Looking Forward by Kenneth Jr. (reading diary .txt) 📕

Open Eyes and Open Minds

As we sketch a picture of the twenty-first-century world, we will seek values that will help individual men, women, and children to achieve feelings of fulfillment. Most of the functional value systems of the past will seem inappropriate in the world of the future that we project in Part II.

We must be prepared to see the dissolution of human institutions that have been with us for thousands of years if they no longer contribute maximally to human happiness in the changed world of the twenty-first century. As we study the future value structures of mankind, we must not be like travelers who go to a foreign land and immediately compare everything with their own home town. To understand another place, we must lay aside the value patterns that we are used to. We must relax our mental sets so that we may feel a new pattern of human experience. The biggest problem that we face is to get the twentieth-century dust out of our eyes so that we may feel and think as freshly as possible about the almost limitless permutations and combinations of life patterns that mankind may explore for ever higher levels of fulfillment in the future.

If you think that today’s vices and virtues are absolute and ultimate and reflect the final value system for all times and all civilizations, you will find our projection of the future to be shocking and incredible. If you have an absolute attitude toward values, all you can do is to project your particular conditioning onto mankind’s dynamically evolving future. You will tend to see the future in terms of the present with, of course, some of the burrs removed. If you want even the slightest chance of understanding where we are going—and possibly helping us get there—shake out the absolutes and put in the relatives. A culture must be seen relative to time, relative to place, and relative to a particular framework of values, thinking methodology, and technology.

Civilization has just recently given up crawling and has begun to toddle. With the development of scientific methods of thinking several centuries ago, mankind began to blossom into what might be called the childhood of civilization. We are today fast-growing adolescents. We have clashing values. We are torn between our inside feelings and needs and outside structures and pressures. The adulthood of human civilization lies before us. There is only one thing we can know for certain—the world of the future will be enormously different from anything in the past or present.

5. The Scientific Method

Our method of thinking helps us choose between formulations, ideas, thoughts, notions, hypotheses, theories, and other cerebral itches. It enables us to decide what is “true” and what is “false.” Our method of thinking should help us pick the most reliable thing to do that offers maximum predictability. It should enable us to reject ideas that do not correspond with observable facts.

What are the various methods of thinking that man has used? There is the method of appealing to authority, or, asking what the wise men, present or past, have to say about the problem. There is the method of intuition, which means pumping your feelings for something that may bear on the problem. There is the method of rational, philosophical, logical thinking, which means using your brain to test out various verbal structures.

We’re in favor of using all the above methods of thinking, and any others you can find, for the purpose of coming up with creative ideas that may be useful. It is vital that we should not misuse these methods of thinking by relying on them to make a final selection. To choose the most useful ideas we must finally quit talking and check whether a verbal formulation corresponds with observable facts.

The history of human thought shows that we don’t get very far as long as we spin words around in our heads and fail to take the scientific step of checking them against observable facts. Non-scientific methods of thinking do not produce agreement between individuals of different backgrounds. They can argue “until the cows come home,” and problems still don’t get settled. Even worse, non-scientific methods have never been successful in building an effective structure of knowledge on which men of all nations can rely. Reliable knowledge accumulates only when men slow the flow of words and start scientifically checking their ideas against something outside their skulls. The enormous progress of science and the technological marvels of our age were possible because men tested their ideas against observable facts.

The Beginning of the Scientific Method

Although the Greeks dabbled in and seemed to have anticipated almost everything, it was not until Francis Bacon (1561–1626) appeared on the scene that men began to use systemically the method of science. As Dr. George Gallup pointed out:

Bacon argued strenuously for an entirely new approach to the physical world. ... He advocated the experimental approach, its virtue being that every finding and conclusion could be tested. Since every new bit of knowledge was demonstrably true, there would be no room for quarreling schools of thought, and knowledge about the physical world could be rapidly expanded. Bacon’s foresight has proved correct. The world of knowledge, as a result, has been literally transformed by this special way of channeling man’s intelligence. Almost all of the physical and material benefits mankind enjoys today are a product of this method of science.

George Gallup, The Miracle Ahead (New York, Evanston, and London: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1964), p. 153.

In a way this scientific method of thinking is really nothing new and not so unusual. We use it often in our everyday personal, business, and social problems. The thing that makes the big difference is the thorough insistence that all knowledge pass the test of being checked by observation. Most of our everyday thinking is a mixture of all methods of thinking.

The scientific method is almost as “old as the hills.” Imagine a group of cave men