Science, Scientists, and Politics Robert M. Hutchins, Scott Buchanan,
Donald N. Michael, Chalmers Sherwin, James Real, and Lynn White, Jr.  
[Reprinted from The Center Magazine, November-December 1987]

This article, which first appeared as a Center Occasional Paper in 1963,
is made up of some of the papers that were presented at a conference on
the role and responsibilities of science executives in the service of
government. The conference was sponsored by the Center in cooperation with
the Twelfth Region of the United States Civil Service Commission. At the
time of publication, Robert Hutchins was the president of the Fund for the
Republic, Inc. Scott Buchanan was a consultant to the Center. Donald N.
Michael was the author of the Center pamphlet Cybernation: The Silent
Conquest and the director of the Peace Research Institute in Washington,
D.C. Chalmers Sherwin was the vice-president and general manager of the
Laboratories Division of Aerospace Corporation in Los Angeles. James Real
was a management consultant for government and industry and the coauthor
of the Center book, The Abolition of War. Lynn White, Jr., was the former
president of Mills College and a professor of history at the University of
California, Los Angeles.

By Robert M. Hutchins, president of U of Chicago

I do not know much about science, but I know a lot about scientists.
Though I do not know much about professional politics, I know a lot about
academic politics - and that is the worst kind. Woodrow Wilson said that
Washington was a snap after Princeton. Not only is academic politics the
worst kind of politics, but scientists are the worst kind of academic
politicians.

I wish at the outset to repudiate C. P. Snow, who intimates in one of his
books that scientists should be entrusted with the world because they are
a little bit better than other people. My view, based on long and painful
observation, is that professors are somewhat worse than other people, and
that scientists are somewhat worse than other professors. Let me
demonstrate that these propositions are self-evidently true.

The foundation of morality in our society is a desire to protect one's
reputation. A professor's reputation depends entirely upon his books and
his articles in learned journals. The narrower the field in which a man
must tell the truth, the wider is the area in which he is free to lie.
This is one of the advantages of specialization. C. R Snow was right about
the morality of the man of science within his profession. There have been
very few scientific frauds.  This is because a scientist would be a fool
to commit a scientific fraud when he can commit frauds every day on his
wife, his associates, the president of his university, and the grocer.
Administrators, politicians (not campaigning), and butchers are all likely
to be more virtuous than professors, not because they want to be, but
because they have to be.

One odd confirmatory fact is that those whose business it is to lie, such
as advertising men, are often scrupulously honest in their private lives.
For example, Senator William Benton, founder of the firm of Benton and
Bowles, used to say that he had to be honest on Madison Avenue because if
he wasn't word would get around that Benton was a crook and he would be
ruined. When he retired from the advertising- business he became vice
president of the University of Chicago, whereupon he was prompted to say,
"Look at these professors,. What harm would it do them if word got around
that they were crooks? They are all on permanent tenure!"

The general moral tone of academic life was once handsomely demonstrated
at a University of Chicago faculty meeting. It was a solemn occasion. Two
hundred full professors had assembled to discuss whether the bachelor's
degree should be relocated at the end of the year, giving it and other
degrees a meaning had never had before. The faculty debated this
proposition for two hours without ever mentioning education. The whole
discourse concerned the effect of the proposed change on public relations
and revenue. Mr. Benton, fresh from Madison Avenue, stormed out of the
assembly shouting, "This is the most sordid meeting I ever attended in my
life!"

There are many examples of this kind of professional morality. The
chairman of a scientific department of the University of Chicago marched
into my office one day and told me mat we could not appoint one of the
world's leading theoretical astronomers because he was an Indian, and
black. Another faculty member, a great American sociologist, who was
president of the American Statistical Association and president of the
American Sociological Association, once informed me that it would be
impossible to appoint a Negro to the faculty because all the graduate
students would leave. We appointed the Negro anyway. As far as I know, no
graduate students left.

The University of Chicago medical school violently resisted admitting
Negro students. Negroes and Jews who had noncommittal names and were not
otherwise visible to the naked eye were detected in photographs required
with applications for admission. It took an executive order from my office
to eliminate this requirement. Fortunately the medical school did not know
that under the statutes of the University I had no power to issue such an
order.

It is clear that the behavior of professors is questionable at best.
Scientists are worse than other professors because they have special
problems. One of these is that their productive lives often end at
thirty-five. I knew an astronomer who was contributing to the
international journals at the age of eleven. Compare that with the
difficulty of contributing at a similar age to an international journal
on, let us say, Greek law. A scientist has a limited education. He labors
on the topic of his dissertation, wins the Nobel prize by the time he is
thirty-five, and suddenly has nothing to do. He has no general ideas, and
while he was pursuing his specialization science has gone past him. He has
no alternative but to spend the rest of his life making a nuisance of
himself.

Scientists are the victims of an education and a way of academic life
created by their misinterpreters and propagandists. These misinterpreters
have propagandized an entirely inconsecutive chain of consecutive
propositions: The pursuit of truth, they say, is the collection of facts.
Facts can be experimentally verified. Thus, the only method of seeking
truth is the scientific method. The only knowledge is scientific
knowledge, and anything else is guesswork or superstition. So Lord
Rutherford could say to Samuel Alexander, the great English philosopher,
"What is it that you have been saying all your life, Alexander? Hot air.
Nothing but hot air."

A recollection I shall always cherish of one of our leading
mathematicians, now a professor at Chicago, affords a stunning example of
the frame of mind the propagandists have created. He came to Chicago as a
graduate student. Toward the close of his first year I asked the chairman
of the mathematics department how the boy was doing. "Oh, Mr. Hutchins,"
he said, "he's a fine mathematician, but I'm sorry to have to tell you,
he's crazy." I said, "What do you mean 'crazy'?  How does he evidence this
unfortunate condition?" And the professor responded, "He's interested in
philosophy!" The misinterpreters' and propagandists' doctrine has
paralyzing educational repercussions. According to its tenets, education
consists in cramming the student with facts. There is not enough time to
stuff in all the facts. Therefore, facts outside a narrow area of
specialization must be excluded. One of our consultants to the Center has
described the education in science in the state university from which he
graduated as two years of German, two years of military training, and all
the rest mathematics, physics, and chemistry.

Seduced by the fact formula, the medical school at the University of
Chicago set out on a perfectly sincere, although somewhat misguided,
campaign against liberal education. There are countless facts in medicine.
A medical school must fill its students with these facts or they will fall
behind. This meant that there was no time to teach anything else. The
medical school strongly recommended that the whole freshman and sophomore
years be abolished - the junior and senior years had already gone - and
that the entire curriculum be devoted to science and medicine. I can
conscientiously say that any senior in the University of Chicago medical
school knew more facts about medicine than any professor in a German
university.

The consequences of this line of educational endeavor are clear enough.  
Everybody specializes. There can be no academic community because
scientists cannot talk to one another. The chairman of the anatomy
department of the University of Chicago brought this home to me once when
we were discussing the great biological symposium that had been held to
celebrate the University's fiftieth anniversary. I said, "Tell me, how was
it?" He said, "I didn't go."  When I asked why not, he replied, "Well,
there weren't any papers in my field."  Scientists cannot talk to anyone
else because there isn't anyone else worth talking to. Hence, university
life offers no remedy for the defects of their education.

