don't be a noam chomsky

part 1 in my series of what type of thinker not to be. follow for part 2: judith butler and part 3: daron acemoglu

Inspired by my own tweet, I’m going to be doing a three-part blog series on avoiding the pitfalls of certain commercially successful thinkers that nevertheless aren’t that great at thinking. I admired all three of these people at one point, and as I’ve grown, I see their habits of mind as something to avoid.

We’ll start in this post with Noam Chomsky, who I see as an emblem of convincing people he’s got it all figured out while in fact providing little insight. The main effect of his rhetorical style is to convince others that he, in his brain, understands things. This is of course not much use to those of us actually doing politics.

Then we’ll move on to Judith Butler, the avatar of saying very little while writing very much. And we’ll finally finish with my vote for the worst social scientist of our time, Daron Acemoglu, who develops ideas that sound right and are shiny but are nevertheless both non-actionable and non-falsifiable—in other words, they don’t matter.

we should not admire noam chomsky’s way of thinking

Noam Chomsky is often lauded as an intellectual titan, a giant, etc. While he certainly wrote a lot of stuff and convinced a lot of people he was right, neither of these things are in themselves praiseworthy. The point of thinking is to move our understanding from less right to more right, and on that front I don’t think Chomsky has been particularly successful.

I’ll leave the language to the linguists, but in the domain I know a bit about—politics—I don’t think Chomsky’s many volumes provide us with much that’s useful. In many respects, they are counter-productive in the sense that you will be less good at doing politics and you will understand less about the world if you read them and take them seriously.

Chomsky’s core shtick is basically the following:

1. You all are idiots

2. I, however, am very smart, I have read many books and I can peer at reality with perspicacity

3. Let me tell you why, in great detail, the New York Times getting a single fact in a single article wrong is evidence of all of society being arrayed against the left

4. Let me also tell you why everything in society is mechanistically controlled by the media and the forces that control the media and the forces that control the forces that control the media. Ultimately reality is just determined by one dude somewhere making bad shit up and we all have to play along.

5. Let me tell you again how smart I am for seeing this, I truly am smart

6. Also everything sucks and we have made no progress, ever

Rather than go exhaustively through various Chomsky books over the decades—which would be very boring—let’s just focus on the it’s-not-genocide-denial about the Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide. Basically, in 1977 Chomsky and coauthor Edward S. Herman questioned reports of really bad shit happening in Cambodia. That bad shit was one of the worst human rights disasters in history, where 25% of Cambodia’s population (1.5-2m people) was killed in a matter of 4 years.

In the article, Chomsky and Herman spend a lot of time calling others’ work “third-rate” and just being mean to people rather than engaging with their arguments. They also clearly want to say that the Cambodian genocide was made up by the American press to slander communists. They don’t outright say this, but they do say that we should be skeptical of refugee accounts that a genocide was happening, that the reporting of genocide was unreliable (“fourth-hand”), and that writing claiming there was a genocide is a “propaganda tract.” In reality, the refugees and the mainstream media and propaganda tracts were right: bad shit was happening!

As far as I know, Chomsky has never come out and gone: “Well folks I really got that one wrong. I had a model of the world where the media was completely in the tank against communism and would make up crazy stuff, and that turned out to be not completely true. The reports were right in this case and I unfortunately cast doubt on what was a terrible humanitarian situation. I am sorry. I have learned some lessons from this such as <lessons here> and I will definitely improve my commentary in the future.”

An honest self-assessment would have Chomsky saying the following things: 1) Yes, I was trying to discredit the geonicde for <reasons here>, 2) I got it wrong for <reasons here>, 3) I have learned <lessons here>, 4) I am sorry.

Instead, Chomsky literally doubled down in Manufacturing Consent, saying that even if the most extreme reports (which he doubted when they were being reported!) were correct (which they were!) it would still support his model of how the media works. Bizarre!

stop talking about this one photo please

If we look more closely at “Distortions at Fourth Hand”—the article casting doubt on the Cambodian genocide—it’s Chomsky in a microcosm. He litigates minutiae of reporting such as: did the Washington Post use a real or fake photo of the purported genocide. This is a totally irrelevant question—the question is whether a lot of people were being killed by their government. Yet in Chomsky’s article, a single possibly fake photo has its entire lineage traced, and its authenticity litigated as if this is a dispositive factor in the presence of a genocide. It is not!

