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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

http://sulekha.com/chpost.asp?for...ilosophy&show=0&cid=74783

excerpts (url below):

CS: Some feminists argue that by participating in marriage one is
perpetuating a system of oppression against women. Do you agree?

Chomsky: No, I wouldn't, having been married some 53 years. It can
be, but that's a choice. There's nothing inherently oppressive about
marriage, and in fact non-marital relations can also be oppressive.
If you really pursue that argument, then sex ought to be outlawed,
language ought to be outlawed. Language has been used as a technique
of oppression forever. We should stop talking.

CS: Do you think we have a problem when the rhetoric in elections,
for example during the Gore-Lieberman campaign in the last
presidential election, seems to be so much dwelling on God and
religion?

Chomsky: Those people are about as religious as I am. But if you want
to run for public office where, say, 40% of the population believes
that the world was created 6000 years ago, then you have to put on an
act of being religious. But if you bother to look, I suspect that
Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Bill Clinton are approximately as
religious as I am.

..... What's a "public intellectual?" A public intellectual is
someone who can make it into the mainstream. How do you make it into
the mainstream? Not by talent. For the most part, by conformism.
That's not a high value.
CS: I've seen your name in lists of celebrity atheists - would you
characterize yourself as an "atheist" and do you think atheists are
marginalized in today's society?
Chomsky: I never felt marginalized because of my lack of religious
beliefs. On the other hand, if you ask me whether or not I'm an
atheist, I wouldn't even answer. I would first want an explanation of
what it is that I'm supposed to not believe in, and I've never seen
an explanation.

..... I don't even know what postmodernism is. There are people who
call themselves postmodernists. I read them. Sometimes I find
something interesting and useful, sometimes I find things that are
unintelligible and irrelevant. I think their contributions have to be
evaluated on their own, independent of what label you give them. If
you ask me what postmodernism is, I couldn't tell you. There is a
tendency in the intellectual world to inflate what one is doing. Most
of the time it's pretty straightforward and simple. There are areas
of quantum physics where you have take special training to really
understand what's going on, but most of what's done is accessible
with relative ease to people who are interested enough to pursue it
and find out about it.

Chomsky: I don't think there's any good terrorism. There are just and
illegitimate confrontations and conflicts in which illegitimate
measures such as terrorism are used, but that doesn't make terrorism
legitimate. For example, the American Revolution was a basically just
cause, but there was plenty of terrorism involved, and that wasn't
just. If there has been a national liberation movement of any kind
that didn't involve terrorism, I'd like to hear about it.

========

http://uuhome.de/global/english/information.html

Is Religious Belief Really a Personal Matter?

- About the Connection between Reason, Emotion and Religious Beliefs -
by Wolfgang Fischer

(excerpts):

Anybody with a genuine interest in political change will first of all
need to ask the question: What kind of picture of humanity, what
conception of human existence and what kind of view of the purpose of
living is apt to generate in humans a psychological atmosphere of
trust, of inner security, of self-determination, of openness, courage
and love? For such an atmosphere would be the precondition for us
ever being able to overcome all the destructive consequences of
mistrust, of alienation and lack of self-confidence, of
untruthfulness, fear and hate.

From a purely biological viewpoint humans appear to be animals. They
are subject to the laws of nature like any other creature. Life,
procreation and death are unavoidable. A factor, however, which
distinguishes the human species from animals is its brain, together
with the vast potential of new experience which it engenders.
We can observe the development in this direction by comparing the
potential of unicellular life forms with that of more highly
developed animal species up to the primates. The range of facility
for acting and reacting increasingly exhibits a certain independence
of the genetically preordained patterns. Parallel to the genetic
determinants the directing and reacting functions are increasingly
determined by contents of consciousness (the mind).
Humans have the capacity to act with foresight, with the evolutionary
developmental steps being partially retained.

We know the motives of human behaviour to be very deep-seated in our
mind, down to the still unconscious regions. We know furthermore that
the causes of reflexes as well as more complex reactive patterns are
to be found in individual experience - that they become
neurologically structured, repeatable and conditionable and - along
paths not yet explored by science - even gain access to the genetic
information.
And indeed: where else could innate reflexes originate? How could
there be any evolutionary development unless individual experience or
advantage - in the sense of genes being provided with increased
opportunities - could structure itself genetically in such a way as
to become hereditary? Why should the genes cause bodies to come into
existence unless they could count on benefiting qualitatively as well
as being passed on through procreation?
To my mind (in contradiction of Crick's thesis according to which any
acquired attributes of organisms cannot be transferred to the genes),
Evolution might not just have its cause in an "accidental" genetic
mutation or copying mistakes on the molecular level but quite
possibly, via individual life experience, directly influences our
genetic structure.

