In “defending”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000563.html#000563 Noam Chomsky from his detractors, Brian Leiter makes a couple of rather extraordinary claims.
bq. [D]o try to remember that Chomsky is a man of genuine intellectual accomplishment, having invented a real scholarly discipline in its modern form, and who participates at the highest level in theoretical debates in cognate fields. This might, at least, create a presumption that when he writes about subjects that make only modest intellectual demands–like foreign relations or politics–that he is unlikely to make gross mistakes, and that he may, in fact, have legitimate reasons for saying what he does.
As I read Leiter, he’s claiming that politics and foreign relations are trivia – they present no serious problems for someone like Chomsky, who has a really first rate intellect. Nor even for someone with a decent undergraduate education in a serious subject; Leiter has already “informed”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000517.html us that “a BA in philosophy apparently puts you well ahead of a PhD in political science.”
Leiter isn’t noted for his belief in civil discourse, and I’ve no desire to start a flame-war. Nor do I want to tip-toe delicately around the fact that he’s talking complete smack. In his posts, Leiter gives us the (perhaps inadvertent) impression that there’s no problem in politics so vexing that a crack squad of linguists and philosophers couldn’t sort it out. Even if this isn’t what he’s trying to say, his claim that politics presents only modest intellectual demands is stuff and nonsense. Politics is complicated and messy; there aren’t any easy answers, and as a consequence it is an intellectually demanding subject matter. Perhaps _too_ demanding; I’m the first to admit that scholars of politics haven’t provided good answers to most of the important questions. But I’m profoundly unconvinced that philosophers of Leiter’s particular bent are likely to do any better. Or linguists for that matter; Chomsky’s unwillingness to grapple with the complexities of politics is perhaps the reason why he’s a first rate linguistic theorist, a second rate polemicist, and a fifth rate political scientist. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and on the evidence to date, there ain’t much eating there.
Update: Looks like Leiter’s post has received a “lot”:http://strangedoctrines.blogspot.com/2003_12_01_strangedoctrines_archive.html#107093336802086802 of “attention”:http://www.enbanc.org/archives/000379.html in the “blogosphere”:http://www.enbanc.org/archives/000379.html. Pejman Yousefzadeh seems to “suggest”:http://www.pejmanesque.com/archives/005187.html that “he too was a member”:http://www.hyperdictionary.com/search.aspx?Dict=&define=apostasy&search.x=0&search.y=0&search=Search of the Chomsky cult once upon a time. Whoda thunk it.
{ 56 comments }
Poin D 12.10.03 at 1:24 am
The “proof of the pudding” in Chomsky’s political analysis lies in the overwhelming preponderance of historical fact that he marshalls to back up his claims.
Henry, you’re overlooking something here: it’s not that politics isn’t a messily complicated business–Chomsky would agree. However, what is not particularly complicated is the basic point that he makes over and over again: American political power, at the federal levels, is consistently wielded by people who don’t much care about the lower-level, “real world” effects of their policies. The lives of ordinary people, particularly non-European peoples, are so much gristle and bone in their meatgrinders. Most Americans live within the relatively comfortable bubble of an empire that passes itself off to its own people as a democracy, and as one that only intervenes oversees in the interests of spreading democracy. That’s not a complicated claim, but it’s certainly self-evident to anyone who listens for awhile to the many facts Chomsky lays out in making it (facts that are, of course, kept from the purview of ordinary folks).
I WOULD say, though, that Chomsky is rather naive about what most people would do if presented with such facts. He thinks they’d rise up; I think they might well just continue to repress.
student @ u of t 12.10.03 at 1:29 am
that’s bull, farrell.
Katherine 12.10.03 at 1:40 am
I think you’re exactly right about political scientists having the hardest problems. I was a poli sci major in college and I got frustrated with it and became basically a very recent history major, avoiding theory entirely. But in retrospect the effort to impose order on chaos is probably a worthy thing even if it leads to frustrating results.
What bothered me most was the half baked political economy. We need the baked kind, badly, but the version I got was almost worthless. It was as if everything led up to THIS moment, so they’d thought until recently that Mexico was a success and Chile and Argentina failures but it turned out Chile’s & Argentina’s economies were better when they wrote their articles, so the years of Pinochet and the Argentinian generals were all worthwile. Yes, Argentina is truly an economic miracle.
Wrong thread, but congratulations on the 10,000th comment. I wish I’d had you as a prof.
dipnut 12.10.03 at 1:41 am
…a BA in philosophy puts you well ahead of a PhD in political science.
And from what premise does blighter reach this conclusion? Why, a certain doctor of political science reacted positively to The Baghdad Turkey Event, whereas some aspiring young philosopher did not.
From this, we are to deduce the relative merits of various academic specialities, and maybe dentistry as well. Perhaps blighter would care to share the proof with us. I’m not smart enough to work it out on my own.
Or maybe he’s just kidding. Those crazy wunderkinder!
cure 12.10.03 at 1:59 am
Hey, from my viewpoint as an Economics student, IPE has been presented so poorly in every IR *and* PoliSci class as to be worthy of tuning out.
Nonetheless, political science certainly presents questions that even a “crack linguist” would have a very difficult time figuring out. PoliSci has a problem, like Sociology, of having a lack of well-known standard models in many areas; as an example, a lot of people think they understand political decision making without knowing Allison.
