Para Un Verdadera Dama…
I saw Chomsky in the courtyard after I’d stepped outside for a smoke. It was MLK day. He was on his way to a speaking engagement in a nearby auditorium. He had on an ill-fitting light blue suit with pants so baggy he made MC Hammer look like Dwight Yoakam. His white shoulder-length hair was a force multiplier to the sartorial disaster. He was in his Octogenarian Lesbian phase.
Even though I was a linguistics student, I didn't speak. I was more concerned with using software as a tool to analyze discourse than revisiting the saga of Generative Grammar. He was too. He retired from MIT in 2002 and spent most of his Emeritus time crafting oracular responses to email missives from the likes of Chapo Trap House. To be honest, I'd heard enough of Chomsky on all fronts and the only thing I could think of at the time was how bad his suit looked.
The good Professor recently endorsed this article as an enlightened take on peaceful protests against COVID 19 measures in Ottawa. I wasn't surprised one iota when I saw it. It may have been shocking for some to see a self-proclaimed champion of free speech lending credence to a long form guilt-by-association fallacy. After all, if one applied Henry Giroux's “logic” to Chomsky’s preface to Robert Faurisson's Mémoire en défense, Chomsky would be considered a greater enemy to Democracy than any Canadian trucker. But we must remember that free speech also includes the freedom to be hypocritical and wrongheaded. Still, it's a shame the sentiment expressed by Giroux and amplified by Chomsky was used to justify state violence against peaceful protesters.
A nearsighted examination of this learned kerfuffle misses the forest for the trees. At the macro level, this is a turf war. The belligerents are ultimately fighting over clear title to the proud sobriquet of “Public Intellectual.” Chomsky has claimed this moniker sovereign territory since the mid-1960's when he took a laudable public stance against the United State's role in the Vietnam Conflict years before the war’s unpopularity reached critical mass. Ironically, Chomsky's opening salvo in a 1968 debate against William F. Buckley Jr. was to claim that the very discussion of the topic of Auschwitz was degrading to one’s humanity.
Chomsky operates deductively in both scholarship and political commentary. His advocacy stems from a primary moral conclusion and his research involves arranging data to fortify his premise. This approach presents problems in both arenas. Chomsky was forced to abandon his initial theory of Universal Grammar and spent a quarter century revising Generative Grammar in an ultimately futile attempt to make his theories viable in the face of refutative data. The drawback of the approach in public debate is self-evident in the Weinsten flap; after fifty years of framing arguments around a priori moral conclusions, it’s probable that some of your statements will conflict with each other.
In a dramatic sense the Public Intellectual is unbounded but in the theatrical sense he is itinerant; academics find him too flippant for a place of pride among their ranks and amplified voices in general public discourse find him too intellectual. (Consider Bill Mahr's awe at professional board-game player Garry Kasparov's mental prowess and increase that by an order of magnitude.)
There is compensation for this constant mode of loneliness though. The intellectual Knight-Errant's armor functions just as well in either realm; his academic shortcomings are excused by his import in public debate, his occasional errors in public judgment are absolved by his academic achievement. Only occasionally does a supervillain appear who can ridicule the Public Intellectual on both fronts.
It seems as if Noam Chomsky is on the verge of breaking his staff and casting his book to the sea. There is something off-putting about the man dubbed the most-quoted living author answering a challenge from his own progeny with a sentence fragment and link to a puerile article. Alas, we think we're marching with time until the exact moment that it marches over us.