by Noam Chomsky
Not there; the tenuous connections are somewhere else.
First of all, we should remember that the kinds of things that any sort of science can shed light on are pretty narrow: when you start moving to complicated systems, scientific knowledge declines very fast. And when you get to the nature of human beings, the sciences have nothing to say. There are a few areas where you can get a lot of insight and understanding, and certain aspects of language happen to be one of those areas, for some reason—but that insight still doesn’t bear on questions of real human concern, at least not at a level which has any consequences for human life.
The connections are quite different—and they are tenuous. The only reason for stressing them is because they’ve been pointed out many times through the course of modern intellectual history, and in fact they lie right at the core of classical liberalism. I mean, contrary to the contemporary version of it, classical liberalism (which remember was pre-capitalist, and in fact, anti-capitalist) focused on the right of people to control their own work, and the need for free creative work under your own control—for human freedom and creativity. So to a classical liberal, wage labor under capitalism would have been considered totally immoral, because it frustrates the fundamental need of people to control their own work: you’re a slave to someone else.
Well, in trying to locate sort of a core in human nature for a right to free, creative work and control over it, some classical liberal philosophers looked at other aspects of human intelligence, and one aspect that had indeed been studied since the seventeenth century, and had a lot to do with Cartesian thought as well [i.e. after the French philosopher Descartes], was language—where it was recognized, quite accurately, that sort of an identifying criterion of possession of a mind in the human sense (as distinct from an animal or an automaton) is the free creative aspect of the normal use of language.
So for example, a central part of Descartes’ argument for a sharp, even ontological distinction between humans and everything else in the world was that if you pose a question to a human being about a new topic using phrases that the person has never heard before, they can give you a new response relevant to what you said, which is not caused by their internal state and not caused by any external circumstances, but which somehow comes out of some creative capacity of their mind. But the same thing won’t be true of an automaton or an animal or anything else—like, if you take a machine and set it in a certain environment and push a button, what will come out is predetermined; or if you give a pigeon a certain stimulus, its actions also are going to be predetermined. But in human language, the product that comes out is not predetermined—it’s undetermined, but still somehow appropriate to situations.
Well, to Descartes, that was the crucial aspect of the human mind. And there was an attempt right through the classical liberal period, by Rousseau, and Humboldt, and others, to link up these elements and identify sort of a need and a right to freedom, an “instinct for freedom,” it was sometimes called, something at the cognitive core of human nature: free creative thought and its expression.
Now, that’s pretty metaphoric—like I say, nobody really knows anything about human nature, so certainly you don’t know whether there’s an instinct for freedom or not. I mean, if somebody wants to say that humans are born to be slaves, they can give as much of a scientific argument as Rousseau could when he said they’re born to be free—it’s like where your hopes are, it’s not that there’s any scientific knowledge.
And the same thing is true today: like, you can read any book you want about sociobiology [theory that specific social behaviors and not just physical characteristics result from evolution], and it’s mostly just fairy tales—I mean, it’s all fine when it’s talking about ants; when it goes up to the level of mammals, it starts being guesswork; and when it gets to humans., it’s like, say anything that comes to your head. But I think you can see a possible connection of that sort—a potential connection. Whether that connection can actually be made substantive, who knows? It’s all so far beyond scientific understanding at this point that you can’t even dream about it. So that’s the main reason why I don’t talk about these things much. I just think they’re interesting ideas, which are maybe worth thinking about in the back of your mind, or maybe writing poems about or something. But they’re simply not topics for scientific inquiry at this point.
Charlatans in the Sciences
WOMAN: Noam, there’s an idea in behavioral science, tied in with Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, that human compassion is a learned quality [the Swiss psychologist Piaget believed that mental development in children progresses through four genetically-determined stages]. Some politicians have seized upon this idea to promote the death penalty being used more often: like, either you catch the boat or you don’t, either you learn human compassion or you don’t—so if these murderers haven’t learned it, well, then it’s impossible to teach it to them now. I’m sure you’re familiar with these arguments?
This stuff doesn’t even rise to the level of idiocy—literally. I mean, if people want to have a fraudulent reason for defending the death penalty, fine, but there is no scientific basis. Take Piaget: Piaget’s work on developmental psychology was interesting, he had some interesting experiments and so on—the whole edifice has totally collapsed, nobody believes a word of it anymore. It turned out that all of the developmental “stages” are false: as you got better experiments, you could show that tiny infants could do all the things he postulated they couldn’t do at that stage. I mean, it was an interesting set of ideas, it wasn’t stupid—and people learned from the experimental work. But there’s nothing left of the picture. Zero.
