Back to the Medieval: Is the United States Stuck in a Decline Narrative?

Could this happen to us?! Probably not, but it's fun to ask anyways.

Yesterday, I read in the Badger Herald that the Synchrotron Radiation Center (a particle accelerator) at the UW-Madison will close on March 7.  The culprit in the lab's closure was federal funding cuts; while the lab was able to scrap by on short-term cash from the UW, it failed to find other sources to keep the lab in operation.  Now, the closure of significant research labs due to federal cuts is nothing new, but this story encapsulated the overall trend of declining federal funding for basic scientific research.  While this current dysfunctional, anti-science Congress might be a passing phase, I wanted to place the trend in historical perspective.  Specifically, I wonder what might happen if the United States collectively decides that basic science is "just not worth it" and keeps on its current path.  Could American science be entering a decline phase, much like the status of Greek natural philosophy during the fall of the Roman Empire and Early Middle Ages?

First, I should caution that most competent historians of science question the whole decline narrative often given for the history of western science.  The old cartoon history of western science narrative (that unfortunately still shows up in a lot of popular works--see for example Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve) depicts a golden age of science and philosophy during Greek antiquity (think Aristotle, etc) followed by a steep decline and long period of stasis through the Middle Ages, finally interrupted by the Scientific Revolution in the 16th and 17th century.  This narrative is simply not true--the Middle Ages saw significant scientific activity, including the birth of the university system, which for the first time truly institutionalized science/natural philosophy.  But.  The debate remains about whether the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the 12th century marked a time of decline for science in Western Europe.  After all, this was a time when many of the institutional supports (which were weak and scarce to begin with) of science slipped away.  Throughout the duration of the Roman Empire, science and philosophy were primarily the activity of a minority group--mostly associated with Greek culture rather than the dominate Latin culture.  The vast majority of scientific works were written in Greek; think of Ptolemy's 1st A.D. work on astronomy or Galen's medical writings--all were written in Greek, on the periphery of the Roman Empire.  Thus, by the time of the 6th century, a scholar like Boethius--who lived in the Western Roman Empire--was worried enough about the survival of Greek philosophy and science to make it his life's goal to record it all in Latin.  The assumption being that the works were scarce enough and knowledge of Greek so rare that his Latin writings might be all that survived.  Is the U.S. entering a similar period?  Like Greek science, American science seems to have thrived for a time without transcending its marginal status.  The Cold War period saw a significant boost in funding for basic science research, but in retrospect this boost is a blip between periods of declining or static funding.  Could the institutional support for science by the federal government disappear?


This comparison between American science now and the status of science in Late Antiquity was pointed out by a professor of mine in his history of ancient and medieval science course.  Does this mean a Mad Max-style post-apocalyptic future in which people in rags stare blankly at a physics textbook, unable to decipher its strange contents, before burning it for warmth?  Thankfully no.  Turns out that even the supposed decline of science in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages is questionable.  In their introduction to Vol. 2 of the Cambridge History of Science (on Medieval Science) Michael Shank and David Lindberg provide good reasons to question whether scientific knowledge truly declined during that period.  If anything, it simply diffused.  While knowledge of Greek texts--such as Aristotle or Plato--declined, scientific knowledge did spread to remote areas of the former Roman Empire in the form of Latin encyclopedias.  These encyclopedias contained rudimentary scientific knowledge, on the level of what you might read in say Scientific American, but nonetheless introduced scientific knowledge to a larger population.  That said, the inherent difficulty in proving a historical narrative of "decline" is cold comfort to most people.  After all, many of the institutions of the Roman Empire did actually collapse (at least in Western Europe--the Byzantine Empire is a whole different story).  And while the Middle Ages were not actually the thousand-year period of misery and ignorance most people imagine, Western Europe during Late Antiquity/the Early Middle Ages was a place of political and social upheaval.  Science and philosophy took a back seat to political and social survival.  Any apparent similarities between the situation now in the U.S. and then does not exactly inspire confidence.  I would be the first to defend the Middle Ages as a time of significant and worthy scientific and intellectual output.  But I would prefer not to live through another decline and fall of the Roman Empire. 

The Copernican Question: Or, the Lower the Stakes the Greater the Vitriol

 This Fall semester, I completed a seminar on astrology from the Middle Ages to the early 17th century.  The seminar was led by the amazing Mike Shank, a medievalist focusing on the history of astronomy.  We ended the course by reading a chunk of Robert Westman's The Copernican Question.    Put simply, Westman's thesis is that Copernicus' heliocentric astronomy was motivated by a desire to reform astrology in the face of criticism by several influential writers.  On its face, this thesis seems plausible, but in the highly specialized academic worlds of the history of astronomy and the Scientific Revolution it raised many red flags.  Indeed, Westman attempts to build the case for Copernicus' motivations using a modified argument from silence.  Copernicus wrote little to nothing on astrology himself, though he did practice astrology and associated with various astrologers in Bologna. At the risk of oversimplification, Westman seems to argue that despite Copernicus' own silence on astrology, the fact that he worked in a scientific context in which astrology was dominant is sufficient to prove that Copernicus' Heliocentrism was an attempt to reform astrology.  This summary might distort Westmam somewhat--but it captures the flawed logic that bothered everyone in the seminar.

