Political Correctness & the Death of God by Andrew Wallace

THE scourge of Political Correctness has been with us now since the 1980s, a distinctively curious modern syndrome of angst marked by critical examination of language and custom. Something of this brouhaha has been with us over longer tracts of history if we care to survey cultural innovation and evolution across the centuries. However the present discomfiture visited upon the heads of our chattering classes, whereby seemingly innocuous linguistic chatter has recently become problematic and in many cases deemed reactionary, speaks to a novel juncture of intellectual frenzy and insecurity.

Our distinctive period of ferment has been variously labelled the late modern, the post-modern and the Anthropocene. Characterised in part by a waning optimism from the European Enlightenment and the giddy new world of neoliberal globalisation, our gilded benevolent post war progress has given way to precarity and anxiety as we attempt to grapple with the complexities of our new multi-spectrum information age.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) is arguably the first modern philosopher and progenitor to articulate the ‘post-modern’ conundrum. Nietzsche’s arresting idea of the ‘Death of God’ is the lynchpin to his unrelenting ‘anti-foundationalism’. As Terry Eagleton has persuasively reasoned, Nietzsche seems to have been the first ‘real deal’ atheist, as all the other atheists up to this point had surreptitiously smuggled in the old Judeo Christian metaphysics and teleology amidst their loud affirmations of the secular. God had now become Reason or Humanism or some other such spurious unfounded belief in progress.

Nietzsche is seen by many as the singular uncompromising figure who primed a metaphorical slow reaction colossus of a nuclear bomb under the rickety infrastructure of Western philosophy. Pushing atheist Enlightenment thought to its apotheosis, Nietzsche spelled out in theatrical bravura the cataclysmic implications of the way ahead. The masses could no longer recoil and refuse to understand the stupendous shift in our world view.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

Nietzsche’s dethronement of the Almighty was also the shattering of Western philosophy and its epistemological and ontological foundations. He would spell out the radical new existential realities for the multitude up till this point largely oblivious to the anti-foundational revolution that had upended the cosmos. A terrifying paradigm shift and cultural shock, vertiginous and exhilarating, would have to be digested by the post-modern.

With the prime mover dethroned along with all the attendant metaphysical ballast, society’s loss of its elaborate meaning system in placating our existential fears and buttressing our sense of selves, our identity and our moralities, Nietzsche had foregrounded the nihilistic conundrum at the centre of modernity. Without recourse to transcendental authority and legitimacy, uncompromising contingency would issue in an intense anomic turbulence.

The realm of normalcy destroyed, regarded as oppressive and socially constructed. Scientific knowledge is now suspect, provisional and relativised. What was once taken as God given and natural is now arbitrary and suitable for deconstruction by suitably qualified post modern scholars well versed in the radical new indeterminism. All traditional ‘centrics’ of language and culture must be prised apart accordingly.

God is dead alongside the Enlightenment belief in Reason. Patriarchy is dead, the family is dead, heterosexuality is dead, the novel is dead, the symphony is dead, the author is dead. Political Correctness is the manifestation of this modern discomfiture played out in our daily lives, an incessant Nietzschean comedy of manners as we scramble to find an acceptable form of parlance stripped of any perceived historical provocations.

Our nomenclatures betray certain socially conservative proclivities and a Christian lineage which a majority of the populace had no alternative but to acquiesce to and defer to a level of fitting observance. This may now have given way to little more than functionality, devoid of the metaphysical fervour of the devoted. Yet as cultural conservatives, the new Political Correctness is seen as an idiotic and unnecessary intrusion into a shared domain of vocabulary considered innocuous.

Nietzsche’s politics defy easy pigeonholing. Clearly not of the left himself although certainly not a textbook conservative or libertarian either. How far his heroic and affirmative existentialism stands as a viable solution and corrective against the bleak nihilist terminus remains questionable, not least because of his hostility to the universal and to the masses at large. It is also doubtful whether Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists have charted a convincing path ahead to steer us beyond the anarchy of the wasteland.

References –

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_is_dead

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche

Terry Eagleton – Culture and the Death of God (2014) – especially relevant is Chapter 5 :

The Death of God.

Also very useful is the related Terry Eagleton lecture uploaded to Youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=ka-HG-WeW_U

'Wild West' Approach to Apprenticeships in the UK

by Brian Bamford

CAMILLA CAVENDISH writing in the FT on 4th, October, wrote: 'The gulf between academic and vocational education in the UK has depressed productivity and exacerbated skills shortages.' She added that: 'Many of the largest shortages reported by employers are in sectors such as construction, health and IT.'

Meanwhile, in the UK only one one in ten adults hold a higher technical qualification as their highest qualification compared to about one in five in Germany and one in three in Canada. Camilla Cavendish estimates that 'as much as 20% of the UK workforce will be significantly under-skilled for their jobs by 2030'.

In this country the government wants to bridge the gap, and according to Ms. Cavendish 'create a "world-class, German-style further education system".' The government has promised a 'lifetime skills guarantee' with the offer of free further education courses to adults without A-levels or the equivalent. Yet Ms. Cavendish insists 'The challenge [for the government] is to make them good enough ans to offer people who didn't enjoy school something better the second time around' and she says: 'Until now, the UK has not done this well.' And she argues that in the 'UK ministers must fight their urge to centralise'.

The trouble is that anyone in the UK can set-up as a joiner without any qualifications. Yet in Germany you can't be a carpenter or plumber unless you have mastered a trade doing an apprenticeship of about three years, often followed by evening classes. The handwerk curriculum is also guided by master craftsmen who know the job, and not what Ms. Cavendish calls: 'pseudo-academics'.

She viciously compares the two systems saying: 'In contrast, vocational training in the UK is a Wild West. There are a bewildering array of more than 12,000 different qualifications. Students are often jammed through courses in which "competition", not actual learning, commands the fee. Sub-contracting is rife, making it hard to monitor quality. There are some excellent courses; but also mis-selling. Good further education courses have also been denuded of funding with their teachers paid less, on average, than their counterparts in schools.'

It may be argued that the German guild system is a bit 'inflexible', and it could opperate a bit like closed shops. Also in the rapidly shifting situation even a gold standard apprenticeship may not last a lifetime. Yet surely it offers a better set-up than we've got now with all kinds of chancers and scallwags passing themselves-off as tradesmen in this country. This decline in workmanship was brought forward with Margaret Thatcher's attack on the trade unions in the 1970s and 80s, and the replacement of the one-to-one traing on the job with the 'pseudo-academics' and the prioritisation of classroom learning.