The propagandists and misinterpreters of science have set the tone for the
whole learned world in the United States. Their slogan is, "If you can't
count it, it doesn't count." The influence of this slogan is felt in
literature, philosophy, languages, and, of course, in the social sciences.
The most striking feature of social science today is the total absence of
theory. Its greatest modern achievement is the public opinion poll. Social
scientists can count, but cannot comprehend.

Those who live their lives without theory are technicians, or mechanics.
As a result there is no significant contemporary social science. Politics
is viewed as power because power can be observed and measured. Power is
something real.  Therefore, using the misinterpreters' logic, it is all
that is real about politics or political science. The most characteristic
book title in social science in the past thirty years is Politics: Who
Gets What: When, How.

In spite of the misinterpreters' nonsense, science contains elements of
sense.  Serious scientists know that science is just one very important
way of looking at the world. When scientists are actually doing science
they are caught in a great tradition. They know they are not simply
collecting facts or conducting random experiments. No serious scientist
believes that if a million monkeys were put down at a million typewriters
one of them would eventually turn out Hamlet.  Nor does he think the
scientific method is the only method. Scientists do not use the scientific
method outside of science. How the propagandists and misinterpreters of
science have managed to take over all the academic virtues and label them
"scientific" escapes me. I ran across a fascinating study of the
scientific attitude by a professor of education. This learned gentleman
had written to sixteen eminent scientists and asked them what
characterized the scientific attitude. These were the replies:

CHEMIST: Openmindedness ... PHYSIOLOGIST: Intellectual honesty ...
BOTANIST:  Openmindedness ... ZOOLOGIST: Observation, inquisitiveness,
perseverance and industry, objectivity and critical independent reflection
… PHYSICIST:  Objectivity; ... SOCIOLOGIST: Objectivity … MICROBIOLOGIST:
Respect observation?  ... MATHEMATICIAN: Openmindedness ...
ANTHROPOLOGIST: Openmindedness ... CHEMIST:  Practiced willingness to
label conclusions tentative until supported by reproducible or confirmed
data ... AGRICULTURIST: Desire to tolerantly explore ideas ...
MATHEMATICIAN: An open mind ... PHYSICIST: A will to know the truth …
CHEMIST: Insistence on critical examination ... DIRECTOR OF EDUCATIONAL
RESEARCH:  Intellectual curiosity … PSYCHOLOGIST: An inquiring mind.

Obviously this study shows that science has a corner on all the rational
processes of thought.

But there is not an honest scholar in any field who would not insist on
being openminded, honest, and objective, and on considering all the
evidence before he reached a conclusion. You can hear Thomas Aquinas
laughing.

The propagandists of science say, "Sure, but fellows like Thomas Aquinas
had commitment^; They all had philosophies and principles that distorted
their thinking. Scientists haven't any." The answer to this is that
everybody has a metaphysics. Every scientist, for example, has a
commitment to the reality of the external world. The distortion comes when
the metaphysics is denied instead of being recognized and made as rational
as possible.

Understanding science is an indispensable part of a liberal education. To
demonstrate my sincerity, I point out that at the University of Chicago
one whole half of the first two years of every student's education was
natural science. St. John's College, with which I also had something to
do, is the only college in the United States that requires four years in
the laboratory for every student. An education without science is no
education at all. The limitations and possibilities of science cannot be
understood without scientific training, and our very existence depends on
comprehending these limits and possibilities.

We do not know what science is, and partly as a result we do not know what
politics is. Mr. C. R Snow is wrong about the two cultures. There is only
one, and it is pseudo-scientific.

The leading phenomena of our time exhibit a curiously ambiguous character.  
Technology may blow us up, or it may usher in the paradise of which man
has been dreaming ever since Adam and Eve got kicked out of the first one.
Bureaucracy may stifle democracy or be the backbone of democratic
government. Nationalism may disrupt the world or prove to be the necessary
precondition of a world community.

Unfortunately these ambiguities do not lend themselves to scientific
procedure.  Our essential problem is what kind of people we want to be and
what kind of world we want to have. Such questions cannot be solved by
experiment and observation. But if we know what justice is, which is not a
scientific matter, science and many other disciplines may help us get it.

The problems resulting from these ambiguities are not going to be solved
by men of fractional or pseudoculture. The solution depends on moral and
intellectual virtues rather than on specialized knowledge. It is a
humbling thought to recall that twenty-five percent of the SS guards in
Nazi Germany were holders of the doctor's degree.

The solution of these problems must lie in the reorganization of American
education and in the redefinition of its purposes. A liberal education,
including scientific education, must be established for all, and true
intellectual communities must be built where men may overcome the
limitations of their fractional cultures. This would require a drastic
change in what the nation expects of American education, and an equally
drastic alteration in the habits of academic people. I think it will be
agreed that this cataclysm is not likely to occur in the lifetime of the
youngest person reading this.

The immediate program, then, has to be something else. It must be an
attempt to build intellectual communities outside the American education
system and to form widespread connections among the intellectual workers,
using these communities as points of interconnection. The hope for the
immediate future, as far as we have one, must rest in our capacity to
communicate with the adult population.  For one thing, unless we do, the
rising generation may not have a chance to rise.

It is in centers like the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions
and in the multiplication of meetings like the one that produced these
papers that we might get some help with the development of a real culture,
and a real understanding of kinds of knowledge and the limits and
potential of each kind.  The radiation from these points might light the
path to a just community for ourselves and for the world. 

- ROBERT M. HUTCHINS

The implication in discussing the nature of science and technology is that
a distinction should be made between science and technology. Such a
distinction is almost wholly unrecognized in our scientific cultural
environment. In a recent seminar in which I participated the question of
the difference between science and technology came up and the answer was:
"There isn't any. We no longer separate them." This is a shocking
statement. It is sobering to think that there is no possibility of
distinction.

C. P. Snow has said that scientists and technologists have become
soldiers. They are not working for themselves: They accept orders from
others. They are hot able to take responsibility for their own strategic
judgments in science, to say nothing of the uses to which their work will
be put. Whether the decisions are being made on the scientific or the
technical level, scientists are not making them.

President Eisenhower in his farewell speech pointed out two things that
needed to be watched: the hook-up among the military, the scientific
community, and the industrial community, and the hook-up between the
scientists and the administrator. We may have heard more about the
scientist-soldier than about the scientist-manager, but the latter is
equally threatening to the political community.

When a scientist is a soldier, he is subject to direction and is a means
to an end established by someone else. When he is a manager, he sets the
goals and directs other people. But this may not be as deep a paradox as
it first appears.  Both as a soldier and as a manager the scientist is
involved in practice, in practical activity. He is working in what a
traditional philosopher would call the "realm of practical reason."
Usefulness is the standard by which he judges his work. Thus it is
difficult to distinguish between science and technology because part of
the meaning has gone out of science. The scientist has diminished not
because he has become irrational, unreasonable, or arbitrary but because
he has become a technologist.

