Impact of Science on Society - Part 1 - Scientific Technique and the Concentration of Power *
Knowledge Driven Revolution
14.01.2008
Brent Jessop
The Impact of Science on Society - Part 1
?So long as the rulers are comfortable, what reason have they to improve the lot of their serfs??- Bertrand Russell, 1952 (p61)
Bertrand Russell in his 1952 book The Impact of Science on Society* he describes the effects of ?scientific technique? on the increasing control of societies by an ever shrinking number of people. As we will see, ?scientific technique? is much more than just the development and widespread use of new technology, but first some of its effects.
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell (1872-1970) was a renowned British philosopher and mathematician who was an adamant internationalist and worked extensively on the education of young children. He was the founder of the Pugwash movement which used the spectre of Cold War nuclear annihilation to push for world government. Among many other prizes, Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950 and UNESCO?s (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) Kalinga prize in 1957.
Increasing Organization
From Impact of Science on Society:
?This [the telegraph] had two important consequences: first messages could now travel faster than human beings; secondly, in large organizations detailed control from a centre became much more possible than it had formerly been.
The fact that messages could travel faster than human beings was useful, above all, to the police?? - 33
?Electricity as a source of power is much more recent than the telegraph, and has not yet had all the effects of which it is capable. As an influence on social organisation its most notable feature is the importance of power stations, which inevitably promote centralisation? as soon as a community has become dependent upon them for lighting and heating and cooking. I lived in America in a farm-house which depended entirely upon electricity, and sometimes, in a blizzard, the wires would be blown down. The resulting inconvenience was almost intolerable. If we had been deliberately cut off for being rebels, we should soon have had to give in.? - 35
?But what is of most importance in this connection is the development of flying. Aeroplanes have increased immeasurably the power of governments. No rebellion can hope to succeed unless it is favoured by at least a portion of the air force.? - 36
?In industry, the integration brought about by scientific technique is much greater [than agriculture] and more intimate.
One of the most obvious results of industrialism is that a much larger percentage of the population live in towns than was formerly the case. The town dweller is a more social being than the agriculturist, and is much more influenced by discussion. In general, he works in a crowd, and his amusements are apt to take him into still larger crowds. The course of nature, the alternations of day and night, summer and winter, wet or shine, make little difference to him; he has no occasion to fear that he will be ruined by frost or drought or sudden rain. What matters to him is his human environment, and his place in various organisations especially.
Take a man who works in a factory, and consider how many organisations affect his life. There is first of all the factory itself, and any larger organisation of which it may be a part. Then there is the man?s trade union and his political party. He probably gets house room from a building society or public authority. His children go to school. If he reads a newspaper or goes to a cinema or looks at a football match, these things are provided by powerful organisations. Indirectly, through his employers, he is dependent upon those from whom they buy their raw material and those to whom they sell their finished product. Above all, there is the State, which taxes him and may at any moment order him to go and get killed in war, in return for which it protects him against murder and theft so long as there is peace, and allows him to buy a fixed modicum of food.? [emphasis mine] - 44
?The increase of organisation has brought into existence new positions of power. Every body has to have executive officials, in whom, at any moment, its power is concentrated. It is true that officials are usually subject to control, but the control may be slow and distant. From the young lady who sells stamps in a Post Office all the way up to the Prime Minister, every official is invested, for the time being, with some part of the power of the State. You can complain of the young lady if her manners are bad, and you can vote against the Prime Minister at the next election if you disapprove of his policy. But both the young lady and the Prime Minister can have a very considerable run for their money before (if ever) your discontent has any effect.? [emphasis mine] - 45
?The increased power of officials is an inevitable result of the greater degree of organisation that scientific technique brings about. It has the drawback that it is apt to be irresponsible, behind-the-scenes, power, like that of Emperors? eunuchs and Kings? mistresses in former times. To discover ways of controlling it is one of the most important political problems of our time. Liberals protested, successfully, against the power of kings and aristocrats; socialists protested against the power of capitalists. But unless the power of officials can be kept within bounds, socialism will mean little more than the substitution of one set of masters for another: all the former power of the capitalist will be inherited by the official. [emphasis mine]? - 47
?As we have seen, the question of freedom needs a completely fresh examination. There are forms of freedom that are desirable, and that are gravely threatened; there are other forms of freedom that are undesirable, but that are very difficult to curb? The resultant two-fold problem, of preserving liberty internally and diminishing it externally, is one that the world must solve, and solve soon, if scientific societies are to survive.
