by Noam Chomsky
I attended one of your seminars in linguistics here at MIT a few years ago, and I was struck by a couple of things. First of all, I was one of the few non-Asians in your class. It was mostly South Asians and East Asians. But the other thing was the extent to which math was involved. You were constantly writing formulas on the blackboard.
We should be clear about that. It’s not deep mathematics. It’s not like proving hard theorems in algebraic topology or something. But there’s good reason why some sophistication in mathematics is at least advantageous, maybe necessary, for advanced work. The basic reason is that language is a computational system. So whatever else it is, the capacity we’re both using and sharing is based on a computational procedure that forms an infinite array of hierarchically structured expressions.
A lot of people conflate linguistics with the ability to speak many languages. So in your case, people think, Oh, Chomsky, he must know ten or twelve languages. But in fact linguistics is another universe. Explain why the study of language is important. Clearly, you’re animated by it. You’ve devoted most of your life to it.
I should say, sometimes there’s a distinction made between languist and linguist. A languist is somebody who can speak a lot of languages. A linguist is somebody who is interested in the nature of language.
Why is it interesting? Think about the picture that I presented before, which I think is fairly uncontroversial. At some time in the very recent past, from an evolutionary point of view, something quite dramatic happened in the human lineage. Humans developed what we now have: a very wide range of creative capacities that are unknown in the previous record or among other animals. There is no analogue to them. That’s the core of human cognitive, moral, aesthetic nature—and right at the heart of it was the emergence of language.
In fact, it’s very likely that language was the lever by which the other capacities develop. In fact, other capacities may just be piggybacking off language. It’s possible that our arithmetical capacities and—quite likely—our moral capacities developed in a comparable way, maybe drawing from the analytical, computational mechanisms that yield language in all of its rich complexity. To the extent that we understand these other things, which is not very much, it seems that they’re using the same or similar computational mechanisms.
Clearly, culture influences and shapes language, even if it doesn’t determine it.
That’s a common comment, but it’s almost meaningless. What’s culture? Culture is just a general term for everything that goes on. Yes, sure, everything that goes on influences language.
If we’re, let’s say, in a violent environment, doesn’t that shape the vocabulary? Wouldn’t that lead us to talk about “epicenter” and “Ground Zero” and “terrorism” and other terms in the lexicon of violence?
Sure, there’s an effect on lexical choices. But that’s peripheral to language. You could take any language that exists and add those concepts to it—a fairly trivial matter. But we don’t know anything really about the effects of culture on lexical choices. In my view, it’s unlikely cultural environments meaningfully affect the nature of language. Take, say, English, and trace it back to earlier periods. English was different in Chaucer’s time or King Arthur’s time, but the language hasn’t fundamentally changed, the vocabulary has. Not long ago Japan was a feudal society, and now it’s a modern technological society. The Japanese language has changed, of course, but not in ways that reflect those changes. And if Japan went back to being a feudal society, the language wouldn’t change much either.
Vocabulary does, of course. You talk about different things. For example, the tribe in Papua New Guinea that I mentioned before wouldn’t have a word for computer. But again that’s fairly trivial. You could add the word for computer. Ken Hale’s work from the 1970s on this question is quite instructive. He was a specialist on Australian aboriginal languages, and he showed that many of these languages appear to lack elements that are common in the modern Indo-European languages. For example, they don’t have words for numbers or colors and they don’t have embedded relative clauses. He studied this topic in depth and showed that these gaps were quite superficial. So, for example, the tribes he was working with didn’t have numbers, but they had absolutely no problem counting. As soon as they moved into a market society and had to deal with counting, they just used other mechanisms. Instead of number words, they would use their hand for five, two hands for ten. They didn’t have color words. Maybe they just had black and white, which apparently every language has. But they used expressions such as like blood for what we would call red.
Hale’s conclusion was that languages are basically all the same. There are gaps. We have many gaps in our language that other languages don’t have, and conversely, they have gaps that we don’t have. It’s a little bit like what I said before about whether organisms vary infinitely or whether there’s a universal genome. If you take a look at organisms, they look wildly different, so it was quite natural to assume fifty years ago that they vary in every possible way. The more we have learned, the less plausible that seems. There’s a lot of conservation of genes. Yeasts have a genetic structure not all that different from ours in many ways, although yeasts look very different from us. But there are fundamental biological processes that just show up differently on the surface and seem different until you understand them. And something like that appears to be the case with language. Ken’s work on this topic is the most sophisticated. There’s a lot of popular discussion about “similar data” now, but most of it is extremely superficial and ignorant. In fact, there’s almost nothing that’s discussed now that he didn’t talk about in a much more serious way forty years ago.
