Noam Chomsky ... still furious at 76

[CHIMO]

ON my way to meet Noam Chomsky in Boston, I pick up a copy of The American Prospect, whose cover features snarling caricatures of US Vice-President Dick Cheney, and of Chomsky: the man dubbed by Bono “the Elvis of academia”. Cheney is presented as the proverbial bull in an international china shop, Chomsky is portrayed by this “magazine of liberal intelligence” as the epitome of high- minded dove-ish, misguided idealism. Chomsky, of course, is well used to such attacks. For every cloying article by a disciple, there is a rocket from the enemy camp revelling in his perceived failings and undermining his reputation, denigrating his scholarship as a linguist and joyfully repeating statements which, when taken out of context, seem tinged with fanaticism.

To his credit, Chomsky puts them all on his website, whether it’s The New Yorker describing him as “the devil’s accountant” and “one of the greatest minds of the 20th century”, or The Nation, which lampooned him as “a very familiar kind of academic hack” whose career has been “the product of a combination of self-promotion, abuse of detractors, and the fudging of his findings”. He stands accused of asserting that every US President since Franklin D Roosevelt should have been impeached as war criminals; of supporting the murderous Pol Pot regime in Cambodia; and of comparing Israel to the Third Reich.

Leaving behind red-brick Harvard, where the winter snow is at last beginning to melt, one enters a vast industrial estate. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Chomsky has been professor of modern languages and linguistics since 1976, is home to more than 10,000 students, each of whom pays around $50,000 a year for the privilege of studying at America’s self-styled “ideas factory”.

“Suppose it had been in Czechoslovakia. Suppose the Russians had murdered an archbishop and killed Havel and half-a-dozen of his associates. Would we know about it? Yeah. We probably would have nuked them. But when we do it, it doesn’t exist. It reminds me of the world.”

http://www.sundayherald.com/48388

[BrklynLiberal]

1. Wow! Thanks....Great article. Is that you? You actually got to

meet him, and talk to him?

[Warpy]

4. I met him when I worked at MIT

he's very quiet and unassuming. People would mention that he was around, I'd point out the nice fellow they'd just been chatting with, and they'd drop their jaws to their knees and say "That was HIM???"

I don't agree with him about a lot of things, but he's definitely ON my list of fantasy dinner party guests.

[katinmn]

8. He is a very unpretentious person.

Not what people expect from one of the country's leading intellectuals.

[CHIMO]

7. No - Not Me

Unfortunately

[etherealtruth]

2. I grew up loving Chomsky's writing...

and still do.

[whistle]

3. Yes, well Chomsky understands that the MSM are journalistic....

...whores so I don't think he would be too worried about what they say and write about him. Now Bush, Cheney and the rest of the neo-conservative ultra right wing, Christian Fundamentalist fascist cabal, that would be another matter. They are becoming bolder and more dangerous. I can only hope and pray that Noam Chomsky and other liberal thinking intelligentsia college professors can stand up to the steady drum-beat of ridicule, character assassination and lies from the right. I speak for myself when I say I need to remain awake and aware of the forces that wish to do in our constitutional rights and freedoms and it is the writings of Noam Chomsky which help me accomplish that.

[Warpy]

5. Acutally, he gets a chuckle out of it.

He has that rarest of human gifts, the ability to laugh at himself and others' opinions of him.

[nightfire]

18. A classroom lesson regarding Chomsky

From a newbie:

It's not just many journalists who are whores but plenty of scholars too, who of course heartily return Chomsky's distaste. A class room scene I witnessed was, I thought, wonderfully representative of the academy's attitude toward him:

In a graduate seminar in foreign policy a decade or so ago at an east coast universiy, the professor, rather unusually, had assigned a Chomsky volume which included his unflattering essays on timid and conformist intellectuals in and outside the academe. One of the brightest, and certainly the most candid, students (not me, folks) said he fully agreed with Chomsky's scathing appraisal. However, he went on to say, Chomsky was safely installed as a linguist at a top institution (MIT) - never mind Chomsky's early career struggles - but how was he ever going to get a job if he was as dangerously critical as Chomsky was? It proved Chomsky's point.

So it goes, as another worthwhile writer likes to say . .

[Mr_Spock]

6. I was just watching my Rage Against the Machine: Battle of Mexico City DVD

on my PC recently (I just got a DVD player) and there in an "extra" on the DVD - an interview Zack de la Rocha did with Noam Chomsky. I watched the interview just the other day - Zack is kind of a hack, but it was interesting to hear Noam discuss his ideas on several subjects. I remember learning about Noam in college and I'm glad he's still fighting the good fight. He has an interesting way of saying something that seems pretty radical, then putting it into perspective. I can see where the simple-minded among us might find him a wealth of perfect opportunities for misquoting. That's good, because it's like he's speaking in a secret code and only those who care enough to listen to all his words need listen anyway.

[muchacho]

14. I would have prefered to see Tom interview Noam

at least Morello is a Harvard grad.

