"The religion of a physicist is his belief in pure reason. He has done
so well with it that he regards it as the whole of consciousness. He is
like a man who has discovered the shovel. It digs so much better than
his hands that he never looks for--"
"--the steam shovel?"
"Dynamite."
"Ouch!"
I laughed. "Take the _Bulletin_ of the Atomic Scientists. This
journal has been coming to me ever since you guys got frightened by
What-Hath-God-Wrought-Now. I've been reading it for so long that I
maybe ought to carry a pocket radiation meter to be sure I don't read
it too much. What is this noble publication? An inquiry, it claims,
into the means for controlling atomic energy and assuring world peace."
"And a pretty complete, exhaustive inquiry, too."
"Is it? Is it even a scientific inquiry? The atomic bomb will never go
to war by itself. Men will drop, toss, or convey it."
"Sure. And the _Bulletin_ has taken up every known means by which
people can be told what atomic energy is, and why it must be
controlled, and how to do that. Every step of the debate in the House
and the Senate--and the debates in the United Nations--has been
followed. Every idea my fellow physicists could hit on has been aired--"
"With no result."
"No result, my eye! If we hadn't ganged up to make Congress see that
atomic energy was more than a military matter--soldiers would control
the whole business right now."
"Grant that. You did get the AEC appointed. The brass doesn't run
the whole domestic show. But the world show is run entirely from the
viewpoint of possible war."
"Do you expect the physicists to be able to do anything about Russia
and the Iron Curtain--when all the statesmen of all the nations can't
drive a pinhole in it?"
"Look. There are too many places where you lads aren't really
scientific at all. You run a magazine to investigate ways for avoiding
atomic war. Men make war. But never in your _Bulletin_ did I once
see an article about human motivations. An article by a top-notch
psychologist. A digest, even, of the existing science of human
personality--and how that might apply to war, to atomic bombs, to
international relations."
"Psychology isn't our business. We're specialists."
I slightly sneered at him. "Son, when you are trying to stop wars,
psychology is the only business you're in! You're in the business of
trying to answer the questions about what makes men tick--including the
tick they make these days that sounds so much like an infernal machine.
But you think that's still the reason--business."
"A lot of big shots," Paul answered, "have called on the psychologists
to contribute. Asked them to speed the work on their science and
the science of sociology--so we'll have a solid technical basis for
establishing peace."
"Yeah. They have. And not one God-damned super-brain in the barrel
has stopped to note for a moment--so far as I'm aware--that the
psychologists are 'way ahead of them. The science of personality--of
behavior--of consciousness and instinct--is well along. The
psychologists could tell them why men fight. They could tell them
why--so far as present evidence indicates--men are going to go right
ahead having wars--atomic bombs, germs, and all--into the far,
foreseeable future."
"Why?" he asked mildly.
"Oh--because they exploit individualism and never take any
responsibility for it. Their hostilities and aggressions, frustrations
and fears--add up, inside their groups, and burst out, since they're
never even noticed, let alone dealt with, on the personal and private
level, where they originate."
"So you have written," he grinned. "So what? Should we pure scientists
simply say that peace is hopeless? Quit cold? Or try for peace with
what we do know?"
"You and your pure science! Pure is a word that should be forbidden all
of you. What's pure in a science that deals exclusively with the object
and rules out the subject doing the dealing?"
"Just," Paul answered, "the result. If we hadn't ruled man out of man's
investigations, we'd still believe the earth was flat, the sky was a
cup, and the stars were holes in it. We'd still be premedieval--"
"Yet--when you did establish the objective facts to a considerable
degree--set up physics and chemistry and biology--did you boys then
turn that knowledge and that method upon yourselves?"
"You claim," Paul answered airily, "that the psychologists have done
so."
"Yes. And you needn't pretend I have no right to make the claim. You
scientists, self-styled, let a few doctors--ridiculed by the public and
unassisted by you--do the investigating of the consciousness you were
applying to electrons and protons. They used your method--the empirical
method. They have announced their results steadily for the past half
century. You never even looked them over. So now what are you? Big
cheeses in the high-tension labs. Mere mice, around the psychological
clinics. Hunting in your _Bulletin_ for a way to stop war when, really,
you haven't a good kindergarten knowledge of what war is and how it
comes about."
"If there were enough psychiatrists, then--we wouldn't have to worry?"
"Be sarcastic!" I said. "All you birds need a good psychiatrist." He
winced at that, rather sharply, I thought. But I didn't let up on
him. "Guys like you are aware enough to see that perhaps Hitler could
have used a psychoanalysis. You are not aware enough to see that any
president of any big engineering school could use it, too. Why? Because
you think pretty much as he thinks. And neither of you can see that
your thinking is largely emotion and only somewhat logic. The great
blunder of science was to imagine that science could be indefinitely
developed for the physical benefit of man and never concurrently
applied to his subjective needs, states, motives."
"It was hard enough for the early scientists to get across the simple
truth about objects. If they'd tampered with man's beliefs--they'd all
have been burned to death."
"What about you later scientists, then? Would anybody burn old Johann
Brink to death, today, say for studying Freud?"