the Real Noam Chomsky - Life and Works - an Introduction

GNOME CHOMSKY THE GARDEN NOAM

Meet the Real Professor Chomsky

For anyone who isn’t familiar with the real Noam Chomsky or his life and works – or who just doesn’t really understand the humor and meaning of why a garden gnome would be made of a college professor – hopefully the following introduction will help. As you’ll see Professor Chomsky has dedicated his life to tackling very serious, controversial, and often depressing World issues – so for many people the idea of ‘mixing’ the innate seriousness of the deep and troubling topics he deals with with the pop cultural silliness of garden gnomes is gratifying in its extreme ridiculousness. That and the fact that Mr. Chomsky retains a mellow sense of humor in the face of the controversy surrounding the many World tragedies he addresses – along with the fact that his name is already ‘Noam’ made it nearly impossible for a cheeseball like me to resist making such the Garden Noam Chomsky gnome.

By no means am I an expert on Noam Chomsky’s life thought and ideas – but I hope the below can serve as an adequate introduction to anyone unfamiliar with his work. Any inaccuracies are entirely my fault. May his ideas long continue to fertilize the seeds of political questioning and positive social change in the hearts and minds of people everywhere!

The Basics to Know about Noam

Noam Chomsky, the brilliant and groundbreaking American linguistics professor and political activist is best known for his vast writings, presentations, and other internationally published work criticizing the corrupt practices of the political-corporate world and its abuse and manipulation of the media. Professor Chomsky is internationally known as one of the most important intellectuals in ‘left wing’ politics, and according to a 1992 report he was the most quoted (or cited) living scholar in the world and one of the top eight most cited intellectuals of all time. In 2006 the magazine New Statesman voted Professor Chomsky into the seventh place on their list of “Heroes of our time”. Ironically, despite Mr. Chomsky’s many important scientific and political contributions and his widespread international recognition, the average American doesn’t even recognize his name.

Noam - A Brief Life Overview

Born Avram Noam Chomsky on December 7, 1928 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to scholarly parents William and Elsie Chomsky. Noam describes his childhood neighborhood as a sort of “Jewish ghetto” where at a young age he experienced a taste of anti-Semitism. He soon managed to develop a considerable awareness of international politics and by his early teens this awareness led Noam to develop a strong identification with anarchist philosophy and politics.

In 1945 Noam went on to study philosophy and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania where several of his professors had a strong effect on his future academic career and political views. In 1949 Chomsky married fellow linguist Carol Schatz and their family eventually grew to include their two daughters Aviva and Diane, and their son Harry. In 1955 Noam achieved his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania and soon thereafter began to teach at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he has continued to teach for the last 50 years. Noam’s best-known book on linguistics, Syntactic Structures was released in 1957. In 1961 he was appointed a full professorship and has gone on to hold various special titles since then.

Noam’s other ‘career’ as a public activist began soon after the start of his teaching career at MIT and the 1967 publication of his essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” announced Chomsky’s arrival as an important figure in the international political mindscape. While Noam’s initial political activism focused on criticism of the Vietnam War his writings and other contributions have ranged over vast territories since then: from the under-acknowledged dependence of the scientific establishment on the military industrial complex, to pointing out that the United States and its allies can easily be seen as the most flourishing, influential, and longstanding terrorists in the world. Over the last 40 years with his authoring of several books and giving of countless speeches around the world Chomsky has become increasingly well recognized as an important and controversial figure in the arena of world politics.

Political Views and Activism

Despite his highly influential and significant academic career, Chomsky is today best known for his political views and activism. He is generally considered an American political dissident because his views so strongly contradict the perspectives put forward by our American media and political organizations. Again, Professor Chomsky’s political writings and other contributions cover a large territory of issues ranging from insights into and criticisms of war and media manipulation to encouraging new forms of social structures. Some of his key political ideas include:

· A strongly critical view of the United State’s aggressive foreign policy. Chomsky is especially talented at pointing out the hypocrisy of the U.S. claim that it supports international democracy and is anti-terrorism – demonstrating how it actually – simultaneously destroys democracies, encourages repression, and both overtly and covertly contributes to many of the worst terrorist acts in the world. Though this perspective is alien and extremely disturbing to most U.S. citizens, professor Chomsky is frighteningly skillfully and very thorough at demonstrating the validity of this point of view.

· That the mass media (whether television, radio, or print, etc.) in the United States is almost entirely a propaganda tool of the U.S. government and in turn the U.S. and International corporations that control it. This phenomena was explored in depth in one of Chomsky’s best known books Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.

· He opposes censorship and strongly supports freedom of speech.

· Strongly opposes the so called U.S. war on drugs, emphasizing that it is actually only a “war on certain drugs” and is really more a means of social and class-race control. He further points out that the real key to solving the problem lays in education and prevention rather than the highly destructive and largely ineffective military and police approach that has been in effect.

· Critical and very cautious of capitalism and of American big business-type capitalism in particular. But also very critical of Leninist types of socialism which also tend to be very repressive.

· A strongly antiwar but not necessarily completely pacifist perspective. Chomsky was very strongly critical of the Vietnam War and other wars that the U.S. has overtly or covertly participated in during the last half century. Even when a war may be ‘justified’ he feels that good diplomacy can usually be used as a preventative to conditions reaching that level.

