The Chomsky paradox: the responsibility of intellectuals, revisited

For several decades Noam
Chomsky has been the writer most widely read among leftwing and anti-imperialist
activists. The numerous reasons are familiar. His writings analyse crimes of
the powerful, contrast their Realpolitik motives with their euphemistic cover-stories,
mock them with a sardonic wit, and provide documentary evidence from original
sources. His critical, engaging approach has been extended to a broad range of
topics – without parallel in the literature.

By the 1970s his political writings had gained an enormous
readership from global anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist movements. Meanwhile
his linguistics writings gained a specialised readership. Reviewing
his book, Language and Responsibility,
a 1979 essay began as follows: ’Judged
in terms of the power, range, novelty and influence of his thought, Noam
Chomsky is arguably the most important intellectual alive today. He is also a
disturbingly divided intellectual….’ (New York Times). The essay noted a
gap between his ‘highly technical linguistic scholarship’ and his political
writings: ‘The “Chomsky problem” is to explain how these two fit
together.’

In what sense is there a gap between these two parts of his
writing? Or perhaps an implicit link? Any
answers have implications for expertise and the responsibility of intellectuals,
as this essay will argue. Sources cited
are in hyperlinks.

Expertise as a tacit politics

Chomsky’s political writings
have been driven by a sense of moral responsibility. This was explicit in his
1967 essay, ‘The Responsibility
of Intellectuals’, emphasising their ‘role in the creation and analysis of
ideology’, especially capitalist ideology disguised as expertise. His essay
mocked a ‘cult of expertise’, which took different forms amongst anti-war activists
and amongst pro-imperialist intellectuals.

He denounced the latter for sanitising US foreign policy,
especially mass murder in Vietnam. According to Charles Wolf, Senior Economist of the Rand Corporation, for example,
the US merely wishes ‘to help the Asian countries progress toward economic
modernization, as relatively open and stable societies, to which our access, as
a country and as individual citizens, is free and comfortable’. Such beneficent
euphemisms were sarcastically quoted in Chomsky’s 1967 essay.

He further argued: ‘If it is the responsibility of the
intellectual to insist upon the truth, it is also his duty to see events in
their historical perspective’, as a crucial basis for distinguishing truth from
deception. Intellectuals must analyse how
elite ideology justifies oppression by variously appealing to moral superiority,
expertise, modernisation, etc.

As a prominent anti-imperialist activist, Chomsky analysed how
US foreign policy serves its elite’s interests, initially in relation to Southeast
Asia and later the Israel-Palestine conflict. Chomsky
has shown how official experts promote
hegemonic ideas normalising the assumptions of ruling elites, as if other viewpoints were irrational or impossible. He has likewise analysed how the mass media
systematically narrows political issues to minor disagreements within policy
elites. Rather than expect that they could bring us a better future, he has looked
to mass movements, such as communal
experiments in the Spanish Civil War and the Occupy movement. Towards such alternative futures, he has espoused his own kind
of anarchism.

For an anarchist anti-imperialist writer, however, his academic
post had an unusual financial basis. He worked in an MIT unit funded by the US
Armed Forces, generating tensions between his academic and political roles. Chomsky’s fellow MIT academics often denied that their
scientific research had any military relevance, some to the extent of
self-delusion. Such a disavowal posed difficulties for Chomsky too, given his political
awareness, accentuated by his students’ involvement in a project run by the MITRE Corporation for the US Air Force. Hence the puzzle of a possible link between Chomsky’s political
and scientific roles (as in the 1979 NYT
essay above).

Those tensions have been analysed
in an impressive book, Decoding
Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics, by Chris Knight. He has discussed more specific
issues about Chomsky’s dual roles in his three articles on openDemocracy, e.g. ‘Explaining
Chomsky’s Strange Science’.

In a response to Knight from Randy
Harris, the Chomsky puzzle has been trivialised as a matter of the
superstar’s personal idiosyncrasies. To take the debate further, my essay will
locate Chomsky’s linguistics and politics ‘in their historical
perspective’ (his 1967 phrase above). From his
various statements, I will identify an apparent paradox: a politics-free
science and a science-free anti-militarist politics.
Going beyond this paradox, my essay will sharpen the issues for their wider
relevance today, revisiting the responsibility of intellectuals in the final
section. I will identify an apparent paradox: a politics-free science and
a science-free anti-militarist politics.

