Technology and Science vs People and Cultures
There is a growing perception of conflict between technology and people, between sciences and cultures. This is reflected in our writings, beliefs, and in reports such as the Future of Academic Medicine and Future of Family Medicine. I came across the following speech, worth a read for those pondering the chaos of the times. Vaclav Havel was the president of the Czech Republic when this speech was made in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, July 4, 1994. He was a dramatist and writer. He was a recipient of numerous awards, including the Four Freedom award from the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute.
As we grow more and more divided by our current predominant focus on
technology, there are key people that can help restore balance. I think that
family physicians, teachers, and others who are grounded in people contact yet
involved in technology and science, will play crucial roles in the coming
chaotic years. see also Technology: Shaping It
or Shaping Us?
The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World By Vaclav Havel as listed at
http://www.worldtrans.org/whole/havelspeech.html
In this postmodern world, cultural conflicts are becoming more dangerous than
any time in history. A new model of coexistence is needed, based on man's
transcending himself.
There are thinkers who claim that, if the modern age began with the discovery of
America, it also ended in America. This is said to have occurred in the year
1969, when America sent the first men to the moon. From this historical moment,
they say, a new age in the life of humanity can be dated.
I think there are good reasons for suggesting that the modern age has ended.
Today, many things indicate that we are going thorough a transitional period,
when it seems that something is on the way out and something else is painfully
being born. It is as if something were crumbling, decaying, and exhausting
itself, while something else, still indistinct, were arising from the rubble.
Periods of history when values undergo a fundamental shift are certainly not
unprecedented. This happened in the Hellenistic period, when from the ruins of
the classical world the Middle Ages were gradually born. It happened during the
Renaissance, which opened the way to the modern era. The distinguishing features
of such transitional periods are a mixing and blending of cultures and a
plurality or parallelism of intellectual and spiritual worlds. These are periods
when all consistent value systems collapse, when cultures distant in time and
space are discovered or rediscovered. They are periods when there is a tendency
to quote, to imitate, and to amplify, rather than to state with authority or
integrate. New meaning is gradually born from the encounter, or the
intersection, of many different elements.
Today, this state of mind or of the human world is called postmodernism. For me,
a symbol of that state is a Bedouin mounted on a camel and clad in traditional
robes under which he is wearing jeans, with a transistor radio in his hands and
an ad for Coca-Cola on the camel's back. I am not ridiculing this, nor am I
shedding an intellectual tear over the commercial expansion of the West that
destroys alien cultures. I see it rather as a typical expression of this
multicultural era, a signal that an amalgamation of cultures is taking place. I
see it as proof that something is happening, something is being born, that we
are in a phase when one age is succeeding another, when everything is possible.
Yes, everything is possible, because our civilization does not have its own
unified style, its own spirit, its own aesthetic.
Science and Modern Civilization
This is related to the crisis, or to the transformation, of science as the basis
of the modern conception of the world.
The dizzying development of this science, with its unconditional faith in
objective reality and its complete dependency on general and rationally knowable
laws, led to the birth of modern technological civilization. It is the first
civilization in the history of the human race that spans the entire globe and
firmly binds together all human societies, submitting them to a common global
destiny. It was this science that enabled man, for the first time, to see Earth
from space with his own eyes; that is, to see it as another star in the sky.
At the same time, however, the relationship to the world that the modern science
fostered and shaped now appears to have exhausted its potential. It is
increasingly clear that, strangely, the relationship is missing something. It
fails to connect with the most intrinsic nature of reality and with natural
human experience. It is now more of a source of disintegration and doubt than a
source of integration and meaning. It produces what amounts to a state of
schizophrenia: Man as an observer is becoming completely alienated from himself
as a being.
Classical modern science described only the surface of things, a single
dimension of reality. And the more dogmatically science treated it as the only
dimension, as the very essence of reality, the more misleading it became. Today,
for instance, we may know immeasurably more about the universe than our
ancestors did, and yet, it increasingly seems they knew something more essential
about it than we do, something that escapes us. The same thing is true of nature
and of ourselves. The more thoroughly all our organs and their functions, their
internal structure, and the biochemical reactions that take place within them
are described, the more we seem to fail to grasp the spirit, purpose, and
meaning of the system that they create together and that we experience as our
unique "self".
