344
J.
M. E.
MORAVCSIK
guage and encourage its creative use by individuals, we are exploring
and encouraging what we have in common, not what separates us.
Rule-governed behavior and creative behavior are, according to Chom–
sky, not opposites; on the contrary, without the former, the latter is
impossible. (Of course, in order to appreciate this, one must have a
sufficiently sophisticated conception of what rules can be like.)
In so far as the humanities are concerned with enlarging our
understanding of language, they enlarge our understanding of what
is distinctly human. In understanding my language more deeply I learn
what unites me with others and thereby I also learn about myself.
The miracle of language is that grammar and meaning enable us to
understand a large part of the total set of utterances without knowing
who produced them, when, where and why. The point can be ex–
tended from the study of language to the study of science or literature.
What makes culture possible is that much that is asserted can be
understood without knowing who proposed it, when, where and why.
The humanities today, at least in the West, do not adequately em–
phasize the impersonal quality of ideas, beliefs and theories: one should
be able to show how
education must be intensely impersonal
without
being misunderstood or charged with manufacturing a paradox.
There is one question bound to
be
raised by anyone even vaguely
familiar with Chomsky: what's the connection between his theoretical
work and his political stands? Like Russell, Chomsky too has repeatedly
emphasized that there are no strictly logical entailments binding one to
the other. Nevertheless, it is no accident that a theoretician who sees the
essence of being human in what we have in common, rather than what
allegedly makes us different, should also protest against social and eco–
nomic individualism and against Western society's sanctification of com–
petitive values. Nor is it simply accident that a thinker who has contribut–
ed so much to the analysis of man's creative capacities should protest
against the political and economic forces that stifle the average citizen.
It is also worth asking what social and economic structure would be
hospitable to Chomsky's conception of the social sciences, since his
emphasis on understanding rather than utility and control cannot
be
used to produce results to create mechanisms for control and exploita–
tion. In our society, human reasoning is explained merely as a series
of reactions to environment and environment is then used to explain
the content of reasoning; and it is difficult to make a strong case against
the kind of mass psychological exploitation the social sciences have
pressured to facilitate. Chomsky offers at least the foundation of a
theoretical stand that condemns psychological exploitation without rely–
ing on the dubious arguments of old-fashioned individualism.