Politics-free science

As noted in the NYT review essay, Chomsky devised a
‘highly technical’ linguistics. This is better described as an
abstract theory of universal grammar or syntax, which pre-dated his arrival at
MIT. It was publicly launched with his 1957 book, Syntactic Structures, which soon gained fame.

In pushing linguistics towards
universal theoretical abstractions, Chomsky made claims which lack credibility
– and which therefore may lack practical relevance. For example, he argued that
linguistic concepts such as ‘book’ have been fixed genetically in the
mind since humans first evolved, long before any books existed. In this and
other ways, Chomsky promoted abstract, formal concepts, apparently designed to
make his linguistics resemble mathematics (as analysed in Decoding
Chomsky).

On this conceptual basis, linguistic
patterns could be identified by computer techniques, needing no knowledge of
specific languages or everyday communication. The task was to identify innate linguistic concepts and structures,
ideally in a form amenable to a computer program. An entire tech community saw his concepts as potentially bringing human
language under computational control, although Chomsky denied such an aim or
possibility (David Golumbia, The Cultural Logic of Computation, p.38).

His theoretical abstractions
contradict recent developments in linguistics, which has extensively researched
how words and concepts are jointly shaped by communicative interchanges. Nevertheless
Chomsky’s concepts make sense from his own institutional standpoint, serving
his claim that a truly scientific linguistics has no social content. Commentators
(such as Knight and Harris) disagree about whether his theory shifted towards even greater levels of
abstraction.

In any case, if such
abstraction helped to avoid any military relevance, then perhaps Chomsky was
influenced by his sponsors, though not in the way they wanted. The claim
that his scientific work is asocial and therefore politically neutral helped Chomsky
disconnect his professional role as Pentagon-funded scientist from his
moral-political role as anti-militarist activist.

Meanwhile the stereotypical science/politics binary was
being widely contested as deceptive. From the 1960s onwards, New Left activists
were criticising expert and professional knowledges as ideology, serving a
tacit politics of capitalist domination. Academics critically analysed their
own disciplines – e.g. anthropology,
geography, sociology, economics, philosophy, etc. – through new organisations and journals.

Such critiques were extended to claims for scientific
objectivity in medical and biophysical sciences. From the central motto, ‘Science
is not neutral’, critics analysed how science naturalised socio-economic
oppression along class, race, gender and neocolonial lines. The epithet
‘scientism’ criticised agendas for extending the methods of biophysical science
beyond their appropriate remit to socio-political issues. More fundamentally, the epithet helped to
identify tacit socio-political assumptions within science, thus contesting the
science/politics binary.

From 1969 onwards, this critique was promoted in the US by Scientists and Engineers for Social and Political Action
(SESPA), which led to the magazine Science for the People (recently
relaunched). A similar critique was
elaborated from 1969 onwards by the British Society for Social Responsibility
for Science (BSSRS), a broad network for thematic
working groups on agribusiness, health, gender, sociobiology, energy, etc. This
network expanded a constituency for several publications such as Science for People, Radical Statistics
and Radical Science Journal.

In 1977 the latter’s cover featured a quote from Marx’s Grundrisse, ‘One basis for life and
another for science is a priori a
lie.’ Contemporary science was a capitalist form of knowledge resulting from a
labour process constituted by capitalist social relations, e.g. a division of
labour, professional hierarchy, proprietary knowledge, anthropomorphic
metaphors, etc. (Radical
Science Journal, 1981). This critical
agenda was later put in a longer historical perspective by Gary Werskey.

On the rare occasions when Chomsky spoke about such issues,
he defended scientific claims for objectivity, by contrast with other forms of knowledge.
Indeed, he characterised the social sciences as ‘mostly
fraud’: they cannot exist, he insisted, because only natural science merits the
label ‘science’ or has ‘theory’ (Decoding
Chomsky, p.8). Given this judgement, ‘Chomsky faced the daunting
task of presenting his linguistic work, now identified as “science”, as somehow
consistent with his politics – identified as a set of common-sense beliefs and
objectives falling outside the remit of science’, according
to Knight (Decoding Chomsky, p.116).