Charles Stewart 12.10.03 at 2:22 am
Of course you can spread your bets and study PPE…
jason 12.10.03 at 2:49 am
philosophy is self indulgent crap.
if there is not anti-Semitism in the US, does anyone think that Lieberman could ever win the presidency?
neil 12.10.03 at 3:14 am
He didn’t say there’s no anti-Semitism in the West. He says it’s on the decline and scarcely exists now. Lieberman is a rather poor example. He’s a devoutly Jewish man who makes no effort to mask his religion (much to the contrary), is a three-term senator and a major-party vice-presidential nominee who went on to win the popular vote. Meanwhile, it was barely fifty years ago that the systemic extermination of those with Jewish blood was considered a debatable issue in the West. I believe that it is safe to say that there is barely a trace of institutional anti-Semitism left.
This isn’t at all the same as saying that anti-Semitism is no longer a problem, that we should be less critical of it when we see it, or that we should be less vigilant in fighting against it. But we need not pretend that it is a bigger problem than it is, or that it’s getting worse when it’s not.
I’m not Jewish but many people (Jews and gentiles alike) assume I am because of my last name. This has never brought me anything but good fortune, which never ceases to surprise me.
Greg Hunter 12.10.03 at 3:48 am
Mr. Chomsky understands that most people will not upset the apple cart (politics is a dead end) because the people in charge are the ones that form the rationalizations for why things should remain status quo. In the long term view, he knows that the people in charge “know the score”, but have wagered that they will not have to pay the consequences, nor will their off spring as they have been set on the same path in life.
Mr. Chomsky would have known that that the best thing for Argentina and Chile was to ignore the World Bank and any advice that the West had to offer. He has chosen the path of education, but deep down recognizes that anarchy (politics is a dead end) may result in a better place (Pinochet was good for Argentina argument).
The Friedrich List approach is the way to go and not Adam Smith. I suggest Economic Democracy by (Copyright © 2003) by J.W. Smith. I am unsure of his solution, but the background is solid.
Walt Pohl 12.10.03 at 3:50 am
From what Leiter says, Chomsky’s remark is defensible in this instance. But Leiter also provides an interesting test for contextualizing a comment like this:
“If you are reading a statement by someone who is manifestly not a fool, then one ought, as a requirement of the principle of charity (even the Davidsonian one!), interpret the statement so that it isn’t patently irrational.”
Chomsky is something much worse than a fool. He is an intellectual crook. He is like an apparatchik for a totalitarian party that only exists in his head. His plain meaning is always clear, and yet he always writes in such an elliptical fashion that he can always take back anything that events decisively refute, or whenever his mental party line changes.
Henry 12.10.03 at 3:56 am
Katherine
That’s a very sweet thing to say – I nearly switched from pol sci to history in grad school (still have a sneaking suspicion that historians have more fun; but they also have greater difficulty getting tenure-track positions).
Ayjay 12.10.03 at 4:35 am
I think the most interesting thing about Leiter’s comment is his “presumption” that a person who has achieved great things in one field will be a reliable guide to complex matters in another field — at least, if that second field makes less stringent “intellectual demands” than the first. Let’s waive for a moment the particular claim that politics is less demanding than linguistics (even though it’s a ridiculous idea) and ask whether the general presumption makes sense. Imagine, for example, a Nobel-Prize-winning physicist who (without any formal training, but with lots of enthisiasm) turns his attentions to epistemology. Would we be justified in presuming that “he is unlikely to make gross mistakes”? Sorry, but I just don’t see the legitimacy of the presumption. In fact, I think it would be likely for such a person to make many mistakes. Most (though certainly not all) academic disciplines have developed, over the years/decades/centuries (as it may be), complex structures of initiation by which students are taught what evidence is, what good arguments are, what counts as demonstration, what avenues of thought are almost certain to be dead ends, and so on. My guess would be that even an extraordinarily intelligent person who had never had access to such disciplinary training would be missing more than a little of what he or she would need to contribute to that discipline. There are surely exceptions, of course — disciplinary training can sometimes obscure as well as initiate — but the odds work against, not for, the Intelligent Outsider.
chun the unavoidable 12.10.03 at 4:56 am
You’re allowing personal pique to color your interpretation of Leiter’s innocuous, even truistic remarks. I find it rather plain that the only fevered minds in the “blogosphere” exercised about Chomsky’s alleged denial of the existence of anti-semitism are those predisposed to lash out at any critic of state power (forgive me if I don’t pay enough attention to the nuances of militarist libertarian thought here).
Chomsky has recounted being told by political scientists that his arguments don’t precede from “received findings” in their field and are thus not worth paying attention to. You can’t blame him for being contemptuous of that, as there rather plainly aren’t any findings. The situation in linguistics, because of the more tractable subject matter, is different. We also shouldn’t forget the counterinsurgency specialists in the MIT poli sci department (and allied fields) and their benevolent role in the Vietnam war in discussing Chomsky’s attitude towards political science (which shares a revealing nominal quirk with the equally intellectually distinguished field of “criminal science”).
I practice literary science, myself, a field that more than justifies its name.
“Fifth-rate political scientist,” all things considered, is rather unseemly ressentiment.
Shai 12.10.03 at 7:13 am
People are reading too much into this. It reminds me of an introductory course in comparative politics that I took last semester. The most innocuous questions such as “why did the west become rich?” would turn into an election on empire or US policies, whatever irritated the radical leftists in the class. And you could literally hear the collective groan after the 20th time or so. Pejmanesque et al. are doing the same out of context cherry picking to rattle on about whatever political and moral beliefs they have in addition to some general disapproval of chomsky.
