Noam Chomsky on Nixon, Art and Bees

What’s the Latest Development?

Noam Chomsky, one of the world’s most active and public thinkers, argues that Richard Nixon would be considered a left-wing radical by today’s Republican standard. The party is dismantling environmental law that Nixon himself established and the GOP’s attacks against climate change, says Chomsky, resemble the old communist parties where everyone was expected to repeat ideology in lock-step. “These are interesting, important things happening in the richest and most powerful country in the world that we should be very much concerned about,” he says. 

What’s the Big Idea?

When it comes to human nature, i.e. the properties and characteristics that are intrinsic to our species, Chomsky believes the investigation may be so complex as to defy science, though that should not surprise anyone. As phenomena become increasingly complex they proceed to broader sciences, from physics to chemistry, from chemistry to biology, from biology to psychology, and from psychology to sociology. When science checks out, says Chomsky, art checks in. So novelists may have more to tell us about human nature than scientific disciplines. 

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