Read Noam Chomsky & Sam Harris’ “Unpleasant” Email Exchange

Agree­ing with Husum, I look a lot more kind­ly upon Chom­sky’s tone. This was noth­ing more than a pub­lic­i­ty stunt from Har­ris as is obvi­ous from him post­ing the exchange and the utter lack of a clear incen­tive to raise this issue peri­od. Har­ris is clear­ly out­ranked here as a com­mer­cial book writer ver­sus long time activist and his­to­ri­an Chom­sky. Banal­i­ty and pueril­i­ty vs con­tent and argu­ment. An embar­rass­ing intel­lec­tu­al mis­match. I Feel bad for Chom­sky hav­ing to waste his time on this at his age.

It was fruit­less by design.

Hi Har­ald,

I agree with your analy­sis, although I feel as though Har­ris was pulling his punch­es a bit.

I can imag­ine some rather sim­ple respons­es on his part to Chom­sky’s point about a) the unim­por­tance of stat­ed inten­tion and b) that gross neg­li­gence is moral­ly worse than inten­tion­al killing.

Per­haps Sam was try­ing to draw him into com­mit­ting to a pub­lic debate. I’m not sure.

All I see here is Har­ris repeat­ed­ly try­ing to make the argu­ment about Chom­sky’s tone, and refus­ing to answer any of his ques­tions. Har­ris is clear­ly bet­ter versed in the new­ly nec­es­sary pose of affect­ed non­cha­lance, but it actu­al­ly seems like Chom­sky gives a shit. “Can’t we just be civ­il?” is for politi­cians, not thinkers.

James,

whether sam har­ris’ views on moral­i­ty are “child­ish” or not is not very rel­e­vant in this con­text, in my view. The fact is that he at least tried to have a decent con­ver­sa­tion, and that Chom­sky refused to do so, instead being extreme­ly uncol­le­gial and dis­mis­sive. Chom­sky said that Har­ris did noth­ing but “fab­ri­cate” his views. When Har­ris then showed a video that clear­ly showed the lit­er­al quote that Chom­sky said accord­ing to Har­ris, Chom­sky sim­ply did­n’t respond, and resort­ed to fur­ther name­call­ing.
I respect Chom­sky a lot, and I have read and lis­tened to him a lot, and will con­tin­ue to do so. But you don’t have to agree with Har­ris’ views on moral­i­ty to rec­og­nize that Chom­sky was not engag­ing in a well-inten­tioned con­ver­sa­tion with Har­ris.

After read­ing this, I’m con­front­ed with the author­i­ty bias I use to jus­ti­fy my less than crit­i­cal read­ings of my favorite thinkers.

The amount of trig­ger words in this cor­re­spon­dence real­ly makes me hope there are some pri­or mails or exchanges which are miss­ing and would do a bet­ter job at explain­ing this rude­ness. Because real­ly, either I’m so incred­i­bly empath­ic or these guys pur­pose­ful­ly mis­read each oth­er.

I was suprised to find that even promi­nent thinkers low­er them­selves to the lev­el of your aver­age inter­net troll. It’s kind of iron­ic for these would-be dis­course experts to sink this low. Though noth­ing human is unfa­mil­iar to me I guess.

I sug­gest that Sam Har­ris request Noam Chom­sky giv­er per­mis­sion for the two of them to have an email exchange and for Sam to post it online.