Shai 12.10.03 at 7:45 am
And specifically about the “a BA in philosophy apparently puts you well ahead of a PhD in political science.†comment, it’s pretty obvious that Leiter was comparing Drezner and Yglesias. His style is to exaggerate for effect, even if he did mean to convey something literal about his opinion of political science as well.
(It should be obvious that specialist knowledge about government, law, political economy, etc will almost always do better than some general reasoning ability, so if Leiter was making that comparison in the most general sense he’s obviously wrong if the question falls in the sphere of what one would call a political science question)
Walt Pohl 12.10.03 at 8:09 am
Chomsky is not just “any critic of state power”. Whenever Chomsky says anything, you have to read it in terms of his larger political project. His statements are never neutral observations of fact.
djw 12.10.03 at 9:31 am
A few points:
1) As someone sympathetic to Chomsky’s politics (even though I’m a knuckle-dragging political scientist—who’dda thunk it?), it is worth noting that the idea that he’s simply placing evidence before us that entire disciplines that ought to be studying exactly that suspiciously avoid is not credible. A great deal of mainstream IR theory takes for granted, or certainly takes seriously, the notion that hegemonic powers will behave in the ways Chomsky describes. They just don’t feel compelled to moralize about it–at least in teh context of their academic commentary on the matter. This is frustrating for Chomsky, and me too. I understand his frustration. But for him (and some of his defenders) this academic habit amongst many (but by no means all) political scientists is an excuse for dismissing the whole discipline with a conspiratorial gesture. To Chomsky’s credit, when he does this sort of thing he at least doesn’t say he’s allowed to do it becuase he’s a linguist, and linguistics is, like, hard and stuff.
2) Leiter is sharp as hell and I love his blog, but his chauvinism and arrogance about his chosen course of study have been on display for anyone who’s paying attention. It’s unfortunate, and I like it when really bright people with whom I frequently agree don’t have these kind of flaws, but there it is.
3) As we seemed to get dissed a fair bit in the blogosphere, it’s nice to see people realize political science is demanding and difficult. If a different way than philosophy, but one that requires a kind of mental flexibility few philosophers have (there are mental skills and tendencies philosophers generally have that I don’t, so I don’t mean this as a put-down). But before we rush to proclaim Chomsky king of the castle in linguistics, let’s take a look at what he has to say. John Searle (a philosopher of some renown, so this cancels out Chomsky’s linguistics cred in Leiter’s world) has a great deal of eye-opening things to say about Chomsky’s revolution in linguistics: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=15154 (yes, this requires a subscription. Sorry.) I’m just recalling this article from when it came out, but Searle convincingly makes the case that much of what made Chomsky famous in the linguistics world is now considered wrong, and many of his claims seem utterly bizarre to those outside the world of linguistics. The notion of a “deep structure” of language, the way it’s described by Chomsky, seems unproven and unprovable at best, and impossible nonsense at worst. Now, I’m no linguist, but it seems to me that when poststructuralists and literary theorists say seemingly silly things about language, no one in the blogosphere is willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Why not extend the same skeptical criticism to the theory of language that suggests that concepts such as “carburetor” are hardwired into the brains of humans in preagricultural societies?
msg 12.10.03 at 10:28 am
I’m not qualified to address Chomsky’s linguistic claims in even the most amateur fashion.
His politics are, at least as I’ve encountered them, participatory, in that he’s commenting on and about a world and a country he lives in as a citizen. That’s democracy folks.
—
Judith Butler’s recent mocking award looks increasingly like more than just a larkish prank to me. That both she and Chomsky are considerably to the left of the mainstream politically seems interesting, under present conditions.
If it is anti-semitic to despise Ariel Sharon and the racial politics he represents, then there is a great deal of anti-semitism in the US today. However, I’d suggest there’s a finer distinction to be made there. One that puts Chomsky and Butler and Paul Krugman and many others on one side and people like Paul Wolfowitz and Thomas Friedman and, sadly, many others as well, on the other. The refusal of virtually anyone with a public audience to address that distinction without resorting to confusing terms like ‘Zionist’ and ‘neocon’ has a lot to do with the rise of broad prejudice and resentment toward what is increasingly seen as ‘Jewish’ control, of both media and finance, in America, and the world. A continued refusal to address this issue will lead only to crisis, and the further death and suffering of innocent people.
—
I got stuck hitchiking once, when I was 27, on a country road in Washington State. For a few hours. A green field, a few billowing clouds, some cows in the distance. A car or truck went by on an average of one or two every half hour. Without the aid of writing utensils or mnemonic device of any kind, I calculated, and recalculated until the sum was consistent three times in a row, the number of days I’d been on earth. Spine-tinglingly, the week before I’d passed ten thousand.
A roman holiday, sort of.
