On Thursday evenings at M.I.T., Noam Chomsky, one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century and one of the most reviled, teaches a class about politics. There are nearly two hundred students and not enough chairs, so latecomers sit or lie down on the floor, which gives the class the air of a teach-in. On a recent evening, the students came to hear Chomsky speak about Iraq. He sat with his arms folded, a little hunched over on his stool, and began to talk into a microphone. He was wearing what he usually wears: shirt, sweater, jeans, sneakers. His hair curled toward the middle of his neck and looked as though he didn’t pay it much attention. He spoke in a quiet monotone.
“When I look at the arguments for this war, I don’t see anything I could even laugh at,” he said. “You don’t undertake violence on the grounds that maybe by some miracle something good will come out of it. Yes, sometimes violence does lead to good things. The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led to many very good things. If you follow the trail, it led to kicking Europeans out of Asia—that saved tens of millions of lives in India alone. Do we celebrate that every year?”
Chomsky told the students that the current Administration was essentially the same as the first Bush Administration and the Reagan Administration, and therefore could not be trusted to replace a tyrant. “The first foreign leader invited to the White House by George Bush No. 1 was Mobutu, who was one of the worst gangsters in modern African history,” Chomsky said. “Another one they loved was General Suharto. His record easily compares with Saddam Hussein’s. Another one they adored was Marcos of the Philippines. In every single one of these cases, the people now in Washington supported them right through their worst atrocities. Are these the people you would ask to bring freedom to Iraqis?”
A student wearing a red V-neck sweater raised his hand to ask a question. “I just was wondering whether this is really a strong argument if you are talking about the motives of the government,” he began, in a european accent.
“I’m talking about expectations,” Chomsky interrupted.
“If Saddam is a monster,” the student went on, “what does it matter, actually, who is going to get rid of him? If you look at the Second World War, the alliance with Stalin was also not a very nice thing, but it was absolutely necessary.”
“Well, let’s pick a worse monster than Saddam Hussein,” Chomsky said. “Suppose we could get Saddam Hussein to conquer North Korea. Would you be in favor of it?”
Chomsky can be brutal in argument, but except for the words themselves there is no outward indication that he is attacking. The expression on his face doesn’t change. He never raises his voice. In fact, his voice is so quiet that, unless he uses a microphone, it is difficult to hear him. He gives his words so little force that they scarcely leave his mouth. His eyes, too, are recessed deeply into his face; they are so narrow that they are almost closed, the right eye more than the left, and are protected by metal-framed glasses.
“The Second World War is a slightly different story,” Chomsky continued. “The United States and Britain fought the war, of course, but not primarily against Nazi Germany. The war against Nazi Germany was fought by the Russians. The German military forces were overwhelmingly on the eastern front.”
“But the world was better off,” the student persisted.
“First of all, you have to ask yourself whether the best way of getting rid of Hitler was to kill tens of millions of Russians. Maybe a better way was not supporting him in the first place, as Britain and the United States did. O.K.? But you’re right, it has nothing to do with motives—it has to do with expectations. And actually if you’re interested in expectations there’s more to say. By Stalingrad in 1942, the Russians had turned back the German offensive, and it was pretty clear that Germany wasn’t going to win the war. Well, we’ve learned from the Russian archives that Britain and the U.S. then began supporting armies established by Hitler to hold back the Russian advance. Tens of thousands of Russian troops were killed. Suppose you’re sitting in Auschwitz. Do you want the Russian troops to be held back?”
The student was silent.
Chomsky always refuses to talk about motives in politics. Like many theorists of universal humanness, he often seems baffled, even repelled, by the thought of actual people and their psychologies. He says he has no heroes, and he doesn’t believe in leaders.This refusal to talk about political motives is in one sense a great weakness, because it amounts to a refusal to take seriously the difference between Administrations, or even between countries, and is by extension a refusal to consider the possibility, short of revolution, of significant political change. It also results in what have become characteristically outrageous Chomsky comparisons. When Chomsky likened the September 11th attacks to Clinton’s bombing of a factory in Khartoum, many found the comparison not only absurd but repugnant: how could he speak in the same breath of an attack intended to maximize civilian deaths and one intended to minimize them? But, in another sense, Chomsky’s argument was a powerful one. For him, the relevant issue was not whether the bombing was conducted specifically in order to kill people (motive) but whether it could be reasonably expected to do so. If there was a reasonable possibility that the factory manufactured medicine rather than arms, then the potential effects of a bombing upon Sudan’s citizens (the number of people who would die without the drugs it supplied—several thousand, according to the Boston Globe) was properly part of the moral calculus. Chomsky’s logic is the unforgiving, mathematical logic of tort law: the philosopher Avishai Margalit has called him “the Devil’s accountant.” His moral calculus is a simple arithmetic. Nothing exculpates or complicates the sheer number of the dead.
Chomsky’s refusal to consider motives in politics is not just a moral impulse; it is also an intellectual position. He believes that a discussion of individual motives is pointless because politics is driven by the economic interests of élite institutions. “Take Robert McNamara,” Chomsky says. “I’m sure he’s a nice man. The actions that he was responsible for are outrageous because of the social and economic institutions within which he was acting more or less reflexively.” The word “reflexively” is significant—it sounds, at times, as though Chomsky were describing a kind of political behaviorism. But he is a rationalist: central both to the linguistics for which he first became famous and to his political thinking is the belief that the human mind contains at birth the structures of thought—even moral thought—through which it perceives the world. Élites, then, in his view, act selfishly, on their own behalf, but this selfishness follows an institutional logic rather than an individual one. They are morally culpable, and yet they can scarcely act otherwise.
It might seem strange that an anarchist libertarian like Chomsky, committed to the idea that people are free and self-determining, should think about politics in such institutional terms, but this is an old paradox. By rejecting, in the name of individual freedom, the idea that people are formed by their circumstances (he is not a Marxist), Chomsky dismisses as inessential everything that makes people individual—all their culture and history and experience. This move follows from the rationalist tradition: if reason is what is most important about humans—what separates them from animals—and if reason is universal, then it follows that humans should be, at core, the same. Chomsky finds this idea congenial: being of a logical rather than an anthropological or literary temperament, he has never been attracted to the notion that psychological originality or cultural variety is essential to what it means to be human. Politically, though, this has always been a dangerous move (the Jacobin move), for it allows the theorist not to take seriously any argument that departs from rationality as the theorist defines it. There is no need to pay attention to motive—what people say they want and why they want it—because their true desires are already written in the logic of their reason. There can be no disagreement, then, only truth and error; no differences, only mistakes, or lies.
Back in the classroom, Chomsky’s co-teacher asked whether one of the students wanted to try to make a case for the war in Iraq. A round-faced young man near the door raised his hand. “I think the most central claim for the pro-war movement is the liberation of the Iraqi people,” the student said. “That’s been the hardest one for the left to counter. I think that at the core the best of what Professor Chomsky has been able to say is that in the past the U.S. hasn’t done it.”
“Not just hasn’t done it, has supported the opposite,” Chomsky broke in. “And not just the U.S. but the people currently in office. . . . Suppose the goal is to liberate Iraq. How come it’s not proposed at the United Nations?”
“There are a lot of answers to that, like I think—” the student began.
“Really? I don’t know of any,” Chomsky interrupted. “But here’s a way to liberate Iraq, an easy way, and it will knock off all the most common arguments. No U.S. casualties, no threat to Israel, good chance of bringing democracy, probably be welcomed by the population, they’ll allow plenty of oil to flow, Saddam will be torn to shreds, they’ll destroy every trace of weapons of mass destruction. Help Iran invade Iraq. They could do it very easily if we gave them any support at all.”
“But—”
“Excuse me. They have a fair chance of introducing democracy. The U.S. doesn’t. The reason is that the majority of Iraq’s population is Shiite. Shiites are likely to want an accommodation with Iran, but the U.S. will never allow them to have a voice in the government because it doesn’t want the government to have an accommodation with Iran. . . . What’s the downside?”
