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Aug 28, 2008
COMMENTS
head of lettace
June 25, 2008, 11:27 am - ladybeans
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Jeremy Scahill is the author of the bestselling Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, published by Nation Books. He is an award-winning investigative journalist and correspondent for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!
http://will.uiuc.edu/media/mediamatters080615.mp3
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Sunday, June 08, 2008
Our guest is Noam Chomsky, the linguist, philosopher, political activist, author and lecturer. Chomsky is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The originator of the Theory of Generative Grammar, which revolutionized the study of linguistics, Chomsky is equally - if not more - well known for his work as a social activist and critic. His work with Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent, provides an analysis of news media coverage of international affairs, resulting in a five-filter model to explain the deficienices and shortcomings of the US news media.
Among his political writings are American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), Peace in the Middle East? (1974, Profit over People (1998), and Rogue States (2000). Chomsky’s bestseller 9-11 (2002) is an analysis of the World Trade Center attack that, while denouncing the atrocity of the event, traces its origins to the actions and power of the United States, which he calls “a leading terrorist state.”
http://will.uiuc.edu/media/mediamatters080608.mp3
---------------------------
(exerpt from Ch5: Remembering Tomorrow by Michael Albert)
The Incongruous Star: Noam Chomsky
A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that
degree or certainty which the evidence warrants.
—Bertrand Russell
For all the famous people who passed through MIT during my stay, or whom I have known in any other capacity since, for all the great achievers, to me the most important has been Noam Chomsky. His example has illuminated many paths I have followed. I met Chomsky when taking his course "Intellectuals and Social Change." We became friends, he a mentor, me a student, and we have stayed close for decades.
Chomsky is often asked what makes him so productive. He flusters and says the only thing he can see in his makeup that seems different from most other people is that he can sit down at a project after having been away for a time and pick it back up instantly, getting immediately back in gear. Noam is right. Other writers typically waste time rereading what we have written and reintegrating ourselves when we return from time off. He is wrong, however, in believing that this is the main thing that differentiates him from the rest of us.
I have been Noam's publisher for nearly forty years and talked with him many hundreds of times. I have regularly had his input on my work and occasionally offered my input on his. I have seen him in all kinds of interactions and shared all kinds of moments with him, personal and political, social and private, on stage and off. It has been a highlight of my life to not only have Noam as a friend and guide, but also to learn from and enjoy so many of his engagements and undertakings. It hasn't even been annoying that whenever I go someplace to speak, from Florida to Ohio, New York to Alaska, Greece to Brazil, England to India, Poland to Australia, invariably considerable time goes to answering questions about Chomsky. How is Noam doing? What does Noam think about the invasion? Why did Noam say that stuff about Cambodia? How does Noam do it? And even, can you explain Noam's linguistics to me? So here are some answers.
Lydia Sargent and I went to Poland in 1980. The trip occurred because South End Press had published young Polish writer Slawomir Magala's book on the uprisings in that country and the emergence of the Polish Workers' Party led by Lech Walesa. Lydia and I went to Frankfurt for the International Book Fair, and continued on to meet Magala in Warsaw and to see events in Poland. I remember being in an apartment talking with Swavek—the author's nickname—and with a number of his friends as well.
At one point, as I was replying to questions about America, the subject of Chomsky's political writings came up. Later, after a break, there was more general discussion, and as there was a biologist and a linguist present, Chomsky's linguistic theories came up for some airing. As I was telling my hosts about Chomsky's views on linguistics, just as I had relayed information about his views about Poland and Russia shortly before, someone interrupted and said, "Wait a minute, how could you know both Chomskys personally? That's quite a coincidence."
I had heard right. It turned out these Poles, who were certainly among the most cosmopolitan people in Poland, all thought that there was one Chomsky who was political and who wrote the books about Vietnam, and another who was a linguist and wrote about grammar and human nature. On reflection, I realized it was a far more likely explanation that there were two special people with one name than that there was one person with two incredibly stellar but thoroughly unconnected professions. So what does make Chomsky special? First, what makes Chomsky so insightful and productive? Second, what makes Chomsky someone worth admiring and emulating?
Partly what makes Chomsky insightful and productive is inborn. Genetic endowment, obviously desirable, isn't something we should praise, and can't be emulated. I can be awed by attributes someone was born with, even if the capacities had to be nurtured to emerge, whether we are talking about Jackie Robinson's speed, Fyodor Dostoevsky's prose, Bob Dylan's song, Emmy Noether's mathematical creativity, or Barbra Streisand's voice. I can enjoy seeing these traits at work. I can be wowed by them. I can be fascinated and enlightened by them. But it doesn't make sense that the owner is worthy of special respect, admiration, or emulation based simply on being born with special abilities.
Noam's inborn abilities include an incredible memory that retains both broad strokes and also fine detail with computer-like recall. Memory declines with age, but even at seventy five Noam's remains formidable. In the 1960s, Noam would routinely give references from books he'd read referencing a page, or even a part of a page. But Noam's memory was by no means photographic, just profound, at least for things he found important. Even now, at speaking engagements, people will query all manner of topics, completely off the assigned agenda, and Noam will reply with singular information in a field other than his own that even experts in that subject can only marvel at.
Second, Noam can think rapidly and clearly. If he was in physics, say, or math, I would have a better feeling for whether this part of his capacity is just incredibly substantial, like von Neumann, or phenomenal, like Feynman. But there is another trait Noam has for which I suspect there are both inborn and also trained aspects that involve effort and discipline.
Noam can, and routinely does, extricate himself from habit and familiarity to consider possibilities that are strikingly different than most people contemplate. It isn't only that there is a wealth of data at hand, or that he can make connections and test logical possibilities that would try another person's capacity. Others who have these talents mostly just collect, enumerate, and detail what is known, or maybe discover some new facts, but don't repeatedly generate dramatically new insights. Noam asks the unexpected question. He raises the odd possibility. He sees the hidden connection.
