——关于政治批评中的“主体性原则”
许多人认为，共产党搞民主，那是不可能的，因为真正的民主是西方的“多党民主”，共产党搞多党选举等于是自己把自己搞倒。另有同样多的人认为，共产党搞“问责民主”，那也是不可能的，因为一党根本就不可能搞问责制衡，搞出的问责制衡一定是假的问责制衡。
网上有人说，中国当前的主要矛盾是群众日益增长的智商和官员不断下降的道德之间的矛盾。也可以说，中国当前的主要矛盾是群众日益增长的发泄的需要和政府不断下降的排泄的供给之间的矛盾。民主问题的矛盾与此相似，似乎也是无法解决的矛盾。所以，许多比较现实的人在排除暴力革命和内部灾变的同时认准了一条出路，那就是不管是选举还是问责，现在先把能搞的搞起来，到时候会搞出什么样的民主，那就由不得你共产党了。
虽然这种“策略性渐进”的主张现在已经颇有市场，它却多少有点一厢情愿。因为不管是选举还是问责，三十年后，如果共产党还牢牢控制着政权，搞成了“一党立宪”，那些想玩共产党的人，就反被共产党玩了一把。那么，到底“多党民主”是真理，还是“一党立宪”是真理？
网友承宣在“讨论政改能否少一些虚伪和天真？”的留言里说：“和经济学一样，好多人觉得自己非常懂，其实是不懂。截然对立的观点都有诺贝尔奖的，可见得了奖也未必懂。张五常觉得自己都懂，郎咸平觉得自己都懂，陈志武觉得自己都懂，秦晖觉得自己很懂，茅于轼觉得自己也很懂，孙立平觉得自己也很懂。其实都不懂！问题就是这么严重，又怎么能指望留言的这些同志都懂呢？不可能嘛。……我们条件很好，无论政治还是经济。我们前路凶险，无论政治还是经济。……不好办的就在这里。这是唯一的问题。唯一的。不要觉得我太狂，看看历史，大萧条时有几个懂啊。我觉得我们的知识还很少，而有些人觉得一切都有了答案，那个狂啊！”
承宣引用了凯恩斯的话:“经济问题应该成为由专家来处理的事务--就像牙病应由牙医来处理一样。如果经济学家们能够作出努力，使得社会把他们看成是平凡而又胜任其职的人，就像牙医的地位一样，那就再好不过了！”然后承宣说：“牙医可以给好多人看病，医术高不高，看几个试试就行了。国家就一个啊，我们该让那个牙医来试呢？我们面临人类的核心难题啊！美国有麻烦了，日本20年前就开始麻烦了，拉美更麻烦。可见牙医问题不好解决啊！”
承宣的这些话里包含了许多非常有意思的内容，我想借着这些话谈一谈政治批评中的“主体性原则”，并以之回答“国家政治是真理之争还是利益之争”这个问题。
首先，承宣说的“牙医问题”为什么不好解决呢？承宣的话其实已经到了嘴边了，但他还是没想或没有说出来。这个没说出来“牙医类比问题”的要点就是“主体性”。人的牙是“活的死物”，不能成为“主体”，牙医可以治牙，但牙无法反过来治牙医。而社会则是“主体”的互动博弈，自以为懂的经济学家都来治牙，但社会的牙却是“活的活物”，都能够反过来“治”牙医，所以社会的牙就不象人的牙那么好解决。这个“牙医类比”由于没有考虑“主体性”和“主体的互动性”，因此它根本不能成立。强调政治“时效性”的凯恩斯同最早提出这种类比的柏拉图一样，都犯了一个“把主体客体化的错误”。主张“政府干预经济”的凯恩斯和推崇“哲学王治国”的柏拉图，都倾向于强调政治运作中“真理”的一面，就象“真理”被握在牙医手里那样。
但更加有意思的是，承宣在说学者们和留言者“其实都不懂”时，他暗含的前提是：“存在一个可以被懂的实在”或“存在一个能懂这个实在的人”。但是他很快又说，“我觉得我们的知识还很少，而有些人觉得一切都有了答案”。可见，他想说的不是“他自己懂”，而是“他懂得自己不懂、别人也不懂”，但学者们和留言者偏偏“觉得自己非常懂”，似乎都象凯恩斯和柏拉图那样觉得“牙医问题”不是问题。说白了，其中有些学者和留言者觉得，中国问题的答案明摆着就是“多党民主”。
“多党民主”真是解决中国问题的真理吗？更一般的说：存在一个可以被懂的真理吗？存在一个能懂这个真理的人吗？真理又是什么呢？真理难道可以独立于利益吗？真理只有一种吗？真理难道不是一种“物质利益”之外的“精神利益”吗？谁又能判定真理呢？真理是由权力、权威、还是人数说了算呢？如何或由谁来判定谁真懂和谁更懂呢？
为了找到这类问题的答案，人类早就发明了一门叫“科学哲学”的科目来研究这类问题。于是我们有了古代的泰勒士、毕达哥拉斯、德谟克利特、柏拉图、亚里斯多德，我们有了近代的培根、迪卡尔、洛克、莱布尼茨、休谟、康德、孔德、穆勒、赫歇尔、威惠尔、马赫、彭加莱、杜恒，我们还有更近一些时期的罗素、维特根斯坦、卡尔纳普、赖欣巴哈、亨普尔，我们更有当代的波普、布里奇曼、奎因、塞拉斯、普特南、库恩、拉卡托斯（我最喜欢的）、费耶阿本德、劳丹、夏佩尔，等等等等。
人类终于找到答案了？当然没有。我们有的是试图回答这类问题的角度：从逻辑实证主义、逻辑经验主义、证伪主义，到操作主义、新实用主义、科学实在论，再到历史主义、无政府主义、新历史主义等等。总之，逻辑不是问题的答案，因为人类自己的历史给出了太多非逻辑的答案，我们于是就摇摆于逻辑主义、实用主义和历史主义之间，权力、权威、人数都在这种摇摆中起作用。
中国有句忽悠了全国人民几十年的话，叫做“实践是检验真理的唯一标准”。如果了解了“科学哲学”，你就会明白真理的关键问题根本不是“检验”，而是“主体”，是上文“牙医类比”中的“主体性”。也就是说，关键是谁来检验真理？谁来给检验下结论？谁下的结论最后又真的算数？
真理有自然真理和社会真理之分，其中除了常识的真理由老百姓说了算之外，重要的自然真理一般由权威说了算，而重要的社会真理一般由权力说了算。人数的作用最低，法国心理学家古斯塔夫·勒庞1895年的《乌合之众》和美国哲学家埃里克·霍弗1951年的《狂热分子》都证明了这一点。美国经济学家萨缪尔森生前说过一句话：“科学的进步是在一个又一个的葬礼之后才有可能的”。违背自然真理时行为主体会受到大自然的直接惩罚，但由于认识和社会的原因，违背自然真理的事仍无处不在。违背社会真理时行为主体却不一定会受害，因为大自然就一个，有“不可分性”，而社会却有“可分性”，违背社会真理时得利和受害的可以是不同的行为主体和非行为主体。
正因为社会真理在得利和受害上的“外部影响”或“外部性”，重要的社会真理权威说了都不算，要权力说了才算。“多党民主”和“一党立宪”都是非常重要的“潜在的”社会真理，所以问题根本不是“权威观点”或“百姓态度”，更不是什么“实践检验”。我可以说“一党立宪”由于中共政权的“限任化、非私人化、全民化、制度化”而初步确立（正因为看不到这些，秦晖才认为“没有全球化，中国就是北朝鲜；没有低人权，中国就是东欧”），但我说了不算，认定“多党民主”才是真理的人说了也不算。个人通过“知识市场”认识真理的成本非常高，所以市场上有很多未被认识的真理；个人通过“行政命令”认识真理的成本非常低，但灌输出来的真理却未必是真理。
关于社会真理的主体性有四个要点：有限理性、暴力权力、自由冲动、道德信仰。由于暴力权力的存在，象“多党民主”这样的“潜在的”社会真理有明显的“不可实践性”，因为国家政权不是“过家家”，也不是实验室里的可控物。更由于人类的有限理性，所以即便有自由冲动和道德信仰的助力，“多党民主”的不确定性仍很高，真理属性也不明确。围绕“多党民主”而进行的政治斗争就必然不是真理之争而是利益之争。
公共选择理论的创始人布坎南也特别强调政治过程是利益争夺的过程，但他的观点是以正义和效率的主体性、过程性、一致性为基础的，即只有主体的一致同意的过程才能实现正义和效率。布坎南的观点忽视了政治过程运用社会真理的可能性，但是，如果把真理看成“精神利益”，就可以涵纳政治过程运用和发现社会真理的可能性，“政治斗争是利益之争”的观点也就更顺理成章了。这样，虽然行政灌输出来的真理却未必是真理，但政治过程仍有可能运用和发现真理；“一党立宪”是不是真理我说了不算，但中国政治仍有可能运用这个“多党民主论者”不认为是真理的真理。
说“政治斗争不是真理之争”除了以上的真理的主体性、人的有限理性、真理的精神利益性之外，还有几个别的原因。有人问我，说既然我可以把真理看成“精神利益”，那能不能把利益看成“物质真理”，然后说“政治斗争是真理之争”。我说不行，因为真理本身就是精神的不是物质的，而利益既可以是物质的也可以是精神的。另外，说“政治斗争是利益之争”还可以杜绝虚伪。真理本身多少有些客观和高尚的光环，多少人追求真理、甚至为真理献身，可到头来那个真理可能只是幻影。因此，把真理看成“精神利益”能够还原追求真理和献身真理的“私人本质”，何况有的人坚持真理不是因为他没认识到真理已不复存在，而是因为他连续投资、上错贼船后积重难返、破罐破摔。真理表面上的客观和高尚往往只是不明真相的人心中的幻觉。
总之，真理的主体性和人的有限理性使“牙医问题”变得更不确定，“其实都不懂”反而变得更加确定，而暴力权力、自由冲动、道德信仰也更加重要了。由于暴力权力在人类事务中的主导地位，也由于真理其实就是人的“物质利益”之外的“精神利益”，故国家政治成了真理向利益的“转换器”。政治可以是社会真理的“断头台”，也可以是社会真理的“永动机”。被当作中国问题答案的“多党民主”，其实就是暴力权力和自由冲动的“物质利益”和“精神利益”的斗争焦点。在这场斗争中，自由冲动试图借用道德信仰来赢得胜利，同时又深深地被有限理性和暴力权力所折磨。
所以，当有些人“觉得自己非常懂”时，我们最好不要把他们当成“哲学王”。正因为看到真理的主体性、利益性、不确定性，我倾向于把真理“描述化”而不是“立场化”，倾向于研究“认识型真理”而不是“规范型真理”。这就是为什么我坚持认为“民主公地悲剧”和“一党立宪”是一种认识而不是一种主张。牙医在操作时“真理在握”，但如果已经认识到社会不是牙，“真理在握”就不能成为规范化和操作化主张的依据。但既然真理和利益如此纠缠不清，一种认识被误认成为一种立场，或一种立场被误认为一种认识，就都是司空见惯的。
如果“多党民主”之争是利益之争，每一个人在这场斗争中又要有什么立场呢？我们应该以什么为站队的依据呢？每一个人在这场斗争中一定要有立场吗？
不，不是的。何况有太多的老百姓根本不关心这类问题，他们甚至不知道有这类问题的存在，除非这类问题与他们具体的生活问题沾上边。因此，在绝对主义的逻辑和相对主义的历史之间，可以选择冷酷的“无立场”（“冷酷实证”），选择用无情的“认识”来代替“立场”，选择探寻绝对主义和相对主义的历史和逻辑来代替立场。
“冷酷实证”最重要的好处是，它可以在特定的研究阶段（经验的逻辑实证、经验的数据实证、规范的价值判断、规范的价值主张等四个阶段），帮助我们更好地运用“主体性原则”去识别政治批评中的“假动作”。我们已经看到了“牙医类比失当”中的“假动作”，下面再来看一个具体的例子：蒋庆的《政治儒学》。
蒋庆是以研究儒学和反对西方民主而著称的学者，他的主要观点集中在2003年的《政治儒学》、2004年的《生命信仰与王道政治》、2006年的“关于重建中国儒教的构想”、以及2008年的《儒家社会与道统复兴：与蒋庆对话》等论著中。
蒋庆认为，二十世纪的新儒学是宋明理学在“生命儒学”或“心性儒学”上的延续，它缺少的却是《春秋》的公羊学和汉代儒学中“政治儒学”或“制度儒学”的传统，因此，新儒家接受了西方的自由民主宪政，却脱离了“制度儒学”的传统。“心性儒学”、“制度儒学”要与“社会儒学”同时发展，中国的儒学传统才能复兴，儒教才能成为一种宗教式的、区别于政统的道统式的国教。
与康晓光的《仁政：中国政治发展的第三条道路》有所不同的是，在《生命信仰与王道政治》中，蒋庆提出了一个源于儒家传统的、由三种合法性构成的政治秩序：超越神圣的合法性、历史文化的合法性、民意的合法性，并使之对应于一个三院制的国会：通儒院、国体院、庶民院。通儒院类似于中国传统中的士大夫执政，是通过荐举产生的士人贤人政治的君子院；国体院类似于英国的上议院或贵族院；庶民院则是符合民本传统的由普选产生的下议院或贫民院。蒋庆认为，西方民主的不当之处是，它只具有民意合法性而缺乏其它两种合法性，这使民众的物欲横流，仁政德治的崇高天道却被制度性地摒弃了。
蒋庆承认，中国政治最大的缺陷，就是没有制度化和程序化的理性传统，因为中国缺乏西方文化那样的自由民主的历史文化合法性，但西方民主最坏的假定，却是不承认柏拉图和施特劳斯所说的人的不同和不平等，结果，西方民主搞成了君子与小人一样的“一人一票”。只有他的“三院制国会”才是一个最理性的方案。
且不说“三院制国会”会把共产党摆在哪里，蒋庆的儒教理性化设计与社会契约论的理性教条，在对“暴力权力”的幻想上有异曲同工之妙；不同的是，社会契约论强调政治上人人平等和多元开放，蒋庆的“三种合法性”则强调君子不同于小人、儒教优于其他宗教。蒋庆的政治批评中的“主体性错误”便是那个“理性教条”，表面上，他强调没有任何政治秩序能完全建立在暴力之上，而实际上，他却把“主体性原则”中的“暴力权力”要点排出在外，同时低估了平等化的“自由冲动”的力量，最终用一种罗尔斯式的“综合性思维”去讨论柏拉图式的“理想国”。这种理想主义精神也在他另外一本书的书名中表现出来：《以善致善：蒋庆与盛洪对话》。
既然是“理想国”，他就可以进一步排除“主体性原则”中的“操作性”要点，“三院制国会”于是变成一种规范参照，它兼顾了君子、权贵和小人，确实是一种上帝才能有的思考方式，唯一的缺陷仅仅是：它行不通。“主体性原则”的要旨在于警告，在讨论有关人类事务的地方，所有知道不能暗中把人剔除掉、把上帝放进来的学者，都应停止偷偷地把人剔除掉、把上帝放进来。把人留住，就是要把
有限理性留住，把无限理性的上帝剔除。只有无限理性的上帝才不用考虑成本、操作、摩擦，也只有上帝才能德主刑辅、道法自然。
在暴力权力和自由冲动之间，只有绝对君主制、现代独裁制、古典贵族制、一党立宪制、以及多党民主制等五种不同产权形式的国家政权是可能的。蒋庆可以反对多党民主制，但“三院制国会”却是一个“智力游戏”般的“思想体操”( 贝淡宁认为三院相互分歧导致的政治瘫痪风险太大，主张放弃国体院)。
这不由让我想起哈耶克关于“两个议会”（立法议会与治理议会）和一个“宪法法院”的改进西方民主的立宪主张。哈耶克认为，美国当年刻意进行分权制衡的立宪者们没有料到两点：“第一，由于立法机构也被赋予了指导政府治理的权力，所以陈述正当行为规则与指导政府实现具体目的而采取的特定行动，这两种全然不同的使命也就注定要渐渐地被混淆在一起；因此第二，法律除了意指那些限制一切专断强制权力或措施的普遍且统一的正当行为规则以外，还被用来指称其他的规则。据此我们可以说，他们实际上从来就没有真正实现过他们旨在实现权力分立的目标。相反，他们却在美国创建了一种常常会减损政府效率的制度；因为根据这种制度，组建政府与指导政府的权力，被分别委派给在不同的时候按照不同的原则选举出来的总统和议会，因此，总统和议会之间常常会发生冲突”（《法律、立法与自由》第三卷，中国大百科全书出版社，2000年，邓正来译，第425-426页）。
人类的宪政史从来都是利益集团的争夺史，完美的宪政设计要么有蓝图而没现实，要么有现实而没实施。“主体性原则”的互动性要点说的就是“博弈均衡”，如果不是利益集团博弈出来的，设计就是摆设。美国参议院的结构就是当年“康涅狄格妥协”的产物。蒋庆的“三院制国会”是反对西方民主的民族主义者招数贫困时“用规范批评现实”的一种贫困的招数，它的问题在于它太完美了，太不情愿把理性从天国唤回人间了（“用规范批评现实”其实是批评西方民主的观点中最不成功的一种）。哈耶克的“二加一”是他“自发秩序观”开小差时冒出的“理性建构主义”，蒋庆的复兴儒学则是“理性教条”太清醒时的“理想国”，两者都是“主体性缺失”的政治批评。
中国的政治文化是“一山不容二虎”，只要否定“一党立宪”的可能性，不管是“政治儒学”还是“现代新儒学”，通通都是西化，只不过一个以传统的合理化为幌子，另一个以传统的现代化为幌子。
当现实远离理想时，“主体性原则”可以帮助我们把思路从“理想的规范设计”、“操作的规范设计”调整到“现实的实证分析”。例如，在讨论中国的政治变革时，这种思维的转向意味着，我们不能老把眼光放在“一旦所有人都反抗现实，政治变革就水到渠成”的愿望上，而是应该问：所有人或那怕多数人都反抗现实是可能的吗？为什么是不可能的？是集体行为逻辑在起作用吗？为什么考虑了规范冲动的压力后现实还是倾向于这个方向而不是那个方向？
总之，“主体性原则”既有助于区别真理和谬误（“牙医类比”）、区别“认识型真理”和“规范型真理”（“一党立宪”和“多党民主”），也有助于避免用中式的规范去批判西方的现实（“政治儒教”），还有助于把政治斗争看成物质和精神利益之争而不是真理之争。由于对“主体性原则”和“认识型真理”缺乏理解，许多知识分子过分热衷于“规范型真理”（用西式的现实和规范来批判中国的现实），甚至于把政治斗争当成真理之争，从而再一次走上自以为“为真理献身”的老路。
Monday, November 29, 2010
方绍伟：中国“民主论战”中的四大派系
---兼论现实视角下的民主与专制
最近一段时间，网上关于民主与宪政的讨论又硝烟四起。讨论民主问题最重要的是弄清起点，起点如果不清楚，问题就不可能谈透，随后的争论可能就会混乱不堪。就是说，认识民主要从“起点意识”开始，现在的社会已经多元化得厉害，“起点意识”是为了防止单一思维，而单一思维所产生的信念往往是偏执的源泉。
按照我的“起点意识”，认识民主可以有四个角度：强权的角度，规范的角度，概念的角度，现实的角度，由此也就形成了当下中国“民主论战”中的四大派系。
1，派系特征
“强权的角度”当然就是政府看待民主的角度，在中国，政府的最高利益是经济学术语所说的“政权垄断最大化”，所以，民主必定是“在不民主的体制内建立民主体制”的民主。更明确地说，“强权角度的民主”是民主体制被纳入了政治治理，不是政治治理被纳入民主体制。这是一种“被动民主”，它的推进必然服务于“政权垄断最大化”，也正因此，“被动民主”的逻辑是稳定、有序、可操控、我行我素。总之一句话：“我说什么是民主，什么就是民主”。
官方意识形态对这一逻辑的维护和美化自然就是必须的，我们常听到的“中国特色的民主”、“社会主义宪政”等等，就是典型的例子。在这一视角下，官方的“新两报一刊”阵容豪华，毛左、新左、洋左也前呼后拥，蔚为壮观。
“规范的角度”当然就是以“普世价值”看待民主的角度，“规范角度的民主”最关心的是民主的真假，所以，官方的“被动民主”对他们来说是不能接受的，是假民主，他们要的是“政治治理被纳入民主体制”的民主，是“主动民主”。
可是，“规范角度的民主”存在一个天大的困难，这就是如何实现“从规范到实际”的操作。刘晓波走的是“体制外推进”的道路，成功的希望大家都比我清楚；蔡定剑走的是“体制内推进”的道路，成功的希望大家也比我清楚；当然还有一种“中共内部分化”的愿景，成功的希望可能也只有天知道。“规范角度的民主”逻辑上并不彻底，但它却有理论的自信，又有西方的参照，还有现实利益的推动，更有媒体的暗中相助，它的“规范冲动力”是不容低估的。
正因如此，官方对它非常警惕，毛左们对它更是恨之入骨。例如，有个叫“社会进步”的网站，把一些“规范角度的民主人士”统称为“西奴”，按学科和等级进行分类“记账”，通通送上了所谓的“西奴吊架”，令人毛骨悚然。在“西奴等级”里，有汉奸级西奴、骨干级西奴、无耻级西奴、爪牙级西奴、幼稚级西奴之分。远志明、刘晓波被归入汉奸级西奴，黄亚生、秦晖、许志永、展江、韩寒、辛子陵、江平被归入骨干级西奴，沙叶新、信力建被归入无耻级西奴，秦晓、萧功秦被归入爪牙级西奴（萧功秦大概会莫名其妙），方舟子被归入幼稚级西奴。另外还有“草根西奴”：范美忠、李剑芒；以及“疑似待继续甄别西奴”：周其仁、郑渊洁等。好一派“红色恐怖”的风光。
自由派人士当然也不闲着，大批判的势头同样不逊色，有人在网上就使出了相似的分类招数：专业五毛---余秋雨、于丹、孔庆东、司马南、孙东东、朗咸平、葛红兵、张维迎、奈斯比特等；职业五毛---王倩、卞移山、朱军、张召忠、倪萍、张宏良、孙哲、伍皓、张五常、胡联合、胡鞍钢、梅宁华、陈奎元、何新等；业余五毛---夕阳红、吴应快、战旗、何青青、宋鲁郑、普评制等。名字也是举不胜举、挂一漏万。
第三种派系叫“概念角度的民主”，这种认识民主的角度比较奇特，它不是从“强权角度的民主”和“规范角度的民主”的现实出发，而是从抽象的概念出发；它了解现实，可却在逻辑上选择逃避现实，喜欢“用概念的字面运动代替现实的实际运动”。在它那里，概念所代表的势力似乎是均等的，概念的运动是没有摩擦费用的，仿佛它是通过“上帝之手”在拿捏现实世界，甚为惬意。“概念角度的民主”是一种“客观主义”、“技术主义”、“未来主义”的理性设计病，它比“规范角度的民主”还要一厢情愿，它表达愿望和幻想比谁都更多而不是更少。这种观念可以被概括地称为“科学的民主”，它可以把现行的民主通通斥之为“专制”、“假民主”或“不够民主”，在它看来，存在的就是坏的，实现不了的就是更好的。
奇妙的是，“概念角度的民主”有时会以西方民主“不够民主”而为“强权角度的民主”辩护，有时又会以西方民主与中国的结合而推销一种概念上的完美民主；更加奇妙的是，它有时则表现为对“规范角度的民主”的一种反叛，而且主要是一种畸形的反叛，因为“规范角度的民主”有操作上的缺陷，而“概念角度的民主”不存在操作问题，它的“上帝之手”如此完美，以至于“意淫”在它那里永远是免费的。这一派系在不同的程度上包括了蒋庆的“政治儒教”，王绍光的“民主四讲”，淡贝宁的“儒家民主”，潘维的“中华体制”，赵心树的“选举设计论”等等。“选举网”上刘学伟的“加权民主”和小红妹的“社会三权”等等也欢迎对号入座。
最后一种派系叫“现实角度的民主”，与“概念角度的民主”正好相反，它完全从“强权角度的民主”和“规范角度的民主”相互对抗的现实出发，反对“用概念的字面运动代替现实的实际运动”。吴思的《潜规则》和《血酬定律》虽然不直接涉及民主，却直接地涉及了中国民主的不利条件，因此是这一派系的突出代表。更为重要的是，吴思提出了“现实研究”的基本方法论主张，我把它称为“吴思信条”，涉及“双重是非标准”和“规范与实证的分工”，是“现实角度的民主”的重要基点（将另文专述）。我的“产权国家论”（见《领导者》2010年4、6、10月号）和“民主公地悲剧论”（见“幻想化解不了多党民主的悲剧”和“民主有利于经济发展吗？”等文），也是“现实角度的民主”的一种努力。
“产权国家论”采用了与“吴思信条”非常相似的“冷酷实证”方法，它与另外三种视角的民主观至少存在三个区别：
第一，“产权国家论”从现实的角度去构建现实的理论，它不象“强权角度的民主”那样完全从“官方意识形态”出发。实际上，许多左派人士从不去构造理论，他们只依附官方理论，本质上是反理论和非学术的；有的则在构造理论时过分地顺从“官方意识形态”，出现了为现实而牺牲逻辑的情况。
第二，也正是由于对“官方意识形态”的依法，他们的逻辑往往是一面倒的：他们批评民主，却很少批评中国特色的民主；他们批评专制，可却从不批评中国现实中的专制。“产权国家论”完全不同，它批评任何地方的民主，也批评任何地方的专制（见“独裁政府为何长命百岁？”和“中国还有哪一套不是西方那一套？”等文）。“产权国家论”让理论逻辑牵着文字走，而不是让意识形态或乌托邦牵着文字走。
