PERSONAL COLUMN

The great space folly

EDWARD DE BONO

other space folly has just returned from moon. Another circus is in town for a days. There was a time in the eighteenth ury when rich gentlemen built elabor- towers on their estates. These delightful lies often had no doors or windows and nays had no use. If a folly can be defined 'expensive exhibitionism without practical then the moon venture qualifies as a Ily.

The budget for the Apollo moon pro- is rather more than the whole United ngdom budget for one year. It might se supported the entire cost of our educa- onal system for six to seven years. It Id have paid for all the medical re- rch done in England for the next one usand years. The same amount of money ght have solved for all time the world ortage of first class protein.

As science, the moon venture is small r. There is an absence of the sort of jor breakthrough which advances science bringing about an insight re-arrange- nt of already available information. It been an admirable process of steady elopment and refinement: better rockets, tter control systems. Contrary to general lief, planning in space is rather easier an planning on earth, since the time ctor is so slow that there are few variables hich cannot be predicted. That the tech- logical spin-off is a joke may be seen om the prominence usually given to such tal developments as high temperature amiss for cooking pots or miniature uipment for recording the pulse. Trivia. The high cost of the Apollo project is thing when compared to the open-ended mmitment it initiates. After the moon ars, and after Mars somewhere else. We re unlikely to run out of space destina- ns. The dangers of expensive continuity to be seen only too clearly in Vietnam ay.

It is too easy and too mundane to quibble bout what are (for America) minor house- eeping costs in criticising the Apollo pro- t. A less obvious but more serious criti-

is that the project is another demon- ration that scientific possibility has its own c of inevitability. The atom bomb was

first demonstration of this. Has society ched a state -when technological tempta- on has become irresistible? What has hap- ned to the old controls over science that ere supposed to be exerted by the human- intellectual tradition? Is the Apollo pro- t an indication that in the future the umanist intellectual tradition will be re- ced to impotent mutterings in the corner Nile technology follows its own momen- ? If this is already happening then the Iumanist intellectuals have only themselves blame. Technology is the grammar of he future. Anyone who refuses to learn he grammar is going to be unable to corn- nunicate with the future.

Descriptions of intellectuals are easy: 1 Person who can tie real knots in imag- larY pieces of string'. In the past the ttellectual style has always been literary. ntellectuals have been word workers. With his medium, there is a danger for descrip- lort to become the object of description in Orals of intricate delight that ever spread 1 they get nowhere. But all this sort of

criticism is unfair for the purpose of in- tellectual charades like the purpose of any other charades is to elaborate the perform- ance to the point where the onlooker has an insight revelation as to what it is all about. The business of an intellectual is to provoke insight, not provide dogma. But the attempt of the humanist tradition to turn its back on technology (in huffy disap- proval) is like acting the charade in one room while the audience waits in quite a different room.

If technology is the grammar of the future, then anyone who carefully avoids learning it can no longer look forward. He can look upward to mysticism, drugs and religion, or he can look downward and backward. One only has to look at the literary pages of any journal to find them dominated by this downward and backward orientation (i.e. sex and history).

Japan is said to be the most future- oriented of any society. That may be be- cause it• carries with it as much of the past as it cares to without the need to look back. It may be that having thoroughly discredited its past it has no choice but to look to the future. On my visit there a few weeks ago I was impressed not so much with the dynamism that has put them into the position of second industrial nation but with the gross inefficiencies of their system. For instance, the productivity per worker is only a quarter of that in the us and half that in Germany. The sobering thought is that if they can achieve such re- sults in spite of this, what is going to happen when the system becomes efficient as well? There is no doubt that the Japanese culture has embraced technology as it embraces any- thing else and makes use of it. A technical book which might well sell a few thousand copies over here can sell over a hundred thousand over there. The first print order for my own books over there is more than ten times as big as over here.

It seems that the Japanese are unen- cumbered by a humanist tradition that wants to have nothing to do with technology. Such a tradition damns itself to impotence and possibly has this effect on the intellectual scene it dominates. In America. it seems that science-based intellectuals are slowly moving into view, but here the dominance of the literary tradition is as strong as ever. If he persists in shying away from technology the dogmatic humanist intellectual will eventually become about as relevant as the games officer on a transatlantic liner—em- ployed in amusing the passengers with in- tellectual (name) bingo and tortoise races. To some extent this is happening already. There is developing a mini ha-ha culture— the trail of the tiny titter. In such a culture the search is for the easy laugh or some equivalent diversion.

Is it fair to identify the very visible liter- ary intellectual tradition with the humanist tradition? Probably not. But there is a very specific test which one can carry out in order to discover whether or not a per- son is a dogmatic humanist. Ask the follow- ing question. `Do you believe that the mind can be explained (now or ever) in terms of the physical behaviour of the brain?' It is a simple enough question and it only works because it tends to elicit dog-

matic answers. Try it on yourself and, if you like, try and imagine how much visible intellects as the following might respond: Malcolm Muggeridge, Brigid Brophy, George Steiner, Arthur Koestler, Cyril Con- nolly. A. J. Ayer.

The question can produce two sorts of negative answer. Both of them indicate the limitations of the humanist tradition. The first type of answer is the emotional dog- matism that insists (by definition) that the human mind must forever be beyond the reach of science. That is the only way it is possible to preserve for humanism a basis apart from science. Unfortunately it creates precisely that sort of religious mystique which humanism was supposed to dispel.

The second type of negative answer is based more on ignorance than on arrog- ance. There is difficulty in seeing just how such human qualities as self, free-will, humour, and creativity could ever be ex- plained as the mechanical behaviour of a physical system. This shows a rather old- fashioned view of science and mathematics, for, cleared of their mystique, these pro- cesses can be seen as the natural behaviour of a particular type of information proces- sing system. It is the refusal to have any- thing to do with science that makes it im- possible to keep up with what is happening. There can no longer he any such thing as a detached mental ability which can stand out- side and then come in to tackle any field usefully. It is the insistence on emotional mystique and the deification of feeling in general that makes the intellectual human- ist tradition so inadequate and so dangerous today. It stands in the way of the develop. ment of the new system ethics we so badly need.

The paradox is that the space folly does not represent a breakaway of technology from the traditional humanist idiom. On the contrary, it represents the abuse of tech- nology by that idiom--as did the atom bomb. The majority of scientists regard the space effort as a waste of money that could have been put to better use elsewhere. The justification for the space folly is exactly the same as for the architectural follies: ex- hibitionism, romanticism, prestige, pride, and power. The project is then accepted as a circus, as a diversion, as the equivalent of the easy laugh in a mini ha-ha culture. Its very uselessness becomes romanticised as its usefulness.