Think of Einstein. What Einstein did that was phenomenal was to extract general physical truths from snippets of physical reality, generating previously untried insights. To think about what would happen if someone ran alongside a light ray, or to think through the dynamics of a falling elevator, two of Einstein's guiding thought experiments, didn't require tremendous calculating capacity or following a logical train of thought through endless byways. The genius Einstein exhibited was not in the number of steps in his deductions, or in their technical difficulty, but in undertaking the key steps at all and following them down paths that others would habitually avoid. The genius was in the innovation. It was in his leaps off the beaten path. Einstein often leaped, and his main catapult was what scientists call thought experiments. His mental gymnastics pared away reality's inessentials and highlighted its key aspects. To do this, Einstein envisioned unattainable contexts, rendered pure and pristine, ready for him to turn inside out.
I think one of the ways Noam innovates is by employing analogies far more often and far more effectively than other people do. Noam takes a familiar situation—and this is a trait that we can learn from and try to emulate—and finds another that is structurally like it, regarding which, however, his (and our) habits and biases operate less powerfully or not at all. He uses this technique both to try to communicate to reticent audiences views that affront their prejudices or expectations, and, I believe, to discover new views for himself as well. He does this magic by analyzing the less-controversial and less-familiar situation that he invents or sometimes remembers in analogy, and then demonstrating the possible meaning it holds for the situation that is under discussion and obstructed by preconceptions.
Physicists do something similar, which is what may have attuned me to the importance of this trait in Noam, when they abstract away countless details, assume all kinds of features that are unattainable, and view in their mind's eye what occurs in the imagined world to discern innermost dynamics without endless cluttering facts and personal prejudices interfering. Noam's analogy trick is quite similar, but is more suited to the realm of worldly affairs, though I would guess that regarding linguistics he probably uses both analogies and thought experiments, or a cross between the two.
The analogy technique Noam uses can be found all through his writings. Thus he switches from talking about the U.S. in Vietnam (fraught with preconception and prejudice) to the role of Russia in Eastern Europe (where an American sees more clearly). He switches from discussing the possibility of a U.S. invasion of Afghanistan (biased for someone from the U.S.) to the possibility of Iran invading Afghanistan (clearer for someone from the U.S.). He switches from assessing the possibility of the U.S. punishing Syria for housing terrorists who attack the U.S. (confused) to Britain punishing the U.S. for housing and financing IRA acts in Britain (clearer). Or he switches from talking about the media emphasizing 9/11 as terrorism to the rest of the world seeing the U.S. embargo of Iraq as chemical and biological terror waged on civilians, or from comparing U.S. and old Soviet media dynamics, or U.S. foreign policy and the behavior of Mafia dons, and so on.
Noam also works hard. Is he driven, compulsive, and even over the top when it comes to work? If you named twenty prominent athletes, actors, and musicians over the past thirty years, Noam would probably have heard of two or three, or maybe five at most, but he would be able to offer essentially zero information about any of them. Noam sees maybe two or three movies a year. He sees a few hours of TV a year. He listens to almost no radio.
Carol Chomsky and Noam have a summer home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. They have a motor boat and a small sailboat and they live on a lake in the summers and in a home in Lexington, Massachusetts, the rest of the year. Over the course of each summer they probably get out on the water in either boat three or four times. They visit the beach more often, walking down to the lake and sitting for a time, often with guests, and Lydia and I have been there many times. Mostly, though, Noam is ensconced in his study, writing, in the summer just like during the rest of the year. Hour upon hour he reads and writes. Combine this diligence with the quick start and with very little editing, since the writing winds up pretty much the way it first comes out, and you get a lot of output, and actually way more output than most people realize.
Noam often answers short letters from unknown folks with long letters back, to the tune of a small book's worth of correspondence each month. Noam revolutionizes an intellectual discipline—linguistics and what is called cognitive science—not once, but every few years. He teaches a seminar each Friday, or did so for decades, and people came from all over the planet just to attend. Why? Each week Noam presented new, original material. This alone is an unfathomable pace of production.
Meanwhile, another Noam churns out scathing denunciations of U.S. foreign policy, media machinations, and other political phenomena, speaks dozens of times a year, each time for hours, does many interviews each week, travels the globe giving talks, and wherever he goes he addresses that place's history and context with the same incredible precision and innovation he offers about the U.S.
Anyone's hard work is worthy of admiration but maybe in a desirable world not everyone should be so driven as Noam. Indeed, I suspect in a desirable world, while Noam would still have worked tirelessly on his science out of the joy and accomplishment of it, he would also have been out sailing on the water, weeding in the garden, and even laughing at movies considerably more often than he does in our current world. So his sacrifice for justice also merits admiration. But what is really most admirable about Noam, it seems to me, is he is scrupulously honest. He has the thing we call integrity in large supply. He respects but does not condescend to others. And he cares.
Honesty is easy to understand. Noam says what is on his mind, sometimes at a cost. Indeed, bad comes with good. Noam's death grip on the truth can interfere, at times, with other virtues, such as sensitivity to the impact words may have on others. Assessing someone in Noam's position, my tendency is to think truth-telling should take precedence over sensitivity, though others might disagree, and it certainly isn't one size fits all.
Integrity is harder to pin down. It means being true to one's values, when one has values that one can be true to. Noam does have values and is true to them. This too can reach levels that cause problems. Noam eschews people affecting the choices of other people by anything other than logic and evidence. This causes Noam to be tremendously wary of his notoriety, worrying that his words will be overweighted by his listeners. It makes Noam loathe giving advice, to the point that quite often he will withhold words that might usefully have been heard. Respecting others is tricky for Noam. He is constantly queried by people who are relatively ignorant of what they ask about. A person in a position like his gets used to these kinds of questions. Respecting the people involved means taking them seriously and answering honestly with patience and attention to communicating clearly. Noam does that. But he also quite reasonably wants such exchanges to move along and a problem arises because Noam is a quick study.
