[Paleopsych] Prospect: Chomsky as the world's top public intellectual
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5.11.18
[articles appended]
A glance at the November issue of Prospect: Chomsky as the world's top
public intellectual
Noam Chomsky, the controversial author and professor of linguistics at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been voted the world's
leading public intellectual from a list of 100 prominent thinkers
compiled by the British magazine.
Mr. Chomsky first won acclaim for his transformational-grammar theory,
which holds that the ability to form language is an innate human
trait. But he is better-known for his outspokenness on political
issues. He was a major voice against the Vietnam War and continues to
argue against American policies that he finds immoral. He falls into a
line of "oppositional intellectuals," writes David Herman, a
contributing editor for the magazine, in an explanation of the poll.
Mr. Chomsky's selection, he adds, proves that "we still yearn for such
figures."
More than 20,000 people participated in the magazine's poll. The vote
for Mr. Chomsky came as no surprise to Robin Blackburn, a visiting
professor of historical studies at the New School, in New York. Mr.
Chomsky, he writes, is a "brilliant thinker" who has stepped outside
his own field of study in order to lambaste corrupt government
policies.
Oliver Kamm, a columnist for The Times of London, does not share in
the adoration. For starters, he writes, Mr. Chomsky combines elaborate
rhetoric with thin evidence to support "dubious arguments." Mr. Kamm
particularly criticizes Mr. Chomsky's opposition to American military
interventions and arguments that equate American foreign policy with
the actions of Nazi Germany.
"If this is your judgment of the U.S.," writes Mr. Kamm, "then it will
be difficult to credit that its intervention might ever serve
humanitarian ends."
That's not necessarily so, says Mr. Blackburn, who notes that neither
apartheid in South Africa nor Stalinism in Russia was eradicated by
"bombardment and invasion." Mr. Chomsky simply opposes putting
American soldiers in harm's way, he writes, where they can "do harm
and acquire a taste for it."
Mr. Blackburn's and Mr. Kamm's essays are contained in the article
"For and Against Chomsky," which is available at
[54]http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=
7110&AuthKey=fea7d83f56a70abc8c07b819492523e1&issue=512
Mr. Herman's analysis, Global public intellectuals poll, is available
at
[55]http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7078&Aut
hKey=fea7d83f56a70abc8c07b819492523e1&issue=512
A tally of the votes for all 100 candidates is available at
[56]http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/intellectuals/results
--Jason M. Breslow
-----------
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7078&AuthKey=fea7d83f56a70abc8c07b819492523e1&issue=512
[No. 116 / Nov 2005]
The Prospect/Foreign Policy list of 100 global public intellectuals
suggested that the age of the great oppositional thinker was over, but
Noam Chomsky's emphatic victory shows many remain nostalgic for it
David Herman
_________________________________________________________________
The two most striking things about this [40]poll are the number of
people who took part and the age of the winners. Over 20,000 people
voted for their top five names from our longlist of 100, and they
tended to reinforce the trends of the original list. More than half of
the top 30 are based in North America. Europe, by contrast, is
surprisingly under-represented--a cluster of well-known names in the
top 20 (Eco, Havel, Habermas) but then it is a long way down to
Kristeva (48) and Negri (50). The most striking absence is France--one
name in the top 40, fewer than Iran or Peru.
There is not one woman in the top ten, and only three in the top 20.
The big names of the left did well (Chomsky, Habermas, Hobsbawm) but
there weren't many of them. Scientists, literary critics, philosophers
and psychologists all fared badly. And voters did not use the "bonus
ball" to champion new faces. The top two names, Milton Friedman and
Stephen Hawking, do not represent new strands of thought. (In fact,
Friedman was specifically named in last month's "criteria for
inclusion"--along with other ancient greats like Solzhenitsyn--as an
example of someone who had been deliberately left off the longlist on
the grounds that they were no longer actively contributing to their
discipline.)
The poll was in one sense a victim of its own success. Word spread
around the internet very quickly, and at least three of our top 20
(Chomsky, Hitchens and Soroush), or their acolytes, decided to draw
attention to their presence on the list by using their personal
websites to link to Prospect's voting page. In Hitchens's and
Soroush's case, the votes then started to flood in. Although it is
hard to tell exactly where voters came from, it is likely that a clear
majority were from Britain and America, with a fair sprinkling from
other parts of Europe and the English-speaking world. There was also a
huge burst from Iran, although very little voting from the far east,
which may explain why four of the bottom five on the list were
thinkers from Japan and China.
What is most interesting about the votes, though, is the age of the
top names. Chomsky won by a mile, with over 4,800 votes. Then Eco,
with just under 2,500, Dawkins and Havel. Only two in the top
nine--Hitchens and Rushdie--were born after the second world war. And
of the top 20, only Klein and Lomborg are under 50. This may reflect
the age of the voters, choosing familiar names. However, surely it
also tells us something about the radically shifting nature of the
public intellectual in the west. Who are the younger equivalents to
Habermas, Chomsky and Havel? Great names are formed by great events.
But there has been no shortage of terrible events in the last ten
years and some names on the list (Ignatieff, Fukuyama, Hitchens) are
so prominent precisely because of what they have said about them. Only
one of these, though, is European, and he lives in Washington DC.
You can read more elsewhere in this issue about Chomsky. Even if you
disagree with his attacks on US foreign policy, there are two reasons
why few would be surprised to see him at the top of the poll. First,
his intellectual range. Like a number of other figures in the top ten,
he is prominent in a number of areas. Havel was a playwright and
statesman; Eco a literary critic and bestselling author; Diamond was a
professor of physiology and now has a chair in geography at UCLA, and
writes on huge issues ranging over a great time span. Second, and more
important, Chomsky belongs to a tradition which goes back to Zola,
Russell and Sartre: a major thinker or writer who speaks out on the
great public issues of his time, opposing his government on questions
of conscience rather than the fine print of policy.
I said last month in my commentary on the original Prospect/Foreign
Policy list of 100 names that it seemed to represent the death of that
grand tradition of oppositional intellectuals. The overwhelming
victory for Noam Chomsky suggests that we still yearn for such
figures--we just don't seem to be able to find any under the age of
70.
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/intellectuals/results
The Prospect/FP Global public intellectuals poll--results
Over 20,000 people voted for their top names from our original
longlist of 100. The final results are below; click [10]here for David
Herman's analysis, and [11]here for brief biographies of the top names
Position Name Total votes
1 Noam Chomsky 4827
2 Umberto Eco 2464
3 Richard Dawkins 2188
4 Václav Havel 1990
5 Christopher Hitchens 1844
6 Paul Krugman 1746
7 Jürgen Habermas 1639
8 Amartya Sen 1590
9 Jared Diamond 1499
10 Salman Rushdie 1468
11 Naomi Klein 1378
12 Shirin Ebadi 1309
13 Hernando De Soto 1202
14 Bjørn Lomborg 1141
15 Abdolkarim Soroush 1114
16 Thomas Friedman 1049
17 Pope Benedict XVI 1046
18 Eric Hobsbawm 1037
19 Paul Wolfowitz 1028
20 Camille Paglia 1013
21 Francis Fukuyama 883
22 Jean Baudrillard 858
23 Slavoj Zizek 840
24 Daniel Dennett 832
25 Freeman Dyson 823
26 Steven Pinker 812
27 Jeffrey Sachs 810
28 Samuel Huntington 805
29 Mario Vargas Llosa 771
30 Ali al-Sistani 768
31 EO Wilson 742
32 Richard Posner 740
33 Peter Singer 703
34 Bernard Lewis 660
35 Fareed Zakaria 634
36 Gary Becker 630
37 Michael Ignatieff 610
38 Chinua Achebe 585
39 Anthony Giddens 582
40 Lawrence Lessig 565
41 Richard Rorty 562
42 Jagdish Bhagwati 561
43 Fernando Cardoso 556
44= JM Coetzee 548
44= Niall Ferguson 548
46 Ayaan Hirsi Ali 546
47 Steven Weinberg 507
48 Julia Kristeva 487
49 Germaine Greer 471
50 Antonio Negri 452
51 Rem Koolhaas 429
52 Timothy Garton Ash 428
53 Martha Nussbaum 422
54 Orhan Pamuk 393
55 Clifford Geertz 388
56 Yusuf al-Qaradawi 382
57 Henry Louis Gates Jr. 379
58 Tariq Ramadan 372
59 Amos Oz 358
60 Larry Summers 351
61 Hans Küng 344
62 Robert Kagan 339
63 Paul Kennedy 334
64 Daniel Kahnemann 312
65 Sari Nusseibeh 297
66 Wole Soyinka 296
67 Kemal Dervis 295
68 Michael Walzer 279
69 Gao Xingjian 277
70 Howard Gardner 273
71 James Lovelock 268
