Chapter Seven
The Straightjacket of Planning
On the 28th of July 1914 all the great European powers were at peace. By the 4th of August all but Italy were at war. According to A. J. P. Taylor's account of that week, in itself hilarious if one forgets the fearful consequences, the politicians `were dragged into war by their armies, instead of using the armies to further their policies'. The armies in their turn were dragged by their plans and by the railway timetables.
To take just the example of Germany: their war plans had been devised by Count von Schlieffen to cope with one problem only, the war on two fronts. Since his death in 1908 they had hardly been looked at, let alone revised. They were: first to attack France and encircle the French armies on the German frontier by a right hook through Belgium; then, having defeated France, to turn their attention to Russia. There was no provison for doing it the other way round. 840,000 men were to be sent by train into Belgium, all though the one railway junction of Aachen; but they could not stop there. The trains had to go on to clear the lines for more trains to come. There was no possibility of stopping at the frontier.
The Kaiser and his Foreign Minister, Bethmen Hollweg, imagined that they could rattle their swords without actually drawing them, as rulers had so often done before. They had no idea how their freedom of action had been constrained by Schlieffen's plan. `They never asked, and the generals never told them.' After the Kaiser had declared war on Russia on August 1st, he was told that Sir Edward Grey had said that Great Britain would remain neutral if Germany would not attack France. Wilhelm was delighted and called for champagne. But Schlieffen's successor, von Moltke, `turned pale and said "It is impossible" '. on learning of Russia's mobilisation, he had, Taylor says, `opened the drawer of his desk and followed Schlieffen's instructions'. 1,100 trains were now on their way, as ordained by the timetable drawn up years before. They could not be halted without throwing the army into confusion. So the Kaiser signed the mobilisation orders against France and justified them by ordering his own planes to raid Nuremberg, pretending that they were French.
The story was similar, although less absurd, in all the other countries. The essence of it was this: the Russians could not make a gesture in support of Serbia against Austria-Hungary, because partial mobilisation against Austria-Hungary (which was all that Suzanov, the Foreign Minister, wanted) would have delayed for months (because of their railway timetables) their capability of mobilising against Germany, should this prove necessary later. So Russia ordered full mobilisation. Germany, as we have seen, could not respond to this threat (which was not meant to be a threat to her),. without first attacking and defeating both Belgium and France; and Britain could not go to the aid of Belgium (which was all that she wanted to do) without allying herself with France. Unknown to Russia and Serbia, the Austro-Hungarian threat against Serbia which provoked the Russian mobilisation could not be carried out for various reasons, one of which was that they dared not commit their army in that direction without being sure of Russian neutrality; and `as a little extra twist of irony' Serbia's decision (unknown of course to both Austria-Hungary and Russia) was not to resist, should Austria-Hungary march on Belgrade.
All these moves and constrictions were imposed by the military plans and had nothing much to do with the personalities or wills of the politicians and generals in office at the time. Indeed in each country the plans prevented the statesmen from doing what they wanted to do. World 3 controlled World 2 and World 1.
It is often said that if only all politicians could be psychoanalysed and freed from their complexes and `hang-ups', there would be no more war. But on this story, even allowing for some oversimplification, it seems that Freud himself, had he changed places (at this stage) with the Kaiser or Grey, would have found it hard to act otherwise than they did. They were held in the straitjacket of their own plans and were powerless to wriggle free. It was the plans that sent ten million soldiers and ultimately twice as many civilians to their deaths.
I retell this story because it clearly still has lessons for us. one might have thought that everybody would have second thoughts for ever more about making long term plans to restrict freedom of action in the future. But in this country at any rate, thousands of people are beavering away as hard as they can doing just that, producing straitjackets for the future, the worst (that we know about!) being the structure plans, which, under the Town and Country Planning Act of 1971, local authorities were to combine together to produce, for roughly county-sized areas.
In the case of South Hampshire, the structure plan had to be radically altered even before it was submitted to the Department of the Environment because the population predictions made only a few years before were already obviously false. one of the worst features of the new arrangement was that the new plans were to take on board as `commitments' the current plans of the previously-existing, smaller, planning authorities. In the case of South Hampshire, some two hundred such commitments were incorporated into the structure plan without further consideration. A Portsmouth scheme, rapidly becoming notorious, known as stage III of the North-South Road (N/S III), was one of these so-called commitments. Had these old plans remained under the auspices of the authorities who thought them up in the first place, many would have been cancelled or modified or would have died a natural death. Now, not only were the plans themselves given a new lease of life and enhanced status as part of a new and altogether grander plan, but the same kiss of life was extended to the planning ideas, many of them by now discredited, on which the plans had been based. For example N/S III had been based on theories of traffic growth and life of houses current in the early 1960s and no longer accepted (see page 110). Furthermore it had been planned before bus priority measures had been thought of, before there was any general concern about an impending energy crisis, and before the 1972-4 quadrupling of world oil prices. Yet although the population growth assumptions on which N/S III was based were even more outdated than those of the structure plan itself, the former was perpetuated and the latter modified. The perpetuation of these old plans has made it almost impossible, without endless bureaucratic unscrambling, to do what seems to be sensible now. We are hamstrung by the plans just as were the Kaiser and von Moltke.
The same Act that gave us the structure plans ordained also that there would follow local plans for smaller areas conforming to the `strategic' outline of the structure plan. Ever since 1972 the planners in Portsmouth have been endeavouring to produce a Fratton Centre Local Plan for the area through which N/S III is planned to run. A draft was published in that year and was hastily withdrawn, as it at once met a storm of objection. Its gestation continued behind the scenes for a further six years, during which it cast a continued blight on the area and during which several major decisions - for the road and for other land use - were taken without it. The plan's central features were the pedestrianisation of the main shopping street which is the main traffic route for the area and the redevelopment (to include multi-storey car park and new department store) of the largest central block. Both these features had to be withdrawn (the first because of council members' opposition and the second because of developer's cold feet) as soon as the council were given a preview and before general publication. But the plan goes on, shorn of its raison d'etre, and consisting now of a hundred or so parochial decisions about parcels of land mostly of less than an acre: a bit of car parking here, build a few houses there - all decisions to be taken now on matters where decisions could better be taken on an ad hoc basis or when need arises. It is truly a matter of trying hard to prevent posterity from doing as it thinks best.
As an illustration of how current planning encumbered by the ideas of the 1960s can indulge in most of the errors enumerated in this book, I cite in some detail the case of part of the Fratton Plan area of Portsmouth, an area about 300 yards square now known as the Cumberland Road area. In 1965 the council decided, as did many others, on a road plan to meet the anticipated needs of 1985. Before I describe this I must explain, for the benefit of non-mathematicians, the confusion of linear and exponential growth, which has bedevilled so many plans for the future. If 1,000 things increase in one year to 1,100, you may say with equal truth either that there has been an increase of 100 or of 10 per cent. If there is a regular increase each year of 100, we have linear growth and the original 1,000 will double itself in 10 years. But a second annual increase of 10 per cent will be 10 per cent of 1,100, that is 110, and the third year 121 and so on. Exponential growth at 10 per cent will double itself in about 72' years. Not very much difference so far. But as time goes on there is rapid divergence. While the linear growth will treble the original in 20 years and quadruple in 30, the exponential will treble in about 111 and quadruple in about 1411.
When something new is introduced, such as cars in a country where there are none, or electricity to a country dependent on candles, the growth at first is likely to be exponential. But as demand begins to be satisfied or restriction on growth begins - most people already have electric lights and a cooker, or traffic congestion starts - that growth tends to become linear and later still tails off to a plateau of no growth.
Portsmouth planners assumed, on the strength of recent annual increases, an exponential growth rate of traffic for the next twenty years of 5 per cent per annum, which would mean rather more than 21 times as much traffic in 1985 as in the planning year, 1965. In fact the growth in the number of registered vehicles between 1966 and 1976 was almost exactly linear and the growth of traffic rather less than linear. This can be explained by the fact that as car ownership increases, more and more of it is accounted for by people having two or even three cars; and they cannot drive them all at once.
To return now to the Cumberland Road area: it consists of four parallel `Coronation Street' type streets, bounded on one side by the railway and on the other three by comparatively main streets, bus routes and so on. It is in fact exceptionally well served by public transport as well as being within easy walking distance of all the city's amenities. It is thus an ideal residential area for families without cars. (One of the chief planner's reasons for wanting to knock it all down now was the absence of garages and off-street parking!)
The 1965 road plan envisaged the sweeping away of this entire area of some 400 houses (which were then doomed anyway, as, according to the theory then prevailing, they had `outlived their useful life'.) In the centre would be a four acre roundabout where would intersect a new north-south highway (N/S III) of four lanes with an east-west highway also of four lanes. At a later stage (but before 1985) a further four lanes of north-south highway built on stilts would `fly over' the roundabout. In the years after 1965, pieces of the ambitious network were completed and other pieces, including the east-west road, were lopped- off and cancelled; but N/S III was neither built nor cancelled. It remained as `part of the programme' to blight all the houses contained in it. Gradually owners sold out to the council who spent little or nothing on the upkeep of the houses they bought, because they were `short-life' properties. However, as the avalanche of traffic predicted in the early 1960s (see page 110) failed to materialise, the scale of the plans was reduced from the eight lanes on two levels for the north-south road in 1965 to six lanes on one level in 1973, to four lanes in 1976 and in 1978 to a single carriageway. Meanwhile the state of the houses steadily deteriorated and so did the social atmosphere, as the council boarded up some houses, moved in so-called problem families to occupy others, and themselves rendered still others uninhabitable.
