by Philip Wylie
Science Fiction and Sanity In an Age of Crisis
by PHILIP WYLIE
PHILIP WYLIE is widely known as a philosopher and psychologist; his criticisms of contemporary man and his society have appeared in such hooks as Generation of Vipers.
He is also a writer of fiction and science fiction as well as science fantasy; with Edwin Balmer, he wrote When Worlds Collide, recently made into a motion picture; his end-of-the-world story, "Blunder," originally printed in Collier's, has appeared in many anthologies; others of his science-fiction novels are The Murderer Invisible, Gladiator, and in a recent hut more fantastic vein, The Disappearance.
Part I
IT HAS BECOME trite to point out that, when an atomic bomb was detonated over Hiroshima and the news was spread abroad, the only considerable group of Americans who understood what it meant consisted of kids. The kids were held to be those who read science-fiction magazines, books and so-called comic books. To be sure, science-fiction magazines have been in existence for a long while, and the "kids" who read the early ones, like myself, are in their forties or fifties. And science-fiction novels, in a sense, are older than civilization. Even modern science fiction has quite a history.
Jules Verne is long dead; shortly after Einstein made his first formulations, the brilliant H. G. Wells produced a book based on atomic bomb warfare. Still, the assumption was that only young people currently engaged in reading about imaginary atomic marvels were able to comprehend the marvel of the Manhattan Project.
In any case, it is certain beyond any doubt that most adults, including nearly every single member of Congress, hadn't the foggiest idea of the meaning of such terms as
"nuclear fission" or "chain reaction." It is also axiomatic that, wherever a subject with vast emotional content comes to public notice, and whenever the public lack realistic or scientific data on the subject, a mythology is created by the people as a substitute for truth. That is not even a subjective assertion; visible behavior demonstrates it every day.
If something is seen in the sky that nobody appears able to explain that "something"
begins to "appear" all over the world, in countless forms, doing different things.
Nevertheless (since the "something" is unknown and hence frightening in a very alarming epoch) a myth is immediately created--it is a "flying saucer," extra-terrestrial, inhabited by nonhuman "people" with superhuman intelligence--and so on, through the whole, silly and familiar event.
Yet the need to know every factual detail about every object or scientific concept likely to be emotion-packed and of wide public concern is not merely evident but forms the basis of the idea of democracy. In a dictatorship, of whichever hand, the need of the people to know is not great. If what they do not know alarms them, the State can punish enough of them for panicky behavior to calm the rest or at least to make the rest assume the outward semblance of calm. But in a democracy, the people must know--or the democratic process dissolves, by its very definition.
For we hold that a majority of any people properly informed will reach appropriate decisions. On that assumption rests our form of government. Without it, there can be no political freedom--hence no actual freedom of any sort. This great idea was evolved principally in Greece, following the reforms of Solon and Clisthenes. It died out under the dogmatic pressures of the early Christians which, in turn, produced the Dark Ages. It was restored by the Renaissance, revolutions in industry, and so on, a few hundred years ago and reached its full flourish in numerous nations in the eighteenth century.
At that time, any citizen and voter with a mere decade of current education had a reasonable comprehension of nearly all the main lines, and all the relevant lines, of contemporary knowledge and speculation. He (or she) was, indeed, "properly informed."
He (or she) was therefore, by democracy's basic assumption, capable of making realistic and forward-looking decisions upon all matters of public import. The democratic idea was then workable and men enjoyed unparalleled measures of personal liberty.
The formula of freedom does not apply today. In the last century, mere factual knowledge has piled up so rapidly that men, including the very scientists who have piled it up, hold it to be impossible for any solitary person to have a good general knowledge of all the fundamental facts and processes in all the sciences and their branches.
Furthermore, science proceeds in two fashions: by blind pragmatism and by speculation followed by careful checking. If the pragmatic facts cannot be poured into any Single human head--the speculations that outreach facts will be far beyond individual competence; for all such speculations about the Unknown rise from the Known.
The result is that we live today (and most of our savants agree we will be henceforward forever obliged to go on living) in a world where it is impossible to have a completely informed minority-- let alone a thoroughly knowledgeable majority. It follows as inevitably as freeze in zero weather that the people are incapable as a whole of making appropriate decisions. It follows, too, that even the scientists are incapable of invariably making appropriate decisions on all topics for all men: they are specialists. They have confessed and even asserted the principle of general uneducability based on the thesis that there's too much to learn. Hence the judgments of any particular astrophysicist, for instance, in a matter of, say, public health, may be as irrelevant, as uninformed and as mistaken as an opinion on the same subject offered by an uneducated baseball player.
And the vote of a great surgeon on, say, a matter of Hood control, may fall as stupidly, as asininely, as the ballot of a moron.