第三是最重要的“独立人格”问题，依附于官方意识形态的人不可能有真正的独立人格，所以他们的文字从来都是谨小慎微，生怕得罪官方意识形态。然而，只有“有意识”地独立于任何意识形态和任何乌托邦，一个人才可能有独立人格。独立人格是一种批评一切（包括民主、专制和自已）的自由意识。
2，“暴力”新概念：强权与规范
“现实角度的民主”的独特之处体现在理解民主的运行上。民主是一种政治制度，但民主却不是一种“概念运动”的结果，而是一种“现实运动”的结果。这种理解常常被误认为是“对强权的妥协”，因为它有“存在即合理”的味道。可实际上，它只是一种“对现实的妥协”，因为它既承认强权的力量，也承认规范的力量；它既看到强权的软弱，也看到规范的软弱；在此之上，它认为现实还是由强权所支配的。
这些当然还谈不上什么独特，但是，当它“把强权看成是对规范的迫害”时，它同时也“把规范看成是对强权的迫害”。也就是说，暴力并不是强权的专利，暴力也可以是规范的专利。吴思把暴力看成决定其他规则的“元规则”，这是对暴力的一种狭义理解和常规定义。按照一个更为宽阔的定义，暴力指的是主体对客体的肉体和精神摧残。人类的发展和暴力的运用，就经历了一个从“硬暴力”到“准暴力”再到“软暴力”的过程。
“硬暴力”是通常意义上的暴力，它靠武器来运用强力；“准暴力”则以国家垄断的武器强力为后盾，靠法规来进行强制；“软暴力”则完全通过理性规范来实现强制，“讲道理”、“讲平等自由的道理”就是“软暴力”的最大武器。
所以，强权垄断的只是“硬暴力”和“准暴力”，规范实际上却垄断了“软暴力”；规范“讲平等自由的道理”会给强权带来极大的精神折磨和摧残；强权有权，却免不了规范给它带来的无尽痛苦。
政府强权之所以要开动意识形态的机器，那就是因为它不满规范对“软暴力”的垄断，它要通过言论、出版和结社的控制来摧毁规范对“软暴力”的垄断，所以，它的反垄断反倒表现为一种垄断，是对言论、出版和结社自由的垄断。但是，之所以说规范对“软暴力”的垄断依然存在，那是因为“软暴力”未必要表现为言论、出版和结社，“软暴力”完全可以表现为一种“敢怒而不敢言”，网络化的世界也为它的发展提供了有利条件。
3，现实视角下的民主与专制
“现实角度的民主”更具体的方面来自于对现实的两个观察，第一是存在于西方民主国家和新兴民主国家的“公地悲剧”。秋风先生曾经以“相信人性，相信民主”为题，批评了我的“民主公地悲剧论”，我也以“秋风的人性幻想与民主乌托邦”为题反驳了他。我特别强调的一点是：我根本不反对民主，我也不规劝别人反民主，更不劝阻别人搞民主，我的责任是揭示民主的本质，阐明为什么有人喜欢而有人害怕民主，而其他三种视角却由于立场偏见而根本无法真正做到这一点。
第二个观察是：为什么伊拉克的民主比台湾的民主糟，台湾的民主比美国的民主糟，美国的民主又比瑞典的民主糟？如果以搞民主的时间长短为理由，那么，又为什么有的地方能先有民主，而有的地方则迟至今日才有民主或根本还没有民主？这就涉及到民主的运行问题，还涉及到民主的真假和好坏问题。当然，瑞典式的民主更直接对应的是民主的质量和经济上的人均收入，民主的质量则未必与世界强国挂钩，因为世界强国还有国家规模等其他因素。我在别的地方已经分析了文化规则对民主运行的制约作用（见“民主不是一个传说”和“腐败的中国人”等文），但我所要表达的，同样不是为了去反对民主，而是为了弄清民主实际运行中的“文化痛苦”和“演化博弈均衡”。
有人把民主的争取和运行问题归之于宗教信仰问题，归之于“对程序的敬畏”，认为中国人缺的不是理想而是信仰。这当然有道理，可是，在尼采看来，西方堕落的全部原因就在于，欧洲人几千年的精神生活完全以信仰上帝为核心，基督教信仰完全使人变成上帝的创造物和附属物，人生的价值和一切都寄托于上帝，而启蒙运动却没能确立新的信仰，人的本能压抑和自由问题还是没有解决，所以，他要以“上帝死了”来杀死上帝，使西方人真正获得新生。也就是说，在尼采推翻了神的等级制度和肯定了人的等级制度100年后，难道我们中国人反倒要去再造一个神的等级制度？更加重要的是，确立新的信仰又如何有理性上和操作上的可能？
民主的问题，最终转化成一个相对价值的问题。就是说，我们可以不再去追究终极问题了，反正人性和人类的制度不可能完美，所以我们中国人当下的策略应该是：“不求最好，只求更好”，我们只去追求可能获得的民主和自由，我们根本不可能为了民主而先去解决信仰问题，也不可能为了一个远大的“民主乌托邦”而牺牲眼前的利益。
在这个可操作的意义上，即便很多人走的是“在不民主的体制内建立民主体制”的道路，他们的努力依然值得肯定（特别是蔡定剑的“财政民主论”）。但是，这更多的是一种“操作的努力”，不是一种“理论的努力”；如果是一种“理论的努力”，它只能是一种“实证理论的努力”而不是一种“规范理论的努力”。“操作的努力”可以妥协，“实证理论的努力”可以描述妥协（如我所讨论的“一党立宪”），但“规范理论的努力”不容妥协。你不可能一边引用邓小平的话，一边又倡导邓小平所不能容忍的制度。所以，“社会主义宪政”可以是一种“操作的努力”，但它决不能是一种“规范理论的努力”，因为“规范理论的努力”要求学者本人要真正做到“目中无人”，你要是需要抬出邓小平来为你的逻辑铺路，玩“打着红旗反红旗”的“阳谋”，你就不是在做“规范理论的努力”，而是在玩意识形态的火。
也正是在相对价值的意义上，“现实角度的民主”转向了对专制的批判。我所说的“冷酷实证”并不否定一切规范，它只是否定实证不足的规范。对我来说，当前最有意义的课题，一是中国的政治和社会腐败，二是中国专制主义漫长的原因。但是，越研究中国的腐败，越研究中国的专制主义，我就越感到存在一个“中国专制之谜”，这是一个韦伯的“儒家伦理”、李约瑟的“官僚封建主义”、魏特夫的“治水社会”和金观涛的“超稳定系统”所企图解决却无法解决的问题。
4， 结语
中国之大，自然足以容下强权的民主、规范的民主、概念的民主、现实的民主，以及任何其他视角的民主观。中国的民主观实际上已经进入了“春秋战国”时代，能够一统天下的“单一思维时代”已经一去不复返了，但是，企图一统天下的“单一思维”仍将继续下去。
最近一段时间，网上关于民主与宪政的讨论又硝烟四起。讨论民主问题最重要的是弄清起点，起点如果不清楚，问题就不可能谈透，随后的争论可能就会混乱不堪。就是说，认识民主要从“起点意识”开始，现在的社会已经多元化得厉害，“起点意识”是为了防止单一思维，而单一思维所产生的信念往往是偏执的源泉。
按照我的“起点意识”，认识民主可以有四个角度：强权的角度，规范的角度，概念的角度，现实的角度，由此也就形成了当下中国“民主论战”中的四大派系。
1，派系特征
“强权的角度”当然就是政府看待民主的角度，在中国，政府的最高利益是经济学术语所说的“政权垄断最大化”，所以，民主必定是“在不民主的体制内建立民主体制”的民主。更明确地说，“强权角度的民主”是民主体制被纳入了政治治理，不是政治治理被纳入民主体制。这是一种“被动民主”，它的推进必然服务于“政权垄断最大化”，也正因此，“被动民主”的逻辑是稳定、有序、可操控、我行我素。总之一句话：“我说什么是民主，什么就是民主”。
官方意识形态对这一逻辑的维护和美化自然就是必须的，我们常听到的“中国特色的民主”、“社会主义宪政”等等，就是典型的例子。在这一视角下，官方的“新两报一刊”阵容豪华，毛左、新左、洋左也前呼后拥，蔚为壮观。
“规范的角度”当然就是以“普世价值”看待民主的角度，“规范角度的民主”最关心的是民主的真假，所以，官方的“被动民主”对他们来说是不能接受的，是假民主，他们要的是“政治治理被纳入民主体制”的民主，是“主动民主”。
可是，“规范角度的民主”存在一个天大的困难，这就是如何实现“从规范到实际”的操作。刘晓波走的是“体制外推进”的道路，成功的希望大家都比我清楚；蔡定剑走的是“体制内推进”的道路，成功的希望大家也比我清楚；当然还有一种“中共内部分化”的愿景，成功的希望可能也只有天知道。“规范角度的民主”逻辑上并不彻底，但它却有理论的自信，又有西方的参照，还有现实利益的推动，更有媒体的暗中相助，它的“规范冲动力”是不容低估的。
正因如此，官方对它非常警惕，毛左们对它更是恨之入骨。例如，有个叫“社会进步”的网站，把一些“规范角度的民主人士”统称为“西奴”，按学科和等级进行分类“记账”，通通送上了所谓的“西奴吊架”，令人毛骨悚然。在“西奴等级”里，有汉奸级西奴、骨干级西奴、无耻级西奴、爪牙级西奴、幼稚级西奴之分。远志明、刘晓波被归入汉奸级西奴，黄亚生、秦晖、许志永、展江、韩寒、辛子陵、江平被归入骨干级西奴，沙叶新、信力建被归入无耻级西奴，秦晓、萧功秦被归入爪牙级西奴（萧功秦大概会莫名其妙），方舟子被归入幼稚级西奴。另外还有“草根西奴”：范美忠、李剑芒；以及“疑似待继续甄别西奴”：周其仁、郑渊洁等。好一派“红色恐怖”的风光。
自由派人士当然也不闲着，大批判的势头同样不逊色，有人在网上就使出了相似的分类招数：专业五毛---余秋雨、于丹、孔庆东、司马南、孙东东、朗咸平、葛红兵、张维迎、奈斯比特等；职业五毛---王倩、卞移山、朱军、张召忠、倪萍、张宏良、孙哲、伍皓、张五常、胡联合、胡鞍钢、梅宁华、陈奎元、何新等；业余五毛---夕阳红、吴应快、战旗、何青青、宋鲁郑、普评制等。名字也是举不胜举、挂一漏万。
第三种派系叫“概念角度的民主”，这种认识民主的角度比较奇特，它不是从“强权角度的民主”和“规范角度的民主”的现实出发，而是从抽象的概念出发；它了解现实，可却在逻辑上选择逃避现实，喜欢“用概念的字面运动代替现实的实际运动”。在它那里，概念所代表的势力似乎是均等的，概念的运动是没有摩擦费用的，仿佛它是通过“上帝之手”在拿捏现实世界，甚为惬意。“概念角度的民主”是一种“客观主义”、“技术主义”、“未来主义”的理性设计病，它比“规范角度的民主”还要一厢情愿，它表达愿望和幻想比谁都更多而不是更少。这种观念可以被概括地称为“科学的民主”，它可以把现行的民主通通斥之为“专制”、“假民主”或“不够民主”，在它看来，存在的就是坏的，实现不了的就是更好的。
奇妙的是，“概念角度的民主”有时会以西方民主“不够民主”而为“强权角度的民主”辩护，有时又会以西方民主与中国的结合而推销一种概念上的完美民主；更加奇妙的是，它有时则表现为对“规范角度的民主”的一种反叛，而且主要是一种畸形的反叛，因为“规范角度的民主”有操作上的缺陷，而“概念角度的民主”不存在操作问题，它的“上帝之手”如此完美，以至于“意淫”在它那里永远是免费的。这一派系在不同的程度上包括了蒋庆的“政治儒教”，王绍光的“民主四讲”，淡贝宁的“儒家民主”，潘维的“中华体制”，赵心树的“选举设计论”等等。“选举网”上刘学伟的“加权民主”和小红妹的“社会三权”等等也欢迎对号入座。
最后一种派系叫“现实角度的民主”，与“概念角度的民主”正好相反，它完全从“强权角度的民主”和“规范角度的民主”相互对抗的现实出发，反对“用概念的字面运动代替现实的实际运动”。吴思的《潜规则》和《血酬定律》虽然不直接涉及民主，却直接地涉及了中国民主的不利条件，因此是这一派系的突出代表。更为重要的是，吴思提出了“现实研究”的基本方法论主张，我把它称为“吴思信条”，涉及“双重是非标准”和“规范与实证的分工”，是“现实角度的民主”的重要基点（将另文专述）。我的“产权国家论”（见《领导者》2010年4、6、10月号）和“民主公地悲剧论”（见“幻想化解不了多党民主的悲剧”和“民主有利于经济发展吗？”等文），也是“现实角度的民主”的一种努力。
“产权国家论”采用了与“吴思信条”非常相似的“冷酷实证”方法，它与另外三种视角的民主观至少存在三个区别：
第一，“产权国家论”从现实的角度去构建现实的理论，它不象“强权角度的民主”那样完全从“官方意识形态”出发。实际上，许多左派人士从不去构造理论，他们只依附官方理论，本质上是反理论和非学术的；有的则在构造理论时过分地顺从“官方意识形态”，出现了为现实而牺牲逻辑的情况。
第二，也正是由于对“官方意识形态”的依法，他们的逻辑往往是一面倒的：他们批评民主，却很少批评中国特色的民主；他们批评专制，可却从不批评中国现实中的专制。“产权国家论”完全不同，它批评任何地方的民主，也批评任何地方的专制（见“独裁政府为何长命百岁？”和“中国还有哪一套不是西方那一套？”等文）。“产权国家论”让理论逻辑牵着文字走，而不是让意识形态或乌托邦牵着文字走。
第三是最重要的“独立人格”问题，依附于官方意识形态的人不可能有真正的独立人格，所以他们的文字从来都是谨小慎微，生怕得罪官方意识形态。然而，只有“有意识”地独立于任何意识形态和任何乌托邦，一个人才可能有独立人格。独立人格是一种批评一切（包括民主、专制和自已）的自由意识。
2，“暴力”新概念：强权与规范
“现实角度的民主”的独特之处体现在理解民主的运行上。民主是一种政治制度，但民主却不是一种“概念运动”的结果，而是一种“现实运动”的结果。这种理解常常被误认为是“对强权的妥协”，因为它有“存在即合理”的味道。可实际上，它只是一种“对现实的妥协”，因为它既承认强权的力量，也承认规范的力量；它既看到强权的软弱，也看到规范的软弱；在此之上，它认为现实还是由强权所支配的。
这些当然还谈不上什么独特，但是，当它“把强权看成是对规范的迫害”时，它同时也“把规范看成是对强权的迫害”。也就是说，暴力并不是强权的专利，暴力也可以是规范的专利。吴思把暴力看成决定其他规则的“元规则”，这是对暴力的一种狭义理解和常规定义。按照一个更为宽阔的定义，暴力指的是主体对客体的肉体和精神摧残。人类的发展和暴力的运用，就经历了一个从“硬暴力”到“准暴力”再到“软暴力”的过程。
“硬暴力”是通常意义上的暴力，它靠武器来运用强力；“准暴力”则以国家垄断的武器强力为后盾，靠法规来进行强制；“软暴力”则完全通过理性规范来实现强制，“讲道理”、“讲平等自由的道理”就是“软暴力”的最大武器。
所以，强权垄断的只是“硬暴力”和“准暴力”，规范实际上却垄断了“软暴力”；规范“讲平等自由的道理”会给强权带来极大的精神折磨和摧残；强权有权，却免不了规范给它带来的无尽痛苦。
政府强权之所以要开动意识形态的机器，那就是因为它不满规范对“软暴力”的垄断，它要通过言论、出版和结社的控制来摧毁规范对“软暴力”的垄断，所以，它的反垄断反倒表现为一种垄断，是对言论、出版和结社自由的垄断。但是，之所以说规范对“软暴力”的垄断依然存在，那是因为“软暴力”未必要表现为言论、出版和结社，“软暴力”完全可以表现为一种“敢怒而不敢言”，网络化的世界也为它的发展提供了有利条件。
3，现实视角下的民主与专制
“现实角度的民主”更具体的方面来自于对现实的两个观察，第一是存在于西方民主国家和新兴民主国家的“公地悲剧”。秋风先生曾经以“相信人性，相信民主”为题，批评了我的“民主公地悲剧论”，我也以“秋风的人性幻想与民主乌托邦”为题反驳了他。我特别强调的一点是：我根本不反对民主，我也不规劝别人反民主，更不劝阻别人搞民主，我的责任是揭示民主的本质，阐明为什么有人喜欢而有人害怕民主，而其他三种视角却由于立场偏见而根本无法真正做到这一点。
第二个观察是：为什么伊拉克的民主比台湾的民主糟，台湾的民主比美国的民主糟，美国的民主又比瑞典的民主糟？如果以搞民主的时间长短为理由，那么，又为什么有的地方能先有民主，而有的地方则迟至今日才有民主或根本还没有民主？这就涉及到民主的运行问题，还涉及到民主的真假和好坏问题。当然，瑞典式的民主更直接对应的是民主的质量和经济上的人均收入，民主的质量则未必与世界强国挂钩，因为世界强国还有国家规模等其他因素。我在别的地方已经分析了文化规则对民主运行的制约作用（见“民主不是一个传说”和“腐败的中国人”等文），但我所要表达的，同样不是为了去反对民主，而是为了弄清民主实际运行中的“文化痛苦”和“演化博弈均衡”。
有人把民主的争取和运行问题归之于宗教信仰问题，归之于“对程序的敬畏”，认为中国人缺的不是理想而是信仰。这当然有道理，可是，在尼采看来，西方堕落的全部原因就在于，欧洲人几千年的精神生活完全以信仰上帝为核心，基督教信仰完全使人变成上帝的创造物和附属物，人生的价值和一切都寄托于上帝，而启蒙运动却没能确立新的信仰，人的本能压抑和自由问题还是没有解决，所以，他要以“上帝死了”来杀死上帝，使西方人真正获得新生。也就是说，在尼采推翻了神的等级制度和肯定了人的等级制度100年后，难道我们中国人反倒要去再造一个神的等级制度？更加重要的是，确立新的信仰又如何有理性上和操作上的可能？
民主的问题，最终转化成一个相对价值的问题。就是说，我们可以不再去追究终极问题了，反正人性和人类的制度不可能完美，所以我们中国人当下的策略应该是：“不求最好，只求更好”，我们只去追求可能获得的民主和自由，我们根本不可能为了民主而先去解决信仰问题，也不可能为了一个远大的“民主乌托邦”而牺牲眼前的利益。
在这个可操作的意义上，即便很多人走的是“在不民主的体制内建立民主体制”的道路，他们的努力依然值得肯定（特别是蔡定剑的“财政民主论”）。但是，这更多的是一种“操作的努力”，不是一种“理论的努力”；如果是一种“理论的努力”，它只能是一种“实证理论的努力”而不是一种“规范理论的努力”。“操作的努力”可以妥协，“实证理论的努力”可以描述妥协（如我所讨论的“一党立宪”），但“规范理论的努力”不容妥协。你不可能一边引用邓小平的话，一边又倡导邓小平所不能容忍的制度。所以，“社会主义宪政”可以是一种“操作的努力”，但它决不能是一种“规范理论的努力”，因为“规范理论的努力”要求学者本人要真正做到“目中无人”，你要是需要抬出邓小平来为你的逻辑铺路，玩“打着红旗反红旗”的“阳谋”，你就不是在做“规范理论的努力”，而是在玩意识形态的火。
也正是在相对价值的意义上，“现实角度的民主”转向了对专制的批判。我所说的“冷酷实证”并不否定一切规范，它只是否定实证不足的规范。对我来说，当前最有意义的课题，一是中国的政治和社会腐败，二是中国专制主义漫长的原因。但是，越研究中国的腐败，越研究中国的专制主义，我就越感到存在一个“中国专制之谜”，这是一个韦伯的“儒家伦理”、李约瑟的“官僚封建主义”、魏特夫的“治水社会”和金观涛的“超稳定系统”所企图解决却无法解决的问题。
4， 结语
中国之大，自然足以容下强权的民主、规范的民主、概念的民主、现实的民主，以及任何其他视角的民主观。中国的民主观实际上已经进入了“春秋战国”时代，能够一统天下的“单一思维时代”已经一去不复返了，但是，企图一统天下的“单一思维”仍将继续下去。
Monday, November 22, 2010
DAEDALUS or Science and the Future
A paper read to the Heretics, Cambridge, on February 4th, 1923
by J. B. S. Haldane
INTRODUCTION
I have slightly expanded certain parts of this paper since reading it. It has therefore probably lost any unity which it may once have possessed. It will be criticized for its undue emphasis on certain unpleasant topics. This is necessary if people are to be induced to think about them, and it is the whole business of a university teacher to induce people to think.
DAEDALUS, or, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE
As I sit down to write these pages I can see before me two scenes from my experience of the late war. The first is a glimpse of a forgotten battle of 1915. It has a curious suggestion of a rather bad cinema film. Through a blur of dust and fumes there appear, quite suddenly, great black and yellow masses of smoke which seem to be tearing up the surface of the earth and disintegrating the works of man with an almost visible hatred. These form the chief part of the picture, but some where in the middle distance one can see a few irrelevant looking human figures, and soon there are fewer. It is hard to believe that these are the protagonists in the battle. One would rather choose those huge substantive oily black masses which are so much more conspicuous, and suppose that the men are in reality their servants, and playing an inglorious, subordinate, and fatal part in the combat. It is possible, after all, that this view is correct.
Had I been privileged to watch a battle three years later, the general aspect would have been very similar, but there would have been fewer men and more shell-bursts. There would probably, however, have been one very significant addition. Then men would have been running, with mad terror in their eyes, from gigantic steel slugs, which were deliberately, relentlessly and successfully pursuing them.
