Just a question I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.
Three-odd centuries ago, the Enlightenment philosophers promised us that Reason and Science would improve everything in our lives. That these things would only deliver on the promised miracles of technology, but would also improve our government, our laws, and every little detail of our lives. Some of these philosophers seem to have been promising utopia.
We certainly didn’t get utopia, but I’m curious to see whether people feel we got a good deal overall.
Two things:
First, the question is deliberately ambiguous. What everyone thinks constitutes an “improvement” or a “failure” is just as interesting to me as the answer itself.
Second, this is not a debate about whether science is right. There are a dozen threads on this board at any given time about that. This is Reason and Science from a social, not a cosmological, perspective.
I would define an improvement as something that has improved the quality of life, human lifespans and mortality or productivity. How you could define those is probably no less contentious, though.
While I’m not sure how you could weigh up the constructive and destructive applications of science, I’m convinced rationality has improved human life. We no longer burn witches, and for the most part we’re more tolerant of differences than our ancestors.
Well, childhood death due to disease is orders of magnitude lower than it had been (and whooping cough and polio and others were horrible ways to die, not “get a fever, forget to wake up tomorrow” problems).
The general mortality has fallen low enough that even in areas that we generally view as having horrible living conditions, the people have enough of a better expactancy that they and their children will survive that birth rates are falling throughout the world.
The number of nations ruled by complete despots who could harm or kill people on a whim is much lower than previously.
Far more people are allowed some say in their government than any time in recorded history.
Slavery is practiced by fewer places than any time in history (and human sacrifice is down quite a bit).
Horrors such as Stalin and Hitler and the Khmer Rouge may appear to be “just as bad” as (or worse than) previous events, but they stand out as horrors for the very reason that most of the world has been able to move away from that sort of behavior.
What we tend to think of as Reason and Science began in Greece in about 600 BCE. It was the growth of philosophy (then understood as rational inquiry into the nature of the world rather than the complex academic subject it is now) that lead, eventually, to the existence of modern physics, chemistry, biology, psychology etc.
Ultimately this project was a search for truth: any improvement in mankind’s lot is coincidental, though it is easy to see with hindsight that understanding the world better will lead to being able to manipulate it better to one’s advantage.
Reason has improved our situation in the sense that we (i.e. people living in rich Western countries) can now expect a long life, plenty of food, much less risk of disease, shelter, entertainment, drugs (even if you only count coffee, cigaretes and alcohol), relative freedom to choose our career, freedom to believe what we want and so on.
On the other hand, there’s no direct evidence that humans are any happier in an advanced civilisation than in a primitive one, in fact it seems more and more likely that material wealth and comfort leads almost inevitably to the development of neuroses and nihilism. (Of course what we must not do is glamourise the past. Even if simpler, agrarian societies offer more fulfilling lives to some they frequently involve terrible oppression of women, and intolerence of any difference: Burning mentally disabled people as possessed by demons anyone?)
What Reason has done is allow us to achive more, whether that means building cities and better understanding the universe or curing disease and working towards genuine equality. Whether it has made people happier overall I can’t say. What is true is that there are a hell of a lot more of us alive to think about this question then there would have been without the advance of modern medicine.
I think that medical advances alone justify whatever negitive effects science and reason may have had. As Tom points out, the diseases of the past were not easy ways to die.
Furthermore, it’s important to remember that in addition to terrible fatal diseases, people of the past suffered just as much from the same chronic diseases we have, only without readily avalible treatments–people still suffered from abscessed teeth, migranes, kidney stones, yeast infections, athelete’s foot, cramps, impotence, chronic back pain, arthritis, bad eye sight, lice, tapeworms, constipation, staff infections, ingrown toenails, etc., etc., and up until the 18th century the only painkiller avalible was alcohol, but only alcohol in the incredibly flat, warm, diluted form of beer or wine fermeted in open vats by whatever yeasts happen to drift into it. Life used to hurt.
The first three posts pretty much reflect my own thoughts on the subject – Reason has given us a lot. There’s no disputing its contribution on the physical level. Human beings can now fly. We survive our first few years and we live longer. We’ve harnassed elecricity, and speak with people on the other side of the planet.
But the reason I asked about Reason was that its record on human affairs is a lot more mixed. When Reason turns its attention to nature, it produces miracles. When Reason turns its attention to society, it’s more likely to make messes.
Reason has had a tendency to erase morality, for instance. Not surprising, since morals can’t be proven one way or another, and a society with Reason at its heart would naturally distrust them. On the one hand, I have reasons to be glad for this. I’m a gay man and a member of a minority religion, and I shudder to think what my life would have been like if Christian morality still reigned supreme.
But I’m also living below the poverty line, and I’m financially precarious at best. I hear libertarians making the point that society and compassion are irrational, from a purely objective standpoint, and so things like compassion for the poor would be best left to individual choice, not to government. How can I argue with that? Morals are irrational. But their philosophy, if put in place, would guarantee I and many of the people I care about would have starved long ago.
The so-called “soft” or “social” sciences seem to be an almost-unmitigated disaster. To quote the title of a popular book, We’ve had a hundred years of psychotherapy and things are getting worse. Sociology is just badly-done philosophy dressed up in dubious statistics. Economists have a record of prediction so awful, they make meteorologists look gifted with powers of prophecy.
