setting
Reading in the old days
04/28/2009 10:09
William J. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. 1989)
This is thought of as a “seminal text” in American book studies. 100 pages in, I can see why. Gilmore died in 1999, while working on a book called Republic of Knowledge. AAS has a typescript from 1998 called “The Regional Book Trade” that might be useful. I wonder if there are archival materials anywhere (Worldcat doesn’t know)?
The interesting thing about this study of books in the 18th century is that it’s about disenchantment and disillusionment. Modernity, Gilmore says, is a profoundly unsatisfying and unsettling state. And it was so from 1785-1830. “History would be a trivial pursuit were it not morally instructive,” he continues. The “new mass culture centered on the printed and written word” that began during and just after the American Revolution has something to tell us about social change in the information age, and also maybe about the dream deferred.
more later…
This is thought of as a “seminal text” in American book studies. 100 pages in, I can see why. Gilmore died in 1999, while working on a book called Republic of Knowledge. AAS has a typescript from 1998 called “The Regional Book Trade” that might be useful. I wonder if there are archival materials anywhere (Worldcat doesn’t know)?
The interesting thing about this study of books in the 18th century is that it’s about disenchantment and disillusionment. Modernity, Gilmore says, is a profoundly unsatisfying and unsettling state. And it was so from 1785-1830. “History would be a trivial pursuit were it not morally instructive,” he continues. The “new mass culture centered on the printed and written word” that began during and just after the American Revolution has something to tell us about social change in the information age, and also maybe about the dream deferred.
more later…
Hall of Science
04/21/2009 13:15
Pseudo-Science
04/13/2009 15:18
“The term pseudo-science was introduced into the history of science by George Sarton and the other founders of the discipline, and it reflects their positivistic convitcion that the history of science is a narrative of the progressive victory of the physical, mathematical sciences over religious, metaphysical, and occult views of nature…In Comte’s account [in Cours de philosophie positive, 1830-42], the decisive epochal break separating the dark ages of religion and metaphysics from the Age of Reason and Enlightenment is the result of the Scientific Revolution and the consequent utilization of science by the intellectual and political elite to master nature and perfect society. “Recent scholarship showing the persistence of ancient traditions of esoteric religion and occult philosophy well into the modern epoch poses a fundamental challenge to these historiographical models—particularly when primary sources show that Bacon, Newton, and other founders of the modern age had a deep reverence for the truths hidden in the myths and symbols of the prisca theologia.” (Preface)
Okay, so starting at the top: pseudo-science assumes there’s a regular, authoritative science that people are being silly, backward, or perverse in trying to evade. This seems clear, looking backward. We believe we understand how science progressed from its primitive roots to its mature, legitimate current form. But, as Conner has shown in his People’s History of Science, that assumption too may be incorrect. And certainly, the people who were driving “science” forward in the early modern period had no roadmap showing them which were the “legitimate” and which the erroneous elements of their studies.
So, we have “natural philosophers” like Bacon, Boyle, and Newton. All of them have classical educations (this may be the main thing that distinguishes them from the “low mechanicks” who produced a lot of the technological innovation leading to new scientific theories, following Conner again), so they presumably believed in some sort of continuity in the “grand design.” This means that, whether they believed in an active, historical god or in Spinoza’s deistic/pantheistic “whatever,” they believed in order. Newton was looking, after all, for a universal law of gravity; not a local one.
Next, there’s the question of periodization. A split between a dark age and an Enlightenment makes sense, for the enlightened. What about everybody else? I suspect the two designations obscure a lot of change that may have been happening in the lives and societies of regular people during the “dark” ages; just as they hide the fact that a lot stayed the same for most people after the Enlightenment. Tied to this is the idea of learning to “master nature and perfect society.” For whom? And, for whom?
The fact that superstition persists to this day doesn’t necessarily challenge the scientific world-view, or the history of science. I hope these articles aren’t going to stop with a suggestion that because these early scientists were Christians, there’s something to it. On the other hand, the idea that they may have found social, moral, and even scientific insights in esoteric and mythological documents that were at the time part of the classical canon doesn’t seem far-fetched. The implications of their scientific discoveries (or systematizations of other people’s discoveries, if you go with Conner’s implication that the elite scientists’ role was mostly communicating the discoveries of technologists and trying to create over-arching, generalized natural philosophy out of them) were often scary; because they directly challenged the “truths” that formed the basis of early-modern society. So they’d be expected to try to reconcile their scientific insights with those of “other magisteria.”
But the question whether there are in fact other magisteria is one of those “prefiguring” issues Hayden White describes in Metahistory (which I’m also reading -- stay tuned for a post). Assuming there’s a unity (in scientific knowledge, general human understanding of the universe, and particularly history) means we’ve already made an interpretive choice. Whether the choice is for comedy or tragedy doesn’t really matter. The only way out (for Smith, and maybe for Northrop Frye, who he draws on) is satire.
