Interview with Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics emeritus. Professor Chomsky is one of the most-cited scholars in modern history.
Manufacturing Consent in the A.M.
Contents
Max Raskin: I originally emailed you when I was maybe 15 back in 2005 and we started a correspondence then. Looking back, it’s pretty remarkable you would talk to a teenager. Do you consider it a political position that you are willing to engage with anyone?
Noam Chomsky: It’s just a belief that human beings should be taken seriously. We're all of value. If a 15-year-old kid writes with a question or comment, you should take it seriously and respond.
MR: It's a very rare quality. Why do you think it’s so rare?
NC: Can't deal with others. Only myself.
MR: Do you know where that quality came from?
NC: It seems the natural thing to do.
The Aleph-Beis
MR: Do you consider yourself a part of the field of psychology?
NC: My own professional work in linguistics, cognitive science – all of that, as far as I can see, is part of human psychology and general psychology. More generally it’s part of human biology. I've felt that back from the very beginning in 1950.
MR: How much of generative grammar, of your theory of linguistics, do you think has to do with your own exposure to Semitic languages?
NC: Well, my first publication – the first generative grammar actually was on Hebrew. That is – my knowledge of Semitic languages. And it's colored it because it is a case of early exposure knowledge.
Actually, back from childhood, I was studying Semitic linguistics. When I was maybe 10 or 11 years old, I read my father's PhD dissertation, which he had just written, on a medieval Hebrew grammarian David Kimhi [the Radak]. I had a lot of background on the Semitic languages and was interested in that and pursued it, discussed it with him, and learned more about it later.
In fact, in the late 1940s, when I was undergraduate, I thought pretty seriously about possibly specializing in Semitic linguistics. I studied Arabic a couple of years and took courses in Ugaritic and was quite interested in it.
MR: What is it that was so interesting to you about it?
NC: It’s very hard to say. It's just intellectually intriguing and I had emotional, personal background commitments and connections to it. Most of my activist work in the 1940s was Israel-Palestine. Palestine at the time.
MR: Do you speak Hebrew today?
NC: Almost never. I'm not really fluent anymore. I can read, but I haven't spoken for many years. Very rarely.
MR: One more thing I just want to ask you about your early exposure to language. From what I've read, you seem to have been a fan of the Yiddishists and Hebraists.
NC: That's a complicated story.
MR: Can you tell it?
NC: In the 1930s when I was growing up, there was a kind of kulturkampf in the Jewish community – a struggle of those who are interested, not just assimilated, between the Yiddishists and the Hebraists. Should we be committed to Hebrew, or should we be committed to Yiddish? And both of my parents themselves and their whole community were dedicated Hebraists. So among my friends, my parents’ friends – there were families that spoke only Hebrew.
MR: You would read Ahad Ha'am, right?
NC: I read Ahad Ha'am. I used to read Hebrew with my father regularly every Friday night. Among things were Ahad Ha'am, which I then read by myself.
Fast Cars, Rock ‘n Roll, and the Anti-Bolshevik Left
MR: What did you feel about the Bundists at the time?
NC: I learned about the Bundists actually a little later. The Bundists – pre-World War II – I thought had a very significant constructive policies. Remember they were mostly wiped out by the Nazis – the Bundists were the Eastern European Jewish community. In the later years, they changed a lot – they became very dedicated, avid Zionists. There were holdouts and splits within the Bundist community. So people like Alex Ehrlich remained committed to traditional Bundist ideas, but the group departed from them radically. I remember witnessing sharp controversies among them.
MR: The Mensheviks were too before you, right?
NC: That was long before I was born.
MR: Not so long.
NC: A decade before. But it was a very live issue when I was growing up – family, friends, my reading. As soon as I got to be at all independent, my independent activities were very much involved with the anti-Bolshevik Left. Anarchists, left-Marxists, and so on. By the time I was, say an early adolescent, and able to do things by myself, that was the direction in which I moved through friends, associates, and sometimes family.
MR: …fellow travelers.
Most people are concerned about cars when they're that age.
NC: I wasn't. There were no cars. Remember my father was able to get a secondhand car when I was about 10 years old, I guess.
MR: And you grew up in Philadelphia, correct?
NC: Yes.
MR: Was being in a Hebraist community a phenomenon of Philadelphia or your particular community in Philadelphia?
NC: The particular community. The main centers of course were in New York, but in Philadelphia, there was a lively, quite old Jewish community. My father and my mother were both involved in the Hebrew education programs in Philadelphia, which were pretty extensive. My father pretty much ran them. And my mother was a participant in them. Their friends were all part of that community. Also, my personal friends – most of them as a child.
MR: Are your friends mostly Jewish today?
NC: Today it’s not an issue anymore. If they are, I wouldn't know.
Roosevelt and Trump
MR: When did you leave the shtetl?
NC: It wasn't a shtetl, actually. The shtetl was in Eastern Europe. That’s where my parents came from, but they had assimilated into American culture.
MR: You would describe them as assimilated?
NC: In the center of their lives was the revival of Hebrew, Hebrew education. I don't think they had any non-Jewish friends, but they were part of American culture. So they were liberal Democrats.
