Well I've gotta say, you've captured my own ambivalence to Chomsky perfectly. Bravo!
As a student, when I came across his fierce takedown of postmodernism (https://libcom.org/article/noam-chomsky-postmodernism) he became an intellectual hero of sorts for articulating the critiques I wanted to make but couldn't quite put so directly and eloquently. Yet not too long ago I heard him interviewed on Yascha Mounk's podcast (https://www.persuasion.community/p/chomsky#details) where he sounded like a CRT proponent, using terms like "white supremacy" in ways that are consistent with postmodern principles.
So when it was intellectually fashionable (as it was back then) he ripped on it? But now that it has been embraced broadly by the left he supports it, or at least doesn't challenge it?
I would also be surprised if he'd said anything recently about the way the left media eco-system has become like the Fox News right used to be (and still is), an argument Matt Taibbi makes in Fear Inc. One would expect the author of Manufacturing Consent to keep abreast of the continuing ways that consent is manufactured by major news sources.
Maybe he's less psychologically enigmatic than we think? Is he just an opportunist, but a very intellectually sophisticated one? I'm not sure if that's a critique that's been leveled at him before but the more I come across him these days the more I think it's right.
For these reasons and others that you articulate in the article it's hard for me to take him seriously anymore. I suppose I should be more skeptical of myself as you counsel, but it's hard not to leave him pinioned to that mat.
I don't feel like I've followed him closely enough to track any kinds of subtle shifts in his stands. In general, he strikes me less as an opportunist than just someone who has a hard time genuinely taking in new information (like your point about the rise of the left wing echo chamber). But I could be wrong about him.
It may be that what I need to do, vis a vis Chomsky, isn't so much to pay a lot of attention to him but to find more sophisticated articulators of the America-skeptic world view and pay attention to them instead.
Fair points. Regarding a more sophisticated articulator of the America-skeptic, I'm perhaps predictably skeptical. It's hard for me to take too seriously arguments that do not assess America's transgressions honestly alongside the crimes of other global regimes, from the Syrian Civil War to the Uyghurs in China (a situation that could actually credibly be described as genocide). That said, I would be willing to look at authors/scholars.
I worry, though, that it would be like the situation with scholars and writers who specialize in the history of race in America. In my reading, even when they are more thoughtful (like, say, Leslie Harris) their arguments and conclusions are often still underpinned and/or infused with a critical social justice ideology that I fundamentally reject.
At a minimum there are plenty of non-left critics of American empire, off the top of my head someone like Robert Wright, who is center left but not at all a lefty. Or Daniel McCarthy, who is a Buchananite. Or someone like Andrew Bacevich.
I like Wright and follow Bloggingheads. He's better than most, but even he occasionally falls into the trap of speaking about Israel/Palestine through the (IMHO) false framing of colonialism.
I appreciate your willingness to show your own vulnerabilities, doubts, filters, and ideas you struggle with. I find many public intellectuals form their critique as if it's generated directly from Truth, not from a changing, imperfect human. I don't know if it's because they are paid to be declarative rather than introspective, or because they lack the self awareness to overcome confirmation bias and adherence to personal brand built around a certain political side. Your posts read more like a private diary, shared publicly. And so it makes sense that you'd have this critique of Chomsky.
I wonder how much he or his popularity is the product of a world where blunt arguments of public debate--even in a pre-social media world--just don't lend themselves to nuance, and doubt. The world needed a figurehead to go against the Vietnam war. There wasn't room for an anti-war champion to love the country, hate the war. I felt the same way when George W Bush made the great, "you're either with us or against us" proclamation. If that's the default framing of the debate, then it's about picking sides, not about challenging the framing itself. Maybe Chomsky became the opposition the left needed him to be. Fine, but for those of us who wish the nature of important contemporary debates could be more nuanced, I agree that he can be off-putting. His analysis is obviously much deeper than my own (it's silly to even make this qualification), but the nature of his certainty reminds me of an earlier version of myself that saw things in black and white. I was proved wrong too many times and try to be skeptical by temperament now.
