杏吧原创

IMPROVING society by the practical application of scientific knowledge is a laudable goal. So why does calling it social engineering have such an ominous ring? A straw poll among my friends yields associations such as Hitler, eugenics, mind control and Aldous Huxley鈥檚 Brave New World. Social engineering鈥檚 bad name is based on more than dictators and dark visions of the future, however.

As historian and anthropologist Rebecca Lemov shows in World as Laboratory, it is firmly rooted in the development of the social sciences in the US during the first half of the 20th century. Her book tells this story through the careers of some of the most prominent social scientists of their day. In retrospect, the striking thing about them was their grandiose expectations, as if a full understanding and control of humans and nature were just around the corner.

Take Jacques Loeb, a biologist who provided the model for the scientist-hero of Sinclair Lewis鈥檚 1925 novel Arrowsmith. He told a reporter, 鈥淚 wanted to take life in my hands and play with it 鈥� to start it, stop it, vary it, study it under every condition.鈥�

Lemov shows these grandiose expectations were combined with a blind faith in authority, as if scientists, politicians and the captains of industry could be expected to do what was right without any oversight.

But what appears most shocking to us today is how these expectations and the trust in authority were combined with a willingness to inflict suffering on individuals in an attempt to benefit society as a whole. The worst excesses took place during the second world war and the Korean war under the guise of national security.

Harold George Wolff, the leading authority on pain who conducted covert research on mind control funded by the CIA, boasted that he could provide the keys to 鈥渉ow a man can be made to think, feel, and behave according to the wishes of others, and, conversely, how a man can avoid being influenced in this manner.鈥�

Some of the experiments conducted during the Korean war by leading scientific authorities are as ghoulish as anything that can be imagined in fiction or the dark recesses of a totalitarian state. They included ice-pick lobotomies that left no scar and the total breakdown of a person prior to 鈥渞econstruction鈥�.

Most social scientists were unaware of these experiments but were willing to receive military funding for their own research. As one CIA scientist put it during a 1977 congressional hearing: 鈥淒on鈥檛 get the idea that all these behavioural scientists were nice and pure, that they didn鈥檛 want to change anything and that they were detached in their science. They were up to their necks in changing people. It just happened that the things they were interested in were not always the same as what we were.鈥�

鈥淒on鈥檛 get the idea these people were all nice and pure鈥�

Lemov鈥檚 gallery of social scientists concludes with Timothy Leary, who had rather different ideas about how to alter human behaviour. As a young and soon-to-be-fired Harvard professor in 1961, he obtained permission to take LSD with inmates of a local prison in an attempt to break down the barrier between scientist and subject.

Leary recalls that his first trip with a Polish embezzler named John got off to a rocky start. 鈥溾�楧oc,鈥� he said, 鈥榳hy are you afraid of me?鈥� I said, 鈥業鈥檓 afraid of you, John, because you鈥檙e a criminal.鈥� He nodded. I said, 鈥楯ohn, why are you afraid of me?鈥� He said, 鈥業鈥檓 afraid of you, Doc, because you鈥檙e a mad scientist.鈥� Then our retinas locked and I slid down into the tunnel of his eyes, and I could feel him walking around in my skull and we both began to laugh.

鈥淎nd there it was, that dark moment of fear and mistrust, which could have changed in a second to hatred and terror. But we made the love connection. The flicker in the dark. Suddenly, the sun came out in the room and I felt great and I knew he did too.鈥�

Leary鈥檚 treatment had a profound effect on the prisoners, but only for as long as their relationship lasted. Nevertheless, his experiment hints at the missing ingredient that can restore social engineering鈥檚 good name 鈥� mutual trust. People dread being controlled by others without their consent, for the best of reasons. When people agree on their social priorities by consensus, then the practical application of scientific knowledge becomes benign. Perhaps social engineering will salvage its good name if we can build bonds of mutual trust more durable than a drug-induced state.