Frederick Crews
Nov 5 · 3 min read

Chomsky and Snowden: The Prophet and the Geek

Frederick Crews

In the latter half of the 1960s, goaded by the lies and misdeeds of Lyndon Johnson and then Richard Nixon, I became an antiwar activist, albeit of a mild professorial kind. My speeches in half-empty halls and on Berkeley’s Sproul steps didn’t budge the needle of public sentiment. Just by chance, though, I did play a part in a major development.

In 1967 Noam Chomsky was lecturing on my campus and also consulting with our Faculty Peace Committee. One day he showed me a long essay he had just composed, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals.” It was the most stunning document I had ever read: a call to conscience and a searing, chapter-and-verse indictment of “expert” complicity with the war machine. With Chomsky’s permission I mailed it off to Robert Silvers (whom I knew) at The New York Review of Books, and Silvers published it without hesitation as a special supplement to the magazine. That essay became the Common Sense of the antiwar movement. It also launched Chomsky’s half-century of prominence as the most uncompromising scourge of the hypocrisy that has clouded or prettified every US military and “intelligence” effort to thwart self-determination around the world.

Because Chomsky’s values are rooted in a transnational vision of human autonomy, he has remained unmoved by the scorn heaped on him from the right, center, and center-left. No more than Amos or Jeremiah would he have contemplated tempering his anathemas out of concern for benefit or applause. Nor would he ever call attention to his own personality. Here is the state’s propaganda, he drily reports, and here is the state’s behavior. Note how they fail to match.

“The Responsibility of Intellectuals” made its great impact because established opinion about the Vietnam War was then amenable to revision. None of Chomsky’s later critiques would have a comparable effect. What was scandalous in his eyes — winking at Israel’s ethnic discrimination, stockpiling potentially civilization-ending weapons, caring for the oil supply above the environment and universal human rights — lay beyond discussion in the corridors of power (or even on MSNBC).

With the publication of his memoir and manifesto Permanent Record (Metropolitan), America now has another moral scold — one who might appear even less likely to sway majority opinion. Edward Snowden isn’t just unpopular; he dwells in exile as a fugitive from justice. Yet his willed martyrdom in 2013, annulling any further possibility of a normal life within our borders, reached so far beyond self-interested conduct as to trouble our collective political slumber.

Snowden’s ostracism was always incomplete. The documentary Citizenfour made a start at rehabilitation in 2014, and civil libertarians have accorded him remote participation in their projects and forums. But with this book he is taking a further, and notably un-Chomskyan, step toward normalization. He is telling his whole personal story, or as much of it as his shyness will allow, to the literate public. If his ordinary humanity becomes real to us, the wager goes, perhaps we will share the outrage he felt upon uncovering warrantless surveillance of the entire populace.

In one respect, of course, Snowden isn’t like most of us; he belongs to the relatively rare subspecies Geekus americanus. One fascinating aspect of Permanent Record is its disclosure of the casualness with which gifted young programmers are entrusted with top-secret data. Their nerdiness is assumed to guarantee their tractability. Just hack for our side, plead the CIA and NSA, and we’ll validate your preexisting sense of superiority to the digitally clueless hordes.

That appeal has usually sufficed to keep appointed cyberspies in line. What made the difference for Snowden was, of all things, the US Constitution — a text whose anachronisms aren’t lost on Chomsky among others. But Snowden’s focus fell on the Bill of Rights, whose theme is freedom from intrusion by government. He has subscribed to American liberty in just the spirit that civics classes are meant to inculcate. Simply, he found the contradiction between national principle and national reality unendurable.

Is Snowden’s horizon, then, more limited than Chomsky’s? It certainly was at the outset of his career, and even now he aims only at reform of a single abuse. At the remarkable age of twenty-nine, however, he became what Chomsky always was, a citizen of the world. It is just the nonpartisan breadth of their shared humanism that arouses uneasiness in our blinkered selves. But for Snowden, at least, Permanent Recordought to melt some suspicion. If so, we’ll all be a little closer to forestalling the Orwellian prospect that lurks wherever the electronic web extends.

Frederick Crews

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Frederick Crews is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book is Freud: The Making of an Illusion (2017).