MR: You said they were Roosevelt supporters.
NC: Yes. I remember listening to all of Roosevelt's fireside chats Friday evening and so on.
MR: What was your impression of him at that age?
NC: I was pretty strongly pro-Roosevelt as a child and remain so. His overall record – I mean there’s flaws and things I don’t like – but by and large, it was a very positive period of American history.
MR: Who do you think in toto is the best American president?
NC: I think Roosevelt.
MR: And how about the worst?
NC: Trump. In fact – the worst figure in American political history. He's in fact well on his way to destroying American democracy, literally. And also destroying the chances for civilized, organized society to exist. Remember that he was a committed denialist. During his four years in office, the United States raced to the precipice of species suicide, maximizing the use of fossil fuels, eliminating, to the extent possible, the measures to mitigate their effect. Just had a hideous effect on the general population. Even concern over global warming among Republican voters declined about 20% during his four years in office. This is a suicide pact.
MR: You said a lot of similar things about George W. Bush. Has your view of him changed in hindsight?
NC: Only by comparison with what followed him.
MR: There’s a principle of generational decline in the Gemara.
NC: I wouldn't say that.
MR: I'm just saying that's what the Gemara says.
NC: The New Deal was preferable to the 1920s and there are ups and downs. Since 1980, late 70s, we've been in a steady period of regression.
Early Highwater Marx
MR: Do you subscribe to a Marxist theory of history?
NC: I don't think there was any Marxist theory of history. Marx had his own ideas about stages of history, which are interesting and worth considering.
MR: But dialectical materialism?
NC: Dialectical materialism is a phrase that as far as I'm aware, Marx never even used. I think it was a phrase of Engels, but I don't exactly know what it is, frankly.
History has contradictions, developments. Marx believed that there was an almost inexorable, not totally, but a general move towards full development of capitalism leading to its internal collapse and the rise of a working class – a rise which would overcome capitalism and lead towards a different society. Ultimately a communist society. I don't think that there's any necessity for that.
MR: Do you have a favorite book or work by Marx? Do you ever re-read him?
NC: Actually, my favorite works by Marx are the early manuscripts.
MR: The poetry?
NC: Not the poetry. The early manuscripts that were first brought into English by Erich Fromm in 1961. These are the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of the early Marx, which I think are very valuable. There's plenty of interesting and important work afterwards.
Mass. Media
MR: What kind of criteria do you have with respect to which media you talk to?
NC: First of all, I don't initiate contacts with media. If they contact me, I respond. It's overwhelming. I'm constantly responding to media requests and inquiries, but it's almost entirely overseas or small, left progressive media here, or individuals – not the major media. I almost never hear from them.
MR: For the person who writes Manufacturing Consent, I’m curious what media you consume first thing in the morning?
NC: The major media, the New York Times, Washington Post, business press, some foreign press, depending on where my interests are.
MR: Will you listen to podcasts?
NC: I don't have time to listen to or watch anything. I keep to the printed page or video.
MR: Are there any things that you would recommend people read that are off the beaten path?
NC: Depends what your interests are.
MR: Let's say in politics.
NC: U.S. politics?
MR: Yes.
NC: The journals I mentioned plus the Wall Street Journal. News sites like Democracy Now! and Politico.
MR: What about Israeli politics? Do you keep up with it?
NC: Yes, I do. I read the major journal, Haaretz, everyday – sometimes other ones. There’s a lot of material concerning Israel in the international press, occasionally in the U.S. press.
MR: Do you have any other countries that you follow their internal politics as much as Israel and the United States?
NC: Yeah. Quite a lot.
MR: Really? Which ones?
NC: Brazil, Central American countries, European politics, and India. It shifts depending on the time. There are times when something really important is happening, say in India, and I'll be following that closely.
Quine Time
MR: How long do you think you'll read for a day in a given day?
NC: I can't say. It's intermittent – a lot of doing things like this. Giving talks, interviews, classes, responding to mail, writing things, professional work. It's just all mixed up.
MR: When you think about how you allocate your day, do you think politics is the most important to you right now?
NC: There are times when I'm working hard on intellectual issues – professional issues. I work with groups of scholars on common interests in linguistics philosophy and other things. In fact, most of the time that's going on in the back of my mind, no matter what else I'm doing.
MR: Do you think the tenor or quality of philosopher has gone up or down since when you started, say in the 1950s or 60s?
NC: It's been about the same. The fact of the matter is I don't really have an accredited profession. It's just a mixture of a lot of things.
MR: You've called yourself a worker and your trade is in the mind.
NC: Pretty much. I couldn't be admitted to any graduate program on the basis of my credentials.
MR: Why not?
NC: Because I just hadn’t done the basic things that are required. From the very beginning back in graduate school, I was just following a personal path. I happened to have faculty advisors who were accommodating and would allow me to do what I wanted to do. So I never really met the professional requirements in any field.
MR: You knew Quine, right?
NC: Yes.
MR: What was he like as a man?
