Noam Chomsky

Alison Edgley

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137320209
• eBook ISBN: 9781137320216
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Exploring the key debates surrounding human nature, epistemology, the nature of social knowledge, foreign policy, the Propaganda Model, the anarchist tradition and the revolutionary transformation of society, this book reveals and explains the structure and power of Chomsky's work.

Part I

Historical Context

1

Chomsky and Religion

Ronald E. Osborn

The three-cornered fight

In his 2007 book, A Secular Age, Charles Taylor describes the philosophical and moral terrain of the modern world as a collision among three broad camps: (1) secular or ‘exclusive humanists’, (2) postmodern or ‘neo-Nietzschean’ anti-humanists, and (3) ‘acknowledgers of transcendence’ (pp. 636–637). One intriguing feature of this struggle, Taylor writes, is the fact that any two parties will always ‘gang up against the third on some important issue’ (p. 636). Exclusive humanists—continuing the Enlightenment project of advancing a politics and ethics within an entirely disenchanted or immanent frame—stand united with neo-Nietzscheans in their opposition to religious ways of thinking and in their goal of liberating society ‘from the illusion of a good beyond life’, relegating ideas of transcendence ‘to the status of past illusion’ (p. 637). Yet it turns out that the ‘camp of unbelief is deeply divided—about the nature of humanism, and more radically, about its value’ (p. 636). Anti-humanists (who Taylor believes have exercised a more powerful influence on history and culture over the past century than many individuals realize) have levelled an ‘immanent counter-Enlightenment’ critique of liberal conceptions of human nature and rights, which they describe as oppressive forms of essentialism and masks for sheer power objectives. Acknowledgers of transcendence—Taylor’s inclusive phrase for a wide variety of religious or metaphysical positions but chiefly theism in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions—meanwhile join with exclusive humanists in resisting the corrosive logic of postmodern anti-humanism and in defending core values of justice, equality, human dignity, and human rights. At the same time, these thinkers agree with Nietzsche and his postmodern heirs that secular humanism—having cut itself off from the spiritual and moral reserves of religious conceptions of personhood—lacks the philosophical depths to provide an intellectually coherent and normatively compelling account of its own highest values.

The picture becomes more complex, Taylor notes, if we add to this typology two intermediate positions that combine elements of the above camps and that might warrant being counted as distinct camps of their own. He identifies a strand of ‘heroic humanism’ (p. 600) in the character of Dr Rieux in Albert Camus’s novel, The Plague. Like the neo-Nietzschean anti-humanists, heroic humanists retain a deep pessimism if not cynicism towards Enlightenment understandings of human nature (whether rooted in confidence in the power of pure reason, following after Kant, or in the power of moral sentiments, following after Hume); yet they continue to fight for humanistic values and in defence of those who suffer as an act of defiance or rebellion against the absurd. Taylor’s own position is in certain ways intermediate between the exclusive humanism of secular liberalism(s) and the religious corner. A committed Catholic, he defends the ‘practical primacy’ of political secularism (the post-Enlightenment disentangling of religious from governmental authority, which he describes as a great gain for humanity and necessity in any pluralistic society), while at the same time rejecting metaphysical secularism or atheism as an intellectually stifling and ultimately disastrous project (that in fact puts practical/political secularism in jeopardy) (p. 637). We might uncover a range of additional positions that would further complicate or problematize the picture of our age as a three-cornered fight. Broadly speaking, though, Taylor’s image of the three-cornered struggle between secular humanists, anti-humanists, and religious humanists provides a helpful guide to the fault lines of much contemporary social and political thought—including the political ethics of Noam Chomsky.