In general Professor Chomsky’s political and ideal social views could be labeled as ‘traditional anarchist’. He’s described himself as a fan of both libertarian socialism and anarcho-syndicalism and supports progressive Unions such as the International Workers of the World. Okay, what does that all mean? – Well, to be lazy and quote Wikipedia:

‘Libertarian socialism is a group of political philosophies that aim to create a society without political, economic or social hierarchies – a society in which all violent or coercive institutions would be dissolved, and in their place every person would have free, equal access to tools of information and production, or a society in which such coercive institutions and hierarchies were drastically reduced in scope.[1]
‘ This equality and freedom would be achieved through the abolition of authoritarian institutions and private property,[2] in order that direct control of the means of production and resources will be gained by the working class [3]’
&
‘Anarcho-syndicalism(can be seen as a specific form of Libertarian socialism, and) is a branch of anarchism labor movement.[47] Anarcho-syndicalists view labor unions as a potential force for revolutionary social change, replacing capitalism and the State with a new society democratically self-managed by workers.’
&
‘The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or the Wobblies) is an international union
(that) … contends that all workers should be united within a single union as a class and that the wage system should be abolished. They may be best known for the Wobbly Shop model of workplace democracy, in which workers elect recallable delegates, and other norms of grassroots democracy (self-management) are implemented.’ and society as a whole. Libertarian socialism also constitutes a tendency of thought that informs the identification, criticism and practical dismantling of illegitimate authority in all aspects of social life. Accordingly libertarian socialists believe that “the exercise of power in any institutionalized form – whether economic, political, religious, or sexual – brutalizes both the wielder of power and the one over whom it is exercised.”

– I know it all sounds like a bunch of hippy idealism – but I have to say that I’ve seen such philosophies and organizations do some pretty amazing things here in my hometown of Portland, Oregon.

Chomsky’s Contributions to Linguistics

While it would be difficult to clearly explain Chomsky’s contributions to linguistics without going into a complex background of linguistic science and theories, suffice it to say that his ideas and other contributions have had a profound effect on the field and have strongly shaped several other disciplines as well. Mr. Chomsky has received numerous awards as well as honorary degrees for his work in linguistics – far too many to list here.

In very general terms linguistics is the study of how and why human languages develop and work as they do, and some of professor Chomsky’s most important linguistic work focuses on why and how children learn languages as quickly and specifically as they do. In somewhat more technical terms: Two of Chomsky’s most significant contributions to theoretical linguistics are the creation of the theory of generative grammar, and a new ranking and classification of the generative power of formal languages. (Don’t worry, I didn’t really understand any of that last sentence either.)

Influence on Other Fields

A younger Chomsky with friend philosopher Enrique Dussel

Additionally, in the field of psychology, professor Chomsky is credited as a major influence in the mid 20th century transition from behaviorist to cognitive psychology, which isn’t all that surprising considering that Chomsky himself considers linguistics itself a branch of cognitive psychology. Further, his theories have had a strong effect on evolutionary psychology as well as on the development of specific psychological methodologies such as the popular methods of neuro-linguistic programming. Even fields as diverse as computer science, phonology, combinatorialist mathematics, and immunological biochemistry have been nourished by Chomskyan ideas.

Chomsky in Pop Culture

Although he’s still not very widely known outside of certain intellectual circles in America; Chomsky’s name has made many appearances in pop-culture. A more memorable pop-cultural Chomsky reference was the naming of a chimpanzee subject of an animal language study at Columbia University ‘Nim Chimpsky’ in joking reference to Chomsky and his theory about human language acquisition.

In 2006 Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez strongly recommended Chomsky’s book Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance in a speech at the U.N. General Assembly. The speech received a good deal of applause and helped boost the book’s sales; but somehow The New York Times ended up reporting that Chavez had expressed his regrets not having been able to meet Chomsky while the Professor was still alive. The paper acknowledged its error about Chomsky’s ‘living status’ but since then it’s become a somewhat popular misconception that Noam actually had passed away.

Professor Noam Chomsky Today

Fortunately Noam continues to live and work in the United States despite his criticism of the government and corporate powers. Though he doesn’t believe in evaluating countries and despite his numerous criticisms of the forces dominating it, Chomsky still considers the U.S. the “greatest country in the world” – because he admires its advances in areas such as free speech –advances gained by ‘centuries of popular struggle’. In addition to his professorship, Noam continues to travel and regularly lecture about world politics. Though his presentations are well received, his manner of speaking has often been described as monotone or ‘largely devoid of personality or emotion.’ But Chomsky seems to be proud of this kind of criticism, saying:

“I’m a boring speaker and I like it that way…I doubt that people are attracted to whatever the persona is…People are interested in the issues, and they’re interested in the issues because they are important.”

* To learn more about Noam Chomsky – check out some of his many books at your local library or bookstore – or watch a video about him – such as The Manufacture of Consent, or of course you could view You-Tube or Google video for online presentations of his speeches or debates.

As you can see from these more recent pictures, over the last few years and now in his nineties Noam has taken to keeping a beard for the first time in his life.

Professor Chomsky, Noam has actually taken on much of the classic look of a garden gnome!