CurlyDarling
12-08-2009, 07:16 AM
This Thursday humanity will proudly observe the medal ceremonies for its annual Olympics of the Brain as the Nobel Prizes for 2009 are awarded in Stockholm.
Inexplicably, there is still no Nobel Prize for English Teaching. This is not fair, of course, but teachers should recall Ecclesiastes: "The race is not always to the swift..." The world's economists, for example, largely cornered the market in "not swift" this year for work on the international economic crisis, yet their discipline still gets a Nobel Prize regardless.
But weaselly social scientists aside, there are some serious Nobel questions for Russians to ponder this week, starting with why their nation, given its early Nobel connections and remarkable history of achievement in the arts and sciences, has done comparatively poorly in this competition for over a century; and why the United States, a country renowned for its lack of culture and full-spectrum superficiality, has essentially kicked the rest of the world's Nobel-aspiring arse, winning over twice as many medals as its closest competitor.
The Russia-Nobel relationship dates from the 1830s, when bankruptcy prompted Immanuel Nobel to relocate his family from Stockholm to St. Petersburg. There he prospered as an arms manufacturer while his son Alfred, the eventual prize endower, grew up fluent in Russian as well as Swedish. Two other sons, Robert and Ludvig, did so well in the oil business in the southern Russian Empire that they became model oligarchs, rich yet socially progressive. Alfred, meanwhile, invented and made an even vaster fortune from dynamite before finally establishing the prizes that bear his name late in the century.
The Nobel family's Russian roots did little, in the end, to influence these prizes toward St. Petersburg and Moscow. Whatever his childhood affinities, Alfred left Swedes and Norwegians to select the award winners. Far more critical in limiting Russia's prize accumulation, however, was the national catastrophe of 1917, whose inhibitive consequences for the production of great literature, statesmanship and science were felt for most of the 20th century. It is richly symbolic that the first Russian winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature - the discipline in which Russians unarguably led the world for most of the preceding century - was a fervently anti-Soviet émigré (Ivan Bunin, 1933).
And now for the ridiculous numbers. Since the prizes were first presented in 1901, Russia has amassed a grand total of 23. Meanwhile the United States, which gave the world television advertising, professional wrestling and George W. Bush, has claimed 323 Nobel laureates - 14 times as many, and clearly without 14 times the native brainpower. Maybe it's the water.
Actually, the real reason for America's disproportionate success is two-fold and easily summarised: open the door and get out of the way.
Nobel Prize winners are creators and innovators - smart people who push. Such pushing happens most productively where authority does not relentlessly push back, trying to direct, restrict and otherwise interfere in the creative process. Half the genius of the United States, which went eternally unrecognised by the competing Soviet Union, was its basic willingness to leave pushy Americans alone.
The other half was drafting more Americans. Everybody in the US has origins someplace else, and the nation's wonderfully fertile admixture of noble strivers and wretched refuse owes much to our ability to let in wave after wave of everybody else's undesirables over the vociferous objections of the previous arrivistes, now a generation or two ashore.
Does importing Americans still pay off? Of the 20 US Nobelists from 2007 through 2009, no fewer than eight were born outside the United States. And one of them was born in, yes, Moscow. In ... 1917. Am I going too fast for anybody here?
President Dmitry Medvedev has made positive noises on the getting-out-of-the-way front, proclaiming the new "modernising" state's interest in encouraging innovation in science, business, education and elsewhere. Good for him - and knock on wood. What he and the country need to avoid in this effort is devolving into "sovereign modernisation," as in "OK, everybody go be spontaneous - then report back to your committees."
The "open door" aspect is also a tough nut. It's not a good sign when the mayor of your capital says the lower the city's quota for migrant workers, the better. Or when your visa system combines bizarre rules with Rube Goldberg mechanics to limit the contributions of highly-qualified foreigners, some of whom might want to become Russian citizens... and perhaps win prizes in Stockholm.
Think about it, Muscovites. And while you're at it, drop a note to the Swedes about adding one more prize.
