Ideational item Instability and the pursuit of civilization

Ideational Item

Instability and the Pursuit

of Civilization ~ q l V

John S. Harlow

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John S. Harlow is a recently retired Professor in the College of Business Administration of the University of Iowa who, in addition to his responsibilities for courses in legal environment and regulatory structure, taught courses in law and in science and society in the MBA program, and an interdisciplinary course involving French civilization and its political structures. He has published in the areas of French economic policy and planning, and law.

Western civilization is shot through with inescapable instabilities. If we can face this issue squarely and learn from the example of science, which believes in the universality rather than nationality of knowledge and experience, we may be able to do something about the shape of our lives. wo mentors of the conservative establishment, Irving Kristol in the Wall Street Journal and George F. Will in Newsweek, have recently expressed grave doubts about the ability of American conservatives to produce an effective, coordinated political and economic policy. Since b o t h m e n are also convinced of the b a n k r u p t c y of the liberal wing, their pron o u n c e m e n t s are sobering. What I propose to discuss are some of the basic reasons for this dilemma. Obviously, it is a p r o d u c t of an industrial, scientific, and technological revolution that is the principal infusion in m o d e r n civilization. The items listed below are major points in the d e v e l o p m e n t of a discussion of this dilemma, a d i l e m m a posed b y the i n a d e q u a c y of our governing orientations. • The major problem of m o d e r n societies is the organization of the industrial revolution. • The problem is as new as the

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industrial revolution itself, and solutions are inevitably experimental. • No society has so far been conclusively successful in solving this problem. • A crucial factor of the major problem is inescapable instability. All current industrial societies are unstable. • The unstable shape of industrial societies is partially r o o t e d in a restless behavioral conditioning, European in origin, t h a t demands constant change. This behavior is, at least in degree, novel within the history of civilizations. It has spread universally, assuring universal instability. • The increasing effectiveness and power of t e c h n o l o g y and science, products of this behavior, have a u g m e n t e d the destabilizing consequences. The invention of invention and creation of organized scientific research are i m p o r t a n t stages in this process. • Technologies often deterBusiness Horizons [ September-October 1982

Instability and the Pursuit of Civilization

mine the very structure of a society. Changing technologies may undermine old structures and introduce new ones. • Science involves a power that is more fundamental than technology. Science has, however, become increasingly integrated with technology. This has substantially expanded the thrust of technological innovation, thereby multiplying the instability of existing technologies and the institutions dependent on them. • Science creates its own culture which competes with other forms of culture as an additional destabilizing factor. Such competition includes concepts of the person, property, and the nationstate. • The foregoing can be summed up in the proposition that, since modern societies are grounded on certain technological structures, the culture that accelerates new technics and new fundamental knowledge constantly and persistently undermines those structures and the societies that rest on them. • A final proposition is the assumption that a sensible people attempts to understand its major problems and deals with them reasonably. • Evolution has as yet failed to produce a sensible people. First Technological Revolution lthough I have outlined a problem associated with the industrial revolution, it is also a problem of civilized society. A number of leading minds agree that civilization has experienced only two major technological revolutions. Peter Drucker calls the first the "irrigation revolution." The second is the industrial revolution, which includes the constant presence not only of modern technology b u t also of modern science. The first revolution occurred

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when people began to create complicated irrigation s y s t e m s - a techn o l o g y - w h i c h mightily increased the production of food. Surplus food permitted, indeed invited, diversity of roles, division of labor, creation of specialties. Diversity called for experiments in organization. This first revolution created the remarkable attributes of civilization; the city, crafts, commerce, armies, arts, complex religions, literacy, complex societies, and political systems are some of these. Greece, Rome, and Israel are important Western names. There were also the Near East, Mesopotamia, and Egypt and to the east were India, Korea, and Japan. Africa participated in the adventure, and so, across the ocean, did the Mayas, Teotihuacan, and the preIncas. To a degree, these older civilizations not only set the stage for our own constructs, b u t they created options in behavior and in institutions that affect us still. Civilization is an exercise in coherence, in attempting to create an understandable society and understandable organizations, from the family to the state, as well as an exercise in technologies and crafts. Men instinctively realize how fragile civilization is, how subject to barbaric destruction, but also how subject to destruction from the anarchy that follows a loss of belief in civilization's connecting links. The pre-industrial civilizations do offer us three or four thousand years of human experiences, much of which is quite relevant. It is part and parcel of our being, for we are more shaped by the pre-industrial experience than the post, and that is also something to consider. The pre-industrial experience is our only long-term experience with civilization, and experience is not, modern belief to the contrary, something that can be improvised. It is well to reflect on the Greek commitment to f r e e d o m - a n d on

