Chomsky Revisited
Oliver Kamm rejects the "self-loathing" tag that's often slapped on Chomsky and other anti-American Americans/anti-Israeli Jews. Kamm is a careful critic of Chomsky, and I agree with him that this label is a mere sneer.
When I did Jen Larson's interview, one of the questions dealt with Chomsky. I started to answer it in detail, but then realized I was taking much too much space, and I sort of left it hanging half-answered. My insight is not a great one. But I've noticed that Chomsky, in his purely adacemic work (without considering political writings) has an absolutist prejudice.
That is, he rules out a certain set of possible explanations for things, a priori, because the consequences of accepting any validity for those possible explanations seems to be intollerable to him. Goodness knows he's not the only person with that quality, or the only academic. But I question whether it's a good way to do science, or to think about international affairs.
In fact some of the people he smites down in academic wars were themselves absolutists of another strain -- the socio-biologists. Where he goes wrong, I think, is mistaking no attempt to distinguish any application of evolution to social situations, however innocent or logical, from the 666 Beast of Socio-biology. Hitler gave his speeches and wrote his orders in German; that's no reason to ban the German language.
Once again, it's not just Chomsky. You can find similar attitudes, for instance, among many creationists. Not that I consider them good scientists either, of course. But his form of it does seem to be peculiarly strong among academics with strong Old Left/social progressive political sensibilities. Stephen Jay Gould, who was a hero of mine for his rear-guard work in holding back creationism, suffered from it, too.
And of course, it's all over the academic discipline of history. Before you accuse me of unthinking right-wing stereotyping, read the autobiographical stories of a Eugene Genovese or an Eric Foner. Read their addresses to one another in the professional organizations. They write the past, but they live the present, and their academic work is done with a view to a future they would like to shape.
Listen to Genovese, answering the interviewer's question, "You grew up in a working-class family. Did this experience influence your scholarship? If so, how?"
Describing one written work of his, Genovese states his goal like this: "I was trying to help develop a left-wing orientation toward the re-emerging problem of black nationalism so that the white Left could prepare itself to contribute constructively to emerging struggles." And looking back on the entire body of work he and his contemporaries accomplished, he concludes, "Whatever our errors and inadequacies, I think we can claim to have accomplished what we set out to do: to reorient the study of southern slave society and to compel a confrontation with a new set of questions."
As he hints, his practical side later rebelled against doctrinaire Marxism (it ultimately led him to Catholicism), and cost him banishment from leftist academic historical circles. He emerged, recently, as one who has been able to write with some sympathy and understanding of the Southern "master class" and to separate slavery from racism and say the latter, not the former, is the real American tragedy.
Back to Kamm. He finds a drift in Chomsky's latest pronouncements that seems to tread thin ice over anti-Semitism.
To charge someone with holding a view out of self-hatred is a pernicious way of arguing, because - like the old antisemitic canard of "dual loyalty" - it is unfalsifiable.
When I did Jen Larson's interview, one of the questions dealt with Chomsky. I started to answer it in detail, but then realized I was taking much too much space, and I sort of left it hanging half-answered. My insight is not a great one. But I've noticed that Chomsky, in his purely adacemic work (without considering political writings) has an absolutist prejudice.
That is, he rules out a certain set of possible explanations for things, a priori, because the consequences of accepting any validity for those possible explanations seems to be intollerable to him. Goodness knows he's not the only person with that quality, or the only academic. But I question whether it's a good way to do science, or to think about international affairs.
In fact some of the people he smites down in academic wars were themselves absolutists of another strain -- the socio-biologists. Where he goes wrong, I think, is mistaking no attempt to distinguish any application of evolution to social situations, however innocent or logical, from the 666 Beast of Socio-biology. Hitler gave his speeches and wrote his orders in German; that's no reason to ban the German language.
Once again, it's not just Chomsky. You can find similar attitudes, for instance, among many creationists. Not that I consider them good scientists either, of course. But his form of it does seem to be peculiarly strong among academics with strong Old Left/social progressive political sensibilities. Stephen Jay Gould, who was a hero of mine for his rear-guard work in holding back creationism, suffered from it, too.
