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Noam Chomsky’S 90Th Birthday I Revolutionary New Ideas Appear Infrequently Essays for Noam Chomsky’s 90th Birthday I (Or Don’t They?) Collected & edited by Michael Schiffmann Tabula Gratulatoria 1. David Adger 2. Nicholas Allott 3. Adriana Belletti 4. Robert Berwick 5. Thomas Bever 6. Manfred Bierwisch 7. Akeel Bilgrami 8. Hagit Borer 9. Zeljko Boskovic 10. John Collins 11. Tecumseh Fitch 12. Robert Freidin 13. Angela Friederici 14. Naoki Fukui 15. Angel Gallego 16. Lila Gleitman 17. Peter Graff 18. Giorgio Graffi 19. Günther Grewendorf 20. Kleanthes K. Grohmann 21. Marc Hauser 22. Norbert Hornstein 23. Riny Huybregts 24. Ray Jackendoff 25. Samuel Jay Keyser 26. Howard Lasnik 27. David Lightfoot 28. James McGilvray 29. Matthias Mahlmann 30. Robert May 31. John Mikhail 32. Shigeru Miyagawa 33. Andrea Moro 34. Andrew Nevins 35. Frederick Newmeyer 36. Dennis Ott 37. Barbara Partee 38. Orin Percus 39. David Pesetsky 40. Jean-Yves Pollock 41. Eric Reuland 42. Luigi Rizzi 43. Ian Roberts 44. Tom Roeper 45. Anna Roussou 46. Michael Schiffmann 47. Neil Smith 48. Wolfgang Sperlich 49. Beverly Stohl 50. Patrick Trettenbrein 51. Juan Uriagereka 52. Deirdre Wilson 53. Dieter Wunderlich 54. Mihoko Zushi Introduction Chomsky at 90 – We’re Here for You, and You for Us by Michael Schiffmann As this project started to kick into high gear a couple of days ago and I sent the first results around to confirmed and po- tential contributors as well as some others, I received an ex- cited phone call by an ex- student who I had cc-d these first essays to: “Man, what are you doing again – this is some really, really crazy stuff!” Having myself gotten into this, I could hardly disagree, and I told Iwo that everything was go- ing well way beyond my expectations, with one excellent con- tribution after another reaching my mailbox day by day. Remembering well that I had first met him in a seminar based on Noam’s Syn- tactic Structures and Howard Lasnik’s Syntactic Structures Revisited, I then asked him, “What, then, has Chomsky and all of what we did after- wards meant to you?” He said: “Before I got into this seminar, I thought everything there at the department was mere talk, and all of a sudden, here was the real thing! We were doing rational analysis, we were doing science!” Out of this and other semi- nars grew the Syntax Reading Group at the English Depart- ment of the University, a small bunch of mostly (but not exclu- sively) hardcore generativists of one or the other stripe, about which a few words later on. Just one day after this tel- ephone call, I stood in front of my class on “Lan- guage Myths,” where “Do Chimpanzees or Other Non-Humans Have Lan- guage?” was the topic of the day. After the obligatory students’ presentation, I tried to do my best to show that what appears to be a dumb, or even almost vacuous question can be turned into a deeper one by turning to specifics: What does the chimpanzee do and what do humans do? It turns out that, (1) whatever the “signs” of chimpanzees actually are, they lack the phonology and the phonological fea- tures of human sign language, (2) counterexamples such as “wa- ter bird” for swan to the contrary, there is no real sign of mor- phology in the signs of apes, (3) the “syntax” of chimpanzees such as the famous Nim Chimpsky (“give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you”) is sin- gularly unimpressive and has nothing to do with human syntax, and (4) even though humans can use signs/words to refer to ob- jects, events, ideas, configurations etc. in apparently sharply constrained ways no one yet completely understands, apes do so in a completely different, essentially associationist fashion. The potential infinity in- herent in (1), (2) and (3) is lacking, and so are the concepts that humans use to deal with the world. So if by “language” we mean HL (= Human Language), the answer is a resound- ing No. QED. How did it happen that I got into the business of trying to in- troduce students to some basic tenets of cognitive science, something I would have never dreamt of immediately after I had finally managed to get out of high school in 1976 without having had to repeat a class or the exams? In 1979, the tragedy of the first two Indochina wars, namely, the one led by French colonialism and the one led by U.S. neocolo- nialism, was compounded by a third Indochina war which mainly involved the two nominally socialist states of Vietnam and a country few people in the Western world had ever heard of, Cambodia. At the time, I was just beginning to free myself from the ideological shackles of various