CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS (SEPTEMBER 22, 2015)
I want to start with a George Orwell essay from 1946, “Why I Write.” He says, “My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice.… [I write] because there is some lie that I want to expose.”1 What’s your starting point?
That’s very hard to say. A lot of my work is scientific work, and the starting points are problems, puzzles, a desire to understand—to borrow the title of my last book—what kind of creatures are we.2 The rest is about things happening in the world, domestically or internationally, that seem to be misleadingly or falsely described and are significant enough to merit close attention.
You, Stephen Hawking, and others signed a petition warning of an artificial intelligence (AI) arms race.3
I think the petition was initiated by Max Tegmark, a fine physicist here at MIT. The concern primarily is with automated military systems, which are extremely threatening. Automated systems can do many technically impressive things, but there are times when judgment matters, and they don’t have it. If missile and nuclear systems are automated, we can expect errors, and those errors might well be lethal if there’s no human intervention. As the systems become more and more automated, they are less and less controllable.
The petition also speaks of beneficial artificial intelligence. What might be some of the benefits of AI?
It would be nice to have a robot clean your house, cook your meals, drive your car. Robots can do useful—in fact, sometimes very useful—things: for example, replacing humans in extremely dangerous work involving radioactivity or other risks. Or, for that matter, just routine and boring work. To my mind, systems that improve our capacity to live a full, decent, and productive life are all to be welcomed.
We’re witnessing the greatest human migration in Europe since the end of World War II. What are your thoughts about this unfolding human catastrophe?
Unfortunately, there are a number of catastrophes, though we shouldn’t exaggerate the scale of them. Kenneth Roth at Human Rights Watch recently pointed out that if you consider the total number of refugees who are likely to try to make it to Europe, it is well under 1 percent of the population.4
Of the global population?
No, of the European population. For some countries, such as Germany, the influx is very welcome economically and socially. The refugees, especially the ones from Syria, are educated middle-class people with skills. Germany has a demographic problem. The society is not reproducing, so there’s a shortage of young, skilled people. That is one of the reasons why Germany is taking a fairly welcoming position compared to the other countries in Europe.
Some other countries have also welcomed refugees, right?
Yes. Lebanon, for example, a small, poor country: by now, maybe a fourth of its population are refugees. Iran takes refugees. Jordan takes huge numbers. Turkey has taken an enormous number of Syrian refugees. Syria itself was accepting many refugees, until it started imploding.
There are also countries that generate refugees. The U.S. invasion of Iraq set all sorts of crises in motion, including the rise of ISIS, but it also created numerous refugees. Nobody knows exactly how many, but maybe one or two million, along with a couple of million displaced people inside the country.5 Refugees are fleeing Iraq. They’re fleeing Afghanistan. They’re fleeing Libya, after we smashed up that country.
So, there are countries that accept refugees, there are countries that generate them, and then there are countries that generate them but refuse to accept them—like us. We may take in a few thousand refugees from the region, but nothing like the number created by the actions that we undertook. You can say the same for Britain and France, on a smaller scale.
Remember, refugees are not coming because they want to. In fact, the United Nations has appealed for humanitarian aid to help refugees stay where they want to be, near the countries of their origin. But they’re only getting about half of the aid that they requested.6 The most constructive and humane way to deal with refugees is to let them stay in or near their own countries. This means providing assistance, aid, and, if we were honest, reparations, because we have a lot to do with the causes of the flight and migration.
During what was being called the American refugee crisis, starting in 2014, the largest group was people fleeing from Honduras.7 Why Honduras? Well, it’s a poor country with plenty of violence and destruction in general, but the violence dramatically escalated after 2009, when a military coup overthrew the parliamentary government. The United States was almost the only country that supported and legitimized the coup. It led to a sharp increase in killings and repression, and people started fleeing. When you do something like supporting a military coup, it has consequences. Just as there are consequences when you bomb and destroy Libya, or when you invade Iraq and smash it to pieces.
Africa is pretty much under the radar, sub-Saharan Africa in particular. Yet it’s the site of enormous carnage and wars and destruction. Why don’t we hear more about what’s happening there?
