|
Education is
Ignorance
By Noam Chomsky
Excerpted from Class Warfare, 1995, pp. 19-23, 27-31
01/04/08 "ICH" -- -- DAVID BARSAMIAN: One of the heroes
of the current right-wing revival... is Adam Smith. You've done
some pretty impressive research on Smith that has excavated... a
lot of information that's not coming out. You've often quoted
him describing the "vile maxim of the masters of mankind: all
for ourselves and nothing for other people."
NOAM CHOMSKY: I didn't do any research at all on Smith. I just
read him. There's no research. Just read it. He's
pre-capitalist, a figure of the Enlightenment. What we would
call capitalism he despised. People read snippets of Adam Smith,
the few phrases they teach in school. Everybody reads the first
paragraph of The Wealth of Nations where he talks about how
wonderful the division of labor is. But not many people get to
the point hundreds of pages later, where he says that division
of labor will destroy human beings and turn people into
creatures as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human
being to be. And therefore in any civilized society the
government is going to have to take some measures to prevent
division of labor from proceeding to its limits.
He did give an argument for markets, but the argument was that
under conditions of perfect liberty, markets will lead to
perfect equality. That's the argument for them, because he
thought that equality of condition (not just opportunity) is
what you should be aiming at. It goes on and on. He gave a
devastating critique of what we would call North-South policies.
He was talking about England and India. He bitterly condemned
the British experiments they were carrying out which were
devastating India.
He also made remarks which ought to be truisms about the way
states work. He pointed out that its totally senseless to talk
about a nation and what we would nowadays call "national
interests." He simply observed in passing, because it's so
obvious, that in England, which is what he's discussing -- and
it was the most democratic society of the day -- the principal
architects of policy are the "merchants and manufacturers," and
they make certain that their own interests are, in his words,
"most peculiarly attended to," no matter what the effect on
others, including the people of England who, he argued, suffered
from their policies. He didn't have the data to prove it at the
time, but he was probably right.
This truism was, a century later, called class analysis, but you
don't have to go to Marx to find it. It's very explicit in Adam
Smith. It's so obvious that any ten-year-old can see it. So he
didn't make a big point of it. He just mentioned it. But that's
correct. If you read through his work, he's intelligent. He's a
person who was from the Enlightenment. His driving motives were
the assumption that people were guided by sympathy and feelings
of solidarity and the need for control of their own work, much
like other Enlightenment and early Romantic thinkers. He's part
of that period, the Scottish Enlightenment.
The version of him that's given today is just ridiculous. But I
didn't have to any research to find this out. All you have to do
is read. If you're literate, you'll find it out. I did do a
little research in the way it's treated, and that's interesting.
For example, the University of Chicago, the great bastion of
free market economics, etc., etc., published a bicentennial
edition of the hero, a scholarly edition with all the footnotes
and the introduction by a Nobel Prize winner, George Stigler, a
huge index, a real scholarly edition. That's the one I used.
It's the best edition. The scholarly framework was very
interesting, including Stigler's introduction. It's likely he
never opened The Wealth of Nations. Just about everything he
said about the book was completely false. I went through a bunch
of examples in writing about it, in Year 501 and elsewhere.
But even more interesting in some ways was the index. Adam Smith
is very well known for his advocacy of division of labor. Take a
look at "division of labor" in the index and there are lots and
lots of things listed. But there's one missing, namely his
denunciation of division of labor, the one I just cited. That's
somehow missing from the index. It goes on like this. I wouldn't
call this research because it's ten minutes' work, but if you
look at the scholarship, then it's interesting.
I want to be clear about this. There is good Smith scholarship.
If you look at the serious Smith scholarship, nothing I'm saying
is any surprise to anyone. How could it be? You open the book
and you read it and it's staring you right in the face. On the
other hand if you look at the myth of Adam Smith, which is the
only one we get, the discrepancy between that and the reality is
enormous.