And thus today we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation. We enjoy all the
achievements of modern civilization that have made our physical existence on
this earth easier so in many important ways. Yet we do not know exactly what to
do with ourselves, where to turn. The world of our experiences seems chaotic,
disconnected, confusing. There appear to be no integrating forces, no unified
meaning, no true inner understanding of phenomena in our experience of the
world. Experts can explain anything in the objective world to us, yet we
understand our own lives less and less. In short, we live in the postmodern
world, where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain.
When Nothing is Certain
This state of affairs has its social and political consequences. The single
planetary civilization to which we all belong confronts us with global
challenges. We stand helpless before them because our civilization has
essentially globalized only the surfaces of our lives. But our inner self
continues to have a life of its own. And the fewer answers the era of rational
knowledge provides to the basic questions of human Being, the more deeply it
would seem that people, behind its back as it were, cling to the ancient
certainties of their tribe. Because of this, individual cultures, increasingly
lumped together by contemporary civilization, are realizing with new urgency
their own inner autonomy and the inner differences of others.
Cultural conflicts are increasing and are understandably more dangerous today
than at any other time in history. The end of the era of rationalism has been
catastrophic. Armed with the same supermodern weapons, often from the same
suppliers, and followed by television cameras, the members of various tribal
cults are at war with one another. By day, we work with statistics; in the
evening, we consult astrologers and frighten ourselves with thrillers about
vampires. The abyss between rational and the spiritual, the external and the
internal, the objective and the subjective, the technical and the moral, the
universal and the unique, constantly grows deeper.
Politicians are rightly worried by the problem of finding the key to ensure the
survival of a civilization that is global and at the same time clearly
multicultural. How can generally respected mechanisms of peaceful coexistence be
set up, and on what set of principles are they to be established?
These questions have been highlighted with particular urgency by the two most
important political events in the second half of the twentieth century: the
collapse of colonial hegemony and the fall of communism. The artificial world
order of the past decades has collapsed, and a new, more-just order has not yet
emerged. the central political task of the final years of this century, then, is
the creation of a new model of coexistence among the various cultures, peoples,
races, and religious spheres within a single interconnected civilization. This
task is all the more urgent because other threats to contemporary humanity
brought about by one-dimensional development of civilization are growing more
serious all the time.
Many believe this task can be accomplished through technical means. That is,
they believe it can be accomplished through the intervention of new
organizational, political, and diplomatic instruments. Yes, it is clearly
necessary to invent organizational structures appropriate to the present
multicultural age. But such efforts are doomed to failure if they do not grow
out of something deeper, out of generally held values.
This, too, is well known. And in searching for the most natural source for
the creation of a new world order, we usually look to an area that is the
traditional foundation of modern justice and a great achievement of the modern
age: to a set of values that - among other things - were first declared in this
building (Independence Hall). I am referring to respect for the unique human
being and his or her liberties and inalienable rights and to the principle that
all power derives from the people. I am, in short, referring to the fundamental
ideas of modern democracy.
What I am about to say may sound provocative, but I feel more and more strongly
that even these ideas are not enough, that we must go farther and deeper. The
point is that the solution they offer is still, as it were, modern, derived from
the climate of the Enlightenment and from a view of man and his relation to the
world that has been characteristic of the Euro-American sphere for the last two
centuries. Today, however, we are in a different place and facing a different
situation, one to which classical modern solutions in themselves do not give a
satisfactory response. After all, the very principle of inalienable human
rights, conferred on man by the Creator, grew out of the typically modern notion
that man - as a being capable of knowing nature and the world - was the pinnacle
of creation and lord of the world,
This modern anthropocentrism inevitably meant that He who allegedly endowed man
with his inalienable rights began to disappear from the world: He was so far
beyond the grasp of modern science that he was gradually pushed into a sphere of
privacy of sorts, if not directly into a sphere of private fancy - that is, to a
place where public obligations no longer apply. The existence of a higher
authority than man himself simply began to get in the way of human aspirations.
Two Transcendent Ideas
The idea of human rights and freedoms must be an integral part of any meaningful
world order. Yet, I think it must be anchored in a different place, and in a
different way, than has been the case so far. If it is to be more than just a
slogan mocked by half the world, it cannot be expressed in the language of a
departing era, and it must not be mere froth floating on the subsiding waters of
faith in a purely scientific relationship to the world.
