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