It seems that most political intellectuals are at least somewhat inclined towards a technocratic worldview. Even if they might subscribe to some other doctrine, like democracy, they still frame their preference in terms of knowledge and competence. So if they profess to like democracy, it is because the population gets to put a check on the representatives, who will then be less likely to be corrupted. The attributes of a good representative is still expertise and political experience, and the attributes of a good voter is on who is “well informed”, i.e., one that has read up on the issues and policies.
Noam Chomsky, in contrast, lets expertise take a backseat to common sense. People have a “Cartesian common sense”, a general ability to grasp the world intuitively without learning advanced specialized theories [1]. [[1] All quotes are from here]
Now it seems to me that the same intellectual skill and capacity for understanding and for accumulating evidence and gaining information and thinking through problems could be used — would be used — under different systems of governance which involve popular participation in important decision-making, in areas that really matter to human life.
There are questions that are hard. There are areas where you need specialized knowledge. I’m not suggesting a kind of anti-intellectualism. But the point is that many things can be understood quite well without a very far-reaching, specialized knowledge. And in fact even a specialized knowledge in these areas is not beyond the reach of people who happen to be interested.
And although some subjects require expertise in order to navigate, things pertaining to human affairs are easy to grasp, he thinks. The political implications of this is that the average citizen has the capacity to have informed opinions on things like geopolitics without studying some field like IR first.
QUESTION: I asked a while ago whether people are inhibited by the aura of expertise. Can one turn this around — are experts and intellectuals afraid of people who could apply the intelligence of sport to their own areas of competency in foreign affairs, social sciences, and so on?
CHOMSKY: I suspect that this is rather common. Those areas of inquiry that have to do with problems of immediate human concern do not happen to be particularly profound or inaccessible to the ordinary person lacking any special training who takes the trouble to learn something about them. Commentary on public affairs in the mainstream literature is often shallow and uninformed. Everyone who writes and speaks about these matters knows how much you can get away with as long as you keep close to received doctrine. I’m sure just about everyone exploits these privileges. I know I do. When I refer to Nazi crimes or Soviet atrocities, for example, I know that I will not be called upon to back up what I say, but a detailed scholarly apparatus is necessary if I say anything critical about the practice of one of the Holy States: the United States itself, or Israel, since it was enshrined by the intelligentsia after its 1967 victory.
Rather than expertise being front and center, “everyman” common sense becomes the focal point of politics. The informed citizen isn’t the one who can recite policy decision and how many Supreme Court justices there are, but the citizen who synthesizes all matter of knowledge in order to draw their own conclusions about where the world is headed.
Does Noam Chomsky’s “Cartesian common sense” approach to politics belong to some school of thought?
QUESTION: You’ve written about the way that professional ideologists and the mandarins obfuscate reality. And you have spoken — in some places you call it a “Cartesian common sense” — of the common sense capacities of people. Indeed, you place a significant emphasis on this common sense when you reveal the ideological aspects of arguments, especially in contemporary social science. What do you mean by common sense? What does it mean in a society like ours? For example, you’ve written that within a highly competitive, fragmented society, it’s very difficult for people to become aware of what their interests are. If you are not able to participate in the political system in meaningful ways, if you are reduced to the role of a passive spectator, then what kind of knowledge do you have? How can common sense emerge in this context?
CHOMSKY: Well, let me give an example. When I’m driving, I sometimes turn on the radio and I find very often that what I’m listening to is a discussion of sports. These are telephone conversations. People call in and have long and intricate discussions, and it’s plain that quite a high degree of thought and analysis is going into that. People know a tremendous amount. They know all sorts of complicated details and enter into far-reaching discussion about whether the coach made the right decision yesterday and so on. These are ordinary people, not professionals, who are applying their intelligence and analytic skills in these areas and accumulating quite a lot of knowledge and, for all I know, understanding. On the other hand, when I hear people talk about, say, international affairs or domestic problems, it’s at a level of superficiality that’s beyond belief.