The other picture is of three Europeans in India looking at a great new star in the milky way. These were apparently all of the guests at a large dance who were interested in such matters. Amongst those who were at all competent to form views as to the origin of this cosmoclastic explosion, the most popular theory attributed it to a collision between two stars, or a star and a nebula. There seem, however, to be at least two possible alternatives to this hypothesis. Perhaps it was the last judgement of some inhabited world, perhaps a too successful experiment in induced radioactivity the part of some of the dwellers there. And perhaps also these two hypotheses are identical, and what we were watching that evening was the detonation of a world on which too many men came out to look at the stars when they should have been dancing.
These two scenes suggest, very briefly, a part of the case against science. Has mankind released from the womb of matter a Demogorgon which is already beginning to turn against him, and may at any moment hurl him into the bottomless void? Or is Samuel Butler's even more horrible vision correct, in which man becomes a mere parasite of machinery, an appendage of the reproductive system of huge and complicated engines which will successively usurp his activities, and end by ousting him from the mastery of this planet? Is the machine-minder engaged on repetition-work the goal and ideal to which humanity is tending? Perhaps a survey of the present trend of science may throw some light on these questions.
But first we may consider for a moment, the question of whether there is any hope of stopping the progress of scientific research. It is after all a very recent form of human activity, and a sufficiently universal protest of mankind would be able to arrest it even now. In the middle ages public opinion made it so dangerous as to be practically impossible, and I am inclined to suspect that Mr. Chesterton, for example, would not be averse to a repetition of this state of things. The late M. Joseph Reinach, an able and not wholly illiberal thinker, publicly advocated it.
I think, however, that so long as our present economic and national systems continue, scientific research has little to fear. Capitalism, though it may not always give the scientific worker a living wage, will always protect him, as being one of the geese which produce golden eggs for its table. And competitive nationalism, even if war is wholly or largely prevented, will hardly forego the national advantages accruing from scientific research.
If we look at the other most probable alternative the prospect is little more hopeful. In this country the labour party alone among political organizations includes the fostering of research in its official programme. Indeed as far as biological research is concerned labour may prove a better master than capitalism, and there can be little doubt that it would be equally friendly to physical and chemical research if these came to lead immediately to shortened hours rather than to unemployment. In particular there is perhaps reason to think that that form of sentimentalism which hampers medical research in this country by legislation would be less likely to flourish in a robust and selfish labour party of the Australian type than in parties whose members enjoy the leisure which seems necessary to the development of such emotional luxuries.
It is of course possible that civilisation may collapse throughout the world as it has done in parts of Russia, and science with it, but such an event would, in all probability, only postpone the problem for a few thousand years. And even in Russia we must not forget that first-rate scientific research is still being carried on.
The possibility has been suggested --- I do not know how seriously --- that the progress of science may cease through lack of new problems for investigation. Mr. Chesterton in The Napoleon of Notting Hill, a book written fifteen years or so ago, prophesied that hansom-cabs would still be in existence a hundred years hence owing to a cessation of invention. Within six years there was a hansom-cab in a museum, and now that romantic but tardy vehicle is a memory like the trireme, the velocipede, and the 1907 Voisin biplane. I do not suggest that Mr. Chesterton be dragged --- a heavier Hector --- behind the last hansom cab, but I do contend that, in so far as he claims to be a prophet rather than the voice of one crying in the wilderness, he may be regarded as negligible for the purposes of our discussion. I shall try shortly to show how far from complete are any branches of science at the present time.
But first a word on Mr. H. G. Wells might not be out of place. The very mention of the future suggests him. There are two points I wish to make about Mr. Wells. In the first place, considered as a serious prophet, as opposed to a fantastic romancer, he is singularly modest. In 1902, for example, in a book called ``Anticipations,'' he gave it as his personal opinion that by 1950 there would be heavier than air flying machines capable of practical use in war. That, he said, was his own view, though he was well aware that it would excite considerable ridicule. I propose in this paper to make no prophecies rasher than the above.
The second and more important point is that he is a generation behind the time. When his scientific ideas were formed, flying and radio-telegraphy, for example, were scientific problems, and the centre of scientific interest still lay in physics and chemistry. Now these are commercial problems, and I believe that the centre of scientific interest lies in biology. A generation hence it may be elsewhere, and the views expressed in this paper will appear as modest, conservative, and unimaginative as do many of those of Mr. Wells today.
I will only touch very briefly on the future of physics, as the subject is inevitably technical. At present physical theory is in a state of profound suspense. This is primarily due to Einstein --- the greatest Jew since Jesus. I have no doubt that Einstein's name will still be remembered and revered when Lloyd George, Foch, and William Hohenzollern share with Charlie Chaplin that ineluctable oblivion which awaits the uncreative mind. I trust that I may be excused if I trespass from the strict subject of my theme to add my quota to the rather numerous misstatements of Einstein's views which have appeared during the last few years.
Ever since the time of Berkeley it has been customary for the majority of metaphysicians to proclaim the ideality of Time, of Space, or of both. But they soon made it clear that in spite of this, time would continue to wait for no man, and space to separate lovers. The only practical consequences that they generally drew was that their own ethical and political views were somehow inherent in the structure of the universe. The experimental proof or disproof of such deductions is difficult, and --- if the late war may be regarded as an experimental disproof of certain of Hegel's political tenets --- costly and unsatisfactory.
Einstein, so far from deducing an new decalogue, has contented himself with deducing the consequences to space and time themselves of their ideality. These are mostly too small to be measurable, but some, such as the deflection of light but the sun's gravitational field, are susceptible of verification, and have been verified. The majority of scientific men are now being constrained by the evidence of these experiments to adopt a very extreme form of Kantian idealism. The Kantian Ding-an-sich is an eternal four-dimensional manifold, which we perceive as space and time, but what we regard as space and what as time is more or less fortuitous.
It is perhaps interesting to speculate on the practical consequences of Einstein's discovery. I do not doubt that he will be believed. A prophet who can give signs in the heavens is always believed. No one ever seriously questioned Newton's theory after the return of Halley's comet. Einstein has told us that space, time and matter are shadows of the fifth dimension, and the heavens have declared his glory. In consequence Kantian idealism will become the basal working hypothesis of the physicist and finally of all educated men, just as materialism did after Newton's day. We may not call ourselves materialists, but we do interpret the activities of the moon, the Thames, influenza, and aeroplanes in terms of matter. Our ancestors did not, nor, in all probability, will our descendants. The materialism (whether conscious or sub-conscious does not matter very much) of the last few generations has led to various results of practical importance, such as sanitation, Marxian socialism, and the right of an accused person to give evidence on his or her own behalf. The reign of Kantian idealism as the basal working hypothesis, first of physics, and then of every-day life, will in all probability last for some centuries. At the end of that time a similar step in advance will be taken. Einstein showed that experience cannot be interpreted in terms of space and time. This was a well-known fact, but so long as space and time down not break down in their own special sphere, that of explaining the facts of motion, physicists continued to believe in them, or at any rate, what was much more important, to think in terms of them for practical purposes.
A time will however come (as I believe) when physiology will invade and destroy mathematical physics, as the latter have destroyed geometry. The basic metaphysical working hypothesis of science and practical life will then, I think, be something like Bergsonian activism. I do not for one moment suggest that this or any other metaphysical system has any claims whatever to finality.