As far as compassion being learned, any one of you knows as much as the fanciest scientist—and what you know is what you know by intuition and experience: you’ve seen children, maybe you’ve had children, you’ve played with them, you see the way they grow up. That’s what anybody knows, nobody knows any more than that. And the sciences have nothing more to tell you—and furthermore, there’s no indication that they ever will: it’s just way too far away. I mean, they may give you some statistical evidence, or maybe someday somebody will be able to show that this kind of background leads to more compassionate people than some other kind of background, that’s entirely possible. But that doesn’t mean there’s ever going to be an understanding of it.
Look, as science progresses, there will be attempts to draw political conclusions from it—but they’re going to be like this Piaget and the death penalty thing: that is, people who have some political agenda will find some total charlatan in the sciences who will tell them, “this is the basis for it.” But in terms of actual scientific knowledge, we aren’t even within super-telescope distance of touching any of these questions—there’s just nothing there. I mean, it’s not that you can’t do research on them: you can do descriptive research, you can do therapy, you can try to extend insights by making them a little bit more careful and controlled—but that’s about it.
It’s kind of like psychotherapy: some people say they get something out of psychotherapy, and maybe they do and maybe they don’t—but if they do, it’s not because there’s any science behind it: there’s no science behind it, any more than there is behind faith-healing. It’s just that somehow, various kinds of human interactions sometimes seem to work.
I remember an anthropologist friend of mine who’s worked in Southwest American Indian communities once described to me people being healed in tribal healing ceremonies: he said that if he didn’t see it with his own eyes, he wouldn’t have believed it. So some person will be really ill—I mean, very serious problems, physical symptoms, he’s not making it up—and they will go through some community-type ritual which involves dancing, and singing, this and that and the other thing, and the person just gets better: you see it happening, nobody knows why it’s happening; maybe it’s something about empathy, or being part of a community, whatever it might be. Well, there’s about as much scientific u
nderstanding in that as there is in psychotherapy.
Or even just take narrow questions of medicine. You know how they decide what kinds of drugs are worth giving to you, say for heart problems? It’s not because the science of it is understood—they just do epidemiological studies with controlled populations, to see if one of the sample populations takes this drug and the other sample population takes that drug, which one lives a little bit longer. I mean, you can call that “science” if you like—but it’s the kind of science that can be done by anybody who can count basically, or who knows something about studying samples and things like that. It’s not because anyone understands the biology of these things—usually that’s barely understood, if at all.
So I think that whenever you hear people talking about things like “learning of compassion” and so on, a big red flag should go up.
WOMAN: You don’t think science will ever have much to say about human behavior—there’s just something spiritual at the human level that is undefinable by science?
It’s not just about humans that scientific insight is very limited—even simple physical things can’t be dealt with either. For instance, there’s a “three body problem” in physics: you can’t really figure out what happens when three bodies are moving, the equations are just too complicated. In fact, a physicist I was talking to recently gave me another example—he said if you take a cup of coffee with cream swirling around in it, presumably all of the natural laws are known, but you can’t solve the equations because they’re just too complex. Alright, that’s not human beings, that’s cream swirling around in a cup of coffee: we can’t figure out what’s going on.
The point is, we may know the laws, but the possibility of applying them, or of solving the equations, or of working out the problems, or of understanding what’s going on, declines very fast when we get past only the very simplest things.
Also, we probably don’t know all the laws—I mean, it’s very unlikely that we really do know the laws, even at the core of science. A physicist will tell you much more about this than I can, but take, say, the matter in the universe: more than 90 percent of the matter in the universe is what’s called “dark matter”—and it’s called “dark” because nobody knows what it is. It’s just sort of postulated that it exists, because if you don’t postulate it, everything blows up—so you have to assume that it’s there. And that’s over 90 percent of the matter in the universe: you don’t even know what it is. In fact, a new branch of physics has developed around superconductivity [“superconductivity” refers to the complete disappearance of electrical resistance in various solids at ultra-low temperatures], and while I don’t have the knowledge to evaluate the claims, what some of the physicists working on it say is that they can now virtually prove (I mean, not quite prove, but come quite close to proving) that in this domain of highly condensed matter, there are principles which are literally not deducible from the known laws of nature: so you can’t reduce the principles of superconductivity to the known laws of nature. And again, that’s talking about really simple things, nothing like a complex organism.
Then when you begin to talk about how organisms develop—well, people say it’s “natural selection,” and that’s not false: undoubtedly Darwin was sort of right. But it could be that natural selection is only a very peripheral part of the development of organisms. So, there’s a channel of physical possibilities that physical laws make available, and within that channel of physical possibilities only certain things can happen—and within the range of those things that can happen, you are going to get effects due to natural selection. But the structure of the channel is totally unknown: I mean, nobody knows what kinds of laws apply to complex organisms, there are just the bare beginnings these days of the studies of self-organizing systems—how systems develop structure and complexity just by virtue of their nature. These things are just barely beginning to be understood—and we’re talking about things way simpler than human beings.
