The Impact of Science on Society - B. Russell

VERTRAND -RUSSELL

THE

IMPACT OF SCIENCE

ON

SOCIETY

CM

ac

AMS PRESS
NEW YORK

Reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
From the original edition of 1953
First AMS EDITION published 1968
Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 68-54290

AMS PRESS, INC.

New York, N.Y. 10003

PREFATORY NOTE

This book is based upon lectures originally given at
Ruskin College, Oxford, England. Three of these —
Chapter I, " Science and Tradition," Chapter II, "Gen-
eral Effects of Scientific Techniques," and Chapter VI,
"Science and Values" — were subsequently repeated at
Columbia University, New York, and published by
the Columbia University Press. None of the other chap-
ters have been published before in the United States.
The last chapter in the present book, "Can a Scientific
Society be Stable?" was the Lloyd Roberts Lecture given
at the Royal Society of Medicine, London.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Science and Tradition i

II. General Effects of Scientific Technique 18

III. Scientific Technique in an Oligarchy 43

IV. Democracy and Scientific Technique 56
V. Science and War 7 1

VI. Science and Values 77

VII. Can a Scientific Society Be Stable? 96

CHAPTER I

Science and Tradition

Man has existed for about a million years. He has
possessed writing for about 6,000 years, agricul-
ture somewhat longer, but perhaps not much
longer. Science, as a dominant factor in determining the
beliefs of educated men, has existed for about 300 years; as a
source of economic technique, for about 150 years. In this
brief period it has proved itself an incredibly powerful
revolutionary force. When we consider how recently it has
risen to power, we find ourselves forced to believe that we
are at the very beginning of its work in transforming human
life. What its future effects will be is a matter of conjecture,
but possibly a study of its effects hitherto may make the
conjecture a little less hazardous.

The effects of science are of various very different kinds.
There are direct intellectual effects : the dispelling of many
traditional beliefs, and the adoption of others suggested by
the success of scientific method. Then there are effects on
technique in industry and war. Then, chiefly as a consequence
of new techniques, there are profound changes in social
organization which are gradually bringing about correspond-
ing political changes. Finally, as a result of the new control
over the environment which scientific knowledge has con-

1

2 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

ferred, a new philosophy is growing up, involving a changed
conception of man's place in the universe.

I shall deal successively with these aspects of the effects of
science on human life. First I shall recount its purely intellec-
tual effect as a solvent of unfounded traditional beliefs, such
as witchcraft. Next, I shall consider scientific technique,
especially since the industrial revolution. Last, I shall set
forth the philosophy which is being suggested by the tri-
umphs of science, and shall contend that this philosophy, if
unchecked, may inspire a form of unwisdom from which
disastrous consequences may result.

The study of anthropology has made us vividly aware of
the mass of unfounded beliefs that influence the lives of un-
civilized human beings. Illness is attributed to sorcery, fail-
ure of crops to angry gods or malignant demons. Human
sacrifice is thought to promote victory in war and the fertility
of the soil; eclipses and comets are held to presage disaster.
The life of the savage is hemmed in by taboos, and the conse-
quences of infringing a taboo are thought to be frightful.

Some parts of this primitive outlook died out early in the
regions in which civilization began. There are traces of
human sacrifice in the Old Testament, for instance in the
stories of Jephthah's daughter and of Abraham and Isaac,
but by the time the Jews became fully historical they had
abandoned the practice. The Greeks abandoned it in about
the seventh century b.c. But the Carthaginians still practiced
it during the Punic Wars. The decay of human sacrifice
in Mediterranean countries is not attributable to science, but
presumably to humanitarian feelings. In other respects,
however, science has been the chief agent in dispelling primi-
tive superstitions.

Eclipses were the earliest natural phenomena to escape

SCIENCE AND TRADITION

from superstition into science. The Babylonians could pre-
dict them, though as regards solar eclipses their predictions
were not always right. But the priests kept this knowledge to
themselves, and used it as a means of increasing their hold
over the populace. When the Greeks learned what the
Babylonians had to teach, they very quickly arrived at as-
tonishing astronomical discoveries. Thucydides mentions an
eclipse of the sun, and says that it occurred at the new moon,
which, he goes on to observe, is apparently the only time at
which such a phenomenon can occur. The Pythagoreans,
very shortly after this time, discovered the correct theory of
both solar and lunar eclipses, and inferred that the earth is a
sphere from the shape of its shadow on the moon.

Although, for the best minds, eclipses were thus brought
within the domain of science, it was a long time before this
knowledge was generally accepted. Milton could still speak
of times when the sun

In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds
On half the nations, and with fear of change
Perplexes monarchs.

But in Milton this had become only poetic license.

It was very much longer before comets were brought
within the compass of science; indeed the process was com-
pleted only by the work of Newton and his friend Halley.
Caesar's death was foretold by a comet; as Shakespeare
makes Calpurnia say:

When beggars die, there are no comets seen;

The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.

The Venerable Bede asserted: "comets portend revolu-
tions of kingdoms, pestilence, war, winds, or heat." John

4 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

Knox regarded comets as evidence of divine anger, and his
followers thought them "a warning to the King to extirpate
the Papists." Probably Shakespeare still held beliefs of a
superstitious kind about comets. It was only when they were
found to obey the law of gravitation, and when some at least
were found to have calculable orbits, that educated men in
general ceased to regard them as portents.

It was in the time of Charles II that scientific rejection of
traditional superstitions became common among educated
men. Charles II perceived that science could be an ally
against the "fanatics," as those who regretted Cromwell
were called. He founded the Royal Society, and made science
fashionable. Enlightenment spread gradually downwards
from the Court. The House of Commons was as yet by no
means as modern in outlook as the King. After the plague
and the Great Fire, a House of Commons Committee in-
quired into the causes of those misfortunes, which were
generally attributed to divine displeasure, though it was not
clear to what the displeasure was due. The Committee
decided that what most displeased the Lord was the works of
Mr. Thomas Hobbes. It was decreed that no work of his
should be published in England. This measure proved effec-
tive: there has never since been a plague or a Great Fire in
London. But Charles, who liked Hobbes because Hobbes had
taught him mathematics, was annoyed. He, however, was
not thought by Parliament to be on intimate terms with
Providence.

It was at this time that belief in witchcraft began to be
viewed as a superstition. James I was a fanatical persecutor
of witches. Shakespeare's Macbeth was a piece of govern-
ment propaganda, and no doubt the witches in that play made
it more acceptable as a piece of flattery of the monarch. Even

SCIENCE AND TRADITION

Bacon pretended to believe in witchcraft, and made no pro-
test when a Parliament of which he was a member passed a
law increasing the severity of the punishment of witches.
The climax was reached under the Commonwealth, for it
was especially Puritans who believed in the power of Satan.
It was partly for this reason that Charles IPs government,
while not yet venturing to deny the possibility of witchcraft,
was much less zealous in searching it out than its predecessors
had been. The last witchcraft trial in England was in 1664,
when Sir Thomas Browne was a witness against the witch.
The laws against it gradually fell into abeyance, and were
repealed in 1736 — though, as late as 1768, John Wesley
continued to support the old superstition. In Scotland the
superstition lingered longer: the last conviction was in 1722.

The victory of humanity and common sense in this matter
was almost entirely due to the spread of the scientific out-
look — not to any definite argument, but to the impossibility
of the whole way of thinking that had been natural before the
age of rationalism that began in the time of Charles II, partly,
it must be confessed, as a revolt against a too rigid moral
code

Scientific medicine had, at first, to combat superstitions
similar to those that inspired belief in witchcraft. When
Vesalius first practiced dissection of corpses, the Church was
horrified. He was saved from persecution, for a time, by the
Emperor Charles V, who was a valetudinarian, and believed
that no other physician could keep him in health. But after the
Emperor died, Vesalius was accused of cutting people up
before they were dead. He was ordered, as a penance, to go
on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land; he was shipwrecked, and
died of exposure. In spite of his work and that of Hervey and
other great men, medicine continued to be largely supersti-

6 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

tious. Insanity, in particular, was thought to be due to posses-
sion by evil spirits, and was therefore treated by subjecting
the insane to cruelties which it was hoped the demons would
dislike. George III, when mad, was still treated on this
principle. The ignorance of the general public continued even
longer. An aunt of mine, when her husband quarreled with
the War Office, was afraid that the worry would cause him
to develop typhus. It is hardly till the time of Lister and
Pasteur that medicine can be said to have become scientific.
The diminution of human suffering owing to the advances in
medicine is beyond all calculation.

Out of the work of the great men of the seventeenth cen-
tury a new outlook on the world was developed, and it was
this outlook, not specific arguments, which brought about the
decay of the belief in portents, witchcraft, demoniacal pos-
session, and so forth. I think there were three ingredients in
the scientific outlook of the eighteenth century that were
specially important:

(i) Statements of fact should be based on observation, not
on unsupported authority.

(2) The inanimate world is a self-acting, self-perpetuating
system, in which all changes conform to natural laws.

(3) The earth is not the center of the universe, and
probably Man is not its purpose (if any); moreover,
"purpose" is a concept which is scientifically useless.

These items make up what is called the "mechanistic out-
look," which clergymen denounce. It led to the cessation of
persecution and to a generally humane attitude. It is now less
accepted than it was, and persecution has revived. To those

SCIENCE AND TRADITION 7

who regard its effects as morally pernicious, I commend
attention to these facts.

Something must be said about each of the above ingredients
of the mechanistic outlook.

(1) Observation versus Authority: To modern educated
people, it seems obvious that matters of fact are to be ascer-
tained by observation, not by consulting ancient authorities.
But this is an entirely modern conception, which hardly
existed before the seventeenth century. Aristotle maintained
that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was
twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this state-
ment by examining his wives' mouths. He said also that chil-
dren will be healthier if conceived when the wind is in the
north. One gathers that the two Mrs. Aristotles both had
to run out and look at the weathercock every evening before
going to bed. He states that a man bitten by a mad dog will
not go mad, but any other animal will (Hist. An. 704a) ; that
the bite of the shrewmouse is dangerous to horses, especially if
the mouse is pregnant (ibid., 604^) ; that elephants suffering
from insomnia can be cured by rubbing their shoulders with
salt, olive oil, and warm water (ibid., 605a) ; and so on and so
on. Nevertheless, classical dons, who have never observed
any animal except the cat and the dog, continue to praise
Aristotle for his fidelity to observation.

The conquest of the East by Alexander caused an immense
influx of superstition into the Hellenistic world. This was
particularly notable as regards astrology, which almost all
later pagans believed in. The Church condemned it, not on
scientific grounds, but because it implied subjection to Fate.
There is, however, in St. Augustine, a scientific argument
against astrology quoted from one of the rare pagan skeptics.

8 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

The argument is that twins often have very different careers,
which they ought not to have if astrology were true.

At the time of the Renaissance, belief in astrology became
a mark of the free thinker: it must be true, he thought, be-
cause the Church condemned it. Free thinkers were not yet
any more scientific than their opponents in the matter of
appeal to observable facts.

Most of us still believe many things that in fact have no
basis except in the assertions of the ancients. I was always
told that ostriches eat nails, and, though I wondered how they
found them in the Bush, it did not occur to me to doubt the
story. At last I discovered that it comes from Pliny, and has
no truth whatever.

Some things are believed because people feel as if they
must be true, and in such cases an immense weight of evi-
dence is necessary to dispel the belief. Maternal impressions
are a case in point. It is supposed that any notable impression
on the mother during gestation will affect the offspring. This
notion has scriptural warrant: you will remember how Jacob
secured speckled kine. If you ask any woman who is not a
scientist or an associate of scientists, she will overwhelm
you with incidents in proof of the superstition. Why, there
was Mrs. So-and-So, who saw a fox caught in a trap, and
sure enough her child was born with a fox's foot. Did you
know Mrs. So-and-So? No, but my friend Mrs. Such-and-
Such did. So, if you are persistent, you ask Mrs. Such-and-
Such, who says: "Oh no, /didn't know Mrs. So-and-So, but
Mrs. What's-Her-Name did." You may spend a lifetime in
the pursuit of Mrs. So-and-So, but you will never catch up
with her. She is a myth.

The same situation occurs in regard to the inheritance of
acquired characters. There is such a strong impulse to be-

SCIENCE AND TRADITION

lieve in this that biologists have the greatest difficulty in
persuading people of the contrary. In Russia they have failed
to convince Stalin, and have been compelled to give up being
scientific in this matter.

When Galileo's telescope revealed Jupiter's moons, the
orthodox refused to look through it, because they knew there
could not be such bodies, and therefore the telescope must be
deceptive.

Respect for observation as opposed to tradition is difficult
and (one might almost say) contrary to human nature.
Science insists upon it, and this insistence was the source of
the most desperate battles between science and authority.
There are still a great many respects in which the lesson has
not been learned. Few people can be convinced that an
obnoxious habit — e.g. exhibitionism — cannot be cured by
punishment. It is pleasant to punish those who shock us, and
we do not like to admit that indulgence in this pleasure is not
always socially desirable.

(2) The autonomy of the physical world: Perhaps the most
powerful solvent of the pre-scientific outlook has been the
first law of motion, which the world owes to Galileo, though
to some extent he was anticipated by Leonardo da Vinci.

The first law of motion says that a body which is moving
will go on moving in the same direction with the same
velocity until something stops it. Before Galileo it had been
thought that a lifeless body will not move of itself, and if it is
in motion it will gradually come to rest. Only living beings,
it was thought, could move without help of some external
agency. Aristotle thought that the heavenly bodies were
pushed by gods. Here on earth, animals can set themselves in
motion and |can cause motion in dead matter. There are,
it was conceded, certain kinds of motion which are "natural"

IO

THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

to dead matter: earth and water naturally move downwards,
air and fire upwards; but beyond these simple "natural"
motions everything depends upon impulsion from the souls
of living beings.

So long as this view prevailed, physics as an independent
science was impossible, since the physical world was thought
to be not causally self-contained. But Galileo and Newton
between them proved that all the movements of the planets,
and of dead matter on the earth, proceed according to the
laws of physics, and once started, will continue indefinitely.
There is no need of mind in this process. Newton still
thought that a Creator was necessary to get the process
going, but that after that He left it to work according to its
own laws.

Descartes held that not only dead matter, but the bodies of
animals also, are wholly governed by the laws of physics.
Probably only theology restrained him from saying the same
of human bodies. In the eighteenth century French free
thinkers took this further step. In their view, the relation of
mind and matter was the antithesis of what Aristotle and the
scholastics had supposed. For Aristotle, first causes were
always mental, as when an engine driver starts a freight train
moving and the impulsion communicates itself from truck to
truck. Eighteenth-century materialists, on the contrary,
considered all causes material, and thought of mental occur-
rences as inoperative by-products.

(3) The dethronement of "purpose''': Aristotle maintained
that causes are of four kinds; modern science admits only one
of the four. Two of Aristotle's four need not concern us; the
two that do concern us are the "efficient" and the "final"
cause. The "efficient" cause is what we should call simply
"the cause"; the "final" cause is the purpose. In human
affairs this distinction has validity. Suppose you find a restau-

SCIENCE AND TRADITION

II

rant at the top of a mountain. The "efficient" cause is the
carrying up of the materials and the arranging of them in the
pattern of a house. The "final" cause is to satisfy the hunger
and thirst of tourists. In human affairs, the question "why?"
is more naturally answered, as a rule, by assigning the final
cause than by setting out the efficient cause. If you ask "why
is there a restaurant here?" the natural answer is "because
many hungry and thirsty people come this way." But the
answer by final cause is only appropriate where human
volitions are involved. If you ask "why do many people die of
cancer?" you will get no clear answer, but the answer you
want is one assigning the efficient cause.

This ambiguity in the word "why" led Aristotle to his
distinction of efficient and final causes. He thought — and
many people still think— that both kinds are to be found
everywhere: whatever exists may be explained, on the one
hand, by the antecedent events that have produced it, and, on
the other hand, by the purpose that it serves. But although it
is still open to the philosopher or theologian to hold that
everything has a "purpose," it has been found that "purpose"
is not a useful concept when we are in search of scientific
laws. We are told in the Bible that the moon was made to
give light by night. But men of science, however pious, do not
regard this as a scientific explanation of the origin of the
moon. Or, to revert to the question about cancer, a man of
science may believe, in his private capacity, that cancer is
sent as a punishment for our sins, but qua man of science he
must ignore this point of view. We know of "purpose" in
human affairs, and we may suppose that there are cosmic
purposes, but in science it is the past that determines the
future, not the future the past. "Final" causes, therefore, do
not occur in the scientific account of the world.

In this connection Darwin's work was decisive. What

12

THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

Galileo and Newton had done for astronomy, Darwin did for
biology. The adaptations of animals and plants to their
environments were a favorite theme of pious naturalists in
the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These adapta-
tions were explained by the Divine Purpose. It is true that the
explanation was sometimes a little odd. If rabbits were
theologians, they might think the exquisite adaptation of
weasels to the killing of rabbits hardly a matter for thankful-
ness. And there was a conspiracy of silence about the tape-
worm. Nevertheless, it was difficult, before Darwin, to
explain the adaptation of living things to their environment
otherwise than by means of the Creator's purposes.

It was not the fact of evolution, but the Darwinian
mechanism of the struggle for existence and the survival of
the fittest, that made it possible to explain adaptation without
bringing in "purpose." Random variation and natural selection
use only efficient causes. This is why many men who accept
the general fact of evolution do not accept Darwin's view as
to how it comes about. Samuel Butler, Bergson, Shaw, and
Lysenko will not accept the dethronement of purpose —
though in the case of Lysenko it is not God's purpose, but
Stalin's, that governs heredity in winter wheat.

(4) Man's place in the universe: The effect of science upon
our view of man's place in the universe has been of two
opposite kinds; it has at once degraded and exalted him. It
has degraded him from the standpoint of contemplation, and
exalted him from that of action. The latter effect has gradu-
ally come to outweigh the former, but both have been im-
portant. I will begin with the contemplative effect.

To get this effect with its full impact, you should read
simultaneously Dante's Divine Comedy and Hubble on the
Realm of the Nebulae — in each case with active imagination

SCIENCE AND TRADITION 13

and with full receptiveness to the cosmos that they portray.
In Dante, the earth is the center of the universe; there are
ten concentric spheres, all revolving about the earth; the
wicked, after death, are punished at the center of the earth;
the comparatively virtuous are purged on the Mount of
Purgatory at the antipodes of Jerusalem; the good, when
purged, enjoy eternal bliss in one or other of the spheres,
according to the degree of their merit. The universe is tidy
and small: Dante visits all the spheres in the course of
twenty-four hours. Everything is contrived in relation to
man: to punish sin and reward virtue. There are no myster-
ies, no abysses, no secrets; the whole thing is like a child's
doll's house, with people as the dolls. But although the people
were dolls they were important because they interested the
Owner of the doll's house.

The modern universe is a very different sort of place.
Since the victory of the Copernican system we have known
that the earth is not the center of the universe. For a time the
sun replaced it, but then it turned out that the sun is by no
means a monarch among stars, in fact, is scarcely even middle
class. There is an incredible amount of empty space in the
universe. The distance from the sun to the nearest star is
about 4- 2 light years, or 25 X 10 12 miles. This is in spite of
the fact that we live in an exceptionally crowded part of the
universe, namely the Milky Way, which is an assemblage of
about 300,000 million stars. This assemblage is one of an
immense number of similar assemblages; about 30 million
are known, but presumably better telescopes would show
more. The average distance from one assemblage to the next
is about 2 million light years. But apparently they still feel
they haven't elbow room, for they are all hurrying away from
each other; some are moving away from us at the rate of

14 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

14,000 miles a second or more. The most distant of them so
far observed are believed to be at a distance from us of about
500 million light years, so that what we see is what they
were 500 million years ago. And as to mass: the sun weighs
about 2 X 10 27 tons, the Milky Way about 160,000 million
times as much as the sun, and is one of a collection of galaxies
of which about 30 million are known. It is not easy to main-
tain a belief in one's own cosmic importance in view of such
overwhelming statistics.

