Decoding Chomsky, by Chris Knight

Noam Chomsky has often discussed "Plato's Problem," which he obviously finds fascinating. The problem is this: how can people know so much given a relative poverty of stimuli? Just today you found yourself talking to someone and the words just flowed out of you; you didn't have to think about them beforehand. You probably never uttered some of those sentences before, in the exact way. We all take this for granted, easily. Plato wondered about it and surmised that the reason we are able to know so much is because we already knew it in a previous life! You just talk to each other and knowledge sorta miraculously emerges via a quasi midwifery. Or rather: our forebears knew things and passed this ability to know (best example: apprehending our native language so easily) on to us. In a sense, we already "know" everything, but we need it drawn out by some...process. Today, people talk about genes. Chomsky takes Plato's "soul" and changes it to something like "biological language acquisition device," but you already knew that. (<----see what I did there?)

But this Plato Problem still seems iffy to me.

Chomsky has often written about "Orwell's Problem" too: how can people not know so many things that truly impact their lives, when the information is basically right in front of them? Noam has offered a solution to why this problem exists in books such as his famous one from 1988 (co-written with Edward Herman), Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Very sophisticated propaganda tools have been developed during the 20th century, suffice to write, for now.

                                     Chris Knight, radical British anthropologist, studied

                                        Chomsky's works for over two decades

In the 1970s an intellectual proposed there's a "Chomsky Problem," which is this: how can one man write a massive body of work on linguistics, while never mentioning the social world or politics in those books, while at the same time issuing scads of books critical of his own country's foreign and domestic policies? In Chomsky's political books the mention of science, much less linguistics is basically zero. The writer who (as far as I know) coined the "Chomsky Problem" thought Noam's linguistic work was brilliant; his political writings were, IIRC, "naive." 

For at least 20 years I've wondered about the Chomsky Problem, but as I read more and more I came to the opposite conclusion: I thought Chomsky's linguistics were preposterous, while his criticism of the official lies of the State Department (and much much much more) were astonishingly acute.

I read books from the Right about Chomsky that were mostly ad hominem character assassinations. I've read far too many books by academics on his linguistics that see his grammar models as genius. Of course, the worldwide Left love his political books. There are at least five intellectuals who seem to have made their careers out of explaining, collecting, and championing Chomsky's oeuvre. 

George Lakoff is one cognitive neurolinguist whose work makes a hell of a lot of sense to me, and he seems to despise Chomsky. Chomsky seems to despise Lakoff. (See Randy Allen Harris's The Linguistics Wars on this, and I understand Harris has an update in the works!) Chomsky answers Lakoff's barbs by saying Lakoff doesn't "understand" his work. But Lakoff was one of the early bright followers of Chomsky's linguistics models, only to break with him - radically - when it became apparent Chomsky's linguistics would never be able to account for semantics (by which I mean meaning in language). And Lakoff (who has amassed quite a large body of scholarship himself) has barely had anything to say about Noam's politics. Lakoff is definitely a liberal of some sort...

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So: Social Anthropologist Chris Knight (Wiki) has, almost miraculously, solved the Chomsky Problem. I've been trying to solve it for 20 years; I now feel the euphoria that one of us has solved it. My many blogspews here as the "Overweening Generalist" on my own attempts to solve the Chomsky Problem now seem horribly unsophisticated. And so it goes...

 Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics, recently released, is an astonishingly well-written and researched volume that will probably be the most important work in the history of ideas, post World War II, that you'll read for quite some time, and I say this if only out of Chomsky's massive influence. Knight has made a stellar contribution to the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of intellectuals 1945-now, and has explicated lucidly a new and dynamite version of how the "cognitive revolution" arose. 

Knight has apparently spent the past 20 years researching this book and has managed to boil it all down to 240 pages, plus endnotes, a massive bibliography, and index. In an interview he mentioned that he'd finished a work in his field of Anthropology and hadn't really covered the origin of language in humans, because he felt he didn't know enough about the subject. Knowing Chomsky was Mr. Linguistics (having virtually single-handedly made it into a science and moving Linguistics from the Anthropology Department into the new Cognitive Science labs at your nearby Big University), he read Chomsky's linguistics in order to understand. And he ran into what I ran into: it's a cold, abstract to a painful degree, literally meaningless, an unworkable series of models that, - get this - by definition, has nothing to do with humans communicating with each other. 

Chris Knight says he admires Chomsky's political work, and there's no reason not to believe him; he clearly admires Chomsky's scholarship and courage in this regard. As do I. At times Knight's said there are a lot of conscientious academics and intellectuals who have criticized the US as imperial power, but no one really even comes close to Chomsky. That said...

                                    Noam Chomsky, whose linguistic models are 

                                   (finally!) seeming to be exposed as going nowhere

Anyone who has tried to follow Chomsky's many models of "Cartesian Linguistics" (AKA masochists) and thought to themselves, "Either I'm an idiot or this is a put-on, or possibly massive fraud" - that was me at one point - will know what I'm referring to: "Phrase Structure Rules," "Transformational Rules," "Grammar," "Deep Structure," the nature of the "language organ," "The Minimalist Program," "Universal Grammar," and "Merge"? All scientistic, all going nowhere, basically. (Knight runs all these down, pp. 173-179)

So, wait a minute: What? How can Noam write about lies and propaganda - which are by definition language and signs and symbols and social work among human beings - while his linguistics work has nothing to do with our social being? Because of an admitted "schizophrenic" life Chomsky admits he must lead, because, since the 1950s, he's worked in the very place that the Pentagon has funneled enormous sums of research money into: MIT. Perhaps because his quasi-kabbalistic linguistics allowed him that Ivory Tower opiate he needed to deal with the cognitive dissonance? If so, if this is anywheres near a close view of Chomsky, then it's dramatic and strange to the nth degree, no?

