Address by John Naughton, Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology, The Open University at the Conferring of Degrees in the Faculty of Arts, University College Cork, Thursday, 19 September, 2002
First of all, let me add my congratulations to those
of the President. Just as there is no
such thing as a minor operation when one has to face the surgeon oneself, there
is no such thing as an easy degree either.
This is sometimes forgotten by government ministers who talk about
widening access to higher education and increasing the numbers of graduates as
if it were a process somehow akin to that of increasing the throughput of steel
mills or oil refineries. They forget
that students are not inanimate objects but creative and fallible human beings,
and that every path to a university degree involves a personal struggle -- a
struggle against one's own ignorance, against the difficulty of profound ideas
and the complexity of intellectual paradigms, against the pressures of time and
-- not least -- against the temptations of undergraduate life. For most of you, I guess that the memory of
the stress of Finals has begun to fade as the anticipation of jobs and careers
and new lives takes over. But before
you go, you should take real pride in what you have achieved so far, and relish
today's rite of passage.
As a graduate of this University myself, it is a great
honour to be here. As an engineer, I
had assumed that I would be addressing the congregation of engineering and
science graduates, and was therefore somewhat surprised -- not to say alarmed
-- to find that the President wanted me to talk to graduates in the
humanities. My alarm stemmed from the
fact that I well remember the contempt in which we engineers were held by our
Arts contemporaries in the Sixties.
They saw us as barbarians -- as philistinic morons endowed with slide
rules, insatiable thirsts and some even baser appetites. And of course many of my fellow-students did
their best to live down to these stereotypes.
But for me there was always a personal note of anguish
in this cultural divide. When I was
choosing what subject to study at UCC I was torn between history and
engineering. (My Leaving Cert results
would have allowed me to do either.)
Indeed as I walked up the drive on registration day (life was simpler
then and there was less competition for places) I mentally tossed up to decide
whether I would sign up to the Faculty of Arts or the Faculty of
Engineering. In the end Engineering
won, and I have never regretted that.
But what did distress me was the automatic assumption people made
thereafter that because I was a technologist my interest in the humanities had
been, as it were, cauterised.
This was my first encounter with a problem first
delineated by CP Snow in 1959 in his celebrated Rede Lecture on 'The Two
Cultures'. The rival cultures Snow
identified were those of the 'literary intellectuals' -- which really means the
humanities -- and of scientists.
Between these two worldviews he claimed there existed profound mutual
incomprehension and suspicion -- which reduced the chances of ever creatively
applying science and technology to solve society's problems.
Snow, who was himself a physicist, castigated the
humanities crowd for their indifference to, and ignorance of, science and
technology. "A good many
times", he said,
"I
have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the
traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable
gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have
asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of
Thermodynamics. The response was cold:
it was also negative. Yet I was asking
something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work
of Shakespeare's?"
Actually, it was the scientific equivalent of asking
someone: can you read? But do
not fret: I am not going to ask anyone here how much they know about the laws
of thermodynamics. Nor am I going to
pretend that scientists and engineers are any better, because the arrogant
indifference of my colleagues towards the social and cultural consequences of
their work is also shameful. My point
is that the gap between the two cultures today is as wide as it was when Snow
drew attention to it two generations ago.
In fact, if anything it's wider and more
dangerous. In the old days, those in
the humanities culture were merely ignorant or indifferent to science. Now they are openly contemptuous of it. Numerous opinion polls show that public
distrust of science and technology has reached a pathological level -- to the
extent that, in Britain at least, many parents are refusing to have their children
immunised using the MMR vaccine despite reputable scientific advice that it is
safe, with the result that preventable childhood diseases are now on the rise.
On the other side of the equation, scientists and
engineers behave in increasingly arrogant ways -- especially in areas like
genetic engineering or reproductive science.
They assert that no boundaries should be placed on their inquiries,
regardless of the potential environmental, ethical or social consequences of
what they are discovering or inventing.
And in defending the sanctity of the scientific method, they
conveniently overlook the fact that most scientific and technological research
nowadays is conducted not as a search for disinterested knowledge but as a way
of furthering the intellectual property portfolios of huge corporations.
The consequence of all this is that there is not much
communication between the two cultures any more, and what little there is tends
to be abusive and unreflective. This
dialogue of the deaf will be disastrous for our societies, which depend for their
health and prosperity on the judicious, ethical and efficient application of
scientific and technological knowledge.
We must find a way of enabling CP Snow's two cultures to talk to one
another.
Which is where you come in. Even in these days of mass education, a university education is a
rare privilege. It confers upon you
unique blessings: the experience of mastering something really difficult; a
personal encounter with the great thinkers of the past; an introduction to the
life of the mind; the ability to do joined-up thinking.
But with this privilege comes a special responsibility
-- to use your learning and intelligence for the public good. The health of our democracy depends on the
quality of our public debate, and too often nowadays our debates about
scientific and technological issues are conducted in an intellectual vacuum
before a bored and uninterested public.
As Arts graduates, you might think that such arguments
are nothing to do with you. If so,
you'd be wrong. Science -- particularly genetic research -- is now raising all
kinds of awkward non-scientific questions.
What does it mean to be human?
What is the mind? Where does
free will fit in a genetically determined world? Is cloning morally
acceptable? Should a company be allowed
to patent a human gene? Such questions
may be alien to science, but they are meat and drink to the humanities. This is your stuff as well as mine, in other
words. We're all in this together.
Go n-eírigh an bóthar libh.