In their famous 1971 debate on Dutch television, Chomsky and Foucault reached an impasse on the question of the meaning of justice that vividly illustrates two camps in Taylor’s three-cornered battle. ‘[I]f justice is at stake in a struggle,’ Foucault asserted, ‘then it is an instrument of power … Rather than thinking of the social struggle in terms of “justice,” one has to emphasize justice in terms of the social struggle’ (Chomsky and Foucault, 2006: 50). Chomsky—who has been described by David Samuels as ‘perhaps the last great thinker of the Enlightenment’ (Chomsky, 2010)—responded incredulously, ‘Yeah, but surely you believe that your role in [opposing the Vietnam] war is a just role, that you are fighting a just war, to bring in a concept from another domain’ (Chomsky and Foucault, 2006: 50). Foucault proceeded, however, to dismiss the idea of justice even more emphatically, declaring that for him all moral vocabulary and talk of ‘justice’ ultimately reduces to sheer power interests:

One makes war to win, not because it is just … one doesn’t speak in terms of justice but in terms of power … If you like, I will be a little bit Nietzschean about this; in other words, it seems to me that the idea of justice in itself is an idea which in effect has been invented and put to work in different types of societies as an instrument of a certain political and economic power or as a weapon against that power. But it seems to me that, in any case, the notion of justice itself functions within a society of classes as a claim made by the oppressed class and as a justification for it.

(pp. 51, 54–55)

Chomsky’s answer to Foucault’s essentially nihilistic position highlights the necessity as well as the precariousness of his moral realism. Common sense tells us that justice, if the word has any meaning at all, is not simply synonymous with power, and that we need a robust sense of justice if we are to have any hope of advancing goals of human flourishing and human rights. In the words of Edward Said, Foucault’s statements in his debate with Chomsky display the ‘disturbing circularity’ and ‘theoretical overtotalization’ of his understanding of power:

This is a perfect instance of Foucault’s unwillingness to take seriously his own ideas about resistance to power. If power oppresses and controls and manipulates, then everything that resists it is not morally equal to power, is not neutrally and simply a weapon against that power. Resistance cannot equally be an adversarial alternative to power and a dependent function of it, except in some metaphysical, ultimately trivial sense. Even if the distinction is hard to draw, there is a distinction to be made—as, for example, Chomsky does when he says that he would give his support to an oppressed proletariat if as a class it made justice the goal of its struggle.

(Said, 2000: 215–216)

Nevertheless, absent a ‘thick’ metaphysical or religious framework, Foucault’s challenge cannot be easily dismissed as simply incoherent, incomprehensible, or inconsequential, even though Chomsky has at times spoken of Foucault in this way. In reply to a question about Said’s relationship to Foucault on the one hand and his own thought on the other, he responded, ‘I can’t really answer that, because I never understood Foucault, so I don’t understand what the two poles are. I thought Foucault had some interesting things to say about the history of ideas, but I did not understand the significance and importance of his work’ (Iskandar, 2010: 372–373). Yet for many postmodern as well as non-Western thinkers, there are no longer any unassailable philosophical reasons why the mere fact of personhood should entail a programme of inviolable or sacrosanct individual rights (in any powerfully normative as opposed to purely pragmatic sense). The implications of this fact have far-reaching consequences. As Stephen Hopgood writes, ‘the ground of human rights is crumbling beneath us, both in theory and in practice: The world in which global rules were assumed to be secular, universal and nonnegotiable rested on the presumption of a deep worldwide consensus about human rights—but this consensus is illusory’ (Hopgood, 2014). What is more, Hopgood contends, the idea of human rights as a universal norm should now be named and rejected for what it is: a historically contingent and metaphysically dubious inheritance of Western Christianity.

Chomsky seems to have been at least partially aware of these grounding dilemmas for rights advocates in his reply to Foucault during their exchange:

I think there is some sort of an absolute basis—if you press me too hard I’ll be in trouble because I can’t sketch it out—ultimately residing in fundamental human qualities, in terms of which a ‘real’ notion of justice is grounded. I think it is too hasty to characterize our existing systems of justice as merely systems of class oppression; I don’t think that they are that. I think that they embody systems of class oppression and elements of other kinds of oppression, but they also embody a kind of groping towards the true humanly valuable concepts of justice and decency and love and kindness and sympathy, which I think are real.

