History of Science: Who Let the Dogs Out?

A talk presented at the Brecht Forum by Cliff Conner, discussing his book A People’s History of Science, January 26, 2006

I’ve been traveling around the country recently from bookstore to bookstore to talk about this book, and I’ve developed what politicians call a “stump speech,” which means that they say pretty much the same thing over and over, everywhere they go. But you’re not going to get my stump speech tonight, because that’s designed for the general reading public, and I know that most people who come to the Brecht Forum form a special category of readers; that is, readers with a particular interest and background in Marxism. After all, the Brecht Forum is the home of the New York Marxist School. So in addition to giving you some idea of what the book is about, I’ll also try to explain what Marx has to do with it.

It’s not explicitly a Marxist book. By that I mean that nowhere in the book do I say that I’m putting forward a Marxist point of view, and I avoided the use of familiar Marxist terminology, like “mode of production,” or “dialectical materialism,” and so forth. Marx and Engels are mentioned a couple of times, but only in passing. I took this low-key approach because I hope that the book will reach a broad readership, and to flaunt its Marxist connections would tend to narrow its potential audience. It would give hostile reviewers a stick to beat it with. Nonetheless, the book is very much a product of Marxist scholarship, and I’ll say more about that later.

But first, let’s turn to the book itself. It has two main purposes. The first has to do mostly with the past, and the second mostly with the present.

With regard to the past, I’m trying to show that science was not created out of the minds of great individuals, but was always a collective endeavor, and that the collective always included large numbers of working people—people who worked with their hands as well as their minds. The traditional way that history of science is discussed is in terms of the contributions of individual geniuses like Galileo, Newton, Darwin, or Einstein. I’m not trying to say that what those famous figures did was useless or uninteresting, but that there is much, much more to the history of science than that. And it’s that “much more”—the collective contributions of many, many anonymous people—that has traditionally been ignored.

Some of the examples that I cite are not of anonymous people—a few of their names have actually been preserved in the historical record. An example is Onesimus, the African slave responsible for introducing the knowledge of smallpox prevention to North America early in the eighteenth century. Onesimus’s contribution represented a major leap forward in the science of epidemiology. But he didn’t create the knowledge he transmitted; that was produced by the experimentation of who-knows-how-many thousands of his African forebears, whose names, of course, are unknown to us. I tell Onesimus’s story in the book, but his name has to represent those anonymous Africans as well. The same is true of Tupaia, a Polynesian navigator whose name we happen to know because it was recorded in Captain Cook’s journals. Tupaia and a few others have to stand in for the many generations of Polynesian navigators whose knowledge of the Pacific enriched the sciences of oceanography, geography, and cartography.

I try to show that rather than talking about individual contributions to scientific knowledge, it might be better to think in terms of occupational categories. And that’s what the book’s subtitle implies: “Miners, Midwives, and ‘Low Mechanicks.’ ” But there are hundreds of occupational groups that could be considered, so these three are again only symbolic of a much larger number. “Low Mechanicks,” for example, was sort of a catch-all term used by the intellectual elite in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to disparage all artisans, or anybody who worked with their hands, for that matter. (I put it in quotation marks to make it clear that the idea that they’re “low” doesn’t come from me.)

Miners were a particularly important occupational group. It’s always been a “3-D” kind of job: Difficult, Dirty, and Dangerous. We’ve just been reminded of the dangers in the tragedy that occurred in West Virginia earlier this month. So as we mourn the deaths of those miners, it’s a good time to recall the collective contributions that miners have made to the sciences. They were the first metallurgists, and metallurgy was a major wellspring of chemistry. As they dug through the layers of rocks, miners contributed a lot of information about the structure of the earth, which gave the initial impulse to the science of geology. And when miners discovered deeply buried fossilized plants and animals and brought them to the surface for further study, that’s how paleontology began.

“Midwives” is to be understood not only as women who participated in the birthing process, but all of the female healers whose folk medicine was, for many centuries, generally way more effective than the practices of the university-trained doctors.