There is a substantial U.S. military presence there, as has been exposed by the journalist Nick Turse, but it’s under the radar, as you say.8 The U.S. is conducting relatively small-scale military operations in Africa, and there aren’t a lot of American troops involved, so we don’t hear about it. In fact, we hear very little about any number of monstrosities. How much do we hear, for example, about eastern Congo, which is probably the worst disaster in the world? Millions of people have been killed.
The choice of what’s reported or not has to do with special interests here, not with what’s important.
In that regard, one of the biggest elephants in the room is Saudi Arabia, which doesn’t really get enough scrutiny in terms of its actual policies.
Saudi Arabia is a violent and aggressive state. Its bombing of Yemen is exacerbating a very serious humanitarian crisis there. Not only do they bomb, but they bomb indiscriminately.
Hillary Clinton, not exactly a radical, said, “Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”9 How does this feudal, homophobic, misogynist regime wind up as a major U.S. ally?
There’s a three-letter word that explains it: “oil.” They are the world’s major oil producer. Also, they’re obedient. Saudi Arabia is a family-run tyranny. Ever since a substantial amount of oil was discovered there in the 1930s, it’s been a prime ally. In fact, during the Second World War, there was a conflict between Britain and the United States over who would control Saudi oil. Britain had been the major actor in the region before the war, but the United States pushed them aside and took over the huge Saudi oil concessions. Washington remains the dominant force in Saudi Arabia, sending them weapons worth tens of billions of dollars.
What Hillary Clinton said is correct. In fact, a European parliamentary commission drew essentially the same conclusion: Saudi funding is the main source of radical jihadi movements.10 And Saudi Arabia is also the most extreme radical fundamentalist state. The British, when they ran the region, tended to support radical Islam rather than secular nationalism, and the Americans, when they took over, followed the same pattern.11 It makes sense. Radical Islam has been a much more natural ally than secular nationalism. Secular nationalism carries the threat that governments might try to use resources for their own populations. Radical Islam has its own fanaticism, but it’s not intrinsically opposed to imperial domination. In fact, it often relies on it.
The U.S. special relationship with Israel, which is unique in international affairs, is relevant here. U.S. relations with Israel were always reasonably close but only went completely off the charts in 1967. That’s the year when Israel performed a huge service to the United States and Saudi Arabia. There was a major conflict under way then, a war between Saudi Arabia and Egypt. They were fighting each other in Yemen at the time, but the conflict was also much broader: Who is going to be the dominant force in the Arab Muslim world? Egypt was the center of secular nationalism in the Arab world, while Saudi Arabia was the center of radical fundamentalist Islam.
Israel settled that question: they smashed up the secular nationalist states, Egypt and Syria, and destroyed secular nationalism. I’m not saying that those were particularly attractive governments, but they were run by secular nationalists. And it was right at that point that U.S. relations with Israel changed radically.
The Iran nuclear deal has been described as “a stinging defeat” for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the major pro-Israel lobby in Washington.12 Do you see the Iran deal that way?
This is a slightly unusual case. It’s not just AIPAC that was against the deal. Strikingly, 100 percent of the Republicans were also opposed and voted against it. That’s the kind of dedication to the party line that you do not typically find in political parties, with one exception: the old Communist Party. There, everyone had to follow the same line. That’s one indication of how the Republicans have ceased to be a political party in the normal sense.
And why were they against the Iran deal? To some extent, they were just enacting the fundamental principle of the Republican Party ever since Obama got elected: destroy Obama and anything that might be seen as an accomplishment of the Obama administration. If he hadn’t made the Iran deal, they would probably be in favor of it.
Their opposition also has to do with the way the Republican base has developed. As we’ve discussed, they can’t get votes based on their actual policies, which are dedicated to the interests of the very wealthy and the corporate sector. So they’ve mobilized evangelical Christians and extreme nativists, and the people who have been harmed by the neoliberal policies of the past generation. After all, real wages for male workers are back to the level they were in the 1960s. Median household wealth has actually declined in recent years.13 There are plenty of angry, frustrated people.
This base is easily mobilized, especially the religious component. The evangelicals are probably the majority, or close to the majority, of the base of the Republican Party right now. For them, defense of Israel against Muslim attackers is a point of religious doctrine. After all, the Bible tells them so. They have a whole eschatology about it.
