How Science Is Losing Its Humanity
The Closing of the Scientific Mind is a plea for scientists to celebrate and enhance humanity rather than belittle human life. Author David Gelernter is a professor of computer science at Yale. His book Subjectivism: The Mind from Inside will be published by Norton later this year. Excerpts below.
The Closing of the Scientific Mind
That science should face crises in the early 21st century is inevitable. Power corrupts, and science today is the Catholic Church around the start of the 16th century: used to having its own way and dealing with heretics by excommunication, not argument.
Science is caught up, also, in the same educational breakdown that has brought so many other proud fields low. Science needs reasoned argument and constant skepticism and open-mindedness. But our leading universities have dedicated themselves to stamping them out—at least in all political areas.
We routinely provide superb technical educations in science, mathematics, and technology to brilliant undergraduates and doctoral students. But if those same students have been taught since kindergarten that you are not permitted to question the doctrine of man-made global warming or the line that men and women are interchangeable or the multiculturalist idea that all cultures and nations are equally good (except for Western nations and cultures, which are worse), how will they ever become reasonable, skeptical scientists?
They’ve been reared on the idea that questioning official doctrine is wrong, gauche, just unacceptable in polite society. (And if you are president of Harvard, it can get you fired.)
Beset by all this mold and fungus and corruption, science has continued to produce deep and brilliant work. Most scientists are skeptical about their own fields and hold their colleagues to rigorous standards.
Recent years have seen remarkable advances in experimental and applied physics, planetary exploration and astronomy, genetics, physiology, synthetic materials, computing, and all sorts of other areas.
Read rest at Science Matters
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