Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (51 page)

Well, obviously he was over-drawing the point—but those sorts of factors also are very influential. I mean, I’ve felt it all my life: it’s extremely easy to be sucked into the dominant culture, it can be very appealing. There are a lot of rewards. And what’s more, the people you meet don’t look like bad people—you don’t want to sit there and insult them. Maybe they’re perfectly nice people. So you try to be friends, maybe you even are friends. Well, you begin to conform, you begin to adapt, you begin to smooth off the harsher edges—and pretty soon it’s just happened, it kind of seeps in. And education at a place like Harvard is largely geared to that, to a remarkable extent in fact.

And there are many other subtle mechanisms which contribute to ideological control as well, of course—including just the fact that the universities support and encourage people to occupy themselves with irrelevant and innocuous work.

Or just take the fact that certain topics are unstudiable in the schools—because they don’t fall anywhere: the disciplines are divided in such a way that they simply will not be studied. That’s something that’s extremely important. So for example, take a question that people were very worried about in the United States for years and years—the economic competitiveness of Japan. Now, I always thought the talk about “American declinism” and “Japan as Number 1” was vastly overblown, just as the later idea of a “Japanese decline” is wildly exaggerated. In fact, Japan retains a very considerable edge in crucial areas of manufacturing, especially in high tech. They did get in trouble because of a huge stock market and real estate boom that collapsed, but serious economists don’t believe that Japan has really lost competitiveness in these areas.
  ¹²

Well, why has Japan been so economically competitive? I mean, there are a lot of reasons why, but the major reason is very clear. Both Japan and the United States (and every other industrial country in the world, actually) have essentially state-coordinated economies—but our traditional system of state coordination is less efficient than theirs.

Remember, talk about “free trade” is fine in editorials, but nobody actually practices it in reality: in every modern economy, the taxpayers are made to subsidize the private corporations, who then keep the profits for themselves. But the point is, different countries have different ways of arranging those subsidies. So take a look at the competitive parts of the U.S. economy, the parts that are successful in international trade—they’re all state-subsidized. Capital-intensive agriculture is a well-known case: American capital-intensive agriculture is able to compete internationally because the state purchases the excess products and stores them, and subsidizes the energy inputs, and so on.

Or look at high-technology industry: research and development for high technology is very costly, and corporations don’t make any profits off it directly—so therefore the taxpayer is made to pay for it. And in the United States, that’s traditionally been done largely through the Pentagon system: the Pentagon pays for high-tech research and development, then if something comes out of it which happens to be marketable, it’s handed over to private corporations so they can make the profits. And the research mostly isn’t weapons, incidentally—it’s things like computers, which are the center of any contemporary industrial economy, and were developed through the Pentagon system in the United States. And the same is true of virtually all high tech, in fact. And furthermore, there’s another important subsidy there: the Pentagon also purchases the
output
of high-technology industry, it serves as a state-guaranteed market for waste-production—that’s what contracts for developing weapons systems are; I mean, you don’t actually
use
the weapons you’re paying for, you just destroy them in a couple years and replace them with the next array of even more advanced stuff you don’t need. Well, all of that is just perfect for pouring continuous taxpayer subsidies into high-tech industry, and it’s because of these enormous subsidies that American high tech is competitive internationally.

Well, Japan has run its economy pretty much the same way we do, except with one crucial difference. Instead of using the military system, the way they’ve worked their public subsidies in Japan is they have a government ministry, M.I.T.I. [the Ministry of International Trade and Industry], which sits down with the big corporations and conglomerates and banking firms, and plans their economic system for the next couple years—they plan how much consumption there’s going to be, and how much investment there’s going to be, and where the investment should go, and so on. Well, that’s more efficient. And since Japan is a very disciplined and obedient society culturally, the population there just does what they tell them, and nobody ever asks any questions about it.

