Haldeman-Julius Monthly pp. 111-114 (January 1928)
THEOCRATIC TENDENCIES OF SCIENCE
T. SWANN HARDING

WHILE the intellectual proletariat with its customary rigid conservatism still fails sufficiently to respect science, it is none the less a fact that the intellectual bourgeoisie worship the scientific concept too credulously and too unanalytically. Nor can this condition be remedied without the assistance of the intellectual aristocracy which alone originates new ideas, new principles and new concepts. Finally the creative work of the intellectual aristocracy is altogether vain without the aid of demagogues competent to drive the herd minds in the desired direction. This makes the impact of intellect always very slight upon the masses, a fact Voltaire recognized.

Granting all this, however, and realizing the cumbersome method by which creative mind must react upon inert mind, it does not seem amiss to call attention to certain chronic fallacies of the rationalist mediocrities who, having discarded religion with its omnipotent deity or its infallible word, seek to fill the vacant niche in the traditional temple of adoration with an image of Science enthroned. This special tendency to view science as the all good and to overdo obeisance is as bad as utter indifference to science. Certain facts militate against the mistake of regarding science and its works as sacrosanct.

Two outstanding faults of organized religion are it deference to constituted and established authority and its tendency to make ceremonial and ritual more important than conviction, progress and respect for truth, in so far as fragments of truth can be ascertained. Curiously enough science tends to indulge in these very self-same errors which, pardonable in a segment of experience which can make few pretensions to reason and accurate analysis, are grossly reprehensible in a sphere where unbiased objective respect for truth is declared to outweigh all other considerations.

As a matter of fact we find that the prestige of personalities is very considerable in science. Not what has been accomplished but "Who did it?" is often paramount, and excellent scientific work has repeatedly been ignored because the worker was new to the field, while the false conclusions of a physically or mentally deceased authority or bigwig have often been permitted to bar the path to progress and to the ascertainment of additional truth.

When Helmholtz announced his theory of the conservation of energy he met with the keenest hostility. Poggendorf declared the idea too speculative to publish in his "Annalen"; all reputable mathematicians lined up against Helmholtz unanimously. Sir James Simpson assaulted Lister's famous announcement of killing germs by heat and chemicals and Sir James Padgett damned him with faint praise. Lord Kelvin roundly denounced the absurd Van't Hoff-Arrhenius theory of electrolytic dissociation, now everywhere accepted. Jenner had to fight indignant opposition; Simpson was fought by the medical profession for introducing chloroform on the theory that agony is a physiological stimulant. Erhlich's theory of disease immunity was religiously taught and his terminology slavishly employed long after it had been reduced to absurdity by the Belgian Bordet, but Bordet was only vindicated at a time when it became "unpatriotic" to credit the Germans with brains.

Then science manifests a deplorably obsequious respect for titles. These are degrees conferred on any mediocrity with sufficient dullness, tenacity and perseverance to pursue a prescribed course of cramming until the degree becomes inevitable. These degrees are not, as they should be, honors conferred upon mature investigators for constructive research. They are instead prostituted to the position of union cards or certificates of training. They repeatedly mask sterility and spell rapid advancement while other men doing excellent work, but who, for good reasons, were unable to acquire the magic degrees, are retarded in progress or ignored. The label is more important than the product labeled, the form than the substance, a typically theocratic fallacy.

Again science is always too intolerant of new knowledge which seems out of the beaten track. It does not even dispassionately fight facts with facts. It has scorned Darwin, Mendeleff, Van't Hoff, Arrhenius, Pasteur, the Curies, Freud and Einstein in turn. Gauss was afraid to publish his non-Euclidian geometry after he had worked it out and he waited till the Russian Lobachevsky and the Hungarian Bolyai could accompany him in his heresy. Lord Kelvin would not even have the electromagnetic theory of light explained to him, much less accept it, for fear it might prove that some of his fundamentals were not fundamental at all. Time after time new ideas have been compelled to fight for life with main strength against a dogmatic hierarchy which possessed the creeds and sacred symbols and was determined not to be dispossessed of those same creeds and symbols. In the matter of healing, which should be strictly scientific, we often find quackery attacked with vituperation and invective rather than with facts. While at least two-thirds of the drugs advertised in the best, most orthodox medical journals are more reprehensible than the better class so-called patent medicines we find the latter often violently attacked for a crime that does not exceed "unethical" advertising. Yet recrimination is irrelevant; its use is theocratic. Science should deal in fact. This is the old tendency to dogmatic scholasticism, but scientific theories should neither be subjected to passionate onslaughts nor ignored because they contravene dogmas commonly accepted at the time.