Limiting science to the practical realm is comparatively new. The word
"science"  has had a long usage - about three thousand years - and until
modern times its meaning contained concern about truth, pursued by
speculative or theoretical reasoning rather than practical reasoning.
These too are diminished words.  Speculation has become something done on
the stock market, and theoretical means "academic" to the general public.
To the technical scientist, theory is simply a means to an end. But there
are some slightly old-fashioned scientists around who feel that the
essential nature of science is not involved with practical reason.  They
say the scientist's work is to discover the truth, formulate it, and make
it a matter of public as well as professional knowledge.

In Thorstein Veblen's striking phrase, a scientist is "addicted to the
practice of idle curiosity." This defiant definition states in a humorous
way a high dogma about what science is. This is the origin of the popular
notion that the scientist is neutral on questions of utility or on the
affairs of practical life.  Idle curiosity means that the scientist is
concerned Only with truth. The results of the search for truth may be used
for good or evil, but it is now said, even by scientists, that judgments
about their use cannot be made by science.

If the scientist's concern is truth, it is his responsibility to be sure
that science is not misused or that something false comes out of it. The
burden of maintaining the activity of discovery implies a responsibility
for academic freedom, but few scientists have defended academic freedom in
this country though it has been in danger for the last generation. Perhaps
it is because most scientists do not distinguish science from technology.
Academic freedom may not be essential to questions of application and use.
There is not much point in defending it if truth is not the object. If
there is any absolute reason for academic freedom, it is that the search
for knowledge of truth is an activity of human beings essential to
everything else they do. The heaviest responsibility of the scientist to
society may be to refuse to make himself useful.

Several kinds of sharply different judgments are to be made about the
whole range of science and technology. The scientist, as a man concerned
about the truth, makes one essential judgment about his findings: whether
they are true or false. The technician, as an original inventor or as an
adapter of something already discovered, makes a judgment of usefulness of
fitness. He decides whether it works, and need not judge whether it is
good or bad in any other sense. Business or industrial interests make
different judgments from those of the scientist or technologist, which
partly explains the difficulty of communication between the laboratory and
the industrial manager. A much more general judgment about the utility,
validity, and desirability of scientific work is made by society and
imposed by social pressures.

But there is something missing in this series of judgments. The purposes
of science may be considered by the scientist as a professional man.
"Profession,"  as it was once understood, meant more than a specialty.
Universities were founded in Europe to educate and certify those who
aspired to the professions, and the training included more than science.
Students were taught the liberal arts, and achieved a realization of a
larger theoretical, speculative body of knowledge in which the sciences
are placed. From this point of view it is possible for a scientist to
stand before the community and say "yes" or "no" to the alternative
applications of science. But we no longer understand what the liberal arts
are. We call them philosophy, but philosophers have shrunk into
departmental academicians. The professional man, in fact the whole
society, does not have a good philosophical background, and as a result
there is a kind of judgment that is not being made. It is the only kind of
judgment that could distinguish between science and technology.

Although medicine has lost a great deal of the philosophical professional
integrity that was once expressed for an earlier time in the Hippocratic
oath, physicians as individuals and as a group still make professional
judgments. They do not prescribe poisons indiscriminately; they do not let
commercial pharmacists dispense certain drugs without prescription; they
judge malpractice.  Although these judgments seem to belong to ethics,
they are not primarily ethical. They are based on the professional
theoretical knowledge of the physician. If the natural and social sciences
wish to become professional, they need to discover and formulate such
judgments both for themselves and for society. But in order to do that
they will have to become philosophical enough to distinguish between truth
and workability. -- SCOTT BUCHANAN

Anthropologists and historians tell us that a crucial juncture in the life
of a culture occurs when the assurance that it has gained from an
unchallenged world view of values, goals, and logic confronts the
unchallenged world view of another culture, ft is not easy for men to
change their view of the world, for it is part of their view of
themselves. The challenge of other values threatens all that has given
them comfort and support. It takes strong men and felicitous circumstances
for a society to ride out the storm of contact with another culture and
learn and grow anew.

It is by no means certain that this will happen. Some people are shattered
by new experiences; so are some cultures. As segments of society splinter
and converge, new institutions and new modes of thinking are generated.
Some societies blossom in their revised form; others die.

Today we are faced with such a cultural crisis. The problems of making
suitable policies for scientific work in the government arise chiefly from
a profound cultural conflict. This conflict is the three-way confrontation
among the scientific community, the nonscientific political governmental
community, and the general public.

What is meant here by an adequate policy for federal science must be made
clear at the outset. Such a policy would reconcile the needs of science
and technology with the needs of the rest of society. Policy now springs
from resolving disputes for priority among various projects. It is made in
many places, from the Pentagon to the Department of Agriculture, as well
as in those offices assigned part of the policy-making task. But nowhere
do the social implications of science have a basic part in the formulation
of policy.

Today, science and technology are not neutral. Not only does their
development require vast social and human resources, but they are pursued
because their powers for enhancing or degrading humanity are recognized.
This non-neutrality demands an explicit relation of science and technology
to the needs and processes of society. This relationship should be the
foundation of federal science policy.

The one consensus among the three cultures - the scientific community, the
nonscientific political community, and the public -- is that the task of
government is to serve the general public. There is no such agreement
about the relationship of science to government and to the general public.
There is no set of values mutually subscribed to by the three cultures
that defines the proper purposes of science and technology and thereby the
appropriate restraints and supports needed to fulfill those purposes. Nor
is it clear that such a set of values can be deliberately produced. Values
do not derive solely from rational considerations. They are historical
products of emotion and plain accident as much as, or more than, reason.
This is one weakness in the thesis that the scientific method by itself
can solve society's problems.

Within each of the three cultures are men and institutions with different
viewpoints and different goals. These dissimilarities are crucial. Some of
them derive largely from training; some are induced by the preconceptions
that each group has about the other two and about itself. Two of the three
are contending for the power to insure that their particular values will
prevail: the science community and the nonscience governmental community.
The general public has essentially no power.

The science community is represented at its upper levels by two types of
scientists. The "traditional" type considers government to be synonymous
with mediocrity and irrationality. These men feel that science must be
left free to pursue its own ways. Their attitudes toward the rest of
society are frequently ambivalent. They avoid involvement in social
questions. Some of them perceive society as subject to, if not already
operating along, logical lines. Others consider society as incorrigibly
irrational and therefore unrelated to them.  They are seldom asked to
consider the social implications of their actions. By attending to their
work, advising on the technical merits of this or that proposal, they can
maintain the comfortable delusion that science can still be pursued
without thought of the social consequences. Frequently they work for the
university or for big industry, advancing the favorite programs of their
employers.

Then there is the new breed of scientist around high Washington conference
tables - the science entrepreneur, the "political" scientist. These men
want to manage the bureaucracy to the extent necessary to make it behave
the way they think it should. They have a sense of political technique,
and they enjoy and seek power. Like the traditionalists, they feel that
science is theirs, that no one else has the right to tamper with it. It is
they who should decide which projects deserve emphasis. They believe a
good dose of science would fix society fine, as C. R Snow has so
frequently tried to demonstrate. There are wise and modest men with social
imagination in this subculture, but frequently the powerful members of
this group are self-assured to the point of arrogance about their own
abilities, about the overriding Tightness of scientific values and
methods, and about the validity of their view of how society operates and
what it needs.