An eight-lane highway is a very inflexible thing. Had a road on that scale been necessary then the site and route for it were reasonable. But once the scale is reduced to single carriageway, you are dealing with something quite manoeuvrable. From that moment it becomes possible to take the road wherever it will do least damage, and that is usually along the route of existing roads. But the plan for an eight-lane route, made in 1965, was for a road through the Cumberland Road area. So through that area must go the single carriageway planned in 1978 to be built in 1981. Sticking to this route is justified by the state of the houses; and demolition of the houses, rather than renovating them as other similar houses elsewhere are being renovated, is justified by the road plan. The reduction of scale has meant a slight change of route for the road, so that some houses which have been empty for six years waiting for the road will not now be needed for it, while one end of a terrace, occupied and in good condition, will now after all be needed for the road. The other end of this well-maintained terrace will be cut off so they `might as well' be demolished and the land given to an adjacent school which is short of play space.
So the route for the road is justified by the state of the houses and the demolition of the houses is justified by the road plan. And the expansion of the school in that direction rather than any other is justified by the road. Nothing is done for its own sake; and where there are real problems, they are ignored or made worse. The only housing problem, namely where to find houses for old people who need them, will be exacerbated by the plan, which will not only remove renewable old houses but will gobble up land on which new ones might be built. There is no traffic problem in the Cumberland Road area. Elsewhere there are junctions which urgently need traffic lights; but they cannot have them because all the money is earmarked for the road. Even on the line of the road there is a crossroads which causes hold-ups. A roundabout would clear the trouble and there is enough waste land nearby for this to be done; but it is not done. We must have the whole scheme or nothing. The Schlieffen-like road plan prevents people from doing now what seems sensible.
We have here four of the errors: solutioneering - a plan without a clear statement of a problem; trendism - a plan based on a trend which was miscalculated and did not continue; tunnel-vision - a road plan which looks only at theoretical good effects and ignores the unfavourable consequences such as obstuction of cross traffic; and holism - refusal to make minor but genuine improvements before the whole plan is put into effect, for fear that they might make the whole patently unnecessary. The north-south road was planned to have been built between 1970 and 1975. Part of the reason for the delay has been the admitted uncertainty of the traffic forecasts. We have been waiting for the result of the South Hampshire Transportation Study, based 'on a highly technical computerised model, which would finally tell us if such a road was really needed `for the 1980s and 90s'. We have had to wait a long time, and now that it is here the answer is a lemon.
The study, it now transpires, was based on three alternative assumptions, one - maximum investment in highways, two - maximum investment in public transport, and a third intermediate one whose details need not concern us here. on the face of it, allowing for some scepticism about both the input and the method (in view especially of COBA's errors - see page 125) these seemed sensible assumptions. It is only now, when the results are emerging, that we find that the second alternative was not, as everyone had assumed, investment in ordinary buses and trains. on the contrary, in the model investment these remained constant. The idea was to invest in two lengths of segregated semi-automatic light tramcars of an unspecified and untried type. These two lengths of track, even if `cost-effective', could not hope to affect more than a small part of the thirty-mile long area of the study, but would swallow up all. the money. Why did they not test the model of a maximum bus investment programme which was what many people would have voted for? The answer appears to be that the modelling procedure could not be adapted to this possibility. So we are likely to be saddled with a transport plan `to take us into the twenty-first century' which excludes a practicable alternative, because it cannot be modelled on the computer.
Of course there are matters on which we have to take decisions now in regard to preparing for the future and there are, in general, three ways of doing this.
1 We can assume that the future will be like the past or, if not exactly so, that trends in the recent past will continue into the future in roughly the same way. This is the way in which evolution prepares for the future. It produces for future use the combination of genes that have been successful in the past.
2 We can use our intelligence to produce the best theory about the future, try to see how the future is likely to differ from the past and its trends, e.g. we can see how certain trends cannot continue because of such things as exhaustion of resources, saturation of demand, etc.
3 We can plan to bring about certain changes that seem desirable, but which will happen only with active human intervention by such things as legislation.
I cannot elaborate on these options here. I shall content myself with citing a case at present in dispute between the government and the Central Electricity Generating Board. It illustrates the dilemma, which does not seem to be recognised as a dilemma because of the prevailing trendism.
It concerns the proposal for a new power station on Inswork Point near Plymouth. The C.E.G.B. want to build an oil-fired station there. The government's alternative seems to be a high-voltage transmission line to meet the projected deficiency in the west country by drawing on the surplus of generating capacity which exists in the country as a whole (see page 149).
If we do either of these things the west country will be provided with an electricity supply to meet the demand estimated on the current trends. once the provision has been made by either means (at considerable cost) then it will be in the interests of the supply industry, and therefore ultimately of electricity consumers everywhere and therefore of the country as a whole, that the demand shall materialise. In other words we shall have lost the opportunity to reduce the demand for electricity.
An alternative policy would be to grasp the opportunity to try out in this area one or several means which appear now as desirable to meet the crisis of the future. Either separately or together we could
1 Cut down the total energy demand by an active heatinsulation policy financed by the government. (In the case of a badly insulated house reducing heating requirement by one kilowatt cost about £20, at 1976 prices, while a new nuclear generating station cost about £400 per kilowatt of generating capacity, according to the Energy Research Group of the Open University.)
2 Cut down electricity demand by using (with financial encouragement) other fuels for heating, e.g. North Sea gas now, to be replaced as necessary by gas from coal (for heating purposes, twice as efficient as other means of using coal).
3 Instead of building one large power station, build a number of smaller (Combined Heat and Power, CHP) stations. These would be less efficient as producers of electricity but, regarded as heat stations producing electricity as a by-product, much more efficient in the overall utilization of energy, about 70 per cent as compared with a little over 30 per cent. There are of course well known difficulties in using the heat.
If either Inswork or the transmission line is built then they actively inhibit the longer term, energy-conserving solutions of 1, 2, and 3 above. For once the investment is made, it is wasteful not to use it.
In spite of widespread disillusion with the achievements of the planners, many people still believe that what is wrong is the attitude and competence of the planners themselves rather than that their aspirations are unrealistic. I think that Popper's work shows that no improvement in technique can possibly realise what planners all over the country are still trying to achieve. Their goal is theoretically - not just practically - impossible.
Two of Popper's propositions are basic to the appreciation of this impossibility. one has already been quoted:
"While it is easy to centralize power, it is impossible to centralize all the knowledge which is distributed over many minds, and whose centralization would be necessary for the wise wielding of centralized power. (P. H.90)"
The second proposition is that the growth of human knowledge is essentially unpredictable.
"Tomorrow, or a year hence, we may propose and test important theories of which nobody has seriously thought so far. If there is growth of knowledge in this sense, then it cannot be predictable by scientific means. For he who could so predict our discoveries of tomorrow could make them today. (O.K.298)"
A trivial example might be that anybody making traffic plans for cities today is likely to consider including some bus-only routes. But nobody making plans in 1950 for the city of the seventies would have included such routes, for the simple reason that the idea had not then been suggested.
Even in such comparatively straightforward matters as the need for international airports and the costs of large engineering developments (I am thinking of Stansted and Concorde) - just to mention two areas where the greatest expertise has been mustered on prediction - the forecasts have surprisingly soon been shown to be uselessly inaccurate. It is not incompetence or deceit on the part of the forecasters; it is that matters like these, in which human behaviour and human knowledge play a large part, are inherently unpredictable.
When it comes to the replanning of major cities and whole counties and it is a matter not just of estimating future road and housing needs or provision of leisure facilities, but of combining all these and many other highly unpredictable items (including such imponderables as what people are going to want) - not just for the next ten years, but for the rest of the century - then the forecasts become worse than useless. To follow them may be worse than doing nothing, because the result of the vast expenditure and the uprooting of people from their homes may be even less acceptable to posterity than if nothing at all were done now.
We are beginning to realize that, beyond a certain point, motorways generate more traffic and are self-defeating. The next step is to realise something similar in regard to planning. The moment planning goes beyond the eradication of present evils, such as getting rid of slums or dangerous road junctions, or goes beyond what has successfully been done before; the moment it becomes utopian and starts to plan the ideal city of the future, it ceases to be rational. It starts to make assumptions that are called predictions. It feeds these bogus figures into computers and compounds the original errors. The wider the scope of the plan, the greater the snags that are not and cannot be foreseen. The surmounting of these requires ad hoc adjustments to the plan, and we are back at Popper's 'notorious phenomenon of unplanned planning'. (P.H. 69).
Popper thinks that the hankering of modern planners - and politicians - after sweeping reforms has an aesthetic basis, it is associated `with the desire to build a world which is not only a little better and more rational than ours, but which is free from its ugliness, not a crazy quilt, an old garment badly patched, but an entirely new gown, a really beautiful new world'. He sympathises with this attitude and thinks that most of us `suffer a little from such dreams of perfection'; but he regards it as a dangerous enthusiasm. Whether it derives from Plato or not it is akin to his attitude to politics. `Politics, to Plato', Popper said,
"is the Royal Art. It is an art - not in a metaphorical sense in which we speak of ... the art of getting things done, but in a more literal sense. It is an art of composition, like music, painting, or architecture. The Platonist politician composes cities, for beauty's sake."
But, Popper protests:
"I do not believe that human lives may be the means for satisfying an artist's desire for self-ｅxpression ... Much as I sympathise with the aesthetic impulse, I suggest that the artist might seek ｅxpression in another material ... dreams of beauty have to submit to the necessity of helping men in distress and men who suffer injustice. O. S. 165)"
Jane Jacobs, in her justly influential book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, echoes this sentiment: 'To approach a city, or even a city neighbourhood', she says, ,as if it were a large architectural problem, capable of being given order by converting it into a disciplined work of art, is to make the mistake of substituting art for life.'
In the next chapter I look at some of the results of the surrender to the passion for sweeping physical reforms, although the aesthetic element in them is rather hard to discern.