This is true of classical liberalism in general. The founders of
classical liberalism, people like Adam Smith and Wilhelm von
Humboldt, who is one of the great exponents of classical
liberalism, and who inspired John Stuart Mill -- they were what
we would call libertarian socialists, at least that ïs the way I
read them. For example, Humboldt, like Smith, says, Consider a
craftsman who builds some beautiful thing. Humboldt says if he
does it under external coercion, like pay, for wages, we may
admire what he does but we despise what he is. On the other
hand, if he does it out of his own free, creative expression of
himself, under free will, not under external coercion of wage
labor, then we also admire what he is because he's a human
being. He said any decent socioeconomic system will be based on
the assumption that people have the freedom to inquire and
create -- since that's the fundamental nature of humans -- in
free association with others, but certainly not under the kinds
of external constraints that came to be called capitalism.
It's the same when you read Jefferson. He lived a half century
later, so he saw state capitalism developing, and he despised
it, of course. He said it's going to lead to a form of
absolutism worse than the one we defended ourselves against. In
fact, if you run through this whole period you see a very clear,
sharp critique of what we would later call capitalism and
certainly of the twentieth century version of it, which is
designed to destroy individual, even entrepreneurial capitalism.
There's a side current here which is rarely looked at but which
is also quite fascinating. That's the working class literature
of the nineteenth century. They didn't read Adam Smith and
Wilhelm von Humboldt, but they're saying the same things. Read
journals put out by the people called the "factory girls of
Lowell," young women in the factories, mechanics, and other
working people who were running their own newspapers. It's the
same kind of critique. There was a real battle fought by working
people in England and the U.S. to defend themselves against what
they called the degradation and oppression and violence of the
industrial capitalist system, which was not only dehumanizing
them but was even radically reducing their intellectual level.
So, you go back to the mid-nineteenth century and these
so-called "factory girls," young girls working in the Lowell
[Massachusetts] mills, were reading serious contemporary
literature. They recognized that the point of the system was to
turn them into tools who would be manipulated, degraded, kicked
around, and so on. And they fought against it bitterly for a
long period. That's the history of the rise of capitalism.
The other part of the story is the development of corporations,
which is an interesting story in itself. Adam Smith didn't say
much about them, but he did criticize the early stages of them.
Jefferson lived long enough to see the beginnings, and he was
very strongly opposed to them. But the development of
corporations really took place in the early twentieth century
and very late in the nineteenth century. Originally,
corporations existed as a public service. People would get
together to build a bridge and they would be incorporated for
that purpose by the state. They built the bridge and that's it.
They were supposed to have a public interest function. Well into
the 1870s, states were removing corporate charters. They were
granted by the state. They didn't have any other authority. They
were fictions. They were removing corporate charters because
they weren't serving a public function. But then you get into
the period of the trusts and various efforts to consolidate
power that were beginning to be made in the late nineteenth
century. It's interesting to look at the literature. The courts
didn't really accept it. There were some hints about it. It
wasn't until the early twentieth century that courts and lawyers
designed a new socioeconomic system. It was never done by
legislation. It was done mostly by courts and lawyers and the
power they could exercise over individual states. New Jersey was
the first state to offer corporations any right they wanted. Of
course, all the capital in the country suddenly started to flow
to New Jersey, for obvious reasons. Then the other states had to
do the same thing just to defend themselves or be wiped out.
It's kind of a small-scale globalization. Then the courts and
the corporate lawyers came along and created a whole new body of
doctrine which gave corporations authority and power that they
never had before. If you look at the background of it, it's the
same background that led to fascism and Bolshevism. A lot of it
was supported by people called progressives, for these reasons:
They said, individual rights are gone. We are in a period of
corporatization of power, consolidation of power,
centralization. That's supposed to be good if you're a
progressive, like a Marxist-Leninist. Out of that same
background came three major things: fascism, Bolshevism, and
corporate tyranny. They all grew out of the same more or less
Hegelian roots. It's fairly recent. We think of corporations as
immutable, but they were designed. It was a conscious design
which worked as Adam Smith said: the principal architects of
policy consolidate state power and use it for their interests.
