by Tom Wolfe
…empty empty empty until there is scarcely a single point Skinner makes in Verbal Behavior that Chomsky has not exploded into hot air. With this one review he demolished the book, dug the ground out from under the theory of behaviorism (it never got back on its feet), and consigned B. F. Skinner to history. No one in academia had ever seen such a show of power. Chomsky said many years later that from the very beginning his aim had been to reduce behaviorism to an absurdity. And that he did. Noam Chomsky became a power nobody in the field dared trifle with. In the one recorded instance of someone confronting him over this business of a language organ, Chomsky finessed his way out of it con brio. The writer John Gliedman asked Chomsky the Question. Was he saying he had found a part of human anatomy that all the anatomists, internists, surgeons, and pathologists in the world had never laid eyes on?
It wasn’t a question of laying eyes on it, Chomsky indicated, because the language organ was located inside the brain.97
Was he saying that one organ, the language organ, was inside another organ, the brain? But organs are by definition discrete entities. “Is there a special place in the brain and a particular kind of neurological structure that comprises the language organ?” asked Gliedman.
“Little enough is known about cognitive systems and their neurological basis,” said Chomsky. “But it does seem that the representation and use of language involve specific neural structures, though their nature is not well understood.”98
It was just a matter of time, he suggested, before empirical research substantiated his analysis. He appeared to be on the verge of the most important anatomical discovery since William Harvey’s discovery of the human circulatory system in 1628.
By 1960 Noam Chomsky’s reign in linguistics was so supreme, it reduced other linguists to filling in gaps and supplying footnotes for Noam Chomsky. As for any random figure of note who persisted in challenging his authority, Chomsky would summarily dismiss him as a “fraud,” a “liar,” or a “charlatan.” He called B. F. Skinner,99 Elie Wiesel,100 Jacques Derrida,101 and “the American intellectual community”102 frauds. He called Alan Dershowitz,103 Christopher Hitchens,104 and Werner Cohn105 liars. He pinned the charlatan tag on the famous French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan106…and he would pin another later on107…
Not really very nice—but at least he woke everybody in the field up from the seventy-seven-year coma. All at once academics, even anthropologists and sociologists, discovered the subject of linguistics. Chomsky had provided them the entire structure, anatomy, and physiology of language as a system.
But there remained this baffling business of figuring out just what it was—the creation of the words themselves, the specific sounds and how they were fitted together, the mechanics of the greatest single power known to man…How do people do it?…and their eyes opened wide as if nobody had ever thought of it before. What would eventually become thousands of articles and conference papers began chundering forth, so many that Müller would have run out of doggy sounds to make fun of them with.
One of the most revealing examples of Chomsky’s power was the linguist Alvin Liberman’s presentation of his motor theory, concerning the visual interpretations that affect face-to-face speech. Liberman didn’t buy Chomsky’s “language organ” for a moment. It took him several years to work up the nerve to say publicly what he really thought.b
The linguists William Stokoe of Gallaudet University (for the deaf), Gordon Hewes, and Roger Westcott edited one of the classics of late-twentieth-century liguistics, Language Origins, in 1974—with the proud claim that they had filled in a gap in Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures.c
And on they came, linguists and anthropologists intent upon shoring up Chomsky’s great edifice with evidence…the gestural theory…the big brain theory…the social complexity theory…and…and…
…and more and more scholars sat at their desks just like junior Chomskys trying to solve the mysteries of language with sheer brainpower. The results were not electrifying. Nevertheless, Chomsky had brought the field back to life.
