This page is an attempt to provide an English translation of the seminar that Alexander Grothendieck gave at the CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Geneva on January 27th 1972. This seminar raises questions that are still relevant today and provides a reflection on how scientific research is conducted, its purpose and how it relates to society from one of the most important mathematicians of the twentieth century. Although necessary, such discussions remain rare in most academic circles.
The translation is based on the text published by Les Editions du Sandre as well as the transcript of the seminar by Taos Aït Si Slimane that I found here. The original recorded seminar can be found on the CERN website archives. Feel free to contact me to suggest any corrections.
Will we continue scientific research?
By Alexander Grothendieck
Dekkers:
Ladies and gentlemen, good evening. In our cycles of conferences, since ten years that we organize them, we periodically asked scientists to come and reflect on science, on the responsibility of scholars and I think that it is particularly interesting to do it because we have a little tendency at the CERN to take ourselves for extraordinary people who are doing theoretical things that are not at all dangerous, as part of an exceptional european collaboration. Hence, always taken by these beautiful ideas, we have the tendency perhaps to be content with it and to not ask more profound questions. It is precisely to go a bit further that it is useful to have seminar speakers such as M. Grothendieck, who we have here tonight and I immediately give him the floor.
Alexandre Grothendieck:
I am very pleased to have the opportunity to speak at the CERN. For many people, whom I was part of, the CERN is one of these citadels, so to speak, of a certain kind of science, in fact a cutting-edge science: nuclear research. I have been corrected. It seems that at the CERN - the European Organization for Nuclear Research - one does not do nuclear research. Whatever, I believe that in the minds of numerous people, the CERN does conduct such research.
Nuclear research is also indissolubly associated, for many people, to military research, to A and H bombs and, also, to something whose disadvantages are just starting to appear: the proliferation of nuclear power plants. In fact, the concern provoked since the end of the last world war by nuclear research has faded a little as the explosion of the A bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki moved further away in the past. Of course, there has been the accumulation of destructive weapons of type A or H that have kept many people in anxiety. A more recent phenomenon is the proliferation of nuclear power plants that pretend to be an answer to the increasing needs in energy of the industrial society. However, we noticed that this proliferation had a certain number of drawbacks, to use a euphemism, “extremely serious” and this has raised severe issues.
That an advanced field of research be associated with a genuine threat for the survival of humanity, also a threat to life on the planet, is not an exceptional situation, it is a situation that is the rule. Since one or two years that I started to question myself on this topic, I realized that, in the end, in each of the big questions that are currently threatening the survival of the human species, these questions would not arise in their current form, the threat of survival would not arise, if the state of our science was that of the year 1900 for example. I do not mean by that that the only reason for all these ailments, for all these dangers, is science. There is, of course, a conjunction of several things; but science, the current form of scientific research, certainly plays an important role.
First of all, I could perhaps say a few personal words. I am a mathematician. I spent the largest part of my life doing mathematical research. Concerning mathematical research, the one that I did and that did the colleagues I was in contact with, seemed to me very far from any sort of practical application. For this reason, I felt for a long time particularly reluctant to ask myself questions about the ins and outs, in particular on the social impact, of this scientific research. It is only at a rather recent date, about two years ago, that I started, like that, progressively, asking myself questions on this topic. Hence, I arrived at a position where, about a year and a half ago in fact, I abandoned all sorts of scientific research. In the future, I will only do what is strictly necessary to meet my needs since, until proven otherwise, I do not have any other job than being a mathematician. I know for a fact that I am not the only one asking myself such questions. Since a year or two, and even since the last few months, more and more people are asking themselves key questions on this topic. I am convinced that at the CERN many scientists and technicians are starting to ask themselves those questions as well. In fact, I met some. In addition, I and others know people, at the CERN for example, who have “extremely serious” ideas on the topic of applications deemed peaceful of nuclear energy, but who do not dare to express them publicly for fear of losing their position. Of course, it is not a climate specific to the CERN. I believe that it is a climate that prevails in most academic or research institutions in France, in Europe, and also, to a certain extent, in the United States where people who take the risk to overtly express their reservations, even on strictly scientific grounds, on certain scientific developments, remain a tiny minority.
Thus, it has been one or two years that I have been asking myself questions. I don’t solely ask them to myself. I ask them to my colleagues as well and, particularly since several months, perhaps six months, I take every opportunity to meet scientists, whether in public discussions like this one or in private, to raise these questions. In particular: “Why are we doing scientific research?” A question that is practically the same, perhaps, in the long term at least, than the question: “Will we continue scientific research?” The extraordinary thing is to see the extent to which my colleagues are incapable of answering this question. In fact, for most of them, this question is simply so strange, so extraordinary, that they refuse to consider it. In any case, they are extremely hesitant to provide an answer, whatever it may be. When we manage to snatch an answer in public discussions or in private, we generally hear, by frequency order of answers “Scientific research? I do it because it makes me happy, because I find intellectual satisfaction in it”. Sometimes, people say: “I do scientific research because I need to earn a living, because I am paid for it”.
Concerning the first motivation, I can say that it was my main motivation during my research life. Indeed, scientific research made me happy and I did not ask questions beyond that. In fact, if it was making me happy, it was mainly because the social consensus told me that it was a noble and positive activity, an activity worth doing; without ever detailing, besides, why it was noble, positive, etc. Obviously, direct experience told me that, with my colleagues, we were building something, some edifice. There was a sentiment of progression that provided a certain sense of achievement[1]... of bliss, and at the same time, some sort of fascination in the problems that arose.
But all that, eventually, does not answer the question: “What is the social purpose of scientific research?” Because if its only purpose was to provide pleasure to a handful of mathematicians or other scientists, there is no doubt that society would hesitate to invest in it such considerable funds - in mathematics they are not considerable, but in other sciences, they can be. Society would probably also hesitate to pay tribute to such activities; while it is quite silent on other activities that require perhaps as much effort, but of a different kind, like playing marbles or things of that nature. We can develop to the extreme certain types of aptitudes, certain technical abilities, whether intellectual, manual or other, but why is there this valuation of scientific research? It is a question worth asking.
While speaking with many of my colleagues, I realized during the last year that, in fact, this satisfaction that scientists are supposed to get from exercising their beloved job, is a pleasure… that is not a pleasure for everyone! To my utter amazement, I realized that for most scientists, scientific research was lived as a constraint, a servitude. Conducting research is a life or death question for any esteemed member of the scientific community. Scientific research is a necessity to get a job when one commits to this path, often without really knowing what this actually means. Once one has a gig, it is a necessity to climb up the ladder. Once one climbed the ladder, assuming that one even managed to do so, it is a necessity to be considered as being in the race. You are expected to be productive. Scientific production, like any other type of production in the prevailing civilization, is considered a necessity in itself. In all this, it is remarkable that, in the end, the content of research entirely takes a back seat. It is about producing a certain number of “papers”. In extreme cases, the productivity of scientists is measured by the number of published pages. In these conditions, for a large number of scientists, probably their overwhelming majority, perhaps except only those who are lucky enough to have an exceptional gift or be in a social position and a state of mind which allow them to free themselves from these feelings of constraints, for most, scientific research is truly a constraint that kills the pleasure we might get from doing it.
It is something I discovered with astonishment because we never talk about it. I believed there were spontaneous and egalitarian relations between my students and me. In fact, this is an illusion in which I was trapped; without noticing it, there exists a true hierarchical relationship. Mathematicians who were my students or who considered themselves as less well situated than me and who felt a sort of alienation from their work, would have never thought to talk about it with me before, from my own initiative, I left the scientific ghetto in which I was trapped and that I aimed to speak with people who were not from my environment; this environment of esoteric scientists who conduct high-level mathematics.
To illustrate my point, I would like to provide a very concrete example. I traveled, two weeks ago, to Brittany. I had the opportunity to go to Nantes where I saw friends, where I spoke at a youth and culture center[2] (MJC) about the issues that we are discussing here today. I was there on a Monday. Since colleagues at Nantes University knew I was coming, they asked in extremis that I come, the following afternoon, to discuss with them about mathematical subjects. However, it happened that the day I visited, one of Nantes’ mathematician, Mr. Molinaro, committed suicide. So, because of this unfortunate incident, the planned discussion was canceled. Instead, I reached out to several colleagues to inquire whether it was possible to gather and talk about mathematical life inside the mathematics department at the university and to also talk a little bit about this suicide. That afternoon in Nantes, there was a meeting extremely revelatory of the pervasive uneasiness, where everyone present visibly - with one exception I would say - clearly felt that this suicide was closely linked to the things that we specifically discussed the previous evening at the MJC.
In fact, I shall perhaps provide one or two details. It happens that Mr. Molinaro had two PhD students who were conducting “third cycle” theses - I believe they were not State-level theses. However, these theses were considered to not have sufficient scientific value. They were harshly judged by Dieudonné, who is a very good colleague of mine with whom I wrote a large handbook of geometric algebra. So I know him very well, he is a man of reliable scientific judgment, who is very demanding on the quality of scientific work. Thus, while these theses were discussed by the committee granting registration to the higher education competence list, he sacked them and registration was denied. Of course, this was felt as a personal injure by Molinaro who already had previous difficulties and he committed suicide in those circumstances. In fact, I had a mathematician friend named Terenhöfel who also committed suicide. I know a certain number of mathematicians - here I speak mostly of mathematicians since it is the environment I know best - who have gone mad.
