Harry Ritchie Follows Wolfe in Dissing Chomsky (But Disses Wolfe, Too)

Harry Ritchie
Google Images

The Scottish writer and journalist Harry Ritchie - tongue lodged firmly in cheek - writes, "Aged 85, Tom Wolfe discovers the key to human progress" (The Spectator, August 27, 2016). Ritchie thinks little of Wolfe's 'discovery' . . . but he does like the way Wolfe deals with Chomsky, as we shall see after some preliminary words on Darwin:

How on earth could language have evolved? Darwin's risible best guess was that we'd started off chirruping in imitation of birdsong. His failure to explain language bequeathed an aeon of medieval ignorance - that is Darwin's real legacy, according to Wolfe - a period longer than the Dark Ages in which the origin of human language was a non-topic, erased from intellectual history.

That is, until the 1950s and the dramatic arrival of Noam Chomsky, linguistics' celebrity intellectual, who grabbed the subject by its lapels, slammed it up against a wall and told it that there was a new boss in town. Chomsky's revolutionary theory, which completely dominated linguistics for the next four decades, explained that human language had evolved, with a genetic mutation creating some sort of neural machinery that could process and acquire speech. Chomsky's "language acquisition device," gifted by evolutionary chance, was innate, encoded by our genes, embedded in our brains before birth. Individual languages differed in lots of superficial ways but they all had in common the deeper rules of a "universal grammar."

Wolfe is at his best when describing Chomsky's almost religiously cultish, charismatic hold over linguistics, his ability to swipe any critics or doubters aside. Actually, he didn’t have to do much swiping for a long time, since linguistics had eagerly handed over its wallet, watch and car keys and agreed to anything Chomsky said.

Was Chomsky really so dominant? I ask out of ignorance. I knew his daughter at Berkeley - we were even friends, if for only a semester. My life was in flux. Anyway, she seemed genuinely happy to meet someone who had heard of her father only as a linguist. I knew nothing of his political views. I therefore went to hear him lecture in Berkeley on US foreign policy in the Middle East, about which I also knew nothing, and I came away impressed by his ability to speak so very articulately and in such detail without notes. His daughter and I then spoke about his views. I mostly listened. She was a sincere, personally very kind soul. I liked her - Platonically, I mean - but we lost contact after that semester.

Be all that as it may, I can see how Chomsky might acquire a cultish following. He has impressive intellectual faculties, and he demonstrated, in the lecture I attended, an ability to field a broad range of questions, without hesitation, and offer answers in great detail. He had what I call the "charisma of reason" (not my coinage, of course) and could draw others to defer to him. When I read him nowadays, though, I find his arguments tendentious, his conclusions exaggerated, and his manner dismissive.

But back to Ritchie . . . for those interested in Ritchie's dissing of Wolfe, go to the article.

Chomsky Dissed by Wolfe?

Tom Wolfe
Google Images

In an AP article attributed to a certain Hillel Italie, "Tom Wolfe talks Darwin, Chomsky and human speech" (Washington Post, August 29, 2016), Noam Chomsky is reported as getting dissed by Tom Wolfe, and I was especially struck by Wolfe's dissenting analysis of Chomsky's rise to prominence:

"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 an all-around genius, and the genius inflated the solon into a veritable Voltaire, and the veritable Voltaire inflated the genius of geniuses into a philosophical giant . . . Noam Chomsky."

This is an interesting analysis by Wolfe, but how do we know it's true? Did Chomsky's stature rise in this roundabout manner, each turn of this screwy path to would-be philosopher king resting upon nothing but the previous fateful twist?

But if Chomsky did rise in this fashion - and Wolfe should know fashion - then who can fill his bootstraps, a barren quest if ever there were one?

Brief Conversation with a Friendly Korean on the Jungang Line

Cheongnyangni Station

Wikipedia

Yesterday on the Jungang Subway Line as my train was just leaving Cheongnyangni Station, a Korean man approached me where I was standing engrossed in my newspaper, greeted me warmly, took my hand and shook it, and asked me if I speak English. When I had affirmed that, he smiled broadly and asked if I were American.

"Yes," I acknowledged, a bit cautious.

His smile grew, and he quietly but with emphatic certitude confided, "Koreans love Americans!"

At first, I was unsure how to respond, wondering if he were crazy or thought I was, but I finally replied, "Some do."

His smile faded, and he looked concerned as he insisted, "All Koreans love Americans. The Americans helped in 1950. Many died. Perhaps some of your uncles?"

I nodded. "Some fought," I revealed, "but lived."

"Koreans and Americans have a blood relationship," he told me, "so Koreans love Americans." But he seemed to reconsider, for he added, "Some Koreans don't. A few. They are 'Advanced.'" He looked at me to see if I understood.

"Progressive," I corrected, knowing that the Leftists in Korea call themselves that.

"Yes," he agreed. "Progressive. But they are traitors."

I didn't follow up on the possibility of a political discussion, but asked him what he does and found out that he teaches English linguistics in a university. He said that he likes Chomsky's linguistic theories.

I wondered what he thought of Chomsky's politics, but our conversations soon ended anyway as the man bade me farewell and exited the train at Hoegi Station.

Noam Chomsky was right about Bruno's discoursability!

