{"id":81827,"date":"2016-10-01T19:11:19","date_gmt":"2016-10-01T19:11:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/?p=81827"},"modified":"2016-10-03T08:15:23","modified_gmt":"2016-10-03T08:15:23","slug":"tom-wolfes-reflections-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/tom-wolfes-reflections-language\/","title":{"rendered":"Tom Wolfe’s Reflections on Language"},"content":{"rendered":"

By E.J. Spode.<\/p>\n

\"9781911214199\"<\/p>\n

‘And here we are. We’ve had our laughs at the expense of Wolfe and Everett and the journalists that fawn over them, but if you think about it, it really isn’t funny.<\/p>\n

One of the greatest scientists of our lifetime has embarked upon a fascinating research program. The program is exploring a property of human nature \u2013 the language faculty \u2013 and he is attempting to show how a half-century of research by thousands of linguists from around the world can be grounded in low-level mathematical and biophysical properties of our world. And whether that program is successful or not, it is a vision of remarkable beauty \u2013 the recursive patterns of our languages and their variety and complexity could be understood perhaps as well as we now understand the spiral patterns in the nautilus shell or the recursive patterns of the snowflake. <\/p>\n

He came to us with that gift. He did not ask us to believe him, nor did he insist that we engage in that project ourselves. He simply told us what his project was and invited us to join him. And all we as a culture could do in our upscale magazines and newspapers and blogs was shit all over the man and clog the conversation with an endless stream of transparent gibberish from obvious charlatans. This is why we can’t have nice things.<\/em>‘<\/p>\n

Tom Wolfe’s most recent book \u2013 The Kingdom of Speech<\/a><\/em> \u2013 is nothing if not iconoclastic. And the icons he has chosen to smash are impressive: Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky! I have no problem with smashing icons, but this effort is an embarrassment for Wolfe, for his publisher, and, because of its largely positive reception, for our broader culture. It is a literary Sharknado of error and self-satisfaction, with borderline racism and anti-Semitism mixed in. It careens between being hilariously bad and tragically bad. It is irredeemable.<\/p>\n

Let’s start with the part of the book about Darwin. Darwin may be one of your scientific heroes and you may even consider him to be one of the great geniuses of the 19th Century. Well, wake up sheeple, because Tom Wolfe has got a story to tell you.<\/p>\n

We are first informed that Darwin is a sort of dandy British gentleman. You know, the kind of guy who reads The Times while his scullery maids are plucking pheasants. But\u2026 and you can almost feel Wolfe’s revulsion here \u2026 Darwin wasn’t just a vanilla British gentleman. No, he was exactly the worst kind. You see, his father started as a mere doctor, and his money came from his true passion, which was \u201cinvesting, lending, and otherwise dealing in the Industrial Revolution’s money markets.” He was, to put a label on it: nouveau riche. Darwin’s father then added to his nouveau-richiness by marrying into more money. And he didn’t marry into the good kind of money \u2013 the old kind\u2014 no, he married into new money, and not even good new money \u2013 he married into the Wedgewood family, and those are the Wedgewoods of Wedgewood china fame. In a nutshell they got their wealth by marrying pottery makers. The shame.<\/p>\n

Now you might be thinking, who cares how Darwin’s father got his money and what does that have to do with the theory of evolution, but the real question is, why does Wolfe care, and the answer seems to be \u2014 as near as I can make it out \u2014 that Wolfe is using this as a foundation for his claim that Darwin was just the kind or not-to-be-trusted nouveau riche character that might lay claim to another person’s work. And therefore he was also the kind of person who would not properly understand the theory with which his name was associated.<\/p>\n

Yes, you got that right. Darwin just didn’t understand the theory of evolution. Perhaps you, like I, were under the impression that Charles Darwin was some sort of genius. Well all Wolfe has to say about that is\u2026 Pish. Posh. <\/p>\n

We are informed that Darwin, after dropping out of medical school and divinity school, ends up as an undergraduate at Cambridge University, which Wolfe appears to consider a safety school, \u201cbarely getting a bachelor of arts degree” (I looked it up: he scored the 10th highest grade out of 178 candidates on his final exam at Cambridge. Whew. Close call!)<\/p>\n

