History Is a Series of Victories Won by the Scientific Man over the Romantic Man

On 25 October 1854, at Balaclava in the Crimea, six hundred and seventy British cavalrymen rode into a valley with Russian guns on three sides. A vague order and a quarrel between two officers had sent them against the wrong target. About two fifths were killed, wounded or captured in minutes. The charge of the Light Brigade was magnificent and pointless, and Tennyson made a poem of its courage. Meanwhile, in the same war, far more soldiers died from cholera and dysentery than from Russian shells, until Florence Nightingale, armed with statistics and sanitary reform, reduced the mortality in her hospital at Scutari. The topic suggests that history is the record of such contests between the romantic and the scientific spirit, and that the second has been winning.

The case is easy to make. Take disease. For most of human history, plague and smallpox were treated with prayers, charms and processions. Edward Jenner's vaccination in 1796 and the later work of Pasteur and Koch placed the matter on evidence, and in 1980 the World Health Organization declared smallpox eradicated, a disease that had killed hundreds of millions. Jonas Salk's polio vaccine in 1955 and the mass vaccinations of the Covid pandemic followed the same pattern. In each case the romantic belief that fate or spirit decides who lives was beaten by patient experiments.

Food provides another victory. The Bengal famine of 1943 killed millions in a country where grain was scarce and badly distributed. In the 1960s Norman Borlaug and Indian scientists such as M. S. Swaminathan developed high yielding varieties of wheat and rice that transformed Indian agriculture within a decade, and India moved from fearing famine to holding surplus stocks. Fertiliser, irrigation and plant breeding, and not heroic leadership, did the work. The scientific man defeated hunger, and the poets could only lament it.

War has its own history of the contest. The mounted knight, with his code of chivalry and personal courage, was made obsolete by the longbow and then the gun. The romantic ideal of the glorious charge was destroyed in the trenches of 1914, where machine guns turned bravery into slaughter. The scientific man proved decisive in the Second World War, through radar, codebreaking and eventually the atomic bomb. These victories were terrible, but they show who prevailed. Whoever understood the physics of the battlefield was the one who won it.

Whoever understood the physics of the battlefield was the one who won it.

Daily life shows the same drift. The clock, the map, the printing press and the thermometer replaced ways of seeing the world that had served communities for centuries. The farmer who consults a weather forecast and not the omens, and the patient who asks for a blood test and not an amulet, are small participants in a long conquest. The methods of science are also self correcting, which gives its victories permanence. A romantic cause lives on the energy of its followers and can be lost in a generation, while a result of science can be checked by anyone and remains true when its discoverer is forgotten.

Yet the record is not so one sided. The romantic man, the one who acts from passion, faith and a vision of what ought to be, has won some of history's greatest victories. Gandhi's march to Dandi was an act of romantic imagination, and no calculation of forces would have predicted the success of a campaign of nonviolence against an empire. The abolition of slavery was driven by preachers and poets and ordinary people moved by outrage, against the economic interests that science and commerce would have supported. Moral progress has been led by those who believed in something that the evidence of their time did not yet show.

The scientific man has also been responsible for disasters, and the tally of his victories must be read with those entries beside it. The eugenics movement of the early twentieth century claimed the authority of science to justify forced sterilisation in many countries, and was the intellectual ground for the Nazi racial laws. Zyklon B was a product of chemistry, and the factory methods of the camps were a triumph of organisation. Hiroshima was the achievement of the finest physicists of the age. Science, unguided by values, can serve any master, and its victories can be victories over humanity.

Romantic writers saw this early. Mary Shelley published Frankenstein in 1818, the tale of a scientist who creates life and then abandons his creation in horror. Wordsworth complained that we murder to dissect. Max Weber at the start of the twentieth century spoke of the disenchantment of the world, in which calculation drives out wonder and we are left with an iron cage of rationality. Their warning was that a civilisation that wins every battle against ignorance may lose the reason for fighting.

There is a deeper irony. The scientific man is driven by something that cannot be derived from science. The passion for truth that kept Marie Curie in a shed processing tonnes of pitchblende for four years, and the faith that nature is orderly enough to be understood, are not conclusions of experiment but the motives for it. Einstein spoke of a cosmic religious feeling as the strongest and noblest driving force behind scientific research. Without the romance of curiosity, the laboratory would be empty, and the scientist who forgets this becomes a mere technician. The best scientists are romantics who have learnt discipline.

If so, the contest in the topic may be an illusion produced by a tidy view of history. The two types are not rival armies but aspects of the same human nature, and the great achievements usually need both, the romantic to choose the goal and the scientific to find the way. A doctor who cures needs the compassion that makes him want to, as well as the knowledge that tells him how. It is not clear who in this partnership should be said to have won, and it would take a historian with no preferences to say, which may be a kind of scientific man that history has not yet produced.