The Coming of Post-Industrial Society

by Daniel Bell

  In the last decade, there have been three major structural changes in the character of science’s relation to government:

  1. The old, closely bound elite structures are dissolving. The old political elites of science derived from close personal associations in wartime experiences—at the radiation lab at MIT, at Chicago, Berkeley, and Los Alamos—and even the cliques that were subsequently formed had their source in differences going back to those old associations and conflicts. The original political elite was drawn largely from the physicists, because of their centrality in wartime research. There is no central elite today, and the multiplication of scientific fields, principally the diverse branches of biology (molecular biology, population biology, and environmental biology), has greatly broadened the top group.

  2. The military, today, has its own weapons labs and is less directly dependent on university science than it was twenty-five years ago. The military-industrial complex, though its influence has been exaggerated, has given the military a broad research capacity it never had before.

  3. The growth of research and development funds, particularly after 1956, has multiplied the claimants of funds for science. Universities have become active political entities in the search for money. Scientists and engineers have started hundreds of profit and nonprofit companies to do research and evaluation. The number of scientific and technical associations with headquarters in Washington to represent their constituents has multiplied enormously. This is the broad base of the bureaucratization of science.

  In this context, then, who speaks for science? There are three different kinds of spokesmen:

  1. The individuals—Nobel laureates or those recognized by their peers—who derive their authority from the charismatic community of science. Inevitably, however, some of the luster is gone simply because of the realization, owing to the events of the last twenty-five years, that as individuals scientists are neither better nor worse at judgment or moral stricture than other leaders of society and that individual scientific achievement is not a guarantee of mosaic wisdom.

  2. Movements like that of the young radicals in science, or ecological reformers such as Rachel Carson or Barry Commoner, who invoke the institutional charisma of science in making moral or political judgments. What we have here is the resumption of the prophetic claims of science as setting forth truth against self-interest.

  3. Institutional associations such as the National Academy of Science or the National Academy of Engineering. In the last two decades, the National Academy of Science—whose membership, by self-selection, is limited to the achieving elite in science—has come to the fore as a quasi-official agency for two reasons. First, since cooperation among governments involves the selection of a single scientific body to negotiate exchanges and cooperation, the academy has more and more become a government conduit for such official transactions. And second, attached to the National Academy of Science is the National Research Council, a body which, under the impetus of the academy or the government, undertakes research on policy questions which often becomes the basis for measures taken by the President or Congress. To the extent that the “advice process” on technical questions has become formalized, it is the National Academy of Science—and in recent years a comparative body, the National Academy of Engineering, set up in 1964—which becomes a spokesman for science.

  Given the large-scale growth of science, the huge number of persons involved, the enormous amounts of money needed for support, and its centrality in the post-industrial society, the bureaucratization of science is inevitable. And the problem of creating representative structures will be one of the most difficult political problems for science in the coming decades. In the past, some persons have talked of a “parliament of science”39 which would be a formal representative body for the drafting of coherent science policies, but it is highly unlikely that such a formal body will ever be established. And yet some greater coordination than now exists is probable, and some clearer identification of the “spokesmen” for science may be necessary.

  Bureaucratization is a problem in every complex society, and the fear of a bureaucracy as a new administrative class both throughout a society and within a large organization has bedeviled the hopes of socialistic and Utopian writers. For science, bureaucratization imposes a number of severe risks. Within the organization of science, bureaucratization may impede the “recognition system” of work and persons which has been the heart of the community of science through the subordination of individual achievement to the over-all goals of a laboratory, or by appropriating the work for the credit of the “bureau” itself. In the over-all organization of science, the creation of a centralized bureaucracy—and centralization is an invariable tendency in these instances—could mean the stifling of inquiry, the demand that scientific work be responsive to stipulated national or social needs and the priority of political goals over scientific work.

  Inevitably, thus, tensions will arise between the bureaucratic tendencies of large-scale science and the charismatic dimension of science, which sees its activities as ends in themselves that should not be subordinated to other goals. These tensions are bound to be of two sorts. One is the demand, voiced most recently by Jacob Bronowski, for the “disestablishment of science.”40 In this argument, government should refrain from any statement of scientific goals and provide only a sum of money, which would be distributed within scientific endeavors by committees of scientists in accordance with their own criteria. In a curious way this demand reopens a debate that took place thirty years ago among leading scientists about the planning of science. In the later 1930s, there was a movement in Great Britain, under the leadership of the Marxist scientist J. D. Bernal, which called for the “planning of science” to meet the practical needs of society. The movement was opposed by another group of scientists, headed by Michael Polanyi and Percy Bridgman, which denied that advances in science arose, as Marxists claimed, in response to material needs and that there was no essential distinction between science and technology. For Bernal, the need for scientific planning was on the same footing as the need for economic planning, in order to achieve greater efficiency in research. Ironically, the very financial needs of science have imposed a rough measure of planning, and the demands to create the weapons of war, and later material production, have brought science close to the point Bernal had thought it should reach. Yet in answer to Bernal, Polanyi argued a different credo. “We must reassert,” he wrote, “that the essense of science is the love of knowledge and that the utility of knowledge does not concern us primarily. We should demand once more for science that public respect and support which is due it as a pursuit of knowledge and knowledge alone. For we scientists are pledged to values more precious than material welfare and to a service more urgent than that of material welfare.”41 To some extent, we have here the reassertion of Max Weber’s idea of “science as a vocation” and the exemption of science from the mundane aspects of the world because of its “sacred” character. It is likely that the move for the “disestablishment of science” will spread.

