It's All About Me, Man: [ItsAllAboutMeMan] DeLong's noxious form of argument

Thursday, March 26, 2009

[ItsAllAboutMeMan] DeLong's noxious form of argument

I ran across an a screed online about Chomsky at:

econ161.berkeley.edu/Politics/Chomsky.html

It was pretty useless, and it was depressing that many people chimed in agreeing to the debatable or outright incorrect points the author, an academic, tried to make. I was heartened to read this excellent rebuttal:

Dear Mr DeLong

I refer to a page you have posted on your site, detailing your "allergic" reaction to Noam Chomsky and his book "What Uncle Sam Really Wants".

I feel compelled to advise you that your reaction to Chomsky and his methods is very revealing and instructive, although not in the way you obviously intended.

I read "My Allergic Reaction..." with great care, and it seems to me that you have missed the point of Chomsky's main thesis entirely. Furthermore, your reaction to his thesis is entirely predictable, according to models outlined by himself and central to his media analysis.

You are clearly set in your ways. You expect any and all accounts of the Cold War to be a litany of Soviet crimes and America's noble efforts to thwart the global threat. You might perhaps allow that U.S. planners made mistakes, due to naiveti or tactical error. Nevertheless, Soviet tyranny is central to your understanding of U.S. policy throughout the post war period. This is what you mean by the "context": a grim elucidation of the totalitarian regimes in the USSR and the Warsaw pact. Of course, no-one can deny the Stalinists their place in the list of tyrannies. But the "context" which concerns Chomsky and that which you find so disturbing is the grim elucidation of the totalitarian regimes sponsored by the US. (I can see your head shake in incomprehension.)

Had you read beyond page seventeen (I suspect that perhaps you did) you might have grasped the thrust of Chomsky's thesis; that US policy was informed by principles other than "containment" or "rollback", principles that required little or no modification when the Soviet empire collapsed, and that are easily demonstrated today by the actually existing facts.

You missed the point in the Seventies also. Chomsky was merely trying to decipher the tortured logic that rendered the ongoing atrocities in East Timor and elsewhere totally invisible to the pundits festooning themselves with moral outrage over the Khmer Rouge. In my opinion, he succeeded. I suspect your allergy will safely immunise you from any impulse to investigate for yourself the articles and books he, and others, published at the time.

I can see that your are comfortable with your world view, and that you dispensed with Chomsky quite to your satisfaction. Seventeen pages is all that was required! So be it. You are clearly an intelligent man. I'm sure you could furnish me with a myriad of facts to support the proposition that human rights, economic development, and democratisation truly are "the focus of a substantial chunk of U.S. post-war policy." Such facts reside for eternity in the handsome tomes that adorn your library. Such facts are extruded on demand by esteemed policy think tanks. Comforting indeed.

"...it is a strange-disposed time: But men may construe things after their fashion, Clean from the purposes of the things themselves." You may by now be wondering why I have bothered to harangue you at all. I guess I'm wondering that myself. Professor Chomsky needs no champion and it would be unfair to accuse you personally of complicity in the macabre travesties of "democracy" that the US loves so much in places like Columbia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Indonesia, Burma, Costa Rica, Bolivia, The Philippines etc. And yet...

What do you believe in, Mr DeLong? That "Free Markets" and liberal democracy go hand in hand? That American ideals and values have shaped the world into a better place? That (to quote Kissinger) "America is a beacon of liberty for all mankind"? Do any of these statements need qualification?

I would suggest that the leafy glades of Academe is not the place to test the veracity of these assumptions. Perhaps Haiti would be more suitable? Haiti, nurtured in the soft bosom of American benevolence for almost a century and, inexplicably, still a picture of total destitution. Maybe poor brown people in these hot places simply don't know what's good for them, and will continue to throw themselves in front of American-made bullets until it finally dawns on them that Washington loves them.

I'm confident you will never "lower the level of the discourse" by questioning the eternal verities of US benevolence. In the meantime, for most of the world, America has become truly the dark cloud that covers the earth. This is great for Monsanto, Wal-Mart, and McDonalds, even for S
Contributed by Simon Kisby (cisbio@freeuk.com) on July 2, 1999.

I wrote the following note to the author:

It's very depressing to read the critics of Chomsky. They want him to bash Stalin, or Pol Pot or whoever, pretending he never has. Of course it isn't his point to do that, but they must never have read him if they think he hasn't. They just want him to do it again, and that's all they want him to do. I wonder if there is any other intellectual who's ideas, methods, conclusions, facts and sources have been more tested and challenged. In his prime he would debate anybody.

But no, they want him to speculate (agree) that things would have been worse for x y or z if they had been allowed to chose their own governments, rather than the US isntalling a fascist dictatorship. Along the lines of argument being advanced right now about how the Palestinians have brought distruction on themselves by electing the wrong representatives... with no responsibility at all being assigned to the Israeli's.

Anyway, this string is 10 years old, but I just found it. I'm incoherent with anger and contempt, but you very calmly and reasonably responded to a man hardly fit to be educating young minds. Though I understand there are lots and lots of them, and he's pretty typical for the economics dept at Berkeley.

It's distressing that this piece, which is revealing and instructive in exactly the way you said (revealing DeLong's intellectual shortcomings) continues to be circulated and discussed on the web, but your response has not. Disturbing, but predictable.

One more thought (http://jeffweintraub.blogspot.com/2006/06/chomsky-problem-peter-beaumont-brad.html) DeLong thought he was delivering a crushing blow to Chomsky by bringing to light private correspondence about Vaclav Havel (DeLong calls Havel a "hero" - but I remember clearly that time, when it was obvious Havel was servile to Washington, and had become something of a clown) - he made the mistake of printing the entire text which shows once again that Chomsky was neither an apologist for Stalin, or ignored his crimes:

"Reading it brought to mind a number of past experiences in Southeast Asia, Central America, the West Bank, and even a kibbutz in Israel where I lived in 1953 -- Mapam, super-Stalinist even to the extent of justifying the anti-Semitic doctor's plot, still under the impact of the image of the USSR as the leader of the anti-Nazi resistance struggle."

But typically, DeLong ignores this. You can't say he didn't read it, he just ignored it because it was inconvenient. For our benefit DeLong "I interpret(s) Chomsky's bile as the result of his native personality..." etc. I wish I was as funny and accurate in my private correspondence!

Jeff Weintraub reprints this on his blog (which allows no comments - seems to me that people who set up their blogs that way don't have any confidence in their arguments - they can't tolerate debate or dissent).

Amusing that in 2006 Weintraub champions Peter Beaumont's view that it's way off base calling the US a "Failed State" - but in 2009, who appears to be correct?

Well, enough of this. I'd never heard of these people (for good reason) before I started a google search on "George Kennon" and "Chomsky." Back to work.

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