89342

SUMMARY

 

Read the following text and summarise it in up to 200 words:

 

At some point in the technological era we have taken a wrong fork on the road. Diverted from the struggle for survival against harsh, forbidding Nature, scientific research and development of technology have become an urge not only to dominate and control Nature, but also to wage war on such a scale that man and nature may both be obliterated. Science and technology have become a force for destruction rather than creation. Furthermore, military technology has become so sophisticated that one person, safe from harm himself, now has the capability to annihilate hundreds of thousands or (in the case of nuclear warriors in secret underground missile silos) millions, utterly shielded from the result of his actions. The abstract nature of this kind of war breeds alienation allowing individuals unperturbed by moral qualms or misgivings to kill with impunity.

 

Moreover, in the West technology for portraying war to the general public has been developed deliberately to obviate moral outrage. An example of such avoidance is the forced cancellation of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki exhibition at the Smithsonian Institute in 1995 because it was deemed that the American people were not ready to face this. Another is the television depiction of the Iraq war, which was essentially a computerised simulation from which the armed forces and the thousands of civilian casualties were curiously absent.

 

Another deviant path is that travelled by the ancient idea of perfecting the self, originally a philosophical ideal concerning the soul and spiritual perfection. It has become an external technological manifestation, an exercise in perfecting the body through scientific and technological manipulation, from face lifts to transplants and endless prolongation of life through technological fixes or cloning.

 

Albert Schweitzer tells us that “Wherever consciousness is lost that every man is an object of concern to us simply because he is a man, civilisation and morals are shaken, and the advance to fully developed inhumanity is only a question of time.”

 

As long as a dispassionate, unreflecting science reigns supreme, and the scientific model of nature is mathematical, devoid of the human factor, it is “only a question of time.” As long as the only ethical requirement for science is to tell the truth, and as long as the only responsibility for the scientist, in Oppenheimer’s words, is “to remain dedicated,” it is “only a question of time.”

 

As long as scientific enquiry and technological development remain unbridled, perhaps it is “only a question of time.” The bounds to scientific enquiry are financial and imposed solely by the nature of humanity. “The human brain,” claims Barrow, “was not evolved with science in mind.” The language of science, mathematics, unlike communicative language, which is innate, is learned language — thus foreign to human minds.

 

British culture critic Raymond Williams reminds us that technology is not an inevitable series of transformations careering along the ringing grooves of change. Rather, it is a set of humanly decided and humanly alterable options for the application of skills. Lewis Mumford makes the point that the most important thing to come out of the mine is not coal or ore. Rather, the most important thing to come out of the mine is the miner.

 

Since the Enlightenment, according to Schweitzer, philosophy has “philosophised about everything except civilisation. She went on working unswervingly to establish a theoretical view of the universe, as though by means of it everything could be restored. She failed to cogitate that this theory, even were it to be completed, would be fashioned exclusively out of history and science, and would accordingly be unoptimistic and unethical. It would ever remain an ‘impotent theory of the universe,’ too puny to muster the energies needed to establish and maintain the ideals of civilisation.”

 

If Heidegger is correct and we are “beings tending towards death,” then Barrow’s idea of progress, that is bereft of ideals “about progress of the whole,” is our rationale for existence in the technological era. I, however, side with Socrates who on his deathbed wagered that we are beings tending towards Good and asserted that “absence of the knowledge of Good is not ignorance but madness.”

 

Adapted from “Only A Question of Time: Science, Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction,” a lecture delivered by Jennifer Allen Simons at the Center for Theoretical Study, Charles University & Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic, 10th Anniversary Conference (The Diverse Landscape of Knowing: Can We Cope With It) August 28th – 30th, 2000.