In defence of the technocrats' addiction to secrecy, it must be said that they have long found comfort in their view of science as the miraculous knight of reason. Science led the way in the battle against the forces of darkness. Discoveries were celebrated as if new territories had been won on the road to a place of eternal light where knowledge would reign. And yet these very real advances in the uncovering of nature's secrets seemed increasingly to create a world which escaped the control of society. New knowledge and new positive powers in the hands of man seemed inevitably to be matched with new inaccessible elites and a new sophistication in the arts of violence and destruction.
Science, the miraculous knight, has consistently resembled a splicing together of Merlin and Lancelot. The former was part prophet, part magician, born of a devil and a virtuous maiden, at one with the laws of nature and therefore able to exploit them. He secretly prepared Arthur to become the perfect king in his hour of destiny. In part because of his immortality, Merlin can be alternately a symbol of freedom or of enslavement. Lancelot, on the other hand, was the greatest of Arthur's knights, the model of chivalry, bravery and fidelity. But he also carried with him the secret of his adulterous love for the Queen, a betrayal which negated all of his qualities. He twice caught sight of the Grail. But his impurity caused him to fail at the last moment and eventually it was that impure secret which brought on the war that destroyed the Round Table and caused Arthur's death. And so the servant of the greater good inexplicably destroyed it, just as the miraculous Merlin, uncoverer of perfection, inexplicably was unable to understand the forces he was releasing.
The great Scientific Revolution in which we are still engulfed began in 1543 when Copernicus published On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres, laying out a theory in which the earth revolved around the sun. From then on all progress seemed to be a victory against established authority and official ideas. Interestingly enough, the opposition to Copernicus was firmer among the leaders of the Reformation, beginning with Martin Luther, than it was in Rome, where Pope Clement VII gave approval for an earlier version of the Revolution to be published. However, when Galileo published his Dialogue on the Chief Systems in 1632, clarifying and actually proving Copernicus's argument, he was put on trial by the Inquisition and forced to recant.
It seemed clear from then on that scientists had embraced the ultimate virtue. They did not appeal in their arguments, as the twentieth-century mathematician and humanist Jacob Bronowski has put it, to race, politics, sex or age. They resisted "every form of persuasion but the fact. [1] Truth was their guide in a world where everyone else was led by interest. Francis Bacon's social model of a dictatorship led by scientists, as laid out in New Atlantis, must be seen in that context. His idea of a nocturnal council of senior scientists, who would decide in secrecy what to do with the new knowledge and how much to tell the population at large, was the beginning of a debate which is still with us. As suited the mind of a courtier, Bacon opted for secrecy and manipulation in the best interests of the public.
But the more general view among scientists has always been that secrecy has no place in their work. To the contrary, theirs is a permanent and open debate around the world -- a "Republic of Science," as Michael Polanyi put it." In the free cooperation of independent scientists we shall find a highly simplified model of a free society." [2] Or as the nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer wrote, "One thing we find throughout the house: there are no locks; there are no shut doors; wherever we go there are the signs and usually the words of welcome. It is an open house, open to all comers." [3]
Of course, the situation is not quite so simple. The Republic of Science does exist in the exalted sphere of pure research. Not only secrecy has no role; neither does social interest. Virtue at this level is the investigation and revelation of the laws of nature. The line between this disinterested work and applied science is theoretically clear. In practice it is confused. Many scientists find themselves on both sides. Once across on the side of application, a whole other set of rules applies. Application involves the interests of race, politics, sex and age, just for a start. Nonscientific choices must be made. Secrecy becomes a tool of the knowledge holder.
It is the confusion over how to deal with crossing the line from theoretical to practical science which so troubles the scientists. If, once across, they surrender all power over knowledge, they quickly find themselves forced by public and private authorities to do things which disturb them for nonscientific reasons. The virtue found in theoretical work is the disinterested purity of the laws of nature. However, human civilization is always "interested" and all choices surrounding scientific application eventually touch moral questions. A very different sort of virtue is involved and the scientist is faced with the impossible task of satisfying both.
This contradiction has been gradually obscured by a third and arbitrary value: the virtue attached to all progress. In order to establish this, the inevitability attributed to theoretical science is arbitrarily extended to applied science, thus eliminating the possibility of making practical choices through public mechanisms. Common sense can tell us at any time that no application is inevitable. Or that civilization must decide what it wishes to do with a breakthrough of science. However, in the rush and disorder of the Scientific Revolution, very few choices have been made by society. Theoretical research may well be open and disinterested, but it also deals in areas obscure to the citizenry. That obscurity has somehow set the tone for all levels of scientific work, thus making any sensible intervention by the citizenry virtually impossible.