In February of 1967—bango!—Chomsky shot up clear through the roof of their little world of linguistics and lit up the sky…with a twelve-thousand-word excoriation of America’s role in the war in Vietnam entitled “The Responsibility of Intellectuals.” The New York Review of Books, the most fashionable organ of the New Left in the Vietnam era, published it as a special supplement.108
The piece delivered a shock beyond even Chomsky’s never-modest expectations. From the very first paragraph to the last, he tore into the United States’ “capitalist” rulers, its supine press, its by turns apathetic and pliable intellectuals. He rolled the country over like a big soggy log, exposing the rot rot rot rot on the underside. He accused the United States of “vicious terror bombings of civilians, perfected as a technique of warfare by the Western democracies and reaching their culmination in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, surely among the most unspeakable crimes in history.” And Vietnam? “We can hardly avoid asking ourselves to what extent the American people bear responsibility for the savage American assault on a largely helpless rural population in Vietnam, still another atrocity in what Asians see as the ‘Vasco da Gama era’”—meaning imperialist—“of world history. As for those of us who stood by in silence and apathy as this catastrophe slowly took shape over the past dozen years—on what page of history do we find our proper place? Only the most insensible can escape these questions.…”
“It is the responsibility of intellectuals,” he said, “to speak the truth and to expose lies. This, at least, may seem enough of a truism to pass over without comment. Not so, however. For the modern intellectual, it is not at all obvious.”
This was an angry god raining fire and brimstone down not merely upon worldlings committing beastly crimes but also upon the anointed angels who had grown soft, corrupt, and silent to the point of complicity with the very forces of Evil it is their sacred duty to protect mankind from.
It was this rebuke of the intellectuals that turned “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” into more than just a provocative essay by an eminent linguist. It became an event, an event on the magnitude of Émile Zola’s J’Accuse in 1898, during the Dreyfus affair in France…when Georges Clemenceau, a radical socialist (later prime minister of France—twice), turned the adjective “intellectual” into a noun: “the intellectual.” At that point “the intellectuals” replaced the old term “the clerisy.” Zola, Anatole France, and Octave Mirbeau were the intellectuals uppermost in Clemenceau’s mind, but he by no means restricted that honorific to writers. Anyone involved in any way in the arts, politics, education—even journalism—who discussed the Higher Things from an at least vaguely savory socialist point of view qualified. So from the very beginning the intellectual was a hard-to-define, in fact rather blurry, figure who gave off whiffs—at least that much, whiffs—of Left-aware politics and alienation of some sort.
Chomsky proved to be perfect for the role, and not just because of his academic charisma. More important was timing. He knew how to exploit a tremendous stroke of luck: another war!—this one in a little country in Southeast Asia. It was a small war compared to World War II, but the jolt it gave universities and colleges in America was just as severe. The draft had been reinstated. Male students rose up in protest and the girls tagged along with them and faculty members sang along with them through every last bar of their anthem, “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” (to be replaced two years later with “Give Peace a Chance”). In 1967 tremendous pressure, social pressure, began to build up among the intellectuals to prove they were more than spectators in the grandstand cheering the brave members of the Movement on. The time had come to prove you were an “activist,” i.e., a brave intellectual willing to leave the office, go to the streets, and take part in antiwar demonstrations. The pressure on figures like Chomsky, who was only thirty-eight, was intense. He did his part, left the building, and marched in the most publicized demonstration of all, the March on the Pentagon in
1967. He proved he was the real thing. He got himself arrested and wound up in the same cell with Norman Mailer,109 who was an “activist” of what was known as the Radical Chic variety. A Radical Chic protester got himself arrested in the late morning or early afternoon, in mild weather. He was booked and released in time to make it to the Electric Circus, that year’s New York nightspot of the century, and tell war stories. Chomsky founded an organization called Resist and got himself arrested so many times that his wife was afraid MIT would finally get tired of it and can him. She began studying linguistics herself, in case she had to start teaching in order to keep bodies and souls together in the family.
