PART SIX: Leading the Revolution
CHAPTER XX

THE CALLING OF SCIENTISTS

"Almost ninety per cent of all scientific endeavor has been undertaken during the past fifty years," guesses one observer.1 Yet a country with a misshapen science will not achieve Kalos. The Soviet Union and the U.S.A. each spend $25 billions on research and development - covering basic research, applied research, and the prototype production of new application. By far the greater part of these funds goes to stratocratic and taxocratic expenditures. We can conclude that what is happening in education will occur in science: Unless it is thoroughly reoriented, science cannot contribute appreciably to raising the kalotic levels of either country, nor to the large sections of the world that depend upon its scientific output.2

If this depressing landscape is upturned by the Kalotic Revolution, its building material can be put to good use. The forms of cosmarchy loom up in the very size of the present activity. There are now more teachers and scientists in America than there are farmers. The Soviet Union is producing engineers, chemists, biologists, agronomists, physicists, and mathematicians in great numbers. Some value may be recaptured from the mass of experience in teaching, organizing, learning, and applying. The world is acquiring a huge tutorial potential. Although America may be the prolific early generator of Tutors, their number is increasing everywhere else as well.

Today, although a politist can become a type of Nazi, reacting with ebbing force against world change, he can also move with the currents of the universe, competent or incompetent, aware or unaware, of bold spirit or of failing heart, as the case may be. For the first time in history the work of the whole world is moving within the scope of mind. To reread now Plato on philosopher-rulers, Hegel on the world as idea, and St. Simon on the regime of technical meritocracy helps frame the giant social trends of the world's way of life as they inexorably push the title, the sword, the purse, and the hierarchy into the background.

The way ahead is strewn with social and mechanical inventions, which can be picked up and used, or tripped over. That is, certain tendencies of scientific mind and organization can cause disaster after disaster, whether by nuclear warfare or by the squelching of personal liberties, privacy, and affectional life, Yet, "the success or failure of the various plans for social reform or social revolution," wrote John Dewey in 1921, "is dependent on the relationship they have to the progress of science. Without the support of science, these plans cannot avoid failure."3

So it must be insisted that the coming age of scientific mind has to be evaluated and a controlling principle enunciated. The age of scientific mind must be subjected to kalotic goals and organization.

Pragmatics

Life is a kind of science and science is a kind of life. After many false starts, a pragmatic mentality espousing these views has gained in the last two centuries a considerable following among men. Its traditional opposition is well-known: dogmatic authority in all of its social and personal forms. Its contemporary opposition is born out of itself; though modern in appearance, it is still dogmatic authority.

Taxocratic regimes, such as the Soviet Union, generally insist upon ideological relevance and controls. Free science has been anathema. Perhaps today the Soviet authorities are not as fully persuaded as they used to be of the overarching integration of science with and under dialectical materialism. The storms that once arose, even out of the enthusiasms of scientists themselves, for ideological dedication are now more likely to come from critics of science. Kommunist, the official party organ, can reproach the Physical Chemistry Institute of Obninsk for the fact that only 17 of 79 leading scientists participate in any kind of political work. And it scores the attitude of various directors of research institutes who, when asked why they neglected the ideological indoctrination of their staffs, would reply: "I need scientists, not propagandists; a scientist should be concerned only with science."4

The plutocracies and dystrocracies are more likely to take science at its world, as being an objective, neutral body of behavior of men whose overwhelming interest is the pursuit of truth. Science itself groups into ever more special fields that all together create a pattern of balkanization or Amer-Indian tribal relations. To the multitude of disciplines of science-social, natural, and humanistic-operating in this milieu, is granted an awful freedom that prevents both the public and the savants themselves from regarding and organizing their work in relation to truths larger than scientific truths.5

Those who are excited that the "Age of Science" has been born are two centuries too late with their enthusiasm and still mistaken as to the meaning of the event. The opinion is common that "there is no use in worrying about the lessons of history. Science can produce a world order by sheer technical mastery of the environment. Science working alone might even do it." Or "surely, if given a free hand modern science could master the problems of material sufficiency, psychological good-will and consensus in the world. Science is already creating a world order. Owing to inventions, for example, in astronautics, aeronautics, ocean travel and shipping, automation of trade and finance, and related means of frequent, fast, and heavy mobility, accompanied by the increased interest in many kinds of cultural education,the people of the world are being brought together. The stage is set for the simple act in which the nations will embrace one another." A deviant branch of science enthusiasts says that if the good inventions will not unify man, the bad inventions will: "We shall have unity out of horror. From the splitting of the atom for bellicose purposes and out of the instinct of self-preservation, we shall fall into one another's arms." Thus the invisible hand of science is supposed to arrange the cosmarchy without help from philosophically-guided collective action.