I do not believe it to be specific to mathematics. I think that the type of atmosphere prevalent in the scientific world, whether mathematics or not, a kind of atmosphere with extremely thin air and the pressure exerted on researchers are largely responsible for the outcome of these unfortunate cases.
This concerns the pleasure that we get when conducting scientific research. I believe that there can be pleasure, but I reached the conclusion that the pleasure of the ones, the pleasure of high ranking people, the pleasure of the brilliant, comes at the expense of a real repression against the average scientist.
Another aspect of this problem, that goes beyond the scientific community, of all scientists, is the fact that these high acrobatics of the human mind come at the expense of the entire population which is dispossessed of knowledge. In the sense that, in the dominant ideology of our society, the only true knowledge is scientific scholarship, scientific knowledge which is the prerogative of a few millions people, perhaps one person in a thousand. All others are supposed to “not know” and, in fact, when we speak with them, they have the feeling that they “don’t know”. Those who know are those high up, in high-level sciences: the mathematicians, the scientists, the very savvy, etc.
Thus I think that there are many critical commentaries to be made about this pleasure that science gives us and its side effects. This pleasure is sort of an ideological justification of a certain path that human society is taking and, in this regard, I believe that even the most disinterested science conducted in the current context, and even the most removed from a practical application, has an extremely negative impact.
It is the reason why, personally, I currently abstain, to the extent possible, from participating in such activities. I would like to explain the reason why I first interrupted my research activity: it was because I was realizing that there were problems so urgent to solve concerning the survival crisis that it seemed a folly to waste forces conducting pure scientific research. When I took this decision, I thought I would dedicate several years doing research, to acquire basic knowledge in biology, with the idea of applying and developing mathematical techniques, mathematical methods, to tackle biological problems. It is an absolutely fascinating thing for me and, nevertheless, once I started with friends a group named Survivre[3] to precisely tackle survival questions, at that moment, from one day to the next, the interest of disinterested scientific research completely vanished from me and I have never regretted it since.
Remains the second motivation: science, scientific activity enables us to have a salary, to earn a living. It is in fact the main motivation for most scientists, given the conversations I had with many of them. There would also be many things to say about this subject. For the young ones in particular who are currently committing to a scientific career thinking they will find a ready profession that will provide security. I believe that it is generally known that this is a vast illusion. By producing so many highly qualified people, we really produced too many of them since the large boom in the production of young scholars, since Sputnik about fifteen years ago there is more and more unemployment in scientific careers. It is a problem that is becoming acute for an increasing number of young people, especially young scientists. In the United States, they produce something like 1000 or 1500 doctoral theses only in mathematics and the number of openings is approximately a third of that.
On the other hand, this does not change that when science enables us to have a salary and to meet our needs, the links between our work and the satisfaction of our needs are practically severed, these are extremely abstract links. The link is practically made by the salary, but our needs are not directly related to the activity we practice. In fact, it is remarkable that when we ask the question: “What is the social purpose of science?”, almost no one is able to answer. Our scientific activities help fulfill directly none of our needs, none of the needs of our nearest and dearest, of people we might know. There is perfect alienation between us and our work.
It is not a phenomenon specific to scientific activity, I think that it is a situation specific to almost all professional activities within industrial civilization. It is one of the great vices of this industrial civilization.
Regarding mathematics more particularly, for the past few months, I really have been trying to discover a manner for which mathematical research, the one that was conducted for several centuries - I do not necessarily speak about the most recent mathematical research, that in which I was still involved until a quite recent date -, could be useful from the point of view of satisfying our needs. I have talked about it to all sorts of mathematicians for three months. Nobody was able to give me an answer. In auditoriums like this one or in smaller groups of colleagues, nobody knows. I would not say that none of this knowledge would be able, in one way or another, to be applicable to make us happy, to allow us a better fulfillment, to satisfy certain of our real desires, but until now I did not find it. If I had found it, I would have been much happier, much more content in some ways, at least until a recent date. After all, I am myself a mathematician and this would have pleased me to know that my mathematical knowledge could help for something socially positive. However, since two years that I try to understand a little bit the course that society is currently taking, the possibilities that we have to act favorably on this course, in particular possibilities that we have to ensure the survival of the human species and to enable an evolution of life that is worth living, that survival be worth it, my scientific knowledge has not been useful once.
The only point on which my training as a mathematician was useful, it is not really my training as a mathematician as such nor my name as a mathematician, it was that, since I was a famous mathematician, I had the opportunity to get myself invited to many universities all over the place. This gave me the opportunity to talk with many colleagues, students, and people all over. This happened for the first time last spring when I toured Canada and the United States. In a three week period, I visited about twenty campuses. I got huge benefits from these contacts; my ideas, my vision of things evolved enormously since that moment. But it is therefore in a totally incidental way that my position as a mathematician was useful; in any case, my mathematical knowledge really had nothing to do with it.
I could add that I got into the habit, since the spring, when I receive an invitation to give mathematics seminars somewhere, and when I accept it, to be explicit that I am interested solely if such a seminar gives me the opportunity to debate more important problems, such as the one we are currently discussing now. Generally, this gives me the occasion to speak with non-mathematicians, with scientists from other disciplines and also with non-scientists. This is why I ask my mathematician colleagues that at least one person from the department takes charge of the organization of such debates. This was the case, for example, for all the seminars I did in Canada and in the United States. Until now, nobody has refused once this proposition to organize non-technical, not purely mathematical, debates on the side of the mathematical invitation in the traditional sense. Moreover, since that time, I have also modified my practice a little by also introducing comments, let us say, preliminary, in the mathematical presentations themselves so that there is not too clear a cut between the mathematical part of my stay and the other.
So, not only do I announce the more general public debate that happens after, but I also take my distances with respect to the very practice of inviting foreign speakers to accomplish a certain ritual – that is to make a high-level conference on a great esoteric subject in front of a public of fifty or a hundred people, of which perhaps two or three can tediously understand something, while the others feel clearly humiliated because, effectively, they feel a social burden put on them to attend. The first time I asked the question clearly, it was in Toulouse, a few months ago, and I effectively felt some kind of relief on the fact that those things were said for once. For the first time since I was doing such seminars, spontaneously, without any advance plans, after the mathematics seminar which was indeed very esoteric and which, in itself, was very painful and heavy – I had to apologize several times during the seminar because, really, it was quite unbearable – well, immediately after, an extremely interesting discussion took place and precisely on this theme: “What is the purpose of such mathematics?” and: “What is the purpose of such rituals that consist in giving seminars in front of people who are rigorously not interested in them?”
My intent was not to do a sort of anti-science theory. I can see that I barely touched some of the problems linked to the question: “Will we continue scientific research?”, even among those that were marked on this leaflet of which I saw a copy. For example, on the possibilities to develop a scientific practice entirely different from the current scientific practice and on a more detailed criticism of this practice.
I talked earlier in concrete terms about my personal experience, of what was transmitted to me by others, for half an hour. It is probably sufficient; perhaps will it be preferable that other points be treated a bit more in depth during a general discussion. I would just like to indicate, before finishing my introductory spiel, that I brought here some copies of a journal that we edit called Survivre…et vivre. This is the group that I mentioned earlier and that changed its name a few months ago. Instead of Survivre[4], after a quite important change of optics, quite characteristic, it became Survivre… et Vivre[5]. At the beginning, we started under the fear of a possible end of the world where the essential imperative, for us, was the imperative of survival. Since, through a parallel path among many of us and also others outside of the group, we reached another conclusion. At the beginning, we were as one can say overwhelmed[6], crushed by the multitude of extremely intricate problems, in such a way that it seemed impossible to address any one of them without bringing them all. Finally, we would have let ourselves go to some sort of despair, of dark pessimism, if we did not make the following change of optics: inside our usual frame of reference where we live, inside the given type of civilization, let’s call it the western civilization or industrial civilization, there is no possible solutions; the intertwining of economic, political, ideological and scientific problems, if you will, is such that there are no possible solution.
At the beginning, we thought that with scientific knowledge, by making it available to enough people, we would be able to better apprehend a solution to the problems that arise. We came back from this illusion. We now believe that the solution will not come from a supplement of scientific knowledge, from a supplement of techniques, but that it will come from a change of civilization. This is what constitutes the extremely important change of optics. For us, the dominant civilization, the industrial civilization, is condemned to disappear in a relatively short time, perhaps ten, twenty or thirty years… one or two generations, within this order of magnitude; because this civilization raises problems that are effectively unsolvable. We now see our role in the following direction: be ourselves an integral part of a process of transformation, ferments of transformation from one type of civilization to another, that we can start developing right now. In that sense, the problem of survival for us was, if we may say, outdated, it became the problem of life, of the transformation of our immediate life; in such a way that it is about ways of life and human relationships that are worth living and that, on the other hand, are viable on the long term and can serve as a starting point for the establishment of post-industrial civilizations, of novel cultures.
