Soon after my love affair with Wallace ended, I started becoming obsessed with Chomsky (almost like he was filling a void) - something I've written about before. I'll skip the already rehearsed details of that narrative, only to say that, thankfully, a few months ago I suddenly realised that I had totally overcome this obsession. For example, I no longer feel like personal pain when somebody attacks the guy and am very cognisant of his many flaws. I mean, I did develop extensive critiques even during my obsession, which you can find on this blog (like this: http://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2017/01/an-essay-called-discussion-of-possible.html), but I now have a fucking arsenal. Here are two things that began to irk me more in recent times:
1.) For all his talk of commitment to rhetorical austerity, he is a huge fan of highly edgy and unnecessarily inflammatory and alienating rhetoric. Apart from anything else, this seems strategically dumb: if you're espousing non-mainstream political views, isn't it more sensible to try to slowly bring people around to your way of seeing things? That is, assuming you're not just a demagogue appealing to the uncritical masses... I mean, I quite admire how he calls the US the world's leading terrorist state and the Republican Party "the most dangerous organisation in human history" (he carefully explains his reasoning for his edginess in these cases), but he often says fairly demagoguish kind of stuff for which there is little justification, like that old Manufacturing Consent-era chestnut that the "function" of sport within the doctrinal system (culturally evolved(?) where do we get the teleology?) is to foster irrational attitudes of tribalism (uh, maybe tribalism is like a fundamental human trait and intellectuals like you and I who hate tribalism are a massive anomaly), or his classic line "You can't have a capitalist democracy" (which, yes, once you get what he's on about (and read some Dewey or whatever) becomes dramatically less silly, but which, unclarified, simply encourages the quite large conspiracy-theorist wing of his fanbase).
2.) Whilst it's true that he receives a lot of completely toothless and inane political criticism from people who are far less serious scholars and researchers than he and considerably stupider persons than he (like Harris, Cohen and Kamm, in recent times), it's true that he seems incapable of ever conceding anything, which is kind of fucked up. Evidence? Yes, I need some of that, but luckily there's plenty. For example: maybe you can forgive his underplaying Pol Pot's atrocities with Herman (though it's understandable why some would find that hard), but why didn't he make more of an effort to express penitence about this? Why does he go on the *attack* when people raise it? (Source: Youtube). And no, he didn't ever properly apologise for the downright stupid shit he said about Faurisson. He seems totally unaware of the potential strategic benefits of niceties (or maybe he ignores niceties precisely because he doesn't care about the 'elites' and 'commissars' who disagree with him (not realising that it's only (relative) elites who read him at all; he sometimes gives the impression of holding the bizarre delusion that it would be reasonable to expect the working American poor to be like the working-class Jewish intelligentsia he grew up with (if only our country wasn't such a mess, then people at McDonald's would be reading Rudolph Rocker! (umm.. no)).
I also briefly became totally obsessed with Derek Parfit (the start of 2015). It started with Larissa Macfarquhar's profile, then I read almost all of both volumes of On What Matters and basically became an ethical objectivist like him, and then I read Reasons and Persons. This obsession is also totally and completely over. Nowadays, I think the guy was essentially a kook who just needed to calm down a bit and stop trying to turn ethics into maths.
I also arguably became obsessed with Steven Pinker in mid-2015, reading all of his non-fiction books in the space of a few months. But I (of course) never swallowed his politics, and thanks to my favourite philosophy lecturer at USyd, Paul Griffiths, I became aware that Pinker's philosophy of biology is very crude. The Blank Slate is not a good, even-handed review of the state of the art in genetics research!
What's the lesson here (apart from that I should read more work from non-male academics!!!)? I should never ever become obsessed and emotionally invested in specific intellectuals again, because every human is at the very least a partial idiot (I suppose even I am a partial idiot!). Fortunately, I seem to be taking on this lesson pretty well, because I've never been more disgusted with the irrationality of everyone I encounter.
This blogpost is rather formless already, and it's only going to get more so, because I'm now going to slag off Chomsky some more - this time, focussing on his linguistics. Last night, I read this 2011 paper: https://philpapers.org/rec/PULOTM.
For those to lazy to read, Pullum shows that much of what has been written about Syntactic Structures is false and the key result, about the impossibility of generating English by a finite state device, is not in fact proven. The book also has inconsistencies, Chomsky's introduction of "transformations" is very sloppy and unnecessary, and the originality of the work is overstated. I wish I knew about this in my essay defending the UG research programme (didn't help that major linguists claim that the key proof does work, like Pinker in The Language Instinct)... When I read the monograph, I assumed that Chomsky actually knew about the properties of a finite state device (I assumed that this formal construction does have properties such that the 'embedding' and 'syntactically correct nonsense' counterexamples did the work of showing that English could not be produced by such a device) - apparently not! (Not really my fault, given that I hadn't done the logic and formal language theory stuff I'm about to do.)
Just as in the case of his politics, whilst the vast majority of the critiques of Chomskyan linguistics are really dumb, written by know-nothings who display a shocking contempt for actual research, there are certainly serious criticisms to be made: some good ones can be found in Ray Jackendoff's amazing book Foundations of Language (a PDF of which I linked in a previous post on this blog).
Incidentally, I now feel slightly embarrassed about the fact that "Chomsky" is my most frequent 'subject' tag. Makes me look like an acolyte, which, though I might have been once, is not at all the case anymore.
Incidentally, I once began a major project assessing Chomsky's political thought overall, but I don't think I will ever finish it. So I guess now is as good an opportunity as ever to publish some of the most important extracts from that document. I last updated this document on the 1st of January of this year. A lot of it would be re-written now, but a lot of it I would still defend (as you'll see I didn't even finish part one of four of the "complete appraisal").
"
A Complete Appraisal of Noam Chomsky’s Politics
Subtitles: A Treatise on Objectivity in Politics
Manifesto for the Moral Anarchist
In this essay, I will assiduously evaluate the four main,
non-slanderous accusations levelled at Noam Chomsky. I am an admirer of
Chomsky, and allude to him often in my writings, but I have not yet given a
sense of my full views of his politics. I feel no sycophantic attitude towards
him, and so this work will be a serious inquiry, rather than an exercise in
hagiography. However, since I think that his critics usually massively misinterpret
his writings, or don’t understand the depth of his thinking, it will – on
balance – amount to a vigorous defence of his writings, his activism and his
general worldview.
Accusation no. 1: Chomsky is highly one-sided in his analysis
of global politics, and maintains a reflexive, irrational opposition to his own
country, regardless of the specific details of the case:
This charge is a very common one, and it is not just
espoused by those on the centre and the right. Many liberals and left-wing
people have accused Chomsky of being too one-sided, or of being reflexively
(even pathologically) antagonistic towards the actions of the US. In fact, it
seems to me that probably the majority
of self-described ‘liberal intellectuals’ in the West think that Chomsky
sometimes or often goes too far in his polemics, and is liable to descend into
a kind of fanaticism (albeit an empirically well-supported kind). I don’t just
say this based on some kind of vague intuition, but with multiple individuals
in mind.
Here is a list of some of those notable
self-identified liberals and leftists who have – with varying degrees of force,
and at differing times during Chomsky’s career – made this kind of accusation: Christopher
Hitchens (the notorious contrarian polemicist and wit who famously turned on
Chomsky after 9/11 (and stopped being a leftist in the process)); Sam Harris (the
well-known New Atheist ‘neuroscientist’, pretend-rationalist and arguable
neocon who famously attacked Chomsky in The
End of Faith for failing to include “intention” in his analysis, and generally
sees Chomsky as a kind of corrupting demagogue (the “godfather of the
regressive left” who has led leftists “off the end of the world”)); Alan
Dershowitz (the august Harvard legal scholar and strident Israel-defender who has
been battling Chomsky on the Israel-Palestine conflict for many decades
(another questionable liberal who nevertheless embraces the label)); John Gray
(the major political philosopher and New Atheist-critic who attacked Chomsky’s
more recent writings four years ago:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/08/making-future-noam-chomsky-review);
Paul Krugman (the well-known “Saltwater”(fake Keynesian, DSGE-modelling)
anti-Sanders economist and prolific New York Times columnist who said in 1999
that Chomsky “epitomized left-wing view that all bad things are the result of
western intervention”); Susan Sontag (the famous polymathic writer who said in
March 2003 that she disagreed with Chomsky’s view that “all uses of American
imperial power are by definition wrong”); George Lakoff (the cognitive linguist
who developed a hatred for Chomsky after his strident, belligerent criticisms
of generative semantics and who can be found criticising Chomsky’s politics
here: http://web.archive.org/web/19970521111825/http://www.journalism.sfsu.edu/www/pubs/gater/spring95/apr27/chom.htm);
Tom Wolfe (the esteemed American writer and wit who can be found in the
documentary Manufacturing Consent deriding
Chomsky and Herman’s book Manufacturing
Consent as “the old cabal theory” and who claimed in December 2005 that
Chomsky “knew nothing” about “American involvement in the war over Vietnam” and
is only regarded as a great intellectual because of how easy it is to show
“righteous indignation”); David Mamet (the acclaimed Jewish playwright who
condemns Chomsky in his 2006 book The
Wicked Son, Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred and the Jews); Camille LaPaglia (the
controversial lesbian anti-feminist feminist and literary critic who wrote in a
2006 Salon article that “Chomsky’s hatred of the US is pathological – stemming
from some bilious problem with father figures that is too fetid to explore”); Nick
Cohen (the notable centrist journalist and critic of the contemporary “left” who
directs much of his anti-left ire at Chomsky and devotes a large part of his
2007 polemic What’s Left? to
criticising Chomsky’s “extreme” views (among other things, Cohen has argued
that Chomsky has fostered anti-Semitism on the left)); and Oliver Kamm (the
well-known The Times journalist who,
like Cohen, has a long-running vendetta against Chomsky and also sees him as an
inciter of anti-Semitism (should be noted that Kamm is an avowed Blairite and self-proclaimed
“liberal neocon” who sees Islamic totalitarianism as an existential threat to
the West which needs to be crushed)).[1]
Though Chomsky is exalted and
lionised in some left-wing quarters, there are actually a surprising number of
liberals who seem to view his general politics (rather than just his foreign
policy critiques) in exactly the way that all
right-wing people view them: as the views of an extremist or near-extremist
overwhelmed by dogmatism, zealotry and motivated reasoning (massive
confirmation and selection bias), and prototypically symbolic of a left-wing
person who has gone off the edge. In fact, I have noticed that even some very smart
left-wing people have this perception. I shall now give an illustrative
anecdote.