So much for the contemplative aspect of man's place in a
scientific cosmos. I come now to the practical aspect.

To the practical man, the nebulae are a matter of indiffer-
ence. He can understand astronomers' thinking about them,
because they are paid to, but there is no reason why he should
worry about anything so unimportant. What matters to him
about the world is what he can make of it. And scientific man
can make vastly more of the world than unscientific man
could.

In the pre-scientific world, power was God's. There was
not much that man could do even in the most favorable cir-
cumstances, and the circumstances were liable to become un-
favorable if men incurred the divine displeasure. This
showed itself in earthquakes, pestilences, famines, and de-
feats in war. Since such events are frequent, it was obviously
very easy to incur divine displeasure. Judging by the analogy
of earthly monarchs, men decided that the thing most dis-
pleasing to the Deity is a lack of humility. If you wished to
slip through life without disaster, you must be meek; you
must be aware of your defenselessness, and constantly ready
to confess it. But the God before whom you humbled your-
self was conceived in the likeness of man, so that the universe
seemed human and warm and cozy, like home if you are the

SCIENCE AND TRADITION

youngest of a large family, painful at times, but never alien
and incomprehensible.

In the scientific world, all this is different. It is not by
prayer and humility that you cause things to go as you wish,
but by acquiring a knowledge of natural laws. The power you
acquire in this way is much greater and much more reliable
that that formerly supposed to be acquired by prayer, be-
cause you never could tell whether your prayer would be
favorably heard in heaven. The power of prayer, moreover,
had recognized limits; it would have been impious to ask too
much. But the power of science has no known limits. We
were told that faith could remove mountains, but no one
believed it; we are now told that the atomic bomb can remove
mountains, and everyone believes it.

It is true that if we ever did stop to think about the cosmos
we might find it uncomfortable. The sun may grow cold or
blow up; the earth may lose its atmosphere and become
uninhabitable. Life is a brief, small, and transitory phenome-
non in an obscure corner, not at all the sort of thing that one
would make a fuss about if one were not personally con-
cerned. But it is monkish and futile — so scientific man will
say — to dwell on such cold and unpractical thoughts. Let us
get on with the job of fertilizing the desert, melting Arctic
ice, and killing each other with perpetually improving tech-
nique. Some of our activities will do good, some harm, but all
alike will show our power. And so, in this godless universe,
we shall become gods.

Darwinism has had many effects upon man's outlook on
life and the world, in addition to the extrusion of purpose of
which I have already spoken. The absence of any sharp line
between men and apes is very awkward for theology. When
did men get souls? Was the Missing Link capable of sin and

l6 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

therefore worthy of hell? Did Pithecanthropus Erectus have
moral responsibility? Was Homo Pekiniensis damned? Did
Piltdown Man go to heaven? Any answer must be arbitrary.

But Darwinism — especially when crudely misinterpreted
— threatened not only theological orthodoxy but also the
creed of eighteenth-century liberalism. Condorcet was a
typical liberal philosopher of the eighteenth century; Mal-
thus developed his theory to refute Condorcet; and Darwin's
theory was suggested by Malthus's. Eighteenth-century
liberals had a conception of man as absolute, in its way, as
that of the theologians. There were the "Rights of Man";
all men were equal; if one showed more ability than another,
that was due entirely to a better education, as James Mill
told his son to prevent him from becoming conceited.

We must ask again: Should Pithecanthropus, if still alive,
enjoy "The Rights of Man"? Would Homo Pekiniensis have
been the equal of Newton if he could have gone to Cam-
bridge? Was the Piltdown Man just as intelligent as the
present inhabitants of that Sussex village? If you answer all
all these questions in the democratic sense, you can be pushed
back to the anthropoid apes, and if you stick to your guns,
you can be driven back ultimately on to the amoeba, which is
absurd (to quote Euclid) . You must therefore admit that men
are not all congenitally equal, and that evolution proceeds by
selecting favorable variations. You must admit that heredity
has a part in producing a good adult, and that education is not
the only factor to be considered. If men are to be convention-
ally equal politically, it must be not because they are really
equal biologically, but for some more specifically political
reason. Such reflections have endangered political liberalism,
though not, to my mind, justly.

The admission that men are not all equal in congenital

SCIENCE AND TRADITION

J 7

endowment becomes dangerous when some group is singled
out as superior or inferior. If you say that the rich are abler
than the poor, or men than women, or white men than black
men, or Germans than men of any other nation, you proclaim
a doctrine which has no support in Darwinism, and which is
almost certain to lead to either slavery or war. But such
doctrines, however unwarrantable, have been proclaimed in
the name of Darwinism. So has the ruthless theory that the
weakest should be left to go to the wall, since this is Nature's
method of progress. If it is by the struggle for existence that
the race is improved — so say the devotees of this creed— let
us welcome wars, the more destructive the better. And so we
come back to Heraclitus, the first of fascists, who said:
"Homer was wrong in saying 'would that strife might
perish from among gods and men.' He did not see that he was
praying for the destruction of the universe. . . . War is
common to all, and strife is justice. . . . War is the father
of all and king of all; and some he has made gods and some
men, some bond and some free."

It would be odd if the last effect of science were to revive a
philosophy dating from 500 b.c. This was to some extent
true of Nietzsche and of the Nazis, but it is not true of any
of the groups now powerful in the world. What is true is that
science has immensely increased the sense of human power.
But this effect is more closely connected with science as
technique than with science as philosophy. In this chapter I
have tried to confine myself to science as a philosophy,
leaving science as technique for later chapters. After we have
have considered science as technique I shall return to the
philosophy of human power that it has seemed to suggest. I
cannot accept this philosophy, which I believe to be very
dangerous. But of that I will not speak yet.

CHAPTER II

General Effects of
Scientific Technique

Science, ever since the time of the Arabs, has had two
functions:, (i) to enable us to know things, and (2)
to enable us to do things. The Greeks, with the ex-
ception of Archimedes, were only interested in the first of
these. They had much curiosity about the world, but, since
civilized people lived comfortably on slave labor, they had
no interest in technique. Interest in the practical uses of
science came first through superstition and magic. The
Arabs wished to discover the philosopher's stone, the elixir
of life, and how to transmute base metals into gold. In pur-
suing investigations having these purposes, they discovered
many facts in chemistry, but they did not arrive at any valid
and important general laws, and their technique remained
elementary.

However, in the late Middle Ages two discoveries were
made which had a profound importance: they were gun-
powder and the mariner's compass. It is not known who
made these discoveries— the only thing certain is that it was
not Roger Bacon.

The main importance of gunpowder, at first, was that it

18

EFFECTS OF SCIENTIFIC TECHNIQUE 19

enabled central governments to subdue rebellious barons.
Magna Carta would have never been won if John had pos-
sessed artillery. But although in this instance we may side
with the barons against the king, in general the Middle Ages
suffered from anarchy, and what was needed was a way of
establishing order and respect for law. At that time, only
royal power could achieve this. The barons had depended
upon their castles, which could not stand against guns. That
is why the Tudors were more powerful than earlier kings.
And the same kind of change occurred at the same time in
France and Spain. The modern power of the State began in
the late fifteenth century and began as a result of gunpowder.
From that day to this, the authority of States has increased,
and throughout it has been mainly improvement in weapons
of war that has made the increase possible. This development
was begun by Henry VII, Louis XI, and Ferdinand and
Isabella. It was artillery that enabled them to succeed.

The mariner's compass was equally important. It made
possible the age of discovery. The New World was opened
to white colonists; the route to the East round Cape of Good
Hope made possible the conquest of India, and brought
about important contacts between Europe and China. The
importance of sea power was enormously increased, and
through sea power Western Europe came to dominate the
world. It is only in the present century that this domination
has come to an end.

Nothing of equal importance occurred in the way of new
scientific technique until the age of steam and the industrial
revolution. The atom bomb has caused many people during
the last seven years to think that scientific technique may be
carried too far. But there is nothing new in this. The indus-
trial revolution caused unspeakable misery both in England

20

THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

and in America. I do not think any student of economic his-
tory can doubt that the average of happiness in England in
the early nineteenth century was lower than it had been a
hundred years earlier; and this was due almost entirely to
scientific technique.

Let us consider cotton, which was the most important
example of early industrialization. In the Lancashire cotton
mills (from which Marx and Engels derived their livelihood) ,
children worked from twelve to sixteen hours a day; they
often began working at the age of six or seven. Children had
to be beaten to keep them from falling asleep while at work;
in spite of this, many failed to keep awake and rolled into the
machinery, by which they were mutilated or killed. Parents
had to submit to the infliction of these atrocities upon their
children, because they themselves were in a desperate plight.
Handicraftsmen had been thrown out of work by the ma-
chines; rural laborers were compelled to migrate to the
towns by the Enclosure Acts, which used Parliament to
make landowners richer by making peasants destitute; trade
unions were illegal until 1824; the government employed
agents provocateurs to try to get revolutionary sentiments out
of wage-earners, who were then deported or hanged.

Such was the first effect of machinery in England.

Meanwhile the effects in the United States had been
equally disastrous.

At the time of the War of Independence, and for some
years after its close, the Southern States were quite willing
to contemplate the abolition of slavery in the near future.
Slavery in the North and West was abolished by a unanimous
vote in 1787, and Jefferson, not without reason, hoped to see
it abolished in the South. But in the year 1793 Whitney in-
vented the cotton gin, which enabled a Negro to clean fifty

EFFECTS OF SCIENTIFIC TECHNIQUE

21

pounds of fiber a day instead of only one, as formerly.
"Laborsaving" devices in England had caused children to
have to work fifteen hours a day; "laborsaving" devices in
America inflicted upon slaves a life of toil far more severe
than what they had to endure before Mr. Whitney's inven-
tion. The slave trade having been abolished in 1808, the
immense increase in the cultivation of cotton after that date
had to be made possible by importing Negroes from the less
southerly States in which cotton could not be grown. The
deep South was unhealthy, and the slaves on the cotton
plantations were cruelly overworked. The less Southern
slave States thus became breeding-grounds for the profitable
Southern graveyards. A peculiarly revolting aspect of the
traffic was that a white man who owned female slaves could
beget children by them, who were his slaves, and whom,
when he needed cash, he could sell to the plantations, to
become (in all likelihood) victims of hookworm, malaria, or
yellow fever.

The ultimate outcome was the Civil War, which would
almost certainly not have occurred if the cotton industry had
remained unscientific.

There were also results in other continents. Cotton goods
could find a market in India and Africa; this was a stimulus
to British imperialism. Africans had to be taught that nudity
is wicked; this was done very cheaply by missionaries. In
addition to cotton goods we exported tuberculosis and
syphilis, but for them there was no charge.

I have dwelt upon the case of cotton because I want to
emphasize that evils due to a new scientific technique are no
new thing. The evils I have been speaking of ceased in time:
child labor was abolished in England, slavery was abolished
in America, imperialism is now at an end in India. The evils

22

THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

that persist in Africa have now nothing to do with cotton.

Steam, which was one of the most important elements in
the industrial revolution, had its most distinctive sphere of
operation in transport — steamers and railways. The really
large-scale effects of steam transportation did not develop
fully till after the middle of the nineteenth century, when
they led to the opening of the Middle West of America and
the use of its grain to feed the industrial populations of
England and New England. This led to a very general in-
crease of prosperity, and had more to do than any other
single cause with Victorian optimism. It made possible a
very rapid increase in population in every civilized country
— except France, where the Code Napoleon had prevented it
by decreeing equal division of a man's property among all his
children, and where a majority were peasant proprietors
owning very little land.

This development was not attended with the evils of early
industrialism, chiefly, I think, because of the abolition of
slavery and the growth of democracy. Irish peasants and
Russian serfs, who were not self-governing, continued to
suffer. Cotton operatives would have continued to suffer if
English landowners had been strong enough to defeat Cobden
and Bright.

The next important stage in the development of scientific
technique is connected with electricity and oil and the inter-
nal-combustion engine.

Long before the use of electricity as a source of power, it
was used in the telegraph. This had two important con-
sequences: first, messages could now travel faster than
human beings; secondly, in large organizations detailed con-
trol from a center became much more possible than it had
formerly been.

EFFECTS OF SCIENTIFIC TECHNIQUE

23

The fact that messages could travel faster than human
beings was useful, above all, to the police. Before the
telegraph, a highwayman on a galloping horse could escape
to a place where his crime had not yet been heard of, and this
made it very much harder to catch him. Unfortunately, how-
ever, the men whom the police wish to catch are frequently
benefactors of mankind. If the telegraph had existed, Polyc-
rates would have caught Pythagoras, the Athenian govern-
ment would have caught Anaxagoras, the Pope would have
caught William of Occam, and Pitt would have caught Tom
Paine when he fled to France in 1792. A large proportion of
the best Germans and Russians have suffered under Hitler
and Stalin; many more would have escaped but for the rapid
transmission of messages. The increased power of the police
therefore, is not wholly a gain.

Increase of central control is an even more important con-
sequence of the telegraph. In ancient empires satraps or
proconsuls in distant provinces could rebel, and had time to
entrench themselves before the central government knew of
their disaffection. When Constantine proclaimed himself
Emperor at York and marched on Rome, he was almost under
the walls of the city before the Roman authorities knew he
was coming. Perhaps if the telegraph had existed in those
days the Western world would not now be Christian. In the
War of 18 1 2, the battle of New Orleans was fought after
peace had been concluded, but neither army was aware of the
fact. Before the telegraph, ambassadors had an independence
which they have now completely lost, because they had to
be allowed a free hand if swift action was necessary in a
crisis.

It was not only in relation to government, but wherever
organizations covering large areas were concerned, that the

24 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

telegraph effected a transformation. Read, for instance, in
Hakluyt's Voyages, the accounts of attempts to foster trade
with Russia that were made by English commercial interests
in the time of Elizabeth. All that could be done was to choose
an energetic and tactful emissary, give him letters, goods,
money, and leave him to make what headway he could.
Contact with his employers was possible only at long inter-
vals, and their instructions could never be up to date.

The effect of the telegraph was to increase the power of
the central government and diminish the initiative of distant
subordinates. This applied not only to the State, but to every
geographically extensive organization. We shall find that a
great deal of scientific technique has a similar effect. The
result is that fewer men have executive power, but those
few have more power than such men had formerly.

In all these respects, broadcasting has completed what the
telegraph began.

Electricity as a source of power is much more recent than
the telegraph, and has not yet had all the effects of which
it is capable. As an influence on social organization its
most notable feature is the importance of power stations,
which inevitably promote centralization. The philosophers of
Laputa could reduce a rebellious dependency to submission
by interposing their floating island between the rebels and
the sun. Something very analogous can be done by those who
control power stations, as soon as a community has become
dependent upon them for lighting and heating and cooking. I
lived in America in a farmhouse which depended entirely
upon electricity, and sometimes, in a blizzard, the wires
would be blown down. The resulting inconvenience was
almost intolerable. If we had been deliberately cut off for
being rebels, we should soon have had to give in.

EFFECTS OF SCIENTIFIC TECHNIQUE 2£

The importance of oil and the internal-combustion engine
in our present technique is obvious to everybody. For
technical reasons, it is advantageous if oil companies are very
large, since otherwise they cannot afford such things as long
pipe lines. The importance of oil companies in the politics of
the last thirty years has been very generally recognized.
This applies especially to the Middle East and Indonesia. Oil
is a serious source of friction between the West and the
U.S.S.R., and tends to generate friendliness towards com-
munism in some regions that are strategically important to
the West.

But what is of most importance in this connection is the
development of flying. Airplanes have increased immeas-
urably the power of governments. No rebellion can hope to
succeed unless it is favored by at least a portion of the air
force. Not only has air warfare increased the power of
governments, but it has increased the disproportion between
great and small Powers. Only great Powers can afford a large
air force, and no small Power can stand out against a great
Power which has secure air supremacy.

This brings me to the most recent technical application of
physical knowledge — I mean the utilization of atomic en-
ergy. It is not yet possible to estimate its peaceful uses.
Perhaps it will become a source of power for certain pur-
poses, thus carrying further the concentration at present rep-
resented by power stations. Perhaps it will be used as the
Soviet Government says it intends to use it — to alter physical
geography by abolishing mountains and turning deserts into
lakes. But as far as can be judged at present, atomic energy
is not likely to be as important in peace as in war.

War has been, throughout history, the chief source of
social cohesion; and since science began, it has been the

l6 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

strongest incentive to technical progress. Large groups have
a better chance of victory than small ones, and therefore the
usual result of war is to make States larger. In any given
state of technique there is a limit to size. The Roman Empire
-was stopped by German forests and African deserts; the
British conquests in India were halted by the Himalayas;
Napoleon was defeated by the Russian winter. And before
the telegraph large empires tended to break up because they
could not be effectively controlled from a center.

Communications have been hitherto the chief factor limit-
ing the size of empires. In antiquity the Persians and the
Romans depended upon roads, but since nothing traveled
faster than a horse, empires became unmanageable when the
distance from the capital to the frontier was very great. This
difficulty was diminished by railways and the telegraph, and
is on the point of disappearing with the improvement of
the long-range bomber. There would now be no technical
difficulty about a single world-wide Empire. Since war is
likely to become more destructive of human life than it has
been in recent centuries, unification under a single govern-
ment is probably necessary unless we are to acquiesce in
cither a return to barbarism or the extinction of the human

race.

There is, it must be confessed, a psychological difficulty
about a single world government. The chief source of social
cohesion in the past, I repeat, has been war: the passions
that inspire a feeling of unity are hate and fear. These de-
pend upon the existence of an enemy, actual or potential. It
seems to follow that a world government could only be kept
in being by force, not by the spontaneous loyalty that now
inspires a nation at war. I will return to this problem at a
later stage.

EFFECTS OF SCIENTIFIC TECHNIQUE

27

So far, I have been considering only techniques derived
from physics and chemistry. These have, up to the present,
been the most important, but biology, physiology, and psy-
chology are likely in the long run to affect human life quite
as much as physics and chemistry.

Take first the question of food and population. At present
the population of the globe is increasing at the rate of about
20 millions a year. Most of this increase is in Russia and
Southeast Asia. The population of Western Europe and
the United States is nearly stationary. Meanwhile, the food
supply of the world as a whole threatens to diminish, as a
result of unwise methods of cultivation and destruction of
forests. This is an explosive situation. Left to itself, it must
lead to a food shortage and thence to a world war. Technique,
however, makes other issues possible.

Vital statistics in the West are dominated by medicine
and birth control: the one diminishes the deaths, the other
the births. The result is that the average age in the West
increases: there is a smaller percentage of young people and
a larger percentage of old people. Some people consider that
this must have unfortunate results, but speaking as an old
person, I am not sure.

The danger of a world shortage of food may be averted
for a time by improvements in the technique of agriculture.
But, if population continues to increase at the present rate,
such improvements cannot long suffice. There will then be
two groups, one poor with an increasing population, the
other rich with a stationary population. Such a situation can
hardly fail to lead to world war. If there is not to be an
endless succession of wars, population will have to become
stationary throughout the world, and this will probably have
to be done, in many countries, as a result of governmental

28 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

measures. This will require an extension of scientific tech-
nique into very intimate matters. There are, however, two
other possibilities. War may become so destructive that, at
any rate for a time, there is no danger of overpopulation; or
the scientific nations may be defeated and anarchy may de-
stroy scientific technique.

Biology is likely to affect human life through the study of
heredity. Without science, men have changed domestic
animals and food plants enormously in advantageous ways.
It may be assumed that they will change them much more,
and much more quickly, by bringing the science of genetics
to bear. Perhaps, even, it may become possible artificially to
induce desirable mutations in genes. (Hitherto the only muta-
tions that can be artificially caused are neutral or harmful.)
In any case, it is pretty certain that scientific technique will
very soon effect great improvements in the animals and
plants that are useful to man.

