The Impact of Scientific Ignorance on Society

As a society, we walk a tightrope between limbo and extinction. We’re on a threshold of survival, in a society threatened as never before to find the way, with less and less margin for error. The decades ahead to the year 2000 and beyond, as were the decades just past, can be either interrogative, presumptuous, or insane. And we have to create our own flight plan, because this Earth didn’t come with one telling us how to get to the future safely. The winds of change are blowing across this land. We’re a nation that can’t afford many more crash landings, yet we keep putting untrained pilots in the cockpit and thinking we’ll all somehow come out all right. No way. No longer.

Today’s climate of controversy, confusion, and too often outright hysteria, compounded by exaggeration and often lies, has brought us to a real crisis, a crisis of confidence in ourselves, a crisis of credibility, and we’re all close to totally disbelieving one another in this country, the media and the government, the people and the government, and sometimes, although not enough, the people and the media. You don’t ask us enough questions. The day’s news leaves even us in the news business feeling stupified, outraged, and heipless. The whole thing reminds me of the 91-year-old astronaut who was asked for his views on homosexuality and replied, “They used to hang men for it in my grandfather’s day. In my father’s day, they put people in prison for it. Now it’s permitted. Well, I want to get out of here before it becomes compulsory!” Or, as one researcher friend puts it, “It’s always darkest just before it gets totally black.” The lesson of the past, if there is one, is that we can’t ignore the future. It is here, now, and inescapable.

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A new climate of almost hysterical disregard for the technological needs of an overpopulated world has sprung up, a world which would starve and succumb to disease if we tried to return to the simple life of a century ago. Technology must not be destroyed; it can and must be controlled, and not with distortions leading to erroneous conclusions, not with unproven charges. As Admiral Rickover once put it, “Half truths are like half a brick; they can be thrown farther.”

Anticipating the future is the lesson of the past, and the modern world is increasingly disenchanted with the technological progress that makes life possible.