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The Idea Channel
What I find perpetually mysterious
is that science is so seldom
represented in literature, and so
seldom understood, in either
literature with a capital L which
typically means fiction by dead
people, or by the popular culture
which mostly seems to look upon
science as a convenient prop for a
paranoid plot structure, and yet
science is the big driver in this
century. Yes, science makes
history. But as a science fiction
writer, I mean you must know. You
practice the embodiment or
rendering of science in your
specific genre. It's true. The
science fiction has been kind of a
poor stepchild in literature for a
long time in spite its origin
within the last century. And it has
fallen into disrepute- or did in
fact in the 1920s when it became
the stuff of pulp magazines. But it
has seized the popular imagination
in America and around the world,
and dominates popular culture now
in a way that would have been
completely implausible say even in
the 1950s, when the march of
science into the media began in
various loathsome ways such as
giant ant movies, but also in the
things like the great SF movies of
say Forbidden Planet and The Day
the Earth Stood Still and so forth.
So it's a curious thing that
science is represented in the
popular culture mainly through
these images dominated by fear, and
of the low order, or what's held to
be the low order of popular
culture. Of course popular culture
is a thing which has a long history
of suddenly becoming recognized as
actually what was going on. Can we
not say that in a sense the world
has become science fiction?
That science fiction is the
unacknowledged legislator of our
future lives has witnessed
everything from the obvious man on
the moon to the perhaps less
obvious, but much more important
personal computer carried around by
people from place to place. And at
the same time that has occurred
hi-brow culture which has dominated
so overwhelmingly by people from
the humanities and the arts has
completely ignored or resisted this
whole facet of culture. Right and
made themselves obsolete, thereby.
The art novel, for example, which
is a recognized genre now with its
own audience, its marketing
package, its publishing strategy
used to be the core of conventional
fiction and now it simply can't
command that landscape. We've
gotten out of control. I mean would
you agree that there's been a
bifurcation in the hi-brow culture
between those elements that still
retain an affinity with the mass
culture? An example of that might
be Tom Wolfe, Bonfire of the
Vanities, and those elements that
clearly reject the broader culture
and dispel some type of extreme
ideology or stance. Perhaps... can
you give us an example, the really
extreme example? Well, I guess I
would think of someone like
Foucault and some kind of bizarre
Hegelian Marxists sadomasochistic
nightmare ideology as an extreme
example. Yeah... in fact, it's an
ideology of the extremes. Yes,
exactly. Which is in many ways has
been inherent in ideology as a
style of thinking since the mid
19th century. That's right. That
very extremism. There's not just
Foucault and the de Man scandal,
for example, surrounding
structuralism... a fellow who
maintains that texts really are, in a
sense meaningless, or introduces
relativistic values on them and
then turns out to be a Nazi
propagandist. I think that's
perfect. Yes... you have to admit
that they are consistent. Yes,
clearly the Goebbels' world flows
naturally. In many modern art
movements. Well, in fact, the Nazis
were an outgrowth of art movements
and that they were heavily
influenced by futurism, surrealism.
So, in a sense they're coming back
to their own. That's right. Well,
Hitler was a painter and a
vegetarian. An animal rights
activist. Right. An early animal
rights activist. But it is
mysterious to me still that our
culture has been in an uneasy way
restlessly trying to deal with
science, but does so almost
pathologically. It never really
represents scientists as people who
employ, what is after all, mostly a
matter of systematic common sense.
That's what the scientific method
is. It's not really mysterious. It
really is a logical continuation,
you might say, of ordinary Yankee
ingenuity. But perhaps the whole
problem is that what you are seeing
is the last stages of the war
initiated by Galileo- at least in
post medieval times- between the
men of science and their notion of
how the world should work, our
notion of how the world should
work, and the priests, Shaman,
conventional philosophers where I
use the term philosophy not in a
technical sense, but in fact a
careerist position. That is to say
we try to make our cases on the
basis of evidence, logic or
persuasion. The other side, as it
were, makes its cases primarily on
the basis of some combination of
received authority or arrogation of
moral stature as in the
revolutionary elite of the
Bolsheviks or any other type of
avant-garde art movement which says
we know the future, you don't.