Chomsky once wrote an article on the fall of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War. He greatly admired the anarchists. He had just turned 10 years old. He decided he'd rejected Trotskyism by age 12. This is an interesting fellow, eh? 

Noam had friends help him land the job at MIT, where he was able to work on the Pentagon's new idea: that computers and cybernetics and information theory would help make the world safe for capitalism after WWII. The idea that there's a language acquisition device - a very sophisticated computer - inside every human being's head? Very appealing to Pentagon folk. This was a computer whose source code must be cracked! And Chomsky's work looked like it was moving in exactly the direction they wanted. Maybe we can develop a computer that can translate any language into English; that should help in the Cold War effort against the Godless Commies. Let's let Chomsky lead a disembodied cognitive revolution. And he did. But: Noam didn't want to do any intellectual work that would help kill people in the name of Omnicorp.

Here's where adept conspiracy theorists can take this book and run with it: did Chomsky hijack linguistics and purposefully make it useless? Neither Knight nor I believe this to be true: Chomsky seems to genuinely have ideas - which seem bizarre and fruitless to me - about a sort of purity of work in "science." There's one of William James's lectures on pragmatism from the early 20th century, in which James talks about two vastly different temperaments among thinkers: the "tough-minded" and the "tender-minded." Somehow, Chomsky is the apex of "tough-minded" when doing his political work, while his Linguistics is the very apogee of the "tender-minded."

His persona as a man of conscience and political integrity seems to have been a perfect match for the Pentagon: see? The top man in Cognitive Science is free to write his books, give talks criticizing the Pentagon all over the world. Because we're a free society! 

But how does Chomsky manage this cognitive dissonance? Does he feel it? What have been the unintended consequences of Chomsky's total oeuvre? Knight answers these questions to my satisfaction. To those of you who've heard or read that Chomsky defended a Holocaust Denier named Robert Faurisson, was/is friends with former CIA director John Deutsch, and went against virtually the entire faculty and student body at MIT in defending Walt Rostow in getting his job back at MIT, even though Rostow has been nailed overwhelmingly in Chomsky's books on Vietnam? Knight satisfactorily answers these queries, too. 

As an Anthropologist, Knight treats the heavily-funded-by-Pentagon cognitive scientists as a "tribe." Why did this particular form of nonsense catch on so wildly in postwar Unistat? Knight gives a fascinating answer. If the only other superpower seemed to run on ideas based in matter (Dialectical Materialism), then what if we do away with matter? And, to a large extent, they did. Information/data is weightless, travels at the speed of light: matter is secondary. So is the Body...

Along the way, you'll learn about the deep roots of Sociobiology (and a form of scientific feminism that needs to come back from being beaten down by anti-science Leftists in academia), how a Russian Futurist/surrealist from the first two decades of the 20th century influenced Chomsky without Chomsky seeming to know about it, and much more.

If you had to ask me, what was the overall value of Chomsky's linguistic work at MIT? I'd say it was  "Don't study language using this approach! Language is and has no doubt always been a deeply social thing!"

If you're interested in politics, philosophy, and the idea of "science" being an open and public - and possibly ultimately unified thing?: Decoding Chomsky is for you. If you're already a seasoned reader of Chomsky, I feel safe to say you'll learn a few new things from this book. For me, the book spoke to my interests in the origin of language (of which Chomsky's work is literally laughable) and the fallout from the new and wonderfully interdisciplinary "cognitive sciences." Knight let me on to some reasons I hadn't even considered about why my valuation of being a "generalist" has taken such a beating since the 1950s. Not long ago I wrote a piece about why I thought Alfred Korzybski's work had waned, and Knight fills in a lot of gaps there, too. I'm interested in the history of Structuralism, the academy, "PR", mass stupidity, intellectuals, embodied knowledge, Descartes, Plato, Newton, Galileo and Bertrand Russell, the possible synthesizing of all knowledge, why many people have the idea that "science" isn't for them, the idea of theory and practice going hand in hand, and the timeless notion that ideas have consequences and one clue to this is looking at the time and place and social situation in which ideas blast off and catch on. 

So, I loved this book. My intellectual friends have already heard WAY too much about my problems with Chomsky, and I'm only so lathered up over Noam because I love him, although I know it doesn't seem like it. Ya just hafta take my word. - OG

Chris Knight's website for further ideas about Chomsky and MIT

Here's an interview with Chris Knight in the journal Radical Anthropology from five or so years ago that gives a lot of the gist and pith of Decoding Chomsky. It was this interview, sent to me by Sue Howard, that felt like a revelation: "Here's a guy who seems to have maybe solved the Chomsky Problem!" 

If you have been taken by Chomsky's ideas about language and want to remediate, some suggestions:

-The Major Transitions of Evolution, by John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary

-Adam's Tongue, by Derek Bickerton

-Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, by Michael Tomasello

-Philosophy In The Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson

-From Molecule to Metaphor, by Jerome Feldman

-Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, by Sarah Hrdy

-The Way We Think, by Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier

Here's something many of us are looking forward to: 7000 Universes: How the Languages We Speak Shape the Way We Think, by the stellar Lera Boroditsky. Gotta wait till 2018, though...

If you're way too busy and don't think you can get to reading Decoding Chomsky soon, HERE is a pretty damned good podcast interview of Chris Knight about Chomsky, by the thoughtful and erudite publisher and science fiction writer Douglas Lain.

Post scriptum: After writing about the Two Chomskys in light of William James's ideas of the "tough-minded" and "tender-minded" I remembered I blogged on it four years ago.