But there is evidence the new scientists had a sense they were doing something fundamentally different. John Friend (1675-1728) was a disciple of Newton’s and wrote a history of science in 1725-6 in which “the mystical religious outlook of the Paracelsians could not be tolerated. Friend rejected Paracelsus as an idle systematizer whose whole cosmology and religious-vitalistic outlook toward nature were the very antithesis of the new science.” (7)
John William Draper (1811-1882) see his History of the Intellectual Development of Europe (1863) and History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874)
See also Andrew Dickson White, The Warfare of Science (1877) This is also a partial transcript of religion vs. “atheism” in the form of science, so it serves 2 purposes.
These people might be useful for a little “Who’s Who in the History of Atheism” if I wanted to do such a thing…whether or not they’re atheists is a possible issue (but is it, really?)…
James Joseph Walsh (1865-1942) made the case for religion. His 1907 book The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries claimed that the church had done much to encourage medicine, including supporting anatomical studies in the Italian universities and establishing hospitals.
See also Herbert Butterfield, “The Whig Interpretation of History,” (1931)
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…
Golden Bough
04/10/2009 09:42
No matter. There’s a woodland lake in Nemi, 18 miles southeast of Rome. The lake is in the crater of an extinct volcano. 1928 lake lowered and two of Caligula’s pleasure-barges discovered on bottom. A few miles away is a larger lake (Albano) in another old crater. (The Turner painting takes place at the gates to the underworld, another crater lake called Avernus, near Naples.)
The lake is called a mirror, but close up, its waters are a warm greenish-blue. The crater is a horseshoe, open at the south end. There’s a flat area to the north – part of the caldera floor that the lake doesn’t cover, and on the eastern and western sides, the hills rise a couple of hundred meters immediately. On their lush green sides two hill-villages are visible overlooking the lake.
Frazer says the lake was called “Diana’s Mirror” by the ancients. Frazer points to a necessary connection, a “subtle link …between the natural beauty of the spot and the dark crimes which under the mask of religion were often perpetrated there.” (1:1) The lake “lies so deep down in the old crater that the calm surface of its clear water is seldom ruffled by the wind.”
The shrine was on the north side, between the lake and the town of Nemi. Diana Nemorensus (“of the Woodland Glade”) had her temple here. “On the north and east it was bounded by great retaining walls which cut into the hillsides and served to support them. Semicircular niches sunk in the walls and faced with columns formed a series of chapels…On the side of the lake the terrace rested on a mighty wall, over seven hundred feet long by thirty feet high, built in triangular buttresses…the temple itself was not large…solidly built of massive blocks of peperino, and adorned with Doric columns…cornices of marble and friezes of terra-cotta…enhanced by tiles of gilt bronze.” (1:3)
There was also a temple of Isis hidden in the woods. (1:5)
“beechwoods and oakwoods…had not yet begun, under the hand of man, to yield to the evergreens of the south, the laurel, the olive, the cypress, and the oleander, still less to those intruders of a later age…the lemon and the orange.” (8)
“In the sacred grove there grew a certain tree round which at any time of the day, and probably far into the night, a grim figure might be seen to prowl. In his hand he carried a drawn sword, and he kept peering warily around him as if at every instant he expected to be set upon by an enemy. He was a priest and a murderer; and the man for whom he looked was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he retained the office till he was himself slain by a stronger or a craftier.” (9)
“the background of forest showing black and jagged against a lowering and stormy sky, the sighing of the wind in the branches, the rustle of the withered leaves under foot, the lapping of the cold water on the shore, and in the foreground, pacing to and fro, now in twilight and now in gloom, a dark figure with a glitter of steel at the shoulder whenever the pale moon, riding clear of the cloud-rack, peers down at him through the matted boughs.” (9-10)
“According to the public opinion of the ancients the fateful branch [that the priest was “defending” at the sacred oak] was that Golden Bough which, at the Sibyl’s bidding, Aeneas plucked before he essayed the perilous journey to the world of the dead” (11) (except, again, this happened at Avernus. The Cumaean Sibyl lived 22 miles from Naples, not 18 miles from Rome).
“during her annual festival, held on the thirteenth of August, at the hottest time of the year, her grove shone with a multitude of torches, whose ruddy glare was reflected by the lake,” (12)
This is a great setting, and the event that Frazer describes in the early pages of the Golden Bough is great! I’m thinking of using this in a dream sequence in my new story. I like the idea of pulling a scene from Frazer’s book, if I’m going to write a story that takes place partly in Victorian England, and deals with mythical characters. The Victorians were really into comparative mythology, and it bordered on a whole pile of stuff we now think of as pseudoscience, but which they took pretty seriously. More on that, later...
