I hope that somebody finds it helpful in understanding the
like of Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, and other neuroscientists
or psychologists. (Joyce Carol Oates, Steven Soderbergh, Judd Apatow, and
Michael Douglas, also.)
For decades, Noam Chomsky has been one of the most
prominent critics of U.S. foreign policy, and the further left one travels
along the political spectrum, the more one feels his influence. Although I
agree with much of what Chomsky has said about the misuses of state power, I
have long maintained that his political views, where the threat of global
jihadism is concerned, produce dangerous delusions. In response, I have been
much criticized by those who believe that I haven’t given the great man his
due.
Last week, I did my best to engineer a public
conversation with Chomsky about the ethics of war, terrorism, state
surveillance, and related topics. As readers of the following email exchange
will discover, I failed. I’ve decided to publish this private correspondence,
with Chomsky’s permission, as a cautionary tale. Clearly, he and I have drawn
different lessons from what was, unfortunately, an unpleasant and fruitless
encounter. I will let readers draw lessons of their own. [“You can’t argue with
people like this.”]
–SH
April 26, 2015
From: Sam Harris
To: Noam Chomsky
Noam - I reached out to you indirectly through
Lawrence Krauss and Johann Hari and was planning to leave it at that, but a
reader has now sent me a copy of an email exchange in which you were quite
dismissive of the prospect of having a “debate” with me. So I just wanted to
clarify that, although I think we might disagree substantially about a few
things, I am far more interested in exploring these disagreements, and
clarifying any misunderstandings, than in having a conventional debate.
If you’d rather not have a public conversation
with me, that’s fine. I can only say that we have many, many readers in common
who would like to see us attempt to find some common ground. The fact that you
have called me “a religious fanatic” who “worships the religion of the state”
makes me think that there are a few misconceptions I could clear up. And many
readers insist that I am similarly off-the-mark where your views are concerned.
In any case, my offer stands, if you change your
mind.
Best,
Sam
April 26, 2015
From: Noam Chomsky
To: Sam Harris
Perhaps I have some misconceptions about you. Most
of what I’ve read of yours is material that has been sent to me about my
alleged views, which is completely false. I don’t see any point in a public
debate about misreadings. If there are things you’d like to explore privately,
fine. But with sources.
April 26, 2015
From: Sam Harris
To: Noam Chomsky
Noam —
Thanks for getting back.
Before engaging on this topic, I’d like to
encourage you to approach this exchange as though we were planning to publish
it. As edifying as it might be to have you correct my misreading of you in
private—it would be far better if you did this publicly. It’s not a matter of
having a “debate about misreadings”; it’s a matter of allowing our readers to
see that conversation on difficult and polarizing topics can occasionally
fulfill its ostensible purpose. If I have misread you, and you can show me
where I’ve gone wrong, I would want my readers to see my views change in real
time. It would be far less desirable for me to simply report that you and I
clarified a few things privately, and that I have now changed my mind about X,
Y, and Z.
Beyond correcting our misreadings, I think we
could have a very interesting conversation about the ethical issues surrounding
war, terrorism, the surveillance state, and so forth. I’d be happy to do this
entirely by email, or we could speak on the phone and have the audio
transcribed. In either case, you would be free to edit and refine your
contributions prior to publication. My only request would be that you not go
back and make such sweeping changes that I would have to totally revise my side
of things.
While you’re thinking about that, I’d like to draw
your attention to the only thing I have ever written about your work. The
following passages appear in my first book, The End of Faith (2004), which was
written in response to the events of 9/11. Needless to say, the whole
discussion betrays the urgency of that period as well as many of the failings
of a first book. I hesitate to put it forward here, if for no other reason than
that the tone is not one that I would have ever adopted in a direct exchange
with you. Nevertheless, if I’ve misrepresented your views in writing, this is
the only place it could have happened. If we’re going to clarify misreadings,
this would seem like a good place to start.
Best,
Sam
Leftist Unreason and the
Strange Case of Noam Chomsky
Nevertheless, many people are now convinced that the
attacks of September 11 say little about Islam and much about the sordid career
of the West—in particular, about the failures of U.S. foreign policy. The
French philosopher Jean Baudrillard gives these
themes an especially luxuriant expression, declaring that terrorism is a
necessary consequence of American “hegemony.” He goes so far as to suggest that
we were secretly hoping that such devastation would be visited upon us:
At a pinch we can say that they did it, but we wished
for it. . . . When global power monopolizes the situation to this extent, when
there is such a formidable condensation of all functions in the technocratic
machinery, and when no alternative form of thinking is allowed, what other way
is there but a terroristic situational transfer. It was the system itself which
created the objective conditions for this brutal retaliation. . . . This is
terror against terror—there is no longer any ideology behind it. We are far
beyond ideology and politics now. . . . As if the power bearing these towers
suddenly lost all energy, all resilience; as though that arrogant power
suddenly gave way under the pressure of too intense an effort: the effort
always to be the unique world model.40
If one were feeling charitable, one might assume that
something essential to these profundities got lost in translation. I think it
far more likely, however, that it did not survive translation into French. If Baudrillard had
been obliged to live in Afghanistan under the Taliban, [Fucking moron.] would
he have thought that the horrible abridgments of his freedom were a matter of
the United States’s “effort always to be the unique world model”? Would the
peculiar halftime entertainment at every soccer match—where suspected
fornicators, adulterers, and thieves were regularly butchered in the dirt at
centerfield—have struck him as the first rumblings of a “terroristic
situational transfer”? We may be beyond politics, but we are not in the least
“beyond ideology” now. Ideology is all that our enemies have.41
And yet, thinkers far more sober than Baudrillard
view the events of September 11 as a consequence of American foreign policy.
Perhaps the foremost among them is Noam Chomsky. In addition to making
foundational contributions to linguistics and the psychology of language,
Chomsky has been a persistent critic of U.S. foreign policy for over three
decades. He has also managed to demonstrate a principal failing of the liberal
critique of power. He appears to be an exquisitely moral man whose political
views prevent him from making the most basic moral distinctions—between types of violence,
and the variety of human purposes that give rise to them.
