When you have a dim view of the situation, and Noam Chomsky comes along to summarize how he sees things, and it pretty much matches you right down the line – well, that’s depressing. Chomsky has a long history of being right: right about Vietnam, right about Linguistics, right about Iraq, right about Bush, right about Obama, and right about Trump.
(@2:00) While this show is going on in public, in the background, the wrecking crew is working. Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, the guys who write his executive orders – what they’re doing is systematically dismantling every aspect of government that works for the benefit of the population. This goes from workers rights to pollution, the environment, rules for protecting consumers, anything you can think of is being dismantled and all efforts are being devoted – kind of, almost with fanaticism – to enrich and empower their actual constituency, which is super-wealth and corporate power, who are delighted; that’s why the stock market goes up. The stock market has not much to do with the economy but keeps booming because that’s the rich people and they love what they’re being granted. Now, the worst policies that he’s carried out – the most dangerous – are barely discussed. Those are the two existential threats that we face. We have to face the fact that humans are now in a situation which has never arisen in human history: this generation has to decide whether organized human existence is going to continue. And it’s not a joke.
Trump is a distraction. He’s a self-playing fiddle playing “here come the clowns” while Rome burns.
I first encountered Chomsky around 1967 but I really only remember him because he had a cool name. He was a visiting professor at Columbia before I was born, and was part of the swirl of student unrest that eventually resulted in my dad moving our family to Baltimore. I don’t know if dad ever worked with Chomsky, I’ll have to ask. I suspect Chomsky was pretty busy elsewhere.
Listen to the complex sentences Chomsky can string together just by putting one word that makes sense in front of another. Holy shit, it’s refreshing.
Mark my words: there will come a day when oil company executives and Wall St speculators will be hunted to extinction; it will be worse than the way the SS were hunted down after WWII. People are going to be angry.
I know we’re not supposed to have heroes, and that everyone is fallible, but Noam Chomsky is one of those rare people who it’s almost impossible to find something bad to say about. I like to think he’s some kind of immortal maiar spirit, sent to help us out against the darkness, and when he finally does pass on he’ll return as Chomsky the White to save us from certain doom.
cartomancer@#1:
I know we’re not supposed to have heroes, and that everyone is fallible, but Noam Chomsky is one of those rare people who it’s almost impossible to find something bad to say about.
I agree. He’s just been so consistent, clear, and solidly progressive (and he can explain why, too!) for the last 50 years… It’s not like he’s likely to suddenly start making a fool out of himself.
I wish he could save us. But if speaking common sense and truth to power were capable of doing the trick, Chomsky would have accomplished it decades ago.
I had a daydream about that just today. I think it was triggered because they are already planning ahead.
Marcus, #2
As Chomsky himself has said often, speaking truth to power is somewhat pointless, because the powerful know the truth already. They have to know, in order to hold on to their power. It’s the powerless who need the truth most.
kurt1@#3:
I think it was triggered because they are already planning ahead.
Yes, they are. They have been for some time, if you believe Gwynne Dyer. [yt]
(That’s a good article)
I am coming to believe the turn of the 20th-century anarchists were right: killing the rich and powerful is the only response that they will understand. I mean it. Just shoot the sonsabitches. “OH, you’re the CEO of the company that’s doing Keystone XL? Well, you’re not going to enjoy spending that money at your estate in the Hamptons.”
When Elon Musk is talking about going to Mars, he’s talking about a bunch of rich assholes escaping the shithole they have created. Why aren’t any of these rich assholes talking about terraforming? Terraforming is easier than colonizing Mars. Demonstrate that we can terraform Earth, then we can talk about terraforming Mars.
It’s like the assholes think Atlas Shrugged was a documentary, or something.
cartomancer@#4:
As Chomsky himself has said often, speaking truth to power is somewhat pointless, because the powerful know the truth already. They have to know, in order to hold on to their power. It’s the powerless who need the truth most.
Quoted for truth.
And, yes, the mice know that the cat would be better with a bell collar on it. But the cat knows that, too, and is not interested in negotiating.
