The Kingdom of Speech (8 page)

Nobody in academia
had ever witnessed or even heard of a performance like this before. In just five years, 1953­–57, a University of Pennsylvania graduate student—a
student,
in his twenties—had taken over an entire field of study, linguistics, and stood it on its head and
hardened
it from a spongy so-called social science into a real science, a
hard
science, and put his name on it: Noam Chomsky.

Officially, on his transcript, Chomsky was enrolled at Penn, where he had completed his graduate school course work. But at bedtime and in his heart of hearts he was living in Boston as a member of Harvard's Society of Fellows and creating a Harvard-level name for himself while he worked on his doctoral dissertation for Penn.
a

This moment, the mid-1950s, was the high tide of the “scientificalization” that had become fashionable just after World War II. Get hard! Whatever you do, make it sound scientific. Get out from under the stigma of studying a “social science”! By now “social” meant soft in the brainpan. Sociologists, for example, were to observe and record hour-by-hour conversations, meetings, correspondence, objective manifestations of status concerns, and make the information really hard by converting it into algorithms full of calculus symbols that gave it the look of mathematical certainty—and they failed totally. Only Chomsky, in linguistics, managed to pull it off and turn all—or almost all—the pillow heads in the field rock-hard. Even before receiving his PhD, he was invited to lecture at the University of Chicago and Yale, where he introduced a radically new theory of language. Language was not something you
learned
. You were born with a built-in “language organ.” It is functioning the moment you come into the world, just the way your heart and your kidneys are already pumping and filtering and excreting away.
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To Chomsky, it didn't matter what a child's first language was. Whatever it was, every child's language organ could use the “deep structure,” “universal grammar,” and “language acquisition device” he was born with to express what he had to say, no matter whether it came out of his mouth in English or Urdu or Nagamese. That was why—as Chomsky said repeatedly—children started speaking so early in life…and so correctly in terms of grammar. They were born with the language organ in place and the power ON. By the age of two, usually, they could speak in whole sentences and generate completely original ones. The “organ”…the “deep structure”…the “universal grammar”…the “device”—as Chomsky explained it, the system was physical, empirical, organic, biological. The power of the language organ sent the universal grammar coursing through the deep structure's lingual ducts to provide nutrition for the LAD, which everybody in the field now knew referred to the “language acquisition device” Chomsky had discovered.
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Two years later, in 1957, when he was twenty-eight, Chomsky pulled all this together in a book with the opaque title
Syntactic Structures
—and was on the way to becoming the biggest name in the 150-year history of linguistics. He drove the discipline indoors and turned it upside down. There were thousands of languages on Earth, which to earthlings sounded like a hopeless Babel of biblical proportions.

That was where Chomsky's soon-to-be-famous Martian linguist came in. A Martian linguist arriving on Earth, he often said…often…often…would immediately realize that all the languages on this planet were the same, with just some minor local accents. And the Martian arrived on Earth during almost every Chomsky talk on language.

Only wearily could Chomsky endure traditional linguists who, like Swadesh, thought fieldwork was essential and wound up in primitive places, emerging from the tall grass zipping their pants up. They were like the ordinary flycatchers in Darwin's day coming back from the middle of nowhere with their sacks full of little facts and buzzing about with their beloved multilanguage
fluency,
Swadesh-style. But what difference did it make, knowing all those native tongues? Chomsky made it clear he was elevating linguistics to the altitude of Plato's—and the Martian's—transcendent eternal universals. They, not sacks of scattered facts, were the ultimate reality, the only true objects of knowledge.
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Besides, he didn't enjoy the outdoors, where “the field” was, and he knew only one language, English. You couldn't very well count the Yiddish and Hebrew he spoke at home growing up. He was relocating the field to Olympus. Not only that, he was giving linguists permission to stay air-conditioned. They wouldn't have to leave the building at all, ever again…no more trekking off to interview boneheads in stench-humid huts. And here on Olympus, you had plumbing.

