — talking about real problems such as being forced out of the jungle by the state authorities. I believe I was correct to assume this: we had no problem communicating although we were as remote as is possible culturally.

Are you suggesting everyone agrees about the nature of vice and virtue?

In fact I think they probably have a very high measure of agreement. One strong bit of evidence for this is that everyone — Genghis Khan, Himmler, Bill Gates — creates stories of themselves where they interpret their actions as working for the benefit of human beings. Even at the extreme levels of depravity, the Nazis did not boast that they wanted to kill Jews, but gave crazed justifications — even that they were acting in ‘self-defense’. It is very rare for people to justify their actions by saying ‘I’m doing this to maximize my own benefit and I don’t care what happens to anybody else’. That would be pathological.

But I think you would agree that not all cultures are equally viable from the standpoint of promoting human fulfillment and well-being? Are you wanting to argue that your understanding of human nature can give us a kind of objective understanding of the conditions of human flourishing?

Now we’re taking an essentialist position which the relativist would contradict. I’m not willing to go that far. We can develop a stronger conception of human nature through drawing on Enlightenment thinking on the issue.

This has support from some of the sciences, but is mainly founded on a philosophical investigation into our hopes, intuition and experience, and an examination of history and cultural variety. There are needs for conditions which allow the flourishing of human capacities. Insights from the Enlightenment show us that people need to exist in free association with others — not in isolation, and not in relations of domination. There is a need to replace social fetters with social bonds. Therefore any social structure that involves relations of domination — whether it’s the family, a transnational corporation, gender relations — has a very heavy burden of proof to bear. It must demonstrate that the benefits it provides outweigh the restrictions it imposes on human capacities. If it can’t demonstrate its legitimacy, it should be dismantled.

Do you think that different social and economic circumstances either block or reinforce certain dispositions — that, for example, whatever there might be in the way of a natural tendency towards selfish and aggressive behavior is reinforced by the capitalist market society?

There’s no doubt about it. Let’s take Germany, for example. In the early 20th century Germany was the most advanced area of Western culture — in music, the arts, science. In the passage of a few years, it entered the absolute depths of human history. Small changes in German society allowed people like Joseph Mengele to flourish rather than people like Einstein and Freud.

Granted the truth of what you say about our distinctively human capacities for freedom and co-operative action, how come we are so open to that kind of manipulation and deceit? How come we remain both globally and locally so caught up in oppression?

It’s a serious question. Why are we born free and end up enslaved?

Is there a case here for viewing social factors as more determinant than biological factors?

You can’t say which factor is more decisive. They interact. Take the example of puberty: small changes in nutrition can modify the onset of puberty by a factor of two, or even terminate it altogether. Or the visual system: in a kitten you can destroy the neural basis for vision simply by not presenting pattern stimulation in the first couple of weeks of its life. However, does this mean that the environment is the decisive force? No. Puberty is a process which human beings undergo at a particular stage of maturation because that’s the way they’ve been designed. You don’t undergo puberty because of peer pressure. Likewise, human limbs will not develop into wings rather than arms or legs. The genetic component determines strict limits within which variation is possible. I believe the same is true of our social and mental development.

How do you see the relationship between work and free time in a more liberated society?

Polls in the US, Germany and elsewhere have shown that people value free time over material goods. Therefore, there are major propaganda efforts to reverse this. One reason over a trillion dollars a year is spent on marketing in the USA is to try to undermine our natural tendency to want free, liberated time.

What are you currently reading?

I’ve just finished a few important books. One is Ha-Joon Chang’s Bad Samaritans, a penetrating and expert study showing how and why standard doctrines concerning economic development are dramatically refuted by the historical record and have caused severe harm when applied. Another is Peter Hallward’s Damming the Flood. The “flood” is Lavalas, the popular movement in Haiti that won the first democratic election in this tragic country, a victim of French and US torture, and the savagery of a small elite, since it became the first free country of free men in the hemisphere. Hallward’s deeply informed account of what he sees as “neo-imperial sabotage” by the traditional torturers explores the background of the coup of 2004 and the persistence of “the flood” in a country that is a microcosm of imperial savagery and heroic resistance, however one interprets recent events.

What are you currently watching?

My wife and I used to be movie addicts, but I’m now pretty much reduced to what the grandchildren want to see. All-time favorite? The one movie I sat through twice was Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, so maybe that qualifies.

What are you currently listening to?

If some ancient equipment could be rehabilitated, I’d take out some wonderful old records of Axel Schiøtz singing Schubert Lieder and Pablo Casals playing Bach solo cello suites, reviving memories of more light-hearted days when my wife and I backpacked through Europe to the Prades festival, 60 years ago.

__________

From two interviews with Noam Chomsky — one from his website, the other from the Christian Science Monitor.

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Chomsky on Education, Children, and the Value of Work

02 Wednesday Jan 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Philosophy

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Children, education, Freedom, Frithjof Bergmann, No Child Left Behind, Noam Chomsky, play, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Work, ZNet

Noam Chomsky

The philosopher Frithjof Bergmann says that most people don’t know what kind of activities they really want to do. He calls that ‘the poverty of desire.’ I find this to be true when I talk to a lot of my friends. Did you always know what you wanted to do?

That’s a problem I never had – for me there was always too much that I wanted to do. I’m not sure how widespread this is – take, say, a craftsman, I happen to be no good with tools, but take someone who can build things, fix things, they really want to do it. They love doing it: ‘if there’s a problem I can solve it’. Or just plain physical labor – that’s also gratifying. If you work on command then of course it’s just drudgery but if you do the very same thing out of your own will or interest it’s exciting and interesting and appealing. I mean that’s why people look for work – gardening for example. So you’ve had a hard week, you have the weekend off, the kids are running around, you could just lie down to sleep but it’s much more fun to be gardening or building something or doing something else.

