Archive for December 17th, 2009

Aldous Huxley

I recently stumbled upon Aldous Huxley’s 1946 essay entitled Science, Liberty and Peace which is a remarkable piece of writing. In it, he argues that science and technology has, throughout history, been one of the main causes of the centralization of power and decline of liberty.

“All that is being maintained here is that progressive science is one of the causative factors involved in the progressive decline of liberty and the progressive centralization of power, which have occurred during the twentieth century.”

It has done this through a number of ways, but the two most potent were coercion and persuasion.

Coercion

“In the course of the past two or three generations science and technology have equipped the political bosses who control the various national states with unprecedentedly efficient instruments of coercion. The tank, the flame-thrower and the bomber – to mention but a few of the instruments – have made nonsense of the old techniques of popular revolt. A the same time, the recent revolutionary improvements in the means of transport and communications have vastly strengthened the hands of the police.”

Huxley was obviously highly pessimistic about the actions of the authorities; after all, he had just witnessed the Second World War and the specter of the atomic bomb looms high in this essay. Because the war-making power of the state is so great against internal dissent, Huxley looks to the nonviolent leadership of Ghandi as an example of how to use new techniques in the face of new technology.

“In the past, personal and political liberty depended to a considerable extent upon governmental inefficiency. The spirit of tyranny was always more than willing; but its organization and material equipment were generally weak.”

Huxley was right then, as Evgeny Morozov is right now, to point out that oppressive governments are always willing to use the newest technological tools to limit liberty; however, this misses the ways in which dissidents can mobilize with technology, as well.

“[F]or in any armed conflict, the side which has the tanks, planes and flame-throwers cannot fail to defeat the side which is armed at the very best only with small arms and hand grenades.”

Really? Then how did napalm, fighter jets and M-16s fail to bring America victory in Vietnam? Or why have million dollar helicopters been brought down by decades old armaments in Somalia? Asymmetric fighting and differing motivations can do much to overcome the technological advances of governments.

Persuasion

But Huxley knows that out-right military advantage is unlikely to be the only deciding factor.

“The pen and the voice are at least as might as the sword; for the sword is wielded in obedience to the spoken or written word.”

The economics of the printing press and radio did much to concentrate political power. Newspapers and radio need either the support of advertisers (“the people who control centralized finance and large-scale, mass-producing and mass-distributing industry” in the words of Huxley) or the support of the government, and their influential writing is biased as such.

Of course, not all ICTs are the same, and the promise of digital technologies, as Yochai Benkler has so eloquently explained in The Wealth of Networks, is in their ability to distribute power and production.

Instability and Progress

Huxley also saw science and technology as profoundly destabilizing for the daily-lives of the common man. Although he didn’t foresee it, he would have seen the recent expansion of government’s role in the financial markets as indicative of what happens when innovations (this time, financial), disrupt livelihoods so much that people turn to government for support.

“A highly progressive technology entails incessant and often very rapid and startling changes of economic, political and ethical state; and such changes tend to keep the societies subjected to them in a chronically uncomfortable and unstable condition. Some day, perhaps, social scientists will be able to tell us what is the optimum rate of change, and what the optimum amount of it at any one time. For the present, Western societies remain at the mercy of their progressive technologies, to the intense discomfort of everybody concerned. Man as a moral, social and political being is sacrificed to homo faber, or man the smith, the inventor and forger of new gadgets.”

He went further, arguing that the mentality of “progress” is a new concept – where our ancestors saw the world in decline, even after the Great Depression and two world wars, the common sentiment at the time of writing was one of optimism and inevitable progress.

“The belief in all-around progress is based upon the wishful dream that one can get something for nothing. Its underlying assumption is that gains in one field do not have to be paid for by losses in other fields.”

I think he misses the point on this one. In seeing the world as zero-sum, Huxley doesn’t realize that growth can be nonzero and lead to widespread gains (without equal and opposite losses). In fact, since economic growth really only began with the industrial revolution, it makes sense for our ancestors to have seen the world as more of a zero-sum game.

War and a Steps to Avoid It

Huxley believed that the presence of deadly weapons and the structure of our global economy inevitably led to war. The temptation was too great for the power-wielders for whom he had little respect. Rejecting what would later come to be known as Mutually Assured Destruction, he wrote:

“Whenever progressive science has produced some strikingly more efficient instrument of slaughter, hopes have been voices, and facts and figures marshaled to prove, that henceforth war would be too expensive in life, suffering and money to be worth waging. Nevertheless wars have still be fought. Methods of defense against the destructive weapons are devised and yet more efficient instruments of counterattack are invented. Advances in technology do not abolish the institution of war; they merely modify its manifestations.”

He has two major suggestions on how to avoid such destructive conflicts as the ones which shaped his thinking. To begin he wants,

“a restatement of the Emersonian of self-reliance – a restatement, not abstract and general, but fully documented with an account of all the presently available techniques for achieving independence within a localized, co-operative community.”

With the presence of nationalism, global trade, for Huxley, was naturally exploitative and led to conflicts over resources. Local self-sufficiency was a path out of international friction. I fear, though, that by supporting isolationism, the jingoism he detested would never be overcome through cross-cultural exchange. Even more, Huxley advocated advances in science to promote the supply of food, but as the experience of genetically modified foods shows, scientific advances to end resource scarcity can promote centralization of power even more.

His other remedy addressed scientists directly. There were three ways he saw scientists acting:

1. Refuse to work on armaments and that which centralizes power;
2. Pool dangerous knowledge and form an international inspectorate; and
3. Create a professional code to apply science in man’s interest.

The problem is that technology, so often, is just a tool that can be used for good or for evil. Huxley noted that basic research is worthwhile, even though it is difficult to understand its uses down-the-line, but the same is true for much applied science (just think of Alfred Noble’s horror at learning that his mining invention was used to kill).

Science, Liberty and Peace by Huxley isn’t easy to find – I’m lucky to have access to a major research university – but if you can get your hands on it, I recommend taking the couple hours to read through it and be challenged by his thinking from more than half a century ago.

[Image credit: WikiMedia]