NC: I didn't really get to know him much as a person. He was pretty reserved and remote – certainly with students. I went to Harvard around 1950 – my main interest and plan was to study with Quine, who I thought was quite impressive. I took all his courses and got to know him reasonably well, but not on a personal level.
MR: Did you get to know any great thinker on a personal level or was it always academic?
NC: Zellig Harris.
MR: He was your doctoral advisor, no?
NC: He was my sort of mentor as an undergraduate and graduate. We were very close, and I got to know him very well. We kept in contact in later years.
Nelson Goodman I worked closely with and got to know him quite well.
MR: He wrote about counterfactuals, right?
NC: He did an important paper on counterfactuals in the 1940s, but more generally worked on constructional systems, simplicity, and induction. A lot of my own work was developments of things that he had done. And I got to know many others over the years.
MR: Do you keep up with the tech advances in different neuro fields? Do you keep up with AI?
NC: AI is a curious field. A lot of the work I do is traditional AI. It's AI in the sense of Turing, who basically invented the discipline – of some of its early pioneers, like Marvin Minsky and others.
MR: Were you close with Minsky at MIT?
NC: We were friends, acquaintances – not really close. But that work has declined in AI. Most of AI today is basically practical applications.
MR: It's neural nets and extrapolations.
NC: It's doing things that are useful. But for Turing, the real founder, and people like Minsky, the goal was to discover the nature of human intelligence. By now that's a very marginal concern in that they talk about it, but it's not what they're doing.
MR: It's industrial now.
NC: It's making things that you can sell – like Google Translate. Quite useful, but it's not science – it’s brute force.
MR: What do you think about the Unabomber’s manifesto and his critique of modern industrial society?
NC: It was a strange document. It was a mixture of some insights, a lot of familiar observations, a lot of craziness.
MR: Were you close at all with Murray Rothbard?
NC: Not at all. We knew each other casually, but I greatly disliked his work and conversely.
MR: Is there any thinker on the Right that you'll read and enjoy now or in the past?
NC: Yeah. A lot of people. Right and Left is a strange concept. There are people who are dedicated free market libertarians – I guess you'd call that the Right – who I think do fantastic work. And they're pretty close to people like David Ellerman, for example.
MR: How do you categorize people politically in your mind?
NC: Not by categories – by the kind of work they do.
MR: But how do you evaluate a work?
NC: Well…it's quality. How else?
MR: I guess a Stalinist would answer that question in a different way.
NC: That's their problem.
Kibbutznik
MR: You don't get asked a lot about religion. Have your views on religion changed or evolved in your life?
NC: Yes. When I was about 11 or 12 years old, I thought that I wanted to be more religious than my father. That was my feeling at the time.
MR: He was an educator, correct?
NC: Hebrew educator. But that lasted about a year or two. Then I realized it's not for me.
MR: Did you ever keep kosher or shabbos?
NC: As a child – I was 11 years old – I did what my parents did.
MR: But in your adult life?
NC: Moderately, but just as symbolism. Just because of my upbringing, it took me a long time before I was really able to easily eat pork or shellfish.
MR: Do you believe in God?
NC: For about a year.
MR: But now you don't?
NC: No.
MR: Do you believe in an afterlife?
NC: No.
MR: Has that been fairly constant throughout your life?
NC: I really haven’t frankly thought about it much since I was a teenager.
MR: Really?
NC: I thought I'd answered the questions to my own satisfaction, so I turned to other things. If it is meaningful for other people, that's their business.
MR: Someone quoted you as saying that ontological questions are a form of harassment. Did you say something like that?
NC: No. I think they're fine. We all are concerned with trying to find out what really exist – those are ontological questions.
MR: I'm curious about your time in Israel on the kibbutz. You went to a Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz, right?
NC: I did for several months.
MR: Were you ever formally associated with any Israeli political party?
NC: No. I could never be. There were some I was sympathetic to, but could never join them because they had beliefs that I couldn't accept. So in the 1940s and the early 50s, I was pretty close to Hashomer Hatzair, which was up until 1948, opposed to a Jewish state as I was and remained. They, however, were divided into Stalinist and Trotskyite components. And I was highly critical of Leninism from early my early years. I never could join them.
MR: Do you remember where you were for the partition decision in ’47?
NC: Maybe in an office at work. I thought it was a very bad decision.
Remember Pearl Harbor
MR: Are there any historical events that blaze in your mind, and you remember exactly where you were?
NC: Sure. December 7th, 1941. I was at home listening to the New York Philharmonic on the radio.
MR: Do you remember what song?
NC: No, but it was some symphony. The radio broke and announced Pearl Harbor. And there are other times I remember. But I really don't much like to talk about personal history. Nobody's business or interest.
MR: Were you opposed to World War II?
NC: No. First of all, remember that the United States did not go to war. Germany declared war on the United States.
After Pearl Harbor, of course, the United States was going to be involved in the Pacific War. So I was not one of those who opposed the.
MR: Was that the only war in your lifetime that you did not oppose?
NC: It's hard to think of another. There are cases of defense – the United States has not had such occasions, but for other countries there are.
MR: But you don't believe the United States has?
NC: I don't think the United States has fought a defensive war since 1945.