AN EDITOR’S BOUQUET: SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS OF CARYL P. HASKINS

ASSEMBLED BY THE EDITOR

Few people are eloquent writers. Even fewer, while exploring different fields of deep understanding, have expressed their profoundly felt convictions in a prose that has not dimmed with the years.

One of these rare persons is Caryl P. Haskins, for many years the President of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. I am extracting from his voluminous written legacy a few samples. It behooves a reader to seek them out in their entirety. They are a rare treat.

THE COSMOS CLUB AND THE LIFE OF THE MIND (1978)

When the Cosmos Club celebrated the 100th anniversary of its founding in l878, Caryl was one of five speakers to present thoughts about this event in the l978 Centennial year. He was then the recipient of the prestigious l978 Cosmos Club Award. His topic was “The Cosmos Club and the Life of the Mind.” Philip H. Abelson, his successor as President of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, said:

“Haskins is a person of uncommon depth, breadth and vitality. The depth is evident in his scientific research and humanistic writing. The breadth is exemplified by his service on scores of important boards of directors and executive committees of organizations. His vitality is seen in a schedule of activities— physical and mental—that few could match.”

Caryl responded:

If I were to try to capture the philosophy around which the Club was built and which ever since has guided it, perhaps it could best be defined in those invariants of spirit, of philosophy and of purpose, which in a real sense are the very elements of scholarship itself. Tonight I would like to emphasize just two of their facets. One might be titled ‘The Mind and Spirit Prepared,’ symbolizing that consuming depth of preparation built from long reflection and from which profound new understanding can emerge. The other might be called ‘The Mind and Spirit Unconstrained,’ embodying that breadth and catholicity of sympathy and outlook on both the natural and the human worlds, and that capacity for easy passage between them, for which also the Club stands.

“In the field of observation, chance favors only the mind that is prepared.” How often one returns to that famous remark of Louis Pasteur, so vividly illustrated in his own life’s work, as one relives those dramatic and historic flashes of insight when the deeply prepared mind, almost as it seems, in an instant, fathomed and fashioned a wholly novel vision out of long immersion in a wide and shifting ocean of observations and ideas. Pasteur, Eddington, Darwin—a host of the scientific pioneers of the nineteenth century exemplify the process so vividly. But for me one of the most vivid and telling and typical vignettes of this kind is the story of the great insight that came to Alfred Russel Wallace when, during a bout of tertian malaria, the critical element of the theory of the origin and evolution of species appeared before him as he lay in chills and fever. It was the vision that when committed to paper during the next few days, formed the genesis of the famous letter of 1858 to Charles Darwin which, read together with Darwin’s own contribution before the Linnean Society of London that summer—twenty years before the Cosmos Club was founded—laid the basis for the concept of organic evolution that so deeply and widely permeates our thinking today.

That vision, seemingly, was the matter of an instant. But behind it there lay a long and tortuous trail of physical hardship, of mental discipline and delight, and, above all, of unremitting intellectual preparation and immersion in a subject over a long period of years...

Now let me turn for a moment to that second quality of scholarship, typified by the Renaissance–like range and versatility of mind and taste and career for which the Club is paradigm.

Leopold Ruczicka, the great Croatian bioorganic chemist who, with Adolf Butenandt, received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in l939 for his achievements in the analysis of certain natural products, has two wonderful sentences in his autobiographical essay entitled ‘Between Bioorganic Chemistry and Biochemistry.’ “Prelog has often said to me that I am a baroque amateur in everything I do. By the term ‘baroque’ Prelog means a complex collection of a great many individual items, in chemistry, in painting, gardening, and the word ‘amateur’ signified an enthusiastic devotee rather than a 100% expert. It was nevertheless important to me to retain full control of these various fields of interest”...

That picture of the trade between pointed specialization and versatile flexibility is everywhere visible in the living world, in realism far beyond the human intellect in the progressive exquisite adaption—but also in the irreversible commitment—of cells of eye or skin or hair in the developing embryo, though each, as we know, carries the same total content of genetic information in its nucleus as the parent ovum in the worker bee or ant, irrevocably dedicated to highly special social functions in its great community, and so excluded as an individual from direct participation in the biological mainstream of its species; in manifold other biological contexts. They bespeak the trade–off as a common condition of life...

If the profoundly prepared mind is, as we all know it to be, a very sine qua non for great new insights in every field of inquiry, and so too of the highest importance both to the individual and to his society, surely the freedom to range, the ebullience, the balance, and the insight of ‘The Mind and Spirit Unconstrained’ are equally vital. To foster and protect both has indeed been a central vision of the Club through all its history...

