This paper attempts not so much to explore as to raise some of the economic and social consequences of the scientific revolution through which we are living. I should perhaps begin by defining my terms. The original meaning of science was observed knowledge as distinct from moral conviction or revelation. The meaning has gradually narrowed until now it is confined by popular usage to those branches of knowledge where variables may be isolated and relationships tested by repeated experiments. I realize that recent advances in scientific thought have tended to substitute statistical probability and interdependence for many of the precise and independent observations that scientists used to rely upon. But there is a degree of tested precision and experimental verification in these branches of knowledge—more in the physical than in the biological sciences—to which studies of human behavior and social organization cannot lay claim.
My concern is not with science itself, but with its applications and the claims made on its behalf. The title of my paper is intended both to emphasize the political or philosophical approach and to disclaim any attempt either to construct a balance-sheet of the costs and benefits of scientific research or to investigate the demand for and supply of scientists. I am concerned only with the political economy of the scientific revolution through which we are passing. Some years ago I coined the word scientician—a combination of scientist and technician—to describe those, including many trained scientists, who are concerned more with the application than with the advancement of knowledge. It is with them I am concerned, rather than with the scientist who keeps strictly to his science.
It may make my point clearer if I cite a definition of the scientific revolution which appeared recently in an article significantly titled “The Challenge of Bureaucratized Science.” This article was written by a political scientist but it appears in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, presumably with the approval of the editorial board. What concerns me is defined as:
“…a revolution in the relationship of theory to practice (and theoreticians to practitioners), a revolution in the relation of science to technology, and in the speed with which science can be exploited technologically, a revolution in the scope of human control, and therefore in the scope of politics, a revolutionary grounding of the country’s basic policies on scientific processes and developments, a corresponding revolution in the meanings given to legislation, representation, and even democracy, and a revolutionary change in man’s environment which finds a synthetic determinism replacing natural determinism as synthesized forces supplant natural forces—with what Teilhard de Chardin has called the noosphere.”
These, I am sure you will agree, are large claims. What they amount to is a claim that scienticians are now able to make reasoned decisions based upon scientific knowledge to organize economic and social life. Instead of relying upon natural forces and the untrained judgment of average men, we shall be governed by trained minds.
The author of the article from which I have just quoted makes this claim explicitly. Let me read you his statement:
“Politicians as a group, as befits democracy, come from somewhat lower economic, social, and educational levels than do scientists. They harbor a natural anti-intellectualism more characteristic of the lower than the upper class. This is magnified by an antagonism born of man’s most fundamental impulse, self-preservation. For the scientific revolution promises to expand politics in one dimension, but to restrict it in another. It will vastly enlarge man’s powers of control—vastly enlarge the noosphere. And what is redeemed from natural determinism and subjected to human determinism will by that measure enlarge the polisphere—the realm of man’s conscious political control. But the new game of politics cannot be played with the old gang of politicians. The amateur and the artisan are giving way to the professional and the scientist in all fields, even including the last preserve of rule-of-thumb prudence, politics.”
One reason why I have cited these statements is to point out that the language of science is not English as most of us know it. Increasingly it is mathematics, spelling out a jargon, or rather a series of jargons, using invented words with precise meanings as shorthand expressions for specific scientific concepts and processes. These jargons underscore the meaning of the last quotation, which I take to be that we are destined to be governed by experts with whom we cannot talk, who, indeed, cannot talk to each other.
The section of Mr. Wheeler’s article that follows this quotation is headed Despotism. A few years ago some engineers tried to develop a popular movement along these lines known as Technocracy. Now it is scientists, or scienticians, with access to government funds, who promote the idea. These scienticians turned bureaucrats, in business as well as government, and even in the professions and the universities, are the “big wheels,” the organizers, the dispensers of grants. As productive technology widens its range, engineers and scientists begin to displace lawyers, accountants, and practical businessmen in the management of large corporate enterprises. A recent publication by Scientific American is entitled “U.S. Industry: Under New Management.” It points out that the percentage of top corporation officials with science or engineering degrees has risen from 6.8% in 1900 to 20% in 1950 and 36% in 1963. What is more important is that in the age group 35-45, from which top management will be drawn in the near future, the percentage is 51%. The scienticians are evidently taking over in business. They are in a fair way also to take over in government. I am not sure that they haven’t already taken over in the universities and the scientific professions.
