Education: For Whom and For What?: Noam Chomsky (Transcript)

He is one of the main founders of the modern public relations industry, and his views were about the same. There has to be an intelligent minority in control, and we have to have a technique, he called it engineering of consent, to make sure that the rabble stays in their place as spectators, not participants.

The basic view goes back much farther, so for example, long before this, Ralph Waldo Emerson was considering the question of why political leaders are interested in having public education, mass public education was just beginning, and he said that the ground on which eminent public servants urge the claims of popular education is fear. In their words, he says, this country is filling up with thousands and millions of voters, we must educate them to keep them from our throats, meaning educate them the right way, keep their perspectives and their understanding narrow and restricted, discourage free and independent thought, and frighten them into obedience, something that’s done over and over in the schools as well, we’ve all experienced it.

To get you back still farther to the framing of the Constitution, it was based essentially on the same principles, so James Madison, the major framer, his view was that pretty much the same, he said we have to make sure that the public is marginalized, because otherwise there will be trouble, and in fact, if you read the speeches in the Constitutional Convention, he urged the convention to think about what would happen in England, that was obviously the model, what would happen in England if they really had a democratic vote, he said well what would happen would be that the majority of the population would use their voting power to take away the property of the rich, to carry out what these days we would call land reform, and obviously that would be unjust, so therefore we’ve got to guard against democracy. Actually it’s kind of interesting that, whether consciously or not, Madison was reformulating an argument that goes back to the first main major study of political theory, Aristotle’s book Politics, Aristotle reviewed the many forms of government there could be and didn’t like any of them but decided that democracy would be the least bad, he’s of course mostly thinking of Athens, but he raised the same dilemma, he said the same problem that Madison did, one of the big problems of democracy is that the majority of the poor would use their voting power to take away and divide up the property of the rich, which is unjust.

So Madison and Aristotle faced the same problem but they picked opposite, they drew opposite conclusions. Aristotle’s conclusion was we should eliminate inequality, make everyone middle class more or less, he proposed actual measures for this, what we would call today welfare state measures and that would overcome the problem, so reduce inequality, overcome the problem.

Madison’s solution was the opposite, reduce democracy, so design a system in which the public will not be able to exercise the kind of free vote that would threaten the main, one of the main goals of government which he said is to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority, so therefore, so same problem but opposite conclusions, reduce democracy.

And if you look at the framing of the constitution that’s the way it’s designed, so again in Madison’s words, the constitutional framework has to ensure that power is in the hands of what he called the wealth of the nation, the responsible men, the men who have respect for property and its rights and therefore will ensure that the opulent minority is protected from the majority. And that’s why in the original framing of the constitution, power is primarily in the hands of the senate, the executive and at that time was kind of an administrator.

So power is in the hands of the senate which remember people didn’t vote for, that was much later and the senate, he said, would be the wealth of the nation, the people who would make judicious and responsible decisions, actually in Madison’s defense it should be mentioned that he was at this point pre-capitalist, so his model of the wealth of the nation was some mythology about Rome, you know where distinguished gentlemen and benign aristocrats devoted to the public good would make all the right decisions, he soon learned differently, but that was the model, that’s the original intent of our constitution for those who are interested in original intent, originalism.

Let’s go back a little bit further and go back to say David Hume, the first great modern political philosopher, he wrote a book called First Principles of Government and in this he, I’ll quote him, he wondered at the easiness with which the many are governed by the few and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we inquire by what means this wonder is brought about, we shall find that as force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore on opinion only that government is founded and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments as well as to the most free and most popular and in fact in the more free and the more popular where force is less available, you get the most sophisticated development of the notions of manufacture of consent, engineering of consent, public relations industry and so on.

And the educational system has to be enlisted in this enterprise, it’s a very conscious policy, I’ll return to the way it works in the modern period. Well that’s one point of view about whom education is for.

Another alternative point of view including high culture is that it’s for everyone and there’s interesting work on this. One book I’d strongly recommend is If You Have Good Eyesight, a very tiny print unfortunately is a book by a scholarly book by Jonathan Rose, it’s called The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. It’s a monumental study of the reading habits of 19th century British workers and it’s pretty remarkable to see what they were reading.

Rose contrasts, I’ll quote him, contrasts the passionate pursuit of knowledge by proletarian autodidacts with the pervasive philistinism of the British aristocracy and he has good evidence for it. And pretty much the same was true in the United States. So in Boston let’s say in the 19th century if a blacksmith had enough, could afford it, he would typically hire a young boy to read to him while he’s working and reading meant reading classics or contemporary literature that we now consider classics.

In the factories that were the mills that were just beginning to be built in the early days of the industrial revolution, a lot of the workers were young women from the farms called factory girls. There was a pretty lively labor press at the time, very interesting to read. The factory girls had plenty of condemnations of the industrial system into which they were being forced, I’ll come back to it a little bit, but one of them was that it was taking away their high culture. They were used to reading contemporary literature, classics and so on when they were driven into the mills that was taken away from them and this continued.

I’m old enough to remember the 1930s at that time there was lively programs of workers’ education. Some of the leading scientists and mathematicians wrote popular books intended for worker education, Mathematics for the Millions and things like that, George Gamow later, 123 Infinity, J.D. Bernal, another well-known scientist and there were educational courses. My own family, my relatives were mostly unemployed working class, but they engaged, they were deeply immersed in the high culture, even those who never made it through elementary school. They were what Rose calls proletarian autodidacts, although they were helped by workers’ education courses and things like free Shakespearean plays in Central Park and so on.

Well, those are two views of whom education is for, two contrasting ones. Then comes the question what it is for and here, too, there are contrasting views. The contrast is actually discussed during the Enlightenment and there’s an imagery associated with it. One image is that education is like pouring water into an empty vessel and, in fact, it’s a pretty leaky vessel, as you all know from your experience. So you pour water into a vessel and, of course, all of us have been through this and you remember nothing.

The other alternative is that education, teaching, should be like laying out a stream along which the student can explore and progress in his own way. That image comes from Wilhelm von Humboldt, who was the founder of the modern university system, also one of the founders of classical liberalism. To get to John Dewey, America’s greatest social philosopher, a century later, he wrote that it is illiberal and immoral to train children to work not freely and intelligently but for the sake of the work earned, in which case their activity is not free because not freely participated in and, as he also pointed out, it will be a leaking vessel.

Those choices, contrasting choices, are very sharply drawn today. I’m sure again that most of you have seen it in your own experience. I certainly have myself. It has very definite policy implications right now, in fact. There’s some very recent and very pointed discussion of this, which I’ll quote the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a scientific organization. It has a regular journal, Journal of Science, and in the last couple of issues, the editor, the biochemist Bruce Alberts, sets forth alternatives, these alternatives, very clearly. He’s discussing science education in the schools, but it generalizes.

One approach he discusses is in fact the enlightenment view, that teaching is laying out a stream along which the student progresses their own way through discovery and exploration. His version of it is that our goal is to make it much easier for teachers everywhere to provide their students with laboratory experiences that mirror the open-ended explorations of scientists instead of the traditional cookbook labs where students follow instructions to a predetermined result.

Then he contrasts that with actual practice, which is of course pretty much the opposite, concepts taught with an overly strict attention to rules, procedures, and rote memorizations. Then he goes on to quote his own testimony to the California Standards Commission, his testimony opposing such ideas as teaching the periodic table of the elements in fifth grade, which totally meaningless to the students. Incidentally he points out he was unsuccessful in this. It’s taught that way.

