Alvin M. Weinberg - “Science and Trans-Science” - Minerva 10 (1972); 209-22

For Weinberg, the relationship between science and society is more complicated than the view that science provides the means and politics provides the ends.  He wants to introduce the notion of trans-science, the idea that there are questions of fact that can be asked of science, but cannot be answered by science.  Questions such as the biological effects of low-level radiation, or the probability of extremely improbable events.  And even entire disciplines have aspects of trans-science, engineering judgment, for example, or simply the elements of scientific uncertainty that are inherent in any advancing technology.  He also considers the social sciences as trans-scientific, since we can’t predict human behavior (no psycho-history á la Asimov), because the subject matter is too variable for rationalization.  There is also the axiology of science.  Questions of scientific value, criteria for scientific choice, the valuation of different styles of science, moral and aesthetic judgments.  All of these fall into the realm of trans-science.

But how do we settle the issues of trans-science?  How do we weigh the benefits and risks of new technology?  There is the political process, which establishes priorities and allocates resources.  There are adversary procedures.  The formal, legal and quasi-legal proceedings where opposing views are heard before some sort of board empowered to decide the issue.  But in order for these processes to work, scientists must help define the science/trans-science border and inject some intellectual discipline into the republic of trans-science.

M Polanyi, "The Republic of Science: its Political and Economic Theory," Minerva 1 (1962): 54-73

Polanyi wants to model the scientific community as a republic, and hence as a political body, with activities coordinated by the mutual adjustment of individual initiatives; each taking into account the activities of the others.  Under this model the problems to be investigated are chosen by the scientific community in order to guarantee that their efforts and resources will not be wasted.  The criteria for their selection are: plausibility; scientific value: accuracy, systematic importance, intrinsic interest; and originality.  He recognizes that there is a tension between the first (plausibility) and the third (originality) criteria.

As a republic, the authority of scientific opinion is mutual and is established between scientists, not over them.  He claims that scientific activities cannot be controlled from a central authority or directed from outside the community in order to serve public interest.  It is an organic growth from existing knowledge to new knowledge and cannot be predicted or shaped.  Any such attempts at direction or shaping will only result in mutilation.  The paradox of the republic of science is that its tradition is one that upholds authority while at the same time cultivating originality.  It is an association of independent initiatives that combine towards an indeterminate achievement.  It is a society of explorers.

No authoritarian technics, here, but neither do we have the federal government controlling science.

D. Kevles, "The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America" (NY, 1978)

Kevles is writing a history of the professionalization of science (and perhaps of the “Greatest Generation” of scientists?).  He traces the professionalization of science back to the late 19th century (post Civil War).  The goal of the emerging class of scientists (the name was coined by William Whewell in 1840, and replaced the tern “natural philosopher” during this time) was to exclude amateurs, improve the condition of science in the colleges and universities and enlarge the role of science in the federal government.  One of the early marriages between science and the government was the Army sponsorship of geographic and geologic surveys, a connection that linked science and western exploration.

 Even at this early stage of things, the scientific community made the distinction between “abstract” and “practical” science.  Abstract science was the study of nature for the sake of understanding its substance, its workings, its laws.  Practical science was the exploitation of nature and of nature’s laws for the sake of material development.  But the public did not understand this distinction, nor did they understand the dependence of technology on scientific progress.

Of course the connections between science and government grow tighter during military conflicts, especially World War II, where it can probably be claimed that science won the war.  (The Atomic bomb ended the war, radar won it).  The story that Kevles tells us is one of the growing involvement of science with government.  We see increases in federal spending on science, the creation of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, the National Science Foundation, the Atomic Energy Commission, the expansion of military research laboratories.  (Is this authoritarian technics taking over democratic government?)  And ultimately we see the politicization of science with the formation of the Union of Concerned Scientists, and scientists speaking out against government policies and research efforts (ABM, for example, or SDI).

So does science serve society or does society and government serve science?  With the political and social changes that take place in the 60's and 70's we see science going from a position of prestige to one of distrust.  Does science get tarred with same brush as the political institutions?  Or do failures in big science contribute to the distrust of government?  Big science, big government, where do we draw the lines?  Or has government fallen into the technology trap?  Only technology can save us from the problems that technology has created, only technology can provide us with the security that is increasingly hard to find in an increasingly unstable world.  Can we spend our way out of a recession?  Can we invent our way out of the mess that our inventions have left us in?

If science won WWII, did it lose Vietnam?  Are we giving too much agency to science?  Ultimately it all comes down to human beings and how we use the knowledge available to us.  If science has agency, it is because we have given it to it.  The Frankenstein of the novel is the scientist, not the monster, only in the movies does the monster get a name.

Lewis Mumford, "Technics and the Nature of Man," Technology and Culture 7 (1966): 303-17

In this article, Mumford is challenging the basic assumption that defines man as a tool-using animal.  Many anthropologists and ethnologists have made the claim that it was tool use that led to the development of the human brain, but as Mumford rightly points out, there are other species that use tools (chimpanzees, for example) and their tool use has not led them into the same developmental pathways that man has followed.  He would argue that it was the creation of significant modes of symbolic expression, rather than more effective tools, that was the basis of Homo Sapiens’ further development.  As evidence to back up this claim he points out the creation of the cave paintings by an early man that was still quite primitive in terms of the tools he had.