The near-total ignorance of Congress in the matter of the structure of the atom in the year 1945 is a case in point. Brien McMahon, Chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy and Senator from Connecticut, once told this author that, on the day the announcement was made of the use of the atomic weapon, he had no lucid understanding of the technical aspect of the bomb. All he had was an intuition--an emotional sensation--that the bomb was of the utmost importance. However, unlike most members of Congress, he refused immediately to plan on the basis of mere emotions, loyalties, prejudices and so on. Instead, since his vacation began that day, he accompanied into the Maine woods a chemist of his acquaintance. He took along books.
For a month, he "briefed" himself intensively on nuclear physics and related topics, with the result that when he returned to Congress he had a powerful grasp of the subject, and more than that: he had a plan for dealing with atomic problems which he opposed to the then-existing scheme: the May-Johnson Bill, which would have turned over atomic science, lock, stock, and barrel, to the military. The McMahon Bill--because of one intelligent man's effort to learn--became the law of our land.
It was undoubtedly as "good" or as "liberal" a piece of legislation as the American citizens in Congress could be made to accept at that time. Why? The correct answer to that "Why?" is, today, self-evident to many persons and becoming plainer to more as time passes. But it was evident to very few in 1945 and 1946. So far as this writer is aware, he, alone, was the only American author who argued (in Collier's magazine and in syndicated newspaper columns) for measures utterly different from any Congress had in mind and who, at that early date, predicted the current era of terror and peril in the event that the notions of Congress became law. For those "notions" were of the "flying saucer"
variety. They were not evidence of thinking at all. Their content was emotional. Their interpretation was mythical. The Congressmen were not able to take into consideration the principle upon which democracy depends for the simple reason that they did not understand physics as a science, science as a method, and the atomic
detail.
Congress (you will remember) assumed that the atomic bomb was "secret" and the knowledge by
which it had been created was a "military" secret. (So did the generals and admirals in the Pentagon, who knew no more about nucleonics than the senators and representatives.) Congress, in 1945, assumed that the Soviets would be unable to "solve the riddle of atomic energy" for another twenty or fifty years. In vain, the atomic scientists argued that all this was balderdash. In vain, they pointed out, beginning with Smyth in his famed Report, that Russia had access to the basic data, and brilliant physicists besides. Congress decided to "keep atomic energy secret." Of course, we have since learned that the Soviets were hard at work on the development of A-bombs by the middle of the war and Congress was as near to nutty in its speculations and beliefs as men can get without chewing rugs.
What Congress did, in essence, was to try to remove a large branch of simple, physical knowledge and science from general human cognizance. Atomic physics was thus ordained by law an official secret of a few men of science and a few military men--
to keep Russia and Russians ignorant. Of course, the Russians already knew--the whole world of science already knew--most of the facts which Congress suddenly proclaimed secret. And the Soviets swiftly managed, through Klaus Fuchs and others, to penetrate further secret details--by espionage--a certainty Congress ignored, since it acted as if the passage of its fiat would prevent such crime. But the bitter fact that, by legislation, Congress had for the first time denied to the people of the American democracy access to abstract knowledge did not occur to Congress or--if it did--failed to alarm Congress.
Thus, in 1946, through ignorance alone, the representatives of the American people set aside the fundamental process of democracy and, in a real sense, junked the Constitution. The Supreme Court was not asked to test the law but it is likely the Court would have failed, also, at that time, to see what had happened. Overnight, the American kids studying arithmetic could pursue it only so far. Beyond the point where it concerned physics, it was no longer knowledge entitled to free expression--it was secret. Overnight, the youngsters working with chemistry apparatus in laboratories found they could no longer learn all that science. The opportunity to become "properly informed" was taken away; thousands of years of effort to emancipate the human mind were, once again, crushed under a tyranny--in the American case, of "defense."
It was obvious to the very few who were willing and able to think rationally of the situation that other parts of other sciences would gradually go under the federal ban. They did. It was plain to the right-reader of human history and behavior that a vast and growing secrecy in government would continually expand into lesser (and even into irrelevant) areas, for secrecy is a cancer among free men, always. The cancer grew. As these lines are written, the President of the United States, in Bat contradiction to the expressed sense of our Constitution, has implied he has the power to seize the press. At this same time, newspaper editors in annual convention are worrying over a sickly spread of censorship, closed meetings, and secrecy into such doings as the conversations of the selectmen in village councils and the meetings of small town school boards. Meantime in Washington, a presidential edict has given every bureau the power, in the diffuse name of
"security," to withhold from the electorate any facts any bureau chooses to withhold.
All this should and could have been foreseen in 1945 and 1946, when the original matter of scientific "secrecy" was discussed. For the United States of America could not then, or ever, become a nation where science, or any part of science, was put under lock and key--without abandoning both democracy and liberty. The refusal of the Soviets to enter into a free, open and inspected world of science should have been regarded as a direct, hostile and intolerable blow to American liberty--one to be met with ultimatum if other means failed. The very few who saw that need were tarred as "warmongers" by the ignorance-ridden and fear-driven majority and even the physicists (!) failed to see that our national philosophy was being throttled. They regarded any thought of using force, not as the final, absolute necessity for a people wishing to stay free, but as a sicklier thing they called "preventive war." In the glare of the atomic blast, all USA was blinded to its history, its meaning and its ideals.
