The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [203]
If so, no scientist has ever had more influence on the risks that humanity has run than Edward Teller, and Teller’s general behavior throughout the arms race was reprehensible...
Edward Teller’s fixation on the H-bomb may have led him to do more to imperil life on this planet than any other individual in our species...
Compared to Teller, the leaders of Western atomic science were frequently babes in the political woods - their leadership having been determined by their professional skills rather than by, in this case, their political skills.
My purpose here is not to castigate a scientist for succumbing to very human passions, but to reiterate that new imperative: the unprecedented powers that science now makes available must be accompanied by unprecedented levels of ethical focus and concern by the scientific community, as well as the most broadly based public education into the importance of science and democracy.
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Real Patriots Ask Questions*
[* Written with Ann Druyan.]
It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.
US Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, 1950
It is a fact of life on our beleaguered little planet that widespread torture, famine and governmental criminal irresponsibility are much more likely to be found in tyrannical than in democratic governments. Why? Because the rulers of the former are much less likely to be thrown out of office for their misdeeds than the rulers of the latter. This is error-correcting machinery in politics. The methods of science, with all its imperfections, can be used to improve social, political and economic systems, and this is, I think, true no matter what criterion of improvement is adopted. How is this possible if science is based on experiment? Humans are not electrons or laboratory rats. But every act of Congress, every Supreme Court decision, every Presidential National Security Directive, every change in the Prime Rate is an experiment. Every shift in economic policy, every increase or decrease in funding for Head Start, every toughening of criminal sentences is an experiment. Exchanging needles, making condoms freely available, or decriminalizing marijuana are all experiments. Doing nothing to help Abyssinia against Italy, or to prevent Nazi Germany from invading the Rhineland was an experiment. Communism in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and China was an experiment. Privatizing mental health care or prisons is an experiment. Japan and West Germany investing a great deal in science and technology and next to nothing on defence - and finding that their economies boomed - was an experiment. Handguns are available for self-protection in Seattle, but not in nearby Vancouver, Canada; handgun killings are five times more common in Seattle and the handgun suicide rate is ten times greater in Seattle. Guns make impulsive killing easy. This is also an experiment. In almost all of these cases, adequate control experiments are not performed, or variables are insufficiently separated. Nevertheless, to a certain and often useful degree, such ideas can be tested. The great waste would be to ignore the results of social experiments because they seem to be ideologically unpalatable.
There is no nation on Earth today optimized for the middle of the twenty-first century. We face an abundance of subtle and complex problems. We need therefore subtle and complex solutions. Since there is no deductive theory of social organization, our only recourse is scientific experiment - trying out sometimes on small scales (community, city and state level, say) a wide range of alternatives. One of the perquisites of power on becoming prime minister in China in the fifth century BC was that you got to construct a model state in your home district or province. It was Confucius’ chief life failing, he lamented, that he never got to try.
Even a casual scrutiny of history reveals