Noam Chomsky - Early Life and Influences

my father was they were both first-generation immigrants my father came when he was about 17 he came in 1913 from the Ukraine he came essentially to escape the czars draft which was almost a death sentence for Jewish boys they lived and he lived in a village which was later wiped out by the Nazis nothing left and he when he came to the United States didn't know any English he worked in a sweatshop and Baltimore man should get to learn the language got some education finally went to Johns Hopkins got a degree ended up a pretty important Hebrew scholar did a lot of work on medieval Hebrew grammar in fact when I was a child I was reading his the draft of his dissertation on david kimba the 13th century medieval grammarian and he went on to be an educator kind of a dewy-eyed educator and then ran taught in a hebrew college and then the Graduate University of Jewish Studies in Philadelphia dropsy College it's my father my mother was also an immigrant she came when she was a baby about a year old and she came from what's now Belarus family was in New York also a both families extreme super Orthodox I mean my I remember my mother telling me that when she was with her friends and in the streets of New York it's a young teenager if she saw her father coming towards them they would cross the street because she didn't want to be embarrassed and in front of her friends by having her father passed by and act as if he didn't recognize her mere girl you know she the girls she was not she was very smart independent but she couldn't go to college that's only for boys so her younger brother was allowed to go to college but she could already go to Normal School she became a teacher an educator also a Hebrew educator workbooks actually two of us even wrote a play together once in Hebrew but she became a pretty influential educator in the Hebrew I wouldn't say you know ghetto isn't exactly the right word but there wasn't it where we they lived in Philadelphia where I grew up though there was a segment of the Jewish community mostly first-generation immigrants who were deeply engaged in revival Hebrew revival of the modernization of Jewish culture they want this split from the Diaspora tradition of Eastern Europe and split from Yiddish yeah they might both my parents their native languages Yiddish but they wouldn't let us hear a word so all I learned of Yiddish was what everybody learns from Woody Allen or a secret language of your parents you dropped the only dish wood into your public performances though don't you occasionally yeah so who influenced you the most politically some or dead politically really neither I mean they were this is the 30s so they were fairly conventional New Deal Democrats I mean I can remember listening to Roosevelt's fireside chats and Friday even I think Friday evening that was kind of a mood of calm settling over the family you know everything's gonna be okay but the influences on me politically to the extent they came from the family came from different part of the family my my mother's relatives were all in New York New York's a short train ride from Philadelphia and by the time I got old enough to travel myself about 11 or 12 had take the train to New York all the time stay with a couple of my relatives and they were mostly they were working-class mostly most of unemployed at the time and there was a pretty lively there was a very lively working class culture in the 1930s sort of forgotten but like my uncle when uncle who was maybe the biggest influence on my life at that age actually never went past fourth grade and others had some education but not much your uncle was a Trotskyite wasn't he he had been through every sect that there was and had checked but so he wasn't it he was an extra suit but an X everything else's will you what you were never seduced by the Communist Party in the Soviet Union where time I was about 12 years old I was not only anti-stalinist but aunt Edie Leninist from the left and I was being led towards the anarchist movements and towards the left Marxists there was a major component of the Marx tradition which was very critical of Bolshevism from the left there was another one from the right the Mensheviks but that was important one on the left people like Anton Pannekoek who was one of the leading intellectuals of the social democracy but a left critic of Bolshevism and others and those are the people I read and they were not too far from the from components of the anarchist movement they were sort of close to the anarcho-syndicalist who I was also interested and I became very much interested in the Spanish revolution right around the early around 1941 that well that was one of that was one of the Buhl the impulse to Rodge pretty much your first column or your first article when you were 10 I don't know if it was the first one but it was yeah an early one I was the editor of the fourth-grade newspaper and I'm probably the only reader and except maybe for my mother I don't know but I did write an article which I was from half remember right after the fall of Barcelona so that would have been about February 1939 it wasn't specifically about the Spanish Civil War it was about the rise of the spread of fascism in Europe which he mimics as a child it seemed very frightening and ominous I mean you know I listen to Hitler's speeches on the radio and understand anything but you'd pick up the mood and the threat and sort of knew some of the things that were happening and the article was about the fall of Austria then Czechoslovakia and now Spain it looked at the time it looked as if fascism was unstoppable nor spread over the world was frightening in itself but it also had a it tied in with personal experiences which incidentally my parents never even knew about those days you didn't talk to your parents about personal things not the least boys didn't it's not done but we lived in a neighborhood where we were the only Jewish family and the neighborhood was a pretty professed partly it was Irish Catholic when they just hated the British and partly was German they were for a Nazi but I was boy in the streets you get to run into these things and I grew up with it just a visceral fear of Catholics I know when the kids came out of the Catholic school down the street they were going to be braving any Semites and maybe later in the afternoon they'd calm down I could play ball or something but it's just part of experience was fear of antes violently anti-semitic mostly Catholic kids coming from this Jesuit school well with this momentum with this background why didn't you study politics when he went to university why did