At this point I must digress briefly to raise a fundamental issue. In his Lowell Lectures, printed as Science in the Modern World, Whitehead propounded an organic philosophy as more consistent with the indeterminacy and relatedness of modern scientific discoveries than the atomistic materialism to which most working scientists still adhere. I do not pretend to judge the validity of his argument as it applies to the experimental scientists. But I may perhaps express my agreement with his brief comment that in the 19th century:
“…this misplaced emphasis of science on materialism coalesced with the abstractions of political economy which in fact are the abstractions in terms of which commercial affairs are carried on. Thus all thought concerned with social organization expressed itself in terms of material things and of capital. Ultimate values were excluded.”
This is an important judgment, even for the limited economic issues to which this paper is confined. To whom are we handing over the power to control the economic and social environment, and for what purposes? What philosophy do they hold? What objectives do they pursue? Consider the current emphasis on growth and development. Is this to be calculated in purely monetary terms as the sum of material production expressed as the Gross National Product? Is policy to aim primarily at more automobiles, more freeways, more plumbing, more goods, and more people? What place can be found for “ultimate values” in the organized society which technology is changing so rapidly—for the arts and music, the conservation of open spaces, education, the use of leisure—for quality as well as quantity? What will this emphasis on material technology do to science itself—to knowledge for the sake of knowledge? Do we need now to bring up to date the wise observation credited to Lord Salisbury when the franchise was widened in England—now we must educate our masters? How can we inject into the already crowded curricula of the scientific faculties some consideration of the ultimate values to be aimed at in social organization?
These are questions too far-reaching to be considered in this paper, which is limited to the impact of science and technology on economic activity—on the way we organize the production of goods and services, on employment and the distribution of income, and on living conditions. This impact is already very great and will be much greater. The economic world is already a very different place from the world into which we were born, in which we received our training and formed our economic and social beliefs.
Perhaps you will forgive me if I use a personal illustration to emphasize this fact. When I was a little boy in Bendigo, I saw the first motion picture to reach Australia—of Bugler Dunne blowing the charge at the Tugela River and transferring the bugle to his left hand when his right arm was hit by a bullet. Someone in the wings blew a bugle—very realistic. I also saw the first horseless carriage—which ran the length of a cricket pitch—22 yards. Telephones, radios, television, and airplanes had not then reached us.
Last year I went back to study the development problems of Australia. I was flown around the outback—the desert country that Alan Moorehead describes in his dramatic account of the first crossing of the continent. We were seldom out of sight of an airstrip and always under control by two-way radio. We visited a Flying Doctor plane and heard everywhere of the Radio School of the Air. When my report was published, the representative of the Australian Press in New York interviewed me in Menlo Park by long-distance telephone, and the interview appeared in Sydney the following morning.
All these practical applications of the new physics are now so familiar as to be commonplace. Much more significant than such advances in communication are those coming from the release of new sources of energy. The automobile and the airplane use the energy of fossil fuels, the controlled explosions of which are sparked by electricity. We already use nuclear energy to produce electric power and to distill water from the sea. Soon we shall use controlled nuclear explosions to cut new canals, create new ports, and underground water basins. And already we begin to use solar heat for domestic purposes. In the very center of Australia, in the little town called Alice that Nevil Shute made famous, we saw many houses with solar reflectors.
But it is in the biological sciences that the most far-reaching economic consequences will be produced. By quite simple methods, based, however, on hard-won scientific knowledge, we have already reduced, and in some cases virtually eliminated, the insect-borne and many other diseases that have hitherto kept population in check. In the advanced industrial areas, more adequate nutrition and improved medical practice have prolonged life beyond the Biblical span, and the less developed areas begin to approach it. This in itself increases the population; but the major cause of the unprecedented population explosion, of which we have as yet seen only the first stages, is the reduction of mortality in infancy and early life.