In spite of this there was a widespread feeling until the arrival of nuclear power that the force of science, in the words of Andre Malraux, "could not turn upon man." [4] The Western world abounded in paintings and statuary which celebrated the good wrought by science. One of the most absolute of these evocations is the 1899 statue of Nature Uncovering Herself Before Science, by the French artist Louis-Ernest Barrias. There she is in the great hall of fetes in the Orsay Museum in Paris, a voluptuous, life-size woman sculpted out of marble, onyx, lapis lazuli and malachite. Her wonderful shoulders and breasts are bare. A scarab beetle at her waist holds together with its claws the drapery which hides the rest of her. The scarab is knowledge. No doubt the sculptor meant us to feel that, with a little coaxing, the beetle would release the cloth, revealing, as it slipped away, the most secret and intimate parts; that knowledge could and would reveal all secrets, if we befriended it. With the help of knowledge, men would penetrate the secrets of nature and the world.
And yet the beetle was in a position to play it either way. By simply using its little claws to keep the veils in place, knowledge would gain great power. Science, with the aid of the beetle, could explore every orifice of nature, giving itself orgasmic pleasure along the way, but deal out to the public only that information which suited it. Few men like to share a mistress, but they do like everyone to know that she is beautiful and gives pleasure.
Although the idealized nineteenth-century love affair between man and the secrets of science was passionate, very early on there were doubts about the innate goodness of such progress. Frankenstein's monster was the most popular example. Mary Shelley's story of the struggle between science and humanism was written in 1818. Frankenstein, the optimistic scientist, creates his ugly monster and educates him with Goethe, Plutarch, Milton. The monster, however, cannot live without love and so becomes a reluctant murderer. The drama ends in Antarctica, where Frankenstein dies and his monster wanders off alone into the snow in order to do the same. By midcentury the philosopher of art, John Ruskin, was writing of modern science such things as: "It gives lectures on Botany, of which the object is to show that there is no flower." Or again, "there was some excuse for your being a little proud when, about last sixth of April you knotted a copper wire all the way to Bombay, and flashed a message along it, and back -- But what was the message, and what the answer? Is India the better for what you said to her?" [5]
Of course, it could be argued that Ruskin was responsible for much of the romantic overstatement which allowed many writers and creators to surrender in their ongoing battle for a public voice and retreat into private places and subjects. His basic contention, that progress was not of itself good, became the contention of many of the creative, unscientific minds. They assumed, following Ruskin, that if not of itself good, then progress must be of itself bad. And so they fled away to the safer ground of private questions, on which so much of the twentieth century's creativity has taken place.
But Ruskin was himself one of the great revolutionary theorists of art and architecture. He helped civilization to see in a new way and in so doing helped to release a fresh burst of creativity which spread from Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris and the Pre- Raphaelites to George Eliot, Walt Whitman and Marcel Proust: The instinctive leaps in his theory resembled those of theoretical scientific research. A century later, Bronowski was examining the same question. Is there any difference between "the creative acts of the mind in art and in science"? He argued that the discoveries of science and works of art are both explorations -- in fact, "are explosions, of a hidden likeness." [6] It was not this sort of creativity which bothered Ruskin, who was also an accomplished geologist, but the seeming impossibility of having any control over the direction and speed of subsequent applications. In truth, if there had been a divorce of science from art, it was an unwilling separation, forced by the absolute doctrine of structure and progress. Ruskin was astonishingly modern. His theories of beauty led him increasingly to political radicalism. His attacks on the mindlessness of applied science were tied into his attacks on social and economic structures which "actually promoted human suffering and the destruction of beauty, whether natural or man-made." [7]
As for the general public, by the middle of the twentieth century, its unquestioning confidence in the innate good of science had worn thin. What remained was a profound, inexpressible need to go on believing that science must be allowed to unfold, that nothing was. more reprehensible than even a hint of resistance in the face of scientific progress. Logic can multiply the smallest doubt at terrifying speed and to question is to doubt. To doubt is to fear. To fear is irrational. To be irrational is to embrace ignorance and emotional instability. And before you know it, you are a Luddite.
As a result, whatever fears are felt, our attitude towards science is that whether pure or applied, it is a single force which must be allowed to move forward. The word forward no longer makes any sense to us, but then many of our difficulties lie in these language traps. A civilization which moves massively in any direction without conscious self-control is in disordered flight as if pursued by enemy hordes. For example, over the last two decades we have become used to frightened groups who belong to what is called the Right, urging upon civilization a general flight into the past. At the same time the inaccessible, almost mystical religion of progress through science has enforced a flight forward into unknown futures.
