Conscience of a nation: Noam Chomsky The Guardian Profile
Oo
Conscience of a nation
The child of working-class immigrants to America, he has become one of the
10 most quoted sources in the humanities - along with Shakespeare and the
Bible. Maya Jaggi on the founding father of linguistic philosophy and
tireless scourge of US imperialism
Maya Jaggi
Guardian
Saturday January 20, 2001
When George W Bush is sworn in as US president today, Washington will be
braced for the biggest inaugural-day demonstrations since Vietnam war
protesters dogged Richard Nixon in 1973. The call to the streets is backed
by a key veteran of that anti-war movement, Noam Chomsky. Yet America's
number one dissident is neither surprised nor disappointed by this election.
"It was a triumph of US democracy," he says, with terse irony that can be
mistaken for cynicism. "Issues on which the business world is united don't
arise in elections, so people vote on peripheral issues the media
concentrate on: personality, style - will George Bush remember where Canada
is? That's how to maintain power when you can't control people by force.
That's exactly the way the Madisonian system is supposed to work."
Chomsky, now 72, has spent much of his life stripping away America's most
cherished illusions. Attacking a political system of "four-year
dictatorship" and an intelligentsia servile to power, he sees not a free
press, but the paradox of "brainwashing under freedom". A perennial scourge
of US foreign policy, from its Latin American "backyard" to Israel and
Indonesia, he tilts at America's "flattering self-image" of benevolent
intent. Domestic liberties in the world's freest society coexist, he
insists, with an imperial dynamic that, in making the world safe for US
capital, leaves the blood of atrocities on American hands.
Edward Said, professor of comparative literature at Columbia University,
sees Chomsky's work as a "protracted war between fact and a series of
myths". For him: "Noam is one of the most significant challengers of unjust
power and delusions; he goes against every assumption about American
altruism and humanitarianism." Another friend, the journalist John Pilger,
agrees Chomsky's enduring theme is power, "that unaccountable power must
always be scrutinised and never accepted at face value. He strips away
layers of propaganda not recognised as propaganda, brilliantly sifting
through political discourse. Often, he goes to the public record, revealing
truth in the words of power itself."
Chomsky's latest book, A New Generation Draws The Line, is out next month.
Its title echoes Tony Blair's words on the 1999 Kosovo war. For Chomsky, the
"official doctrine" of the dawn of a brave new era of military intervention
to safeguard human rights is as much a sham as the "New World Order"
trumpeted during the Gulf war. Contrasting the avowed concern for Kosovo
with indifference to Kurds in Nato's ally Turkey, or with US fuelling of
atrocities in Colombia and (with its British sidekick) East Timor, he denies
that the inconsistency can be benign. On Kosovo, Chomsky adds, since the
worst Serb atrocities predictably followed the Nato air strikes they were
said to justify, protecting human rights was neither a motive nor an
outcome.
Chomsky first made his name in linguistic philosophy, where the "Chomskian
revolution" in studying language as a faculty of the mind/brain was pivotal
in the radical shift in cognitive science of the 50s and 60s; the era before
him was known as "Linguistics BC". While he has modified his linguistic
theory over the years - the latest being the Minimalist Programme outlined
last autumn in his book New Horizons In The Study Of Language And Mind - his
impact on the field has been likened to that of Einstein or Freud. He has
broached barriers between the sciences and humanities. "He did for cognitive
science what Galileo did for physical science," says Neil Smith, professor
of linguistics at University College, London. "We now study the mind as part
of the physical world."
Chomsky ranks with Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible as one of the 10 most
quoted sources in the humanities - and is the only writer among them still
alive. Even one of his staunchest critics, the philosopher Hilary Putnam,
acknowledged that reading Chomsky was to be "struck by a sense of great
intellectual power; one knows one is encountering an extraordinary mind",
whose virtues included "originality and scorn for the faddish and
superficial". His dual prowess, in linguistics and politics, and some 70
books, have fuelled suspicions that there must be two Chomskys. Yet their
relationship remains an enigma. When the New York Times called him "arguably
the most important intellectual alive today", the writer continued: "[So]
how can he write such terrible things about American foreign policy?"
His view of academics and journalists as "secular priests" has scarcely
endeared him to the US media , yet his frequent talks in the US and abroad
are guaranteed audiences in their thousands. His speeches and interviews,
including transcriptions from local radio, cram the internet.
