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BC-SCIENCE-04-15
    By William Braden
    (c) 1983 Chicago Sun-Times (Independent Press Service)
    Call it Past Shock.
    It's an impression of some deep-seated change taking place in
society - of a flashback to other times and other values. It started
in January when television newscasts showed grinning workers being
recalled to auto factories, including the General Motors plant in
Lordstown, Ohio.
    Lordstown? That seemed to ring a vague bell.
    ---
    Flashback: The year was 1972. A strike at the Lordstown plant was
being seized upon by social commentators to symbolize what was said
to be a growing sense of alienation among America's young blue-collar
workers. The workers were letting their hair grow long. And it was
said they had been infected by the so-called counterculture of their
college-student contemporaries who were in open revolt against the
values of the dominant culture - including science, technology and
the damnable Work Ethic. It was said the assembly-line workers
demanded meaningful labor - that there must be more to life than
''putting bumpers on a Buick.''
    ---
    A decade later, it appeared that the workers would be overjoyed by
an opportunity to install those bumpers. If anything, they were
worried that the job might go to a steel-collar worker. That is to
say, a robot.
    ---
    Another strong jolt of Past Shock was provided in early April at a
conference hosted by the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago to
explore the impact of science and technology on society in the 50
years since the museum opened its doors.
    The conference was even more successful in demonstrating the
astonishing sea of change that has occurred during the last decade in
society's attitudes toward science and technology.
    ---
    Flashback: The year once again was 1972. An organization called the
Club of Rome was spreading alarm with a doomsday computer study
suggesting that world civilization would collapse within a century -
that we would starve to death, or choke to death in a giant cloud of
pollution, unless we achieved zero increase in economic growth.
Smokestacks were out. Windmills were in. More was less. And countless
conferences were held across the land in which scientists and
technologists masochistically allowed themselves to be lectured by
finger-wagging humanists.
    ---
    That same mix of people came together at last week's museum
conference - a prestigious gathering that included five Nobel
laureates. But the tone of the panel discussions had changed. The
humanists were far less strident, and the scientists and
technologists had shifted from defense to offense.
    A thoughtful analysis of the new mood was offered by opinion
researcher Daniel Yankelovich, who said unemployment caused by the
shift from smokestack industries to high-tech ''will be the central
political issue of this decade in the United States and Western
Europe.''
    Yankelovich said U.S. public opinion of science and technology has
been on a roller coaster in recent decades - not a simple trend line,
but a series of ups and downs that can be divided into three distinct
periods.
    - The first period lasted from the end of World War II to the early
1960s. The atom bomb had helped us win a ''just war'' in which there
were no moral ambiguities. Following the war, science and technology
created world prosperity and the greatest period of sustained
industrial growth in history. And while people had a mistaken idea of
science as a detached, impersonal method, they also believed that
''science magic'' was basically a force for good that could solve all
the world's problems. When U.S. technological superiority was
threatened by Sputnik in 1957, the nation immediately rose to meet
the challenge and win the space race.
    - The second period lasted from the mid-1960s to 1980, and it saw a
severe reaction against science and technology expressed in three
basic critiques. Science and technology were ravaging nature. They
were dehumanizing society. And they claimed a monopoly on ultimate
truth - which provoked a mystical turning inward and a rejection by
some of rational thought.
    - The new decade has produced a new synthesis marked by a less
romanticized view of nature and a more realistic acceptance of
technology. Real problems are created by technological abuse, but
these can be addressed politically - and it is possible to be
pro-environment without being anti-technology. There is a ''dramatic
rejection'' of the notion science and technology are depersonalizing.
And there is less interest in esoteric mysticism because science
itself is seen as less closed. It is revealing the wonders of nature
-opening new worlds, new horizons, new visions.
    While the public now holds a positive view of science and technology
- and believes by a 7-1 margin that they bring more benefits than
problems - Yankelovich himself sees a horrific threat in the
co-existence of 20th century science and Stone Age emotions: of
cruise missiles controlled by a species with strong aggressive
impulses.
    Similar concerns were echoed by almost all of the conference
participants - including the scientists and technologists, whose
deeper knowledge of their work gives them perhaps a deeper awareness
of the perils and ethical problems involved in enterprises ranging
from nuclear weaponry to genetic engineering. And there was universal
agreement on the need for greater public knowledge and awareness.
    But nobody was apologizing for what he or she does in the lab. The
talk was generally upbeat and optimistic (''Now we can't make a frog,
but in the future we might''), and the once-nasty computer was viewed
as a symbol of hope. Nor was there any reluctance to equate progress
with another word that had fallen from favor in the recent past.
    ---
    Flashback: It was the early 1960s. Informed citizens concerned with
the nation's most urgent social problems had their noses stuck in a
book by John Kenneth Galbraith, first published in 1958. Its title:
''The Affluent Society.'' We worried about affluence. We wondered if
it wasn't destroying our souls, our humanity, ''the quality of life.''
    ---
    At the museum conference, from the perspective of 1983, it seemed
clear that earlier breast-beating about the evils of materialism was
an exercise in self-indulgence made possible by the very affluence
that was under attack. And Nobel laureate Rosalyn S. Yalow had no
trouble putting her finger on the cause of the new positive attitude
toward science and technology.
    That attitude, said Yalow, arises from the realization that ''we are
no longer as affluent a society as we once were.'' And the problem
now, she said, is ''to rebuild our affluence.''
    Yalow and others also placed their fingers on the way to do that. To
rebuild affluence - and to maintain our technological edge in
competition with the Japanese and others - we must rebuild our
educational system.
    ---
    Flashback: Education was another dirty word a decade ago - when
universities were assailed as tools of a military-industrial
conspiracy, when the concept of schooling per se was called into
question by critics who demanded that studies be ''relevant'' to the
preoccupations of students hellbent on doing their own thing. Their
own thing was not physics. Nor was it mathematics, computer science
or engineering science.
    ---
    Today we have a serious shortage of students graduating in those
fields.
    ''If you examine the Japanese equivalent of our SAT scores,'' said
Yalow, ''you might conclude that either the Japanese are better than
we genetically or you might come to the conclusion - what is my
conclusion - that we simply haven't disciplined our students to the
kinds of studying that permit them to move up in fields such as
mathematics, applied sciences and so on. I think we're going to have
to change the way we think about these things.
    ''The fact is that some of the attitudes are changing in the '80s,
compared to what they were like in the '60s and '70s. ...
Increasingly, we find that schools are now starting to require, at
least at some level, examinations in order to go on.
    ''I think it's been a tragedy in our country that we teach remedial
reading in college. ... If we're going to survive in the world, we're
going to have to institute a certain increase in disciplined learning
at a lower level. I think we can do it. I think we have the talent
here. We have the opportunity. We have to set standards.''
    Buckminister Fuller said it more than a decade ago, when others were
saying that more is less. He said the underlying cause of war and
social unrest is not political and will not be solved politically.
The underlying cause is ''not enough to go around.'' The only lasting
solution is a superabundant economy. And the only way to achieve that
is through science and computerized technology.
    In a year that began with the computer replacing man on the cover of
Time magazine (''Machine of the Year''), it also appeared to be the
message that emerged from the learned discussions at the Museum of
Science and Industry.
    END