You're the Philistine Bourgeois
majority therefore you have to
suffer at our hands, which of
course, is what modern art is all
about. And thus we will instruct
you. I mean there's this very big
divide. And the second school, what
I call the shamanistic school or
the hi-brow culture school, of
course, used to own everything. In
the 17th century they were the
entire educated elite and at that
time their instruments of choice
were the Bible and sometimes the
writings of Aristotle. More
recently the conflict is, of
course, is vastly broader and not
only physicists joined the fray,
but then of course, the biologist
would've joined the fray and
economists. Two sides are piling up
in this gigantic culture academic
football game that sort of fights
for two things: of course, the soul
of the university where we mostly
reside, and on the other hand, the
soul of the culture as the whole.
That's true... that's true. I have
a feeling that the humanities have
largely lost their understanding of
where the culture is going. They
continually seem to be blindsided
by events and scramble to adopt the
latest "ism" whatever it might be.
What really bothers me about this
abyss between the sciences and
humanities is that the first few
were attempting to build any
bridges, and second, that it
reflects in a culture as a whole.
The general ignorance about science
in the culture arises deeply from
inadequate education K through 12,
and has an enormous impact on
national politics upon rational
discussion of the standard style of
the media now. Either the
fictionalized media or the
so-called news media is essentially
paranoid. You can only report a
scientific story with a high
profile by making it induce
paranoia in at least some fraction
of the viewership. So the first
question that the reporters learn
to ask of anything new is: who does
it threaten? Not who does it help.
So in your own field in biology the
enormous emphasis on unwanted side
effects, gee suppose this modified
plant gets out and instead of being
a tomato it can resist frost, it
turns out to be a tomato that likes
to eat other plants or other
people. It's hard to imagine what
these people can imagine, but
there's a bias in favor of the
artificiality introduced by human
technology as being rapacious. I'd
call this the Jeremy Rifkin
syndrome overwhelmingly. Well I
think it really reflects this clash
of two worlds, two cultures in C.
P. Snow's terminology but actually
more profound than two cultures.
It's two futures or it's a past
wrestling with the future. If the
world is to be rationally
apprehended by the tools, science,
mathematic, evidence, logical
persuasion, then it has a certain
character to it in which threats
can be real threats and yet still
quantitatively evaluate it, still
discussed on an evidential basis-
or we could live in a Kafkaesque
world of nightmares burgeoning
everywhere of weird and bizarre
transformations in which we can
make no sense, and so long as we
have an educational system and a
culture, certainly the highbrow
humanities-oriented culture which
fosters the paranoia of which you
speak, then that sort of ammunition
in favor of this dark funereal
Wagnerian future with all of the
irrationality and all of this sort
of blood force and anxiety that I
think that the shamanistic
humanities culture requires to
survive. The more we radiate a
blinding light the more they have
to shrink. Your bringing up Snow is
really right on the mark, because
C.P. Snow was a major intellectual
figure of the 50s and 60s in
Britain. And regrettably he is very
little remembered now. But he
brought up the whole idea of the
two cultures and pushed it in a
series of lectures at Cambridge and
I reread those a year or so ago
plus the essay he wrote afterward
reflecting on it. His real point
about the two cultures was that it
crippled the advanced nations in
their attempting to uplift the bulk
of nations, that the division
actually hampered any of long-term
goals of the human race. If there
is anything I think most people
would agree about, it's for
fundamental reasons we should
attempt to increase the level to
uplift the lot of so many people
who live in abysmal ignorance and
poverty. You mean in humanities.
No, I didn't mean the humanities. I
mean the geographical south versus
the geographical north largely,
although actually, I would argue
perhaps what we used to call a
third world ought to be now
extended to cover the second world
since it's in a state of obvious
decrepitude. But Snow said unless
we follow these more modern ways of
analyzing problems and encouraging
rational debate we're going to
deliver ourselves into the hands of
people who will be unable to help
humanity. There's a way out of the
abyss of poverty and ignorance and
it has been demonstrated now in
modern times and some intelligent
adaptation- adapting of that to the
tropical nations let's call them- is
the way to go and it means lots of
things such as population control.
