While Chomsky Is Still Alive, for When He Isn't: Pre-Empting the 'Deficienti'

What we can learn from Chomsky's critics.

Yesterday, I had quite a scare. Not the (fake, it turns out) news that Noam Chomsky had died - after all, the poor, indefatigable guy deserves a rest for once - but the thought that he had died before I had written an essay I had been meaning to write for ages.

As I had long expected, as soon as (a rumor of) his death got out, mediocrities came crawling out of the woodwork to do what they lacked the intellect and courage to do while he was alive to defend himself: attempt to critique Chomsky's political arguments. Legacy media outlets must be holding on to dozens of such attempts, just recently filed away after discovering, to their editors' chagrin, that Chomsky is still alive. But they will be published once he passes. Some new-media midwits, e.g., the twitter user Noah Opinion, or whatever his name is - a raft of utterly forgettable, too-clever-by-half bores who pass for "intellectuals" in the U.S. - jumped the gun and posted their obituaries-cum-critiques online. To intelligent people - people who read and think - these attempts closely resemble the mutterings of a corpulent slob critiquing Manny Pacquiao for flaws in his boxing technique, or Patrick Mahomes for being an overrated quarterback, all while ensconced in a sofa and enveloped in a cloud of aerosolized potato chips and saliva.

This, you may have guessed, is personal. Not because Noam is a lover of mine - alas, my seduction game proved insufficient - but because he shattered my worldview. And more pertinently, because none of the many deficienti* who claim to know better than him were capable of restoring it for me.

You see, I was raised on rightwing politics. Rush Limbaugh first piqued my interest in politics, and from there, I soon got into harder drugs. I devoured National Review and First Things, and, well, you are what you eat: I developed a rightwing worldview. Republicans were the good guys, Democrats were the bad guys. (Hey, for a teenager, one out of two ain't bad.) The only problem with the U.S. war on Vietnam (and Laos and Cambodia) was that the U.S. stopped killing millions of people there for the noblest of reasons: to save them from Satan's own ideology, communism. God had a soft spot for the U.S.A., and its military carried out His will, which was to gift freedom and democracy to the benighted children of parents who mated within foreign borders.

But then I went to university, and liberal professors indoctrin... no, just kidding. Actually what happened was that in high school the internet exposed me to arguments that my religious ideology could not withstand, and that left my rightwing political ideology unmoored. Later, at university, I met a friend who gave me a little book of Noam Chomsky's, just a pamphlet really, and urged me to read it. (Proving Voltaire's point: "What harm can a book do that costs a hundred crowns? Twenty volumes folio will never make a revolution; it is the little pocket pamphlets [sold cheaply] that are to be feared.")

I liked the guy - he later became a close friend - so I bit, I read the pamphlet. My first reaction? "Obviously, this is bullshit." How could it not be? Chomsky argued that everything I had been taught, everything my friends and family believed, everything the best and brightest of the U.S. professed from the White House, Congress, and the news media - not just the dastardly Democrats but the bipartisan consensus, including God's favored Republicans - was entirely wrong. He had the gall to claim, falsely I was certain, that the U.S. government was not motivated exclusively by intentions pure as freshly fallen snow, to liberate the world's people with the blessings of freedom and democracy. Turning The Truth on its head, in Chomsky World the U.S. government was instead principally motivated by a desire to maximize its power. It used its unmatched military and diplomatic might to ensure that wealthy U.S. Americans would dominate the global economy, control the most advanced technologies, and obtain vital resources (unluckily located within foreign borders) at the minimum cost - all of which maximized the power the U.S. government could wield. In other words: Chomsky was spewing obvious bullshit.

