Thomas Alva Edison, the “wizard of Menlo Park,” was an inventor and tinkerer—a technological innovator, not a scientific researcher. His “invention factory” at Menlo Park, New Jersey, turned out literally hundreds of world-transforming gadgets—the typewriter, the phonograph, the lightbulb, the telegraph, storage batteries, electric meters and motors, moving pictures—yet in his entire career Edison made only one discovery that could be called “pure science”: the observation that heated metals in a vacuum emit electrons. Because this phenomenon had no utility for his purposes, he simply wrote it down in a notebook and forgot about it. His success as an inventor and businessman, however, made him a prototype for scientists to come. Automaker Henry Ford, a close friend and admirer, observed that Edison “definitely ended the distinction between the theoretical man of science and the practical man of science, so that today we think of scientific discoveries in connection with their possible present or future application to the needs of man. He took the old rule-of-thumb methods out of industry and substituted exact scientific knowledge, while on the other hand, he directed scientific research into useful channels.”4
“Useful channels,” in Edison’s eyes and certainly in Ford’s, were virtually synonymous with commercial viability. Their concept of science fit perfectly within the American pragmatic tradition, and it was a concept that certainly had its virtues. Its flaws were less immediately obvious.
Galileo vs. the Guardians
Historically, science has often allied itself with the political philosophy of democracy. To function freely, science depends upon the democratic values of free speech, thought, and association, and in fact the ancient Greek democracies were the first Western societies to produce a substantial scientific literature. The Dark Ages brought both a return to authoritarian governments and a suppression of scientific inquiry, which threatened the absolute dogmas handed down from King and Church. The Italian mathematician and astronomer Galileo Galilei has come to symbolize both scientific genius and the importance of intellectual freedom for his persistent efforts to prove that the earth travels around the sun. Condemned in 1633 as a heretic by the Roman Inquisition, Galileo spent the last eight years of his life under house arrest. Eventually, of course, his astronomical conclusions won unanimous acceptance, and today he is frequently cited as an example of steadfast scientific dissent in the face of repressive orthodoxy.
The philosophy of democracy has as its core doctrine the belief that “the people” are better qualified to make decisions that affect their lives than anyone else. It follows from this assumption that governments should be elected by the people and serve their interests. Other institutions, such as corporations, are permitted to pursue their private goal of making money, but their activities may be restricted if the public deems them harmful.
Throughout history, the alternatives to this democratic worldview have been variations on the theme of “guardianship”—the notion that people are not really able to make wise decisions and therefore need to be governed by someone who is smarter, better informed, more rational, or somehow better fit to rule. Plato thought that society should be governed by “philosopher-kings”—men who understood the “science of ruling” and possessed the ability to see beyond appearances and grasp the essential “forms” of true justice. Since this ability is assumed to be rare, it follows that letting “the people” govern will lead to chaos, anarchy, and bad policies. The notion that people need a guardian to govern on their behalf has been used as a rationale by authoritarian governments of all stripes, from the monarchies of Europe to the Marxist-Leninist states in China and Russia to the military regimes that have ruled by terror in places like Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Nigeria.
In reality, Plato’s “royal science” of governance is a chimera. Politics is more of an art than a science. It depends on moral propositions that cannot be reduced to mathematical or physical “scientific laws.” Should abortion be legal? Is it moral to build nuclear weapons? Should poor people have access to free medical care? These are only a few of the important questions that do not have scientific or technical answers.
In the struggle between democracy and guardianship, science has acquired a unique and often contradictory role. Heretic stargazers such as Galileo have led scientific rebellions against society’s guardians, but others have eagerly served the royal courts, sometimes even imagining that their specialized knowledge entitles them to become rulers themselves.
Sir Francis Bacon, who is widely regarded as the philosopher responsible for first codifying the modern scientific method, served as Lord Chancellor of England under King James the First. He was hardly an enemy of guardianship, but he recognized that the doctrines of his day, based on royal authority and religious tradition, had become stagnant. “The many surrender themselves to the leadership of one . . . and become incapable of adding anything new,” he wrote. “For when philosophy is severed from its roots in experience, whence it first sprouted and grew, it becomes a dead thing.” By contrast, he observed, the scientific method had shown its ability to “acquire new strength and capacities” by drawing upon “the talents of many individuals.”5 As an alternative to the concept of rule by philosopher-kings, he envisioned a utopian society run by a technical elite, which would draw upon the knowledge generated by science in order to govern in the interests of efficiency, order, and progress.
The Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, founded in 1660 as England’s official scientific society, drew much of its inspiration from Bacon’s belief that scientific knowledge should come from all quarters and walks of life. At the time of the society’s charter, two-thirds of its members were interested amateurs rather than full-time scientists. Rather than narrow specialists, scientists of the period were wide-ranging intellectuals interested in all of the ideas of the day, from physics to theology. They combined passion for knowledge with practical interests in commerce, agriculture, and industry. “We find noble rarities to be every day given in,” wrote Bishop Sprat, the first historian of the Society, “not only by the hands of the learned, but from the shops of mechanics, voyages of merchants, ploughs of husbandmen, gardens of gentlemen.”