Greek instability; on R o m a n order and universalism-and blood in the arenas. The creation of a civilization does not guarantee its survival. Virtually all civilizations have had some internal life-drive that created a battery of technologies, skills and arts, a clutch of beliefs, a cluster of organizing ideas, an array of roles, a library of wisdom, and knowledge that eventually stabilized. Some civilizations maintained such a stabilized state for more than a millenium. Some disintegrated. Many were destroyed through external violence; a few from internal. Stability itself has always been relative. A stable technology may not stabilize a political or social system, or art, or religion. Nor have civilizations been a single thing. For most civilizations, internal dynamic change has not been the rule or the ideal. St. Paul argued in good Mediterranean fashion for stability of roles; and the essence of b o t h Greek and R o m a n law was similar. Honeste vivere, as R o m a n doctrine, meant honor the conventions of your allotted place in life, and the second doctrine, "to each his own," is similar. The survival of, as well as tensions created by, these ideas are clear in all European peoples, including our own. Central to our discussion is the fact that a number of older civilizations invented substantial technologies, b u t none invented the useful motorized machine. Some created what may properly be called sciences and even the idea of science, notably the Greeks, but they did not direct science toward "useful purposes." Medicine, yes; marginal matters of geometry and astronomy, also. But to most civilizations science was a wonderful object of religious awe or aristocratic curiosity. Except to the Europeans.

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"In creating the second great technological revolution, the Europeans raised the very stakes of civilization, changed the measures of possible power and greatness, of possible destruction, and of instabilities and possibilities for stability." 32 The European Difference n creating the second great technological revolution, the Europeans raised the very stakes of civilization, changed the measures of possible power and greatness, of possible destruction, and of instabilities and possibilities for stability. The second revolution is young, though the whole history of civilization is its background. It is forced to experiment with its own organization because it is new. It requires rethinking much that has gone before. And the stakes have never been higher. Why Europeans? Despite their sometime illusions, surely not because Europeans are more wonderful than other peoples. They are neither brighter nor more perceptive, neither kinder nor more just. Perhaps it is because they have suffered through and been a part of the destruction of the western R o m a n empire, experienced the great Germanic barbarian invasions and the brutal infighting that followed for five interminable centuries. Somehow, in the long century before the Norman Conquest of 1066, enough order was reestablished to permit the rebuilding of a civilization out of the inherited wreckage. And so they did, with amazing vigor. The behavior of these new Europeans was restless b e y o n d that

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of any of their predecessors; restless in terms of space and territory, as many peoples have been, b u t restless within their culture, too. Restless in their relation to their environment and to their created environment. The physical restlessness of wandering tribes seems to have been converted into a subtle impatience with institutions as well as fashions, ideas as well as forms. They were, after all, the heirs of fighting wanderers, and also of contesting cultures, Germanic, Hebrew-Christian, Roman, Greek, each claiming supremacy over the other. Such competing legacies were unlikely to breed a taste for stable conformity, regardless of the sometime dominant regime. Dynamic restlessness and a hankering for change were not their ideals-simply their behavior. In theory, they lauded tribal addiction to norms, R o m a n piety and Christian orthodoxy. But an examination of almost any aspect of their culture gives them away. Consider Western church architecture, for example. The architects of the Romanesque style that blossomed with the turn of the millenium were never content. As the builders of the great arches reached higher and higher, they became more and more impatient and finally broke with the past. They invented, from the barest Eastern suggestions, the Gothic, an architecture that is in essence a stone skeleton, not a