The science entrepreneurs are supported by and in turn support big
business, big publicity, big military, sometimes big academia and parts of
big government.  They are both the captives and the kings of these
powerful coalitions - kings for obvious reasons, captives because in
reaping the benefits of affiliation they capitulate in some degree to the
operating principles of these institutions.  They have climbed to power
through conservative hierarchies and tend to hold conservative values. The
infusion of Emigres from the disciplined institutions of Europe seems, in
general, not to have been a liberalizing influence. The more powerful the
"political" scientist gets, the more omnipresent he is at major
deliberations on science policy.

The nonscience community in Congress and the bureaucracies regards itself
as the bones, meat, and brains of government and society. They resent the
"woolly-headed"  scientist who may be trying to change their ways or
implying that these ways are inadequate. They are not about to be
displaced by a new attitude or a new kind of knowledge. Scientific
expertise is respected, but the political and social naivete that is
supposed to accompany it is regarded with disdain. A general feeling
exists among these "nonscientists" that science must be controlled.  
Usurpation of power is feared, partly because of a conviction that science
somehow cannot be stopped.

These men consider society a nonrational environment. They see the
political process as subtle and changing, responsive to many pressures of
which science is only one, and by no means the most important. They view
science as a means, not as an end. But they are confused about means and
ends in general, as well as about the implications of science, and have no
clear view of the proper role of scientists in formulating policy.

These two cultures between them decide on national science programs. They
are in deep conflict within and between themselves. There are great
political and ethical splinterings in the science community alone. The
entrepreneurs claim to speak for science, but speak only for their
faction. The traditionalists are fearful and envious of the "political"
scientists, upon whom they must depend for their survival, especially if
they hope for accomplishment in fields requiring expensive equipment or
team research. Both groups are dissatisfied with the workings of
government.

Given this dash of cultures, how can a valid basis be found for
policymaking in federal science? We must discover a common ground from
which science and technology can be intelligently directed. We must be
able to evaluate the social consequences of scientific innovation. We need
to plan our economics to assure the effective and humane introduction of
modern technologies. We must equip government to meet new regulatory and
managerial tasks. It is not clear that these responsibilities can be met
by a traditional form of government; nor is it certain that democracy can
be preserved in doing so. What is clear is that we cannot continue to
bumble along.

Already we are in desperate trouble over nuclear weapons. We are about to
be overwhelmed by that terrible blessing of medical technology,
overpopulation. The social implications of biological and
psycho-pharmacological engineering are already evident. Cybernation is
causing serious problems. What is more, our environment is being changed
in ways no cybernetical system can cope with indefinitely. It must respond
to a tremendous and growing range of information at increasing speed and
with increasing accuracy. Instability of the system is the inevitable
result.

In spite of these menacing developments we remain unable to forecast the
social consequences of technology. This is partly because of the limited
vision of both the nonscientists and the scientists. The first group does
not have sufficient knowledge of technology to sense the potentialities of
new developments and therefore cannot predict their social impact, and
they are too preoccupied with conventional assessments of political issues
and impacts. The second group is aware of the technological possibilities
but is not sufficiently sensitive to their social implications. Some of
the scientists care only about the success of their favorite projects.
Some apply to these problems a personal psuedo-sociology made useless by
its arrogance or naivete. And still others dodge responsibility by arguing
that technology itself is neither good nor bad, that its virtues are
determined by its uses.

Another reason why the social repercussions of science are difficult to
forecast is that we have too little understanding of the social processes.
This limitation has been fostered by the disinclination of the natural
scientist and the government operator to stimulate work in the social
sciences. The bureaucrat feels threatened by the possibility that
formalized knowledge will replace "experience"  and "political know-how."
Furthermore, the social sciences might demonstrate that the products of
technology, or even science itself, need social control.  This is an
unhappy prospect for those scientists who are feeling for the first time
the satisfactions of wielding power.

Since the consequences of scientific and technological developments are
not fully predictable, it would seem impossible to establish priorities
for individual projects on any sensible basis. Yet the forces of
technological advance compel some kind of choice. Creative talent is a
scarce resource and the availability of money is a political, if not a
real, limitation. "Political"  scientists push their preferences
vigorously, and the very existence of large programs influences selections
in the absence of better criteria. Priority decisions today depend on
political and economic pressures, personalities, and public relations.

The public relations juggernaut, in particular, imposes a crippling
distortion on science and on those who would make scientific policy. From
the laboratory to the launching pad science and technology are harried by
promises about "product superiority" and the glamour of "breakthroughs."
Commitments are quickly publicized and then science is pressed to maintain
the "reality" of the commitments. The natural failures of science and the
natural limits of accomplishment are covered by an ever-depending layer of
misrepresentation, deviousness, and downright lies. So pervasive becomes
the aura of untruth that it is hard for anyone, from the man in the
laboratory to the public, to know where reality lies.

A cliche of our political folklore is that somehow the public will make
everything right. In its wisdom it will judge between the contending power
groups, evaluate technologies, establish a scale for priorities. But the
public, the third culture, hardly knows what is happening. Understanding
or judging the conflicts and compromises now occurring between science and
government is far beyond its capacity. The public is caught between a
publicity-induced fantasy world where science knows all the answers and a
frustrating actuality which it does not realize is caused at least in part
by the inadequate or incorrect use of science and technology. The
frustrations are blamed on someone else: Russia, the government, perhaps
the intellectuals, seldom on science. The public still believes in the mad
scientists working on bombs, or in the humble scientist laboring over
polio vaccine. The member of government, civil servant or politician, is
perceived no more realistically.

Rather than becoming able to resolve the problems of science policy, the
public is likely to become increasingly alienated both from government and
from science.  As with many other groups in the past that have met
cultures somehow superior to their own, the public may withdraw from the
challenge of "adjusting up" to the new priests and the new power. How, in
fact, can the ordinary citizen adjust up to a computer-run society and
classified questions of life and death?

One segment of the public will not surrender without protest. This is the
group of articulate, concerned laymen who are not solely scientists,
politicians, or civil servants and who worry about the arms race,
overpopulation, the ascendancy of the "political" scientists, and the
inadequacy of nonscientific bureaucracies.  These people might be the
moderators, the synthesists, for a new culture. They do not have the
trained incapacities of those solely immersed in the two contending
cultures, and they do have perspective that the general public lacks.  
But these very characteristics may deny them the opportunity. The day of
the technical specialist grows ever brighter. The scientist will not
freely yield his newly gained power, nor will the government worker
relinquish his long-held dominion. Neither is likely to give ground to a
non-specialist who cannot build bombs or tread bureaucratic water, or
otherwise play according to the rules of science and government.