Let us consider for a moment the social psychology involved in this situation.
?The armed forces of one?s own nation exist - so each nation asserts - to prevent aggression by other nations. But the armed forces of other nations exist - or so many people believe - to promote aggression. If you say anything against the armed forces of your own country, you are a traitor, wishing to see your fatherland ground under the heel of a brutal conqueror. If, on the other hand, you defend a potential enemy State for thinking armed forces necessary to its safety, you malign your own country, whose unalterable devotion to peace only perverse malice could lead you to question?
And so it comes about that, whenever an organisation has a combatant purpose, its members are reluctant to criticise their officials and tend to acquiesce in usurpations and arbitrary exercise of power which, but for the war mentality, they would bitterly resent. It is the war mentality that gives officials and governments their opportunity. It is therefore only natural that officials and governments are prone to foster war mentality.? [emphasis mine] - 51
?I incline to think that ?liberty?, as the word was understood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is no longer quite the right concept; I should prefer to substitute ?opportunity for initiative?. And my reason for suggesting this change is the character of a scientific society.? - 68
More Organization is More Power
?The effect of the telegraph was to increase the power of the central government and diminish the initiative of distant subordinates. This applied not only to the State, but to every geographically extensive organization. We shall find a great deal of scientific technique has a similar effect. The result is that fewer men have executive power, but those few had more power than such men had formerly.? [emphasis mine] - 35
?We have seen that scientific technique increases the importance of organisations, and therefore the extent to which authority impinges upon the life of the individual. It follows that a scientific oligarchy has more power than any oligarchy could have in pre-scientific times. There is a tendency, which is inevitable unless consciously combated, for organisations to coalesce, and so to increase in size, until, ultimately, almost all become merged in the State. A scientific oligarchy, accordingly, is bound to become what is called ?totalitarian?, that is to say, all important forms of power will become a monopoly of the State.? [emphasis mine] - 56
?In the first place, since the new oligarchs are the adherents of a certain creed, and base their claim to exclusive power upon the rightness of this creed, their system depends essentially upon dogma: whoever questions the governmental dogma questions the moral authority of the government, and is therefore a rebel. While the oligarchy is still new, there are sure to be other creeds, held with equal conviction, which must be suppressed by force, since the principle of majority rule has been abandoned. It follows that there cannot be freedom of the Press, freedom of discussion, or freedom of book publication. There must be an organ of government whose duty it is to pronounce as to what is orthodox, and to punish heresy. The history of the Inquisition shows what such an organ of government must inevitably become. In the normal pursuit of power, it will seek out more and more subtle heresies. The Church, as soon as it acquired political power, developed incredible refinement of dogma, and persecuted what to us appear microscopic deviations form the official creed. Exactly the same sort of thing happens in the modern States that confine political power to supporters of a certain doctrine.? - 57
?The completeness of the resulting control over opinion depends in various ways upon scientific technique. Where all children go to school, and all schools are controlled by the government, the authorities can close the minds of the young to everything contrary to official orthodoxy. Printing is impossible without paper, and all paper belongs to the State. Broadcasting and the cinema are equally public monopolies. The only remaining possibility of unauthorised propaganda is by secret whispers from one individual to another. But this, in turn, is rendered appallingly dangerous by improvements in the art of spying. Children at school are taught that it is their duty to denounce their parents if they allow themselves subversive utterances in the bosom of the family. No one can be sure that a man who seems to be his dearest friend will not denounce him to the police; the man may himself have been in some trouble, and may know that if he is not efficient as a spy his wife and children will suffer. All this is not imaginary, it is daily and hourly reality. Nor, given oligarchy, is there the slightest reason to expect anything else.? [emphasis mine] - 58
What is Scientific Technique?
Scientific technique is much more than just the impact of new technology on the machinations of society. It is the use of science, in its most calculating and inhumane ways, to analyze, control and guide societies in a desired direction. This topic was elaborated on in a couple of talks given by Alan Watt (here and here) particularly through the writings of Jacques Ellul.
The rest of the articles in this series will also elaborate on other aspects of scientific technique, especially its application to education and human breeding. But first, I will examine Bertrand Russell?s views about the stability of scientific societies and the possibility of a scientific world government.