Meanwhile we are in for a few centuries during which many practical activities will probably be conducted on a basis, not of materialism, but of Kantian idealism. How will this affect our manners, morals and politics? Frankly I do not know, though I think the effect will be as great as that of Newton's work, which created most of the intellectual forces of the 18th century. The Condorcets, Benthams, and Marxs of the future will I think be as ruthlessly critical of the metaphysics and ethics of their times as were their predecessors, but not quite so sure of their own; they will lack a certain heaviness of touch which we may note in Utilitarianism and Socialism. They will recognise that perhaps in ethics as in physics, there are so to speak fourth and fifth dimensions that show themselves by effects which, like the perturbations of the planet Mercury, are hard to detect even in one generation, but yet perhaps in the course of ages are quite as important as the three- dimensional phenomena.
If the quantum hypothesis is generally adopted even more radical alterations in our thinking will be necessary. But I feel it premature even to suggest their direction in the present unsatisfactory state of quantum mechanics. It may be that as Poincare (the other Poincare) suggested we shall be forced to conceive of all changes as occurring in a series of clicks, and all space as consisting of discrete points. However this may be it is safe to say that a better knowledge of radiation will permit us to produce it in a more satisfactory manner than is at present possible. Almost all our present sources of light are hot bodies, 95% of whose radiation is invisible. To light a lamp as a source of light is about as wasteful of energy as to burn down one's house to roast one's pork. It is a fairly safe prophecy that in 50 years light will cost about a fiftieth of its present price, and there will be no more night in our cities. The alternation of day and night is a check on the freedom of human activity which must go the way of other spatial and temporal checks. In the long run I think that all that applied physics can do for us is abolish these checks. It enables us to possess more, travel more, and communicate more. I shall not attempt to predict in detail the future developments of transport and communication. They are only limited by the velocity of light. We are working towards a condition when any two persons on earth will be able to be completely present to one another in not more than 1/24 of a second. We shall never reach it, but that is the limit which we shall approach indefinitely. {2}
Developments in this direction are tending to bring mankind more and more together, to render life more and more complex, artificial, and rich in possibilities --- to increase indefinitely man's powers for good and evil.
But there are two prerequisites for all progress of this kind, namely continuous supplies of human and mechanical power. As industries become more and more closely interwoven, so that a dislocation of any one will paralyse a dozen others (and that is the position towards which we are rapidly moving), the ideal of the leaders of industry, under no matter what economic system, will be directed less and less to the indefinite increase of production in the intervals between such dislocations, and more and more to stable and regular production, even at the cost of reduction of profits and output while the industry is proceeding normally. {3} It is quite possible that capitalism itself may demand that the control of certain key industries be handed over completely to the workers in those industries, simply in order to reduce the number of sporadic strikes in them. And as industrial progress continues an ever larger number --- perhaps the majority --- of industries will become key industries. The solution may be entirely different --- we may well see a return to feudalism. But the probability is that the problem will be solved. This view may seem optimistic, but it is more likely than the alternative thesis which may be briefly stated as follows: "No human society will ever succeed in producing a stable organization in which the majority of the population is employed otherwise than in agriculture, animal-rearing, hunting or fishing." It took some thousands of years to produce the stable agricultural society which forms the basis of European life and whose morals we are too apt to regards as eternal truths. It should take a shorter time to evolve a stable industrial society. The people that do so will inherit the earth. In sum, I believe that the progress of science will ultimately make industrial injustice as self- destructive as it is now making international injustice.
As for the supplies of mechanical power, it is axiomatic that the exhaustion of our coal and oil-fields is a matter of centuries only. As it has often been assumed that their exhaustion would lead to the collapse of industrial civilization, I may perhaps be pardoned if I give some of the reasons which lead me to doubt this proposition.
Water-power is not, I think, a probable substitute, on account of its small quantity, seasonal fluctuation, and sporadic distribution. It may perhaps, however, shift the centre of industrial gravity to well-watered mountainous tracts such as the Himalayan foothills, British Columbia, and Armenia. Ultimately we shall have to tap those intermittent but inexhaustible sources of power, the wind and the sunlight. The problem is simply one of storing their energy in a form as convenient as coal or petrol. If a windmill in one's back garden could produce a hundredweight of coal daily (and it can produce its equivalent in energy), our coalmines would be shut down to-morrow. Even to-morrow a cheap, foolproof, and durable storage battery may be invented, which will enable us to transform the intermittent energy of the wind into continuous electric power.
Personally, I think that four hundred years hence the power question in England may be solved somewhat as follows: The country will be covered with rows of metallic windmills working electric motors which in their turn supply current at a very high voltage to great electric mains. At suitable distances, there will be great power stations where during windy weather the surplus power will be used for the electrolytic decomposition of water into oxygen and hydrogen. These gasses will be liquefied, and stored in vast vacuum jacketed reservoirs, probably sunk in the ground. If these reservoirs are sufficiently large, the loss of liquid due to leakage inwards of heat will not be great; thus the proportion evaporating daily from a reservoir 100 yards square by 60 feet deep would not be 1/1000 of that lost from a tank measuring two feet each way. In times of calm, the gasses will be recombined in explosion motors working dynamos which produce electrical energy once more, or more probably in oxidation cells. Liquid hydrogen is weight for weight the most efficient known method of storing energy, as it gives about three times as much heat per pound as petrol. On the other hand it is very light, and bulk for bulk has only one third of the efficiency of petrol. This will not, however, detract from its use in aeroplanes, where weight is more important than bulk. These huge reservoirs of liquified gasses will enable wind energy to be stored, so that it can be expended for industry, transportation, heating and lighting, as desired. The initial costs will be very considerable, but the running expenses less than those of our present system. Among its more obvious advantages will be the fact that energy will be as cheap in one part of the country as another, so that industry will be greatly decentralized; and that no smoke or ash will be produced.
It is on some such lines as these, I think, that the problem will be solved. It is essentially a practical problem, and the exhaustion of our coal- fields will furnish the necessary stimulus for its solution. Even now perhaps Italy might achieve economic independence by the expenditure of a few million pounds upon research on the lines indicated. I may add in parenthesis that, on thermodynamical grounds which I can hardly summarize shortly, I do not much believe in the commercial possibility of induced radio-activity.
Before I turn to the principal part of my subject I should like to consider very briefly the influence on art and literature of our gradual conquest of space and time. I think that the blame for the decay of certain arts rests primarily on the defective education of the artists. An artist must understand his subject matter. At present not a single competent poet and very few painters and etchers outside the Glasgow School understand industrial life, and I believe that there is only one architect of any real originality who understands the possibilities of ferro-concrete. I do not know his name, but he produced in Soissons before the war a market-place with the dignity and daring of an ancient Egyptian temple. If I knew that he had been entrusted with the rebuilding of Soissons, I could not regret its destruction.
Now if we want poets to interpret physical science as Milton and Shelley did (Shelley and Keats were the last English poets who were at all up- to-date in their chemical knowledge), we must see that our possible poets are instructed, as their masters were, in science and economics. I am absolutely convinced that science is vastly more stimulating to the imagination than are the classics {4} , but the products of this stimulus do not normally see the light because scientific men as a class are devoid of any perception of literary form. When they can express themselves we get a Butler or a Norman Douglas. Not until our poets are once more drawn from the educated classes (I speak as a scientist), will they appeal to the average man by showing him the beauty in his own life as Homer and Virgil appealed to the street urchins who scrawled their verses on the walls of Pompeii.
And if we must educate our poets and artists in science, we must educate our masters, labour and capital, in art. Personally I believe that we may have good hopes of both. The capitalist's idea of art in industry at present tends to limit itself to painting green and white stripes on the front of his factories in certain cases. This is a primitive type of decoration, but it has, I think, the root of the matter in it. Before long someone may discover that frescoes inside a factory increase the average efficiency of the worker 1.03% and art will become a commercial proposition once more. Even now it is being discovered that artistic advertising often pays. Similarly I do not doubt that labour will come to find that it cannot live by bread (or shall we say bread and beer) alone. But it can hardly be expected to make this discovery until it is assured of its supply of bread and beer.
Applied chemistry has introduced into human life no radical novelty of the importance of the heat-engine or the telegraph. It has vastly increased the production of various types of substance the most important being metals. But there were explosives, dyes and drugs before chemistry was a science, and its progress along present lines will mainly alter life in a quantitative manner. Perhaps the biggest problems before it in metallurgy are the utilization of low-grade iron ores, and the production of aluminium from clay, which contains up to 24% of that metal. I do not think that even when this is accomplished aluminium will oust iron and steel as they ousted bronze and flint, but it and its alloys will certainly take the second, and possibly the first place as industrial metals. There is just a hope, though I fear little more, that a large-scale production of perfume may form the basis of a re-education of our rather rudimentary sense of smell, but the most interesting possibilities of chemical invention are very clearly in biological chemistry, and for the following reasons.
Desirable substances fall on the whole into two classes. The first are desirable on account of their physical or chemical properties, for example iron, wood or glass, which we use as a part of systems such as fires, houses or razors, which procure us certain benefits. The second are desirable on account of their physiological properties. Such substances include foods, drinks, tobacco and drugs. Colours and scents occupy an intermediate position. The value of this second class of substances rests on a quite special relationship to the human organism which depends in the most intimate way on the constitution of the latter, and has not in general been at all fully explained in terms of physics and chemistry. For example fires can be made of coal or peat instead of wood, but no other chemical substance has the same effect as water or alcohol. So unless a chemical substance has new physiological properties its production will merely serve to improve or make possible some appliance whose use lies within the sphere of applied physics. Within historical time two and only two substances of the second class have come into universal use in Europe, namely caffeine and nicotine, which were introduced into this country in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There are others of immense importance, such as chloroform and quinine, but their use is not universal. But coffee, tea, and tobacco, with alcohol, are as much a part of normal life as food and water. There is no reason to suppose that the list of such substances is exhausted. During the war Embden {5} the professor of physiology in Frankfurt University discovered that a dose of about 7 grams of acid sodium phosphate increased a man's capacity for prolonged muscular work by about 20% and probably aids in prolonged mental work. It can be taken over very lengthy periods. A group of coal-miners took it for nine months on end with very great effects on their output. It has no after-effects like those of alcohol, and one cannot take a serious overdose as it merely acts as a purgative. (they gave certain Stosstruppen too much!) Thousands of people in Germany take it habitually. It is possible that it may become as normal a beverage as coffee or tea. It costs 1/9 per pound, or 1/3d. per dose.
The vast majority of chemical substances with physiological properties are unsuited for daily use like castor oil, or dangerous like morphine; probably none are without bad effects in certain cases. Those which are susceptible of daily use are of the utmost social importance. Tobacco has slight but definite effects on the character. Coffee-houses in London in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and cafes in modern Europe were and are civilizing influences of incalculable value. But these substances are profoundly obnoxious to a certain type of mind. It would perhaps be fantastic to suggest that Sir Walter Raleigh owed his death in part to his sovereign's objection to tobacco. But if he is not its proto-martyr it is at least probable that more have died for tobacco smoking at the hands of Sikhs, Senussis, and Wahabis, whose religions forbid this practice, than died under the Roman empire for professing Christianity. Should it ever be generally realised that temperance is a mean we may expect that mankind will ultimately have at its disposal a vast array of substances like wine, coffee and tobacco, whose intelligent use can add to the amenity of life and promote the expression of man's higher faculties.
But before that day comes chemistry will be applied to the production of a still more important group of physiologically active substances, namely foods. The facts about food are rather curious. Everyone knows that food is ultimately produced by plants, though we may get it at second or third hand if we eat animals or their products. But the average plant turns most of its sugar not into starch which is digestible, but into cellulose which is not, but forms its woody skeleton. The hoofed animals have dealt with this problem in their own way, by turning their bellies into vast hives of bacteria that attack cellulose, and on whose by-products they live. We have got to do the same, but outside our bodies. It may be done on chemical lines. Irvine has obtained a 95% yield of sugar from cellulose, but at a prohibitive cost. Or we may use micro-organisms, but in any case within the next century sugar and starch will be about as cheap as sawdust. Many of our foodstuffs, including the proteins, we shall probably build up from simpler sources such as coal and atmospheric nitrogen. I should be inclined to allow 120 years, but not much more, before a completely satisfactory diet can be produced in this way on a commercial scale.
This will mean that agriculture will become a luxury, and that mankind will be completely urbanized. Personally I do not regret the probable disappearance of the agricultural labourer in favour of the factory worker, who seems to me a higher type of person from most points of view. Human progress in historical time has been the progress of cities dragging a reluctant countryside in their wake. Synthetic food will substitute the flower garden and the factory for the dunghill and the slaughterhouse, and make the city at last self-sufficient.
There's many a strong farmer whose heart would break in two
If he could see the townland that we are riding to.
Boughs have their fruit and blossom at all times of the year,
Rivers are running over with red beer and brown beer,
An old man plays the bagpipes in a golden and silver wood,
Queens, their eyes blue like the ice, are dancing in a crowd.
I should have like had time allowed to have added my quota to the speculations which have been made with regard to inter-planetary communication. Whether this is possible I can form no conjecture; that it will be attempted I have no doubt whatever.
With regard to the application of biology to human life, the average prophet appears to content himself with considerable if rather rudimentary progress in medicine and surgery, some improvements in domestic plants and animals, and possibly the introduction of a little eugenics. The eugenic official, a compound, it would appear, of the policeman, the priest and the procurer, is to hale us off at suitable intervals to the local temple of Venus Genetrix with a partner chosen, one gathers, by something of a glorified medical board. To this prophecy I should reply that it proceeds from a type of mind as lacking in originality as in knowledge of human nature. Marriage "by numbers", so to speak, was a comparatively novel idea when proposed by Plato 2,300 years ago, but it has already actually been practised in various places, notably among the subject of the Jesuits in Paraguay. It is moreover likely, as we shall see, that the ends proposed by the eugenist will be attained in a very different manner.
But before we proceed to prophecy I should like to turn back to the past and examine very briefly the half dozen or so important biological inventions which have already been made. By a biological invention I mean the establishment of a new relationship between man and other animals or plants, or between different human beings, provided that such relationship is one which comes primarily under the domain of biology rather than physics, psychology or ethics. Of the biological inventions of the past, four were made before the dawn of history. I refer to the domestication of animals, the domestication of plants, the domestication of fungi for the production of alcohol, and to a fourth invention, which I believe was of more ultimate and far-reaching importance than any of these, since it altered the path of sexual selection, focussed the attention of man as a lover upon woman's face and breasts, and changed our idea of beauty from the steatapygous Hottentot to the modern European, from the Venus of Brassempouy to the Venus of Milo. There are certain races which have not yet made this last invention. And in our own day two more have been made, namely bactericide and the artificial control of conception.
The first point that we may notice about these inventions is that they have all had a profound emotional and ethical effect. Of the four earlier there is not one which has not formed the basis of a religion. I do not know what strange god will have the hardihood to adopt Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant in the place of Triptolemus and Noah, but one may remark that it is impossible to keep religion out of any discussion of the practices which they popularized.
The second point is perhaps harder to express. The chemical or physical inventor is always a Prometheus. There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god. But if every physical and chemical invention is a blasphemy, every biological invention is a perversion. There is hardly one which, on first being brought to the notice of an observer from any nation which has not previously heard of their existence, would not appear to him as indecent and unnatural.
Consider so simple and time-honored a process as the milking of a cow. The milk which should have been an intimate and almost sacramental bond between mother and child is elicited by the deft fingers of a milk-maid, and drunk, cooked, or even allowed to rot into cheese. We have only to imagine ourselves as drinking any of its other secretions, in order to realise the radical indecency of our relation to the cow. {6}
No less disgusting a priori is the process of corruption which yields our wine and beer. But in actual fact the process of milking and of the making and drinking of beer appear to us profoundly natural; they have even tended to develop a ritual of their own whose infraction nowadays has a certain air of impropriety. There is something slightly disgusting in the idea of milking a cow electrically or drinking beer out of tea-cups. And all this of course applies much more strongly to the sexual act.
I fancy that the sentimental interest attaching to Prometheus has unduly distracted our attention from the far more interesting figure of Daedalus. It is with infinite relief that amidst a welter of heroes armed with gorgon's heads or protected by Stygian baptisms the student of Greek mythology comes across the first modern man. Beginning as a realistic sculptor (he was the first to produce statues whose feet were separated) it was natural that he should proceed to the construction of an image of Aphrodite whose limbs were activated by quicksilver. After this his interest inevitably turned to biological problems, and it is safe to say that posterity has never equaled is only recorded success in experimental genetics. Had the housing and feeding of the Minotaur been less expensive it is probable that Daedalus would have anticipated Mendel. But Minos held that a labyrinth and an annual provision of 50 youths and 50 virgins were excessive as an endowment for research, and in order to escape from his ruthless economies Daedalus was forced to invent the art of flying. Minos pursued him to Sicily and was slain there. Save for his valuable invention of glue, little else is known of Daedalus. But it is most significant that, although he was responsible for the death of Zeus' son Minos he was neither smitten by a thunderbolt, chained to a rock, nor pursued by furies. Still less did any of the rather numerous visitors to Hades discover him either in Elysium or Tartarus. We can hardly imagine him as a member of the throng of shades who besieged Charon's ferry like sheep at a gap. He was the first to demonstrate that the scientific worker is not concerned with gods.
The unconscious mind of the early Greeks, who focussed in this amazing figure the dim traditions of Minoan science, was presumably aware of this fact. The most monstrous and unnatural action in all human legend was unpunished in this world or the next. Even the death of Icarus must have weighed lightly with a man who had already been banished from Athens for the murder of his nephew. But if he escaped the vengeance of the gods he has been exposed to the universal and agelong reprobation of a humanity to whom biological inventions are abhorrent, with one very significant exception. Socrates was proud to claim him as an ancestor.
The biological invention then tends to begin as a perversion and end as a ritual supported by unquestioned beliefs and prejudices. Even now surgical cleanliness is developing its rites and its dogmas, which, it may be remarked, are accepted most religiously by women. With the above facts in your minds I would ask you to excuse what at first sight might appear improbable or indecent in any speculations which appear below, and to dismiss from your minds the belief that biology will consist merely and physical and chemical discoveries as applied to men, animals and plants.