It’s that group that was defeated by the Iran deal, but only temporarily. The Republicans actually had the majority in Congress, a substantial majority. Obama was only able to push the Iran deal through because their majority was not veto-proof. There’s no question that the Republicans will continue to try to undermine the terms of the deal. And they may succeed in carrying out measures—increased sanctions, maybe secondary sanctions on other countries—that will lead Iran to withdraw from its arrangement with the United States. It’s possible.
That does not mean, need not mean, ending the deal. Remember, this was not a deal between Iran and the United States, but between Iran and the so-called P5+1, the five permanent members of the Security Council and Germany. France, for instance, has established an agricultural trading mission in Iran.14 The French are joining China and India, which for years found various ways to get around the U.S. sanctions, using barter instead of finance and the like.
The world is almost totally opposed to the U.S. position that Iran cannot have any nuclear energy program. The nonaligned countries have been vigorously supporting Iran’s nuclear programs from the beginning. They’re discounted in the West, but they actually represent the majority of the world’s population. The U.S. may end up being totally isolated on this point, which would not be unusual—it’s the same on many other issues.
Millions of dollars were spent on a campaign to oppose the deal, including full-page ads in major newspapers, TV ads. But they weren’t successful.
They were successful in persuading a substantial majority of Congress. They were also successful in changing public opinion. If you take a look at the polls, at first the public was in favor of the deal. Over the months, as the propaganda campaign went on, support declined. The last polling I saw showed opinion is split fifty-fifty or even a little bit against.15 So the opponents did succeed in gaining public support for their position, as well as congressional support. They didn’t manage to override a veto, but they’re at the point where they could definitely undermine the deal using the kinds of measures—like sanctions—they’re now undertaking. And they’re pretty open about it. They’ve announced what they’re going to do.
If you go through the torture of listening to the Republican primaries, the debate is: Do we bomb Iran as soon as I take office, or—the moderate position—do we wait until after the first cabinet meeting, then bomb Iran?16 To say that AIPAC and that whole amalgam—it’s not just AIPAC—didn’t succeed is a little misleading.
It’s often said in the wake of this Iran deal that Tel Aviv–Washington relations have never been worse, that there’s a major schism now dividing Israel and the United States. Does that hold any water?
Very little. Actually, Obama is probably the most pro-Israel president yet, though not pro-Israel enough for the extremists. This was obvious even before his first election, as I noted in 2008, just citing his website.17 He had a very thin record, but one of the few things he did as a senator, which he advertised as one of his real achievements, had to do with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. He cosponsored a resolution demanding that the United States do nothing to impede Israel’s attack on Lebanon and, furthermore, that it punish anyone who opposed it. That’s pretty extreme. It was a vicious invasion.
And he continued on that path as president. So, for example, in February 2011, Obama vetoed a resolution calling for implementation of official U.S. policy, which is that Israel shouldn’t expand the settlements.18 Of course, the expansion is a minor point; the real issue is the settlements themselves. This resolution called for stopping expansion and also noted that the settlements are illegal, which everyone recognizes. And Obama vetoed it.
Something even more important happened in the summer of 2015, and it barely got mentioned. Every five years the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) participants have a review meeting. The Non-Proliferation Treaty’s continuation is meant to be conditional on moving toward establishing a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East. That was an initiative of the Arab states, which have been pressing very hard for a weapons-of-mass-destruction-free region in the area.
Israel, which has nuclear weapons, is not a signatory to the NPT.
Israel, Pakistan, and India—all nuclear weapons states supported by the United States—are not signatories. Every five years, this comes up at the NPT meeting. In 2005, the Bush administration just didn’t participate. In 2010, Obama blocked any discussion of a nuclear-weapons-free Middle East, and he did so again in 2015.19 The U.S. gives one or another pretext, but everyone understands that the real motive is to keep Israeli nuclear weapons from being inspected and supervised. That’s pretty serious. Not only does it create serious instability in the region, but it may also destroy the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
So Obama’s position represents very strong support of Israel’s military domination of the region. As Israel has moved far to the right, some of his views are now seen as hostile. But that’s really more a comment on what’s happened in Israel.