In his book 9-11, with rubble of the World Trade
Center still piled high and smoldering, Chomsky urged us not to forget that
“the U.S. itself is a leading terrorist state.” In support of this claim he
catalogs a number of American misdeeds, including the sanctions that the United
States imposed upon Iraq, which led to the death of “maybe half a million
children,” and the 1998 bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceuticals plant in Sudan,
which may have set the stage for tens of thousands of innocent Sudanese to die
of tuberculosis, malaria, and other treatable diseases. Chomsky does not
hesitate to draw moral equivalences here: “For the first time in modern
history, Europe and its offshoots were subjected, on home soil, to the kind of
atrocity that they routinely have carried out elsewhere.”42
Before pointing out just how wayward Chomsky’s
thinking is on this subject, I would like to concede many of his points, since
they have the virtue of being both generally important and irrelevant to the
matter at hand. There is no doubt that the United
States has much to atone for, both domestically and abroad. In this respect, we
can more or less swallow Chomsky’s thesis whole. To produce this horrible
confection at home, start with our genocidal treatment of the Native Americans,
add a couple hundred years of slavery, along with our denial of entry to Jewish
refugees fleeing the death camps of the Third Reich, stir in our collusion with
a long list of modern despots and our subsequent disregard for their appalling
human rights records, add our bombing of Cambodia and the Pentagon Papers to
taste, and then top with our recent refusals to sign the Kyoto protocol for
greenhouse emissions, to support any ban on land mines, and to submit ourselves
to the rulings of the International Criminal Court. The result should smell of
death, hypocrisy, and fresh brimstone.
We have surely done some terrible things in the past.
Undoubtedly, we are poised to do terrible things in the future. Nothing
I have written in this book should be construed as a denial of these facts, or
as defense of state practices that are manifestly abhorrent. There may be much
that Western powers, and the United States in particular, should pay
reparations for. And our failure to acknowledge our misdeeds over the years has
undermined our credibility in the international community. We can concede all
of this, and even share Chomsky’s acute sense of outrage, while recognizing
that his analysis of our current situation in the world is a masterpiece of
moral blindness.
Take the bombing of the
Al-Shifa pharmaceuticals plant: according to Chomsky, the atrocity of September
11 pales in comparison with that perpetrated by the Clinton administration in
August 1998. But let us now ask some very basic
questions that Chomsky seems to have neglected to ask himself: What did the
U.S. government think it was doing when it sent cruise missiles into Sudan? Destroying a
chemical weapons site used by Al Qaeda. Did the Clinton administration intend
to bring about the deaths of thousands of Sudanese children? No. Was our goal
to kill as many Sudanese as we could? No. Were we trying to
kill anyone at all? Not unless we thought members of Al Qaeda would be at the
Al-Shifa facility in the middle of the night. Asking these questions about
Osama bin Laden and the nineteen hijackers puts us in a different moral
universe entirely.
If we are inclined to follow Chomsky down the path of
moral equivalence and ignore the role of human intentions, we can forget about
the bombing of the Al-Shifa plant, because many of the things we did not do in
Sudan had even greater consequences. What about all the money and food we
simply never thought to give the Sudanese prior to 1998? How many children did
we kill (that is, not save) just by living in blissful ignorance of the
conditions in Sudan? Surely if we had all made it a priority to keep death out
of Sudan for as long as possible, untold millions could have been saved from
whatever it was that wound up killing them. We could have sent teams of
well-intentioned men and women into Khartoum to ensure that the Sudanese wore
their seatbelts. Are we culpable for all the preventable injury and death that we did
nothing to prevent? [This motherfucker’s obviouslyhigh. It’s toolate to recant
all of his statements. Fucking sad & Fucking moron. Young
NormanFinkelstein.] We may be, up to a point. The philosopher Peter
Unger has made a persuasive case that a single dollar spent on anything but the
absolute essentials of our survival is a dollar that has some starving child’s
blood on it.43 Perhaps we do have far more moral responsibility for the state
of the world than most of us seem ready to contemplate. This is not Chomsky’s
argument, however.
Arundhati Roy, a great admirer of Chomsky, has
summed up his position very well:
[T]he U.S. government refuses to judge itself by
the same moral standards by which it judges others. . . . Its technique is to
position itself as the well-intentioned giant whose good deeds are confounded
in strange countries by their scheming natives, whose markets it’s trying to
free, whose societies it’s trying to modernize, whose women it’s trying to
liberate, whose souls it’s trying to save. . . . [T]he U.S. government has
conferred upon itself the right and freedom to murder and exterminate people
“for their own good.”44
But we are, in many respects, just such a
“well-intentioned giant.” And it is rather astonishing that intelligent people,
like Chomsky and Roy, fail to see this. What we need to counter their arguments is
a device that enables us to distinguish the morality of men like Osama bin
Laden and Saddam Hussein from that of George Bush and Tony Blair. It
is not hard to imagine the properties of such a tool. We can call it “the
perfect weapon.”
Perfect Weapons and the
Ethics of “Collateral Damage”
What we euphemistically
describe as “collateral damage” in times of war is the direct result of
limitations in the power and precision of our technology. To see that
this is so, we need only imagine how any of our recent conflicts would have
looked if we had possessed perfect weapons—weapons that allowed us either to
temporarily impair or to kill a particular person, or group, at any distance,
without harming others or their property. What would we do with such
technology? Pacifists would refuse to use it, despite the variety of monsters
currently loose in the world: the killers and torturers of children, the
genocidal sadists, the men who, for want of the right genes, the right
upbringing, or the right ideas, cannot possibly be expected to live peacefully
with the rest of us. I will say a few things about
pacifism in a later chapter—for it seems to me to be a deeply immoral position
that comes to us swaddled in the dogma of highest moralism—but most of us are
not pacifists. Most of us would elect to use weapons of this sort. A
moment’s thought reveals that a person’s use of such a weapon would offer a
perfect window onto the soul of his ethics.
Consider the all too facile comparisons that have
recently been made between George Bush and Saddam Hussein (or Osama bin Laden,
or Hitler, etc.)—in the pages of writers like Roy and Chomsky, in the Arab
press, and in classrooms throughout the free world. How would George Bush have
prosecuted the recent war in Iraq with perfect weapons? Would he have targeted
the thousands of Iraqi civilians who were maimed or killed by our bombs? Would
he have put out the eyes of little girls or torn the arms from their mothers? Whether
or not you admire the man’s politics—or the man—there is no reason to think
that he would have sanctioned the injury or death of even a single innocent
person. What would Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden do with perfect weapons?
What would Hitler have done? They would have used them rather differently.
It is time for us to admit that not all cultures are
at the same stage of moral development. This is a radically impolitic thing to
say, of course, but it seems as objectively true as saying that not all
societies have equal material resources. We might even conceive of our moral
differences in just these terms: not all societies have the same degree of
moral wealth. Many things contribute to such an endowment. Political and
economic stability, literacy, a modicum of social equality—where such things
are lacking, people tend to find many compelling reasons to treat one another
rather badly. Our recent history offers much evidence of our own development on
these fronts, and a corresponding change in our morality. A visit to New York
in the summer of 1863 would have found the streets ruled by roving gangs of
thugs; blacks, where not owned outright by white slaveholders, were regularly
lynched and burned. Is there any doubt that many New Yorkers of the nineteenth
century were barbarians by our present standards? To say of another culture
that it lags a hundred and fifty years behind our own in social development is
a terrible criticism indeed, given how far we’ve come in that time. Now imagine
the benighted Americans of 1863 coming to possess chemical, biological, and
nuclear weapons. This is more or less the situation we confront in much of the
developing world.
