Science And Politics
by J.B.S. Haldane

From time to time I am asked whether I have ever thought of taking to politics. I suppose that question is asked of every man who can speak consecutively for twenty minutes. Sometimes I fear I have answered that politics are no occupation for an honest man. If I made that answer I was wrong, for it is my duty, and every one's duty, to try to alter that state of affairs if it exists. But the true answer was that I thought I could be of more use where I was. 'But why?' my questioner might have asked, 'if you can find a method of reducing the amount of potassium in your own blood or altering the distribution of sugar between the different tissues of your body, should you not apply your mind to reducing the amount of unemployment in the country or helping to bring about a juster distribution of its wealth?' I could not answer that these questions do not interest me. I have not to take many paces outside my laboratory to see the need for political and social reform. As a skilled manual worker and a trade unionist, I have a strong idea where I should find my political affinities.

I might claim that my work had done something to save life and health in the fight against disease. But if it resulted in halving the death-rate from heart disease (which is highly unlikely) it would not save half as many lives as if I could be instrumental in bringing the sanitary conditions of the unskilled urban labourer up to those of the skilled artisan. And these conditions depend mainly on housing and wages.

My only valid excuse seems to be along quite different lines. I believe that social problems can only be solved in the long run by the application of scientific method, such as has made possible modern industry and modern medicine. I am at once answered by two sets of people. The first tell me that if I think on scientific lines about politics I shall inevitably be led to their own favourite scheme, a scientific tariff perhaps, or a scientific organization of the means of production by the State. The others say that my scientific method may be adequate for dealing with machines or animals; but that as man is a great deal more than a machine or an animal, it cannot be applied to politics. With these last I have considerable sympathy.

If I thought that science in its present embryonic state could be applied to politics I should become a politician. But it certainly cannot. Man is no more a mere animal than he is an economic unit. It is quite true that biological laws apply to him as mechanical laws do. Good intentions alone are as useless against smallpox as against an earthquake, though they are needed for dealing with both these calamities. But to predict the behaviour of men in the mass we require knowledge of a special kind of psychology. And at the present moment the expert politician knows ten times as much of it as the best psychologist. But there is this big difference between the two. What little knowledge the psychologist possesses, though it is so abstract and meagre as to be of very little practical value, can be put in a form accessible to other psychologists. The same cannot be said of the politicians.

Mr. Ramsay MacDonald and Lord Younger disagree on most political topics; but they would probably agree to a large extent in estimating the ability and integrity of a given statesman, or the probability of gaining votes by a given speech or measure. Yet they could not put into words the processes by which they arrive at these estimates, although their judgment is clearly worth more when they agree than when they differ. The psychologists are just beginning to give an account of these processes. In another two or three centuries they will be beating the politicians at their own game and usurping their power, provided that the politicians have left a civilization in which psychology can exist.

I say two or three centuries for the following reason. Two hundred years ago the physicists and chemists were beginning to study the properties of metals by exact methods involving measurement, and the biologists were looking down the first microscopes. But the real knowledge of metals lay in the hands of skilled workmen, who handed down their rule of thumb methods and manual dexterity to their children. To-day metallurgy is a branch of applied science, while biologists are just beginning to be of some use to the practical animal breeder, though they cannot yet beat him at his own game. Psychology is about as much more complex than biology as biology than physics. Hence my estimate of the time it will take to develop. Let us hope that it is too large.

Why then am I not a psychologist? Because, with all respect to psychologists, I do not think psychology is yet a science.

Mechanics became a science when physicists had decided what they meant by such words as weight, velocity, and force, but not till then. The psychologists are still trying to arrive at a satisfactory terminology for the simplest phenomena that they have to deal with. Until they are clearer as to the exact meaning of the words they use, they can hardly begin to record events on scientific lines. Moreover, I do not believe that psychology will go very far without a satisfactory physiology of the nervous system, any more than physiology could advance until physics and chemistry had developed to a certain point. This is not to say that physiology is a mere branch of physics or chemistry, or the mind a mere by-product of the brain. But it is a fact that we can only know about life by observing the movements of matter.

You may be the most spiritually minded man on earth, but I can only learn that fact by seeing, hearing, or feeling your bodily movements. As the latter depend on events in your brain, I may as well get some information about those events. Moreover, the close dependence of your thought on processes in your brain may readily be shown by comparing the effects on it of a blow on your head and a blow elsewhere. To study psychology before we understand the physiology of the brain is like trying to study physics without a knowledge of mathematics. Physics is more than mathematics, as matter is more than space, but you cannot have the one without the other. Now at the moment the physiology of the nervous system is being worked out with great speed, and by contributing to its progress I suspect that I am doing more for psychology than if I became a psychologist.

