The alternative to despair is to build an ark

doi:10.1126/science.abk0210

GSTDTAP > 气候变化

DOI	10.1126/science.abk0210
	The alternative to despair is to build an ark
	Yochai Benkler
	2021-08-13
发表期刊	Science
出版年	2021
英文摘要	Between 1936 and 1938, H. G. Wells delivered a series of lectures first published under the title World Brain in 1938. The standard reading of that text over the past few decades has framed Wells as the utopian futurist projecting from microfilm, radio, and telephone a world encyclopedia freely available to all. Predicting, various authors have written, the World Wide Web or Wikipedia, World Brain naïvely imagined that such a facility would provide the global community with the knowledge base we would need to create world peace. After 5 years of research on propaganda and misinformation, I read World Brain very differently. In one of the early talks collected in the book, Wells told his audience “I do not agree with that inevitability of another great war.” But by 1938, he conceded: “The Flood is coming anyhow, and the alternative to despair is to build an ark. My other name is Noah, but I am like someone who plans an ark while the rain is actually beginning.” Fascism and communism loomed large in the world of propaganda that Wells decried. But his point was both deeper and more banal than these twin threats. “Big business in America,” he wrote, “appears to be completely bankrupt of political and social philosophy. Probably it never had any. It had simply a set of excuses for practices that were for a time extremely profitable and agreeable.” The reader cannot but think of the “merchants of doubt,” as Naomi Oreskes dubbed them, selling climate denial or the harmlessness of tobacco, sugar, or opiates ([ 1 ][1]). Yet Wells spent fewer pages decrying political or business propaganda, or exalting the benefits of microfilms, than he did criticizing our stagnant education and research systems. Overworked, underpaid elementary school teachers and university professors in silly gowns are weighted down by bureaucratic burdens and follow centuries-old teaching practices, he wrote, particularly on “the collegiate side of a contemporary university, the superficial finishing-school exercises of sportive young people mostly of the wealthier classes.” “The universities,” he lamented, “go out to meet the tremendous challenges of our social and political life, like men who go out in armour with bows and arrows to meet a bombing aeroplane. They are pushed aside by men like Hitler, Mussolini creates academies in their despite, Stalin sends party commissars to regulate their researches.” What, then, is Wells's ark? “What I am saying,” he writes, “is…that without a World Encyclopaedia to hold men's minds together in something like a common interpretation of reality, there is no hope whatever of anything but an accidental and transitory alleviation of any of our world troubles.” Wells's “world encyclopedia” is primarily organizational, not technological. He envisioned thousands of experts continuously engaged in a global series of workshops and conferences refining a body of authoritative knowledge. His world brain, read so, is less like Wikipedia and more like a general-purpose Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—a collaborative global network of expert researchers from universities and public bodies working to produce an authoritative statement on a matter of core global concern designed to guide action. We face an epistemic crisis. The world is awash in falsehoods rooted in similar dynamics to those Wells described in his own time: religious fundamentalism, corporate opportunism, and the politics of racial and ethnonationalist hate. Hundreds of millions of people reject evolution and science; reject vaccines in the teeth of a devastating pandemic; and refuse to believe in climate science, droughts, fires, floods, and famines notwithstanding. Wells urges us to build the ark that we can rather than despair or waste time on designing arks that we cannot build. There is no world in which the few, the expert, declare what is true and enforce it on the many. Wells himself wrote, “A professor-ridden world might prove as unsatisfactory under the stress of modern life and fluctuating conditions as a theologian-ridden world.” What universities and research institutes can do is to produce the most conscientious “world encyclopedia” possible—a statement, continuously updated, of what we know to be true, what we know to be untrue, and what we believe to be in reasonable doubt—and to translate that constantly updated consensus into teaching materials for diverse levels of education and other broadly intelligible and freely accessible formats. Such an effort would need to be publicly funded and operate internationally, so as to be resistant to corporate manipulation and the influence of any single nation's interests. In some fields, such as the physical and biological sciences, this task will be hard. In others, such as history, sociology, or economics, it may be impossible to offer definitive answers to some questions. But clever tricks to fix social media will not address a problem with roots deeper and broader than the tweet-length blink of our technological moment. And we must do what we can. The waters are rising. 1. [↵][2]1. N. Oreskes, 2. E. M. Conway , Merchants of Doubt (Bloomsbury, 2010). [1]: #ref-1 [2]: #xref-ref-1-1 "View reference 1 in text"
领域	气候变化 ; 资源环境
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文献类型	期刊论文
条目标识符	http://119.78.100.173/C666/handle/2XK7JSWQ/335866
专题	气候变化资源环境科学
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714	Yochai Benkler. The alternative to despair is to build an ark[J]. Science,2021.
APA	Yochai Benkler.(2021).The alternative to despair is to build an ark.Science.
MLA	Yochai Benkler."The alternative to despair is to build an ark".Science (2021).