Fifty Degrees Below by Kim Stanley Robinson

a green presidential candidate speaking:

The President isn't going to do anything. He and his oil-and-guns crowd will just try to find an island somewhere to skip to when they're done raiding the world. They'll leave us in the wreckage and build themselves bubble fortresses, that's been their sick plan all along. building a good world for our kids is our plan, and it's as scientific as can be, but only if you understand science as a way of being together, an ethical system an not just a method for seeing the world. What this political endorsement underlines is that science contains in it a plan for dealing with the world that we find ourselves in, a plan which aims to reduce human suffering and increase the quality of life on Earth for everyone.

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I like the idea of science as an ethical system. The excesses of modern life are not a result of science, but of marketing: big companies trying to get everyone to buy one thing. They often leap on a single scientific idea and then push it to death. They have no flexibility. They have invested so much in one idea that they cannot switch. Look at the recent revelations about the manipulation of drug studies by the pharmaceutical industry. What a racket and then people blame science an scientists.

Just today, there was an article in the N Y. Times about the life span of a company. It was about Microsoft's complete failure to jump from the hardware/software business to the interent. It suggested that companies have "term limits." The idea actually came from Bill Gates who suggested that companies cannot survive a paradigm shift in their industries. And he quit this week, too.

Science at its best would take to common goals of a society and then try to find the best answers. Even the goals of cooperation are scientifically valid. Not only is science based on sharing of ideas and a cooperative building of knowledge, the idea of sharing for the common good is provable as a survival benefit. Wouldn't it be nice if we were all that rational.