Nineteen Eighty-Four: Science Between Utopia and Dystopia by Helga Nowotny (auth.), Everett Mendelsohn, Helga Nowotny

By Helga Nowotny (auth.), Everett Mendelsohn, Helga Nowotny (eds.)

Just fifty years in the past Julian Huxley, the biologist grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, released a booklet which simply might be noticeable to symbolize the succeed­ ing outlook between younger scientists of the day: If I have been a Dictator (1934). The outlook is positive, the tone playfully rational, the purpose transparent - permit technology a unfastened hand and during rational making plans it may possibly convey order out of the encircling social chaos. He complained, even if: in the interim, technology is for many half both an highbrow luxurious or the paid servant of capitalist or the nationalist kingdom. while it and its effects can't be geared up into the present framework, it and they're overlooked; and in addition the constitution of medical study is grossly lopsided, with over-emphasis on a few forms of technology and partial or whole forget of others. (pp. 83-84) All this the scientist dictator may set correct. a brand new period of clinical human­ ism would supply replacement visions to the normal religions with their Gods and the civic religions similar to Nazism and fascism. technological know-how in Huxley's model incorporates in it the dual impulses of the utopian mind's eye - strength and Order. after all, it used to be precisely this imaginative and prescient of technological know-how which led that different grand­ son of Thomas Henry Huxley, the author Aldous Huxley, to painting medical discovery as probably subversive and clinical perform as eventually en­ slaving.

Show description

Read Online or Download Nineteen Eighty-Four: Science Between Utopia and Dystopia PDF

Similar science books

Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point: New Directions for the Physics of Time

Why is the long run so various from the previous? Why does the prior impact the long run and never the wrong way round? What does quantum mechanics rather let us know concerning the global? during this very important and obtainable booklet, Huw cost throws interesting new gentle on many of the nice mysteries of contemporary physics, and connects them in a unconditionally unique manner.

Souls of Distortion Awakening

This booklet reunites technology and spirituality after her roads separated three hundred years in the past. a growing number of scientists are getting to know that either disciplines are just aspects of an analogous coin. we are at the verge of an incredible paradigm switch in technology the place the immaterial subjective global of the brain can not be separated from the target fabric international.

Advances in Soil Science

The realm wishes for nutrition and fiber proceed to extend. inhabitants progress within the constructing nations peaked at 2. four percentage a 12 months in 1965, and has fallen to approximately 2. 1 percentage. notwithstanding, in lots of constructing international locations nearly part the folks are less than 15 years of age, poised to go into their effective and reproductive years.

Extra resources for Nineteen Eighty-Four: Science Between Utopia and Dystopia

Example text

Vol. III, pp. 264-5. 8. Bacon, The New Organon, in Works of Bacon, Vol. IV, pp. 247-8. 9. Bacon, Valerius Terminus, in Works of Bacon, Vol. III, pp. 221-2. 10. Stanley E. Fish, Sel}Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth Century Literature, Los Angeles, 1972. 11. Cf. Jonathan Swift's comments on longevity amongst the Struldbruggs in Gulliver's Travels, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1967, pp. 257-60. In Huxley's Brave New 44 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. Da~s World everyone lives without physiological deterioration until the age of sixty and then suddenly dies.

Davis These distinctions between ideal society types may be of some importance because they enable us to cut through a rather tangled and confused picture of the relationship between social idealism and science and to disentangle some of the more significant threads. Secondly, because we begin to see that, of all ideal society forms, science is most likely to be closely associated with utopia it becomes important to grasp what the implications of utopia and that relationship are. Thirdly, for the last four centuries, utopia has been a powerful influence on western institutional and political structures (35) in such a way that the relationship goes to the heart of the current crises of both science and utopia.

Freedom is lost and with it one of the liberal preconditions of scientific inquiry. The ultimate extension of this is to give fixity to science within a utopian construct. Again, if we look at the beginnings of the modem utopian tradition, we can see it exemplified. In the New Atlantis what we are shown is the basis of scientific inquiry. In Campanella's City of the Sun, by contrast, we are shown the results of scientific inquiry, fixed, complete, finished, an immutable orthodoxy in which there is no longer any role for scientific research (51).

Download PDF sample

Rated 4.40 of 5 – based on 42 votes