09/11/2007

The Sky is Not Falling

This weekend my father gave me an article from Reason magazine ("the magazine of free minds and free markets") provocatively titled "The Four Boneheaded Biases of Stupid Voters." I found the fourth bias particularly salient: apparently, people believe the world is getting worse.

Admittedly, there's plenty of bad news every day. If you focus on the headline-making environmental disasters, human rights violations, political scandals and economic crises, the world is bound to look doomed. And it's not just the media that profits from focusing on bad news. It's central to the nature of their profession for politicians (top headline-getters themselves) to focus on the negative – the worse things are, the more we need politicians who will improve them. As the New York Times put it in the lead of a front-page article this past Saturday, "For the first time in four years, economic concerns are rivaling the war in Iraq as a top issue on the political agenda." (And the top story in the newspaper too.)

Unfortunately, the public is buying all this doomsday talk. And it’s not just "stupid voters." Yesterday I finished some assigned reading in a book by a professor at the London School of Economics. The author discusses science as the originator of modern societies, but criticizes the persistent Enlightenment-era myth that science will unify the world into a harmonious modern society based on scientific truths. I have no argument with his assertion that utopia is unattainable. But I ceased to admire this well-educated, widely published scholar when he concluded his book thus:

The human prospect is shaped by rising human numbers, mounting competition for natural resources and the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Each of these forces is a by-product of the growth of scientific knowledge. Interacting with historic and religious enmities, they augur conflicts as destructive as any in the twentieth century.

This pessimistic conclusion is based on the author's conviction that science drives history, with or without human consent. Astoundingly, he defends this perspective with Darwin's theories, claiming, "There is no room in [Darwin's] theory for free will." Poor Darwin would turn over in his grave if he knew the perverse ends to which his discoveries have been applied (think eugenics, for starters).

Just hours after finishing that infuriating book in a huff over its irrationality and pessimism, I was presented with vindication on a silver platter. This morning, The New York Times published an article titled "Low Technologies, High Aims." It was that rare beast, good news, about a workshop at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The goal of the month-long summit was to apply technology to the simple but serious problems of the participants' home countries, sixteen developing nations including Brazil, Tanzania, Ghana and Guatemala. Prototypes created included a backpack for carrying water from rural wells and charcoal made of corncobs and cow manure. Now what was that about scientific progress being driven by animalistic instincts for self-preservation?

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