Noam Chomsky: Mr. Conservative?

Admittedly, this is Doug bait. Even so, I would be curious of what he thinks of this piece.

From Charles Glass at Taki's Magazine:

Noam Chomsky’s new book, Hopes and Prospects, leads me to a conclusion that will startle his admirers and critics alike: Chomsky is a conservative. It might surprise him as well. After all, he is a socialist and a libertarian. The fundamental precept of his philosophy, which stems from a view of humans as free and creative beings, is that people should be left alone. While the managers of society may coerce and manipulate people, they can and should resist domination. Most conservatives, at least in the American tradition, believe the state should stay out of the lives of its citizens. Too many self-described conservatives insist that the government they can resist at home should involve itself in the lives of people in other countries. Dictating to others how to live is deeply unconservative. If the American government should stay out of the affairs of those of us who have the right to vote for and against it, how much more should it leave alone those with no say in its direction? The American federal government has, as Chomsky states in this enlightening series of essays, no more right to break into the houses of people in foreign lands than into your house in Kentucky or Alaska. Chomsky’s conservatism is more consistent than that of many who claim for themselves, which Chomsky certainly does not, the name conservative. He believes not only in the freedom of Americans, but in freedom from Americans.

Chomsky’s conservatism, with its explicit distrust of politicians and corporate managers, may explain why his most strident critics are to be found among liberals.

I think Chomsky has occasionally described himself as an anarchist. I'm not sure I've ever heard him describe himself as a socialist though he may have.

Personally I've never completely understood the strong contempt for socialism by at least the masses in the middle who fall between left and right positions especially older Americans whose lives are propped up by safety net programs like medicaid/medicare and social security. I think there is a bit of ignorance involved. Speaking of the U. S. of A. we are blend of capitalism with these safety net programs which are essential to the survival of so many especially retirees.

Back to Chomsky--I appreciate a good many of his positions but reading him can be a little boring at times. He's a very technical writer and for good reason.

Chomsky has consistently described himself as an anarcho-syndicalist. Which looks like a libertarian if you only take account of views on the state. And like a socialist if you only take account of views on work and property.

he is a socialist and a libertarian

They're trying to do to the word "libertarian" what they did to the word "liberal."

I don't think Chomsky is easy to define at all. We try to put things into boxes so we can get a better feeling what they're all about--so much so that the actual "meaning" of a word (like liberal or communism or socialist) gets lost in all the feelings. The word (and its meaning) become so tainted that it doesn't matter what the word means at all.

So Chomsky is frustrating because it becomes very hard to put him into any real 'category' that people can define clearly. You don't get a sense that he's trying to convince you to do any specific thing even though he's extremely passionate about what he's telling you.

I once saw him speak and in the Q&A afterward someone asked him if Iraq was 'winnable'. His response was, "Well look at East Timor" (a very tiny island in the Asian Pacific which has had multiple power swings since the mid 70's). To be honest, probably 95% of us in the audience had no idea why he made this reference or what the connection was. But that's just it: that's Chomsky. He doesn't say the answer that sways the most people or brings us all around to some obvious conclusion; rather, he'll go from that to Chile to some decision Teddy Roosevelt made that still haunts us to this day. He's like that genius that could never be a politician because virtually no one understands where he's going as he shifts from point to point.

But again, that's what makes him charming: he's not trying to be popular or rich or famous. He's just working to get his thoughts out there, regardless of where they land. He's not trying to represent (or earn the support of) any one particular group.

So, yeah, whether you call him a Socialist or a Conservative or a Libertarian or an anarcho-syndicalist or a rationalist it doesn't really matter. Somewhere along the line you're probably right.

I think everyone on the Right should read Chomsky. He's one of the most effective opponents of contemporary Western society you'll ever come across. He has a great following among self-hating liberals and lefties.

Of course, he has the usual insane Leftist bias which sees anything done by the West as evil, and is effectively blind to the context in which events happen. A liberal critique of this attitude of his can be found here.

