"The Devil's Accountant"

Chomsky may be right to believe that language did not gradually evolve, but even he would admit that this idea is only speculation. He just prefers to think of the language organ as a self-enclosed system whose origins are mysterious. It is not for nothing that he has been called a "crypto-creationist." Steven Pinker, an admirer of both Chomsky and Darwin, thinks that Chomsky's distaste stems from a more general dislike of arguments that derive human qualities from utility. The theory of natural selection, after all, assumes that things evolve because they are useful; in that, it is a larger version of the behaviorist thesis that humans, like animals, do things in order to get stuff for themselves. And it is true that Chomsky believes that humans are driven by the desire for creative expression, not by anything so crass and petty as advantage. Daniel Dennett, a philosopher at Tufts University, believes that Chomsky's resistance is also due to a dislike of the ad-hoc, gadgetry aspect of evolution: Chomsky wants to think of language as a perfect, unified system....

Chomsky is often criticized for focussing on America's evil doings and ignoring or minimizing those of other countries, but this is also a consequence of his limited mandate. It is not that he hates America's government in particular: Chomsky is an anarchist; he hates all national governments....

Though he is a rhetorician of serpentine cunning, Chomsky chooses to believe that his debates consist only of facts and arguments, and that audiences evaluate these with the detachment of a computer. In his political work, he even makes the silly claim (the opposite of the sophisticated anti-empiricism he favors in linguistics) that he is presenting only facts-that he subscribes to no general theories of any sort. (His theories, of course, are in his tone-in the sarcasm that implies "this is only to be expected, given the way things are.") This claim to rhetorical purity has for years infuriated Chomsky's interlocutors, some of whom point out that his facts, gleaned from newspaper clippings, are not always accurate....

Paul Postal, these days a professor at N.Y.U., still loathes Chomsky with an astonishing passion. "After many years, I came to the conclusion that everything he says is false," Postal says. "He will lie just for the fun of it. Every one of his arguments was tinged and coded with falseness and pretense. It was like playing chess with extra pieces. It was all fake."

by Larissa Macfarquhar, in the March 31, 2003 New Yorker.

He certainly doesn't come off very well, does he? Like a lot of academics, he thinks he knows it all, and will brook no opposition.