The student looked baffled. “Are you honestly advocating that we help Iran invade Iraq?” he asked.
“No. You are,” Chomsky said. The students laughed, startled by this unexpected twist. “Proposing that Iran attack Iraq is insane. But it makes a lot more sense than having the U.S. attack. Are you saying that the people who supported Saddam while he was committing his worst atrocities are more likely to liberate the Iraqis than the people who opposed him?”
Chomsky continued to berate the student for a long time, ignoring his attempts to break in. People cried out “Let him talk!” but to no avail. Another student stood up and called out a request that he be allowed to help, but Chomsky ignored him. People made loud, disgruntled noises in protest at this treatment, but Chomsky ignored those, too. Finally, the first student sat down.
Chomsky told the class that the only justifiable way for Saddam to be removed was by his own people but that Iraqis had been so crippled by sanctions that they were unable to do so. “For ten years, while killing a couple of hundred thousand Iraqis, we’ve also been preventing Saddam from being overthrown,” he said. “Marcos, Duvalier, Suharto, Ceau¸sescu, you go through the list, that’s the way they were overthrown. If we would stop impeding that and allow it to happen, it probably would.”
Chomsky is not a pacifist on principle, but when it comes to the United States he has never supported an intervention. The country’s record is just too damning, he says: to expect better in the future is to indulge in willful self-delusion. States, he believes, can never be moral actors. But when asked to suggest a better way—an alternative to intervention in, say, Bosnia or Kosovo or Rwanda, to stop massacres currently taking place—he has no ideas to offer. Those are, he says, difficult cases. He does not know how to think about them.
This opposition to what he scornfully calls the “new military humanism” has alienated Chomsky from many former admirers. During the sixties, he was a hero to those who, like him, opposed the Vietnam War. His criticism of American involvement in Latin America in the eighties was echoed by mainstream liberals. But in the last ten years, as American ventures abroad have come to seem to many on the left a more complicated affair, it has been said that Chomsky’s thinking has grown simplistic and rigid: that he is stuck in the past, believing that, because America’s intervention in Vietnam was futile and immoral, all American intervention must be futile and immoral. When his book about the September 11th attacks, “9-11,” became a best-seller, many people were shocked. “He used to have this great, dignified passion to him,” Christopher Hitchens, who, until his own political change of heart, defended Chomsky, says. “I thought he was an exemplary man, who had almost no distance between what he believed and what he was willing to do. But ‘silent genocide’ in Afghanistan!” — “silent genocide” is how Chomsky described the U.S. bombing. “Now, that is the gleam of utter lunacy piercing through.”
As Chomsky has become increasingly alienated from the mainstream, though, his role in the American political debate has grown more important, not less. In the sixties, he was one of many protesting the war; now, when he opposes bombing Afghanistan, he is almost alone. It is not, then, really surprising that “9-11” was a best-seller. For those who doubt the consensus of the nineties and the war on terrorism, Chomsky is almost the only voice there is.
Chomsky’s intellectual influence is still extraordinary. On an academic list of the ten most frequently cited sources of all time (a list that includes the Bible), he ranks eighth—above Hegel and Cicero, just below Plato and Freud. The revolution he started in linguistics in the late nineteen-fifties captured the public imagination the way Einstein’s revolution in physics did. Leonard Bernstein used Chomsky’s theories to analyze music; literary critics used them in the interpretation of poetry. Psychologists studied children’s acquisition of language almost for the first time. A new school of thought, cognitive science, arose, based on Chomsky’s theory of language, along with notions about artificial intelligence. Philosophers started talking about ideas that hadn’t been taken seriously since the time of Descartes.
What’s more, although Chomsky long ago became alienated from the American political center, elsewhere in the world he is a superstar. Wherever he goes, he is sought after by mainstream politicians and the mainstream press, and when he speaks it is to audiences of thousands, sometimes tens of thousands. Last December, he gave a speech at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London to an audience of two thousand; another thousand showed up without tickets and stood outside in the cold in the hope of getting in. The next day, nearly two thousand more—old lefties and new lefties, men with very long hair and men with very short hair—stood in line to hear him speak at the University of London. Outside the auditorium, people marched up and down selling copies of Socialist Worker and Freedom, an anarchist fortnightly. The organizers of the talk distributed leaflets that, with the slogan “Share Chomsky with a friend,” encouraged the purchase of audiotapes. “I doubt there is any other American besides Bruce Springsteen who would have generated such a demand for tickets,” Chomsky’s introducer said to the crowd.
Chomsky’s office is a narrow room with many bookshelves and two desks, each stacked with at least a hundred books, leaving barely any space to work. There are a few uncomfortable wooden chairs and a couple of windows that look out onto an alley. Chomsky sat at the desk farther from the door with his feet propped on an open drawer, as is his habit. The phone rang. It was someone calling to ask for his support for Lynne Stewart, a radical lawyer who had defended an Egyptian cleric against terrorist charges, and was now herself under arrest, accused of supporting terrorism. Chomsky receives countless calls like this one. He told the person that he simply could not do anything to help but would sign his name to a statement. The person offered to read it to him.
“I’m sure it’s O.K.,” Chomsky sighed, wanting to get off the phone and back to work. The person urged him to listen.
“O.K.” He listened. “Yes, that’s fine. Right. Bye.” Chomsky hung up the phone. He looked tired. He rubbed his eyes under his glasses. “A thousand petitions,” he said.
It is typical of Chomsky to have created an office in which there is nowhere comfortable to sit and no proper space to work. He seems genuinely indifferent to material things. Before his wife took over, he often gave away the copyrights to his books because he didn’t read contracts. He would sign anything that was put in front of him. He will wear the same outfit every day for a week.
“My first impression of him was, like many people’s, one of awe,” Steven Pinker, an M.I.T. colleague, says. “There’s a psychologist named Jonathan Haidt who studies what he calls moral awe, a feeling that you have around a Gandhi or a Mother Teresa. He believes that the very understatedness of the physical presentation seems proof of the purity and the nobility of the cause. I don’t think it’s by design, but I think the fact that Chomsky is so unflashy adds to the feeling of awe that people come away with. If he were a loudmouth, then people would have more doubts.”
Chomsky’s abstraction from the material world is temperamental, however, not dogmatic. In many ways, he and his wife, Carol, lead a conventional middle-class life. They live in Lexington, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb, in a large brown clapboard house that looks, inside, much like any other professor’s house, with a mixture of modern furniture and ethnic pillows and wall hangings. When their children were little, they went on vacations to the Caribbean; they summer on Cape Cod. Chomsky loves to sail—at one point, he owned a small fleet of sailboats, plus a motorboat. “He doesn’t do the kind of recreational things that other people do, like go to the movies,” a friend of his says. “He thinks it’s a waste of time. But he likes to be out of doors in the summer, he likes to swim in the lake and go sailing and eat junk food. Carol is looser than Noam. Well, everybody is.” When Chomsky and Carol are in Cambridge, they usually watch an hour of television at night—“Law & Order” or some other cop show. Carol makes sure that they go to bed right afterward, and they wake up around eight. (It is commonly believed that Chomsky never sleeps, but this is not the case.) When their daughter Aviva was twelve, all her friends were getting bat-mitzvahed and she wanted to as well, but she was ineligible for Hebrew school because her family didn’t belong to the local synagogue. Her demand that they join engendered a minor household crisis, but in the end Chomsky put his distaste aside and became a member. “Noam will always stop whatever he’s doing and do something with the family,” Carol says. “He is totally devoted. It’s his outlet.”