The 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was clearly aware of this vast gulf between practical know-how on the job and speculative classroom efforts to solve problems when he remarked to his student Maurice Drury: 'You think philosophy is difficult enough but I can tell you it is nothing to the difficulty of being a good architect. When I was building the house for for my sister in Vienna I was so completely exhausted at the end of the day that all I could do was go out to a "flick" every night.'

Based on his own building site experiences and observations, Wittgenstein noted the language games employed by building workers giving orders and obeying them in building a wall: such as for example shouting 'brick' and not 'bring me a brick' and so forth to his mate (see his Philosophical Investigations). Classroom learning creates a completely different language game which somehow lacks the quality of the practical situation. In Wittgenstein's terms they are two distinct 'forms of life' and two different 'language games'.

The snobbery of the middle class will naturally continue to prefer the full time graduate degree as the ideal. But it will still not help when we want to get the roof fixed.

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'If Liberty Means Anything!'

EDITORIAL STATEMENT: A STATUE of George Orwell stands outside Broadcasting House, the headquarters of the BBC, in London. The wall behind the statue is inscribed with Orwell's words 'If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear'. Although the statue was not unveiled until 7 November 2017, the Northern Voices blog, and before that the magazine of the same name, was established to be a concrete manifestation of that same sentiment. We do not have an alignment with any political party and have a scepticism about the activities of many politicians. It will be apparent to readers that our contributors have left of centre allegiances. This covers a spectrum of libertarians, trades unionists and democratic socialists. We believe that everyone has the right to have a different viewpoint from ourselves and from others, irrespective of who they are, and no one should be prevented from expressing that viewpoint, even if we or others disagree with it. This does not place upon us any obligation to publish material which is abusive, unsubstantiated or merely an assertion. However often an assertion is repeated, it does not make it true. In commenting on the views of others we avoid overused terms like, racist, sexist, homo-phobic, trans-phobic, islamo-phobic, anti-semitic, fascist, nazi etc, and object to their use in contexts where they are little more than abuse intended to intimidate others into remaining silent and so stifle debate on contentious issues. If anyone reading this blog objects to what one of our contributors has to say then we encourage them to write a comment. Unless they can provide some evidence more substantial than their own opinion about the nature of the content, it is unlikely that it will be taken down or altered.

'ON CERTAINTY' in the Coronavirus

 On Being Cock-Sure about Covid-19
by Brian Bamford

SHORTLY before he died, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote:  "I do philosophy now like an old woman who is always mislaying something and having to look for it again: now her spectacles, now her keys."*

This humility of the philosopher contrasts with the terrifying certainty that is being thrust upon us daily by various forces from the political left and the right.
Yet it fairly describes the dilemma facing governments at the moment over the coronavirus pandemic.

Today I have had two e-mails in my in-box:   one a Special Issue (March 2020) of Labour Internationalist, containing a dramatic statement dated 24 March 2020 on the Covid-19 pandemic by the Organising Committee for the Reconstitution of the Fourth International (OCRFI), and another from 'Defend Our NHS' is now confidently declaring:  'The coronavirus letter you’ve just been sent by Johnson is a lie.'

And the Labour Internationalist with bold determined conviction in a subtitle declares:  'The failed capitalist system and the governments that serve its interests:  they are guilty and responsible for the growth of the coronavirus pandemic!'

'Wishful Thinking'

It is not only the Marxists who are brimming over with confident conclusions, in that case catostrophic conclusions, but we all like to embrace wishful thinking.  Tim Harford in his recent column in the Financial Times warned:  'Wishful thinking is a powerful thing', and he went on to write:  'When I read about a new disease modelling study from the University of Oxford, I desperately wanted to believe.  It is the most prominent exploration of the "tip of the iceberg hypothesis", which suggests that the majority of coronavirus infections are so mild as to have passed unrecorded by the authorities and perhaps even by the people infected.'

If true?  That could mean that many of us have already had the virus and have probably developed some degree of immunity to it.  'Herd Immunity' was the concept that in the earlier stages of this crisis the government seemed to be following.

Yesterday, Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, an epidemiologist Sydney, Australia, wrote an essay in ScienceAlert on this approach:
'It's hard to predict things in a pandemic.  The situation changes so much on a daily basis that everything you thought you knew last week is wrong by the end of the day.  Things are changing so fast that even the solid certainties that we thought we were sure of – the reproductive rate, the symptoms of the infection, the key to making a good quarantine – are suspect and need to be re-evaluated.'

Despite all the bluster of the cock-sure political lobbyists in the current crisis, there are still a lack of reliable facts and data to form firm conclusions.

Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz continued:
'But among all this uncertainty, I can say for sure that there is one thing that I would never have seen coming: the discussion about herd immunity. It is so out of the blue that the first time a journalist asked my opinion on whether it was effective for the coronavirus, I literally laughed out loud because I assumed they were joking.'

About 15-years ago another epidemiologist, Prof. Ioannidis, published a study entitled 'Why Most Published Research Findings Are False'.  He wrote on March 17th, this year, that Covid-19 'might be a one-in-a-century evidence fiasco', because some infections are being missed, and we have no idea how many.  Consequently we have no idea how deadly Covid-19 actually is.

Hence, there is still no certainty to how things will turn out with the pandemic.

'The will to certitude'

Wittgenstein's 'On Certainty' was a text that can plausibly be interpreted as an anthem against the human will to certitude and mastery of the world.  Most obviously, it reminds us that uncertainty is an intimate, everyday matter.  There is a personal dimension of the experience of not knowing exactly who we are, what our world is and where both we and our world are heading.  Big talk of global spikes and planetary spectres of uncertainty is one thing.  Daily living with uncertainty is another. 

This is why particularly we shouldn't be surprise if the Marxists around Labour Internationalist want to declare a forthcoming catastrophy in the making owing to capitalist government's handling of the pandemic.  Or that a lobby group for the NHS want to use the current crisis as part of its campaign strategy to get more funds.  

There’s a French proverb that runs rien n’est sûr que la chose incertaine (nothing’s certain but uncertainty).  This could easily be a motto for democracy.  Considered as a political form and as a whole way of life, democracy is like no other.  The totalitarian or authoritarian mind craves the comfort of a political line that resolve the uncertainties.

But how do the uncertainties of our age compare with the great religious turmoil of the late medieval and early modern period, masterfully analysed by Jean Delumeau: the fears of damnation and death mobilised by the church and compounded by episodes of military violence, famine, disease and the widespread belief in witchcraft and other forces of magic?

The unknown consequences of the current crisis could well give rise to political delusions or even religious expectations.  We could anticipate that uncertainty is fickle and capricious tormentor of the human condition and conviction.

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*  Nothing is forever. Uncertainty, the twin of certainty, cannot be banished from human affairs. Not even taxes and death are certain, we could say.  Although Wittgenstein doesn’t put things this way, truth claims, paradoxically, stir up doubts about truth.  Truth is a contaminant of truth.  Its yearning for certainty calls into question things that are taken for granted.  Nothing is certain but the uncertainty of the unforeseen.  Hence Wittgenstein appeals for greater humility about what we know, or suppose we know.

A reply to Derek Pattison on class

by Andrew Wallace

THANKS for Mr Pattison’s reply on my article which raises some interesting issues, particularly concerning what he considers to be my penchant for ‘pretentious academic verbiage’ along with the social philosopher David Selbourne whose writings I drew upon.

His beef at the outset seems to be with my perceived stylistic idiosyncrasies and resort to pedantry, which he considers ‘barely comprehensible to most people’.  This seems to be an ad hominem attack and a disingenuous slice of anti-intellectualism.  Northern Voices amongst other things is a forum for literate and stimulating thought-pieces of various complexity and for employing a ‘highbrow’ discourse I make no apologies.  I suggest my vocabulary is hardly a radical departure from the general tenor and house style of NV.

Leftists struggle to push this faux anti-intellectualism because it is so obviously built on contradiction.  Leftists are often the chattering classes incarnate.  Only in the discredited regimes of ‘actually existing socialism’ did intellectuals face real persecution, but of course those societies had a very different dynamic in contrast to their Western European counterparts.

However even thinkers like Selbourne has taken issue with the “incomprehensible scholasticism, emanating from the nether darkness of academia where nothing grows”, so it seems a certain ‘anti-intellectual intellectualism’ is justified.  Certainly Selbourne and other writers of his ilk have largely avoided the dense impenetrable obscurantism of post-modernism that was so successfully lampooned and deservedly so in the Sokal Affair. So Selbourne might be galled to learn his former student accuse him of this very vice that has been so assiduously critiqued in his life work.

Dan Fox seems to have the measure of this ‘Prolier-than-thou’ trolling in his book (see below) even references Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language’ –

' “pretentiousness” is the put-down of choice for a certain sort of bluff, meat-and-potatoes Englishman who distrusts foreign words and complicated ideas'.

I do plead guilty to neglecting the newer, more ‘liberal’ cohort of the working class as depicted by Guy Standing in his work on the Precariat.  My admittedly non-scientific anecdotal observations are largely based on the older, traditional working class, based around the factories and textile mills that gave brief sustenance in the post war era.

Working class autodidacts are often deeply impressive and imposing figures, yet their comparative rarity makes them extra-ordinary individuals and a far cry from being representative of the working class.

Regards

Andrew Wallace

References

How the left was lost: the need to relearn what true progress means, New Statesman, 24.07.14. – David Selbourne

Pretentiousness by Dan Fox – (11.02.16.) Guardian review by Steven Poole

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/11/pretentiousness-why-it-matters-dan-fox-review

Pretentiousness by Dan Fox review – why anti-intellectualism is the real snobbery | Books | The Guardian

Germaine Greer on 'Bad Faith' & 'career rapees'

An anthropological approach to rape in society

by Brian Bamford

YESTERDAY Germaine Greer argued on Radio Four's 'TODAY' program that we need to look at how the rape narrative is tackled and defined in society, and what this tells us about the treatment of women today.  She said, among other things, when asked to define her stance on #MeToo, Ms Greer declared: ‘I don’t actually think it’s gone too far, I don’t think its got anywhere at all.'

She then added:  ‘What we need is to sort out the law regarding rape and to sort out our concept of what it is.
‘It’s pointless now bringing up this stuff when [for] most of it no action can be taken.
‘Why wait 20 years?’

She of course neglected to concern herself here with the treatment of men or boys in society.

 Cambridge House & the abuse of boys

And yet, I live in Rochdale where it was at Cambridge House in November 2012, that the issue of the exploitation and abuse of boys by Cyril Smith in the 1960s was initially reported on this NV Blog and simultaneously on the Westminster Politics Home website.  A few hours later Simon Danczuk made his speech in the House of Commons (an earlier story about this in 1979 in Rochdale's Alternative Paper [RAP] had been squashed by a threat of legal action by Cyril Smith's solicitor).

Rape & Jean-Paul Sartre on  'Bad Faith'

Ms. Greer told listeners to Radio Four that #MeToo doesn’t work:  ‘I don’t actually think it’s gone too far, I don’t think its got anywhere at all.
‘What we need is to sort out the law regarding rape and to sort out our concept of what it is.’

To understand this better perhaps we should consider the nature of bad faith and exploitative behaviour in human relationships generally.  Ms. Greer talks about women who 'open their legs' to gain career advantages from Harvey Weinstein

In the North it was in the 1970s and 80s, and may still be, a common practice for women to hang around in  pubs using their charms in order to get men to buy them free drinks, and one (perhaps I should say second generation feminist) use to complain to me about these working-class women who boasted about it as she thought it was 'disgusting' and anti-feminist.  When I went working in London I worked with men in the sugar refinery in Hammersmith who used to chat-up women in clubs and when the women went to the toilet they would tell me how they would empty their handbags. 

Dealing with bad faith in a way which seems to relate to what Ms. Greer has said, the French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre. gave an example of a young girl on a first date:
'The young woman’s date compliments her on her physical appearance, but she ignores the obvious sexual connotations of his compliment and chooses instead to direct the compliment at herself as a conscious human being. He then takes her hand, but she neither takes it nor rejects it. Instead, she lets her hand rest indifferently in his so as to buy time and delay having to make a choice about accepting or rejecting his advances. Whereas she chooses to treat his compliment as being unrelated to her body, she chooses to treat her hand (which is a part of her body) as an object, thereby acknowledging her freedom to make choices.'

 The #MeToo Mob in Hollywood want to argue that they had no choices and had to succumb to Weinstein's wilds and that they had no power of agency. 