Genetics these days tends to be dominated by analysis and
manipulation, even though we have not the slightest idea about the
possible effects of arbitrary manipulations upon ourselves or future
generations. Even the metabolism of the DNA remains obscure, i.e. we
do not know anything about the behaviour of the genetic code within
the organism after having been incorporated as food.

Nor was this of great concern until recently, since the code of the
DNA structured by Evolution, from the unicellular organism to the
vegetable and up to beef, was found to be compatible if not identical
with the human cellular information. Whether this still is the case
nowadays, in the face of increasing manipulation of genetic
information and the insertion of artificial genes into the food
chain, is so far anyone's guess: we have all been degraded to the
status of guinea-pigs! The scandal of the mad cow disease merely
indicates the helplessness with which science is subject to
mercantile interests, as well as the scandalous manner in which it
treats the ordinary people. (With these remarks I do mean not to
oppose genetic engineering as such but certainly the laissez faire
attitude in which it is handled!)

Yet to get back to the subject of human motivation. It is common
knowledge that we are not merely motivated by rational thought but
equally by emotional impulses, and that both regions are closely
interconnected. The emotions are in part biological heritage, they
tend to interfere in our lives in the manner of reflexes; and it is
part of the human maturing process, both individually and
collectively, to become aware of this connection so as to be able to
handle one's emotions creatively.

Although this area, too, has not yet been researched exhaustively, we
do know that emotions, too, may be subject to a continuous phylogenic
development, and that, via the cerebrum with its potential of thought
and knowledge, we are able to influence our emotional behaviour. Here
again the spheres of thinking and emotion are closely interconnected.

Purely rational knowledge or thoughts not held to be true tend to
have little influence upon our actions. Conversely, thought content
or knowledge which affects us emotionally and is deemed to be in
accordance with the truth will exert a strong influence upon our
actions as well as on further thinking.
Because of its basic influence to nearly every decision to make it is
precisely this 'emotional resonance' which, though often forgotten,
renders any debate about our view of humanity, about religions and
ideologies, so supremely important. For such debate can draw
attention to the extent to which certain beliefs are apt to affect
everyday life through their massive influence upon our thoughts and
actions.

(In the Beginning was the Word)

For us humans, language - i.e. the spoken or written WORD - as a
suggestive impulse affecting the life of the individual, represents a
stimulus of huge intensity.

Information, whether oral, visual or material, has a decisive
influence upon our very being. It is therefore imperative to question
whatever we believe. And religious information should certainly be no
exception, and should not be allowed to be left untouched as
something of merely personal significance.

======================================================================

http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/C/Chomsky.asp

(nom chom´ske) , 1928-, educator and linguist, b. Philadelphia.
Chomsky, who has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
since 1955, developed a theory of transformational (sometimes called
generative or transformational-generative) grammar that
revolutionized the scientific study of language. He first set out his
abstract analysis of language in his doctoral dissertation (1955) and
Syntactic Structures (1957). Instead of starting with minimal sounds,
as the structural linguists had done, Chomsky began with the
rudimentary or primitive sentence; from this base he developed his
argument that innumerable syntactic combinations can be generated by
means of a complex series of rules.

According to transformational grammar, every intelligible sentence
conforms not only to grammatical rules peculiar to its particular
language, but also to "deep structures," a universal grammar
underlying all languages and corresponding to an innate capacity of
the human brain. Chomsky and other linguists who built on his work
formulated transformational rules, which transform a sentence with a
given grammatical structure (e.g., "John saw Mary" ) into a sentence
with a different grammatical structure but the same essential meaning
( "Mary was seen by John" ). Transformational linguistics has been
influential in psycholinguistics, particularly in the study of
language acquisition by children. In the 1990s Chomsky formulated
a "Minimalist Program" in an attempt to simplify the symbolic
representations of the language facility.

Chomsky is a prolific author whose principal linguistic works after
Syntactic Structures include Current Issues in Linguistic Theory
(1964), The Sound Pattern of English (with Morris Halle, 1968),
Language and Mind (1972), Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar
(1972), and Knowledge of Language (1986). In addition, he has wide-
ranging political interests. He was an early and outspoken critic of
U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and has written extensively on
many political issues from a generally left-wing point of view. Among
his political writings are American Power and the New Mandarins
(1969), Peace in the Middle East? (1974), Some Concepts and
Consequences of the Theory of Government and Binding (1982),
Manufacturing Consent (with E. S. Herman, 1988), Profit over People
(1998), and Rogue States (2000). Chomsky's controversial bestseller 9-
11 (2002) is an analysis of the World Trade Center attack that, while
denouncing the atrocity of the event, traces its origins to the
actions and power of the United States, which he calls "a leading
terrorist state."

