A couple days ago, our esteemed colleague Jaquandor posted a rumination on the decline of science education in this country, hinging his thoughts around a lengthy passage from the book Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier by Neil DeGrasse Tyson. If that name doesn’t ring a bell for you, it’s possible his face might: Tyson is an astrophysicist who has hosted a number of PBS series in recent years. He’s also a tireless advocate of space exploration, and, in the view of many, the true heir to Carl Sagan in terms of being able to explain complex and exotic scientific ideas to a popular audience. (It is probably not coincidental that Tyson has been tapped to host a new version of Sagan’s landmark TV series Cosmos.) In any event, it’s worth reading Jaquandor’s entire post, and the full passage he quotes from Space Chronicles, but I’d like to reprint the segment of that passage I found particularly resonant:

There was a day when Americans would construct the tallest buildings, the longest suspension bridges, the longest tunnels, the biggest dams. You might say, “Well, those are just bragging rights.” Yes, they were bragging rights. But more important, they embodied a mission statement about working on the frontier – the technological frontier, the engineering frontier, the intellectual frontier – about going places that had not been visited the day before. When that stops, your infrastructure crumbles.

 

There’s a lot of talk about China these days. So let’s talk more about it. We keep hearing about ancient Chinese remedies and ancient Chinese inventions. But when do you hear about modern Chinese inventions? Here are some of the things that the Chinese achieved between the late sixth and late fifteenth centuries AD: They discovered the solar wind and magnetic declination. They invented matches, chess, and playing cards. They figured out that you can diagnose diabetes by analyzing urine. They invented the first mechanical clock, movable type, paper money, and the segmented-arch bridge. They basically invented the compass and showed that magnetic north is not the same as geographic north – a good thing to know when you’re trying to navigate. They invented phosphorescent paint, gunpowder, flares, and fireworks. They even invented grenades. They were hugely active in international trade over that period, discovering new lands and new peoples.

 

And then, in the late 1400s, China turned insular. It stopped looking beyond its shores. It stopped exploring beyond its then-current state of knowledge. And the entire enterprise of creativity stopped. That’s why you don’t hear people saying, “Here’s a modern Chinese answer to that problem.” Instead they’re talking about ancient Chinese remedies. There’s a cost when you stop innovating and stop investing and stop exploring. That cost is severe. And it worries me deeply, because if you don’t explore, you recede into irrelevance as other nations figure out the value of exploration.

This is the same basic thing I’ve tried to say so many times myself in my own ham-fisted way as I’ve written about the end of the shuttle program and James Cameron’s dive into the real-world abyss and the general indifference and apathy I perceive in so many of the people I encounter… especially younger people. I believe our species became something more than the rest of the hominids the day one of our kind, a hundred thousand years ago, looked to the horizon and wondered what was over there… and then decided to find out instead of just sticking around the familiar hunting grounds. Our country became what it is, in large part, because Americans embodied that same spirit: People wanted to see what was here to be found, and after we’d seen it and settled it and reshaped it (for better or worse), they then wanted to make it better through invention and discovery. We went to the moon for the same reason, to see what was there with our own eyes (as well as, admittedly, to score the bragging rights before the Russians did, but there were plenty of idealists involved in the Space Race, no matter that they got their funding from Cold War politicians). But somehow, in a shockingly short span of time, Americans seem to have lost interest in doing Big Things; we no longer want to spend the money or take the risks, at least not as a collective society. (It remains to be seen whether private enterprise and a handful of wealthy eccentrics can fill the gap.) We’ve redefined “innovation” to mean smaller cellphones and clever new ways of wasting time on them. A significant percentage of Americans now think science is a threat to their religion, or to their profit margins, or simply to their comfortable ideas about the world. We bicker endlessly about the best way to legislate other people’s morality while the highways crumble and our electric grid collapses. And nobody cares because there’s always a big sale on somewhere, and it’s more fun to go shopping for more cheaply made crap we don’t need than to actually think about anything substantive.

In my view, all of this is another way of “turning insular,” to use Tyson’s phrasing.  We may not be literally isolating ourselves as the Chinese did in the 15th century, but have no doubt, America is turning away from the horizon and shrinking into itself in a very real way. And, like Tyson, I find this deeply worrying. I am not a particularly nationalistic type; I find the flag-waving, “we’re-number-one” stuff distasteful as hell. Not to mention frequently inaccurate. But I grew up believing my country was in the forefront of certain things — engineering feats, technological advancements, space exploration, general scientific research — and while I may wish this country was more like Europe in certain respects (notably a sensible universal healthcare system and more interest in quality of life than working oneself to death), by Crom, I think the US of A ought to remain in the forefront of those things. And we’re not doing it. We’re not doing it because we glorify ignorance and wealth (especially when the two are combined), and we crave fame more than accomplishment, and we fear anything and everything we don’t understand, and quite frankly, we’re not doing it because pro-science people like myself can’t seem to convince enough of our fellow Americans that church is church and school is school, and, while each has its value, they concern themselves with different things and it’s better that they not be intertwined. I only hope we manage to pull our heads out of our collective rear end before this country completely degenerates into a banana republic watched over at night by the lights from the Chinese moon base…