Noam Chomsky

If Marx (Karl, that is) was an unlikely vessel of fame, so Chomsky — in an age of star worship — is almost an anti-celebrity. Marx was more literary by temperament, Chomsky more scientific; and Chomsky had the advantage of growing up in the United States, which has made him a more consistent democrat than Marx. But in both cases, their rigor, intensity, and austerity — their radical seriousness — doesn’t seem like a recipe for popularity. And yet over the past decade, polls have seen Marx voted the most influential thinker of the millennium and Chomsky the most influential intellectual alive.

And then there was light
I first encountered Chomsky 30 years ago, as a gentle but insistently reasonable voice emanating from my radio. When the interview was over, I rushed out, bought his books, and found myself hooked. Whether or not you agree with Marx or Chomsky, Edmund Burke or Leon Trotsky, there’s something exhilarating about reading any of them: the power, the momentum, the sense of a vast argument gathering force like a storm system. If you do agree — if, like Chomsky, you think that part of the colossal amount of unnecessary suffering in the world is caused by your own government and the business/financial class who mostly control it, and that the privilege of being an American citizen makes you responsible for doing something about that — then reading him can feel like a revelation and a summons.

Actually, that radio interview wasn’t the first time I’d heard Chomsky’s name. Leonard Bernstein, in The Unanswered Question, his 1973 Norton Lectures, quoted Chomsky’s famous specimen sentence: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” That was the other world-renowned Noam Chomsky, who had reinvented linguistics in his 30s. Linguistic theorists used to believe that language was a skill, like mathematics or piano-playing, learned step-by-step, via stimulus and response. But, Chomsky showed, children are always saying new things they could not have explicitly learned. How is that possible? Perhaps, he suggested, our language faculty is more like an organ than a skill: it grows, and new stages appear at age-determined times, as with walking or sex. Chomsky was the first to propose this new, biologically based model, and it has turned the study of language upside down. None of his books on linguistics have become Amazon bestsellers, but the Chomskian revolution in cognitive science does appear to be permanent — however distantly linked to his political criticism.

Do Chomsky’s 30 or so books about politics have a common theme? Yes, according to his critics: that America is omnipotent, monolithic, and uniquely malevolent, as bad as Nazi Germany and responsible for all the evil in the contemporary world. If that were true, you might wonder why anyone would bother reading him. But it’s not. On the contrary: according to Chomsky, America is like every other country that has ever existed in this fundamental sense: it contains powerful elites who try, with much success, to influence government policy in their own interests while at the same time portraying those interests as the “national interest” or “general good.”

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This is all but obvious in domestic politics. Practically no one believes that the insurance industry or the pharmaceutical industry or the credit-card industry or the banking industry or the energy industry or the entertainment industry has the public welfare at heart, or anyone’s welfare at heart except their executives’ and shareholders’. And few people who read the newspapers believe that those or any other industries behave fairly or democratically in promoting their interests. But apparently skepticism stops at the water’s edge. Most Americans, including most intellectuals, believe that, unlike every other country that has ever existed, the United States acts internationally to advance noble ideals — liberty and justice for all — rather than to advance the interests of its dominant elites.

Nonsense, Chomsky replies. Sometimes American foreign policy aims to benefit individual industries, as when we overthrew the government of Guatemala, in 1954, on behalf of American agribusiness, and the government of Iran, in 1953, on behalf of American oil companies. Sometimes it aims to control valuable resources, like Venezuelan or Middle Eastern oil and gas. Above all, it aims to set the rules of the global economic game — to establish a business climate favorable to the US over as much of the world as possible. How that is accomplished, how it is disguised by intellectuals, and what it implies for those on the receiving end of American policy: this, in harrowing detail and lucid, impassioned prose, is the substance of those 30 books.