‘When we consider what religion is for mankind, and what science is, it is no exaggeration to say that the future course of history depends upon the decision of this generation as to the relations between them.’
Alfred North Whitehead, 1925
One Hundred Years Since Whitehead’s Warnings
A Look Back at ‘Religion and Science’ (Lowell Lectures, 1925)
by Beezone
What will follow this introduction is the essay by Alfred North Whitehead that comes from a series of public lectures delivered in Boston during February and March of 1925 under the auspices of the Lowell Institute. These lectures were later revised and published the same year as the book Science and the Modern World.
At the time, the Lowell Lectures were intended not as academic presentations but as public reflections addressed to educate the public who were concerned with the changing intellectual climate of the modern world. Whitehead had only recently arrived at Harvard University in 1924 after a distinguished career in mathematics and philosophy in England. The lectures represent an important turning point in his thought, as he began to move beyond the strictly mathematical and scientific concerns that had previously defined much of his work.
The essay I will present is from “Lecture VII – Science and the Modern World.”
Delivered nearly a century ago, Whitehead’s ideas contain a deep and cautionary warning for the 21st century. Whitehead, writing at the early part of the 20th century, was already concerned that the rapid growth of scientific knowledge and technological power was not being matched by an equal growth in philosophical understanding or moral wisdom.
At one point in the lecture he writes:
“The western world is now suffering from the limited moral outlook of the three previous generations.”
Whitehead here was referring primarily to the intellectual inheritance of the nineteenth century — an era of previously unknown industrial expansion and scientific discovery that was overtaking earlier 18th and 19th century speculative philosophical thinking. Scientific knowledge was becoming the leading edge of the new ‘modern world’ while previous speculative philosophy—questions about meaning, epistemology, ontology, value, and the direction of civilization—were receiving less attention. Blind science and excited technology were taking over in a manner Goethe had warned about centuries earlier.
Looking back at what Whitehead was concerned about 100 years earlier seems less like a casual observation and more like an early recognition of a problem that has only intensified with time.
Modern civilization has acquired technological powers far beyond anything imaginable in 1925 and is moving at a pace far beyond the comprehension of human understanding. Yet the deeper questions that Whitehead believed needed to accompany such power remain largely ignored. And even if considered, they are found to be beyond the capability of human comprehension.
In 1925, when Whitehead delivered the Lowell Lectures, in one of the closing passages he wrote a cautionary warning:
“The western world is now suffering from the limited moral outlook of the three previous generations.”
Whitehead was telling us about the dangers of science. Science has given humanity new powers, but the minds and the culture that produced those powers were captured by the promises it held.
He saw clearly that the nineteenth century had produced an extraordinary acceleration of knowledge and technical ability. Communications, factories, railroads, industry, medicine, electricity — the world, drunk on its own wonder, began moving into territory it had no idea its desire was fueling.
At the same time, with all the glory and promise science was revealing, human thought and its focus were becoming narrower and more myopic even while knowledge was becoming larger. Humanity was moving down a rabbit hole it had no idea it was falling into.
Scientists, the new priests of knowledge, were now called experts. The new experts were learning more and more about smaller and smaller pieces of reality. The chemist knew chemistry, mathematicians knew more about physics, engineers developed more amazing capabilities that expanded engineering to build skyscrapers beyond belief, while at the same time road travel moved from horses to automobiles that were quickly outdated by air travel unthought of one generation earlier.
Whitehead feared that the growing power of science and technology was not being matched by an equal growth of wisdom, and that imbalance not only worried him, it gave him great concern for the future of humanity.
These ‘buckets’ or ‘silos’ of knowledge were described by Whitehead as “grooves.” The specialization of knowledge makes progress possible, but it also creates dangerous side effects: people become very intelligent inside an ever-narrowing field of study and strangely ignorant outside it. The danger, he wrote, is that society will likely become extremely competent at solving technical problems while losing sight of the whole picture of human life. Human design will outstrip its ability to see the unintended consequences of its naive excitement.
Looking back from a century later, it is hard not to notice how prophetic Whitehead’s concerns now appear.
Our civilization is immensely powerful. We can alter the genetic code of life. We can communicate instantly across the planet. We can construct machines capable of learning and decision-making. We can influence the climate of the Earth itself.
Yet the question Whitehead worried about still hangs over all of it:
Do we actually know what we are doing? Are we fully capable of understanding our actions?
Whitehead was not alone in sensing that something unusual was happening inside modern civilization. During the twentieth century a number of thinkers — working in very different fields — began describing the same pattern. They did not always use the same language, but the underlying concern was remarkably similar.
Arnold Toynbee studied the rise and fall of civilizations and came to an unsettling conclusion. Lewis Mumford looked at modern industrial systems and saw something new emerging — what he called the megamachine. Jacques Ellul, the French sociologist, described what happens when technological development begins to follow its own internal logic.
Once a society adopts the principle that efficiency and technical capability are the highest values, it becomes extremely difficult to say no to new technologies. Ivan Illich noticed something similar inside modern institutions. Schools, hospitals, transportation systems — all originally created to help human life — gradually grow so large that people must reshape their lives to serve the institution instead. The tool becomes the master.
Carl Jung, exploring the newly discovered mind of humans, sensed the imbalance. Human intelligence had advanced enormously in the outer world, but the inner world of human consciousness—newly discovered and explored—was still in its infancy.
When you place these voices side by side, even though they belonged to different countries, professions, and disciplines, they all arrived at the same general observation:
Modern civilization is technically brilliant but psychologically and spiritually bankrupt.
We have learned how to do many things. But we have lost sight of why we are doing them.
If Whitehead were looking at the world today, he might still ask the same questions he was hinting at in 1925.
What is the real aim of civilization — wealth, power, or the flourishing of human life?
Who actually decides the direction of technological development?
Can technological innovation be guided by wisdom rather than competition alone?
Is the natural world simply raw material for human use, or something with value in its own right?
Can education cultivate wisdom, or will it only produce specialists?
Can democratic societies guide technologies that evolve faster than political institutions?
Can human freedom survive systems that increasingly influence behavior, attention, and belief?
Can an economic system based on endless growth exist on a finite planet?
And most importantly, can humanity develop a shared moral, ethical, and spiritual framework in a world that is now so technologically and economically driven and interconnected that it cannot think its way out of the nineteenth-century world of Descartes, Hume, Locke, Newton, and other earlier conceptions?
Singer and songwriter Hal Ketchum, in his 1962 song “Small Town Saturday Night,” used a line that captures the feeling of the present moment rather well:
“We’re going ninety miles an hour down a dead end road.”
Modern civilization, if you’ve been paying attention, feels exactly like that. Speed in all its many forms is out of control, and there seems to be no one wise enough to raise a warning flag. We’re capable of raising all other kinds of flags, but nothing with yellow and red colors.
Very few voices seem to be allowed to broadcast across local lines where Whitehead’s warning could be heard.
Whitehead believed that civilization could still correct its course—but only if it rediscovered something that modern culture has forgotten: wisdom. Where the deeper integration of science, philosophy, culture, psychological insight, and spiritual understanding were the foundations of human civilization before the takeover of science, logic, and yes—mathematics.
Without a call for some form of checks and balances on the insane drive for the dollar, and the understanding that ancient boundaries are founded in tribal identities, the “frying pan” will only get hotter.
And most likely, what was unheard in Whitehead’s words a century ago will only go down as one more failed warning on the road to catastrophes unimaginable in today’s artificial intelligence and dollar-driven world of material science—without any wisdom to guide the way.
Ed Reither, Beezone