  The second tension is the inherent confrontation of science with any arbitrary power. In this view, the fate of science is tied to the fate of intellectual freedom, and science must necessarily speak out actively against any efforts to impose an official ideology or doctrinal view of truth. This is a faith which derives from the ethos of science. This is a view which has received its most vigorous emphasis in recent years in the Soviet Union itself. For Soviet science the most damning example of the havoc created by partiinost—the doctrine that the party must direct all aspects of science and literature—was the Lysenko affair. As a reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement observed: “The Lysenko affair has been aptly described as perhaps the most bizarre chapter in the history of modern science. For thirty years, until 1964, Soviet genetics was dominated by an illiterate, neurotic charlatan who was allowed absolute dictatorship over both biological research and agricultural practice. Hundreds of scientists los
t their jobs, and the outstanding Russian geneticist N. I. Vavilov, Lysenko’s main opponent, died in one of Stalin’s prisons. All genetics teaching in universities was stopped, laboratories were closed or taken over by Lysenko’s supporters, and research came to a halt.” Behind this bizarre episode was an ideological doctrine that the Lamarckian hypothesis of the inheritance of acquired characteristics was truer than Mendelian genetics; environment, not heredity, could be the most powerful force shaping a society. This was accompanied by the political bosses’ arrogant belief that they knew better than scientists how to increase farm yields.

  The shame of the Lysenko affair spurred the Russian biologist Zhores Medvedev to write The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko, which was published abroad, and to send out a book, The Medvedev Papers, which is a record of his efforts to establish full and free communication with scientists abroad, to end censorship, and to be able to travel freely to scientific congresses. It is the necessity for intellectual freedom and international cooperation that underlies the document Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom, by Andrei Sakharov.

  Andrei Sakharov, most brilliant of the younger Soviet physicists, was at the age of thirty instrumental in creating the Russian hydrogen bomb. (At thirty-two he was elected to the Soviet Academy of Science, the youngest Russian scientist ever to be given this honor.) Like the physicists who created the first atomic bomb, the threat of thermonuclear war has disturbed him deeply, as has Stalin’s terrible destruction in the Soviet Union. The document which Sakharov issued, after circulating it among leading Soviet scientists and intellectuals, has two theses: the need for international agreements to outlaw nuclear weapons, and the fact that “intellectual freedom is essential to human society.” But the fundamental premise, contained in the opening page, is that the method of science—“presupposing unprejudice, unfearing open discussion and conclusions”—has not become a reality and must be employed. What is perhaps most important of all is the implicit thesis that an international community of science is a reality and that its moral foundations compel all men who believe in science to support the conditions of cooperation and intellectual freedom.42

  All of this leads to a set of classic conundrums. Is science to be only “pure” science, serving knowledge and truth as defined by the community of science? Or is science to be of “service to the society”? If science is to be “pure,” how does it justify the vast sums that are necessary for modern research, and how are the levels to be established? And does the purity of science mean that it has to be apolitical to justify government support? If science is to serve society, how is this to be determined? By the scientists themselves, or does the polity have the decisive voice in deciding what kind of scientific and technological enterprises—military or social service—take priority? In practice, none of these stark divisions make complete sense, for in the very way science is intertwined with military, technological, and economic development, there will be forces at work arguing for all these positions. Yet by the very fact that science is so strategic and the sums involved are so large, state intervention is inevitable, either in the tight and direct form of the Soviet Union, or the loose and pluralistic monetary controls of the United States.

  The defense of science—against bureaucratization, against political subjugation, against totalitarianism—derives eventually thus from the vitality of its ethos. The charismatic aspect of science gives it its “sacred” quality as a way of life for its members. Like Christianity, this charismatic dimension has within it a recurrent Utopian and even messianic appeal. It is the tension between those charismatic elements and the realities of large-scale organization that will frame the political realities of science in the post-industrial society.