====================

http://www.countercurrents.org/chomsky240703.htm

CS: Do you think the conflict in the Middle East is fundamentally
about religion?

Chomsky: It is not about religion; religion cuts many ways. Secular
and religious Jews may have different goals on lots of things, but
they both want a separate state in which they are the majority and
they control things. The same is true of secular and religious
Palestinians. Many of the people on both sides are secular

CS: Some people claim that the September 11 attacks show the dangers
of religion, or more broadly, the danger of religion mixing with
politics and governments. Do you think that's a correct analysis of
the situation?

Chomsky: September 11 is a false starting point in this case. We
should really be looking at the 1980s for evidence to support this
notion. Twenty years ago, the CIA began supporting and training the
best killers it could find. Not to help the Afghans - which would
have been a reasonable, legitimate endeavor - but to harm the
Russians. The results for Afghanistan were devastating. The best
killers the CIA could find for their purposes were extremist, radical
Islamists from North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and other places.
They gathered, trained and armed them, knowing perfectly well what
they were up to. And yes, that was exploiting religion. In fact,
fundamentalist Islam has been, to a significant extent, supported and
initiated by outside forces. It was often a weapon against secular
forces. I mean, when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, the goal, quite
explicitly, was to undermine the secular, nationalist PLO, which was
pressing hard for negotiations over the Occupied Territories, and
Israel didn't want that. So, Israel succeeded in undermining the
secular PLO for a while, but ended up with Hezbollah on their hands.
Something of the same sort happened in the Occupied Territories. The
religious elements, which ended up being Hamas, were actually
supported by Israel in opposition to the secular nationalists.

CS: So do you think there are lessons that we can learn from those
examples for the US?

Chomsky: Fundamentalist Christianity in the US is a serious danger,
but there are broader implications. The lessons we should learn from
the events of the 1980s that I just described is that we should not -
neither we nor others - use force to try to attain our ends, whether
that force involves recruiting radical Islamists or people who want
to take over the world. When the Contra armies that the United States
organized in the 1980s carried out massive terrorists attacks in
Nicaragua, they weren't religious fundamentalists, but the
consequences were just as bad.

CS: Is Zionism today morally equivalent to racism?

Chomsky: No, it's not morally equivalent to racism. Zionism covers
lots of different things. The positions I hold now were at one time
called Zionist. Were they racist? Well, there was an element of
racism in them. There's an element of racism in my living where I do -
someone else lived there before they were driven out. That's true
for all of us. But we don't want to use racism that loosely. There
are a lot of things wrong in the world that may involve ethnic and
cultural and other conflicts, but we don't call them racism.

CS: How do you distinguish between good and bad terrorism or,
perhaps, necessary and unnecessary terrorism? Or do you think
terrorism is just a bad term to be throwing around?

Chomsky: I don't think there's any good terrorism. There are just and
illegitimate confrontations and conflicts in which illegitimate
measures such as terrorism are used, but that doesn't make terrorism
legitimate. For example, the American Revolution was a basically just
cause, but there was plenty of terrorism involved, and that wasn't
just. If there has been a national liberation movement of any kind
that didn't involve terrorism, I'd like to hear about it.

CS: Some elements of the anti-globalization movement have used
property destruction as a tactic, especially in big demonstrations
like in Seattle. Do you think that's appropriate or useful?

Chomsky: For one thing, I wouldn't call it an anti-globalization
movement; that's a term invented by those who want to pursue the
dominant form of globalization. The people opposed to what I would
call "investor rights globalization" are not opposed to
globalization. I don't know of anybody who's opposed to
globalization. Certainly not the Left and the labor movement - they
were founded on the concept of internationalism, and that's a kind of
globalization. Should those who are opposed to the contemporary form
of investor rights and international integration use property damage
as a tactic? I don't think so. It's a dubious tactic at best. Any
form of violence against property or people has to be justified, and
I don't see the justification.

CS: How generally should we put our ideals into action in everyday
life? For example, would you buy coffee at Starbucks?