you suddenly opt for linguistics I didn't study politics because I really didn't believe in what was being taught I thought I had better insight from other sources and I in retrospect think that was probably a wise decision and actually I got into linguistics through political contacts it's a just a personal story my office of any general pictures while I'd love to hear I in I went to a do experimental school as I said my father was very much interested in do we do E's educational theories and practice them it was run by Temple University Department which have a progressive education department it was a terrific school I was there from infancy really but 18 months old since my parents worked until the high school so until 12 and it was a very exciting experience the there was no you weren't graded there were no ranking actually I didn't know I was a good student until I got into high school I knew I had skipped a grade but okay that's just meant I was the smallest kid in the class nobody paid any attention to it and it did the teachers kind of an inspired creative work often cooperative he worked with other people or he's pursued your own interests there was a curriculum you followed it and I can remember the school very well then I got into the academic high so there's one academic high school in the city actually two one for boys one for girls my life went future wife went to the girls woman and it was it's kind of like a black hole and I don't remember a thing I everything was great it had to pass exams you know yeah everything was ranked they were extremely boring I was looking forward to go to cut going to college the local college of course there's no thought of going anywhere else live at home you work go to college but and I looked in the cap I was 16 when I got into college and the catalog look very exciting that's going to take courses and stuff when I started to take the courses I discovered it's it's high school you know it's just boring routine and I was ready to drop out after about a year I didn't see any point going on and I happen to run into through political contact through left what's now would be called anti-zionist then it was I honest left zionist and a state radical activism I ran into a professor at the this is zellig harris zellig harris who was very much involved in these things in fact was at the center of many of these movements and had a big influence a lot of young Jewish intellectuals at the period he didn't write much so nobody knows about it was very influential and kind of a charismatic person I got to know him and he in retrospect I think he was trying to convince me to get back into college he didn't say anything but he just suggested that I start taking some of his graduate courses so I I took them isn't life serendipitous strange you have absolutely arbitrary eyes no the whole thing for me is totally so I don't even have professional qualifications which is when I'm teaching at MIT they didn't care but I had no professional qualifications in a field through Harrison influence I started taking graduate he directed me to faculty members at the University were pretty exciting people but in different fields the one was at mathematics another in philosophy and I ended up with a strange hodgepodge of well you did pretty well because you finished up as institutional professor and professor emeritus of linguistic and philosophy at MIT which isn't too bad for a sort of an autodidact it was serendipitous uses it's mostly accidental when I got out of I did go for four years of at Harvard Graduate work site a fellow's kind of a graduate in sub institution at Harvard for select students and that was very free also it's kind of like elementary school again but when I was finished with that I had no profession and I had no particular job prospects and I had friends at MIT and they just suggested that I come to the electronic I get a job in the electronics lab and I can't tell our radio from a tape recorder this day if I something goes wrong with my computer I've check with my grandchildren but so I had an interview the head of the our research lab electronics a person became pretty well known Jerry Wiesner he became Kent Kennedy's science advisor shortly after and we had an interview he was interested and talking about what I was interested and he thought it was interesting he jested that i work in a project that they had there on machine translation and I told them I thought it was a silly project I wasn't going to work on it but the way to solve it was just brute force there was nothing else you could do which turned out to be correct here's a later but he thought that was a pretty good answer so he said okay I want you to just work out what you're interested in and it kind of went on from there but it was locked you know otherwise I would never have ended up in the academic world it's interesting that even if you had never made a public utterance on matters political that you were going to be a trailblazer because I vividly recall your great contribution your great theoretical contribution to the notion of language that it is innate and not learnt and you argued discovered the role of hormones in the emergence of human language in much the same way as hormones play such a part in the emergence of puberty in a sense that's correct there was a kind of a general atmosphere in Cambridge Mass which was all over the place but in Cambridge was kind of the the peak in philosophy social sciences psychology linguistics or frankly all fields it was called behavioral science they there was a belief there was an interesting period that an American life altogether it was an interesting period it's worth remembering that before the Second World War the United States was far and away the richest country in the world but it really wasn't a major player in world affairs you know Britain was the dominant power and intellectually it was a kind of a backwater if you wanted to study the physics or philosophy or math you went to Germany or England if you want to be a writer he went to Paris you know the United States was like central Iowa he wanted to get out if you wanted to do anything so much so that after the Second World War when I was teaching at MIT we were still teaching French and German to the graduate students because as I hold over from the pre-war period they had to know them because that's where the work was after the Second World War changed all that dramatically the power shifted to the United States it became the major technological center intellectual center a lot of European Emma grace came they fled fascism Europe was devastated so there was a kind of a sort