The Paradoxical Paths of Noam Chomsky with Dr. Chris Knight

The episode dives into the complex duality of Noam Chomsky as a linguist and an activist, revealing the schism between his scientific work and political beliefs. Through insights from Dr. Chris Knight, listeners explore how Chomsky's theories, while revolutionary, risk disconnecting from social context and the critical implications this has for understanding human communication. Join us for a compelling conversation with Dr. Chris Knight, author of "Decoding Chomsky," as we explore the fascinating duality of Noam Chomsky's life as both a groundbreaking linguist and an unwavering political activist

• Exploration of Chomsky's linguistic theories versus his political activism 
• Discussion on the military influence in Chomsky's academic career 
• Components of Chomsky’s work that neglect social interaction 
• Analysis of the implications of universal grammar 
• Importance of gender dynamics in linguistic discourse 
• Reflection on the separation of language as a tool versus a social construct 
• Relevance of Chomsky's legacy in contemporary sociopolitical contexts

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Chapters

• 0:48 Chomsky's Linguistics and Activism Disconnect
• 13:45 Chomsky's Linguistics and Activist Bind
• 24:02 Chomsky's Academic and Political Influence
• 34:51 Chomsky's Linguistic and Activist Interpretation
• 51:12 Critique of Graeber's Anthropological Theory
• 1:04:11 Left's Rejection of Modern Science
• 1:11:51 Hunter-Gatherer Societies and Narrativity
• 1:24:12 Gender, Revolution, and Language Analysis
• 1:32:01 Human Culture Born on Picket Line

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:49

Hello, welcome to Bobblog.

Speaker 1: 0:50

I'm here with Dr Chris Knight, one of the founding members of the Radical Anthropology Group and author of many, many books, but the one that is going to be coming up today is one from 2016, decoding Chomsky, as well as the exploration of the implication of Chomsky's linguistics.

Speaker 1: 1:15

Linguistics and Dr Knight and I were talking briefly before the show and he was informing me that Chomsky is actually probably quite correct when he says that his linguistics aren't related to his activism, and I've personally gone back and forth on that, having read a ton of both. But one of the things that you implicate in the book, and you were definitely telling me a few minutes ago, is that we have to look at the difference in, let's say, the structure of what Chomsky and linguistics is concerned about versus what Chomsky's political theory is concerned about, and how they almost lead to two completely different people Ochoomski, who works for MIT, and Ochoomski, who is, you know, standing up against US militarization and US foreign policy, as well as supporting various socialist and anarchist causes. So why is there such a schism there, dr Knight?

Speaker 2: 2:09

Well, because working for the US military is not the same thing as working against the US military. He spent his whole life working for the US military as a linguist.

Speaker 1: 2:26

He spent his whole life working against the US military as an activist working against the US military as an activist, and this seems to almost fundamentally split his activist work from his linguistic work. And one thing that I have never thought about is that his view of human language processing is not particularly social. It's, you know, based about pre-existing modules in the brain where the person is basically in some ways talking to themselves. Why would that have been something influenced by, you know, working for a department highly funded by the military?

Speaker 2: 3:14

influenced by working for a department highly funded by the military. Well, I mean because they were hoping that he would provide them with a kind of black box which they could put inside a missile or other weapon, probably in those days a nuclear weapon. And they didn't want those weapons talking to each other, they wanted the weapon, you know, the black box, to basically receive instructions and act on them in preferably any language and act on them in preferably any language, so you could be speaking whatever Russian, vietnamese, french, whatever Swahili, and just say, during the Vietnam War, go left, go right, hit them Viet Cong. Not there, you idiot. It would have been on a keyboard in those days rather than, you know, vocal, vocal speech. But the idea was that if this black box contained universal grammar, um, it would be able to comprehend and compute instructions in any one of the world's languages, because you've got the, you've got the installed inside that missile or weapon, you've got universal grammar. That was the idea.

Speaker 1: 4:39

So this is a very both singular, as in a singular person, not particularly social and also very programming influence view of language social and also very programming-influenced view of language.

Speaker 2: 5:11

What would be if that were true as a theory? What would be the implications of that? I mean, the implication is that I mean there's just so many implications. But the implication is that first of all, it's got absolutely nothing whatever to do with a person that I know and love as Noam Chomsky, and perhaps I should just say we miss him so much since he's been ill. I mean, we just needed his voice of reason as a Jewish activist who doesn't, you know, doesn't just accept that my country, right or wrong, in a place like Gaza. I mean he was just absolute voice of sanity in an increasingly politically deranged world, politically deranged world.

Speaker 2: 5:51

But he would say himself emphatically if you want to understand my activism or if you want to understand what I think maybe we ought to do, you know as socialists or anarchists. He would say himself don't look to my linguistics. He would say I mean he actually said I'm almost two people. And then an interviewer asked him when the activist Chomsky meets up with the linguists, what do they say to each other? And he said basically they've got nothing to say.

Speaker 2: 6:24

And of course he pointed out that his brain has a certain structure. It's sort of bifurcated like different compartments of a computer. One gets on with one job, another gets on with another job. And I think you can see why. When he was having meals with, you know, the director of the CIA or whoever he was having a meal with, he wouldn't want his activists comrades in the same room at the same time. He would want it equally in the evening after the political meeting denouncing the CIA. He probably wouldn't want the director of the CIA with him. So he needed to separate those two components of his life absolutely and completely, and so he did.

Speaker 1: 7:06

And.

Speaker 2: 7:11

I mean one side of his life would have just interfered with, cataclysmically got in the way of the other. Had they not been completely insulated against each other, had his own mind not been absolutely successfully bifurcated, the linguistics would have interfered with and restrained his politics. His politics would have gotten in the way of his linguistics. The military, using his linguistics, wouldn't want him to insert his politics into the process. I mean they wanted him to just be a scientist and get on with the job, and vice versa. So I mean having any real connection between the two sides of his life would have led to some kind of compromise when neither side was any good at all. It would be a miserable gray area with each side holding up the other and making it useless.

Speaker 1: 8:05

Well, this is something that I've always wondered. I'm trained in applied linguistics and so I've gone through a whole lot of Chomsky readings, and for the longest time, particularly when I was much younger, definitely before you wrote your book I was trying to reconcile Chomsky's stances on like innate human sociality and his linguistics, which you could wish to be about innate human sociality. But, as you pointed out both in your book and to me before the show, there's very little social in Chomsky's likeule theory of innate structural language.

Speaker 2: 8:53

It's not just, honestly, you've understated it, it's not just very little, you really need to get this. It's not very little social, it's zero social. Language is i-language, it's a computational module. It doesn't speak, it doesn't even make sounds. Uh, he has a theory about the origin of language and what and the origin of language, and most of us think there must have been some social processes which made linguistic communication possible.

Speaker 2: 9:24

But he's, he has a theory which was that, um, some kind of ape man was wandering around at some distant prehistoric time and it was a cosmic ray shower and it produced a mutation in this one individual's head, whereupon it started talking to itself. He makes that very clear. I mean, he sort of describes it as a fairy tale, but every time he comes back to anyone trying to press him come on, noam, if you're saying, language is biological, most biological things, in most aspects of human nature which are biological, they've evolved in some way. And he said, no, no, this didn't evolve, it was installed as a result of a random mutation. And when it was installed, it was installed in perfect form. Um, and very, and from the very start it was.

Speaker 2: 10:10

You know it was, it was churning out thought inside this one individual's head and sound wasn't necessary, because when you're thinking to yourself you don't need to make sounds. You can if you want to, but it's kind of irrelevant. And you say you were trained in applied linguistics. You may have noticed during your studies that Chomsky had no time for applied linguistics. Whatever, none, I would just say no time. I mean he just showed no interest, if anything a slight sort of contempt, for the whole area of applied linguistics, because his version of linguistics was of no use, unless you are trying to design a missile I mean, I find this uh interesting for a variety of reasons.

Speaker 1: 11:03

one is that, following the, the stuff coming out of linguistics and linguistic anthropology which which I don't work in, but since I do language education, I follow it and it seems like even people who are universal grammar partisans have had to systemically reduce the claims of what we can tell as the modularity of language.