The character of the coming generation of scientists is changing. The
attributes attractive to laboratory directors interested in team-work are
bringing a new personality into science. The old-guard traditionalists may
be on the way out.  Those who succeed will be those who are good at
working with - or subverting - the nonscientific bureaucracy. Will these
men be good scientists? This is not the important question. The real
concern is for whom they will speak, and for what ends. The problem in
trying to resolve the ambitions of the two power cultures is that neither
group has a clear view of what it wants in the way of policy for
governmental science. As long as there is no community of values to guide
judgment, basic policy decisions cannot be made, much less decisions on
specific priorities for specific projects. Yet crises are arising on every
hand.  The evolution of a consensus cannot be awaited. If this society
does not learn how to assimilate the changes that confront it, it will not
survive. -- DONALD N.  MICHAEL

Science and technology are the key to the future, the key to power, and
the key to the solution of the problems we face today. They alone will not
save us, but if we seek to untangle our problems without them, we are
lost.

In the last thirty years the increasing sophistication of the physical and
biological sciences has exhibited the properties of a true revolution. It
has radically altered the social organization within which it grew. It
emerged in less than one working generation, and the suddenness of it
caught all of us off balance. People still believe that science can be
handled by the techniques and devices that it has itself made obsolete, or
that if the problems it has brought are ignored they will vanish.

A common modern complaint is that while government has spread like an
octopus, our problems have grown worse. It follows that the cure for our
ills is less government. But government did not bloom spontaneously. It
grew in response to the scientific revolution. As men have invented more
gadgets and uncovered more, knowledge about the world, an enormous
expansion of government has been necessary,' both to protect the public
interest and to foster further scientific advance.

In 1800 the government of the United States played a modest role. It had
an army, a postal department, a tax on whiskey, and some import duties:
The Department of State kept track of the world. That was about it. But by
1830, railroad and steamboat traffic began to grow, and, to regulate it in
the public interest, so did federal power. Later, internal combustion
engines were invented, more was discovered about aeronautical science, and
suddenly airways had to be regulated.  Tele^ graph, radio, and television
each generated complicated governmental problems. Modern chemistry and
pharmaceuticals brought into being the whole field of food and drug
control.

The economic disaster of agricultural overproduction, a triumph of applied
science, is a prime example of the difficulties that technology has handed
to government. The farm problem really began in 1862 when land-grant
colleges were founded with federal support. By 1900 science was being
applied to agriculture on a big scale, and by 1920 food production was
beginning to be excessive.  Hybrids, modern machinery, new methods of food
processing, and new types of fertilizers were developed, and all at once
America was producing too much food.  Science and technology caused the
surplus, but the federal government had to try to cope with it. Its
efforts to do so, plus its efforts to make agriculture still more
efficient, have spawned a giant bureaucratic structure.

The biggest surge of all in government growth was caused by the
exploration of the atom. In 1938, when science suddenly found a major key
to the secrets, no one but the government could afford to exploit it.
Science has not stopped finding keys - those to space, for example - and
the job of the federal government has not stopped getting bigger. Atomic
and space research are unsuitable for private exploitation, not only
because the government alone can afford the massive costs but also because
the results require governmental control.

The expansion of government suggests support for the idea that government
should control science and technology. The feeling that modern knowledge
and power must somehow be turned to the public good has currency. Even
those interested only in the progress of science want government to help
sustain its advance. Whether government's job is constraining science to
serve the public interest or promoting the scientific front, or both, it
must understand the phenomenon with which it is dealing.

Unfortunately, the people running government often do not understand
science and technology. Despite some notable exceptions, scientific
ignoramuses usually handle scientific decisions. The serious technical
questions, such as how atomic energy and military space operations can be
controlled, will remain unanswered until this basic difficulty is somehow
solved.

Government managers of science and technology often do not know their
business, partly because, as C. P Snow argues, our educational system is
no longer geared to the source of our power. Our power now rests on
science, but we let those who administer and govern remain incompetent in
the substantive knowledge of the area.

The revolution in science can be distinguished from the industrial
revolution by the fact that a high school undergraduate can understand the
principles of the latter. The steam engine, a railroad train, and, with a
. little more effort, even an electrical generator are within his grasp,
but he gets lost in modern biochemistry, electronics, and nuclear physics.
Mastery of this new knowledge is not quickly won. The subtleties of modern
research and development, or even of technical production, are not easily
learned late in life. But a manager must know the substance behind the
problems he handles if he is to be effective. It is increasingly true that
critical evaluation of substantive technical details is the very heart of
policy decisions. The era of classical administrative formulation, "You
name it, I'll manage it," is past. Today, few people except professional
scientists have the technical sophistication necessary to make many of the
crucial decisions affecting both science and society.

Using scientists in government seems an obvious answer to the dilemma of
management. But creative scientists and engineers are usually outside
government.  Most creative physical scientists are in universities, which
is remarkable considering the salary structure. Private industry employs a
big proportion of our scientific talent, which means that these scientists
are under pressure to serve industrial aims and their loyalties are often
diverted from the public interest.

Part of the reason why the scientific community is clustered outside
government has been the mismanagement of science by the military. Military
power must now be considered primarily in terms of science and technology.
Yet military organization and education have not changed to fit the new
facts. Obviously the military will need more and more scientifically
mature personnel and fewer squadron leaders, but it continues to train
squadron leaders. What is more, up to now it has had a negative approach
to its selection of scientific management.  Processes used to select a
good man to run a submarine are applied, despite their inappropriateness,
to selecting a man to run a laboratory or to choose between two complex
weapons systems. Good scientific managers are automatically weeded out,
and poor ones promoted.

Unfortunately, the traditional military organizational structure tends to
be inimical to the promotion of scientific progress. It was designed to
produce specialists in violence. Now suddenly me most critical task is the
selection of highly technical weapons systems - a function for which the
military structure is not particularly suited.

But scientists outside government still try to influence matters from the
edges by pulling strings and poking their fingers into the wheels. They
give generalized advice, but the problems are specific. Someone must
choose, for instance, between spending $500 million to make better reentry
vehicles for missiles or spending $500 million to build a completely
different missile with a different basing system, and these decisions must
be lived with. The kibitzing scientist, not responsible for the
consequences of his advice, is at best of limited usefulness; at worst,
dangerous.

Responsibility and scientific competence must somehow be brought together
if government is to serve the public interest and if the right decisions
are to be made to advance the intricate giant that science has become.

Having the top ranks of government heavily staffed with people trained in
science, who really know how to handle scientific problems, is a solution
apparently not available to this country. Obviously it is being tried in
Russia.

In the United States the government, lacking scientific expertise, farms
out its scientific problems to industry. The ordinary profitmaking company
has a very limited sense of public responsibility. It may be effective in
production and capable of top-notch research and development, but its
interests often - and necessarily - diverge from the public interest.
There is a tendency to let die government finance the long shots but to
seize promising developments and exploit them with company money. Industry
naturally tries to exploit governmental support for private gain (within
legal limits) and steers the short course of its own health and well
being. If a company is to survive in this quasi-capitalist society, it
must look out for itself first. Because of this inevitable self-interest,
industry must not be allowed to become the arbiter of national science
policy by default.

One promising scheme for handling science and technology in the public
interest has been the nonprofit organization, or, as they prefer to be
called, the public trust organization. The government first used the
nonprofit device in about 1820, when it gave a contract to the Franklin
Institute in Philadelphia to find out what made steam boilers explode. In
the last thirty or forty years there has been a proliferation of nonprofit
organizations that have been extremely effective in basic research,
applied research, and even production. A number of these are run by
universities, such as the Argonne Laboratories of the University of
Chicago, MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, and the University of California's two
weapons research labs and its operation at Los Alamos. There are also
private nonprofit companies like Rand, System Development Corporation, and
Aerospace Corporation.

The main advantage of these organizational inventions is that they are
insulated from bureaucratic meddling. They work on governmental problems
outside the governmental structure. They typically have a broad charter in
which their responsibilities are general, their budgetary restraints
nonspecific, and monitorship of their operation reasonable. They permit a
freer use of scientific talent. They break through the unrealistic
ceilings set by government on the salaries of scientists and allow the
public service to compete on an even economic footing with private
industry. Most important, they are able to maintain an atmosphere
congenial to the scientific community. This kind of freedom is necessary
for scientific accomplishment, and the method has proved itself. In terms
of technological productivity the nonprofit groups have been extremely
successful, particularly with the Atomic Energy Commission. But the
freedom on which their success is based is achieved by a delegation of
power from government, and even though they have strong internal
commitments to the public interest, and their actions usually serve that
interest well, they do not literally represent government.

What is needed is an invention inside government equivalent to these
nonprofit corporations. Within government a delegation of authority and
responsibility could be made to large self-contained units. The liberty
necessary for a benign environment for science could be preserved, and
creative scientists might be lured into government service. Yet the power
to direct the course of science and weigh its consequences in terms of the
public welfare would not be relinquished.  The AEC system, an experiment
in governmental management of science and technology, is a significant
step in the right direction.

A new and better marriage must be made between governmental responsibility
and scientific capability if the full promise of science is to be realized
and its perils escaped. - CHALMERS SHERWIN

Almost eighty percent of all research and development monies are furnished
by government, of which all but a small fraction are directed at prompt
application to the technologies of warfare and its endless supporting
apparatus.

It is unlikely that we shall ever hear again such lines as were delivered
in 1958 by a distinguished Nobel Laureate physicist to an assembly of his
colleagues. "The scientist," he insisted, "has no idea what disposition
will be made of his work. There is usually at least a two-year lag between
his discoveries and their unpredictable applications." The Laureate went
on to spin out this thesis of disassociation, even though everyone in the
hall was intimately aware of die hundreds of laboratories and plants
created for and totally supported by government, populated by tens of
thousands of physical scientists working cheek to jowl with lesser folk to
achieve specific and immediate technological ends.

As incredible as this posture was in 1958, it is now even more absurd.
Today there are fourth and fifth generations of scientists who have never
worked on anything but weaponry and who view their careers as lifelong.
They are permanently dedicated to the invention and construction of what
may appear to be a succession of weapons systems stretching through
foreseeable time. In a real sense, these men are institutionalized:
captive to their narrow specialties and to the paymaster, the grant, and
the contract.

The military, who are the ultimate appliers of the laboratory invention,
are not threatening to us because of their eagerness to fight or to
govern. I believe that they are generally a good deal less belligerent
than some of their predecessors in these last twenty-five years. .It is
the delicate and dangerous gear with which they are charged that raises
the specters of the consequences of accident, irresponsibility, or
madness, common phenomena of any war, to such heights. And it is the
latitude in making decisions for which the military is asking that
suggests future perils for us. The military does not object to the
decisions once they come; what it complains about is that getting the
decisions through the civilian bureaucracy renders the strategic and
tactical advantages of modern war equipages useless.

What is the value of computerized, highly mobile war gear, they ask, when
the opponent can come back in an hour with a decision that takes us three
days to make and transmit? It should be apparent that a major crisis of
decision will some day, somewhere, once and for all tumble the system
whereby ultrasonic weapons and their attendants are controlled by the
ponderous machinery of nineteenth-century decision-making processes.

It is clear that weapons diplomacy, the application of force as the trump
card in international relations, is archaic. Worse, it is useless. To
think otherwise, one is forced to ignore the microsecond weapons systems
which have created such an unbearable crisis in international political
decision-making processes everywhere, especially in the democratic
societies.

My contention is that it does not have to be left this way; that perhaps
before it is institutionalized completely, the scientific community can
make a massive attempt to balance the war system which they have bestowed
on the republic with devices and systems to block its use. They can decide
to turn a portion of their interest from the redundancies of thermonuclear
overkill and the versions of outer space to the aid of the political
process and the real defense of the free society. Specifically, I am
asking if it is not possible to build into the framework of democratic
governing processes advanced technological systems that will give us a
chance to understand the current conditions and attitudes of the rest of
the world, its peoples, and its leaders; devices that will enable us to
abort crisis situations or, once they are upon us, provide us with
alternatives to violence.

There are obstacles to any significant movement of science toward a
concentrated assault on problems of this magnitude. For one thing, they
are hard. Science, for all its awesome facade, now likes to do easy
things. A large portion of the physical science population has been
immersed in polishing inventions twenty or more years old. The behavioral
and social sciences, bemused by access to electronic counting gear, each
year load the trade magazines with projects of increasing triviality. In
spite of some progress, the scientific pecking order is still much as it
has been, rigidly segregated by craft status and increasingly insulated,
one discipline from another, by staggering inventions of professional
syntax.

In a very few areas, attempts are being made to attack the problems of the
social and political orders by at least asking questions of the
technicians stultified by their long tenure in the weapons business:

What, if anything, can the wondrous machines do to help us assess the
hopes, fears, and aspirations of the world in a continuous way? Is there,
for example, nothing science can do to close the technical gap between
doorbell-ringing opinion-gathering methods and the capacity of the
million-bit memory drum, which is now sometimes diverted to such uses as
predicting the best bus schedules from California to a Nevada gambling
house?

Is there no better way to guide our governors than by the guesswork of the
people who have elevated themselves to the role of "operations analysts"
and who, for lack of our possession of better methods, profoundly affect
the gravest decisions of history?

What, we ask, is "credibility"? Is it the same to one man as it is to
another?

In the same patois, what is "rational behavior"? Is it the same to an
Israelite as to a Formosan, to a Japanese as to a Nebraskan?

What are the components of "threat" that filially tote up to being
"intolerable"?

Can incipient paranoid behavior out of the forces of complex circumstances
be predicted in a people or their leaders? If not, a useful understanding
of mass behavior is not foreseeable, and most of psychiatry, psychology,
and a good deal of physiology must be marked off as limited individual
therapeutic techniques.

The questions go on, inferentially urging all the disciplines of science
to consolidate and press a fraction of the ingenuity and energy that has
gone into the war system toward an information gathering and analysis
system that can begin to help us out of the horror that by 1965 will cause
the equivalent of thirty-five tons of TNT to be assigned to the personal
containment of every human being then living on the globe.

Walter Lippmann has warned that neither the United States nor Soviet
Russia must push the other beyond that point of provocation and
humiliation at which even the most rational nation "can be provoked and
exasperated to the point of lunacy where its nervous system cannot endure
inaction - where only violence can relieve its feelings. It is the
business of government to find where that line is - and to stay well back
of it." And, I would add, it is the business of science to help government
find and hold the line.

