{"id":41087,"date":"2018-11-30T09:37:31","date_gmt":"2018-11-30T14:37:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=41087"},"modified":"2018-11-30T09:37:31","modified_gmt":"2018-11-30T14:37:31","slug":"an-ode-to-chomsky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=41087","title":{"rendered":"An Ode to Chomsky"},"content":{"rendered":"

An Ode to Chomsky<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Photo Source Matthew Straubmuller |\u00a0CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Ninety years old and still going strong. Almost twenty years after the age when that other great left-wing public intellectual\u00a0Jean-Paul Sartre<\/a>\u00a0was already utterly frail, uncommunicative, pliable in the hands of his handlers, and prone to haplessly spilling egg and mayonnaise on his face while eating, Chomsky is still constantly giving interviews, traveling to distant countries to give talks on the political issues of the day, and in general is just as lucid as he always has been. It\u2019s an unusual constitution that guy has.<\/p>\n

A few years ago I wrote\u00a0a long article<\/a>\u00a0about why I find Chomsky important, but I\u2019m now embarrassed by that piece and unable to read it. Nor did it succeed in communicating what he has meant to me. So I thought that on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday I\u2019d take another stab at it. A lot has been written about him, but little from the \u201cpersonal\u201d perspective I\u2019ll adopt.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m well aware of Chomsky\u2019s aversion to personalizing things, and to an extent I share his taste. There\u2019s something inegalitarian about singling people out and praising them to the sky, something anti-democratic and anti-anarchistic about treating them as authorities (particularly if they\u2019re perceived as nearly infallible). Even aesthetically one might object to doing so, if one prefers the coolly rational and objective aesthetic of classicism, of Bach and Mozart, the purity of a vision elevated above the spots and blemishes of the concretely existing. I\u2019ve always much preferred the realm of ideas and perfection to that of personality and politics. It\u2019s just so much\u00a0cleaner<\/a>, so much nobler and more sublime, timeless, transporting, this realm of philosophy, science, intellectual and art history, music from the Baroque and Classical eras, all things not merely time-bound or\u00a0particular. The universal is what\u2019s healthy; the particular slides into decadence.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An Ode to Chomsky Photo Source Matthew Straubmuller |\u00a0CC BY 2.0 Ninety years old and still going strong. Almost twenty years after the age when that other great left-wing public intellectual\u00a0Jean-Paul Sartre\u00a0was already utterly frail, uncommunicative, pliable in the hands of his handlers, and prone to haplessly spilling egg and mayonnaise on his face while […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[23268,5493,1880],"class_list":["post-41087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-chris-wright","tag-counterpunch","tag-noam-chomsky"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41087"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41087\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41088,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41087\/revisions\/41088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}