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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.