Science and Public Policy: Promises and Constraints 53 



Historians are, of course, professionally obligated to point 

 out that the roots of modern science lie very far in the past, 

 extending back not only to the civilizations of the Greeks and 

 Romans but earlier to Mesopotamia. Nevertheless, the Euro- 

 peans, on becoming aware of the older developments at the 

 time of the Crusades 800-odd years ago, were not only able to 

 absorb them but to recast them into something distinctly new 

 and useful. The question of why this should have happened 

 is an eternal conundrum which will be of enduring interest to 

 the philosopher and the historian. Some have said that the 

 essential feature which distinguished European society from 

 earlier ones can be associated with the fact that it did not culti- 

 vate slavery. There is no doubt that the absence of slavery was 

 vitally important in conditioning the nature of European so- 

 ciety, yet we may note that neither the Eskimos nor the North 

 American Indians had slavery to a significant degree and yet 

 they did not thereby automatically invent the scientific 

 method. The understanding of the riddle must, of course, lie 

 in the full complex of social institutions and attitudes of the 

 Europeans including the issue of slavery. I am inclined to be- 

 lieve that the two factors which made science flourish in Euro- 

 pean culture were the enormous respect paid to practical inno- 

 vation at all levels of society and the deep interest in culture 

 and philosophy. Both attributes appear very early in the evolu- 

 tion of European society and endured essentially without 

 interruption. 



When I was young, it was common to take the view that the 

 Europeans lived in relative darkness until some time between 

 the early Crusades and, say, 1400, when the Renaissance began 

 to blossom. The period before the Crusades was treated as if 

 relatively unimportant for what happened later. Actually, I 

 believe that the foundations for the attitudes which made the 

 scientific revolution possible were in fact laid well before the 

 year 1000. European culture was in the ballistic range for all 

 practical purposes by the time of the Crusades. It could still 

 be sensitive to cultural importations and could have been 



