Unquestioning Scientists & Servile Intellectuals

Photo by Vanessa Loring

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By Richard Steinhardt

The genre of science fiction begins, really, with Frankenstein and flourishes with Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Jules Verne wrote in the era after Isambard Kingdom Brunel had already built his giant iron ships and bridges suspended from one cliff to another.

Think of the Montgolfier balloons, think of the steam engine. Jules Verne wasn’t talking about the evolution of a future society. He was extrapolating his stories from the technological base of the 19th century. He was a writer and trend forecaster. His logic was: if there is a machine that can do one thing, then there is also a machine that can do another. If there is a machine that can go under the water, then there is a machine that can both fly and go under the water.

This is trans-medium transport technology. In the ’70s by the Thames there was a little car that drove off into the river, boiled around in circles in the water, and then drove out again. Now, if that car had its windows closed and was watertight and had little fins, it would be the the submarine white Lotus car driven by Roger Moore in ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’. If that car had wings that unfolded, it would fly like Ian Fleming’s Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang. It was the most natural thing in the world for Jules Verne to imagine that a machine travelling underwater could be designed to come out of the water and fly. A modern example of this is a nuclear missile fired from a submarine.

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There are other kinds of propulsion technology which are obvious, but like private yachts and Jets, these forms of travel are not designed for ordinary people. Elon Musk is probably building building a high-velocity vehicle for a tunnel that shoots up to the north to Canada, where he hopes Russian missiles won’t fall on him. If you have the money—and you’d have to be Elon Musk to have that money—you could redirect a satellite to spot the construction of Musk’s ratline from space. Given the rich technological fantasy life of the US oligarchy, it’s logical and inevitable that he would do something like this.

The film ‘2012’ was about saving a select few, the Ayn Randian “anointed”. The elect get onto huge metallic arks where they are protected, and float when the oceans overspill while the rest of us drown. The Hollywood imagination is pustulant and shimmering.

This brings us back to the science fiction of social extrapolation where technology is a consequence and not the prime mover. In such Science Fiction, Gimcrackery could still be marvelled at, but it was generated by a perceived need. H.G. Wells was a better science fiction writer than Verne because his idea of science was broader in scope. H.G. Wells understood the more inclusive notion of Wissenschaft; the systematic pursuit of knowledge, learning, and scholarship

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There is no real ‘hard’ science or ‘soft’ science. To separate the ‘hardness’ of the study of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) from the ‘softness’ of the study of the social sciences is only useful to the system that needs to cauterise the moral conscience of its technicians. By asking students to focus exclusively on STEM separates the intellectual effort of producing something like an atomic bomb from the intellectual exercise of thinking about what will happen after you produce that atomic bomb. This stubborn oversight in science education, separating the rational mid from the heart, has mystified and troubled those students with a conscience. The way we are taught and trained to do science requires a kind of hemispherectomy.

But it is not an oversight that on most science courses, people are never asked to think about the history of science or mathematics. The omission is intentional. The purposes and history of mathematics are none of your business little STEM worker. Science is there for the powerful to use it. Even medical science, the most humane science of all, can be skewed toward profit at the cost of fully effective treatment. Science answers to money: why does the money go into the armaments industry to produce rockets when it could be producing sustainable energy sources for ordinary people’s housing? These are not the questions the people who design missiles are encouraged to ask.

The instinct to conserve, to nurture, and to protect is something can shape everything: cities, shorelines, climate, the number of species, parks, schools, and hospitals. It can cause nature to thrive instead of enclosing and strip-mining. Love can protect animals. It can cause things to be and cause things not to be. This is not ‘softness’.

I was in Abney Park the other day and there was a house that was heated geothermally at no cost whatsoever, apart from the construction materials. The Trident missile program, if scrapped, could provide free energy to every house in Britain.

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If you are a wage slave scientist, it is not up to you to decide what will happen to the profit. You have no vote. You have no vote about what is made or to what specifications. Go into your factory and produce the latest armaments that go into Israel and Ukraine and don’t ask any questions.

