The Scientific Attitude

C. H. Waddington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317351948
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1941 (this edition in 1968), this book explores the relationship between science, culture, and society- focusing on human beings, and human communities. Here, C. H. Waddington uses the concept of science to mean more than factual information about genes and haemoglobin and his subject is the effect of scientific ways of speaking on the ways in which people look at the world around them.

The work discusses biological assumptions made by various communities, particularly fascist movements, on human beings and compares them with the scientific attitude. The Nazis for instance spoke about 'racial purity' and 'German blood' but these expressions, whilst arousing emotion, had, and have, no rational meaning- they are inaccurate and tell us nothing of human genetics.

As well as presenting a scientific argument, being published initially in 1941, this book also acts as a historical document, conveying some of the feeling of living through WWII. It highlights the fact that science and scientific assumptions have very wide implications for the whole conduct of life.

SCIENCE AND CULTURE

CHAPTER I

ON WHOSE SIDE IS HISTORY?

We accused Nazism of being barbarism, a death to culture; we smashed it to the ground; but what do we offer in its place? We have been, I think, inclined to feel that Nazism is so beastly that there is no need to think out an alternative to it. We have held up our hands in horror as one after another of our cherished ideals has been flouted: at the persecution of Jews and other minorities, at the burning of books, at the legal changes which leave a man completely at the mercy of his judge's personal prejudices. But holding up one's hands is a gesture of surrender, and indignation is a very blunt weapon. Nazism will only finally be conquered when the whole social system which it produced is not only broken up but replaced by a better one which makes a stronger appeal to the people who live in it.

One of the first steps towards making such a system is to realise that Nazism did appeal to Nazis. The whole business of Winter Aid and concentration camps, the Strength-through-Joy and the Gestapo, the compulsory military and labour service, and the reduction in the number of students; the whole complex system, which touched almost every point in the life of every German, did not appear out of the blue for no particular reason. It was able to come about because in most Germans there was something to which it appealed. This does not mean to say that the general mass of Germans got together in a democratic way and invented Nazism; they clearly did not. It is probable that most of the ordinary men and women in Germany would not, if left entirely to themselves, have undertaken the terrific labour and unpleasantness involved in many of the most important Nazi ideas, such as its desire for world dominion. But even this idea, with all the toil and suffering that it brings with it, appeals to something in many people – certainly in many Germans; and it was presented to them along with other ideals which probably appealed more strongly and, at the beginning, seemed more immediately practical and therefore more important.

A new system of social ideas, such as those of Nazism, does not have much chance to be taken up and put into practice unless people are suffering more than usually from the stresses and strains of life. In Germany before Hitler came to power many people were certainly unsettled enough to be ready for a change of some sort. Their difficulties were of two kinds, economic and what one might call general. Now of these two the economic may, very likely, be the more fundamental, and the intellectual cynicism and disintegration of the whole system of values and morals, which was so noticeable in Germany, may in the last analysis be a result of the misfiring of the economic machine. But for most people, things don’t appear quite as the economists suggest. A man's economic difficulties are straightforward affairs, such as being out of work, or trying to cadge a living as a car salesman although he has an engineering degree. The connection between these circumstances and his moral and emotional troubles will probably be clear enough ; his family life may break down because he can’t afford to give his wife a decent home, or his son may take to drink, or more recondite vices, for sheer lack of anything else to do. But what is in theory important, and what in practice does not enter into one's ordinary experience, is the connection between social disintegration and the particular kind of breakdown which the economic machine is undergoing. It may, or again it may not, be true that you cannot have a system of lifelong monogamous marriages unless the economic system provides for at least a certain amount of private property. But even if it were absolutely true under all possible circumstances, nobody would know it as an immediate fact of experience. And if people are starting to recast the social system, it is likely that they will first decide that they want certain social and emotional things, such as monogamy or freedom of opinion, and only come later to the conclusion that they must have an economic order organised in corporations or limited liability companies or whatever it may be as a means of attaining their primary non-economic aims.

It is very important to remember that people may easily be mistaken as to the appropriate economic organisation for attaining their general aims. Such a mistake was made by the German people. The reason why they were willing to support Nazism originally was that they wanted certain things in their daily lives; some of these things, such as a system of established values which they could accept without question, and a sense of belonging to a community, they probably got; but others, such as a better standard of life, and security, they did not.