Chomsky: I don't know much about Starbucks, so it's a hard question
to answer. But should we put our principles into operation? Yes, we
should, although there are obvious limits. You can't live a life as a
saint every moment, making sure that you do nothing that will harm
any human being. That's a physical impossibility. You have to make
choices, and you have to set priorities as to how much energy you're
going to put into trying to improve the world - it can't be 100% of
your time.

CS: With so many different ways to improve the world and problems
like animal rights and world hunger, how should activists determine
their priorities?

Chomsky: You should go with your personal concerns, with what you
think is important. You can make a case that the most important thing
in the world now is preventing the militarization of space because
that might destroy the world very quickly. You could also make a case
that the most important thing is preventing destruction of the
environment because that may end the conditions for a viable human
existence in a couple of generations. Or you can make a case that the
most important thing is that, even in the United States, there are
millions of hungry people, and around the world, close to a billion
of them. People have to decide what is important to them, considering
who they are and what they are able to accomplish. You can't do
everything, and there's no way to rank these problems.

CS: Universities say that their responsibility is to educate
students, with the result that they can't be bothered by "social"
concerns, such as living wages and harmful investments. Do you think
that's correct and what has your experience at MIT been?

Chomsky: What's a university? A university is an abstract entity.
It's a collection of people who come together for certain ends, and
among those people are students, faculty and staff, and they have to
decide what they're into. As a member of a university, I believe that
one of our ends ought to be that people have decent wages. Notice
that paying a living wage is not something that the university does,
it's something that the faculty and students do. A university is not
an infinite source of money, it has certain resources that can be
used for particular purposes. If they're used for one purpose,
they're not used for another purpose. So if students support a living
wage, as I think they definitely should, they should understand that
this money is not coming from an infinite source. It's coming from an
existing institution with finite resources - if these resources go to
paying living wages, they will not go to other things.

CS: University administrations say that it's their fiduciary
responsibility to the alumni and others to see that university
resources are used in a specific way: for the education of students.

Chomsky: They might say that, but that's accepting a picture of the
university that I don't think we ought to accept. It's saying that
the university is a totalitarian institution that is owned by
outsiders who decide what it will do. If they decide that the
university ought to be used for training terrorists, then that's what
the university ought to do. I don't agree with that, and I don't
think anybody does. The university is the people who participate in
it. It's true that is set up as a business operation, but that's what
we ought to be upset about. If it's a public university, would we say
that the legislature has a right to decide what the university does
while the participants don't? A decently run university leaves
decision-making in the hands of participants. Take my university,
which is technically private: nobody would dream of allowing the
trustees to come in start dictating courses. If it's the fiduciary
responsibility of the administration to respond to the trustees why
won't they allow that?

CS: Your debate with Michel Foucault seems to symbolize an
intellectual challenge posed by postmodernism - to both the Left and
Right. Do you think postmodernism is a "threat" in the context of the
academy or is it activism?

Chomsky: This was 30 years ago, and I don't think Foucault would have
called himself a postmodernist. I don't think those are the issues
that came up in the debate. I don't even know what postmodernism is.
There are people who call themselves postmodernists. I read them.
Sometimes I find something interesting and useful, sometimes I find
things that are unintelligible and irrelevant. I think their
contributions have to be evaluated on their own, independent of what
label you give them. If you ask me what postmodernism is, I couldn't
tell you. There is a tendency in the intellectual world to inflate
what one is doing. Most of the time it's pretty straightforward and
simple. There are areas of quantum physics where you have take
special training to really understand what's going on, but most of
what's done is accessible with relative ease to people who are
interested enough to pursue it and find out about it.

CS: Some feminists argue that by participating in marriage one is
perpetuating a system of oppression against women. Do you agree?

Chomsky: No, I wouldn't, having been married some 53 years. It can
be, but that's a choice. There's nothing inherently oppressive about
marriage, and in fact non-marital relations can also be oppressive.
If you really pursue that argument, then sex ought to be outlawed,
language ought to be outlawed. Language has been used as a technique
of oppression forever. We should stop talking.

CS: Richard Posner recently published a book that included a ranking
of the top 100 public intellectuals. Do you think it is healthy to
have "public intellectuals" speak to Americans about moral questions.

Chomsky: First of all, I think the book is an exercise in such
silliness that I can't even talk about it. Putting aside the
silliness of that particular effort, to be an intellectual is a
vocation for anybody: it means using your mind and applying it to
issues of human significance. Some people are privileged, powerful
and usually conformist enough that they can make their way into the
public arena. That doesn't make them any more intellectual than a
taxi driver who happens to be thinking about the same things and may
be much smarter and much more understanding of them. It's a question
of power. What's a "public intellectual?" A public intellectual is
someone who can make it into the mainstream. How do you make it into
the mainstream? Not by talent. For the most part, by conformism.
That's not a high value.