A few months ago, I discovered the
blog of the notable MIT electrical engineer, “theoretical computer scientist”
and quantum computing expert, Scott Aaronson. The blog’s called Shtetl Optimized (he’s Jewish (like so
many American scientists)). Since I am always interested in people’s political
views, I soon decided to search in the blog archives for some references to
politics. I thus learned that Aaronson is a liberal or left-liberal. I then
searched for a mention of Chomsky. Thereupon, I discovered, to my great
displeasure, that Aaronson had mentioned Chomsky, multiple times, but only to disparage him. In one
February 2011 discussion with several of his commenters, I even discovered a
series of outright condemnations. After one of Aaronson’s readers brought up
Chomsky on February 13, and asked Aaronson whether he had ever sought to strike
up a conversation with the man (given their shared place of work and their shared
political leanings), Aaronson wrote the following: “Sure, I’m “left-leaning,”
but Chomsky is left-toppling-over—so much so that he winds up all the way on
the other end of the political spectrum, writing laudatory prefaces for books
by Holocaust deniers” (http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=536). In a few
subsequent comments, Aaronson then backed up these (trite) allegations by
briefly detailing the incriminating aspects of the notorious “Faurisson Affair”
– the standard example invoked by those critics seeking to implicate Chomsky in
anti-Semitism (and accusing him of poor reasoning).
After a few more comments from
his interlocutors, Aaronson then wrote this:
“Milk Dud: I have read
as much of Chomsky’s stuff as I could take. Whenever he writes about anything
remotely political, I find his style hateful, condescending, and sophistic,
even when he has a point (which being intelligent, of course he sometimes
does). In other words, I find his entire political oeuvre to be perfectly
consistent with his behavior in the Faurisson affair (which, BTW, is not some
obscure incident I dredged up, but the thing that destroyed his reputation in
large parts of the intellectual world, and which he’s continually refused to
apologize for over the last 30 years).
To pick a random example: Chomsky
once wrote that the fact that US presidential election results are usually
fairly balanced (i.e., close to 50% Democratic and 50% Republican) proves that
American democracy is a sham: people know the two parties are essentially
identical, therefore they vote randomly. For why else would the outcomes be so
close?
This is prototypical Chomsky: to
an acolyte already sold on the premise that 99.9% of the world is “sheeple,” it
might sound profound, yet a moment’s thought reveals the argument’s idiocy. The
real explanation for why election outcomes are close to balanced is game-theoretic:
basically, if Democrats were only getting 30% of the vote, they’d move to the
right until they got close to 50%; if they were getting 70%, they’d move left
until they had just enough votes to win. Welcome to reality—full of good and
bad agents with competing interests, not some master puppeteer orchestrating a
planetary charade!
The view of Chomsky that I formed
from his writings is also consistent with what I later learned from the people
at MIT who knew him in the 60s. They said that, on the one hand, he and Marvin
Minsky were considered the two smartest people around; on the other, Chomsky
(unlike Minsky) was an intellectual bully—someone who relished verbally
destroying grad students, and would happily do so even when he knew he was
wrong.
I don’t believe for a minute that
Chomsky is motivated by what you call “civil rights, the working class, the
voiceless, etc,” even if his agenda and the “voiceless’s” have inner product bounded
away from 0. Rather, I think he’s motivated by hate (of “elites,” America,
Israel, Jews other than himself…), and uses other people’s compassion
for the downtrodden as the best available tool with which to attack his
enemies. In other words, I think he has the psychology of a Lenin, not of a
Martin Luther King.”
I don’t at all resent Mr.
Aaronson for holding these views, and in fact, I think he might have a couple
of valid points to make here (though I certainly strongly disagree with most claims
made). Happily, the objections to Chomsky laid out here give me an excellent
opportunity to stake out where I myself stand on matters like the Faurisson
Affair, as well as the question of Chomsky’s ego, character and motivations. It
also gives me an opportunity to correct some misinformation, and begin some
preliminary exculpation (again, let it be made clear that I don’t seek to
absolve Chomsky of all malefactions and errors).
Firstly, the Faurisson Affair. This
is really a very old and very tired old controversy, and I will therefore not
dwell on it too long. I will start by making a few points absolutely clear.
·
Chomsky is categorically
and unequivocally not a Holocaust denier, nor did he ever
flirt with Holocaust denialism – ever.
·
Chomsky is a free-speech absolutist. One of his
most famous quotes – the first one that comes up on Google when you type his
name – is this: “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we
despise, we don’t believe in it at all”. It is his absolute commitment to this
principle that explains – not just partly, but wholly – why he signed the petition defending Faurisson’s work.
·
When Chomsky did sign the petition, he knew only
the tiniest bit about Faurisson’s work; he recognised that the petition was a
free speech matter, and that was that. Chomsky signs lots of petitions (even
today), so it is not surprising that he wouldn’t do much research in this case.
·
Yes, it is true that Chomsky should have thought
harder about the consequences of singing a petition defending a controversial
author of whom he was almost entirely ignorant.
·
Yes, it is true that Chomsky then wrote an essay
defending Faurisson’s research – but he still hadn’t read deeply into
Faurisson’s work when he wrote it, and he did not know it was to become the
preface of Faurisson’s book (it was reproduced without his permission).
And now comes the incriminating
part. Here are two quotes from the essay that Chomsky wrote on Faurisson, both
of which Aaronson extracts:
(1) “[I]s it true that Faurisson
is an anti-Semite or a neo-Nazi? As noted earlier, I do not know his work very
well. But from what I have read — largely as a result of the nature of the
attacks on him — I find no evidence to support either conclusion. Nor do I find
credible evidence in the material that I have read concerning him, either in
the public record or in private correspondence. As far as I can determine, he
is a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort.”
(2) “I see no anti-Semitic
implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers or even denial of the
Holocaust. Nor would there be anti-Semitic implications, per se, in the claim
that the Holocaust (whether one believes it took place or not) is being
exploited, viciously so, by apologists for Israeli repression and violence. I
see no hint of anti-Semitic implications in Faurisson’s work.”
These are typically the gotcha
passages used by opponents, and it is easy to see why (especially with the
second one, which looks, on the face of it, quite appalling and would deeply offend
me if I didn’t know more). Aaronson believes Chomsky should have apologised for
writing this, and I wouldn’t strongly disagree (and Chomsky has not apologised,
since he apologises for nothing).
However, please, let us be absolutely
clear that, as much as Chomsky is a critic of Israel and forever inveighs
against the “elites” (which does unfortunately attract a tiny handful of
neo-Nazi conspiracy theorists to his Youtube videos), it is totally and utterly insane to accuse him
of being anti-Semitic, or of seeking to foster anti-Semitic sentiment to the
most minimal degree. Simply consider the following facts: Chomsky is Jewish
himself, he grew up in a traditional Jewish household (his father was a Hebrew
scholar), and he spent his childhood fully immersed in a culture of
working-class Jewish intellectuals; he was still immersed in Jewish culture as
a young man, he married a Jewish woman with whom he went to Jewish summer camps,
and he identified in his early years as a “Zionist”; for a while, in the 1950s,
he actually lived in an Israeli Kibbutz with his wife; he was himself the
victim of anti-Semitic bullying and abuse as a child, and spent his schoolyears
living in terror of the vicious, anti-Semitic Irish Catholics on his street
(and the vicious, anti-Semitic culture that created them); he personally
remembers the spine-shivering horror of hearing Hitler’s ferocious snarling on
the radio, and sensing the dark mood of the crowd at the rally; and he
personally remembers living in fear of the rise of Fascism, by which he became morbidly
fascinated from an astonishingly young age (he was incredibly precocious).
