This is why we can't have nice things
January 19, 2017 9:47 PM   Subscribe

"The Kingdom of speech" is a literary Sharknado of error and self-satisfaction, with borderline racism and anti-Semitism mixed in. In which E.J. Spode reviews Tom Wolfe's latest book, with special guest appearances by George Lyell and Ali G. (via)
posted by AElfwine Evenstar (32 comments total) 25 users marked this as a favorite
 
Such a good review. I especially liked this bit:
Chomsky is working at his computer when a student rushes in.
Student: “Professor Chomsky! They’ve discovered an Amazonian tribe that has a language without recursion!”
Chomsky (slowly turning from his computer): “Can they learn Portuguese?”
Student: “Well… yes.”
Chomsky slowly turns back to his computer.
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 10:15 PM on January 19, 2017 [7 favorites]


For some reason this line struck me as particularly relevant to a lot of modern day political discourse:
what is a more reliable sign that you are right than that people start arguing against you with things like facts
posted by eye of newt at 10:28 PM on January 19, 2017 [5 favorites]


Epic
posted by latkes at 11:14 PM on January 19, 2017


A great review, and I say this as as a guy who once liked Tom Wolf's fiction and journalism. There is a down side to the human race's newly-found greater longevity.
posted by Agave at 12:06 AM on January 20, 2017 [5 favorites]


I am constantly baffled by the fact that people take Tom Wolfe seriously. To be honest I haven't read the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, maybe it actually is that good that you can coast on it for the rest of your career.
posted by Dr Dracator at 12:16 AM on January 20, 2017 [4 favorites]


That guy really but really doesn't like Wolfe.

Not that he's wrong, but it's a tiny bit funny how much he really really really but really really doesn't like the guy. Really really really doesn't.
posted by From Bklyn at 12:51 AM on January 20, 2017


Is Wolfe's latest a metafiction that makes sense in anotherdimensionontherightdrugs? As a very in, very dark joke? Is it an unconscious cry for help? Exhibit A of a privileged life lived? A stunning proof of devolution?
posted by riverlife at 12:53 AM on January 20, 2017


Such a good review. I especially liked this bit:
Chomsky is working at his computer when a student rushes in.
Student: “Professor Chomsky! They’ve discovered an Amazonian tribe that has a language without recursion!”
Chomsky (slowly turning from his computer): “Can they learn Portuguese?”
Student: “Well… yes.”
Chomsky slowly turns back to his computer.
I'm trying to adopt a policy of not getting involved in any Chomsky-related fight, but as a point of interest, Everett actually addressed this aspect in a recent article in Aeon:
Chomsky and others have even made the false claim that many Pirahãs speak Portuguese, strengthening the case that they can use recursion. Again, they use this to claim that it is therefore the case that the Pirahãs do have recursive abilities and so the hypothesis of the narrow faculty of language is safe and sound after all. But, as I said, this doesn’t follow. For example, it is extremely telling that, of the Pirahãs who speak any Portuguese at all, no Pirahã has ever learned Portuguese subsequent to learning to speak Pirahã. The only Pirahãs who have learned Portuguese well have learned it by being raised outside the village, with Portuguese as their native language. Jeanette Sakel of the University of the West of England in Bristol has studied exactly this. She has visited the Pirahãs with me and conducted her own research, publishing several articles in refereed journals on the Pirahãs’ use of Portuguese.

Pirahãs who speak Pirahã natively and are culturally Pirahãs speak very little Portuguese, if any. And, according to Sakel’s work, when they do speak it is non-recursive Portuguese.
posted by No-sword at 1:04 AM on January 20, 2017 [4 favorites]


(Incidentally, I know that this blurs distinction between being physically able to learn Portuguese in principle, and being able as a practical matter to learn Portuguese as a second language, but Sakel's papers are interesting in their own right... and since the article is basically Everett's response to the whole decade-long kerfuffle to which Tom Wolfe hitched his gleefully ignorant wagon for the book under review, I think it's worth linking to here.)
posted by No-sword at 1:55 AM on January 20, 2017


I'm in favor of taking down Wolfe, and as colorfully as possible. But the article casts some nasty aspersions about Benjamin Lee Whorf and Dan Everett.

