Submitted to a Candid World

If Raymond Kurzweil is to be believed, the future may not be here yet, but humanity stands at the brink of discoveries that will revolutionize our lives in the next fifty years. Kurzweil, one of the more respected futurists, predicts that the “law of accelerating returns” – which explains how scientists can realize exponential progress in certain fields of research, like electronics in the 1990s – heralds an unprecedented era of discovery, thanks to nano- and bio-technology.

The problem is that, while humanity stands at the brink of this revolution, we also stand at a crossroads (huzzah for mixing metaphors!). Six years ago, at the beginning of the biotech revolution, Harvard’s Juan Enriquez made the case in his simple book As the Future Catches You that the revolution waits for no man. While science advances, propelling humanity forward, we as a society have the choice of partaking in this growth by funding and respecting the role of science in our democracy, or sidelining it and watching the revolution pass us by. American hegemony has always been built on scientific superiority, but we show signs of balking today, just when our commitment to scientific progress matters most.

Our commitment to science matters for more than just us, too. If we embrace our role as the most powerful nation in the world – by force of arms or force of credit – we realize that the task of blazing a trail into the next era of discovery falls to us. If we as the harbingers of scientific progress falter, we risk not only losing out on the revolution, to the benefit of another nation (say, China or England), but we also risk stalling inventions that could benefit all of humanity, not just those men and women within our borders. We cannot afford to stall the future; as Enriquez points out, it always catches you, one way or another.

This is not to say that one should unflinchingly engage in all sorts of dangerous research; no doubt the limits of responsible science are short of the limits of what science can actually accomplish.  I don’t think anyone would advocate construction of doomsday devices a la Futurama.  But I think we as a society risk stopping short of what responsible science can accomplish.  On that note, as Edward Murrow would say, allow me say what I mean, and mean what I say.

The past eight years have seen science stalled by a confused, manipulated, and angry American minority.  Speaking for small religious circles, our President has stymied stem cell research, and our politicians and interest groups have turned biology into a political football.  While the former is a threat to science, and the latter an indirect threat to science education, both are equally damaging, and ought to warn of a dangerous tendency to place science in political controversy just to score ideological points.  Despite John Adams’ old injunction, that facts are “deaf, deaf as adders to the clamor of the populace,” we face a populace that believes that scientific facts can be voted away.  No one man, or no small group, ought to have a heckler’s veto over scientific progress that stands to benefit all of humanity, and yet as technology leads humanity for the better towards a vastly different future, one that we today may not recognize, we can only expect these conservative forces to increase their clamor. 

We cannot afford to take that path.  Societies and civilizations never have an option to stand still.  The choice is either to grow, but grow responsibly, or fade and become increasingly irrelevant as the future – and other civilizations – catch us.  We cannot afford to stand against scientific progress without cause, and we cannot allow science, and its promise to help the many, to be held hostage to the spurious and subjective religious or moral objections of the few.