Oliver Kamm

Chomsky's influence in linguistics (by Bob Borsley)

I have written much on this site and elsewhere about the political writings of Noam Chomsky, but have no competence to discuss his academic work in linguistics. Fortunately among my regular correspondents are two leading theoretical linguists, Bob Borsley of Essex University and Paul Postal of NYU, whose advice I benefited from especially when writing for Prospect about the designation of Chomsky as the world's top public intellectual. Bob has sent me the further comments below about Chomsky's influence in linguistics, and has kindly given me permission to post them here - OK

Chomsky has been the most influential figure in theoretical linguistics since the 1960s. In that time, all sorts of people have contested his ideas. However, a good many of those critics have little understanding of the ideas and frankly talk nonsense. I discuss one example of this sort of thing here.

The work of those who know what they are talking about varies a lot in scope and significance. The most important is that which develops a broad general critique of Chomsky's work and advances some sort of alternative. Over the last thirty years a number of alternative approaches have been developed, which share some of Chomsky's assumptions but reject others. Particularly important in my view are Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) and Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG).

The response of Chomsky and Chomskyans to these approaches has been to ignore them, in effect to pretend they do not exist. They have had some impact but they remain minority currents. In recent years, however, a number of linguists who were once quite close to Chomsky have rejected major elements of his approach. An important one is Frederick Newmeyer, who argues against Chomsky's idea that language variety is the result of a set of innate parameters in his book Possible and Probable Languages (OUP, 2005).

Probably more important is the work of Peter Culicover and Ray Jackendoff, especially their book Simpler Syntax (OUP, 2005), which develops a detailed critique of Chomsky's current ideas, showing how their flaws have their origins in his earlier work and arguing for a simpler approach, which has a lot in common with HPSG and LFG. Also important is Jackendoff's work with the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker on Chomsky's ideas about language evolution.

It is too soon to be sure, but I think we may well be moving towards a theoretical linguistics which is less dominated by Chomsky and less flawed.

Chomsky's self-revelation

The February issue of Prospect carries this letter from me (link requires subscription):

Kamm replies to Chomsky 29th December 2005

Over 40 years, Noam Chomsky (January) has accused many more distinguished men than I of "tacit acquiescence to horrendous crimes." More interesting would have been a defence of his polemical distortions. We get only a reprise. Chomsky's account of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's comments on East Timor excises relevant context, presents unrelated passages as sequential, and interpolates remarks that Moynihan did not make. Even where Chomsky was right to attack western policy, he is analytically unscrupulous.

I noted (November) that from his earliest writings Chomsky "went beyond the standard left critique of US imperialism to the belief that 'what is needed [in the US] is a kind of denazification.'" Chomsky replies: "To demonstrate my 'central' doctrine, Kamm misquotes my statement that, 'We have to ask ourselves whether what is needed in the US is dissent—or denazification.'"

The full quotation runs: "We have to ask ourselves whether what is needed in the United States is dissent or denazification. The question is a debatable one. Reasonable people may differ. The fact that the question is even debatable is a terrifying thing. To me it seems that what is needed is a kind of denazification." Chomsky quotes only the first sentence, suggesting agnosticism on whether the US needed "denazification," and omits the fifth, where he makes precisely that judgement. He withholds this information from Prospect's readers to complain baselessly of misquotation. "The world's top public intellectual responds to accusations of dishonesty," indeed.

Oliver Kamm
Hove

This, I think, concludes the exchange.

Israel and Hamas

I spent the past week in Israel, and had the good fortune, with a few other British writers and journalists, to speak with some of the most senior political figures on both the Israeli and the Palestinian sides. (Our interlocutors' briefings were conducted unattributably, so I am unable to name them or quote them directly.) They were aware of the likely strength of Hamas in the Palestinian elections. Though all (barring Likud) wished for a two-state territorial settlement, none believed it likely in the near future. Their realism was well-placed. My reading of the situation after the Palestinian elections remains as I wrote it a few months ago when Israel withdrew from Gaza:

The dispiriting fact is that no negotiated two-state agreement is likely in the near future. Western commentators who speak of a two-state “solution” adopt a misnomer. A two-state arrangement, with Israel withdrawing to boundaries approximating the pre-1967 armistice line, is not a solution to the conflict, but an outcome of the end of the conflict. The end of the conflict requires something more deep-rooted: a changed relationship and mutual trust between Israelis and Palestinians.