Edward O. Wilson, his colleague in the study of ants as social insects, said:

“On Tuesday, January 25, l955, Caryl Haskins joined me at Esperance at the southwestern coast of Australia to begin a search for the Grail of myrmicology. Fifty to a hundred miles to the east of us, out across the sandplain heath, in one of the loneliest places on earth, lived the Grail: Nothomyrmecia macrops, the most primitive known living ant by anatomical criteria... I was impressed that a man just appointed as president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, with a distinguished career as scientist and government adviser already behind him, would trek halfway around the world to grub for ants in a cloud of bush flies... But we never found Nothomyrmecia... Caryl and I may have missed our primary goal, but the adventure was worth the effort. The added aura and fame contributed by our trip to the ant speeded its later rediscovery [by Robert Taylor, chief curator of the Australian National Insect Collection]....In his writings and example, he helped to make the study of insect behavior a respectable branch of biology through the dark days of the molecular hegemony, when anything above the level of the cell was widely deemed to be unimportant. It was a very important part of biology and Caryl knew it.”

OF SOCIETIES AND MEN (1951)

In the Introduction to Caryl’s book Of Societies and Men (l951) Vannevar Bush said:

“This book is of great importance to us all. Its author is at once a scientist of highest distinction in the exact study of living beings—biology— and a social philosopher who, through combining unremitting work in his special field with widely ranging participation in the affairs of the world from business operations to public service of many kinds, has laid a sound basis for an understanding of the motives and aspirations of his fellows.”

Let Caryl speak when the accomplishments of the great war against Nazi terrorism had to be continued to face down the Communist threat:

Anyone who undertakes to write of societies must feel that in so doing he essays a great adventure— one fraught with perils as well as spiced with rewards. The danger of anthropomorphism and of false analogy beset the way. But if these can be avoided there is the chance of achieving a somewhat wider and more inclusive viewpoint of the social way and how it came to be. If any new vistas in the great social kingdoms in which we dwell be opened to the reader of this book, if a bit of the excitement that attended its writing survive for him, then writing it will have been more than worthwhile...

There are suggestive resemblances between the evolution of human society and that of other social organizations of the world. Some of these resemblances are superficial. Others are deceptive. But many more are more than fortuitous. Their significance is the result of parallel evolution and of the pressure of a basically similar environment upon man, who does not differ fundamentally in his constitution from the rest of life on the earth...

If many social forms which are only distantly related evolve similarly under a particular set of conditions, a study of these parallels should reflect something about the environment itself. From this knowledge it may be possible to predict from the behavior of older social organisms something of the way that the society of man is likely to behave in the future. The assumption basic to this is that, much as the societies of man and man himself may differ from the rest of the living world in many striking features of constitution and behavior, they are nonetheless fundamentally similar...

What may be called a drive to integration is another great feature of the social continent which deeply affects organic and social evolution. It is the tendency both of organisms and of certain kinds of societies, evolving under the pressure of natural selection, to become more and more close–knit entities, and of their parts to become increasingly specialized and dependent upon the whole... What is involved is the adjustment and welding of parts of an inefficient and loosely organized social grouping, whereby it is transformed into a compact, smoothly operating whole. Vivid examples of this trend are to be found among animal societies. Some of the most interesting occur among the social insects...

The history of human social evolution is not without conspicuous evidence of the influence of this social trend to integration. The league of the Five Nations of the Iroquois, with its specialization of the Onondagas to leadership of the clans, with the specialization of the Senecas to the so–called door–keeper functions, and its complex political and social structure is an example in point in a relatively primitive society. So also was that far more striking and more ambitiously integrated Indian state to the southward—the Inca of Peru, with its tightly regimented vassal states and its hereditary chieftainships and governing class...We recently fought a war to halt its latest expression in the fanatic nationalism of peoples...

Man does not live by bread alone. Variously phrased by philosopher, poet, and priest, how constantly has this thought been reiterated down the ages! How poignant is the testimony it offers that if we would truly understand the social life of man, we must look far beyond its biological aspects to those mental and spiritual elements which are of controlling importance within it!...

There is the sharpest possible contrast between the purely biological life of man and his life as a thinking and exquisitely sentient being. As a biological organism, he shows close relationship in structure and behavior with the rest of the living world. The structure of his protoplasm is as theirs, his chromosomes and genes behave like those of other higher multicellular organisms, and the mechanisms of his inheritance are Mendelian. Even his nervous system shows a close kinship with those of other vertebrates, and his mind, in the fundamental aspects of its structure, is akin to theirs. But in its extraordinary power of ideation and abstract thinking, in its power of analysis and synthesis, the human mind is so different in degree from the typical vertebrate brain as almost different in kind...

The “society” of human culture, like the “organism” of individual human thought, carries on an independent evolution of its own. Like a true living society, it is subject to “mutations,” representing in this case by the origination of new ideas...

