Noam Chomsky

Chomsky's been described as possibly the most important intellectual alive. Yes, I know that the second half of the original quote goes on to question why he writes such nonsense on international affairs, but that doesn't invalidate the description. Despite his complaints about being marginalised by the mainstream media (that phrase always to be said with a sneer), Chomsky has enormous influence on the left. In fact I'd bet that for quite a few people the only serious books on politics they've ever read are by Chomsky (I don't count Michael Moore as serious).

It seems to me for a start that there's some interesting parallels between Chomsky's work in linguistics and his political writings. Back in the late fifties the dominant paradigm within psychology was Skinnerian stimulus-response, which was in effect a sort of behaviourism-lite. Everyone could see that there were problems with behaviourism, but no one could really see how to develop a science of mind based on subjective experience. So psychologists were still looking at the behaviour of rats: you put in this stimulus and got out that response. Reward them and they do this, give them an electric shock and they don't do that. Humans, so it was hoped, would turn out to be somewhere further along that continuum. And language? The generally accepted explanation for language learning was that it was a more complicated version of operant conditioning. Well, the whole thing was waiting to be blown apart, and it's generally acknowleged that Chomsky was the man who did it with his review of Skinner's book "Verbal Behaviour" in 1959. It was one of those arguments that just changes everything. He made it seem so obvious. Quite clearly there is insufficient input - stimuli, in the old stimulus-response terminology - for an individual to learn such an incredibly complex skill as speaking a language in such a short time. So Chomsky, and linguists after him, started talking of an innate grammar. Humans must have some inbuilt propensity to learn to speak.

But it's interesting how this was developed. The Chomskian revolution was presented as a triumph for rationalists, that is, heirs of Descartes with his clear distinction between mind and body, over the empiricists, heirs to Locke and Hume, who were assumed to be the spiritual fathers to the whole behaviourist enterprise. Chomsky made this clear with the title of his book, Cartesian Linguistics. So here was an iconoclast, shattering the cosy consensus of the day. This was taken to be nothing short of a revolution, not just in linguistics but in psychology as well. Out went the old empiricist dogmas, in came the new rationalism. The talk was of competence versus performance, deep and surface structures, generative grammars.

My feeling is that the whole Cartesian revolution is dead and buried, having been overtaken by the development of Evolutionary Psychology, but beyond noting that we are dealing here with a man who sees himself as an iconoclast, that's not really my main point. What interests me more is the way that Chomsky developed his linguistics by making the methodological decision to take innate grammar as a given, on the perfectly reasonable grounds that origins were not what he was interested in and wouldn't help the business of untangling the actual inner workings of language, but then announced that this was the way things were. A methodological decision became a central tenet of his philosophy - a fact, if you like, about the world.

When Chomsky is asked why, in his political writings, he deals only with the US and its crimes, his response is along the lines of, well, that's what I do, I write about the US because I'm an American, it's what interests me. It's the most powerful country in the world. If you want to read criticism of other countries, you can read it anywhere: the mainstream press is full of it. Well yes, that seems fair enough. But what happens here, as with his Cartesian linguistics, is that a methodological decision, to confine himself to criticism of the US, has hardened into a vision of reality. "I'm only going to deal with US crimes" becomes "the only real crimes are US crimes".

It helped of course that in the early days of Chomsky's political writings, in the late sixties, the presentation of the US as a dominant and aggressive power was not a difficult argument to make. At the height of the cold war, the prevailing climate of opinion was that the US was fighting for freedom and democracy against the evil totalitarianism of Soviet Russia. What many of us thought, and what Chomsky perhaps articulated better than anyone, was that this seemed to have little to do with what the US was actually doing in Vietnam. For the left this wasn't about fighting against communism: this was a neo-colonialist war in which the US had replaced the earlier colonial power, the French, in trying to suppress a indigenous movement of national liberation. The central disagreement over Vietnam was between those who saw it as part of the cold war, and those who saw it as a brutal suppression of a country's right of self-determination. It was an argument that the left effectively won. And frankly the relevance of the cold war was equally hard to discern when looking at US policies in the rest of the world, and most notably in Latin America - Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador. It wasn't a pretty story, and Chomsky was compelling.

Given that the cold war was rejected by Chomsky as an explanation for US policies, the familiar panoply of Chomskian themes was developed. Since it wasn't reacting against anything, the US could only be an aggressor, with its goal a total world hegemony for the benefit of big business. This was achieved through one of Chomsky's central themes, military Keynesianism, whereby the US government pumped money into the military, which primed the economy via the high tech industries which were involved in developing more advanced ways of killing people. Meanwhile the corrupt dictators who controlled the US client states used their wealth, obtained if not through natural resources such as oil then through US aid of some form or another, to purchase these arms. This not only kept the US economy going but also served to keep the suffering masses under control. An evil empire indeed; the real terrorist state.

