SCIENTIFIC 'FREEDOM' AND GROUP INTERESTS
The necessity for the science to have freedom to research whatever scientists see as worthwhile has long been as much part of academic ideology, comparable to that of the freedom of the press. Freedom of access to information is a common aim of journalists and scientists. This freedom is often seen as threatened by virtually any kind of censorship. The same general ideology is shared too, namely that these freedoms 'are in the best interests of the public'. One big difference between these two freedoms is that the press depends upon sales to the public and is subject to certain public control, while scientific knowledge is increasingly financed and kept secret by states and large corporations. Another is the fact that scientific research is mostly beyond any but the most infrequent and shallow governmental control and so is one of the last bastions of a scientific social elite virtually beyond democratic control. Increasing involvement with corporate business and private enterprise suggests that 'Science Ltd.' would have been a reasonable title for this chapter.
SCIENCE MISREPRESENTED AS A COLLECTIVE ENTERPRISE
The sciences have supported the European ideal of the 'free-ranging intellectual' as a source of impartiality, imaginative insight and humanistic inspiration. However, science is no longer mainly an obscure preoccupation mainly of intellectual aristocrats but has become part and parcel of national economies and a widespread form of occupation with both military and big business aims. The falsity of the image of lofty minds spreading pure goodness from ivory towers has long since been exploded by the deep involvement of science in every kind of warfare and industrial over-exploitation, yet it lingers on in academia. The free-thinking intellectual has indeed produced many a benefit for society, but also many a terrible bugbear.
To employ one's freedom is not, however, to avoid the consequences of one's choice. Nor does it imply freedom from responsibility for them. The scientific call for freedom to pursue whatever avenue of investigation that may seem to produce some result, whatever it be, has all too often overlooked the problem of consequences. Unforseen consequences doubtless arise even in the best ordered society, but the low level of research and debate into the effect of science on society allows all the more to remain unthought of and unforseen. The proper regulation of scientific curiosity - and the funds that fuel it - are still in its infancy, but it is at last beginning to bring about some international curbs on what can best be called 'socially blind research', such as in certain risky forms of cloning and genetic manipulations of a similar kind. Since this was first written, a good deal has been done to try to regulate cloning and unregulated genetic modifications, but there are still too many interests around the world trying to push back the barriers set in the way of 'free experiementation' without sufficient circumspection.
One is repeatedly told that science is a great collective enterprise and is supposedly carried out in academic and scientific freedom by idealistic persons acting 'for the common good of mankind'. History demonstrates how individuals of the past like popes, dictators and despots backed up by their various power apparati, have been able to pervert scientific opinion for long periods of time, such as under Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Nowadays, economic and political power play the major role in the direction of science - one that is on the increase under the many new pressures of the world economic market. For example, a new organisation for funding science and technology - making wealth-creation and explicit criterion - and a governmental White Paper on 1995 gave industry a much greater say in the U.K. as from 1992.
Scientists have consequently become more the kind of collective force that a general trades union is, wanting to keep its members and trade in as privileged a position as possible. To do so in the present world climate, however, they have to enter more and more into co-operation with their real employers, the capital-rich and profit-hungry partial interests that large corporations are. The individual researcher is bound by a double subservience, a more explicit and direct one to collegial pressures and another towards the paymasters of their trade. The latter is often less evident and can be of a subtly manipulative nature. The science community of colleagues and co-workers is represented by a collective forum of leading figures as to what is and is not 'scientific'. This introduces a number of common delusions and blind-spots into the sciences. These can be theoretical positions that are defended with a vehement closed-shop attitude towards dissenters against the ever-rosy view of established opinion and the benefits and wisdom of modern scientific theory and method, both basal and applied. This attitude, prevalent in scientific journals, at conferences and media interviews, sometimes runs quite contrary to the spirit that should inform seekers of facts and truth.
Scientific research is nowadays far more of a political and social institution than an individual achievement and, as such, it is subject to pressures of many more or less unusual kinds within society. This may not always be noticeable at the outset of a given research, but overall the results come to be used by those who best can profit from them. Since the advance in scientific research is far from being equal in all areas or on all questions, the results reached will now support one set of interests and again support the other. This is easily observed in the way social sciences like economics, demography, anthropology and others are capitalised on in the political sphere.
