Chemistry and Social Concern
Milton K. Snyder 131 West 8th Street Claremont, California 91711
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The Irrelevance of Teaching Chemistry
People are hurting. At the personal level, this is visible in the feelings of fragmentation, powerlessness, loneliness,hopelessness, meaninglessness, and lack of personal satisfaction in life. On the wider scene, this boils up into violence, chaos, divisiveness, alienat.ion, and polarization. This is the inevitable outcome of our perception of the meaning of life and the purpose of man. Now lve have reached a point of discontinuity; a time for major change in direct,ion rather than extrapolationinto the future. Science in general and chemistry in particular are integral parts of this old perception and therefore t,hey are implicated in our pain. For example, scient,ific reductionism is reflected in our divide and conquer attitrude and the resulting fragmentation we feel. We separate reason, int.ellect, objectivity, and action from passion, sensitivity, subjectivity, and feeling. We polarize ourselves into narrowly defined, compet,itive, self-interest groups and then "resolve" our conflicts by compromising away some of our "self-interest." We make "either-or" rather than "both-and" decisions thus excluding some vital truths from our lives. Ultimately we succumb t,o the dictat.orship of cliques of experts who design our lives for us. The specialized vision of these experts develops int.0 a personal passthe-buckism which grows into collective irresponsibility that. places us in an atmosphere of galloping amoralism. Unaware of the interrelated outcomes of our behavior and ignorant of the larger meaning of our knowledge and expertise, we fail to see the moral components of our daily actions. Thus morality becomes someone else's business on special occasions, leaving us devoid of important guidelines and the sense of responsibilit.y that we need to live meaningfully . decisive, personal lives. We as chemists and scientists are high on the list of self-interest groups of elitist-minded experts wanting to tell others how to live their lives. In the climb to eminence, we scientists have sold our souls to the corporate state in return for the support and maintenance of the institutionalized scientific edifice in which we have a vested interest. As the quest for more support in the midst of hard times continues, we promote science as the power to sustain the corporate state of which we are, and hope to remain, an integral part. We are led to believe that our first responsibility is to the preservation of the institution called science, and we promote the myth that whatever is Based on a paper presented at the Symposium on "Chemistry Instruction and Social Concern." National AAAS Meetine. -. Chicago, December, 1970. 'COLE, DANDRIDGE, "Beyond Tomorrow,'' Amherst Press, Amherst, Wiso., 1965, pp. 103-6.
good for science is good for people, the superstition that the failure to maintain present levels of support for science will bring civilization to a crashing halt, and a new version of the golden rule: whatever can be done must be done. What destiny are we promoting for humanity? For one thing, we worship a t the shrine of durability and physical immortality, arrogantly pursuing control to assert our human superiority. Starting with a view of ourselves in mortal combat with our environment, we have gradually, and piecemeal, undertaken the destruction of that environment in favor of more durable substitutes, a process that plays a vital role in turning the wheels of the corporate state that supposedly manufactures the good life. The individual person, as we know him, will cease to exist. Instead, he will be a programmed brain, designed and creat,ed by men to perform specific functions wit,h pleasures, joys, and satisfactions emanating from easily controlled electronic impulses. His natural components will be replaced by more durable and efficient artificial parts. Individuals will become "cells" wit,hin larger organisms that Dandridge Cole called "Macro life," and which he characterized asfollows' The new step in evolution is from man.. .to the c l d cycle societ,y or Macro life. . . . These highly developed societies.. . will constitut,enew giant life forms.. .in that they will have the cspsbility far motion, growth, reproduction, reaction to stimuli, and even intelligent thought. They will exceed in power and survival value any previous product of evolution known to us on earth, and will be the undisputed mssters of the known universe. They will be practically indestructible and immortd and will continue to grow and reproduce indefinitely.