As they passed from savagery through barbarism to civilization, individual men came to know an unprecedented order of physical security. But if they experienced this luxury, they were now exposed to the hazard of another kind. Never, in all their amazing growth from savagery to ancient civilization, were they to solve satisfactorily this problem of the curious dichotomy that ran to the center of their society. Never could they feel that one road might be followed to the exclusion of the other. For it was by these two distinct roads of integration and association that their very civilization took its being...

In totalitarianism, a philosophy of government seems to have been designed as a tool, not of civiliza– tion as a whole, but as the integrated culture society alone. It does not serve as a means to ascertain and stabilize the proper balance between the associative and integrative parts of human civilization. Instead it takes the integrative development as its proper goal, and it will brook no competition from the vast associative forces with which it deals. This, basically, is why it is fundamentally unrealistic. This, basically, is why it cannot serve as a proper governmental tool of human civilization in its truest sense.

The greater vision must lie along another path, the course of which takes due account of the dichotomy of man. It is a winding path, running now along the ridges of the integrated way, now along the shores of associative living, and now poised delicately between the two. Its course must be sensitively adjusted to the changing needs of man and the shifting balance between the conflicting aspects of his nature, and his life. It is hard to define this governmental form precisely, harder still to predict its course. But its philosophy is to follow and to serve the needs of man as he is—not to mold him to some Procrustean ideological bed. Though difficult to define, it has a name. We call it democracy. Its task is the most difficult and the least defined in detail. Yet in grand principle it is the clearest of all the governmental forms that mankind has ever known.

SCIENCE IN OUR NATIONAL LIFE (1958)

Seven years later, in an article in Foreign Affairs (l958) on “Science in Our National Life,” Caryl sets out to put into perspective the great unease created by the successful launch of the Soviet satellite program:

It is a year since, at 5:28 p.m. on October 4, l957, the Moscow radio announced that the Soviet Union had placed in orbit the first man–made, man–launched earth satellite. In many ways it has been an extraordinary year.

There was also much, of course, that was noisy and transitory, bearing the stamp of an all–too–human eagerness to wish away unpleasant questions.

Subsequent Soviet satellite launchings, for better or for worse, have not excited anything like the same public anxiety as the historic first, though their significance was no less. We have begun to realize that the basic pattern of our technological effort in national defense was affected far less by the event of the satellite than by more massive and permanent domestic considerations—technical, fiscal, organizational and political.

In this somewhat lengthened perspective, there may be an opportunity now to bring this experience into focus. If we can do this with the intensity that is required, demanding of ourselves the long view of the kind of world that we and our children may expect, our own proper place in it, and the severe requirements that our role imposes on us, then the year past will indeed have been worthwhile.

Our misconceptions must excite particular concern. It is the notion that the October launching demonstrates that the United States has irrevocably lost a technological race with the Soviet Union and must now think of itself as occupying a “second place” in the technical competition of the world.

There can be no question today of the magnitude, skill, capability, drive and imagination of Russian science and technology to which this remarkable achievement attests. But the image of a technological race lost by our nation is not only wrong but paltry because it poses the easy image of a single contest where one event, one action, one failure, could be conclusive. It is a dangerous view because it misreads the whole nature of our world and its challenges.

Far more important is a dangerous conclusion which may follow. It reasons that, because the Soviet Union has transformed itself from a technologically rather backward state to a modern and vastly powerful one in a breathtakingly short time, the operating forms by which this was accomplished have a special validity.

This reasoning entirely ignores an all–important truth. Though the factual basis of knowledge and insights about the natural world and their use in the service of man is indeed available to all modern peoples, the modes by which that knowledge can be most effectively assimilated and used and new knowledge created are highly human factors, conditioned by the basic assumptions of each society. They must be profoundly characteristic of each society. We may—and we must—learn a great deal from Soviet science, as the Russians, with possibly greater diligence, are learning from ours. But to make the assumption that failure to parallel their pattern is remiss is gravely to risk the autonomy of our own scientific effort.

And there can be few things more precious to us than our autonomy, in science no less than in other areas of our national life. If this autonomy were ever lost, and with it the strength, balance and confidence that it conveys, we could easily fall prey to false leads in our scientific and technical emphasis, in substance no less than in approach.

The concept that we are to be continuously challenged to reaffirm our values and prove their effectiveness is new and difficult for us to grasp. We must recognize that today none of our larger problems will be amenable to clear and final solutions. They will instead present lengthy tests of persistent and concentrated purpose.