stone b o x - c l o s e r to the skyscraper than intervening Classic styles. Having invented Gothic, they threw that aside also, after a period of change, change, change. This was not the behavior of other civilizations. The same unique story of change is found in ships, in arms, and in a dozen other technologies. Such behavior may seem normal to us, because we are heirs of that civilization. Those who are not are not likely to think such behavior normal. It is well for us to remember how deeply rooted this facet of our behavior is. In the Middle Ages, through constant, stubborn development of the long ship and the round ship, builders finally produced the first vessel that was fully able to confront the seven seas. Dhows, junks, even Polynesian outriggers (as Egyptian and Phoenician craft before them) performed spectacularly, and a certain degree of ocean commerce was even developed, but it was the relentless curiosity of the European which created a completely novel vehicle of exploration, commerce, and conquest. The age of exploration and empire followed. A museum of arms is sobering evidence of the European's unquiet behavior, as reflected in the calculated development and "improvement" of weapons of destruction and of attempted defense. The

Instability and the Pursuit of Civilization

arms of 1000 AD were not the arms of either 1100 or 1200. The Tower of London is not the Chateau Gaillard. In the next century gunpowder is introduced, and with it, feudalism becomes obsolete. No other civilization created such an unstable experience with weaponry, with such internal and external consequences. The stirrup, a device borrowed from the East, probably changed the nature of European war and society. It tripled the power of a horseman's lance, and for a while shifted the balance from the infantry, which had been popular in Roman and Carolingian times, to the more expensive knight. This in turn justified the claim of the mounted aristocracy to special privileges. Firearms were a leveler, as the N R A insists and the Second A m e n d m e n t suggests. Although it t o o k centuries for European aristocratic claims to wither and military habits to perish--European lancers charged the enemy in both World W a r s - g u n p o w d e r doggedly undercut b o t h claims and habits. And now, that European-American invention, the ultimate weapon, haunts the future of all military and many civilian institutions. Thus arms are another dramatic consequence of Europe's commitment to change and underline the dramatic effect of new technologies on social structures. Technologies shape societies; so do ideas. Europe, building on its four-fold heritage, has been since the early Middle Ages as restless in consolidating its ideas as its technology. Since technologies constantly altered the economic and social environment, it was inevitable that the ideas linked with that environment were under pressure. It is indicative that as early as the thirteenth century, Roger Bacon, a Franciscan friar teaching at Oxford, suggested many of the rituals of scientific procedures, including emphasis on mathematics

and experimental proofs. Three hundred years later, Copernicus (a canon in the ChurcM), Galileo, and Kepler nailed down a way of thinking that leads to Newton, Descartes, and Einstein. Much hard, sophisticated thought was spent on problems of o r t h o d o x y and heresy, sometimes with b l o o d y massacres and b l o o d y wars as a result. The most that can be said is that, like similar exercises in modern law schools, this rigorous mental training might have been devoted to more useful consequences and eventually was. In general, the Middle Ages were a practical time, especially in the commercial cities, where liquid wealth was centered and where other factors of power were following suit. It was a world that required reorganizing, and new thinking and new explanations were demanded in that cause. National states were consolidating, and empire glittered on the horizon. It was a world in which the habit of change prospered and grew. The Renaissance, nominally an attempt to restore the worlds of Greece and Rome, was really an exercise in legitimizing a thisworldly orientation that, in covert or overt form, had strongly marked the Middle Ages. N o w laurels were openly and gladly placed on worldly thought and inventive imagination. Exhibit A - L e o n a r d o da Vinci. The Renaissance was part of and was amalgamated in a final flowering of the first technological revolution in Europe, a phase that led to, produced, and merged with the second technological revolution. During this final period, power was increasingly concentrated as a result of a widespread acceptance and institutionalizing of science, through an increasing merger of science with technology, and through the partnership between technology and the middle class, a