Another example of bad faith that Sartre gives is that of a young woman on a first date.  The young woman’s date compliments her on her physical appearance, but she ignores the obvious sexual connotations of his compliment and chooses instead to direct the compliment at herself as a conscious human being.  He then takes her hand, but she neither takes it nor rejects it.  Instead, she lets her hand rest indifferently in his so as to buy time and delay having to make a choice about accepting or rejecting his advances.  Whereas she chooses to treat his compliment as being unrelated to her body, she chooses to treat her hand (which is a part of her body) as an object, thereby acknowledging her freedom to make choices.

For Sartre, people may pretend to themselves that they do not have the freedom to make choices, but they cannot pretend to themselves that they are not themselves, that is, conscious human beings who actually have little or nothing to do with their pragmatic concerns, social roles, and value systems.

 Germaine Greer's anthropological analysis & the initiation of 'Donkey Dick'!

Germaine Greer's approach to what she calls 'career rapees' is it seems to me anthropological, while Sartre's is philosophical.

I mentioned Rochdale, and the historic case I knew about of the teenagers abused by Cyril Smith at Cambridge House, using spanking practices and 'false medicals'.  I could have dealt with the historic practices of the initiation ceremonies which took place in the factories in the North West of England in the 1950s and 60s, when I was an apprentice electrician.  Last month we had Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Tueday, and it was at that time common for young apprentices to get their balls blacked or greased, or both.  De-bagging's of lads were often indulged in on the shopfloor on the pretext that it was an ancient custom of an 'iniation ceremony', in the 1950s it was argued that this should be done when lads reached 18-years when the lads became 'improvers', perhaps owing to the advent of the Welfare State, lads were becoming too big at 21 on completion of their apprenticeship when they officially 'came out of their time'.  One lad at Tweedale & Smalley where I worked, gained the title 'Donkey Dick' and seemed to enjoy the title as well as the exploits and High Jinks.

However an outsider may view these escapades, and when I did try to protest I was made to feel like a wet blanket,

How do we consider these initiation practices?  Are they to be represented as the abuse and exploitation of young people and apprentices by tradesmen?  Or are we to see it as an ancient custom perhaps handed down to us from the times of the rural village? Perhaps even Harvey Weinstein and those who engaged with him thought they we involved in some ancient ritual or initiation ceremony.

 Jean-Paul Sartre on Bad Faith | Outre monde:

www.https://outre-monde.com/2011/03/29/jean-paul-sartre-on-bad-faith/ 
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Noam Chomsky on the new popularist paradigm

NOAM Chomsky is a philosopher, social critic, political activist, and pioneering linguist. Having served as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1955, Chomsky is the author of dozens of books, with his most recent book, Who Rules the World?, published in 2016. Chomsky spoke with Harvard International Review editors Kenneth Palmer and Richard Yarrow about his reflections on politics in the West, and what issues he thinks it has failed to properly address.

Question:  What would you consider the origin of the rise in populist sentiments, illustrated by the referenda in the United Kingdom...and the ascent of Trump in the United States?  Do you see a common thread between these developments?

Noam Chomsky:  What’s happening in Europe and the United States has certain similarities.  It fundamentally traces back, I think, to the new liberal programs of the past generation which have just cast a huge number of people to the side. These programs have improved corporate profit, kept wages stagnant, and highly concentrated wealth and power. They’ve undermined democracy. People have no faith or trust in institutions in Europe— it’s actually worse than [in the United States]. Decisions are basically made in Brussels; people can elect whoever they like, but [the EU elections] have almost no implications for policy. As [economist and Columbia University professor] Joe Stiglitz pointed out, it’s basically one dollar, one vote, and one of the reactions is just anger at everything.

So for example, Brexit interacts with the Thatcherite programs of de-industrializing England. Financial manipulations enriched southeast England and left the rest to wither on the vine. People are angry about that, but they picked, in my view, an irrational answer, since leaving Europe doesn’t help— Europe didn’t elect Thatcher, Major, Blair, or Cameron. My guess is that Brexit will even make it worse, but you can see what the source of the anger is.  On the continent it’s pretty similar: the austerity programs have severely harmed the economy, but they’ve also essentially undermined democratic functioning: the centrist parties are collapsing, and there’s no faith in institutions. You see it in both the Trump and the Sanders phenomena—different ways of reacting to this collapse of functioning policies that [once existed] for the benefit of the population.

Trump supporters are not necessarily very poor—some of them are moderately well-off, they have jobs, but then, the image that’s been used, which is not a bad one, I think, is that they are people who see themselves as standing in line trying to get ahead. That they’ve worked hard, they’ve “done” their place in line, and they’re stuck there. The people ahead of them are shooting off into the stratosphere, and the people behind them, in their view, are being pushed ahead in the line by the federal government. That’s what the federal government does [in their view]—it takes people who are behind them and who haven’t worked hard enough they way they have, and pushes them ahead by some supportive programs. They listen to talk radio, for example, and hear laments about how Syrian immigrants are treated like kings while “I can’t get my kids my college.”

Question:  Recently, economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton identified a marked decrease in life expectancies or increase in mortality rates among white, middle-aged Americans, often due to drug abuse or suicide. How would you say that change in mortality rates has been affecting American culture or society?

Noam Chomsky:  It’s the other way around, I think: the changes in American culture and society have led to the mortality rates. This is a sector of exactly the kind of people I was describing, mostly white and mostly male, in the sort of working age period of their lives, who are apparently suffering from depression, loss of face, lack of sense of any self-worth, and turning to drugs and alcoholism. Something similar happened in Russia during the market reforms of the 1990s. There was a huge increase in the death rate, and probably millions of people died. And a lot of it was the same sense that “everything’s falling apart, we have nothing, I’ll just drink myself to death.”

Question:  Do you think that the changes in mortality rates are necessarily connected with the changes in politics—that it’s all part of a similar phenomenon?

Noam Chomsky:  I think it’s a reflection of it. Very much like, in another way, the Brexit vote is. That is, “I have no way out, so I’ll scream.” It would be quite different if, say, there was an organized labor movement, which could mobilize people. In the 1930s the situation was objectively far worse, but there was a sense of hopefulness. I am old enough to remember—there was militant labor action, CIO organizing, left-wing parties, and a relatively sympathetic administration, and so somehow we were going to get out of this. And now people don’t have that. It’s a striking difference.

Question:  You’ve talked a lot about the use of drones and, especially during the Obama administration, have criticized their use. Do you think there are ever conditions under which drone strikes are justified? What would be necessary to meet a moral threshold?