The fixation upon man as the tool user, which may also be an expression of presentism, casting our modern day obsession with machines back upon our ancestors, has led to a fascination with the machine to the exclusion of other aspects of humanity’s existence.  But, Mumford, would argue, at its origins, technics was life-centered, not work-centered or power-centered.  The greatest technical feat of early man was the domestication of plants and animals, a feat that did not require great sophistication in our tools, but did require a concentration upon sexuality in all its varied manifestations, a concentration that was abundantly evident in cult objects and symbolic art (the Venus sculptures, for example).

The mechanization and regimentation of society through industrial and bureaucratic organization eventually replaced religious ritual as a means of promoting the stability of mass populations.  Leading us, ultimately to a present in which the focus of human activity has shifted form an organic environment to the Megamachine, and a future in which all forms of life and culture will be reduced to something that can be translated into the current system of scientific abstractions and transformed en masse to machines and electronic apparatus.

In order to bring technics back into the service of human culture, we need to cease our further expansion of the Megamachine and instead concentrate on the development of those parts of the organic environment and the human personality that have been suppressed.  We must replace automation, the proper end for a machine, with autonomy, the proper end for a human being.

Lewis Mumford, "Authoritarian and Democratic Technics," Technology and Culture 5 (1964): 1-9.

For Mumford, democracy consists in giving final authority to the whole, rather than the part, and only living human beings are an expression of that whole.  Associated with this central principle are ideas of communal self-government, free communication, unimpeded access to the common store of knowledge, protection against arbitrary external control and a sense of individual moral responsibility for behavior that affects the entire community.

Democratic technics, then, is characterized by small scale methods of production that rest mostly on human skill and energy and that remains under human control, even when machines are used.  But in society, as in technics, there is a tension between small-scale association and large-scale organization, between personal autonomy and institutional regulation.  The irony of civilization is that as our societies have been moving from authoritarian regimes to democratic ones, our technology has been moving from democratic technics to authoritarian technics.

Mumford traces democratic technics back to the earliest use of tools, claiming that it has been the underlying support of every historic culture, balancing the authoritarian regimes of the day.  Authoritarian technics, on the other hand is a more recent trend (relatively speaking), traced back to the fourth millennium B.C., coinciding with the rise of civilization in the form of centralized political control.  Drawing on inventions and discoveries in mathematics, writing, irrigation, and astronomy it created complex human machines - the work army, the military army, the bureaucracy.  Authoritarian technics was tolerated, despite its potential for destruction, because it also created abundance.

Unfortunately, through mechanization and automation authoritarian technics has overcome its greatest weakness: its dependence upon human beings as its component parts.  And now the center of authority no longer lies with people but with the system itself, even the scientists that created it have become trapped within the organization that they have created.  The ultimate end of this technics is to transfer the attributes of life to the machine and the mechanical collective (we are the Borg, resistance is futile, you will be assimilated).  And the only way to maintain our democratic institutions is to make sure that our constructive efforts include technology.  We must reconstruct our science and our technics so that it includes the human personality and favor variety and ecological complexity over uniformity and standardization.  We must put humanity back at the center of our technology.

Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harper, 1934)

In the Fall of 2001 I did a directed reading with my advisor.  The subject was technology/science and society.  For coursework I wrote summaries of the books that we read.

Mumford wants to know how and why Western Europeans carried the physical sciences to the point where the whole mode of life had been adapted to the pace and capacities of the machine so that, in effect, the society had surrendered to the machine.  He traces this development to the invention of the clock, which allows time to be divided up and measured in the same sense that space is and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.

The first wave of the machine was in the 10th century and was characterized by an effort to achieve order and power by purely external means.  The second wave occurred in the 18th century with improvements in mining and iron-working.  Attempts were made by the disciples of Watt and Awkright to universalize the ideological premises of the first effort to create the machine, and to take advantage of the practical consequences.  With the third wave (20th century) the machine ceases to be a substitute for God or for an orderly society and its success is now measured by the mechanization of life.

He also links the emergence of the present-day form of capitalism with the beginning of the machine age and the substitution of money-values for life-values.  In the quest for power by the means of abstractions, one abstraction reinforces another.  Time is money, money is power, and power required the furtherance of trade and production, and increases in production drive increases in mechanization.  This abstraction of capitalism preceded the abstractions of modern science so that the power that was science and the power that was money became the same kind of power - the power of abstraction, measurement and quantification.

