Speaking of Exceptionalism

Chomsky via [Daniel] Oppenheimer

I’m a subscriber to Daniel Oppenheimer’s Substack, “Eminent Americans,” and you should be, too.

The Chomsky Conundrum

The guy has a way of convincing you that how one writes is as telling as what one writes—how form determines content on the page, to be sure, but also how a writer’s style is, or can be if examined carefully enough, an index to that writer’s personality and politics. And vice versa. This approach to literary biography, if that’s what it is, sounds like an invitation to reductionist readings which promise accurate renditions of authorial intention; but it leads instead to wider angles on any given writer: it makes you think about evident yet unsaid or unknown sources and consequences of the writing.

The latest example of Oppenheimer’s exemplary approach is a troubled essay on Noam Chomsky, the writer who radicalized me even before I encountered Marvin Rosen, the pan-sexual Freudo-Marxist maniac who hustled me into graduate school. You might ask—I did—why in the world would Oppenheimer be troubled by this man (Noam, not Marvin), the moral compass of our time, the man who old-fashioned socialists like me can always expect to be farther left than I am, at least when it comes to matters of US foreign policy?

Below I paste the moment in the essay that got me thinking, and let me put into words what I have been thinking about Chomsky for a long time but was never able to say intelligibly until Oppenheimer said his piece. (This excerpt leads with a quoted passage from George Scialabba, the legendary critic whose range of interests and expertise knows no bounds.)

Here are the words—the conclusions—that Oppenheimer let me draw from his vexed relation to Chomsky:

First, the great irony of Chomsky’s relentless critique of American foreign policy is the simple inversion of the exceptionalism he constantly denounces (which Scialabba summarizes in praising him). In other words, the USA is exactly the opposite of the great power depicted by that notion, viz., a nation somehow innocent of selfish, economic interest, always trying instead to make the world safe for democracy. No, American “diplomacy” is a uniquely dishonest, malevolent, and destructive force that has disfigured everything it has touched, from the indigenous peoples it annihilated in the 19th century to the peoples of Guatemala, Iran, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Iraq—have I left anyone out?—it sabotaged, starved, tortured, and bombed in the 20th and the 21st centuries.

In treating America as an omnivorously, almost omnipotently evil force in the world— you might even say a Great Satan—Chomsky has reproduced the religious idiocies (and ecstasies) of exceptionalist mythologizing. Once exempt from any charge, pardoned in advance by its virgin birth on a continent empty of civilization, the US now stands convicted of every war crime in the book, exiled from paradise and never to be redeemed except by an act of God.

Second, and following logically from the first, the historical circumstance we call the USA is the absolute negation of any ethical principle that a liberal, leftist, social democrat, or sentient being could embrace as a guide to either public policy or personal comportment. There is nothing in the recorded past of this nation that could ground our principles in the actually existing present, and so we, as sentient beings equipped with a conscience, can’t place our hopes on anything but a thorough repudiation of, or complete escape from, that past. In practical terms, we are expatriates whose hopes must be invested in a world elsewhere, because we have nothing to say to our fellow citizens, who are, for the most part, attached to their homes, their jobs, their families, their neighborhoods, and yes, their country.

Third, the scholarship and the politics go together, after all, notwithstanding Chomsky’s refusal to entertain any such affinity or overlap. The Kantian heights Chomsky scales in proving the a priori existence of a universal or generative grammar match up perfectly with the God’s eye view of the world he attains by his withdrawal to the Olympian vantage of “objectivity,” where all the facts are plain to see—this is what Scialabba calls his “moral universalism”—and any disagreement on them are deviations from the truth dictated by false consciousness.

Here’s the excerpt. I urge you to read the whole thing.

[From Scialabba] ‘T. S. Eliot observed that “Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them; there is no third.” If I had to choose the exemplary public intellectual of my generation (or spanning my generation), I would say Noam Chomsky, and I might very well add: “There is no second.” Certainly no one else approaches his preternatural rigor or dialectical virtuosity. One critic described Chomsky as “a logic machine with a well-developed moral imagination.” That’s good, but it leaves out the astonishing abundance of detail that makes his books an encyclopedic history of American depredations in Southeast Asia, Central America, and the Middle East over the last sixty years, as well as the (barely) restrained sarcasm, unshowy but lethal, that makes of his indignation a high style.

‘If there is one theme that unifies Chomsky’s vast corpus, it is moral universalism: the insistence that we apply to ourselves and our government the same moral standards we apply to others. This directly contradicts American exceptionalism: the belief, usually assumed rather than argued, that the United States is unique in contemporary, perhaps even world, history in acting abroad for selfless purposes, often at considerable sacrifice, in order to bestow or defend freedom, democracy, and prosperity. … American policy always gets the benefit of the doubt, even when there is no doubt.’

“[Oppenheimer hereafter] Scialabba is close, here, to getting at what I see as the heart of why Chomsky is such a vexing figure for me, but I think he doesn’t go far enough in describing the reach of Chomsky’s critique. It is not just a faith in American exceptionalism that Chomsky assails so brilliantly and brutally. He gives no quarter to those of us who believe in American okay-ness, those of us (liberals) who think we see clearly the flaws of our nation but pledge it qualified allegiance nonetheless. It’s like family, we might say, flawed but lovable, fucked up but familiar, a battered but still worthy repository of mature, reflective love.

”For Chomsky this isn’t good enough. He doesn’t give America an inch, nor does he give an inch to those of us who would retain any loyalty to it. We are fooling ourselves. America is an empire, and like all empires in history it is brutally committed to serving its own imperial ends, no matter the cost to its own and other peoples. Even worse, in fooling ourselves and then moving through the world as political actors, we are complicit in the ongoing project of manufacturing consent to the ideological structures than enable America to go about its ruthless imperial ways. We all have blood on our hands.”