[lbo-talk] Noam on Intellectuals

[Arash]

The issue for Chomsky seems to be unquestioning deference to authority. 
That is how he frames the topic in the interview below, using France as an
example just as he did in his response to Doug.  I don't agree that
situation in America is any better.  An intellectual's status may not hold
much sway over the public in the US but that doesn't translate into our
anti-intellectualism being a kind of healthy skepticism, a desire for
evidence and reasoning.  It's more of a "you're opinion is just as good as
mine" attitude.  The predictive powers of social science are such that
this might be true for a number of cases, but this is a lousy
justification for being ambivalent to analysis in this area as a whole. 
That is the same smug foolishness that guides people to dismiss global
warming because their weatherman has let them down in the past.

http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/1991----.htm

I’m always struck by the fact when traveling elsewhere, let’s say to
England, that the forms of deference and authority that people assume
automatically are generally unknown here. For example, here there’s no
problem with a university professor and a garage mechanic talking together
informally as complete equals. But that is not true in England. That’s a
very positive thing about the United States. Intellectuals in the United
States are always deploring the fact that intellectuals here aren’t taken
seriously the way they’re taken seriously in Europe. That’s one of the
good things about the United States. There’s absolutely no reason to take
them seriously for the most part. I remember in the 1960s, sometimes I
would sign an international statement against the war in Vietnam—signed by
me here, Sartre and some other person in Europe, and so on. Well, in Paris
there’d be big front-page headlines; here nobody paid any attention at
all, which was the only healthy reaction. Okay, so three guys signed a
statement; who cares? The statement signed by 120 intellectuals in the
time of the Algerian War was a major event in Paris. If a similar thing
happened here, it wouldn’t even make the newspapers—correctly.

All that reflects a kind of internalized democratic understanding and
freedom that’s extremely important. One shouldn’t underestimate it. I
think that it’s one of the reasons why we have the Pentagon system.
Compare the United States, say, with Japan. How come we had to turn to the
Pentagon system as a way to force the public to subsidize high-technology
industry, whereas Japan didn’t? They just get the public to subsidize
high-technology industry directly, through reduction of con­sumption,
fiscal measures, and soon. That makes them a lot more efficient than we
are. If you want to build the next generation of, say, computers, the
Japanese just say, “Okay, we’re going to lower consumption levels, put
this much into investment, and build computers.” If you want to do it in
the United States, you say, “Well, we’re going to build some lunatic
system to stop Soviet missiles, and for that you’re going to have to lower
your consumption level and maybe, somehow, we’ll get computers out of
that.” Obviously, the Japanese system is more much efficient. So why don’t
we adopt the more efficient system? The reason is that we’re a freer
society; we can’t do it here. In a society that’s more fascist than state
capitalist, and I mean that culturally as well as in terms of economic
institutions, you can just tell people what they’re going to do and they
do it. Here you can’t do that. No politician in the United States can get
up and say, “You guys are going to lower your standard of living next year
so that IBM can make more profit, and that’s the way it’s going to work.”
That’s not going to sell. Here you have to fool people into it by fear and
so on. We need all kinds of com­plicated mechanisms of propaganda and
coercion which in a well-run, more fascistic society are quite
unnecessary. You just give orders. That’s one of the reasons fascism is so
efficient.