72 Robert Hughes 259
73 Ali Mazrui 251
74 Craig Venter 244
75 Martin Rees 242
76 James Q Wilson 229
77 Robert Putnam 221
78 Peter Sloterdijk 217
79 Sergei Karaganov 194
80 Sunita Narain 186
81 Alain Finkielkraut 185
82 Fan Gang 180
83 Florence Wambugu 159
84 Gilles Kepel 156
85 Enrique Krauze 144
86 Ha Jin 129
87 Neil Gershenfeld 120
88 Paul Ekman 118
89 Jaron Lanier 117
90 Gordon Conway 90
91 Pavol Demes 88
92 Elaine Scarry 87
93 Robert Cooper 86
94 Harold Varmus 85
95 Pramoedya Ananta Toer 84
96 Zheng Bijian 76
97 Kenichi Ohmae 68
98= Wang Jisi 59
98= Kishore Mahbubani 59
100 Shintaro Ishihara 57
We asked voters to select a "bonus ball" nomination--a name they
believe we should have included on our original longlist. Hundreds of
people were chosen--from Bob Dylan to Kofi Annan. Here are the top 20
names
Position Name Total votes
1 Milton Friedman 98
2 Stephen Hawking 81
3 Arundhati Roy 78
4 Howard Zinn 72
5 Bill Clinton 67
6 Joseph Stiglitz 57
7 Johan Norberg 48
8= Dalai Lama 45
8= Thomas Sowell 45
10= Cornell West 39
10= Nelson Mandela 39
12 Gore Vidal 37
13 Mohammad Khatami 35
14 John Ralston Saul 33
15= George Monbiot 26
15= Judith Butler 26
17 Victor Davis Hanson 25
18 Gabriel García Márquez 24
19= Bono 23
19= Harold Bloom 23
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7110&AuthKey=fea7d83f56a70abc8c07b819492523e1&issue=512
[No. 116 / Nov 2005]
For and against Chomsky
Is the world's top public intellectual a brilliant expositor of
linguistics and the US's duplicitous foreign policy? Or a reflexive
anti-American, cavalier with his sources?
Robin Blackburn
Oliver Kamm
_________________________________________________________________
Robin Blackburn teaches at the New School for Social Research, New
York.
Oliver Kamm is a "Times" columnist
For Chomsky
Robin Blackburn celebrates a courageous truth-teller to power
The huge [40]vote for Noam Chomsky as the world's leading "public
intellectual" should be no surprise at all. Who could match him for
sheer intellectual achievement and political courage?
Very few transform an entire field of enquiry, as Chomsky has done in
linguistics. Chomsky's scientific work is still controversial, but his
immense achievement is not in question, as may be easily confirmed by
consulting the recent Cambridge Companion to Chomsky. He didn't only
transform linguistics in the 1950s and 1960s; he has remained in the
forefront of controversy and research.
The huge admiration for Chomsky evident in Prospect's poll is
obviously not only, or even mainly, a response to intellectual
achievement. Rather it goes to a brilliant thinker who is willing to
step outside his study and devote himself to exposing the high crimes
and misdemeanours of the most powerful country in the world and its
complicity with venal and brutal rulers across four continents over
half a century or more.
Some believe--as Paul Robinson, writing in the New York Times Book
Review, once put it--that there is a "Chomsky problem." On the one
hand, he is the author of profound, though forbiddingly technical,
contributions to linguistics. On the other, his political
pronouncements are often "maddeningly simple-minded."
In fact, it is not difficult to spot connections between the
intellectual strategies Chomsky has adopted in science and in
politics. Chomsky's approach to syntax stressed the economy of
explanation that could be achieved if similarities in the structure of
human languages were seen as stemming from biologically rooted, innate
capacities of the human mind, above all the recursive ability to
generate an infinite number of statements from a finite set of words
and symbols. Many modern critics of the radical academy are apt to
bemoan its disregard for scientific method and evidence. This is not a
reproach that can be aimed at Chomsky, who has pursued a naturalistic
and reductionist standpoint in what he calls, in the title of his 1995
volume, The Minimalist Programme.