Now, with regard to the argument about the collective nature of knowledge production, I’m trying to show that it applies to two main stages in the history of science: first, in the origins of the very earliest scientific knowledge everywhere in the world; and second, in the origins of the kind of science that’s most familiar to us today—what we call modern science. If we think of science as knowledge of nature, it shouldn’t be surprising to find that it originated with the people closest to nature: those forced by the conditions of their lives to wrest the means of their survival from an encounter with nature on a daily basis. The earliest contributions to science, then, were made over many millennia by prehistoric people, so the book includes a chapter on what hunter-gatherers came to know about nature. As for modern science, I show that the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the work, primarily, of artisans: miners, blacksmiths, sailors, mechanics, carpenters, watch-makers, lens-grinders, and others like them.

One of the traditional heroes of the Scientific Revolution is Francis Bacon, who is frequently credited with creating the ideology of modern science. He was the most effective critic of the old science that was dominant in the universities of his day, the science that looked to Aristotle’s writings for all the answers. That old-fashioned kind of science was dead and lifeless, he said. So what did he propose as a substitute? Well, he said, the only people who are really gaining new knowledge are the artisans, the craftsmen. If educated people want to learn anything new about nature, they’ll have to go to the workshops of artisans to learn it. Well, Bacon was right—that was where the action was in the science of his day. And it was from the workshops of the artisans that the Scientific Revolution developed. But here’s my question—if that’s so, how come the history books pay great attention to Francis Bacon and hardly any attention at all to the artisans he was talking about?

* * *

OK, I said the book has two main purposes. The second one—the one that has to do more with the present than the past—is the subject of the last two chapters, which are titled “The Union of Capital and Science,” and “The Scientific-Industrial Complex.” In these chapters, I discuss how the rise of capitalism has shaped the historical development of science, which has resulted in the paradoxical nature of science in today’s world. On the one hand, modern science is often put on a pedestal and portrayed as the most solid form of knowledge and the most dependable means of acquiring knowledge, but at the same time, the pronouncements of scientists are frequently perceived as utterly untrustworthy, because the scientists are seen as paid apologists for the interests of self-seeking corporations or government agencies of dubious honesty. In other words, the last two chapters of the book examine how capitalism has corrupted science and knowledge by turning them into commodities—that is, into things that can be bought and sold—so that today when you hear a scientific claim, you have to take into consideration who has bought the scientists—who’s paying their salaries.

You’ve heard the phrase “science wars” used to describe a subcategory of the culture wars that are raging in the United States today. What’s at the heart of the science wars is a dispute over whether science should be looked to as a source of unchallengeable authority. In ages past, ruling classes sought to base their legitimacy on one kind of religion or another—in the western world it took the form of the so-called “divine right of kings.” But those days are gone. Ruling groups still appeal to religion as much as they can, and although on the surface it appears that religion still has a lot of political clout—it certainly seems that way in the United States, anyway—generally speaking, the secularization of modern society reached the point at least a century ago where ruling groups felt the need for another source of unchallengeable authority other than religion. And that role was filled by modern science. It served that purpose very well for a while, but in the last several decades, the authority of science has been increasingly challenged. And that’s what the “science wars” are all about. In this book, I join this ideological battle on the side of the challengers. To quote Richard Lewontin, the idealizers of science say: “When Science speaks, let no dog bark.” Well, I say, let’s let the dogs out. In the history that I’ve recounted in this book, by taking the spotlight off the traditional Great Heroes of Science and focusing instead on the social nature of knowledge production, I’ve tried to show that modern science is not a product of unfathomable genius that transcends the puny powers of understanding of ordinary people like ourselves.

* * *

I’ll read a couple of passages in a minute, but first, let me return to something I mentioned at the beginning. I said that the book is a product of Marxist scholarship. A large proportion of the sources I drew on to write this book were Marxist historians and scientists. The two primary influences that stimulated me to write it in the first place were the works of two Marxist scholars named Edgar Zilsel and Boris Hessen, and I explain their contributions to the history of science in detail. Some of the others were J. D. Bernal, his son Martin Bernal, Joseph Needham, Benjamin Farrington, M. I. Finley, Lancelot Hogben, Christopher Hill, Garland Allen, Harry Braverman, Richard Lewontin, Roy Porter, Erwin Ackerknecht, and a couple of authors who are listed on the board of the New York Marxist School, Richard Levins and the late Stephen Jay Gould.