  3. Meritocracy and Equality

  In 1958, the English sociologist Michael Young wrote a fable, The Rise of the Meritocracy.43 It purports to be a “manuscript,” written in the year 2033, which breaks off inconclusively for reasons the “narrator” failed to comprehend. The theme is the transformation of English society, by the turn of the twenty-first century, owing to the victory of the principle of achievement over that of ascription (i.e. the gaining of place by assignment or inheritance). For centuries, the elite positions in the society had been held by the children of the nobility on the hereditary principle of succession. But in the nature of modern society, “the rate of social progress depend[ed] on the degree to which power is matched with intelligence.” Britain could no longer afford a ruling class without the necessary technical skills. Through the successive school-reform acts, the principle of merit slowly became established. Each man had his place in the society on the basis of “IQ and Effort.” By 1990 or thereabouts, all adults with IQs over 125 belonged to the meritocracy.

  But with that transformation came an unexpected reaction. Previously, talent had been distributed throughout the society, and each class or social group had its own natural leaders. Now all men of talent were raised into a common elite, and those below had no excuses for their failures; they bore the stigma of rejection, they were known inferiors.

  By the year 2034 the Populists had revolted. Though the majority of the rebels were members of the lower classes, the leaders were high-status women, often the wives of leading scientists. Relegated during the early married years to the household because of the need to nurture high-IQ children, the activist women had demanded equality between the sexes, a movement that was then generalized into the demand for equality for all, and for a classless society. Life was not to be ruled by “a mathematical measure” but each person would develop his own diverse capacities for leading his own life.44 The Populists won. After little more than half a century, the Meritocracy had come to an end.

  Is this, too, the fate of the post-industrial society? The post-industrial society, in its initial logic, is a meritocracy. Differential status and differential income are based on technical skills and higher education. Without those achievements one cannot fulfill the requirements of the new social division of labor which is a feature of that society. And there are few high places open without those skills. To that extent, the post-industrial society differs from society at the turn of the twentieth century. The initial change, of course, came in the professions. Seventy years or so ago, one could still “read” law in a lawyer’s office and take the bar examination without a college degree. Today, in medicine, law, accounting, and a dozen other professions, one needs a college degree and accrediting, through examination, by legally sanctioned committees of the profession, before one can practice one’s art. For many years, until after World War II, business was the chief route open to an ambitious and aggressive person who wanted to strike out for himself. And the rags-to-riches ascent (or, more accurately, clerk-to-capitalist, if one follows the career of a Rockefeller, Harriman, or Carnegie) required drive and ruthlessness rather than education and skills. One can still start various kinds of small businesses (usually, now, by franchise from a larger corporation), but the expansion of such enterprises takes vastly different skills than in the past. Within the corporation, as managerial positions have become professionalized, individuals are rarely promoted from shop jobs below but are chosen from the outside, with a college degree as the passport of recognition. Only in politics, where position may be achieved through the ability to recruit a following, or through patronage, is there a relatively open ladder without formal credentials.

  Technical skill, in the post-industrial society, is what the economists call “human capital.” An “investment” in four years of college, according to initial estimates of Gary Becker, yields, over the average working life of the male graduate, an annual return of about 13 percent.45 Graduation from an elite college (or elite law school or business school) gives one a further differential advantage over graduates from “mass” or state schools. Thus, the university, which once reflected the status system of the society, has now become the arbiter of class position. As the gatekeeper, it has gained a quasi-monopoly in determining the future stratificat
ion of the society.46

  Any institution which gains a quasi-monopoly power over the fate of individuals is likely, in a free society, to be subject to quick attack. Thus, it is striking that the populist revolt, which Michael Young foresaw several decades hence, has already begun, at the very onset of the post-industrial society. One sees this in the derogation of the IQ and the denunciation of theories espousing a genetic basis of intelligence; the demand for “open admission” to universities on the part of minority groups in the large urban centers; the pressure for increased numbers of blacks, women, and specific minority groups such as Puerto Ricans and Chicanos in the faculties of universities, by quotas if necessary; and the attack on “credentials” and even schooling itself as the determinant of a man’s position in the society. A post-industrial society reshapes the class structure of society by creating new technical elites. The populist reaction, which has begun in the 1970s, raises the demand for greater “equality” as a defense against being excluded from that society. Thus the issue of meritocracy versus equality.

  In the nature of a meritocracy, as it has been traditionally conceived, what is central to the assessment of a person is the assumed relation of achievement to intelligence, and of intelligence to its measurement on the Intelligence Quotient scale. The first question, therefore, is what determines intelligence. In the received social science and biology opinion, the number of talented persons in a society, as measured by IQ, is a limited pool; and this is reflected in the bell-shaped curve of a normal distribution of test scores in a particular age category. By the logic of a meritocracy, these high-scoring individuals, no matter where they are in the society, should be brought to the top in order to make the best use of their talents.47 This is the basis of the liberal theory of equality of opportunity and of Jefferson’s belief in the “natural aristoi” against the ascriptive nobility.