When someone starts to ask Noam something familiar, Noam tends to fill in the blanks, deducing the person's real intent, and interrupting to begin answering sometimes well before the person finishes their question. This can sidetrack Noam's hearing what is actually being said in the interests of saving time and even imposing accuracy. Experience counts and often Noam helps the questioner by making the question more precise and complete. Other times, however, Noam jumps too quickly and misrepresents the questioner, due to thinking he recognizes the questioner when in fact he doesn't. In other words, sometimes a person accosting Noam or disagreeing with him knows more than those who typically use essentially the same initial words. Noam may miss this difference, thereby seeming to be oblivious to the person's true intents and insights. It is not pleasant when it happens to you, and I have undergone it plenty of times, but it is not ill motivated, either.
To understand caring is hard. There are people who routinely evidence extreme sympathy and concern for others, but who, in my view, don't really give a damn. Something that looks and sounds like caring is present, to be sure, and many people are very impressed by its symptoms, but minutes or even seconds later the seeming concern is gone. It has no staying power and few implications beyond appearances. With Noam the caring is less evident, less demonstrative, and less of a show, but it lasts and it has implications.
Noam believes strongly in civility, though I think many people who have gotten into debates with him and had their views dismissed or even annihilated—sometimes with words like "stupid" and "trivial" punctuating the dissection—would find that hard to believe. But for Noam, calling an idea stupid or calling a claim trivial is not uncivil but truthful. In this, he is a scientist in the sense that scientists routinely debate and skewer one another in no uncertain terms. Finding the truth and escaping falsehoods, which is the scientist's reason for being, demands this behavior.
But Noam does not denigrate others to build himself up. Likewise, Noam does not evidence the kind of condescending and self-promoting or guilt-salving concern for others that is all too frequent in many circles, particularly, I hate to say it, in progressive (politically correct) circles. Noam's caring is real. There is no pomp or circumstance. He does not weep wildly or gush effusively. But Noam remembers people's needs. He fulfills requests. He notices pain and tries to do real things to alleviate it. He is quite civil. You could even call Noam very conservative in daily life characteristics. If there is a sign to stay off a lawn, Noam obeys. Noam routinely abides almost all rules unless higher values take precedence.
For Noam's seventieth birthday, as a present, I oversaw a kind of testimonial tribute. I put on the Internet a means by which people could write a message that he would see on his birthday. About two thousand people entered messages and the results went online. Most of these folks were people who Noam had never closely met but who had read his work, or heard him speak, and had been dramatically affected and wanted to register their thanks. Many other people who contributed did know Noam, but also wanted to say their piece to their friend, ally, teacher, coworker, or what have you.
The entry I was most moved by was written by Fred Branfman, who was himself a very effective advocate of human rights and supporter of the Indochinese people against U.S. violence.
When you visited me in Laos in 1970, I was at a real low point, anguished by the bombing and feeling almost totally isolated. Your passion, commitment and shared pain about the need to stop the bombing, and warm, personal support and caring, meant more to me than you will ever know. It also meant a lot to me for reasons I can't quite explain that of the dozens and dozens of people I took out to the camps to interview the refugees from the bombing you were the only one, besides myself, to cry. Your subsequent article for the New York Review of Books and all the other writing and speaking you did on Laos, was also the only body of work that got it absolutely right. It has given me a little more faith in the species ever since to know that it has produced a being of so much integrity, passion and intellect. I feel a lot of love for you on your birthday—and shake my head in amazement knowing that you'll never stop.
Noam and I have had plenty of arguments over the years. Noam can be a very ornery fellow, and he is world-class stubborn, even if not demonstrative or flailing about it. He expects to be right, since he most often is, and he doesn't like to lose an argument—ever.
This may be a bit like someone not liking to fall down when crossing the room, or to slip in the tub—in other words, not liking to do something that is highly unfamiliar and which has a negative aspect. Still, it is an unendearing trait that makes Noam the human he is. It can be and has been for numerous people immensely annoying, frustrating, and even hurtful. All in all, though, I have never known anyone smarter, with a better memory, with a greater facility for creatively escaping the bounds of acceptable thought, or, more admirably, a person with more honesty, integrity, respect, and real universal concern. Noam is a package deal. As with everyone, Noam travels through life warts and all. It is just that in Noam's journey there are few warts, and the "and all" is a big deal.
Oftentimes Noam and I will see what's out in the world a bit differently or feel responses ought to have slightly different aspects. Sometimes we have larger disagreements. Here are two such disputes, each important, I think.
The first was about what I call the crowding-out effect, borrowing the label from economists. Noam goes out and speaks a huge amount to very large audiences. Everyone wants Noam to come and talk. Very few people want any of the many others who, while perhaps not as excellent as Noam, would be much more than ample. The result is that Noam talks a huge volume but even with his great industry, many places, settling for no one other than Noam, have no speaker. Other undeniably worthy speakers, lacking fame, won't fill the bill because they won't attract sufficient audience. What to do?
Over the years, I urged Noam to tell those asking him to come speak that he would not do so unless there could be a second speaker on the bill with him whom he would select. Each time he would go out, in that scenario, so too would Steve Shalom go, or Holly Sklar, Cynthia Peters, or Clarence Lusane, and so on. In this way, others would be seen, word of mouth about the quality of their talks would spread, and in time these people would get more invitations. Then these additional people, becoming better known, could themselves do the same thing, bringing along still another generation. After a bit, many more people, steadily more diverse in background and experience, would be going around speaking and many more talks would be given and heard.
Noam never did this and we argued about it quite a few times. His resistance was partly ideological and partly personal. He didn't want to use his "bargaining power" to impose conditions—he would also deny that he could get a positive response by making such demands, which was of course false—and he also, I am sure, didn't want to share the stage with a co-speaker, since that would mean traveling just as far, taking as much time away from other work, but speaking and dealing with questions for a lot less time, not to mention having to listen to the other speaker. I speak publicly recently much more than earlier, though still only a fraction as often as Noam does, and I now understand better his side of this dispute. I now think what's needed is not largesse by prominent speakers placing demands on hosts, but for speakers' bureaus to impose the condition for us.