Yeah there's definitely a much bigger market for certainty than ambivalence. I think Chomsky was always going to be the guy he is, market for his ideas notwithstanding, but no doubt he's bigger than he would otherwise be if he were less of a hammer.
As I grow older the flaws of orthodox leftism become more apparent to me and more ineradicable, and a flawed but stable liberal incrementalism comes to seem more desirable than I once thought. Yet I still find a sort of offensive and depressing failure of imagination in the liberal worldview, the idea that the political road we can walk is so narrow that just a few degrees of divergence in either direction sends you to the death camps on one end and the gulag on another. And that this fact makes America's crimes somehow "mistakes" in the way that Germany's or Belgium's crimes are not. Post-Vietnam America has done a good job farming out the really dirty business in its foreign policy to groups that we "merely" train and fund and sell weapons to and provide information for. But I wonder how much that makes a difference in the moral accounting at the end of the day.
Honestly I love being American. I love the country and the people, the mythology, the culture, Walt Whitman, Miles Davis, Yosemite, Buc-ees, all of it. I wouldn't trade it for better healthcare and the cuckoo clock. But I also wonder if giving yourself permission to think in that way is giving yourself license to forgive the unforgiveable. It's good to have Chomsky around to vex us.
That’s a really good way of putting it. I’m not sure where I land on the rationales for American empire, which I think in the end are basically arguments that if it’s not us blundering around wielding force, inevitably crudely, that it will either be someone else worse who’s on top or just a lot of small fires everywhere that add up to more death overall. I don’t dismiss them out of hand, but it also doesn’t feel nearly as open and shut as we tend to treat it. Like, maybe it’s wrong and the world would be a better place or not a worse place if we just didn’t act like we had the right to determine everyone else’s fate. Certainly a lot of the founders were on that side of things, I think.
But then, yeah, I can’t take seriously the orthodox left for all sorts of reasons, even if they have worthwhile points to make on this front.
Yes and it's distressing that (I assume) most people in the foreign policy establishment subscribe to that rationale, because it's basically giving yourself a license to do anything.
When push came to shove he always either tacitly, or in some cases pro actively, supported the big moves of those he purported to oppose. An an example I have from personal life is some anti activist I knew as kid approached him (he used to be around Cambridge and fairly accessible) just after Powell's UN speech with the then open but not reported and thus secret publicly available specs of the US militaries helicopter rockets aluminum tubes spec grades which proved he had lied on that (it was big element of it too) but he just through out platitudes; he a big mic back then but he wouldn't use it. On the proactive side, he played a role in getting people in Uni/intellectual/activist circles to not really oppose all the national and international centralizations that they were wam bam rolling out, telling people it was inevitable and it was for the best to roll with and the changes can later be used for good and blah blah blah; but they were'nt inevitable, they'd destroyed the old democratic governance structures by then and the press had been hyper centralized and captured and so those circles were the only big means left to propagate info and expose lies they were telling to conceal what they were doing, it may have had an effect. There's much more than that stuff too, the list is actually pretty long
I don’t think Chomsky is on the spectrum, and I think he actually is very guilty of doublethink. It’s just not directed at rationalizing commitment to the US, but commitment to himself and his ideas personally. This is based largely on my experience with him as a linguist, however. I would guess narcissism spectrum not autism.
An example: he usually claims his linguistics is not and was never about creating a science that could be applied to computer engineering, yet we can find multiple instances of him saying that it is a very important goal to apply his linguistics to computer engineering. Similarly, activist Chomsky says we must ruthlessly interrogate all media (“propaganda”) based on its funding sources… all media except his linguistics apparently, because linguist Chomsky owes his entire academic career to a cash infusion from the US military (trying to develop computers with his work… which never worked…).
That may be the case. I think there's something to be said for identifying an autistic style of reasoning, maybe, but I wasn't making the diagnosis with much confidence. I'm probably bending over backwards for Chomsky in part because he's the avatar of a broader critique that I find troubling if not always persuasive.
chomsky is a god for those of us the heard him lecture.
i think i will write a play about him, foucault, and the incident.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eF9BtrX0YEE
Well I've gotta say, you've captured my own ambivalence to Chomsky perfectly. Bravo!