Speaker 1: 11:32

And that's not even getting into Tomasello's critique, where you could explain what Chomsky is observing in a completely different way and it would still be perfectly coherent. So I mean one question that I would have and I know that you've done some work on the historical development of languages what kind of evidence do we have that Chomsky's highly evolutionary modular programming view of grammar is true at all?

Speaker 2: 12:19

Well, I mean, mean it isn't true. I mean I mean and nobody really thinks it is these days. I mean there was a time when chomsky, when trying to argue with chomsky was like trying to argue with over in this country. Argue with the king, I mean, if you, if you're somebody like me and I'm not a member of the royal family and I try to argue with his majesty, I've lost already because he's his majesty and I'm just chris knight. So I mean, chomsky has always been a mythical figure, utterly utterly mythical. He's like you know, he is like modern linguistic theory in the States, and clearly that's because he's got such massive institutional backing from the US military and therefore from Eastman, kodak and God knows which massive corporations and all that massive institutional backing, almost like the backing which a monarch gets. In other words, it's backing from the state, given this mythical, mystical, almost like the backing which a monarch gets. In other words, it's backing from the state, given this mystical authority. And then combine that with the fact that he's also an anarchist or communist of some sort libertarian communist he wouldn't use that term, communist, I don't think but certainly very far-left anarchist, and he becomes sort of godlike anarchist and it becomes I mean he becomes sort of godlike. So, um, you can't really argue against. You know, an institution I mean chomsky just would always win. But if you're asking whether the theory worked, he's the first person to say that.

Speaker 2: 13:46

Not not one single variant of his um, you know, of his model of universal grammar work. If it had worked, he wouldn't have kept changing his mind about everything. I mean, you know, first of all we have all the, all the critical things going on with surface structure, and then it all turns about to be deep, deep structure. Then he forget. He says forget both deep structure and surface structure. And every time he goes through a new incarnation, the. The reason he has to do that, he has to drop the old theory and adopt a new one, is because the old theory was just so completely hopelessly misguided.

Speaker 2: 14:20

But of course, you know, the faithful were prepared. Well, actually, most of them weren't. I mean, usually his disciples would just say come on now, given now that we've all come behind you and accepted this particular model. And then he suddenly said well, actually, you're all wrong. I mean, so every time he made a big change, he lost a huge number of disciples. But there's always ambitious young people looking for jobs who would jump on board and adopt the new model. But I mean so, I mean clearly, he's the first to say that none of them actually worked.

Speaker 2: 14:56

And as I say in my book, at the end of the day an interviewer said well, come on, noam. At the end of the day, what is universal grammar? And you may remember from my book what his answer was he said, well, it's anyone's guess. Those are his actual words.

Speaker 2: 15:14

And then then of course, add to that the fact that the us military, very excited initially at the idea that they could you know, it's almost like the manhattan project they thought they were going to get this young, young jewish, absolute astonishing genius to give them some sort of super weapon in terms of missile guidance. But it very quickly turned out that absolutely nothing worked. And then of course, the US military, as far as I can kind of work out, realized that Chomsky was useful in other ways. I mean the actual theory didn't work. But I mean there's all sorts of ways in which the outcome of Chomsky's linguistics was extremely beneficial to the state and extremely damaging to all of us, because it just made this critical feature of human nature absolutely baffling, absolutely incomprehensible. Plus, his interventions were cataclysmically divisive. I mean, you know, it just meant that the scientific community couldn't put the natural sciences together with the social sciences and make any kind of coherent model of what it means to be human, because the critical part of what it means to be human, which is, of course, the fact that we talk to each other, you know, was just like a huge barbed wire fence was erected around it.

Speaker 1: 16:37

It is weird, given how much he thinks a human cooperation and communication and sociality is innate in his activism, that this would go the way it went. But to talk a little bit more about, like you know, chomsky's linguistics, it's you don't become the most sighted linguist or academic in the world unless someone in military operations is also sighting you. I mean, there's, there's really no way around that. And one of the things that I always found I found deeply telling and ironic. I got it from your book and an article you wrote, probably a decade ago for the Weekly Worker Maybe not quite that long ago.

Speaker 1: 17:28

Yeah, maybe not quite that long ago about the duality here. When you look at Chomsky's early writing on Vietnam and Cambodia, people, even some leftists, have rightly caught him out for misreading Cambodia. But then looking at who was funding his research at MIT and you mentioned the Mitra Corporation, which was set up jointly by MIT and the Air Force why is that important and why is that so deeply ironic?

Speaker 2: 18:10

Well, I mean it's deeply ironic because Chomsky was kind of always hoping that he could just confine himself in his linguistics work to theory. He wasn't going to roll up his sleeves and produce anything which could actually kill somebody. So he wasn't going to make a missile, make a bomb, make a guidance system electronically. He was working in an electronics lab. But when he was asked by the US military and I'll go into all the details of who asked him why to come up with this thing, he basically said well, I'll come up with basic science, I'll come up with basic theory. It's rather like if somebody had asked albert einstein, would he make us a bomb? I think einstein would have said certainly not. I'm a pacifist, but I that's not going to stop me working on, you know, on theory, on on, you know, the just huge amount of energy packed up in an atom which, if you did split it would, you know, cause havoc. So he was very intent that he wouldn't want to actually in practical ways kill people the way, say, the us military wanted to do in, say, vietnam. Nowadays, of course, israelis are doing it in Gaza, but the problem was that the MITRE Corporation was precisely the arm of MIT which operationalized things. So MITRE was all about getting theoretical stuff done at MIT in the electronics lab turned into weaponry. So quite a few of Strzomski's students and I've spoken to a number of them, as I'm sure you know, especially from the paperback edition of my book Barbara Party and various others they were all actually employed to sort of make military sense of these ideas of Chomsky. And Chomsky was very, very, I think, very worried. I think that actually did um affect his conscience and he was quite careful um, you know, not to get a military pass to go in and out of um, the mitre corporation building where his students were. So for example, when he was over there at mitre supervising students, when he went to the toilet he was accompanied by security guards and that's because he didn't have a pass. And I think he was very it mattered to him that he didn't have a pass, because having a pass in that building would have been too much like real practical collusion with killing people.

Speaker 2: 20:31

But I was, I feel, like asking you. I mean, you seem to know everything. You seem to know that the is an extraordinarily brilliant, moving, heartfelt, magnificent sociality to trumpski the activist conception of human nature, and there's never been a linguist who went to such an extreme in saying that language isn't even for communication, it's just for one individual computing something in the head. Now you know that it's your experience. I always feel like I know it's an interview going one way, not the other, but I do feel like throwing it back at you to something.

Speaker 2: 21:03

What the hell is your explanation? I mean, are you just saying the guy's some sort of schizophrenic or something? What are you saying? Because I'm not saying he's schizophrenic, I'm saying he was in an institutional bind, he was an, he wanted a good job and he wanted to keep his conscience and be an activist and and because the two were in complete contradiction of each other, he was in a bit of a bind, but he found a magnificent solution and it was a very, very clever move that he made to keep his job and keep on being an activist. But what's your explanation?

Speaker 1: 21:33

my initial explanation before I read your book was actually that that, uh, there must have been more sociality to chompsley's linguistic theory than there obviously seemed to be. I mean, I kept looking for it and I was just like you know, where's this Rosetta Stone that's going to explain how this man One of the things that I admired about Chomsky is that he didn't treat, even in his activism, he didn't treat human beings as tabula rassas in either of his two personas. But when I really, when I really sat down and thought about it and I remember having a crisis about it when I was still working, when I was still teaching teachers about linguistics and I was having to teach him Chomsky and also talking a little bit about his activism and and going like I don't I, I I feel like there should be a way that they're related and other than the fact that they're both not tabula rasa views of human beings, I don't have anything. And your book actually gave me an answer because I was like, oh, I'm looking for this in the ideas and I actually should probably be looking for this in the material conditions and biography. But it was a big deal to me because I was also trying at the time I was trying to figure out why Chomsky's stance on the state always seemed a little bit odd to me, and I don't think they're related. I think the linguistics are separate from this.

