Chomsky on Anarchism.pdf - Zine Library

CHOMSKY ON ANARCHISM
In a few domains, it has been possible to pose the question of fact in a seri
ous way, and inquiry has borne some fruit. In these domains, it has been possible
seriously to face the question of what we "innately know," a question
raised in the announcement for this meeting. It has been possible to gain some
understanding of those parts of our knowledge that come from the original
hand of nature, in Hume's terms-from genetic endowment, in the modern
version. We quickly learn that these components of our knowledge and under
standing are far beyond anything that Hume envisioned. His predecessors
appear to have been far closer to the mark: Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the
Cambridge Platonists of the 17th century, and the continental rationalists of
the same era.
The more we investigate, the more we discover that basic elements of
thought and language derive from an invariant intellectual endowment, a
structure of concepts and principles that provides the framework for experience,
interpretation, judgment and understanding. The more we learn about
these matters, the more it seems that training is an irrelevance and learning an
artefact, except at the margins. It seems that mental structures grow in the
mind along their natural, intrinsically determined path, triggered by experi
ence and partially modified by it, bur apparently only in fairly superficial ways.
This should not be a surprising conclusion. If true, it means that mental organs
are like bodily organs-or more accurately, like other bodily organs, for these
are organs of the body as well. Despite conventional empiricist and behavior 175
ist dogma, we should not be startled to discover that the mind and brain are
like everything else in the natural world, and that it is a highly specific initial
endowment that permits the mind to develop rich and articulated systems of
knowledge, understanding and judgment, largely shared with others, vastly
beyond the reach of any determining experience.
Where does this leave us with respect to social theory and action? Still pret
ry far away, I am afraid. There is a large gap between what we must establish
to ground the choice of action, and what we grasp with any confidence and
understanding. Whether the gap can be filled is not clear. No one knows how
to do it now, and we are left with the unavoidable necessity to act on the basis
of intuition and hope. Mine is that something like the classical liberal doctrine
is correct, and that there is no legitimacy to the commissar, the corporate or
cultural manager, or any of those who claim the right to manipulate and control
us, typically on specious grounds.