Simultaneously, however, an unmistakable thread of elitism ran through the thinking of the scientific utopians. Bacon openly disdained the “innate depravity and malignant disposition of the common people” and viewed science as a way to teach “the peoples [to] take upon them the yoke of laws and submit to authority, and forget their ungovernable attitudes.” 6 Likewise, Sprat of the Royal Society saw particular value in the participation of its noble-born, amateur members—“gentlemen, free and unconfined . . . who by the freedom of their education, the plenty of their estates and the usual generosity of noble blood, may be well supposed to be most averse from sordid considerations.”7
In France the philosophes, whose thinking helped inspire the French Revolution, dreamed of doing to government what Sir Isaac Newton had done to the human understanding of mathematics and physics. They believed that once men grasped the underlying “fundamental laws” of human society, they would be able to operate the “world-machine” smoothly and efficiently for the betterment of all.8 This belief found realization in the Jacobin movement, whose goal, notes historian Lewis Coser, was “to make France over in the image of pure reason.” And yet it was precisely the intensity of the Jacobin commitment to “pure reason” and “obedience to the law of nature, which intends every man to be just,” that led to the French Terror and rule by guillotine. “As long as the demands of nature were violated, as long as there were corruption and rascals and lukewarm concern with public virtue, the purge must continue,” Coser observes. “In the pursuit of so exalted an aim, men invested with high purpose and morally invulnerable need feel no pity. Their opponents were not in error; they were in sin. They could therefore be exterminated in good conscience.”9
A great gulf obviously separated reality from revolutionary ideals, and yet the utopian vision of a wor
ld made perfect by reason proved too captivating to abandon. As the French Revolution gave way to disillusionment, philosopher Claude-Henri Saint-Simon became one of the most popular thinkers of the nineteenth century and has had a profound influence on later generations of thinkers. E. H. Carr has aptly described him as “the precursor of socialism, the precursor of the technocrats, and the precursor of totalitarianism.”10 Like Sir Francis Bacon, Saint-Simon believed that science and technology would “solve major social as well as technical problems.” In order for technical experts to run society, however, the “unenlightened masses” had to be controlled. This in turn implied a “need to abandon mass democracy and, in turn, politics.”11 In their place, he proposed establishing a new science that would guide all of the others, which he called the “science of organization.”12
Saint-Simon’s ideas were promulgated further by his primary disciple, August Comte, who believed that politics should eventually become a form of “applied physics.” Their thinking was similar in many respects to the ideas of the Jacobins. The main difference was that the terrors and trials of revolution had taught Saint-Simon and Comte a certain hostility to politics and even to democracy itself, leading to a “deep-seated conviction that politicians should be replaced by scientific and technical elites. These ideas,” writes sociologist Frank Fischer, “occur again and again throughout technocratic writings. Only the historical circumstances change; the ideas themselves remain remarkably constant.”13
Science, far from being merely a way to study the physical world, had undergone a dramatic transformation. The hard science of physics, with its precise measurements and exact mechanical laws, had become a metaphor, a model of rationality and discipline that people attempted to imitate as they studied softer subjects such as biology, language, human behavior and even the behavior of entire societies. Somehow it didn’t seem to matter that none of these subjects lent themselves to precise measurements and predictions. Science had ceased to be merely a methodology and had become an ideology as well.
As an ideology, it lent itself to diverse and conflicting political uses. In England, the Utilitarians adopted an air of scientific rigor as they set out to collect data in support of abolishing the British Poor Law, the welfare system of the day. In its place, they imposed the more “efficient” (i.e., cheaper) workhouse system, whose vicious exploitation of the poor would later be depicted with heartrending detail in the novels of Charles Dickens. Somewhat later, the Fabian Socialists would pave the way for the British welfare state with similar assiduous compilations of meticulous, statistics-laden reports, through which they aimed to establish themselves as “unofficial expert ‘clerks’ to any decision-maker hampered by lack of expert advice.”14 The Utilitarian obsession with data collection also led to the compilation of the famous Victorian Blue Books, the densest collection of social statistics in human history, which in turn became the source from which Karl Marx drew all of the information he needed for his damning indictment of capitalism. The Marxist “science” of history and class struggle inspired the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, with its own belief in completely rational state power wielded by militant intellectuals. Like the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks believed that they were scientifically manipulating “objective laws of history” in order to create an ideal society. Once again, these ideals degenerated in practice into a new system of bureaucratic tyranny and repressive terror.
