There is too big a gap in society. At Lancaster University, I both studied at postgraduate level, thus coming into contact with a lot of full-time professional academics, and worked part-time moving furniture from one building to another, including for the Religious Studies Department where I had studied, thus working alongside some guys who could see no point whatsoever in any expensive scientific research. Of course, they took for granted and benefited from technology that required such research plus which pure research, like Einstein's, has unpredictable practical applications but my workmates had no occasion to reflect any further on the matter. We do not need to be so polarized. The motto of Lancaster University is Patet Veritas Omnibus, "Truth lies open to all," but it is expressed in Latin so that my fellow furniture removers would not be able to understand it. (I would prefer not a ban on Latin mottos but an educational system that made their meanings more easily accessible.)
Later, when I worked full-time for a local authority, there was too big a gap not only between management and the shop floor but also between shop stewards, like me, working full-time on the shop floor and full-time union officials who were forever telling us that we had not followed correct procedures and therefore that whatever we had done had been counterproductive. (I also learned a solution to this latter problem: in another authority, one steward worked 50% of the time in his regular job and had 50% facility time for union work. Thus, he was neither cut off from the shop floor nor alienated from the union full-timers.)
If we are clear about the extent of this problem in current society, then I think that we can better appreciate HG Wells' The Time Machine where the Victorian bourgeoisie and proletariat devolve into Morlocks and Eloi and also Poul Anderson's Harvest Of Stars where the extra-solar colonists receive these communications from Earth:
"...an increasing percentage of superior humans and metamorphs integrate themselves with the system, but this does not transform, rather it transcends their nature. They realize their fullest potential and then go beyond it." (57, p. 486)
"It is evident from your recent communications that you and the limited artificial intelligences you employ no longer find us comprehensible. Unless you care for news of whatever unintegrated humans are left on Earth, and we project that that would be of no more significance to you than to us, further contact is pointless and probably, for you, inadvisable." (61, pp. 507-508)
Superior human beings can realize and transcend their potential whereas unintegrated human beings are insignificant? Then why not terminate them? We know of a twentieth-century political movement that would agree with that.
In fact, it is the extra-solar colonists who, eventually, learn how to use technology not to negate but to enhance organic human life.
4 comments:
Nobody can know everything, and people generally don't acquire information that's not relevant or useful to them.
Kaor, Paul!
While I agree with Stirling's comment above, I would have added that you have to EXPECT some degree of polarization, because that is simply how real human beings behave.
Most of us are simply not going to have the talents or cast of mind needed for making and exploiting fundamental scientific and technological advances. Here I mean real persons like Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Bill Gates, or Elon Musk. Or fictional ones like D.D. Harriman, Nicholas van Rijn, or Anson Guthrie. So the existence of those persons you once knew who could not understand the need for scientific research does not surprise me.
Ad astra! Sean
Granted that no one can know everything and that knowledge is specialized. The more we know the more we realize how little we know. But some people know so little that they don't realize how little they know! The guys to whom I referred were completely alienated from academic knowledge. We could have a culture where there is a better appreciation of knowledge and there are less social barriers between people in different kinds of work.
Kaor, Paul!
I agree on the desirability of having a culture with more appreciation for GENUINE knowledge. Not the kind of PC nonsense we see so much of these days. And the desirability of there being fewer social barriers between people in varied lines of work. Altho I remain skeptical of the latter, if only because so many are so snobby!
Ad astra! Sean
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