In the modern world, the measure of the strength and, in the truest sense, the wealth of a nation is the creativity, originality and ardor of its people. These elements, always in short supply, affect every field of activity. In many, science and technology among them, devotion to intellectual quality, to learning and to a certain kind of intellectual adventure is prerequisite to their healthy growth. In a world where technical achievement is a prominent factor in the total capacity for survival, the scientific capability of a people and, above all, their understanding and esteem of scientific values are extremely important elements of strength. Many factors must underpin them—the opportunities for scientific education, the material support available to science and technology, the breadth of comprehension of their proper nature and proper management.

Because the ideal of our civilization is the development of the whole man, whose daily tasks may be specialized but whose sense of responsibility and concern embrace the entire fabric of society, a necessary condition for creativeness among us is the wide and unimpeded horizon, the total freedom, of the individual. It is easy to forget that other social and political systems may operate in other ways.

Some of the incentives to excellence in scientific training and achievement which are paramount in the Soviet system are not open to us, nor would we wish them to be—escape from hardship, for example, or disproportionally high material rewards. But there are other rewards which our society is particularly able to afford: the intrinsic satisfaction of intellectual accomplishment attained by personal commitment to the limits of capacity; the excitement of discovery; the satisfaction of service; the identification with worlds transcending individual concerns. There is every reason to believe that once our society is geared to the effort, it is especially well adapted to nourish and expand the ideals of hard individual effort, discipline, adventure, frugality and dedication which the culture of individual excellence implies in every path including the scientific.

There is a deep antitheses between the attitude of the citizen as consumer—constantly served and entreated to express ever more varied and extensive material wants, upon the satisfaction of which the prosperity of a free economy so largely rests—and that of the citizen—as creator, geared to making demands on himself to the limit of his capacity in his own interest and for the further benefit of his society.

Perhaps there is no greater strength of a free society than the sense of individual competition that it cultivates among its citizens. In an economy of plenty such competition in the acquisition or dispersal of material things cannot much longer offer us personal challenges that are genuinely satisfying. But to every citizen the keenest sort of competitive challenge—intense and absorbing and immune to satiety—is offered by the world of the mind, in whatever aspect and at whatever level his tastes, aspirations and abilities may dictate. It is only necessary that our scale of values comprehend this dimension and accord it the high place it deserves.

Science is a way of life, a view of the world, a challenge and inspiration to some of the highest and most absorbing efforts of individual self–expression and self–development that man can know. Its rewards lie in the joys of dedication, in the intoxicating adventure of discovery, in its astringent discipline and the combination which it demands of creativity with critical appraisal. But science is also a way of getting things done, and to this highly practical characteristic, together with the cumulative and self–propagating nature of the knowledge which it gathers, it owes its striking rate of growth.

The very size of the scientific and technical effort, and its importance to our national welfare and power, mean that science must be an important concern of government. Even the nature of the task—gigantic, subtle, protean— is not yet understood... But our ability to devise effective ways of meeting it, within our own pattern of values and within the peculiar requirements of science, will affect our national safety and our national power to an important degree. Significant steps have been taken in this direction during the past year in the creation of an entirely new post of Special Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and the intensified duties and widened scope of the President’s Science Advisory Committee.

One more consequence of the growth of science and its place in our national life is too important to go unmentioned, namely the particular difficulty of communication between the world of technology and those who formulate national policy. The gulf between the modes of thinking normal to science and those used in judgment of general affairs is greater than can be appreciated by those who have not tried to span them. There can never be more than a handful of men who, coming exclusively from one background or the other, can learn to close the gap effectively in the full tide of adult life. Today a handful is not enough.

Just as we must recognize that, for better or worse, we live in an era when scientific and technical creativity are important aspects of our national wealth and strength, we must recognized that ipso facto science is an important element of our general culture. And so it is incumbent upon us to see that those who in future may be making decisions of national policy, whether military or civilian, shall have received a sufficiently thorough grounding in the scientific way to be familiar not only with its modes of thinking, its peculiar reservoir of skills and its scale of values.

These, then, are some of the reflections that the year has brought. Ahead of us lies the enormous task of preparing ourselves as a nation to live with credit— indeed, just to live—in a world requiring individual and collective excellence, creativity and capacity for innovation.

In its present intensity, extended into an indefinite future, this demand is new to our experience, but we can meet it if we will. We have, in fact, no alternative.

During his 14–year tenure as President of the Carnegie Institution of Washington (founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1902 and composed of five independent research establishments in the physical and biological sciences), Caryl produced an annual ‘Report of the President,’ which in their totality presented an overview of science and society unique in clarity of thought and depth of understanding. Only a few samples can be presented here (see selected writings of Haskins).

Caryl P. Haskins (CC ‘41) was
President of the Carnegie Institution of Washington 1956–1971,
1545 18th Street, NW,
Washington, DC 20037;
tel: (202) 332-6880

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