I’ve skipped Chris Knight’s contribution [until now], which has no place in a serious discussion of [the responsibility of intellectuals], except, perhaps, as an indication of how some intellectuals perceive their responsibility. With considerable distaste, I’ll go through some of its highlights.
Knight’s essay is another exercise in an intensive campaign he has been waging for several years to establish the thesis that I concocted some exotic form of linguistics, unique in history, to assuage my guilt for my work for the US military machine at ‘the heart of the empire’ – in his words, my design of approaches to language that are ‘so asocial, apolitical and devoid of practical application that I can only assume Chomsky favoured them to keep his conscience clear: he needed them to ensure that his militarily funded linguistics couldn’t possibly have any military use’ (London Review of Books, v39, n14).
As he amplifies here, despite what he sees as Chomsky’s ‘heartfelt regrets’ at not having involved himself in anti-war activities in 1950 or 1955, this tormented creature was
determined to continue his linguistics research at MIT. But from this point on [1965], he felt morally impelled to clarify that his work was restricted to pure science. His linguistic theories had always been highly abstract but he now needed to stress that if his military sponsors found his models to be unworkable, that did not bother him at all. He would press on with models of language so utterly abstract and ideal – so completely removed from social usage, communication or any kind of technological application – that they were never likely to work for weapons ‘command and control’ or indeed for any other military purpose (p. 61, N. Allott, C. Knight, N. Smith,The Responsibility of Intellectuals …, 2019).
Let’s take this apart step by step. First, just who devoted themselves to work against the Vietnam War in the early 1950s? Answer, essentially no one. My ‘heartfelt regrets’ were over my failure to depart from the universal norm. And what happened in 1965? Knight knows very well. In 1965 I expanded my anti-war activities from giving talks and organising meetings to direct resistance, initiatives based right at the ‘heart of empire’, at a time when even in liberal Boston support for the war was so extreme that it was scarcely possible even to organise public events without violent disruption (see pp. 5-6, Allott, 2019). And I moved very soon on to more direct resistance, as discussed earlier.
So, yes, I was determined to continue my work in a lively and flourishing research environment that also happened to be the main academic centre of anti-war activism. So were the rest of the malefactors in the den of iniquity.
Let’s turn then to his main thesis, which he elaborates extensively in the book of his to which he refers: my design of linguistic work ‘so asocial, apolitical and devoid of practical application’ that Knight ‘can only assume’ that I undertook it to make sure it could not be used for any military purpose.
For several years, I avoided responding to Knight’s charges, but when they appeared (twice) in a widely read journal, I did respond (LRB, v39, n12 / v39, n16), pointing out that his charges are instantly refuted by the fact that I had been doing this work for years before I had any thought of an appointment at ‘the heart of the empire’, in fact, as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1940s and then in graduate work at Harvard in the early 1950s (Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew, 1951 and The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, 1956). And that I simply carried the work further after my appointment at MIT in 1955. End of story, at least in a universe where facts matter.
Knight’s response to this total refutation of his primary thesis was to evade it and amplify the charges – see the LRB exchange – proceeding to do so again here. He could hardly be more explicit in informing us about the true nature of the campaign he is conducting.
Since that refutation was more than enough, I did not go on to point out what is obvious to anyone with the slightest familiarity with the study of language. But since he amplifies the refuted claim here, perhaps a few words are in order.
The approach that is so ‘asocial, apolitical and devoid of practical application’ that it must have been devised to avoid exploitation by the US military has been the core of the inquiry into language for millennia, since classical Greece and India, through the medieval Arab and Hebrew grammarians (whom I happened to be studying at U. Penn when I began this work), on to the rich tradition of ‘rational and universal grammar’ founded in the seventeenth century, including the great achievements of comparative and historical Indo-European grammar, and then twentieth century structural and anthropological linguistics. And the approach has been adopted without question for very good reasons. It was always understood that the task posed by Aristotle of discovering the relation of sound and meaning poses some of the deepest problems of science and the humanities: to discover the uniquely human capacity to construct in our minds an unbounded array of thoughts that are used in creative and innovative ways, sometimes externalised in sound or some other medium, the core of our cognitive nature, with no analogue elsewhere in the organic world.