The perceived usefulness of some line of research itself stimulates other researchers looking for a viable field, and so more of the same kind of results are generated for the identifiable groups of information-consumer. The need of many large-scale vested interests both in industry, trade and State bureaucracy for standardised information, particularly studies which cover large groups and strata, makes itself felt increasingly on researchers in the social sciences. Any overview one may care to make of the research output of the social sciences having public financial backing shows that the type of information produced about the population is relatively useless to others than such agencies. The understanding and hence the interests of the man in the street are hardly taken into account, the form of the researches usually being so technical that only researchers, bureaucrats and planners can apply this information.
Research is thus often made to order for the social and economic planners, whether public or private, whatever the public might wish to know. One example is typical of many instances: a study of ethnic Sami (but derogatively called Lapp) culture commissioned by Norwegians in the distant capital and carried out by persons from the chief national university produced results that were neither in the Sami language, nor intelligible to any Norwegian-speaking Samis, who lacked sociological education and understanding of the graphs, terms etc. The overall result was usable only to those who wished to know how best to gain more external control over the Sami culture or its traditional common grazing steppes and their various resources.
For example, the post-war development of behaviourism in the social sciences owes very much to the policy of major US institutions. This included massive funding from the Ford Foundation for reasons that are still not entirely clear, but the general idea of 'social engineering political' and possible control of social institutions and people was a motive. Such science seems to have distorted our view of the individual and society more than they have improved it or contributed useful and valid knowledge. The overall direction of much of the world's social bureaucracy is still governed by 'scientific' ideas and methods about human interaction developed during the Cold War.
IDEOLOGY AND EXPLOITATIVE SCIENCE
The relative freedom of the individual scientific genius had more and more been exchanged for the alleged but doubtful 'freedom of the market', in this case the market for information, knowledge and technology. But this 'open market place' has depended largely on national security and money interests, illustrated by the fact that it has long since become an arena of massive industrial espionage. The community of scientists is itself from time to time definitely influenced in its support for a given direction of research in theoretical science by coteries of persons wielding influence and especially economic power in society. The influence can be direct, but is more often indirect, such as through setting general directives, controlling the direction of major science budgeting, supporting institutions which provide the services and techniques preferred, to the detriment of those that have independent ideals. The military-industrial complex is the most obvious example of this.
Alternative research is, however, making some headway. In a longer term, science may eventually tread new ways because of the increasing force of world intelligent public opinion on many vital environmental, health and social issues. It appears that researchers, especially younger ones whose careers are not yet compromised, are slowly being influenced towards subjects of public concern, even against the objectives of powerful business and political enclaves. This is doubtless being demonstrated increasingly in various shifts of scientific theory towards the study of ecology, pollution, resource destruction, personal creative development and in the very gradual transition towards more holistic thinking in general. The ground swell of informed extra-scientific opinion, obviously not excluding breakaway scientists, appears to be having some influence in redirecting scientific efforts against the blind rule of 'progress' as dictated by big money and multi-national interests. This opinion may be rooted in common experiences the possibility of which science has denied, but which cannot be eliminated in fact.
A scientifically trained mind has increasingly become the chief key to many professions in modern technologised and bureaucratised society, while the qualities of character and humanity are hardly considered. The world has always suffered from those whose minds are divorced from the heart - the brainy emotionless quasi-intellectual. The highly-educated are mostly well trained in using one of the chief currencies of influence in society; convincing or impressive language and subtle rhetoric. They can therefore easily package what furthers their personal interests as being in the common interest or make plausible but one-sided cases for how their particular theories advance progress or cultural growth. Braininess of the quiz-winning kind is nowadays a chief hallmark of careerists who benefit from most current systems of higher education. When this tendency is increasingly backed up, as at present, by a largely unspoken but widely practised social doctrine once known as 'every man for himself', we have the recipe for society gone wrong. One example indicates what level of self-interest we are dealing with: a confidential questionnaire research in Norway published in 1997 showed that one in ten of researchers admitted to having wilfully falsified research results!
The role of ideology in the 20th century in politics has taught the world - or some part of it - that it can be misused as propaganda by those in power to help conceal truth and create literal havoc and hell, as in the extreme but major examples of the Nazi, Soviet and Chinese Communist regimes. Unfortunately, ideology is not dead! Most of the major 20th century ideologies may be so, but exploitative capitalism in the form of economism flourishes. Macro-scale corporative capitalism, the free-market and privatisation ideology are so pervasive and dominant in the daily praxis of consumer society as hardly to be noticed as ideological, especially by new generations. This 'free market' ideology was always intrinsically linked to the development of science through technological innovation, often short-sightedly bringing rapid and drastic social change and environmental disturbance.
