by scientists, who generally seemed as if they couldn’t have cared less about the humanities. Why bother with all the reading and writing and talking when science was actually doing things? But this was equally shortsighted, and in this shift the West let go of something precious: a grasp on the classics that had informed Western culture. Since scientists couldn’t be bothered with civics, democracy continued to draw its elected leaders primarily from the humanities, creating a culture war that is with us to this day, threatening the ability of Western democracies to solve their problems—just as Snow feared.
Democracy is, as we now know, rooted in science, knowledge, and the biology of natural law. But most of our elected leaders have not had significant training in science, or, more importantly, in how the foundational ideas of modern law and democracy relate to, and grew out of, science. In the middle years of the twentieth century, this was beginning to pose a problem.
The twin threads of fear and resentment created a growing sense that science might be outpacing the ability of a democracy to govern itself. The situation was alarming enough that it compelled President Eisenhower to warn the American people about it. On January 17, 1961, in his farewell address to the nation, he famously warned of the dangers of the emerging “military-industrial complex.” Ike blamed the rise of this behemoth on the federal government’s growing funding of science, and he complained that the solitary inventor was being overshadowed by teams of scientists in cloistered labs, hidden from the watchful eye of the public and awash in taxpayer money. “[I]n holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should,” Ike warned, “we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
How far the United States had come from the days of the first State of the Union address, when George Washington told Congress that “there is nothing which can better deserve your patronage than the promotion of Science and Literature.” Democracy itself had been created by a scientific-technological elite that had included Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Benjamin Rush, and other Founding Fathers. Elitism had been something to aspire to. Now, thanks to its association with a cozy cabal of military officers and allied contractors, science had become something to be feared.
SCIENCE, DRUGS, AND ROCK ’N’ ROLL
Doubt has replaced hopefulness—and men act out a defeatism that is labeled realistic. The decline of utopia and hope is in fact one of the defining features of social life today. The reasons are various: the dreams of the older left were perverted by Stalinism and never recreated; the congressional stalemate makes men narrow their view of the possible; the specialization of human activity leaves little room for sweeping thought; the horrors of the twentieth century, symbolized in the gas-ovens and concentration camps and atom bombs, have blasted hopefulness. To be idealistic is to be considered apocalyptic, deluded. To have no serious aspirations, on the contrary, is to be “toughminded.”
—The Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society, 1962
Curiosity-Driven versus Goal-Driven Science
There is a dynamic tension between the two types of science—basic, curiosity-driven science, and applied, goal-driven science—that began to emerge out of both industry and the war effort in World War II. They aren’t so much two types as two ends of the spectrum. Basic science was the realm of the gentleman and philanthropist-funded explorers, and, after World War II, the recipient of about half of the spending on government-funded research centers and university science labs. Applied science was the realm of engineering-oriented American entrepreneurs like Edison, Tesla, and Bell, and later of the major corporate research programs like pharmaceutical research, as well as goal-driven government projects like the Manhattan Project and the majority of other military-funded research.
Much of the public’s skepticism toward science derives from the narrow focus of military- and industry-funded applied research, and, in the early years, the industrial applications of war-effort-funded research such as the development of pesticides—research that, too often, was applied without regard to its wider consequences, and that has historically been weakly regulated.
And then there were the public-private research programs of the military-industrial complex. Despite the fact that the bulk of both applied and basic government research has historically been about improving health, military-funded applied research began to drive the political conversation about almost all of government science.
The Graduates
Eisenhower’s warning about science as part of the military-industrial complex fed into the momentous changes afoot in American, British, and broader Western culture. Traumatized by a dozen years of high alert to the threat of nuclear holocaust, the public’s patience was wearing thin. The enormously powerful hydrogen bomb had made “duck and cover” a ludicrous farce. Advances in government-and industry-funded applied science were viewed with increasing skepticism. The baby boomers found their generational power by questioning the authority of the government and, by extension, government science. Instead of the solution, government was seen as the problem, as Ronald Reagan would point out two decades later.
That their parents were incapable of providing safety, that their world might end at any moment, that the government—their government—had brought this threat into their lives, that their parents’ generation had managed to screw things up so badly while at the same time celebrating the “victory culture” of the postwar years, that the stated ideals of democracy didn’t seem to extend to blacks or, during the war, to Japanese, who had been held in American concentration camps, that the military-industial complex seemed to be increasingly captivating public policy for its own profiteering ends—all this combined to increase the cynicism, rebellion, mistrust, and antigovernment sentiment that fueled the baby boomers’ late adolescence and early twenties. This gave rise to a new counterculture. Adults and the government had lost their moral authority, hedonism was justifiable since death might come at any moment, and the young ruled the cultural conversation. These conditions were described in the seminal document of the new left movement that came to define the counterculture, the 1962 Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society:
As we grew . . . our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to dismiss. First, the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry, compelled most of us from silence to activism. Second, the enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the Bomb, brought awareness that we ourselves, and our friends, and millions of abstract “others” we knew more directly because of our common peril, might die at any time. We might deliberately ignore, or avoid, or fail to feel all other human problems, but not these two, for these were too immediate and crushing in their impact, too challenging in the demand that we as individuals take the responsibility for encounter and resolution.
While these and other problems either directly oppressed us or rankled our consciences and became our own subjective concerns, we began to see complicated and disturbing paradoxes in our surrounding America. The declaration “all men are created equal . . .” rang hollow before the facts of Negro life in the South and the big cities of the North. The proclaimed peaceful intentions of the United States contradicted its economic and military investments in the Cold War status quo.
Scientists and engineers as a whole were suddenly seen as associated with the military-industrial complex, as were organized religion and other sources of authority, all of which had failed this young generation. The culture at large began rejecting science and tradition and the government itself—and with it, government contractors like Honeywell—and began moving more toward nature, hedonism, anarchy, and spiritualism.
And why not? Faced with the collapse of the mainstream culture’s moral authority but lacking the power to change it, many baby boomers either raged in anarchistic riots or tuned in, turned on, and dropped out. World-renowned British mathematician Bertrand Russell captured the dour pessimism in a 1963 Playboy interview: