Wednesday 30 December 2020

Chomsky & the irresponsibility of intellectuals

 Back in 1967, Noam Chomsky wrote on 'The Responsibility of Intellectuals'. Apparently, that responsibility wasn't- as the hoi polloi thought- to use their intellects for the common good- or at least not make their students, or readers, stupider than they would otherwise have been. 

Instead, Intellectuals were supposed to choose some particularly puerile fringe ideology- preferably one which had already fucked up massively- and present it in its most paranoid form. 

Chomsky, it seems, had been influenced by Dwight Macdonald- already a byword for 'having nothing to say and everything to add'. Over the next 50 years, Chomsky- whose own 'intellectual' work turned out to be utterly useless- worked hard to make himself an even more noisome blathershite. 

TWENTY-YEARS AGO, Dwight Macdonald published a series of articles in Politics on the responsibility of peoples and, specifically, the responsibility of intellectuals.

Those articles were worthless. It was silly of Macdonald to oppose a War America did not start. The President had a responsibility to fuck up the stupid cunts who had attacked or declared war on the greatest power on earth. 

The truth is responsibility only exists if a coercive mechanism actually holds you responsible for your acts of omission and commission. Responsibilities you claim to have but for which no legal basis exists are just as likely to pose a nuisance than a source of benefit to Society. Indeed, Freedom involves Hohfeldian immunities from interference by people who claim to feel responsible for your soul or your ethos or other such shite.

I read them as an undergraduate, in the years just after the war, and had occasion to read them again a few months ago. They seem to me to have lost none of their power or persuasiveness.

This suggests that Chomsky never matured intellectually. His is a sad case of arrested development. He needed to say something like 'Rereading Macdonald, I found new arguments, which I had not previously spotted, which were even more persuasive than those I was able to discern back when I was a teenager.' 

Macdonald is concerned with the question of war guilt.

War guilt had become a real thing. The guys who won the War, put some of the enemy on trial and proceeded to incarcerate or execute the worst of them. One major reason to inflict punishment through a judicial process- rather than just bayonet the bastards to death- had to do with the fact that enemy territory had been occupied, permanent Military bases had been erected there, and the successor States had been adopted Constitutions agreeable to the occupiers. In other words, 'War guilt' was no longer a matter of collective reparations or losses of territory inflicted on the losing side. It was individualized and involved a new legal concept called 'Command Responsibility'. It was also part and parcel of a complete restructuring of the polity and juristic foundations of the defeated enemy such that they would have an internal mechanism to prevent a return to militarism.

Macdonald or Chomsky may have wanted the Victors to adopt a similar judicial doctrine for themselves. But they did not do so- because they weren't as stupid as shit. The Brits didn't want to see Churchill in the dock for war crimes, nor would the Yanks put up with any such thing happening to Truman or Eisenhower. So there was no question of 'war guilt' for them. A fundamental asymmetry existed just as it does between parents and little kiddies.  It is not the case that your 5 year old is legally responsible to make sure you get to School. On the other hand, you are legally responsible for educating a child in your care. 

Responsibilities, like Rights, are linked to a vinculum juris- a bond of Law- such that they don't just cancel themselves out- with each party claiming every other party has violated its rights or not fulfilled their responsibilities- leaving nothing but a public nuisance which needs to be curbed. 

He asks the question: To what extent were the German or Japanese people responsible for the atrocities committed by their governments?

This was the question that the Victors made a determination of. They developed a juristic doctrine of War Guilt and created a legal machinery to hang or lock up those who were convicted on charges of that sort. However, it was only worth doing so because the Allies were prepared to keep troops on enemy soil indefinitely. With hindsight, there is little point maintaining such a doctrine unless permanent military basis on conquered territory are economically feasible.  

And, quite properly, he turns the question back to us:

For the Germans and Japanese, it was a fact that 'War Guilt' of various types could lead to your being locked up or executed. It was proper for them to acknowledge a responsibility which was perfectly real and justiciable. By contrast, it was foolish of Macdonald to talk bollocks about the 'guilt' of the Victors, because the thing was not punishable at all. He may as well have pretended that babies have a responsibility to ensure their Mummies get enough milk. 

To what extent are the British or American people responsible for the vicious terror bombings of civilians, perfected as a technique of warfare by the Western democracies and reaching their culmination in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, surely among the most unspeakable crimes in history.

From the legal point of view- none at all. That is why nobody was put on trial and no reparations were paid. 

The most unspeakable crime in history is my losing a Tik Tok twerking competition to a fucking 78 year old Iyengar.  The reason it is unspeakable is not just because it hasn't happened but also because I don't know the Tamil word for twerking. 