He is institute professor of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology in Cambridge, across the Charles river from Boston.
His once wiry frame now appears fuller (though he remains a keen swimmer),
and his soft, gravelly voice belies his reputation for fierce rows.
Seriousness gives way to radiant anticipation of a weekend visit from his
daughter Diane, who works for development agencies with her Nicaraguan
husband in Managua, and and their two children, Ema and Inti. (Chomsky and
his wife Carol have another daughter, Avi, who teaches Latin American
history, and a son, Harry, a softwear engineer in California.)
Chomsky has described himself as a "fanatic" in terms of workload and a
"neurotic letter writer". According to Morris Halle, a colleague and friend
for more than 40 years, "when you send him five pages of criticism, he sends
10 pages back, whoever you are. It's not ego, it's the substance of the
criticism that's the issue." Two assistants help cope with the 200-odd
emails he receives each day. While many friends stress Chomsky's work ethic,
phenomenal memory, ironic sense of humour and self-effacement, Halle says he
is "not much for small talk; everything he does he takes seriously - with
real commitment".
Chomsky was born in 1928 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the eldest of two
boys. His father William, a Hebrew scholar, had fled Russia in 1913 to avoid
being drafted into the Tsarist army. His mother Elsie, who came as an infant
from Lithuania, also taught in Hebrew school. "My immediate family was kind
of a Jewish ghetto in Philadelphia," says Chomsky. "My father's family was
extremely orthodox, from an east European shtetl." His mother's relatives,
who included communists, were "unemployed and involved in a rich, vibrant
intellectual life - ranging from music and art to political activity. Most
had little formal education, but it was a lively working-class culture that
happened to be Jewish." One uncle in New York, "a hunchback with a
background in crime", ran a newsstand on the corner of 72nd Street and
Broadway.
Chomsky was a child of the Great Depression of 1929-39. "By the standards of
those days we were well off; both my parents had jobs." Among his earliest
memories were "seeing people coming to the door selling rags; and in a
trolley car with my mother, I saw people beating up women strikers outside a
textile factory". He came early to political consciousness. "I always felt
isolated in my picture of the world. This was the late 30s; a time of
political activism, debate, and great fear of Hitler conquering Europe. I
saw the world as a complicated, frightening place."
Survival was tough for "the only Jewish family in a lower-middle-class
neighbourhood that was mostly Irish and German Catholic, and rabidly
anti-Semitic. The local kids went to Jesuit school, and I grew up with a
visceral fear of Catholics. There were pro-Nazi beer parties at the fall of
Paris. Then in December 1941 [after the Japanese attacked the US fleet at
Pearl Harbor] the neighbourhood shifted 180 degrees. The same people who
were cheering for the Nazis would open their doors wearing tin hats to say,
'pull down the blinds'. It was an educational experience." He adds: "Neither
my brother nor I talked to my parents about this. They were in the Jewish
ghetto and we were partly out in the streets. But it wasn't the kind of
thing you talked about."
On the origins of his acute sense of moral responsibility, Chomsky is
tentative: "I was very moved as a young child by oppression, destruction,
the intense fear of what was going on in Europe. I'd hear Hitler's speeches
on the radio and see the reactions of my mother. By the time I was nine or
10 I was reading newspapers, and it went on from there. It seems obvious:
you're responsible for your own actions, and their anticipated
consequences." He was 16 when the US dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
"I was in a Hebrew-speaking summer camp when news came. I found it shocking,
and equally shocking to me was that nobody seemed to care. There was nobody
to talk to because no-one saw it as an atrocity." While his progressive
primary school had put a "premium on individual creativity", he found his
high school - where he excelled - dullingly competitive.
Chomsky sees the debate among immigrants as his political education. A
lifelong anarchist or "libertarian socialist" - not a doctrine but a
"tendency in human thought" - he believes "violence, deceit and lawlessness
are natural functions of the state". At 10 he wrote an editorial for his
school newspaper on the fall of Barcelona in the Spanish civil war, a
"lament about the rise of fascism". "I was always on the side of the
losers," he said. He recalls: "I spent my free time from age 13 picking up
anarchist books in stores. I was quickly attracted to left anarchist
critiques of the Bolsheviks, and [became] interested in the Spanish
anarchist revolution which was crushed by communists."
