The Chomsky Conundrum

I grapple with the great and terrible Noam Chomsky, who vexes me.

Near the front of the The Chomsky Reader, there’s a long interview of the man by the volume’s editor, James Peck. It begins and concludes with answers from Chomsky that are almost too good to be true from the perspective of confirming my distaste for him, though one has to assume that he and Peck perceived the answers differently than I do.

“You’ve rarely written much on the kinds of experiences that led to your politics,” begins Peck, “even though, it seems to me, they may have been deeply formed and influenced by your background.” Chomsky responds: “No. I’ve not thought about it a great deal.”

They continue, with Peck asking whether there are any particular works of literature that influenced him. “Of course there have been,” says Chomsky, “but it is true that I rarely write about these matters. I am not writing about myself, and these matters don’t seem particularly pertinent to the topics I am addressing. There are things that I resonate to when I read, but I have a feeling that my feelings and attitudes were largely formed prior to reading literature.

The interview concludes with Peck asking Chomsky to reflect on how he has been changed by decades of intense, often all-consuming activism. “In looking back on those years, did you find yourself significantly changed by them?” he asks.

Chomsky’s answer is basically no. He has spent his time differently than he would have if he’d never become an activist, doing different things, encountering different people, etc. But if the question is whether he was changed in meaningful ways, in terms of his beliefs or psyche or orientation to the world, he doesn’t see it: “You asked whether I was significantly changed personally? Not really, I think, in any fundamental way. I’ve learned a lot, experienced a lot that I never would have seen or lived through, but I cannot honestly say that my beliefs or attitudes have changed in any significant ways.”

This is rather astonishing. By all accounts he is one of the great thinkers of our era, a seminal figure in both politics and linguistics, but he hasn’t thought much about how his politics or academic work were formed by his background. He appreciates literature and other forms of culture but doesn’t think they bear much on questions of politics, and his politics haven’t been affected much by his reading of literature. And then, most astonishing of all, he takes stock of his life, one of the most consequential activist lives of the last 75 years, and concludes that he hasn’t been changed by it. “I cannot honestly say that my beliefs or attitudes have changed in any significant ways.”

In her 2003 New Yorker profile on Chomsky, Larissa MacFarquhar writes of Chomsky that “he often seems baffled, even repelled, by the thought of actual people and their psychologies.” This coldness, she suggests, is a source both of his charisma and of much of the loathing he has inspired over the decades. To those who admire him, he seems a man of undiluted purpose and purity, his manner and decisions uninfluenced by the factors of psychology, self-interest, friendship, vanity, or civility that derail the rest of us in how we analyze and engage with the world. She quotes one of his colleagues and acolytes at MIT. “Noam is not a human being. He’s an angel.” 

To those who dislike him, the coldness seems a mask. They discern aggression seething beneath the clinical, dispassionate p(r)ose. MacFarquhar quotes another, less worshipful colleague on what Chomsky can be like at his worst: “There really is an alpha-male dominance psychology at work there. He has some of the primate dominance moves. The staring down. The withering tone of voice.” 

MacFarquhar sums up: “Revolutions, even some intellectual ones, are brutal, and carried out by brutal people. When Benjamin Jowett, a close friend of Florence Nightingale, was asked to describe her, he said, “violent. Very violent.’ Chomsky is an extraordinarily violent man.”

I wrote recently about how the New Yorker is particularly good, among American magazines, at provoking and then assuaging the ideological and cultural anxieties of its readership, which in the New Yorker’s case is the highly educated, affluent, urban liberal elite. The goal is to give the reader the sense that she has given a fair hearing to substantive critiques of her own worldview while at the same time subtly reassuring her that her own values and commitments are the correct ones, and furthermore the ones that will prevail in the larger clash of interests and ideas. 

