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On Growth (1974)

On Growth

(1974)–Willem Oltmans–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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42. Noam Chomsky

Professor Noam Chomsky has become famous in recent years for revolutionizing the understanding of the meaning of language, while his radical critiques of American foreign policy have made him one of the most influential spokesmen of the left today.
He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1928. He obtained a Ph.D. in linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1955. His doctoral thesis, written while at Harvard University, was called ‘Transformational Analysis.’ In 1955 Chomsky joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a joint appointment in the department of foreign literatures and linguistics, and the Research Laboratory of Electronics. In 1966 he was appointed to the Ferrari P. Ward Professorship of Modern Languages and Linguistics.
Among his best-known books are: Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), Cartesian Linguistics (1966), Language and Mind (1968), American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), At War with Asia, Problems of Knowledge and Freedom, Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar (1972), and For Reasons of State (1973).

MIT computers have produced Limits to Growth as a first step to study the way to global equilibrium. How useful do you think that kind of approach is to the world's problems?

 

Without commenting on the empirical adequacy of the Forrester study and related studies I don't think that there's any doubt whatsoever that their general point is qualitatively correct, i.e., there are limits to growth, set by natural, by physical and chemical law. It would be inanely optimistic to simply assume that technology will somehow develop and overcome any problem posed by the finite limits of resources and the finite capacity of the ecological system to tolerate pollution and destruction. Of course, that's not the case. There is no doubt, that irrational economic growth will press the limits of natural law at some stage, probably not a very distant stage. This is a prospect which has enormous social consequences.

The crucial point - which, as far as I see it, is not brought up by the Forrester study but is quite central, nevertheless - is that as the prospects for limitless growth fade, a major technique for social control will be lost. The idea that economic growth will continue without limit has been a very effective device for controlling and limiting demands for redistribution of wealth, for example. And this is quite explicitly understood. Walter Heller, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President John F. Kennedy, made it very explicit that the notion of limitless growth could be employed to bring about consensus instead of conflict by overcoming the demands for redistribution of wealth, which would certainly be heard if one could not look forward to gaining more of life's benefits by some other method.

Of course, the privileged are willing to tolerate talk about redistribution only as long as it is rhetoric. They are never willing to see talk translated into action, which means that as soon as the limits of growth are seriously faced, a violent class war might erupt in which the tremendous resources of destruction that are available to the privileged will be used to destroy anyone who challenges privilege - whether it's a Third World country trying to separate itself from the Western-controlled global economy or whether it's disaffected groups in the industrial societies themselves.

 

Bertrand Russell1 once said that there would never be real freedom in democracy until those who do the work control the management. That's the kind of class war you just referred to?

 

That is right. It's conceivable that owners of capital will tolerate workers taking control of their own insurance programs. They might call it ‘co-determination,’ as they do in Germany. But when it comes beyond that to an actual share of management and profit and determining the direction of an enterprise and the character of the work that is done, of course that will not be accepted. At that point serious struggle will arise, the kind of struggle which has been suppressed by the prospects of unending growth.

 

Would that explain the barrage of protests to Limits to Growth by economists like Samuelson or Kaysen?2

 

It is very striking that the liberal and progressive economists have on the whole been quite negative towards this thesis that growth will reach certain limits. I think the reason is exactly the one expressed by Walter Heller, which I quoted. He pointed out quite correctly that when, in his

phrase, you don't have to rob Peter to pay Paul, when anyone can gain, then consensus replaces conflict. That is perfectly true. It's perfectly true that if you can promise to everyone that his lot will be better tomorrow, then even the underprivileged and the dispossessed have reason to accept a society which is strongly prejudiced against them. But those reasons disappear, as Heller and other liberal economists quite understand, as soon as these prospects no longer exist.

 

Do you feel H.G. Wells'3 dream of elegant engineers ruling with perfect benevolence (instead of our new mandarins) will come through some day?

 

I tend more to accept, with some qualifications, a much earlier prophecy than H.G. Wells' - namely, that of Bakunin4 and other left-wing social critics since. Bakunin saw the scientific intelligentsia as a new class. It would be the most despotic, the most authoritarian, the most ruthless class that would ever rule in human society, and would control the resources of wealth and knowledge, and force the uneducated masses to live and work and march to the beat of the drum, or words approximately to that effect.

