Noam Chomsky |
Had Groucho Marx been a Marxist and stopped in the middle of A Night at the Opera to praise Karl Marx, the effect might have been a little like that which greeted Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez after he lauded Noam Chomsky at the UN General Assembly last week. Marx’s Capital would undoubtedly have shot to the top of the bestseller list, just as Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival, which Chavez waved enthusiastically before the UN delegates, has done on Amazon.com. I’m glad about this, but grudgingly. I’ve written half a dozen rave reviews of Chomsky’s books over the years — why does Hugo get all the attention?If Marx (Karl, that is) was an unlikely vessel of fame, so Chomsky — in an age of star worship — is almost an anti-celebrity. Marx was more literary by temperament, Chomsky more scientific; and Chomsky had the advantage of growing up in the United States, which has made him a more consistent democrat than Marx. But in both cases, their rigor, intensity, and austerity — their radical seriousness — doesn’t seem like a recipe for popularity. And yet over the past decade, polls have seen Marx voted the most influential thinker of the millennium and Chomsky the most influential intellectual alive.
And then there was light
I first encountered Chomsky 30 years ago, as a gentle but insistently reasonable voice emanating from my radio. When the interview was over, I rushed out, bought his books, and found myself hooked. Whether or not you agree with Marx or Chomsky, Edmund Burke or Leon Trotsky, there’s something exhilarating about reading any of them: the power, the momentum, the sense of a vast argument gathering force like a storm system. If you do agree — if, like Chomsky, you think that part of the colossal amount of unnecessary suffering in the world is caused by your own government and the business/financial class who mostly control it, and that the privilege of being an American citizen makes you responsible for doing something about that — then reading him can feel like a revelation and a summons.
Actually, that radio interview wasn’t the first time I’d heard Chomsky’s name. Leonard Bernstein, in The Unanswered Question, his 1973 Norton Lectures, quoted Chomsky’s famous specimen sentence: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” That was the other world-renowned Noam Chomsky, who had reinvented linguistics in his 30s. Linguistic theorists used to believe that language was a skill, like mathematics or piano-playing, learned step-by-step, via stimulus and response. But, Chomsky showed, children are always saying new things they could not have explicitly learned. How is that possible? Perhaps, he suggested, our language faculty is more like an organ than a skill: it grows, and new stages appear at age-determined times, as with walking or sex. Chomsky was the first to propose this new, biologically based model, and it has turned the study of language upside down. None of his books on linguistics have become Amazon bestsellers, but the Chomskian revolution in cognitive science does appear to be permanent — however distantly linked to his political criticism.