Speaker 1: 23:17

But I was also trying to go there because I was like, okay, well, he's an anarchist, he's some kind of like soft anarchist, cynicalist, but he's also got this game theoretic approach to when we should support Democrats, which means that we should almost always support Democrats, and that sounds like a weird and very frustrating cul-de-sac to be in. Is there a relationship there too? And no, I mean, you know, I couldn't find it, but I was desperately trying to. Then I just was like well, trotsky is just wrong. Well, trotsky's just wrong, and maybe that's why he's, because his social theory is correct. I think for the most part there is human and ace sociality. I have undergraduate formal training in nothing professional grade but and anthropology actually, training in Lenduist. It's nothing professional grade but and anthropology actually. But I was just I couldn't reconcile it, and particularly when I realized what his theory of how language emerged was, because I was just like what, like what? Yeah, I don't know anybody in anthropology who thinks that, even right-wing anthropologists. What is this?

Speaker 2: 24:38

The thing is, his model, of course, is. I mean, one of the words he uses for this thing in the brain is digital infinity, and of course I mean digital infinity. When you think about it, well, you can't really have a gradual evolution of digital infinity. So if you did, you'd have to have something being sort of slightly digital, but not too digital, and slightly infinite, not too infinite. But both the word digital and the word infinity are sort of mathematical concepts which are absolutes. And of course in my book I compare that to Descartes' conception of the soul. I mean, you know the idea of a baby that's got a little bit of soul but not really a soul, and then it has a little bit more soul. I mean, any theologian will tell you you've either got a soul or you haven't, because of course, in each case, whether it's digital infinity or the soul, it's, it's an abstraction, and the abstraction is designed to have pretty hard edges because you know, as I say, either either you've got a solo or you haven't, and the same with those things. So you can see why he couldn't possibly accept the gradual evolution of language. Um, I mean, that's, you know, that's, that's. That's looking at it from one point of view. But I mean, you know, on the issue of of, you know this sort of weirdly extreme um. I mean it's more than bourgeois individualism, it's a sort of individualism I don't know with, on sort of on steroids. I mean it's just this. This individual just computes, um, it doesn't, it doesn't have emotions, it doesn't, it doesn't have a body, it doesn't seem to move around, doesn't seem to. It's just, of course, it's a mainframe to computer. It's one of those computers that you had in the 50s when chomsky got his first job, and and that thing doesn't move around, it doesn't engage, it doesn't really. I mean, it's got a sort of body, I suppose, but I mean that's not the sort of body that can gradually evolve. You have to design it and at a certain point you switch it on and it's either off or it's on. And and and I mean, of course I'm sure you've noticed this as well that all of his most influential um students over over, you know, over time, um have just, I mean, like stephen pinker, of course, is the most famous, successful whatever.

Speaker 2: 26:54

But I mean he just says that the idea that language isn't for communication is just. I mean Pinker's obviously on the right, he's a rather politically quite a nasty piece of work, I would argue. But he just couldn't possibly stomach this ridiculous idea that language isn't for communication. Do you remember? There's a thing here that Nirmus says? He says, well, you know communication. Yeah, you can communicate with anything. You can communicate with your hair. You get a different haircut. You're signaling something. You can slam a door and say something. So you can slam your car door, slam your front door, show you're in a bad temper. I mean, he literally says that all the extraordinarily sophisticated thing you know, features of syntactical language, you know, he sort of equates them with just you know, a style of hair or a style of walking or slamming a door or something. It's just anybody, I mean you know as soon as you think about it, and obviously pink Pinker's not the only one. You just think, hang on a bit. Surely language with all its complexities is actually designed for sharing thoughts, not just having them, and surely language is not just thinking, it's sharing thinking, making thinking accessible to other people.

Speaker 2: 28:07

But Trump, he just couldn't even take that step because as soon as he did, his science would be sort of social science and then of course the social science would be mingling with his highly social, sociable, magnificent and many ways inspiring um activism and and in order to keep the two absolutely apart I mean no contact whatever, a big firewall between the two all of his sociality had to go into his activism and absolutely none of it into his science. He had to just cleanse or purify the language of any contact with human life, emotions, sociality, communication, politics I mean any. And of course yeah, I just mentioned politics there just get all the politics out of his linguistics, because of course, if there had been any politics in his linguistics, it would be in, would have been american imperialist politics, because that you know. So that's what he was designed for, and he and I'm, and of course he took the right decision. But you know, in so many ways he would, at the end of the, even at the cost of his linguistics, he would stick to his conscience, his morality.

Speaker 2: 29:19

What I would definitely say is, at the end of the day, insofar as he had to make a choice and occasionally sort of had to, he put his anarchism, his conscience, the human being that is Noam Chomsky, the real, wonderful and inspiring activist. He put that first and the cost was his linguistics, because his linguistics ended up being kind of nonsensical. But the great thing from his point of view was that even when the linguistics didn't work at all, the state MIT I would say the military in different ways, not directly with actually funding, trying to fund something which would work in a missile, but somehow there were other uses to which they could put Chomsky and they were very obviously MIT was proud to have him there. He was a great symbol, in many ways, I suppose a kind of fig leaf for all the unpleasant work going on in that place To have somebody as magnificent and clean of moral turpitude Noam was a was it served?

Speaker 2: 30:32

It served MIT well and in some ways served the American establishment establishment well. It enabled them to trumpet the idea of freedom and democracy. Look, you know, uh, you know Noam's a left-winger, an anarchist, and he's got all this. You know all these privileges and he's. You know his free speech and his status at MIT and all that.

Speaker 1: 30:55

One of the things your book got me thinking. There's actually two questions that I had and they're radically different, so I'm going to start with the one that's more related to what you said. But one of the things your book got me thinking about was the function of the long march through the academy which Chomsky in many ways was a precursor of. I mean, he was already in academia. But when you think about new left and new communist academics in the United States, how many of them ended up going into theory off of a hope to bring a new cadre of intellectuals and also have access to students who are young and had a lot of time and use that as a way to pivot politics in a more radical direction. I mean, you can think of Angela Davis, you can think of just tons and tons and tons of these. But yeah, one thing I never hear asked about that that your book actually got me thinking about was why would the universities who still I mean people underestimate how much funding they get from the Department of Defense and from government contractors? If you've been an academic in the United States, you probably don't even realize that you're two steps away from some government intelligence agency somewhere. And your book got me thinking oh, there's something in it. You know, this long march to the academy, even though it leads to weird reactionary cottage industries announcing professors that go all the way back to William Buckley's Got a man at Yale. It's a genre of conservative literature now that's over a half century long to be some benefit to the state apparatus for letting the people doing at the time so much of the state apparatuses developmental work. I mean today a lot more of it's done by DARPA directly, but particularly in the 60s and 70s it was pretty diffuse out amongst the academy. And when you look at the history of American institutions during the Cold War, if you're a radical academic in a university until the 1980s, you also have to deal with the fact that in some way, crucially, all your funding is based on a state that is also doing. Cold War largesse Like, part of the growth of the American university was how much military money they got, and both through the GI Bill but also through grants, developmental corporations, that sort of thing.

Speaker 1: 33:47

And I guess your book got me to think oh, there actually is a way that even someone who is principled like Chomsky you know so we're not talking about people being completely a principled here would still be doing the state they oppose a big favor by doing this kind of work and by bifurcating or even sometimes not bifurcating their work, although it's harder to. The other thing that you got me thinking about is the dilemma that the hard sciences would be in on this, because the social sciences doing ideology, if they're doing ideological work, they're also probably doing a real scholarship too. In fact I know they are, I shouldn't say probably they're. If you know they're two or three steps removed from the military apparatus at best, right, but someone like Chomsky is one step removed and I find that interesting. Go ahead.

Speaker 2: 34:52

This is quite a good book the Linguistics Wars. Randy Allen Harris is the new edition and there's quite a lot on my stuff towards the end of that book. And he's just pointing out I mean an obvious fact that Noam is constantly interpreting my writing as saying that he was colluding with the US military and therefore he was a sort of two-timer. He was, you know white man, speak with forked tongue that he was really some. I mean, chomsky argues, or seems to think, that I'm arguing, that I'm accusing him of being a sort of US agent. And the funny thing is, as Randy Harris acknowledges, I'm actually doing the opposite. I mean, I'm just trying to point out that all of his work at MIT was designed to be so theoretical, so abstract, so pure, that in the end he, he kind of didn't care if it wouldn't work, um, because he'd actually, in the end of the day, he didn't want to make missiles which would kill people. So I'm, I'm actually, I'm actually one of the few people able to um exonerate.

