The Acceleration of History

Fülszöveg

The pubhsher of Scientific American and author of Science in the Cause of Man here essays the definition and resolution of the political, economic, and ethical conflicts that flare along the boundary of science and society. His book is addressed to specific issues of the decade: abroad, the arms race and the deepening gulf between the rich and the poor nations; at home, the automation of production and the compulsions of work and leisure, metropolitan segregation and the creeping blight of suburbia, welfare medicine and caste in our democracy, the student rebellion and the moral crisis of the universities. Mr. Piel approaches these and other issues from his own response to three underlying questions: Is science amoral and without humane value? Must technology proceed in accord with its own imperatives and without regard to utility or peril? Has the individual conscience no place in the vast, interlocked enterprises of industrial civilization? According to the author, the... Tovább

Fülszöveg

The pubhsher of Scientific American and author of Science in the Cause of Man here essays the definition and resolution of the political, economic, and ethical conflicts that flare along the boundary of science and society. His book is addressed to specific issues of the decade: abroad, the arms race and the deepening gulf between the rich and the poor nations; at home, the automation of production and the compulsions of work and leisure, metropolitan segregation and the creeping blight of suburbia, welfare medicine and caste in our democracy, the student rebellion and the moral crisis of the universities. Mr. Piel approaches these and other issues from his own response to three underlying questions: Is science amoral and without humane value? Must technology proceed in accord with its own imperatives and without regard to utility or peril? Has the individual conscience no place in the vast, interlocked enterprises of industrial civilization? According to the author, the conventional, despairing answers to these questions necessarily accept the apocalypse of thermonuclear war or the alternative Malthusian extinction by starvation hastened by pollution. Such answers, he contends, are alibis for failure to embrace personal responsibility.
Demolishing the contemporary folklore of the laboratory, of the machine, and of economics, Gerard Piel asserts the responsibility of each citizen for the uses to which society puts the enormous forces now at its command. The values of science show the dilemmas of technology to be political issues demanding urgent, rational action. Science and technology extend the dignity of citizenship to all members of society; institutions created for the inequitable distribution of scarcity must yield to measures for equitable sharing of abundance. The obligations of citizenship, he declares, are laid the more squarely upon each individual by what he must inescapably learn from science about the world and his place in it.
Jacket design by Muriel Nasser Vissza