That changed relationship will take time, on any likely reckoning. In the meantime, Israel is likely to continue to pursue a twin-track policy, even with the inevitability of Prime Minister Sharon's departure. (Since the fomation of Kadima and the resignation of Labour and Likud ministers, this is the first government for many years to comprise members of only one party. The ministers in the interim government include some impressive figures, notably the acting Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni. I'm hopeful that Kadima will prosper even without Sharon - though in the short term Hamas's victory will certainly cause Israeli electoral opinion to shift towards Benjamin Netanyahu, the Chairman of Likud and former Prime Minister, who resigned from Sharon's government over Gaza.)

Those policies will comprise defensive deterrence (symbolised by the security barrier, commonly miscalled a 'wall' even though almost all of it is a wire fence), which has sharply reduced the number of suicide bombings against Israeli civilians; and declaratory policy of an end to the occupation of the West Bank, consequent upon the Palestinian Authority's defeating and disarming terrorist groups. With a PA under the rule of one such group, only actions and not words can be taken as evidence of that good intent. European governments should accept that that is the limit of Israel's room for manoeuvre; she is not able to declare peace unilaterally. Writing earlier this week, Dennis Ross, America's principal negotiator under three Presidents, summarised the prerequisites of progress towards a Middle East peace:

• First, that the international community will not deal with Hamas unless it renounces violence, gives up its weapons and commits to co-existence. (Presently, most Palestinians assume there is no cost to voting for Hamas; they need to understand that there are political and economic ramifications for empowering a terrorist organization.)

• Second, that international assistance will be immediately forthcoming for job-creating projects but will cease if Palestinians do not immediately establish law and order in Gaza and the West Bank.

• And third, that continuing assistance to the Palestinian Authority will depend on its assumption of its real governing responsibilities, including a sustained effort to prevent acts of terror against Israel.

Hamas and the Palestinian Authority cannot have it both ways; it cannot be acceptable for Hamas to go along with law and order internally while it still tolerates and supports terrorism against Israel. Without such a clear-cut set of conditions and unmistakable international attention, the militarization of Palestinian society will intensify, affect the Israeli elections adversely, and point the way to a grim future.

I'm afraid this is right. Avoiding that grim future requires a long-term strategy.

Intermission

There will be a short interruption to this blog. The next post will be in about a week.

Covert payments

It will probably come out at some time, so I had better say it now. I have written a lot on this site and in the print media about the linguist and activist Noam Chomsky, and hope at some point to produce a book-length study of his political thought. In that task, I have periodically accepted payment from the US State Department, which has taken an interest in my work. I haven't declared those payments to the editors who have published my articles, because they really have been small sums of money - in effect, just travelling expenses to meet my US contacts and a bit of pocket money. Moreover, accepting the money plainly hasn't compromised my intellectual independence, as I would have written the articles anyway. In fact, I thought the secrecy involved was quite amusing. I'm certain that no fairminded person would conclude that I have been misleading or in any way acted improperly in failing to declare that my political commentaries are subsidised by a foreign government.

The paragraph I have just written is of course nonsense. No such payments have ever been offered, solicited or received. But if that paragraph had been serious, you would have rightly drawn the appropriate conclusions about my reliability and ethics as a commentator on foreign policy. By analogy: the long-defunct magazine Encounter, a mainstay of Cold War liberalism, had its own credibility destroyed when it eventually admitted receiving subventions from the CIA.

