I did not read the entire exchange entitled “The Limits of Discourse As Demonstrated by Sam Harris and Noam Chomsky” verbatim, but I read equal portions on both sides.
Professor Chomsky was indeed rather impatient, as Sam Harris notes, yet on matters of substance he was quite to the point. Harris was concerned about erroneous judgments he thought Chomsky had made about him and his views; Chomsky was concerned with errors of substance (not “misreadings”) and agreed to try to sort them out in a private exchange with Harris. Harris was evidently from the outset aiming for a public exchange, for their respective “readers.” Chomsky is remarkably generous in private, one-on-one communication, but he is clearly impatient with grandstanding (exhibitionism), as he notes. And although Chomsky notably neither expects nor demands it, it is evident to an onlooker that Harris did not show him the respect that he has most assuredly earned, if anyone has. Harris seems to think the exchange makes Chomsky look bad; perhaps that was Harris’s intention. I think the exchange makes Harris look extremely bad.
Chomsky’s main point, as is often the case, is that defenders of power often overlook or minimize the wrong done by their side, reckoning only the wrongs done by their enemies. And that the Western powers often inflict a far greater scale of carnage than their enemies. All this without reference to who is in the right or the wrong, nor what their intentions — actual or avowed — are. Chomsky is uncannily skillful in detecting and providing evidence of these double standards and imbalances, and the moral blindness they represent. Harris does not seem to show understanding of that, nor the motivation to discuss it head on. He seems too concerned about Chomsky’s having done him wrong (whereas it’s Harris who wrote a not too courteous critique of Chomsky, not Chomsky of Harris: “Leftist Unreason and the Strange Case of Noam Chomsky“).
Harris’s is not an unusual reaction toward someone of the intellectual and moral stature of Professor Chomsky. See “Chomsky’s Universe”
Despite Chomsky’s generosity with his time, this was yet another opportunity missed.
(I do not, by the way, think that benign intentions are irrelevant, and that only quantity of carnage caused counts; but I don’t think Chomsky thinks that either… He’s right, too, that self-righteous nationalism can be every bit as monstrous as any other creed or credo.)