To an undergraduate in 1945-46—to anyone whose political and moral consciousness had been formed by the horrors of the 1930s, by the war in Ethiopia, the Russian purge, the “China Incident,” the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi atrocities,

in other words, a silly adolescent who didn't actually have any 'moral' or 'political' consciousness. The fucker was American. He should have been talking about the political options open to him- i.e. volunteering for this, rather than that, Democrat running for office- rather than gushing on like a school girl about far away places where you'd be this fast-talking photo-journalist and then you would bump into this wicked handsome Commissar who is like totes in love with you and then, quite suddenly, your room-mate slips you the tongue and you let her finger you and suddenly you wonder whether you shouldn't quit the cheer-leading squad and take up lacrosse at Bryn Mawr.  

the Western reaction to these events and, in part, complicity in them—these questions had particular significance and poignancy.

Coz it get you all hot and bothered and then, quite suddenly, your room-mate slips his pinky up your asshole. 

With respect to the responsibility of intellectuals, there are still other, equally disturbing questions.

No there aren't. Intellectuals need to do smart stuff not gush on like adolescent school girls or rave about Government complicity like loons in tin-foil hats.  

Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments,

No. Intellectuals are too stupid to distinguish between white lies, 'mere puffery', and alethic statements. Thus the 'lies they expose' make them look ludicrous. On the other hand, when Government's lie about money or other stuff that matters, then lawyers and accountants and 'Civil Society' can get on the case.  

to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.

The problem here is that ordinary people understand that 'intentions' need to be 'hidden' for politeness sake. Intellectuals may say- 'dude, you are lying to that large breasted woman. You don't think her views on Quantum Mechanics are fascinating and insightful. You want her to give you a titty-wank'.  But this is an 'unthought known' for ordinary people. We can easily turn the tables on the pointy heads by saying- 'Don't act so coy and innocent. You only talk about the Spanish Civil War and Stalin's purges coz you want us to get rock-hard for your tight little Trotskyite asshole. Bend over now for the good of the Proletariat!' Gaslighting can work both ways.

In the Western world, at least, they have the power that comes from political liberty, from access to information and freedom of expression. For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.

Yet, 'seeing through the veil' is more, not less common, among lunatics and the very poorly educated. Moreover, kids living in remote jungles in India or Amazonia can talk this type of shite even better than Chomsky. But, Boko Haram does an even better job. Peeps wot read books have already been brainwashed. Kill them all and start again.  

The responsibilities of intellectuals, then, are much deeper than what Macdonald calls the “responsibility of people,” given the unique privileges that intellectuals enjoy.

It is not a privilege to stick with a failed research program decade after decade while kids who had better supervisors get very very rich developing Voice Recognition Technology and Automatic Translation and so on. Look at Robert Mercer. He went in for 'Brown Clustering' and became a billionaire who has probably had quite a big political impact on things like Brexit and Trump's gaining hegemony over the Republican Party. By contrast, Chomsky's students have achieved nothing. Long run, Intellectuals are only as good as the Mechanisms which embody their research programs. These may be technological, or they may be legal or economic or political. If a 'thinker's' legacy is just a type of childish sulk or  paranoid antagonomia, then there was no actual thinking going on. Just the pretense of thinking. 

The issues that Macdonald raised are as pertinent today as they were twenty years ago. We can hardly avoid asking ourselves to what extent the American people bear responsibility for the savage American assault on a largely helpless rural population in Vietnam, still another atrocity in what Asians see as the “Vasco da Gama era” of world history. As for those of us who stood by in silence and apathy as this catastrophe slowly took shape over the past dozen years—on what page of history do we find our proper place? Only the most insensible can escape these questions. I want to return to them, later on, after a few scattered remarks about the responsibility of intellectuals and how, in practice, they go about meeting this responsibility in the mid-1960s.

Irma Adelman, having helped put South Korea on the path to prosperity, went to Vietnam and figured out a 'win-win' strategy. Finance land-reform- it would cost a lot less than military aid and pay for itself in terms of higher growth. The peasants then have no incentive to support the VC. Prosperity in the South leaks over the border. Ho Chi Minh gets out from under China and gets the American alliance he had always wanted. 

This was a purely economic problem and had a purely economic solution. Politics gets pretty fucked up when it departs from economic common-sense. Sadly, a lot of American Mathematical Economists were Chomsky level stupid and worthless, coz they refused to accept Knightian Uncertainty. 

 Irma Adelman didn't just lack a dick. Her maths wasn't quite quite. That's how come she could give good advice.  

IT IS THE RESPONSIBILITY of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.

No. It is the responsibility of people who are paid to find out the truth to tell the truth to their employers. Detectives, Auditors, Lawyers- but also certain Scientists and Mathematicians and so forth- have this duty but only within their domain of expertise. But 'intellectuals' don't have an obligation to talk ultracrepidarian shite any more than I am obliged to discuss the shortcomings of Voevodsky's univalent foundations program. 

Pedagogues have responsibilities to their students or publishers. But those responsibilities don't include telling the truth. A Professor who says 'my Department is shit. Get your sheepskin in something useful or prestigious' might suffer various annoyances from the College authorities even if he has tenure. True, such a Professor may move to a new field and do well there- but that tends to be the exception rather than the rule. 

This, at least, may seem enough of a truism to pass over without comment.

It is not a truism. Professors are supposed to teach whatever shite is on the curriculum.  