Noam Chomsky:  For example, just recently, ISIS was blocked with a drone that had an explosive in it. Would that be legitimate?  It’s wartime, [the launchers of the drone were] under attack, they’re using a weapon for self-defense.  I don’t approve of it because I don’t approve of them, but in that kind of situation I guess you could argue that it’s like any other kind of weapon.  On the other hand, when it’s a technique of assassination of suspects, it’s a different story. I mean, it’s not a question of drones.  Suppose we sent killers to assassinate people who we think are planning attacks on us. Would that be legitimate?  Suppose they did it to us—would that be legitimate?   The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other major newspapers have published op-eds saying we should bomb Iran now, not wait.  So would Iran be justified in sending somebody to assassinate the editors? How would we react?

Question:  Do you think that US politics has been changing in its attitude toward humanitarian issues, or toward using drones in a better way?

Noam Chomsky:  Take a look at US history.  We’ve been at war for five hundred years without a break. The people who lived here were driven out or exterminated. Up until the twentieth century it was clearing what we now call the national territory, with constant war and vicious, brutal war. Immediately after that it expanded to other parts of the world. It’s five hundred years, virtually without a break, and the policies really haven’t changed much.

Question:  Do you see potential for greater change, and by what means? How do you think the attitude towards humanitarian issues could change?

Noam Chomsky:  It has in some respects. Take, say, torture again. The popular negative reaction was sufficient, so that it’s now apparently not being used like the way it was being used under Bush. On the other hand, we shouldn’t exaggerate. Take maximum security prisons in the United States: they’re torture chambers. I mean, prisoners are subjected to solitary confinement, which is torture, for long periods, maybe a large part of their life, so torture still goes on all the time.

Question:  Psychologist Steven Pinker argues that over time we’ve been able to use reason and the “better angels of our nature” to make improvements in reducing violence. Would you agree with his analysis?

Noam Chomsky:  There’s something to that, but the story that he presents is pretty shaky. I mean, ninety-five per-cent, roughly, of human history is in hunter-gatherer societies. He claims that they were very violent and brutal, but the specialists on the topic don’t agree with him. There’s work by some of the leading people who work on indigenous societies—Brian Ferguson, Douglas Fry, Stephen Cory—they just claim [that Pinker’s notion about hunter-gatherers is] completely false. The large-scale killings are pretty much associated with the origin of cities and the state system. One [of Pinker’s] strongest arguments is in what’s called the “democratic peace,” that democracies don’t fight each other. Almost all the evidence for that comes from the post-Second World War period, but during this period non-democracies don’t fight each other either. Russia and China have been virtually at war, but never broke out into a war. They’re not democracies, but the United States and Russia also didn’t go to war, and Russia’s certainly not a democracy.  What happened in 1945 is that great powers, or powers of some scale, recognized that you just can’t go to war anymore.  If you do, everything’s destroyed.  So Europe had centuries of murders and internal wars, but not after 1945 because the next one’s the end.  I don’t think that shows anything about the better angels of our nature.  In fact, most of the wars since 1945 have been exported, and if you take a look at the way Pinker handles these, he mostly blames the victims. The wars, he says, are in Southeast Asia and Muslim areas. I mean, is that because of the Iraqis and the Vietnamese?

Question:  What do you think is the most important issue in international politics that is not being adequately discussed today?

Noam Chomsky:  Well, there are two huge issues, neither of them being adequately discussed.  One is an increasing and very serious threat of possible nuclear war, especially at the Russian border.  The other’s an environmental catastrophe, which is coming at us very fast, and there’s nothing much being done about it. These are issues of species survival, really, beyond anything that’s ever been written about in human history. Take, say, the [last US presidential] election campaign. [These two problems were] barely mentioned, which is just astounding. Here we have an election campaign in the most powerful state in human history, which is going to have a major effect on determining what happens in the future, and the most crucial issues that have ever arisen in human history are just not being discussed.  What we’re discussing is Trump’s 3 a.m. tweets and things like “did Hillary lie in her emails?”

Question:  Why do you think those issues are not being discussed more broadly?

Noam Chomsky:  I think there’s a kind of a tacit recognition that people should be kept out of the democratic system. It’s not their area, so divert them with something else. That can be consumerism, that can be obscene remarks about women, anything, but not the major issues. I don’t think that’s a conscious choice, but it’s just kind of implicit in a subconscious, elite recognition of the way the world is supposed to work.

Question:  Does that apply for these issues as well— the nuclear threat and the environmental threat?

Noam Chomsky:  If you start looking at the nuclear threat, you have to ask yourself a lot of questions that maybe are best kept under the rug. Like, for example, why did NATO expand to the East? In fact, why does NATO exist? NATO was supposed to be a defense against the Russians. No Russians after 1991, so why NATO? A lot of questions like that are quite serious, and of course, it’s not that they’re not discussed at all. There’s scholarship, but they’re not in part of the mainstream. The way we talk about it is demonizing Russia, and they’re doing plenty of rotten things, but there are other questions.

Trump: Civilisation in the Salon & Locker Room

Escaping Derogatory References and Membership Characterisation Devices!

DONALD J. Trump described his words spoken over a decade ago about women as 'locker room banter'.  When Kenneth Clarke in his book and later TV program 'Civilisation' said about the historical rise of the French salon in the 18^th century, was that the nature of the saloon by a social mixing of the sexes, was that it had a moderating effect on the behaviour and conversation of the people involved in so far as the saloon restrained vulgarity, obnoxious and other uncouth conduct by both men and women.  I suppose the 20^th century tap-room in the average public house by separating the sexes and allowing the unrestrained free flow of talk, jokes, banter and gesticulations would have had the opposite effect.

Nigel Farage, according to the current Private Eye, has justified Donald Trump's remarks  about 'feeling-up' women as follows:  'It's the kind of thing, if we are being honest, that men do.  They sit around and have a drink  and they talk like this.'

Any collectivity of either sex be it a 'Hen Party' or 'Bachelor Do' or even an ordinary workplace on the shop-floor is likely to produce conversation and conduct which in another context would raise eyebrows.  In the same way that an academic community of scholars has its own 'interpretive community' and special forms of talk so the average shop-floor setting often has tribal language which would be distinct from from other social engagements with people.  In the foundry at Holcroft Castings & Forging in Rochdale, where I worked  as a maintenance electrician in the 1980s, the terms 'split-arses', and other derogatory expressions were often used to refer to women in general or more specifically in referring to lasses in the machine departments. 