Chomsky's political analyses also strive to keep it simple, but not at
the expense of the evidence, which he can abundantly cite if
challenged. But it is "maddening" none the less, just as the
minimalist programme may be to some of his scientific colleagues. The
apparent straightforwardness of Chomsky's political judgements--his
"predictable" or even "kneejerk" opposition to western, especially US,
military intervention--could seem simplistic. Yet they are based on a
mountain of evidence and an economical account of how power and
information are shared, distributed and denied. Characteristically,
Chomsky begins with a claim of stark simplicity which he elaborates
into an intricate account of the different roles of government,
military, media and business in the running of the world.
Chomsky's apparently simple political stance is rooted in an anarchism
and collectivism which generates its own sense of individuality and
complexity. He was drawn to the study of language and syntax by a
mentor, Zellig Harris, who also combined libertarianism with
linguistics. Chomsky's key idea of an innate, shared linguistic
capacity for co-operation and innovation is a positive, rather than
purely normative, rebuttal of the Straussian argument that natural
human inequality vitiates democracy.
Andersen's tale of the little boy who, to the fury of the courtiers,
pointed out that the emperor was naked, has a Chomskian flavour, not
simply because it told of speaking truth to power but also because the
simple childish eye proved keener than the sophisticated adult eye. I
was present when Chomsky addressed Karl Popper's LSE seminar in the
spring of 1969 and paid tribute to children's intellectual powers
(Chomsky secured my admittance to the seminar at a time when my
employment at the LSE was suspended).
As I recall, Chomsky explained how the vowel shift that had occurred
in late medieval English was part of a transformation that resulted
from a generational dynamic. The parent generation spoke using small
innovations of their own, arrived at in a spontaneous and ad hoc
fashion. Growing youngsters, because of their innate syntactical
capacity, ordered the language they heard their parents using by means
of a more inclusive grammatical structure, which itself made possible
more systematic change.
In politics, the child's eye might see right through the humanitarian
and democratic claptrap to the dismal results of western military
interventions--shattered states, gangsterism, narco-traffic, elite
competition for the occupiers' favour, vicious communal and religious
hatred.
Chomsky openly admits he prefers "pacifist platitudes" to belligerent
mendacity. This makes some wrongly charge that he is "passive in the
face of evil." But neither apartheid in South Africa, nor Stalinism in
Russia, nor military rule in much of Latin America were defeated or
dismantled by bombardment and invasion. Chomsky had no difficulty
supporting the ultimately successful campaign against apartheid, or
for the Indonesian withdrawal from East Timor. He simply opposes
putting US soldiers in harm's way--also meaning where they will do
harm and acquire a taste for it.
Chomsky's victory in a parlour game should not be overpitched. But,
like Marx's win earlier this year in the BBC Radio 4 competition for
"greatest philosopher," it shows that thinking people are still
attracted by the critical impulse, above all when it is directed with
consistency at the trend towards a global pensée unique. The
Prospect/FP list was sparing in its inclusion of critics of US foreign
policy, which may have increased Chomsky's lead a little. But no
change in the list would have made a difference to the outcome. The
editors had misjudged the mood and discernment of their own readers.
_________________________________________________________________
Against Chomsky
Oliver Kamm deplores his crude and dishonest arguments
In his book Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, Richard Posner
noted that "a successful academic may be able to use his success to
reach the general public on matters about which he is an idiot."
Judging by caustic remarks elsewhere in the book, he was thinking of
Noam Chomsky. He was not wrong.
[Intellectuals_Kamm.gif]-SubmitChomsky remains the most influential
figure in theoretical linguistics, known to the public for his ideas
that language is a cognitive system and the realisation of an innate
faculty. While those ideas enjoy a wide currency, many linguists
reject them. His theories have come under criticism from those, such
as the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, who were once close to him.
Paul Postal, one of Chomsky's earliest colleagues, stresses the
tendency for the grandiloquence of Chomsky's claims to increase as he
addresses non-specialist audiences. Frederick Newmeyer, a supporter of
Chomsky's ideas until the mid-1990s, notes: "One is left with the
feeling that Chomsky's ever-increasingly triumphalistic rhetoric is
inversely proportional to the actual empirical results that he can
point to."