Speaker 2: 36:14

No, no, because, as I point out out, all of us have got to make a living, we've got to live under capitalism. I mean, how many of us? I don't know even blue-collar workers. I mean, we're working for some mining company, some defence industry, some, I don't know, whatever it is. We have to work for some. I mean, where do we get money from if it's not from capitalism? So I'm just saying, all of us have to. If we are on the left, we have to oppose capitalism, and yet we make a living by doing stuff for capitalism, whether it's for a bank or a mining company, whatever it is. And of course, what we try to do is to hold our heads high, and it's sometimes I mean, for some of it it's harder than for others. I mean, I find it fairly easy to keep my head high, I think because I'm not aware of producing any remote use to anyone in the establishment or the military. On the contrary, I mean, my stuff is completely counter-establishment from top to bottom. But Noam, in my own view, at the end of the day, put his own principles first.

Speaker 2: 37:22

And Randy Alan Harris berates Noam for not seeing that I was, in all my writing, kind of doing him a favour, trying to shield Noam himself from the accusation that he was a double dealer. And I don't think of him as a double dealer. I think of him as an example of what all of us have to be, which is to be sort of opposed to all sorts of elements of the world we live in and yet somehow colluding because we've got to make a living. But he's an extraordinarily extreme case of that. He's a very extreme case of having to oppose the you know the regime, if you like, the us military regime, having to oppose it while working for it, because in his case he really was in that electronics lab, I mean working for it.

Speaker 2: 38:14

Of course what he says is that the military didn't care what he was. I've got lots of quotes of, of course, probably in my book and also in the stuff I've done more recently. He keeps saying oh, you know, everything that ever happens in the States is always funded by the military. So are you against child psychology, childcare, I don't know medicine, I mean because all of it gets. You know the military, I mean because all of it gets, you know. So he argues that everybody gets, just because you know all real heavy funding comes from the US military.

Speaker 2: 38:46

He tries to argue that I'm making a further point that the US military were directly concerned and he keeps saying, no, they didn't care what you did. He said I know I'm chumpsy, I could do what I like, and the military didn't really care, uh, exactly what it was, because you know they were. They were just funding stuff which might be useful for all sorts of purposes, not just for the military. Um, I mean, that's the claim he makes, um, and I'm I'm very pleased when in this book, randy ellis howard because of course is it is the finest, this book is actually the finest real, scholarly account of the whole history of Chomsky and his fights and his U-turns and everything else. I was really pleased to see that he, he, he himself, gets what I was trying to do and berates Chomsky for, oh, apparently deliberately misinterpreting my, my work.

Speaker 1: 39:43

Well, yeah, the, the number of people who I've seen, just who read your book or saying he was a C, a, c, I, a shill or something, actually really amuses me, because that is clearly not what you're doing. Um, and Chomsky's an interesting case, and I guess we have a comparison case of a radical anthropologist who died recently, uh, james c scott, where uh, scott's relationship to the sa is not nearly as as fragmented or easy to clean up as, say, chomsky's is to the military and to me. I'm not here to condemn James Scott or to throw out his work. I think seeing a state's a great book, but interestingly, you don't have what you have with Chomsky, which is someone who's compartmentalized themselves. It's a lot more problematic. It is an interesting case study.

Speaker 1: 40:55

The other thing that your book made me think about would would Chomsky? Um, is that, prior to Chomsky and linguistics, there is a lot of hope that, uh, cybernetic theories would be the way to get this universal programming, by assuming that, like, the ideomurdo effect was the basis of everything, and you can see, um, uh, basically the, the way that a machine gear turns and will adjust to the turning is also a way that you can understand, like human interaction. Um, and there's the more social side of that, and Sanford Beer, which a lot of Marxists have rediscovered recently. But I always would say, well, one, why did the radical cybernetic stuff stop? And two, why did the military seem so interested in it and then drop it like a rock? And it occurred to me reading your book that Tomsey's linguistics actually does a better job because it doesn't have the baggage of assuming mid-century behavioralist assumptions about human beings which were transparently not defensible not defensible, that you know that that which is you know, um, it was a gift.

Speaker 2: 42:22

It was a gift to chomsky that when he first shot into prominence his he could, he could present himself as the alternative to blank slate behaviorism. You know no human nature, we just do what we'd like. You know, rats in a? You know rats in a maze, just being electrocuted or rewarded to remember how to navigate through this wretched maze, I mean that was such a rubbish. I mean obviously completely totalitarian. As Chomsky points out, it's the kind of model of human nature which anyone, like Stalin or any Ford Motor Company boss, would hope that humans are sufficiently plastic to be just. You can just do what you like with them, because there's no such thing as human nature. But I mean he was very fortunate there, because of course so many other people Piaget and I don't know, I mean so many other psychologists of course never went down that road of insane behaviorism, as if humans are just like, you know, plastic clay. You know to be molded in any direction. So he was, he was, he was. It was great for him that he was able to do that. Um, what am I saying now? Yeah, I mean it's just, yes, he managed to scoop up the credit for being the guy that got rid of behaviorism and and then, and of course that that was marvelous. But of course, as so often happens in things which are sort of purported to be science but aren't really science, you just go from one extreme to the other. So behaviorism says everything which shapes us, our behavior, is external, uh, and the internal stuff? You can just forget it. There's nothing there, no such thing as mind. And then, chubbs, he comes up with the exact, diametric and equally insane, I have to say, opposite, which is nothing external is of any importance. Everything which matters in language is already inside the human brain, installed there genetically, such that as, again, as I point out, you know, he was asked well, what about a word like carburettor was? Was that installed in Homo sapiens in the African Middle Stone Age, like you know, whatever, 300,000 years ago or something, and you know which is, of course, as other people have said. Well, what about the concept of a bicycle? I mean, you know, and of course Chomsky says yes, yes, carburettor, hovercraft, bicycle, all these concepts are innate, these lexical concepts that's the side of a word which isn't just the sound they were installed in Homo sapiens at origin. I mean, it is completely and utterly mad that we had in our head the concept of a carburettor before there were any cars. Any cars, but he would.

Speaker 2: 44:59

But he's sort of forced to say that in order to go right to the extreme in saying that experience, history, culture is irrelevant, it's all in the head to start with, and of course with a computer, that's true. I mean, nowadays computers can learn, of course. But in his day you know rubbish in, rubbish out. If you didn't put something in the bloody computer it wasn't there. So you had these massive mainframe computers and you had to put stuff into it. Then you had to switch it on and it all had to be there. From the start. That computer wasn't going to wander around the world making experiments, talking to other computers, learning stuff.

Speaker 2: 45:28

And of course and I've kind of linked to this point when chomsky was first employed officially to work on machine translation, the reason he wasn't interested because he realized even then. It just shows how sharp he was at that stage he just realized that any sensible machine translation would have to be you'd have to equip your machine with enormous amount of of memory and it would have to take a word in French or some other language and then shift around with all the possible interpretations in other languages. And of course we now have very good automatic translation. But it works on precisely the lines that Chomsky was saying he wasn't interested in because in his day you didn't have sufficient memory, you didn't have a sufficient store of already digitized stuff I mean nowadays ai.

Speaker 2: 46:22

I mean, if I'm quite interested in ai because of course I'm interested in human origins and I I'm a very, I'm very convinced that human, the history, the story of, of human origins, including origins of language, wasn't just the, the story of males doing something man the hunter, man the toolmaker, man the thinker. But if you look at AI, it's all completely man does this, man does the other, because all AI can do is find out what's out there and sort of average it. Chomsky knew in advance that that wasn't interesting. What he was interested in was a completely different way of doing translation, which is to tunnel down to the ultimate universal grammar, so that if you have something in Russian you translate it back into universal grammar. That is like an ultimate underlying computer code for all the world's languages. And if the US military managed to get hold of that, wow, that would have been a smart weapon, but of course there's no such thing.