In the Daily Mail, Quentin Letts writes:  'No one talks like that in the locker room of the gym I use.'

That's surprising, because when |I was about 12-years-of-age I had a job as a scorer for the Tweedales & Smalley factory second eleven cricket team, and it was there in the pavilion changing-room that I first began to encounter how grown working-class men talk in groups on occasions when women are not present.  Before that as an eldest child I also heard how women when they think they alone with their own sex talk together about men:  I often heard how my grandmother and mother in private discussed men judgementally, not with foul language of course, but with comments that judgementally loaded blame and curses on male members of the family.  In a way it sometimes amounted to objectifying men by stereo-typing them.

In this circumstances to pretend shock or surprise at what Donald Trump has had to say in the setting in which he was recorded, is a little over-the-top or even naieve. 

Whenever we talk about the meaning of words, rather than reaching for some lazy feminist or a tin-pot politically correct interpretation. perhaps we should consider what Ludwig Wittgenstein had to say in his 'Philosophical Investigations': 

'Think of tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screw-driver, a rule, a glue-pot, glue, nails and screws.  -- The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects.  (And in both cases there similarities.)'

The meaning of a word is in its use; just as the significance of a tool is in its use.  When I was an apprentice electrician in the late 1950s it was a common trick of leg-pulling tradesmen to send young apprentices to the stores to get a 'rubber hammer'.  The absurdity of the 'rubber hammer' is that it is unlikely to accomplish any utility of persuading anything it hit to move or do the job for which a hammer is normally intended.  Wittgenstein asks in 'Philosophical Investigations':

'Imagine someone's saying:  “All tools serve to modify something.  Thus the hammer modifies the position of the nail, the saw the shape of the board, and so on.”  And what is modified by the rule, the glue-pot, the nails?- “Our knowledge of a thing's length, the temperature of the glue, and the solidity of the box.”-- Would anything be gained by this assimilation of expressions?--'

When a wheelwright at Holcroft Castings uses the term 'split arses' to refer to a women or all women, the words would modify our idea of women perhaps in the sense of the picture theory of language; just as a hammer hitting a nail will modify the position of the nail or a screw-driver may transform the position of a screw and if its a wood-screw it may also modify a piece of wood. 

Words are becoming ever more dangerous things use in a world of surveillance were privacy is in short supply, perhaps we should join Wittgenstein and resort to whistling or sign language.

I've no room to talk because besides doing journalism now I have, in the past, been involved in anthropological investigations and conversational analysis in which I used tape-recorders to surreptitiously record everyday talk by union officials, and others, for the purpose of research.  In a sense we are a bit hypocritical.

Noam Chomsky Interview

“Enormous Sense of Hopelessness and Anger”