                                         Psychedelische Grafik von Bob Campbell

Rachel Dolezal, Caitlyn Jenner and Self-Definition, "Passing" and the Myth of "Race"

Prefatory Remarks: This is Hot Stuff for the OG
With these two stories - Dolezal and Jenner - taking up so much public mind-space lately, I need to strike while the iron is hot and get in a jab or two, perhaps try to get in a mixed metaphor. Because this issue and ones that surround it fascinate me no end. It's got everything an overweening generalist can frolic in: language, social perception, biology, philosophical "essentialism" and reifications, the social unconscious/paideuma, libertarian and Nietzschean and pragmatic ideas about self-creation and realization, "reality", imposters, frauds, and mass contradiction. Just for starters. So I can only touch on a few topics before I bore the crap out of even my most fervent reader.

Confessio
A friend brought up my blogspew on the Joe Satriani book, and I went on to confess that I read far too many rock star biographies and autobiographies, and that they're often so shallow and filled with omissions that I don't know why I read these books. I've probably read about 60 of these things in the past four years. It's my own form of "slumming" reading. I enjoy these books, even if they're not very good. As a library clerk I noted certain patrons read mystery novels as if they were their own form of crossword puzzles. Other intellectual types will read porn. (I do this too.)

In the past few years I've noted the rise of the phrases "hate watching" and "hate reading." I don't think I'm hate-reading these rock-star books. I have a background as a guitar player and teacher, and I told my friend I feel like I'm sort of "like" these people, I just never "made it." But I understand the worlds they inhabit. Or rather: I imagine I do. And then, internally and without saying anything, I'd suddenly realized I'd just given an account of part of who I "am" and what social group/subculture I feel like I'm somehow privy to. And, Dolezal and Jenner had been ricocheting through my consciousness as of late. This is something I think we all do: we sub-vocalize stories to ourselves about who we "are", who are "our" people, what tribe we belong to, etc. Often, we say stuff out loud. Lawd knows there are jabbering orifices in the media who are happy to tell all of us who "really is" who or if someone "really isn't" a "true" member of some group. We have a long way to go with this jit, and I'm frequently as guilty as anyone else.

Robert Trivers
At this point I could write 5000 words on the work of renegade, colorful genius biologist Robert Trivers, but will leave this for some other day. What he's written on the biology of deception, which requires self-deception in order to work well, has really blown my mind. Also: though he's a white guy who came from the East Coast and has had more influence on evolutionary psychology than anyone: he seems to "be" sorta "black." It's not just me. In David Jay Brown's intro to the interview with Trivers published in Mavericks of the Mind (found HERE), Trivers's colleague Burney Le Boeuf refers to Trivers as "the blackest white man I know." Trivers joined the Black Panther Party in 1979 and named Huey Newton as one of his children's godfather. He loves Jamaica and Jamaican women and rasta and cannabis, and says he's "Jamaican in my soul and spirit." Anyway...

Caitlyn Jenner
As far as Caitlyn Jenner goes, my joy is that many of us have evolved enough to just say, "Good for her! It takes courage." Other than that, it's her business, and let us not forget the vast accumulation of scientific social activity and research and technique that allows anyone to physically become more or what they feel like is their "true self." (When I was very young and Bruce Jenner won the Decathlon in the Olympics, he was my hero for a few months. I wanted to be a decathlete! Then, as a painfully skinny asthmatic, I picked up an actual shot - the metal ball used in the shot-put - and realized I might imagine other fallback positions. How he fell in with Kardashians I have no idea and probably will never find out...and sorta hope I never do.)

Science!
When it comes to Rachel Dolezal: what better story to expose those ideological positions of media people who don't seem to have internalized the scientific consensus on "race." Let me quote from the American Association of Physical Anthropology's statement on the biological aspects of race:

Humanity cannot be classified into discrete geographic categories with absolute boundaries. Partly as a result of gene flow, the hereditary characteristics of human populations are in a state of perpetual flux. Distinctive local populations are continually coming into and passing out of existence. Such populations do not correspond to breeds of domestic animals, which have been produced by artificial selection over many generations for specific human purposes. There is no necessary concordance between biological characteristics and culturally defined groups. On every continent, there are diverse populations that differ in language, economy, and culture. There is no national, religious, linguistic or cultural group or economic class that constitutes a race...there is no causal linkage between these physical and behavioral traits, and therefore it is not justifiable to attribute cultural characteristics to genetic inheritance.

Sociology!
And YET...we all, even those of us who have internalized the above scientific idea, "know" that race is a Big Deal in our lives. The 1928 Thomas Theorem in sociology holds, and fast:

If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.

Almost all of us will want to tweak the Theorem by replacing "men" with "men and women" or just "humans." But this quote in itself is worth internalizing, if not memorizing, eh?

From the Former Lew Alcindor
So: I've been following the Dolezal story for my own purposes, and it's one that tells me far more about the commenters than Dolezal herself. And who comes along, in Time magazine no less, to articulate what my basic take is? Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, another one of my childhood sports heroes. Kareem knows race is a social construct yet most people don't know or act like it, and besides, who doesn't wanna be "black" every now and then?

Mezz Mezzrow
This reminds me of one of the most amazing books I've ever read: Really the Blues, by Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe. Not only does the jewish Mezz identify with what he perceives as the authenticity of the "Negro," but he gradually "becomes" one, officially: prison wardens honor his insistence that he be housed with the blacks and not the whites; the draft board allows Mezz to pass as black. Mezz passed, athough he didn't look black at all. I accept him as black as part of a Nietzschean self-creation which was so good, his black-skinned jazz colleagues accepted him as one of their own.

He married a black woman, lived as a black man, resided in an African-American mental culture, so thoroughly internalized the ethos of his black friends that he felt he "really was" "black." (Side Q: did J.K. Rowling get the term Mezz sometimes uses for cannabis, "muggles", from Mezz/Wolfe? Does Voldemort know about this?)

