작년인가 한 일간지에서 '제3의 문화'의 주창자 브록맨이 이끌고 있는 엣지(Edge) 재단의 저널 '디 엣지'의 신년 설문을 크게 다룬 적이 있다. 작년의 물음은 "당신의 위험한 생각은 무엇인가?"였는데, 경향신문의 기사를 보니까 올해의 질문은 "당신은 무엇을 낙관하는가? 왜?"이다. 기사의 타이틀은 "25년 안에 종교-미신 힘 못 쓴다"라고 돼 있는데, 역시나 과학자들이 현실에 대해서 대체적으로 좀더 '낙관적'인 전망을 내놓는 듯하다. 우리에게 친숙한 과학자들의 이름이 보이고(친숙한 이름들 중에 누락된 것도 여럿 된다), 일부의 주장은 서로 상충되기에 흥미롭다. 연초부터 잿빛 전망들에 다소 우울한 독자들이라면 이 '올해의 질문'에 답해보면서 기운을 좀 내보는 것도 좋겠다.
경향신문(06. 01. 03) "25년 안에 종교·미신 힘 못쓴다”
'앞으로 25년 안에 종교와 미신이 더 이상 힘을 발휘하지 못하게 될 것이다. 전쟁과 자폐증은 사라지고 100살이 넘어서도 활동적으로 사는 게 특별한 일이 아닌 날이 도래할 것이다.’
미국 뉴욕에 본부를 둔 인터넷 잡지 ‘디 엣지(The Edge)’가 과학자와 지식인들을 대상으로 ‘당신이 낙관하는 것은?’이라고 물은 데 대한 답변들이다. 영국 일간 가디언은 이같은 미래에 대한 장밋빛 전망에 대해 “TV나 인터넷을 통한 정보획득이 더 손쉽게 이뤄지고 과학자들이 모든 현상을 하나의 이론으로 설명하는 최종이론 발견에 점점 더 가까이 다가서고 있기 때문”이라고 분석했다.
엣지는 사회·자연과학자 집단인 제3의문화 회원들을 대상으로 매년 ‘올해의 질문’을 던진 뒤 1월1일 홈페이지(www.edge.org)를 통해 소개하고 있다. 올해의 경우 157명의 사계의 권위자들이 답변했다(*답변자는 더 늘어나서 최종적으론 160명이다). 이들이 쏟아낸 주제는 물리학의 초끈이론, 정보, 인구증가, 암, 기후, 22세기, 과학의 미래, 고등교육의 세계화, 우정 등 다양했다. 엣지는 과학자나 과학적 마인드를 가진 사람들은 세상은 점점 더 나빠진다는 전통적인 생각과 달리 미래를 낙관적으로 보고 있다고 지적했다.
전쟁이 종식되고 폭력이 감소할 것이라는 데에 일부 학자들은 공감을 표시했다. 반면 모든 현상을 하나의 이론으로 설명하는 최종이론에 대해서는 과학들간에 의견이 엇갈렸다. “최상의 것은 아직 오지 않았다”며 미래에 대한 희망을 강조한 심리학자의 진단은 곱씹을 만하다. 대표적인 답변들을 요약해 소개한다.
◇“종교에 대한 경외심 증발”(다니엘 데니트/철학자)=앞으로 25년 안에 종교는 현재와 같은 경외심을 불러일으키지는 못할 것이다. 인터넷과 휴대전화를 통한 정보의 확산은 종교에 대한 광신적인 믿음과 편견을 낳는 사고방식들을 서서히, 그리고 저항할 수 없게 허물어버릴 것이다.
◇“폭력의 감소”(스티븐 핀커/하버드대 심리학과 교수)=20세기의 피로 얼룩진 역사로 고통받은 많은 사람들은 믿을 수 없는 주장이라고 하지만, 그동안의 연구를 보면 조직적인 폭력사태는 하향국면에 접어들었다.
◇“자폐증과 디지털 시대의 부상”(사이먼 바론 코언/케임브리지대 심리학 교수)=자폐증이 증가추세이긴 하지만 미래는 낙관적이다. 상당 비율의 자폐증은 역대 최상의 상황에 놓여있기 때문이다. 디지털 혁명으로 컴퓨터가 등장한 것은 1953년이다. 많은 아이들이 컴퓨터를 갖게 된 것은 불과 54년이 지난 후이다. 디지털시대는 자폐 심리와도 놀라울 정도로 조화를 이룰 것이다. 다른 어린이들이 사람에 대한 직관적인 이해를 키워가는 것처럼 많은 자폐아동들도 컴퓨터에 대한 직관적인 이해를 키워나갈 것이다.
