Jacob Bronowski. Science and Human Values (1956, 1964)

     Jacob Bronowski. Science and Human Values (1956, 1964) Bronowski reworked some lectures he gave at MIT in 1953. His deep humaneness informs his thinking, and his style is a model of clarity. Lovely book, worth rereading. His thesis is that science, because of its creativity and “habit of truth” is a profoundly human enterprise, and that the values we consider democratic and humane arose from the scientists’ habit of truth, or perhaps from the same source. For that habit demands both individual freedom to ask whatever questions one wants, and social responsibility in submitting one’s concepts and ideas to the criticism of others.
     Science is both an individual and a collective enterprise. Whatever scientists have proposed must be tested by experience – does it work? Does it conform to the tests of experiment and/or observation? Bronowski argues that human values are subject to the same tests, which is why they also change over time. In particular, the values we consider to be democratic and humane arose because people realised that what they thought was right or wrong had bad consequences, so they adapted their views.
     I think Bronowski is right, but the forces of faith and superstition are also powerful, and threaten to destroy the freedoms we have come to take for granted. It is difficult for later generations to recognise the fragility of their world view, since they haven’t had to establish it, but have merely inherited it. The struggle for freedom and dignity must be renewed in every generation.
     Bronowski ends the book with a quotation from himself:
     Poetry does not move us to be just or unjust, in itself. It moves us to thoughts in whose light justice and injustice are seen in fearful sharpness of outline.
     Well said. *** (2005)