Our Asian Frontiers of Knowledge
by
Dr. Edwin O. Reischauer
Professor of Far Eastern Languages
Harvard University
Director, Harvard-Yenching Institute
It may seem somewhat quixotic to suggest that there are any significant frontiers to human knowledge today other than those of the natural sciences. Asia as a land mass has been thoroughly explored for many decades. We have been in close contact with its people for an equal period. The frontiers of knowledge, it would seem, swept over such nearby, commonplace fields long ago and are now far beyond them. Today, the only challenging frontiers appear to be distantly removed from simple human matters, deep in the invisible recesses of the atom, far out in inter-stellar space, or even further afield in the realm of pure mathematical speculation.
All the recent clamor about a sense of urgency has, of course, been directed toward the natural sciences—often toward singularly narrow fields within the natural sciences, such as the ability to hurl with a fair degree of accuracy a relatively small package of nuclear materials a few thousand miles. No one would deny the need to insure that no hostile or irresponsible group should achieve marked superiority in dangerous gadgets of this sort, for obviously the chief immediate threat to human society, as we know it, is the unwise use of these scientific instruments of destruction.
It would be a serious mistake, however, to assume, as many Americans have, that our only significant problems today are those relating to the successful application of scientific knowledge to techniques of production or destruction. Even the natural scientist will point out that more important than the work of practical application is that of pure and apparently impractical scientific research, for it is from such pure research that the important new practical steps will eventually emerge.
But there is an even more basic fallacy to the assumption that the fundamental problems facing us today are those involving the practical application of scientific knowledge. Actually our scientific efforts, for all their urgency, deal only with the symptoms of the malady of modern times—not with its causes. Obviously we are not engaged in a life and death struggle with