Congratulations.
john c. halasz 12.10.03 at 11:14 am
I am not overly familiar with Chomsky’s writings, just a sampler. But it seems to me there is a connection between his linguistics and his “politics”. Behind his lingusitics is a Cartesian belief in a semantically self-subsistent mind- (that language might be the result of communicative interaction between agents, since once there were “agents” without language, and that it derives therefrom an unsuspected binding force, threatens the nice, neat boundary between the rational and the empirical, and would be put down by Chomsky as mere “behavioralism”)- and this underwrites an assumption that facts can be clearly picked out. But this ignores that facts always occur within frameworks and, when facts are transferred from one time and place to another, the conditions of their contextualization and reception change. Now while I find the basic claim that the established media employ filters to screen out untoward facts and that the powers-that-be make concerted efforts to “manufacture consensus” highly plausible, if not obvious, ignoring the different venues of their origination and reception mislocates this process and occludes it from explanatory understanding. Futher, any human community necessarily generates power-relations as a fact of its collective existence and a forteriori for relations between such political communities- ( this is one of the principal axes of any political analysis or interpretation). Now power is a strange alchemy between violence/force/coercion and legitimation/justification/”positive externalities” and, though I would be heavily inclined to favour strong legitimacy- (call me naive, if you will)-, I am at a loss as to what to do when violent force trumps legitimacy (and corrupts justifications). Picking out facts, especially facts about lamentable violence, transhistorically and independent from the context of power-relations in which they occurred, though it may stoke legitimate moral outrage, does not provide per se any enlightenment or insight into the processes by which such violent outrages occur, nor as to the possible alternatives and organizations against them. Chomsky’s exclusive focus on such facts is not so much selective as not selective enough, insufficiently differentiating and contextualizing them. It is as if, as a cartographer of political violence, he concluded that the average height above sea level is minus forty feet and ignored the peaks and valleys and plateaus of that portion of the earth’s crust that is above sea level. Though Chomsky’s relentless focus on the violent outrages of the Western exercise of power in his “political” writings is perhaps gruesomely admirable, as well as informative, I find a self-sufficient morality in politics no more convincing than a self-sufficient mind in philosophy or linguistics.
Jeffrey Kramer 12.10.03 at 11:26 am
Chun characterizes Leiter’s remarks as “innocuous, even truistic” — if a comment made by an intelligent man seems foolish when looked at in one context, assume he was employing a different context. Sounds reasonable, but just how hard to we have to look, and how far do we have to stretch, to find the ‘proper’ context which will allow us to breathe that sigh of relief as we contemplate what a waste it would have been if the bright fellow really had lost his mind?
Leiter tries pretty hard, and stretches pretty far, and it still doesn’t work. Essentially, he translates Chomsky’s ‘Anti-Semitism scarcely exists in the West’ into ‘Institutional barriers against Jews in employment, housing and so forth are nothing like what they were fifty years ago’ Which is true, of course. It’s equally true about institutional barriers against Blacks in those same areas. So, can anybody who has an advanced degree in a Leiter-approved field feel free to say “anti-Black racism scarcely exists in the West”, and have Leiter standing ready to offer the same angry rejoinder about the imbecility of his critics? I suspect not.
And if that’s the context in which Chomsky was operating, what was he doing saying that (in contrast to anti-Semitism) anti-Arab racism was on the rise? Is an Arab in America or Europe more or less likely to encounter discrimination in housing and employment today than he or she would have been fifty years ago?
Maynard Handley 12.10.03 at 12:18 pm
Chomsky famous in the linguistics world is now considered wrong, and many of his claims seem utterly bizarre to those outside the world of linguistics. The notion of a “deep structure†of language, the way it’s described by Chomsky, seems unproven and unprovable at best, and impossible nonsense at worst.
I think one should be fair to Chomsky here. In what sense are people claiming he was wrong? That he was wrong in the sense that people who believe that weather is caused by gods are wrong? In the sense that alchemists were wrong (ie the idea of probing matter through experiment was correct but pretty much nothing else was) or wrong in the sense that Newton was wrong (because he knew nothing about relativity or QM).
What exactly do you consider to be so nonsensical about deep structure? Deep structure refers to the chain of transformations between whatever happens in the brain and the spoken word. On the one hand we know there is some sort of commonality to how people think because babies learn language so easily. So such a transformation has to occur. On the other hand, one can, based on assumptions about these rules, make predictions about things like the sorts of mistakes native speakers will make, and these predictions can be tested and are found to be true.
Andrew Boucher 12.10.03 at 1:17 pm
“Question: Is anti-Semitism on the increase?
Answer: In the West, fortunately, it scarcely exists now, though it did in the past.”
I guess Chomsky provided more detail to his answer, thereby qualifying it and making truer than it is, as it stands. Brian changes the question to being about “institutional” anti-Semitism – I’m not sure where that came from.
To take only two ambiguities, what is “the West” and what is the reference point for “the past?” In France, leaving aside the Franco-French about which one could still argue (e.g. Le Pen), there is a sizable Muslim population, sometimes very anti-Semitic. Are they part of the “West”? Surely they are…
And yes if one uses as “the past” the reference point of the 30s, surely anti-Semitism is much less. But that’s not the only past. What about the more recent past, the 60s or 70s? Don’t know about that one.
Anyway agree wholeheartedly with Harry’s general assessment of Chomsky. My personal read is that Chomsky is just too bloody American: he believes in good guys and bad guys. Putting a little moral ambiguity into his world view would do wonders.
just someone 12.10.03 at 1:55 pm
The refusal of virtually anyone with a public audience to address that distinction without resorting to confusing terms like ‘Zionist’ and ‘neocon’ has a lot to do with the rise of broad prejudice and resentment toward what is increasingly seen as ‘Jewish’ control, of both media and finance, in America, and the world. A continued refusal to address this issue will lead only to crisis, and the further death and suffering of innocent people.
It seems that Chomsky was wrong – Anti-semitism is both alive and kicking. And you having proved my point more elloquantly than ever I could have done, I will refrain from going on.
No one doubts you can dislike Ariel Sharon. Jews never said otherwise. I hear Jewish and Israeli dissent about Sharon’s policies all the time. Read an Israel newspaper if you want to hear criticisms about Sharon.
