National Post
January 6, 2001
The importance of speaking truth to Noam Chomsky
by Christopher Hitchens
CHOMSKY ON MISEDUCATION
Edited and introduced by Donald Macedo Rowman & Littlefield, 197 pp., $29.75
Some years ago, in an interview conducted with himself for The Chomsky
Reader, America's most and least celebrated public intellectual came up with
a beautiful piece of empirically based reasoning. Listen to the talk radio
shows, he suggested, and notice what happens. When the argument is about
sports, people will call up full of convictions and express themselves in
strong and vivid language, challenging the experts and proposing their own
solutions. Then, when it's time for a public affairs program, the audience
will speak in received-opinion babble, hesitate and defer to the pundits. In
the first case, they trust themselves and know what they know; in the
second, they feel they are trespassing on forbidden establishment turf. It's
politics, not football, that is the dismal, consumerized, spectator pursuit.
Plain insights such as this have won Chomsky a following that, should he
ever show an inclination to declare himself The Leader, would constitute a
cult. But he persists in his direct, unadorned campaign to speak truth, not
to power (which knows the truth, as he bluntly points out) but to the
powerless. He considers his own discoveries in the field of linguistics to
be essentially simple -- language and cognition are common and innate
capacities available to all -- and he stands out as a defender of the
verifiable and the objective against various post-modern relativists and
casuists who sneer at the notion that anything can be intrinsically knowable
or valuable ...
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