These are matters that I discussed extensively from the early 60s at the ‘heart of the empire’ while studying precedents for contemporary generative grammar, which addresses these tasks directly (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 1964; Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, 1965; Cartesian Linguistics, 1966; Language and Mind, 1968).
Furthermore, simple logic suffices to show that the traditional concerns, pursued further in the contemporary work that Knight finds incomprehensible, are also the prerequisite for any serious investigation of the social, political and practical applications of language to which he confines his interests. All of this has of course been well understood by the great anthropological linguists, Boas, Sapir and others, as is evident from their linguistic work.
So much for Knight’s primary thesis.
In his present amplification of his thesis, Knight focuses on my malevolent contributions to the imperial military machine, so let’s have a look at these.
Knight’s pièce de résistance is my consultantship at the MITRE Corporation, which brought me ‘dangerously close to direct collusion with the US military’. MITRE does in fact do military work along with much else; it is, for example, famous for its early work on global warming, brought to high levels of the US government in 1979 by the leader of the project, conscientious objector and Vietnam War protestor Gordon MacDonald (New York Times, 1/9/18). In the early 60s it also had a small language project, where several MIT linguistics students were able to obtain summer jobs. Knight carried out extensive interviews with them in his effort to try to establish my involvement in US militarism, and that of our MIT programme in linguistics more generally. And he is kind enough to cite what he discovered (Allott, p. 69, note 31). If we take the trouble to look at the interviews he cites, we instantly discover that they flatly refute all of his claims.
From what he calls ‘the most informative’ of his interviews, Knight learned that ‘Chomsky definitely did come out and consult with us at least once’ (since the students were unable to come to my office for their regular appointments), to discuss some technical problems of linguistics (in particular, about adjunction). ‘We had total freedom. Everybody could choose their own topic [but] dear Don [the linguist head of the project] realized that he’d have to get us to work collectively on producing a grammar and a parser [that is, standard linguistics, everywhere] in order to convince the generals that it was valuable to hire us …’, though we made it clear that any imaginable military application would be far in the remote future.
Others added that ‘I must also say that I never had any whiff of military work at MITRE. Maybe we had to wear badges, I have no recollection of that, but what we talked about had nothing at all to do with command and control or Air Force or anything similar. Our talk was about syntax and confusions about semantics … I do not recall any time when [Chomsky] was cooperating with the Air Force on anything related to the US war effort anywhere … From the viewpoint of the grad students who were [at MITRE], it was an interesting and well paid adventure. We were given total freedom’ … We ‘had a lot of interesting conversations with Noam. But they were all about linguistics’. Another said that though I never talked politics in my linguistics classes, students did learn about my attitudes (with astonishment, because they were so rare in those days), and he ‘became an anti-Vietnam protestor’. At MITRE, he added, it was ‘colonels we had to impress, not generals’.
Knight does mention one of these high officers they had to impress, the man he calls ‘Colonel Jay Keyser’ – in the real world, Lieutenant Samuel Jay Keyser, well known to linguists, who had joined the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) in 1952, a standard alternative to the draft for students. Knight avoids telling us how the insidious ‘Colonel Keyser’ was instructing his troops while he was working at MITRE, though he knows the answers from his interviews: Keyser was working ‘on Old English metrics’ – more accurately on Chaucer, continuing the studies of Middle English for which he is well known in the field.
Keyser told Knight that he could not recall any discussions about ‘taking military funding [which was] how the government supported higher education back then’. In fact, as is familiar, in those years US industrial and educational policy was largely funded under the general rubric of ‘defence’, including the great expansion of institutions of higher education; development of computers, the internet and indeed the basis for most of today’s high-tech economy; the national interstate highway system (formally, the ‘National System of Interstate and Defense Highways’); and much else. The pretext was so thin that by 1970, when public concern was growing, Congress passed laws limiting military funding to research with some potential relationship to military functions, while still permitting rather lax application (Wikipedia, ‘Mike Mansfield’).