Science must mount an unprecedented effort to furnish government with an
assessment system that draws on the pertinent knowledge of all its
branches and to transmit it in usable form to the managers of the
political and the military systems. The scientist no longer has the right
to remain apolitical. These efforts will have to be launched, maintained,
argued, and defended by individual scientists. For example, since money is
not only the lubricant but the propellant of scientific development, the
scientist himself must start to influence the disposition of governmental
research and development funds.

I am not asking for an overlying organization of scientists to tell us
what to do and how to do it. I am asking for the attention of the
individual scientist who is now immersed in weaponry or in the Next Fifty
Years at Bell Labs. Science and its common-law wife, technology, have
bathed long enough in the adulation of the popular press and in the awe in
which great segments of the society have held them because of their
creation of such impressive murder machines. Now they must turn to
inventions of far greater novelty, complexity, and importance. The
mounting of the thermonuclear war machine has stultified international
order and crippled our hopes to revive it by traditional political and
social means. Now science must somehow furnish us a parallel system of
equal impressiveness under which their highly refined system of murder
machines may be controlled. -- JAMES REAL

................

About 130 years ago Auguste Comte schematized human history in terms of
three ages: the age of religion, the age of philosophy, and the age of
positive knowledge or science. He had faith in science, and his positivism
is the heart of modern orthodoxy. All of us today take for granted that
humanity is progressing from bondage to mastery of the natural
environment, from superstition to knowledge, from darkness to light. It is
axiomatic that science is the exploration of an endless frontier and that
its processes cannot be reversed or even seriously interrupted. Every
American or European, every Asian or African deeply influenced by Western
culture, has implicit trust in the inevitability and Tightness of this
onward sweep of science. Even the churches embrace the new orthodoxy, if
they are judged more by what they do not say than by what they say.

The modern positivist is a man of faith as much as was the medieval
mystic. The concept of human destiny secularized by Comte was evolved by
Joachim of Flora, a Cistercian abbot of the late twelfth century, who
divided history according to the Trinitarian dogma, equating die ages of
the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost with an age of fear, an age of
love, and an age of freedom. Joachim's vision was taken up by the left
wing of the Franciscan movement and broadcast over Europe. It was inherent
in the thinking of late medieval and early modern proletarian revolutions
and underlies the Marxist straight-line notion of human destiny. When
Comte transmuted Joachim's formula, he was replacing one faith with
another closely related to it.

No faith can afford to reign unexamined. Our habit of regarding scientific
progress as inevitable may in fact be dangerous to its continuing vigor.
In every civilized society something that can legitimately be called
science has existed, but the amount of energy put into it has varied
enormously. In every age minds of great ability are attracted to the focus
of cultural interest, be it the fine arts, literature, religion, science,
or something else. If the cultural climate shifts, the concentration of
intellectual energies and capital investments follows.

Science must have a positive emotional context to thrive, as well as
economic and political encouragement. Legislatures and corporate bodies
must reach decisions favorable to science, and investors and voters must
approve what their representatives do. Parents must want science in the
education of their children.  Above all, a significant proportion of the
ablest minds must choose to dedicate themselves with passion to scientific
investigation if the movement is to progress.

The modern outburst of scientific activity is not necessarily permanent.
The cultural support that science enjoys today rests more on fear of
foreign enemies and of disease than upon understanding, and fear may not
be a healthy of lasting foundation. Science needs its statesmen, and
statesmanship demands the long view.  The future of science, like its
past, will largely be a matter of accident unless measures to assure its
continuance are attentively sought. Since the energy that civilization
expends on any activity depends on the cultural climate, the important
question today is: What can be done to insure an affirmative social
context for science?

The historian has no ready answers. No professional historian thinks that
history repeats itself. History does not foretell the future, but study of
the past may provide some keys to understanding. Above all, knowledge of
history should liberate us from the past and enable us to be vividly
contemporary.  Viewing human experience in vastly different circumstances
helps to dislodge presuppositions, and may free our ideas about what needs
to be done to assure the future of science.

The prestige of science today sustains a common but false assumption that
any robust culture must have had considerable scientific activity. Now,
Rome was immensely vigorous. Languages descended from Latin are still
spoken from Tijuana to Bucharest. The overwhelming mass of legal
structures of the world, not only in Europe but in Asia and the Communist
countries as well, is descended from Roman law. The Romans had vast
creative ability and originality; yet there was no ancient Roman science.
Nothing that can be called science existed in the Latin tongue until the
twelfth century. From our modern point of view, Roman indifference to
Greek science was absolutely spectacular. It has been argued that, by the
time of the Roman Empire, Greek science was so far past its great days
that it could not attract the vigorous Roman mind. But distinguished Greek
scientists, such as Galen, lived for long periods in Rome. As for the
"petering out" of Hellenic science, one of the most original Greek
scientific thinkers, Philoponus of Alexandria, was contemporary with
Justinian in the sixth century.  Greek science was available to the
Romans, but was ignored.

Even more disconcerting is the case of Islamic science. During some four
centuries, from roughly 750 to 1150 A.D., Islam held the lead in
scientific activity. In the eighth century a government-supported
Institute of translation emerged in Baghdad. Very nearly the complete
corpus of Greek science and a major part of Indian science were made
available in Arabic within about eighty years.  Original scientific work
began appearing in Arabic by the late ninth century, especially in
mathematics, optics, astronomy, and medicine.

In the early tenth century, Al-Razi, an Islamic physician, produced a book
known eventually in Latin as Liber Continens, an encyclopedic codification
of Greek and Hindu medicine, including a great deal of Al-Razi's own
observation. It is probably the biggest single book ever written by a
medical man, and is a superb work. In 1279 it was translated into Latin
for Charles of Anjou by a Jewish physician of Agrigento in Sicily. It was
published in Brescia in 1486 and reprinted four times before 1542. It was
a fundamental medical reference book for centuries, and was entirely
absorbed into the stream of Western medicine.  But perhaps the most
striking thing about it is that no complete copy of Al-Razi's great
medical encyclopedia exists in Arabic, It was practically forgotten in
Islam after a few generations.

The Arabic-speaking civilization knew what science was and was proficient
in it.  For four hundred years science was one of its major concerns. But
a crystallization of other values occurred in the late eleventh century
that shifted the whole focus of Islamic culture. Science was abandoned,
and abandoned deliberately.

Christianity's relation to scientific activity has varied greatly through
the ages. It has been said that early Christianity killed Greek science;
but Christians were no more indifferent to science than were contemporary
pagan Romans. The early Christian attitude was based on the view that
natural phenomena were relatively unimportant. Only spiritual values had
significance.  The natural world deserved attention solely because God
used it to communicate specific messages to the faithful.