It is for these reasons – because non-economic considerations are a motive force in human behaviour in a more immediate and conscious way than different systems of economic organisation are – that it seems justifiable to discuss the modern world with an emphasis on its cultural aspect rather than its economic. By doing so I do not imply that the cultural motives were the most important for political leaders, as opposed to their followers. And it will be apparent all through the discussion that the two aspects cannot be at all sharply separated, and we shall come back later to the question of what the cultural requirements demand of an economic system that will allow them to be fulfilled.

The dominant characteristic of the cultural life of the world today is the existence of revolutionary movements. Communism is one, already over a quarter of a century old in the country of its origin, but still with its old fire in its newly conquered territories, and something not very different even in Russia herself. Nazism was another movement whose adherents, at any rate at the beginning, felt they were playing a part in a movement which would change the course of history. In England and America we know little of the vivid self-confidence and impatience of second thoughts which the revolutionary ardour produces; and little also of the difficulty for a single individual living in a community filled with this spirit to have any ideas of his own, independent of those surrounding him. But in large areas of the world – perhaps the greater part of it – men are living in consciously revolutionary societies; and even in the more sophisticated and self-critical Western European civilisation, people have had a taste during the war of feeling themselves a part of an all-embracing social effort, and alongside the relaxation of going back to ordinary life there is a feeling that things have grown smaller and of less consequence. Moreover we have seen a bit too much of the demerits of all the various revolutions offered to us – Nazism, Communism, 150% Nationalism – to feel much confidence in any of them. But a revolutionary set of ideas cannot, at least after it has attained a certain impetus, be defeated by a mere blanket of inertia. If Western Europe is to retain its old cultural importance in the new world of the future it must discover a new outlook to guide and animate its life.

The ideas on which our industrial civilisations have been run are breaking down everywhere, not only in Germany. They went first, and most completely, in Russia, in which a capitalist industrial system of the English type was in fact never fully developed. Then they were superseded in Italy, where again they had never been fully developed. The great slump of the beginning of the 1930's not only swept them out of Germany, but loosened their hold in England, France and America, where they were most firmly fixed. Who believes now that we shall ever return to the economic system and the social ideas of 1913? That world has gone; and we cannot oppose the chaos and anarchy of today by calling for a return of it. And yet, it is difficult to deny that England now is a worse country to live in than it was then.

It is not only that before the war we were beginning to accept mass unemployment as nothing out of the ordinary, and were getting accustomed to the fact that in times of peace our productive resources are sometimes less than half used. But, with the acceptance of such a low standard of social efficiency, we were also tending to acquiesce in a gradual loss of social enthusiasm. Before the war most people were half persuaded that the old pride in being an Englishman was after all mere imperialistic jingoism, an unworthy attitude in face of the international problems of the day. That was perhaps in a sense true. But no society is worth much if its members cannot find something which makes them proud to belong to it. It is one of the conditions for the success of a new social order that it supplies something which fills this need, and it is one of the conditions of our survival that we shall find something which will make us as proud to be democrats as Nazis were to be Nazis.

There will never be any great enthusiasm for belonging to a society which is not going forward. And throughout England in the years before the war progress was at a discount. In almost all walks of life the way to get on, to reach positions of power and responsibility, has not necessarily been by the exercise of initiative and drive, or by showing an ability to seize opportunities and make the most of them. It has been at least equally useful to demonstrate that one knows the correct thing to do.