In part, this reaction may be due to my own areas of interest, but I think it’s quite accurate, basically. And I think that this concentration on such topics as sports makes a certain degree of sense. The way the system is set up, there is virtually nothing people can do anyway, without a degree of organization that’s far beyond anything that exists now, to influence the real world. They might as well live in a fantasy world, and that’s in fact what they do. I’m sure they are using their common sense and intellectual skills, but in an area which has no meaning and probably thrives because it has no meaning, as a displacement from the serious problems which one cannot influence and affect because the power happens to lie elsewhere.
Now it seems to me that the same intellectual skill and capacity for understanding and for accumulating evidence and gaining information and thinking through problems could be used — would be used — under different systems of governance which involve popular participation in important decision-making, in areas that really matter to human life.
There are questions that are hard. There are areas where you need specialized knowledge. I’m not suggesting a kind of anti-intellectualism. But the point is that many things can be understood quite well without a very far-reaching, specialized knowledge. And in fact even a specialized knowledge in these areas is not beyond the reach of people who happen to be interested. […]
When I talk about, say, Cartesian common sense, what I mean is that it does not require very far-reaching, specialized knowledge to perceive that the United States was invading South Vietnam. And, in fact, to take apart the system of illusions and deception which functions to prevent understanding of contemporary reality, that’s not a task that requires extraordinary skill or understanding. It requires the kind of normal skepticism and willingness to apply one’s analytical skills that almost all people have and that they can exercise. It just happens that they exercise them in analyzing what the New England Patriots ought to do next Sunday instead of questions that really matter for human life, their own included. […]
QUESTION: I asked a while ago whether people are inhibited by the aura of expertise. Can one turn this around — are experts and intellectuals afraid of people who could apply the intelligence of sport to their own areas of competency in foreign affairs, social sciences, and so on?
CHOMSKY: I suspect that this is rather common. Those areas of inquiry that have to do with problems of immediate human concern do not happen to be particularly profound or inaccessible to the ordinary person lacking any special training who takes the trouble to learn something about them. Commentary on public affairs in the mainstream literature is often shallow and uninformed. Everyone who writes and speaks about these matters knows how much you can get away with as long as you keep close to received doctrine. I’m sure just about everyone exploits these privileges. I know I do. When I refer to Nazi crimes or Soviet atrocities, for example, I know that I will not be called upon to back up what I say, but a detailed scholarly apparatus is necessary if I say anything critical about the practice of one of the Holy States: the United States itself, or Israel, since it was enshrined by the intelligentsia after its 1967 victory. This freedom from the requirements of evidence or even rationality is quite a convenience, as any informed reader of the journals of public opinion, or even much of the scholarly literature, will quickly discover. It makes life easy, and permits expression of a good deal of nonsense or ignorant bias with impunity, also sheer slander. Evidence is unnecessary, argument beside the point. Thus a standard charge against American dissidents or even American liberals — I’ve cited quite a few cases in print and have collected many others — is that they claim that the United States is the sole source of evil in the world or other similar idiocies; the convention is that such charges are entirely legitimate when the target is someone who does not march in the appropriate parades, and they are therefore produced without even a pretense of evidence. Adherence to the party line confers the right to act in ways that would properly be regarded as scandalous on the part of any critic of received orthodoxies. […]
QUESTION: Do you have a deep faith in reason?
CHOMSKY: I don’t have a faith in that or anything else.
QUESTION: Not even in reason?
CHOMSKY: I wouldn’t say “faith.” I think… it’s all we have. I don’t have faith that the truth will prevail if it becomes known, but we have no alternative to proceeding on that assumption, whatever its credibility may be.
Noam Chomsky: What the World is Really Like: Who Knows It — and Why (1983)
Q: Does a citizen have to have far-reaching, specialized knowledge to understand the realities of power, to understand what’s really going on?
Noam Chomsky: It’s not absolutely trivial, but I mean, as compared with intellectually complex tasks, it’s pretty slight. It’s not like the sciences. I mean, I think there’s a big effort made to make everything seem mysterious, but there are things that you have to study and know something about. But by and large, what happens in social and political life is relatively accessible. It does not take special training. It does not take unusual intelligence. What it really takes is honesty.
Q: Honesty?
Noam Chomsky: Yes, if you’re honest you can see it.
Q: Do you believe in common sense?
Noam Chomsky: 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.
Q: Seems a little incongruous to hear a man from the ivory tower of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a scholar, a distinguished linguistics scholar, talk about common people with such appreciation, and common sense.