*Quotes from Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society (1952). ISBN0-415-10906-X
Note: I first heard about this book from talks given by Alan Watt at Cutting Through The Matrix.com, an individual well worth looking into
Showing posts with label reading material. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reading material. Show all posts
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Impact of Science on Society
ESSAYS ON SCIENCE AND SOCIETY:
The Impact of Society on Science
Sydney Brenner
Sydney Brenner After earning his doctorate from Oxford in 1952, Sydney Brenner worked in the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge until 1987, serving as its director until 1992. During these years he collaborated in the discovery of the triplet code messenger RNA, established the importance of C. elegans in the analysis of complex biological processes, and in the 1980s turned to the study of vertebrate genomics. He is currently director of the Molecular Science Institute in Berkeley, CA.
At 72 I am almost half the age of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and belong to the generation that made the 20th-century revolution in biology. We have lived through a century of momentous changes, both in science and society, and more is still to come.
In the grim days of the Cold War, with the threat of global nuclear war hanging over us, who could have imagined that Communism would undergo a total collapse, that the Soviet Union would disintegrate, and that Russia would rapidly become a poor country controlled by gangsters. Our world now has an immediacy of contact never experienced before. Technology has brought all of humanity together, and nearly everything can be watched live--war in the Middle East, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, and people dying of starvation and disease in Africa. Whereas it once took days or weeks for news to travel and a year for an influenza epidemic to spread, news can now be transmitted instantaneously and a new virus can spread all over the world in 24 hours.
All around I see evidence of the impact of science on society. This is so obvious and so well known that little more remains to be said about it. Science and the technologies it has spawned form the basis of all human activity, from the houses that we live in, the food that we eat, the cars that we drive, to the electronic gadgetry in almost every home that we use to remain informed and entertained.
Yet, despite these technological innovations, the paradoxes that I noticed when I was young are still with us: In advanced societies an increasing proportion of national wealth is now spent on health and recreation and large sums of money are devoted to military enterprises, while in the underdeveloped world famine and pointless wars still exact a terrible toll of human lives, malnutrition and disease are still rife, and even the basic necessities of life such as food and shelter cannot be provided for all. There is no doubt that great advances could be made in the treatment of malaria and other parasitic diseases that afflict more than half of the world's population, but the people who have these diseases also have another called MDD--money deficiency disease. There are many problems that science and technology, by themselves, are unable to solve given the economic structure of the world that we live in. So when we speak of the impact of science on society we are speaking about the more advanced countries, and when we speculate on the future, it usually concerns the same areas of the world.
Following the advent of molecular biology came the technologies and their applications. For many years it was widely held that molecular biology was a completely useless subject, a "fundamental" science of no interest to those working on practical matters. Then suddenly it came to be viewed as dangerous, and genetic engineering was considered an almost Satanic activity. Biological scientists became suspect and trust in this science diminished, as fantastical scenarios were played out to an increasingly terrified public. Our times are characterized by a view that we can accomplish everything in this generation, especially if we can find and apply the right technology. Thus when a newspaper journalist accused me of being one of the scientists who is going to make people in a test tube, I had to reply that I could think of a much more pleasant and cheaper way of making people than genetic engineering. The fixation on technology gives us a slanted view of human existence. For example, immortality may be a futile notion, yet some believe that through the use of high technology it might nevertheless be brought off.
The history of the last 25 years teaches us the profound lesson that it is necessary for scientists to communicate to society at large not only the content, use, and misuse of scientific discoveries, but also what their work tells us about the intrinsic limitations of our bodies and minds. This is not an easy task, especially in a science whose content becomes more complicated every day.
I do not know whether I want to speculate on what impact science will have on society in the next 150 years. I wish I could say that we will banish hunger and war, and I wish I could reassure readers that we will still have a planet to live on. As everybody knows, this does not depend on science alone but on economic forces and political wills, something that scientists do not control.
However, there is another subject that is not often discussed in this context: the impact of society on science, the inverse of the general theme of this essay series. Much like the evidence for the impact of science on society, the evidence for the impact of society on science is all around for everyone to see, mainly in the form of the large (but never sufficient) funding that science enjoys in the more advanced countries. Society and its arm of action, government, understands that science has developed powerful methods for solving a large number of problems. What distinguishes science from all other kinds of problem-solving activities is the demand that the answers it discovers work in the real world. It is why rulers gave up slaughtering animals to examine their entrails: Magic does not exist in any world at all. However, in stimulating and supporting science, society, as the paymaster, has taken a much shorter term view of research than most scientists would like. There has been much discussion about the different kinds of science. We call one pure, another applied, and a possible third, strategic--it could also be called "apploid"--that is pure but destined to become applied. Then there is mission-directed as opposed to curiosity-driven research, a distinction that I find particularly obnoxious because one can almost see the word "idle" in front of curiosity. Actually, the answer to the question of which type of science to fund is quite simple: Since all science is problem driven, it should be judged by the quality of the problems posed, and the quality of the solutions provided.
