wolfe, chomsky, and intellectualism

Okay, let's start this off with an excerpt from an interview with author Thom Wolfe, which has gotten a bit under my skin:

TW: I make a distinction between intellectuals and people of intellectual achievement.

C: Who are intellectuals?

TW: An intellectual feeds on indignation and really can't get by without it. The perfect example is Noam Chomsky. When Chomsky was merely the most exciting and most looked-to and in many ways, the most profound linguist in this country if not the world, he was never spoken of as an American intellectual. Here was a man of intellectual achievement. He was not considered an intellectual until he denounced the war in Vietnam, which he knew nothing about. Then he became one of America's leading intellectuals. He remains one until this day, which finally has led to my definition of an intellectual: An intellectual is a person who is knowledgeable in one field but speaks out only in others.

This whole business was started unintentionally by my great idol, Émile Zola, in the Dreyfus case. Zola was an extremely popular novelist. A popular writer writing fiction had never been considered a person of any intellectual importance before, but in the Dreyfus case he and Anatole France and others who were trying to defend Dreyfus were singled out by Clemenceau as "the intellectuals." The term had never been used that way before-meaning people who live by intellectual labor. That was Clemenceau's term.

When Zola wrote his great manifesto, J'accuse . . .!, it appeared on the front page of a daily newspaper. All 300,000 copies of the newspaper were sold out by afternoon. Suddenly the world of writers and teachers and all of these intellectual laborers realized that it was possible for a mere scrivener to be called an intellectual and be considered an important person.

Zola, incidentally, was very knowledgeable about the Dreyfus case. He knew it as well as anybody, as well as any law clerk did. That part was lost later on; it was considered not necessary to go that deeply into anything. All that was required was indignation.

Marshall McLuhan once said that moral indignation is a standard strategy for endowing the idiot with dignity. I think that's quite true these days.

Besides implicitly calling Chomsky - a well-respected scientist who revolutionized the field of linguistics - an idiot, this statement suggests that his discourses (i.e., on sociopolitical issues ranging from Vietnam to modern propaganda to American hegemony) do not delve deeply into the topics they address. For starters, this is absurd. Chomsky is well-known for being extremely thorough in his research; for his relatively recent book "Hegemony or survival: America's quest for global dominance", he uses a total of 502 references, or approximately 50 per chapter. Wolfe, on the other hand, writes fiction, and apparently dabbles in the sciences. I think it is important to examine this a bit further, not to disparage Wolfe - who I admire in many ways - nor to defend Chomsky - who needs no protection - but because this idea of communicative style versus substance is essential to a critical appreciation of, as Wolfe might call it, intellectualism.


One big difference I see (or feel) between the expressions of Chomsky and Wolfe is that of candour. While I have no doubt that Wolfe is being candid in his own fashion, Chomsky is candid on an entirely different level (for instance here or here), such that my impression is that I could - irrespective of my views and biases - have a very enjoyable and enriching discussion with Chomsky, while with Wolfe I would be cast immediately into the role of debater; either agreeing wholsesale with a prefabricated package of ideas he has tossed to me, or instinctively creating a package of my own to toss back, and in the end find myself wondering what the hell just happened..

This is only an impression. But in many ways, that is the point. Wolfe speaks repeatedly on the power of language, and it is important to appreciate the angle at which he is approaching communication. There is a large difference between communications of the basic scientist and mathematician (Chomsky's school) and that of the aestheticist (Wolfe's). In the former case, communication emerges primarily as a means to elucidate a logical analysis of evidence; in the latter, it is the aesthetic of language that takes priority.

To explore this further, here is the introduction to Wolfe's 2006 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities at the Warner Theatre:

Ladies and Gentlemen, this evening it is my modest intention to tell you in the short time we have together . . . everything you will ever need to know about the human beast.

This is amusingly ironic, as was certainly its intention; one can imagine the gentle laughter that it induces in its audience. We cannot fault Wolfe for thus skilfully engaging the interest of his audience, but it nonetheless sets the tone in a noteable way: we can expect a speaker who is self assured, amusing, and provocative. And Wolfe does not disappoint.

