“The task of humanity…is to create a global civilization which embodies both the spiritual and material dimensions of existence.”
The Universal House of Justice
Dec 18, 2011. Last week, I blogged about how the role of science in society was changing. I illustrated those changes by discussing the decline of Bell Labs and NTT Research Labs, two industrial research labs that played an important role in scientific and industrial development in the United States and Japan respectively in the 20th century.
I am using the example of the labs to help illustrate the Baha’i point of view that both science and religion are needed if the world is to advance:
“Religion and science are the two wings upon which man’s intelligence can soar into the heights, with which the human soul can progress. It is not possible to fly with one wing alone!”
This week, I want to use the important lessons to be learned from Bell Labs and NTT Research Labs to elaborate on some of the future changes that need to take place if science is to become a “wing” of the bird of humanity that benefits all the people of the world.
Lessons To Be Learned
Both Bell Labs and NTT Research Labs were large – each had more than 10,000 employees – and both were the research and development organizations of national telecommunications monopolies. They epitomized the focused, wealth-building, centralized, and highly top-down form of science and engineering typical of the late 20th century.
The lessons that are to be learned from them and their decline – if I may recapitulate – include on one hand the power of concentrated scientific research, and on the other hand the limitations of concentrated control of the fruits of that research.
In the first case, massively concentrated scientific research of the type which these labs excelled at played an important role in 20th century scientific and technical development. Bell Labs, for example, developed transistors, microwave and RF technologies, lasers, optical fibers, e-mail, and the precursors to the internet. These are the fundamental technologies of the 21st century.
NTT Labs played a similar developmental role in Japan, first helping create the giant electronics firms – NEC, Fujitsu, Toshiba – that are at the core of the Japanese electronics industry. Then, through NTT DoCoMo, playing a major role in the development of the modern cell phone industry.
But despite the wealth of scientific and technological productivity of these two labs, the benefits to society of much of their research was limited. (The exceptions, of course, are transistors and lasers which – in effect – escaped from Bell Labs and grew rapidly into important technologies.)
It was only when the telecommunications monopolies – AT&T and NTT – that controlled the labs were broken apart that the telecommunications industry exploded with creativity and rapidly developed the new technologies that have lead to the cell-phone and internet technologies we see today – and with them the global information and communications networks that reach to all except the most remote part of the world today.
So the lesson is twofold: (1) concentrated research can create scientific and engineering advances that can change the world, and (2) scientific and engineering advances require new forms of social organization – the telephone monopolies of the 20th century were inadequate – if they are to proliferate and benefit large numbers of people.
The lesson for those with goodwill towards the whole of the world is, I submit, that the fruits of concentrated scientific development are real, and that focused scientific research – if successively and massively implemented – can create fundamental changes in how the world functions.
But, in the world that we live in today, scientific research focused on the real needs of the people of the world often does not take place and the mechanisms for implementation the potential fruits of such research are lacking. To echo the Occupy Wall Street crowd, the world is mainly structured for the material benefits of the “1%”.This is due, I think, to the lack of true religion and the concurrent rise of materialism:
“Should a man try to fly … with the wing of science alone he would also make no progress, but fall into the despairing slough of materialism.”
Universal Scientific Literacy
If we are to fully use the power of science, then it must be harnessed for the benefit of all.
This should be viewed as the next step in an ongoing series of scientific revolutions – and it is a step that is just dawning. It includes the expansion of scientific literacy and the extension of the capacities of science to all the members of the world’s communities and all the members of their various component social groups.
When this happens, it will level the playing fields for all of the world’s peoples and allow them to take their destiny into their own hands. When this happens, science will belong to all. It will more radically change the world than anything in the most fevered dreams of the most ardent revolutionaries of the past.
Truly, universal scientific literacy will be “power to the people”, for there is no greater power known than the power of the mind.
Changes in Social Organization
The other lesson to be drawn from the story of Bell Labs and NTT Labs is that the sharing of the benefits of science is determined by social organization. The fruits of the great scientific advances of these labs were only widely made available when monopoly control of the telecommunications industry was ended.
Similarly, if the fruits of the benefits of society are to be extended to all, there needs to be massive shifts in the social organization of world societies, much as there were massive shifts in the world’s telecommunications and internet industries.
If that shift is to extend to all corner’s of the globe and to all communities, that is an undertaking that our present forms of social organization – now seemingly incapable of maintaining even the strength of the world’s leading industrial democracies – are unprepared for and incapable of doing.
