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Wednesday 25 June 2014
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In an almost empty hotel bar, around the corner from the British Museum, an 81-y
ear-old American professor is sipping tea and talking in a monotone so muted I w
onder whether he is having me on. I soon conclude that he isnt; that he doesnt do
jokes; that he, Noam Chomsky, does not, in fact, possess a sense of humour.
Sacha Baron Cohen came to the same conclusion when, as Ali G, he asked Chomsky:
How many words does you know, and what is some of them? Chomsky didnt even smile,
he simply informed his interviewer how many words the average Westerner knows, a
nd then, as requested, revealed what is some of them.
Baron Cohens question may have been amusing but it wasnt entirely random. Chomsky
found global fame in the Sixties, in the unlikely field of linguistics. He more
or less founded the discipline, becoming to it what Freud became to psychoanaly
sis and Einstein to cosmology.
In contradiction of the prevailing behaviourist view that language was learned, C
homsky argued that the human mind is actually hard-wired for grammatical thought
. The way children successfully acquire their native language in so little time
suggested, for him, that the structures of language were innate, rather than acq
uired, and that all languages shared common underlying rules. This he called Uni
versal Grammar but dont worry, I wont be testing you later, and linguistics is not
what this interview is about.
Although I should perhaps add that the debate about language has moved on since
Chomskys theories in the Sixties. And Chomsky has moved on, too. In fact he is b
etter known these days as a political activist. The man the American Right love
to hate. The American Left arent exactly wild about him either.
Related Articles
Daniel Everett: lost in translation 10 Apr 2012
As a self-styled anarchist and Enlightenment liberal, he collects political ene
mies the way sticky paper collects flies.
You somehow imagine that a man with his rhetorical clout and reputation will ha
ve a booming voice, or at least some basic oratory skills. Yet here he is, barel
y 4ft away from me, and I am straining to hear him. Its nothing to do with his ag
e or health he is a slender, fit looking, slightly stooped man with greying wavy
hair, a diffident manner and a tendency to glance sideways at you through wire-
rimmed glasses.
It is more that his voice is a croak that begins at the back of the throat and
barely has the energy to leave his mouth. When I put my tape recorder down on th
e table in front of him he says sotto voce You wont be able to hear me. No one can
. I once did a three-hour interview with Radio Oxford only to be told the microp
hone hadnt picked me up.
He is over here to give a lecture at the London School of Economics, and he wil
l have a microphone for that. Over there, he is still an emeritus professor at t
he world-renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has taught for
55 years. And he is still being interviewed regularly on radio and television.
Still addressing public meetings. Still writing polemical books (these days abou
t world affairs). And perhaps what his voice shows, actually, is that he is used
to being listened to, used to crowded rooms falling silent when he begins to ta
lk.
I am no Barack Obama, he says to me now. I dont have any oratory skills. But I woul
d not use them if I had. I dont like to listen to it. Even people I admire, like
Martin Luther King, just turn me off. I dont think it is the way to reach people.
If you are giving a graduate course you dont try to impress the students with or
atory, you try to challenge them, get them to question you.
Unlike Obama, Chomsky has never needed votes. Yet, as an academic, he has alway
s attracted acolytes. He also attracts conspiracy-theory nuts by the thousand, g
iving foam-flecked bloggers the world over a sense that their paranoid ramblings
have a whiff of academic respectability. Yes but I have never wanted them, he say
s. Its one of the reasons Ive stayed at MIT. The reason I like it there is the inte
llectual culture. You dont lecture people, you get them to question, to think for
themselves, not follow. I dont want followers.
He gets them anyway. To judge by his sales figures (his pamphlet on the meaning
of 9/11 sold upwards of half a million copies), the followers are an ever-growi
ng number. In the build up to the Iraq war, indeed, a simple piece of graffiti b
egan appearing on campuses across the world: Read Chomsky. And he is hero-worshipp
ed by the antiglobalisation movement. Bono calls him the Elvis of Academia and rebe
l without a pause.
Other prominent disciples include (or included) John Pilger, Michael Moore and
the late Harold Pinter. The usual suspects perhaps, but there cant be many silver
-haired professors who have appeared on stage with Rage Against the Machine. And
it is not just the young and trendy who seemingly have to go through a Chomsky p
hase.
Even the corporate media he professes to despise has been known to sing his prais
es. The New Yorker calls him One of the finest minds of the 20th century, while Th
e New York Times has labelled him arguably the most important intellectual alive.
But there is also a hint of sulphur in the air that swirls around him. A collec
tion of essays called The Anti-Chomsky Reader, edited by Peter Collier and David
Horowitz, analyses Chomskys anti-Americanism and concludes that he is man with a
deep contempt for the truth. The Left-wing Nation magazine, meanwhile, called him
Americas most prominent self-hating Jew. Back in the early Sixties, long before op
position to the Vietnam War became a fashionable cause for the bien pensants, Ch
omsky was threatened with imprisonment for organising demonstrations and withhol
ding his taxes.
He argued that the war was being fought to halt the spread of independent natio
nalism, not communism. Forty years on, after the attack on the twin towers, he b
ecame the professorial point-man for the campus opposition to the Bush administr
ation.
Touring Americas universities as he preached the cause of radical dissent, he ar
gued that the attacks were ultimately caused by US policies and were rooted in t
he fury and despair of the Arab world.
While he is keen to remind you that he has always described 9/11 as an atrocity
, he adds that it pales next to the Wests deep-seated culture of terrorism. The US,
to him, is the ultimate rogue nation. He even goes so far as to call it genocid
al.
We should recognise that in much of the world the United States is regarded as a
leading terrorist state, with good reason, he says. Most controversially, he has
argued that every post-war American president would have been hanged for war cr
imes under the Nuremberg Laws.
Though he has had dozens of books published, and though he has a sizeable platf
orm in the print and broadcast media, he still likes to play the martyr, the wou
nded outsider, the victim of witch-hunts. Surely, I say, it is a credit to the v
ery American way of life he so often criticises that he is still seen as being p
art of the liberal establishment. He is still, after all, a professor at one of
the leading science universities in the world.
Even in the Bush era, which was the most restrictive since McCarthy, he was sti
ll allowed to say whatever he wanted. I think that freedom is a lot to do with my
association with MIT, he says. It may have been funded by the Pentagon in the Fif
ties and Sixties, yet it was also the centre of the resistance movement. It had
autonomy.
Hes not kidding. When Nixon drew up his enemies list in the early Seventies it fea
tured dozens of individuals but only one institution, MIT. Chomsky seems to have
more respect for enemies like Nixon, who acknowledge he is an enemy, than suppo
sed allies who subvert him more subtly and pretend he is their friend.
If you dont like what someone has to say, argue with them, he says. Dont ban them. I
n the US they have a corporate media system and they have a narrow spectrum that
they will tolerate. I have the honour of being identified in print as the one p
erson that they will never allow to appear on NPR [National Public Radio], the s
o-called liberal radio. I would appear on Fox News more easily than I would NPR.
Its not censorship, its part of the narrow liberal intellectual culture.
And it gets personal in the States. What about his dust-up with that one-time l
iberal pin-up and fellow traveller Christopher Hitchens? As the post-9/11 argume
nts raged, it should be explained, Hitchens accused Chomsky of making excuses for
theocratic fascism and exercising moral equivalency in his discussions of 9/11 and
US imperialism. In some awful way, Chomskys regard for the underdog has mutated i
nto support for mad dogs, Hitchens said.
When I ask Chomsky how he answers Hitchens charge that he is an appeaser of Isla
mic fascism, he (disingenuously) denies that he knew that Hitchens had said that
. He said that did he? I havent read him for 15 years.
It is sometimes said that Chomsky would be a better debater if he occasionally
allowed that his enemies acted out of moral convictions as heartfelt as his own.
Hes genial in person, yet his writing hectors when it should persuade.
This is not complicated, he will write. You can be a pure hypocrite or you can loo
k at events honestly. His sentences brook no deviation. No one with even a shred o
f honesty would disagree is a characteristic bit of Chomskyan throat-clearing. In
linguistics, this style of his might be called the attenuated sympathetic. But pe
rhaps his position is more nuanced than my pen-portrait of him allows.
Chomsky may be considered a dissident in America, and a traitor to some, but he i
s not a pacifist. Though he considered the dropping of the atom bomb one of the m
ost unspeakable crimes in human history, he thought the US role in the Second Wor
ld War justified, not least because he is Jewish.
He encountered anti-Semitism as a child, but never told his father, a rabbinica
l scholar who worked on medieval grammar. Theirs was a pretty academic household
, it seems. Chomsky was 10 when he had his first article published, about the Sp
anish Civil War and the rise of fascism in Europe.
Certainly I was inside a political culture, he has said. First generation Jewish w
orking class in Philadelphia. There were strikes and rallies, and so on. I remem
ber at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group o
f women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten
by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.
