It's Been a Good Life

by Isaac Asimov

  [About giving a talk to a small audience that seemed to possess "unsullied gravity"] ... since I don't prepare my talks I am guided entirely by audience reaction and not even consciously. I just automatically get more and more funny if the audience laughs ... or less and less funny if the audience doesn't laugh. This time I got less and less funny and began an increasingly sober discussion of the possible usefulness of the Moon program, ending with the hope that the Moon colony would teach mankind how to live an ecologically sane existence, which brought me into the problems of overpopulation and overpollution and I grew very intense indeed ... I spoke rapidly and pulled no punches and everyone left shaken up and saying they wouldn't be able to sleep that night.

  They should have laughed.

  [About an interview with a reporter for a European magazine] She whipped out a recorder and asked if I'd mind and I said "No." (What the heck, I'm not ashamed of anything I say.) Then I talked freely for two hours, giving her my feelings that ... exploring space was something for all mankind and I hated to see it made a football for national rivalries, but perhaps that was the only way in this insane world of doing it at all; and I said that the Moon could never support enough men to make it a way of absorbing our population excess, and that the population explosion had to be solved by 2000 C.E. or else, and that we could not look for help from outer space but had to solve it by then right here on Earth; and that we had to stop polluting water and air and crowding other species recklessly off the face of the earth; and that extending the life span to 200 years would be of dubious benefit since the population would explode that much faster and extending the life span of a small minority of worthwhile people would create such a problem of "who is to decide" that I dreaded the thought of it; and that in an automated world, boredom would be a painful epidemic disease, and that the worst punishment would be to take a criminal off the "work-lists" for the number of years required to fit the crime.-All like that there.

  [The reporter] kept saying enthusiastically, "You're the first American who has said such things to me." It made me nervous ... people can spout official statements, . . . but I can say what I please; or at least I will say what I please.

  [About the flap over whether or not flatworms automatically became conditioned if they ate pieces of other, conditioned worms] ... I viewed this with severe suspicion (my "built-in doubter," you know) but finally decided that the only way it could happen was that RNA molecules (the key to memory) were incorporated whole into the cannibalistic worms since their organization was so low-key that they probably didn't require digestion when their food was so like themselves. To my delight, this turned out to be the most popular explanation by "real scientists." However, [a "very good scientist"] now insists that the work of the worm-runners can't be confirmed; that flatworms can't be conditioned. This gives me some sardonic amusement for, of course, John Campbell jumped on this at the very beginning, convinced that there was some explanation that would upset all of "orthodox science." (He is for anything far-out, not because he values the far-out, but because he wants to see the amateur-like himself-win over the professionals who wouldn't let him finish MIT.)

  Also, have you read that the meteorite in which traces of life were discovered turns out to have been hoaxed a century ago? It is another example of the value of routine doubting. My thesis, in case you've forgotten, is not doubt-for-doubt's-sake, but doubt as a necessary barrier which the valid can overcome and the nonvalid cannot. The more a finding seems to destroy the basis of the scientific structure, the higher the barrier of doubt. Of course one must remember that "doubt" is not synonymous with "refusal to listen."

  I was on a two-hour radio show and discussed the origin of life ... talked learnedly and rapidly about the development through chance of nucleic acid molecules, of evolution by natural selection, etc. etc. etc. In the second hour the listeners phoned in questions, and some of them were from Fundamentalists who were simply furious with me. They quoted from the Bible and denounced me as someone who would steal the beauty of the universe (as though the conceptions of evolution and the long history of the stars was not infinitely more beautiful than the story of a petulant God making and destroying a pint-sized basketball of a world). One questioner, her voice shaking, would refer to me only as that man and addressed her questions (or rather her denunciations) only to the announcer. You would have been proud of me, though. I was calm and polite and smooth and in answering these people I kept saying, "[Scientists] neither back the Bible nor refute it. The Bible doesn't concern us one way or the other." Of course that reduced them to gibbering fury and the announcer would then cut them off.

  The trouble is these people have a comfortable little world of miracles and literal-word-of-the-Bible and associate only with others who live in the same world and go to a tiny, Fundamentalist church on Sunday and (like the green peas in the pod who thought the whole universe was green) honestly think that all the world thinks as they do. They don't read books on the scientific view, or go to lectures, or attend courses-and then, they have the radio on and to their disbelief and horror, someone is spouting blasphemy at them and speaking of life originating by chance and mankind developing through the blind forces of natural selection and never mentioning God.

  It's a wonder they don't break down at the mere fact that I am not being struck by lightning. Anyway, I think I brought some fresh air into the minds of a number who were not irrevocably wedded to ignorance. It was an interesting experience.

  I have just received a very strange fan letter from a "Bible Fundamentalist" who says "After years of admiring you and your goodness in putting your knowledge into layman's terms so many of us could enjoy this great world of science with you, I am finally dropping these lines to tell you how much I appreciate what you have contributed to my faith in the literal word of God."

  Dearest doctor-where have I gone wrong?