Writes Paul Goodman:

... the popular superstition of science is more desperate than the medieval superstition of the Church... Our learned physicians are much better than the ancients, but when they happen to be off on a wrong tangent, a patient cannot escape to his common prudence, veterinary wisdom, or old-wives' folklore.6

Adherence to scientoid belief is thus as common among the mass as among the elite. But we hold that science as technology and natural science cannot create a world order. Even science in the broader sense of the term, including the social, political, and behavioral sciences, cannot do so.

For one thing, the world order depends upon non-rational factors as much as upon rational factors; if the non-rational elements produced by disorder work against any peaceful solution to the world's problem, other non-rational factors can work towards producing a world order. Cosmarchy is an adjusting of the emotions as well as of rationality, a change of direction and of speed of change itself. Science recommends a great deal to us, but always on the basis of our desire for a Revolution of Kalos. Conventional science does not tell us where we should go, including how far we should go; nor does it tell us how we should get there, whenever getting touches our sense of good and evil; nor as a special case of means, how fast we should move to get there.

Natural science, furthermore, does not have the material ability to fulfill the wants and needs of people without limit. It will probably never be adequate in this regard because wants tend to be almost unlimited. Wants and needs have to be assembled and formularized by ideological and political forces before applied science can cope with them.

There are, in sum, three psychological obstructions to science: the opposition of traditional religions and morality to its workings; the opposition of authoritative communist science that would force scientists upon the procrustean bed of "the one true science;" and, third, the opposition of some scientists who believe that if only they will sit at the feet of nature, nature will read them a book, and if they would be let to transcribe this book for the public, it would have the answer to all questions. All three theories are false and dangerous. The kalotic theory is that science is a life process, of specialized behaviors aimed at perfecting the steering, intelligence, and evaluating mechanisms of mankind working towards Kalos, whether at the very center or the remote reaches of social decision.

Adventurism versus Responsibility

Science, left to itself, creates new needs in the process of solving old problems. For, actually, it rarely solves whole problems, but rather parts of problems and creates parts of other problems. To most people, this is clearer in respect to applications than in respect to pure science. Thus the atomic bomb has created more problems than it has solved. This would be true even granted that the horrible prospect of the atom bomb has tended to preserve "Large-scale peace." But the social cost of nuclear weapons has been enormous. Civil defense measures, the most expensive kinds of armaments and defense systems an unknown but plausible considerable increase in mental illness, anxiety, unhappiness: these add to the negative effects of its direct potential for destruction. On the other side, the industrial benefits of nuclear fission and fusion do not yet approach the disadvantage of "unlocking [some of ] the secrets of the atom." And, of course, the disposal of industrial radioactive wastes is again a big problem. And so no.

Would the same thing be true of other "adventures in science?" (That phrase encourages a positive and romantic view of science:" Adventures in science!" It could be used in an entirely ironic sense as the communists use the term "adventurism" to characterize irresponsible activities without thought of consequences.) Many adventures of science bring as much likelihood of evil as good, where the total consequences are known.

What has been the net gain from the airplane? The present type of world order may be slightly different from what it would have been without the airplane, but very slightly. On the other hand, some problems of world order might have been more readily solved if the airplane did not exist. Perhaps older conventional forms of diplomacy,with slow-moving supplies, messages,and travel might have deterred in some cases obstacles from being deliberately formed, or eased difficulties, or prevented small difficulties from growing into larger ones. Much destruction in warfare that brought little military advantage would not have occurred. The airplane has not helped peace-making or stability in the Congo, Angola, Cuba,Nigeria, or Vietnam. In all five cases those who have been opposed to some kinds of foreign intervention have argued that the introduction of aircraft into the situation increased the provocation, the possibilities, and the actualities of disaster. The same may be said about automobiles with traffic and accidents, pesticides with water pollution, and so on; again, to fertilize the land of Vietnam or Indonesia or Mexico makes possible a fast growth of the population and a consequent overcrowding.

