As my academic adventure continues, I ask myself in what way the scientific mindset influences the way modern man builds today’s world.
Borrowing philosophy and methods from the natural sciences, the social sciences have as their object of observation all phenomena that result from human intervention. From the expansion of urban centers to the monetary policy of the European Central Bank; from mass migrations to the psychological dynamics underlying the management of a condominium.
To be such, the social sciences must be objective: they must not tell “how things could or should go,” but rather “how things are.”
Ensuring maximum impartiality, I as a scientist observe and collect data. I analyze them and assign statistical value. I interpret them, trying to make explicit a series of cause-and-effect relationships. The rest is not my business: by definition, as a scientist I am not required to express an opinion on a desirable direction to take on the basis of such results.
On the contrary, personal opinion and judgment, in the most rigorous scientific environments, are perhaps among the most deplorable things one can have.
Example.
Let us suppose I am a social scientist dealing with the process of urbanization that has shaken the world in the last ten years. First, I will look for data on the construction of new housing (how many, where, area, etc.), then compare them with data on population expansion (births, deaths, new immigrants, etc.), and with those relating to the cost of money and mortgages (interest rates, etc.).
Probably, I will find and quantify the following correlation among variables: as the cost of money and mortgages goes down, there is an increase in the construction of new houses, but not a proportionate increase in the number of inhabitants.
The point I want to reach is this: this conclusion says nothing about whether the observed phenomenon is beautiful or ugly, right or wrong. For example, it says nothing about the fact that by building more houses than inhabitants:
- we will find ourselves in a world increasingly devoid of nature and full of concrete, even if there is no need;
- if the investment market no longer compensates, house prices will sooner or later collapse (and indeed that is what happened, not by chance little predicted by economists).
For a moment I would like to imagine a world in which everyone reasons like scientists.
A world that is, that is, in which everyone studies the past to understand the present (as in the exercise just made), but in which nobody asks what future we are building, and inquires about the goodness of the direction taken. In other words, it seems to me that science looks at the past rather than the future: not by chance it is based on a statistical method called “regression” (!).
It is also interesting to note that beyond science, finance too is crushed upon the present. Indeed, it is based on the principle of “present value”: the goodness of an investment is not measured by future gain, but by its present convenience in light of the depreciation of money and other alternatives in play.
I believe therefore that if science and finance are not balanced by ethics and normative knowledge (that founded on shared norms, which indicate to us what is good and what is evil), there is the risk of finding ourselves in a society that has no idea where it is going.
Look at today’s globalization, built on a business approach increasingly scientific and financial: “without noticing it,” it is destroying the ecosystems of the world; introducing new technologies before verifying potential future harm to human beings (I think for example of nanotechnologies); creating a global village without people having time to adapt to it.
In my view, it is not so surprising that we have no idea which world we will hand over to our children. But what is surprising is that we do not pose the problem.
And if one does pose it, one relies on an ideological and simplistic vision: “globalization, anchored in the greatest freedom of science and finance, is the solution to all evils.”
I do not believe, however, that the solution lies in blaming science and finance.
On the contrary, we will perhaps have an ever more desperate need for both to resolve the challenges we face. The point is to reassign to them their proper value. To contextualize them, de-ideologize them, blunt their more radical traits, pursuing interdisciplinarity and the practice of common sense in people’s education and training.
So that the future, in addition to the past and the present, is also taken into account in the scientific approach as well as in the financial one. To create those mechanisms by which the leaders of tomorrow cannot be anything but fully rounded.