[lit-ideas] Re: Chomsky on education
- From: "Eric Yost" <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2011 14:58:18 -0400
Noam Chomsky, I used to love him. I was seventeen and the world seemed
less complex. Listening to or reading Noam was an echo of what it must
have been like for 19th century teenagers to listen to Emerson. An
eloquent debunker, the anti-Wizard of Oz, an American original.
Now Noam is sort of an embarrassment, as if Emerson had calcified into a
shrill and predictable downer with no alternative solutions, just an
endless debunking that felt like … well, like bunk, and also like that
old man smell one can never quite forget from one’s graybearded ancestry
in hospitals.
I’m sure there is a lot of useful information in the article I just
skimmed, but it’s Noam, so the motives behind the information are all
wrong. Ad hominem as pragmatic conclusion unfortunately.
One thing. If, as Noam assumes, being a good Marxist, $ = SCIENCE, most
innovations wouldn’t be here. Murray Feigenbaum, for instance, was an
outré mathematician who lived on Coca-Cola and cigarettes and was
working on an unrelated project, when, as was habitual during his
night-long strolls, he got a clue to the numbers that unlocked sequences
in Chaos theory. Qubits in quantum information theory were developed in
a Chinese restaurant.
One could populate the examples, but I’m sure the point is obvious. A
lot of very smart people don’t give an owl’s hoot about money. They
think of their projects as beloved callings, as a “that for the sake of
which,” the terminus ad quem in Aristotelian causation. They think of
their work as Noam must have thought, so very long ago, about
linguistics.
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