Chom­sky gave per­mis­sion for this to be pub­lished. He clear­ly said that it could be pub­lished and he did­n’t say that he could not pub­lish it. So mov­ing past that, I’ve seen a num­ber of Chom­sky fans jump all over this as if their guy had “won” or “out classed” and “out argued” Har­ris. This clear­ly did not hap­pen. Sam Har­ris approached this as he approach­es all intel­lec­tu­al dis­cus­sions, with hon­esty and polite­ness and with a clear open­ness to being proven wrong. This is how a sci­en­tist approach­es things. Chom­sky mis­read, or did­n’t care to read Sam’s intent, though it was clear­ly stat­ed and with respect. At times it looks as though Noam Chom­sky had staffed this exer­cise out to an overzeal­ous intern who pre­ferred to be rude and play defense, in addi­tion to a heavy dose of “gotcha.” Sam Har­ris was under the mis­con­cep­tion that Noam Chom­sky is an intel­lec­tu­al. He is a bit more and a bit less. He is a bit more in the sense that he has become a pub­lic fig­ure who rep­re­sents a mind­set, not unlike many right wing fig­ures who have zero inter­est in fur­ther­ing debate or find­ing that they were at any point mis­tak­en. He is less in the sense that he is an extrem­ist ide­o­logue who has so con­sis­tent­ly carved out an unnu­anced, sim­pli­fied, myopic and pre­dictable niche. Noam Chom­sky can see no need for nuance. He despis­es the state. He demon­strates a deep loathing for west­ern pow­er and this puts him, as he firm­ly places him­self, in a realm where “the ene­my of my ene­my” is the vic­tim always. The entire­ty of Chom­sky’s writ­ing on Osama Bin Laden and Al Qae­da make it clear that Chom­sky is open to con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries (he wrote a famous book about his media con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries) and it often looks as though Chom­sky con­sid­ers Osama Bin Laden and his cohorts to have been some­thing akin to anti-colo­nial free­dom fight­ers. Chom­sky has no inter­est in hav­ing a dis­cus­sion with Sam Har­ris about moral equiv­a­len­cy because Chom­sky is inca­pable of ced­ing a sin­gle point, no mat­ter how minus­cule. It is just not use­ful to try to debate extrem­ists.

More like, The Lim­its of Sam Har­ris. That he is try­ing to inflate this as the lim­its of the idea of dis­course, rather than the lim­its of him to engage in it, would be rather amus­ing if it was­n’t so arro­gant. It is inter­est­ing in how one side con­tin­u­al­ly evades the dis­cus­sion, tone polices and then blames the fail­ure of this on the idea of dis­course itself rather than his own behav­ior. I would­n’t expect any­thing less from some­one who lets off war crimes as sim­ply being an instance of well-inten­tioned idio­cy. Count me as uncon­vinced by Sam Har­ris here.

The “hon­est” play on words in the audio was cheap.
Sam used the word inten­tion, instead of pur­pose or objec­tive. He was exploit­ing the asso­ci­a­tion of that word with unin­ten­tion­al or acci­den­tal, and plac­ing the oth­er par­ty in an asy­met­ric posi­tion to pro­voke the oppo­site asso­ci­a­tion.
If he used objec­tive instead of inten­tion, his point of view would­n’t look attrac­tive any­more as it would com­pare ratio­nal eco­nom­ic inter­ests to a myopic moral sys­tem as a ratio­nale behind killing and num­bers would stand out as the big dif­fer­ence.

I too have to agree. Har­ris plays a rather inter­est­ing rhetor­i­cal game here. I def­i­nite­ly gained a greater appre­ci­a­tion for his rhetor­i­cal skills, but not exact­ly for his argu­ments. He essen­tial­ly sea-lions him, which is some­thing I expect from igno­rant com­ments sec­tion trolls but not from accom­plished authors.

I like both these writ­ers and have noth­ing against either of them, just as I had noth­ing against Chom­sky or Zizek. Though in the case with Chom­sky vs. Zizek I did­n’t think Chom­sky said any­thing mean­ing­ful at all. In this case how­ev­er, as we see him actu­al­ly apply him­self to the task of crit­i­cal­ly engag­ing with har­ris, and we see har­ris play­ing rhetor­i­cal games, accus­ing him of using inap­pro­pri­ate lan­guage, being angry, read­ing his mind (I think it’s fairy appro­pri­ate to address what your inter­locu­tor choos­es not to men­tion, but Har­ris dis­miss­es this as mind read­ing). If the con­ver­sa­tion sounds child­ish, it’s because Chom­sky is exac­er­bat­ed, and har­ris is obvi­ous­ly play­ing it up to get some press (he obvi­ous­ly want­ed to be seen pub­licly engag­ing this intel­lec­tu­al for his “mil­lions of read­ers”).

