SCIENCE AND SOCIETY

Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21908, 8 October 1936, Page 7

SCIENCE AND SOCIETY

SIR JOSIAH STAMP’S ADDRESS

“BIRTH CONTROL” FOR MACHINERY

SCOPE FOR NEW THOUGHT IN FIELD OF ETHICS

(yiiOil ODE OWN CORRESPONDENT.)

LONDON, September 12. The British Association and Science Guild are in sessL at Blackpool. The attendance totals 2300, and includes many women. On one day alone no fewer than 74 addresses and many more speeches were delivered. Sir Josiah Stamp is the president. The subject of his opening address was “The Impact of Science Upon, Society.”

He said that widespread uneasiness exis.pd, both among scientists and the general public, about possible ill* effects of scientific research and its application. He restricted himself to a limited field—the adjustments to change in social and economic affairs made necessary by the progress of science. Up till now that field had remained a no-man’s land, neglected by scientists, economists, and governments alms. Here was a new and important field for scientific study. '* In the future, the k xpact of change due to science was likely to be more severe, since we should shortly be deprived of the economic safety-valve of ncreasing population. Perhaps the rate of application of scient’fic discovery should b,e retimed. Put enigrammatically. birth-control for human beings might dem d birth-control for their and other impedimenta. They were, however, also to devise methods of ensuring that desi”able p"pkrat'ons of serntifi' knowledge d’d not ccme withm the scone of the nrofit m n tive shnidd not nndu’y delayed. This apnlied notab’y to the raising of the health of the people by proper feeding.

Cost of Displaced Labour Looking at displaced labour and fhe cost of it. Sir Josiah Stamp said that if the effect of diversion of demand through ii vention was to reduce the scope' or outnut of particular industries or concerns in private management. they had no option but to reduce statf If the pressure was not too great, or the changes too rapid, this did rot necessarily result in dismissals, for the contraction of numbers might be made by not filling up with young people, the vacancies caused by natural wastage through death or retirement. But where dismissals were inevitab’e, re-engage-ments might take place quickly in the competing indu~t~ies; otherwise unemployment ensued. In the upshot, the iniuries to labour, though not to capital, were regarded as equitably a charge to be borne by society in general through taxation, and to be ptit upon neither the causing nor the suffering business unit.

It would be clear. Sir Josiah Stamp submitted, that the difference between the introduction by purely competitive elements involving premature obsolescence and unemployment, and by delayed action, was a cost to society for a greater p’-omotness of accessibi'ity to novelty. The two elements of capital and labour put out of action would have supplied society with an extra quantity of existing classes of goods; but society preferred to forgo that for the privilege of an earlier anticipation of new things. He estimated this price to be of the order of 3 per cent, of the annual national income. But when they spoke of social advantage, on balance, outweighing social cost they dare not be so simple in practice. “If the aggregate individual advantage,” he added, “of adopting some nove’ty is IOOx and the social cost in sustaining the consequential unemployed is COx, it does not follow that it is a justifiable bargain for society. f The money cost Is based on an economic minimum for important reasons of social repercussions. But the moral effects of unemployment upon the character and happiness of the individual escape this equation altogether, and are so great that we must pause upon the figures. What shall it profit a civilisation if it gain the whole world of innovation and its victims lose their souls?”

Society and Economics “The impact of economic science upon society to-day is intense and confusing, because, addressing itself to the logic of various sets of conditions as the likely or necessary ones according to its exponents’ predilections, it speaks with several voices, and the public are bewildered. Unlike their claims upon physics and mathematics, since it is dealing with money, wages, and employment, the things of every day, they have a natural feeling that it ought to be easily understandable and its truth recognisable. “The necessity for a concentration upon new theoretical and analytical analysis, and upon realistic research, is very great. But so also is the need for widespread and popular teaching. For a single chemist or engineer may by his discovery affect the lives of millions who enter into it but do not understand it, whereas a conception in economic life, however brilliant, generally requires the conformity of the understanding and wills of a great number before it can be effective.”

Ordered knowledge and principles, Sir Josiah Stamp said, were wanted at every point. The initial impact of new science was in the factory itself. The kind of remedy required here was covered by the work of the National Institute of Industrial Psychology, which invoked the aid of many branches of science. It was the very first point of impact. Yet its finance was left to personal advocacy and commanded not 10 per cent, of the expenditure on research in artificial silk, without which the world was reasonably happy for some centuries. Again, the scientific ancillaries of medicine had made immense strides. Clinical medicine as an art made tardy, unscientific, and halting use of them.

Much Yet to Learn In conclusion Sir Josiah Stamp said that the field of ethics needed the toil of new thought. “The systems of today, evolving over 2000 years, are rooted in individualism and the relations between individuals. But the relations of society to-day are not predominantly individual, for it is permeated through and through with corporate relations of every kind. Each of these works over some delegated area of the individual’s choice of action and evolves a separate code for the appropriate relationship. The assumption that ethical questions are decided by processes which engage the individual’s whole ethical personality is no longer even remotely true. The joint stock company may do something, or refrain from doing something, on behalf of its shareholders, which is a limited field of ethics and may but faintly resemble what they wo -id individually do with all other considerations added to their financial interests.

“The whole body, of ethics needs to be reworked in the light of modem corporate relations, from church and company to cadet corps and the League of Nations. In no case need we glorify change; but true rest may be only

ideally controlled motion. My predecessors have spoken of the shortcomings of the active world —to me they are but the fallings short of science. Wherever we look we discover that if we are to avoid trouble we must take trouble—scientific trouble. The duality which puts science and man’s other activity in contrasted categories with disharmony to be resolved, gaps to be bridged, is unreal. We are simply beholding everextending science too rough round the edges, as it grows. "What we have learnt concerning the proper impact of science upon society' in the last century is trifling compared with what we have yet to discover and apply. 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.”