[Mr_Spock]

16. Yeah, Zack was kinda awkward, but Noam just took over anyway!

Basically it didn't matter how awkward Zack was - Noam expressed himself very thoughtfully and Zack just kinda listened :D

[autorank]

9. ...still furious at 76." My personal goal!

[wellst0nev0ter]

10. I'll Bet Every One Of Those Anti-Chomsky Quotes From The Nation

Came from Eric Alterman. I mostly like the way he thinks, but he should drop his self-promoting "feud" with Chomsky. And all his criticisms is based upon some non-event in the early eighties where a Holocaust denier used Chomsky's statements about how Holocaust deniers have a right to free speech as his forward for a book.

[muchacho]

13. agreed

I once read why Alterman has a hard on for Chomsky but I forget what it was because it seemed more like a difference of opinion instead of a difference on facts.

the Left is a great place for thinkers but a terrible place for cohesion.

[pnorman]

19. Europe, particularly France and Germany,

have very BAD memories of Hitler, his Thousand Year Reich, and his Holocaust. Accordingly, they enacted very strict laws regarding promotion/glorification of any bit of that. In my opinion, and probably shared by most here, such legislation is WRONG ... it will eventually backfire.

Chomsky, being a "Left-Libertarian", took a similar position, and while in France, "defended" a Holocaust denying academic there ----NOT for his position, but for what should be his RIGHT to assert it. Chomsky is a Thinker, rather than a Lawyer or a Politician. Acordingly, he didn't bother framing his response in bullet-proof language.

Understandably, that's a tough call for a Jew, and I can understand the moral dilemna of such as Alterman. But an awful lot of those Chomsky-bashers are closet anti-Semites, through and through.

pnorman

[wellst0nev0ter]

11. Now That I Read The Article

I think I've been too easy on Eric Alterman and the rest of the subconscious appeasers.

[muchacho]

12. Excellent

thanks for the post.

[ixion]

15. Chomsky is one of the Great Minds of Our Time

the intellect's intellect, for sure. :-)

[porkrind]

17. Chomsky is great! America needs to hear what he is saying.

It makes a hell of a lot of sense.

[pnorman]

20. When I first tried reading Chomsky about 20 years ago,

I found him a very difficult read. His tightly reasoned stuff seemed almost impenetrable. But later, I came across an essay by him that really impressed me with it's "common sense" ... as it would no doubt impress most here. There are variants of it which appear in many of his writings. Here's one I found on the internet:

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Excerpts from a 1987 interview
Noam Chomsky interviewed by James Peck
Source: The Chomsky Reader (Pantheon, 1987)

QUESTION: You’ve written about the way that professional ideologists and the mandarins obfuscate reality. And you have spoken -- in some places you call it a "Cartesian common sense" -- of the commonsense capacities of people. Indeed, you place a significant emphasis on this common sense when you reveal the ideological aspects of arguments, especially in contemporary social science. What do you mean by common sense? What does it mean in a society like ours? For example, you’ve written that within a highly competitive, fragmented society, it’s very difficult for people to become aware of what their interests are. If you are not able to participate in the political system in meaningful ways, if you are reduced to the role of a passive spectator, then what kind of knowledge do you have? How can common sense emerge in this context?

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CHOMSKY: Well, let me give an example. When I’m driving, I sometimes turn on the radio and I find very often that what I’m listening to is a discussion of sports. These are telephone conversations. People call in and have long and intricate discussions, and it’s plain that quite a high degree of thought and analysis is going into that. People know a tremendous amount. They know all sorts of complicated details and enter into far-reaching discussion about whether the coach made the right decision yesterday and so on. These are ordinary people, not professionals, who are applying their intelligence and analytic skills in these areas and accumulating quite a lot of knowledge and, for all I know, understanding. On the other hand, when I hear people talk about, say, international affairs or domestic problems, it’s at a level of superficiality that’s beyond belief.

In part, this reaction may be due to my own areas of interest, but I think it’s quite accurate, basically. And I think that this concentration on such topics as sports makes a certain degree of sense. The way the system is set up, there is virtually nothing people can do anyway, without a degree of organization that’s far beyond anything that exists now, to influence the real world. They might as well live in a fantasy world, and that’s in fact what they do. I’m sure they are using their common sense and intellectual skills, but in an area which has no meaning and probably thrives because it has no meaning, as a displacement from the serious problems which one cannot influence and affect because the power happens to lie elsewhere.

Now it seems to me that the same intellectual skill and capacity for understanding and for accumulating evidence and gaining information and thinking through problems could be used -- would be used -- under different systems of governance which involve popular participation in important decision-making, in areas that really matter to human life. There are questions that are hard. There are areas where you need specialized knowledge. I’m not suggesting a kind of anti-intellectualism. But the point is that many things can be understood quite well without a very far-reaching, specialized knowledge. And in fact even a specialized knowledge in these areas is not beyond the reach of people who happen to be interested.
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He's still not an "easy" read, for me with many of his writings, but they're most DEFINITELY worth the effort.

pnorman