SCIENCE AND FREEDOM
In 1949, I saw that American scientists and intellectuals were
greatly worried about the question of scientific freedom, meaning thereby
freedom for the scientist to do what he liked while being paid by big
business, war departments, or universities whose funds tended to come more
and more from one or the other source. These gentlemen, living in a society
where he who pays the piper insists upon calling the tune, did not seem to
realize that science was no longer 'independent' as in the days when modern
machine production was still expanding at the lower stage of technical
development, and the scientist who made the most essential discoveries was
looked upon as a: hannless individual toying with
bits of wire, chemicals, perhaps collecting odd specimens in out of the
many places. The scientist now is part of a far more closely integrated,
tightly exploited, social system; he lives much more comfortably than
Faraday, but at the same time under the necessity of producing regular
output of patentable or advertising value, while avoiding all dangerous
social or philosophical ideas. As a result, the worthies I mention were
quite worried about the lack of scientific freedom in a planned society,
but only indirectly and perhaps subconsciously as to what was actually happening
to their own freedom in an age and time of extensive witch-hunting, where
being called a communist was far more dangerous than being caught redhanded in a fraud or robbery .
These considerations, however, are mentioned only because they
lead one astray from the main facts. There is an intimate connection
between science and freedom, the individual freedom of the scientist being
only a small corollary. Freedom is the recognition of necessity, science
is the cognition of necessity .The first is the classical Marxist
definition of freedom, to which I have added my own definition of science.
Let us look closer into the implications.
As an illustration, consider the simple idea of flying. I am told
that our ancestors in India had mastered some mysterious
secrets of yoga whereby they could fly hundreds of miles in an
instant. I don't believe it; these are flights of the fancy rather than of
the body. Attempts to imitate the birds had very limited success, but
gliders were more successful. Then came the posing of the elements of the
problem, namely sources of power, methods of propulsion, laws
of aerodynamics -all scientific and experimental truths. Mankind was not
free to fly till the flying machine was invented. Today, anyone can fly
without yoga-provided he has the means to enter an airplane. This,
as society and its property relations are constituted, implies that either
he owns the plane; or someone who does allows him admission; ultimately,
the question is whether or not our flying human has money, i.e. the
necessary control over means of production. In the abstract nothing
prevents him from sprouting a pair of wings and flying off like a bird; nor
from becoming a yogi and soaring into the atmosphere by mere
exercises of will-power. Such freedoms nevertheless, are illusory;
necessity compels man to find other, more feasible technical methods.
Take a commoner case, of eyesight. Five hundred years ago,
extreme short sight or extreme farsight would
have been regarded as varieties of blindness; they were written off as
afflictions from heaven, or concomitants of old age. Glasses have to be
invented for the restoration to normal sight of such people. This means
today the science of optics, some knowledge of eye-structure, of glass,
including its chemistry, lens-grinding technique, factories and workshops.
There are still many people who suffer from eye-defects that could easily
be corrected by glasses; they are legally free to wear glasses. Only lack
of funds prevents them trum wearing glasses. In India the number of pairs of
glasses really necessary but not available would run into the millions.
We observe, then, that to recognize the necessity implies sceintific experiment; in addition, there is a
technical level which cannot be divorced from the experimental. Finally,
there is a social structure that is not only intimately connected with the
technical level, but also conditions the freedom of the individual by
introducing a social necessity that in the abstract seems
unnecessary but exists nevertheless.
Some of my experiments about science are not likely to be
disputed; that science knows only one test, that
of validity, of material proof. Science is nothing if it does not work in
practice. Science is direct investigation of properties of matter, hence
materialistic. Scientific results are independent of the individual who
carries out the experiment, in the sense that the same action gives indentical results. Finally, as the search for causes
and their effects, science is cumulative; science is the history of
science. Every scientific discovery of any importance is absorbed into
the body of human scientific knowledge, to be used thereafter. Schoolboys
can repeat Galelio's experiments, and first year
college students learn more mathematics than Newton knew; the young students
must go through much the same mental process, stripped of inessentials and
repeated according to modern points of view, when they study. But they do
not have to read Galileo's dialogues, not the Principia. Here
science differs essentially from the arts, for in painting, the modern
painter need not study the prehistoric bisons in
the cave of Altamia, nor. the
poet read Kalidasa. On the other hand, we can
appreciate works of art and literature of all ages, foI:
they are not subsumed in their successors in. the
manner of scientific discovery. Aesthetically, they have a survival value,
a lack of obsolescence that the scientific work lacks. However, not all
aesthetic effects have this survival value; the rapidly changing fashions
that most ruling classes think necessary in their gannents
become as quickly ridiculous.