Animal breeders have long known, as Bakewell remarked in the late 18th century, that by selective mating they could get an animal to weigh where they wanted it to weigh. Plant breeders in the atomic age produce mutations from which they select varieties, such as hybrid corn, that are more useful to mankind. Sheep breeders in New Zealand inject hormones into the breeding ewes to increase the probability of multiple births. And now biochemists begin to unravel the genetic mechanisms of heredity, with the prospect that reproductive and developmental processes may be controlled not only in domestic animals but in human beings.
This brings me back to the main theme of my paper, which is indeed a very old question—quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will control the controllers? How are we to ensure that those who apply these scientific discoveries will direct their efforts to achieve the ultimate values which are so ill-defined, neglected, and even ignored in our society? Hitler and Stalin have shown us that technology can be mobilized for power. But it can also be mobilized for purely material but self-defeating ends.
This year it is estimated that in the United States alone the total expenditure on research and development will be $20 billion. The other industrial countries spend comparable proportions of their national incomes. We are all involved if only because three-fourths of the cost is included on our tax returns.
I hasten to add that science, in any strict definition of the term, receives only a small fraction of these huge sums—perhaps 2 to 3 percent. The greater part is spent on the development of new products and processes and on the application of already known scientific discoveries. Much indeed, of what is labeled research bears only a faint resemblance to the laborious and painstaking studies that yield insight into the complex and intricate relationships of nature—animate and inanimate.
Tracing the historical development of these words, research and researcher, the Oxford English Dictionary cites a question that was asked in 1883 but is still pertinent: “How can we know that the money given to a researcher is spent upon research?” A restive Congress is beginning to ask this question with increasing urgency. When is the growth of public expenditure on research going to slow down? What results can be shown for it? We have spent about $100 billion on research and development since the war ended—mostly for defense. Do we have any greater degree of national security? Or prosperity? The answer is probably yes to both questions. But how widely is the prosperity spread over the community as a whole? How much of the defense and space technology can be transferred to civilian uses? Have the large sums spent on economic aid resulted in real economic development or only in increased population? These are hard questions to answer.
One of the real risks we run is that unsatisfactory answers may encourage an anti-intellectual reaction in Congress and in the electorate. If such a reaction leads, as with foreign aid, to funds being cut back, who is going to distinguish between the scientists and the scienticians? The scienticians have shown considerable capacity to survive, and they know the ways of government. It is not impossible that the axe, if it falls, will fall upon science rather than technology.
This rather sudden and rapid increase in expenditures on research and development has come about because there has been an almost mystical belief in the magic of science. On my first visit to the United States, a Harvard economist read me the opening sentence of a commemoration speech:
“The eighteenth century reposed its faith in something it called Reason. The twentieth century has the same blind faith, but for the word Reason it substitutes the word Research.”
That was thirty-six years ago. In the meantime, faith in research has grown to the dimensions of a creed. But if the magic doesn’t work, the uninstructed quickly lose faith in any creed.
The increased funds available have brought into existence a new profession of researchers. Some of them remind me of the parallel development of educationists a generation ago. We need another Joel Hildebrand to wage unrelenting criticism on those who mistake method for subject matter. They acquire a rather slight knowledge, usually of mathematical techniques of analysis, which they are ready to apply to any subject, irrespective of its content. As a tool in the hands of one who has a profound knowledge of his subject, these techniques can be valuable, but they cannot be a substitute for knowledge. A computer can solve equations and make laborious calculations with lightning speed, but the validity of its answers depends on the data fed into it and the assumptions built into this data.
This rather obvious fact needs more emphasis in social studies than in the physical sciences, where observation and quantitative data are more precise and can be verified by experiment repeated under varying conditions so as to isolate all the variables in complex relationships. But even competent scientists, when they stray from their own special fields into the less precise and highly conditioned questions of social organization, seem often to be unaware of the extent to which they inject their own naive preconceptions and prejudices into the analysis of social problems. One of my colleagues recently made a survey of science fiction. He was impressed by the sophistication of its scientific ideas and by the naiveté of its social concepts. One of our most famous physicists reflected this naiveté when he argued that if we could put the first man on the moon, priority of occupation would give us the right in international law to annex it.