What he says is when we teach children about aspects of science that they cannot yet grasp, then we have wasted valuable educational resources, produced nothing of lasting value, and much worse, we take all the enjoyment out of science when we do so. He discusses DNA, his own field. He says unfortunately most students today are taught about DNA at such an early age that they are forced to merely memorize the fact that, this is a quote from a textbook, DNA is the material from which genes are made. It’s a chore that brings no enjoyment or understanding whatsoever.

Much later he says, when they do have the background to understand both the structure of the DNA molecule and its explanatory power, I fear that the joy of discovery has been eliminated by the early memorization of boring DNA facts. We spoil the beautiful story for them by teaching it at the wrong time.

And he goes on to the college level. He says, for example, in an introductory biology class, students are often required to learn the names of the ten enzymes that oxidize sugars. But an obsession with such details can obscure any real understanding of the central issue, leaves students with the impression that science is impossibly dull, causes many of them to drop it. Tragically, we have managed to simultaneously trivialize and complicate science education. As a result, for far too many, science seems a game of recalling boring, incomprehensible facts, so much so that it may make little difference whether the factoids about science that come from the periodic table or a movie script. Let me give some examples. Again, I’m sure you’ve had your own experience about that.

Just to interpolate, I certainly have. I remember when I was a 16-year-old freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, I had to take a general chemistry course with about this many students in the audience. It was insufferably boring. Furthermore, it was completely obvious what was going to happen. If you read the textbook, you knew exactly what was going to happen, so I never went to class. I got an A. It was okay. I actually had a friend who took notes. That helped.

The worst part was that they had a lab. I knew perfectly well that if I went to the lab and carried out the experiments, none of them would work. This kind of reflects automatic. So I didn’t go to the lab. There was a manual where you had to fill in the answers to the results of the experiments. Again, it was entirely obvious what they were going to be, so I filled it in. I got an A and so on.

But then I had a very unpleasant experience. I had to register for the next semester. When I tried to register, they insisted on my paying a fee for breakage in the laboratory. I had never been to the laboratory. I didn’t know where I was, but obviously couldn’t say that. So I had to pay seventeen dollars, which was a lot of money in those days, for the breakage in the lab that I never attended. Of course, I don’t remember a thing from the course. I’m sure not many of you can duplicate this experience.

Actually, this approach generalizes. It even has a name. It’s called No Child Left Behind. It’s been going on for about ten years. No reported progress, which is no surprise. Serious education is radically different. It’s what Alberts was recommending. And it’s the way science is actually taught at the advanced levels. Take my own university, MIT. It’s a research university. There’s a famous, world famous physicist, Victor Weisskopf, who like a lot of senior faculty taught freshman courses. And he used to say that when he came to the first session of his freshman course, students would ask, what are we going to cover this semester? And his routine answer was, it doesn’t matter what we cover. It matters what you discover. And maybe you’ll discover that what I’m teaching is wrong. That would be great. That’s the kind of thing we want to do. This goes on right through the graduate level that’s in a serious university. That’s all there is. It’s the whole curriculum.

And that’s actually possible all the way down to kindergarten. There are examples. In fact, Alberts in this series of articles. It gives a good example. He talks about a kindergarten class which won some award in the sciences. Five year old kids. The task that was given them, each kid in the class was given a dish that contained seeds, petals and shells. And their task was to figure out which ones were the seeds. So the kids got together in what they call the scientific conference and they each had ideas about how you might do it. They exchanged the ideas, suggested some ways of testing it and finally carried out the tests. They finally got somewhere, a little teacher guidance, but basically figuring it out for themselves.

It ended up at the point where they figured out what were the seeds and they were dissecting the seeds. They were given magnifying glasses and could look into it and locate the embryo which is the source of the sustenance. That’s learning, real learning. That’s enlightenment style learning, no child left behind. It can be done and sometimes is, like in this case, far too little.

Well let’s take a brief look at the history. Not surprisingly, the US system of higher education has evolved along with broader socioeconomic changes. Actually there was a very sharp change at the time of World War II. Everything changed after World War II. It was a very dramatic event in world history. The United States had been, was the richest country in the world, but it wasn’t a major actor in the world scene. The major actors were Britain, primarily France, Germany, but not the United States, except regionally.

But after World War II, it was all different, totally. The United States emerged from World War II with a position of global dominance that had absolutely no precedent in history and no precedent since began declining shortly after. The United States at that time had literally 50% of the world’s wealth. Other industrial societies had been seriously harmed or devastated. For the United States, which was untouched by the war, the war was a tremendous stimulus, huge government stimulus to the economy. The industrial production quadrupled and it already had been the richest country in the world. It also had an overwhelming position of security, nothing remotely like it.

Well, this affected the whole culture, including education. Prior to this, higher education, at least elite education, had been a kind of a gentleman’s club and indeed it remained so at the elite schools well after. Personal experience again, was a student at Harvard in the early 50s and that’s exactly what it was, was a gentleman’s club.

But the U.S. had also pioneered mass education through college as well. In fact, that’s a very important achievement of American society. It was motivated in part by just what Emerson talked about. It was motivated by the transition from an agricultural society of free independent people to an industrial society. It was necessary to turn free farmers into disciplined factory workers and since they didn’t like it, you needed the kind of education that Emerson was talking about, a kind of education that will keep them from our throats. And it was dramatic.

I mentioned the labor press and it’s very interesting to read factory girls, artisans from the towns. They have many complaints about the system they’re being driven into. It’s worth reading. It’s available now. The industrial system, they said, was crushing their culture, their dignity, their freedom. It was turning them into something like slaves. In fact, a century and a half ago, a very common belief, so common that it was a slogan of the Republican Party supported by Abraham Lincoln, was that wage labor is different from chattel slavery only in that it’s temporary. But other than that, it’s the same.

You’re being forced, you’re working on command, not under your own initiative. So they want to get rid of it, worker ownership and so on. The most interesting, I think, the most interesting part element of their critique was their condemnation of what they called the new spirit of the age. Remember, this is 150 years ago. The new spirit of the age is gain wealth, forgetting all but self. Adam Smith had talked about that. He called it the vile maxim of the masters of mankind, all for ourselves, nothing for anyone else. And the new spirit of the age, a century later, was to try to drive this deeply inhuman idea into people’s heads. It was a very sharp break from traditional societies that valued trust, solidarity, mutual aid for common purposes.

In our own tradition, the standard example should be the English commons. We’re going to celebrate, probably won’t, but we should be commemorating the 900th anniversary of the Magna Carta, the great charter, in a couple of months. Magna Carta, as everyone ought to know, is the foundation of civil liberties, presumption of innocence, trial by jury, due process and so on.

But it’s sort of forgotten, interestingly, that there were two charters. There was a charter of liberties and there was a charter of the forests. The charter of the forests was about preservation of the commons. The commons, including the forests, were the possession of everyone. And they were the source of food, of fuel, of building materials. They had been carefully cultivated with mutual aid and mutual support for centuries. So they were very complex ecosystems, which everyone had access to.

And the charter, the great charter that calls for preservation of the commons from the predatory acts of the kings and nobles, well, that’s been forgotten. So nobody talks about that anymore. And that’s a very serious problem because the, in fact, that’s the failure to attend to the commons is going to destroy us. That’s the environmental crisis, which we’re marching towards with utter abandon. If some extraterrestrial observer was watching, I think we’re all lunatics.

But what’s going on right now? I mean, unless this conception of the preservation of the commons and the values that were part of it, unless that’s restored, we’re in trouble.

Well, shortly after that, with the beginnings of capitalist industrialization, there’s a move towards making everything a commodity. And it then becomes necessary to inculcate the new spirit of the age, gain wealth for getting old itself and reverence for what Adam Smith condemned as the vile maxim. Actually, there are major industries devoted to it. The public relations industry, advertising, marketing is probably the sixth of gross national domestic product, is devoted pretty much to this. It’s devoted very consciously.

Interesting to read the literature, their own literature. It’s devoted to create what’s for creating wants, fancied needs, stimulating consumerism, turning people’s attention to what are called the superficial things of life, like fashionable consumption and away from real human values. And enormous work goes into this. Keep people from our throats again. That new spirit of the age is so inhuman, that over 150 years of effort, there still is always resistance.

So in the early 1970s, as kind of an outgrowth of 1960s activism, there was a very important series of labor strikes. Young workers mostly, many of them were Vietnam veterans, others just young people getting into the workforce. The most famous one was at Lordstone, and very significantly, they were not striking particularly for wages and benefits, but for dignity, for human dignity in the workplace. That was also the time when women were becoming organized and active. Chicanos, farm workers, black unions and so on.

All this was beaten back, and it’s been beaten back for a generation, but it’s there. In fact, the Occupy movements that are spreading all over are reviving it. I think it remains significant, and a lot hinges on whether the new spirit of the age, 150 years old, whether it can be, and in fact in England going back centuries, the destruction of the commons. It’s very important to determine whether this new spirit can be overcome. If not, we’re just lemmings walking off the cliff, and soon, there’s a lot to say about that, but I’ll put it aside.

Well, again, after World War II, going back to that, there was another new spirit, a spirit of triumphalism. Before the Second World War, the United States was a kind of a cultural, intellectual backwater. If you wanted to study science or philosophy or the arts or to be a writer, you went to Europe, Germany, Britain, France, some place like that.

But after World War II, that all changed, and it led to just a different attitude. I mean, I remember it very well. I was just becoming a college student at the time. The atmosphere was that we should shed all of this old world baggage and lead the world to a bright future, what was called an American century. European scholars, many of whom were emigrating here fleeing Nazi Germany, they were feared because they were too good, and they were disdained because that’s the old-fashioned baggage, and the two were at the same time.

There were many very ugly incidents. I could tell you about some of them, which I remember. From a student perspective, like what I was in the 1940s in philosophy, linguistics, psychology, they just had to start afresh, disregard all of this old nonsense from Europe, biology too, in fact, forget it all, don’t talk about it, and start from the beginning. We’re going to create a new age, and a lot of contempt and a lot of ignorance, and there are many consequences, some of them right to the present. It’s very striking in the behavioral sciences, in fact, but also elsewhere.

There were also changes at that time, crucial changes in the nature, in the way the economy functioned, in the state role in the economy, which had a huge impact on the universities, higher education particularly. You go back to the colonial period, Adam Smith gave advice to the colonies, the greatest economists of the day, and the advice he gave was the standard prescriptions that the World Bank and the IMF and the US Treasury and others give to the poor countries today. Pursue your comparative advantage, don’t try to import higher manufactured goods, more advanced goods from the advanced countries, so don’t try to control your resources, everything will be better if you do that.

Well, the United States was independent by that time, so they were able to totally reject the rules of what are called sound economics, and they did. If we had accepted them, we’d be a third world country, but in fact that’s how the third world was pretty much created. But the colonies could reject it, the so-called Hamiltonian system introduced very high tariffs to block superior British manufacturers. There was a lot of stealing of technology, what’s now called piracy, and the United States began to develop, and this went from textiles, the early stages of industrialization, right through steel, and on pretty much to the Second World War.

There was a huge role of the state system and state sector in developing the economy. Mass industrialization was developed, for example, in armories, because there you could control things. The railroad system was managed by the Army Corps of Engineers and so on.

Well, after World War II, that took a major leap forward, huge. There was massive funding for science and technology, mostly through the Pentagon, and it was done through the Pentagon for the usual reasons. You have to inspire fear, and you can get taxpayers to pay the Pentagon to protect us from various imaginary dangers, but the money that went through the Pentagon ended up creating the high-tech economy that we are now living in. So computers, internet, satellites, microelectronics, a whole array of stuff comes out of decades of mostly Pentagon funding and research. My own university, MIT, was right in the middle of it.

The net effect is to socialize cost and to privatize profit, and it’s a standard device. The interstate highway system is another example. It’s not what it’s claimed to be. It was sold on the basis of defense as really part of the mass subsidy to automobiles, energy corporations, rubber corporations. The idea was to make us a society that massively used waste fossil fuels with consequences we’re now in the middle of.

There was also a rapid expansion of the student body through the GI Bill, which brought a whole new sector of the population into higher education. People never could have gone before. That had a very positive impact on the colleges and on the general society. That’s incidentally a course that’s been reversed in the last generation. I’ll come back to it.

The sharp increase in funding was mainly directed to science and technology, but of course there was a spillover into other domains. In 1957, the Russians sent a satellite into space, Sputnik, and there were laments about how the U.S. was falling behind and wanting to be destroyed and so on. The scientific community knew that this was total nonsense, that the achievement was essentially nothing. We could duplicate it and go way beyond it any time we wanted to, but it was exploited.

It was exploited pretty cynically, I should say. I remember it very well. It was exploited to give an enormous additional input into higher education and also K to 12. That’s when you get the start of the kinds of things that Alberts is deploring, like new math, for example. I have to say, I had young kids at that time. We had very amusing experiences watching my young children, 10-year-old children, try to learn new math from teachers who didn’t understand a word about the set theoretic basis for it, but were trying to teach it. The kids were kind of making up their own.

I’ll just give you one example. When my youngest daughter was maybe 10 or so, I had a visit from a friend, an Israeli logician, an old friend, Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, some of you know. He came and stayed with us for a while. He saw my daughter doing her work in what was called set theory, actually Boolean algebra. He was interested because he’d been trying to teach it to junior high school students in Israel, and they had a hard time doing it, and she seemed to be doing it fine.

So we started asking her questions, like if you have three things, how many sets are there, like a milk bottle and a cup and a book or something. She said right off eight sets. Then he asked her to list them. She listed them all, including the null set. He asked her which set is included in all the others. She said the null set. I couldn’t believe it, so I asked her, how do you know the null set is included in all the others? She said, well, to have a set, what you do is draw braces, and you put the things inside it. If you look carefully, there’s always a little space between them. That’s where the null set comes.

So what in fact had happened is she was doing something quite sensible. She was making up a physical model, which happened to work for these principals, and of course had nothing to do with what they were trying to teach them. This was going on all the time. That’s No Child Left Behind.

In the sixties, there were major changes, major social, cultural changes. The civil rights movement moves towards diversity, women’s rights, all sorts of things. The universities were greatly enriched by that, as indeed was the whole society. By the end of the sixties, there was also a fair amount of political activism developing, and it became a major force. Again, at my own university, MIT, mainly Science University, it had been extremely conservative and passive right through the sixties. People were absorbing their work.

But by the end of the sixties, by 1969, activism had gotten to the point that a day was set aside, formally, to just consider the question of, for the whole institute, to consider the question of the role of technology in society. Amazingly, a question that had never been asked, you just do it. And that led to a lot of consequences, which in fact have changed the, MIT wrote about a permanent change in the institute, and similar things are happening in other places. This is even abroad too, it’s a very, it’s a general movement.