[... short discussion on how to get Survivre et… Vivre and how to pay for it…]
Discussion
Question:
- I really would like to know what, according to you, makes life worth living.</span>
Answer:
- In fact, until now, the activity, the life that I had, I considered it absolutely worth living. I had the feeling of a certain type of personal fulfillment, which satisfied me. Now, looking back, I look at my past life in a very different light; in the sense that I realize that this fulfillment was at the same time a mutilation. Indeed, it is an extremely intense activity, but in an excessively narrow direction. In such a way that all the other possibilities of development of the person are not affected. For me, there is absolutely no longer any possible doubt on this subject. The kind of activity I have now is infinitely more satisfying, more enriching, than the one I had for twenty or twenty-five years in my practice as a researcher in mathematics. This is a purely personal point of view, concerning my own life.</span>
On the other hand, when I speak of a life that is worth living, it is not only about my life, it is about everyone's life. And I realize that the fulfillment that I was able to realize in a very limited direction was at the expense of the possibilities of fulfillment for other people. If some people have found themselves under a psychological pressure so strong that they have sometimes committed suicide, it is indeed because of a dominant consensus that made that the value of the person was judged, for instance, according to their technical virtuosity in proving theorems, that is to say, in carrying out excessively specialized operations – precisely when all the rest of the person was left completely in the shade. This is something I have experienced many times. When we talk about a certain person and I ask "Who is this?", I am answered “He’s an idiot!”. Meaning by that, between mathematicians, that he is a guy who either demonstrates theorems that are not very interesting, or demonstrates theorems that are false, or else does not demonstrate any theorems at all.
[audience laughter and applause]
So here, I defined somewhat negatively what I mean by a life worth living. I think that, for everyone, there is the possibility of fulfillment without being judged by others, by such narrow, such limited criteria. In fact, I believe that this scale of values has a directly mutilating effect on the possibilities of fulfillment. Well, this is one of the aspects, I do not pretend to answer here the question raised which is very broad; but from the perspective in which we are placing ourselves here, starting from scientific practice, this is what I see most immediate to answer.
Question:
- What are your opinions on the structure of scientific research in the People's Republic of China?
Answer:
- Until a fairly recent date, say until about three months ago, I was quite closed to all information that came to me from China, because it was wrapped in jargon such that we wanted, a priori, to doubt them – we didn't want to take them seriously. The jargon, let’s say, of a frantic personality cult of Mao Tse Tung, a kind of hagiography that accompanied it made me read these publications quite often but they fell from my hands of discouragement: it did not pass. So, three months ago, I met the New Alchemists, who made me understand the possibility of a scientific practice entirely different from the type of practice which currently prevails in all the sciences which are professed in universities and research institutes. From that moment, indeed, I attached a renewed interest to what is happening in China and I had the motivation to go beyond, let's say, the frills of style and to try to see the bottom of things. Hence, I convinced myself that there are extremely interesting things happening in China as well, precisely in the direction of the development of a new science. In any case, China is the only country in which the myth of the expert is officially teared down, in which people are told: "don't trust the experts", "don't wait for the government to send competent guys to solve them yourself”, “solve them yourself with the means at hand, with the means you find on the spot”. Whether we are university professors, workers or peasants, we are all capable of creative initiatives, we are all capable of inventing something. I believe that the most striking way that these… let's call them “watchwords”, or this new movement has materialized, it is in the development of Chinese medicine. Especially since the Cultural Revolution. This is an example where, precisely, science leaves the hands of a certain caste to become the science of all and it is only by becoming the science of all that it can become the science for all. In fact, virtually anyone can become a doctor, regardless of their cultural background. This vast movement of "barefoot doctors" has mobilized an impressive number of people – but I'm bad at statistics and I can't say how many – who roam the countryside for all kinds of simple medical interventions which would only be accepted after years and years of medical studies in a social context like ours. Whereas over there, after a few months of preparation, you can carry out certain medical activities.
We notice in particular the sensational development of Chinese acupuncture, which has made it possible to cure certain ailments in completely unsuspected cases until now, or to be, for example, an auxiliary to certain medical techniques. We know the role currently played by Chinese acupuncture in anesthesia. Acupuncture allows to cure all kinds of ailments, including such trivial ailments as colds, but also, for example, very serious ailments like womb descents in very advanced states. I recently read the translation of an article from a Chinese journal on this topic, which sheds some light on the differences between, let's say, scientific practice, in particular medical practice, in western countries like France or Switzerland, and the practice in China, where an entirely new technique of healing a very advanced womb descent was found by a young female doctor, who had very little study behind her, but who was strongly motivated to cure a specific case. On the other hand, she found herself in a cultural climate where it is not considered inadmissible, unthinkable, that a person with little knowledge, with practically no diplomas, could develop new techniques. She experimented on herself, by making stings on her own lower vertebrae, since she knew, from the few elementary things she had learned, that there were direct nervous links between the matrix and these vertebrae, and by enough experimentation on herself, she ended up finding a point that caused her to have an extremely strong reaction that caused the matrix to rise back inside her belly. Thereupon, being convinced that she had found the correct point, she applied it to the patient whom she had in mind, and the sick was cured. Since then, according to this journal, about fifty other cases have been treated, with forty-five cases of recovery.
One can see here the fundamental difference between this kind of practice and scientific discovery and that which prevails in western countries. First of all, the patient is no longer an object in the hands of the doctor; it is no longer the doctor who is the subject who knows and who applies their knowledge to the sick object. Here, in scientific investigation, the doctor is at the same time the object of experimentation, which, at the same time, allows them to overcome this intolerable relationship for the patient to be precisely an object without will, without personality, in the hands of the doctor and, at the same time, which allows, I believe, a much more direct, much more intense knowledge of what is happening.
When you feel scientific research in your own flesh, when you yourself feel the reactions of the body, it is a completely different knowledge than if you do something on a sick and that some needles, or others, record reactions in a purely quantitative way. I think that there is a set of factors here where the rational faculties of the person are no longer separated from each other, where they are no longer separated, for example, from direct sensory experience, or affective, ideological motivations, call them what you will.
So I think that there is a real integration of our different cognitive faculties, of our different faculties of knowledge, which is absolutely lacking in the dominant western scientific practice. Here, on the contrary, we do everything to separate at all costs purely rational faculties and all the rest of our possibilities of knowledge. This is, among other things, one of the factors that has led to this kind of technological delirium which makes scientists capable of becoming fascinated by technical problems, such as those posed by the construction of intercontinental missiles or other similar things, without at all asking the question of the atrocious implications of the eventual use of what they are building.
Question:
- According to you, it is necessary to change society into a post-industrial society within ten or twenty years. I even give you fifty years. I am asking you the following: assume that a fairy gives you an unlimited power to persuade everyone to do what you think we ought to do. What would you do without provoking, let’s say, a famine, etc?
Answer:
- I believe that there is already a basic misunderstanding. I did not say that anyone in particular, or someone else, me for example, has to transform industrial society, like that, in the next ten, twenty or thirty coming years, in another form of predetermined society. If a fairy invested me with discretionary powers, I would tell her that I didn't want to. Indeed, I am quite convinced that what I could do wouldn’t be more than putting even more mess[7], shambles, than there is already. In fact, I am completely convinced that absolutely no one is capable of, say, programming, predicting the changes that are about to happen. I think that the complexity of world problems is so great that it absolutely defies capacities of mathematical or empirical analysis. We are in a situation where empirical science methods are close to no use to us. Because, in the end, a planet Earth, there is only one and a situation like the crisis situation we are in now happens only once in the course of evolution. Thus, we have here an experiment that we cannot repeat at will to see what will be the consequences of one operation or another, in order to then optimize our operational modes. This is absolutely not the question here. It is a unique situation, of complexity infinitely beyond our analytic and detailed prediction abilities.
All we can do, I am convinced, is that, each in our own sphere of activity, in our own environment, we try to be a ferment of transformation in the direction which, instinctively, intuitively, seems the most appropriate, starting with human relationships with our loved ones, members of our family, our children, our wife, our friends, also our work colleagues. I am convinced that it is a first transformation which has the advantage of being communicative, of communicating from one to the other.
Among the transformations to be carried out, there is more specifically: the overcoming of the attitude of competitiveness between people, the overcoming of the attitude or the desire for domination of some on others, which on the other hand engenders the desire to submission to authority - they are in fact two aspects of the same tendency- and above all, the establishment of communication between people, which has become extremely poor in our civilization. I recently took stock of my own life and the human relationships I had, and I was struck by how poor real communication was. For example, in a mathematical environment, between colleagues, conversations essentially revolve around technical subjects concerning mathematics. I've had a number of romantic relationships in my life, like I am sure most of you, and there too I realized how much true communication, knowing one another, was poor. I am completely convinced that it is not a particularity linked to my person because I would personally be less good at communication than others. In fact, this is a general phenomenon in our culture and indeed speaking with many other people, I have made quite similar observations. For my part, for example, I made this general decision to pursue romantic relationships with a woman only insofar as they seemed to me to be a means of establishing a deeper communication. If you will, this is just one particular example of how each of us can immediately transform the way we approach others. Likewise, I can tell you that my relationships with my children have changed; in the sense that I understood that on many occasions I exercised quite arbitrary authority over them, let's say, over things which, in good conscience, were within their own purview. So those are things that can be changed.
One might wonder, at first glance, how this kind of change is related to, say, global issues of survival. I am convinced of it, but I cannot prove it because nothing important can be proven; one can simply feel it, guess it. But I am convinced that these changes in human relations will indeed be a decisive factor, perhaps the most important, in the changes that will take place from one mode of civilization to another. Once again, it has now become completely clear to me that these changes will not be made by virtue of technical innovations, structural changes. The truly profound change that will take place is a change in mentalities and human relations.
Question:
- I would like to come back to scientific research. You talk about the deviations of scientific research. I partly agree with some of your diagnoses: the fact that we seek too much personal glory, fashionable subservience, the abusive pretensions of certain scientists, etc. But is this inherent in science? Science, in my opinion, would like to construct a new vision of the world. What purpose would you give to another scientific practice?
