Is Noam Chomsky full of shit?

Factual Questions
21

i didn’t mention that his political stuff isn’t the easiest of reads. he assumes a certain level of knowledge about 20th century history, and it particularly helps if you understand the “alternative” histories of world events. i think he limits the amount of background because he is usually assaulting you with loads of evidence to support his points. if you’re relatively well-informed, you should be okay.

but it can also be hard to read because he will be saying things that are ** diametrically opposite ** to almost everything you’ve ever heard before. (a simple example is changing the Vietnam war from: “a war to defend South Vietnam from Communist aggression” TO “the military invasion and occupation of Vietnam.”) he’s going to have you questioning assumptions with every other sentence.

let’s just say that it can be draining. i suspect that many of the people (not all, of course!) who question his writing haven’t read very much of it. maybe they believe that his ideas go so hard against the grain that they must be wrong somehow.

and now that i’ve made it sound like a chore…

like people have mentioned before, the video * Manufacturing Consent* is an excellent introduction and is even conveniently reading-free for those who just want a taste without the struggle. i know you can buy it, but maybe your local library has a copy.

they have also put together small, short books (100 pages or so) as summaries of his views in order to make them more accessible. it’s called the * Real Story Series* and here are the titles:

  • What Uncle Sam Really Wants*
  • Secrets, Lies and Democracy *
  • The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many*

that would be a good start and might encourage you to read more. my favorite book of his is * Year 501*, where he places modern neo-colonialism as the latest stop on an chain of exploitation unbroken since the days of Columbus.

The Fateful Triangle is his book about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. the Middle East was a complete mystery for me my entire life until i read this book.

  • Deterring Democracy* helped me understand the Gulf War and the New World Order and * Manufacturing Consent* shows how the media really works.

and it’s hard to argue with a specialist, but i just wanted to provide a counter to what Wendell Wagner has said. my understanding is that Chomsky completely changed the study of linguistics–hasn’t it been called the “Chomsky Revolution?” his idea that language was innate was absolutely groundbreaking for the time and has greatly effected our understanding of language, the brain, even evolution (i read a good amount of general interest science books and his name seems to come up a lot). i don’t know about the mid-1960s or 1970s, but the book that put him on the map, Syntactic Structures came out in 1957.

that being said, want to remind you that i know absolutely nothing about linguistics and this meager paragraph is almost all i have to offer. hope you understand that when you see a hero of the radical left being criticized, you wonder if it’s on point or if it’s politically motivated. don’t spank me too hard, please.

22

Hey, Wendell, hapaXL,

Wendell, you could also try The Chomsky Reader, which contains a broad-ranging collection of short articles that touch on almost every aspect of his political and ethical stance. It’s a really good read, too! And it contains a nice long interview with interesting biographical info as well.

Z-Magazine runs a site that includes a random Chomsky selection daily at http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/index.cfm. It’s called “the Chomsky Archive” and contains lots of great stuff.

Oh, and finally, to answer the OP: No, Chomsky is not full of shit.

23

hapaXL writes:

> that being said, want to remind you that i know
> absolutely nothing about linguistics and this meager
> paragraph is almost all i have to offer. hope you
> understand that when you see a hero of the radical left
> being criticized, you wonder if it’s on point or if it’s
> politically motivated. don’t spank me too hard, please.

I don’t think that I’m hugely different from Chomsky in politics, and interestingly, neither were the leaders of the generative semanticists, his opponents in this academic battle of the '60’s and '70’s. You could see the differences between Chomsky and the major generative semanticists just by looking at their personal styles. Chomsky always looked to me like a leftover radical from the early '50’s - very straight-looking in an old academic way, passionately committed to his causes, convinced that anyone who disagreed with him was not just wrong but was a tool of the system, his writing style totally lacking in any sense of humor or even warmth, communicating with other linguists only by occasionally issuing a book or an article in which he made authoritarian pronouncements about new developments in theories which he expected everyone to immediately adhere to even though he had hardly given any justification for them.

I never met Chomsky, since by the '70’s he no longer bothered to go to linguistics academic conferences anymore. Perhaps he might come to make a speech if he were the main invited speaker, but he considered it beneath him to associate with ordinary linguistics professors, let alone grad students. Even doing invited talks eventually gradually fell by the wayside for him, since he thought his important work was his political writings. In the '70’s, his linguistics papers were rather difficult to read - not because they contained difficult ideas, but because he really wasn’t a very clear writer, and he apparently thought it was unnecessary to edit his work.

The generative semanticists were very hippie-ish types though. I never met Postal or Ross, but George Lakoff was very much the late thirty-ish professor happy to show off his hippie tastes. He was kind of heavy-set, had a thick mustache and unkempt curly hair, and frequently wore a dashiki. McCawley also had a mustache, and he wore his hair long. These guys loved to come to academic meetings and were happy to speak to grad students. McCawley (who died last year) was probably the smartest major figure in linguistics. He was the one best able to look back at the entire history of the generative syntax/generative semantics battle and see places where neither side were arguing very clearly.

Unlike Chomsky, the papers of the generative semanticists were well-written and often very funny. At times, the ideas presented in their papers weren’t defended much better than the ones in Chomsky’s papers, but it seemed to me that at least they knew that they were just guessing. They were throwing out ideas in the spirit of “Hey, here’s an idea that might work! Can anybody expand on this notion?”, while Chomsky always seemed to be saying, “I think that the following idea might work. I’ll let you mere peons do the work of defending it. I can’t be bothered with it.” I think that the generative semanticists were genuinely astonished when they began to promulgate their ideas in the mid-‘60’s that Chomsky took such a hard line against them. They thought that Chomsky would be intriguing by their ideas for extending his system in what they thought was a natural way, when instead he declared their ideas anathema and treated them as heretics.

Nobody in either group was a passionate conservative defender of the Vietnam War. I would have been astonished if I had run into anyone at a linguistics meeting arguing against Chomsky because they were in favor of the Vietnam War. Everybody I knew then was either a hippie-ish liberal or a straight-dressing liberal (but that distinction didn’t always predict which school of generative grammar people fit into).

There never was a very clear relationship between Chomsky’s ideas in different areas, and Chomsky never seemed to understand this. He did a lot of jumping from one area of linguistics to another and assuming that if you believed him in one thing that of course you had to follow him in another thing. If there was any resentment toward his political views among linguists, it was because he wasn’t spending the time at the hard work of explaining his linguistic ideas anymore. He didn’t seem to consider the job of working out the details interesting. He wanted to get on with politics and not waste time on linguistics.

But all I’ve said here is just about the style of the arguments, not an explanation of the differences between generative syntax and generative semantics that I’ve promised. That’s going to take me a while to organize and write, so it’ll be a while before I can post it.