A second disagreement has been over matters of vision, economic mostly, but otherwise as well. This is a far more important debate, I think, and one where I have to say, years passing or not, I haven't given an inch. Noam feels that trying to describe a future society can overstep existing bounds of knowledge, crowd out creativity by establishing aims prematurely, and tend toward sectarianism. He feels broad values are what we need, plus practice, practice, and more practice that in turn yields day-to-day innovations that in turn lead to people experimenting with and implementing new ways of being from the bottom up. I feel this is all well and good, true on every count, but after a couple of hundred years of it we should have something more to show. How do the lessons of thinking hard, analyzing, and experimenting become part of the general popular movement if they are not presented, debated, refined, and finally advocated?
To me, it seems obvious that we need answers to the question "what do you want" that can provide hope, direction, and a positive tone able to inform both analysis and strategy. This entails more than a list of broad values and aspirations. It requires institutional pictures. Noam's concern is to ensure participation and avoid elites imposing a view on movements. My answer is that I agree with this priority but I feel we will get what Noam fears if we don't have movements full of participants who understand, advocate, and continually refine a full vision able to motivate and orient participation. The alternative to elitist vision isn't having no vision, but having the most accessible, widely shared, compelling, and substantial vision we can write up, debate, refine, and advocate.
Our differences aside, I once wrote a piece built around the experience of reading Chomsky and its impact on people and also around how Noam manages to constantly immerse himself in so much data about pain without becoming jaded himself. It isn't that his burrowing in the tombs of injustice doesn't take a toll—it does. There are times when Noam is brought down low by the news he wades through, and times when he is wired tight and becomes difficult. How Carol Chomsky gets through all that may be as amazing as some of Noam's accomplishments. At any rate, the essay I wrote with these personal dimensions and of course also the problem of changing the world in mind was called "Stop the Killing Train." For me, this was an infrequent attempt at being poetic and it later became the lead essay of a book going by the same name. Over a decade old, written in the lead-up to the first Gulf War, I think the essay is no less timely now than when it was written, and perhaps it is a good way to move on from Noam—so here is the key part.
Evolution has given humans the capacity to perceive, think, feel, imagine. At a time of war—as now in the Gulf—if we get aroused to action we begin to see the whole train as it persists day in and day out. When this happens, what do we do about it. Become depressed? Cynical? Anguished? Cry? Day dream of Armageddon? Day dream of justice? Hand out a leaflet?
Suppose a hypothetical god got tired of what we humans do to one another and decided that from January 1, 1991 onward all corpses unnaturally created any where in the "free world" would cease to decompose. Anyone dying for want of food or medicine, anyone hung or garroted to death, shot or beaten to death, raped or bombed to death, anyone dying unjustly and inhumanely would, as a corpse, persist without decomposing. And the permanent corpse would then automatically enter a glass-walled cattle car attached to an ethereal train traveling monotonously across the U.S., state by state, never stopping. One by one the corpses would be loaded onto the cattle cars and after every thousand corpses piled in, higgeldy piggeldy, a new car would hitch up and begin filling too. Mile after mile the killing train would roll along, each corpse viewed through its transparent walls, 200 new corpses a minute, one new car every five minutes, day and night, without pause.
By the end of 1991, on its first birthday, the killing train would measure over 2,000 miles long. Traveling at 20 miles an hour it would take about five days to pass any intersection. By the year 2000, assuming no dramatic change in institutions and behavior in the interim, the train would stretch from coast to coast about seven times. It would take about six weeks from the time its engine passed the Statue of Liberty to when its caboose would go by, God still wondering when pitiful, aspiring humanity would get the message.
Think how a young child sometimes points to a picture in a book or maga zine and asks for an explanation, "Tell me about a tree?" A car? A boat? A train? A big train? The killing train? Go ahead, answer that.
If the ecologists are right that this planet is a single super-organism, they are wrong that pollution, toxic waste, and other human-created garbage is the most deadly virus attacking it. The killing train is worse.
Think about the pain that radiates from the Vietnam War monument with its 50,000 names in Washington, D.C. Imagine the lost opportunity and lost love and the network of negative influences that radiate from the unnecessary deaths enumerated on that monument. Now think about the killing train stretching from coast to coast and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. Consider its impact, not only on those on board, but on every person that any of those corpses ever loved or would have loved, fed or would have fed, taught or would have taught.
Who rides the killing train? Citizens of the "Third World," selling their organs for food, selling their babies to save their families, suffering disappearances and starvation. They live in Brazil, the Philippines, El Salvador, and New York. They are headed for the killing train. Every day. Millions.
Is this exaggerated? When 10 million children die yearly for lack of basic medical aid that the U.S. could provide at almost no cost in countries whose economies Exxon and the Bank of America have looted, what can you call it other than mass murder? Bloated diseased bodies are victims of murder just as surely as bullet-riddled bodies tossed into rivers by death squads. Denying medicine is no less criminal than supplying torture racks or stealing resources.
Once we begin to see it, how do we face the killing train? Part of me says these crimes are so grotesque, so inhumane, that the perpetrators deserve to die. A little tiny killing train for the killers and no more big killing train for everyone else. An eye for a million eyes. What other step makes more sense?
But that's not the way the world works. People give the orders, wield the axes, withhold the food, pay the pitiful salaries, but institutions create the pressures that mold these people. When an institutional cancer consumes the human patient, what kind of surgeon can cut it all away? Is the weight of repression so intense it can never be lifted?
At first, becoming attuned to our country's responsibility for the corpses the hypothetical God stacked behind transparent cattle-car walls makes handing out leaflets, or arguing for peace with a co-worker, or urging a relative to think twice about paying taxes, or going to a demonstration, or sitting in, or even doing civil disobedience seem insignificant. But the fact is, these are the acts that the hypothetical God, tired of our behavior, would be calling for if she were to actually parade the "free world's" corpses down our main streets in killing trains. These are the acts that can accumulate into a firestorm of informed protest that raises the cost of profiteering and domination so high that the institutions breeding such behavior start to buckle.
"You lose, you lose, you lose, and then you win." Every loss is part of the process that leads to transforming institutions so that there can be no people as vile as Hussein or Bush. No more "Good Germans" or "Good Americans," cremated Jews or decapitated peasants.
Finally, about knowing Noam, I might echo what Bob Dylan had to say about Dave Van Ronk: "No puppet strings on him, ever. He was big, sky high, and I looked up to him. He came from the land of giants."
