Montgomery shifted uncomfortably. He refused to believe the arguments Nagle was proposing, yet he wasn’t quite sure how he would have refuted them if he had been in a position to do so.
“I suppose in that case,” he said, “the fire goes out. You believe this has happened?”
“It is happening,” said Nagle, “at an alarming rate. Education is being substituted for learning. Data-collecting is taking the place of research.
“Perhaps no period of our culture has seen a more optimum balance between the two than the last thirty years of the nineteenth century and the first decade of this one. Education was widespread enough to enable a country the size of the United States to function as a unit — and limited enough to keep from smothering the culture-shaking activities of the Edison-Ford-Wright type. We have to work toward a restoration of that balance.”
Montgomery shook his head — not too vigorously, in view of the necessity to not antagonize Nagle. “Cultures can’t be static structures trying to avoid all change,” he said. “They don’t last very long if they are. To exist, a culture must be a vigorous, growing entity. Ours is — and in my opinion our educational system is largely responsible for it. For every invention of the Edison, Ford, or Wright type you’ve got a thousand others produced quietly in industrial and university research centers, and each is just as important in its own way as the work of the barefoot boys who sold newspapers. After all, the atom bomb didn’t come out of somebody’s basement lab!”
“No — it came only after virtually all homeostatic forces involved were thoroughly shackled. We could argue the variations in thousands of instances, but that would hardly be practical.
“What is practical is to note that the situation we’re in produces XB-91's — and will continue to produce them unless a change occurs. We have to tackle the basic problems of the minds that do the thinking. We supply them with bigger wind tunnels, more complex computers. That merely evades the problem. It doesn’t solve it.
“We must find out the nature and purposes of the human being — of you and me. We have to turn our vision from the external world to the internal. This is something that science, society — our whole culture from the very beginning — has been afraid to do. We make believe we’re going after it by taking electroencephalograms, analyzing blood constituents and glandular products. But this, too, is an evasion. It tells us nothing of what a man is and what he’s doing - and why he’s doing it.
“And you’ve missed my point about the function of homeostatic controls. They don’t necessarily prevent cultural growth. They keep it within certain bounds. But the control must not be confused with the agency responsible for growth. That would be somewhat like confusing the thermostat with the fire!”
Montgomery felt a sense of anger growing within him for a reason he couldn’t quite name. Nagle seemed so sure he had all the answers. “What agency is responsible, then?” he demanded.