Researchers—good, bad, and indifferent—are multiplied by the ready availability of research grants. In a modern university, or multiversity, their numbers exceed those of the teaching faculty. The teachers themselves scramble for grants as a means to publication and therefore promotion and prestige. While I was still an active member of a university faculty, I heard the Chancellor asked by a new faculty member about the conditions of promotion. His reply was emphatic:
“The University,” he said, “has an approved statement of criteria always handed to faculty promotion committees. The criteria are teaching ability, university service, public service, and research. But as these are interpreted by faculty committees they can be summed up in the simple statement that you publish or perish.”
There are still some eccentric members of the faculty who cling to the belief that effective teaching and scholarly research rank high among their responsibilities. But these usually fit Bertrand Russell’s definition of an eccentric as a professor with tenure. The younger men know that it does not pay to be an eccentric. Many of the eccentrics have a rather strong feeling that the availability of research and travel grants, from the great foundations and still more from government agencies, threatens to ruin not only teaching but science. But the trend runs against them. In a multiversity, the unity of knowledge and of thought is dispersed among multiplying specialisms. The faculty is united only by a common parking grievance. I have read a recent preview of the multiversity of the future which envisages students attending television lectures in convention halls or by plugging in their earphones to computerized data retrieval systems.
One of the roots from which all this proliferation of research activity has sprung was the discovery during World War II that trained minds could solve specific problems that baffled those who relied on the rigid traditional disciplines of the armed services. What was then called operations research has since been broadened and applied to a variety of problems of organization in many fields. It has played a large role in the recent reorganization of the armed services—being applied not only to weapons systems, but to logistics, manpower, training, infantry tactics, and almost every aspect of military, naval, air, and missile organization. Increasingly it is applied to business organization, in specific detail and in corporate strategy. It has not yet found much scope in the broader problems of society such as unemployment, education, and urban agglomeration.
What I have just said about the superficiality of some practitioners of research should not be misinterpreted. Quite remarkable results can be obtained in problem-oriented research, pinpointed to a specific issue, even by those who are not highly trained specialists. It does not require great skill to collect data bearing upon a specific business problem so that a busy manager may base his decisions upon ascertained fact rather than a hunch. There is much useful and profitable work of this kind for those experienced in data collecting, who know sources and methods, and are often able to bring to the attention of their client important aspects of the problem that have escaped his attention. Nor is this confined to business practice.
For example, there has recently been considerable discussion in medical journals regarding the value and limits of computers. Much diagnostic information, both of the patient’s medical history and comparative statistical data regarding symptoms, as well as medical procedures, can be stored in a computer. The computer works as well at 3 a.m. as at 8 a.m. and does not forget or overlook facts that may escape a harassed or tired physician or surgeon. The final judgment must be human, but in a critical situation, it may help to recall such background data.
There is much to be said, therefore, to justify the research techniques which apply knowledge already available. The pace at which new knowledge is added and new techniques are invented, and the difficulty experienced by many practitioners in keeping abreast of their professions, are bound to increase the need for this kind of applied research. Those business firms that maintain the best research staffs are the most successful and rapidly growing enterprises. They are also the best customers of the applied research institutes.
I realize that scientists, in the strict sense, are not much concerned, as a rule, with the fruits of their research. They push towards the frontiers of knowledge and are interested in understanding rather than application. This is why tenure is important in a university—to shelter those who pursue the quest of knowledge for its own sake. But those who administer research grants must justify them by results. Congressional committees and government auditors are skeptical of vague generalities such as the advancement of knowledge. They are apt to want hardware or at least publishable results that can be turned to practical use. So the scramble for grants, if not very carefully controlled, tends to undermine scientific integrity.
I do not intend to draw any clear line between pure and applied research, nor to belittle technology. Indeed, there is great value for science in the clinical observations that identify areas where more fundamental research is needed. This is particularly true in social studies, which often reminds me of Lichty’s cartoon showing an automobile pulling away from a service station with the wife saying to her husband, “Why do you always contradict me? Conversation can be interesting without facts.” The “abstractions of political economy” are too often based upon the abstractions of past rather than present or future commercial practice. There is a famous passage in which Lord Keynes argued that “practical men, who believe themselves exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” This is true enough. But it is also true that economists who develop theoretical models often base them on defunct business practices and attitudes.
