I feel much sympathy with the views expressed by Prince Charles in his recent Reith lecture regarding human endeavours to control and exploit for profit natural processes. That such ideas should provoke controversy was only to be expected, given the present methods by which academic institutions and those holding influential posts within them are increasingly controlled by global finance.
Perhaps the days when scientists could be relied upon as strictly objective and impartial have gone. The powerful industrial corporations which, pace the politicians, control our daily lives, could hardly contemplate ideas like those expressed by the prince without reacting violently to defend their bunkers. Such corporations have done much to advance the argument that whatever scientists (or strictly their technologists) devise is sacrosanct and offers the only hope for the future of mankind.
The issue at stake is how far the type of science that involves a blinkered concentration on isolated aspects of life without considering the wider picture should be permitted to take precedence. The crude notion that the world and its fundamental natural laws should be regarded as a human possession that can be manipulated to suit our immediate desires, and that we are so wise and clever that we can find a technological fix for anything without suffering any adverse circumstances, is the height of arrogance.
And the ultimate price we pay for unbridled arrogance is disaster. However useful to us we regard the universe, it is entitled to our respect. We did not create it, and increasingly we fail to manage it fruitfully. Mankind is part of nature, not its sole proprietor. It is the deadly quality of hubris that would persuade us otherwise.
The arguments raised by the Reith lecture are largely dependent on how we view the role of science in the world, and public judgments of science are lamentably fickle and ill-founded. In our own Western culture, scientists were distinguished from philosophers by their devotion to specific rather than general problems, and from artisans by their theoretical rather than practical approach. The first of these distinctions held the seed of the unfortunate tendency of scientists to take the reductionist attitude to nature. The second foreshadowed the division between science proper and technology, the application of scientific knowledge. The scientific approach involves observing, reasoning, and applying the results to further problems. The religious approach also aims to explain the nature of the world, but includes the consideration of purpose and will, so that it carries a moral dimension which science does not necessarily recognise.
True science is objective and takes no account of motive or justification, values which have divided it from technology and which are responsible for much of the distrust it suffers. Technology has been responsible for many of our ills, science cannot be. It consists of observing phenomena, deriving universal laws governing them, and studying how phenomena interact to maintain a living unity. It has no concern with manipulating things to our advantage or fancied advantage.
James Lovelock, in his fascinating concept of Gaia, imagines the earth as a coherent system of living things, self-regulating according to the pressures generated within it. Technology confers on us no right to tinker with it without due regard for possible reactions which we cannot control. But technology is now being developed to satisfy human greed rather than human necessity.