We Smashed Up the World: On Noam Chomsky

by Marie Snyder

Noam Chomsky was rumoured to have left us almost a month ago, but he always told us not to trust the media! 

It appears he’s still alive at time of writing, and recovering at home from a stroke. Both The New Statesman and Jacoben published obituaries. Yanis Varoufakis claims his article about his friend was inadvertently published as an obituary (despite referencing Chomsky’s passing in it). That article has since disappeared. In shows that even the best of us can be duped. Vivek Chibber’s piece morphed into a tribute in which he said, 

“Noam hasn’t just pointed to injustice where he saw it, no matter how remote–he has felt it . . . as an affront to his own sensibility. . . . He doesn’t just have educated opinions on a bewildering array of topics and geographical regions–he has real expertise. This is what has made him such a towering figure.”

Absolutely. 

The benefit of mistakes like this (and there have been a lot of them) is getting to see what people really think of you! 

Chomsky is a different person than you or me — well, than me for sure. He has a wealth of knowledge and an astute analysis of events pretty much from the beginning of time to now all in his head and instantaneously available to him, but he’s also very down to earth, of the people. Most importantly, he gives us a framework of the world that’s necessary to understand in order to help us fight the good fight. 

Out of the multitude of writings he’s produced in his 95 years, I think one of the most comprehensive places for the uninitiated to start is with Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, a collection of talks given between 1989 and 1999. Below, I’ve summarized the ideas down to ten common threads often seen elsewhere in his work, abridged without all the evidence – you have to read the full 400-paged book for that. (Page numbers are from the 2002 paperback edition.) Read more »



Monday, January 1, 2024

A Fruitful Exploration of the Core

by Marie Snyder

Maybe there are seeds of potential deep within ourselves, but maybe there’s nothing there but a collection of signals. Regardless the outcome, we need to dig in to see what we can find.

In several classes I took last term, the idea of a core self that’s fluid came through discussions of the postmodernist view of the self. But I’m not convinced we’re still living the pomo life, and I’m not sure we want to be.

Taking liberally from Charles Taylor, and others, it appears that we once had some communal ideals, then flipped from seeking answers from God to proving them with science, then realized some pretty major problems with glorifying any kind of authority and renounced all of them, but now, drawing on the types of films being made and the stories told, it feels like we’re readjusting back to a place with more solid values and truths. I hope so, anyway.

In the pre-modern time, when God was truth and miracles could happen, there was no need for individual identities. We were all divine through our very creation. Modernism reacted against random beliefs with a scientific method that began to be embraced to find the real truths out there. Suddenly individual identity became interesting. What even are we? In 1641 Descartes deduced we have proof that we exist whenever we consider our own existence because something must be there to be thinking about what we are, and we call that something “I”. That was a big deal. Read more »