As for the scientists, the vast majority of whom continue to believe in the inviolability of progress, they still do so with the driven purity of terrorists. Indeed, their devotion to the need for physical change reassures us that our society is not in confusion or bogged down. The few scientists who learn to doubt and dare to do so publicly, are usually discredited as being unstable by the majority of the scientific community.
From time to time, a scientific leader will find the right words with which to question our society's assumptions. The Nobel Prize-winning chemist, John Polanyi, calmly persists in a campaign for common sense to be applied to the development of knowledge." The progress of science," he argues, "has its own logic, which you ignore at your peril." [8] He is not suggesting that attempts should be made to restrain pure science, but that society, with the aid of scientists, must develop mechanisms of choice which apply common sense, public interest and morality to the development of scientific breakthroughs.
***
The prime example of the seemingly uncontrollable relationship between research and development was the investigation which entered its final stage with Einstein's theory of relativity in 1905 and culminated with Otto Hahn's splitting of the atom in 1939. The first application was the atomic bomb. The scientists who produced that explosion felt themselves obliged to discuss, in secret, as the times required, the implications of their work. These discussions produced a report which was delivered by hand in June 1945, a month before the first atomic bomb test, to Henry Stimson, the American Secretary of War:
In the past, science has often been able to provide new methods of protection against new weapons of aggression.... But it cannot promise such efficient protection against the destructive use of nuclear power. The protection can come only from the political organization of the world. Among all the arguments calling for an efficient international organization for peace, the existence of nuclear weapons is the most compelling one.
[We] cannot hope to avoid a nuclear armament race either by keeping secret from the competing nations the basic scientific facts of nuclear power, or by cornering the raw materials required for such a race.
[T]he race for nuclear armaments will be on in earnest not later than the morning after our first demonstration of the existence of nuclear weapons.
The Franck Report was received and put away, to be ignored by the political and the administrative structure. The nuclear physicists who signed this document were in the unusual position of inventing a process whose full consequences were immediately foreseeable. Their call for common sense before the bomb was dropped can be seen as a cry of desperation. Because, from the moment of the explosion, a new profession could not help but be formalized -- that of the scientists trained and employed to further develop the greatest weapon ever invented. That profession would have a structure linking it to the structures of the state. And the whole thing would be buoyed up by a self-justifying logic. Only in those last days before the explosion were the inventors both conscious and free; a combination which, as the Book of Genesis established some time ago, brings on expulsion from the garden of innocence and an admission of the evil within each individual.
In the Franck Report, the scientists were attempting to take responsibility for the unacceptable application of their inevitable· invention. That is the optimistic interpretation. A more cynical view would be that they were declaring pure science to be an innocent participant in the whole affair and shifting responsibility for any application to the politicians. But it was the finest scientists of the century who in the first place had encouraged the politicians to build the bomb or had themselves agreed to build it. Einstein, Leo Szilard, Niels Bohr, James Franck, J. Robert Oppenheimer and dozens of others were involved. All considered themselves to be humanists, and many were pacifists. Their call in 1945 for nuclear restraint by the politicians was sincere, but was it honest?
Einstein, who wrote to President Roosevelt in 1939 encouraging him to build the bomb as fast as possible in order to stay ahead of the Germans, said after it was dropped, "If I knew they were going to do this, I would have become a shoemaker." If Einstein did not understand the process of development and did not help the public to understand it, what responsibility was he taking in his letter of 1939? To put it crudely, just because Einstein thought himself a nice guy doesn't mean he was.
The real problem is that during four hundred years of scientific revolution, the continual message has been that invention and change are virtues, rational virtues, As for the dividing line between the inevitability of pure science and the choices theoretically presented by applied science, no attempt has ever been made to formalize the crossover point in coordination with the development of a public process of choice, Only the scientists have had any hope of identifying that line before, during or after it is crossed, as the Manhattan Project demonstrated, It would be unrealistic to imagine that the line could ever be perfectly clear. However, the "Republic of Science" could improve this situation if it recognized a second obligation, equal to that, of open debate among experts -- that is, an obligation to help the citizen understand the choices at stake. This would involve refusing the comforts of exclusive language and exclusive dialogues with the power structures. In other words, for the first time in modern history, to develop the idea that society, with the help of the scientist, has a brief to alter the progress of progress.
And yet, as John Polanyi points out, most scientists continue to remain silent because they regard themselves as too poorly informed to make a contribution outside their narrow fields. In a world of expertise and competing structures, they, the mythological experts, are indeed ignorant about the political and economic structures which administer society. When the occasional scientist does actually speak out, he is more often than not mercilessly martyrized.
