The Evening Post SATURDAY, OCTOBER 31, 1936. SCIENCE AND SOCIETY

Evening Post, Volume CXXII, Issue 106, 31 October 1936, Page 8

The Evening Post SATURDAY, OCTOBER 31, 1936. SCIENCE AND SOCIETY

Towards the end of last month reports appeared in American newspapers of the first practical trials of a new invention which, if it proves as successful as it promises to be, will have extraordinary consequences. This is a mechanical cotton-picker, invented by two brotfiers named Rust, of Memphis, Tennessee, who estimate that one of their machines should do the work of from one hundred to one hundred and fifty persons now engaged in picking cotton by hand. Cotton is one of America's staple crops and employs in its primary processes several million people. If the Rustmachine does what is expected of it, the immediate effect will he the &s----placement of labour on a vast scale and a corresponding unemployment pro.blem. This will be one more outstanding instance of what has been termed the "impact of science on society." , Scarcely any form of human activity but has felt the guiding hand of science in the saving of labour, increase in productivity, the creation of new commodities, new amenities, new services, and the supersession of old. New Zealand has come 'well within the range of this "impact of science." A typical example was illustrated in a recent article in "The Post," on the "Evolution of Farming," in a passage on the dairy industry:

In the days of hand milking the herds were naturally limited by the amount of labour available, but in 1935 the milking machines of New Zealand were capable of milking 90,073 cows simultaneously, a task that could only be equalled by one person out of every eighteen in the population taking a place in the milking shed.

What has been the effect of machinery in this case? As elsewhere, to increase production enormously without increase in labour. It was probably with this and other aids from science in mind that the Minister of Agriculture (Mr. Lee Martin) bluntly told the Imperial delegates to the recent Chambers of Commerce Conference that "without putting another single farmer on the land in New Zealand, the Dominion could double her production in ten years."

This remark of the Minister's, though, no doubt, spontaneous and uncalculated, touches directly what is perhaps the ,most serious aspect of the relationship of science to society, and the most baffling element in the problem. In itself the problem is not new. It began with the invention of the steam engine and the textile machinery to the driving of which steam was applied over a hundred years ago. Labour-saving machinery had its troubles then with the workers it displaced. They smashed it and wrecked the factories, but not for long. Society—with some hardship—adjusted, itself to the changes wrought by science, and the process went on steadily, without serious hindrance, through the nineteenth century. In that period both science and society were dynamic, acting and reacting on each other with healthy elasticity. Today— especially since the War—science in the practical/ application of invention has ' become increasingly dynamic, the "impact" has redoubled force; but the society that has to sustain it is losing its dynamic quality and becoming static, because the population of Western countries tends towards a stationary position, preliminary, perhaps, to a decline.

Is then the scientist to slow down the tempo of his activities to the pace of the society he serves? This was. broadly, the question put by Sir Josiah Stamp in his recent address to the British Association, when he said:

The price of pace is peace. Man must move by stages in which he enjoys for a space a settled idea, and thus there must always be something which is rather delayed in its introduction, and the source of sectional scientific scorn. If every day is "moving" day, man must live in a constant muddle, and create that very fidget and unrest of mind which is the negation of happiness. ... In some ways we are so obsessed with the delight and advantage of discovery of new things that we have no proportionate regard for the problems of arrangement and absorption of the things discovered. We are like a contractor who has too many men bringing materials on to the sits and not enough men to erect the buildings.

What Sir Josiah meant was that the scientist and his henchman, the inventor, were busy piling up the fruits of their labours, while there was nobody, so to speak, to do the planning of the building in which these were to be embodied. It was a plea for the social sciences, the "poor relations" of "pure science," and the victims of its intellectual snobbery— physiology, psychology, economics, sociology. "Unless," he said, "progress is made in these fields which is comparable with the golden ages of discovery in physics and chemistry, we are producing progressively more problems for society than we are solving. . . . We have spent much and long upon the science of matter, and the greater our success the greater must be our failure, unless we turn also at long last to an equal advance in the science of man." And so the President of the British Association ends on a hypothetical note of rather gloomy prophecy. The upshot of the whole matter seems to be that we must begin to educate our future leaders on a different plan. Today the man of affairs blames the man of science for piling up the material to produce an economic chaos. The scientist retorts that the politician and the business man are muddlers who might manage better, if they had any train-

ing in scientific method. • The humanist needs more science and the scientist more humanity. Why not then make a beginning from now on in the schools, as Sir Richard Gregory urged his colleagues at the science congress, and let the humanities and science walk hand in hand on the same road instead of at a distance on divergent tracks. Then there might be some prospect of ultimately clearing up the muddle. In the meantime there is hope in the attitude of the blathers Rust, of Memphis, Tennessee, inventors of the revolutionary mechanical cottonpicker, mentioned at the outset:

From childhood, we are told, they themselves worked as cotton-pickers, and it was their intimate acquaintance with the back-breaking severity of the task that first turned their thoughts towards a possible labour-saving machine. Having some years ago embraced mildly socialistic tenets, ,they have considered refusing to sell or lease their machines except to persons willing to agree in advance that the displaced labour shall in some manner be cared for. They have thought of establishing a foundation, supported from the profits of their invention, to study the problems of social adjustment the cotton-picking machine is expected to bring about, and to assist in lessening the shock.

Thus voluntarily these inventors, with a touch of nobility, are prepared to forgo their immediate profits, in the interests of socialprogress, to bring practical science to the touchstone of ethics, and thereby soften its impact on society, an example which might go far, if followed, towards a solution of one of the most pressing problems of the day. .