Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (21 page)

Well, my heroes are people who were working with S.N.C.C. [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a Civil Rights Movement organization] in the South—people who day after day faced very harsh conditions and suffered badly, some of them were even killed. They’ll never enter into history, but I knew some of them, I saw some of them—they’re heroes. Draft resisters during the Vietnam War I think are heroes. Plenty of people in the Third World are heroes: if you ever have the chance to go to a place where people are really struggling—like the West Bank, Nicaragua, Laos—there’s an awful lot of heroism, just an awful lot of heroism. Among sort of middle-class organizers, there are three or four people I know who would get the Nobel Peace Prize if it meant anything, which of course it doesn’t, in fact it’s kind of an insult to get it—take a look at who it goes to.
  ⁶⁶
If you look around, there are people like that: if you want heroes, you can find them. You’re not going to find them among anybody whose name is mentioned in the newspapers—if they’re there, you know probably they’re not heroes, they’re anti-heroes.

I mean, there are plenty of people who when some popular movement gets going are willing to stand up and say, “I’m your leader”—the Eugene McCarthy phenomenon. Eugene McCarthy [a contender for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination in 1968] is a perfect example of it. I remember John Kenneth Galbraith [American economist] once saying, “McCarthy’s the real hero of the Vietnam War opposition,” and American liberalism always writes about him as a great hero.
  ⁶⁷
Well, if you take a look at McCarthy’s history, you can understand why. During the
hard
years of building up the anti-war movement, nobody ever heard of Eugene McCarthy. There were some people in Congress involved in opposing the war, but it wasn’t McCarthy; in fact, it wasn’t even McGovern, if you want to know the truth—it was Wayne Morse, Ernest Gruening, Gaylord Nelson, maybe a couple of others, but certainly not McCarthy. In fact, you never even
heard
of Eugene McCarthy until around the time of the Tet Offensive [in January 1968]. Around the time of the Tet Offensive, corporate America turned against the war, there was a huge mass popular movement out there, and Eugene McCarthy figured that he could get some personal power out of it, so he announced himself as “Your Leader.” He didn’t really say anything—if you look back, you don’t even know which side he was on, if you read the words—but somehow he managed to put across the impression that he was this big anti-war leader.

He won the New Hampshire primary in ’68 and went to the Democratic National Convention. At the Democratic Convention, lots and lots of young people showed up to work on his campaign—you know, “Clean for Gene” and so on—and they got battered bloody by the Chicago police [in a police riot with anti-war demonstrators]. McCarthy didn’t bat an eyelash, he never even came down to talk to them. He didn’t win at the 1968 Convention, so he disappeared. He had a lot of prestige at that point—totally undeserved—but he had a lot of prestige as the self-elected spokesman of the anti-war movement, and if he’d cared even marginally about anything he was saying, he would have used that undeserved status to work against the war. But he quit: the power game was over, it was more fun to write poetry and talk about baseball, so that’s what he did. And that’s why he’s a liberal hero—because he’s a total fraud. I mean, you couldn’t have a more clear example of a total fraud.

Well, those are the kind of “heroes” that the culture is going to set up for you—the kind who show up when there are points to be gotten and power to be gotten, and who try to exploit popular movements for their own personal power-trips, and therefore marginalize the popular movements. Then if things don’t work out for them, they go on and do something else: that’s a “hero.” Or you know, after you get shot, after you’re killed, like Martin Luther King, then you can become a hero—but not while you’re alive. Remember, despite all of the mythology today, Martin Luther King was strongly opposed while he was alive: the Kennedy administration really disliked him, they tried to block him in every possible way. I mean, eventually the Civil Rights Movement became powerful enough that they had to
pretend
that they liked him, so there was sort of a period of popularity for King when he was seen to be focusing on extremely narrow issues, like racist sheriffs in the South and so on. But as soon as he turned to broader issues, whether it was the Vietnam War, or planning the Poor People’s Campaign [a 1968 encampment and protest march on Washington], or other things like that, he became a total pariah, and was actively opposed.
  ⁶⁸

I. F. Stone is another case like that. I. F. Stone is a great hero of the press—they all talk about, “Boy, if we only had more people like Izzy Stone” and so on. But if you take a look at the actual record, it’s kind of revealing; I did it once. Up until 1971, Izzy Stone was a total outcast, his name wasn’t even mentioned—and the reason is, he was publishing his radical news weekly [
I. F Stone’s Weekly
]. There were a lot of journalists ripping it off, but this guy was a Communist, so you don’t ever want to mention him. Then in 1971, he couldn’t continue putting out the
Weekly
anymore because he and his wife were getting too old, so they stopped publishing it—and within a year he won the George Polk Award, there were films being made about him, he was being hailed everywhere as the great maverick reporter who proved what a terrific press we had, “if only we had more people like him,” and so on. Everybody just plays along with the farce, everybody plays along.

“Anti-Intellectualism”

W
OMAN
: Noam, I’ve noticed that in general there’s a strong strain of anti-intellectualism in American society
.

When you say there’s “anti-intellectualism,” what exactly does that mean? Does it mean people think Henry Kissinger shouldn’t be allowed to be National Security Advisor?

W
OMAN
: Well, I feel there’s a sense in which you’re looked down on if you deal with ideas. Like, I’ll go back and tell the people I work with that I spent the whole weekend listening to someone talk about foreign policy, and they won’t look at that in a positive way
.

Yeah, because you should have been out making money, or watching sports or something. But see, I don’t call that “anti-intellectual,” that’s just being de-politicized—what’s especially “intellectual” about being concerned with the world? If we had functioning labor unions, the working class would be concerned with the world. In fact, they
are
in many places—Salvadoran peasants are concerned with the world, they’re not “intellectuals.”

