It’s amazing how far science has gone to destroy life without being blamed. We live in the scientific age, and science’s prestige has permitted it to spread far beyond the good it can do. The first shock was the atom bomb in 1945. Only people of that generation recall the deep horror that came with the first explosion of a weapon that foresaw the potential destruction of humankind itself. But in many ways the A-bomb is a bogeyman that has been successfully caged while an invisible virus has done far more harm.
That virus is the amorality of science. Science is unique in that we allow it to have no morality. Destruction and healing are on an equal footing. New weapons technologies are funded by the same government budget that funds new cancer research. Untested medical treatments and toxic drugs are allowed almost free rein to harm and kill patients in the name of helping them. If you doubt this, consider that surgeries are not monitored by any governmental regulation. Operations can become standard procedures with a minimum of testing. Among these are heart bypass surgery, balloon angioplasty, hysterectomies, and radical mastectomies. None went through double-blind testing. As a result, radical mastectomy was the procedure of choice for decades in this country, while at the same time lumpectomies, a far more benign procedure, provided the same survival rates in Europe. Current studies show that angioplasty, performed by the thousands every month on heart patients, is not effective in extending life span.
Science is an enormous outlet for creativity, but when that creativity turns diabolical, we can’t keep allowing amorality to continue. Science has given us toxic pesticides and dubious genetic engineering of staple crops. High-yield fertilizers kill the soil; hormone-injected meats fill every supermarket. In the defense industry, ever more bizarre weapons of mechanized death have almost no oversight. Quite the contrary, eager technology buffs can’t wait to test lasers in space, robot armies, and neutron bombs that kill all living things while leaving buildings intact (the rationale being that bricks and mortar are more worth saving than lives). Current armaments are designed to make sure that maximum damage is done to the flesh of anyone in their vicinity — hence the white phosphorus from Israeli bombs that fell on schoolchildren in Gaza and scorched their skin.
The amorality of science is sometimes indirect. For example, as we became a nation of pill-poppers and surgery junkies over the past fifty years, millions of people felt free to ignore the positive benefits of wellness and prevention. Didn’t science promise the next miracle cure around the corner? As long as the doctor could fix us, we felt liberated to eat junk food, ignore exercise, and grow fatter than any population in history. In the last few months, studies have revealed that wellness isn’t pie in the sky. People who practice prevention in terms of diet, exercise, and stress management actually alter their genes in a beneficial way and lower the activity of genes that trigger diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. So there was no free pass by not doing the right thing.
Because science is worshipped and scientists have grown used to an ethos of amorality, to protest against diabolical creativity makes you a target of irrational smears. It doesn’t seem to bother the defenders of science-at-all-costs that they are acting out of the very irrationality that science is supposed to defeat.
Science deserves to be free, and ideas should never be enclosed in boundaries. No one is talking about the religious-based intolerance and anti-intellectualism that prompted the Bush administration to put a halt to funding of stem-cell research. But if we look at the problem without irrational attacks, we can have the benefits of science without the excessive dangers we now face. A new science that works to raise our humanity is possible, and in the face of an endangered planet and nightmarish weapons spreading everywhere, nothing is more critical.
Morality in science..great topic Deepak!
Got over 12,400 myspace friends I'll post it there…get the word out and create awareness on the subject matter.
BLove,T
Very good article Deepak, I think you touched all the bases and then some. Of course what you are writing might be considered heresy by those with a vested interest in the ignorance you dispel. Hopefully Obama will understand it and address the issue on behalf of the nation.
I wrote this a long while back and it complements your contention.
Pure heresy they may call it, especially if it is a threat.
What is heresy?
A proposition that is, at the same time, a challenge to present understanding, current beliefs and a challenge to power.
"If we keep others believing the world is flat, the fear that they will fall off will keep them from discovering new lands and our sources for spices. We will be able to discover the new lands first and remain dominant in the spice industry. "
Do so called "authoritive" resources like to admit they are wrong? What does it do to their authority?
Is what they taught you about the world around you while you were in school correct? Is it unbiased?
Activities of science are supported by, and to some extent controlled by, organizations such as scientific societies, agencies of the federal government and (to a lesser but non-negligible extent) by the structuring of universities and corporations into schools, divisions, departments, laboratories, etc. These organizations in turn need respect from their competitors, approval from their colleagues, support from the public and favorable press from the media and economic support. Any scientist who jeopardizes the good standing of these important scientific organizations may, knowingly or unknowingly, weaken organized science and thereby hurt his fellow scientists. In this way, the issue of true science is converted from one that is purely intellectual to one that has sociological, political and economic consequences. Such issues perceived as heretical may be so because they involve a combination of political and economic ramifications.
If a researcher finds a cure he must find another job or project which may be difficult and the institution gets no more funding (not in it's best interest). Worst is the fabrication of a problem that does not really exist.
For example pests generally attack unhealthy plants culling them from the cell line. Since most crops are grown in unhealthy mineral deficient soil it necessitates the need for pesticides. Herbicides also kill natural flora needed to balance the area.