And of course, it's all over the academic discipline of history. Before you accuse me of unthinking right-wing stereotyping, read the autobiographical stories of a Eugene Genovese or an Eric Foner. Read their addresses to one another in the professional organizations. They write the past, but they live the present, and their academic work is done with a view to a future they would like to shape.
Listen to Genovese, answering the interviewer's question, "You grew up in a working-class family. Did this experience influence your scholarship? If so, how?"
"Undoubtedly it did in a big way. The specifics, however, are hard to come by. To take a direct example, my discussion of the driver in 'Roll, Jordan, Roll' drew upon the stories that my father, a wood caulker, told me of the contradictory roles of foremen on the docks in the port of New York. More broadly, growing up with workers and in a working-class neighborhood provided a strong antidote to the romanticism that characterizes a good deal of the 'new labor history.'
"I entered the communist movement in 1945 at age fifteen and spent summers working in shops as an organizer for Communist-led unions. It was a valuable experience, which reinforced my hard class attitudes but also my resistance to romanticism. ... In any case, I grew up in a class-conscious home -- class-conscious but by no means ideologically driven. I hated the bourgeoisie with the terrible passion that perhaps only a child can muster. When I came across some Communists at age fifteen and read the Communist Manifesto and some other pamphlets, I suddenly had a precise focus for my hatred. I would happily have sent the bastards to firing squads in large numbers, and their wives and children along with them.
"... My biggest problem as a historian has always been, I suppose, the conscious effort to rein in that hatred and not let it distort my reading of the historical record. I am sure that it has taken a toll, but I hope I have kept that toll to a minimum." ["Eugene D. Genovese and History: An Interview," in Slavery, Secession, and Southern History, ed. Robert Louis Paquette and Louis A Ferleger, University Press of Virginia, 2000, p.197]
Describing one written work of his, Genovese states his goal like this: "I was trying to help develop a left-wing orientation toward the re-emerging problem of black nationalism so that the white Left could prepare itself to contribute constructively to emerging struggles." And looking back on the entire body of work he and his contemporaries accomplished, he concludes, "Whatever our errors and inadequacies, I think we can claim to have accomplished what we set out to do: to reorient the study of southern slave society and to compel a confrontation with a new set of questions."
As he hints, his practical side later rebelled against doctrinaire Marxism (it ultimately led him to Catholicism), and cost him banishment from leftist academic historical circles. He emerged, recently, as one who has been able to write with some sympathy and understanding of the Southern "master class" and to separate slavery from racism and say the latter, not the former, is the real American tragedy.
Back to Kamm. He finds a drift in Chomsky's latest pronouncements that seems to tread thin ice over anti-Semitism.
But take a look at a more recent pronouncement by Chomsky. At the end of 2002, Chomsky spoke by video link to the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign and others on 'Antisemitism, Zionism and the Palestinians'. Chomsky is discussing the historical presence of antisemitism in US society, and concludes:
You find occasional instances of anti-Semitism but they are marginal. There’s plenty of racism, but it’s directed against Blacks, Latinos, Arabs are targets of enormous racism, and those problems are real. Anti-Semitism is no longer a problem, fortunately. It’s raised, but it’s raised because privileged people want to make sure they have total control, not just 98% control. That’s why anti-Semitism is becoming an issue. Not because of the threat of anti-Semitism; they want to make sure there’s no critical look at the policies the US (and they themselves) support in the Middle East.
What can one make of this? The best possible interpretation that could be spun is that Chomsky is talking about "privileged people" rather than Jews, and that just conceivably he did not mean to imply an identity between those groups. But it's a strained interpretation. The more direct interpretation is that the Jews control America, they want total domination, and they manufacture the chimera of antisemitism in order to divert attention from their nefarious foreign policy goals.
Because this is the first time I have seen this type of statement from Chomsky, and he was speaking rather than writing it, I would be inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt on the matter and resolve to watch him closely. I have not the slightest doubt that the antisemitic totalitarians of far-Right and far-Left, of secular ideologies and theocratic fundamentalisms, would be liable to understand Chomsky's demagoguery according to the more direct interpretation. As the phrase goes, go figure.
Labels: Noam Chomsky
