A Quotation for the Ages

Every now and then, someone will say something profound without really trying. Take Don Hancock, for instance:

"People are capable of creating problems we don't know how to solve."

Now Hancock was talking about nuclear waste, which is famously tricky to store safely for the tens of thousands of years required to render the hot stuff harmless to living organisms. (For more on that note, check out this article from Wired.) But he's right. He also condenses into a short and memorable line one of the points I was trying to make in the last post.

We're accustomed to seeing only good in our interesting discoveries and scientific breakthroughs--and there is a good deal of good in them, to be sure. But we should remember that our thirst for knowledge and the power it brings with it has always brought us trouble.

The medieval Scholastics (mis)understood the Fall of man to be a consequence of mere curiosity; that distorted view has fortunately been replaced by a much more reasonable recognition that pride was at the root of the dawn of evil.

It is tempting to see Science as mere curiosity, but the tendency to see Science as the be-all end-all force for good, never to be questioned or gainsaid recapitulates the edenic delusion that we can handle everything that is knowable and that all knowledge is good.

But that has never really been true.

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