Noam Chomsky (2 page)

Dr William and Elsie Chomsky with children David and Noam.

While his family struggled to maintain
FDR
-style liberalism, Noam was increasingly influenced by an uncle from New York who told him that there was more to it, much more, including solidarity with the working classes and those increasingly misled and oppressed by domestic and international propaganda. This led him to listen carefully to the different voices and languages around him. While the social circle of the Chomsky family was quite small, there was at least his uncle from New York, who provided rich pickings.

Noam’s formal education started remarkably early: barely aged two, he was enrolled in Oak Lane County Day School, a Deweyite experimental school run by Temple University, and stayed there until aged twelve.

Chomsky had a natural predilection for mental work. Critical reading of a vast amount of modern Jewish and socialist-orientated literature, as well as some highly technical works on Hebrew language matters (including his father’s doctoral dissertation on David Kimche), honed his mind to a degree that was extraordinary for a twelve-year-old boy. While such progress was quite ordinary in the sense of a natural environment providing all the stimuli, there is also the sense that Chomsky became quite competitive in his quest: a family friend is quoted as saying that he was already trying to ‘outdo his parents’.
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Naturally one would expect that Chomsky’s parents would have been delighted to see his early determination for the common cause to make the world a better place. There is no suggestion that he was pushed as a
Wunderkind
or child prodigy, an idea that would have been contrary to the educational ideals his parents practised.

Their Jewish community circles also gave rise to the specific preoccupation with the politics of Zionism. Given the impact on subsequent world history, therein lies one of the great contradictions into which Chomsky became enmeshed from early in his life. The permutation from Zionist to anti-Zionist, as perceived by some, remains one of the most bitter political and cultural arguments of our time, even if the hard evidence has always been on Chomsky’s side. That he would discuss such matters with some kids from school, at an age when other kids from the non-Jewish neighbourhood were reading, if anything at all, Superman comics, was not so much surprising as it was unusual in the overall context of American life at the time – or of any time. Even so Chomsky has pointed out that such serious discussions were not the order of things, and that normal kids’ play predominated.

Aged ten he contributed an editorial article to his school newspaper concerning the spread of fascism. He still remembers the first sentence as something like ‘Austria falls, Czechoslovakia falls, and now Barcelona falls’. Two years later he became immersed in the Spanish anarchist revolution, mainly by hanging out in New York second-hand bookstores (many run by recent anti-fascist refugees) and in the office of the anarchist journal
Freie Arbeiter Stimme
, and by discussions with his uncle. That a ten- to twelve-year-old should grapple with such issues might again seem extraordinary. Chomsky maintains today that even a ten-year-old can understand such issues because they are fundamental and based on common sense, hence accessible to anyone at any age of reason. But it comes as no surprise that Chomsky, in his professional life, has not seen any advances in education of the sort he himself was lucky enough to experience, and that he continues to call for the radical reform of mainstream education in America and elsewhere. The obstacles at hand are those of a society based on authoritarian hierarchical institutions not tolerating such alternative school systems for very long. One of the key lessons learned is that a real and positive education can be obtained, much as the anarcho-syndicalist movements achieved a brief but real workers’ society in Barcelona. When Chomsky is described as an anarcho-syndicalist and/or a socialist libertarian, even the more well-meaning detractors refer to his high-minded and utopian idealism, when in fact his common-sense stance, as practised by many before him, has always been a realistic option.

At the age of twelve Chomsky received a surprise when he entered Central High, also in Philadelphia. A good school, it nevertheless practised a kind of indoctrination, ‘providing a system of false beliefs’.
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He managed to get excellent grades, but he was perturbed to realize that, unlike at his first school where excellence was solely measured against oneself, he was expected to do so at the expense of those who got lesser marks. A story from high school life describes his break with a practice that is a common obsession in schools and beyond: competitive sports. Initially cheering for the school football team with everyone else, one day he realized the folly of it, especially as he actually ‘hates’ his high school. This echoes the endless progression of students who come to hate schools and anything they stand for. Orwell, an author Chomsky admires (with reservations), is famous for denouncing his education in no uncertain terms, and so are countless other literary figures who have the means to make it known.

Escaping the narrow confines of Philadelphia, Chomsky, aged thirteen, began to make regular trips to New York, where he visited his mother’s family, a family contained within Jewish working-class culture. As noted before, his uncle, Milton Krauss (married to Chomsky’s mother’s sister), had a news-stand on Seventy-Second Street that was a magnet for mostly middle-class and professional intellectuals, many of them German émigrés and such. Krauss, a remarkable autodidact, was deeply immersed in psychoanalytic literature at the time, and some of those who gravitated to the news-stand in the evenings were professional psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, again mostly German refugees. (His uncle ended up becoming a very successful lay analyst with a Riverside Drive apartment.) Chomsky thus made friends with an assortment of down-at-heel intellectuals. He recalls this as ‘the most influential intellectual culture during my early teens’.
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Moving freely between the realms of unorthodox Marxism and anarchism, he visited the offices of the
Freie Arbeiter Stimme
. A notable contributor was Rudolf Rocker, who wrote convincingly on the merits of anarchism and political revolution.