Jeremy Scahill is the author of the bestselling Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, published by Nation Books. He is an award-winning investigative journalist and correspondent for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!
http://will.uiuc.edu/media/mediamatters080615.mp3
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Sunday, June 08, 2008
Our guest is Noam Chomsky, the linguist, philosopher, political activist, author and lecturer. Chomsky is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The originator of the Theory of Generative Grammar, which revolutionized the study of linguistics, Chomsky is equally - if not more - well known for his work as a social activist and critic. His work with Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent, provides an analysis of news media coverage of international affairs, resulting in a five-filter model to explain the deficienices and shortcomings of the US news media.
Among his political writings are American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), Peace in the Middle East? (1974, Profit over People (1998), and Rogue States (2000). Chomsky’s bestseller 9-11 (2002) is an analysis of the World Trade Center attack that, while denouncing the atrocity of the event, traces its origins to the actions and power of the United States, which he calls “a leading terrorist state.”
http://will.uiuc.edu/media/mediamatters080608.mp3
---------------------------
(exerpt from Ch5: Remembering Tomorrow by Michael Albert)
The Incongruous Star: Noam Chomsky
A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that
degree or certainty which the evidence warrants.
—Bertrand Russell
For all the famous people who passed through MIT during my stay, or whom I have known in any other capacity since, for all the great achievers, to me the most important has been Noam Chomsky. His example has illuminated many paths I have followed. I met Chomsky when taking his course "Intellectuals and Social Change." We became friends, he a mentor, me a student, and we have stayed close for decades.
Chomsky is often asked what makes him so productive. He flusters and says the only thing he can see in his makeup that seems different from most other people is that he can sit down at a project after having been away for a time and pick it back up instantly, getting immediately back in gear. Noam is right. Other writers typically waste time rereading what we have written and reintegrating ourselves when we return from time off. He is wrong, however, in believing that this is the main thing that differentiates him from the rest of us.
I have been Noam's publisher for nearly forty years and talked with him many hundreds of times. I have regularly had his input on my work and occasionally offered my input on his. I have seen him in all kinds of interactions and shared all kinds of moments with him, personal and political, social and private, on stage and off. It has been a highlight of my life to not only have Noam as a friend and guide, but also to learn from and enjoy so many of his engagements and undertakings. It hasn't even been annoying that whenever I go someplace to speak, from Florida to Ohio, New York to Alaska, Greece to Brazil, England to India, Poland to Australia, invariably considerable time goes to answering questions about Chomsky. How is Noam doing? What does Noam think about the invasion? Why did Noam say that stuff about Cambodia? How does Noam do it? And even, can you explain Noam's linguistics to me? So here are some answers.
Lydia Sargent and I went to Poland in 1980. The trip occurred because South End Press had published young Polish writer Slawomir Magala's book on the uprisings in that country and the emergence of the Polish Workers' Party led by Lech Walesa. Lydia and I went to Frankfurt for the International Book Fair, and continued on to meet Magala in Warsaw and to see events in Poland. I remember being in an apartment talking with Swavek—the author's nickname—and with a number of his friends as well.
At one point, as I was replying to questions about America, the subject of Chomsky's political writings came up. Later, after a break, there was more general discussion, and as there was a biologist and a linguist present, Chomsky's linguistic theories came up for some airing. As I was telling my hosts about Chomsky's views on linguistics, just as I had relayed information about his views about Poland and Russia shortly before, someone interrupted and said, "Wait a minute, how could you know both Chomskys personally? That's quite a coincidence."
I had heard right. It turned out these Poles, who were certainly among the most cosmopolitan people in Poland, all thought that there was one Chomsky who was political and who wrote the books about Vietnam, and another who was a linguist and wrote about grammar and human nature. On reflection, I realized it was a far more likely explanation that there were two special people with one name than that there was one person with two incredibly stellar but thoroughly unconnected professions. So what does make Chomsky special? First, what makes Chomsky so insightful and productive? Second, what makes Chomsky someone worth admiring and emulating?
Partly what makes Chomsky insightful and productive is inborn. Genetic endowment, obviously desirable, isn't something we should praise, and can't be emulated. I can be awed by attributes someone was born with, even if the capacities had to be nurtured to emerge, whether we are talking about Jackie Robinson's speed, Fyodor Dostoevsky's prose, Bob Dylan's song, Emmy Noether's mathematical creativity, or Barbra Streisand's voice. I can enjoy seeing these traits at work. I can be wowed by them. I can be fascinated and enlightened by them. But it doesn't make sense that the owner is worthy of special respect, admiration, or emulation based simply on being born with special abilities.
Noam's inborn abilities include an incredible memory that retains both broad strokes and also fine detail with computer-like recall. Memory declines with age, but even at seventy five Noam's remains formidable. In the 1960s, Noam would routinely give references from books he'd read referencing a page, or even a part of a page. But Noam's memory was by no means photographic, just profound, at least for things he found important. Even now, at speaking engagements, people will query all manner of topics, completely off the assigned agenda, and Noam will reply with singular information in a field other than his own that even experts in that subject can only marvel at.
Second, Noam can think rapidly and clearly. If he was in physics, say, or math, I would have a better feeling for whether this part of his capacity is just incredibly substantial, like von Neumann, or phenomenal, like Feynman. But there is another trait Noam has for which I suspect there are both inborn and also trained aspects that involve effort and discipline.
Noam can, and routinely does, extricate himself from habit and familiarity to consider possibilities that are strikingly different than most people contemplate. It isn't only that there is a wealth of data at hand, or that he can make connections and test logical possibilities that would try another person's capacity. Others who have these talents mostly just collect, enumerate, and detail what is known, or maybe discover some new facts, but don't repeatedly generate dramatically new insights. Noam asks the unexpected question. He raises the odd possibility. He sees the hidden connection.
