Between Thought and Expression Lies a Lifetime

Why Ideas Matter

James Kelman, Noam Chomsky, James Kelman

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781629639000
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique comparée

"The world is full of information. What do we do when we get the information, when we have digested the information, what do we do then? Is there a point where ye say, yes, stop, now I shall move on."

James Kelman here offers something of why a book such of this is in front of the public. The State relies on our suffocation, that we cannot hope to learn "the truth." But whether we can or not is beside "the point." Finally, there is no "point." We must grasp the nettle, we assume control and go forward.

Kelman says, "I wanted to convey some of that sensibility with the idea of being in conversation with Noam Chomsky, of being in his presence, a sort of seminar. It is not influence. I don't see it as 'being influenced' by Chomsky. He belongs to the great tradition of teaching, of learning. We learn from him through what he does."

At its core, this exhilarating collection of essays, interviews, and correspondence—spanning the years 1988 through 2018, and reaching back a decade or more previous—is about the simple concept that ideas matter. And not only that ideas matter. But that ideas—in this case, through the lens of two engaged intellectuals—mutate, inform, inspire, and ultimately provide more fuel for thought, the actions that follow such thought, and for carrying on, and doing the work.

At the Self-Determination & Power Event

The Self-Determination & Power event was a two-day conference which took place at the Pearce Institute, Govan, Glasgow in January 1990. It was organized by the Free University Network, with support from the Scottish Child magazine. The opening welcome was by Derek Rodger, then editor of Scottish Child magazine.

Introducing Day One*

James Kelman

Noam Chomsky is not only a major Western philosopher, he is a major thinker of the left. In one way or another, he has spent most of his life in the struggle against oppression, against greed. There are at least three things I see to put him out on a limb:

1) in philosophical terms he is a rationalist, he believes there are certain kinds of knowledge available to folk right at birth; that is, before they’ve had any experience gained from living in the actual world; at this present time it seems the most comprehensive way of explaining how it is we are able to know and understand things in the way that we do;

2) as a committed thinker of the left, he insists on discussing politics at almost every opportunity, not only in conversation but on the page; he is as likely to publish an article on the secretive and murderous affairs of state—in particular the US state—as he is to publish an essay on philosophy or aspects of transformational grammar.

The third reason I want to point to is the way he uses his own skills to break down information.

It’s not too difficult to imagine the effect of all that on established authority, academic and otherwise—even at a basic level, by which I mean his colleagues and peers; at least those who share the usual career preoccupations of job-security and the accumulation of personal wealth. Most so-called experts seem to look on their own specialized field of study as a piece of property anyway. This can be seen in terms of this event too, in its informality and unofficial nature, which has put some of them off. Maybe they’ve gone in the huff. Maybe they wanted a personal invitation, and a brass band to play them up the stairs and along the road from Govan subway station.

The third reason Noam Chomsky can be considered subversive has to with the dissemination of knowledge, the tremendous range of work he does in spreading information, just getting things known to the public at large. It is central to his thesis that everybody can know: “there is no body of theory or significant body of relevant information, beyond the comprehension of the layman, which makes policy immune from criticism.”

Unless we are mentally ill or in some other way mentally disadvantaged, all of us have the analytic skills and intelligence to attempt an understanding of the world. It just isn’t good enough to be bad at mathematics; the skills demanded of an elderly person playing several hands of bingo, the skills demanded to get to the supermarket and do a weekly shopping on a limited budget for a large family of young kids—all such skills are there to be developed and applied to any subject whatsoever, including subjects like a country’s foreign policy or, nearer home, the correlation between cuts in welfare and infant mortality; between cuts in welfare and suicide, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, prostitution, madness.*

No one should have any illusions about how political this can be. It’s probably the basic premise in most countries of the world that everybody can’t know.

There’s always the risk of sounding paranoiac when you criticize the way information and knowledge is relayed by the mainstream media. But generally speaking they operate on a basis similar to imperialism. If they don’t “discover” you, then you don’t exist. Once they do discover you, they turn you into a colony. What they do is provide you with their own context, then they give you a name. Take a local example, how the European City of Culture business works.* It means that any piece of art, no matter the medium, created by any artist in Glasgow is instantly transformed into a piece of packaged property and has entered the ownership of those entrepreneurs who nowadays lay claim to the city itself. What happens is you cannot exist beyond the context they’ve designed for you. It applies across the board. Even this event, the Self-Determination conference, couldn’t avoid the tarnish, no matter the pains we took to disassociate ourselves from it: because it takes place in Glasgow in 1990 it takes place in the City of Culture context; you can be for it or against it, but you don’t transcend it unless maybe by silence, or by going into exile.