The other statements may also be briefly illustrated. Two
painters painting the same scene will produce substantially different
pictures; two people clicking the shutter of the same camera pointed at the
same object will not. The fruits of ritual depend upon the rank of the
celebrant, and only the king, medicine-man, shaman, or brahmin
have the power or the right to draw down certain benefits for mankind;
science tells u.s: that these supposed benefits
are imaginary, and fertility of the soil is better obtained by special agrotechniques, chemical fertilizers, and so on, than
by fertility rites. Moreover, the chemicals and techniques work in the same
way independently of who applies them.
Now I give these examples deliberately, because both art and
ritual performed at one time the functions that have been displaced by
scientific observation. Primitive ritual was a substitute for what we now
call scientific theory though primitive technique was correct. In India the menstrual tabu is still observed, though dying out in the cities,
where the hurly-burly of industrial life deprived it of all meaning. Our
workmen worship their tools on one day in the year, a custom not without charm
which can be traced back to the oldest known times; but lathes, trubines, electric motors and railway trains have made
it clear that there is none of the workman's personal mana
that resides in the tool. I note in the market that the humble
vegetable vendor makes the first sale of the day with a humble salutation
to the balances, and to the goddess Bhavani; the sharemarket speculator may spend considerable sums on
astrologers, but doesn't neglect the market quotations, and relies upon
study of trends and corners in shares, stocks, bonds, and such modern
financial jugglery which is absent in his and the in astrologer's
scriptures. The millions that bathe even now at the of time of a solar
eclipse can point with pride to the fact that their prayers have been
successful, that the sun has always been freed from the maw of the demon
who swallows him; but astronomical theory which predicts the eclipse to the
minute has crept into our traditional pancanga
almanacs, through the Western ephemerides, so
that people cannot really believe in what has come to be an obsolete
practice. In science, practice and theory cannot be divorced. This
does not mean that scientists have never held a wrong theory , but only
that they keep on making better and better approximations to the truth,
knowing I that there is no final truth simply because the properties of
matter are infinite and inexhaustible. In ritual, no one dares make an
experiment; the older the precept the more sure its grip.
Religion develops from ritual when primitive society acquires a
class structure, a tighter organisation of its
originally varied components into a larger whole. This need not be
elaborated here. What most of us do not realize is that science is also a
social development; that the scientific method is not eternal and that science
came into being only when the new class structure of society made it
necessary. Of course, science really comes into its own with the
machine age, which cannot develop without science and which in turn
contributes highly useful technical aid to scientific discovery But the fundamentl, inner connection is that machine
production, like science, is cumulative. The machine accumulates human labour time towards the fulfilment
of a specific human purpose. Yet modern science, as we know it, came into
being before the machine age, and for the same purpose, namely to serve the
new social needs. Modern science is the creation of the bourgeoisie.
