Judy Cole: Welcome to the Faculty Forum Online,
a program of the MIT Alumni Association.
I'm Judy Cole, the EVP and CEO of the Alumni Association and I will serve as moderator.
Our viewers of today's conversation include MIT alumni, friends, friends of MIT libraries and the
general public. Any MIT alumni who wish to
ask a question, enter your name and question
and we'll try to get to as many questions
as possible. The general public is encouraged
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#mitfaculty. Our guest today is Noam Chomsky,
Institute Professor Emeritus in the Department
of Linguistics at MIT. Professor Chomsky is
an author, political activist, and philosopher,
and he created the field of modern linguistics,
the scientific study of language. He is also
the subject of the Chomsky Archive, a recently
launched MIT Libraries project to preserve
and digitize the lectures, personal papers
and materials he has donated to MIT's Institute
Archives and Special Collections. Professor
Chomsky, welcome. Could you start by telling
us what you hope readers and researchers will
draw from these historic items?
Noam Chomsky: Well, the archives include everything
I could think of. Endless amounts of correspondence,
the hard copy of the maybe 20 years ago and
it starts mostly to be electronic. Books,
papers, class notes from most of 60 years,
notes or talks, lengthy transcripts of discussions,
and probably tapes of things like this. What
I hope people will be able to do is reconstruct
some of the history of both sides of my existence,
both how the linguistics, cognitive science,
modern philosophy have taken the shape they
have, and on the other side an ongoing commentary
on what's going on in the world. So lots of
data in there.
Judy Cole: No doubt, I'm sure it will provide
a rich, rich text of the evolution of your
thinking. Questions are coming in now and
as we gather them let me ask a question or
two of my own to start us off. As you may
know, we've been doing these forums for years.
Never have we had so much interest from viewers
as for this one, nor so many testy responses.
As a public intellectual, you've certainly
sparked controversy. How do you decide which
contemporary issues to address?
Noam Chomsky: Well, it's a mixture. Partly
it's just personal interest and background.
Partly I try to evaluate what are the most
humanly significant issues that we're now
confronting. And some mixture of those two
considerations.
Judy Cole: So here's another question. You
have been applauded for your boldness and
clarity and your many vigorous public debates
are legendary. Is there a favorite debate
that stands out or do you have a favorite
opponent, perhaps someone you vigorously disagree
with or enjoy engaging in debate with?
Noam Chomsky: Well the people I enjoy most
engaging with are in the so-called, what I
think of as the professional side of my field,
so discussions about the nature of language,
the origin of human cognition and language,
and lots of lively discussions and debates
about that. Those are pretty constructive.
Judy Cole: So now we are getting them from
our alumni. Bob in Leverett, MA, asks...uh,
somehow this isn't scrolling properly, there
we go. I value the insights I've learned from
you but every time I hear you speak I feel
depressed. How can we change feelings of helplessness
into positive actions that can turn our governments
around?
Noam Chomsky: Well the best way to do it,
there are several ways. One is to pay attention
to history. Things may look difficult and
uncomfortable now but they were much worse
50 or 60 years ago. Take MIT, where we’re
all from. When I got here in 1955, the Institute
was virtually, entirely white males – well
dressed, polite, deferential, relatively formal
relations among people, faculty and students.
Take a walk down the halls today, it’s radically
different. It’s half women, maybe a third
minorities, informal relations, informal dress,
which is in fact symbolic of the informal
relations among people. Look at the bulletin
boards – calls for engagement in all kinds
of issues, at that time, it was virtually
nothing. That’s happened all over the world
and it’s a very positive development. It
didn’t happen by itself, it happened by
a lot of difficult struggle. Yesterday, Martin
Luther King day, was a good time to recall
a very substantial part of it. It was by no
means easy, and there’s plenty to go forward.
If you look back beyond, there’s kind of
a trajectory, with relative progress over
the last few centuries. In many respects.
There’s also regression, but the best reason
for optimism is we’ve changed things before
and we can do it again.
Judy Cole: It seems like there’s a certain
impatience in the MIT DNA that wants things
to happen more quickly, so. But you’re right,
putting it in perspective is what really…
Noam Chomsky: One of the difficulties in the
United States is that there’s very little
continuity in activism. Everything begins
from zero. So take the Occupy movement. It
began with a, it just sprang up, no historical
recollection, no, few connections to everything
that happened before. You have to kind of
learn everything from scratch. Along with
that comes a feeling that we want quick victories.
