CHOMSKY ON POLITICS AND LANGUAGE

Chomsky has recently alienated many of his supporters on the political left. He refuses, for example, to talk about his opposition to war in terms of morality, and focuses purely on whether it is reasonable to achieve the intended result. His opposition to the war on Iraq is therefore predicated on these ‘facts’: (a) Few countries have ever (and America has never) successfully replaced a country’s regime with one more acceptable to the people of that country. Only internal, civil revolutions have been successful in doing this (e.g. Marcos, Duvalier, Suharto, Ceausescu). (b) Iraq is an artificial construct imposed by the British, which means the only regimes likely to find enduring favour with the local populace are those that the U.S. could not tolerate (e.g. a Shiite muslim state closely allied with the similar state in Iran, and a Kurdish state allied with a break-away Turkish Kurdish state). Chomsky was recently in Turkey using his influence for the successful release of a Kurdish journalist charged with treason (for publishing Chomsky’s articles condemning Turkey’s treatment of the Kurds).

Chomsky seems to be as inept in many of his actions as he is brilliant in his thoughts. He inadvertently lent his name and his credibility to an anti-Semitic tract when he defended the author’s rights to free speech (his quote appeared as an ‘endorsement’ on the offensive book’s cover). His book on 9/11 has been vilified for its moral indifference: He compared the 9/11 attacks to Clinton’s bombing of a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant (the U.S. suspected it was a chemical weapons plant, and because of the error several thousand people died as a result of not getting their medicines). Regardless of intent or morality, he argued, neither attack could reasonably have been expected to have accomplished its objectives with minimal risk, so they were equally indefensible.

He has alienated many people in his field of linguistics as well. He has radically changed his basic thinking on the subject three times, each time turning his back contemptuously on supporters of his previous theories. He still believes that language is hard-wired in the brain (which is why babies learn it so easily, and ‘wild children’ who don’t learn language by adolescence spend the rest of their lives illiterate and culturally disconnected from the rest of the human race). He believes all human languages are intimately connected and remarkably and inevitably alike, although he has seemingly given up on the holy grail of a universal ‘proto-language’ or syntax. A passionate anti-behaviouralist, he thinks it possible that language could yet prove to be a Gouldian ‘spandrel’, an accident of human evolution that arose as a side-effect of some more  ‘purposeful’ evolutionary development.

The article left me with two unanswered questions:

1. Is Chomsky’s ‘rational’, morally neutral approach to looking at political events and public policy better or worse than approaches that invoke morality, humanity, and altruism?
2. Is Chomsky a linguistic speciesist, blinded by his narrow study of human language to believe that only humans have sophisticated, ‘hard-wired’ innate language ability, and hence reasoning and cognition? If he studied dolphins or ravens would he really come to understand what language and consciousness and reason is, how and why they evolved and what they’re for?

Anyone have any thoughts on these two issues, or other thoughts about Chomsky? Seems to me this might be diablogue material. What do we make of his incredible worldwide popularity, everywhere except in the U.S.? And what should we make of his wife’s weary comment that when he’s asked what to do about everything that’s wrong, he ‘fakes’ an answer rather than admit he has none?

Post-script: Since I’m pimping the New Yorker, I should note that the magazine cover I reproduced on my To Be Nobody But Yourself post (also on Monday) was, by an amazing coincidence, featured in this week’s New Yorker vintage cover collection ad. I now know the artist’s name: Charles E. Martin, and the date of initial publication, 1971. You can buy it, as I’m going to do, from their Cartoon Bank .