◇“100살이 넘도록 건강하고 생산적인 삶을 살 것”(리오 차루파/UC데이비스대 신경생물학 교수)=21세기 중반에는 100살이 넘는 사람들이 활동적인 삶을 살아가는 것도 특별한 일이 아닐 것이다. 세가지 이유가 있다. 하나는 선진국의 수명이 크게 늘고 있다는 점이다. 나머지 둘은 생명을 연장할 수 있도록 세포 기능을 통제할 수 있고, 손상된 뇌 부위를 재생할 수 있는 생명의학 분야의 발전에 따른 것이다.
◇“에너지 도전”(마틴 리즈/영국왕립연구소 소장)=몇년 전 쓴 ‘우리의 마지막 세기’라는 책에서 파괴적인 퇴보없이 2100년을 버틸 수 있는 문명은 50%밖에 되지 않을 것이라고 진단한 적이 있다. 하지만 많은 사람들은 나보다 더 비관적이었으며 그후 나는 낙관주의자가 됐다. 사실 기술적 낙관주의자의 근거는 많다. 하지만 개도국이든 선진국이든 청정하고 지속가능한 에너지를 공급하는 것이 과학의 최우선 과제이다.
◇“올바른 선택이 지배할 것”(자레드 다이아몬드/UCLA 생물학자)=현 상황에 대해 낙관적인 데 이유는 두가지이다. 첫째는 대기업이 장기적으로 인류의 미래에 좋은 결과를 낳는 것이 결국 이익이 된다는 결론에 도달하기 때문이며, 민주주의 하에서 유권자들은 나쁜 선택보다는 올바른 선택을 하기 때문이다.
◇“도덕적 진보”(샘 해리스/신경과학 연구자)=끊이지 않는 모략에도 불구하고 우리는 도덕성 부분에 있어서는 명백한 진보를 이뤄왔다. 우리의 감정이입 능력은 성장하고 있다. 우리는 지금 인류 역사상 어느 때보다도 인류의 이익을 위해 행동해야 할 상황에 있다.
◇“우정은 생존한다”(주디스 리치 해리스/이론가)=우정에 대해 일부는 비관적이지만 우정은 사라지지 않는다. 우정은 변화하는 세상에 적응할 뿐이다. 사람들은 서로 사귀는 방법을 찾을 것이다. 볼링을 같이 할 친구는 찾기 힘들어도 대화할 상대는 찾기 쉽다. 대화하는 방법은 많기 때문이다.
◇“최상은 아직 아니다”(니컬러스 험프리/런던정경대 심리학자)=나는 1007년에 살았다 하더라도 모차르트 음악이나, 셰익스피어의 작품이나, 도스토예프스키의 소설을 미리 생각하지 못했을 것이다. 인간의 예술적 재능은 항상 우리를 놀라게 하기 때문이다. 똑같은 실수를 반복하지 않기 위해 2007년인 지금 나는 최상은 아직 오지 않았다고 믿는다. 어느 시대도 경험하지 못한 예술의 위대한 작품은 항상 우리 미래에 오기 때문이다.
◇“과학자들의 낙관주의”(리처드 도킨스/옥스포드대 진화생물학자)=물리학자들이 아인슈타인이 꿈꿔온 물리학의 근본이론을 하나로 통합하는, 모든 것을 관장하는 최종이론을 발견할 것으로 낙관한다. 또 과학을 통한 각성은 기존의 종교와 새로 생겨나고 있는 종교에 다소 늦은 감은 있지만 최후의 일격을 가할 것이이다.
◇“최종이론은 성취 못할 것”(프랭크 윌첵/MIT 물리학교수·2004년 노벨 물리학상 수상자)=물리학은 모든 현상을 하나로 설명하는 최종이론을 규명하지 못할 것이라고 생각한다. 말 그대로라면 최종이론은 매력적이지 못할지도 모른다. 우리를 놀라게도, 가르치지도 않는다는 것을 함축하기 때문이다. 나는 세상이 우리를 계속 환상적이고도 근본적인 방법으로 놀라게 만들 것으로 여긴다.(조찬제 기자)
The Edge Annual Question — 2007
WHAT ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC ABOUT? WHY?