The example of Oppenheimer is wired into the collective memory of the international scientific community like an illuminated cross that flashes on whenever they are tempted to convert their scientific expertise into public morality. Oppenheimer was the physicist chosen to direct the Manhattan Project. Neither before nor after Hiroshima did he doubt that it was "man's highest function to know and to understand the objective world and its laws." [9] However, he found the division between knowing and applying increasingly difficult to deal With. From the Franck Report on, he grew reluctant about further development of the bomb. He gradually applied what could be described as scientifically informed moral or humanist standards in order to put a brake on the nuclear military program, for whose future he was still partially responsible. As a result he was caught up in the. net of McCarthyism and treated as part of the Communist scare. This led to his removal from positions of responsibility. Only then did he seriously carry his campaign for the moral application of scientific knowledge outside the circles. of scientific and political power into the arena of public debate.
***
Our civilization detests the expert who gives in to generalized free speech. Public comment by an individual speaking outside his area of expertise, or even attempting to draw wider conclusions from his specific knowledge, is seen as a dangerous victory of emotion over professional competence. It interferes in the domains of others and it suggests that structures are inadequate. The words of a writer or of a journalist are relatively harmless. They come from the margins. But a proper expert, who is therefore a full participant in society, is attacking himself when he attacks others. As for critical public comment by an individual on his own area of expertise, that is almost worse. He is betraying the secrets of his confrerie. Expertise and structure thus succeed in silencing most serious public debate.
In the world of science the modern secret finds its full worth. Knowing and understanding are the qualities of rational man which permit him to act. But the scientist retains that knowledge. He holds it back. Not in its details. Those are handed over to companies and, governments. But he holds back any configuration of those details which would allow the citizen to understand. When faced by questioning from nonexperts, the scientist invariably retreats behind veils of complication and specialization. Of course it is complicated. But there is no other profession in which the sense of obligation to convert the inner dialect into the language of man is so absolutely absent. Through this form of secrecy the scientist makes it impossible for the citizen to know and to understand and therefore to act, except in ignorance. At its best, thanks to solid common sense, human ignorance may still attain the level of decent humanism; at worst it is emotive and fearful. In any case, both humanism and emotion will be discounted by expertise.
The nuclear industry has become a microcosm of all the protective superiority and secrecy attached to scientific knowledge. In France, for example, the decision was taken by the administrative elites, in the late 1950s, to reduce oil imports by converting to nuclear energy. Some 70 percent of the country's needs are now satisfied by nuclear reactors. Soon the figure will be 80 percent, as twenty more plants are added to the existing forty and fast-breeder reactors come fully on stream. Between the introduction of the original plants and 1986, there was not a single nuclear accident in France. Its elites were thus able to boast at home and around the world of their system's superiority. Like the systems of other countries, it was being sold on the international market. The other builders of nuclear plants -- the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, the Soviet Union -- had not had many accidents and most of those were described as mere technical incidents. In general this appeared to be a safe industry bringing much needed energy to those who lacked oil and coal. For decades it was unsullied in the public mind. This was the future of technology: clean, Silent, invisible as opposed to the dirty, noisy, obtrusive methods of the nineteenth century. The sense of purity was such that the scientific myth of moral change for the good of mankind was given a whole new boost. The public good was here synonymous with applied knowledge. Young scientists around the world dreamed of joining the nuclear sector and doing good, not unlike the young men who once dreamed of following Saint Francis. They were not seeking great fortunes on the backs of others. They weren't becoming property developers or currency speculators or leveraged buyout manipulators. They were choosing public service, which if not so sacrificial as joining the early Franciscans was nevertheless neither selfish nor self-interested.
And what was true everywhere else was particularly true in France, where the industry's record was perfect. A national consensus, ever more solid, reflected the confidence of experience and, inevitably, the confidence born of necessity as the country became increasingly reliant on the nuclear grid. Nuclear scientists had once worked for a future dream. Now they defended a national system.
Then, in 1986, came the accident at Chernobyl. The leak had been so bad that it was first detected outside the Soviet Union when the alarm systems inside Swedish reactors went off as if there were a local disaster. All of Europe went on radiation alert. In the weeks that followed, it became clear that there had been massive contamination of food products across the continent. Milk and cheese were destroyed in most places. Italy destroyed its vegetables and kept children indoors. Contaminated animals were killed and burnt.
Curiously, France alone seemed to have been spared by the winds bearing clouds of radiation. Life went on. Milk, cheese, vegetables and animals were eaten. As citizens looked at the daily maps of radiation movements in their newspapers, they could not help but be confused by the Cartesian elegance with which the winds carried contamination to the north and to the south, leaving a neat hole in the middle large enough to accommodate France.