As a student, when I came across his fierce takedown of postmodernism (https://libcom.org/article/noam-chomsky-postmodernism) he became an intellectual hero of sorts for articulating the critiques I wanted to make but couldn't quite put so directly and eloquently. Yet not too long ago I heard him interviewed on Yascha Mounk's podcast (https://www.persuasion.community/p/chomsky#details) where he sounded like a CRT proponent, using terms like "white supremacy" in ways that are consistent with postmodern principles.
So when it was intellectually fashionable (as it was back then) he ripped on it? But now that it has been embraced broadly by the left he supports it, or at least doesn't challenge it?
I would also be surprised if he'd said anything recently about the way the left media eco-system has become like the Fox News right used to be (and still is), an argument Matt Taibbi makes in Fear Inc. One would expect the author of Manufacturing Consent to keep abreast of the continuing ways that consent is manufactured by major news sources.
Maybe he's less psychologically enigmatic than we think? Is he just an opportunist, but a very intellectually sophisticated one? I'm not sure if that's a critique that's been leveled at him before but the more I come across him these days the more I think it's right.
For these reasons and others that you articulate in the article it's hard for me to take him seriously anymore. I suppose I should be more skeptical of myself as you counsel, but it's hard not to leave him pinioned to that mat.
I don't feel like I've followed him closely enough to track any kinds of subtle shifts in his stands. In general, he strikes me less as an opportunist than just someone who has a hard time genuinely taking in new information (like your point about the rise of the left wing echo chamber). But I could be wrong about him.
It may be that what I need to do, vis a vis Chomsky, isn't so much to pay a lot of attention to him but to find more sophisticated articulators of the America-skeptic world view and pay attention to them instead.
Fair points. Regarding a more sophisticated articulator of the America-skeptic, I'm perhaps predictably skeptical. It's hard for me to take too seriously arguments that do not assess America's transgressions honestly alongside the crimes of other global regimes, from the Syrian Civil War to the Uyghurs in China (a situation that could actually credibly be described as genocide). That said, I would be willing to look at authors/scholars.
I worry, though, that it would be like the situation with scholars and writers who specialize in the history of race in America. In my reading, even when they are more thoughtful (like, say, Leslie Harris) their arguments and conclusions are often still underpinned and/or infused with a critical social justice ideology that I fundamentally reject.
At a minimum there are plenty of non-left critics of American empire, off the top of my head someone like Robert Wright, who is center left but not at all a lefty. Or Daniel McCarthy, who is a Buchananite. Or someone like Andrew Bacevich.
I like Wright and follow Bloggingheads. He's better than most, but even he occasionally falls into the trap of speaking about Israel/Palestine through the (IMHO) false framing of colonialism.
I'll check out the other two.
I appreciate your willingness to show your own vulnerabilities, doubts, filters, and ideas you struggle with. I find many public intellectuals form their critique as if it's generated directly from Truth, not from a changing, imperfect human. I don't know if it's because they are paid to be declarative rather than introspective, or because they lack the self awareness to overcome confirmation bias and adherence to personal brand built around a certain political side. Your posts read more like a private diary, shared publicly. And so it makes sense that you'd have this critique of Chomsky.
I wonder how much he or his popularity is the product of a world where blunt arguments of public debate--even in a pre-social media world--just don't lend themselves to nuance, and doubt. The world needed a figurehead to go against the Vietnam war. There wasn't room for an anti-war champion to love the country, hate the war. I felt the same way when George W Bush made the great, "you're either with us or against us" proclamation. If that's the default framing of the debate, then it's about picking sides, not about challenging the framing itself. Maybe Chomsky became the opposition the left needed him to be. Fine, but for those of us who wish the nature of important contemporary debates could be more nuanced, I agree that he can be off-putting. His analysis is obviously much deeper than my own (it's silly to even make this qualification), but the nature of his certainty reminds me of an earlier version of myself that saw things in black and white. I was proved wrong too many times and try to be skeptical by temperament now.