No one seemed to realize it, but the antiwar movement had brought out in Chomsky some real-enough political convictions from his childhood, ideas long since dried up and irrelevant—one would have thought. Chomsky was born and raised in Philadelphia, but his parents were among tens of thousands of Ashkenazic Jews who fled Russia following the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881.110 Jewish anarchists were singled out (falsely) as the assassins, setting off waves of the bloodiest pogroms in history. On top of that, thousands of Jews were forcibly removed from their homes in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and adjoining regions and led off, some in chains, to the so-called Pale of Settlement, a geographical ghetto along Russia’s western frontier. They risked severe punishment if they ventured beyond the Pale…pale, as in the pales of a fence. Even inside the Pale they were restricted from entering cities such as Kiev and Nikolaev, from owning or even leasing property, receiving a college education, or engaging in certain professions. By 1910, 90 percent of Russia’s Jews—5.6 million in all—were confined to the Pale.111
Anarchism had been a logical enough reaction. The word “anarchy” literally means “without rulers.” The Jewish refugees from Russian racial hatred translated that as not merely no more czars…but no more authorities of any sort…no public officials, no police, no army, no courts of law, no judges, no jailers, no banks—no money—no financial system at all…in short, no government…and no social classes, either. The dream was of a land made up entirely of communes (not terribly different from the hippie communes of the United States in the 1960s).
A dream it was…a dream…and talk talk talk it was, and endless theory theory theory, until—¡milagroso! ¡maravilla!—more than half of a major nation, Spain, was taken over by anarchist cooperativas during the first two years, 1936–1938, of the Spanish Civil War…when the Loyalists, as they were known, were in power.112 In 1939 General Francisco Franco and his forces crushed the Loyalists in one of their last strongholds, Barcelona, leading to the memorable gob-of-guilt-in-your-eye cry, “Where were you when Barcelona fell?”
Noam Chomsky, all ten years of him, was in Philadelphia when Barcelona fell. He was so worked up about it that it was the topic of his first published article…for the student newspaper of the Deweyite progressive school he went to…a piece in which he denounced Franco as a “fascist.”113 His political outlook—anarchism—appears to have been set, fixed forever, at that moment. Or perhaps the word is pre-fixed…pre-fixed in a shtetl in Russia half a century before he was born. Then, at thirty-eight years old, he laced “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” with so much Marxist lingo that people took him to be part of the radical Left, if not an outright Communist. But he routinely denounced the Soviet Union and Marxism-Leninism as well as capitalism and the United States. He was above their tawdry battles. An angry god was speaking from a higher plane.
Chomsky’s audacity and his exotic Old World, Eastern European slant on life were things most intellectuals found charming, since by then, 1967, opposition to the war in Vietnam had become something stronger than a passion…namely, a fashion, a certification that one had risen above the herd. This set off what economists call the multiplier effect. Chomsky’s politics enhanced his reputation as a great linguist, and his reputation as a great linguist enhanced his reputation as a political solon, and his reputation as a political solon inflated his reputation from great linguist to all-around genius, and the genius inflated the solon into a veritable Voltaire, and the veritable Voltaire inflated the genius of all geniuses into a philosophical giant…Noam Chomsky.
Even in academia it no longer mattered whether one agreed with Chomsky’s scholarly or political opinions or not…for fame enveloped him like a golden armature.