Here is my argument and a challenge. We have seen hugely increasing rates of change, both in technology and in the expectations of people everywhere. Now, the main benefits of those changes are the citizens of the world’s leading industrial nations, and to a lesser extent, citizens of resource-rich regions. (But of course benefits seem to be slipping away even as I write from most people in these countries – wealth and privilege is becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few.) Real and needed social change, accordingly, must take place if the benefits of science are to be extended to all. The challenge is to create opportunities for such change.
We have argued earlier – and quoted the Baha’i Writings as saying – that this requires religion to play a central role. Here is the grand picture I want to paint:
- Four hundred years ago, the scientific revolution began as Islamic learning merged with European creative energies to explore the earth and the heavens and create unparalleled new technologies.
- Two hundred years ago, enlightened European thought labored to cast aside the world’s great religions, thinking them retrograde and an impediment to the world’s evolution.
- Now, we live in a time of unmatched material prosperity for some, and chaos and despair for most others. But, we stand on the brink of yet another world revolution promised by the growth of knowledge and the possibility of universal scientific literacy.
- The means to achieve that long promised new world is not science alone, it requires a rejuvenated and re-energized religion.
- We now know that the enlightenment rejection of religion was – to the extent that it saw religion as superseded by science – juvenile and ignorant. The circle has turned, and it is the ignorance and political baggage of the secular, nationalistic, materialistic heritage of two hundred years ago – and yes, many scientists – that impedes progress.
- The relationship of science and religion has gone nearly a full circle. Four hundred years ago they were in accord, two hundred years ago in conflict, and now the relationship is coming back to its starting point. Science and religion need to come into accord again if we are to realize the dreams of both for the future.
Next Week
Next week, we will continue further our exploration of the coming together of science and religion.
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This is the 10th in a series of blogs on religion and science working together to create a global civilization. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. He did extensive research in quantum optics in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.
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John
December 19, 2011 at 3:06 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Dear Stephen,
Hi! I’ve just now finally gotten on board Common Ground and am learning its ins and outs, creating my profile, etc.
This is an excellent posting, very informative about how Bell Labs and NTT labs worked, with a nice graphic arts touch too!
I really should go back to the beginning of this series and read through it, and I’m sorry to start my comments in “mid-stream,” but I did have a couple (that you may have already answered earlier).
First, as I’m sure you are aware, there is a long history of effort within the framework of the United Nations to stimulate a transnational consensus among states to harness science and technology for development for all, for the “99 percent.” There are resolutions on this topic every year in the UN General Assembly, and it has long been a central part of the UN’s efforts to facilitate the emergence of a “new global human order.” To bring an end to the scourge of war, and to bring about a world of greater welfare and larger freedom is written into the UN Charter itself. It is what “We the Peoples of the United Nations agreed to in the Preamble in 1945.
However, the world has not proceeded far enough in this direction, and we need to analyze the spiritual and psycho-structural reasons for this failure. I think you are absolutely correct in invoking the 1%/99% distinction in initially looking at this failure. Science has been hijacked by the interests of the 1% to the detriment of the interests of the 99%. What is the figure? Is it not true that well over half of the world’s scientists work for the military?
The United Nations Organization and public international law in general are neutral as to economic system. Public international law defines the rights and duties of states, one duty being to uphold internationally defined human rights within each state’s domestic framework.
There is also, of course, a long history within states–even within capitalist states–of trying to distribute wealth and income more equally.
At least in this article, however, you did not mention or explore this history at the global or the national level, and that non-mention creates a bit of an impression that nothing has happened yet along this line and that religions now have to start making this effort from the beginning.
We really don’t have time to reinvent the wheel. In fact, what religious institutions and people everywhere need to start doing is tapping into and supporting the UN’s already existing program to focus science on things that help meet the real needs of the 99 percent of humanity, particularly in termsof renewable energy. The UN estimates that if even only one-third of the world’s one-trillion-dollar military budget were rechanneled into intelligent progras to meet the needs of the 99%, we would soon have a sustainable, peaceful world. Current global budget priorities represent absolute insanity. In fact, we do not even have an idea of a global budget. All we have is the sum of national government budgets, and even that is hardly ever put before the world as a coherent set of statistics.
Second, I have a kind of generic complaint about the typical semantic categories of the “science and religion” discourse. Please hear me out.
I find it logically unsettling that we talk about science and religion as apparently two separate things on some occasions and then, on other occasions, as Baha’is, we say that religion is defined as the “science of the love of God.” We are thus putting ourselves in the awkward position of saying that true “religion” is the “science” of the love of God, while “science” is the science of everything else. So both religion and science are science, and thus we are left with one real category: science.
Logically and ethically, we should thus stop being inconsistent and confusing. We should simply say that the science of the love of God tells us that we should do X, and the science of a sustainable biosphere tells us how to do X and how much to do X, where X is an empirical or deductive-hypothetical proposition about distributing benefits.
