Noam Chomsky

Not a few of mankind’s original thinkers have been colourful figures, led flamboyant lives and thus provided valuable material for many a biography filled with a salacious story or two. Take Friedrich Schiller, the German dramatic rebel and accidental academic. When giving his inaugural lecture at the University of Jena in 1789, he saw that far more people had turned up than could be accommodated in the lecture hall. Rather than let his employers find something bigger nearby, the youthful Schiller seized the moment and marched with the crowd through the streets of Jena to the town hall. There he lectured to an enthusiastic crowd of thousands shouting ‘freedom’, subsequently enjoying the attention he received from the liberated ladies of the town. Other fighters for freedom and reason, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertrand Russell, led eccentric lives that had the local establishments in uproar. Even a working-class hero like George Orwell could never quite divorce himself from his upper-class public school upbringing, or so his biographers tell us. All such activists – known and unknown – fought their battles to improve the lot of ordinary men and women, and quite a few advanced science and the arts along the way.

Noam Chomsky is one of the most notable contemporary champions of the people. He is also a scientist of the highest calibre. But is he great material for a biography? Certainly not, if you ask the subject. An intensely private man, he is horrified to be considered the main character in any story. He jokes about the notion that people come to see him, listen to him, even adore him, when in fact he is the most boring speaker ever to hit the stage. He gets serious very quickly and tells his audiences that they have come to hear about the ‘issues’ of our time, issues that are important to them and, as it happens, to him. What is it that he knows and the people don’t? Wrong question, he would say. The people merely want to know the truth and they know it is hidden from them by a vast propaganda machine. His skill is to lift the veil and reveal the truth. Anyone can do it, says Chomsky, it only takes some dedicated research and logical reasoning.

Chomsky at work in private.

Two large problems of the world are known as Plato’s problem and Orwell’s problem, respectively. Chomsky describes them thus:

Orwell’s problem is an apt description for any political activist, conveying despair at the lack of action in the face of overwhelming information that would dictate otherwise. Why are we unable to stop wars and genocide? Why are we unable to alleviate poverty? Why are we unable to establish a social order where justice and
égalité
are the norm rather than the exception? Plato’s problem on the other hand must appeal to all true scientists, like Chomsky. He would ask, as have Galileo, Descartes and Humboldt before him, ‘how do we acquire what we call language based on so little input from our language environment?’ How do we know all the rules of language when nobody ever taught us? How can we say things we never said before and never heard before? It cannot be learned behaviour, as perhaps the advertising industry would like to have us believe as it tries to manipulate the people.

Stop there, Chomsky would say, don’t mix science with political activism. There is no necessary connection between the two, especially not in his case. Like Einstein’s theory of relativity, or Russell’s principles of mathematical logic, Chomskyan linguistics takes years of training and dedication to the scientific method to advance new theories and make new discoveries. Political activism on the other hand is the people’s domain, and while scientists are people, too, there is no logical rule that says that a good scientist is also a good political activist – and quite obviously less so the other way round – however much we would like to believe in its possibility.

So let’s look at Noam Chomsky as two people: the scientist (the linguist) and the political activist. His private life is remarkable for its lack of an extraordinary story line. Given the status he has achieved – quite unintended, as we shall see – and the income and financial security that come with it, Chomsky is the first to point out that he leads a privileged life, at least in comparison to the working classes in America, and more so when set against the abject poverty of the masses of people living in the so-called Third World. What is important about Chomsky, however, is that he is one of those who says what the reasons are for this world of oppression and blatant social injustice. In return he is vilified by the corporate world of power, including the mainstream press, in both the
US
and Europe – the German news magazine
Der Spiegel
has described Chomsky as ‘Ayatollah des antiamerikanischen Hasses’ (‘the Ayatollah of anti-American hatred’).
²

In 2005 Chomsky celebrated his 77th birthday. He is edging closer to becoming an octogenarian linguist and political activist, and bound to remember the public birthday wishes he received from his wife Carol when he turned 70: ‘Well, seventy is nice, but what I’m really looking forward to is eighty!’
³
On his birthday, as on every other day of the year, he receives some 200 e-mails dealing with linguistics, politics and other matters. He answers them all, every day of the week (though, befitting his many responsibilities, a couple of personal assistants help him in the process). In addition he prepares speeches, lecture notes, learned articles, his latest book and other writing tasks. As a retired Emeritus Institute Professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (
MIT
) he still contributes to teaching and research well beyond the call of duty. Chomsky is a ferocious reader and reads with great attention to detail. Over the years he has acquired an encyclopaedic knowledge. As such he never stops working. His output and achievements are enormous, yet he would say that a humble factory worker on the assembly line produces far more than he has ever done. He is deeply aware that his status within the working classes is a privileged one. Still, the true nature of an academic worker is embodied in Chomsky.

Where does Chomsky’s capacity for highly productive and original work come from? One source may well be his genetic endowment: it’s ‘in his bones’, as Chomsky is fond of saying. This is a compliment to his parents, who migrated from the Ukraine and Belarus to the United States in 1913 and, as many a successful immigrant tale goes, established themselves through sheer hard work. Both came from an ultra-orthodox Jewish background. His mother, Elsie, was a teacher and activist who managed the Chomsky family in a fairly traditional way within the narrow constraints of contemporary American dominant culture. His father, William, was also a teacher and distinguished himself as a Hebrew scholar, specializing in Hebrew grammar. Elsie’s extended family in New York harboured some highly politicized members, but otherwise his parents were both Roosevelt Democrats, immersed in Deweyite educational theories. Being Jewish meant Hebrew-Zionism, which for them meant something like Ahad Ha’am’s cultural Zionism, with Palestine seen as a cultural centre but with the notion of a Jewish state only hovering in the background. Chomsky and his younger brother David, both born in Philadelphia, were certainly brought up in an environment of great mental stimulation, with a focus on educational and social issues based on the Democrat tradition of the
US
. That their father subjected language to intense investigation was an additional bonus for Noam in particular. The social issues faced in the 1930s were among the most intense in recent history. Quite apart from the social upheavals caused by the Great Depression in the city of their upbringing, there were the great national and international movements to consider. As chronicled in Orwellian literature, the dark shadows of totalitarianism enveloped the whole world. In Philadelphia the shadow of oppression was very real for young Chomsky, even in the streets, since theirs was an anti-Semitic neighbourhood, right-wing Catholic in tone and partly Irish and German in origin.