| 摘要 | Editors’ note: With this issue, the Public Interest begins an occasional series of “readings”–reprints of articles, essays, and lectures that we believe are as pertinent today, if not more so, as when they first appeared. We begin with a talk given by Irving Kristol at the Polytechnic Institute of New York in 1975. It addresses the problems technology poses for liberal democracy–a subject that, given current developments in human genetics, merits serious consideration.
To say that I know nothing about science would be the understatement of the century. I was born and raised in Brooklyn, but unhappily, I didn’t go to Brooklyn Poly. I went to City College instead. I don’t know why, just a family tradition. It is true, I did start out as a physics major, but after one year of studying physics, I discovered that physics was very hard. So I decided to be an intellectual instead. In those days, one could spend four years in City College becoming an intellectual. It was very pleasant, because you didn’t have to go to class. I suppose my function here today is to be a kind of kibitzer-intellectual. An intellectual has been defined as a man with a great many opinions on a great many subjects about which he knows precious little. But he nevertheless fulfills a useful function–sometimes.
What I want to talk about today is the question of the place of science and technology in a liberal democracy in the decades ahead. I think that is not a matter about which one can be smug. I think we must anticipate some very serious problems involving the place of science and technology in our society. These are problems we are going to have to face up to, although they may not be problems we like to face.
Progress and Perfection
There is a very interesting historical controversy concerning why the Greeks and the Chinese did not develop the technology that their theoretical science evidently made possible. There are different hypotheses for why this ocurred. The major one is the “institutional” one–namely, that there was slavery, or that labor was depreciated, not held in high esteem; and therefore, though pure science developed to a considerable degree in the ancient world, applied science and technology did not. There is another theory for why pure science developed while applied technology did not–namely, that the ancient Greeks and the Chinese were very wise people. They knew that although science is beautiful when contemplated in its theoretical aspects, when it is transformed into technology it becomes a form of power. And power is the power for good and for evil. The theory goes on to say that the ancients decided that this was not a power they cared to entrust men with, and therefore deliberately, systematically discouraged the application of pure theory to the development of technology.
This notion is preserved for us in our literature, in the myth of Doctor Faustus, for instance. The idea that there is something diabolical about science, the idea that the power that science gives you over the world is a power that comes not from God but from the devil–this idea was certainly very strong until around the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At that point, we saw the emergence of the modern idea of science and technology, that not only is pure science good but the development of all the inherent potentialities of science and technology is also good.
For this change of perception and this change of perspective to take place, certain basic assumptions had to be changed as well. Two new grand intellectual ideas emerged to legitimate the modern scientific enterprise. One was that man could be trusted with this power, that man was not a creature of original sin, that man was not a creature of innate perversity–and that he was, if not perfectible in the literal sense, then perfectible enough to permit one to entrust to humanity the power that science, when converted into technology, gives us. The second basic idea that the Greeks did not have was that history was progressive, consisting of a series of stages whereby humanity perfected itself. Therefore, since the future would be better than the past and human beings in the future would be better than they had been in the past, there really was no great cause for concern in giving humanity this new and great power.
These two ideas, when conformed, give us the essence of what we call in our textbooks the Enlightenment–meaning that it’s a good thing to get as much knowledge as possible and to make it as widely available as possible. Enlighten everyone, make knowledge freely available to all who seek it. This set of beliefs is the basis of our liberal democratic society.
Brave New Worlds
During the past few decades, however, these assumptions have become less firmly held. It seems clear to me, at any rate, that these assumptions have become problematic, and will probably become more problematic in the years ahead.
I think the first great blow to the Enlightenment’s view of the world, the modern view of the world, was the explosion of the atom bomb. It suddenly became very clear to us indeed that the power of science is a power for evil as well as for good. And not only for evil but for unlimited evil. Suddenly, humanity had within its grasp the power to destroy itself and the entire world quickly, without much effort. And the question was bound to occur to us: Is it unthinkable that humanity should do such a thing? Once we really looked at the world and thought about the matter, we came to the conclusion that no, it wasn’t unthinkable. As a matter of fact, though we may have been slow in coming to that conclusion, our children were not. It’s clear that the generation that came to maturity in the 1950s, after the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, saw the world rather differently from those of us who had the good luck, as it were, to be born and raised during the Depression.
The skepticism that then began to emerge about the necessary benefits of science and technology was reinforced by the upsurge of concern for ecology, the environmentalist movement. One must understand the environmentalist and the ecological movements in their full seriousness. These are not just movements for improving the world. These are movements that, in their full thrust, challenge the basic assumptions upon which modern civilization–modern, liberal, democratic civilization–was created. They question whether the furthest development of science and the richest, most ample application of technology necessarily are going to lead to a good society and a good world. And it is quite clear that, among young people today, there is a great deal of doubt and skepticism about this.
Oddly enough, throughout the twentieth century, even when the basic assumptions of our worldview and our society were not being explicitly challenged, there was one area of our culture where one could find it under very critical scrutiny. I trust that many of you read science fiction. One of the fascinating facts of our cultural history of the past 50 years is the the way in which science fiction, having begun on an optimistic note very early on–long before the hydrogen bomb–became extremely pessimistic. If you look at the worlds that are described in science-fiction stories of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, you will find they are not usually the kinds of worlds that most of us would want to live in. They are not, to begin with, liberal; practically all of them are despotisms. Some are benevolent despotisms, some malevolent despotisms. But none of them is a self-governing community, and always for the same reason: Someone has to keep control of the knowledge that can destroy the entire civilization. And there is usually one group that has control of that knowledge: a good group, or a bad group. But what you do not have is anything like a liberal society, a self-governing political community of the kind that we have grown up in, where knowledge is free, where knowledge can be published freely, where knowledge can be circulated widely, and where it is assumed that all this will somehow lead to a good end result.
