Old Journal Inside a Fox Den with New Meaning
"Science in the Totalitarian State" Foreign Affairs, January, 1941
“If our society wants science it must choose between totalitarianism and democracy. There can be no compromise.”
Back when the Council on Foreign Relations publicly questioned totalitarianism instead of demanding it, the journal of CFR, Foreign Affairs, shared more truth than it hid. This 1941 article provides a fascinating insight to the field of science under Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. And asks questions about the role of science in a democracy. The number of parallels to what we are experiencing today are striking.
Fox first shared this as a comment made under another post in May, 2023, Rapidly Changing Norms, Rules and Laws Are Hallmarks of Totalitarianism.
Fox encourages readers to click the link and read the FA piece in its entirety, your takeaways will be different. My selected excerpts below.
Science in the Totalitarian State
Foreign Affairs, January, 1941
"The totalitarian conception of the relation of science to the state is remarkably elastic. When political expediency so determines, the whole concept is modified. "
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"This Nazi and Soviet pursuit of "rebels" may seem absurd, but actually it is logical. An artist or a scientist in Germany and in Russia serves the state. He therefore cannot separate his politics from his strictly professional activities. If he departs from the prevailing official ideology he automatically becomes an anti-Nazi in Germany and a counter-revolutionary in the Soviet Union."
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"It was also charged that Soviet materialistic works on cosmology "have been suppressed by the enemies of the people." In other words, because Marx and Engels were saturated in Victorian materialism, which followed Newton in picturing the universe as a colossal machine instead of a problem in higher geometry, all the experimental and observational evidence that supports relativity must be rejected.
How does science like this tyranny? A few bold spirits still survive in Germany and Russia, but, on the whole, there is a remarkable pliancy of the scientific mind in both countries."
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"The Russian gift of recantation, which marked the trials of Party members accused of adherence to Trotsky, manifests itself in science as well as in politics.
Back of the ideologies of the dictators, back of the professional pliancy, is something more than political expediency, something more than blind obedience. Long before the world ever heard of Mussolini and Stalin and Hitler it was in a state of social unrest. The revolutions that overthrew the Romanoffs and the Hohenzollerns, the upheavals that gave British labor new rights and privileges, were expressions of dissatisfaction with the social structure. To say that the dictators emerged because science and technology had taken possession of society and stamped it with a pattern utterly different from that which the égalitarians of the eighteenth century knew is an over-simplification. There are psychic factors that cannot be ignored -- inner drives, national traditions, habits of life. Yet if the dictators are to be overthrown, if democracy is to be preserved, the part that science and technology played in the rise of democracy cannot be ignored. Research produces not only change within science itself but social change. The democratic method is to adapt social change to technological change. The dictators are trying to do the contrary.
In considering the relation of science to the dictators we must bear in mind that the human mind is intrinsically no better than it was 10,000 years ago. It simply has acquired new interests under social tension. In the Middle Ages social tension expressed itself so strongly in religion that there were 110 holy days in the year; a new ecclesiastical architecture was evolved; all Europe rose to the spiritual need of wresting Jerusalem from the "infidel." Today, however, it means more to our society to discover how the atom is constituted than that a new ecclesiastical architecture is developed, more that the mechanism of heredity is revealed than that savages in Africa are converted to Christianity. Perhaps its pragmatic attitude has led science to ignore essential ethical values. But the point is that science dominates our society, and that if our society wants science it must choose between totalitarianism and democracy. There can be no compromise."
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"When the business man and the inventor were freed from this aristocratic fetishism, machine after machine appeared, and with the machines came mass production and mass consumption of identical goods. Without standardization mass production is impossible. To have cheap, good clothes we must all dress more or less alike. To bring automobiles within the reach of millions we must have the assembly line. To live inexpensively in cities we must eat packaged foods, dwell in more or less standardized homes, bathe in standardized bath tubs, and draw water and gas from common reservoirs. Mass production has brought it about that the average life in New York is hardly different from the average life in Wichita. The same motion pictures brighten the screen, the same voices and music well out of loud-speakers in every town, identical cans of tomatoes and packages of cereals are to be found on all grocers' shelves, identical electric toasters brown identical slices of bread everywhere, identical refrigerators freeze identical ice cubes in a million kitchens. If gunpowder made all men the same height, in Carlyle's classic phrase, mass production has standardized behavior, pleasures, tastes, comforts, life itself.
Mass production and labor-saving devices have created a social crisis. We cannot have mass production and mechanization without planning. Engineers and their financial backers are planners. Dictators are planners. Whether they know it or not, most corporation executives and engineers are necessary totalitarians in practice. Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin clearly have the instincts of engineers. Their states are designed social structures."
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"Often enough we hear it said that mechanical invention has outstripped social invention -- that new social forms must be devised if we are to forestall the economic crises that are brought about by what is called the "impact of science" on society. Communism and Fascism are social inventions, intended among other things to solve the economic problems created by technological change under the influence of capitalism. They attempt to answer a question: Are the technical experts and their financial backers to shape the course of society unrestrained, and even to rule nations directly and indirectly, as they did in France, and as they do in part in Great Britain and the United States? The totalitarians say that a capitalistic democratic government cannot control the experts, the inventors, the creators of this evolving mechanical culture. They therefore have decided to take control of thinking, above all scientific thinking, out of which flow the manufacturing processes and the machines which change life.
But science is more than coal-tar dyes and drugs, electric lamps, airplanes, radio, television, relativity and astrophysics. It is an attitude of mind -- what Professor Whitehead has called "the most intimate change in outlook that the human race has yet experienced." If Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin are to rule, that scientific attitude will have to be abandoned when it conflicts with the official social philosophy. But if it is abandoned there can be no Newtons, no Darwins, no Einsteins. Science will be unable to make discoveries which will change the human outlook and, with the outlook, the social order. If the world wants to preserve science as a powerful social force for good the research physicist, chemist and biologist must be permitted to work without intellectual restraint, i.e. to enjoy the fundamental freedom of democracy."
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"An essential to this progress has been that the scientist has not demanded that his theory be considered "true." He does not profess to know what the truth is. A theory must work. It is an expedient. When it ceases to work it is thrown overboard or modified. This method of merciless self-examination cannot be followed in a society where the result of each investigation is predetermined for extraneous reasons. Democracy flounders before it arrives at satisfactory solutions of its social problems. But it is better to flounder and progress than to follow the philosophy of a dictator and to remain socially and scientifically static."
Dear Freedom Fox!
Too much reading and too much to read! Have found this post belatedly and tho’ I’ve yet to read the full original CFR piece I do have an impression. It’s an interesting look at the CFR and the powerful guiding bodies of that time — and thank you.
It seems to say more about the CFR than it does the totalitarians he decries! Here is one of my takeaways.
It states:
“The democratic method is to adapt social change to technological change. The dictators are trying to do the contrary.”
When the CFR’s writer says ‘democracy’ here what they’re really saying is “progressivism”. And that is of the very same genus of hell-spawned insect as the dictatorships he mentions, though he presents them as opposing kinds altogether. The essential difference between the two is that in 1941, the progressive insect was as yet a nymph; now we see it fully metamorphosed, and that’s why it so resembles the Soviet, Fascist and Nazi states. It’s because this CFR ‘democracy’ of social change and technological development was always a totalitarian state in its nature. It’s why this CFR ‘democracy’ sounds so danged familiar these days: “Our Democracy”. The beast now has its wings.
OK, I read it twice.
Last night and this afternoon.
This was written 82 years ago?
Many things caught my attention, the 1st being:
"Today, the German university professor must ask himself one question: Does my scientific work serve the welfare of National Socialism?"
Good read, though.