Noam Chomsky, emeritus professor of linguistics at MIT, turned 90 last Friday, and he is still going
strong…thankfully.
Professor Chomsky is one of America’s (perhaps, the world’s) leading intellectuals. Yet, I suspect that most Americans know little if anything about him.
If you don’t know anything about Professor Chomsky, you should. In 1970 the London Times named him one of the “makers of the 20th century:” a well-deserved accolade.
Nathan J. Robinson has a very good summary of Chomsky’s influence and legacy at Current Affairs entitled, “Lessons from Chomsky.” I have posted an excerpt below that mentions one of the features of Chomsky’s work in the field of public policy that I have always found most helpful.
“One of Chomsky’s simplest principles is among the most difficult to apply in practice: You should judge yourself by the same moral standards that you judge others by. This has formed the core of his critique of U.S. foreign policy, and yet it is often insufficiently appreciated even by those that embrace his conclusions. Many people think that Chomsky is uniquely “anti-American.” In fact, his criticisms of the United States are so strong largely because when this elementary moral principle is applied to the facts, the conclusion is inevitably deeply damning. It simply turns out that if you judge the United States by the standard that it uses to judge other people, the United States does not look very good. If you take the facts of, say, the U.S. bombing of Laos(where the United States secretly dropped 2.5 million tons of bombs in the ’60s and ’70s, massacring and maiming thousands of peaceable villagers, 20,000 of whom were killed or injured in the decades after the bombing when unexploded bombs went off), and you imagine how it would appear to us if the roles had been reversed and Laos had been bombing the United States, you begin to see just how inconsistent we are in our evaluations of our own actions versus the actions of others. 500,000 people died in the Iraq War. If Iraq had invaded the United States and 500,000 people died (actually, the proportional population equivalent would be closer to 5,000,000), would there be any way that anybody in the country could conceive of Iraq as a “force for good” in the world in the way that the U.S. believes people should think we are? It’s laughable. If Vietnam had invaded the United States the way the United States had invaded Vietnam, could such an act ever be considered justified?
“This idea of moral consistency, of trying to treat like behaviors alike, is the simplest possible notion in the world. It’s so elementary that it sounds childish to even pose the questions. And yet the power of latent patriotic sentiment is so great that it makes a clear-eyed and fair assessment incredibly difficult. It’s hard to see the world through other people’s eyes, to see what our self-justifications look like to those who are on the receiving end of our actions. And when we do it, it’s deeply discomforting. But this is the foundation of Chomsky’s critique: It’s not enough to have “values” (e.g., “terrorism is bad”), you must apply those values consistently (i.e., if something would constitute terrorism if done against us, it must constitute terrorism if it is done by us). Chomsky is seen as being “anti-American” for pointing out that if the Nuremberg principles were applied consistently, essentially every postwar U.S. president would have to be hanged. But this is just a result of the application of consistency: The crime of “aggressive war” that was so forcefully condemned at Nuremberg has been committed repeatedly by the U.S.”
You can find the entire article, which is well worth your time to read in its entirety, here:
I have read lots of Chomsky over the years. Naturally, I don’t always agree with him. Heck, I don’t always agree with myself. But I have the deepest admiration for him and his life’s work.
If those Christian leaders who style themselves as “public intellectuals” had even half the integrity, humility and consistency of clear-mindedness demonstrated by the body of Professor Chomsky’s work, the church and, perhaps, the world would be in far better shape than they are today.
Remember, brothers and sisters that “God does not show favoritism” (Acts 10:34). We are exhorted in James 2:1, “as believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ, don’t show favoritism.”
Noam Chomsky, a committed atheist, lives this moral principle and displays its significance for politics, public policy and foreign affairs, more clearly than any other leader — including Christians — I know of.
It is also the reason he is never asked to appear on mainstream media outlets. It’s why you never see him used as a commentator on the network news.
For his standards of morality require the death of American exceptionalism, the tearing down of American empire, and the radical transformation of American Christianity.
