Tor Wennerberg: One idea that I find extremely interesting and fascinating is the notion that just as our language capabilities are genetically determined, so is our capacity – as human beings – for moral judgment. What do you see as the implications of the idea that our moral capacity is innate?
Noam Chomsky: Well, for one thing, I don’t think it can really be much of a question. (That’s not to say we understand anything about it.) But, the fact of the matter is that we’re constantly making moral judgments in new situations, and over a substantial range we do it in a convergent fashion – we don’t differ randomly and wildly from one another. Furthermore, young children do it, very quickly, and they also converge.
Of course, there are cultural and social and historical effects, but even for those to operate, they must be operating on something. If you look at this range of phenomena, there are only two possibilities: one is, it’s a miracle, and the other is, it’s rooted in our nature. It’s rooted in our nature in the same sense in which language is, or for that matter, having arms and legs is. And it takes different forms depending on the circumstances, just as arms and legs depend on nutrition, and language depends on my not having heard Swedish when I was six months old and so on. But basically, it must be something that flows out of our nature, or otherwise we’d never use it in any systematic way, except just repeating what happened before. So, it’s got to be there.
What are the implications? One implication is, we ought to be interested in finding out what it is. We’d learn something important about ourselves. You can’t hope at this stage that we’re beginning to learn anything from biology. Biology doesn’t begin to reach that far. In principle it should, but right now it deals with much tinier problems. It has a hard time figuring out how bees function, let alone humans.
But I think we can learn things by history and experience. Take, say, the debate over big issues like slavery or women’s rights and so on. It wasn’t just people screaming at each other. There were arguments, in fact, interesting arguments on both sides. The pro–slavery side had very substantial arguments that are not easy to answer. But there was a kind of common moral ground in which a good bit of the debate took place, and as it resolved, which it essentially did, you see a consciousness emerging of what really is right, which must mean it reflects our built – in conception of what’s right. And that’s something that we learn more about over time, we get more insight into what’s coming out of our nature. The implications are very substantial, to the extent that we can understand them. It’s better to have a conscious understanding of what’s guiding you, to the extent you can, than just to react intuitively, without understanding. That’s true whether you’re a carpenter reacting to how to form wood artifacts or a moral human being reacting to how to decide between behaviors toward others.
we just make the thought experiment that a whole generation of children were given the opportunity to grow up in a truly loving and respectful environment, through liberatory child – rearing, so that they would be able to fully develop their moral capacity, would it then, do you think, be impossible to uphold a social order based on vast inequality and elite rule?
wouldn’t say it’s impossible, but I would think it would generate very considerable resistance. Actually, it always generates resistance. And it would generate even more in that case. It’s a striking fact, if you look at the notion of equality, take our own history, from the Greeks to the present, it’s very striking that just about every leading figure has regarded equality as an obvious desideratum.
Take the earliest serious work on politics, Aristotle’s Politics. Well he points out that he’s not a great fan of democracy, it’s the best of a bunch of bad systems. But he said a democracy cannot function if there are extremes of wealth. Everyone has to be roughly equal – everyone has to be middle class, he said. And in fact, he called for a super welfare state. He said in any democratic society, public resources will have to be used in ways that he outlines, like communal meals, to ensure that the poor are relatively well off and that there are no big differences. Otherwise, it’s impossible to have a properly functioning democracy…I think this is a deep sentiment, and an understandable one, and we all recognize, at some core of our being, that there’s something quite wrong with one person having superfluities and another person starving. You find that all the way through the tradition, in people’s actions, in literature.
And now, just looking at the latest Human Development Report, the figures on the combined wealth of the 250 – something richest individuals in the world...
But you noticed that they criticized it. They don’t say, isn’t this wonderful? They say it’s something wrong. In fact everybody says there’s something wrong. The only arguments that support it are saying, really everybody benefits because it trickles down. The arguments are ludicrous, but it’s interesting that they have to give the arguments. The arguments for defensive war are often equally ludicrous.
If we consider the likelihood that we as humans have an instinct for creativity and a moral instinct, what is it in the way our system of education is functioning, that perverts or inhibits these instincts from fully developing themselves?
A good educational system ought to nurture and encourage these aspects of human life and allow them to flourish. But of course that has problems. For one thing it means that you will encourage challenge of authority and domination. It will encourage questioning of powerful institutions. The fact of the matter is that honesty, integrity, creativity, all these things we’re supposed to value, all run up dramatically against the hierarchic, authoritarian structure of the institutional framework in which we live. And since that structure is what sets the basic framework in which things happen, it becomes virtually contradictory to implement the values that you talk about in church on Sunday morning. So you put the values to the side, to the Sunday Service, and get on with existing the rest of the time. So Sunday is when you say, yeah, love and kindness and charity and equality and all that stuff are the soul of life. But the other six days of the week you’re working within institutions of authority and domination and control and self–enrichment and so on and you must comply or suffer even graver consequences for not complying.
And schools are like that. So the way schools actually function – of course it’s not 100 percent, because there is a contradiction, so all sorts of aspects show themselves depending on the teacher and so on – but, by and large, there’s a very strong tendency which works its way out in the long run and on average, for the schools to have a kind of filtering effect. They filter out independence of thought, creativity, imagination, and in their place foster obedience and subordination. I think everyone knows this from their own history. Like, how did I get to a good college myself? I was always very critical and dissident. But I got there by shutting up! I went through high school, thinking it was all really stupid and authoritarian and boring, but I was obedient, I was quiet, I wasn’t a behavior problem, I didn’t tell the teacher what I thought he was teaching was ludicrous when I thought it was. And I made it to a good college.
There are people who don’t accept, who aren’t obedient. They are weeded out, they’re driving taxi cabs, they’re behavior problems. The long–term effect of this is to reward and foster subordination; it begins in kindergarten and goes all the way through your professional or other career. If you challenge authority, you get in one or another kind of trouble. Again, it’s not 100 percent the case, and there are some areas of life were it’s dramatically not the case, but on average and overwhelmingly in the outcomes, it holds.
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