Curieuse coïncidence. Au même moment je découvre le billet de Pierre Assouline portant ce titre et, dans un mail envoyé par un collègue, une interview de Noam Chomsky portant également ce titre… mettre les deux en comparaison me semble instructif (bien sûr, je sais que dans les colonnes du Monde et d’autres journaux français, le linguiste américain n’est pas très apprécié, qualifié qu’il a été par R. P. Droit « d’intellectuel baroque »). Tout le monde peut facilement lire l’article d’Assouline, qui reprend un article de Pierre Lévy paru dans « le Monde Diplomatique ». Moins de monde, surtout en France, ont accès aux propos de Chomsky, et c’est la raison pour laquelle, j’en donne ci-dessous quelques extraits. S’il faut faire un commentaire, je dirai que dans le premier (P. Lévy), on nage dans l’optimisme quasi béat. Les intellectuels, qui se limitent aux chercheurs en sciences sociales, aux spécialistes des sciences de l’information et aux « passeurs d’héritage culturel », sont appelés à fraterniser pour la réalisation d’un monde meilleur, c’est-à-dire un monde « où l’intelligence collective » accomplirait enfin son grand bond en avant. La solution est simple, il suffisait d’y penser : faire en sorte que les algorithmes travaillent sur le sens plutôt que sur les signes ! que voilà une idée qu’elle est bonne, comme aurait dit Coluche… Bien, 1) comment on va faire ? il faut savoir tout de même que les programmes informatiques ne peuvent traiter que des suites de bits, lesquelles encodent des symboles (revenir à Turing, dont la puissance des machines n’a pas été surpassée, sauf peut-être à envisager des machines dont la réalisation demeure très hypothétique). Le « sens », quand il y en a, n’est jamais qu’un autre assemblage de signes. On peut bien sûr imaginer des notions comme le web sémantique, mais il ne faudrait pas que le lecteur croit que, par enchantement, les moteurs de recherche vont avoir accès « au sens », ils n’auront accès qu’à ce qui du sens des mots aura été préalablement codé. Autrement dit, on aura déjà décidé le « sens » qu’il convient d’accorder à tel ou tel énoncé. 2) cette dernière remarque permet d’enchaîner sur le deuxième point : quand bien même coderait-on et utiliserait-on une certaine représentation du sens dans les mots et les textes, ou parviendrait-on par des algorithmes sophistiqués (souvent basés sur des méthodes statistiques) à dégager des classes d’équivalence d’énoncés auxquelles on attribuerait le statut de « signification », on voit tout de suite à quelles conséquences on aboutirait. Mieux que ce qui se fait aujourd’hui dans la recherche des mots-clés d’autrui, une certaine forme de pénétration dans sa pensée. Il n’y a pas si longtemps, la CIA cherchait activement des algorithmes ou des chercheurs travaillant sur des algorithmes qui permettraient de détecter efficacement les terroristes potentiels uniquement à partir de messages interceptés. Dans un de mes billets récents, je faisais référence aux perspectives ouvertes par l’IRM dans le domaine de la véritable détection de mensonge, je disais que le chercheur qui en parlait, Lionel Naccache, en parlait, à mon avis, avec un peu trop de légèreté (ce qui me faisait penser qu’il ne fallait pas aller chercher trop loin les raisons de la désaffection du public pour la science).

Donner aux intellectuels cette tâche c’est évidemment accepter par avance qu’au moins certains d’entre eux décident des orientations idéologiques qui doivent prévaloir. On me dira peut-être : mais c’est déjà le cas ! et on n’aura pas tort. Là arrive justement Chomsky.

(l’interviewer est Gabriel Matthiews Schivone. Merci à Pierre Pica pour avoir fait circuler cette interview sur la liste [parislinguists]. C’est moi qui mets en gras certains passages.)

GMS: In your view, what is it about the privileges within university education and academic scholarship which, as you assert in some of the things you’ve written, correlate with them a greater responsibility for catastrophic atrocities such as the Vietnam War or those in the Middle East in which the United States is now involved?

C: Well, there are really some moral truisms. One of them is that opportunity confers responsibility. If you have very limited opportunities, then you have limited responsibility for what you do. If you have substantial opportunity you have greater responsibility for what you do. I mean, that’s kind of elementary, I don’t know how it can be discussed.

And the people who we call ‘intellectuals’ are just those who happen to have substantial opportunity. They have privilege, they have resources, they have training. In our society, they have a high degree of freedom-not a hundred percent, but quite a lot-and that gives them a range of choices that they can pursue with a fair degree of freedom, and that hence simply confers responsibility for the predictable consequences of the choices they make.