Well, and it had a real civilizing effect on the whole society. Well, that civilizing effect of the 1960s aroused deep concerns all across the mainstream spectrum. That’s why it’s usually called the time of troubles. It was civilizing the country too much, and that’s dangerous. And it’s kind of interesting, I’ll talk a little about the reaction. It has effects, very strong effects, right to the present.

On the right, one striking example was an influential memorandum, which is worth reading, you can pick it up on the internet. A memorandum by Lewis Powell, who’s a corporate lawyer. He was later appointed by Nixon to the Supreme Court. At the other end of the spectrum, there’s an important study, also worth reading, by the Trilateral Commission. These are liberal internationalists from the three major industrial regions, Europe, the United States and Japan. Their general outlook is indicated by the fact that the Carter administration was drawn almost completely from their ranks. That’s who they were.

And both of them merit attention. They provide a good insight into the ideological aspects of what has in fact been a major assault on democracy and on rights that was beginning to take shape 40 years ago, escalated pretty sharply in the Reagan Thatcher years and continued, and it’s now reaching new heights. And they also provide insight into how this assault targets the educational system.

So let’s start with Powell’s memorandum, 1971. This was sent to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. That’s the main business lobby. The title was The Attack on the American Free Enterprise System. And it’s worth reading, not only for the content, but also for the tone, which is totally paranoid, which is characteristic. The major criminals were Ralph Nader with his consumer safety campaigns, Herbert Marcuse, who was preaching Marxism, new leftists on the rampage, but primarily their naive victims who dominate the universities, the schools, television and other media, the educated community and virtually control the government. If you haven’t noticed it, I’m incidentally not exaggerating. That’s exactly what it said. I urge you to read it.

Well, the takeover of the country by these devils is a dire threat to freedom, he said, because the only alternatives to free enterprise are varying degrees of bureaucratic regulation of individual freedom, ranging from moderate socialism to the leftist and rightist dictatorships. Actually, if any of you are watching the Republican debates, it’s the same thing that’s being repeated right now, you know, the center of the right Obama administration and Marxist radicals and so on.

Actually, Powell was very familiar with another alternative to free enterprise, namely the system in which he and his Chamber of Commerce associates thrived. He was an influential lobbyist for the tobacco industry and he was surely aware of the huge federal subsidies for the production of this leading killer, which not only kills users at a scale that vastly exceeds the targets of the mostly farcical drug wars, but also kills many others, and that’s from passive smoking, collateral damage, you know, just being around when somebody’s smoking, way beyond those from hard drugs.

And he was surely aware of the great successes of lobbyists like him in assuring that for many decades the government would help not only subsidize the industry, but help it conceal what they all knew. They knew about the lethal product that they were peddling, and there are huge mounds of corpses to show for their achievement. They’re still piling up rapidly.

But that didn’t keep him from wailing in his memo that, I’ll quote, as every business executive knows, few elements of American society today have as little influence in government as the American businessman, corporation, even the millions of corporate stockholders, in case you hadn’t noticed. And that again is pretty characteristic.

And the reason is that there’s an assumption that for the state to support, subsidize private power, that’s just the natural order. Any disruption of it is a catastrophe. And he then drew the obvious conclusion. He was talking about the universities. He said the campuses from which much of this emanates are supported by tax funds generated largely from American business, and contributions from capital funds controlled or generated by American business. The boards of trustees of our universities overwhelmingly are composed of men and women who are leaders in the business system. Most of the media, including the national TV systems, are owned and theoretically controlled by corporations which depend on profits and the enterprise system to survive.

And therefore these marginalized groups who are being destroyed should organize to defend themselves instead of just watching passively while business and our fundamental freedoms are destroyed by this Marxist onslaught from the media and the universities.

Well, Powell’s memo expresses the concerns elicited by 1960s activism at the right end of the mainstream spectrum, but much more revealing, I think, is the reaction at the opposite extreme, the liberal internationalists. And these are spelled out in the Trilateral Commission report that I mentioned. It’s called The Crisis of Democracy. It’s not easy to find, incidentally, because they mostly took it off the market when people started reading it. But it’s there. Actually, I should say that MIT, as soon as I read it, I read it when it came out and I figured this isn’t going to last very long. So I bought a lot of copies from the MIT library. So if you can’t find one, MIT library has maybe a dozen or so copies.

And then it did go out of print, I should say, very quickly. The crisis of democracy that they were talking about is literally that there’s too much democracy. The problem, they said, this is leading figures, you know, major political scientists from Harvard and so on. The public, the way that democratic order is supposed to work, the public is supposed to be passive and apathetic. The Lippman, Bernays, Emerson, Madison model, or Hume. They’re supposed to be passive and apathetic, but in the 60s they were beginning to organize, to press their demands.

That’s what was being done by what are called the special interests. The special interests are women, young people, old people, workers, farmers, the population, in other words. They’re the special interests. If you look through, when they press their demands, there’s too much pressure on the state. The state can’t deal with them, so therefore they have to moderate the demands.

Now there’s one group that isn’t mentioned, the corporate sector, and that makes sense because they represent the national interest, not special interests. So just like the far right, the liberal internationalists assume that their extraordinary power and their control of the state and other institutions is just the natural order.

A primary concern of the trilateral scholars, just like Lewis Powell, was the failures of what they called, I’m quoting, the institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young. The schools, the universities, the churches and the like, they’re not carrying out their duty to indoctrinate the young properly. And that’s why we had this time of troubles. In general, they said we have to have more moderation in democracy if the national interest is to be protected, including much more successful indoctrination of the young.

Well, the Powell memo and the trilateral study spell out the concerns at the opposite extremes of the dominant ideological spectrum. These are largely shared concerns. They said vigorous action to restore order, as has often happened in the past. One consequence of these and other developments has been a pretty sharp attack on public education, taking many forms. I’ll mention a few.

About a year ago, I went to Mexico to give talks at the National University, UNAM. Quite a good university. It’s a very poor country, of course, but quite a good, impressive university. High standards, good faculty, lively discussion, reasonable facilities. Not like a rich American university, but quite reasonable. I also visited a city university. There’s a city university in Mexico City, which, as instantly UNAM, is free. No tuition. About ten years ago, there was an attempt by the government to raise just a very low tuition. That led to a national student strike. The country practically closed down. The government withdrew the proposal.

Actually, still on the UNAM campus is an administration building that was occupied at the time and is still occupied and it’s used as a kind of activism center. The city university is not only free, but has open admissions with compensatory options for those who need them. And it’s also pretty respectable. I was quite impressed to see it.

Well, I went from Mexico to California, maybe the richest place in the world. There, the public education system, which is just the best public education system in the world, is being destroyed. It’s being privatized. For the rich, of course. For the rest, some level of mostly technical training. And that’s quite a contrast between a poor country and, in many ways, the richest place in the world. And that’s happening all across the country.

So in most states, like here I just heard before, tuition, in most states, tuition covers more than half of college budgets. That’s also true of most public research universities. Pretty soon, only the community colleges will be state-financed, and even they are under attack. I’m quoting a recent study, analysts generally agree that the era of affordable four-year public universities, subsidized by the state, may be over. That’s one important way to implement indoctrination of the young, for a very good, simple reason. Students leave in a debt trap. A college debt has reached the astonishing level of over a trillion dollars.

Now, when a student leaves college with a big debt, they don’t have many options. Indoctrination is working. That’s true of social control generally. It’s also an important feature of international policy.

Well, as the Mexico-California comparison illustrates, the reasons for the conscious destruction of the greatest public education system in the world, in California and comparable things elsewhere, the reasons are not economic. There are many other cases, including rich societies, so Germany, to mention one. Or for that matter, the post-war U.S. experience. Much poorer country than we are now, but it wasn’t totally free, but tuition was very low.

