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From: 00HFSTAHLKE@BSU.CSNET (Herb Stahlke)
Newsgroups: comp.society
Subject: Re: The Impact of Inventions
Message-ID: <2066@hplabsc.HP.COM>
Date: Sun, 21-Jun-87 18:34:03 EDT
Article-I.D.: hplabsc.2066
Posted: Sun Jun 21 18:34:03 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 23-Jun-87 01:17:57 EDT
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Organization: Department of English, Ball State University
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Approved: taylor@hplabs

It's evident that many of your local respondents to Harrington's proposal are
unaware of the social force represented by philosophers and poets--I omit
feminists because they cross-classify.  Lincoln credited Harriet Beecher Stow
with starting the Civil War by writing *Uncle Tom's Cabin*, a slight but not 
unreasonable exaggeration.  Nietzsche and Wagner played a frighteningly 
significant role in laying the groundwork for the rise of National Socialism 
in Germany.  Khomeini, whatever we may think of him politically, is a major 
Shiite moral and legal thinker and bears heavy responsibility for actions 
verging on genocide.  The non-quantifiable, empirically untestable 
non-technological products in thought and art of people like these have had 
greater impact, in unpredictable ways, for good or ill, than all the Nobels, 
Edisons, Eddingtons, and Bells combined.  Jesus and Mohammed were persecuted 
not because of their dangerous inventions but because of their dangerous 
thoughts.  

Persecution of scientists and engineers because of the political misuse of 
their inventions is the stuff of science fiction and fundamentalism--Christian, 
Moslem, Sephardic, Luddite, whatever.  If we are to demand social impact 
statements of anyone, it should be of the poets, essayist, novelists, teachers, 
philosophers, artists, musicians, and religious visionaries who shape the mores 
that in turn determine what society does with the inventions of engineers and 
businessmen.  And the quickest way to stifle the development of technology, for 
good or ill, is to attempt to control thought.

						Herb Stahlke
						Department of English
						Ball State University
						00hfstahlke@bsu.csnet