Alright, to see how this difference played out over the years, just look at the “Star Wars” program in the United States, for example. Star Wars [the Strategic Defense Initiative] is the pretext for a huge amount of research and development spending through the Pentagon system here—it’s our way of funding the new generation of computer technology, lasers, new software, and so on. Well, if you look at the distribution of expenses for Star Wars, it turns out that it was virtually the same allocation of funding as was made through the Japanese state-directed economic system in the same time period: in those same years, M.I.T.I. made about the same judgments about how to distribute their resources as we did, they spent about the same proportion of money in lasers, and the same proportion in software, and so on.
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And the reason is that all of these planners make approximately the same judgments about the likely new technologies.

Well, why was Japan so competitive with the U.S. economically, despite highly inauspicious conditions? There are a lot of reasons. But the main reason is that they directed their public subsidy straight to the commercial market. So to work on lasers, they tried to figure out ways of producing lasers for the commercial market, and they do it pretty well. But when we want to develop lasers for the commercial market, what we do is pour the money into the Pentagon, which then tries to work out a way to use a laser to shoot down a missile ten thousand miles away—and if they can work that out, then they hope there’ll be some commercial spin-offs that come out of it all. Okay, that’s less efficient. And since the Japanese are no dumber than we are, and they have an efficient system of state-coordination while we have an inefficient one, over the years they succeeded in the economic competition.

Well, these are major phenomena of modern life—but where do you go to study them in the universities or the academic profession? That’s a very interesting question. You don’t go to the economics department, because that’s not what they look at: the real hot-shot economics departments are interested in abstract models of how a pure free-enterprise economy works—you know, generalizations to ten-dimensional space of some nonexistent free-market system. You don’t go to the political science department, because they’re concerned with electoral statistics, and voting patterns, and micro-bureaucracy—like the way one government bureaucrat talks to another in some detailed air. You don’t go to the anthropology department, because they’re studying hill tribesmen in New Guinea. You don’t go to the sociology department, because they’re studying crime in the ghettos. In fact, you don’t go anywhere—there isn’t any field that deals with these topics. There’s no journal that deals with them. In fact, there is no academic profession that is concerned with the central problems of modern society. Now, you can go to the
business school
, and there they’ll talk about them—because those people are in the real world. But not in the academic departments: nobody there is going to tell you what’s really going on in the world.
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And it’s extremely important that there
not
be a field that studies these questions—because if there ever were such a field, people might come to understand too much, and in a relatively free society like ours, they might start to do something with that understanding. Well, no institution is going to encourage
that
. I mean, there’s nothing in what I just said that you couldn’t explain to junior high school students, it’s all pretty straightforward. But it’s not what you study in a junior high Civics course—what you study there is propaganda about the way systems are supposed to work but don’t.

Incidentally, part of the genius of this aspect of the higher education system is that it can get people to sell out even while they think they’re doing exactly the right thing. So some young person going into academia will say to themself, “Look, I’m going to be a real radical here”—and you
can
be, as long as you adapt yourself to these categories which guarantee that you’ll never ask the right questions, and that you’ll never even
look
at the right questions. But you don’t
feel
like you’re selling out, you’re not saying “I’m working for the ruling class” or anything like that—you’re not, you’re being a Marxist economist or something. But the effect is, they’ve totally neutralized you.

Alright, all of these are subtle forms of control, with the effect of preventing serious insight into the way that power actually works in the society. And it makes very good sense for a system to be set up like that: powerful institutions don’t want to be investigated, obviously. Why would they? They don’t want the public to know how they work—maybe the people inside them understand how they work, but they don’t want anybody else to know, because that would threaten and undermine their power. So one should
expect
the institutions to function in such a way as to protect themselves—and some of the ways in which they protect themselves are by various subtle techniques of ideological control like these.

