Science, Scientists, and Politics

Robert M. Hutchins

[An exchange involving Robert M. Hutchins, Scott Buchanan, Donald N. Michael, Chalmers Sherwin, James Real, and Lynn White, Jr.
Reprinted from The Center Magazine, November-December 1987]

This article, which first appeared as a Center Occasional Paper in 1963, is made up of some of the papers that were presented at a conference on the role and responsibilities of science executives in the service of government. The conference was sponsored by the Center in cooperation with the Twelfth Region of the United States Civil Service Commission. At the time of publication, Robert Hutchins was the president of the Fund for the Republic, Inc. Scott Buchanan was a consultant to the Center. Donald N. Michael was the author of the Center pamphlet Cybernation: The Silent Conquest and the director of the Peace Research Institute in Washington, D.C. Chalmers Sherwin was the vice-president and general manager of the Laboratories Division of Aerospace Corporation in Los Angeles. James Real was a management consultant for government and industry and the coauthor of the Center book, The Abolition of War. Lynn White, Jr., was the former president of Mills College and a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles.

I do not know much about science, but I know a lot about scientists. Though I do not know much about professional politics, I know a lot about academic politics - and that is the worst kind. Woodrow Wilson said that Washington was a snap after Princeton. Not only is academic politics the worst kind of politics, but scientists are the worst kind of academic politicians.

I wish at the outset to repudiate C. P. Snow, who intimates in one of his books that scientists should be entrusted with the world because they are a little bit better than other people. My view, based on long and painful observation, is that professors are somewhat worse than other people, and that scientists are somewhat worse than other professors. Let me demonstrate that these propositions are self-evidently true.

The foundation of morality in our society is a desire to protect one's reputation. A professor's reputation depends entirely upon his books and his articles in learned journals. The narrower the field in which a man must tell the truth, the wider is the area in which he is free to lie. This is one of the advantages of specialization. C. R Snow was right about the morality of the man of science within his profession. There have been very few scientific frauds. This is because a scientist would be a fool to commit a scientific fraud when he can commit frauds every day on his wife, his associates, the president of his university, and the grocer. Administrators, politicians (not campaigning), and butchers are all likely to be more virtuous than professors, not because they want to be, but because they have to be.

One odd confirmatory fact is that those whose business it is to lie, such as advertising men, are often scrupulously honest in their private lives. For example, Senator William Benton, founder of the firm of Benton and Bowles, used to say that he had to be honest on Madison Avenue because if he wasn't word would get around that Benton was a crook and he would be ruined. When he retired from the advertising- business he became vice president of the University of Chicago, whereupon he was prompted to say, "Look at these professors,. What harm would it do them if word got around that they were crooks? They are all on permanent tenure!"

The general moral tone of academic life was once handsomely demonstrated at a University of Chicago faculty meeting. It was a solemn occasion. Two hundred full professors had assembled to discuss whether the bachelor's degree should be relocated at the end of the year, giving it and other degrees a meaning had never had before. The faculty debated this proposition for two hours without ever mentioning education. The whole discourse concerned the effect of the proposed change on public relations and revenue. Mr. Benton, fresh from Madison Avenue, stormed out of the assembly shouting, "This is the most sordid meeting I ever attended in my life!"

There are many examples of this kind of professional morality. The chairman of a scientific department of the University of Chicago marched into my office one day and told me mat we could not appoint one of the world's leading theoretical astronomers because he was an Indian, and black. Another faculty member, a great American sociologist, who was president of the American Statistical Association and president of the American Sociological Association, once informed me that it would be impossible to appoint a Negro to the faculty because all the graduate students would leave. We appointed the Negro anyway. As far as I know, no graduate students left.

The University of Chicago medical school violently resisted admitting Negro students. Negroes and Jews who had noncommittal names and were not otherwise visible to the naked eye were detected in photographs required with applications for admission. It took an executive order from my office to eliminate this requirement. Fortunately the medical school did not know that under the statutes of the University I had no power to issue such an order.

It is clear that the behavior of professors is questionable at best. Scientists are worse than other professors because they have special problems. One of these is that their productive lives often end at thirty-five. I knew an astronomer who was contributing to the international journals at the age of eleven. Compare that with the difficulty of contributing at a similar age to an international journal on, let us say, Greek law. A scientist has a limited education. He labors on the topic of his dissertation, wins the Nobel prize by the time he is thirty-five, and suddenly has nothing to do. He has no general ideas, and while he was pursuing his specialization science has gone past him. He has no alternative but to spend the rest of his life making a nuisance of himself.

Scientists are the victims of an education and a way of academic life created by their misinterpreters and propagandists. These misinterpreters have propagandized an entirely inconsecutive chain of consecutive propositions: The pursuit of truth, they say, is the collection of facts. Facts can be experimentally verified. Thus, the only method of seeking truth is the scientific method. The only knowledge is scientific knowledge, and anything else is guesswork or superstition. So Lord Rutherford could say to Samuel Alexander, the great English philosopher, "What is it that you have been saying all your life, Alexander? Hot air. Nothing but hot air."

A recollection I shall always cherish of one of our leading mathematicians, now a professor at Chicago, affords a stunning example of the frame of mind the propagandists have created. He came to Chicago as a graduate student. Toward the close of his first year I asked the chairman of the mathematics department how the boy was doing. "Oh, Mr. Hutchins," he said, "he's a fine mathematician, but I'm sorry to have to tell you, he's crazy." I said, "What do you mean 'crazy'? How does he evidence this unfortunate condition?" And the professor responded, "He's interested in philosophy!" The misinterpreters' and propagandists' doctrine has paralyzing educational repercussions. According to its tenets, education consists in cramming the student with facts. There is not enough time to stuff in all the facts. Therefore, facts outside a narrow area of specialization must be excluded. One of our consultants to the Center has described the education in science in the state university from which he graduated as two years of German, two years of military training, and all the rest mathematics, physics, and chemistry.

Seduced by the fact formula, the medical school at the University of Chicago set out on a perfectly sincere, although somewhat misguided, campaign against liberal education. There are countless facts in medicine. A medical school must fill its students with these facts or they will fall behind. This meant that there was no time to teach anything else. The medical school strongly recommended that the whole freshman and sophomore years be abolished - the junior and senior years had already gone - and that the entire curriculum be devoted to science and medicine. I can conscientiously say that any senior in the University of Chicago medical school knew more facts about medicine than any professor in a German university.

The consequences of this line of educational endeavor are clear enough. Everybody specializes. There can be no academic community because scientists cannot talk to one another. The chairman of the anatomy department of the University of Chicago brought this home to me once when we were discussing the great biological symposium that had been held to celebrate the University's fiftieth anniversary. I said, "Tell me, how was it?" He said, "I didn't go." When I asked why not, he replied, "Well, there weren't any papers in my field." Scientists cannot talk to anyone else because there isn't anyone else worth talking to. Hence, university life offers no remedy for the defects of their education.

