http://www.enteract.com/~peterk/
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Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2001 07:49:30 -0600
From: "Peter K." <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Hitchens on Chomsky

http://www.nationalpost.com/

National Post
January 6, 2001
The importance of speaking truth to Noam Chomsky

by Christopher Hitchens

CHOMSKY ON MISEDUCATION
Edited and introduced by Donald Macedo Rowman & Littlefield, 197 pp., $29.75

Some years ago, in an interview conducted with himself for The Chomsky
Reader, America's most and least celebrated public intellectual came up with
a beautiful piece of empirically based reasoning. Listen to the talk radio
shows, he suggested, and notice what happens. When the argument is about
sports, people will call up full of convictions and express themselves in
strong and vivid language, challenging the experts and proposing their own
solutions. Then, when it's time for a public affairs program, the audience
will speak in received-opinion babble, hesitate and defer to the pundits. In
the first case, they trust themselves and know what they know; in the
second, they feel they are trespassing on forbidden establishment turf. It's
politics, not football, that is the dismal, consumerized, spectator pursuit.

Plain insights such as this have won Chomsky a following that, should he
ever show an inclination to declare himself The Leader, would constitute a
cult. But he persists in his direct, unadorned campaign to speak truth, not
to power (which knows the truth, as he bluntly points out) but to the
powerless. He considers his own discoveries in the field of linguistics to
be essentially simple -- language and cognition are common and innate
capacities available to all -- and he stands out as a defender of the
verifiable and the objective against various post-modern relativists and
casuists who sneer at the notion that anything can be intrinsically knowable
or valuable.

There remain two problems. Or rather, one problem and one reservation. The
problem is: How come so many sane and decent and well-informed people can be
so easily fooled or intimidated? The reservation -- illustrated by Donaldo
Macedo and one or two other Chomsky fans and anthologists -- is: How come
people of supposedly critical intelligence will simply echo what Chomsky
says? Let me give two brief examples.

Chomsky has written and argued (quite rightly in my opinion) that the armed
forces of El Salvador in the 1980s treated the population of that country as
if they lived under foreign occupation, which to an important extent they
did. I should add that he drew attention to this when it was a good deal
less popular to do so and the facts were a great deal less well known. But
then he adds, in an interview with Macedo published here: "Vaclav Havel, who
became the darling dissident for the West, repaid his supporters handsomely
when he addressed the U.S. Congress a few weeks after the six Jesuits in El
Salvador were murdered. Instead of showing solidarity with his comrade
dissidents in El Salvador, he praised and extolled Congress as 'the defender
of freedom.' The scandal is so obvious that it requires no comment."

To this, Macedo returns a few rather opaque observations from the late
Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire. But had Havel praised the U.S. Congress
for its complicity in El Salvador? He had not. Had he not, only a few weeks
earlier, also defied all odds to become president of his country? He had.
Did he owe a debt to the U.S. Congress? To some extent. Had many members of
that Congress not also voted for, say, the Boland amendment and criticized
the death squads? Surely. Thus, whatever the ambiguities and compromises
involved, it's hardly a "scandal" or, if it is, not such a scandal as to be
self-evident to anyone but a moral cretin.

Chomsky redeems himself on the next page, by leaving Macedo's Freire-derived
phrases alone and upholding the concept of inquisitive detachment.

My next criticism is directed at Macedo alone. After a paragraph of routine
abuse of Henry Kissinger, which again pushes at an open door as far as I am
concerned, he says, "Instead of being charged with crimes against humanity
by the War Crime (sic) Tribunal, Kissinger continuous (sic) to make
pronouncements regarding the NATO bombing of Kosovo." This could leave an
uninstructed reader with the impression that Kissinger's "pronouncements"
(which have, by the way, become quite discontinued) were in favour of that
bombing. In point of fact, and in common with much of the American and
European right, Kissinger argued strongly against the bombing, and for
leaving Milosevic alone. Among those who admire Chomsky, there has been a
protracted and interesting argument about his own relative neutralism on
both the moral and political question of former Yugoslavia; Macedo had an
excellent chance to clarify and argue this (much of the book is a dialogue
between the two men) and has chosen instead to elude or even obfuscate it.
His hero deserves -- in both senses of that term -- a more tenacious
questioner.

In several cases, such as that of East Timor, Chomsky has been vindicated in
saying that the matter is perfectly simple -- an obvious case of aggression
and genocide -- and that only the terrible twins of Western moral smugness
and Western strategic self-interest were capable of obscuring the fact. His
long battle to publicize the injustice done to the Arabs of Palestine is
also an exemplary one and has involved him in facing a torrent of nasty
abuse. I must add that, as a journalist living in Washington, I can't praise
him enough for his mordant remarks about the servility and sloth of the
American media, always ready to trade "access" for a slew of deceitful
euphemisms. However, there would be less interest and less urgency involved
in these matters if there was always an obvious truth to be revealed by the
tearing of a curtain of lies. Chomsky's intellectual mentors are such men as
John Stuart Mill, John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, George Orwell and -- more of
a surprise than it ought to be -- Adam Smith. I share his admiration for the
honest prose and the penetrating style of this tradition. However, there
does come a point where the pedagogic style can become a pitying one, with
the instructor saying only stupidity prevents the pupil from seeing what he
ought to see. It's no concession to the amoralism of Jean Baudrillard and
other Parisian mystifiers to assert that one of the delights of argument
lies in ambiguity and distinction, and that relativity is not always the
same as relativism.
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Christopher Hitchens' latest book is Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in
the Public Sphere.

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