The call to service: A commencement address (cont.)
Part 3 of John Erskine's essay, "The Call to Service" from his collection of essays, *The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent*.
I have been speaking to those of you who, in love of service, may think of entering the ministry, and my purpose has been to describe that gulf between your good intentions and the real needs of those whom you may have thought of as destined to be served. Yet others of you, I am aware, may not be stirred to repentance by the picture I have drawn; you may indeed be far from displeased by it. Perhaps you have left religion behind you, as an old-fashioned preoccupation of your grandmothers, and whatever seems to be a criticism of it will confirm your complacency at having left it behind. You also are in love with service, but it is the call of science that you hear—real service, as you would say, without superstition or humbug.
Science does call you to a service of her own, but her program is perhaps less original than you think. Like religion, she would teach you an attitude of mind, an intimate approach to the universe. Like religion, science also urges you to good works; but whereas the rewards of religion are often indirect or deferred, science can appeal to your selfishness by showing an immediate as well as a re- mote profit. In this smaller, practical office science might be expected even to surpass the service of religion, telling you how to make yourselves immune to disease, how to regulate your diet, how to choose your dress, how to keep the streets clean, how to secure sanitation. Science has far larger and more difficult things to teach, principles and prospects of which these matters are the merest incidents; but out of her exuberant joy of service she freely bestows these simple aids toward a more abundant life.
Yet you can no more be scientific for your neighbors than you can be holy for them. If you persuade them to submit to the experiment, they will lose what little intelligence they had. Do we not see that the average man is more and more disposed to honor a few scientists, superstitiously exalting their skill into a kind of magic, and relying less and less upon himself? For every service science has rendered, some common intelligence has been taken away. She gave us the barometer, and we ceased to be weatherwise; the almanac, and we forgot the stars. If this service from without left us free to apply our knowledge in other fields, there might be a compensation for the intelligence that has been taken away. But with intelligence departs the willingness even to be intelligently served, and just as religion falls back upon threats of hell, so at last science calls in the police. If my house is ventilated and sanitary, it is not because science has made me intelligent, but because the expert to whom I have delegated my intelligence is now applying it on my behalf, with or without my consent. When my fire-escape was cast in the foundry, perhaps for the rescue of my life some day, they fixed in the mold a threat to fine me ten dollars, if ever I should block it up.
However we may condemn the result, the intention to serve us is unmistakable. But science is strangely inconsistent. Having assumed the place of our intelligence, she develops what seems to be a startling indifference to our welfare. At times she surpasses the worst that has been charged against religion in the disposition to fall in love with her own image. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, men at her invitation have contemplated their unsavory beginning and the myriad processes by which they are supposed to have escaped from it. They have not been greatly edified; kinship with the monkey, if true, is uninspiring. Into what nobler relations are we to enter? Science does not reply. The excuse is that science is collecting facts, or perfecting methods, or at best is occupied in remedial work, in solving problems of disease and in reducing the discomforts of life. Service so vast and so humane cannot be over-valued. Yet even in the region of this service, is not science frittering itself away upon methods, instead of setting before us the end? And is it possible to estimate the value of the method, until we know the end.'' One scientist tells us, as a matter of fact, that our best days are over at forty. Much of the information which science imparts is as cheerful as that. Another tells us how to prolong life, by drinking sour milk. But if the first doctor is right and our heyday is over at forty, why should we wish to grow old? Our true benefactor would tell us how long we ought to wish to live. Or even when science is not so blind, it often sins by applying itself to an end it knows to be wrong. It invents vehicles of constantly greater speed, though it assures us that such acceleration is the ruin of our nerves. It invents methods of killing people, and means of protecting them, though it persuades us at the same time—as if we needed persuasion!—that war is an awkward way of serving mankind.
Those of you who heard with complacence my criticism of religion ought not to protest if I bring the same judgment to bear on science. Indeed there is a fine irony in substituting the service of science for the service of religion as a target for the fault-finder; for science, which began by pointing out the insufficiencies of religion, and gradually usurped religion's place in this matter of serving mankind, has also, it may be, taken to herself some of the frailties she once condemned. Between you and those whom you would serve through science the same gulf lies as between the priests and those they would benefit. The protest against science is not yet so loud, I grant you, as that against religion, but it is the same in kind, and it is growing. Scientists are as eager to do our thinking for us as ever the Church has been, they are just as ready to use force to make effective the truth as they see it, and they keep their scientific spirit to themselves as effectively as the priests keep their priesthood. They look upon themselves as a caste, and in the name of science they presume to dogmatise outside of their field, exactly as the priests once did. We, meanwhile, as profoundly desirous of magic as primitive man ever was, wait with awe upon the word of these latest magicians, or begin to grumble because they do not let us into the secret. We grow rich, it appears, in the results of science, but poor in its spirit. If the symptoms of this unhealthy condition were found only in the man in the street, there would be less need to worry, for that mythical person is by definition the first to get hold of applied results and the last to be interested in principles. But the criticism is justified in the places where science is avowedly engaged in handing on her torch—in your college, for example, where almost all of you studied the sciences and almost none of you was suspected by anybody of being scientific. The technic of the laboratory instruments appealed to you exactly as does the management of a motor-car or the handling of a shotgun; most young men like to use a machine and to get mechanical results. But as to learning the insatiable love of truth, the precise observation and the inexorable deduction which are essential in the scientist, you probably have not even made a beginning.
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