When such methods of modifying the congenital character
of animals and plants have been pursued long enough to make
their success obvious, it is probable that there will be a
powerful movement for applying scientific methods to human
propagation. There would at first be strong religious and
emotional obstacles to the adoption of such a policy. But sup-
pose (say) Russia were able to overcome these obstacles
and to breed a race stronger, more intelligent, and more
resistant to disease than any race of men that has hitherto
existed, and suppose the other nations perceived that unless
they followed suit they would be defeated in war, then either
the other nations would voluntarily forgo their prejudices, or,
after defeat, they would be compelled to forgo them. Any
scientific technique, however beastly, is bound to spread if
it is useful in war— until such time as men decide that they

EFFECTS OF SCIENTIFIC TECHNIQUE 29

have had enough of war and will henceforth live in peace. As
that day does not seem to be at hand, scientific breeding of
human beings must be expected to come about. I shall return
to this subject in a later chapter.

Physiology and psychology afford fields for scientific tech-
nique which still await development. Two great men, Pavlov
and Freud, have laid the foundation. I do not accept the view
that they are in any essential conflict, but what structure
will be built on their foundations is still in doubt.

I think the subject which will be of most importance polit-
ically is mass psychology. Mass psychology is, scientifically
speaking, not a very advanced study, and so far its professors
have not been in universities: they have been advertisers,
politicians, and, above all, dictators. This study is immensely
useful to practical men, whether they wish to become rich
or to acquire the government. It is, of course, as a science,
founded upon individual psychology, but hitherto it has
employed rule-of-thumb methods which were based upon a
kind of intuitive common sense. Its importance has been
enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of
propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called
"education." Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one;
the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part.

What is essential in mass psychology is the art of per-
suasion. If you compare a speech of Hitler's with a speech of
(say) Edmund Burke, you will see what strides have been
made in the art since the eighteenth century. What went
wrong formerly was that people had read in books that man
is a rational animal, and framed their arguments on this
hypothesis. We now know that limelight and a brass band
do more to persuade than can be done by the most elegant
train of syllogisms. It may be hoped that in time anybody

3°

THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch
the patient young and is provided by the State with money
and equipment.

This subject will make great strides when it is taken up
by scientists under a scientific dictatorship. Anaxagoras
maintained that snow is black, but no one believed him.
The social psychologists of the future will have a number of
classes of school children on whom they will try different
methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is
black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First, that the
influence of home is obstructive. Second, that not much can
be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten.
Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are
very effective. Fourth, that the opinion that snow is white
must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity. But I
anticipate. It is for future scientists to make these maxims
precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to
make children believe that snow is black, and how much less
it would cost to make them believe it is dark gray.

Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be
rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will
not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated.
When the technique has been perfected, every government
that has been in charge of education for a generation will be
able to control its subjects securely without the need of
armies or policemen. As yet there is only one country which
has succeeded in creating this politician's paradise.

The social effects of scientific technique have already been
many and important, and are likely to be even more note-
worthy in the future. Some of these effects depend upon the
political and economic character of the country concerned;
others are inevitable, whatever this character may be. I

EFFECTS OF SCIENTIFIC TECHNIQUE

3*

propose in this chapter to consider only the inevitable

effects.

The most obvious and inescapable effect of scientific tech-
nique is that it makes society more organic, in the sense of
increasing the interdependence of its various parts. In the
sphere of production, this has two forms. There is first the
very intimate interconnection of individuals engaged in a
common enterprise, e.g. in a single factory; and secondly
there is the relation, less intimate but still essential, between
one enterprise and another. Each of these becomes more
important with every advance in scientific technique.

A peasant in an unindustrialized country may produce
almost all his own food by means of very inexpensive tools.
These tools, some of his clothes, and a few things such as salt
are all that he needs to buy. His relations with the outer
world are thus reduced to a minimum. So long as he produces,
with the help of his wife and children, a little more food than
the family requires, he can enjoy almost complete independ-
ence, though at the cost of hardship and poverty. But in a
time of famine he goes hungry, and probably most of his
children die. His liberty is so dearly bought that few civilized
men would change places with him. This was the lot of
most of the population of civilized countries till the rise of
industrialism.

Although the peasant's lot is in any case a hard one, it is
apt to be rendered harder by one or both of two enemies: the
moneylender and the landowner. In any history of any pe-
riod, you will find roughly the following gloomy picture:
"At this time the old hardy yeoman stock had fallen upon
evil days. Under threat of starvation from bad harvests, many
of them had borrowed from urban landowners, who had none
of their traditions, their ancient piety, or their patient cour-

32 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

age. Those who had taken this fatal step became, almost in-
evitably, the slaves or serfs of members of the new com-
mercial class. And so the sturdy farmers, who had been the
backbone of the nation, were submerged by supple men who
had the skill to amass new wealth by dubious methods."
You will find substantially this account in the history of
Attica before Solon, of Latium after the Punic Wars, of
England in the early nineteenth century, of Southern Cali-
fornia as depicted in Norris' Octopus, of India under the
British Raj, and of the reasons which have led Chinese
peasants to support communism. The process, however
regrettable, is an unavoidable stage in the integration of
agriculture into a larger economy.

By way of contrast with the primitive peasant, consider
the agrarian interests in modern California or Canada or
Australia or the Argentine. Everything is produced for ex-
port, and the prosperity to be brought by exporting depends
upon such distant matters as war in Europe or Marshall Aid
or the devaluation of the pound. Everything turns on politics,
on whether the Farm Bloc is strong in Washington, whether
there is reason to fear that Argentina may make friends with
Russia, and so on. There may still be nominally independent
farmers, but in fact they are in the power of the vast financial
interests that are concerned in manipulating political issues.
This interdependence is in no degree lessened — perhaps it is
even increased — if the countries concerned are socialist, as,
for example, if the Soviet Government and the British Gov-
ernment make a deal to exchange food for machinery. All
this is the effect of scientific technique in agriculture. Mal-
thus, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, wrote: "In
the wildness of speculation it has been suggested (of course
more in jest than in earnest) that Europe should grow its corn

EFFECTS OF SCIENTIFIC TECHNIQUE 33

in America, and devote itself solely to manufactures and
commerce." It turned out that the speculation was by no
means "wild."

So much for agriculture. In industry, the integration
brought about by scientific technique is much greater and
more intimate.

One of the most obvious results of industrialism is that a
much larger percentage of the population live in towns than
was formerly the case. The town dweller is a more social
being than the agriculturist, and is much more influenced by
discussion. In general, he works in a crowd, and his amuse-
ments are apt to take him into still larger crowds. The course
of nature, the alternations of day and night, summer and
winter, wet or shine, make little difference to him; he has
no occasion to fear that he will be ruined by frost or drought
or sudden rain. What matters to him is his human environ-
ment, and his place in various organizations especially.

Take a man who works in a factory, and consider how
many organizations affect his life. There is first of all the
factory itself, and any larger organization of which it may
be a part. Then there is the man's trade union and his political
party. He probably gets house room from a building society
or public authority. His children go to school. If he reads a
newspaper or goes to a cinema or looks at a football match,
these things are provided by powerful organizations. In-
directly, through his employers, he is dependent upon those
from whom they buy their raw material and those to whom
they sell their finished product. Above all, there is the State,
which taxes him and may at any moment order him to go
and get killed in war, in return for which it protects him
against murder and theft so long as there is peace, and allows
him to buy a fixed modicum of food.

34 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

The capitalist in modern England, as he is never weary of
telling us, is equally hemmed in. Half, or more than half, of
his profits go to a government that he detests. His investing
is severely controlled. He needs permits for everything, and
has to show cause why he should get them. The government
has views as to where he should sell. His raw material may
be very difficult to get, particularly if it comes from a dollar
area. In all dealings with his employees he has to be careful
to avoid stirring up a strike. He is haunted by fear of a slump,
and wonders whether he will be able to keep up the premiums
on his life insurance. He wakes in the night in a cold sweat,
having dreamed that war has broken out and his factory and
his house and his wife and his children have all been wiped
out. But, although his liberty is destroyed by such a multi-
plicity of organizations, he is busy trying to make more of
them: new armed units, Western Union, Atlantic Pact,
lobbies, and fighting unions of manufacturers. In nostalgic
moments he may talk about laisserfaire, but in fact he sees no
hope of safety except in new organizations to fight existing
ones that he dislikes, for he knows that as an isolated unit
he would be powerless, and as an isolated State his country
would be powerless.

The increase of organization has brought into existence
new positions of power. Every body has to have executive
officials, in whom, at any moment, its power is concentrated.
It is true that officials are usually subject to control, but the
control may be slow and distant. From the young lady who
sells stamps in a post office all the way up to the Prime
Minister, every official is invested, for the time being, with
some part of the power of the State. You can complain of
the young lady if her manners are bad, and you can vote
against the Prime Minister at the next election if you dis-

EFFECTS OF SCIENTIFIC TECHNIQUE 35

approve of his policy. But both the young lady and the Prime
Minister can have a very considerable run for their money
before (if ever) your discontent has any effect. This increase
in the power of officials is a constant source of irritation to
everybody else. In most countries they are much less polite
than in England; the police, especially in America for in-
stance, seem to think you must be a rare exception if you are
not a criminal. This tyranny of officials is one of the worst
results of increasing organization, and one against which it
is of the utmost importance to find safeguards if a scientific
society is not to be intolerable to all but an insolent aristoc-
racy of Jacks-in-office. But for the present I am concerned
with description, not with schemes of reform.

The power of officials is, usually, distinct from that of
people who are theoretically in ultimate control. In large
corporations, although the directors are nominally elected
by the shareholders, they usually manage, by various de-
vices, to be in fact self-perpetuating, and to acquire new
directors, when necessary, by co-option more or less dis-
guised as election. In British politics, it is a commonplace
that most Ministers find it impossible to cope with their civil
servants, who in effect dictate policy except on party ques-
tions that have been prominently before the public. In many
countries the armed forces are apt to get out of hand and
defy the civil authorities. Of the police I have already spoken,
but concerning them there is more to be said. In countries
where the communists enter coalition governments, they
always endeavor to make sure of control of the police. When
once this is secured, they can manufacture plots, make ar-
rests, and extort confessions freely. By this means they pass
from being participants in a coalition to being the whole
government. The problem of causing the police to obey the

36 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

law is a very difficult one; it is, for example, very far from
being sslved in America, where confessions are apt to be
extorted by "third degree" from people who may well be
innocent. 1

The increased power of officials is an inevitable result of
the greater degree of organization that scientific technique
brings about. It has the drawback that it is apt to be irre-
sponsible, behind-the-scenes, power, like that of emperors'
eunuchs and kings' mistresses in former times. To dis-
cover ways of controlling it is one of the most important po-
litical problems of our time. Liberals protested, successfully,
against the power of kings and aristocrats; socialists pro-
tested against the power of capitalists. But unless the power
of officials can be kept within bounds, socialism will mean
little more than the substitution of one set of masters for
another: all the former power of the capitalist will be in-
herited by the official. In 1942, when I lived in the country
in America, I had a part-time gardener, who spent the bulk
of his working day making munitions. He told me with
triumph that his union had secured the "closed shop." A
little while later he told me, without triumph, that the
union dues had been raised and that the extra money went
wholly to increase the salary of the secretary of the union.
Owing to what was practically a war situation between
labor and capital, any agitation against the secretary could
be represented as treachery. This little story illustrates the
helplessness of the public against its own officials, even where
there is nominally complete democracy.

One of the drawbacks to the power of officials is that they
are apt to be quite remote from the things they control.

1 See Our Lawless Police, by Ernest Jerome Hopkins, N.Y., Viking
Press.

EFFECTS OF SCIENTIFIC TECHNIQUE 37

What do the men in the Education Office know about educa-
tion? Only what they dimly remember of their public school
and university some twenty or thirty years ago. What does
the Ministry of Agriculture know about mangel-wurzels?
Only how they are spelled. What does the Foreign Office
know about modern China? After I had returned from China
in 1 92 1 , 1 had some dealings with the permanent officials who
determined British Far Eastern policy, and found their igno-
rance unsurpassed except by their conceit. America has in-
vented the phrase "yes-men" for those who flatter great
executives. In England we are more troubled by "no-men,"
who make it their business to employ clever ignorance in
opposing and sabotaging every scheme suggested by those
who have knowledge and imagination and enterprise. I am
afraid our "no-men" are a thousand times more harmful
than the American "yes-men." If we are to recover pros-
perity, we shall have to find ways of emancipating energy
and enterprise from the frustrating control of constitution-
ally timid ignoramuses.

Owing to increase of organization, the question of the
limits of individual liberty needs completely different treat-
ment from that of nineteenth-century writers such as Mill.
The acts of a single man are as a rule unimportant, but
the acts of groups are more important than they used to be.
Take, for example, refusal to work. If one man, on his own
initiative, chooses to be idle, that may be regarded as his
own affair; he loses his wages, and there is an end of the
matter. But if there is a strike in a vital industry, the whole
community suffers. I am not arguing that the right to strike
should be abolished; I am only arguing that, if it is to be
preserved, it must be for reasons concerned with this par-
ticular matter, and not on general grounds of personal

38 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

liberty. In a highly organized country there are many
activities which are important to everybody, and without
which there would be widespread hardship. Matters should
be so arranged that large groups seldom think it to their
interest to strike. This can be done by arbitration and con-
ciliation, or, as under the dictatorship of the proletariat, by
starvation and police action. But in one way or another it
must be done if an industrial society is to prosper.

War is a more extreme case than strikes, but raises very
similar questions of principle. When two men fight a duel,
the matter is trivial, but when 200 million people fight 200
million other people the matter is serious. And with every
increase of organization war becomes more serious. Until
the present century, the great majority of the population,
even in nations engaged in such contests as the Napoleonic
Wars, were still occupied with peaceful pursuits, and as a
rule little disturbed in their ordinary habits of life. Now,
almost everybody, women as well as men, are set to some
kind of war work. The resulting dislocation makes the peace,
when it comes, almost worse than the war. Since the end of
the late war, throughout Central Europe, enormous numbers,
men, women, and children, have died in circumstances of
appalling suffering, and many millions of survivors have
become homeless wanderers, uprooted, without work, with-
out hope, a burden equally to themselves and to those who
feed them. This sort of thing is to be expected when defeat
introduces chaos into highly organized communities.

The right to make war, like the right to strike, but in a far
higher degree, is very dangerous in a world governed by
scientific technique. Neither can be simply abolished, since
that would open the road to tyranny. But in each case it must
be recognized that groups cannot, in the name of freedom,

EFFECTS OF SCIENTIFIC TECHNIQUE 39

justly claim the right to inflict great injuries upon others. As
regards war, the principle of unrestricted national sover-
eignty, cherished by liberals in the nineteenth century and by
the Kremlin in the present day, must be abandoned. Means
must be found of subjecting the relations of nations to the
rule of law, so that a single nation will no longer be, as at
present, the judge in its own cause. If this is not done, the
world will quickly return to barbarism. If that case, scientific
technique will disappear along with science, and men will be
able to go on being quarrelsome because their quarrels will no
longer do much harm. It is, however, just possible that man-
kind may prefer to survive and prosper rather than to perish
in misery, and, if so, national liberty will have to be effec-
tively restrained.

As we have seen, the question of freedom needs a com-
pletely fresh examination. There are forms of freedom that
are desirable, and that are gravely threatened; there are other
forms of freedom that are undesirable, but that are very
difficult to curb. There are two dangers, both rapidly in-
creasing. Within any given organization, the power of
officials, or of what may be called the "government," tends
to become excessive, and to subject individuals to various
forms of tyranny. On the other hand, conflicts between
different organizations become more and more harmful as
organizations acquire more power over their members.
Tyranny within and conflict without are each other's
counterpart. Both spring from the same source: the lust for
power. A State which is internally despotic will be externally
warlike, in both respects because the men who govern the
State desire the greatest attainable extent and intensity of
control over the lives of other men. The resultant twofold
problem, of preserving liberty internally and diminishing it

40 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

externally, is one that the world must solve, and solve soon,
if scientific societies are to survive.

Let us consider for a moment the social psychology in-
volved in this situation.

Organizations are of two kinds, those which aim at getting
something done, and those which aim at preventing some-
thing from being done. The Post Office is an example of the
first kind; a fire brigade is an example of the second kind.
Neither of these arouses much controversy, because no one
objects to letters' being carried, and incendiaries dare not
avow a desire to see buildings burnt down. But when what
is to be prevented is something done by human beings, not by
Nature, the matter is otherwise. The armed forces of one's
own nation exist — so each nation asserts — to prevent
aggression by other nations. But the armed forces of other
nations exist — or so many people believe — to promote aggres-
sion. If you say anything against the armed forces of your
own country, you are a traitor, wishing to see your father-
land ground under the heel of a brutal conqueror. If, on the
other hand, you defend a potential enemy State for thinking
armed forces necessary to its safety, you malign your own
country, whose unalterable devotion to peace only perverse
malice could lead you to question. I heard all this said about
Germany by a thoroughly virtuous German lady in 1936, in
the course of a panegyric on Hitler.

The same sort of thing applies, though with slightly less
force, to other combatant organizations. My Pennsylvania
gardener would not publicly criticize his trade union secre-
tary for fear of weakening the union in contest with capital-
ists. It is difficult for a man of ardent political convictions to
admit either the shortcomings of politicians of his own Party
or the merits of those of the opposite Party.

EFFECTS OF SCIENTIFIC TECHNIQUE

41

And so it comes about that, whenever an organization has
a combatant purpose, its members are reluctant to criticize
their officials, and tend to acquiesce in usurpations and
arbitrary exercises of power which, but for the war mental-
ity, they would bitterly resent. It is the war mentality that
gives officials and governments their opportunity. It is there-
fore only natural that officials and governments are prone to
foster war mentality.

The only escape is to have the greatest possible number of
disputes settled by legal process, and not by a trial of strength.
Thus here again the preservation of internal liberty and
external control go hand in hand, and both equally depend
upon what is prima facie a restraint upon liberty, namely an
extension of the domain of law and of the public force
necessary for its enforcement.

In what I have been saying so far in this chapter I feel that
I have not sufficiently emphasized the gains that we derive
from scientific technique. It is obvious that the average in-
habitant of the United States at the present day is very much
richer than the average inhabitant of England in the eight-
eenth century, and this advance is almost entirely due to
scientific technique. The gain in the case of England is not so
great, but that is because we have spent so much on killing
Germans. But even in England there are enormous material
advances. In spite of shortages, almost everybody has as
much to eat as is necessary for health and efficiency. Most
people have warmth in winter and adequate light after sunset.
The streets, except in time of war, are not pitch dark at
night. All children go to school. Everyone can get medical
attendance. Life and property are much more secure (in
peacetime) than they were in the eighteenth century. A
much smaller percentage of the population lives in slums.

4 2

THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

Travel is vastly easier, and many more amusements are
available than in former times. The improvement in health
would in itself be sufficient to make this age preferable to
those earlier times for which some people feel nostalgic. On
the whole, I think, this age is an improvement on all its
predecessors except for the rich and privileged.

Our advantages are due entirely, or almost entirely, to the
fact that a given amount of labor is more productive than it
was in pre-scientific days. I used to live on a hilltop sur-
rounded by trees, where I could pick up firewood with the
greatest ease. But to secure a given amount of fuel in this way
cost more human labor than to have it brought across half
England in the form of coal, because the coal was mined and
brought scientifically, whereas I could employ only primitive
methods in gathering sticks. In old days, one man produced
not much more than one man's necessaries; a tiny aristocracy
lived in luxury, a small middle class lived in moderate com-
fort, but the great majority of the population had very little
more than was required in order to keep alive. It is true that
we do not always spend our surplus of labor wisely. We are
able to set aside a much larger proportion for war than our
ancestors could. But almost all the large-scale disadvantages
of our time arise from failure to extend the domain of law to
the settlement of disputes which, when left to the arbitra-
ment of force, have become, through our very efficiency, more
harmful than in previous centuries. This survival of formerly
endurable anarchy must be dealt with if our civilization is to
survive. Where liberty is harmful, it is to law that we must
look.

