Lewis Pyenson - Servants of Nature - A History of Scientific Institutions, Enterprises and Sensibilities

Today science is threatened with absorption by technology, in the way that Hellenistic learning eroded under Roman domination. Roman architects and administrators used existing knowledge to produce monuments of temporal authority – roads, aqueducts, markets, and public buildings. The durable monuments of Roman civilization, however, were its laws. Romans used what worked to establish what was right. Abstract truth was an affair for Greek tutors.

The early twentieth-century desire to establish truth was an outcome of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, which led into modern times. But today, echoing Roman sentiment, morality is the watchword. Public servants, for example, are castigated for failing one or another standard of ethical purity. However, since we have no universally accepted notion of goodness, we are surrounded by an appeal to eclectic principles and credos. Eclecticism appears in architecture, with whimsical adornments alluding to diverse precedent. Eclecticism is revealed in the way that orchestras focus on compositions before around 1960, largely bypassing living composers. In the world of letters, all expressions have been called into question. The evidence suggests that we have gone beyond the modern.

The ‘postmodern’ approach to ideas has extended to science. In postmodernist quarters, it is sufficient to assert that all ideas are expressions of power relations. In the view of postmodernist commentators, scientific writings are merely codes for reinforcing the authority of people in charge. Knowledge, according to Michel Foucault (1926–1984), is ‘not made for understanding – instead it is made for cutting’. 7 For Foucault, knowledge is about commanding people incisively. It is about separating things. It concerns morality and values. But it has no privileged claim to truth.

Historian of technology Leo Marx locates postmodernism in the political pessimism of the 1970s. In his view, postmodernists reject the Enlightenment ideal of progress and human perfectability. Sceptical in the extreme, they repudiate all large-scale interpretations of culture and history. The human condition is held hostage by vague, universal forces called power relations, borrowing a metaphor from the Scientific Revolution. But ‘unlike the old notion of entrenched power that can be attacked, removed, or replaced, postmodernists envisage forms of power that have no central, single, fixed, discernible, controllable locus. This kind of power is everywhere but concentrated nowhere’. 8 As a result, in Marx’s view, postmodernists focus on microscopic manifestations of power. These writers are typically uninterested in long projects that systematically document large populations. Vague, impressionistic surveys share the billing with narrow, idiosyncratic discussions of printed texts.

How did postmodernism find a place in the history of science? Animated by the programme of social history elaborated during the 1960s, the 1970s saw significant works of scholarship and dedication. The innovations of Merton, Price, and Kuhn found concrete application in analyses of eighteenth-century German chemistry, physics in modern Germany and the United States, French scientific institutions, British natural history, and the general issue of the Newtonian synthesis. But this systematic and time-consuming labour took place in a time of growing anxiety about the material survival of the labourers. A long period of economic contraction coupled with demographic changes resulted in a dearth of academic posts for an entire generation of young scholars. Historians of science fared better than linguists or classicists, but the academy groaned under the mass of men and women hired in the flush of the fat 1960s.

The ingenuous assertions of the 1960s – that war is the root of domestic poverty, that racial prejudice and discrimination against women are structural features of capitalism – derived from a perception of social life; to understand the world one had to measure its demography and political economy. By the 1980s, however, mere writings were held to be at once examples and sources of oppression. Postmodernists claim that the ideas and institutions of modern science are irredeemably sexist; that experiment and mathematics, applied to the investigation of nature, are little more than tricks; that science has more in common with styles of clothing than geometric certainty. The assertions appear in the absence of persuasive documentation, for the role of evidence itself is called into question. Indeed, documentation for postmodernists is mere adornment. The content of footnotes or endnotes matters less than the appearance of having appealed to instance and precedent – a matter of legitimizing authority. 9 Sociologist Bruno Latour has published widely reviewed essays about the scientific work of Einstein and Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) without appealing to their scientific publications. Another postmodernist, Latour’s sociologist colleague Steven Shapin, alleges in a survey titled The Scientific Revolution (1996) that the revolution was a ‘non event’ 10 – even though his examples persuade a reader of the cause in question.

Latour and Shapin are cavalier about evidence because they hold that all knowledge derives from social interaction. In a sympathetic reading of Latour, philosopher Chris McClellan summarizes the extreme form of this contention: ‘everything is actively linked to everything else, while the only form to this seamless cloth comes from the varying durability and strength of the associations that tie it together.’ 11 Shapin’s unusual approach to evidence and reason lies at the centre of a related essay, A Social History of Truth (1994). There he contends that in seventeenth-century England, rhetoric and social standing overwhelmed open discussion of experimental results, and that as a result from its inception modern science has maintained standards and practices at odds with the search for universal truths.

Shapin’s sociology of science has generated unprecedented discussion in the pages of the journal founded by George Sarton, Isis. Historian Mordechai Feingold observed: ‘Shapin’s approach is ahistorical. He denies the historian possession of any privileged knowledge of the past. Meanings and intentions in history are forever lost, and all one can do is concentrate on ideals – “publicly voiced attitudes”…’ Feingold affirmed the importance of assuming that ‘there are historical facts that can either sustain or invalidate interpretations’, and he insisted ‘that a scholar who abolishes boundaries between facts and interpretations must be held accountable’. Feingold again summarized Shapin’s methodology: ‘Notwithstanding the “elaborate” sources Shapin has gathered, all too often his conclusions are shaped by a confusing and inaccurate discussion of the literature, including citing out of context and the occasional cropping of texts.’ Shapin himself replied to the criticism, but without mentioning Feingold by name or providing a reference for Feingold’s review. Feingold then patiently reasserted the importance of evidence and Shapin’s misleading use of it: ‘Thanks to a skillful deployment of rhetoric – copious repetitions intended to drive a message home and the articulation of many key sentences in a subtle and confusing manner – the reader, who has not infinite time to engage in hermeneutics, can easily mistake the conceivable for the actual.’ 12 Although we can imagine a flying horse and may deliver orations about it, the image remains firmly in the realm of fiction.

An exchange about the African roots of Western science also reveals the postmodernist style. Sociologist Martin Bernal has contended that much of Hellenic wisdom derived from Egyptian civilization. Bernal believes that ‘many cultural similarities that could reasonably be attributed to independent invention in distant communities should not be so explained for those between societies as close in time and place as Egypt and Greece’. But in commenting on Bernal’s work, historian of science Robert Palter requires stronger canons of reason. Palter notes that the Egyptians had no mathematical astronomy resembling Greek works, that Egyptian mathematics never attained the sophistication of Babylonian and Greek expressions; and that the traditions of medicine in Egypt and Greece diverged considerably. The point is that Bernal’s desire to demonstrate that Aryan civilization derived from black antecedents displaces a concern for evidence. 13 Postmodernist palladins now ride to the rescue of false assertions. In a spirited review of a recent book that criticized propositions advanced by both Bernal and Shapin, the historian of science M. Norton Wise has declined to admit more than that the critics have ‘doubtless … located some blunders’. Wise prefers to submerge substantive issues in a farrago of unrelated material. 14 By their allegations of wilful misrepresentation, these exchanges are untypical of academic debate in history of science. They point to significant discontent with disciplinary standards.