One of the major contributions of science is that it separates
theory from technique, specifically from productive technique. If you look
at our village workmen, you find them still producing excellent work with
quite inferior tools simply because the workman masters the individual
tool, makes it as extension of his person. Only he can handle the
particular bit of metal efficiently enough to obtain good results. But his pr,oduction is not
standardized. If he makes two complicated devices of the same type, the
parts will not be interchangeable, though both may have the same design and
function. In the modern factory, on the other hand, the lathe or the loom
is independent of the person handling it, just as the sceintific
experiment is independent of the experimenter, provided in each case the
worker has the minimum efficiency necessary to keep the mechanism from
damage. A village weaver is whole ages and social layers apart from the
village potter; a worker on the assembly line can easily shift from one
type of factory to another. In the case of the handicrafts-man, theory is
not divorced from the tool, his knowledge is
acquired as well as expressed through his fingers. The result is that the
transmission of such knowledge is slow, craft workers tend to form into
closed guilds (in India small sub-castes), and a
long apprenticeship is necessary for the production of more workmen, their
numbers and production being severely limited. This was the situation jn Renaissance Europe, for example, when considerable
accumulation of money with the merchant princes (and its overflow) made it
necessary to find new methods of making money grow. The older usury was
limited in scope; more than a certain profit could not be extracted from
the debtors tied to the older mode of production. Confiscating the
mortgaged tools of a craftsman may lead to starvation for him and his
family but the tools are unproductive bits of metal and wood to the
usurers. There is needed a new class which can produce goods efficiently
without long training, and whose surplus labour
can be appropriated by an employer. This turns the mere usurer into a
capitalist, the craftsman into a proletarian. But to manage such
enterprises, there is needed some theory of material processes that works
in practice, and serves the managing class which does not handle the tools
of production. This is precisely the role of scierice.
If you look into Galileo's researches, for example, you will find them
concerned with such practical things as why pumps don't suck up water above
a certain height-which, leads to hydrostatics, and also to better pumps.
Accurate tim-keeping is made possible by his
observations upon the pendulum; but it is factory production, where many
men have to be brought together simultaneously for coordinated labour ,
that needs accurate time-keeping; not cottage industries. Galileo cast or
recast horoscopes rather badly. His astronomy was revolutionary because he
turned a telescope upon the heavens, to interpret what he saw in a
perfectly natural manner. The man in the moon disappeared, to be replaced
by mountains. But what made his astronomy dangerous was the fact that it
shook a system of the universe taken for granted by the ruling class and by
the church that served it; by implication, the rest of the social system
was also laid open to challenge, something that no man is free to do
without risk.
Science is not mere accumulation of experimental data. No
experiment is great unless it settles some disputed theory; no theory is a
striking advance unless it explains puzzling experimental data, or
forecasts the results of unperformed experiments. But one has only to look
at the way the scientific centre of Europe has shifted to see the
intimate connection between science and production, between the coming to
power of a new bourgeoisie and the local age of discovery. Leeuwenhoek was
a janitor in Delft who ground his own lenses
and made the first good microscopes, which he turned upon drops of water
and the smallest insects. It was the Royal Society of London that sent its
secretary to visit him and published his papers, just as they published Redi's communications against the doctrine of
spontaneous generation, which helped solve the very practical problem of
food storage. But the idea of giving credit to him who publishes first is
comparatively new. Even Newton did not like to give away
his discoveries light-heartedly, and the further back we go the stronger we
find the tendency to keep a precious secret concealed as a monopoly. It is
the social mode of production that changes the fashion, though private
ownership of the means still insists upon patents, cartels, monopolies at
level of technique and manufacture. Now is it an accident that the very
century during which two revolutions place the bourgeoisie in power in England produced Newton? How is it that the French
revolution, which cleared off the rubbish of feudalism in France saw the greatest of French
and European scientists: Lagrange, Laplace,
Ampere, Berthelot? They rose with the bourgeoisie
and survived Napoleon. Gauss, the great name in German science, appears on
the scene at about the time the German bourgeoisie becomes the real power
in its own country; and he is not alone. If we wrote all these off as
accidents, we should be in the ridiculous position of denying the
possibility of a scientific basis for the origins of science, by taking the
history of science as a series of fortunate coincidences, though science is
its own history and has always progressed by seeking the reason behind
suspicious coincidences. I might go further and say that Greek science was
(in spite of all the admiration lavished upon it, and in spite of its
logical method having served as inspiration to the Renaissance) not science
in the modern sense at all, but pseudo-science, much as Greek and Roman
capital can at best be called pseudo-capital in spite of modern imperialist
tendencies and actions. The aim of Greek science was to reduce all
phenomena to reasoning from the techniques that had originated the very
discoveries. That too was a social necessity, for in classical society the
work was done by slaves, whose existence was taken as a law of nature, a
necessity which reflected itself in the scientific outlook of the time.
