For and against Chomsky

[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From Prospect, Issue 116 / November 2005

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

Robin Blackburn teaches at the New School for Social Research, New York.
Oliver Kamm is a "Times" columnist

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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
believeas Paul Robinson, writing in the New York Times Book Review, once
put itthat 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 judgementshis "predictable" or even "kneejerk"
opposition to western, especially US, military interventioncould 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,
Zellig Harris, 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
interventionsshattered 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 wayalso 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 pense 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.

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Against Chomsky


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 rhetoricwhich 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 societyinstead, 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 Sudanin 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 idee 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.

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