Nobody really knows where the expression “motherhood and apple pie” comes from, but it began life as a simile for all things American – and has come since to mean “all things good”. Cynical folk are apt to use it to characterise the trite outpourings of politicians (usually), when they praise those wholesome ideas and institutions with whose adoption or existence none feels able to disagree. But alas, there is no idea or institution so wholesome that it cannot be vitiated by the touch of government.
Consider the most extreme example - motherhood. In 1933 Adolf Hitler passed a “Law for the Encouragement of Marriage” offering couples loans of 1000 Deutschmarks (nine months’ average income). One child cancelled a quarter of the loan. Four cancelled the debt. “Marriage”, clearly, was not what it was about. Soon there were Lebensborn – where single women “could go” (but were frequently dragged) to be impregnated by SS men.
As Germany’s women were forced out of work and into labour, Hitler announced (1935): “In Germanic nations... both sexes have their rights and tasks, of equal dignity and value. Hence men and women are and have always been on an equal footing.” Nazi endorsement of motherhood was actually a breeding scheme for cannon-fodder; and in the process, “equal rights” justified driving women into legalised prostitution.
So, having shown what a government of monsters could do to motherhood, let us turn to what any averagely venal government can do with multidisciplinarity. In 1918, Liberal politician Richard Burdon Sanderson Haldane, (JBS’s uncle) produced the Haldane Report, which set the rules for the proper arm’s length arrangement between governments and scientists. Scientists alone, it maintained, are best placed to decide what science needs doing. Research Councils were the embodiment of it.
But all is not well with Haldane today. Even the Select Committee on Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills’ Fourth Report said: “The cornerstone of science funding in the UK is the Haldane Principle ... But in the 2007 allocations process the Government has had a significant influence on how this Science Budget will be spent.” So how did political influence get smuggled almost unnoticed into science funding? Through motherhood, apple pie and “multidisciplinarity”.
It all started in the 1970s, when breaking down discipline barriers seemed such a good idea. So it is – see
Soapbox; but the term has become a Trojan Horse for various alien, non-scientific agendas. Paradoxically this has been achieved through the Research Councils themselves, who (at Government behest) set out so-called multi-disciplinary (but in effect “non-disciplinary”) themes to which their funds are attached. One such might be “Environment”; but it might equally be ageing, social cohesion, security, or God forbid, respect.
Any one of these politicised abstractions is a chink through which funding may fall, and so scientists adapt what they do in order to catch what they can. Moreover it is being done in the name of taxpayer accountability; but the result has been to turn research into an agent of political policy. And all it has taken to tempt scientists (and sadly those originally put there to protect them) down the road to legalised prostitution has been the taste and smell of apple pie.