Salesmen in Power
Science and Government. By C. P. Snow. (0.U.P., 9s. 6d.)
A Lor of people, for a long time, have known the outlines of the Tizard-Lindemann controversy. Sir Charles Snow tells it here with commendable brevity and balance and uses it as a parable on which to hang a lesson. It is superlatively well done, a brilliant thought-provoking essay. Tizard, from 1935, fought and won the battle for radar (RDF, we called it then) as the backbone of air defence. Lindemann, proponent of numerous gadgets like air-to-air bombing, was outnumbered and overruled. But 'the Prof' had political strings, in. particular Churchillian strings, and when Churchill - came to power in 1940 Lindemann came with him—clever but shallow, for his fellow-scientists 'an amateur among specialists'— and Tizard went, as ignominiously sacked as ever any man was. And with Lindemann (soon to be Lord Cherwell) came strategic bombing, satura- tion bombing, the policy—incredible at the time and totally disproved by post-war analysis—of forcing Germany to surrender by bombing Ger- mans out of house and home. 'It added six months to the war': so I was told in 1945 by an officer whose business it was to know. Today we should probably think his estimate conservative.
This is the story: what are the lessons? The problem, as Sir Charles emphasises, is central in modern industrial society, clearest in war but no less insistent in peace. Decisions have to be taken which may mean survival or non-survival, which in any case involve a commitment of resources and manpower so vast that the decision, once taken, is in practice irreversible. And these deci- sionS, for the most part, must be 'secret' decisions, either because security is involved, or else because the subject is scientifically so abstruse that only a handful of men are capable of informed and in- telligent choice. Here, in the crucial issues, 'demo- cracy' in the sense of consulting the electorate, or even of consulting Parliament, is out of the ques- tion. How can we be sure that the right decisions are taken? Mitst we remain, in Sir Charles's Phrase, 'at the mercy of scientific salesmen'? Or can we 'arrange to make choices a little more reasonably'?
Sir Charles is surely right when he says that the Policy of saturation bombing carried the day not only because it was backed by Lindemann who was backed by Churchill, but also because its opponents 'had nothing so simple and unified to Put in its place.' But it is another question whether, as Sir Charles argues, the problem is simply another illustration of the split between two cultures,' or between the scientific and the non-scientific mind. Of course, many of the crucial decisions today are scientific decisions; but the suggestion that things would somehow be better if we had more 'scientists active in all the levels of government' could be a very misleading simplification. Many non-scientists questioned the postulates of strategic bombing; and it is easy 10 think of other crucial decisions—the Suez ad- venture of 1956, for example—where scientists `diffused through government' would have made no appreciable difference. it was not because it was staffed by 'people trained in the natural like that the Spectator perceived that Suez, strategic bombing, was an unrealistic attempt 1O impose a 'simple and unified' solution on a complicated situation.
What Sir Charles Snow has done in this lively essay is to illuminate from one particular angle— namely, the scientific—the wider question of the terribles simplificatears. As Burckhardt foresaw, they are a central problem of modern society. Lindemann in his way was a simplificateur: he was also a consummate operator. Perhaps the author of The Masters will now give us another novel called The Operators; for that is what Sir Charles has really written about. The operator— intelligent and adept at putting a complicated proposition in a form which will 'sell'—is a char- acteristic figure of our society. Perhaps (1 do not know) we cannot do without him: but certainly his emergence, not only in the scientific sphere. is a part of what a German ,N Ma has called 'the structural transformation of modern democracy. It is because it casts light on this fundamental pro- cess of political change that Sir Charles Snow's little book is important out of all proportion to its size.
GEOFFREY RARRACLOUGI1
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