Science: IN ALL PERSONS ALIKE

Only a block away from the Berkeley campus of the University of California, one of the world’s proudest scientific centers, is the Pacific School of Religion. In last week’s Christian Century, the school’s dean, the Rev. Dr. Robert Elliot Fitch, gives his scientific friends and neighbors a gentle warning about the temptations that threaten the “new priesthood of science.”

THE fact is that the scientists in our civilization constitute a new sort of religious order [that] sets itself apart from the world by a discipline, a language and an attitude. The attitude is that of contemptus mundi, a scorn for the ordinary pleasures and privileges of life. The language is no longer Latin but mathematics, and this is the universal tongue in which the higher rituals of the order are conducted all over the earth. The candidate who presents himself for ordination must mortify the flesh through long years of labors in the laboratory. His reward is membership in a community which holds powrer and profit in contempt in its zealous devotion to a higher end.

“Yet to the common man the scientist is the authoritative master of a truth and a power to salvation. Here lies the key to well-being on this earth. It will win a war, improve education and morals.

“It is the purest of the pure scientists, the theoretical physicists, who, in their possession of the truth of science, are also the administrators of the most terrible power of science in nuclear energy. Both the truth and the power lie in the hands of an elite within the order.

“As for the temptations which the scientist confronts, they are the classical ones of any priestly group: the temptation to spiritual pride, and the temptation that comes from the invitation to assume temporal authority.

“For any priestly caste, its very possession of the truth and the power unto salvation is a temptation to spiritual pride. Both religion and science are disposed to make a claim to infallibility. [But] the most virtuous priest may have his virtue corrupted by stupidity and ignorance, and the most intelligent scientist may have his wisdom distorted by pride and arrogance and the lust for personal prestige.

“The temptation to temporal power which befalls the scientist is unlike that which troubled the priesthood in the classical theocracies. Ordinarily it is not proposed that the scientist should assume full and final authority in government. But so far as the scientist has pre-eminent prestige as the guardian of the truth and the power, his blessing will always be sought for a new cold cream or a fresh departure in foreign policy or an innovation in military technology. In most cases, judgment of the worth of the enterprise lies entirely outside the competence of the scientist as such.

“The scientist is likely also to be an ethical purist. For what never exists in the laboratory, what Robert Oppenheimer discovered with a great sense of shock in the world outside, is ‘sin.’ We may understand ‘sin’ to express the way in which the evil mingles with the good in life, the way in which the noblest efforts of man can somehow become entangled in moral catastrophe. This ‘sin’ is not to be found under the microscope.

“Laboring under these handicaps, the scientist is prone to fall into three errors with reference to public affairs. He may, like the medieval anchorite, withdraw from society by living in the cell which is his laboratory. Or, emerging from his cell, with its austere discipline and chaste aspirations, he will be profoundly shocked to see the way his own truth and power are prostituted to ends with which he cannot become reconciled. He will then do like all pietists before him: propose simple solutions to complex problems, see all issues naively and out of context, and make absolute moral judgments where the need is for shrewd compromise.

“The third possibility is that, being vain even as other men are vain, he will accept the inducements that are offered to him from every hand, will bestow an indiscriminate blessing upon whatever enterprise will ensure him the prestige and perquisites which he feels are his due.

“There are ways that do not lead to such dead ends for the scientist, but they are difficult ways. One is the way of a Conant or a Killian: deliberately to enter into the experiences and to assume the responsibilities and the disciplines that have to do with the art of human relations. The product of this dual discipline, in the scientist-statesman, can be one of our most valuable public servants in times like this. “For those who do not have a genius for the double task, there is another choice. This is simply to put their truth and their power in the service of a democracy instead of in the service of a tyranny. In a free society the scientist will play his role as citizen like anyone else. The new priest like the old priest will have to learn that, no matter how potent the mana that he commands, no matter how great his power and his truth, he is not vested with any peculiar authority to decide on its uses. In a democracy, that authority resides in all persons alike.”