\"9780140432688\"<\/p>\n

Perhaps you, like I, read The Voyage of the Beagle<\/a><\/em> and found it to be a remarkable triumph of literature and naturalism and science and, dare I say it, the intellect. The fact that you think this, however, just makes you a homer for the Victorian upper class. Wolfe is here to set us straight. In a rare moment of empathy towards the Darwin family, Wolfe imagines what it must have been like for Charles’ poor father, who \u201cbegrudgingly paid for the boy to enjoy a five-year voyage or exploration, or sightseeing, or something, aboard a boat named for a dog, His Majesty’s Ship Beagle, to prepare him for a career in the field of\u2014as far as Dr. Darwin could tell\u2014nothing.” <\/p>\n

Yes, it was a veritable Spring Break at sea. Charles could just as well have spent those five years in the basement playing Call of Duty on an Xbox.<\/p>\n

Well, now that Wolfe has, he hopes, woven together enough innuendo to get you thinking that that Darwin was a simpleton, he’s going to show you just HOW MUCH of a simpleton Darwin was \u2014 sooo stupid his students leave him baffled with really just the most simple questions <\/p>\n

“[Darwin’s students] wanted to know some small but fundamental details about the moment Evolution got under way and how exactly, physically, it started up\u2014and from what? Darwin had apparently never thought of it quite that way before. Long pause\u2026and finally, \u201cOhhh,” he said, \u201cprobably from four or five cells floating in a warm pool somewhere.” One student pressed him further. He wanted to know where the cells came from. Who or what put them in the pool? An exasperated Darwin said, in effect, \u201cWell, I don’t know\u2026look, isn’t it enough that I’ve brought you man and all the animals and plants in the world?'”<\/p>\n

You may be wondering, just how did Wolfe come to witness this humiliation of slow Darwin at the hands of his much brighter students? Was it a steampunk time machine that took him back to the 19th Century? Or was it a secret NSA surveillance tool \u2013 a Jules-Verne-o-scope \u2013 that allowed him to spy on Victorian classrooms? And did Darwin actually hold a teaching position ever? Well, no, it seems that the whole passage is a riff on a letter from Darwin to the naturalist J.D. Hooker. Fortunately for us, Joshua Leach took the trouble to look up what Darwin actually said, and it went thus: <\/p>\n

“It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present.\u2014 But if (& oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia & phosphoric salts,\u2014light, heat, electricity &c present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter wd be instantly devoured, or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.”<\/p>\n

This is the language that Wolfe has glossed as \u201cI don’t know.” <\/p>\n

But hey, who wants to hear about ammonia and phosphoric salts and proteins and complex changes? That is just window dressing for what we all know is the core of Darwin’s actual position: No clue. But it wasn’t for lack of trying! \u201cDarwin often thought about it, but it made his head hurt.” Wolfe goes on to tell us that Darwin’s hypothesis about the origin of life is \u201ctypical of the more primitive cosmogonies.” Indeed, we are assured that Darwin’s idea is precisely the structure of an Apache creation myth. <\/p>\n

Yes, all this is actually in Wolfe’s book. Let’s set aside the part about Darwin’s hurting head and focus on how Darwin’s proposal was \u201ctypical of primitive cosmogonies.” The Apache creation story, Wolfe tells us, is this: \u201cWay up in the void arrives a disk. Curled up inside the disk is a little old man with a long white beard. He sticks his head out and finds himself utterly alone. So he creates another little man, much like himself.” Long story short, they play with a ball of dirt, and then a scorpion appears and the scorpion starts pulling things out of the ball etc. Now if this is or was someone’s creation story I have no quarrel with it. My only point here is that it is decidedly NOT the same proposal that Darwin made in is letter to Hooker. For one thing, Darwin left out the agency, and yes that kind of is important. He is talking about life emerging from undirected chemical processes (more on this later).<\/p>\n

Next, Wolfe wants you to know that even though Darwin was slow slow slow, he did have a gift \u2014 a gift typical of those British aristocrats that got their money by marrying into families of rich china makers. You see, he was \u201csmooth.” Actually, not just smooth: \u201cHe was also a slick operator\u2026smooth\u2026smooth and then some.” (Apparently this smoothness was not the kind that worked with the Victorian ladies, as Wolfe is eager to describe Darwin’s spouse, Emma, as a \u201cperfectly nice, if plain, thirty-year-old spinster first cousin.”)<\/p>\n

Now, all of this talk of Darwin’s dumbness and smoothness is leading up to something \u2014 the idea that if you are that dumb but also that smoothie smooth, there is a natural path for you to take to achieve fame as a naturalist \u2014 obviously, you take credit for someone else’s work! And here Wolfe introduces us to Alfred Russel Wallace, a hard-working non-aristocrat laboring away in the Malay Archipelago, sweating through his sheets as he struggled against Malaria, and coming up with his own theory of evolution, which he then sent to Darwin for consideration in 1857.<\/p>\n