The propagandists and misinterpreters of science have set the tone for the whole learned world in the United States. Their slogan is, "If you can't count it, it doesn't count." The influence of this slogan is felt in literature, philosophy, languages, and, of course, in the social sciences. The most striking feature of social science today is the total absence of theory. Its greatest modern achievement is the public opinion poll. Social scientists can count, but cannot comprehend.

Those who live their lives without theory are technicians, or mechanics. As a result there is no significant contemporary social science. Politics is viewed as power because power can be observed and measured. Power is something real. Therefore, using the misinterpreters' logic, it is all that is real about politics or political science. The most characteristic book title in social science in the past thirty years is Politics: Who Gets What: When, How.

In spite of the misinterpreters' nonsense, science contains elements of sense. Serious scientists know that science is just one very important way of looking at the world. When scientists are actually doing science they are caught in a great tradition. They know they are not simply collecting facts or conducting random experiments. No serious scientist believes that if a million monkeys were put down at a million typewriters one of them would eventually turn out Hamlet. Nor does he think the scientific method is the only method. Scientists do not use the scientific method outside of science. How the propagandists and misinterpreters of science have managed to take over all the academic virtues and label them "scientific" escapes me. I ran across a fascinating study of the scientific attitude by a professor of education. This learned gentleman had written to sixteen eminent scientists and asked them what characterized the scientific attitude. These were the replies:

CHEMIST: Openmindedness ... PHYSIOLOGIST: Intellectual honesty ... BOTANIST: Openmindedness ... ZOOLOGIST: Observation, inquisitiveness, perseverance and industry, objectivity and critical independent reflection … PHYSICIST: Objectivity; ... SOCIOLOGIST: Objectivity … MICROBIOLOGIST: Respect observation? ... MATHEMATICIAN: Openmindedness ... ANTHROPOLOGIST: Openmindedness ... CHEMIST: Practiced willingness to label conclusions tentative until supported by reproducible or confirmed data ... AGRICULTURIST: Desire to tolerantly explore ideas ... MATHEMATICIAN: An open mind ... PHYSICIST: A will to know the truth … CHEMIST: Insistence on critical examination ... DIRECTOR OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH: Intellectual curiosity … PSYCHOLOGIST: An inquiring mind.

Obviously this study shows that science has a corner on all the rational processes of thought.

But there is not an honest scholar in any field who would not insist on being openminded, honest, and objective, and on considering all the evidence before he reached a conclusion. You can hear Thomas Aquinas laughing.

The propagandists of science say, "Sure, but fellows like Thomas Aquinas had commitment^; They all had philosophies and principles that distorted their thinking. Scientists haven't any." The answer to this is that everybody has a metaphysics. Every scientist, for example, has a commitment to the reality of the external world. The distortion comes when the metaphysics is denied instead of being recognized and made as rational as possible.

Understanding science is an indispensable part of a liberal education. To demonstrate my sincerity, I point out that at the University of Chicago one whole half of the first two years of every student's education was natural science. St. John's College, with which I also had something to do, is the only college in the United States that requires four years in the laboratory for every student. An education without science is no education at all. The limitations and possibilities of science cannot be understood without scientific training, and our very existence depends on comprehending these limits and possibilities.

We do not know what science is, and partly as a result we do not know what politics is. Mr. C. R Snow is wrong about the two cultures. There is only one, and it is pseudo-scientific.

The leading phenomena of our time exhibit a curiously ambiguous character. Technology may blow us up, or it may usher in the paradise of which man has been dreaming ever since Adam and Eve got kicked out of the first one. Bureaucracy may stifle democracy or be the backbone of democratic government. Nationalism may disrupt the world or prove to be the necessary precondition of a world community.

Unfortunately these ambiguities do not lend themselves to scientific procedure. Our essential problem is what kind of people we want to be and what kind of world we want to have. Such questions cannot be solved by experiment and observation. But if we know what justice is, which is not a scientific matter, science and many other disciplines may help us get it.

The problems resulting from these ambiguities are not going to be solved by men of fractional or pseudoculture. The solution depends on moral and intellectual virtues rather than on specialized knowledge. It is a humbling thought to recall that twenty-five percent of the SS guards in Nazi Germany were holders of the doctor's degree.

The solution of these problems must lie in the reorganization of American education and in the redefinition of its purposes. A liberal education, including scientific education, must be established for all, and true intellectual communities must be built where men may overcome the limitations of their fractional cultures. This would require a drastic change in what the nation expects of American education, and an equally drastic alteration in the habits of academic people. I think it will be agreed that this cataclysm is not likely to occur in the lifetime of the youngest person reading this.

The immediate program, then, has to be something else. It must be an attempt to build intellectual communities outside the American education system and to form widespread connections among the intellectual workers, using these communities as points of interconnection. The hope for the immediate future, as far as we have one, must rest in our capacity to communicate with the adult population. For one thing, unless we do, the rising generation may not have a chance to rise.

It is in centers like the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions and in the multiplication of meetings like the one that produced these papers that we might get some help with the development of a real culture, and a real understanding of kinds of knowledge and the limits and potential of each kind. The radiation from these points might light the path to a just community for ourselves and for the world. - ROBERT M. HUTCHINS

The implication in discussing the nature of science and technology is that a distinction should be made between science and technology. Such a distinction is almost wholly unrecognized in our scientific cultural environment. In a recent seminar in which I participated the question of the difference between science and technology came up and the answer was: "There isn't any. We no longer separate them." This is a shocking statement. It is sobering to think that there is no possibility of distinction.

C. P. Snow has said that scientists and technologists have become soldiers. They are not working for themselves: They accept orders from others. They are hot able to take responsibility for their own strategic judgments in science, to say nothing of the uses to which their work will be put. Whether the decisions are being made on the scientific or the technical level, scientists are not making them.

President Eisenhower in his farewell speech pointed out two things that needed to be watched: the hook-up among the military, the scientific community, and the industrial community, and the hook-up between the scientists and the administrator. We may have heard more about the scientist-soldier than about the scientist-manager, but the latter is equally threatening to the political community.

When a scientist is a soldier, he is subject to direction and is a means to an end established by someone else. When he is a manager, he sets the goals and directs other people. But this may not be as deep a paradox as it first appears. Both as a soldier and as a manager the scientist is involved in practice, in practical activity. He is working in what a traditional philosopher would call the "realm of practical reason." Usefulness is the standard by which he judges his work. Thus it is difficult to distinguish between science and technology because part of the meaning has gone out of science. The scientist has diminished not because he has become irrational, unreasonable, or arbitrary but because he has become a technologist.