Consider the horrors that Americans perpetrated as
recently as 1968, at My Lai:
Early in the morning the soldiers were landed in
the village by helicopter. Many were firing as they spread out, killing both
people and animals. There was no sign of the Vietcong battalion and no shot was
fired at Charlie Company all day, but they carried on. They burnt down every
house. They raped women and girls and then killed them. They stabbed some women
in the vagina and disemboweled others, or cut off their hands or scalps.
Pregnant women had their stomachs slashed open and were left to die. There were
gang rapes and killings by shooting or with bayonets. There were mass
executions. Dozens of people at a time, including old men, women and children,
were machine-gunned in a ditch. In four hours nearly 500 villagers were
killed.45
This is about as bad as human beings are capable
of behaving. But what distinguishes us from many of our enemies is that this
indiscriminate violence appalls us. [Racism. Under the influence.] The
massacre at My Lai is remembered as a signature moment of shame for the
American military. Even at the time, U.S. soldiers were dumbstruck with horror
by the behavior of their comrades. One helicopter pilot who arrived on the
scene ordered his subordinates to use their machine guns against their own
troops if they would not stop killing villagers.46 As a culture, we have
clearly outgrown our tolerance for the deliberate torture and murder of
innocents. We would do well to realize that much of the world has not.
Wherever there are facts of any kind to be known, one
thing is certain: not all people will discover them at the same time or
understand them equally well. Conceding this leaves but a short step to
hierarchical thinking of a sort that is at present inadmissible in most liberal
discourse. Wherever there are right and wrong answers to important questions,
there will be better or worse ways to get those answers, and better or worse
ways to put them to use. Take child rearing as an example: How can we keep
children free from disease? How can we raise them to be happy and responsible
members of society? There are undoubtedly both good and bad answers to
questions of this sort, and not all belief systems and cultural practices will
be equally suited to bringing the good ones to light. This is not to say that
there will always be only one right answer to every question, or a single, best
way to reach every specific goal. But given the inescapable specificity of our
world, the range of optimal solutions to any problem will generally be quite
limited. While there might not be one best food to eat, we cannot eat
stones—and any culture that would make stone eating a virtue, or a religious
precept, will suffer mightily for want of nourishment (and teeth). It is
inevitable, therefore, that some approaches to politics, economics, science,
and even spirituality and ethics will be objectively better than their
competitors (by any measure of “better” we might wish to adopt), and gradations
here will translate into very real differences in human happiness.
Any systematic approach to ethics, or to
understanding the necessary underpinnings of a civil society, will find many
Muslims standing eye deep in the red barbarity of the fourteenth century. There
are undoubtedly historical and cultural reasons for this, and enough blame to
go around, but we should not ignore the fact that we must now confront whole
societies whose moral and political development—in their treatment of women and
children, in their prosecution of war, in their approach to criminal justice,
and in their very intuitions about what constitutes cruelty—lags behind our
own. This may seem like an unscientific and potentially racist thing to say,
but it is neither. It is not in the least racist, since it is not at all likely
that there are biological reasons for the disparities here, and it is
unscientific only because science has not yet addressed the moral sphere in a
systematic way. Come back in a hundred years, and if we haven’t returned to
living in caves and killing one another with clubs, we will have some
scientifically astute things to say about ethics. Any honest witness to current
events will realize that there is no moral equivalence between the kind of
force civilized democracies project in the world, warts and all, and the
internecine violence that is perpetrated by Muslim militants, or indeed by
Muslim governments. Chomsky seems to think that the disparity either does not
exist or runs the other way.
Consider the recent conflict
in Iraq: If the situation had been reversed, what are the chances that the
Iraqi Republican Guard, attempting to execute a regime change on the Potomac,
would have taken the same degree of care to minimize civilian casualties? What
are the chances that Iraqi forces would have been deterred by our use of human
shields? (What are the chances we would have used human shields?) What are the
chances that a routed American government would have called for its citizens to
volunteer to be suicide bombers? What are the chances that Iraqi
soldiers would have wept upon killing a carload of American civilians at a
checkpoint unnecessarily? You should have, in the ledger of your imagination, a
mounting column of zeros.
Nothing in Chomsky’s account acknowledges the difference between
intending to kill a child, because of the effect you hope to produce on its
parents (we call this “terrorism”), and inadvertently killing a child in an
attempt to capture or kill an avowed child murderer (we call this “collateral
damage”). In both cases a child has died, and in both cases it is a
tragedy. But the ethical status of the perpetrators, be they individuals or
states, could hardly be more distinct.
Chomsky might object that to knowingly place the life
of a child in jeopardy is unacceptable in any case, but clearly this is not a
principle we can follow. The makers of roller coasters know, for instance,
that despite rigorous safety precautions, sometime, somewhere, a child will be
killed by one of their contraptions. Makers of automobiles know this as well.
So do makers of hockey sticks, baseball bats, plastic bags, swimming pools,
chain-link fences, or nearly anything else that could conceivably contribute to
the death of a child. There is a reason we do not refer to the inevitable
deaths of children on our ski slopes as “skiing atrocities.” But you would
not know this from reading Chomsky. For him, intentions do not seem to matter.
Body count is all.
We are now living in a world that can no longer
tolerate well-armed, malevolent regimes. Without perfect weapons, collateral
damage—the maiming and killing of innocent people—is unavoidable. Similar
suffering will be imposed on still more innocent people because of our lack of
perfect automobiles, airplanes, antibiotics, surgical procedures, and window
glass. If we want to draw conclusions about ethics—as well as make predictions
about what a given person or society will do in the future—we cannot ignore
human intentions. Where ethics are concerned, intentions are everything.47
Notes:
40 J. Baudrillard, The Spirit
of Terrorism, trans. C. Turner (New York: Verso, 2002).
41 It may seem strange to encounter phrases like “our
enemies,” uttered without apparent self-consciousness, and it is strange for me
to write them. But there is no doubt that enemies are what we have (and I leave
it for the reader to draw the boundaries of “we” as broadly or narrowly as he
or she likes). The liberal fallacy that I will attempt to unravel in the
present section is the notion that we made these enemies and that we are,
therefore, their “moral equivalent.” We are not. An analysis of their religious
ideology reveals that we are confronted by people who would have put us to
sword, had they had the power, long before the World Bank, the International
Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization were even a gleam in the eye of
the first rapacious globalizer.
42 N. Chomsky, 9–11 (New York: Seven Stories Press,
2001), 119.
43 P. Unger, Living High & Letting Die: Our
Illusion of Innocence (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996).
44 A. Roy, War Talk (Cambridge, Mass.: South End
Press, 2003), 84–85.
45 J. Glover, Humanity: A
Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1999), 58.