I say advisedly "will consist", for we are at present almost completely ignorant of biology, a fact which often escapes the notice of biologists, and renders them to presumptuous in their estimates of the present position of their science, too modest in their claims for its future. If for example we take a typical case of applied biology such as the detection and destruction of the cholera bacillus, we find a great deal of science involved, but the only purely biological principle s the very important but not very profound one that some bacteria kill some men. The really scientific parts of the process are the optical and chemical methods involved in the magnification, staining and killing of the bacilli. When on the other hand we come to immunization to typhoid we find certain purely biological principles involved which are neither simple nor at all completely understood.
Actually biological theory consists of some ancient but not very easily stated truths about organisms in general, due largely to Aristotle, Hippocrates and Harvey, a few great principles such as those formulated by Darwin, Mayer, Claude Bernard, and Mendel, and a vast mass of facts about individual organisms and their parts which are still awaiting adequate generalization.
Darwin's results are beginning to be appreciated, with alarming effects on certain types of religion, those of Weismann and Mendel will be digested in the course of the present century, and are going to affect political and philosophical theories almost equally profoundly. I need hardly say that these latter results deal with the question of reproduction and heredity. We may expect, moreover, as time goes on, that a series of shocks of the type of Darwinism will be given to established opinions on all sorts of subjects. One cannot suggest in detail what these shocks will be, but since the opinions on which they will impinge are deep-seated and irrational, they will come upon us and our descendants with the same air of presumption and indecency with which the view that we are descended from monkeys came to our grandfathers. But owing to man's fortunate capacity for thinking in watertight (or rather idea-tight) compartments, they will probably not have immediate and disruptive effects upon society any more than Darwinism had.
Far more profound will be the effect of the practical applications of biology. I believe that the progress of medicine has had almost, if not quite, as deep an effect on society in Western Europe as the industrial revolution. Apart from the important social consequences which have flowed from the partial substitution of the doctor for the priest, its net result has been that whereas four hundred years ago most people died in childhood, they now live on an average, (apart from the late war), until forty-five. Bad as our urban conditions are, there is not a slum in the country which has a third of the infantile death-rates of the royal family in the middle ages. Largely as a result of this religion has come to lay less and less stress on a good death, and more and more on a good life, and its whole outlook has gradually changed in consequence. Death has receded so far into the background of our normal thoughts that when we came into somewhat close contact with it during the war most of us failed to take it seriously.
Similarly institutions which were based on short lives have almost wholly collapsed. For example the English land system postulated that the land- owner should die aged about forty, and be succeeded by his eldest son, aged about twenty. The son had spent most of his life on the estate, and had few interests outside it. He managed it at least as well as anyone else could have done. Nowadays the father dodders on till about eighty, and is generally incompetent for ten years before his death. His son succeeds him at the age of fifty or so, by which time he may be a fairly competent colonel or stockbroker, but cannot hope to learn the art of managing an estate. In consequence he either hands it over to an agent who is often corrupt, or runs it unscientifically, gets a low return, and ascribes to Bolshevism what he should really lay at the door of vaccination.
But to return, if I may use the expression, to the future, I am going to suggest a few obvious developments which seem probable in the present state of biological science, without assuming any great new generalizations of the type of Darwinism. I have the very best precedents for introducing a myth at this point, so perhaps I may be excused if I reproduce some extracts from an essay on the influence of biology on history during the 20th century which will (it is hoped) be read by a rather stupid undergraduate member of this university to his supervisor during his first term 150 years hence.
``As early as the first decade of the twentieth century we find a conscious attempt at the application of biology to politics in the so-called eugenic movement. A number of earnest persons, having discovered the existence of biology, attempted to apply it in its then very crude condition to the production of a race of super-men, and in certain countries managed to carry a good deal of legislation. They appear to have managed to prevent the transmission of a good deal of syphilis, insanity, and the like, and they certainly succeeded in producing the most violent opposition and hatred amongst the classes whom they somewhat gratuitously regarded as undesirable parents. (There was even a rebellion in Nebraska). However, they undoubtably prepared public opinion for what was to come, and so far served a useful purpose. Far more important was the progress in medicine which practically abolished infectious diseases in those countries which were prepared to tolerate the requisite amount of state interference in private life, and finally, after the league's {7} ordinance of 1958, all over the world; though owing to Hindu opposition, parts of India were still quite unhealthy up to 1980 or so.
But from a wider point of view the most important biological work in the first third of the century was in experimental zoology and botany. When we consider that in 1912 Morgan had located several Mendelian factors in the nucleus of Drosophila, and modified its sex-ratio, while Marmorek had taught a harmless bacillus to kill guinea-pigs, and finally in 1913 Brachet had grown rabbit embryos in serum for some days, it is remarkable how little the scientific workers of that time, and a fortiori the general public, seem to have foreseen the practical bearing of such results.
As a matter of fact it was not until 1940 that Selkovski invented the purple alga Porphyrococcus fixator which was to have so great an effect on the world's history. In the 50 years before this date the world's average wheat yield per hectare had been approximately doubled, partly by the application of various chemical manures, but most of all by the results of systematic crossing work with different races; there was however little prospect of further advance on any of these lines. Porphyrococcus is an enormously efficient nitrogen-fixer and will grow in almost any climate where there are water and traces of potash and phosphates in the soil, obtaining its nitrogen from the air. It has about the effect in four days that a crop of vetches would have had in a year. It could not, of course, have been produced in the course of nature, as its immediate ancestors would only grow in artificial media and could not have survived outside a laboratory. Wherever nitrogen was the principal limiting factor to plant growth it doubled the yield of wheat, and quadrupled the value of grass land for grazing purposes. The enormous fall in food prices and the ruin of purely agricultural states was of course one of the chief causes of the disastrous events of 1943 and 1944. The food glut was also greatly accentuated when in 1942 the Q strain of Porphyrococcus escaped into the sea and multiplied with enormous rapidity. Indeed for two months the surface of the tropical Atlantic set to a jelly, with disastrous results to the weather of Europe. When certain of the plankton organisms developed ferments capable of digesting it the increase of the fish population of the seas was so great as to make fish the universal food that it is now, and to render even England self-supporting in respect of food. So great was the prosperity in England that in that year the coal-miner's union entered its first horse for the Derby (a horse-race which still took place annually at that time).
It was of course as a result of its invasion by Porphyrococcus that the sea assumed the intense purple colour which seems so natural to us, but which so distressed the more aesthetically minded of our great grand- parents who witnessed the change. It is certainly curious to us to read of the sea as having been green or blue. I need not detail the work of Ferguson and Rahmatullah who in 1957 produced the lichen which has bound the drifting sand of the world's deserts (for it was merely a continuation of that of Selkovski), nor yet the story of how the agricultural countries dealt with their unemployment by huge socialistic windpower schemes.
It was in 1951 that Dupont and Schwarz produced the first ectogenetic child. As early as 1901 Heape had transferred embryo rabbits from one female to another, in 1925 Haldane had grown embryonic rats in serum for ten days, but had failed to carry the process to its conclusion, and it was not till 1946 that Clark succeeded with the pig, using Kehlmann's solution as medium. Dupont and Schwarz obtained a fresh ovary from a woman who was the victim of an aeroplane accident, and kept it living in their medium for five years. They obtained several eggs from it and fertilized them successfully, but the problem of nutrition and support of the embryo was more difficult, and was only solved in the fourth year. Now that the technique is fully developed, we can take an ovary from a woman, and keep it growing in a suitable fluid for as long as twenty years, producing a fresh ovum each month, of which 90 per cent can be fertilized, and the embryos grown successfully for nine months, and then brought out into the air. Schwarz never got such good results, but the news of his first success caused an unprecedented sensation throughout the entire world, for the birthrate was already less than the death rate in most civilised countries. France was the first country to adopt ectogenesis officially, and by 1968 was producing 60,000 children annually by this method. In most countries the opposition was far stronger, and was intensified by the Papal Bull ``Nunquam prius audito'', and by the similar fetwa of the Khalif, both of which appeared in 1960.
As we know ectogenesis is now universal, and in this country less than 30 per cent of children are now born of woman. The effect on human psychology and social life of the separation of sexual love and reproduction which was begun in the 19th century and completed in the 20th is by no means wholly satisfactory. The old family life had certainly a good deal to commend it, and although nowadays we bring on lactation in women by injection of placentin as a routine, and thus conserve much of what was best in the former instinctive cycle, we must admit that in certain respects our great grandparents had the advantage of us. On the other hand it is generally admitted that the effects of selection have more than counterbalanced these evils. The small proportion of men and women who are selected as ancestors for the next generation are so undoubtedly superior to the average that the advance in each generation in any single respect, from the increased output of first-class music to the decreased convictions for theft, is very startling. {8} Had it not been for ectogenesis there can be little doubt that civilisation would have collapsed within a measurable time owing to the greater fertility of the less desirable members of the population in almost all countries.
It is perhaps fortunate that the process of becoming an ectogenetic mother of the next generation involves an operation which is somewhat unpleasant, though now no longer disfiguring or dangerous, and never physiologically injurious, and is therefore an honour but by no means a pleasure. Had this not been the case, it is perfectly possible that popular opposition would have proved too strong for the selectionist movement. As it was the opposition was very fierce, and characteristically enough this country only adopted its present rather stringent standard of selection a generation late than Germany, though it is now perhaps more advanced than any other country in this respect. The advantages of thorough-going selection, have, however, proved to be enormous. The question of the ideal sex ratio is still a matter of violent discussion, but the modern reaction towards equality is certainly strong.''
Our essayist would then perhaps go on to discuss some far more radical advances made about 1990, but I have only quoted his account of the earlier applications of biology. The second appears to me to be neither impossible nor improbable, but it has those features which we saw above to be characteristic of biological inventions. If reproduction is once completely separated from sexual love mankind will be free in an altogether new sense. At present the national character is changing slowly according to quite unknown laws. The problem of politics is to find institutions suitable to it. In the future perhaps it may be possible by selective breeding to change character as quickly as institutions. I can foresee the election placards of 300 years hence, if such quaint political methods survive, which is perhaps improbable, ``Vote for Smith and more musicians'', ``Vote for O'Leary and more girls'', or perhaps finally ``Vote for Macpherson and a prehensile tail for your great-grandchildren''. We can already alter animal species to an enormous extent, and it seems only a question of time before we shall be able to apply the same principles to our own.
I suggest then that biology will probably be applied on lines roughly resembling the above. There are perhaps equally great possibilities in the way of direct improvement of the individual, as we come to know more of the physiological obstacles to the development of different faculties. But at present we can only guess at the nature of these obstacles, and the line of attack suggested in the myth is the one which seems most obvious to a Darwinian. We already know however that many of our spiritual faculties can only be manifested if certain glands, notably the thyroid and sex-glands, are functioning properly, and that very minute changes in such glands affect the character greatly. As our knowledge of this subject increases we may be able, for example, to control our passions by some more direct method than fasting and flagellation, to stimulate our imagination by some reagent with less after- effects than alcohol, to deal with perverted instincts by physiology rather than prison. Conversely there will inevitably arise possibilities of new vices similar to but even more profound than those opened up by the pharmacological discoveries of the 19th century.
The recent history of medicine is as follows. Until about 1870 medicine was largely founded on physiology, or, as the Scotch called it ``Institutes of medicine''. Disease was looked at from the point of view of the patient, as injuries still are. Pasteur's discovery of the nature of infectious disease transformed the whole outlook, and made it possible to abolish one group of diseases. But it also diverted scientific medicine from its former path, and it is probable that, were bacteria unknown, though many more people would die of sepsis and typhoid, we should be better able to cope with kidney disease and cancer. Certain diseases such as cancer are probably not due to specific organisms, whilst others such as phthisis are due to forms which are fairly harmless to the average person, but attack others for unknown reasons. We are not likely to deal with them effectually on Pasteur's lines, we must divert our view from the micro-organism to the patient. Where the doctor cannot deal with the former he can often keep the patient alive long enough to be able to do so himself. And here he has to rely largely on a knowledge of physiology. I do not say that a physiologist will discover how to prevent cancer. Pasteur started life as a crystallographer. But whoever does so is likely at least to make use of physiological data on a large scale.
The abolition of disease will make death a physiological event like sleep. A generation that has lived together will die together. I suspect that man's desire for a future life is largely due to two causes, a feeling that most lives are incomplete, and a desire to meet friends from whom we have parted prematurely. A gentle decline into the grave at the end of a completed life's work will largely do away with the first, and our contemporaries will rarely leave us sorrowing for long.
Old age is perhaps harder on women than on men. They live longer, but their life is too often marred by the sudden change which generally overtakes them between forty and fifty, and sometimes leaves them a prey to disease, though it may improve their health. This change seems to be due to a sudden failure of a definite chemical substance produced by the ovary. When we can isolate and synthesize this body we shall be able to prolong a woman's youth, and allow her to age as gradually as the average man.
Psychology is hardly a science yet. Like biology it has arrived at certain generalizations of a rather abstract and philosophic character, but these are still to some extent matters of controversy. And though a vast number of most important empirical facts are known, only a few great generalizations from them --- such as the existence of the subconscious mind --- have yet been made. But anyone who has seen even a single example of the power of hypnotism and suggestion must realise that the face of the world and the possibilities of existence will be totally altered when we can control their effects and standardize their application, as has been possible, for example, with drugs which were once regarded as equally magical. Infinitely greater, of course, would be the results of the opening up of systematic communication with spiritual beings in another world, which is claimed as a scientific possibility. Spiritualism is already Christianity's most formidable enemy, and we have no data which allow us to estimate the probable effect on man of a religion whose dogmas are matters of experiment, whose mysteries are prosaic as electric lighting, whose ethics are based on the observed results in the next world of a good or bad life in this. Yet that is the prospect before us if spiritualism obtains the scientific verification which it is now demanding, not perhaps with great success.
I have only been able, in the time at my disposal, to traverse a very few of the possible fields of scientific advance. If I have convinced anyone present that science has still a good deal up her sleeve, and that of sufficiently startling character, I shall be amply repaid. If anything I have said appears to be of a gratuitously disgusting nature, I would reply that certain phenomena of normal life do seem to many to be of that nature, and that these phenomena are of the utmost scientific and practical importance.
I have tried to show why I believe that the biologist is the most romantic figure on earth at the present day. At first sight he seems to be just a poor little scrubby underpaid man, groping blindly amid the mazes of the ultra-microscopic, engaging in bitter and lifelong quarrels over the nephridia of flatworms, waking perhaps one morning to find that someone whose name he has never heard has demolished by a few crucial experiments the work which he had hoped would render him immortal. There is real tragedy in his life, but he knows that he has a responsibility which he dare not disclaim, and he is urged on, apart from all utilitarian considerations, by something or someone which he feels to be higher than himself.
The conservative has but little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of the passions. These are the wreckers of outworn empires and civilisations, doubters, disintegrators, deicides {9} . In the past they have been, in general, men like Voltaire, Bentham, Thales, Marx, and very possibly the divine Julius {10} , but I think that Darwin furnishes an example of the same relentlessness of reason in the field of science. I suspect that as it becomes clear that at present reason not only has a freer play in science than elsewhere, but can produce as great effects on the world through science as through politics, philosophy, or literature, there will be more Darwins. Such men are interested primarily in truth as such, but they can hardly be quite uninterested in what will happen when they throw down their dragon's teeth into the world.
I do not say that biologists as a general rule try to imagine in any detail the future applications of their science. The central problems of life for them may be the relationship between the echinoderms and the brachiopods, and the attempt to live on their salaries. They do not see themselves as sinister and revolutionary figures. They have no time to dream. But I suspect that more of them dream than would care to confess it.
I have given above a very small selection from my dreams. Perhaps they are bad dreams. It is of course almost hopeless to attempt any very exact prophecies as to how in detail scientific knowledge is going to revolutionize human life, but I believe that it will continue to do so, and even more profoundly than I have suggested. And though personally I am Victorian enough in my sympathies to hope that after all family life, for example, may be spared, I can only reiterate that not one of the practical advances which I have predicted is not already foreshadowed by recent scientific work. If a chemist or physicist living at the end of the seventeenth century had been asked to predict the future application of his science he would doubtless have made many laughable errors in the best Laputan style, but he would have been certain that it would somehow be applied, and his faith would have been justified.
We must regard science then from three points of view. First it is the free activity of man's divine faculties of reason and imagination. Secondly it is the answer of the few to the demands of the many for wealth, comfort and victory, for {Here Haldane quots a Greek phrase I cannot reproduce in ASCII}, gifts which it will grant only in exchange for peace, security and stagnation. Finally it is man's gradual conquest, first of space and time, then of matter as such, then of his own body and those of other living beings, and finally the subjugation of the dark and evil elements in his own soul.
None of these conquests will ever be complete but all, I believe will be progressive. The question of what he will do with these powers is essentially a question for religion and aesthetic. It may be urged that they are only fit to be placed in the hands of a being who has learned to control himself, and that man armed with science is like a baby armed with a box of matches.
The answer to this contention may, I think, be found in the daily papers. For scores of centuries idealists had urged that wars must cease and all the earth be united under one rule. As long as any other alternative was possible it was persisted in. The events of the last nine years constituted a reductio ad absurdum of war, but when we ask who responsible for this we shall find that it was not the visionaries but men like Black, Kekule, and Langley, who enlarged man's power over nature until he was forced by the inexorable logic of facts to form the nucleus of an international government.
We have already reacted against the frame of mind that engendered the league of nations, but we have not reacted at all completely. The league exists and is working, and in every country on earth there are many people, and ordinary normal people, who favor the idea in one form or another of a world state. I do not suggest that a world-state will arise from the present league --- or for the matter of that from the third international. I merely observe that there is a widespread and organized desire for such an institution, and several possible nuclei for it. It may take another world-war or two to convert the majority. The prospect of the next world-war has at least this satisfactory element. In the late war the most rabid nationalists were to be found well behind the front line. In the next war no one will be behind the front line. It will be brought home to all whom it may concern that war is a very dirty business.
No doubt there is a fair chance that the possibility of human organization on a planetary scale may be rendered impossible by such a war. If so mankind will probably have to wait for a couple of thousand years for another opportunity. But to the student of geology such a period is negligible. It took man 250,000 years to transcend the hunting pack. It will not take him so long to transcend the nation.
I think then that the tendency of applied science is to magnify injustices until they become too intolerable to be borne, and the average man whom all the prophets and poets could not move, turns at least and extinguishes the evil at its source. Marx' theory of industrial evolution is a particular example of this tendency, though it does not in the least follow that his somewhat artificial solution of the problem will be adopted.
It is probable that biological progress will prove to be as incompatible with certain of our social evils as industrial progress has proved to be with war or certain systems of private ownership. To take a concrete example it is clear that the second biological invention considered by my future essayist would be intolerable in conjunction with our present system of relations between classes and sexes. Moral progress is so difficult that I think any developments are to be welcomed which present it as the naked alternative to destruction, no matter how horrible may be the stimulus which is necessary before man will take the moral step in question.
To sum up, then, science is as yet in its infancy, and we can foretell little of the future save that the thing that has not been is the thing that shall be; that no beliefs, no values, no institutions are safe. So far from being an isolated phenomenon the late war is only an example of the disruptive result that we may constantly expect from the progress of science. The future will be no primrose path. It will have its own problems. Some will be the secular problems of the past, giant flowers of evil blossoming at last to their own destruction. Others will be wholly new. Whether in the end man will survive his ascensions of power we cannot tell. But the problem is no new one. It is the old paradox of freedom re-enacted with mankind for actor and the earth for stage. To those who believe in the divinity of that part of man which aspires after knowledge for its own sake, who are, in the words of Boethius:
te cernere finis
Principum, vector, dux, semita, terminus idem
the prospect will appear most hopeful. But it is only hopeful if mankind can adjust its morality to its powers. If we can succeed in this, then science holds in her hands one at least of the keys to the thorny and arduous path of moral progress, then:
Per cruciamina leti
Via panditur ardua justis,
Et ad astra doloribus itur.
That is possibly a correct large-scale view, but it is only for short periods that one can take views of history sufficiently broad to render the fate of one's own generation irrelevant. The scientific worker is brought up with the moral values of his neighbors. He is perhaps fortunate if he does not realize that it is his destiny to turn good into evil. The moral and physical (though not the intellectual) virtues are means between two extremes. They are essentially quantitative. It follows that an alteration in the scale of human power will render actions bad which were formerly good. Our increased knowledge of hygiene has transformed resignation and inaction in face of epidemic disease from a religious virtue to a justly punishable offence. We have improved our armaments, and patriotism, which was once a flame upon the altar, has become a world-devouring conflagration.
The time has gone by when a Huxley could believe that while science might indeed remould traditional mythology, traditional morals were impregnable and sacrosanct to it. We must learn not to take traditional morals too seriously. And it is just because even the least dogmatic of religions tends to associate itself with some kind of unalterable moral tradition, that there can be no truce between science and religion.
There does not seem to be any particular reason why a religion should not arise with an ethic as fluid as Hindu mythology, but it has not yet arisen. Christianity has probably the most flexible morals of any religion, because Jesus left no code of law behind him like Moses or Muhammad, and his moral precepts are so different from those of ordinary life that no society has ever made any serious attempt to carry them out, such as was possible in the case of Israel and Islam. But every Christian church has tried to impose a code of morals of some kind for which it has claimed divine sanction. As these codes have always been opposed to those of the gospels a loophole has been left for moral progress such as hardly exists in other religions. This is no doubt an argument for Christianity as against other religions, but not as against none at all, or as against a religion which will frankly admit that its mythology and morals are provisional. That is the only sort of religion that would satisfy the scientific mind, and it is very doubtful whether it could properly be called a religion at all.
No doubt many people hope that such a religion may develop from Christianity. The human intellect is feeble, and there are times when it does not assert the infinity of its claims. But even then:
Though in black jest it bows and nods
* * * *
I know it is roaring at the gods
Waiting for the last eclipse.
The scientific worker of the future will more and more resemble the lonely figure of Daedalus as he becomes conscious of his ghastly mission, and proud of it.
Black is his robe from top to toe,
His flesh is white and warm below,
All through his silent veins flow free
Hunger and thirst and venery,
But in his eyes a still small flame
Like the first cell from which he came
Burns round and luminous, as he rides
Singing my song of deicides.
NOTES
1: Speaking as a physicist, and with all due respect for Haldane, Einstein's theories do not depend on any "ideality" of space or time, or even imply their ideality. See Russell's The ABC of Relativity, or Wheeler's Spacetime Physics.
2: Cf. Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars and Stewart Brand's The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT.
3: Cf. John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State.
4: Haldane took first honors in both mathematics and classics as an undergraduate.
5: Embden, Grafe and Schmitz. Zeitschrift fur physiologische Chemie, Vol. 113, p. 67, 1921. [Haldane's note.]
6: The Hindus have recognized the special and physiological relation of man to the cow by making the latter animal holy. A good Hindu would no more kill a cow than his foster-mother. But the holiness of the cow has unfortunately extend to all its products, and the extensive use of cow dung in Indian religious ceremonies is disgusting to the average European. The latter, however, is insensitive to the equally loathsome injunctions of the Catholic Church with regard to human marriage. It would perhaps be better if both marriage and milking could be secularized. [Haldane's note.]
7: All references to "the league" are to the League of Nations.
8: Whether Haldane meant that there were fewer thieves, or merely fewer dumb enough to let themselves be convicted, is unclear.
9: That is, god-killers.
10: That is, Julius Caesar.
by J. B. S. Haldane
INTRODUCTION
I have slightly expanded certain parts of this paper since reading it. It has therefore probably lost any unity which it may once have possessed. It will be criticized for its undue emphasis on certain unpleasant topics. This is necessary if people are to be induced to think about them, and it is the whole business of a university teacher to induce people to think.
DAEDALUS, or, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE
As I sit down to write these pages I can see before me two scenes from my experience of the late war. The first is a glimpse of a forgotten battle of 1915. It has a curious suggestion of a rather bad cinema film. Through a blur of dust and fumes there appear, quite suddenly, great black and yellow masses of smoke which seem to be tearing up the surface of the earth and disintegrating the works of man with an almost visible hatred. These form the chief part of the picture, but some where in the middle distance one can see a few irrelevant looking human figures, and soon there are fewer. It is hard to believe that these are the protagonists in the battle. One would rather choose those huge substantive oily black masses which are so much more conspicuous, and suppose that the men are in reality their servants, and playing an inglorious, subordinate, and fatal part in the combat. It is possible, after all, that this view is correct.
Had I been privileged to watch a battle three years later, the general aspect would have been very similar, but there would have been fewer men and more shell-bursts. There would probably, however, have been one very significant addition. Then men would have been running, with mad terror in their eyes, from gigantic steel slugs, which were deliberately, relentlessly and successfully pursuing them.
The other picture is of three Europeans in India looking at a great new star in the milky way. These were apparently all of the guests at a large dance who were interested in such matters. Amongst those who were at all competent to form views as to the origin of this cosmoclastic explosion, the most popular theory attributed it to a collision between two stars, or a star and a nebula. There seem, however, to be at least two possible alternatives to this hypothesis. Perhaps it was the last judgement of some inhabited world, perhaps a too successful experiment in induced radioactivity the part of some of the dwellers there. And perhaps also these two hypotheses are identical, and what we were watching that evening was the detonation of a world on which too many men came out to look at the stars when they should have been dancing.
These two scenes suggest, very briefly, a part of the case against science. Has mankind released from the womb of matter a Demogorgon which is already beginning to turn against him, and may at any moment hurl him into the bottomless void? Or is Samuel Butler's even more horrible vision correct, in which man becomes a mere parasite of machinery, an appendage of the reproductive system of huge and complicated engines which will successively usurp his activities, and end by ousting him from the mastery of this planet? Is the machine-minder engaged on repetition-work the goal and ideal to which humanity is tending? Perhaps a survey of the present trend of science may throw some light on these questions.
But first we may consider for a moment, the question of whether there is any hope of stopping the progress of scientific research. It is after all a very recent form of human activity, and a sufficiently universal protest of mankind would be able to arrest it even now. In the middle ages public opinion made it so dangerous as to be practically impossible, and I am inclined to suspect that Mr. Chesterton, for example, would not be averse to a repetition of this state of things. The late M. Joseph Reinach, an able and not wholly illiberal thinker, publicly advocated it.
I think, however, that so long as our present economic and national systems continue, scientific research has little to fear. Capitalism, though it may not always give the scientific worker a living wage, will always protect him, as being one of the geese which produce golden eggs for its table. And competitive nationalism, even if war is wholly or largely prevented, will hardly forego the national advantages accruing from scientific research.
If we look at the other most probable alternative the prospect is little more hopeful. In this country the labour party alone among political organizations includes the fostering of research in its official programme. Indeed as far as biological research is concerned labour may prove a better master than capitalism, and there can be little doubt that it would be equally friendly to physical and chemical research if these came to lead immediately to shortened hours rather than to unemployment. In particular there is perhaps reason to think that that form of sentimentalism which hampers medical research in this country by legislation would be less likely to flourish in a robust and selfish labour party of the Australian type than in parties whose members enjoy the leisure which seems necessary to the development of such emotional luxuries.
It is of course possible that civilisation may collapse throughout the world as it has done in parts of Russia, and science with it, but such an event would, in all probability, only postpone the problem for a few thousand years. And even in Russia we must not forget that first-rate scientific research is still being carried on.
The possibility has been suggested --- I do not know how seriously --- that the progress of science may cease through lack of new problems for investigation. Mr. Chesterton in The Napoleon of Notting Hill, a book written fifteen years or so ago, prophesied that hansom-cabs would still be in existence a hundred years hence owing to a cessation of invention. Within six years there was a hansom-cab in a museum, and now that romantic but tardy vehicle is a memory like the trireme, the velocipede, and the 1907 Voisin biplane. I do not suggest that Mr. Chesterton be dragged --- a heavier Hector --- behind the last hansom cab, but I do contend that, in so far as he claims to be a prophet rather than the voice of one crying in the wilderness, he may be regarded as negligible for the purposes of our discussion. I shall try shortly to show how far from complete are any branches of science at the present time.
But first a word on Mr. H. G. Wells might not be out of place. The very mention of the future suggests him. There are two points I wish to make about Mr. Wells. In the first place, considered as a serious prophet, as opposed to a fantastic romancer, he is singularly modest. In 1902, for example, in a book called ``Anticipations,'' he gave it as his personal opinion that by 1950 there would be heavier than air flying machines capable of practical use in war. That, he said, was his own view, though he was well aware that it would excite considerable ridicule. I propose in this paper to make no prophecies rasher than the above.
The second and more important point is that he is a generation behind the time. When his scientific ideas were formed, flying and radio-telegraphy, for example, were scientific problems, and the centre of scientific interest still lay in physics and chemistry. Now these are commercial problems, and I believe that the centre of scientific interest lies in biology. A generation hence it may be elsewhere, and the views expressed in this paper will appear as modest, conservative, and unimaginative as do many of those of Mr. Wells today.
I will only touch very briefly on the future of physics, as the subject is inevitably technical. At present physical theory is in a state of profound suspense. This is primarily due to Einstein --- the greatest Jew since Jesus. I have no doubt that Einstein's name will still be remembered and revered when Lloyd George, Foch, and William Hohenzollern share with Charlie Chaplin that ineluctable oblivion which awaits the uncreative mind. I trust that I may be excused if I trespass from the strict subject of my theme to add my quota to the rather numerous misstatements of Einstein's views which have appeared during the last few years.
Ever since the time of Berkeley it has been customary for the majority of metaphysicians to proclaim the ideality of Time, of Space, or of both. But they soon made it clear that in spite of this, time would continue to wait for no man, and space to separate lovers. The only practical consequences that they generally drew was that their own ethical and political views were somehow inherent in the structure of the universe. The experimental proof or disproof of such deductions is difficult, and --- if the late war may be regarded as an experimental disproof of certain of Hegel's political tenets --- costly and unsatisfactory.
Einstein, so far from deducing an new decalogue, has contented himself with deducing the consequences to space and time themselves of their ideality. These are mostly too small to be measurable, but some, such as the deflection of light but the sun's gravitational field, are susceptible of verification, and have been verified. The majority of scientific men are now being constrained by the evidence of these experiments to adopt a very extreme form of Kantian idealism. The Kantian Ding-an-sich is an eternal four-dimensional manifold, which we perceive as space and time, but what we regard as space and what as time is more or less fortuitous.
It is perhaps interesting to speculate on the practical consequences of Einstein's discovery. I do not doubt that he will be believed. A prophet who can give signs in the heavens is always believed. No one ever seriously questioned Newton's theory after the return of Halley's comet. Einstein has told us that space, time and matter are shadows of the fifth dimension, and the heavens have declared his glory. In consequence Kantian idealism will become the basal working hypothesis of the physicist and finally of all educated men, just as materialism did after Newton's day. We may not call ourselves materialists, but we do interpret the activities of the moon, the Thames, influenza, and aeroplanes in terms of matter. Our ancestors did not, nor, in all probability, will our descendants. The materialism (whether conscious or sub-conscious does not matter very much) of the last few generations has led to various results of practical importance, such as sanitation, Marxian socialism, and the right of an accused person to give evidence on his or her own behalf. The reign of Kantian idealism as the basal working hypothesis, first of physics, and then of every-day life, will in all probability last for some centuries. At the end of that time a similar step in advance will be taken. Einstein showed that experience cannot be interpreted in terms of space and time. This was a well-known fact, but so long as space and time down not break down in their own special sphere, that of explaining the facts of motion, physicists continued to believe in them, or at any rate, what was much more important, to think in terms of them for practical purposes.
A time will however come (as I believe) when physiology will invade and destroy mathematical physics, as the latter have destroyed geometry. The basic metaphysical working hypothesis of science and practical life will then, I think, be something like Bergsonian activism. I do not for one moment suggest that this or any other metaphysical system has any claims whatever to finality.
Meanwhile we are in for a few centuries during which many practical activities will probably be conducted on a basis, not of materialism, but of Kantian idealism. How will this affect our manners, morals and politics? Frankly I do not know, though I think the effect will be as great as that of Newton's work, which created most of the intellectual forces of the 18th century. The Condorcets, Benthams, and Marxs of the future will I think be as ruthlessly critical of the metaphysics and ethics of their times as were their predecessors, but not quite so sure of their own; they will lack a certain heaviness of touch which we may note in Utilitarianism and Socialism. They will recognise that perhaps in ethics as in physics, there are so to speak fourth and fifth dimensions that show themselves by effects which, like the perturbations of the planet Mercury, are hard to detect even in one generation, but yet perhaps in the course of ages are quite as important as the three- dimensional phenomena.
If the quantum hypothesis is generally adopted even more radical alterations in our thinking will be necessary. But I feel it premature even to suggest their direction in the present unsatisfactory state of quantum mechanics. It may be that as Poincare (the other Poincare) suggested we shall be forced to conceive of all changes as occurring in a series of clicks, and all space as consisting of discrete points. However this may be it is safe to say that a better knowledge of radiation will permit us to produce it in a more satisfactory manner than is at present possible. Almost all our present sources of light are hot bodies, 95% of whose radiation is invisible. To light a lamp as a source of light is about as wasteful of energy as to burn down one's house to roast one's pork. It is a fairly safe prophecy that in 50 years light will cost about a fiftieth of its present price, and there will be no more night in our cities. The alternation of day and night is a check on the freedom of human activity which must go the way of other spatial and temporal checks. In the long run I think that all that applied physics can do for us is abolish these checks. It enables us to possess more, travel more, and communicate more. I shall not attempt to predict in detail the future developments of transport and communication. They are only limited by the velocity of light. We are working towards a condition when any two persons on earth will be able to be completely present to one another in not more than 1/24 of a second. We shall never reach it, but that is the limit which we shall approach indefinitely. {2}
Developments in this direction are tending to bring mankind more and more together, to render life more and more complex, artificial, and rich in possibilities --- to increase indefinitely man's powers for good and evil.
But there are two prerequisites for all progress of this kind, namely continuous supplies of human and mechanical power. As industries become more and more closely interwoven, so that a dislocation of any one will paralyse a dozen others (and that is the position towards which we are rapidly moving), the ideal of the leaders of industry, under no matter what economic system, will be directed less and less to the indefinite increase of production in the intervals between such dislocations, and more and more to stable and regular production, even at the cost of reduction of profits and output while the industry is proceeding normally. {3} It is quite possible that capitalism itself may demand that the control of certain key industries be handed over completely to the workers in those industries, simply in order to reduce the number of sporadic strikes in them. And as industrial progress continues an ever larger number --- perhaps the majority --- of industries will become key industries. The solution may be entirely different --- we may well see a return to feudalism. But the probability is that the problem will be solved. This view may seem optimistic, but it is more likely than the alternative thesis which may be briefly stated as follows: "No human society will ever succeed in producing a stable organization in which the majority of the population is employed otherwise than in agriculture, animal-rearing, hunting or fishing." It took some thousands of years to produce the stable agricultural society which forms the basis of European life and whose morals we are too apt to regards as eternal truths. It should take a shorter time to evolve a stable industrial society. The people that do so will inherit the earth. In sum, I believe that the progress of science will ultimately make industrial injustice as self- destructive as it is now making international injustice.
As for the supplies of mechanical power, it is axiomatic that the exhaustion of our coal and oil-fields is a matter of centuries only. As it has often been assumed that their exhaustion would lead to the collapse of industrial civilization, I may perhaps be pardoned if I give some of the reasons which lead me to doubt this proposition.
Water-power is not, I think, a probable substitute, on account of its small quantity, seasonal fluctuation, and sporadic distribution. It may perhaps, however, shift the centre of industrial gravity to well-watered mountainous tracts such as the Himalayan foothills, British Columbia, and Armenia. Ultimately we shall have to tap those intermittent but inexhaustible sources of power, the wind and the sunlight. The problem is simply one of storing their energy in a form as convenient as coal or petrol. If a windmill in one's back garden could produce a hundredweight of coal daily (and it can produce its equivalent in energy), our coalmines would be shut down to-morrow. Even to-morrow a cheap, foolproof, and durable storage battery may be invented, which will enable us to transform the intermittent energy of the wind into continuous electric power.