The “Science of Ruling” Comes to America
In the United States, the technocratic agenda found prominent expression in the Progressive movement that emerged in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Herbert Croly, the founder of The New Republic magazine, was deeply influenced by the philosophy of August Comte, as was Walter Lippmann. Meanwhile, on the conservative side of the political ledger, Frederick Taylor was developing his theories of “scientific management.” Using time and motion studies of workers, he sought to design factories and the work process in ways that would maximize productivity. His approach appealed not only to capitalists but to Russian revolutionary leader V. I. Lenin, who urged Soviet factories to “organize the study and teaching of the Taylor system,” which he called one of the “greatest scientific achievements in the field of analyzing mechanical motions during work, the elimination of superfluous and awkward motions, the elaboration of correct methods of work, the introduction of the best system of accounting and control.”15
“The functions of scientific management were twofold,” observes Fischer. “First, they were to enter the workplace to learn (through time and motion studies) what the workers already knew: how to plan and direct the details of the work process. Second, through managerial planning and analysis, Taylorites were to employ this newly gained knowledge to ‘efficiently’ redesign the production process under management control. . . . On the shop floor, the division of labor was increased by giving workers more specialized, less complex tasks. As a cost-saving device, it permitted the substitution of cheaper, less skilled workers for skilled workers. Work was less interesting and more repetitive for the worker, but it was more profitable for management. To foil resistance, Taylor’s strategy also introduced a number of technical changes. For example, work was designed to make the production process incomprehensible to workers. . . . As Taylor put it, ‘all possible brain work should be removed from the shop and centered in the planning or layout department.’ ”16
Not only were workers denied control over their own work processes, they were declared psychologically unfit for rational thought. Here, the impetus came from the much-cited “Hawthorne Studies,” which probably remain the most widely analyzed and discussed experiments in the history of the social sciences. Named after a Western Electric plant where the studies were conducted, the Hawthorne Studies were led by Harvard University professor Elton Mayo, who studied groups of women workers in an effort to determine what factors made them more productive. The Hawthorne Studies became influential not because of what they “proved,” but because Mayo’s conclusions found a ready audience in the business community. He claimed that there was a fundamental psychological difference between workers and management. Whereas management acts on the basis of logic and rationality, he said, workers are motivated by emotions. 17
The period between World Wars I and II came to be known as the “Age of the Machine.” It was during this period that mechanical technologies diffused throughout society. The automobile came into fashion. Machines became symbols of rationality, order, efficiency, power, and progress.18 A fledgling “technocracy movement” arose in the United States that saw “science banishing waste, unemployment, hunger, and insecurity of income forever . . . we see science replacing an economy of scarcity with an era of abundance . . . we see functional competence displacing grotesque and wasteful incompetence, facts displacing disorder, industrial planning displacing industrial chaos.”19 Sometimes calling itself “Technocracy, Inc.,” the movement exhibited protofascistic tendencies: “Organized around a rigid hierarchical structure, the members of technocracy featured gray uniforms with special insignias, drove a fleet of gray automobiles, and greeted one another with a special salute,” Fischer notes.20
In the wake of the First World War, observed contemporary historian Frederick Lewis Allen, science was “the one great intellectual force which had not suffered disrepute. . . . The prestige of science was colossal. The man in the street and the woman in the kitchen, confronted on every hand with new machines and devices which they owed to the laboratory, were ready to believe that science could accomplish almost anything; and they were being deluged with scientific information and theory. The newspapers were giving columns of space to inform (or misinform) them of the latest discoveries; a new dictum from Albert Einstein was now front-page stuff even though practically nobody could understand it. Outlines of knowledge poured from the presses to tell people about the planetesimal hypothesis and the constitution of the atom, to describe for them in unwarranted detail the daily life of the cave-man, and to acquaint them with the e
lectron, endocrines, hormones, vitamins, reflexes and psychoses.”21
The 1920s was also the period when the psychosexual theories of Sigmund Freud found a mass audience. “Psychology was king,” Allen observes. “Freud, Adler, Jung and Watson had their tens of thousands of votaries; intelligence-testers invaded the schools in quest of I.Q.’s; psychiatrists were installed in business houses to hire and fire employees and determine advertising policies.”
The Wizard of Spin
Freud exerted particular influence on Edward L. Bernays, the man who has come to be known as the “father of public relations.” For him, Freud was not just a towering intellect but a family member and personal mentor. Bernays was the son of Eli Bernays and Anna Freud Bernays, Sigmund’s sister. In fact, the Freuds and Bernayses got along so well that Sigmund himself ended up marrying Martha Bernays, Eli’s sister. What this meant for Edward Bernays is that he was not only Sigmund Freud’s nephew but a nephew twice over. Through Bernays, Freud’s influence on the fledgling public relations industry was enormous, and that legacy continues today in the most direct familial sense at Freud Communications, a high-powered British PR firm owned by Matthew Freud, Sigmund’s great-grandson. In addition to handling celebrities such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Hugh Grant, and Pamela Anderson, Freud Communications has worked for companies such as Volvo and Pizza Hut, and also handled the PR for the 1995 launch of Pepsi’s redesigned soda pop cans.
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