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
manufacturing 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 harmless 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 tlle 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 red
handed 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 exercise 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 afllictions 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
know- ledge 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. 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
scientific 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 statements 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 identical 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 Galileo's experiments, and first
year college students learn more mathematics than Newton knew; the young
students must go through much the same mental processes, stripped of
inessentials and repeated according to modem points of view, when they
study. But they do not have to read Galileo's dialogues, nor the Principia.
Here science differs essentially from the arts, for in painting, the
modem painter need not study the prehistoric bisons in the cave of
Altamira, nor the poet read Kalidasa. On the other hand, we can appreciate
works of art and literature of all ages, for 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
garments 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
us 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 taboo 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, turbines,
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
comers in shares, stocks, bonds, and such modem financial jugglery which is
absent in his and the astrologer's scriptures. The millions that bathe even
now at the 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 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 nev class structure of society made it necessary. Of course,
science really comes into its own with the machine age, which camlot
develop without science and which in turn contributes highly useful technical
aid to scientific discovery. But the fundamental 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. Moddem 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 an extension of his person. Only he can handle the particular
bit of metal efficiently enough to obtain good results. But his production
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 scientific
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 in 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 science.
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 time-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 acccurate
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 expefiments. 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 placed 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
anti 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 the 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 discovery 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 no weight and social necessity is
often dependent for its recognition upon the class in power. Leonardo da
Vinci, whose 500th anniversary is now being celebrated, 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 Leonaido expected to
make a fortune) , and who used 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 development, 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, the liquefaction of gases, so
long considered an impossibility, was 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
to 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 us 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 period. During the middle ages, we
find Europeans turning to meditation, the monastic life, theological
speculation. Such tendencies were highly respected and advertised, with the
assistance of an occasional miracle. However, the theology was not
independent of the class structure of contemporary society; dangerous
speculations led a man to the stake. Not only feudal rulers, but the later
merchant classes used theology, protestantism in the 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 bishoprics 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 miracles 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 underground 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 class. Only in science planned
for the benefit of all mankind, not for bacteriological, atomic,
psychological or other mass warfare can the scientist be really free. He
belongs to the forefront 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, and 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 no beast could achieve, a level below that of a tribal witch-doctor.
After all, how does science analyse necessity? The sciences are
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 individual 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, that they need. In the
final analysis, science acts by changing its 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
was possible only when the light that reaches the astronomer was 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 contradictions. 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, pp. 200-205, with addi-
lions, as printed here, in Vijnan-Karmee, vol. IV, October 1959, pp.
5.11.
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