Chapter Eight
The Concrete Jerusalem
Science and democracy are both essentially antiauthoritarian, both depend on freely available information and freedom of discussion and criticism. We have already seen how the process of planning has mushroomed beyond all sense. In this chapter I shall show how the plans have too often been based on untested, bogus theories, sometimes beyond the criticism of the public because based on computerised analysis of statistics; and the execution of the plans has been undemocratic in the extreme. Things would have been very different had it been publicly and officially recognised that holism and prediction of the future state of society are impossible dreams; and that theories cannot be accepted until they have stood up to public attempts to falsify them.
We are emerging from a decade in which cities all over the country have been literally torn apart in the name of three novel causes; comprehensive redevelopment, highrise flats, and urban motorways. These ideas were foisted on the public by the professions concerned, with the connivance of all the political parties and entirely without any popular democratic demand. If in some matters there is doubt about what the people want, this was not one of them. What people wanted and still want is a house with a bit of garden or at least a back yard. It was implied, although not often explicitly stated, and certainly never proved, that this was impossible unless they were content to be farmed out from their cities to bleak outlying housing estates. The way slum clearance and the redevelopment of central areas of the older cities was carried out in defiance of the wishes of the people was as arrogant as in any dictatorship. The result has been the provision on a vast scale of housing of a type that practically nobody wants. In Portsmouth, which has about 27,000 council dwellings, the housing department themselves acknowledge that there are 8,000 families with young children living in flats and maisonettes, nearly all built since the second world war, which are not suitable for them. Meanwhile the Council are trying to go ahead with a road scheme (page 200) which will destroy some 400 houses with gardens, all built before the first world war, and precisely what the families want.
Shaw once said that every profession was a conspiracy against the public; but of none has this been more true than of the unholy alliance of planners, housing officers, and architectural departments of local authorities, aided and abetted by the then Ministry of Housing and Local Government.
As long ago as 1932 this was written (by Hitchcock and Johnson) of 'international style' housing:
"It implies preparation not for a given family but for a typical family. This statistical monster, the typical family, has no personal existence and cannot defend itself against the sociological theories of the architects ... The idealism of the functionalists too often demands that they provide what ought to be needed, even at the expense of what is actually needed. Instead of facing the difficulties of the present, they rush on to face the uncertain future."
- a typical combination of holism and historicism.
On the other hand, as recently as 1941 George Orwell described us as
"a nation of stamp collectors, pigeon fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon snippers, darts players, crosswordpuzzle fans. All the culture which is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official - the pub, the football match, the backgarden, the fireside."
Now, through no choice of their own, for very many there is no back garden, no place in which to pursue these characteristic hobbies - and no fireside either.
As though all this was not enough, there was an added element of uglification in much that was done. Not only were many of the new buildings constructed of some sort of preformed concrete panels, but there was a deliberate disregard by architects and planners of aesthetic detail, proportion, and above all, scale. Jeremy Bugler described in the Observer how one particular building featured 'a massive lift and ventilator shaft, looking like nothing so much as a lift and ventilator shaft'. And this was typical. The idea that one facet of art is deception, the calculated creation of illusion, was scorned in favour of what was called `honesty' in design. A high rise office block would be placed next to a listed regency house and visually destroy it, just as the stock exchange and its companion monstrosities have destroyed the grandeur of St Paul's.
Nor, in spite of their honesty, were the buildings any better in respect of their primary function of keeping out the weather. What the layman calls leaks and the expert 'water penetration' occurred all too frequently, partly because of a fashion for flat roofs instead of the traditional pitched variety which is not only virtually foolproof for keeping out the rain but also effective in keeping the heat in in winter and out in summer. They were plagued too, owing to a general ignorance of physics, by condensation, leading to great growths of mould; but this was usually blamed on the occupants in that they did too much washing, bathing, and breathing. At least half of the 523 houses, maisonettes, and flats in Portsdown Park, a Portsmouth municipal housing scheme designed in 1965, have let in the rain (and hundreds are still doing so), some so badly as to make it dangerous to switch on the ceiling lights in wet weather. The architects were the winners of a nationally organised competition, and their. scheme later won a design award! Four blocks, each of 136 flats, in another scheme just fifteen years old, built by the Bison system, are now shedding lumps of concrete and having to be repaired at a total cost of at least £21 million. According to Building Design (20 October 1978) nearly 50,000 flats of this type were built throughout the country. The London Borough of Hillingdon which has 1,450 of them is in perhaps the greatest trouble.
A public, who during the war had reacted with indignation at what were called the Baedeker raids - air attacks on selected cathedral cities, looked on dumbly as the bulldozers cut swathes right up to the cathedral closes in Canterbury, Worcester, and Salisbury. And the almost unrelieved dreariness of the new buildings together with the legalized vandalism of the demolition squads invited and were answered by illegal vandalism on a scale never seen before. In two lines Sir John Betjeman said it all: Goodbye to old Bath! We who loved you are sorry. They've carted you off by developer's lorry. At the heart of the matter were two theories, assumed but hardly criticised, two bogeys which, at the beginning of the 1960s, frightened both central government and local authorities into ill-considered and precipitate action. one was the theory that all the houses built before 1900 would have to be replaced in the near future, and the other was the prediction of a tidal wave of motor traffic. The spectre of cities being swamped by a deluge of cars was given a special fillip by the publication in 1963 of the Buchanan Report Traffic in Towns, an absurd futuristic fantasy. It is hard now to believe that it was ever taken seriously. (Later, in 1972, Buchanan wrote: 'I have yet to see anything that has taken my breath away as it was taken away when I first saw the German autobahnen in 1937'.) His 1963 report was seized on by municipal planners and engineers all over the country and used to scare their councils into letting them lay waste their cities more thoroughly than the German bombers had done twenty years before. In Portsmouth, for example, the development officer reported to the city council in 1964 as follows: 'The report [Buchanan] reveals the startling fact [sic] that the number of cars may be expected to double by 1970 and treble by 1980.' It was not a fact. Total vehicle registrations in 1963 were 12 million, and they rose only to 14.93 million in 1970. It was not even a fact that that was what Buchanan had predicted, though he too was wildly out in only seven years. He had predicted 18 million by 1970 - nearly double the 1960 figure of 91 million. 18 million was not reached until 1976.
There was no question in the reports of the early 1960s of not trying to accommodate the expected flood of traffic. There was an implicit view of traffic as comparable to sewage, something whose flow one simply dared not attempt to constrict. There was also the fear of the total seize up, with all traffic grinding to a halt. Nobody ever seemed to ask the question: what will happen if we do not build all these roads? The only traffic experts had trained as road builders. The only way they knew for coping with traffic was to build new roads or widen the old ones.
It was not until Jane Jacob's great iconoclastic, anti-planning classic reached this country that people came to their senses and realised that traffic is an assemblage of vehicles, each dependent on an individual driver's decision as to whether to go this way or that or to leave his car at home. She described a case in New York where the protesters against the plan for a new highway which would bisect their residential area succeeded not only in stopping it but also in closing to through traffic the existing main route. Contrary to the experts' predictions that the consequence would be a surge of traffic down residential side roads, there was in fact a reduction of traffic there too.
Jane Jacobs also brought a breath of economic reality into the planners' dream of having everything new. `If a city area has only new buildings, the enterprises that can exist there are automatically limited to those that can support the high costs of construction ... only operations that are well-established, high-turnover, standardized or heavily subsidized ... chain stores, chain restaurants, and banks . . .' Planners have failed to realize that in tearing down every old building they have stifled the emergence of new enterprises. `As for really new ideas of any kind - no matter how profitable or successful some of them might ultimately be - there is no leeway for chancy trial, error, and experimentation, in the high-overhead economy of new construction.' She sums it up with the aphorism: `Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.'
The two bogeys - short life of houses and traffic avalanche - worked together to further the cause of the urban motorway mania. Councillors who might have jibbed at the idea of destroying hundreds of perfectly good homes for roads, felt differently when told that the houses have to come down in a few years anyway, so why not now? Phrases such as 'nearing the end of their useful life' and 'ripe for redevelopment' were used to imply that it was kinder to destroy these houses now, like lame horses, than allow them to crumble of old age in a few years' time. Now, in contrast with the idea of the 1960s that hundred-year-old houses would have to come down, some local authorities, while energetically rehabilitating their nineteenth century houses, are having to contemplate demolition of their highrise tenements only twenty years old.
If anybody doubts that what we have just witnessed was a fashion and not rational action, he has only to consider one of the arguments for highrise which was swallowed by councils all over the country. It was that you could not get the required density of population per acre with low- or medium-rise development. Although the facts on which the calculation was based have not changed, architects now generally accept that this is not true; and this changed opinion is born out by the fact that the density is roughly the same in the Somers Town area of Portsmouth, rebuilt between 1964 and '66 largely with 18-storey blocks of flats, as it is in phase 2 of the Buckland area of the same city, rebuilt in the early 1970s with one 7-storey block and many two-storey houses. More absurd was the programme of new roads for Greater Manchester. 75 per cent of it has now been dropped; but, according to the Greater Manchester Transport Action Group, the whole scheme would, at the rate of road building so far, have taken three hundred years to complete. Alan Stones's article `Liverpool Now' (Built Enviroment, March 1977) provides a third example.
"Liverpool's development plans had always incorporated a substantial `primary road networks'. However, there has never been enough finance to implement more than a small part of it ... Last year the previously `essential' Inner Ring Motorway scheme and the link from it to the M62 were formally abandoned. So far, 30.4ha of land has been cleared for highway use in the inner area, but only 2.7ha of this formed any part of any programmed works. The majority of the cleared highway sites are in the form of long, narrow strips that the Council has decided, rightly or wrongly, are incapable of alternative development for housing or industry, and will have to become open spaces (for which, incidentally, no funds are available.)"
