Science and Government

Charles Percy Snow, C. P. Snow

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780674072374
• eBook ISBN: 9780674075894
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

Science and Government is a gripping account of one of the great scientific rivalries of the twentieth century. The antagonists are Sir Henry Tizard, a chemist from Imperial College, and Frederick Lindemann (Lord Cherwell), a physicist from the University of Oxford. The scientist-turned-novelist Charles Percy Snow tells a story of hatred and ambition at the top of British science, exposing how vital decisions were made in secret and sometimes with little regard to truth or the prevailing scientific consensus.

Tizard, an adviser to a Labor government, believed the air war against Nazi Germany would be won by investing in the new science of radar. Lindemann favored bombing the homes of German citizens. Each man produced data to support his case, but in the end what mattered was politics. When Labor was in power, Tizard's view prevailed. When the Conservatives returned, Lindemann, who was Winston Churchill's personal adviser, became untouchable.

Snow's 1959 "Two Cultures" Rede Lecture propelled him to worldwide fame. Science and Government, originally the 1960 Godkin Lectures at Harvard, has been largely forgotten. Today the space occupied by scientists and politicians is much more contested than it was in Snow's time, but there remains no better guide to it than Snow's dramatic narrative.

C. P. Snow (1905–1980) held several positions in the British Civil Service and was the author of many fiction and nonfiction books, most notably The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.

SCIENCE AND GOVERNMENT

I.

One of the most bizarre features of any advanced industrial society in our time is that the cardinal choices have to be made by a handful of men: in secret: and, at least in legal form, by men who cannot have a firsthand knowledge of what those choices depend upon or what their results may be.

When I say “advanced industrial society” I am thinking in the first place of the three in which I am most interested—the United States, the Soviet Union, and my own country. And when I say the “cardinal choices,” I mean those which determine in the crudest sense whether we live or die. For instance, the choice in England and the United States in 1940 and 1941, to go ahead with work on the fission bomb: the choice in 1945 to use that bomb when it was made: the choice in the United States and the Soviet Union, in the late forties, to make the fusion bomb: the choice, which led to a different result in the United States and the Soviet Union, about intercontinental missiles.

It is in the making of weapons of absolute destruction that you can see my central theme at its sharpest and most dramatic, or most melodramatic if you like. But the same reflections would apply to a whole assembly of decisions which are not designed to do harm. For example, some of the most important choices about a nation’s physical health are made, or not made, by a handful of men, in secret, and, again in legal form, by men who normally are not able to comprehend the arguments in depth.

This phenomenon of the modern world is, as I say, bizarre. We have got used to it, just as we have got used to so many results of the lack of communication between scientists and nonscientists, or of the increasing difficulty of the languages of science itself. Yet I think the phenomenon is worth examining. A good deal of the future may spring from it.

In the West, we have not been very good at looking at this singularity with fresh and candid eyes. We are too apt to delude ourselves with phrases like “the free world,” or “the freedom of science.” None of those phrases is meaningful when we are concerned with the kind of choice I am describing. Such phrases only obscure the truth. I shall come back to that point later. For the moment I will just say that all societies, whatever their political structure or legalistic formulations, are going to be faced with this same type of choice so long as we have nation-states, and that the results are going to be not only significant, but much too significant.

I know that we can draw diagrams of political responsibility which are able to make us feel that everything can be reconciled with the principles of parliamentary government. But if we do, we shall not even begin to understand what is really happening. We shall fool ourselves, as we do too often, with that particular brand of complacency, of lack of gravity, which is one of the liabilities of the West, growing upon us perhaps as we become more affluent.

The first thing, it seems to me, is to try to understand what really happens. “We must learn to think,” Don K. Price has written, “without making use of the patterns or models taken for granted by most of the text books.”¹ It is harder than it sounds.

No one who has ever thought at all about the relations of science and government, much less anyone who has experienced part of them directly, is likely to think that positive conclusions are going to be either firm or easy to come by. Most of the concepts that administrative theorists use are at best rationalisations, not guides to further thought; as a rule they are unrealistically remote from the workaday experience.

No one that I have read has found the right answers. Very few have even asked the right questions. The best I can do is tell a story. The story is intended to contain a little of something which actually did happen. I shall not pretend that the story is not supposed to bear some relation to our present problems. I shall try to extract a few generalisations from it, or, to be more sensible, a few working rules.

II.

This story is about two men and two choices. The first of the two men is Sir Henry Tizard. Let me declare my interest straight away, as they say in English board rooms. I believe, along with a number of Englishmen who are interested in recent military-scientific history, that Tizard’s was the best scientific mind that in England has ever applied itself to war. I further believe, although in general I take a pretty Tolstoyan view of the influence of distinguished men upon events, that of all the people who had a share in England’s surviving the air battles of July to September 1940, Tizard made a contribution at least as great as any. It has not yet been properly recognised. As he himself wrote in his diary on May 8th, 1945, when he was living in what for him was high-level exile, as president of Magdalen College, Oxford, “I wonder if the part that scientists have played will ever be faithfully and fully recorded. Probably not.”²

To an American audience, it is natural that I should have to introduce him from scratch: but if I was speaking of him to most English audiences, I should have to do the same. In fact I have never spoken of him before, and I am very glad that I should do so for the first time in the United States. He had much feeling for America and American science. It was owing to him, as we shall see, that, sixteen months before the United States came into the war, American scientists were told all that the English were doing and all they knew. That gesture of bold trust, forced through by him, and very like his temperament, saved both our countries quite an appreciable bit of time in the Hitler war.