We're now some fourteen years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and it's become clear to some of us that the cold war story wasn't simply a myth peddled by ruthless power merchants in Washington. A significant factor in US foreign policy from the end of the Second World War right up to 1989 was indeed, just like they said, the battle against communism. And of course they were right in principle, if often not in practice. But Chomsky hasn't changed, and nor have much of the left. The US, they say, always needs an enemy to justify its brutality. Before it was communism, now it's Islam. Just as the communists were never really a threat, so with Islam. They'd happily leave us all alone if we we left them alone: Islamophobia as the new McCarthyism. But the arguments became ever more desperate. How on earth did the NATO action in Kosovo advance the business interests of the US power elite? And how could anyone casually dismiss 9/11, as Chomsky did, as equivalent to the bombing by Clinton of the aspirin factory in Sudan, which killed one person?

But it's when you look at the extraordinary moral force of Chomsky's writings that you start to get an understanding of why he's so influential. There is surely a whiff of the cult here. This may seem far-fetched - Chomsky doesn't appear to be after followers in the same way as, say, Marx was. He's no patriarch: more Woody Allen than Moses. He's the picture of modesty, just simply presenting the facts. And I don't want to push this too far: I'm not arguing that Chomsky actually runs a cult. But there's a continuum between on the one hand the normal exchange of information in a free society with people talking, arguing, writing articles and books, up through more charismatic individuals with a point to get across, through movements, religions, cults. And Chomsky is somewhere along that continuum. His attitude to who those who disagree with him, is, by and large, one of contempt. The only reason they can't see the simple truth of what he's saying is that they are, in one way or another, morally deficient. Normally this moral deficiency takes the form of selling out to the establishment. People want to get on in their career but they see which way the wind blows - if they write the truth they don't last long, don't get promotion, don't win those Pulitzer prizes - so they write what the establishment wants to hear. So there they are, hypocrites, tossing and turning in their beds raddled with guilt, while outside - can you hear it? - there's a still small voice, the voice they're trying to marginalise, the voice which sick, violent, mainstream America doesn't want you to hear, the voice of Noam Chomsky, telling the plain unadorned truth. Have you got the moral character to respond to that voice? Not many do (oh it's a cruel, shallow world) but for those chosen few they can look around them, in the street, on the tube, in the office, and think to themselves "The fools! The blind stupid fools! They think they're the good ones, threatened by terrorists, but it's the other way around! We're the real terrorists! And those pathetic cries of Democracy and Freedom - they're just advertising slogans to dupe you."

This, I think, is verging on cult territory. The Chomskian world is almost exactly a reverse of the way most of us view things, but only a few, those with special moral vision, can see it. For Chomsky, one of whose favourite terms is "Orwellian", we already live in the world of Big Brother. But to spell this out is immediately to see how fatuous it is, and what an insult it is to everything that Orwell stood for. To pretend that we in the West are living in an Orwellian state is simply grotesque while Kim Jong Il still rules in North Korea.

But you can't ignore it: that small insistent voice goes on and on. Just the plain and simple truth, which anyone, if they're not corrupted by the wicked world, can understand. In the past few years the US and its allies have bombed and invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. It's true. Go back a bit and they were blasting away at the Serbians. Can you deny it? And they've been doing it for decades. Go back sixty years and they were storming across the Pacific leaving a trail of destruction in their wake, bombing and killing, then virtually flattening Tokyo before dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and setting up a pro-western government to rule over a devastated country. At the same time in Western Europe they killed hundreds of thousands with targeted bombing on German cities before advancing across Germany, deposing the legitimate elected government and setting up a puppet government in Bonn. That's how it was, but that's not the story you'll read about in the mainstream press.

Comments

[Eve Garrard]

Thanks for this really interesting analysis. Your proposal that the common feature between Chomsky's linguistics and his politics is the slide from methodology to ontology sounds very convincing.

[Joe Baxter]

I'm not a member of the Chomsky cult, if such a thing exists, however, I was stopped short by the following statement, which you put in direct quotes -

"I'm only going to deal with US crimes" becomes "the only real crimes are US crimes"

Is this actually a direct quote from Chomsky? I would really like to know.

[Mick Hartley]

Joe,

No, sorry, they're not direct quotes from Chomsky, rather my precis of the slide in his approach. If you think the quotation marks implied that these were direct quotes, (and put like that, it does seem a fair assumption) then I'm sorry, that wasn't my intention.

