- April 30, 2015
From: Noam Chomsky
To: Sam Harris
The idea of publishing personal correspondence is pretty weird, a strange form of exhibitionism – whatever the content. Personally, I can’t imagine doing it. However, if you want to do it, I won’t object.
An entertaining exchange between Chomsky and Harris which goes about exactly as you'd expect.
I must say, Chomsky is one cantankerous son of a gun. Granted, Harris was less than flattering in his original treatment of Chomsky's points in The End of Faith (as he included near the beginning here), but in this exchange, Harris strikes me as a reasonable man. Chomsky, on the other hand, strikes me as a pedant used to an automatic deference from those he deigns to interact with. While I agree that the tone of an argument has no ultimate bearing on its contents — they say not to shoot the messenger because of his message — I can't help but think about the power that tone has in an exchange. If men were perfectly rational beings free of the frailties and cognitive biases inherent to human psychology, then the tone one takes would make no difference because we'd be able to weigh the argument without feeling personally attacked, our flight or fight response kicking in and shutting down the higher-functioning parts of our brain, or as Spock would say, becoming emotionally compromised. Harris, it seems to me, took the pain to create an environment relatively free of hostility, adopted a tone that engendered a safe channel of communication. Chomsky got irate to the point of being emotionally compromised anyway. Because that's what this is about right? Sam Harris published this because he wanted to show how incapable Noam Chomsky is of a clear-headed debate. I think, in that sense, he's right.
A very irritating and interesting exchange. Rational discourse can be tricky, but the idea isn't hard. It's like building a bridge, you use tools to form a construction that spans a gap. Chomsky is an expert in language, the most important tool. No doubt he can acquit himself with modus ponens and such logical tools. What he clearly lacks is "curiosity and goodwill." These are dismissed as the irrelevant "tone of the messenger" as if they were two modems communicating over a noisy line. Hostility and contempt are inimical to constructive discourse among humans. What's the point? I am curious about one thing: who was "the perpetrator of by far the worst crime of this millennium who did so, he explained, because God had instructed him that he must smite the enemy"?
The "perpetrator of by far the worst crime of this millennium" appears to be W, who, according to "a translation of a translation of a translation" said "God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them." God is silent on the matter, and Zis scribes are all in confusion. Details of W's direct line to heaven aside, did he perpetrate the "worst crime of this millennium"? Chomsky may still be writing 1999 on his checks, but let's take this to mean the past thousand years. Wikipedia has the ghoulish numbers: War on Terror (including Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan): 0.272 to 1.26 million deaths. Iran-Iraq War: 0.5 to 2 million deaths (citation needed, sigh). You can sort the table and find even more impressive statistics, and few of them ocurred before 1015. Perhaps someone should ask Chomsky to elucidate what he means by "crime." Someone other than Sam Harris.
The most interesting part of this was imagining having such a large ego you can't step around it for just the duration of a single email. I agree with Chomsky on every political and ethical point made here (that I'd had any thoughts about beforehand) but his constant talk of "evasions" and his imagined slights are just ridiculous.
> his constant talk of "evasions" and his imagined slights are just ridiculous. Did Harris not evade anything then?