Controlling Change
by Science
It is relatively easy to see that the world changes and for those who cannot see it many authors
have come to the rescue by setting up a catalog of changes. They point at the exponential growth
of economies, the explosion of technological and scientific developments, the wildly increasing
possibilities for communications spanning the whole world, the sometimes devastating effects
on nature and life in general, and the loss of cohesion in society. It is not just that change occurs:
it occurs ever faster and faster. Indeed, even change changes.
There is no retired person who does not remember the
times without computers, smart phones, helicopters, traffic
jams, unbelievably silly television shows and soaps, joggers,
billboards, and the like. He also remembers the times with books,
storytellers, poverty, clean rivers, formal language during all
public events, dirty people, long walks, stinking cities, seas of
time, children dying young, and boring Sundays. Some of these
elderly people even remember the times without electricity,
without water flowing from taps and with stoves that burn peat.
It cannot be stressed enough how much has changed over the
past decades, and it cannot be stressed enough either that a
lot more will happen in the decades to follow. If you are young
now and listen with some mixture of amusement and boredom
to the memories of the elderly, be warned that chances are
high that your children will simply ignore you because you and
your memories will mean even nothing to them. Change does
frighten a lot of people. What separates the young from the old
is, basically, a plethora of gadgets and the social consequences
of them.
Let us retract from the cataract of change and focus on its
origins. There is one subset of human actions that can easily
be pinpointed as the major source of all changes. It is science
and technology. Ever since its invention, at several locations in
Europe around the 17-th century, modern science has changed
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the world drastically. It was in part due to science that religion
gradually lost its dominance. It was science that gave us the
modern evolutionary view on life and the universe as a whole.
When science was applied the consequences were drastic. It was
through science and technology that the knowledge needed to
rebuild the entire infrastructure of society (electricity, roads and
railroads, the communication networks, centralized factories)
was developed; people were forced to leave their traditional
social environment and had to work in factories because
production methods demanded; nature suffered badly from the
energy drain needed to fuel these developments. If we have to
select only one cause of all changes that have occurred, then
science and technology is the one to pick.
The human origin of change does not make the consequences
predictable. It is as if we are engineers that have access to the
engine of a car but only rarely to its steering wheel and absolutely
never to its brakes. In that respect one key characteristic of true
science and true technology is conserved through all changes;
the results of science are not predictable. The hallmark of science
is the power to be surprised and to accept the unexpected.
Science adheres to a method of producing knowledge, not to
knowledge per se and certainly not to preconceived notions
about how the world works. It is the perceived loss of control
that makes us want to access the steering wheel that drives
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all change. And science seems to be the ideal tool to manage
change.
Precisely because science prefers method above knowledge,
it has become a great problem solving tool. There is some
reason therefore to believe that we can at least manage the
consequences of change and actually reach the steering wheel
of change by using science. The same method applied under the
same circumstances, leads to the same result. That is the defining
characteristic of an experiment, and it is also the characteristic
that makes technology predictable. In a scientific context the
repeatability of an experiment makes theories trustworthy (if at
least the theory predicts the observed results), in a technological
context this characteristic is what makes problem solving a
trustworthy process. If the result is a desired one, the problem is
solved. In short: the power of science can be used to harness the
power of science.
So far so good, it seems. The changes come to us as a set of
problems and opportunities and solving the problems or
realizing the opportunities is what science and technology is
asked to do. The literature is filled with suggestions on how to
manage innovation and knowledge, on how to make people
creative in using science and technology (and, admittedly,
a few other things space forbids me to speak about) with the
single aim of realizing the problem solving potentials of science.
Governments too tend to prefer (more and more) to give grants
to those parts of science that may play a role in the management
of change. It is a rare application for a grant that does not magnify
(often to absurd proportions) the usefulness of the results that
will be obtained.
than a problem solving technique. Precisely because its methods
do lead to new perspectives on the world, on man and on the
universe, it is tool for freedom too, a tool that may liberate us
from preconceived notions and that may force us to rethink
our existence. Science did that may times. It replaced religious
dogmatism by an open view on the laws of nature, evolution
theory made us friends with apes, and theoretical physics gave
us new perspectives on time, space and free will. Constraining
science to the role of problem solver, as governments, knowledge
managers and entrepreneurs tend to do, is throwing away one
good element of change: the liberation from preconceived
notions.
It is also this liberation that can connect the generations. World
views evolve much slower than practical applications and
gadgets. Your children may be able to understand your world
view, while using gadgets that you can’t possibly master. Change
may allowed to be fast if only we let science also fulfill its role as
a liberator. We need pure science and we do need philosophy if
we want to understand our parents and our children.
We need to liberate science from the desire to control change.
Text by Henk Ellerman
Understanding Society
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where science meets society and life
Expand your horizon, take the time to reflect
www.tilburguniversity.edu/academicforum
But we face a real problem. Science has been and is much more
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