Introduction

This chapter explores Chomsky’s political morality by focusing on his ideas about the individual, the corporation, and the state. This presentation is no substitute for reading Chomsky himself. His propositions become far more convincing upon studying the historical record he has assembled, a dismaying collection which reveals how the actions and rationalizations of the ruling class are remarkably predictable (at least by the standards of any social science).

I will follow Chomsky’s approach of focusing on the United States to understand the interlocking relationships between state and private power. For more than three decades, he has relentlessly pursued the task of documenting the American political system’s effects on its own citizenry and other nations. He provides so many facts to support his claims and verify his predictions that even the reader who ultimately rejects his analysis is likely to emerge less than enthralled with most American foreign and domestic policies and more skeptical of how government officials and the media present these decisions to the public. For instance, the idea of an idealistic, naïve United States easily manipulated by ruthless, clever foreigners is a sentimental myth. Far closer to the truth is the fear Simon Bolivar expressed in 1822: “There is at the head of this great continent a very powerful country, very rich, very warlike, and capable of anything” (cited in Chomsky 1993d: 142; see also Wilson 2002).

Here’s one way this chapter could go. After defining the terms “innate” and “idea,” we say whether Chomsky thinks any ideas are innate - and if so, which ones. Unfortunately, we don't have any theoretically interesting definitions to offer; and, so far as we know, Chomsky has never said that any ideas are innate. Since saying that would make for a very short chapter, we propose to do something else. Our aim is to locate Chomsky, as he locates himself, in a rationalist tradition where talk of innate ideas has often been used to express the following view: the general character of human thought is due largely to human nature.

One can endorse this view without saying that humans have specific concepts, like t u r n i p or c a r b u r e t o r, independent of experience. Correlatively, it is important to remember that while Chomsky is a nativist about language, he does not think that specific languages are innate. Whether a child ends up speaking Japanese or English, or both, clearly depends on the child’s experience. The nativist claim is that all natural languages share core features that reflect the biology of homo sapiens. Knowing a language, like having a heart, is a reflection of our biological endowment. Just as humans have internal organs with characteristic traits, they speak languages with characteristic traits. According to Chomsky, linguistic variation is severely constrained by the mental systems that make human language possible. But this is compatible with some linguistic variation across (and within) communities, since the traits of individuals are always products of nature and nurture. Diet and exercise affect one’s heart, within a limited range of possibilities. Similarly, experience affects the course of a child’s linguistic development, within certain parameters.

I first met Noam Chomsky through a project that attempted to get the baby chimp Nim Chimpsky to “talk.” At nineteen, with the certainty of youth, I knew that I would soon be “talking to the animals.” Nim was the focus of our Columbia University research team’s Grand Experiment: could we teach human language to other animals through environmental input alone with direct instruction and reinforcement principles? Or would there prove to be aspects of human language that resisted instruction, suggesting that language is a cognitive capacity that is uniquely human and likely under biological control? Nim was affectionately named “Chimpsky” because we were testing some of Chomsky’s nativist views. To do so, we used natural sign language. Chimps cannot literally speak and cannot learn spoken language. But chimps have hands, arms, and faces and thus can, in principle, learn the silent language of Deaf people.

By the early 1970s, a surprising number of researchers had turned to learning about human language through the study of non-human apes. Noam Chomsky had stated the challenge: important parts of the grammar of human language are innate and specific to human beings alone. Key among these parts is the specific way that humans arrange words in a sentence (syntax), the ways that humans change the meanings of words by adding and taking away small meaningful parts to word stems (morphology), and the ways that a small set of meaningless sounds are arranged to produce all the words in an entire language (phonology). The human baby, Chomsky argued, is not born a “blank slate” with only the capacity to learn from direct instruction the sentences that its mother reinforces in the child’s environment, as had been one of the prevailing tenets of a famous psychologist of the time, B. F. Skinner.

Introduction

“… no great power - not even one so selfless and beneficent as the United States - has the authority or the competence to determine by force the social and political structure of Vietnam or any other country, no right to serve as international judge and executioner” (Chomsky 1971b: 86). Noam Chomsky’s positionwas articulated with a characteristic blend of irony and blunt eloquence in his 1971 lecture in honor of Bertrand Russell. It was accompanied by his affirmation that “the radical reconstruction of society must search for ways to liberate the creative impulse, not to establish new forms of authority.”