of a Rome Greece attitude towards Europe yeah it's there and say your personal timing was perfect with your personal timing was perfect like that look at it but it was more than that I mean there was a sense in the United States and the 50s if you read back the literature then that we can discard all of that old-fashioned stuff that was all old European stuff we're gonna do it the right way we're Americans we'll do everything from scratch and it had an objective basis of the United States at that time was you know the by farther it had literally half the world's wealth and incredible security and it was in a position to dominate the world and planners knew it there were careful plans laid for running the world but in the intellectual spheres and it was kind of at its peak and places like Cambridge you know Harvard and MIT and so on there was a sense that we can start everything all over and there were there were a lot of new discoveries that the early 1950s that was discovery of DNA oK we've somehow in the 1930s there was and it included a major American scientist Linus Pauling that was kind of a it was became possible to unify chemistry and physics with the new quantum theory and that was a step forward then during the war a lot of technological development after the war came in the late forties an information theory which looked like could be a unifying concept for the human sciences and then came radical behaviorism Skinner's work late forties it looked like kind of the answer to human behavior couple years later came Crick and Watson discovery of DNA it looked as if somehow biology was going to be integrated into a chemistry which already somehow had a link to physics and the concept of unified science you know we can unify all of science and march on what was very dominant it's still just beyond their reach is by now saying for Ava's a lot more modesty now and properly in the human sciences including linguistics there was a sense that everything was basically solved you know just kind of a few touches here and there but the basic ideas are understood the most influential philosopher of the period it happened to be at Harvard WV Quine one of the very influential philosopher his view was that as he put it languages just essentially an arbitrary collection of conditioned responses it's a fabric of sentences connected to one another and to stimuli by conditioned response and scary and lines and that was virtually Dogma that together with information theory you know the computers were just coming along it looked as if it would be possible to automate analytic techniques that's where the machine translation interest came from there were a couple of us actually three grad students who didn't believe a word of it at Harvard and early 50s and we try to work at our own views one of the one of them died some years ago it was the founder of modern biology of language and others my officemate still after 60 years at MIT is retired also but we thought first of all that with regard the language that the core problems were just being ignored and not even studied I mean the core the most elementary property of language when you think about it and it was kind of understood in the 17th and 18th century is that the core is a capacity which all humans share and no other organism has to act creatively with language to produce an unbounded number of expressions which have very specific meaning and very specific sound not determined by stimuli either external or internal appropriate to situations not caused by them intelligible to others who recognize that they could have expressed the same thought the same way that that record them before and it can go on without bounds that's a kind of an elementary aspect of human nature and a very distinctive one you should go back to see the cart that was kind of the core of a Cartesian philosophy and it it spread and found its way into all sorts of directions like classical liberalism much enlightenment thought a lot of it's been forgotten since but it was quite real it was forgotten in the 19th century in the 20th century it was became much became turned into what I just described behavioral science analysis of data and so on but it was missing all of these points and then the three of you come along and well the three of us you know just a little a couple of other friends you know it was mainly the three of us thought first of all but this ought to be the core problem for the study of language and the other thing we thought was that language should not be divorced from biology that the capacity for languages of biological capacity much like I say the visual system or the immune system and so on just some subsystem of the cognitive faculties which should be studied chemistry on its own but also integrated with others that later came to be called bio linguistics and pursuing those two directions a new approach to language and cognitive science sort of began to develop with in interaction with this around the same time it's still a very little conflicted it's it's not that everyone accept it by any means I'm aware of that you are under constant attack in that area of your life as you were but so as you are politically it's a contested area but I think it I don't really think there's much shouldn't be much controversy on it but and out of that came and then MIT just became the center of it we were all at MIT and one of us Erik Lana Berg that went off to medical school and worked on biology of language and Morris Howie is as I said still my officemate after all these years and we developed the department and students came and so on and so forth spread all over the world and you were able to demonstrate quite convincingly that the capacity to learn language was as its greatest when the human being is pretty young it was kind of known intuitively but as the topic became studied much more intensively actually some of the best works done by a couple of scientists who are right here now Stephen Crane and Ross Thorne by now this intensive study of acquisition of language and yeah like other biological capacities it it appears to have what's called a critical period that was it it functions almost reflexively at a certain stage of life later stages gets outside hotter doesn't it has differently actions are individual differences but it's generally through

Channel: Chomsky's Philosophy

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Keywords: chomsky, language, schooling, noam chomsky, politics, MIT, massachusetts institute of technology, linguistics, philosophy

Id: EwRT02AxoJ0

Length: 23min 31sec (1411 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 10 2016