It was a technological revolution that made the Roman Empire, the Lords was reminded yesterday, and after that we had the Dark Ages. It began to look, before this debate was very far advanced, that Britain may be settling for its own Dark Age without any technological revolution.
For although both sides in Parliament are competing with each other in their professed desire to speed that revolution, the country is not going along with them. The warning came in impressively similar terms from two highly influential quarters ╤ from Lord Todd, the Master of Christ╒s College, Cambridge, and a Nobel Prize winner for chemistry, and from the Government Despatch Box in the occupation of Lord Snow.
The Master and the New Man saw eye to eye about the perilously low status still accorded in our confused and self-deceiving society to the men who would power the technological age if we decided to have one, the applied scientist and the engineer.
Arts flourishing
The arts are flourishing in all the universities of the land. The pure scientist is considered socially acceptable in some perfectly civilised colleges. But the poor engineer, we almost gathered, with oily spanners bulging his pockets and his knuckles brushing the ground as he walks, is courted by none. The image is all wrong, and nobody ╤ excepting always the Master, the New Man and, of course, that top technologist Lord Bowden ╤ seems to want to put it right.
Lord Todd couldn╒t understand it at all. He insisted that technological subjects in their relation to industry provide as good an intellectual discipline as pure science ╤ indeed, in some respects it is more demanding since it brings in things like economics and human relations. He would have expected the young to find such studies exciting. But offer them the most sophisticated of spanners or even a computer, and it seems that they reach for their barrister╒s wig. Industry is still spurned by the young ╤ or is it by the parents of the young? ╤ in favour of the professions.
╥It╒s no good doubling the places in the universities by 1970 if we don╒t fill them, Lord Todd said. Taking up the same theme, Lord Snow told the attentive House that every arts place in every university is filled at the moment, while there are hundreds of science and technology vacancies. If that situation goes on, he made no bones about the fact that the famous new Ministry of Technology is going to be impotent.
Ready to listen
As a nation we declined to believe in the technological revolution; we had the idea that if we didn╒t look it wouldn╒t happen. ╥We╒ve got to change the climate of society at least enough to respect those who make the wealth,╙ was Lord Snow╒s conclusion, and until we managed to do that our decline would continue.
He also told us something of the new Ministry╒s way of going about its job, assuming that it is going to be allowed to do it at all. In particular, it seems, it intends to listen to everybody who wants to talk to it. Presumably it will have the last word. At the inevitable protest from the Conservative side at any idea that ╥the man in Whitehall knows best╙ Lord Snow╒s face broke into a beaming smile, as though he had written the line himself in order to deny it.
╥Of course not,╙ he retorted. In fact, he told us something of the departmental in-fighting, knife-work and general gang warfare that went on when he himself was a civil servant. ╥It made me feel,╙ he rather grimly remarked, ╥I might as well be back in Cambridge.╙