For instance, in neurophysiology, the organism that people study is a little worm called nematodes—and the reason they study nematodes is because they’re tiny, for one thing: they have a thousand cells, a three-day gestation period, three hundred neurons, and the entire wiring diagram of the three hundred neurons is known, so we know exactly how they’re all linked up together. But still, nobody can figure out why the stupid worm does what it does, whatever it does—I don’t know, probably turn left or something. Whatever it does is so far unexplained on the basis of a three-hundred-neuron system, where the entire structure of it is known, and the whole gestation period is completely known. It’s just too complicated, too many things are going on, there are too many chemical interactions. And this is three hundred neurons—it’s not 10 11 neurons, like in your head. So the difference is just so qualitatively huge that the fall-off in understanding when it comes to human beings is extremely dramatic.
And this is again why the study of language is so particularly interesting, because for some reason it seems like things in the inorganic world: there are aspects of it you can study by the methods of the sciences, which is curious—but still it’s like a little laser beam of light that goes through human behavior, leaving most things about language out. Like, science has nothing to say about what you and I are doing now—only about the mechanisms that are involved in it, not about how we do it. About that, there’s nothing to say, except again you can write poems. So the reach of scientific understanding is highly specific: very deep in the few areas where it goes, but they’re limited areas.
Now, when you say that human behavior might be beyond our inquiry, that’s possible—but I wouldn’t say that’s because of a “spiritual” property we have: the same thing might be true of large parts of nature. So there’s some capacity of the brain, some faculty of the mind that nobody understands, which allows us to do scientific inquiry—and like any other part of biology, it’s highly structured: it’s very good at certain things, and consequently very bad at other things. I mean, you can’t be good at something if you’re not bad at something else, those two things necessarily go together—like, if you’re a great weight-lifter, you’re going to be a rotten butterfly. You can’t be both, right? So if a human embryo can become a human being, it can’t become a fly—it’s too “weak” to become a fly, if you like, because it’s “strong” enough to become a human being: by a matter of logic, those things go together. So if you have a great capacity in one area, you’re going to have lousy capacities in another area. And if the human science-forming capacity is good enough to figure out quantum theory for some completely unexplained reason, it’s also going to be so bad that it’s not going to figure out lots of other things. And we don’t know what those other things are—but they might very well be most everything that we’re really interested in.
So when someone comes along claiming a scientific basis for some social policy or anything else having to do with human beings, I’d be very skeptical if I were you—because the knowledge just isn’t there right now, and may never be, either.
Adam Smith: Real and Fake
MAN: You said that classical liberalism was “anti-capitalist.” What did you mean by that?
Well, the underlying, fundamental principles of Adam Smith and other classical liberals were that people should be free: they shouldn’t be under the control of authoritarian institutions, they shouldn’t be subjected to things like division of labor, which destroys them. So look at Smith: why was he in favor of markets? He gave kind of a complicated argument for them, but at the core of it was the idea that if you had perfect liberty, markets would lead to perfect equality—that’s why Adam Smith was in favor of markets. 34 Adam Smith was in favor of markets because he thought that people ought to be completely equal—completely equal—and that was because, as a classical liberal, he believed that people’s fundamental character involves notions like sympathy, and solidarity, the right to control their own work, and so on and so forth: all the exact opposite of capitalism.
/> In fact, there are no two points of view more antithetical than classical liberalism and capitalism—and that’s why when the University of Chicago publishes a bicentennial edition of Smith, they have to distort the text (which they did): because as a true classical liberal, Smith was strongly opposed to all of the idiocy they now spout in his name.
So if you read George Stigler’s introduction to the bicentennial edition of The Wealth of Nations—it’s a big scholarly edition, University of Chicago Press, so it’s kind of interesting to look at—it is diametrically opposed to Smith’s text on point after point. 35 Smith is famous for what he wrote about division of labor: he’s supposed to have thought that division of labor was a great thing. Well, he didn’t: he thought division of labor was a terrible thing—in fact, he said that in any civilized society, the government is going to have to intervene to prevent division of labor from simply destroying people. Okay, now take a look at the University of Chicago’s index (you know, a detailed scholarly index) under “division of labor”: you won’t find an entry for that passage—it’s simply not there. 36
Well, that’s real scholarship: suppress the facts totally, present them as the opposite of what they are, and figure, “probably nobody’s going to read to page 473 anyhow, because I didn’t.” I mean, ask the guys who edited it if they ever read to page 473—answer: well, they probably read the first paragraph, then sort of remembered what they’d been taught in some college course.
But the point is, for classical liberals in the eighteenth century, there was a certain conception of just what human beings are like—namely, that what kind of creatures they are depends on the kind of work they do, and the kind of control they have over it, and their ability to act creatively and according to their own decisions and choices. And there was in fact a lot of very insightful comment about this at the time.