Paradoxically, inspiration for the renewal of this lost integrity can once again
be found in science, in a science that is new - let us say postmodern - a
science producing ideas that in a certain sense allow it to transcend its own
limits. I will give two examples:
The first is the Anthropic Cosmological Principle. Its authors and adherents
have pointed out that from the countless possible courses of its evolution the
universe took the only one that enabled life to emerge. This is not yet proof
that the aim of the universe has always been that it should one day see itself
through our eyes. But how else can this matter be explained?
I think the Anthropic Cosmological Principle brings to us an idea perhaps as old
as humanity itself: that we are not at all just an accidental anomaly, the
microscopic caprice of a tine particle whirling in the endless depth of the
universe. Instead, we are mysteriously connected to the entire universe, we are
mirrored in it, just as the entire evolution of the universe is mirrored in us.
Until recently, it might have seemed that we were an unhappy bit of mildew on a
heavenly body whirling in space among many that have no mildew on them at all.
this was something that classical science could explain. Yet, the moment it
begins to appear that we are deeply connected to the entire universe, science
reaches the outer limits of its powers. Because it is founded on the search for
universal laws, it cannot deal with singularity, that is, with uniqueness. The
universe is a unique event and a unique story, and so far we are the unique
point of that story. But unique events and stories are the domain of poetry, not
science. With the formulation of the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, science
has found itself on the border between formula and story, between science and
myth. In that, however, science has paradoxically returned, in a roundabout way,
to man, and offers him - in new clothing - his lost integrity. It does so by
anchoring him once more in the cosmos.
The second example is the Gaia Hypothesis. This theory brings together proof
that the dense network of mutual interactions between the organic and inorganic
portions of the earth's surface form a single system, a kind of mega-organism, a
living planet - Gaia - named after an ancient goddess who is recognizable as an
archetype of the Earth Mother in perhaps all religions. According to the Gaia
Hypothesis, we are parts of a greater whole. If we endanger her, she will
dispense with us in the interest of a higher value - that is, life itself.
Toward Self-Transcendence
What makes the Anthropic Principle and the Gaia Hypothesis so inspiring? One
simple thing: Both remind us, in modern language, of what we have long
suspected, of what we have long projected into our forgotten myths and perhaps
what has always lain dormant within us as archetypes. That is, the awareness of
our being anchored in the earth and the universe, the awareness that we are not
here alone nor for ourselves alone, but that we are an integral part of higher,
mysterious entities against whom it is not advisable to blaspheme. This
forgotten awareness is encoded in all religions. All cultures anticipate it in
various forms. It is one of the things that form the basis of man's
understanding of himself, of his place in the world, and ultimately of the world
as such.
A modern philosopher once said: "Only a God can save us now."
Yes, the only real hope of people today is probably a renewal of our certainty
that we are rooted in the earth and, at the same time, in the cosmos. This
awareness endows us with the capacity for self-transcendence. Politicians at
international forums may reiterate a thousand times that the basis of the new
world order must be universal respects for human rights, but it will mean
nothing as long as this imperative does not derive from the respect of the
miracle of Being, the miracle of the universe, the miracle of nature, the
miracle of our own existence. Only someone who submits to the authority of the
universal order and of creation, who values the right to be a part of it and a
participant in it, can genuinely value himself and his neighbors, and thus honor
their rights as well.
It logically follows that, in today's multicultural world, the truly reliable
path to coexistence, to peaceful coexistence and creative cooperation, must
start from what is at the root of all cultures and what lies infinitely deeper
in human hearts and minds than political opinion, convictions, antipathies, or
sympathies - it must be rooted in self-transcendence:
Transcendence as a hand reached out to those close to us, to foreigners, to the
human community, to all living creatures, to nature, to the universe.
Transcendence as a deeply and joyously experienced need to be in harmony even
with what we ourselves are not, what we do not understand, what seems distant
from us in time and space, but with which we are nevertheless mysteriously
linked because, together with us, all this constitutes a single world.
Transcendence as the only real alternative to extinction.
The Declaration of Independence states that the Creator gave man the right to
liberty. It seems man can realize that liberty only if he does not forget the
One who endowed him with it.
The above text was from
http://www.worldtrans.org/whole/havelspeech.html
More and more I see those who maintain connections with people and with
education and science and health, as critical to this transformation Teachers,
family physicians and others who maintain contact with all types of peoples and
who relish direct contact with people, writers, and others who have connections
in the people and connections in science and technology must step up this role
to ease this transition.
Robert C. Bowman, M.D. rbowman@unmc.edu