Examples of the consequences of this gap are not hard to find. Consider the following, which seems particularly relevant to science fiction readers.
From Aviation Technical News Volume IX, No. 5, published by Kerr Industrial Applications Center, Southeastern Oklahoma State University, for NASA's Technology Utilization Division. I give an EXACT quote:
LONG TIME PARKING
(From Goddard News Jan. 15, 1983, article by Charles Recknagel)
"The international Sun-Earth Explorer space craft has been parked 1.6 million km from the earth since 1978. During these approximately five years the space craft has been suspended at the point where the Earth's and the Sun's gravitational pull are equal. The point is called the 'Liberation point.' After monitoring the charged particles emanating from the sun these many years, NASA decided in Oct. of 82 that they would crank up the satellite and use it for another purpose. The vehicle will swing within 100 km. of the moon's surface Dec. 23 of'83."
Note "Liberation Point," and the ludicrous orbital mechanics. One might almost excuse John Holt. Holt, a well-known educator and popular lecturer, author of Why Children Fail; How Children Learn; What Do I Do Monday?, chose to attack the concept of space colonies in a special issue of CoEvolution Quarterly (1977) devoted to the subject.
In a section entitled Technical Debate Holt says, "It seems that if L-5 is a point where the gravitational fields of earth and moon cancel each other out, any movement toward either earth or moon would lead to a further movement in that direction, there being no correcting or opposing force. The effect of these forces might be very slight, so that we could say of a 64 million ton cylinder that it would take many thousands or tens of thousands of years before it finally reached the earth. Still, it would be rather hard for those on earth."
Holt's argument against space colonies sounds scientific, and he probably believes he is being scientific. He also objects on "moral" grounds. When Tom Heppenheimer (certainly no soft-spoken advocate) says that Holt's arguments are "largely theological, reflecting bias or intuitive dislike, rather than any semblance of reasoned assessment," Holt replies:
"Again 'theological.' My objections to this project are variously ethical, moral, philosophical, political, and economic. (I might add that, according to Gerald Piel, publisher of Scientific American, many scientists themselves oppose this project on moral grounds.) To call such objections 'theological' is imprecise, and has in it more than a whiff of Dr. Strangelove, or hard-nosed talk about 'mega-deaths' or 'credible first strike capability' or 'acceptable risks.' And this may be the point to note that in all of O'Neill's and Heppenheimer's talk about space colonies there is no mention of risks. The risks would in fact be enormous. We have already lost three lives in space, and almost three more; the Russians have lost at least three. This is a death rate of something over 6%. But our ventures into space have been very modest, and surrounded by the most elaborate and expensive precautions. It seems altogether reasonable to assume that if we begin complicated mining and industrial operations on the moon, our casualty rate will be higher, perhaps much higher."
When Heppenheimer says that "It cannot be denied that large numbers of people will freely volunteer to live in space, even under austere conditions, when this becomes possible," Holt, in footnote #51 (of 56; his annotations are at least as long as Heppenheimer's text; Heppenheimer's text was itself a reply to an unannotated essay by Holt; this is known as the fairness doctrine) says:
"I do deny it—unless, of course, they have been told terrible lies about what life and work in space is really like. I expect that this will happen, and in fact is happening, and it is one of my ethical and moral reasons for opposing this project."
The interesting part is that we are listening to scientific-sounding nonsense from a man who does not know high school physics, and seems to know little of probability. He is, however, a "humanist," and thus should know human behavior. Yet I wonder, and call to evidence Shackleton's experience:
Ernest Shackleton was adjutant to the 1901 South Polar expedition. In 1900 he placed the following advertisement:
"MEN WANTED for Hazardous Journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success." When he later reported on the advertisement's success, he said, "It seemed as though all the men in Great Britain were determined to accompany me, the response was so overwhelming."
I suspect I would have little difficulty recruiting qualified people for L-5 colonies, or indeed for an early lunar colony. Perhaps I'm wrong, but unlike Holt I have some evidence, and a smattering of data.
One may believe, as I do, that communications between scientists and non-scientists are in a sad state, and that this is a dangerous situation, without accepting C. P. Snow's picture as accurate. In my judgment the critical gap is not between "scientists" and "humanists," or between the sciences and the arts; the critical gap is between the so-called "social sciences" and everyone else.
This gap is exacerbated to the extent that neither scientists nor humanists believe there is scientific value in the "social sciences." In my judgment there is very little science in the "social sciences" and the use of the word "science" to describe these disciplines is generally either mendacious or farcical. Alas, it may also be tragic.
The real difference between arts and sciences is the difference between data and evidence; and the "social sciences" don't know the one from the other.
Imagine a spectrum. On one end you have science fiction. On the other end, you have hard science. What connects them is the nature of their subject matter.