Scientific ritual occasionally reaches lengths of absolute absurdity and includes all sorts of ceremonial acts which, presumed to make for greater accuracy, are actually in most cases symptoms of a neurotic complex like the one which impelled Lady Macbeth to do her hand-washing. Weighing and measuring can be made sacraments; cleansing apparatus can become another. An impossible standard of accuracy can be insisted upon here while an unavoidable error exists there which is of greater magnitude than any slight inaccuracies for which painstaking corrections are piously made.

Thus in a division of human endeavor where criticism should be absolutely dispassionate and unprejudiced, or unaffected by personal motives, the reverse too often obtains. There is even the theocratic tendency to differentiate into mutually antagonistic sects and cliques accompanied by pettiness, jealousy, intolerance, bigotry and other typically religious virtues. The puerile hatreds, chicanes, diplomatic trickeries and sly, childish spites of dignified scientists would truly amaze the more frenetic devotees of science enthroned.

From these conditions naturally spring any number of superfluous articles and any number of falsely argued theories. Papers are published purely for prestige purposes in academic circles or as commercial propaganda in industrial circles. Papers are published merely to offer some investigator an opportunity to be sarcastic in denouncing a rival's efforts, or in order to obtain larger appropriations, or, indeed, for almost any purpose under the sun save for the disinterested desire to increase the sum total of human knowledge.

In this connection a letter from a first-class biological chemist is worthy of comment because it indicates a theocratic atavism. He declares that for doing certain sorts of chemical work one must have a mystic flair, a sort of esoteric occultism which suggested great chunks of "ectoplasm" lying about here and there in the laboratory while the worker proceeded in a trance state to celebrate his thaumaturgic rites. True the chemist did later retire gracefully and declare that he rather had in mind a neuropsycho-muscular coordination which made good work possible automatically, yet the form of expression implied a strong theocratic tinge. The recent fanatical urge of a man like Millikan to render science compatible with Presbyterianism simply eludes rational explanation altogether and must be subsumed under metaphysics.

Then what is a scientist anyway? He is a man who seeks facts by endeavoring rapidly to control experimental conditions and permitting his mind to play upon these facts impartially, dispassionately, without prejudice. He follows the definition of truthfulness given by Bertrand Russell once in The Century when he said that it "is the habit of forming our opinions on the evidence, and holding them with that degree of conviction which the evidence warrants. This degree will always fall short of complete certainty, and therefore we must always be ready to admit new evidence against previous beliefs."

Such is the scientific ideal, and it is obviously an ideal antipathetic to most ordinary human instincts and passions. The scientist every moment seeks to work in contradiction to some of the most pronounced human traits-bias, prejudice, emotion, and especially, the strong, impulsive tendency to explain everything finally, however irrelevant or fragmentary his data, by recourse to any assumption which it is natural for him very soon to love and to vindicate.

"The constructive leader in progress is an individual who is men tally what the horticulturist would call a sport, he must diverge sharply from the average." Phylogenetically he tends to be controlled by inherited tendencies and by the static, conservative attitude of the social masses surrounding him; ontogenetically he is subjected to the will of others from birth, he is taught to obey authority and to do as his parents did. To become a scientist an individual must revolt against all this and must incur hostility. The scientist must not, then, be judged too harshly because he is fighting natural human tendencies and predilections every moment in order to achieve a moderately disinterested viewpoint in the presence of plain facts.

But it is just as mistaken for the relatively intelligent layman to kneel complacently and worship at the designated shrine of science because he is too indifferent to understand that something may appear in incomprehensible language on the pages of a very forbidding journal and yet be absolutely valueless. More and more science tends to exhibit the sins of ritualism, formalism and bigotry unless it be subjected to healthful criticism. These tendencies must be eradicated before we can hope to progress as we should. They will not be eradicated so long as apparently intelligent people are sufficiently credulous and unanalytical to indulge scientists in their vices.