The Lost Massey Lectures (14 page)

The rationalization is ready to hand. Modern science
requires
big capital and big organization: take cyclotrons, moon shots, statistical surveys, universal information-retrieval. These are now science
par excellence
. There has been a re-definition. Bypassing the experience of nearly four hundred years, the method of observation, analysis, deduction, and crucial experiment, we have amazingly come back full circle to the bureaucratic system of Bacon's
Novum Organum
, a dragnet of facts, stored, retrieved, and computed.

It is hard to know whether the corporate style of research is really the best one, for it tends to be self-proving. If brainy people agree to operate in this manner, they are not operating in some other manner and we do not know what they would be producing. Yet there is a curious body of evidence compiled by the Anti-Trust Committee of the United States Senate that shows rather overwhelmingly that in recent decades, even in practical Research and Development, the majority of significant advances have
not
come from big corporations and big universities, and have not been sponsored by foundations and government; they have still come from lonely (and often rejected) individuals, random amateur inventors, partnerships, tiny firms where the scientists, technicians, and craftsmen have a chance to talk to one another. One would expect this to be still more so in pure science.

Let me make myself clear once again. I am not opposed to heavy subsidies for science. It is one of the few things that make it worthwhile to be human; no price can be set on it. But, like art, perhaps science is hard to buy directly. Perhaps the best we can do is provide a decent society in which people can be themselves and children can grow up with their lively curiosity not too stultified. By definition, anything radically new must seem far-fetched except to its innovator. Certainly, as public policy—if only to increase the general cultivation—I would decentralize subsidies for science as widely as possible rather than, as we do, letting the money go to a few managers.

The morality of technology has also suffered a sea-change. Historically, the main origin of technology, in the work of craftsmen, miners, navigators, etc., provided a ready check on utility, efficiency, costs, and unforeseen effects. A secondary but important origin, in the natural experiments of Medieval and Renaissance alchemists and magicians, and perhaps physicians, provided no such check; the archetypal story is
The Sorcerer's Apprentice
. But therefore these groups had a strong ethical code, to permit only white magic, and prescribing Christian virtue as the priceless ingredient of the Philosopher's Stone. The Black Magician, like our Mad Scientist, was a villain for popular tragedy.

But even with the Industrial Revolution and the capitalization of machinery finally for cash profits rather than any other purpose, the market itself provided a check on the cheapness of the process and the utility of the products, although of course the whole system was notoriously careless of social costs and remote effects like enclosure, slums, air pollution, slag heaps, and the exhaustion of resources.

In principle, the discipline of Political Economy was, and is, supposed to regulate costs and benefits so as to guarantee the general good. In this discipline, the use and extent of a technology are subject to prudence, including safety, caution because of the possibility of unforeseen disadvantages, forethought to prevent over-commitment, and concern for the shape and function of the whole.

The history has been different. Political Economy did not devote itself to these matters but to the Gross National Product measured in cash; its advice was, and is, how to maximize technological growth to increase the abstract number of goods and services, whatever their quality or mutual contradictions. The check of the market has been weakened by subsidies, cost-plus contracts, monopolies, price-fixing, advertising, and the ignorance of consumers. And the various technologies increasingly interlock and depend on one another in a vast and recondite system, so that it has become fantastically difficult even for experts to decide what is by and large useful, cheap, or even safe. No one at all can trace the remote effects. And the control of the systems of technology, and of the systems of systems, is lodged in managers who finally are not interested in efficiency, not to speak of prudence. They are not in business for technical or citizenly reasons.

There ceases to be a morality of technique at all. A technician is hired to execute a detail of a program handed down to him. Apart from honestly trying to make his detail work, he is not entitled to criticize the program itself, in terms of its efficiency, common sense, beauty, effect on the community, or human scale. If management is not concerned with these either, a technician must often lend his wits to ludicrous contradictions. Cars are designed to go faster than it is safe to drive; food is processed to take out the nourishment; housing is expertly engineered to destroy neighborhoods; weapons are stockpiled that only a maniac would use. The
ultimate of irresponsibility is that the engineer is not allowed to know what he is making, and we have had this too.

The interlocking of systems of technology without the direct check of personal acquaintance and use and political prudence creates a series of booby traps. Human scale may be quite disregarded, the time and energy that people actually have, the space they need to move in, and the rhythm or randomness with which they best operate. As the engineers design, we move, or sometimes can't move. Facilities are improved, but during the transition everybody is inconvenienced, and by the time the facility is completed it may be obsolescent. Fast trips are made possible by jet, but they prove to chop up our lives, to involve longer trips to airports and more waiting in terminals, so we have less free time. Business machines are installed and there is no longer any person from whom to get information or service for one's particular case. Cities spread so far that one can't get out of them; the country is deserted, so it is inefficient to provide means to get to it. Immense printing presses and other means of communication are devised, but to warrant such an investment of capital requires a mass audience, and it becomes hard to publish a serious book or transmit a serious message.

This sounds like chaos and modern life pretty nearly is. Apart from the cure of infectious diseases, some public services, and some household and farm equipment, there have been few recent advances in technique that have not proved to be a mixed bag in actual convenience. The great advantages, on balance, that came from universalizing basic conveniences or necessities, like electricity or water-supply, do not necessarily occur when massifying comforts and luxuries. The moral advantages, of enriched opportunity, are largely delusory. New opportunities do not make time available to enjoy them, and the chance for choice works out as superficial acquaintance and confusion. The marvels of fable, like
flying through the air and seeing at a distance, have not proved so beautiful in reality. It is not hard to fantasize a use of our high technology that would be neat, uncomplicated, rich, and educative; but it is significant that utopian writers have stopped fantasizing in this direction. The fact remains that countries with a fifth or a tenth of our available technology have a way of life that is as good or better. I do not mean by this argument that we ought to cut back our technology, for human beings are bound to try out everything; but there is a problem here that we have no right to disregard as we do.

