Noam Chomsky: Why Americans Know So Much About Sports But So Little About World Affairs
http://www.alternet.org/noam-chomsky-why-americans-know-so-much-about-sports-so-little-about-world-affairsThe following is a short excerpt from a classic from Noam Chomsky's many published works, The Chomsky Reader, which offers a unique insight on a question worth asking -- how is it that we as a people can be so knowledgable about the intricacies of various sports teams, yet be colossally ignorant about our various undertakings abroad?
QUESTION: You've written about the way that professional ideologists and the mandarins obfuscate reality. And you have spoken -- in some places you call it a "Cartesian common sense" -- of the commonsense capacities of people. Indeed, you place a significant emphasis on this common sense when you reveal the ideological aspects of arguments, especially in contemporary social science. What do you mean by common sense? What does it mean in a society like ours? For example, you've written that within a highly competitive, fragmented society, it's very difficult for people to become aware of what their interests are. If you are not able to participate in the political system in meaningful ways, if you are reduced to the role of a passive spectator, then what kind of knowledge do you have? How can common sense emerge in this context?
CHOMSKY: Well, let me give an example. When I'm driving, I sometimes turn on the radio and I find very often that what I'm listening to is a discussion of sports. These are telephone conversations. People call in and have long and intricate discussions, and it's plain that quite a high degree of thought and analysis is going into that. People know a tremendous amount. They know all sorts of complicated details and enter into far-reaching discussion about whether the coach made the right decision yesterday and so on. These are ordinary people, not professionals, who are applying their intelligence and analytic skills in these areas and accumulating quite a lot of knowledge and, for all I know, understanding. On the other hand, when I hear people talk about, say, international affairs or domestic problems, it's at a level of superficiality that's beyond belief.
In part, this reaction may be due to my own areas of interest, but I think it's quite accurate, basically. And I think that this concentration on such topics as sports makes a certain degree of sense. The way the system is set up, there is virtually nothing people can do anyway, without a degree of organization that's far beyond anything that exists now, to influence the real world. They might as well live in a fantasy world, and that's in fact what they do. I'm sure they are using their common sense and intellectual skills, but in an area which has no meaning and probably thrives because it has no meaning, as a displacement from the serious problems which one cannot influence and affect because the power happens to lie elsewhere.
Now it seems to me that the same intellectual skill and capacity for understanding and for accumulating evidence and gaining information and thinking through problems could be used -- would be used -- under different systems of governance which involve popular participation in important decision-making, in areas that really matter to human life.
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I wouldn't call them dickish, not publicly, because some of them are made for reasons of personal differences.
Ask some of the frequent posters in the History of Feminism group, for example.
In my case, I support the Second Amendment and the others in the Bill of Rights, and posters have said repeatedly that I should be banned, or barred from hosting, or both, and worse.
That's transparency!
Glad to see it in the 1st response and a couple of others. Great minds, etc etc...
Last edited Wed Sep 17, 2014, 02:24 AM - Edit history (1)
What can I say? I'm addicted to basketball and football. 
Highly entertaining.
Um no. The guy can't even talk about sports without slipping in one of his anti-union anti-voting anti-organizing anti-Democrat messages. Stay home and tend to your garden, Noam murmurs in our ear, and let Dick and George and Henry do what needs to be done.
Why anyone on DU gives credit to Chomsky's silly sermons is hard for me to understanding. They are utterly antithetical to "progressivism" as the word is used here.