As much of the public was coming to understand by the late 60s, the process of funding economic development and university expansion under a defence pretext raises many serious questions about functioning democracy, questions that many of us had been raising for years but that are of no interest to Knight, who ignores them completely, even after all of this has been patiently explained to him.
That was my consultancy at MITRE, my main contribution to the military machine, which ‘was bringing [me] dangerously close to direct collusion with the US military’ – an ‘involvement with the MITRE Corporation’ to which I never ‘made any reference’ in my writings. What a strange evasion.
The tale continues. On departing from my (non-existent) consultancy for the military machine at MITRE, Knight reports, I ‘became an adviser to MIT’s anti-Vietnam War committee, although such activism only ever involved what [Chomsky] calls “a very small group of faculty”‘, underscoring its insignificance.
Decoding this concoction, the ‘very small group of faculty’ was not an anti-Vietnam War committee but rather the Boston Area Faculty Group on Public Issues (BAFGOPI), centred at MIT, as most regional peace activism was (see pp. 114-5, Allott 2019), at the outset devoted to disarmament issues. I did not become ‘an adviser’, and in fact had joined it years earlier, as soon as it was founded by my close friend and fellow activist biologist (Nobel laureate) Salvador Luria. And it was indeed small, as one would expect of a regional faculty peace group, and as is surely true of others (if there were any like it at the time; not to my knowledge). Its activism extended to many protests it organised nationwide. But the major anti-war activism on campus was not BAFGOPI, but what I described earlier (Allott, pp. 5-6).
Let us put these fantasies aside and turn to the den of iniquity itself: the Research Lab of Electronics (RLE) in the famous Building 20, well known as a rich and lively interdisciplinary centre from which several departments developed – linguistics, philosophy, psychology and others – as MIT was making the transition from an engineering school to a science-based university with distinguished departments in the humanities and social sciences. RLE housed a small project on machine translation (MT), to which I was appointed in 1955, along with several other linguists. Following his consistent practice, Knight once again scrupulously ignores what is plainly the most relevant evidence relating to his charges: what were they actually doing? So I will fill in the gaps.
The project was headed by physicist Victor Yngve, who was genuinely interested in MT, as was a regular visitor, Israeli philosopherlogician Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, who published widely on the topic. Neither had a thought of any military application, nor did anyone else on the project, and in retrospect, it is uncontroversial that there never was any.
Knight concedes that I had no interest in MT; rather, I continued the work I had been doing since my undergraduate years. The other linguists on the project were GH Matthews (working on the first large-scale generative grammar, of the Amerindian language Hidatsa), RB Lees (studying Turkish nominalisations, his PhD dissertation, the first in our programme) and F Lukoff (grammar of Korean). All of us were also continuing our work on linguistic theory and the structure of English. Several of us also worked closely with the other linguist at RLE, Morris Halle, who was pursuing his investigations of acoustic phonetics and Russian phonology, often in collaboration with Roman Jakobson, who came to MIT after retiring from Harvard in 1967. In the early 60s, we were joined by John Viertel, who was engaged in translation and analysis of classic work of Wilhelm von Humboldt, and shortly after by the remarkable linguist and cultural anthropologist Kenneth Hale, under whose leadership our programme became a leading international centre for the study of Australian, Native American and other indigenous languages, along with work on indigenous land rights, establishing cultural centres, bringing students from indigenous communities to study at MIT, etc. Other faculty also joined, working on a wide range of similar topics, as can easily be determined by the publications that Knight avoids.
Military significance? Zero. Social and political consequences? Actually quite a lot. Small wonder that Knight ignores it all, just as he completely evades the fact, discussed earlier, that RLE, along with MIT generally, was the regional centre of Vietnam War protest and, from 1965, direct resistance (academics among the founders and board members of the national organisation RESIST, for example, were primarily from MIT, particularly RLE).