Cruder Methods of Control

Then aside from all that, there are also crude methods of control. So if some young political scientist or economist decides they
are
going to try to ask these kinds of questions, the chances are they’re going to be marginalized in some fashion, or else be weeded out of the institution altogether. At the extreme end, there have been repeated university purges in the United States. During the 1950s, for example, the universities were just cleaned out of dissident thought—people were fired on all kinds of grounds, or not allowed to teach things. And the effects of that were very strong. Then during the late 1960s, when the political ferment really got going, the purges began again—and often they were just straight political firings, not even obscured.
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For instance, a lot of the best Asia scholars from the United States are now teaching in Australia and Japan—because they couldn’t keep jobs in the U.S., they had the wrong ideas. Australia has some of the best Southeast Asia scholars in the world, and they’re mostly Americans who were young scholars in the Sixties and couldn’t make it into the American academic system, because they thought the wrong things. So if you want to study Cambodia with a top American scholar, you basically have to go to Australia.
  ¹⁶
One of the best Japan historians in the world [Herbert Bix] is teaching in a Japanese university—he’s American, but he can’t get a job in the United States.

Or let me just tell you a story about M.I.T., which is pretty revealing. A young political science professor—who’s by now one of the top people in the field, incidentally [Thomas Ferguson]—was appointed at M.I.T. as an assistant professor right after he got his Ph.D. from Princeton; he’s very radical, but he’s also extremely smart, so the department just needed him. Well, one day I was sitting in my office and he came over fuming. He told me that the chairman of his department had just come into his office and told him straight out: “If you ever want to get tenure in this department, keep away from anything after the New Deal; you can write all of your radical stuff up to the New Deal, but if you try and do it for the post-New Deal period, you’re never going to get tenure in this department.”
  ¹⁷
He just told him straight out. Usually you’re not told it straight out, but you get to understand it—you get to understand it from the reactions you receive.

This kind of stuff also happens with graduate students. I’m what’s called an “Institute Professor” at M.I.T., which means I can teach courses in any department of the university. And over the years I’ve taught all over the place—but if I even get
near
Political Science, you can feel the bad vibes starting. So in other departments, I’m often asked to be on students’ Ph.D. committees, but in Political Science it’s virtually never happened—and the few times it has happened, it’s always been Third World women. And there’s a reason for that: Third World women have a little bit of extra space to maneuver in, because the department doesn’t want to appear
too
overtly racist or
too
overtly sexist, so there are some things they can do that other people can’t.

Well, a few years ago, one very smart woman graduate student in the Political Science Department wanted to do her dissertation on the media and Southern Africa, and she wanted me to be on her Ph.D. committee. Okay, it’s a topic that I’m interested in, and I’ve worked on it probably more than anybody else there, so there was just no way for them to say I couldn’t do it. Then the routine started. The first stage in the doctoral process is that the candidate has a meeting with a couple of faculty members and presents her proposal. Usually two faculty members show up, that’s about it. This time it was different: they circulated a notice through the department saying that every faculty member had to show up—and the reason was,
I
was going to be there, and they had to combat this baleful influence. So everybody showed up.

Well, the woman started presenting her dissertation proposal, and you could just see people turning pale. Somebody asked her, “What’s your hypothesis?”—you’re supposed to have a hypothesis—and it was that media coverage of Southern Africa is going to be influenced by corporate interests. People were practically passing out and falling out the windows. Then starts the critical analysis: “What’s your methodology going to be? What tests are you going to use?” And gradually an apparatus was set up and a level of proof demanded that you just can’t meet in the social sciences. It wasn’t, “I’m going to read the editorials and figure out what they say”—you had to count the words, and do all sorts of statistical nonsense, and so on and so forth. But she fought it through, she just continued fighting. They ultimately required so much junk in her thesis, so much irrelevant, phony social-scientific junk, numbers and charts and meaningless business, that you could barely pick out the content from the morass of methodology. But she did finally make it through—just because she was willing to fight it out. Now, you know, you can do that—but it’s tough. And some people really get killed.