MacFarquhar’s profile of Chomsky, in this sense, is an exemplary New Yorker piece. She spends many thousands of words giving him his due, airing the most persuasive and destabilizing aspects of his critique of America and its imperial interventions, while at the same time reassuring us in a variety of ways that we don’t have to take him too seriously. We learn about his heroic opposition to the Vietnam War, but also get a recounting of the time he ended up serving as a semi-apologist for the French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson. She fully credits his accomplishments as a linguist, but also walks us through the colleagues he has stomped upon over the course of his academic ascent. Above all we see him being a huge dick to anybody who disagrees with him, applying his extraordinarily powerful intellect to the task of vindicating its own conclusions rather than exploring the vulnerabilities and limitations of those conclusions. He always seeks self-verification rather than development and growth. When he says that he hasn’t changed over the last half century or so, we believe him.   

I would prefer to leave it here, with Chomsky pinioned to the mat as a gadfly, useful to the body politic but only in a very limited fashion, available to occasionally prick our consciences and presumptions but not at all to serve as the kind of foundational thinker to whom we should look for first-order moral and political guidance. He is too rigid and brutal for that, too alienated from what makes us most human and what makes politics so irreducibly complex and tragic. As a writer, too, he is so punishing to read. As MacFarquhar puts it, “[h]is sentences slice and gash, envenomed by a vicious sarcasm. His rhythm is repetitive and monotonous, like the hacking of a machine.” His books stack on top of each other, volume after slapdash volume, each algorithmically applying the same withering skepticism to the latest iteration of American depredation abroad.

I would prefer to leave it there, with Chomsky contained, but I am too suspicious of myself, too skeptical of my habits of mind that push against judging him fairly: my strong preference for the status quo, a qualified but deep affection for America, an aversion to what I perceive of as overly severe moralism, and a very visceral distaste for people (men in particular) who evince too much confidence in their own opinions and too little interest in the conflicting opinions of others. I’m also too quick to see an identity between aesthetic and moral texture. If it’s written boorishly, I assume that the boorishness must cross over into the moral and political realms as well. 

I don’t feel the need to apologize for these prejudices; we go to war with the character we have. But it’s worth being aware of the ways in which we’re limited: in particular I think I’m too quick to look away from certain hard truths when they come packaged in certain hard shells or are conveyed by hard souls. I need to pause when it comes to someone like Chomsky, who is so well-engineered to provoke my distaste. I need to pause, too, because of the rather extravagant admiration that Chomsky has elicited from writers who I hold in high esteem. It would feel cheap to disregard their admiration, to chalk it up merely to a failure of judgment on their parts.  

Back in the day when Christopher Hitchens was good, in the early and middle phases of his career, he was a great admirer of Chomsky. The turn against Chomsky came after 9/11, around the time Hitchens got stupid politically and boring stylistically. The radio/podcast personality Chris Lydon, who is a model of judiciousness, refers to Chomsky as the “American Socrates.” In his new collection Only a Voice, the great critic and humanist George Scialabba writes of Chomsky: 

T. S. Eliot observed that “Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them; there is no third.” If I had to choose the exemplary public intellectual of my generation (or spanning my generation), I would say Noam Chomsky, and I might very well add: “There is no second.” Certainly no one else approaches his preternatural rigor or dialectical virtuosity. One critic described Chomsky as “a logic machine with a well-developed moral imagination.” That’s good, but it leaves out the astonishing abundance of detail that makes his books an encyclopedic history of American depredations in Southeast Asia, Central America, and the Middle East over the last sixty years, as well as the (barely) restrained sarcasm, unshowy but lethal, that makes of his indignation a high style.

If there is one theme that unifies Chomsky’s vast corpus, it is moral universalism: the insistence that we apply to ourselves and our government the same moral standards we apply to others. This directly contradicts American exceptionalism: the belief, usually assumed rather than argued, that the United States is unique in contemporary, perhaps even world, history in acting abroad for selfless purposes, often at considerable sacrifice, in order to bestow or defend freedom, democracy, and prosperity. … American policy always gets the benefit of the doubt, even when there is no doubt.