Applied research, which grapples with current problems and future projections of developing technologies, can be a useful corrective to such theories. Much has been done and is being done for private business by such applied studies. Estimating a potential market, projecting the trends of population and production, advising on plant locations, analyzing corporate strategy, planning development programs—none of these forms of guessing the future is always borne out by subsequent experience; but they do give those who must make business decisions a reasoned basis on which to make their judgments. That such guessing of the future is valuable is attested not only by the growing demand for it but by the success of the enterprises which pay for it.
But the economy of a nation is more than a collection of business enterprises, successful or unsuccessful, growing or stagnant. Indeed, many of the gains made by particular enterprises entail social costs such as the congestion of city traffic combined with the decay of urban shopping areas, or the unemployment caused by automation. It is easy to make a long list of problems that have been created for our society by the adoption of new technologies. The last generation transferred much heavy labor from the shoulders of men to falling water. Our generation is rapidly dispensing with any employment that can be reduced to routine—clerical as well as manual. This is the most difficult of all our present problems. Transportation, communications, the wasteful use of energy, water pollution, air pollution, the complex of urban and suburban housing and area decay—all these are difficult, but they are insignificant compared with the wastage of human resources, the visible aspect of which is the hard core of persistent unemployment.
At a time when productivity is greater than ever before, and continuously accelerates, there is no occupation into which we can fit those whose capacity or training is inadequate to the new economic requirements. These are primarily the underprivileged minority groups in our great cities; but they also include masses of young adolescents who have not acquired the new technical skills, and whole areas whose staple industries have been left derelict by technological progress. It is possible, even probable, that we cannot cure this situation simply by dealing with symptoms such as lack of education. It may be necessary to reorganize the economic structure so as once again to equate the supply and demand for human labor.
Very fundamental issues begin to emerge. Is it possible to educate the whole population in the new scientific techniques? Or must we be content to educate an elite and trust them to organize our society? How can we educate such an elite, not only in technology but in ultimate values—in ends as well as means? What can we do with those who cannot be educated? There is already too large a residuum of unemployables—perhaps three million in the United States—who have given up the struggle. Every city has its Skid Row. Some take refuge in alcohol or drugs. Others live by crime. Most of them merely drift.
One of the most pathetic aspects of this problem is the increasing number of men and women in the older age groups for whom our society has no place and no use. They constitute a substantial element of the poverty in our midst. They live longer but with substantial handicaps of ill-health and lack of purpose.
Worse still is the plight of the young unemployed—the dropouts, the unskilled, and the drifters. Shall we be driven to euthanasia for those who have outlived their usefulness? Or to selective training of the kind Aldous Huxley envisaged for the Betas and Gammas among the new generations, conditioning them so that they may be content with a lowly place in society? Or shall we be driven to selective breeding to upgrade human capacity?
If not, can we change the economic system so as to take the supply of capacity as given and adapt the demand to it? We begin to do this by mechanical methods such as lowering the retirement age, shortening the working week, and extending the period of early training. What economists call the labor force participation ratio falls steadily. It takes a smaller proportion of the population to produce the economic necessities, even though these necessities now include mechanical gadgets as well as food, shelter, and clothing. The fastest-growing avenues of employment are in the service occupations that cater to leisure and luxury. But this again raises the question of ultimate values. How shall we use the leisure time—not of the elite whose hours are often too crowded for them to take time for reflection, but of those on whose hands time hangs heavily because they lack intellectual interests and the capacity to pursue them? Both groups—the elite and the masses—tend to lose direction because our society is oriented towards means rather than ends.
One reason why I am fearful of the growing power of the scienticians in regard to such vital questions is that we cannot be sure of their values. The highway engineers will drive a freeway through a grove of thousand-year-old redwoods or ruin the parks and vistas of our city. Developers are busy turning San Francisco Bay into a drainage channel. Their calculus is purely financial. Beauty and serenity cannot be costed or their benefits appraised. How then can we be sure that the scienticians will take human values into account when they turn to social questions?