But you are right about one thing. An increasing perception of ‘Jewish’ control [and I am not sure why Jewish needs to be in quotations] has, in the past, lead to the “death and suffering of innocent people”. It’s called The Holocaust. You know… millions of European Jews staving in organized forced squalor before they are sent to bake in ovens.
His politics are, at least as I’ve encountered them, participatory, in that he’s commenting on and about a world and a country he lives in as a citizen. That’s democracy folks.
Thank you for point that out, otherwise I would not have known. My what a big brain you have. This need to cast Chomsky as the wounded man fighting against a system trying to repress him is ridiculous. That’s certainly not what is happening here. What is happening here is a commentary on the validity of Chomsky’s claims and the habits of his followers. That’s [free speech], folks.
Peepak 12.10.03 at 2:25 pm
I posted this at Chun’s website, so if you’ve seen it already, my apologies..
Let’s put what Chomsky said into context, because, after all, before agreeing or disagreeing, we really should offer exegesis.
So, what did Chomsky say?
1) A claim is made regarding the prevalence of anti-semitism.
2) A comparison is made with ‘the past’
3) A comparison is made with anti-Arab sentiment
4) A point is made about the legitimacy in our society, of anti-Arab racism, and the relative non-legitimacy of anti-semitism.
5) A point is made about genuine anti-semitism (i.e. racism against Jews) and ersatz anti-semitism (i.e. dislike & disapproval of the state of Israel’s policies)
Put it all together, and we get:
“Anti-semitism scarcely exists today, in the West, compared to the past, compared to anti-Arabism, which latter seems less prevalent than it really is, since it has the aura of legitimacy, granted by the power structures in our societies, and ourselves, while the former seems more prevalent than it really is, for much of that sentiment is actually disapproval of the state of Israel’s policies.”
I don’t really see what’s so controversial about this. It’s not as if he said that anti-semitism didn’t exist. If that were the case, the question & answer would have been:
“Q: Does anti-semitism in the West exist, today?”
“Chomsky: No, it scarcely exists.”
matt 12.10.03 at 2:43 pm
I very much hoped to stay out of this, but I want to comment on Jeffery Kramer’s comment, since I had some similar thought myself at first. In the end, I don’t think that idea works. Here’s why: while Blacks are not explicitly and officially discriminated against anymore, they are surely still systematically disadvantaged in the US (and other places) in ways that Jews are not. To deny this would be to deny the obvious, I’d think. No one is stopped by the police for “driving while jewish”. Jews are not arrested (and subsequently disenfranchised- see the posts on this site below) for drug crimes at a rate high above both there percentage in the population and the best estimates of their percentage of the drug-using populaiton. Jews are not presented as the stereotype of criminals and leaches on the welfare state. Jews are not systematically given inferior schools (I don’t say ‘intentionally’, just systematically), while at Penn we struggle mightily to have a black population that comes anywhere close to what it is percentage-wise for blacks in the US, we have something like a 12 or 15% Jewish student body, vastly above the 2 or 3% Jews make up of the population- they seem to be doing pretty well here. Jews have been heads of the government in both France and the UK, while it’s awfully hard to imagine a black having such a position. In general, Jews in the US are at least as well off as most people, perhaps more so than most (largely, I think, becuase Jews rarely live in the poorest parts of the country) while blacks, as a group, are much poorer than average. One could go on and on. So, while the comparison might make sense at first, I don’t think it holds up in the end. If Chomsky had said the same thing about Blacks, there might still be a semi-plausible interpritation one could put on it, but it would be vastly less plausible.
alkali 12.10.03 at 2:50 pm
P***ing matches over whose discipline is smarter (correct answer: string theorists crush the rest of us like bugs) aside, this is a really stupid discussion.
Chomsky made a remark about anti-Semitism that is inarguably correct if taken one way (i.e., that today’s anti-Semitism is nothing compared to the anti-Semitism that prevailed a couple generations ago in the West), and impossible to defend if taken another way (i.e., that there are no instances at all of anti-Semitism any more in the West).
Leiter suggests that given those two alternatives, we should presume that Chomsky, a reasonably intelligent individual, intended the innocuous meaning instead of the obviously false meaning.
Even keeping in mind Chomsky’s history of making inflammatory claims, that seems a pretty reasonable conclusion, or at least not one worth arguing about.
just someone 12.10.03 at 3:49 pm
Jews are not arrested (and subsequently disenfranchised- see the posts on this site below) for drug crimes at a rate high above both there percentage in the population and the best estimates of their percentage of the drug-using populaiton
Which only means one thing. That Anti-Semitism expresses itself in different ways and thus must (in some ways) be something different than the prejudice suffered by these racial minorities. And reasonably the solutions to it will be different.
That Jews do not suffer the same indignities, does not mean that Jews are not subjected to indiginity of anti-semitism. I would NEVER seek to compare the indignity of lynching, withheld voting rights or segregation by saying “it wasn’t mass genocide, so it wasn’t as bad as what Jews suffered”. That’s just insulting.
There IS Anti-Semitism. It IS on the rise. Though, I admit not uniformally. I don’t deny Anti-Muslim and Anti-Arab sentiment are also on the rise. Both sadden me greatly.
I am happy Chomsky’s own experience of anti-semitism has declined. But fact remains that Jews still suffer from indignities, and threats in Chomsky’s West.