But, as others have noted, he doesn't do bullshit. He avoids Leftie bullshit by simply not saying very much about all the issues on which the Left is vulnerable. (He's good on the absurdity of post-modernism, though. And he is not a hypocrite about free speech, like a lot of the Left. )

He's one of those people who, you feel, just says what he thinks, without first considering its effect on the audience, and then tailoring his remarks with that in mind. People like this are rare.

He's a Jew, but not a Jewish nationalist, so the Jewish nationalists loathe him. Almost everything they say about him is lies and should be ignored.

He has two weaknesses, which are related, which make him unreliable as a source of political fact. By "unreliable", I mean if you simply repeat something he has said without checking it, you run the risk of being caught out, especially where he is accusing an opponent of saying something really wicked. (I went to some trouble to check on something he had accused Samuel Huntington of, and found that, yes, Chomsky was not being honest.) Of course, in theory you should do this for everything and everyone, but do it especially for Chomsky.

If anyone reading this doubts that Chomsky is unreliable, you should read this critique, written by someone who is not a conservative ... in fact, not even political, so far as I can see.

First weakness: pride. He can never admit he was wrong. So the famous incidents in which he did something foolish -- dismissing reports of mass murder by the Liberation Forces in Cambodia, endorsing a Holocaust-denier as a serious scholar -- hurt him a lot more than they would if he could just say, "Hey, I was a bit naive and careless in my utterances, and too quick to dismiss what my opponents were saying -- since they lie so much, it's easy to think they always lie -- but sometimes they're right, as they were about the Khmer Rouge and Mr Faurrison. No-one's perfect." But he can't do that.

Second weakness: he believes it's okay to tell what are effectively untruths about your opponent, if you know he's evil anyway. I suppose people who do this think it's like faking a hair-raising entry from Heinrich Himmler's diary.

Of course, many people on the Right do this sort of thing, and worse. (There are various spurious quotations floating around, in which prominent Communists apparently confide to their conservative interlocutor that, hee hee, America will soon fall into Communist slavery, via liberalism.) He evidently does this not just in political conflict, but in conflicts with other theorists of grammar, over technical questions -- one linguist said of him, "He's a genius, and he fights dirty."

But what I find really annoying about Chomsky is that he is ferociously critical of capitalism, in any of its manifestations, and yet coyly refuses to say how his "anarcho-syndicalist" alternative would actually work. So he can be pure.

The custard-heads who worship him don't bother themselves with trivialities like how we would actually produce anything under "anarcho-syndicalism" -- they probably assume they'll keep getting an allowance from their parents -- so no interviewer ever presses him on just how his alternative would work.

Cody: you'll perhaps be amused by this: I think he agrees with you about race and IQ, but thinks it would be bad to have the facts known right now. He's too honest, by his own lights, to mouth PC b.s. on the issue, but doesn't want to play into the hands of racists. So he doesn't want research done into the subject at the moment. (I actually am somewhat sympathetic to that attitude.)

(Chomsky) doesn't do bullshit.

Douglas! What have you been smoking?!

Sounds more like anarchism than conservatism to me. Conservatives understand man, while maybe free and creative, to be essentially flawed. If men were angels, no government would be necessary. Maybe Chomsky thinks that if all rules and laws were abolished, our true angelic natures could finally show themselves. I have my doubts about such a view.

Okay, it's poorly-phrased. I know what I want to say, but I can't say it exactly. Maybe I'm out of practice.

The best and most sober critique of Chomsky that I have read is by Keith Windshuttle, with all the damning naive Useful Idiot quotations from him where he praises various totalitarian regimes, published in New Criterion, but you can't access it unless you are a subscriber. But I will send extracts to anyone interested.

The possibility is there, Doug. Chomsky, for all the disdain those on the right express toward him, pretty much single handedly brought the concept of "human nature" back into mainstream, scientific discourse during a time when tabula rasa was the reigning paradigm. He's no stranger to intractable issues.