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The Scientific Mind of Ben Franklin

Jerry Weinberger

Had Benjamin Franklin managed to outwit the Grim Reaper, he would have turned three hundred years old in 2006, and would probably have been making plans for another three hundred. Journalist, scientist, diplomat, and vendor of the virtues, Franklin stands in our imagination as the iconic “First American,” the self-made man and proud inventor of the future. His scientific achievements were indeed interesting and impressive—especially his research on electricity and his invention of the lightning rod. But equally interesting, and far more complicated, was Franklin’s idea of science. He was, you might say, our first home-grown Baconian—seeing scientific ingenuity as the greatest delight and truest redeemer of human life.

In 1780, Franklin complained to his friend and fellow natural philosopher Joseph Priestley of the disparity between scientific and moral progress: so badly constructed were most human beings, said Franklin, that Priestley should have killed boys and girls instead of innocent mice in his experiments with mephitic air. How much better than the bratty kids were the results of these experiments. Scientific progress, Franklin commented,

occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born so soon. It is impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried in a thousand years, the power of man over matter. We may perhaps learn to deprive large masses of their gravity, and give them absolute levity, for the sake of easy transport. Agriculture may diminish its labor and double its produce; all diseases may by sure means be prevented or cured, not excepting even that of old age, and our lives lengthened at pleasure even beyond the antediluvian standard.

Later on, in letters to other friends, Franklin trimmed his timetable by a full nine hundred years, saying that a mere one hundred would see modern science produce discoveries of which he could have “no conception.” And he said again that the “art of physic” would advance so far and so fast that mankind would be able to avoid diseases and live as long as “the Patriarchs in Genesis; to which I suppose we should make little objection.”

In these comments Franklin makes it clear that even the antediluvian standard is not insuperable. Franklin says that it’s impossible to imagine the height to which scientific power will rise, and that height would therefore have to include what we could imagine: the conquest of death as such. If Franklin had lived three hundred years but died just today, we can well imagine him lined up next to Ted Williams in a cryonic tube—although doubtless the careful Franklin would have made sure that his head didn’t get knocked off in the process.

Charity and Faith

But why would Franklin comment that he supposes we “should make little objection” to all this? Why any objection at all? The answer is that Franklin knew there was a fly in the ointment of Bacon’s project for the conquest of nature and the relief of man’s estate. As Franklin makes clear in his letters, from the scientific point of view aging and even death are potentially curable diseases. Yet he also knew that from the biblical point of view death is the wages of sin, and that believers in the biblical account of man’s origins and fall might see the Baconian project as a prideful and blasphemous attempt to play God. Franklin’s wisecrack about kids, mice, and mephitic air has a serious and even nasty edge that reminds us of the current debate about stem cell research and human cloning: it makes a lot more sense to be worried about these matters if one believes that human beings are sinful but created in the “image of God” than if one believes we are on our own in this world, suffering, curious, and never to be judged.

Franklin knew perfectly well that the scientific progress he envisioned wouldn’t always jibe with the faithful view of life. In 1751, Franklin published a piece in the Pennsylvania Gazette called “Appeal for the Hospital.” In the Autobiography, Franklin describes his maneuvers on behalf of the hospital project as his most charitable use of political cunning. The ruse consisted of what must be history’s first matching grant. Franklin convinced the Pennsylvania Assembly, including many of its members in no mood for such charitable spending, to pledge money toward the hospital on the condition that the sum would be matched by private contributors. That condition carried the day in the assembly, because the members opposed to the charity thought the private contributions would never be raised, giving them a reputation for virtue without having to the pay the price. Franklin then used the pledge from the assembly to cajole the private donors into giving one dollar when they might otherwise have been asked for two. Thus the conditional clause in the assembly bill, said Franklin, “worked both ways.”

This story puts a charming gloss on the scheme for the Philadelphia hospital, by which Franklin managed to turn the selfish impulses of his fellow citizens to charitable ends. But the original essay in the Gazette also contained a serious reflection on the relationships among charity, suffering, and disease. Franklin argues that the remarkable thing about living creatures is that all, regardless of kind or individual characteristics, are subject to disease. Even Achilles, the ancient poets noted, was vulnerable in his heel. Of all the animals, however, man is unique in being subject to the most diseases, “whether they are the effects of our intemperance and vice, or are given us, that we may have a greater opportunity of exercising towards each other that virtue, which most of all recommends us to the Deity, I mean CHARITY.”

Franklin follows up with three references to the Gospel according to Luke: the story of the Good Samaritan, the story of the rich man and Lazarus, and the story about Jesus and the ten lepers. The lesson to be drawn, says Franklin, is that care of the sick, regardless of who they are, “seems essential to the true spirit of Christianity.” In particular, the story of the rich man and Lazarus shows that “I was sick, and ye visited me is one of the terms of admission into bliss, and the contrary, a cause of exclusion.”

Franklin is here quite delicate: the “exclusion” of which he speaks is condemnation to the anguishing flames of hell. But he immediately gets down to brass tacks when he says that our circumstances are subject to change according to providence, that we should help each other and not harden our hearts against the lowly who are sick lest we find ourselves in their places, and that what we may suffer for hard-heartedness in this world pales before what we might suffer for it in the next. The best form of charity for the sick is building a hospital, where skillful professionals can heal the sick with more than just their devotion. Even the pagans thought that nothing made men more like the gods than helping the sick, and if the pagans felt this way how much more should we expect from Christians, for whom the inclination of duty is enhanced by the sanctions of revelation.

Apart from the rhetoric of self-interest rightly understood that he uses in the essay—the hospital will help others but also help all who give—Franklin clearly and most stirringly appeals to the idea that disease is the occasion for charity, for the practice of which we are rewarded with heaven and for the neglect of which we are punished by the fires of hell.

It is one thing to tend to the sick, even with a hospital and improved methods for alleviating suffering, and quite another to put an end to the very occasion for charity by conquering human disease. One might make the heterodox argument that working toward the technological conquest of disease and death is the highest charity, and that those devoted Baconians who die before the full conquest of death will be resurrected by those who work afterward, with their dead bodies brought skillfully and charitably back to life. One might say that all this is the working out of divine providence. Only such an argument could square the Baconian project, as Franklin understood it, with any belief in the seriousness of Franklin’s piety.

But Franklin knew this argument would be a hard sell to his Calvinist and Presbyterian neighbors. For them, taking salvation into one’s own hands is the essence of the sin of pride. And the Baconian way to self-salvation could be seen as the most obnoxious way imaginable—or at least the most foolish, since the omnipotent God, who has miraculous command over all the motions of nature, has already determined who will and will not be saved at the real end of days.

Faith and Reason

These reflections bring us back to Franklin’s nasty crack about boys, girls, and experiments with mephitic air. To the pious believer, such dark humor is deadly serious, falsely treating man as both a thing and a god, available for use and answerable to no power higher than the scientific will. Without the divine law, every moral slope in the project of science is a slippery one. At the same time, those who think we’re on our own in this world suspect that the believers will use the slippery slope bogeyman, at crucial turns, to butt into and retard the humanistic project of modern science.


More, including description of Franklin's resurgent religiosity at: http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/15/weinberger.htm