This should dispose of idea that science is the creation of gifted
individuals, thinking for 'purely' scientific purposes along problems which
came to them out of some realm of the mind. There are gifted individuals in
every age and society, but the manner in which they exercise their gifts
depends upon the environment, just as much as the language in which they
choose to do their thinking. It is as impossible for the mind to exist
without thought as for the body to exist without motion. There are still
people in India who speculate upon the
relative merits of Sankara's and Ramanuja's philosophy, though they do not thereby
presume to acquire the prominence of those two founders. If I repeat Newton's experiment with the prism,
I shall get the same results, but certainly not the same credit as a
scientist or founder of optics. The weight, the significance of a
scientific overy depends solely upon its importance
to society .This is why the college student, knowing more mathematics
than all of Newton's contemporaries, is still
not a prodigy. A discovery that has been assimilated is reduced to the
level of useful technique. A discovery made before it is socially necessary
gains weight and social necessity is often dependent for its recognition
upon the class in power. Leonardo da Vinci, whose
500th anniversary is completed, is the most famous example of this. He
still served feudal masters, who were not interested, for example, in the
manufacture of pins (from which Leonardo lected
to make a fortune), and who use his mechanical talents for stage effects. A
hundred years later, his fame as an artist would have been far less than an
inventor. That social delopment, both in
technique and in needs of production, evoked scientific discovery long
before the days of organized research is clear from the independent and
simultaneous discoveries made so often in the history of science. For
example, liquefaction of gases, so long considered an
impossibility, done by two different people in France at once. The Raman effect,
whose theory is still imperfect, was discovered simultaneously in the USSR and India. The credit rightly belongs Raman, who realized at once that while the rest
of the world had been looking for an atomic effect, this was a molecular
phenomenon. The experiments he devised proved it, and gave a valuable
technique of analysis which does not change the substance.
But occasionally, as with Priestley, the conflict between the
scientist and the class that dominates society becomes too great for the
individual and for his discoveries to gain proper recognition. This is not
a characteristic merely of the bourgeois. During the middle ages, we find
Europeans turning to Ion, the monastic life, theological speculation. Such
tendencies were highly respected and advertised, with the assistance of an
occasional miracle. However, the theology was dependent of the class
structure of contemporary society; dangerous speculations led a man to the
stake. Not only feudal but the later merchant classes used theology, protestantism in latter case. The early saints and
martyrs upon whose reputation the church was apparently founded, did not
suffice in the later period. When the church itself became a great holder
of feudal property, abbacies and bishopries
turned into the prerogatives of particular rich families, or groups of
families; this happened, incidentally even with Buddhism as may be seen
from the history of the Barmecides, or of the few
ruling families of Tibet till its recent liberation or from the history of
the richer monasteries in Ceylon. The foundations of Sankara,
Ramanuja, and even a real people's saint like Tukarama are now chiefly preoccupied with methods of
increasing their wealth, retaining outworn prerogatives, avoiding taxes.
The wealthy church in Europe needed the inquisition to support its claims;
that holy office found Galileo's thought dangerous. The crusades were
diverted to strange aims, such as the conquest of Constantinople, and the suppression of a
popular movement in the Albigeois. The Index Expurgatorious shows the church's attitude towards
certain type of advanced thinking, while the last Spanish civil conflict
demonstrated what steps the church in Spain, as Spain's greatest owner of
property, was capable of taking against a democratic government.
A fairly close parallel could be drawn on the thesis that science
is the theology of the bourgeoisie; at least it replaces theology
whenever the bourgeoisie- capitalist mode of production displaces the
feudal. The scientist must remain comparatively poor like the monk, but is
admired, admitted to the board of the capitalist baron just as the cleric
was to that of the feudal lord. His discoveries must be patentable, but he
rarely makes the millions; Pasteur and Faraday received a beggarly pittance
of the profit made from their discoveries. A press-agent may make the
scientist's miracle known, but only if they are acceptable to the lord of
the press, hence to the ruling class. And most striking of all, in the
period of decay, witch-hunting is as prominent in its own way as with the
end of feudalism .