Insane things were done everywhere. The traffic counts showed that Arundel Street, Portsmouth, was carrying at peak hours 400 per cent of its calculated traffic capacity. It was therefore decided to widen it in order to make it capable of carrying the traffic it already was carrying. After this was done, new figures for road capacity were officially issued and they showed that in its old width it was capable of carrying what it always did carry. Now, of course, after widening, it is grossly underused.
Happily while all this has been going on, there has been something of a revolution in ideas about town planning; but hardly any of the new ideas have yet had much effect on the ground, although they have been successful in stemming the advance of the demolition and road-construction mania. The new ideas are to a large extent old ideas. There has been a realisation that many of the unquestioned assumptions of town planning were wrong, and that what happened as a matter of course before town planning was in vogue, was in many ways better than what has been designed since. Take for instance the Edwardian semi-detached. These houses have been the butt of ridicule by the `modern' movement in architecture, yet as Nicholas Taylor points out (The Village in the City), they provide a more satisfactory and, indeed, sophisticated family home than anything that has been provided on any large scale in the post-war years.
Taylor cites the absurd advocacy of the famous Roehampton development, which set the fashion for highrise all over the country, in terms of even the poor having their private park. The Roehampton highrise scheme was built in three formerly private parks; but, as Taylor points out, the whole point of a private park is that it is private, and the owner and his family have the exclusive use of it. At Roehampton and other similar developments the `parkland' is only too public and more often than not it carries notices saying `keep off the grass', `no ball games on the grass', etc. It was actually claimed by some architects that the provision of all this communal space would engender a communal spirit and a greater respect for public property. As everybody knows, the reverse was the case at Roehampton and in similar schemes elsewhere - the tenants resented the fact that they had nowhere of their own. Taylor's conclusion, with which I concur, is that `Privacy is nothing to be ashamed of. It is in fact of paramount importance to most families, the five foot garden fence or wall making an incalculable gain in their happiness'.
To be specific, the theories that were held to be sacrosanct and are now emerging as mistaken are as follows:
1 The aims of rigid zoning into exclusively residential, commercial, industrial, etc., zones and the ousting of all `non-conforming users' - resulting in longer journeys to work, an absence of plumbers and jobbing repair builders in residential areas, and excessive vandalism - and crime generally. (Because the main deterrent is casual observation. Areas which are exclusively residential tend to be empty by day and the same goes for exclusive shopping areas by night.)
2 The idea of comprehensive redevelopment as the best way of revitalising run-down areas of cities. (The word 'comprehensive' being used in quite a different sense from its use as applied to schools.)
3 The surrounding of new developments with open space. (I do not of course mean playgrounds or parks, but the useless open spaces variously called grass verges, amenity strips, or architectural landscaping - useless public space at the expense of usable private space in the form of private back gardens. And this has been widely linked with the fallacy that the minimising of private facilities and the maximising of communal ones - corridors, washing machines, etc. - all makes for an increase in communal spirit and willingness to take responsibility for communal and private property. In fact, of course, the opposite is more nearly true.
4 The theory held by municipal architects that buildings have a natural life of the order of 100 years and that after that it is uneconomic to try to prop them up. This is in bland disregard of the fact that most architects themselves actually choose to live in houses of up to three hundred years old in preference to those of their own design, and probably wisely so.
5 The idea that road widening is necessarily an improvement while road narrowing is never thought of.
6 The idea that specially built double carriageway roads with no access to neighbouring buildings can drain off not only through traffic, but local traffic, from shopping and residential streets.
7 The assumption that traffic everywhere increases automatically and inevitably at 5 per cent per year.
These ideas have common characteristics of ruthlessness, disdain for the opinion of people who are actually most likely to be directly affected, and contempt for tradition and local vernacular. They are nearly all of this century or of the very end of the nineteenth century. They are holist in spirit and they were carried out by solutioneering as opposed to problem-solving. Many can be traced to Ebenezer Howard and the garden city ideal, which itself was based on the idea that industry, all industry, was necessarily noxious and people must be enabled to live far away from it, and that cities were inherently nasty and must be made as much like the country as possible. There were good reasons for Howard's feelings. Industry was nasty then. But the ideas were put into practice on a large scale long after most of industry had, largely as a consequence of electric power, become much nicer, when in most cases it was better to live next to a factory than to a pub or a school.
But another powerful force behind the planning movements that have so changed our cities can be traced to none other than Karl Marx. The general acquiescence in the idea that society should be planned, and that it is either possible or sensible to plan twenty years ahead, derives from historicism. For it assumes that we know the direction in which `society as a whole' is moving - and that we can do nothing to stop it if we do not like it.
The lame horse theory of houses, the idea that houses have a 'useful life' is not dead. The majority of Victorian houses that escaped the German bombers and the British bulldozers have gradually over the years been repaired and greatly altered inside. Bedrooms have been changed into bathrooms, dining rooms into bedrooms or garages, small rooms have been knocked into one and large rooms have been divided. Gas, electricity, internal w.c.s, copper plumbing and central heating have been installed, sometimes in one swoop but more often piecemeal, while the main brick structure has usually remained unaltered and still needs no alteration. This is the reality. But officially houses are either `improved' or `unimproved'; and improvement is seen, still in the light of the `useful life' theory, as a kind of transplant that extends `life', but only for thirty years.
So there is a new bogey, a new-improved lame horse theory, being hinted at whenever the question is raised of whether to demolish or not. We may be laying up trouble for the next generation. In thirty years' time, it is hinted, there will be the same demand for comprehensive redevelopment as there was (according to re-written history) in the '50s and '60s. It is really a sociological theory disguised as a practical matter of the structure of buildings and confused by historicism. What the bogey-man is saying is that by 2010 people will no longer be content THE CONCRETE JERUSALEM 117 to live in this sort of house; but it is put over in such a way as to suggest that they may all then collapse. But the sociological fact is that Coronation Street-type houses form part of a `housing ladder'. They tend to be acquired by young couples - in the jargon: first-time buyers, who, if they prosper, move on to something more spacious. Thus the same people do not have to put up with this sort of house for thirty years. Furthermore should it turn out that fewer and fewer people of any sort want these houses as time goes on, then there is the obvious remedy now known as `gradual renewal', that is gradual replacement with new, the process that obtained for centuries until comprehensive redevelopment brought it to a halt.
At least until the demise of the Callaghan government, civil servants from the Department of the Environment were touring the country inspecting General Improvement Areas, preaching this lame horse doctrine and so advocating more demolition, a policy contrary to that of their political masters.
An interesting example is provided by Frank Guy of how, in the absence of a routine of criticism, absurd practices can become widespread or practices, sensible in one context, can become fashionable and then be copied inappropriately in another. He describes the background to the prefabrication, by metal-framed sections, of post-war new schools, something that has been widely acclaimed outside the architectural profession (who know what they cost) and the teaching profession (who know what they are like to teach in). A shortage of bricklayers in post-war Hertfordshire was the ostensible reason for trying to meet the need for new schools by non-traditional building methods. Standard steel-framed sections were factory-made and assembled on site. A different system known as CLASP (Consortium of Local Authorities Schools Projects - Guy's title is `Unclasp me'), was developed by the Nottinghamshire County architects, although Nottingham, City stuck to bricks. (Guy comments drily `The shortage of bricklayers was extremely local.') Since the buildings could be supported at intervals on jacks, they had a genuine advantage over traditionally constructed ones in mining areas where there was soil subsidence. on this Guy remarks: `Of course it meant either that most buildings were structurally redundant and to that extent uneconomic, or that one scoured the country looking for old mines over which to site schools.' He continues `In the lush green counties of the south (now full of bricklayers) yet another iron-frame system was born, SCOLA Mark I. Later reconnaissance having failed to reveal any old coalmines, SCOLA Mark II is now done without the frame, which introduces a doubt.' What Guy is saying with gentle derision is that rationalised traditional construction could have done the job better and cheaper, except only in the sites with subsidence. For as well as high initial costs, maintenance costs on these buildings are high and so are heating costs because of the light structure, with poor thermal insulation and low thermal capacity, and `huge areas of glass - baking hot in summer, leaking heat like mad in winter'. The demand for huge areas of glass masked, Guy says, `the inherent inefficiency of using a frame for a school. As long as windows were enormous one felt a frame might be necessary'. But the excessively large windows were also the result of a muddle. They were required by a daylighting standard derived mistakenly from a wartime standard for factories. It is perhaps mainly the huge windows that make the prefabricated schools less comfortable to teach in than the old ones.
Colin Ward has written recently:
"There used to be a map of education authorities on the wall at the Department of Education and Science, coloured according to the various consortia of authorities with joint systems for school construction. A white patch in the middle stood out as a reproach. This was Buckinghamshire, who went on building purpose-designed schools of brick, timber, and pitched roofs, and who have at last been vindicated for their simple, durable, and cheaply-maintained buildings, which gave about 15 per cent more school for the money."
It is a moot point to what extent 'system-building' caught on because of the name. `Systems-analysis' had been invented in the war for organising the planning and co-ordination of such things as aircraft production on a large scale and the mounting of huge military operations like the invasion of Normandy. The word suggested the latest thing and, in the atmosphere of historicism which prevailed, the latest thing was the good thing whether or not it was an improvement on the old. It is interesting that Max Nicolson in his book The System (sub-titled The Misgovernment of Modern Britain), although he is a penetrating critic of the civil service system, fell most uncritically for this building gimmick.
one of the most significant and successful achievements of the new Ministry (of Education) was to bring together a joint working party of architects, builders, teachers, educationists, and administrators to design and arrange for production of largely prefabricated new school buildings, of the highest possible standards and at the lowest possible cost. By this simple device, counter to all the conventional principles and practices of Whitehall, British school design and construction achieved a leading position in Europe."