Let me offer you two things. The
first one is rather than two
cultures, Galileo proposed the
existence of three, which from my
understanding- which is of course
is limited- were the sort of
biblically-derived Aristotelean in
his system like a modern science
based system we now operate within,
you and I. So this kind of multiple
worlds distinction is, in fact, a
very long standing multiple worlds
of both intellect and approach to
life. And the second point I would
make comes from one of your fellow
science fiction authors R. A.
Lafferty in Past Master, in which
he contrasts a utopian brave new
world kind of system planned by
technocrats, with the reaction of
people to that technocratic world
and their abandonment of the
technocratic world to live in a
complete squalor. And I think a
very deep issue for people like us
sitting around a table talking like
H.G. Wells did in the 1930s, is
that we have to face the fact that
rational or technocratic or
scientifically-oriented approaches
to any problem may not appeal to
people because they believe
strongly in Allah, the revolution,
God, New York expressionist art
forms, sado- masochistic sex with
boys, whatever. They may have all
of those tastes and inclinations
they're absolutely unwilling to
give up in the face of our bland
proposals of efficiency or a
compromise or effective design.
That's true. We've of course
ignored the bureaucrats for the
pseudo-rational- that is- they are
not so interested in the frontiers
of knowledge as they are in control
which is power... which is another
issue. Scientists don't have power
except by long range. I mean
scientists have changed these terms
of strategic warfare fundamentally
and forever by inventing things.
We've changed the terms of
reproduction of writing letters, of
driving to and from work. Through
the implications of technology, but
also through the world view. The
fact that, after all, it's we who
are in the end responsible for a
great deal of the angst and ennui
that comes from the modern age.
That is, we have displaced humanity
from the center of creation. But is
that not, I think, a modern fiction
that modernity is responsible for
our ills. To what extent were there
ills 400 years ago before modernity
was really ever a problem? That's
one of the classic unexamined
questions. That's an ideology which
to some extent was put forward by
Rousseau. It was picked by Marx and
it was transmitted by every sort of
lump and intellectual assistant
professor of sociology that
modernity is awful and somehow we
try to struggle with it. What's
impressive to me is when you survey
real people and ask them about
concrete choices that they face
given technology is things like
telephones, cars. Would they really
be willing to give up those things
one by one and the answer is almost
always no by the vast majority. The
things that are out there that
people have, the highbrow culture
despises network television, still
appeal to a very large fraction of
people and may not be sources of
alienation or inconvenience or any
of those other things with
Rifkinesque paranoia that may fact
be comforting, supporting and
useful to everyday people who are
not faculty at universities. The
polyester leisure suit argument,
that it's hopelessly DeClasse, but
lots of people like it. And it is
more comfortable than burlap...
although I don't much like it. I
think there's a lot of logic to
what you say. It has been a long,
long time coming in western
literature as it tries to confront
science. I remember that, well take
the original text, Frankenstein and
the interesting thing about that
book, now, of course,
transmogrified into all sorts of
films, is that everyone takes
Frankenstein to be the name of the
monster, but it's the name of the
scientist. What does the scientist
do upon every appearance of the
monster? He goes literally, and
this is quoting Mary Shelley, he
goes into a "swoon like a heroine
in a Victorian novel."
He swoons away and is
literally unconscious when the
monster appears in his deadly
manifestations and in fact carries
off the scientist's bride. Which is
a little obvious, but it can't be
mistaken. The monster is the
scientist's unconscious it seems to
me. And what the text is saying is
that there this is something deep
and dark buried inside this urge to
knowledge. That knowledge is dark.
Well, is there something deep and
dark buried inside the urge to
knowledge, or is there simply
something deep and dark buried
within us period- which scientists
will suppress and disguise or avoid
as they pursue their trade? Well
you're right. I think Frankenstein
attempts to turn the discussion
back to the inner resources and
deep swamps of the scientist and
say in a sense well you're not
better than us maybe you're worse.