In short, politics and the sciences still influence one another in a number of ways and will for the forseeable future. Misconceived aims and inappropriate methods in politics can and do strongly contribute to the development of false theories and distorted perspectives in certain sciences and lead to developments that may well be unwanted by the public or may not be in the common interest. A prominent example is the introduction of genetically manipulated food plants and such products appearing on the shelf, against which an increasing public movement in many countries is struggling against massive international concerns.
Governmental direction or influence on research and education budgets, grants and so forth almost inevitably affects scientific work at some level. For example, the policies that prevail can and do affect the individual's choice of research subjects in applying for grants. In other words, the ideas that actually get to be researched do not arise in a social vacuum; there is an interplay between politics and scientific ideas, one which becomes most complex in the human sciences like social economy, sociology and social psychology. To take an illustration of the above, Norway, which is considered not to be among the most backward environmentally-aware nations, nevertheless spends ten times as much on research into genetic manipulation than on ecological research, against strong public preference for the latter as measured through opinion surveys. This is an indicator of how lop-sided and hence dangerous for future generations that biological research supported by minority profit interests still is.
In the great industrialised areas, both Western and the Eastern, scientific materialism is the dominant force of the times in almost all aspects of life. Materialism is still regarded by the majority of influential world leaders at nearly all levels as a constructive force because of the obvious technological and shortish term economic benefits, even though they may often at the same time decry materialism in accordance with a growing public opinion.
More and more people understand the overall destructivity of a 'materialistic lifestyle', which really means runaway consumerism and the use of unnecessary and luxury products. The increasing exhaustion of irreplaceable world resources and environments is underpinned by the predominant climate of scientific materialism. This way of thinking, lacking the sound underpinning of any inherent ethical philosophy, inevitably also leads to the weakening of human values necessary to the overall quality of life. The materialists' fascination with physical and sensory reality results in loss of insight into human potentials that pertain, not so much to the mind but to the psyche or soul, which has itself been lost entirely from sight, with the usual result of truncation of personal life experience. Physical scientism is the nearest one can come to a philosophical standpoint - with its semi-ideological nature - that supports these modern tendencies. Institutions and professorships for the dissemination of science, which act not merely to forward science as an instrument of technological and social progress, but as an intellectual panacea and a substitute for spirituality (i.e. the practice of common religious values) are an integral part of the march of world-wide corporative economic imperialism and the domination of economic considerations over values and the quality of life.
ETHICAL DECISIONS: BY SCIENTISTS OR SOCIETY?
We have seen that no realistic modern description of science can avoid its character as a world-wide activity with far-reaching social, economical and political significance that affects most areas of modern life, both for good and ill. As players on the world field, scientists cannot claim to be neutral perfect referees and they become more like fans than passive observers in their strong support for specific scientific aims.
In the role of scientist one may try to look disinterestedly at the facts, but when one considers oneself as a persons, it is clear that no one is disinterested in the outcome, nor should one be. One also have to interpret facts, select some and reject others as irrelevant to one's purposes. Immediately we are involved in a more total sense than scientific method itself would accept, for it's programme is to eliminate the subjective element wherever it occurs. Disinterest is only a relative quality... a more or less broad view can be adopted, which reduces subjectivity, but at bottom there must be a motivating interest and hence the source of a number of unavoidably subjective ideas and judgements. This rule applies least widely to hard-data physical sciences (it does apply even there) and most to inter-human studies like anthropology, political science, psychology and other social studies. To maintain as strong a semblance of scientific neutrality as possible, the underlying purposes and possible questionable consequences of work are all too often overlooked or minimalised. But they should often merit a serious study of themselves.
To argue that advances in science are good, by and large, because they are ultimately in the interest of 'truth', is but to beg the question. Each 'truth' that a science may discover is like a double-bladed surgical knife, it can either cut to heal or up ill. Foresight about the outcome is not merely a technical matter, for one seldom knows enough in advance about applications. This is not an excuse for leaving the outcome to chance. Instead, all possible social and moral consequences must be aired and seriously considered in advance and to an extent that is not common today. One major shortcoming here is not allowing time for a proper lengthy public deliberation and broad debate. This is easily seen today in the headlong rush in genetical engineering. Even the pundits whose job it is to regulate research ethics in the UK were overwhelmed by events when the first cloned sheep ('Dolly') appeared as a fait accompli. The speed of scientific advance is definitely not an advantage to society as a whole, though it may be to a handful of early guinea pig patients, or more likely to the ambitious researcher or the patent and profit-hungry corporation.
