Material Humanism in Action
Soviet Science. By J. G. Crowther. (Kogan Paul. 12s. Gd.) By an odd chance, the most famous scientist both in Germany and Russia found himself in bitter opposition to his country's revolution. Einstein escaped at the beginning of the Nazi regime, accepted, with a pleasing but bewildering impartiality, a Studentship at Christ Church as well as chairs at Madrid and Constantinople, and finally arrived at the Mathematical Institute at Princeton : meanwhile, his countrymen dedicated the new department at Heidelberg to the disproving of his discoveries. Pavlov stayed in Russia ; he behaved not so much with dignity as with the Slavonic buffoonery that comes from the same emotional source and produces almost the same effect ; he crossed himself in front of churches, or the sites of churches now transformed, and sometimes invented the sites in order to perform the gesture ; he made a point of saying on Soviet festivals that the Russian revolution was the greatest disaster that had happened to mankind. The Soviet Government named laboratories after him, gave him houses, a large salary, motor-cars and assistants ; his death was mourned as no scientist's in England or France has ever been.
It is possible to argue, of course, that if Einstein had stayed in Germany to see the revolution through, the Nazis would have done as much for him ; but to do so shows a lack of realisation of an essential difference between the two sorts of dictatorship. Fascism, particularly in Germany, is forced by its own nature to relegate any kind of intellectual activity to the background ; intellectual work may be permitted so long as it does not intrude ; but ultimately the values of Fascism must be judged not by the intellect, but by the " blood "—that is, by the fears and rages and jealousies that move us all, though we have not been taught to give them such a transcendental significance. The " blood," as it happens, can tell us a number of things which the intellect will not allow, such as the homogeneity of the German race, and the Nordic blood of Jesus ; so much the worse for the intellect. And so much the worse for the intellect's most triumphant organisation, science ; at the best it can be tolerated in those departments where it does not interfere with the authority of the " blood," just as in the middle ages it could work in obscurity under the authority of the church.
The Communist dictatorship has to take a very different attitude. For the Soviet Government, by its official philosophy, has as an explicit aim the maximum development of the material resources in Russia ; not only the material resources as they are now worked and understood, but as they could be with complete control over the natural world. The Soviets are committed, in fact, to an application of that material humanism which I tried to describe a little in a recent review in The Spectator ; and since control of the natural world is simply another name for applied science, they are bound to regard the development of science as one of the first tasks of government. Material humanism—the desire for the material well-being of the race, increasing as science progresses—is meaningless without science ; science is both its inspiration and its instrument ; accordingly, science in Russia today is more closely interweaved with the Government than it has ever been elsewhere in the world.
The new conditions under which it is carried on give Russian science its peculiar interest. We arc used to scientific research as an academic pursuit, admitted rather reluctantly into our universities, worked at more or less in private, with very little orgalisation, occasionally applied to practical purposes by those scientists with an inventive turn of mind or by the ingenious employees of industrial firms: the whole structure as irrational as the M.C.C. or the Jockey Club, and grown up in somewhat the same fashion. The Soviets have changed all that. Applied science is to control industry and invent industries ; so great scientific institutes are built in industrial centres, in order that, by contact with the working reality, scientists should perceive their problems and be at hand to apply their own solutions. This continual interplay of technical process and science follows from the materialist theory ; according to the theory, it is the way science should be organised to be most effective, both in devising applications and in reaching fundamental laws. Thus the immense physical laboratories at Leningrad and Kharkov are Physico- Technieal Institutes, divorced from any kind of, university in our sense, in closer touch with engineering works than with the liberal studies ; the internal organisation is MON.,
democratic than ours, where a professor can be a fairly com- plete autocrat, and at the same time more rigid, each man's work discussed and mapped out by frequent meetings of the research staff ; the external organisation and general control of each institute's work is in the hands of the Commissariat of Heavy Industry. All this is described in Mr. Crowther's new book, which is, like everything he writes, informer], fresh and stimulating (and also slightly irritating, because one has to quarry for the information in a mass of short paragraphs arranged in a haphazard fashion rather like a scrap-book).
But any grumbles at Mr. Crowther can only be trivial. He does work that is genuinely important and that no one else shows any signs of doing ; his journalism is scholarly and his reporting always fair. He has travelled over the Russian laboratories in his bright-eyed alert fashion, and here are his results ; it is the best of tributes to him (no commentator could be less egotistic) to say one almost forgets the book in the excitement of the questions : How is it all coming out ? What is the progress of science when it is organised as thoroughly as this ? Is Russian science better than ours now ? Is it going to be better ?
It is difficult to reach any answers that are remotely satisfying. About the actual achievement of Russian science since the revolution, one can make a tentative judgement : it is not negligible, but rather disappointing. Just as in literature there has been no creative work of a high order, in the exact sciences there have been very few important discoveries ; there has been a quantity of adequate research, much of it insufficiently worked out ; the general state of physics and physical chemistry in Russia now would seem rather like that in America towards the end of the nineteenth century. The triumphs of Russian science in recent years have been, not unnaturally, in fields where planning and large-scale organisation are more important than detailed imaginative work : Vavilov's researches on plant genetics are on a scale unequalled in the rest of the world, and there is no doubt that in the scientific side of agriculture Russia is going to produce most of the important work of the next few years. But that will probably not be so in the exact sciences ; there is still a great distance before Russian physics catches up that of England, America, even Scandinavia or Holland. The reasons arc important for us as well as Russia ; some may be connected with the new method, and some need only time before they disappear. The first is, it seems to me, that a good deal of the organisa- tion defeats itself ; most successful research, like any detailed creative work, demands a continuous supply of minor ideas and devices which are independent of the main conception and which must, for the most part, be supplied by one man working alone. People vary much in their needs for help and solitude ; some go into the wilderness and some solve their difficulties by thinking aloud in company and asking advice ; but almost everyone has to be alone at times. And it is just that individual solitariness, in which ideas get worked out, that the Russian organisation, or any organisation for that matter, makes more difficult to obtain than does the freedom of academic tradition. The Soviet planners make a genuine attempt to cope with the oddities of human tempera- ment ; but it is more difficult to allow for individual tempera- ment in an institution than to let it work its own way out, untrammelled by any institution at all. Libraries and apparatus and expert information at hand—organisation must supply all these, but as soon as it goes further and intrudes into a man's habit of thought, it is as likely to be a hindrance as a help.
If there is anything in this criticism, the defect is not one which time will remedy of its own accord ; probably there will be a gradual lessening of the rigour of the plans, and an approach to something more like the tradition of academic research. Some of the other defects in Soviet science are, of course, simply due to lack of time : for instance the supply of competent research workers is at present fir too small ; this must be caused mainly by deficiencies in secondary cd.ien- tion, and should be rectified within the next decade or two. By then, there is no reasonable doubt, the Soviets will be producing, in all the fields of science, work that will bear
comparison with any in the world. C. P. SNOW.
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