Monday, March 19, 2012
Better than 84
Looking for the exact Orwell quote about Quakers to buttress the previous entry, I ran into another Orwell essay that I'd never read before.
What is Science? from 1945.
This will do:
Exactly. And the situation has grown massively worse since 1945, with vastly narrower specialization and professional tunnel vision.
But even Orwell isn't perfect. In other parts of the essay he bemoans the fact that "scientists" in his time gravitated toward Nationalism, helping America and Britain to develop the A-bomb.
He was factually wrong, but the facts weren't public in 1945. Many of the top-level physicists were in fact internationalists just like Orwell, and were working for America and Britain as a temporary tactic to help Stalin defeat Germany, while quietly feeding secret info to Stalin.
When Stalin turned against the West the very next year, those same physicists followed him, helping to create the United Nations and the pro-Soviet peace movement, thus unraveling the Western victory. ¶ 5:41 PM
What is Science? from 1945.
This will do:
But does all this mean that the general public should not be more scientifically educated? On the contrary! All it means is that scientific education for the masses will do little good, and probably a lot of harm, if it simply boils down to more physics, more chemistry, more biology, etc., to the detriment of literature and history. Its probable effect on the average human being would be to narrow the range of his thoughts and make him more than ever contemptuous of such knowledge as he did not possess: and his political reactions would probably be somewhat less intelligent than those of an illiterate peasant who retained a few historical memories and a fairly sound aesthetic sense.
Clearly, scientific education ought to mean the implanting of a rational, sceptical, experimental habit of mind. It ought to mean acquiring a method — a method that can be used on any problem that one meets — and not simply piling up a lot of facts. Put it in those words, and the apologist of scientific education will usually agree. Press him further, ask him to particularize, and somehow it always turns out that scientific education means more attention to the sciences, in other words — more facts. The idea that science means a way of looking at the world, and not simply a body of knowledge, is in practice strongly resisted. I think sheer professional jealousy is part of the reason for this. For if science is simply a method or an attitude, so that anyone whose thought-processes are sufficiently rational can in some sense be described as a scientist — what then becomes of the enormous prestige now enjoyed by the chemist, the physicist, etc. and his claim to be somehow wiser than the rest of us?
Exactly. And the situation has grown massively worse since 1945, with vastly narrower specialization and professional tunnel vision.
But even Orwell isn't perfect. In other parts of the essay he bemoans the fact that "scientists" in his time gravitated toward Nationalism, helping America and Britain to develop the A-bomb.
He was factually wrong, but the facts weren't public in 1945. Many of the top-level physicists were in fact internationalists just like Orwell, and were working for America and Britain as a temporary tactic to help Stalin defeat Germany, while quietly feeding secret info to Stalin.
When Stalin turned against the West the very next year, those same physicists followed him, helping to create the United Nations and the pro-Soviet peace movement, thus unraveling the Western victory. ¶ 5:41 PM