CHAPTER III

Scientific Technique in
an Oligarchy

I mean by "oligarchy" any system in which ultimate
power is confined to a section of the community: the
rich to the exclusion of the poor, Protestants to the
exclusion of Catholics, aristocrats to the exclusion of
plebeians, white men to the exclusion of colored men, males
to the exclusion of females, or members of one political party
to the exclusion of the rest. A system may be more oligarchic
or less so, according to the percentage of the population that
is excluded; absolute monarchy is the extreme of oligarchy.
Apart from masculine domination, which was universal
until the present century, oligarchies in the past were usually
based upon birth or wealth or race. A new kind of oligarchy
was introduced by the Puritans during the English Civil War.
They called it the "Rule of the Saints." It consisted essen-
tially of confining the possession of arms to the adherents of
one political creed, who were thus enabled to control the
government in spite of being a minority without any tradi-
tional claim to power. This system, although in England it
ended with the Restoration, was revived in Russia in 191 8,
in Italy in 1922, and in Germany in 1933. It is now the only

43

44 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

vital form of oligarchy, and it is therefore the form that I
shall specially consider.

We have seen that scientific technique increases the im-
portance of organizations, and therefore the extent to which
authority impinges upon the life of the individual. It follows
that a scientific oligarchy has more power than any oligarchy
could have in pre-scientific times. There is a tendency, which
is inevitable unless consciously combated, for organizations
to coalesce, and so to increase in size, until, ultimately, al-
most all become merged in the State. A scientific oligarchy,
accordingly, is bound to become what is called "totalitarian,"
that is to say, all important forms of power will become a
monopoly of the State. This monolithic system has sufficient
merits to be attractive to many people, but to my mind its
demerits are far greater than its merits. For some reason
which I have failed to understand, many people like the
system when it is Russian but disliked the very same system
when it was German. I am compelled to think that this is due
to the power of labels; these people like whatever is labeled
"Left" without examining whether the label has any justifica-
tion.

Oligarchies, throughout past history, have always thought
more of their own advantage than of that of the rest of the
community. It would be foolish to be morally indignant with
them on this account; human nature, in the main and in the
mass, is egoistic, and in most circumstances a fair dose of
egoism is necessary for survival. It was revolt against the
selfishness of past political oligarchies that produced the
Liberal movement in favor of democracy, and it was revolt
against economic oligarchies that produced socialism. But
although everybody who was in any degree progressive
recognized the evils of oligarchy throughout the past history

SCIENTIFIC TECHNIQUE IN OLIGARCHY 45

of mankind, many progressives were taken in by an argu-
ment for a new kind of oligarchy. "We, the progressives" —
so runs the argument — "are the wise and good; we know
what reforms the world needs; if we have power, we shall
create a paradise." And so, narcissistically hypnotized by
contemplation of their own wisdom and goodness, they pro-
ceeded to create a new tyranny, more drastic than any
previously known. It is the effect of science in such a system
that I wish to consider in this chapter.

In the first place, since the new oligarchs are the adherents
of a certain creed, and base their claim to exclusive power
upon the Tightness of this creed, their system depends essen-
tially upon dogma: whoever questions the governmental
dogma questions the moral authority of the government, and
is therefore a rebel. While the oligarchy is still new, there
are sure to be other creeds, held with equal conviction, which
would seize the government if they could. Such rival creeds
must be suppressed by force, since the principle of majority
rule has been abandoned. It follows that there cannot be
freedom of the press, freedom of discussion, or freedom of
book publication. There must be an organ of government
whose duty it is to pronounce as to what is orthodox, and to
punish heresy. The history of the Inquisition shows what
such an organ of government must inevitably become. In the
normal pursuit of power, it will seek out more and more
subtle heresies. The Church, as soon as it acquired political
power, developed incredible refinements of dogma, and
persecuted what to us appear microscopic deviations from
the official creed. Exactly the same sort of thing happens in
the modern States that confine political power to supporters
of a certain doctrine.

The completeness of the resulting control over opinion

46 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

depends in various ways upon scientific technique. Where
all children go to school, and all schools are controlled by the
government, the authorities can close the minds of the young
to everything contrary to official orthodoxy. Printing is im-
possible without paper, and all paper belongs to the State.
Broadcasting and the cinema are equally public monopolies.
The only remaining possibility of unauthorized propaganda
is by secret whispers from one individual to another. But this,
in turn, is rendered appallingly dangerous by improvements
in the art of spying. Children at school are taught that it is
their duty to denounce their parents if they allow themselves
subversive utterances in the bosom of the family. No one can
be sure that a man who seems to be his dearest friend will
not denounce him to the police; the man may himself have
been in some trouble, and may know that if he is not efficient
as a spy his wife and children will suffer. All this is not
imaginary; it is daily and hourly reality. Nor, given oli-
garchy, is there the slightest reason to expect anything else.

People still shudder at the enormities of men like Caligula
and Nero, but their misdeeds fade into insignificance beside
those of modern tyrants. Except among the upper classes in
Rome, daily life was much as usual even under the worst
emperors. Caligula wished his enemies had but a single
head; how he would have envied Hitler the scientific lethal
chambers of Auschwitz! Nero did his best to establish a
spy system which would smell out traitors, but a conspiracy
defeated him in the end. If he had been defended by the
N.K.V.D. he might have died in his bed at a ripe old age.
These are a few of the blessings that science has bestowed on
tyrants.

Consider next the economic system appropriate to an
oligarchy. We in England had such a system in the early

SCIENTIFIC TECHNIQUE IN OLIGARCHY 47

nineteenth century; how abominable it was, you can read in
the Hammonds' books. It came to an end, chiefly owing to
the quarrel between landowners and industrialists. Land-
owners befriended the wage-earners in towns, and indus-
trialists befriended those in the country. Between the two,
factory Acts were passed and the Corn Laws were repealed.
In the end we adopted democracy, which made a modicum of
economic justice unavoidable.

In Russia the development has been different. The govern-
ment fell into the hands of the self-professed champions of the
proletariat, who, as a result of civil war, were able to estab-
lish a military dictatorship. Gradually irresponsible power
produced its usual effect. Those who commanded the army
and the police saw no occasion for economic justice; soldiers
were sent to take grain by force from starving peasants, who
died by millions as a result. Wage-earners, deprived of the
right to strike, and without the possibility of electing repre-
sentatives to plead their cause, were kept down to bare
subsistence level. The percentage difference between the pay
of army officers and that of privates is vastly greater in
Russia than in any Western country. Men who hold impor-
tant positions in business live in luxury; the ordinary em-
ployee suffers as much as in England one hundred and fifty
years ago. But even he is still among the more fortunate.

Underneath the system of so-called "free" labor there is
another: the system of forced labor and concentration camps.
The life of the victims of this system is unspeakable. The
hours are unbearably long, the food only just enough to keep
the laborers alive for a year or so, the clothing in an arctic
winter so scanty that it would barely suffice in an English
summer. Men and women are seized in their homes in the
middle of the night; there is no trial, and often no charge is

48 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

formulated; they disappear, and inquiries by their families
remain unanswered; after a year or two in Northeast
Siberia or on the shores of the White Sea, they die of cold,
overwork, and undernourishment. But that causes no con-
cern to the authorities; there are plenty more to come.

This terrible system is rapidly growing. The number of
people condemned to forced labor is a matter of conjecture;
some say that 16 per cent of the adult males in the U.S.S.R.
are involved, and all competent authorities (except the Soviet
Government and its friends) are agreed that it is at least 8
per cent. The proportion of women and children, though
large, is much less than that of adult males.

Inevitably, forced labor, because it is economical, is
favorably viewed by the authorities, and tends, by its com-
petition, to depress the condition of "free" laborers. In the
nature of things, unless the system is swept away, it must
grow until no one is outside it except the army, the police,
and government officials.

From the standpoint of the national economy, the system
has great advantages. It has made possible the construction
of the Baltic-White Sea canal and the sale of timber in
exchange for machinery. It has increased the surplus of
labor available for war production. By the terror that it in-
spires it has diminished disaffection. But these are small mat-
ters compared to what — we are told — is to be accomplished
in the near future. Atomic energy is to be employed (so at
least it is said) to divert the waters of the River Yenisei,
which now flow fruitlessly into the Arctic, so as to cause
them to bestow fertility on a vast desert region in Central
Asia.

But if, when this work is completed, Russia is still subject
to a small despotic aristocracy, there is no reason to expect

SCIENTIFIC TECHNIQUE IN OLIGARCHY 49

that the masses will be allowed to benefit. It will be found that
radioactive spray can be used to melt the Polar ice, or that
a range of mountains in northern Siberia would divert the
cold north winds, and could be constructed at a cost in
human misery which would not be thought excessive. And
whenever other ways of disposing of the surplus fail, there
is always war. So long as the rulers are comfortable, what
reason have they to improve the lot of their serfs?

I think the evils that have grown up in Soviet Russia will
exist, in a greater or less degree, wherever there is a scientific
government which is securely established and is not de-
pendent upon popular support. It is possible nowadays for a
government to be very much more oppressive than any gov-
ernment could be before there was scientific technique. Prop-
aganda makes persuasion easier for the government; public
ownership of halls and paper makes counterpropaganda
more difficult; and the effectiveness of modern armaments
makes popular risings impossible. No revolution can succeed
in a modern country unless it has the support of at least a
considerable section of the armed forces. But the armed
forces can be kept loyal by being given a higher standard of
life than that of the average worker, and this is made easier
by every step in the degradation of ordinary labor. Thus the
very evils of the system help to give it stability. Apart from
external pressure, there is no reason why such a regime
should not last for a very long time.

Scientific societies are as yet in their infancy. It may be
worth while to spend a few moments in speculating as to
possible future developments of those that are oligarchies.

It is to be expected that advances in physiology and
psychology will give governments much more control over
individual mentality than they now have even in totalitarian

50 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

countries. Fichte laid it down that education should aim at
destroying free will, so that, after pupils have left school,
they shall be incapable, throughout the rest of their lives, of
thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters
would have wished. But in his day this was an unattainable
ideal: what he regarded as the best system in existence
produced Karl Marx. In future such failures are not likely to
occur where there is dictatorship. Diet, injections, and
injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce
the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities
consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers
that be will become psychologically impossible. Even if all
are miserable, all will believe themselves happy, because
the government will tell them that they are so.

A totalitarian government with a scientific bent might do
things that to us would seem horrifying. The Nazis were
more scientific than the present rulers of Russia, and were
more inclined towards the sort of atrocities than I have in
mind. They were said — I do not know with what truth — to
use prisoners in concentration camps as material for all kinds
of experiments, some involving death after much pain. If
they had survived, they would probably have soon taken to
scientific breeding. Any nation which adopts this practice
will, within a generation, secure great military advantages.
The system, one may surmise, will be something like this:
except possibly in the governing aristocracy, all but 5 per
cent of males and 30 per cent of females will be sterilized.
The 30 per cent of females will be expected to spend the
years from eighteen to forty in reproduction, in order to
secure adequate cannon fodder. As a rule, artificial insemina-
tion will be preferred to the natural method. The unsterilized,

SCIENTIFIC TECHNIQUE IN OLIGARCHY 51

if they desire the pleasures of love, will usually have to seek
them with sterilized partners.

Sires will be chosen for various qualities, some for muscle,
others for brains. All will have to be healthy, and unless they
are to be the fathers of oligarchs they will have to be of a
submissive and docile disposition. Children will, as in Plato's
Republic, be taken from their mothers and reared by pro-
fessional nurses. Gradually, by selective breeding, the
congenital differences between rulers and ruled will increase
until they become almost different species. A revolt of the
plebs would become as unthinkable as an organized insurrec-
tion of sheep against the practice of eating mutton. (The
Aztecs kept a domesticated alien tribe for purposes of
cannibalism. Their regime was totalitarian.)

To those accustomed to this system, the family as we
know it would seem as queer as the tribal and totem organi-
zation of Australian aborigines seems to us. Freud would
have to be rewritten, and I incline to think that Adler would
be found more relevant. The laboring class would have such
long hours of work and so little to eat that their desires would
hardly extend beyond sleep and food. The upper class, being
deprived of the softer pleasures both by the abolition of the
family and by the supreme duty of devotion to the State,
would acquire the mentality of ascetics: they would care
only for power, and in pursuit of it would not shrink from
cruelty. By the practice of cruelty men would become hard-
ened, so that worse and worse tortures would be required to
give the spectators a thrill.

Such possibilities, on any large scale, may seem a fantastic
nightmare. But I firmly believe that, if the Nazis had won the
last war, and if in the end they had acquired world supremacy

52 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

they would, before long, have established just such a system
as I have been suggesting. They would have used Russians
and Poles as robots, and when their empire was secure they
would have used also Negroes and Chinese. Western nations
would have been converted into becoming collaborationists,
by the methods practiced in France from 1940 to 1944.
Thirty years of these methods would have left the West with
little inclination to rebel.

To prevent these scientific horrors, democracy is necessary
but not sufficient. There must be also that kind of respect for
the individual that inspired the doctrine of the Rights of
Man. As an absolute theory the doctrine cannot be accepted.
As Bentham said: "Rights of man, nonsense; imprescriptible
rights of man, nonsense on stilts." We must admit that there
are gains to the community so great that for their sake it
becomes right to inflict an injustice on an individual. This
may happen, to take an obvious example, if a victorious
enemy demands hostages as the price of not destroying a
city. The city authorities (not of course the enemy) cannot
be blamed, in such circumstances, if they deliver the re-
quired number of hostages. In general, the "Rights of Man"
must be subject to the supreme consideration of the general
welfare. But having admitted this we must go on to assert,
and to assert emphatically, that there are injuries which it is
hardly ever in the general interest to inflict on innocent
individuals. The doctrine is important because the holders of
power, especially in an oligarchy, will be much too prone,
on each occasion, to think that this is one of those cases in
which the doctrine should be ignored.

Totalitariansim has a theory as well as a practice. As a
practice, it means that a certain group, having by one means
or another seized the apparatus of power, especially arma-

SCIENTIFIC TECHNIQUE IN OLIGARCHY 53

ments and police, proceed to exploit their advantageous
position to the utmost, by regulating everything in the way
that gives them the maximum of control over others. But as a
theory it is something different: it is the doctrine that the
State, or the nation, or the community is capable of a good
different from that of individuals, and not consisting of any-
thing that individuals think or feel. This doctrine was espe-
cially advocated by Hegel, who glorified the State, and
thought that a community should be as organic as possible.
In an organic community, he thought, excellence would
reside in the whole. An individual is an organism, and we do
not think that his separate parts have separate goods: if he
has a pain in his great toe it is he that suffers, not specially
the great toe. So, in an organic society, good and evil will
belong to the whole rather than the parts. This is the theoreti-
cal form of totalitarianism.

The difficulty about this theory is that it extends illegiti-
mately the analogy between a social organism and a single
person as an organism. The government, as opposed to its
individual members, is not sentient; it does not rejoice at a
victory or suffer at a defeat. When the body politic is injured,
whatever pain is to be felt must be felt by its members, not
by it as a whole. With the body of a single person it is
otherwise: all pains are felt at the center. If the different
parts of the body had pains that the central ego did not feel,
they might have their separate interests, and need a Parlia-
ment to decide whether the toes should give way to the
fingers or the fingers to the toes. As this is not the case, a
single person is an ethical unit. Neither parts of a person nor
organizations of many persons can occupy the same position
of ethical importance. The good of a multitude is a sum of
the goods of the individuals composing it, not a new and

54

THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

separate good. In concrete fact, when it is pretended that the
State has a good different from that of the citizens, what is
really meant is that the good of the government or of the
ruling class is more important than that of other people.
Such a view can have no basis except in arbitrary power.

More important than these metaphysical speculations is
the question whether a scientific dictatorship, such as we
have been considering, can be stable, or is more likely to
be stable than a democracy.

Apart from the danger of war, I see no reason why such a
regime should be unstable. After all, most civilized and semi-
civilized countries known to history have had a large class
of slaves or serfs completely subordinate to their owners.
There js nothing in human nature that makes the persistence
of such a system impossible. And the whole development of
scientific technique has made it easier than it used to be to
maintain a despotic rule of a minority. When the govern-
ment controls the distribution of food, its power is absolute
so long as it can count on the police and the armed forces.
And their loyalty can be secured by giving them some of the
privileges of the governing class. I do not see how any
internal movement of revolt can ever bring freedom to the
oppressed in a modern scientific dictatorship.

But when it comes to external war the matter is different.
Given two countries with equal natural resources, one a
dictatorship and the other allowing individual liberty, the
one allowing liberty is almost certain to become superior to
the other in war technique in no very long time. As we have
seen in Germany and Russia, freedom in scientific research
is incompatible with dictatorship. Germany might well have
won the war if Hitler could have endured Jewish physicists.
Russia will have less grain than if Stalin had not insisted

SCIENTIFIC TECHNIQUE IN OLIGARCHY 55

upon the adoption of Lysenko's theories. It is highly probable
that there will soon be, in Russia, a similar governmental
incursion into the domain of nuclear physics. I do not doubt
that, if there is no war during the next fifteen years, Russian
scientific war technique will, at the end of that time, be very
markedly inferior to that of the West, and that the inferiority
will be directly traceable to dictatorship. I think, therefore,
that, so long as powerful democracies exist, democracy will
in the long run be victorious. And on this basis I allow my-
self a moderate optimism as to the future. Scientific dictator-
ships will perish through not being sufficiently scientific.

We may perhaps go further: the causes which will make
dictatorships lag behind in science will also generate other
weaknesses. All new ideas will come to be viewed as heresy,
so that there will be a lack of adaptability to new circum-
stances. The governing class will tend to become lazy as soon
as it feels secure. If, on the other hand, initiative is en-
couraged in the people near the top, there will be constant
danger of palace revolutions. One of the troubles in the late
Roman Empire was that a successful general could, with
luck, make himself Emperor, so that the reigning Emperor
always had a motive for putting successful generals to death.
This sort of trouble can easily arise in a dictatorship, as
events have already proved.

For these various reasons, I do not believe that dictator-
ship is a lasting form of scientific society— unless (but this
proviso is important) it can become world-wide.

CHAPTER IV

Democracy and Scientific
Technique

The word "democracy" has become ambiguous. East
of the Elbe it means "military dictatorship of a
minority enforced by arbitrary police power." West
of the Elbe its meaning is less definite, but broadly speaking
it means "even distribution of ultimate political power among
all adults except lunatics, criminals, and peers." This is not
a precise definition, because of the word "ultimate." Suppose
the British Constitution were to be changed in only one
respect: that General Elections should occur once in thirty
years instead of once in five. This would so much diminish
the dependence of Parliament on public opinion that the
resulting system could hardly be called a democracy. Many
socialists would add economic to political power, as what
demands even distribution in a democracy. But we may
ignore these verbal questions. The essence of the matter is
approach to equality of power, and it is obvious that democ-
racy is a matter of degree.

When people think of democracy, they generally couple
with it a considerable measure of liberty for individuals and
groups. Religious persecution, for instance, would be ex-

56

}

DEMOCRACY AND SCIENTIFIC TECHNIQUE 57

eluded in imagination, although it is entirely compatible with
democracy as defined a moment ago. I incline to think that
"liberty," as the word was understood in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, is no longer quite the right concept; I
should prefer to substitute "opportunity for initiative." And
my reason for suggesting this change is the character of a
scientific society.

