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While reports of his passing, to quote Steven Pinker, were greatly exaggerated, a Chomsky 101 feels quite appropriate in the circumstances. Explaining Chomsky from scratch is an arduous task, much like explaining Shah Rukh Khan to someone who has never watched a Hindi film. But that doesn’t matter one shouldn’t try:
The epithet was bestowed upon him by Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit. As New Yorker profile writer Larissa MacFarquhar explains, the Devil’s accountant implies that he follows the mathematical logic of tort law. She wrote in the New Yorker: “His moral calculus is simple arithmetic. Nothing exculpates or complicates the sheer number of the dead.”
For the uninitiated, tort law refers to a civil wrong where the price for compensation must be borne by the indicted (usually moral compensation), as opposed to criminal law, which is punishable by the state. In this argument, the tort law is based on the number of deaths (and subsequent impact) someone’s action has on other lives.
The example MacFarquhar used was when Chomsky was universally panned for likening the 9/11 attacks to the Clinton Administration bombing of a factory in Khartoum (Sudan). In Chomsky’s worldview, the motive of the bombing was immaterial, but simply the count of total dead, due to the attack, an uncomplicated moral calculator doing basic math where all lives mattered equally.
Chomsky’s clear-eyed sharp logic extended to criticising all wars and berating those who considered them a moral necessity as he argued in an MIT lecture. Speaking about the Iraq War in 2003, he compared the arguments made in favour of the war with the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour. He argued: “If you follow the trail, it led to kicking Europeans out of Asia—that saved tens of millions of lives in India alone. Do we celebrate that every year?”
Like Einstein or Marx, Chomsky is without a doubt one of the most revered intellectuals in the world right now, whose views have shaped public discourse for the last six years, and whose voice has never wavered over the years. Interestingly, the only other American who has had such a deep influence over six decades would be Bob Dylan, though Chomsky once argued that Dylan sounded like someone invented by a capitalist PR machine for their purpose.
Born in Philadelphia, where the two documents (Declaration of Independence and Constitution) that made America the world’s most powerful centralised state, were written and signed, Chomsky remained a lifelong opponent of said centralisation. His views were shaped by numerous things, including his strict Jewish upbringing, early run-ins with anti-Semitics, his father’s work on Hebrew grammar, his mother’s activism, and the writings of Marx and Co. Of course, Chomsky, much like Marx, has often claimed that he is not Marxist.
Noam Chomsky’s – The
Noam Chomsky at MIT
Noam Chomsky had the sort of academic career that would gladden a Bengali mother’s heart. Chomsky was only 10 when he wrote an editorial lamenting the fall of Barcelona (not Pep Guardiola leaving) in the Spanish Civil War in an editorial for his school newspaper. This early research actually would cement his views as a political commentator. He entered the University of Pennsylvania when he was 16 and almost quit before meeting Zellig S Harris, one of the founders of structural linguistics. He studied linguistics, philosophy, and mathematics and would clash with his mentors based on their understanding of how the mind learns language.
While behaviourists have argued that the mind is a tabula rasa (blank slate) where children learn a language as a conditioned response, Chomsky believed they were innately present in the human mind. Like Descartes (I think therefore I am), Chomsky believed the use of proper language was a “creative principle,” not a result of rote learning or repeating. Chomsky earned a BA, MA, and PhD in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania.
He started teaching at MIT in 1955 and formally retired in 1996, though he continued to be associated with the institute as an Emeritus Professor. Chomsky spent most of his career at MIT, where he taught generations of students and researchers. Chomsky also wrote over 150 books and is often called the world’s most cited author (he’s actually eighth in a list that includes the Bible, Plato, and Freud).
Noam Chomsky – The Scientist
Chomsky proposed that all human languages share an underlying structure called Universal Grammar, that acquiring the use of language is innate to humans, and all languages are essentially variations of this grammar. He argues that we possess a LAD (language acquisition device) that allows us (especially more as children) to rapidly learn and understand languages. He distinguished between deep structure and surface structure, how the syntax of a sentence was different from its spoken form. Like Einstein fundamentally changed how the Newtonian universe was understood, Chomsky’s theory of language acquisition challenged the preconceived notion of behaviourists that language was learned through imitation and copying.
The bio-linguistics argued that the principles underpinning the structure of language are present in the human brain, while all behaviourists after BF Skinner argued that language was a condition of one’s nurturing, not nature. Chomsky, on the other hand, said nature is predominantly important. Chomsky’s hypothesis argued that the human brain simply didn’t copy (monkey see, monkey do) and was way more elegant than an information-processing system. He also helped set the theories of modularity of the mind that argued that our brain has special independent modules for different cognitive functions.
Chomsky’s work is multi-disciplinary and has influenced various branches of Science, including linguistics, psychology, computer science, philosophy, and anthropology. His ideas have also impacted the fields of AI and computational linguistics, including natural language processing. Even at an advanced age, his hold on the subject remained superlative.
A guest essay for the NYT titled The False Promise of ChatGPT, he co-wrote with Ian Roberts and Jeffrey Watumull, explained how the large-language models were different from the human brain. Arguing that ChatGPT and their ilk were a “lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching … that gave the most probable answer”, the essay called the human mind an “elegant system that doesn’t infer brute correlations among data points but creates explanations.”