Scientific inventions do not solve problems with a new kalotic balance unless they are fully assimilated into the social system that they affect.7 This has not normally happened. In this sense, science is like most pre-kalotic legislation, which, as we have shown in the case of tax laws,8 usually fails to foresee some of its important conseqeuences. Thus, there is little difference between most inventions, once put into effect or into production, and uninvented collective movements, or unconscious changes in customs.9 Migrations of people to other lands have often occurred. Taken as new responses to social problems, they have been solutions of but a few years. If Australia were settled by fifty million Chinese today, tomorrow China would have made up the gaps in its population. The palliative value of emigrant remittances in many parts of the world, in many periods of history, is not to be questioned, and a "breathing spell" can be obtained for achieving some programs of development. In other words, long-range solutions do not lie in mass transfers of people unless they are part of a larger plan controlling all side-effects.

The social sciences can add to the scope of science in solving problems of world order, whether resulting from inventions or collective social transformations. Yet too many, even among social scientists, suffer from the "naturalistic fallacy." They believe that the good and the true will emerge naturally from the scientific solution of whatever problem emerges, and that nature houses secrets that need simply to be let out in order to produce solutions. Others succumb to the "hardware fallacy." They tend to make the social sciences a kind of cheerleader for the rapid proliferation of uncontrolled hardware inventions and physical science changes. The naturalistic fallacy and the hardware fallacy cannote inferior ideology and practices of scientists, public, and the policy-makers.

Neither inventions nor unplanned change can be let happen uncontained. They must be continuously monitored.10 The Chinese proverb applies in both cases: "He who mounts the tiger cannot choose to dismount." Even the "happenings" of hippies and the "brainstorming" of executive groups are contained within a social box.

We need a broad science and an aware science. In many parts of the world, the limited view of the nature of science allows and encourages uncontrolled invention, changes without foresight, and mechanisms that destroy social systems without building new systems of a better sort in place of the old. It is a universal proposition, important for world order, that solutions of applied science should be presented in context. Science, like those who use science, needs some sense of what it wants to deprive people of and what it does not want to relieve them of, of how much they should be forced and how much they should be worked with on the principle of consent.

An interdisciplinary view of the sciences will rightly ban the pretense of solving important problems by the application of the techniques of a single science. Not even a simple footbridge can be built by an engineer as engineer; a hypodermic needle cannot be injected by a doctor as doctor.11 The approach of a single science appears almost always to be harsh and ruthless because of its very narrowness. The monomania of a scientist is proverbial; comic strips, gossip, and the mass media are continually elaborating these caricatures of men who want to twist the world into a single technical vision.

Truly, however, scientists are driven into narrowness by the gross ignorance of and continual quarreling among, political leaders. Yet, in turn, the indifference and confusion about goals among the leaders of the world owes something also to semantic disturbances, which some scientists are professionally equipped to cure but other scientists are both unequipped to treat and themselves victimized by. Many discrepancies of goal would not survive if scientists and decision-makers could understand what each was trying to say to the other.

The trouble in communication also relates to the enlarge ment of goals, Agreement on the goals of a social system, if it does exist, has to be stated in general terms. These terms can be unintentionally and honestly misdefined, setting scientists and politicians to factional disputes and working at cross-purposes. Again, if we broaden the scope of objectives, the problem of finding solutions becomes more complicated. If more people are brought together to decide, it is often more difficult to solve a problem. This happens in the treatment of intercultural, racial, and national differences of all kinds as well as in the government of a single toparchy.

Hence social scientists have as a major task, in addition to all other tasks, the facilitation of difficult solutions by many minds. There is an incredible shortage of social scientists who are trained to undertake the resolution as well as the searching for solutions and gathering of data about social problems. There are too few people in the world who are capable of advising leaders or themselves taking a scientific view of the decisions they are about to make.