Answer:
- When we say “inherent in science”, inherent in which science? I think it is inherent in science as it is defined by the practice of the last centuries, as it has developed since the beginning of the exact sciences. I think it is inherent in the very method of these sciences. Among the distinctive features of this scientific practice, there is a first point that is the strict separation of our rational faculties and other modes of knowledge. So the instinctive distrust of everything that is, let's say emotionality, of everything that is philosophical, religious knowledge, of everything that is ethical consideration, of everything that is felt, sensory, direct. In this sense we have more confidence in the indications of a hand on a dial, than in what we feel immediately, directly.
The following example measures this distrust of immediate experience very well; I could cite many others, but this one seems particularly striking to me. It is the case of parents who go to see a doctor with their child saying: “We are very unhappy, our child is becoming more and more impossible in class, he is a kleptomaniac, he gets into fights with everyone; with us he stays sulking for entire days, he wets the bed, etc.” And they ask the question, "Is our child sick?" We are asking the specialist, the person who knows, to pronounce a ritual formula: “Your child is sick” or “Your child is not sick”. In the "Your child is sick" case, we expect him to prescribe a medicine, a method of treatment, something that will make him return to the other state, the "Your child is not sick” case and period, that will be all. But if, by chance, he says: "Your child is not sick", the parents, a little consoled, will go home and will have the impression that there is no problem. really. This is, I believe, one of the ways of illustrating this state of mind in science, of wanting to disregard lived experience and state everything in terms of purely rational standards which are expressed, which are embodied by specialists.
We come to the second point, the second flaw in the method, which is inherent in the scientific method. It is the analytical attitude which, of course - I know it well - was necessary for the development of this type of knowledge. The fact of dividing each parcel of reality, each problem into simple components, to better solve them and this tendency to specialize, as we know, has become greater and greater. Each of us now grasps only a tiny fraction of reality. Which makes each of us utterly powerless to grasp, to understand, and to take options in any important matter of his life, the life of the community, or the life of the world. Because any important question has an infinity of different aspects, its division into small slices of specialties is perfectly arbitrary, and what a specialist alone cannot do, a symposium of a hundred specialists from different specialties will not succeed either.
Finally, by its own internal logic, by the evolution of the analytical method, we have reached a point where I believe, independently of the question of the ecological crisis, there is a crisis of knowledge. In this sense I believe that, if there had not been the ecological crisis, in ten or twenty years we would all have noticed that there is a deep crisis of knowledge, even in the sense of scientific knowledge. In the sense that we are not able anymore to integrate in a coherent image a vision of the world - since after all that is what we want to achieve, a vision of reality that allows us to interact favorably with it from our small specialty slices. This is a second aspect that seems to me to have become harmful.
There is a third point related to this. It is that the specialties arrange themselves spontaneously in relation to each other, according to objective criteria, of subordination to each other; in such a way that we see appearing a stratification of society, starting, let us say, with a stratification of science, according to so-called objective criteria of subordination of specialties to each other. In this sense, science, in its current practice as it has developed over three hundred or four hundred years, seems to me to be the main ideological support for the stratification of society with all the alienations that it implies. I believe that, in this sense, the scientific community is a kind of microcosm that fairly accurately reflects trends within global society.
In addition, the fourth point is the separation in science between knowledge on the one hand and desires and needs on the other. Scientific knowledge develops according to, supposedly, an internal logic to knowledge, according to supposedly objective criteria for the pursuit of knowledge. But in fact, moving further and further away from our true needs and desires. The most striking thing in this regard seems to me to be the state of relative stagnation in which agriculture finds itself, during the four hundred years that the exact sciences have developed, when we compare it with the rise of branches such as mathematics, physics, chemistry or more recently biology. Agriculture, after all, has been the basis of our so-called civilized societies for ten thousand years. It is truly the basic activity of society, it is from there that we draw most of the resources to satisfy our material needs. One would have thought that with the development of new methods of knowledge, they would have been applied in priority to agriculture to allow us to free ourselves, to a certain extent, from this obligation of excessive work to satisfy our basic needs. This has not happened. Even today, I believe that for most of us, agriculture is not considered a science. It would seem unworthy of a brilliant mind to bother with agriculture. However, precisely, with new scientific practices, the first thing to ask is: “What can the science, the content of the science, that we are developing be used for?” I think that among the most important themes that will be studied by a new science, there will be precisely the development of new agricultural techniques, much more efficient and above all much more viable in the long run than the techniques that have been used until now.
So here are some criticisms of current scientific practice. From what I have heard of certain attempts in an innovative direction, I am convinced that we can overcome these limitations of current science, that we can develop a science which is directly and constantly subordinate to our needs, and our desires, in which there would no longer be any arbitrary separation between scientific activity and all our ways of knowledge, where there would no longer be any arbitrary separation between science and our lives. At the same time, too, the human relationships promoted by scientific activity would change completely. Science would no longer be the property of a caste of scientists, science would be the science of everyone. It would not be done in laboratories, by certain highly regarded people to the exclusion of the vast majority of the population, it would be done in the fields, in the gardens, at the bedside of the sick, by all those who take part in production in our society, that is to say to the satisfaction of our real needs, that is to say in fact by everyone.
So science truly becomes everyone's science. For the New Alchemists, this group to which I have already alluded, it is even a necessity from the technical point of view. Indeed, their intention, their starting point, was to develop biotechnologies which allow, with extremely rudimentary means that do not call on the technological industrial hyper-structure, to create artificial ecosystems very productive in food. The technological means in the ordinary sense, for example the introduction of a continuous source of energy (electricity), or the supply of food by chemical industries (the fertilizers or the food that one would give to livestock, to fish), can be substituted by a sophisticated and global knowledge of the natural phenomena within the artificial ecosystems. To do this, they convinced themselves that it was unthinkable to do it within existing academic structures; in fact, that it was not possible to do it even inside closed laboratories; we could do it only in the field, because it was necessary to take into account subtle ecological factors in the development of these techniques which vary enormously from one ecological microsystem to another - and there are thousands and tens of thousands of them in a country such as the United States where they pursue their activities.
So, to be able to develop these methods, it is in the field that they must be developed and everyone must be associated with them virtually. The New Alchemists are connected with millions of Americans interested in agrobiology, organic gardening and farming, through their Organic Gardening and Farming Magazine. Among them, there are already thousands of ordinary people, small farmers, small gardeners, who have written to them to join their research concerning the development of such ecosystems. So right now it is not just baseless ideas, but things that are being done in a country as radically opposed to that kind of thinking as the United States. Again, from concrete details that John Todd explained to me, one of the founders of the New Alchemists, it is absolutely not possible to promote this kind of research within the existing academic structures. They tried, but it's impossible.
Question:
- Although 99.9% of the population does not have access to science, it should be noted that they have a greater respect for science than you and this is based on a fact which is not simply due to their ignorance. For example, one can ask the question: “How many people in this room owe their lives to this science that you disparage?” That there were repercussions in medicine, for example; which was not acupuncture, which was not the ascent of the wombs, but which was simply penicillin and a certain number of decisive things which caused the population of the globe to increase. A certain number of us, we live - your group is called Living - because there was this cursed science.
It is true that we risk destruction and it is natural that there is a reflection on what science is today in the hands of types who seem to come from the depths of time, because they are barbarians ready to use it to destroy humanity. It's true. But I find in you that part of this reflection is destroyed by the kind of absolute nihilism, absolute negation, that you profess with regard to science.
In your presentation, I noted a number of peremptory assertions that reduce some of the significance of your position:
- You expressed the doubt, based on the relations you have with certain people at CERN, that the research that we can do, for example, has no military application. It is something that we can perfectly doubt. We may all be complete idiots[8], but I don't think so. Really, I do not believe that colleagues would take the slightest risk to come and tell us: “how what we are doing risks having military applications?” And that brings me to something that I consider essential.
- We asked the question: “What is mathematics for?” We must continue: what is music for? What is the use of a certain number of activities that people do just for fun?
- Finally, what is your conception of man? It is true that a certain number of people have activities to which the masses do not have access, but I do not think that it is by deciding that Mr Einstein should not do research or that Mr Évariste Galois should not do research that you will manage to enrich the lives of people who are neither Galois nor Einstein. There are problems that are posed for people who are neither Galois nor Einstein and who are in large institutions in which the organization of research in an industrial way poses considerable problems, considerable anxieties.
But I find that with your way of totally rejecting science, you are joining Planète, you join a certain number of..., you see what I'm thinking..., you are joining a certain number of obscurantists. I apologize. As I receive you in the guts for the first time, I cannot criticize your positions, but there are many things about you that deserve debate.
