The Real Responsibilities of the Scientist
Jacob Bronowski
[Reprinted from the Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists, January 1956]
Dr. Jacob Bronowski was
born in 1908 in Poland, but has spent most of his career in England.
Trained as a mathematician, he received the Ph.D. from Cambridge in
1933 and was for some years a senior lecturer at Hull. In 1945 he
was scientific deputy to the British Chiefs of Stuff Mission to
Japan. He has been head of the Projects Division of UNESCO and held
a variety of posts conducting and directing research into industrial
development for British government agencies. One of his main
interests has been the relation between science and the arts, and he
is well known in England for broadcasts on atomic energy and other
science subjects and for his radio dramas. Among his writings are
The Poet's Defense (1939), William Blake: a Man without
a Mask (1944), The Common Sense of Science (1951), Science
and Human Values (1959), The Western Intellectual Tradition
from Leonardo to Hegel (1960), and Insight (1964). This
essay was written as an address to the International Liaison
Committee of the Organizations for Peace.
We live in times of very difficult decisions for scientists, for
statesmen, and for the lay public. Many of these decisions are forced
on us by new scientific discoveries, and the difficulties in making
them are created by the distance between the scientist and the public.
{Indeed, there is a frightening distance even between scientists in
one field and those in another.) This sense of distance is, I think, a
grave threat to the survival of the kind of society in which science
can flourish at all.
People hate scientists. There is no use in beating about the bush
here. The scientist is in danger of becoming the scapegoat for the
helplessness which the public feels. And if an immense revulsion of
public feeling does lead to the destruction of the scientific
tradition, then the world may again enter a dark age as it did after
the Goths destroyed Rome. It is not impossible that the whole
mechanical and intellectual society which we know could be abolished
by a great wave of fanaticism.
That is the danger which faces us, because people hate scientists.
But even if this danger does not materialize, something as terrible
can happen - and is happening. This is that the scientist is forced,
by the hatred of public opinion, to side with established authority
and government. He becomes a prisoner of the hatred of the lay public,
and by that becomes the tool of authority.
My purpose is not to underline these obvious dangers, which we may
hide from ourselves but which in our hearts we all know to exist. My
purpose is to try to give a picture, as I see it, of the real
responsibilities of scientists, government, and public, in order that,
beginning from this diagnosis, we may begin to cure the great and
threatening division between them.
What the lay public does when it hates the scientist is what it does
also when it hates policemen and ministers of state and all symbols of
authority. It tries to shift the responsibility for decisions from its
own shoulders to the shoulders of other people. "They have done
this," it says. And "They" is always the law, the
government - or in this case, the scientist.
You must allow me here to make a digression which is not strictly
part of my theme, but which I think needs saying. It is this: that we
must not forget that scientists do bear a heavy responsibility. I am
of course about to explain that really the public and governments bear
the main responsibility. But this does not shift from us, the
scientists, the grave onus of having acquiesced in the abuse of
science. We have contrived weapons and policies with our public
conscience, which each of us individually would never have undertaken
with his private conscience. Men are only murderers in large groups.
They do not individually go out and strangle their neighbor. And
scientists are only murderers in large groups - collectively. For
scientists are very ordinary human beings. Any collection of people in
any laboratory contains good and bad, people with consciences and
without, and what we have allowed to happen is the conquest of science
by the minority without conscience which exists in every group.
It is sad that scientists have been exceptionally corruptible. Look
into your own experience. Most of us have come from poor parents. We
have worked our own way up. The practice of science has enabled us to
earn salaries which would be unthinkable to us if we had stayed
peddling whatever our fathers peddled. Quite suddenly, the possession
of a special skill has opened to us a blue door in the antechambers of
prime ministers. We sit at conference tables, we have become important
people, because we happen to be able to be murderers. And therefore
scientists have been bought with large salaries and fellowships and
rewards quite inappropriate to their merits, because a policy was
furthered by their techniques. The scientist has proved to be the
easiest of all men to blind with the attractions of public life.
Having said this I now propose to stop abusing the scientist. I think
it is right that we should all make this confession of guilt - I have
been as guilty as anyone else - but this is all spilt milk, this is
all water over the dam. We must now look toward what we can do to
remedy what has happened. And it cannot be remedied by a gigantic
strike of scientists, who will suddenly refuse to have anything to do
with commercial or war research, because the society of scientists
contains too many fallible human beings to make this practicable.