The scientist requires hard facts. He needs data, ideally in the from of repeatable experiments. Data, to a scientist, is best generated in controlled experiments which can be described, published, and repeated.
Figure One: From Verisimilitude to Data
ART FORM Verisimilitude Plausibility Argumentative
LEGAL : Evidence : Selection : "Proof"
SCIENCE : Data : All of the data : Validation
The science fiction writer doesn't need any data. Certainly he must use some hard facts, because if everything is contrary to the reader's expectations, the work isn't going to be taken seriously: therefore, the science fiction writer makes use of "facts" not as data, but for verisimilitude and plausibility.
However, science fiction can't "prove" anything about the universe. We can speculate about it, we can try to expand people's horizons and stretch their imaginations; but we cannot, as science fiction writers, add to scientific knowledge, and this goes for "insights into the human condition" every whit as much as for contributions to nuclear physics.
Science fiction can't prove anything, because science fiction makes up its data. You can prove anything if you can make up your data.
Example: An earlier paper given at this very panel (at the Contact! symposium) uses the speech by the Army major in the film Close Encounters as an example of how the military thinks. This is patently absurd; it is at best evidence of Steve Spielberg's theory of how the military thinks, and it's probably not even useful for inferring that. Once again we have confusion of data, evidence, and plausibility.
The social scientist vaguely understands this fundamental principle, but doesn't really distinguish between data and evidence. Thus when Margaret Mead studied adolescence in Samoa, she was seeking evidence for a theory. Later writers, wishing to challenge the biggest name in the field, have done precisely the same thing. None of them seem interested in gathering data.
When this was put to Dr. Paul Bohanan, dean of the School of Social Sciences at the University of Southern California, he replied that Mead's value didn't lie in her data-gathering. She stretched imaginations and made people think larger thoughts.
Granted this may be true, but it seems more the job of a science fiction writer than a scientist.
As art forms, the social sciences may or may not be useful; but they are not content as art forms. Whenever anything of social significanc
e happens—a riot, for example—the TV screens are filled with learned social scientists giving us both explanations and advice.
On their advice, for example, the police have been withdrawn from riot areas. The results have been uniformly disastrous, but this doesn't prevent the social scientists from advising the same remedy the next time.
You can prove anything if you make up your data. You can prove nearly anything if you are allowed to select your evidence and forget embarrassing facts.
The social sciences have made an art of forgetting embarrassing facts.
If a fact doesn't fit the theory, leave the fact for another discipline. Sociology has nothing to learn from anthropology which has nothing to learn from social psychology. None of these has anything to learn from the mathematics, physics, or chemistry departments.
The solution to C. P. Snow's dilemma seems clear. Scientists must learn something of the humanities. That, I think, is done rather more often than not. Scientists do read books. I have met the maniac scientist bent on discovery no matter the harm far more often in literature than in the laboratory.
Secondly, the humanists must learn something of science. This is less common, but it does happen. It isn't necessary that the humanist become a scientist, or even learn how to do science; it is necessary that he learn the principles of scientific reasoning.
I would be far more willing to believe that the two cultures could coexist, however, were it not for the contamination of the "social sciences," which pose as sciences to the humanists, and humanities to the scientists, but which are not in fact much good as either. The poet who believes he knows something of science having taken "Sosh 103" and "Ed Stat" is far more dangerous than ever he would have been if he had remained ignorant.
Meanwhile, novelists have as much right to be called "experts" on human behavior as any social scientist, which is to say we can learn as much about our fellow humans from a good novel as from a sociology treatise; and I know which I would rather read. Similarly, the poet may find beauty in the theory of probability, and will learn something of the difference between data and evidence while studying it; "Stat for Social Scientists" teaches nothing, and is dull in the bargain.
When the social scientists are challenged as unscientific, their usual plea is that their subject matter is very complex and thus the methodology of physical science won't work. This is an interesting argument, but it would carry more weight if students of social science knew something of physical science's methodologies. Granted that the "social sciences" have an intrinsically more difficult job; is this any reason to abandon the tools of science?
Editor's Introduction To:
Nicaragua: A Speech To My Former Comrades On The Left
David Horowitz
Western diplomats seem to have forgotten long ago that the objective of negotiation is to wring concessions from their opponents.
It may seem too casually cruel to lampoon intelligent, patriotic men whose only fault was a shortage of ideas they needed to understand what was, to them at least, a new political phenomenon: totalitarianism. Precisely because they were intelligent, we see their errors not so much as personal lapses, but as reflections of a fundamental lack of an interpretative framework. More serious is the fact that after the war, we still lacked this framework for understanding Communist totalitarianism, despite the price paid by the West for those "pioneers of detente" who considered Munich a response to Nazi totalitarianism.