Speaker 2: 47:30

There isn't that underlying computer code of all the world's languages? The world's languages are radically different from each other, although of course, they have a huge amount in common like digital format and so many other things.

Speaker 1: 47:43

Well, yeah, it was always interesting to me when reading Chauncey's linguistics and the various revisions during the linguistic wars, how vaguer and vaguer and vaguer the modular grammar structures that we're all supposed to have got, because it's just like, well, yeah, we got a counterexample here. We got a counterexample here. We got a counterexample here.

Speaker 2: 48:06

You know, chomsky said there's a difference between core and periphery. Right, I'm only interested in the core. Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. The trouble was almost everything turned out to be in the periphery, everything of any interest. There was almost nothing left of the court. Anyway, I mean yeah.

Speaker 1: 48:24

Yeah, I find that. What I find interesting about this is another trend, and I've read a lot of your writings, and David Graeber as well, that's good, that's good and.

Speaker 2: 48:35

David Graeber as well. That's good.

Speaker 1: 48:40

That's good, and there's this interesting dialectic about sociality and biology that I see as a trend, actually weirdly, in your investigations of both Chomsky and Graeber, where Chomsky takes biology seriously but, as your work indicates, he basically for for reasons of of structures outside of himself and trying to operate morally within what is a fundamentally immoral framework that you can't escape, um, that, that he doubles down on biology but makes it totally individual, right, like it's just.

Speaker 1: 49:22

it's about, you know, genetic individual things going back innately that's been passed down genetically, even though we don't have a gene marker, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, but then to contrast that with Graeber reading all of Graeber's books and I was suspicious about this, but actually seeing you say it made me feel good that I wasn't the only person who was like is he denying any genetic anything to human beings? Because it seems like he is and he was. And I'm fascinated about this tendency because I don't just think these two people are isolated in this, but even with radical scholars to keep the biological sciences and social sciences radically apart.

Speaker 2: 50:13

Exactly Graeber's whole, obviously. I mean there's a lot in common between chomsky and graber. They're very, very, very, very different indeed. Of course I mean in their interests. But one thing in common is the anti-marxism I mean it's both radically anti-marxist and both radically. I mean, if you think of marxism and all sorts of things you can say about Marxism, the dialectic of it all, I'm totally committed to myself, but I mean just the mere fact of being materialist, so that mind comes out of different patterns of mental structure, emerge out of real life real patterns of real material movement of the bodies and production, reproduction and so forth. So both graber and chomsky turn it all round into mind over matter. So for chomsky, as a linguist, not as an activist and an activist, he's perfectly materialist, of course, um, but in his linguistics mind alone is real. You can have a theory of mind. He actually says that. He actually says he's like a cartesian who's the opposite of it's like a Cartesian who's the opposite. He's like a reverse Cartesian.

Speaker 2: 51:20

Descartes thought you can't say much about the soul. I'll leave that to the theologians. I'm interested in cutting up dogs to find out the pineal gland, I'm interested in the body. And Chomsky reverses that and says there's no such thing as body. All you've got is mind, because of mind, because, of course, as soon as you get into abstract, mathematicus and so on, and which is kind of what he's trying to do, yeah, it's, it's, it's um, it's pure mind.

Speaker 2: 51:42

But but graver is doing the same thing in a different way. He's trying to say, right across history, human beings, whether hunter gatherers, farmers, you know, pastoralists, city dwellers, capitalists, whatever, at every single stage, what humans have done and still can do is whatever they please. So you can be a farmer or cattle owner, whatever it is. You feel like being an egalitarian for a while, like hunter-gatherers? Well, okay, you just just do it, just want it, you know, do it. And then. And then he says of course you're going to get a bit bored after being a egalitarian for a while. You're going to need some despotism. So let's have some slavery, let's have slavery for a while. Quite who is choosing to do the slavery? You've never quite explained whether it's the slaves or the slave owners, but all I'm saying is it's in his case with grave.

Speaker 2: 52:37

It's actually whimsical that you can do whatever you please and humans already always have done whatever they please and what they do, what they've always liked to do is have fun to switch from one one one structure to another. So you know a bit of a bit of imperialism, you know fun, and now a bit of egalitarianism, a bit of communism, now a bit of capitalism. Let's just, let's play around with things and have fun. I mean it is an absolutely useless and ridiculous theory, apart from being very insulting to hunter-gatherers by saying that they're no more likely to be egalitarian than anybody else. I mean, which is such an outrageously stupid thing to say, given the astonishing accomplishments of egalitarian hunter-gatherers and overthrowing the structures of dominance which are so characteristic of our closest primary relatives, the chimpanzees, I mean, including the bonobos, who have dominance, but it's like it happens to be female rather than male, which probably is slightly more, some ways more pleasant.

Speaker 2: 53:32

But I mean, you know, to establish a genet and egalitarian social order, a communistic social order without borders, with chains of connection stretching across the landscape. Wherever you travel, there's no borders. You'll always find kin somewhere or other. I mean it's such an incredible accomplishment by hunter-gatherers which Graeber, who knows nothing about it, just completely dismisses and Wenger, who knows even less about it, sort of colludes with. I mean, I don't know what on earth was going on when Graeber thought he should team up with Wengro, who knows nothing much about anything really, except certain periods of relatively recent history Bronze Age and so on and archaeology Certainly knows nothing about. Well, you know what you need to know in order to write a book called the dawn of everything um, yeah, I mean, I won't.

Speaker 1: 54:30

I I'm probably a bigger critic of graver than even you are, but um, oh really, oh, that's interesting yeah, like I, I, I.

Speaker 1: 54:42

It's one of those things. As a person who was very fascinated and studied anthropology somewhat formally in my undergrad, of course I counted david graver early and then the more I dug into the implications of what he was saying, the more I was. This is totally volunteerist. It weirdly somehow claims to be speaking for radical scholarship and yet even in the debt book not, I'm talking about the Not Everything book it feels like the conclusion David Graeber comes to is the opposite conclusion of what every other anthropologist looking at this stuff comes to. Like you know, yes, there's some stuff about Marcel Mauss and then I also got into David Graeber's like recounting of anarchist history which he just said things often that were not true. My favorite one is that Marcel Maas was a secret anarchist somehow and stuff like that. So I'm pretty critical of him. But I never assumed he was insincere. Actually he didn't believe what he was saying.

Speaker 1: 55:57

But I think the anti-biologism really got me because I was just like you know.

Speaker 1: 56:03

I'm trying to argue that these structures of of, that are the structure of class, are not innate to human beings. They're possible for human beings to go into but they're not innate and we know that from our long history and particularly when you look at, you know, low surplus hunter gatherers in particular, but not just them, you know. And then his-gatherers in particular, but not just them, you know. And then his dawn of everything book comes out and I'm like, okay, we're finally going to discuss all these societies that built off of these and that's just fundamentally rejected in the beginning, out of hand. And then I was like, okay, what do I got here? So my, I feel like my suspicion that, for whatever reason, I uh, I could speculate about marshall solon's influence. I like marshall solon's work quite a bit, but I could speculate about marshall solon's influence. I could, I could, just sometimes I also felt like graver was actually putting in his scholarship our arguments. He had online with other Marxists and different kinds of anarchists.

Speaker 2: 57:12

Well, there's this terrible class division in academia, I suppose, maybe particularly in the States, but pretty much everywhere, where science is kind of working class and if you're a feat and part of the really you know, ruling establishment, you do arty stuff and you don't dirty your hands. And so all the martial silences and all the various social anthropologists in the States, the cultural anthropologists, I don't know, there's this sort of sneering attitude towards genetics, darwinism, anything which is quantified really, genetics, darwinism, anything which is quantified really. And of course Graeber is, although obviously, rather unusually, he is a genuine proletarian. His background is a Jewish proletarian from New York, but his identification as an academic is with the dominant class. And of course it's so damaging when that stupid division between the arts and the sciences, between cultural and social anthropology on the one hand and biological anthropology on the other, is perpetuated in that way with such, I mean, I would say venom. I mean Graeber, by the way, I'm sure you know this, I mean Graeber and I got on extremely well when he came over here. We were very much comrades in huge amounts of activism and it took a long time for me to realize that sort of behind my back he was savagely attacking my, you know, my, my theoretical work and because we, you know, when we were together, we were involved in fairly practical stuff. We and we just laugh and joke and have drinks and get on with each other. I never realized how deeply hostile he was to everything I stand for as a scientist, um, but I suppose I'm just saying that um, yeah, that that I, I, I.

