Politics & Power Quote by John Desmond Bernal

Bernal is threading a needle between propaganda and denial: politics matters to art and science, but the clumsiest way to admit that is to make the work wear a campaign button. “Effective, but not in a very obvious fashion” reads like a warning to both sides of the culture-war instinct. To the state (and its would-be cultural managers): if you demand overt “usefulness,” you’ll get slogans, not breakthroughs. To the artist or scientist who wants to pretend the laboratory is a hermitage: history still leaks in, shaping what questions feel urgent, fundable, even thinkable.

The real bite is in the pairing of “political confusion” and “prolonged peace.” Bernal, writing in the shadow of world wars and ideological trench warfare, is skeptical of the easy story that turmoil automatically generates genius and stability automatically produces complacency. Confusion can be a stimulant (new alignments, new problems, new patrons) or a solvent that dissolves institutions needed for sustained work. Peace can be a greenhouse for long projects and basic research, or it can dull the appetite for risk by removing existential stakes. He refuses to hand either camp its preferred morality tale.

Subtextually, Bernal is defending complexity as an ethical stance. Creativity isn’t a virtue rewarded by the right political weather; it’s an ecosystem with feedback loops, incentives, and distortions. His insistence that the effect is “not at all certain” isn’t evasive. It’s a scientist’s rebuke to the cultural commentator’s favorite habit: turning messy causality into a clean slogan.