Worrying Words of Doctor Rupert Read!

The Man who took on Freedom, Chomsky & the Transgender Politics

IN January, Rupert Read who is a Philosopher and Green councillor, had to apologise for some tweets in which he questioned the validity of trans people's gender, describing trans women as 'a sort of "opt-in" version of what it is to be a woman'.  His comments were condemned by the Green LGBTIQ group, and Sahar Brown, a former Cambridge councillor and trans activist, attacked him for 'endorsing a fringe form of feminism that portrays transgender women as dangerous sex pests and predators'.

Mr. Read has said:  'It is completely, 100% untrue, for instance to claim that I "portray transgender women as dangerous sex pests and predator".  On the contrary I reject transphobia completely.  But I also remain a very strong backer of feminism.  All that I have done is join many feminists in saying that it is up to women, not anyone else - and certainly not me - to decide who gets let into women-only spaces, such as women's toilets.  All women have a right to be involved in making those decisions.  I think that most Cambridge residents will see that as a not-unreasonable point of view, and will find it surprising that I have been told repeatedly on Twitter to "Go f*** myself (and much worse) for saying so, including by a handful of activists from certain other parties, who perhaps have been looking at this as an easy way to stick the boot into the Greens as we threaten them in the polls both nationally and here in Cambridge.'

Thus, Mr. Read believes, I think, that only 'real' women should have the right to decide who uses the 'Ladies' toilets.  That is according to Read the position of 'many feminists', and he says that they have the right to let women into women-only spaces. 

 

Elsewhere Rupert has claimed that Media Lens tends to talk up the numbers of victims from western actions but to minimise those of regimes in conflict with the west, such as those of Milošević and Bashar al-Assad in Syria.^[26]  He has accused them of using dubious source material on fatalities in the 2012 Syrian crisis from Aisling Byrne and Robert Dreyfuss.

Back in 2001, Rupert Read while then at the Manchester Met. University (MMU), wrote an essay in a publication titled  'Chomsky & his Critics'  and what was to become the Alternative Raven:  Language, Mind & Society, when the then managers of Freedom Press refused to publish Mr. Read's essay entitled 'What is "Chomskyism" or Chomsky Against Chomsky'.  The reason given by Donald Rooum, now one of the Friends of Freedom Press, was that the essay by Rupert Read was 'too academic' for anarchists in England to understand.  Others took the view that the real reason was because Professor Noam Chomsky himself had taken strong exception in a letter to me as editor to Mr. Read's essay; which while it praised Pro. Chomsky's politics it strongly criticised his linguistic theories.

At the time I, as editor of The Alternative Raven, wrote:

'The majority of articles in this Alternative Raven are concerned with the work of the leading linguist and political thinker, Noam Chomsky, the essays of Rupert Read ('What is "Chomskyism"?') and Wil Coleman ('Noam Chomsky & the Myth of the Generative Grammar') are both controversial critiques of the writings of Chomsky.  But Doctor Read's less technical cheeky polemic, perhaps because it is more lightweight has drawn blood.' 

 

I claimed that both Read and Chomsky 'recognise they are trying to tackle the job set by Orwell in his essay "Politics & the English Language".'   In that essay written for Horizon in 1946, Orwell claimed, 'In our time political speech is largely the defence of the indefensible'.

 

I continued:

'Naturally Rupert Read's attempt to extend this criticism of the misuse of words from the realm of politics to linguistics, cognitive science and philosophy as well as sociology and ethnomethodology is upsetting some people.' 

 

Hence, Mr. Read not only trod on the big toes of Professor Chomsky in 2001, but he caused some consternation among the Freedom Press anarchists such as Donald Rooum, who was desperate to insist that Freedom was not engaged in censorship in order to protect Noam Chomsky's feelings.  Professor Chomsky seemed to have a special relationship with Freedom through the good offices of Milan Rai (now the editor of Peace News).  Mr. Rai was formerly Professor Chomsky's political secretary, and had seemingly been putting pressure on Freedom not to publish Rupert Read's essay.

It was one of those moments when Freedom showed itself to be lacking the guts to take on Professor Chomsky and Milan Rai, who I believe is now editor of Peace News. 

At that time supporters of the Northern Anarchist Network like Harold Sculthorpe, at that time in 2000 the Secretary of the Friends of Freedom Press, fully supported Rupert Read's article and believed Freedom ought to publish it in the Raven.  Indeed, at that time, Harold Sculthorpe who went to many lectures on the Manchester Ethnography Group at both Manchester University and the MMU, thought the sun shone out of Rupert Read's arse.  On that occasion as on several occasions since Freedom lacked the nerve to challenge those like Professor Chomsky in powerful positions.

