Matt Johnson

*Originally published on The News Hub, November 12, 2015

In my last article, I attacked Glenn Greenwald’s disingenuous screed about “Sam Harris, the New Atheists, and anti-Muslim animus.” I explained how his myopia about Islam prevents him from identifying – much less confronting – flagrant threats to free speech, women’s rights, and pluralism. But I didn’t mention that this attitude stems from a much more fundamental aspect of his worldview.

Greenwald’s refusal to acknowledge the consequences of Islamic doctrine is a symptom of an intellectual illness that has become increasingly virulent on the left, and is yet another sign of regression – parochialism.

“Parochial” may seem like the wrong word to describe someone who broke the biggest international story of the decade (the Edward Snowden/NSA disclosures) and was recently ranked one of Foreign Policy Magazine’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers.” But I see no other way to describe a sentiment like this: “…I find extremely suspect the behavior of westerners like Harris (and Hitchens and Dawkins) who spend the bulk of their time condemning the sins of other, distant peoples rather than the bulk of their time working against the sins of their own country.”

Kyle Kulinski (the host of a progressive radio show called Secular Talk), refers to this maxim as the “Chomsky Rule.” Noam Chomsky is its most renowned proponent, and he frequently works it into his talks about foreign policy (Greenwald credits him for encapsulating it “perfectly” in a lecture called On Power and Ideology). At first, it seems like a reasonable principle – you are, after all, responsible for the way your taxes are spent, what your elected representatives do, etc. You should be an active citizen, and this includes petitioning and denouncing your government when it does reprehensible things. If Chomsky and Greenwald stopped there, I’d agree with them.

But they don’t. They argue that citizens of the United States are ethically obligated to spend most of their intellectual and political energy criticizing their own government. In Chomsky’s mind, a New York Times editorial that lambastes the House of Saud for flogging and imprisoning Raif Badawi (a man convicted of blogging – let those words sink in for a moment) has “about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century.” Similarly, in Greenwald’s warped moral universe, if someone writes a piece that exposes Afghan men who spray battery acid in the faces of teenage girls for the crime of attending school, he’s doing something “morally dubious.”

Because such an article probably won’t be translated into Dari or Pashtun, Greenwald doesn’t see the point in writing it. What’s more, he would suspect the author of “exploiting human rights concerns in service of a much different agenda.” This is a weirdly blinkered and cynical way to look at the world, especially in 2015. The United States has been intimately involved in Afghanistan for almost a decade and a half, and President Obama just announced that 5,500 soldiers will remain there through 2017. As Greenwald would happily concede, the U.S. armed and funded the anti-Soviet mujahideen – which later mutated into the Taliban – in the late 1980s. But ask yourself: do these facts increase or decrease American responsibility in Afghanistan? Isn’t the fate of Afghan women vital to the resuscitation of the country? Couldn’t an article about acid attacks against schoolgirls draw attention – and perhaps dollars – to an organization like Women for Afghan Women? “Morally dubious,” indeed.

If you live in the west and care about women’s rights, you have a duty to break the Chomsky Rule. While activists in the U.S. “raise awareness” about the pernicious effects of the word “bossy,” more than 125 million girls and women are coping with the aftermath of female genital mutilation. While Americans fret about gender imbalances in the sciences and Silicon Valley, thousands of women are being murdered by their family members every year in the name of “honor.” While Jennifer Lawrence complains that her $52 million salary should have been a bit higher, millions of women and girls are being forced into humiliating, abusive marriages. This isn’t to say that national or local campaigns about gender inequality are pointless – far from it. But it would be obscene to neglect the parts of the world where women are marginalized, stoned, raped, and mutilated as a matter of course.

Here’s how Greenwald outlines his adherence to the Chomsky Rule: “Are you going to have the most impact if you discuss police corruption in Chile? Or extremism in Morocco? Or imperialism and inequality in the United States?” Okay – should Robert Conquest have written about the “sins” of Prime Minister Harold Wilson instead of the horrors of Stalinism? Should George Orwell have written Animal Farm about Churchill’s government instead of the Russian revolution? These imperishable critiques of “other, distant peoples” were written by British citizens – would Chomsky and Greenwald therefore regard them as ethically frivolous?

In 1981, Peter Singer published The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress, in which he argues that altruism originally derived from a genetic predisposition to protect one’s family and tribe. He goes on to detail how, over the course of human history, this impulse has been consciously extended to larger and larger communities. Singer believes this trend will continue, and our discourse will necessarily reflect it. With this in mind, there’s no reason to keep quiet about more than 95 percent of the world’s population.

The Chomsky Rule might have made more sense in a bygone era – before the idea of an “international community” had taken root; before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; before globalization and the internet; before the circle had expanded. In 2015, most of us recognize that people shouldn’t be condemned to lives of indigence, disease, and brutality because they were unlucky enough to be born in the wrong place. As economies and political organizations continue to integrate, the job of forging an international civil society will become all the more pressing. And with these developments, our conversations about government and culture should be widened – not silenced at the border.