The Hidden Power

Commentary by Hugo Estrella,
International Student / Young Pugwash Coordinator

Presented at the Student Pugwash USA Conference
Chicago, IL, 2 April 2000

AS teenagers, we live through a usually uncomfortable, questioning time: we question our parents, the world's unfairness, and many times feel every injustice translated into personal terms. When we arrive at university is when the big change in our lives happens. We are never going to be the same. We have earned the ability to question the world, but this time in a systematic, scientific way.

And science is a quest for answers, or, as Bertrand Russell said, "the ability to formulate the proper questions". In that way we change ourselves, we improve our knowledge, and the outcome of it all is the ability to modify reality. Therefore, it challenges power, or at least people in power.

Myths

We can learn a lot from the traditions of ancient cultures, and these have several warnings for those seeking knowledge and for what we can do with the knowledge we acquire. Sometimes those warnings are intellectually challenging, some other times they are scaring: a manifestation of the other powers, trying to maintain knowledgeable people within their "proper" limits.

The message seems to be: "Be careful, you are too small and weak for making your own decisions. Let us guide you, and keep you safe and warm". I can recall two myths about this: the punishment for eating from the tree of knowledge, and good and evil, better known as the Fall. The other myth, my preferred one, is that of Prometheus, who built some funny mud creatures, and felt sorry for them, suffering cold, unable to find a way to warm themselves. So he stole the fire of knowledge from the Olympic gods, and gave it to his creatures. The Gods were really mad at him, and meted out a horrible punishment for his action. In any event, throughout history humans acquired more and more knowledge and lost their fear, up to the point that we no longer believe in Zeus, once the thunderbolt thrower, and Olympus itself became a small, irrelevant mountain.

This doesn't mean there was no price to pay for questioning authority. A few days ago we commemorated Giordano Bruno, burnt at the stake 400 years ago after six years of torture, for affirming that according to evidence, the Universe is infinite, and Earth is not its centre.

There have been other warnings, more challenging, more appealing to scientific minds. I would point out the ones that were expressed in artistic, literary terms as a result of those that were held inside the scientific community. These had much to do with the rare ability science and technology showed for shaping and rapidly changing the world as it was known in some stages of the modern Era.

I can think of some examples, like Brave New World, 1984 or Fritz Lang's movie Metropolis. They raised an ethical concern for developments that were then considered almost impossible, like interactive media, human cloning or robotization. But, somehow, as soon as those developments became possible, probable and eventually real, ethical concerns were less often present, and the fascination for technology and its ability to create wealth, seemed to act as a sort of anaesthesia.

Questioning in a scientific way

Universities inherited and improved that ability for challenging power. But something very interesting happened with those who entered them: they became part of a small community with a universal view. This community has survived through the centuries, dating even prior to the existence of nation-states. My university for instance, Cordoba, was founded in 1613, before the colonial organisation of "Virreinato del Rio de la Plata" (1776), and centuries before Argentina itself (1816). And even in those founding times, universities were integrated into that long lasting tradition that made science possible: THE QUEST FOR TRUTH. It included the sense of belonging to a community, the high level of responsibility for the outcome of that relation with knowledge, a commitment to the rest of society. Society knows that universities and scientists are able to look for the solution to their problems. Therefore those people educated at a university level are citizens, citizens with an important role to play. For what they know, and for what the others know they know.

And that line of thinking led university people to be in the forefront of every single progressive movement in the world.

Protesting for freedom, for rationality in a world rarely led by Reason. At a time when Modernity and its ideals are challenged, we must remember the motto of the French revolution and how it led to a dream of a better world, which has somehow been achieved: Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. All three of them are needed for human-centred action. We need liberty for inquiry at the very basis of science; we need to move to a more equal situation specially achieved by spreading education; and we need to behave fraternally to each other.

There is no better way to feel safe than relying on our fellows. That is Fraternity. And that is a wonderful message and life example we get from people like Professor Rotblat and those who have acted in Pugwash: we cannot rely on just our national boundaries, on our wealth, on our governments, or even on a nuclear arsenal to survive.

You can only rely on others, on those with whom we share our characters as human beings, and especially on those who share our privilege of having been admitted into knowledge.

And I hope students from all over the world are able to learn and feel this message. I believe it will happen, because there is something wonderful with universities and their students all over the world.

Wherever a dictatorship is questioned, the justification of a war is publicly discussed, or a movement for democracy or defending the environment is started, no doubt you will find that university students are in the forefront.

It happened in the 1960s in Cordoba, Mexico, Paris, Prague, Berkeley and London. It happened in the last ten years in Prague again, Belgrade, Tian-An-Men and Jakarta.

And even though the price we had to pay was very high, it was worth it: Indonesian dictator Suharto, who had been in power for more than 30 years, was pulled down mainly by the effect of students' protests. Milosevic's regime was more successfully challenged by the massive protests of Belgrade University students, than by the NATO bombings. And students did not destroy bridges, factories, or mistakenly attack civilian targets.

All this is just to say how much we have been able -- and are able -- to do with what we learn, with the knowledge we inherit, and the knowledge we create.

Pugwash is a wonderful movement that gives us the unique opportunity of thinking in new ways. We are allowed to interact with remarkable scholars and learn something that is unfortunately not very often taught in Academia. We can work with people who feel the same responsibility in distant and different places. We have been able to meet in many opportunities, to network, to have over 20 national student/young groups all over the world. We know we can make a difference. We can recreate that spirit of responsibility as scientists, as citizens, as human beings. We can recall what has been our secret for generations: students may be in the forefront due to numbers and energy, but the best of our mentors, the wise men and women of our communities, are with us.

I would like to finish using another artistic example: Many of you may have seen the movie, The Truman Show. I think it's a good example of how many of us feel. We must abandon a wonderful "warm world" set up for us to feel comfortable and safe, but in which we are not really able to decide. Let's open the door to a real world, let's take the challenge of shaping our own life, relying on our personal capacities and the fraternal behaviour of our fellow humans.