Revilo vs Chomsky

Introducing Revilo P Oliver

A few months ago I was introduced to the late professor Revilo P Oliver*. Not personally that is, but his writings . Which is just as well — Oliver was one of the last of the “hyper-intellectual” hyper-racists. He was a professor of classics (“Western” classics, naturally), philology etc, but lectured consistently on political/racial matters up until his death in 1994. He is quite entertaining in that he combines extreme racism and crazy paranoia in a way that is almost never encountered today. He was a fossil from a bygone era, a professor who believed that atheism plus evolution meant eugenics, amongst other things. As such, some of his arguments are very instructive in the ways of history.

Introducing Chomsky['s Language Acquisition Theories]

Most people would have heard about the linguist Noam Chomsky from his anarcho-socialist political activities and “extreme” criticism of the establishment that spans decades. And in fact he resembles Oliver in his longevity of argument and constant engagement with events as the years roll on. However, what I think is more important about him are his theories on language. These have been more influential on linguistics than any other for decades.

On language acquisition and development, Chomsky postulates that what’s special about language is its capacity for recursion and potentially infinite structures. An example would be the sentence “Mary thinks that John knows that Frank sees that Claire wants that…” The ability to process such structures has evolved in a subsystem of the human brain called the Language Acquisition Device. The brain therefore expects language in certain forms and the only thing a child acquires is the parameters of his/her specific language. The basic knowledge of language is therefore innate, and a child “acquires” a language as opposed to “learning” it.

Revilo on Chomsky

Now, Oliver wrote an article about Chomsky’s theories that is an absolute classic about how racists and cranks interpret science. The article is here (usual warning about batshit craziness and extreme racism applies).

Revlio’s first “misunderstanding” is that he confuses Chomsky’s idea of language acquisition as being innate to humans (with the specific language only affecting the switches of the system) with the idea that language acquisition is innate to each individual race**.

Strictly applied, the theory would state, for example, that Indo-European languages are varieties of the native language of Aryans, corresponding to the structure of their minds, while Japanese is the native language of the largely Mongolian but hybrid race that has now made their small and poor country the leading industrial nation of the world, the language corresponding to the way in which they naturally think. One has, as I have said, to allow for the human ability to simulate and emulate the conduct of alien races. (On the lowest level, a nigger may be taught to behave in public like a member of a civilized race.)

Revilo also seems to be fond of the idea that there is something intrinsic about each language that limits the mindset of the speaker. This is a separate hypothesis (the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) that has fallen out of favour. Of course it has nothing to do with Chomsky’s theory. If anything according to Chomsky it is the exact opposite — human languages are seen to be almost identical with very minor variations, therefore they are more likely to be the product of a similar, not a different, mindset across cultures. Undeterred by this, here’s Revilo:

When you turn to languages that are not Indo-European, you are confronted by quite different and seemingly “unnatural” modalities of thought. Chinese and Japanese are striking illustrations of this (try reading a literal, word-for-word translation from one of them), but Semitic languages are also alien to you

What’s interesting is that Revilo is very Chomskian on Indo-European languages. In the article he states that they are very similar and differ only in small parameters. He [deliberately] misses that Chomsky would extend this to all languages. But this goes against Revilo’s dogma that Semitic and Asian languages are Very Foreign.

Of course the fact that the arguments of such an extreme racist are flawed isn’t very interesting or novel by itself. What I find interesting is the motivation. Part of me wants to think he genuinely misunderstandood Chomsky because he read him through lenses where race is everything and really was unable to grasp the concept of a universally innate language acquisition device. The other part of me thinks it’s unlikely that he could read into Chomsky the very opposite of what he was saying, so it must be deliberate. But I’m betting for someone so extreme, the two halves might blend together: he might well think he is reading Chomsky with flaws and then relating what Chomsky “should” have said. It’s not that uncommon to give the most charitable reading you can of someone else’s view. But to Revilo the most charitable reading is completely insane, thereby he may well be partly misunderstanding and partly lying.

The other thing to note is how easily it is for someone to attribute to an authority the very exact opposite to what they really think. It’s done more often than we’re aware of when people flat-out lie, but it is also quite easy to delude yourself into thinking someone’s views support yours because “of course he/she must have meant what I mean since the alternative is just incoherent”!

To see how far Revilo is able to invert Chomsky’s views, let’s end with the paragraph I found most amusing in its craziness and most dripping in vile hate. This is Revilo speculating on whether Chomsky believes in the Holocaust:

What Chomsky himself believes is unknown. He is, however, an intelligent man with a scientific education and, naturally, an atheist, and he must have some knowledge of physics and chemistry. I am sure, therefore, that he privately doubts the story that the tribal deity, old Yahweh, suspended the operation of the laws of nature to enable the Germans to vaporize or otherwise annihilate millions or billions of his own masterpieces.

*His name is a palindrome that was in the family for generations.
**I was going to put race in scare quotes but then realised that an article about Revilo should have every second word in scare quotes. I hereby give up.