It was certainly not popular will. It's basically court
decisions and lawyers' decisions, which created a form of
private tyranny which is now more massive in many ways than even
state tyranny was. These are major parts of modern twentieth
century history. The classical liberals would be horrified. They
didn't even imagine this. But the smaller things that they saw,
they were already horrified about. This would have totally
scandalized Adam Smith or Jefferson or anyone like that....
BARSAMIAN: ....You're very patient with people, particularly
people who ask the most inane kinds of questions. Is this
something you've cultivated?
CHOMSKY: First of all, I'm usually fuming inside, so what you
see on the outside isn't necessarily what's inside. But as far
as questions, the only thing I ever get irritated about is elite
intellectuals, the stuff they do I do find irritating. I
shouldn't. I should expect it. But I do find it irritating. But
on the other hand, what you're describing as inane questions
usually strike me as perfectly honest questions. People have no
reason to believe anything other than what they're saying. If
you think about where the questioner is coming from, what the
person has been exposed to, that's a very rational and
intelligent question. It may sound inane from some other point
of view, but it's not at all inane from within the framework in
which it's being raised. It's usually quite reasonable. So
there's nothing to be irritated about.
You may be sorry about the conditions in which the questions
arise. The thing to do is to try to help them get out of their
intellectual confinement, which is not just accidental, as I
mentioned. There are huge efforts that do go into making people,
to borrow Adam Smith's phrase, "as stupid and ignorant as it is
possible for a human being to be." A lot of the educational
system is designed for that, if you think about it, it's
designed for obedience and passivity. From childhood, a lot of
it is designed to prevent people from being independent and
creative. If you're independent-minded in school, you're
probably going to get into trouble very early on. That's not the
trait that's being preferred or cultivated. When people live
through all this stuff, plus corporate propaganda, plus
television, plus the press and the whole mass, the deluge of
ideological distortion that goes on, they ask questions that
from another point of view are completely reasonable....
BARSAMIAN: At the Mellon lecture that you gave in Chicago... you
focused primarily on the ideas of John Dewey and Bertrand
Russell [regarding education]...
CHOMSKY: ... These were highly libertarian ideas. Dewey himself
comes straight from the American mainstream. People who read
what he actually said would now consider him some far-out
anti-American lunatic or something. He was expressing mainstream
thinking before the ideological system had so grotesquely
distorted the tradition. By now, it's unrecognizable. For
example, not only did he agree with the whole Enlightenment
tradition that, as he put it, "the goal of production is to
produce free people," -- "free men," he said, but that's many
years ago. That's the goal of production, not to produce
commodities. He was a major theorist of democracy. There were
many different, conflicting strands of democratic theory, but
the one I'm talking about held that democracy requires
dissolution of private power. He said as long as there is
private control over the economic system, talk about democracy
is a joke. Repeating basically Adam Smith, Dewey said, Politics
is the shadow that big business casts over society. He said
attenuating the shadow doesn't do much. Reforms are still going
to leave it tyrannical. Basically, a classical liberal view. His
main point was that you can't even talk about democracy until
you have democratic control of industry, commerce, banking,
everything. That means control by the people who work in the
institutions, and the communities.
These are standard libertarian socialist and anarchist ideas
which go straight back to the Enlightenment, an outgrowth of the
views of the kind that we were talking about before from
classical liberalism. Dewey represented these in the modern
period, as did Bertrand Russell, from another tradition, but
again with roots in the Enlightenment. These were two of the
major, if not the two major thinkers, of the twentieth century,
whose ideas are about as well known as the real Adam Smith.
Which is a sign of how efficient the educational system has
been, and the propaganda system, in simply destroying even our
awareness of our own immediate intellectual background.