To say that Whorf was "fantasizing" or making the Hopi "exotic" is pretty vile. Also ironic, because the modern Left's cultural relativism owes a lot to Whorf. Wikipedia has a summary of the Hopi/time business; it's not cut-and-dried. Spode does not make himself look good by misquoting Whorf and pronouncing judgment on things he doesn't know anything about.

The same can be said for his treatment of Everett, who doesn't deserve to be thrown under a bus just because Spode doesn't like Tom Wolfe. What's going on with Pirahã is something to be decided by the very few scholars who know Pirahã. (Everett seems a little cranky to me, but hey, so does Chomsky. Non-linguists may be surprised at how many linguists don't accept Chomsky's framework.)
posted by zompist at 2:08 AM on January 20, 2017 [6 favorites]


That was a great essay, thank you.
posted by smoke at 2:16 AM on January 20, 2017 [1 favorite]


This could be the first great American novel of the Age of Trump.
posted by acb at 4:09 AM on January 20, 2017


What No-sword and zompist said. The review is enjoyable (if you don't mind a little slander mixed in with your over-the-top hostility), but Chomsky is still wrong about pretty much everything.
posted by languagehat at 7:00 AM on January 20, 2017 [1 favorite]


Wolfe has to be trolling. Has to be. I don't believe a response as thoroughly outraged as this can be got any other way.
posted by flabdablet at 7:05 AM on January 20, 2017


I absolutely adored Tom Wolfe in my teenage years. Now I look back and all I can see is the flood of barely veiled contempt he has for people of color, poors, women, the uneducated, Jews, the foreign, the disabled. His books are an endless parade of nuggets of the self-satisfaction of the self-proclaimed elite, sprayed with disingenuous know-nothingism, wrapped up in a Barbour jacket of snobbery with the price tag left on.
posted by jfwlucy at 8:29 AM on January 20, 2017 [7 favorites]


That was fantastic. Wolfe has always seemed to me to be quite the asshole, including for wearing those white suits while supposedly entering into the culture of the merry pranksters, who then had lots of fun fucking around with him, thereby rendering the journalistic value of Electric Koolaid Acid Test suspect at best. It's great to see him taken down with the same intellectual snobbery he inflicts on others, especially when his snobbery is in the service of anti-intellectualism, the scourge of our generation.

Give me a shot of Hunter Thompson any time. Compare Hell's Angels to Electric Koolaid. Thompson actually risked his life while he gathered material for that book, while Wolfe risked a slightly increased dry cleaning bill for his.
posted by janey47 at 8:36 AM on January 20, 2017


I figured that whole thing about the Piraha having no sense of future was nonsense when I read the anthropologist's report of how one night he noticed that the women of the tribe had headed off to the forest because the men had started drinking and they (the women) knew trouble would follow, as indeed it did.

(Mind you, I can think of plenty of people I know who seem to have no sense of consequences following from actions, or in-actions, so in that sense....)
posted by BWA at 11:10 AM on January 20, 2017 [1 favorite]


Hunter Thompson writing about The Merry Pranksters could have been kinda a mess, though. It needed some sobriety, and Wolfe did a good job, by and large. Radical Chic and Mau Mauing the Flak Catchers is also a useful and entertaining document of the times, which Wolfe's wry woke conservative schtick works well for.
posted by iotic at 11:30 AM on January 20, 2017


Pirahãs who speak Pirahã natively and are culturally Pirahãs speak very little Portuguese, if any. And, according to Sakel’s work, when they do speak it is non-recursive Portuguese.