Ignoring the fact that what science
attempts to do is to get the swamp,
at least temporarily, out of our
arguments so we that we can
understand the world without being
possessed by all of the other
elements about our being. But the
shamanistic impulse, and similarly,
the sort of aggressive art
movements of the 20th century
clearly endeavor to exploit that
underlying core of Wagner...
perfect example of this. Just this
effort to get into the deep, dark
recesses, bring them up to the
surface and then in a sense, have
them rule. And that, of course, is
exactly what the Nazis exploited in
their whole system of hypnotizing
the German population. I mean
unlike the Bolsheviks, the Nazis
were overwhelmingly popular in the
political movement in Germany in
their day. This I think really is
the only reason why there is still
the ongoing struggle between the
side of sort of Galilean, modern,
scientific rationalism or
empiricism on the one hand and high
culture, art culture,
deconstructionism and all the rest
is this element that comes from,
obviously, the rest of the brain. I
think that's one of the crucibles
for our understanding of ourselves.
Evidently, that is the Freudian
territory and that's what Freud
brought forward at the turn of the
century, and then Jung and Adler
and all of the descendants sort of
kept stirring the pot. And that is
something that clearly, as
scientists, we have not yet
successfully dealt with the
questions that Freud raised and
that Hitler embodied in what he was
doing, and you could say turning it
around that someone like Foucault
embodies. There we are. I think
that's also what was in R. A.
Lafferty's Past Master, or for that
matter, Huxley's Brave New World
the unyielding irrationality at the
core of at least some human
behavior and experience. Yes, but
nobody really wants to banish
irrationality because after all
aesthetics is irrational, too.
Well, we don't deal with it. Right,
we don't deal with it. We just
evade the problem so it's out there
for everyone else to pick up on,
from Wagner to Foucault to anything
else. And so long as that is the
case, then the sort of one-eye man
in the kingdom of the blind
metaphor continues to apply to
science. You don't see with the
other eye. So we're walking into
things, clunk. And those things are
those irrationalities, those
pervasive paranoias which you
alluded to in the case of the
horror movies, or real world
disasters like fascism. And there's
a great fear actually, I believe,
in the culture that too much
emphasis on understanding ourselves
will lead to the kind of control
that everyone fears. Anthony
Burgess's A Clockwork Orange,
particularly Kubrick's film, is in
the end about how the irrepressible
self will still beat this new form
of social control. And in fact,
it's horrific. But it's also very
clear who you're supposed to
identify with in that movie. It
always is. I mean it's never the
sort of technocratic rationalist
who is the point of unification but
is always the earnest typically
imperfect, emotionally intense
young man, very rarely young woman-
which is interesting... who is the
focus of our affections. That's
right. Occasionally there's some
variations. Let's think of a
popular movie. Say Jaws, there's a
scientist in Jaws and he lectures
us about sharks and he has a hand
in putting down the irrational, the
dark force out of the sea...
although it's actually the cop- the
village policeman- who dispatches
the shark in the end. But the
scientist is the kind of- he's the
not the amusing sidekick, he's the
logical sidekick of the force of
order. And typically the scientist,
the kind, what was the guy's
name... the part played by
Christopher Lloyd in Back to the
Future, I think Doc Brown, is
typically portrayed as somewhat
ineffectual and very one-eyed in
Christopher Lloyd's character in
Back to the Future is typically
klutzy and mistaken in how he
thinks things are going to work.
And I think that is a very crude
evocation of the sense that people
have that sort of the modern,
rational, scientific world still is
not yet able to cope with the full
spectrum of human nature or the
human situation. It's true. It may
never be able to after all. But
there are all these fears running
through this. I've often wondered
why science fiction in the popular
media, particularly in films, has
been able to suddenly capture the
central ground of discussion.
Something like five out of the top
ten grossing films of all time are
science fiction. And the
interesting thing is that none of
them are directly taken from
science fiction text. They are
transmogrifications of lots of SF
ideas at the hands of very adept
filmmakers. So even when a film
like Aliens, for example, is a big
hit and it's very gloomy, gothic
science fiction. It comes from a
short story written by A. E. Van
Vogt called "Discord in Scarlet."
It's been ripped free of
attribution, no acknowledgment of
Van Vogt in the film which is a
matter of a lawsuit. The Hollywood
instinct is to believe that in the
Promethean legend that all these
ideas spring full blown from a brow
of graduates of U.S.C., but it
ain't so. It really does come out
of something deep in the culture
that has been hatching for a long
time. But I don't quite understand
in a way why science fiction has
been able to take over the turns of
discussion. It is almost as though
the field has been abandoned by
other forces. We live in a world of
science fiction as I said earlier.
I mean our present was science
fiction's past. Science fiction was
the only literature which really
was coming close to preparing us
for our world, the world we live
in. And in science fiction I think,
actually, an interesting point is,
as you yourself illustrated with
one of the first great science
fiction novels, Frankenstein, is
that science fiction very early on
had the conflict between the
rationality, the logic, the
scientific attempt to understand on
the one hand. On the other hand,
the dark forces of irrationality
and the unconscious science fiction
blended those things and presents
their tension and that's the
tension that we all live with. I
think in the middle ages where you
had for everyone essentially,
leaving aside a few scholars of
Greek texts, everyone lived in an
irrational world dominated by
rational forces. There was no
rationality- true rationality
counter-posed to irrationality. You
just have the sea of irrationality
of various types. There was the
good irrationality identified with
the Christian God and the various
other types of dark irrationality
which identify with the devil or
unreconstructed original sin, human
nature. But we all lived in that
world completely. Along comes
Galileo, along comes the modern
world and empirical irrationality
comes in and the tension for us to
build and we still live with that
tension. It's getting greater and
greater... you see it. Well, the
kind of acknowledged- the greatest
science fiction of film of all
time, 2001 has at the core its
deep, long plot problem is the
computer HAL who disrupts this
mission and it turns out it is
because he was programmed to
essentially lie and to conceal. And
he couldn't do it. It's a bit hard
to understand. So in a sense he
went onto greater equals. Yeah,
that's right. Well, think about the
opening sequence of that very film
which was not about HAL. It wasn't
even a terribly bland trip to the
moon. It was a bunch of primates
expertly made up from human actors
discovering the violent use of
tools against conspecifics. It was
the discovery of evil. Yes. It was
the discovery of power. Yes. And
the very bone with which our killer
primate killed the other primates
who were killed is tossed up into
the sky and becomes a piece of the
orbiting human artifact around the
planet. From technology, coupled
with evil and aggression, comes the
future of technological
developments. I mean obviously, the
atomic bomb is the perfect
illustration of the marriage of
technology and evil and the
potential for spectacular
destruction. And there it was. And
HAL, I think, was relatively- to
me- as a plot device relatively
unimpressive. Well, I didn't think
of science fiction but yes- it was
there. No... but those terrific
images.... that whole part in the
movie, by the way, was shot after
Kubrick had "finished the film".
And he was forced to put a frame
around the movie and that was it.
Now, who forced him? The studio.
Yes... bad, bad studios... always
bad for the creator. But in fact,
they actually improved that movie a
great deal. I remember Arthur
Clarke telling me that some studio
exec came out and said "I can't
figure this movie out. I don't know
what it's about. We open up and
there's this spaceship."
Blah...blah... blah. So Kubrick...
to keep down the budget he gave us
28 minutes with no speaking parts
and shot it. The open, by the way,
outside London, he just did some
background still shots for Africa
and shot the whole thing on a
platform outside London. People who
have this standard, romantic image
of the artist from whom everything
springs full blown never
acknowledged that most of what's
really interesting about popular
culture of the 20th century is
participatory and collaborative.
Films certainly are. Absolutely.
But what really strikes me is that
America is so weirdly obsessed with
it in the level of the department
of humanities a kind of an
inferiority complex about this.
They really think in terms of the
19th century that what is really
important is novels and symphonies,
and maybe even epic poems. But what
America is good at is its
inventions. It dominates popular
culture because say, look at music,
the Broadway musical, jazz, rock n
roll, blues, even rap music if you
want to count that. But in fiction,
it's invented most of the major
genres and dominates them utterly.
The modern hard-boiled detective of
modern suspense stories, science
fiction, modern fantasy. I thought
Casanova invented the science
fiction. No he invented the romance
novel, [laughs] which also is
dominated by American although out
of a long lineage. Of course,
there's always the western...
another stage- Perhaps one question
we could address is a difference
between, say, American culture on
the hand and European culture in
terms of their experience of the
tensions between scientific
rationality on the one hand and the
arts, the dark unconscious on the
other hand. In that sense I think
2001 is a film, is a European film.