Why is it that there is so much disagreement between scientists? Motive, desire for a particular reality (illusion) or fear of a new one?
I think spirituality and science can co-exist. It worked in my own narrow experience. Between 1991 and 1996 I was treated with conventional chemotherapy and the high-dose chemotherapy of two bone marrow transplants for four bouts of bone cancer. The doctors gave me about a 10% chance of survival from the outset.
To survive, I knew I needed an edge. So I trained with a kung fu master in internal energy exercises, mainly standing post meditation. The thousands of hours of training I logged allowed me to withstand the unbelievable doses of chemotherapy and let it do it's job–kill the cancer. I meditated for an hour at a time, every day, and had various spiritual experiences. The training reinforced my will, every day, and eventuallly I could live in the moment and stop fearing death. I finally beat the disease in 1996–I've been clear for over 12 years.
The Western treatment for cancer is horrible, whether chemo or radiation. But cancer is too unpredictable a disease to trust to meditation alone. I think West and East complement each other well. Science and spirituality.
For more reading, with benefits, supporting Deepak's contention.
The end of disease – executable steps and technical details
http://intelegen.com/nutrients/index.htm
Amaranth – The fix for poverty, malnutrition and hunger
http://amaranth.me
Rock Dust Surface Soil Reminerlization – Restoring balance
http://remineralize.me
Okay I posted the above and a link to this dialog on Obama's blog, lets hope he is still keeping tabs.
http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/blog/ric…
http://skeptic.me
also picked up the debate.
Deepak, I have touched on this before but now I see it with clarity. The reason there is so much importance to maintaining Darwin
Our values as a society dictate what is acceptable in our culture and as long as the dollar rules, people will continue to find diabolical creative ways of using science for their perceived benefit. I like Deepak and others comparing the diabolical science behind the Military Industrial Complex and the Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex, because both have vested interest in accumulating more power and wealth at all cost. Until we establish a currency of consciousness or values, we will be at the mercy of those with power and wealth.
I hope that the electing of President Obama, is a reflection and affirmation of the evolutionary shift of consciousness taking place on the planet. I hope the new administration governs, not just in science but all fields of government, with the ethics and awareness that is needed in confronting the many challenges. So together, we can have a "real" opportunity in providing the best environment for us and our children. It really does come down to ethics because intelligence can be good or bad, as so eloquently described, but ethics has all of our best interests at heart.
Great Deepak, grateful you address all these issues.
Recently I was guided – by treehugger actually- to a new green LEED certified Math and Sciences college building – I think it was of St. Lawrence university. Visiting their website I read about their "commitment to greeen chemistry". Commitment – wow, I thought! I had never thought that natural sciences would and could commit to anything – science hating to be restricted or restrict itself – although it sounds quite logical thinking more about it.
Later on I learnt that there are in fact quite a number of universities that have committed to green chemistry and there is also a lab21-initiative. Also, I read some months ago about an initiative that tries to make hospitals healthier in commiting not only to organic hospital food but to a number of other eco-friendly principles as well – see http://h2e-online.org/index.cfm (Hospitals for a Healthy Environment ) and http://www.noharm.org/ (Health Care without harm). A year or more ago I had read about the initiative to see that hospitals are more silent at night. These are so obvious principles corroborated by so many scientific research studies. We need a culture in research institutions of commiting to non-harm and maybe also certification institutions who see that certain rules are maintained.
Lot of problems here.
I don't think you can say science is amoral any more than you can say religion is a amoral or a tree is amoral. That's entirely a subjective opinion.
What you can say is that scientific discoveries have sometimes been used for immoral purposes (such as developing ways to kill people).
The implication of Deepak's post is that, by extension, scientists must be amoral people.
This is simply not true in the case of many, many individuals who are career scientists. Most of them do have morals, have families, have values they want to live by and instill into their children. Scientists R us, real people. Let's drop the strawman arguments and bogey-man invoking.
The logical conclusion is that Albert Einstein was amoral. He was a critical individual in the discoveries that led to the atomic bomb. Without the work of Einstein there would have been no atomic bomb. But we know from history that the man was in fact a pacifist who regretted for the rest of his life that his research had been perverted to the cause of the atom bombs which were dropped on Japan.
Nothing is gained by painting scientists as evil except possibly to stir up a lynch mob. I find it kind of shocking that Deepak would even entertain such logic (or lack thereof).
The problem is not science here. The problem is the age-old issue of militaristic thinking, aggrandizement of warfare, greed, and the problem of people who seek money and power by whatever means possible (and yes, science can become one of those means).
Science is neither good nor evil in and of itself, but what is good or evil is the uses to which men may put the science.
The evil will always reside in the hearts of men, not in the technologies they are capable of developing. For example consider that age-old human tool, the knife. There are hundreds of beneficial uses for knives, and there are a few really immoral uses for them as well.