commercial-business class that was increasingly infected b y a novel, open commitment to p r o g r e s s - a n d to instability. Where it had not y e t seized political and social power, this middle class was on the verge of doing so. That is what the French Revolution was all about. The members of this middle class were the vehicle for the Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment. Locke was its high priest, Jefferson and Hamilton were among its interesting models. The long battle with the aristocratic classes, increasingly on the defensive, was reaching a conclusion, and tensions implicit in that struggle were dissipating. Technology had much to do with all this. Now an even older idea came to the fore: democracy. The Enlightenment was quite aware of the Greek experience with democracy and Greek thinking in this regard, though the interest was mainly parlor discussion. Democracy mingled in a funny way with the idea of Freedom, and Freedom was a touchstone for middle class amb i t i o n s - F r e e d o m of trade and other economic freedoms, including Freedom in the use of property; and political Freedom as a corollary, for the protection of economic Freedoms. The middle class did not realize quite what it was doing. Democracy does not always stabilize middle class power. Freedom may not raise a protective bulwark for existing interests, middle class or otherwise. But the middle class was generally conditioned b y a superb optimism. It assumed that cosmic powers were benevolent; it called them Providence and Laws of Nature and it was happy to trust its bankrolls and sacred honor to them. And, in the last days of the first revolution, there were largescale and unique shock a b s o r b e r s alternatives for a yeomanry undercut b y the disruptive effects of a long-term agricultural revolution,

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"The general optimism of the middle class . . . set the major tone for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the world of your ancestors and mine. That world believed, whenever is thought about the subject, that change itself would cure the instabilities created by change. Progress was a cure-all."

and alternatives for craftsmen, whose ancient economic ways were compromised by pre-industrial changes in production patterns. There was, in other words, a particular experience in that time and place, a bright hope rising from the empty lands across the sea, a buffer against the storms of instability that repeatedly swept over Europe. That buffering experience cannot be repeated, and to assume it can through colonies in the sky is a delusion. Delusions are dangerous. In the meanwhile, the second technological revolution entered Europe without knocking, a culmination of eight hundred years of a special experience in civilization, an experience with constant change.

Second Technological Revolution e all know the major features of the industrial revolution. We know that it was closely related to a flaring, a nova in the European mind, that has persisted for a thousand years. Yet it is a developed aspect of an urge, the civilizing urge that has been expressed in nascent form in many peoples and many civilizations. Still, it is a new thing, only the second of the great technological revolutions and the novel civilizations each has fostered.

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It occurred in a society that had created and become accustomed and committed to constant changes in technologies and in ideas, avid for the singular powers that these produced. The invention of mechanical power and the machines it motivates, the constant supplanting and improvement of tools and machines and the thrusting of totally new ones into the matrix are central to the experience. The equal novelty in ideas, including ideas regarding institutions, has been and is part and parcel of the process. The resulting compression of the agricultural sector, the total dominance of the urban, the ballooning of a population beyond all prior experience and imagination, have produced a civilization that is not only unique, but one that is shot through with inescapable instabilities and in which prior safeguards against those instabilities have in many respects declined or been eliminated. Although the items within the problem are various, this discussion chooses to center on change as the m o t h e r of instability because the other pressing issues are closely r e l a t e d - t h e question of continuing the work of organizing nations in a fashion that can up the chances of survival; the shaping of our lives and orientation toward one another in a more supportive mann e r - s o m e t i m e s called religion; a

more serious consideration of a word more often spoken than pondered-Democracy. If we can face the issue of instability, perhaps we can do something worthwhile in all these other sectors. But there is a great deal in our experience that makes it difficult for us to face that issue. Two such difficulties are our experiences with optimism and pessimism. The Problem of Optimism n general, since Europe has primarily been an experience in growth, it has been optimistic. That optimism has moved toward and become centered in the middle class and burgeoned with the Industrial Revolution. It increased with a solidifying of both economic and political power in the middle class. This optimism was supported and supplemented by the optimism of scientists and of those who ruled technologies. C.P. Snow, in a well-known piece, emphasizes the comparison between the splendid optimism of science with the pessimism of literature. He lived in both worlds. The general optimism of the middle class, however, set the major tone for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the world of your ancestors and mine. That world believed, whenever it thought about the subject, that

