Prospect Magazine (UK):
Politics Essays Argument
November
2005 Cover story»
For and against Chomsky
Is the
world's top public intellectual a brilliant expositor of
linguistics and the US's duplicitous foreign policy? Or a
reflexive anti-American — cavalier with his sources?
Robin
Blackburn
Oliver Kamm
Robin Blackburn teaches
at the New School for Social Research, New York. Oliver
Kamm is a "Times" columnist
For
Chomsky
Robin
Blackburn celebrates a courageous truth-teller to power
The huge vote for Noam Chomsky as the world's leading
"public intellectual" should be no surprise at
all. Who could match him for sheer intellectual
achievement and political courage?
Very few transform an entire field of enquiry, as Chomsky
has done in linguistics. Chomsky's scientific work is
still controversial, but his immense achievement is not
in question, as may be easily confirmed by consulting the
recent Cambridge Companion to Chomsky. He didn't only
transform linguistics in the 1950s and 1960s; he has
remained in the forefront of controversy and research.
The huge admiration for Chomsky evident in Prospect's
poll is obviously not only, or even mainly, a response to
intellectual achievement. Rather it goes to a brilliant
thinker who is willing to step outside his study and
devote himself to exposing the high crimes and
misdemeanours of the most powerful country in the world
and its complicity with venal and brutal rulers across
four continents over half a century or more.
Some believe—as Paul Robinson, writing in the New
York Times Book Review, once put it—that there is a
"Chomsky problem." On the one hand, he is the
author of profound, though forbiddingly technical,
contributions to linguistics. On the other, his political
pronouncements are often "maddeningly
simple-minded."
In fact, it is not difficult to spot connections between
the intellectual strategies Chomsky has adopted in
science and in politics. Chomsky's approach to syntax
stressed the economy of explanation that could be
achieved if similarities in the structure of human
languages were seen as stemming from biologically rooted,
innate capacities of the human mind, above all the
recursive ability to generate an infinite number of
statements from a finite set of words and symbols. Many
modern critics of the radical academy are apt to bemoan
its disregard for scientific method and evidence. This is
not a reproach that can be aimed at Chomsky, who has
pursued a naturalistic and reductionist standpoint in
what he calls, in the title of his 1995 volume, The
Minimalist Programme.
Chomsky's political analyses also strive to keep it
simple, but not at the expense of the evidence, which he
can abundantly cite if challenged. But it is
"maddening" none the less, just as the
minimalist programme may be to some of his scientific
colleagues. The apparent straightforwardness of Chomsky's
political judgements—his "predictable" or
even "kneejerk" opposition to western,
especially US, military intervention—could seem
simplistic. Yet they are based on a mountain of evidence
and an economical account of how power and information
are shared, distributed and denied. Characteristically,
Chomsky begins with a claim of stark simplicity which he
elaborates into an intricate account of the different
roles of government, military, media and business in the
running of the world.
Chomsky's apparently simple political stance is rooted in
an anarchism and collectivism which generates its own
sense of individuality and complexity. He was drawn to
the study of language and syntax by a mentor, Selig
Harrison, who also combined libertarianism with
linguistics. Chomsky's key idea of an innate, shared
linguistic capacity for co-operation and innovation is a
positive, rather than purely normative, rebuttal of the
Straussian argument that natural human inequality
vitiates democracy.
Andersen's tale of the little boy who, to the fury of the
courtiers, pointed out that the emperor was naked, has a
Chomskian flavour, not simply because it told of speaking
truth to power but also because the simple childish eye
proved keener than the sophisticated adult eye. I was
present when Chomsky addressed Karl Popper's LSE seminar
in the spring of 1969 and paid tribute to children's
intellectual powers (Chomsky secured my admittance to the
seminar at a time when my employment at the LSE was
suspended).
As I recall, Chomsky explained how the vowel shift that
had occurred in late medieval English was part of a
transformation that resulted from a generational dynamic.
The parent generation spoke using small innovations of
their own, arrived at in a spontaneous and ad hoc
fashion. Growing youngsters, because of their innate
syntactical capacity, ordered the language they heard
their parents using by means of a more inclusive
grammatical structure, which itself made possible more
systematic change.
In politics, the child's eye might see right through the
humanitarian and democratic claptrap to the dismal
results of western military interventions—shattered
states, gangsterism, narco-traffic, elite competition for
the occupiers' favour, vicious communal and religious
hatred.
Chomsky openly admits he prefers "pacifist
platitudes" to belligerent mendacity. This makes
some wrongly charge that he is "passive in the face
of evil." But neither apartheid in South Africa, nor
Stalinism in Russia, nor military rule in much of Latin
America were defeated or dismantled by bombardment and
invasion. Chomsky had no difficulty supporting the
ultimately successful campaign against apartheid, or for
the Indonesian withdrawal from East Timor. He simply
opposes putting US soldiers in harm's way—also
meaning where they will do harm and acquire a taste for
it.
Chomsky's victory in a parlour game should not be
overpitched. But, like Marx's win earlier this year in
the BBC Radio 4 competition for "greatest
philosopher," it shows that thinking people are
still attracted by the critical impulse, above all when
it is directed with consistency at the trend towards a
global pensée unique. The Prospect/FP list was sparing
in its inclusion of critics of US foreign policy, which
may have increased Chomsky's lead a little. But no change
in the list would have made a difference to the outcome.