Because of this link between technics and capitalism, technics takes on the characteristics of capitalism, which utilized the machine not to further social welfare but to increase private profit.  It was capitalism that destroyed the handicraft industries, even though the machine products were inferior.  It was because of the possibilities of profit that the place of the machine was over-emphasized and the degree of regimentation pushed beyond what was necessary to harmony or efficiency.  It was because of capitalism that the machine (a neutral agent) has been the malicious element in human society, careless of human life, indifferent to human interests.  The machine has suffered the sins of capitalism and capitalism has taken credit for the virtues of the machine.  (Marxism)

The development of the machine civilization is divided into three successive but over-lapping and interpenetrating phases.  The Eotechnic phase is characterized by wood and water with the primary inventions being mechanical clocks, the telescope, cheap paper, print, the printing-press, the magnetic compass and the scientific method.  The Paleotechnic phase is characterized by coal and iron.  After 1750 industry passed into a new phase with different sources of power, different materials and different social objectives that multiplied, vulgarized, and spread the methods and goals of the first wave that were directed towards the quantification of life.  The source of mechanical power in the Paleotechnic phase was coal, and its industry rested on the mine, whose products dominated its life and determined the characteristics of its inventions and improvements.  This period is also marked by environmental degradation and the treatment of the environment as another abstraction along with money, prices, capital and most of human existence.  It also saw the worker as a resource to be exploited, mined, exhausted and discarded.

In the Neotechnic phase the scientific method took possession of the other domains of experience and turned the living organism and human society into objects of systematic investigation.  It is characterized by electricity and alloys and in order to survive it has to organize industry and its polity on a worldwide scale.  This phase is marked by instantaneous personal communication over long distances, and this instantaneous personal communication is the mechanical symbol of the world-wide cooperation of thought and feeling that must emerge if the world is not to sink into ruin.  (Wells’ World State?)

Stalin and the Bomb

Stalin and the Bomb by David Holloway - Modern European Intellectual History 12
(The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956)

 Science was seen in Russia, by both its friends and its enemies as a progressive and democratic force.  But even after it was assimilated into Russian culture, it was mistrusted by many because it was seen as embodying Western values.  We have already seen the influence of the Bolshevik revolution on biology with Lysenko and physics was also at risk of being politicized.  It was saved from that fate because Lenin understood that science and technology were essential for defense and economic security (“it is necessary to master the highest technology or be crushed”).

The first 30 years of the 20th century saw a rising interest in nuclear physics in the West, reaching a peak in the early 30s with the realization of the possibility of fission and the consequent release of energy.  Soviet scientists followed the advances in nuclear physics as well as participating in them, although they were hampered in their research by not always having access to the best equipment.  The State wanted science that would benefit the people, pure research was harder to justify.  Although in the West the notion that nuclear fission could be used to create an extremely powerful bomb was being discussed at this time, in the Soviet Union the primary interest was in the possibilities for power generation.  Physicists in the Soviet Union did not grow concerned about the possibility of the atomic bomb until work in the US, Britain and Germany was already underway.

In 1942, a review of journals by Flerov revealed that articles on fission were no longer appearing and that the scientists doing the research on fission were not publishing on other research.  From “the dogs that do not bark” he determined that research on fission had gone secret in the US, which meant that the Americans were trying to build an atomic bomb.  He wrote to several people, including Stalin.  There was no response.  An ongoing concern in the Soviet Union, however, was the supply of uranium, needed for power plants as well as for bombs and over the years there were attempts by physicists to get the state to organize the search for sources of uranium, with varying degrees of success.

Stalin, it seems did not really understand the significance of the bomb, even when he knew that the Americans possessed one.  (The Soviets had details of the Manhattan project as well as the Maud Commission’s report).  It was not until the US dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima that Stalin took a real interest in it, and only then did the Soviet Union begin a concerted effort to build one of their own.  The detailed intelligence that they obtained was not shown to all the scientists working on the project however, it was only shown to Kurchatov, who was in charge.  He then used this knowledge to help guide the work.  The Soviet Union exploded their first atomic bomb on August 29, 1949.  It had taken them only a little longer to develop than it took the US to develop theirs.

It is important to remember that the relationship between politics and science was not an easy one in the Soviet Union.  Stalin distrusted the scientists, probably because he could not really understand what they were doing, and it is extremely likely that had the test on August 29th been a failure the scientists in charge would have been taken out and shot.

Stalin perceived the US foreign policy as being one of Atomic Blackmail.  After WWII, when the US was the only nation that had the bomb, he expected them to use it to establish an hegemony over the world.  This was something that the Soviet Union must, at all costs, resist.  The only people who feared the atomic bomb were those who had “weak nerves.”  This led to a war of nerves and of atomic brinkmanship, especially once the Soviet Union had their own bomb.  They didn’t want to give in to the US in international affairs, because that would make them look weak, but at the same time they didn’t want to provoke a war. Stalin, however, believed that another war was inevitable so long as capitalism survived in the world.  WWI had heralded the Bolshevik revolution, WWII the rise of the Soviet Union, WWIII would crush capitalism forever.

After WWII, Stalin invested heavily in other military technology besides nuclear weapons, including jet engines, radar and missile technology, the size of the military also increased markedly.  Immediately after building the atomic bomb, the Soviet physicists were set to work on the hydrogen bomb.  In this effort they did not duplicate the work being done in the US, but rather developed the technology on their own.  They tested their hydrogen bomb on August 8, 1953.   Under Stalin’s leadership the command economy, combined with the large defense industry and large military establishment set the Soviet Union on a path of militarized development from which it was unable to escape, even after Stalin’s death.