  [In a letter I wrote to Isaac about an argument I'd had with a Fundamentalist relative:... Some people will always believe any insane system if it happens to fit their needs enough, especially if their needs are very neurotic ... but fewer people would be taken in if they got a thorough grounding in scientific principles in childhood. Every single child born in this age should have a rough idea of what scientific method is, so that their thinking runs along-at least vaguely-lines similar to those used by scientists when confronted with hypotheses, new data, new questions, etc. Not that scientists aren't prey to emotionalism and other forms of distorted thinking, but at least they have the tools of thinking which they can use if they are not too anxious and frightened. My cousin doesn't have these tools and there is no use arguing with him, because he has no adequate means of appraising your reasoning or his own.J

  [Isaac's response] . . . You and I are alike children of Thales, for he was the first known rationalist; the first to attempt to explain the universe without calling upon the supernatural; the first to believe, bYfaith, that the workings of the universe could be understood by reason. We share the same heritage, you and I, and our ancestors are men who withstood persecution and derision, who labored under difficulties and often without any sort of appreciation, who were rarely enriched and often impoverished by their work. In writing my biographies [of great scientists], I was in a sense writing the story of our ancestors and was aware, as I was doing so, of a Mystic bond (well, I can think of no other word) that bound me to all those men of the past and to all the men of the time yet to come-those very, very few who are rationalists and who work at it.

  A friend of mine commented idly that my book The Human Brain had made clear the meaning of EMF [electromotive force] for the first time. As soon as [ could get hold of the book myself I quickly looked up EMF in the index and turned to the page and read it, with great delight; feeling that I was sharing a learning experience.

  How sad it is that for one reason or another (social, personal, philosophical. I don't know-you're the psychiatrist) learning usually becomes associated with pain, work, and boredom so that as s
oon as school is over and enforced learning put to an end, the average person thankfully puts it all behind and proceeds to forget whatever he or she has learned, above the barest minimum of reading, writing, and thirdgrade arithmetic. (Really, for most people, there is no way of telling from their conversation or work that they have ever progressed beyond the third grade.) But I am not saying this to criticize; but rather to sympathize; for the loss is theirs, not mine.

  It is not even knowing that really adds a joy to life, but the ability and eagerness to learn. For instance ... [A friend's astronomy article] works out calculations that are of only minimal interest to me; but what does stay with me is the idea of Earth and Moon as two islands in the empty volume of a single body circling the Sun. It's just a way of looking at matters that never occurred to me but which fascinates me now that it has been put into my mind. It adds to my picture of the universe; it gives me all the pleasure of new knowledge that a poem might give to one of literary bent or a sudden revelation might give to one of mystical bent.

  I am now writing an F&SF article on . . a subject 1 do not understand very well, but by the time I have written the article, I will understand it. In fact, I sometimes think my articles are a vast scheme of self-education. It works, too. There is nothing like writing an article on a subject for forcing yourself to think that subject through clearly.

  All that is, has developed out of the random application of the laws of the universe, in my belief. I find the hypothesis of a directing intelligence to be more implausible than the hypothesis of a nondirecting random process that just happens to be here at this point in time. It might have been somewhere else, but it happens to be here...

  ... We must distinguish between scientific knowledge and all knowledge. Scientific knowledge is only one subspecies of the genus. It is knowledge gained in a particular way. There is knowledge gained in other ways. For instance, a young man in love knows that his young woman is the most wonderful one in the world. He doesn't measure her in any way; he knows by a reaction in himself that is indescribable, let alone measurable.

  [About a fan letter] He responds to my recent article in which I take off on mystical explanations of the universe. The fan points out that the Sun corresponds to the brain; the nine planets to the nine major openings in the body (two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, mouth and, I presume, urethra and anus-the young man, apparently, having never looked closely at the feminine urethra and environs, completely missed a tenth opening, in the female at least), the asteroids (as an exploded planet) to the umbilicus, as an opening that once was but is no longer (Hmm, could the asteroids signify that tenth opening, broken up to indicate it is present in only one sex?). He also maintains that if we could count all the asteroids, comets, and smaller bodies these would correspond exactly to the number of pores in the skinthe minor openings.

  I am sending back a postcard saying "Excellently reasoned! And as the umbilicus is in the middle of the body, so is the asteroid belt in the middle of the solar system."

  [About a review of one of his science books] I sat down and wrote a perfectly furious letter ... I pointed out that facts were facts and that I was shocked to know that he favored altering facts to fit theory and that this worried me because in the same issue he had an article favoring the widespread use of pesticides and I wasn't sure it was safe to listen to him...

  After I wrote the letter, and addressed an airmail envelope and sealed the envelope, I found my fury evaporating. I reread the review and found it was stupid but not as evil as I had thought. He had even used the adjective "interesting" at one point so that the review was not solidly bad. So now I have to nerve myself to tear up an envelope with a perfectly good stamp on it.

  PS I've just torn it up.

  He loved Benjamin Franklin] ... Just the other day I learned something new about him. During the American Revolution, Captain Cook was engaged in his phenomenal sweeps across the Pacific Ocean. He was the first of the great modem scientific explorers, searching not for gold, trade, or colonies but for knowledge. In those days, American privateers were scouring the seas looking for British craft to sink out of a little bit of patriotism and a whole lot of love of loot. Captain Cook, however, went untouched and undisturbed, officially protected against harm by the American revolutionaries, at the advice and insistence of Benjamin Franklin.