Now the premonitions of science fiction over the past 40 years have come home to roost in actuality in our lifetime. It really is a fact that in 30 or 40 or 50 years, these premonitions will be coping with a reality. It will happen that almost anyone with a smattering of college chemistry and physics will be able to create some form of atomic weapon. It’s quite clear that, at the rate things are going, in 40 or 50 years almost anybody will be able to create explosives of a kind that can destroy an entire city. And if anyone can, it is possible to surmise that someone will, the world being what it is and human beings what they are. It is also quite clear that, given the tremendous developments in chemistry, some high school student puttering around in his basement is going to come up with a nerve gas that could decimate an entire country. Something like that will happen as science gets more and more sophisticated, as young people become masters of technologies that only a genius could dream of 50 years ago.
Educating the Scientist
All of these things are on the horizon. I don’t say this to scare you; I say this as a matter of fact. It is clear that this is going to happen. The real question is: How are we going to cope with it? Humanity has not perfected itself in any great degree as a result of the progress of science and technology in these past four centuries. It certainly has not perfected itself in its basic feelings of benevolence toward other human beings. And it is clear to me, therefore, that the basic premises of our liberal society are going to be under challenge and scrutiny. We’re going to have to think about what we can do with the results of scientific enlightenment, with the results of the spread of scientific and technological knowledge as this knowledge becomes ever more powerful.
I hope we will approach this problem with the intention of preserving our liberal democratic society. But that is going to be extremely difficult. It will involve not the training of better technologists, but rather the moral education of scientists and technologists. And this may well turn out to be the biggest single challenge facing the scientific community–its own moral education, its own assumption of moral responsibility for the use and abuse of scientific knowledge. For this, you need an education not in science but in the humanities, because you don’t get moral education by studying science. You may acquire good moral habits by studying science, but you don’t get a moral education. You don’t learn to think about problems of good and evil by studying science. That’s what the humanities are for. And scientists, I believe, in the decades ahead, are going to have to become much more attentive than they have been to the humanities, in their own self-defense.
I think there is some loose thinking about this whole problem of scientists, engineers, and their social responsibilities. When scientists say they want to live up to their social responsibilities, what they usually mean is that they want more power than they have; it means they want to run things, to take charge. It’s always nicer to run things than to be run by them. But that’s not what moral responsibility really means. As a matter of fact I am not all that eager to see scientists get involved in politics per se. I think that with the possible exception of businessmen, engineers and scientists are the worst people I’ve seen working in politics. Businessmen are used to making decisions. They come to Washington and discover that you can spend 10 years in Washington and never have the privilege of making a decision; all you’re doing is making compromises with other people who aren’t making decisions either. It gets terribly frustrating for them, and they go home, back to a nice easy life where if you say “do something,” somebody does it.
Scientists and engineers, on the other hand, have the inclination to think that the world is full of “problems” to which they should seek “solutions.” But the world isn’t full of problems; the world is full of other people. That’s not a problem, that’s a condition. Politics exist precisely because the world is full of other people. These other people have ideas, different ways of life, different preferences, and in the end, there is no “solution” to the existence of other people. All you can do is figure out a civilized accommodation with them.
So I am not all that eager to see scientists become active in political affairs. I am, however, concerned to see engineers and scientists become interested in themselves–not in improving the rest of the world, but in facing the tasks of their own self-improvement, and learning how to think about their own responsibilities in a more serious and reflective way, rather than the traditional one: We can solve the problem, just give us the power to do it.
First Things
One can’t help but notice that the phrase “long-range planning” keeps coming up when scientists talk about politics. Scientists always love planning. The assumption underlying long-range planning is that people will do what you tell them to do. But in politics the problem with long-range planning is that unless you have absolute power over people, they don’t do what you want them to do; they have their own inclinations. So what I think the scientific and engineering community has to face up to is its own self-education, its own social education. It has to start thinking about the problems of political philosphy–not political science, but political philosophy. Here I mean what is called in the academy “normative” political philosophy. I happen to think there is no other kind. It involves such questions as: What is a good society? How do you go about achieving it? How do you–what do we–learn from history? What do we learn from political philosophers of the past? I think that this kind of educational inquiry tends to be neglected in modern scientific education, as the fields proliferate and there is more and more to know.
I have no reason to doubt that the Polytechnic Institute will incorporate in its curriculum, and in its intentions, this humanistic intent. I’m assuming it will. It should. In my view, there isn’t a scientific institution in the United States which is doing it right as yet, doing it seriously enough with a sense of the urgency involved. There are enormous decisions that will have to be made. And scientists, because they are the “experts,” will be called in to say, for instance, do we clone, or don’t we clone? Well, how do you decide whether to clone or not to clone? You cannot decide on the basis of science. You decide on the basis of philosophy, and especially on the basis of moral and political philosophy. Scientists need the whole area of self-education if they are going to cope with the world which science has brought about. And they will have a central role, I hope, in saving that world.
Irving Kristol is a senior fellow at AEI. |
