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very extent that it does succeed in manipulating men and nations
into hopeless and ludicrous situations, like Vietnam, then this is
no more perplexing than the argument of other radicals, who must
claim some irreducible power of persistence for the "inner man"
in order even to imagine that some external power is destroying it.
He is in the potentially self-contradictory position of arguing
against the powers of technological and political manipulation and
at the same time insisting, as against Skinner's behaviorism, that
environmental manipulation cannot order the world if it ignores
certain innate capacities unique to human beings.
Because Chomsky's hypothesis of innate capacity is based
entirely on theories of language and corresponding structures in
the brain, he is often rather imperviously glib about the possibil–
ities of change in the external systems. Since it can be shown that
the United States is acting illogically, then the United States
should simply stop acting illogically. Someone like Reich, on the
other hand, puts his stress on sexuality and on the damage to it of
"four to six thousand years" of "authoritarian culture." His radi–
calism is thus similar in its diagrammatic shape to Chomsky's but
much less optimistic . "Psychic disturbances," he writes, "are the
results of the sexual chaos brought about by the nature of soc iety.
This chaos has, for thousands of years, served the function of
making people submissive to existing conditions, in other words of
internalizing the external mechanizations of life." Curiously
enough, Chomsky's refutations of Skinner are based on an implicit
optimism . And this is derived from the total indifference to sexu–
ality which distinguishes his radicalism from that of Reich, or
~lailer,
or Lawrence, or Brown. It is their inquiry into sex which
convinces them that external mechanizations can be injuriously
internalized. His rejection of behaviorism depends on the assump–
tion that there remains someth ing "in" us that is not subject to
contro ls, even the deadening contro ls that are an essential refer–
ence for most radical analyses .
Radicalism customari ly assumes that nature needs to be saved
from technological forces that intrude upon and sully it. Every–
where in Mailer and Lawrence, in Brown and Reich, are metaphors
having to do with the geography of depth, of margins, and of
movement outward .
If
we are to believe the radical geography of
