>CHOMSKY: That's my assumption. Either there's something there that's so
>deep that it's a kind of qualitative change in human intelligence, or
>there isn't a lot there. And it's not just literary theory. If somebody
>came along with a theory of history, it would be the same. "Theory" would
>be a sort of truism. Maybe "smart ideas." Somebody could have smart ideas
>and say, Why don't you look at class struggle? It's interesting. Or, Why
>don't you look at economic factors lying behind the Constitution? Pick
>your topic. Those are interesting smart ideas. But you can say them in
>monosyllables. And it's rare outside the natural sciences to find things
>that can't be said in monosyllables. There are interesting, simple ideas.
>They're often hard to come up with, and they're often extremely hard to
>work out. Like you want to try to understand what actually happened, say,
>in the modern industrial economy and how it developed the way it is. That
>can take a lot of work. But there isn't going to be anything too complex
>to talk about ... the theory will be extremely thin, if by "theory" we
>mean something with principles which are not obvious when you look at them
>from which you can deduce surprising consequences, check out the
>consequences, and then confirm the principles. You're not going to find
>anything like that.
This would throw, oh just to pick a random example, most of Marx's Capital out the window. So all the phenomenal categories of visible capitalism - wages, interest, profit, dividends, rent - are all you need to know, and their sources and uses completely transparent to the uneducated eye. How can such a smart man make such a deliberately shallow argument?
Doug