Science for peace and development
Today, November 10, is World Science Day for Peace and Development. We know that science is historical and progresses in line with the social process. The knowledge of an era is rectified or contradicted by others, which is why we cannot speak with rigor of a definitive science, as if it were forever based on its principles and its absolute or immutable conclusions. It is more prudent then to speak of the "present state of the sciences.
Science is called to serve the human being, his development, the harmony between him and nature. Unfortunately, at present and for the time being, an enormous amount of knowledge is used to destroy, not to build.
The application of science derives, is involved and feeds back into the technique. That is to say, in a set of practical applications that come from the former. High technologies or state-of-the-art technologies (computing, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, biotechnology, aerospace, etc.), as a rule, concentrate enormous human and economic resources, in the military industrial complex associated with the great financial capital. International finance and industry for war, are the worst structural enemies of peace and human development.
At the same time the social sciences are used to manipulate the social consciousness and conduct of human groups, strengthening the oligarchic power and bureaucratic institutions.
Culture, education, socialization of the personality and social progress depend on the level of development of science, on the orientation with which it is driven, whether in a humanistic or anti-humanistic direction.
The ideas of foresight and planning for the future have a strong influence on the technological developments of the present. Faced with the same material environment, different lines of development can be chosen, and the directionality of values takes on relevance when making decisions.
Currently, science has been emptied of its meaning, turning it into technology for misery and destruction, due to the actions of big capital and large economic corporations. These act like birds of prey using for plundering the violent legal regulations implemented through patent and intellectual property laws. They end up being left in the hands of a few, knowledge that is supported by millennial accumulations of the long process of human evolution, and/or that comes from the resources that the states invest in R&D and that then end up being appropriated by private companies with profit-centered interests.
We humanists do not need to argue much when we emphasize that today the world, thanks to the development of science, is in sufficient technological condition to solve in a short time the problems of vast regions in terms of full employment, food, health, housing, and education. If this possibility is not realized, it is not for lack of good knowledge, it is simply because the monstrous speculation of big capital prevents it.
In our opinion, science must urgently be redirected with resolution and exclusively towards overcoming human pain and suffering. Knowledge cannot be at the service of selfishness and oppression. Knowledge must be directed towards overcoming the needs of having and achieving the growing satisfaction of the needs of being. The Good Knowledge that must orient science will necessarily lead it to justice, peace and the non-violent development of society.
Science must have a prominent place in the agenda of priorities of all those people, institutions and organizations that fight for the humanization of the earth. In order to leave behind the human prehistory in which we live, science must be at the service of our fellow man, of life and development in peace, toward the construction of the Universal Human Nation.
International Coordination Team International Humanist Party