Technocracy and scientific progress

pp. 477-490

in: Joseph Agassi, Science and society, Berlin, Springer, 1981

Abstract

When Newton's contemporary, the English author Daniel Defoe, heard a sailor's tale about having been shipwrecked and marooned, he was seized with great excitement and ran home to start writing his classic Robinson Crusoe. It is not that a marooned sailor is such a rare bird, that the very meeting of one fires the imagination. Nor is there in the story Defoe wrote any detailed knowledge that requires an interview with an experienced informant to find it out. On the contrary, inasmuch as there is detailed information in Defoe's book, it has to do with the inner life of his hero; most likely this reflects the mentality of the author much more than that of the informant. For, what we hear about the ecology of Robinson Crusoe's desert island, and about the desired knowledge concerning suivival on it, is less than minimal. If anything, the author takes literary license and allows his hero to salvage from the wrecked ship a few essential tools that he could not possibly manufacture, a few seeds which he certainly could make do without, and a Bible. The story is most impressive in its austerity and bareness. When things start moving at all and Man Friday appears, the story is drastically altered. Up till there it is a parable of the self-sufficient individual; from then on it is the parable of the role of the self-sufficient individual as lord and master.