Mezz, as filtered through the canny writer Bernard Wolfe, identifies with all that is Dionysian in black culture, against the stuffy, stuck, miserableness of white culture. And New Orleans-style anarchic jazz is the epitome: a mind-meld of true consciousness flowing out of musical instruments. All Mezz wants is "authenticity" and to feel really good. We read 1946's Really the Blues for many reasons: the vivid depictions of the gangster underworld in Unistat during Prohibition, the anecdotes about famous jazzmen (it's why Woody Allen said he likes the book), about "jive" and the sociolinguistics of Harlem in the 1930s and 40s, tales of pot smoking versus alcohol and its "juice heads", and that damned opium that tore Mezz apart for awhile. It's also fanciful beyond belief, but we're never sure to what extent.

Something that I've discovered has been noted previously by others, but perhaps not well enough: passages in Kerouac's On the Road that discuss jazz? Kerouac was probably highly influenced by Mezzrow here. Kerouac didn't admit to reading Mezz/Wolfe, but Ginsberg remembers the book being around in his closest circle (of very very many circles!), and Kerouac was in that circle. Mezz/Wolfe: 1946. On the Road: 1955. FWIW...I know that my reading of Really the Blues took the shine off the pants of Kerouac's depictions of jazz ecstasy, and I'd read Kerouac first. Mezz really felt it, and though Mezz is talking about New Orleans-style jazz, and what Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty are digging seems more be-bop? (Mezz famously seems almost retrograde in his aesthetic.)

Bernard Wolfe, like Robert Anton Wilson (their careers as writers have much in common), who actually wrote the book, went to Yale, was with Trotsky in Mexico, was guided into a career of writing porn by Henry Miller and Anais Nin: Wolfe needed something to pay bills and wanted to keep up his writing life, was influenced by Alfred Korzybski and Norbert Wiener and a psychoanalyst named Edmund Bergler, and wrote a science fiction book called Limbo, about which scholar Carolyn Geduld writes, "In its own way, Limbo may be as difficult a book as James Joyce's Ulysses. The latter imposes difficulties of form on a relatively simple narrative, while Limbo uses a simple form - the science fiction, antiutopian novel - to discuss very complex theoretical material."- from Bernard Wolfe, by Carolyn Geduld, p.73...Enough of this digression...

In short, I see Mezz's book "as told to" Wolfe - who makes a brief appearance as a character in the book - as one of those autobiographies that strike me as Wholly Other. But I do believe Mezz really thought he was black. And he gives his reasons. And I honor them.

                                Mezz Mezzrow, cannabis enthusiast, friend of Louis Armstrong,
                                "black" man. Photo by Wm. P. Gottlieb

A Philosopher of "Passing"
Daniel Silvermint is a Philosophy professor at the U. of Connecticut and writes interestingly about "passing" with regard to the Dolezal case HERE. Note well his second paragraph, in which he states his background and that he's "probably mistaken about much." This was for a time a "thing" among cultural anthropologists who wrote ethnographies. I feel such "disclaimers" would bring more light to almost all discussions coming from professors, and other culture writers, if only from a claim made from the very heart of the sociology of knowledge.

What turns me on is any attempt to create a proto-taxonomy of "passing." There's "reverse passing," which Silvermint objects to, as it assumes there's only one "natural" direction anyone would pass that would be appropriate, and he reminds us there's a remarkable number of social categories of passing and cases. People try to "pass" for something else for any number of reasons. We need to look at who is claiming what identity and what their personal circumstances and priorities are before making distinctions. But it's ultra complex stuff: we all carry around stereotypes and assumptions, but forget how fluid and arbitrary these identities seem. It seems to me that taking to heart the scientific findings about race quoted above, together with the gritty socially constructed world of "race" we must inhabit, is but a starting point.

Silvermint says some cases of passing are about wanting others to misidentify you. I often wonder how many times I've not noticed a really accomplished transvestite. There seems to be a notion of "trans" passing, but someone who's undergone sexual reassignment really "is" the new sex. Even with this, there seem to be infinite gradations. Just hormones? Hormones and surgery, but still dressing the way you did before you became transsexual? Etc. Far more interesting to me, and probably more pervasive, is what Silvermint calls "unintentional passing" or "passive passing": other people do a poor job of identifying what's going on. He gives examples: we see someone who's interracial and call them white. (Or with Obama: black.) Intersex people might be seen as male. (See Alice Dreger's recent book Galileo's Middle Finger for a tremendous elaboration on this idea.) Or, Silvermint suggests, we might see a gender nonconformist as a woman. I knew two brothers in Los Angeles, both very charming and funny, well-educated and polyglot. They were muslims from Afghanistan, but in Los Angeles after 9/11, they were okay with regularly being mistaken for being Mexican workers. And it's now an old joke that liberal Unistatians who traveled to Europe after Bush and Cheney started the Iraq war, sewed Canadian flags on their backpacks.

We seem to have a very strong need to put people in boxes, the "correct" categories, always forgetting we made all the categories up long ago and have reified them.

Other cases are the oppressed passing as the privileged. (What's with all the fancy cars parked in impoverished neighborhoods?) Or: privileged people passing as the oppressed. I recall a fascinating lecture from Anthropology professor Sam Sandt in which he said there are some groups that are relatively easy to access in order to do an ethnography on them: the nouveau riche are easy: they want people to know how great they are 'cuz they're now rich! The most difficult group is the Old Money people: families that have been very wealthy for a few generations. Often their houses are not viewable from the street, and they drive old beat-up cars.

Dolezal's parents, who outed her and showed the press photos of Rachel as a teenage girl who looks a lot like the beautiful and talented actress Laura Linney, think they've blown the whistle on their daughter and ended the charade. Had Dolezal adopted the "oppressed" position to gain advantage? To me, as of this date, it's not at all that clear. She, like Mezzrow, seems to truly see herself as "black." Again, I tend to agree with Abdul-Jabbar. Silvermint brings up the "mutually-beneficial" variety of passing. This might fit Dolezal, too.