He was active in a "fringe of Zionism" - "always opposed to a Jewish state,
and in favour of a bi-nationalist outcome in Palestine based on Arab-Jewish
co-operation, which wasn't so unrealistic at the time as it seems today". In
1953 he spent six weeks on an Israeli kibbutz with his wife, Carol Schatz
(now a linguist), whom he had known at Hebrew school and married in 1949.
"We seriously thought of moving there; I liked the life. The nice thing
about physical labour is you have a finite task - when it's done, it's done.
No one's going to second-guess you." But there were flaws in what Chomsky
saw as an anarchist experiment. "The way the Arabs, and even Oriental Jews,
were treated was very ugly. The thing that disturbed me most was the
ideological uniformity; it was deeply Stalinist - left and Buberite - which
I found impossible to take."
Drawn into linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, where he worked
under the libertarian Zellig Harris (and paid his way as a Hebrew
schoolteacher), Chomsky became a junior fellow at Harvard. He moved down the
road to MIT in 1955. "Jews were barely tolerated in Harvard; they weren't
part of the cultural life. One reason MIT became so great was that Jewish
intellectuals couldn't get jobs elsewhere." He felt an outsider in other
ways. "I had no professional credentials. I got my position here in a
research laboratory on electronics, of which I know nothing. But it happened
to be the centre of innovative research and had no vested interests in the
humanities. They were willing to experiment."
His Syntactic Structures, published in 1957 when he was 29, revolutionised
the study of language as part of psychology and biology. From his belief
that, despite the Babel of tongues, humans share an innate language faculty,
or "organ", grew his theory of an underlying Universal Grammar. New
disciplines, from psycholinguistics to how children learn language, sprang
from his ideas. According to Jean Aitchison, professor of language and
communication at Oxford: "In less than 120 pages, he turned linguistics from
an obscure discipline, studied by missionaries, into a major social science.
He shifted the question from the corpus of actual utterance to the mental
system that produces it."
Heir to Enlightenment ideas of language as a "mirror of the mind", Chomsky
shares the Cartesian view that language is the human inheritance that most
distinguishes man from animal or machine. (A chimpanzee whom researchers in
the 1970s tried unsuccessfully to teach sign language was roguishly named
Nim Chimpsky.) His work is still disparaged in some quarters as unscientific
"MIT mentalism". Yet according to Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at
MIT and author of The Language Instinct, Chomsky's "theory of generative
grammar is the most common single approach to linguistics even today. It's a
minority view, but everyone sets their sights on it: it's the theory to
beat."
Chomsky's scathing 1959 review of BF Skinner, for whom language was merely
learnt behaviour, bucked the empiricist tenet of the blank slate - that
there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses. "He gave the
first, fatal shot to the school of behaviourism, and made theories of innate
mental structure respectable after centuries of their being unthinkable,"
says Pinker, who hints at one link between theories of language and
politics: "Skinner said behaviour should be controlled; he wanted to turn
society into a Skinner box - rewarding and punishing humans like the rats
and pigeons in his experiments, a vision Chomsky described as like a
"well-run concentration camp".
Chomsky has tended to shy away from explicitly linking his linguistic and
political theories. Others, though, link his insistence on universality -
that everybody speaks "human" - and the creativity evidenced by language to
his anarchist vision of free association. Political systems often rest on a
view of human nature, and in his 1970 essay Language And Freedom, Chomsky
wrote of language as a "springboard" for investigating that nature.
"Linkages were drawn in the 17th and 18th centuries between language as a
fundamental, creative component of intelligence, and an instinct for freedom
that could be the basis of how humans organise their lives," he says. "I
think there is something to it, though there's certainly no logical
connection.
"But it's an interesting question as to why behaviourism had the appeal and
prestige it did when it's so barren and shallow. Within the Marxist left -
not including Marx - there's a strong tendency to insist there is no human
nature; that people are just constructed by their historical circumstances
and environment. This makes no sense, but these ideas are very convenient
for those who aspire to managerial politics; they remove moral barriers to
manipulation and coercion.
"If people have no fundamental human nature based on some instinct for
freedom that can challenge and overthrow aggression and hierarchy, then
there really are no moral values; if people are ignorant, malleable
creatures who can be modified by experience and training, they can be
controlled for their own good. That's an appealing idea to intellectuals
across the political spectrum. Leninism is one expression of it, and social
democracy is another."