I respect har­ris and agree whole­heart­ed­ly with a lot of things he says. I have many of his arti­cles and state­ments saved for ref­er­ence. I don’t even like Chom­sky all that much and find his will­ing­ness to dis­miss a whole host of thinkers I like to read rather annoy­ing. But I lost some respect for har­ris today. He seemed rather too oppor­tunis­tic and vapid. And I think his dis­missal of him proves to have been war­rant­ed.

Har­ris opens the dia­log with a lengthy pas­sage from his book where he essen­tial­ly says Chom­sky is an idiot, then gets all huffy when Chom­sky is occa­sion­al­ly short with him. Over­all, when Chom­sky asks Har­ris ques­tions, Har­ris refus­es to answer and then express­es puz­zle­ment. As for the issues: When Chom­sky does answer Har­ris’s ques­tions about inten­tions, Har­ris then paints a rosy pic­ture of US inten­tions through an anal­o­gy, and then, when chal­lenged, retreats to claim­ing it was all just a thought exper­i­ment which had noth­ing to do with the US. When Chom­sky says, well, then, let’s dis­cuss the actu­al inten­tions in ques­tion, Har­ris says you should just accept a coun­try’s claims of benev­o­lent inten­tions on their face, with­out evi­dence. Chom­sky points out that this would get most dic­ta­tor­ships off the hook, and adds that it might even be the case that some dic­ta­tor­ships actu­al­ly believe they have good inten­tions when they car­ry out their crimes against human­i­ty — does that mean that we should then ignore their crimes against human­i­ty? Har­ris basi­cal­ly ignores that point but in effect insists that we should sim­ply accept the US’s stat­ed good inten­tions with­out evi­dence, and stop our moral analy­sis of the US, a least, with those stat­ed inten­tions. The fact that Har­ris actu­al­ly insist­ed on pub­lish­ing this sad exchange any­way does make me sus­pect that he was­n’t just pre­tend­ing to be puz­zled and in fact had no idea what was going on in the con­ver­sa­tion.

I am sor­ry to say that Har­ris was entire­ly dis­re­spect­ful towards Chom­sky. He hid this behind a seem­ing polite­ness. He delib­er­ate­ly tried to bait Chom­sky into this weird email ‘debate’un­der a false pre­text. This is proven by a care­ful read­ing of the tran­script. Har­ris plain­ly refus­es to answer many of Chom­sky’s basic ques­tions. This was quite bla­tant affron­tery and is not a tac­tic that belongs in real debate. Chom­sky was irri­tat­ed by this and called Har­ris’ bluff. Har­ris — plain­ly out of his depth — intem­per­ate­ly flounces off stage. Chom­sky states that Har­ris’s wish to pub­lish is bizarre but he allows this to hap­pen with appar­ent ease. Har­ris has revealed an intem­per­ate and vain aspect to his per­son­al­i­ty in attempt­ing to use this sil­ly ‘debate’ to his advan­tage. A for­lorn hope. Har­ris needs to do some work on his impetu­ous­ness. To use mod­ern par­lance — ‘a mas­sive fail’!

I agree that Chom­sky was nev­er act­ing in good faith, but when did he say he would? He rebuffed the ini­tial offer, to which Har­ris respond­ed by basi­cal­ly going ahead any­way, mak­ing sure to clar­i­fy that Chom­sky should write as if these emails would be pub­lished.

Also, any­one who is falil­iar with Chom­sky would rec­og­nize his “strange­ly prick­ly” tone as rather char­ac­ter­is­tic of how the man both writes and speaks pub­li­cal­ly.