Probably most of us draw the line at passing yourself off as the long-lost cousin who shows up with his inheritance due, like the Duke and Dauphin in Huckleberry Finn. That's just a straight con-job, right? At the same time, read about the life of Ferdinand Waldo Demara, "The Great Imposter," who once passed himself off as a surgeon, and when confronted with a necessary chest surgery, found a textbook on how to do it, crammed feverishly, and pulled it off! The patient lived! Demara's life as an imposter is truly amazing, and he had a proto-Erving Goffman-like theory about the presentation of self in everyday life, what's taken for "reality" and how to bend this reality. He's a criminal, yes. But also: some sort of Artist.

Here's another type of passing: Tania Head, the Woman Who Wasn't There. She had everyone believing her story about losing her boyfriend in the World Trade Center on 9/11. Why did she do it? There's a fascinating documentary about her. She seems like Demara to me, but less daring and artistic, but then my personal taxonomy of passing is still inchoate.

Silvermint's strongest point, to me, is this: "We don't normally think of racialized group membership as something one can genuinely transition into or out of, but perhaps that's as socially determined as anything else." I think he's right: how we carry on conversations with each other can reinforce socially-constructed categories.

All of this passing business seems complex-unto-vertigo, but it could just boil down to Robert Anton Wilson's maxim: Reality is what you can get away with. There are some readers here who know me, and they're "on" to my game. But to those who don't know me personally: that picture over to the side may not be accurate at all. This "Michael" guy who calls himself the "Overweening Generalist" just MIGHT be a 47 year old Latina lesbian. What do we really know, at this point?

Some Other Passing Examples To Think On
The Founder of the Nation of Islam lied about his "race."

Emperor Norton of San Francisco (mutually beneficial passing?)

Neo-Nazi Craig Cobb finds out his ancestors were black (Dolezal made this point: that we all came out of Africa at some point. I've often felt compelled to check "African-American" on bureaucratic forms, instead of "caucasian" -which most people would say I "am" - simply in protest that those boxes were there at all. But this idiot essentialist Cobb deserved to be blinded by science, no?)

The Cobb story reminds me of comedian Dave Chappelle's brilliant and hilarious bit on a white supremacist who's blind...and black. See it HERE. If you've never seen it, it's NSFW and 9 minutes of your life you really should make time for...

Jazzman Billy Tipton was really a female all along.

Two books on the subject: Passing, by Nella Larsen, and Black Like Me, by John Howard Griffin.  Get thee to the library!

Three articles on Donezal I read closely:
"Rachel Donezal and the History of Passing for Black"
"Rachel Donezal's 'Passing' Isn't So Unusual"
"16 Key Takeaways From Rachel Dolezal's Interview with Melissa Harris-Perry"

I previously riffed on some aspects of self-identity back in 2011.

You'll notice I haven't said a thing about two of our favorite actor-Scientologists, John Travolta and Tom Cruise. And it shall remain that way.

Finally: I must recommend a wonderful book from 2012 by an Anthropologist named Agustin Fuentes titled Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You. Subtitled, "Busting myths about human nature." I found the official statement from the AAPA about race in his book. It's not the easiest of reads, but the slog was for me well worth my while, and it might be worth yours as well.

                                           artwork by Bobby Campbell

Trust Me On This: Deception, Biology, Politics

"Reality is the temporary resultant of the struggle between rival gangs of programmers." - Robert Anton Wilson

When I was 16 I lived with my father just outside of Denver, and he and his childhood friend and drinking buddy got into watching pro-wrestling on TV. The absurdity and theatricality of it all made them howl with laughter. Later I attended a few live shows in downtown Denver, and was struck by the idea that a few people sitting near us seemed to believe the "matches" were on the up-and-up.

Later I read then-structuralist Roland Barthes's Mythologies (I should say I tried to read Barthes, but the  epistemological [semiotic] assumptions - derived from Ferdinand de Saussure, who I had not read at the time - rendered much of Barthes's work opaque to me) and this 1957 book had an essay on pro wrestling, which I'll link to here, if anyone is interested. Barthes contrasted boxing - in which the thrust is to see who wins, with wrestling, which was a sum of episodes, the point not being about winning, but the sheer spectacle of the thing, which with its pantomimes of characters Good and Evil, had an underlying message of playing on the ideas in mass culture about Justice.

Later I read much of Murray Edelman's work in sociology. He had a lot to say about politics as a spectacle. (Here's the NYT obit for Edelman, which gives a thumbnail of his concerns.) Edelman seems a quite underrated figure; he was writing about things that Jean Baudrillard took up much later, and, while in academic language, Edelman was still quite readable. Some have called him the first postmodern political scientist. Politics? It's a show, sorta like wrestling. Edelman says that people fall into the drama, play parts, internalize the totality of the show, and increasingly take it seriously. What? I'll try to elaborate.

Look at the foggy, mystifying language surrounding politics and its main delivery system, the mass media. Look at how many people seem to not question the semantic content of the jargon and glossary in political-speak. (Because they don't know how? Or they'd rather stick with the "fun" of playing inside the melodrama of politics? I don't know. Edelman seemed to wonder too.) Political institutions are symbolic acts that must be interpreted within some schema or another. But the institutions and acts tend to serve to more or less keep things the same rather than change things. Oh, changes do occur. If they didn't, the Show would get stale, and the players wouldn't be able to take it seriously anymore. It must perpetually seem vital to the players within. Voters who don't show up or who don't follow politics? They're onto the game and don't want to play. They see the game as bullshit. I think Edelman is right here to an extent, but I also think there are people who would rather not know anything; they don't see into/through Edelman's elaborate socio-political spectacle because they never had a serious look in the first place.