It’s an old insight, not mine. Wilhelm von Humboldt, who did some of the most interesting work on this, once pointed out that if an artisan produces a beautiful object on command we may admire what he did but we despise what he is – he’s a tool in the hands of others. If on the other hand he creates that same beautiful object out of his own will we admire it and him and he’s fulfilling himself. It’s kind of like study at school – I think we all know from our experience that if you study on command because you have to pass a test you can do fine on the test but two weeks later you’ve forgotten everything. On the other hand if you do it because you want to find out, and you explore and you make mistakes and you look in the wrong place and so on, then ultimately you remember.

So you think that basically a person knows what it is that he or she wants to do?

Under the right circumstances that would be true. Children for example are naturally curious – they want to know about everything, they want to explore everything but that generally gets knocked out of their heads. They’re put into disciplined structures, things are organized for them to act in certain ways so it tends to get beaten out of you. That’s why school’s boring. School can be exciting. It happens that I went to a Deweyite school until I was about 12. It was an exciting experience, you wanted to be there, you wanted to go. There was no ranking, there were no grades. Things were guided so it wasn’t just do anything you feel like. There was a structure but you were basically encouraged to pursue your own interests and concerns and to work together with others. I basically didn’t know I was a good student until I got to high school. I went to an academic high school in which everybody was ranked and you had to get to college so you had to pass tests. In elementary school I had actually skipped a year but nobody paid much attention to it. The only thing I saw was that I was the smallest kid in the class. But it wasn’t a big thing that anybody paid attention to. High school was totally different – you’ve gotta be first in the class, not second. And that’s a very destructive environment – it drives people into the situation where you really don’t know what you want to do. It happened to me in fact – in high school I kinda lost all interest. When I looked at the college catalogue it was really exciting – lots of courses, great things. But it turned out that the college was like an overgrown high school. After about a year I was going to just drop out and it was just by accident that I stayed in. I happened to meet up with a faculty member who suggested to me I start taking his graduate courses and then I started taking other graduate courses. But I have no professional training. That’s why I’m teaching at MIT – I don’t have the credentials to teach at an academic university.

But that’s what education ought to be like. Otherwise it can be extremely alienating – I see it with my grandchildren or the circles in which they live. There are kids who just don’t know what they want to do so they smoke pot, or they drink, they skip school, or they get into all kinds of other anti-social behavior. Because they have energy and excitement and nothing to do with it. That’s true here, I don’t know how it is in Europe, but here even the concept of play has changed. I can see it even in the place where I live. My wife and I moved out to this area because it was very good for children – there wasn’t a lot of traffic, there were woods out the back and the kids could play in the street. The kids were out playing all the time, riding their bikes whatever. Now there are children around but they’re not outside, they’re either inside looking at video games or something or else they’re involved in organized activities: adult-organized sports activities or something. But just the concept of spontaneous play seems to have diminished considerably. There are some studies about this, I’ve seen them for the United States and England, I don’t know if it’s true elsewhere but spontaneous play has just declined under social changes. And I think it’s a very bad thing because that’s where your creative instincts flourish. If you have to make up a game in the streets, if you play baseball with a broom handle you found somewhere that’s different from going to an organized league where you have to wear a uniform.

Sometimes it’s just surreal – I remember when my grandson was about ten and he was very interested in sports, he was always playing for teams for the town. Once we were over at his mother’s house and he came back pretty disconsolate because there was supposed to be a baseball game but the other team that they were playing only had eight players. I don’t know if you know how baseball works but everybody’s sitting all the time, there’s about three people actually doing anything, everybody else is just sitting around. But his team simply couldn’t give the other team an extra player so that the kids could have fun, because you have to keep by the league rules. I mean that’s carrying it to real absurdity, but that’s the kind of thing that’s happening.

It’s true in school too – the great educational innovation of Bush and Obama was ‘No Child Left Behind’. I can see the effects in schools from talking to teachers, parents and students. It’s training to pass tests and the teachers are evaluated on how well the students do in the test – I’ve talked to teachers who’ve told me that a kid will be interested in something that comes up in class and want to pursue it and the teacher has to tell them – ‘you can’t do that because you have to pass this test next week’. That’s the opposite of education.

What is your personal work routine? How do manage to work so much?

Well my wife died a couple of years ago and since then I’ve done nothing but work. I see my children once in a while but almost nothing else. Before that I worked pretty hard but had a personal life outside. But that’s unique.

How many hours of sleep do you get?

I try to get about six or seven hours of sleep if I can. It’s a pretty crazy life – tremendous number of talks and meetings so I don’t have anywhere near as much time as I’d like to just plain work because other things crowd in. But I nearly never have any free time – I never go to the movies or out to dinner. But that’s not a model of any sane kind of existence.

__________

Excerpts from Noam Chomsky’s recent interview on Work, Learning, and Freedom with Michael Kasenbacher of ZMagazine.

It’s tough to know where to begin with Chomsky. I try to read every word he writes, and listen to most of his interviews, but it’s a daunting task given just how much he produces and how wide a range of topics fall within the scope of his knowledge. If the first paragraph of his Wikipedia page is any indication —

Noam Avram Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, logician, historian, political critic, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. In addition to his work in linguistics, he has written on war, politics, and mass media, and is the author of over 100 books. According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar from 1980 to 1992, and was the eighth most cited source overall. 

— you can see just how much breadth and depth there is to his work. I’ve also exchanged about 500 emails with him since I was 15, and these have provided a sort of intellectual sounding board for my deepest political, philosophical, and personal questions about the world. I plan on posting some of those emails on here soon.

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