Last year, John Brockman, my literary agent as well as the agent for many other popular-science writers, put together his annual book of answers to one Edge question. The 2015 book was This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress. My short contribution was “Free Will”, and since everyone knows why I think that notion should quietly lie down and expire, I won’t go into it. Rather, I wanted to show how it prompted an irate email from someone whose name I have expunged out of mercy:
Dear Sir:
I’ve read what you wrote in This Idea Must Die.
Maybe you should look at Taylor Branch’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the civil rights movement, “At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968.” King publicly asked America’s clergymen to come to Selma to help him, and hundreds of them poured in. He would have accepted science professors too, of course, He needed all the help he could get. But no science professors showed up. They didn’t care. There was a contest here to see who cares about morality, religion or science, and religion won in a landslide.Branch is a personal friend of Bill Clinton. I doubt that he is biased in favor of religion.In the 1980s, the same story. Lots of clergymen condemned Reagan’s mass murder in Central America, but when did the Nobel Prize winning scientists sign a petition condemning it? Never. They didn’t care. If they had done that, maybe the American people would’ve woken up a little bit, but they didn’t care. Sagan could’ve written a book called “Reagan Is Committing Mass Murder” but he never bothered. Instead he wrote about comets and “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors,” a completely worthless book.Read any biography of Richard Feynman. You will see he never showed the slightest interest in politics, or in improving the world. He lived for pleasure.Sincerely,[Name redacted to protect the clueless]
As far as I can determine, this letter has nothing to do with free will. Rather, it’s an indictment of scientists for being unconcerned with social progress. The problem is that it compares scientists with clergymen, but what about every other profession? Just counting academics, what about economists, art historians, or medical school professors? For that matter, what about plumbers, dentists, engineers, merchants, or baseball players? Clearly the clergy would be overrepresented in matters like the civil rights movement, for Dr. King was one of them. But the workers for racial equality weren’t all clergymen: what about the thousands of students who marched for civil rights—some of them dying? I was one of them (no, I didn’t die!), and I have the lapel buttons to prove it.
As for Feynman, well, he wasn’t totally silent on matters of social import. He cared deeply about education, wrote textbooks, and we shouldn’t forget his presence on the Challenger panel—he zeroed in on the O-rings (as had the engineers who were overruled) as the cause of the disaster.
As for scientists not interested in improving the world, the writer is simply an idiot about that. Many scientists go into their professions to improve the world, or to understand it in ways that could lead to a better world. I’m not saying that all of us are deeply invested in improving society, but I’ll also claim that, as a group, scientists have done a tremendous amount for humanity, and I’m counting here the material and physical well being of humanity, not the bonus of giving us an inspiring understanding of nature.