46 Ibid., 62.
47 Are intentions really the bottom line? What are we
to say, for instance, about those Christian missionaries in the New World who
baptized Indian infants only to promptly kill them, thereby sending them to
heaven? Their intentions were (apparently) good. Were their actions ethical? Yes,
within the confines of a deplorably limited worldview. The
medieval apothecary who gave his patients quicksilver really was trying to
help. He was just mistaken about the role this element played in the human
body. Intentions
matter, but they are not all that matters.
April 26, 2015
From: Noam Chomsky
To: Sam Harris
The example that you cite illustrates very well
why I do not see any point in a public discussion.
Here’s the passage to which you refer:
Or take the destruction of the Al-Shifa
pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, one little footnote in the record of state
terror, quickly forgotten. What would the reaction have been if the bin Laden
network had blown up half the pharmaceutical supplies in the U.S. and the
facilities for replenishing them? We can imagine, though the comparison is
unfair, the consequences are vastly more severe in Sudan. That aside, if the
U.S. or Israel or England were to be the target of such an atrocity, what would
the reaction be? In this case we say, “Oh, well, too bad, minor mistake, let’s
go on to the next topic, let the victims rot.” Other people in the world don’t
react like that. When bin Laden brings up that bombing, he strikes a resonant
chord, even among those who despise and fear him; and the same, unfortunately,
is true of much of the rest of his rhetoric.
Though it is merely a footnote, the Sudan case is
nonetheless highly instructive. One interesting
aspect is the reaction when someone dares to mention it. I have in the
past, and did so again in response to queries from journalists shortly after
9-11 atrocities. I mentioned that the toll of the “horrendous crime” of 9-11,
committed with “wickedness and awesome cruelty” (quoting Robert Fisk), may be
comparable to the consequences of Clinton’s bombing of the Al-Shifa plant in
August 1998. That plausible conclusion elicited an extraordinary reaction,
filling many web sites and journals with feverish and fanciful condemnations,
which I’ll ignore. The only important aspect is that single sentence—which, on
a closer look, appears to be an understatement—was regarded by some
commentators as utterly scandalous. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion
that at some deep level, however they may deny it to themselves, they regard
our crimes against the weak to be as normal as the air we breathe. Our crimes,
for which we are responsible: as taxpayers, for failing to provide massive
reparations, for granting refuge and immunity to the perpetrators, and for
allowing the terrible facts to be sunk deep in the memory hole. All of this is
of great significance, as it has been in the past.
It goes on to review the only evidence
available—we do not investigate our crimes, indeed bar investigation of
them—which is from quite credible sources, estimating that casualties might
well have been in the tens of thousands.
Your response is interesting both for what it does
not say and what it does say. What it does not do is answer the question
raised: “What would the reaction have been if the bin Laden network had blown
up half the pharmaceutical supplies in the U.S. and the facilities for
replenishing them? We can imagine, though the comparison is unfair, the
consequences are vastly more severe in Sudan. That aside, if the U.S. or Israel
or England were to be the target of such an atrocity, what would the reaction
be?”
Anyone who cites this passage has the minimal
responsibility to give their reactions. Failure to do so speaks volumes.
Let’s turn to what you did say—a disquisition on
“moral equivalence.” You fail to mention, though, that I did not suggest that
they were “morally equivalent” and in fact indicated quite the opposite. I did
not describe the Al-Shifa bombing as a “horrendous crime” committed with
“wickedness and awesome cruelty.” Rather, I pointed out that the toll might be
comparable, which turns out on inquiry (which is not undertaken here, and which
apologists for our crimes ignore), turns out to be, quite likely, a serious
understatement.
You also ignored the fact that I had already
responded to your claim about lack of intention—which, frankly, I find quite
shocking on elementary moral grounds, as I suspect you would too if you were to
respond to the question raised at the beginning of my quoted comment. Hence it
is simply false to assert that your “basic question” is one that “Chomsky seems
to have neglected to ask himself.” Quite the contrary, I asked myself right
away, and responded, appropriately I believe, to your subsequent charges. The
following is from Radical Priorities, 2003.
Most commentary on the Sudan bombing keeps to the
question of whether the plant was believed to produce chemical weapons; true or
false, that has no bearing on “the magnitude with which the aggression
interfered with key values in the society attacked,” such as survival. Others
point out that the killings were unintended, as are many of the atrocities we
rightly denounce. In this case, we can hardly doubt that the likely human
consequences were understood by US planners. The acts can be excused, then,
only on the Hegelian assumption that Africans are “mere things,” whose lives have
“no value,” an attitude that accords with practice in ways that are not
overlooked among the victims, who may draw their own conclusions about the
“moral orthodoxy of the West.”
Perhaps you can reciprocate by referring me to
what I have written citing your published views. If there is anything I’ve
written that is remotely as erroneous as this—putting aside moral
judgments—I’ll be happy to correct it.
April 27, 2015
From: Sam Harris
To: Noam Chomsky
Noam —
We appear to be running into the weeds here. Let me
just make two observations, before I recommend a fresh start:
I have not read Radical Priorities. I treated your
short book, 9/11, as a self-contained statement on the topic. I do not think it
was unethical or irresponsible of me to do so.
It still seems to me that
everything you have written here ignores the moral significance of intention.
I am happy to answer your question. What would I say
about al-Qaeda (or any other group) if it destroyed half the pharmaceutical
supplies in the U.S.? It would depend on what they intended to do. Consider the
following possibilities:
Imagine that al-Qaeda is filled, not with
God-intoxicated sociopaths intent upon creating a global caliphate, but genuine
humanitarians. Based on their research, they believe that a deadly batch of
vaccine has made it into the U.S. pharmaceutical supply. They have communicated
their concerns to the FDA but were rebuffed. Acting rashly, with the intention
of saving millions of lives, they unleash a computer virus, targeted to impede
the release of this deadly vaccine. As it turns out, they are right about the
vaccine but wrong about the consequences of their meddling—and they wind up
destroying half the pharmaceuticals in the U.S.
What would I say? I would say that this was a very
unfortunate event—but these are people we want on our team. I would find the
FDA highly culpable for not having effectively communicated with them. These
people are our friends, and we were all very unlucky.
al-Qaeda is precisely as terrible a group as it is,
and it destroys our pharmaceuticals intentionally, for the purpose of harming
millions of innocent people.
What would I say? We should imprison or kill these
people at the first opportunity.
While the body count might be
the same, these are totally different scenarios. Ethically speaking, intention
is (nearly) the whole story. The difference between intending to harm
someone and accidentally harming them is enormous—if for no other reason than
that the presence of harmful intent tells us a lot about what a person or group
is likely to do in the future.
Do you agree? Your remarks thus far leave me unsure.
Sam
April 27, 2015
From: Noam Chomsky
To: Sam Harris
I don’t circulate private correspondence without
authorization, but I am glad to authorize you to send this correspondence to
Krauss and Hari, who you mention.
