The military was not interested in anecdotal material that academics such as Swadesh had picked up on their treks. They wanted data suitably mathed-up, quantified, hardened (the going metaphor), and standardized in the interest of routinized efficiency. All by itself, throughout the country, the military generated tremendous momentum for a trend toward an empirical approach. “Empirical” was a single adjective encompassing all the foregoing (quantified, hardened, mathed-up, standardized). Empiricism put great pressure on academics in the soft sciences, such as sociology, anthropology, and linguistics, to harden up until they had at least a ghost of a chance of resembling physics or chemistry—or, at the very least, biology.
In 1948 Swadesh created, and not very mellifluously named, a new field of linguistic study: glottochronology…and its offshoot, glottogenesis…from the Greek glotto, meaning “tongue” and, by extension, “language.” Both terms bristled with lexicostatistical (Swadesh invented the term) mathematical symbols—
—such as the sigma, with its sharp angles and bladelike lines impaling the unwary human brain and making language research look and sound like radioactive carbon dating, which was the whole idea, literally. Radioactive carbon dating was used to approximate, within thousands of years, the age of solid objects, chiefly rocks and bones. Swadesh liked the scientifical look and sound of that. He wanted to establish the chronology of languages by the changes in their grammars, syntaxes, spellings, vocabularies, and rates of absorption of other languages over time, and he wanted it as hard as radioactive carbon dating appeared to be.81
Linguists intrigued by Swadesh’s glottogenesis began to close in on the subject of exactly how language works. Notable among them was a Canadian sinologist named Edwin G. Pulleyblank:
“Our capacity, through language, to manipulate the mental world and so deal imaginatively with the world of experience,” said Pulleyblank, “has been a major factor, perhaps the major factor, in giving humans the overwhelming advantage over other species in terms of cultural, as opposed to biological, evolution.”82
Close he was, but he never quite made it to the heart of the matter, which is not merely what language can do but what it is…nor did any other glottogenesist.
Swadesh’s glottolingo gradually disappeared from the journals.
Swadesh might have been the first, but the most prominent of the war-boom linguists were affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Radar turned that twelve-syllable mouthful into MIT, initials soon uttered worldwide when the subject of brilliant engineering feats came up. In 1940, at the outset of the war, the government set up the Radiation Laboratory at MIT with the urgent, secret, highest-priority mission of developing radar as a military weapon. For one thing, radar could aim bombs from the belly of a bomber toward the target. The program was so successful that at the height of the war in 1945 the Rad Lab—svelted down from nine syllables to two—had 3,897 employees working day and night in an intended-to-be-temporary three-story building known as Building 20, slapped together out of wood framing with asbestos cladding and crammed into the campus only by relocating the squash courts and a cluster of other soft, as it were, facilities. By then Building 20 had 196,200 square feet of floor space, i.e., three and a half football fields’ worth.83
At war’s end the building’s radar heroes moved out, and microwave, nuclear science, and communications engineers moved in. Speech communications, as it was called, had become a major discipline, thanks to the war, and a regular hard science. The communications angle opened the doors of Building 20 to a pair of soft sciences, too, namely, modern languages and…linguistics. The linguists were now thrust face-to-face with the engineers…and their glow. The engineers were lit up, the entire breed, with the aura of the victorious radar warriors. In 1949 this curious couple, linguistics and engineering, held a joint conference at MIT.84 Such excitement!—so much of it that from then on the conferences kept rolling in…waves of them. The linguists were now eager to be indistinguishable from the engineers. From the very beginning they decorated their papers with enough esoteric equations, algorithms, and that most scientifical of all visual displays, graphs, to outdo even Morris Swadesh and his glottochronologists. And languages? They mastered language after language and wore them proudly, like pelts on a belt.
a Darwin uses this phrase in a June 29, 1870, letter to John Jenner Weir (http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-7253).
b “I am inclined to believe, as we shall see under sexual selection, that man, or rather primarily woman, became divested of hair for ornamental purposes…” Darwin (1871), 149–150.
c One anonymous reviewer put it this way: “Mr. Darwin’s long expected and lately published volumes will not be so much to startle…as to consolidate, to fortify, and to push to a conclusion the scheme of ideas which the world has learned for years to associate with his name.” (See “Darwin’s Descent of Man,” Saturday Review 3, April 1871.)
d Mendel sent Darwin a copy of his article, which was found unread with its pages still uncut after both men had died.
Chapter IV
Noam Charisma
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.85
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.86
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 lingui
stics. 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.87 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 before88…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.89 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.”90 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.”91
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.”92
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.”93
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.”94
“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.”95
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…”96