On Chomsky and the Responsibility of Intellectuals
Yesterday the internet fooled me into thinking that Noam Chomsky had died. Shame on me. It got me returning to his (1967) NRYB essay, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” which, I assume, made him first famous outside linguistics back in the day. Chomsky frames his essay with a nod to Dwight MacDonald’s (1945) essay “The responsibility of intellectuals.” (This I warmly recommend.) And lurking in the background of both (recall) is Benda’s (1928) The Treason of the Intellectuals.
Complicity in the crimes committed by empire is widespread. And in his 1967, Chomsky reserves special ire for two kinds of intellectuals. First are those that practice deceit (and worse) in the service of imperial projects. Chomsky is realist enough to be unsurprised by this. And, in particular, he is unsurprised that that intellectual service to empire is lucrative. But he recognizes a deeper corruption. Let me quote him:
It is of no particular interest that one man is quite happy to lie in behalf of a cause which he knows to be unjust; but it is significant that such events provoke so little response in the intellectual community—for example, no one has said that there is something strange in the offer of a major chair in the humanities to a historian who feels it to be his duty to persuade the world that an American-sponsored invasion of a nearby country is nothing of the sort. [emphasis added]
The historian in question is Arthur Schlesinger Jr (1917 – 2007), whose mendacious activities Chomsky had just described and, who I learn from Wikipedia had returned to academia as the Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center just before in 1966. (A more contemporary instance of the same phenomenon may be John Yoo, the Emanuel Heller Professor of Law at Berkeley.)
Notice that Chomsky is not claiming that government service in support of a regime that does awful things is the problem here (although he surely also finds that problematic). Rather, it is that the intellectual and academic communities (Chomsky seems to conflate the two) shrug shoulders over the very public practice of academic vices (dishonesty, lying, engaging in propaganda) in the service of very bad government practices.
In a nearby footnote Chomsky contrasts this with Schlesinger’s occasional “display” of “admirable scholarly caution,” so Chomsky implies that Schlesinger knows the difference between scholarship and propaganda. In particular Chomsky notes that the intellectual community really doesn’t want to know the extent of the mendacity involved: “The facts are known to all who care to know.”
Chomsky doesn’t explain the ultimate source of indifference, although, while noting the importance of propaganda, he implies it’s fundamentally deference to existing authority that turns to be characteristic of many established intellectuals. I think this because he contrasts the established intellectual community with those who “as honest men” that is “the students and junior faculty [who] are attempting to find out the truth for themselves rather than ceding the responsibility to “experts” or to government.” We are not told whether such deference to authority is a distinctive feature of intellectual life among senior intellectuals, or of humans as such.
But Chomsky does note that among certain academics, the obtuseness to moral hazards may be a feature (and not a bug) of the method and/or conception of science. And, second, in his criticism of these kind of scientists, more of his thinking is revealed. I quote:
IN THIS IMPLICIT DISPARAGEMENT of traditional intellectual values, Kristol reflects attitudes that are fairly widespread in academic circles. I do not doubt that these attitudes are in part a consequence of the desperate attempt of the social and behavioral sciences to imitate the surface features of sciences that really have significant intellectual content. But they have other sources as well. Anyone can be a moral individual, concerned with human rights and problems; but only a college professor, a trained expert, can solve technical problems by “sophisticated” methods. Ergo, it is only problems of the latter sort that are important or real. Responsible, non-ideological experts will give advice on tactical questions; irresponsible, “ideological types” will “harangue” about principle and trouble themselves over moral issues and human rights, or over the traditional problems of man and society, concerning which “social and behavioral science” has nothing to offer beyond trivalities [sic]. Obviously, these emotional, ideological types are irrational, since, being well-off and having power in their grasp, they shouldn’t worry about such matters.
What’s interesting is that Chomsky here draws on arguments then familiar from the then political right who are opposed to New Deal liberalism (or collectivist liberalism). So, there is a social-science-as-rent-seeking argument made famous by Gordon Tullock in The Organization of Inquiry, originally published in 1966. There is also an argument articulated by Leo Strauss that the purported value neutrality and technocratic sensibility of social science will implicate it in moral monstrosities (articulated in his 1953 Natural Right and History), and the then recent subject of a very high profile polemics because of the (1962) publication of Strauss’ students’ edited volume (Herbert J. Storing (ed.)) Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics with an ‘epilogue’ by Strauss.
