Monday, July 05, 2004

God, Chomsky and Reason

Andrew from Ambient Irony emails a mild difference of opinion on my Chomsky posts:

I disagree with you about Chomsky. I'm not actually sure whether he hates God or not (and indeed I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that).

But I strongly feel that the biggest problem with Chomsky is his anti-rationality. He's not just irrational; he actively attacks rational thought.

His linguistic theories are really just cargo-cult linguistics - pretty words that *look like* a linguistic theory but don't actually mean anything. His broader philosophy suffers from the same problem. His approach is that if you dress it up prettily enough, people won't notice that there's nothing there.

But it gets even worse: The post-modernist notion that all points of view are equally valid - and that science is a construct of Western bias and has no special validity - flat out contradicts everything we actually know. This nonsense has caused brain rot throughout academia all around the world.

An the cure for that is to make every student take and pass a course in engineering. That will thin the buggers out a bit. :)

I am not sure that this is actually a disagreement but rather a difference in emphasis. What I said was "I think the ultimate problem with Chomsky is not his irrationality, but his hatred of God which leads to a hatred of truth, liberty and all manner of other aspects of God's kingdom." This entails that Chomsky's irrationality (or anti-rationality as Andrew aptly puts it) is part of his problem, just not the most fundamental part.

I agree that anti-rationality is a major problem, but I suggest that one does not come to be anti-rational unless there is a more basic motivation at work. After all, Chomsky, and others like him, will use the tools of reason in their arguments so, at least to that extent they pay homage to reason even while arguing that objective reason is a myth. This is the same principle that makes a hypocrite pay lip service to virtue, even while living a morally reprehensible life. But what motivates this hatred of reason in a man obviously not willing to make the final step of explicitly embracing madness?

I submit that anti-reason is a misguided attempt to strike out at God, who, being invulnerable, does not present as promising a target. Similar principles hold with anti-Semitism -- also one of Chomsky's vices -- by the way. It is the moral equivalent of the man who, angry at his boss, goes home and yells at his wife, beats the kids or maybe just kicks the dog. It is the same principle that Milton attributed to Satan in Paradise Lost:
Nor will occasion want, nor shall we need
With dangerous expedition to invade
Heav'n, whose high walls fear no assault or Siege,
Or ambush from the Deep. What if we find
Some easier enterprize?

As to the question of whether or not Chomsky hates God: it is true that he tends to present himself as more of an agnostic in such quotes as this:
How do I define God? I don't. Divinities have been understood in various ways in the cultural traditions that we know. Take, say, the core of the established religions today: the Bible. It is basically polytheistic, with the warrior God demanding of his chosen people that they not worship the other Gods and destroy those who do -- in an extremely brutal way, in fact. It would be hard to find a more genocidal text in the literary canon, or a more violent and destructive character than the God who was to be worshipped. So that's one definition.
Looking beyond, we find other conceptions, of many kinds. But I have nothing to propose. People who find such conceptions important for themselves have every right to frame them as they like. Personally, I don't. That's why you haven't found my "thoughts on this [for you] criticaI question." I have none, because I see no need for them (apart from the -- often extremely interesting and revealing -- inquiry into human culture an history).

But reading between the lines, it is not at all difficult to see his utter contempt for the God of the Bible and for religious people in general. And yet he frequently casts himself as a defender of people whose religion is vastly more violent and imperialistic than Christianity. My conclusion is that his fundamental war is with his creator and that the hatred of Capitalism, of Jews, of Western civilization, and of Reason itself are symptoms of this more basic disease.

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