It cannot be denied that democracy no longer inspires the
same enthusiasm as it inspired in Rousseau and the men of the
French Revolution. This is, of course, mainly because it has
been achieved. Advocates of a reform always overstate their
case, so that their converts expect the reform to bring the
millennium. When it fails to do so there is disappointment,
even if very solid advantages are secured. In France under
Louis XVI many people thought that all evils proceeded from
kings and priests, so they cut off the king's head and turned
priests into hunted fugitives. But still they failed to enjoy
celestial bliss. So they decided that although kings are bad
there is no harm in emperors.

So it has been with democracy. Its sober advocates, nota-
bly Bentham and his school, maintained that it would do away
with certain evils, and on the whole they proved right. But
its enthusiasts, the followers of Rousseau especially, thought
that it could achieve far more than there was good reason to
expect. Its sober successes were forgotten, just because the
evils which it had cured were no longer there to cause
indignation. Consequently people listened to Carlyle's
ridicule and Nietzsche's savage invective against it as the
ethic of slaves. In many minds the cult of the hero replaced
the cult of the common man. And the cult of the hero, in
practice, is fascism.

The cult of the hero is anarchic and retrograde, and does

58 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

not easily fit in with the needs of a scientific society. But
there is an opposite tendency, embodied in communism,
which, though also antidemocratic, is in line with the
technical developments of modern industry, and therefore
much more worthy of consideration. This is the tendency
to attach importance neither to heroes nor to common men,
but to organizations. In this view the individual is nothing
apart from the social bodies of which he is a member. Each
such body — so it is said — represents some social force, and
it is only as part of such a force that an individual is of
importance.

We have thus three points of view, leading to three
different political philosophies. You may view an individual,
(a) as a common man, (b) as a hero, (c) as a cog in the
machine. The first view leads you to old-fashioned democ-
racy, the second to fascism, and the third to communism. I
think that democracy, if it is to recover the power of in-
spiring vigorous action, needs to take account of what is
valid in the other two way of regarding individuals.

Everybody exemplifies all three points of view in different
situations. Even if you are the greatest of living poets, you
are a common man where your ration book is concerned, or
when you go to the polling booth to vote. However hum-
drum your daily life may be, there is a good chance that you
will now and again have an opportunity for heroism: you
may save someone from drowning, or (more likely) you may
die nobly in battle. You are a cog in the machine if you
work in an organized group, e.g. the army or the mining
industry. What science has done is to increase the propor-
tion of your life in which you are a cog, to the extent of
endangering what is due to you as a hero or as a common

DEMOCRACY AND SCIENTIFIC TECHNIQUE

59

man. The business of a modern advocate of democracy is to
develop a political philosophy which avoids this danger.

In a good social system, every man will be at once a hero,
a common man, and a cog, to the greatest possible extent,
though if he is any one of these in an exceptional degree his
other two roles may be diminished. Qua hero, a man should
have the opportunity of initiative; qua common man, he
should have security; qua cog, he should be useful. A nation
cannot achieve great excellence by any one of these alone.
In Poland before the partition, all were heroes (at least all
nobles) ; the Middle West is the home of the common man;
and in Russia everyone outside the Politburo is a cog. No
one of these three is quite satisfactory.

The cog theory, though mechanically feasible, is humanly
the most devastating of the three. A cog, we said, should be
useful. Yes, but useful for what? You cannot say useful for
promoting initiative, since the cog mentality is antithetic to
the hero mentality. If you say useful for the happiness of the
common man, you subordinate the machine to its effect
in human feelings, which is to abandon the cog theory.
You can only justify the cog theory by worship of the
machine. You must make the machine an end in itself,
not a means to what it produces. Human beings then become
like slaves of the lamp in The Arabian Nights. It no longer
matters what the machine produces, though on the whole
bombs will be preferred to food because they require more
elaborate mechanisms for their production. In time men will
come to pray to the machine: "Almighty and most merciful
Machine, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like
lost screws; we have put in those nuts which we ought not
to have put in, and we have left out those nuts which we

60 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

ought to have put in, and there is no cogginess in us" — and so
on.

This really won't do. The idolatry of the machine is an
abomination. The Machine as an object of adoration is the
modern form of Satan, and its worship is the modern diabo-
lism.

Not that I wish, like the Erewhonians, to prohibit ma-
chines. The Egyptians worshiped bulls, which we think was
a mistake, but we do not on that account prohibit bulls. It is
only when the Machine takes the place of God that I object
to it. Whatever else may be mechanical, values are not, and
this is something which no political philosopher must for-
get.

But it is time to have done with these pleasant fancies and
return to the subject of democracy.

The main point is this: Scientific technique, by making
society more organic, increases the extent to which an
individual is a cog; if this is not to be an evil, ways must be
found of preventing him from being a mere cog. This means
that initiative must be preserved in spite of organization.
But most initiative will be what may be called in a large
sense "political," that is to say, it will consist of advice as to
what some organization should do. And if there is to be
opportunity for this sort of initiative, organizations must,
as far as possible, be governed democratically. Not only so,
but the federal principle must be carried so far that every
energetic person can hope to influence the government of
some social group of which he is a member.

Democracy, at present, defeats its object by the vastness
of the constituencies involved. Suppose you are an American,
interested in a Presidential election. If you are a Senator or
a Congressman, you can have a considerable influence, but

DEMOCRACY AND SCIENTIFIC TECHNIQUE 6l

the odds are about 100,000 to 1 that you are neither. If you
are a ward politician you can do something. But if you are
an ordinary citizen you can only vote. And I do not think
there has ever been a Presidential election where one man's
abstention would have altered the result. And so you feel as
powerless as if you lived under a dictatorship. You are, of
course, committing the classical fallacy of the heap, but
most people's minds work that way.

In England it is not quite so bad, because there is no
election in which the whole nation is one constituency. In
1945 I worked for a candidate who got a majority of forty-
six, so if my work converted twenty-four people the result
would have been different if I had been idle. If the Labour
Party had got a majority of one in Parliament I might have
come to think myself quite important; but as it was I had
to content myself with the pleasure of being on the winning
side.

Things would be better if people took an interest in local
politics, but unfortunately few do. Nor is this surprising,
since most of the important issues are decided nationally,
not locally. It is to be regretted that there is so little civic
pride nowadays. In the Middle Ages each city wished to be
pre-eminent in the splendor of its cathedral, and we still
profit by the result. In our own time, Stockholm had the same
feeling about its Town Hall, which is splendid. But English
large towns seem to have no such feeling.

In industry there is room for a great deal of devolution.
For many years the Labour Party has advocated nationaliza-
tion of railways, and most railway employees have supported
the Party in this. But now a good many of them are finding
that the State is, after all, not so very different from a
private company. It is equally remote, and under a Con-

62 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

servative government it will be equally likely to be on bad
terms with the unions. In fact nationalization needs to be
supplemented by a measure of limited self-government for
the railways, the railway government being elected demo-
cratically by the employees.

In all federal systems, the general principle should be to
divide the affairs of each component body into home affairs
and foreign affairs, the component bodies having free control
of their home affairs, and the federal body having authority
in matters which are foreign affairs for the components
but not for it. It, in turn, should be a unit in a wider federa-
tion, and so on until we reach the world government, which,
for the present, would have no foreign affairs. Of course it
is not always easy to decide whether a matter is purely local
or not, but this will be a question for the law courts, as in
America and Australia.

This principle should be applied not only geographically,
but also vocationally. In old days, when travel was slow and
roads often impassable, geographical location was more
important than it is now. Now, especially in a small country
like ours, there would be no difficulty in allocating certain
governmental functions to bodies like the trade unions,
which classify people by their occupation, not by their
habitation. The foreign relations of an industry are access to
raw material, quantity and price of finished product. These
it should not control. But everything else it should be free to
decide for itself.

In such a system, there would be many more opportunities
of individual initiative than there are at present, although
central control would remain wherever it is essential. Of
course the system would be difficult to work in time of war,
and so long as there is imminent risk of war it is impossible to

DEMOCRACY AND SCIENTIFIC TECHNIQUE

63

escape from the authority of the State except to a very
limited degree. It is mainly war that has caused the excessive
power of modern States, and until the fear of war is removed
it is inevitable that everything should be subordinated to
short-term efficiency. But I have thought it worth while to
think for a moment of the world as it may be when a world
government has ended the present nightmare dread of war.

In addition to the kind of federalism that I have been
speaking of, there is, for certain purposes, a somewhat differ-
ent method which can be advantageous. It is that of bodies
which, though really part of the State, have a very consider-
able degree of independence. Such are, for example, the
universities, the Royal Society, the B.B.C., and the Port of
of London Authority. The smooth working of such bodies
depends upon a certain degree of homogeneity in the com-
munity. If the Royal Society or the B.B.C. came to contain a
majority of communists, Parliament would no doubt curtail
its liberties. But in the meantime both have a good deal of
autonomy, which is highly desirable. Our older universities,
being governed by men with respect for learning, are, I am
happy to observe, much more liberal towards academically
distinguished communists than the universities of America,
in which men of learning have no voice in the government.

Art and literature are peculiar in the modern world in
that those who practice them retain the individual liberty of
former times, and are practically untouched by scientific
technique unless they are drawn into the cinema. This is
more true of authors than of artists, because, as private
fortunes dwindle, artists become increasingly dependent upon
the patronage of public bodies. But if an artist is prepared to
starve, nothing can prevent him from doing his best. How-
ever, the position of both artists and authors is precarious.

64 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

In Russia they are already mere licensed sycophants. Else-
where, before long, with conscription of labor, no one will
be allowed to practice literature or painting unless he can
get twelve magistrates or ministers of religion to testify to
his competence. I am not quite sure that the aesthetic taste
of these worthy men will always be impeccable.

Liberty, in the old-fashioned sense, is much more impor-
tant in regard to mental than to material goods. The reason is
simple: that in regard to mental goods what one man pos-
sesses is not taken from other men, whereas with material
goods it is otherwise. When a limited supply of (say) food
has to be shared out, the obvious principle is justice. This
does not mean exact equality: a navvy needs more food than
a bedridden old man. The principle must be, in the words
of the old slogan, "to each according to his needs." There is
here, however, a difficulty, much emphasized by opponents
of socialism; it is that of incentive. Under capitalism, the in-
centive is fear of starvation; under communism, it is the fear
of drastic police punishment. Neither is quite what the
democratic socialist wants. But I do not think industry can
work efficiently through the mere motive of public spirit;
something more personal is necessary in normal times. My
own belief is that a collective profit motive can be, and should
be, combined with socialism. Take, say, coal mining. The
State should decide, at the beginning of each year, what
prices it is prepared to pay for coal of various qualities.
Methods of mining should be left to the industry. Every
technical improvement would then result in more coal or
less work for miners. The profit motive, in a new form,
would survive, but without the old evils. By devolution, the
motive could be made to operate on each mine.

In regard to mental goods, neither justice nor incentive is

DEMOCRACY AND SCIENTIFIC TECHNIQUE

65

important; what is important is opportunity. Opportunity, of
course, includes remaining alive, and to this extent involves
material goods. But most men of great creative power are
not interested in becoming rich, so that a modest subsistence
would suffice. And if these men are put to death, like Socra-
tes, when their work is done, no harm is done to anyone. But
great harm is done if, during their lifetime, their work is
hampered by authority, even if the hampering takes the
form of heaping honors upon them as the price of conformity.
No society can be progressive without a leaven of rebels,
and modern technique makes it more and more difficult to be
a rebel.

The difficulties of the problem are very great. As regards
science, I do not think that any complete solution is possible.
You cannot work at nuclear physics in America unless you
are politically orthodox; you cannot work at any science in
Russia unless you are orthodox, not only in politics, but also
in science, and orthodoxy in science means accepting all
Stalin's uneducated prejudices. The difficulty arises from the
vast expense of scientific apparatus. There is, or was, a law
that when a man is sued for debt he must not be deprived of
the tools of his trade, but when his tools cost many millions
of pounds the situation is very different from that of the
eighteenth-century handicraftsman.

I do not think that, in the present state of the world, any
government can be blamed for demanding political orthodoxy
of nuclear physicists. If Guy Fawkes had demanded gun-
powder on the ground that it was one of the tools of his
trade, I think James I's government would have viewed the
request somewhat coldly, and this applies with even more
force to the nuclear physicists of our time: governments
must demand some assurance as to -who they are going to

66

THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

blow up. But there is no justification whatever for demanding
scientific orthodoxy. Fortunately, in science it is fairly easy
to estimate a man's ability. It is therefore possible to act on
the principle that a scientist should be given opportunity in
proportion to his ability, not to his scientific orthodoxy. I
think that on the whole, in Western Europe, this principle
is fairly well observed. But its observance is precarious, and
mightly easily cease in a time of acute scientific controversy.
In art and literature the problem is different. On the one
hand, freedom is more possible, because the authorities are
not asked to provide expensive apparatus. But on the other
hand merit is much more difficult to estimate. The older gen-
eration of artists and writers is almost invariably mistaken as
to the younger generation: the pundits almost always condemn
new men who are subsequently judged to have outstanding
merit. For this reason such bodies as the French Academy
or the Royal Academy are useless, if not harmful. There is
no conceivable method by which the community can recog-
nize the artist until he is old and most of his work is done.
The community can only give opportunity and toleration. It
can hardly be expected that the community should license
every man who says he means to paint, and should support
him for his daubs however execrable they may be. I think
the only solution is that the artist should support himself by
work other than his art, until such time as he gets a knight-
hood. He should seek ill-paid half-time employment, live
austerely, and do his creative work in his spare time. Some-
times less arduous solutions are possible: a dramatist can be
an actor, a composer can be a performer. But in any case the
artist or writer must, while he is young, keep his creative
work outside the economic machine and make his living by
work of which the value is obvious to the authorities. For

DEMOCRACY AND SCIENTIFIC TECHNIQUE 6j

if his creative work affords his official means of livelihood,
it will be hampered and impaired by the ignorant censorship
of the authorities. The most that can be hoped — and this is
much — is that a man who does good work will not be pun-
ished for it.

The construction of Utopias used to be despised as the
foolish refuge of those who could not face the real world.
But in our time social change has been so rapid, and so
largely inspired by Utopian aspirations, that it is more
necessary than it used to be to consider the wisdom or un-
wisdom of dominant aspirations. Marx, though he made fun
of Utopians, was himself one of them, and so was his disciple
Lenin. Lenin had the almost unique privilege of actually
constructing his Utopia in a great and powerful State; he
was the nearest approach known to history to Plato's
philosopher king. The fact that the result is unsatisfactory is,
I think, mainly due to intellectual errors on the part of
Marx and Lenin — errors which remain intellectual although
they have an emotional source in the dictatorial character of
the two men. Western democrats are constantly accused,
even by many of their friends, of having no inspiring and
coherent doctrine with which to confront communism. I
think this challenge can be met. I will therefore repeat, in a
less argumentative form, the conception of a good society
by which I believe that democratic socialism should be
guided.

In a good society, a man should (i) be useful, (2) be as
far as possible secure from undeserved misfortune, (3) have
opportunity for initiative in all ways not positively harmful
to others. No one of these three is absolute. A lunatic cannot
be useful, but should not on that account be punished. During
a war, undeserved misfortunes are unavoidable. In a time of

68 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

great public disaster, even the greatest artist may have to
give up his own work in order to combat fire or flood or
pestilence. Our three requisites are general directives, not
absolute imperatives.

(i) When I say that a man should be "useful," I am think-
ing of him in relation to the community, and am accepting
the community's judgment as to what is useful. If a man is a
great poet or a Seventh-Day Adventist, he personally may
think that the most useful thing he can do is to write verses
or preach that the Sabbath should be observed on Saturday.
But if the community does not agree with him, he should
find some way of earning his living which is generally ac-
knowledged to be useful, and confine to his leisure hours his
activities as a poet or a missionary.

(2) Security has been one of the chief aims of British
social legislation since the great days of Lloyd George. Un-
employment, illness, and old age do not deserve punishment,
and should not be allowed to bring avoidable suffering. The
community has the right to exact work from those capable
of work, but it has also the duty to support all those willing
to work, whether in fact they are able to work or not.
Security has also legal aspects: a man must not be subject
to arbitrary arrest or to confiscation of his property without
judicial or legislative sanction.

(3) Opportunity for initiative is a more difficult matter,
but not less important. Usefulness and security form the
basis of the theoretical case for socialism, but without
opportunity for initiative a socialist community might have
little merit. Read Plato's Republic and More's Utopia —
both socialist works — and imagine yourself living in the
community portrayed by either. You will see that boredom
would drive you to suicide or rebellion. A man who has

DEMOCRACY AND SCIENTIFIC TECHNIQUE 69

never had security may think that it would satisfy him, but
in fact — to borrow an analogy from mountaineering — it is
only a base camp from which dangerous ascents can begin.
The impulse to danger and adventure is deeply ingrained in
human nature, and no society which ignores it can long be
stable.

A democratic scientific society, by exacting service and
conferring security, forbids or prevents much personal
initiative which is possible in a less well-regulated world.
Eighty years ago, Vanderbilt and Jay Gould each claimed
ownership of the Erie Railroad; each had a printing press to
prove how many shares he owned; each had a posse of
corrupt judges ready to give any legal decision demanded
of them; each had physical control of a portion of the rolling
stock. On a given day, one started a train at one end of the
line, the other at the other; the trains met in the middle;
each was full of hired bravos, and the two gangs had a six-
hour battle. Obviously Vanderbilt and Jay Gould enjoyed
themselves hugely; so did the bravos; so did the whole
American nation except those who wanted to use the Erie
Railroad. So did I when I read about the affair. Neverthe-
less, the affair was thought to be a scandal. Nowadays the
impulse to such delights has to seek satisfaction in the con-
struction of hydrogen bombs, which is at once more harmful
and less emotionally satisfying. If the world is ever to have
peace, it must find ways of combining peace with the possibil-
ity of adventures that are not destructive.

The solution lies in providing opportunities for contests
that are not conducted by violent means. This is one of the
great merits of democracy. If you hate socialism or capi-
talism, you are not reduced to assassinating Mr. Attlee or
Mr. Churchill; you can make election speeches, or, if that

7°

THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

doesn't satisfy you, get yourself elected to Parliament. So
long as the old Liberal freedoms survive, you can engage in
propaganda for whatever excites you. Such activities suffice
to satisfy most men's combative instincts. Creative im-
pulses which are not combative, such as those of the artist
and the writer, cannot be satisfied in this way, and for them
the only solution, in a socialist State, is liberty to employ
your leisure as you like. This is the only solution, because
such activities are sometimes extremely valuable, but the
community has no way of judging, in a given case, whether
the artist's or writer's work is worthless or shows immortal
genius. Such activities, therefore, must not be systematized
or controlled. Some part of life — perhaps the most important
part— must be left to the spontaneous action of individual
impulse, for where all is system there will be mental and
spiritual death.

CHAPTER V

Science and War

The connection of science with war has grown gradu-
ally more and more intimate. It began with Archi-
medes, who helped his cousin the tyrant of Syracuse
to defend that city against the Romans in 212 B.C. In Plu-
tarch's Life of Marcellus there is a highly romantic and
obviously largely mythical account of the engines of war
that Archimedes invented. I quote North.