It is possible to manipulate STEM professionals because people who go into mathematics or science classes are never encouraged to ask “Why?” from the beginning. The moral awareness of what they are doing ensures that the conscience of scientists is kept childish and embryonic.

Because nobody would tell me why I had to solve quadratic equations, I didn’t see the need to solve them. But there are people who are like monkeys that run up ladders, who, when faced with a problem, take pleasure in solving it with no questions asked—whether it is designing an algorithm to make money for an investment bank impoverishing millions and destabilising whole economies, or simply wasting precious weeks of life on solving a Rubik’s Cube.

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But someone who asks “why,” and who is concerned with the reasons for doing things, might never reach the point where they feel the need to spend weeks learning how to solve a puzzle. The fundamental question is always “why?”; think before you run up that ladder.

The problem extends to the social sciences and takes a different form. Why do we learn history by rote? How do you produce servile intellectuals? The answers to the questions “Why?” in the social sciences are often already embedded as assumptions into the discourse. In the social science the ‘hardness’ arrives when there assumptions made you are not allowed to question, but are simply required to take for granted before being allowed to continue with your studies. In economics, you must believe in the beneficial workings of the market. In social science, you are forced to swallow even the act of questioning itself.

The modern idea of “critical thinking” causes serious feelings of nausea in intelligent students because often it is the critical thinking of ratiocination. So called critical thinking is about the ability to arrive convincingly at foregone conclusions. It is the smoothing, sandpapering, and planing of thoughts so that they fit into existing arguments and conform to established assumptions. Critical thinking in schools and colleges, particularly in schools and colleges in the USA is quite performative. Capitalism is embraced as the prior assumption; socialism is rejected as early on as possible.

This is an essential aspect of liberalism. Liberalism has its axioms. And one of the key features of liberalism is that you do not question these axioms because without them, it would no longer be liberalism.

One of these axioms is that property is a sacred right. The idea that if I own a billion, it’s all mine—I got it legally—and for the state to take it away would be to destroy the axiom of a man’s right to property. Systems are generated. Laws are generated through real power, which is economic. As Humpty Dumpty said in Alice in Wonderland, “The question is, who is to be master—that’s all.”

The secret intellectual oppression we all face is off-the-peg axiomatic thought. This is why ways of thinking that seriously question established concepts are, in reality, not regarded as ‘creative’ or ‘interesting’ but as unhelpful and destructive. real real creative thinking involves questioning axioms.

And all of us scrabble to live like the wage slaves we are in reality. We are taught to dissemble to survive and to defend and shore up the system that both enslaves us and sustains us; servile intellectuals learn to secretly support certain strategies and doctrines in the hope that the people with money are watching and will reward them. Because if we were to weaken the established pillars of our society, if we were to try to change it, we would not be rewarded by the people who benefit from that system: the investment bankers, the people with share portfolios. Instead we would be shut down and punished.

Why has it been impossible for workers to own their own factories? What has stood in the way? When the employees bought Triumph Motorcycles to rescue it, the media, owned by the powerful, and the British state, controlled by the powerful, were universally against it.

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To have a company requires finance, requires advertising, requires support from the state. It requires that you be a component in the system. But the system rejects worker cooperatives as if they were an infection of the blood and applies a tourniquet. You don’t see so many cooperatives in countries like Britain, though you may in countries like Brazil. And that’s not the market working itself out; that’s antibodies rushing to the defence of the system.

Althusser noted that the economic system reproduced itself first in the minds of people through what Althusser called the Ideological State Apparatus. Capitalism reproduces the conditions of production. It’s wall-to-wall; you must breathe these basic assumptions. You drink them like water; you’ve never known anything else. So when Margaret Thatcher says, “There is no alternative to radical privatising capitalism,” you believe it. You have mistaken the solidity of the world around you—the solidity of the servility and servile unquestioning values you’ve been taught, the solidity of your cultural experience and your understanding of how to survive in capitalist society, for reality itself.

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Richard Steinhardt is a committed socialist and a radical humanist and has published in the Morning Star and a variety of other communist and socialist publications. He believes that human conscience and understanding should always precede dogma and deterministic formulas posturing as ‘social science’.