The Lost Massey Lectures (13 page)

Your own Marshall McLuhan of the University of Toronto pursues the same theme less pessimistically. He holds that the technical style of communications alters the nature of human perception and thought. It makes little difference, he says, what message or entertainment is broadcast on television, or whether the airways are a free forum or are regimented by monopolies, for the effect on human nature has already occurred because of the electronics medium itself. There is no point in making value judgments, and Professor McLuhan claims, at least in his delightful lectures, that he is morally neutral. (I think he is privately more disturbed.)

For Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, however, the new knowledge and technique constitute no less than a leap forward in organic evolution, transcending humanity as we have known it. Essentially, we now inhabit the Noösphere, the world-wide network of exchange of scientific information. Behavior no longer springs
from animal humors, the personal conflict of passion and reason, or the politics of groups, but from the decision of the giant intellectual spirit. As a pious Christian, Teilhard de Chardin is enthusiastic about our new state of being, which is imbued with divine love. I am bemused at the nature of the love given or received, as either eros or agape, by what seem to be information-retrieval computers, but no doubt I fail to understand.

Here, then, are three strong minds who see essentially the same phenomenon, the system of scientific technology brooding free and determining the future, though they evaluate it differently as horrible, neutral, or blessed.

Yet the gross history of the past hundred years does not reveal this free floating technology. Scientific technology has certainly affected with its products, processes, and method most human beings and nearly every human function; in large areas it has created an artificial landscape and altered the balance of species; it has gotten off the planet and may destroy a good part of life on the planet. But invariably, in its quantity and in its direction of development, scientific technology has been in the employ of familiar human motives: either convenience, health, and excitement, or profits, power, and the aggrandizement of persons or groups. It has not been independent. On the contrary, it can be shown that the organization of recent scientific technology has, by and large, moved
away
from the traditional research autonomy of science and the principle of efficiency of technology, and under political, military, and economic control. If they were organized in their own terms, science and technology would be very differently organized. At present there is a waste of scientists' time and brains, and engineers are not allowed to decide like real professionals. And the increasing moral and ritual drives to standardization, rationalization, control, and self-control—what Max Weber called the Protestant Ethic—have not, in my opinion, been mainly due
to technical routine but to new psychological obsessions to ward off insecurity, and compulsions to identify with power. People submit to inhuman routine out of fear and helplessness. And such routine is
not
of the essence of scientific technology. In the past both science and technology progressed better without such rituals, and they would do so now.

The present submissive state of scientific technology is a sad betrayal of the promise of independent scientific technology dreamed of by Thomas Huxley, Kropotkin, Veblen, John Dewey, Buckminster Fuller. They thought of science as humble, brave, and austere, and of technology as circumspect, neat, and serviceable. Working by its own morale, scientific technology should by now have simplified life rather than complicated it, emptied the environment rather than cluttered it, and educated an inventive and skillful generation rather than a conformist and inept one. It is the same with the effect of the technological development of communications, which Marshall McLuhan makes much of. Norbert Wiener used to point out that repetition of communication just increases the noise; in general, he said, there is more new information in a good poem than in a scientific report. Then, if our electronics media, and printing media, were doing their job, there would be less brainwashing and less gabble altogether; and Americans would not be spending six hours a day watching television and learning new habits of perception.

Jacques Ellul is mistaken about us miserable intellectuals. We complain not because we balk at technical progress but because we are disappointed in it.

Since I intend to complain about the present morale of scientific technology, let me first make clear what I do not complain of. Science
is
autonomous, because knowledge must be pursued for its own sake as part of the human adventure. Despite the risks involved, for instance in nuclear physics, most people honor this claim. I do. Also, technology is grounded in the human principle that you must give a workman the best tool, otherwise he is degraded. Despite the disruption sometimes involved, for instance in automation, most people are not Luddite and do not oppose technological advance. I do not.

Apart from these basic principles, however, the meaning of both science and technology has changed radically in the past fifty years. The often repeated statement that there are more scientists now alive than existed in all previous time ought to put us on the alert. How do these new multitudes of scientists take themselves? How are they in the world?

The present orthodox philosophy of scientific technology is that there is something called pure science or basic research which is morally neutral (except for the drive toward knowledge). Its inquiries may or may not lead to anything useful. Useful findings are “applied” and become part of the system of technology.

This is a peculiar position, and quite untraditional. What is neutral science? What is “applied” science? There
is
a difference between science and technology. It is reasonable to make the Aristotelian distinction between science as an act of wonder, disinterested curiosity, and esthetic construction, and technique as empirical rules of thumb for efficient practice; but, especially since the Renaissance, natural philosophers would not have made a big deal of such a distinction. Every theory has operations and apparatus; and a
reasoned
machine, like a steam engine or a storage
battery, is a model of its theory, it is not an “application.” It is the machine, not the theory, that is “applied” or put to use; this is a matter of choice and capitalization, not of technology as such. In fact, of course, science and technology have rarely gone separate ways anyway. It would be odd if they had. Agriculture, domestication of animals, measurement, building, machinery, navigation, transportation, communication, politics, war, pedagogy, medicine, all abound in controlled experiments that invite observation and testing; their difficulties and errors lead to new questions; new apparatus makes new theory. Contrariwise, any natural discovery is bound to be tried out; a model is built if only as a toy; and natural philosophers have always put their wits to work for industry, war, and medicine.