Nowadays he is sometimes the one being accused of anti-Semitism, in light of hi
s criticisms of Israel. If you do a Google search you will probably read a lot of
stuff about how I am someone who wants to kill all the Jews and hates the Unite
d States. The internet has compromised the quality of debate.
It is basically positive but it has its downsides. If something comes to mind, p
eople just put it up on the internet without even thinking about it. I get a ton
of mail. It used to be hard copy, now it is mostly email and the quality is so
different now. With letters, a lot of stuff is cut out, the stuff that has just
popped into someones mind. With email they send that stuff without thinking. Ther
e is more spontaneity to it but less contemplation.
There may be a quiet anger and testiness just below his surface but, in terms o
f his public persona, Professor Chomsky is diffidence personified, and he is gen
erous with his time. He diligently answers the thousands of emails sent to him e
very week, a laborious task that eats up several hours a day and he usually sign
s off simply with Noam. He recognises no hierarchies, according to his assistant.
He is wearing jeans today. This is because he considers them unhierarchical. Unlik
e suits.
Chomskys new book is called Hopes and Prospects and is about the fallout from Ir
aq and Afghanistan. It also tackles the financial bail-out. Lets start with that,
I say. Eighteen months on, Goldman Sachs is back with the biggest bonuses ever.
What happened to the meltdown?
To them nothing happened. The perpetrators of the crisis emerged more powerful,
richer and better prepared for the next crisis, which they are creating. They ar
e discussing it openly, the people called in as economic advisers to Obama.
I take it he didnt buy into Obamas message of hope and change. Elections in the Un
ited States are expensive extravaganzas run by the public relations industry. Th
e PR people looked at the polls and picked slogans accordingly.
Did you know Obama won the best campaign of the advertising industry in 2008? It
was politicians being marketed as a product, like toothpaste. What does that ha
ve to do with democracy? If you read his statement you find yourself asking what
was the hope? What was the change? These were empty words.
The special relationship isnt so special any more under Obama; he doesnt care wha
t Britain thinks, is that correct? The best definition of the special relationshi
p came at the height of the Cuban missile crisis. America was making decisions w
hich would have affected England, caused its destruction, but without consulting
Macmillan, the then prime minister.
They decided not to let Britain know what they were planning to do because they
decided they were not sufficiently rational to make the right decisions. Things
werent so different 40 years on. Bush considered Blair his lieutenant, not his pa
rtner. The US told Britain it had to support what they were going to do in the U
N otherwise they were irrelevant. That was the word that was used. Does that seem
special to you?
Does Chomsky consider Blair a war criminal? Of course. Have you seen the text of
the Nuremburg tribunal? Worth looking at. It defines aggression as the supreme
international crime. Different from other crimes in that it encompasses all the
evil that follows.
At Nuremburg the chief prosecutor Justice Jackson said: We are handing the defend
ants a poisoned chalice and if we ever sip from it ourselves we have to accept t
he same consequences. Being hanged and being considered as a potential president
of the EU, as Tony Blair was, are not the same consequences.
Chomsky has had many death threats over the years, including one from the Unabo
mber. But did things get particularly ugly for him after 9/11? It was much worse
in the Sixties. I had regular death threats. I remember once the MIT police call
ed me up and said they had received a bomb threat. It was aimed at my home. It i
s open and easier now. It is a completely different atmosphere. People are more
tolerant towards activists these days.
Like that other scion of the left, Tony Benn, Chomsky has a tendency to flap hi
s hands as he talks, birds trapped behind a pane of glass. Benn was devoted to h
is wife Caroline, whom he married in 1949 (she died in 2000). They had four chil
dren and many grandchildren. Chomsky was devoted to his wife Carol whom he marri
ed in 1949 (she died in 2008). They had three children and there are photographs
of his grandchildren on his desk at MIT. And above his door is a large photo of
Bertrand Russell, a fellow libertarian pin-up.
Having said there would be no more linguistics, I find myself back on the subje
ct. What does Chomsky make of stories about undergraduates at British universiti
es having to be taught grammar in their freshman years? To a linguist, one whose
own literary style favours phrases such as generative transformational grammar, t
hat must seem an abomination.
Yes, there is that. It is probably down to the texting culture. The use of texto
nyms and so on. But it is also to do with the way young people read on screen. T
he digital age cuts back reading and, as a consequence, young people are losing
the ability to think seriously. They get distracted more easily, breaking off to
check an email. Speed-reading is exactly the wrong thing to do. You have to thi
nk about what you are reading. He gives me his sideways look. You have to ponder.
Buy Hopes and Prospects by Noam Chomsky from Telegraph Books or call 0844 873 0316