However, I think there's one qualification necessary in Bakunin's original forecast of the rise of the new class, which as far as I know was the first such prophecy. Also in the many later variants on this theme, I mean recently by people like John Kenneth Galbraith5 or Daniel Bell,6 who claim to see a transfer of power into the hands of the technical intelligentsia. In my opinion they are wrong in seeing a real transfer of power into the hands of a scientific intelligentsia. Rather what we are seeing, in this stage of industrial society, is that the technical and scientific intelligentsia - Galbraith's educational and scientific estate - are able to perform very significant services for those who really do own and manage the central institutions of society. In fact, they are able to provide them with the results of science and technology and scientific management and so on. Far more significant is that they are able to legitimize authoritarian control of wealth and institutions by masking this control in the aura of science. Everyone knows that science is good and noble and worthy, and everyone is deeply in awe of technical expertise. If the intelligentsia can make it appear that authoritarian control by the privileged and allegedly the talented is a necessary condition of modern life, then they will have succeeded in legitimating precisely that kind of privilege. I believe that probably is the major contribution of the intelligentsia in the service of power and privilege.

How to influence the complex, biologically given system of the human mind, globally? Where to start to influence man's mind?

 

I think the best way to influence the human mind is by presenting evidence and argument, by persuasion and by explanation. These are by far the most effective techniques for influencing the human mind. It is perfectly true that one could invent the kind of behavioral technology that would make you stop smoking, if you smoke. But it's also equally true that with a rational explanation as to why you should stop doing it, you might very well come to the same conclusion. Now, the proper way to influence the human mind is by the art of explanation. There's nothing much deeper that can be said than that. Any other techniques of influencing the human mind are simply another form of service to those who want to wield coercive power. Ultimately I think one should look forward to a society in which choice and decision reside in the hands of freely associated individuals. One precisely does not want to employ the controls of the behavioral technologists or, for that matter, the techniques of the military interrogator or prison guard. It is important not to be caught up in the fraud and pretense of scientists who claim otherwise.

 

Wouldn't you agree with Skinner7 that survival is the planet's foremost value right now?8

 

He actually says that survival of a culture is the highest value of that culture. With that view of course I do not agree. I think that there should be very significant changes and alterations of cultural and social institutions. Changes that one might call its replacement rather than its survival. But survival of the species of course remains a value.

 

Toynbee9 has warned of the Germanization of America. The US is the second largest state management in the world right now. How do you see its future develop?

 

There is not going to be any simple reform or in fact any complicated reforms that will change the present situation. There's the matter of outright aggression, as in the case of Vietnam, which is in fact a traditional colonial war in which the United States is trying to destroy a radical nationalist movement struggling for independence and to extricate its society from the global economy dominated by the United States. In the traditional manner, the United States is unwilling to tolerate this, and

it uses the vast resources at its command to destroy the indigenous nationalist movement. Nothing particularly new about that. It's the scale that is new. But the phenomenon is familiar from history.

 

But is there a visible trend towards a Germanization of America?

 

Not because they are Nazis. It's because there's nothing else available. There is no other technique for government intervention in the economy, other than the production of waste. This has to do with the fact that the government cannot act in such a way as to conflict with the needs of the real rulers of the society. The government, for example, is not going to pour money into a mass-transportation system when most of the top corporations get their profits from irrational use of the automobile. Nor is the government going to produce anything useful because if it does, it will compete with the private empires that control the economy. Furthermore, government intervention in the economy has to be tolerated by the taxpayer who pays the bill.

Incidentally, the same liberal economists introduced one of the most regressive tax proposals of modern times in the United States. The taxpayer can be whipped into line when he believes that his life is threatened, so he'll be willing to pay for military expenses. The state religion is powerful enough so that when national prestige is on the line, as in the space race, then the citizen can be beaten into submission and will tolerate spending for it, for a time. But these various conditions on governmental intervention in the economy - namely, that it not conflict with the interests of ruling groups but rather enhance those interests, that it be tolerable to the citizen who has to pay for it - if you look into those conditions, they virtually determine that government intervention in the economy will be the production of military waste, of military goods which will sometimes be used, as in Indochina.

