entire book - Chris Hables Gray

Future Peace [ 235 ]
with Einstein, that the implication of the nuclear armaments race is that
"in the end, there beckons more and more clearly general annihilation,"
this achievement on a deeper level represents a horrendous failure of
Western civilization in its use of science and technology, (pp. 274-275)
Wiener's resistance to war science was as thoughtful as von Neumann's
support of it was thoughtless. Wiener argued that science was a limited
knowledge system that needed ethics and moral philosophy if it wasn't going
to contribute to the destruction of humanity.
Yet, Heims reports:
In the years 1968-1972 I asked a considerable number of mathematicians
and scientists about their opinions of Wiener's social concerns and his
preoccupation with the uses of technology. The typical answer went
something like this: "Wiener was a great mathematician, but he was also
eccentric. When he began talking about society and the responsibility of
scientists, a topic outside of his area of expertise, well I just couldn't take
him seriously." (p. 343)
Von Neumann died young, of cancer, in great fear. A man who made
death for so many possible became psychotic in the face of death. Wiener
died old and happy. Perhaps their deaths don't reflect their lives, or maybe
they do, but there certainly is evidence that their politics influenced their
science. In his book Heims contrasts their science in crucial ways. According
to Heims, von Neumann believed in mathematics totally; through the power
of numbers and calculations he felt every important problem could be solved.
Wiener argued that mathematics was limited, so he put forward ecological,
interactive theories creating the discipline of cybernetics, and then spent his
last years working on prosthetics and similar projects. The military has found
many uses for both of their work. Of their politics and philosophies, von
Neumann, who claimed to have none, became a powerful political figure
while Wiener was marginalized. Von Neumann's politics of no politics was
just right for postmodern war.
The reasons for this go right to the heart of science as we know it. Heims
points to two "pillars" that "hold up the practice of science." The first pillar
is "value neutrality" institutionalized, in his view, in the Royal Society. In
return for royal protection and encouragement the society "outlawed the
subjects of theology and politics from its meetings." The second pillar is the
idea of the inevitable progress of science.
"In the seventeenth century," he goes on to point out:
the rhetoric of value neutrality tended to obscure the fact that the new
science was the beginning of a radical subversion of the status quo through
a scientific-technological-industrial revolution. In the twentieth century,
however, the claim of value neutrality has . . . tended ... to hide . .. [the