But if this is all true, you’re thinking, why would Chomsky say that second quote? Here’s my answer: as
callous as this sounds, I think Chomsky was just trying to make a subtle
logical point. He was trying to point out that there’s no necessary connection between scepticism about the historical
reality of the Holocaust (or at least the important details, and facts and
figures (I don’t know how far Faurisson went)) and anti-Semitism. It is difficult
to make such a cold and bloodless logical point about such a chilling,
repugnant event in history, and it was clearly a mistake to try to do so (and
the claim about “implications” was silly, unless he’s talking about logical
implication (but why would he?)). Nonetheless, once again, it would be crazy to
see this as proof that Chomsky doesn’t mourn the dead of the Holocaust. Chomsky
has spent his life in activism in large part because of his memory of European Fascism and Hitler; his terror at
the ferment in 1930s Europe was one of the formative experiences of his life.
Indeed, it was Fascism’s rise that convinced him of the urgent need of every
moral person to stand up to systems of power, domination and tyranny.
So, ultimately, as much as I empathise
with the visceral revulsion of someone like Aaronson to Chomsky’s bloodless commentary
on perhaps the worst atrocity ever committed by human beings, I think it is in itself
offensive to suggest that Chomsky might be a closet anti-Semite.
Since it would make more sense to
address Aaronson’s Democrat-Republican example of Chomskyan sophistry under
“Accusation 2” (as you’ll later see), I will now skip ahead to Aaronson’s
insinuation that Chomsky is a kind of Harean psychopath – a highly intelligent,
highly charismatic narcissistic egomaniac who, despite all his moral talk, secretly
feels nothing at all.
I am absolutely certain that Chomsky is not a Harean psychopath,
that his psychology is not that of “a Lenin”, that what motivates him is indeed
a profound sense of moral obligation and responsibility, and that he does
indeed desire to improve the lives of others. I will defend this set of claims in
several paragraphs’ time. For now, though, I will consider the weaker charge
that he was, or is, an “intellectual bully”.
It may surprise you that I think
that Chomsky probably is (or was) an intellectual bully. The testimony of
former colleagues doesn’t surprise me at all, since he does indeed always debate with mordant, withering
rhetoric, and never gives so much as an inch – or even an opportunity for his
interlocutor to draw breath. Of course, he does always speak with a very quiet
voice (he usually never comes close to shouting), but this gentleness of voice doesn’t
change the high-horsepower, intellectually brutal style of debating he adopts with
all interlocutors: relentless, monotonal, data-laden litigation, interspersed
with sardonic put-downs. As Steven Pinker put it, Chomsky’s way of arguing
portrays people who disagree with him as “stupid or evil”. In his writing, you
get exactly the same kind of style; in fact, Chomsky’s writing is incredibly similar to his oratory in just about every way (the syntax,
lexicon, and even sources referred to and quoted, carry across remarkably well).
His writing is exactly as grey as his speech, exactly as precise, exactly as
litigatory, and contains exactly the same mordant turns-of-phrase.
I learned a couple of months ago
that this incredible verbal-literary consistency is largely explicable by the
fact that, when he writes, Chomsky doesn’t actually bother doing careful
editing in order to improve lyricism and fluidity, and doesn’t actually spend
any time carefully pondering what he’s about to say; instead, he apparently bashes
out polemics at breakneck speed, in the short intervals when he has time (he
doesn’t even stop for a moment’s thought). As I learned from the blog posts of
his long-time secretary, Beverley Stohl, the reason he is able to do this is that – in his words – there are “buffers” in
his brain that provide him with instant recall of details from a given topic,
even if there has been a long interruption since he last dealt with it.
Though I certainly don’t want to defend
Chomsky’s intellectual bullying (and I genuinely feel sorry for those students
and colleagues who were on the receiving end, and suffered serious emotional,
reputational and careeral consequences as a result (particularly the generative
semanticists he hung out to dry in the 60s and 70s)), I do want to make a few
palliative comments. First of all, it’s important to point out that, in the
debating context, brilliance and intellectual dominance are very hard to
separate from aggression and belligerence, and people are unduly prone to
conflate them. Consider this: is it really possible for a debater who believes
herself to be correct, wants everyone to be fully convinced that she is
correct, and wants everyone to know all the flaws in her opponent’s argument,
to succeed in convincing everyone that she is correct, and to succeed in revealing
all the flaws in her opponent’s argument,
while at the same time avoiding offending or hurting her opponent, or seeming
aggressive and belligerent? Personally, I have serious doubts. If your
opponent is himself quite strident, you have no choice but to simply bombard
him with facts, figures, statistics and information, and to do this all with
conviction and strength. If you succeed in this, you may well look like a bully.
Of course, you still might wonder
why Chomsky would need to browbeat students,
since students are not normally actually trying to seriously challenge their
teachers (especially if their teacher is Chomsky). To this, I have no answer
(though I’m about to suggest a tentative one).
The second thing I want to say is
more of a speculation than a statement of fact. It is this: I suspect that part
of the explanation for Chomsky’s brutal refutations – for the impression he
gives in both speech and writing of believing that his opponents are “stupid or
evil” – is the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
People normally invoke the
Dunning-Kruger Effect when they’re deriding a stupid person who doesn’t realise
they’re stupid, but the Effect is actually a dual phenomenon. It is the dual
empirical finding that highly unskilled people typically have a very low
awareness of how unskilled they are (they often think that they are skilled), and that highly skilled people typically have a very low awareness
of how skilled they are (because of the effect of cognitive ease). With respect
to Chomsky, I’m suggesting that part of the problem he has in dealings with
other academics is that he doesn’t
realise how smart he is (yes, he is anomalously intelligent even compared
with other academics). And the reason
I think this might be a partial explanation for the “stupid or
evil”-viciousness of his debating style is that his intellectual brilliance
leaves him baffled as to how people could
think the things they do. He does seem often to conclude that his
interlocutors are either stupid or
evil. Certainly, when it comes to politics, he thinks that intellectuals who
disagree with him are – bar none – morally
deplorable hypocrites and should all be ashamed of their craven genuflection
to state and corporate power. This attitude will, of course, be fecund ground
to explore later.
I will now present evidence that
Chomsky is not just some narcissistic psychopath, and really does do the things
in commitment to abstract principles of morality, and a desire to better the
world:
·
Chomsky is an anarchist; as an anarchist, it
would violate his entire philosophy to be “a Lenin”.
·
Chomsky’s style of talking is itself a
reflection of his anarchist principles. It is not an accident that Chomsky
sounds so dull, grey and uncharismatic in his oratory, and adds only the most
minimal embellishment to the deluge of propositional content that comes out of
his mouth. In fact, it is actually (in part) a conscious choice, inspired by his
commitment to anarchist principles. Here’s a relevant extract from the book The Science of Language (a book in which
he converses with the McGill philosopher James McGilvray):
“JM: When we
were together last time, we spoke briefly about Akeel Bilgrami's piece on
Gandhi, and the distinction between universals and universalisability. You
mentioned that Gandhi had held the principle that you should not persuade,
because that was a form of violence. I was interested in that in part because
...
NC: You can
only exemplify ...
JM: Ok, right.
A colleague, now retired, Harry Bracken, used to hold a related view.
NC: Really?
JM: It appeared
in his view that rational argument is not a form of persuasion, rather it's a
form of display, or a form of deduction from accepted principles, principles on
which the participants agree, or can on consideration accept. Persuasion
typically involves the use of force, power, authority ... It is not rational
argument. Is that the kind of distinction that you had in mind?
NC: I'd put it
differently, but I essentially agree with the position. So, say, you're with
children ,or teaching, or involved in a discussion, or talking to an audience
... Ideally, you should not be trying to persuade them -- that is, get them to
accept your position. You should be trying to encourage them to think the issue
through and arrive at their conclusion, and rational argument presents materials
that they can use. So, for example, they may decide that they don't like the
premises, or they may find that there's a flaw in the argument, or something
else. It's presenting a framework that people may not have thought of and that
they can use for their own purposes. It's a pretty hard distinction to make and
observe. When you're talking to people, it's hard not to try to persuade them.
But at least as an ideal, that's what one ought to strive for.
It should be
true of teaching. There's no point in persuading people. If you're teaching,
say, physics, there's no point in persuading a student that you're right. You
want to encourage them to find out what the truth is, which is probably that
you're wrong.
JM: Is this
policy driven partially prudentially, that people can't effectively develop any
kind of conviction unless they make the decision themselves, basing it on their
own grounds.
NC: I think
that's probably a fact; you're not going to arrive at a true understanding
unless you somehow reach it yourself. But, quite apart from that, it's [really]
just a moral issue. It depends on what your attitude is towards other people:
should they obey you, or should they think things through for themselves?
JM: Harry used
to put in terms of Plato's distinction between rhetoric on the one hand and
philosophy -- by which he meant rational argument -- on the other. I think
that's plausible, although it does suggest that there's a clear distinction
there ...