Think of Einstein. What Einstein did that was phenomenal was to extract general physical truths from snippets of physical reality, generating previously untried insights. To think about what would happen if someone ran alongside a light ray, or to think through the dynamics of a falling elevator, two of Einstein's guiding thought experiments, didn't require tremendous calculating capacity or following a logical train of thought through endless byways. The genius Einstein exhibited was not in the number of steps in his deductions, or in their technical difficulty, but in undertaking the key steps at all and following them down paths that others would habitually avoid. The genius was in the innovation. It was in his leaps off the beaten path. Einstein often leaped, and his main catapult was what scientists call thought experiments. His mental gymnastics pared away reality's inessentials and highlighted its key aspects. To do this, Einstein envisioned unattainable contexts, rendered pure and pristine, ready for him to turn inside out.
I think one of the ways Noam innovates is by employing analogies far more often and far more effectively than other people do. Noam takes a familiar situation—and this is a trait that we can learn from and try to emulate—and finds another that is structurally like it, regarding which, however, his (and our) habits and biases operate less powerfully or not at all. He uses this technique both to try to communicate to reticent audiences views that affront their prejudices or expectations, and, I believe, to discover new views for himself as well. He does this magic by analyzing the less-controversial and less-familiar situation that he invents or sometimes remembers in analogy, and then demonstrating the possible meaning it holds for the situation that is under discussion and obstructed by preconceptions.
Physicists do something similar, which is what may have attuned me to the importance of this trait in Noam, when they abstract away countless details, assume all kinds of features that are unattainable, and view in their mind's eye what occurs in the imagined world to discern innermost dynamics without endless cluttering facts and personal prejudices interfering. Noam's analogy trick is quite similar, but is more suited to the realm of worldly affairs, though I would guess that regarding linguistics he probably uses both analogies and thought experiments, or a cross between the two.
The analogy technique Noam uses can be found all through his writings. Thus he switches from talking about the U.S. in Vietnam (fraught with preconception and prejudice) to the role of Russia in Eastern Europe (where an American sees more clearly). He switches from discussing the possibility of a U.S. invasion of Afghanistan (biased for someone from the U.S.) to the possibility of Iran invading Afghanistan (clearer for someone from the U.S.). He switches from assessing the possibility of the U.S. punishing Syria for housing terrorists who attack the U.S. (confused) to Britain punishing the U.S. for housing and financing IRA acts in Britain (clearer). Or he switches from talking about the media emphasizing 9/11 as terrorism to the rest of the world seeing the U.S. embargo of Iraq as chemical and biological terror waged on civilians, or from comparing U.S. and old Soviet media dynamics, or U.S. foreign policy and the behavior of Mafia dons, and so on.
Noam also works hard. Is he driven, compulsive, and even over the top when it comes to work? If you named twenty prominent athletes, actors, and musicians over the past thirty years, Noam would probably have heard of two or three, or maybe five at most, but he would be able to offer essentially zero information about any of them. Noam sees maybe two or three movies a year. He sees a few hours of TV a year. He listens to almost no radio.
Carol Chomsky and Noam have a summer home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. They have a motor boat and a small sailboat and they live on a lake in the summers and in a home in Lexington, Massachusetts, the rest of the year. Over the course of each summer they probably get out on the water in either boat three or four times. They visit the beach more often, walking down to the lake and sitting for a time, often with guests, and Lydia and I have been there many times. Mostly, though, Noam is ensconced in his study, writing, in the summer just like during the rest of the year. Hour upon hour he reads and writes. Combine this diligence with the quick start and with very little editing, since the writing winds up pretty much the way it first comes out, and you get a lot of output, and actually way more output than most people realize.
Noam often answers short letters from unknown folks with long letters back, to the tune of a small book's worth of correspondence each month. Noam revolutionizes an intellectual discipline—linguistics and what is called cognitive science—not once, but every few years. He teaches a seminar each Friday, or did so for decades, and people came from all over the planet just to attend. Why? Each week Noam presented new, original material. This alone is an unfathomable pace of production.
Meanwhile, another Noam churns out scathing denunciations of U.S. foreign policy, media machinations, and other political phenomena, speaks dozens of times a year, each time for hours, does many interviews each week, travels the globe giving talks, and wherever he goes he addresses that place's history and context with the same incredible precision and innovation he offers about the U.S.
Anyone's hard work is worthy of admiration but maybe in a desirable world not everyone should be so driven as Noam. Indeed, I suspect in a desirable world, while Noam would still have worked tirelessly on his science out of the joy and accomplishment of it, he would also have been out sailing on the water, weeding in the garden, and even laughing at movies considerably more often than he does in our current world. So his sacrifice for justice also merits admiration. But what is really most admirable about Noam, it seems to me, is he is scrupulously honest. He has the thing we call integrity in large supply. He respects but does not condescend to others. And he cares.
Honesty is easy to understand. Noam says what is on his mind, sometimes at a cost. Indeed, bad comes with good. Noam's death grip on the truth can interfere, at times, with other virtues, such as sensitivity to the impact words may have on others. Assessing someone in Noam's position, my tendency is to think truth-telling should take precedence over sensitivity, though others might disagree, and it certainly isn't one size fits all.
Integrity is harder to pin down. It means being true to one's values, when one has values that one can be true to. Noam does have values and is true to them. This too can reach levels that cause problems. Noam eschews people affecting the choices of other people by anything other than logic and evidence. This causes Noam to be tremendously wary of his notoriety, worrying that his words will be overweighted by his listeners. It makes Noam loathe giving advice, to the point that quite often he will withhold words that might usefully have been heard. Respecting others is tricky for Noam. He is constantly queried by people who are relatively ignorant of what they ask about. A person in a position like his gets used to these kinds of questions. Respecting the people involved means taking them seriously and answering honestly with patience and attention to communicating clearly. Noam does that. But he also quite reasonably wants such exchanges to move along and a problem arises because Noam is a quick study.
When someone starts to ask Noam something familiar, Noam tends to fill in the blanks, deducing the person's real intent, and interrupting to begin answering sometimes well before the person finishes their question. This can sidetrack Noam's hearing what is actually being said in the interests of saving time and even imposing accuracy. Experience counts and often Noam helps the questioner by making the question more precise and complete. Other times, however, Noam jumps too quickly and misrepresents the questioner, due to thinking he recognizes the questioner when in fact he doesn't. In other words, sometimes a person accosting Noam or disagreeing with him knows more than those who typically use essentially the same initial words. Noam may miss this difference, thereby seeming to be oblivious to the person's true intents and insights. It is not pleasant when it happens to you, and I have undergone it plenty of times, but it is not ill motivated, either.