Since then the reputation of Freedom has declined considerably with each year of its fragile life in the 21st Century.  In 2010, Chris Knight and Milan Rai debated Noam Chomsky's science and politics at the London Anarchist Bookfair, and Chris Knight drew attention to the episode of Freedom's failure to publish the Rupert Read article and the other essays challenging Chomsky's linguistics.

The link to the Alternative Raven posted by Chris Knight on his site Radical Anthropology and containing Rupert Read's article is to be found on:

Language, Mind And Society: An Alternative Raven - Radical ...  

Totalitarian Word Play, Freedom & New Words

Simon Saunders:  Dare to be Daniel!

by Brian Bamford

LAST week, one-time editor (unpaid?) of the now defunct Freedom, Simon Saunders, accused Northern Voices of 'Doxxing' him.*   By that, I think he means that the Northern Voices Blog has 'outed' him by allowing the publication of his 'real name' in the public domain.  I ought to say at this stage that Mr. Saunders' name is already in the public domain in the sense that he has been for several years a paid journalist on the former Communist Morning Star using his 'real name'.  For some strange reason Mr. Saunders is shy about being identified with the anarchist publication Freedom or anarchism but happy to be a paid journalist on the Morning Star which is generally associated with a political philosophy 'Communism' or 'Marxism' which has been described as 'morally and politically bankrupt' (see Lord Kenneth Clarke's 1970's essay on 'Civilisation'.  

Mr. Saunders, who is now over 30, went from playing children's computer games like 'Dracula in London' when he was 8-years-old to University; to editing Freedom (the Anarchist journal) in his twenties; to writing as a reporter on the Communist Morning Star; he has never had what some people would call a proper job.  Yet, in accusing me and other editors of the NV Blog of 'Doxxing' he raises for me an interesting point about the introduction and use of new words into the vocabulary.   

In an essay written around 1940 entitled 'New Words', George Orwell wrote:

'At present the formation of new words is a slow process (I have read somewhere that English gains about six and looses about four words a year) and no new words are deliberately coined except as names for material objects. Abstract words are never coined at all, though old words (e.g. 'condition', 'reflex', etc.) are sometimes twisted into new meanings for scientific purposes.'   

Orwell goes on to recommend that 'it would be quite feasible to invent a vocabulary of, perhaps amounting to several thousand of words, which would deal with parts of our experience now practicably unamenable to language.   

I discussed this Orwell essay 'New Words' with the Manchester academic and ethnomethodologist, Wil Coleman, at that time my friend Harold Scunthorpe, a Friend of Freedom Press, and I were intending to publish what was to be a Raven on Noam Chomsky's linguistics and politics in 1999.  Both Wil Coleman, and the Wittgensteinian academic and 'green anarchist', Rupert Read, had written critiques of Professor Chomsky's linguistics for publication.   

In a way Orwell is dealing in this essay with some of the problems of language and communication addressed by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his book 'Philosophical Investigations' published later.  Orwell for example is really dealing with Wittgenstein's notion of the issues of solipsism and the problems of a private language when he writes:

'For one man, or a clique, to try and make up language, as I believe James Joyce is now doing, is as absurd as one man trying to play football alone.'   

The editor of the now defunct paper Freedom, Simon Saunders, when he admonishes me and Mr. Albert Hall, the writer of the comment revealing Mr. Saunders' real name, refers to the relatively new word 'doxxing' and has even been kind enough to give this word a meaning or dictionary definition: 'doxxing' equals '

Wittgenstein, in his later work, challenges dictionary definitions by showing that a word like  'game' has an infinite number of meanings, and Orwell writes of the meaning of a poem:

'The dictionary-meaning has, as nearly always, something to do with the real meaning, but not more than the “anecdote” of a picture has to do with its design..'   

When one considers the preoccupations of Orwell's later book '1984', one can well understand why he wants to extend the volume of words to embrace meanings which better cover the contents of our minds and inner selves.  The strategy of the Party in that book is to reduce the vocabulary through 'Newspeak'  in order that it would be impossible to articulate or think subversive thoughts   In the appendix to '1984' entitled 'The Principles of Newspeak' Orwell wrote:

'It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English, as we should call it) by the year 2050...  The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.'   

At the beginning of Wittgenstein's 'Philosophical Investigations' he quotes from Augustine's 'Confessions' and he writes that:  'Every word has a meaning.  This meaning is correlated with a word.  It is the object for which the word stands.'   