Dan writes, “On the issue of rad­i­cal Islam, Chom­sky doesn’t seem to acknowl­edge very much the role that reli­gious ide­ol­o­gy plays in moti­vat­ing bad behav­ior.” On the con­trary, Chom­sky has often acknowl­edged the role that reli­gious ide­ol­o­gy plays in moti­vat­ing bad behav­ior, point­ing out the mur­der­ous role of Chris­tian­i­ty in US his­to­ry from its begin­nings, from the Euro­pean invaders’ dis­dain for the human­i­ty of abo­rig­i­nal Amer­i­cans through Chris­t­ian jus­ti­fi­ca­tion of slav­ery, right down to the present. The US is, he has said, is one of the most reli­gious­ly fun­da­men­tal­ist coun­tries in the world, and when you com­pare it to Europe and much of East Asia for exam­ple, I don’t see how any­one can doubt that. That’s one rea­son why Har­ris’s attempt to define the US as a well-mean­ing spe­cial snowflake is so ris­i­ble: if he real­ly were as anti-reli­gious as he pre­tends, he’d be much more crit­i­cal of the US than he is. (I won­der what he thinks of Mar­tin Luther King’s 1967 claim that the US was the great­est pur­vey­or of vio­lence in the world?) As an old-school Zion­ist, Chom­sky is also aware of the harm­ful role that ortho­dox Judaism has played in mod­ern Israel. As for rad­i­cal Islam, he has often point­ed out that the US gets along just fine with fun­da­men­tal­ist Islamist states like Sau­di Ara­bia, Mus­lim mass mur­der­ers like Suhar­to, and has financed and used jihadist ter­ror­ists as prox­ies dur­ing the Cold War and since — with the best of inten­tions, of course.

As for ISIS, I think you’re mis­un­der­stand­ing him on that too. One can debate the impor­tance of reli­gion in the rise of ISIS (as one can debate the impor­tance of reli­gion in Rea­gan­ite / Bushite holy wars against Com­mu­nism and “ter­ror”), but it’s hard for me to see how any­one could pre­tend that US actions, which include inva­sion, aggres­sion, tor­ture, sup­port for bru­tal dic­ta­tor­ships, and good old-fash­ioned mass mur­der, have no con­se­quences in the Mid­dle East or else­where. When the US and its clients sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly stamp out mod­er­ate, demo­c­ra­t­ic ele­ments, what will remain the most extreme hard-line ele­ments, like ISIS. The same thing has hap­pened around the world.

Ed said:
“Har­ris opens the dia­log with a lengthy pas­sage from his book where he essen­tial­ly says Chom­sky is an idiot, then gets all huffy when Chom­sky is occa­sion­al­ly short with him.”

Ed, you omit this part of Har­ris’s open­ing: “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.”

He APOLOGIZES for the tone of it. He tries to have a civ­il, pro­duc­tive dis­cus­sion and to be cor­rect­ed on any­thing he mis­rep­re­sent­ed. Chom­sky just spits in his face over and over again. Real­ly bad form on Chom­sky’s part.

No one so far seems to grasp an essen­tial point: Har­ris ini­ti­at­ed this dis­cus­sion, and the bur­den was on him to real­ly lis­ten to what Chom­sky was say­ing. All Har­ris had to do to get the thing off the ground was to hum­ble him­self and have the dis­po­si­tion that per­haps he had some­thing to learn from Chom­sky. To me that seems an entire­ly rea­son­able way to pro­ceed. I mean, if I had been Har­ris, just a con­sid­er­a­tion of all that Chom­sky has done and accom­plished in his life (includ­ing the very seri­ous risks he took with the Pen­ta­gon Papers) would have made me want to lis­ten and learn. If I had to ask for clar­i­fi­ca­tions or per­haps restate some of what Chom­sky was say­ing to bet­ter ask him if I under­stood what he was get­ting at — then fine, so be it.

