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Defending Prometheus Prometheus is the mythical figure who brought humankind fire and put it on the path of progress. But today many have soured on society's striving for betterment by means of science and technology. They question the value of past achievements and are rethinking assumptions and goals for the future. The articles that follow explore these issues. Secular humanists must support a renewed commitment to the spirit of Prometheus, especially since we stand on the brink of new scientific frontiers.—EDS. Rekindling Humanity's Love Affair with Science and Technology Thomas W. Flynn P rometheus is the legendary Titan who in fable brought fire to huddled humankind, and with it Homo sapiens' first taste of mastery independent of the gods. In today's climate it is far too often assumed that Prometheus erred in making the offer—or that human beings erred in accepting it. In the most scientific and technological age the world has ever known, rising to the defense of Prometheus has become a counter- cultural act. Should secular humanists decry or defend the human impulse to manipulate our world? As the late Joseph Fletcher observed, the use of science and tech- nology does not make human beings less human; on the contrary, it may be the most profoundly human activity they can engage in. This special section, "Defending Prometheus," presents a spectrum of arguments in favor of rekindling humanity's historic love affair with science and technology. A century ago, freethinkers and other progressives expected science to yield immediate answers for every human problem. Robert Green Ingersoll boomed that science was "the only possible savior of humankind." Such naive optimism sowed the seeds of its own disillusionment. Correction was inevitable. Yet in recent years the 14 "In the most scientific and tech- nological age the world has ever known, rising to the defense of Prometheus has become a counter- cultural act." pendulum has swung too far away from the scientific temper. For reasons alter- nately frivolous and profound, the default assumptions of our intellectual life have drifted into a Luddite orien- tation. Criticism of science and technology by the educated may be the tragic hallmark of our era. Environmentalists condemn the human fascination with increasingly powerful technologies for upsetting the natural order—perhaps, for setting into motion processes that will make the biosphere unlivable. Deep ecologists and radical greens go further, sometimes treating humankind itself as a (fortunately curable) blight on the planet's face) Critics in the humanities warn that, in the pursuit of technological "fixes," we may turn our backs on the qualities that makes us most human— or create an environment in which prized aesthetic qualities no longer flourish. Advocates for ethnic, attitudinal, and gender minorities charge "mainstream" science with complicity in what they see as a white male, European program to monopolize the sources of power, influence, and prestige in society. Some radical feminists have called for a "feminist science" or "feminist epistemol- ogy" that rejects objectivity, rationality, and intersubjectivity as androcentric falsehoods. Under the banner of "mul- ticultural education," some African- American reformers have advocated a pseudoscientific historical revisionism that teaches, among other things, that the ancient Egyptians were blacks who had mastered nonpowered flight.2 On every front the accusation is that science is less a means of explicating reality than a ploy of the powerful to expand their influence. Yet, in other arenas, the new foes of technology are reformers whom many in the humanist movement support. We too abhor the indiscriminate use of natural resources, celebrate the arts and the humanities, and battle prejudice and bigotry. Where we differ with today's critics of science and technology is primarily in our view of reason. Though reason and its products may be horribly abused, humanists continue to view them as humankind's best chance to overcome individual fallibility and subjectivity, to FREE INQUIRY
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Page 1: Defending Prometheus

Defending Prometheus Prometheus is the mythical figure who brought humankind fire and put it on the path of progress. But today many have soured on society's striving for betterment by means of science and technology. They question the value of past achievements and are rethinking assumptions and goals for the future.

The articles that follow explore these issues. Secular humanists must support a renewed commitment to the spirit of Prometheus, especially since we stand on the brink of new scientific frontiers.—EDS.

Rekindling Humanity's Love Affair with Science and Technology

Thomas W. Flynn

Prometheus is the legendary Titan who in fable brought fire to huddled

humankind, and with it Homo sapiens' first taste of mastery independent of the gods. In today's climate it is far too often assumed that Prometheus erred in making the offer—or that human beings erred in accepting it. In the most scientific and technological age the world has ever known, rising to the defense of Prometheus has become a counter-cultural act.

Should secular humanists decry or defend the human impulse to manipulate our world? As the late Joseph Fletcher observed, the use of science and tech-nology does not make human beings less human; on the contrary, it may be the most profoundly human activity they can engage in. This special section, "Defending Prometheus," presents a spectrum of arguments in favor of rekindling humanity's historic love affair with science and technology.

A century ago, freethinkers and other progressives expected science to yield immediate answers for every human problem. Robert Green Ingersoll boomed that science was "the only possible savior of humankind." Such naive optimism sowed the seeds of its own disillusionment. Correction was inevitable. Yet in recent years the

14

"In the most scientific and tech- nological age the world has ever known, rising to the defense of

Prometheus has become a counter- cultural act."

pendulum has swung too far away from the scientific temper. For reasons alter-nately frivolous and profound, the default assumptions of our intellectual life have drifted into a Luddite orien-tation.