I don't suggest for a moment that Simon Saunders, one-time Editor of Freedom and now a paid-pundit on the Communist Morning Star, has thought his through his position with reference to these considerations when he he tries to explain to me the meaning of the word 'doxxing'.and urges me to 'take down' his name from the Northern Voices Blog on the dubious grounds that he may be subjected to some form of blacklisting by some Human Resources Department in his 'industry' – the newspaper trade.         

Mr. Saunders ought to understand that to qualify for inclusion on a blacklist one has to do something as such inclusion is a kind of accomplishment.  In his Obituary entitled 'Freedom, 1886-2014:  An Appreciation' David Goodway describes the blacklisting of an earlier editor of Freedom:

'Vernon Richards had qualified as a civil engineer – during the war he worked on the last significant stretch of rail track to be constructed in the British Isles at March in Cambrideshire – but another consequence of the trial (for “conspiracy to seduce from duty persons in the Forces to cause disaffection”)  was the realisation that his imprisonment would serve to blacklist him in his profession.'  

The fact here is that Vernon Richards was placed on the blacklist of the civil engineering industry because of the stand he took in urging the returning troops from the Second World War to 'disaffection'.  Unlike Vernon Richards, the journalist Simon Saunders wants to edit Freedom shyly in the shadows.  Now I believe that that approach represents a kind of cowardly corruption that runs through some sections of the British left today like a stick of Blackpool Rock.  Unfortunately, Mr. Saunders is not alone in what I see as this shallow, shy skedaddler politics.  It represent a sad degeneration of the radical body politic in this country.  

*   I note that despite my request you have still not taken my real name down from comments on your blog connecting me to radical politics (comments under your "Anarchist Fed.: Under the Pavement Politics" article).  As I have noted to you before, I keep my real name off such things for a reason, as once it's up online in this manner it becomes immensely easy for a prospective employer to keep me out of a job simply by Googling my name. In modern times outing people in the public domain in this way is known as "Doxxing" and is generally regarded as extremely reprehensible behaviour.

If you have any pretensions to fighting blacklists, rather than enabling them, then take my name down immediately.

Simon

CHOMSKY & HIS CRITICS

Review: 'CHOMSKY & HIS CRITICS'
by D.W. Randal (Manchester Metropolitan University) published in Northern Voices No.2 in the Winter 2003/4 issue
_________________________________________________________
We are republishing this old review from Northern Voices No.2 by the sociologist Dave Randal, because of the recent difficulties experienced by the linguist, Dr. Daniel Everett, and others doing controversial research among the Pirahã people in Brazil (see the 'Whatever Happened to Chomsky's Critics' posting below), which appears to undermine Chomsky's dominant theory of language. With a research team from M.I.T., led by Ted Gibson, a professor of cognitive science scheduled to run a documentary on the Smithsonian Channel next month, we want to recall the trouble we had in examining Chomsky's ideas. In 2001, those of us who later became associated with Northern Voices were involved with some Manchester academics in the publishing of 'an Alternative Raven' dealing with the subject 'Chomsky & his Critics'. It had originally been intended that Freedom Press (the anarchist publishers)would bring this series of essays out in their publication The Raven. In the end this was not to be, and we brought it out independently. Later in 2002, a schoolmaster, Toby Crowe, took over the editorship of Freedom and he agreed to publish a review of 'Chomsky & his Critics' , if we could find someone who had not contributed to the original publication. Thus, Dave Randal from the Department of Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University, agreed to write the review below. But, before it was submitted Toby Crowe withdrew his offer to publish the review in Freedom and we were forced to publish it in Northern Voices No.2. The comments by Toby Crowe in the Canadian anarchist publication 'Any Time Now', accusing one of our leading contributors denouncing 'Chomsky's theory as unscientific' because 'it doesn't conform to the Stalin/ Lysenko doctrine that everything in biology is decided solely by the environment' is absurd and suggests that the writer, Mr Crowe, hadn't read a word of either Chomsky or Wittgenstein's linguistics.
__________________________________________________________
READERS of the 'Alternative Raven' on 'Chomsky & His Critics' may well have asked themselves what the fuss was about when first Chomsky and then various others took exception to some of its contributions. As someone who was a more or less disinterested observer (although I know many of these contributors well and share their doubts about Chomsky's linguistic claims) I was taken aback when I read that the decision not to publish its contents was apparently taken because 'we were unimpressed by the quality of some of the material it contains, not to mention the political orientation behind it.' The main article, Toby Crowe (Editor of Freedom at that time) claims: 'denounces Chomsky's theory as unscientific, for example, on the grounds that it doesn't conform to the Stalin/ Lysenko doctrine that everything in biology is decided solely by the environment.'*