Marxist-Leninist or Maoist parties and was thus looking for independent quality lit- erature particularly on the politics of Cambodia, preferably in German because in high school, my knowledge of English had barely allowed me to scrape by. This would later change, and not only would I become a translator of English into German, but also, the other way around.1 The one thing I could get hold of at the time was a slim volume called Cambodia, Laos, North Vietnam2 by a certain Noam Chom- sky, which as it turned out was the second part of a larger book that had appeared in the U.S. This got me interested and I start- ed to read more, first the collection For Reasons of State,3 which also contained interesting material on Cambodia, of course, 1 By now, Thomas Schmidinger, Rojava: Revolution, War and the Future of Syria's Kurds (Pluto 2018), and Schmidinger, Battle for the Mountain of the Kurds: Self-Determination and Ethnic Cleansing in Rojava (PM 2019). 2 Noam Chomsky, Kambodscha, Laos, Nordvietnam. Im Krieg mit Asien II. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1972. 3 A much shorter German edition in which all material on Indochina was deleted appeared as Aus Staatsraison. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1974. and inevitably, American Power and the New Mandarins. Then came Ed Herman’s and his magisterial two volume study The Political Economy of Human Rights, the second volume of which, After the Cataclysm. Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology was devoted to the treatment of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia by the Western media (and academia) af- ter these three unfortunate countries had been laid to waste first by the French and then by U.S. intervention, a treatment that they showed in meticulous detail to be extremely unfair and selective in order to portray the “enemy” regimes that had come to power there in the worst possible light. Different from others who denounced Chomsky as an apologist for postwar repression in Indochina in general and the nefarious Pol Pot regime in particular, after some time spent scratching my head, I soon understood what I believe is one of the main tenets of Chomsky’s political thinking: The distinction between facts on the one, and the ways these facts are packaged and sold by various power systems on the other hand. Even though this sounds quite trivial, in actual fact it is not. It may well be that few people would be willing to go as far as the Ex-U.S. Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, who did not only say that sacrificing half a million Iraqi children who had died from U.S.-imposed sanctions was a price worth paying when it came to toppling the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein,4 but also once stated that she just couldn’t believe how good and benevo- lent the United States was and has always been. Whether it’s offi- cial speakers of states, Fascists, Stalinists, followers of this, that, or the other party or movement, there is always a strong tendency to follow the standard George Orwell ascribed to “the nationalist”: He “not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”5 Many Western media and spokespersons who did not only – rightly – denounce the actual crimes of the postwar re- gimes in Indochina, but also resorted to a flood of distortions and lies to exaggerate them were the very same ones who had not on- ly not disapproved of most of the U.S. crimes in Indochina but had also failed to even hear about them – let alone report them to the general public that might have acted on them. So here was a stark, if not exactly intellectually challenging les- son to follow: Apply the same standards to everyone, particu- larly to yourself. Rationality 101, or Morality 101, easily dis- missed as it goes back to the Bible and is found in all Holy Scriptures whether they have actually been written down or not, but turning you into a hypocrite or worse if you don’t fol- 4 Those who have a hard time believing this might want to watch it here: https://youtu.be/4iFYaeoE3n4?t=36. 5 Quoted in the first volume of Chomsky’s and Herman’s study mentioned above, p. vii. low it. Or as Shigeru Miyagawa (see this volume) might have said it, by – again – establishing this principle, Chomsky “hit it out of the park,” particularly as Chomsky has had this uncanny ability to follow this Morality 101 principle in his incredibly many speeches, articles, and books on political, social, and moral topics. That was one of the things that hooked me when I became ac- quainted with his political writings.
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