The great Chomsky/Harris non-debate

[David]

Well, Noam Chomsky and one of the New Atheists finally went toe to toe, and the result was... a bit of a fizzer.

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-limits-of-discourse

These are two people I have great respect for as thinkers and writers, but I don't think either of them have a mortgage on common sense or flawless intellectual reasoning. I kind of cringe whenever Harris talks about Islam, and Chomsky can be stubbornly dense at times. That aside, I think they've both contributed plenty of interesting ideas to the public arena, and I thought a debate between them would be well worth the read.

Well... see what you think. To me, the only issue of real interest that was raised was the question of whether intent matters when causing harm. That is, is it worse to kill 3000 people deliberately, or recklessly/negligently? Or are consequences the only thing that matters? Certainly a subject I'd be willing to argue the toss on here, if anyone's interested.

Otherwise, these are my observations:

a) While politeness isn't the most important quality in intellectual debate, it can certainly shape an argument. Compare Harris's relatively gentlemanly approach (at least at the beginning, before he cracks a major sulk) with Chomsky's rather arrogant responses. That doesn't in any way make him wrong and Harris right, of course, but it certainly gets things off to a bad start, and things get worse from there. It would be fair enough if Chomsky didn't have the time or energy to engage, but the length of some of his emails suggests that he did. If some of that effort had been transferred into a polite response, they might have actually opened a channel and had an enlightening discussion.

b) Harris does need to work on some of his comprehension skills, as he admits in the post-script.

What do you think? Any lessons that we Nicksters can apply to our own Internet practice?

[swoop42]

So pietillidie is Chomsky.

Never took him for a Collingwood supporter.














P.S-Just one question though.












Who the hell is Chomsky?

[pietillidie]

^Lol.

Noam is old, grumpy and repetitive, but sadly he's always been more or less right on this point: The huff and puff about the crimes of others is prescientific avoidance that has no place in serious analysis.

The fact is, those with Imperial Fawning Disease have traded in the rational capacity to view the death of an Other as equivalent to the death of someone they subconsciously identify with. It's just too big a comfort teat to let go of, lest they have to man up and face the big bad world as it is--including their own violent tendencies.

All sorts of time wasting rubbish ensues in between, but in the end they still refuse the most basic science of all, namely H.sapiens being much of a muchness everywhere, and therefore needing to be approached as much of a muchness in analysis. And they probably never will without serious therapy to deal with whatever is driving them to denial. As I say, if GPs behaved the way these idiots claiming to have insight into politics and international affairs do, they would be fired immediately for negligence. These are cringeworthy, propaganda fields at best.

As a case in point, how anti-rational would you have to be to overlook the fact that extraordinary narcissism and layers of propagandists are required to run for high office, and such narcissism very easily views others as ants? ("I'm so good, I have the clarity and wisdom to lead zillions of people...hmm...and I might get the intern to blow me in the oval office while I'm pondering who to save and who to kill..."). This is basic science demonstrated a hundred times over in experiment and actual life.

Please, take back whatever credentials Harris has concerning the human mind; he's being willfully stupid, and Chomsky for all his own flaws knows it.

The real question here is how to deal with such pre-modern, prescientific, pre-urban, pre-global psychiatry as is currently uniting the Old Empire fantasists such as Harris and friends in a clique of imperial bum-slapping. Postmodernism retreating to farce is not the undeliberate caricature it is often made out to represent; what else is left? Postmodernism is overtly the new comedy of existential despair, and openly admits as much very often. We've already seen that, given enough power, the institutional left is just as tyrannical as the Imperial right. How can a supposedly intelligent person even posit as a starting point a sane elite that doesn't threaten to crush the inconsequential as ants? The LOL is all on them, I'm afraid.

Even worse, how can Harris be so unaware as to not even acknowledge his own role in the new farce with a wink and a nod? Comedy is existentially streets ahead of denial, which is why the sane resort to it in the face of the human contradiction and nonsense.

Chomsky: Scientifically, let's assume modern H.sapiens is pretty much like us, both geographically and historically. Now, ... drone on with 1980s space fillers trying to pull the conversation back to a rational scientific starting point, boring all but the most avid Marxian fans.

Harris: Let's assume that Jesus and the little lamb of The Little Golden Book of Imperial Tales represent us. Now, ... crap on with sundry Internet blog rhetoric trying to avoid being held to standards of scientific discourse, concluding we're special and the Other is evil, exciting the New Paranoid.