NC: I know I'm
always put off by people who are called good speakers, by those who can rouse
an audience. That's just what you do not want. If you have the capacity to do
it, you should suppress it.
JM: But you are
a good speaker, you know.
NC: I think I'm
a rather boring speaker. But if I had the capacity to be a speaker who could
rouse an audience to passion and excitement, I would try, at least, not to use
that capacity. Because I think it's wrong.
JM: That's
characteristic of your argument style in politics: you just present the facts.
It seems to me it's an excellent technique. Even when you use irony, it works
because those who hear it know what the facts are ...
NC: Well, by
now quite the opposite is refined into almost a point of principle. A political
figure is not supposed to present materials and ask you to make your own
judgement. It's also enshrined in one of the greatest tributes to human
irrationality that exists, namely, formal debates -- you know, debating
societies like those found at Oxford, Yale ... They're based on a principle of
profound irrationality, namely, that you can't change your mind. The rules of
debate are that you must take a position and keep to it, even if you're convinced
that your opponent has a good argument, you're not allowed to say so. You have
to show in some way that it's not right, even though you think it is. There
cannot be anything more irrational. That's why I usually refuse when I'm
invited to take part in these debating societies, and so on -- or even to take
part in debates; it's ridiculous.
Suppose it's an
area in which people at least try to be reasonable, say, the sciences, where
it's a goal to be reasonable. You don't have debates with people; you interact
with them and you see if their arguments are correct. If a student comes in
with a paper, we don't have a debate -- or we shouldn't. What we should have is
a discussion to see which parts are right, which parts are wrong, where we
change our ideas, and so on. But the very concept of a debate --it's just a
tribute to human irrationality.
It's a part of
the same thing, Somehow, the point is to persuade, not to find out what is
right, or to work out your own ideas, and so on.
JM: Obviously,
you're not in training to be a lawyer.
NC: Lawyers have to do it; they're paid for it. A
lawyer's job is to defend the client, no matter how rotten the case is. You can
understand why a legal system should have such a role. It provides a person
with some kind of defence. But to regard that as anything that people would
enter into voluntarily, without having a role in a system of defending a
person's rights, is just totally irrational. All these debating societies
should go out of existence, in my opinion.
The one
argument you can give for them is that they're kind of like chess -- that they
sharpen people's modes of thinking, and so on. I doubt that. But I can't think
of any other argument in their favour. In fact, you can see it in debating
societies. A debating team is trained to take both sides, and you don't know
until you get there which side you're going to take.
JM: And it
helps to know who the judges are, and what would convince them too ...
NC: What
convinces them is usually rhetoric, trickery ... I don't know if you've ever
watched or participated in these elite debating societies, like, say, Yale's. I
do it occasionally, but I really feel like walking out. It's mostly trickery,
or rhetoric, or deviousness ... and that's considered the ideal.. You somehow
have to trip up your opponent, even if he's right and you know he's right.”
Clearly,
Aaronson would say that Chomsky is being mendacious here, because – in practice
– he doesn’t really live up to these ideals. Perhaps I am naïve, but I really
don’t think that Chomsky is being mendacious, even if it is true that he
doesn’t completely live up to these ideals, and even if it is true (as I think
it is) that Chomsky is deluding himself if he thinks that the average person is capable of thinking and evaluating
arguments for themselves (as Hitchens quipped, Chomsky pretends that his
audience are “computers” (processing the propositional content like a computer following
code)). In any case, I think if Chomsky did want to be “a Lenin”, he would speak like an orator, and try to
stir up crowds. But he never does.
And if you want
more evidence that Chomsky takes his anti-rhetoric principle seriously,
consider that, as much as he admires Martin Luther King, Chomsky has actually
said that he can’t stand listening to the Doctor’s speeches, because they’re
too charismatic. (Yes, he really takes it that far.)
·
Even
though he does normally speak in a very flat tone of voice, Chomsky clearly
does sometimes display emotions (thus proving that he’s not a sociopath). If
you listen to his talks carefully, one can often hear his voice quivering and
cracking, increasing in pitch, and so on. The moral indignation at atrocities
is unmistakeable (this shouldn’t be necessary to say).
·
If Chomsky was an activist not out of duty, but
in part because of grandiosity and megalomania (as Aaronson confidently claims),
then one would expect his activism to
have certain characteristic features. Presumably, he would speak and write in a more florid and charismatic style;
presumably, he would accept those invitations with the greatest coverage, where
he got to speak to the largest audiences; and presumably, he would not be shy
about self-aggrandising and self-publicity (he wouldn’t be a private person). But
none of these things are true of Chomsky. Instead, he has spent decades
devoting forty hours of his week to
writing emails (before emails, letters) to random people, which helps his
career not one jot; he takes on speaking obligations in various places across
the world, where there are usually no cameras and no press; he laments the cult
of personality that has grown around him, forever saying things like “We
shouldn’t be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas”[2];
and he is an intensely private person, who has tried to eschew more personal
interviews and always shies away from talking about himself. Add to this his
deliberately dry speaking style and his very plain manner, and you have a
person who is clearly trying his best not
to be “a Lenin”; in fact, you have a person who is trying his best not even
to be “a Martin Luther King” (since King was too charismatic).
Yes, it may well be true that all
this just makes him look more like a
saint, and so, conceivably, Chomsky could still be an egomaniac – just a very
clever and canny one. But I think this
is a lunatic interpretation. Chomsky clearly does care about civil rights,
women’s rights, working people, and the future of the human race (he is
constantly despairing about inaction on climate change and the still
unextinguished threat of nuclear Armageddon, for example). And, if you just
observe his actions, you see a moral saint trying to do something about it.
Scott Aaronson, meanwhile, is not an activist and does nothing to improve the
state of the world – so what right does he have to besmirch the motivations of
someone who has literally given over his entire life to the twin-principles of
justice and freedom (especially when he has never met the man and knows nothing
about him)?
I also strongly suspect that
Chomsky might be one of those people who has
worked out how to suppress their ego, and to worry only about other things and
other people. I’m not 100% sure about this, but there seems to be good evidence.
As we have already seen, he certainly radiates that impression of Stoic/Buddhist/Daoist
egolessness in his dress, manner and his matter-of-fact attitude towards
questions about himself. More importantly, for someone with frontal lobes like
Chomsky’s, it shouldn’t actually be too hard to extirpate emotions that would get
in the way of his anarchist principles and moral commitments. A strong sense of
ego would be one of these emotions.
It’s not just these details that
lend support either; I actually have direct
evidence for this conjecture. As I was interested in Chomsky’s psychology before
I encountered Aaronson’s comments (despite my recognition that Chomsky would
hate me for being interested in his psychology), in the first email I sent to
Chomsky (of the two I have sent him) I deliberately probed his status as a
prophet. Basically, I sent him a one-page “Thank you” in which I expressed my
ambivalence about thanking someone who is thanked all the time, and yet also
really deserves to be thanked. I regretted writing it as soon as I had sent it
(and even while I was writing it), because even though I was acknowledging how
useless and psychologically harmful it must be to get praise all the time, I
was still myself just writing a trite email of the kind that he has probably
received countless times before. But, obviously, I still did send it in the end
(late at night).
Here is a relevant passage from
the middle of this email: “Unless you have discovered some remarkable method of
blocking out people's perceptions of you, the notoriety, prophetisation and
mass public judgement you have endured for decades has assuredly corrupted your
ego, and perverted the ancient, healthier sense of self you must have had back
when you were a young linguistics graduate student basically like any other,
with a life taken up by a family and so on. It is for this reason that I really
don't want to just be another person saying that you are the greatest man who
ever lived or anything like that. I don't think you're Jesus Christ. No doubt
you've done some nasty or selfish things, like any other human being.”
Here is
Chomsky’s reply to the whole thing:
“Thanks very much for your letter. I think I’ve been
able to maintain due humility, primarily because I can easily see how many
reasons I have for humility. That comes pretty easily when one has fairly
regular contacts with people who are under severe repression and attack, and
who maintain their dignity, and resist as they can, with enormous courage.
I hope very much that our paths will cross one of these
days, and good luck in the difficult and challenging – and exciting – paths
that lie ahead.
Noam Chomsky”
I don’t think he’s lying here
when he says “That comes pretty easily”. Maybe I’m naïve, but I just don’t. And,
in any case, even if there is still some small element of dishumility (i.e.
narcissism) in his psychology (and I doubt it), I don’t see how this refutes
the saintliness of his life. To me, that’s the crucial point. He’s done far
more good over his life than the vast majority of people, and almost certainly
more than I will in my life. He’s an incredible intellectual workhorse, and
he’s been writing, researching and supporting activists for literally decades.
How can I fail to admire him for that?
I have now finally finished
discussing the phenomenon of liberals and leftists who criticise Chomsky. At
long last, we can begin dealing directly with the accusation that we are
supposedly to be dealing with: that Chomsky’s political analysis is one-sided,
and irrationally, disproportionately hostile to his nation of birth.