How can we even know this? Personally, I don’t buy the universal grammar (UG) theory or the poverty of the stimulus (POS) argument. There are some problems with those. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar#Criticisms
Back when professors taught me all this stuff in a university course, I felt like I had just accidentally landed in a psychology course where they are teaching me something invented by Maslow or Freud. Sure, Chomsky came up with a pretty and nice sounding theory, but where the hell are the proofs and evidence that would conclusively prove that this theory really is true?
I understand that it’s hard to research what’s going on inside human brains. It’s tricky to figure out how human brain processes language. And, once you have some theory, how can you possibly conclusively prove that it is true? When I say that I want conclusive evidence, I know that I’m asking for a lot. But the problem is, as long as there is no conclusive evidence, why should I accept some theory as true? Who knows, maybe Chomsky got it right, and the universal grammar theory actually is correct. . . But so far I remain unconvinced.
Wow, you sure are optimistic here. Just a few days ago I said that I don’t want to win our race to the bottom to see who is more cynical. I really don’t. Yet now it seems like I’m more cynical about this particular question. Here’s my prediction: When the climate changes and whole regions of our planet become uninhabitable, the poor will die of starvation. There will be attempts at mass migration, but it’s likely that a lot of people will die anyway. Armed conflicts are also likely to happen. The rich, on the other hand, will be living relatively comfortably in the few remaining regions where human life will remain sustainable. If a horde of angry peasants come with pitchforks and torches, they will use hired bodyguards with guns or even a nation’s army to quickly end the protests. The ones who will suffer most from the climate change will be those who never contributed to the CO2 problem in the first place. Peasants living a simple life in some remote rural place in the middle of nowhere will die once the climate changes. Wealthy businessmen who profited from the fossil fuel economy and who contributed to the climate change by traveling in a private jet, well, they will be the ones to have relatively more comfortable life also in the post climate change world. After all, by now the rich have already accumulated immense power and wealth. A successful revolution that could strip them of these assets won’t be that simple to accomplish.
I begin to perceive the outlines of an endgame. A transnational global North of white ethno-enclaves, awash in a bewildering media stew (social- and “traditional”) of paranoid propaganda and misdirection, sheltering a kleptocratic oligarchy from the pressures of the climate crisis and the (southern; brown) populations most impacted by it. It fucking sucks.
Thanks for posting the link to the interview.
At the age of nearly 90, he speaks off the cuff with clarity, just like from the early days during the Vietnam war.
I had not been aware that he had moved to Tucson last year to join the University of Arizona.
So basically, Trump is Zaphod Beeblebrox.
@ 7 Ieva Skrebele
I felt like I had just accidentally landed in a psychology course where they are teaching me something invented by Maslow or Freud
Amazing. As a psychology student taking an introductory course in linguistics, upon being introduced to Chomsky in the 1970’s I felt like I had landed in some strange philosophy course, maybe based on Descartes work. I had never heard of Freud or Maslow so maybe your comparison is better than mine.
I have been told by one academic linguist that Chomskian theory is extremely use in computer science but I have no idea how.
I do know that at least one developmental psychologist who specializes in language acquisition in young children thinks Chomsky is wrong in some of his statements about early language development. And anyone who can put FRS after her name and testifies before UK parliamentary committees may be worth attending to.
@ 9 Mano Singham
Yes, the clarity of his discussions is always amazing. And he has been around long enough to know where all the bodies are buried.
It is no wonder the US right has hated him for the last, what, forty or fifty years?
So basically, Trump is Zaphod Beeblebrox.
With half the brains.
Ieva Skrebele and jrkrideau:
I think Chomsky’s enduring contribution to linguistics is the theory that language is, for all intents and purposes, the stuff of thought. His argument (if I recall correctly) is that they are inseparable since they define eachother. For computer science that comes out as McLuhan’s “the media is the message” – data is structured for processing and that is based on its representation.
The universal language stuff skates closer to evolutionary psychology than I am comfortable with.