The morality depends on the person, not the knife, and not the technology used to create the knife.
So as you sit away typing on your broadband-connected computer (science) in your warm home (heated by science) at night (using light provided by science), knowing you have unspoiled food in your refrigerator (science) if you get hungry, or a bathroom with hot and cold running water (science) for your toilet and cleansing needs, with a nice car (science) to take you to your job or the store, or wherever, or maybe you want to watch a movie on your big HD TV (science).
And you type away about the evils of science.
Maybe I should agree that we were better off in the dark ages before we had all this pesky science?
No.
You want to talk about something that has really bad morals, and has killed a lot more people than science could dream of? I give you religion. Religion is nasty stuff. I'm talking about Inquisitions, Crusades, feeding Christians to lions, suicide-bombers and the myriad other "angels of death" that religion has graced us with over the millenia.
Now, now you might say, don't go blaming religion! It's individuals that are good or bad, not religion itself.
Viola.
It comes back to people taking responsibility for their own thoughts and actions. Shifting the responsibility for the evils of men onto abstract concepts such as science or religion is simply avoidance.
Want to see the source of the evil? Look in the mirror. There you will see exactly what needs to be worked on to create a better morality in our society. We need to work on ourselves. Not blame abstractions for our ills.
The idea of people worshipping science is ludicrous. First of all science isn't a religion. It does not have sacred deities and rituals of worship. Nor does it have an agreed upon belief system.
What it has is an agreed-upon methodology. It's called the scientific method, which is basically a system of testing, re-testing, rooting out possible biases in the test procedures, checking results against controls, and replicating results to see if they are consistent.
If there is some possible explanation for the test results, then that leads to new rounds of testing to verify or dispel the possible explanations for a given phenomenon.
If there's anything that bonds scientists, it's the quest to find errors in each other's work. Not worship.
Take for example Stephen Hawking. He's the world's top scientist, a man who occupies Newton's shoes in terms of the positions and stature he has held in the field of astrophysics.
And yet many, many scientists have deep disagreements with his scientific theories, regardless of their respect for the man himself. Regardless of his stature, many scientists have devoted their careers to proving aspects of his work are flawed. Not exactly "worship" in my book. Respect is what Hawking gets, and he deserves it. Worship, no (not to mention he doesn't want anyone worshiping him, at any rate).
I'm kind of disappointed at the level of discussion around science issues here.
Sure meditation, ayurveda, and other disciplines add a lot to the human experience and can create spiritual breakthroughs and healings when done properly.
I myself spent decades pursuing meditation-based spirituality and use ayurvedic products and medicine for my health. They can both be very beneficial modalities.
But that does not lead to the conclusion that somehow science itself is bad. At best, such logic comes off sounding like partisan politics.
Truth is Yogi, don't you think, everything has it's 'diabolical' aspect. Perhaps a little research into judgementalism would blur the edges a little more effectively…..
perhaps!!
Interesting posts, Richard. Thanks for the new ideas. There was a video I saw over a decade ago which proposed that natural demineralization was part of the ice age cycle and that we might be able to dampen this cycle with rock dust remineralization. I went and bought a bag of it over a decade ago but I wasn't a gardener so I wasn't really aware of how it needed to be used. Some of the experiences I see now on the internet seem intriguing.
It is exciting to see Deepak Chopra speak to this issue. The amoral aspect of science may not be completely evident to all, but it was certainly a part of the culture I was "raised" in at MIT. We called ourselves "tools", to be used by the decision makers. Although scientists as individuals have almost always chimed in about questions of values and social good – there is definitely a tradition that science should be value-free.
It saddens me to see many who have been trained in the sciences to be unaware of their own traditions. The philosophy of science as it has evolved may be a bit fuzzy today from major tremors and shifts happening at the paradigmatic foundations. There is actually much more willingness now to cross territorial borders that were drawn up centuries ago. But in the philosophy of Science (it is not just a methodology) there was a term used specifically to evaluate a work. It was a German word, wertfrei. In English, value-free.
See this link about the term value-free, http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?…. Here's a partial quote, "A century ago, nearly all of those who wrote about the nature of science would have been in agreement that science ought to be 'value-free.' [...] Science, so it was said, deals with facts, and facts and values are irreducibly distinct."
Although this concept of science needing to be "value-free" has become out of fashion today, centuries of this tradition continues to manifest itself. The manifestations of this "value-free" ideal of science show up most powerfully in the "debate" between some scientists and religionists.
I put "debate" in quotes because Dr. Chopra has noted quite well that these debates seem mostly to be happening in the fundamentalist trenches of both "religion" and "science" and it would be more accurate call it outright war – as there is almost no listening going on, only an intention to mortally wound the perspective of the other side.
Alas, it is easy for me to throw stones in a little note here. I have more listening (and reading) to do myself, but thank you Deepak for your observations. May we arrive at a more graceful cooperation (and dare I say integration?) between science and religion for the benefit of humankind.