Noam Chomsky

(Wikipedia)

I have to eat my words. That fabulous ape Bruno Littlemore is utterly -- or should I say unutterably -- incapable of language! Just look at Bruno's description of the interest that students on the University of Chicago campus showed in him:

When they saw Lydia and I strolling hand in hand across the campus, they would approach us and try to speak to me, and want to touch me. (Ben Hale, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, page 79)

Gnome Chompy can have Bruno now, for all I care! In fact, Chompy can eat my words for me -- and Bruno's failed words, too! J'accuse -- that chimp doesn't know the difference between accusative and nominative!

Some impeccable linguist Bruno be!

Bruno Littlemore on the Evil Gnome Chompy

Noam Chomsky

or
Gnome Chompy?
(EAGAINST)

I am still reading Benjamin Hale's novel and laughing out loud at the deeply intellectual humor that reminds me a bit of Thomas Pynchon's humorous style in Gravity's Rainbow. For instance, the scene in which Bruno the chimp overhears the name of a dangerous creature seemingly out to get him:

I remember intuiting that they were, ultimately, though perhaps indirectly, talking about me. I remember that they often uttered a word, or series of words, that sounded to me like, "Gnome Chompy." Of course I understood what a gnome was, because a gnome happened to be the protagonist of my second-favorite TV show, Francis the Gnome. Francis was portrayed as a small, benevolent force in a big, wicked world. So I assumed that they were speaking of a gnome named Chompy. However, I could ascertain from the wrathful tones in which the two women spoke of the Gnome Chompy that they considered him to be a harmful and vituperative creature, much unlike the magnanimous-hearted Francis. I imagined Chompy -- as his surname connotes -- as a predatory gnome with a great gnashing jawful of evilly gleaming teeth, with which he dismembers the innocent creatures of the forest and devours their bloody entrails. I remember how they hated the Gnome Chompy. I remember hearing them say -- or thought I heard them say -- that they would have to protect me, Bruno, from the Gnome Chompy. I remember that they mentioned -- and when they did their tone took on almost conspiratorial tones -- they even mentioned Norm Plumlee's name once or twice in connection with the Gnome Chompy, as if they believed that Norm and Chompy may have been in some kind of collusion. (Benjamin Hale, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, New York: Twelve, 2011, pages 159-160)

This a wonderful, creative misunderstanding on Bruno's part of the name of the linguist Noam Chomsky, who holds that only humans, and no animals, have a Language Acquisition Device (LAD), an innate sort of neural network for language located in the brain. Being a mere chimp, Bruno would necessarily lack one of those.

Chomsky wouldn't really be in collusion with Norm Plumlee, the Behaviorist director of research on Bruno, for Chomsky is actually a critic of the Behaviorist model of the mind as a "black box" and of the stimulus-response (S-R) model of language learning, for as he has pointed out, the S-R model can't account for the child's ability to construct sentences it has never heard, let alone been rewarded for producing.

Behaviorism's critique of "anthropomorphism," however, would similarly relegate Bruno to the animal world, forbidden to become human through language and acculturation. To be fair, though, Behaviorism also even forbade anthropomorphizing human beings!

Anyway, Bruno doesn't much fear Norm Plumlee, whom he knows too well, but he does have nightmares about Gnome Chompy, beginning the very night that he learned of the terrible gnome, when he dreams of Chompy stalking his parents in the jungles of Zaire. Bruno tries to call out to warn them of the great danger, but he finds that the Gnome Chompy "had robbed me of the power of speech"!

A clever little inside joke . . .

William Pfaff 'Recalls' Huntington's Civilizational Theory of Conflict

Samuel P. Huntington

"When Cultures Conflict"

World Economic Forum 2004

Davos, Switzerland

(Image from Wikipedia)

I happened to read in a paper -- never mind which -- a recent column by William Pfaff in which he 'remembers' Samuel Huntington's thesis on the "Clash of Civilizations," which he refers to as:

. . . the colossal error of the late Samuel Huntington in asserting that the "next world war" would be a war of civilizations -- actually, his grandiose extrapolation of the war between Israel and the Arabs. The Israelis were invested with the honor of embodying western civilization while Arabs, who make up only a fifth of the world's Moslems, were conflated with all the world's Moslems, most of them actually Asians and Africans.

I've read Huntington on this theory, and I don't recall him specifying that the "next world war" would be civilizational. I think that rather than specifically predicting such an overwhelming global conflict, he instead warned of civilizational conflicts on the horizen after the Cold War's end and offered some means of avoiding such conflict through civilizational dialogue and understanding, a point often neglected in polemical allusions to his theory. And he certainly didn't invest the Israelis with bearing the standard of the West, for he saw Judaism as the basis for a civilization separate from the West, namely, Jewish civilization. Nor did he imagine that all Muslims were Arab.

I'm surprised the Pfaff would mischaracterize Huntington's ideas in such a distorted manner, but I must say that I often have a similar impression in reading Pfaff's columns, that his mind is a sort of Procrustian bed into which issues must be forced to fit by trimming or stretching -- though not quite so radically Procrustian as Chomsky's mind, of course, which can stretch one death from a US bombing in Sudan to an atrocity worse than the nearly 3000 deaths from Al-Qaeda's attack on America.

No, Pfaff is no Chomsky, for he's sometimes right on the money, as with his warning about accepting Georgia into Nato, i.e., that such an agreement "has war built into it," but he's more often too ex-centric in his views for me to accept his analyses unsalted.