Criticism of science and technology by the educated may be the tragic hallmark of our era. Environmentalists condemn the human fascination with increasingly powerful technologies for upsetting the natural order—perhaps, for setting into motion processes that will make the biosphere unlivable. Deep ecologists and radical greens go further, sometimes treating humankind itself as a (fortunately curable) blight on the planet's face) Critics in the humanities warn that, in the pursuit of technological "fixes," we may turn our backs on the qualities that makes us most human—or create an environment in which prized aesthetic qualities no longer flourish. Advocates for ethnic, attitudinal, and

gender minorities charge "mainstream" science with complicity in what they see as a white male, European program to monopolize the sources of power, influence, and prestige in society. Some radical feminists have called for a "feminist science" or "feminist epistemol-ogy" that rejects objectivity, rationality, and intersubjectivity as androcentric falsehoods. Under the banner of "mul-ticultural education," some African-American reformers have advocated a pseudoscientific historical revisionism that teaches, among other things, that the ancient Egyptians were blacks who had mastered nonpowered flight.2 On every front the accusation is that science is less a means of explicating reality than a ploy of the powerful to expand their influence.

Yet, in other arenas, the new foes of technology are reformers whom many in the humanist movement support. We too abhor the indiscriminate use of natural resources, celebrate the arts and the humanities, and battle prejudice and bigotry. Where we differ with today's critics of science and technology is primarily in our view of reason. Though reason and its products may be horribly abused, humanists continue to view them as humankind's best chance to overcome individual fallibility and subjectivity, to

FREE INQUIRY

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apprehend as nearly as possible the world as it is, and to take meaningful action aimed at enhancing human wel-fare. And so we rise to defend science, to embrace technology, and to con-template with optimism and zest the developments still in store. We recognize that, on balance, technology has brought more hope than suffering. For the writers in our special section, the Promethean impulse does not threaten to make us less human. Rather, it promises us the means of expanding what it means to be human—perhaps even of coming to understand our own consciousness in radically new and constructive ways.

Science in Crisis

Distrust of science and technology are widespread and have engen-

dered most unfortunate byproducts. Consider some cautionary examples:

At the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History, several exhibits from the 1950s and 1960s now bear red, white, and black warning stickers. One old diorama shows a pride of lions assembled in a cave. Adjacent is a sticker bearing the words "Gender Bias" in bold black type, with the crimson international "no" symbol slashing through them. The sticker's body type goes on to explain that, though the diorama cannot yet be replaced, viewers should discount the anachronistic gender bias implicit in its design. The male lion stands defiantly at the cave entrance looking toward the beckoning world outside, while the lioness turns her back to concentrate on her cubs.

If the diorama misrepresents the known behavior of lions in order to reflect, however unconsciously, some past curator's outmoded attitudes about how human groupings ought to comport themselves, revision is in order, and a warning sticker is an appropriate stop-gap. But in today's often-overheated climate of "political correctness," it can be difficult to distinguish between genuine bias and an innocent factual presentation that happens to be out of step with the orthodoxy of reform.

Feminism is just one of many good causes whose energies have been diverted

into promoting the postmodern attack on science and technology. Environmen-talism is another.

Elsewhere at the Museum of Natural History, a dated exhibit from the 1950s deals with parasitism by rodents. Under the heading "Destructive Mammals," it describes in disapproving tones the tendency of Norway rats to steal into grain ships, eat some of the grain, and foul the rest. The exhibit is flanked by another of those purse-lipped warning stickers. As Dave Barry says, I am not making this up: the sticker apologizes for the speciesism entailed in offering a negative value judgment about rats eating food meant for human con-sumption.

Postmodernism and Anti-Scientific Attitudes

The intellectual pedigree of postmod-ern opposition to science is well

known. Connect the dots: draw a forking line from Hegel and Nietzsche and Heidegger through Einstein,3 Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrodinger. Jag

"The Promethean impulse does not threaten to make us less

human. Rather, it promises us the means of expanding what it means

to be human—perhaps even of coming to understand our own

consciousness in radically new and constructive ways."

next through Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Jacques Monod. Lurch one way to acquire Thomas Kuhn and Fritjof Capra, another to embrace Jacques Derrida, Jean-Françoise Lyotard, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault.

Postmodernists in a disconcerting range of specialties argue that inter-subjectivity is an illusion; that laboratory knowledge is neither more firmly grounded, nor less tendentious, than personal opinion; that our experiences in the natural world give us no warrant to value one model of reality as inher-ently superior to any other. No obser-vation is certain, no measurement

unambiguous, no hypothesis verifiable in any way that transcends the social and political matrix from which it emerged. The very idea that recent advances might entitle us to believe that we have begun, however imperfectly, to grasp "how things really are" strikes postmodern critics as hubris of the most dangerous sort. To imagine that through the scientific method we can overcome our individual biases and deficits and arrive at any higher criterion of truth is said to be the cruelest joke of all.

