Undercurrents Manifesto 1973 Page 1
Science with a Human Face UNDERCURRENTS has been started by some people who believe that radical views on scientific and technological subjects need a medium in which they can be aired. Science, we feel, has largely abandoned its original 'quest for truth' --- if the phrase sounds naive today, it is a measure of that abandonment. Nowadays, a significantly new scientific theory has to fight against a massive weight of bureaucratic orthodoxy and entrenched academic reputations if it even to be given a hearing. And scientific theories are only listened to if they emanate from 'senior academics' or 'respected researchers', men who, almost by definition, have cast their minds in an orthodox mould. Technology, too, while still masquerading as mankind's great emancipator, is increasingly becoming the instrument of our enslavement. Though it continues to be regarded as simply the application of scientific rationalism to the satisfaction of human needs, technology in practice is the means whereby the unjust economy and power structure of our industrial civilisation is kept intact and entrenched. Technology no longer concerns itself with the satisfaction of individual human needs, but with the churning-out of cheaper and ever-moresophisticated products which the masses can be persuaded they need, brainwashed as they are by the propaganda of advertising and the mass media. Keeping the wheels of industry turning in this way produces an ever-increasing national and international 'cake', extra slices of which can be thrown occasionally to the poor in case they become too discontented, provided of course that the overall distribution of wealth stays the same (the top one-fifth of Britain's population still controls three-quarters of the individual wealth of the country). More fundamentally, the supremacy in our civilisation of the scientific world view has come under heavy fire in recent years. Critics like Theodore Roszak have led assaults on the 'myth of objective consciousness' and have charged that the scientist. whose "habitual mode of contact with the world is a cool curiosity untouched by love, tenderness or passionate wonder", has arrogated to himself an excessively dominant say in the way the world is run and viewed by its inhabitants. The scientist has been pilloried, too, by such bodies as the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science, for remaining too aloof from the uses to which scientific knowledge can be, and is being, put. And as pollution, UC Manifesto: page 1