This idea of the team that could do better than the individual, was another ill-conceived panacea that has often misguided us during the past twenty years or so. Somebody, ignorant of the way in which architects normally work and consult their clients, could imagine that a committee of all these people would produce a better result than an architect on his own. Similarly it has been imagined that a team of doctor, health visitor, nurse, midwife, social worker etc. can produce a better result than these individuals sticking to their own tasks. What is needed is that the expert, however he works, shall be subject to criticism. A team of experts is equally in need of criticism but less likely to receive it. There is the point made by Leslie Chapman (whose exposure of the Civil Service I quote from in Chapter 11) that `if you create a management structure where . . . for anything that needs to be decided there is a committee, and perhaps more than one committee, involved, you are well on the way to creating an organization where no one can ever be blamed for anything'.
Change of building techniques and materials and the consequent problems of water penetration and condensation illustrate another aspect of the importance of criticism. Take bricks for example. Until recent times all bricks were what what would now be called soft. It was entirely reasonable that the newer hard bricks should be used for heavy load-bearing in multi-storey buildings, for instance in the Portsdown Park development already mentioned. It is now realised that one of the advantages of the old soft bricks was their sponge-like quality which enabled them to absorb moisture. The hard modern bricks are impervious, and so driving rain tends to penetrate in larger quantities the unavoidable crevices in the brickwork. I am not saying that in the old days they knew better. They did not have to know. The old bricks worked well. Probably nobody ever bothered to wonder why. It is only when we come to replace them that we come to appreciate their qualities. So it is, I suggest, with all tradition. We may not be able to see any reason, there may well have been no reason as such, in a traditional practice; but this does not mean that we can abandon it with impunity. We must always expect, in changing from something that works well to something which looks as if it should work better, that there will be unforeseen snags, indeed unforeseeable ones. We have to try and see what happens. We readily see the white swans; but we must look for the black ones. This is not of course to say that tradition is good and innovation bad. We need both and we need a critical attitude to both.
Benefits which could be obtained more certainly by a direct, piecemeal, approach are sometimes obtained incidentally by holist solutioneering and retrospectively claimed to justify it. Terence Bendixson quotes from a speech in May 1973 by the then Secretary of State for the Environment:
one of the aims of our current programme of strategic roads is to achieve environmental improvements by relieving a large number of towns and villages in this way. Of the 520 towns in England with a population over 10,000, about 100 have by-passes or high quality relief roads and by the end of the 1980s another 150 will have been completed .. ."
And then, warming to his subject, He goes on:
"Some of the effects of such relief can be measured and expressed in terms of reduced levels of noise and pollution, but the main benefit is to the well-being of local inhabitants: the relief from stress through being rid of noisy, smelly, intrusive traffic which they feel should not be there."
On looking at this speech the other way round, Bendixson points out, what emerges is that by the end of the 1980s (officialese for 1990) more than half of the towns mentioned will still be without a by-pass. Five miles of 24-foot two-lane by-pass can be constructed for the cost of each mile of motorway. Now, if the preliminary operation had been to list the most urgent problems concerning road traffic, and if, as most of those affected would certainly have said, the most urgent problem was to free towns and villages of heavy through-traffic, then it might have led to an entirely different idea - abandon the motorway network (not necessarily abandon all motorway construction) - and make the first priority the construction of by-passes. Then probably all the 520 towns could be relieved of through traffic by 1990, with all the advantages that the Minister listed.
This solution, unlike the strategic motorway network, would not appeal to those of holist mentality and, if ever considered in the 1960s, was doubtless dismissed as merely tinkering with the problem. Rather late in the day, it is now being adopted, at least in the south of England, where the south coast motorway is being abandoned in favour of local by-passes. I suspect that this is one instance where ministers have managed to get the better of their professional advisers.
It is important to note that the Minister justified the holist solution, the strategic network, by its welcome popular effect of relieving towns of traffic, which it will do only incidentally. The solution is justified in other words as compared with doing nothing rather than compared with a plan specifically designed to relieve towns of through-traffic. This dishonesty is a very common practice. Objectors to holist schemes are regularly made to appear as opposing the desirable object of improving the conditions of the people in whatever way it may be - better housing, better education etc., when what they are really objecting to is the particular solution proposed which, often enough, both fails to achieve its alleged object economically, and gratuitously ruins a hundred perfectly good houses by the way.
Once on the look-out for solutioneering, one finds examples of it in surprisingly rational-seeming disguise. The M.O.T. test for cars which are more than three years old is, on the face of it, a rational measure for improving road safety. However there were no official figures for accidents due to defective vehicles before 1961 when the test was introduced, according to Malcolm Hulke, and now that there are, they hardly support the idea. The 2,130 accidents that occurred between 1970 and 1974 within twenty miles of the Transport and Road Research Laboratory (TRRL) in Berkshire were studied in detail. only 24 per cent of these could be attributed to vehicle defects alone; and in 894 per cent vehicle defects played no part. on the other hand 65 per cent were solely the fault of road users. The TRRL reported that of 632 `impaired' drivers, 463 were drunk, 159 tired, 87 drugged, and 26 unhappy. Obviously only a very small return could be expected in terms of lives saved from measures to bring all vehicles even up to 100 per cent efficiency, very small compared, for instance to `don't drink and drive' measures. It certainly looks as though the institution of the M.O.T. test was a piece of solutioneering, coupled perhaps with a holist prejudice against patching up old cars, the idea being to try to force them off the road and replace them with new ones. Certainly there was no previous study to indicate the extent of the problem, no precise formulation of what it was, and no monitoring of the effect. Since it was started, its range has been greatly extended and its cost increased, so obliging the non-mechanical members of the public to be the dupes of unscrupulous garages.
The threat to democracy posed by the misuse of computers has been brought to light most clearly in public inquiries associated with proposed new motorways and other major roads. The case for the road is always based by the Department of Transport on a cost -benefit analysis (C.O.B.A.) which takes into account one cost (the cost of building the road) and three benefits: the savings of time, vehicle operating costs, and accidents. As Dr John Adams points out, cash evaluation of these four elements yields a quite arbitrary cost-benefit ratio. Of the four, one (construction costs) is a hard cash element, one (vehicle operating costs) is generally insignificant, one (time saving) is highly contentious, and one (the cost of accidents) is meaningless. This last confuses `the price that someone is prepared to pay to safeguard something he values (for example his life) with the price he would consider fair compensation for its loss'. (And the second, if the something is life, ties the cost-benefit analysts into logical knots when they `try to calculate the cash compensation that ought to be paid to someone who is dead and incapable of spending it'. At that time (1976) C.O.B.A. valued a fatal accident at £44,000, a little more, Adams pointed out, than `the damage done to the reputation of an actor' [the creator of Kojak] 'by a newspaper article which claimed that he got drunk and forgot his lines'.
Although the death and serious injury rate per passenger mile is much less on motorways than on other roads as a whole (largely because there are no pedestrians or cyclists and these two categories of road users make up 50 per cent of the serious casualties on other roads), there can be no doubt that one of the effects of building a motorway is to increase the amount of traffic in the country as a whole. Since the more traffic there is, the more accidents there are, it must follow that motorways cause accidents elsewhere. So although the casualties on a motorway itself can be expected to be low, its true costs even in accidents are not taken into account because it will cause them elsewhere. In fact what is counted as a benefit is really a cost.
This system is objectionable in two ways. First the C.O.B.A. rests on the assumption that everyone has his price. Again Adams exposed this nicely when he said:
"The sincere exasperation of C.B. analysts with a man who cannot, or will not, name his price illustrates what an insidiously corrupting poison cost-benefit analysis is. It used to be a common view that people ought to hold certain things, the most valuable things, above price. The extent to which this view is less common than previously is a measure of the increased acceptance of the cost-benefit ethic. It is an ethic which debases that which is important and disregards entirely that which is supremely important."
Secondly, although C.O. B. A. is based on the analysis of only four factors, the calculation of them is extremely complicated and can be done only by a computer. And for all that the public know the statistics that form the material for these abstruse and inaccessible calculations may be gathered by the process described by Mr Denis Healey, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, who while unfit for active service during the war, was posted to Swindon station to replace 'a drunken bombadier who was a railway checker'. Mr Healey told a newspaper interviewer that he had learnt there 'a lesson of lasting importance about statistics'. 'one of my jobs', he said, 'was to count all the service people getting on every train, getting off every train, and off and on again, on six platforms in the blackout.' It was an impossible job. He had to invent the numbers getting on, and off and on, and went to the ticket collector to get the numbers of those who were getting off. 'After I'd been there a fortnight I found that he made up his numbers too!' His comment was that he suspects that a great deal of economic planning today is based on this kind of statistics. At any rate - to return to C.O. B. A. - the figures that emerge have the status of a revelation. The Department of Transport, as the saying is, has a hot line to God. The objectors to the Department's schemes have no direct communication with God. The most they can do is to express their scepticism.
That one side of the argument in a public debate should be incomprehensible to the public negates democracy and reduces these inquiries to the status of a farce. It also means that however much expertise the Department of Transport may deploy, their calculations lack the objective status of science because, as has already. been stated, that objectivity depends not on such things as the efficiency of computers, but on anybody so minded being able' to check the calculations for himself. Computer scientists themselves have a saying: `garbage in, garbage out'.