[Combustible Boy]

It's no exaggeration, by the way, to say that Chomsky tends to see people who disagree with him as morally deficient, since he often argues his case in terms of what he calls "moral truisms" (just search in Google for Chomsky and "moral truisms" sometime), seemingly blind to the way many people see the concept of a truism as a question-begging logical short-circuit...

[Ellen1910]

Years before Alterman wrote his best seller there was Chomsky and Herman's The Myth of the Liberal Media. Yes; Alterman makes an effort to control his polemical tendencies, and Chomsky lets his run free. But is Chomsky so wrong?

Is it enough to point out a red herring, to knock down a strawman as Alterman does? Is it not necessary to go further -- to argue that the NYT and WaPo are myth makers, that they are the expression of the superstructure of a conservative society, that they promote anomie and marginalize the impulse to community all to the principal benefit of the upper class? And this, Chomsky does.

Yes; le style c'est l'homme. And here, Chomsky (he doesn't suffer opponents lightly) doesn't help his cause. But to call him a leader of a cult seems, at least to me, overdone.

[Jurjen]

Chomsky may not be a cult leader (I don't think he is, and I don't that's what Mick is alleging), but he undeniably has a cult following.

That said, I can't help but feel that the characterisation of "the liberal media" is a bit of a "No True Scotsman" fallacy; a deliberate obfuscation of the distinction between "the media, who are liberal" and "the media who are liberal." That comma makes all the difference. From what I understand of Chomsky, however, he commits the same fallacy only going the other way.

Interesting analysis, Mick, and quite compelling.

[Ellen1910]

On our side of the pond "the liberal media" is not an obfuscation (and I do understand if not take Jurjen's point) but rather, a term of art.

The New York Times and the Washington Post are, among elite political discussants, held to be liberal if not left-leaning papers [I don't believe I'm wrong in thinking that the overwhelming majority of liberals think the Times is centrist and the Washington Post is right of center]. The rest of the media is, of course, below the salt (is that how you say it?).

With no liberal media the fulcrum of our discourse is right of right of center.

[Steve]

Mark,

Let me suggest that you have not laid a single substantive charge against Chomsky's writings on US foreign policy.

For all that are intersted, check out this amazing debate between Chomsky and Richard Perle in 1988. The debate is ferocious, as they each go after the other with great vigour. By the end of the debate Chomsky has factually destroyed the dreamlike vision of US foreign policy that Perle articulated. The crowd gives Chomsky repeated ovations while occasionally booing Perle. Makes for great listening. Here's the link:

http://www.radio4all.net/proginfo.php?id=8409

[Roger Cohen]

Mick,

I must concur with Steve. Your comments on Chomsky are essentially rambling impressions. You reference nothing that Chomsky has actually said or written, and much of what you write here are rehashed, warmed over charges that are made against Chomsky routinely. I am not Chomsky "cultist" and I find, like you, his seemingly singular emphasis on US crimes and atrocities problematic. But if you are going to take on Chomsky, I'd advise you do so in a scholarly and better-researched fashion. This, of course, require doing some homework, and hard work, both of which are sorely lacking in the blogosphere.

[Mick H]

Roger (and Steve),

Sorry, but I wasn't trying for a definitive point-by-point rebuttal of Chomsky. His arguments, many of them, are perfectly fine as far as they go. What I'm saying is, by totally ignoring the context (the cold war, the fight against terrorism, etc.), his charges lose a great deal of their force. It's like describing a boxing match by concentrating on only one boxer. It's not wrong, but as a description of what's going on it's useless.

[Roger Cohen]

Useless? All but Chomsky's most virulent detractors concede that his critiques raise important questions. And Chomsky remains one of the world's foremost social critics, respected by fellow intellectuals but also by less educated people around the globe. Useless? I guess one of the beauties of a blog is you can say just about anything. I'd recommend you get out some more, and I mean out of the country, where in parts of the world, Chomsky is regarded not only as a great thinker, but a hero. And I do not mean a "cult" hero.

