'Science and Government'

Sir Charles Snow's Rede Lecture, "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution," reached an enormous audience on both sides of the Atlantic. This was partly because of Snow's reputation as a novelist and distinguished civil servant, but more because the lecture said things that were on everybody's mind. It mirrored the academic community's disquiet over a sense of division within itself, and met a prevailing current of thought favoring some sort of inter-disciplinary ecumenical movement. Snow's Godkin Lectures on "Science and Government" fill no such need and will probably not have the same kind of effect, and as an admirer of Sir Charles, I would like to record my disappointment. The saving grace of the series was not the ideas presented, for these were points that either have been made already or are dubious, but the charm of Snow himself.

The first two of the three lectures were a novelistic account of the "closed politics" in the historic feud between Sir Henry Tizard and F. A. Lindemann, Churchill's scientific adviser before and through the Second World War. The tale was told, as you might expect, superbly. Snow is a sensitive and gifted man, and a personal knowledge of the scientists involved (as well as how the British government works) made the narrative more alive than it could possibly have been in the hands of a historian. This historic parable was meant to illustrate that, in modern industrial societies, a handful of men engaged in secret politics make decisions which determine "in the crudest sense whether we live or die."

Most of his listeners would agree that Snow made his point. I would question, though, his assumption that such secret politics are in any way bizarre or peculiar to our own age. It seemed to me that what he was describing--committee maneuvers, the politics of hierarchy, and "court politics"--are traditional means by which men have always arrived at decisions. His use of the phrase "court politics" to describe Lindemann's alliance with his powerful patron, Churchill, indicates how timeless and universal such politicking is. And, after the war and a decade of precarious coexistence, I don't think that any of Snow's listeners were surprised to hear that there are important decisions made in our society that are not subject to popular approval.

This is not to say that no problem exists, no conflict between expert and voter; obviously advances in technology have given all secret scientific decisions a kind of grisly finality, and the problem of trusting those who make them has assumed greater poignance than it had before. Snow, however, does not deal at all with questions of trust and responsibility, or the relationships between closed and open politics.

During his first two lectures I thought he was showing, in an admirably graphic way, that scientists making decisions are no different from other people making decisions. They act as men rather than as professionals, and they choose on the basis of sudden hatreds and loves, factional loyalties, and personal tastes. I was therefore surprised when he concluded his last lecture with a plea for more scientists at the top levels of our government. Although I might agree, it just didn't seem to follow.

In that lecture, he said that more scientists in government would make it easier for us to develop from an "existentialist" society into a "future-directed" one. Scientists, who have a sense of the future by virtue of the changing, historical character of their disciplines, can provide an antidote to our "existentialist," present-centered thinking. We are, Snow feels, self-satisfied and unmindful of the starving other two-thirds of the human race. We should make it a goal of our drifting society to feed these people. Such a goal would require planning ahead. Since scientists are more apt to think in terms of the future ("they have a sense of knowledge to come"), we need more scientists in government.

This is the kind of argument you can take or leave. There is no evidence that scientists are more prone to be future minded about non-science affairs than other men, nor that the scientist in the street would be better at secret decisions than, say, the historian in the street, whose discipline is also constantly undergoing revision. Probably neither would do well as a politician. Only Snow's immense common sense keeps him from sounding like the post-World War I expert-ists such as Veblen and Walter Lippmann.

Rage at existentialist sloth and his plea for a new vision to strive after place Snow near the camps of those calling for national purpose and those who are sad to se the end of ideology. His weak argument for more scientists in top government positions derives from something more serious and more important: a revulsion against the current western attitude of hopelessness about politics and all attempts to organize men in he service of a common ideal. To the extent that his mood is born of a sense of the emptiness of so much of the activity in our society, and separating it from his catch-phrase talk about "future-directed" scientists, I would applaud it heartily.

We who have, for the most part, attained wealth have become aware of deeper spiritual maladjustments, and some of us have concluded that the trouble with material goals is that you can reach them. But as the world's arrivistes, the western nations should not forget what misery means. Anomie, after all, is a good deal easier to endure than hunger and cold.

The problem of diverting our energies to the wretched of the world, however, is one for political leadership more than scientific know-how. We cannot adopt the means used by, say, the Soviet government to coerce its people into sacrificing for their children's world without accepting more of its premises than we are prepared to accept. Therefore our problem is to persuade ourselves that the sacrifice is worth it. That is a task for politicians. It was an ex-haberdasher from Missouri, and not a scientist, who was President when the Marshall Plan went into effect. And even the "closed politics" of scientists such as Tizard and Lindemann derived their real significance from their connections with Churchill's political authority.

One of the mysteries of the recent campaign was the extent to which Kennedy was telling us that we were going to have to sacrifice. We were never sure exactly what he was asking or why. And until the issue is put before the electorate by a politician, there will be no hope for the "future-directed" society men like Snow want. Democratic politicians may well be, as Snow says, "masters of the short-term solution," but they, and not the scientists have the opportunity. Any spring-cleaning in Heartbreak House is going to be done by those who can reach the public.