Misunderstanding of communism stamped all postwar Western statesmen. They could not grasp its particularity, the laws by which it functions. They persisted in explaining it by its leaders' psychology. Or they likened it to the forms of political power with which they were familiar: czarism, the French Revolution, "socialism minus freedom." Some simply thought of it as a preliminary to freedom. "Roosevelt never understood communism," Averill Harriman said. "He viewed it as a sort of extension of the New Deal." Perhaps the veteran diplomat should have noticed this when he was in a position to do something about it.
—Jean-Francois Revel
How Democracies Perish,
Doubleday, 1983
The lessons learned so painfully about Hitler in the '30s were not applied to Stalin in the '40s and '50s. When I was an undergraduate in the '50s, it was fashionable for the professors to say that "Whereas the Nazis were purely criminals, Communism, for all its faults, is within the Western progressive tradition." In other words, all that was needed was reform: there wasn't anything fundamentally wrong with the communist system.
It is remarkable how few political leaders are influenced by evidence. During the '30s there was plenty of evidence for the famines in the Ukraine, but as George Orwell observed, "Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of the English russophiles." Those events escaped most of the American left as well.
So, apparently, has the slaughter in Cambodia, the pitiable condition of the Boat People, and Yellow Rain. To a great many tenured professors on U.S. campuses, there is still no enemy to the left, nor can there be.
You can prove anything if you can make up your data; the corollary is that you can prove almost anything if you can ignore the data that won't fit.
David Horowitz was a founder of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, and editor of Ramparts magazine. He was solidly for Castro after the Cuban Revolution.
Nicaragua: A Speech To My Former Comrades On The Left
David Horowitz
Twenty-five years ago I was one of the founders of the New Left. I was one of the organizers of the first political demonstrations on the Berkeley campus—and indeed on any campus—to protest our government's anti-Communist policies in Cuba and Vietnam. Tonight I come before you as the kind of man I used to tell myself I would never be: a supporter of President Reagan, a committed opponent of Communist rule in Nicaragua.
I offer no apologies for my present position. It was what I thought was the humanity of the Marxist idea that made me what I was then; it is the inhumanity of what I have seen to be the Marxist reality that has made me what I am now. If my former comrades who support the Sandinistas were to pause for a moment and then plunge their busy political minds into the human legacies of their activist pasts, they would instantly drown in an ocean of blood.
The issue before us is not whether it is morally right for the United States to arm the contras, or whether there are unpleasant men among them. Nor is it whether the United States should defer to the wisdom of the Contadora powers—more than thirty years ago the United States tried to overthrow Somoza, and it was the Contadora powers of the time who bailed him out.
The issue before us and before all people who cherish freedom is how to oppose a Soviet imperialism so vicious and so vast as to dwarf any previously known. An "ocean of blood" is no metaphor. As we speak here tonight, this empire—whose axis runs through Havana and now Managua—is killing hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians to consolidate a dictatorship whose policies against its black citizens make the South African government look civilized and humane.
A second issue, especially important to me, is the credibility and commitment of the American Left.
In his speech on Nicaragua, President Reagan invoked the Truman Doctrine, the first attempt to oppose Soviet expansion through revolutionary surrogates. I marched against the Truman Doctrine in 1948, and defended, with the Left, the revolutions in Russia and China, in Eastern Europe and Cuba, in Cambodia and Vietnam—just as the Left defends the Sandinistas today.
And I remember the arguments and "facts" with which we made our case and what the other side said, too—the Presidents who came and went, and the anti-Communists on the Right, the William Buckleys and the Ronald Reagans. And in every case, without exception, time has proved the Left wrong. Wrong in its views of the revolutionaries' intentions, and wrong about the facts of their revolutionary rule. And just as consistently the anti-Communists were proved right.
Today the
Left dismisses Reagan's warnings about Soviet expansion as anti-Communist paranoia, a threat to the peace, and a mask for American imperialism. We said the same things about Truman when he warned us then. Russia's control of Eastern Europe, we said, was only a defensive buffer, a temporary response to American power—first, because Russia had no nuclear weapons; and then, because it lacked the missiles to deliver them.
Today, the Soviet Union is a nuclear superpower, missiles and all, but it has not given up an inch of the empire which it gained during World War II—not Eastern Europe, not the Baltic states which Hitler delivered to Stalin and whose nationhood Stalin erased and which are now all but forgotten, not even the Kurile Islands which were once part of Japan.
Not only have the Soviets failed to relinquish their conquests in all these years—years of dramatic, total decolonization in the West—but their growing strength and the wounds of Vietnam have encouraged them to reach for more. South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Ethiopia, Yemen, Mozambique, and Angola are among the dominoes which have recently fallen into the Soviet orbit.
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