Governments support research because its findings contribute greatly to social ends such as the health and wealth of citizens, causes that get politicians re-elected and for which people pay taxes. Of course governments indulge in other activities that cost much more than scientific research, and one can always find military expenditures that could keep a lot of labs going for a long time. The increased funding for scientific research in recent years, especially in the health fields, has resulted in a great expansion of the number of scientists and thus in increased competition for academic and research funds. We have established an elaborate system of peer reviews to deal with this competition, and a similar process is in force for the publication of scientific results. All of this has subtle consequences for the scientific enterprise. If you know what sort of research is wanted by a committee you write your grant to satisfy these expectations, and if you know what the oligarchy believes is the correct view of a subject, you give your paper that slant. Ironically, all of this was originally introduced to ensure fairness and to eliminate the older system where powerful people got all the money, appointed who they liked to their laboratories, and published only papers written by their friends. Both the old feudal system and the new bureaucracy have consequences for scientific innovation; the former narrowed its pursuit to only a few, while the latter discourages its pursuit by all. But there are also more insidious effects because in most countries research and education are now linked almost exclusively to universities: Postdocs learn from professors, students learn from postdocs, and the art of surviving is very quickly transmitted. It is only through the use of subterfuge such as applying for money for work already done that innovative research can be freely pursued.
We need to take these matters seriously, otherwise science will lose the independence of thought required for innovation that it has cherished for centuries. In my own subjects, genetics and molecular biology, research has become so directed toward medical problems and the needs of the pharmaceutical companies that most people do not recognize that the most challenging intellectual problem of all time, the reconstruction of our biological past, can now be tackled with some hope of success. I hope it is not too much to ask that rich societies provide more support for this and other fundamental fields of biology. We need to assure the future of biological research and prevent it from becoming stilted and boring. We can only do this by attracting new young minds to our science and offer them problems as challenging as those that excited my generation.
The author is at the Molecular Sciences Institute, Inc., 2168 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94704, USA
The Impact of Society on Science
Sydney Brenner
Sydney Brenner After earning his doctorate from Oxford in 1952, Sydney Brenner worked in the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge until 1987, serving as its director until 1992. During these years he collaborated in the discovery of the triplet code messenger RNA, established the importance of C. elegans in the analysis of complex biological processes, and in the 1980s turned to the study of vertebrate genomics. He is currently director of the Molecular Science Institute in Berkeley, CA.
At 72 I am almost half the age of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and belong to the generation that made the 20th-century revolution in biology. We have lived through a century of momentous changes, both in science and society, and more is still to come.
In the grim days of the Cold War, with the threat of global nuclear war hanging over us, who could have imagined that Communism would undergo a total collapse, that the Soviet Union would disintegrate, and that Russia would rapidly become a poor country controlled by gangsters. Our world now has an immediacy of contact never experienced before. Technology has brought all of humanity together, and nearly everything can be watched live--war in the Middle East, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, and people dying of starvation and disease in Africa. Whereas it once took days or weeks for news to travel and a year for an influenza epidemic to spread, news can now be transmitted instantaneously and a new virus can spread all over the world in 24 hours.
All around I see evidence of the impact of science on society. This is so obvious and so well known that little more remains to be said about it. Science and the technologies it has spawned form the basis of all human activity, from the houses that we live in, the food that we eat, the cars that we drive, to the electronic gadgetry in almost every home that we use to remain informed and entertained.
Yet, despite these technological innovations, the paradoxes that I noticed when I was young are still with us: In advanced societies an increasing proportion of national wealth is now spent on health and recreation and large sums of money are devoted to military enterprises, while in the underdeveloped world famine and pointless wars still exact a terrible toll of human lives, malnutrition and disease are still rife, and even the basic necessities of life such as food and shelter cannot be provided for all. There is no doubt that great advances could be made in the treatment of malaria and other parasitic diseases that afflict more than half of the world's population, but the people who have these diseases also have another called MDD--money deficiency disease. There are many problems that science and technology, by themselves, are unable to solve given the economic structure of the world that we live in. So when we speak of the impact of science on society we are speaking about the more advanced countries, and when we speculate on the future, it usually concerns the same areas of the world.
