- June 4, 2010
- NOAM CHOMPSKY
Reading a hilarious blog post the other day by an academician trying to argue that research has been dumbed down by Google, I had to give pause. So many conclusions in our modern world are drawn with such finality that one can easily forget that 10,000 years ago we had a habit of squatting to shit behind a tree. As though best practices are the devils work. We, here, think about what we do, find the BEST way, people proudly proclaim.
But underneath the studied lives of formal education (whether primary, secondary, tertiary or quaternary), the world just hums. A carpenter comes upon a problem that resembles one he’s solved many times, but is slightly different. He toe-nails a planed bough of pine in place to hold a load. A reporter, full of personal biases, does her best to make her writing compulsively readable because without an audience, why write? Facts are included, facts are excluded and the reader is left with some homework, but not academic homework.
No, the reader is left with spiritual homework. Because the last thing a child learns in this world is that you can’t really trust anyone, but you will have to trust everyone. The house you live in, unless you built it yourself, must be trusted to hold your physical weight day after day. All a reporter can tell you is that an American citizen was shot four times in the face by an Israeli IDF commando. But the world is demanding, and readership counts towards your bottom line, so you dress up the facts a little bit, try to describe the environment aboard the ship. The motor idling, the sun about to rise, and commandos drop down from the sky and begin spraying paintballs, and perhaps real munitions.
Academics have solved the problem with accreditation. Construction with permitting and inspections. But what happens when the accrediting group is corrupt? How easy would it be to pay off your local building inspector? The point here is that trust breaks down all over the world, all the time. Journalism, carpentry and edcuation are only three examples. When the cards are down, all you have is yourself. But, the relationships most resilient in the face of corruption are those that we nurture year over year, the people geographically and emotionally closest to you.
Yup, you guessed it. This whole post, and my general distates for academics is just another manifesto for living a fierce localist life. As far as I can tell in my own amateur investigations, evil is not in the details. Evil is in the thoughtless pursuit of efficiency, growth, profits, love, technology, popularity, power, art, and the list goes on.
Try writing a brief sentence about why you want to do something before you do it. We could all save each other a lot of grief. I’ll start. “I want as many stories about the Freedom Flotilla because I would … um … like to be more knowledgeable about world events?” Hmm. Not sure that one stands up to much scrutiny. Time to go cultivate the garden and tend to the chickens.
- This post is in the Trials of America chapter and has .