And again, I was excited, because I knew who Freeman Dyson was. I knew him as the author of a number of other intelligent, accessible works on science, as well as countless scientific papers. I cherished Dyson for his commitment to projects near and dear to my heart, such as space exploration, but even more I appreciated the bravura daring of his mind. It was Freeman Dyson who observed that an advanced civilization requires two things to keep growing: space and power, and envisioned, in response, the Dyson sphere, a hypothetical artifact in which an advanced civilization builds a sphere that entirely encloses their sun, multiplying the surface area available to them for building many thousandfold and addressing their power needs by harnessing the entire energy output of their sun. Amazing in itself, the Dyson sphere quickly moved through science fiction, spawning many projects in response, including Larry Niven’s Ringworld, which addressed many of the same needs but simplified construction immensely. (For example, you can spin a ringworld to get artificial gravity, whereas you must generate gravity in a Dyson sphere.) In short, I was excited because I knew who Dyson was, but didn’t believe that the general population could.
Apparently, I was wrong. All tickets for the Freeman Dyson lecture were gone within 30 minutes of the time they became available; I wasted some time trying to negotiate standing room for an interested third party later.
The talk was scheduled for 6:30 PM. When I arrived at 6:10, the auditorium, which held thousands of people, was completely full on the ground floor, and the only seats available were midway back in the balcony. There was a buzz in the crowd, which looked to be mostly undergraduates; they sounded like they were waiting for a good concert to start. I later learned that the university had done a fine job of prepping the students, with months of publicity, on campus meeting with Dyson, and a strong push for instructors to link class activities to the visit.
The Pacific Northwest is known as a hotbed of political liberalism, and it became obvious throughout the evening that it was the lecture’s specific topic, “Technology & Social Justice,” that had drawn most of the audience. Any time that Dyson articulate a view that could be claimed as liberal, he was greeted with intense applause. However, several times he spoke with even greater insight and compassion, but without voicing a recognizably liberal position, and was greeted with confused silence.
However, I’m getting ahead of myself. The evening started on time. A university representative delivered a brief biography that accented Dyson’s background and summarized his career—and answered the question of how Western got him to come to campus. It turns out that his son, Lyn Dyson, teaches for Western Washington (in the college of education), and Dyson was lured more by his son and grandson’s presence in the town than by anything special about the school.
For indeed neither the general topic, which has long been a concern of Dyson’s, or the specific talk, seemed adapted for this particular audience. When Dyson took the stage, springing up the steps two at a time in a fashion that belied his recent retirement, he took it as a platform, as another chance to talk about issues that have consumed him his entire career. Early in the talk he stated that he was there to talk about two questions. First, is it possible to have a high technology civilization without aggravating the gap between rich and poor? And second, is there a practical way to combine increased technology with social justice?
To address these questions, he delivered eight case studies, incidents in which conscious attempts had been made to bring about social change for the better by means of technological enhancement. The first of these, an intricate tale of the “African groundnut scheme,” in which the plant Americans know as the peanut was introduced to Tanzania in an attempt to address regional hunger and economic need, established a couple of expectations which Dyson spent the remainder of the evening fulfilling. First and decidedly not least, he is a fine speaker. He spent his early years in London, and the traces of an accent combine with precise wording, a careful cadence, and considerable dry wit to produce complete control of his audience. Not the least of these qualities as a speaker was his willingness and ability to educate without condescending; each generalization was illustrated, each principle followed by examples and analogies—and again, often jokes.
But second, it established that Dyson meant “technology” in its deepest sense, not its common usage. Dyson used the term in the sense of its original Greek original, in which any techne,—a body of knowledge, or established craft or practice—is a technology. In this sense, he spoke late in the speech of the respective reigns of “green technology” and “gray technology.” Green technology is his term, not specifically for technology which is ecologically friendly, but rather for techne that is based in biology; Dyson spoke of green technology as producing the first five thousand years of human civilization, during which time human civilization centered on the village. Gray technology, on the other hand, is based on chemistry and physics, and produced the most recent five thousand years of human civilization. Beginning with the smelting of metals, gray technology brought humanity into cities.
Throughout the talk Dyson implicitly accented the need to redress the balance of power between these two loci of civilization. At the end of the speech he explicitly called for such a redistribution of power, so that once again the village would be the center of human life. And here is one of many places where my reaction parted from the bulk of the audience’s. Dyson made this point near the close of his formal speech, calling for a rebirth of green technology, and seeing its foreshadowing in things such as the cloning of Dolly the sheep. When Dyson spoke approvingly of this, the audience applauded. I waited, but Dyson didn’t provide anywhere near as complex or consistent a set of reasons when dealing with ethical questions as when dealing with technological ones
But again, I’m getting ahead of myself. Dyson’s discussion of the African ground nut scheme, which was historically informed and culturally astute, showed his ability to synthesize lessons from history, economics, sociology, and anthropology, as well as farming, and to treat them all as techne fit for solving problems. His flexibility was impressive, as was his willingness to think in truly independent ways.
Part of this flexibility comes from his own acknowledged membership in two communities that are too often distinct: that in which science and technology are seen as goods in themselves, and that in which social justice is pursued, with little or no concern for science. As someone in both communities, Dyson repeatedly reflected on the compatibility of ethics and intellectual freedom. He brought home the complexity of this question through sharing a number of further case studies, each of which were selected to highlight some lesson or principle.
Each of his summaries was cogent and relevant to his guiding questions; each offered Dyson’s audience another chance to follow him through a complex interdisciplinary path in search of ethical truths. As he spoke, one thing that became desperately clear was how fundamental his use of technology in its original meaning was. Rather than equate “technology” with current high technology, such as computers, Dyson used it to mean any condensed form of human understanding, from hammers and screwdrivers to principles of social organization. What’s more, at no time in his stories did a single science or specific technology provide an answer to anything, and, most often, when someone did attempt to address a complex question with a single science, they failed. Often these failures were horrendous, as in his second case study, Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the millions it left dead in its wake. Without ever saying so directly, Dyson undercut the arrogance of the fanatic, the vested interest, and the overly rigid. Such tools, he indicated, were at best wasteful, and at worst deadly.
Such judgments offer clues to the slippery complexity of Dyson’s own politics. He is clearly opposed to the massive centralized planning that has characterized many socialist nations. However, he made it clear that for members of developing countries, both free market projects of industrialization and altruistically-minded human aid programs have been experienced in the same fashion. Both have imposed solutions from the outside on local situations without full knowledge of local customs, or, even of local geology, climate, or biological constraints. If pressed, I would characterize Dyson’s politics as a sort of enlightened cybernetic web. He acknowledges the presence of and need for both a world economy and a global information network, but accents the sovereignty of local communities and the need to respect regional beliefs and practices. In theory that sounds pretty good. In practice, despite Dyson’s detailed examples, I’m not sure how this works as a policy.