I would­n’t have mind­ed Chom­sky’s acer­bic tone and his obvi­ous impa­tience etc. That would have been beside the point. Chom­sky is an old­er guy, an old­er guy and a genius too — men like that are enti­tled to be can­tan­ker­ous if they choose. Also, if you watch videos of Chom­sky (even with knuck­le­heads as extreme as Alex Jones!) he is almost always very patient and will­ing to go step by step through things. Har­ris should have want­ed to reach that part of Chom­sky, and he should have done any­thing he had to to get to it.

I was very dis­ap­point­ed in Har­ris in this thing. He did­n’t seem to have much self-under­stand­ing. He should have tak­en the time and patience need­ed to get the dis­cus­sion going. It could have been a good dis­cus­sion, I believe, if he had done that.

Perus­ing some of these com­ments makes me think that 1) most peo­ple haven’t read any­thing Har­ris has writ­ten and instead rely on third-hand sound bites to form their opin­ion about him, and 2) the froth­ing anger than Har­ris elic­its may be from reli­gious peo­ple who had their feel­ings hurt by his clear and con­vinc­ing anti-the­ist argu­ments. How else to explain such blind, emo­tion­al hatred?
That said, this was nei­ther an “exchange” or a debate: Chom­sky came into it very angry and pre­vent­ed any actu­al con­ver­sa­tion from occur­ring — noth­ing of sub­stance was thus said by either par­ty. I expect­ed bet­ter of Chom­sky.

So well stat­ed I could not agree more. Thank you.

I’m sur­prised Sam Har­ris did not appear to know what his friend Christo­pher Hitchens wrote about the Al-Shi­fa bomb­ing since it clear­ly speaks to “intent” and if it’s a cred­i­ble account, it also explains why Chom­sky took the tone he did. Hitchens has a whole chap­ter in his book “No One Left To Lie To” enti­tled “Clin­ton’s War Crimes” which direct­ly address­es this sub­ject and he points out that the Admin­is­tra­tions claims about the plant all fell apart with­in days. It was a legit phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal fac­to­ry, there were no direct finan­cial ties to OBL or AQ, and the Admin­is­tra­tion refused to turn over the “soil sam­ple” they alleged con­tained “traces” of pre­cur­sor chem­i­cals for weapons. Fur­ther the US blocked a UN request for onsite inspec­tion of the facil­i­ty. Hitchens also cites a British engi­neer who was a project man­ag­er of the con­struc­tion of the plant who claimed there was no space avail­able for clan­des­tine oper­a­tions as well as a Ger­man Ambas­sador who report­ed the fac­to­ry was used as a show­place for for­eign vis­i­tors and not suit­able to pro­duce lethal chem­i­cals. Fur­ther, Hitchens spoke to a CIA offi­cial who says that it was astound­ing that such an action was tak­en on such flim­sy evi­dence as a soil sam­ple in a coun­try with which the US had both offi­cial diplo­mat­ic rela­tions and back chan­nels. Why not demand a short notice inspec­tion of the facil­i­ty and put every­one on notice who might be pro­duc­ing weapons or shel­ter­ing AQ assets? Why the rush to bomb? Hitchens also points out a piece from the New York­er which states that 4 chiefs from the Joint Chiefs of Staff were delib­er­ate­ly not told of the action before hand because it was known they would argue against it. Oh yeah, and this action just hap­pened to coin­cide with Mon­i­ca Lewin­sky’s return to the grand jury… So while Chom­sky does­n’t bring any of this up, this is con­text for con­sid­er­ing what the “inten­tions” were at the time. Since Har­ris does­n’t men­tion any of this con­text in his piece on Chom­sky in his book or sub­se­quent­ly, I can under­stand why Chom­sky would take the tone he did. It was a pret­ty con­tro­ver­sial action, and Har­ris seems to be com­plete­ly unaware why and has the temer­i­ty to chal­lenge Chom­sky on why he does­n’t accept the good inten­tions. I like Har­ris but he real­ly did­n’t do his home­work on the facts and Chom­sky knew this from the start and let him make a fool of him­self lit­i­gat­ing over the “tone”

Any­one who thinks Har­ris came out ahead of Chom­sky is delu­sion­al. This was a KO for Noam.