There’s never been a time when censorship and suppression didn’t exist in this country; information has always been withheld, and specialized knowledge mystified. In the mainstream media names like John Pilger are exceptions, and exceptions only prove the rule. It’s always been right in front of our nose. If we haven’t seen it, it’s because we either haven’t looked or else we’re operating on that basis of intellectual myopia, which Noam Chomsky essays on so accurately.

It is because of the fact of media suppression and distortion that other channels of communication must be available; the need for them has to be assumed. It’s just a waste of time to argue about it. The same applies to other forms of knowledge.

When I was at university as a mature student, I had to study his earlier work on linguistics; his political writings were not part of the curriculum. Why was that? One reason is that politics is regarded as irrelevant to the study of language. Our educational system operates on a system of specialist segregation: literature for the literature department, linguistics for the linguistics department, politics for the politics department, and so on.

Once you finish school, college, or university, you are encouraged to stop learning; to stop finding things out: you are trained to leave intellectual matters to the “experts.” Even existence itself, you are trained to leave the living of your life to those who specialize in such “concepts,” the folk who are paid by the state: they won’t live your life for you but they’ll determine how it should be lived, they’ll let you know what’s possible, and what is not possible. The situation of being a child in society is appropriate here, the expert as parent. But so too is the situation of a group or class or an entire race of people under domination or colonization, external or internal; folk who cannot determine their own existence: they are in thrall. The right to self-determination has been taken from them and is kept from them, often by force, by the calculated violence of those in power.

As I recall the Free University project was started by assuming the power of those in control, we didn’t really have to argue it out. We wanted a network based on the free exchange of ideas and information; a network of shared experience, shared energy and material resources; a network based on alternative forms even of movement, so that at an event like this one in Govan folk from all over could come and get a crash somewhere. Such networks find ways of supporting one another in trying to live our own lives, define our own context, our own existence. In different parts of the world, there are folk who have been doing that and trying to do that for years.

We should remember that there are people present here in Govan for this two-day event whose commitment to social change has meant they’ve had to face various degrees of harassment, and personal danger. People are with us who are unable to raise their family within the traditions and customs of their own culture. There are people here this morning who cannot even live in their own country.

Professor Chomsky is wary of links being made between his work on the philosophies of mind and language and his work on politics—and he gives good grounds for that. As he said in a recent interview, “obviously one can’t infer anything about politics from what you know about universal grammar, or conversely.”

But at the same time there is something implicit in the very fact of our existence as human beings, and that is freedom, the right to self-determination, the right to not be tortured, and the right to not be raped, the right to not be violated—the right to not be colonized in any way whatsoever.

And from my own reading of his work, this is his position, and either we do battle on that basic principle of freedom, or we don’t.

The theme of this conference is Self-Determination & Power, how individuals cope in the face of power and authority, ordinary people trying to determine their own day to day existence. We have tried to appeal to local groups and organizations throughout the country, anti-racist groups, homeless people, unemployed centers. People applied for tickets from different parts of Britain and also from abroad. We received enquiries from as far away as Lithuania and Estonia.

* This is a revised version of the opening talk delivered by James Kelman.

* Quoting from James Kelman, “A Reading from Noam Chomsky and the Scottish Tradition in the Philosophy of Common Sense,” see pages 29–75, this volume.

* The City of Glasgow had purchased the title European City of Culture in 1990.

Containing the Threat of Democracy: A Keynote Address¹

Noam Chomsky

In his study of the Scottish intellectual tradition, George E. Davie identifies its central theme as a recognition of the fundamental role of “natural beliefs or principles of common sense, such as the belief in an independent external world, the belief in causality, the belief in ideal standards, and the belief in the self of conscience as separate from the rest of one.” These principles are sometimes considered to have a regulative character; though never fully justified, they provide the foundations for thought and conception. Some held that they contain “an irreducible element of mystery,” Davie points out, while others hoped to provide a rational foundation for them. On that issue, the jury is still out.²

We can trace such ideas to seventeenth-century thinkers who reacted to the skeptical crisis of the times by recognizing that there are no absolutely certain grounds for knowledge, but that we do, nevertheless, have ways to gain a reliable understanding of the world and to improve that understanding and apply it—essentially the standpoint of the working scientist today. Similarly, in normal life, a reasonable person relies on the natural beliefs of common sense while recognizing that they may be parochial or misguided and hoping to refine or alter them as understanding progresses.