These are funny words, actually. I mean, the way it’s used, being an “intellectual” has virtually nothing to do with working with your mind: those are two different things. My suspicion is that plenty of people in the crafts, auto mechanics and so on, probably do as much or more intellectual work as plenty of people in universities. There are big areas in academia where what’s called “scholarly” work is just clerical work, and I don’t think clerical work’s more challenging mentally than fixing an automobile engine—in fact, I think the opposite: I can
do
clerical work, I can never figure out how to fix an automobile engine.

So if by “intellectual” you mean people who are using their minds, then it’s all over the society. If by “intellectual” you mean people who are a special class who are in the business of imposing thoughts, and framing ideas for people in power, and telling everyone what they should believe, and so on, well, yeah, that’s different. Those people are called “intellectuals”—but they’re really more a kind of secular priesthood, whose task is to uphold the doctrinal truths of the society. And the population
should
be anti-intellectual in that respect, I think that’s a healthy reaction.

In fact, if you compare the United States with France—or with most of Europe, for that matter—I think one of the healthy things about the United States is precisely this: there’s very little respect for intellectuals as such. And there shouldn’t be. What’s there to respect? I mean, in France if you’re part of the intellectual elite and you cough, there’s a front-page story in
Le Monde
. That’s one of the reasons why French intellectual culture is so farcical—it’s like Hollywood. You’re in front of the television cameras all the time, and you’ve got to keep doing something new so they’ll keep focusing on you and not on the guy at the next table, and people don’t have ideas that are that good, so they have to come up with crazy stuff, and the intellectuals get all pompous and self-important. So I remember during the Vietnam War, there’d be these big international campaigns to protest the war, and a number of times I was asked to co-sign letters with, say, Jean-Paul Sartre [French philosopher]. Well, we’d co-sign some statement, and in France it was front-page news; here, nobody even mentioned it. And the French thought that was scandalous; I thought it was terrific—why the hell should anybody mention it? What difference does it make if two guys who happen to have some name recognition got together and signed a statement? Why should that be of any particular interest to anybody? So I think the American reaction is much healthier in this respect.

W
OMAN
: But I want to point out that you’ve told us about a number of books this weekend which support some of the contentions you’re making: you would not know a lot of these things if you hadn’t read that material.

That’s right—but you see, that’s a reflection of
privilege
, not a reflection of intellectual life. The fact is that if you’re at a university, you’re very privileged. For one thing, contrary to what a lot of people say, you don’t have to work all that hard. And you control your own work—I mean, maybe you decide to work eighty hours a week, but
you
decide which eighty hours. That makes a tremendous difference: it’s one of the few domains where you control your own work. And furthermore, you have a lot of resources—you’ve got training, you know how to use a library, you see the ads for books so you know which books are probably worth reading, you know there are declassified documents because you learned that in school somewhere, and you know how to find them because you know how to use a reference library. And that collection of skills and privileges gives you access to a lot of information. But it has nothing to do with being “intellectual”: there are plenty of people in the universities who have all of this stuff, and use all of these things, and they do clerical work. Which is perfectly possible—you can get the declassified documents, and you can copy them, and compare them, and then make a notation about some footnote referring to something else. That’s in fact most of the scholarship in these fields—take a look at the monographs sometime, there’s not a thought in people’s heads. I think there’s less real intellectual work going on in a lot of university departments than there is in trying to figure out what’s the matter with my car, which requires some creativity.

W
OMAN
: Okay, let’s accept that the auto mechanic is an intellectual—then I think on the other side, we also have to accept that those people who deal with books correctly, and aren’t the clerical workers, are also intellectuals
.

Well, if by “intellectual” you just want to refer to people who use their minds, yeah, okay. But in that sense, I don’t think that people
are
anti-intellectual. For example, if you take your car to a really hot-shot mechanic who’s the only guy in your town who can ever figure out what’s wrong—the guys in the car manufacturing place can never do it, but this guy’s just got a real feel for automobiles; he looks at your car, and starts taking it apart …

W
OMAN
: She
…

Or she, or whatever—you don’t look down on that person. Nobody looks down on that person. You admire them.

W
OMAN
: But people do look down on people who read books
.

But look, this guy may have read books—maybe he read the manual. Those manuals are not so easy to read; in fact, they’re harder to read than most scholarly books, I think.

But I’m not trying to disagree, I just think that we should look at the thing a little differently. There’s intellectual
work
, which plenty of people do; then there’s what’s called “intellectual
life
” which is a special craft which doesn’t particularly require thought—in fact, you’re probably better off if you don’t think too much—and
that’s
what’s called being a respected intellectual. And people are right to look down on that, because there’s nothing very special about it. It’s just a not very interesting craft, not very well done usually.

In my own view, it’s wrong if a society has these kinds of differentiations. My own early background was in a kind of Jewish working-class environment, where the people were not formally educated and they were workers—like somebody could be a shop-boy, or a seamstress or something like that—but they were very literate: I would call them intellectuals. They weren’t “intellectuals” in the sense that people usually talk about, but they were very well-read, they thought about things, they argued about things—I don’t see any reason why that can’t be what you do when you’re a seamstress.

Spectator Sports

W
OMAN
: Could you talk a bit more about the role that sports play in the society in de-politicizing people—it seems to me it’s more significant than people usually assume
.

That’s an interesting one, actually—I don’t know all that much about it personally, but just looking at the phenomenon from the outside, it’s obvious that professional sports, and non-participation sports generally, play a huge role. I mean, there’s no doubt they take up just a tremendous amount of attention.