One thing that must have impressed the teenage Chomsky was that there were armies of good and well-meaning writers and activists who made absolutely no money out of their endeavours, working hard only to advance the common good, with no material benefit for themselves. This was starkly opposed to the crass capitalism he saw around him in New York and closer to home in Philadelphia, where middle- and upper-class people only worked to advance their own interests and material benefits. The idea of working for others and not for oneself became a matter of principle for young Chomsky. It was the natural state of being in the milieu in which he was now immersed. The Hebrew-Zionist culture of his parents’ circles was also very dedicated, not to their own material interests, but rather to the ‘cause’ of revival of Hebrew culture and language, the Zionist settlement in Palestine, and so on. What Chomsky also learnt at a remarkably early age is that ‘bad’ people can usurp ‘good’ ideas, hence ideologies can become meaningless when they are hijacked by people with totalitarian tendencies. Chomsky’s absolute disdain of Stalinist commissars is thus equal to that of ‘imperialist stooges’ like Reagan and Bush in the latter days of American power politics.

Reading, as he was, the works of political pamphleteers and underground writers, he was equally struck by what, in stark comparison, the mainstream press and bookstores had to offer. The contrast could not have been greater. Why? The latter is the product of a huge propaganda machine, a notion Chomsky would later set out to prove in detail. The general paranoia of the war years further intensified the gap between truth and propaganda.

When Chomsky graduated from high school, aged sixteen, he had already completed an upbringing that was shaped by what one might call a fortunate combination of genetic endowment and excellent learning experiences. And yet Chomsky is diffident in ascribing his evolution to these factors alone. Asked in an interview about parental influence he said that ‘it’s a combination of influence and resistance, which is difficult to sort out. Undoubtedly, the background shaped the kinds of interests and tendencies and directions that I pursued. But it was independent.’
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Thus Chomsky from an early age placed much importance on the internal dimension of the mind.

At the time that the Second World War was coming to an end, Chomsky enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, although he continued to live at home. Doing a general course in philosophy, logic and languages, he was one of those students who take papers because they sound interesting, not because they have anything to do with a chosen professional career. Such idealism was often disappointed by the academic reality, which was a crude continuation of a regimented high school system. Only a few lecturers stood out, like his Arabic language teacher, ‘an antifascist exile from Italy who was a marvellous person as well as an outstanding scholar’.
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Such criteria for academics are hard to come by and Chomsky, like so many before and after him, considered dropping out, perhaps to go to Palestine and work in a kibbutz.

Noam Chomsky’s High School graduation day.

With Chomsky’s intensely Jewish background such a move might have been considered quite the thing to do. Indeed the kibbutzim attracted, then as today, many people from all around the world, not necessarily because they were Jewish, but because the kibbutzim system was admired for its cooperative and egalitarian ways of doing things. At the time there were still some kibbutzim that advocated Arab-Jewish cooperation and were opposed to the creation of the Zionist state. It was such a kibbutz that Chomsky would have liked to work in. One problem, however, was that the organizations representing kibbutzim in the
US
were split between Stalinist and Trotskyite (in Palestine, they were almost all Stalinist), and by his early teens he was a pretty committed anti-Leninist (and, of course, anti-Stalin and anti-Trotsky). These were major issues in those days. While Chomsky has since visited Israel many times, he has remained opposed to a Jewish state. As a pragmatist, however, he does not accept the
fait accompli
.

Two events prevented him going to Palestine for good. One was his childhood friend Carol Schatz: they fell in love. The second was meeting Zellig Harris, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. Harris had established the first department of linguistics anywhere in the United States and can fairly be described as the founder of structural linguistics and discourse analysis in America. He had developed a rigorous set of methods by which all languages can be studied and described. He did this by applying methods of segmentation and classification, and some reconstruction, to find the elements of language. Chomsky was interested.

Better still, Harris’s politics were close enough to that of Chomsky. Harris was a critical thinker attracted to the Frankfurt School and psychoanalysis. He leaned to the anti-Bolshevik left – Rosenberg, Pannekoek, Paul Mattick (who was his personal friend and whom Chomsky later came to know as well). However his main engagement was with left anti-state Zionism: the League for Arab-Jewish Rapprochement (bi-national) and, primarily, Avukah, the American left anti-state Zionist organization, of which he was the leading figure. Avukah had enormous influence on many young people in those days – lots of young Jewish radical intellectuals involved in Zionism, but anti-state, anti-Stalinist and anti-Leninist as well. For Chomsky this fitted pretty well with his earlier anarchist involvements, which were Rocker-style anarcho-syndicalism and Pannekoek-style left Marxism.

Harris’s teaching methods were unorthodox and he engaged with students on a personal level, eschewing the lecture theatres for the pub or his apartment. Chomsky remembers that ‘there used to be a Horn & Hardart’s right past 34th Street on Woodland Avenue, and we’d often meet in the upstairs, or in his apartment in Princeton. His partner was a mathematician; she was working with Einstein.’
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