Bearing this in mind, consider a review in the latest issue of The New Statesman. The reviewer, Richard Gott, is commenting on a new book by the Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis entitled The Cold War. The book is in my view excellent, summarising for a general audience the fruits of Gaddis's scholarship on this subject over many years and in several volumes. It is a balanced and fair work of popular scholarship, in which Gaddis concludes that, among other things: "There was, to be sure, a great deal to regret about the Cold War: the running of risks with everyone's future; the resources expended for useless armaments; the environmental and health consequences of massive military-industrial complexes; the repression that blighted the lives of entire generations; the loss of life that all too often accompanied it."

Gott believes by contrast - erroneously, and with scant evidence, but as is his reviewer's prerogative - that Gaddis's book "is an unashamedly American and triumphalist version of the long US-Soviet quarrel that broke out after the Second World War". He declares, having presumably consulted one or two of the relevant population: "Few British historians would accept it uncritically." And he depicts three schools of thought regarding the Cold War, of which he places himself in the Via Media: "A third group, to which I have long belonged, thought that the entire contest was a huge mistake, totally misconceived and possibly fabricated, both expensive and dangerous."

And here we return to my initial point. Nowhere in the review do you find the slightest hint or allusion - other than his claim that "the much-derided [Berlin] wall brought a measure of stability to the European scene" - that Gott was scarcely a disinterested party remote from the partisans of both camps. He in fact received covert payments from the KGB. When this was revealed in 1994, Gott resigned as Literary Editor of The Guardian and penned an apologia for the newspaper in which he claimed no harm had come from his activities. It was all a bit of a giggle, in fact: "I enjoyed it."

I would expect nothing less of Richard Gott. But I hope the NS editor, John Kampfner, can be persuaded to state explicitly his reasons for omitting this information (which he certainly knows) from his reviewer's byline.

Brazenness and effrontery

An online petition has been launched for the urgent cause of defending Iraqi academics from murderous violence. The signatories include Noam Chomsky. Tony Benn, Harold Pinter, Bianca Jagger, John Pilger, and, from the Stop the War Coalition, Andrew Murray and Lindsey German.

But there's an oddity: the petition at no point identifies the assassins. The reason appears to be that if Chomsky and co stated their charge openly they would be ridiculed. So they insinuate it instead by means of a quotation from an authoritative source:

Already on July 14, 2004, veteran correspondent Robert Fisk reported from Iraq that: "University staff suspect that there is a campaign to strip Iraq of its academics, to complete the destruction of Iraq's cultural identity which began when the American army entered Baghdad."

Bogus chronology (what does Fisk imagine the state of "Iraq's cultural identity" - and especially free academic inquiry - was before American troops arrived in Baghdad?) is transmuted into teleology. And by this alchemy, the petitioners hold the US responsible for the death squads:

As an occupying power, and under international humanitarian law, final responsibility for protecting Iraqi citizens, including academics, lies with the United States.

You see, the Americans are the real killers, because they are not exercising power strongly enough to defend Iraqi civil society from those determined to destroy it. They are not confronting effectively the motley collection of Jihadists and Baathists that seeks to extirpate the emergence of democracy in Iraq. These are the forces commonly described by the Stop the War Coalition and its controllers, the Socialist Workers' Party, as the "insurgents" or the "resistance", and whose victory is earnestly sought by the same people.

I am accustomed to the sophistry of this wing of the anti-war movement, which manages to find an American hand behind every evil worth mentioning, and avoids mentioning evils where no such hand can be identifed even with the use of the most strained analogies. But for brazenness and effrontery, this case (brought to my attention by Francis Wheen, to whom my thanks) has few equals.

Chomsky: a correction

I've noticed that in my Little Atoms radio interview, I inadvertently made a comment on Chomsky that was wrong. I said that most of Chomsky's books are transcripts of interviews. What I meant to say was that most of his recent books, over roughly the past decade and a half, are of that form.