Chomsky’s three children have reacted to their half-conventional, half-radical upbringing in various ways. Aviva, the eldest, is the most like her father. She is a historian of Latin America, and teaches at Salem State College, in Massachusetts. She is also an activist: she has protested the working conditions at the Colombia mine from which a Salem power plant buys its coal, and the unfair labor practices of an egg farm in Maine. Harry, the youngest, is the least political of the three: he is an aspiring violinist who lives in Berkeley and works part time in computer programming. Diane, the middle child, moved to Nicaragua in her mid-twenties to work as a volunteer on a Sandinista newspaper; she fell in love with a Sandinista activist, and stayed. “She went native,” Carol says dryly. Carol has tried, over the years, to stage minor bourgeois interventions to alleviate what she sees as her daughter’s appalling penury, but Diane rejects creature comforts as immoral. Once, when Diane was away, Carol conspired with Diane’s boyfriend to buy the family a washing machine (he does not share Diane’s aversion to consumerism and, indeed, would be quite happy to move to America), but, to Carol’s despair, Diane never hooked the machine up. “Her life is pitiful,” Carol says. “She says, ‘Ninety-five per cent of the world lives this way, why should I live better?’ ”
Chomsky’s children never rebelled, and Chomsky, too, is in some ways a logical product of his upbringing. His father, William, was born in 1896 in Ukraine and emigrated to Baltimore as a young man; his mother, Elsie, was born in Russia in 1903, in a town near Minsk, and emigrated to Brooklyn in 1906. Both came from Orthodox families and left home when they were young to move to Philadelphia. They both rejected the religiosity of their parents, but they both trained as Hebrew teachers and cared a great deal about promoting Hebrew as a living language. They were married shortly after they met, in the summer of 1927. Avram Noam, their first child, was born on December 7, 1928; David, their second, was born six years later. Although the family spoke English at home, Noam and David became fluent in Hebrew when they were young. There was not much talk of God in the house, but the family kept kosher and went to Sabbath services. While the boys were growing up, William Chomsky became well known as a Hebrew scholar; in 1957, he published what became a classic history, “Hebrew: The Eternal Language.” Elsie wrote two children’s books about courageous young Jewish heroes who risk their lives fighting evil Arabs to found settlements in Israel.
Chomsky was preoccupied with politics even as a child, and his views have not changed significantly since he was ten. At ten, he published his first article, in the school newspaper: an editorial on the fall of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War. Later, he read Orwell’s account of the war, “Homage to Catalonia,” and ever since he has referred to the anarcho-syndicalist Barcelona that Orwell described as an example of the kind of worker-run, libertarian order that he believes to be the best form of government. During junior high school, Chomsky spent a lot of time in Manhattan with an uncle, a legally blind, hunchbacked communist named Milton Kraus, who owned a newsstand at Broadway and Seventy-second Street that became a kind of street-corner salon for radical conversation. Kraus got him interested in communism, but by thirteen or so Chomsky was over Marx. He was too young to be caught up in the debates over Stalin and Trotsky that engaged people ten or fifteen years older; he was more attracted to contemporary anarchists like Rudolf Rocker, who wanted to combine classical liberalism’s aspiration to minimal government with socialism’s condemnation of wage slavery. In New York, Chomsky liked to hang around the secondhand bookstores on Fourth Avenue and pick up obscure radical literature. In the early nineteen-forties, he discovered an extremely obscure group that called itself the Marlenites (from Marx and Lenin), and maintained that the war was an international class struggle in disguise—the American and European ruling classes secretly working together to crush the European proletariat. “I didn’t believe any of it, but it was intriguing,” Chomsky says now. “Their critique of the Soviet Union and Western imperialism struck me as well thought out.”
In the circles in which Chomsky grew up, the measure of a boy was his skill in Hebrew. Since Chomsky was the best, he was the leader. “It wasn’t the measure of intelligence so much as focus,” Carol says. Chomsky attended Camp Massad, a Hebrew-language summer camp in the Poconos; he organized Zionist youth groups and Hebrew-culture youth groups. Carol’s family, the Schatzes, belonged to the same synagogue as the Chomskys, and she first met Noam when she was three and he was five. When Chomsky became interested in Carol, he used his influence to make sure that she got a place in Hebrew summer camp, so that she would speak the language well enough to be worthy of him. Carol was then, as she is now, small and slightly built, though her hair was shorter—now white, it grows nearly to her shoulders. She decided in her teens that she disliked wearing lipstick, and she has stuck to that. She and Chomsky were married when she was nineteen and he was twenty-one.
During his first year in college, at the University of Pennsylvania, Chomsky was bored and considered dropping out, but then he started to study with Zellig Harris, a linguistics professor who was involved in just the sort of left-Zionist politics that Chomsky was. Actually, Chomsky had met Harris when he was a child; the Chomskys had been to seders at the Harrises’ house. “When I was a kid, Zellig’s father was very famous,” he said and grinned. “He was the mohel, who circumcised every Jewish boy, including me.” It was only fitting, with such delicate proto-Oedipal dynamics already in place, that Harris should become Chomsky’s mentor.
By the time Chomsky arrived at Penn, just after the war, Harris had been for a decade or so a kind of elder statesman to the New York branch of a student organization called Avukah (Hebrew for “torch”). Nathan Glazer, the Harvard sociologist, was a member of Avukah when he was a student at City College in New York during the war and knew Harris then. “He was very dry,” Glazer says. “Intense. He would come to New York and stay at the Biltmore Hotel, which we thought was very grand, because we were all very poor and grubby. There was no question that we were impressed with him. And we felt that his rage was enormous.” The group consisted of young Zionists who opposed the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine: they identified themselves with the leftist kibbutz settlers who were in favor of a binational socialist state—Jewish workers and Arab workers united together. This notion did not then seem as implausible or as radical as it did after 1948, when it would be called anti-Zionist rather than Zionist. It was supported by many of the well-known intellectuals who were associated with Hebrew University: Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Erich Fromm. Besides, Zionism in any form was not much debated among mainstream American Jewish intellectuals. “Most of them had divorced themselves in a very radical way from Jewish interests and Jewish concerns,” Glazer says. “Look at the people around Partisan Review. When the American Jewish Committee started Commentary, in 1945, no one there had any Zionist background but me—neither Irving Kristol nor Robert Warshow nor Clement Greenberg.”
It was Harris’s politics, then, rather than his linguistics, that first drew Chomsky to him, and in this sense Chomsky’s career as a linguist was something of an accident. “Noam thought that he would probably end up being a Hebrew-school principal somewhere,” Carol says. “His mother used to say, ‘I walk up and down the streets of Philadelphia looking for a sign that says “Wanted: Linguist.” I never see it!’ ” Although Chomsky was brought up in a household preoccupied by issues of language—of Hebrew—he was not, as a child, enthralled by languages per se. He has never been the type to revel in the variety of tongues—to delight in strange words and strange sounds. He was interested in language as a window onto the mind.
Chomsky studied mathematics, logic, and philosophy, and for his undergraduate and master’s thesis he devised an eccentric but ingenious analysis of modern Hebrew grammar. He stayed in Philadelphia for graduate school, and in the early fifties he was awarded a junior fellowship at Harvard—a great honor, which paid him to do research for several years. In a burst of fierce work in Cambridge, he wrote a long, dense book (later published as “The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory”) and submitted a chapter of it to serve as his Ph.D. thesis. The thesis was so abstract that most linguists who read it found it impenetrable, but shortly after receiving his doctorate he was hired by a university used to such productions, M.I.T.
On Thursday afternoons, Chomsky teaches a seminar on linguistic foundations. It is not a technical syntax class; its purpose is to induct new graduate students into the Chomskyan mode of thought. In the seminar’s second meeting this year, the subject was ethology, the study of animal behavior. Twenty or so students sat around the table in the linguistics conference room. Chomsky sat at one end, leaning back in his chair, a yellow legal pad balanced on his knees. One of the students cracked a joke and Chomsky smiled. He has an unexpectedly warm and lovely smile. The gap between his front teeth shows as he grins, and he looks like a happy boy who has just pulled off a wonderful prank.
That week, the class had read an article criticizing the behaviorist idea that learning was simply a matter of associating stimuli with reinforcement. Give a pigeon a food pellet after it has pecked a lighted button, the behaviorist model went, and after a while the pigeon will learn to associate the two; praise a child for saying “two feet” rather than “two foots” and he will pick up grammar. The article argued that, on the contrary, to talk about a general-purpose learning process made no more sense than to talk about a general-purpose sensing organ. Learning was a function of specialized cognitive “modules” in the brain, just as sensing was a function of specialized organs like the eye and the ear.
The student giving the presentation that week got up and went to the blackboard and sketched two nerve cells with ions passing back and forth across the synapse between them. This, he explained, was the Hebb synapse. Donald Hebb was a psychologist who, in the late nineteen-forties, identified what he claimed to be the neurological underpinning for the behaviorist model of learning. Chomsky loathes behaviorism. Naturally, he wasn’t going to let these neurological pretensions go unchallenged.
“There’s no proof that there is any neurological basis even for computations as basic as addition,” he told the class.
“But we know addition takes place in cells,” a student objected, in a loud voice. “If you put in twice as many ions, you get twice as much voltage.” The student had a crewcut and wore a light-brown long-sleeved T-shirt.
“But there’s no evidence that that has anything to do with computation, the mental process,” Chomsky pointed out.
“I don’t think it would be too difficult to prove,” the student said.
“You try it,” Chomsky said, irritated. “If you prove it, they’ll publish it in Science tomorrow.”
The behaviorist model of learning was one of Chomsky’s first targets of attack after he appeared on the academic scene, in the late nineteen-fifties. B. F. Skinner, in his 1957 book, “Verbal Behavior,” had argued that language, like other behavior, could be described in physical, observable terms, without reference to thought or any other mental process. Two years later, in the journal Language, Chomsky published a review of “Verbal Behavior” that was among the most devastating and influential reviews ever written. He argued that Skinner had not arrived at a method of studying speech objectively; he had merely covered up traditional notions with scientific-sounding terms. To claim, for instance, that a painting was a “controlling stimulus” that regulated a person’s “verbal response” was meaningless: since the person might respond in an infinite number of ways, his response was clearly determined as much by his internal disposition as by anything objective about the painting. Chomsky pointed out that, similarly, it was absurd to suppose that Skinner-style training was more important in the development of language than human beings’ native mental endowment. After all, children of different intelligence, raised in vastly different environments, acquired language at much the same pace, and very few (if any) of them were systematically tutored or rewarded. Moreover, children acquired grammar in a way suggesting that they were following rules rather than mechanically imitating what they heard. (Almost all children, for instance, make the mistake of overgeneralizing the rule that to form a plural you add “s,” saying “foots” and “sheeps” instead of “feet” and “sheep.”)
Even the most grammatically punctilious and linguistically rich milieu could not account for the infinite variety of wholly novel sentences that young children could utter and understand, Chomsky concluded. It was preposterous, therefore, to talk about language as a matter of learning through reinforcement. In some crucial way, grammatical rules must be already there, hardwired into the brain, into something like a language organ. The ability to speak developed naturally, like the ability to see or hear. There was, in this quintessentially human endeavor, no need for pellets. Chomsky’s review was calm, it was precise, it was brilliantly argued; it was even, in places, funny. It effectively destroyed behaviorism—a school of thought that had dominated the human sciences for more than half a century.
It wasn’t just behaviorism that Chomsky wanted dead by the end of the class; he wanted the broader empiricist notion of inductive scientific reasoning gone as well. The student in the light-brown shirt had, helpfully, begun of his own accord to argue for the empiricist point of view. Scientists had to start from some piece of knowledge and generate a theory from it, he said. Without factual constraints, how could they decide what to believe? But science didn’t work that way, Chomsky told him. A scientist came up with a theory first and then went looking for the facts to fit it. If the facts didn’t fit, he added a fix here or a patch there until the theory worked again, or else he discarded the facts entirely, hoping they’d be explained away later.
“But surely neurological correlates are one piece of data that you can use to constrain your model,” the student protested.
“For any datum there are infinitely many theories that can explain it,” Chomsky said. “That’s just elementary logic.”
Later, the class moved on from neurology to bees. It was well known that a bee that had located a source of food habitually returned home and performed an elaborate “waggle dance” that contained information about the direction and distance of the food from the hive. The vast majority of scientists assumed that conveying this information was the purpose of the dance: that the dance was, in effect, a form of bee language. Chomsky, however, disliked the notion that such a minimally evolved creature as a bee could have language, because language was, to him, distinctly human; he also disliked the implication that language in humans was, like the waggle dance, a skill that had evolved because it was useful. Chomsky had, accordingly, seized on the work of a maverick scientist, A. M. Wenner, who claimed that although humans could detect information from the dance, the bees themselves did not: they found their way to food using only odor.
“You can’t just assume that because something’s there it is functional, or has been adapted for,” Chomsky pointed out. “It could just be there. Crickets don’t chirp so you can enjoy the summer evening.” Crickets were a useful example for Chomsky, because scientists had managed to extract a lot of information from crickets’ noises, but there was no evidence to suggest that crickets themselves could interpret the noises, or showed any interest in doing so. Despite the cricket example, however, nobody seemed convinced. It seemed very unlikely that bees might perform an elaborate dance for no reason other than sheer apian ebullience. And the idea that, even though the dance contained precise instructions about the location of food, bees might just not have figured them out seemed insane.
“I don’t find that persuasive,” a student protested. “I mean, by that logic you could say that linguists think grammatical agreement matters but speakers don’t give a damn. The argument has no force!”
“It’s possible that speakers don’t give a damn,” Chomsky said serenely. “You have to prove it.”
Chomsky has always been ambivalent about evolution. He is enough of a conventional scientist to acknowledge its power as an explanation for most biological phenomena, but he resists applying it to language. If asked about this resistance, he will shrug and say that the state of our knowledge is such that any hypothesizing on the subject can only be the purest speculation. He will allude to Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin’s theory of “spandrels”—side effects of evolution that are not selected for but arise as a consequence of other developments. He will say it is possible that we will discover in the future that language appeared in the human brain as a consequence of some as yet unknown physical law: perhaps biological systems like brains throw up a linguistic structure once they reach a certain level of complexity, in the way that certain compounds take on the structure of crystals.
Chomsky may be right to believe that language did not gradually evolve, but even he would admit that this idea is only speculation. He just prefers to think of the language organ as a self-enclosed system whose origins are mysterious. It is not for nothing that he has been called a “crypto-creationist.” Steven Pinker, an admirer of both Chomsky and Darwin, thinks that Chomsky’s distaste stems from a more general dislike of arguments that derive human qualities from utility. The theory of natural selection, after all, assumes that things evolve because they are useful; in that, it is a larger version of the behaviorist thesis that humans, like animals, do things in order to get stuff for themselves. And it is true that Chomsky believes that humans are driven by the desire for creative expression, not by anything so crass and petty as advantage. Daniel Dennett, a philosopher at Tufts University, believes that Chomsky’s resistance is also due to a dislike of the ad-hoc, gadgetry aspect of evolution: Chomsky wants to think of language as a perfect, unified system.
Chomsky was not the first to think of language that way. A group of scholars called the Modistae, in the Middle Ages, and later, in the Renaissance, the French Port-Royal school believed that all languages were based on a universal grammar that reflected the structure of the mind of God. (Chomsky read the texts of both these schools as a young man and refers often to their influence on him.) Some nineteenth-century linguists took it as their mission to uncover, disguised amid the polyglot confusion of modern dialects, the original tongue that Adam and Eve spoke in the Garden of Eden, which remained the only human language until the erection of the Tower of Babel.
Modern linguistics is generally agreed to have begun with an address that Sir William Jones, the Chief Justice of Bengal, gave in 1786 to the Royal Asiatic Society: Jones suggested that Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek originated in a common source, and he inspired several generations of scholars to compare sounds and meanings from one language to another, looking for similarities. They discovered that some words shifted in sound in a regular fashion from one language to another. Just as pater in Latin shifted to Vater in German and “father” in English, so piscis in Latin became Fisch in German and “fish” in English. By the end of the nineteenth century, the family relationship of the Indo-European languages had been decisively established. Around the same time, however, Franz Boas, a linguistically minded anthropologist who had emigrated to America from Germany, was growing irritated with the European tendency to force languages into the Latin mold. Just because Indo-European languages could be traced back to a common root didn’t mean that all languages were poor relations of the same family. Boas saw in Native American languages, which were dying out fast, an opportunity and a mission: he decreed that, instead of studying dead languages or well-known living ones, linguists would travel across America collecting verbal arcana, like botanists hunting specimens. The mission paid off: it turned out that not only were Native American languages not related to Indo-European ones—they weren’t even related to one another. Languages that had grown up right next to each other had no more in common than Tamil and Basque.
In the nineteen-twenties and thirties, a University of Chicago linguist, Leonard Bloomfield, disciplined Boas’s anthropological linguistics into a full-fledged taxonomical science. Just as Skinner believed that a scientific psychology should devote its attention exclusively to observable behavior, so Bloomfield believed that a scientific linguistics should restrict itself to marks on the page and sounds in the mouth. In part because it confined itself within such tight, workable boundaries, Bloomfieldian linguistics was very successful; in fact, it was so successful that by the time Chomsky arrived in college, in the mid-nineteen-forties, many linguists felt that in a few years the field’s work would be complete.
When Chomsky’s first book, “Syntactic Structures,” was published, in 1957, its revolutionary intentions were not immediately apparent. It was initially assumed to be a useful appendix to the Bloomfieldian literature, bringing syntax, which had been ignored for too long, into its purview. But a year later, beginning at a conference in Texas, Chomsky went on the attack. Bloomfieldians, he said, who had imagined themselves to be bringing scientific rigor to what had previously been a subject for the humanities, were not scientific at all: the point of science was to explain the world, and Bloomfieldians, by confining themselves to the surface ephemera of language, were merely describing it. To talk about languages as varied and unpredictable was to be hopelessly distracted by superficial differences, Chomsky said. A language was not a cultural artifact that existed out there, in the world: grammar came from within; it was part of the human biological endowment. Underneath all the variegated noise of culture, grammar had a universal structure, and the mission of the linguist was to discern it. It was not necessary to tromp sweatily about collecting polyglot data, as the Bloomfieldians had been doing for decades. If all languages were, at root, the same, then English was enough to go on, at least at first. Linguistics could be done in the office.
The Bloomfieldians fought back bitterly. They called Chomsky medieval (for his similarity to the Modistae), and they were scandalized by his disdain for data. For several years, linguistics conferences devolved into bloody battles. Chomsky gathered around him at M.I.T. a group of young students who were nearly as bellicose as he was. Robert Lees, one of this group, developed a style he later characterized as “calling people stupid”; an attack at a Linguistics Society meeting by Paul Postal, one of Chomsky’s closest associates, was so extreme that it was stricken from the minutes.
Chomsky’s students at M.I.T. felt themselves to be the vanguard of a revolution. For half a century, social scientists and philosophers had told themselves that the mind was murky and amorphous, impossible to study in a rigorous way, so it was better to ignore it. Chomsky declared that they were wrong: the mind was a beautiful system, and its construction was visible in language; he who solved language’s puzzle would win the greatest prize of all, knowledge of the structure of thought. Chomsky’s students were like a holy army; there was, in their attacks, a theological fervor. Heresies had to be stamped out. Truth and science were at stake! And at the root of the fervor was a nearly theological reverence for Chomsky himself. “It verged on worship,” Robin Lakoff, a member of this group, later wrote. “To be in Chomsky’s good graces meant . . . that you were worthy of him, you partook in some small way in the godhead.” Chomsky, with his personal reserve, his quiet voice, and his astonishing mind, seemed to them a figure of pure reason, an instrument of truth. “Noam is not a human being,” Jay Keyser, one of the M.I.T. group, once said. “He’s an angel.” Chomsky’s revolution was entirely successful. Within a few years, Bloomfield’s ideas were considered ridiculous.
Chomsky is not an activist by temperament. In photographs from the time of the Vietnam War, he looks much younger than he was, but it is clear that he was still a man of the nineteen-fifties, with his conventional clothes and his short, neat hair. He is not a marcher; not a rousing speaker; not one who thrills to crowds or succumbs to the ecstasy of the barricades. Even though he has been intensely involved in politics for forty years and it is hard to imagine that he does not get some sort of gratification from the adulatory crowds who come to hear him (his wife and his friends think he must, though he would never admit it), it is clear that, much of the time when he is engaged in political work, he would prefer to be alone. If there is one theme that recurs through all his work and all his life, it is isolation. Intervention, evolution, conversation, learning—all are intrusions into the hermetic sanctity of the self.
“He wishes the world would go away,” Carol says. “That the world wouldn’t require it. He wishes that every society would be decently democratic and everything would work and then he wouldn’t have to involve himself. No, I don’t think he enjoys it. If the world wasn’t the way it is, everything would be easier. But the world is the way it is.” Chomsky is involved in politics because what he perceives as injustice makes him violently angry. “He gets very upset,” Carol says. “It hits him very, very hard. He can’t stand it. Every morning he’s reading the paper and clipping and muttering, ‘Look at what Powell said,’ and on and on and on. It infuriates him.”
This is, no doubt, one reason that Chomsky, in his political speeches, tends to be unremittingly harsh, talking only of the horrors of past and present. He is not interested in utopia. He is impelled by duty and rage; sympathy, too, though of an abstract, impersonal sort—all injustices, all claims, all deaths seem to move him equally. He feels obliged to fight wrongs, but only as far as decency requires him to. Chomsky is often criticized for focussing on America’s evil doings and ignoring or minimizing those of other countries, but this is also a consequence of his limited mandate. It is not that he hates America’s government in particular: Chomsky is an anarchist; he hates all national governments. (He says often that the United States, for all its flaws, is still the freest country on earth.) He criticizes America because, as an American, he feels that he is culpable for its bad actions, and is in a position to affect them. He does not hold himself responsible for the world.
Getting seriously involved in politics was an unpleasant choice for Chomsky—he had a nice life, and he didn’t want to give it up. In the mid-sixties, when he first became involved in the antiwar movement, it was not the mass phenomenon that it would become. He gave talks all the time, but to tiny groups, in churches, in people’s living rooms. Then, when the movement began to get more attention, there were other problems. Chomsky didn’t just speak against the war; for ten years, he refused to pay his taxes, and he supported draft dodgers; he was arrested several times and put on Nixon’s official enemies list. “It was a big thing to make decisions that could land you in jail,” he says. “Not that anyone was going to be tortured—it wasn’t Turkey. But it’s just a big decision when you’ve got a comfortable life and you’re doing work you like and your family’s growing up.” At one point, when it looked as though he might spend several years in prison, he and Carol decided that she should go back to school and get a Ph.D., so she could support the family. (She wrote a dissertation on early-childhood language acquisition and started teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.) Chomsky did not, in the end, have to leave his family to go to jail, but his activism had other consequences. “In the late sixties, there were a lot of personal ruptures, some of them pretty sharp,” he says. “Things just got too tense. I mean, when the Vietnam War was heating up, if you were seriously involved in actions against it, you just couldn’t talk to people who didn’t agree with you, and they couldn’t talk to you. I mean, these things engaged an awful lot of emotion and concern, even concern about your life. It was all-consuming.”
Chomsky’s involvement in the antiwar movement lost him some friends, but that was nothing compared with his position on Israel, especially after the Six-Day War, in 1967. “After ’48, opposition to a Jewish state became a pretty marginal position in America, but it was only after ’67 that it became a fighting issue,” Chomsky says. “People who had had nothing to do with Zionism their whole lives all of a sudden became fanatic Zionists in ’67. I think a lot of it had to do with domestic issues in the United States. My own relatives from the communist party became raving reactionaries. You could see just what was happening: they were being challenged by black people who regarded them as the oppressors.”
When Chomsky and Carol were first married, they thought seriously about moving to Israel in order to join a kibbutz. To Chomsky, the kibbutzim were one of the few societies the world had known that put anarchist principles into practice: they were democratic and non-hierarchical and shared manual work in an equitable way. In 1953, Chomsky and Carol lived for a month’s trial period in a left-leaning, Buberite kibbutz called Hazorea; Chomsky, who had no relevant skills, worked as an agricultural laborer. He found the kibbutz racist and ideologically stifling, but the reason that he and Carol ultimately decided not to emigrate was that he didn’t want to work in a university and live with his family only on weekends.
After the Six-Day War, however, Chomsky grew disgusted with Israel. “The country changed enormously after 1967,” he says. “Hundreds of thousands of illegal workers from Romania, Thailand, and they do all the dirty work. Most people don’t even see them—they’re hidden in the slums of Tel Aviv. And then there’s the occupied territories, which is another story. All that is extremely corrosive to the moral fibre of the country. I’ve been intimately involved with Israel since childhood, it’s a large part of my life, and there’s never been a period like this. After the six-day war, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who was a professor at Hebrew University—a Talmudist, very highly respected, Orthodox Jew, and so on—warned right away: he said if we hold on to this occupation we’re going to turn into what he called Judeo-Nazis. Unfortunately, he was right. Israel is becoming more and more like South Africa.”
There are many people who feel that Chomsky has gone so far in his criticism of Israel that he must be anti-Semitic. This suspicion became widespread twenty-five years ago, in the course of an unpleasant interlude in Chomsky’s life known as the Faurisson affair. Robert Faurisson was a professor of French literature at the University of Lyon-2, in France, who had been suspended from his teaching duties after a mob of students protested his denials of the Holocaust. Faurisson’s publisher drew up a petition arguing that the university should protect his right to free speech; the petition, which called Faurisson a “respected” professor and referred to his statements on the Holocaust as “findings,” was published in several French newspapers and bore Chomsky’s name as one of its signers. Not surprisingly, the petition engendered considerable confusion and dismay among Chomsky’s supporters. How could he lend his name to such a cause? And why would right-wing anti-Semites think to call Chomsky in the first place? It turned out to be a case of, as Nathan Glazer puts it, “les extrêmes se touchent.” Faurisson’s publisher, La Vieille Taupe, had started out as a bookshop of the same name, which had been, during the Paris student revolts of 1968, an unofficial radical salon. Over the years, the Vieille Taupe group had become so extreme and so isolated that it had joined forces with Ogmios, another bookstore-cum-political movement, far to the French anti-Semitic, anti-foreign right. It was Serge Thion, an old leftist associated with La Vieille Taupe, who had thought to call Chomsky.
Some months after the petition appeared, Thion asked Chomsky to write a further public statement on the subject. Chomsky agreed, and wrote that in his opinion serious adherence to the principle of free speech meant granting it even to fascists and anti-Semites; but Faurisson was neither—he was, Chomsky suggested, bizarrely, “a relatively apolitical liberal.” He gave the statement to Thion and told him to do with it what he pleased; the publisher appended it as a preface to a book by Faurisson. Two months after Chomsky sent off the statement, he seemed to realize that he had done something very stupid. He saw that it might so seriously undermine his credibility even with the left that he might become politically sterilized. He asked the publisher to withdraw the statement, but it was too late: the book had already been published, with Chomsky’s name on the cover. Chomsky had indeed done something stupid. He was excoriated for calling Faurisson a liberal, for signing a petition that referred to Faurisson’s Holocaust denial as “findings,” and for endorsing a book that he had not read. Chomsky has since vainly pointed out that he did not feel the need to read “The Satanic Verses” before signing petitions in support of Salman Rushdie. Since Chomsky had not read Faurisson’s book, his statement could not logically be taken as an endorsement of its contents, but to his furious public that made no difference.
Around the same time, Chomsky became preoccupied with the issue of America’s supplying of weapons to Indonesia when the Indonesian government was killing thousands of people in East Timor. Very few people in America knew about the ongoing massacre, because it was barely written about in the press, so Chomsky took it upon himself to bring it to the public’s attention, and he worked tirelessly toward this goal for several years. To Chomsky, the failure of coverage was due not merely to moral laziness, or to lack of interest in a small place far away; it was part of a long-standing pattern. In an influential book, “Manufacturing Consent,” which he wrote with Edward Herman, Chomsky compared the continuous, furious press coverage of Pol Pot’s massacres to the silence on Indonesia’s. The press, he concluded, castigated American enemies while ignoring the misdeeds of American allies; it imagined itself to be independent and critical but actually functioned as a propaganda organ of the government. To many people, this sounded like a conspiracy theory, but Chomsky argued that conspiracy wasn’t necessary: it was necessary merely to take seriously the fact that media are products in a market; saying that the press responds to the interests of its élite patrons is no more a conspiracy theory than saying that managers at General Motors respond to the interests of investors.
To read Chomsky’s recent political writing at any length is to feel almost physically damaged. The effect is difficult to convey in a quotation because it is cumulative. The writing is a catalogue of crimes committed by America, terrible crimes, and many of them, but it is not they that produce the sensation of blows: it is Chomsky’s rage as he describes them. His sentences slice and gash, envenomed by a vicious sarcasm. His rhythm is repetitive and monotonous, like the hacking of a machine. The writing is as ferocious as the actions it describes, but coldly so. It is not Chomsky’s style to make death live, to prick his readers with lurid images. He uses certain words over and over, atrocity, murder, genocide, massacre, murder, massacre, genocide, atrocity, atrocity, massacre, murder, genocide, until, through repetition, the words lose their meaning and become technical. The sentences are accusations of guilt, but not from a position of innocence or hope for something better: Chomsky’s sarcasm is the scowl of a fallen world, the sneer of Hell’s veteran to its appalled naïfs.
To pick up Chomsky’s first political book, “American Power and the New Mandarins,” after reading his recent writing is a strange and moving experience. “American Power,” published in 1967, contains some of Chomsky’s earliest political writing, mostly about the Vietnam War, and here the tone is completely different. He is fierce in his criticism, but there is none of the corrosive sarcasm that is everywhere in his later work. He speaks of hope for the future; when he talks about America, he talks about “we.” In the famous essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” he charges intellectuals with the noble duty of uncovering political falsehood. (These days, he says that intellectuals almost always bow to power.) “There is a new mood of questioning and rebellion among the youth of the country, a very healthy and hopeful development, by and large, that few would have predicted a decade ago,” he writes. “These stirrings of concern and commitment give some reason to hope that we will not repeat the crimes of the recent past.”
It is not just in his political work that Chomsky is vicious in argument. “The thing about Noam that people don’t understand is that about linguistics he doesn’t have much sense of humor,” Morris Halle, a colleague of Chomsky’s since the fifties and one of his closest friends, says. “He takes it deathly seriously. And that causes problems. A woman linguist whom I know went in to see Noam and asked him some technical questions and somehow set him off. And he hit her this way and he hit her that way and on and on and you couldn’t stop him. She cried and she was terribly upset about it. Well, I went in afterward and he said, ‘She didn’t come here to have pleasant conversation, she came here for technical reasons.’ He didn’t think he was being unkind to her. He just doesn’t make small talk about linguistics.”
People often accuse Chomsky of setting himself up as a guru, of encouraging the cult that has grown up around him, but if he wanted to be a guru he would not work so consistently to alienate his followers. “There really is an alpha-male dominance psychology at work there,” a colleague says. “He has some of the primate dominance moves. The staring down. The withering tone of voice.” Revolutions, even some intellectual ones, are brutal, and carried out by brutal people. When Benjamin Jowett, a close friend of Florence Nightingale, was asked to describe her, he said, “violent. Very violent.” Chomsky is an extraordinarily violent man.
Though he is a rhetorician of serpentine cunning, Chomsky chooses to believe that his debates consist only of facts and arguments, and that audiences evaluate these with the detachment of a computer. In his political work, he even makes the silly claim (the opposite of the sophisticated anti-empiricism he favors in linguistics) that he is presenting only facts—that he subscribes to no general theories of any sort. (His theories, of course, are in his tone—in the sarcasm that implies “this is only to be expected, given the way things are.”) This claim to rhetorical purity has for years infuriated Chomsky’s interlocutors, some of whom point out that his facts, gleaned from newspaper clippings, are not always accurate. “These are the facts, there are no others,” Christopher Hitchens says, mocking Chomsky’s claims to objectivity. “And if someone disagrees the objection is ‘well, are you telling me you’re against the truth?’ As if empiricism of the crudest kind were the best that we can do. I mean, that’s very vulgar. And that’s the authoritarian personality.” When Chomsky says he is presenting only the facts, though, he really believes it. “I would not feel comfortable thinking that I was able to change people’s minds on a matter of human significance,” he says. “Who am I to change their minds? If I can give them facts, fine. But nobody should want to have that kind of authority, and if you have it you shouldn’t use it.”
Chomsky has fought many battles over the years, political and linguistic, but perhaps the most ferocious was the fight in the late sixties and early seventies that became known as the linguistics wars. The first task he had set for his new field after the destruction of Bloomfield was the construction of an English grammar. One of the core ideas he came up with was the notion of deep structure: a sentence that could be considered the root of other sentences, translated into them by means of various movements, or transformations. “John is easy to please” and “Is John easy to please?,” for instance, could both be analyzed as derivations of “For us to please John is easy”—a sentence in which subject, verb, and object were arranged in what is, in English, the most basic syntactic order. This allowed him to codify the relationship between active, passive, and interrogative versions of the same sentence. Chomsky was mostly content to focus on English, but by the mid-sixties a group of his students grew impatient: they wanted to get to universal grammar faster, and so they started studying other languages as well. Once polyglot data were brought into the picture, it seemed to them that there was simply too much syntactic variation in the world for a universal grammar to be based on syntax—it must, they thought, be based on something more general, like logic. In 1966, Chomsky went on sabbatical to Berkeley for a year, and, without his gravitational presence, this movement, which was later known as “generative semantics,” flourished.
The generative-semantics movement was led by four young linguists who called themselves “the four horsemen of the Apocalypse.” They were only a little younger than Chomsky, but they were from a different generation, the sixties counterculture. Chomsky called his theory, in alpha-male style, “the standard theory”; they gave their theories names like “Clyde,” and their sentences were convoluted and full of jokes—“The M.C. introduced Mick Jagger’s penis as being large enough to amaze the most jaded of groupies,” for example. One of the four horsemen, James McCawley, wrote under the pseudonym Quang Phuc Dong, of the South Hanoi Institute of Technology, and they all had T-shirts made with “S.H.I.T.” printed on them. The generative semanticists were also of a different intellectual bent—a different aesthetic. Chomsky was of a mathematical turn of mind and was interested in language as a formal system: thought, in the most abstract sense of the word. The generative semanticists came out of the humanities and were interested in actual human beings and the way they spoke.
In laying the crucial groundwork for his revolution, Chomsky had distinguished what he called “performance” from what he called “competence.” “Performance” was language as it was used every day: ephemeral sentences, made imperfect by slips of the tongue, lapses of attention, idiosyncratic mistakes, odd neighborhood locutions. “Competence,” on the other hand, was the generic knowledge of a language possessed by a native speaker—the sentence forms that would be recognized intuitively by such a speaker as correct. Chomsky decreed that linguistics could ignore performance as “noise”—as idiosyncrasies irrelevant to a theorist of grammar, as cuts or bruises would be considered irrelevant by a biologist describing the structure of a leg. In fact, he believed, not only was everyday conversation irrelevant to the core of linguistic knowledge; communication in general was a relatively minor aspect of language. Language was most important as a tool for thinking, a means for structuring thought.
The generative semanticists felt that Chomsky’s dismissal of communication was crazy. McCawley compared his competence-performance thesis to a theory of the stomach that ignored digestion. The generative semanticists, influenced by ordinary language philosophy, argued that sentences could not be understood outside a specific conversational context. A sentence like “Spiro conjectures Ex-Lax,” for instance (to use one of their typical examples), seems like ungrammatical nonsense, except when understood as a response to the question “Does anyone know what Pat Nixon frosts her cakes with?” Chomsky had carefully erected methodological walls to keep his grammar pure, free from the messiness of the social, but the generative semanticists gleefully punched holes in the walls to let all the beautiful chaos flood back in.
In 1967, Chomsky came back from Berkeley and immediately went on the attack. The generative semanticists found the conflict very upsetting: Chomsky was their hero, and here he was, seemingly destroying their theory for the sake of it. He seemed to them to be fighting dirty, purposely misunderstanding their arguments. Chomsky, of course, denied that he was doing any such thing—he felt he was just correcting error, as usual. The situation was too emotional to be an ordinary academic disagreement, and soon it grew nasty. The generative semanticists had been trained in the fight against Bloomfield to wage theoretical war with as much cruelty as possible, and, if Chomsky had once been an angel to them, he now became Satan. Paul Postal, these days a professor at N.Y.U., still loathes Chomsky with an astonishing passion. “After many years, I came to the conclusion that everything he says is false,” Postal says. “He will lie just for the fun of it. Every one of his arguments was tinged and coded with falseness and pretense. It was like playing chess with extra pieces. It was all fake.” Finally, in the seventies, Chomsky stopped attacking generative semantics and began simply to ignore it. Most linguists at that point were persuaded of the generative-semantic position; not even all of the M.I.T. department was on Chomsky’s side. (Indeed, even now, while Chomsky’s general reputation is that of a brilliant linguist with dubious political ideas, a significant minority of linguists view him as a heroic political thinker with dubious linguistic ideas.) Yet, somehow, by the time Chomsky had developed his next model, several years later, nobody was doing generative semantics anymore. Once again, Chomsky had won.
In the past thirty years, Chomsky has staged two more linguistic revolutions, in each of which he repudiated much of what he had said before. These revolutions have a Maoist effect: Chomskyan doctrine never becomes entirely public, part of normal science, but stays rooted in the man himself. With every revolution, Chomsky loses some followers, but, for his adherents, the revolutions are exhilarating.
In early 1979, Chomsky spent several months in Italy, giving what came to be known as the Pisa lectures. During that time, he decided that traditional grammatical constructions, such as the passive, or relative clauses, which he had spent the previous twenty years analyzing, were just conventional artifacts, and that the truly interesting properties of syntax cut across those boundaries. Since traditional constructions are different in different languages, removing them made linguists feel that they were suddenly much closer to the goal that Chomsky had declared twenty years before: the discovery of the universal principles that underlie all languages and are hardwired into the human brain.
In the fall of 1979, Chomsky returned to M.I.T., and huge numbers of people followed him. European linguistics departments were emptied of their generative grammarians. Linguists came from all over the world to talk to each other, to talk to Chomsky, to attend his famous Thursday-afternoon syntax seminars, to join the revolution. There was all sorts of brand-new, fantastically interesting work to do, and they wanted to be part of it. David Pesetsky, who is now a professor in Chomsky’s department, was a graduate student at M.I.T. at the time. “It felt like a revolution,” he says. “It was very exciting. Suddenly there were questions that you could ask that hadn’t been asked before, and real answers to questions that people had been asking before. And to be a student here at the time was an incredible privilege. In a sense, it was a cheat. Because it was just very, very easy to say something interesting that no one had ever said before. You could be a celebrity!”
One of the major ideas that grew out of this revolution was the notion of parameters. In the course of perfecting his previous English grammar, Chomsky and his students had developed so many rules and sub-rules that the grammar had grown quite baroque. This was a problem, because the more complicated and English-specific the grammar grew, the more implausible it seemed that something like it could possibly be wired into children’s brains at birth. Studying in Pisa with linguists whose first language was not English had made this problem seem even more urgent to Chomsky. He came up with a radical solution. Whereas before he had thought that the linguist’s task was to derive a grammar whose rules worked for all languages, now he decided that the trick was to think of languages as differing from each other in a finite set of ways. What was wired into the brain was not a single universal grammar but something like a series of on-off switches: a setting of on-off-on-off would produce one language; a setting of off-off-on-off would produce another. One of the switches he came up with, for instance, was the choice between “head first” and “head last.” A language is considered “head first” if the “head” of a phrase—the noun in a noun phrase, the adjective in an adjective phrase—comes first. So in a head-first language like English it is correct to say “I heard [[rumors] that you are leaving town]” (where “rumors” is the noun and “rumors that you are leaving town” is the noun phrase); but in a head-last language like Japanese it is correct to say “I [[that you are leaving town] rumors] heard.” Chomsky suggested that after children are born the language they hear triggers their brain to set their mental switches in the way that is appropriate for their native tongue. suddenly, the learning of language and the structure of the language organ looked much simpler and more elegant than they had before.
Last December, just before the holidays, Chomsky flew from Istanbul to Diyarbakir. Diyarbakir is a dilapidated, poor, muddy, overcrowded city in southeastern Turkey, on the banks of the Tigris, about sixty miles north of Turkey’s border with Iraq. It is the center of Kurdish guerrilla resistance to the Turkish government, and is thought of, in certain circles, as the capital of an independent Kurdistan. Chomsky arrived at Diyarbakir’s tiny airport on a freezing night, and was greeted, as he is greeted everywhere, by a crowd of cameras and microphones. In the dining room of his spartan, Soviet-style hotel, Diyarbakir was waiting to meet him. The mayor was there, along with a famous Armenian-language novelist, a Kurdish poet, and a crowd of Kurdish-rights activists.
Chomsky had been to Turkey once before, in February of last year, to attend the trial of his publisher. Aram, an Istanbul publishing house associated with the P.K.K., the Kurdish guerrilla resistance movement, had published a collection of Chomsky material, some of it downloaded from the Internet, in which Chomsky criticized the Turkish government’s human-rights record and its policies toward the Kurds. Aram’s editors knew that they were likely to be prosecuted for publishing the book—in fact, they had done so precisely in order to provoke prosecution, both for publicity and as an act of civil disobedience. Chomsky’s presence in the courtroom made the trial an international event, and, perhaps because the government felt uncomfortable under this unexpected scrutiny, the charges were dismissed. Chomsky was treated like a rock star. Reporters, photographers, and TV cameramen camped outside his hotel in Istanbul for the three days and nights that he was there. When he visited Diyarbakir, he was greeted by a crowd of loudly ululating women.
Chomsky had come to Diyarbakir this time to speak at a human-rights conference. He was taken to a large, low-ceilinged, windowless room, lit by fluorescent lights. On either side of the stage, local activist groups had propped seven-foot-tall cardboard signs in the shape of giant lollipops, bearing their organizational banners and covered in bright-colored tissue paper.
“I’d like to say a few words about what lies immediately ahead, and what this may bring to the Kurdish populations of the Middle East,” Chomsky said. “It’s clear that the government of the United States, with Britain trailing along, is desperately seeking to go to war with Iraq, although the disparity of force is so vast that the term ‘war’ is hardly appropriate.” As he spoke, a tiny orange kitten appeared and wandered out in front of the stage. It spotted the huge audience and froze, terrified. Several of the photographers snapped pictures of it. It ran back and forth frantically and then hid behind a curtain.
“Like most states in the world,” Chomsky continued, unaware of the kitten, “Iraq is an artificial creation—it was patched together by the rulers of the world eighty years ago in order to satisfy two conditions: first, that Britain, not Turkey, would gain control of the huge oil reserves of the north, and, secondly, that the British dependency of Iraq would have no access to the sea and therefore would remain a dependency. When the United States took over global management from Britain sixty years ago, it kept the same arrangements in place.” Another kitten ran out onto the stage, followed by the first one. The two curled up together and fell asleep.
Carol, sitting in the front row in a purple down coat, was also asleep, her chin resting on her chest. It had been a very long week. Just before he travelled to Diyarbakir, Chomsky had spent three days engaged in non-stop activity in London. He had then, after a twenty-four-hour stop in Geneva, spent seventy-two hours in Istanbul, during which time he opened a book fair by cutting a ribbon with the mayor, lectured at a symposium on peace and democracy, dined with trade-union activists, gave a linguistics seminar at Bosporus University, and received the first Turkish Publishers Union Peace Prize. Chomsky is now seventy-four, and all his travel is taking its toll on him.
“The trip was horrible,” Carol said later. “I’m never going on another one. What am I going to do? Sit there and watch him kill himself?” She had accompanied him in an effort to make him slow down, but she had failed. “About ten years ago, Noam came home from a trip to India in a state of complete nervous exhaustion,” she said. “He dragged himself into the doctor’s office and the doctor said, ‘You’ll die. You can’t do this. Clear your schedule for two weeks, stay in bed.’ He had a whole regimen. Big meal in the afternoon, not at night, twenty minutes’ soak in the tub, and he put him on Valium or something. And he said, ‘You’ve got to do something different. You can’t be at the mercy of your hosts.’ We decided that I should be the policeman because he can’t say no, someone else has to say no for him. But this trip he said, ‘Turkey is different, don’t get in my way. There’s not going to be any sticking to the schedule because things are so awful and they need so much.’ ”
Carol shares her husband’s views, and has been politically involved herself, but she dislikes the activist existence even more than he does. “My life has certainly not turned out the way I expected,” she said. “To me, the interesting question is, if I were in the position of making the choice to marry now, would I choose him?” She went on, “That’s a funny question. Who knows? I mean, it is very different from what I expected. Just in terms of the fame and notoriety, or whatever you call it. The intrusion of public life. The ridiculous clutching at him. The noblesse-oblige aspect—sometimes he says, ‘I just have to take that call.’ We’ve actually got it now so that the phone almost never rings, except when it rings at 3 a.m. from some party where kids are having an Ecstasy rave or who knows what.” Asked if she regretted any of the decisions she had made in her life, she paused for a long time. “Well, you roll with the punches,” she said at last. “He leaves me alone about things, so that makes it very easy. He can do his thing, I do mine.”
“It’s reasonably clear that the official reasons for the war cannot be taken seriously,” Chomsky went on. “The Bush administration is carrying out a serious assault against the general population”—he meant its domestic policies. “They have to prevent people from paying attention, and the only way anyone has ever figured out how to do that is to terrify them with tales of monsters who are about to destroy us.”
As nearly always happens at a Chomsky talk, the unrelieved gloom of the lecture was followed by questions begging for suggestions and hope. Chomsky complied, with the few sentences he reserves for such moments. “The peace movements have expanded enormously in the past thirty or forty years,” he said. “And the global-justice movements are also something completely new. It’s the first time ever that there has been something that looks like a true international—the dream of the workers’ movement and the left since their modern origins.” Carol watched him deliver these thoughts with tired bemusement. “An early question in every Q. & A. is ‘you’ve told us everything that’s wrong but not what we can do about it,’ ” she said later. “And they’re right. He hasn’t. So he gives what to me is a fake answer: ‘you’ve got to organize, because a lot of people think these things but they’re isolated from each other.’ He’s doing it because people walk out too depressed. He’s responding to people saying, ‘Just give us something to hang on to.’ ”
After the lecture, many people hurried up to the stage. An old woman in a head scarf asked Chomsky to help her find her sons, who had been picked up by the Army, and he told her there was nothing he could do. After a short while, Carol gestured to the organizers, Chomsky was guided through the crowd out of the hall, and the owners of the giant lollipops stepped forward to take them away. ♦