People who just read your books don’t realize, I think, that you have a mischievous side. At the linguistics seminar I attended, I told you that I had to leave early, and you told me to shake my head back and forth, as I was leaving the classroom, and say, “I don’t know what that guy Chomsky is talking about. This is just a lot of nonsense.”
That’s what this all sounds like if you don’t have the right background. There’s this commonsense idea: when I talk, I don’t think about any of those things linguists are talking about. I don’t have any of these structures in my head. So how can they be real? This kind of deep anti-intellectualism, an insistence on ignorance, runs through a large part of the culture. With discussions of language, it’s almost ubiquitous.
You could say the same thing about vision. So, for example, one of the most interesting things known about the visual system is that it has core properties that interpret complex reality in terms of rigid objects in motion. In fact, you almost never see rigid objects in motion. It’s not part of experience. But that’s the way the visual system works.
Take, say, a baseball game. When you interpret an outfielder catching a fly ball, you don’t and he doesn’t introspect into the method by which he’s doing that, which is a pretty remarkable thing. Like how does an outfielder know instantaneously where to run as soon as the crack of a bat takes place? It turns out that’s a pretty sophisticated calculation and pretty well understood. But you can’t introspect into it. In fact, if you did, you would fall on your face and you wouldn’t catch the ball. It’s sort of like trying to introspect on how you digest your food. You can’t do it. People feel that they ought to be able to do it in cognitive domains because we’re partially conscious—at least, we have a consciousness of some of the superficial aspects of our actions. For example, you know you’re running to catch a ball. But consciousness of superficial aspects of our activity doesn’t give you any insight into the internal computations of the brain that allow these actions to take place.
You’ve said many times that your linguistics and political work don’t intersect in any way. But what is striking is your syncretic power, your ability to gather very disparate information together into a coherent picture.
I think anybody can do it. I have no special talents in that regard. There are some talents, if you like, that
are useful for the sciences—or for the study of, say, international affairs or personal relations. One important one that everybody has, if they feel like using it, is just the ability to be puzzled. Why do things happen this way? If you look at the history of modern science, that ability has yielded dramatic results at many points. Albert Einstein was interested in the question of what the world would look like if you were traveling at the speed of light. He was puzzled by that. Out of that came important insights.
Modern science really developed from a willingness to question things that had always been taken for granted. If I have a cup in my hand full of boiling water, and I let go with both hands, the steam rises and the cup falls. Why? Well, for millennia there was a good answer from the best scientists: the cup and steam are both going to their natural place. The natural place of the steam is up there, and the natural place for the cup is down there. End of discussion. But Galileo and others decided that they were puzzled by this event. Why does this happen? And as soon as they started to be puzzled, the question turned out to be significant. As soon as you look carefully, you find that all your intuitions are wrong. Our intuition is that a heavy ball and a light ball will fall at different rates. They don’t. In fact, just about all intuitions are wrong. Modern science comes out of that understanding.
When you go to the social and political domain, there are certain doctrines that are just taken for granted, like things go to their natural place. For example, the United States is a benign actor. It makes mistakes, but its leaders are trying to do good in the world. People make mistakes, it’s a complicated world, but we’re promoting democracy. We love democracy. If you don’t accept these dogmas, you’re just not part of the discourse. That’s true of ordinary discourse. That’s true of professional scholarship to a remarkable degree. That’s true of the media overwhelmingly. You can find case after case.
Take a look at an article in the New York Times by Bill Keller, the paper’s former executive editor, on our inherent benign character.2 He points out there are very troubling exceptions: we supported and are supporting serious atrocities in Bahrain, and we don’t do anything about the most reactionary state in the region, Saudi Arabia. He says these exceptions are troubling because they don’t fit our general nature. That’s about at the level of “things go to their natural place.”
It doesn’t take much brilliance to recognize that this is not schizophrenia and there’s nothing surprising about it. It’s exactly the way great powers operate. They have domestic power structures that determine policy. There are a lot of other factors, but they’re not overwhelmingly significant. If you look at the goals and intentions of political elites, everything falls into place. Of course, if you take that stand, you’re excluded from polite discourse—just as, incidentally, Galileo was. He couldn’t convince the funders, the aristocrats, that any of his ideas made any sense because they were so counter to common sense. He suffered for it under the Inquisition, as dissidents commonly do suffer. He was forced to renounce formally everything he believed. Legend has it that under his breath he said, “Eppur si muove” (“And yet it moves”). Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know.