BARSAMIAN: In that same Mellon lecture, you paraphrased Russell
on education. You said that he promoted the idea that education
is not to be viewed as something like filling a vessel with
water, but rather assisting a flower to grow in its own way...
CHOMSKY: That's an eighteenth century idea. I don't know if
Russell knew about it or reinvented it, but you read that as
standard in early Enlightenment literature. That's the image
that was used... Humboldt, the founder of classical liberalism,
his view was that education is a matter of laying out a string
along which the child will develop, but in its own way. You may
do some guiding. That's what serious education would be from
kindergarten up through graduate school. You do get it in
advanced science, because there's no other way to do it.
But most of the educational system is quite different. Mass
education was designed to turn independent farmers into docile,
passive tools of production. That was its primary purpose. And
don't think people didn't know it. They knew it and they fought
against it. There was a lot of resistance to mass education for
exactly that reason. It was also understood by the elites.
Emerson once said something about how we're educating them to
keep them from our throats. If you don't educate them, what we
call "education," they're going to take control -- "they" being
what Alexander Hamilton called the "great beast," namely the
people. The anti-democratic thrust of opinion in what are called
democratic societies is really ferocious. And for good reason.
Because the freer the society gets, the more dangerous the great
beast becomes and the more you have to be careful to cage it
somehow.
On the other hand, there are exceptions, and Dewey and Russell
are among those exceptions. But they are completely marginalized
and unknown, although everybody sings praises to them, as they
do to Adam Smith. What they actually said would be considered
intolerable in the autocratic climate of dominant opinion. The
totalitarian element of it is quite striking. The very fact that
the concept "anti-American" can exist -- forget the way it's
used -- exhibits a totalitarian streak that's pretty dramatic.
That concept, anti-Americanism -- the only real counterpart to
it in the modern world is anti-Sovietism. In the Soviet Union,
the worst crime was to be anti-Soviet. That's the hallmark of a
totalitarian society, to have concepts like anti-Sovietism or
anti-Americanism. Here it's considered quite natural. Books on
anti-Americanism, by people who are basically Stalinist clones,
are highly respected. That's true of Anglo-American societies,
which are strikingly the more democratic societies. I think
there's a correlation there...As freedom grows, the need to
coerce and control opinion also grows if you want to prevent the
great beast from doing something with its freedom....
... Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis, two economists, in their work on
the American educational system some years back... pointed out
that the educational system is divided into fragments. The part
that's directed toward working people and the general population
is indeed designed to impose obedience. But the education for
elites can't quite do that. It has to allow creativity and
independence. Otherwise they won't be able to do their job of
making money. You find the same thing in the press. That's why I
read the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times and
Business Week. They just have to tell the truth. That's a
contradiction in the mainstream press, too. Take, say, the New
York Times or the Washington Post. They have dual functions and
they're contradictory. One function is to subdue the great
beast. But another function is to let their audience, which is
an elite audience, gain a tolerably realistic picture of what's
going on in the world. Otherwise, they won't be able to satisfy
their own needs. That's a contradiction that runs right through
the educational system as well. It's totally independent of
another factor, namely just professional integrity, which a lot
of people have: honesty, no matter what the external constraints
are. That leads to various complexities. If you really look at
the details of how the newspapers work, you find these
contradictions and problems playing themselves out in
complicated ways....
Click on "comments" below to read or post comments
Comment Guidelines
Be succinct, constructive and
relevant to the story.
We encourage engaging, diverse
and meaningful commentary. Do not include
personal information such as names, addresses,
phone numbers and emails. Comments falling
outside our guidelines – those including
personal attacks and profanity – are not
permitted.
See our complete
Comment Policy
and
use this link to notify us if you have concerns
about a comment.
We’ll promptly review and remove any
inappropriate postings.
Send Page To a Friend
In accordance
with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational
purposes. Information Clearing House has no
affiliation whatsoever with the originator of
this article nor is Information ClearingHouse
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
|
