Chomsky, Chesterton, and a Moment of Purposeful Carelessness

There must still be a few geniuses at The Onion —America’s finest news source, yes—and perhaps a few disaffected intellectuals as well. Mustering as much cynicism—but with humor—as the academic himself, a r ecent Onion musing on Noam Chomsky read:

Describing himself as “terribly exhausted,” famed linguist and political dissident Noam Chomsky said Monday that he was taking a break from combating the hegemony of the American imperialist machine to try and take it easy for once.

“I just want to lie in a hammock and have a nice relaxing morning,” said the outspoken anarcho-syndicalist academic, who first came to public attention with his breakthrough 1957 book Syntactic Structures. “The systems of control designed to manufacture consent among a largely ignorant public will still be there for me to worry about tomorrow. Today, I’m just going to kick back and enjoy some much-needed Noam Time.”

“No fighting against institutional racism, no exposing the legacies of colonialist ideologies still persistent today, no standing up to the widespread dissemination of misinformation and state-sanctioned propaganda,” Chomsky added. “Just a nice, cool breeze through an open window on a warm spring day.”

One of the best things about The Onion ’s humor is its subtle but unforced reference to serious points in the midst of utterly irreverent wit. As Chomsky’s much-parodied attitude suggests, there’s something conspiratorial about comprehensive academic theories that renders them outlandish to those outside the gothic towers. Chesterton called them maniacal, and had little patience for rationalistic ‘theories of everything.’ Critiquing determinists unappreciative of the free will paradox, Chesterton gives a strikingly pertinent word to Chomsky’s mode of thought, in Orthodoxy :

If any human acts may loosely be called causeless, they are the minor acts of a healthy man; whistling as he walks; slashing the grass with a stick; kicking his heels or rubbing his hands. It is the happy man who does the useless things; the sick man is not strong enough to be idle. It is exactly such careless and causeless actions that the madman could never understand; for the madman (like the determinist) generally sees too much cause in everything. The madman would read a conspiratorial significance into those empty activities. He would think that the lopping of the grass was an attack on private property. He would think that the kicking of the heels was a signal to an accomplice. If the madman could for an instant become careless, he would become sane.

A moment of purposeful carelessness is exactly what The Onion suggests. This carelessness, though, is hard to find in moderation; it’s scarce in universities and overabundant outside them. Cynics of intellectual life can be heard saying academic theories are only as useful as their practical applications in society; cynics within the university try vainly, as Chesterton said, to get the heavens into their heads. Philosophers’ theories, as we may call them, are ideas that never leave the university. Sometimes proposed to ‘get students to think,’ the denial of free will and objective morality are particularly fashionable these days in many philosophy departments. And yet, as we know, university students can’t plead for higher grades because determinism and natural selection made them turn in papers three days late, nor can they escape punishment for plagiarism because our anti-cheating norm is arbitrary and socially conditioned by a patriarchal Western hegemony. Noam Chomsky fits somewhere in this academic paradox, and, as The Onion suggests, it’s often a good sign for our sanity if, every once in a while, we find the rubber hitting the road.