When the National Academy of Sciences held a three-day conference last year to promote the use of advanced computer and entertainment technologies to “reinvent schools,” it scheduled no sessions to analyze whether research supported such a dramatic proposal.
But it did invite several speakers with a financial stake in the issue, including Douglas Glen, group vice-president of the video-game giant, Sega of America Inc.
“We understand what it takes to make software that kids play for hours,” Mr. Glen pointed out at a news briefing for the meeting, according to the academy’s news magazine. But video games offer another advantage to schools, he added. Because the games often pit good against evil, he was quoted as saying, they help children develop a moral framework.
Some scholars say Mr. Glen’s message neatly captures an absence of critical thinking that afflicts the scientific and technological mindset of many political, academic, and corporate leaders in the United States today.
They point out that three games made for Sega have since been sharply criticized by lawmakers and parents as being anything but a moral inspiration because of their excessive violence.
Technology has become a religion, some scientists and scholars argue, that is devouring American culture and exacerbating environmental and social problems. A glib focus on technical challenges, they say, is distracting governments, businesses, educators, and ordinary citizens from the real causes of many problems -- and the toll of such technological bias to date.
The mindset is also distracting them from imaginative thinking about the kinds of changes in human behavior that are possible to address problems now, the critics say.
“Americans have come to believe that technological progress is the same thing as human progress, and that through technological ingenuity and development we can all reach paradise,” says Neil Postman, professor of communication arts and sciences at New York University.
Many scientists disagree with these critics. They counter that the public has too little confidence -- not too much -- in science and technology.
Mr. Postman, however, says the rush is on to transform personal, social, political, and economic life with a constant stream of new technologies. But almost no one seems to be thinking, he continues, about what stands to be lost as technologies change those spheres, what has already been lost, or whether the potential benefits even address the most critical problems.
Instead, Americans’ naive optimism about technology amounts to “a culture conspiring against itself,” wrote Mr. Postman in Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1992.
“We are driven to fill our lives with the quest to `access’ information,” he wrote, adding: “The fact is, there are very few political, social, and especially personal problems that arise because of insufficient information.”
Science itself is generating warning signs that the technical status quo cannot continue, many critics contend. Studies related to the ozone hole, global warming, environmental degradation, and social upheaval related to rapid technological changes are all signals that a shift in the prevailing technological world view is urgently needed, they say.
They call for a new sense of both the limits of scientific knowledge and the mixed historical record of its technical applications. The critics represent a diverse set of disciplines and opinions. Some of their more common themes are:
* The lack of democratic participation in the design and use of technologies that profoundly alter ordinary citizens’ lives here and around the world.
* The threat of global and local ecological crises fueled by technological advances with unforeseen consequences.
* The increasing isolation of human beings from the rest of the living world, and a technological vision that would make most of the natural living world -- including most of the human body -- obsolete.
* The weakening of family and local community ties, even as individuals plug themselves into machines that encourage long-distance relationships -- and a false sense of power over distant events.
* The tendency for new technologies and the global economy they promote to centralize political and economic power, and to homogenize and impoverish cultures.
Some critics propose the ultimate heresy for a technological culture. Human welfare, they say, would be better served by slowing down the process of technological innovation, not speeding it up.
“I’d like for us to just take one great big, long breath on essentially everything, including the computer industry,” says Wes Jackson, a former MacArthur Foundation fellow who is president of the Land Institute in Kansas. His research institute studies what combination of agricultural practices would imitate the prairie ecosystem. “Let’s not go so far, so fast, so heedlessly,” he says.
That advice runs counter to what most political, corporate, and academic leaders advocate today.
In fact, Mr. Jackson, who has a doctorate in plant genetics, proposes a five-year moratorium on biotechnology research and its applications -- and a dramatic increase in ecological research. Such an approach, he says, would avoid destruction of the environment upon which human life depends.
Instead of rushing to manipulate nature, scientists should focus on discovering “nature’s wisdom,” Mr. Jackson says. Natural ecosystems are better able to sustain life, he adds, than what he regards as the narrow technical cleverness that modern humans have mastered.
“There’s more to be discovered than invented,” he continues. “And the more we discover, the less inclined we may be to invent.”
The emphasis of academic, government, and business leaders, Mr. Jackson says, has been on quickly converting new tidbits of knowledge into money-making inventions that seek to overcome natural limits. He points to efforts to develop new herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers, instead of focusing on developing a more sustainable system, modeled after nature, such as a diversity of plant species that would include perennial grains, some crops that fix nitogren in the soil, and some that produce natural herbicides. He says the focus should be on research and broad democratic deliberations on practices that “fit” with the rest of the natural world.
Otherwise, he fears that short-sighted human cleverness will lead to more “miracle” products, like asbestos insulation and chlorofluorocarbons for refrigeration, that create worse problems than they solve. The latter, he says, were originally hailed for safety. Studies have since demonstrated that the compound depletes the upper atmosphere’s protective ozone layer.
Adds Joseph Weizenbaum, professor emeritus of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “I would say that `slow it down’ is good advice in just about every area.”