No one likes their friends to get suckered, so I took it upon myself to amass the knowledge required to disabuse my friend of his foolish beliefs. Giving the devil his due, I first read a full book of Chomsky's to supplement the pamphlet, and then sought out the criticism that would help me remove the splinter from my friend's eye. Such an audacious huckster as Chomsky, making such outrageous claims striking at the heart of The Truth about the U.S., with such a wide readership and exerting so much influence over legions of brainwashed lefty (communist?) zombies - doubtless, the adults in the room would have sorted him out. I would quickly find a superior intellect applied to debunking Chomsky's politics. Surely, the only challenge facing me was to pick one out of so many books that sliced through each of Chomsky's claims, revealing his mendacity in selectively citing some facts, but excluding others that would cast the facts he deceptively chose to mention in the opposite light. Thereby salvaging the worldview I shared in common with most U.S. Americans, including the best and brightest, and correcting the error of my friend's ways.

Setting about my new task, I found a website with hundreds of purported "corrections" of Chomsky's writings. "Aha, that's the ticket," I initially thought. But the more I read, the more I realized that this was a mere collection of opinions differing from Chomsky's, without the requisite evidence to back them up. This search for critiques of Chomsky continued, and became an intermittent hobby of mine, lasting several years. Some time later, I found The Anti-Chomsky Reader, and rejoiced: here we go, at last, serious scholarship applied to expose the Chomster for the fraud he must be!

But hundreds of pages later, all the book established was a prima facie case for two assertions: that Chomsky may have been too quick to discount early claims about the precise extent of mass killing by the then-Cambodian-government (later, in exile and after the actual extent of its killing was well established, it would be supported by the U.S. government because: Vietnam & USSR bad), and that Chomsky's linguistics might be wrong. But the main use of those hundreds of pages was in making the case that Chomsky's moral(-psychological) reasoning was immoral, actually. Coincidentally (since correlation only may suggest causation), Chomsky's moral-psychological reasoning put the blame on - trigger warning! - the national in-group. (You know, the in-group - part of "intergroup bias," probably the most comprehensively established bias in the science of social psychology: we humans feel positive affect toward arbitrarily defined in-groups, like the nation one happens to be born into and the government that represents it, and, under certain conditions - like in our present world, where there is perceived competition over scarce resources - antipathy toward arbitrarily defined out-groups. Potentially nasty stuff, something we as a society might want to address.)

There are no papers I could think to cite in psychology to directly support the claim or interpretation that Chomsky's critics, the overwhelming majority simply being unserious**, are motivated only by "irrational," "emotional" forces, overwhelming, without their awareness, the perfect rationality that is their lived experience. (And I wouldn't hazard provoking some Jungian reverie from a certain Canadian and his teenage-boy fanbase, by suggesting that his/their thinking may be influenced by irrational, emotional, and - since ancient myths have powerful psychological effects today, and should be used as a divining rod to interpret present reality - feminine forces!). 

But the only reason why I cannot cite psychological research perfectly apposite to this claim is that the idea that intergroup bias would make us more likely to irrationally accept arguments making our in-groups look good, and to irrationally reject arguments making our in-groups look bad, is so obvious a hypothesis that testing it would be seen as a waste of time, and unpublishable. (Just imagine the paper's abstract: "In this study, we investigate dozens of countries to see whether the dominant beliefs in each country paint the national in-group in a positive or negative light" - the editor stops reading and rejects it immediately for being too obvious.)

There are, however, lots of studies to suggest that the way our brains work, we are all, always, everywhere at once influenced by a range of cognitive-emotional factors, operating outside of our conscious awareness (or lived experience), when we think about politics. Some of these factors would be considered rational according to conventional understandings of reason, and others would be considered irrational, and potentially harmful - something a society might want to address. And those cognitive-emotional factors we would conventionally consider irrational are the ones most likely to influence our thinking when our precious in-groups are threatened with criticism.

Anyway, here I was, looking for a point-by-point rebuttal of Chomsky's claims about the U.S. government, its motivations and foreign policy, and all I could find after years of searching were critics expressing moral outrage, divergent opinions with far less evidence to support them, and potshots at his writings on linguistics (which I had not read and did not interest me).

