As a graduate student at Penn State, I had made it almost a requirement to read at least three or four Noam Chomsky books a year. If you read enough Chomsky, you start wondering, "What is his outlook on my line of work?" Over the years I had been doing music interviews with bands, but I wanted to try a different sort of interview about the U.S government's involvement with science and the arts. I met with Chomsky in mid-February at MIT.
MIKSE:
What is your perspective on science and its role in the development of human progress and the human mind?
CHOMSKY:
It's right at the core. If you mean professional science, for a long time it didn't make much of a direct contribution in getting things done. The point at which true science began to really influence practice is pretty recent. Take MIT. When I got here almost 60 years ago, it was an engineering school. People learned how to make things—build a bridge, make an electrical circuit. It was mostly craft. You learned things the way a good carpenter learns things. There were science courses and math courses, but they were pretty much service courses, techniques for engineers. Within 20 years, if you wanted to build things or make things, you didn't go to MIT, you went to Northeastern or Wentworth Institute or some place like that. This has become a science university.
The reason was because of the change that took place. Science had something to say to the practical arts and there was a huge explosion of technology: computers, software, IT, satellites, microelectronics. A lot of these massive changes came out of fundamental science. Furthermore, technology started to change much faster. If you wanted to train engineers of the future, there's not much point training them in the technology of today. It's going to be much different 20 years from now, so you study fundamental science.
The same thing took place in medicine. Until, say, a century ago, there was a real question studied by the historians of medicine. If you went to a doctor, your chances of improvement would be no better than 50 percent because it's mostly intuition and craft. I remember doctors in my childhood who would do things such as leeches, which was supposed to bring out the blood. That changed a lot with the development of the first sulfur drugs, antibiotics, and so on—and also advanced surgical techniques. But these were all consequences of the contributions of real science, such as biology, to the practice of medicine. It's not the first time. Like the early industrial revolution, the physical principals are not the most sophisticated ones.
By now, not only the world, but the survival of the species depends on sophisticated science. We're not going to get out of the environmental crisis unless there are significant scientific innovations, figuring out some way to harness solar power. That's not going to happen by itself. Unfortunately, a lot of science tradition throughout the years has been going into developing better means of destruction.
The early agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago was based on the science of the day; that is, figuring out how to grow crops more effectively. It was pretty sophisticated. One of the things that's been discovered that surprised contemporary scientists and anthropologists is that, quite commonly when the West goes into some cultures like Liberia and proposes scientific agriculture, its yields decline. What's happened is that there's a tremendous amount of technical lore that isn't written down and is usually passed from mother to daughter. Agriculture was usually women's work, but very complex lore—you should plant this seed under this rock because the sun hits it at a certain hour and so on and so forth. That lore wasn't known by most men in the community, let alone anyone else. When scientific agriculture comes in, it destroys it and brings in Western concepts of agriculture: high use of fertilizer, other inputs, to deal with a decline in yields. So science isn't simply what we do in an MIT laboratory.
What is the general public's outlook on science and the arts? Do they consider it a worthwhile part of their education? Is it even possible to measure?
You can take polls, but they give you strange results. The United States is a strange country. It's off the spectrum on many of these issues. I don't think there's any other industrial country or part of the modern world where you get half the population thinking the world was created 10,000 years ago. That's a pretty unique U.S. phenomenon.
Listen to talk radio sometimes, which I do a lot when I'm driving. It's a segment of popular opinion. I happened to catch Rush Limbaugh interviewing Sarah Palin. For anybody who cares about possible survival, it's pretty frightening. It was all leading questions, "Sarah, what do you think of global warming?" "Oh, that's just made up by elitist liberals who are taking our jobs who don't care about us poor people. It's nothing like that. Look out the window, do you see any palm trees? Well, that takes care of global warming."