No matter how one tries to escape Empire, there are always bevies of paid minions at the ready to make deranged institutional views like Harris' seem normal, some paid directly, others paid by association. (This is what worries me about you relying on writing, David; how will you make money without having to appease some audience and becoming just another air-headed blogging big mouth? The economics and ego always win; before you know it you'll be justifying nonsense and will be sucked into the vortex). Then, there's the next layer of paranoids clinging to the institution because the actual human predicament scares the crap out of them. Then, the rest is par-for-the-course hip-pocketism and tribalism. Miles and miles of non-rational incentive wherever you bother looking.

As you know, that's why for now I focus on competition quality as a proxy for social good; it's all I can come up with that might possibly generate a way forward, exposing as it does the fraud of both right and left, thus nullifying the old debate in some small way.

The refusal to focus on the economies of the Middle East is possibly the most cringeworthy failure of all, exposing as it does the complete lies of the Empire fantasists and their feigned moral concern--and most certainly their delusion of moral superiority. Of course a deformed, non-competitive economy gives rise to social tyranny and dysfunction. You can't teach that as orthodox day after day in lecture theatres, along with the advantages of decentralised decision making as expressed in democratic forms of government, and then impose economic dictatorship on an entire region with a straight face.

Pharasaical frauds of the highest order.

[David]

[David]

[think positive]

[pietillidie]

[David]

I'm not sure what a consensual sex act has to do with anything, although I appreciate that you're trying to make a point about the pathology of power. I'm not sure what the studies say or how compelling their results are, but it doesn't strike me as intuitively obvious that Barack Obama is a less ethically minded person than you or me or the person next door. If Clinton treated his Sudanese victims as ants, then he was only really thinking of them in the same manner as most people in the West do (for all their claims to empathy or occasional charitable donations), which I think is a point that Chomsky makes in that exchange.

That the position tends to attract narcissists and psychopaths is probably unquestionable, but what that says about the individual Bill Clinton and his psychology at the time of the Al-Shifa attack is another story. It's not special pleading to state that we just don't know, just as we don't know whether George W. Bush is a good father or whether Kim Jong-un cries when he watches movies.

What Chomsky clearly gets wrong in this discussion is his interpretation of Harris's argument about intent. It's not about whether the perpetrator has "good intentions"—as Chomsky points out, many mass murderers do—but whether some intentions are objectively better and more likely to produce positive consequences than other intentions. If we grant that (a "trivial truth", in Chomsky's language), then it becomes quite insufficient to judge equal or comparable acts on consequences alone. This is really the same argument that you and Mugwump have had in here umpteen times, and as much as I've generally taken your view in those discussions, I think he's also made some compelling points in this area. 3000 people and their grieving friends and family members may not care whether they were killed maliciously or recklessly, but degree of malice or recklessness certainly shapes how we should consider the perpetrators and their overall utilitarian quality.

As for Sam Harris, I'm no expert on him by any means; though, I have bought a few of his books and watched a handful of videos of him speaking. His stuff on religion is really only ever interesting when he's talking about it in general terms (and let's not forget just how prevalent that form of cultural psychosis is, particularly in Harris's home country of the US); any comments he has to make on Islam are generally embarrassing and not worth paying attention to. Otherwise, I like him for his (expert) insights into the human brain and his philosophical explorations of ethics, which are among the most interesting writings in today's pop sci sphere. He's certainly no time-waster, unless, like Chomsky in the email exchange, you're in the mood to waste your time.

[pietillidie]

[pietillidie]

^BTW, just to highlight another disingenuous element of the usual analyses here. Groups such as ISIS use fear amplification and iteration in their public relations, while dominant groups use immoral obfuscation and deception. For people to then compare the public relations of the two groups at face value is really cringeworthy.

I am almost happy to call them liars outright for putting forward a false analysis and deceiving people. The only thing holding me back is some might actually be dull enough to have not noticed. There's a real chance some folk have not spent two minutes of their waking lives pondering how sociology, culture and the like affect propaganda form, despite it being a huge field of its own lol.

You've already seen this type of fraud in "free speech" discussions concerning China. Because there's a complex interplay between the universal (the underlying science) and the contemporary local cultural form, this whole area is ripe for endless manipulation by propagandists. IMO, we have to start with the underlying science and move towards explaining the superficial variation. Once we've done that you've earned the intellectual right to deal with cultural issues. Prior to that, as I say, we might as well be talking about the dark side of the moon.

[David]

[pietillidie]

[pietillidie]

[pietillidie]

[David]

Perhaps I'm a bonehead too, because unless you're nailing Harris for anthropomorphising and ascribing morality to societies/nation states (a common sin), then I have no idea what you're talking about.