[audience applause]
Answer:
- If you allow me, I shall say a few words about your intervention. You accuse me of anti-science nihilism. It is true that insofar as “science” is understood to mean scientific activity as it is practiced today, I have come to the conclusion that, in many respects, it is one of the main negative forces at work in the current society. This was probably not the case two hundred years ago and perhaps not even the case a hundred years ago. Currently I believe that the situation has changed a lot. But again, as I said earlier, I think current scientific activity is likely to change very, very profoundly; I think this will not happen without most of the current scientific sectors simply withering away. I am completely convinced that current research where we begin to catalog elementary particles, corresponding to such and such operators in Hilbert space, or mathematical research, in which I have been involved until now will wither away, not by any authoritarian decree of me or anyone else, but spontaneously. When the present structures of society will crumble, when the cogs will no longer function, because the mechanisms of the industrial society, by their inherent operation, are self-destructive; they destroy the environment, and fortunately for us, I would say. In such a way that they cannot continue to function indefinitely, they set in motion irreversible processes. Then there will be a collapse of our current ways of life. When our cities, for example, will collapse, when no one will pay the wages which allow us, thanks to an esoteric scientific activity, to go and buy the provisions which we need in the stores, to buy clothes, to pay rents, etc. - and even if we had the money, this money would be of no use because we will have to pull food out of the ground by our own means, because there will not be enough of it -, then, the motivations to study elementary particles will disappear entirely.
[audience applause]
I was rather fanatic, if one can say, of research. I was really captivated, there are noble passions. But suppose that there will still remain physicists - despite the extremely strong pressure of material necessities for survival - who would dream of continuing research, we must not forget that a particle accelerator is something that we do not manufacture with a few pieces of wood; it is something that involves considerable social effort and I doubt very much that other members of society would be willing to distract from activities that are truly necessary to establish a viable world, worth living in, to rebuild particle accelerators and the like. In any case, I believe that, for accelerators and other devices of this kind, the general public has never been consulted. Besides, I add that if it had been, probably it would have been in such a way that it would have said “Amen! ".
[audience applause]
After the lessons that each of us who will survive will be able to draw from the events that will accompany the collapse of industrial society, I think mentalities will have profoundly changed. It is for this reason that scientific research will cease, it will not be because such and such has decided authoritatively that we will no longer do scientific research from today. It will cease simply, as something which, by general consensus, will have become entirely uninteresting. We will no longer want, I am sure, to do it. This does not mean that we will no longer want to do research at all. Research, let's say, our creative activities, will go in quite different directions.
I am thinking, for example, of the kind of research that the New Alchemists are carrying out with thousands of common people who do not have a university education. These are fascinating things that will challenge the creativity of each of us as deeply and perhaps as satisfyingly as today's ultra-specialized work in the laboratory.
We were brought up in a certain ambient culture, in a certain reference system. For many of us, according to the conditioning received from primary school in fact, we consider that society as we know it is the ultimate outcome of evolution, the nec plus ultra[9]. Well, this is the case for the majority of scientists. But we forget that there were hundreds and thousands of civilizations before ours, with different cultures, which were born, lived, flourished and died out. Our civilization, or the industrial civilization - because I no longer consider it mine - will be no exception.
[audience applause]
One thing that goes beyond that remark, in my view, is realizing that this is a process that is truly ahead of us, that we are already engaged in now. In fact, the ecological crisis, the crisis of civilization, is not something for ten or twenty years from now: we are right in it. I even believe that more and more people are realizing it; it's something that over the last few months and weeks has struck me more and more, how people, who you would least expect, are starting to feel it. You scratch a little bit below the superficial things they say and you see that there is a real disarray about, say, the overall meaning of the surrounding culture. So this is it for the charge of nihilism. So there is some truth in it if you apply it to some form of scientific activity. I have somewhat forgotten the other objections you made?
Question:
-We owe life to science!
Answer:
- I think that there are useful things to say about this.
[audience applause]
Assuming that some here owe their lives to science, one can say that there are hundreds of thousands of people in Vietnam who also owe their deaths, and their deaths under atrocious conditions, to the same science.
[audience applause]
It is indeed a rather easy argument because there are many people who say: "Science was badly used, the remedy is to continue the same kind of science, but to place it in the hands of people who are going to use it well.” We will be told, for example, that medicine, biological research, etc., is the type of science that is used mainly in a beneficial way. So, there again, there is an easy way to answer by saying: the same kind of fundamental research in biology, which through some engineering[10] work will, for example, be used to develop vaccines against poliomyelitis or against other diseases, this same kind of fundamental research, through other engineering work, will be used to produce strains of highly pathogenic microbes, highly resistant to all antibiotic agents and which will be used for bacteriological warfare. So, ultimately, “research has no smell”, and whatever the intentions of whoever promotes a certain type of research - at least the type of research that is currently being promoted within our traditional science - experience has shown that it is always divertable and diverted.
As I have given here the example of bacteriological warfare, we could say that the two examples are somewhat of the same type. In the sense that they can be considered as linked to an accident, namely: the existence of the military apparatus, the existence of antagonistic nations. But suppose that these difficulties are eliminated, that the dream of the citizens of the world is realized, that there is a world government. Or suppose that either the United States, Russia or China, has absorbed the whole planet, that there is only one country left. Or suppose that the planet is smaller than it is and that it is made up only of the United States, or suppose that the United States, through an extreme isolationist policy, manages to live in a vacuum, and let's look at what is happening in there. I claim that in fact the problems are deeper than that, that essential problems still arise, even if there were no more military problems.
Take, for example, the antibiotics you mentioned, precisely because they do save human lives. What do we see for the use of antibiotics? We find out that when we have the slightest cold, any condition whatsoever, we go to the doctor. What does he prescribe? He prescribes us antibiotics. In fact, for simple fatigue, very often, he prescribes antibiotics. He seems to be caught under a kind of social pressure. Namely, his client expects him to prescribe each time the remedy that is likely, as quickly as possible, to provide an improvement. This without prejudice to what will happen in the long run. However, any biologist will tell you, you don't need to be a great genius for that, even I know it well, although I am not a biologist, the fact of routinely using antibiotics is a real nonsense. Indeed, through this practice, we contribute to the formation of strains of microbes in our body that will develop resistance, precisely to the antibiotics we take. So that, in really serious cases where an urgent intervention by antibiotics would be likely to save our life, we risk dying. Now, we are in a situation where it is difficult to assess the benefits or the advantages that there have been in the use of antibiotics. Which trumps the other: do the tens of thousands of lives that have been saved by the use of antibiotics weigh more heavily in the balance than, say, the millions of organisms that have been weakened in their natural resistance to microbial agents by the careless use of antibiotics?
I will not settle this problem, but I will simply say that the question here is not a technological question, it is not a question of knowledge. It is quite clear that biologists have the knowledge necessary to decide, right now, that the use made of it by doctors, in clinics and in their daily practice, is insane. It's a matter of lifestyle. It is a matter of civilization. In fact, I am not saying that we must necessarily ban antibiotics in an ideal future society. Antibiotics are fungi that can be produced with extremely rudimentary means, without using the large hyper-structures of heavy industry. We can therefore very well use antibiotics in a very decentralized society in which communes of a few hundred or a few thousand inhabitants live in relative autarky. It is entirely possible and probable that antibiotics will continue to be used in post-industrial societies, in some at least. It is not because they were produced in our current Western scientific culture that we should put a general ban against this kind of process. I believe that it is necessary to judge on facts, it is not a theoretical work to be done now, namely to separate the wheat from the chaff in all of our scientific knowledge and the techniques currently available . It is, I believe, a job that will be done day by day, according to the needs of the hour. That is to say, it is a job that will not be done by a few specialists, biologists, doctors, psychiatrists, physicists, etc. It will be done by everyone as needed. We will see what is needed in the great mass of scientific knowledge, most of which I am convinced is completely useless and will completely wither away.
Question:
- What about the relationship between the CERN and the military?
Answer:
- I don't have any secret information about it. I did not pretend to speak of, say, real relations, official or occult, between the CERN and the military apparatus. I don't know of such things. What I wanted to talk about is the image that the name CERN has, I believe, on a large part of the more or less educated public, for example myself. The name already: the European Center for Nuclear Research. The fact that it is a European body which brings together a certain number of countries, the prestige attached to it and which you will probably not deny; the fact also that it is research concerning at least the atom, even if it is not “nuclear research” and this is linked, let us say, to the concern, to the growing worries in the public about precisely the atom, including the peaceful atom, all of which creates a certain resonance concerning the CERN, which cannot be denied. Except that, as far as I am concerned, the kind of research, the kind of scientific practices pursued at CERN, as in any other current scientific institution - but even more because of the general connotations of atomic research with the dangers linked to our survival -, all of this has the effect of creating discomfort, I believe, for many and for me in particular.
Question:
- And Evariste Galois?
Answer:
- The poor guy died.
Question:
- You have pointed out many bad things and I agree with you, they should be changed. The question is: "What is the relationship with science?" You point out that many scientists are greedy, seek honors, steeped in hierarchy, etc. Is it really different among artists, farmers, politicians and others? Likewise, you point out many deplorable things on a human level: people commit suicide or are about to commit suicide, have nervous breakdowns. Here too, is it otherwise among politicians, businessmen, etc., and is science responsible for these misfortunes? Is it only science that makes people greedy or suicidal?
And, to take an example, there have been poets who have written very beautiful things without having any communication, say, with their wives. Do you think that again science is really responsible for this lack of communication? I think that it is inherent to human nature and that it is bad. We have to fight against it, but it has nothing to do with science.
And finally, about the wars, about Vietnam. We all agree that this is a tragedy. But is science responsible for this? I mean, three thousand years ago, do you think it was fundamentally different? Thanks.