As it turned out, there had been no stupidity or political manipulation. The French nuclear scientists were simply so used to protecting their citizens from the moral dangers of knowledge improperly understood that they had extended the same protection to the Russians.
This protective impulse might be called the conspiracy against panic. Rational man's greatest fear remains that the citizen will fall back on his baser instincts and act rashly. Reason over passion. Reason over fear. Reason over panic. Above all, modern man must remain calm.
Interestingly enough, in those countries which dealt most openly with the dangers of the Chernobyl accident, the citizens took their right to panic to heart. They listened carefully to all warnings and advice. They did not eat what they were told was dangerous. They did not complain about lost crops. They kept their children indoors. No one ran amok in the streets. They used their common sense to panic with dignity.
And when, in France, the knowledge began to filter through that they had been treated like children, the citizens reacted with a certain anger. First, French lamb was rejected at foreign borders as toxic. France's experts blamed this on foreign ignorance. Then even French herbs were turned-back from Japan. The international press began to concentrate on the refusal of Paris to admit that something serious had happened. Gradually the French citizen's confidence in the nuclear system was shaken. In the weeks that followed, the revelation of undeniable deceit forced a certain openness upon the experts.
Suddenly, nuclear reactors, safe for thirty years, began to have accidents -- a half dozen in the next twelve months. Then accounts of earlier accidents began to leak out. On April 4, 1984, at Bugey, which lies in the intensely cultivated and heavily populated area between the Swiss border and Lyon, the official unpublished report had said -- "An incident of this gravity has not been met with before on a heavy water reactor.... A supplementary failure ... would therefore have led to a complete loss of electrical power, an unmeasurable situation.... The failure of the valves to close would have led to an additional degeneration of the incident towards a situation difficult to control." [10]
The scientist responsible for this report no doubt feels that the subsequent leaking and publication of his words was a betrayal. He would probably say that if read by untrained, uninvolved outsiders, the report could be used to create a narrow and sensationalist picture of the truth. As for the truth, that is a vast intricate thing which an outsider could not possibly understand.
The average person, if called upon to listen to this explanation, would sense beneath the scientist's words an anger beyond any rational explanation. The source of this fury is the scientist's, and above all the nuclear scientist's, belief that he is Merlin/Lancelot, the miraculous servant of the future. Suddenly, ordinary people everywhere are accusing him of endangering their lives.
The beloved child reacts to the questioning of his actions as though his motives -- that is, his moral judgment -- were being questioned. He responds with the weapons he most despises. He reacts with fear; with hatred of the outsider. He lashes out. He conceals. In fact, he does the very thing he keeps saying the ignorant public will do if they are not carefully handled: he panics. And having been nursed upon the abstract, he panics badly, without common sense or dignity. This makes it impossible for society to deal calmly with the problems which arise from his labours.
In 1987 constantly high levels of radioactive contamination were registered on a beach near the Dounreay nuclear plant in Scotland. These levels were confirmed by separate expert measurement. In fact, the responsible scientists did not deny the findings. However, the plant was scheduled for expansion. Studies and hearings were underway. The same responsible scientists refused to take the beach contamination levels into account in their studies of safety standards. One had nothing to do with the other. [11] It was as if they had been presented not with facts but with disloyal information which had inexplicably gone over to the side of darkness.
Repeated leaks at the nuclear plant of Pickering -- in the suburbs of Toronto, surrounded by five million people -- are consistently described as technical problems. In the post- Chernobyl period, a documented public report in Canada threw doubt on local nuclear safety standards. The Canadian government reacted by instructing its Crown-owned nuclear reactor development corporation to reexamine those standards. Instead the corporation explained at great length that reexamination was unnecessary because the public report was based upon unfounded fears. The refusal to entertain doubt seemed to be absolute.
The scientists within nuclear plants usually report incidents to their superiors. This is part of internal expert structures, For example, it is known that in 1986 there were 2,836 accidents in the 99 American nuclear plants. In 1987 there were 2,940 accidents in the then 105 nuclear plants. [12] The information blockage seems to come at the moment when the technical knowledge threatens to escape from the absolute control of the expert system.
Over twenty-eight years, reactor accidents at the enormous Du Pont Savannah River nuclear plant in South Carolina were reported by the plant to the regional office of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). This included a 1985 memorandum written by a scientist to his superiors summarizing thirty "reactor incidents of greatest significance." None of this was acted on. Nor was the information reported to the central offices of the AEC or to the Department of Energy. The information was kept secret. Those concerned pretended that nothing had happened. And yet they are not the sort of people normally thought of as belonging to the criminal element. They are quite probably good citizens. Loving parents who pay their taxes and take their children to Little League practice or piano lessons. When the information finally came out, the Energy Department put this secrecy down' to a deeply rooted institutional practice going back to the Manhattan Project in 1942, when security was all-important. [13] But this hardly explains a decision not to report incidents to the Department of Energy. The Department of Energy could hardly be called a foreign agency. Rather, this obsessive retention reflects a terrible confusion of expertise, self-worth and morality.
