"Science is a self-sufficient activity"
About this Quote
“Science is a self-sufficient activity” lands like a neat piece of stagecraft: a short line that sounds comforting, even liberating, while quietly picking a fight with almost everyone who wants science to behave.
Coming from Jonathan Miller - an entertainer who moved fluently between medicine, theater, and television - the phrase isn’t a lab-coat slogan so much as a corrective to how public culture tends to treat scientific work. We like our research with a moral attached: cure this, justify that, deliver progress on schedule. Miller’s intent is to strip away that transactional framing. Science, he suggests, doesn’t need to borrow legitimacy from politics, religion, philanthropy, or even immediate usefulness. It makes its own meaning through method: asking, testing, revising, repeating. That’s the “self-sufficient” part - not arrogant independence, but an internal discipline that generates its own standards of truth.
The subtext is sharper. If science is self-sufficient, then the public’s demand for tidy narratives is a distortion. So is the insistence that every discovery come packaged with certainty, consensus, and a happy ending. Miller spent years translating complicated ideas for mass audiences; he knew how easily science gets reduced to a prestige costume worn by pundits, advertisers, and ideologues. The line pushes back: science isn’t your rhetorical prop.
Context matters: postwar Britain, expanding mass media, and a growing skepticism about “experts” on one side and technocratic overconfidence on the other. Miller’s claim tries to protect the practice from both. It’s also a reminder that science’s value isn’t only what it produces, but what it models: a way of thinking that refuses to be bribed by applause.
Coming from Jonathan Miller - an entertainer who moved fluently between medicine, theater, and television - the phrase isn’t a lab-coat slogan so much as a corrective to how public culture tends to treat scientific work. We like our research with a moral attached: cure this, justify that, deliver progress on schedule. Miller’s intent is to strip away that transactional framing. Science, he suggests, doesn’t need to borrow legitimacy from politics, religion, philanthropy, or even immediate usefulness. It makes its own meaning through method: asking, testing, revising, repeating. That’s the “self-sufficient” part - not arrogant independence, but an internal discipline that generates its own standards of truth.
The subtext is sharper. If science is self-sufficient, then the public’s demand for tidy narratives is a distortion. So is the insistence that every discovery come packaged with certainty, consensus, and a happy ending. Miller spent years translating complicated ideas for mass audiences; he knew how easily science gets reduced to a prestige costume worn by pundits, advertisers, and ideologues. The line pushes back: science isn’t your rhetorical prop.
Context matters: postwar Britain, expanding mass media, and a growing skepticism about “experts” on one side and technocratic overconfidence on the other. Miller’s claim tries to protect the practice from both. It’s also a reminder that science’s value isn’t only what it produces, but what it models: a way of thinking that refuses to be bribed by applause.
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
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