by Ben Brothers, 1999
All generations create their future, and ours is no exception. But the idea that the future must be better than the past is relatively new. For most the history of our species, the future offered no hope for a happier life. There were new kings to worship and new wars to fight, but most of all, things were the same. There really was nothing new under the sun. What we knew was based on tradition and ritual. Things were done a certain way because they had always been done that way. Those who remembered and kept these rituals became powerful scribes and priests, who would often challenge new ideas as a threat to their power.
But twenty-five hundred years ago, in a place called Ionia, there was something new. We discovered knowledge. Of course, man had discovered things and invented things before, but this was a fundamental shift in the way he thought. Knowledge was no longer a static thing. Knowledge was dynamic. It was less a body of what we knew, and more a way of thinking. It was bred in the confidence that we could find out new things, ask more insightful questions and reveal the secrets of the universe.
Greek philosophers and thinkers made amazing discoveries in astronomy, mathematics, physics, and politics. But these ideas challenged long-held notions about the world, and so they frightened many people in high places. The world was not ready for it, so ancient science slowly faded away. Civilization returned to a dark age of ignorance, fear and superstition.
Yet copies of the old works remained, and eventually the ideas of reason and rationalism again triumphed. And they worked. So many new creations of art and science and literature appeared that the time was known as the Renaissance, a rebirth, and as the Enlightenment. We now know much more about our world and our universe, than any other species that has ever lived on the Earth. And because of that knowledge, all of us are better off. Our future, if we pursue it wisely and knowingly, seems very bright to me. But to do so, we must remain true to the tenets of rational scientific thought that have brought us so far.
Unfortunately, there is no assurance that we will do so. There are two philosophies, two ways of looking at the world, that are absolutely fundamental to rational thought. These are openness and skepticism. We need to listen to, to consider every theory that is proposed. We can't write off ideas merely because we do not like the source, or because we hadn't thought of them before, or because we do not approve of their implications, or because we are afraid of uncertainty.
But we also need to distinguish between sense and nonsense. Many ideas can be proven wrong. Let's reject those. Many of them are constructed in such a way as to be invulnerable to disproof. These are equally worthless. (That is not to say they are necessarily wrong, an entirely different argument. I mean only that we cannot use them to explore further into that which we do not know.)
We need to subject a new theory to the most critical tests. Does it explain all of our observations? What other explanations can there be? Where does it improve upon our current understanding? What are its weaknesses? What experiments can we devise to see that this theory works but others do not? Can we use this theory to predict some other phenomenon, and then see if it works like we think? This enterprise, of course, is called science.
Its alternatives are mysticism, closed-mindedness and credulity. Despite our advances, millions of people around the world continue to believe this nonsense. Otherwise prestigious newspapers print horoscopes every day. School boards refuse to teach evolutionary biology. People call psychics for readings about their future. We talk about ghosts and alien abductions with straight faces.
It's not that these people are stupid. It's that they haven't taught themselves to think rationally.
I said before that the key to the Enlightenment was not so much a revolution of knowledge, but a revolution in thinking. In my opinion, our school system is having such trouble because our teachers have forgotten this, if they ever recognized it in the first place.
Science classes are usually taught not as a grand experiment about the world, but as a rote memorization of known facts and discoveries. While this is useful to some degree, it suffers from the cardinal error of being very boring, and for many people, very difficult.
If we make the effort to teach not only science, but also how we do science, we would be much better off. By keeping some of the excitement, we can keep a lot of the interest and curiosity that we all had at some point in our life, but which most of us have forgotten or suppressed. People who are excited about something will take the time to find out about it. And that's good for all of us.
In a future that will be increasingly technological and scientific, it is vital that this knowledge be shared by all. The man who doesn't learn about the world he lives in will not be able to succeed in it very often. Power becomes concentrated in the hands of the few, and the many lose. In crude terms, this is the danger we face in the future if we fail to reform in the present.
On the other hand, once someone learns to approach a problem logically, he rarely falls back on superstition or irrationality. And the man who approaches the scientific world logically is likely to do the same to other endeavors. Imagine the benefits if Congress, when debating a new law, consulted the experts in the field with the honest goal of reaching the best solution, instead of with the goal of finding support for a position already chosen, or for pandering for votes. And imagine voters looking for this, and removing those politicians who insult their intelligence.
I see no downside to an increase in our expenditures on science and technology and the future. But I see enormous pitfalls for the nation that commits itself to short-sighted policies like cutting funding to the National Science Foundation, or to renewable energy research, or to NASA. And the nation that refuses to spend money on education may save some money now, but in the long run it will lose far more than it will ever realize.
There is much that currently lies just beyond what we know. Amazing discoveries await us in every field, from genetics to astronomy, from the smallest genes to the most distant galaxies. Solutions to so many of man's problems are within our reach, if we dedicate ourselves to their pursuit. Jacob Bronowski once called this pursuit the ascent of man. He was right. There are no insurmountable barriers in our way; the future is what we make it.
Written by Ben Brothers, 1999. Send comments to ben@gwaihir.org.