The legendary leftist intellectual also discusses his theory of the good life and more.
Friday, April 23rd, 2021
I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.” [MUSIC PLAYING]
The first political book I ever received was “9-11” by Noam Chomsky. My older brother gave it to me, just a little bit after 9/11. And I read it, and I reread it. And I argued with people over it. And then over the years, I would dip into the Noam Chomsky library. And just always its breadth is so astonishing. Noam Chomsky, he’s written more political books than I can count, and politics isn’t even his main research interest. He’s a pioneering linguist who put that entire field on a new footing. He’s done very important work. He’s a media theorist. He’s made waves in the artificial intelligence world. It’s really a remarkable example of a mind just continually at work. And it’s still true. Chomsky is 92, and he’s still writing books and giving interviews and trying to make his dent in the world. If you just know Noam Chomsky as a symbol of a certain kind of leftism or as a critic of American imperialism, you’re going to miss a lot. There’s a coexistence in his arguments of the world he wants to build and then the urgency of what needs to change right now, which includes compromising. He’s a utopian thinker but a very pragmatic actor. He spent much of 2020, for instance, trying to convince the left to vote for Joe Biden. He says, he’s a conservative when it comes to social change, and you’ll hear that here. There’s a resistance in his thinking to making sweeping pronouncements about how things should or will work in his ideal world because he doesn’t think that’s how change can actually function. Which is, all to say, there’s a deep independence to Chomsky’s thinking that I’ve always admired. Whether I agreed with the conclusions he came to or not, he is always and everywhere himself, both when that’s easy and when that’s hard. But the core of Chomskyism, as I’ve always understood it, is an idea about what human beings are and what we want, an idea based and his work on language and how we think but then feeding into his beliefs about the political architecture that would best support human flourishing. And for him, that’s anarchism, but not anarchism in the way the word is often used now or just is a synonym for chaos or for lack of organization. Anarchism as the libertarian wing of socialism, as a way of putting freedom and equality into fundamental forms of cooperation rather than fundamental forms of competition. So that’s where we begin here, but obviously not where we end. This is a conversation about both the world Chomsky wants us to build in the future and why, but also conversation about the world he hopes we can save right now with all the compromises and imperfections and contradictions that run through it. As always, my email is ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. Here’s Noam Chomsky.