To understand caring is hard. There are people who routinely evidence extreme sympathy and concern for others, but who, in my view, don't really give a damn. Something that looks and sounds like caring is present, to be sure, and many people are very impressed by its symptoms, but minutes or even seconds later the seeming concern is gone. It has no staying power and few implications beyond appearances. With Noam the caring is less evident, less demonstrative, and less of a show, but it lasts and it has implications.
Noam believes strongly in civility, though I think many people who have gotten into debates with him and had their views dismissed or even annihilated—sometimes with words like "stupid" and "trivial" punctuating the dissection—would find that hard to believe. But for Noam, calling an idea stupid or calling a claim trivial is not uncivil but truthful. In this, he is a scientist in the sense that scientists routinely debate and skewer one another in no uncertain terms. Finding the truth and escaping falsehoods, which is the scientist's reason for being, demands this behavior.
But Noam does not denigrate others to build himself up. Likewise, Noam does not evidence the kind of condescending and self-promoting or guilt-salving concern for others that is all too frequent in many circles, particularly, I hate to say it, in progressive (politically correct) circles. Noam's caring is real. There is no pomp or circumstance. He does not weep wildly or gush effusively. But Noam remembers people's needs. He fulfills requests. He notices pain and tries to do real things to alleviate it. He is quite civil. You could even call Noam very conservative in daily life characteristics. If there is a sign to stay off a lawn, Noam obeys. Noam routinely abides almost all rules unless higher values take precedence.
For Noam's seventieth birthday, as a present, I oversaw a kind of testimonial tribute. I put on the Internet a means by which people could write a message that he would see on his birthday. About two thousand people entered messages and the results went online. Most of these folks were people who Noam had never closely met but who had read his work, or heard him speak, and had been dramatically affected and wanted to register their thanks. Many other people who contributed did know Noam, but also wanted to say their piece to their friend, ally, teacher, coworker, or what have you.
The entry I was most moved by was written by Fred Branfman, who was himself a very effective advocate of human rights and supporter of the Indochinese people against U.S. violence.
When you visited me in Laos in 1970, I was at a real low point, anguished by the bombing and feeling almost totally isolated. Your passion, commitment and shared pain about the need to stop the bombing, and warm, personal support and caring, meant more to me than you will ever know. It also meant a lot to me for reasons I can't quite explain that of the dozens and dozens of people I took out to the camps to interview the refugees from the bombing you were the only one, besides myself, to cry. Your subsequent article for the New York Review of Books and all the other writing and speaking you did on Laos, was also the only body of work that got it absolutely right. It has given me a little more faith in the species ever since to know that it has produced a being of so much integrity, passion and intellect. I feel a lot of love for you on your birthday—and shake my head in amazement knowing that you'll never stop.
Noam and I have had plenty of arguments over the years. Noam can be a very ornery fellow, and he is world-class stubborn, even if not demonstrative or flailing about it. He expects to be right, since he most often is, and he doesn't like to lose an argument—ever.
This may be a bit like someone not liking to fall down when crossing the room, or to slip in the tub—in other words, not liking to do something that is highly unfamiliar and which has a negative aspect. Still, it is an unendearing trait that makes Noam the human he is. It can be and has been for numerous people immensely annoying, frustrating, and even hurtful. All in all, though, I have never known anyone smarter, with a better memory, with a greater facility for creatively escaping the bounds of acceptable thought, or, more admirably, a person with more honesty, integrity, respect, and real universal concern. Noam is a package deal. As with everyone, Noam travels through life warts and all. It is just that in Noam's journey there are few warts, and the "and all" is a big deal.
Oftentimes Noam and I will see what's out in the world a bit differently or feel responses ought to have slightly different aspects. Sometimes we have larger disagreements. Here are two such disputes, each important, I think.
The first was about what I call the crowding-out effect, borrowing the label from economists. Noam goes out and speaks a huge amount to very large audiences. Everyone wants Noam to come and talk. Very few people want any of the many others who, while perhaps not as excellent as Noam, would be much more than ample. The result is that Noam talks a huge volume but even with his great industry, many places, settling for no one other than Noam, have no speaker. Other undeniably worthy speakers, lacking fame, won't fill the bill because they won't attract sufficient audience. What to do?
Over the years, I urged Noam to tell those asking him to come speak that he would not do so unless there could be a second speaker on the bill with him whom he would select. Each time he would go out, in that scenario, so too would Steve Shalom go, or Holly Sklar, Cynthia Peters, or Clarence Lusane, and so on. In this way, others would be seen, word of mouth about the quality of their talks would spread, and in time these people would get more invitations. Then these additional people, becoming better known, could themselves do the same thing, bringing along still another generation. After a bit, many more people, steadily more diverse in background and experience, would be going around speaking and many more talks would be given and heard.
Noam never did this and we argued about it quite a few times. His resistance was partly ideological and partly personal. He didn't want to use his "bargaining power" to impose conditions—he would also deny that he could get a positive response by making such demands, which was of course false—and he also, I am sure, didn't want to share the stage with a co-speaker, since that would mean traveling just as far, taking as much time away from other work, but speaking and dealing with questions for a lot less time, not to mention having to listen to the other speaker. I speak publicly recently much more than earlier, though still only a fraction as often as Noam does, and I now understand better his side of this dispute. I now think what's needed is not largesse by prominent speakers placing demands on hosts, but for speakers' bureaus to impose the condition for us.
A second disagreement has been over matters of vision, economic mostly, but otherwise as well. This is a far more important debate, I think, and one where I have to say, years passing or not, I haven't given an inch. Noam feels that trying to describe a future society can overstep existing bounds of knowledge, crowd out creativity by establishing aims prematurely, and tend toward sectarianism. He feels broad values are what we need, plus practice, practice, and more practice that in turn yields day-to-day innovations that in turn lead to people experimenting with and implementing new ways of being from the bottom up. I feel this is all well and good, true on every count, but after a couple of hundred years of it we should have something more to show. How do the lessons of thinking hard, analyzing, and experimenting become part of the general popular movement if they are not presented, debated, refined, and finally advocated?