There are perhaps fifty thousand persons in the world who are highly qualified as applied social scientists. They are defined as persons who are capable of innovative initiatives, that is, new applications, and of giving counsel on human relations management. Their base in science may be psychology, political science, anthropology, sociology, administrative analysis, or city planning. There are perhaps a million persons, who if retreaded like used auto tires, might become qualified as competent innovators in practical situations where social change is at issue. The need, though, is probably for fifty million applied social scientists, social engineers, people who are competent in the hundreds of fields involving human relations. That would be one Tutor for each 600 persons in the world. These include all those who can work along with hardware engineers and natural scientists, whenever for example a dam must be constructed, a new factory system erected, new types of aircraft designed, and so forth. They include all those who must pitch in on the numerous tasks assigned to the kalotic movement of reconstructing society.

Priorities

A "man on the moon" has preceded "peace on earth, good will towards men." Why? The achievements of the Soviet Union and the United States in space outstrip their constructive achievements on earth. On earth, these colossi have frightened the world of three billion people for a generation and have gotten nowhere. With all their influence, power, technology, and resources, they have given us a world worse off than it was a generation ago. But they have placed men on the moon.

After the first thrills of watching men gyrating in space, a period of relative quiescence in space activity will probably occur. There is a faint chance of further valuable discoveries but, more likely, the contradiction of policies that give over huge resources to such undertakings will become manifest: man's place on earth is still highly unstable and uncertain. The analogies with wars, Roman circuses, and plutocratic extravagances will become unsettling. The energies of many thousands of the most highly educated and expensively equipped scientists, technicians, and managers should better be applied to wrestling with the agonies of earthly existence. Space explorations are better than war, but then war is not the only alternative.

The scientific world itself, not the public, alone must ask critical questions opposed to the pursuit of weapons of distruction, until some kalotic priorities are set up for society. Then they can go to work wholeheartedly in the realization that their inventions will be applied as part of a worldwide scheme of human betterment. The disintegration of the sciences, even as they have become superbly equipped in detail, has produced demoralization on a grand scale. (That is, as pneumos increased, dikeos was not provided.) At the present time,scientists are not organized, not thinking in broad terms and altogether possessed by a crude empiricism and plutocratic "featherbedding" that they hardly can bear to recognize in themselves.

The "priorities of science" is the way the problem of ragged technical advance is put. Actually man's control over features of his life is determined only partly by resources taken from other things. His control is affected in part also by accidental discoveries or unpremeditated applications of his discoveries. It is related, moreover, to his desires, morale, time spent, and the quality of people involved. Consideration of the priorities of science must encompass all of these problems, planning what we can and planning for the unforeseen.

The sum of "resources applied" do not by themselves foreshadow the achievement and extent of results. Many of the least "expensive" inventions have had the most far-reaching effects. Many simple schemes ("cultivate your garden") can better the most complicated. For this reason, scientists often can aspire to kalotic independence. They need not cooperate where their work will harm the prospect of kalos. They can stand greater in their own eyes and in the eyes of history if they pass up a million-dollar machine for research or research or resign from a scientific group that rewards only research performed with expensive equipment. The next generation may bless him by building the machines for the work that he is pioneering.

The priorities of science are measured only vaguely in dollarinvestment in branches of scientific invention and development; they show the seriousness of scientific invention and development; they show the seriousness of scientific push. Numbers of scientists do not spell priorities, either; large numbers of skilled people may devote themselves to trivia. Not valid either as an indicator of priorities are the brilliance, the originality, or the scientificity of scientists at work in certain areas. Many great scientists of the past worked on problems of low conventional priority and even of low repute. The legions of science are not to be elaborately garbed and sent charging up a steep slope like the Light Brigade.

It is of psychiatric interest to know that later astronauts, as one of their doctors told a reporter following the first manned orbiting of the Moon, are "much more scientifically oriented" and not like the earlier "typically combat- oriented pilots." And, concluded the reporter, Homar Bigart, "The three men who circled the moon were of a new breed of scientist-astronaut motivated more by an obsessive curiosity about space travel than by mere ambition to perform a historic act." Searching for a moral to explain their trip to themselves, the astronauts read to the watching and listening earthlings the Biblical version of the Genesis of the universe.12 The fore motives--combat,adventure, curiousity, and religiousness-- are, for the most part the kind of residual motives that impel men in the particular to action in the particular. And scientists in the particular to science of the particular!

Their larger motivational frame, as we have already indicated, is not more kalotically rational. The motives are of highly speculative future returns. How difficult it would be to get one or all nations to spend $30,000,000,000 in watering and ploughing the dusty rocky moon-like surfaces of Earth which are several times the surfaces of the Moon. Who would allot an extra $24,000,000,000, the estimated cost in 1969 of landing a man on Mars by 1986, for schooling and housing or simply pensioning the hundreds of millions of hungry old people of the world?

The motives include possible military advantage (far more speculative, too, than an anti-missile defense network, or building bomb-shelters for the whole of the Russian and American peoples), or as an expenditure of funds to give Americans work and exercise the economy (at which war-spending and all forms of peace-spending are more diversified and direct, especially for the unskilled, poorer sectors of the employment market.)13

Let no one believe that rational analysis will stem this expensive emotionalism, no more than it can the hero-worship, or the aggressive urges that spring from still mysterious origins in man's brain. Until a large and commanding body of men throughout the world place the needs of the world in rankorder of priorities, resisting diversions and demanding appropriate policies, resisting diversions and demanding appropriate policies, these and other anti-kalotic collective delusions will rule human conduct.14 If the Tutors are to form the bulk of the new elite and simultaneously to effect a Kalotic Revolution, they must be prepared to eradicate their own anti-kalotic motivations along with those that are peculiar to other social strata of the world.

The Specialist as Revolutionary.

After the initial discovery and its first formulations, science is a form of administration. Its consequences are perceived and a channel is dug for them to enter the life process of science and, hopefully, the larger world. Rules are prescribed(scientific method) and a social environment surrounds it (the scientific reception system) for the enlarging, spreading, and developing of the creative moment of truth. Then, also, science is administrated in the conventional sense when it becomes too large and too mixed up with other social elements to be managed by scientists acting in their scientific capacity. In the U.S. federal government alone, "some 34 committees are in the business of advising the federal government in some aspect of the broad area of science."15 Hundreds of special committees are buried in the agencies. The Soviet Union has equally complicated systems.16 All of these do not add up to the kalotic employment of science because the spirit of science does not pervade the totality of governmental process, from the small field office to the three top-elite branches of government.

As administration in both senses, science can no more be free and irresponsible than the military, businessmen, workers, officials, or academicians can be. Its special busines is programmed as enlightenment and invention, but it inexorably acquires goals and rules of operation, and it spends scarce resources. Whether conceived as internal administration or an externally effective system, the principle of the political accountability of science holds.

The role of the specialist in the Kalotic Revolution is necessary and large. Nine out of ten Tutors have to be experts on one or another of the problems that the revolution sets itself to solve. But in every special discipline there will naturally be men who can both communicate faithfully with their colleagues and command general loyalties in the population. If this is true of soldiers and officials, it must be equally true of scientists and technicians.

However, scientists, despite their protestations that whatever they do is for the public good--or, in fact, precisely because they believe their work needs no demonstration of its goodness and indeed fits without predirection or plan into the public good-- are not so adept at relating to the general society.

They even pride themselves in their ability to stay aloof from controversy hoping futilely that the problems created by them will be solved for them by others or that merely expert consultation will bring them what they want. As a result, what is potentially the most powerful of aggregates in modernizing and technically advanced societies has an influence that is often not even proportionate to its simple number.

The scientist, in becoming a specialist,as he must, often acquires three sets of traits that are a resource for revolution. One is the speciality itself, which, by its being highly esteemed and necessary to the effective functioning of society, works like the guns of the military to add weight to words.

Second, in the course of becoming a specialist, the scientist, like other educated men, acquires an unusual treasure of symbols. He commands a large amount of miscellaneous information about the world.

At the same time, he acquires a general social (as opposed to personal) self--confidence. Self--confidence helps him to extend his influence;it gives him the habit of taking initiatives; and it lends to him a supra-historical mentality which, while it makes for impracticality, also makes him readier than most people for large changes in the environment.

When the specialist's qualities are harnessed to the general principles of revolution, the scientist can become a powerful person relative to other elements of society. If even this has not been in fact realized, it is because the scientist has not realized so, or, when he has, he has employed only the barest of techniques for exercising influence. Statements before public agency committees, conventional scientific journals, and letters to newspapers are hardly a forcible entry to power.He also lacks the services that men of power need.17 His failure to find his revolution, that all the facts of the times exhibit to the realistic eye, is a product of his innocence and pride. Nor is he helped by the trivial debates that typically agitate academic halls and professional meetings.