Personally, I think that four hundred years hence the power question in England may be solved somewhat as follows: The country will be covered with rows of metallic windmills working electric motors which in their turn supply current at a very high voltage to great electric mains. At suitable distances, there will be great power stations where during windy weather the surplus power will be used for the electrolytic decomposition of water into oxygen and hydrogen. These gasses will be liquefied, and stored in vast vacuum jacketed reservoirs, probably sunk in the ground. If these reservoirs are sufficiently large, the loss of liquid due to leakage inwards of heat will not be great; thus the proportion evaporating daily from a reservoir 100 yards square by 60 feet deep would not be 1/1000 of that lost from a tank measuring two feet each way. In times of calm, the gasses will be recombined in explosion motors working dynamos which produce electrical energy once more, or more probably in oxidation cells. Liquid hydrogen is weight for weight the most efficient known method of storing energy, as it gives about three times as much heat per pound as petrol. On the other hand it is very light, and bulk for bulk has only one third of the efficiency of petrol. This will not, however, detract from its use in aeroplanes, where weight is more important than bulk. These huge reservoirs of liquified gasses will enable wind energy to be stored, so that it can be expended for industry, transportation, heating and lighting, as desired. The initial costs will be very considerable, but the running expenses less than those of our present system. Among its more obvious advantages will be the fact that energy will be as cheap in one part of the country as another, so that industry will be greatly decentralized; and that no smoke or ash will be produced.
It is on some such lines as these, I think, that the problem will be solved. It is essentially a practical problem, and the exhaustion of our coal- fields will furnish the necessary stimulus for its solution. Even now perhaps Italy might achieve economic independence by the expenditure of a few million pounds upon research on the lines indicated. I may add in parenthesis that, on thermodynamical grounds which I can hardly summarize shortly, I do not much believe in the commercial possibility of induced radio-activity.
Before I turn to the principal part of my subject I should like to consider very briefly the influence on art and literature of our gradual conquest of space and time. I think that the blame for the decay of certain arts rests primarily on the defective education of the artists. An artist must understand his subject matter. At present not a single competent poet and very few painters and etchers outside the Glasgow School understand industrial life, and I believe that there is only one architect of any real originality who understands the possibilities of ferro-concrete. I do not know his name, but he produced in Soissons before the war a market-place with the dignity and daring of an ancient Egyptian temple. If I knew that he had been entrusted with the rebuilding of Soissons, I could not regret its destruction.
Now if we want poets to interpret physical science as Milton and Shelley did (Shelley and Keats were the last English poets who were at all up- to-date in their chemical knowledge), we must see that our possible poets are instructed, as their masters were, in science and economics. I am absolutely convinced that science is vastly more stimulating to the imagination than are the classics {4} , but the products of this stimulus do not normally see the light because scientific men as a class are devoid of any perception of literary form. When they can express themselves we get a Butler or a Norman Douglas. Not until our poets are once more drawn from the educated classes (I speak as a scientist), will they appeal to the average man by showing him the beauty in his own life as Homer and Virgil appealed to the street urchins who scrawled their verses on the walls of Pompeii.
And if we must educate our poets and artists in science, we must educate our masters, labour and capital, in art. Personally I believe that we may have good hopes of both. The capitalist's idea of art in industry at present tends to limit itself to painting green and white stripes on the front of his factories in certain cases. This is a primitive type of decoration, but it has, I think, the root of the matter in it. Before long someone may discover that frescoes inside a factory increase the average efficiency of the worker 1.03% and art will become a commercial proposition once more. Even now it is being discovered that artistic advertising often pays. Similarly I do not doubt that labour will come to find that it cannot live by bread (or shall we say bread and beer) alone. But it can hardly be expected to make this discovery until it is assured of its supply of bread and beer.
Applied chemistry has introduced into human life no radical novelty of the importance of the heat-engine or the telegraph. It has vastly increased the production of various types of substance the most important being metals. But there were explosives, dyes and drugs before chemistry was a science, and its progress along present lines will mainly alter life in a quantitative manner. Perhaps the biggest problems before it in metallurgy are the utilization of low-grade iron ores, and the production of aluminium from clay, which contains up to 24% of that metal. I do not think that even when this is accomplished aluminium will oust iron and steel as they ousted bronze and flint, but it and its alloys will certainly take the second, and possibly the first place as industrial metals. There is just a hope, though I fear little more, that a large-scale production of perfume may form the basis of a re-education of our rather rudimentary sense of smell, but the most interesting possibilities of chemical invention are very clearly in biological chemistry, and for the following reasons.
Desirable substances fall on the whole into two classes. The first are desirable on account of their physical or chemical properties, for example iron, wood or glass, which we use as a part of systems such as fires, houses or razors, which procure us certain benefits. The second are desirable on account of their physiological properties. Such substances include foods, drinks, tobacco and drugs. Colours and scents occupy an intermediate position. The value of this second class of substances rests on a quite special relationship to the human organism which depends in the most intimate way on the constitution of the latter, and has not in general been at all fully explained in terms of physics and chemistry. For example fires can be made of coal or peat instead of wood, but no other chemical substance has the same effect as water or alcohol. So unless a chemical substance has new physiological properties its production will merely serve to improve or make possible some appliance whose use lies within the sphere of applied physics. Within historical time two and only two substances of the second class have come into universal use in Europe, namely caffeine and nicotine, which were introduced into this country in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There are others of immense importance, such as chloroform and quinine, but their use is not universal. But coffee, tea, and tobacco, with alcohol, are as much a part of normal life as food and water. There is no reason to suppose that the list of such substances is exhausted. During the war Embden {5} the professor of physiology in Frankfurt University discovered that a dose of about 7 grams of acid sodium phosphate increased a man's capacity for prolonged muscular work by about 20% and probably aids in prolonged mental work. It can be taken over very lengthy periods. A group of coal-miners took it for nine months on end with very great effects on their output. It has no after-effects like those of alcohol, and one cannot take a serious overdose as it merely acts as a purgative. (they gave certain Stosstruppen too much!) Thousands of people in Germany take it habitually. It is possible that it may become as normal a beverage as coffee or tea. It costs 1/9 per pound, or 1/3d. per dose.
The vast majority of chemical substances with physiological properties are unsuited for daily use like castor oil, or dangerous like morphine; probably none are without bad effects in certain cases. Those which are susceptible of daily use are of the utmost social importance. Tobacco has slight but definite effects on the character. Coffee-houses in London in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and cafes in modern Europe were and are civilizing influences of incalculable value. But these substances are profoundly obnoxious to a certain type of mind. It would perhaps be fantastic to suggest that Sir Walter Raleigh owed his death in part to his sovereign's objection to tobacco. But if he is not its proto-martyr it is at least probable that more have died for tobacco smoking at the hands of Sikhs, Senussis, and Wahabis, whose religions forbid this practice, than died under the Roman empire for professing Christianity. Should it ever be generally realised that temperance is a mean we may expect that mankind will ultimately have at its disposal a vast array of substances like wine, coffee and tobacco, whose intelligent use can add to the amenity of life and promote the expression of man's higher faculties.
But before that day comes chemistry will be applied to the production of a still more important group of physiologically active substances, namely foods. The facts about food are rather curious. Everyone knows that food is ultimately produced by plants, though we may get it at second or third hand if we eat animals or their products. But the average plant turns most of its sugar not into starch which is digestible, but into cellulose which is not, but forms its woody skeleton. The hoofed animals have dealt with this problem in their own way, by turning their bellies into vast hives of bacteria that attack cellulose, and on whose by-products they live. We have got to do the same, but outside our bodies. It may be done on chemical lines. Irvine has obtained a 95% yield of sugar from cellulose, but at a prohibitive cost. Or we may use micro-organisms, but in any case within the next century sugar and starch will be about as cheap as sawdust. Many of our foodstuffs, including the proteins, we shall probably build up from simpler sources such as coal and atmospheric nitrogen. I should be inclined to allow 120 years, but not much more, before a completely satisfactory diet can be produced in this way on a commercial scale.
This will mean that agriculture will become a luxury, and that mankind will be completely urbanized. Personally I do not regret the probable disappearance of the agricultural labourer in favour of the factory worker, who seems to me a higher type of person from most points of view. Human progress in historical time has been the progress of cities dragging a reluctant countryside in their wake. Synthetic food will substitute the flower garden and the factory for the dunghill and the slaughterhouse, and make the city at last self-sufficient.
There's many a strong farmer whose heart would break in two
If he could see the townland that we are riding to.
Boughs have their fruit and blossom at all times of the year,
Rivers are running over with red beer and brown beer,
An old man plays the bagpipes in a golden and silver wood,
Queens, their eyes blue like the ice, are dancing in a crowd.
I should have like had time allowed to have added my quota to the speculations which have been made with regard to inter-planetary communication. Whether this is possible I can form no conjecture; that it will be attempted I have no doubt whatever.
With regard to the application of biology to human life, the average prophet appears to content himself with considerable if rather rudimentary progress in medicine and surgery, some improvements in domestic plants and animals, and possibly the introduction of a little eugenics. The eugenic official, a compound, it would appear, of the policeman, the priest and the procurer, is to hale us off at suitable intervals to the local temple of Venus Genetrix with a partner chosen, one gathers, by something of a glorified medical board. To this prophecy I should reply that it proceeds from a type of mind as lacking in originality as in knowledge of human nature. Marriage "by numbers", so to speak, was a comparatively novel idea when proposed by Plato 2,300 years ago, but it has already actually been practised in various places, notably among the subject of the Jesuits in Paraguay. It is moreover likely, as we shall see, that the ends proposed by the eugenist will be attained in a very different manner.
But before we proceed to prophecy I should like to turn back to the past and examine very briefly the half dozen or so important biological inventions which have already been made. By a biological invention I mean the establishment of a new relationship between man and other animals or plants, or between different human beings, provided that such relationship is one which comes primarily under the domain of biology rather than physics, psychology or ethics. Of the biological inventions of the past, four were made before the dawn of history. I refer to the domestication of animals, the domestication of plants, the domestication of fungi for the production of alcohol, and to a fourth invention, which I believe was of more ultimate and far-reaching importance than any of these, since it altered the path of sexual selection, focussed the attention of man as a lover upon woman's face and breasts, and changed our idea of beauty from the steatapygous Hottentot to the modern European, from the Venus of Brassempouy to the Venus of Milo. There are certain races which have not yet made this last invention. And in our own day two more have been made, namely bactericide and the artificial control of conception.
The first point that we may notice about these inventions is that they have all had a profound emotional and ethical effect. Of the four earlier there is not one which has not formed the basis of a religion. I do not know what strange god will have the hardihood to adopt Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant in the place of Triptolemus and Noah, but one may remark that it is impossible to keep religion out of any discussion of the practices which they popularized.
The second point is perhaps harder to express. The chemical or physical inventor is always a Prometheus. There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god. But if every physical and chemical invention is a blasphemy, every biological invention is a perversion. There is hardly one which, on first being brought to the notice of an observer from any nation which has not previously heard of their existence, would not appear to him as indecent and unnatural.
Consider so simple and time-honored a process as the milking of a cow. The milk which should have been an intimate and almost sacramental bond between mother and child is elicited by the deft fingers of a milk-maid, and drunk, cooked, or even allowed to rot into cheese. We have only to imagine ourselves as drinking any of its other secretions, in order to realise the radical indecency of our relation to the cow. {6}
No less disgusting a priori is the process of corruption which yields our wine and beer. But in actual fact the process of milking and of the making and drinking of beer appear to us profoundly natural; they have even tended to develop a ritual of their own whose infraction nowadays has a certain air of impropriety. There is something slightly disgusting in the idea of milking a cow electrically or drinking beer out of tea-cups. And all this of course applies much more strongly to the sexual act.
I fancy that the sentimental interest attaching to Prometheus has unduly distracted our attention from the far more interesting figure of Daedalus. It is with infinite relief that amidst a welter of heroes armed with gorgon's heads or protected by Stygian baptisms the student of Greek mythology comes across the first modern man. Beginning as a realistic sculptor (he was the first to produce statues whose feet were separated) it was natural that he should proceed to the construction of an image of Aphrodite whose limbs were activated by quicksilver. After this his interest inevitably turned to biological problems, and it is safe to say that posterity has never equaled is only recorded success in experimental genetics. Had the housing and feeding of the Minotaur been less expensive it is probable that Daedalus would have anticipated Mendel. But Minos held that a labyrinth and an annual provision of 50 youths and 50 virgins were excessive as an endowment for research, and in order to escape from his ruthless economies Daedalus was forced to invent the art of flying. Minos pursued him to Sicily and was slain there. Save for his valuable invention of glue, little else is known of Daedalus. But it is most significant that, although he was responsible for the death of Zeus' son Minos he was neither smitten by a thunderbolt, chained to a rock, nor pursued by furies. Still less did any of the rather numerous visitors to Hades discover him either in Elysium or Tartarus. We can hardly imagine him as a member of the throng of shades who besieged Charon's ferry like sheep at a gap. He was the first to demonstrate that the scientific worker is not concerned with gods.
The unconscious mind of the early Greeks, who focussed in this amazing figure the dim traditions of Minoan science, was presumably aware of this fact. The most monstrous and unnatural action in all human legend was unpunished in this world or the next. Even the death of Icarus must have weighed lightly with a man who had already been banished from Athens for the murder of his nephew. But if he escaped the vengeance of the gods he has been exposed to the universal and agelong reprobation of a humanity to whom biological inventions are abhorrent, with one very significant exception. Socrates was proud to claim him as an ancestor.
The biological invention then tends to begin as a perversion and end as a ritual supported by unquestioned beliefs and prejudices. Even now surgical cleanliness is developing its rites and its dogmas, which, it may be remarked, are accepted most religiously by women. With the above facts in your minds I would ask you to excuse what at first sight might appear improbable or indecent in any speculations which appear below, and to dismiss from your minds the belief that biology will consist merely and physical and chemical discoveries as applied to men, animals and plants.
I say advisedly "will consist", for we are at present almost completely ignorant of biology, a fact which often escapes the notice of biologists, and renders them to presumptuous in their estimates of the present position of their science, too modest in their claims for its future. If for example we take a typical case of applied biology such as the detection and destruction of the cholera bacillus, we find a great deal of science involved, but the only purely biological principle s the very important but not very profound one that some bacteria kill some men. The really scientific parts of the process are the optical and chemical methods involved in the magnification, staining and killing of the bacilli. When on the other hand we come to immunization to typhoid we find certain purely biological principles involved which are neither simple nor at all completely understood.
Actually biological theory consists of some ancient but not very easily stated truths about organisms in general, due largely to Aristotle, Hippocrates and Harvey, a few great principles such as those formulated by Darwin, Mayer, Claude Bernard, and Mendel, and a vast mass of facts about individual organisms and their parts which are still awaiting adequate generalization.
Darwin's results are beginning to be appreciated, with alarming effects on certain types of religion, those of Weismann and Mendel will be digested in the course of the present century, and are going to affect political and philosophical theories almost equally profoundly. I need hardly say that these latter results deal with the question of reproduction and heredity. We may expect, moreover, as time goes on, that a series of shocks of the type of Darwinism will be given to established opinions on all sorts of subjects. One cannot suggest in detail what these shocks will be, but since the opinions on which they will impinge are deep-seated and irrational, they will come upon us and our descendants with the same air of presumption and indecency with which the view that we are descended from monkeys came to our grandfathers. But owing to man's fortunate capacity for thinking in watertight (or rather idea-tight) compartments, they will probably not have immediate and disruptive effects upon society any more than Darwinism had.
Far more profound will be the effect of the practical applications of biology. I believe that the progress of medicine has had almost, if not quite, as deep an effect on society in Western Europe as the industrial revolution. Apart from the important social consequences which have flowed from the partial substitution of the doctor for the priest, its net result has been that whereas four hundred years ago most people died in childhood, they now live on an average, (apart from the late war), until forty-five. Bad as our urban conditions are, there is not a slum in the country which has a third of the infantile death-rates of the royal family in the middle ages. Largely as a result of this religion has come to lay less and less stress on a good death, and more and more on a good life, and its whole outlook has gradually changed in consequence. Death has receded so far into the background of our normal thoughts that when we came into somewhat close contact with it during the war most of us failed to take it seriously.
Similarly institutions which were based on short lives have almost wholly collapsed. For example the English land system postulated that the land- owner should die aged about forty, and be succeeded by his eldest son, aged about twenty. The son had spent most of his life on the estate, and had few interests outside it. He managed it at least as well as anyone else could have done. Nowadays the father dodders on till about eighty, and is generally incompetent for ten years before his death. His son succeeds him at the age of fifty or so, by which time he may be a fairly competent colonel or stockbroker, but cannot hope to learn the art of managing an estate. In consequence he either hands it over to an agent who is often corrupt, or runs it unscientifically, gets a low return, and ascribes to Bolshevism what he should really lay at the door of vaccination.
But to return, if I may use the expression, to the future, I am going to suggest a few obvious developments which seem probable in the present state of biological science, without assuming any great new generalizations of the type of Darwinism. I have the very best precedents for introducing a myth at this point, so perhaps I may be excused if I reproduce some extracts from an essay on the influence of biology on history during the 20th century which will (it is hoped) be read by a rather stupid undergraduate member of this university to his supervisor during his first term 150 years hence.
``As early as the first decade of the twentieth century we find a conscious attempt at the application of biology to politics in the so-called eugenic movement. A number of earnest persons, having discovered the existence of biology, attempted to apply it in its then very crude condition to the production of a race of super-men, and in certain countries managed to carry a good deal of legislation. They appear to have managed to prevent the transmission of a good deal of syphilis, insanity, and the like, and they certainly succeeded in producing the most violent opposition and hatred amongst the classes whom they somewhat gratuitously regarded as undesirable parents. (There was even a rebellion in Nebraska). However, they undoubtably prepared public opinion for what was to come, and so far served a useful purpose. Far more important was the progress in medicine which practically abolished infectious diseases in those countries which were prepared to tolerate the requisite amount of state interference in private life, and finally, after the league's {7} ordinance of 1958, all over the world; though owing to Hindu opposition, parts of India were still quite unhealthy up to 1980 or so.
But from a wider point of view the most important biological work in the first third of the century was in experimental zoology and botany. When we consider that in 1912 Morgan had located several Mendelian factors in the nucleus of Drosophila, and modified its sex-ratio, while Marmorek had taught a harmless bacillus to kill guinea-pigs, and finally in 1913 Brachet had grown rabbit embryos in serum for some days, it is remarkable how little the scientific workers of that time, and a fortiori the general public, seem to have foreseen the practical bearing of such results.
