The Edinburgh Medal (Edinburgh International Science Festival) - Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet
It struck me that The Lancet sounds like The Guardian of the science publishing world – a journal that has challenged and set publishing guidelines about research results and reporting, and has challenged its own publisher’s connections to an arms fair selling cluster bombs and torture equipment.
He spoke on the theme of Science and Society with both vision and tenacity, drawing on the topics of human dignity and ethics in particular. He addressed the three “terrors” of our modern world - eco-scide, disease and war. His message, that we have ability to choose our fate but we are tied to our poorest, weakest neighbour. Can our science knowledge save us from those three disaster scenarios? It’s still unknown, unsure… His advice as to the best possible solution was mass co-operation between nations and people, but our very natures seem to driving these three and us all to destruction.
But with two competing narratives - globalisation and human rights development – it becomes a case not of “what you should do” but “what do you do or are you doing”. Altruism rules. Close (in every sense) human co-operation seems to result in more meaningful relationships and connections, with the immediate benefits of co-operation being more visible to all parties. Help your neighbour becomes a way of keeping us all thriving and alive. When we are more specific and local about our actions, making one small but strong connection, we see benefits, which knock on to others.
There are inherent dangers in this theory, he admits – that the local action can be perceived as only being passed on to those we “like”/ those like us, whereas “the other” becomes more remote and therefore a risk (illustrated in John Carey’s The Intellectuals and The Masses). But here’s his crazy moment of it-might-just-work – could we find a way to match up the poorest and richest three billion people on the planet?
This biological underpinning of 'do unto others' is indeed a strand of compassionate evolution (ref Darwin's The Descent of Man, with his desire to “render those artificial barriers [between people] obsolete”). Hobbes (and Dawkins?) might have us believe that human life on the planet can be nasty, selfish, brutish and short... but Horton’s certainly got other ideas.
technorati tag: edinburgh international science festival, richard horton, the lancet
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