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Instability and the Pursuit of Civilization

change itself would cure the instabilities created by change. Progress was a cure-all. It also believed that a certain amount of struggle, dislocation, and pain was necessary for Evolution and the Ascent of Man. Struggle and dislocation were part of the scheme of things and essentially Good. The middle class was evidence of the survival of the fittest and proved that all things w o r k for the best. I knew the people of that world well. They included m y parents, m y grandparents, and all their friends. They and their like had lived through the Industrial Revolution, through two hundred years of constant success, in growth in everything the word "civilized" means. Or so they believed. They knew they had not reached perfection, but everything was change, change; the right people were in the right places; and a benevolent Providence smiled. They believed deeply in Providence, in Natural Law, in Freed o m - p a r t i c u l a r l y the economic freedoms and freedom of prope r t y - a n d in Progress; and they believed these four were a team, Apollo's horses. Our ancestors were children of light; and it is difficult not to envy them and their bright view of life, their optimism. Perhaps it is too easy to c o n d e m n their errors. But their errors were majestic, and both their errors and the consequences of those errors are still with us. Fundamentally, they refused to face the reality of instability, and they did not do enough about it. The Problem of Pessimism ir Edward Grey, Viscount Fallodon, British Foreign Secretary, is supposed (in an oftquoted line) on the eve of the Great War to have said somberly to Queen Marie of Rumania, "The lights are going out all over Europe, and they will not be lit again in our time."

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It is not comforting to catalogue the events of the present century. Perhaps that is why so many of us insist on continuing a nineteenth century optimism and refuse to do so. Candide lives. The brutality of World War I is neatly pictured in the final frames of the film, "Gallipoli." That war was followed by the brutalities of Soviet Communism, of Italian Fascism, of German National Socialism, and of Spanish and Japanese reactionary militarism. Each was a response to instabilities within European civilization and to the Industrial Revolution that it had fostered. They evidenced the inadequacies of the dominant middle class's response to that revolution. The economic vessel that had been created by the optimistic middle class rocked badly and threatened to founder. Then came the unthinkable catastrophe of a repetition of World War I. At that second war's conclusion, science and technology offered us the dubious present of nuclear fission. As these events were being played out, the European empires that had had something to do with European optimism vanished. The world became partitioned into two major sectors and a number of minor ones, no longer separated by oceans or any other comforting barrier. These and similar items in the catalogue are not evidence of growing illumination. They support a pessimism that is the obverse of European optimism and which has been a counter-theme through all of European history and of American history as well. In medieval history there was Peter Brueghel's animal joy and animal brutality. There was the pessimistic fascination with death's heads. There was the devil and damnation, so interestingly pictured on cathedral portals and in in the Sistine Chapel. All these contrasted with a very real love of this world, the making and building of things, and a present hope

blessings of the next world, with the Rose, Mary, in the center, beckoning. Even the Renaissance, when it was not surviving plagues or military catastrophes, mingled its joy in this and classic humanity with the somber remembrance that golden boys and girls must come to dust and that the mortal moon is forever being eclipsed. The Romantic era brought even gloomier thoughts into the world of middle class optimism--a repetition of the themes of mortality, decay, and terror. The tendency toward alienation was real and may have resulted in some insights into the shallowness of then current optimisms, though often it was simply disaffection. The same may be said for pre-war literature. Of course, those who were being displaced by a changing present were usually pessimistic. The pessimism of the post-war period is another thing. It is amply supported by evidence, as we have reminded ourselves. A good deal of it, nevertheless, is often an outlet for the disaffected and the romantic. This is often paralleled by the survival of a stubborn optimism nourished by fading dogmas or reflecting unstable existing interests. The lucky are likely to smile on the world. A realistic view of the human condition is less simple. Uncertainty is a justifiable response of the responsible. The instabilities wrought by persistent change in ideas, in institutions, in technologies are with us, and at their worst, they do threaten civilization and even survival. We are not conditioned to a manly or womanly facing of this situation. For all its h o n e y m o o n with change, the leap toward a solid sense of reality and responsibility is something the middle class finds very difficult. It is collectively the rich young man. It would prefer to repeat the slogans of Freedom and avoid a probing of