Yeah there's definitely a much bigger market for certainty than ambivalence. I think Chomsky was always going to be the guy he is, market for his ideas notwithstanding, but no doubt he's bigger than he would otherwise be if he were less of a hammer.
As I grow older the flaws of orthodox leftism become more apparent to me and more ineradicable, and a flawed but stable liberal incrementalism comes to seem more desirable than I once thought. Yet I still find a sort of offensive and depressing failure of imagination in the liberal worldview, the idea that the political road we can walk is so narrow that just a few degrees of divergence in either direction sends you to the death camps on one end and the gulag on another. And that this fact makes America's crimes somehow "mistakes" in the way that Germany's or Belgium's crimes are not. Post-Vietnam America has done a good job farming out the really dirty business in its foreign policy to groups that we "merely" train and fund and sell weapons to and provide information for. But I wonder how much that makes a difference in the moral accounting at the end of the day.
Honestly I love being American. I love the country and the people, the mythology, the culture, Walt Whitman, Miles Davis, Yosemite, Buc-ees, all of it. I wouldn't trade it for better healthcare and the cuckoo clock. But I also wonder if giving yourself permission to think in that way is giving yourself license to forgive the unforgiveable. It's good to have Chomsky around to vex us.
That’s a really good way of putting it. I’m not sure where I land on the rationales for American empire, which I think in the end are basically arguments that if it’s not us blundering around wielding force, inevitably crudely, that it will either be someone else worse who’s on top or just a lot of small fires everywhere that add up to more death overall. I don’t dismiss them out of hand, but it also doesn’t feel nearly as open and shut as we tend to treat it. Like, maybe it’s wrong and the world would be a better place or not a worse place if we just didn’t act like we had the right to determine everyone else’s fate. Certainly a lot of the founders were on that side of things, I think.
But then, yeah, I can’t take seriously the orthodox left for all sorts of reasons, even if they have worthwhile points to make on this front.
Yes and it's distressing that (I assume) most people in the foreign policy establishment subscribe to that rationale, because it's basically giving yourself a license to do anything.
My problem is less that they subscribe to it per se than that it seems so often taken for granted as *obviously* the right framework.
When push came to shove he always either tacitly, or in some cases pro actively, supported the big moves of those he purported to oppose. An an example I have from personal life is some anti activist I knew as kid approached him (he used to be around Cambridge and fairly accessible) just after Powell's UN speech with the then open but not reported and thus secret publicly available specs of the US militaries helicopter rockets aluminum tubes spec grades which proved he had lied on that (it was big element of it too) but he just through out platitudes; he a big mic back then but he wouldn't use it. On the proactive side, he played a role in getting people in Uni/intellectual/activist circles to not really oppose all the national and international centralizations that they were wam bam rolling out, telling people it was inevitable and it was for the best to roll with and the changes can later be used for good and blah blah blah; but they were'nt inevitable, they'd destroyed the old democratic governance structures by then and the press had been hyper centralized and captured and so those circles were the only big means left to propagate info and expose lies they were telling to conceal what they were doing, it may have had an effect. There's much more than that stuff too, the list is actually pretty long
I don’t think Chomsky is on the spectrum, and I think he actually is very guilty of doublethink. It’s just not directed at rationalizing commitment to the US, but commitment to himself and his ideas personally. This is based largely on my experience with him as a linguist, however. I would guess narcissism spectrum not autism.
An example: he usually claims his linguistics is not and was never about creating a science that could be applied to computer engineering, yet we can find multiple instances of him saying that it is a very important goal to apply his linguistics to computer engineering. Similarly, activist Chomsky says we must ruthlessly interrogate all media (“propaganda”) based on its funding sources… all media except his linguistics apparently, because linguist Chomsky owes his entire academic career to a cash infusion from the US military (trying to develop computers with his work… which never worked…).
That may be the case. I think there's something to be said for identifying an autistic style of reasoning, maybe, but I wasn't making the diagnosis with much confidence. I'm probably bending over backwards for Chomsky in part because he's the avatar of a broader critique that I find troubling if not always persuasive.