It is revealing that during Chomsky's long lifetime, none of his critics managed to cobble together anything approaching a serious, scholarly critique of his political writings: that is, a critique analyzing his books on politics, debunking claim after claim by engaging with the sources he used, and adding additional evidence demonstrating that Chomsky's use of evidence was misleadingly selective. Contra Rumsfeld, absence of evidence is evidence of absence. In this case, the absence of a serious scholarly critique of Chomsky's political writings is evidence of the following absence: that there is no serious rebuttal that can be made.

I should know. I experienced both "accuracy" and "directional" motivations in seeking out a serious argument against Chomsky. That is, like all of us, I was motivated to arrive at accurate beliefs about the world, the "accuracy" motivation. My "directional" motivation - seeking out what makes us feel good because it is in accord with our pre-existing beliefs, or what we want to believe (e.g., that your partner isn't cheating; or that your favorite politician - or, again, romantic partner - is a good guy/gal) - was to protect my original beliefs, and make me feel warm and fuzzy about my national in-group and the government that is often equated with it. But the deficienti frustrated my directional motivation, by providing nothing significant for my accuracy motivation to latch on to.

Perhaps I should be grateful for Chomsky's critics, these revealed deficienti, because the shock I experienced at not being able to find superior counterarguments to Chomsky's arguments was what first piqued my interest in political psychology. How could this be!? Assuming no improbably vast conspiracy, and subjective good faith (after all, other than psychopaths, we all think/feel we are good people) on the part of the U.S. political and media elite, how could Chomsky's political scholarship go un-debunked when it argues such a radically different view of the U.S. government, its motivations and foreign policy? The evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers' partial foray into political psychology, The Folly of Fools, helped a lot, and long story short, I ended up writing Manufacturing Consent 2: This Time, with Psychology, a.k.a. this book.

So to reiterate: while Chomsky lives, none of his cocksure-as-they-are-unserious critics have managed to produce a convincing critique. Very telling. But after he dies? When he is no longer around to issue a defense? I still would not hold my breath for a serious critique. But do expect the elevator doors from The Shining to open, and from ceiling to floor a wave of cockroaches to flood the public sphere,** all airily chittering about Chomsky the dead "conspiracy theorist" (despite the fact that only an ignoramus could read his work and see anything other than a structural thesis). Those called "liberals," "moderates," or "centrists" in the U.S. will write denunciations of Chomsky the America-Baddist, and the Right will go with Chomsky the Blame-America-Firster.

These critiques of Chomsky are one and the same in their essentials, but like Nyerere said of the U.S. uniparty system, with typical American extravagance there will be two versions of them. The America-Baddist critique will come from the liberal-moderate-centrist side, and with oh so much nuance, sophistication, and complexity, will argue that Chomsky focused too much on the crimes of the U.S. government, and neglected to give equal time to each and every demon in the world. America-Baddist-ers will essentially repurpose Trump: "there are a lot of killers, there are a lot of killers; what, you think other countries are so innocent?" This is a powerful argument to be sure, except I have not heard its expositors address Chomsky's response to it: that as a citizen of the purportedly democratic U.S. - not of the many other demon/killer countries[' governments] out there - it makes more sense to focus on the government one has nominal influence over, rather than occupying Harvard Square and going on hunger strike to pressure the DPRK government to change its policies. 

The Blame-America-Firster critique, befitting its origin on the right, is even stupider. It cannot even abide Trump's unassailable observation: "what, you think our country is so innocent?" (Unless, for some of them perhaps, you remind them that it was their hero who spoke those words.) That is, Chomsky's flaw is not that he focuses his criticism on the U.S. government when the world is full of (other) demons and killers, but that the U.S. government is an angel, and every one of its (unfortunate, because-they-made-us-do-it) killings was justified. The thing speaks for itself, or this argument is self-evidently a weaker version of the first: the Blame-America-Firster critique has all of the flaws of the America-Baddist critique, while rejecting the only part of the latter that is factually correct, and might be developed into an actual argument.