Interesting. Made by Kubrick a guy
from the Bronx and Clarke a guy
from Sussex, no...I'm sure I'm
wrong- south of London. I think the
Europeans are actually better at
this than we are... although they
have less energy. Less synergy or
less energy. Ah, either synergy or
energy. [laughter] I mean it's
certainly true that they've shown
themselves very good at not getting
along with each other in this
century... so there's the synergy.
I mean, could one say something
like the following- and I'm just
offering this as like a clichÈ to
discuss. Is it true that American
civilization is a more
technocratic, rationalist
empirically-oriented civilization
in which the dark, unconscious
Wagnerian elements are relatively
suppressed, compared to the
Europeans who have more dark
Wagnerian elements of the
surface... or is that wrong? Gee, I
honestly don't know how to even to
think about it. It's very hard, you
know, as a fish to understand the
sea. It's very hard as an American
to swim in this culture and to
truly see it. We feel it
intuitively. There are writers like
J. G. Ballard who stand outside
American culture and write about it
obsessively and to him everything
is fraught with meaning, but to us
a freeway is a freeway, it's a way
of getting someplace. To him it's a
metaphor. So the difference between
us and the Europeans is that we've
now dominated the popular cultural
landscape and also the ideological
landscape for so long, but it has
been amazingly unconscious in many
ways. Is that uncharacteristic of
American culture that it's
amazingly unconscious? Yes, right.
One difference to me is the
self-consciousness of European
culture. Oh yeah. And they'll go
around talking about culture and
they will have television programs
on the big networks, prime time,
about culture, capital C. Yes.
Which you never see here. That's
right. And I think it's because
culture is so bound up with class
in Europe, whereas in the United
States our great popular culture
almost always comes welling up from
below: jazz, rock 'n' roll, not
invented by the guys on government
grants. Almost all of those popular
music forms are in fact
African-American. They have
invented virtually all except
country and western. Right, the
genres, they were invented in low
life pulp magazines most of them.
And were there not some genres
invented in Victorian England in
the penny dreadfuls. Oh, yeah. All
fairly things that don't affect me
very much but I can recognize their
power. Things like, say, Star Trek
obviously comes out of some kind of
earlier antecedents. Mr. Spock is
actually, of course, Sherlock
Holmes. He is the rational engine.
And we benefit by being amused by
him, yet fascinated with him. It's
was a piece of genius to put him in
that show. And so these things are
really deep cultural discussions
that go way back and he is supposed
to stand for scientific
rationality. Now that's
interesting. I mean one of the few
heroic embodiments of scientific
rationality because many people,
not just Trekies, are huge fans of
the Spock character. But of course
at the same time Spock is always
portrayed as a character with
tremendous limitations or
struggling with tremendous
limitations. And Kirk, who is the
more sort of ordinary- or every man
figure- is the one with the full
range of feeling, the full range of
possible styles of thought quite
unlike Spock who is so narrowly
constrained. Is this a reflection
of our cultural notion that to be
fully human you can't be fully
rational? Could be. I mean Captain
Kirk is a guy who doesn't know
science, but he knows what he
likes. You know the old clichÈ
about I don't know nothing about
art, but I know what I like.
Actually exact parallel I think to
Jaws. Captain Kirk is the village
sheriff and Spock is the scientist
who comes on and tells him how
sharks work. I think actually what
you say is true what the deep,
popular culture is telling us is
there is an uneasiness, because
Spock never gets to run the show.
He's useful, but he doesn't get to
run the show. And I think the
audience will basically be more
comfortable with that. Oh, yeah.
Spock doesn't have any persuasive
rhetoric the way the leader figures
do. He produces results not
rhetoric. Rhetoric is the lubricant
of society. And is rhetoric sort of
the natural expressions of
shamanistic culture where you stand
up and talk about patriotism or God
or Mithra, or the cosmic oneness or
whatever else you are selling.