It was­n’t even a debate. You are the one that is delu­sion­al.

“When Har­ris then showed a video that clear­ly showed the lit­er­al quote that Chom­sky said accord­ing to Har­ris, Chom­sky sim­ply didn’t respond,”

he did respond — he said in the email fol­low­ing the one you cite:

“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”

Exact­ly bad form and fee­ble didat­ic smack down. Just a Grand­stand­ing move from a minor char­ac­ter to draw atten­tion to him­self by fan­ning a weak cin­der of thought in an unwant­ed argu­ment.

Har­ris is a pro­found hyp­ocrite.

Would he ever point out that it was the gangs of Begin and Shamir who intro­duced ter­ror­ist bomb­ing in the Mid­dle East?

I am not against Jews.…there are good and bad of every reli­gion.

And peo­ple like Begin and Shamir were secularists.…some if not many of these ter­ror­ists were even athe­ists.

There would be no ISIS in Iraq if it is was not for the destruc­tion of the Iraqi state and the for­ma­tion of these gangs of youths who know noth­ing about Islam but are just gangs of crim­i­nals held togeth­er but for­mer Baath army lead­ers who were removed by our stu­pid deci­sions to do sud­den and mas­sive debaathi­fi­ca­tion caus­ing mas­sive unem­ploy­ment.

Let’s not for­get that Iraq did not kill one of us.

But our inva­sion led to hun­dreds of thou­sands of deaths of Iraqis and many more hun­dreds of thou­sands who are wounded.….many are prob­a­bly in pain right now.

Har­ris is too arro­gant to be grate­ful for the Cre­ator who cre­at­ed him and every­thing.

Har­ris, the hyp­ocrite, is pro­found­ly evil and his ego is incred­i­bly and grotesque­ly inflat­ed.

After read­ing the exchange I did my home­work on al-Shi­fa and came to sim­i­lar con­clu­sions. There real­ly is a lot of reli­able info out there on the top­ic, and it all points to real­ly flim­sy pre­tens­es.

I did not know, how­ev­er, that Hitchens had writ­ten a chap­ter on it as well. Thanks for that info, and I will look it up!

“Although I can under­stand many athe­ists – who became athe­ists because they had a rough time in a reli­gious school or some rea­son like this” — actu­al­ly i am an athe­ist because i was born into a non-reli­gious fam­i­ly and can see through reli­gious non­sense.

that was a good thump­ing to SH by NC. SH is just cry­ing out loud in most of his con­ver­sa­tions want­i­ng peo­ple to like him. SH argu­ment about inten­tion is BS, how can you jus­ti­fy it when you know there “may” or in many cas­es “will” be civil­ian casu­al­ties. How are those inten­tions good. In such sim­i­lar terms the ter­ror­ists can eas­i­ly jus­ti­fy their inten­tions.

SH and the oth­er so call new age athe­ists are sim­ply anti-the­ists and it sad to see that when peo­ple like SH can make such bril­liant argu­ments and the­o­ries, they start sound­ing like fanat­ics as right­ly point­ed by NC because of their few irra­tional state­ments like “vast amount of mus­lims” with noth­ing to back this BS. Most of the prob­lems are because of peo­ple and reli­gion is a tool, if not reli­gion there will be anoth­er tool, there are far more pow­er­ful tools like nation­al­ism etc which are used by extrem­ists. So this whole anti-the­is­tic views and espe­cial­ly against Islam nowa­days is total HS (Horse shit). Do some­thing use­ful to the com­mu­ni­ty, work on devel­op­ment, growth, har­mo­ny etc and even­tu­al­ly we will not have a need for things like reli­gion, does not work by spread­ing hate you suck­er.

poor sam got his feel­ings hurt