Can anybody do it better than this?
See below the winner of the British Society for the History of Science‘s competition for the best 500 word essay aimed at a general audience answering the question: “Why should anyone need to know about the history of science?” (The winner was Michal Meyer from University of Florida). Can you do it better in 500 words?
Why should anyone need to know about the history of science?
The world we take for granted is built on science. Both the material products of civilization – electricity, atom bombs, cars, computers, the decoded human genome – and the way we think about the world and ourselves lie on foundations laid by science. We are homo scientificus, the makers and the made of this world of science.
It wasn’t always so. How did we get this way? And who and what made us this way? Just as that illustration in biology textbooks showing our hairy hunched-over ancestors gradually straightening, striding out and suffering hair loss gives us a sense of our biological origins, history of science gives us the origins of our ideas and understandings of the natural world. And it does more: it tells us how these ideas changed the way we view the world and allowed us to change the world and ourselves.
Our ever-changing understanding of nature has always interacted with and affected the nature of our society. A machine philosophy helped generate the industrial revolution; the middle class that rose on the back of that revolution created our modern consumer society. The needs of an empire to communicate with itself advanced our understanding of electricity and its manipulation, and built the world-wide web of telegraph cables that knitted the British Empire together in the nineteenth century. Our understanding of the physical microworld combined with the urgencies of war created the atomic bomb of the twentieth century, which in turn led to the new politics of the Cold War.
But as science remade the world around it, it also remade us. The very idea of progress is tightly entwined with the origins of modern science in the seventeenth century. When we talk of controlling the environment – when we build huge dams or create an agricultural revolution to feed the planet’s growing population – we draw on ideas developed during that time, for better and for worse. In the nineteenth century, with Darwin’s theory of evolution, science reshaped the very concept of what it means to be human. That shaping continues to this day.
Today, we often think of science as the final arbiter of what is true and what is false, and as the epitome of reason. The history of science puts science back in the messy contingent world of human beings and their desires and limitations. Choices made and decisions taken in the past make up our present. Understanding the how and why of our scientific world, and the effort – both scientific and non-scientific – it took to fashion that world, offers the best hope of understanding the issues facing us. Issues from global warming to space exploration; from the very nature of progress to what it means to be human.
Just like science itself, the history of science is knowledge for knowledge’s sake and a tool for prying open the world. In a very real sense, the history of science tells us of the world we created and the idea-creating creatures who inhabit it.
Michal Meyer
(see further BSHS’s website)
30 Oct 2006 Thomas
A clear NO – couldn’t have done it better. But – put aside the seductiveness of a very well written text, I don’t think this presentation fits too well with the way we think and talk of science (medicine) in this institution.
“In the beginning there was Science, and Science was Idea(s)” seems to be at the crux of this story. Where is practice, scientific and its inseparability from other social practices that are not just its products? Where is the public engagement – as much more than a ‘consequence’ of new scientific ideas? Where is materiality and materialization?
I agree that the essay doesn’t address the same problems as we are struggling with here. It doesn’t mention public engagement with science explicitly (but on the other hand it is an attempt to engage the public in practice). It doesn’t focus on the material aspects of science either (but on the other hands it takes its point of departure in “the material products of civilization”).
As you say, the essay seems to focus on scientific ideas rather than scientific practices and it also seems to treat science as separable from other social practices. I think you are right, but I am not sure I find this a disadvantage. I rather find it interesting, because I believe this is an essay — and a choice from the side of the BSHS award committee — that signals an upcoming shift in historical sensibilities.
The last 30-40 years intellectual development in history of science has been characterized by 1) a movement away from history of science as history of ideas (history of Ideas) and a corresponding move towards scientific practice, and 2) a movement away from treating science as an independent cultural phenomenon to seeing it embedded with other social practices.
The book that, more than any other, I think, epitomizes these two movements is Steve Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump (1986). It came at the right moment and has had an immense influence on the field; for two decades it has been impossible to think of a graduate course in history of science without Leviathan and the Air Pump on the literature list. It is no coincidence that the book was re-reviewed (in 2000) in the H-Net Retrospective Reviews series of the most important contributions to intellectual history; see here.
But historians shift their attentions and interests (by the way, the 13 October issue of TLS has a wonderful essay called “New ways revisited” by Keith Thomas on the change in historical theorizing and choice of problems in the last 40 years). My own (sometimes pretty fallible, but sometimes not) intuition tells me that historians of science are about to take the history of ideas (even Ideas) and the view of science as a prime mover of social change to their heart again. After all, the BSHS award committee have also been intellectually molded by the same intellectual movement that gave rise to Leviathan and the Air Pump, and can therefore not be suspected of not being familiar with the huge literature on scientific practice and contextual history of science over the last decades.
There is a distinct ‘old-school’ flavour to the essay. It might as well have been written in the 1950s – its tone is almost optimistic, and lacks the critical edge that we have become accustomed to when historians of science (particularly those working with the history of medicine) writes about why they do what they do. This is, I believe, no accident. Historiographically speaking, the history of medicine during the last 30 years have been founded on two movements – a social history of medicine, which employed politics, economy and class in a critique of medical knowledge, that emphasised this knowledge’s complicit relationship with societal power structures; and a cultural history of medicine, which employed a cultural/linguistic analysis taken from anthropology, philosophy and literary theory to critique the epistemological foundations of medical knowledge. Just as the social history of medicine lost steam, the cultural history of medicine is similarly losing critical momentum, because its fundamental insights about ideology/discourse/language already have been absorbed into the general historiographical repertoire.
Historians now are, I believe, struggling with this lack of critical momentum (and have been since the late 90s), to the point of turning the gun on themselves (see Gumbrecht’s writings about the necessity of literary theory for an example – Runias work on presence might similarly be construed as a more positive example of this process, in that it takes the individual scholars experiences as the starting point for historiographical analysis). This essay might then be construed as a part of a restatement of what history of science is and should be, one which does not gain the entirety of its momentum from a critique of scientific knowledge (even if that particular hammer is still in the disciplinary toolbox), but rather attempts to situate scientific knowledge in distinct, multifaceted contexts. In that sense, I agree with Thomas that it might signal a return to a history of ideas – but one which relies on a different understanding of what ideas are.