  Franklin quite well realized that the search for knowledge (of the universe by scientists, of man's senses and emotions by writers and artists, of man's ethics and behavior by psychologists, philosophers, and-ugh-theologians) was mankind's highest purpose in life and was what made man man and not merely another animal. Most of all he realized, and made the American government realize, that it stood even higher than purely national interest.

  We're living in a time when science has made "purely national interest" completely obsolete, only not enough of us realize it.

  The thing that gets me is that people are ready to consider scientists evil for their part in the bomb. but scientists are those who have rebelled against the bomb (not all of them, of course) and fought against it. It was the politicians that actually made the decision to use it, and the military that used it-and where is a single politician or military man who has ever regretted publicly his part in the atomic bomb and its use? It is my theory that the type of mind which is today drawn to science, which in ancient tines was drawn to philosophy, in medieval times to theology-is not only the best mind but the goodest mind. (Which, of course, does not mean that there are not rats in the ranks of science.)

  [About an old science-fiction movie] Earth can't leave its orbit and swirl toward the Sun as a result of anything, anything, anything that happens on Earth. An external force must be applied. Earth can be blown into tiny pieces as a result of actions on Earth and some of the pieces may hurtle toward the Sun, but then an equivalent mass must hurtle in the opposite direction and the center of gravity of all the pieces will continue to move majestically about the Sun just as it is doing. Damn it, not to know this (and nobody in the movie capital does) is to be preGalilean. It is equivalent in the artistic world of saying that Mozart wrote Gotterdamnzerung. And it's no use saying, "Oh, well, the stupid jerks who watch the picture won't know the difference and wouldn't care if they did." In this present world, scientific illiteracy is a sin and anyone who encourages the spread of scientific illiteracy is a criminal.

  A lot of good it does us to try to teach legitimate physics in the schools, when the movies do things that prove they never heard of the conservation of' angular momentum.

  [About vandalism and terrorism] The whole world is being burned down or torn up or broken to pieces and people don't care. I have reached the point where I can almost hope that the death rate goes up quickly, i'erv quickly, with maximum damage to humanity and minimum damage to the rest of the animal kingdom and the inanimate environment so that the old planet has a chance to recover. I am becoming misanthropic. Individual human beings are becoming monsters incapable of any kind of motive except that of grabbing what they can from the universal wreckage.

  You must not use the phrase "nineteenth-century mechanists" as though it were a dirty word. The nineteenth-century mechanists were a heck of a lot closer to the mark than were their competitors, the vitalists, the theologians, and the mystics. By a "mechanist" I mean someone who thinks that the behavior of the universe can be interpreted through a series of general statements which we can call "laws of nature." That the universe and its component parts always behave so as to agree with the laws of nature and cannot disobey. This negates any thought of "free will" or a "directing intelligence" or a "god" if you want me to be blunt. It also implies that man, as part of the universe, lacks free will and cannot disobey the laws of nature. In short, the universe has characteristics in common with those we recognize in a machine.

  This view of matters was emotionally offensive to many who felt bound and determined to consider themselves as more than machines, as equipped with free will and souls and all the rest. Consequently
there was vast relief among many philosophers when it turned out that the nineteenth-century mechanists didn't know as much as they thought they did. (Nobody does, and the odd part is that nineteenth-century mechanists were a lot less arrogant in this respect than their opponents ...)

  The great addition that had to be made can be summed up in the one word "probability." The gas laws weren't as absolute as they seemed, once they were interpreted as the result of random motion of particles. They fuzzed out into probability. The uncertainty principle fuzzed everything out into probability.

  This didn't mean the universe was not a machine. It simply meant that we didn't know as much about machines as we thought we did. The universe is governed by uncertainty in that we can't say yes or no, but so are all machines. We can set up mathematical expressions that pre cisely express the probabilities. We can't stop the fuzziness from being fuzzy, but we can describe the nature of the fuzziness. And the universe is still a machine; we just know more about machines, that's all. So I'm a twentieth-century mechanist-and a very thoroughgoing one-and I will not admit that there is any reason to suppose that everything in the universe cannot be satisfactorily explained on the basis of material things (with energy and matter both considered material).

  In other words, in order for arrangement, order, interrelationship, and all such abstractions to have meaning, there must be order and arrangement of certain material objects. And you will never truly understand order and arrangement until you know what it is you are ordering and arranging.

  For instance, it is quite possible to study symptoms and cures of diseases without knowing anything about the cause of the disease. Great successes can be achieved even. Vaccination and quinine were introduced when only superficial knowledge existed concerning smallpox and malaria. However, it was only after the germ theory of disease was introduced that medicine became more than empirical guesswork. Which was more important, good doctor, vaccination or germ theory? And, if it were possible by skimping on research into vaccination to have discovered the germ theory twenty years sooner, would that not have been beneficial in the long run`?