Today, as a direct result, the nation in which we live is no longer "governed by the people"--or even by their elected representatives. For Congressmen do not have the
"clearance" which entitles them to the facts--and even if they had the clearance, they would not have the intellectual capacity to assimilate and assay the facts. We are no longer permitted to know for what purposes the gigantic tax assessment upon us all is spent. We do not know what our government knows of the arms and plans of our potential battlefield enemy. We do not know what the foreign policy is--or if one exists worthy of the name--or on what new ideal (since democracy no longer prevails) it may be based. In many vital areas we, the American people, are as uninformed as the citizens behind Russia's Iron Curtain. Indeed, from the practical and actual viewpoint, USA is nowadays a quasi-dictatorship. For it so happens that only one elected American can be told all the facts: the President. Without a fight, without knowing what we did, we Americans abandoned freedom as a philosophy. It is not surprising the direct result is that we live in terror or insecurity, in anxiety or in a fatuous state of apathy, according to our personal knowledge and private nature.
For, by voluntarily cutting ourselves off from science we have left no modus vivendi for ourselves save by the invention of fables and myths--fables like flying saucers and myths like the notion that the Soviets couldn't crack the "atomic secret" for twenty--
or fifty--years. Thus the dawn of the atomic age is coincident with the greatest social blackout since the descending Dark Ages closed down on the knowledge of the Greeks and Romans.
Again, why? Even though most Americans can never expect to understand, say, the mathematics upon which the atomic bomb is based, there is a vast difference between (a) having such information publicly available and known to anyone who wishes to learn it and possesses the ability to learn it, and (b) outlawing such data for the general public.
Under the former condition, a people is potentially and theoretically free; under it, even an uninformed population gets intellectual and reassuring impressions of proper means for deciding political problems through open and public discussions on the part of those who do understand every matter in detail. But under the latter condition, which now prevails, the public--accustomed to liberty or its constant potentiality, absolute freedom of knowledge--suddenly realizes freedom has vanished. For now, even the people who do understand can't talk. No sensible impression of situations can be gathered by the naive from the debates of the learned. The philosophy that was the mainstay not just of liberty but of human individuation and self-assurance is gone. The era that will follow must be one of constant crisis--and negative crisis--since the positive sensations as well as positive facts have been taken away. That is what has happened--a tragedy of fantastic magnitude, all the worse for not being generally and consciously perceived--to a nation in which only "the kids" had any inkling of atomic facts so soon put under the steel wraps of military security. It is a deluded, objective kind of security, gained at the expense of the very foundations of the intellectual and emotional security of the American people--and, just incidentally, as a result, of all the peoples of Earth.
Part II
It may be asked what all this has to do with science fiction-- and even with science fiction and sanity. Obviously, the majority of the American people are not science-fiction buffs; neither are the majority of Americans Congressmen. Besides--though less obviously--it does not follow necessarily that even if the whole population read and understood and enthused over science fiction, the attitudes connoted above, which cost us our freedom, would have been altered in any fashion. For the fact cited at the opening of this argument-that only kids, in the main, understood the A-bomb--does not signify that their elders, given the same understanding, would have made a wiser, braver and more far-sighted resolution of the great crisis that rose
when the Soviets blocked all hope of scientific freedom without war, or, at least, our willingness again to go to war to stay free.
The children and young people referred to here understood the mechanics of atomic bombs, more or less, and far better than the grownups, by and large. That is all. They had not been prepared by science fiction to contemplate the responsibilities at stake and the ideals involved. Hence, the fundamental questions of this essay are the following: Is science fiction truly educational? Does it, so to speak, present not only facts, and logical extrapolation therefrom, but tend to augment the reader's ability to reason?
Or does science fiction, by muddling fact with fancy, tend to delude and addle the mind?
Has science fiction any sort of obligation, aside from the task of entertaining anybody in any fashion the author deems profitable for himself? Or--put another way: does science fiction owe anything to the exalted standards of science itself? In short, does science fiction augment or aberrate human sanity in this age?
It will be held here that science fiction potentially can abet human wisdom but that the bulk of its present production has the opposite effect.
We have come to realize that mere factual knowledge is worthless by itself. Facts, however penetrative and productive, will serve the Hitlers and Stalins of this world as readily as free peoples. Yet the orientation of our public and our higher education for many decades has steadily tended toward the erroneous direction that comes from the assumption that specialization in one field of multitudinous facts constitutes "education."
This is hardly the case, as has been indicated here by the statement that an accomplished physicist may be no more able to appraise a problem in public health than a baseball player who, perhaps, never got past the fifth grade. We have produced, through the means of what we consider very high education, a large group of persons who are ultra-knowing in one or two special fields and--often--ultra-ignorant in the remaining hundreds of fields.