It is worth while taking an example of what I mean by the application of psychology to politics. The success or failure of Socialism will depend on whether it can furnish as good an incentive to individual effort as our present economic system, more than on any other single fact. This is a very favourite topic with debating societies. Similarly the question whether the first bird came out of the first egg or the other way round was debated; until a study of fossils showed that birds were descended from reptiles which laid eggs, and therefore the egg had the priority. But a better analogy is the case of human diet. During the war the basis of the people's food had to be changed, and an adequate but not excessive ration assigned. If this had been left to politicians it is fairly certain that while there would have been waste in some directions, yet essential ingredients in the diet would have been left out, and we should have had outbreaks of scurvy, rickets, and dropsy such as occurred on the Continent, even where there was not actual starvation. But the politicians took the advice of some very competent biochemists, and rationing was a success.

A hundred years ago one of Napoleon's armies was put on a cheap and portable diet drawn up by the best physiologists of that day. Some essential ingredients were left out with disastrous results. I fear that the results would be no better if we asked the psychologists of to-day to draw up a scheme of non-economic incentives to effort for a socialized industry. We should do much better to rely on practical experience of the fighting services, municipal enterprises, labour battalions in the war, and so on. But even a hundred years hence I think the psychologists might be quite as valuable as the 'practical men.'

For the moment, then, I believe that the man with a gift for thought on scientific lines is of more use to his fellows in the laboratory than out of it. He can work on clearly defined problems to which his really accurate if rather narrow type of thought can be applied. I know that this is little comfort to the unemployed workman or the war widow who watches the approach of the conflict that will claim her only son. But we have not yet got the general principles to apply to their problems, though we may applaud and support efforts to remedy individual evils. To take a problem which is much nearer solution, that of cancer, we can tell the sufferer to go to the surgeon, who will give him a sporting chance of recovery if the disease is not too far advanced. (The surgeons can cure about fifty per cent. of cases of cancer of the breast or womb if they come in time.)

But the surgeon's methods are rough and often ineffective, though we have every reason to think that in fifty years we shall be able to deal with this disease as we have with typhoid and smallpox. However, few men who are dying of inoperable cancer will be cheered by the news that cancerous tissues have been shown to be capable of breaking up sugars far more rapidly than ordinary tissues can, though this may be the clue to the ultimate prevention or cure of cancer.

To say that the scientific mind is still best employed outside politics, is not, of course, an assertion that politics are only suited for fools. If I may conclude with some remarks on a subject of which I know no more than it is my duty as a voter to know, I would suggest that with the extension of the State's activities the organizing type of mind is becoming more necessary in politics than the emotional and sympathetic type which has led great causes in the past. When this country makes its first experiments in Socialism we shall need in control of the nationalized industries the type of mind that has from time to time successfully reorganized the fighting services in the past. It will be the duty of the Government to entrust them to such a person though he or she were as tongue-tied as Sir Eric Geddes, and as adulterous as Samuel Pepys. Fortunately such a man or woman is quite as likely to rise to power by organizing a great trade union, as by the paths which lead to success in the older parties. But as long as the principles of politics are unsystematized and incommunicable, I, for one, shall continue to regard any political projects as interesting experiments which may or may not promote human happiness but will certainly furnish important data for future use.

Of the biochemical experiments which I have done on myself, perhaps two-thirds have had the results for which I was looking. But every one has also had unexpected, and many of them unpleasant, effects. Nothing can be more instructive than to read the forecasts which the more intelligent economists of the eighteenth century, Adam Smith in particular, made as to the effects of the economic system which was substantially adopted in the nineteenth. Smith foresaw the great increase of wealth and education. He did not predict the amazingly unequal distribution of incomes, the periodic waves of unemployment, the gigantic industrial conflicts.

And until politics are a branch of science we shall do well to regard political and social reforms as experiments rather than short cuts to the millennium. The time-scale of evolution so far has been the geological time-scale, in which we expect no substantial change in less than a hundred thousand years. We may be thankful if we have speeded up this progress a thousandfold and at the end of a long life can leave the world noticeably better than we found it.

End of Science And Politics by J.B.S. Haldane