I am sorry you are unwilling
to retract your false claim that I “ignore the moral significance of
intentions.” Of course I did, as you know. Also, I gave the appropriate
answer, which applies accurately to you in the al-Shifa case, the very case in
question.
If you had read further before launching your
accusations, the usual procedure in work intended to be serious, you would have
discovered that I also reviewed the substantial evidence about the very sincere
intentions of Japanese fascists while they were devastating China, Hitler in
the Sudetenland and Poland, etc. There is at least as much reason to suppose
that they were sincere as Clinton was when he bombed al-Shifa. Much more so in
fact. Therefore, if you believe what you are saying, you should be justifying
their actions as well. I also reviewed other cases, pointing out that
professing benign intentions is the norm for those who carry out atrocities and
crimes, perhaps sincerely – and surely more plausibly than in this case. And
that only the most abject apologists justify the actions on the grounds that
perpetrators are adopting the normal stance of criminals.
I am also sorry that you evade the fact that your
charge of “moral equivalence” was flatly false, as you know.
And in particular, I am sorry to see your total
refusal to respond to the question raised at the outset of the piece you
quoted. The scenario you describe here is, I’m afraid, so ludicrous as to be
embarrassing. It hasn’t even the remotest relation to Clinton’s decision to
bomb al-Shifa – not because they had suddenly discovered anything remotely like
what you fantasize here, or for that matter any credible evidence at all, and
by sheer coincidence, immediately after the Embassy bombings for which it was retaliation,
as widely acknowledged. That is truly scandalous.
And of course they knew that there would be major
casualties. They are not imbeciles, but rather adopt a stance that is arguably
even more immoral than purposeful killing, which at least recognizes the human
status of the victims, not just killing ants while walking down the street, who
cares?
In fact, as you would know if you deigned to read
before launching accusations, they were informed at once by Kenneth Roth of HRW
about the impending humanitarian catastrophe, already underway. And of course
they had far more information available than HRW did.
Your own moral stance is revealed even further by
your complete lack of concern about the apparently huge casualties and the
refusal even to investigate them.
As for Clinton and associates being “genuine
humanitarians,” perhaps that explains why they were imposing sanctions on Iraq
so murderous that both of the highly respected international diplomats who
administered the “Oil for food” program resigned in protest because they
regarded them as “genocidal,” condemning Clinton for blocking testimony at the
UN Security Council. Or why he poured arms into Turkey as it was carrying out a
horrendous attack on its Kurdish population, one of the worst crimes of the
‘90s. Or why he shifted Turkey from leading recipient of arms worldwide
(Israel-Egypt excepted) to Colombia, as soon as the Turkish atrocities achieved
their goal and while Colombia was leading the hemisphere by far in atrocious
human rights violations. Or why he authorized the Texaco Oil Company to provide
oil to the murderous Haitian junta in violation of sanctions. And on, and on,
as you could learn if you bothered to read before launching accusations and
professing to talk about “ethics” and “morality.”
I’ve seen apologetics for atrocities before, but
rarely at this level – not to speak of the refusal to withdraw false charges, a
minor fault in comparison.
Since you profess to be concerned about
“God-intoxicated sociopaths,” perhaps you can refer me to your condemnation of
the perpetrator of by far the worst crime of this millennium because God had
instructed him that he must smite the enemy.
No point wasting time on your unwillingness to
respond to my request that you “reciprocate by referring me to what I have
written citing your published views. If there is anything I’ve written that is
remotely as erroneous as this – putting aside moral judgments – I’ll be happy
to correct it.”
Plainly there is no point pretending to have a
rational discussion. But I do think you would do your readers a favor if you
presented your tale about why Clinton bombed al-Shifa and his grand
humanitarianism. That is surely the least you can do, given your refusal to
withdraw what you know to be completely false charges and a display of moral
and ethical righteousness.
April 27, 2015
From: Sam Harris
To: Noam Chomsky
Noam—
Unfortunately, you are now misreading both my
“silences” and my statements—and I cannot help but feel that the peremptory and
censorious attitude you have brought to what could, in fact, be a perfectly
collegial exchange, is partly to blame. You appear to have begun this dialogue
at (or very near) the end of your patience. If we were to publish it, I would
strongly urge you to edit what you have already written, removing unfriendly
flourishes such as “as you know”, “the usual procedure in work intended to be
serious,” “ludicrous and embarrassing,” “total refusal,” etc. I trust that
certain of your acolytes would love to see the master in high
dudgeon—believing, as you seem to, that you are in the process of mopping the
floor with me—but the truth is that your emotions are getting the better of
you. I’d rather you not look like the dog who caught the car.
Despite your apparent powers of telepathy, I am
not “evading” anything. The fact that I did not address every point raised in
your last email is due to the fact that I remain confused about how you view
the ethical significance of intentions—and I answered your central question in
such a way as to clarify this point (I had hoped). I was not drawing an analogy
between my contrived case of al-Qaeda being “great humanitarians” and the
Clinton administration. The purpose of that example was to distinguish the
ethical importance of intention (given the same body count) as clearly as
possible. The case was not meant to realistic (how would an “as you know” read
here?).
On the topic of there being a “moral equivalence”
between al-Shifa and 9/11, I’m afraid that what you have written is hard to
understand. Despite your insistence that you drew no moral equivalence
whatsoever between the two cases, you call Clinton’s actions an “atrocity” the
consequences of which were “vastly more severe” than if the same had been done
to the U.S., and you say that any comparison with the consequences of 9/11 is,
if anything, “an understatement.” You then appear to be upbraiding me for not
immediately detecting an important difference between a “horrendous crime” and
an “atrocity.” Is there one? You are, of course, the famous linguist, but I
believe that the editors of the OED will be nonplussed by this discovery.
Perhaps you can just state it plainly: What is the moral difference between
al-Shifa and 9/11?
Please don’t interpret my silence on any other
matter as a sign of my unwillingness to discuss it further or to have my views
changed by a proper collision with evidence and argument. You have raised many
interesting historical and ethical points which I would sincerely like to
explore (Hitler, Japan, and so forth). But I am reluctant to move forward
before I understand how you view the significance of intention in cases where
the difference between altruism (however inept), negligence, and malevolence is
absolutely clear.
Sam
April 27, 2015
From: Noam Chomsky
To: Sam Harris
Your effort to respond to the question that you
had avoided in your published article is, I’m afraid, indeed embarrassing and
ludicrous. The question was about the al-Shifa bombing, and it won’t do to
evade it by concocting an outlandish tale that has no relation whatsoever to
that situation. So you are still evading that question. It takes no telepathy
to perceive that.
So let’s face it directly.
