http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/8/rubin.htm

Daedalus and Icarus Revisited

Charles T. Rubin
"Man or Machine?" (Winter 2004)
"Artificial Intelligence and Human Nature" (Spring 2003)

Doubts about the goodness of scientific and technological progress are
hardly new, and fears about the dangers of human knowledge existed long
before it became plausible to worry that the fate of the entire world
might be in peril. The physicist Freeman Dyson offers one common—and
very modern—way of describing our predicament: “Progress of science is
destined to bring enormous confusion and misery to mankind unless it is
accompanied by progress in ethics.” In other words, we need some novel
ethic to match our technological ingenuity. But progress in ethics
might also mean what Abraham Lincoln had in mind when describing the
principles of the Declaration of Independence as “a standard maxim for
free society ... constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even
though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated.” Dyson’s idea
suggests new ideals replacing old ones as history moves technologically
forward; Lincoln’s idea suggests more permanent human aspirations that
serve as the measure of different ages. Either meaning poses very
serious challenges. Genuinely novel ethics are not always genuine
improvements, while many anciently articulated ethical goals remain
elusive.
The ambiguity in the meaning of moral progress is at the heart of a
1923 debate between biochemist J. B. S. Haldane and logician Bertrand
Russell, two of the greatest and most argumentative public
intellectuals of twentieth-century Britain. Haldane, who would go on to
an extremely distinguished career as a biochemist and geneticist, spoke
under the auspices of the Cambridge Heretics discussion club. Russell,
already a famous philosopher, answered him as part of a speakers series
sponsored by the Fabian Society under the general title, “Is
Civilization Decaying?” The published version of Haldane’s remarks
created no little controversy; even Albert Einstein had a copy in his
library. There is also little question that Haldane’s work influenced
two of the greatest British critics of scientific and technological
progress: Julian Huxley and C. S. Lewis.
The titles of the essays, Haldane using Daedalus and Russell Icarus,
support the common idea that Haldane writes as an advocate of progress
and Russell as a skeptic. While this view is understandable, it is
hardly exhaustive. Haldane freely highlights horrible possibilities for
the future, and he is quite blunt about the socially problematic
character of scientific research and scientists. Russell, on the other
hand, can imagine circumstances (albeit unlikely ones) where the power
of science could be ethically or socially constrained. The real
argument is about the meaning of and prospects for moral progress, a
debate as relevant today as it was then. Haldane believed that morality
must (and will) adapt to novel material conditions of life by
developing novel ideals. Russell feared for the future because he
doubted the ability of human beings to generate sufficient “kindliness”
to employ the great powers unleashed by modern science to socially good
ends.
Both authors explore the problem of relating moral and technological
progress with sufficient depth that we would benefit by reexamining
this debate with a view to our own time. But the manner in which they
frame the problem stands in the way of articulating a clear moral goal
that might serve as progress’s purpose and judge. With serious ethical
discussion thus sidelined, technological change itself becomes the
fundamental imperative, despite the reasonable doubts both Haldane and
Russell have concerning its ultimate consequences. And while Haldane is
more loath to acknowledge it than Russell, the net result of their
debate is a tragic view of mankind’s future, marked by an
irreconcilable and destructive mismatch between our aspiration to
understand nature and the power we gain from that knowledge.
In the Image of Science
Haldane begins Daedalus with a directness that does not characterize
most of the essay that follows. Drawing on scenes of destruction from
World War I and from casual discussion of the possible reasons for
exploding stars, he asks whether the progress of science will culminate
in the complete destruction of humanity or in the reduction of human
life to an appendage of machines. “Perhaps a survey of the present
trend of science may throw some light on these questions.” It is
already revealing that Haldane gives this kind of scientific projection
such a privileged place, for it suggests that in his mind the primary
question behind the destruction of mankind is simply whether science
will gain the power to accomplish it. If the central issue of our
future is the power to destroy ourselves, then the most obvious way of
avoiding that risk is preventing mankind from gaining that power in the
first place. Yet Haldane sees no realistic chance of stopping the
progress of science. He argues that believing in the future might
strangely require a willingness to see all that we know destroyed and
replaced. Even if we can avert apocalyptic disaster, we will remake
ourselves in unrecognizable ways.
Haldane believes that biology is likely to become “the center of
scientific interest” in the future, and this is where the bulk of his
essay is focused. But he digresses to discuss the situation in physics,
which is in a “state of profound suspense ... primarily due to
Einstein, the greatest Jew since Jesus.” Avoiding an “inevitably
technical” discussion of physical theory, he decides instead to
speculate on the “practical consequences of Einstein’s discovery.” In
so doing, he provides a preview of the logic that will inform his
entire essay. Einstein heralds the end of the era of Newtonian physics,
whose concomitant working metaphysic was materialism. This scientific
revolution means the coming of a new metaphysical and moral order, and
Haldane predicts that Einstein’s work will bring with it a triumph of
Kantian idealism (although he admits that he does not know exactly what
this change will mean in practice). He projects further that “some
centuries” hence “physiology will invade and destroy mathematical
physics.” Overall, “we are working towards a condition when any two
persons on earth will be able to be completely present to one another
in not more than 1/24 of a second.... Developments in this direction
are tending to bring mankind more and more together, to render life
more and more complex, artificial and rich in possibilities—to increase
indefinitely man’s powers for good and evil.”
This statement is an answer of sorts to the original question: Will man
survive, and what will he be like? Haldane’s answer hardly seems like
much of an advance over where the essay began: Self-destruction, he
suggests, is a genuine possibility as we “increase indefinitely man’s
powers for good and evil.” But in fact, Haldane has laid out two
crucial elements of his larger argument. First, there is the implicit
definition of progress: bringing mankind closer together, increased
complexity, artificiality, and open-endedness. We will see how this
view culminates in his picture of a united humanity working to
transcend itself, and in his turn to evolution as a form of salvation.
Second, as Haldane understands the world, scientific discovery brings
with it a horizon of belief that sets the parameters of daily life.
While Haldane will speak of “labor and capital” as “our masters,” his
essay attempts to show how it is really the scientists, the Daedaluses
of the world, who discover new ways of seeing and doing, and at a far
deeper level are in control. This point is reiterated in yet another
digression on “the decay of certain arts,” which Haldane describes as a
consequence of artists not understanding the scientific and industrial
order in which they live. This view of science’s role in setting the
agenda for human life has crucial consequences for the ethical question
that is supposed to be the motive force behind the essay. If science
shapes the parameters of human aspiration and human virtue, then
morality is simply an effort to respond to man’s ever-increasing and
ever-changing power over nature. We judge ourselves in the image of
science, not science in the image of some transcendent idea of the
human good.
The Malleability of Morals
When the main topic of the essay—advances in biology—is taken up, the
subject is again introduced with a digression. To foretell the impact
of future development in biology, Haldane looks at four “biological
inventions of the past” to see the nature of their consequences. Three
inventions are stated directly: domestication of animals, domestication
of plants, and production of alcohol. A fourth is only hinted at,
involving an unspecified invention that focused male sexual attention
on the female face and breasts rather than buttocks. Haldane also
mentions the invention of bactericide and birth control.
These biological inventions have two common characteristics. First,
they have had a “profound emotional and ethical effect” on human life.
Second, the biological invention “tends to begin as a perversion and
end as a ritual supported by unquestioned beliefs and prejudices.”
Haldane asks us to consider the “radical indecency” that milk drinking
introduces into our relationship to the cow, or the “process of
corruption which yields our wine and beer.” Any innovator who would
suggest such disgusting things would clearly at first be considered
outside the bounds of civilization. But civilization adjusts. In a
typical bit of satire, Haldane wonders what “strange god will have the
hardihood to adopt Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant,” tireless
workers for birth control and other secular causes of the nineteenth
century.
Haldane takes the figure of Daedalus as instructive about the changing
status of beliefs. Daedalus had no care for the gods, and the gods
failed to punish him even for so monstrous an act as breeding a woman
with a bull. “He was the first to demonstrate that the scientific
worker is not concerned with gods,” and thus he exposed himself to the
“universal and agelong reprobation of humanity”—with the exception of
Socrates, who was “proud to claim him as an ancestor.” The point here
is ambiguous. If there is ongoing disapproval of Daedalus, then
Haldane’s case that mankind adjusts its ideals to its technologies
seems questionable. Yet insofar as the West is heir to Socratic
rationalism, it is somehow also heir to Daedalus.
Haldane tries to clarify his argument that yesterday’s perversions
become today’s “unquestioned beliefs” by presenting the bulk of his
projections about biology in the form of an essay from “150 years
hence,” written by “a rather stupid undergraduate” reviewing the
progress made in this period. The student presents the most remarkable
achievements—a global food glut, the transformation of the color of the
ocean to purple due to the same microorganism that created the food
glut, the elimination of deserts, ectogenic children, and genetic
engineering—in a deeply matter of fact and unreflective way. This is
his world, and while intellectually he understands it has not always
been so, he is reasonably content with the way things are. Haldane
follows this mock essay with his own speculations on birth control,
eugenics, behavior control, the abolition of disease and old age, and
the transformation of death into “a physiological event like sleep,”
shorn of its emotional terrors.
In arguing that we adjust our ethics to our inventions, Haldane
exploits two truths about human life: over time, many ideas of right
and wrong do change in response to changed circumstances, and most
people do have a fairly thoughtless understanding of the sources of the
ideas of right and wrong that inform their moral horizons. But Haldane
draws too much from these observations, because he fails to connect
them in any way. He neglects to think about the possibility that
greater reflection on moral principles might lead to less malleability.
Socrates, after all, proceeded in his investigations by holding open
the possibility that opinion could be distinguished from truth, even in
moral matters.
For his most ancient examples, the truth of the ethical transformation
Haldane describes is so shrouded in myth and mystery that we cannot say
anything with certainty. Haldane does not even attempt to produce
evidence of a period of revulsion concerning milk, alcohol, or the
female face. He is on more solid ground with the cases of sanitation
and birth control. But the growing acceptance of both, in the face of
what Haldane would see as mere traditionally minded opposition, tells
us nothing in and of itself. We would need to examine, for example,
whether opposition to cleanliness was any more or less defensible in
its moral claims than opposition to birth control. Since Haldane does
not find it necessary to reflect on this point, he leaves himself open
to the charge of holding an unreflective and dogmatic belief in ethical
relativism, which from the start transforms all moral claims into
cultural prejudices. Indeed, when Haldane speaks in his own voice about
what the future holds, he notes that “I am Victorian enough in my
sympathies to hope that after all family life, for example, may be
spared,” even as it becomes unnecessary for women to bear children. His
only imaginable response to the abolition of the family is rooted in
emotions trained by the mores of a particular time and place.
At this point in the essay, it appears that Haldane can provide no
assurances that scientific progress will not lead to our demise. In
fact, that demise might be brought on by the way changes wrought by
science create new moral desiderata—new norms that adjust our
expectations to things that we once saw as evil, blinding us to a
self-destructive course. And even if science does not lead to our
demise, a man of the past looking into the future is unlikely to see
what he would call “progress” strictly speaking; he is likely instead
to see horrifying change and a generation that complacently accepts
indecency.
This part of Haldane’s essay culminates with the observation that the
“conservative has but little to fear from the man whose reason is the
servant of his passion, but let him beware of him in whom reason has
become the greatest and most terrible of the passions. These are the
wreckers of outworn empires and civilizations, doubters,
disintegrators, deicides.” This free-spirited view of human affairs
might be tolerable if one were confident that something better would be
built on the wreckage of the old. But on Haldane’s own understanding,
as presented so far, no such claim can withstand the fierce gaze of the
reasonable man. So it may come as no surprise that Haldane tries to
shift somewhat the ground of his argument.
Might Makes Right
This shift begins with Haldane’s argument that science should be seen
from three points of view: First, it is “the free activity of man’s
divine faculties of reason and imagination.” Second, it is “the answer
of the few to the demands of the many for wealth, comfort and victory.”
Haldane legitimately reminds us of the bargain on which modern natural
science rests, which allows the “free activity” of science for the sake
of the benefits it produces. (Of course, if those benefits are
inherently double-edged, one might reconsider the terms of the original
bargain.) Third, science is “man’s gradual conquest, first of space and
time, then of matter as such, then of his own body and those of other
living beings, and finally the subjugation of the dark and evil
elements of his own soul.” These conquests, Haldane acknowledges, will
never be complete but they will be “progressive.” And the “question of
what he [mankind] will do with these powers is essentially a question
for religion and aesthetic.”
This last point is breathtaking, as Haldane seems to understand. For
what are the “dark and evil” aspects of the soul that require conquest?
Not, apparently, the passion of unadulterated reason; not the urge to
destroy civilizations or commit deicide; not the urge to murder a rival
or satisfy a monstrous lust. Not, alas, if Daedalus is to remain a
model to be admired. And how do “religion and aesthetic” suddenly rise
to such a prominent place in shaping man’s fate, or is their impotence
in the face of scientific advance precisely the point? For Haldane
acknowledges that the scientific powers now being given to mankind are
like giving a baby a box of matches; we seem to possess the power of
gods and the wisdom of infants. How can we expect this all to turn out
well? In what sense can we call the “conquest” of nature and of the
human soul “progressive”?
Haldane’s hope is that “the tendency of applied science is to magnify
injustices until they become too intolerable to be borne, and the
average man whom all the prophets and poets could not move, turns at
last and extinguishes the evil at its source.” But with the impotence
of “religion and aesthetic” already confirmed, we are left to wonder
what Haldane means by injustice, or by what standard “evil” will be
recognized and judged. To clarify what he means, Haldane offers the
example of war. By making mankind more powerful, science has created
the “reductio ad absurdum” of modern warfare, and thus created the
circumstances that make world government more possible, since it is the
only vehicle that might stop apocalyptic self-destruction. (He wrote
this essay, remember, in the wake of what was then history’s bloodiest
war and at a time when the League of Nations still seemed to hold
promise.) As Haldane puts it: “Moral progress is so difficult that I
think any developments are to be welcomed which present it as the naked
alternative to destruction, no matter how horrible may be the stimulus
which is necessary before man will take the moral step in question.”
Our moral future thus depends on flirting with the technological brink,
which we seem destined to do whether we like it or not.
Haldane seems to believe that science first pushes society to become
more just according to the local standard of justice (“the scientific
worker is brought up with the moral values of his neighbors”). But then
science, by increasing our power and changing our circumstances, helps
to destroy that standard (“an alteration of the scale of human power
will render actions bad which were formerly good”). So at the very
moment that society is forced to become more just, it is on the way to
becoming more “outworn.” When Haldane concludes that the prospect for
humanity is “hopeful if mankind can adjust its morality to its powers,”
he means that progress can only in the most limited sense be seen as
the achievement of what was ineffectively advocated by prophets and
poets. His effort to soften his teaching on science’s power of moral
destruction fails; progress is not the realization of old ideals but
the necessary birth of new ones. “It is just because even the least
dogmatic of religions tends to associate itself with some kind of
unalterable moral tradition, that there can be no truce between science
and religion.”
Haldane eventually returns to what is central in his essay: the
influence of the man for whom reason has become “the greatest and most
terrible of the passions.” The essay concludes with a poetic evocation
of “the lonely figure of Daedalus,” conscious and proud of his
“ghastly” mission, “Singing my song of deicides.” From this point of
view, moral progress would mean adopting the view that “mythology and
morals are provisional” or situational—with Daedalus creating the
situations. In effect, Haldane transforms “might makes right” into the
hallmark of moral progress—an odd but deeply telling conclusion for an
essay that has come to be seen as an “optimistic” assessment of the
future of science.
Why does Haldane fail to appreciate this result? One reason is clearly
his romantic image of the scientist as a crusader for truth without
regard to consequences, and another reason is the need to free the
scientist to work unmolested despite all the acknowledged problematic
consequences of doing so. But more deeply, this moral concession to
scientific might is perhaps obscured for Haldane by his understanding
of the evolving character of scientific power—that is, by his idea of
the “gradual conquest, first of space and time, then of matter as such,
then of his own body and other living beings, and finally the
subjugation of the dark and evil elements of his own soul.” Part of
what Haldane has in mind by this growing, but always incomplete,
process of conquest is evident both in his look backward at past
discoveries and his look forward at future possibilities. By looking to
both past and future, he is attempting to overcome our prosaic
acceptance of current abilities, to highlight how remarkable they would
look from the perspective of the past, and how we might be similarly
impressed (or naïvely horrified) by what the future will make possible.
He wants us to be awed by what human beings can achieve through our
“divine faculties of reason and imagination,” and so to believe in the
self-transcending possibility of self-directed evolution. By realizing
the temporary character and utter foreignness of the human past, we
might put our faith in a post-human future.
Inventing the Future
This post-human project comes out even more clearly in Haldane’s story,
“The Last Judgment,” where he attempts to look forty million years into
the future of mankind. In this vision of the future, man’s use of tidal
power changes the orbit of the moon, drawing it close enough to be
destroyed and to destroy all life on Earth. In the meantime, mankind
makes multiple efforts to reach, colonize, and terraform Venus, taking
half a million years to achieve the first successful landing. Realizing
the hostile conditions for life on Venus, a group of men set out to
restart evolution; for by then, natural selection had been stopped and
mankind had reached a state of happy equilibrium indistinguishable from
utter stagnation. “Confronted once more with an ideal as high as that
of religion but more rational, a task as concrete as but infinitely
greater than that of the patriot, man became once more capable of
self-transcendence.” After only ten thousand years, a genetically
engineered offshoot of humanity is created, at odds with its
environment, hence driven and unhappy, hence a being that can survive
on Venus. These early settlers develop into a “superorganism” of
individuals mentally linked to one another, and they prepare a race
capable of colonizing the outer planets. Read in conjunction with
Daedalus, the story illustrates Haldane’s view of the consequences of
our increased scientific and technological powers: on the one hand,
destroying Earth and all human life, and on the other hand,
self-consciously directing human evolution into a form that can thrive
elsewhere. The noble goal of self-transcendence does not produce
happiness, but happiness means stagnation.
Haldane was familiar enough with the work of H.G. Wells to anticipate
the likely reaction to such a story. In its own time, it fires the
imagination, and hence serves the author’s purpose: to inspire people
to look to the future for guidance rather than the past. Seen in
retrospect, its very quaintness fuels pride in actual accomplishments.
But this way of understanding progress has a troubling side as well,
which is well illustrated in British author Olaf Stapledon’s work Last
and First Men, written very much under the influence of Haldane. The
book is a future history covering some two billion years, being
dictated to the author by one of the “last men.” During this period,
eighteen species of “men”—all of them human descendants but few
recognizably human—rise and fall, first on Earth, then on Venus, then
finally on Neptune.
The Stapledon story, whose early millennia clearly elaborate on “The
Last Judgment,” is rich in satire and imagination. Stapledon creates
distinctive races of men with their own abilities, physical
characteristics, and cultures: men that can fly, men with telepathic
powers, men that are nothing more than huge brains. Civilizations rise
and fall due to violence or stagnation; religions and social movements
form on the basis of misunderstandings; the past is forgotten and
rediscovered. But at a certain point all the races face the necessity
or desire for self-transcendence, the inner drive or external push to
be more than themselves. And it is just at this moment that most races
destroy themselves—either deliberately via successful evolution of
their successors, or unintentionally by unwise use of their scientific
powers. Despite the cyclical character of the story, marked by the rise
and fall of different races, there is also a broad progressive tendency
in the races’ increased power over their physical worlds, over their
own bodies and minds, and finally over their own pasts.
Some races are happier than others; some periods of time are more
blessed. But overall, the last men look back at the story and see it as
a tragedy. “If actual grief has not preponderated over joy, it is
because, mercifully, the fulfillment that is wholly missed cannot be
conceived.” The last men discover that their own end is coming due to
the disintegration of the Sun, and they cannot conceive of a way to
save themselves. Instead, they engage in two god-like efforts. The
first is an attempt to redeem the tragic past by “participation” in it,
exemplified by sending this history back to their ancestors. (Stapledon
does not here trouble himself much with the paradoxes of time travel.)
The last men hope that what they see as signs of providence—signs for
which they are not responsible—are evidence of a future intelligence
yet greater than their own. The second god-like effort is an attempt to
seed the cosmos with life, in the hope of beginning somewhere else the
long evolution towards intelligence.
What drives them, even knowing that there is a limit to their days, is
that same impulse for self-transcendence, which becomes their effort to
redeem the whole tragic history of intelligent life. With the end
looming, they seek to make the finite eternal:
If ever the cosmic ideal could be realized, even though for a moment
only, then in that time the awakened Soul of All will embrace within
itself all spirits whatever throughout the whole of time’s wide
circuit. And so to each one of them, even to the least, it will seem
that he has awakened and discovered himself to be the Soul of All,
knowing all things and rejoicing in all things. And though afterwards,
through the inevitable decay of the stars, this most glorious vision
must be lost, suddenly or in the long-drawn-out defeat of life, yet
would the awakened Soul of All have eternal being, and in it each
martyred spirit would have beatitude eternally, though unknown to
itself in its own temporal mode.
Is this passage simply like others in the story, where Stapledon is
more obviously satirizing self-deceptive mystical beliefs? And are we
to believe that the real future of intelligence rests with the last
men’s effort to seed the galaxy with life? If so, then the tragic
element of the story becomes the final moral lesson: If intelligence
arises again, why should not the whole bloody mess simply repeat itself
in some new way? Yet it seems more likely that this passage is not
satire at all, and through his own future history Stapledon comes to an
important insight: perhaps the human desire for self-transcendence is
really a world-transcending aspiration, an “attraction to infinity.”
Properly understood, that attraction might open the door to genuine
religious faith.
Haldane approaches a similar conclusion at the end of “The Last
Judgment,” where he acknowledges that religion and science teach some
of the same lessons, although for different reasons. Religion says that
it is a mistake to think that one’s own “ideals should be realized,”
because “God’s ways are not our ways.” Science says instead that “human
ideals are the products of natural processes that do not conform to
them.” Religion teaches an “emotional attitude to the universe as a
whole,” a sense of human limitation that is only confirmed when science
illuminates the awesome immensities and complexities of the universe.
Both teach us to “conjecture what purposes may be developed” and to
think grandly about human plans and our unselfish “cooperation” in
them.
Both religion and science, in other words, teach that “events are
taking place for other ‘great and glorious ends’ which we can only
dimly conjecture.... Without necessarily accepting such a view, one can
express some of its implications in a myth.” If there is even this
degree of convergence between religion and science, why prefer myths of
the future over existing stories of God’s presence in history? Why look
to the future instead of the past? The answer, for Haldane, is because
such future-oriented stories are obviously provisional, because they
glorify human power and achievement and carry the authority of science,
and because they can be constructed to propose no moral absolutes.
Daedalus is a delightful essay, literate and witty. As a scientist,
Haldane deserves credit for refusing to provide a guarantee for the
human future, and he is right to suggest that our uncertainty stems
from “the old paradox of human freedom re-enacted with mankind for
actor and the earth for stage.” But for all the charm of Daedalus,
Haldane does not recognize that this great paradox is being reenacted
without a moral compass, and thus without any serious basis to call
what may happen in the future, even if we do not destroy ourselves,
genuine “progress.” The substitution of science fiction for religious
tradition is not obviously an advance when it comes to making serious
judgments about “great and glorious ends,” particularly if those ends
finally derive from Daedalus’ willful quest for power. In the end,
scientific progress parallels moral progress only if might does indeed
make right. And while Socrates might honor the curiosity of Daedalus,
even he could not accept such a blind definition of the human good.
Servant of the Ruling Class
Bertrand Russell’s reply to Haldane does not start in an especially
promising way. He characterizes Daedalus as “an attractive picture of
the future as it may become through the use of scientific discoveries
to promote human happiness,” which hardly seems an adequate description
of Haldane’s intention or his belief that the future happiness of our
descendants will probably not look attractive to us. In contrast,
Russell thinks that science will continue in the future to do what it
does in the present: not serve human happiness in general but serve the
power of “dominant groups.” This is a proposition that Haldane would
not necessarily deny, although he has a deeper view of exactly who is
whose master. Russell then says that he will focus on “some of the
dangers inherent in the progress of science while we retain our present
political and economic institutions”—yet again, a premise with which
Haldane would almost surely agree. So far, at least, there would seem
to be no real debate between the two men.
Like Haldane, Russell divides his discussion into various fields of
science (physical, biological, anthropological), and he freely combines
projection into the future with satiric commentary on the present. In
laying out his broad purpose, Russell eventually adumbrates his first
real differences from Haldane. Acknowledging the huge effect science
has made in shaping the world “since Queen Anne’s time,” Russell
observes that the impact of science can take two basic forms: first,
“without altering men’s passions or their general outlook, it may
increase their power of gratifying their desires,” and second, it may
change their outlook on the world, “the theology or philosophy which is
accepted by energetic men.” Russell will focus, he says, on the first
kind of effect: how science serves existing desires rather than how it
creates new worldviews.
This restriction appears curious at first sight, for it gives the
appearance of circularity to Russell’s understanding of the results of
scientific progress. If he thinks science is problematic under present
circumstances, it may be because he is not interested in thinking (à la
Haldane) about the manner in which science may form and change those
circumstances. Perhaps he sees science serving the interests of today’s
dominant groups because he is not considering how it might create new
dominant groups. Russell thus excludes from the start the possibility
that science will be anything but “conservative,” and he appears at
first critical of modern science precisely for this conservatism.
The divide between the two men turns out to revolve precisely around
this difference of emphasis. The key to Russell’s response to Haldane
is understanding why Russell thinks that, on balance, science is more
likely to serve existing power structures than to challenge them.
Russell announces his answer in brief early on: “Science has increased
man’s control over nature, and might therefore be supposed likely to
increase his happiness and well being. This would be the case if men
were rational, but in fact they are bundles of passions and instincts.”
The Cynical Utopian
Russell’s focus in Icarus is on the physical and anthropological
sciences, which he sees as having had a fourfold effect: increase of
population, increase of comfort, increased energy for war, and
increased need for large-scale organization. The fact that “modern
industrialism is a struggle between nations for two things, markets and
raw materials, as well as for the sheer pleasure of domination,” means
that war and large-scale organizations are particularly important. The
place of science in this struggle is ambiguous. While on one page he
says that the national character of organizational rivalry is something
“with which science has nothing to do,” just a couple of pages later he
concludes that “the harm that is being done by science and
industrialism is almost wholly due to the fact that, while they have
proved strong enough to produce a national organization of economic
forces, they have not proved strong enough to produce an international
organization.”
What stands in the way of international organization, he argues, is
that the pleasure produced by rivalry is the driving motivation among
the few rich men who control big business. To think that their goal is
wealth is to misunderstand them, like thinking that scoring goals is
the point of soccer. Were that true, teams would cooperate, for then
many more goals could be scored. So too with business: more cooperation
would mean more wealth. But in both instances, the really important
thing, the team rivalry, would be missing.
The power vested in these large organizations is already so great that
“the ideals of liberalism are wholly inapplicable” to the modern world;
there is no liberty except for those who control the sources of
economic power, no free competition except “between States by means of
armaments.” The only hope for freedom or democracy in a “scientific
civilization” would be if economic and nationalistic competition were
to produce one big winner, establishing a “cruel and despotic” global
tyranny. But in time, Russell hopes, the energy of the tyrants at the
top might flag, leaving behind a “stable world-organization,” a
“diminishment of the evils which now threaten civilization,” and “a
more thorough democracy than that which now exists.” Where Haldane
looks to the possibility of self-destruction as the potential impetus
to moral progress, Russell looks to tyranny as the potential pathway to
peace.
Both Russell and Haldane believe that scientific progress will be best
assured under world government. But why this should be so requires some
elucidation. Clearly, the key problem for Russell is rivalry combined
with the power of modern science, which is one powerful example of how
our passions and instincts lead to irrational results as circumstances
change. It is clear how tyrannical centralized control could use the
power of science to limit rivalry, but less clear how rivalry would not
arise even with world organization, once that control loosened and the
organization became a “more thorough democracy.”
A telling example of how Russell sees world government and its
relationship to science comes when he discusses the need to implement
birth control measures—particularly, he seems to expect, among
non-white races, so that no nation will grow much faster than others.
He expects white races, already showing signs of population decline, to
use “more prolific races as mercenaries,” threatening a revolt that
ends in the extermination of the white races. The casual racialism
behind such thinking, however common at the time among progressive
intellectuals, confirms the extent to which world government,
tyrannical or not, is unlikely to be premised on human political
equality.
When it comes to eugenics and the goal of producing a “better race,”
however, Russell is not a naïve inegalitarian, and it is here that we
reach the crux of his disagreement with Haldane. Like Haldane, Russell
expects that eugenic efforts will be attempted and may even work, but
on the whole he is skeptical about the moral prospects of positive
eugenics. Where Haldane imagines democratic campaigning for this or
that eugenic ideal (“Vote for Smith and more musicians”), Russell
thinks that such decisions “would of course be in the hands of State
officials, presumably elderly medical men. Whether they would be
preferable to Nature I do not feel sure. I suspect they would breed a
subservient population, convenient to rulers but incapable of
initiative. However, it may be I am too skeptical of the wisdom of
officials.”
Russell is also skeptical when it comes to the biochemical control of
behavior. This novel capacity would give those in charge “power beyond
the dreams of the Jesuits, but there is no reason to suppose they will
have more sense than the men who control education today. Technical
scientific knowledge does not make men sensible in their aims, and
administrators in the future, will be presumably no less stupid and no
less prejudiced than they are at present.” In this, at least, his
utopianism about world government is moderated by his realism about
human folly and perversion.
Russell raises this skepticism to the level of principle: Science
increases the power of those in power. If their ends are good, they can
achieve more good; if their ends are evil, more evil. “In the present
age, the purposes of the holders of power are in the main evil,” so
science does harm. “Science is no substitute for virtue; the heart is
as necessary for a good life as the head.” By heart, Russell means the
“sum-total of kindly impulses” which make people “indifferent to their
own interest” but in fact serve that interest, once it is properly
distinguished from a rationalized “impulse to injure others.”
Intelligence plus such deliberate desire “would be enough to make the
world almost a paradise.”
Russell is reasonably certain that science could increase the kindly
impulses, but also reasonably certain it will never happen. Those who
would make the discovery and administer the treatment (he imagines a
“secret society of physiologists” kidnapping and treating world
leaders) would already have to be governed by natural kindness,
otherwise “they would prefer to win titles and fortunes by injecting
military ferocity in recruits.” “And so we come back to the old
dilemma: only kindliness can save the world, and even if we knew how to
produce kindliness we should not do so unless we were already kindly.”
The remaining alternatives, Russell believes, are self-extermination or
“world-wide domination by one group, say the United States,” leading
eventually to an orderly world government. Yet the “sterility” of the
Roman empire leads Russell to conclude by wondering whether “the
collapse of our civilization” is perhaps the best answer after all.
Such glib and world-weary statements are part of what made Bertrand
Russell the man we remember as Bertrand Russell. But there remains a
serious claim being put forward. To Haldane’s core assertion that
science will produce progress by giving human beings the choice of
reform or oblivion, Russell responds that we will likely, and perhaps
even should, choose oblivion. Haldane looking forward sees future
evolution as our best hope; Russell looking backward sees our
evolutionary heritage as a fatal flaw. The full force of an analogy
used by Russell at the beginning of his essay only becomes clear at the
end: Dogs, he noted, overeat because they are descendants of wolves,
who needed to be driven by “insistent hunger.” Under domestic
circumstances, this retained drive hurts dogs. Likewise, human beings
have “instincts of power and rivalry” that are inconsistent with our
well-being, and hence self-destructive under present circumstances. And
these instincts, it seems, are more likely to be gratified by means of
science than altered. We are creatures of our nature, creatures of our
passions. Coming closer to the technological brink is not likely to
change this fact.
This outlook helps explain why Russell does not meet Haldane head on by
looking at the way science changes the outlook of “energetic men.”
Whatever the guiding theology or philosophy of the day, however
influenced it may be by modern science, natural instinct will win out.
“Science is no substitute for virtue,” Russell notes, but he puts
little weight on the ability of virtue to counter the raw human
instinct for power, injury, and rivalry.
Russell’s skepticism about the strength of virtue creates a moral
vacuum, which leads him to dark and dire conclusions. One does not have
to believe in man’s overwhelming goodness to wonder whether Russell’s
outlook is grounded more in fashionable cynicism than moral realism. If
injury, power, and rivalry were as powerful as Russell suggests, then
it is hard to see how life is not a great deal more terrible than it
already is. Moreover, it is not obvious why the generous and kindly
“impulses” must take a back seat to the darker passions. Russell
assumes, at best by analogy, that the rivalrous impulses would be those
more conducive to survival. But by his own admission, virtue is not
simply unnatural and may act to our benefit. As an example, he cites
the Quakers, who controlled a natural greedy impulse in the name of a
moral principle (don’t misrepresent prices) and had success as a
result. If once useful impulses can become self-defeating, why can’t
“kindly” impulses take their places?
In reality, we discover that virtue is of far less interest to Russell
than it ought to be. His cynicism about morality’s sway over the human
soul is really born of dissatisfied utopianism: “If men were rational
in their conduct ... intelligence would be enough to make the world
almost a paradise.” But as civilization is not made up mostly of
Bertrand Russells, there is little hope for anything other than
collapse. From this point of view, Russell looks like a disappointed
Haldane, the Haldane who looks with apparent equanimity on the
possibility that humanity may finally prove itself unworthy of survival
by not surviving. As Haldane put it, “At worst our earth is only a very
small septic area in the universe, which could be sterilized without
very great trouble, and conceivably is not even worth sterilizing.” By
different roads and for different reasons, both authors come to the
same anti-human conclusion. The core difference is that Haldane
believes we might become something better by shattering what we are
now.
The Real Meaning of Progress
So where does this debate leave us? It is telling that Haldane refers
to G. K. Chesterton towards both the beginning and ending of his essay.
The second time he quotes lines of poetry by Chesterton, without
attribution, to acknowledge yet again the potentially destructive power
of the human intellect. The first time he criticizes The Napoleon of
Notting Hill, which “prophesied that hansom-cabs would still be in
existence a hundred years hence owing to a cessation of invention.
Within six years there was a hansom-cab in a museum.” In commenting on
this apparent failure of prediction, Haldane gives some indication that
he might understand that Chesterton was not really predicting at all,
but satirizing predictors just like himself, who (in Chesterton’s
words) project small things of the present into big things of the
future, “just as when we see a pig in a litter that is larger than the
other pigs, we know by an unalterable law of the Inscrutable it will
someday be larger than an elephant.” But it is also possible that
Haldane missed the more serious point of Chesterton’s book: even if the
future were to look like the present with respect to hansom-cabs, it
would not mean that we are failures in the ways that matter most. There
would still be ample room for the whole range of human abilities and
aspirations to play themselves out both for good and for ill.
This truth is likely to be lost if we understand the human story in
terms of the aspirations outlined in Daedalus. Haldane believes in the
possibility, although not the necessity, that science will lead to the
progressive improvement of the world, because he thinks that human
beliefs can accommodate themselves to the changing conditions created
by the vast increases in human power. We are driven down that path by a
hitherto inchoate, and potentially self-destructive, desire for
self-transcendence, a desire that comes into its own when we have the
power to make it real. Progress cannot be measured by human happiness,
because happiness would produce stagnation. But Haldane’s notion of
progress is by necessity discontinuous, since the goodness of one stage
of the human story will not be recognizable as such by those at a
different stage. Only some imagined being of the far future, heir to
the whole human narrative, might be able to look back and see (or
construct) the thread that binds it all together, redeeming a chaotic
and otherwise tragic past.
Russell rejects Haldane’s picture of progress, because he thinks that
there is a fixity to those aspects of human nature that will lead us to
use the increased powers granted by science to destructive ends. The
powers of science could potentially be used to alter our nature,
Russell believes, but our nature provides significant disincentives to
doing so in any manner that will serve good ends. Generosity is in
short supply, so we should not expect to be engineered or biochemically
manipulated to be nicer to each other. To do so we would need to be
nice already. Unlike Haldane, Russell in this essay does not explicitly
make the realm of virtue and kindly impulses situational, but he does
believe that morality is very weak in comparison with other drives.
Absent some utopian re-ordering of the world, science really is giving
matches to babies.
For Russell, science places us on the edge of a cliff, and our nature
is likely to push us over the edge. For Haldane, science places us on
the edge of a cliff, and we cannot simply step back, while holding
steady has its own risks. So we must take the leap, accept what looks
to us now like a bad option, with the hope that it will look like the
right choice to our descendants, who will find ways to normalize and
moralize the consequences of our choice. Russell disarms virtue,
Haldane relativizes it.
The net result is that a debate about science’s ability to improve
human life excludes serious consideration of what a good human life is,
along with how it might be achieved, and therefore what the hallmarks
of an improved ability to achieve it would look like. Shorn of serious
moral content, the measures of “progress”—if it can be said to exist at
all—become our amazement at or dissatisfaction with all our discoveries
and inventions, our awed anticipation of what might yet be achieved,
our terror about what might go wrong along the way. The result of
framing the question of scientific progress in this way is evident in
the very structure of most popular discussions of science, both in
books and on television. Start with a little history to produce an
attitude of pride that we know so much more than we once did. Look at
what we know now, and stress the dangers of our remaining ignorance.
Anticipate the future, and how humbled we are that those who follow us
will know far more than we do if only we stick with it.
Above all, the very thinness of any notion of progress that survives
the Haldane-Russell debate—little more than the fact of accumulation of
knowledge and a vague hope that things might turn out well in light of
unspecified yet grand civilizational projects—helps to explain the
widespread belief that any effort to restrain science on the basis of
ethics represents a threat to “scientific progress.” To see this as
simply a result of the self-interest of scientists is to do them an
injustice. Like Haldane, most scientists are probably unaware of how
the belief that morality must adjust to scientific and technological
change amounts to saying that might makes right. The sense of threat is
partly due to the poverty of thought on the subject, and perhaps the
narrow education that is required for making measurable scientific
achievements. For restraint doubtless would slow accumulation, and
(from this point of view) can only represent the triumph of fear over
hope. But what is to be said for accumulation when Russell and Haldane
have done with it? It serves either the power of the conventionally
powerful or the power of the scientists.
A clear-eyed defense of science needs to take seriously the original
“bargain” that Haldane himself describes: that free research produces
increased well-being. To investigate the meaning of well being, or
doing well, means neither the dogmatic acceptance nor the dogmatic
rejection of the moral values of one’s neighbors. It requires avoiding
cynicism and utopianism about human motives and possibilities. It
requires a willingness to look at the question of the human good with
care and seriousness. And even if such an investigation yields a
complex and mixed picture of what a good life is and how science
contributes to it, the defense of science still requires the
willingness to encourage what is valued and discourage what is
troublesome, knowing that we will face many grave uncertainties and
honest disagreements along the way.
The Greek tale of Daedalus and Icarus illustrates that doubts over the
results of human knowledge and ingenuity are hardly new. The debate
enshrined in Daedalus and Icarus suggests that today the great increase
in our powers co-exists with a diminished capacity to think about them
with any kind of moral realism. By slighting ethics, Haldane and
Russell did not serve the cause of science well, since science only
matters in human terms if it truly serves our humanity. And that is by
no means guaranteed.