Now it happens that on two recent occasions, there have been, among the objectors to the Department of Transport's schemes, people with the necessary time and expertise to repeat the C.O.B.A. for themselves; and on these two occasions they have shown the calculations to be wrong. It has not been made very clear in the press what has been the reason for the many disruptions of the proceedings at motorway inquiries. They have been portrayed as being due to people seeking to take the law into their own hands. on the contrary, they see themselves, I think rightly, as upholders of the democratic process and the law (a view with which the Court of Appeal now seems to agree). Until the disorderly disruptions, evidence against the need for road schemes was, contrary to the Highways Act of 1959, disallowed at public inquiries. Objectors were allowed only to dispute the route. There were a number of other irregularities of procedure which John Tyme goes into in his book Motorways Versus Democracy. Mr John Thorn, Headmaster of Winchester College, who was marched out of one inquiry, was particularly incensed:
"The workings of our so-called democracy in this matter of roads is left to tribunals whose composition and procedures are reminiscent not of the English Common Law Courts, but of Tudor treason trials ... Respectable, law-abiding and peace-loving citizens do not lightly behave noisily in public ... but occasionally, just occasionally, they feel something so deeply, become so frustrated with a system which denies them power while granting them speech, that they begin non-violently to behave like rebels."
These attitudes have been abundantly justified now in retrospect by the revelation of the serious official miscalculations. Not only have the Department of Transport behaved high-handedly, but their case has been arithmetically wrong. Needlesss to say, in both cases the error was in the direction of forecasting greater benefits from their schemes than were warranted by the assumptions made. It is now apparent that the burying in concrete of what Mr Thorn described as 'one of the most beautiful square miles of stone, river, and meadow, in the whole of western Europe' (the south-eastern fringe of Winchester) might have been deemed justified in the interests of the country's economy on the basis of a computer operator's error. This surely rams home the point that theories and calculations must not be relied upon until serious public attempts have been made to refute them and have failed.
In a B.B.C. television programme (24.2.79) reviewing a series of films on post-war planning and architecture, the question arose as to who had had the power to carry through, for example, the decision to build pre-fabricated tower blocks and slabs. Was it the architects, the planners, the politicians, the construction companies? Christopher Booker, the author of one of the films (a devastating exposure of the disasters discussed here) replied. He said he could answer the question in one word: it was the 'vision', the vision of the city of the future, something partly but not wholly derived from Le Corbusier, something not precisely spelt out and never systematically criticised. This World 3 object was the culprit.
Chapter Nine
Blinding with Science
Of nearly every theory it may be said that it agrees with many facts: this is one of the reasons why a theory can be said to be corroborated only if we are unable to find refuting facts, rather than if we are able to find supporting facts.
Popper (P. H. 111n)
In most people's eyes, whatever may be said against science, it works. The facts of space travel, television, computers - to name just three of the spectacular products of inventions based on scientific discoveries - proves to most people's satisfaction that science is not nonsense.
But although, in performing his task of formulating theories and testing them, a scientist may need to amass data and possess the skills necessary to operate an electron microscope or to programme a computer, these skills of themselves do not make a scientist. It is possible for people who possess these skills to appear to be speaking with the voice of science when actually they are speaking with the voice of dogma. Genuine scientists, as well as those who are only skilled in the use of the tools of science, can lapse from the high discipline of scientific methods and begin to pontificate. To the general public it sounds like science and they are misled.
The difference between adopting a scientific outlook in the Popperian sense and an inductive one may sometimes seem very slight, but it is usually far-reaching in its consequences. A good example is the relationship between housing conditions, particularly overcrowding, and the intellectual performance of children at school, allegedly discovered by the authors of From Birth to Seven (Ronald Davie et al.), the second of the `longitudinal' studies of all the children born in the United Kingdom in one week of 1958. The fallacy inherent in the conclusion was cleverly exposed by Tyrrell Burgess, a fellow-disciple of Popper, in New Society (1975). As the argument is rather subtle and as there are probably many unexposed instances of the same kind of fallacy, I propose to go into the matter in some detail.
In their book the authors had written: `Poor housing is often mentioned as one of the contributory causes of school failure.' They then quoted the following from Professor R. N. Titmuss's introduction to the 1964 edition of R. H. Tawney's Equality: `We delude ourselves if we think we can equalise the social distribution of life's chances by expanding educational opportunities, while millions of children live in slums, without baths, decent lavatories, room to explore and space to dream.' Having dropped these prestigious names the authors duly found that over the country as a whole `the effect of overcrowding (defined as more than 1.5 persons per room) was equivalent to two or three months' retardation in reading age at age 7'. Surprisingly to them the effects of shared or absent basic amenities (hot water, indoor W.C.s, etc.) was much more - nine months retardation. By juggling the figures and taking into account family size, the retarding effect of overcrowding was brought up also to nine months. From this the authors drew their very definite conclusion: `The results have demonstrated clearly the relationship between poor housing conditions and overcrowding on the one hand and on the other educational performance . . . at the age of seven'.
However, what they did not mention, although they were contained within their own results, were other figures which Burgess extracted to fuel his fire. These show that, while Scotland as a whole contains the greatest percentage of children from overcrowded conditions (39.2 per cent compared with London and the South East's 13.4 per cent,, and Eastern England's 6.6 per cent), it also produced considerably the best reading results: 40 per cent good readers compared with 31 per cent for each of the two areas I have singled out, and 28 per cent for Wales, which was the worst reading area although one of the least overcrowded (8.7 per cent). And Scotland was no flash in the pan. The second and equal third most crowded (Northern and North West) were second and third for the percentage of good readers. The statistics of this report admittedly do not exclude the possibility that bad home conditions are incompatible with good reading ability (nor, to take a frivolous example, do they exclude the possibility that boys called Robert are never good readers). It is admittedly possible that the 40 per cent of Scottish good readers came only from the 60.8 per cent of homes that were not overcrowded. In Wales, on the other hand, that assumption - that all the overcrowded children were bad readers - would still mean that 7 out of every 8 of the bad readers (63.3 out of 72 per cent of bad readers) would have come from the 91.3 per cent of the homes that were not overcrowded. In the case of an overwhelming majority of bad readers therefore, overcrowding could not have been a factor or link. Nor could there have been in their case any `relationship between poor housing conditions and overcrowding on the one hand and on the other educational performance' as the authors had claimed. And even in Scotland at least a third (20.8 out of every 60) of `bad' readers must have come from `good' homes.
Clearly what the authors had done was to extract their own preconceived conclusion from the mass of data they had accumulated. They claimed that their data confirmed their theories when what they should have done was, as Burgess pointed out, to have formulated their hunches in a form of a precise theory such as `there is a rate of overcrowding x at which y per cent of children failed to reach a "good" standard r'. This could have been tested, and on the evidence they had already accumulated would have been found to be false.
The authors, steeped in the idea that all one has to do is to look for evidence to confirm one's hunches, genuinely could not see the force of Burgess's criticism. David Donnison, then Director of the Centre for Environmental Studies, had written in the foreword to their book: 'The patterns glimpsed in the National Child Development Study are so deeply embedded in this country's economic and social structure that they cannot be greatly changed by anything short of equally far reaching changes in that structure.' Evidently they all had their eyes fixed in this one direction. In replying to Burgess, they still maintained that `to expect schools to cope with this situation [by implication `the situation' was: being expected to teach reading successfully in the face of bad home conditions] unaided by other agencies and by improvements in social conditions is to impose an unreasonable and impossible burden and to fly in the face of virtually every piece of research on this topic'.
I thought an analogous case might help them and I cited the fight against tuberculosis, a disease universally regarded as fostered by overcrowding and other unhygienic conditions, although when most rampant it had not only spared many of the poor but also claimed its victims among the well-to-do. Yet, by tackling the disease itself and its means of spread and by early detection and treatment, it has been possible almost to eradicate it from this country (except in areas where it is constantly being reintroduced from abroad) in spite of the fact that poverty and overcrowding have not been abolished.
The holistic outlook, not very different from the revolutionary outlook, tends to encourage the adoption of vague ideas such as that bad social conditions are the cause of (or a contributary cause of - it makes little difference) failure to read. And you can easily find some facts to confirm it - just as you could confirm the theory that wealth is the result of winning the pools. It is again a case of the swans. The authors were so busy counting their white ones that they ignored the black ones that were staring them in the face.
If they had been right in their conclusion, then the consequence must be that it will take a very long time to achieve any substantial improvement in reading standards - as long as it will take to eliminate overcrowding and, provide universal basic amenities, or, if Donnison is right, even longer - until the country's whole economic aid social structure has been changed. But what their results actually show is that overcrowded home conditions are not a factor in the poor achievement of many children, and that in some areas most of the children who in fact perform badly are not overcrowded. Their results therefore suggest that it may be possible to improve the achievement of all children in spite of continuing bad conditions. Even the dissemination among teachers and parents of this piece of knowledge alone would probably immediately help children who are at school now (whereas the Donnisons of this world cannot hope to benefit the present generation of school children). For there is abundant evidence from other sources that children's attainments closely match teachers' expectations. So long as educational sociologists tell teachers that they cannot expect good results from children from poor homes, so long will many teachers not attempt what they are told is impossible. Burgess's argument, of course, does not detract in any way from the need to improve bad housing conditions. But the case for doing this is easily made on its own account and does not require the help of a bogus educational theory.
Burgess commented on the quotation from Donnison as follows:
"This kind of analysis is typical of educational sociology - particularly the conclusion that there is a 'combination' or `cycle of deprivation' which means that you cannot change anything unless you change everything. The practical consequences of these `findings' have undermined the search for effective solutions to grave social problems and encouraged the view that schools are helpless victims of an independent and destructive social process. Not only are the poor trapped in a cycle of deprivation, but the agencies that might help them are trapped in a cycle of impotence."
The 'findings' of some educational psychologists have had a similar undermining effect. Professor Denis Stott points out the fallacy in the assumption of `disability-producing deficits' as explanations of poor school performance - dyslexia and hyperactivity are the best-known examples. These deficits, he says, `have become an academic myth - a myth convenient to the college academic and the school psychologist because it ... provided them with a professional mystique ... convenient to parents because it absolved them from the shame of having a dull or retarded child, and convenient to the teacher because it excused what looked like teaching failure'. These mythical deficits (presumably in the central nervous system) have been assumed as the only explanation of poor academic performance in children whose nervous systems are, by any other test, intact. (Winston Churchill would, by modern standards, have been `deemed' hyperactive and a suitable case for treatment; and Einstein was so late in learning to talk, according to Jeremy Bernstein, that his parents were worried that he might be mentally deficient!)
