Special Feature

Who is Noam Chomsky?

Page 1 | Page 2

'How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me,' he says. 'I mean, there are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say that person I see is a savage monster; instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do. If you ask the CEO of some major corporation what he does he will say, in all honesty, that he is slaving 20 hours a day to provide his customers with the best goods or services he can and creating the best possible working conditions for his employees. But then you take a look at what the corporation does, the effect of its legal structure, the vast inequalities in pay and conditions, and you see the reality is something far different.'

Given 50 years of self-delusion in the land of the free, 50 years in which, in Chomsky's terms, it has wilfully supported and committed war crimes across the globe (from Korea to Angola to Indonesia), I wonder if he can countenance any possibility of redemption?

'Things are a lot better than they were 40 years ago,' he suggests, almost brightly. 'I mean, in the late Fifties and early Sixties, opposition to state terror and aggression and torture and so on was zero. That was a horrible time: the massive Kennedy terror operation against Cuba, the first attacks on Vietnam in 1962, the imposition of national security states in South America. Compare this with the current Iraq war, when for the first time in the United States or even in Europe there have been massive popular protests against a foreign aggression before it even began. Governments don't control people like they used to.'

Since he has been at the vanguard of that dissent for so long - imprisoned for Vietnam protests, hero-worshipped by the anti-globalisation movement - does he find that fact in any respect gratifying?

'Not gratifying,' he says, predictably quickly. 'I'm happy to see it. At the end of my book I identify two possible long-term trajectories in global affairs: the first sees continuing international aggression, advancing state terrorism and the probable destruction of the species. The second sees civilised populations beginning to understand across the world that there is an alternative to that future.'

While he is saying this, I recall a remark he once made about the moment he heard about the bomb at Hiroshima. 'I remember that I literally couldn't talk to anybody,' he said, of his 16-year-old self. 'There was nobody. I was at a summer camp and I walked off into the woods and stayed alone for a couple of hours when I heard about it. I could never talk to anyone about it and never understood anyone's reaction. I felt completely isolated.'

That isolation no longer imprisons Chomsky. He has long been in constant contact with a growing army of fellow travellers, these days by email. He retains, though, a sense of singularity, a feeling of himself against the world. It is tempting to think that there was one event in his early childhood that gave him this mission, but he says it was always there.

'Growing up in the place I did I never was aware of any other option but to question everything. The first article I wrote,' he says, 'at the age of 10, was concerned with the Spanish civil war and the rise of fascism in Europe. Even as a child I would haunt second-hand bookshops for radical pamphlets.'

Did that engagement come from the example of his parents?

'Certainly I was inside a political culture,' he says. 'First generation Jewish working class in Philadelphia, and there were strikes and rallies, and so on. I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.'

Chomsky's father was a rabbinical scholar who worked on medieval grammar, and as a child, Chomsky recalls, he would pore over whatever his father was engaged in, try to understand his notes.

It seems a short step from this to his revolutionary fascination with the structures of language but, typically, Chomsky refuses the simple link. Instead, he says, he never imagined himself in an academic career. In his twenties, married and with young children, it was not clear in what area he would make his mark. He was given a fellowship at MIT in an electronics lab - 'though I hardly knew the difference between a tape recorder and a telephone'- and ironically, because the lab had been 'given a ton of money by the Pentagon', was pretty much left to his own devices. Instead of studying electric circuits he devoted his time to developing an understanding of the hard-wiring of the human mind. Quite quickly, he published a theory that the structures of language were innate, rather than acquired, and that all languages shared common underlying rules. His idea of Universal Grammar undid the prevailing consensus that language was entirely a learnt skill.

Chomsky rejects any suggestion of a link between his political theorising, in which events are subject to a unifying theory of power, and his academic work, which also overturned orthodoxy with a single heretical concept. But still, he describes his work in similar terms.

'[Universal grammar] was obvious to me,' he says. 'And it was very counter to the prevailing doctrines at the time, in philosophy and psychology, but they were simply and demonstrably wrong. That language is a biologically-based capacity is so obvious there is hardly any point arguing it; that it is a specific human capacity is also self-evident.'

He uses the same constructions when he discusses the horrors of American foreign policy, which are, he contests, mostly 'so obvious' and 'so self-evident' as to be beyond debate. Thus the Marshall Plan was 'clearly' a device by which 'the American people gave $13bn to American corporations', and likewise the goal in Iraq is 'unequivocally' to ensure the US will have a client state at the heart of the oil-producing regions. 'If you believe that this was at all about extending democracy, then you will also believe that Stalin was, as he claimed, extending democracy to the countries of Eastern Europe.'

The perfect simplicity of this kind of moral equivalence is what gives both Chomsky's critics and his supporters their ammunition. (The one person to have seriously challenged Chomsky over his stance on post-11 September America is his one-time defender, Christopher Hitchens, who contends that everything for Chomsky, these days, is a truism. Their debate, conducted in the pages of the Nation and online, is the subject of endless webchat by people who care about these things, a kind of mythical rumble in the jungle for the left, and worth seeking out simply for the rhetorical strategies each combatant employs - Chomsky opting for the rope-a-dope tactic of insisting Hitchens 'cannot mean what he says'.)

I wonder if the professor never finds, in such debates, the responsibility of being 'the conscience of America' an onerous one?

He smiles just a little wearily. 'Responsibility I believe accrues through privilege,' he begins. 'People like you and me have an unbelievable amount of privilege and therefore we have a huge amount of responsibility. We live in free societies where we are not afraid of the police, we have extraordinary wealth available to us by global standards. If you have those things then you have the kind of responsibility that a person does not have if he or she is slaving 70 hours a week to put food on the table - a responsibility at the very least to inform yourself about power. Beyond that it is a question of whether you believe in moral certainties or not.'

Does he ever give himself time to stop, and, as it were, smell the roses?

'I'd like to,' he says, for once without too much conviction. 'My time not working is devoted pretty much to playing with my grandchildren.'

Before my time is up, we talk about Bush's visit to Britain, and the suggestion in his book that the new Cold War will not be between America and another superpower, or between America and international terrorism, but between America and informed global public opinion.

'New York is a very insular society, but 11 September came as a wake-up call and many people, it seems, were led to the sudden realisation that they did not know enough about their country's role in the world. Small publishers responded by reissuing some of the books that began to explain the history. People did not necessarily agree with the analysis, but it was clear that they wanted to hear it.' Can he imagine a time when that swell of disquiet is reflected within the US electoral spectrum?

'At the moment that does not seem possible, but there is no doubt that it could become so. It depends,' he says, 'on whether the United States is capable of creating a democracy not reliant on the concentration of capital, or if a popular movement can overcome those restrictions.'

It depends, many might say, on how many people read Chomsky.

Page 1 | Page 2

This article was originally published in the Observer magazine on November 30, 2003.

For more about Noam Chomsky, ZNet's Chomsky Archive is an exhaustive resource with information on articles, books, talks, interviews and much more.

<<Back Number | Top | Recent Issue>>

(Discuss this topic on our Message Board)