"I didn't say that. The race brought its own destruction. Our culture was scientific anyway, in all except its psychological basis. It's up to us to take that last and hardest step. If we do, man - or man's descendants - my yet survive.'"
-Poul Anderson, Twilight World, Prologue, 5, p. 34.
In Anderson's first future history series, the Psychotechnic Institute tried to prevent human self-destruction by applying a predictive science of society and of individual psychology.
James Blish's After Such Knowledge Trilogy addresses the question whether the desire for secular/scientific knowledge is evil. Blish's Cities In Flight and The Seedling Stars answer that it is not. (See, in particular, the concluding section of the linked article, "Blish on Knowledge.")
CS Lewis argued in the non-fictional The Abolition Of Man and the fictional That Hideous Strength that scientists reconditioning human values would themselves lack values and would abolish humanity.
Science fiction asks: what is mankind and what should it do about itself?
After an afternoon with Nygel and visiting Art Questor, I will shortly meet Kevin and John in the Gregson Centre.
5 comments:
Science is about things which can be verified, or at least falsified -- the inverse square law, for example.
Politics cannot by its nature be "scientific", because it's about judgments of value, which are inherently and completely subjective.
You can argue logically -from- a moral intuition, but you can't argue logically -to- it. It's merely a statement of preference.
Values are about ends; science is merely about means.
Mr Stirling,
I agree. The same knowledge and understanding of social interactions and psychological processes could be applied to different political ends. Indeed, different political ends would generate different interpretations of social and psychological data. Different ends would even generate different data because different questions would be asked, different observations made, different experiments conducted etc. Lewis' Weston, assuming human superiority, would seek and no doubt find evidence confirming Martian inferiority.
Paul.
Superior or inferior by what criteria? - for a kick-off.
Well, there's ultimately "who can remove who from the gene pool".
That would work!
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