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

The word discipline carries many meanings, anthropologist Clifford Geertz reminds us, and all of them relate to authority. 15 A leitmotif of the careers of Merton, Price, and Kuhn is a concern with the bounds of authority in science. To explore authority they counterposed the scientific discipline with its complementary social structure, the corporate institution. Disciplines function according to general, abstract rules and principles; they attract adherents who earn their living in various ways, profess manifold credos, and pray to diverse gods. Institutions, however, operate by corporate structure and private covenant; they demand allegiance to a chain of command. At the risk of oversimplification, one might say that disciplines exhibit an abstract solidarity while institutions exhibit a more earthy, organic solidarity. Exploring the authority of disciplines and institutions to elaborate the counterpoint of tradition and innovation, in Kuhn’s words, is the project that has animated historians of science since the 1960s. In this book, we begin by considering scientific institutions.

The postmodernist interlude reminds us that generalization is a privilege of experience. The concrete experiences analysed by historians of science – whose number as full-time, dues-paying, certified practitioners is only in the thousands – have transformed our vision of the human condition. They give us new pictures of the ways that people have seen the natural world, and they have added to a long list of misconceived apprehensions. Despite occasional claims to the contrary, the discipline of history of science is indeed regular, cumulative, and progressive.

Recent debates about whether science expresses truths about the world call to mind an observation by a sixteenth-century patron of natural knowledge, Thomas Gresham (1518/19–1579). Councillor of state, founder of the British stock exchange, and endower of a college that served as the nucleus of the Royal Society and persisted into the twentieth century, Gresham proposed a principle of economics that has been epitomized as: ‘Bad money drives out good money.’ That is, silver currency will inevitably force gold currency out of circulation. The principle applies more generally to governments, trades, and professions. In a parliamentary system of government, the actions of one corrupt delegate can provoke a vote of ‘no confidence’ that will produce new elections. Gresham’s Law suggests why professional corporations are concerned about enforcing standards. If isolated unscrupulous practices shake confidence in, for example, stock brokerage, physical therapy, or dental surgery, people will cease patronizing the enterprise. In the world of scholarship, outrageous or demonstrably false assertions can bring an entire specialty into disrepute. Gresham’s Law has found an application in the history of science through the claims of postmodern writers. 16

An elegy for postmodernism has been written by Frank Lentricchia, professor of English at Duke University and for decades one of the most persistent critics of the notion that ideas have integrity. He confesses that he lived a double life. He read great literature because it transported him with insight and delight. But he taught that ‘what is called “literature” is nothing but the most devious of rhetorical discourses (writing with political designs upon us all), either in opposition to or in complicity with the power in place’. There were two of him. ‘In private, I was tranquillity personified; in public, an actor in the endless strife and divisiveness of argument, the “Dirty Harry of literary theory,” as one reviewer put it.’ The contradiction produced a crisis and a response. Lentricchia finally decided that there were writers, clever and dull, whose writings could be read with pleasure and profit. Some writings, he has concluded, transcend the accidental circumstances of the writer. 17 The observation carries over to science. Some of what we see is conditioned by our upbringing, but seminal syntheses of natural knowledge transcend the circumstances of their formulation.

We do not choose our parents, our mother tongue, or the circumstances of our early years. The world is not made for our effortless gratification. Rather, we respond to the imperatives of existence. The latitude of that response – how much we do by choice and inspiration and how much we are instructed to do by way of convention and authority – is one of the most interesting problems for people who study the course of cultures and civilizations. The following pages will have succeeded if they convey a sense of the many ways that we have seen what is all around us.

Well into middle age the man awoke with a nightmare about honours examinations at his undergraduate college. For years the nightmare took the same form. He was unprepared for the material. Other students streamed towards the classrooms, confident that they had mastered Heine and Heisenberg, Proust and politics, evolution and revolution. He was all at sea, barely familiar with the course syllabi. Before intimations of mortality replaced the fear of inadequacy in the man’s sleeping consciousness, the examination dream evolved a more complicated and quite preposterous plot: though the man held a doctorate, he was returning to complete an undergraduate college degree.

Most people have experienced an anxiety dream about school. The reason is clear: schooling is an unnatural and traumatic event. Children are confided to a stranger for instruction in abstractions. They are required to commit great quantities of facts to memory, largely by the intermediary of the written word. It comes as no surprise that some creative minds have questioned the value of traditional schooling, with its emphasis on examinations. Albert Einstein (1879–1955), in one of his earliest popular writings, found little to commend the traditional German secondary school-leaving examination, the Abitur. The examination was injurious to mental health precisely because it gave rise to nightmares. Furthermore, a good deal of time in the last year of secondary school was wasted in preparing students for the test. 1 Einstein himself never submitted to the Abitur, although he once failed the entrance examination for the Zurich polytechnical institute, and his lover failed the final examinations there.

Einstein studied in Germany and Switzerland, and he may even have attended school briefly in Italy. He could have affirmed that many nations have a hierarchy of schools where citizens are obliged to receive state-sanctioned training. Knowledge may be imparted anywhere, and skills may be acquired on the job, but an academic institution carries an ethos and acts as a crucible for culture. Most important is teaching manners – the essential, outward features of daily life that distinguish civilization from barbarism. Some academic institutions even instruct about what to say at a cocktail reception, which utensil to pick up first at a dinner party, and how to act au courant of the latest intellectual fad. With the eclipse of gentry, priests, and community healers, academic graduates have increasingly been called to officiate in matters large and small.

Whence this prestige attached to the resources controlled by a self-perpetuating guild? The vast majority of academic diplomas no longer lead directly to a post in the workaday world. Today they do not provide evidence, except indirectly, of having mastered the skills required to succeed in business or public affairs. And in an age of sliding-fee structures, social class and family wealth are no longer associated with the crest of a particular institution.

Schools generally are conservative social institutions, and prestige radiates from their traditions, customs, and rituals. They divide the day into class hours and the year into semesters, the calendar of events culminating in colourful ceremonies at which diplomas are conferred. These rituals of formal schooling, which express a way of ordering the world, have entered into the consciousness of a large part of the world’s peoples.