There is a very clear tendency for them to turn their attention to these social problems. The really significant contribution of recent scientific research, they argue, is not in new materials or processes but in the ability of technicians to solve technical, managerial, psychological, social, and political problems. Let me quote a recent statement by the research director of an electronics firm:
“Perhaps this newfound ability to combine a great diversity of scientific and technical skills and disciplines to make a massive assault on very large-scale problems (such, for instance, as air pollution, transport, communication, unemployment, and poverty) will turn out to be a social invention of even greater consequence in the long run than the scientific and technical innovations on which most attention is focused.”
This is what is known in the research profession as the systems approach or systems analysis. It has been used very effectively to reorganize our defense systems—so effectively indeed that the systems analysts may be working themselves out of a job. One reason for their newfound interest in social organization is the cutback in defense expenditures, which affects not only the defense agencies themselves but their suppliers, particularly in the electronics industry.
It is obvious that the idea of a concerted attack from many angles on the tangled complex of these social problems holds great promise. After so many years in which highway engineers and other specialists, including industrial leaders, have been free to pursue their independent ways, it is urgently necessary to review and re-appraise the consequences for society of their enthusiastic energies.
But it is necessary to remember two important conditions of the successes so far achieved by the systems analysts. First, they have had very little concern with cost and almost free access to the public purse. More important, they have had authoritative direction to achieve objectives that could be rather clearly defined in terms of material achievement.
Let me pass over the rather obvious difficulty of finding the necessary resources to carry out a systematic reorganization, for example, of our city structures. I do not regard this as decisive. We have the means, if we so wish, to reorganize our educational systems and institute training programs for the unskilled, to rebuild our cities, and reorganize our transport systems. What is lacking is not the means but the will and above all the vision that would enable us to rise above petty interests and vested rights. More important to my argument is the second difficulty: where are we to find a clear statement of purpose, of the social objectives to be achieved?
Lord Beveridge, who was the principal author of the British social welfare system, has written that “planning under democracy is like breathing under water.” But Beveridge proceeded to argue:
“It is perfectly possible to breathe under water, as fishes do, but only if, like the fishes, one develops special organs for that purpose. The special organ needed for planning under democracy is the organ of coordinated review and forethought which I have described as an Economic General Staff.”
This, you will realize, is where we came into this argument. The United States has the beginnings of an economic general staff in the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, which is moving cautiously by way of guidelines on prices and wage rates towards a larger measure of national economic planning. And now the scienticians are moving in on the planning.
This prospect alarms me, and I believe it should alarm anyone who is concerned to maintain the freedom and flexibility under which our society has grown rich and strong. What we need is not more planning to achieve more material progress, but a revision of values.
This is in fact underway in the best graduate schools of business. The new scientific managers of industry demand it. There is more interest in the humanities courses now offered in these business schools than in the technical business courses. In my view, if science is to be saved from technology, the science schools must follow suit. If there is no room in the undergraduate curriculum to educate future scientists in the ultimate values, at least we should organize postgraduate facilities whereby the scientists and scienticians who are to be our future rulers may be confronted with them.
There is a lamentable lack of support for the humanities in our universities, but the need for them is greater than ever before—provided, of course, they do not, in their scramble for research grants, destroy their values by attempting to ape the experimental sciences.
I should add that, in my judgment, any failure to establish clear goals of social purpose should be laid at the door of the humanists rather than the scientists. There is much evidence that most scientists have a keen appreciation of “ultimate values.” The professional schools—of business, engineering, medicine, and law—increasingly emphasize the need for courses in the humanities. But the social sciences and the humanities suffer from fragmentation and strive to emulate the experimental sciences by elaborating projects by which they also may secure the research grants that bring prestige and patronage. In doing so, they fail to grapple with the basic issues of social organization. There is increasing narrow specialization when what is needed is synthesis and interpretation that cannot be confined to a single academic discipline, still less to a narrow segment of it.
This is not a new idea, but it needs new emphasis. We are in a much more dangerous situation than England was in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution when Shelley wrote his Defence of Poetry. Shelley himself dabbled in science. The conclusion to which he came sums up the argument I have been trying to make:
“We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life: our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest. The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave…. The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceeds the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature.”