So, for example, when I went to the University of Pennsylvania as an undergraduate, it was literally $100 a year. That might be $400 today. It’s not an economic reason, but as a technique of indoctrination, it’s very valuable.

Well, if they’re not publicly supported, how are universities going to survive? They don’t produce commodities for profit, and that’s the dominant value under the new spirit of the age. The funding issue raises many troubling issues. These would not arise if fostering independent thought and inquiry were regarded as a public good in the Enlightenment model. That is, as having intrinsic value, the traditional ideal of the universities, however flawed in practice, and there are major attempts to change that.

So, crossing the ocean, in Britain, the right-wing government is now challenging what’s been, for a century, called The Haldane Principle. It’s a century-old principle that barred government intrusion into academic research. Whether they’ll succeed in overturning it, I don’t know. And, well, there’s another kind of assault on intellectual culture that you can read about in this morning’s newspapers. The Cameron government has announced that it’s not going to apologize. It’s not going to give an apology for, essentially, murdering one of the great mathematicians and scientists of the 20th century, Alan Turing, who, apart from being a major intellectual figure, also happened to be a war hero. He was crucially involved in decoding the German codes, something which saved Britain. They killed him, basically, drove him to suicide.

Cameron, the Prime Minister, said they’re not going to apologize because Turing broke the law. He was guilty of the crime of homosexuality, which is a violation of law. This should be a major scandal. I mean, I don’t know how to describe it, but we’ll see if it is. It isn’t so far.

Well, for the United States, for, say, research institutions like my own, MIT, the way the problem is being dealt with is by a shift to more corporate funding, and that has several effects. First of all, there’s more emphasis on short-term, applied work. So, funding from, say, the Pentagon or the NIH, they’re concerned with the long-term future of the advanced economy. That, incidentally, means also the profitability of the corporate sector long afterwards. So, develop computers and the Internet for a couple of decades, and it ends up being profitable for the private corporations that feed off it. That’s the socializing costs, privatizing profit principle.

Well, that’s government funding, Pentagon funding, for example. Very free. Best funder there is. I was funded by them for a long time. In contrast, a business firm typically wants something it can use, not its competitors, and it wants to be able to use it tomorrow. I don’t know of a careful study, but it appears that the shift towards corporate funding, in fact, does lead to more short-term applied research and less exploration of what might turn out to be interesting and valuable for the longer-term future.

And another consequence of the shift from, say, Pentagon funding to corporate funding is more secrecy. During the Pentagon funded era at MIT, I happened to be on a faculty student committee which examined it carefully, decades of Pentagon funding, there was no secrecy on campus. One exception was the political science department, but in the sciences there was no secrecy. Literally true, they were involved in the Vietnam War. So not in the physics department, engineering departments, nowhere else. That’s not true today.

Corporate funders, of course, cannot force secrecy, but they have an indirect way of doing it. They can threaten non-renewal of contracts. That’s led to some scandals, some of them severe enough to have landed on the front page of the Wall Street Journal involving MIT. Corporatization can also have a considerable influence in other ways. Corporations, by their nature, focus on profit-making, that’s what they’re for. And they seek to convert as much of life as possible into commodities.

There’s a lot to say about this topic in no time, but one particular consequence is the focus on what’s called efficiency. Efficiency is not a simple economic concept. It has quite crucial ideological dimensions. So, for example, if a business reduces personnel, it becomes more efficient by standard measures with lower costs. But, quite typically, that shifts a burden to the public. It’s a very familiar phenomenon. And the costs to the public are not counted. That’s not a choice based on economic theory, but ideology.

And that applies directly to the business models for the university. Increasing class size, using cheap temporary labor instead of full-time faculty, graduate students, for example, and other measures like that may look good on university budgets, but significant costs are transferred to the students and to the society generally as the quality of instruction is affected.

There’s furthermore no way to measure the human and the social costs of converting the schools and universities into facilities that produce commodities for the job market, abandoning the traditional ideal of the universities, encouraging creative and independent thought and inquiry, challenging perceived beliefs, exploring the horizons free of external constraints. It’s an ideal that’s undoubtedly been flawed in practice, but nevertheless it is a kind of a measure of the level of civilization achieved.

Well, the related consequences for the K-12 is a major assault on the public schools underway and the main reason is the new spirit of the age. Public schools are based on a very dangerous principle. They’re based on the principle that we care about one another. So that’s in violation of the new spirit of the age. So me, for example, I don’t happen to have kids in the schools anymore, obviously, so why should I pay taxes? I mean, I’m not getting anything out of it, so therefore let’s get rid of public schools and just do things for ourselves.

The attack on Social Security has pretty much the same root. It’s based on the principle that you’re supposed to care about the disabled widow across town. You’re supposed to care if she doesn’t have food to eat, say. So why should I care? I’m doing fine. There are various pretexts offered, but they collapse very quickly on examination.

The real source of these attacks on just humane public values and public good, I think, is the passionate effort to instill this hateful and destructive principle, this new spirit of the age, from going on for 150 years and long before that and the attack on the commons. Instilling it has enormous profits to concentrated private power, very harmful to human and human effects.

There’s a related campaign to destroy those parts of the educational system that enrich the lives of students and enable them to follow the string that’s laid out for them in the Enlightenment Division of Education. That interferes with indoctrination, with control, with imposing passivity and obedience, with subordination to the principle of caring only about oneself. A major struggle about that right here is, you know better than I do, the destruction of the flourishing Mexican-American studies program and even the removal from classrooms of books that are used in that program. This has become a national scandal incidentally.

Classics like [Palafrere], the history of Chicanos and the Mexican civil rights movement. Books like Rethinking Columbus, even Shakespeare’s Tempest. This is all reminiscent of precedents that we don’t like to think about, but they’re worth thinking about. And it’s particularly dramatic that it’s happening right here in the midst of what could properly be called occupied Mexico. It was conquered in a brutal war of aggression.

Well, I don’t know any simple answers to the dilemmas that constantly arise in trying to develop and sustain an educational system of independence and integrity. One that strives for the enlightenment ideal. And to do this within societies that are dominated by concentrations of power with very different values and goals.

But at least one thing seems clear enough. Efforts to do this cannot progress very far in isolation from much broader struggles to protect what has already been achieved. And a lot has been achieved from severe ongoing attacks and to carry them forward towards a world of greater freedom and justice.

Thanks.

MODERATOR: Thank you so much, ladies and gentlemen. As we get ready for the question and answer part of our program tonight, reminder we only have about 30 minutes for this. And I can imagine a lot of you, if you had paper as I do, would have a lot of notes and a lot of questions and a lot of comments for Professor Chomsky.

So as we get into this question and answer, let me lay out some ground rules, some housekeeping, if you will. We have two microphones in the aisle. We’ll alternate back and forth. As Dr. Jones mentioned at the beginning, make sure you respect others’ opinions. We want a thoughtful and civil discourse, as he talked about. There may be a few differences of opinion in here.

Also, the ground rules for this. We’re not going to do follow-up questions from our people in the audience because we want to get as many questions as we can. So please try and keep your questions as succinct as possible, and we’ll get through as many questions as we can in about the next 30 minutes or so.

As you line up for the questions, and we will have staff there, I’m going to ask the first question. I’m going to take moderator’s privilege here, if you will.