Let’s go on to other subjects. What do you think about the partial decriminalization of marijuana in Colorado, Washington, Oregon, and California?
It’s long overdue. Criminalization of drugs has been a social disaster. It’s the main factor leading to the huge increase in incarceration. The United States is way ahead of everybody else in the world in tossing people in jail. It’s a deeply racist system, as is evident in everything from police activities to sentencing practices. And it’s deeply damaging, even after people are released from prison. People who have been convicted of drug possession, which is a nonviolent crime, can’t get into public housing, can’t get jobs, and so on. The only sensible thing to do is decriminalization, at least of soft drugs.
Think about tobacco, which is more lethal than marijuana, more lethal even than hard drugs. Tobacco use has declined along class lines, so it’s now pretty much a class issue. Educated people with some degree of privilege are much less likely to smoke than they were twenty or thirty years ago. Tobacco wasn’t criminalized. Instead, educational processes led to healthier lifestyles, better diets, and so on—and reduction of tobacco use was part of that.
Would you put alcohol in the same category?
Alcohol is also pretty much a class issue. It is far more lethal than drugs. Furthermore, alcohol and tobacco are not just extremely harmful to the user, but to nonusers as well. If you use marijuana, you’re not harming anyone else. If you drink alcohol, you may become abusive and violent. There are many deaths of nonusers from alcohol—driving accidents, homicides, and so on. Yet, again, alcohol isn’t criminalized; its usage has been controlled somewhat by educational processes.
Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si’, generated some attention. He wrote, “Climate change is a global problem with grave implications,” and he warns of an “unprecedented destruction of ecosystems, with serious consequences for all of us.”20 There is a movement to divest from fossil fuel. Are those divestment actions coming in time?
Those actions are important, but they’re nowhere near what needs to be done. The threat is far greater than reported. The scientific literature describes a pace of destruction that is already frightening, and that might at any moment become nonlinear, abruptly rising far more sharply. Even without that, even with just the regular processes that are predicted, there is likely to be a rise in sea level in the not very distant future. This could be massively destructive to countries like Bangladesh, with its coastal plains, and cities like Boston, a good part of which could wind up under water.
The Guardian reports that “ExxonMobil, the world’s biggest oil company, knew as early as 1981 of climate change—seven years before it became a public issue.… Despite this the firm spent millions” in subsequent decades “to promote climate denial.”21
That’s what you expect to happen in a market society. Corporations are not benevolent institutions. They can’t be. If they were, they wouldn’t survive. They’re dedicated to profit and market control. The same with health care: if you put it in the hands of private companies, they’re going to try to make money from it, not concern themselves with health.
Which reminds me of a placard I saw in Seattle during the “kayaktivist” protest.22 The protesters were trying to block a Shell rig that was going to the Arctic to drill for oil. They held up a placard that said, “A good planet is hard to find.” In terms of climate change, what can individuals do beyond, say, recycling?
Recycling is worth doing, partly for itself, partly for symbolic reasons. It’s a little bit like civil disobedience: the act itself may not achieve any end, but it does encourage others to do more. Eventually, though, we have to go beyond individual action to collective action. In our world that means actions by states, which have to be forced to take those actions by their populations.
Do you see the United Nations as a body that can bring about this kind of change?
No, the U.N. can act only as far as the major powers permit. It is not an independent agency. So when we ask, “Can the U.N. do something?” we’re really asking, “Will the United States permit something to be done?”
Volkswagen has admitted that millions of its cars used software to defeat emissions tests. GM cars were found to have faulty ignition switches, which the company knew about and covered up, leading to more than 120 deaths. Laura Christian, the mother of one of these victims, a sixteen-year-old girl, said, “While nothing can bring my daughter back, we need a system where auto executives are accountable to the public and not just corporate profits.”23
And not just auto executives. Johnson & Johnson, the huge pharmaceutical firm, is apparently facing billions of dollars of fines for mislabeling prescriptions.24 Financial institutions are paying billions of dollars in fines for robbing the public. But that’s the nature of capitalism: you try to steal as much as you can. We’re after huge profits, and one of the ways to make profits is to cheat. And if you get caught and pay a fine, well, that’s just the cost of doing business.
They pay the fines, but no one does any jail time.
