by NOAM CHOMSKY and MICHAEL ALBERT
President George W. Bush with French President Jacques Chirac at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France on May 26, 2002. PHOTO/Paul Morse/White House
Transcript of Z Video DVD Chomsky Sessions II, Science, Religion and Human Nature, an Interview with Noam Chomsky and Michael Albert (http://www.zcommunications.org/zstore/products/114).
Just briefly, what’s irrationality? And then, conversely, what’s rationality?
Well, a perfect example of extreme irrationality is what we’ve just been talking about. What Orwell called double-think. The ability to have two contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time and to believe both of them. That’s the peak of irrationality. And that virtually defines the elite intellectual community.
Now let’s take concrete examples of fundamentalist irrationality, I’ll give you a real example. Actually it’s an example I knew about five years ago, but I didn’t publish it ’cause it sounded so crazy it couldn’t be true. It turns out to be true. It’s now verified. In January 2003, immediately before the invasion of Iraq, George Bush was trying to round up international support for the invasion, and he met the French president, president Chirac. And in this meeting with Chirac, he started ranting about a passage from Ezekiel, the book of Ezekiel, a very obscure passage that nobody understands. It’s a passage about Gog and Magog, nobody knows if they’re people or places or whatever they are. But Gog and Magog are supposed to come from the North to attack Israel, and then we get off into ultra-fanatic Christian Evangelical madness. There’s a whole big story about how Gog and Magog come down to attack Israel, there’s a battle in Armageddon, everybody gets slaughtered, and the souls who are saved rise to Heaven.
OK, some kind of story like that. Reagan apparently believed it. When his handlers didn’t control him enough and he was kind of off by himself, he’d start raving about this stuff. For him, Gog and Magog were Russia. For Bush, Gog and Magog were Iraq. So he told this to Chirac, and Chirac hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. So he approached the French Foreign Office, the Elysée, and said: ”Do you know what this madman is raving about?”. And they didn’t know either. So they approached a pretty well-known Belgian theologian who wrote sort of a disposition on this passage and the way it’s interpreted and whatever it might mean and so on. OK, how do I know? Well, I know because that Belgian theologian [inaudible] sent me a copy of it, with a background of the story. I never published it because this just sounded too off the wall.
Finally, I was talking to an Australian academic, researcher, and I mentioned it to him. He decided to look into it. It turns out to be correct. In fact the story appears in the biographies of Chirac and in other evidence. So yeah, that actually happened. So here’s the world in the hands of a raving lunatic who, you know, is talking about Gog and Magog and Armageddon and the souls rising to Heaven. And the world survived. Well, OK, that’s, that’s not a small thing in the United States. I don’t know what the percentage is, but it’s maybe 25, 30 percent of the population. Yeah, that’s pretty serious irrationality.
OK. Science, then. What’s science? I mean, why is something scientific, what marks something as being sensible science or nonsensical non-science masquerading etc. On the one hand, and, since you’re going to answer fully, how do you feel about left criticisms of science? Leftists who criticize science as being, you know, whatever they say, it’s imperial or it’s sexist or it’s rooted in Western whatever, and so on.
Well, you know, like anything that we understand about at all, with regard to things as complicated as human affairs, the answers are pretty trivial. If they’re not trivial, we don’t understand it. There is a category of intellectuals who are undoubtedly perfectly sincere, who, if you look at it from the outside, what they’re actually doing is using polysyllabic words and complicated constructions which, apparently they seem to understand ’cause they talk to each other. Most of the time I can’t understand what the heck they’re talking about. Even people who are supposed to be in my field. And, it’s all very inflated and, you know, a lot of prestige and so on.
It has a terrible effect in the third world. In the first world, the rich countries, this stuff doesn’t really matter that much. So, if a lot of nonsense goes on in the Paris cafes or the Yale comparative literature department, well, OK. On the other hand, in the third world popular movements really need serious intellectuals to participate. And if they’re all ranting postmodern absurdities, well they’re gone. I mean, I’ve seen real examples, I could give them to you. But, so there is that category. And it’s considered very left wing, and very advanced and so on and so forth.
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