It would not be true of course to say that all sociologists and educational psychologists think like the Birth to Seven authors. It just seems like it. one can hardly open a journal without catching a sociologist in the act of white-swanning. I open the Guardian and find Nicky Hart from the Department of Sociology of the University of Essex, listing, quite rightly, some of the many ways in which the vital statistics for social class V (unskilled workers) are throughout life markedly worse than those for class I (professional and managerial). 'These differences in life chances', Hart says, `reflect the distribution of material advantage in Britain' and he makes it clear that he means by this that material inequality is the cause of these differences. one can be quite sure that it is not the only cause by virtue of the fact that the life expectancy of women in each social class is so consistently greater than that for men in the same class. Not even a male chauvinist pig could allege that women enjoy a marked 'material advantage' over men in their own class. Other factors must be involved; and there is much evidence that cultural habit is more important in this regard than material wealth. Just to take one fact to support this contention: the risk of serious respiratory disease in the first two years of life is increased by half for a child whose mother smokes and doubled if the father does also. Smoking is much more prevalent among young peopleit in class V than in classes I and II and cannot be called material deprivation.
My second example of unreason masquerading as science concerns the distinguished biologist, the late C. H. Waddington, formerly Professor of Animal Genetics at Edinburgh, who at the end of his life wrote a book, published posthumously, entitled Tools for Thought.
In it, Professor Waddington makes a specific reference to Popper, but at the same time makes it clear that he does not begin to understand the force of Popper's ideas: `Karl Popper argued that the real method of science is not to try to verify statements, but to disprove them. A surprising number of scientists, including very successful ones, have expressed agreement with him.' This is a mis-statement of Popper's position. Waddington omits the very first step - the hypothesis, the bold conjecture. He goes on: ` ... suppose we have a hypothesis like "if a match is put to twigs a fire starts" ... sometimes the fire does` not start, the twigs are wet, or something; and this does not completely disprove the suggestion that matches have something to do with starting fires.' This is a case of careless and unprecise formulation. The original hypothesis is definite `a fire starts', but in order to make Popper look silly, he changes it when he talks about disproof to `something to do with starting fires', a different and vaguer proposition. `The mistake made by both sets of philosophers', he goes on, ` - those who asked for verification and those who would settle for falsification - is that they demand 100 per cent certainty: and that is something we can never have in the real world.'
I can only describe this argument as silly. Waddington does not seem to have made any effort to discover what either set of philosophers is talking about. Popper, of course, has stipulated that hypotheses must be formulated clearly, and if the hypothesis is so wide though clear as `a lighted match will always ignite a bunch of twigs', then one failure does, quite properly, falsify it. one then tries again, perhaps specifying the degree of dryness and thickness of the twigs, type of wood used, the absence of draught, temperature of the air, etc. one pursues this until one is unable to refute it. That is all that Popper is saying. Now Waddington goes on to give, as examples of how silly the philosophers are, that when `Mendel discovered the laws of heredity he was not trying to disprove them'. This is of course true; but what are now known as the Mendelian laws were the bold conjectures (the step that Waddinton omitted from the process) which invited refutation. As it happens the theory has withstood all attempts to refute it and so is generally accepted.
In his introduction to the book, Waddington goes more seriously astray through not having made an effort to understand Popper's theory of the growth of knowledge and the function of social science. He starts off well enough: `We have been trained to think, or have accepted as commonsense, that what goes on around us can usually be understood as some set of simple causal sequences in which, for instance, a causes b and b then causes c, then c causes d and so on. This is only good enough when a causes b but has very little other effect on anything else, and similarly the overwhelmingly most important effect of b is to cause c. Many of our own individual actions still have this character.' So far so good. But, `The change which has occurred, or is occurring now, is that the effects of human society on their surroundings are now so powerful that it is no longer adequate to concentrate on the primary effects and neglect all secondary influences.' And later: 'No powerful action can be expected to have only one consequence, confined to the thing it was primarily directed at.' But it never could. Clearly he has never considered the house-buying example (page 10). a practically never does nor did cause only b. The upshot of Waddington's argument is that things are now so complicated that we must use the new 'powerful' tools of systems-analysis allied with the inevitable computer.
The conclusion is wrong and if put into effect would be disastrous because it ignores the difference between human society and complex combinations of such things as industrial processes. For the latter systems-analysis is highly successful. The technique was evolved during the second world war and was successful then, even though it involved manipulating human beings, because in the circumstances of war their individual aspirations could be ignored. The purpose of the whole enterprise was to win battles. But cities and nations have no purpose in this sense and the individual aspirations of their citizens cannot be ignored. It would be a centralising of power not just in human hands but in the computer's hands, and, as has been said before, although it is easy to centralise power it cannot be wisely wielded, the reason being that the computer cannot be informed of all that knowedge in all those individual minds which is essential for the wise wielding of power.
Any attempt to do this would be up against the same objections as are being rightly made now against C.O.B.A. for the motorways. The authorities would be calling on a private line to God. It would be an attempt to answer criticism with complexity.
Rupert Crawshay-Williams has told of the setting up of the Metalogical Society in 1949 by Professor A. J. Ayer, with the object of getting philosophers and scientists together. He said that the eventual fading out of the society was in part due to the fact that the scientists tended not to recognise as their own the aims and methods which the philosophers attributed to them and this was despite the fact, he says, that 'they certainly accepted Karl Popper's famous denial of the traditional theory that scientific method uses induction'. He went on that 'The philosophers (including Popper) assumed that the task of science was to discover . "absolute-all" statements.' And he gives an example of this as 'metals expand when heated' and later mentions, to refute this statement, the new welded railway lines which do not expand when heated. This incredible muddle of imprecision is strongly reminiscent of what I have just quoted from Waddington; and one cannot help wondering whether he was the scientists' spokesman. The statement 'metals expand when heated', with no mention of conditions, is like Waddington's 'something to do with starting fires'.
It is in a way typical of what has gone wrong that it should be thought that systems-analysis is the answer. Here is something successful in war but not directly applicable to peacetime human problems. on the other hand war-time lessons of universal applicability have been ignored. Professor R. V. Jones describes how it was proposed that our heavy bombers should be fitted with equipment to prevent losses from icing-up; but the proposal was dropped when it was realised that more bombers would be needed to make up the loads lost by the weight of the de-icing equipment and that more bombers sent out would mean more shot down. It was calculated that the extra number lost to enemy action would be significantly greater than the number that could possibly be saved by prevention of icing. The fitting of the equipment would have increased casualities rather than saved them. (Just as motorways cause more casualities than they save.) Professor Jones commented: `This is an example of a phenomenon where an action can have the opposite effect from that intended, and a lesson always to be borne in mind by politicians and administrators.' Jones was one who did not suffer from tunnel-vision but, as we have seen, his lesson has not always been borne in mind.
The attraction of magic machinery and the over-emphasis on the large scale has obscured another war-time lesson pointed out by R. V. Jones. The station commander at Tangmere during the flying-bomb assault had asked one squadron commander how he succeeded in getting twice as much work out of his squadron as did the other two. The answer was that this particular squadron was organised on the old system that had operated throughout the Battle of Britain. Each pilot had his own aircraft which was serviced by a devoted ground crew who regarded themselves as part of a team with the pilot. His victories were their victories. The system was extravagant in ground crews; and one of the earliest results of 'Operational Research' was to show that substantial savings could be made by changing to a kind of central garage system into which each aircraft was sent after each operation and from which each pilot could draw a serviced aircraft. The other two squadrons at Tangmere had changed to the new system. There were a number of snags to it, Jones recalls, but the main one was the loss of the team spirit which in the old individual crew system 'somehow drew substantially more work' out of the ground crew when emergencies cropped up. 'Since this is rarely quantifiable', Jones comments, 'it is usually not taken into account by any plan to improve administrative efficiency.' Computers can only compute measurable quantities. Inevitably they leave out of account what is not measurable. Our science may thus blind us to what is not measurable but not necessarily unimportant.
On the whole, in my own profession of medicine, we have I think managed to avoid the main conceptual mistakes I have outlined because our chickens usually come home to roost rather fast, a situation that is unlike that in, for example, the civil service where the authors of an idea have usually retired or moved elsewhere by the time the effect of their actions has become apparent. In particular we are from the start taught to regard as a vice the special form of solutioneering open to us (and which we are constantly tempted by patients to indulge in), that is embarking on treatment before making a diagnosis. once led into that trap, one is liable to find oneself unable to distinguish between the unintended effects of treatment and the unidentified disease. This again tempts one to indulge in adjustments to the treatment in a manner analogous to Popper's unplanned planning.
To doctors the making of a diagnosis is always tentative, it is a hypothesis which is open to refutation and if refuted must be changed. From the very start of our careers, we cannot help realising that nothing is certain. We can never be absolutely sure of the outcome of any treatment or operation. This fact gives rise to great difficulty with the public, who expect certainty and are always pressing doctors to commit themselves and wanting a second or third opinion if certainty is not forthcoming. Unwillingly we are often forced to reveal our conjectures, such as that the possibility of malignancy must be excluded. (i.e. one hypothesis is that this is a case of malignant disease and we will do tests with the object of refuting that theory.) But inevitably the patient's relatives will get the message that the doctors think it is cancer. The tests whose `results' are awaited with so much eagerness by patients and their relatives and received with so much disappointment when `negative', are again attempted refutations.
