Noam Chomsky Turns 84
I first heard of Noam Chomsky when I was taking a linguistics class in college.  Since I was not impressed enough with his work to remember any of it, I can only conclude I probably did not do the reading that week.  At 19 I missed the point entirely…need to keep that in mind as I grade my student’s papers this weekend. 

The next time I heard of Chomsky, I was living as a foreign exchange student in Beijing in 1980.  One of the most frequent questions I was asked by Chinese classmates was what I thought of Noam Chomsky.  

 

At the time, I made no connection to linguistics, because the questioners were all asking me what I thought of the ‘famous American dissident, Noam Chomsky.’   

When I think back on those conversations I remember someone making the comment that if we had a real free press in American we would see Noam Chomsky on the David Brinkley Show instead of Sam Donaldson, to battle George Will (or something like that, the memory is not as precise as a sentence compared to the impression in my head).  I was reminded of this when I read a New Yorker essay on Chomsky today.

In his very interesting short essay, NoamChomsky’s Legacy, Gary Marcus focuses on Chomsky’s scholarly work in linguistics (and not Chomsky’s political analysis) and makes the following observation about Chomsky's response when he asked Chomsky about a recent comment that Marcus interpreted as Chomsky renouncing Chomsky.

‘I was so surprised by the dramatic shift that I wrote to him to ask. “A lot of people take [your new] paper to be a renouncing of your earlier arguments.” Was that really the case? His response, as immediate as ever, “As for my own views, they’ve of course evolved over the years. This conception of ‘renouncing beliefs’ is very odd, as if we’re in some kind of religious cult. I ‘renounce beliefs’ practically every time I think about the topics or find out what someone else is thinking.”

Nine academics out of ten never change their mind about anything; most (though there are salient exceptions, like Wittgenstein) lock into a position earlier in their careers and then defend vigor with which he has criticized others. For fifty years, his search for linguistic truth has been relentless.’

This strikes me as a fundamentally important political insight.  Chomsky can be frustratingly arrogant and dismissive, as Marcus notes later in the essay.  And Marcus may be right that we put up with it, in part, because Chomsky is brilliant.  Something like the reasons my parents like House.

At the same time, I submit that we might put up with this, at least in part, because Chomsky is open-minded, always pushing to deepen our understanding, and even as the smartest guy in the room he remains constantly willing and ready to change his mind, to reconsider, indeed renounce with prejudice, even positions he has passionately defended in the past. 

I would love to see a Sunday talk show with Chomsky as a regular analyst.  And, as my Chinese counterparts were suggesting, the fact that such a show is nearly unimaginable suggests a form of censorship in America worth thinking about.