Table of Contents
In “The Scientific Outlook“; Bertrand Russell imagines a future that is dominated by science and technology. In this world, there will be one government. This centralized authority will be intolerant of nationalism and regional divisions that breed inefficiency and conflict. It will preach loyalty to the world state over petty local allegiances.
Once established, such a global government will prove highly stable. Economic gains will be immense – unemployment, poverty and boom-bust cycles will be eliminated as centralized planning ensures that every able-bodied person has productive work and basic comforts. Those few who refuse to contribute will be imprisoned.
When technological progress renders some jobs obsolete, the state will efficiently retrain and reassign workers to new roles. Population levels will likely be kept in stasis, controlled through economic incentives and disincentives.
It remains uncertain whether people will find contentment in such a tightly-managed paradise. Perhaps biochemistry will unlock the secrets to engineering happiness despite spartan conditions. Dangerous sports might be promoted to engage the anarchic impulses of those who would otherwise grow restless with sterile stability. Spectacular blood sports, maybe even with lethal consequences, could become popular entertainments to gratify humanity’s baser instincts.
In this brave new world, a universal language, either Esperanto or simplified English, will reign. Literature and art of the past, with their disruptive emotional resonance, will be heavily restricted. The masses will be permitted only saccharine, anodyne culture so as not to stir up passions. Love and private murder, pirates and warfare – such thrilling but destabilizing themes will be verboten. Only sober academics will have access to the upsetting classics of yesteryear.
Rationality requires irrationality be constrained if a scientific civilization is to endure. Criminal antiheroes cannot be romanticized; humble conformity must be exalted over unruly individualism. Though something will be lost in the process, the wild energies that endanger orderly society have to be subdued for progress to advance unimpeded.
Demographic pressures present another challenge to the stability of a scientific civilization. Birth rates among the most intelligent and advanced populations are plummeting. If present trends continue, the brightest civilizations will dwindle and the demanding work of sustaining a hi-tech world order will fall to less capable races. Europe could go the way of Haiti if its shrinking white population grows dependent on African laborers who in time could rise up against their masters. China may inherit global scientific leadership for a time, but will likely see its own birth rates plunge as it develops.
Therefore, for a scientific civilization to endure, reproduction cannot be left to individual choice but must be managed like any other resource. Financial and cultural obstacles to natalist policies will have to be overcome. A scientific approach to breeding is required if global technocracy is to escape an ignominious demise.
Rational Reproduction
Truly rational reproductive practices may diverge radically from traditional sentiments. In each generation, the state might select the fittest 25% of women and 5% of men to parent the next generation, with the rest humanely sterilized. Sexual pleasure would be freely permitted, but shorn of any social significance.
Chosen mothers would be required to bear 8-9 children each, but would be relieved of all other duties besides nursing. Their liaisons with sterilized men would be of no consequence. Artificial insemination may be embraced to preempt personal contact between biological parents – an unseemly vulgarity in a world of surgical sterility. Romantic love would be reserved for recreational dalliances, wholly separate from the serious business of breeding.
Pairing would be based on dispassionate calculations of what traits are desired in offspring – robust health and, for the ruling elite, high intelligence. Narrow pelvises and other complications of natural birth will be bred out, or gestation eventually shortened with fetuses transferred to artificial incubators for the final months. Expectant mothers of the governing class would spend their pregnancies having the unborn subjected to an array of treatments to enhance the abilities and attributes of their progeny and their progeny’s progeny.
Children of promise would be raised by expert nurses, not their biological mothers. Those displaying undue affection for any particular adult would be separated from the object of their attachment. The architects of this new order will concur that private bonds of sentiment are backward superstitions to be discarded – a source of inefficient entanglements per the Freudians, an obstacle to productive single-minded devotion per the captains of industry, a frivolous distraction per the stoic clergy of the new rationalist faith.
The Psychology of the Scientific State
What then of the inner lives of those inhabiting this antiseptic dystopia? The laboring masses may achieve a kind of lobotomized contentment, their days filled with simple work and vapid entertainments, their minds steeped from infancy in awe of their white-coated overlords. Sterilized drones will fornicate free of lasting consequence, save for the abiding emptiness where meaning used to reside.