“The West” as I recall includes more than his little bit of earth. There are very many synagogues that have to be protected with armed guards. To face an armed guard and have him route through your prayer accessories (one’s most meaningful possessions) before going to pray is a bleak reminder of what really exsists in The West.
Matthew 12.10.03 at 3:54 pm
Yes, Alkali spells it out.
But, hey, a good old flame war is more fun…
Keith M Ellis 12.10.03 at 4:15 pm
There are many people that write this way. Sometimes, I think that they do so intentionally, carefully plowing the rhetorical ground between connotation and denotation such that they maximize plausible deniability. Other times I think they are unaware of the nuances of ordinary language. But it’s damn suspicious.
Jeffrey Kramer 12.10.03 at 4:33 pm
Peepak: the fact that the question put to Chomsky was in the form of a comparison (“is it more or less than it was?”) does not mean that Chomsky’s answer must be read as expressing only a ‘comparative’ view. I’d bet pretty much every linguist would agree that’s just not how dialogue operates. For example, if you ask me “has so-and-so improved as a singer since he started recording?” and I reply “he can scarcely sing at all” then I’m not just denying a comparative improvement, I’m making a flat judgment. Even if I go on to say “and he used to sing pretty well,” that does *not* allow me to reply to so-and-so’s outraged fans by saying “I never suggested that he wasn’t still a good singer in many ways, I just meant that he wasn’t nearly as good as he used to be.”
Matt, if you or Chomsky or Leiter want to say “anti-Semitism is not as palpable a presence in the life of the typical American/European Jew as racism is in the life of the typical American/European Black,” then that’s a reasonable statement, IMO. But “Anti-Semitism scarcely exists” is just not synonymous with that.
Vinteuil 12.10.03 at 4:42 pm
Here’s Chomsky in a recent piece entitled *Anti-Semitism, Zionism, and the Palestinians*:
“By now Jews in the US are the most privileged and influential part of the population. You find occasional instances of anti-Semitism but they are marginal. There’s plenty of racism, but it’s directed against Blacks, Latinos, Arabs are targets of enormous racism, and those problems are real. Anti-Semitism is no longer a problem, fortunately. It’s raised, but it’s raised because privileged people want to make sure they have total control, not just 98% control. That’s why anti-Semitism is becoming an issue. Not because of the threat of anti-Semitism; they want to make sure there’s no critical look at the policies the US (and they themselves) support in the Middle East.”
Chomsky sees the existence of anti-semitism as politically convenient for his opponents and therefore prefers to minimize its extent. He is not an impartial judge stating innocuous truisms about the issue.
Vinteuil 12.10.03 at 4:56 pm
Incidentally, Chomsky’s observation about Jewish “privilege” and “influence” completely misses the point. Jews in many Western countries are a classic example of a “market-dominant minority,” like ethnic Chinese in Malaysia and The Phillipines, Lebanese in East Africa, Korean shopkeepers in American black neigborhoods, etc. All these groups face intense prejudice and discrimination precisely, in part, *because* of their relative success.
BigMacAttack 12.10.03 at 5:07 pm
Wow! I really enjoyed a lot of the comments on this topic.(Pohl Alkali and many others)
I think Leiterman did a very good job defending Chomsky’s comment. The context he provided makes the comment seem very reasonable.
I think the topic is tempting because –
Leiterman is such a supercilious snot nosed ninny. He really thinks that philosophy = physics, philosopher = smarter, left wing = smarter, left wing + philosopher + PHD = smartest = Leiterman = all the scientifically correct answers, non-PHD, non-philosopher, right wing gnats = stupid = always wrong.
And Chomsky is a hugely hypocritical moralizing blowhard who gets idolized for writing 2nd rate political analysis.
Admitting that Chomsky and Leiterman are in this instance ‘correct’ and indulging myself by flinging some mostly gratuitous ad-hominem insults has given me both emotional and intellectual satisfaction.
AH!
Peepak 12.10.03 at 5:15 pm
Jeffrey,
Hmm..I don’t think your analogy works too well, because you added the words ‘at all,’ at the end, thus making the claim absolute.
If you take out the ‘at all,’ and look at the entire answer, which I tried to give an expansion of, I still think it works.
I just don’t think it’s a legitimate exegetical move to take what soneone’s saying out of context; you can make a demon out of anyone like that..
Now, of course, Chomsky may be factually wrong about anti-semitism being on the wane, but I think one must take him to being comparative, given his entire answer, which was clearly comparative.
dsquared 12.10.03 at 5:23 pm
All these groups face intense prejudice and discrimination precisely, in part, because of their relative success
Nah, this one won’t fly as a theory of anti-Semitism in the USA. The period during which anti-Semitism in the USA was at its strongest was one during which the Jewish population of the USA was mainly poor, often illiterate and surprisingly often criminal Central European immigrants. They were not discriminated against because of their success.
Vinteuil 12.10.03 at 5:34 pm
dsquared: note the present tense and the phrase “in part” in my remark. If I had intended this as a universal “theory of anti-Semitism in the USA” I would have said so. The point is that socio-economic success does not protect minorities from prejudice and discrimination.
Vinteuil 12.10.03 at 5:42 pm
Peepak: why are you so determined to pretend that Chomsky is merely belaboring the bloody obvious? I agree that one must consider relevant context. And the relevant context here is that Chomsky returns to this theme again and again. He really does think that Western anti-semitism is now a trivial matter *tout court* and not just in comparison to the past. He thinks that the only reason anyone goes on about it is in order to smear the opponents of Israeli and American foreign policy. Now that may be true or it may be false–but it is not a boring truism.