By 1961, Chomsky was a full professor at MIT, happy in his research, and
with a young family. In 1964, supporting students against the draft, he
began openly resisting the Vietnam war ("it would have been hopelessly
immoral not to"). He rues it was "already much too late; after the US
invaded South Vietnam, what we call ethnic cleansing when others are doing
it was going on from the early 60s. That was the time to get seriously
involved." He knew there was no going back. "It was a tremendous burden for
my wife. She went back to college and got a degree partly because it looked
as though I might go to jail."
For years, he recalls, "it was almost impossible to act publicly against the
war. In Boston, a liberal city which likes to call itself the Athens of
America, I spoke at the first major public meeting, in October 1965. We were
attacked by hordes of people, and were only saved by the state police: they
didn't like what we were saying but didn't want people murdered on Boston
Common." He became a tax resister in 1966 and was arrested at the 1967
Pentagon protest. Norman Mailer, who was jailed with him, recalled a "slim,
sharp- featured man with an ascetic expression and an air of gentle but
absolute moral authority" - who seemed "uneasy at the thought of missing
class on Monday".
In his 1966 essay The Responsibility Of Intellectuals, Chomsky described
their duty as being "to speak the truth and to expose lies". His first
collection of political writings, American Power and the New Mandarins, was
published in 1969. While intellectuals and "commissars" lie in the service
of power, he suggests, it requires no expertise other than "Cartesian common
sense" to understand politics or foreign affairs. Some critics have objected
to an opposition between indoctrinated "elites" and "the people". He
responds: "In any inegalitarian society, there's a natural tendency for
those who share wealth and power to try to maintain it. Some systems do it
by force; others by gaining the consent of the population, or at least their
passivity."
In Manufacturing Consent, co-authored with Edward Herman, Chomsky proposed a
model of the mass media that moulds this consent with bias and omission.
"Propaganda is to democracy what violence is to totalitarianism," they
wrote. While some see the "propaganda model" as reducing everyone to dupes
or liars, others have dismissed it as conspiracy theory. "It's exactly the
opposite - it's free-market theory," says Chomsky. "The media are major
corporations. They sell a product (readers or viewers) to a market
(advertisers). If a Martian were looking at this system, what would he
expect? That the media product would be shaped by the perspectives and
interests of the sellers and buyers and the external conditions (the state).
You'd expect no interaction at all. It's no more a conspiracy than that
General Motors tries to make a profit."
The internet is a means of evading media limitations, he believes, citing
protests, such as those in Seattle, which were heavily reliant on net
organisation. But he sees a struggle being waged, since net development was
handed to private corporations in the mid-90s, between its use as an
"information superhighway"and as a channel for "ecommerce". He says: "As
long as it was in the public sector it was free and open but limited; few
people had access. Now access is wider, but the freedom is under attack."
In Deterring Democracy, and other books on international affairs, Chomsky
has copiously documented how Washington thwarts democratic experiments
across the globe. Though his focus is increasingly on economic and trade
issues, he continues to hold the US to account as a "rogue superpower" which
distinguishes between "worthy" and "unworthy" victims of atrocity depending
on whether they take place in a client state or in an "official enemy". He
claims that if the Nuremberg laws had been applied then every post-war
American president would have been hanged.
He was accused of playing down Khmer Rouge atrocities in Cambodia, but
maintains he was merely telling the truth about the number of deaths. "We
also pointed out that casualties of American bombing had been greatly
exaggerated, but no one criticised us for correcting that."
Nor does he expect change under Bush's secretary of state Colin Powell: "If
you take Republicans at their words, they'll probably be willing to use
force only in more limited ways under the 'Powell doctrine' that says don't
intervene except with massive and overwhelming force. That's only a nuance
of difference with the Democrats." But he deems the new administration "much
more dangerous" in its commitment to the national missile defence programme.
"It'll be interpreted as a first-strike weapon system by any potential
adversary. It's absolutely insane."
Fred Halliday, professor of international relations at the LSE, believes
Chomsky, a luminary of a "new anti-imperialism", overestimates US power and
underestimates a public shift in attitudes and debates on human rights in
the past 10 years. "He's become the guru of the new anti-capitalist and
Third World movements. They take his views very uncritically; it's part of
the Seattle mood - whatever America does is wrong. He confronts orthodoxy
but he's becoming a big simplifier. What he can't see is Third World and
other regimes that are oppressive and not controlled by America."
