Icarus : $b or, The future of scienceRussell, Bertrand
Philosophy
Icarus : $b or, The future of science
Russell, Bertrand
Civilization; Science; Science and state
More sensational than tests of intelligence is the possibility of
controlling the emotional life through the secretions of the ductless
glands. It will be possible to make people choleric or timid, strongly
or weakly sexed, and so on, as may be desired. Differences of emotional
disposition seem to be chiefly due to secretions of the ductless
glands, and therefore controllable by injections or by increasing
or diminishing the secretions. Assuming an oligarchic organization
of society, the State could give to the children of holders of power
the disposition required for command, and to the children of the
proletariat the disposition required for obedience. Against the
injections of the State physicians the most eloquent Socialist oratory
would be powerless. The only difficulty would be to combine this
submissiveness with the necessary ferocity against external enemies;
but I do not doubt that official science would be equal to the task.
It is not necessary, when we are considering political consequences,
to pin our faith to the particular theories of the ductless glands,
which may blow over, like other theories. All that is essential in
our hypothesis is the belief that physiology will in time find ways of
controlling emotion, which it is scarcely possible to doubt. When that
day comes, we shall have the emotions desired by our rulers, and the
chief business of elementary education will be to produce the desired
disposition, no longer by punishment or moral precept, but by the far
surer method of injection or diet. The men who will administer this
system will have a power beyond the dreams of the Jesuits, but there
is no reason to suppose that they will have more sense than the men
who control education to-day. 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.
CONCLUSION
It may seem as though I had been at once gloomy and frivolous in some
of my prognostications. I will end, however, with the serious lesson
which seems to me to result. Men sometimes speak as though the progress
of science must necessarily be a boon to mankind, but that, I fear,
is one of the comfortable nineteenth-century delusions which our more
disillusioned age must discard. Science enables the holders of power
to realize their purposes more fully than they could otherwise do. If
their purposes are good, this is a gain; if they are evil, it is a
loss. In the present age, it seems that the purposes of the holders
of power are in the main evil, in the sense that they involve a
diminution, in the world at large, of the things men are agreed in
thinking good. Therefore, at present, science does harm by increasing
the power of rulers. Science is no substitute for virtue; the heart is
as necessary for a good life as the head.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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