Noam Chomsky
“The cat will mew, and every dog will have his day.”
— Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 1
Lately my former professor from my grad school days at MIT is in the news. Noam Chomsky’s correspondence has been detected at a not inconsiderable quantity in the email logs of Jeffrey Epstein, notorious CIA blackmailer running the Lolita Express to Epstein Island. I’m going to write about him here in the past tense, cause he’s kind of checked out down there in some Brazilian ICU or care facility.
I knew him because I was a student in MIT’s Theoretical Linguistic doctoral program, way far back in the day. And closer than most students, because he was on my Generals Paper committee (equivalent to pre-doctoral Master’s Thesis). He could only do, at most two, of those commitees in any given year. So I got to spend time with him.
What impressed me the most about him was his style. I’ve always been very superficial in that way. He was like an intellectual Billy the Kid. His verbal acumen and dry wit, coupled with an ungodly, absolutely elephantine memory for citations across tens of thousands of obscure books and articles in every nook and corner of linguistics, philosophy, psychology, history, foreign affairs and more make him completely unbeatable in debate or discussion.
He used to hold public court every Thursday afternoon in his Syntax seminar on campus. I say seminar which makes it sound cozy but it had to be held in one of those ampitheater style classrooms, because faculty and scholars from half a dozen other discipines, from over a dozen different universities would be in attendance every time. Most of them were extreme fanboys, as was I at the time, but they had their pride and they would sometimes attempt to spar with the professor on extremely arcane points of generative linguistic theory. He just wiped the floor with them every single time.
Not unkindly, but in this Olympian style he had. Like some distinguish visitor would proudly raise a quibble about the branching factor or c-command scope of one of the insanely complex structural diagrams Noam would scrawl on the board. NC would let the guy drone on, have his little moment in the sun, every dog has his day mode. Then once the point was well made, and the guy had dug himself a deep enough hole, Noam would just say something like (fictious example)
"That's a perfectly natural objection if you're working within the assumptions of the 1957 model, which I abandoned for precisely this reason — the constraint you're invoking doesn't survive the move to Minimalism, and in fact the data you're pointing to is not a counterexample to what's on the board but a in fact clear illustration of it, once you factor in the adjunct scope and the fairly obvious spec-head violation, which I grant is easy to miss if you aren’t distinguishing agreement from clitic co-indexing. This point has been made using different data, an example from Mbabaram I believe, in Woodchuck et. al 1978, you may want to look that up."
But the words themselves don’t do it justice - like a great comic or gunslinger it was all in the style, panache, the delivery. OMG. That is where his true genius lay.
As for the whole 75 years of his Universal Grammar hypothesis and project, as for the literally millions of pages of analysis, and argument and theses, articles, books, Festschrifts, lectures, and whatever else, I can only say, as someone intimately familiar both with NC’s theories and more besides, in all relevant areas of language study (theoretical, applied, computational, and personal spoken mastery of multiple languages), I can only say, with fullest heartfelt sincerity:
WHO THE FUCK KNOWS??
In this scholarly paper, Chomsky along with seven other linguistic discipline royalty admitted what Thomas Wolfe (“The Kingdom of Speech”) characterized as eight heavyweight evolutionists, linguists, biologists, anthropologists, and computer scientists announcing they were "giving up, throwing in the towel" on the question of where speech-language comes from and how it works. I basically agree with Wolfe’s characterization. After all those decades of fussing and white and black boarding, and Linguistic Inquiry-ing, nobody really has a clue about what language is and how it functions to do its thing. Wolfe pretty much called out the Emperor with nothing on.
So definitely my boyish admiration of the guy was truly based on that incomparable style factor, far more than anything substantive. But I give him his due: style like that is itself a true form of genius. I would sincerely say that in itself it is a rare talent straight from Our Lord’s hand. Furthermore, in all my weekly 1-1 appointment sessions with him, he was unfailingly kind, supportive, interested, even warm. Also humorous and unhurried despite his insance academic and media schedule. I really learned quite a lot about not only linguistics, but philosophy from him.
The fundamental barrier he had was totally unwillingness to even remotely consider that language as we experience it is just the visible 10% of a massive non-material iceberg of a psychic function. Language is just the material tip of a metaphysical process. In his public lectures, he was a very strict naive materialist (despite his fame for trashing BF Skinner’s superficial behaviorism in favor of cognitive introspection, he was firmly welded to what he called ‘Cartesian common sense’ and had absolutely no time whatsoever for any hint of psychic workings under the covers). I think he secretly suffered from severe Theoretical Physics Envy, their rigor and absolute devotion to crafting a Beautifully Minimal Theory of Everything had possessed him.
But he was surprisingly relaxed about it in private conversation. Once I recall we were discussing some strange linguistic something, and I had the temerity to suggest that it could be evidence for reincarnation. He said agreed that was quite possible, and cited Plato’s story of the servant boy and “remembrance”.
Anyway none of the above is what you dug into this post for, is it? Now the whole story is Epstein. Actually, I had to reluctantly let go of the hero worship long before Epstein, when I was astonished to hear him ferociously trashing the obvious fact of 911 as an inside job, and then later stating that COVID non-vaxxers were enemies of the people, or something along those lines.
There’s no evidence that NC ever rode on the Lolita Express or participated in any of the abuse. But it’s very disappointing that NC apparently had so much cordial respect for, and such a warmly sustained friendship going with, a guy that, as far as I can see, in addition to being evil, doesn’t seem to me to have been all that bright. I would have thought JE was far beneath NC’s notice. It’s a good object lesson to me in fighting my natural tendency towards hero worship based on style, flair and panache.