As a matter of fact it was not until 1940 that Selkovski invented the purple alga Porphyrococcus fixator which was to have so great an effect on the world's history. In the 50 years before this date the world's average wheat yield per hectare had been approximately doubled, partly by the application of various chemical manures, but most of all by the results of systematic crossing work with different races; there was however little prospect of further advance on any of these lines. Porphyrococcus is an enormously efficient nitrogen-fixer and will grow in almost any climate where there are water and traces of potash and phosphates in the soil, obtaining its nitrogen from the air. It has about the effect in four days that a crop of vetches would have had in a year. It could not, of course, have been produced in the course of nature, as its immediate ancestors would only grow in artificial media and could not have survived outside a laboratory. Wherever nitrogen was the principal limiting factor to plant growth it doubled the yield of wheat, and quadrupled the value of grass land for grazing purposes. The enormous fall in food prices and the ruin of purely agricultural states was of course one of the chief causes of the disastrous events of 1943 and 1944. The food glut was also greatly accentuated when in 1942 the Q strain of Porphyrococcus escaped into the sea and multiplied with enormous rapidity. Indeed for two months the surface of the tropical Atlantic set to a jelly, with disastrous results to the weather of Europe. When certain of the plankton organisms developed ferments capable of digesting it the increase of the fish population of the seas was so great as to make fish the universal food that it is now, and to render even England self-supporting in respect of food. So great was the prosperity in England that in that year the coal-miner's union entered its first horse for the Derby (a horse-race which still took place annually at that time).
It was of course as a result of its invasion by Porphyrococcus that the sea assumed the intense purple colour which seems so natural to us, but which so distressed the more aesthetically minded of our great grand- parents who witnessed the change. It is certainly curious to us to read of the sea as having been green or blue. I need not detail the work of Ferguson and Rahmatullah who in 1957 produced the lichen which has bound the drifting sand of the world's deserts (for it was merely a continuation of that of Selkovski), nor yet the story of how the agricultural countries dealt with their unemployment by huge socialistic windpower schemes.
It was in 1951 that Dupont and Schwarz produced the first ectogenetic child. As early as 1901 Heape had transferred embryo rabbits from one female to another, in 1925 Haldane had grown embryonic rats in serum for ten days, but had failed to carry the process to its conclusion, and it was not till 1946 that Clark succeeded with the pig, using Kehlmann's solution as medium. Dupont and Schwarz obtained a fresh ovary from a woman who was the victim of an aeroplane accident, and kept it living in their medium for five years. They obtained several eggs from it and fertilized them successfully, but the problem of nutrition and support of the embryo was more difficult, and was only solved in the fourth year. Now that the technique is fully developed, we can take an ovary from a woman, and keep it growing in a suitable fluid for as long as twenty years, producing a fresh ovum each month, of which 90 per cent can be fertilized, and the embryos grown successfully for nine months, and then brought out into the air. Schwarz never got such good results, but the news of his first success caused an unprecedented sensation throughout the entire world, for the birthrate was already less than the death rate in most civilised countries. France was the first country to adopt ectogenesis officially, and by 1968 was producing 60,000 children annually by this method. In most countries the opposition was far stronger, and was intensified by the Papal Bull ``Nunquam prius audito'', and by the similar fetwa of the Khalif, both of which appeared in 1960.
As we know ectogenesis is now universal, and in this country less than 30 per cent of children are now born of woman. The effect on human psychology and social life of the separation of sexual love and reproduction which was begun in the 19th century and completed in the 20th is by no means wholly satisfactory. The old family life had certainly a good deal to commend it, and although nowadays we bring on lactation in women by injection of placentin as a routine, and thus conserve much of what was best in the former instinctive cycle, we must admit that in certain respects our great grandparents had the advantage of us. On the other hand it is generally admitted that the effects of selection have more than counterbalanced these evils. The small proportion of men and women who are selected as ancestors for the next generation are so undoubtedly superior to the average that the advance in each generation in any single respect, from the increased output of first-class music to the decreased convictions for theft, is very startling. {8} Had it not been for ectogenesis there can be little doubt that civilisation would have collapsed within a measurable time owing to the greater fertility of the less desirable members of the population in almost all countries.
It is perhaps fortunate that the process of becoming an ectogenetic mother of the next generation involves an operation which is somewhat unpleasant, though now no longer disfiguring or dangerous, and never physiologically injurious, and is therefore an honour but by no means a pleasure. Had this not been the case, it is perfectly possible that popular opposition would have proved too strong for the selectionist movement. As it was the opposition was very fierce, and characteristically enough this country only adopted its present rather stringent standard of selection a generation late than Germany, though it is now perhaps more advanced than any other country in this respect. The advantages of thorough-going selection, have, however, proved to be enormous. The question of the ideal sex ratio is still a matter of violent discussion, but the modern reaction towards equality is certainly strong.''
Our essayist would then perhaps go on to discuss some far more radical advances made about 1990, but I have only quoted his account of the earlier applications of biology. The second appears to me to be neither impossible nor improbable, but it has those features which we saw above to be characteristic of biological inventions. If reproduction is once completely separated from sexual love mankind will be free in an altogether new sense. At present the national character is changing slowly according to quite unknown laws. The problem of politics is to find institutions suitable to it. In the future perhaps it may be possible by selective breeding to change character as quickly as institutions. I can foresee the election placards of 300 years hence, if such quaint political methods survive, which is perhaps improbable, ``Vote for Smith and more musicians'', ``Vote for O'Leary and more girls'', or perhaps finally ``Vote for Macpherson and a prehensile tail for your great-grandchildren''. We can already alter animal species to an enormous extent, and it seems only a question of time before we shall be able to apply the same principles to our own.
I suggest then that biology will probably be applied on lines roughly resembling the above. There are perhaps equally great possibilities in the way of direct improvement of the individual, as we come to know more of the physiological obstacles to the development of different faculties. But at present we can only guess at the nature of these obstacles, and the line of attack suggested in the myth is the one which seems most obvious to a Darwinian. We already know however that many of our spiritual faculties can only be manifested if certain glands, notably the thyroid and sex-glands, are functioning properly, and that very minute changes in such glands affect the character greatly. As our knowledge of this subject increases we may be able, for example, to control our passions by some more direct method than fasting and flagellation, to stimulate our imagination by some reagent with less after- effects than alcohol, to deal with perverted instincts by physiology rather than prison. Conversely there will inevitably arise possibilities of new vices similar to but even more profound than those opened up by the pharmacological discoveries of the 19th century.
The recent history of medicine is as follows. Until about 1870 medicine was largely founded on physiology, or, as the Scotch called it ``Institutes of medicine''. Disease was looked at from the point of view of the patient, as injuries still are. Pasteur's discovery of the nature of infectious disease transformed the whole outlook, and made it possible to abolish one group of diseases. But it also diverted scientific medicine from its former path, and it is probable that, were bacteria unknown, though many more people would die of sepsis and typhoid, we should be better able to cope with kidney disease and cancer. Certain diseases such as cancer are probably not due to specific organisms, whilst others such as phthisis are due to forms which are fairly harmless to the average person, but attack others for unknown reasons. We are not likely to deal with them effectually on Pasteur's lines, we must divert our view from the micro-organism to the patient. Where the doctor cannot deal with the former he can often keep the patient alive long enough to be able to do so himself. And here he has to rely largely on a knowledge of physiology. I do not say that a physiologist will discover how to prevent cancer. Pasteur started life as a crystallographer. But whoever does so is likely at least to make use of physiological data on a large scale.
The abolition of disease will make death a physiological event like sleep. A generation that has lived together will die together. I suspect that man's desire for a future life is largely due to two causes, a feeling that most lives are incomplete, and a desire to meet friends from whom we have parted prematurely. A gentle decline into the grave at the end of a completed life's work will largely do away with the first, and our contemporaries will rarely leave us sorrowing for long.
Old age is perhaps harder on women than on men. They live longer, but their life is too often marred by the sudden change which generally overtakes them between forty and fifty, and sometimes leaves them a prey to disease, though it may improve their health. This change seems to be due to a sudden failure of a definite chemical substance produced by the ovary. When we can isolate and synthesize this body we shall be able to prolong a woman's youth, and allow her to age as gradually as the average man.
Psychology is hardly a science yet. Like biology it has arrived at certain generalizations of a rather abstract and philosophic character, but these are still to some extent matters of controversy. And though a vast number of most important empirical facts are known, only a few great generalizations from them --- such as the existence of the subconscious mind --- have yet been made. But anyone who has seen even a single example of the power of hypnotism and suggestion must realise that the face of the world and the possibilities of existence will be totally altered when we can control their effects and standardize their application, as has been possible, for example, with drugs which were once regarded as equally magical. Infinitely greater, of course, would be the results of the opening up of systematic communication with spiritual beings in another world, which is claimed as a scientific possibility. Spiritualism is already Christianity's most formidable enemy, and we have no data which allow us to estimate the probable effect on man of a religion whose dogmas are matters of experiment, whose mysteries are prosaic as electric lighting, whose ethics are based on the observed results in the next world of a good or bad life in this. Yet that is the prospect before us if spiritualism obtains the scientific verification which it is now demanding, not perhaps with great success.
I have only been able, in the time at my disposal, to traverse a very few of the possible fields of scientific advance. If I have convinced anyone present that science has still a good deal up her sleeve, and that of sufficiently startling character, I shall be amply repaid. If anything I have said appears to be of a gratuitously disgusting nature, I would reply that certain phenomena of normal life do seem to many to be of that nature, and that these phenomena are of the utmost scientific and practical importance.
I have tried to show why I believe that the biologist is the most romantic figure on earth at the present day. At first sight he seems to be just a poor little scrubby underpaid man, groping blindly amid the mazes of the ultra-microscopic, engaging in bitter and lifelong quarrels over the nephridia of flatworms, waking perhaps one morning to find that someone whose name he has never heard has demolished by a few crucial experiments the work which he had hoped would render him immortal. There is real tragedy in his life, but he knows that he has a responsibility which he dare not disclaim, and he is urged on, apart from all utilitarian considerations, by something or someone which he feels to be higher than himself.
The conservative has but little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of the passions. These are the wreckers of outworn empires and civilisations, doubters, disintegrators, deicides {9} . In the past they have been, in general, men like Voltaire, Bentham, Thales, Marx, and very possibly the divine Julius {10} , but I think that Darwin furnishes an example of the same relentlessness of reason in the field of science. I suspect that as it becomes clear that at present reason not only has a freer play in science than elsewhere, but can produce as great effects on the world through science as through politics, philosophy, or literature, there will be more Darwins. Such men are interested primarily in truth as such, but they can hardly be quite uninterested in what will happen when they throw down their dragon's teeth into the world.
I do not say that biologists as a general rule try to imagine in any detail the future applications of their science. The central problems of life for them may be the relationship between the echinoderms and the brachiopods, and the attempt to live on their salaries. They do not see themselves as sinister and revolutionary figures. They have no time to dream. But I suspect that more of them dream than would care to confess it.
I have given above a very small selection from my dreams. Perhaps they are bad dreams. It is of course almost hopeless to attempt any very exact prophecies as to how in detail scientific knowledge is going to revolutionize human life, but I believe that it will continue to do so, and even more profoundly than I have suggested. And though personally I am Victorian enough in my sympathies to hope that after all family life, for example, may be spared, I can only reiterate that not one of the practical advances which I have predicted is not already foreshadowed by recent scientific work. If a chemist or physicist living at the end of the seventeenth century had been asked to predict the future application of his science he would doubtless have made many laughable errors in the best Laputan style, but he would have been certain that it would somehow be applied, and his faith would have been justified.
We must regard science then from three points of view. First it is the free activity of man's divine faculties of reason and imagination. Secondly it is the answer of the few to the demands of the many for wealth, comfort and victory, for {Here Haldane quots a Greek phrase I cannot reproduce in ASCII}, gifts which it will grant only in exchange for peace, security and stagnation. Finally it is man's gradual conquest, first of space and time, then of matter as such, then of his own body and those of other living beings, and finally the subjugation of the dark and evil elements in his own soul.
None of these conquests will ever be complete but all, I believe will be progressive. The question of what he will do with these powers is essentially a question for religion and aesthetic. It may be urged that they are only fit to be placed in the hands of a being who has learned to control himself, and that man armed with science is like a baby armed with a box of matches.
The answer to this contention may, I think, be found in the daily papers. For scores of centuries idealists had urged that wars must cease and all the earth be united under one rule. As long as any other alternative was possible it was persisted in. The events of the last nine years constituted a reductio ad absurdum of war, but when we ask who responsible for this we shall find that it was not the visionaries but men like Black, Kekule, and Langley, who enlarged man's power over nature until he was forced by the inexorable logic of facts to form the nucleus of an international government.
We have already reacted against the frame of mind that engendered the league of nations, but we have not reacted at all completely. The league exists and is working, and in every country on earth there are many people, and ordinary normal people, who favor the idea in one form or another of a world state. I do not suggest that a world-state will arise from the present league --- or for the matter of that from the third international. I merely observe that there is a widespread and organized desire for such an institution, and several possible nuclei for it. It may take another world-war or two to convert the majority. The prospect of the next world-war has at least this satisfactory element. In the late war the most rabid nationalists were to be found well behind the front line. In the next war no one will be behind the front line. It will be brought home to all whom it may concern that war is a very dirty business.
No doubt there is a fair chance that the possibility of human organization on a planetary scale may be rendered impossible by such a war. If so mankind will probably have to wait for a couple of thousand years for another opportunity. But to the student of geology such a period is negligible. It took man 250,000 years to transcend the hunting pack. It will not take him so long to transcend the nation.
I think then that the tendency of applied science is to magnify injustices until they become too intolerable to be borne, and the average man whom all the prophets and poets could not move, turns at least and extinguishes the evil at its source. Marx' theory of industrial evolution is a particular example of this tendency, though it does not in the least follow that his somewhat artificial solution of the problem will be adopted.
It is probable that biological progress will prove to be as incompatible with certain of our social evils as industrial progress has proved to be with war or certain systems of private ownership. To take a concrete example it is clear that the second biological invention considered by my future essayist would be intolerable in conjunction with our present system of relations between classes and sexes. Moral progress is so difficult that I think any developments are to be welcomed which present it as the naked alternative to destruction, no matter how horrible may be the stimulus which is necessary before man will take the moral step in question.
To sum up, then, science is as yet in its infancy, and we can foretell little of the future save that the thing that has not been is the thing that shall be; that no beliefs, no values, no institutions are safe. So far from being an isolated phenomenon the late war is only an example of the disruptive result that we may constantly expect from the progress of science. The future will be no primrose path. It will have its own problems. Some will be the secular problems of the past, giant flowers of evil blossoming at last to their own destruction. Others will be wholly new. Whether in the end man will survive his ascensions of power we cannot tell. But the problem is no new one. It is the old paradox of freedom re-enacted with mankind for actor and the earth for stage. To those who believe in the divinity of that part of man which aspires after knowledge for its own sake, who are, in the words of Boethius:
te cernere finis
Principum, vector, dux, semita, terminus idem
the prospect will appear most hopeful. But it is only hopeful if mankind can adjust its morality to its powers. If we can succeed in this, then science holds in her hands one at least of the keys to the thorny and arduous path of moral progress, then:
Per cruciamina leti
Via panditur ardua justis,
Et ad astra doloribus itur.
That is possibly a correct large-scale view, but it is only for short periods that one can take views of history sufficiently broad to render the fate of one's own generation irrelevant. The scientific worker is brought up with the moral values of his neighbors. He is perhaps fortunate if he does not realize that it is his destiny to turn good into evil. The moral and physical (though not the intellectual) virtues are means between two extremes. They are essentially quantitative. It follows that an alteration in the scale of human power will render actions bad which were formerly good. Our increased knowledge of hygiene has transformed resignation and inaction in face of epidemic disease from a religious virtue to a justly punishable offence. We have improved our armaments, and patriotism, which was once a flame upon the altar, has become a world-devouring conflagration.
The time has gone by when a Huxley could believe that while science might indeed remould traditional mythology, traditional morals were impregnable and sacrosanct to it. We must learn not to take traditional morals too seriously. And it is just because even the least dogmatic of religions tends to associate itself with some kind of unalterable moral tradition, that there can be no truce between science and religion.
There does not seem to be any particular reason why a religion should not arise with an ethic as fluid as Hindu mythology, but it has not yet arisen. Christianity has probably the most flexible morals of any religion, because Jesus left no code of law behind him like Moses or Muhammad, and his moral precepts are so different from those of ordinary life that no society has ever made any serious attempt to carry them out, such as was possible in the case of Israel and Islam. But every Christian church has tried to impose a code of morals of some kind for which it has claimed divine sanction. As these codes have always been opposed to those of the gospels a loophole has been left for moral progress such as hardly exists in other religions. This is no doubt an argument for Christianity as against other religions, but not as against none at all, or as against a religion which will frankly admit that its mythology and morals are provisional. That is the only sort of religion that would satisfy the scientific mind, and it is very doubtful whether it could properly be called a religion at all.
No doubt many people hope that such a religion may develop from Christianity. The human intellect is feeble, and there are times when it does not assert the infinity of its claims. But even then:
Though in black jest it bows and nods
* * * *
I know it is roaring at the gods
Waiting for the last eclipse.
The scientific worker of the future will more and more resemble the lonely figure of Daedalus as he becomes conscious of his ghastly mission, and proud of it.
Black is his robe from top to toe,
His flesh is white and warm below,
All through his silent veins flow free
Hunger and thirst and venery,
But in his eyes a still small flame
Like the first cell from which he came
Burns round and luminous, as he rides
Singing my song of deicides.
NOTES
1: Speaking as a physicist, and with all due respect for Haldane, Einstein's theories do not depend on any "ideality" of space or time, or even imply their ideality. See Russell's The ABC of Relativity, or Wheeler's Spacetime Physics.
2: Cf. Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars and Stewart Brand's The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT.
3: Cf. John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State.
4: Haldane took first honors in both mathematics and classics as an undergraduate.
5: Embden, Grafe and Schmitz. Zeitschrift fur physiologische Chemie, Vol. 113, p. 67, 1921. [Haldane's note.]
6: The Hindus have recognized the special and physiological relation of man to the cow by making the latter animal holy. A good Hindu would no more kill a cow than his foster-mother. But the holiness of the cow has unfortunately extend to all its products, and the extensive use of cow dung in Indian religious ceremonies is disgusting to the average European. The latter, however, is insensitive to the equally loathsome injunctions of the Catholic Church with regard to human marriage. It would perhaps be better if both marriage and milking could be secularized. [Haldane's note.]
7: All references to "the league" are to the League of Nations.
8: Whether Haldane meant that there were fewer thieves, or merely fewer dumb enough to let themselves be convicted, is unclear.
9: That is, god-killers.
10: That is, Julius Caesar.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)