To these guiding principles of Chomsky’s political thought, a third may be added, a commitment “to penetrate the clouds of deceit and distortion and learn the truth about the world, then to organize and act to change it” (1996a,b: 131). It is both a statement of purpose and a strategy for action. It defines Chomsky’s political work - his ongoing critique of US foreign policy, and his relentless exposé of “the clouds of deceit and distortion” designed to mask it. The result is a record of historical retrieval that has fundamentally altered what we know of US foreign policy. The Chomsky files testify to the power embedded in such retrieval. To engage in retrieval is to question who we are and what we know. It is to explain why we have accepted a distortion of history that is akin to its theft. And it is to face the responsibility of change.

At the time of writing, Noam Chomsky has produced over eighty books, hundreds of articles, and thousands of speeches. He has given thousands of interviews, written countless letters, and supervised scores of theses. He has made important, sometimes groundbreaking, contributions to three areas - linguistics, philosophy of mind and human nature, and politics. He set linguistics on a successful naturalistic, biologically oriented scientific course; his theoretical contributions continue to lead the field. Like Descartes, Galileo, and Hume, and unlike the eighteenth-century philosopher Kant and the great majority of philosophers thereafter, Chomsky is both scientist and philosopher, and his philosophical work is continuous with his scientific. His science of language and incipient science of mind offer a genuine prospect of coming to a biologically based grasp of human nature and of the way it allows for human understanding and action. His political work, like both Hobbes’s and Rousseau's, seeks a foundation in a science of human nature, although with better prospects for developing such a theory - and for exploring its implications for political ideals and goals - than Hobbes’s misguided attempt to construct a causal theory of human action or Rousseau’s fanciful assays into a “state of nature.” And unlike both of them - and far too many contemporary political “theorists” - there is no sign in Chomsky’s political work that his views and critical analyses are driven by a wish for power.

Language makes us human.

Whatever we do, language is central to our lives, and the use of language underpins the study of every other discipline. Understanding language gives us insight into ourselves and a tool for the investigation of the rest of the universe. Martians and dolphins, bonobos and bees, may be just as intelligent, cute, adept at social organization, and morally worthwhile, but they don't share our language, they don't speak “human.” One of Chomsky’s achievements is to have demonstrated that, despite the easily observable richness of the world’s languages, there is really only one human language: that the complex and bewildering array of different languages surrounding us are all variations on a single theme, most of whose properties are innately given.

The scientific study of language

Linguistics is conventionally defined as the “scientific study of language” - “language” in the singular. Although its domain is usually taken to include not just the wealth of the world’s languages - Amharic, Berber, Chinese, Dutch, English, etc. - but also all possible languages, past, present, and future, for Chomsky the focus of linguistics is the study of knowledge of language, of “human.” This chapter will attempt to justify and explain this emphasis, spell out its implications, and motivate the description of his linguistics as “scientific.”

Introduction

Chomsky and Halle’s approach to phonological theory, as with other components of generative grammar, represented a sharp break with the main currents of American linguistics that immediately preceded them. The differences were conceptual as well as technical. Accounts of the development of phonology emphasize technical issues, such as arguments over the existence of a “taxonomic phonemic level,” or whether it is permissible to “mix levels” in a phonological analysis. Lying behind discussion of these issues, however, were assumptions about psychology and the practice of science. Indeed, throughout the development of phonology, major changes came about not only through technical breakthroughs, but also by reinterpreting the significance of existing technical devices. This was also the case with Chomsky and Halle’s innovations.

In this chapter I discuss Chomsky and Halle’s contributions to phonological theory by putting their views in the context of the theories that prevailed before them. I will also try to connect the technical issues to the larger conceptual ones concerning the nature of language acquisition and the mind. I will be treating Chomsky and Halle’s contributions together, without attempting to distinguish who contributed precisely which ideas. Their early work in generative phonology, culminating in the major work The Sound Pattern of English (Chomsky & Halle 1968, henceforth SPE), was done jointly.