 

Philip Handler, the president of the National Academy of Science, explained to me how the participating scientists in the National Academy often are not even aware of the gap in the use of language. ‘They would not be able,’ he said, ‘to put down on paper what divides them.’ In your field of cognitive psychology and linguistics, would it be possible to bridge these still-prevailing gaps between politicians, diplomats and scientists?

 

I would not like you to think - because it is not true - that linguistics

and cognitive psychology have contributions to make in this domain. It is an interesting and important field. I happen to devote my intellectual energies to it. But we are not going to solve the problems you raise. It's misleading - and it's in fact part of that subversion of science that I mentioned earlier - to believe that this is a matter for scientific and technical expertise to solve.

The answer to this problem is in the hands of every single human being. It requires no profound insight into the mysteries of science to see it. People are under ideological controls which are determined very specifically by the structure of privilege and power in their societies. In the United States there is an official state ideology which is propagated daily and drilled into everyone from childhood onwards. Quite naturally people who are incapable of extricating themselves from that ideology will have a very distorted and perverted view of things that happen, of the affairs of everyday life and things that happen in the world or what they see in front of them. I think this is true of every other society as well.

The answer is to try to gain understanding of social and political processes, to see how power is being exercised. There is no contribution of science that is going to make any significant contribution. Data are available to people. People have to decide to use their intelligence, to free themselves from ideological constraints, to penetrate the duplicity and the distortion that is an intrinsic component of any system of power, ours or any others. People must try to investigate for themselves what no scientist could tell them, namely, what are the conditions for decent human existence and how to achieve them.

 

But with one-third of the world illiterate and another third of the world having no schools whatsoever and with the population increasing to seven billion by the year 2000, how to do it if we are to live?

 

The major problem of Limits to Growth is not posed by the underdeveloped world. It's posed by the advanced industrial societies, where people are literate, where people are committing their vast resources, material and intellectual, to destruction, to waste and so on. It is here that people have to extricate themselves from the ideological controls that distort the thinking about these matters. One cannot pass the responsibility over to scientists, and one cannot pass the responsibility over to the illiterate peasants of the Third World. The responsibility lies right in the hands of every citizen of an advanced industrial society.

How then do you view the period immediately ahead?

 

If in fact the limits of growth, which certainly exist, become apparent in this period, then I believe there will be a very significant social upheaval in the industrial societies, as the great mass of people who are underprivileged, dispossessed, oppressed in many ways, recognize that they no longer have any reason to accept a system of inequality and injustice which is prejudiced against them. Not having such a reason, they will begin soon to explore the ideological assumptions, to challenge them and to challenge institutional structures that are oppressive and unequal. As soon as they begin to do this, they will be met with force, because those who have power and privilege will never tolerate any serious challenge to that privilege.

I cannot predict the outcome of that kind of struggle. Clearly it will depend on the state of consciousness and organization achieved at the point when massive force is used to crush efforts to attain equality and justice.

Incidentally, I think that something of the same sort can perhaps be expected on an international scale. Just as the privileged and the affluent in a particular society will use force and terror and violence to protect their privilege if ideological controls no longer work, the same is true of the relationship between advanced industrial societies and the so-called developing and very often not-developing world. If some - say, some Third World society, so-called - decides to extricate itself from the global system which is prejudiced against it and decides to use its limited material and human resources for its own benefit, then one can predict with a high degree of probability that the privileged of the world will not tolerate that behavior and will attempt to crush it by force, as, for example, they have been attempting in Vietnam for the last twenty-five years.

I recall there was a study, in fact, one of the very few studies of the political economy of American Foreign Policy - by a conservative group incidentally. They pointed out, absolutely accurately, that the primary threat of communism is the unwillingness or the inability of the communist powers to complement the industrial societies of the West, i.e., their unwillingness to play their role in the game of comparative advantage, their backward and subservient role. That is the primary threat of communism, and it is in fact true. What we call communistic societies are societies trying to undertake a kind of do-it-yourself program of development with mobilization of the population and generally some kind

of authoritarian control over it. What we really objected to was that they no longer complement the industrial societies of the West.

If that tendency develops elsewhere in the world, of course, the threat will be resisted by force if necessary, by the use of all the resources of technology and science which are available. I think these are plausible speculations for the next half-century.


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