I would normally defend, like Toby Crowe, the rights of publishers to make publishing decisions but I would add a caveat. Publishing decisions, in my view, are best made from a position other than that of ignorance. It is easy to be unimpressed by something if you do not consider that it might be necessary to read and understand it before forming an opinion. To be sure, anyone with even the vaguest understanding of the discussion at hand would not mistake any of the participants as being involved in some peculiar attempt to recapitulate environmental determinism in biology. The issues have nothing to do with this at all. Stated simply, they are about a theory which lays out a particular causal connection between 'brain states' and behaviour, much as most cognitive science does. Objections to this kind of theory are usually along the lines of a contrasting view of behaviour which is that it is normally 'social', involves 'shared understanding' in some way and thus cannot be down to simple causal links between brain states and behaviour.

In the case of Chomsky specifically, the argument is about a 'language organ' and its relationship, if it exists at all, with our ability to speak and write.

Chomsky, without question, did the world a favour in demolishing the pretensions of behaviourism all those years ago. He was instrumental in providing the foundations for an alternative - cognitive science or cognitive psychology - for which we should be less grateful. There can be no doubt that cognitive science today holds a dominant position in intellectual life. It is committed to a view which holds that the human mind/ brain is computer-like. This has many complex ramifications, but include the idea that the mind/ brain is a piece of hardware, organised on modular lines and in which each part has a specific purpose or function. Contained in this is the view that the storage, recall and transformation of 'information' is what is going on in our heads, and thus that the human mind/ brain is engaged in something which we can term 'information processing'.

To believe Chomsky, you are more or less committed to a view of language which says that language is best understood as a form of information stored in our heads. This is not information about the meanings of words, but about their structuring. That is, Chomsky requires us to believe that we best understand language by analysing grammar/ syntax rather that semantics/ meaning; that the grammar in question is 'universal', or at some deep level the same across all languages, and that the acquisition of language is not, in important ways, learned but given genetically.

This bears repeating, for it implies that our ability to use a language is independent of our experience of the world. Two initial points, then. Firstly, the critics of Chomsky writing in the Alternative Raven are not offering and alternative biological viewpoint at all, but a sociological alternative (albeit a sociological alternative of a very specific kind). They are not suggesting that there cannot be a connection of some kind between brains and speech, no more than they would argue there is no connection between legs and walking. They are suggesting that Chomsky's specific causal model of language acquisition doesn't stack up precisely because it is a naive biological account.

Previous critics have emphasised the lack of empirical confirmation for his theories, noting that we have very little actual evidence to support the idea of 'deep structures'. Moreover, the actual grammatical structures of different world languages seem to vary most when they share least heritage, supporting the idea that something like history rather than biology is what drives their similarity. The contributors to the Alternative Raven (Chomsky & his Critics), however, are arguing that the problems go deeper, for they are based on a confusion between empirical and conceptual matters. Wil Coleman, in particular, is asking us to think carefully about what a language is and whether it is useful or right to think about languages as grammatical structures a la Chomsky at all. Whether one agrees with these authors or not, the force of their argument is clear. They are offering a competing account based on Wittgenstein's later philosophy, and in which it is argued that language is best understood in and through the way it is used rather than through any structure it might (putatively) have. They are, in other words, taking the debate about the plausibility of Chomsky's view of language a stage further.

Chomsky's political arguments have a different status, insofar as they are largely untheoretical polemics. There is no claim, in other words, that any science is being done. I would disagree with Rupert Read, another of Chomsky's critics here, where he claims to see connections between Chomsky's linguistic work and his political commitments, for I see none of any consequence. For what it is worth, Chomsky's political views (although he is evidently on the side of the angels) always seem to me to trade on a weak and unarticulated view of 'ideology'.

In this, the interests of Corporate America dominate police through its handmaiden, the media. Well, they almost certainly do, at least much of the time. Much better political theorists than Chomsky, however, have argued the link between capitalism and the State through interest theories of ideology. Althusser and Gramsci spring to mind. It never seems to me that Chomsky adds anything to this kind of argument apart from a certain passion.

Overall, the fact that Chomsky and others hold to an information-theoretic view of language and thinking has powerful consequences, and debates about their merits or otherwise very much need to take place. It seems to me that the dominant view has had, for instance, major ramifications in our education system, (see Roszak, 'The Cult of Information'). I discern no lack of quality

*Letter from Toby Crowe (Freedom's Editor in 2003/ 04) in the Canadian anarchist-decentralist newspaper 'Any Time Now'.