The pattern continues, sometimes with deceit so petty that one can only gasp in disbelief. Take for example his discussion of the important issue of the two military labs that were formally administered by MIT, though separate from the academic programme. As discussed at the conference (Allott, pp. 115-6), as activism developed in the late 60s, two positions emerged on how to deal with the labs: roughly, the ‘left-wing position’ (me and a few others) that the formal relation should be maintained, for the reasons discussed at the conference; and the ‘right-wing position’ that they should be formally separated – Knight’s position. (That is easily demonstrated. Once separated from MIT, the labs had the same status as Raytheon, ITEK and others doing military work, to which Knight expresses no objection.)
In his heroic effort to confuse the issue, Knight reports (Allott, p. 67, note 7) that ‘Chomsky was well aware of what was going on at his university. As he said, “I’m at MIT, so I’m always talking to the scientists who work on missiles for the Pentagon.” Or again: “There was extensive weapons research on the MIT campus. … In fact, a good deal of the [nuclear] missile guidance technology was developed right on the MIT campus and in laboratories run by the university”‘.
Damning no doubt, until we check his source and once again find carefully contrived deceit. The taped conversation that he unearthed with considerable effort is not about MIT itself, but about the military lab near the campus, the I-Lab (now Draper Laboratory). It was ‘run by the university’ in the manner I discussed: under joint administration, while entirely separate from the academic programme, where there was no classified work at all. The phrase ‘MIT campus’ is used here informally, as was standard, to include the military labs that were separate from the actual campus.
A major theme of Knight’s tale, here and in earlier publications, is that I was facing incredible pressures from the directors and inhabitants of the den of iniquity at the ‘heart of the empire’, and he praises me effusively for my courage in somehow managing to resist it while contriving my exotic brand of linguistics to assuage my conscience for working for the American military machine.
He provides not a particle of evidence about the pressures, and, as usual, provides us with the refutation of his claims, this time in the actual text, not just in footnotes that we have to investigate to reveal the conscious deceit. By 1967, he writes, ‘MIT’s managers had given Chomsky a named professorship which, as he recalls, “isolated me from the alumni and government pressures”‘. This was after I had – very publicly – moved from my active involvement in anti-war protest in earlier years to direct resistance – for which I was in fact facing a federal trial. Though of course one could not publicly go into detail on these matters, I did give some indication of the range of resistance activities in which I and others were involved in a 1967 essay (‘On Resistance’), reprinted in a collection that includes ‘RoI’ and others from the same time or before, and dedicated to ‘the brave young men who refuse to serve in a criminal war’ (American Power and the New Mandarins, 1969).
I could go on to detail how supportive ‘MIT’s managers’ were not only of me personally, but of the department generally, including all of us who were intensively engaged in political action, including very public resistance activities. Same throughout the Institute. Another pillar of Knight’s construction crumbles, this time on minimal inspection. (Evidently recognising the self-refutation, Knight adds: ‘But, despite this, his retraction suggests that he was still facing pressure from somewhere, presumably from his own colleagues at MIT’. The ‘retraction’ is another of Knight’s gross distortions of a statement that is nothing of the sort. As any political activist is aware, dissidence invariably elicits opposition, and in my case it’s easy enough to document it from the printed record. And there has been plenty more, but nothing of any moment at MIT, for me or other activists, again contrary to Knight’s unsupported fabrications.)
There should be no need to proceed to dismantle further the web of deceit and misinformation that Knight spins, though at least a few words are necessary about the two individuals he specifically maligns, the two figures whose photos he selected to post. One is John Deutch, who ‘brought biological warfare research to the university in the 1980s’, and may have even gone ‘so far as to pressure junior faculty into performing this research “on campus”‘. Very serious charges, certainly. Checking Knight’s footnote, we find that his sole source is an unsourced statement in an underground newspaper that he mis-describes as ‘the student newspaper.’ More impressive scholarship.