Answer:
- I completely agree with you to note that most of the aspects of scientific practice that I have put forward - a certain number at least - are not specific to scientific research. I don't necessarily think there are more suicides, say, among mathematicians than in other professions. Why did I mention it? Simply because we talk better, despite everything, about the environment we know, we talk about it firsthand. And I talked about it because, ultimately, there is a certain myth that wants things to be better in the scientific community; that wants, for example, that scientific activity is necessarily a source of satisfaction, a source of pleasure, of joy. Whereas, in a certain number of cases, it can be shown that it is precisely scientific activity that is the source of constraints, repressions and tragedies. I know of other cases, let's say less extreme than this, in my personal practice. But it is to go against certain myths that I have spoken of those cases. Otherwise, I completely agree with your objection. So, ultimately, I think there is a misunderstanding, it is not really a significant difference in vision. As for the other question, I don't think science is the only cause of the rather catastrophic situation in which we find ourselves. I said from the start that this is one of the causes. In any case, if this cause did not exist, the problems linked to the survival of man would not presently arise. They might arise in a few centuries, but they would not arise now. Of course, wars like Vietnam could very well take place and have taken place without the current development of science. What is striking, I think, for a scientist, is to see how the most modern scientific techniques find their application in this war. I went to North Vietnam and I was able to discuss there with the interested parties, on the various improvements of the fragmentation bombs, for example. The balls have a very fast rotation movement in order to better shred the flesh and also to penetrate inside air-raid shelters that are dug pretty much everywhere along streets and roads, if care has not been taken to close them. And finally, they burst into the air to better hit the civilian populations. Moreover, despite instructions, most Vietnamese, who want to see what is happening, do not close the holes. So when the bombs go off, it makes those shelters pretty much illusory. Similarly,metal balls have been replaced by plastic balls so that their detection using radiography becomes impossible. It is therefore necessary to develop new techniques to be able to extract these balls from the shredded flesh. The military technology used in Vietnam is oriented more towards mutilating the population than towards its direct extermination, because a mutilated person requires the care of many other people to keep him alive, while a person killed demands very little. So there are a number of pretty atrocious aspects of the technology that really relate to research, to the current state of the science.
In fact, there is something that I did not realize when I began to reflect on these questions, it is that almost all large American commercial firms are directly involved in the manufacturing of armaments. It is true to a lesser extent for French firms; I do not know the case of Swiss firms. In fact, when I left the institute where I worked because of the presence of 5% of the budget which was of military origin, I saw nothing wrong with the fact that most of the funds came from firms such as Esso, Saint-Gobain and others. But since then, I discovered that these firms are also very directly implicated in these manufactures of armament, they all have important contracts with the army. In such a way that, finally, it becomes impossible to distinguish between military research and research in general, and even between civilian firms and firms linked to the proliferation of military devices. Finally, I ended up realizing that everything was inextricably linked.
By the way, I realize that there is a question that I did not answer, which was perhaps related to Galois. It was the affirmation that it was good to pursue scientific research for its own sake, for the pleasure of knowledge, in the same way as one pursues an artistic activity. So here, there is perhaps a thing or two to say.
The first thing is that to come to understand and appreciate the kind of mathematics I was doing, for example, three years ago, even supposing that we short-circuit the usual education channels, that we go straight to the point, to the essential, it takes something like a specialized training of five to ten years. However, it is quite clear that such training will in the current state of affairs be the prerogative of a tiny minority of the population. On the other hand, hundreds of other mathematicians are doing equally esoteric things in their corner. So finally, those who manage to understand the kind of thing that I was doing, a thing that I had been doing intensely for a few years, are - what do I know - maybe five, ten, fifteen, twenty people in the world, something like that. So the importance that mathematical activity can have from an artistic point of view is very different from the importance that music can have, for example. To feel music, we do not need a long training. In fact, we don't even have to be born yet, because even an embryo, in its mother's womb, already reacts to musical stimuli. I think a lot of people must have done the experiment, in any case my wife did it: when there was jazz music, when she was five or six months pregnant, the baby danced in her womb. Of course, when I talk about art here, I'm talking about elementary art, the art that we can enjoy, and even that we can do each of us: music, drawing, pottery, things like that, which require relatively minimal training.
But it is true that in the arts, as in the sciences, as in practically all human activity, also in physical activity, in sports, finally the aspect of competition is gaining more and more importance. Currently, for almost everyone, when we say “art”, the reflex is to think of people like Rubinstein, Gieseking, or Heifetz, or like Picasso, etc. That is to say, to immediately think of the great art virtuosos, those who have reached a position of extraordinary prestige. Finally, art becomes the prerogative of a very small number of people who make art for us, by proxy, because there is absolutely no way anymore that any of us do the same in their own life.
That is one more thing that could be said about the question of what is meant by a life worth living: it is precisely a life that contains its share of creativity, including its share of artistic creativity. It is much more important that each of us is able to be an artist in our own field and at our own level, to produce music, to perform it, say, on a harmonica, on a piano or on a guitar and derive direct pleasure from it. This pleasure, I believe, will be infinitely deeper than the pleasure one may have in listening to a record by Heifetz or Giesking. It is of another nature, in any case, it is put on another level. Maybe one doesn't preclude the other, that's not clear either. I have the impression that the kind of mentality that reigns among the great virtuosos – which makes them perform, for example, five hours of scales a day, day after day – ends up killing a lot of the joy they feel playing music. And this is necessary to be able to hold on in the very strong competition that exists between virtuosos. I think it is of the same type as the competition, sometimes unconscious, that exists between scientists. Competition which makes people I know, including myself sometimes, spend fifteen hours of their day, day after day, for a long time, trying to develop more and more sophisticated, more and more esoteric mathematical theorems. I have the impression that this type of mentality will disappear in the generations to come.
Question:
- [the beginning of the question is not audible] … between you and science on the one hand and between you and the humans around you, you have found that somehow our world is a world where there is no dialogue, in any case there is a sad monologue under somewhat speculative appearances, and that if we really wanted, let's say, to grossly seek in each of us, you say: “Try it, you will see, what is the drama” In fact, you are calling onto us to become conscious of this world. Let’s admit that we become conscious of this world, like you, I am then asking you the following question: “Do you think that there is something much more - whatever the mode of civilization - which is specific to man: this freedom, which is troubling, to ask questions, to ask wonder “Why, for example, do the planets revolve in this way around the sun?”; “Why can the sun rise for people on one side and not on the other side?”; “Why does the grain grow?”; “Why are we sick?”; ”“Why are we unhappy?”; “Why are we becoming conscious of what does not work?”. So, this great freedom seems to me a little condemned with respect to science when we will lose it because in fact we also have this freedom to say that science is a misfortune. By making us aware that current science is bad, you might take away in the future all the freedom to others. Perhaps one day, science could be good. A little like a pendulum, man is at the same time cohabited by the angel and the demon. You just want it to be inhabited by the angel. I would love that to, but human history has often shown that it oscillates between bad and good. This duality is inherent to humankind and its destiny. You may be anticipating that the pendulum will swing to the good side this time around. I hope with you, but I do not know if this pendulum will be stopped in the future in this position.
Answer:
- One of your questions is whether by turning our backs on science as it is currently done and, possibly, by taking away people's freedom to ask themselves the kind of questions that current science asks itself, we are not going to remove at the same time the freedom or an appreciable part of the freedom. Isn't that your question?
Question:
- Man will not return again, after a period of nirvana without science, because he is cohabited also by the devil, to bad science. It is this question of freedom which is proper to man to choose, unfortunately, his misfortune and not his happiness.
Answer:
- I would like to say on this point that, first of all, I and my friends at Survivre et Vivre do not recommend taking coercive measures that would prevent anyone from doing science. The question is not there. If I foresee that science, as it is currently practiced, will wither away, that for example the whole of mathematics, more or less, will disappear in the generations to come, it is because it will be a natural withering away, because people will no longer feel prompted to do it. So, to draw a parallel, on a much smaller scale of course, of what happened, it seems, I don't know if my historical memories are correct, I believe it was in the first century of our era, when the science of hyperplane sections, conic sections and bundles of conics, things like that, families of conics, had reached such a degree of complexity and blooming that mathematicians of that time thought that it was the end of mathematics, because in any case, by going beyond this point, it would be impossible for the human mind to make sense of anything. Now, what has happened is that, purely and simply, we have completely dropped this kind of speculation and mathematics has continued in entirely different ways, and we realize that mathematics has not ceased to produce novelties until today. Along the same line of ideas, I think the research direction that has developed over the last four hundred years, let's say, in a certain mind, will similarly wither away and that human mind will take very different paths. Not in a coercive way, simply because it will not be practices anymore. There will be imperatives linked to our real needs.
I am thinking of agriculture, livestock, decentralized energy production, a certain kind of medicine very different from the medicine that currently prevails, will be at the forefront. It is impossible to say what will be the part of purely creative joy in these new developments. I hope it will be a creative development where there will be no essential differences between conceptual activities and manual physical activities. When men will become sufficiently masters of their needs so that an appreciable part of their creativity remains free - and this will take an unpredictable time, it will be perhaps a generation, perhaps ten, no one knows -, at that time, anyone, not just a certain scientific elite, will be able to devote a significant part of their time to purely creative, purely speculative, purely playful research. Even if we resume certain research directions which would have been abandoned in the meantime, for example certain research directions of current mathematics or even physics - if society is ready to take charge of them, because current physics is not simply done in one’s head, it is done with serious instrumentation, with substantial investments, and implies the mobilization of great collective energy -, at that time, I do not see any issue in it; but I believe that it is absolutely impossible to predict it now. In any case, I agree with you that freedom is truly an essential criterion for the directions to be take; for me at least it certainly is. I think that nothing good will be created outside of freedom and even, once again, that the withering away of current science will increase our freedom, and it will not be at the expense of anyone's freedom.
