Louis Pasteur, Max Planck, Alfred Nobel, and Lord Kelvin.
This focus on tinkering and engineering versus science and discovery (or, in some ways, applied science versus basic science) was partly because America lacked the well-established academies of Europe, and perhaps partly because of the American obsession with building a new country. But it also seemed to have something to do with the American social character itself. French political scholar Alexis de Tocqueville noted this focus on pragmatism and application when he toured America in 1831 and 1832, some fifty-five years after its birth. His report of what he learned, Democracy in America, contains a chapter titled “Why the Americans are More Addicted to Practical than to Theoretical Science.” Tocqueville observed that free men who are equal want to judge everything for themselves, and so they have a certain “contempt for tradition and for forms.” They are men of action rather than reflection, and hold meditation in low regard. “Nothing,” he argued, “is more necessary to the culture of the higher sciences or of the more elevated departments of science than meditation; and nothing is less suited to meditation than the structure of democratic society. . . . A desire to utilize knowledge is one thing; the pure desire to know is another.” Tocqueville argued that this relative disregard for basic, curiosity-driven science, on the one hand, and the focus on applied, objective-driven science, on the other, might eventually be the country’s downfall. He related a striking cautionary tale that resonates powerfully today:
When Europeans first arrived in China, three hundred years ago, they found that almost all the arts had reached a certain degree of perfection there, and they were surprised that a people which had attained this point should not have gone beyond it. At a later period they discovered traces of some higher branches of science that had been lost. The nation was absorbed in productive industry; the greater part of its scientific processes had been preserved, but science itself no longer existed there. This served to explain the strange immobility in which they found the minds of this people. The Chinese, in following the track of their forefathers, had forgotten the reasons by which the latter had been guided. They still used the formula without asking for its meaning; they retained the instrument, but they no longer possessed the art of altering or renewing it. The Chinese, then, had lost the power of change; for them improvement was impossible. They were compelled at all times and in all points to imitate their predecessors lest they should stray into utter darkness by deviating for an instant from the path already laid down for them. The source of human knowledge was all but dry; and though the stream still ran on, it could neither swell its waters nor alter its course.
In other words, China fell under a conservative, authoritarian intellectual fundamentalism that deeply honored tradition but lacked the substance, freedom, and capacity to create anything new. The craft was there, but the creativity, art, and science were gone.
Tocqueville concluded that the basic research that had the power to change the future, to alter the course of the stream at will, was the product of more liberal European thinking. His tale suggests the dangers posed by embracing the form of science at the expense of the process, of tradition and precedent at the expense of openness and creativity, of applied research at the expense of basic science, of fear at the expense of wonder, of utility at the expense of beauty, and of insisting on financially quantifiable projections before an investment is made—the idea of which runs contrary to the entire process of discovery and creativity. Imagine, for example, an insistence on the promise of financial return prior to Darwin’s trips on the Beagle or Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon. They would never have happened. And yet it is hard to quantify the enormous wealth that has spun off from those economically unsupportable adventures into the unknown.
But Tocqueville was being a bit unfair in his assessment, or perhaps just taking too short a view of history. Europe was the home of the greatest imperial collapse in Western history, after all, and the collapse was, in many ways, all about science and culture. Like sixteenth-century China, the Roman Empire was the inheritor of centuries of scientific, artistic, and philosophical culture from the ancient Greeks. The ruling classes of Rome were taught this Greek knowledge and Greek culture.
But Roman intellectual and political culture was much more practical than theoretical—more applied than basic, more form than process. And with this approach Romans became increasingly anti-intellectual. There was an assumption that basic, curiosity-driven science just wasn’t necessary. One can see this in the writings of Pliny the Elder. Gaius Plinius Secundus was the most prominent natural philosopher of his day. He published a famous book called Natural History, which was based on the much earlier observational, basic science of the Greek researcher Claudius Galen. But Pliny included several other theories in his book. Unlike Galen’s work, they weren’t based on observations of nature, and they turned out to be mostly wrong. Yet his book became a foundational textbook of the Roman Empire. As the Romans valued science and observation less and less, the artistic and scientific institutions that fed Roman culture began to weaken and decline.
Those who want to dismiss the arguments for basic research—thinking the private sector is the source of today’s innovation and the public sector is a laggard—should consider the arguments by economist Mariana Mazzucato in her book The Entrepreneurial State. The Internet was a technological creation that came out of basic research. The Apple iPhone, while a creation of Apple as a design package, was based on technology that came out of government-funded basic research. Many universities today receive significant funding from licensing fees paid by private firms commoditizing their basic research. Private industry doesn’t have the financial wherewithal to weather the risks that basic research imposes—namely, that a lot of it is wasted looking in the wrong places because of the trial-and-error nature of observational science. But when basic research hits, it hits big, creating entire new economies and transformative breakthroughs. We can’t afford not to do basic research. The only thing we can be sure of is that, if we don’t do it, we won’t get the breakthroughs that solve global problems or make trillions of dollars. The private sector is timid by comparison, Mazzucato argues. It’s the public sector that can be a catalyst for big, bold, problem-solving ideas, which is why the argument for science and democracy is so essential.
Despite his shortsightedness, it’s possible that Tocqueville’s general assessment of America may have been correct, and that the United States would have coasted off its vast natural resource exploitation until its economy eventually ran out of growth, but would have never really led the world, were it not for three major developments. The first grew out of Jefferson’s insistence on public education, which over time did indeed provide opportunity to undiscovered talent. The second, also heavily encouraged by Jefferson, was the burgeoning American university system, which was being built up to rival those of Europe. And the third was the American values of tolerance and freedom, which drew talented immigrants from elsewhere. By the first decades of the twentieth century, all three developments were beginning to pay major dividends for America—and particularly for Republicans.
When Conservatives were Pro-Science and Pro-Immigration
In today’s Western culture, particularly throughout the former British colonies, conservatives have come to be aligned with vested economic and ideological interests, and have come to be seen as antiscience. Science itself, some conservatives have argued, has a liberal bias, a sentiment comedian Stephen Colbert echoed when he quipped that “reality has a well-known liberal bias” at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
In fact, by its very nature, science is both progressive and conservative. It is conservative in that it is retentive of knowledge and cautious about making new assertions until they are fully defensible. But it is also progressive in that it is, and must always be, open to wherever observation leads, independent of belief and ideology, and focused on creating new knowledge.
It would thus be a mistake to characterize scientists as mostly Democrats or mostly Republicans, or mostly liberals or conservatives. They are mostly for freedom, exploration, creativity, caution, and knowledge—and not intrinsically of one or another party, unless a party or political orientation becomes authoritarian and begins to turn its back on evidence. In the early twenty-first century, the political orientation that most stands for freedom, openness, tolerance, caution, and science is the liberals. In the United States, this ideology is represented by the Democrats, which may explain