The ruling elites tasked with maintaining this grand machinery will make a religiously rationalist cult of efficiency, sacrificing the softer sentiments to the ideal of optimal social functioning. Should forbidden feelings start to take forbidden form between peers, omnipresent surveillance systems will alert the authorities to admonish and separate the offenders before their dalliance can imperil the smooth functioning of the endeavor at hand.
All affect will be suspect, save for the sanctioned fanaticism of devotion to science and state. The young elite will sublimate frustrated energies into ferocious athletics and perilous adventure, channeled into conditioning killer instincts for keeping the drones in line. Loveless stress relief will be ubiquitous and conspicuous, but any gesture toward deeper caring will be stigmatized as a symptom of shameful disorder.
In this anhedonic world, joyless pleasures may endure but exuberant ecstasy will be extinct, the watchword a pitiless, mechanical functionalism. Without sin as a safety valve, scientific sadism could grow rampant, human suffering recast as a necessary input for the allegedly noble end of advancing knowledge, until the screams of vivisected subjects rings out from every laboratory. As understanding of the psyche grows sufficiently sophisticated, the ruled may be drugged into perfect compliance, their very will to resist pharmaceutically amputated.
Thus might the Scientific World Order endure, founded upon a self-devouring renunciation – knowledge without wisdom, power without purpose, people without humanity. But is such a devil’s bargain the inevitable terminus of the triumph of technique over tradition, or might it be averted?
Steps Back from the Abyss
The destination described is not presented as an iron necessity, but rather as the ultimate extrapolation of certain tendencies within the modern scientific project. Features both fair and foul are hopelessly entangled in this portrait. The impulse to pursue understanding and leverage its discoveries to better the human condition is a commendable one – so long as it does not steamroll all other aspirations underfoot. When unbound technique is elevated to the supreme and exclusive value, it becomes a cruel tyrant.
Therein lies the chief danger confronting civilization: that an unchecked and militantly reductionist instrumentalism may conquer the planet and shatter the soul. As science encroaches upon metaphysics, it paradoxically erodes its own epistemological foundations. An honest accounting reveals the roots of our convictions in animal instinct, not induction, with disbelief rather than belief the child of ratiocination.
Only by bracketing such ultimate questions can science unleash its tremendous technological potency upon our environment and our selves. We can only wield this transformative power by renouncing the contemplative pursuit of truth for its own sake. Thus is man seemingly forced to choose between knowing the world as a lover and controlling it as a technician.
But to definitively cleave the spirit in this manner would be to amputate what is best in us. If we are to preserve a life worth living, we must defend a space for spontaneity against the totalizing schemes and dreams of scientific Caesar. Knowledge is good and ignorance evil – this is the one dogma a true humanist cannot doubt. But power for its own sake is vacuous vanity, meaningful only when harnessed to humane ends.
Today’s power-drunk potentates cannot tell the difference, intoxicated by the breaking of limits previously assumed inviolable. They mistake capability for justification, novelty for necessity. Only power subordinated to life-affirming aims is liable to do more good than harm.
So what ultimately are the proper ends of existence? No single soul has the authority to dictate the answer to another. For each individual, the telos of their time on Earth is that which grants them profound peace and satisfaction – or if such blessed stasis is too much to demand of our tragic cosmos, at least moments of delight, joy and ecstasy. The grasping megalomaniac can never experience the radiant contentment available to the mystic, poet or lover enraptured by the sublime. Temporal power is at best a means, never an end.
When death comes knocking, it is not a craven clinging to control that will grant solace but gratitude for having witnessed the marvels and miracles strewn throughout mundane existence for those with eyes to behold them: a scarlet sunset, a sparkling sunrise, a silent snow drift, petrichor after a drought, storm-tossed seas smashing stone. If science can preserve and expand access to these simple glories, it will be a blessing. But if instead it presumes to expunge life’s intrinsic luster for the sake of ruthless mastery, it will yield only the bitter fruit of alienation and anomie.
References:
- Bertrand Russell’s “The Scientific Outlook“