Limiting science to the practical realm is comparatively new. The word "science" has had a long usage - about three thousand years - and until modern times its meaning contained concern about truth, pursued by speculative or theoretical reasoning rather than practical reasoning. These too are diminished words. Speculation has become something done on the stock market, and theoretical means "academic" to the general public. To the technical scientist, theory is simply a means to an end. But there are some slightly old-fashioned scientists around who feel that the essential nature of science is not involved with practical reason. They say the scientist's work is to discover the truth, formulate it, and make it a matter of public as well as professional knowledge.

In Thorstein Veblen's striking phrase, a scientist is "addicted to the practice of idle curiosity." This defiant definition states in a humorous way a high dogma about what science is. This is the origin of the popular notion that the scientist is neutral on questions of utility or on the affairs of practical life. Idle curiosity means that the scientist is concerned Only with truth. The results of the search for truth may be used for good or evil, but it is now said, even by scientists, that judgments about their use cannot be made by science.

If the scientist's concern is truth, it is his responsibility to be sure that science is not misused or that something false comes out of it. The burden of maintaining the activity of discovery implies a responsibility for academic freedom, but few scientists have defended academic freedom in this country though it has been in danger for the last generation. Perhaps it is because most scientists do not distinguish science from technology. Academic freedom may not be essential to questions of application and use. There is not much point in defending it if truth is not the object. If there is any absolute reason for academic freedom, it is that the search for knowledge of truth is an activity of human beings essential to everything else they do. The heaviest responsibility of the scientist to society may be to refuse to make himself useful.

Several kinds of sharply different judgments are to be made about the whole range of science and technology. The scientist, as a man concerned about the truth, makes one essential judgment about his findings: whether they are true or false. The technician, as an original inventor or as an adapter of something already discovered, makes a judgment of usefulness of fitness. He decides whether it works, and need not judge whether it is good or bad in any other sense. Business or industrial interests make different judgments from those of the scientist or technologist, which partly explains the difficulty of communication between the laboratory and the industrial manager. A much more general judgment about the utility, validity, and desirability of scientific work is made by society and imposed by social pressures.

But there is something missing in this series of judgments. The purposes of science may be considered by the scientist as a professional man. "Profession," as it was once understood, meant more than a specialty. Universities were founded in Europe to educate and certify those who aspired to the professions, and the training included more than science. Students were taught the liberal arts, and achieved a realization of a larger theoretical, speculative body of knowledge in which the sciences are placed. From this point of view it is possible for a scientist to stand before the community and say "yes" or "no" to the alternative applications of science. But we no longer understand what the liberal arts are. We call them philosophy, but philosophers have shrunk into departmental academicians. The professional man, in fact the whole society, does not have a good philosophical background, and as a result there is a kind of judgment that is not being made. It is the only kind of judgment that could distinguish between science and technology.

Although medicine has lost a great deal of the philosophical professional integrity that was once expressed for an earlier time in the Hippocratic oath, physicians as individuals and as a group still make professional judgments. They do not prescribe poisons indiscriminately; they do not let commercial pharmacists dispense certain drugs without prescription; they judge malpractice. Although these judgments seem to belong to ethics, they are not primarily ethical. They are based on the professional theoretical knowledge of the physician. If the natural and social sciences wish to become professional, they need to discover and formulate such judgments both for themselves and for society. But in order to do that they will have to become philosophical enough to distinguish between truth and workability. -- SCOTT BUCHANAN

Anthropologists and historians tell us that a crucial juncture in the life of a culture occurs when the assurance that it has gained from an unchallenged world view of values, goals, and logic confronts the unchallenged world view of another culture, ft is not easy for men to change their view of the world, for it is part of their view of themselves. The challenge of other values threatens all that has given them comfort and support. It takes strong men and felicitous circumstances for a society to ride out the storm of contact with another culture and learn and grow anew.

It is by no means certain that this will happen. Some people are shattered by new experiences; so are some cultures. As segments of society splinter and converge, new institutions and new modes of thinking are generated. Some societies blossom in their revised form; others die.

Today we are faced with such a cultural crisis. The problems of making suitable policies for scientific work in the government arise chiefly from a profound cultural conflict. This conflict is the three-way confrontation among the scientific community, the nonscientific political governmental community, and the general public.

What is meant here by an adequate policy for federal science must be made clear at the outset. Such a policy would reconcile the needs of science and technology with the needs of the rest of society. Policy now springs from resolving disputes for priority among various projects. It is made in many places, from the Pentagon to the Department of Agriculture, as well as in those offices assigned part of the policy-making task. But nowhere do the social implications of science have a basic part in the formulation of policy.

Today, science and technology are not neutral. Not only does their development require vast social and human resources, but they are pursued because their powers for enhancing or degrading humanity are recognized. This non-neutrality demands an explicit relation of science and technology to the needs and processes of society. This relationship should be the foundation of federal science policy.

The one consensus among the three cultures - the scientific community, the nonscientific political community, and the public -- is that the task of government is to serve the general public. There is no such agreement about the relationship of science to government and to the general public. There is no set of values mutually subscribed to by the three cultures that defines the proper purposes of science and technology and thereby the appropriate restraints and supports needed to fulfill those purposes. Nor is it clear that such a set of values can be deliberately produced. Values do not derive solely from rational considerations. They are historical products of emotion and plain accident as much as, or more than, reason. This is one weakness in the thesis that the scientific method by itself can solve society's problems.

Within each of the three cultures are men and institutions with different viewpoints and different goals. These dissimilarities are crucial. Some of them derive largely from training; some are induced by the preconceptions that each group has about the other two and about itself. Two of the three are contending for the power to insure that their particular values will prevail: the science community and the nonscience governmental community. The general public has essentially no power.

The science community is represented at its upper levels by two types of scientists. The "traditional" type considers government to be synonymous with mediocrity and irrationality. These men feel that science must be left free to pursue its own ways. Their attitudes toward the rest of society are frequently ambivalent. They avoid involvement in social questions. Some of them perceive society as subject to, if not already operating along, logical lines. Others consider society as incorrigibly irrational and therefore unrelated to them. They are seldom asked to consider the social implications of their actions. By attending to their work, advising on the technical merits of this or that proposal, they can maintain the comfortable delusion that science can still be pursued without thought of the social consequences. Frequently they work for the university or for big industry, advancing the favorite programs of their employers.

Then there is the new breed of scientist around high Washington conference tables - the science entrepreneur, the "political" scientist. These men want to manage the bureaucracy to the extent necessary to make it behave the way they think it should. They have a sense of political technique, and they enjoy and seek power. Like the traditionalists, they feel that science is theirs, that no one else has the right to tamper with it. It is they who should decide which projects deserve emphasis. They believe a good dose of science would fix society fine, as C. R Snow has so frequently tried to demonstrate. There are wise and modest men with social imagination in this subculture, but frequently the powerful members of this group are self-assured to the point of arrogance about their own abilities, about the overriding Tightness of scientific values and methods, and about the validity of their view of how society operates and what it needs.

