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Conversations Between Michael Albertand Noam Chomsky
December, 26 2008By
Noam Chomsky
 and
Michael Albert
 
[This essay is part of the ZNet Classics series. Three times a week we will re-post anarticle that we think is of timeless importance. This one was first published January,1993.]In January 1993 Michael Albert and Noam Chomsky recorded a seriesof conversations which were later distributed by
Z Magazine
. Here wepresent a transcription of some material from the 1993 tapes,essentially verbatim, in three parts. Some of the topical material isnow historical, of course, but the rest is as timely as when firstdiscussed.
You once wrote an essay called "Responsibility and Intellectuals". Perhaps we could start by talking a little bit about that. First of all, what makes a person an intellectual in the first place. What is an intellectual? 
 It's not a term I take all that seriously. Some of the most intellectual people I've metand known in my life were very remote from the so-called intellectual professions.Plenty of people who are called intellectual workers, who work with their minds, nottheir, say, hands, are involved in what amounts to clerical work. An awful lot of academic scholarship, for example, is basically a kind of clerical work.
Suppose we use the word positively.
 With a positive connotation I would want to talk about whoever it is who's thinkingabout things, trying to understand things, trying to work things out, maybe trying toarticulate and express that understanding to others and so on. That's intellectual life.
So "things" could be society, it could be quarks ...
 It could be music.
It could be sports. So basically, arguably, just about everyone.
 Except that an awful lot of the activity of most of us is routine, not considered, notdirected to problems that really do concern us and not based on efforts, maybe evenopportunities to gain deeper understanding.
So intellectuals have a whole lot of time to do this part of life that we all do some of the time.
 
 
 There are people who are privileged enough to be able to spend an awful lot of theirtime and effort on these things if they so choose. They rarely do. They often do turnto routine kind of hack work, which is the easy way.
So supposing a society like ours does give some people the opportunity to spend more time doing intellectual work, then I guess that's the context in which we raisethe question, What's the responsibility of a person like that, a person who is free tohave that time? 
 We can distinguish what we you might call their "task" from their moralresponsibility. Their task, that is, the reason why social institutions provide them withthis time and effort, their task is, say, so that they can support power, authority, theycan carry out doctrinal management. They can try to ensure that others perceive theworld in a way which is supportive of existing authority and privilege. That's theirtask. If they stop performing their task, they're likely to be deprived of theopportunities to dedicate themselves to intellectual work. On the other hand, theirmoral responsibility is quite different, in fact, almost the opposite. Their moralresponsibility is to try to understand the truth, to try to work with others to come toan understanding of what the world is like, to try to convey that to other people, helpthem understand, and lay the basis for constructive action. That's their responsibility.But of course there is a conflict. If you pursue the responsibility, you're likely to bedenied the privileges of exercising the intellectual effort.It's pretty evident, not hard to understand. If you're a young person, say, in collegeor in journalism or for that matter a fourth grader, and you have too much of anindependent mind, meaning you're beginning to fulfill your responsibility, there is awhole variety of devices that will try to deflect you from that error and, if you can'tbe controlled, to marginalize and eliminate you some way. In fourth grade you maybe a behavior problem. In college you may be irresponsible and erratic and not theright kind of student. If you make it to the faculty you'll fail in what's sometimescalled "collegiality," getting along with your colleagues. If you're a young journalistand you're pursuing stories that the managerial level above you understands, eitherintuitively or explicitly, are not to be pursued, you can be sent off to the police deskand advised that you are not thinking through properly and how you don't haveproper standards of objectivity and so on. There's a range of devices. We live in afree society, so you're not sent to the gas chambers. They don't send the deathsquads after you, as is commonly done in many countries ... you don't have to govery far away to see that, say in Mexico. But there nevertheless are quite successfuldevices to ensure that doctrinal correctness is not seriously infringed upon.
But certainly intellectuals aren't only journalists, economists, political scientists and the like. That's one set in the social sciences. But then there's also hard scientists.There's biologists and physicists and the like. There it would seem that there's lessof a social control problem, and so maybe you get a different kind of behavior. Arethe intellectuals in the linguistics department comparable to the intellectuals in theeconomics department? 
 First of all, there
is
a social control problem. It's just that we've transcended it.Galileo faced it, for example. You go back a couple of centuries in the West and thesocial control problem was very severe. Descartes is alleged to have destroyed thefinal volume of his treatise on the world, the one that was supposed to deal with thehuman mind, because he learned of the fate of Galileo. That's something like the
 
death squads. The Inquisition was doing precisely that. Okay, that's past, in theWest, at least. Not everywhere.
Why is it past? In other words, what is it about a society in the West that enables at least that kind of pursuit of knowledge to be free to go wherever it goes, but not in,say, Moslem society? 
 There are a number of reasons. One of them is just increase in freedom andenlightenment. We've become a much freer society than we were in absolutist times.Popular struggles over centuries have enlarged the domain of freedom. Intellectualshave often played a role in this, during the Enlightenment, for example, in breakingbarriers and creating a space for greater freedom of thought. That often took a lot of courage and quite a struggle. And it goes on until today. But there are other factors,too. It's utilitarian. It turns out that with modern science, especially in the lastcentury or two, the ability to gain deeper understanding of the world has interactedcritically with modern economic development, modern power. In fact, the course of science and the course of military endeavors is very close, way back to Archimedes.Archimedes was after all designing devices for military purposes. And militarytechnology and science, their history closely interweaves in the modern period,particularly since the mid-nineteenth century. The sciences have actually begun tocontribute materially to industrial development. So there are utilitarian purposes, butI wouldn't overexaggerate them. It's like the kind of result that led to freedom inother domains, like slavery, let's say. Or after a hundred and fifty years of Americanhistory women were allowed to vote. Things like that. These are significant.Back to the point, especially after the great scientific revelations of the seventeenthcentury, it got to the point where you simply couldn't do science if you weresubjected to the doctrinal controls that are quite effective outside the hard sciences.You can't do it. You try to be a physicist after Newton spinning off ideologicalfanaticism, and you're just out of the game. Progress was too much. It's striking. Youcan see it right here in Cambridge. I've lived here almost all my adult life. There aretwo major academic institutions only a couple of miles apart. One of them is scienceand technology based, MIT. The other has sciences of course, but the tone of it isbasically humanities and social sciences, Harvard. And the atmosphere is radicallydifferent.In fact, there is a funny problem in the natural sciences. That is that there is aninternal conflict. The goal, and in fact what you're being paid for, to put is crassly,why you're being given the opportunities, is to find out the truth about the world.And you can't do that under doctrinal constraints. So there's a tension. On the onehand it just
has
to be free, and it just has to encourage independent thought. On theother hand, people with power and authority want it to be constrained. Thatcontradiction is much more striking in the natural sciences than it is in the socialsciences or humanities. You can tell falsehoods forever there.
But that implies that in the social sciences and economics and so on, to be crass,what they're being paid for is not to find the truth but something else.
 They are performing their role as long as they provide ideological services. To makeit simple, take, say, modern economic theory, with its sort of free-market ideology.Planners in business and government are not going to waste their time followingthose rules. So the U.S. has a steel industry because it radically violated those rules.It was able to recover its steel industry in the last ten years under allegedly free-
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