[...]
[...]
One last word on objectivity in
politics.
As my bullet-points on
objectivity made clear, I totally discount the notion that any political
analyst can just give “the facts”; taken literally, I regard it as naïve and
stupid. There is, however, an
important caveat: I still think that the traditional standards of rigour in
political (and historical) analysis hold, and I don’t believe that there is any
contradiction in this. The reason I see no contradiction is simple: the
traditional standards of rigour don’t entail metaphysical claims; they are simply
good ways of mitigating (sans extirpating) bias, distortion and
oversimplification.
If this seems in any way
confusing, consider the following analogy: you don’t have to believe in a
Platonic heaven to accept the use of mathematics in physics, and to believe
that physics would be impoverished without it.
So what are these traditional standards?
Well, I think the following are crucial – indeed, non-negotiable – practices of good political analysis: researching
as widely and deeply as possible; maintaining a vigilant awareness of biases
and counter-alethic tendencies in one’s own cognition; carefully assessing the
reliability of sources, and adjusting one’s credence as a result; trying one’s
best to avoid simplifying narratives or metanarratives; sticking as closely to
the empirical and quantifiable as possible; and citing and footnoting
everything.
The kind of Pomo relativists who
think none of this matters because Il n’y
a rien dehors la texte” (or whatever other shit they say) are simply wrong.
The baby does not need to be thrown out.
We’re now done with this abstract
investigation of objectivity. At long last, we can directly probe the
accusation against Chomsky.
Is Chomsky reflexively hostile to
America, and far too one-sided in his polemics? Well, no; but it is certainly
true that he is very one-sided in his polemics, and has always been hostile to
the American state (when accused of “anti-Americanism”,
which he thinks is a “totalitarian” notion, Chomsky always points out that it
should be obvious in a free society that there is a distinction between the
state from the citizenry). Chomsky has
focussed all his foreign policy writings on criticising America, from the very
beginning of his activist career to the present day. Consider what unites the
following:
·
His polemics against the Vietnam invasion and the
devastating US bombing campaigns, and the deferential attitude of American
technocrats and intellectuals towards these monstrosities.
·
His controversial work with Edward Herman in
1978 and 1979 on the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot and media portrayals thereof, and his
use of the media coverage of the genocide as an example of the US propaganda
system in action.
·
His important investigations into, and consciousness-raising
about, the US-backed Indonesian occupation of East Timor and genocide, and his
juxtaposition of this genocide with that in Cambodia as a means of illustrating
the workings of the propaganda system.
·
His indictments of Israeli policy and atrocities
(the endless Gaza bombings, the settlements and the Lebanon invasion), and
Israel and the US’ hypocritical recalcitrance on diplomacy and nuclear
proliferation (especially regarding Iran); his indictments of the unconditional
US backing for Israel in whatever they do, against all international bodies and
laws; and his indictments of the apologetics of intellectuals for this whole
mess, starting with The Fateful Triangle and
continuing to the present.
·
His many writings on US interventions and terrorism
in Central America, including the 1954 CIA coup in Guatemala on behalf of the
United Fruit Company (essentially), the obstruction of democracy in Chile
culminating in the 1973 CIA-backed coup which established Augusto Pinochet’s
murderous military dictatorship (a dictatorship which was advised on economics by
Milton Friedman and his Chicago Boys), the obstruction of democracy in El
Salvador throughout the 1970s, the US support from 1979 of the deadly
right-wing Contras against the economically successful left-wing socialist
Sandinista Junta of National Reconstruction government in Nicaragua, and the
invasion of Panama in December 1989.
·
His jeremiads against US-led neoliberal
globalisation and “the neoliberal assault”, begun under Reagan and frequently
focussing on the US-dominated, Wall-St-infected, hypocritically-market-fundamentalist,
third-world-destroying corporate-crime-syndicate that is the International
Monetary Fund.
·
His condemnations of GATT, and (later) of so-called
“free-trade” agreements (really “free investment agreements”) like NAFTA and
the TPP, demanded and dictated by US megacorporations, and anti-democratic in
every respect.
·
His strident criticisms of George Bush snr’s
involvement in the Gulf War, and the US refusal to allow diplomatic settlement.
·
His denunciation of the devastating US missile
attack on the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in 1998, which may have eventually
resulted in tens of thousands of civilian deaths (from medicine shortages and
halted famine-relief efforts).
·
His denunciation of the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia
during the Kosovo War, which resulted in hundreds of civilian casualties and
led to a brutal response by Serbian forces on the ground.
·
His calumniation of the War in Afghanistan
(“Operation Enduring Freedom”), and its bloody (not to mention totally
counterproductive) consequences.
·
His vituperation of the invasion of Iraq, of the
many apologists for the war who claimed “noble motivations” and ignored
economic and institutional factors (as per usual), his vituperation of US
torture, and his persistent lamentations of the thousands of civilian deaths that
resulted from the war, including several (mostly unpublicised) atrocities, the
most significant of which was the November 2004 attack on the city of Falluja, which
Chomsky described as “one of the worst atrocities of the 21st
Century”.
·
His excoriations of US policy towards the Middle
East under Obama, which involved (Obama’s more balanced rhetoric notwithstanding)
continued acquiescence towards Israel, the NATO bombing of Libya, and most
importantly, Obama’s drone campaign, “the most extreme terrorist campaign of
recent times”, which has violated principles enshrined in the Magna Carta by
summarily executing citizens merely suspected (not proven) to be implicated in
terrorist activities. (In other words, the drones are a massively powerful, nightmarish
technology of terrorism and death used to obliterate suspected terror on the other side of the world.)
Given this overwhelming evidence
of one-sided hostility to America, I think we really ought to change the
question. I propose that the question we should answer instead is to what
extent Chomsky’s anti-American focus is justified.
In order to answer this question, I shall first examine it synchronically, evaluating Chomsky’s general reasons for an
immutable attitude of hostility to US state and military power, and his general
reasons for a total, blanket distrust in government professions of rectitude
and humanitarianism. Later, I shall evaluate the specific cases of controversy,
like Herman and Chomsky’s writings on Cambodia.
Understanding in general terms
why Chomsky is so hyper-critical of US foreign policy is crucial to
understanding his overall politics. Unpacking the logic of his perpetual
outrage will require us to understand how he does political analysis, the
highly system-based, institution-based economically
deterministic (roughly, Leninist) way he analyses politics and sees the
political world, and what “anarchism” means to him. I will argue that intelligent
people like Aaronson fail to understand Chomsky because they don’t understand
the logic behind any of Chomsky’s politics – his radical opposition to power,
the utter conviction of his polemics and his often simplistic-seeming rhetoric.
I will also suggest that they haven’t bothered to find out how much of what he
says is absolutely right.
Incidentally, as a Chomskyan, one
is almost tempted to blame this failure of smart people to understand Chomsky on
the propaganda system (which we will, of course, discuss later), and the way
journalists and intellectuals are trained within the “doctrinal system”, always
predicating political analysis on naïve assumptions about democracy in America.
However, there are a couple more concrete and – it must be said – more prosaic
reasons that it is difficult for even intelligent people to unpack the logic of
Chomsky’s political work. The first is that he never lays this logic out all in
one go – merely giving hints here and there. The second is that, while carrying
out his polemics, he immediately launches – without any intellectual scaffolding
– into often highly categorical,
intransigent assertions about all sorts of things that go almost entirely
unmentioned in mainstream political discourse: concentrations of state-corporate
power, the lies of the state and the mainstream media, the non-existence of populist
democracy in America, the neoliberal assault on democracy, the neoliberal
assault on the Third World, America’s thirst for global domination, the fantasy
of the “free-market”, the mendacity of “free-trade deals”, the submissiveness
of intellectuals and the indoctrinating ‘function’ of the education system etc.
While these claims are always well-supported by evidence and data, they also
strike one (before they understand the logic) as overly simplistic, or at least
framed in a disingenuous way. I first encountered Chomsky through Youtube
videos, and I know that the first few times I heard him talk, my recurring
thought was, “Well, he’s definitely got a point here, but doesn’t he just take
some of this stuff a little bit far?” Yes,
there’s a sense in which the education system is indoctrinating the youth, but,
you know. Could it be any other way?
Nevertheless, through learning
more and more about his politics and his political philosophy, and being
exposed to more of his writings and interviews, I eventually discovered that he
was not the least bit simple-minded in his thinking – that, behind all of his
attitudes and all of his arguments, there was indeed an elaborate logic. Once I
did unpack the logic, and learned of his justifications for his various stances
and attitudes, I found that I could no longer find major fault with any of them (perhaps I exaggerate). Certainly,
I decided that he was broadly correct to see the world in the way that he does.
I hope to show this in my exposition.
Before I carry out this
exposition of the “elaborate logic”, it must be said that there’s a certain
irony in the very idea that I would need to “unpack” Chomsky’s political views.