Marcus @5
More like the Bible – Morally repugnant, long winded, wrong about nearly everything and written by someone who didn’t know anything about anything, but popular because it tells those who find it convincing that they are the chosen people.
Would I miss much if if I just listened to the audio from the Gwynn Dyer talk?
@ 14 Marcus
The universal language stuff skates closer to evolutionary psychology than I am comfortable with.
Ah yes! It does. I had not connected the two.
Mind I don’t think evolutionary psychology existed when Chomsky was first developing his theory. I saw it as closer the Cartesianism of Descartes (as I understood it. which was not well).
As something of a Skinnerian, I was a bit skeptical of Chomsky’s approach.
militantagnostic@#15:
Would I miss much if if I just listened to the audio from the Gwynn Dyer talk?
He doesn’t have slides, so the audio should be fine. Warning: depressing.
jrkrideau @ #11:
I have been told by one academic linguist that Chomskian theory is extremely use in computer science but I have no idea how.
It’s not the same theory — or, at least, it’s a different aspect of it. The part that’s useful in computer science is, basically, a branch of mathematics — so it’s perfectly respectable and rigorous.
I don’t know enough about Chomsky’s work that applies to human language to form an opinion, so it could very well be based on unflasifiable statements and just-so stories — but the computer science stuff is sound, uncontroversial, and extremely useful.
The problem with assuming that people doing awful things will pay for the awful things they do is it requires an honest and accurate understanding of the problem.
If you want to see what this would look like in miniature, check out the tobacco companies and all the paying they’ve done for poisoning people. Look at where they are now.
Blah. I should drink coffee before commenting. I meant the victims have to have an honest and accurate understanding of the problem.
If you look on the wikipedia entry on Chomsky there is an impressively long list of important theories and ideas by the man. His psycholinguistic theory is described as being one of the foundations of evolutionary psychology, so … there’s that.
@ 18 cvoinescu
Ah, thanks.
@ 21 Marcus Ranum
His psycholinguistic theory is described as being one of the foundations of evolutionary psychology,
I am not sure I can forgive him. The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again.
One relatively easy to understand example of an important idea in computing science derived from Chomsky’s work is his hierarchy of formal grammars. This useful in language design and can tell you things like, “what kind of sentences can I match with a regular expression?”
I don’t see any connection here. When McLuhan said “The medium is the message,” he was making a point that not just messages but the media that carry them needed study and analysis; the social effects of ostensibly similar messages could be quite different depending on the medium through which they were transmitted.
But in mathematics and computing science the effects, use and handling of different representations is uncontroversial and has long been a standard tool.
That different representations can have the same meaning but make other things easier or harder is implicitly accepted in computing science when you talk about things like Church encoding of natural numbers (as the number of times you apply a function to a value), or just constructing natural numbers out of sets (e.g., 0 = {} or ∅ , 1 = {∅}, 2 = {{∅}}, …), a concept that long predates computing science. Going back much further you can look at things like cartesian versus polar representation of coordinates on a two-dimensional plane where it’s really clear how certain manipulations (e.g., rotation versus translation) become easier or harder.
Importantly with this, mathematicians are very careful to determine whether two different representations are isomorphic, i.e. whether those representations truly are just different ways of saying the same thing, and go to great trouble both to properly prove this and provide tools to translate between representations. That’s not really something people were thinking about during various stages of introduction and growth of new media, however.
Perhaps I can sum this up this way:
Programmers from the start have consciously been using data structures and explicitly choosing different ones based on what they can represent, speed of access under different circumstances, and so on. When you choose to use a tree over a list, you do so for an explicit reason.
Users of new media, however, tend mostly not to make such conscious choices about representation. Sure, sometimes people will send a telegram instead of making a phone call in order to appear more formal, but in the early days of the telephone people would mostly just use the telephone over a telegram or vice versa based on what came conveniently to hand at the moment, rather than because they were concerned about the representation. Even now, artists and creators generally pick a medium and work in it consistently, rather than constantly moving between media based on the particular message they want to communicate.