Says Wolfe:

O. I love you, Emile, but by the time you and Darwin got hold of it, evolution had been irrelevant for 11,000 years. Why couldn't you two see it? Evolution came to an end when the human beast developed speech!

Contends Wolfe:

No evolutionist has come up with even an interesting guess as to when speech began, but it was at least 11,000 years ago, which is to say, 9000 B.C. It seems to be the consensus . . . in the notoriously capricious field of evolutionary chronology . . . that 9000 B.C. was about when the human beast began farming, and the beast couldn't have farmed without speech, without being able to say to his son, "Son, this here's seeds. You best be putting 'em in the ground in rows ov'ere like I tell you if you wanna git any ears a corn this summer."

Now, not being an "evolutionist", whatever that is, I'm not sure what the basis is for this argument, but by very basic logic it is no stretch to imagine that an activity so simple as agriculture did not initially require anything more than a few grunts and teaching-by-example. Nonetheless, the passage is amusing and ironical, so we just grin and suspend our disbelief.

Where Chomsky seems to thrive in a mental world of original ideas, Wolfe appears to have decorated his mental mansion with personalities and the ideologies they represent. In the number of interviews and lectures I have read, he evokes a long list of names and isms: Darwin (and Neo-Darwinism), Chomsky, Zola (and Intellectualism), Weber, Nietzche, and Freud, about whom he states:

I turned to the literature of the physiology of the brain for the answer, only to discover that Sigmund Freud had stopped the physical study of the brain cold for 40 years. Freud had been so persuasive, had so convinced the scientific community and the academic community in general that he had found the final answers to mental disturbance in his theories of the id, the ego, the superego, and the Oedipal drama within the family, that it was rather pointless to go through the tedious, laborious business of determining what synapses, what dendrites, what circuits in the brain accounted for what one already knew anyway. The physical study of the brain didn't resume until 1969, thanks to the work of a Spanish physician and brain physiologist named Jose Delgado.

Now, it is no strange thing within the world of academia to represent ideas by the names of people who originally posited them; and Wolfe certainly proposes a number of his own ideas. But what I see in this is an association of ideas with aesthetics; instead of examining them in more candid detail, it is more appealing somehow to assign a name and a school to a notion, and thus relegate it to a symbol, ignoring the unresolved complexity underlying it. To be honest, Freud did not bring a halt to neuroscience, nor did Delgado singlehandedly revive it. In 1949, Donald Hebb published "The Organization of Behaviour", combining experience in both neurosurgery and human behaviour to introduce several remarkable insights into the connection between brain and mind, the most renowned of which is his theory of how neurons might support learning and memory. In the early 50's, Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley were busy investigating the electrical properties of neurons, eventually developing a mathematical model for which they received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962. Starting in 1959, David Hubel and Thorsten Wiesel designed a set of electrophysiological experiments which revolutionized the understanding of visual processing, and provided further insight towards a general model of cortical organization, for which they also won the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology in 1981.

In fact, many of the most revolutionary discoveries in neuroscience occurred in the period during which Wolfe contends Freud had stopped the field dead. This is a mere detail, however, which interferes with the aesthetic he wishes to produce, of a single mind dominating the thought of an entire field of scientific study, which is simply not true. The idea of naming Delgado as the sole saviour of neuroscientific reasearch may be similarly linked to the sensational aesthetic of a man stopping a raging bull in its track with targeted brain stimulation. Without detracting from the importance of the man's research contributions, they can hardly be said to supercede those of William Scoville and Brenda Milner, whose discovery in the 50's of neural regions necessary for the formation of explicit memory (most famously with patient H.M.) have led to our current understanding of the neuroanatomical basis of memory.

In an attempt to give some substance to his thesis that oral culture has rendered evolution nonexistent, Wolfe provides an example of an article from PLOS Biology entitled "Rapid Behavioral and Genomic Responses to Social Opportunity". He shrewdly informs his audience that the researchers in question hail from Stanford and Duke; which, while having no importance with respect to the merit of their research, bears the stamp of social status, and thus aesthetic quality. From this study he quotes findings about the cichlid fish Astatotilapia (Haplochromis) burtoni. In a nutshell, this species has a social organization such that dominant males have a bright colourful display - which attracts females and thus allows procreation - in comparison with subordinate males who have dull coloration. If a dominant male is removed from a tank, a previously subordinate male can assume its coloration and behaviour in a matter of minutes, a change which was observed to be induced by the expression of the immediate-early gene egr-1. Thus, summarizes Wolfe:

They had established that a change in social status had caused a change in the brain. It was the opposite of the situation envisioned by Neo-Darwinists neuroscientists who assume is that the genetic inheritance triggers changes in status.