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the uncertainties of Responsibility within the realities of the present. At its worst, the middle class, if things deteriorate, may reach again for the non-solutions of Italy and Germany during the 1920s. It can happen here. Or they, its members, may simply hang on. And on. The destruction wrought in this century is i m m e n s e - d e s t r u c t i o n of life and properties; and destruction of confidence and of beliefs. There is a certain amount of talk that suggests that this destruction has caused a permanent loss of capital, similar to the real loss that follows the erosion of land. The destruction of lives in this century is surely a sobering tragedy as we conceive of tragedy. But there is not much evidence that even the cataclysms of war, the holocausts, or attendant starvation have markedly reduced the human energy of Europe or America or the rest of the riven world. One does not need the cynicism of a Bonaparte in order to recognize the restorative powers of humankind, a power that has been multiplied a thousand-fold in the age of science and technology. Science and technology are themselves the prime capital of this civilization, not bricks, mortar or metals. Neither of the powerful twins has been weakened in this century. Each has grown in power, even in the presence of Mars. Nor have the behavioral habits of change, once called progress, been measurably impaired. We have preserved all our knowledge and all our skills. We are prepared to continue increasing the power of each. These matters are also important in the appraisal of the validity of pessimism and optimism. An old schoolmate of mine is the head of a major national laboratory devoted to a study of the human brain. He concludes that three consecutive developments of the brain exist within a single

envelope. It is the third and most recent of these that is the source of human empathy, the sense of human brotherhood, the universality of personality, the receiver of the Second Great Commandment. It is not at all certain where the dominating control lies within this structure. One may guess that it varies from individual to individual. It is fairly clear that the more highly civilized brain may well lose the struggle for dominance within civilization. But perhaps that third brain is sufficiently dominant in a sufficient number of us to respond effectively to this present great challenge to civilization and human life itself. We know that people, persons, have strong strains of stubborn nihilism, of persistent blindness, of brutal egotism, callousness, and cruelty. But we also know that peoples of every type and kind are endowed with traits that make it possible for men and w o m e n to accept the Second if not the First of the two great commandments. Those who remember the first days of the second great war were given a vision of the depths and heights of American possibilities. Heroic u n i t y - a n d concentration camps for the American Japanese. Such a people, despite the reluctance of the middle class, b u t probably under its leadership, may well conquer its difficulty in facing up to the substantially dangerous consequences of the instabilities of an industrial society committed to science, technology and change; and it may vigorously and intelligently go about the task of creating institutions that protect against the inevitable destructiveness of those instabilities. It would not be unreasonable for that people to swing toward a decent and measured optimism, while opening its eyes to the verities and carefully dismantling its attachment to illustrations.

An Afterword on Science, Tech. nology, and Business ~'-~lcience as we c o m m o n l y use L'ql~the word means ( 1 ) c o m m i t ~_Jment to objective rational thought process of a particular kind and order (especially mathematical) and (2) the fund of information that is the consequence. Fringe uses of the word are less austere and are confusing; b u t the foregoing is the current core. It is generally, though not universally, assumed that the human experience extends b e y o n d the boundaries of "science"-that poetry is a reality of a somewhat different order, that "justice" is a meaningful word with which mathematics can deal only in part. But science's limited conception of the universe is a partial reason for its very success, and within its own closed order, science has become one of the most powerful facts of life and one of the most powerful cultures within the history of civilizations. Our main theme is the constant presence and effect of change in our civilization, the difficulties this creates and the peculiar problem of awakening a sense of these difficulties, of creating a realistic confrontation of the problem presented. Science was part of and became central to the man- and earthcentered outlook and activities that created the modern world. The fact that knowledge is Truth (not as clear a conclusion as may appear) and Truth is G o o d (which conflicts with the story of the Garden of Eden) was dogma in a discipline that assumed to reject dogmm In a sense the liaison between Freedom and the unfettered search for Scientific Knowledge are justified only by a belief in the benevolence of Nature and Providence, another dogma. One thing is certain. Science is