If you do have this sense of continuity and
struggle, you know it goes back a long time,
so take again the civil rights struggle, it
kind of sparked around 1960 when several events,
a couple of black students sat at a lunch
counter in Greensborough, North Carolina,
others joined and were arrested, others joined
them and pretty soon you had freedom riders
in the south, violence, tremendous courage,
registering voters, marches like Selma and
so on, and finally some victories. But it
didn’t begin in 1960, it goes back to abolition,
and that’s the way life works, you’re
not going to get quick, you can get small
changes, but major victories are going to
take time.
Judy Cole: So another alumnus, David in Jerusalem,
asks, what influences and which teachers helped
you form your current world views, including
your view on the Arab/Israeli disagreements?
Noam Chomsky: Well actually that was a major
concern of my life as a teenager. There were
individuals of course, but I was very much
involved as a teenager in what was then called
Zionist activism, now it’s called anti-Zionist.
It was part of the Zion – this is pre-1948,
it was the part of the Zionist movement that
was opposed to a Jewish state, and was committed
to some form of Arab-Jewish cooperation at
the time within an effort to develop a cooperative
economy, an economy of the kind that was in
fact partially developing in Palestine at
the time, the Jewish sectors of Palestine.
And there were, there were particular individuals
who were influential, but it was mainly the…simply
engagement in the constant activism committed
to those goals and continued from there.
Judy Cole: So, Louis in Massachusetts asks,
do you feel your writing has influenced or
directly impacted decisions made by policy
makers and what evidence if any do you see
to support this?
Noam Chomsky: The influence is often, the
most significant influence is indirect, so
take, say the Vietnam War, a major topic,
I was very intensively involved in it through
the 60s and 70s, and many others were too,
in fact MIT became one of the leading centers
of opposition to the war, even resistance
activities. What was the effect? Well the
effect, it had an effect on bringing the war
to an end, very slowly, much too slowly, not
until millions of people had been killed and
several countries practically destroyed, but
it did come to an end. If you look closely
at how it came to an end, uh, it traces back
to the fact that there was so much opposition
to the war engendered by these activities
that the government was never able to call
a national mobilization of the kind that was
called during World War II when people really
dedicated to the war effort. Well, the national
mobilization is very good for the economy,
uh, if you take a look at what happened during
World War II, the war’s horror story, if
you just look at the economy, industrial production
almost quadrupled, depression was ended, there
were jobs for everyone, the basis was laid
for very substantial technological and economic
growth in the subsequent years, cause people
were really committed to the effort. In the
1960s you couldn’t do that, it wasn’t
that kind of commitment. So what was fought
was what was called a guns and butter war.
You have to keep the population quiet and
at the same time continue with the war. That’s
very harmful to the economy. And in fact it
led to stagflation. Stagnation and inflation
became the…the internal economy began to
suffer. In January 1968, there was a major
uprising in South Vietnam, the Tet Offensive,
that made it very clear to the decision makers,
in particular in the business community that
this war was going to go on for a long time.
At that point a decision was made to begin
to wind it down. Now it … they don’t,
no one says the peace movement pulled the
decision makers to wind it down, but the indirect
activities of stimulating opposition concern,
dissent, protest, had the indirect effect
of leading to the decision, and in fact we
have direct evidence for that. It’s pretty
obvious from what happened, but if you look
at say the Pentagon Papers, the famous Pentagon
Papers, the record there ends in mid-1968,
a few months after the Tet Offensive, and
if you look at those last few sections, they’re
pretty interesting. What happened is that
the government…these are internal records
so not intended to be read, but, the government,
uh, the Johnson administration, wanted to
send a couple hundred thousand more troops
to Vietnam after the offensive. The military
was wary, they didn’t want to do it, and
the reason was, they said that there would,
if that happened they would need troops in
the United States for civil disorder control
because of the extent of the protest and dissent
among young people, among women, among minorities.
They listed the groups they were concerned
with. Well, that’s –
Judy Cole: I remember those days.
Noam Chomsky: Yes. That’s a way to influence
policy. And it happens over and over in complicated
ways, and it’s not a matter of, take a trip
to Washington and convincing the president
that you should do so and so, you know, they
know what you’re going to tell them anyway.
But there are indirect ways of, uh, bringing
about results. Yesterday’s commemoration
of King is a good example. It wasn’t a matter
of Martin Luther King going to Washington
and convincing Lyndon Johnson to pass the
voting rights act. A lot of activism took
place for years, in fact going back centuries,
but in recent – in the immediately preceding
years, there was very intensive struggle,
activism, popular mobilization, it created
a situation in which certain decisions were
made.
Judy Cole: Very interesting, I have to tell
you, it’s a much more international set
of questions than we typically get. The next
one is from an alumnus, Kalil in Saudi Arabia.
What role did the west and the regional powers
play in distinguishing the Arab Spring outcries
and flares? Do you think they will rekindle
again?
Noam Chomsky: Well the Arab Spring took many
different forms. It actually began in the
last African colony, Western Sahara, about
a month before the Tunisia, uh, the demonstrations
and protests.
Judy Cole: I didn’t realize that.
Noam Chomsky: Well it’s not discussed, but
it’s important that it’s not discussed.
There’s one colony left in Africa, Western
Sahara. It was Spanish. The Spanish left in
1975. It was supposed to go through decolonization
under UN auspices, but Morocco invaded and
uh, the, a war began which continues between
the indigenous population and the Moroccan
invaders. Morocco transferred arms, a number
of people into the territory, hoping to swamp
a referendum if it ever takes place, and this
struggle continues right up to the Security
Council. It’s one of the cases where there
hasn’t been significant progress because
there isn’t popular activism and mobilization.
That’s quite significant. In cases where
there has been, there was progress. Back in,
I guess it was October, shortly before the
Arab Spring broke out, there was a popular
demonstration, a tent city, set up in the
main cities of Western Sahara by the Sahrawi
indigenous population. They were crushed by
force very quickly. Went to the Security Council
and it was blocked, mostly by France which
is a patron of Morocco. That one ended. Then
came Tunisia, then Egypt, then other places,
and the effects varied. So in Tunisia there
was, there has been significant progress,
uh, again it’s mostly French influenced.
French tried to block it, but it didn’t
break out, and it continued. Egypt is a complicated
matter, they’re again, substantial achievements
but a sharp reversal. Egypt’s now heading
into a very dark period. Saudi Arabia, where
the questioners is, I’m sure the person
knows, there were initial attempts at joining
the Arab Spring, very mild purposed, they
were crushed by force instantly and nothing
ever happened. In nearby Bahrain, where struggles
went on for a while, finally Saudi Arabia
sent troops to quell the uprising, and it,
Syria of course turned into the whole monstrosity,
Libya was torn to shreds and nothing left,
so the question what happened, well, right
now I think it’s kind of in limbo. My suspicion
is it’s going to, I think there were substantial
achievements despite the regression, and it
probably lays the basis for something that
will break out soon. I don’t think the current
regimes will mostly really dictorial regimes,
have the capacity to deal with the demands
of the, the just demands of the population,
for freedom, for economic development, for
some degree of social rights, and …
Judy Cole: The current situation seems unsustainable
indefinitely. Maybe a little longer but hopefully
not too much longer.
Noam Chomsky: Well right now the region is
being torn to shreds by the repercussions
of the invasion of Iraq. The invasion of Iraq
was very devastating for Iraq, but it also
set in motion sectarian conflicts which didn’t
really exist before. Take a look at Baghdad
in the year 2000. Shiite and Sunni were intermingled,
they intermarried, they lived in the same
places, sometimes people living in the…it
was kind of like knowing what Protestant sect
your neighbors were in . Some you didn’t
know. Within a couple of years it turned into
a raging war, now tearing the whole region
to shreds. That’s going to be very hard
to deal with.
Judy Cole: Indeed. So our next question comes
from Geneva. Alumna Simone. What are the fundamental
differences between spoken and invented languages,
e.g. Elvish, and what are the main difficulties
in inventing a language?
