TOR WENNERBERG: One idea that I find extremely interesting and fascinating is the notion that just as our language capabilities are genetically determined, so is our capacity -- as human beings -- for moral judgment. What do you see as the implications of the idea that our moral capacity is innate?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, for one thing, I don't think it can really be much of a question...

Of course, there are cultural and social and historical effects, but even for those to operate, they must be operating on something. If you look at this range of phenomena, there are only two possibilities: one is, it's a miracle, and the other is, it's rooted in our nature. It's rooted in our nature in the same sense in which language is, or for that matter, having arms and legs is. And it takes different forms depending on the circumstances, just as arms and legs depend on nutrition, and language depends on my not having heard Swedish when I was six months old and so on. But basically, it must be something that flows out of our nature, or otherwise we'd never use it in any systematic way, except just repeating what happened before. So, it's got to be there.

NC on top form.. mandatory reading- enjoy!

TOR WENNERBERG: I just reread the chapter Psychology and Ideology in The Chomsky Reader, your critique of Skinner. Behaviorism is much less influential today, but I wonder - you write this 2 or 3 decades ago -- what you think has happened in the time since with the theory of human malleability in a broader sense?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, behaviorism was very popular among the managerial classes, for not surprising reasons. For one thing, it gave them a moral right to control and dominate people. If people have no nature, no intrinsic nature, then there is no moral barrier to control or manipulation of them -- in their own interest, of course. Somehow ‘we,’ the controllers, are immune from this human condition of infinite malleability, however. ‘We’ have a nature and ‘we’ understand what's good, that's kind of like a hidden premise. But for the rest of the slobs out there, they're just passive objects, and we can control and manage and organize them using the latest behavioral techniques, and they'll all be better off.

That's a strain of thought that runs right through the whole intellectual, managerial culture, from priesthoods up to Leninist commissars and to contemporary liberal theorists. And behaviorism gave the perfect intellectual justification for it; it didn't matter that the intellectual foundations were ridiculous. It served a function so it survived. And the parts of the society that need that, they still believe it -- in fact, believe it more than ever.