Pinker believes a tendency to treat Chomsky as a "guru and pontiff or a
great satan" is encouraged by his own style, "which portrays people who
disagree with him as stupid or evil, using withering scorn in his rhetoric.
It's great sport if you identify with him, but it leads to equally extreme
responses on the opposite side." For Neil Smith, however, Chomsky "can be a
ruthless debater in arguing for what he believes is the truth. He thinks
faster than other people and tends to win arguments. But he's divisive only
because he puts forward novel positions that undermine others."
Chomsky drew flak in the early 80s for his stand for free speech in the case
of Robert Faurisson, the French professor convicted in court of falsifying
history for denying the existence of Nazi gas chambers. Chomsky says: "The
principle that the state should determine historical truth and punish those
who say otherwise is a legacy of totalitarianism. In this case what the
state determines to be true happens to be true, but that's irrelevant. It
doesn't show great sympathy for the memory of victims of the holocaust to
adopt the doctrines of their murderers." He also opposed the ITN libel case
last year against LM magazine, which had alleged images of Trnopolje camp in
Bosnia had been falsified - as a big media corporation muscling in against
free speech.
For the Oxford historian Stephen Howe, Chomsky has "the faults as well as
the virtues of the great moral crusader. Sometimes his attacks can seem
excessive and indiscriminate." Phil Edwards, former culture editor of Red
Pepper magazine, believes "it's difficult to criticise Chomsky on the left -
which is odd, given his own denunciation of conformity".
Chomsky himself discourages uncritical adherence to anyone's views, whether
by Marxists or Freudians. He disavows the "Talmudic certainty" one
commentator once attributed to him. "It's a bad choice of words; the Talmud
is anything but certain - it's full of debate and argument. But if it's
true, it's a fault."
On whether he is slowing down, he says: "I have to retire, but I don't think
anything will change. My professional work is intense and exciting, and
political commitments grow. Something has to go if you try to live two
intense lives - like relaxation. If my wife and I get to see one movie in a
year, we consider it a triumph." But on Cape Cod they have a summer cottage
and a sailing boat. "It's the only way I can survive the rest of the year."
For Pilger, who says Chomsky almost single-handedly exposed Indonesian
atrocities in East Timor, he is a "genuine people's hero; an inspiration for
struggles all over the world for that basic decency known as freedom. To a
lot of people in the margins - activists and movements - he's unfailingly
supportive." While some sense cynicism ("a realistic account of the way the
world works will sound cynical"), Chomsky favours Gramsci's "pessisim of the
intellect, optimism of the will". In his own unique role as a moral
conscience, insisting that the privileges of the "free world" should not
rest on corpses elsewhere, some see a theological thrust; that he carries a
higher moral torch for the world's most powerful country.
"There's truth in that," he says. "I'm a citizen of the United States and I
have a share of responsibility for what it does. I'd like to see it act in
ways that meet decent moral standards. It's back to moral truisms: it's of
little moral value to criticise the crimes of someone else - though you
should do it, and tell the truth. I have no influence over the policies of
Sudan but a certain degree over the policies of the US. It's not a matter of
expectation but of aspiration."
Life at a glance: Avram Noam Chomsky
Born: December 7 1928, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania..
Education: Oak Lane Country Day School; Central High School, Phila-
delphia;University of Pennsylvania.
Married: 1949 Carol Schatz (two daughters Avi, Diane; one son, Harry).
Career: 1951-55 Junior fellow, Harvard University; 1955- Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, 1961 professor, 1976- institute professor,
linguistics and philosophy.
Some books: Syntactic Structures ('57), American Power And The New Mandarins
(69) Language And Responsibility (79), The Chomsky Reader (87),
Manufacturing Consent (88), Necessary Illusions (89), Deterring Democracy
(92), Year 501 (93), World Orders, Old And New (97), Fateful Triangle
(updated 99), The New Military Humanism (99), Rogue States (00), New
Horizons In The Study Of Language and Mind (00), A New Generation Draws The
Line (01).
banana
<Oo_...@aol.com> writes
>http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4120040,00.html
>
>Conscience of a nation
An appropriate term, I think. As in advocating a view of 'what the US
should be, if true to its ideals' or some such. Support for the
underlying is built-in to the 'critique'.
