The Meaning of It All (6 page)

Russia is a backward country. Oh, it is technologically advanced. I described the difference between what I like to call the science and technology. It does not apparently seem, unfortunately, that engineering and technological development are not consistent with suppressed new opinion. It appears, at least in the days of Hitler, where no new science was developed, nevertheless rockets were made, and rockets also can be made in Russia. I am sorry to hear that, but it is true that technological development, the applications of science, can go on without the freedom. Russia is backward because it has not learned that there is a limit to government power. The great discovery of the Anglo-Saxons is—they are not the only people who thought of it, but, to take the later history of the long struggle of the idea—that there can be a limit to government power. There is no free criticism of ideas in Russia. You say, “Yes, they discuss anti-Stalinism.”
Only in a definite form. Only to a definite extent. We should take advantage of this. Why don't we discuss anti-Stalinism too? Why don't we point out all the troubles we had with that gentleman? Why don't we point out the dangers that there are in a government that can have such a thing grow inside itself? Why don't we point out the analogies between the Stalinism that is being criticized inside of Russia and the behavior that is going on at the very same moment inside Russia? Well, all right, all right . . .

Now, I get excited, see. . . . It's only emotion. I shouldn't do that, because we should do this more scientifically. I won't convince you very well unless I make believe that it is a completely rational, unprejudiced scientific argument.

I only have a little experience in those countries. I visited Poland, and I found something interesting. The Polish people, of course, are freedom-loving people, and they are under the influence of the Russians. They can't publish what they want, but at the time when I was there, which was a year ago, they could say what they wanted, strangely enough, but not publish anything. And so we would have very lively discussions in public places on all sides of various questions. The most striking thing to remember about Poland, by the way, is that they have had an experience with Germany which is so deep and so frightening and so horrible that they cannot possibly forget it. And, therefore, all of their attitudes in foreign
affairs have to do with a fear of the resurgence of Germany. And I thought while I was there of the terrible crime that would be the result of a policy on the part of the free countries which would permit once again the development of that kind of a thing in that country. Therefore, they accept Russia. Therefore, they explained to me, you see, the Russians definitely are holding down the East Germans. There is no way that the East Germans are going to have any Nazis. And there is no question that the Russians can control them. And so at least there is that buffer. And the thing that struck me as odd was that they didn't realize that one country can protect another country, and guarantee it, without dominating it completely, without living there.

The other thing they told me was very often, different individuals would call me aside and say that we would be surprised to find that, if Poland did get free of Russia and had their own government and were free, they would go along more or less the way they are going. I said, “What do you mean? I am surprised. You mean you wouldn't have freedom of speech.” “Oh, no, we would have all the freedoms. We would love the freedoms, but we would have nationalized industries and so on. We believe in the socialistic ideas.” I was surprised because I don't understand the problem that way. I don't think of the problem as between socialism and capitalism but rather between suppression of ideas and free ideas. If it is that free ideas and socialism are better than communism,
it will work its way through. And it will be better for everybody. And if capitalism is better than socialism, it will work its way through. We have got 52 percent . . . well . . .

The fact that Russia is not free is clear to everyone, and the consequences in the sciences are quite obvious. One of the best examples is Lysenko, who has a theory of genetics, which is that acquired characteristics can be passed on to the offspring. This is probably true. The great majority, however, of genetic influences are undoubtedly of a different kind, and they are carried by the germ plasm. There are undoubtedly a few examples, a few small examples already known, in which some kind of a characteristic is carried to the next generation by direct, what we like to call
cytoplasmic
; inheritance. But the main point is that the major part of genetic behavior is in a different manner than Lysenko thinks. So he has spoiled Russia. The great Mendel, who discovered the laws of genetics, and the beginnings of the science, is dead. Only in the Western countries can it be continued, because they are not free in Russia to analyze these things. They have to discuss and argue against us all the time. And the result is interesting. Not only in this case has it stopped the science of biology, which, by the way, is the most active, most exciting, and most rapidly developing science today in the West. In Russia it is doing nothing. At the same time you would think that from an economic standpoint such a thing is
impossible. But nevertheless by having the incorrect theories of inheritance and genetics, the biology of the agriculture of Russia is behind. They don't develop the hybrid corn right. They don't know how to develop better brands of potatoes. They used to know. They had the greatest potato tuber collections and so on in Russia before Lysenko than anywhere in the world. But today they have nothing of this kind. They only argue with the West.

In physics there was a time when there was trouble. In recent times there has been a great freedom for the physicist. Not a hundred percent freedom; there are different schools of thought which argue with each other. They were all in a meeting in Poland. And the Polish Intourist, the analogue of Intourist in Poland, which is call
Polorbis,
arranged a trip. And of course, there was only a limited number of rooms, and they made the mistake of putting Russians in the same room. They came down and they screamed, “For seventeen years I have never talked to that man, and I will not be in the same room with him.”

There are two schools of physics. And there are the good guys and the bad guys, and it's perfectly obvious, and it's very interesting. And there are great physicists in Russia, but physics is developing much more rapidly in the West, and although it looked for a while like something good would happen there, it hasn't.

Now this doesn't mean that technology is not developing
or that they are in some way backward that way, but I'm trying to show that in a country of this kind the development of ideas is doomed.

You have read about the recent phenomenon in modern art. When I was in Poland there was modern art hung in little corners in back streets. And there was the beginning of modern art in Russia. I don't know what the value of modern art is. I mean either way. But Mr. Khrushchev visited such a place, and Mr. Khrushchev decided that it looked as if this painting were painted by the tail of a jackass. My comment is, he should know.