There is, of course, no such thing as scientific expertise in moral matters. But this does not free one from full and open discussion of the ethical desirability or otherwise of the likely applications of science. The technological applications or social uses to which research results may be put cannot often be guaranteed in advance. But to hope they will, and argue accordingly, is better than to wash one's hands of the moral and practical issues.
Basal science washes its hands of ethical issues on the grounds of the sheer impartiality and immediate impracticability of abstract thought. Further, there is as such no responsible agency anywhere called 'science'. An academy of science evidently cannot today control what all or even most scientists actually do, even if it should know all of what they are doing. Science having become closely involved with so many aspects of life, so many governments and organisations, it is like a many-headed hydra, one with both godlike and Medusa heads.
Strictly speaking, science exists as such only as a body of theories and only scientists and the users of science can be responsible for the ills attributable to 'science'. Ultimately, therefore, a laboratory or an individual scientist is very often the agent who has responsibility for making or publicising a discovery. In so far as its possible consequences are conceivable, the discoverers cannot wash their hands of the whole affair thereafter, the individuals involved bear a certain responsibility for them. This responsibility was heavily felt after the event, by Einstein, Oppenheimer, Joseph Rotblat, later founder of the Pugwash Conference and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate (a very much belated award!) and many others whose research made possible nuclear weapons.
A very common argument of scientists was put, for example, by Ralph Brewster on BBC World Service in May 1996, that it is "up to scientists to find out what is possible but up to society to decide whether or not something is permitted." This has become almost a standard reply of scientists to all who question the ethicality of their practices. It demonstrates a high level of naiviety as to how information functions and is used in our kind of society.
The problem is that 'society' is not itself a single, consistent and intelligent body able to decide on behalf of all those who make up the human race. Society includes many competing interests and the degree of social control is never 100%, even though it may perhaps be approachable for a time in a rigid and ruthless totalitarian state. Brewster went on, "people must be allowed to make observations for themselves" and "the individual must be allowed to decide depending on the circumstances". This norm, if followed rigorously, would contradict the right of society to ban by law anything that 'individuals' find suitable. It may well be so that what is truly good for the individual must be good for society, but then what the individual thinks is good is certainly not necessarily so. Most individuals act on their own interests without considering all the possible consequences of such actions for all members of society. Even if they do so, lack of full information, limitations of knowledge and ignorance of many shades more frequently than not combine to bring about unforseen and highly undesirable results.
The individual person in science has moral responsibility for the correct presentation of scientific results without excessive claims or rigid moral standpoints. Further, it is a deception still is to act in the name of science and then push the moral responsibility for one's scientific practices onto 'society', the system or its politicians. Though it is, or should be, for the public, acting through adequate and representative controlling institutions and national or international law, to judge the desirability of some scientific directions, this does not give researchers the moral carte blanche to do whatever can be done.
Thus, once the Pandora's box of knowledge of all kinds of possibility of manipulating human genetics is opened, it cannot be closed by ethical committees asserting moral limits after the fact or by the laws of a few nations or even by binding international agreements. No more than abortion could be eliminated when forbidden by law, can illegal genetic experiments probably be totally stopped on a world-wide basis in the longer term. The same applies with even more force to genetic manipulations in plants and animals; once these reach the environment their influence will be irreversible and the long-term consequences of such rapid changes in eco-systems are not only unknown but also likely to stimulate the emergence of new bacteria and viruses with which the human body's defences and immune system have not been developed to cope. The reality of cloning of animal and human embryos, of making scientists capable of making the eugenics of Huxley's Brave New World not merely possible, but feasible and even quite likely in some societies, do not result from the consensus of other than a handful of powerful adherents of scientism. Such issues as these appear to be bringing science to a most crucial turning point in its history. What the eventual outcome will be, and whether mankind will really benefit from genetics or whether genetics will lose all repute, only an ignoramus would risk predicting.