I would say: of course the US State (or any State) does x,y,z - what
does one expect, given its nature as a tool of part of the dictatorial
capitalist elite - and in fact, as a tool of the entire elite, given
that the unity of the capitalist class even as it is internally
competitive?
It comes down to the question, what is one actually criticising? A
collection of nastinesses, or a nasty mode of production, based on
exploiting the only force that can abolish it?
>The child of working-class immigrants to America, he has become one of
>the 10 most quoted sources in the humanities - along with Shakespeare
>and the Bible.
Quite an interesting bit of info. Yet still his supporters complain that
his book on 911 managed to miss getting onto the 'top 15' books on the
'New York Times' list, getting instead onto the next part of the list
(16-30), which IIANM isn't published in the hardcopy version of the
newspaper.
>America's number one dissident
Apt.
>"It was a triumph of US democracy," he says, with terse irony that can be
>mistaken for cynicism. "Issues on which the business world
What a vague concept but very media-friendly.
>is united don't
>arise in elections, so people vote on peripheral issues the media
>concentrate on: personality, style - will George Bush remember where Canada
>is? That's how to maintain power when you can't control people by force.
What a woolly pair of concepts. They do control people by force. He
should try shop-lifting and see what happens.
>Attacking a political system of "four-year
>dictatorship"
Uh?????? No, that's *not* the reality in the US... Rockefeller and co
don't rule for four years, then for another four, then for another
four... They just rule.
<snip>
>Edward Said, professor of comparative literature at Columbia
>University, sees Chomsky's work as a "protracted war between fact and a
>series of myths".
Given the choice between being in a lift with Said or Chomsky, and being
in a lift with 'King' Fahd or Sharon, I would prefer Said or Chomsky,
goes without saying. But as Loren Goldner has shown, Said's view of
specifically 'Arab' 'socialism' is codswallop and anti-globalist. I
haven't read the details but I bet Said just turns 'orientalism' on its
head.
>For him: "Noam is one of the most significant challengers of unjust
>power and delusions; he goes against every assumption about American
>altruism and humanitarianism." Another friend, the journalist John
>Pilger,
Aaarrgghhhhhh! As the Gulf War of 1991 was about to break out, he led a
chorus of hacks in singing 'Give Peace a Chance'. Dunno whether they
paid Yoko Ono for the performance rights.
Hats off to him for exposing a lot of info about the massacres brought
by Rockefellers and US policy in Indonesia though. Credit where it's
due.
>agrees Chomsky's enduring theme is power, "that unaccountable power
>must always be scrutinised and never accepted at face value.
A non-revolutionary aim. Democratic capitalism. Kind of 'make capitalism
honourable and truthful'. But the truth is that propaganda and
idiotisation are very very 'true' to the nature of the underlying
society.
The young Marx is good on this sort of stuff.
<snip>
>"He did for cognitive
>science what Galileo did for physical science," says Neil Smith, professor
>of linguistics at University College, London. "We now study the mind as part
>of the physical world."
But mind isn't part of the physical world. Who are 'we'?
The Galileo reference, although intellectually 'cheap', is relevant, if
not in the way its author intended. I am very much reminded of the
democratic tendency that the young Marx criticised (in the article on
the 'king' of Prussia and social reform, and in the article on the
'Jewish question'), that wanted basically a capitalism without religious
lies, a State illusorily based on civil society. Marx shot this down in
flames by showing how the principle of religion would actually be more,
not less, actualised under such a reform.
<snip>
>Heir to Enlightenment ideas of language as a "mirror of the mind",
>Chomsky shares the Cartesian view that language is the human
>inheritance that most distinguishes man from animal or machine.
This is a mindfuck. At the same time as saying this, he has built from
an analysis of linguistic usage using computers into a 'theory' of
language. Is this really the way to posit humanity against the cold,
hard, inhuman ideology of cybernetics? Sure he doesn't say the same as
behaviourists, it would be wrong to say that he does, but...
Meanwhile on the right wing there are people like Richard Dawkins
(again, I would much rather be in a lift with Noam Chomsky than with
Richard Dawkins, don't get me wrong), who as an Oxford University
propagandist acts as a high-up scientific priest, coating his cold,
hard, inhuman scientific atheist religion with stuff about how it's all
about 'wonder'. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down?