(Chomsky and Foucault, 2006: 55)

In Taylorian perspective, Chomsky’s inability, as a self-identifying Enlightenment rationalist, to refute Foucault’s strong relativism and anti-humanism on purely rationalistic grounds (‘if you press me too hard I’ll be in trouble because I can’t sketch it out’) points to a significant lacuna in Chomsky’s philosophy that is also a persistent dilemma of our ‘secular age’: the gap between 1) his appeal to ‘absolute’ or ‘fundamental human qualities’ that might give our ‘groping towards the true humanly valuable concepts of justice and decency and love and kindness and sympathy’ meaning and motivating force; and 2) his commitment to a strict ‘methodological monism’ and scientific account of human nature that has rendered the above ideals increasingly philosophically problematic, culturally contested, and politically fragile.¹

In the light of this dilemma, there is rich and as yet unexplored ground for dialogue between Chomsky and the third camp in the three-cornered fight that was missing from the 1971 debate. Chomsky has described his encounter with Foucault as a baffling one that took him by surprise and that left no room for further conversation on moral-ethical questions. ‘I’d never met anyone who was so totally amoral,’ he states. ‘Usually, when you talk to someone, you take for granted that you share some moral territory. Usually, what you find is self-justification in terms of shared moral criteria; in that case, you can have an argument … With him, though, I felt like I was talking to someone who didn’t inhabit the same moral universe’ (as cited in Miller, 1993: 203). By contrast, Chomsky does inhabit the same moral universe as numerous religious believers or ‘acknowledgers of transcendence’, with whom he has frequently made common cause (his first talks against the Vietnam War, for example, were delivered in churches) (Barsky, 1997: 121). Chomsky’s relationship to religion is more complex than the narrative Chomsky has himself at times put forward of Enlightenment reason squaring off against ‘irrational belief’. For one thing, such a picture fails to give an adequate account of the relationship between radical thought and the Jewish cultural and religious milieu in which Chomsky was raised and which helped to shape his moral and political commitments from an early age. It also ignores the historical importance of religious and metaphysical ideas as a wellspring for the putatively strictly secular humanistic values of the Enlightenment project. Further, a growing body of work has challenged the sharp sacred/secular binary of liberal political theory and begun to map the contours of a ‘post-secular’ world in which even Chomsky might in certain ways be regarded as a paradoxically ‘secular religious’ thinker.

Chomsky’s ambivalence towards religion

While Chomsky’s work has encompassed a remarkably wide range of topics and disciplines, he has been surprisingly silent on the subject of religion, despite the historical and philosophical importance of religious beliefs and practices for questions of human nature, morality, and politics. The indexes to The Chomsky Reader edited by James Peck and The Essential Chomsky edited by Anthony Arnove do not contain the word ‘religion’, and what references to ‘religion’ can be found in their pages and in Chomsky’s major works almost invariably refer not to religion in any conventional sense but rather to the ‘state religions’ of nationalism and capitalism, sustained by the mass media and its priesthood of intellectual elites. A representative example of Chomsky’s pejorative and ironic use of the word ‘religion’ can be found in his 1984 essay, ‘The Manufacture of Consent’, in which he writes:

Violence, deceit, and lawlessness are natural functions of the state, any state. What is important in the present context is the contribution of the harshest critics (within the mainstream) to reinforcing the system of indoctrination, of which they themselves are the victims—as is the norm for the educated classes, who are typically the most profoundly indoctrinated and in a deep sense the most ignorant group, the victims as well as the purveyors of the doctrines of faith … If you want to learn something about the propaganda system have a close look at the critics and their tacit assumptions. These typically constitute the doctrines of the state religion.

(Chomsky, 1987: 126)

However, insofar as Chomsky has engaged with matters of theology and religion (typically in response to questions from interviewers) it has been in terms that are at once deeply ambivalent and highly allusive.