This may seem a minor point, but it does involve a slight injustice to Chomsky, and is thus one that I ought to correct publicly. The form and quality of these volumes of interviews is generally poor and sometimes disgraceful. Chomsky's other political books are no more reputable as works of history. While decked in the garb of scholarly inquiry, they are fundamentally unreliable and their handling of source material is insupportable. Academic historians do not cite Chomsky, as one despairing CounterPunch contributor noted here. But some of these volumes (such as Deterring Democracy, 1991, a parody of academic writing on US national security doctrine in the Cold War) do take the form of a sustained argument, however insubstantial and tendentious the argument.

The 'interview' books lack even that characteristic. They exemplify the same practice of sweeping assertion but combine with minimal substantiation and a painfully deferential, even worshipful, interviewer. I have in mind such judgements as (in Class Warfare, 1996) "my impression is that the Nagasaki bomb was basically an experiment", combined with his frank admission that he's saying this without having done the research: "somebody ought to check this out, I'm not certain." When I was drafting my article for Prospect last November attacking the choice of Chomsky as top public intellectual, I was intending to include this statement as an example of his intellectual irresponsibility, though in the end didn't have space for it. (Among my correspondents are a dozen of the leading American historians of the War in the Pacific, one of whom wrote to me with a detailed refutation of Chomsky's claim and the conclusion: "It also should be clear even to Mr. Chomsky that if one wants to look at homicidal 'experimenters' in the Pacific War, Japan might be a more promising location to start.")

Prospect's poll for top public intellectual was intended to reflect recent work, and for that reason Chomsky's books of interview transcripts since roughly 1990 were the right target in that argument, as was his increasingly startling political judgement dating from his opposition to intervention in Bosnia. But the torrents of interview books are a relatively recent development in his schedule of publications, and I am glad to place that correction on the record.

One other aspect of my comments on Chomsky merits an addendum. I referred in my interview to two linguists who contest Chomsky's academic work, and who advised me when I was writing the Prospect piece, Bob Borsley of Essex University and Paul Postal of NYU. Bob in addition points out that Chomsky's work in linguistics has been criticised by a number of scholars who were once close to Chomsky (or seen as such), and this is quite a recent development. The principal names here are Newmeyer, Jackendoff and Culicover.

Stuff

The excellent David Aaronovitch of The Times now has his own web log. Which reminds me I should put the links back up on the right-hand margin of this site. I never got round to it after changing the design, and I am not the most technically proficient of bloggers. But it will be done.

The Labour Friends of Iraq web site has an article by Harry Barnes commenting on Andrew Murray's long review of my book in The Communist Morning Star. Barnes comes from a different part of the Left from me, and rightly writes not to defend me but to criticise Murray's extraordinary insouciance about, inter very much alia, Soviet imperialism. Much of what Barnes says is sensible and welcome, until you get to the preposterous last sentence when he urges "Democratic Socialists should avoid the twin dangers of New Labour and the New Fascism" - as if these were comparable forces.

My interview on the Little Atoms radio programme last week is now available for download from the programme's web site, should you have nothing better to do than listen to me opining for an hour - or even for a few minutes. We talked about anti-totalitarianism, foreign policy, Noam Chomsky, the Middle East and other things. Nick Cohen will be the next guest on this programme, on Friday 20 January.

I don't exactly urge you to do this, but following this link to Sky News is an education. As the report says:

There have been extraordinary scenes broadcast from the Big Brother house. A highlight of the reality television footage was George Galloway pretending to be a cat, as he licked milk out of the hands of actress Rula Lenska.

The description doesn't prepare you for the sight of a bald middle-aged man nuzzling the cupped hands of an aging actress. It is physically repellent. I went on Sky News this evening to debate Galloway's antics with John Rees, national secretary of the Respect 'Coalition' and a leading member of the Socialist Workers' Party which controls it. For some reason Galloway himself was unavailable. I confess I didn't listen to a word Rees said, I was so engrossed by the body language: shiftiness scarcely covers it.