What is striking is that the doctrine of pure science and its moral neutrality always comes to the fore when scientists are assigned an official status and become salaried or subsidized, as in the German universities in the 19th century or in America today. It looks like an attempt, on the part of the scientists, to affirm their identity and protect themselves against officious interference by managers; but it is also, I am afraid, a self-deception and a hoax on the public. In America at present the great bulk of the billions of dollars for science is for research on extrinsically chosen problems, or even on particular products. A large part of the training of scientists in the universities is toward rather narrow technological expertness. Of nearly $20 billion marked for Research and Development, more than 90% is actually devoted to last-stage designing of hardware for production. Corporations mark up prices 1,000% in order, they say, to pay for basic research, but much of the research is to bypass other firms' patents. It is hard to credit that this kind of science is disinterested, and that promoters are not using the prestige of science as a talking-point.

It is taken for granted that amazing new developments will, if
possible, at once be sequestered for military use and sometimes be made secret. Lasers will be death rays. The adventure of space will end in orbiting missile sites. The chief use of drugs that influence behavior will be to paralyze an enemy's will to resist. Anthropology is for counter-insurgency in primitive countries. And even the benevolent dolphins are to be trained as kamikaze submarines. Unfortunately this is not a caricature. Then it is dismaying to hear dedicated scientists explain that they are allowed perfect freedom to do restricted-publication research, and that any theoretical problem is indifferently good for the progress of science. The simplest explanation of the proposition that “there are more scientists alive today than existed up to now” is that business-as-usual has co-opted science. It is not that our society has become scientific, but that to be a “scientist” has become one of the acceptable roles.

Make an historical contrast. During the heroic age of modern science, say from the 16th through the 18th centuries, natural philosophers believed, uncritically and perhaps naively, that they directly confronted the nature of things and were in a kind of dialogue with Nature with a capital N. Each man was solitarily engaged in this open dialogue which might lead in any direction and hopefully surprisingly. But since all were engaged in a common enterprise on the frontier of knowledge, they eagerly communicated with one another, by publication, academies, depositing theses in university libraries, and enormous correspondence by letter. (Theorists of anarchism point to the sublime progress of modern science as a triumph of almost perfect coordination without top-down management.) The duty of publication to allow others to replicate the experiment became part of the definition of science; by it one became honored as the first. One is puzzled as to what restricted “scientific” information can mean. Does “replicable” mean “replicable by those cleared by the
FBI
”?

During the heroic period, science was not the social orthodoxy. Indeed, a disproportionate number of the natural philosophers were exploring forbidden territory and publishing defiantly. They were not getting any grants. Their image was rough and morose or moonstruck and bumbling. Their claim to freedom of inquiry was grounded not in a formal distinction about role but in a civil conflict about content; this confirmed their solidarity as a rebellious band. They were not morally neutral, nor was Nature morally neutral. Nature was wonderful or horrible or fascinating; she was surely beyond ordinary human uses, but abounding in moral as well as practical lessons for human betterment.

In their hearts, I am sure, many scientists still belong to the ancient band—just as many academics still vote with Abelard. Sometimes a great scientist talks the old language. Old-fashioned moralists hanker after a “natural ethics” or a “scientific way of life.” But the official position is quite otherwise. Science is no longer a dialogue with Nature but a system of expanding knowledge that is self-contained and self-correcting, something like Hegel's progressive Absolute Idea. It is to this system that scientists are dedicated and which they serve with a special method practiced with considerable formal scrupulosity, so that it sometimes seems to be the correct method rather than the content that constitutes scientific truth. Rather than banded individuals, scientists have become an organized priesthood, and their system has become the major orthodoxy of modern society; it is the system of ideas that everybody—including myself—believes, whether or not one knows anything about it. The popular feeling about it contains both superstitious reverence and superstitious fear, and the current mass-education in science, we shall see, does not allay these. By and large, however, laymen are convinced that the progress of science will increase human happiness.

The shift of emphasis from an open dialogue of morose or
bumbling men with surprising Nature to an élite service to a progressive self-correcting system of knowledge has been accompanied by immense changes in the social organization of science, the role of the scientist, and the personal engagement of the man in the role. There is now less use for individual genius and hunch, and less opportunity for a personal ethical choice of a field of search as peculiarly fascinating, congenial, or “good.” The issue is not, let me make it clear, whether the field is benevolent or useful, for it has often been the hallmark of scientific genius to research the senseless, the apparently trivial, the pathological. But I doubt that an older-style scientist paid attention to what
he
considered indifferent. His work was suffused with himself—and it is my Wordsworthian bias that scientists and artists, formed by their disinterested conversation with meaning, are usually good people. When a study is pursued as indifferently scientific, however, it is likely that extrinsic purposes will dictate the direction that is taken. Inevitably there is pressure for pay-off results rather than the wandering dialogue with surprise. A scientist becomes personnel, pursuing the goals of the organization.

More fatefully, as a great successful institution, the system of knowledge has become interlocked with the other great institutions of society, and the dominant style takes over. But this style was not devised for open dialogue with surprise; it was devised for cash-accounting, tax collection, military discipline, logistics, and mass-manufacture. Yet bureaucratic methods, it is believed, must somehow be appropriate to science too. Committees
must
be able to evaluate “projects.” There
must
be profiles of gifted persons to support, and there
must
be university courses relevant to training others. Scientific thinking must be able to be parcelled out for efficient division of labor, and discoveries must occur on schedule: basic research, application, development, shaping up for production. With enough capital, one can mount
a crash program and break through. To be serviceable, excellent scientists become administrators. Grant-getters, who are clever about the forms, become scientists. Corporations become impresarios for scientists. Scientific brains from other countries are bought up to work in the American style on American problems, seriously depoverishing their own peoples and precluding the development of various schools of thought. In the end, unless an hypothesis involves big cash, its author cannot afford to pursue it, though he used to love it.