The essay further compares it to a child’s “genetically installed operating system that endows humans with the capacity to generate complex sentences and long trains of thought.” The essay argues: “Indeed, such programs are stuck in a prehuman or nonhuman phase of cognitive evolution. Their deepest flaw is the absence of the most critical capacity of any intelligence: to say not only what is the case, what was the case, and what will be the case — that’s description and prediction — but also what is not the case and what could and could not be the case. Those are the ingredients of explanation, the mark of true intelligence.”
Noam Chomsky – The Critic
Chomsky’s reputation as a distinguished scientist helped cement his reputation, which made his criticism harder to dismiss as that of a wayward rabble-rouser. His stellar academic credentials gave credence to much of his political views which couldn’t be shut down by the state. To paraphrase Charle De Gaulle: “One can’t easily silence Voltaire.”
One of his finest works is Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), written along with Edward S Herman, which developed the Propaganda Model, which argues that mainstream media serves the interests of the elites and their power structures and is simply a tool to shape and control public opinion. Much like Amartya Sen argued that English media in India looks to serve only the top 20%, Chomsky argued the same about the USA, identifying mechanisms that the media uses, to favour the wealthy and powerful.
The five filters of information are:
1) Ownership: Media outlets are owned by elites, who will align with other elites.
2) Advertising: Media’s reliance on ad revenue that will align with the views of the advertisers.
3) Sourcing: Media’s reliance on information from those who represent elite interests, including Big Govt, Big Business, and “expert” sources.
4) Flak: The fourth filter is flak, where anyone challenging power will be pushed to the margins, a perpetual flak machine that goes to discredit those who seek to challenge the established world order.
5) Enemy: And finally, the fifth filter that was identified is a “target”. A common enemy for everyone to hate like communists, terrorists, immigrants, or any other group that could be easily othered and vilified.
Of course, one wonders if Manufacturing Consent was written in 2024, whether it would have a sixth and more important filter that has become the norm in this day and age: Distraction: a modern-day version of the Juvenal Bread-Circus Duality (panem et circenses) that states that you can simply distract most of the population when you give it bread and circus. In modern media, that could apply to the proliferation of what’s called viral content.
Meme: Are you not entertained?
In a piece (that was erroneously tagged as an obituary) in Jacobin, Vivek Chibber argues that the closest parallel to exist with Chomsky was Marx, embodying the Marx notion that “nothing human was alien to him.” Of course, it’s a different matter that Marx found it rather alien when taken down a factory once where he could barely survive.
Calling Chomsky a one-man think tank, Chibber argues: “Chomsky’s commentary is a kind of counter archive, an unofficial documentation of the course of events, which future historians can lean on to fact-check the official record as they try to reconstruct the past. His cataloguing of American criminality in Vietnam or Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinians will be no less important than Marx’s journalism about the Arrow War in 1856 or the Great Indian Rebellion of 1857.”
Chomsky’s Political Views
Chomsky has spent the better part of his life vocally criticising a lot of things, almost like a perennial opposition politician, but near the top of the list will always be capitalism. He argued it prioritises profit over human welfare, leading to inequality and environmental degradation. The concentration of power in the hands of so few, he has constantly argued, would undermine democracy or social justice.
A proponent of anarcho-syndicalism, he argues that workers should have direct control over means of production through decentralised organisations. A fierce critic of American foreign policy, Chomsky has always pointed out – dissing those who argued that America leads the rules-based-international order – that Uncle Sam’s interventions around the world are driven by a desire for strategic or economic desires, and not to promote democracy, social justice or any such quaint notions. He has argued that every single post-war US president can be considered a war criminal.
Chomsky also frowns upon a centralised state, which he believes will always serve the powerful rather than the hoi polloi or the general populace.
The remarkable thing about Chomsky’s long innings in academia and political commentary is that many of the views he holds are now considered mainstream, with many groups agreeing with his overall criticism of the government or the media.
Earlier, this year, many wondered why Chomsky – who’s famously private – hadn’t commented on the Israel-Palestine conflict. In the past, Chomsky has been one of the most vocal critics of both Israel and the USA’s support for Jerusalem, so his silence was seen as eerie.
Last week, a Brazilian newspaper reported (and the details were later confirmed by his wife) that he suffered a massive stroke in the US and now he was having difficulty speaking and the right side of his body was numb. After not getting a lot of hope from American doctors, Chomsky’s wife Valeria flew him to Sao Paulo, where he was first admitted to an ICU before moving to a regular room.
While not able to speak much, the report stated that Chomsky would often raise his left arm in a “lament of anger” whenever he saw images from the conflict in Gaza. It could very well be the last sigh of the avowed anti-establishment critic.
In some ways, Chomsky’s lifelong political advocacy feels a little like John Lennon’s Imagine: great on paper but largely impractical in the real world we live in as opposed to the perceived universe that academics and activists occupy. On the other hand, many will point out that Chomsky lived his life amplifying the sighs of the oppressed around the world.
There’s an old African proverb that goes: “Until the lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.” For close to six decades, the proverbial lion could depend on Noam Chomsky to speak up for him.