I am not a linguist but I looked up this (by Sakel) in discussing the Pirahã controversy with somebody and it sounds to me like her conclusion is that few currently do but they probably can with experience? Obviously this is jumping into the middle of something I don't know that much about.

I do know that Chomsky's linguistics have pretty much never been uncontroversial. But if Wolfe is seriously writing a whole book about him and then saying this

One bright night it dawned on me—not as a profound revelation, not as any sort of analysis at all, but as something so perfectly obvious, I could hardly believe that no licensed savant had ever pointed it out before. There is a cardinal distinction between man and animal, a sheerly dividing line as abrupt and immovable as a cliff: namely, speech.

without addressing the man's own contribution to this idea that is weird as hell.
posted by atoxyl at 11:43 AM on January 20, 2017 [1 favorite]


Something broke in Wolfe in the 80s, I think. I mean, he's always had his flaws, but his 60s and 70s work has a vitality to it that just went away and was replaced by flabby garbage. You can pretty much feel him giving up in the middle of The Bonfire of the Vanities, and I don't think he ever successfully got back on the horse.
posted by the phlegmatic king at 1:07 PM on January 20, 2017 [1 favorite]


People are right to call out the problems/criticisms of chomsky, but I feel that makes it all the weirder; Wolfe acts like he's killing this sacred cow - a scion of the field no one has dared take on - when in fact the opposite is true, and Chomsky's theories have in fact been fiercely contested almost from their conception (and by people far more qualified than Wolfe).
posted by smoke at 1:28 PM on January 20, 2017 [4 favorites]


There is a down side to the human race's newly-found greater longevity.

In his day, Wolfe went places and reported on things and wrote like nobody else. Even as late as the novel, "A Man in Full" he was investigating subcultures that mainstream journalists were oblivious to, and writing it up in a style that could actually affect your pulse rate. But age affects your ability to multi-task, and Wolfe can no longer think deeply, write entertainingly, and report accurately at the same time. One or another or all of those now fail when he tries. But you gotta admire the whacky ambition of going after Chomsky, when he could have chosen so many easier, less specialized targets. Young journalists shouldn't let this particular failure, or Wolfe's politics, obscure their view of his earlier works in all their splendor.
posted by Modest House at 2:59 PM on January 20, 2017


Thank you so much for passing this on, AElfwine -- it's good to have another shoe drop after the excerpt of Wolfe's book published this summer (in Harper's I think?) My reaction to that was "damn, Tommy, did Noam piss in your polenta?" It was such a weirdly personal attack. Like many others said here, I read his 1960s stuff and rather liked it, so I was baffled and almost hurt to see Wolfe publishing such a piece of crap.
posted by gusandrews at 3:56 PM on January 20, 2017


I'm trying to adopt a policy of not getting involved in any Chomsky-related fight, but as a point of interest, Everett actually addressed this aspect in a recent article in Aeon:

I know you don't want to get into a fight about this. I don't either. I do want to talk a bit about it, though, since I find it interesting. I'll try not to be fighty. I just read the Everett article, and I'm really not sure what to make of it. It seems to me that there are two different claims that we really need to keep clearly separate: (1) All [human?] language is recursive, and (2) The faculty or brain structure that makes language learning possible in humans is recursive in the sense that it allows languages with recursion to be learned.

It seems to me that if Pirahã lacks recursion, that is evidence against (1) but not evidence against (2), which is what the imagined exchange about Pirahãn people learning Portuguese is intended to highlight. As you quote, Everett says that "it is extremely telling that, of the Pirahãs who speak any Portuguese at all, no Pirahã has ever learned Portuguese subsequent to learning to speak Pirahã." But ... why is it extremely telling? I don't mean to be falling into calling Everett irrelevant, but I really just don't get how this is a challenge to (2).