At this point Wolfe invents (again of whole cloth) an imaginary conversation in which it is not the students, but the naturalist Charles Lyell who must deal with poor simple Charles. He must help dumb Charles concoct a CONSPIRACY!, and it goes like this:<\/p>\n

“Oh, Charlie, Charlie, Charlie,\u2026Who was it who told you you’d better get busy and publish this pet theory of yours? The main thing, Charlie, is to establish your work and Wallace’s. Now that’s fair isn’t it? Even-steven and all that? Well, to be perfectly frank, there is one slight hitch. You’ve never published a line of your work on evolution. Not one line\u2026 You don’t even have a paper to present at the meeting\u2026hmmm\u2026 Ahh! I know! We can help you create an abstract overnight! An abstract. Get it?”<\/p>\n

And here I guess we are supposed to imagine Lyell giving Darwin a noogie or something as he wonders if Darwin does in fact know what an abstract is and whether he will be up all night helping poor dumb Darwin write it.<\/p>\n

\"9780199219223\"<\/p>\n

In point of fact, however, in 1844 Darwin had corresponded with Hooker about his idea and by July of that year had written \u2013 not an abstract \u2013 but a 230 page essay outlining his theory of evolution<\/a>. As Darwin correctly surmised, it was dangerous stuff and he locked it away with instructions that should he die, it be published with selected research of his. In 1847 Hooker read a copy of the manuscript, and wrote Darwin back, offering helpful feedback but also questioning whether Darwin really was really serious about getting rid of all continuing acts of creation. <\/p>\n

When the Wallace paper arrived and forced the issue, Darwin wrote a paper outlining his own theory AND he helped arrange for Wallace’s paper to be published with his paper in the very same issue of the Proceedings of the Linnaean Society. You might think that was kind of him. Wolfe wants us to know that only sheeple think that way.<\/p>\n

In the 1980s there were a pair of books that argued that Darwin did not give proper credit to Wallace, or perhaps worse, he took a key idea from Wallace and claimed it as his own. One of them claimed that Darwin sat on Wallace’s letter for two weeks (cleverly using the time to write up his own version of the theory of evolution) before sending it on to Lyell. The conspiracy claim was subsequently researched to death by scholars who even looked at Victorian shipping schedules (tracing potential paths of the letter on steamers and camels) to show that Wallace’s letter to Darwin could not have arrived prior to the day Darwin forwarded it to Lyell. None of this seems to matter to Wolfe, who has gone full Darwin truther. Wolfe would have us believe that the hard working little guy has been given the shaft once again by those smooth cultural elites. <\/p>\n

What seems to convince Wolfe that Wallace was the brighter bulb is that he did not make the chump mistake that Darwin did \u2014 for example, thinking that human higher mental faculties were the product of evolution. Wallace knew just where to draw the line. He knew where to draw the line on the beginning of the process too \u2013 Wallace rejected the idea that life could have evolved from inorganic matter. None of that nonsense about ammonia and phosphoric salts for Wallace! Hilariously, it never occurs to Wolfe that perhaps these are two of the reasons that Darwin has the bigger place in our history books.<\/p>\n

At this point we should pause and take a breath, because \u2026 well because now it is time to talk about Chomsky. You see, Wolfe assumes that by now you are just livid \u2013 livid I tell you! \u2013 at how the cultural elites gave poor hardworking Alfred Wallace the shaft. But wait! What if history is repeating itself and cultural elites are shafting some other regular guy even as you read this? Mind you, this new elite isn’t a dandy Victorian rich person elite \u2013 but a worse kind of elite. You know\u2026the kind of elite that is into math and numbers and thinks that he is smarter than you and me.<\/p>\n

Wolfe begins part two by carefully laying out the case for Chomsky’s greatness, for this is going to be another David and Goliath story and he wants his Goliath to be extra super gigantic. And it is all there: Chomsky the boy Genius, Chomsky taking down Skinner, Chomsky revolutionizing linguistics, the quotes saying he \u201cis the most important intellectual alive,” the citation indices that put him at eighth most cited person on the all time \u2013 right between Freud and Hegel \u2013 and finally the Minimalist Program and which has something to do with recursion in language (we’ll get to that).<\/p>\n