Rituals in politics are elaborate. The quantity of them is large and they are repeated so often that people cannot "see" the rituals as rituals. Rather, something solemn about Justice and Freedom and Democracy and The Good and Fairness and Meritocracy is being upheld. (Sorta like...wrestling?) The rituals of politics invest in the authority of the main players on the stage, and we are meant to hold the whole show in awe.

Now, irony and provocation being two of my favorite tropes from intellectuals, I appreciate Edelman's ouvre and I think quite a lot of it is accurate and generally edifying discourse, but, like most of those thinkers we call postmodern, there tends to be an inexorable taking of the thesis to extremes, so that something begins to waft up...what's that? Do you smell it? You do? Then it's not just me, thankgod. Yea, but what is it? Does it smell like burning garbage to you? No? Like unpleasant incense? Really? Oh! Now I know what it is! We've been reading postmodernists, and we smell a reductio ad absurdum. Whew! I was about to get the fire extinguisher.

What I like about Edelman's work is the Things Are Not As They Seem-ishness of it all; I also like that he concentrated on language and semiotic/symbolic analysis, which fits into my main model and along with valued thinkers like Robert Anton Wilson, Alfred Korzybski, Marshall McLuhan, George Lakoff, and even, in a way, Noam Chomsky. Also, there's a thread running from Giambattista Vico's 2000+ years of class warfare of the Rich vs. Everyone Else that Edelman can fit with.

What I don't like about the over-baked aspect of Edelman is the lingering hopelessness, and there's quite a clash between an idea that I think holds much sway - that if you don't "do" politics it'll be done to you - and the sort of paralysis via analysis I get from Edelman, which leads to passivity. He has made me question my role in the political Show, and now I'm far more ironic about it all, but I'm verging away. Back to deception.

In the blogpost from four days ago, I briefly discussed Edward O. Wilson. Another giant in Sociobiology, who was there at creation, was Robert Trivers. In the bibliography for Wilson's revolutionary 1975 work, Sociobiology: A New Synthesis a handful of Trivers's papers are listed. Trivers has been perhaps most noted for being a sort of hardcore exponent of Dawkins's kin selection idea, but with particular emphasis on reciprocal altruism (shorthand: "you scratch my back and then I'll scratch yours" in Biology). When you get into reciprocal altruism, you also allow for "deals" between non-kin. It gets very abstruse when you start to run with it, especially when you're trying to keep in mind what Hamilton wrote, how EOW took it compared to Dawkins, how they sought to create new ideas to separate themselves as the first-line sociobiologists/evolutionary psychologists, etc.

As Trivers elaborated on reciprocal altruism, he began to concentrate on something that seemed to spin out of it: deception. And now, after a few decades of writing and thinking about it, he's maybe the foremost thinker on deception from biology on up to humans.

Trivers, a manic-depressive genius since childhood, a longtime pot smoker, classic anti-authoritarian, who, in May of 1979 joined the Black Panthers and, according to David Jay Brown, Trivers's colleague Burney Le Boeuf, called Trivers "the blackest white man I know." (Mavericks of the Mind, p.54)

In John Horgan's review of Trivers's book The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, we see this passage:

Trivers calls deceit a “deep feature” of life, even a necessity, given genes’ brutal struggle to prevail. Anglerfish lure prey by dangling “bait” in front of their jaws, edible butterflies deter predators by adopting the coloring of poisonous species. Possums play possum, cowbirds and cuckoos avoid the hassle of raising offspring by laying their eggs in other birds’ nests. Even viruses and bacteria employ subterfuge to sneak past a host’s immune system. The complexity of organisms, Trivers suggests, stems at least in part from a primordial arms race between deceit and deceit-detection.

So how much of this stuff goes on, in all the domains of our lives? It seems easy to fall into paranoia when contemplating The Spectacle, language as virus, conspiracy, double and triple crosses and agents, counterfeiting, prevarication (the very word seems to be hiding something, no?), "spin," fakes, secrecy, claims of "transparency," the information deformations that occur within status hierarchies, advertising and PR and hypnotic techniques, etc. Let us consider this list as The Shadow of ourselves, vis a vis what we'd prefer to think about "reality": that most of us care about the Truth and act trustworthy, because we want others to act honestly with us. The Shadow would be all that which is...less than trustworthy? 

The vast data from the animal kingdom shows how common camouflage is, how many animals have developed a way to APPEAR far more menacing than they are, on and on. Is deceit built into the fabric of all biology? It appears so. But then so is the attempt to detect...

It's common to read about deceit and lying and note the linkage between our very complex intra-species signaling system (i.e, human language) and how it's exquisitely available for the purposes of deceit. When ants communicate via very elaborate pheromones, the lying has its limits, it seems, at least compared to our signaling systems.

What I also note is the biological metaphor often used in writings on deceit: that lying is "parasitic" upon the truth, and that too many people engaged in deceit tend to ruin a system. From The Oxford Companion To The Mind:

Conveying useful information from one person to another about 'facts' is the essence of this extraordinary human invention. Lying is therefore parasitic upon general truthfulness, and if its incidence becomes too high the system becomes useless.

So here we have a reason for truthfulness that's not lame-brained ("The Bible sez..." or "good people tell the truth!", etc): the system is preserved. But then we must ask, "Is the system worth preserving?" Since Ronald Reagan, people running for office as Republicans have made it part of their platform that government doesn't work and should get out of the way of "people's lives," by which they mean corporations should be able to do whatever they want. Convince people you want a job that you don't think should even exist? What "system" do they favor? And do they really believe what they say or are they being deceptive? Hoo-boy...

The "parasite" metaphor brings us back to biology, but other writers have borrowed a metaphor from physics: that deception is like entropy. But I'd rather return to wrestling.