To me, it seems obvious that we need answers to the question "what do you want" that can provide hope, direction, and a positive tone able to inform both analysis and strategy. This entails more than a list of broad values and aspirations. It requires institutional pictures. Noam's concern is to ensure participation and avoid elites imposing a view on movements. My answer is that I agree with this priority but I feel we will get what Noam fears if we don't have movements full of participants who understand, advocate, and continually refine a full vision able to motivate and orient participation. The alternative to elitist vision isn't having no vision, but having the most accessible, widely shared, compelling, and substantial vision we can write up, debate, refine, and advocate.
Our differences aside, I once wrote a piece built around the experience of reading Chomsky and its impact on people and also around how Noam manages to constantly immerse himself in so much data about pain without becoming jaded himself. It isn't that his burrowing in the tombs of injustice doesn't take a toll—it does. There are times when Noam is brought down low by the news he wades through, and times when he is wired tight and becomes difficult. How Carol Chomsky gets through all that may be as amazing as some of Noam's accomplishments. At any rate, the essay I wrote with these personal dimensions and of course also the problem of changing the world in mind was called "Stop the Killing Train." For me, this was an infrequent attempt at being poetic and it later became the lead essay of a book going by the same name. Over a decade old, written in the lead-up to the first Gulf War, I think the essay is no less timely now than when it was written, and perhaps it is a good way to move on from Noam—so here is the key part.
Evolution has given humans the capacity to perceive, think, feel, imagine. At a time of war—as now in the Gulf—if we get aroused to action we begin to see the whole train as it persists day in and day out. When this happens, what do we do about it. Become depressed? Cynical? Anguished? Cry? Day dream of Armageddon? Day dream of justice? Hand out a leaflet?
Suppose a hypothetical god got tired of what we humans do to one another and decided that from January 1, 1991 onward all corpses unnaturally created any where in the "free world" would cease to decompose. Anyone dying for want of food or medicine, anyone hung or garroted to death, shot or beaten to death, raped or bombed to death, anyone dying unjustly and inhumanely would, as a corpse, persist without decomposing. And the permanent corpse would then automatically enter a glass-walled cattle car attached to an ethereal train traveling monotonously across the U.S., state by state, never stopping. One by one the corpses would be loaded onto the cattle cars and after every thousand corpses piled in, higgeldy piggeldy, a new car would hitch up and begin filling too. Mile after mile the killing train would roll along, each corpse viewed through its transparent walls, 200 new corpses a minute, one new car every five minutes, day and night, without pause.
By the end of 1991, on its first birthday, the killing train would measure over 2,000 miles long. Traveling at 20 miles an hour it would take about five days to pass any intersection. By the year 2000, assuming no dramatic change in institutions and behavior in the interim, the train would stretch from coast to coast about seven times. It would take about six weeks from the time its engine passed the Statue of Liberty to when its caboose would go by, God still wondering when pitiful, aspiring humanity would get the message.
Think how a young child sometimes points to a picture in a book or maga zine and asks for an explanation, "Tell me about a tree?" A car? A boat? A train? A big train? The killing train? Go ahead, answer that.
If the ecologists are right that this planet is a single super-organism, they are wrong that pollution, toxic waste, and other human-created garbage is the most deadly virus attacking it. The killing train is worse.
Think about the pain that radiates from the Vietnam War monument with its 50,000 names in Washington, D.C. Imagine the lost opportunity and lost love and the network of negative influences that radiate from the unnecessary deaths enumerated on that monument. Now think about the killing train stretching from coast to coast and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. Consider its impact, not only on those on board, but on every person that any of those corpses ever loved or would have loved, fed or would have fed, taught or would have taught.
Who rides the killing train? Citizens of the "Third World," selling their organs for food, selling their babies to save their families, suffering disappearances and starvation. They live in Brazil, the Philippines, El Salvador, and New York. They are headed for the killing train. Every day. Millions.
Is this exaggerated? When 10 million children die yearly for lack of basic medical aid that the U.S. could provide at almost no cost in countries whose economies Exxon and the Bank of America have looted, what can you call it other than mass murder? Bloated diseased bodies are victims of murder just as surely as bullet-riddled bodies tossed into rivers by death squads. Denying medicine is no less criminal than supplying torture racks or stealing resources.
Once we begin to see it, how do we face the killing train? Part of me says these crimes are so grotesque, so inhumane, that the perpetrators deserve to die. A little tiny killing train for the killers and no more big killing train for everyone else. An eye for a million eyes. What other step makes more sense?
But that's not the way the world works. People give the orders, wield the axes, withhold the food, pay the pitiful salaries, but institutions create the pressures that mold these people. When an institutional cancer consumes the human patient, what kind of surgeon can cut it all away? Is the weight of repression so intense it can never be lifted?
At first, becoming attuned to our country's responsibility for the corpses the hypothetical God stacked behind transparent cattle-car walls makes handing out leaflets, or arguing for peace with a co-worker, or urging a relative to think twice about paying taxes, or going to a demonstration, or sitting in, or even doing civil disobedience seem insignificant. But the fact is, these are the acts that the hypothetical God, tired of our behavior, would be calling for if she were to actually parade the "free world's" corpses down our main streets in killing trains. These are the acts that can accumulate into a firestorm of informed protest that raises the cost of profiteering and domination so high that the institutions breeding such behavior start to buckle.
"You lose, you lose, you lose, and then you win." Every loss is part of the process that leads to transforming institutions so that there can be no people as vile as Hussein or Bush. No more "Good Germans" or "Good Americans," cremated Jews or decapitated peasants.
Finally, about knowing Noam, I might echo what Bob Dylan had to say about Dave Van Ronk: "No puppet strings on him, ever. He was big, sky high, and I looked up to him. He came from the land of giants."