(Before war had begun)

The king prayed him to make him some engines, both to assault
and defend, in all manner of sieges and assaults. So Archimedes
made him many engines, but King Hieron never occupied any of
them, because he reigned the most part of his time in peace without
any wars. But this provision and munition of engines served the
Syracusans marvellously at that time (when Syracuse was be-
sieged). When Archimedes fell to handle his engines, and to set
them at liberty, there flew in the air infinite kinds of shot, and
marvellous great stones, with an incredible great noise and force
on the sudden, upon the footmen that came to assault the city by
land, bearing down and tearing in pieces all those which came
against them, or in what place soever they lighted, no earthly
body being able to resist the violence of so heavy a weight : so that
all their ranks were marvellously disordered. And as for the galleys
that gave assault by sea, some were sunk with long pieces of

71

72 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

timber, which were suddenly blown over the walls with force of
their engines into their galleys, and so sunk them by their over-
great weight. Other being hoist up by their prows with hands of
iron, and hooks made like cranes' bills, plunged their poops into
the sea. Other being taken up with certain engines fastened within,
one contrary to another, made them turn in the air like a whirligig,
and so cast them upon the rocks by the tour walls, and splitted
them all to fitters, to the great spoil and murder of the persons that
were within them. And sometimes the ships and galleys were lift
clean out of the water, that it was a fearful thing to see them hang
and turn in the air as they did : until that, casting their men within
them over the hatches, some here, some there, by this terrible
turning, they came in the end to be empty, and to break against the
walls, or else to fall into the sea again, when their engine left their
hold. .

In spite of all this scientific technique, however, the
Romans were victorious, and Archimedes was killed by a
plain infantry soldier. One can imagine the exultation of
Roman Blimps at the proof that once more these newfangled
devices of long-haired scientists had been defeated by the
old tried traditional forces by means of which the Empire's
greatness had been built up.

Nevertheless science continued to play a decisive part in
war. Greek fire kept the Byzantine Empire in existence for
centuries. Artillery destroyed the feudal system, and by
making English archery obsolete created the myth of Joan of
Arc. The greatest men of the Renaissance commended them-
selves to the powerful by their skill in scientific warfare.
When Leonardo wanted to get a job from the Duke of
Milan, he wrote the Duke a long letter about his improve-
ments in the art of fortification, and in the last sentence
mentioned briefly that he could also paint a bit. He got the

SCIENCE AND WAR 73

job, though I doubt if the Duke read as far as the last
sentence. When Galileo wanted employment under the
Grand Duke of Tuscany, it was on his calculations of the
trajectories of cannon-balls that he relied. In the French
Revolution, such men of science as were not guillotined
owed their immunity to their contributions to the war ef-
fort. I know of only one instance on the other side. During
the Crimean War Faraday was consulted as to the use of
poison gas. He replied that it was entirely feasible, but was
to be condemned on grounds of humanity. In those inefficient
days his opinion prevailed. But that was long ago.

The Crimean War could still be celebrated by Kinglake
in the romantic language of the ages of chivalry, but modern
war is a very different matter. No doubt there are still
gallant officers and brave men who die nobly in the ancient
manner, but it is not they who are important. One nuclear
physicist is worth more than many divisions of infantry. And
apart from applications of the latest science, what secures
success in war is not heroic armies but heavy industry.
Consider the success of the United States after Pearl Har-
bor. No nation has ever shown more heroism than was shown
by the Japanese, but they were defeated by American in-
dustrial productivity. It is to steel and oil and uranium, not
to martial ardor, that modern nations must look for victory
in war.

Modern warfare, so far, has not been more destructive of
life than the warfare of less scientific ages, for the increased
deadlines s of weapons has been offset by the improvement in
medicine and hygiene. Until recent times, pestilence almost
invariably proved far more fatal than enemy action. When
Sennacherib besieged Jerusalem, 185,000 of his army died in
one night, "and when they arose early in the morning, behold

74 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

they were all dead corpses" (II Kings xix. 35). The plague
in Athens did much to decide the Peloponnesian War. The
many wars between Syracuse and Carthage were usually
ended by pestilence. Barbarossa, after he had completely
defeated the Lombard League, lost almost his whole army
by disease, and had to fly secretly over the Alps. The mor-
tality rate in such campaigns was far greater than in the two
great wars of our own century. I do not say that future wars
will have as low a casualty rate as the last two; that is a
matter to which I will come shortly. I say only, what many
people do not realize, that up to the present science has not
made war more destructive.

There are, however, other respects in which the evils of
war have much increased. France was at war, almost con-
tinuously, from 1792 to 181 5, and in the end suffered com-
plete defeat, but the population of France did not, after 1815,
suffer anything comparable to what has been suffered
throughout Central Europe since 1945. A modern nation at
war is more organized, more disciplined, and more com-
pletely concentrated on the effort to secure victory, than was
possible in pre-industrial times; the consequence is that de-
feat is more serious, more disorganizing, more demoralizing
to the general population, than it was in the days of Napo-
leon.

But even in this respect it is not possible to make a general
rule. Some wars in the past were quite as disorganizing and
as destructive of the civilization of devastated areas as was
the Second World War. North Africa has never regained
the level of prosperity that it enjoyed under the Romans.
Persia never recovered from the Mongols nor Syria from the
Turks. There have always been two kinds of wars, those in
which the vanquished incurred disaster, and those in which

SCIENCE AND WAR

75

they only incurred discomfort. We seem, unfortunately, to
be entering upon an era in which wars are of the former sort.

The atom bomb, and still more the hydrogen bomb, have
caused new fears, involving new doubts as to the effects of
science on human life. Some eminent authorities, including
Einstein, have pointed out that there is a danger of the extinc-
tion of all life on this planet. I do not myself think that this
will happen in the next war, but I think it may well happen
in the next but one, if that is allowed to occur. If this expec-
tation is correct, we have to choose, within the next fifty
years or so, between two alternatives. Either we must allow
the human race to exterminate itself, or we must forgo
certain liberties which are very dear to us, more especially
the liberty to kill foreigners whenever we feel so disposed.
I think it probable that mankind will choose its own exter-
mination as the preferable alternative. The choice will be
made, of course, by persuading ourselves that it is not being
made, since (so militarists on both sides will say) the victory
of the right is certain without risk of universal disaster. We
are perhaps living in the last age of man, and, if so, it is to
science that he will owe his extinction.

If, however, the human race decides to let itself go on
living, it will have to make very drastic changes in its ways of
thinking, feeling, and behaving. We must learn not to say:
"Never! Better death than dishonor." We, must learn to
submit to law, even when imposed by aliens whom we hate
and despise, and whom we believe to be blind to all consider-
ations of righteousness. Consider some concrete examples.
Jews and Arabs will have to agree to submit to arbitration;
if the award goes against the Jews, the President of the
United States will have to insure the victory of the party to
which he is opposed, since, if he supports the international

j6 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

authority, he will lose the Jewish vote in New York State.
On the other hand, if the award goes in favor of the Jews, the
Mohammedan world will be indignant, and will be supported
by all other malcontents. Or, to take another instance, Eire
will demand the right to oppress the Protestants of Ulster,
and on this issue the United States will support Eire while
Britain will support Ulster. Could an international authority
survive such a dissension? Again: India and Pakistan cannot
agree about Kashmir, therefore one of them must support
Russia and the other the United States. It will be obvious to
anyone who is an interested party in one of these disputes
that the issue is far more important than the continuance of
life on our planet. The hope that the human race will allow
itself to survive is therefore somewhat slender.

But if human life is to continue in spite of science, mankind
will have to learn a discipline of the passions which, in the
past, has not been necessary. Men will have to submit to the
law, even when they think the law unjust and iniquitous.
Nations which are persuaded that they are only demanding
the barest justice will have to acquiesce when this demand is
denied them by the neutral authority. I do not say that this is
easy; I do not prophesy that it will happen; I say only that if
it does not happen the human race will perish, and will
perish as a result of science.

A clear choice must be made within fifty years, the choice
between Reason and Death. And by "Reason" I mean will-
ingness to submit to law as declared by an international
authority. I fear that mankind may choose Death. I hope I am
mistaken.

CHAPTER VI

Science and Values

The philosophy which has seemed appropriate to
science has varied from time to time. To Newton and
most of his English contemporaries science seemed to
afford proof of the existence of God as the Almighty Law-
giver: He had decreed the law of gravitation and whatever
other natural laws had been discovered by Englishmen. In
spite of Copernicus, man was still the moral center of the
universe, and God's purposes were mainly concerned with
the human race. The more radical among the French
philosophes, being politically in conflict with the Church,
took a different view. They did not admit that laws imply a
lawgiver; on the other hand, they thought that physical
laws could explain human behavior. This led them to
materialism and denial of free will. In their view, the universe
has no purpose and man is an insignificant episode. The vast-
ness of the universe impressed them and inspired in them a
new form of humility to replace that which atheism had
made obsolete. This point of view is well expressed in a little
poem by Leopardi and expresses, more nearly than any other
known to me, my own feeling about the universe and human

passions:

77

78

THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

THE INFINITE *

Dear to me always was this lonely hill

And this hedge that excludes so large a part

Of the ultimate horizon from my view.

But as I sit and gaze, my thought conceives

Interminable vastnesses of space

Beyond it, and unearthly silences,

And profoundest calm; whereat my heart almost

Becomes dismayed. And as I hear the wind

Blustering through these branches, I find myself

Comparing with this sound that infinite silence;

And then I call to mind eternity,

And the ages that are dead, and this that now

Is living, and the noise of it. And so

In this immensity my thought sinks drowned :

And sweet it seems to shipwreck in this sea.

But this has become an old-fashioned way of feeling.
Science used to be valued as a means of getting to know the
world; now, owing to the triumph of technique, it is con-
ceived as showing how to change the world. The new point
of view, which is adopted in practice throughout America
and Russia, and in theory by many modern philosophers,
was first proclaimed by Marx in 1845, in his Theses on
Feuerbach. He says:

The question whether objective truth belongs to human thinking
is not a question of theory, but a practical question. The truth, i.e.
the reality and power, of thought must be demonstrated in practice.
The contest as to the reality or non-reality of a thought which is
isolated from practice, is a purely scholastic question. . . .

1 Translation by R. C. Trevelyan from Translations from Leopardi;
Cambridge University Press, 1941.

SCIENCE AND VALUES

79

Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, but
the real task is to alter it.

From the point of view of technical philosophy, this theory
has been best developed by John Dewey, who is universally
acknowledged as America's most eminent philosopher.

This philosophy has two aspects, one thoretical and the
other ethical. On the theoretical side, it analyzes away the
concept "truth," for which it substitutes "utility." It used
to be thought that, if you believed Caesar crossed the Rubi-
con, you believed truly, because Caesar did cross the
Rubicon. Not so, say the philosophers we are considering: to
say that your belief is "true" is another way of saying that
you will find it more profitable than the opposite belief. I
might object that there have been cases of historical beliefs
which, after being generally accepted for a long time, have in
the end been admitted to be mistaken. In the case of such
beliefs, every examinee would find the accepted falsehood of
his time more profitable than the as yet unacknowledged
truth. But this kind of objection is swept aside by the con-
tention that a belief may be "true" at one time and "false"
at another. In 1920 it was "true" that Trotsky had a great
part in the Russian Revolution; in 1930 it was "false." The
results of this view have been admirably worked out in
George Orwell's "1984."

This philosophy derives its inspiration from science in
several different ways. Take first its best aspect, as developed
by Dewey. He points out that scientific theories change from
time to time, and that what recommends a theory is that it
"works." When new phenomena are discovered, for which it
no longer "works," it is discarded. A theory— so Dewey
concludes — is a tool like another; it enables us to manipulate

80 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

raw material. Like any other tool, it is judged good or bad
by its efficiency in this manipulation, and like any other tool,
it is good at one time and bad at another. While it is good it
may be called "true," but this word must not be allowed its
usual connotations. Dewey prefers the phrase "warranted
assertibility" to the word "truth."

The second source of the theory is technique. What do we
want to know about electricity? Only how to make it work
for us. To want to know more is to plunge into useless
metaphysics. Science is to be admired because it gives us
power over nature, and the power comes wholly from
technique. Therefore an interpretation which reduces
science to technique keeps all the useful part, and dismisses
only a dead weight of medieval lumber. If technique is all
that interests you, you are likely to find this argument very
convincing.

The third attraction of prgamatism — which cannot be
wholly separated from the second — is love of power. Most
men's desires are of various kinds. There are the pleasures of
sense; there are aesthetic pleasures and pleasures of contem-
plation; there are private affections; and there is power. In
an individual, any one of these may acquire predominance
over the others. If love of power dominates, you arrive at
Marx's view that what is important is not to understand the
world, but to change it. Traditional theories of knowledge
were invented by men who loved contemplation — a monkish
taste, according to modern devotees of mechanism. Mecha-
nism augments human power to an enormous degree. It is
therefore this aspect of science that attracts the lovers of
power. And if power is all you want from science, the
pragmatist theory gives you just what you want, without
accretions that to you seem irrelevant. It gives you even
more than you could have expected, for if you control the

SCIENCE AND VALUES »I

police it gives you the godlike power of making truth. You
cannot make the sun cold, but you can confer pragmatic
"truth" on the proposition "the sun is cold" if you can
ensure that everyone who denies it is liquidated. I doubt
whether Zeus could do more.

This engineer's philosophy, as it may be called, is dis-
tinguished from common sense and from most other philoso-
phies by its rejection of "fact" as a fundamental concept in
defining "truth." If you say, for example, "the South Pole
is cold," you say something which, according to traditional
views, is "true" in virtue of a "fact," namely that the South
Pole is cold. And this is a fact, not because people believe
it, or because it pays to believe it; it just is a fact. Facts, when
they are not about human beings and their doings, represent
the limitations of human power. We find ourselves in a
universe of a certain sort, and we find out what sort of
universe it is by observation, not by self-assertion. It is true
that we can make changes on or near the surface of the earth,
but not elsewhere. Practical men have no wish to make
changes elsewhere, and can therefore accept a philosophy
which treats the surface of the earth as if it were the whole
universe. But even on the surface of the earth our power is
limited. To forget that we are hemmed in by facts which are
for the most part independent of our desires is a form of
insane megalomania. This kind of insanity has grown up as a
result of the triumph of scientific technique. Its latest
manifestation is Stalin's refusal to believe that heredity can
have the temerity to ignore Soviet decrees, which is like
Xerxes whipping the Hellespont to teach Poseidon a lesson.

"The pragmatic theory of truth [I wrote in 1907] is
inherently connected with the appeal to force. If there is a
non-human truth, which one man may know while another
does not, there is a standard outside the disputants, to which,

82 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

we may urge, the dispute ought to be submitted; hence a
pacific and judicial settlement of disputes is at least theoreti-
cally possible. If, on the contrary, the only way of discover-
ing which of the disputants is in the right is to wait and see
which of them is successful, there is no longer any principle
except force by which the issue can be decided. ... In
international matters, owing to the fact that the disputants
are often strong enough to be independent of outside control,
these considerations become more important. The hopes of
international peace, like the achievement of internal peace,
depend upon the creation of an effective force of public
opinion formed upon an estimate of the rights and wrongs of
disputes. Thus it would be misleading to say that the dispute
is decided by force, without adding that force is dependent
upon justice. But the possibility of such a public opinion de-
pends upon the possibility of a standard of justice which is a
cause, not an effect, of the wishes of the community; and
such a standard of justice seems incompatible with the
pragmatist philosophy. This philosophy, therefore, although
it begins with liberty and toleration, develops, by inherent
necessity, into the appeal to force and the arbitrament of the
big battalions. By this development it becomes equally
adapted to democracy at home and to imperialism abroad.
Thus here again it is more delicately adjusted to the require-
ments of the time than any other philosophy which has
hitherto been invented.

"To sum up: Pragmatism appeals to the temper of mind
which finds on the surface of this planet the whole of its
imaginative material; which feels confident of progress, and
unaware of non-human limitations to human power; which
loves battle, with all the attendant risks, because it has no
real doubt that it will achieve victory; which desires religion,

SCIENCE AND VALUES 83

as it desires railways and electric light, as a comfort and a
help in the affairs of this world, not as providing non-human
objects to satisfy the hunger for perfection. But for those who
feel that life on this planet would be a life in prison if it were
not for the windows into a greater world beyond; for those
to whom a belief in man's omnipotence seems arrogant; who
desire rather the stoic freedom that comes of mastery over
the passions than the Napoleonic domination that sees the
kingdoms of this world at its feet — in a word, to men who
do not find man an adequate object of their worship, the
pragmatist' s world will seem narrow and petty, robbing life
of all that gives it value, and making man himself smaller by
depriving the universe which he contemplates of all its
splendor."

Let us now try to sum up what increases in human happi-
ness science has rendered possible, and what ancient evils it is
in danger of intensifying.

I do not pretend that there is any way of arriving at the
millennium. Whatever our social institutions, there will be
death and illness (though in a diminishing quantity) ; there
will be old age and insanity; there will be either danger or
boredom. So long as the present family survives, there will be
unrequited love and parents' tyranny and children's ingrati-
tude; and if something new were substituted for the family,
it would bring new evils, probably worse. Human life cannot
be made a matter of unalloyed bliss, and to allow oneself
excessive hopes is to court disappointment. Nevertheless
what can be soberly hoped is very considerable. In what
follows, I am not prophesying what will happen, but pointing
out the best that may happen, and the further fact that this
best will happen if it is widely desired.

84 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

There are two ancient evils that science, unwisely used,
may intensify: they are tyranny and war. But I am concerned
now rather with pleasant possibilities than with unpleasant
ones.

Science can confer two kinds of benefits : it can diminish
bad things, and it can increase good things. Let us begin with
the former.

Science can abolish poverty and excessive hours of labor.
In the earliest human communities, before agriculture, each
human individual required two or more square miles to sus-
tain life. Subsistence was precarious and death from starva-
tion must have been frequent. At that stage, men had the same
mixture of misery and carefree enjoyment as still makes up
the lives of other animals.

Agriculture was a technical advance of the same kind of
importance as attaches to modern machine industry. The
way that agriculture was used is an awful warning to our age.
It introduced slavery and serfdom, human sacrifice, absolute
monarchy and large wars. Instead of raising the standard of
life, except for a tiny governing minority, it merely in-
creased the population. On the whole, it probably increased
the sum of human misery. It is not impossible that indus-
trialism may take the same course.

Fortunately, however, the growth of industrialism has
coincided in the West with the growth of democracy. It is
possible now, if the population of the world does not increase
too fast, for one man's labor to produce much more than is
needed to provide a bare subsistence for himself and his
family. Given an intelligent democracy not misled by some
dogmatic creed, this possibility will be used to raise the
standard of life. It has been so used, to a limited extent, in
Britain and America, and would have been so used more

SCIENCE AND VALUES 85

effectively but for war. Its use in raising the standard of life
has depended mainly upon three things: democracy, trade
unionism, and birth control. All three, of course, have in-
curred hostility from the rich. If these three things can be
extended to the rest of the world as it becomes industrialized,
and if the danger of great wars can be eliminated, poverty
can be abolished throughout the whole world and excessive
hours of labor will no longer be necessary anywhere. But
without these three things, industrialism will create a regime
like that in which the Pharaohs built the pyramids. In
particular, if world population continues to increase at the
present rate, the abolition of poverty and excessive work
will be totally impossible.

Science has already conferred an immense boon on man-
kind by the growth of medicine. In the eighteenth century
people expected most of their children to die before they were
grown up. Improvement began at the beginning of the nine-
teenth century, chiefly owing to vaccination. It has contin-
ued ever since and is still continuing. In 1920 the infant
mortality in England and Wales was 80 per thousand, in
1948 it was 34 per thousand. The general death rate in 1948
(10 -8) was the lowest ever recorded up to that date. There
is no obvious limit to the improvement of health that can be
brought about by medicine. The sum of human suffering has
also been much diminished by the discovery of anesthetics.

The general diminution of lawlessness and crimes of
violence would not have been possible without science. If
you read eighteenth-century novels, you get a strange im-
pression of London: unlighted streets, footpads and high-
waymen, nothing that we should count as a police force, but,
in a futile attempt to compensate for all this, an abominably
savage and ferocious criminal law. Street lighting, telephones,

86 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

finger-printing, and the psychology of crime and punishment
are scientific advances which have made it possible for the
police to reduce crime below anything that the most Utopian
philosopher of the "Age of Reason" would have imagined
possible.