The reason I say this is that Chomsky often seems to imply that there’s no elaborate logic behind his political
views, just “commonsense”, something that anyone can understand (in fact, I
remember hearing him claim that (in his experience, from talks he has given) it
is easier for laypeople to understand
him, since they don’t have all this ideological baggage to complicate and
mystify the obvious facts). He prides himself on being “theory-free” in his
analysis and regards his political writing as essentially just a combination of
“the facts” and some “Cartesian logic”. In fact, the reason he eschews “theory”
– in fact, totally dismisses and derides it, as can be seen in his evisceration
of Postmodernism [http://mindfulpleasures.blogspot.com.au/2011/01/noam-chomsky-on-derrida-foucault-lacan.html]
– is basically epistemological, echoing one of my objections to the idea of
naïve objectivity in politics. Chomsky doesn’t think the word “theory” should
even be used outside of science, where it obviously means something like
‘well-tested, elegant system of explanation capable of generating novel
predictions and insights’. To understand this requires some understanding of
the philosophy of science and the nature of complexity. Thus, unfortunately, another
digression is in order.
In order to understand why
Chomsky totally dismisses the idea of “theory” in politics, the essential epistemological
truth one must understand is that politics is nothing like physics, chemistry or
even biology (though it does, of course, have much more to do with the third
than the first two, both methodologically and content-wise). I pretty much made
this point already when I refuted super naïve objectivism about politics. As I
said in that demolition, politics (along with sociology, anthropology, history
and economics) occurs on a very high level of abstraction, mostly above the
level of ‘natural kinds’,[1] describing
a profoundly anthropocentric world filled with entities that couldn’t exist
without consciousness and language and this unfathomably complex totality of ‘information’
we call ‘culture’ (and, pertinently, trying to reduce the word ‘culture’ to
natural kind terms is simply impossible (c.f. mind-body problem)). To put this
in slightly different terms, an intelligent alien species would be much quicker
to figure out our writings on physics, chemistry and, to some extent, biology[2]
than they would to work out what the fuck we are talking about in sociology,
anthropology, history and probably also economics (notwithstanding the
pretensions of neoclassical economists, who seem to think their models and
equations capture Newtonian-style laws). If one were to pinpoint one major
difference between the human sciences and the natural sciences, it would be
that teleological explanations are the norm in the human sciences (because people and states (supposedly) have
“intentions” and “goals” that they either successfully or unsuccessfully carry
out), whereas in physics, chemistry and biology, teleology doesn’t play a role
at all. In fact, physics, chemistry and biology tell us there’s no such thing
as teleology! The cosmos has no
purpose.
Now, clearly, biology has, since
Darwin, been able to invoke purpose constantly – wings are for flying, the
heart is for pumping blood around the body, the ‘fight or flight’ response is
for the avoidance of predators, and most things are ultimately for sex (or, in
the gene-centric view, for perpetuating one’s genes, which helps to explain
kin-based altruism). However, these explanations of attributes of organisms in
terms of genetic fitness (in terms of adaptive purpose) are really only
quasi-teleological; as Dawkins says, natural selection gives the appearance of purpose or design, but
doesn’t actually require it. The term used by philosophers of biology to
describe this is teleonomy – the “quality
of apparent purposefulness and of goal-directedness of structures and functions
in living organisms brought about by natural laws (like natural selection)”
(Wikipedia).
Anyhow, the central point this
all leads us to is this: there’s not going to be a Newtonian theory of
geopolitical conflicts, and there ain’t going to be a Darwin for sociology or
history. This, in turn, explains Chomsky’s conclusion: that anyone who claims
to have some “theory” of politics (eg Slavoj Zizek) is just a pretentious
sophist. All anyone who writes on politics should do, in Chomsky’s view, is try
their best to uncover the truth through rigorous research of all the most
reliable sources, and then write their findings plainly and honestly, cleaving
as closely to the factual and verifiable as possible (with meticulous citation
of sources). This is, of course, Chomsky’s style: fastidious political
empiricism. Though Chomsky does, of course, often structure his works (and his
speeches) around bold, sweeping claims, he always provides plentiful evidence
to back them up, he never becomes melodramatic or hyperbolic, and on a point of
controversy, he very often he uses the words of his enemies against them in
quite ingenious ways (for example, he uses the CIA’s own definition of
terrorism to indict the US as the world’s leading terrorist state, uses the
Washington Post’s description of free-trade agreements as “free investment
agreements” to indict NAFTA, and uses the words written about Obama in the
international business press post-2008 (the success of the advertising campaign
to get him elected) as proof of the farce of democracy in the US (candidates
are sold “like toothpaste”) (Requiem for
the American Dream (2014))).
Now that that digression is over, we can
finally begin unpacking the elaborate logic behind Chomsky’s politics. The
first thing worth trying to understand is the most relevant to this charge of
“one-sidedness”: the relentlessness and purity of his attacks on US foreign
policy.
A nice place to start trying to
understand this one-sidedness would be Chomsky’s own explanation for his
relentless attacks on US foreign policy, from one of his millions of interviews[3]:
"My own concern is primarily
the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one
thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence.
But also for a much more important reason than that; namely, I can do something
about it. So even if the U.S. was responsible for 2 percent of the violence in
the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2 percent I would be
primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the
ethical value of one’s actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences.
It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as
much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th
century."
Does this make sense? My own view
is that yes, it make perfect sense. By “do[ing] something about it”, Chomsky
clearly doesn’t mean affecting the decisions of Presidents and military
generals; what he means instead, I think, is that he acts as one of the lone
voices fulfilling the important democratic duty of letting the people know of
their state’s atrocities, and that he is able to motivate and mobilise other
activists to put pressure on the state. This is non-trivial work that Chomsky
actually does in real life. The more important point Chomsky raises is this: if
he were just another guy spouting centrist pabulum, or another guy talking
constantly about the crimes of other nations and problems with other parts of
the world (misogyny in the Arab world, the aggression of Russia, the human
rights abuses of China)), there would be no point his travelling around giving
talks everywhere and writing book after book after book, because people would be hearing the same stuff on
the mainstream media, and from other intellectuals. What Chomsky does is
tells people things that one simply does not see in the mainstream media, and
that gives his activism an immediate importance. Of course, I have skipped over
the first reason Chomsky adduces in this response: that “the terror and
violence carried out” by the US “happens to be the larger component of international
violence”. Statistically speaking, in terms of the amount of corpses, this is
undoubtedly correct: tally up the casualties from Korea, from Vietnam, from the
coups in South America, from Africa, from the Middle East, from Israel
(indirect US crimes), and you’ve got a total that no nation can possibly compete
with – perhaps somewhere in the range of 40 million, on a conservative estimate
[I’ve derived this figure from some mental arithmetic based on the figures used
in this review of Pinker’s 2011 book The
Better Angels of our Nature, http://www.globalresearch.ca/reality-denial-apologetics-for-western-imperial-violence/32066].
But what’s interesting is that someone like Sam Harris (or Pinker, who is the
person attacked in that link) is probably not crazy enough to deny this claim
about US violence, and he might even accept Chomsky’s logic on the second one.
Where he’d differ from Chomsky is, as he made clear in his debate with Chomsky,
the assessment that any of the mass killings of the US (since Vietnam perhaps)
were really “atrocities” or horrendous “war crimes”, or that the US has ever
acted (since Vietnam perhaps) in a way that would refute the characterisation
of the state as a “well-intentioned giant”, suffering from “all the lumbering
ineptitude that name implies” (Harris, Salon).
I happen to think this is a reasonable argument, and it is an argument that largely exculpates him from any accusation of cognitive bias or zealotry. Evidently, I am not trying to argue that he is not one-sided, merely that he has a very good reason for this.
Chomsky also has two other arguments for his one-sidedness, both of which are related to this. The first is that, if he wasn't such a harsh critic of US foreign policy, then he would be leaving a massive vacuum, since, just as it has been throughout history, the vast majority of intellectuals today reflexively support the actions of their state. One provocative, historical example he often cites to show this is the great moral icon, John Stuart Mill, who wrote paens to the humanity and decency of British imperialism (and most right-thinking people nowadays recognise that there was plenty to polemicise about in the British Empire's treatment of native peoples from Africa to India to Australia (including what can only be called genocide), even if there might be a utilitarian case that the British Empire overall did more good than bad (and I personally think that's impossible to determine)). I think it is pretty obvious that Chomsky is performing a profound and unique service in expressing dissident opinions on US foreign policy.
I happen to think this is a reasonable argument, and it is an argument that largely exculpates him from any accusation of cognitive bias or zealotry. Evidently, I am not trying to argue that he is not one-sided, merely that he has a very good reason for this.
Chomsky also has two other arguments for his one-sidedness, both of which are related to this. The first is that, if he wasn't such a harsh critic of US foreign policy, then he would be leaving a massive vacuum, since, just as it has been throughout history, the vast majority of intellectuals today reflexively support the actions of their state. One provocative, historical example he often cites to show this is the great moral icon, John Stuart Mill, who wrote paens to the humanity and decency of British imperialism (and most right-thinking people nowadays recognise that there was plenty to polemicise about in the British Empire's treatment of native peoples from Africa to India to Australia (including what can only be called genocide), even if there might be a utilitarian case that the British Empire overall did more good than bad (and I personally think that's impossible to determine)). I think it is pretty obvious that Chomsky is performing a profound and unique service in expressing dissident opinions on US foreign policy.
