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Three, two, one, take two. Good morning.
Welcome to Erin Mills Town Centre, the home
of the world's largest permanent point of purchase
video wall installation. My name is
Kelvin Flook and I'm your video host all day
here at EMTV. I want to take this opportunity
to extend a very special and warm welcome to
the film crew from Necessary Illusions. We've
got an excellent li ne-up of television programming
for you today, so let's get on with it.
So how long have they been working on this documentary?
Gosh , they've been working on it- I don't
know how long, but every country I show up
they're always there.
They're there, huh
They were in England, they were in Japan-all
over the place. They must have five hundred
hours worth of tape by now.
Wow. J bet they put together a real doozie
when they're done, huh
I can't imagine who's going to want to hear
somebody talk for an hour, but I guess they
know what they're doing
So, where are you all from?
Florida.
Florida?
Yeah, Gulf Coast.
You all talk like a chorus.
(Giggle)
We're making a film about Noam Chomsky.
Does anyone know who Noam Chomsky is'?
NO ..
Good afternoon and welcome to "Wyoming
Talks ." My guest today is well-known
intellectual Noam Chomsky. Thank you for
being on our program today . Very glad to be here.
Well, I know probably the main purpose for
your trip to Wyoming is to discuss "thought
control in a democratic society ," Now, all right,
say I'm just Jane USA and I say, "Well , gee, this
is a democratic society and what do you mean
'thought control''? I make up my own mind. I
create my own destiny." •
What would you say to her?
Weill would suggest that Jane take a close look
at the way the media operate, the way the
public relations industry operates; the extensive
thinking that's been going on for a long, long
period about the necessity for finding ways to
marginalize and control the public in
democratic societies.
But particularly to look at
the evidence that's been accumulated about the
way the major media , the sort of agenda-setting
media-I mean the national press and the
television and so on- the way they shape and
control the kinds of opinions that appear, the
kinds of information that comes through , the
sources to which they go, and so on, and I think
that Jane will find some very surprising things
out about the democratic system.
I'd like to welcome all of you to this lecture
today. Several years ago, Professor Chomsky
was described in The New York Times Book Review
as follows: 'Judged in terms of the power, range,
novelty and influence of his thought, Noam
Chomsky is arguably the most important
intellectual alive." Professor Noam Chomsky.
I gather there are some people out behind that
blackness there but if I don't look you in the eye
it's 'cause I don't see you, all I see is the blackness.
Perhaps I ought to begin by reporting something
that's never read-the line about the "arguably
the most important intellectual" in the world
and so on comes from a publisher's blurb. And
you always got to watch those things
because if you go back to the original
you'll find that that sentence is actually there
this is in The New York Times-but the next
sentence is: "Since that's the case, how can he
write such terrible things about American
foreign policy,"
And they never quote that part.
But in fact if it wasn't for that second sentence I
would begin to think that I'm doing something
wrong. And I'm not joking about that. It's true
that the emperor doesn't have any clothes, but
the emperor doesn't like to be told it, and the
emperor's lapdogs like The New York Times are not
going to enjoy the experience if you do.
Good evening, I'm Bill Moyers. What's more
dangerous, the big stick or the big lie,
Governments have used both against their own
people. Tonight I'll be talking with a man who
has been thinking about how we can see the
developing lie . He says that propaganda is to
democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.
But he hasn't lost faith in the power of common
people to speak up for the truth.
You have said that we live entangled in webs
of endless deceit, that we live in a highly
indoctrinated society where elementary truths
are easily buried. Elementary truths such as ..?
Such as the fact that we invaded South Vietnam.
Or the fact that we're standing in the way of
significant-and have for years-of significant
moves towards arms negotiations-or the fact
that the military system is to a substantial
extent-not totally-but to a substantial extent,
a mechanism by which the general population is
compelled to provide a subsidy to high technology
industry. Since they're not going to
do it if you ask them to, you have to deceive
them into doing it. There are many truths like
that, and we don't face them .
Do you believe in common sense'? I mean you're a
Absolutely, I believe in Cartesian common
sense. I think people have the capacities to see
through the deceit in which they are ensnared,
but they've got to make the effort.
Seems a little incongruous to hear a man from
the ivory tower of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, a scholar, a distinguished
linguistics scholar, talk about common people
with such appreciation .