Peepak 12.10.03 at 6:11 pm
Vinteuil:
I’m ‘so determined’ to ‘pretend’ that Chomsky is belabouring the obvious, because, well, I think his words were being twisted. Don’t they teach us in school to ‘stand up for what you think is right’, or some such stuff? Besides, this is a discussion-oriented blog, for god’s sake! If you didn’t argue on this blog, what on earth would you do?
But: “He really does think that Western anti-semitism is now a trivial matter tout court and not just in comparison to the past. He thinks that the only reason anyone goes on about it is in order to smear the opponents of Israeli and American foreign policy.”
Well, if he indeed does think this (tho’ I don’t agree with that; would Chomsky say: “anti-semitism, as a sentiment, in the west, today, is dead.” Well, I don’t think so.), then he’s wrong.
Peepak 12.10.03 at 6:18 pm
Actually, Vinteuil, I just read your excerpt from ‘Anti-Semitism, Zionism, and the Palestinians.’ And I agree that in this piece he’s not correct. At least I think he isn’t; I’m not Jewish & I live in Brooklyn [New York], so my perception of anti-semitism is probably somewhat skewed…
alkali 12.10.03 at 6:44 pm
why are you so determined to pretend that Chomsky is merely belaboring the bloody obvious? … [T]he relevant context here is that Chomsky returns to this theme again and again.
If everything else Chomsky has ever said on the subject demonstrates his view to your satisfaction, then why are you so worried about what this particular brief, vague statement might signify?
I don’t care a whit for Chomsky, but singling out this potshard of dialogue as evidence of his mendacity is overreaching.
Keith M Ellis 12.10.03 at 7:11 pm
I think that quote is self-evidently antisemitic. Not only is it demonstrably false, it also is a well-known and distinctive shibboleth of antisemites with a very long history.
Vinteuil 12.10.03 at 7:35 pm
alkali: Chomsky answered a question. Pejman took his answer at face value. Leiter insisted that Chomsky was too smart to mean anything so stupid and came up with a subtler alternative interpretation. You agreed that his conclusion was reasonable. But a quick glance at Chomsky’s other writings reveals that he really does believe pretty much what Pejman took him to be saying in the first place.
Sorry, but it is not Pejman who is “overreaching” here. (Hmmm… “overreaching”…who was the last person I saw making that charge against someone…?)
alkali 12.10.03 at 8:14 pm
vinteuil: Chomsky answered a question. Leiter took his answer at face value. Pejman insisted that Chomsky was too anti-Semitic to mean anything so innocuous and came up with a subtler alternative interpretation. You agreed that his conclusion was reasonable.
Sorry, but it is not Leiter who is “overreaching” here.
alkali 12.10.03 at 8:16 pm
Oh hell. I’ve been drawn into this stupid argument myself.
msg 12.10.03 at 9:26 pm
In the days, the late 60’s and early 70’s, when ‘civl rights’ was finally and permanently a publicly discussed subject, and the rationalizations for traditional bigotry were being dispensed with one after another, there was this cliche that people who weren’t really ‘getting it’ would use to lead off controversial statements:
“Now, don’t get me wrong, some of my best friends are…”
When the subject is anti-semitism, this seems impossible for some reason.
I’m not anti-semitic. My position is that there is a distinct sub-group hiding behind the historical, factual, victimhood of Jews, using that victimhood as a shield whenever they’re accused or attacked. The refusal to allow that sub-group to be named further protects them, and also endangers the innocent, while the hysteria of many Jewish people around this topic means there is virtually no rational dialog in public about it.
The idea that Chomsky is anti-semitic is tragically ludicrous.
One of the vilest insults in the neo-nazi underground is ‘race-traitor’. The parallels are instructive.
John 12.10.03 at 10:14 pm
Meanwhile, it was barely fifty years ago that the systemic extermination of those with Jewish blood was considered a debatable issue in the West.
This is untrue, if by “debatable” we mean “something which was debated”. In fact, the Nazis seem to have been quite aware that, whatever they were actually doing to the Jews in Poland and the Soviet Union, the issue was absolutely undebatable – nothing could ever be said about it. Even to other people who knows exactly what is meant by the carefully chosen euphemisms the Nazis always used to discuss the “final solution to the Jewish question” (itself a euphemism, of course). Suggests that even the Nazis realized that what they were doing was rather horrendous, even though they (obviously) chose to do it anyway.
Ah, semantics!
Vinteuil 12.10.03 at 11:50 pm
alkali: if you believe that it was Pejman, and not Leiter, who was being too clever by half, then I doubt whether anything I might say could change your mind. I won’t try.
Still, I hope you would agree with two points:
(1) Pejman’s interpretation was not so egregious as to warrant throwing around words like “ignorant,” “inane,” “trivial,” “lightweight,” “stupidity,” etc.
(2) Pejman’s interpretation was in fact entirely consonant with previous remarks that Chomsky has made on this topic (see my post above).
What Leiter really needs to understand is that he simply cannot adopt a *de haut en bas* attitude when defending Chomsky and expect to convince anybody who doesn’t already agree with him. Chomsky is the Ayn Rand of the left. Always interesting, sometimes insightful, often totally loopy. If only someone could filter out the nonsense and save just the best bits. Leiter himself might be the man for the job. But not if he carries on like this.