<snip>
>Chomsky's scathing 1959 review of BF Skinner, for whom language was merely
>learnt behaviour, bucked the empiricist tenet of the blank slate - that
>there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses. "He gave the
>first, fatal shot to the school of behaviourism, and made theories of innate
>mental structure respectable after centuries of their being unthinkable,"
>says Pinker, who hints at one link between theories of language and
>politics: "Skinner said behaviour should be controlled; he wanted to turn
>society into a Skinner box - rewarding and punishing humans like the rats
>and pigeons in his experiments, a vision Chomsky described as like a
>"well-run concentration camp".
He was right to say that. But of course he was not the only one to say
it.
<snip>
>"But it's an interesting question as to why behaviourism had the appeal and
>prestige it did when it's so barren and shallow. Within the Marxist left -
>not including Marx - there's a strong tendency to insist there is no human
>nature; that people are just constructed by their historical circumstances
>and environment. This makes no sense, but these ideas are very convenient
>for those who aspire to managerial politics; they remove moral barriers to
>manipulation and coercion.
This is very vague and confused, although I realise he is trying to say
something sensible, and he is right about the difference between Marx
and the 'Marxist' left.
I'd recommend reading say Agnes Heller 'The Theory of Need in Marx', for
a very clear understanding of how true humanity and individuality comes
into its own by creating a society without exploitation, how *this* is
human nature.
Chomsky is backward on the relationship between ideas and production and
it is not surprising that this goes together with reformist politics.
For a much much better take on the capitalist spectacle, see Guy
Debord's 'Society of the Spectacle' (which is online).
>"If people have no fundamental human nature based on some instinct for
>freedom that can challenge and overthrow aggression and hierarchy, then
>there really are no moral values; if people are ignorant, malleable
>creatures who can be modified by experience and training, they can be
>controlled for their own good. That's an appealing idea to intellectuals
>across the political spectrum. Leninism is one expression of it, and social
>democracy is another."
I could agree with this as far as it goes but it is very woolly. There
is the question of what moral values should we have. And anyway what
distinguishes Chomsky's position from one of social democracy?
>By 1961, Chomsky was a full professor at MIT, happy in his research, and
>with a young family. In 1964, supporting students against the draft, he
>began openly resisting the Vietnam war ("it would have been hopelessly
>immoral not to").
Sometimes I think, spare me from those who 'bear witness'. Still,
opponent of US war effort in Vietnam, good on him for that.
>He rues it was "already much too late; after the US
>invaded South Vietnam, what we call ethnic cleansing when others are doing
>it was going on from the early 60s. That was the time to get seriously
>involved." He knew there was no going back. "It was a tremendous burden for
>my wife. She went back to college and got a degree partly because it looked
>as though I might go to jail."
>
>For years, he recalls, "it was almost impossible to act publicly against the
>war. In Boston, a liberal city which likes to call itself the Athens of
>America, I spoke at the first major public meeting, in October 1965. We were
>attacked by hordes of people, and were only saved by the state police: they
>didn't like what we were saying but didn't want people murdered on Boston
>Common." He became a tax resister in 1966 and was arrested at the 1967
>Pentagon protest. Norman Mailer, who was jailed with him, recalled a "slim,
>sharp- featured man with an ascetic expression and an air of gentle but
>absolute moral authority" - who seemed "uneasy at the thought of missing
>class on Monday".
:-) The Messiah maybe?
<snip>
>In Manufacturing Consent, co-authored with Edward Herman, Chomsky proposed a
>model of the mass media that moulds this consent with bias and omission.
>"Propaganda is to democracy what violence is to totalitarianism,"
Tell that to the US prison population. People are physically forced to
work by violence that keeps the means of production out of their hands.
As for that last quoted sentence it sounds very much like linguistics or
anthropology, and I'm sure his definition of the terms 'democracy' and
'totalitarianism' would be woolly as hell. What's revealing was Hanna
Arendt's friendship with Martin Heidegger. I heartily recommend Loren
Goldner's website:
<http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner>
and in particular:
<http://www.home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/yockey.html>
which takes the form of a book review and is brilliant in its take on
mindfuckery. If Goldner wrote a critique of Chomsky, I'm sure it would
be excellent.
--
banana "The thing I hate about you, Rowntree, is the way you
give Coca-Cola to your scum, and your best teddy-bear to
Oxfam, and expect us to lick your frigid fingers for the
rest of your frigid life." (Mick Travis, 'If...', 1968)