From this it follows necessarily that efforts to improve human life by the application of scientific knowledge are, at best, misguided. At worst, the argu-ment goes, they lead to Auschwitz, the Gulag, and Chernobyl. (The fact that Nazism and Marxism were deeply pseudoscientific does nothing to keep real science from being blamed for their sins.)

Above All, a Distaste for the Human

At the heart of all this seems to lie a fundamental distaste for the

human. Prometheus did not err in giving humans fire; to the radical postmoder-fist, he erred in having such poor taste as to take an interest in humans at all. As secular humanists whose moral concern focuses particularly on the human condition, our obligation to criticize postmodern romanticism and its view of science seems clear. We should naturally become the defenders of Prometheus—if not us, whom?

Prometheus as Iconoclast: Embracing Quantum and Chaos

Prometheus was not merely an arche-typal Santa Claus bringing humans

the gift of fire. He was also a profound iconoclast. His was a complex gift, destroying old certainties and old ways of life even as it introduced new hopes and possibilities. Surely science has done no less, turning our lives upside down as has perhaps no other single force in human life.

Postmodern critics delight in pointing out that new scientific paradigms have rendered many of our old certainties

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sterile and naive. Quantum physics is said to overturn conventional ideas of causality. Chaos theory is said to make the very idea of scientific prediction a sham. Physicists like Fritjof Capra, John A. Wheeler, and others argue that such counter-intuitive findings somehow prove the ascendancy of conventional spirituality over science. Certainly they deal a serious blow to the mechanistic, deterministic view of causation that Newton and Laplace knew—but what of that? Strict determinism was a good guess for its time, but no more. If emerging studies of chaos make clear that Laplace could not have predicted the present state of the world, no matter how much information he collected about antecedent conditions, that is compatible with science. We celebrate that science continues to reveal to us a real world far stranger than we could have imagined before we knew the facts.

A Promethean view recognizes that science endows human beings with the most powerful tool for exposing every type of illusion—including the illusions associated with previous scientific orthodoxies. Science applies to the natural world and our view of it the same astringent iconoclasm that secular humanism applies to the claims of religion.

Actually, determinism never worked very well; I, for one, am glad to be rid of it. It may be that many of the "profound" dilemmas that have fasci-nated philosophers for the last four hundred years simply spring from contradictions in the error of determi-nism to which so many of us were wed. From strict determinism great mischief flowed: if all things are predestined, there is no room for free will. Creativity is at worst impossible, at best ineffable. Here we find the roots of Calvin's ideas about predestination. Determinism's contradictions influenced generations of mystics inside and outside of the churches: some concluded that God was necessary in order to make possible the free will and creativity that obviously could not arise in the natural universe. Others deified the elan vital they thought they needed to give life and conscious-ness to brute matter. In psychology, determinism may have paved the way

for behaviorism, which was long criti-cized for defining mind and volition out of existence simply because, by the behaviorist's preconceptions, they were prima facie "unscientific."

We must sift the evidence with care, but it seems at least possible that relativity, quantum mechanics, and chaos theory make the scientific world-view friendly to a more nuanced con-ception of human nature. If quantum processes can sometimes sidestep the demands of strict causality, even at the macro level—if, as chaos theory suggests, similar initial conditions can lead to unpredictably different outcomes—then perhaps we need not look to some transcendent world after all to account for the eruption of freedom and novelty into human life. Dare we hope that a science that has outgrown naive deter-minism might be big enough to encom-pass the humanities too?

Can Science Solve the Riddle of Consciousness? Will We Like the Answer?

Nowhere does science threaten cher-ished illusions more than in emerg-

ing studies of human consciousness. Synthesizing generations of patient study

of neural mechanisms, Nobel Laureate Francis Crick, his young colleague Christof Koch, Gerald Edelman, Michael Dennett, and others have begun to study the detailed mechanisms that may underlie human consciousness. Because they denied the existence of the soul, atheists were committed to the idea that consciousness arose solely from brain events long before science could confirm or deny it. From that perspec-tive, today's scientists of consciousness are catching up to us, having at last developed the tools and concepts with which to address one of the great mysteries of the human condition. In his article "The `Soul,' " Morton Hunt explores some of these issues.