People as witness yet another
episode of cult hysteria and
violence; people cling powerfully
to those things to you totally
unjustified associations,
completely absurd demagogy and
rhetoric, patently implausible
reasoning and all the rest of it
and they buy it in large
quantities. Oscar Wilde, as usual,
said it best that "in matters of
supreme significance, style is
always more important than
substance". And there was the
1980s... there was a lot of that in
every time. I really rather wonder
about how we as scientists can
reach the people in our culture and
persuade them that if they just
understood the habits of mind of
science we can solve problems by
something other than rhetoric. That
science is not a lot of bony icy
results and certainly not just
sheets of facts. Certainly not
that. The old game shows, the
$60,000 question, people seem to
have the notion that being educated
means you have memorized a lot.
Whereas in fact, I have a fairly
terrible memory and I make a habit
of not remembering things... so
that I must look them up. So that I
at least get them right. Well, you
never would've gone into medical
school. Yes, I've never been a
doctor. Doctors have to carry a lot
of info right up here because they
need it very quickly... physicists
seldom do. A good memory is always
an asset, but it's a minor tool in
understanding anything. It's a
basic tool which crosses all
culture differences. You know if
you're Wagner or Hitler and press
the right buttons you have to know
when to remember to hit the red
buttons and where the buttons are
located. Actually Hitler was
terrible in running things. Thank
goodness. Yes, he really mismanaged
the Second World War dreadfully by
running it himself. If he let the
German general staff have control
we would be speaking German. If I
could get one thing across I think
to the great mind of the American
republic it would be that the
simple matter of understanding the
common sense way the science
proceeds and of understanding basic
things like the simple idea of
statistics, for example, and risk,
for example, about which we're
completely irrational in a total
society. Spending a billion dollars
to save one life near a nuclear
reactor, and not spending the
$75,000 that it costs on average to
save a life on the Interstate
Highway System. We could manage the
society without turning it into
some kind of brittle, brave, new
world run by autocrat managers.
Could we? I mean what would the
full Galilean modern western
scientific society be like? Gosh,
nobody has ever tried it. [laughs]
I don't know. I mean a question in
my mind is whether or not Madison
and Jefferson didn't, in fact, try
it in the United States... that
this isn't, in fact, the closest
thing that anyone has ever come to?
The American Constitution was one
of the very first attempts to
deliberately contrive an apparatus
of government that would work for
the greater good meaning the
utilitarian good as opposed to all
the older systems which were based
on rights, prerogatives, powers and
all those other things. Yes, it was
run the way Manhattan is today. You
know- perhaps this is the best that
can be done and if we as scientists
think that we'll ever push the
irrational Wagnerian and
destructive elements of human
nature farther away than this,
we're kidding ourselves. Yeah...
that we're kidding about, but the
mere matter of making better
decisions because you understand
something about how the world
works. That's a much less ambitious
thing. I'd like to see us try that.
We can take on Wagner later. But you
can't just choose what your culture
will be. You can't just say I will
be this and that's all there is to
it. Any way of experiencing the
world or perceiving the world as
science illustrates, as humanities
illustrate is found a relatively,
deep cultural matrix. You know the
cultural matrix of science goes
back hundreds of years, if not
thousands of years to the Greeks.
And similarly, the critical
approach of the humanities patently
goes back to the Greeks. You can't
just wave a magic wand and say well
now we'll look at risk more
objectively because of course one's
perception of risk grow out of how
much rifkanesque [phonetic]
hysteria is floating around in the
ambient culture; how you were
taught to deal with questions of
risk as a child; and thus it has to
do with what your parents were like
and their values... and so I guess
I'm not one who believes we can
suddenly decide to be more rational
about any question without broadly
advancing the culture of rational
or empirical thought. Well, I think
that's unfortunately true that we
can't have spot solutions; that
we've got to have a sea change in
society. Unfortunately, when you
realize that it makes the task so
gargantuan that it promotes mere
lassitude not ambition, because it
seems like such a prodigious
project. But I have some hope. I
have some hope. Well, clearly
Galileo did. I mean there he was,
living in a world which is
overwhelmingly irrational with a
just the small elements of
rationality inherited from the
classical Greeks. And yet he- and
to less extent Hobbes- and people
like them began to develop
rational, modern western styles of
thinking. So it's not impossible,
but how to do it? Well, that's a
subject perhaps for another
discussion. Another day. Yes,
another day.