A British doctor sees his immediate diagnostic task as one of excluding serious, that is potentially lethal or chronically disabling, illness rather than of answering the question 'what is it?', a question which need not be pursued at all if the symptoms rapidly subside. This Popperian, but traditional, approach contrasts with American practice which tends to aim exhaustively for certainty. I think this philosophical difference accounts to a large extent for the fact that we are able to afford a medical service which, for all its faults and gaps, is broadly comprehensive, while the Americans in spite of their wealth cannot.
The British doctor on the basis of a few simple questions, answers, and observations, can in most cases make a provisional diagnosis of this excluding sort and decide either on treatment or on a course of wait and see. Because there is no financial transaction, he can see the patient as often as necessary to check on his original diagnosis and if need be change it, in what may be a series of very brief consultations. If the patient had to pay for each attendance, he would expect more time and more tangible action from the doctor.
The American doctor, aiming at certainty, is always confronted by a patient who wants his money's worth. He has to start with an impressive battery of expensive tests employing the latest technology. The difference of approach is well illustrated by the experience of a friend of mine who was taken ill, with what turned out to be infective hepatitis (jaundice), while on a professional visit to the United States. Before being allowed to see a doctor, he was subjected to the routine battery of tests which, incidentally, did not include either a test of liver function or any examination of the urine. Simply looking at the colour of the urine, without any chemical test, would at least have suggested ithe diagnosis even if it did not clinch it. only after all this was he seen by the doctor, who was about to say that, as all the tests were normal, the diagnosis by process of elimination was influenza, when for the first time he looked at the patient and saw that his eyes were yellow. In this country the doctor would have looked first and no tests would have been necessary except as base lines for measuring subsequent progress.
Something of the American attitude does sometimes obtain in British hospitals, especially in the out-patient departments, where there are no arrangements for patients to be seen frequently and briefly. Doctors there often feel themselves under an obligation to exclude every possibility (to aim for certainty). There is a definite tendency for over-investigation in the form of the ordering of expensive and sometimes (for the patient) unpleasant tests which time may well show to be unnecessary. 'The most valuable diagnostic instrument', a wise doctor remarked, 'is the passage of time.'
But so far as treatment is concerned, medical practice is only now becoming rational. Dr John Todd has rightly written that `the supreme medical error throughout the ages has been to devise treatment from theory and deduce that it must be effective. Until very recently virtually no one compared patients who were given some remedy with those who were not'. And even recent long-term theorising has been suspect. I am thinking particularly about diet, where I believe medical advice has been wrong. A particular example was the recommendation in 1950 of the British Medical Association Committee on Nutrition. I believe the doctors concerned were blinded by their own science. Dietitians have been mesmerised by the analysis of food. So long as sufficient proteins, vitamins, etc. are contained in the food eaten, it has been assumed not to matter how these elements are combined. This was the theory by which they were guided, and they seem not to have looked for contrary evidence, nor even realised the magnitude of the assumption they were making.
They realised that the war-time `national' flour contained nutrients which would be lost if white flour were once more to be the standard; but their opinion was (probably rightly) that these lost elements could be made up because they occurred in sufficient abundance in other foods. They did not look for evidence that the change might nevertheless be for the worse although this was readily available to them in the form of the vital statistics. These showed that there had been a halt during the war years to the previously rapid increase of such diseases as coronary heart disease and diabetes. They did not ask themselves how this could have happened during a period when living conditions as a whole had deteriorated. Their mistake, if as I believe it was a mistake, has been a very costly one in terms of the nation's health.
It has also caused an enormous waste of patients' and doctors' time and unnecessary anxiety. Children and young people frequently suffer from recurrent attacks of abdominal pain. It is usually due to constipation - not to complete blockage but to hard stools which are difficult to propel through the gut. Parents tend to jump to the conclusion that this is appendicitis; and it is right to bear this possibility in mind. Sometimes the differential diagnosis is difficult and the child has to be admitted to hospital for observation. But these attacks are usually relieved over a few weeks by a change to a diet that contains more indigestible fibrous residue.
No importance has been allowed in conventional dietary theory to whether the body has to extract the essential elements from the diet or whether the extraction has taken place before in mill or refinery. Richard Wilkinson has demonstrated that the steadily worsening mortality of men in social classes IV and V relative to classes I and II is associated with differences in diet and not much else. There is no evidence at all that shortage of vitamins or trace elements are causing the deaths of the poor, and they are certainly getting enough calories (often too many) and proteins in their sugar and chips diet (a diet for a nation with ill-fitting teeth, Aneurin Bevan called it). But they are consuming their essentials of nutrition in such a way as to rot their teeth, ulcerate their guts, and clog up their arteries and veins. It is not surprising that excessive concentratipn matters. The only element that we consume from the air we breath is oxygen, the other components are simply breathed in and out again. Yet everybody knows that breathing pure oxygen is quite rapidly fatal. Unfortunately, eating nearly pure carbohydrates is only slowly fatal - after from thirty to sixty years usually, and it has taken us proportionately long to learn the lesson.
Surgeon Captain Cleave has been a pioneer in refuting the conventional medical theories in these matters. He first showed that constipation was due to an over-refined diet and then refuted the orthodox theory that varicose veins, piles, and peptic ulcers were of hereditary origin (or emotional in the latter case) and put forward his own bold conjecture that the first two were the consequences of chronic constipation, but all three due to the same unnatural diet. Gradually these views are becoming acceptable to a conservative profession. Meanwhile Cleave (together with Burkitt) has moved on to an even bolder conjecture that almost the whole range of 'diseases of civilisation' including coronary artery disease, the cause of so many deaths in middle-aged men, is a result of the excessive consumption of refined carbohydrates, i.e. sugar, white flour and polished rice.
This theory is of course impossible to prove. It is also difficult to refute. The same can be said for some of the orthodox theories. In such circumstances, in the absence of hard evidence, it is rational to act on whatever seems the best theory. Doctors in general have been inhibited from accepting the Cleave-Burkitt theory because of this persisting belief that theories can be confirmed and that one should not act on them until they have been.
For my part I regard the present generally accepted theory that a high consumption of saturated fats is the principle dietary cause of coronary artery disease as rendered unlikely, if not disproved, by the fact that a hundred years ago, when as far as we know coronary artery disease was uncommon, the average consumption of saturated fat was as high as it is now, while poly-unsaturated fats played a negligible part in the diet of this country until after coronary heart disease began to be common. (This is not to deny that a poly-unsaturated fat diet may be a good treatment for those who already have the disease.) In the absence of definite refutations therefore I opt for and act on Cleave's theory and believe in wholemeal bread, plenty of root vegetables, and a minimum of sugar, indeed a minimum of extracted foods, e.g. whole orange rather than orange juice.
Finally I turn to a medical scientist whose work, while it has had little effect on the medical profession, has to a considerable extent misled the public. It is well known that the statistical researches of Sir Arthur Bradford-Hill and Sir Richard Doll have made a strong case for the theory that something to do with cigarette smoking is the cause of most cases of lung cancer or carcinoma of the bronchus. It is important from the point of view of Popperian theory to note that when they embarked on their research they expected to find confirmation of their hunch that diesel fumes were the primary cause of the recent alarming increase in this disease. But the figures they amassed were not compatible with that possibility. That theory was conclusively refuted. They found that although there were some anomalies, on the whole the incidence of the disease was such that the possibility of getting it was roughly proportional to the number of cigarettes smoked. This does not, of course, prove a causal relationship. It remains a hypothesis. But P. R. Burch, Professor of Medical Physics at the University of Leeds, has obtained a considerable amount of publicity for his alternative theory that lung cancer is hereditary, that the same people have both a hereditary tendency to smoke cigarettes and to suffer from the disease. His theory is supported by rather complicated mathematical analysis in which the incidence of onset of hereditary disease of the kind he postulates is matched with the actual incidence of lung cancer. I do not pretend fully to understand his method. But just as I would criticise an architect whose buildings did not keep out the rain, although I myself could. not design a satisfactory house, so I criticise Professor Burch because his theory is refuted by the facts, even though I do not fully understand how he supports his theory. It is the swans again.
The statistics show that the incidence of carcinoma of the lung in 34,000 doctors who were followed from 1953 to 1965 was considerably lower than the incidence in the general population at the beginning of the study in 1953 and that in the twelve years of the survey it had fallen further, while the incidence in the same age range of the general population had risen. In the same period the consumption of cigarettes by the doctors had roughly halved while the change in consumption over the country as a whole was insignificantly small (Doll, 1972). These facts are simply not compatible with the cause being entirely hereditary unless doctors are considered to belong to an alien race.
Professor Burch has sought to get over part of this difficulty by the hypothesis that 'those who gave up were a self-selected group who were less addicted to smoking: it might be that few of them were genetically pre-disposed to lung cancer'. But Professor Doll had anticipated this suggestion some years previously. He had said (1967): 'If those who stop do so because they lack a genetic factor which causes both a strong desire to smoke and a predisposition to the disease, the fact that they stop will serve only to concentrate the incidence in those who continue, and will do nothing to alter the incidence in the whole group of people who were smoking originally.' This completely refutes Burch's theory and in so doing must be considered to amount to a severe test survived by the smoking causation theory.
I do not at all mean to discredit the genuine scientific work carried out by any one of the people mentioned in this chapter. We all succumb to the temptation to preach; and my only point in selecting these examples is to demonstrate that the most illustrious can err and so to emphasise that the most humble have the right, indeed the duty, to point out mistakes and muddled thinking, whoever may be the perpetrators. Most of the lapses from science made by scientists are cases of white-swanning, they result from the failure to realise the truth of Popper's remark quoted at the beginning of this chapter: 'Of nearly every theory it may be said that it agrees with many facts; this is one of the reasons why a theory can be said to be corroborated only if we are unable to find refuting facts, rather than if we are able to find supporting facts.' In other words it is not enough that there is a lot to say in favour of a particular scheme or theory; what matters is that there shall not be a lot to be said against it.
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