On the one hand, Chomsky rejects theistic worldviews such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as at best ‘irrational belief’, at worst dangerous fanaticism and ‘subordination to authority’ (Chomsky, 1992: 152; 1998: 16). In answer to what he makes of the idea of God as well as concepts of teleology in evolution, his reply is terse and emphatic: ‘I don’t think there’s any reason to suspect there’s any validity to any such notions’ (emphasis mine) (Chomsky, 2005: 37–39). The God of Hebrew Scripture in Chomsky’s reading (following in the tradition of Enlightenment sceptics such as Voltaire and Thomas Paine²) appears not as a source of moral wisdom or humanistic values so much as a cosmic tyrant. ‘[T]he Bible is probably the most genocidal book in the literary canon,’ he declares:

[N]ot only did [the God of the Bible] order His chosen people to carry out literal genocide … the God of the Bible was ready to destroy every living creature on earth because some humans irritated Him. That’s the story of Noah. I mean, that’s beyond genocide—you don’t know how to describe this creature. Somebody offended Him, and He was going to destroy every living being on earth? And then He was talked into allowing two of each species to stay alive—that’s supposed to be gentle and wonderful.

(Chomsky, 2004a: 14; see also Chomsky, 1999: 154)

The Exodus/conquest narrative—the stories of Israel’s deliverance from slavery in Egypt and of its violent seizure of the land of Canaan being inseparably linked in the biblical texts (Schwartz, 1997: 15–38)—is thus challenged by Chomsky from the perspective of a secular rationalist-humanist critique and a ‘plain’ reading hermeneutic in keeping with his ‘Cartesian common sense’ approach to questions of ideology and political power in general (Chomsky, 1987: 33–35). No specialized knowledge or complex historical contextualization and literary analysis are required to evaluate the meanings of these works or their significance for readers today. One must simply apply one’s intellect to the evidence available to all. Chomsky has shown little time or interest in the nuanced attempts by some biblical scholars to salvage a positive ethic from what—at least on the surface for many modern readers—are some of the most unsettling documents in human history (see, for example, Brueggemann, 2009).

One possible reason for Chomsky’s insistence upon a ‘common sense’ or ‘plain’ approach to these central narratives of both Judaism and Christianity is the fact that—whatever they might have meant to their earliest audiences or to sophisticated readers in the present, and whether or not they are rooted in memories of actual historical events³—their violent potential as living texts for persons of faith remains an undeniable dilemma. If Chomsky has at times problematically adopted the same analytical approach to Scripture followed by Jewish and Christian fundamentalists (who also insist upon a ‘plain’ or ‘literal’ reading that dispenses with all subtlety, tension, irony, and ambiguity in the text so as to drive us to a place of firm moral commitment), he nonetheless forces us to wrestle more honestly and directly with how the biblical narratives are frequently used. Similar to Said, who offered a pointed critique of Michael Walzer’s reading of the Exodus story as an emancipatory text, Chomsky calls attention to the way the conquest narratives of the Hebrew Bible have contributed to recent and ongoing assaults on human rights and human dignity in the Middle East (Said, 1986: 86–106). During Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, for example, military Rabbis distributed maps of the country to Israeli soldiers with the Arabic names of cities replaced by Hebrew names drawn from the Bible, encouraging the fighters to fulfil the divine mandate given to Joshua and to occupy the land as the rightful inheritance of descendants of the tribe of Asher (Chomsky, 1999: 153–154).

In keeping with Marxian sociology, Chomsky has at times described the persistence of religion in modern, industrialized societies as a symptom or pathology of structures of inequality, class, and power. According to Marx, religion fulfils a dual function: it buttresses the political order as a tool of the p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Historical Context
• Part II: Key Works
• Part III: Themes and Debates
• Part IV: Contemporary Relevance
• Reflections
• Guide to Further Reading
• Index