As an activity, as a state of mind, science is fundamentally optimistic. Science figures out how things work and thus can make them work better. Much of the news is either good news or news that can be made good, thanks to ever deepening knowledge and ever more efficient and powerful tools and techniques. Science, on its frontiers, poses more and ever better questions, ever better put. What are you optimistic about? Why? Surprise us!
몇몇 학자들의 답변을 전문 인용한다.
Daniel C. Dennett
The Evaporation of the Powerful Mystique of Religion
I’m so optimistic that I expect to live to see the evaporation of the powerful mystique of religion. I think that in about twenty-five years almost all religions will have evolved into very different phenomena, so much so that in most quarters religion will no longer command the awe it does today. Of course many people–perhaps a majority of people in the world–will still cling to their religion with the sort of passion that can fuel violence and other intolerant and reprehensible behavior. But the rest of the world will see this behavior for what it is, and learn to work around it until it subsides, as it surely will. That’s the good news. The bad news is that we will need every morsel of this reasonable attitude to deal with such complex global problems as climate change, fresh water, and economic inequality in an effective way. It will be touch and go, and in my pessimistic moods I think Sir Martin Rees may be right: some disaffected religious (or political) group may unleash a biological or nuclear catastrophe that forecloses all our good efforts. But I do think we have the resources and the knowledge to forestall such calamities if we are vigilant.
Recall that only fifty years ago smoking was a high status activity and it was considered rude to ask somebody to stop smoking in one’s presence. Today we’ve learned that we shouldn’t make the mistake of trying to prohibit smoking altogether, and so we still have plenty of cigarettes and smokers, but we have certainly contained the noxious aspects within quite acceptable boundaries. Smoking is no longer cool, and the day will come when religion is, first, a take-it-or-leave-it choice, and later: no longer cool–except in its socially valuable forms, where it will be one type of allegiance among many. Will those descendant institutions still be religions? Or will religions have thereby morphed themselves into extinction? It all depends on what you think the key or defining elements of religion are. Are dinosaurs extinct, or do their lineages live on as birds?
Why am I confident that this will happen? Mainly because of the asymmetry in the information explosion. With the worldwide spread of information technology (not just the internet, but cell phones and portable radios and television), it is no longer feasible for guardians of religious traditions to protect their young from exposure to the kinds of facts (and, yes, of course, misinformation and junk of every genre) that gently, irresistibly undermine the mindsets requisite for religious fanaticism and intolerance. The religious fervor of today is a last, desperate attempt by our generation to block the eyes and ears of the coming generations, and it isn’t working. For every well-publicized victory–the inundation of the Bush administration with evangelicals, the growing number of home schoolers in the USA, the rise of radical Islam, the much exaggerated “rebound” of religion in Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union, to take the most obvious cases–there are many less dramatic defeats, as young people quietly walk away from the faith of their parents and grandparents. That trend will continue, especially when young people come to know how many of their peers are making this low-profile choice. Around the world, the category of “not religious” is growing faster than the Mormons, faster than the evangelicals, faster even than Islam, whose growth is due almost entirely to fecundity, not conversion, and is bound to level off soon.
Those who are secular can encourage their own children to drink from the well of knowledge wherever it leads them, confident that only a small percentage will rebel against their secular upbringing and turn to one religion or another. Cults will rise and fall, as they do today and have done for millennia, but only those that can metamorphose into socially benign organizations will be able to flourish. Many religions have already made the transition, quietly de-emphasizing the irrational elements in their heritages, abandoning the xenophobic and sexist prohibitions of their quite recent past, and turning their attention from doctrinal purity to moral effectiveness. The fact that these adapting religions are scorned as former religions by the diehard purists shows how brittle the objects of their desperate allegiance have become. As the world informs itself about these transitions, those who are devout in the old-fashioned way will have to work around the clock to provide attractions, distractions—and guilt trips—to hold the attention and allegiance of their children. They will not succeed, and it will not be a painless transition. Families will be torn apart, and generations will accuse each other of disloyalty and worse: the young will be appalled by their discovery of the deliberate misrepresentations of their elders, and their elders will feel abandoned and betrayed by their descendants. We must not underestimate the anguish that these cultural transformations will engender, and we should try to anticipate the main effects and be ready to provide relief and hope for those who are afflicted.