The science entrepreneurs are supported by and in turn support big business, big publicity, big military, sometimes big academia and parts of big government. They are both the captives and the kings of these powerful coalitions - kings for obvious reasons, captives because in reaping the benefits of affiliation they capitulate in some degree to the operating principles of these institutions. They have climbed to power through conservative hierarchies and tend to hold conservative values. The infusion of Emigres from the disciplined institutions of Europe seems, in general, not to have been a liberalizing influence. The more powerful the "political" scientist gets, the more omnipresent he is at major deliberations on science policy.

The nonscience community in Congress and the bureaucracies regards itself as the bones, meat, and brains of government and society. They resent the "woolly-headed" scientist who may be trying to change their ways or implying that these ways are inadequate. They are not about to be displaced by a new attitude or a new kind of knowledge. Scientific expertise is respected, but the political and social naivete that is supposed to accompany it is regarded with disdain. A general feeling exists among these "nonscientists" that science must be controlled. Usurpation of power is feared, partly because of a conviction that science somehow cannot be stopped.

These men consider society a nonrational environment. They see the political process as subtle and changing, responsive to many pressures of which science is only one, and by no means the most important. They view science as a means, not as an end. But they are confused about means and ends in general, as well as about the implications of science, and have no clear view of the proper role of scientists in formulating policy.

These two cultures between them decide on national science programs. They are in deep conflict within and between themselves. There are great political and ethical splinterings in the science community alone. The entrepreneurs claim to speak for science, but speak only for their faction. The traditionalists are fearful and envious of the "political" scientists, upon whom they must depend for their survival, especially if they hope for accomplishment in fields requiring expensive equipment or team research. Both groups are dissatisfied with the workings of government.

Given this dash of cultures, how can a valid basis be found for policymaking in federal science? We must discover a common ground from which science and technology can be intelligently directed. We must be able to evaluate the social consequences of scientific innovation. We need to plan our economics to assure the effective and humane introduction of modern technologies. We must equip government to meet new regulatory and managerial tasks. It is not clear that these responsibilities can be met by a traditional form of government; nor is it certain that democracy can be preserved in doing so. What is clear is that we cannot continue to bumble along.

Already we are in desperate trouble over nuclear weapons. We are about to be overwhelmed by that terrible blessing of medical technology, overpopulation. The social implications of biological and psycho-pharmacological engineering are already evident. Cybernation is causing serious problems. What is more, our environment is being changed in ways no cybernetical system can cope with indefinitely. It must respond to a tremendous and growing range of information at increasing speed and with increasing accuracy. Instability of the system is the inevitable result.

In spite of these menacing developments we remain unable to forecast the social consequences of technology. This is partly because of the limited vision of both the nonscientists and the scientists. The first group does not have sufficient knowledge of technology to sense the potentialities of new developments and therefore cannot predict their social impact, and they are too preoccupied with conventional assessments of political issues and impacts. The second group is aware of the technological possibilities but is not sufficiently sensitive to their social implications. Some of the scientists care only about the success of their favorite projects. Some apply to these problems a personal psuedo-sociology made useless by its arrogance or naivete. And still others dodge responsibility by arguing that technology itself is neither good nor bad, that its virtues are determined by its uses.

Another reason why the social repercussions of science are difficult to forecast is that we have too little understanding of the social processes. This limitation has been fostered by the disinclination of the natural scientist and the government operator to stimulate work in the social sciences. The bureaucrat feels threatened by the possibility that formalized knowledge will replace "experience" and "political know-how." Furthermore, the social sciences might demonstrate that the products of technology, or even science itself, need social control. This is an unhappy prospect for those scientists who are feeling for the first time the satisfactions of wielding power.

Since the consequences of scientific and technological developments are not fully predictable, it would seem impossible to establish priorities for individual projects on any sensible basis. Yet the forces of technological advance compel some kind of choice. Creative talent is a scarce resource and the availability of money is a political, if not a real, limitation. "Political" scientists push their preferences vigorously, and the very existence of large programs influences selections in the absence of better criteria. Priority decisions today depend on political and economic pressures, personalities, and public relations.

The public relations juggernaut, in particular, imposes a crippling distortion on science and on those who would make scientific policy. From the laboratory to the launching pad science and technology are harried by promises about "product superiority" and the glamour of "breakthroughs." Commitments are quickly publicized and then science is pressed to maintain the "reality" of the commitments. The natural failures of science and the natural limits of accomplishment are covered by an ever-depending layer of misrepresentation, deviousness, and downright lies. So pervasive becomes the aura of untruth that it is hard for anyone, from the man in the laboratory to the public, to know where reality lies.

A cliche of our political folklore is that somehow the public will make everything right. In its wisdom it will judge between the contending power groups, evaluate technologies, establish a scale for priorities. But the public, the third culture, hardly knows what is happening. Understanding or judging the conflicts and compromises now occurring between science and government is far beyond its capacity. The public is caught between a publicity-induced fantasy world where science knows all the answers and a frustrating actuality which it does not realize is caused at least in part by the inadequate or incorrect use of science and technology. The frustrations are blamed on someone else: Russia, the government, perhaps the intellectuals, seldom on science. The public still believes in the mad scientists working on bombs, or in the humble scientist laboring over polio vaccine. The member of government, civil servant or politician, is perceived no more realistically.

Rather than becoming able to resolve the problems of science policy, the public is likely to become increasingly alienated both from government and from science. As with many other groups in the past that have met cultures somehow superior to their own, the public may withdraw from the challenge of "adjusting up" to the new priests and the new power. How, in fact, can the ordinary citizen adjust up to a computer-run society and classified questions of life and death?

One segment of the public will not surrender without protest. This is the group of articulate, concerned laymen who are not solely scientists, politicians, or civil servants and who worry about the arms race, overpopulation, the ascendancy of the "political" scientists, and the inadequacy of nonscientific bureaucracies. These people might be the moderators, the synthesists, for a new culture. They do not have the trained incapacities of those solely immersed in the two contending cultures, and they do have perspective that the general public lacks. But these very characteristics may deny them the opportunity. The day of the technical specialist grows ever brighter. The scientist will not freely yield his newly gained power, nor will the government worker relinquish his long-held dominion. Neither is likely to give ground to a non-specialist who cannot build bombs or tread bureaucratic water, or otherwise play according to the rules of science and government.