The Rise of a Technical Intelligentsia

GMS: I think at this point it may do well for us to go over a bit the beginnings and evolution of the ideological currents which now prevail throughout modern social intellectual life in the U.S. Essentially, from where may we trace the development of this strong coterie of technical experts in the schools, and elsewhere, sometimes having been referred to as a ‘bought’ or ‘secular priesthood’?

C: Well, it really goes back to the latter-part of the nineteenth century, when there was substantial discussion – not just in the United States but in Europe, too – of what was then sometimes called ‘a new class’ of scientific intellectuals. In that period of time there was a level of knowledge and technical expertise accumulating that allowed a kind of managerial class of educated, trained people to have a greater share in decision-making and planning. It was thought that they were a new class displacing the aristocracy, the owners, political leaders and so on, and they could have a larger role-and of course they liked that idea. Out of this group developed an ideology of technocratic planning. In industry it was called ‘scientific management’. It developed in intellectual life with a concept of what was called a ‘responsible class’ of technocratic, serious intellectuals who could solve the world’s problems rationally, and would have to be protected from the ‘vulgar masses’ who might interfere with them. And it goes right up until the present. Just how realistic this is, is another question, but for the class of technical intellectuals, it’s a very attractive conception that, ‘We are the rational, intelligent people, and management and decision-making should be in our hands.’

Actually, as I’ve pointed out in some of the things I’ve written, it’s very close to Bolshevism. And, in fact, if you put side-by-side, say, statements by people like Robert McNamara and V.I. Lenin, it’s strikingly similar. In both cases there’s a conception of a vanguard of rational planners who know the direction that society ought to go and can make efficient decisions, and have to be allowed to do so without interference from, what one of them, Walter Lippmann, called the ‘meddlesome and ignorant outsiders’ , namely, the population, who just get in the way.

It’s not an entirely new conception: it’s just a new category of people. Two hundred years ago you didn’t have an easily identifiable class of technical intellectuals, just generally educated people. But as scientific and technical progress increased there were people who felt they can appropriate it and become the proper managers of the society, in every domain. That, as I said, goes from scientific management in industry, to social and political control.
There are periods in history, for example, during the Kennedy years, when these ideas really flourished. There were, as they called themselves, ‘the best and the brightest.’ The ‘smart guys’ who could run everything if only they were allowed to; who could do things scientifically without people getting in their way.

It’s a pretty constant strain, and understandable. And it underlies the fear and dislike of democracy that runs through elite culture always, and very dramatically right now. It often correlates closely with posturing about love of democracy. As any reader of Orwell would expect, these two things tend to correlate. The more you hate democracy, the more you talk about how wonderful it is and how much you’re dedicated to it. It’s one of the clearer expressions of the visceral fear and dislike of democracy, and of allowing, again, going back to Lippmann, the ‘ignorant and meddlesome outsiders’ to get in our way. They have to be distracted and marginalized somehow while we can take care of the serious questions.
Now, that’s the basic strain. And you find it all the time, but increasingly in the modern period when, at least, claims to expertise become somewhat more plausible. Whether they’re authentic or not is, again, a different question. But, the claims to expertise are very striking. So, economists tell you, ‘We know how to run the economy’; the political scientists tell
you, ‘We know how to run the world, and you keep out of it because you don’t have special knowledge and training.’

When you look at it, the claims tend to erode pretty quickly. It’s not quantum physics; there is, at least, a pretense, and sometimes, some justification for the claims. But what matters for human life is, typically, well within the reach of the concerned person who is willing to undertake some effort.

GMS: Given the, albeit, self-proclaimed notion that this new class is entitled to decision-making, how close are they to actual policy, then?

My feeling is that they’re nowhere near as powerful as they think they are. So, when, say, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote about the technocratic elite which is taking over the running of society-or when McNamara wrote about it, or others-there’s a lot of illusion there. Meaning, they can gain positions of authority and decision-making when they act in the interests of those who really own and run the society. You can have people that are just as competent, or more competent, and who have conceptions of social and economic order that run counter to, say, corporate power, and they’re not going to be in the planning sectors. So, to get into those planning sectors you first of all have to conform to the interests of the real concentrations of power.

And, again, there are a lot of illusions about this – in the media, too. Tom Wicker is a famous example, one of the ‘left commentators’ of the New York Times. He would get very angry when critics would tell him he’s conforming to power interests and that he’s keeping within the doctrinal framework of the media, which goes back to their corporate structure and so on. And he would answer, very angrily-and correctly-that nobody tells him what to say. He writes anything he wants,-which is absolutely true. But if he wasn’t writing the things he did he wouldn’t have a column in the New York Times.

That’s the kind of thing that is very hard to perceive. People do not want-or often are not able-to perceive that they are conforming to external authority. They feel themselves to be very free-and indeed they are-as long as they conform. But power lies elsewhere. That’s as old as history in the modern period. It’s often very explicit.