Anonymous ID: 884550 Feb. 14, 2019, 3:26 p.m. No.5176275   🗄️.is 🔗kun

>>5175530

 

'FOREWORD' TO THE FRUSTRATION OF SCIENCE (1935)

 

It is very gratifying to be asked to write a foreword to this book. It deals

with what I called long ago the inversion of science, and it is indicative

of the growing sense of social responsibility, among some individual

scientific men at least, for the world the labors of their order have so

largely created. The public expect far more from scientific men in this

respect than they have as yet contributed. Individually most of them in

this field are still utterly unscientific, and quite as apt as the public

themselves to regard original thought on these subjects as socially

dangerous and to be suppressed and those who have strayed from the

path of 'pure' science in these directions as cranks or impostors. As for

the official and professional bodies representing science and medicine,

as yet they have hardly emerged from the easy but very questionable

attitude that it is no concern of theirs what they are hired out for.

On the other hand, the public must not expect too much. They are apt

to forget that in effect, as an entity with power of acting, they hardly

exist, until in extremis when it is too late. The pioneer and bearer of a

new evangel is always up against an inchoate mass, educable only when

miserable and, when prosperous, too proud to learn. This much at least

of justification can be offered for the doctrine, so utterly the opposite of

the truth for the individual, that suffering is the great goad to progress.

Unfortunately, scientific powers of inflicting mass suffering are now so

powerful that once started they are hardly likely to stop so long as there

is anyone left to suffer.

 

From the beginning to the end of these pages, whether we read of the

willful destruction of the products and productivity of the soil, the aerial

destruction of wealth by the thousand million pounds' worth, created by

somebody's labor, the embarrassing fecundity of modern technology

resulting only in every conceivable form of sabotage, the anomalous

position of the conscientious medical practitioner, the refusal of women

to bring children into such a world, the development of the art of

spreading bacterial infection as a new war technique, or the frank

abandonment by modern political movements of the hope of social

progress that science renders possible - from the beginning to the end of

these pages the reader will find elegant examples of the sort of ruling

mentality now dominating the world. Bitter, and justifiably so, as many

of the critics of science are, surely nothing bitterer could be said of it

than this, that its abundance has but enthroned the wastrel. Nor is the

solution exactly what one of the contributors rather naively suggests,

that science should look for a new master. The solution is for the public

to acknowledge its real master, and, for its own safety, insist on being

ruled not by the reflection of a reflection, but direct by those who are

concerned with the creation of its wealth rather than of its debts. It

should require that its universities and learned societies should no

longer evade their responsibilities and hide under the guise of false

humility as the hired servants of the world their work has made possible,

but do that for which they are supported in cultured release from

routine occupations, and speak the truth though the heavens fall.

 

FREDERICK SODDY