Universities are being pushed by federal and state governments to work more closely with industry to turn research results into new products more quickly. But Mr. Weizenbaum, who has a doctorate in mathematics, suggests that scientists and engineers should do the opposite -- slow down the spiraling system of innovation to give the public time to evaluate potential technological applications before it’s too late.
He proposes a further heresy: Researchers, he says, should voluntarily drop lines of scientific inquiry if it seems likely to them that their society would apply the results in particularly damaging ways -- even if positive applications are also likely.
Other scientists and scholars, however, suggest that such critics may be accomplices, wittingly or not, to what they regard as a dangerous trend in academe toward “science bashing.” They detect a considerable public disillusionment with science and technology.
Paul Gross, professor of biology at the University of Virginia, says he certainly agrees that science and technology have limits. But for many problems, he adds, they are the best hope humanity has. He fears that romantic “New Age” notions will discourage talented students from pursuing scientific careers at the very time when so many pressing issues depend on scientific advances -- not on wishful thinking. Mr. Gross is the co-author of Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science, published this year by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
In contrast to Mr. Jackson’s views, Mr. Gross says that the sheer size of the human population as a species means that “we have a very unnatural system.” Short of a major die-off, Mr. Gross adds, further technical advances, not attempts to understand and mimic “natural” systems, offer the best hope.
Gerald Holton, a professor of physics and the history of science at Harvard University, is the author of Science and Anti-Science, published last year by Harvard University Press. He declined to comment for this story.
But in his book, Mr. Holton argues that the scientific values of objectivity and rationality are under attack at a time when they need to be much more widely applied. His book argues that “cultural Luddites” who criticize the modern role of science and technology should read history. The Nazis, he adds, initially aligned their own movement with romantic philosophers who rejected science and technology.
But the technology critics say they don’t want to reject science, or return to a pre-technological past. Instead, they call for an evolution of the modern world view in ways that support democratic and ecological values.
Mr. Jackson suggests replacing the idea of a knowledge-based society with that of an ignorance-based society. The more researchers discover, the more they realize how much more there is to be known, he says. “We are billions of times more ignorant than we are knowledgeable,” he adds. So a new humility in science -- and a new caution in technology -- would be prudent, he argues.
Science and technology, others say, have focused on quantification and a too-narrow definition of objectivity that obscures the web of connections between the observer and the observed. Science tends to reduce all subjects under scrutiny -- even humans -- to the status of objects that need to be explained, so that technologies can be developed to control them, suggests Douglas Sloan, professor of the history of education at Columbia University’s Teachers College.
The focus on technical solutions, Mr. Sloan argues, ignores other rigorous, objective ways of understanding and responding to the world. He points to art, story telling, and spiritual traditions as examples that focus on questions of quality, meaning, and morality -- none of which can be quantitatively measured, he says.
Mr. Sloan suggests that scientists can enrich their understanding of the world by developing their artistic imagination. “There are other things to be known that are qualitative, and these require just as rigorous procedures as the scientific, and in fact are a kind of science,” he maintains.
Along that line, he argues that much more public discussion is needed about the effects of connecting every classroom to the information highway, as the Administration and others want. He suggests that exposing children in the early grades to computers, television, and other electronic media inhibits the development of imagination. Electronic images can overwhelm children’s ability to create their own mental images, he adds.
David Ray Griffin, a professor of philosophy of religion at the Claremont Graduate School, has coined the term “constructive postmodernism” for the new world view that many critics urge. He distinguishes it from other strands of postmodernist thought, which he says take apart the modern view in a way that negates the possibility of shared meaning and core values.
Constructive postmodernism, he says, tries to advance beyond modernism, not to return to the premodern past. It seeks, he has written, “a creative synthesis” of valuable scientific advances, such as the polio vaccine, with the “recovery of truths and values” from premodern thought and practice that were “dogmatically rejected.”
For many critics, technological culture could be revitalized with a sense of the connections -- spiritual and material -- between people and the rest of the natural world. As for charges of romantic nonsense, they say this world view demands more attending to the reality of the physical world, not less. The real world, they add, is awash in relationships that laboratory science often fails to account for.
For example, the economist Herman Daly, a senior research scholar at the University of Maryland, says that his colleagues have become more “scientific,” and more enthralled with mathematical formulations of economic behavior through the years. But they have paid less and less attention, he says, to the messy empirical reality -- the complexity of how people actually behave in political, social, cultural, and natural communities.
Many critics say redefining objectivity to include this broader scope of observations would enhance, not demean, its value. So would efforts by scientists to be more thoughtful about how and why they frame their scientific agendas, and the consequences of technical applications, they say.
Charlene Spretnak, a visiting professor of philosophy and religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies, adds that recent scientific work on complexity and chaos theory emphasizes the relationships within systems, and their creative potential.
So science, she says, is coming to common ground with the wisdom of traditional cultures, which recognize the natural world as a creative subject in its own right. Contemporary Western cultures, she adds, could learn much from the way traditional cultures weave their lives into the fabric of their local environments.
“Traditional native peoples,” she concludes, “are very good botanists and zoologists, in that they are very sharp, careful observers of the subtle processes of the natural world.”