Davie credits David Hume with providing this particular cast to Scottish philosophy, and, more generally, with having taught philosophy the proper questions to ask. One puzzle that Hume raised is particularly pertinent to the questions we are hoping to address in these two days of discussions. In considering the First Principles of Government, Hume found “nothing more surprising” than to see the easiness with which the many are governed by the few and to observe the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is brought about, we shall find, that as Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular.

One dubious feature is the idea that force is on the side of the governed. Reality is more grim. A good part of human history supports the contrary thesis put forth a century earlier by advocates of the rule of parliament against the king, but, more significantly, against the people: that “the power of the Sword is, and ever hath been, the Foundation of all Titles to Government.”³ Nevertheless, Hume’s paradox is real. Even despotic rule is commonly founded on a measure of consent, and the abdication of rights is the hallmark of more free societies—a fact that calls for analysis.

The harsher side of the truth is clarified by the successes and the tragedies, fate of the popular movements of the past decade. In the Soviet satellites, the governors had ruled by force, not opinion. When force was withdrawn, the fragile tyrannies quickly collapsed, for the most part with little bloodshed. These remarkable successes are a sharp departure from the historical norm. Throughout modern history, popular forces motivated by radical democratic ideals have sought to combat autocratic rule. Sometimes they have been able to expand the realms of freedom and justice before being brought to heel. Often, they are simply crushed. But it is hard to think of another case when established power simply withdrew in the face of a popular challenge. No less remarkable is the behavior of the reigning superpower, which not only did not bar these developments by force as in the past, but even encouraged them, alongside of significant internal changes.

The historical norm is illustrated by the dramatically contrasting case of Central America, where any popular effort to overthrow the brutal tyrannies of the oligarchy and the military is met with murderous force, supported or directly organized by the ruler of the hemisphere. Ten years ago, there were signs of hope for an end to the dark ages of terror and misery, with the rise of self-help groups, unions, peasant associations, and other popular organizations that might have led the way to democracy and social reform. This prospect elicited a stern response by the United States and its client regimes, supported by Britain and other Western allies, with a campaign of slaughter, torture, and general barbarism on a scale reminiscent of Pol Pot. This violent Western response to the threat of democracy left societies “affected by terror and panic,” “collective intimidation and generalized fear,” and “internalized acceptance of the terror,” in the words of a Church-based Salvadoran human rights organization, well after the shameful elections held to satisfy the consciences and propaganda needs of the masters. Early efforts in Nicaragua to direct resources to the poor majority impelled Washington to economic and ideological warfare, and outright terrorism, to punish these transgressions by reducing life to the zero grade.

Western opinion regards such consequences as a success insofar as the challenge to power and privilege is rebuffed and the targets are properly chosen: killing priests is not clever, but rural activists, union leaders and human rights activists are fair game—and, of course, peasants, Indians, students, and other lowlife generally.

The pattern is uniform. US occupying forces in Panama were quickly ordered to arrest most political activists and union leaders, because they are “bad guys of some sort,” the US Embassy told reporters.⁴

The “good guys” to be restored to power are the bankers who were happily laundering drug money in the early 1980s. Then Noriega was also a “good guy,” running drugs, killing and torturing and stealing elections—and, crucially, following American orders. He had not yet shown the dangerous streak of independence that transferred him to the category of demon. Apart from tactics, nothing changes over the years, including the inability of educated opinion to perceive that two and two is four.

Central America represents the historical norm, not Eastern Europe. Hume’s observation requires this correction. Recognizing that, it remains true, and important, that government is founded on opinion, which brings will submission.

In the contemporary period, Hume’s insight has been revived and elaborated, but with a crucial innovation: control of thought is “more” important for governments that are free and popular than for despotic and military states. The logic is straightforward. A despotic state can control its domestic enemy by force, but as the state loses this weapon, other devices are required to prevent the ignorant masses from interfering with public affairs, which are none of their business.

The point is, in fact, far more general. The public must be reduced to passivity in the political realm, but for submissiveness to become a reliable trait, it must be entrenched in the realm of belief as well. The public are to be observers, not participants, consumers of ideology as well as products. Eduardo Galleano writes that “the majority must resign itself to the consumption of fantasy. Illusions of wealth are sold to the poor, illusions of freedom to the oppressed, dreams of victory to the defeated and of power to the weak.”⁵ That is the essential point.

I will come back to these central themes of modern political and intellectual culture. But let us first have a look at some of the “natural beliefs” that guide our contact and our thought. One such belief is that a crucial element of essential human nature is what Bakunin called “an instinct for freedom.” Hume’s paradox arises only if we make this assumption. It is the failure to act upon this instinct that Hume found so surprising. The same failure inspir...