[Roger Cohen]

Mick: Allow me to make a larger point here. I found your commentary on Chomsky when a writer at "Full Context" referred to it as a "definitive" critique. You are clearly a thoughtful and intelligent person, but has our understanding of language and our intellectual rigor become so debased that your rambling, unsubstantiated commentary on Chomsky could, with a straight face, be referred to as "definitive"? Your comments are essentially the same remarks that friends have made to me at a bar or at a ballgame when the conversation turned to politics. This is rather like saying, "I was standing at a bar the other night and I overheard this guy offer the definitive critque of Noam Chomsky." This is laughable, and yet this is the very type of "authority" that a blog confers, I guess. A "definitive" critique of a major intellectual without a single footnote; with nary a quote or reference to any of the subject's actual work? And then to see the work of such a major intellectual force dismissed by said blogger as "useless"? I am no "fan" of Chomsky, and if I were, that fact would be irrelevant. But if I am going to take on a heavyweight like this professor, I sure would do a good deal of homework --- despite the paltry standards of intellectual demanded by blogs.

[Steve]

Mick,

I think you are misreading Chomsky, or perhaps not reading him at all. Chomsky goes to great lengths to show how more often than not, US leaders used the Cold war as a pretext for their aggressive actions. He demonstrates this by citing internal declassified government documents, quoting policy planners at length and by contrasting US actions before the Cold War and after the Cold War with their actions during the Cold War. Chomsky convincingly shows that there is very little difference!

If you haven't read Hegemony or Survival yet, you probably should. It's one of the most important books on foreign policy that has come out recently.

[Roger Cohen]

Chomsky has also written very critically about the Soviet empire, particularly the invasion of Afghanistan. He also at least once called Iraq one of the world's worst terror states. And has written very critically about the corruption of Palestinian leadership. None of this fits into the cartoon-character Chomsky. To say he limits his attacks to the US is not to have read him enough.

[Rajeev Advani]

Roger Cohen is referring to my posting on www.fullcontext.com. Yes, I called your article "definitive" - a bit rash - but I maintain that your article is the single most eloquent piece on the driving forces behind "Chomskyism". But Roger Cohen wants rigor. To that end a pet project on my website has been the exposure of blatant factual misrepresentations promulgated by Mr. Chomsky. I've been tardy in this project, but now feel newly inspired to resume. For what many forget - especially the grudging admirers of Chomsky - is that arguments aside, he is one of the most intellectually dishonest writers alive.

[Steve]

Rajeev your post is a joke. You responded to a post requesting substantive proof for your charges and responded with more empty rhetoric.

As for Mic's piece being the "single most eloquent piece on the driving forces behind "Chomskyism," the only thing one can presume is that you must not read very much. Chomsky has far more eloquent and substantive critics, although they, also, are unconvincing.

Why don't you watch the Chomsky - Perle debate and let us know what you disagree with.

[Rajeev Advani]

Steve - it does not matter to me if Chomsky can defeat Perle in a debate of policy. What matters to me is that Chomsky is a propagandist skilled at bodyguarding his claims with mountains of falsified evidence. I certainly don't disagree with everything Chomsky has written - I consider myself one of the left - but Chomsky's full ideology is a desperate one, and Mic's essay captures that. I did not respond with empty rhetoric - I responded that I would resume a project of documenting Chomsky's misrepresentations. Much has been documented already, as I'm sure you know, which lends much credibility to my accusation of dishonesty. Try Russil Wvong's site for an introduction here:

http://www.geocities.com/rwvong/future/chomsky.html

[Rajeev Advani]

Not to belabor the point, but in response to Steve and Roger requesting substantive prove of Chomsky's dishonesty, I've posted an essay detailing Chomsky's deceptions in the handling of the work of Amartya Sen with regard to India.

http://www.fullcontext.com/archives/000100.html

This is but one case out of many.

[Mick Hartley]

Thanks for the links Rajeev. I liked your piece on Amartya Sen. Haven't read the Russil Wvong essay yet, but I will do.

[the noticer]

you wrote: -- When Chomsky is asked why, in his political writings, he deals only with the US and its crimes, his response is along the lines of, well, that's what I do, I write about the US because I'm an American, it's what interests me. It's the most powerful country in the world. If you want to read criticism of other countries, you can read it anywhere: the mainstream press is full of it. Well yes, that seems fair enough. But what happens here, as with his Cartesian linguistics, is that a methodological decision, to confine himself to criticism of the US, has hardened into a vision of reality. "I'm only going to deal with US crimes" becomes "the only real crimes are US crimes". --

is this your main point? because this is just false as huge numbers of people are perfectly well aware and anybody can easily determine by doing a tiny bit of research. Chomsky has explained his reasons for focusing on the crimes of the USA probably thousands of times in public over the last 35 plus years.. and his reasoning is uncomplicated and clear. he says he does so because it is his basic moral responsibility to focus on the crimes he is partly responsible for, the crimes he can most easily prevent. whether you believe him or not, your account of his continuously stated motivations is just totally false. to put that distortion at the center of your argument is just silly.

