Science under Social, Political, and Economic Influence

 

In 1942, Robert Merton, the founding father of modern sociology, introduced his four norms that comprised the ethos of modern science: communism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism. (Lecture 17) It constituted a principle that promises collective collaboration and common ownership of science and independence of science from sociopolitical status and personal gain; however, what was supposed to be a tenet to which scientists should adhere was proven to be a mere ideal. In the past century, science had been distorted by social, political, and economic factors to an extent where it served not the objective reality, but the authority’s will.

 

Ever since the Darwinian idea of natural selection joined forces with genetics, not just survival of individual organisms, but also improvement of the entire population became possible. People’s wonderings of upgrading the whole race gave birth to eugenics. The term “eugenics” was first coined by Galton in 1883 in his book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. (Lecture 13) Galton believed that the human species can improve by selectively mating people with specific desirable hereditary traits and by breeding out disease and other undesirable characteristics. He emphasized the idea of “positive eugenics”, which aimed to encourage physically and mentally superior members of the population to reproduce. He did not, however, anticipate the flip side of the coin, the “negative eugenics”, that signified the deformity of scientific purpose under which the idea of negative eugenics was utilized to discourage or prevent inferior “defective” people, who possessed undesirable traits, from reproducing. 

 

The social context of the Progressive Era during the early 1900s in the United States provided a hotbed for the emergence of such scientific racism. When white supremacists realized that the population had been leaning too far away from the favored "Anglo-Saxon superiority" and blamed the poor and the immigrants for the omnipresent social problems, negative eugenics seemed to be a solution. The Eugenics Movement in the US started with various corporate foundations such as the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation funding scientists to justify the eugenics reform. Public acceptance and the support of the Supreme Court then led the eugenics legislation to legalize the forced sterilization of thousands, mostly mentally disabled people, criminals, and the poor. From 1909 to 1979, around 20,000 sterilizations were performed in California. (Lecture 13) White supremacy had never been so explicitly and justifiably expressed, thanks to science backing it up, to an extent where it had become a model role of Nazi racial policies. This social movement had disfigured science with such hatred and prejudice best worded by Charles Davenport, a once-prominent biologist and the director of Eugenics Records Office: “Is not death nature’s great blessing to the race?” (12, Davenport)

 

Science had also been under political arrest. Deutsche Physik, a 1930s German textbook series, was primarily a political movement under Nazi Germany against Jewish Physics. (Lecture 15) Racial shifts in physics during the 20th century revived theoretical physics in the light of quantum physics and relativity, replacing the once highly-praised experimentalists. With many of the leading theorists such as Albert Einstein as Jews, Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark, who personally hate Jews and their theories, saw it as an opportunity to bring back experimentalism to the main focus as Hitler rose to power. They promoted Deutsche Physik as a new form of physics which based on experiments and rejected quantum physics, relativity, and the traditional Newtonian world, which they had categorized as Jewish Physics. They praised their German physics as the probers of reality and the only path to scientific truth. This was not all. Deutsche Physik became more a racially motivated political movement when Lenard especially noted in Deutsche Physik, “science is determined by race or blood”. (Lecture 15) Under the Nazi regime where Jewish physicists were either dismissed or exiled, this series of textbooks became a tool of political propaganda that twisted the physics realm to an extent that most of the German universities did not even use it at the time. This did not seem to, nevertheless, matter to Lenard and Stark. They had lost the right to speak for science ever since they surrendered science to political powers.

 

Just as the bold social and political abuses of science rested and the scientists thought they were set free came the Big Science that had, in fact, enslaved itself. The success of the atomic bomb since WWII drew the US government’s attention to the potential of the physics field to develop weapons for national defense against the Soviet Union. Huge funds had since poured into the construction of huge rockets, massive high-energy accelerators, and high-flux research reactors during the postwar period to satisfy government contracts and Cold War industry needs. In the same way Arthur Roberts had described in his song Take Away Your Billion Dollars, as many physics research programs had shifted from Small Science, those done “with love and string and sealing wax” (18, Roberts), to the Big Science, big money was making the choice for the physicists in what they should investigate. It was as the physicists were stripped of their free will and bound by budgets without even knowing. 

 

Furthermore, military, government, and industry funding, which primarily asks for new weapons and useful technologies that depend mostly on engineering, can erode the disciplinary identity of physics and blur the line between engineering, applied physics, and pure physics. Physicists no longer are physicists when their researches are not basic and pure. When the Big Science projects are strapped to federal budgets, they can even “divert the universities from their primary purpose and by converting university professors into administrators, housekeepers, and publicists” (162, Weinberg) Namely, the $250,000 cyclotron at UC Berkeley was exactly what Roberts was afraid of. (Lecture 17) What physicists need are not Big money, Big teams, or Big machines, but zest and curiosity. So take away your billion dollars, and let’s be physicists again. (19, Roberts)

 

For science was intertwined with the world, it takes little effort to affect or distort it. Science is fragile: it is never free of social, political, and economic tinges; however, science is powerful: it represents authority and sway of the public. So use it very carefully. Although the Eugenics Movement, Deutsche Physik, and Big Science all disproved the norms of Merton, every scientist and all men of power should still be striving to perceive a liberated scientific world.

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Bibliography

 

Davenport, C. B. “The Eugenics Programme and Progress in Its Achievement.” Eugenics: Twelve University Lectures, edited by Morton Arnold Aldrich, Hardpress Publishing, 2013, pp. 1–14.

 

Roberts, Arthur. “Take Away Your Billion Dollars.” Physics Today, vol. 1, no. 7, 1948, pp. 17–21. Crossref, doi:10.1063/1.3066183.

 

Weinberg, A. M. “Impact of Large-Scale Science on the United States: Big Science Is Here to Stay, but We Have yet to Make the Hard Financial and Educational Choices It Imposes.” Science, vol. 134, no. 3473, 1961, pp. 161–64. Crossref, doi:10.1126/science.134.3473.161.

 

Professor Patrick McCray. Lecture 13, 15, 17. [PDF file]. Retrieved at 2021, July 31 from HIST 20 Gauchospace