The 'love of truth' that motivates the true spirit of science has been cultivated at the expense of its equally important converse, the 'truth of love'. The value of 'love', meaning universal respect and sympathy with all persons and beings, all of nature and cosmic creation - including the love of the Creator - is ultimately inseparable from truth. The sciences have neglected and eschewed the investigation of love, both as a value and as a many-sided universal reality. All such questions have been pushed aside as 'extra-scientific' as not being within the realm of concerns of a scientist per se. Yet the fact that love is a psychological, social and cultural reality itself shows that this cannot logically fall outside the concerns of science and of scientists.
The same is true of the human value non-violence. Non-violence is an ideal long revered by people in all cultures, however violent their own environments may have been. In the global society, non-violence is becoming more widely established as an international norms of behaviour and an obvious requirement of peaceable relations. One example suffices here to demonstrate infallibly the fact that scientists are far from being neutral in human affairs and that the practice of science is inseparable from the gravest responsibility. In this case the scientist, Niels Bohr, was well-intentioned in his belief in non-violence:
William Stevenson wrote:- "In Copenhagen, under German eyes, Bohr was swept forward by his own enthusiasm toward a goal that for him meant unlocking fresh mysteries, whereas for the Nazis it meant the key to atomic power... the human race came very close to falling into a Dark Age."1 Niels Bohr was so high-mindedly non-violent that he was not capable of seeing what he was unquestionably being used for. He believed in an open world and "free access to information and unchallenged opportunity for exchange of ideas". He confused this ideal world with the reality of Gestapo-ruled Denmark, where he was surrounded by subtle Nazi deception that was using his idealism towards their secret aim of creating a nuclear weapon.
During the Cold War, the so-called 'military-industrial complex' developed in sheer capacity, power and influence far beyond the imaginings of any Napoleon or Hitler. Violence became institutionalised in its weaponry and techniques, which surpassed all limits during the Cold War, but which are still the backbone of a world-wide arms industry, still employing large numbers of scientists.
SOCIAL CONTROL THROUGH SCIENCE
In the latter part of the 19th century, economics, psychology, sociology and ethnology began to grow, largely through the efforts of more or less isolated individual scholars. The human being is a part of nature, one reasoned, and therefore the methods of natural science would, if only applied on a large enough scale, tell us about human nature and enable us to understand and then eventually to eliminate the problems that arise from human folly. This was also a call for scientific freedom.
The originator of scientific positivism, Auguste Comte, envisaged that society was evolving from animism through religion and on to a stage where it would be entirely run by what it is fair to call a 'scientific priesthood'. Though scientists have fortunately for us all not become the wielders of power, but rather an instrument of it, the positivistic ideal clearly lives on in less blatant and newer forms.
That psychological and social science would make the control of individuals and society possible was long a dream of totalitarians and also of some elitist intellectuals, and is still not quite as dead as an ideal in industrialised societies as it surely ought to be. The fact is that research in the human sciences expanded only when military, business and other governmental interests began to finance it. This mean that the freedom of research became gradually more circumscribed by powerful external social forces.
The work of applying scientific methods to the study of man increased gradually, expanding rapidly mainly after the 2nd World War, when the management of masses of combatants and civilians were organised on much more efficient lines than previously. One leading example was the classification and sorting of human potentials through the famous IQ test (Binet's 'Intelligence Quotient Test'). This opened the way for many other forms of psychological measurement, including many questionable classificatory systems and not least unjust and discriminatory kinds, both in social welfare, state administration and business.
The policy of some large organisations including the US government, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation and others, good intentioned though also politically motivated, was to stimulate and finance research in social and allied studies that may lead to a better knowledge basis for social planning and hence more forms of social control. The prevailing objectivistic or 'external' view of human beings in these sciences was strongly reinforced, such as in behaviourism and quantitative sociological statistics. This view is much more manipulative than democratic, for it tends strongly to question the insight, integrity, opinions and independence of the individual citizen.
Perhaps the greatest danger that science represents today is as the spearhead of that new form of repressive colonisation that goes under the cloaks of technological development or foreign aid and advice. This operates primarily by Western scientists deciding over the heads of the Third World, what it needs in the form of new crops, new export industries and appropriate 'education' into new techniques of production etc. This is repressive and colonial because the entire enterprise takes its lead from the ideologies and technologies of modern industrialised nations and does not start from the perceived needs of those who are to be developed and educated and whose culture is to be changed or abolished through education to modern methods and by gradual integration in the world market.