The superlatives came pouring forth from 1967 on. In 1979 a Sunday New York Times review of Chomsky’s Language and Responsibility (Paul Robinson’s “The Chomsky Problem”) began: “Judged in terms of the power, range, novelty and influence of his thought, Noam Chomsky is arguably the most important intellectual alive today.”114 In 1986, in the Thomson Reuters Arts & Humanities Citation Index, which tracks how often authors are mentioned in other authors’ work, Chomsky came in eighth…in very fast company…the first seven were Marx, Lenin, Shakespeare, Aristotle, the Bible, Plato, and Freud.115 The Prospect–Foreign Policy world thinkers poll for 2005 found Chomsky to be the number one intellectual in the world, with twice the polling numbers of the runner-up (Umberto Eco).116 In the New Statesman’s 2006 “Heroes of Our Time” listings—the heroes being mainly fighters for justice and civil rights who had been imprisoned for the Cause, such as Nelson Mandela, the Nobel Peace Prize winner (1993) who had served twenty-seven years of a life sentence for plotting the violent overthrow of the South African government, and another Nobel winner, Aung San Suu Kyi, who was under house arrest in Myanmar at the time—Chomsky came in seventh.117 His arrests were of the token variety that seldom caused the miscreant to miss dinner out. But his status made up for the never-lost time. A New Yorker profile of Chomsky in 2003 entitled “The Devil’s Accountant” called him “one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century and one of the most reviled.”118 In 2010 the Encyclopaedia Britannica put him on the roster in their book The 100 Most Influential Philosophers of All Time, along with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Epictetus, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Moses Maimonides, David Hume, Schopenhauer, Rousseau, Heidegger, Sartre…in other words, the greatest minds in the history of the world.119 This wasn’t fast company, it was a roster of the immortals.
In his new role as an eminence, Chomsky hurled thunderbolts at malefactors down below, ceaselessly, at an astonishing rate…118 books, with titles such as Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (coauthored by Edward S. Herman)…Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance…Profit over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order…Failed States (very much including the United States): The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy…an average of 2 books per year…271 articles, at a rate of 4.7 per year120…innumerable speaking engagements, which finally got him out of the building and onto airplanes and before podiums far away.
At the same time his output of linguistic papers continued apace, climaxing in 2002 with his and two colleagues’ theory of recursion.121 Recursion consists, he said, of putting one sentence, one thought, inside another in a series that, theoretically, could be endless. For example, a sentence such as “He assumed that now that her bulbs had burned out, he could shine and achieve the celebrity he had always longed for.” Tucked inside the one thought beginning “He assumed” are four more thoughts, tucked inside one another: “Her bulbs had burned out,” “He could shine,” “He could achieve celebrity,” and “He had always longed for celebrity.” So five thoughts, starting with “He assumed,” are folded and subfolded inside twenty-two words…recursion…On the face of it, the discovery of recursion was a historic achievement. Every language depended upon recursion—every language. Recursion was the one capability that distinguished human thought from all other forms of cognition…recursion accounted for man’s dominance among all the animals on the globe.
Recursion!…it was not just a theory, it was a law!—just like Newton’s law of gravity. Objects didn’t fall at one speed in most of the world…but slower in Australia and faster in the Canary Islands. Gravity was a law nothing could br
eak. Likewise, recursion!…it was a newly discovered law of life on earth…recursion!…it was the sort of thing that could lift one up to a plateau on Olympus alongside Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, Einstein—Noam Chomsky.
a In Language and Politics (1988) Chomsky writes that his original dissertation (“which almost no one looked at at the time”) was part of a one-thousand-page manuscript he wrote as a graduate student. According to Robert F. Barsky, Chomsky’s dissertation committee passed him after reading only one chapter. See Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 83.
b In “An Oral History of Haskins Laboratories,” Liberman’s colleagues Frank Cooper and Katherine Harris remember developing the motor theory with Liberman. Later in the same interview, Harris describes a 1964 paper as “the first direct attack on Chomsky and Halle.” A transcript of the interview, conducted by Patrick W. Nye in 1988, is available on the Haskins Laboratories website at http://www.haskins.yale.edu/history/OH/HL_Oral_History.pdf.
c By extending generative grammar to sign language, the editors supported some of Chomsky’s theories but disagreed with others.
Chapter V
What the Flycatcher Caught
By 2005, Noam Chomsky was flying very high. In fact, very high barely says it. The man was…in…orbit. He had made over an entire field of study in his own likeness and put his name on it. If anybody brought up the subject of linguistics, two words inevitably followed: Noam Chomsky. After all, in 2002, so old (at seventy-three) he was already a professor emeritus, he had topped even himself. He had discovered and, as linguistics’ reigning authority, decreed the Law of Recur—
