Books reviewed: How Noam Chomsky’s world works by David Hawkes

Noam Chomsky
HOW THE WORLD WORKS
Edited by Arthur Naiman
THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE
Interviews with James McGilvray

Anyone following the career of Noam Chomsky is soon confronted with a problem. In fact, it has become known as the “Chomsky problem”. Chomsky has achieved eminence in two very different fields, theoretical linguistics and political commentary. The “Chomsky problem” is that his approaches to these fields appear to contradict each other. In politics Chomsky is a radical, but in linguistics he takes positions that can easily be characterized as reactionary. He treats linguistics as a branch of biology. He traces language to a “Universal Grammar” resident in the physical brain. He believes that our linguistic nature is hard-wired into our genes. Because they diminish the influence of environment on human behaviour, such claims can be used to suggest that certain modes of social organization are natural & immutable. As a result they have often been associated with conservative politics.

Chomsky himself professes to see no problem. He believes that linguistics is a natural science, and research in the natural sciences must be objective and based on the evidence alone. Indeed, part of the researcher’s job is to divest himself of his cultural and political prejudices before entering the laboratory. These methodological principles were established by the seventeenth-century scientific revolution of Newton and the Royal Society, which was in Chomsky’s view a progressive development and an immeasurable boon to humanity. He sees no reason why the methods of the natural sciences should not be applied to the study of the human mind.

His critics caution that empirical science is closely linked, certainly historically and perhaps conceptually, to capitalist political economy. These discourses both emerge in late seventeenth-century England, and they conquer the world together. Surely this suggests an affinity that ought to trouble those who advocate one but castigate the other? The interviews now published as The Science of Language and How the World Works show that this paradox is at least playing on Chomsky’s mind. The conversations range promiscuously, and although one book is largely concerned with linguistics while the other is mainly political, Chomsky seems happier than usual to discuss the mutual implications of his two fields of interest. By issuing such collections of informal discussions, transcribed and edited by others, Chomsky is presumably attempting to reach a popular audience..

This ideological chasm between the American Left and its putative constituency yawns nowhere wider than in Chomsky’s withering references to popular religion. He cites the fact that “about 75% of the US population has a literal belief in the devil” as the clearest possible example of American ignorance and stupidity. But is it really so different from his own beliefs? Throughout his career, Chomsky has depicted a world ruled by demonic forces of quite incredible malice and guile. Whatever is running the world Chomsky describes is undoubtedly a very greedy, violent and selfish entity – it would be hard not to call it “evil”, or even Evil, were such tropes not sternly prohibited by the monochrome literalism of our age. The incarnate, worldly identity of this terrifying power is less clear. Sometimes it is “the US government”, which Chomsky depicts as a cartoonish amalgamation of petty spite and cataclysmic violence, determined to crush the slightest remnant of human decency still cowering in any corner of its empire. “When the Mennonites tried to send pencils to Cambodia, the State Department tried to stop them”, while the CIA allegedly trained its Central American death squads by forcing recruits to bite the heads off live vultures. As Chomsky puts it, “no degree of cruelty is too great for Washington sadists”. The America described here is a crazed, bloodthirsty monster, hell-bent on the destruction of humanity.

But Chomsky is not so silly as to ascribe a monopoly of malignity to any single nation. He traces the roots of American turpitude back to medieval Europe, which “had been fighting vicious, murderous wars internally. So it had developed an unsurpassed culture of violence”. As a result, European colonialism unleashed a wave of unprecedented horror on a hapless world: “European wars were wars of extermination. If we were to be honest about that history, we would describe it simply as a barbarian invasion”. Here, at least, Chomsky does not discuss the ways in which empirical science both facilitated and rationalized the European conquest of the globe.

In any case, the degree of historical blame accruing to either Europe or America is unimportant. The important question, surely, is what made these polities so fearsomely aggressive? Chomsky usually locates the source of modern evil in economics rather than politics, assigning ultimate blame to the pursuit of self-interest, which he sometimes presents as a manifestation of human nature, and sometimes as a historical aberration. He refers to “class war” but does not identify the classes he believes to be engaged in warfare. He frequently describes our oppressors as “investors” or “the people in charge of investment decisions”, as if the problem were a group of nefarious individuals. But he concedes the futility of convincing an individual capitalist of the error of his ways: “What would happen then? He’d get thrown out and someone else would be put in as CEO”.

Occasionally, Chomsky implies that the pursuit of self-interest is, like language, simply in our genes. But he is far too sophisticated to be satisfied with such Hobbesian speculation. Nor does the problem lie with the ethical failings of any nation, bloc of nations, social class or malignant cabal. The problem lies with the power that motivates the malignity. The problem is capital itself. Although Chomsky calls capital a “virtual Senate” and a “de facto world government”, he does not follow through to the conclusions involved in this position. If the nominal possessors of capital are in reality its slaves, if their actions are determined by its demands, and if we want to understand the atrocities that Chomsky documents, we must not look to human nature, but to the nature of capital.

This Chomsky cannot do. The logical conclusion of his political commentary is that capital acts as an independent agent, insinuating itself into the human mind and systematically perverting it. But this is incompatible with his scientific assumption that the mind is merely an “emergent property” of the physical brain. As Chomsky himself reminds us, the idea that human beings are purely physical entities, devoid of discarnate qualities such as mind, spirit or soul (or indeed ideas), has become plausible only over the past three centuries. Thomas Kuhn refers to this as a “paradigm shift”, but Chomsky rejects the concept because it implies that scientific truth is historically relative. For him, the Galilean revolution of the seventeenth century was simply an unprecedented, almost miraculous leap forward, and he sees it as his task to extend this revolution to areas, such as linguistics, in which its impact has been delayed. He does not attempt to explain why it occurred in the first place... 

Read the full review: http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1114177.ece