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191  Just What Scientific Lore
     Would Be Better Unknown?
     The Washington Post  January 24, 1970

     Every deadline poses a new opportunity and a new challenge.  I
scan my recent productions only to see a string  of lamentations.  I
hope to offer some novelty of scientific fact or critical point of
view; some I know may be mainly bad temper indignation.

     Could one not expose some more positive program to build, some new
vision of human achievement illuminated by science? Or if not some
cheery amusements?  But even such a titillation as the new chemical
aphrodisiacs, when one thinks again, will turn into another of the
ironic self-deceptions that foolish mortals are prone to play.

     Good news is just hard to find, and then we must be wary of it.
This is the age when sweet is bitter, when even the blessings of new
births are ambiguous (viewed as statistics).  Among younger people,
the frustrations of potential nuclear war, population unlimited, and
pollution everywhere are especially poignant, and are sometimes 
internalized into self-hatred and alienation.  How hard to extol the 
dignity of man, when there are so many of us!

     Perhaps, then, there is a positive side to concerted criticism:
that to react to obvious wrongs is to help build the only kind of 
community that can enlist our energies and dissipate our loneliness.
Karl Popper's book "The Open Society and its Enemies" is the manifesto
for piecemeal social engineering, which he opposed to the ideals of
Utopian planning of the pre-Stalinist era.

     He wrote 30 years ago that "a systematic fight against suffering
and injustice and war is more likely to be supported by the agreement
and approval of a great number of people than the fight for the
establishment of some ideal.  The existence of social evils can be
comparatively well established.  Those who suffer can judge for 
themselves, and the others can hardly deny that they would not like to
change places.

     "It is infinitely more complicated to reason about an ideal
society.  Social life is so complicated that few men, or not at all,
could judge a blueprint for social engineering on the grand scale ...
accordingly, adopt the method of searching for, and fighting against,
the greatest and most urgent evils of society, rather than searching
for, and fighting for, its greatest ultimate good."

     As the better way to identify a liberal society, Popper's 
argument is faultless.  Today, we have just one reason to voice an 
exception: the survival of the human community on earth may already be a
Utopian ideal.

     For its realization, we have little experience, tools, training
or organization.  We lack even the will to proceed with the long-range
global planning needed to meet the realities of today's poverty 
and tomorrow's revolutions of hunger and unfulfilled expectations.

     In the face of the Pearson Commission's reasoned analysis of
world development needs, Congress last year slashed foreign aid 
appropriations to the lowest levels in recent years.  This was harsh
and ungenerous, but was it totally irrational?

     For we are too divided against ourselves to think out the plans
to reveal how a billion dollars more or less would matter for the long
run odds of a viable world.  Back to piecemeal planning, until we can
rebuild our institutions to where they can take on such tasks.

     The same overview may help short-circuit a lot of argument about
technological assestment, how to allocate priorities for one kind of
science compared to another and so on.  The fact is, no one is wise
enough for such judgments on a grand scale.

     Who would have known enough to fund Gutenberg? And who knows
enough now to say whether the Manhattan Project will have led to the
end, or to a new beginning, of world history? Just what scientific
knowledge already in hand would be better known, and if so, how would
we keep it so? Do we imagine overpowering nature to annihilate a fact?

     More important than particular scientific products are the 
institutions which are built as the all-important side-effects of the 
technological budget and which can generate the balance we need.  Large
defense contracts help build missile systems, and also a military 
industrial complex.

     Supporting "big science" assures a ready reserve of physicists
and engineers; "little science" and the humanities at the universities
will promote skeptical teachers and critics.  If we replace the
universities with vocational schools, we can also bolster the status
quo, but at the expense of our adaptability to change and the chance
of ever taking on the big jobs ahead.
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