There is a new technological instrument of Political Economy that, ideally, could follow up some of the bewildering remote effects of innovation and detect the contradictions before they occur. This is computing costs and benefits. But it would have to be used authentically, focussing on what happens to people rather than on the convenience of the programmer or the aggrandizement of his system. Actual examples, in city planning, welfare, education, and foreign policy, have not been promising. They tend to omit from the equations factors that are unknown or stubbornly existing but excessively complicated, like individual differences, history, anomie, esthetics, the changeableness of policy. Then, though wise and impartial, the computer cannot give its best advice, which might often be: Not safe! Do not over-commit! Take it easy! Make it human! Instead, on the basis of puerile theories the programmers compute hard-nosed facts—“hard” facts are those with numbers attached—and bull through solutions to which human beings with the flexibility and fortitude that, God bless them, they have, adjust as best they can. The theories are thus confirmed.

Let me suggest two kinds of remedies to restore morale to scientific technology.

The first is to judge technology directly in terms of the moral criteria appropriate to it as a branch of practical philosophy. (How odd it is that today this obvious proposal has an odd ring!) Consider a possible list of criteria: Utility, Efficiency, Comprehensibility, Repairability, Flexibility, Amenity, Relevance, Modesty. By utility I mean, for instance, not pushing brand-name variety that makes no practical difference, whether in cars or drugs; not building obsolescence into expensive machines as if they were children's toys. By efficiency, I mean especially not over-riding the competence of technicians for the demands of the system; not disregarding thrift merely for convenience of administration—for instance, radical decentralization would often save on costs, as well as giving more control to those who do the work. By comprehensibility of design and concern for repairability we might alleviate the growing ineptitude of users and their bondage to repair-men and corporation service-stations. By flexibility we might stave off the increasingly frequent disasters that occur when interlocking systems of technology break down as a whole because of stoppage in a part; we might ease the entry of small enterprises and new regions into the economy. By amenity I mean concern for the whole range of feelings, not trivia like getting rid of billboards but the frayed nerves of traffic congestion, the destruction of cities by freeways, the chewing up of landscape for quick profits and transient convenience; not breeding out the taste and maturity of food for the convenience of processors and packagers. By relevance I mean concern for human scale, the time, size, energy, need for space of actual people, rather than calculating efficiency in abstract units of time, space, and energy. By modesty I mean not
looming larger than a function warrants; caution about hasty commitment and over-commitment which by now have given us several generations of slums of engineering and piles of junk.

Another valuable consideration is to check competition in technology when an enterprise reaches a size and expense that makes it a natural monopoly that should be regulated in the public interest or nationalized. At present, I think, this applies especially to automating, where it is absurd to duplicate immense concentrations of tools—though it might be wise radically to decentralize the programming. It certainly applies to the crazy competition in exploring space.

Such a moral program is, I say, obvious; yet it is revolutionary and beyond our present political means. We can legislate, and exact penalties for, hazard, dishonest claims, and malpractice, but not for slovenliness, childish gluttony, callousness about the community, and indecency. Then the public becomes resigned. Nevertheless, in my opinion, a lot would be accomplished if technicians would take the lead and insist on acting like professionals. Common people would follow their lead and find political means. It is endlessly amazing how people spring back to life and good instincts if they see a glimmer of hope; there is a dramatic reversal in the opinion polls.

Much could be accomplished also by a different kind of mass education in science. I agree with the current wisdom that in a world pervaded with scientific technology, a great part of the curriculum must be scientific. The question is for what purpose and how. At present, there is some effort to teach the excitement and beauty of science and natural truth, and to get great men to give the
TV
lessons; this is laudable. But the chief purpose of most
recent curriculum reform seems to me to be wrongheaded: it is to process Ph.D.'s or even to educate creative scientists; and the method is to teach the latest findings. The time of the vast majority who are not going on to scientific careers is wasted. Yet it is likely that most of those who are scientifically gifted will follow their bent anyway, quicker than they can in standard courses. We really do not know how to educate for creative genius. And it is not the case, as is claimed, that in a high technology average workmen need extensive scientific schooling; on the contrary, a few weeks to a year on the job, rather than years of lessons, is still the best way to train adequate low-level technicians.

Entirely neglected in the present curriculum, however, is what science
is
, as a way of being in the world. For instance, its austerity and honesty. For this, it is worse than useless for the average student to learn answers for the College Board examinations. This turns the whole thing into an abstraction or a hoax. The student ought instead to be scrupulously reporting what happened in his laboratory, why his experiment did
not
“work out”—of course, it has worked out some way or other.

There should be heavy emphasis on becoming at home in the actual technology, making model machines and learning to repair intelligently the usual standard machines. This was the scientific program of classical progressive education fifty years ago, to make critical and self-reliant users in an industrial society, to restore the sense of causal control of things rather than feeling powerless among things.

As part of social studies, a major subject should be the economics, politics, and organization of science and technology. I do not see any way for the average citizen to be able to judge the substantive issues relevant to the vast sums for research and development, medicine, space exploration, and technical training; but it would be helpful if he understood the interests and politics involved.