Science-free politics

Symmetrically with his politics-free science, Chomsky’s anti-militarist
politics has remained putatively science-free in two senses. First, Chomsky has
explicitly disavowed science as a source of political insight or inspiration.
Second, he has said little about the technoscientific contribution to
oppressive power.

In the 1960s the US military-industrial-university complex
was funding and designing science for myriad roles. Some academic research projects
became targets of political critique and even physical attack by activists. MIT
was the second largest university contractor of military research. The chief of
Chomsky’s unit, Jerome Wiesner, managed a large military programme, justifying
his own role on grounds of ‘academic freedom’. Student anti-war activists there
sought to terminate or prevent such research, provoking intense controversy
over academic complicity (Decoding
Chomsky, p.37).

Although
Chomsky militantly opposed the US war machine, he was reticent about its basis in
science. As perhaps his strongest statement, he wrote, ‘As to MIT, I think that
its involvement in the war effort is tragic and indefensible’ (letter to the NYT, 23.03.67). Yet soon afterwards he
shifted the responsibility from MIT as an institution to its staff, though he
named no specific academic or research project there. By contrast, Chomsky named social and
political scientists at prestigious universities for their complicity in
the US imperial project.

Three decades after the 1960s conflicts over MIT’s military
funding, he reflected, ‘I wanted to keep the labs on campus, on the principle
that what is going to be going on anyway ought to be open and above board, so
that people would know what is happening and act accordingly’ (quoted originally
in Barsky’s 1997
biography, later cited in Chris Knight’s book).
Four decades later, however, he unpersuasively asserted, ‘There was
zero military work on campus’, perhaps taking a very narrow definition of
‘military’. Such contradictory statements about MIT’s
military funding indicate some ambivalence, apparently seeking to separate his own unit’s role from his anti-militarist politics.

‘Cognitive
paradigm’ as intellectual counter-insurgency

Chomsky’s syntactic
theory had no known military relevance – and perhaps no such potential (as explained
earlier). By privileging innate cognitive characteristics, however, it played an
implicit political role.

Knight explains the
political context as follows: the 1950s
US imperial project identified dual threats, from ‘communism’ (code for
national liberation movements), and from materialist-institutional perspectives
in the social sciences, inspired by political rebellion. The US
counter-insurgency strategy sought ‘to win hearts and minds’ on both fronts – violently
through forced resettlement of Vietnamese villages, and more subtly within the
west.

Namely,
a new ‘cognitive paradigm’ asserted the innate basis of individuals’ ideas. US Establishment figures promoted this perspective within
professional associations and academic disciplines (Decoding Chomsky, pp. 192-93). While explicitly contesting
behaviourist concepts of human plasticity, the cognitive paradigm had a more
ambitious agenda.

According to the historian David Golumbia, it was ‘a
deliberate and also largely covert effort to resist the possibility of
communist/Marxist encroachment on the US conceptual establishment’. Through this paradigm, ‘individuals,
government entities including military and intelligence bodies, and private
foundations like the RAND Corporation, promoted values like objectivity and
rationalism over against subjectivity, collectivity, and shared social
responsibility’ (Golumbia, The Cultural
Logic of Computation, p.32).

Here
the Chomsky paradox deepens. His 1967
political essay targeted Rand’s Charles
Wolf for his expert euphemisms about modernising Southeast Asia, especially as regards Vietnam. According to
Wolf’s 1965 advice to the Pentagon, a successful counterinsurgency
strategy must go beyond ‘winning hearts and minds’; it must ‘raise the cost and
difficulty of the insurgent operation’. This inevitably blurred any distinction
between targeting armed insurgents and their community support base.

Chomsky
highlighted this violent logic of modernisation in his sardonic way: ‘If we
want to be truly utopian, we may consider the possibility that American
resources might be used to alleviate the terrorism that is the inevitable
correlate of modernization….’ (‘Some
thoughts on intellectuals and the schools’, 1966; reprinted in American Power and the New Mandarins, 1969). Here ‘utopian’ meant reversing
or countering its state-terrorist role in the global modernisation agenda. (Let
us return later to this theme.)