What is that "I" that seems to look out through our eyes and experience the world? How does such awareness arise in the brain? Does introspection inform or mislead us about what is really going on in our heads? In an exclusive FREE INQUIRY interview, Francis Crick, co-discover of the structure of DNA, discusses current developments in the field and summarizes key arguments from his book The Astonishing Hypothesis. In "What Is 'Conscious-ness'?" Adam Carley interprets other work in the study of consciousness to

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suggest that the "self-aware self" is nothing but an illusion, a trick of short-term memory that evolution preserved because it let humans learn more richly from experience. Centuries ago, icono-clastic inquiry led the philosophes to reject their comforting, intuitive notions about God. Perhaps the inquiries of today will lead tomorrow's thinkers to reject our own no less comforting and intuitive notions about the self.

A Time for Transhumanism

Where will our discoveries about human consciousness lead us

next? Over the years dreamers have offered provocative ideas. Recent ad-vances in electronic technologies have inspired dreams of radical new futures for humankind. Need consciousness as we know it be restricted to biological organisms? Can electronic hardware and software sustain inquiring minds as well as the "wetware" between our ears? Can organic and electronic forms of the future combine to enjoy experiences and achieve insights that neither could reach alone?

In the primitive "cyberspace" of the Internet where millions already interact we see the beginnings of a "wired" community. A small coterie of scientists and knowledge workers has banded together to explore the future cross-fertilization of human life by technology. They have coined the word extropy to capture their brand of technological optimism. The natural world is charac-terized by entropy, the tendency of energy and organization to devolve into less and less accessible forms. Extropy is defined as the capacity of human knowledge and will to reverse that process: to concentrate energy and information, generating new knowledge that permits the process to continue at ever larger scales. Interestingly, in its founding documents "extropianism" presents itself explicitly as a eupraxophy in the sense put forward by Paul Kurtz. But for the extropians, humanism is not enough: they espouse a "transhumanist" philosophy. Science having given us the tools to do so, they advocate that we explore ways of liberating consciousness from the confines of the merely human.

In "Heaven on a Chip," Bart Kosko, author of Fuzzy Thinking, presents an eye-opening speculation whose treat-ment of the organic brain as "meat" reflects a viewpoint deeply shaped by transhumanist ideas. Nietzsche called humankind a rope across an abyss; trans-humanism serves up an optimistic proposal for crossing that abyss in a very literal way. Is this naivete, or vision? "On Becoming Posthuman" by Max More provides a broader introduction to the cutting edge of contemporary tech-nological optimism.

Whither Humankind

Tike it or not, the confluence of i (external forces and those we have

ourselves set into motion is changing human life in profound and sometimes unforeseeable ways. Generations ago, simple folk imagined that their world lay under the control of spectral beings whose activities were mirrored in the shaft of sunlight and the crash of thunder. Today, at least some of us understand that we live in an undesigned and unintended universe, compelled to rely on ourselves for meaning and a sense of mission in life. In many ways the pre-scientific view is more comforting. Surely we can understand the emotional appeal of the Luddite impulses that drive postmodernists to despise scientific inquiry—that inspire feminists and greens to attack the foundations of knowledge itself—that impel Smithson-ian curators to apologize for their predecessors' dislike of rats. Yet we cannot meet the challenges tomorrow will bring—some of which, admittedly, arise from yesterday's technological blunders—by following the most com-fortable path.

Do we know all we need to? Of course not. Must we act anyway? Almost certainly. Given those conditions, it seems unconscionable not to make use of all the information at our disposal, limited though it may be. Many of the authors in this section would agree that science is far from perfect. Yet despite its flaws it continues to stand as the most effective discipline fallible humans have yet discovered for unlocking the secrets that surround us—and, on balance, for

protecting us from our own mistakes. Surely at this critical juncture in human development, we have more to gain by loving rather than loathing the curiosity that drives us toward science and technology.

Acknowledgment

I wish to acknowledge the generous assist-ance of Zaius Marsalek and the Washington, D.C., Area Secular Humanists (WASH), through whose on-site inspection of the Smithsonian I learned that conditions are not any worse than herein described.

Notes

1. For the reflections of a one-time radical environmentalist on the excesses of this move-ment's radical fringe, see Martin W. Lewis, Green Delusions: An Environmentalist Critique of Radical Environmentalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992).

2. See Bernard 0rtiz de Montellano, "Mul-ticultural Pseudoscience: Spreading Scientific Illiteracy Among Minorities," Skeptical Inquirer, Fall 1991, 46-50; "Magic Melanin: Spreading Scientific Illiteracy Among Minorities," Skeptical Inquirer Winter 1992, 162-166.

3. Einstein was, of course, no postmodernist. He vainly sought a unified field theory in order to counter the counter-intuitive implications of quantum mechanics, from which effort springs his famous statement that "God does not play dice with the universe." Nonetheless, the success of his theory of relativity served the first indubitable notice upon the scientific community that the Newtonian model that had served so well for centuries was in for drastic revision.

Thomas W. Flynn is senior editor of FREE INQUIRY.

Fall 1994 17


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