By Noam Chomsky and Melissa Parker
Source: Smashing Interviews Magazine

January 21, 2016

NOAM Chomsky is a renowned intellectual, an eminent theoretical linguist, cognitive scientist, philosopher, author, political activist and a major figure in analytic philosophy. He has spent most of his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where his current title is Institute Professor Emeritus. Chomsky is the author of over 100 books on politics and linguistics. Politically speaking, he describes himself as a libertarian socialist.
In 1949, Chomsky married Carol Schatz, and they were married until her death from cancer in 2008. They had three children together, Aviva, Diane and Harry. In 2014, he married Valeria Wasserman.
At the age of 87, Chomsky remains as active as ever in his work as a world-renowned political dissident and pioneering linguist.
Melissa Parker: How have you been, Professor Chomsky?
Noam Chomsky: Busy (laughs).
Melissa Parker: We last spoke about a year ago, and there have been a few presidential debates since then.
Noam Chomsky: I never watch them (laughs). I read the transcripts later.
Melissa Parker: Well, tell me who the final two candidates will be when the dust settles.
Noam Chomsky: I assume that Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination just because of the nature of our electoral system, which is basically now “bought” elections overwhelmingly, and the major funders will probably succeed at putting her across. What Bernie Sanders has achieved is pretty remarkable, but I doubt very much, in our existing system, he can make it beyond the primaries. So I think a fair guess is that Clinton will be nominated.
On the other side, it is probably going to be either Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. In my opinion, Cruz is scarier than Trump. Trump is a kind of wildcard, but Cruz is really dangerous, if he means anything he’s saying.
Melissa Parker: You have a personal friendship with Bernie Sanders?
Noam Chomsky: That’s kind of an exaggeration. When he was mayor of Burlington about 30 years ago, he did invite me up for a couple of days to give some talks at town hall, and I also spent time with him. We talked, and I kind of followed him around in his daily duties talking to firemen, people in old age homes, just discussing with people about their personal problems. I was struck by the fact that Sanders was able to engage very easily with people over quite a broad spectrum of attitudes, thoughts and class lines. I thought he was very effective.
Sanders calls himself a Socialist, but I think what that means is New Deal Democrat basically. A New Deal Democrat in today’s political spectrum is way off to the left. President Eisenhower, who said that anyone who doesn’t accept New Deal measures is out of the political system, would be regarded as a dangerous leftist today. Everything has moved so far to the right. I don’t agree with Sanders on everything, not surprisingly, but I think he’s a respectable New Deal Democrat whose proposals would help the country considerably.
Melissa Parker: I think some Americans may be sort of repelled when hearing the word “Socialist.”
Noam Chomsky: I don’t know what the term “Socialist” is even supposed to mean anymore, but whatever it is, it’s nothing like traditional socialism. The Sanders phenomenon and the Trump phenomenon both reflect something quite significant about the country and about the world. In the United States and in Europe, in different ways you see the same tendencies developing. It’s largely a result of the neoliberal programs of the past generation, that were neither new nor liberal, which have had fairly similar effects wherever they’ve been applied. They’ve been quite harmful to the majority of the population and have led to stagnation in income, wages, decline of benefits, deterioration of the social structure and even the infrastructure, resulting in enormous wealth concentrated in very few hands and mostly in the hands of sectors who are essentially predatory.
Take the financial sector, for example, which has harmed the economy. That’s a large part of it. This has also been accompanied by the decline in the actual functioning of democracy. That is, governments are less and less responsive to the concerns of the population they’re supposedly representing. There’s plenty of work on this which demonstrates it. One of it is that the center is kind of collapsing. In Europe, the traditional mainstream parties of social Democrat and conservative are declining, and what you’re seeing is an increase in engagement in participation at both edges of the political spectrum.
Something similar is happening here. This is a somewhat unusual country. People are very atomized and isolated. There’s very little in the way of any kind of organization. If you compare it with the 1940s, which I’m old enough to remember, objectively the situation was much worse then. But psychologically, it was much better. My family were mostly working class living on a pittance, but they were hopeful. It was a sense that “We’re going to get out of this together. There’s a lot we can do. There’s a sympathetic administration.” There was quite a range of active, political organizations. There were things happening that made people say, “Look. It’s bad now, but it’ll get better.” It’s quite different today.
Melissa Parker: A sense of hopelessness?
Noam Chomsky: There’s an enormous sense of hopelessness and anger, and it shows up in pretty dramatic ways. You’ve probably seen the revelation a couple of months ago that among less educated, white, middle-aged males, mortality is actually increasing. That is unheard of in rich, developed societies outside of real catastrophes.
It’s a reflection of depression, anger and hopelessness. It shows up in the appeal of Donald Trump from one perspective and Bernie Sanders from another. In Europe, it shows up in Podemos in Spain as a left-wing populist party along with quite right wing ultra nationalists, sometimes neo-fascist on the other side.
Melissa Parker: Believing that our country was founded on Christian principles seem to give Republicans, in particular, some hope for the future. But they have consternation that the government is not totally immersed in religious ethics. What are your comments about mixing religion and politics?
Noam Chomsky: First of all, the country was founded as a secular country. There’s rhetoric about religion, but the basic founding of the Constitution separated a religion from the state sharply. Thus the First Amendment. That meant that there was no established religion, no Anglican Church like England or no Catholic Church like in Spain and so on. That left the field open for a wide variety of religious groupings to flourish on their own, mostly Protestant groups of all kinds. Their popularity was enormous.
Even though it’s a secular country in its legal and foundational structure, it’s a very religious country in terms of religious beliefs and commitments. It’s one of the most fundamentalist countries in the world. It’s very hard to find any country where over a third of the population thinks that the world was created a couple of thousand years ago, or where the majority of the population is expecting the Second Coming, and about half of them expect it in their own lifetime. Things like that are just unknown in other countries except maybe Saudi Arabia or something. I’m not even sure there.
Melissa Parker: And you mentioned earlier that everything has moved so far to the right. Religion has played a bigger part since that happened?
Noam Chomsky: As the Republican Party drifted way off the spectrum to the right in its actual policy commitments to corporate sectors, in order to get votes they’ve had to mobilize these sectors so that a large part of the base of the Republican Party is evangelical Christians, many of whom are extreme. In fact, if you look over the recent years, we’ve had three presidents who were born again Christians. Jimmy Carter was one, but it didn’t mean much in his administration.
Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were born again Christians, and there were policy consequences. Reagan brought in extremists at times, even evangelicals, to talk to the National Security Council about the day of Armageddon not being too far off. When George W. Bush went to war in Iraq, he told us it was because he was following the commands of his Lord. He tried to get France to join in by invoking weird notions from the strange evangelical interpretations of the Bible about Gog and Magog. The President of France wondered how anyone could think that way. It’s very strong in the country.
Melissa Parker: Recent stories have indicated that Christianity faces a sharp decline in America. Could that be true?
Noam Chomsky: You could probably find polls saying that the number of people who are secular is increasing. That’s possible. On the other hand, religious commitment here is quite beyond what you find in Europe or in comparable developed countries, and it always has been.
Through American history, there have been repeated periods of revivalism, the revival of religious fanatics, or whatever you want to call it … religious excitement, enthusiasm. One of them was in the 1950s. That’s when you got the “One Nation Under God” and all of that. But it’s pretty constant throughout American history. Now it’s politically much more significant because of the way it has affected the Republican base.
Melissa Parker: President Obama receives much criticism and even hatred from his detractors almost on a daily basis. How do you feel about his executive orders regarding stricter gun control laws?
Noam Chomsky: Well, that’s a real pathology in the United States which goes way back. It happens to be kind of peaking in the last few years again, but deep roots go back to the early part of our history. About half of the history of the country, there were two major problems that required guns. One was eliminating the indigenous population. They had to be eliminated or exterminated. They fought back which meant you needed guns.
The other was that the United States was running the most hideous slave labor camps in human history in the South, which is a large part of the basis of their economy. It was not done just for the wealth of the plantation owners, the manufacturing system was based for a long time on textile production that was largely cotton based. The banks were developing credit for cotton. Cotton was the main commodity of the early part of the Industrial Revolution. Same in England. A large part of their economic wealth and power developed from the slave labor camps. Well, you know, running slave labor camps means you’ve got to be afraid of the slaves. Maybe they’ll erupt.
