Noam Chomsky and Sam Harris had an email exchange which Sam Harris published on his blog.
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-limits-of-discourse
If I google it, I get a lot of results praising Chomsky and saying he won the debate.
To me, Chomsky seems to behave rather ill-mannered. Is this really the manner of discourse people prefer?
I don’t think Sam Harris comes off too well in that. Chomsky comes across as a bit grouchy but then he’s always grouchy. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him be anything else. I’ve never seen him laugh or even smile.
It’s actually quite amusing the way Harris seems to be expecting some kind of polite, dinner jacket, university debating society type of exchange. Sam Harris has clearly never watched Chomsky be interviewed.
He invites Chomsky into a debate which Chomsky doesn’t particularly want in the first place but gamely plays along with and then spends most of the debate whining about how rude Chomsky is and how he was expecting a “collegiate” exchange of views.
If I was involved in an email debate with Chomsky I would be expecting him to be abrasive. I would just overlook that and try to deal with his actual arguments. It seems like Sam Harris was unable to get past that.
Chomsky is a terror, and that makes him hard to debate with. I don’t know anything about Sam Harris, but if he wanted a friendly discussion, he picked the wrong guy to argue with.
For me personally, Chomsky’s abrasiveness means I ignore and discount most of his arguments. He is just not worth it. But I wouldn’t defend that as an intellectually rigorous approach.
That was entertaining, thanks. I don’t know who Sam Harris is, but he starts off whiny from the beginning and it only gets worse…he seems to spend more time arguing Chomsky’s presentation of the topics than he does their actual content.
I pretty much agree with everything in this video. He kind of criticizes both but doesn’t really condemn either person and states that he likes both Harris and Chomsky:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yXYqKSv6Ko
Harris is an Atheist author/lecturer
The problem is that Mr. Chomsky has written extensively on his views (whether they’re stupid or brilliant, I don’t presume to judge), so I can see how it’s annoying to have person #1,238,972 come along and ask “Can you summarize your views to me so that I can have an easier time countering them?”
On the other hand, I don’t think stonewalling qualifies as winning a debate.
For the average person of average intelligence maybe, but he should welcome debate with someone of the Intellectual caliber of Harris. They both, after all, make their living as authors and lecturers.
Sam Harris didn’t seem interested in having a debate at all. I’m not quite sure what he intended with this, but to me he came of as less interested in an honest debate than, Chomsky, who explicitly stated he’s not interested in having a debate with Harris. Atleast Chomsky argued and defended his views, right or wrong, rude or polite.
Also, I have to add that I found Harris’ “thought experiment” cringe worthy, and Chomsky had every right to call it embarrasing.
Chomsky eventually won me over to the idea that Clinton is a war criminal, but Jesus, why does he have to be such a dick, pretty much all the time about everything.
Equally cringe-worthy was the suggestion that “If you’re defending Clinton, you must be defending Hitler!! Or maybe just Tojo.”
EDIT: I think they both graduated from the Birch Barlow school of debating.
Well, they both make a living as authors and lecturers so it makes sense that Harris would want to debate him. Chomskys views eventually won me over but man is he a world class jerk.
Some can enjoy a precious gift in spite of its uninviting wrap.
Yeah, I’m not Chomsky’s biggest fan, to be honest. I can agree with him on some things, but he seems to have a tendency to exaggerate for effect and jump to conclusions. The Hitler argument reinforce those impressions, and could have been presented in a much better way. Him being a dick however, I have no problem with at all.
Chomsky chooses his words carefully, and says precisely what he means. However, while that often means that he doesn’t mean what he doesn’t say, it can’t be taken for granted that his omission means anything in particular. It does seem that Chomsky is less impressed than Harris is by intent versus consequences, but Harris’s initial writings and his responses to Chomsky indicate that he’s assuming far too much - that because Chomsky didn’t say straight out that “9/11 and the bombing of the Al Shifa plant aren’t morally equivalent,” that he thought they were, or at least hadn’t thought about it. Both are false, but Harris can’t seem to wrap his head around Chomsky’s actual position.
Harris also can’t seem to grasp why Chomsky says that President Clinton can’t possibly have determined that Al Shifa was a chemical weapons plant in the short interval between the embassy bombings and the Al Shifa bombing. He says it’s possible that Clinton had already come to that conclusion, and doesn’t see that this doesn’t affect Chomsky’s position that the Al Shifa bombing was in retaliation for the embassy bombings (that it was just a coincidence is not impossible, but it does beggar the imagination).
I don’t know whether Chomsky deliberately plays this shell game with his readers, or merely hasn’t the patience to be explicit about things that don’t interest him or support his arguments, but Harris seems clearly unprepared to parse Chomsky’s writing in this respect, and is not a good choice to address Chomsky at all, much less debate him.
yeah, it seems clear it was in retaliation and done without regard for the consequences
What a joke.
On the one hand, we have the modern-day reincarnation (in his mind probably literally so) of Baron Von Ungern-Sternberg, a dilettente devotee of Oriental mysticism whose also picked up the less savoury side of Oriental cruelty along the way. Hence this odd product of a man who will proclaim the superiority of secular humanistic morality whilst advocating the torture of those icky monotheists and probably will happily order the nuking of Mecca before going off to practice Tantric Meditation in some pathetic imitation of a Class A Japanese War Criminal who at least made a decent soldier.
On the other hand we have the cunning linguist who somehow decided that advocating certain questionable views in his field of expertise made him an expert in everything including politics. Said views appear to consist of posing him as a brilliant iconoclast when in reality he is literally the dean of American academia and which really can be summed up into: American can do no right.
Where the Hell is Reinhold Niebuhr when you need him?
Oh, that guy. I saw him on Bill Maher, he seemed kind of shallow.
I actually like them both a lot but I know they are not for everyone. I did enjoy reading your description Quin Shi
I kind of got the impression that Harris is used to being King of whatever debates he initiates and Chomsky kept handing him his ass for wanting to make professed good intentions triumph over semi-genocidal real politick consequences of state actions.