Michael Crichton on UFO’s and Global Warming:
http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches_quote04.html
My comment: I am reminded of SF books I read in my youth (World of Null-A,
Galactic Patrol, Lucky Starr, Buck Rogers, Foundation) where the Games Machine,
or Mentor of Arisia, or the Council of Science, or the Psychohistorians would
use SCIENCE to determine how to govern mankind. Dispassionate and rational, the
Council of Science and the Science Patrol would use SCIENCE to organize society.
Only the short story “Poor Superman” by Fritz Leiber had a realistic view, amid
all this optimism, and protrayed the Council of Science as it really would be:
if you appoint scientists to become politicians, they act like politicians.
The idea of a Council of Science is like the Socratic idea of the
Philosopher-King. In reality Philosopher-Kings would act like Alexander the
Great, which is to say, like any other king, a pirate writ large.
Nowadays, ideas like ‘nuclear winter’ ‘the population bomb’ ‘second-hand smoke’
and ‘global warming’, are presented to the public as if they were scientific. We
are attempting to use a scientific consensus to guide public policy. We are
attempting to turn control of the public bureaucracy over to an informal sort of
Council of Science. What we have instead is rule by the Council of Propoganda.
