You blame Chomsky for WHAT?!?!?!?

OK, this is a pretty weird piece. It starts with this title + comment:

It's time to challenge the notion that there is only one way to speak English. Why do we persist in thinking that standard English is right, when it is spoken by only 15% of the British population? Linguistics-loving Harry Ritchie blames Noam Chomsky.

Wait, what? It's Chomsky's fault that there's linguistic bias? Here's the start of the article:

Did you see that great documentary on linguistics the other night? What about that terrific series on Radio 4 about the Indo-European language family tree? Or that news report on language extinction? It is strange that none of those programmes happened, or has ever happened: it's not as if language is an arcane subject. Just as puzzling is the conspicuous lack of a properly informed book about language – either our own or language in general.

Oh.  So, who gets the blame? After some meandering commentary on Pinker's Language Instinct, among other things, we eventually learn:

I put it down to the strange way that the discipline developed under the aegis of the man who has dominated and defined it since the late 50s, the father of modern linguistics, Chomsky.

And this is no vague blame, just about the popular impact or perception of linguistics:

the wholesale acceptance of Chomsky's rationalist assumptions has meant that the discipline has been hunting for unicorns while neglecting many key areas of language. There is still little research being carried out on, for example, environmental influences on children's language acquisition. 

Most pressingly of all, too little work is being done to record the languages currently facing extinction. By one estimate, 95% of the 7,000 languages now spoken in the world are in danger of dying out. Recording these should have been a priority.

I just googled 'endangered languages' and got over 2,000,000 hits. Google 'generative grammar' and you get over 500,000. That probably roughly reflects the current levels of activity on those two fronts. I would add something on 'environmental influences on children's language acquisition', but I'm not entirely sure what it means.

Ultimately, Chomsky "turned grammar into a technical subject full of jargon and algebra studied on whiteboards by men with beards". Yeah, that's certainly killed physics and cognitive science and whatnot. 

I eventually realized I was reading science fiction. 

Image from here.

"Chomsky's Nightmare"

In a recent post, I noted ever so briefly how some of the people leading the anti-foreign language crusades in the US are tied pretty directly to the extreme right, closing with acknowledging that the connection to linguistics was pretty tenuous.

Here's a closely parallel situation in a way: The June issue of The Progressive has a big article by Matt Rothschild, the editor, called: "Chomsky's Nightmare: Is Fascism coming to America?" (excerpt available here).

Chomsky lays out here a point that people had been saying that he made in his appearance here in April (which I missed), and one he's made elsewhere, quoted here:

Ridiculing the tea party shenanigans is a serious error. [The attitudes of the tea party people] are understandable."

He talks, as so often, about the deterioration of life for the big majority of Americans or recent decades -- falling income, etc. -- while bankers suddenly get extra billions. And:

People want some answers. They are hearing answers from only one place: Fox, talk radio, and Sarah Palin.

Agreed to an extent: The rise of non-far-right voices in the media remains still very slow, but I think that Rachel Maddow and progressive radio are working hard to counter that noise.

But the bigger argument, that the US is in danger of becoming a fascist country, is a tougher sale. In fact, Rothschild devotes a lot of the article to evaluating that and arguing that it's unlikely. Agreed again. Still, I'd agree with Chris Berlet, quoted in the article, that this is "time for a conversation about it."

In particular, and here's the tie to the earlier post, it seems beyond question right now that there are major party candidates openly expressing anti-democratic views. Arizona state senator Pearce forwards Nazi emails to his supporters and a pretty conservative (from what I know) paper can say about a US Senate candidate "Armed revolt part of Sharron Angle's rhetoric", with this passage in the article, starting with a quote from her that's pretty well known now:

"In fact, Thomas Jefferson said it’s good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years. I hope that’s not where we’re going, but you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies.”

Also that month, she told Reno conservative talk show host Bill Manders she hoped her opponent, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, would be defeated at the ballot box before the electorate resorted to more aggressive measures.

If you read the right news, you see that there are dozens of people out there saying this stuff, candidates for national and state office. These views have long been around but mostly at the margins, although hardly always (remember Jesse Helms?).

So, I don't fear that the fascists out there are actually about to take over, but we have to recognize that there's a set of people out there in power or close to power who would push as hard as they can in that direction.

"It is very difficult to criticize" Chomsky

The context of that is politics, not linguistics. Not that plenty of people won't continue to criticize him in both and other realms. The refusal to let Noam Chomsky enter Israel last week continues to amaze me and apparently lots of other people. This article from Ha(')aretz gives the latest, about a letter signed by 500 people, including leading academics, and ending with this quote:

Dr. Anat Matar from Tel Aviv University said that the Interior Ministry's act was "so baseless and insane, that it is very difficult to criticize [Chomsky] – that is the situation we have reached."

Is there any conceivable upside to the action? The man himself makes the point cleanly and clearly:

the government of Israel does not like the kinds of things I say — which puts them into the category of I suppose every other government in the world.

Yup.