By treating the public as children likely to panic, the scientist can succeed in making them do just that. Witness the weeping and self-flagellation in British novelist Martin Amis's introduction to his book of short stories, Einstein's Monsters. Nuclear weapons "make me want to throw up, they make me feel sick to my stomach." In the case of a nuclear war, "I shall be obliged (and it's the last thing I'll feel like doing) to retrace that long mile home, through the firestorm, the remains- of the thousand-miles-an-hour winds, the warped atoms, the grovelling dead. Then -- God willing if I still have the strength, and, of course, if they are still alive -- I must find my wife and children and I must kill them." [14] Amis's hysteria gives comfort to the scientist and to the authorities. The expert feels exonerated in his withholding of knowledge, although Amis slipped into this frenzy only because, after forty years of refusing to discuss nuclear power in a calm, open manner, the scientists have left the amateur no other style of argument.
Curiously enough, such attacks simply reinforce the scientist's view that, while nuclear weapons are a necessary evil dictated by the needs of uncivilized man, nuclear power is a good necessary to the well-being of man. And yet the risk of a catastrophe is far more likely to come from peaceful reactors than from bombs. The weapons, after all, are dormant. Someone must decide to use them. Common sense and simple humanity protect us. The reactors, however, are constantly exploding. That is how they produce energy. All that stands between man and the unleashing of this force is the effectiveness of the machinery containing the explosions and the competence of those responsible for administering the plants. One thing we do know is that neither mechanical nor human infallibility has ever existed. Passenger jets crash. High-speed, high-technology trains crash. Dams give way. Bridges fall down. And there were 2,940 nuclear accidents in the United States alone in 1987 in only 105 plants.
The late 1980s saw a breakthrough for sensible concerns over nuclear power. Britain, for example, has virtually abandoned the building of additional nuclear plants. But the way in which this happened shows that no progress has been made in bringing the secrets of science out into the open for public scrutiny. To the contrary. No public debate preceded the, government's decision; not even debate among nuclear scientists. It was simply announced that the planned government privatization of electricity would not include the nuclear sector. Closer examination revealed that this was for two reasons. First, despite decades of promises to the contrary, nuclear power was still more expensive than old- fashioned energy sources. Second, the private sector was not interested in investing in such a risky sector. They were particularly disturbed by the risks and costs involved in dismantling old plants.
Nowhere was there a hint that the public should be concerned by those risks or costs. Instead, the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Authority repeated the standard arguments: "We have to demonstrate that nuclear power is not only safe but economic. There is no doubt that the public has been confused by press reports about the financial risk of nuclear power." [15]
In other words, neither the nuclear scientists nor the government and business elites admitted anything. Instead they stated that problems in the nuclear industry came from confusion in the public's mind -- which is to say, from ignorance. One senses that what has happened in Britain constitutes only a temporary pause. The scientific community is still convinced that it must go on. It will, therefore, continue pushing inside the various systems until, one day, the British government will abruptly announce a new, improved program, This decision will seem to come out of nowhere and yet the program will be born fully formed. One of the arguments which will make continuation seem to be inevitable will be that most other Western nations have not paused, France and Canada are plunging onwards. The United States will begin again the moment there is a new energy crisis. Only Sweden appears to have made a definitive decision to denuclearize. In the spring of 1991 -- the fifth anniversary of Chernobyl -- the industry began a concerted international effort to sell the public on its new safety standards. [16]
***
The interesting questions in this debate are the simple ones the experts avoid. Why should the public submit itself to uncertain risks? What right do the scientists have to impose their timetable on the general population? Why are the scientists so panicked by the fear of moving carefully? Why do they feel obliged to flee so erratically into the future?