CS: I've seen your name in lists of celebrity atheists - would you
characterize yourself as an "atheist" and do you think atheists are
marginalized in today's society?

Chomsky: I never felt marginalized because of my lack of religious
beliefs. On the other hand, if you ask me whether or not I'm an
atheist, I wouldn't even answer. I would first want an explanation of
what it is that I'm supposed to not believe in, and I've never seen
an explanation.

CS: Do you think we have a problem when the rhetoric in elections,
for example during the Gore-Lieberman campaign in the last
presidential election, seems to be so much dwelling on God and
religion?

Chomsky: Those people are about as religious as I am. But if you want
to run for public office where, say, 40% of the population believes
that the world was created 6000 years ago, then you have to put on an
act of being religious. But if you bother to look, I suspect that
Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Bill Clinton are approximately as
religious as I am.

CS: Is that problematic, though, that you have to put on this act of
being religious?

Chomsky: It's very problematic. But the problem isn't only that they
are pretending to be religious. What's problematic is that we have a
political system in which candidates are crafted by the public
relations industry to take positions which nobody trusts nobody
believes and to avoid issues that are of great significance to the
public. To avoid them, because quite systematically, public opinion
and the opinion of powerful sectors - the elite opinion - have been
different. But this is a problem about American democracy. And what's
more, the general population is well aware of it. Politicians are not
talking about the issues that the population is concerned with. For
example, polls show very clearly, that what are called globalization
issues - the trade deficit, trade agreements, opening up public
functions to private control, privatization - are major issues for
the public and they didn't come up in the election. There was no
discussion about the Free Trade Area of the Americas that was coming
up for a decision at the Summit of the Americas. A lot of people knew
about it because they live and function outside the domain of mass
media. But there's a huge effort to keep this information away from
people, and it does not arise on elections. What arises in the
electoral system is, "Is this the kind of guy you'd like to have a
beer with in a bar?" And people know that this is a joke and that's
why there's so much cynicism.

CS: Have you seen a change in the students who pass through MIT over
the decades, especially with respect to their political interests and
leanings?
Chomsky: An enormous difference. If you walked through the halls here
forty years ago, you would have found a white, male, straight-laced,
very professionally-oriented institution. If you walk through the
halls today, it's about half women, maybe 30% minorities, anything
but straight-laced, interested in all sorts of things. It's been a
tremendous change over the last 40 years. There was a big change in
the 1960s, but then it extended and expanded.

CS: Activists look back nostalgically now, though, saying that one
could have a thousand students out at a protest against the Vietnam
War, whereas now…

Chomsky: … there are thousands and thousands and there isn't even
anything like the Vietnam War. Activism is far beyond what it was in
the 60s. Protest against the Vietnam War was so limited that we don't
even remember the war took place. March 2002 happened to be the
fortieth anniversary of the public announcement, by the Kennedy
administration that the US Air Force was starting to bomb South
Vietnam. That was the month that they began the use of chemical
warfare to destroy crops, which had horrible effects, when they
authorized Napalm, when they began to drive millions of people into
concentration camps. A major war against South Vietnam that was
publicly launched 40 years ago - did anybody mention it in March of
this year? No. Of course nobody at the time even cared. You know,
attack another country, good, attack another country. There was
protest later, years later, but very little until a major war was
going on with hundreds of thousands of American troops rampaging
around South Vietnam.At that point you finally got protests, but by
now the protests are much greater in incidents that are bad enough
but have much less severity than that.

CS: In 20-30 years, when the people who are now in college will be
running the world, so to speak, where do you see the US going?

Chomsky: Human affairs is a very low-confidence activity and the
record of prediction is horrible, partly because we don't understand
very much about complicated things like that, but largely because
these are matters of choice. There was no way of predicting in 1960s
if you looked at MIT or the rest of a country that in a few years,
developments would take place, that would enormously change the
country and make it far more civilized than it was. There was no way
of predicting that, and nobody did. Those were the days, the 1960s,
in which public intellectuals were talking about what they called
the "end of ideology," which meant no more controversy, no more
discussion, end of history. A common line of thinking was that
henceforth it was just a matter of technical manipulation of small
problems, which were done by experts. These experts explained that
there would be no more economic problems because they knew how to run
an economy with 3% growth just by tinkering. So, all the problems
were basically over and there was nothing much to talk about. A
couple of years later the country was blowing up. There's no way of
predicting.

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