It seems to be axiomatic, in most discussions about Vietnam, that the only important questions about that country’s future are ones relating to the Americans. To what extent are Vietnamese capable of efficiently taking over American policies and operations (i.e. just how good a substitute for an American is a Vietnamese)? How worthy of American support is the Vietnamese Government? Will it survive American departure long enough to save American faces?, etc. During a seven-week stay in Vietnam last summer, I was lucky enough to avoid getting stuck in that foreign way of life in which Vietnam is seen simply as a function of American policy, and to meet some people and groups whose work and ideals vigorously make nonsense of the habit of defining everything Vietnamese in terms of American plans and expectations.

Not, that is to say, orphanages with teams busily arranging adoptions as a salve to Western consciences, in implicit denial that Vietnamese children have any Vietnamese future. Not relief organizations where the question is only what proportion of these supplies is being sold for private profit. Not the world on which a Vietnamese academic, met in circumstances of free and friendly discussion, commented bitterly, ‘We drink American drinks, drive on American petrol, fire American bullets and have our governments changed by American coups’. I saw that world too: you can’t miss it. But, luckily for me, I saw some very different things as well.

Thus, forcefully, the Spalding Professor of Eastern Religion and Ethics at Oxford. Certainly the fashionable currency of quasireligious mysticism, the resort to the private and aggressively anti-modern can, along with aestheticism and sexual liberation, remind one of the 1890s. Incense and beads abound; the lush, the exotic and the febrile. And Professor Zaehner reminds us that meditation takes time, and time takes unearned income, and is thus open to the same criticism as psycho-analysis. But it is not difficult to disengage from his testy remarks about washing machines and televisions, and his fine disdain for modern theology, matters which are of a substantial, complex and even hopeful contemporary relevance.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that in private life Jane Austen was deeply religious. Henry Austen’s Notice stresses her charity, ‘Faultless herself, she always sought, in the faults of others, something to excuse, to forgive or forget. . . . She never uttered a hasty, a silly or a severe expression.’ Her devotion is the other prominent aspect. ‘She was thoroughly religious and devout; fearful of giving offence to God, and incapable of feeling it towards any fellow creature.’

But critics have generally held that her religion has not influenced her novels in any major way and have given it little attention. An exception was Angus Wilson in his series of broadcast talks on Evil in the English Novel, in which he maintained that religious belief and practice influenced Jane Austen’s art directly, though his suggestion that the material of her novels, ‘Three or Four Families in a Country Village’, reflects a belief that the salvation of one’s soul can best be achieved in retirement from ‘the world’ seems to me to be mistaken. The more one reads the novels the more one becomes aware that they are written from an essentially religious outlook on life but that this is so absorbed and taken for granted in her thinking that it is only occasionally made explicit. And, of course, it is an outlook profoundly influenced by the reading and preaching available to her in the early nineteenth century, characterized by a reticence in the expression of faith and a keen interest in the moral life—‘By their fruits ye shall know them’.

When the editor first suggested that it might be useful to have a short, article introducing some of Noam Chomsky’s ideas, I agreed, and was about to begin when John Lyons’ book appeared and made the exercise rather redundant. His introduction is unquestionably the most lucid and coherent account of Chomsky’s linguistic work that we have, and I thought it would be pointless to write at that time an article which would in effect be little more than a paraphrase of its topic sentences. There are, however, a few things that might be said about recent trends, not dealt with by Lyons, which are needed in order to complete an outline understanding of the contemporary scene in generative linguistics; also a few critical comments, from someone a mite less sympathetic to the Chomskyan approach than Lyons is, might be helpful to anyone wanting to reach an evaluation of this field. Hence the following remarks. But first, some background, and a review of what Lyons does say.

It is quite remarkable how Chomsky’s name has become a vogue word in intellectual circles. He is known about, sometimes, even when his discipline, linguistics, is not. To an academic linguist, of course, this can be embarrassing. I suppose it is always the way when a teenage discipline catches everyone’s attention through a famous practitioner: one does not know whether to be grateful, because of the publicity to the subject, or furious, because of the over-simplification and polemic which publicity invariably brings. In Chomsky’s case, in this country, the popular awareness of the man dates from the mid-sixties.

Thirteen years ago Professor G. E. M. Anscombe gave reasons for thinking that it is not at present profitable for us to do moral philosophy. The steady flow of books since then shows how little notice was taken. The three I shall be considering in this article present an opportunity to consider the case she made and its continuing relevance.

Miss Anscombe’s essay, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, is included in The Definition of Morality, together with twelve others which are meant to hang from the same peg: the question, ‘What is the meaning of “morality”?’ The most interesting of them get up and walk away with the peg, opening up issues beyond the matters of usage which the editors tidily catalogue in their introduction. This is certainly true of Miss Anscombe’s. Her quarrel with modern moral philosophers is not that they are wrong in the way they use or define ‘moral’ and ‘morality’, but that in the way they use them these terms mean nothing at all. She argues that the concept of obligation, with its related moral sense of‘ought’, which has been given pride of place by moral philosophers since the eighteenth century, is intelligible only within a law-conception of morality. To speak of a moral ‘law’, of being ‘bound’, ‘obliged’ and so on, makes no sense unless one believes that there is someone who issues the law. The decay of divine law as a basis for morality has left these terms bereft of content, but not, unfortunately, of their ‘mesmeric force’. The smell remains for some time even when the gas-works has been dismantled. When ‘ought’ lacks the content provided by some actual law, telling a man that he ought not to commit adultery gives him no reason at all for not doing so.