Clinton bombed al-Shifa in reaction to the Embassy bombings, having discovered
no credible evidence in the brief interim of course, and knowing full well that
there would be enormous casualties. Apologists may appeal to
undetectable humanitarian intentions, but the fact is that the bombing was
taken in exactly the way I described in the earlier publication which dealt the
question of intentions in this case, the question that you claimed falsely that
I ignored: to repeat, it just didn’t matter if lots of people are killed in a
poor African country, just as we don’t care if we kill ants when we walk down
the street. On moral grounds, that is arguably even worse than murder, which at
least recognizes that the victim is human. That is exactly the situation. And
we are left with your unwillingness to address the very clear question that
opened the passage you cite is, instead offering evasions that are exactly as I
described. And your unwillingness to address the crucial ethical question about
intentions.
To adopt your terms, the matter of “altruism
(however inept), negligence, and malevolence is absolutely clear” in the case
of the al-Shifa bombing. There wasn’t even a hint of altruism, inept or not, so
we can dismiss that. There was clear negligence – the fate of probably tens of
thousands of African victims did not matter. As to whether there is
malevolence, that depends on the ethical question I raised, which you seem not
to want to consider: to repeat, how do we rank murder (which treats the victim
as a human) with quite consciously killing a great number of people, but not
caring, because we treat them as we do ants when we walk down the street: the
al-Shifa case?
And a further question. How do we regard citizens
of the country that carried out this atrocity who seek to provide some
justification in terms of clearly non-existent altruistic intentions.
As you know (apologies for the accuracy), I
described 9/11 as a “horrendous crime” committed with “wickedness and awesome
cruelty.” In the case of al-Shifa, I said nothing of the sort. I described it
as an atrocity, as it clearly is, and merely stated the unquestionable facts. There
is no “moral equivalence,” the term that has been regularly used, since Jeane
Kirkpatrick, to try to undercut critical analysis of the state one defends.
As for intentions, there is nothing at all to say
in general. There is a lot to say about specific cases, like the al-Shifa
bombing, or Japanese fascists in China (who you should absolve, on your
grounds, since there’s every reason to suppose that their intention to bring an
“earthly paradise” was quite real), and other cases I’ve discussed, including
Hitler and high Stalinist officials. So your puzzlement about my attitude towards
intentions generally is quite understandable. There can be no general answer. Accordingly,
you give none. Nor do I.
I’m glad that you are interested in looking at the
other cases I’ve discussed for 50 years, addressing exactly the question you
claim I ignored. These cases shed great light on the ethical question of how to
evaluate “benign intentions”. As I’ve discussed for many years, in fact
decades, benign intentions are virtually always professed, even by the worst
monsters, and hence carry no information, even in the technical sense of that
term. That’s quite independent of their “sincerity,” however we determine that
(pretty easy in the Japanese case, and the question doesn’t even arise in the
al-Shifa case).
We are left as we were. You made a series of
accusations that were quite false, and are unwilling to withdraw them. You
refuse to consider, let alone answer, the very simple and straightforward
question posed in the passage you cited. And you still refuse to reciprocate as
I have properly requested several times.
That means, clearly, that there is no basis for a
rational public interchange.
I’ll skip the rest.
April 27, 2015
From: Sam Harris
To: Noam Chomsky
Well, let’s chalk some of this up to the
well-understood problem of email. I doubt that we would have achieved this
level of cantankerousness in a face-to-face exchange.
To the point about my refusing to “reciprocate” by
referring to places where you have written about me or my work: I’m unaware of
your having done so. I have seen a video or two in which, when asked to comment
about my views, or about the “new atheism” generally, you have said something
disparaging. As I mention in my initial email, you have, on at least one
occasion, referred to me as a “religious fanatic” who “worships the religion of
the state.” You may have been talking about both Christopher Hitchens and me,
given the way the question was posed. The history is unimportant. It makes much
more sense to deal with what we each say in this exchange.
Here is my assumption about the al-Shifa case. I assume that
Clinton believed that it was, in fact, a chemical weapons factory—because I see
no rational reason for him to have intentionally destroyed a pharmaceutical
plant in retaliation for the embassy bombings. I take it that you consider this
assumption terribly naive. Why so?
April 27, 2015
From: Noam Chomsky
To: Sam Harris
Easy to know why you’re unaware of my having
written about your work. I haven’t done so. In contrast, you’ve written about
my work, with crucial false accusations that you evidently have no interest in
correcting. As to my “misconceptions” about you, I’m interested to see that
there is no credible source.
Turning to the more important question of al-Shifa.
Why so? For exactly the reasons I mentioned.
The bombing of al-Shifa was an immediate response
to the Embassy bombings, which is why it is almost universally assumed to be
retaliation. It is inconceivable that in that brief interim period evidence was
found that it was a chemical weapons factory, and properly evaluated to justify
a bombing. And of course no evidence was ever found. Plainly, if there had been
evidence, the bombing would not have (just by accident) taken place immediately
after the Embassy bombings (along with bombings in Afghanistan at the same
time, also clearly retaliation).
There’s no rational way to explain this except by
assuming that he intentionally bombed what was known to be Sudan’s major
pharmaceutical plant, and of course he and his advisers knew that under severe
sanctions, this poor African country could not replenish them – so it is a much
worse crime than if al-Qaeda had done the same in the US, or Israel, or any
other country were people matter.
I do not, again, claim that Clinton intentionally
wanted to kill the thousands of victims. Rather, that was probably of no
concern, raising the very serious ethical question that I have discussed, again
repeatedly in this correspondence. And again, I have often discussed the
ethical question about the significance of real or professed intentions, for
about 50 years in fact, discussing real cases, where there are possible and
meaningful answers. Something clearly worth doing, since the real ethical
issues are interesting and important ones.
April 27, 2015
From: Sam Harris
To: Noam Chomsky
Noam—
I am hard pressed to understand the uncharitable
attitude—really bordering on contempt—conveyed by almost everything you have
written thus far. What is it adding to the discussion? If you want some
disinterested feedback, we might pass this exchange along to Lawrence and
Johann, as you suggested below. I believe they will echo my concern and tell
you that you are not doing yourself any favors here.
Your latest email is as strangely prickly as the
others. If you haven’t written about my work, why not just say so, rather than
act like you’ve sprung a trap on me? I never assumed you had written about me.
In fact, I assumed you hadn’t. So what was the point of this “reciprocation”
business?
And really, you’re “interested to see that there
is no credible source” for my claim that you have called me a religious fanatic
who worships the religion of the state? Is your own mouth a credible source?
Watch this video and behold yourself speaking the very words I attributed to
you:
I have a question that I would like you to ponder
for at least 5 seconds before responding to this email: Is it possible for you
to enter into a discussion on these topics with me in the spirit of genuine
curiosity and goodwill?
Contrary to your repeated allegation, I have not
“refused” to correct my “false accusations” about you. I’m still struggling to
understand in what sense they are false. Your dismissal of an idealized thought
experiment as “embarrassing and ludicrous,” and your insistence upon focusing
on real-world cases about which our intelligence is murky is not helping to
clarify things. With respect to al-Shifa, for instance, you draw some very
confident (and, I suspect, unwarranted) inferences from the timing of events.
