This is the first of at least a couple, perhaps more, posts prompted by re-reading Noam Chomsky's Necessary Illusions. They are solely to clarify, for myself, how I feel about his writings, and are probably both boring and irrelevant to anyone else.
I wish I could remember where I read it, years ago, that someone said many on the left go through a "Chomsky phase". His writings are a bracing alternative, can even be enlightening, or perhaps connect various things that seemed nascent prior to reading him. All the same, the person who spoke of this "phase" also noted two things: most grow out of it; Chomsky himself has become, over the years, more caustic, even sarcastic in noting how little impact his own strenuous efforts have had in shaping public discourse, making his writing increasingly tough going, even for those who continue to read him.
A pioneer of scientific linguistics, whose fundamental theories have been paradigmatic for that particular discipline, Chomsky has had, for over forty years, a side career as a critic of American foreign and domestic policy. Part of what makes discovering Chomsky so enlightening, I think, is the uniqueness of his perspective, combined with the way she uses publicly available information to shape a narrative of American power that uses the same sources as our conventional discourse, but arrives at completely different conclusions.
Unlike many critics dating to the Vietnam era, Chomsky does not come from a traditional leftist perspective. He describes himself as an anarchist, a left-libertarian (variously), and seems close to the thinking of syndicalists like Georges Sorel (although Sorel was an advocate and theorist of violence, and Chomsky most definitely is not). He not only traces the effect of class and corporate power as it shapes our state institutions; he also is critically opposed to state power as such. In a revealing passage in Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies, he discusses the way elites during the founding generation of America squelched popular democracy even in the years prior to the Constitution, during the Confederation period. He sees Shays Rebellion, a popular uprising in Massachusetts that was the prime reason for ditching the Articles of Confederation and creating a new Constitution, as the last real gasp of the "Spirit of 1776"; certainly the rebels in that instance so saw themselves.
Which also reveals one of the issues I have with Chomsky. His basic criticism of the American system seems to be that our rhetoric of openness and democracy belies a history of elite control, from the founding period until today, that is, relatively speaking, unbroken. While there is truth in this, I have to ask: When have states behaved otherwise?
This question, again and again, crops up as I read Necessary Illusions. He criticizes our conventional discussion regarding the Vietnam War, our refusal to take responsibility for the devastation that we rained down, for the continuing cost of that war (the book derived from lectures he gave over CBC radio in 1989, so it is a bit dated in its information) in lives lost to munitions left behind and the effects of chemical warfare on the population. Yet, when has any state admitted without coercion that it is guilty of horrid crimes against another state and its people during wartime? When has any state voluntarily accepted the responsibility for repaying to the victims of its aggression some small measure of recompense? This is not to argue the morality of the issue; that, sixteen years after the US withdrew from Vietnam we still had not provided Hanoi with information regarding the placement of landmines, placements that still brought a heavy toll in lost limbs and lives and livelihoods because they tended to be sowed in areas ripe for agriculture is, as he says, unconscionable. All the same, lectures on what may or may not be morally correct really are irrelevant in foreign policy. Which, again, is not to argue this is right or wrong, only to say it is a fundamental reality.
Which, of course, brings up another question. Obviously, not only for domestic consumption but also for the moral satisfaction of policy-makers responsible for it, we in the United States view our actions through a prism, not of self-interest, but rather of a certain moral purity (does anyone besides me remember laughing out loud on September 11, 2001, when former Secretary of State Alexander Haig said that the attacks on New York and Washington signaled America's "loss of innocence"?). While there is very little one can do beyond discarding such nonsense, there has been a long tradition in the United States of seeing ourselves as morally superior, of our actions being above the bare minimum of "national interest", of that silly notion of "American exceptionalism" that pervades not only our sense of our history, but even our domestic and foreign policy.
In a sense then, Chomsky as moral scold can be bracing - or infuriating, depending on who is reading him - precisely because he seems to be saying, over and over again, "OK, folks, if we're so moral, why do we do this, this, this, and this, which, by and standard are clearly immoral?" To which, of course, the answer is either silence or rejection of the messenger. By framing a consideration of our foreign policy rooted in a national self-interest defined by and for the benefit of the major contributors to our state apparatus (not just in monetary terms, but also in personnel), many pieces that seem incongruous do fall in to place. Chomsky sees these as morally vicious, and too much of our discussion about foreign policy nonsensical or even vacuous because it pretends otherwise. While certainly taking his narrative seriously, up to and including much of his moral opprobrium directed at our direct and indirect responsibility for crimes against the peace and humanity around the world, we should also note that one of his fundamental assumptions - that the state itself is an immoral institution, bent on violence - needs to be questioned as well. Any thoughtful consideration of the history of Great Powers should include the reality that Great Powers do horrible things to maintain their power. Whether that is right or wrong, I feel myself incompetent to judge. That it has and does and will continue to happen is a reality that must be accepted.
Chomsky's many volumes are an important contribution to any larger discussion of American foreign policy. His views should always be tempered, however, with a consideration of his particular vantage point, as well as putting important questions to his insistence that our moral failings around the world are somehow unique. Empires are not known for their charity or even-handedness. This point also needs to be kept in mind.
