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The following article is from the Secular Humanist Bulletin, Volume 23, Number 2 (Summer 2007).
When either the Council for Secular Humanism or the Center for Inquiry/ Transnational sends out one of our action alerts, calling for our members to chime in on matters of public policy, I usually receive a handful of angry responses advising me that, whatever the program we are focusing on, it ought to be eliminated. These comments typically make the argument that government ought not to be involved at all in such and such, whether it’s funding medical research or programs like Head Start. I sympathize, in a way, with the sentiment behind these letters. But each of us has some special interest, some pet project that to our minds warrants some government action, in some form.
Take, for example, science. When we sent out an action alert urging people to pressure legislators to fund stem-cell research, one responder suggested that science should not be government funded at all, that it ought to be entirely privately supported. Again, the sentiment is nice, but it is actually an antiscientific stance. Government does have a rational and necessary role in funding basic science. In this day and age, scientific advance requires lots of money, and basic science is too high of a risk for private investment. It often has no conceivable economic gain.
Consider physics and the ongoing program to understand the basic make-up of matter. This research program requires huge expenditures with little or no expected economic return. Verifying the standard model of particle physics demands the building of ever-bigger accelerators that cost billions of dollars and have no commercial value whatsoever. It is welfare, of a sort, for physicists. Private money doesn’t fund it, and it never will. The most important programs in particle physics are being funded by governments.
Indeed, some within the United States argue that government ought not be in the business of providing anything but defense. Grover Norquist, whose conservative philosophy guides the current administration, famously exclaimed that we need to shrink government to a size where it could fit in a bathtub and then drown it. Perhaps this is why the Europeans, who are funding the Large Hadron Super collider at CERN, will beat us to an understanding of matter. We opted out here in the United States, de-funding the Superconducting Super Collider in the 1990s and ceding the next great advance in particle physics to the Europeans. I submit that those of us who favor the progress of reason and science cannot rationally hold that this was a wise move. We must recognize that government plays a necessary role in basic scientific research.
We will continue to work under this assumption and to call for greater governmental recognition of science and funding of basic research. It is part of the humanist ideal to seek truth. That search goes beyond the realm of private enterprise. Seeking it is part of our collective duty as a society, fulfilling a communal need for knowledge and discovery.
David Koepsell is Executive Director of the Council for Secular Humanism.
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