"It seems that this situation is not restricted to science but is more generally human"
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Bloch’s line lands with the dry understatement of someone who has watched a supposedly rational enterprise behave like a very familiar social club. On the surface, he’s widening the frame: whatever “this situation” is, don’t blame the lab coat. The real move is deflationary. Science sells itself as a machine for separating truth from ego, and Bloch quietly punctures that myth by insisting the mess is portable. Put humans in any system with status, scarcity, and recognition, and you get the same patterns: territoriality over ideas, politics around credit, fashionable consensus, blind spots that persist not because the data are unclear but because the people are.
The phrasing matters. “It seems” performs scientific humility while also signaling hard-earned resignation: he’s not theorizing from the armchair, he’s reporting fieldwork from committees, seminars, and priority disputes. “Not restricted” suggests the initial temptation to treat the problem as a pathology of science itself - a comforting diagnosis, because it implies a clean fix: better methods, better training, better norms. Bloch’s subtext is harsher: you can improve procedures, but you can’t proceduralize away envy, insecurity, ambition, or the craving to be right.
Contextually, coming from a 20th-century physicist who lived through the transformation of science into a large, institutional, often militarized project, the line reads like a late-stage correction to the heroic narrative. It’s not anti-science. It’s pro-realism: the reliability of knowledge depends on structures that anticipate human weakness rather than denying it.
The phrasing matters. “It seems” performs scientific humility while also signaling hard-earned resignation: he’s not theorizing from the armchair, he’s reporting fieldwork from committees, seminars, and priority disputes. “Not restricted” suggests the initial temptation to treat the problem as a pathology of science itself - a comforting diagnosis, because it implies a clean fix: better methods, better training, better norms. Bloch’s subtext is harsher: you can improve procedures, but you can’t proceduralize away envy, insecurity, ambition, or the craving to be right.
Contextually, coming from a 20th-century physicist who lived through the transformation of science into a large, institutional, often militarized project, the line reads like a late-stage correction to the heroic narrative. It’s not anti-science. It’s pro-realism: the reliability of knowledge depends on structures that anticipate human weakness rather than denying it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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