The most important and neglected law of science and technology is Murphy’s Law: “Whatever can go wrong will go wrong.”
by Gordon Albright
We have all been brought up to believe that the human race was making greater and greater progress all the time, and was certain of a glorious future of peace and plenty for all. Unfortunately, the truth is exactly the opposite. Almost all our apparent “progress” has been made at the expense of ourfuture. The greater it becomes, the more it destroys our lasting well-being and our chances of survival. As the future we have sacrificed for immediate gains becomes the present, and our lives become more and more difficult, we have to sacrifice our future more than ever just to maintain the way of life we’ve become accustomed to. Soon even this will no longer be possible, and we will fall into collapse and chaos that could easily destroy the human race.
We are living at the expense of our future in all kinds of ways. Our scientific, technological and industrial establishments assure us, on their “expert” authority, that everything they’re doing is perfectly safe. The trouble is that their “expertise” doesn’t see beyond the immediate problems they’re trying to solve, and they know little or nothing of the lasting, global consequences of what they’re doing. As a result, they cause all kinds of “unforeseen consequences,” such as damage to the ozone layer, climate change, diseases of all kinds, and the destruction of the natural and human resources that are our only lasting means of support. The most important and neglected law of science and technology is Murphy’s Law: “Whatever can go wrong will go wrong.” We can only survive by making sure that nothing fatal to our future ever can go wrong. That is an enormous challenge, and we’ve ignored it completely.
The only way to save ourselves is to stop living at the expense of our future. We can’t even afford to take the risk of making a single fatal mistake. All it takes is one, and that’s the end of us. If we keep on playing Russian Roulette with the future of the human race, instead of putting safety first, we are certain to destroy ourselves. Instead we must sustain ourselves entirely with safe, lasting resources. These can never come from the destructive, reckless, irresponsible technologies we are now relying on, but only from technologies that sustain and strengthen the human and natural communities that are our only lasting means of support. The science that generates these technologies cannot be based, as it is now, on data that is far too limited to be reliable. To ensure our survival, its laws must be based on logic and long, well-established experience. The most important of these laws are simple, self-evident, easy to understand, and inescapable. They all follow from one central law:
The Law of Survival:
We cannot live at the expense of our future.
The challenge of survival is to look after our immediate well-being without harming our lasting well-being. If we sacrifice our future for immediate gains, our lives get harder and harder as the future we have sacrificed becomes the present. This forces us to live at the expense of our future more than ever. We are trapped in the death spiral of addiction, and it will soon destroy us if we don’t free ourselves from it. Our current way of life is based on the all-out pursuit of immediate gains without regard for our future, so it’s really a way of death.
The Law of Love:
We must care for everything that our future depends on ahead of ourselves, and even sacrifice ourselves for it if necessary.
Otherwise we live at the expense of our future by failing to preserve and protect it. So this law is a direct consequence of the previous one.
The Law of Community:
One for all and all for one.
This double law ensures lasting support from human communities, one of the two pillars of support for our lasting well-being. “One for all” follows from the Law of Love. Our human communities are an essential part of what sustains us, so we have to look after them ahead of ourselves. But “all for one” is also essential, because anyone who does not get enough community support will be forced to live at the expense of the common future of everyone. A basic principle follows from this: the greatest human right, and the greatest human responsibility, is to live in a way that does no harm to anyone’s future.
The Law of Renewal:
All the material products we consume must be completely recycled as fast as we consume them.
This ensures lasting support from our natural environment, the other pillar of support for our lasting well-being. We can only survive if all the waste from all the material products we consume is completely recycled as fast as it is produced. This can’t be done with most of the waste that our technologies produce. This is why they’re technologies of mass destruction that make us the greatest destroyers on Earth. All the material products we consume have to come from natural cycles, because they’re the only production processes that cause no resource depletion and no pollution.
The Law of Power:
When we use our material power for the greatest immediate gain, it destroys us.
The greatest immediate gain can only come at the greatest expense to our future, and this is certain to destroy us. We fall into this Power Trap whenever arrogance or desperation makes us believe that our material power can give us more than anything else. Then it becomes a “moral obligation” to use it in every way we can. “Everything that can be done must be done.” But this means that everything that can go wrong must go wrong, including things that could destroy the human race. The only way out is to stop doing what got us into the Power Trap in the first place, by abandoning the use of material power to get what we want. Instead we must sustain ourselves with our spiritual power, by establishing and maintaining strong, lasting, mutually supportive partnerships with each other and with the natural community of life. We can never survive without complete social and environmental justice.
Living extravagantly at the expense of our future is what makes us destroy our natural environment, each other, and ourselves. By using our material power for the greatest possible immediate gains, we have only made false “progress” at the expense of our lasting well-being, and dug ourselves into a deeper and deeper hole. The longer we wait to start climbing out of it, the harder it will be and the more it will cost us. If we wait until human society collapses into chaos, it may cost us our very existence. We don’t have to live at the expense of our future, or we would have destroyed ourselves long ago. We only feel that way, because we’ve become addictively dependent on means of support that harm our lasting well-being. We can only save ourselves by establishing a lasting base of support that gives the entire human race all the necessities of life, so that everyone can give up completely all dependence on self-destructive means of support. We certainly can’t go on living recklessly and destructively instead of cautiously and responsibly.
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Gordon Albright is a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at York University.
This article is an outline of a future book .
[From WS September/October 2007]