Chomsky had a personality and a charisma equal to Georges Cuvier's in France in the early 1800s. Cuvier orchestrated his belligerence from sweet reason to outbursts of perfectly timed and rhetorically elegant fury. In contrast, nothing about Chomsky's charisma was elegant. He spoke in a monotone and never raised his voice, but his eyes lasered any challenger with a look of absolute authority. He wasn't debating him, he was enduring him. Something about Chomsky's unchanging tone and visage turned a challenger's power of reason to jelly.

Charismatic figures in their twenties are not a rare breed. In new religious movements they have tended to be the rule, not the exception: Joseph Smith of the Mormons…Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha…Scientology's David Miscavige, a “prodigy” and L. Ron Hubbard's handpicked successor…the Báb, forerunner of the Baha'i faith…Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell of the International Churches of Christ…the Jehovah's Witnesses' Charles Taze Russell…and Moishe Rosen of Jews for Jesus. Likewise in warfare: the aforementioned Lamarck, a seventeen-year-old enlisted man taking over an infantry company in the midst of battle…Joan of Arc, a French peasant girl who becomes an army general and the greatest heroine in French history—at the age of nineteen…Napoléon Bonaparte, who by the age of twenty-nine had led victories against French royalist forces as well as the Austrians and the Ottoman Empire…Alexander the Great, who had conquered much of the Hellenistic world before his thirtieth birthday…William Wallace, Guardian of Scotland, who at twenty-seven led the Scots to victory over the British at the Battle of Stirling Bridge.

Charismatic leaders radiate more than simple confidence. They radiate authority. They don't tell jokes or speak ironically, except to rebuke—as in “Kindly spare me your ‘originality.'” Irony, like plain humor, invariably turns upon some indulgence of human weakness. Charismatic figures show only strength. They refuse to buckle under in the face of threats, including physical threats. They are usually prophets of some new idea or cause.

Chomsky's idea of the “language organ” created great excitement among young linguists. He made the field seem loftier, more tightly structured, more scientific, more conceptual, more on a Platonic plane, not just a huge heaped-up leaf pile of the data field-workers brought in from places one never necessarily heard of before
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…linguistics would no longer mean working out in the field among more breeds of na—
er
…
indigenous
peoples…than one ever dreamed existed. Thanks to Chomsky's success, linguistics rose from being merely a satellite orbiting around language studies and became the main event on the cutting edge.…The number of full, formed departments of linguistics soared, as did the numbers of field-workers. Fieldwork was no longer a requirement, however, and more linguists than dared confess it were relieved not to have to go into the not-so-great outdoors the Morris Swadesh way. Now all the new, Higher Things in a linguist's life were to be found indoors, at a desk…looking at learnèd journals filled with cramped type instead of at a bunch of hambone faces in a cloud of gnats.

His radical discovery—the language organ—plus his charisma had already advanced Chomsky to the very front of the pack. But what iced it for him was a book review in the journal
Language
. The book was
Verbal Behavior
by B. F. Skinner, the behaviorist psychologist who had supplanted Freud as the leading figure in the pack.
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Skinner's radical behaviorism, as he called it, had turned Freudianism inside out. Freud sought to get inside his patient's head, all too much like a voodoo houngan or a Gilgamesh, by hearing him recite his dreams
—his dreams!—
plus whatever unspeakable intimate matters were on his conscious mind and interpreting them by using a few (rather simple, as it turned out) pet formulas…e.g., dreams of flying in airplanes and other experiences involving rapid ascents referred to orgasms. Skinner dismissed all this as sheer “mentalism.”
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He wasn't interested in what a patient said or dreamed but in what he
did,
i.e., his observable actions and his behavior, including his verbal behavior.