Our culture is full of unformulated rules of conventional behaviour, and we have placed a perfectly absurd value on the ability to conform to those rules, and thus to preserve the whole system whose behaviour they are supposed to regulate. A few years ago, many people said that one of England's greatest leaders in the last twenty years was the former Prime Minister Mr Baldwin, the late Lord Baldwin of Bewdley. And they said this, not so much because they believed that he created any great new values for us, or saved us from any major disaster, but because of the way in which he handled the abdication of Edward VIII. That is, what impressed them was Baldwin's knowledge of what would seem polite behaviour in an embarrassing situation; just what note to strike over the wireless, just how to bring the Dominions into the situation, and what gestures should be made by the Church and Parliament and House of Lords and so on. All these things are actually perfectly trivial compared with facts of economic organisation and international politics. Baldwin is also the man who, running on a ‘Trust Baldwin’ platform, consciously misled the people as to his views on the international situation in order to reach a position in which he could carry out a rearmament which he believed to be necessary; and, having reached the position, neglected to carry out the rearmament to a sufficient extent. Only a society which is completely sunk in formalistic politeness could consider that of less importance than the ability to handle the ritualistic niceties of exchanging one king for another. England in recent years has been very dangerously near to this. In little things, as in big ones, the man to whom responsibility and trust was given was only too often the man of experience in keeping things as they are and not the man of initiative in improving them. During the war we did quite largely succeed in getting away from this attitude; and the election of a Labour Government showed that the country as a whole was prepared to put ability and initiative before correctness. But Britain is still, thank Heaven, a country of tradition; and it is as well to recognise the dangers, as well as the advantages, of that.

There is no denying, of course, that tradition has a value, and a very high one. A great many people who felt like running into a hole as soon as the air-raid sirens started up were kept going mainly because they knew it wouldn’t be the thing. And the refusal of England to panic at the time France fell was mainly due to our stubborn acceptance of the traditional idea that England doesn’t get beaten. I doubt if we should become hysterical, as many Americans did some years ago, at a realistic broadcast of an invasion of the world from Mars; such things just don’t happen here. The strong belief which we still have that there are certain ways in which things should be done, and others in which they should not, is one of our strengths. But it becomes a weakness if the ways we believe in are too petty and rigidly fixed, and to some extent that is the case. We emphasised the importance of ‘correct’ and traditional behaviour to such an extent that we almost lost the art of dealing with new situations which tradition did not foresee. Sometimes we get away with it by a sudden burst of initiative when things get really bad – our famous ‘muddling through’; it may come off, but again, as in the early part of the war, it may most definitely not.

It took several years of war before we learnt to sort out the really competent men, give them a reasonably free hand, and thus produce what the American Supreme Commander admitted to be the most efficient planning staff on our side.

The low estimation in which initiative is still held in England is probably hardly realised by most people who have never experienced anything else. But the contrast is very striking in America, for instance. People there are much nearer to a time at which initiative was a real social necessity and brought its own reward. When America was pushing out to the west and opening up new country, the drive and work of an individual who brought new land into cultivation or who founded a new business brought new wealth into the whole community; and the social values appropriate to those conditions are still recognised to a considerable extent in America, although the conditions of social life now are actually very different. As a matter of fact, a similar process of development must have gone on in England in a less obvious way. Our economic system was, in the early years of the last century, based on individual competition between small businesses, and originality and efficiency were qualities which an individual could show with his own resources; and they brought success, and were prized for doing so. Nowadays even in America there are hardly any empty niches left in which an energetic and competent man, starting from scratch, can raise himself to the top of the social pyramid; in spite of the ballyhoo about the ‘Land of Opportunity’, the great majority of American labourers will remain labourers to the end of their days. And in England the independent producer has almost ceased to exist. The work of society is carried on, not by self-sufficient individuals, but by large firms and corporations. It is becoming less and less possible to set up on one's own except as a professional man or a shopkeeper, and even then the conditions of work are very largely controlled by external authorities. Most people today have to enter a firm in a junior position as wage or salary earners; and getting on is not so much a matter of doing something real, with things, as of doing something psychological, to impress one's bosses.

It is probably not impossible to find a social system in which the integration of production into large units does not curb and frustrate the initiative of the men and women concerned. Certainly one must hope that it is possible, since there is no doubt that the integration is here to stay. In fact, it is clearly increasing all the time, and will increase further. The system of free enterprise of small units, whatever its merits were in the past, has been failing to work for many years. It failed even as a money-making concern, and we have seen a fairly rapid absorption of the small businesses into enormous combines and monopolies. The main driving force of these has been, of course, to make profits and distribute dividends; and they have mostly found that the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Foreword
• Science and Culture
• Science and Society
• Summary
• List of References
• Notes
• Questions for discussion