Noam Chomsky: Well, the concept of inventing
a language is very misleading. So take say
the best known one, Esperanto. If you take
a look at ta grammar of Esperanto, it doesn’t’
tell you the rules of Esperanto, just as if
you take a look at a grammar of Spanish, it
doesn’t tell you the rules of Spanish. Those
almost nobody knows, those are matters of
discovery. To try to find the principles that
are really operating when you and I converse
is a problem like finding out what’s going
on in our visual systems when stimuli hit
our retina and I see a person or a room or
whatever, that’s very com- you can’t interspect
into that. You don’t know what it is, you
have to discover it from the outside. The
same is true of language. Esperanto is, carries
over, when people think they know Esperanto,
what’s really happening is they know language,
they know their own language, they know something
about common romance languages. Unconsciously.
And beyond the level of consciousness, just
like they can’t figure out how your digestive
system is working, or your visual system or
whatever. So the invented languages are really
just the invention of extremely superficial
elements of language, like the choice of words,
or the choice of sounds, or the decision what
order to put the words in. These are all facts
about language but they’re extremely superficial.
What’s really happening, say in our interchange,
is deep and below the level of conscious awareness,
and it’s actually the topic of linguistics
and cognitive sciences and brain sciences,
is to try to unearth it. But all of that is
taken over unconsciously, when people say
they’re inventing a language, what they’re
doing is actually filling out some of the
superficial details of their actual linguistic
knowledge.
Judy Cole: Fascinating. I’m not sure I understand
all of that but it was really good. So Michelle
in Philadelphia: what do you think of the
impact of the world wide web – what do you
think of the impact that the world wide web
has had on language.
Noam Chomsky: My hometown. Philadelphia. I
don’t think, I mean it’s had a kind of
effect in the way that teenage slang has an
effect on the language. So there are some
locutions that are used that weren’t used
otherwise, but languages are constantly changing
in these pretty superficial respects. The
web is, use of the web, especially texting
and so on, has probably had some minor effects
but the language doesn’t change.
Judy Cole: It seems it’s sort of in formalized
it somewhat in the same way that relations
between people at MIT has become less formal
over time.
Noam Chomsky: Well that’s a process that’s
been going on for a long time and it affects
usage of the language but it doesn’t affect
the language.
Judy Cole: Okay.
Noam Chomsky: The language is the same whether
you use it in formal discourse or informal
talk with your grandchildren.
Judy Cole: Got it. So Erik in California asks,
what are the long term prospects for the U.S.
economy? The standard of living has been maintained
through consumer debt and asset bubbles but
these cannot continue indefinitely. What other
obstacles are there?
Noam Chomsky: Well actually consumer debt
did rise sharply in this early part of this
millennium, but by now it’s not really high
relative to GDP. Problems with the economy
are different. Problems are…the problem
is that during the, what’s called the new
liberal period, roughly the past new generation,
productivity has increased not quite as fast
as before, but it has increased, on the other
hand it hasn’t reached the population. For
the majority of the population it’s been
a period of relative stagnation or decline.
So a real minimum wages today are at about
the level of the 1960s even through productivity
has gotten much greater, wealth has been produced
but it’s gone into very few pockets. The
last decade, I don’t have the exact figures
but I think about 95% of the wealth produced,
something like that, went to 1% of the population,
and the 1% that people talk about is misleading,
because if you take a look at that 1%, it’s
heavily skewed towards a tenth of one percent
at the very top, so what’s happened is an
extreme maldistribution of wealth. Stagnation,
relative stagnation for much of the population
and the limited opportunities for work. I
mean there’s now a lot of, uh, some, uh,
praise for the fact that the unemployment
rate has gone down, which is good but misleading
because one of the reasons it’s gone down
is that people have just dropped out of the
workforce.
Judy Cole: They’ve given up, yeah.
Noam Chomsky: If you take a look at the proportion
of the working population that has good, full
time employment, it’s still way below what
it should be. I mean, this, you know the financial
access is for the last roughly, actually it
goes back 20 or 30 years since deregulation
started, but particularly the last decade
have lost trillions of dollars of output,
and those are the problems of the economy.
You can see there’s much discussion now
about the minimum wage. But some things are
overlooked. If you go back to the rapid growth
periods, 1950s and 60s, what’s called the
golden age of the economy, the minimum wage
tracked productivity, which it should. As
productivity increases the minimum wage increased.