Concerning your image of man with angels and demons, I don't believe in this dichotomy of good and evil. I do not share this viewpoint; there is instead a complex mixture of two opposing principles. If you allow me, I will make a small philosophical digression concerning the mode of mathematical thinking and its influence on general thought. One thing had already struck me before arriving at a general critique of science almost two years ago: it is the coarseness of the mode of mathematical reasoning, when one confronts it with the phenomena of life, with natural phenomena. The models provided by mathematics, including logical models, are a kind of Procrustean bed for reality. A very thing particular to mathematics is that each proposition, if we put aside logical subtleties, is either true or false; there is no middle ground between the two, it is a total dichotomy. In fact, it absolutely does not correspond to the nature of things. In nature, in life, there are no propositions that are absolutely true or absolutely false. Very often, to properly apprehend reality, one must take into account seemingly contradictory aspects, in any case, complementary aspects of reality, and both are important. From a more basic point of view, no door is ever fully closed or fully open, it doesn't make sense. This dichotomy, which perhaps comes from mathematics, from Aristotelian logic, has really permeated the way of thinking, including in everyday life and in any debate of ideas or even personal life. This is something I have often noticed when talking to people, whether in private or in public. In general, people see two extreme alternatives and do not see a middle ground between the two. If my interlocutor has chosen a certain alternative and that I have a vision that goes beyond the one he considers correct, immediately he will accuse me of having chosen the opposite extreme alternative, because he does not see the middle.
I believe that there is an inherent flaw to the mathematical way of thinking and I have the impression that it is also reflected in this Manichean view of human nature. There are on the one hand the good, on the other the bad, and in the best of cases we see them coexist. It seems to me that what we call bad is just a natural reaction to a number of repressions that we have been subjected to since birth; in a sense they are just as natural, just as necessary reactions as, for example, the appearance of fever - which is a sign that our body is reacting painfully and positively to a microbial invasion. The task of the doctor is not to eliminate the fever, but to try to combat the microbial invasion with drugs. This is at least the official thesis. Perhaps the task of the doctor of the future will be to understand the psychosomatic cause of the microbial proliferation at this time rather than at another, since there are always microbes in the environment and since we are exposed to them all the time: what are the real causes, what stresses have we been subjected to and that make us vulnerable? But that's another story. So, I have the impression that the Manichean vision is not very good. It is part of the air we breathe with the ambient culture and I believe that this vision will also change.
[applause from the audience]
Question:
- You think that this view of right and wrong is the air that we breathe and that comes from mathematics. I rather think the opposite. Modern mathematics is younger than all our medieval philosophy or even than theology. Because this thought that there is the good God and the Devil, the two adversaries, is very old. Perhaps the medieval mathematicians of the 15th and 16th centuries were so steeped in this idea that it was natural to think like this concerning the other example you gave, of the doctor. I think that before medicine was at the point it is now, people were trying to expel evil spirits, the Devil. So it was the same idea. I just wanted to cast a doubt, I just see it upside down. I would not say it is a vice that is due to mathematics alone, but I would say it was maybe already inherited from the past.
[laughs from the audience]
Answer:
- Bourbaki is not at the origin of mathematics; in his historical notes, Bourbaki brings it back to the Greek mathematicians, let us say from Pythagoras. So it is already a very old tradition. Take for example Euclid who developed this systematic mind in an absolutely perfect way, such that it was taught until not so long ago. So it is possible that mathematics has something to do with that mindset; although I'm not going to swear there is a causal effect. But the fact that the two things go in the same direction, the mathematics dichotomy and Manichaeism, or this tendency to only see the two extremes of an alternative, this can hardly be a coincidence; there is certainly a correlation between both. These are related things in mainstream culture. This dominant culture, anyways, does not date from yesterday, it has been developing for more than two thousand years. I am not very good in history but, for example, people like Jacques Ellul or Lewis Mumford have studied precisely the ideological ins and outs of science and technology since the origins. As far as Mumford is concerned, I believe that he already situates them at the time of the pharaohs, from the great works of Egypt. So, I believe that our ancestors, on this subject, go back quite far. But there was another question I believe?
Question:
- [beginning of question inaudible] demystification or denunciation of the role of science and especially the motivation of the scientist, even if this is perhaps incomplete. I believe, for example, that we could discuss at length and note the important roles that, in my opinion, science has in the conservation of social structures in our society. I found it a bit worrying the kind of interpretation that could arise from your presentation on the solutions that can be found to this difficulty. The solution of withdrawing from work, which is ultimately the reason society pays you, is a luxury solution that is only accessible to very few people, it cannot be elevated to a solution. Materially, a worker cannot withdraw himself from work to educate himself. In my opinion, if a worker does not educate himself, it is not because he does not want to, or does not understand what the real problems are; it is because the crushing weight of society and the rhythms of work, the living conditions to which he is subjected offer him no other possibility. In my opinion, it is not the symptoms that need to be treated, it is the disease. The disease is entirely based in the social structure. In my opinion, it is only by participating in these structural changes that we could one day envisage finding a new role, either in the sensitivity of each person, or a new role for science itself. It is not by doing a bit of theory, like here on "what is the role of science?" that we can find our place. I believe that participation in this struggle is difficult for a scientist, precisely because the parcelization of social activities makes it difficult. I believe that participation in this struggle can only happen from one’s workstation because the workstation is everybody's weapon and I don't see why it would be any different for a scientist.
Answer:
- I think there is a misunderstanding in that you believe that I am advocating this or that solution. Now, indeed, I spoke of my personal experience, of my personal practice, as an illustration of a type of action, of conclusions that can be drawn when confronted with certain contradictions. However, it is absolutely not with the intention to pose as a model for anyone. I realize that the conditions in which people are placed are extremely different. On the one hand the so-called objective conditions and then the subjective conditions, let's say, the state of preparation necessary to take rather drastic decisions, such as those I took when I left the Institute in which I worked and a little later when I decided to stop scientific research. Which does not prevent, though, that I am still paid to teach, last year and this year, very esoteric science at the College de France and that next year I will be either a teacher at the Faculty of Sciences or director of research at the Centre National pour la Recherch Scientifique (CNRS). That is to say that I will not have escaped the contradiction of my status as a scientist.
Finally, what matters to me is not so much reaching a position of moral purity, which is perfectly impossible within our society – it is one of the many things that I have learned during these last two years –, what counts is that we be a leaven of transformations, a factor of transformations where we are. Of course, if we find ourselves in a certain professional environment, it is not necessary that we leave this professional environment. But what I am convinced of is that this transformation will not take place by the magic virtue of joining a certain party or, from time to time, distributing leaflets, or even joining certain trade unions or cast ballots. I am fully convinced that these kinds of transformations will take place, to begin with, at the level of personal relationships. Insofar as these personal relationships will not change profoundly, nothing will change. If one thinks that personal relations can only change after the structures have changed — this means that one sends everything back to the big “D” day of the revolution — the revolution will never come or the revolution that will come will not change anything. That is to say, it will put a technocratic management team in place of another technocratic team and the industrial society will go on as before. As an example of relationships that will have to change radically, I am thinking, for example, of the relationship between teachers and students.
[Applause]
I can go on a little bit, I lost you, I was afraid you left the room before I finished answering.
[Laughs from the audience]
I will probably be confronted with this situation in the fall. It is the first time in my life that I will be in an amphitheater with students to whom I have to teach mathematics for good, that will prepare them for certain exams, provide them with certain diplomas which I am convinced are useless. On the one hand, they are useless for society as a whole, on the other hand, it is not even clear that it is of any use to those who will have these degrees, because it is absolutely not clear that this will allow them to have a job afterwards. Nowadays, still, most scientists either refuse to see the problem, or else, if they see it, they put a modest veil over it in their relations with students. Relations with students are therefore traditional teacher-student relationships; it means they do a technical course, the one we ask of them, and that is it. When, exceptionally, students ask technical questions, we answer these technical questions as best we can and that is it. As far as I am concerned, I have decided not to limit myself to this type of relationship and to no longer separate mathematical teaching from a card-on-the-table discussion with students or anyone who wants to come and attend the discussion to try to take stock: “Why are we here?“; “What are we going to learn together?”; " Why?”; “What does the exam that is at the end of this year’s program mean?”; "What is its meaning ?”; “What is our mutual role, me teacher and you students?". And finally, decide together what we will do. Probably in the next few years, unless the situation matures even faster than I expect, it is likely that the majority of students will insist that, once these discussions are over, we follow more or less the traditional program and that we do the usual ritual of exams. It is also possible that they decide otherwise, in which case I will comply with their opinion. In any case, there is the possibility of a dynamic exchange, of a ripening of the general atmosphere.
In fact, I began to put these ideas into practice this very year at the College de France, where I announced as a first part of the planned mathematics course, a discussion on the same theme of today’s discussion. This proposal gave rise to a fairly lively debate among my colleagues at the College de France.
[Laughs from the audience]
For the vast majority of them, it was absolutely unthinkable that a mathematics course could be partially and officially devoted to a question of this type. In fact, the title was longer: "Science and technology in the current evolutionary crisis, will we continue scientific research?". I was therefore asking the question of the crisis of civilization which seems to me to be the urgent question to be debated at the moment. Now, perhaps for the first time, or one of the rare times that in this august institution a truly burning question is asked for the civilization in which we are placed and that one proposes to discuss it publicly and in depth, it is practically the only time where the assembled faculty refuses to give their approval to this subject of the course. Indeed, the vote gave something like thirty-five votes against and nine votes for. I myself was surprised to find nine colleagues to support my initiative.