Moreover, I don't think Chomsky's
critiques are as one-sided as they are made out to be by the standard, trite,
ill-informed criticisms of the man (for example, Cohen's, Kamm's, Harris',
Windschuttle's etc). While there is clearly a bias in his FRAMING of issues, as
well as in the topics he chooses to focus on, he is typically far more rigorous
than any state apologists in his citation of facts and concentration on the
empirical and verifiable, rather than the vague, general and specious (compare
Dershowitz on Israel-Palestine to Chomsky, or Sam Harris on ISIS to Chomsky on
ISIS).
The second sub-argument emerges
from Chomsky's view that -- in Marxist slogan form -- "the only language
the powerful understand is violence". As one can see in Chomsky's exchange
with Harris, and in basically all his writings (which Harris knew nothing about
before initiating the exchange), Chomsky thinks it little more than a category
error to impute "noble intentions" or "humanitarian
motivations" to powerful states. This view is not some crude anarchist
dogma, but simply an empirical generalisation resulting from intelligent
institutional analysis and a passing scrutiny of the annals of history. The
institutional analysis I am referring to here is Chomsky's very sensible view
that the US state is not really democratic in any meaningful sense, since the
state has a powerful, symbiotic relationship with the corporate and financial
worlds in all kinds of ways (super-Pacs, donations, lobbying organisations, an
economic structure that has become reliant on huge multinationals, politicians
who come from the corporate world or financial sector, the corporate media (see
Manufacturing Consent)), and his belief that foreign policy is largely dictated
by Eisenhower's notorious "military-industrial complex". If you want
more evidence that the US is not democratic in any meaningful sense, please see
the relevant section of this essay I wrote:
http://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2016/02/a-67-page-dismantling-of-economics-of.html
Meanwhile, the "passing scrutiny of the annals of history" I am referring to is the idea that reading a bit of history leads one to the conclusion that similar patterns get repeated endlessly. Intellectuals invariably defend the "humanitarian interventions" (i.e. conquests) of their states, and always claim the same thing: "noble intentions". As Chomsky pointed out to Harris in the exchange, this was even true in Japan during the time of the Rape of Nanking and was most certainly true in Nazi Germany.
So even though Chomsky is happy to concede that American people are, in very general terms, more morally advanced than Wahabi muslims (contra Harris' ignorant impressions), he doesn't think this extends to the state, with good reason.
Meanwhile, the "passing scrutiny of the annals of history" I am referring to is the idea that reading a bit of history leads one to the conclusion that similar patterns get repeated endlessly. Intellectuals invariably defend the "humanitarian interventions" (i.e. conquests) of their states, and always claim the same thing: "noble intentions". As Chomsky pointed out to Harris in the exchange, this was even true in Japan during the time of the Rape of Nanking and was most certainly true in Nazi Germany.
So even though Chomsky is happy to concede that American people are, in very general terms, more morally advanced than Wahabi muslims (contra Harris' ignorant impressions), he doesn't think this extends to the state, with good reason.
Chomsky’s broader analyse Chomsky’s
commentary on all major US foreign policy events since Vietnam (to seek out
specific errors or distortions), and then ask the broader question about the overall
pattern, and Chomsky’s justifications for it.
First, Vietnam. As most people
know, Chomsky rose to prominence as an activist through his strident criticisms
of the Vietnam invasion, and his indictment of the technocratic, pseudojustifications
given by intellectuals for this imperial war. He was, in fact, one of the very
first intellectuals to protest the American intrusion into Vietnam, which
initially meant giving lectures in people’s living rooms (as he often points
out, there was almost no dissent until 1966 or 1967, making the immediate reaction much smaller than that to
the Iraq War). On February 23 1967, the publication of his brilliant essay “The
Responsibility of Intellectuals” in The
New York Review of Books saw him emerge as one of the most important
intellectual critics of the war.[4]
As Chomsky details in his essay
“On Resistance” – published in the same publication on December 7 of the same
year – he also took part in “resistance” activities during this time, including
withholding half of his income tax, and taking part in (and speaking at) the
1967 march on the Pentagon, where he was eventually arrested by a Federal
Marshal and forced to spend the night in prison.
In 1969, he published his first
book on foreign policy, American Power
and the New Mandarins. This attracted fairly significant media attention,
and led Chomsky to his famous interview with William F. Buckley, where – as one
can see on Youtube – he really gave Buckley quite a beating.
That’s basically all the history
there is to tell about Chomsky on Vietnam. What’s interesting is that – as far
as I’m aware – none of Chomsky’s liberal and left-wing critics criticise him
for his anti-Vietnam activism. It’s easy to see why this is the case, of course:
everyone with even the vaguest of left leanings is compelled to recognise the
monumental disaster of the Vietnam War (including the futility of the campaign),
the devastation that the US army wreaked (in particular, the thousands of
civilian deaths, the mass defoliation, the long-term nightmare of Agent Orange)
and the sickening atrocities (My Lai being one of several). Indeed, one’s position
on the student protests to Vietnam is one of the most reliable yardsticks for gauging
political alignment: anyone who calls themselves a liberal will say that they
were justified; anyone further to the right will express reservations or censure.
And, from the point of view of a liberal, anyone (like Chomsky) who was part of
these student protests is respected for this brave dissent.
But despite Chomsky’s exoneration
by liberals as regards the Vietnam War, it’s important to recognise that Chomsky
himself didn’t change after the Vietnam War. Indeed, Chomsky’s criticisms of
the Vietnam War were just as radical compared to the rest of the culture as his
criticisms of the Iraq War. Notably, his characteristic government-motive-questioning
was already in full flower, leading him to (for example) make the unique claim
that the US government actually achieved their
main policy objective in Vietnam, because the US government’s main policy objective
in Vietnam was not to defeat Communism in Vietnam, but to destroy the
nationalist movements in the Vietnamese peasantry.
I think many of Chomsky’s more
‘liberal’ critics would probably agree with the following criticism: “Chomsky was
right about Vietnam, but his mistake was in regarding every foreign intervention
thereafter in exactly the same way”. Perhaps the most cited example of
Chomsky’s overzealous anti-Americanism is the foreign policy work he did just
after the Vietnam War was over, on Cambodia and Pol Pot. I will now discuss
this.
Chomsky is never criticised alone
for his work on Cambodia and Pol Pot, but usually in conjunction with Edward S. Herman, the University of
Pennsylvania Finance Professor (?) who collaborated with him on the matter of
Cambodia (and who also co-wrote Manufacturing
Consent). I don’t really know that much about Chomsky and Herman’s work on
Cambodia, so I’ll leave it to Wikipedia to explain it, by taking an extract
from the page “Cambodian Genocide Denial”:
“Linguist Noam
Chomsky and scholar Edward
S. Herman were among the academics who examined the conflicting
reports of the situation in Cambodia in 1977. On June 6, 1977, Chomsky and
Herman published an article in The
Nation which contrasted the views expressed in books by Barron and
Paul, Ponchaud, and Porter and Hildebrand, and in articles and accounts by
Butterfield, Bragg, Kahin, Cazaux, Shanberg, Tolgraven and others. Chomsky and
Herman noted the conflicting information in the various accounts, and suggested
that after the "failure of the American effort to subdue South Vietnam and
to crush the mass movements elsewhere in Indochina" that there was now
"a campaign to reconstruct the history of these years so as to place the
role of the United States in a more favorable light". This rewriting of
history by the establishment press was served well by "tales of Communist
atrocities, which not only prove the evils of communism but undermine the
credibility of those who opposed the war and might interfere with future
crusades for freedom." They wrote that the refugee stories of Khmer Rouge
atrocities should be treated with great "care and caution" because
"refugees are frightened and defenseless, at the mercy of alien forces.
They naturally tend to report what they believe their interlocuters wish to
hear."[12]
In support of their assertion,
Chomsky and Herman criticized Barron and Paul's Murder in a Gentle Land book
for ignoring the U.S. government's role in creating the situation, saying,
"When they speak of 'the murder of a gentle land,' they are not referring
to B-52 attacks on villages or the systematic bombing and murderous ground
sweeps by American troops or forces organized and supplied by the United
States, in a land that had been largely removed from the conflict prior to the
American attack". They give several examples to show that Barron and
Paul's "scholarship collapses under the barest scrutiny," and they
conclude that, "It is a fair generalization that the larger the number of
deaths attributed to the Khmer Rouge, and the more the U.S. role is set aside,
the larger the audience that will be reached. The Barron-Paul volume is a
third-rate propaganda tract, but its exclusive focus on Communist terror
assures it a huge audience."[12]
Chomsky and Herman had both
praise and criticism for Ponchaud's book Year Zero, writing that it
was "serious and worth reading" and "the serious reader will
find much to make him somewhat wary."[12] In
the introduction to the American edition of his book, Ponchaud responded to a
personal letter from Chomsky, saying, "He [Chomsky] wrote me a letter on
October 19, 1977 in which he drew my attention to the way it [Year Zero]
was being misused by anti-revolutionary propagandists. He has made it my duty
to 'stem the flood of lies' about Cambodia -- particularly, according to him,
those propagated by Anthony Paul and John Barron in Murder of a Gentle
Land."[13]
A different response appeared in
the British introduction to Ponchaud's book.