Both critiques are variants of good old "American exceptionalism." But as Chomsky pointed out, this "American exceptionalism" is entirely unexceptional; rather, it is a mental malady that seems to afflict all in-group members of powerful states. British exceptionalism was the British empire's selfless civilizing mission for the world; and French exceptionalism was extra exceptional, because its empire had instead a selfless mission civilisatrice. The Dutch empire had a Beschavingsmissie, also selfless to be sure, and which might sound the most exceptional - until it is translated (yet another "civilizing mission"). The Japanese empire's exceptionalism was even more exceptional, having both superficial-leftwing and rightwing forms: saving Asia from European imperialism, and replacing it with European-style Japanese imperialism (oops, I mean creating a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere for the betterment of mankind - as imperial Japan's counterparts to our Blob corpuscles considered it). To anyone with a passing knowledge of social psychology, that in-group members would believe such bullshit about their in-group is so predictable as to be trite; a trivial truth; a mundane, obvious hypothesis. Forget knowledge of social psychology; even Orwell noticed that "the nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."

But the principle reason why no one has produced a serious critique of Chomsky's political writings while the man lives, is that a serious critique is impossible to pull off without certain "auxiliary assumptions," as they are called.

Here we must take a brief detour into "international relations theory", or IR for short. It's the body of social science scholarship that studies how and why governments act the way they do in international politics. It's what informs the thinking of countless government officials and think tankers, and from there trickles down to the news media, ending up in some form of puddle among the minority of the politically interested, a.k.a. "political junkies". Repurposing Keynes: even the most practical of U.S. foreign policy officials, the least academic corpuscles of the Blob, "who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct [IR theorist]. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back."

There are plenty of examples of solid scholarship from the IR schools of both "liberalism" and "realism", but the many corpuscles comprising the U.S. foreign policy Blob distill their frenzy into crackpot realism and crackpot liberal internationalism. (The crackpot variants take the least tenable portions of their scholarly counterparts, and exaggerate them: crackpot realists exaggerate the threatening implications of an "anarchic" world into a paranoid delusion, and crackpost liberal internationalists exaggerate the virtuousness of the national in-group and its beneficial effects on the rest of the world.) Certainly most IR "realists", and probably a lot of crackpot realists too, would acknowledge that Chomsky is right about the crimes of the U.S. government around the world. (In fact, from their perspective, Chomsky's political writings amount to a significant if superfluous amount of empirical support for "realist" theory.) But here's where auxiliary assumptions come in: sure, "we" had to do lots of bad stuff - but it was for the greater good. If the U.S. government did not maximize its power to become the biggest rat bastard in the world, then some other, out-group government would. And since out-groups are bad, and the in-group is good, in the best of all possible worlds the U.S. government should be the world's biggest rat bastard. Q.E.D.

Crackpot liberal internationalists take a different tack. In their posthumous Chomsky critiques, expect to see a lot of a magic word: "nuance" and its synonyms. That is, Chomsky's flaw was a lack of nuance; his analysis was unsophisticated, Manichean, and ill-suited to deal with the real world's complexity, overlooking the burden of making the heart-rending but unavoidable moral trade-offs our brave Blob corpuscles are virtuous enough to shoulder for the rest of us. Not only did he fail to accept the crackpost realists' irrefutable argument that the in-group is by definition the good guys, and out-groups are to be assumed bad guys, but he errs further by ascribing bad motivations to the U.S. foreign policy elite! Whereas Chomsky the vulgar, in-group-slandering realist presumes that the Blob is motivated by power maximization über alles, in their actual lived experience, in how it feels for them to exercise their agency, Blob corpuscles are in reality motivated by the purest of intentions. (Unlike their British, French, or Japanese imperial counterparts - but of course, you see, those are out-groups, silly!) Just look at a sweet, golden retriever of a man like Michael McFaul - Chomsky thinks even his little puppy-dog heart is black! Clearly, Chomsky is wrong, because he lacks the high-minded nuance, sophistication, and complexity of his crackpot critics. We are the good guys - it really is just that simple.