Instability and the Pursuit of Civilization

"The multiple imbalances, dislocations, and other disturbances that innovative technologies have created in the world tag not only the creators of technologies, the technicians and other masters of the technologies, but the scientists who stand behind them, as candidates for a new dispensation, a new proportionate restraint and behavioral responsibility." a c o m m i t m e n t to power. Its processes are a powerful m e t h o d of acquiring powerful knowledge. Science participates in the complicated human experience with power, for scientific knowledge is something besides t r u t h - i t is power. Other ages were more conscious of this than ours. Prometheus and Icarus warn of the need for sophrosyne, moderation, restraint, responsibility; and underscore the danger of hybris, immeasurable pride. Neither the first nor the second technological revolution was the direct consequence of science. Science, even in the Greek world, had no close alliance with the technologies of the time. The same was true in medieval Europe. The great inventions, created or acquired, that became powerful instruments of the rising middle class were products of ingenious, daring craftsmen and technicians, not of scientists: gunpowder, the water mill, the rudder, compass, watch, blast furnace, steam engine, power loom, cotton gin, steamboat and locomotive, telegraph, motor car, and a multitude of others. Science developed a way of its own and a culture of its own before the Industrial Revolution, while the world of t e c h n o l o g y - o f craft and craftsmanship, of tools and of pre-Industrial Revolution machines--created its own habits

and perspectives. They were not identical habits or viewpoints or values; b u t the imperatives of the Industrial Revolution brought technology and science together, even forced them together, in a useful, necessary, b u t sometimes abrasive, relationship. College science departments have been blown to pieces in the competition b e t w e e n their " p u r e " and "applied" wings; but in a world that has b e c o m e essentially middle class, the impulse to emphasize the "useful" has been compelling in every aspect of society, from aesthetics and religion to education and science. Science is, as a result, schizoid, on the one hand arguing the beauty of knowledge for its own sake, on the other, arguing its multiple usefulness. When science argues for support on the basis of its value in "advancing truth," this carries a certain weight. But when it argues the truth of "useful knowledge" in some fashionable area, it is likely to receive more rapt attention. In addition the alliance, sometimes a virtual merger, b e t w e e n science and various technologies is a major reason for an incomparable surge of power within the practical world. The multiple imbalances, dislocations, and other disturbances that innovative technologies have created in the world tag not only the creators of technologies, the

technicians and other masters of the technologies, b u t the scientists who stand behind them, as candidates for a new dispensation, a new proportionate restraint and behavioral responsibility. Nuclear fission offers a paradigm, a model for the problem. There is, of course, a tendency to argue that each situation is discrete, unique, and therefore offers no basis for generalizing. But in fact, the nuclear model is unique only in terms of its size. Otherwise it offers the clearest lesson in the general relationship between science, technology, and their joint ability to change the nature of things. Not long ago a televised documentary outlined the Los Alamos events in considerable detail through the mouths of participants. The film confirmed the strong faith of the central core of scientists in the dogma of the legitimacy of the search for knowledge, any knowledge; the absence of any depth of concern for the consequences; the European behavioral eagerness for change, with little sense of counterbalancing restraint; a general growing intoxication of the captains of this endeavor with the immeasurable power they were about to "control," each man an avatar of Zeus. The aftermath is not simple. Many of those very scientists now argue that " t r u t h " and "knowl-