Prospect readers who voted for Chomsky will know his prominence in
linguistics, but are more likely to have read his numerous popular
critiques of western foreign policy. The connection, if any, between
Chomsky's linguistics and his politics is a matter of debate, but one
obvious link is that in both fields he deploys dubious arguments
leavened with extravagant rhetoric--which is what makes the notion of
Chomsky as pre-eminent public intellectual untimely as well as
unwarranted.
Chomsky's first book on politics, American Power and the New Mandarins
(1969) grew from protest against the Vietnam war. But Chomsky went
beyond the standard left critique of US imperialism to the belief that
"what is needed [in the US] is a kind of denazification." This
diagnosis is central to Chomsky's political output. While he does not
depict the US as an overtly repressive society--instead, it is a place
where "money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print
and marginalise dissent"--he does liken America's conduct to that of
Nazi Germany. In his newly published Imperial Ambitions, he maintains
that "the pretences for the invasion [of Iraq] are no more convincing
than Hitler's."
If this is your judgement of the US then it will be difficult to
credit that its interventionism might ever serve humanitarian ends.
Even so, Chomsky's political judgements have only become more
startling over the past decade.
In The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many (1994), Chomsky considered
whether the west should bomb Serb encampments to stop the
dismemberment of Bosnia, and by an absurdly tortuous route concluded
"it's not so simple." By the time of the Kosovo war, this prophet of
the amoral quietism of the Major government had progressed to
depicting Milosevic's regime as a wronged party: "Nato had no
intention of living up to the scraps of paper it had signed, and moved
at once to violate them."
After 9/11, Chomsky deployed fanciful arithmetic to draw an
equivalence between the destruction of the twin towers and the Clinton
administration's bombing of Sudan--in which a pharmaceutical factory,
wrongly identified as a bomb factory, was destroyed and a
nightwatchman killed. When the US-led coalition bombed Afghanistan,
Chomsky depicted mass starvation as a conscious choice of US policy,
declaring that "plans are being made and programmes implemented on the
assumption that they may lead to the death of several million people
in the next couple of weeks... very casually, with no particular
thought about it." His judgement was offered without evidence.
In A New Generation Draws the Line: Kosovo, East Timor and the
Standards of the West (2000), Chomsky wryly challenged advocates of
Nato intervention in Kosovo to urge also the bombing of Jakarta,
Washington and London in protest at Indonesia's subjugation of East
Timor. If necessary, citizens should be encouraged to do the bombing
themselves, "perhaps joining the Bin Laden network." Shortly after
9/11, the political theorist Jeffrey Isaac wrote of this thought
experiment that, while it was intended metaphorically, "One wonders if
Chomsky ever considered the possibility that someone lacking in his
own logical rigour might read his book and carelessly draw the
conclusion that the bombing of Washington is required."
This episode gives an indication of the destructiveness of Chomsky's
advocacy even on issues where he has been right. Chomsky was an early
critic of Indonesia's brutal annexation of East Timor in 1975 in the
face of the indolence, at best, of the Ford administration. The
problem is not these criticisms, but Chomsky's later use of them to
rationalise his opposition to western efforts to halt genocide
elsewhere. (Chomsky buttresses his argument, incidentally, with a
peculiarly dishonest handling of source material. He manipulates a
self-mocking reference in the memoirs of the then US ambassador to the
UN, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, by running separate passages together as
if they are sequential and attributing to Moynihan comments he did not
make, to yield the conclusion that Moynihan took pride in Nazi-like
policies. The victims of cold war realpolitik are real enough without
such rhetorical expedients.)
If Chomsky's political writings expressed merely an idée fixe, they
would be a footnote in his career as a public intellectual. But
Chomsky has a dedicated following among those of university education,
and especially of university age, for judgements that have the veneer
of scholarship and reason yet verge on the pathological. He once
described the task of the media as "to select the facts, or to invent
them, in such a way as to render the required conclusions not too
transparently absurd--at least for properly disciplined minds." There
could scarcely be a nicer encapsulation of his own practice.
The author is grateful for the advice of Bob Borsley and Paul Postal.
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