His second example, Jerome Wiesner, is far more important. Wiesner was director of RLE, then became John F. Kennedy’s science adviser, then returned to MIT as provost and later president. So he was my ‘boss’ for several decades, Knight declares. Knight seems to know as little about research institutions and universities as, it seems, about political activism. The director of a lab, or the provost and president of a university, is not the ‘boss’ of anyone. That’s not how the institutions work. There should be no need to elaborate.
Once again, Knight’s footnotes provide ample material to flatly refute the defamatory tale he spins of a leading warmonger.
Opening Knight’s primary source on Wiesner (W. Rosenblith, Jerry Wiesner 2003), we discover a highly knowledgeable account of his actual activities both at MIT and in the government – an account from the left, by physicist Philip Morrison, a McCarthy target who was forced to curtail his non-academic activities and then came to MIT, where he was free to pursue them (Wikipedia, ‘Philip Morrison’). Morrison describes Wiesner as
one of MIT’s most effective reforming presidents. The years of his presidency yielded lasting student diversity (women now comprise more than 40 percent of undergraduates [there were virtually none before]) and a widened range of opportunities for creative teaching and research, reaching the arts, spanning the humanities, and including the serious study of science and technology in their relation to society. (Rosenblith, 2003, p. 59.)
Morrison also reviews Wiesner’s leading role, while in the government, in bringing about the Partial Test Ban Treaty, which ‘stopped the rapid and disastrous trend while levels [of fallout] were still tolerable’, though it did not ‘end the arms race – as Jerry, I, and others had hoped’ (Rosenblith, 2003). The same source, which Knight was again kind enough to cite, provides ample evidence of Wiesner’s initiatives on disarmament and arms control from the 50s and, as Kennedy’s science adviser, and on to later years, all work for which he is quite well known.
And all ignored by Knight, who instead concocts a fairy tale about Wiesner’s role in creating the missile gap. In fact, Wiesner’s role was so slight that he is not even mentioned in authoritative insider accounts of the missile gap (D. Ellsberg, Doomsday Machine, 2017). He was one of the scientists who investigated Air Force intelligence that did indeed indicate that there was a missile gap. But – crucially – he was the first to bring to the attention of Defence Secretary Robert McNamara that the intelligence was flawed, leading McNamara to recognise that ‘There is no missile gap’. (Rosenblith, p. 285. Or rather, as the new evidence that Wiesner provided to McNamara revealed, there was a substantial ‘missile gap’ – in Washington’s favour. See Ellsberg.)
To support his charges, Knight cites Wiesner’s report to incoming President Kennedy on 10 January 1961, in which he reviewed the consensus of all of the scientists that there was a missile gap, also calling for peaceful exploration of space. But the actual facts, mentioned above, he totally conceals. Again, Knight’s prize charge collapses as soon as we look at his own sources.
Knight posts a photo he found of Wiesner in 1961, when he was Kennedy’s science adviser, standing next to Defence Secretary McNamara, the implication being ‘you know what that means’. And, revealingly, he omits Wiesner’s crucial communication to McNamara explaining that there was no missile gap, his one significant contribution on this matter.
What is striking is the unfailing regularity with which Knight’s vulgar exercises of defamation crash to the ground on a moment’s inquiry, typically into the sources he provides. I can only assume that Knight provided these extensive sources in a show of scholarship, assuming that few would actually look into them. What precedes illustrates the pattern very clearly.
So it continues, paragraph after paragraph. It is unpleasant to permit the defamation and deceit to stand without comment. But perhaps this is enough to reveal the character of what Knight is doing. If any reader is interested in what I’ve put to the side here, I’ll be glad to discuss it. And meanwhile I apologise for wasting time and space on this performance.
[strong]Noam Chomsky[/strong] (from p.90-99 of The Responsibility of Intellectuals …,, ‘free access book’, UCL Press 2019)