When the public dreams of such a strike, when it says: "scientists
ought not to have invented this or disclosed that secret," it is
already demanding something of the individual scientist which lies
beyond his personal responsibility.
The voters of Great Britain elect for the purpose of making their
policy six hundred and thirty members of Parliament. They do not elect
the people who go to Harwell or the people who go to my own research
laboratory. That is: we have already deputed to those whom we elect
the responsibility for framing policy in peace and war, and it is
quite wrong to ask a body of professional experts like the scientists
to take this responsibility from the men whom our society has named.
The individual scientist is not the keeper of the public conscience,
because that is not what he was chosen for. The population at large,
through its deputed ministers, has chosen scientists to execute
certain public orders which are thought to represent the public will.
And you cannot ask the scientist to be executioner of this will, and
judge as well. If you have given a body of scientists this particular
hangman's task, you cannot ask them also to form a collective
opposition to it. The collective responsibility belongs to the lay
public and through that, to those who were elected by that public to
carry it out.
Thus when Einstein on August 2, 1939, wrote a letter to President
Roosevelt in order to draw his attention to the possibility of an
atomic bomb, he was acting with exemplary correctness. He was
Disclosing to the elected head of government a matter of public
importance on which the decision was not his, the writer's, but was
the President's to make.
We must explain to people that they are asking of scientists quite
the wrong collective decision when they say, "you should not have
invented this" or "you should not have disclosed that."
This is asking us all to betray the public in the same way as Dr.
Klaus Fuchs did, by asking scientists to make decisions which are for
the nation to make. The only man who ever, on his own responsibility,
was willing to shoulder public responsibility in this way, was Dr.
Fuchs. But so far from being hailed as the only sane scientist, he was
treated as quite the opposite - as of course he was, since scientists
have no right to betray the will of the nation. Yet Fuchs did just
what the public asks of every scientist - he decided what to do with a
scientific invention.
Very well. We will agree that the scientist is not the keeper of the
nation's policy. Then what is he the keeper of? He is the keeper of
his own private conscience. His responsibility is not to be seduced as
a person. He has the right te act individually as a conscientious
objector. Indeed, I believe he has the duty to act as a conscientious
objector. I would like to repeat this point. It is in this country an
offense to betray the armed forces or to seduce their members from
their allegiance. It is not an offense to refuse to be a soldier. And
I believe that this is exactly like the position of the scientist. He
has no business to act as if he commands the army, but he has a
business to settle with his own conscience: the serious business
whether he personally will engage in forms of research of which he
does not morally approve.
My claim then is that the individual scientist should exercise his
own personal conscience. This is his duty. What is the duty of
governments in this respect? It is to make it possible for him to
exercise his conscience. The responsibility of governments in this is
to create the conditions in which a scientist can say: No! to projects
in which he does not want to take part. He must even be able to give
advice which is distasteful to those in authority, and still must not
be hounded out of public life or prevented from making a living.
In all countries the serious threat to scientists who have once
touched the fringes of secret subjects is that they are then caught,
in something from which they can never escape again. They do not get a
passport, in case somebody captures them. They cannot get a job
because, if they do not want to do this, then they are too dangerous
or awkward to be trusted with anything else. This is what we must
prevent governments from doing, and this can only be prevented by the
opinion of quite ordinary citizens. This is the duty which citizens
owe to scientists, to insist that governments shall make it possible
for scientists to be conscientious objectors if they wish.
I have explored this subject in general terms, and I would now like
to be specific. I would like to tell you precisely what I think is the
responsibility of the public, of the scientists, and of governments.
The responsibility of the public is to make the decisions of policy
on which their future depends, and to make them themselves. And in a
democracy the apparatus for this is to elect those people in whose
judgment you have confidence - and to elect them on the issues which
in fact face the world. Now you can only elect such people, you can
only put pressure on them about public issues, if you are well
informed. The greatest lack in public opinion today is lack of
information about what is possible and not possible in science. This
sets my teeth on edge every time I read a scientific newsflash. I will
quote one of many instances which I find distasteful: the use of the
phrase "cobalt bomb." This is a technical term for a piece
of medical equipment, but has suddenly become transformed into
something to describe how a hydrogen bomb might be clothed. As a
result, of the fifty million people in this country, forty-nine
million nine hundred odd thousand have heard the words "cobalt
bomb," but are helplessly confused between radioactive treatment
and something that you blow people up with. The public must be well
informed; and the public gets not only the government it deserves, but
the newspapers it deserves.