                                 Eric Weinstein, popularizer of the kayfabe idea
                                                  for thinkers caught in "ordinary" economic reality

Eric Weinstein, relating his ideas about information and deceit in economic systems, has drawn on the obscure wrestling term kayfabe. In an article in This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking (edited by John Brockman), Weinstein cites recent work in evolutionary biology by the aforementioned Trivers and Richard Alexander that says deceit plays a bigger role than accurate information transfer in systems with selective pressures. "Yet most of our thinking treats deception as a perturbation in the exchange of pure information, leaving us unprepared to contemplate a world in which fakery may reliably crowd out the genuine. In particular, humanity's future selective pressures appear likely to remain tied to economic theory that uses as its central construct a market model based on assumptions of perfect information." (p.321) 

Weinstein says that in the early years of wrestling, matches went on for too long, guys got hurt, the matches became boring, and eventually the "sport" became a ritualized thing, "negotiated, choreographed and rehearsed," its complex dramaturgical "rules" closed to outsiders. This seems something like our financial system now, "an altered reality of layered falsehoods, in which nothing can be assumed to be as it appears." Wait, there's more.

Why didn't the "freshwater" Chicago school of economists foresee the 2008 economic meltdown? Why didn't the "saltwater" Ivy Leaguers catch it? Probably because they're caught in the kayfabe: there is a quiet agreement to not let the outsiders know the game is fixed. Note: neither group suffered for not knowing. And still they are "experts." 

Weinstein says that, if you're wondering why there are no investigative journalists doing the real work they used to do and seemingly "bitter corporate rivals cooperate on everything from joint ventures to lobbying efforts," we'd understand this better if we knew what a kayfabe is. And it comes out of the traveling-carnival of hokum that is professional wrestling. 

"What makes kayfabe remarkable is that it provides the most complete example of the process by which a wide class of important endeavors transition from failed reality to successful fakery." (p.322) Weinstein sees kaybrification as an important feature of love, science, war, finance and politics. And we would all be better served to know this term and its mechanisms. The truly horrifying thing about kayfabe, as I read Weinstein about it, is that it shows the 1%/Ruling Class and its managers how many layers of disbelief the human mind is capable of suspending before fantasy melds seamlessly with reality.

Add to that: wrestling eventually became so over the top that it had to admit it was fake...but the public loved it anyway, or as Weinstein puts it, "Professional wrestling had come full circle to its honest origins by at last moving the responsibility for deception off the shoulders of the performers and into the willing minds of the audience." (p.323) (an online link to the Weinstein article I'm drawing from is HERE.)

Going back to my idea about secrecy and spin and deceit and advertising and other such terms as part of the Shadow of truth, and given the kayfabe and Trivers's arguments (even bacteria and viruses employ subterfuge to sneak past your immune system)...to quote a famous painter: Who are we? Where are we going?

My favorite philosopher, Robert Anton Wilson, was not an academic and more like a great generalist-thinker. He gave an interview 36 years ago and here's one Q and his A that, I think, pertains to these topics, and provides a slight slant that allows us more perspective:

Science Fiction Review: How serious are you about the Illuminati and conspiracies in general?

Robert Anton Wilson: Being serious is not one of my vices. I will venture, however, that the idea that there are no conspiracies has been popularized by historians working for universities and institutes funded by the principle conspirators of our time: the Rockefeller-Morgan banking interests, the Council on Foreign Relations crowd, the Trilateral Commission. This is not astonishing or depressing. Conspiracy is standard mammalian politics for reasons to be found in ethology and Von Neumann's and Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Vertebrate competition depends on knowing more than the opposition, monopolizing information along with territory, hoarding signals. Entropy, in a word. Science is based on transmitting the signal accurately, accelerating the process of information transfer. Negentropy. The final war may be between Pavlov's Dog and Schrodinger's Cat.

However, I am profoundly suspicious about all conspiracy theories, including my own, because conspiracy buffs tend to forget the difference between a plausible argument and a real proof. Or between a legal proof, a proof in the behavioral sciences, a proof in physics, a mathematical or logical proof, or a parody of any of the above. My advice to all is Buddha's last words, "Doubt, and find your own light." Or, as Crowley wrote, "I slept with Faith and found her a corpse in the morning. I drank and danced all night with Doubt, and found her a virgin in the morning." Doubt suffereth long, but is kind; doubt covereth a multitude of sins; doubt puffeth not itself up into dogma. For now abideth doubt, hope, and charity, these three: and the greatest of these is doubt. With doubt all things are possible. Every other entity in the universe, including Goddess Herself, may be trying to con you. It's all Show Biz. Did you know that Billy Graham is a Bull Dyke in drag?
-The Illuminati Papers, p.47

Question from the OG: Where is The Shadow? 

Here's 7 minutes of Chomsky and Trivers, riffing on the topic of deception:

Closing In On My Chomsky Problem, OR: The Chomsky From 20,000 Fathoms

Studying this issue highlights my basic epistemological stance of "model agnosticism": I consider all of my perceptions and thoughts about "reality" as necessarily contingent. This is mostly due to my understanding of the way the nervous system processes information, and how easily we fool ourselves into thinking we have the One True Model for some phenomena. Model agnosticism means I try to have at minimum three different models for thinking about any issue or phenomena, and I must always be taking in new information, changing my mind a little bit here, combining some ideas there, discarding or relegating other ideas at other times. As I understand it, modern model agnosticism was born of Niels Bohr's Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, which was influenced by William James and American pragmatism.

So: I'm trying to figure out my version of the Chomsky Problem, which might be stated: Given all the work Noam Chomsky has done in linguistics and in a seemingly unrelated field, politics, how might they cohere? And what's most pressing for me: why does Chomsky seem to not want to deal with semantics in the way that Frank Luntz, George Lakoff, "public relations" and other advertising people, Alfred Korzybski, or George Orwell deal with it? 

I have explicated some of this in previous blogposts; I'm still working on it. Where I've become mired is in Chomsky's seeming fear - and I'm not sure I'm on "the" right track here - that if he admits that the realm of linguistics called "pragmatics" or "sociolinguistics" or especially a Neural Theory of Language as all far more powerful in the phenomenal-existential worlds we live in, then he has to admit he's living in a runaway world where masses of people can be swayed by the manipulation of words and symbols, that some sort of...what might be called...Skinnerian behaviorism is still at play? Despite Chomsky's famous "demolition" of Skinner back in the 1960s/early 70s? One of the intellectual moves that put him on the map as major player in the intellectual world? If Chomsky's semantics/"surface structure" is so trivial because of his overweening emphasis on syntax, he can't really account for this...Monstrous Thing that acts like a virus that eats human brains! 

I may be dramatically overstating it a bit here, but this scenario I call Chomsky's Nightmare, and it's here, it's been here, at least since the advent of "public relations" in the very early 20th century (Nietzsche's and Vico's work in philology suggests it goes back a loooong way), and Chomsky - for some reason I'm still trying to figure out - seems to evade this Hideous Truth, although he certainly hints that he knows it's going on. My working hypothesis/abduction is that admitting that language actually works socially in a way all-too-close to the way Skinner said it did, would amount to admitting his cherished notions of how a "human nature" could be defined had been tragically lost, and that his entire linguistics project was fundamentally flawed.

[For background on Chomsky's famous attack on B.F. Skinner see "Psychology and Ideology" from 1972, collected in The Chomsky Reader and For Reasons of State. I think Chomsky did a fantastic job of demonstrating that the human mind is far more complex than the operant conditioned chimp-like thing Skinner assumes, then proves. But: I see Chomsky's demolition as a tad too nifty: people need to decide not to be automatons; very many of them do not do that, and that's part of My Nightmare. Skinner still lurks; he's still relevant. Chomsky's Nightmare and mine seem closely related; I seem to have a more jaundiced take on "human nature." But I still hold hope...ironically for the very reason Chomsky does, which I hope to briefly elucidate at the end of this post - the OG]

Chomsky is taking questions from the audience from 1989 -1996, the text for "Community Activists," chapter six of Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky is unclear on where/when this exchange took place:

Another Man: People often ask you about the connections between your scientific work in linguistics and your politics, and you tend to say something about, "Yes, there are a few tenuous connections." Would you amplify on that? I myself have been thinking that maybe part of our political problem is that the human brain is very good at seeing things in competitive terms like "more" and "less" and it's not very good at conceptualizing "enough."

Chomsky: Well, that may be true - but these are topics where the scientific study of language has nothing to say. I mean, you know as much about it as the fanciest linguist around.

Man: Where are they, then - even the tenuous connections? 

Chomsky: Not there; the tenuous connections are somewhere else. First of all, we should remember that the kinds of things that any sort of science can shed light on are pretty narrow: when you start moving to complicated systems, scientific knowledge declines very fast. And when you get to the nature of human beings, the sciences have nothing to say. There are a few areas where you can get a lot of insight and understanding, and certain aspects of language happen to be one of those areas, for some reason - but that insight still doesn't bear on questions of real human concern, at least not at the level that has any consequences for human life...The connections are quite different - and they are tenuous. The only reason for stressing them is because they've been pointed out many times through the course of modern intellectual history, and in fact they lie right at the core of classical liberalism. I mean, contrary to the contemporary version of it, classical liberalism (which remember was pre-capitalist, and in fact, anti-capitalist) focused on the right of people to control their own work, and the need for free creative work under your own control - for human freedom and creativity. So to a classical liberal, wage labor under capitalism would have been considered totally immoral, because it frustrates the fundamental need of people to control their own work: you're a slave to someone else.

-pp. 215-216, op cit

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Noam then goes on for four more paragraphs about Descartes, Rousseau, Humboldt, and his - Chomsky's - ideas about "human nature" that are in that line of Old Enlightenment, 18th century thought. It's a marvelous idea, it's romantic, I tend to agree with it, but it's an idea about "reason" that, it turns out, is wrong in about eight ways, I'm sorry to say. I will elaborate on this in a blog post soon. What galls me is Chomsky's radically - maybe even arrogant - deflationary view of modern research. At the end of the answer to this "Man" in the audience, Chomsky says this:

"You can read any book you want about sociobiology [theory that specific social behaviors and not just physical characteristics result from evolution], and it's mostly fairy tales - I mean, it's all fine when it's talking about ants; when it goes up to the level of mammals, it starts being guesswork; and when it gets to humans it's like, say anything that comes to your head. But I think you can see a possible connection of that sort - a potential connection. Whether that connection can actually be made substantive, who knows? It's all so far beyond scientific understanding at this point that you can't even dream about it. So that's the main reason why I don't talk about these things much. I just think they're interesting ideas, which are maybe worth thinking about in the back of your mind, or maybe writing poems about or something. But they're simply not topics for scientific inquiry at this point." 

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I find this maddening. The "tenuous connections" are "somewhere else"? 

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What more do I need to address? Does anyone reading this have something to add? A citation from a text that would illuminate me? Do I need to elaborate on something more, or have I elucidated My Chomsky Problem sufficiently above, taken with previous posts on the topic?

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Oh yea: Chomsky's reason for optimism regarding political and social problems: It's based on Pascal's Wager.  Chomsky's adaptation: "On this issue of human freedom, if you assume that there's no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, that hope is possible, then hope may be justified, and a better world may be built. That's your choice."- adapted from Milan Rai's Chomsky's Politics, p. 58

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