The character of the coming generation of scientists is changing. The attributes attractive to laboratory directors interested in team-work are bringing a new personality into science. The old-guard traditionalists may be on the way out. Those who succeed will be those who are good at working with - or subverting - the nonscientific bureaucracy. Will these men be good scientists? This is not the important question. The real concern is for whom they will speak, and for what ends. The problem in trying to resolve the ambitions of the two power cultures is that neither group has a clear view of what it wants in the way of policy for governmental science. As long as there is no community of values to guide judgment, basic policy decisions cannot be made, much less decisions on specific priorities for specific projects. Yet crises are arising on every hand. The evolution of a consensus cannot be awaited. If this society does not learn how to assimilate the changes that confront it, it will not survive. -- DONALD N. MICHAEL

Science and technology are the key to the future, the key to power, and the key to the solution of the problems we face today. They alone will not save us, but if we seek to untangle our problems without them, we are lost.

In the last thirty years the increasing sophistication of the physical and biological sciences has exhibited the properties of a true revolution. It has radically altered the social organization within which it grew. It emerged in less than one working generation, and the suddenness of it caught all of us off balance. People still believe that science can be handled by the techniques and devices that it has itself made obsolete, or that if the problems it has brought are ignored they will vanish.

A common modern complaint is that while government has spread like an octopus, our problems have grown worse. It follows that the cure for our ills is less government. But government did not bloom spontaneously. It grew in response to the scientific revolution. As men have invented more gadgets and uncovered more, knowledge about the world, an enormous expansion of government has been necessary,' both to protect the public interest and to foster further scientific advance.

In 1800 the government of the United States played a modest role. It had an army, a postal department, a tax on whiskey, and some import duties: The Department of State kept track of the world. That was about it. But by 1830, railroad and steamboat traffic began to grow, and, to regulate it in the public interest, so did federal power. Later, internal combustion engines were invented, more was discovered about aeronautical science, and suddenly airways had to be regulated. Tele^ graph, radio, and television each generated complicated governmental problems. Modern chemistry and pharmaceuticals brought into being the whole field of food and drug control.

The economic disaster of agricultural overproduction, a triumph of applied science, is a prime example of the difficulties that technology has handed to government. The farm problem really began in 1862 when land-grant colleges were founded with federal support. By 1900 science was being applied to agriculture on a big scale, and by 1920 food production was beginning to be excessive. Hybrids, modern machinery, new methods of food processing, and new types of fertilizers were developed, and all at once America was producing too much food. Science and technology caused the surplus, but the federal government had to try to cope with it. Its efforts to do so, plus its efforts to make agriculture still more efficient, have spawned a giant bureaucratic structure.

The biggest surge of all in government growth was caused by the exploration of the atom. In 1938, when science suddenly found a major key to the secrets, no one but the government could afford to exploit it. Science has not stopped finding keys - those to space, for example - and the job of the federal government has not stopped getting bigger. Atomic and space research are unsuitable for private exploitation, not only because the government alone can afford the massive costs but also because the results require governmental control.

The expansion of government suggests support for the idea that government should control science and technology. The feeling that modern knowledge and power must somehow be turned to the public good has currency. Even those interested only in the progress of science want government to help sustain its advance. Whether government's job is constraining science to serve the public interest or promoting the scientific front, or both, it must understand the phenomenon with which it is dealing.

Unfortunately, the people running government often do not understand science and technology. Despite some notable exceptions, scientific ignoramuses usually handle scientific decisions. The serious technical questions, such as how atomic energy and military space operations can be controlled, will remain unanswered until this basic difficulty is somehow solved.

Government managers of science and technology often do not know their business, partly because, as C. P Snow argues, our educational system is no longer geared to the source of our power. Our power now rests on science, but we let those who administer and govern remain incompetent in the substantive knowledge of the area.

The revolution in science can be distinguished from the industrial revolution by the fact that a high school undergraduate can understand the principles of the latter. The steam engine, a railroad train, and, with a . little more effort, even an electrical generator are within his grasp, but he gets lost in modern biochemistry, electronics, and nuclear physics. Mastery of this new knowledge is not quickly won. The subtleties of modern research and development, or even of technical production, are not easily learned late in life. But a manager must know the substance behind the problems he handles if he is to be effective. It is increasingly true that critical evaluation of substantive technical details is the very heart of policy decisions. The era of classical administrative formulation, "You name it, I'll manage it," is past. Today, few people except professional scientists have the technical sophistication necessary to make many of the crucial decisions affecting both science and society.

Using scientists in government seems an obvious answer to the dilemma of management. But creative scientists and engineers are usually outside government. Most creative physical scientists are in universities, which is remarkable considering the salary structure. Private industry employs a big proportion of our scientific talent, which means that these scientists are under pressure to serve industrial aims and their loyalties are often diverted from the public interest.

Part of the reason why the scientific community is clustered outside government has been the mismanagement of science by the military. Military power must now be considered primarily in terms of science and technology. Yet military organization and education have not changed to fit the new facts. Obviously the military will need more and more scientifically mature personnel and fewer squadron leaders, but it continues to train squadron leaders. What is more, up to now it has had a negative approach to its selection of scientific management. Processes used to select a good man to run a submarine are applied, despite their inappropriateness, to selecting a man to run a laboratory or to choose between two complex weapons systems. Good scientific managers are automatically weeded out, and poor ones promoted.

Unfortunately, the traditional military organizational structure tends to be inimical to the promotion of scientific progress. It was designed to produce specialists in violence. Now suddenly me most critical task is the selection of highly technical weapons systems - a function for which the military structure is not particularly suited.

But scientists outside government still try to influence matters from the edges by pulling strings and poking their fingers into the wheels. They give generalized advice, but the problems are specific. Someone must choose, for instance, between spending $500 million to make better reentry vehicles for missiles or spending $500 million to build a completely different missile with a different basing system, and these decisions must be lived with. The kibitzing scientist, not responsible for the consequences of his advice, is at best of limited usefulness; at worst, dangerous.

Responsibility and scientific competence must somehow be brought together if government is to serve the public interest and if the right decisions are to be made to advance the intricate giant that science has become.

Having the top ranks of government heavily staffed with people trained in science, who really know how to handle scientific problems, is a solution apparently not available to this country. Obviously it is being tried in Russia.

In the United States the government, lacking scientific expertise, farms out its scientific problems to industry. The ordinary profitmaking company has a very limited sense of public responsibility. It may be effective in production and capable of top-notch research and development, but its interests often - and necessarily - diverge from the public interest. There is a tendency to let die government finance the long shots but to seize promising developments and exploit them with company money. Industry naturally tries to exploit governmental support for private gain (within legal limits) and steers the short course of its own health and well being. If a company is to survive in this quasi-capitalist society, it must look out for itself first. Because of this inevitable self-interest, industry must not be allowed to become the arbiter of national science policy by default.

