Tony, the Scientists' Pal
Later on today, in a speech widely trailed, the prime minister will tell us that he is worried about science - or rather, its unpopularity. But science here means profits and progress.
In its latest lurch the Blairite revolution tries to drag science into the big tent. Later on today, in a speech widely trailed, the prime minister will tell us that he is worried about science - or rather, its unpopularity. Time, he opines, to speak up for his new ally. For Blairism, that restless seeker of easy enemies to vanquish, has found a new foe. Britain's "anti-science fashion" must be taken on and beaten. The banner is unfurled as Mr Blair's drum beats to a newly discovered rhythm. Capitalism can't be regulated - but knowledge can.
Unsurprisingly, the sermon has a business angle. Mr Blair's "science" is hardly a question of voyaging in strange seas of intellectual delight. His point of departure is research and technology. For science here means profits and progress. Developing countries, he fears, which have less time for moral debate about science, will steal a march on Britain.
The ethical indifference underlying the ethical uplift is a familiar noise by now. It's a reminder of the neo-colonial patronage which is the undertow to Blairite internationalism. Africa - an entire continent which recently became a friend - now seems a bit of a threat. And Indian business, he tells us admiringly, is alive to the close links between "enterprise" and science.
Perhaps this is the unique Hinduja contribution to his latest mental evolution. Science's new friend has an easy credulity about science and an equally lazy view of sceptics as merely superstitious.
Tut-tutting about anti-science, along with sighs about anti-business attitudes, are an established feature of British public debate. Conservatives used to have a franchise on that policy brand. Which may be why Mr Blair does it. It's lay preaching of the kind the Duke of Edinburgh used to indulge in when pontificating abut the need for Britain to pull itself up by the boot straps, and stop moaning when international markets have to be exploited.
The propaganda about science stands at several removes from science itself. It has no room for intuition, play, mystery or beauty - features of science which are basic not peripheral. And the inability of scientists to communicate those qualities to a wider public is one reason why anti-science is as widespread as Mr Blair fears.
The idea that science is about regularity, order, categorisation and abstraction has entered deep into the public consciousness. It explains the obscure feeling that science is an inhuman affair, controlling and manipulating, and the preserve of men (and science is seen as masculine).
What is lost is the picture of science as tentative, driven by hypotheses and imagination, sometimes sharing the assumptions of an age, sometimes making a leap beyond the age. It is driven by faith as much as by rationalism - the faith that an answer can be found.
Popularisation of science packages it for the present and reflects the contemporary. "The selfish gene" was an unsurprising arrival in late 20th-century Britain. But science itself also reflects the time and place in which it is done. Ancient Babylon in the second millennium BC organised vast teams of scholars to examine and exhume livers in a science of endless sophistication. It was the core science of Mesopotamia, as atomic physics was for the world in the 20th century. What counts as relevant and true in science shifts.
Mr Blair's portrayal of science may tell us little about real science - but it tells us a lot about him and his peculiarly British brand of progressivism. For the idea that he is some kind of genetic freak in the body politic is wide of the mark. It's a left-leaning blindness to describe this scientism as a feature of the right.
For socialism itself eventually came to invest a lot of hope in the message that it was somehow scientific. The prophetic Marxist message that the last days were just around the corner mixed eschatology with social science, hope along with prediction. It was meant to encourage into action, as well as to show that what had to be would be. But much was lost in Marx's sneering at non-scientific socialists as mere utopians, early pioneers who had just arrived too early, as it were, in the human story.
But the faith in a scientific future had a wider constituency than the Marxist. English establishment progressivism went for it avidly. And the liberal progressives who established a dominance in the parliamentary Labour party were its high priests. This version of progressivism was about control, order, centralism. Its techniques were the pamphlet and its method was managerialist bureaucracy. It was the world of the Fabian Webbs as well as of HG Wells.
But it was also the world of the Liberal Beveridge. It was Lib-Labbery which then mutated into the SDP. Its accents survive wherever two or three are gathered together to moan about backward cultures and the need to remould the world to suit optimistic progressivism. It preaches easily and condescendingly, and has little sense of human variety. It is intolerant of superstition, while being innocent about its own prejudices. It wants clean lines in its design for living.
To be self-consciously avant-garde and on the side of progress is the liberal dream. But that progress is a self-serving conceit. When the native cultures of Africa were discovered by European artists in the early 20th century they were acclaimed as an inspiration for a culture grown feeble. The "primitive" was celebrated as a life force, something vital and free. Listen to Stravinsky's Firebird and we still sense that celebration of energy.
But it was of course a discovery which was thoroughly colonial in cultural terms. The image of the African as sensuous and free was a nasty bit of barbarism - something that could be worked up for the next artistic commission. When Mr Blair preaches about Africa he does so in the spirit of that same avant-garde.
In his speech Mr Blair will show the genealogy of his morality. He is the progressivist centrist, the latest specimen of that English liberalism so relentless in its bourgeois uplift, so convinced of its own good will, so confident in its cadences and narrow in its assumptions. On the other side of the divide stands an older nobler tradition of the British left. Those early socialists such as Robert Owen, castigated by Marx, were no control freaks.
The semi-intellectual talk of science and progress was remote to them, as was the idea that there was a controlling plan wired into history. Theirs was the language of trade unionism, of the cooperative movement, of congregations brought together by belief, suffering and community. And they walked by faith in humanity, in things largely unseen but sometimes glimpsed and felt in the heart. They acted rather than preached and were generous not starchy.