I happen to know that he would have liked me to talk about him, because I once threatened him with it. He said: “At least I can trust you to do it with the gloves off.” He meant, of course, as he said himself when writing of Rutherford, that with characters big enough one ought not to be polite. His family are also sure that he would have relished being treated so, and I have been given unqualified access to the Tizard papers. He wrote quite a lot about himself. He began an autobiography and he kept a number of fragmentary diaries. Towards the end of his life, like a good many men who have played a part in history, he wanted his own end of the record to be kept straight. Although I knew him well, I have drawn on this documentary material as well as on other written sources. There is very little in what follows which is my own opinion or unsupported impression. When there is, I shall try to make it clear.

What was he like? Physically he did not alter much from middle age, when I first met him, until he died in 1959. He was English of the English. His whole appearance, build, and manner were something one does not often see outside England, or even outside the English professional class from which he sprang. He was not pretty. There were times when he looked like a highly intelligent and sensitive frog. His hair, what was left of it, was reddish. His face was unusually wide across the jaw line. But his expression was transfigured by his eyes, which were transparent light blue, sparkling with dash and interest. He was middle sized, and like nearly all successful men of affairs, he was in a muscular sense strong. But that tough physique, that alert, confident, commanding manner, that warm rasp of a voice, hid certain disharmonies. He was not all of a piece.

He came into a room, and he had an authority, a pugnacity, that made men attend to him. He had a lively satirical tongue, of a kind that seemed a little stylised to my generation. “Andrade [who was looking after wartime inventions] is like an inverted Micawber, waiting for something to turn down.” Of the personal antagonism with which I shall soon be dealing: “The hatchet is buried for the present: but the handle is conveniently near the surface.” And so on. There were heaps of Tizardisms—but they were to an extent misleading.

True, he knew he was a gifted man; he knew his own capacity pretty well; but the confidence which made men follow him was not the deep-rooted, relaxed confidence of those who have their creative achievement safely behind them—the relaxed creative confidence, for example, of his idol Rutherford. Tizard did not always find himself easy to live with. The bold face he put on did not completely mask the strains of his inner life.

In the same way, his tough powerful physique was not as impregnable as it looked. All his life he seems to have been vulnerable to infections, suddenly knocked out by mysterious high temperatures. He was lucky in his family, and had sons of very high ability: but he had a great need for affection, not only in his family, but among his friends. Friendship mattered more to him than it would have done if he had been the self-sufficient man he looked. Fortunately for him, he had the energy and warmth to make friends of all ages. I sometimes thought he was at his happiest in the Athenaeum—he had the curious distinction of being able to make the Athenaeum cosy—among people who not only admired him, but were fond of him.

He was born in 1885. His father was a naval officer—a naval officer of strong scientific leanings, who became assistant hydrographer to the Navy and a Fellow of the Royal Society, but first and foremost a naval officer. That had a direct importance to Tizard, both in his attitudes and in what he was able to achieve. All his life he had the simple, unquestioning, absolute patriotism of a regular officer: and he had a complete intuitive understanding of what soldiers and sailors were like. Except for a physical chance, in fact, he would have been one himself. He would—as a matter of course in such a family—have entered the Navy, if it had not been discovered, just before the examination, that he had a blind patch in one eye. Tizard says, “I must have taken this verdict philosophically at the time, for I don’t remember being disappointed or relieved: but it was a bad blow for my father . . . He went to a friend in the Admiralty and said, ‘What would you do with a boy who cannot get into the Navy?’”³

These traditional loyalties were very deep in Tizard. In scientific and technical things his mind was radical: but emotionally he remained until he died bound to that upright, intelligent, dutiful, conservative line. His family were always short of money. Running true to form of the conservative English service families, they both had a certain contempt for money and were constantly worried about it. That stayed so with Tizard. He was worried about money till his death. He never made any, and when he retired from the public service no proper provision was made for him, owing to the changes and chances of his career. His one bitter complaint, in his old age, was that he did not know how he was going to live.

Instead of entering the Navy, he went through an orthodox professional English education—Westminster and Oxford. He was dazzlingly clever at anything he put his hand to. Later on he thought he might have made a goodish academic mathematician, and wished he had tried. Actually, he specialised in chemistry, which was at the time the only adequate scientific school in Oxford. Oxford is now, of course, highly developed in scientific subjects, and it is a bit startling to be reminded that the young Tizard in 1908, bursting with both academic honours and promise, anxious to make a start in research, could find no one in Oxford to work under. Like other bright young Englishmen and Americans of that period, he decided that Germany was the place to find the masters of research. He went off to Berlin to work under Nernst.