I think that scholarship. at least the field that I
work in, has the opposite consequences. My
own studies in language and human cognition
demonstrate to me at least what remarkable
creativity ordinary people have. The very fact
that people talk to one another is a reflection
just in a normal way, I don't mean anything
particularly fancy- reflects deep-seated features
of human creativity which in fact separate
human beings from any other biological system
we know.
Tonight. Scientists talk to the animals, but are
they talking back?
The Journal. With Barbara
Frum and Mary Lou Findlay.
Communicating with animals is a serious
scientific pursuit.
This is Nim Chimpsky. Nim, jokingly named
after the great linguist Noam Chomsky, was the
great hope of anima l communication in the
1970s. For four years Petitto and others coached
him in sign language, but in the end they
decided it was a lost cause. Nim could ask for
things, but not much more.
I would have loved to have a conversation with
Nim and understand how he looked at the
universe. He failed to communicate that
information to me. And we gave him every
opportunity.
Noam Chomsky, theorist of language and
political activist, has had an extraordinary career.
I can think of none like it in recent American
history and few anywhere at any time. He has
literally transformed the subject of linguistics.
At the same time he has become one of the
most consistent critics of power politics in all its
protean guises. Scholar and propagandist, his
two careers apparently reinforce each other.
In 1957 he published his Syntactic Structures, which
began what has frequently been called the
Chomskyan Revolution in linguistics.
Like a latter-day Copernicus, Chomsky proposed a
radically new way of looking at the theory of
grammar.
Chomsky worked out the formal rules
of a universal grammar which generated the
specific rules of actual or natural languages.
The general approach I'm taking seems to me
rather simple-minded and unsophisticated- but
nevertheless correct.
Maybe I will use the blackboard .
Later he came to argue that such systems are
innate features of human beings; they belong to
the characteristics of the species, and have
been , in effect, programmed into the genetic
equipment of the mind like the machine
language in a computer.
One needn't be interested in this question, of
course. I am interested in it. And the interesting
question from this point of view would be:
What is the nature of the initial state? That is,
what is human nature in this respect?
That in turn explains the
astonishing-you try the next one
f..a .. c .. i..I .. ee .. tee
Facility.
Facility.
That in turn explains the astonishing facility
that children have in learning the rules of
natural language, no matter how complicated,
incredibly quickly, from what are imperfect and
often degenerate samples.
Complain-
Complicated
Complicated-
It's a complicated word. You know what
complicated means? It means it's complicated.
If in fact our minds were a blank slate and
experience wrote on them we would be very
impoverished creatures indeed. So the obvious
hypothesis is that our language is the result of
the unfolding of a genetically determined
program. Well, plainly there are different
languages; in fact the apparent variation of
languages is quite superficial.
It's certain-as certain as anything is-that
humans are not genetically programmed to
learn one or another language. So you bring up
a Japanese baby in Boston, it will speak Boston
English. If you bring up my child in Japan, it'll
speak Japanese. From that it simply follows by
logic that the basic structure of the languages
must be essentially the same.
Our task as scientists is to try to determine
exactly what those fundamental principles are
that cause the knowledge of language to unfold
in the manner in which it does under particular
circumstances, and, incidentally, I think there is
no doubt the same must be true of other aspects
of human intelligence and systems of
understanding and interpretation and moral and
aesthetic judgment, and so on.
The implications of these views have washed
over the fields of psychology, education,
sociology, philosophy, literary criticism and
logic.
In the fifties and sixties, the bridge between
your theoretical work and your political work
seems to have been the attack on behaviorism.
But now behaviorism is no longer an issue-or
so it seems-so how does this leave the link
between your linguistics and your politics?
Well , I've always regarded the link- I've never
really perceived much of a link to tell you the
truth.
Again I would be very pleased to be able to
discover intellectually convincing connections
between my own anarchist convictions on the
one hand and what I think I can demonstrate, or
at least begin to see about the nature of human
intelligence on the other. But I simply can't find
intellectually satisfying connections between
those two domains. I can discover some tenuous
points of contact.
If it is correct , as I believe it is, that a
fundamental element of human nature is the
need for creative work o r creative inquiry, for
free creation without the arbitrary limiting
effects of coercive institutions, then of course it
will follow that a decent society should
maximize the possibilities for t his fundamental
human characteristic to be realized . Now, a
federated , decentralized system of free
associations incorporating economic as well as
social institutions would be what I refer to as
anarcho-syndicalism. And it seems to me that it
is the appropriate form of social organization
for an advanced techno logical society, in which
human beings do not have' to be forced in to the