Despite
Chomsky attacking the Rand Corporation, its ‘cognitive paradigm’ agenda was complemented by his claims for linguistics as a
natural science. He compared the human capacity for language with a
digital machine conferring innate ideas and structures. His 1957 book Syntactic Structures ‘was the snowball
which began the avalanche of the modern “cognitive revolution”’, according to David
Lightfoot’s new 2002 Introduction. Through his
linguistics theory, ‘More than any other figure, Chomsky defined the intellectual climate in the English-speaking world
in the second half of the twentieth century’, further argues David Golumbia
(cited in Decoding Chomsky).

Modernisation’s science/politics binary

Let us return to the puzzle
raised by the NYT’s 1969 essay. Chomsky
has written on linguistics and politics in quite different languages, as if for
separate readerships. Each category offers no motive for its audience to take any
interest in the other. His linguistics writings have been opaque to most
general readers and even to many linguists.

Alongside that apparent gap, the two categories have a
paradoxical link. Chomsky devised a politics-free
linguistic science and science-free
anti-militarist politics, each a reverse mirror-image of the other. Although he has been the writer most widely
read by political activists, his linguistics theory resonates with the
cognitive paradigm, an intellectual counter-insurgency against critical social
sciences (as above). Deepening the paradox, his science/politics binary
unwittingly resonates with the capitalist modernisation project that he
attacked.

As understood by Max Weber, modernisation
devises a scientific rationality for expert solutions to societal problems;
efficiency calculations displace emotions and sympathy. Structured in a
bureaucracy, such imperatives impose an ‘iron cage’ on participants. Although Weber expressed some ambivalence towards
modernisation, it has become widely equated with societal progress in elite
agendas.

For at least three centuries,
the modernisation project has elaborated
a calculative-instrumental reason undermining non-capitalist social bonds, thus
marginalising subaltern versions of truth and reality. It has devised a scientistic ideology of
technical knowledge, as if devoid of any socio-political content. Professional experts have often seen the
science/politics binary as a strategic protection against political
interference, yet the binary has effectively concealed policy assumptions
within expertise.

In 2002 Edward Said wrote about the
public role of intellectuals, echoing Chomsky’s 1967 phrase:

‘The cult of expertise has never
ruled the world of discourse as much as it now does in the USA. Another reason
is that even though the USA is actually full of intellectuals hard at work
filling the airwaves, print, and cyberspace with their effusions, the public
realm is so taken up with questions of policy and government, as well as with
considerations of power and authority….’

Edward Said’s essay cited Pierre Bourdieu on the ‘symbolic
domination which increasingly relies on the authority of science…’, e.g. in methods
for classifying socio-economic groups. According to Bourdieu, scientific
authority helps to disguise such domination, even amongst the people being dominated
(La Misère du monde, 1993, translated in The Weight of the World, 1999). This
again exemplifies the science/politics binary, which warrants a systemic
critique.

What responsibility of intellectuals?

In conclusion, let us return
to Chomsky’s insights from a half-century ago about the responsibility of
intellectuals. Here are two general implications for the future.

First, policy elites have
extended a cult of expertise to all areas of life, provoking widespread disputes
over the basis for distinguishing between truth, deception and self-deception. When
building on insights from critical analyses (including Chomsky’s), we should
question any pretence of value-free knowledge or a science/politics binary which
disguises normative assumptions. Likewise, we should question the pervasive expertise
which depoliticises elite agendas and so forecloses societal futures – be it in
the name of modernisation, science, neutral expertise or rationality. We should question the pervasive expertise which
depoliticises elite agendas and so forecloses societal futures.

Second, capitalist expertise
often appropriates ideas which were apparently impractical or even potentially anti-capitalist.
When Wassily Leontief developed his ‘input-output economics’, which eventually served to manage capitalist
economies, he drew on his earlier Marxist education, especially concepts in Capital, Volume 2. Many anti-capitalist
perspectives have been recuperated and turned into legitimation strategies (see
the critical book, The New Spirit of Capitalism). By analysing hegemonic concepts (e.g. the cognitive
paradigm), we can better devise and sharpen critical ones that are less readily
appropriated for elite agendas.