Following the advent of molecular biology came the technologies and their applications. For many years it was widely held that molecular biology was a completely useless subject, a "fundamental" science of no interest to those working on practical matters. Then suddenly it came to be viewed as dangerous, and genetic engineering was considered an almost Satanic activity. Biological scientists became suspect and trust in this science diminished, as fantastical scenarios were played out to an increasingly terrified public. Our times are characterized by a view that we can accomplish everything in this generation, especially if we can find and apply the right technology. Thus when a newspaper journalist accused me of being one of the scientists who is going to make people in a test tube, I had to reply that I could think of a much more pleasant and cheaper way of making people than genetic engineering. The fixation on technology gives us a slanted view of human existence. For example, immortality may be a futile notion, yet some believe that through the use of high technology it might nevertheless be brought off.
The history of the last 25 years teaches us the profound lesson that it is necessary for scientists to communicate to society at large not only the content, use, and misuse of scientific discoveries, but also what their work tells us about the intrinsic limitations of our bodies and minds. This is not an easy task, especially in a science whose content becomes more complicated every day.
I do not know whether I want to speculate on what impact science will have on society in the next 150 years. I wish I could say that we will banish hunger and war, and I wish I could reassure readers that we will still have a planet to live on. As everybody knows, this does not depend on science alone but on economic forces and political wills, something that scientists do not control.
However, there is another subject that is not often discussed in this context: the impact of society on science, the inverse of the general theme of this essay series. Much like the evidence for the impact of science on society, the evidence for the impact of society on science is all around for everyone to see, mainly in the form of the large (but never sufficient) funding that science enjoys in the more advanced countries. Society and its arm of action, government, understands that science has developed powerful methods for solving a large number of problems. What distinguishes science from all other kinds of problem-solving activities is the demand that the answers it discovers work in the real world. It is why rulers gave up slaughtering animals to examine their entrails: Magic does not exist in any world at all. However, in stimulating and supporting science, society, as the paymaster, has taken a much shorter term view of research than most scientists would like. There has been much discussion about the different kinds of science. We call one pure, another applied, and a possible third, strategic--it could also be called "apploid"--that is pure but destined to become applied. Then there is mission-directed as opposed to curiosity-driven research, a distinction that I find particularly obnoxious because one can almost see the word "idle" in front of curiosity. Actually, the answer to the question of which type of science to fund is quite simple: Since all science is problem driven, it should be judged by the quality of the problems posed, and the quality of the solutions provided.
Governments support research because its findings contribute greatly to social ends such as the health and wealth of citizens, causes that get politicians re-elected and for which people pay taxes. Of course governments indulge in other activities that cost much more than scientific research, and one can always find military expenditures that could keep a lot of labs going for a long time. The increased funding for scientific research in recent years, especially in the health fields, has resulted in a great expansion of the number of scientists and thus in increased competition for academic and research funds. We have established an elaborate system of peer reviews to deal with this competition, and a similar process is in force for the publication of scientific results. All of this has subtle consequences for the scientific enterprise. If you know what sort of research is wanted by a committee you write your grant to satisfy these expectations, and if you know what the oligarchy believes is the correct view of a subject, you give your paper that slant. Ironically, all of this was originally introduced to ensure fairness and to eliminate the older system where powerful people got all the money, appointed who they liked to their laboratories, and published only papers written by their friends. Both the old feudal system and the new bureaucracy have consequences for scientific innovation; the former narrowed its pursuit to only a few, while the latter discourages its pursuit by all. But there are also more insidious effects because in most countries research and education are now linked almost exclusively to universities: Postdocs learn from professors, students learn from postdocs, and the art of surviving is very quickly transmitted. It is only through the use of subterfuge such as applying for money for work already done that innovative research can be freely pursued.
We need to take these matters seriously, otherwise science will lose the independence of thought required for innovation that it has cherished for centuries. In my own subjects, genetics and molecular biology, research has become so directed toward medical problems and the needs of the pharmaceutical companies that most people do not recognize that the most challenging intellectual problem of all time, the reconstruction of our biological past, can now be tackled with some hope of success. I hope it is not too much to ask that rich societies provide more support for this and other fundamental fields of biology. We need to assure the future of biological research and prevent it from becoming stilted and boring. We can only do this by attracting new young minds to our science and offer them problems as challenging as those that excited my generation.
The author is at the Molecular Sciences Institute, Inc., 2168 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94704, USA
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