Anyway, if (1) is a claim about all possible languages, it seems trivially false, unless one just defines language as having recursion. (Here I agree with Everett, I think, and this kind of circularity is something that has bothered me for a while now in the use of "animal communication" instead of "animal language.") So if (1) is an empirical claim about whether all actual, full-fledged, adult, human languages have recursion, then I see the importance of Pirahã lacking recursion. But I still don't see the challenge to (2). For example, (2) seems compatible with a story on which a human may learn any of a range of languages initially -- some of which have recursion and some of which do not -- but if one learns a non-recursive language initially, then the machinery that makes acquiring a recursive language easy shuts off or disconnects. (This assumes that Everett is right that Pirahã lacks recursion and that Pirahãs who learn Pirahã initially have difficulty learning Portuguese, can't learn it at all, or can't learn the recursive elements.)

But ... I feel like I must be missing something here. Somebody want to help me understand what, exactly?

Incidentally, has anyone here with more background in linguistics read this paper by Sauerland (pdf) on false speech reports in Pirahã? It looks like clear evidence for (perhaps faltering use of) recursion in Pirahã to me. But I am not a linguist, so again, I feel like I must be missing something.
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 11:14 PM on January 20, 2017


Thanks for the link to the paper. One important bit is on the first page: both Everett and his critics are relying mostly on data from field work 30 years ago. And since most of that data is Everett's, it's a battle over interpretations of that data. It's not a satisfying situation.

But anyway, this paper tries to add new data! I'm not going to speak for Everett, but it doesn't seem like he should be worried. Sauerland says himself that he found speakers giving 'correct' answers 62% of the time. That's awfully low for what is supposed to be a basic function of language (and one which, according to he and Chomsky, is innately provided by the language organ).

Doing syntax outside your native tongue is really difficult... if a sentence is reported as wrong, it's hard to say if it's ungrammatical, or mistranslated, or unusual in a way that's confusing people. Even his English example "Speaker A was talking and his skin is green" is a little weird. It's certainly not clear to me that the intended meaning is that A said his skin is green.

Plus, I don't agree with him that
He didn’t do anything wrong. John believes this.
can't be said if the speaker disagrees with the first sentence. Of course it can: we do things like this all the time, repeating someone's utterance or temporarily taking on a role. But if his examples don't quite work in English, how certain is it that they work as he intends in Pirahã? Maybe his examples are like weird poetry to the Pirahã-- sometimes they get his meaning, sometimes not.

Which is why it's often better to do corpus linguistics, and see what people actually say. Here's an example from Everett's (non-technical) book Don't Sleep, There are Snakes:
Ko Paita, tapoa xigaboopaati. Xoogiai hi goo tapoa. Xaisigiai.
Hey, Paita, bring back some nails. Dan bought those very nails. They are the same.
As Everett notes, English would have expressed this with a relative clause: "Bring back the nails that Dan bought." (Relativization is one instance of the recursion we're talking about.)

I find this a very interesting example, because it shows that you can actually get along pretty well without relative clauses. Maybe it took a few more words, but it worked. Quechua, which does allow relativization, often prefers to do without it: e.g. you can say the equivalent of "Where is she? He knows that." rather than "He knows where she is."

Also, to directly answer your question: you're quite right that (1) is not direct evidence against (2). But surely it makes the proposition shakier? Suppose half of all languages were like Pirahã: wouldn't it be far harder to maintain that recursion was part of the language organ, rather than a property of certain languages?
posted by zompist at 2:02 AM on January 21, 2017 [1 favorite]


Interesting points about relative clauses. I agree that we have speech acts like "playing devil's advocate," and that's an interesting suggestion about how to make sense of, "He didn't do anything wrong. John believes this." I don't have a dog in this fight, but I think I lean toward saying that Everett should be a little worried by Sauerland's data, even given what you've said here. But I also agree with you that 62% seems low. There is a clear statistical difference between the cases ... but maybe not a practically significant one. It would be nice if it were clear what sort of effect size is predicted for studies like Sauerland's by each side in the debate. For example, if Everett says, "There shouldn't be any effect here at all," and Chomsky says, "The effect should be very large," then it looks like they're both wrong. What should we say then?