I expressed sympathy for Rees for coming on the programme when his party had previously condemned Big Brother as 'sewer-dredgingly awful', and I said that Galloway's appearance had the merit of not being the least creditable thing or most egregious debasement of public office he had done. After George travelled to Damascus last July to tell the Syrian people, who had had no say in the matter, how fortunate they were to have Bashar al-Assad as their leader, there were few ways open to him to lose his dignity further, and he at least showed imagination in finding one of them.

UPDATE: Nick Cohen in The Observer makes the essential point about Galloway:

When Galloway comes out of the Big Brother house, no one in the middle classes will want to know him and that will be for the good. Far from being sinister, Celebrity Big Brother deserves to win a Bafta for its exposure of the truly sinister.

Still, aren't they weird? The liberals who think it is worse to appear on a TV show than in the court of a fascist tyrant; the socialists who believe that it is left wing to ignore Iraq as the forces of the far right blow it to pieces. Not just fatuous and immoral, but weird beyond measure.

More on Rose

The Guardian has two letters today on General Sir Michael Rose's call for the impeachment of Tony Blair. One is from a Labour MP, and the other is from a former Labour MP. Fortunately the one that's worth quoting is the one from the sitting MP:

Is Gen Michael Rose (Comment, January 10) who is lambasting the prime minister for taking on Saddam Hussein the same person who did so much to resist Nato bombing of Serb positions during the Milosevic years? A quick visit to the Guardian Unlimited archive reveals the assessment of your Balkans expert, Ian Traynor, of how seriously we should value Gen Rose's judgment. He wrote: "British military officers such as Michael Rose ... deflected and subverted calls for Nato bombing of Serb positions in the wake of atrocities in Sarajevo or crises in UN 'safe havens' such as Gorazde in 1994, a policy that led willy-nilly to the Serbs' massacre of 7,000 Muslim males at Srebrenica in July 1995."

The prime minister's record in tackling dictators such as Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic is perhaps not best questioned by those whose own record of leadership is so authoritatively criticised.
Siôn Simon MP
Lab, Birmingham Erdington

O, Rose, thou art sick

This article appears in The Times today.

GENERAL SIR Michael Rose, former commander of the UN protection force in Bosnia, is an angry man. In The Guardian, and a Channel 4 documentary made by the former war correspondent Martin Bell, he calls for Tony Blair’s impeachment over the Iraq war. Sir Michael believes this “would prevent politicians treating quite so carelessly the subject of taking a country into war”. Had he still been a serving officer, he would “certainly” have resigned his commission, to try to persuade MPs to “think twice about what they were doing”.

Perhaps Mr Bell recalls his 1996 judgment of Sir Michael’s service in Bosnia: “By the time he left, there was little muscular or robust about the force he led, or his leadership of it.” Sir Michael’s performance caused the greatest rift in transatlantic relations since Suez. That record does not invalidate his criticisms now. But Sir Michael’s judgment of the impact of his hypothetical resignation indicates a rare confidence in the way others see him.

Sir Michael argues, conventionally, that the Government misled the Commons over Iraq’s WMD. He also practises a conventional omission. Nowhere does he refer to 9/11. Those attacks inevitably changed policymakers’ perception of strategic risk. The foundations of postwar security policy — deterrence and containment — had been undermined in a morning.

Sir Michael holds Mr Blair responsible for not testing flawed intelligence. He gives no advice on how to do that beyond waiting till the intelligence is confirmed or refuted. That was the route Sir Michael chose in 1994 when he disastrously played down reports that Gorazde was about to fall. No prime minister can afford to be so mistaken.

Saddam welcomed 9/11 and sought a WMD capability in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions. Intelligence about current capabilities was wrong, but Iraq did possess dual-use facilities that, according to Charles Duelfer of the Iraq Survey Group, could quickly have produced chemical and biological weapons. Saddam was a sponsor of terrorism, and remained the most likely route by which Islamist groups could obtain WMD. How to weigh those factors was a political judgment, not a perfidious wangle.

The military mind in politics, from Cromwell to Douglas MacArthur and beyond, is notoriously insensitive to uncertainty. Sir Michael's advice should be treated with the respect due to him.