This serious, non-science-fiction projection indicates the destiny toward which our scientific experts would take us: that of non-humans in a man-made world that has no place for surprise, awe, failure, wonder, the unexpected and unpredictable, or love beyond the necessary toleration to get along with each other efficiently so as not to impair performance and reliability. We face the decision whether to continue this quest for collective human power or to make peace with the natural environment, seek our place in the natural order, and transcend our inclinations for domination, manipulation, control, and immortality. These are the modern parameters of the question: "What is man?" I s he just a coordinated collection of atoms, molecules, force fields, and energy receptors about to come of age and thus free from what he has believed to be his limitations, or is he more than the sum of these isolated parts and more intimately related to the subtle aspects of the natural order than his reductionistically determined chemistry and physics might suggest? Volume 48, Number 10, October 1971
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Chemistry and Social Concern New Perceotions
Alternatives to the perceptions of scientific expert, are emerging at this time of discontinuity. They ems body changes in emphasis from reductionism to holism, from dispassionate-rational-intellectual-objective-detachment to psychoanalytical involvement, from material concerns to social and psychological concerns, from eking out the necessities for survival to learning to live meaningful lives, from the restrictive limitations and exclusions of the "either-or" to the experienceexpanding inclusiveness of the "both-and", from hatred and fear of external enemies to love of fellows with whom we share a small planet, from reliance on external rewards to the recognition of the internal rewards of personal satisfaction, from spectatorism to participation, from the amoralistic escapism of trying to become something we are not to a responsible development of the untapped resources we already have as persons, from cultural isolation and ethnocentricity to cultural mixing and sharing of cultural values, from the conformity and uniformity of the artificial to the diversity of the natural, from concern only for what technology can do for man t o an understanding of what technology can do to man, from personal repression to personal liberation. Educationally, this discontinuity implies changes from the isolated, residential, campus community to the whole world and life's total scene of action as the campus; from the detached, objective search for kuowledge to the linking of thought and action; from fixed, standardized, and homogenizing curricula to personalized, individualized, participative, and diversifying thrusts into life's experiences; from fragmenting, discipline-oriented expertise to integrative, comprehensive, and pan-disciplinary reaching out; from an almost exclusive concern with the development of the rational-intellectual capacity to the additional development of all human capacities for awareness, knowing, deciding, and acting; from professional-vocational training to the quest for meaning in life out of which vocational commitment emerges; from education fixed in time to education as a life-long process; from objective, dispassionate, detached, authoritarian-professional-specialist faculty to concerned and involved resource-broker facilitators who participate in the on-going processes of becoming more human. Some Suggestions
To engage in needed change, I suggest submerging our concern for preserving the institutions of science and education and elevating our concern for preserving persons, losing our identities as scientific and educational experts and finding new identities as persons. The relevance of chemistry, or science, to the new age that is struggling to emerge lies in neither the institutional edifice we have come to call science, nor the vested interest, professional roles we play. Rather it is embedded within those warm, alive, concerned humans who also call themselves scientists and who have internalized the disciplines and concepts of science. The humanistic values of science are revealed and shared best as those persons called scientists allow their unique selves to commingle with and penetrate other lives in a personal way, for they are the personification of science and through them science can become personalized. 652
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Primarilv we should declare our inde~endencefrom the tyranny of the institutions which ensiave us, reduce our: dedication to committees, busyness, obtaining grants, 'writing papers and reports, and consulting. The liberated time should be spent committing ourselves to other persons and to the pursuit of meaning in our common humanity, developing a fellowship of concern out of which new perspectives can grow. Educationally, we must tear down the ghetto walls surrounding our academic disciplines and open the lines of communication with other disciplines in the development of pan-disciplinary alternatives to the departmental empires which currently fragment higher education in a milieu of conflicting self-interests. I n addition, we need to give serious attention to the new perspectives of ecology, boiling up from the scientific enterprise and expanding into a pan-disciplinary, life-serving endeavor, that provides alternatives to some of our current societal value orientations. For example, the emphasis on competitive acheivement is replaced by a concern for quality life; our preoccupation with manipulation, domination, subjugation, and exploitation is replaced by the search for our place in the interrelated web of l i e ; our obsession with efficiency, practicality, and expediency, which has resulted in fragmentation, is replaced by a value on holism; our notion of quantitative progress is replaced by concern for ecological balance; our value on material comfort which has led to an artificial environment full of artifacts for our self-indulgence is replaced by the value of the natural environment as the source of sustenance for quality life; our drive for uniformity and conformity is replaced by the enrichment of diversity; and our parochial ethnocentrism is replaced by globalism. Finally, another potential academic thrust is futuristics. This is not the kind of futurism found in the deferred benefits of our old perception, nor is it prognostic extrapolation of the usual sort. Rather, it is an explicit designing and evaluation of possible alternative futures along with what Alvin Toffler has called "value-impact forecasting": a means to evaluate our present actions by trying to project their ultimate outcome^.^ After all, this is the meaning of intellectual integrity, that we understand the interrelatedness and implications of our ideas, concepts, and actions and that we adjust our behavior accordingly. Conclusion
I n this time of change, we need to discard our old perspectives, not because they were evil or misguided, but simply because they have served their purpose. They have guided us well to a life full of material goods and to a point where we need not fear our environment. But they also have brought us to a stage in which other hilrts are more prominent, where we recognize that we have not yet arrived at the good life because that involves more than we understood before. Although we have made significant advances, we have no obvious right t o believe that the means for freeing us from one set of hurts and fears will suffice to liberate us from new ones. I n fact, some of our pain results from our careless extrapolation of short term methods to their long term 1 TOPFLEE, ALVIN, ('Future Shock," Random House, New York, 1970; Horizon, 12, No. 2, 82 (Spring, 1970).
Chemistry end Social Concern
implications, and the time has come to change direction. We have encased our past methods in sturdy institutions. These institutions served another pcrception and \when we insist upon preserving them, they no longer serve us so we feel dominated and coerced into serving them. Higher education is a federation of departmental empires, each built around an academic discipline that served our old percep+,ion. Our science departmellts are not only a part of this institutional structure, but also part of institutionalized science which is a contending self-interest group vying for
political and ideological power to determine our human destiny. Within this context, consuming ourselves in a preoccupation with teaching science is irrelevant and even detrimental to our major task today, which is the exciting adventure of developing new perceptions and charting new patterns of behavior and action that are compatible with them and that speak t o our humanity. To focus on the teaching of chemistry, or science, is to stare through our most important mission and to dwell on the maintenance of institutions that no longer serve our best interests.
Volume 48, Number 10, October 1971
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