Not so, however. For the modern intellectual, it is not at all obvious. Thus we have Martin Heidegger

German Professors were Civil Servants. They had a long tradition of supporting the Ruler. Sadly Heidegger was too Nazi for the Nazis and thus got sidelined.  

writing, in a pro-Hitler declaration of 1933, that “truth is the revelation of that which makes a people certain, clear, and strong in its action and knowledge”; it is only this kind of “truth” that one has a responsibility to speak.

This was true enough under that regime. Obviously, once it had been utterly destroyed on the battlefield, one could go back to vaguely Catholic shite. At least that was what Scmitt & Heidi did. 

Americans tend to be more forthright. When Arthur Schlesinger was asked by The New York Times in November, 1965, to explain the contradiction between his published account of the Bay of Pigs incident and the story he had given the press at the time of the attack, he simply remarked that he had lied; and a few days later, he went on to compliment the Times for also having suppressed information on the planned invasion, in “the national interest,” as this term was defined by the group of arrogant and deluded men of whom Schlesinger gives such a flattering portrait in his recent account of the Kennedy Administration. It is of no particular interest that one man is quite happy to lie in behalf of a cause which he knows to be unjust;

Schlesinger knew no such thing. On the other hand, he did come out against the Iraq War.  

but it is significant that such events provoke so little response in the intellectual community

Yes. It is significant that the 'intellectual community' is not utterly stupid. It knows about 'white lies', and 'mere puffery' and strategic deception of a type beneficial to one's country and one's career.  

—for example, no one has said that there is something strange in the offer of a major chair in the humanities to a historian who feels it to be his duty to persuade the world that an American-sponsored invasion of a nearby country is nothing of the sort.

Because it wasn't strange at all. My guess is giving this guy a chair attracted high quality students as well as wealthy donors. To act in a self-interested way is common-place. We would be astounded if we met a person who felt she had an obligation to wipe everybody else's ass just because she is responsible for wiping her own ass.  

And what of the incredible sequence of lies on the part of our government and its spokesmen concerning such matters as negotiations in Vietnam?

What of it? Bargaining involves pretending you don't want the thing you are dying to get your greedy little mitts on. 

The facts are known to all who care to know. The press, foreign and domestic, has presented documentation to refute each falsehood as it appears. But the power of the government’s propaganda apparatus is such that the citizen who does not undertake a research project on the subject can hardly hope to confront government pronouncements with fact.

But why bother when the thing is 'common knowledge'? This is not a context where lies matter. On the other hand a criticism based on economic and geopolitical calculations might be persuasive. Propaganda fails when people realize they'd be financially better off by ignoring it. I suppose the big question was- would 'boomers' get to take over from the 'greatest generation'- bypassing the 'silent generation'-  despite dodging the draft like crazy? The answer was yes- till Biden got elected. But then Biden got 5 deferments before, like Trump, getting a medical exemption.  

Chomky wrote the following 50 years ago. How has it held up?

 ... what is one to make of the testimony of Thomas Schelling before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, January 27, 1965, in which he discusses two great dangers if all Asia “goes Communist”? First, this would exclude “the United States and what we call Western civilization from a large part of the world that is poor and colored and potentially hostile.” Second, “a country like the United States probably cannot maintain self-confidence if just about the greatest thing it ever attempted, namely to create the basis for decency and prosperity and democratic government in the underdeveloped world, had to be acknowledged as a failure or as an attempt that we wouldn’t try again.” It surpasses belief that a person with even a minimal acquaintance with the record of American foreign policy could produce such statements.  

Anyone with minimal acquaintance with 'the record of American foreign policy' will know of its 'Open Door' doctrine- i.e. that America wanted 'civilizational', not colonial, contact with the East of a mutually beneficial sort.

 Schelling certainly understood that this doctrine was a 'focal point' for coordination games in International Relations. America needed to show it was continuing this policy. As a matter of fact, the Vietnam War could end because Nixon opened the door to China. McNamara, repenting his role in the War, helped put China on a path which lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. It is important that Biden & Harris continue to send the sort signals Schelling was sending. Why? Focal solutions to coordination games are important. It is worth investing in not just cheap talk but also costly signals so as to preserve their salience. 

Chomsky, poor booby, still doesn't understand the importance of Schelling's work. He doesn't get that a convention need not be alethic to be useful. Or perhaps he does. Having failed in his own field, he decided to spend the rest of his long life shouting 'liar!' every time anybody said 'Good Morning' on the grounds that it wasn't actually Morning somewhere in the world and, anyway, how can you say Morning is good when trillions of poor brown people are being beaten, robbed, sodomized and subjected to aggravated acts of fellatio and cunnilingus by Wall Street Capitalists?               

Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling helped change International Relations for the better by introducing new game theoretic concepts. He was a responsible intellectual because he talked about stuff he knew on the basis of an improved Structural Causal Model from which everybody could benefit. Chomsky was and is an irresponsible intellectual because he talks about what he does not know and which he has no Structural Causal Model for He is simply some sort Manichaean nut-job who believes he is an Old Testament prophet.                                       


 

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