This concept of the function and nature of the physical world is
illustrated in a sixth-century story about Pope Gregory the Great.
Gregory, not yet pope, had seen English slaves in the Roman slave markets,
and decided to evangelize this pagan people. He received permission from
the then pope and started for England.  On the evening of the second day
out, while he was resting and reading, a locust -: locusta in Latin -
hopped up on his book. He knew that God was speaking to him. The Latin
words loco sta mean "stop";,he took this to be the meaning of the message
and went no farther. The next day, couriers from Rome reached him and
summoned him back. The people of Rome had demanded that the pope recall
Gregory from what would have been a lifelong mission because they
desperately needed his leadership.

It is plain that science could not flourish in a culture that held to such
a "rebus"  interpretation of natural phenomena. But by the twelfth century
this attitude began to change, at least in the Latin West. People began to
pay more attention to the physical world. Sculpture of the early Gothic
period clearly shows that the artist looked at real vegetation when he
carved ornamental leaves or flowers.  In the thirteenth century, St.
Francis of Assisi, supplemented the doctrine that material things convey
messages from God with the new idea that natural phenomena are important
in themselves: all things are fellow creatures praising God in their own
ways* as men do in theirs. This new notion opened a door to natural
science, and partly explains the enthusiasm for experimental science in
the Franciscan order at that time.

Another concept crucial for the whole development of modern science was
emphasized in the thirteenth century and found its clearest spokesman in
the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon. He said that there are two sources of
knowledge of the mind of God - the Book of Scripture and the Book of
Nature - and that each of these must be searched by the faithful with
equal energy. He pointed out further that study of the Book of Nature had
been sorely neglected.

This idea - natural theology - changed the role of men from passive
recipients of spiritual messages through natural phenomena to active
seekers for an understanding of the Divine nature as it is reflected in
the pattern of creation.  Natural theology was the motivational basis of
late medieval and early modern science. Every major scientist from about
1250 to about 1650 - four hundred years during which our present
scientific movement was taking form - considered himself primarily a
theologian: Leibnitz and Newton are notable examples. The importance to
science of the religious devotion which these men gave their work cannot
be exaggerated.

Why did the idea of an operational natural theology emerge in the
thirteenth century, and in the Latin West alone? There was no similar
development in Greek Christendom. It may have sprung from the key
religious struggle of the time, the battle of Latin Christianity with the
great Cathar heresy. Early in the thirteenth century it looked as though
the Cathars were going to get control of a strip of territory extending
from the middle Balkans across northern Italy and southern France almost
to the Atlantic coast * separating the Papacy from the more orthodox areas
of northern Europe. The Cathars' major doctrine was that there are two
gods - a god of good and a god of evil. The visible universe is the
creation of the god of evil, which means that living a good life involves
having as little as possible to do with physical actuality. Christianity
holds that matter is the creation of the one good Deity. In the process of
upholding the Christian position against Catharism, natural theology
assumed a new relevance and vividness.

Natural theology was unquestionably a major underpinning of Western
science. By the time the theological motivation began to diminish, Western
science was formed. Today the motive force of natural theology has long
been spent, and it does not seem to have been replaced with any other idea
of equal power. Are modern scientists quite sure why they are pursuing
science? Science is fun, and the exhilaration of the chase may keep it
going for a long while. But will scientific advance continue without more
serious impulsion?

Scientists must become increasingly aware of the complexity and intimacy
of science's relationships to its total context. The modern tendency to
regard science as somehow apart from, or even dominant over, the main
human currents that surround it is dangerous to its continuance, and can
be harmful even to progress within science. The veneration of the circle
is an example of a general presupposition that constricted even so great a
scientific mind as Galileo's.  Galileo, in bondage to the axiom that the
circle is the perfect curved form and therefore necessary to any
significant speculation, could not seriously contemplate Kepler's thesis
that the planets move in elliptical orbits. He neither accepted nor
refuted Kepler's notion. He committed the unforgivable sin:  He
disregarded it.

Fixation on the circle was almost complete in ancient culture. The Romans
recognized only three ovoid forms: in arenas, in shields, and in the
bezels of rings. Pagan Scandinavians used the oval for a type of brooch,
but discarded it as soon as they were Christianized, that is,
Mediterraneanized. The Middle Ages had no oval forms except occasionally
the nimbus surrounding Christ in scenes of the Last Judgment or the
Ascension, and even this was a version of the ancient Christian fish
symbol, pointed at both ends. As late as the fifteenth century, artists
could not draw a picture of the Coliseum which showed it oval. The first
ascertainable oval design in a major European work of art is the paving
that Michelangelo designed in 1535 for the remodeling of the Capitoline
Piazza in Rome. Michelangelo and his successors during the next fifty
years created an atmosphere in which ovoid forms became respectable, until
finally Baroque art was dominated by the oval. Kepler's astronomical
breakthrough was prepared by the artists who softened up the circle and
made variations of the circular form not only artistically but also
intellectually acceptable.

While the sanctity of the circle long impeded science by closing avenues
of speculation, another inherited classical idea of a very different sort
restrained progress by divorcing thought from practice. Manual labor was
extolled for seven hundred years by monks, especially the Benedictines, as
being not merely expedient but spiritually valuable as well. With the late
medieval revival of Greek and Roman attitudes, however, the classical
contempt for manual labor reasserted itself. The universities emerging in
the thirteenth century had faculties in the liberal arts, law, theology,
and medicine. Medicine was the only discipline with an embarrassing manual
aspect, and in order to retain their prestige the medics separated surgery
from medicine. Surgeons did not want to be downgraded either, so surgery
became largely theory. There are pictures showing a professor of medicine
lecturing to students, while a theoretical surgeon in turn directs a
barber surgeon, who dissects the cadaver. Medicine advanced during the
latter Middle Ages, but it seems likely that it advanced less rapidly than
would have been the case if the study of surgery, anatomy, and medicine
had been carried on by the same people. Speculation too far removed from
substance is often of limited value. The trend to purge university
curricula of "vocational"  courses may contain a seed of decay.

Current discussion of the problems of maintaining scientific progress
usually focuses on the importance of providing an adequate economic base
for science and creating an atmosphere of political and intellectual
freedom in which science may flourish. But, as we have seen, changes in
science in the past have also to be related to changes in basic religious
attitudes, in aesthetic perceptions, and in social relationships. More of
our attention should be directed to an examination of the sources of our
faith in science today, and to the wellsprings of motivation that lead men
to pursue science. Why does a man become a scientist?  Why does he choose
his manner of work, and how does he select the area that engrosses him?
The answers to questions like these are not entirely economic or
political.

Our science itself may contain unexamined axioms, like the circular prison
mat held Galileo captive. Hypnotism is an example of a phenomenon that
science has not really tried to explicate, apparently because in some way
it seems outside accepted categories of "reality," although it has been
used in amazing ways in dentistry and surgery.

A distinguished surgeon told me about a delicate heart operation carried
out under hypnotism, and added, "That sure is fooling them." But who is
being fooled?'

The continuation of civilization as we know it depends on science, and the
continuance of science would seem to depend on our ability to examine this
sphere of human activity objectively and relate it to its human context.
Those responsible for the statesmanship of science must develop a
scientific understanding of science itself. They must become increasingly
aware of the intricacy of the ecology of the scientist. We must learn to
think about science in new ways unless we intend to leave the future of
science to, chance. - LYNN WHITE, JR.