I am a regular reader of Aeon weekly magazine. It's a nifty foray into a wide range of cultural and intellectual topics, written by wits at the top of their game. Masturbation, cathedrals, anthropology, philosophy, medical breakthroughs, art, and language. Aeon has it all, and it's hard to get through the dense material on a weekend and still have time for my favorite reads in Harpers and the New Yorker. However, a seeming hit piece in last week's Aeon broke my admiration for a spell.
The article, titled "The Two Chomskys," was written by Chris Knight, a senior research associate in the department of anthropology at University College London. He's written a book on Noam Chomsky, Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics(2016), and he has ablog devoted to his criticism of Chomsky. The piece drew my attention because it came in my inbox from Aeon as a separate promotion from that week's offerings at a time when I had just finished publishing a piece celebrating the 95th birthday of Chomsky -- a week after the MSM quietly (for the most part) lamented the departure to eternity of Henry Kissinger, war criminal. I took the opportunity to urge readers to pick up a copy of Bev Boisseau Stohl's memoir, Chomsky and Me (OR Books, 2023), detailing her quarter of a century as Chomsky's office manager at MIT.
The Knight article takes issue with two major facets of Chomsky's legacy: his linguistics and his political activism. The problem the anthropologist has with the linguistics is two-fold: one, he's not happy that Chomsky's linguistics, especially his well-known theory of Universal Grammar, were developed and paid for by the Pentagon, as, Knight contends, as part of Chomsky efforts to help create command-and-control systems for weapons; and, two, that Chomsky's UG theory is wack. Language is a social phenomenon not a near-autistic experiment in raw thinking, Knight proffers. The problem Knight has with Chomsky's political activism is, similar to his problem with his linguistics, is that Chomsky managed to get paid by the Pentagon even though he was a vocal critic of many Pentagon policies, especially its prolonged efforts to improve its war-making capabilities. And he goes out of his way in the piece to quote from his book times when Chomsky has contradicted himself regarding MIT's symbiotic relationship with the Pentagon's warriors. To Knight, this all smacks of hypocrisy.
Chomsky's linguistics seem to have some import in the development of AI for weapons. At least that's what Knight hints at when he points to new enthusiasm fomenting for Universal Grammar vis-a-vis weapons. He alludes to a government paper that explicitly fingers Chomsky's UG (see the Abstract). But Chomsky is not behind it and, besides, Chomsky has been highly vocal in his criticism of the likelihood of AI attaining AGI-like status. In any case, such research shouldn't be condemned outright because it is funded and produced by the military. (DARPA, god love them, helped develop vaccines and monoclonal treatments for Covid-19.) We need a military and it might as well be excellent. A theory of language developed out of that research does not necessarily mean it should be ridiculed and humiliated.
Such criticism is not new and has been duly noted by critics and apologists alike as they've duked it out over the years, with Chomsky's honor, reputation, and legacy on the line. That's all fine. Chomsky managed to escape much of the hullabaloo more or less unscathed by the right wing nutjobs who find a mardi gras waiting in such 'critical studies' of the Great Man. Me, I see him, as I said in piece, as a living example of a latter day Socrates, a gadfly who would make us think about what democracy means and how it is usurped by Turd Blossoms with alternate reality fixations. And, yes, let's face it, Socrates was a militarist during the Peloponnesian unrest. Kicked some ass, too, accounts tell us.
Like I say, it was the timing of Knight's piece that stuck in my craw. I was celebrating the fact that Chomsky is still alive at 95, but I couldn't (and can't yet) fathom what the Aeon piece was doing. No mention of the birthday, and the book from which Knight extracts generously is now 7 years old. It's not exactly a classic. No updated material is offered. What's next for Knight (and Aeon) -- a critique of Daniel Ellsberg's years as a warplanner for the Pentagon (through his think tank position at RAND)?
Ellsberg was an insider who spilled the beans on the crazies who would get into even nuclear conflagrations, if left to their own devices. (Ellsberg, coming out of a cinema with a RAND colleague, Harry Rowen, after viewing Dr. Strangelove, remarked, in his memoir The Doomsday Machine, that he and Rowen agreed that what they had just watched was "essentially a documentary." Ellsberg's memoir was, the writer said, even more vital a revelation than the Pentagon Papers, as they detailed the US military's reckless thinking and strategic plans around nukes.
Chomsky is and has been an excellent gadfly. Knight's piece in Aeon, especially his allusion to Chomsky being "connected" somehow to Jeffrey Epstein, which reeks of guilt by association (shall we openly condemn Stephen Hawking and Bill Clinton, among others, who went to Epstein's pleasure island for visits or photo ops?). Probably could have been left out of the article, especially since no extension of context was applied. Knight wants to come across as an enthusiast of Chomsky's activism while at the same time undermining his affiliations. Just because Chomsky accepted the Pentagon's money doesn't mean he slept with Epstein's teens. Jeesh.