In answer to your closing question, I'm not sure. I think it would be surprising if, say, the situation were flipped and Pirahã were the only language with recursion. It would be surprising because it would be unclear why so many people have a brain structure that allows them to learn recursive languages when there are virtually no recursive languages. At least, it would be surprising if there were a cost to having the ability to learn recursive languages (i.e., assuming that having a recursive language organ is more computationally expensive than having a non-recursive one) and if the language organ were a direct adaptation as opposed to an example of co-opting an existing structure that was being applied to some other problem. So something that extreme probably puts explanatory pressure on the idea. But if the split were 50/50, I'm not sure someone who accepts (2) should be surprised, let alone take it as evidence against (2). I would have thought that the main pieces of evidence for something like (2) would come from looking at the brains of people who speak various languages (and especially comparing recursive and non-recursive language-speakers), seeing whether the children of people who speak non-recursive languages can acquire recursive languages, seeing whether there are genes that control for language, etc.

Maybe what Chomsky has in mind is actually a bit stronger than (2)? Maybe such that Chomsky's view is threatened by the inability of people who first learn Pirahã to ever learn a language with recursion (assuming Everett is right about that claim). If what Chomsky wants is a language organ that remains unchanged in its basic abilities after a first language is learned, then there seems to be a problem. (It still wouldn't be a problem, I think, to find that lots of languages lack recursion.) But I thought that Chomsky had a view closer to thinking that the language organ has something analogous to a set of switches that get flipped based on early exposure to language. It doesn't seem to be a far step from that to the thought that one of those switches is a switch we might label "use recursion." Suppose that once the "use recursion" switch is flipped, it can't be flipped again. Then one would expect people who first learn a non-recursive language to fail to pick up recursion, even in other languages.
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 10:59 AM on January 21, 2017


Yes, I think we have to remember that child language aqquisition is the relevant part here, concerning Chomsky and his focus. To say that a person as an adult couldn't learn to speak Portuguese when the language they learned as a child had a very different grammar....I mean, it's pretty understandable....can an English speaker easily learn how to speak a polysynthetic language? No. And I find it very telling that Everett asserts that the Piraha can't learn both, like they are incapable of it. I mean, does he know that for a fact? How? Has someone convinced all of the Piraha people to try and learn Portuguese and they just can't, like their brains spazz out and...it's a pretty ridiculously broad assertion that I find suspect. Learning a second language as an adult is totally different than learning as a small child. Unless the argument about recursion not existing within Piraha is actually true, and then somehow, someone tried to teach all the Piraha toddlers Portuguese and Piraha the same time, and they just couldn't learn both when they were learning to speak because their brains won't allow for recursion and non recursion? I mean, huh?

Didn't the reveiw also point out that it's irrelevant to Chomsky's project if one language doesn't have recursion? But Wolfe didn't seem to understand that? Maybe I am missing something....I did study Theoretical Linguistics, but it was a long time ago.

I thought it was really important that the author critiqued the dehumanizing and primitiveizing viewpoint of the Piranha people belonging to Everett (recursion!), that Wolfe latched onto, and that has been a part of anthropology since it's beginning. I mean, it's ludicrous to say that the Piraha don't have tools (how do they eat? Hunt? Find shelter?) Or a concept of future and past (how do they exist? Do they not have mental capacity for remembering? I mean, come on!). That viewpoint is so reductive, stinks of Colonialism and I would very much question the play that the world views of a former? missionary scientist who would make those almost animalistic assertions, and what business he had playing at science.

