Chomsky Derangement Syndrome
Nearly everyone you meet has some kind of CDS, Chomsky Derangement Syndrome. There is the political variety, where Chomsky is seen as some kind of partisan spin doctor and there is the scientific variety where he is seen as a dangerous heretic.
I can’t claim to understand Noam Chomsky, but it seems pretty clear that the man is against such things as force and violence, and especially as they tend toward bloodshed and the loss of life and he feels a deep moral commitment to speak out against these things. He is an American patriot, still I believe, who feels that his tax dollars make him in some sense unwillingly complicit in certain government actions, he’s going to speak his mind on such issues, as an American and as a dissident, and by the simple fact that no one has put a bag over his head and made him disappear he shows that in America we do not do things that way.
Professionally Chomsky has done a lot of scientific and philosophical work that many people simply do not want to think about. He has a number of ideas about human development which are supported by libraries which, I am sure, he can mumble out in his sleep. Chomskys work in the study of the development of language in humans, individually and as a species, stands in bold defiance of behaviorist ideas of social construction.
The sheer clarity and raw explanatory power of Chomskys Mysterian, Nativist argument can make all of Marxism and critical theory vanish in a puff of smoke if only the message can find messengers. Compare the argument I present in a few short paragraphs in my previous post ‘revisiting an attempt to define religion’ to the long winded and fanciful one presented by Daniel Dennett in his talk ‘Wild and Domesticated Religions: How the Machinery of Religion Evolved’ at The Santa Fe Institute, available on YouTube.
A good place to begin exploring these dangerous arguments might be ‘Noam Chomsky - Mysterianism, Language, and Human Understanding’ which is available on Youtube.