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“In conversation (with David Barsamian), Chomsky is more relaxed, tentative, and discursive than he is in his books or his public speaking engagements.”

Vancouver Sun

In accordance with the spirit of paying tribute to “arguably the most important intellectual alive”, we bring to our readers a fascinating selection of dialogue excerpts between veteran radio interviewer and long time activist David Barsamian and Noam Chomsky. Together they explore and fathom the powerful maze of information, ideas and analysis on subjects that are usually best left out. They urge the listeners to evaluate, discern and condemn the illusions of corporate power and face the truth.

Learning about Chomsky

A lot of people don’t know that your given name is actually Avram. When did that switch take place?

Before I was conscious. My parents told me that when I was a couple of months old they didn’t want everyone calling me Abie, so they figured they’d switch to the second name.

Is Abie the diminutive of Noam?

No, of Avram. Avram is Abraham.

Is it Noam in Hebrew?

Yes don’t tell anybody – it means “pleasantness”.

Surely the irony was noted by your parents. You once told me there was a little bit of gender confusion around your name.

I once had to get my birth certificate for some reason. I wrote a letter to City Hall in Philadelphia. They sent me a copy. The birth certificate had my name crossed off in pencil. Some clerk didn’t believe it and changed Noam to Naomi. That’s understandable. But they also changed Avram to Avrane. I think the idea is that girls could have crazy names, but boys have to have names like John or Tom. They didn’t change M to F, so I was still male.

You talked about the demands on your time, for example, the hours you’re spending on e–mail. How do you organize your time? With the constant and ever–increasing demands on your time, how do you do it?

Badly. There’s no way to do it. There are physical limitations. The day’s twenty–four hours long. If you do one thing, you’re not doing something else.

But if you’re spending a couple of hours responding to e–mail, you’re not writing an article on linguistics or a political article for Z.

That’s a decision I made forty years ago. You cannot overcome the fact that time is finite. So you make your choices. Maybe badly, maybe well, but there’s no algorithm, no procedure to give you the right answer.

I’d like to put readers in this office space for a moment. Your desk is pretty neat right now. There are usually even higher piles of books. There are at least six or seven piles, stacks of books and papers, and on your filing cabinets even more. How do you divide your labor? You’ve just been away for about two weeks. You come back and have this avalanche of mail, phone calls, things to read. How do you get through this? What are you prioritizing here? Is there an order to this madness?

First of all, it looks remarkably neat now because while I was away they did something really nasty. They painted and cleaned the office, which I never would have permitted while I was here. So it looks surprisingly clean. You may have noticed I’m trying to take care of that.

So it does look neater than usual. But if you want to know what it’s like, you’ve been at our house. Around 4:30 this morning there was what we thought was an earthquake, a huge noise. Our bedroom is right next to the study. We went in and discovered that these big piles of books, six feet high, a couple of piles had fallen and were scattered all over the floor. That’s where I put the books that are urgent reading. Sometimes when I’m having an extremely boring phone call, I try to calculate how many centuries I’d have to live in order to read the urgent books if I were to read twenty–four hours a day, seven days a week at some speed reading pace. It’s pretty depressing. So the answer to your question is, I don’t get anywhere near doing what I would like to do.

You make yourself available for various groups all over the country. You made that choice pretty early on. Why don’t other intellectuals, other privileged people in your position, get engaged politically?

Individuals have their own reasons. Presumably the reason most don’t is because they think they’re doing the right thing. That is, I’m sure that overwhelmingly people who are supportive of atrocious acts of power and privilege do believe and convince themselves that it was the right thing to do, which is extremely easy. In fact, a standard technique of belief formation is to do something in your own interest and then to construct a framework in which that’s the right thing to do. We all know this from our own experience. We always manage to construct our own framework that says, yes, that was the right thing to do and it’s going to be good. Sometimes the conclusions are accurate. It’s not always self–deception. But it’s very easy to fall into self–deception when it’s advantageous. It’s not surprising.