One promising scheme for handling science and technology in the public interest has been the nonprofit organization, or, as they prefer to be called, the public trust organization. The government first used the nonprofit device in about 1820, when it gave a contract to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia to find out what made steam boilers explode. In the last thirty or forty years there has been a proliferation of nonprofit organizations that have been extremely effective in basic research, applied research, and even production. A number of these are run by universities, such as the Argonne Laboratories of the University of Chicago, MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, and the University of California's two weapons research labs and its operation at Los Alamos. There are also private nonprofit companies like Rand, System Development Corporation, and Aerospace Corporation.

The main advantage of these organizational inventions is that they are insulated from bureaucratic meddling. They work on governmental problems outside the governmental structure. They typically have a broad charter in which their responsibilities are general, their budgetary restraints nonspecific, and monitorship of their operation reasonable. They permit a freer use of scientific talent. They break through the unrealistic ceilings set by government on the salaries of scientists and allow the public service to compete on an even economic footing with private industry. Most important, they are able to maintain an atmosphere congenial to the scientific community. This kind of freedom is necessary for scientific accomplishment, and the method has proved itself. In terms of technological productivity the nonprofit groups have been extremely successful, particularly with the Atomic Energy Commission. But the freedom on which their success is based is achieved by a delegation of power from government, and even though they have strong internal commitments to the public interest, and their actions usually serve that interest well, they do not literally represent government.

What is needed is an invention inside government equivalent to these nonprofit corporations. Within government a delegation of authority and responsibility could be made to large self-contained units. The liberty necessary for a benign environment for science could be preserved, and creative scientists might be lured into government service. Yet the power to direct the course of science and weigh its consequences in terms of the public welfare would not be relinquished. The AEC system, an experiment in governmental management of science and technology, is a significant step in the right direction.

A new and better marriage must be made between governmental responsibility and scientific capability if the full promise of science is to be realized and its perils escaped. - CHALMERS SHERWIN

Almost eighty percent of all research and development monies are furnished by government, of which all but a small fraction are directed at prompt application to the technologies of warfare and its endless supporting apparatus.

It is unlikely that we shall ever hear again such lines as were delivered in 1958 by a distinguished Nobel Laureate physicist to an assembly of his colleagues. "The scientist," he insisted, "has no idea what disposition will be made of his work. There is usually at least a two-year lag between his discoveries and their unpredictable applications." The Laureate went on to spin out this thesis of disassociation, even though everyone in the hall was intimately aware of die hundreds of laboratories and plants created for and totally supported by government, populated by tens of thousands of physical scientists working cheek to jowl with lesser folk to achieve specific and immediate technological ends.

As incredible as this posture was in 1958, it is now even more absurd. Today there are fourth and fifth generations of scientists who have never worked on anything but weaponry and who view their careers as lifelong. They are permanently dedicated to the invention and construction of what may appear to be a succession of weapons systems stretching through foreseeable time. In a real sense, these men are institutionalized: captive to their narrow specialties and to the paymaster, the grant, and the contract.

The military, who are the ultimate appliers of the laboratory invention, are not threatening to us because of their eagerness to fight or to govern. I believe that they are generally a good deal less belligerent than some of their predecessors in these last twenty-five years. .It is the delicate and dangerous gear with which they are charged that raises the specters of the consequences of accident, irresponsibility, or madness, common phenomena of any war, to such heights. And it is the latitude in making decisions for which the military is asking that suggests future perils for us. The military does not object to the decisions once they come; what it complains about is that getting the decisions through the civilian bureaucracy renders the strategic and tactical advantages of modern war equipages useless.

What is the value of computerized, highly mobile war gear, they ask, when the opponent can come back in an hour with a decision that takes us three days to make and transmit? It should be apparent that a major crisis of decision will some day, somewhere, once and for all tumble the system whereby ultrasonic weapons and their attendants are controlled by the ponderous machinery of nineteenth-century decision-making processes.

It is clear that weapons diplomacy, the application of force as the trump card in international relations, is archaic. Worse, it is useless. To think otherwise, one is forced to ignore the microsecond weapons systems which have created such an unbearable crisis in international political decision-making processes everywhere, especially in the democratic societies.

My contention is that it does not have to be left this way; that perhaps before it is institutionalized completely, the scientific community can make a massive attempt to balance the war system which they have bestowed on the republic with devices and systems to block its use. They can decide to turn a portion of their interest from the redundancies of thermonuclear overkill and the versions of outer space to the aid of the political process and the real defense of the free society. Specifically, I am asking if it is not possible to build into the framework of democratic governing processes advanced technological systems that will give us a chance to understand the current conditions and attitudes of the rest of the world, its peoples, and its leaders; devices that will enable us to abort crisis situations or, once they are upon us, provide us with alternatives to violence.

There are obstacles to any significant movement of science toward a concentrated assault on problems of this magnitude. For one thing, they are hard. Science, for all its awesome facade, now likes to do easy things. A large portion of the physical science population has been immersed in polishing inventions twenty or more years old. The behavioral and social sciences, bemused by access to electronic counting gear, each year load the trade magazines with projects of increasing triviality. In spite of some progress, the scientific pecking order is still much as it has been, rigidly segregated by craft status and increasingly insulated, one discipline from another, by staggering inventions of professional syntax.

In a very few areas, attempts are being made to attack the problems of the social and political orders by at least asking questions of the technicians stultified by their long tenure in the weapons business:

• What, if anything, can the wondrous machines do to help us assess the hopes, fears, and aspirations of the world in a continuous way? Is there, for example, nothing science can do to close the technical gap between doorbell-ringing opinion-gathering methods and the capacity of the million-bit memory drum, which is now sometimes diverted to such uses as predicting the best bus schedules from California to a Nevada gambling house?
  
• Is there no better way to guide our governors than by the guesswork of the people who have elevated themselves to the role of "operations analysts" and who, for lack of our possession of better methods, profoundly affect the gravest decisions of history?
  
• What, we ask, is "credibility"? Is it the same to one man as it is to another?
  
• In the same patois, what is "rational behavior"? Is it the same to an Israelite as to a Formosan, to a Japanese as to a Nebraskan?
  
• What are the components of "threat" that filially tote up to being "intolerable"?
  
• Can incipient paranoid behavior out of the forces of complex circumstances be predicted in a people or their leaders? If not, a useful understanding of mass behavior is not foreseeable, and most of psychiatry, psychology, and a good deal of physiology must be marked off as limited individual therapeutic techniques.
  

The questions go on, inferentially urging all the disciplines of science to consolidate and press a fraction of the ingenuity and energy that has gone into the war system toward an information gathering and analysis system that can begin to help us out of the horror that by 1965 will cause the equivalent of thirty-five tons of TNT to be assigned to the personal containment of every human being then living on the globe.

Walter Lippmann has warned that neither the United States nor Soviet Russia must push the other beyond that point of provocation and humiliation at which even the most rational nation "can be provoked and exasperated to the point of lunacy where its nervous system cannot endure inaction - where only violence can relieve its feelings. It is the business of government to find where that line is - and to stay well back of it." And, I would add, it is the business of science to help government find and hold the line.