As neoliberal attitudes and policies expand, there’s more impunity. That hasn’t always been true. If you go back to the savings and loan scandal under Reagan, quite a lot of people went to jail. That wasn’t that long ago.
Bernie Sanders has been talking about income inequality and the depredations of the economic system, much as you’ve described. What do you think of his prospects?
It’s interesting to see how much public support Sanders is getting with very little funding. He obviously doesn’t have Sheldon Adelson giving him a billion dollars.
I think you can raise questions about many of his policies, but I think he’s bringing important issues to the attention of a large part of the public. He’s probably pressing the mainstream Democrats a little bit toward progressive directions.
But his prospects are pretty limited in a system like ours. It’s a system of bought elections and what amounts to a plutocracy. And Sanders has a very small chance of breaking through this. But even if he did, by some near miracle, there isn’t a lot that he could do. He’s not running a political organization. He wouldn’t have congressional representatives. He wouldn’t have the bureaucracy. He wouldn’t have governors, state legislatures, and so on. All the things that contribute to formulating policy would be lacking.
Concentrated private power is so enormous that it could block even somebody who had all of those supporting systems in place. So the chance that Sanders could implement any major policies would be slight, unless a massive political movement was behind him.
The real hope of the Sanders campaign is that after the primaries—I assume he won’t be nominated—the popular movement that supports him will persist, grow, and develop. That would be significant.
On the walk over to your office, I was talking to another MIT professor. I asked her, “If you could ask Noam Chomsky one question, what would that be?” She said, “Ask him, how does he do it?”
We are very privileged people, professors at MIT or elsewhere. We’re reasonably well-off. We have a reasonable degree of security. We have resources, training. We’re in one of the very few professions where you control your own work to a large extent. You may decide to work seventy hours a week, but it’s your seventy hours, for the most part. There are commitments, but a lot of the work is work of your own choosing. That’s very unusual in the world. Yes, there are problems and obstacles, and you can complain about this and that, but the opportunities are just enormous compared with what most people have.
You recently went back to your hometown, North Philadelphia. What was that like for you?
Actually, my wife, Valéria, wanted to see where I grew up and what it was like. It hasn’t changed that much.
Were your parents very strict with you?
Strict? Only with the things they cared about. My father, for example, would insist that we have the right table manners. We could only get two ice cream cones a week. We went to Hebrew school, synagogue, and so on. I wouldn’t say strict particularly, but there were rules.
How did you get along with your younger brother, David?
My skepticism about the adult world and recognition of its irrationality developed when my brother was just a couple of months old. My mother had told me this story about how it’s going to be so much fun to have a baby brother, how I would have a playmate. And then this blob appeared, which did nothing but cry, get in my way, and take my mother’s attention. They kicked me out of my room, so I had to sleep on a couch in my father’s study. I didn’t see any point to it at all.
One day, we went to the boardwalk in Atlantic City, and there was an organ grinder with a monkey. The monkey was fantastic. It was doing all kinds of wonderful things. I turned to my mother and asked her, “Why we don’t trade in my brother for the monkey?” She didn’t give me any reasonable answer, just laughed. And then I realized how ridiculous the adult world is, because it would have been an obvious trade.
But, later, we did get along like siblings, playing and so on.
Years ago, you told me that you had bad genes and didn’t expect to live a long life. You’re turning eighty-seven in December. How did you manage to trick nature, as it were?
I didn’t do anything special. I didn’t exercise or do all the things you’re supposed to do.
As one ages, obviously there are infirmities and limitations. How are you managing that and still keeping up your work?
Some minor infirmities, naturally, but they’ve faded into the background since I met and married Valéria, which renewed my life.
You’re inevitably asked in interviews, What gives you hope?
People who are dedicated, who are struggling, often against really tremendous odds—not like us—to create decent spaces for existence and a better world. That’s my source of hope.
How important is solidarity and cooperation?
Without it, there is nothing. Individually, in an atomized society, you can do virtually nothing. You can ride a bicycle instead of driving, say, but that’s kind of like chipping away at a mountain with a toothpick. If anything is going to happen, it is going to be through mutual aid, solidarity, community, and a collective commitment to really making changes. That’s always been the case in the past, and there’s no reason to think it will be different in the future.