Speaker 2: 59:13

To me, as a marxist, one of the greatest ways and the most powerful ways the ruling class divide us is by dividing academia, dividing knowledge, dividing learning, science. I mean into, into these arts versus sciences, crap. The two cultures, as it, as it gets called over here for various reasons, the two cultures, you know, you go to university or whatever. You go to higher education, you decide you're going to be arty or you're going to be sciencey and posh people do the art stuff and it's just so, so rubbish. And to perpetuate that divide in the way to great. But um did in that book, especially in the dawn of everything, where, as you say, this is, there's no biology and suddenly everything starts. This dawn of everything starts in in europe with the upper paleolithic revolution, I mean it's.

Speaker 2: 1:00:04

He makes a few tiny concessions, but it's a, it's a deeply, deeply. I I'm not saying he's a racist exactly, but to say that you know, okay, we evolved in Africa but we didn't get smart until we hit Europe, which is kind of the framework he's coming from and that's, you know, that's this so-called you know, sapient paradox. You know that we evolved in africa but that was just our bodies and and then we got, we got artistic and clever with language and stuff when we reached europe. I mean, that's a hugely eurocentric, racist um model which I'm afraid both both of those two authors, both gray brown, wangrove. They make a few efforts to sort of tone it down a bit, but basically that racist idea that you know, culture and language were European inventions, not African ones, is still lingering there, just by the fact they have this date for the dawn of everything, 40,000 years ago, which of course my colleague Camilla Power called the tea time of everything, which I nick for one of my reviews.

Speaker 1: 1:01:14

Oh, I mean, I'm fascinated by that, the kind of irony of the division of class assumptions. I was working class born, I went into the arts, but you are right that, like one, I almost instantly regretted it because, as a working class person, even though everyone was properly, they said the right things about class, they didn't act like it. And two, how much was about social codes that are presented as a moral code, and I even kind of admire the moral code. But you have to be highly educated and fairly elite to know what the social codes are and they're constantly shifting, the, the um. But I was also very interested, uh, in um, the biological end of anthropology, even because I was, you know, I was. I want to understand what makes human beings tick Right. Particularly they wanted to teach them, cause I knew a lot of pedagogy is based on pretty much nothing. And and so I, I, I I'm fascinated by that division. But I see it, I mean, and I like, I like Solon's to a good, to a fair amount of degree in some ways, I see it, I like Sollins to a fair amount of degree. In some ways I like him more than Graber. But the hostility to the biological, to the point of almost denying it. Sollins' book on sociobiology does not actually go as far as Graber seems to, but it's still pretty much like. Well, we can't really use any of that.

Speaker 1: 1:02:57

And I remember in my own life when I started talking about what we can learn from primate studies and whatnot, about how to do radical engagements, other Marxists would tell me that I'm not being materialist, and by materialist I mean everything is socially determined.

Speaker 1: 1:03:14

That's a fun one, and and and the other thing that I found fascinating is that the to bring it back to what you're saying about the division between sciences being almost proletarian because they're practical, the irony of that in the United States is like the humanities are are incredibly underfunded because they're not as useful to the military or industry. So so, but weirdly they actually seems to exacerbate that, that divide. Because one, I guess. Now, if you want to go into the arts, you pretty much have to be well off, you have to be able to do unpaid work for long periods of time to be able to get a stable job, et cetera, et cetera. There's really not a whole lot around that in the united states anyway. And and uh, you know, we can talk about bourgeois science all we want, but um the sciences, while I I don't completely remove the academic taint from them.

Speaker 2: 1:04:26

I don't want to like be naive here, but um yeah, I'm just going to say I mean it's a sort of related topic, but not quite the same one. It's, I mean, the um, the terrible mistake. I mean I must, of course, reasons for the mistake. Mistakes don't just happen, there's always something behind them all. But, um, talking about marshall sarnins, the use and abuse of biology, a terrible mistake made by almost the whole of the Stalinists, communists, trotskyists, whatever anarchists left, in demonising this terrible, terrible monster called sociobiology, which I mean obviously. I mean it's just so ironic because now we have Sarah Herdy, who is correctly regarded as probably the world's most authoritative and insightful Darwinian since Darwin himself, you know, discovering that the first form of cooperation that made us human was not man the hunter cooperating in the hunt, but was actually cooperating in that most difficult of jobs of all, which is childcare. She is the only one of those founding mothers and fathers of sociability whose expertise was in hominins, in primates, and she's celebrated now. But you just noticed, I'm sure you will have noticed so many people now are saying oh, sarah Heard is wonderful, she's put back woman and given her a proper statute. I'm saying this very positively because Sarah is a good friend and colleague of mine and ours in radical anthropology.

Speaker 2: 1:05:58

But the one thing they forget is that she could never have made those discoveries if she hadn't realized right from the outset that a gene is a molecule designed to replicate self. As soon as the gene starts replicating other, it's an ex-gene really, really quickly. And that's all. Selfish gene theory is. It's just that you've got to reconcile all the cooperation we find in nature huge amounts of extraordinarily complex cooperation with the fact that the gene itself has got to get itself into the future and it can do that through creating selfish creatures or altruistic ones and so on. But I'm just making the point that this sort of sneering attitude towards science by the kind of middle class left ended up with repudiation of all that's finest in modern, in the modern life sciences. I mean, none of the life sciences, including covid vaccines, could have possibly got off the ground without understanding what a gene is.

Speaker 2: 1:06:58

And the left, just the left just completely missed it in demonizing the idea that the gene is a selfish replicator. And and so, and marshall salins was, I mean, probably more guilty than anyone else in some ways, just because he wrote this ridiculous book on it all. But I mean, it's very tragic actually, because Marshall Sarlins began as somebody who wrote, as I mentioned in some of the things I've written. He wrote a book called the Origin of Society, not a book, an article in the Scientific American 1960, where he dealt beautifully with monkeys and apes as well as hunter-gatherers, and had a very nice perspective on how becoming human was not just an evolutionary process but was a revolutionary one. And it was a big tragedy when he took offence at this brilliant new discovery, which was that Darwinian struggle for survival, survival of the fittest, competition and conflict wasn't between races, which is the old idea, group selection, um eugenics, it was wasn't between races, it was really that selection acted at the genetic level.

Speaker 2: 1:08:04

And and the whole of the left sort of remains stuck and I I've experienced it particularly over here because of our socialist workers party we're all completely brain dead on those issues. I mean quite good at other issues, organizing demos in support of palestine or whatever, but um, when they do they do that job, kind of okay, I suppose. But I mean they, they, they just, they just treated um sociobiology as just the, they just treated it as just evil, sexism, racism, genetic, genetic determinism even, which is again, funnily enough, it's just the exact opposite. You know, self-regen theory never says genes determine behavior. It's that, you know. Whatever it is that determines behavior has to make sure that the genes get replicated, otherwise the lineage comes to an end. That's the end of the story, anyway. I'm just saying you know, that was another part of it, this cataclysmic, I mean disastrous abandonment of science by the left. Shocking, I mean. What on earth is marxism if it's not science, if it's not?

Speaker 1: 1:09:03

yeah, when I was 20 I think I was 26, 27 years old and I got hold of Steven Pinker's Blank Slate book. I'm like you. I think Steven Pinker's an intellectual villain. The Better Langers of Our Nature is a book I kind of want to beat people to death with. Nonetheless, his Blank Slate book is actually pretty convincing.

Speaker 2: 1:09:30

Yeah, I agree with that. I agree with you. Yeah, I agree with you. It is convincing.

Speaker 1: 1:09:35

yeah, and Chomsky would agree with it as well of course, right, and I find this, you know, yeah, I find this interesting as like a case study of two approaches to biology, which Chomsky almost like goes more Hobbesian than Hobbes in the great individual myth. And then Graeber I remember being I remember being offended at some things he said in the Dawn of Everything in particular and I don't usually get offended, but just like what he's, implying that those of us who talk about primate studies are racist because we're we're quote comparing primitive people to animals, and I'm like no, what actually I'm saying is animals are people, like it's the opposite actually, um, um and yeah yeah, yeah, we.