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edge" are in themselves insufficient justification for scientific or technological developments unless there is equal attention paid to responsible restraints that are proportional to the " t r u t h " and "knowledge" involved. They assert that proper attention must be paid to the instabilities that also are created, with effective creation of buffers, institutional and behavioral, to cushion their impact. If these scientists are right, we have a job to do. One of the difficulties of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been the thinness of its foundation, the weakness of the belief that a problem really does exist. If any technology is operating within the conventions of Freedom, Knowledge, Truth, and Progress, it is the computer. This, like the nuclear vessel, navigates under the joint, inseparable command of the technician and the scientist. Pure and applied science, craftsmanship, invention, technology are linked in this machine. We know that improved technologies in mechanical tools, in robots and similar devices, have stopped the growth of blue collar e m p l o y m e n t dead in its tracks since World War II. The resulting blockage of entry into employment is one reason for the deplorable conditions of young blacks. Significant increase in emp l o y m e n t has taken place only in the white collar s e c t o r s - 5 1 percent of modern e m p l o y m e n t - a n d in the service industries. There have been and are insistent ramblings that point to a technological assault on these clean-hand portions of the labor pie. The computer will doubtless spearhead the assault. Such engagement may even decimate management and academe. This week I lunched with a computer scientist of some note, a young full professor. I asked him how much attention was being paid to the human economic and

social consequences of the introduction of computers in America. " E x c e p t for matters of efficiency, not m u c h , " he replied. There are a few other matters that involve science that should be mentioned, though at first glance their relation to the topic of instability may seem distant. They are not. The scientific culture is only partially compatible with a political culture that esteems, or insists that is esteems, democracy. If some participation in the major decisions of one's , time, no matter how thin the participation may be, is the essence of democracy, then science often makes such participation difficult. It may not hide its interests in a cave, b u t its very language makes it possible to squirrel away its doings. More scientists than laymen are, to their credit, concerned about this, yet solutions are not easy. In any culture that depends on gradations of mental excellence, and the culture of science is one, there is an inevitable tendency to b e l i e v e that decisions should be made b y the "qualified"; and you and I are not likely to be among the qualified. You and I neither knew about nor had any say in the development of nuclear fission, and today we are in a similar position with regard to the computer. This raises an interesting question regarding the definition of democracy. It is, as further evidence of the unsettling influence of science, a blatant fact that the scientific culture is unpatriotic and heretical. It does not require the Rev. Mr. Falwell to confirm its heresies; and its patriotism is challenged b y an incurable internationalism. The motley gang that gathered in Chicago to create the hot little bugbear of nuclear fission is sufficient evidence of the second charge, as is the illicit collaboration of scientists of mixed lineage in moving toward nuclear fusion via a Soviet-inspired

machine in the Forrestal laboratories at Princeton. Science is not only inherently universal and hence non-national in its orientation, it is also essentially collective, as civilization is essentially collective. "I did it m y w a y " is not the theme song of science. Though Nobel prizes are given to individuals, and though the power of a single brain was the ultimate medium that asserted E = mc ~ , these individuals and that brain would protest that their service is not only social b u t universal-and that that is the more perfect freedom, as St. Paul also insisted. Much of this competes with and is even unsettling in terms of national political, social, and economic norms; and our subject is the unsettling characteristics of a change-oriented society. A final subversion. Although science has proven to be a kind of cornucopia, pouring forth many new and dazzling properties, science threatens to change and displace a great many things on which the security of persons rests; and worse, it contests the very belief in the validity of certain sacred notions of property. It threatens to unravel the idea that concepts of universal usefulness can or ought to be properly staked d o w n b y actions at law or petitions in equity, in deed registers, or corrals. The scientific culture believes in the universality of man's knowledge and experience, in the universality rather than the nationality of man and woman. Such quixotic ideas are upsetting and must be carefully watched. Science, then, is involved up to its ears in the general instabilities of a world's civilizations, and although it neither has the right, the power, nor the ability to attempt to dominate the reinsertion of effective stabilities into the world's unstable structures, it is accepting,

Instability and the Pursuit of Civilization

perhaps more than others, the obligation to participate in the process. For that it deserves our gratitude. Yet science has, as C.P. Snow

asserts, created its own mansion, with which the world must make its peace. Unless that peace includes wisdom that is not yet a part of the house, that peace may

be unfortunate. But it may be a peace that changes the world, and that may not be a bad thing for us or for the world. V-]

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