Then Wolfe starts chipping away at Chomsky in his classic Wolfean way. Not really chipping at anything Chomsky said or did; he just starts carefully layering together a picture of Chomsky just as he had for Darwin.<\/p>\n

\u201cNoam Chomsky, all ten years of him, was in Philadelphia when Barcelona fell. … His political outlook \u2013 anarchism \u2013 appears to have been set, fixed forever, at that moment. Or perhaps the word is pre-fixed … pre-fixed in a shtetl in Russia half a century before he was born.” Chomsky, Wolfe informs us, is one of those MIT indoor linguists \u201crelieved not to go into the not-so-great outdoors.” He prefers \u201clooking at learned journals with cramped type” and he \u201cnever left the computer, much less the building.” No, Chomsky is someone \u201cvery high, in an armchair, in an air conditioned office, spic and span,” one of those MIT intellectuals with \u201cradiation-bluish computer screen pallors and faux-manly open shirts,” steering well clear of the \u201cmuck of life down below.” <\/p>\n

Let’s set aside the point that Chomsky achieved his fame before computers or air-conditioned offices; these descriptions are designed to set us up for Alfred Russel Wallace 2.0 \u2013 a good son of a cowboy who is toiling away in the jungles of the Amazon, studying the language of an isolated group of peoples known as the Pirah\u00c3\u00a3. His name is Dan Everett. And the first thing Wolfe wants you to know is just how different Everett is from Chomsky.<\/p>\n

\u201cLook at him! Everett was everything Chomsky wasn’t: a rugged outdoorsman, a hard rider with a thatchy reddish beard and a head of thick thatchy reddish hair. He could have passed for a ranch hand or a West Virginia gas driller.” <\/p>\n

Wolfe is nothing if not the master of literary description, and right now you are probably imagining the two men looking something like this:<\/p>\n

\"untitled\"<\/p>\n

[Image credit: Taylor Carman<\/a>]<\/p>\n

But back to the narrative: What did Everett do? Why is he so important?<\/p>\n

Well, in 2005, Everett published a paper in Current Anthropology that described a group of people that, as Wolfe tells it, had \u201cnot only the simplest language on earth, but also the simplest culture. They had no leaders let alone any form of government. They had no social classes. They had no religion. \u2026They had no rituals or ceremonies at all. They had no music or dance whatsoever. They had no words for colors\u2026” And all that is interesting, but it has nothing to do with Chomsky. No, what REALLY makes the Pirah\u00c3\u00a3 interesting is that their language apparently did not have a property known as recursion. Crudely (we’ll get to the details later), recursive structures involve patterns that are repeated \u201cwithin themselves” \u2013 like the branching patterns in trees or the fractal patterns in snowflakes. Everett imagined (for some reason) that this fact (if it is a fact \u2013 see below) had refuted Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar.<\/p>\n

Wolfe, having read Wolfe’s claims, wants us to know that (a) he is persuaded, and (b) he LOVES boxing metaphors. <\/p>\n

\u201cOOOF!\u2014right into the solar plexus!”<\/p>\n

Everett to Chomsky:
\nCOME MEET THE TRIBE
\nTHAT KO’D YOUR THEORY<\/p>\n

But is it true? Did Everett and their Amazonian tribe really lay waste to seventy years of hard work by Chomsky and thousands of linguists around the world?<\/p>\n

The short answer is no, first, because Chomsky never said every language has recursion. Indeed what he had been claiming for decades is that he was interested in the properties of the biological system \u2013 the Language Acquisition Device — that makes it possible for us to learn languages that have properties like recursion.<\/p>\n

More specifically, what he was interested in were the low level biophysical properties that might make this possible. We can illustrate this idea by talking about snowflakes. There are different kinds of snowflakes all over the world and some of them exhibit very interesting recursive patterns and some are just very boring. But the Chomsky-like project for snowflakes would be to ask, what are the properties of water that give rise to these recursive patters when they occur. One property would be that the hydrogen atoms are at 104.5 degrees to each other, and so the water molecules can bind with each other and form interesting hexagonal structures\u2026and\u2026 well, that is just the beginning of the story. The point is that not all snowflakes have recursive patterns, but we want to understand the principles that explain WHY they do WHEN they do.<\/p>\n

Not surprisingly then, when people started claiming that Everett and the Pirah\u00c3\u00a3 had murderdeathkilled his research program, Chomsky seemed to be more baffled than he was in that Ali G interview \u2013 especially the part where Ali G pretends to confuse \u201cbilingual” and \u201cbisexual.” <\/p>\n