People's History of Science
04/11/2009 11:33
I came upon this by accident in the Keene State College stacks (never underestimate the power of browsing on either side of the title you were looking for!). As the title suggests, Conner presents the progress of science as the work of regular people, solving problems in their day-to-day lives and crafts. He’s definitely in the tradition of Zinn, who called it “a delightfully refreshing new look at the history of science” (I noticed on Amazon there’s a “people’s history of the world,” blurbed by Zinn, that might also be something for me to take a look at).
Midway through the second chapter, I decided I needed to buy this book. So these are my thoughts on the first two chapters. I’ll read the rest when my own copy arrives (so I can write in it). Maybe at that point, I’ll look at the controversy that apparently surrounded this “revisionist,” “proletarian” history.
This book is filled with not only a really interesting argument about history, but some great, overlooked details of the past. In his introduction, Conner mentions that when American plantation owners decided to grow rice, they relied on their African slaves not only for labor, but for the entire technique they employed in the Carolinas and Georgia. This is a really interesting thought: that the slaves were the masters of this technology, intellectually (as well as morally) superior to the whites who’d enslaved them. Conner goes on to say that smallpox inoculation was widely practiced in Africa, and was introduced to America by a slave named Onesimus, and to England by a farmer named Benjamin Jesty.
Conner believes with Karl Popper, that knowledge “for the most part advanced through the modification of earlier knowledge.” This seems to be demonstrated by the story he tells. I can’t tell, yet, but I think he’s going to say that Kuhn’s idea of paradigm shift is too top-down, and doesn’t reflect the way knowledge works outside of the academy. This seems like a legitimate point, so far…
One of Conner’s heroes of “anti-elite” science seems to be Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (Paracelsus). I’m looking forward to reading that chapter, and I expect to find some good story material there. It doesn’t look like he delves too much into medicine, but I’ve already got some sources for that. He says the “imperialism of physics” really took off in the 20th century (especially with the Manhattan Project), and reminds us that “the appeal of neutrality [in “objective” academic science – see Haskell] operates in support of the status quo, which is underpinned by …assumptions of which the scientists themselves are often unaware.” (12) Conner also says the practice of “rigidly separating the histories of science and technology serves to reinforce the fallacious notion that science arose from the realm of pure thought, floating in the clouds above the world of mundane human pursuits.” (15) In addition to the obvious political results of this view, I think it reinforces the Platonic/Cartesian dualism that’s still at the center of most of our philosophical problems in the world today.
Conner says his thesis is that “artisans contributed not only to the mass of empirical knowledge that furnished the raw material of the Scientific Revolution, but the empirical method itself.” I think this is a modest claim, it already seems in the first chapters that he’s demonstrating more than this.
One element where Conner’s account doesn’t seem to square with his claims is the repeated declarations of early scientists that they got their ideas from artisans and regular people. In almost every account in the early chapters, Conner says the “scientists” history has credited with major discoveries (Jenner, William Withering, etc.) had pointed to the common people who were the source of their insights. So there’s something more complicated going on here. The “scientists” are definitely taking common empirical knowledge to a different place (the Royal Society) where different rules of legitimacy, credit, and value apply (sometimes not to their benefit, cf Jenner). So there’s a class thing happening in the present, as these ideas are moved from the popular to the elite venue. But then, there’s a (deliberate?) process in the recording of these “discoveries” that focuses entirely on the elite scientists, and completely forgets the common people they were careful to credit. There’s almost a sense that “it’s not Knowledge until the Royal Society says it’s Knowledge,” so why bother talking about the ultimate source? But is this due to the scientists, the Society, or the historians? Seems to me, a huge part of it is the historians. So I’m not sold on Conner’s claim that the problem is that “the history of science has been shaped not by historians of science but by scientists themselves.” (17) It seems more likely to me that historians recognized the extreme importance of science in the social change they were recording, and were completely aware of what they were doing.
Conner says social historians who present “bottom up” views have managed to broaden “the social context in which historic events have been understood,” but he warns that often they’ve failed to abandon “the point of view of the dominant social classes.” They tell the stories that “history” has judged are meaningful, from the bottom. Not the stories that mattered at the time, on the bottom. But he does point out that in the “nascent capitalist economy, the benefits of increased productivity were no to the producers but to a privileged few whose access to capital allowed them to gain control of the productive process. The artisans who forfeited their knowledge [to Royal Society members who “liberated” trade secrets as self-proclaimed benefactors for the world] were for the most part eventually forced into dependency as wageworkers.” (22) This is one of several places in the early pages, where Conner got me thinking about the current “intellectual property” debates.
In the second chapter (on pre-history), Conner suggests that the shift from a foraging way of life to agriculture may have been the original “Fall,” forced on the ancients by increasing human population density and a corresponding decrease of food sources. Clearly, in this scenario, there would always be the option of walking away from the center, to find a new wilderness. Why, then, did many choose to stay? (cf the end of Blade Runner, when the hero leaves the distopian Los Angeles, and as the credits roll is flying over the primeval forests of the Pacific northwest. If they were always there, why stay in LA? This is the big question hidden in the movie) Conner points to a really important issue: the early agriculturalists would have been the “gatherers,” in the hunter-gatherer world. Women, he says. But also children and the old. This would be true of much of neolithic technology, metals were probably discovered in kilns. Pottery was not hunters’ work. Agriculture and technology was developed by those who stayed behind. Vulcan was a woman.
Discussing the “brain vs. hand” controversy, Conner takes the issue back to Engels’ essay on The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man. Engels called the “cerebral primacy” a “deep-seated social prejudice related to the class position of professional thinkers and their patrons.” (32) It’s interesting (and very useful to me) that there was so much thinking about this type of thing in Victorian England. Not to mention comparative mythology, mysticism, and all the “dead-end” science and meta-science that didn’t end up as part of the admittedly “tunnel-vision” path of science Conner is focusing on here. Now, what I have to do is pick out the actual pieces I’m going to use…