"Even before this book was
translated it was sharply criticized by Mr Noam Chomsky [reference to
correspondence with Silvers and the review cited in note 100] and Mr Gareth
Porter [reference to May Hearings]. These two 'experts' on Asia
claim that I am mistakenly trying to convince people that Cambodia was drowned
in a sea of blood after the departure of the last American diplomats. They say
there have been no massacres, and they lay the blame for the tragedy of the
Khmer people on the American bombings. They accuse me of being insufficiently
critical in my approach to the refugee's accounts. For them, refugees are not a
valid source... "After an investigation of this kind, it is surprising to
see that 'experts' who have spoken to few if any refugees should reject their
very significant place in any study of modern Cambodia. These experts would
rather base their arguments on reasoning: if something seems impossible to
their personal logic, then it doesn't exist. Their only sources for evaluation
are deliberately chosen official statements. Where is that critical approach
which they accuse others of not having?"[14]
By contrast, Chomsky portrayed
Porter and Hildebrand's book as "a carefully documented study of the
destructive American impact on Cambodia and the success of the Cambodian
revolutionaries in overcoming it, giving a very favorable picture of their
programs and policies, based on a wide range of sources." Refuting Chomsky
on the question of documentation, researcher Bruce Sharp found that 33 out of
50 citations in one chapter of Porter and Hildebrand's book derived from the
Khmer Rouge government and six from China, the Khmer Rouge's principal
supporter.[15]
Chomsky and Herman dismissed
reports by the "mass media" of extensive Khmer Rouge atrocities and
instead cited "analyses by highly qualified specialists...who have
concluded that executions [by the Khmer Rouge] have numbered at most in the
thousands." They cited the "extreme unreliability of refugee
reports."[12]
Veteran Cambodia
correspondent Nate Thayer said of Chomsky and Herman's Nation article
that they "denied the credibility of information leaking out of Cambodia
of a bloodbath underway and viciously attacked the authors of reportage
suggesting many were suffering under the Khmer Rouge."[16]
Journalist Andrew Anthony in the
London Observer, said later that the Porter and
Hildebrand's book "cravenly rehashed the Khmer Rouge's most outlandish
lies to produce a picture of a kind of radical bucolic idyll."[17] Chomsky,
he said, questioned "refugee testimony" believing that "their
stories were exaggerations or fabrications, designed for a western media
involved in a 'vast and unprecedented propaganda campaign' against the Khmer
Rouge government, 'including systematic distortion of the truth.'"
Beachler cited reports that
Chomsky's attempts to counter charges of Khmer Rouge atrocities also consisted
of writing letters to editors and publications. He said: "Examining
materials in the Documentation Center of Cambodia archives, American
commentator Peter Maguire found that Chomsky wrote to publishers such as Robert
Silver of the New York Review of Books to urge
discounting atrocity stories. Maguire reports that some of these letters were
as long as twenty pages, and that they were even sharper in tone than Chomsky’s
published words."[18] Journalist Fred Barnes also mentioned that
Chomsky had written "a letter or two" to the New York Review of
Books. Barnes discussed the Khmer Rouge with Chomsky and "the thrust of
what he [Chomsky] said was that there was no evidence of mass murder" in
Cambodia. Chomsky, according to Barnes, believed that "tales of holocaust
in Cambodia were so much propaganda."[19]
Journalist Christopher Hitchens defended Chomsky and
Herman. They "were engaged in the admittedly touchy business of
distinguishing evidence from interpretations."[20]Chomsky
and Herman have continued to argue that their analysis of the situation in
Cambodia was reasonable based on the information available to them at the time,
and a legitimate critique of the disparities in reporting atrocities committed
by communist regimes relative to the atrocities committed by the U.S. and its
allies. Nonetheless, in 1993, Chomsky acknowledged the massive scale of the
Cambodian genocide in the documentary film Manufacturing Consent. He said,
"I mean the great act of genocide in the modern period is Pol Pot, 1975
through 1978 - that atrocity - I think it would be hard to find any example of
a comparable outrage and outpouring of fury."[21]”
Here’s another Wikipedia extract
about the controversy, from the page “Political positions of Noam Chomsky”:
“Chomsky and Herman later
co-authored a book about Cambodia titled After the Cataclysm (1979),
which appeared after the Khmer Rouge regime had been deposed. The book was
described by Cambodian scholar Sophal Ear as
"one of the most supportive books of the Khmer revolution" in which
they "perform what amounts to a defense of the Khmer Rouge cloaked in an
attack on the media".[69] In
the book, Chomsky and Herman acknowledged that "The record of atrocities
in Cambodia is substantial and often gruesome", but questioned their
scale, which may have been inflated "by a factor of 100". Khmer Rouge
agricultural policies reportedly produced "spectacular"
results." [70]
Contrary to Chomsky and Herman,
the reports of massive Khmer Rouge atrocities and starvation in Cambodia proved
to be accurate and uninflated. Many deniers or doubters of the Cambodian
genocide recanted their previous opinions, but Chomsky continued to insist that
his analysis of Cambodia was without error based on the information available
to him at the time.[71] Herman
addressed critics in 2001: "Chomsky and I found that the very asking of
questions about...the victims in the anti-Khmer Rouge propaganda campaign of
1975–1979 was unacceptable, and was treated almost without exception as
'apologetics for Pol Pot'."
I’ll leave it to the reader to
make up their mind about this information, though I will make a couple of brief
comments.
I think Chomsky and Herman did certainly
err on their early writings on Cambodia, and I suspect they regret the
aggressiveness of their initial attack on the reports coming out of this
country, and the extremeness of their sceptical attitude. But it is also
important to recognise that they did have some very important points to make
about the actions of the US media at that time – points which they would later
explore together in Manufacturing
Consent.
To begin with, America’s secret
bombings in Cambodia were a massive factor in the rise of the Khmer Rouge, and the media never mentioned this. Pol
Pot’s reign of terror was painted as a parable about the perils of agrarian communism
and far-left authoritarianism, but – in reality – it was just as much a story about
US imperialist terrorism."
[1]
Ecology and climate are mentioned in certain works of history (for example, the
works of the ‘Annales’ school or Jared Diamond’s writings). Also, some
historians and probably sociologists do explain human behaviour in terms of
evolutionary psychology, thus drawing attention to the fact that us humans are
one species among many in the vast tree of life on Earth, rather than angels.
The deeper issue here is
whether the way I am using “natural kind” is metaphysically sound. I don’t
really know, but I think it is understood what I mean.
[2] As
Dawkins suggests in The Selfish Gene, Darwin’s
Theory of Evolution by natural selection undoubtedly captures universal laws –
that is to say, the process of natural selection would surely obtain wherever
there is life (a set of biological replicators with some mutable chemical
template like DNA). Evolution may not necessarily lead to the kind of
complexity we see on our own planet (chemical, environmental, ecological,
atmospheric factors enter the equation), but it would be insane to think that
the process of natural selection itself only operates on our own planet.
Natural selection is not even a uniquely biological phenomenon; a bad business
going bust is essentially the same thing as a weakly adapted species going
extinct. In both cases, the two ‘organisms’ have been unable to survive in a
competitive environment because of their lack of fitnessa
(adaptedness) to that environment.
a Incidentally,
note the etymology of the word “fitness”. It’s a contraction of “fittingness”,
so it’s actually got nothing to do with athleticism per se.
[3] I
myself found this quote in The Guardian, in a Glenn Greenwald article.
[4]
For what it’s worth, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” is really a very
powerful polemic, and I would highly recommend reading it.
Incidentally, one odd thing
about the essay is that it wasn’t even deliberately composed by Chomsky. In
fact, it was transcribed from a speech he had given to several students. To my
mind, this makes the precision, detail and bite of the piece all the more
astonishing.
[1]
Most of these quotes, plus citations, can be found on the Wikiquotes page for
Chomsky.
[2]
Here is a relevant extract from Robert F. Barsky’s biography of Chomsky, Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent: “For
Chomsky, the work he has produced is his
life. In response to comments I made about the 1992 film Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, Chomsky remarked
that he had not, and most probably would not, go to see it:
“[F]irst, I hate watching
or hearing myself. I can only think about how I should have said things better.
Second, I’m not happy with the personalised framework. Things happen in the
world because of the efforts of dedicated and courageous people whose names no
one has heard, and who disappear from history. I can give talks and write
because of their organising efforts, to which I’m able to contribute in my own
ways. Not having seen the film, I don’t know whether this is brought out. I’m
concerned that it may not be.” (18 Feb. 1993)