As it turned out, he did not bring off anything of scientific interest during his year there. But he brought off something else. For it was in Nernst’s laboratory that he first met the other main character in this story. There is a difficulty about this other character because of the English habit of changing names and styles. Thirty odd years later, as the right-hand man and grey eminence of Winston Churchill, he became known as Lord Cherwell. But nearly all the way through his friendship and enmity with Tizard he was called F. A. Lindemann. That is the name by which Tizard in his papers always refers to him. For clarity’s sake I shall stick to the same convention.

III.

These two young men met in Berlin in the autumn of 1908. We do not know the exact circumstances. It would be nice to know, for even if we eliminate what was to happen, they were two of the most remarkable young men alive, and there cannot have been many such meetings. Lindemann was, by any standards, a very odd and a very gifted man, a genuine heavyweight of personality. I did not know him as well as I did Tizard, but I talked to him a good many times. As he thought I was relatively sensible about the job I was doing, he gave me some tough support. He even made a speech about me in the House of Lords.⁴ More important than that, as far as I was concerned, his was the sort of character that makes a novelist’s fingers itch. So, although in the two issues I am going to use for analytical purposes I have no doubt that he was wrong and Tizard right, I have a soft spot for him and a complex of respect. I do not think that I should be so interested in the Tizard-Lindemann struggles if I did not have that kind of feeling for both men.

I said that Tizard was English of the English. Lindemann was quite un-English. If one met him for the first time in middle age, I have always thought that one would have taken him for a Central European business man —pallid, heavy featured, correctly dressed, one who had been a notable tennis player in his youth and was now putting on weight. He spoke German as well as he did English, and there was a faint Teutonic undertone to his English, to his inaudible, constricted mumble. No one seems to know to this day what his father’s nationality was.⁵ He may have been a German or an Alsatian. It is possible, though I doubt it, that he was Jewish. No doubt this rather silly mystery will be cleared up in the official biography which Lord Birkenhead is now writing. But it is certain that Lindemann’s father was distinctly rich, and Lindemann himself, unlike Tizard, had the attitude to money of a rich man, not of a member of the professional Establishment.

There was a similar sharp difference in the nature of their patriotism. As I have said, Tizard’s was the patriotism of a naval officer, which came to him as naturally and unselfconsciously as breathing. Lindemann, who was not an Englishman but became one, had the fanatical patriotism of someone who adopts a country which is nevertheless not, in the deepest sense, his own. No one cared more about England than Lindemann, in his own way: but it was a way that, with its flavour of the patriotism of the converted exile, struck men like Tizard as uncomfortable and strained.

A great deal else of Lindemann’s personality struck them also as uncomfortable and strained. About him there hung an air of indefinable malaise—so that, if one was drawn to him at all, one wanted to alleviate it. He was formidable, he was savage, he had a suspicious malevolent sadistic turn of what he would have called humour, though it was not really that. But he did not seem, when it came to the most fundamental things, to understand his own life, and despite his intelligence and will, he did not seem good at grappling with it. He enjoyed none of the sensual pleasures. He never drank. He was an extreme and cranky vegetarian, who lived largely on the whites of eggs, Port Salut cheese, and olive oil. So far as is known, he had no sexual relations. And yet he was a man of intense emotions.

Tizard, whose emotions were also deep and difficult to control, had an outgoing nature, which, luckily for him, found him wife and family and friends. Lindemann’s passions were repressed and turned in upon himself. You could hear the difference in their kind of joke. Tizard, as I mentioned, had a tongue which was harsh, which could be rough with pretentious persons, but which was in the long run good-natured. Lindemann’s had the bitter edge of repression.

I remember being in Oxford one morning when the Honours List had been published. I think this must have been during the war. I was talking to Lindemann. I happened to remark that the English honours system must cause far more pain than pleasure: that every January and June the pleasure to those who got awards was nothing like so great as the pain of those who did not. Miraculously Lindemann’s sombre, heavy face lit up. His brown eyes were usually sad, but now they were glowing. With a gleeful sneer he said: “Of course it is. It wouldn’t be any use getting an award if one didn’t think of all the people who were miserable because they hadn’t managed it.”

In that kind of venom, in almost everything he did, he was much more intense than most men. His passions were a bit bigger than life-size; they often took on the inflated monomania of the passions in Balzac’s novels. He was altogether a bit bigger than life-size. As I have already said, he was a character who made a novelist’s fingers itch. And yet, thinking of him and Tizard, I am not sure which would interest me more as a novelist. When I was younger, Lindemann certainly. Now that I have found my interest gradually change from what we call “abnormal” to “normal” personalities—I am using these words, of course, as a shorthand jargon—I think it might be Tizard. He was externally a far less odd man than Lindemann. In the structure of his personality he was probably more complex.

IV.

One would like to know what they talked about, in Berlin that winter of 1908. Science, of course. Both had an unshakable faith that science was the supreme intellectual manifestation of the mind of man, a faith they never lost. Tizard had strong interests in literature, but Lindemann none, nor in any othe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Lord Robert May of Oxford
• Preface
• Science and Government
• Appendix
• Notes