The crisis of our times is that we have science without wisdom.  This is the crisis behind all the others.  Population growth, the terrifyingly lethal character of modern war and terrorism, immense discrepancies of wealth across the globe, annihilation of indigenous people, cultures and languages, impending depletion of natural resources, destruction of tropical rain forests and other natural habitats, rapid mass extinction of species, pollution of sea, earth and air, thinning of the ozone layer, global warming  -  even the aids epidemic: all these relatively recent crises have been made possible by modern science and technology.  Indeed, in a perfectly reasonable sense of "cause", they have been CAUSED by modern science and technology.  If by the cause of event E we mean that prior change which led to E occurring, then it is the advent of modern science and technology that has caused all these crises.  It is not that people became greedier or more wicked in the 19th and 20th centuries; nor is it that the new economic system of capitalism is responsible, as some historians and economists would have us believe.  The crucial factor is the creation and immense success of modern science and technology.  This has led to modern medicine and hygiene, to population growth, to modern agriculture and industry, to world wide travel (which spreads diseases such as aids), and to the destructive might of the technology of modern war, conventional, chemical, biological, nuclear.

All this is to be expected.  Successful science produces knowledge, which facilitates the development of technology, all of which enormously increases our power to act.  It is to be expected that this power will often be used beneficially (as it has been used), to cure disease, feed people, and in general enhance the quality of human life.  But it is also to be expected, in the absence of wisdom, that such an abrupt, massive increase in power will be used to cause harm, whether unintentionally, as in the case (initially at least) of environmental damage, or intentionally, as in war and terror.  Before the advent of modern science, lack of wisdom did not matter too much; we lacked the means to do too much damage to ourselves and the planet.  But now, in possession of unprecedented powers bequeathed to us by science, lack of wisdom has become a menace.  The crucial question becomes: How can we learn to become wiser?

The answer is staring us in the face.  In order to learn how to become wiser we need traditions and institutions of learning rationally designed to help us learn wisdom.  This at present we do not have.  Academic inquiry as it exists at present, devoted primarily to the pursuit of knowledge and technological know-how, is grossly and damagingly irrational when assessed from the standpoint of helping humanity acquire wisdom  -  wisdom being the capacity to realize what is of value for oneself and others, and thus including knowledge, understanding and technological know-how.  (Like knowledge, wisdom can be thought of as something possessed, not just by individuals, but by institutions, societies and cultures.) Two elementary, banal rules of rational problem-solving are: (1) articulate the problem to be solved, and (2) propose and critically assess possible solutions.  A kind of academic inquiry rationally devoted to helping humanity solve its problems of living so that that which is of value may be realized (thus enhancing wisdom) would put rules (1) and (2) into practice: it would give intellectual priority to (1) articulating our problems of living and (2) proposing and critically assessing possible solutions, possible actions, policies, philosophies of life.  This goes on, at present, within academia, but only on the fringes: the primary intellectual activity is to solve problems of knowledge, not problems of living.  To pursue knowledge more or less dissociated from the attempt to help humanity resolve its conflicts and problems of living in more just and cooperative ways than at present is not only irrational; it is a recipe for disaster, as we have seen.  It is this which has led to our distinctively modern global problems.

As I have argued at length elsewhere (see my FROM KNOWLEDGE TO WISDOM, Blackwell, 1984; see also "Is Science Neurotic?", METAPHILOSOPHY, vol. 33, 2002, pp. 259-299), we need to bring about a revolution in the academic enterprise so that the basic aim becomes to promote wisdom rather than just acquire knowledge.   Social inquiry needs to change, so that it gives intellectual priority to problems of living over problems of knowledge about the social world.  The relationship between social inquiry and natural science needs to change, the new kind of social inquiry becoming more fundamental intellectually than natural science.  The natural sciences need to change so that three domains of discussion are recognized, namely evidence, theory, and aims, the latter involving problematic issues about what is unknown, and values.  Education needs to change.  The whole relationship between academia and the social world needs to change, so that academia does not just study the social world, but rather is in two-way debate with it, ideas, experiences and arguments flowing in both directions.  Academia needs to become a kind of people's civil service, doing openly for the public what actual civil services are supposed to do in secret for governments.

Academics today have a profound responsibility before humanity to put their house in order, intellectually and morally, and create a kind of inquiry rationally devoted to helping humanity learn how to resolve its conflicts and problems of living in more just, cooperative ways than at present.

Nicholas Maxwell




Do We Need an Academic Revolution?
Nicholas Maxwell
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