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. ----------------- Christopher Hitchens' latest book is Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere.