“Education is the most powerful weapon we can use to change the world”
– Nelson Mandela
Given the seemingly never ending stream of bad news (climate change, poverty, wars, social inequality, massacres, the irreversible destruction of habitats and the rise of militant Islam), it would seem that as a species, we are drifting into the arena of the unwell.
The western world is obsessed with economic growth, driven by the myth that human satisfaction can be achieved through the accumulation of material possessions, that if we keep making and buying ‘things’ we’ll be happy. Corporate interests determine foreign policy, the rich are getting richer, the poor poorer, with over 2 billion people forced to drink toxic water. The worlds majority still believe in magic and superstition, faithfully dedicating their thoughts and services to the fictional musings of our ancestors. To quote Sam Harris, we live in a world where Muslims riot by the hundreds of thousands over cartoons, where Catholics oppose condom use in villages decimated by AIDS, and where the only ‘moral’ judgement guarenteed to unite the better part of humanity at this moment is that homosexuality is wrong.
Contrast this reality with another. In the not-so-distant future, scientific breakthroughs will afford total command over the material world, allowing infinite opportunity to create, but also destroy. Given our ability to weaponise breakthroughs in scientific understanding, and failure to control our irrational vices, can we still be optimistic about the future?
I recently read a great book that attempts to address this very question. The author asks many of the worlds leading thinkers across a range of fields what is that they feel optimistic about. The answers are refreshing, and having just finished the book, I thought I would share with you several themes that jumped out and made me happy.
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War will end (Steven Pinker, John Horgan, John McCarthy)
Our evolutionary cousins are violent, and regularly fight inter-communal wars. In some chimp communities, it has been observed that more than 33% of males die by violence. For primitive Human societies, it has been estimated that mortality rates may have reached 50%. Contrast this with today. Even in the blood soaked and brutal 20th century, it is estimated that 100 million men, women and children died from war related causes (including disease and famine) – less than 2% of the world’s population.
These statistics will provide little comfort for victims of recent conflicts; nevertheless there is no disputing that things are moving in the right direction. Cruelty, Human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery, genocide, mutilation, murder, rape and torture are much less prevalent than they once were, especially in the west. When they do occur, these practices are increasingly scrutinized and generally met with alarm and disgust. Our powers of empathy appear to be growing. This surely gives us something to remain optimistic about.
Several reasons have been attributed to this general moral progress. Our lives are longer and less painful than ever. When tragedy and early death are no longer expected features of our own life, perhaps we feel reluctant to inflict these features on others. Some point to the rise in global trade, where other people are more valuable to us alive than dead. I am inclined to agree with Peter Singer and attribute these changes to ‘the golden rule’, the more we understand and think about life, compassion and the universe, the harder it is to priveldge our own interests over those of other sentient beings.
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The truth will set us free (Carlo Rovelli, Anton Zeilinger, Sam Harris, Clay Shirky, J. Craig Venter)
Anaxaminder once suggested that rain is not sent by Zeus, but water evaporated by the Sun and carried by the wind. 26 centuries have passed since then, but many still reject that scientific thought is rich, deep and good for us. In the small world of academia at least, this is not the case. Intellectuals on all sides realise that the enormity of contemporary knowledge cannot be grasped without looking at everything. Science without philosophy is impoverished, philosophy without science is blind.
Science has helped guide us out of the dark, telling us how things are, but has so far stayed very quiet about how things ought to be. This is partly due to the current limitations of our scientific inqury, but also due to the fallacious Cartesian assumption that minds and matter are somehow different. With a greater understanding of the physical brain, we will slowly converge on objective claims about the real foundations of morality and human flourishing.
Evidence-based decision making will continue to improve society, particularly as we begin to understand and unlock ‘big data’. We will learn more about the human condition in the next two decades than we have the past two millenia, and will be better placed to apply what we learn, from evidence-based politics, evidence-based law, to evidence-based teaching and parenting.
We are the universe, we seldom realise the cosmos is a living organism. That very understanding is at the heart of our breakthroughs in understanding consciousness from both a scientific, and spiritual perspective. We have just began to scratch the surface of the implications of this truth, but as we understand more, will find a completely new way of looking at the world which will transcend our current understanding of ourselves and our place in the universe, without greed, hate, selfishness or delusion.
Here’s to hope.
Science in our lives 