Almost every society I’ve ever heard of, back to the earliest records, treats those we call dissidents, people who depart from the established consensus, pretty harshly. How harshly depends on the society. Another interesting thing about our culture is that we are very outraged by the harsh treatment of dissidents in enemy states. So the treatment of, say, Václav Havel or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is considered an utter outrage quite rightly. You can find countless articles in the New York Times about the horrible way in which dissidents are treated elsewhere. But, if you look at the facts, dissidents in U.S. domains are treated far more harshly. So you can read in the standard Cambridge History of the Cold War that since 1960 the record of torture, assassination, and other atrocities in U.S. domains vastly exceeds anything in the Soviet and Russian domains.3 It’s obviously true. So yes, Havel was imprisoned. Very bad. Six Jesuit intellectuals in El Salvador had their heads blown off.4 Worse. In fact, nobody even knows their names. Everyone knows the names of the Eastern European dissidents. Try to find somebody who knows the names of the dissidents in, say, El Salvador or Colombia, anywhere in U.S. domains.
A lot of what is called the new media, Facebook and Twitter, plus what are called handheld devices, iPads and tablets and the like, are creating greater social atomization and isolation. I’ve had the experience of being in a restaurant and everyone is looking down at their iPhone, sending messages and checking e-mail. What impact might this have on society?
I’m really not part of this culture at all, so I’m just observing it from outside, and not with very much intensity or understanding. But my impression is that the people participating in it, the young people participating in it have a feeling of intimacy and interaction. But I have to say, it reminds me of a close friend of mine as a kid who had a little booklet in which he wrote the names of all his friends. He used to boast that he had two hundred friends, which meant he had no friends, because you don’t have two hundred friends. And I suspect that it’s similar to that. If you have a whole bunch of friends on Facebook or whatever, it almost has to be pretty superficial. If that’s your outlet to the world, there’s something really missing in your life.
In fact, one of the significant aspects of the Occupy movements, maybe their most significant aspect, is the way they’re overcoming that by creating real communities of people who interact, who have associations and bonds and help each other, support each other, really talk to each other freely, something which is very much missing in the whole society. You have it in bits and pieces, of course. But there has been, I think, a conscious effort to atomize the society for a long time, to break people up, to break down what are called secondary associations in the sociological literature: groups that interact and construct spaces in which people can formulate ideas, test them, begin to understand human relations and learn what it means to cooperate with each other. Unions were one of the major examples of this, and that’s part of the reason for their generally very progressive impact on society. And, of course, they’ve been a major target of attack, I think partially for that reason.
The whole concept of social solidarity is considered very threatening by concentrated power. That’s true in any system, and is very striking in ours.
Although the social media are undoubtedly invaluable for organizing and keeping some connections alive, I think they contribute to atomization. That’s my superficial impression from outside.
Let’s talk about education in a capitalist society. You’ve taught for many years. One of your strongest influences was the educator John Dewey, whom you’ve described as “one of the relics of the Enlightenment classical liberal tradition.”5
One of the real achievements of the United States is that it pioneered mass public education, not just elite education for the few and maybe some vocational training, if anything, for the many. The opening of land-grant colleges and general schools in the nineteenth century was a very significant development. But if you look back, the reasons for this were complex. Actually, one of them was discussed by Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was struck by the fact that business elites—he didn’t use that term—were interested in public education. He speculated that the reason was that “you must educate them to keep them from our throats.”6 In other words, the mass of the population is getting more rights, and unless they’re properly educated, they may come after us.
There’s a corollary to this. If you have a free education that engenders creativity and independence, the way of looking at the world that we were talking about before, people are going to come for your throat because they won’t want to be governed. So yes, let’s have a mass education system, but of a particular kind, one that inculcates obedience, subordination, acceptance of authority, acceptance of doctrine. One that doesn’t raise too many questions. Deweyite education was quite counter to this. It was libertarian education.<
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The conflicts about what education ought to be go right back through the early Enlightenment. There are two striking images that I think capture the essence of the conflict. One view is that education should be like pouring water into a bucket. As we all know from our own experiences, the brain is a pretty leaky bucket, so you can study for an exam on some topic in a course you’re not interested in, learn enough to pass the exam, and a week later you’ve forgotten what the course was. The water has leaked out. But this approach to education does train you to be obedient and follow orders, even meaningless orders. The other type of education was described by one of the great founders of the modern higher education system, Wilhelm von Humboldt, a leading figure and founder of classical liberalism. He said education should be like laying out a string that the student follows in his own way.7 In other words, giving a general structure in which the learner—whether it’s a child or an adult—will explore the world in their own creative, individual, independent fashion. Developing, not only acquiring knowledge. Learning how to learn.
That’s the model you do find in a good scientific university. So if you’re at MIT, a physics course is not a matter of pouring water into a bucket. This was described nicely by one of the great modern physicists, Victor Weisskopf, who died some years ago. When students would ask him what his course would cover, he would say, “It doesn’t matter what we cover. It matters what you discover.” In other words, if you can learn how to discover, then it doesn’t matter what the subject matter is. You will use that talent elsewhere. That’s essentially Humboldt’s conception of education.