The editors had misjudged the mood and discernment of
their own readers.
Against
Chomsky
Oliver
Kamm deplores his crude and dishonest arguments
In his book Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline,
Richard Posner noted that "a successful academic may
be able to use his success to reach the general public on
matters about which he is an idiot." Judging by
caustic remarks elsewhere in the book, he was thinking of
Noam Chomsky. He was not wrong.
Chomsky remains the most influential figure in
theoretical linguistics, known to the public for his
ideas that language is a cognitive system and the
realisation of an innate faculty. While those ideas enjoy
a wide currency, many linguists reject them. His theories
have come under criticism from those, such as the
cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, who were once close to
him. Paul Postal, one of Chomsky's earliest colleagues,
stresses the tendency for the grandiloquence of Chomsky's
claims to increase as he addresses non-specialist
audiences. Frederick Newmeyer, a supporter of Chomsky's
ideas until the mid-1990s, notes: "One is left with
the feeling that Chomsky's ever-increasingly
triumphalistic rhetoric is inversely proportional to the
actual empirical results that he can point to."
Prospect readers who voted for Chomsky will know his
prominence in linguistics, but are more likely to have
read his numerous popular critiques of western foreign
policy. The connection, if any, between Chomsky's
linguistics and his politics is a matter of debate, but
one obvious link is that in both fields he deploys
dubious arguments leavened with extravagant
rhetoric—which is what makes the notion of Chomsky
as pre-eminent public intellectual untimely as well as
unwarranted.
Chomsky's first book on politics, American Power and the
New Mandarins (1969) grew from protest against the
Vietnam war. But Chomsky went beyond the standard left
critique of US imperialism to the belief that "what
is needed [in the US] is a kind of denazification."
This diagnosis is central to Chomsky's political output.
While he does not depict the US as an overtly repressive
society—instead, it is a place where "money and
power are able to filter out the news fit to print and
marginalise dissent"—he does liken America's
conduct to that of Nazi Germany. In his newly published
Imperial Ambitions, he maintains that "the pretences
for the invasion [of Iraq] are no more convincing than
Hitler's."
If this is your judgement of the US then it will be
difficult to credit that its interventionism might ever
serve humanitarian ends. Even so, Chomsky's political
judgements have only become more startling over the past
decade.
In The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many (1994),
Chomsky considered whether the west should bomb Serb
encampments to stop the dismemberment of Bosnia, and by
an absurdly tortuous route concluded "it's not so
simple." By the time of the Kosovo war, this prophet
of the amoral quietism of the Major government had
progressed to depicting Milosevic's regime as a wronged
party: "Nato had no intention of living up to the
scraps of paper it had signed, and moved at once to
violate them."
After 9/11, Chomsky deployed fanciful arithmetic to draw
an equivalence between the destruction of the twin towers
and the Clinton administration's bombing of Sudan—in
which a pharmaceutical factory, wrongly identified as a
bomb factory, was destroyed and a nightwatchman killed.
When the US-led coalition bombed Afghanistan, Chomsky
depicted mass starvation as a conscious choice of US
policy, declaring that "plans are being made and
programmes implemented on the assumption that they may
lead to the death of several million people in the next
couple of weeks… very casually, with no particular
thought about it." His judgement was offered without
evidence.
In A New Generation Draws the Line: Kosovo, East Timor
and the Standards of the West (2000), Chomsky wryly
challenged advocates of Nato intervention in Kosovo to
urge also the bombing of Jakarta, Washington and London
in protest at Indonesia's subjugation of East Timor. If
necessary, citizens should be encouraged to do the
bombing themselves, "perhaps joining the Bin Laden
network." Shortly after 9/11, the political theorist
Jeffrey Isaac wrote of this thought experiment that,
while it was intended metaphorically, "One wonders
if Chomsky ever considered the possibility that someone
lacking in his own logical rigour might read his book and
carelessly draw the conclusion that the bombing of
Washington is required."
This episode gives an indication of the destructiveness
of Chomsky's advocacy even on issues where he has been
right. Chomsky was an early critic of Indonesia's brutal
annexation of East Timor in 1975 in the face of the
indolence, at best, of the Ford administration. The
problem is not these criticisms, but Chomsky's later use
of them to rationalise his opposition to western efforts
to halt genocide elsewhere. (Chomsky buttresses his
argument, incidentally, with a peculiarly dishonest
handling of source material. He manipulates a
self-mocking reference in the memoirs of the then US
ambassador to the UN, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, by running
separate passages together as if they are sequential and
attributing to Moynihan comments he did not make, to
yield the conclusion that Moynihan took pride in
Nazi-like policies. The victims of cold war realpolitik
are real enough without such rhetorical expedients.)
If Chomsky's political writings expressed merely an idée
fixe, they would be a footnote in his career as a public
intellectual. But Chomsky has a dedicated following among
those of university education, and especially of
university age, for judgements that have the veneer of
scholarship and reason yet verge on the pathological. He
once described the task of the media as "to select
the facts, or to invent them, in such a way as to render
the required conclusions not too transparently
absurd—at least for properly disciplined
minds." There could scarcely be a nicer
encapsulation of his own practice.
The author is
grateful for the advice of Bob Borsley and Paul Postal.
End
of the article
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