If this is once granted, the next step I think is simple. If it is
once granted that we believe in democratic election, and that in our
generation this can only be carried out by a public informed on the
scientific issues on which the fate of nations hangs, then the duty of
the scientist is clear. The duty of the scientist is to inform the
public. The duty of the scientist is to create the public opinion for
right policies, and this he can only create if the public shares his
knowledge.
My generation has a heavy task here, because it ought to spend the
bulk of its time - alas - not in laboratories at all, but in
explaining to the voting public what is going on in the laboratories.
What are the choices which face us? What could be done with
antibiotics, with new materials, with coal (if you like), and with
alternative forms of energy? These are urgent questions and yet,
however many times we raise them, the layman still does not understand
the scale of the changes which our work is making, and on which the
answers must hang.
There is a slightly irreverent story about this. At the time the
Smyth Report was published in America there was published in this
country a White Paper on the British contribution to atomic energy.
One of the documents in it is the directive which Mr. Winston
Churchill, as he then was, gave about the setting up of an atomic
energy project. This directive begins with the words, "Though
personally satisfied with the power of existing explosives...."
This bland phrase is a monument to a nonscientific education. For it
could only have been written by a man, an intelligent man, who simply
does not understand how big a million is. The difference between
atomic explosives and ordinary explosives is the difference beween the
length of a nuclear bond and a molecular bond; and this is a factor of
more than a million. To suppose somehow that in multiplying the energy
of an explosive by a million, you are doing nothing very different
from multiplying it by two, or five, or ten - this is simply not to
grasp the scale of the world.
And the public does not grasp it. To say "ten to the sixth"
to anybody, however educated, is still to invite the reproof today
that one is stressing mere numerical details. One of our tasks, as
scientists, must be to educate people in the scale of things.
While I am telling improper stories - improper only in the amusing
sense - I will tell you that everybody who works in industrial
research has this trouble all the time, when he discusses the
economics of new processes. We put forward the result of research, or
we simply estimate what would happen if a piece of research proved
successful. And at once we get back a balance sheet from the finance
department which says: The current process makes a profit of 2 / 2d a
ton, and what you have in mind might make a loss of 8d a ton; it is
therefore not worth pursuing. This, if you please, is the comment on a
piece of research which, if it works on the full scale, might cut
costs by a factor of five. But no accountant understands a factor of
five; he budgets in shillings and pence, and what is liable to loss is
to him as good as lost. One cannot explain a factor of five, or a
factor of a million, to people who have not been brought up in a
scientific tradition. This is what I mean when I say that the
scientist has a duty to become a teacher to the public in
understanding the pace, the nature, the scale of the changes which are
possible in our lifetime.
I have detailed the duties of the public and of the scientist. What
are the duties of government? The duties of government are to give its
public the opportunity to learn, and therefore to give scientists the
opportunity to teach. And I have already suggested that these duties
are twofold. One is to give scientists freedom to live their own lives
if they do not want to go on with research projects which seem to them
without conscience. The other is the duty to allow scientists to speak
freely on subjects of world importance.
As for the second, everyone who has ever been connected with the
atomic energy projects knows how it is met today. We spend our time
waiting for some American journalist to publish some piece of
information which we know to be accurate, so that we may then quote it
as being the opinion of the New York Times. I am being frank
about this: I do it all the time. I read what the greatest indiscreet
senator said to the small indiscreet reporters, and I know that nine
statements are nonsense and one statement is accurate. Then I quote
the one that is accurate - but not as my opinion.
Of course it is natural that governments resist the explosive
opinions of scientists. All governments, all societies are resistant
to change. Rather over two thousand years ago, Plato was anxious to
exile poets from his society; and in our lifetime, for the same
reason, governments are in effect anxious to exile or at least silence
scientists. They are anxious to exile all dissidents, because
dissidents are the people who will change society.
There is a simple difference between governments and scientists.
Governments believe that society ought to stay the way it is for good
- and particularly, that there ought to be no more elections.
Scientists believe that society ought to be stable, but this does not
mean the same thing to them as being static. We scientists want to see
an evolving, society, because when the physical world is
evolving (and we are helping to evolve it) the forms of society and
government cannot be kept the same.
