The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [7]
I know that science and technology are not just cornucopias pouring gifts out into the world. Scientists not only conceived nuclear weapons; they also took political leaders by the lapels, arguing that their nation - whichever it happened to be - had to have one first. Then they manufactured over 60,000 of them. During the Cold War, scientists in the United States, the Soviet Union, China and other nations were willing to expose their own fellow citizens to radiation - in most cases without their knowledge - to prepare for nuclear war. Physicians in Tuskegee, Alabama, misled a group of veterans into thinking they were receiving medical treatment for their syphilis, when they were the untreated controls. The atrocious cruelties of Nazi doctors are well-known. Our technology has produced thalidomide, CFCs, Agent Orange, nerve gas, pollution of air and water, species extinctions, and industries so powerful they can ruin the climate of the planet. Roughly half the scientists on Earth work at least part-time for the military. While a few scientists are still perceived as outsiders, courageously criticizing the ills of society and providing early warnings of potential technological catastrophes, many are seen as compliant opportunists, or as the willing source of corporate profits and weapons of mass destruction - never mind the long-term consequences. The technological perils that science serves up, its implicit challenge to received wisdom, and its perceived difficulty, are all reasons for some people to mistrust and avoid it. There’s a reason people are nervous about science and technology. And so the image of the mad scientist haunts our world - down to the white-coated loonies of Saturday morning children’s TV and the plethora of Faustian bargains in popular culture, from the eponymous Dr Faustus himself to Dr Frankenstein, Dr Strangelove, and Jurassic Park.
But we can’t simply conclude that science puts too much power into the hands of morally feeble technologists or corrupt, power-crazed politicians and so decide to get rid of it. Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history.* Advances in transportation, communication and entertainment have transformed and unified the world. In opinion poll after opinion poll science is rated among the most admired and trusted occupations, despite the misgivings. The sword of science is double-edged. Its awesome power forces on all of us, including politicians, a new responsibility - more attention to the long-term consequences of technology, a global and transgenerational perspective, an incentive to avoid easy appeals to nationalism and chauvinism. Mistakes are becoming too expensive.
[* At a large dinner party recently, I asked the assembled guests - ranging in age, I guess, from thirties to sixties - how many of them would be alive today if not for antibiotics, cardiac pacemakers, and the rest of the panoply of modern medicine. Only one hand went up. It was not mine.]
Do we care what’s true? Does it matter?
…where ignorance is bliss,
Tis folly to be wise
wrote the poet Thomas Gray. But is it? Edmund Way Teale in his 1950 book Circle of the Seasons understood the dilemma better:
It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it.
It’s disheartening to discover government corruption and incompetence, for example; but it is better not to know about it? Whose interest does ignorance serve? If we humans bear, say, hereditary propensities toward the hatred of strangers, isn’t self-knowledge the only antidote? If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?
In The Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche, as so many