This highly original book argues the need for a profound and comprehensive intellectual revolution. Its central concern is to address the problems of hunger, poverty, political oppression, war and the threat of war, showing how a new kind of practical wisdom affecting all branches of science, technology and scholarship might help us to resolve such problems of living. 'The essential idea is really so simple, so transparently right ...It is a profound book, refreshingly unpretentious and deserves to be read, refined and implemented.' 'Annals of Science' 'A strong effort is needed if one is to stand back and clearly state the objections to the whole enormous tangle of misconceptions which surround the notion of science today. Maxwell has made that effort in this powerful, profound and important book.' Mary Midgley,'University Quarterly' 'Maxwell is advocating nothing less than a revolution (based on reason, not on religious or Marxist doctrine) in our intellectual goals and methods of inquiry ...There are altogether too many symptoms of malaise in our science-based society for (his) diagnosis to be ignored.' Christopher Longuet-Higgins,'Nature' Students and scholars of philosophy, philosophy and history of science, general science and history.
CHAPTER ONE HUMAN SUFFERING AND THE NEED FOR A COMPREHENSIVE
INTELLECTUAL REVOLUTION
Our planet earth carries all too heavy a burden of killing, torture,
enslavement, poverty, suffering, peril and death. It has been estimated
that over three and a half million people die each year from starvation or
from disease related to malnutrition (George, 1976, p. 19). Millions of
children suffer from protein deficiency, their brains failing to develop
properly as a result. And yet it seems we have the capacity to produce
enough food for everyone to get enough to eat, given a more just
distribution of land and food, and less wasteful priorities of food
production in the developed world. Life expectancy in the developed world
is seventy-two years; in the poorer regions of the underdeveloped world it
is as low as forty-five years. In the developed world, on average, fewer
than two children out of one hundred die during the first year of life; in
the poorer regions of the underdeveloped world fifty out of a hundred die
during their first year. Somewhere between thirty-five and sixty million
people died as a result of the last world war; and a larger number of
people have died in wars since then. Dictatorships are commonplace amongst
the nations, the criminally insane not infrequently seizing and holding
power, dictatorial power being maintained by means of terror, arbitrary
imprisonment, torture and execution - and such dictatorships are even
supported by democracies. The cold war between east and west continues,
together with the nuclear arms race, the balance of terror, and the
persistent possibility that nuclear war will before long engulf the world,
through escalating bluff and threat, or accident.
Danger, suffering and death are inevitable aspects of life, imposed on
us as a result of our living in, and being a part of, the natural world.
The danger, suffering and death just indicated, experienced by so many, are
not however caused solely by natural phenomena: they are our own creation,
our own responsibility, caused by our own actions, or by our failure to
act.
The problem to be tackled in this book can be put like this. What kind of
rational inquiry gives us the best hope of helping us progressively to
resolve our most urgent problems of living - such as those indicated above
- thus helping us to develop a more humane, a more just, a happier, a saner
and more cooperative world? What kind of science, technology, scholarship
and education is best designed to help us promote human welfare, realize
that which is genuinely of value in life? What ought to be the basic
intellectual aims and methods of such an inquiry, and how ought these to be
related to our personal and social aims and methods in life?
Insofar as academic inquiry does try to help promote human welfare, it does
so, overwhelmingly, at present, by seeking to improve knowledge of various
aspects of the world. It does this in the hope that new knowledge, thus
obtained, will be used to help resolve social problems in a humane and just
fashion. The view that rational inquiry ought to help enhance the quality
of human life by, in the first instance, improving knowledge is, one might
say, the official basic creed of the whole scientific/academic enterprise.
The view can be traced back at least to Francis Bacon in the seventeenth
century, and perhaps back to the ancient Greeks. It has been almost
unthinkingly taken for granted by almost everyone associated with the
development of science, scholarship, universities and education in the
western world, and elsewhere. And as a result the view is now firmly built
into the whole intellectual-institutional structure of the
scientific/academic enterprise.
The central claim of this book can now be put like this. Granted that
inquiry has as its basic aim to help enhance the quality of human life it
is actually profoundly and damagingly irrational, unrigorous, for inquiry
to give intellectual priority to the task of improving knowledge. Rather,
intellectual priority needs to be given to the dual tasks of articulating
our problems of living, and proposing and criticizing possible solutions,
namely possible human actions. Problems of knowledge and understanding need
to be tackled as rationally subordinate to intellectually more fundamental
problems of living. In order to develop better solutions to the appalling
human problems indicated above, it is not primarily new knowledge that we
need; rather what we primarily need is to act in new, appropriate ways. The
fundamental intellectual task of a kind of inquiry that is devoted, in a
genuinely rational and rigorous way, to helping us improve the quality of
human life, must be to create and make available a rich store of vividly
imagined and severely criticized possible actions, so that our capacity to
act intelligently and humanely in reality is thereby enhanced. In order to
improve our capacity to resolve the appalling problems confronting humanity
today, we need, as a matter of urgency, to develop a new more rigorous kind
of inquiry, in many ways radically different from what we have at present,
having, as its basic aim, to improve not knowledge only, but rather
wisdom.
There is thus, I claim, a major intellectual disaster at the heart of
western science, technology, scholarship and education - at the heart of
western thought; and this long-standing intellectual disaster has much to
do with the human disasters of our age, our incapacity to tackle more
humanely and successfully our present world-wide problems. In order to
develop a saner, happier, more just and humane world it is certainly not a
sufficient condition that we have an influential tradition of rational
inquiry devoted to helping us achieve such ends. It is, however, I shall
argue, a necessary condition. In the absence of such a tradition of
thought, rationally devoted to helping us solve our problems of living, we
are not likely to resolve these problems very successfully in the real
world.