Having described the duties of the public, of scientists, and of
governments, let me now underline what I have said by describing what
happens in all three cases if these duties are not kept. If
governments do not allow scientists freedom of conscience, to work at
what they like and to refuse to work at what they do not like, and to
speak freely about why they do so, then you get the gravest of all
disasters - the disaster of state intolerance. This is a disaster
because it saps both sides of the moral contract. For there is a moral
contract between society and its individuals which allows the
individual to be a dissident; and if the state breaks this moral
contract, then it leaves the individual no alternative but to become a
terrorist. I do not know whether the great state trials in Russia were
just or were false. But I know that if they were just, if men like
Radek and Trotsky and Zinoviev really committed those enormities, then
this in itself condemns the system of government which does not allow
any other form of protest than such a form. The grave danger to our
society too is that this becomes the only choice which is left open to
scientists, if state intolerance imprisons them and tries to turn them
into a secret Egyptian priestcraft.
The great sin of the public is acquiescence in this secrecy. I am
horrified by the feeling that I get, from such trifling things as
American advertisements, that people really enjoy the sense that they
are not to be trusted. There is an advertisement running in the New
Yorker at the moment (I think for a clothing firm) which shows a
man who has just got out of an airplane. He has a face like a
prizefighter, he is well-dressed and wears what in New York is called
a sharp hat, and he carries a bag in one hand which is chained to his
wrist. He is carrying secret documents. This is the holy of holies.
This is what we are to admire - the man with his mouth shut tight who
is not trusting you and me, because of course you and I are not to be
trusted. When people come to believe this, when they themselves
believe that it is better for them not to know, then totalitarianism
is on the doorstep. Then you are ready for Hitler to get up and say: "I
am the man who will take your communal responsibilities. I will make
your decisions for you."
And the third in our scheme, the scientist, must preserve the
tradition of quarrelling, of questioning, and of dissent on which
science (and I believe all post-Renaissance civilization) has been
built. He must do this for two reasons. First, there is the mundane
reason which is obvious in the failure of German research after Hitler
took power. It is this: that you do not get good science as soon as
you have reduced the scientists to yes-men. It is the nature of
scientists to be thoroughly contrary people - let us own up to that.
It is the nature of science as an activity to doubt your word and
mine. As soon as you get a science, such as atomic energy research in
totalitarian Germany, in which the young men are no longer allowed to
question what the great men have said, then that science is dead. You
can find in the files of the German Atomic Energy Commission that
several young men made what I suppose must be called very good
suggestions, but they were not followed because (such is the influence
of totalitarianism) Heisenberg always knew the answers already.
This does not happen in English laboratories yet. Mr. Churchill
begins by saying that he is satisfied with existing explosives, but
after the comma he does give scientists the opportunity to be
dissatisfied. This tradition, this independence and tolerance, is I
believe the base of all our values; and this is what we as scientists
must preserve.
I have given you the simple practical grounds for allowing scientists
to be awkward, but I believe also that imaginatively and
intellectually this is equally important. The sense of intellectual
heresy is the lifeblood of our civilization. And the heresy of
scientists cannot be confined to their science. Newton was thoroughly
and rightly contrary in science, and he was also a thorough heretic in
religious matters. For the same reason, people like Oppenheimer and
Einstein are found to associate with such unreliable characters. You
cannot say to scientists: "When you get into the laboratory at
nine in the morning you are going to become a dissenter; and when you
go out at five-thirty you are going to become a citizen who touches
his cap and who is politically sound." The intellect is not
divided into these simple categories.
I have said that the duty of the scientist is today publicly to
become a teacher. Let me end by saying something of what he is to
teach. There is, of course, the scientific method. There are things
about the scale and order of size, of which I have spoken. There are
the possibilities which are open to us in controlling nature and
ourselves. Above all, he can teach men to ask whether the distance
between promise and achievement in our age need be quite so large;
whether there must be such a gap between what society is capable of
doing and what it does. All this, every scientist can teach.
But every scientist can also teach something deeper. He can teach men
to resist all forms of acquiescence, of indifference, and all
imposition of secrecy and denial. We must resist the attitude of
officials, that there ought to be a good reason why something should
be published before you allow it. We must teach even officials that
there will have to be a very good reason indeed before anyone is
silenced by secrecy.
Mr. Gordon Dean, former chairman of the American Atomic Energy
Commission, has just been complaining against secrecy on practical
grounds. He says that the commercial reactors which are being built in
America are still on the secret list and that this is handicapping
American business in its competition with English business for world
reactor markets. God works in a mysterious way and it may be that by
this anxiety to sell atomic power, science will be liberated. At any
rate, let us not look askance at any ally in the drive against
silence. My message, in this and in all else, has been the scientist's
duty to speak. There is one thing above all others that the scientist
has a duty to teach to the public and to governments: it is the duty
of heresy.
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