The very notion of “People’s History” is of Marxist provenance. You’re all aware of Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” but I think the first example of the genre—and the one that I presume Howard Zinn took his inspiration from—was “A People’s History of England,” which was published in England in the 1930s by a Marxist historian named A. L. Morton. As I see it, “people’s history” is sort of a spin-off from the more general category of social history. And although many of today’s social historians may not know it, and may not want to acknowledge it, their discipline owes its existence to Karl Marx. It was Marx who gave the decisive impetus to the practice of de-emphasizing the role of kings and generals in making history and bringing the struggles of social classes to the fore. As the well-known French thinker Michel Foucault explained, “It is impossible at the present time . . . to write history without using a whole range of concepts directly or indirectly linked to Marx’s thought . . . . One might even wonder what difference there could ultimately be between being a historian and being a Marxist.”

* * *

When I wrote about the scientific contributions of ordinary working people, the point wasn’t simply to right a historical wrong by giving credit to people who had been unjustly ignored by traditional historians. I had a deeper ideological purpose in mind. The traditional hero worship that raises Newton and Einstein to the skies and ignores almost everybody else is a reflection of an ideological commitment that shapes the way all of us perceive the world, and yet we’re virtually unaware of it—it’s so deeply ingrained in our psyches that we take it for granted. Richard Lewontin, again, has written very eloquently about this; he identifies it as “the priority of the individual over the collective.” The deep commitment to individualism, he says, “is simply a reflection of the ideologies of the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century that placed the individual in the center of everything.”

The opposite of individualism—collectivism—is obviously an important component of Marxist and socialist ideology. Unfortunately, collectivism has gotten a black eye because of the unattractive aspects of the regimes in the Soviet Union and China, in which individuals were often deprived of their humanity in the name of the collective. A healthy socialist ideology would not demand the negation of individualism, but would recognize a balance between the needs of individuals and the collective. If I may be permitted to use a bit of Hegelian jargon, it would acknowledge the “dialectical interpenetration of individualism and collectivism.”

Anyway, my ideological purpose in stressing the collective nature of scientific knowledge production was to take a step toward restoring the necessary balance between individualism and collectivism. Our current culture is afflicted with an out-of-control cult of celebrity—whether the celebrity is a Michael Jackson or an Albert Einstein—and so I was trying to show that in the history of science, at least, we need to go in another direction. I don’t expect what I’ve written here to have a direct impact on popular culture as a whole, of course, but it’s my way of challenging a critical unstated assumption underlying the traditional history of science, and hopefully that will prove useful to the greater project of developing a socialist ideology for the future.

* * *

Now let me close by reading a couple of passages from the book.

(1) Plato and the George W. Bush regime:

Plato’s ideology . . . played a significant role in a two-thousand-year retardation of scientific thought—arguably the greatest damage any scientific elite has ever inflicted on science in all of human history.

Plato was one of the most forthright elitists of all time. It is ironic that he is often lauded as the greatest thinker produced by Athenian democracy, because few have ever harbored a more passionate hatred of democracy. The eminent historian of science George Sarton described Plato, with good reason, as “a disgruntled old man, full of political rancor, fearing and hating the crowd.” Sarton took Plato to task for praising the virtues of despotic Sparta and compared him to American rightwingers during World War II “who carried their hatred of their own government so far that they were ready to admire the Fascists and the Nazis.” . . .

Also ironic is Plato’s public-relations image as a philosopher who personified the ideals of truthfulness and honesty as the highest virtues. In fact, Plato believed that government was only possible on the basis of a lie, and he “devoted his life to the elaboration” of that lie. To uphold that falsehood, Plato urged “that his own fraudulent book [the Laws] should be imposed by the State as the one and only obligatory source of doctrine.” For dissenters who objected to his plans, he advocated the death penalty. This was Plato’s idea of a political utopia, as he spelled it out in the Republic. “Who,” Benjamin Farrington asks, “with any sense of the human tragedy of the twenty-three centuries that separate us from Plato can read his proposals without a sense of horror?”

What was the famous “noble lie” that Plato wanted to impose as the official doctrine of the state? . . . It was the ultimate ideological justification of elitism: that social hierarchies are immutable because they were created by God, and that the ruling class deserves to rule because God made its members out of superior material. The aristocrats are the Golden Men while the farmers and artisans are composed of brass and iron. . . .