and as for the cult thing - another irony - the real common thread between Chomsky's linguistics and his politics is that he is sort of a nativist. he believes that all humans have an inherent linguistic potential inside them as well as an inherent anti-authoritarian morality - just like all cheetahs have inherent running potential and birds have inherent flying potential, though all of these potentialites can be crushed by force. his thinking does indeed flow from these basic ideas - but these ideas are: 1) so commonly held that it is silly to attribute them to Chomsky, and 2) are anti-elitist right off the bat - identifying language and morality as traits of the species rather than as accomplishments of the exceptional few. when you say "cult" - it's hard to understand what that means in the absence of any authoritarian tendency or belief system. maybe your usage of "cult" just refers to an instance of free association that you don't like, for whatever unstated reasons, political or otherwise.

of course Chomsky should be questioned and criticized. but people should be clear about their real reasons. i don't like his stardom for example, because i don't like stardom in general, and i think his voluntary stardom is inconsistent with his anti-elitist principles. i have even debated Chomsky briefly on a different topic (“primitivism”) in an internet forum though i admit to being very influenced by his work more or less in the same way that other normal readers are.

i think the most obvious "explanation" for Chomsky's huge influence is immediately obvious to anyone who checks out his work: the man has simply done huge amounts of meticulous work - more hard work in his chosen areas than almost anybody else - and he makes his political ideas simple and clear. i think anybody who accomplishes these two things in a free society is likely to achieve some recognition and influence, regardless of their politics. even you. obviously almost nobody has the time or the inclination to do as much work as Chomsky has done but he did it and it shouldn’t surprise anyone that it has effects. it’s again ironic that people who search for alternative explanations and theories have so little belief in the intellectual culture they believe they are defending.

if people are not clear about this they should really check out how much work this guy has really done.

also: Clinton bombed a medicine factory in Sudan, not Libya.

[Mick H]

Noticer (?) - yes you're right - it was Sudan not Libya.

[オンラインカジノ]

I like your site. Hello from Japan.

[Adam Cooper]

Hi Mick
You're obviously well-read, to the point of being a little dangerous... in that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, e.g. Skinner *was* a behaviourist, one of the original, not behaviourist-lite. I know that because I studied psychology for 12 years. Which makes me question the authority with which you speak on the other areas... my bone of contention here rests with your analysis of 'Chomsky as cult-leader-lite'. You state (I'm paraphrasing - another stock Chomsky phrase) that Chomksy is a bit of a cultist because he treats those who challenge him as if they are morally deficient. You go on to elaborate this with a bunch of prose, while failing to recognise that (from my experience) when people challenge Chomsky they tend to do so without recourse to evidence. A bit like yourself, no less. I see no evidence substantiating the claims you make about Chomsky or anything else in the article. Unlike Chomsky yours is simply a bunch of claims - no quotes, no citations, in short no evidence - just "what you think". It's no wonder then, that a man who has spent years researching evidence on issues, is contemptuous of at times very vitriolic attacks on his argument when the challenge comes 'evidence-lite'.

best wishes
Adam

[Jake]

You have every right to disagree with Chomsky, and the onyl links I see here have so far been people disagreeing with the conclusions he draws. Have fun, but realize this is in no way a refuation of his work, but only a disagreement.

[ArekExcelsior]

Yeah, I think this is rather simplistic too. Chomsky doesn't JUST say "I'm an American, so I focus on America"; he instead says that our primary focus should be on the behavior that we can do something to stop and that we are responsible for. I end up muttering this personal responsbility mantra quite a bit, but it's important to remember completely. That is, when we focus on how crappy things are in the Sudan, while that is surely appropriate for edification, it's not totally relevant unless we plan on doing something about it, not nearly as relevant as questioning the pharmaceutical plant bombing or domestic policy here or whatever else. People can disagree with Chomsky, but I've read everything in my years as a high school debater, and I can tell you that not only is Chomsky the most consistent and intellectually satisfying critic I've read, he also has mountains of evidence that he uses VERY carefully. Case in point: In Heg/Survival, he cites Grossman and Mitchell on space militarization. I ran space mil as a case in the 2001-2002 topic. Grossman and Mitchell not only say what Chomsky says, they say it even more stridently and say even more controversial and terrifying things. Chomsky could have leapt up and down as we did in debate rounds with the infamous "orbiting death stars" quote and the "micro-waved cities of grilled dead people" quote, but he instead was very measured in the analysis he made and stuck only to things he felt he could justify based on some other prima facia plausibility evidence.

Oh, and Raj, I read your blog on Sen and Chomsky. Thoroughly underwhelming.