Coming now to positive goods, there is, to begin with, an
immense increase of education which has been rendered
possible by the increased productivity of labor. As regards
general education, this is most marked in America, where
even university education is free. If I took a taxi in New
York, I would often find that the driver was a Ph.D., who
would start arguing about philosophy at imminent risk to
himself and me. But in England as well as in America the
improvement at the highest level is equally remarkable.
Read, for instance, Gibbon's account of Oxford.

With this goes an increase of opportunity. It is much
easier than it used to be for an able young man without what
are called "natural" advantages (i.e. inherited wealth) to
rise to a position in which he can make the best use of his
talents. In this respect there is still much to be done, but
there is every reason to expect that in England and in Amer-
ica it will be done. The waste of talent in former times must
have been appalling; I shudder to think how many "mute
inglorious Miltons" there must have been. Our modern
Miltons, alas, remain for the most part inglorious, though
not mute. But ours is not a poetic age.

Finally, there is more diffused happiness than ever before,
and if the fear of war were removed this improvement would
be very much greater than it is.

Let us consider for a moment the kind of disposition that
must be widely diffused if a good world is to be created and
sustained.

SCIENCE AND VALUES 87

I will begin with the intellectual temper that is required.
There must be in many a desire to know the important facts,
and in most an unwillingness to give assent to pleasant illu-
sions. There are in the world at the present day two great
opposing systems of dogma: Catholicism and Communism.
If you believe either with such intensity that you are pre-
pared to face martyrdom, you can live a happy life, and even
enjoy a happy death if it comes quickly. You can inspire
converts, you can create an army, you can stir up hatred of
the opposite dogma and its adherents, and generally you can
seem immensely effective. I am constantly asked: What can
you, with your cold rationalism, offer to the seeker after
salvation that is comparable to the cozy homelike comfort of
a fenced-in dogmatic creed?

To this the answer is many-sided. In the first place, I do
not say that I can offer as much happiness as is to be ob-
tained by the abdication of reason. I do not say that I can
offer as much happiness as is to be obtained from drink or
drugs or amassing great wealth by swindling widows and
orphans. It is not the happiness of the individual convert that
concerns me; it is the happiness of mankind. If you genuinely
desire the happiness of mankind, certain forms of ignoble
personal happiness are not open to you. If your child is ill,
and you are a conscientious parent, you accept medical
diagnosis, however doubtful and discouraging; if you accept
the cheerful opinion of a quack and your child consequently
dies, you are not excused by the pleasantness of belief in the
quack while it lasted. If people loved humanity as genuinely
as they love their children, they would be as unwilling in
politics as in the home to let themselves be deceived by
comfortable fairy tales.

The next point is that all fanatical creeds do harm. This is

88 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

obvious when they have to compete with other fanaticisms,
since in that case they promote hatred and strife. But it is
true even when only one fanatical creed is in the field. It can-
not allow free inquiry, since this might shake its hold. It must
oppose intellectual progress. If, as is usually the case, it
involves a priesthood, it gives great power to a caste profes-
sionally devoted to maintenance of the intellectual status quo
and to a pretense of certainty where in fact there is no cer-
tainty.

Every fanatical creed essentially involves hatred. I knew
once a fanatical advocate of an international language, but he
preferred Ido to Esperanto. Listening to his conversation, I
was appalled by the depravity of the Esperantists, who, it
seemed, had sunk to hitherto unimaginable depths of wicked-
ness. Luckily, my friend failed to convince any government,
and so the Esperantists survived. But if he had been at the
head of a State of two hundred million inhabitants, I shudder
to think what would have happened to them.

Very often the element of hatred in a fanatical doctrine
becomes predominant. People who tell you they love the
proletariat often in fact only hate the rich. Some people who
believe that you should love your neighbor as yourself think
it right to hate those who do not do so. As these are the vast
majority, no notable increase of loving-kindness results
from their creed.

Apart from such specific evils, the whole attitude of
accepting a belief unquestioningly on a basis of authority is
contrary to the scientific spirit, and, if widespread, scarcely
compatible with the progress of science. Not only the Bible,
but even the works of Marx and Engels, contain demon-
strably false statements. The Bible says the hare chews the
cud, and Engels said that the Austrians would win the war of

SCIENCE AND VALUES 89

1866. These are only arguments against fundamentalists.
But when a Sacred Book is retained while fundamentalism is
rejected, the authority of The Book becomes vested in the
priesthood. The meaning of "dialectical materialism" changes
every decade, and the penalty for a belated interpretation
is death or the concentration camp.

The triumphs of science are due to the substitution of
observation and inference for authority. Every attempt to
revive authority in intellectual matters is a retrograde step.
And it is part of the scientific attitude that the pronounce-
ments of science do not claim to be certain, but only to be the
most probable on present evidence. One of the greatest
benefits that science confers upon those who understand its
spirit is that it enables them to live without the delusive
support of subjective certainty. That is why science cannot
favor persecution.

The desire for a fanatical creed is one of the great evils of
our time. There have been other ages with the same disease:
the late Roman Empire and the sixteenth century are the
most obvious examples. When Rome began to decay, and
when, in the third century, barbarian irruptions produced
fear and impoverishment, men began to look for safety in
another world. Plotinus found it in Plato's eternal world,
the followers of Mithra in a solar paradise, and the Christians
in heaven. The Christians won, largely because their dog-
matic certainty was the greatest. Having won, they started
persecuting each other for small deviations, and hardly had
leisure to notice the barbarian invaders except to observe that
they were Arians — the ancient equivalent of Trotskyites.
The religious fervor of that time was a product of fear and
despair; so is the religious fervor — Christian or communist —
of our age. It is an irrational reaction to danger, tending to

90 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

bring about what it fears. Dread of the hydrogen bomb pro-
motes fanaticism, and fanaticism is more likely than any-
thing else to lead to actual use of the hydrogen bomb.
Heavenly salvation perhaps, if the fanatics are right, but
earthly salvation is not to be found along that road.

I will say a few words about the connection of love with
intellectual honesty. There are several different attitudes
that may be adopted towards the spectacle of intolerable
suffering. If you are a sadist, you may find pleasure in it; if
you are completely detached, you may ignore it; if you are a
sentimentalist, you may persuade yourself that it is not as
bad as it seems; but if you feel genuine compassion you will
try to apprehend the evil truly in order to be able to cure
it. The sentimentalist will say that you are coldly intellectual,
and that, if you really minded the sufferings of others, you
could not be so scientific about them. The sentimentalist
will claim to have a tenderer heart than yours, and will show
it by letting the suffering continue rather than suffer himself.

There is a tender hearted lady in Gilbert and Sullivan who
remarks :

I heard one day
A gentleman say
That criminals who
Are sawn in two
Do not much feel

The fatal steel
But come in twain
Without much pain.
If this be true
How lucky for you.

Similarly, the men who made the Munich surrender
would pretend, (a) that the Nazis didn't go in for pogroms,
(b) that Jews enjoyed being massacred. And fellow-travelers
maintain, (a) that there is no forced labor in Russia, (b) that
there is nothing Russians find more delectable than being

SCIENCE AND VALUES

91

worked to death in an arctic winter. Such men are not "coldly
intellectual."

The most disquiting psychological feature of our time,
and the one which affords the best argument for the necessity
of some creed, however irrational, is the death wish. Every-
one knows how some primitive communities, brought sud-
denly into contact with white men, become listless, and
finally die from mere absence of the will to live. In Western
Europe, the new conditions of danger which exist are having
something of the same effect. Facing facts is painful, and the
way out is not clear. Nostalgia takes the place of energy
directed towards the future. There is a tendency to shrug the
shoulders and say, "Oh well, if we are exterminated by
hydrogen bombs, it will save a lot of trouble." This is a tired
and feeble reaction, like that of the late Romans to the bar-
barians. It can only be met by courage, hope, and a reasoned
optimism. Let us see what basis there is for hope.

First: 1 have no doubt that, leaving on one side, for the
moment, the danger of war, the average level of happiness,
in Britain as well as in America, is higher than in any previous
community at any time. Moreover improvement continues
whenever there is not war. We have therefore something
important to conserve.

There are certain things that our age needs, and certain
things that it should avoid. It needs compassion and a wish
that mankind should be happy; it needs the desire for knowl-
edge and the determination to eschew pleasant myths; it
needs, above all, courageous hope and the impulse to creative-
ness. The things that it must avoid, and that have brought it
to the brink of catastrophe, are cruelty, envy, greed, com-
petitiveness, search for irrational subjective certainty, and
what Freudians call the death wish.

92 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

The root of the matter is a very simple and old-fashioned
thing, a thing so simple that I am almost ashamed to mention
it, for fear of the derisive smile with which wise cynics will
greet my words. The thing I mean — please forgive me for
mentioning it — is love, Christian love, or compassion. If you
feel this, you have a motive for existence, a guide in action,
a reason for courage, an imperative necessity for intellectual
honesty. If you feel this, you have all that anybody should
need in the way of religion. Although you may not find
happiness, you will never know the deep despair of those
whose life is aimless and void of purpose; for there is always
something that you can do to diminish the awful sum of
human misery.

What I do want to stress is that the kind of lethargic
despair which is now not uncommon, is irrational. Mankind
is in the position of a man climbing a difficult and dangerous
precipice, at the summit of which there is a plateau of deli-
cious mountain meadows. With every step that he climbs, his
fall, if he does fall, becomes more terrible; with every step
his weariness increases and the ascent grows more difficult.
At last there is only one more step to be taken, but the
climber does not know this, because he cannot see beyond
the jutting rocks at his head. His exhaustion is so complete
that he wants nothing but rest. If he lets go he will find rest
in death. Hope calls: "One more effort — perhaps it will be
the last effort needed." Irony retorts: "Silly fellow! Haven't
you been listening to hope all this time, and see where it has
landed you." Optimism says: "While there is life there is
hope." Pessimism growls: "While there is life there is pain."
Does the exhausted climber make one more effort, or does
he let himself sink into the abyss? In a few years those of us
who are still alive will know the answer.

SCIENCE AND VALUES 93

Dropping metaphor, the present situation is as follows:
Science offers the possibility of far greater well-being for
the human race than has ever been known before. It offers
this on certain conditions: abolition of war, even distribution
of ultimate power, and limitation of the growth of popula-
tion. All these are much nearer to being possible than they
ever were before. In Western industrial countries, the
growth of population is almost nil; the same causes will have
the same effect in other countries as they become modern-
ized, unless dictators and missionaries interfere. The even
distribution of ultimate power, economic as well as political,
has been nearly achieved in Britain, and other democratic
countries are rapidly moving towards it. The prevention of
war? It may seem a paradox to say that we are nearer to
achieving this than ever before, but I am persuaded that it is
true. I will explain why I think so.

In the past, there were many sovereign States, any two of
which might at any moment quarrel. Attempts on the lines
of the League of Nations were bound to fail, because, when
a dispute arose, the disputants were too proud to accept out-
side arbitration, and the neutrals were too lazy to enforce it.
Now there are only two sovereign States: Russia (with
satellites) and the United States (with satellites) . If either
becomes preponderant, either by victory in war or by an
obvious military superiority, the preponderant Power can
establish a single Authority over the whole world, and thus
make future wars impossible. At first this Authority will, in
certain regions, be based on force, but if the Western nations
are in control, force will as soon as possible give way to
consent. When that has been achieved, the most difficult of
world problems will have been solved, and science can be-
come wholly beneficent.

94

THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

I do not think there is reason to fear that such a regime,
once established, would be unstable. The chief causes of
large-scale violence are: love of power, competition, hate and
fear. Love of power will have no national outlet when all
serious military force is concentrated in the international
army. Competition will be effectively regulated by law, and
mitigated by governmental controls. Fear — in the acute form
in which we know it — will disappear when war is no longer
to be expected. There remains hate and malevolence. This
has a deep hold on human nature. We all believe at once any
gossip discreditable to our neighbors, however slender the
evidence may be. After the First World War many people
hated Germany so much that they could not believe in injury
to themselves as a necessary result of extreme severity to the
Germans. One sees in Congress a widespread reluctance to
admit that self-preservation requires help to Western Europe.
America wishes to sell without buying, but finds that this
often involves giving rather than selling; the benefit to the
recipients is felt by many to be almost unendurable. This
wide diffusion of malevolence is one of the most unfortunate
things in human nature, and it must be lessened if a world
State is to be stable.

I am persuaded that it can be lessened, and very quickly.
If peace becomes secure there will be a very rapid increase of
material prosperity, and this tends more than anything else to
provide a mood of kindly feeling. Consider the immense
diminution of cruelty in Britain during the Victorian Age;
this was mainly due to rapidly increasing wealth in all
classes. I think we may confidently expect a similar effect
throughout the world owing to the increased wealth that
will result from the elimination of war. A great deal, also, is
to be hoped from a change in propaganda. Nationalist propa-

SCIENCE AND VALUES 95

ganda, in any violent form, will have to be illegal, and chil-
dren in schools will not be taught to hate and despise foreign
nations. Active instruction in the evils of the old times and the
advantages of the new system would do the rest. I am con-
vinced that only a few psychopaths would wish to return to
the daily dread of radioactive disintegration.

What stands in the way? Not physical or technical
obstacles, but only the evil passions in human minds: sus-
picion, fear, lust for power, hatred, intolerance. I will not
deny that these evil passions are more dominant in the East
than in the West, but they certainly exist in the West as well.
The human race could, here and now, begin a rapid approach
to a vastly better world, given one single condition: the
removal of mutual distrust between East and West. I do not
know what can be done to fulfill this condition. Most of the
suggestions that I have seen have struck me as silly. Mean-
while the only thing to do is to prevent an explosion some-
how, and to hope that time may bring wisdom. The near
future must either be much better or much worse than the
past; which it is to be will be decided within the next few
years.

CHAPTER VII

Can a Scientific Society
Be Stable? 1

IN this final chapter I wish to consider a purely scientific
question, namely: Can a society in which thought and
technique are scientific persist for a long period, as, for
example, ancient Egypt persisted, or does it necessarily con-
tain within itself forces which must bring either decay or
explosion?

I will begin with some explanation of the question with
which I am concerned. I call a society "scientific" in the
degree to which scientific knowledge, and technique based
upon that knowledge, affects its daily life, its economics, and
its political organization. This, of course, is a matter of
degree. Science in its early stages had few social effects
except upon the small number of learned men who took an
interest in it, but in recent times it has been transforming or-
dinary life with ever-increasing velocity.

I am using the word "stable" as it is used in physics. A top
is "stable" so long as it rotates with more than a certain

1 This chapter was first delivered as the Lloyd Roberts Lecture given
at the Royal Society of Medicine, London, on November 29, 1949.

96

CAN A SCIENTIFIC SOCIETY BE STABLE?

97

speed; then it becomes unstable and the top falls over. An
atom which is not radioactive is "stable" until a nuclear
physicist gets hold of it. A star is "stable" for millions of
years, and then one day it explodes. It is in this sense that I
wish to ask whether the kind of society that we are creating
is "stable."

I want to emphasize that the question I am asking is purely
factual. I am not considering whether it is better to be stable
or to be unstable; that is a question of values, and lies outside
the scope of scientific discussion. I am asking whether, in
fact, it is probable or improbable that soci ety will persist in
being scientific. If it does, it must almost inevitably grow
progressively more and more scientific, since new knowl-
edge will accumulate. If it does not, there may be either a
gradual decay, like the cooling of the sun by radiation, or a
violent transformation, like those that cause novae to appear
in the heavens. The former would show itself in exhaustion,
the latter in revolution or unsuccessful war.

The problem is extremely speculative, as appears when we
consider the time scale. Astronomers tell us that in all likeli-
hood the earth will remain habitable for very many millions
of years. Man has existed for about a million years. There-
fore if all goes well his future should be immeasurably longer
than his past.

Broadly speaking, we are in the middle of a race between
human skill as to means and human folly as to ends. Given
sufficient folly as to ends, every increase in the skill required
to achieve them is to the bad. The human race has survived
hitherto owing to ignorance and imcompetence; but, given
knowledge and competence combined with folly, there can
be no certainty of survival. Knowledge is power, but it is
power for evil just as much as for good. It follows that,

98 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

unless men increase in wisdom as much as in knowledge,
increase of knowledge will be increase of sorrow.

CAUSES OF INSTABILITY

Possible causes of instability may be grouped under three
heads: physical, biological, and psychological. I will begin
with the physical causes.

PHYSICAL

Both industry and agriculture, to a continually increasing
degree, are carried on in ways that waste the world's capital
of natural resources. In agriculture this has always been the
case since man first tilled the soil, except in places like the
Nile Valley, where there were very exceptional conditions.
While population was sparse, people merely moved on when
their former fields became unsatisfactory. Then it was found
that corpses could be used as fertilizers, and human sacrifice
became common. This had the double advantage of increas-
ing the yield and diminishing the number of mouths to be fed;
nevertheless the method came to be frowned upon, and its
place was taken by war. Wars, however, were not suffi-
ciently destructive of human life to prevent the survivors
from suffering, and the exhaustion of the soil has continued
at a constantly increasing rate right down to our own day.
At last the creation of the Dust Bowl in the United States
compelled attention to the problem. It is now known what
must be done if the world's supply of food is not to diminish
catastrophically. But whether what is necessary will be done
is a very doubtful question. The demand for food is so
insistent, and the immediate profit so great, that only a
strong and intelligent government can enforce the required
measures; and in many parts of the world governments are

CAN A SCIENTIFIC SOCIETY BE STABLE? 99

not both strong and intelligent. I am for the present ignoring
the population problem, which I shall consider presently.

Raw materials, in the long run, present just as grave a
problem as agriculture. Cornwall produced tin from Phoeni-
cian times until very lately; now the tin of Cornwall is
exhausted. Lightheartedly, the world contents itself with
observing that there is tin in Malaya, forgetting that that too
will be used up presently. Sooner or later all easily accessible
tin will have been used up, and the same is true of most raw
materials. The most pressing, at the moment, is oil. Without
oil a nation cannot, with our present techniques, prosper
industrially or defend itself in war. The supply is being
rapidly depleted, and will be used up even more swiftly in the
wars that are to be expected for possession of such supplies
as will remain. Of course I shall be told that atomic energy
will replace oil as a source of power. But what will happen
when all the available uranium and thorium have done their
work of killing men and fishes?

The indisputable fact is that industry — and agriculture in
so far as it uses artificial fertilizers — depends upon irreplace-
able materials and sources of energy. No doubt science will
discover new sources as the need arises, but this will involve
a gradual decrease in the yield of a given amount of land and
labor, and in any case is an essentially temporary expedient.
The world has been living on capital, and so long as it re-
mains industrial it must continue to do so. This is one ines-
capable though perhaps rather distant source of instability in
a scientific society.

BIOLOGICAL

I come now to the biological aspects of our question. If we
estimate the biological success of a species by its numbers it

IOO

THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

must be admitted that man has been most remarkably suc-
cessful. In his early days man must have been a very rare
species". His two great advantages — the capacity of using his
hands to manipulate tools, and the power of transmitting
experience and invention by means of language — are slowly
cumulative: at first there were few tools and there was little
knowledge to transmit; moreover, no one knows at what
stage language developed. However that may be, there were
three great advances by means of which the human population
of the globe was increased. The first was the taming of the
animals that became domestic; the second was the adoption
of agriculture; and the third was the industrial revolution.
By means of these three advances men have become enor-
mously more numerous than any species of large wild
animals. Sheep and cattle owe their large numbers to human
care; as competitors with man large mammals have no chance,
as appears from the virtual extinction of the buffalo.