Science is deeply involved in the organisational systems that intend to alter food production and land use through genetics and against which the ill-organised poor people of the world are virtually defenceless, not even being able to discover what forces are operating on them to what ends. The recently discovered 'terminator gene', which stops plants from producing seeds that will sprout is but the latest abomination from genetics, which will eventually make all good strains of seed expensive yearly outlays for farmers. This means nothing less than runaway profiteering and world injustice.
Geneticists argue that their new strains of plant, distributed through seeds (which are patented and thus are increased in cost) alone will increase food production to cope with the expected needs of an inexhorable increase in population. The argument is specious, because a major shift to vegetarianism in the developed world alone would release far more arable land than the world will need within the overseeable future. Such a shift has indeed begun to take place, though so far mainly on health grounds. Scientists involved in genetic research are adamant in predicting that the future is theirs, while so far having little to show that improves anything but the profits of the conglomerates for whom they work. Meanwhile, the lack of research into eco-security combined with the huge lack of international and national legislation, controls and policing of bio-environmental activity makes the entire undertaking of genetic manipulation an extremely unpredictable and hence dangerous kind of social control that will probably affect future world conditions in very serious ways.
SCIENTIFIC WASTEFULNESS AND WASTED OPPORTUNITY
Using technological extensions of the sense organs - amazingly delicate measuring instruments of exploration - the mind penetrates further into the amazing phenomena of the expanding physical universe. This process is itself an expansion at one level of the mind's total field of objects and the mind is of course itself the agent of the experienced expansion.
As a result of the 'objectivistic' physical assumptions of science, however, scientists have become obsessed with external reality to the exclusion of the inward study of man's mind and soul. The active support by many scientists of the pathetic, "Is there anybody out there?" syndrome tempts one to wish to knock on such persons' heads to ask, "Is there anyone in there?" The use of resources on many sci-fi projects, such as the University of California's SETI to send radio signals to contact aliens or to pick up messages from ETIs, shows what boyish aberrations much of the science community actively supports and publicises to the point of lethal boredom.
That mankind will always wish to explore the unknown is put forth as the clinching argument for space exploration. This is in principle no better as an argument than 'men will always make war'. Whatever it costs, whoever is suffering as a result of it or the negligence it involves, the show must go on and the cushy jobs must not be lost. Exploring the unknown is understood only in physical terms, however, like going further into space. It is all alien to the concerns worthy of responsible human beings and any who explore how to discover the unknown suffering of the poor and sick of our world and try to do something about that. Human wonder over the fact of creation, the nature of the world and universe and the ultimate origin and destination of mankind asks for and deserves a much more all-inclusive and spiritually-satisfying answer than the details of a Big physical Bang. The most important unknown is the human mind, which should be patently evident to anyone who has even had fever hallucinations, let alone any degree of transcendental consciousness. Clearly, no answer to the enigmas of where we come from and what is our ultimate purpose can be found in astrophysics or space exploration. As Robert Louis Stevenson put it so admirably once long ago, referring to the abstract mathematical facts of science: "Of the Kosmos in the last resort, science reports many doubtful things and all of them appalling... Consideration dares no dwell upon this view; that way madness lies; science carries us into zones of speculation, where there is no habitable city for the mind of man."2
Today most astrophysics and astronomy deals literally and figuratively with what are very remote concerns for all but, perhaps, their own kind. That humanity should be able to benefit in any substantial or desirable way from most of the information it produces is unlikely in the extreme. The massive resource-consuming programmes for space telescopes and other super-hi-tech constructions might advance the abstruse debates between competing schools and individual theorists, but never settle anything worthwhile once and for all, it seems. In 1997 NASA announced a new generation of satellites with hyper-expensive equipment to look for the origins of the universe, apart from the Hubble telescope, which had already consumed over 4,000 million US dollars itself! This 'astronomical sum' is more than the total annual government budget of many a nation.
Who really cares whether, say, there are fossilised primitive life forms on Mars, or conditions similar to ancient earth on Saturn's deep-frozen satellite Titan? The only people to whom this makes positive difference within any reasonably imaginable future are a relative handful of scientists and engineers whose careers and status may be boosted. Such as by the success of the 3 billion dollar Hugyens space vehicle the size of a double-decker bus (which may yet share the same fate as other such that were lost) or the International Space Station which estimated to cost US $60 billion to keep some men in space for a few years!
The selfish interests of researchers, masquerading as what humanity craves, was seen here very clearly. Against intelligent demonstrators in the US, the risk of sending up a plutonium powered craft was off-handedly stated by those responsible as being very negligeable. Very negligent is closer to the truth, since enough rockets have already crashed, such as various Ariadne rockets and even the space shuttle. Plutonium is the deadliest known poison and cannot be detected except by very hi-tech. equipment, even if on knew where and over what areas it might fall and contaminate. What moral right have these people to take such potentially life-threatening decisions on behalf of the world population, a majority of which would doubtless prefer to stop them? Introduced by musical fanfares on science programmes, scientists involved spoke with Boy Scout enthusiasm of 'absolutely fascinating' and 'unique data'. I feel no fascination for such pieces of a passing information that will change nothing tangible other than deplete the resources that could have been used to make a difference in a world needing quite other knowledge to solve massive human problems everywhere. The much trumpeted 'spin-offs' from interplanetary probes etc. have not amounted to anything other than abstract hypothetical knowledge irrelevant to any genuine human concerns within any remotely foreseeable time or a few tiny alterations in the latest encyclopaedias. In short, a truly irresponsible and immoral wastage of huge proportions by people with half-mad, half-bad ideas and distorted value priorities.
One almost feels that the hunger for increased funds and virtually useless information would not be satisfied until scientists might succeed in reproducing black holes or the Big Bang itself. But is it a valid priority in this world of travails to need to know or to care whether 90% of the mass of the universe is missing, whether black holes are eating it up or whether it is hiding in the form of hitherto undetected gas? All this seems only to lead further down the sci-fi garden path of travelling to other planets, sending costly probes to every corner of the solar system and beyond, trying to contact the aliens that many scientists suppose to exist, while at the same time ridiculing any claims of actually having seen one. The entire concern with extra-terrestrial beings is comparable in intellectual terms to Middle Age theological speculations about hellfire or how many angels can occupy the space on a pinhead. The question bears no demonstrably useful relation whatever to human life and our proper concerns, only to psychological fears and mental obsessions.
Added to all this is the vast expense that cyclotrons and countless other kinds of scientific paraphernalia involve for society - so huge that the US government for the first time actually in 1996 drew back from the most advanced cyclotron project, a multi-billion dollar monster project involving even more miles upon miles of underground tunnel. As Joseph Schwartz had pointed out so aptly, the super costly accelerators can only "give us a picture of matter as it was early in the evolution of the universe... what the building blocks are. They cannot tell us how the processes of history have shaped those building blocks into the material structures we see today."
Physicists and atomic scientists certainly want such super toys, but does society? The question is one of priorities: are theoretical problems that, if solved, may lead to yet more advanced, doubtless expensive and most probably potentially dangerous technology more important than the countless practical problems experienced by the extremely deprived populations of the world? As to advancing human knowledge of the mysteries of the universe, well, from the viewpoint of the need for such knowledge of the mass of humanity, most of these costly projects end up contributing a few sentences in an encyclopaedia.
Many other problems and questions which are beyond scientific solutions are far more vital to people and mankind as a whole. These are all the questions of how to make the world a secure, just and peaceful place to live in.
Research into fusion technology as a means to solving the world's energy problems and global warming from CO2 generation may pay off. Yet it is a tremendously costly gamble - the research itself using about ´% of the total energy production of the world and gigantic investments. The technology is so advanced and difficult, the consequences of major breakdown so inconceivable and probably much underplayed by the scientific community involved, and future operating would be so dependent upon the total removal of human error that every thinking person must ask why other less-polluting and much simpler forms of alternative energy source like wave power and sunlight are receiving so little funding. It has been admitted that there will obviously also be non-disposable radioactive waste in the form of obscolescent materials from the used reactors.
Involved scientists are still vehemently denying such views, but we can be sure that they are in no position to predict whether this technology would also prove beneficial to humanity. The issue of why science does not invest its energies in researching fully sustainable low-level technology ought to be held at the forefront of the political agenda. The sensational 'cold fusion' experiments of Pons and Fleischmann are still ridiculed and tabooed by the powerful scientific institutions that protect hot fusion and all related theories and technologies, yet as Richard Milton has detailed in Forbidden Science, they have been reproduced and their main findings confirmed by many serious labs such as Los Alamos National Laboratory, Stanford Research Institute, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and at many universities and institutes world wide.
The reason for massive risky investment in unwieldy and dangerous nuclear technologies seems to lie chiefly in the wider community of physical scientists and technologists, which finds it primarily in their present interests; exciting work, personally remunerative and advantageous to the future influence of scientists.
Other extremely expensive investments that scientists uncritically regard as most promising for mankind with a view to more advanced medical technology and drugs, like the human genome mapping project, are probably even more dangerous in the long run, due to the rapid introduction of many artificially produced drugs into the ancient human physiology and the sheer complexity of such solutions being used by humanly fallible doctors. Above all, we have the hugely over-shadowing threat of inconceivably awful misuses of gene technology, just as every technology has been misused somehow by some governments in the past.
So is all this factual progress for humanity or only for scientific and their allied communities? The space industry is a throw-off of the many billion dollar space race of the Cold War, a white elephant on the back of humanity. It most certainly costs far, far more than it produces in spin-offs for the development of humanity. Orbiting communications satellites could doubtless have been developed even without space travel, let along journeys to the moon. The discovery of a few protein-like remains in a meteorite gets a kind of media hysteria going, which only ends when the US President promises that a manned space flight to Mars will get his support. No one can calculate the total cost of all the various unmanned probes that must precede this and the development of what is equivalent to a whole new industry.
Scientists obviously bear a heavier responsibility than any other professional group for the preposterously wasteful fallacy that mankind could and should populate the planets, and even travel to the stars. Is this not a childish fantasy of escape from the wicked world which one is unable to understand or improve? But all too seldom do we find the Western intelligentia speaking out about the sheer injustice of such examples of scientific wastefulness.
Meanwhile there are about 7 billion human beings on earth, of whom the UN estimates 750 million are victims of hunger and malnutrition. There are around 200 million bond-slaves, in the 3rd world and slavery prostitution is a probably a trillion dollar industry world-wide. Tens of millions of child labourers work under worse conditions than at the height of the British Industrial Revolution. It is exceedingly callous and inhuman. It would be quite possible to divert more funds from further shabby space odysseys and the hyper-expensive vicious circles of ever more micro-physical oddities towards humanitarian work of many direly-needed kinds. It is morally justifiable to make this connection and it is surely an ethical duty at least to support the changing of such meaningless priorities?
It seems wrong to leave the subject without mention of one major world problem that scientific technology has helped provide us in the form of the death-dealing and life-maiming motor vehicle. Cars may be safer in rich countries, but despite all manner of scientific discovery and technological 'improvement', car driving and its many effects is apparently not getting safer overall for the population at large. Road death alone is enormously costly in human and economic terms, but the sciences seem relatively uninterested and unable to bring much more wisdom to bear on the matter than so far.
Human life on the planet is made by the run of scientists to look a matter of sheer know-how and can-do... and absolutely nothing resembling a cosmic passage from ignorance to self-realisation, from narrowness to all-inclusive love and respect of everything, and towards fulfilment of human aspirations with higher and inscrutably divine purpose. Of course, the scientist will call this 'unfounded assumptions' and often even nonsense. This, however, says far more about the narrowness of science's unfounded assumptions and the resultant mentality than about the Cosmos.
A majority of leading science figures and Nobel laureates these days claim lack of faith in anything above or beyond the observable physical universe as unscientific speaks for itself. It also tells of the lack convincing spiritual experience. Some go as far as to claim that science denies any possibility of such controversial beliefs as life after death, reincarnation, the existence of God. This is certainly to overstep the mark of what can be said on sound grounds.
It is the more sad and demeaning when one thinks that the first, basic insights of science itself can be said to be that 'all is not necessarily as it appears' or Aristotle's causal dictum that 'nothing that exists is in vain'. It is as if the very possibility that phenomena for which neither controlled observations nor laws exist yet is rejected in advance... the very possibility of which stimulated the scientific wonder in the first place.
Footnotes:
1. A Man Called Intrepid, William Stevenson (N.Y 1976 & Ballantine Books 1977).
2.Pulvis et Umbra, R.L. Stevenson essay in Across The Plains., (London, 1892).
Continue to Ch. 7: Science and the Demise of Philosophy
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The above material is the copyright of Robert Priddy, Oslo 1999