In short, the Baha’i definition of religion as the real connections between things and as the science of the love of God is so far removed from the ordinary connotations of “religion” as institutionalized blind belief that we need to be very careful in our wording. When we start characterizing the Enlightenment as a war against “religion,” we are obviously using ‘religion’ in its commonly used sense of institutionalized blind belief, since the Enlightenment was not a war against enlightenment but against ignorance and unquestioning beliefs. We need to be clear, too, that this war was a just war, an absolutely vital war, and that it is still going on.
When, however, we then turn around and say that “religion” should play a central, re-energized, and rejuvenated role in harnessing science’s benefits for all, we reverse the previously negative connotation of the word “religion” and turn “religion” into something good. But how can institutionalized blind belief suddenly become something good? Why do we want institutionalized blind belief to become re-energized” and “rejuvenated”? This is, in fact, exactly what we see in the failure of the United States to seek meaningful legal agreements on greenhouse gas emissions. It is “religion” in the negative sense, re-energized and rejuvenated, that is steering the US and thus the world toward global disaster. What is really needed is a re-energized and rejuvenated sense of rational ethics.
In essence, ‘science’ is a word that connotes and denotes some kind of critical thought process, some kind of methodology. ‘Religion’ is a flip-flop word. In its common usage, it neither denotes nor connotes any kind of critical thinking process. At best it connotes the presence of a critical moral awareness; at worst it connotes mass psychosis, mere supernaturalism, the inversion of the Golden Rule, and theological words without moral deeds.
We therefore need to emphasize, in my opinion, in the “science/religion” dialogue, that the really operative set of categories consists not of “science” and “religion” but of the dialogue of science and ethics, universal facts and universal values.
Yours,
John Dale
Stephen Friberg
December 20, 2011 at 9:55 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
John, welcome onto Common Ground Group and its absolutely great to have your comments, which, to my way of thinking, are an important part of what this blog can be.
I’ve got to run to work, so let me quickly respond to your comments. I’ll say more tonight if you answer them.
First of all you say:
I would reply that this approach, as correct and admirable as it is, is not working. First of all, the mindset still is heavily top-down development-oriented, although that is changing. The approach that I’m talking about is ultimately about people having their own access to science and getting its fruits for themselves. It’s not what we should give them by doing science for them, but leveling the playing field so that people are doing science for themselves. I would say that science and technical development are shot through with the assumptions of national development and economic and military supremacy, and we need a shift away from those assumptions.
And of course the huge expenditures on military issues show how retrograde our thinking – and our structural systems – are.
Also, you write:
I think that you’ve described one of the central aspects of the difficulties of the topic here. In a way, we are stuck with the categories and the terminologies – on one hand the enlightenment engagement with the topics involved used these categories and they have been used ever since. On the other hand, `Abdu’l-Baha, Shoghi Effendi, and the Universal House of Justice have used the same terminologies in Baha’i discourse. But, yes, there are very real problems.
One of the problems, as you point out, is the continued belief that religion is a negative thing. But, a big part of the truth is that religion was never the monolithically negative thing caricatured by its bitter enemies and those who wanted to overturn its transnational allegiances in favor of national power. Religion has evolved and changed too.
I would go a step further and say that the extraordinarily harsh and untrue language the new atheists and anti-Islamic cold warriors use to portray religion is as inaccurate as it is unscientific. And while the faults of established religion are real and well-documented, religion too is a moving target and blanket accusations against it invariably untrue. We have to be fair and judicious in our appraisal of religion, and the evidence increasingly is that even the old-time religions are reforming and helping transform the world in ways that were once thought the exclusive domain of secularism and European enlightened thought.
Stephen
Mark H.
December 20, 2011 at 9:05 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Two fundamental axioms must permeate the collective human mentality before any of this can work.
1: I am essentially a spiritual being. My corporeal existence and material possessions/comfort are means to an end — not ends in and of themselves.
2: All “other” people are also spiritual beings, the same as me, on the deepest and most profound level. Therefore, there can really be no “other.” There is no “us” and “them.” In reality, there is only “we.”
If religion can truly reflect that, and if it can truly take hold, then the rest will fall into place.
Stephen Friberg
December 20, 2011 at 9:49 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Agreed.
Doing as you is a tall order and in many ways speaks to new revolution in society. But, as far as I can tell, that is what we are going to have to embrace.
Maya Bohnhoff
January 4, 2012 at 10:11 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Mark, I couldn’t have put it better. In fact, “There is no ‘us’ and ‘them’, there is only ‘us’” has become somewhat of a motto for me. I find myself using it on an almost daily basis.
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