Science must mount an unprecedented effort to furnish government with an assessment system that draws on the pertinent knowledge of all its branches and to transmit it in usable form to the managers of the political and the military systems. The scientist no longer has the right to remain apolitical. These efforts will have to be launched, maintained, argued, and defended by individual scientists. For example, since money is not only the lubricant but the propellant of scientific development, the scientist himself must start to influence the disposition of governmental research and development funds.

I am not asking for an overlying organization of scientists to tell us what to do and how to do it. I am asking for the attention of the individual scientist who is now immersed in weaponry or in the Next Fifty Years at Bell Labs. Science and its common-law wife, technology, have bathed long enough in the adulation of the popular press and in the awe in which great segments of the society have held them because of their creation of such impressive murder machines. Now they must turn to inventions of far greater novelty, complexity, and importance. The mounting of the thermonuclear war machine has stultified international order and crippled our hopes to revive it by traditional political and social means. Now science must somehow furnish us a parallel system of equal impressiveness under which their highly refined system of murder machines may be controlled. -- JAMES REAL

About 130 years ago Auguste Comte schematized human history in terms of three ages: the age of religion, the age of philosophy, and the age of positive knowledge or science. He had faith in science, and his positivism is the heart of modern orthodoxy. All of us today take for granted that humanity is progressing from bondage to mastery of the natural environment, from superstition to knowledge, from darkness to light. It is axiomatic that science is the exploration of an endless frontier and that its processes cannot be reversed or even seriously interrupted. Every American or European, every Asian or African deeply influenced by Western culture, has implicit trust in the inevitability and Tightness of this onward sweep of science. Even the churches embrace the new orthodoxy, if they are judged more by what they do not say than by what they say.

The modern positivist is a man of faith as much as was the medieval mystic. The concept of human destiny secularized by Comte was evolved by Joachim of Flora, a Cistercian abbot of the late twelfth century, who divided history according to the Trinitarian dogma, equating die ages of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost with an age of fear, an age of love, and an age of freedom. Joachim's vision was taken up by the left wing of the Franciscan movement and broadcast over Europe. It was inherent in the thinking of late medieval and early modern proletarian revolutions and underlies the Marxist straight-line notion of human destiny. When Comte transmuted Joachim's formula, he was replacing one faith with another closely related to it.

No faith can afford to reign unexamined. Our habit of regarding scientific progress as inevitable may in fact be dangerous to its continuing vigor. In every civilized society something that can legitimately be called science has existed, but the amount of energy put into it has varied enormously. In every age minds of great ability are attracted to the focus of cultural interest, be it the fine arts, literature, religion, science, or something else. If the cultural climate shifts, the concentration of intellectual energies and capital investments follows.

Science must have a positive emotional context to thrive, as well as economic and political encouragement. Legislatures and corporate bodies must reach decisions favorable to science, and investors and voters must approve what their representatives do. Parents must want science in the education of their children. Above all, a significant proportion of the ablest minds must choose to dedicate themselves with passion to scientific investigation if the movement is to progress.

The modern outburst of scientific activity is not necessarily permanent. The cultural support that science enjoys today rests more on fear of foreign enemies and of disease than upon understanding, and fear may not be a healthy of lasting foundation. Science needs its statesmen, and statesmanship demands the long view. The future of science, like its past, will largely be a matter of accident unless measures to assure its continuance are attentively sought. Since the energy that civilization expends on any activity depends on the cultural climate, the important question today is: What can be done to insure an affirmative social context for science?

The historian has no ready answers. No professional historian thinks that history repeats itself. History does not foretell the future, but study of the past may provide some keys to understanding. Above all, knowledge of history should liberate us from the past and enable us to be vividly contemporary. Viewing human experience in vastly different circumstances helps to dislodge presuppositions, and may free our ideas about what needs to be done to assure the future of science.

The prestige of science today sustains a common but false assumption that any robust culture must have had considerable scientific activity. Now, Rome was immensely vigorous. Languages descended from Latin are still spoken from Tijuana to Bucharest. The overwhelming mass of legal structures of the world, not only in Europe but in Asia and the Communist countries as well, is descended from Roman law. The Romans had vast creative ability and originality; yet there was no ancient Roman science. Nothing that can be called science existed in the Latin tongue until the twelfth century. From our modern point of view, Roman indifference to Greek science was absolutely spectacular. It has been argued that, by the time of the Roman Empire, Greek science was so far past its great days that it could not attract the vigorous Roman mind. But distinguished Greek scientists, such as Galen, lived for long periods in Rome. As for the "petering out" of Hellenic science, one of the most original Greek scientific thinkers, Philoponus of Alexandria, was contemporary with Justinian in the sixth century. Greek science was available to the Romans, but was ignored.

Even more disconcerting is the case of Islamic science. During some four centuries, from roughly 750 to 1150 A.D., Islam held the lead in scientific activity. In the eighth century a government-supported Institute of translation emerged in Baghdad. Very nearly the complete corpus of Greek science and a major part of Indian science were made available in Arabic within about eighty years. Original scientific work began appearing in Arabic by the late ninth century, especially in mathematics, optics, astronomy, and medicine.

In the early tenth century, Al-Razi, an Islamic physician, produced a book known eventually in Latin as Liber Continens, an encyclopedic codification of Greek and Hindu medicine, including a great deal of Al-Razi's own observation. It is probably the biggest single book ever written by a medical man, and is a superb work. In 1279 it was translated into Latin for Charles of Anjou by a Jewish physician of Agrigento in Sicily. It was published in Brescia in 1486 and reprinted four times before 1542. It was a fundamental medical reference book for centuries, and was entirely absorbed into the stream of Western medicine. But perhaps the most striking thing about it is that no complete copy of Al-Razi's great medical encyclopedia exists in Arabic, It was practically forgotten in Islam after a few generations.

The Arabic-speaking civilization knew what science was and was proficient in it. For four hundred years science was one of its major concerns. But a crystallization of other values occurred in the late eleventh century that shifted the whole focus of Islamic culture. Science was abandoned, and abandoned deliberately.

Christianity's relation to scientific activity has varied greatly through the ages. It has been said that early Christianity killed Greek science; but Christians were no more indifferent to science than were contemporary pagan Romans. The early Christian attitude was based on the view that natural phenomena were relatively unimportant. Only spiritual values had significance. The natural world deserved attention solely because God used it to communicate specific messages to the faithful.