As you get to the mid-1970s they start to
separate. Productivity goes up and minimum
wage flattens, which means it goes down relatively.
If the minimum wage had continued at the rate
of the 50s and the 60s, it would now probably
be about $20/hour or something like that,
and that’s a reflect- and that of course
reflects everything else. AS minimum wages
go down, so do others, and we have a period
of, if you take a look at the economy today,
you can see really deep failures. I mean there’s
a huge amount of work that has to be done,
Drive around the city, the infrastructure
is a wreck, schools underfunded, the health
center is an international scandal, way too
expensive for what’s achieved. There’
s a tremendous amount of work to be done,
there’s lot of people who want to do the
work, plenty of resources, and it’s not
happening. The system is so dysfunctional
that massive capital resources, great and
willingness to work, vast amounts of work
to be done can’t be put together. That’s
a serious, I mean, we can think of ways out
of that, but the fact that it’s happening
is a major problem. Consumer debt in contrast
is not a major problem.
Judy Cole: Right, and that has actually gone
down more recently anyway.
Noam Chomsky: It’s now within a reasonable
limit. It did increase briefly during the
housing bubble.
Judy Cole: So I was hearing on the radio this
morning about legislation around creating
super PACs, and the ability of anonymous donors
to support different political lobbying efforts.
It seems to me that that might be a part of
the causes of some of these problems that
you’re talking about, getting it all together.
Noam Chomsky: There is a very fundamental
problem of the functioning of the democratic
system. There’s a very good study of the
last election, the midterm election, by two
leading political scientists, Water Dean Burnham
and Thomas Ferguson, the major students of
electoral politics, and the figures, the results
that came out are pretty startling. It turns
out that voting participation in much of the
country is about at the level of the early
19th century. That’s a time when voting
was restricted to propertied white males.
Judy Cole: That’s scary.
Noam Chomsky: It’s very scary and what they
conclude is plausibly, people have just given
up on the political system. They know that
it doesn’t do anything for them. And if
you look at other studies, you see the details.
So for example an important book came out
a couple of years ago by Martin Gilens, I
think he’s at Princeton, it’s called Affluence
and Influence, it’s just a study of how,
the relation between public opinion and public
policy. There are many such studies. This
is one. What he found, which is what others
find, is that for a large majority of the
population, roughly 70% at the lower part
of the income scale, they’re effectively
disenfranchised. Their representatives simply
pay no attention to their opinions. As you
go up the scale you get a little bit more
influence. When you get to the very top, that’s
where policy is made. And that’s closely
related to what you brought up. The elections
are basically bought and those who are, uh,
put into office by the massive funding of
concentrated wealth are responsive to that
constituency. Actually, this goes way back,
it’s nothing new. You go back about a century,
the famous campaign manager Mark Hannah, he
was once asked what are the important things
for running a successful campaign? And his
answer was, he said there are 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 much more extreme,
particularly in the light of recent Supreme
Court rulings.
Judy Cole: So I’m going to jump around a
little bit here and stick with the international
flavor. Tugral in Nairobi, Kenya, asks, media
powerhouses around the world use words and
language of exclusion and division such as
martyr, religious, and terrorist. Do you think
social media has the ability to counter the
divisive language used by mass media?
Noam Chomsky: They can in the same way that
popular activism can counter public decisions
that impose repression and oppression. So
social…take, say terrorism, social media
– the term is used in almost a certain Orwellian
manner, the terrorism means the terrorism
they commit against us but not what we commit
against them. So social media, I mean we’ve
seen this, right, in the last couple of days
in regard to the Charlie Hebdo affair. It
was a terrorist act. There are others that
we’ve committed that are very similar that
don’t even enter into the discussion. Some
are even worse. For example the U.S., and
NATO, bombed and destroyed, put off the air
a Serb television station, uh, during the
attack on Serbia in 1999. And killed 16 journalists,
about the same as Paris. And there was a reason:
it was producing information supportive of
the government we were attacking, okay? That’s
not called terrorism. We did it a couple of
years later, uh, the U.S. Marines invaded
the town of Fallujah, in Iraq. You take a
look at the newspapers just days of the invasion,
very positive reporting, it was described
as a noble enterprise. It’s still described
that way. It’s actually one of the worst
war crimes of the millennia. First day of
the invasion, you take a look at the New York
Times, there’s a picture on the front page
of, which is described in the caption, the
picture is patients lying on the floor of
the general hospital, the troops invaded the
general hospital, which is a war crime, uh,
took the patients out of the beds, put them
on the floor, tied their hands behind their
back. Same with hospital personnel and so
on. There were questions from reporters and
there was a reason: they said the hospital
was a propaganda agency for the rebels. What
was the propaganda? Producing casualty figures.
Well, when we do that’s considered fine.
In fact, there’s a bestselling movie now,
a famous movie that glorifies some of these
things. When if they were to do that to us.
Judy Cole: They would be terrorists.
Noam Chomsky: Oh my God, beyond terrorism.
But that’s the kind of thing that can be
overcome by popular engagement, and social
media is just one form of popular engagement.
Judy Cole: Mm hmm. So going back, let me see,
where was I, Jane in Cambridge: how do you
write and how have you managed to be so productive.
Was it a conscious goal for you to be prolific?
Do you believe that it’s possible to be
so politically active while still climbing
the ranks of academia?
Noam Chomsky: Sure. There’s no special trick.
It’s just hard work. It’s something anybody
can do if they want to. You have to decide
how you want to spend your time. It takes
time for other things, you can’t help but
doing that.
Judy Cole: Right, there’s only 24 hours
in a day.
Noam Chomsky: Only 24 hours, but it’s very
fulfilling in many ways.
Judy Cole: So Jonathan in California asks:
do you have any observations or predictions
about the recent warming of relations between
the U.S. and Cuba?
Noam Chomsky: Well that’s an interesting
development. We should look a little bit at
the background. The U.S. has been extremely
isolated on Cuba. You take a look at the votes
of the United Nations. Every year there’s
a vote in the general assembly on the U.S.
embargo in Cuba, basically a blockade. The
votes are, you know, 180 to three. The United
States, Israel, and the Marshall Islands or
something like that. But it goes on year after
year. It’s gotten so extreme. A very interesting
development has taken place in the Western
hemisphere in the last ten or fifteen years.
For the first time in the last 500 years,
literally, the countries mainly of South America,
have begun to extricate themselves from imperial
domination. In the last century or so, that
means U.S. domination. They’ve begun to
move towards integration. They’ve moved
towards independence. The U.S. is, one sign
of it is the U.S. doesn’t have a single
military base left in South America. The,
uh, and they’ve begun to confront their
very serious internal problems. One consequence
of this is that the U.S. has lost its influence
in the continent. If you go back to, say,
1945, where at the end of the second world
war, the U.S. was able right away to call
a hemispheric conference in Mexico, where
the U.S. virtually dictated what was called
an economic charter for the Americas, designed
very explicitly to keep the continent as exploitable
resource base for U.S. industry and enterprise.
You can’t conceive of doing that now. In
fact the last hemispheric conference, the
U.S. and Canada were virtually excluded, and
the next one they may be literally excluded.
That’s the background for the…Obama’s
move toward Cuba. One of several issues which
the U.S. has been isolated in the Western
Hemisphere is the refusal to allow Cuba to
enter into the Hemispheric system, the rest
of the hemisphere is in favor of that and
has been for a long time.
Judy Cole: Well and haven’t some of the
South American countries been ignoring our
blockade?
Noam Chomsky: They try to ignore it but you
can’t really ignore it. The U.S. has been
very punitive about the blockade. Not just
South America, so, you know if Sweden, to
take a real case, sends medical equipment
somewhere that’s using nickel that was gotten
from Cuba, that can be punished under the
U.S. embargo. It’s a very punitive system
and it’s been, of course, extremely harmful
to Cuba. But on top of that, going back to
terrorism, the U.S. tends to forget that beginning
with Kennedy, the U.S. launched a very serious
terrorist war against Cuba. What people talk
about is attempts to assassinate Castro, and
yeah, they existed. But that wasn’t what
it was about. It was blowing up petrochemical
plants, killing a lot of people, sinking ships
in harbor, shelling hotels, uh, biological,
probable it’s not certain, biological warfare
it could be, it’s not certain. A very serious
attack. That’s kind of out of our, our history,
but it’s in real history. And that’s again
part of the background that went on into the
90s.
Judy Cole: So we’re going to, we’re running
out of time here, but um, we have time for
just one or two more questions I think. I
think this is an interesting one. What do
you think is the greatest tool in demilitarizing
our economy and our culture?
Noam Chomsky: The human will. It’s the greatest
tool for any change. But take, say, nuclear
weapons. There are now plans to spend about
a trillion dollars in the current coming decades
to upgrade the nuclear weapons system. That’s
a tremendous threat to survival. I mean it’s
kind of a miracle that we’ve survived the
nuclear age. If you look at the record, there
have been case after case where war came very
close through inadvertence. So take a recent
case that was just discovered from archival
research. In the early 1980s, this is one
of many incidentally – in the early 1980s,
the incoming Reagan administration decided
to probe Russian air and sea defenses by simulating
attacks including nuclear attacks to try to
determine how they would react and to learn
about their defensive systems. They also declared
a nuclear alert intended for the Russians
to know it so that they would take it seriously.
Well, this was a very tense moment, it turns
out. Pershing missiles were being installed
in Western Europe, a five or ten minute flight
time to Moscow. The, of course Russia was
completely surrounded by missiles, Turkey,
everywhere. Star Wars, so-called SDI program,
was announced. That’s understood to be on
all sides a first strike. The Russians took
it very seriously. Newly released archives
indicate that there was a major war scare
which was not well understood but it’s worse.
Just about a year ago, again, archival information
revealed that, you know, in this very tense
period, the Russian automated systems which
make huge numbers of errors, errors, detected
a major missile attack from the United States.
And the protocol is that that information
is supposed to be transmitted to the high
command which then ordered a retaliatory strike.
Well there’s one human being, his name is
Stanislav Petrov, who received the automated
information and decided not to transmit it.
And that’s why we’re here to talk about
it. We don’t know how many cases there are
like that but there are, there’s a recent
study that came out in the Atomic Scientist,
just studying the, whatever data they have,
a lot of it is classified, but whatever data
they have from the U.S. systems, from about
1980 to 1983, that period, they found probably
hundreds of cases where there were accidents
that could have blown up and they assumed
that it continues. Well this is quite apart
from cases where there were really open confrontations
like the Cuban missile crisis, or what might
be building up, that’s constant. In the
face of that we’re now upgrading our missile
systems. Just a couple of days ago the Russians
announced that they are withdrawing from a
pretty successful agreement in which the U.S.
helped them eliminate dangerous nuclear weapons
stores that they had after the Cold War. They’re
pulling out of it because of the conflict
in Ukraine. That’s hazardous. And this is
a case where we know, at least we know the
answer of how to end the problem: get rid
of nuclear weapons. And in fact we’re committed
to that by the non-proliferation treaty. But
we’re going in the other direction.
Judy Cole: Like that old movie War Games,
where the only winning move is not to play.
Noam Chomsky: Well if the article of the Atomic
Scientist starts off by talking about black
swans, you know, highly improbable events
that do nevertheless take place. And what
it says is a nuclear war is a black swan.
We won’t know that there is one until we’re
all dead.
Judy Cole: Well going back to the person who
asked about how to feel better afterwards,
that’s kind of a sad note to end on, but
I’m afraid we must. Cause we’re out of
time.
Noam Chomsky: It’s an optimistic note to
end on, and the reason is that this is at
least one problem that we know how to solve.
There are others equally serious where it’s
not clear that we know, like environmental
catastrophes.
Judy Cole: That’s very true. So on behalf
of the MIT Alumni Association, thank you Noam
for your insights, and thanks to our viewing
audience for joining us. For more information
on the Chomsky Archive at the MIT Libraries,
visit libraries.mit.edu/chomsky. We encourage
you to continue discussing these topics on
our blog, Slice of MIT, by following the link
that will appear on your screen, and on Twitter
by using the hashtag mit-faculty. You can
also view an archive of past Faculty Forums
Online by visiting the Learn section on the
Alumni Association website. Please join us
next month for another session of the Faculty
Forum Online.