And yeah. Thanks to the author for wrapping it up by pointing out how frightening it is how books like this are gleefully accepted and reviewed because of the bombastic, press making nature, never mind the encouragement of anti intellectualism it normalizes. *Sigh.
posted by branravenraven at 12:55 PM on January 21, 2017


And I find it very telling that Everett asserts that the Piraha can't learn both, like they are incapable of it. I mean, does he know that for a fact? How? Has someone convinced all of the Piraha people to try and learn Portuguese and they just can't, like their brains spazz out and...it's a pretty ridiculously broad assertion that I find suspect.

Again, not going to argue anything specific, but Everette's article links to two papers by Jeanette Sakel which examine the use of Portuguese by actual Pirahã speakers. He isn't just saying "Their brains would probably spazz out," he's saying, "Someone did research and found that when Pirahã speakers learn Portuguese as a second language (after learning Pirahã as their first), they speak it in an unusual way that supports my claims about Pirahã." You can take issue with Sakel's research, or Everett's interpretation of it, of course, but he isn't just fabulating on the spot.
posted by No-sword at 1:52 PM on January 21, 2017


But I thought that Chomsky had a view closer to thinking that the language organ has something analogous to a set of switches that get flipped based on early exposure to language.

If I understand you correctly, you are thinking of "Principles and Parameters", but (as the Wikipedia article alludes to) Chomsky's thinking has changed a bit since that original proposal. (Just providing the link in an attempt to get you hooked on the field...)
posted by No-sword at 2:02 PM on January 21, 2017 [1 favorite]


You can take issue with Sakel's research, or Everett's interpretation of it

Do you think my interpretation of the one I linked was correct or incorrect? I read it as suggesting that the most advanced Pirahã Portuguese learners do start to use more complex Portuguese syntax, which may mean that there are simply not that many Pirahã with substantial experience speaking Portuguese - not enough to prove anything one way or the other anyway. But I don't have a full grasp on all the technical vocabulary she uses so I don't know.
posted by atoxyl at 3:16 PM on January 21, 2017


On brains, remember that it's Chomsky, not Everett, who thinks that language is genetic. Everett believes that language is a cultural tool.

Everett nowhere says that Pirahã is "primitive". Quite the reverse; he emphasizes how difficult it is. Its phonological tone is difficult to master, and its verb is extremely complex.
posted by zompist at 3:36 PM on January 21, 2017


Atoxyl: I think the key takeaway from Sakel's paper, from the point of view of this debate, is that although her Pirahã informants do start to use more complex syntax, there's still a paucity of the kind of "relative clauses" everyone is speaking of in this context. She did encounter one (and only one!) instance of a possible complement clause (the quería vir example), but even this she interprets not as a Portuguese-style complement clause, but a new structure born of the interaction between Pirahã and Portuguese (which doesn't "disqualify" it or anything, but is certainly an intriguing detail). The summary seems clearest to me:
Yet, my data show that one speaker, GK2, uses a complement clause which appears suspiciously complex. It can be analysed as an extension of a catenative verb construction and could allow for an analysis as a syntactically complex structure. The resulting construction is not similar to the target-like Portuguese way of expressing complementation. Rather, the construction is intermediate between Pirahã and Portuguese, arguably undergoing contact-induced grammaticalisation. The gatekeeper who uses this construction is one of the most proficient Portuguese speakers among the Pirahã and he is in regular contact with outsiders. The arising syntactic complexity in his variety of Portuguese is probably something that we will eventually also see in other speakers as well. This is because the language situation in the Pirahã region is likely to change considerably over the coming years, due to prolonged contact with the outside world, including a new hospital and education projects. The Portuguese proficiency of the gatekeepers is likely to increase, and with it - more than likely - also the complexity of their learner varieties.
Ultimately, I think your second point is correct—Sakel's paper is a helpful look at how things stand, but it doesn't seem justified to extrapolate to general principles (supporting either side) based on that data alone. (I also note that she puts, right near the top, "I do not wish to embark on a theoretical discussion of the concept of recursion within generative grammar.")
posted by No-sword at 4:31 PM on January 21, 2017 [1 favorite]


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