Dr. Tariq Rahman
On Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky, Professor of
Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the United States is
arguably one of the world’s most versatile and creative thinkers. His lectures
in South Asia are being widely reported in many papers. He is visiting Pakistan
also. He is well known for being one of the most respected and acclaimed
critics of American and Israeli policies in the world. He has been critical of
America’s violence in Vietnam; The Gulf War of 1991 with Iraq which has
resulted in death and malnutrition for so many Iraqis; American and Israeli
suppression of the Palestinians and nowadays the U.S’s use of overwhelming
force against Afghanistan. As these are all political issues people often forget
that Chomsky is a profoundly original thinker in linguistics too. There are
several books on the Chomskyan Revolution in linguistics but, since linguistics
is not taught in a systematic manner at the advanced level in Pakistan, most
people are unaware of Chomsky’s contribution to it.
In the Managua lectures of 1986 Chomsky defined his aims.
These are to answer the following questions:
1. What is the system of knowledge? What is in the mind/brain of the speaker of English or Spanish or Japanese?
2.
How
does this system of knowledge arise in the mind/brain?
3.
How
is this knowledge put to use in speech (or secondary systems such as writing)?
4.
What
are the physical mechanisms that serve as the material basis for this system of
knowledge and for the use of this knowledge?
These questions lie in the
domains of psychology and philosophy also. That is why Chomsky is not the kind
of narrow linguist who only dabbles in nouns and verbs or compares words in
different languages to find out which family a language belongs to. He is a
revolutionary in linguistics because he has provided theories which give us
insights into the processing of language in the mind.
Basically, Chomsky argues that human beings are endowed
with an innate capacity to learn language (Language Acquisition Device). We
also have certain rules which are universal for language-learning (Universal
Grammar) but we adjust these rules so as to learn the specific rules of the
language to which we are most exposed in childhood. At the deep level our mind
is equipped with the words (Lexicon) and the basic rules (phrase structure
rules) which enable us to make sentences. These basic sentences are sequences
of meaning and have to be transformed by other sets of rules to be spoken or
written down. This device which we have in our minds is called ‘grammar’. As we
have seen, it generates basic sets of meaning (kernel sentences) and transforms
them by using transformational rules. Hence the grammar in our minds may be
called ‘transformational-generative grammar’. In other words, we have a
computer programme in the mind. This programme processes language to produce
sentences. The programme is meant for the production of any human language but
we modify it to produce our first language in early infancy. After this if we
do learn other languages we tend to continue to use some of the rules of our
first language to produce sentences in our newly learned language. That is why
most of us retain a ‘foreign’ accent when we speak another language. This
foreigness comes from using the old rules of our first language to produce
sounds of another language. In short, Chomsky’s theories help us understand
phenomenon like language acquisition. These are the insights Chomsky’s theories
give us. These insights are now used into fields as complicated as robotics,
artificial intelligence, psychology and philosophy. Although some aspects of
Chomsky’s theories are unprovable this maybe because he is dealing with very
complicated issues. It is like Stephen Hawking’s theories about what happens
just before one enters a black hole or what happend a micro second after the
Big Bang. One deals with abstractions and not with tangible objects to begin
with. Even if some theories are mistaken, most of Chomsky’s work is still the
major ‘paradigm’ (as used by Kuhn) in linguistics. His position in linguistics
is like that of Einstein’s in physics---even to prove part of it wrong, you
have to refer to the work as a whole.
Had Chomsky taught the world only linguistics he might
never have become as famous as he has. Chomsky has become famous both as a
linguists and as a dissident intellectual. He is an American citizen; yet he
opposed the U.S.A’s war in Vietnam. He is Jewish; yet he opposes Israel’s
oppression of the Palestinian Arabs. This kind of fearless commitment to
humanity is so rare as to evoke the world’s admiration. Yet, in his own
country, he is reviled by the chauvinistic press which he exposes.
Chomsky has expressed deep insight into the nature and
use of power---which is the central issue in politics---in a series of
brilliant books. A book written with Edward Herman entitled Manufacturing Consent (1988) makes the
point that in democracies, since governments do not find it convenient to jail
or assassinate dissidents, peoples’ views are influenced by the pressure of the
media in the desired direction so much that those who disagree look like fools
or fanatics to the others. In an essay ‘Democracy and Markets in the New World
Order’ he tells us that the ‘free market’ is ‘state protection and public
subsidy for the rich, market discipline for the poor’. This means making the
poor poorer but everyone agrees to use such sanitized words for it that nobody
can understand how cruel and oppressive the system is for the powerless.
In a number of books and articles, like Fateful Triangle (1983), Chomsky tells
us that America supports Israel against the Palestinian Arabs. The Israelis, he
says, do not accept the Palestinians as equal human beings. They suppress them
and use them as cheap labour. The Israeli settlements are formidable places
where stone-throwing Palestinians boys are shot with impunity and torture is
used regularly. He ends this books by predicting that the ‘peace process’ could
actually make Israel dominant and end the Palestinian problem by crushing out
the dissidents while co-opting the others in a new Apartheid kind of Israeli
state. He says that if this happens the ‘privileged sectors of American,
Israeli, and Palestinian society will have a lot to answer for’.
Chomsky’s writings on politics, whether it is East Timor
or the West Bank or any other place, are based on empirical evidence of the
kind which takes years to find. Most dissident writing on such subjects is high
on emotion but short or facts. Chomsky’s writing is full of facts. His argument
is built brick by brick, so to speak, and is impossible to demolish even if one
points out inaccuracies as his critics very often do. As Edward Said said about
Fateful Triangle, his sources are
‘staggeringly complete’ and the book maybe the most ambitious book ever
attempted on the conflict between Zionism and the Palestinians. Now that
Chomsky has spoken out against the U.S.A’s attack on Afghanistan he has again
taught us that if we want to preserve decency and democratic values then we must
have the moral courage of standing up to opinions which appear to be based on
the consent of the powerful---that ‘consent’ which, in his immortal phrase, is
‘manufactured consent’.
Dr. Tariq Rahman