Noam Chomsky, the renowned linguist and controversial social critic, visited Taiwan for the first time last week to present several lectures.
The 81-year-old American scholar and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — best known for his highly influential theories in modern linguistics but also regarded as an icon for the political left — gave a speech on international affairs last Monday at Academia Sinica.
Chomsky’s hour-long talk, entitled Contours of World Order: Continuities and Changes, had been highly anticipated. All of the 800 seats available were already reserved a week before the lecture, which prompted organizers to set up a separate conference room with a video feed of the lecture for those who couldn’t get into the auditorium.
In a dense and wide-ranging speech, Chomsky laid out a sobering assessment of world affairs, framed within criticisms of US foreign policy and overall economic inequality.
“At least two major threats to human survival, environmental catastrophe and nuclear war, are not only very real, but they’re growing, and they’re growing for reasons that are deeply rooted in institutional structures of great power and durability,” he said.
Chomsky pointed to the US and UK as among the culprits, saying the countries’ policies were “undermining the establishment of nuclear weapons-free zones.”
His speech also touched upon global flashpoints such as Latin America and the Middle East. He commented on Israel’s attack on Gaza in 2008, calling Israel’s claim that it was acting in self-defense against Hamas rocket fire a “transparent falsehood.”
He said a peaceful solution to that particular conflict was possible but ultimately had been obstructed by an “imperial ideology” forwarded by the US and its “client states.”
Chomsky also remarked on economic sanctions imposed upon Iran, quoting a prominent dissident in the country as saying “sanctions will hurt people rather than its leaders.”
He downplayed the threat of Iran as portrayed by the US. “The government of Iran is indeed a severe threat, mainly to its own population, but it’s hardly unique in that respect,” he said.
With regards to Iran’s desire to increase its nuclear capabilities, Chomsky said that the US’ demand that Israel be exempt from a proposed nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East was an equal cause for concern.
Chomsky acknowledged East Asia’s growing role in the global economy, noting that China has become one of the world’s largest importers of oil from the Middle East and the largest exporter to the region.
But he also cast doubt on the conventional notion that the rise of China and India’s economies represented a “great global shift in power” away from the West.
Despite their impressive economic growth in terms of GDP, Chomsky said the situation in China and India was more complicated, given both countries’ high levels of economic inequality.
He noted these countries’ poor rankings on the UN’s human development index, which measures the impact of economic policies on quality of life (India ranked 134th, China ranked 92nd).
Chomsky also suggested that new measures were needed to measure economic growth. “It’s not at all clear that prosperity in any sense meaningful to human life is measured by the number of commodities within reach, and the amount of fossil fuel that one can consume.”
During a question-and-answer session after the speech, Chomsky was asked by an audience member to comment on why Taiwan’s economy had been able to succeed despite the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) repressive rule until the late 1980s.
“Taiwan became a very successful development model ... by following the Japanese model, and violating the principles that are determined by the US, the World Bank, the IMF and so on,” he said.
“And that’s not accidental. That’s true of every developed society, including Britian, the United States, Germany, Italy, Japan, right up to the East Asian tigers. Every developed state has violated, radically, neo-classical economic principles. And Taiwan did as well.”
Chomsky said that for Taiwan, this meant using state intervention and protectionist measures in the economy.
He offered several historical examples to make the point that many developed economies started under heavy control by the state, which produced “successful development models.”
“Whether they’re good social models is another question,” he said.
In the case of Taiwan, Chomsky said, the US was willing to tolerate KMT rule for “strategic purposes.”
The press conference after the lecture was much livelier.
“You have a problem with the relativity of evil,” said a man who identified himself as a reporter for the Associated Press, clearly irked by Chomsky’s views. “How much of the evil that is created in the world today on a per capita basis? How much of it is American evil, how much of it is Chinese, how much of it is Iranian, how much of it is Burmese or Israeli? Because I didn’t get a sense of balance in your presentation.”
“You’re saying that the United States is the leading terrorist country in the world,” the man continued, his voice rising. “You are attributing most of the evil in the world to the United States.”
Chomsky responded with relative calm. “When I write [about terrorism], I use the official US government definition. And that causes tremendous anger, like yours, because we’re not supposed to use the official American definition. Because if we use that definition, it follows that at once that the US is a leading terrorist state.”
“There’s just no such thing as measuring the amount of evil,” he said. “That’s why I wouldn’t pose the question. You can’t count the amount of evil — you can talk about what states do, and we should, we should be concerned about our own state. But there is a moral issue, but it’s not the one you raise. The moral issue, which is elementary, is that we are primarily responsible for our own actions and their consequences.”
A reporter for Radio Taiwan International asked Chomsky’s opinion as a linguist on Taiwan’s current restrictions on pre-schoolers and kindergarteners learning English.
“It’s illegal to learn two languages?” Chomsky asked incredulously. The reporter clarified his question by asking at which age was it acceptable for children to start learning a language.
“It’s not a question of linguistics,” he said. “For a young child, language learning is kind of like breathing.”
Chomsky said the real consideration was one of social policy. “What kind of society do you want to live in? Do you want to live in a multicultural society or a culturally uniform society? And that’s not a problem for linguists.”
Chomsky also delivered a lecture on linguistics last Tuesday at National Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu.
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