Speaker 2: 1:10:34

We have in radical anthropology a great friend, um focus summer, who's just given a talk at our at our session on last tuesday. He, he, he, he's. He probably lived with chimps and bonobos and other primates more continuously than well, I think more than anyone else I'm aware of, at any rate, because many primatologists, like robin dunbar, for example, they did a stint out there with their baboons and then gave up on it and became, became gurus, whereas voca has been consistently involved with that and he says, yes, exactly like you just said, chimpanzees should be given human rights. They are people. He says exactly that as soon as you live with chimps I mean in some ways they're not very nice people in the sense that their social organizations are extremely unpleasant, but I mean their sufferings and emotions and stuff under those circumstances aren't too different from those of any of us which had to put up with such unpleasant political arrangements which are not exactly capitalist, but there's, you know. But obviously long before there was capitalism, there was patriarchy and sexism and male dominance and common chimps have to put up with, especially the females, put up with, well you know, pretty damn intolerable circumstances and yeah, so, yes, I agree, that's a lovely way of putting it.

Speaker 2: 1:11:51

Animals are people not? I mean, I don't know whether fruit flies are exactly people. Uh, some people have argued that, but tim ingold is one of them. That you know, all animals have personhood. I'm not quite sure what I can quite go with that. Um, you know closed moths and fruit flies and stuff.

Speaker 1: 1:12:07

Maybe not haven got personal, but anyway yeah, yeah, I don't know that I take it, but at least with social mammals, you know, primates, whales, that sort of thing, they seem pretty close to us yeah and it to me to imply that my motivations for saying that are are demonizing quote primitive peoples is pretty fucking hilarious, so like and infuriating that, um, there's only one way of dealing with that, which is to say you know, back to the future, that the hunter gatherers are is.

Speaker 2: 1:12:46

The way I put it is that it's just possible that we humans do have a future, that humanity has a future. It doesn't seem all that likely just these days with what's going on, but it is possible. We have a future, in which case today's extant egalitarian hunter-gatherers are already there and we're going to reach up to the level they've attained, because the rest of us have fallen far below the standard of being. You know humans, you know the way we live these days is not, is inhuman, if you like.

Speaker 1: 1:13:21

Yeah, and with Solange it's particularly interesting. I mean one of my favorite books by Solange, because it kind of proves that even if Marx got to it accidentally through Hegelian speculation or whatever, that there is a truth to the idea of communism. And that Stone Age economics book that Solomon wrote actually does a good job of proving that.

Speaker 2: 1:13:49

Stone Age economics was magnificent, the original affluent society a magnificent idea. It has been critiqued to be one or two people who sort of say various things, but I mean, yeah, there's no question that the diet, the joy, the pleasure. Of course they don't have quite the same medicines and they might die of various things a little bit earlier than we do and of course that's no small thing. But in terms of quality of life, egalitarian hunter-gatherers are absolutely up there and they experience abundance. I mean, jerome Lewis, my colleague, just tells me that among the Ben Jebby they find it hard to believe that anywhere in the world people are short of food, I mean, and starvation is just. They think, well, how can you possibly starve? I mean, you know, all around them nature is abundant and in the rainforest it absolutely is abundant. There's very high quality food. So many different kinds of honey, so many different. You know types of tubers, so many different, you know things you can eat. And they spend most of their time singing, dancing, doing all sorts of things. The amount of time they do, I would say they do very little of what we might call labor, like you know, hard digging work. I mean, yeah, tubers are hard to get out of the ground if you live, you know, like they had to do in relatively open grasslands. But yeah, that was a magnificent book and yeah, it was such a tragedy that he turned pretty much full circle. Do you know that? Sarnin's latest?

Speaker 2: 1:15:22

A group of us went to hear him give a talk, I think a year before he died, over here in London, and he told us that hunter-gatherers have kings, they have the monarchy. We weren't sure what he meant, but it's because they have what he called gods. Every single hunter-gatherer culture has a religion and in their religions you have gods. And because kings are divine kings, or at least were um, therefore all gods have aspects of monarchy in them and and human beings cower in fear below them. So they fear the thunder, the weather, the change in the climate and I don't know trees falling down in a storm or whatever, and um, and so they have kings and I, and I mean it's just absolutely ridiculous because, as Jerome points out, my colleague points out with a bit jetty you have tricksters, you dance, you party, you joke with the gods, you play with them, you insult them.

Speaker 2: 1:16:22

You know the gods are sort of like your mates and I mean anyone should know that hunter-gatherers don't have gods. It's called the trickster, kind of linked with the moon of course. Anyway, I'm just saying it's just shocking what happened to Marshall Sarnin. He just did a complete full circle from saying that hunter-gatherers were communists to saying they're monarchists.

Speaker 1: 1:16:48

Yeah, I remember being very confused reading on kings after reading, like his various books on thucydides, and being like this feels like you just flip positions somehow, and then watching graver use that to argue well, that's. You know, we have this inherent hierarchy just as much as we have inherent egalitarianism. And you know, we we offset this. And then I was like, okay, but you don't believe in genetics, so I don't know how anything's inherent. But you know, I actually actually couldn't figure out what I mean. This is a strange critique. Uh, I'm like chomsky, who I know what he thinks a human is, even if I sometimes disagree with it, depending on if we're dealing with Chomsky 1 or Chomsky 2, anyway, when it comes to Graeber, I don't know what he thinks human beings actually are, which is a weird thing to say to an anthropologist. But I'm like, yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 2: 1:17:50

As I understand it, he thinks that the thing which humans do is make up stories about themselves. So the way you get ahead in the world is to construct a fictional narrative. So if you want to be a good astrologer, you construct all kinds of ancestral astrologers in your lineage that you know, produce all sorts of incredible prophecies and um. And then he sort of said that he found when he was in madagascar that his best way of surviving among the locals was to keep making up stories about himself. And then it turns out that the daughter of everything they actually said in the beginning. They're not doing science, they're saying they're making up a new story and they just think so, hunter, gatherers and others. They just make up stories and you have.

Speaker 2: 1:18:35

Obviously it's a version of post-modernism everything's nothing's really true, it's all a story. So the whole point about it is that you make up a good story and somehow the story and this is the idealist part of it like the mind of a matter, part of it with enough with of a good story. It's like you fake it till you make it. So if you fake up, if you're an astrologer and you make up all the people, your ancestors that were brilliant prophets, you'll probably make a good living as an astrologer. And he, I mean Graham, is kind of funny about this. He sort of says well, I just found that if I make up a lot of stories about myself, people sort of says well, I just found that if I make up a lot of stories about myself, people start believing it and I become quite a senior anthropologist. And that's what we all do we make up stories. Okay, it's a theory, I suppose.

Speaker 1: 1:19:25

And what we need is a new story, right, I mean, in some ways that reminds me of, like I don't know, foucault, because, okay, sure, I think that as a, as a, as a kind of life observation of human relations, narrativity is super important to us. I work in English, I definitely see that, but on the same, the same token, I have to go. But why, though, like why do we tell stories? Why does that matter? What is, what is that? What does that emerge from our sociology or sociality, and why would a biological being do that?

Speaker 2: 1:19:56

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:19:57

And great, give me an answer Well, of course, when, when, when you have a realm of shared fiction. That's what we mean by symbolic culture. I mean, we humans live in the real world, in brute reality, but of course we don't fight wars over that. We, when people die for something, it's for some, some symbols on flag or something, some identity, you know what, the star of david or the swastika, or one of those damn things. So yeah, I mean so we, when, when, when stories become shared, they become another version of reality. I mean, obviously, the word for that is institutional reality, of which the prime example is money. Money is a hallucination, it's a fiction, but if enough people believe in money, it has a reality of its own. So that's it.

Speaker 2: 1:20:45

That's an interesting idea, but it's actually funny enough. It's not really graber's idea. He has a much more anarchist idea of storytelling. It's just different people make up different stories and um and and if you've got a particularly good story, you'll probably make a living out of it. And he is, it's rather, rather um fetching. I mean, it's like it's sort of self-deprecating that he, he sort of makes. He used to make jokes to me about that to some extent himself that he, you know, he, he likes telling a story about himself and he just finds that there are good stories that you can tell about yourself and he's he was particularly good at it. Uh, yeah, it's true he was.

Speaker 1: 1:21:21

Yeah, and of course, the dawn of everything is one more of those so, um, I guess the theme of this interview has been you know, we have to contextualize these, these key leftist thinkers, uh, particularly when they're interfacing in that liminal space between the quote hard sciences I'm putting that in those people listening, those are, that is in scare quotes and the humanities and social sciences that's also in scare quotes. I think, interestingly, this illustrates to me that maybe we should take the intersection of the humanities and biology, chemistry, physics and anthropology a lot more seriously as radical thinkers than we do. And yet we also have to remind ourselves we all exist in social institutions and that they have certain incentives. And I know for myself I mean, I'm a, I'm a teacher, I'm basically a public school teacher. These days I do very much split a lot of what I do, even if my social theory doesn't form my teaching. Legally I have to politics from as a teacher in the role of a teacher will get you fired Immediately, no questions asked, and your license stripped from you.

Speaker 2: 1:22:57

So what's your role in this interview with me? It's not your role as a teacher. It's completely separate, is it?

Speaker 1: 1:23:04

Yes and no. I mean that's the thing. I realize that what I do as a teacher informs what I'm doing right now, but I still have to in some ways compartmentalize them, and how much you do that or don't really does seem to affect like and how aware of it you are. I mean cause. One thing I will say about Chomsky versus maybe Graber is Chomsky seems to be acutely aware of what he was doing after reading your book, even if he doesn't understand it when said back to him. I don't, I don't always know that Graber understood all of his own incentive system. You know, I, I, I. That's maybe fair, maybe I'm fair.

Speaker 1: 1:23:44

I didn't know the man. I argued with him once on Twitter when he was alive. That's my extent of interaction with him and it was over his debt book. But and I think it was actually, if I'm like my arguments and he called me a dogmatist because I was just like, I think I critiqued him for talking about Confucians in China being anti-capitalist when there was no capitalism in China yet and markets aren't capitalism.

Speaker 1: 1:24:13

If you had a better definition of what capitalism, communism were, maybe you would say less dumb things and um, but I mean, I think we all, I want to have some grace for these people, because I think we all do this when I there's a a tendency right now on the left that's emerged recently where anyone who's ever interfaced with the intelligence department ever is now being treated as if they were forever a CIA agent. And I just point out to these people I'm like even people who are saying this they probably interfaced with the intelligence department without even realizing it, because it's all over academia. If you've taken a Fulbright, you have interfaced with the intelligence departments. Sorry, like so. I just think we have to contextualize all this. But it does seem to me that there's a real problem with ignoring the sciences on the left, and it puts us at a distinct disadvantage when a person saying things that make sense to people who understand anything about genetics is Steven Pinker, who has really abysmal politics and does tie it into his scholarly work.

Speaker 2: 1:25:28

I wanted to say that throughout this whole interview it's not your fault or mine, it just hasn't happened. It's just, for whatever reason the whole question of gender has been sort of sidelined. As you know, my book Blood Relations was called Blood Relations, menstruation and the Origins of Culture. I don't know what we do about all that. I mean, obviously it's trying to put an end to this interview, but I feel a little bit, I don't know a little bit regretful if we close it without just just well, the main point is that if we, in order to get the sciences and the humanities linked up, there's only one way to do it and that's to get a proper model of how we became human, having been once animals, however, you know, human, like those animals were, and unless we understand this in a scientific sense, that the absolutely decisive role of the female, of the species, which has been brought out by Sarah Hurley, as I mentioned.

Speaker 2: 1:26:36

But if we don't understand that again, it's not just that our models won't work out scientifically, it's just that our image of any kind of possible revolution is severely impoverished. Because it is absolutely clear to me that if there is to be any kind of revolution, and it's still not, you know who knows? I mean, obviously, you know we can all be a bit pessimistic, and not surprising, but any kind of revolution would have to be led by women. In my view, it just, it's just a logical thing, it's just, otherwise it's not really revolution. We haven't really turned the world upside down unless we turn upside down the gender hierarchy. So I'm just, I'm just saying I would be a little bit upset if I didn't sort of end with that, even though it hasn't been the topic of the interview.

Speaker 1: 1:27:21

No, I think it's actually important, because one thing that we can say about the people that we've been mentioning is I mean, david Graeber has a lot of good things to say about gender and I don't want to disparage him, but when I read his books, it is not primary to the way he discussed as human beings and Chomsky's. You know, primordial person in his linguistics may not be male, but if it's not male, it's sexless, like you know, which is weird when you're talking about something being passed down genetically. But nonetheless, I don't want to accuse either one of those people of being necessarily phallocentric or whatever, but it's absolutely true.

Speaker 2: 1:28:09

When people have a unisex term for everything they describe, you can. You can be absolutely certain that that hiding behind that unisex model is a completely sexist model. It's just. You know, just using unisex terminology is just. I mean, it just leaves the assumption that we're really we're talking about men. It just leaves that intact and it's um and it's uh, it it's shameful and it goes on, especially, by the way, perhaps I should emphasize this.

Speaker 2: 1:28:37

Of course, in linguistics in particular, there's nowadays I don't know how many about 50, 80, 90, 150 actual books now on the origin of language, and I don't know of a single one. I suppose there's a sort of exception of Robin Dunbar's gossip and the gossip and grooming, but apart from that, there's no gender, it's just completely unisex. And of course, the excuse for that is that, yeah, women do talk. You know, it's not just men, I mean songbirds. It's different. You often get the male makes the song and the female doesn't do anything very interesting because women and men both talk and use more or less the same language. It's sort of legitimized the idea that you can just have a unisex model but behind that, you all those unisex models is just.

Speaker 2: 1:29:28

This threat is Really deep down. Let's face it, we're talking about men and that is just. It's not just unpleasant, it just gets. We just will never solve the problem of how the hell we became human, never solve the problem of how on earth did this extraordinary thing called language emerge, if we don't discriminate between male and female and and look at the different contributions, as in you know, I mean this is a fundamental feature of darwinism. You know, you don't expect female strategies to coincide with male strategies. Females and males will have different strategies for getting the deans into the future. You know, it's just and that's a marvelous thing, of course, which Sarah Hrdy has brought to the fore and worked out that actually the female strategies were absolutely decisive in many ways. Whatever the males did was they started doing these things because of, you know, in response to female strategies which were increasingly revolutionary.

Speaker 1: 1:30:29

Yeah, I mean your work is really important on that. I mean we can talk about, you know, the the, basically the primate revolution that you posit, which is mostly actually about sex and gender, and that's really crucial. And I think you know, for the flaws and Ingalls's anthropological speculations and there are many, they were of their time he does get. I mean, you know we can confront it today with an increasing number of communists, marxists, who think we can overthrow capitalism and maintain pretty much traditional gender relations. I don't know if this is a big deal in the UK, but you may have seen on X if you make the mistake of going there. This is increasingly common in the United States, where there's these communists who want to promote traditional values and like communism is a way to go back to the nuclear family. And my thought is like, if you're going to change the methods of production and not change the methods of social reproduction, I think you've somehow fundamentally missed the point. And also, ingles is pretty clear that gender is a first class divide. Yeah, so yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:31:51

Right, I think we probably should be winding this up. Is that right now?

Speaker 2: 1:31:57

Yes, we are yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I just wanted to end up by saying the obvious thing, which is that all human culture, all religion, all kinship, all human culture, all religion, all kinship, everything that makes us distinctively human, was born on the picket line. That's it. That's my take-home message, in case anyone wants to know what the take-home message is. And I'm writing a book with Jerome Lewis called when Eve Laughed the Origins of Language, with Yale University Press, and it won't be out for a bit, but it should be out spring 2026. And any help with getting it known and talked about from you or anyone else will be very much welcome.

Speaker 1: 1:32:49

All right, well, I will be looking out for it. Thank you so much for your time, dr Knight.

Speaker 2: 1:32:53

Okay, cheers, bye-bye, cheers.

Speaker 1: 1:32:55

Bye.