From Robin Oakley-Hill
John Emsley provides a useful review of an important book, Facing the Future: The Case for Science (Review, 10 June). However, his opening tone makes one uneasy. He suggests that science has run the world for 300 years or so. It hasn’t. Politicians, generals, company directors, ideologists and dictators have. Even the original inventions that shaped the modern world were not science-based. In particular, the steam engine was around for a century before Nicolas Carnot found out how it worked – effectively by studying it as though it were a manifestation of nature.
Then to suggest that we may fall under the control of New Age nonsense-mongers is, frankly, absurd. It is the very weakness of those who oppose governmental manufacturing of poverty and environmental degradation that causes their drippy-hippy vapourings. In the debate on where our (arguably unsustainable) civilisation is to go, scientists are to be found on both sides. The most-cited scientist of the modern world – Noam Chomsky – is hardly a member of the “you never had it so good” school.
Science is gaining ground as a major component of high culture, and it is a grave disservice to identify it with the use of technology by corporate adventurers. In this connection, the title of Emsley’s prize book (The Consumer’s Good Chemical Guide) is unfortunate. It is the big corporations that have reduced our status from citizen to consumer.
Raymond Williams said of the word consumer: “It is a way of seeing people as though they are either stomachs or furnaces.” This way of seeing is surely not one that scientists would wish to identify with.
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