And moreover:

Only foolish writers make predictions instead of descriptions, but this fool feels certain that Fernald, Burmeister, and Jarvis are sure bets for a Nobel prize in biology, should such a social influence prove to be the case with human beasts.

Firstly, it is not a revolutionary discovery that the state of an organism, as induced by its environment, leads to a change in genetic expression. As far back as 1998, when I began my interest in neuroscience, the prevailing model of long-term potentiation of a synapse (which is posited as a basic mechanism of learning and memory) included the theory that certain patterns of neural activity trigger short- and long-term alterations to genetic expression which ultimately give rise to lasting changes in the cell and its response to other cells. Secondly, while I will join Wolfe in predicting a Nobel Prize for extending these findings to a description of the incredibly more complex social organization of humans, I won't hold my breath for this.

Thirdly, with respect to "Neo-Darwinists". I will allow that the system of genetics presented by Dawkins and Crick is quite limited and in some ways inexcusably inflexible, but while one may certainly exist, in my brief career I have not encountered any prominent neuroscientist who clings to the simple-minded theory that genes do not interact with environment. In fact I do not necessarily disagree with Wolfe's assertion that language (and its products, oral tradition, religion, culture, etc.) have substantially altered the purely genetic notion of evolution, replacing it with a sort of traditional evolution - but it is a bit naive to contend, as Wolfe does, that "evolution came to an end when the human beast developed speech". Language did not develop "suddenly", as Wolfe seems to imagine, but it evolved genetically as human society developed, as social groups clashed with one another, as humans routinely killed other humans and thus continued to drive genetic evolution.

Regardless of that debate, which is too extensive a digression for this thread, the trend I am trying to illustrate is Wolfe's consistent favouring of style over substance. I won't pretend that his insights do not strike chords with me, nor that I do not admire the man for his style and obvious intelligence (I find this interview with prominent neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga particularly insightful, for instance). I do find a need to comment, however, on the hypocrisy inherent in criticizing someone like Chomsky for speaking out on topics which are not directly related to his prior "intellectual achievements", while obviously having no problem doing the same on a much broader and highly superficial level. To state that Chomsky knows nothing about the subjects on which he speaks and writes is nothing short of asinine, given the massive amount of documented research supporting his communications. In fact, Wolfe could likely learn something from Chomsky, namely that if one is willing to venture outside of the field in which he has built his reputation (and why shouldn't he?), then he ought to at the very least undertake an earnest effort to inform himself about the field, and ensure that his statements are founded in substance, rather than being mere rhetorical devices.

It seems more likely to me that Wolfe takes exception to Chomsky's sociopolitical expressions because they are so discordant and aesthetically unpleasant. I have no doubt that Wolfe would make a far better guest at a cocktail party, where discussing social status as a mechanism for human behaviour is far more entertaining (and less sobering) than Chomsky's detailed analyses of the nefarious mechanisms of the state and its various systematic abuses of democratic principles, and the impact of this upon the planet. Such criticisms require serious thought and much energy, whereas hand-waving about the Human Beast, complete with its name-dropping and clever irony, is as effortless as watching the Discovery Channel.

In the past, powerful dissidents have been silenced by violent means. These days the methods are far less brutal, but arguably more effective. In a world where convenience is king (i.e., a capital-driven world), inconvenient messages are easily drowned out by a barrage of aesthetically-pleasing noise (as our modern mass-media has become). Advertently or not, Wolfe is attempting to marginalize Chomsky not on the basis of the merit of his ideas (nowhere have I discovered a substantive critique), but rather on their lack of aesthetic accessibility, colourfully attacking Chomsky's apparent lack of depth with no apparent appreciation of the irony of such an attack...