Every behaviorist finding began in the laboratory with a rat placed in a small chamber known as a Skinner box, a container about the size of a small carton of paper towels with a bar on one wall. The rat sooner or later learns that if it presses the bar, a food pellet drops onto a little tray. Eventually comes a time when the rat presses the bar…and no pellet drops to the tray. Gradually the rat discovers it will get a pellet only on every
third
press of the bar or some such change of order. Over time the experimenter can keep changing the order until the rat learns to do extraordinary things…such as press the bar, get no pellet, get no reward until it walks in a counterclockwise circle and comes back and presses the bar again. To his great surprise, wrote Skinner, he found that he could “extend these methods to human behavior,” even verbal behavior, “without serious modification.”
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Really? With that, Chomsky clears his throat in the polite scholarly fashion—then pulls out a boning knife and goes to work. Whatever rats and pigeons do in a box, says Chomsky, can be applied to complex human behavior only in “the most gross and superficial way.” He goes on: “The magnitude of the failure of [Skinner's] attempt to account for verbal behavior…[is] an indication of how little is really known about this remarkably complex phenomenon.”
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All Skinner is doing, as Chomsky sees it, is using the technical vocabulary of laboratory experiments—“controls,” “probabilities,” “stimulus,” “response,” “reinforcement”—“to creat[e] the illusion of a rigorous scientific theory”…by taking the very same words out of the rat's box and stretching them far enough to fit real-life human beings at large. He loves to sprinkle the statistical term “probabilities” like salt and pepper on his prose to give it the tang of statistical accuracy…when in fact he has stretched those rigorous terms out so far that “probabilities” means nothing more than “probably” or, even lamer, “possibly.” The rigorous statistical term “controls” stretches out to a weak, thin “affects.” “Stimulus” winds up as a wan “to begin with,” and so on, or else they result in nothing at all and turn out to be totally “empty.”
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Skinner, says Chomsky, seems to believe that the way to maximize a point in science is to generate, in Skinner's own words, “additional variables to increase its probability” and strength. “If we take this suggestion quite literally,” says Chomsky, “the degree of confirmation of a scientific assertion can be measured as a simple function of the loudness, pitch, and frequency with which it is proclaimed, and a general procedure for increasing its degree of confirmation would be, for instance, to train machine guns on large crowds of people who have been instructed to shout it.”
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“A typical example of ‘stimulus control' for Skinner,” he says, “would be the response to a piece of music with the utterance ‘Mozart' or to a painting with the response ‘Dutch.' These responses are asserted to be ‘under the control of extremely subtle properties' of the physical object or event. Suppose instead of saying ‘Dutch' we had said ‘Clashes with the wallpaper,' ‘I thought you liked abstract work,' ‘Never saw it before,' ‘Tilted,' ‘Hanging too low,' ‘Beautiful,' ‘Hideous,' ‘Remember our camping trip last summer?,' or whatever else might come into our minds when looking at a picture…Skinner could only say that each of these responses is under the control of some other stimulus property of the physical object…This device is simple as it is empty.”
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As Chomsky grinds through Skinner for twenty thousand words, he uses the expressions “empty,” “quite empty,” “quite false,” “completely meaningless,” “perfectly useless,” and the like repeatedly…plus “vacuous”…“complete retreat to mentalistic psychology”…“mere paraphrases for the popular vocabulary” (appears on the same page as “perfectly useless,” “vacuous,” and “likewise empty”)…“serious delusion”…“of no conceivable interest”…“play-acting at science”…“This is simply not true”…“no basis in fact”…“very implausible speculation”…“entirely pointless and empty…”
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…
empty empty empty
until there is scarcely a single point Skinner makes in
Verbal Behavior
that Chomsky has not exploded into hot air. With this one review he demolished the book, dug the ground out from under the theory of behaviorism (it never got back on its feet), and consigned B. F. Skinner to history. No one in academia had ever seen such a show of power. Chomsky said many years later that from the very beginning his aim had been to reduce behaviorism to an absurdity. And that he did. Noam Chomsky became a power nobody in the field dared trifle with. In the one recorded instance of someone confronting him over this business of a language organ, Chomsky finessed his way out of it con brio. The writer John Gliedman asked Chomsky the Question. Was he saying he had found a part of human anatomy that all the anatomists, internists, surgeons, and pathologists in the world had never laid eyes on?