Though a creation of the bourgeoisie, science is not its
monopoly, and need not decay with the bourgeoisie. The art of dancing began
as part of ritual, but is now one of society's aesthetic pleasures even
though the witch-doctors who initiated it have mostly vanished. Music is no
longer necessary to promote the growth of plants; even as I write, I can
hear the primitive rhythm of tomtoms and ancient
chants being practised at midnight-not for better
crops but for the sake of some relief from the daily grind of life by
people who are milkmen, factory workers, and house-servants. Sculpture does
not mean the ground mysteries of pre-historic French grottos; the Parthenon
statuary is admired in the British Museum, but no longer worshipped.
There is no reason for science to remain bound any longer to the decaying
class that brought it into existence four centuries ago. The scientist
needs this freedom most of all, namely freedom from servitude to a
particular. Only in science planned for the benefit of all mankind,
for bacteriological, atomic, psychological or
other mass warfare can the scientist be really free. He belongs to the
front of that great tradition by which mankind raised itself above the
beasts, first gathering and storing, then growing its own food; finding
sources of energy outside its muscular efforts in the taming of fire,
harnessing animals, wind, water, electricity, the atomic nucleus. But if he
serves the class that grows food scientifically and then dumps it in the
ocean while millions starve all over the world, if he believes that the
world is over- populated and the atom-bomb a blessing that will perpetuate his
own comfort, he is moving in a retrograde orbit, on a level beast could
achieve, a level below that of a tribal witch-doctor .
After all, how does science analyse
necessity? The sciences usually divided into the exact and the descriptive,
according to their being based upon a mathematical theory or not. This
distinction has faded away because the biological sciences have begun to
feel the need for exact numerical prediction, ,while
physics and chemistry have discovered that, on the level of the lividual particle, exact prediction is not possible- as
with the movement of the solar system. Both have found the new mathematical
technique, based upon the theory of probability, it they need. In the final
analysis, science acts by changing scene of activity. It may be objected
that astronomy does not change the planets or the stars; is it not purely a
science of observation? Astronomy first became a science by observing the
changes in the position of heavenly bodies. Further progress is possible
only when the light that reaches the astronomer as changed by being
gathered into telescopes, broken up by passage through spectrographs, or
twisted by polarimeters. Parallel observations of
changes, say in metallic vapours, in the
laboratory enabled conclusions to be drawn about the internal constitution
of the stars. There is no science without change.
If this be admitted. we are near the end
of the inquiry. The reason why the scientist in a capitalist society today
feels hemmed in and confined is that the class he serves fears the
consequences of change such as has already taken place over a great part of
the world's surface. The question of the desirability of such change cannot
be discussed dispassionately, cannot be approached in a scientific manner,
by the supposedly 'free' scientist. The only test would be to see the two
systems in peaceful competition, to see which one collapses of its own
weight, succumbs to its own internal
contradiction. But the scientist who says that this should be done finds
himself without a job if he is on the wrong side of the "iron
curtain". The real task is to change society, to turn the light of
scientific inquiry upon the foundations of social structure. Are classes
necessary, and in particular, what is the necessity for the bourgeoisie now?
But it is precisely from cognition of this great problem of the day that
the scientist is barred if a small class should happen to rule his country.
Perhaps the crisis cannot be considered immediate in new democracies like India, where the bourgeoisie is
itself a new class? This is incorrect. The new class did not develop its
own science any more than it invented its own Indian steam engine and motor
car. Just as they import the best paying machinery, the science they need
is also imported in ready-made form. They are also ready to import any
political ideology that serves their end. This means that instead of the
centuries of development from medieval to modern as in Europe we can expect at best
decades in India, under the leadership of a
bourgeois-capitalist class that has only re-oriented but not lost its
colonial mentality.
Monthly Review (New York) Vol
4, 1952
|