Professor Chomsky, you were talking about, towards the end, corporate influence, corporate funding, and the idea that the universities in the corporate eyes need to turn out commodities. MIT, your home institution, now has a new program called OpenCourseWare that I know is getting a lot of information given out about it. For those who don’t know what it is, there are many courses at MIT that the materials are now available free and online for the public. Talk about that a little bit and how that may be going against that corporate idea.

NOAM CHOMSKY: I think it’s, actually one of my close friends is more or less running, but I think it’s a great idea. I think it’s just what ought to be done. I mean, of course, that means it’s available on the internet, so not only here, but everywhere, all over the world. You can hear leading scientists, scholars, others delivering their lectures, you can hear the classroom interaction. I mean, it’s not like taking a course in a decent, in a serious university, because you’re not part of the interaction. Like you can’t stand up and say, that’s wrong, better way to do it, you know, which is a large part of what real education is.

It’s supposed to encourage independent thought, that means challenges, and a lot of what we and everybody else is teaching is wrong. That’s why you don’t teach the same thing every year, unless your field is dead. Because you’re learning, and a lot of the learning comes from what students are doing. They’re part of the educational process, and you don’t interact with other students.

I’m sure all of you know, just from your own experience, that what’s enriched your educational experience is peer interchange. Talking with other students, arguing about things, trying to work things out together and so on. I’ll take my own university, since I know it best. If you walk around the floors of the departments, students are talking to each other, working together, writing joint papers, and a lot of very important stuff comes out of that.

Well, if you’re watching OpenCourseWare, you’re not part of that. So it is necessarily kind of passive. Actually, there are efforts being made, and it’s tricky, to develop modes of more interaction. It’s not impossible, but it’s hard, and I hope that it will go to that. But the general idea is great, I think.

MODERATOR: All right, I will abide by our own rules and not ask a follow-up as badly as I would like to. Let me start on this side, and again, let’s keep our questions fairly short so we can get through as many as we can.

MALE AUDIENCE: Hi, Professor Chomsky. First thing I want to say is thank you for visiting the University of Arizona, and thank you for such a great talk. I wanted to ask about the two documents you mentioned, the Powell Memorandum and the Trilateral Commission. Do you consider that the major reason for the increase in tuition, and what other factors come into play?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, I don’t really know of any study of this, so I have to speculate. It’s kind of surprising that there isn’t, as far as I know, there isn’t any study, because it’s a major phenomenon. But if you just look at the timing and the thinking behind it and other things that are happening in the society, it’s hard to doubt that the concern about what they called, on the liberal end, the failure of the institutions to indoctrinate the young, bear free. The failure of this, which showed up in the civilizing effect of the sixties, it was followed very shortly. And not only by the beginning of the rise in tuitions, but by lots of other things, even university architecture.

So university architecture began to change. If you look at universities that were built and designed, this is worldwide incidentally, Japan, the United States, everywhere, that are designed in the seventies and the eighties, they usually don’t have public places. They don’t have anything like Sproul Plaza in Berkeley where students get together and have discussions, demonstrations and so on. There are paths from here to there, but not places for students to get together. That is conscious. I’ve talked to architects about it.

And I suspect that the same is true of tuitions. Actually it’s a good topic to study. I don’t know of any studies, but it looks very plausible. Again, there can’t be an economic reason for it, for the reasons I mentioned. It’s got to be an ideological reason.

MODERATOR: Thanks for your question. Now come over to this side.

MALE AUDIENCE: Thank you for coming Professor Chomsky. I just wanted to ask, I think a lot of us here are in that group who would say that education is for everyone. So in light of things like No Child Left Behind and the HB 2281 anti-ethnic studies, my question is about hope. Where should we find inspiration, as a lot of us being educators in here, to kind of go forth with hope for education?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, for one thing, take say Mexico. It’s right nearby. As I say, we’re basically in it. It’s a poor country and it’s not a rich country like us for reasons that have something to do with us, as you know. But anyway, it’s a fact and what they do in the higher education system is quite impressive. Actually, I should add that this city college and city university, open city university in Mexico City is not old. It was instituted by Obrador when he was the mayor, left wing mayor in Mexico City. He started it and it’s been apparently flourishing since.

As I say, I visited and was pretty impressed. Things like that, that’s an inspiration. Or you can look at the student movements over this hemisphere. I mean, from Chile up to here in fact, there are very lively, vibrant student movements. In Chile it’s amazing. It has just revitalized the country. There’s been student protests. Remember, this is protests against the lingering effects of the dictatorship that we imposed on what in Latin America is called the first 9/11. It’s kind of striking that people here don’t know what that means, most of them.

But the first 9-11 — 9-11-1973, by any dimension that I can think of, was much worse than what we call 9-11. Not just in Chile, it had very global effects. The dictatorship has formally been gone for about 20 years, but there are lingering effects, just as there are in Spain. The lingering effects of the Franco dictatorship right now, and the young people protesting there, the Indignados as they’re called, are trying to undermine the very serious lingering effects of the dictatorship. They’re very real.

Well, that’s Chile, and there are similar things going on through the hemisphere, in fact abroad, and in fact right here. The protests about the destruction of the Mexican studies program, for example, it’s important. Teachers are organizing, and there aren’t a lot of pressure, tremendous pressures against public school teachers, you speak up, you’re thrown out, and so on. But that doesn’t mean that people are taking it passively. There are efforts to respond, there are journals where people are writing about it, and there are the struggles of the past.

I feel we’ve achieved a lot. This country isn’t what it was 30 years ago, or 100 years ago. There’s a lot more freedom, justice, rights, and so on. Again, I take my own university, but it generalizes over the country. If you walk down the halls at MIT, when I got there in the 1950s, you would have seen white males, well dressed, very passive, very conformist, doing their work, often very well, but that’s it. That was the Institute.

If you walk down the halls today, it looks like this. Half women, third minorities, informal dress, which symbolizes informal relations, and a lot of concerns and activism, all sorts of things. It didn’t happen by magic. It’s happened all over the country, in many ways all over the world, and that’s the kind of inspiration that ought to suffice. I think it goes back to the early days, the very earliest days, way far back if you want to trace it in history.

MODERATOR: Thank you. Over on this side now.

FEMALE AUDIENCE: Hi, I’m Denise from Chicago. First, I just want to thank the intergenerational audience that came tonight from where I stand. It’s so exciting, especially seeing all the young people here, so thank you to both of you for bringing that out. Two, I’d like to invite you, Professor Chomsky and anyone here to Chicago, May 19th, a concert for troubadour Woody Guthrie, who emulates many of the themes that you talked about tonight. And you can find info on the Illinois Labor History webpage, who holds the deed for the Haymarket martyrs.

A question? What do you think of the super PAC and the decision by the Obama administration to get into it with the, you know, you talked about lobbying, and now they’ve made the decision to enter that fight?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, it’s obviously a sellout, but of any principle, not the first one, incidentally. On the other hand, you know, there is an institutional fact that political figures just have to live with. The structure of elections, the electoral system, has been shredded. I mean, it always was under the effect of, there was always a big effect of campaign spending. If you want to learn about it, the best work that’s done is by a political economist named Thomas Ferguson, his personal friend, but he has a book called Golden Rule, which goes back a century, studying in detail the effect of campaign spending, not only on who’s elected, but on what their programs are.

It goes right through the New Deal, right up to the present. He’s since extended it since, and I think it’s pretty convincing. It’s what he calls the investment theory of politics. It treats elections as occasions in which groups of investors coalesce to invest to control the state. Campaign funding is one standard mechanism, and it doesn’t explain everything, doesn’t pretend that it does, but it explains quite a lot.