And so lurking in Chomsky’s argument is the thought that the desire for scientific status among a certain managerial technocracy (that populates the rank of New Deal administrative state) has, in conjunction with the benefits provided and a pervasive (false) image of science, also corroded the capacity of certain established social scientific expert practitioners to make any substantive moral judgments about the application of their tools in the real world at all. We may say in jargon that the inductive risk of their advice over tactical issues in policy has been screened off from the more consequential (as it were, strategic) effects on those really impacted by policy.
That is, these so-called experts with a “facade of tough-mindedness and pseudo-science” wouldn’t be able to speak truth to power qua social scientific experts even if they wanted to because their sophisticated tools they pride themselves on — which provide a “facade of rationality” — prevent them from doing so altogether. And in broader context the implication is that in so far as these pseudo-scientists have prestige within the academy it is no surprise that the intellectual community can’t bring itself to be indignant about awarding fancy chairs to war-propagandists and war-criminals.
Now, Chomsky recognizes that his attack on social science might come off as advocacy of irrationalism in policy-land. And so he adds a more general qualification that appeals to pretty standard 1960s philosophy of science (and implied demarcation criteria):
There is much more that can be said about this topic, but, without continuing, I would simply like to emphasize that, as is no doubt obvious, the cult of the experts is both self-serving, for those who propound it, and fraudulent. Obviously, one must learn from social and behavioral science whatever one can; obviously, these fields should be pursued as seriously as possible. But it will be quite unfortunate, and highly dangerous, if they are not accepted and judged on their merits and according to their actual, not pretended, accomplishments. In particular, if there is a body of theory, well-tested and verified, that applies to the conduct of foreign affairs or the resolution of domestic or international conflict, its existence has been kept a well-guarded secret. In the case of Vietnam, if those who feel themselves to be experts have access to principles or information that would justify what the American government is doing in that unfortunate country, they have been singularly ineffective in making this fact known. To anyone who has any familiarity with the social and behavioral sciences (or the “policy sciences”), the claim that there are certain considerations and principles too deep for the outsider to comprehend is simply an absurdity, unworthy of comment.
More than a half century on it is an open question whether there is a “body of theory, well-tested and verified” that could justify foreign policy in the way one might wish. More often than not actual policy reflects political will, warts and all, rather than the insights of any such a theory.
As regular readers know I am actually quite sympathetic to the various lines of criticism of the clerisy that Chomsky develops in his piece (and many subsequent essays), even though I am by temperament and conviction much more at ease with embracing the necessity of Pax Americana than he ever would be.
But I am also struck by the fact that among the broad-tent liberals like myself — those who take the combination of moral egalitarianism and enlightened self-interest with cosmopolitanism rather seriously — there has been no true reckoning with these cognitive failures of the high tide of the ‘best and brightest’' technocratic liberalism of the 1960s that was Chomsky’s target.* For, many of Chomsky’s insights have not lost their bite against what came to be known as neoliberalism of the Washington Consensus or (let’s say) Obama-style-liberalism (as one can read in Chomsky’s “The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Redux: Using Privilege to Challenge the State.”)
Chomsky describes his own positionality in the following terms: “For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.” In some ways the situation is more dire than this. In his essay, Chomsky makes clear that often democratic power doesn’t even need to conceal the truth because it can count on acquiescence of those in the know.
This prompts a different thought: it’s almost as if the privileged minority that really can afford to speak truth is itself no more than a status symbol, worth beholding on a beautiful campus (academic or corporate) or worth reading about in glossy weeklies/monthlies (that may or may not receive grants from fancy foundations). Lacking spiritual authority it is doomed to irrelevance in a political system like ours.
*In my own scholarly work, I have emphasized the vulnerability of technocratic free-market liberalism (often associated with Milton Friedman, Gary Becker and James Buchanan) to similar criticisms.