[Laughs from the audience]
This surprise was, I am convinced, much greater among the thirty-five others. According to the tone in which this discussion had taken place, it was clear that for them it was unthinkable that a common-sense scientist might not be shocked by the kind of proposal I was making for this so-called mathematics class.
This just as an example, not to say that everyone can do the same thing, but as a concrete example of what I personally try to do to take advantage of a simply contradictory situation. Instead of trying to hide these contradictions, I try to bring them to light as brutally as possible, as a way of making a certain situation more mature.
Question:
- You have constantly referred to scientific research, but I have the impression that you give the term too narrow a meaning. I have the impression that for you it is mathematics of course, then physics, something like that, to some extent also medical research. But I feel that you are unaware that there is social science research, human sciences research. You talk in apocalyptic terms about what is going to happen to society, to civilization, as if it were something that was bound to fatally and uncontrollably happen by humankind. I do not agree with you because, precisely, the humanities enable the control of this evolution. We can already observe the concrete work of advertising agencies, not to mention much more serious things than the consumption of Coca-Cola. You talk in apocalyptic terms about things that have to happen as things that are out of humanity's control, and here I believe you are wrong, because if you want to change society in one way – and I totally agree with you that it should be changed, even if I am not entirely certain that it is in the same direction, but in any case we agree on the principle –, I believe on the contrary that we must do this cursed science, as the gentleman said, in order to be able to control this evolution that you present in a fatalistic manner. On the other hand, when you say that you are going to discuss with the students, what will be your relationship with them, you are going to make a human science which is called pedagogical communication. It is not mathematics, but it is science. I fear that you will inevitably fall back either into religion or into science, because either you make apocalyptic prophecies or else you will try to do with your students, to reinvent sciences that have already been done.
Answer:
- You talk about an apocalyptic vision of civilization and it is a term that often comes up when talking about civilization. It is always this same conditioning that makes us conceive that there is one civilization, as if there had not been hundreds and as if there are not going to be hundreds of others. So, already, a first point that I would like to put in place, in my vision at least: it is that it is about a certain civilization, which one can very well reject besides and which one can very well foresee that it will disappear like many other civilizations have disappeared. When almost two years ago, I did envisage the disappearance of civilization, I was still too much a prisoner of its conditioning: I identified civilization, the only one I knew, with humanity. The destruction of this civilization did indeed appear to me under an apocalyptic image of the end of the human species. But, I explained, half an hour or an hour ago, that this vision has now entirely changed. The collapse of this civilization is not an apocalyptic vision; it is something that seems to me highly desirable. I consider it to be our great fortune that there is a biological basis of human society which refuses to follow the path of the dominant industrial civilization. Ultimately, it is the ecological crisis that will force us, whether we like it or not, to change our course and manage to develop ways of life, and modes of production, which are radically different from the modes of production of industrial civilization.
On the other hand, you talk about the role of the human sciences by saying that there are not only the so-called exact sciences, the physical sciences, and I know this very well. You also know, like me, and this is a very serious criticism one can level at human sciences, that they are trying more and more to mold themselves on the model of the so-called exact sciences, the mathematical sciences in particular. In such a way that insofar as the human sciences want to attain true scientific status – since only science according to universally accepted standards is considered serious –, these human sciences are increasingly confined to an often mathematical jargon. We know the influence of numerical tests, quantitative methods in psychology for example. We could also point out that a lot of treatises on economics, big treatises, begin, for two thirds of the book, with the presentation of heavy mathematical formalisms, the sole purpose of which is to make them incomprehensible to ordinary people. An economics professor literally told one of my friends that the goal of this mathematical formalism in his book was to hide the fact that the real scientific content could be understood by anyone with a middle-school level of education. In fact, one can make a very serious criticism of the human sciences in this direction.
On the other hand, human sciences can be diverted and in this regard, are subject to the same criticisms as other sciences. For example, in the penultimate issue of Survivre, we give a lot of details on the use of anthropology in the war in Southwest Asia. In fact, American anthropological science is to a large extent at the service of the military: in order to be able to square the indigenous populations in Southwest Asia, to be able to study by computers the impact that one policy or another could have, such as burning harvests, for example, in order to understand if the fallout will be more beneficial with regard to American settlement or if, on the contrary, resentment could prevail. So there are studies like these that are done in the field by anthropologists.
Finally, I believe that there are not so many differences to be made from the point of view of the practical and ideological role between the human sciences and the so-called exact sciences, the natural sciences, let us say.
Question:
- I would like to ask you what are the goals of the Survivre movement and what contacts do you have with existing movements in the region such as the Bugey-Cobaye committee?
Answer:
- The goals of the Survivre movement? At the beginning, our vision was apocalyptic, and we had taken as our goal to fight for the survival of humankind, threatened by the dangers of military conflicts and by the ecological crisis resulting from pollution and depletion of natural resources. But in a year and a half of existence we have evolved quite a bit and I think you could phrase the way most of us see our purpose as this: help pave the way from one type of civilization to another, by transformations which can take place immediately. So far, our work has been mostly critical work. Nevertheless, it has been quite a long time, more than six months, that we have seen quite clearly that it is necessary to go beyond critical work to manage to do something in a constructive direction. For example, disseminate information on the community movement, on the development of techniques of light technology, biotechnology, in the sense of the New Alchemists; disseminate information on experiences of new schools like Summerhill and things like that. But, between the intention to do it and the preparation from the point of view of experience, from the point of view of contact, etc. there is one more step. I believe that this transformation, in the content of the publication and our action, will take place gradually, over the course of the year or years to come. I hope that within a year, for example, at least half of the publications that we will put out, whether it is a journal or something else, will be in this constructive direction instead of being purely critical.
Concerning our relations with the Bugey-Cobaye committee, we are on good terms with them! Five members of Survivre participated in the big celebration-demonstration of Bugey-Cobaye last June. We are in fairly close contact with them. We even had someone who was then at a sort of duty station in front of the Bugey nuclear power plant, for a month or two last autumn. He was a member from Hérault[11], an editor of the Courpatier, a small regional ecological newspaper in Provence.
From a practical point of view, one of the useful things that we can do, say, as a specific action, especially because we are a lot of scientists inside Survivre and therefore we are better placed than a lot of others, is to help denounce a number of scientific myths. And we will start vigorously in this direction from the n°9 of Survivre. Its editorial is devoted to a critical description of scientistic ideology, with the title “The New Universal Church”.
On the other hand, we think that there is a very important phenomenon that is happening. Namely, the increasing number of people isolated in their corner or in their family or professional environment, who are beginning to be quite aware of the existence of a real crisis of civilization. They therefore feel isolated and therefore paralyzed, and we want to help create a network of acquaintances between these people. In fact, this network is truly forming through all sorts of factors; I believe, for example, that Fournier's articles in Charlie-Hebdo contribute to this and I think the existence of our group also contributes to this. Moreover, this phenomenon of creating a network of links between initially isolated entities does not only apply to individuals but also to groups. For example, for quite a while, the group Survivre thought they were the only ones of their kind to critically analyze science. But we have since realized that, almost everywhere, there are similar groups that are emerging. We are particularly familiar with the Lacitoc group, and another group in the United States, Science for the People. There are other groups that were created more or less simultaneously with us and under the same “Survival” name in the United States. These groups, which each started from a specific aspect of the problem of the crisis of civilization, gradually broaden their starting point with all sorts of other groups which started from very different points. I have the feeling that this extremely fast process will probably be completed within the next year. That is to say, from then on, anyone in Western society, at the very least, who begins to feel quite clearly that something is wrong, from the point of view of civilization, who begins to be gripped by an incoherence in his own life – but an incoherence which has a global meaning –, from the outset it will be impossible for them to be isolated, they will immediately find a place in this network. This is a process to which a group like ours can contribute very well. These are quite modest things, let’s say, everyone does it in their own sphere of activity, but since there are many people and groups who do it, the global effect is by no means negligible.
Presenter:
- That sounds like a very good conclusion to me. I think we can go on all night, but we have to find an end. I think we can thank you because a lot of points have been deepened this time. Many aspects of these problems certainly still deserve reflection. We will continue these kinds of discussions when sharing with other speakers.
Alexandre Grothendieck:
- I would like to add something. Of course, if there are people who want to continue discussing certain points, with me in particular, can we do it on site or does it close at a certain time?
Presenter:
- It is possible to do it downstairs in the canteen.
Alexandre Grothendieck:
- From my personal experience, the discussions that take place after the fact, after the meeting is adjourned, are more fruitful, more interesting than the general discussion, which was particularly orderly here but which in general is much more anarchic, much more chaotic. There, I see that we are dealing with scientists, that is to say, disciplined people.
[heavy applause from the audience]
[1] In English in the speech
[2] Maison de jeunes et de la culture (MJC) in French.
[3] To survive or survival
[4] Survive
[5] Survive… and live
[6] In English in the speech
[7] In English in the speech
[8] Alas! No more no less than the Nobel prize winner E. Rutherford who did not see in 1932 “any sort of practical applications to atomic research” [note with any citation - as found in the french book]
[9] In french - translated as “the last word”
[10] In English in the text
[11] French region