The Spread of Irrationality

Transcript of a Youtube video. Noam Chomsky says:

If you look at the history of French culture since the end of the Second World War, it has some strange characteristics. Let's take the 1970's when this began to blossom. The French intellectuals were the last dedicated Stalinists. I mean, some of them were a little shaken by the end of 1956, but if they weren't Stalinists they were Maoists. I remember, and I don't know if it's fair to mention names, but I happened to meet Kristeva in Paris in the 1970's, a flaming Maoist. And it was pretty common all the way through. There's a history in France, which has some justification, that they are somehow at the peak of cultural life, so whatever they're doing that's what’s important. In fact France is an extremely insular culture, always has been. Everything is in France, nothing is anywhere else, anything that's anywhere else doesn't matter.

And so for example let's take another domain, say Logical Positivism. It spread over the world in the 20's and 30's, and by the 1950's and 60's it had sort of been assimilated into the currents and wasn't a passionate ideology anymore. It never even reached France. The first translations into French of the work of the Vienna Positivists was actually in the 1980's, and it was from a young French philosopher, Pierre Jacob, who came to Boston and learned about it, then went back and translated work from the 1930's and 40's, which by then had mostly been forgotten in the west, and was just then being revived in Paris.

It's even true in fields like the sciences. I mean, they have a rich tradition in some areas, but I remember about 30 years ago there was an article in some science journal discussing the history of the acceptance of Darwinian evolutionary theory. As it spread around the world it took pretty much the same course, some resistance which it finally overcame, and by the time the article was written it was standard scientific doctrine everywhere. With one exception, France. A large number of the professional biologists were still pre Darwinian. This didn't seem plausible to me, so I asked a friend who's a Nobel laureate in biology, who got his education in France in fact, I asked him if it made any sense. He just laughed and said the only reason it wasn't 100% true is that Jacques Monod had been in the resistance, and as a reward for his resistance service he was granted a small laboratory. Out of that laboratory came all of the great modern French biology, Monod, Jacob, and other great biologists, but just from that little lab.

Well, this gets back to the Stalinism and Maoism of the 1970's, which suddenly collapsed. One of the things that caused it to collapse was Solzenitskin's Gulag. It was translated in France, was a big sensation, and all of a sudden everyone in France became a passionate anti Communist. And since it's Paris they had to be the first ones who ever discovered it. I remember going there and hearing from leading intellectuals things I knew when I was 10 years old, because we were reading it then. But it was all a new discovery and they had to have something novel. So what do you do that's novel?

I should add another feature of Paris cultural life. The French intellectuals tend to be videt, they're media stars. So French intellectuals are taken very seriously, they're on the front pages of Le Monde and so on, it's probably not a good thing. But if you want to be taken seriously you have to have something exciting to say, like a movie star or a television figure. And it's not easy to come up with exciting new ideas, so you have to come up with crazy ideas, then they can make it to the front pages. And this is kind of what went on. One of the ways to have exciting new ideas is to tear everything to shreds, and say everyone was wrong. The Enlightenment was wrong, there's no foundationalism. And they're right, there's no foundationalism, that was known in the 17th century. But they had to rediscover it and put it in a fancy way and so on and so forth.

Out of this comes this irrational tendency, which was very welcome in many areas because it did undermine dedicated activism. I happened to be in Paris a couple months ago, about a year ago I guess, giving talks. One of them was a big political talk organized by Le Monde Diplomatique, and a good discussion, with the usual questions from the floor. One young man got up, he had a rather plaintive question. He said, "Bertrand Russel tells us we should look for the truth, but the philosophers tell us there is no truth. So what should we do?" By philosophers he means the fashionable people who call themselves philosophers in France. You don't hear that kind of thing anywhere else in the world, except where this influence has spread, and it has spread to intellectual circles in much of the world. In the United States for example it's mostly confined to comparative literature departments. So if they talk to each other in incomprehensible rhetoric nobody cares.

The place where it’s been really harmfull is in the third world, because third world intellectuals are badly needed in the popular movements, they can make contributions. And a lot of them are just drawn away from this, anthropologists, sociologists and others, they're drawn away into these arcane and in my view mostly meaningless discourses, and are dissociated from popular struggles. And you can see the impact. I've had experiences around the third world, it's kind of unfair and I won't even talk about them, but they really indicate how the level of irrationality that grows out of this undermines the opportunities for doing something really significant and important. I mean, rationality is a tool you'd better have if you want to acheive anything, you might as well have a grasp of what the real world is like. If you give up on that you can be an easy victim for any outside force.