There is little difference between the nuclear scientist's moralistic prevention, through the retention of knowledge, of proper public debate and that of scientists in other areas. For example, every year there are two million cases of human poisoning through contact with applied pesticides, Forty thousand of these are mortal. Pesticides have poisoned water tables throughout the world. In 1987 the main rice-producing area in Italy was obliged to truck in drinking water for the farming families. Rice, of course, is grown in flooded fields, The farmers had poisoned their own water tables. The effect on the rice produced is another question, which the farmers themselves wouldn't want to discuss, In southern Europe there is an epidemic of microscopic red spiders which attack crops, These spiders are a side effect of advanced chemical antimildew treatments. A number of European studies have identified a sharp rise in terminal diseases among early-middle-aged farmers and have linked this to intensive chemical farming. The University of Guelph has tied the sharp rise in Parkinson's disease to an element in chemical fertilizers. There is also a sharp growth in human immunity to antibiotics. For example, in 1960 only 13 percent of staphylococcus infections were resistant to penicillin. In 1988 the figure was 91 percent. In part this has been traced back to overuse of these drugs, which has also led to epidemics of such diseases as meningitis and gonorrhea. Numerous tracing tests have also followed part of the problem back to the feeding of antibiotics to cows, sheep, pigs and chickens to prevent disease and stimulate growth. Fifty-five percent of American antibiotics are used on farm animals. In a phenomenon called "jumping genes," the bacteria are now developing defence mechanisms faster than the scientists can come up with new treatments. In a related development, the feeding of hormones to animals has been forbidden in Europe. This was apolitical victory over the local hormone experts, who deny any side effects, as do their colleagues in the United States. The appearance of salmonellosis inside fresh eggs was first seriously noted in the United States. In the nine years from 1979 to 1988, the recorded incidence multiplied sixfold. Dr. Douglas Archer, director of the Microbiology Division of the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, confirmed in December 1988 that the cause was the battery-hen advanced-production method. A month later a British cabinet minister, Edwina Currie, spoke publicly of this problem and was forced to resign. [17]
These random examples are relatively straightforward. The refusal of most organizations to admit that there is a problem when one does arise, let alone do anything about it, could simply be put down to corporate interests. Nothing is neater than to blame human greed. However, most of the corporations involved are run by managers, not owners. Many of these managers are scientists or engineers. Most are technocrats of one sort or another. And beyond them are gigantic reserves of expertise in universities, hospitals and institutes. The vast majority of these honourable scientists either cooperate with the problem-denial process or simply remain silent. They seem unable to step back from progress in order to disapprove specific advances.
Thus the pesticide poisonings are blamed on incorrect use by the farmers. Water-table contamination cannot be specifically linked to agriculture. When, in January 1989, it was revealed that the pesticide levels in water processed by four U.K. water authorities were above what Common Market health standards allowed, the reaction of the authorities and the government was childlike. They said the EEC level was too low. They said this ,was bad news for consumers, who would have to pay more if the strict regulations were complied with. There wasn't a hint of concern over possible health implications. The red spider epidemic is blamed on incorrect use of the antimildew products. And the spiders are seen as a technical incident which is being dealt with through the creation of additional chemical treatments. There is an absolute denial that chemical fertilizers cause any diseases or have any effects on such things as water systems. And yet the water in apparently pristine lakes in Canada can no longer be drunk unfiltered. The government warns against eating too many fish caught in these waters. Oysters and mussels from beds in unpolluted areas off Europe and North America, suddenly poison people. The problem is rarely admitted to be local. The poison has been carried into the area by a current. Not a serious word is said about the millions of tons of agricultural runoff, which is one of the causes of the tragic change in all these waters. It is denied that antibiotics survive through the food cycle. Each example of tracing is treated as incidental. Rather than reexamine its liberal use of antibiotics, the scientific community Bees forward, discovering cures for calamities which its previous cures have caused. Not only do the North American 'creators of hormones for animals deny there are any risks, they claim that the European ban is a ploy by protectionist governments against competitive foreign products. They are terrified that the European precedent will help antihormone pressure groups in the United States. The European hormone producers side with the Americans and have created a pressure group called European Enterprises for Animal Health. The name is a perfect example of the dictatorship of vocabulary carried to the point of nonsense. They have appropriated SPCA sentiments for the name of an organization devoted to the chemical fattening of animals for slaughter.
Annual analyses of the cost of organic gram farming versus chemical grain farming in the United States show that the organic system is now marginally cheaper. The production costs are the same, but the chemical farmer must pay for his expensive chemicals. Despite these facts, the scientific community remains united with the corporate structure in denigrating what they define as a nonscientific approach. Why something that works better, has no negative side effects and costs less should be eliminated on the basis of devotion to what is seen as modernity is not at all clear. The modern devotion to efficiency evaporates the moment the proposed method does not complement the methods in place. In 1989 a remarkable breakthrough was made. The American National Academy of Sciences announced the results of a long study which established that organic farming was as productive if not more productive than chemical farming. They are now recommending that forty years of government policies promoting "modern" agriculture be reversed. This revolutionary announcement was greeted with silence from the scientific community. Nor did this news roll across borders causing great discussion in the rice region of northern Italy or the intensive market garden area of southern France or in England, which prides itself on having the most modern, industrialized agriculture in Europe.
