Science has traditionally been represented as an agent of liberty, and among the tyrants from which it liberated us were the Church and poverty.
The Church
Science first emerged in classical Greece, and though the Greek city-states were hardly theocracies, nonetheless tensions emerged between the priests, who drew their power from received authority, and the scientists, who drew their insights from reason and observation. And when there were victims, they were not the priests. Thus when, during the 5th century BCE, Anaxagoras claimed the sun might not be a god but rather “a rock bigger even than the whole Peloponnese,” the Athenians would have executed him had his old friend Pericles not engineered his escape to Lampascus.
It was therefore impressive of Hippocrates, known as the father of medicine, to write during the 4th century BCE in On the Sacred Disease:
I am about to describe the disease called “sacred” [epilepsy]. It is not in my opinion any more divine or sacred than other diseases but has a natural cause, and its supposed divine nature is due to men’s inexperience and to their wonder at its peculiar character.
The priests in classical Greece were not, however, as powerful as those who emerged in medieval Europe, which is why the writings of Francis Bacon still have the power to startle. Bacon (1561–1626), an English lawyer and politician, is recognized as the first great philosopher of science, and though he lived in an age of faith, he nonetheless dared to portray science, not religion, as a portal to the sublime, writing in 1607 in Cogitata et Visa de Interpretatione Naturae (“Thoughts and Conclusions on the Interpretation of Nature”),
It is this glory of discovery that is the true ornament of mankind1 … the improvement of man’s mind and the improvement of his lot are one and the same thing.2
It was also Bacon who wrote ipsa scientia potestas est, “knowledge itself is power,” which—in an age when power was the perquisite only of Church and state—was a radical statement. Certainly the Church (or perhaps we should write churches, because the Reformation had inadvertently helped create intellectual space for science) suppressed challenges to its intellectual authority. This is why we still remember that in 1633, Galileo was shown the instruments of torture by Pope Urban VIII, and that he was thereafter sentenced to house imprisonment for believing the earth rotated round the sun.
Although the Reformation had empowered dissent from Catholic doctrine, the reformers could be equally intolerant, and their intolerance extended to science. Thus Martin Luther condemned as a “fool” the astronomer who believed the earth rotated round the sun, saying:
So it goes now. Whoever wants to be clever must agree with nothing that others esteem. He must do something of his own. This is what that fellow does who wishes to turn the whole of astronomy upside down. Even in these things that are thrown into disorder I believe the Holy Scriptures, for Joshua commanded the sun to stand still and not the earth.3
Calvin also denounced believers in heliocentricity as “stark raving mad” and “possessed by the Devil.”4 And he was a man not to be crossed: he did, after all, burn Servetus alive, and Servetus was a great scientist who had discovered pulmonary circulation (though to be accurate, Calvin burned him for religious rather than scientific reasons, because Servetus had questioned the doctrine of the trinity).
Nonetheless, for all its limitations, the Reformation broke the Roman Catholic monopoly on truth, and as medieval thinking yielded to the Age of Reason (or Enlightenment) of the 18th century, so science advanced at the expense of religion. Today, science’s victory over religious intolerance is nearly complete in the West, and although obscurantism still rules in some parts of the world, the advance of scientific reason seems inexorable. Yet even as science has flourished in the modern era, it has lately come to be captured to a great degree by the state.
One illiberal aspect of present-day science is that scientists have long sought state funding and have therefore long aligned themselves with state doctrines. The perennial anxiety of scientists for funding—from any source—was parodied as long as ago as 1726 by Jonathan Swift in his satirical take on the fellows of the Royal Society of London:
The first man I saw was of a meagre aspect, with sooty hands and face, his hair and beard long, ragged, and singed in several places. His clothes, shirt, and skin, were all of the same colour. He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers. He told me he did not doubt that in eight years more he should be able to supply the Governor’s garden with sunshine at a reasonable rate; but he complained that his stock was low, and he entreated me to give him something as an encouragement to ingenuity, especially since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers. I made him a small present, for my lord had supplied me with money on purpose, because he knew their practice of begging from all who go to see them.5
The sentiment had been expressed less humorously a century earlier, in 1605, by Francis Bacon himself when he told King James I that “there is not any part of good government more worthy than the further endowment of the world with sound and fruitful knowledge.”6
Bacon was therefore not only a great philosopher of science; he was also the first to argue that science was a public good that required public funding. Science, Bacon wrote, is a “universality” that benefits everyone, not any particular individual: “The benefits inventors confer extend to the whole human race.”7 That is the classic description of a public good. The individual who makes a pen to sell to another individual will receive from the sale of that private good the full profit, but the individual who invents the idea of the pen will not receive the full profit from all the subsequent sales of pens across the globe and across the ages. Therefore, Bacon said, no one will invent a new technology, for which, he said, “there is no ready money.”8
It is a false argument because it ignores the principle of opportunity benefit, which is the converse of opportunity cost. If there is a choice between doing A or B, and if A is chosen over B, the opportunity cost is the forgone benefit from B. Yet if A is more valuable than B, it is rational to choose A for its additional or opportunity benefit. Well, if the individual who invents the pen has, as his forgone opportunity, the benefit of ploughing a field, say, and if the benefit from ploughing the field is $10 in profit, and if the benefit of inventing the pen is $20 in profit, that individual will rationally invent the pen even if the total global profit from the sales of pens is $10 billion. The inventor of the pen may make only $20 in profit from the pens he sells, and this may be only a fraction of the global profits of the whole pen market of $10 billion. But because it’s $10 more than he earns from ploughing a field, the individual will still be motivated to invent the pen.
The man who contested Bacon’s public-goods argument was a Scot. Adam Smith (1723–1790) was eager, 150 years after Bacon had proposed that science was a public good, to test Bacon’s idea against experience. Smith recognized public goods as being “of such a nature that the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals,” but he found that industrial technology did not fit that category and that the profit did repay the expense to individuals.9 So in 1772–1773, in his Lectures on Jurisprudence, he wrote,
If we go into the workplace of any manufacturer and … enquire concerning the machines, they will tell you that such or such a one was invented by common workman.10
In Smith’s footsteps, Marx and Engels also found science to be endogenous to markets, writing in the Communist Party Manifesto of 1848 that,
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all the preceding generations together.11
And in 1942, Joseph Schumpeter wrote,
Industrial mutation incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within. [Schumpeter’s emphasis]12
The evidence of industrialization, therefore, suggested to empirical observers that governments need not fund science.