Platonic elitism, unfortunately, is not merely a matter of ancient history; it is still drastically afflicting the human race even in the twenty-first century. The architects of American foreign policy who carried out the imperialist assaults on Afghanistan and Iraq are known to be zealous disciples of political philosopher Leo Strauss, an admirer of Plato. “The effect of Strauss’s teaching is to convince his acolytes that they are the natural ruling elite,” says Shadia Drury, who has written extensively on Strauss’s ideas and their consequences. “Leo Strauss,” she continues, “was a great believer in the efficacy and usefulness of lies in politics” who “justifies his position by an appeal to Plato’s concept of the noble lie.” Straussian influence was all too apparent in the Bush administration’s use of deception and blatant falsehoods to convince the American public of the need to go to war against Iraq. “The ancient philosophers whom Strauss most cherished believed that the unwashed masses were not fit for either truth or liberty, and that giving them these sublime treasures would be like throwing pearls before swine.”

* * *

Now let’s jump two thousand or so years ahead to the twentieth century:

(2) John Maynard Keynes and Star Wars:

Because the form, content, and direction of science have been so strongly influenced by immense expenditures on war-related research, knowing why those expenditures are made is essential to understanding the place of science in contemporary America. It certainly has nothing to do with preparedness to combat a genuine military threat. When the bugaboo of “international communism” evaporated with the collapse of the Soviet Union, a new specious justification for maintaining the several-hundred-billion-dollar war budget—“international terrorism”—was quickly conjured up. Random acts of terrorism pose a real (if statistically miniscule) threat to some urban populations, but to think that the architects of American imperialism really fear raggedy groups of Islamic radicals is equivalent to belief in the bogeyman.

An observation by Dr. Helen Caldicott renders the deceit apparent: the U.S. Department of Energy is currently engaged in “a massive scientific undertaking costing 5 to 6 billion dollars annually for the next ten to fifteen years, to design, test, and develop new nuclear weapons,” but “the largest nuclear stockpile in the world can accomplish little in the face of terrorists armed with box cutters.”

Nor is the war spending primarily motivated by a desire for weapons for offensive purposes. Most of all, it is necessary to keep the wheels of the American economy from rapidly grinding to a halt. The Great Depression of the 1930s revealed that the capitalist system, left to its own devices, has become so productive that it is no longer capable of generating enough purchasing power to absorb all the products with which it continuously floods the market. John Maynard Keynes explained to Franklin Roosevelt that to create enough “aggregate demand” to keep the economy from freezing up, governments would henceforth have to create new purchasing power (i.e., new jobs) by engaging in massive deficit spending.

It would not suffice to merely “prime the pump” and then step back to allow the invisible hand of supply and demand to reestablish economic equilibrium. Government deficit spending was destined to become a permanent condition, with deficits continuously increasing. When questioned as to what would happen “in the long run” as governments continued endlessly piling up mountains of debt, Keynes’s famous riposte was, “In the long run we are all dead.”

Not all deficit spending, it was discovered, is equally effective in preventing economic gridlock. Using government money to produce useful things such as schools or housing or highways does not help because it competes with private capital, which puts downward pressure on the number of jobs in the private sector and on the purchasing power they represent. The most effective of Roosevelt’s public works programs were those that produced nothing, most notoriously exemplified by legions of workers with shovels digging holes and then filling them back in again. As useless as such activity would seem to be, it gave workers paychecks that allowed them to buy some of the surplus production without having them create more surplus products. But the apparent wastefulness was an insult to reason, and it was impossible in the American political context to explain that the paradox was an inescapable feature of the capitalist economic system.

In any event, the deficit spending represented by Roosevelt’s public works programs was far from adequate to lift the American economy out of the mire. What ended the Great Depression was the truly massive military expenditure in the run-up to World War II.

After the war the rebuilding of Europe through the Marshall Plan eased the problem of insufficient aggregate demand, but that was a temporary fix. To prevent the world economy from once again lapsing into a terminal crisis of overproduction, governments would have to continuously spend enormous amounts on utterly useless production—industrial output that would not house, feed, clothe, or otherwise benefit anybody in any way. But how could that be justified? The answer was found in weapons systems deemed necessary (wink, wink) for national security. Thus was born the ever-increasing “defense” budget, which has been the primary source of science funding ever since. It is sad to have to conclude that the major portion of Big Science’s attention has been and is still being directed toward a vast exercise in deliberate waste.

The most egregious example of Big Science’s planned wastefulness is SDI, the Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as “Star Wars.”

In the book, I go on to describe the Star Wars program and its consequences, but this seems like a good time for me to stop talking and open the floor for discussion. Thank you.