Yes, Chomsky too

I don’t expect much from politicians, corporate tycoons, the presidents of prestigious universities, billionaire philanthropists, celebrities, royalty or oligarchs. They live in narcissistic and hedonistic bubbles that cater to their self-worship and moral depravity. But I do expect a lot from intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky. The explanation by his wife Valéria – Noam suffered a severe stroke in June 2023 and is incapacitated – of their relationship with Jeffrey Epstein is filled with the fatuous excuses used by all those who have been outed in the Epstein emails and documents. According to Valéria, she and Noam were “overly trusting.” This led to “poor judgment.”

Chris Hedges, February 9: Chomsky, Epstein & Betrayal

There is no ethical way to be a billionaire. Having that much money and power destroys your brain, destroys your morality to the point where it’s clear from these files that Epstein and others considered themselves completely above the law and held no value for human life. And that’s what really comes out of these thing  – that this, the billionaire class that rules us, has to be destroyed and overthrown.

So what was Chomsky doing?

Alan McLeod to Mnar Adley, February 6:: Behind The Headlines

I’ve often cited Noam Chomsky approvingly on this site, but always in the context of his work on corporate media’s systemic corruption: its inability, structural and irremediable, to speak truth to power on matters crucial to the same; its irreducible role in manufacturing consent for the agendas of power. ¹

On his record of applying his own theorising to the designs of really existing empire, I was less enamoured. It wasn’t a red line for me – I try to keep those to a bare minimum, like cannibalism, genocide apologetics and Jeremy Clarkson – but Chomsky’s pithy appraisal of “Putin’s unprovoked war in Ukraine” …

Of course it was provoked. That’s why they have to keep saying it was unprovoked.

… was paired with condemnation of Russia’s SMO. This lacuna, far from unique to the professor, seems to me untenable. If we acknowledge that Russia was, for reasons set out here, placed in an impossible situation by Western aggression, yet condemn her response of four years ago and counting, it is surely incumbent on us to set out an alternative path she should have taken.

The silence, from Chomsky and others, is deafening.

But this post isn’t about that, or the other issues where Chomsky the theorist and Chomsky the practitioner aren’t easily reconciled. It’s about why he was not only accepting the largesse of a known paedophile, but advising him on how to negotiate the public opprobrium consequent on his conviction as such. ²

I’m no stranger myself to spectacular errors of judgment. But as the latest revelations about Chomsky see the broad left moving from defence and denial to dismayed acceptance that our man had feet of clay – though it should be stressed there is no evidence or even suggestion of his being involved in the abuse of girls – there’s simply no way of glossing over what we now know. For a commendably clear setting out of the case, by two of the many who had held him in great esteem, I recommend the twenty-four minute dialogue between Mnar Adley and Alan Mceod from which the second of my opening quotes is taken. Here again is the link.

I first encountered Chomsky half a century ago in the context not of his overtly political work –  this was ten years before he and Ed Herman published Manufacturing Consent in 1988 – but as a linguist.  I was a twenty-something student on a Communication Studies degree, one of whose strands was language theory. Writing yesterday to a friend, socialist and one of my former teachers on that course, I said:

His account of language acquisition via a “language acquisition device” drew charges of circularity, and of idealism bordering on metaphysical. But I thought and still do that his enduring legacy, in a field dominated by behaviourism on the one hand, the lone problem solving Robinson Crusoe of cognitive psychology on the other, was to show how badly both had underestimated the complexity of their subject; hence of the staggering feat almost all of us have pulled off by the age of three.

(Instead of invoking a LAD as the only way to explain it, couldn’t he have used that amazing feat as start point for exploring immense and untapped human intellectual potential?)

Be that as it may, one academic sets out to answer the conundrum – why would a man like Chomsky give time of day to one like Epstein? – in a CounterPunch piece just two days ago.

Noting Chomsky’s decades of working both with and against the military industrial complex, Prof Knight wonders whether the cognitive dissonance induced by so Jekyll and Hyde an existence led him at some level of awareness to theorise language in terms so abstract as to be useless to paymasters seeking linguistic solutions to problems of advanced missile guidance!

Far fetched? I can think of explanations, of the Chomsky-Epstein friendship, more resilient to Occam’s Razor! But his is a short, lucid and far from boring read. 

To be sure, it’s not the most burning issue right now. (I anticipate returning to what we can expect of the USS Abraham Lincoln and carrier fleet in my next post.) It’s not even the most important question in respect of Chomsky. But FWIW, and I deem that not negligible, here is Chris Knight’s piece on The Chomsky-Epstein Puzzle. It’s not a long read, and there’s a good deal in it you probably didn’t know about his relations with the military industrial complex.

Meanwhile and without minimising this great thinker’s transgression, I make my now customary plea: please don’t throw out baby with bathwater.

* * *

1. Here’s a paragraph I’ve recycled so many times I’ve forgotten when and in what context I first wrote it:

   On many matters ‘quality’ media serve us tolerably well but this truth enables a greater lie. They need to show good faith even when doing so may embarrass those in high office. (Not only does their long term capacity to influence opinion and manufacture consent depend on it. So too, on pain of losing market share, do their business models.) But the trust so gained helps them mislead us, more by omission than commission, on matters critical – above all the vilifying of states and leaders in the way of empire designs – to the power they ultimately serve.

2. The counsel Chomsky gave Epstein was reciprocal. The child abuser in turn gave the professor advice on how to manage his financial affairs – to the point of the latter seeking to make Epstein’s right hand man a guardian on his family trust. The consequent estrangement from his own children is unlikely to be resolved given their nonagenarian father’s incapacitation by a massive stroke.