Professional Documents
Culture Documents
David Hawkes
Noam Chomsky
HOW THE WORLD WORKS
Edited by Arthur Naiman
335pp. Hamish Hamilton. Paperback, £14.99. 978 0 241 14538 8
US: Soft Skull Press. Paperback, $18. 978 1 59376 427 2
A nyone following the career of Noam Chomsky is soon confronted with a problem. In
fact, it has become known as the “Chomsky problem”. Chomsky has achieved eminence
in two very different fields, theoretical linguistics and political commentary. The
“Chomsky problem” is that his approaches to these fields appear to contradict each
other. In politics Chomsky is a radical, but in linguistics he takes positions that
can easily be characterized as reactionary. He treats linguistics as a branch of
biology. He traces language to a “Universal Grammar” resident in the physical
brain. He believes that our linguistic nature is hard-wired into our genes. Because
they diminish the influence of environment on human behaviour, such claims can be
used to suggest that certain modes of social organization are natural and
immutable. As a result, they have often been associated with conservative politics.
This ideological chasm between the American Left and its putative constituency
yawns nowhere wider than in Chomsky’s withering references to popular religion. He
cites the fact that “about 75% of the US population has a literal belief in the
devil” as the clearest possible example of American ignorance and stupidity. But is
it really so different from his own beliefs? Throughout his career, Chomsky has
depicted a world ruled by demonic forces of quite incredible malice and guile.
Whatever is running the world Chomsky describes is undoubtedly a very greedy,
violent and selfish entity – it would be hard not to call it “evil”, or even Evil,
were such tropes not sternly prohibited by the monochrome literalism of our age.
The incarnate, worldly identity of this terrifying power is less clear. Sometimes
it is “the US government”, which Chomsky depicts as a cartoonish amalgamation of
petty spite and cataclysmic violence, determined to crush the slightest remnant of
human decency still cowering in any corner of its empire. “When the Mennonites
tried to send pencils to Cambodia, the State Department tried to stop them”, while
the CIA allegedly trained its Central American death squads by forcing recruits to
bite the heads off live vultures. As Chomsky puts it, “no degree of cruelty is too
great for Washington sadists”. The America described here is a crazed, bloodthirsty
monster, hell-bent on the destruction of humanity.
In any case, the degree of historical blame accruing to either Europe or America is
unimportant. The important question, surely, is what made these polities so
fearsomely aggressive? Chomsky usually locates the source of modern evil in
economics rather than politics, assigning ultimate blame to the pursuit of self-
interest, which he sometimes presents as a manifestation of human nature, and
sometimes as a historical aberration. He refers to “class war” but does not
identify the classes he believes to be engaged in warfare. He frequently describes
our oppressors as “investors” or “the people in charge of investment decisions”, as
if the problem were a group of nefarious individuals. But he concedes the futility
of convincing an individual capitalist of the error of his ways: “What would happen
then? He’d get thrown out and someone else would be put in as CEO”.
Occasionally, Chomsky implies that the pursuit of self-interest is, like language,
simply in our genes. But he is far too sophisticated to be satisfied with such
Hobbesian speculation. Nor does the problem lie with the ethical failings of any
nation, bloc of nations, social class or malignant cabal. The problem lies with the
power that motivates the malignity. The problem is capital itself. Although Chomsky
calls capital a “virtual Senate” and a “de facto world government”, he does not
follow through to the conclusions involved in this position. If the nominal
possessors of capital are in reality its slaves, if their actions are determined by
its demands, and if we want to understand the atrocities that Chomsky documents, we
must not look to human nature, but to the nature of capital.
This Chomsky cannot do. The logical conclusion of his political commentary is that
capital acts as an independent agent, insinuating itself into the human mind and
systematically perverting it. But this is incompatible with his scientific
assumption that the mind is merely an “emergent property” of the physical brain. As
Chomsky himself reminds us, the idea that human beings are purely physical
entities, devoid of discarnate qualities such as mind, spirit or soul (or indeed
ideas), has become plausible only over the past three centuries. Thomas Kuhn refers
to this as a “paradigm shift”, but Chomsky rejects the concept because it implies
that scientific truth is historically relative. For him, the Galilean revolution of
the seventeenth century was simply an unprecedented, almost miraculous leap
forward, and he sees it as his task to extend this revolution to areas, such as
linguistics, in which its impact has been delayed. He does not attempt to explain
why it occurred in the first place.
Both his science and his politics have seemed the poorer for his neglect of the
connections between them, and the main attraction of these books is that they go
some way to remedying that deficiency. Along with the Galilean revolution in
science, economic systems based on wage labour have rapidly spread throughout the
world over the past three centuries. A wage labourer must think of his time – which
is his life – as a thing that he owns and can sell. He must conceive of his self as
an alienable object. And Chomsky’s scientific approach enthusiastically endorses
the conception of human beings as objects. His linguistics proposes that our
thoughts are produced by the material brain, and that biology holds the key to our
nature. His scientific assumptions prevent him from considering the possibility
that the kind of human being he describes might be the result of capitalism, rather
than its cause.
Yet his own observations point directly to that conclusion. Chomsky has often noted
the similarities between modern wage slavery and chattel slavery. As he remarks in
The Science of Language:
“In a market society, you rent people; in a slave society, you buy them. So
therefore slave societies are more moral than market societies. Well, I’ve never
heard an answer to that, and I don’t think that there is an answer. But it’s
rejected as morally repugnant – correctly – without following out the implications,
that renting people is an atrocity. If you follow out that thought, slave owners
are right: renting people is indeed a moral atrocity.”
Furthermore, wage labour has now become almost universal, so that “wage slavery
seems to be the natural condition today”. As Chomsky recalls, Aristotle defines a
slave as one who does not pursue his own ends, but whose activity is subordinated
to the ends of another. According to this classical definition, all wage labour is
piecemeal slavery. The worker’s time, his life, is not his property while he is at
work.
Chomsky has always been clear about this indictment of wage labour. Yet he has
never taken the next logical step in the argument. The classical tradition assumes,
plausibly enough, that the condition of slavery has certain psychological
consequences. Slaves conceive of themselves as objects, for the very good reason
that legally they are objects: commodities to be traded on the market. Aristotle’s
Politics therefore associates slavery with corporeality: “that which can foresee by
the exercise of mind is by nature intended to be lord and master, and that which
can with its body give effect to such foresight is a subject, and by nature a
slave”.
David Hawkes is Professor of English at Arizona State University. His most recent
books are John Milton: A hero for our time, 2009, and The Culture of Usury in
Renaissance England, 2010.
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1114177.ece