From the earliest period, cinema in Ireland has contended with two apparently conflicting forces: the 'esperanto of the eye' promulgated by the globalising drive of Hollywood, and the localising lens adopted by the Irish Literary Revival. Part of the cultural power of Hollywood in its formative decades lay in its appeal, as a cheap form of entertainment, to the working class and immigrant populations rapidly expanding in American cities at the turn of the century. To facilitate cross-cultural markets, story-lines, narrative forms and visual styles were devised that addressed spectators not as 'Irish', 'Italians' or 'Jews' but at the most general, human interest level - shorthand for the individualism and universal aspirations of the American way of life. Notwithstanding its crass commercialism, the movie industry also performed a powerful civic function: by divesting viewers of their ethnicity or inherited loyalties, or at least making them redundant on entering a film theatre, it promoted the assimilation of widely divergent cultural minorities into the white American mainstream. It was not entirely coincidental that D.W. Griffith called his landmark film The Birth of a Nation (1915) - though its white supremacist vision and replaying of the civil war also betrayed some of the underlying narratives of that nation.

But while cinema was establishing a commodified public sphere in the United States – what Robert Sklar refers to as ‘movie-made America’ – theatre and literature were spearheading a national renaissance of a different kind in Ireland. As if emphasising the very cultural ties endangered by Hollywood, the Irish literary movement looked to the past, the vernacular and the local to stage its version of the nation. It would be a mistake, however, to see this solely in terms of the backward look of romanticism.

Introduction

The novel, the dominant narrative form in the English-speaking world for the period treated in this volume, is not an indigenous Irish form. When novels did come to be written in and about Ireland (from the late eighteenth century), English was the language of expression and the influence of Irish-language narratives on these new productions was not obvious. Nonetheless, writers in English from the time of Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800) have been at least intermittently and selectively responsive to Irish-language materials, particularly the largely oral story-telling tradition. When an important Irish-language tradition of prose fiction did emerge, at the beginning of the twentieth century, it drew energy from both the revival of indigenous forms and English language influences. Thus, it is no longer possible to insist with some of the older cultural nationalists that prose fiction in Irish owes nothing to Irish prose fiction in English. Much scholarly work remains to be done, however, in investigating the two bodies of writing and in establishing points of contact. This chapter treats the two traditions of novel writing in separate sections,but aims to offer readers a rich sense of the Irish novel as it developed across a range of voices, forms and languages.

Prose fiction in Irish

The history of prose literature in Irish since 1800 inevitably reflects the shifting state of the Irish language itself during that period, from its cataclysmic decline in the nineteenth century and its revival at the end of that century and on to its continuing survival today.

Language has operated as a vehicle for debates concerned with cultural identity and political legitimacy in Ireland for much of its modern history. While the incorporation of Ireland into the United Kingdom by the Act of Union of 1800 marks a milestone in the cultural no less than the constitutional history of Ireland, the direction and dynamic of the 'language shift', from Irish to English as the general vernacular, were already well established and, as it seemed, irreversible, by the end of the eighteenth century.

Language and, even more crucially, religion, were the key elements of cultural discrimination in the great convulsion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the outcome of which was the establishment of a Protestant, overwhelmingly planter, new ruling class in Ireland, together with the triumph of the English language, law and politico-administrative institutions throughout Ireland, and the defeat of the whole institutional edifice of the Gaelic political and social order which had sustained and been mediated through the Irish language.

In the centuries that followed, language, together with religion, remained at the centre of the debate on Irish culture, community and identity. But the language shift to English, the language of power and of all the avenues to advancement, soon gathered momentum among those who aspired to improve their condition or to progress and participate fully in the life of the country under the new order. By the late eighteenth century, Irish was already considered the language of the past and of the poor; not only by the planter society, but by the emerging Catholic middle class in town and countryside, who, while continuing to use Irish in transactions or social intercourse with the lower orders, had themselves made the transition to English as the language of their domestic as well as their public lives. For the literate, Irish was still largely a scribal language of manuscripts, with only a limited presence in the world of print.

Nationalism and modernism: the twin imperatives

In 1939, the Irish architect Michael Scott brought his design for an Irish Pavilion to the New York World's Fair: 'A board of ten or twelve architects vetted every building for the World's Fair. I appeared before them with the model and explained the whole idea behind it. They thought it was marvellous, a wonderful building. They liked how I solved the problem of nationalism and made it modern at the same time.' To the visitor the pavilion initially appeared as a sleek and sinuous form clad in concrete and glass, with a bright, airy interior (Fig. 16.1). Only from the air would it become clear that the building had a shamrock-shaped plan. If this device now seems somewhat corny or superficial, the challenge facing Scott - that of reconciling the imperatives of nationalism and of modernism within a single representative form - was evidently a substantial and enduring one. Indeed it seems possible to discuss the architecture of Ireland's modern era precisely in terms of this tension between the desire to be modern and the requirement to be representative of some idea of the 'national spirit'.