I think the main problem we face today is overreaction, making martyrs out of people who desperately want to become martyrs. What it will take is patience, good information, and a steady demand for universal education about the world’s religions. This will favor the evolution of avirulent forms of religion, which we can all welcome as continuing parts of our planet’s cultural heritage. Eventually the truth will set us free.
Steven Pinker
The Decline of Violence
In 16th century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted on a stage and was slowly lowered into a fire. According to the historian Norman Davies, "the spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized."
As horrific as present-day events are, such sadism would be unthinkable today in most of the world. This is just one example of the most important and under appreciated trend in the history of our species: the decline of violence. Cruelty as popular entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, genocide for convenience, torture and mutilation as routine forms of punishment, execution for trivial crimes and misdemeanors, assassination as a means of political succession, pogroms as an outlet for frustration, and homicide as the major means of conflict resolution—all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. Yet today they are statistically rare in the West, less common elsewhere than they used to be, and widely condemned when they do occur.
Most people, sickened by the headlines and the bloody history of the twentieth century, find this claim incredible. Yet as far as I know, every systematic attempt to document the prevalence of violence over centuries and millennia (and, for that matter, the past fifty years), particularly in the West, has shown that the overall trend is downward (though of course with many zigzags). The most thorough is James Payne’s The History of Force; other studies include Lawrence Keeley’s War Before Civilization, Martin Daly & Margo Wilson’s Homicide, Donald Horowitz’s The Deadly Ethnic Riot, Robert Wright’s Nonzero, Peter Singer’s The Expanding Circle, Stephen Leblanc’s Constant Battles, and surveys of the ethnographic and archeological record by Bruce Knauft and Philip Walker.
Anyone who doubts this by pointing to residues of force in America (capital punishment in Texas, Abu Ghraib, sex slavery in immigrant groups, and so on) misses two key points. One is that statistically, the prevalence of these practices is almost certainly a tiny fraction of what it was in centuries past. The other is that these practices are, to varying degrees, hidden, illegal, condemned, or at the very least (as in the case of capital punishment) intensely controversial. In the past, they were no big deal. Even the mass murders of the twentieth century in Europe, China, and the Soviet Union probably killed a smaller proportion of the population than a typical hunter-gatherer feud or biblical conquest. The world’s population has exploded, and wars and killings are scrutinized and documented, so we are more aware of violence, even when it may be statistically less extensive.
What went right? No one knows, possibly because we have been asking the wrong question—"Why is there war?" instead of “Why is there peace?" There have been some suggestions, all unproven. Perhaps the gradual perfecting of a democratic Leviathan—"a common power to keep [men] in awe"—has removed the incentive to do it to them before they do it to us. Payne suggests that it’s because for many people, life has become longer and less awful—when pain, tragedy, and early death are expected features of one’s own life, one feels fewer compunctions about inflicting them on others. Wright points to technologies that enhance networks of reciprocity and trade, which make other people more valuable alive than dead. Singer attributes it to the inexorable logic of the golden rule: the more one knows and thinks, the harder it is to privilege one’s own interests over those of other sentient beings. Perhaps this is amplified by cosmopolitanism, in which history, journalism, memoir, and realistic fiction make the inner lives of other people, and the contingent nature of one’s own station, more palpable—the feeling that "there but for fortune go I."
My optimism lies in the hope that the decline of force over the centuries is a real phenomenon, that is the product of systematic forces that will continue to operate, and that we can identify those forces and perhaps concentrate and bottle them.
Jared Diamond
Good Choices Sometimes Prevail
I am cautiously optimistic about the state of the world, because: 1. Big businesses sometimes conclude that what is good for the long-term future of humanity is also good for their bottom line (cf. Wal-Mart's recent decision to shift their seafood purchases entirely to certified sustainable fisheries within the next three to five years). 2. Voters in democracy sometimes make good choices and avoid bad choices (cf. some recent elections in a major First World country).
Richard Dawkins
The Final Scientific Enlightenment
I am optimistic that the physicists of our species will complete Einstein's dream and discover the final theory of everything before superior creatures, evolved on another world, make contact and tell us the answer. I am optimistic that, although the theory of everything will bring fundamental physics to a convincing closure, the enterprise of physics itself will continue to flourish, just as biology went on growing after Darwin solved its deep problem. I am optimistic that the two theories together will furnish a totally satisfying naturalistic explanation for the existence of the universe and everything that's in it including ourselves. And I am optimistic that this final scientific enlightenment will deal an overdue deathblow to religion and other juvenile superstitions.
07. 01. 03.