Technoscientific Angst: Ethics And Responsibility

Preface

Preface The anguish of artists and poets is celebrated by societies that expect justice and happiness in the future regardless of their current conditions . Anguish is accepted and endorsed not so much as a judgment about the present but as a means to envision and usher in a different future. Oddly enough, those who are members of the technoscientific community are discouraged from playing the same social role as do artists and poets; their anguish is neither acknowledged nor displayed. On the rare occasions when they express professional anxiety, personal anguish, or cultural angst, they are invited to leave the technoscientific community. 1find this situation unfortunate, disturbing, and socially harmful. It is reasonable to believe that if members of the technoscientific community were encouraged to display their concerns publicly and thereby enhance the critical involvementof society as a whole (as did, for example, Joseph Rotblat, the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize laureate), we might be spared in the future the horrors of the past, like those of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. How can we expect to avert future horrors from taking place? In Cultural Collisions: Postmodern Technoscience (1995), I used the metaphor of the European cafe to explain the multitudes of language games and cultural rules of etiquette that govern our behavior in different geographic locations. I argued for the need for philosophers or philosophically minded intellectuals to translate from one language to another so as to minimize, if not completely eliminate, the potential ix x Preface for misunderstanding that leads to hatred and death. In the present context, I fear the metaphor of a cafe will be of little solace to those who suffered in concentration camps or at Hiroshima or Nagasaki, or to any of their children. Perhaps a more forceful metaphor with a preemptive thrust is necessary to highlight the urgency of the current situation of the technoscientific community. The airplane (as a metaphor and as a lived experience) embodies many of the issues under discussion in this book. To begin with, it captures images of Icarus, who glued feathers to his arms with wax and soared to the sky, only to find out that as he got closer to the sun, the wax melted and destroyed his artificially constructed wings. The image is captivating, the dream comes true, but the technology falls short of the conceptual scheme. Second, once the airplane was designed and developed, its eventual uses remained beyond the control of technoscientists: Would it fly people or bombs? Would it save or destroy life? Third, it is not clear whether air travel has enhanced or retarded world peace: Is the so-called global village a better place to live in than the world of an earlier century wherein travel was difficult and infrequent? And fourth, one can ask whether airplanes have contributed to the democratization of the world. Though air travel is common, it is still stratified into travel by luxury and low-fare airlines or into travel in first class, connoisseur class, business class, or economy class. Similarly, though wealthy countries have military might displayed in aerial superiority (from air force planes to satellites),even the poorest of the nation-states have aircraft and weaponry capable of destroying millions of lives. Sitting some 35,000 feet above ground, watching the clouds and the sky, one has the opportunity to examine the old-fashioned views of the conquest of nature. Gravity seems to dissipate the higher the plane flies, and vast distances are covered in a matter of minutes and hours. Traditional cultural matrices of time and space are reconfigured by the airplane. A technoscientificfeat has become an inescapable reality, a reality whose control is no longer in the hands of particular organizations and individuals.This does not mean that aerial and space developments are beyond human control; all it means is that the clock cannot be set back to a time when only birds flew over the horizon, that it is now impossible to imagine a world without airplanes. Just as gunpowder, once invented, never left us (we only went on to more sophisticated modes of explosion and destruction), so the airplane is Preface xi here to stay. We may have planes perform the task of buses and trains, we may build them bigger or smaller, more or less safe, quicker or slower, but their very presence remains intact. This all connects to what I am trying to explore in the present text...