While this tension sometimes became the subject of deliberate theories and projects (as with Scott’s pavilion), more often it simply formed the cultural climate within which Irish architecture was produced. Sometimes the two forces effectively cancelled each other out, resulting in architecture which was neither particularly modern nor particularly Irish. But at other times an architecture emerged which seemed, almost effortlessly, to be as much of its place as of its time.

Introduction

This chapter shows how the Great Famine of 1845 to 1852 was the single most important event in Ireland in the modern period. In European terms, famine had become an increasingly remote event, and that Ireland should suffer a devastating episode was made all the more unusual in that it then formed part of the richest, most powerful and centralised state in the world - the United Kingdom created by the Act of Union in 1800. The Famine disproportionately impacted on the 3 million potato dependent people who comprised the notoriously poverty-stricken base of Irish society. These effects were compounded by doctrinaire government policies, designed as much to appease British opinion and to promote social engineering as to alleviate poverty or save lives. Over 1 million people died and 2 million more emigrated within a decade: the population of the island halved by 1900, the result of endemic emigration by young people, delayed marriages and abnormally high rates of celibacy.

The Famine therefore marked a water shed in many areas of Irish life – demographics, economics, society, culture. Yet the immediate response appears sluggish. Indubitably, Ireland remained culturally comatose in the immediate post-Famine period. The period from the 1880s, when the post-Famine generation took over, witnessed the creation of a series of radical responses to the Famine legacy, of which the Irish literary revival is one. Many other initiatives were also undertaken, inspired by people themselves born during the Famine. The best-known examples include Michael Davitt, founder of the Land League in 1879, and Michael Cusack, founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association in 1884.

Introduction: change and continuity

For over two centuries, republicanism and unionism/loyalism have marked polarities in Irish politics - the former committed to a 'sovereign' all-Ireland republic, the latter to the maintenance and consolidation of Ireland (and Northern Ireland since 1920) as part of the United Kingdom. Much has changed, however, in the period between the United Irish Rebellion of 1798 and the Belfast Agreement of 1998. In the first instance, the social composition of the constituencies supporting both ideologies have altered substantially over time, influenced by Ireland's complex integration into the global capitalist economy, by famine and war, and the outcome of political struggle. In the interim, too, the substantive issues at the heart of unionist-republican conflict such as the 'Union', the 'Republic', self-determination, government, democracy, the state, Irishness, Britishness and 'Ulster' have changed their scope and meaning. Irish unionism and republicanism also register the successive imprints of their changing international contexts - the republican revolutions in the US and France; the subsequent 'age of imperialism'; and imperial fragmentation and the growing significance of the national state in its aftermath.

Against this vast panorama of change, the first part of this chapter examines some of the reasons for the endurance of unionism and republicanism. It suggests that the roots of their survival are to be found in a resilient, if highly asymmetric power structure, the legacy of colonial and imperial Ireland and the working out of the Partition settlement. Within this power structure, nationalists and republicans have developed characteristic, if asymmetric, views of the relationship between state and nation, modes of remembrance and styles of political mobilisation. The second part of the chapter sketches how Partition reconstituted unionism and republicanism and discusses how the ‘politics of culture’ has come to be central in the Northern Ireland conflict and in the search for a solution.

Religion and everyday life

Being Catholic or Protestant has been fundamental to what Irish people have done and said over the past two hundred years. It has been central to family life, education, health care and social welfare and has influenced the schools people attended, the friends they had and who they married. Religion has reached into areas such as the businesses, shops and pubs used by people; as well as the sports played and the newspapers and magazines read. In many ways, Catholics and Protestants in Ireland occupied two different, divided, social worlds. These worlds necessarily overlapped in business and everyday life, of course,but the doctrinal division between Catholicism and Protestantism remained central to commonly held conceptions of national and individual identity.

Religious identity in modern Ireland has been as socially significant as gender, class, ethnicity or sexual orientation. There is nothing uncommon about this. Throughout history and in the contemporary world, religious affiliation has been a major social divider. What made Ireland exceptional throughout the twentieth century was that while the rest of Western Europe became increasing secularised, religious affiliation remained a strong social marker for the Irish. In the terms adopted in this chapter,what mattered was not so much that Irish people were labelled as Catholic or Protestant, but that they were good Catholics and Protestants and could be identified within their communities as having accumulated spiritual capital.