To make the thing still more real I give you the example of a Mr. Nakhrosov who traveled in the United States and in Italy and went home and wrote what he saw. He was castigated for, I quote the castigator, “A 50-50 approach, for bourgeois objectivism.” Is this a scientific country? Where did we ever get the idea that the Russians were, in some sense, scientific? Because in the early days of their revolution they had different ideas than they have now? But it is not scientific to not adopt a 50-50 approach—that is, to not understand what there is in the world in order to modify things; that is, to be blind in order to maintain ignorance.

I cannot help going on with this criticism of Mr. Nakhrosov and to tell you more about it. It was made by a man whose name is Padgovney, who is the first secretary of the Ukranian Communist Party. He said, “You told us here . . . (He was at a meeting at which the other man had
just spoken, but nobody knows what he said, because it wasn't published. But the criticism was published.) You told us here you would only write the truth, the great truth, the real truth, for which you fought in the trenches of Stalingrad. That would be fine. We all advise you to write that way. (I hope he does.) Your speech, and the ideas you continue to support smack of petty bourgeois anarchy. This the party and people cannot and will not tolerate. You, Comrade Nakhrosov, had better think this over very seriously.” How can the poor man think it over seriously? How can anyone think seriously about being a petty bourgeois anarchist? Can you picture an old anarchist who is a bourgeois also? And at the same time petty? The whole thing is absurd. Therefore, I hope that we can all maintain laughter and ridicule for the people like Mr. Padgovney, and at the same time try to communicate in some way to Mr. Nakhrosov that we admire and respect his courage, because we are here only at the very beginning of time for the human race. There are thousands of years in the past, and there is an unknown amount of time in the future. There are all kinds of opportunities, and there are all kinds of dangers. Man has been stopped before by stopping his ideas. Man has been jammed for long periods of time. We will not tolerate this. I hope for freedom for future generations—freedom to doubt, to develop, to continue the adventure of finding out new ways of doing things, of solving problems.

Why do we grapple with problems? We are only in
the beginning. We have plenty of time to solve the problems. The only way that we will make a mistake is that in the impetuous youth of humanity we will decide we know the answer. This is it. No one else can think of anything else. And we will jam. We will confine man to the limited imagination of today's human beings.

We are not so smart. We are dumb. We are ignorant. We must maintain an open channel. I believe in limited government. I believe that government should be limited in many ways, and what I am going to emphasize is only an intellectual thing. I don't want to talk about everything at the same time. Let's take a small piece, an intellectual thing.

No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literary or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race. Thank you.

I
WAS HAPPY, WHEN
I got the invitation to give the John Danz Lectures, to hear that there would be three lectures, as I had thought about these ideas at great length and wanted an opportunity not to express myself in only one lecture, but to develop the ideas slowly and carefully in three lectures. I found out that I developed them slowly and carefully, completely, in two.

I have completely run out of organized ideas, but I have a large number of uncomfortable feelings about the world which I haven't been able to put into some obvious, logical, and sensible form. So, since I already contracted to give three lectures, the only thing I can do is to give this potpourri of uncomfortable feelings without having them very well organized.

Perhaps someday, when I find a real deep reason behind them all, I will be able to give them in one sensible lecture instead of this thing. Also, in case you are beginning to believe that some of the things I said before are true because I am a scientist and according to the brochure that you get I won some awards and so forth, instead of your looking at the ideas themselves and judging them directly—in other words, you see, you have some feeling toward authority—I will get rid of that tonight. I dedicate this lecture to showing what ridiculous conclusions and rare statements such a man
as myself can make. I wish, therefore, to destroy any image of authority that has previously been generated.

You see, a Saturday night is a night for entertainment, and that is . . . I think I have got the right spirit now and we can go on. It is always a good to entitle a lecture in a way that nobody can believe. It is either peculiar or it is just the opposite of what you would expect. And that is the reason, of course, for calling it “This Unscientific Age.” Of course if you mean by scientific the applications of technology, there is no doubt that this is a scientific age. There is no doubt at all that today we have all kinds of scientific applications which are causing us all kinds of trouble as well as giving us all kinds of advantages. And so in that sense it certainly is a scientific age. If you mean by a scientific age an age in which science is developing rapidly and advancing fully as fast as it can, then this is definitely a scientific age.

The speed at which science has been developing for the last two hundred years has been ever increasing, and we reach a culmination of speed now. We are in particular in the biological sciences, on the threshold of the most remarkable discoveries. What they are going to be I am unable to tell you. Naturally, that is the excitement of it. And the excitement that comes from turning one stone over after another and finding underneath new discoveries has been going on now perpetually for several hundred years, and it is an ever-rising crescendo. This is, in that sense, definitely a scientific age. It has been called a
heroic age, by a scientist, of course. Nobody else knows about it. Sometime when history looks back at this age they will see that it was a most dramatic and remarkable age, the transformation from not knowing much about the world to knowing a great deal more than was known before. But if you mean that this is an age of science in the sense that in art, in literature, and in people's attitudes and understandings, and so forth science plays a large part, I don't think it is a scientific age at all. You see, if you take the heroic age of the Greeks, say, there were poems about the military heroes. In the religious period of the Middle Ages, art was related directly to religion, and people's attitudes toward life were definitely closely knit to the religious viewpoints. It was a religious age. This is not a scientific age from that point of view.