Now, that’s changed radically in the last 30 years. The last 30 years, part of this whole, basically neo-liberal assault on democracy and justice, and that’s what it is, it’s worldwide, but here too, part of it has just been the sharply rising cost of elections. And now, especially since Citizens United and the super PACs, it’s gone through the roof, But it’s been going up steadily, and it has a very definite effect. It forces political figures into the pockets of those who have the money, the private corporate sector, it’s increasingly financial institutions. Incidentally, that’s not only true of the President running for office or Congress running for office, it’s even permeated the Congress.

I mean, it used to be the case that if positions of some authority or prestige in Congress, say, chair of an important committee, that used to be the result of seniority and service. By now, literally, you have to buy it. You have to pay money into the party coffers in order to qualify for a chair of a committee. Well, you can guess what the effects of that are, obviously. And this has been enormously changed by Citizens United and the Super PACs, but it’s a process that’s always been there.

Actually, you go back a century, there was a great, famous campaign financier, the most famous of the era, Mark Anna. He was once asked, what are the important things in politics? And his answer was, he said, well, I can think of three things that are important. The first one is money. The second one is money. And I’ve forgotten what the third one is. That was over a century ago, and it’s gotten a lot more extreme. So, yeah, this is a sellout on Obama’s part, but if he wants to run in a multibillion dollar election, you don’t have a lot of choices. It’s the system that’s rotten at the core, not the choices of individuals.

MODERATOR: Good question.

MALE AUDIENCE: Thank you, Professor Chomsky. I’m a student from South Korea, and thank you a lot for your writing for the Village of Gangjang in Jeju Island. It suffers a lot from military-based construction, but I just want to know your opinion about the tax expenditures on the military expenditure instead of education. For instance, Korean students are suffering a lot from increasing tuition. We are heading towards the same way American students have been, but still the government is expending lots of money on the military instead of educating people for better humanity.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Actually, that Jeju Island construction that you mentioned is something very significant. We ought to know about it. Jeju Island is quite significant for Korea. It was the site of a huge massacre in 1948 by the U.S.-backed, basically fascist state in South Korea. A horrible massacre. The island has been actually designated, I think, by the U.N. as an island of peace. It is trying to be an island of peace.

The U.S. and South Korea are trying to build a major military base, major naval base on the island oriented towards China. I think it is 500 kilometers from China, approximately. It is part of the encirclement of China, which is called Containment of China. Here it is described as protection of freedom of the seas. The Chinese see it a little differently. They see it the way we would see it if the Chinese navy was building bases in the Caribbean. We would blow them off the planet if they did that.

But the way the world is supposed to work, we are supposed to be able to do it anywhere. In fact, if you read the professional literature on strategic analysis, security studies, they refer to the Chinese-American naval confrontation as a classic security dilemma. Each of the two sides thinks that there is kind of an existential danger. They just can’t give it up. It is too important.

So we think that it is an existential threat if the United States doesn’t control all the oceans around China. And they think it is an existential threat if we send nuclear-armed super-carriers into their territorial waters. That is the security dilemma. What can you do? And in fact, the U.S. is trying hard to essentially encircle China so that they can’t have access to the Pacific or to the Malacca Straits where a lot of trade goes and so on. Japan is part of this system. Japan is a client state. There are military bases all over Japan. Many of them on Okinawa. This is over the strong objections of the people of Okinawa who have been trying to get those bases off for 60 years. And they can’t do it.

Recently the U.S. basically forced the Japanese Prime Minister out of office because he was thinking about it. Well Jeju Island in South Korea is another case. And it is really serious and an important issue. There is a lot of protest on the island. Civil disobedience, a lot of arrests, legal violence and so on.

But your general point is quite right. The vast military expenditures are part of the… I don’t think they are the main reason. Like we had these vast military expenditures in the 50s and it still was almost free education. And for a GI Bill totally free and huge amounts of money going into the research system and so on. And now it is a burden undoubtedly.

But the society has to decide where you want to spend your money. You want to spend it on classic security dilemmas in China’s territorial waters with all that that could lead to. Building naval bases on Jeju Island, on Okinawa and so on. Where do you want to spend it building a decent society? And this question arises all across the board.

I mean one of the most striking cases doesn’t involve education but it does involve survival is Canadian tar sands and shale oil throughout the country. In Obama’s state of the nation address, if you read it carefully, one of the things he said was that we are now coming to a position where we can have a hundred years of energy independence by exploiting, using high technology techniques and fracking and so on, to get previously inaccessible and incidentally very dirty oil with all sorts of environmental, local environmental consequences. And this is all over.

There was a recent speech by the president of the Chamber of Commerce, main business lobby. You can find it on the internet. This is his annual speech to the business world. And the first point that he mentions, the most important point, is that we can now move to, he says, several centuries of energy independence by just tapping our own oil. You go to the most responsible and serious newspaper in the world that I know of, the London Financial Times. They devote a whole full page to a euphoric description of the possibility of the United States having a century of energy independence and a century of global hegemony by tapping these resources.

There’s only one small footnote: If we use those resources, we’re finished. There’s no future for your children and your grandchildren. That’s not discussed. You’ve got to gain wealth for getting old but stealth. And that means my profits tomorrow. Not what happens 30 years from now to my grandchildren. And that’s decent.

And meanwhile, there are alternatives, like ultimately probably solar energy is going to be the main alternative. And it’s quite striking to see what’s happening to the solar energy industry. By now, about half the world’s solar panels are being produced in China. Now that’s not cheap labor. It’s not a labor-intensive industry. They started the way all manufacturing starts, very low-level manufacturing. Manufacturing provides the incentive, the ideas, the design conceptions and so on that lead to technological advances. Very common. And slowly, not so slowly, they’ve been moving up the high technology ladder. They’ve been producing the most advanced solar cells in the world.

Well, okay, that’s one way to use your resources. We have choices. We have plenty of choices, because we’re a very rich society. China’s a very poor society. We’re a very rich one. So we have plenty of options.

MODERATOR: We have about ten minutes left, so thank you so much for keeping your questions short so we can get through as many.

NOAM CHOMSKY: That means I should keep my answers short. I got it.

MODERATOR: You’re the guest of honor. You can answer as long as you like.

FEMALE AUDIENCE: Hello, Dr. Chomsky. I’m a member of O’Neill. And our question is, so in your opinion, what are the larger implications of the decision by the TUSD governing board and state superintendent John Huppenthal to ban Mex-American Studies?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, I think it’s a particularly ugly part of the whole attack on anything like the enlightenment ideal of education. In this case, to destroy the diversity, the richness of the educational system, the meaningfulness for students and so on, for a large number of students, after all, a big Mexican community. So I think it’s just part of the general attack on free and creative education that stimulates learning, discovery, enriching one’s life and so on, and trying to impose indoctrination and conformity. A particularly ugly case right here, because of where it’s happening. It would be ugly anywhere, but it’s particularly so right here.

MODERATOR: Thank you. Back to this side.

MALE AUDIENCE: Professor Chomsky, I believe I speak on behalf of almost everyone here. It’s an absolute humbling honor to be learning from you in person. I’m an Iranian-American peace and human rights and environmental activist, and I’m a participant in the Iran’s Green Movement, a supporter of the Arab Spring Movement against dictatorship. And obviously, I’m a passionate participant in the Occupy Movement in this country, which I believe has already awakened incredible energy. And therefore, I am hopeful but also fearful of what it may do wrong in order to possibly waste this last chance movement. So please share with us your wisdom about what is it that you think, at this point in history, the Occupy Movement needs to be wary of or be careful about.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, like you, I think the Occupy Movement has been quite a remarkable success, way beyond what I thought. And the tactic has been very effective for a lot of reasons. One effect that it’s had is just changing national discourse. In fact, even the terminology and imagery of the Occupy Movement is now sort of mainstream. It’s focused attention on serious problems, inequality, like somebody asked before, the purchase of elections, trading of democracy, the extraordinary power of financial institutions, which probably contribute very little, if anything, to the economy.

In fact, the leading, the most respected financial commentator in the world, I think, Martin Wolf of the Financial Times in London is very conservative, highly respected correspondent. He describes the financial institutions that have developed in the last 30 years as kind of like a larva that destroys the host in which it’s embedded. I couldn’t get away with saying that, but he can. And I can get away with quoting him. And the Occupy movement has directed attention to foreclosures, homelessness, a lot of problems that are there that were kind of varied.

Another major contribution that’s made, in my opinion, is just overcoming the atomization of the society. In the United States, they’re an atomized society. People are kind of alone. The ideal social unit, from the point of view of concentrated power, is a dyad, you and the screen, but nothing else. That’s a way to make sure that everybody’s conforming. And there’s a lot of that. Children, it’s a real disease, pathology. And the Occupy movement’s overcoming it. It’s creating, spontaneously, communities of people who actually are reviving traditional ideals.

I mean, if there were any real conservatives in the country, they’d be applauding the fact that they’re reviving the concepts of solidarity, mutual support, sympathy, free discussion, and so on, that are just the most traditional values we have. It’s been major efforts to destroy them. And that’s being revived in the communities of mutual support and solidarity that are being created.

Well, all of this is really important, I think. But now, where do you go from here? Well, first of all, I don’t regard myself as any kind of an expert on tactics. I’ve been wrong so many times on tactical judgments that I usually shut up. And these are important judgments. Tactical judgments are those that have direct human consequences, so they’re not marginal.

But my general feeling is that tactics have a kind of a half-life. They have diminishing returns. They may be very successful, but it sort of declines. After a while, there’s kind of a dynamism in which the tactic begins to relate, to overcome the purpose, apart from beginning to alienate other people who you’re trying to reach. So while I think that the Occupy tactic has been a great success, I think it has to be rethought and moves have to be made somehow to reach out into larger communities. That’s been going on in a number of interesting ways, like one of the developments in several cities, I know in New York and Boston and elsewhere, has been what’s been called Occupy the Hood, neighborhood Occupy movements, which have to some extent integrated with the ones that make the newspapers, Occupy Wall Street, Occupy our neighborhood in Brooklyn, Occupy other things.

And those deal with the immediate problems of the local people, and they can be very serious. I mean, it can be something that sounds as simple as getting a traffic light where kids have to cross the street. I mean, if people can achieve that, they learn you can achieve something by mutual aid and you can go on. That’s what successful organizing is about. And if the Occupy movements can go in that direction, reach out to larger sections of the population, and engage the working class, which they have yet really to do, that’s very significant, then I think they have great prospects. But it’s not easy to do. There’s going to be a lot of repression, violent repression sometimes. Power systems don’t fade away cheerfully. They’ll do what they can to control things.

But I think that David Hume was correct: Power is in the hands of the governed. There’s nothing, there’s no weapon that the powerful have other than control of opinion, attitudes, opinions, beliefs. If they can make people feel hopeless, dependent, passive, atomized, okay, then you can keep power. But the governed, that is the 99% in the imagery of the Occupy movement, they have the power. But they have to get organized, committed. And that’s the task of people who want to devote themselves to this.

MODERATOR: We have time for one final question. It will come from this side.

MALE AUDIENCE: Hi, Dr. Chomsky. I met you first with Daniel Berrigan. It’s a long time ago. But anyway, getting back to your specific expertise in linguistics. It’s been troublesome to me that the media will use words like socialism, class warfare, but we never hear fascism. And from my studies of ideology, state-supported capitalism, pretty much what you’ve been talking about is fascism. I know words have power, and you know that too. Are we too shy to talk about what basically almost brought the end of mankind in the last century? Or is it just the media controls and you have to go to Link TV or Democracy Now? I don’t know. But they are not supported. They have to be supported by people donating to them. Isn’t anyone aware?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, the history of that word is kind of interesting. Fascism obviously took on bad connotations in the 1940s. But if you go back, and incidentally the same is true of other words, like take propaganda. The term propaganda now is not used for information in English. It still is in other languages. If you go back to the 1920s, information was just called propaganda. Like Edward Bernays, who I mentioned, the founder of the public relations industry. The book of his, which I was quoting on engineering of consent and controlling the masses and so on, is called propaganda. Propaganda is just what you do when you try to control beliefs and attitudes.

Well, since the 1930s and ‘40s, you can’t use that term anymore for its obvious connotations. Fascism is a very interesting one. And we can learn a lot about ourselves from looking at its history. Before the Second World War, before the United States got into the Second World War in 1941, fascism was not regarded particularly critically. In fact, there’s a very important book I urge you to read if you haven’t called Business as a System of Power by one of the great political economists, Robert Brady, a Veblenite economist. It’s about the spread of fascism through the industrial world. He points out that in every country, all of the industrial countries, there are developments of basically fascist character. He discusses them and perfectly understands what is quite right in fact.

There’s nothing inherent in fascism that says you have to have gas chambers. That’s a special thing that developed. In fact, Mussolini’s fascism was very highly regarded in the United States. Remember, that’s pre-Nazi. FDR, Franklin Roosevelt, President Roosevelt, he described Mussolini as that admirable Italian gentleman. As late as 1939, he was praising Mussolini saying, well, he’s been kind of misled by Hitler but basically doing the right thing.

When fascism was instituted in Italy and it was pretty ugly, it was praised across the board in the United States. Business investment shot up. It also did after Hitler came in. Fortune magazine, the main business journal, had an issue in, I think, 1932. The title, you look at the front page cover, big letters, it says, the Wops are unwapping themselves, meaning the Wops are finally doing something right. They got a fascist government which works and we like that.

People on the left were praising it. The same with Nazism. I mean, as late as 1938, Roosevelt’s main advisor, Sumner Welles, went to the Munich Conference. That’s the conference which tore up Czechoslovakia. He came back full of praise for the Nazi moderates who were going to help us usher in a new era of peace. They’re the moderates, you know, kind of protecting civilized values from the extremists of the right and left and so on.

I mean, George Kennan, who’s very much honored and respected now, there’s a major biography that just came out full of praise. If you take a look at his actual record, he was the American Consul in Berlin right through 1941. He was withdrawn from Pearl Harbor. He was sending back diplomatic correspondents to Washington saying, you shouldn’t be so hard on the Nazis. They’re doing some things wrong, but basically we can do business with them. They’re the right kind of people.

Well, a couple of years later, you couldn’t talk about fascism that way. Fascism meant crematoria, you know, gas chambers and so on, so you stopped using the word. But your point is correct. As a social and political order, Robert Brady knew what he was talking about. There are elements of this kind of state capitalist order all over the industrial world taking different forms.

MODERATOR: Well, thank you all for all of your questions and for your attention.

FOR FURTHER READING:

‘Does Israel Have The Right To Exist?’: Benjamin Netanyahu (Transcript)

One Size Doesn’t Fit All: Democracy is Not Always the Best Form of Government (Transcript)

Days of Noah & Lot: Derek Prince (Transcript)

Israel, Russia, China, Iran: The World in Conflict: Walter Russell Mead (Transcript)

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