It is with trepidation that I advance my next thesis, which
is this. Medicine cannot, except over a short period, increase
the population of the world. No doubt if medicine in the
fourteenth century had known how to combat the Black
Death the population of Europe in the latter half of the
fourteenth century would have been larger than it was. But
the deficiency was soon made up to its Malthusian level by
natural increase. In China, European and American medical
missions do much to diminish the infant death rate; the
consequence is that more children die painfully of famine at
the age of five or six. The benefit to mankind is very ques-
tionable. Except where the birth rate is low the population in
the long run depends upon the food supply and upon nothing
else. In the Western world the fall in the birth rate has for
the time being falsified Malthus's doctrine. But until lately

CAN A SCIENTIFIC SOCIETY BE STABLE? IOI

this doctrine was true throughout the world, and it is still
true in the densely populated countries of the East.

What has science done to increase population? In the first
place, by machinery, fertilizers, and improved breeds it has
increased the yield per acre and the yield per man-hour of
labor. This is a direct effect. But there is another which is
perhaps more important, at least for the moment. By im-
provement in means of transport it has become possible for
one region to produce an excess of food while another
produces an excess of industrial products or raw materials.
This makes it possible — as for instance in our own country —
for a region to contain a larger population than its own food
resources could support. Assuming free mobility of persons
and goods, it is only necessary that the whole world should
produce enough food for the population of the whole world,
provided the regions of deficient food production have some-
thing to offer which the regions of surplus food production
are willing to accept in exchange for food. But this condition
is apt to fail in bad times. In Russia, after the First World
War, the peasants had just about the amount of food they
wanted for themselves, and would not willingly part with
any of it for the purchase of urban products. At that time,
and again during the famine in the early thirties, the urban
population was kept alive only by the energetic use of armed
force. In the famine, as a result of government action, millions
of peasants died of starvation; if the government had been
neutral the town-dwellers would have died.

Such considerations point to a conclusion which, it seems
to me, is too often ignored. Industry, except in so far as it
ministers directly to the needs of agriculture, is a luxury:
in bad times its products will be unsalable, and only force
directed against food-producers can keep industrial workers

102

THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

alive, and that only if very many food-producers are left to
die. If bad times become common, it must be inferred that
industry will dwindle and that the industrialization char-
acteristic of the last 1 50 years will be rudely checked.

But bad times, you may say, are exceptional, and can be
dealt with by exceptional methods. This has been more or
less true during the honeymoon period of industrialism, but
it will not remain true unless the increase of population can
be enormously diminished. At present the population of the
world is increasing at about 58,000 per diem. War, so far,
has had no very great effect on this increase, which continued
throughout each of the world wars. Until the last quarter of
the nineteenth century this increase was more rapid in
advance countries than in backward ones, but now it is
almost wholly confined to very poor countries. Of these,
China and India are numerically the most important, while
Russia is the most important in world politics. But I want,
for the present, to confine myself, so far as I can, to biological
considerations, leaving world politics on one side.

What is the inevitable result if the increase of population
is not checked? There must be a very general lowering of the
standard of life in what are now prosperous countries. With
that lowering there must go a great diminution in the demand
for industrial products. Detroit will have to give up making
private cars, and confine itself to lorries. Such things as books,
pianos, watches will become the rare luxuries of a few excep-
tionally powerful men — notably those who control the army
and the police. In the end there will be a uniformity of misery,
and the Malthusian law will reign unchecked. The world
having been technically unified, population will increase when
world harvests are good, and diminish by starvation when-
ever they are bad. Most of the present urban and industrial

CAN A SCIENTIFIC SOCIETY BE STABLE? IO3

centers will have become derelict, and their inhabitants, if
still alive, will have reverted to the peasant hardships of their
medieval ancestors. The world will have achieved a new
stability, but at the cost of everything that gives value to
human life.

Are mere numbers so important that, for their sake, we
should patiently permit such a state of affairs to come about?
Surely not. What, then, can we do? Apart from certain deep-
seated prejudices, the answer would be obvious. The nations
which at present increase rapidly should be encouraged to
adopt the methods by which, in the West, the increase of
population has been checked. Educational propaganda, with
government help, could achieve this result in a generation.
There are, however, two powerful forces opposed to such a
policy: one is religion, the other is nationalism. I think it is
the duty of all who are capable of facing facts to realize,
and to proclaim, that opposition to the spread of birth con-
trol, if successful, must inflict upon mankind the most ap-
palling depth of misery and degradation, and that within
another fifty years or so.

I do not pretend that birth control is the only way in
which population can be kept from increasing. There are
others, which, one must suppose, opponents of birth control
would prefer. War, as I remarked a moment ago, has hitherto
been disappointing in this respect, but perhaps bacteriological
war may prove more effective. If a Black Death could be
spread throughout the world once in every generation
survivors could procreate freely without making the world
too full. There would be nothing in this to offend the con-
sciences of the devout or to restrain the ambitions of national-
ists. The state of affairs might be somewhat unpleasant, but
what of that? Really high-minded people are indifferent to

104

THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

happiness, especially other people's. However, I am wander-
ing from the question of stability, to which I must return.

There are three ways of securing a society that shall be
stable as regards population. The first is that of birth control,
the second that of infanticide or really destructive wars, and
the third that of general misery except for a powerful minor-
ity. All these methods have been practiced: the first, for
example, by the Australian aborigines; the second by the
Aztecs, the Spartans, and the rulers of Plato's Republic; the
third in the world as some Western internationalists hope
to make it and in Soviet Russia. (It is not to be supposed that
Indians and Chinese like starving, but they have to endure it
because the armaments of the West are too strong for them.)
Of these three, only birth control avoids extreme cruelty and
unhappiness for the majority of human beings. Meanwhile, so
long as there is not a single world government there will
be competition for power among the different nations. And
as increase of population brings the threat of famine, national
power will become more and more obviously the only way
of avoiding starvation. There will therefore be blocs in which
the hungry nations band together against those that are well
fed. That is the explanation of the victory of communism in
China.

These considerations prove that a scientific world society
cannot be stable unless there is a world government.

It may be said, however, that this is a hasty conclusion.
All that follows directly from what has been said is that, un-
less there is a world government which secures universal
birth control, there must from time to time be great wars, in
which the penalty of defeat is widespread death by starvation.
That is exactly the present state of the world, and some may
hold that there is no reason why it should not continue for

CAN A SCIENTIFIC SOCIETY BE STABLE? I05

centuries. I do not myself believe that this is possible. The
two great wars that we have experienced have lowered the
level of civilization in many parts of the world, and the next
is pretty sure to achieve much more in this direction. Unless,
at some stage, one power or group of powers emerges
victorious and proceeds to establish a single government of
the world with a monopoly of armed force, it is clear that
the level of civilization must continually decline until
scientific warfare becomes impossible — that is until science is
extinct. Reduced once more to bows and arrows, Homo
sapiens might breathe again, and climb anew the dreary road
to a similar futile culmination.

The need for a world government, if the population
problem is to be solved in any humane manner, is completely
evident on Darwinian principles. Given two groups, of which
one has an increasing and the other a stationary population,
the one with the increasing population will (other things
being equal) in time become the stronger. After victory, it
will cut down the food supply of the vanquished, of whom
many will die. 1 Therefore there will be a continually re-
newed victory of those nations that, from a world point of
view, are unduly prolific. This is merely the modern form
of the old struggle for existence. And given scientific powers
of destruction, a world which allows this struggle to continue
cannot be stable.

PSYCHOLOGICAL

The psychological conditions of stability in a scientific
society are to my mind quite as important as the physical and

1 Some may think this statement unduly brutal. But if they will look
up newspapers of 1946 they will find, side by side, indignant letters say-
ing that British labor could not be efficient on a diet of 2,500 calories, and
that it was preposterous to suppose that a German needed more than 1,200
calories.

106 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

biological conditions, but they are much more difficult to
discuss, because psychology is a less advanced science than
either physics or biology. Nevertheless, let us make the
attempt.

The old rationalist psychology used to assume that if you
showed a man quite clearly that a certain course of action
would lead to disaster for himself he would probably avoid it.
It also took for granted a will to live, except in a negligible
minority. Chiefly as a result of psychoanalysis this Bentham-
ite belief that most men pursue their own interest in a more
or less reasonable way has not now the hold on informed
opinion that it formerly had. But not very many people,
among those concerned with politics, have applied modern
psychology to the explanation of large-scale social phenom-
ena. This is what I propose, with much diffidence, to at-
tempt.

Consider, as the most important illustration, the present
drift towards a third world war. You are arguing, let us say,
with an ordinary cheerful nonpolitical and legally sane per-
son. You point out to him what can be done by atom bombs,
what Russian occupation of Western Europe would mean in
suffering and destruction of culture, what poverty and what
regimentation would result even in the event of a fairly quick
victory. All this he fully admits, but nevertheless you do not
achieve the result for which you had hoped. You make his
flesh creep, but he rather enjoys the sensation. You point out
the disorganization to be expected, and he thinks: "Well,
anyhow, I shan't have to go to the office every morning."
You expatiate on the large number of civilian deaths that will
take place, and while in the top layer of his mind, he is duly
horrified, there is a whisper in a deeper layer: "Perhaps I
shall become a widower, and that might not be so bad." And

1

CAN A SCIENTIFIC SOCIETY BE STABLE? IO7

so, to your disgust, he takes refuge in archaic heroism, and
exclaims :

Blow wind! come wrack!

At least we'll die with harness on our back

or whatever more prosaic equivalent he may prefer.

Psychologically, there are two opposite maladies which
have become so common as to be dominant factors in politics.
One is rage, the other listlessness. The typical example of the
former was the mentality of the Nazis; of the latter, the
mentality in France which weakened resistance to Germany
before and during the war. In less acute forms these two
maladies exist in other countries, and are, I think, intimately
bound up with the regimentation which is associated with
industrialism. Rage causes nations to embark on enterprises
that are practically certain to be injurious to themselves;
listlessness causes nations to be careless in warding off evils,
and generally disinclined to undertake anything arduous.
Both are the outcome of a deep malaise resulting from lack of
harmony between disposition and mode of life.

One cause of this malaise is the rapidity of change in
material conditions. Savages suddenly subjected to European
restraints not infrequently die from inability to endure a life
so different from what they have been accustomed to. When
I was in Japan in 192 1 I seemed to sense in the people with
whom I talked, and in the faces of the people I met in the
streets, a great nervous strain, of the sort likely to promote
hysteria. I thought this came from the fact that deep-rooted
unconscious expectations were adapted to old Japan, whereas
the whole conscious life of town-dwellers was devoted to an
effort to become as like Americans as possible. Such a malad-
justment between the conscious and the unconscious was

108 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

bound to produce discouragement or fury, according as the
person concerned was less or more energetic. The same sort
of thing happens wherever there is rapid industrialization; it
must have happened with considerable intensity in Russia.

But even in a country like our own, where industrialism is
old, changes occur with a rapidity which is psychologically
difficult. Consider what has happened during my lifetime.
When I was a child telephones were new and very rare.
During my first visit to America I did not see a single motor-
car. I was thirty-nine when I first saw an airplane. Broad-
casting and the cinema have made the life of the young pro-
foundly different from what it was during my own youth.
As for public life, when I first became politically conscious
Gladstone and Disraeli still confronted each other amid
Victorian solidities, the British Empire seemed eternal, a
threat to British naval supremacy was unthinkable, the
country was aristocratic and rich and growing richer, and
socialism was regarded as the fad of a few disgruntled and
disreputable foreigners.

For an old man, with such a background, it is difficult to
feel at home in a world of atomic bombs, communism, and
American supremacy. Experience, formerly a help in the
acquisition of political sagacity, is now a positive hindrance,
because it was acquired in such different conditions. It is
now scarcely possible for a man to acquire slowly the sort of
wisdom which in former times caused "elders" to be re-
spected, because the lessons of experience become out of date
as fast as they are learned. Science, while it has enormously
accelerated outward change, has not yet found any way of
hastening psychological change, especially where the un-
conscious and subconscious are concerned. Few men's

CAN A SCIENTIFIC SOCIETY BE STABLE? I09

unconscious feels at home except in conditions very similar
to those which prevailed when they were children.

Rapidity of change, however, is only one of the causes of
psychological discontent. Another, perhaps more potent, is
the increasing subordination of individuals to organizations,
which, so far, has seemed to be an unavoidable feature of a
scientific society. In a factory containing expensive plant,
and depending upon the closely co-ordinated labor of many
people, individual impulses must be completely controlled
except by the men constituting the management. There is no
possibility, in working hours, of either adventure or idleness.
And even outside working hours the opportunities are few
for most people. Getting from home to work and from work
to home takes time; at the end of the day there is neither
time nor money for anything very exciting. And what is true
of workers in a factory is true, in a greater or less degree, of
most people in a well-organized modern community. Most
people, when they are no longer quite young, find themselves
in a groove — like the man in the limerick, "not a bus, not a
bus, but a tram." Energetic people become rebellious, quiet
people become apathetic. War, if it comes, offers an escape.
I should like a Gallup poll on the question: "Are you more or
less happy now than during the war?" This question should
be addressed to both men and women. I think it would be
found that a very considerable percentage are less happy now
than then.

This state of affairs presents a psychological problem
which is too little considered by statesmen. It is hopeless to
construct schemes for preserving peace if most people would
rather not preserve it. As they do not admit, and perhaps do
do not know, that they would prefer war, their unconscious

no

THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

will lead them to prefer specious schemes that are not likely
to achieve their ostensible purpose.

The difficulty of the problem arises from the highly
organic character of modern communities, which makes each
dependent upon all to a far greater degree than in pre-indus-
trial times. This makes it necessary to restrain impulse more
than was formerly necessary. But restraint of impulse, be-
yond a point, is very dangerous: it causes destructiveness,
cruelty, and anarchic rebellion. Therefore, if populations are
not to rise up in a fury and destroy their own creations,
ways must be found of giving more scope for individuality
than exists for most people in the modern world. A society is
not stable unless it is on the whole satisfactory to the holders
of power and the holders of power are not exposed to the
risk of successful revolution. But it is also not stable if the
holders of power embark upon rash adventures, such as those
of the Kaiser and Hitler. These are the Scylla and Charybdis
of the psychological problem, and to steer between them is
not easy. Adventure, yes; but not adventure inspired by
destructive passions.

CONCLUSIONS

Let us now bring together the conclusions which result
from our inquiry into the various kinds of conditions that a
scientific society must fulfill if it is to be stable.

First, as regards physical conditions. Soil and raw materials
must not be used up so fast that scientific progress cannot
continually make good the loss by means of new inventions
and discoveries. Scientific progress is therefore a condition,
not merely of social progress, but even of maintaining the
degree of prosperity already achieved. Given a stationary
technique, the raw materials that it requires will be used up

m

CAN A SCIENTIFIC SOCIETY BE STABLE?

in no very long time. If raw materials are not to be used up
too fast, there must not be free competition for their acquisi-
tion and use but an international authority to ration them in
such quantities as may from time to time seem compatible
with continued industrial prosperity. And similar considera-
tions apply to soil conservation.

Second, as regards population. If there is not to be a
permanent and increasing shortage of food, agriculture must
be conducted by methods which are not wasteful of soil, and
increase of population must not outrun the increase in food
production rendered possible by technical improvements. At
present neither condition is fulfilled. The population of the
world is increasing, and its capacity for food production is
diminishing. Such a state of affairs obviously cannot continue
very long without producing a cataclysm.

To deal with this problem it will be necessary to find ways
of preventing an increase in world population. If this is to be
done otherwise than by wars, pestilences, and famines, it will
demand a powerful international authority. This authority
should deal out the world's food to the various nations in
proportion to their population at the time of the establishment
of the authority. If any nation subsequently increased its
population it should not on that account receive any more
food. The motive for not increasing population would there-
fore be very compelling. What method of preventing an
increase might be preferred should be left to each State to
decide.

But although this is the logical solution of the problem, it is
obviously at present totally impracticable. It is quite hard
enough to create a strong international authority, and it will
become impossible if it is to have such unpopular duties.
There are, in fact, two opposite difficulties. If at the present

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moment the world's food were rationed evenly the Western
nations would suffer what to them would seem starvation.
But, on the other hand, the poorer nations are those whose
population increases fastest, and who would suffer most from
an allocation which was to remain constant. Therefore, as
things stand, all the world would oppose the logical solution.

Taking a long view, however, it is by no means impossible
that the population problem will in time solve itself. Pros-
perous industrial countries have low birth rates; Western
nations barely maintain their numbers. If the East were to
become as prosperous and as industrial as the West, the
increase of population might become sufficiently slow to
present no insoluble problem. At present Russia, China, and
India are the three great reservoirs of procreation and
poverty. If those countries reached the level of diffused
well-being now existing in America their surplus popula-
tion might cease to be a menace to the world.

In general terms, we may say that so far as the population
problem is concerned a scientific society could be stable if all
the world were as prosperous as America is now. The diffi-
culty, however, is to reach this economic paradise without a
previous success in limiting population. It cannot be done as
things are now without an appalling upheaval. Only govern-
ment propaganda on a large scale could quickly change the
biological habits of Asia. But most Eastern governments
would never consent to this except after defeat in war. And
without such a change of biological habits Asia cannot be-
come prosperous except by defeating the Western nations,
exterminating a large part of their population, and opening
the territories now occupied by them to Asiatic immigration.
For the Western nations this is not an attractive prospect, but
it is not impossible that it may happen. Irrational passions

CAN A SCIENTIFIC SOCIETY BE STABLE? 113

and convictions are so deeply involved in the problem that
only an infinitesimal minority, even among highly educated
people, are willing even to attempt to consider it rationally.
That is the main reason for a gloomy prognosis.

Coming, finally, to the psychological conditions of stabil-
ity, we find again that a high level of economic prosperity is
essential. This would make it possible to give long holidays
with full pay. In the days before currency restrictions dons
and public schoolmasters used to make their lives endurable
by risking death in the Alps. Given secure peace, a not ex-
cessive population, and a scientific technique of production,
there is no reason why such pleasures should not be open to
everybody. There will be need also of devolution, of a great
extension of federal forms of government, and of keeping
alive the kind of semi-independence that now exists in Eng-
lish universities. But I will not develop this theme, as I have
dealt with it in my Reith lectures on "Authority and the
Individual."

My conclusion is that a scientific society can be stable
given certain conditions. The first of these is a single govern-
ment of the whole world, possessing a monopoly of armed
force and therefore able to enforce peace. The second condi-
tion is a general diffusion of prosperity, so that there is no
occasion for envy of one part of the world by another. The
third condition (which supposes the second fulfilled) is a low
birth rate everywhere, so that the population of the world
becomes stationary, or nearly so. The fourth condition is the
provision for individual initiative both in work and in play,
and the greatest diffusion of power compatible with main-
taining the necessary political and economic framework.

The world is a long way from realizing these conditions,
and therefore we must expect vast upheavals and appalling

ii4

THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY

suffering before stability is attained. But, while upheavals
and suffering have hitherto been the lot of man, we can now
see, however dimly and uncertainly, a possible future culmi-
nation in which poverty and war will have been overcome,
and fear, where it survives, will have become pathological.
The road, I fear, is long, but that is no reason for losing sight
of the ultimate hope.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bertrand Arthur William Russell received the Nobel Prize
for literature in ipjo. He is the grandson of Lord John Russell,
the British Foreign Secretary during the Civil War. Before
going to Cambridge he was educated at home by governesses
and tutors, acquiring a thorough knowledge of German and
French; and it has been said that his "admirable and lucid Eng-
lish style may be attributed to the fact that he did not undergo
a classical education at a public school." Certainly, this style is
perceptible in the many books that have flowed from his pen
during half a century — books that have shown him to be the
most profound of mathematicians, the most brilliant of philoso-
phers, 'and the most lucid of popularizers. His most recent ma-
jor works are A History of Western Philosophy, published in
1945; Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, published in
1948; Authority and the Individual, published in 1949; Unpopu-
lar Essays, that grossly mistitled book, published in 19J1; and
New Hopes for a Changing World, published in 19s 2.