Mark H. Teeter teaches English and Russian-American relations in Moscow
Moscow News
Inexplicably, there is still no Nobel Prize for English Teaching. This is not fair, of course, but teachers should recall Ecclesiastes: "The race is not always to the swift..." The world's economists, for example, largely cornered the market in "not swift" this year for work on the international economic crisis, yet their discipline still gets a Nobel Prize regardless.
But weaselly social scientists aside, there are some serious Nobel questions for Russians to ponder this week, starting with why their nation, given its early Nobel connections and remarkable history of achievement in the arts and sciences, has done comparatively poorly in this competition for over a century; and why the United States, a country renowned for its lack of culture and full-spectrum superficiality, has essentially kicked the rest of the world's Nobel-aspiring arse, winning over twice as many medals as its closest competitor.
The Russia-Nobel relationship dates from the 1830s, when bankruptcy prompted Immanuel Nobel to relocate his family from Stockholm to St. Petersburg. There he prospered as an arms manufacturer while his son Alfred, the eventual prize endower, grew up fluent in Russian as well as Swedish. Two other sons, Robert and Ludvig, did so well in the oil business in the southern Russian Empire that they became model oligarchs, rich yet socially progressive. Alfred, meanwhile, invented and made an even vaster fortune from dynamite before finally establishing the prizes that bear his name late in the century.
The Nobel family's Russian roots did little, in the end, to influence these prizes toward St. Petersburg and Moscow. Whatever his childhood affinities, Alfred left Swedes and Norwegians to select the award winners. Far more critical in limiting Russia's prize accumulation, however, was the national catastrophe of 1917, whose inhibitive consequences for the production of great literature, statesmanship and science were felt for most of the 20th century. It is richly symbolic that the first Russian winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature - the discipline in which Russians unarguably led the world for most of the preceding century - was a fervently anti-Soviet émigré (Ivan Bunin, 1933).
And now for the ridiculous numbers. Since the prizes were first presented in 1901, Russia has amassed a grand total of 23. Meanwhile the United States, which gave the world television advertising, professional wrestling and George W. Bush, has claimed 323 Nobel laureates - 14 times as many, and clearly without 14 times the native brainpower. Maybe it's the water.
Actually, the real reason for America's disproportionate success is two-fold and easily summarised: open the door and get out of the way.
Nobel Prize winners are creators and innovators - smart people who push. Such pushing happens most productively where authority does not relentlessly push back, trying to direct, restrict and otherwise interfere in the creative process. Half the genius of the United States, which went eternally unrecognised by the competing Soviet Union, was its basic willingness to leave pushy Americans alone.
The other half was drafting more Americans. Everybody in the US has origins someplace else, and the nation's wonderfully fertile admixture of noble strivers and wretched refuse owes much to our ability to let in wave after wave of everybody else's undesirables over the vociferous objections of the previous arrivistes, now a generation or two ashore.
Does importing Americans still pay off? Of the 20 US Nobelists from 2007 through 2009, no fewer than eight were born outside the United States. And one of them was born in, yes, Moscow. In ... 1917. Am I going too fast for anybody here?
President Dmitry Medvedev has made positive noises on the getting-out-of-the-way front, proclaiming the new "modernising" state's interest in encouraging innovation in science, business, education and elsewhere. Good for him - and knock on wood. What he and the country need to avoid in this effort is devolving into "sovereign modernisation," as in "OK, everybody go be spontaneous - then report back to your committees."
The "open door" aspect is also a tough nut. It's not a good sign when the mayor of your capital says the lower the city's quota for migrant workers, the better. Or when your visa system combines bizarre rules with Rube Goldberg mechanics to limit the contributions of highly-qualified foreigners, some of whom might want to become Russian citizens... and perhaps win prizes in Stockholm.
Think about it, Muscovites. And while you're at it, drop a note to the Swedes about adding one more prize.
Mark H. Teeter teaches English and Russian-American relations in Moscow
Moscow News