Theirs was the fabric of humanity. They made the Labour party. That organisation's sole purpose now, it seems for Mr Blair, is to act as a benchmark. It is something against which he can measure himself in his endlessly inventive chameleon's dance.
taliesin.hywel@virgin.net
Unsurprisingly, the sermon has a business angle. Mr Blair's "science" is hardly a question of voyaging in strange seas of intellectual delight. His point of departure is research and technology. For science here means profits and progress. Developing countries, he fears, which have less time for moral debate about science, will steal a march on Britain.
The ethical indifference underlying the ethical uplift is a familiar noise by now. It's a reminder of the neo-colonial patronage which is the undertow to Blairite internationalism. Africa - an entire continent which recently became a friend - now seems a bit of a threat. And Indian business, he tells us admiringly, is alive to the close links between "enterprise" and science.
Perhaps this is the unique Hinduja contribution to his latest mental evolution. Science's new friend has an easy credulity about science and an equally lazy view of sceptics as merely superstitious.
Tut-tutting about anti-science, along with sighs about anti-business attitudes, are an established feature of British public debate. Conservatives used to have a franchise on that policy brand. Which may be why Mr Blair does it. It's lay preaching of the kind the Duke of Edinburgh used to indulge in when pontificating abut the need for Britain to pull itself up by the boot straps, and stop moaning when international markets have to be exploited.
The propaganda about science stands at several removes from science itself. It has no room for intuition, play, mystery or beauty - features of science which are basic not peripheral. And the inability of scientists to communicate those qualities to a wider public is one reason why anti-science is as widespread as Mr Blair fears.
The idea that science is about regularity, order, categorisation and abstraction has entered deep into the public consciousness. It explains the obscure feeling that science is an inhuman affair, controlling and manipulating, and the preserve of men (and science is seen as masculine).
What is lost is the picture of science as tentative, driven by hypotheses and imagination, sometimes sharing the assumptions of an age, sometimes making a leap beyond the age. It is driven by faith as much as by rationalism - the faith that an answer can be found.
Popularisation of science packages it for the present and reflects the contemporary. "The selfish gene" was an unsurprising arrival in late 20th-century Britain. But science itself also reflects the time and place in which it is done. Ancient Babylon in the second millennium BC organised vast teams of scholars to examine and exhume livers in a science of endless sophistication. It was the core science of Mesopotamia, as atomic physics was for the world in the 20th century. What counts as relevant and true in science shifts.
Mr Blair's portrayal of science may tell us little about real science - but it tells us a lot about him and his peculiarly British brand of progressivism. For the idea that he is some kind of genetic freak in the body politic is wide of the mark. It's a left-leaning blindness to describe this scientism as a feature of the right.
For socialism itself eventually came to invest a lot of hope in the message that it was somehow scientific. The prophetic Marxist message that the last days were just around the corner mixed eschatology with social science, hope along with prediction. It was meant to encourage into action, as well as to show that what had to be would be. But much was lost in Marx's sneering at non-scientific socialists as mere utopians, early pioneers who had just arrived too early, as it were, in the human story.
But the faith in a scientific future had a wider constituency than the Marxist. English establishment progressivism went for it avidly. And the liberal progressives who established a dominance in the parliamentary Labour party were its high priests. This version of progressivism was about control, order, centralism. Its techniques were the pamphlet and its method was managerialist bureaucracy. It was the world of the Fabian Webbs as well as of HG Wells.
But it was also the world of the Liberal Beveridge. It was Lib-Labbery which then mutated into the SDP. Its accents survive wherever two or three are gathered together to moan about backward cultures and the need to remould the world to suit optimistic progressivism. It preaches easily and condescendingly, and has little sense of human variety. It is intolerant of superstition, while being innocent about its own prejudices. It wants clean lines in its design for living.
To be self-consciously avant-garde and on the side of progress is the liberal dream. But that progress is a self-serving conceit. When the native cultures of Africa were discovered by European artists in the early 20th century they were acclaimed as an inspiration for a culture grown feeble. The "primitive" was celebrated as a life force, something vital and free. Listen to Stravinsky's Firebird and we still sense that celebration of energy.
But it was of course a discovery which was thoroughly colonial in cultural terms. The image of the African as sensuous and free was a nasty bit of barbarism - something that could be worked up for the next artistic commission. When Mr Blair preaches about Africa he does so in the spirit of that same avant-garde.
In his speech Mr Blair will show the genealogy of his morality. He is the progressivist centrist, the latest specimen of that English liberalism so relentless in its bourgeois uplift, so convinced of its own good will, so confident in its cadences and narrow in its assumptions. On the other side of the divide stands an older nobler tradition of the British left. Those early socialists such as Robert Owen, castigated by Marx, were no control freaks.
The semi-intellectual talk of science and progress was remote to them, as was the idea that there was a controlling plan wired into history. Theirs was the language of trade unionism, of the cooperative movement, of congregations brought together by belief, suffering and community. And they walked by faith in humanity, in things largely unseen but sometimes glimpsed and felt in the heart. They acted rather than preached and were generous not starchy.
Theirs was the fabric of humanity. They made the Labour party. That organisation's sole purpose now, it seems for Mr Blair, is to act as a benchmark. It is something against which he can measure himself in his endlessly inventive chameleon's dance.
taliesin.hywel@virgin.net
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