Science: A Menace to Civilisation?

On the face of it, the statement “Science is a menace to civilisation” seems to be utter nonsense. Today, if we have a toothache, we can visit a dentist who can perform a painless extraction or make a permanent filling. A hundred years ago, dentistry was carried out by a barber with a pair of pliers, imagine that. Medicine, through science, has certainly made astonishing strides in improving the lot of mankind. Besides, it also promoted health and longevity, improving man’s whole way of life by allowing him or her to use the world’s natural resources to the full, etc. So what then?

However, yet today, something has to be said on the other side and I agree with this other end of view. The old proverb ‘knowledge is power’ has more truth than it will ever before, and in many advanced countries, we are reaching the position where the real power has fallen into the hands of nuclear scientists who possess the means of whole-sale destruction. Such brain-power often goes together with psychological immaturity and childish dreams of an “international society” in which all knowledge should be pooled. Such idealism, noble in the abstract, is dangerous in an imperfect world, particularly, when scientists reveal potentially dangerous secrets or defect from one political block to another. Today, science is indeed the enemy of civilisation in this sense.

Further considerations are the fact that science has made warfare easy for the unscrupulous. Any small or vindictive nation can purchase jet aircraft, poison gas or the high velocity rifle. Some of the more general results of science are also somewhat disquieting. Crop fertilizers taint the crops. Tampering with nature can produce imbalance or drought. Besides, animal experimenting, chemical research and farming techniques also rose in number. Only the uncivilised would allow such cruelty. But perhaps, the most important danger is that science seems to be gaining control over man himself, as it has produced what we call “modern life”, with all it nervous tension, ceaseless activity, worry and unbalanced living. City-dwellers tend to curse the machine like the computer which has forced them into a rigid pattern of restricted, high-pressure and yet monotonous living. Highly developed electrical entertainment and communication devices such as handphones, emails, etc, have posed a threat to numb our brains as it kills our life social skills and the art of conversation. So has science improved our lives? I doubt exactly so.

Charlie Chaplin’s old film “Modern Times” effectively satirized this tendency some forty years ago and, for most of us, life has developed along the lines he predicted. Science undermines the environment slowly, but still as ruthlessly in times of peace - through the technological developments of the industrial revolution (c.1750-1850) such as the coal-fired steam engine, and more recently through fossil- and nuclear-fuelled power stations. Even more recently, developments in genetic science have brought is to the brink of realising the nightmare scenarios of novels such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984.

All in all, I am more inclined to agreeing that science can be a menace to civilisation. However, it is actually neither man’s enemy nor his friend. Like the jungle, it is neutral. Everything depends on man’s use or misuse of it. Today’s signs are that its worst dangers are at least being recognized. To end off, there is hope for the future, provided science is made man’s servant and not his master.

“Our way of life has been influenced by the way technology has developed. In future, it seems to me, we ought to try to reverse this and so develop our technology that it meets the needs of the sort of life we wish to lead.”
PRINCE PHILIP