(Is it really “inconceivable” that the government already believed it to be a
chemical weapons factory?) Do I have to accept to all your assumptions in order
to discuss the underlying ethics?
And your ethical position is still unclear (to me).
You say that you are NOT claiming that “Clinton intentionally wanted to kill
thousands of victims.” Okay. But you seem to be suggesting that he had every
reason to expect that he would be killing them by his actions (and just didn’t
care). And you seem disinclined to distinguish the ethics of these cases.
Perhaps we can rank order the callousness and cruelty
here:
al-Qaeda wanted and intended to kill thousands of
innocent people—and did so.
Clinton (as you imagine him
to be) did not want or intend to kill thousands of innocent people. He simply
wanted to destroy a valuable pharmaceutical plant. But he knew that he would be
killing thousands of people, and he simply didn’t care.
Clinton (as I imagine him to
be) did not want or intend to kill anyone at all, necessarily. He simply wanted
to destroy what he believed to be a chemical weapons factory. But he did wind
up killing innocent people, and we don’t really know how he felt about it. [I do.]
Is it safe to assume that you view these three cases,
as I do, as demonstrating descending degrees of evil?
Sam
April 27, 2015
From: Noam Chomsky
To: Sam Harris
Let’s review this curious non-interchange.
It began with you suggesting a public debate because
of “The fact that you have called me “a religious fanatic” who “worships the
religion of the state” makes me think that there are a few misconceptions I
could clear up. And many readers insist that I am similarly off-the-mark where
your views are concerned.”
It turns out that you have published version of my
views that are completely false, and that the only source you have for “the
fact” that you cite is something on Youtube in which, as you wrote, that I “may
have been talking about both Christopher Hitchens and [you], given the way the
question was posed,” or maybe about Hitchens, whose views I know about, whereas
in your case I only know about your published falsifications of my views, which
readers of yours have sent to me, and which I didn’t bother to respond to.
Therefore, the only meaningful debate could be about your published
falsifications.
These, as we have reviewed, are quite extreme. Your
primary charge is that I neglected to ask “very basic questions” about
intentions. As we have now established, I asked and responded to exactly those
basic questions in this case and in other cases, while you have completely
failed to address “the basic questions” about the significance of professed
intentions (about actual intentions we can only guess). There are two important
questions about these: (1) how seriously do we take them? (2) on moral grounds,
how do we rank (a) intention to kill as compared with (b) knowledge that of
course you will kill but you don’t care, like stepping on ants when you walk.
As for (1), I have been discussing it for 50
years, explaining in detail why, as we all agree, such professed intentions
carry little if any weight, and in fact are quite uninformative, since they are
almost entirely predictable, even in the case of the worst monsters, and I have
also provided evidence that they may be quite sincere, even in the case of
these monsters, but we of course dismiss them nonetheless. In contrast, it
seems that you have never discussed (1).
As for (2), I posed the question, the one serious
moral question that arises in the case at issue, and though I didn’t give a
definite answer I suggested what I think: that one might argue that on moral
grounds, (b) is even more depraved than (a). Again, it seems that you have
never even considered (2), let alone discussed it.
To summarize, then, you issue instructions about
moral issues that you have never even considered to people who have considered
and discussed these issues for many decades, including the very case you cite. And
when this is explained to you in detail, you have nothing to say except to
repeat your initial stance.
As if that’s enough, you evaded the question asked
in the passage you cite, and when I asked for a response, you did give a
response – or so I assumed.
To be crystal clear, either that response was
irrelevant to the question, or you intended it to seriously, that is, to be
relevant to Clinton’s bombing of al-Shifa. I assumed the latter. In that case,
it follows at once, as I wrote, that the claim is ludicrous and embarrassing. You
now say that it was only a “thought experiment.” That leaves us where we were. Either
it is irrelevant, or it is ludicrous and embarrassing, or else you are refusing
to answer the question. All of that is straightforward enough so that I need
not spell it out any further.
Let’s turn finally to your interpretation of
al-Shifa: Clinton “did not want or intend to kill anyone at all, necessarily.
He simply wanted to destroy what he believed to be a chemical weapons factory.
But he did wind up killing innocent people, and we don’t really know how he
felt about it.”
I’m sure you are right that Clinton did not want
or intend to kill anyone at all. That was exactly my point. Rather, assuming
that he was minimally sane, he certainly knew that he would kill a great many
people but he simply didn’t care: case (2) above, the one serious moral issue,
which I had discussed (contrary to your charge) and you never have.
As for the rest, you may, if you like, believe
that when Clinton bombed Afghanistan and Sudan in immediate reaction to the
Embassy bombings (and in retaliation, it is naturally assumed), he had credible
information that he was bombing a chemical factory – which also was, as
publicly known, the major pharmaceutical factory in Sudan (which, of course,
could not replenish supplies), and he judged that the evidence was strong
enough to overlook the human consequences. But, oddly, he was never able to
produce a particle of credible evidence, as was widely reported. And when
informed immediately (by HRW) that a humanitarian catastrophe was already
beginning he ignored it, as he ignored the subsequent evidence about the scale
of the casualties (as you incidentally did too).
On your assumptions, he’s quite clearly a moral
monster, and there’s no need to comment further on people who seek to justify
these crimes – your crimes and mine, as citizens of a free society where we can
influence policy.
It seems to me clear what your response should be
on elementary moral grounds. I’m not holding my breath.
April 30, 2015
From: Sam Harris
To: Noam Chomsky
Noam —
I’m sorry to say that I have now lost hope that we
can communicate effectively in this medium. Rather than explore these issues
with genuine interest and civility, you seem committed to litigating all points
(both real and imagined) in the most plodding and accusatory way. And so, to my
amazement, I find that the only conversation you and I are likely to ever have
has grown too tedious to continue.
Please understand that this is not a case of you
having raised important challenges for which I have no answer—to the contrary,
I would find that a thrilling result of any collision between us. And, as I
said at the outset, I would be eager for readers to witness it. Rather, you
have simply convinced me that engaging you on these topics is a waste of time.
Apologies for any part I played in making this
encounter less enlightening than it might have been…
Sam
April 30, 2015
From: Noam Chomsky
To: Sam Harris
Very glad to see that we are terminating this
interesting non-interchange with a large measure of agreement. I agree with you
completely that we cannot have a rational discussion of these matters, and that
it is too tedious to pretend otherwise. And I agree that I am litigating all
points (all real, as far as we have so far determined) in a “plodding and
accusatory way.” That is, of course, a necessity in responding to quite serious
published accusations that are all demonstrably false, and as I have reviewed,
false in a most interesting way: namely, you issue lectures condemning others
for ignoring “basic questions” that they have discussed for years, in my case
decades, whereas you have refused to address them and apparently do not even
allow yourself to understand them. That’s impressive.