There are scholars among the crackpot realists and crackpot liberal internationalists, so why have none of them bothered to write a serious critique of Chomsky? Probably because they realize that while their auxiliary assumptions are a great comfort to themselves - they reduce cognitive dissonance like gangbusters! - they would be hard pressed to convince the general public to adopt them. As one such scholar put it:

"Whereas for the foreign-policy elite, the need for American leadership in the world is a matter of settled conviction, in the general public the commitment to global leadership is weaker…. That commitment depends on a view of its effects on the rest of the world and the likely consequences of its absence. These are views for which most Americans … lack the relevant information..."

In other words, the general public lacks information deemed relevant by the crackpot: for instance, arguments about how, if the U.S. were not the world's biggest rat bastard, a worse, out-group rat bastard would take over, and commit worse acts of rat-bastardtry; or apologetics for U.S. government commission of, participation in, and support for atrocities all over the world, from Bangladesh to Guatemala. (And yes, they and Trump are right, there are a lot of killers out there, and one should not think that other countries are so innocent. See, I can be nuanced and sophisticated!) The crackpot realists and crackpot liberal internationalists agree: If you think those atrocities were bad, just imagine what atrocities would have occurred in a counterfactual world where an out-group were the biggest rat bastard! What... you plebes don't find that thought experiment dispositive, or even somewhat convincing? Oh, the lower orders! They must lack the relevant information.

...

To conclude, I give my sincere thanks to whomever started the rumor that Noam Chomsky died on June 19th, 2024. I needed the motivation to write something ready to copy, paste, and send to the legions of deficienti sure to emerge with their long-overdue (but ever so wonderfully nuanced) critiques of Chomsky's political writings - just as soon as he is actually posthumous.

* In English, "deficients" - meaning people who are deficient or lacking in some important quality, like the ability to learn from history and/or social psychology, and exercise skepticism about the beliefs in which one was inculcated and the conventional wisdom in one's society. In Italian, it's better: deficienti sounds like "deaf - ee - chien - tee", with the pronunciation of cien essentially forcing your mouth into an appropriate sneer.

** "Unserious", the favorite word I learned from a neoconservative friend, which means, in this context: failing to engage deeply with a subject, by doing significant amounts of reading and thinking; as evidenced by not spending the time to learn an opponent's arguments and the evidence on which they are based, and, like a bad defence lawyer, making your case without even attempting to refute the opposition's case.

*** Of course, there is and will be criticism of Chomsky from the Left too, for instance:

• anarcho-syndicalism is anarkiddie, a juvenile ideology that ignores the powerful structural constraints the real world imposes;

• Michael Parenti was better;

• Chomsky should have openly supported the USSR while it existed (while Chomsky was an un-fired, un-imprisoned, un-assassinated professor at a U.S. university during the mass psychosis of the Red Scare, mind you) to help prevent the USSR's dread "social imperialism" (not a term he used, AFAIK, probably since he also didn't support the PRC) from devolving into the hellscape that is today's Russian Federation;

• Hey maybe he was a CIA asset, controlled opposition policing the far boundaries of the "Compatible [with U.S. empire] Left"; 

• Etc., maybe even something about how the words he chose to use in his writing evince some prejudicial -ism or other

To which, Mao Zedong, whom Chomsky disliked, had something relevant to say: "If our task is to cross a river, we cannot cross it without a bridge or a boat. Unless the bridge or boat problem is solved, it is idle to speak of crossing the river. Unless the problem of method is solved, talk about the task is useless." In other words, I very much look forward to the Left's conclusive debate over Chomsky, whether he was net good or bad - an important task to be sure. It's a shame we have other things to attend to first, like attaining state power and using it to avoid ecological catastrophe. And by the time these more pressing problems are solved, we'll probably only get around to the big Chomsky debate by the 50th or 60th Global People's Congress.

- Peter