Jeffrey Kramer 12.11.03 at 2:08 am
Peepak, I think the difference between “can’t sing at all” and “can’t sing” is far smaller than the difference between “can’t sing” and (say) “can’t sing in a large arena without lots of electronic assistance.” And that’s the rough equivalent of what Leiter is doing: producing ad lib qualifiers to an apparently unqualified statement. For any apparently silly, unqualified statement, there are a near-infinite number of qualifications which would turn it into a sensible statement. No reader should be expected to know just which of those is to be applied, and asking readers to keep trying until they find one that fits, because the speaker is a bright guy, strikes me as rather too close to fundamentalist hermeneutics as applied to Holy Scripture. (‘If it appears to say the earth is flat, but we know the earth is round, then we must assume it’s meant to be read allegorically.’)
Whatever you think of this, I think the point remains: it is perfectly possible to make a categorical statement in response to a relative question; it is not always necessary or even reasonable to say ‘he was asked a question about whether it was more or less than the past, therefore his answer must be read with the silent ‘as compared to the past’ understood.”
Keith M Ellis 12.11.03 at 3:39 am
Ooh, that’s really good. I wish I had said that. I think it’s very true, both in terms of the intellectual and his/her followers.
Joshua W. Burton 12.11.03 at 3:55 am
Poin D writes:
The “proof of the pudding†in Chomsky’s political analysis lies in the overwhelming preponderance of historical fact that he marshalls to back up his claims.
My response is now almost eight years old, and marred at its end by the poignant optimism of a lost moment in history. But I stand by the legwork, and it’s stood by me over the years. As I say in the posting, everyone should do this to Chomsky, _once_.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4m5u69%24jpm%40news.acns.nwu.edu
Keith M Ellis 12.11.03 at 6:09 am
Bruce Sharp has a very nice essay on Chomsky on the Khmer Rouge.
He tries to offer a balanced and fair critique, but he has this to say in his introduction:
I read this essay last year. I think that Sharp does a very good job demonstrating, as he says, that Chomsky, the anti-propogandist, is himself a propogandist. Well-intentioned, perhaps. Closer to the truth than those he criticizes, maybe. But a propogandist who subordinates truth to spin, nevertheless.
Peepak 12.11.03 at 2:18 pm
Jeffrey:
I see your point. And certainly one shouldn’t supply qualifiers in order to make the statement come out as your desire dictates.. all true, all true.
However, the qualifiers are all there, in C.’s original statement. I have interpreted it thus (but I haven’t added any qualifiers, nor do I think I’ve departed from his meaning. If you think my interpretation is all off, feel free to bash it.):
“Anti-semitism scarcely exists today, in the West, compared to the past, compared to anti-Arabism, which latter seems less prevalent than it really is, since it has the aura of legitimacy, granted by the power structures in our societies, and ourselves, while the former seems more prevalent than it really is, for much of that sentiment is actually disapproval of the state of Israel’s policies”
In any case, this argument is getting really old, and I suggest we can it. It seems (as we knew anyway) that reasonable people may not agree on even interpreting a paragraph. It seems the liberals were wrong about the power of reason; our interpretation depends (as is obvious) on whether we agree with Chomsky in the first place.
just someone 12.11.03 at 4:24 pm
In support of my earlier comment that Chomsky’s West includes more than his little bit of earth, I have included a quote about France. I think we will all agree that France is in the West.
“This anti-Semitism is real in our country,” commission secretary Remy Schwartz said. “We found children have to leave public schools in some areas because they are not physically secure… This has profoundly shocked the commission.”
It may shock the commission and Chomsky, but it doesn’t shock me one bit.
The aticle can be found at…
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=Q504RECJ1EYZMCRBAELCFEY?type=worldNews&storyID=3976524&pageNumber=1
Mikhel 12.11.03 at 4:28 pm
As in prior discussions, I find myself in agreement with Keith Ellis and, certainly, with Vinteuil. I must add, however, that if the Rand/Chomsky comparison is unfair, it is unfair to Rand. Not to the extent of a particular idealogical extremism; but, that I am not familar with comments by Ms. Rand that equate with comments like
“By now Jews in the US are the most privileged and influential part of the population.â€
which is nearly laughable in its bias and falsity. It is true that I’m not as familiar with Rand’s biographical details, so I’ll caution my statement with a nod to my ignorance.
What I’ve found to be interesting in interactions concerning Chomsky, is that one often defends his less savory statements and pronouncements so as to justify his political conclusions that one is in agreement with. This discussion — as interesting as it has been — seems to be another indication of such an opinion.
Jeffrey Kramer 12.12.03 at 2:15 am
Peepak; I’m not particularly in a bashing mood, so let’s, as you suggest, just let it rest. :)
WTB 12.12.03 at 10:40 pm
Leiter’s got a vested interest in arguing that established academics like Chomsky (and Brian Leiter) are, in virture of their scholarly eminence, smarter than everyone else. His “Philosophical Gourmet” is, among other things, an attempt to establish objective rankings of the quality of philosophy departments based on the most narrowly conventional measures of scholarly achievement. E.g. who says who’s hot right now and who’s being cited the most. It’s a very good resource if you want to understand the terms in which you must think in order to get a job as a philosophy professor, but not a good indicator of who’s the smartest philosopher of them all — much less who will be read 100 years from now.
Apparently, Leiter thinks that if he admits that if someone without his eminent qualifications might be as smart as him, this would undermine the validity of the Gourmet Report. (Which, who knows, might the only philosophical contribution he’s remembered for 100 years from now.)
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