Beyond this, the presence of the possibly fake photo is taken to be evidence of grander forces—it is the tip of the spear of the entire American propaganda complex where Good Views like those questioning the genocide are censored and Bad Views like those saying there is a genocide are not.

In short, this is not particularly serious thinking. If the photo is not real, well that sucks, but it may be an honest mistake in reporting. And it may be an honest mistake in reporting that does not undermine the main thrust of the reporting itself.

Chomsky has an implicit belief that by questioning the reports of events hard enough you can change or question the events themselves, and that is not right. The media does not determine reality, although it does provide a very powerful lens to view reality through. Ultimately though, there is a reality under all the words, either something is happening or it is not.

The clear goal of the piece, although obviously the authors knew they could not say this directly, was to question the presence of a genocide in Cambodia by making the argument that those saying there was a genocide were just doing American propaganda. That is the argument. That is, like, not a great argument! And it turns out this bad argument was wrong and the authors have never owned up to making it.

do better politics

Throughout the piece questioning the Cambodian genocide, Chomsky laments that the “serious books” (by leftists) are not getting attention and instead the “propaganda books” (by everyone else) are. This is viewed as evidence of a grand rigged system against the heroic leftist scholars, and is viewed as evidence of the fact that we in America live in a highly controlled basically authoritarian society that would make dictators envious if dictators were smart.

Never does the thought arise that maybe the reason nobody is paying attention to the books you want them to pay attention to is some combination of

1. The books are irrelevant

2. The books are wrong

3. The books are written in ways that don’t have broad appeal

Ultimately, Chomsky is encouraging an attitude of blaming the system when he should be looking inward and asking his compatriots to also look inward. If you want to change the world, you can’t just write whatever you want and then complain nobody is reading it. You have to figure out who your audience is, and find out how to communicate in ways that persuade them. This is one of the most basic things in politics.

And, to put it bluntly, Chomsky’s article here is poorly written and poorly argued. It is overly reliant on quotations, does not make a clear case for anything (because it is trying to do genocide denial which is icky and they don’t want to do it outright), and just basically litigates random little points in some books that are irrelevant to the overall argument. This isn’t going to persuade anyone, and it’s laborious to read.

Never does Chomsky go: “We leftists need to figure out how to communicate better, and that starts with me. I am spending my time figuring out how to better communicate with the American public to make real change. We need to make sure we’re expressing ourselves in lock-step with the values of the median voter.” Etc.

It’s always: we’re right, we don’t need to change, and we’re losing because of insurmountable forces arrayed against us. Well then, why bother? You’ll note that this is also a thing that contemporary leftists (and rightists) say: it’s always the external forces that are the problem, never the internal ones. In fact, internal forces have a lot to do with why your badly written articles casting doubt on atrocities aren’t getting more traction!

This is a beautiful losers mentality, where it’s better to purely express something aesthetically than to actually try to acquire power and make the world better.

calvinball

If you believe you are so smart you have dechipered the world-system in a way that nobody else can see, you should chill out and reassess. For all of Noam Chomsky’s certainty, and for all of his writing, he has left us doing politics with very little that’s useable. From my own experience doing politics, it doesn’t seem like his description fits at all. Politics is a big mess, there is little mechanistic control, there are a lot of dynamic forces going against each other, the media orgs are dumb rather than malicious, people are acting in good faith but often just wrong, etc.

But in Chomsky’s world, every event confirms his own self-styled deep understanding of everything. There are nefarious forces, mechanistic control, it’s all pre-planned like a Cigarette Smoking Man plot on the X-Files.

We all have that one friend who always needs to be right about everything. No matter what happens, it confirms with what they said. Intellectual Calvinball. That’s Noam Chomsky. It doesn’t matter what the facts are, or what unexpected events happen, it confirms his model of the world.

I think Chomsky would have been well served to actually do some politics rather than simply commentate on it. Perhaps through that process would come humility in the face of uncertain events, an inability to talk away unpleasant realities, and the discipline that comes with competitive practice. Or maybe he would have just sucked at it and blamed nefarious forces.