Melissa Parker: So they needed guns to protect themselves from the slaves. Thomas Jefferson had some radical views on slavery.
Noam Chomsky: Thomas Jefferson had a mixed attitude toward slavery. He thought it was wrong. In fact, he thought it was a terrible crime. But he kept slaves. The way he described it once was saying, “We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.” In other words, we want to hold onto it because we shouldn’t punish the wolf, and we can’t let it go because it’ll destroy us. Jefferson thought that if you don’t keep the slaves in the slave labor camps, there’d be a race war, and they’d wipe us out. All of this required guns, of course.
In fact, in the South, guns were part of the culture for other reasons, not just for fear of the slaves, but in order to show that you were not a slave. Like if you wanted to stand up to another white man and say, “Look. You’re not going to push me around.” You had to have a gun. All of that shows up today while keeping your gun ostentatiously on your hip when you enter a coffee shop or walk around a university with it, all those crazy things. The effect is very clear.
The United States is pretty much like other industrial counties, but deaths from guns are way out of sight. If you look at what are called massacres, meaning the killing of four or more people, I think the majority is families where a kid picks up a gun and shoots somebody. It’s just a plague.
With the president, it seems that gun sales have increased considerably during the Obama years. That’s probably straight racism of which there’s plenty. We pretend it’s not there, but that’s a pretense, and it shows up all over the place. The visceral hatred of Obama by Republicans is just shocking. You can dislike a president without thinking he’s the antichrist or that he was born in Kenya or something like that. They even make words like Obamacare. It’s an interesting term if you think about it. Medicare was signed into law in 1965 by President Lyndon B. Johnson, but does anybody call it Johnsoncare? No. But even supporters of Obama call it Obamacare.
For decades, most of the population has been in favor of some kind of healthcare. But still probably the majority of the population is opposed to what they want because it’s Obamacare. These are deep facts about the country and its history which cannot simply be obliterated in words by saying, “Yeah. We’re a post racial society.” No. I’m sorry. We’re not.
Melissa Parker: ISIS attacked Paris last November and just recently claimed 10 lives in Istanbul, Turkey, in a major tourist area. What should be done to combat ISIS?
Noam Chomsky: The first thing we have to do is understand what it is and where it’s coming from. Scott Atran, for example, has done extensive work investigating the appeal of ISIS, studying ISIS members, former members and the communities in which they draw support. It’s a very important phenomenon. It’s a monstrosity. There’s no doubt about that. But where does that monstrosity come from? If you look back, it comes largely from the United States invasion of Iraq which destroyed the country, killed hundreds of thousands of people, created a couple of million refugees and incited a sectarian conflict. There was none before in Iraq. There were disagreements between two protestant sects or something, but the country was integrated. Shiites and Sunni families lived in the same neighborhoods.
One of the consequences of the invasion was to instigate a sectarian conflict which was tearing the country and region apart. And one of the out-groups of it was Al-Qaeda in Iraq. Out of that came ISIS. That was one factor. The other factor in the development of ISIS is Saudi Arabia which is an extremist, fundamentalist, Islamic state, the most extreme in the world and far more than Iran. Furthermore, it’s a missionary state. They have plenty of resources because of the oil, so they put huge resources into trying to expand their extremist Wahhabi and Salafi doctrine by direct funding of Jihadist groups not excluding ISIS, but also by funding koranic schools. Madrassa is an Islamic religious school and where the Taliban comes from.
Journalist Patrick Cockburn calls the rise of the Islamic state as one of the most dangerous developments of the modern era. That’s another factor. ISIS is an extremist offshoot of the Wahhabi version of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia, our ally. The Sunni populations in Syria and Iraq where ISIS is based may hate ISIS, but they also see it as a protector. In these horrible sectarian conflicts that have been instigated, they see it as a kind of protector and a source of stability. That’s the same way lots of people in Afghanistan think that the Taliban were protecting themselves from the extremists Mujahideen, mujahid elements that the United States has been supporting.
If you look elsewhere, say in France or other countries where the Jihadists are coming from, they are coming from seriously oppressed neighborhoods where people are humiliated and degraded. There’s a racist contempt for them. They live without hope, without any chance of entering the society they come from in countries which have been devastated by French atrocities for well over a century, Algerians and other parts of West Africa.
They’re very bitter, young people who want something in life. They want something. They want some cause. They want something that will give them dignity. That’s where the Jihadists are coming from. Most of them come from backgrounds with very little Islamic background. They don’t know the Koran or anything at all. They’re just looking for something in their lives, and that’s drawing them to it.
Melissa Parker: So in a sense, you’re saying that we need to really examine the psychology behind these terrorist groups?
Noam Chomsky: The first thing we have to do in combatting ISIS is understanding what all this is about. Not just screaming imprecations, but asking what it’s about. Undoubtedly they commit horrible atrocities, but we’re not exactly immune to that. Belgium is now one of the countries suffering from the offshoots of Islamic terrorism. What’s its record? The potentially richest colony in Africa which could have led Africa to enormous development is a Congo that was run by the Belgians. They were just slaughtering people, maybe 10 million people, because they weren’t bringing in enough rubber.
In 1960, Congo was liberated. It had a very promising young nationalist leader, probably the most promising one in Africa who campaigned for independence from Belgium, named Patrice Lumumba. He could have led Congo on with its enormous resources to help the development of Africa. So what happened? The Belgians murdered him. The CIA was under orders to murder him, but the Belgians got there first. They didn’t just murder him. After he was murdered, his body was hacked to pieces and dissolved in sulfuric acid. There’s plenty of stuff like that, so I could go on and on. But we have to understand those things. We do not like to look at them, but we need to understand them.
If we do understand them, we’ll begin to treat ISIS at its roots. We’ll ask where it’s coming from, and we will deal with those problems. It is a monstrosity. We should undoubtedly support anyone who’s defending themselves against ISIS crimes like the Kurds and Syria definitely. Take Turkey where the ISIS crimes take place today. It has been allowing jihadists to flow into ISIS territories right across its borders. It has been allowing funding for ISIS. It has been openly supporting Jihadi groups different from ISIS like the al-Nusra Front. Well, okay. That’s not part of ancient history. That’s today. We have to look at those things.
Melissa Parker: But the answer is not US military intervention?
Noam Chomsky: There are plenty of ways to combat ISIS seriously, but not by Ted Cruz’s carpet bombing. In fact, hit any of these things with a sledgehammer and you’ll make it worse. There’s a long record that shows that when you attack radical insurgencies or even individual terrorists with violence, you usually end up with something much worse. That’s the Ted Cruz reaction.
If you want to be serious about it, you’ll follow the proposals of people like Scott Atran and William Polk who understand the actual circumstances and who pay attention to the nature of their roots and who come up with pretty sound proposals. Polk worked many years at the highest level of US government planning as well as being a very good Middle East specialist. The proposals are sensible. They’re not dramatic. They’re not like carpet bombing which kind of sounds good until you think about what the consequences would be.
Just take a look at the records of the last 15 years. The last 15 years is what’s called the “Global War on Terror.” The method that has been used in the “Global War On Terror” is violence. That’s what we’re good at. Violence. So we invade. We kill people with drones. We have all kinds of ways of killing people. What has been the effect? Take a look. Fifteen years ago terrorist groups were concentrated in a small tribal area in Afghanistan. That was it. Where are the now? All over the world.
The worst terrorist crimes are going on in West Africa with Boko Haram, a lot of which is an offshoot of the bombing in Syria. They’re in West Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia. They carry out attacks in Turkey, in Paris and so on. We’ve succeeded in spreading it from a little corner of tribal Afghanistan to most of the world. It’s a great achievement for the use of violence. Can we draw some lessons from that? Yeah. We can.
Melissa Parker: I recently interviewed Steven Pinker and asked him if you two had a love/hate relationship because of your disagreements (laughs).
Noam Chomsky: There are things I disagree with him on, and some things I agree with. It’s okay. We’re perfectly friendly.
Melissa Parker: And the debates between you two are fascinating. Your energy is remarkable, Professor Chomsky. Any plans to slow down from that very busy schedule?
Noam Chomsky: Well, I’d love to do lots of things, but there’s just too much going on in the world. I don’t know. As long as I’m upright, I guess I’ll keep going.