Physics, Chemistry, Biology – these delivered on their promises. But are there some places where science doesn’t belong?
You cite the increasing acceptance of homosexuality. That, of course, is a good thing, and was accomplished by pitting religous beliefs against reason. Likewise, reason has been a driving force in changing morality from accepting the inferiority of other races as a given to condemning that assumption. It has been responsible for overturning the Divine Right of Kings.
Yes, in much social policy, reason has not necessarily produced the desired results, but I think a lot of that has to due with a lack of empirical evidence. The Soviet Union was originally intended to be a communist country, a worker’s paradise and all that. Suffice it to say, certain flaws in the system were found in that experience, and it’s unlikely that the same plan of action could ever get popular support.
To be fair, the softer sciences are still very young (most are only about 100 years old), and the things they seek to study are much more complicated and harder to measure than what the others do. Give 'em some time.
Science is a method of gaining knowledge about the empirical world. It has no business doing anything else. Now technology, and philosophical considerations drawn from scientific fact/theory are another matter entirely.
FWIW, I think that reason has improved life overall. We no longer live in fear of gods that can smite us for no reason. We can combat ignorance that leads to hatred of what is different. These two things alone are worth it, in my view.
Morals are irrational, but feeding starving people is not.
There are some places where science is in its infancy. I would say the main problem is that the people in those sciences like to think that they aren’t so ignorant is the main problem. They would like to think they are right even when there is no science to back up what they claim.
Indoor plumbing
Dentistry
Central heating and air conditioning
Tylenol
Penicillin
The Internet
Washing machines and dryers
Educational opportunity
…just off the top of my head, I am sure there’s plenty more where that came from.
There was a series on PBS called “The 1900 House”, in which modern day people attempted to live as people did 100 years ago. It looked absolutely hideous, and that’s just one century in the past.
I would have to say that other people–whether in other parts of the world now, or in other periods in history–who have to or had to worry about the great likelihood of their children dying in infancy and their wives and daughters dying in childbirth; about getting enough food to eat tonight; about being persecuted on account of their religion or nationality or tribe; about being captured by barbarian raiders and sold into slavery; about having everything they own being seized by the powers that be; about having to engage in back-breaking labor from sunup to sundown every day for the rest of their lives just to survive; are probably somewhat less than impressed about the deep existential angst experienced by 21st Century First Worlders. If material prosperity; personal security; personal, political, and religious liberty; plenty of food, clean running water, public sanitation, and good health; and in general not being cruelly oppressed or dying horrible deaths at an early age don’t make us happier, then I’d say we’re a bunch of spoiled brats.
It’s improved our lives tremendously in the physical sense but in terms of understanding one another and seeing past ethnic/religious/political preconceptions it’s done just north of squat.
Because people were so understanding of religious and ethnic differences during the Bronze Age or the Thirty Years’ War or the Spanish Conquest of Mexico, whereas citizens of modern industrialized democracies never make earnest attempts to understand each others points of view and get along despite all their differences.
Given that 300 years ago most European nations had laws banning people of the “wrong” religion and that killing people out of hand for having the wrong belief was not really a rare event, I’d say that was have made some improvements. Northern Ireland and the Middle East have far more to do with culture and the rarity of resources than actual religious differences. The Taliban is an example of the worst that can occur under Islam.
We have a long way to go, but I’d say we have definitely made progress.
Many of the earlier posts have brought up medical advances as examples of how science has improved human lives.
Now let me give a personal example.
Science has definitely improved my life. Or at least altered the way my life could have been had science not progressed far enough.
Allow me to explain.
I was born with a severe to profound hearing loss in 1973. What this hearing loss means is that without the use of very powerful hearing aids, I can hear nothing. If you were to put your mouth right next to my left ear (which is the better ear) and scream at the top of your lungs, I would hear something akin to a whisper.
If I had been born just a hundred years earlier, I would never have heard the sounds of my parents’ voices. I would never have heard Beethoven or Mozart. The odds would have been against me ever learning how to speak, and learning how to read would have been very difficult for me. My life would have been so unimaginably different that I cannot even begin to conceive what it could have been like.
Even if I had been born in the early part of the 20th century, I would have been in a similar position.
To those who like to wax nostalgic for the long-ago “simpler” times of the 19th or 18th century, I say “hell, no.” I count myself lucky that I was born in the late 20th century.
Interesting thread. I’d agree with everybody who says that technology has made our quality of life better and led to increased tolerance. However, I see another important benefit to reason and science in our society. Individual people are now exposed to more and different philosophies than they were in the past. Ultimately, I think that people now can develop for themselves a full and well-rounded personal philosophy by which to guide their lives, and can draw on the teachings of the world’s greatest thinkers in order to do so, something which wasn’t always possible in the past. In my opinion, this is a major way in which science and reason have improved out lives.
Well, I enjoy Reason because I have sympathy for libertarian viewpoints, and appreciate that it generally manages to present them in a less shrill manner than others. Science subscriptions are rather expensive, and the actual research articles are out of my depth, but I enjoy the abstracts and more general articles that take up the front half. And increased enjoyment is an improvement over it not being there.
Oh, and reason and science have done a lot to improve the lot of people, too, for all the reasons given.