Again, the question which the scientific community shows little interest in asking or answering is why the public should be submitted to the risks without its understanding or consent. The thirty-five chemical products which go into the production and preservation of a modern apple mayor may not present a risk to public health. But why was the use of these insecticides, artificial fertilizers, fungicides and preservatives rushed ahead with? Why was there no time to publicly consider whether this was the right road and whether the citizen wished to travel down it? The parliamentary systems demand that a government justify its actions in public. The scientific community has changed our life more in this century than any parliament, and yet it feels obliged to justify nothing.
As for the scandal in early 1989 over whether British eggs contained salmonella, the process involved might easily have been mistaken for satire. First, no reference was made by scientists, politicians or journalists to the fact that this is a problem in all Western countries in which advanced industrial methods are used to raise chickens. Second, the crisis immediately fell to the lowest level of nationalism -- British eggs are good. Overnight every hen was waving a Union Jack as Mrs. Thatcher stood up for working chickens. Third, the Minister who dared to speak the truth was left in isolation by the scientific community, in order to give the impression that she was hysterical. That she had panicked. Fourth, having gotten rid of her, the responsible officials took partial measures -- just enough to prevent panic -- which confirmed that the Minister had been right all the time.
Attitudes towards science have seemed to be changing over the last few years. The sudden rise of the Green movement to a level of political importance imposed on the politicians, the bureaucrats, the businessmen and even on the scientists a more careful agenda. However, the victories being won for environmentalism are taking place almost exclusively in the political arena. This demonstrates the muscles democracy is capable of flexing. But there is a great distance between showing biceps and changing a society. For the latter, one must win over, change or destroy the system.
At this point neither the scientific community nor the bureaucrats nor the business managers have shown any major signs of responding to the new political signals. There has been a response which implies acquiescence. Environmentally sound paragraphs are now inserted, along with other motherhood issues, into the speeches of politicians and corporate leaders. Deprived of their exclusive vocabulary, environmentally oriented political parties such as the Greens have already begun to founder on the complexities of modern politics. And the few real changes to have been made are concentrated in narrow areas where there are political points to be scored.
The British government calls for environmental responsibility while attempting to keep the quality of municipal water at as low a level as legally possible. The American government is concerned about deforestation in Brazil while its own emissions of carbon dioxide are growing faster every year -- faster than the world's growth rate. The Canadian government bangs on about the dangers of acid rain while closing its eyes to the equivalent of desertification through massive deforestation. And no existing structures have engaged in any sort of discussion with those who question the wisdom of following applied science blindly into the future. If one listens attentively, there is at best a sullen silence.
The problem is not Green or anti-Green any more than it is environmentalists versus capitalists. The problem is a whole approach to truth and knowledge retention and power which goes far beyond these movements. The Green approach deals with an important slice of the scientific problem, but only a slice. Environmental risks are a result of the problem but are not the problem itself.
If the scientific-administrative structure were somehow to be won over to the Greens, it would be just as secretive; retentive and sure of itself as ever. From the self-evident truths of nuclear energy as a beneficial social good, we would pass to the self-evident truth of generalized nondevelopment.
The psychological effect the rational approach produces in people stems in part from the confusing of such words as modern and good. These belong together as little as back to nature and good. The public knows that absolutes have no place in process, but our society offers us no tools for questioning or rejecting with common sense.
The comic level to which this descends can be seen in the mythology surrounding French wine. The romantic image of a plump old vigneron, working with his gnarled hands on the vines, is central to the pleasure of drinking wine, Along with it come other images which have to do with past glories -- Henri IV drank only Nuits St. Georges; Chambertin was the favourite wine of Napoleon. And yet there is a professional and public conviction that wine produced other than with modern methodology would be undrinkable. If you say to a Frenchman, "this is organic wine," he will roll his eyes. But organic wine is simply wine made more or less as it was for Henri IV or Napoleon, that is, as it was before two late- nineteenth-century revolutions: the arrival of phylloxera, which wiped out the vineyards; and the introduction of the scientific sugaring of pressed grape juice, known as chaptalization. The organic producer macerates the grape juice longer with its skin and pips; the resulting wine is held longer in wood casks and kept longer in the bottle. Its stability, body and taste come from itself.
Modern wine tends to be filled with sulfur, chemical stabilizers, fungicides, beet sugar and alcohol additives. These elements, not grape alcohol, are the cause of most hangovers. Contemporary wine doesn't taste anything like Henri IV's Nuit St. Georges. It is forced, matures quicker and dies faster. Like nuclear reactors, modern wine is part of the secretive promise of our society.