This concept of the function and nature of the physical world is illustrated in a sixth-century story about Pope Gregory the Great. Gregory, not yet pope, had seen English slaves in the Roman slave markets, and decided to evangelize this pagan people. He received permission from the then pope and started for England. On the evening of the second day out, while he was resting and reading, a locust -: locusta in Latin - hopped up on his book. He knew that God was speaking to him. The Latin words loco sta mean "stop";,he took this to be the meaning of the message and went no farther. The next day, couriers from Rome reached him and summoned him back. The people of Rome had demanded that the pope recall Gregory from what would have been a lifelong mission because they desperately needed his leadership.

It is plain that science could not flourish in a culture that held to such a "rebus" interpretation of natural phenomena. But by the twelfth century this attitude began to change, at least in the Latin West. People began to pay more attention to the physical world. Sculpture of the early Gothic period clearly shows that the artist looked at real vegetation when he carved ornamental leaves or flowers. In the thirteenth century, St. Francis of Assisi, supplemented the doctrine that material things convey messages from God with the new idea that natural phenomena are important in themselves: all things are fellow creatures praising God in their own ways* as men do in theirs. This new notion opened a door to natural science, and partly explains the enthusiasm for experimental science in the Franciscan order at that time.

Another concept crucial for the whole development of modern science was emphasized in the thirteenth century and found its clearest spokesman in the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon. He said that there are two sources of knowledge of the mind of God - the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature - and that each of these must be searched by the faithful with equal energy. He pointed out further that study of the Book of Nature had been sorely neglected.

This idea - natural theology - changed the role of men from passive recipients of spiritual messages through natural phenomena to active seekers for an understanding of the Divine nature as it is reflected in the pattern of creation. Natural theology was the motivational basis of late medieval and early modern science. Every major scientist from about 1250 to about 1650 - four hundred years during which our present scientific movement was taking form - considered himself primarily a theologian: Leibnitz and Newton are notable examples. The importance to science of the religious devotion which these men gave their work cannot be exaggerated.

Why did the idea of an operational natural theology emerge in the thirteenth century, and in the Latin West alone? There was no similar development in Greek Christendom. It may have sprung from the key religious struggle of the time, the battle of Latin Christianity with the great Cathar heresy. Early in the thirteenth century it looked as though the Cathars were going to get control of a strip of territory extending from the middle Balkans across northern Italy and southern France almost to the Atlantic coast * separating the Papacy from the more orthodox areas of northern Europe. The Cathars' major doctrine was that there are two gods - a god of good and a god of evil. The visible universe is the creation of the god of evil, which means that living a good life involves having as little as possible to do with physical actuality. Christianity holds that matter is the creation of the one good Deity. In the process of upholding the Christian position against Catharism, natural theology assumed a new relevance and vividness.

Natural theology was unquestionably a major underpinning of Western science. By the time the theological motivation began to diminish, Western science was formed. Today the motive force of natural theology has long been spent, and it does not seem to have been replaced with any other idea of equal power. Are modern scientists quite sure why they are pursuing science? Science is fun, and the exhilaration of the chase may keep it going for a long while. But will scientific advance continue without more serious impulsion?

Scientists must become increasingly aware of the complexity and intimacy of science's relationships to its total context. The modern tendency to regard science as somehow apart from, or even dominant over, the main human currents that surround it is dangerous to its continuance, and can be harmful even to progress within science. The veneration of the circle is an example of a general presupposition that constricted even so great a scientific mind as Galileo's. Galileo, in bondage to the axiom that the circle is the perfect curved form and therefore necessary to any significant speculation, could not seriously contemplate Kepler's thesis that the planets move in elliptical orbits. He neither accepted nor refuted Kepler's notion. He committed the unforgivable sin: He disregarded it.

Fixation on the circle was almost complete in ancient culture. The Romans recognized only three ovoid forms: in arenas, in shields, and in the bezels of rings. Pagan Scandinavians used the oval for a type of brooch, but discarded it as soon as they were Christianized, that is, Mediterraneanized. The Middle Ages had no oval forms except occasionally the nimbus surrounding Christ in scenes of the Last Judgment or the Ascension, and even this was a version of the ancient Christian fish symbol, pointed at both ends. As late as the fifteenth century, artists could not draw a picture of the Coliseum which showed it oval. The first ascertainable oval design in a major European work of art is the paving that Michelangelo designed in 1535 for the remodeling of the Capitoline Piazza in Rome. Michelangelo and his successors during the next fifty years created an atmosphere in which ovoid forms became respectable, until finally Baroque art was dominated by the oval. Kepler's astronomical breakthrough was prepared by the artists who softened up the circle and made variations of the circular form not only artistically but also intellectually acceptable.

While the sanctity of the circle long impeded science by closing avenues of speculation, another inherited classical idea of a very different sort restrained progress by divorcing thought from practice. Manual labor was extolled for seven hundred years by monks, especially the Benedictines, as being not merely expedient but spiritually valuable as well. With the late medieval revival of Greek and Roman attitudes, however, the classical contempt for manual labor reasserted itself. The universities emerging in the thirteenth century had faculties in the liberal arts, law, theology, and medicine. Medicine was the only discipline with an embarrassing manual aspect, and in order to retain their prestige the medics separated surgery from medicine. Surgeons did not want to be downgraded either, so surgery became largely theory. There are pictures showing a professor of medicine lecturing to students, while a theoretical surgeon in turn directs a barber surgeon, who dissects the cadaver. Medicine advanced during the latter Middle Ages, but it seems likely that it advanced less rapidly than would have been the case if the study of surgery, anatomy, and medicine had been carried on by the same people. Speculation too far removed from substance is often of limited value. The trend to purge university curricula of "vocational" courses may contain a seed of decay.

Current discussion of the problems of maintaining scientific progress usually focuses on the importance of providing an adequate economic base for science and creating an atmosphere of political and intellectual freedom in which science may flourish. But, as we have seen, changes in science in the past have also to be related to changes in basic religious attitudes, in aesthetic perceptions, and in social relationships. More of our attention should be directed to an examination of the sources of our faith in science today, and to the wellsprings of motivation that lead men to pursue science. Why does a man become a scientist? Why does he choose his manner of work, and how does he select the area that engrosses him? The answers to questions like these are not entirely economic or political.

Our science itself may contain unexamined axioms, like the circular prison mat held Galileo captive. Hypnotism is an example of a phenomenon that science has not really tried to explicate, apparently because in some way it seems outside accepted categories of "reality," although it has been used in amazing ways in dentistry and surgery.

A distinguished surgeon told me about a delicate heart operation carried out under hypnotism, and added, "That sure is fooling them." But who is being fooled?'

The continuation of civilization as we know it depends on science, and the continuance of science would seem to depend on our ability to examine this sphere of human activity objectively and relate it to its human context. Those responsible for the statesmanship of science must develop a scientific understanding of science itself. They must become increasingly aware of the intricacy of the ecology of the scientist. We must learn to think about science in new ways unless we intend to leave the future of science to, chance. - LYNN WHITE, JR.