Today marks the 97th birthday of Noam Chomsky, known both for his status as “the father of modern linguistics” as well as his prolific political commentary.
I’m aware that as the opinion editor of an editorial page that tilts libertarian he’s an unusual figure to highlight, but he was intellectually influential to me ever since I read a booklet of his (“9/11”) sometime in 2002 (I would’ve been 11). Though I came to identify more with thinkers like Milton Friedman, Chomsky is still someone whose writings and speeches I return to.
The story of Chomsky entails covering two very different tracks.
The first is his contribution to the field of linguistics and by extension cognitive science over the course of an academic career based mainly at MIT from 1955 through the 2000s. To utterly simplify things, Chomsky challenged the notion that languages were a learned behavior and instead argued language acquisition reflected an innate capability of the human mind. Though some of his theoretical developments have fallen out of favor, his work is foundational to much of what’s come of the field of linguistics.
But then there’s the other side of Chomsky, more relevant to an opinion page and no doubt what readers are angrily writing to me about already based on the headline: his political worldview.
Since the 1960s, Chomsky has been a tireless critic of American foreign policy, of the capitalist system, of the American press and of really all systems of domination and power.
From the Vietnam war through the wars of recent years, Chomsky challenged mainstream understandings of American foreign policy. Often framing foreign interventions as no more than modern American imperialism at work, often at the service of American corporate interests and at the expense of human rights, Chomsky’s critiques were greatly influential to me as someone who was a teenager during the presidency of George W. Bush. I’ve viewed pretty much every foreign policy intervention through that prism , which is why I’m a noninterventionist by default.
Most recently, and prior to a stroke in 2023 that unfortunately incapacitated him, Chomsky condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a criminal act of aggression while also arguing the United States provoked Russia over the course of years by repeatedly meddling in and around Russia and seeking to extend Nato to the Russian border. He also lamented the unintended consequence of the Russian invasion making Europe subservient to the United States and delivering a gift to the military-industrial with greater military spending. To his point, see: The recent news that the U.S. has ordered Europe to ramp up their military capabilities by 2027.
Separate from foreign policy, Chomsky has also been a critic of American capitalism.
His political ideals were rooted in variants of anarchism, aspiring to a stateless society where communities organized themselves on principles like liberty, solidarity and equality. It was all a bit too squishy and utopian to hold up for me, but many of his more specific criticisms of the status quo have held up.
“Societies differ, but in ours, the major decisions over what happens in the society — decisions over investment and production and distribution and so on — are in the hands of a relatively concentrated network of major corporations and conglomerates and investment firms,” he said in 1992. “They are also the ones who staff the major executive positions in the government. They’re the ones who own the media and they’re the ones who have to be in a position to make the decisions.”
That’s really only intensified since he said that, with the public ceding more and more control over political and intellectual life to ever-more-powerful government and wealthy interests.
Finally, Chomsky deserves credit for maintaining an iron-clad commitment to freedom of speech. While many on the left have taken to the censorious view that words are violence, Chomsky signed onto the somehow controversial Harper’s Letter in 2020 which affirms, “The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.”
As Chomsky said decades ago, “Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech.”
As I run out of words on this column, I’ll say that while I certainly don’t agree with Chomsky on many things and many will find plenty to disagree with him, I think his ideas and arguments are still worth grappling with as one tries to make sense of this ever stranger world.
Sal Rodriguez can be reached at salrodriguez@scng.com