There’s also no other way to pursue your various
evasions of the “basic question” that arises right at the outset of the passage
of mine that you quoted. No need to run through this again, but the plodding
review makes it clear that you simply refuse to answer the question, perhaps
not surprisingly.
I’ll put aside your apologetics for the crimes for
which you and I share responsibility, which, frankly, I find quite shocking,
particularly on the part of someone who feels entitled to deliver moral
lectures.
And I’ll also put aside your interesting feeling
that you see no challenge when your accusations are refuted point by point,
along with a demonstration that you are the one who refuses to address the
“basic questions” that you charge me with ignoring, even after you have learned
that I had dealt with them quite specifically before you wrote, and in fact for
decades.
It would also be interesting if, someday, you
decide actually to become concerned with “God-intoxicated sociopaths,” most
notably, 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.
April 30, 2015
From: Sam Harris
To: Noam Chomsky
Noam —
I’m afraid I won’t take the bait, apart from
asking the obvious question: If you’re so sure you’ve acquitted yourself well
in this conversation, exposing both my intellectual misconduct with respect
your own work and my moral blindness regarding the actions of our government,
why not let me publish it in full so that our readers can draw their own
conclusions?
Sam
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.
April 30, 2015
From: Sam Harris
To: Noam Chomsky
Understood, Noam. I’ll let you know what I do.
Sam
May 1, 2015
From: Sam Harris
To: Noam Chomsky
Noam—
I’ve now read our correspondence through and have
decided to publish it (www.samharris.org). I understand your point about
“exhibitionism,” but I disagree in this case.
You and I probably share a million readers who
would have found a genuine conversation between us extremely useful. And I
trust that they will be disappointed by our failure to produce one, as I am.
However, if publishing this exchange helps anyone to better communicate about
these topics in the future, our time won’t have been entirely wasted.
Sam
Postscript
May 3, 2015
The response to my exchange with Chomsky has been
extraordinarily heated. Many people appear confused both about its contents and
about my motives for publishing it.
It would not be productive—or, I think, fair to
Chomsky—for me to argue my case in great detail after the fact. But I would
like to close the door on a few common misconceptions:
I did not publish this exchange because I believe
that I “won” a debate with Chomsky. On the contrary, I spent the entire time
struggling to begin a conversation that never got started. I remain confused
about Chomsky’s position on several important issues and would sincerely have
liked to discuss them.
It is now clear to me that I did (in a very narrow
way) misrepresent Chomsky in The End of Faith. Obviously, he had asked himself
“very basic questions” about what the U.S. government intended when it bombed
the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant. Rereading that text, along with the relevant
section of his book 9/11, I can see that my point was not that he literally
hadn’t asked these questions but that the answers he arrived at are, in my
opinion, scandalously wrong. Perhaps Chomsky didn’t
literally “ignore the role of human intentions,” but he effectively ignored it,
because he did not appear to give intentions any ethical weight. I now see that
to the extent that he does weigh intentions, he may do so differently than I
would (for instance, he says that Clinton’s bombing al-Shifa without thinking
about the consequences is “arguably even worse than murder, which at least
recognizes that the victim is human”). This would have been interesting
terrain to explore. I consider his related claims that virtually everyone
professes benign intentions, and that such professions are generally
meaningless, to be false. Professions aside, there can be vast ethical
differences between sincerely held beliefs about what is “good,” and these
differences are often very easy to discern. To pretend otherwise is to risk
destroying everything we are right to care about.
In any case, I can now see that I was using rather
rhetorical language in my book and that Chomsky was entitled to reject my
characterization of him on literal (if pedantic) grounds. He had asked the
questions I said he hadn’t; I just didn’t like the answers. Conceding this
doesn’t render the views he expressed in 9/11 easier to digest. But given the
umbrage that Chomsky took over the offending phrases, it would have been
helpful if I had admitted that they were sloppily written and, in a narrow
sense, untrue. Nevertheless, all our real work would still have lain ahead of
us.
Chomsky’s charge that I
misrepresented him on the topic of “moral equivalence” is far less credible.
Judging from what he wrote in 9/11 (as well as in our exchange) he may view the
bombing of al-Shifa to be ethically worse than the attack on the Twin Towers.
[Imperialist. Racist, typical of Darwinian. Clintonapologist.]
Because my aim was to have a productive dialogue,
I ignored most of Chomsky’s initial accusations in the hopes of establishing
some basic principles and a spirit of mutual goodwill. He viewed this as
evasive—or as conceding points that I would not, in fact, have conceded. This
contributed greatly to the sense that we were talking past each other. I agree
with readers who feel that I might have done more to get the conversation on
track. Still, I was quite bewildered by the level of hostility I met in
Chomsky, and I did the best I could at the time.
Certain readers saw my focus on Chomsky’s tone as an
abject attempt to dodge hard questions. I can only reiterate that it wasn’t. I
had ready answers to most of the points Chomsky raised, and where I didn’t I
was genuinely interested in discovering what I thought in conversation with
him. For instance, his observation that my view of intentions requires that I
count certain sincerely motivated horrors as “ethical” (albeit within the
context of a mistaken worldview) is something I discussed in the very excerpt
from The End of Faith provided (see footnote 47). Whether such a charitable
view can reasonably be applied to Hitler and Japan during WWII (I think not) is
something that I would have been happy to discuss, had we ever got there.
What would the reaction
have been if al-Qaeda had blown up half the pharmaceuticals in the U.S.? I’m
sure it would have been considered a terrorist atrocity, and rightly so. Where
is my published attack on the religious motivations of George Bush? It’s in my
book The End of Faith and in many subsequent articles. I wasn’t dodging these
questions. I just viewed them as distractions from the necessary work of our
first agreeing about basic ethical principles. Nothing
I said or didn’t say should have been construed as an unwillingness to
criticize the U.S. government or to discuss any of its specific actions that
may, in fact, constitute atrocities. [JoyceCarolOates.] As to whether we
can trust Chomsky’s account of the al-Shifa bombing, I have my doubts.
In each of my emails I was merely attempting to
begin an exchange that would be worth reading—having considered the preceding
volleys both unproductive and unpublishable. In the end, I decided to publish
the whole mess to demonstrate how difficult it can be to have a conversation on
these important topics, in the hopes that some good might come of showing what
that effort looks like on the page. I’m not sure I made the right decision, but
I am certain that what I published bears little resemblance to any debate that
Chomsky and I would have had if we had formally engaged each other in print.
Needless to say, I agree that a person’s tone, however contemptuous, isn’t
relevant to the substance of a debate. Had this been a debate, I’d have been
happy to have Chomsky at his angriest. [“You can’t argue to have people like
this.”]
Finally, I can only say that I was greatly
disappointed by my encounter with Chomsky. I had truly hoped to have a
productive conversation with him. —SH
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