Mark Goldes <[email protected]> wrote: I largely agree with Jed's comments. However, I am an emotional optimist > and an intellectual pessimist. >
I am not optimistic or pessimistic. I have read a great deal of history. I have read and talked to many people who lived through the worst of 20th century history, including Russian, U.S. and Japanese combat veterans of WWII, and concentration camp survivors. If there is one thing the 20th century taught us it is that people everywhere are capable of any atrocity. Modern people can be as evil as they were in the days of Attila the Hun. If you were to change the laws in the US, and you offered a $10 bounty for the heads of women and children, I am certain you would find hundreds of thousands of people who would gleefully go around chasing down, shooting and decapitating innocent people and bayoneting small children. That is what the Japanese army did in China. The army had no difficulty persuading ordinary soldiers to do it. The thing is, those soldiers are no different from you or I. Back in Japan after the war they were ordinary, decent, law abiding people, loving fathers and grandfathers, pillars of the community. I am certain that in the near future someone will assemble top-notch group of K Street lobbyists and advertisers and tell them: "Cold fusion is real and it will solve all the world's energy problems, but I will pay you people $50 million to make sure it never happens." (Or maybe $100 million; I have no idea what the going rate is.) I am certain that every one of them will be eager to participate. It would never occur to them not to do it. It would not bother them any more than it bothered the tobacco executives in the 1970s. They will say "business is business and money is money. People in favor of cold fusion can hire their own lobbyists." I think there has been enormous moral progress in the last several centuries. I think the MLK and Obama are right that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. Since I am the proverbial man who has only a hammer, and sees all problems as a nail, I think this is progress has mainly been a side benefit of technological progress. For example, slavery has been eliminated from most of the world because it does not pay anymore. If you want to grow cotton or run a factory, it is cheaper to have machines and well-educated people working freely for you than it would be to have uneducated slaves. Many wealthy people do not give a damn whether poor people have health insurance or enough to eat. On the other hand they would not like to see starving people on the streets, and people dying of cancer with flies buzzing around them in the gutter. That is what you see in India, everywhere you turn. Americans would not like that if for no other reason because it lowers property values. It is unseemly. So most wealthy Americans will grudgingly allow a social safety net. The progress of technology is mostly caused by scientific progress. The human race is morally better and life is easier. 99% of the credit goes to scientists, engineers and educators; 1% to businessmen. Science has brought us good things such as vaccines and bad things such as thermonuclear weapons and poison gas. It is value-neutral. It can be used for unthinkable barbarism as easily as for enlightened progress. It is only because most people most of the time tend to be good rather than evil that things tend to get better. That outcome is not assured. Civilization can always collapse into a nightmare. See J. Diamond's book "Collapse" for examples. Civilization has often descended into barbarism in the past and it may again in the future. I know many Japanese people who lived through that in the 1940s. They never imagined they would see such a thing. You have to realize, Japan was a civilized, first-world country in 1932. It was a safe, secure, ordinary, law-abiding place, not much different than the U.S. or Europe. It was not a broken nation like Germany was. I have Japanese textbooks, newspaper, magazines and novels from that era. I lived with people who grew up there. I know what it was like. It changed into an unimaginable hellhole 10 years later, whose young men went around bayoneting small children. Believe me, *we could end doing that* in 10 years. If you doubt that you have learned nothing from the 20th century. There is good hope that mankind will muddle through. We often did in the past. There is good hope that cold fusion will succeed in eliminating things like global warming and starvation. But there is *absolutely no assurance* of that. Everyone in favor of cold fusion will have to fight for it, for many years to come. - Jed
