Volume 40, Number 9 · May 13, 1993
The Case Against Science
By Timothy Ferris
Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man
by Brian Appleyard
Doubleday, 269 pp., $23.50
Bertrand Russell concluded his 1933 book The Scientific Outlook with a chapter warning what life might be like in 'the world which would result if scientific technique were to rule unchecked.' Many of Russell's prophecies sound quaint today: He feared the establishment of a world government that forbade the public from reading Hamlet and jailed anybody who wouldn't work. He was concerned that medical advances would make life so long and safe that thrill-seekers would commit suicide for recreation ('To fall through the air before a million spectators may come to be thought a glorious death even if it has no purpose but the amusement of the holiday crowd'). He assumed that Esperanto would have become the universal language. But Russell's prognostications served merely to ornament his more philosophical concerns, which as one might expect have held up rather better. Science, he cautioned, was gravitating from knowledge toward power, undergoing a 'passage from contemplation to manipulation':
Review, 3539 words
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