Scialabba is close, here, to getting at what I see as the heart of why Chomsky is such a vexing figure for me, but I think he doesn’t go far enough in describing the reach of Chomsky’s critique. It is not just a faith in American exceptionalism that Chomsky assails so brilliantly and brutally. He gives no quarter to those of us who believe in American okay-ness, those of us (liberals) who think we see clearly the flaws of our nation but pledge it qualified allegiance nonetheless. It’s like family, we might say, flawed but lovable, fucked up but familiar, a battered but still worthy repository of mature, reflective love.

For Chomsky this isn’t good enough. He doesn’t give America an inch, nor does he give an inch to those of us who would retain any loyalty to it. We are fooling ourselves. America is an empire, and like all empires in history it is brutally committed to serving its own imperial ends, no matter the cost to its own and other peoples. Even worse, in fooling ourselves and then moving through the world as political actors, we are complicit in the ongoing project of manufacturing consent to the ideological structures than enable America to go about its ruthless imperial ways. We all have blood on our hands.

Chomsky was disquieting when he first emerged as a political intellectual, critiquing the Vietnam War as an immoral endeavor from root to branch at a time when most liberals were either affirmatively on board with the war or were opposed to the war but on strategic rather than moral grounds. He has remained disquieting, all these decades, in much the same way. Here he is recently, for instance, talking about the Ukraine-Russia war and how to understand U.S. involvement in it:

We can usefully begin by asking what is not on the NATO/U.S. agenda. The answer to that is easy: efforts to bring the horrors to an end before they become much worse. “Much worse” begins with the increasing devastation of Ukraine, awful enough, even though nowhere near the scale of the U.S.-U.K. invasion of Iraq or, of course, the U.S. destruction of Indochina, in a class by itself in the post-WWII era. That does not come close to exhausting the highly relevant list. To take a few minor examples, as of February 2023, the UN estimates civilian deaths in Ukraine at about 7,000. That’s surely a severe underestimate. If we triple it, we reach the probable death toll of the U.S.-backed Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. If we multiply it by 30, we reach the toll of Ronald Reagan’s slaughter in Central America, one of Washington’s minor escapades. And so it continues.

But this is a pointless exercise, in fact a contemptible one in Western doctrine. How dare one bring up Western crimes when the official task is to denounce Russia as uniquely horrendous! Furthermore, for each of our crimes, elaborate apologetics are readily available. They quickly collapse on investigation, as has been demonstrated in painstaking detail. But that is all irrelevant within a well-functioning doctrinal system in which “unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban,” to borrow George Orwell’s description of free England in his (unpublished) introduction to Animal Farm.

I can criticize Chomsky for the rigid and predictable way he approaches these issues (you could ask him what he had for breakfast, and you’d probably get a brief history of American interventions in Latin America before he got around to “oatmeal”). But the important thing, it seems to me, isn’t to do more of the work which so many critics of Chomsky have already done over the decades neutralizing his critiques. It’s to ask what we’re feeling compelled to neutralize not because it’s wrong but because it’s threatening.

I’m reminded of “Transience and hope: A return to Freud in a time of pandemic,” the Jonathan Lear essay that I mentioned in a previous post, and its discussion of the psychological risks of unconsciously attaching ourselves to vast projects like nations. Lear writes:

Freud is clear that we form attachments not only to other people but also to ideas and ideals, to nations and causes and peoples, to religious beings—God and angels and spirits—to cultural achievements and natural wonders and beauties. Through all our attachments, we make ourselves vulnerable to loss. Indeed, we inadvertently make ourselves doubly vulnerable. For as we form our attachments, we are liable, without quite noticing what we are doing, to identify with them—that is, to take personal pride in, say, the purportedly eternal achievements of civilization. Should there be disillusionment with the ideal, we not only suffer that loss, we also, as it were, are snuck up from behind and have to suffer the unexpected loss of a piece of ourselves.

Chomsky is so threatening, among other reasons, because he goes after those parts of us that are attached to a positive vision of the United States, even if our attachment is relatively modest—that we see the U.S. as a nation among nations, deeply flawed as all nations are but also rich and beautiful in its own eccentric ways. You can not have even this, Chomsky says. Your nation is beyond the pale of normal affection. He doesn’t (quite) compare us to the great tyrannies of modern history, but he suggests that we should be divorced from our nation, our empire, as Solzhenitsyn was from the Soviet Union, as Thomas Mann was from Nazi Germany. We should see the American empire for what it is: sick, brutal, selfish, corrupt, unworthy of loyalty and affection.

This is a profoundly difficult ask for most of us. Most of us hold some affection for America. To detach in the way Chomsky would have us do would entail the double loss that Lear describes above. We’d have to give up not just our love of country but the part of ourselves that has so come to identify with country that love of country is love of self. That would hurt.

Even for those of us who have no particular affection for America, adopting Chomsky’s frame would mean the choice to exist in internal exile, living against the grain of so much of pop culture, so many of our neighbors and fellow citizens, the basic premises of local and national politics, the major institutions of higher learning and high culture, the textbooks in your kids’ schools, and the fundamental narratives of mainstream intellectual and political life. It would wear at you.

Not all criticism of Chomsky is mere psychological evasion. His critics aren’t all going after him because they are afraid that he’s right (and therefore that they’re wrong, lacking, immature, craven). What I’d say, instead, is that this is at least some of what’s going on, and that the discourse, broadly speaking, hasn’t done well in metabolizing Chomsky or the broader critique and critical approach of which he is the most notable practitioner. This is in part his fault; in his boorishness he makes it too easy for us to dismiss and contain him. But it’s also ours.

In his classic 1966 essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” Chomsky offers a few overlapping statements of what the responsibility of intellectuals should be. It is “to speak the truth and to expose lies.” It is “to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology, and class interest through which the events of current history are presented to us.” And it is (quoting Dwight MacDonald, one of Chomsky’s intellectual models) “to resist authority … when it conflicts too intolerably with [one’s] personal moral code.”

These are easy things to say. They are hard to live by. Or more to the point, when thinking about the challenge Chomsky presents to us, it can be hard even to properly formulate in one’s own life what it would mean to live by these dictates. What truth is it we should seek and then speak? Where precisely is ideology most effectively distorting our view of things? What authority is it we should resist? What, for that matter, is our personal moral code? We’re so damned good at deceiving ourselves, so flawed in our capacities for accurate perception.

Chomsky is too inhuman—too pure, or too arrested, depending on who you ask—to really understand these difficulties, to appreciate at the psychological rather than the structural level how the greatest lies can often look like the deepest truths and how authority can be most seductive precisely when it is asking us to sacrifice our ideals for our interests. But for precisely this reason we have to be careful not to dismiss his perceptions too easily.

The Russian-American New Yorker writer Masha Gessen has put forth the theory that many of the major Soviet dissidents were on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum (had Asperger’s, as we used to say). They tended toward dissent because the doublethink that allowed neurotypical people to get by in the bizarro world of Soviet totalitarianism was simply intolerable to them.

“If you simply can’t do doublethink, if your brain explodes, then it is less discomfiting for you to become a dissident than to exist within a society,” Gessen said. “For most people, it’s more comfortable to do whatever you’re required to do. If it requires doublethink, it requires doublethink. But if you just can’t do doublethink, then you become a dissident.”

I haven’t seen people make the argument that Chomsky is on the spectrum, but his style of moral reasoning seems spectrum-y in the relevant sense. This is a weakness in all sorts of respects—one can’t understand so much that’s essential about politics without insight into the neurotypical capacity for hypocrisy, self-delusion, nuance, and ambiguity—but it can also be a strength. I would guess that people on the spectrum are over-represented in the ranks of both cranks and dissidents. Chomsky, I’d wager, is both types in good measure. The great majority of the treatment of him, by the discourse, has been dedicated to characterizing him as a crank. That’s fair, as long as we credit him as a true dissident as well, which we’ve been too loathe to do.