Noam Chomsky: I think that scholarship, at least the field that I work in, has the opposite consequences.
Source: Meaningful Democracy: Noam Chomsky interviewed by Bill Moyers
Philosophically, Chomsky is a rationalist as opposed to an empiricist; he does not gather and manipulate empirical facts using experimental methods in order to arrive at general conclusions (although his work is grounded in a wealth of empirical data), but assumes that empirical phenomenon in the social world are the result of an order of relationships or principles that may be hidden but are substantially ‘given’ and will become transparent once brought to light.80 ‘In the analysis of social and political issues it is sufficient to face the facts and to be willing to follow a rational line of argument’, Chomsky declares. ‘Only Cartesian common sense, which is quite evenly distributed, is needed […] if by that you understand the willingness to look at the facts with an open mind, to put simple assumptions to the test, and to pursue an argument to its conclusion’.81
Unfortunately, Chomsky’s critique of obfuscating theoretical language in the academy has at times been unnecessarily sweeping and harsh. Linguistic posturing, he writes, has allowed ‘experts’ ‘to imitate the surface features of sciences that really have significant intellectual content’. Yet for people genuinely concerned with ‘moral issues and human rights, or over the traditional problems of man and society […] “social and behavioral science” has nothing to offer beyond trivialities’.82 ‘[I]f by theory we mean something with principles which are not obvious when you first look at them, and from which you can deduce surprising consequences and try to confirm the principles – you’re not going to find anything like that in the social world’.83 There are no useful social or political ideas, according to Chomsky, that can’t be explained at the level a high school student would understand – including his own. Chomsky’s view of Marxism is illustrative of his dismissive attitude toward political theory in general. Marx, he asserts,‘introduced some interesting concepts … notions like class, and relations of production (which Chomsky freely uses), but Marxism is ‘an irrational cult’ that belongs ‘to the history of organized religion’. […]
We must assume that there are grounds for hope in human freedom and creativity, Chomsky argues in a reformulation of Pascal’s wager in the existence of God, because this offers the only chance for a better world, while to abandon hope is to ‘guarantee that there will be no hope’.90
Like Albert Camus, Chomsky’s outlook might therefore be described as ‘pessimistic as to human destiny, optimistic as to man’.91 His politics, Edgley shows, emerge from a ‘militant optimism’ about human nature.92 Unlike Niebuhr and Morgenthau, whose realism included claims about human ‘fallenness’ or innate aggressiveness, Chomsky refuses to accept that violence and injustice are necessary or inescapable facts of the human condition.93 But while Chomsky remains militantly optimistic with regard to human nature, his analysis of the trajectory of human history and existing power structures also contains an urgency that is often literally apocalyptic in tone. The danger posed by US economic and military policies, he declares, ‘has reached the level of a threat to human survival’.94 The human race is ‘likely’ to ‘self-destruct’.95 In January of 2002, in the week before theWorld Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, Chomsky was asked in an interview whether the terms ‘optimism’ and ‘pessimism’ ‘make any sense’. He responded by quoting from Antonio Gramsci: ‘we should have “pessimism of the intellect, and optimism of the will.” The concepts definitely make sense, and I think that is how we should use them’.96
Chomsky’s claim to be a ‘pessimist of the intellect and optimist of the will’ highlights the fact that his thinking often defies easy categorisation and straddles widely assumed dichotomies in social and political theory. On the normative side of his politics, he has emphasised the importance of human agency, individual responsibility and creativity, and libertarian socialist values, which he sees as being logical extensions of rationalist and classical liberal thought. Yet analytically, Chomsky has focused on structural, systemic, and institutional aspects of state power, attempting to expose uncomfortable realities of self-interest, violence and coercion beneath the surface of the international order and even at the heart of liberal democracies. It is Chomsky’s analytical framework – his ‘pessimism of the intellect’ – that I have described as realist at its core.
Source: Noam Chomsky and the realist tradition (2009)
[Chomsky] believes/hopes that all healthy human beings have in common a Cartesian common sense, a Humean moral sense, and an “instinct for freedom,”
Source: The Individual, the State, and the Corporation (2005)
wonkmonk's notes 