But what really struck about The Copernican Question was the critical response to the book.  Alongside a significant chunk of the book, we read a set of reviews.  They were universally negative, not surprising given the flawed logic that everyone picked up on.  What I did not expect to read were the almost comically snarky and mean tone of the reviews by John L. Heilbron and Noel Swerdlow.  Both Heilbronn and Swerdlow are distinguished historians of science and noted experts in their fields. Both point to legitimate flaws in Westman's use of sources, his translations, and grasp of the astronomical material.  Yet these historical questions were overshadowed by their ad hominum attacks on Westman's writing style and Westman's equally defensive and unpleasant reply to their reviews.  Heilbron basically implies that Westman was an incompetent and sloppy translator, representative of the overall decline in the rigor of historical research.  Similarly, Swerdlow suggests that Westman has no grasp of mathematical astronomy and is therefore unqualified to really say anything about Copernicus' work.  Westman has responded both to these reviews and others by trying to shift focus to other parts of the book, arguing that critics have unfairly singled out the material dealing with Copernicus, which is just one part of a 600 page book.  

Several of my fellow seminar students agreed that if this is what it meant to be an academic, then they wanted no part. Our reaction might help explain why the humanities often has such a difficult job engaging the public.  Reading Nicholas Kristoff's recent op-ed on the declining relevance of academics condemns a lot of what those reviews represent.  In my mind, the history of science is filled with questions that are not only intrinsically interesting but relevant to society.  Westman's question about Copernicus' motivation not only raises questions about what drives scientists to embrace new theories but also touches on how a scientist's social context shapes his or her work.  These are hardly obscure or elitist issues.  But a non-specialist reading these reviews can be forgiven for thinking that the debate is just another irrelevant and pretentious debate on an obscure historical issue.  Even with all of the emphasis on the importance of STEM fields, I find it difficult to convince people that the history of science is not only fascinating but actually matters.  While the persistent obscurity of the history of science as a discipline might result partly from the dwindling number of departments and declining funding, it also stems from a failure by historians of science to make their work relevant to the public.  Certainly, topics like the history of astrology will always only draw a limited audience (in the seminar, we were 9 souls strong).  But even studying a supposedly "dead" science like astrology raises important questions about what counts as a science, how standards for successful theories change, etc.  Turning legitimate historical debates into intellectual pissing contests just reinforces the apparent obscurity and irrelevance of history to the "real world."

Summer Light Reading #2: Moby-Dick as a history of sciece

This summer, I read Moby Dick for the first time.  While I knew the novel dealt with whales (spoiler alert!), I did not realize how much great history of science material Melville's novel contains.  Moby-Dick is obviously worth studying as a work of literature, but is also worth reading to get a glimpse a popular natural history circa 1850.  Of course, the internet is a great check on one's ego; a quick Wikipedia search brings up an entire article on the "Cetology of Moby-Dick".   The wikipedia article refers to chapter XXXII (which you can read here), in which Melville proposes his own taxonomy of whales.  I will not try and analyze this chapter in-depth without first brushing up on my 19th century natural history and knowledge of whale taxonomy.  Instead, what I find striking is the fact that such a technical digression was included in a novel.  I am curious how the average reader in 1851 reacted to this chapter; from what I can remember from a history of modern biology course I took, natural history in Victorian England became a past-time for a newly minted middle-class with too much time on its hands.  Just as many science literate laypeople today know the basics of evolutionary biology, I'm assuming that a science literate reader then would have known something about Linnean taxonomy.  These are interesting questions to pursue, and despite the wikipedia article, it seems to be an area open for exploration (though a search of an EBSCOhost HSMT database does yield a dissertation on "Melville in the Age of Darwin and Paley").  While this chapter is the most striking example of natural history working its way into the novel, other examples abound.  For historians of technology, the book offers lots as well-- Melville provides rich descriptions of naval technology and everyday life on a whaling vessel.  Given Moby Dick's length, the whole text would not fit into a college course, but long excerpts, such as chapter XXXII might fit nicely into a history of biology course.  Incorporating fiction into history of science seems to be an increasingly hot idea; Romantic literature (think Mary Shelley's Frankenstein) abounds with descriptions and discussions of science.  Moby Dick seems to fit nicely into these studies.

The Goal of this Blog

My plan is to use this blog as something of a public journal of my thoughts on the history of science and related fields (e.g. STS, philosophy of science, science and politics, etc).  For me, the blog will be a kind of summer exercise: a way to avoid letting my shaky writing and critical thinking skills from atrophying completely over the summer.  Given the journal format, I won't promise completely polished posts, just sketches of different ideas--hopefully a few will actually be interesting.

To give you a sense of where my interests lie, here's a brief academic sketch.  I am currently fourth year undergraduate studying the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Like a lot of students who stumbled across the program, my interests are all over the place; my attraction to the field was partially based on the flexibility of the course-work--in the same semester I could study both Greek and Roman medicine alongside the history of classical physics.  Currently, my interests have narrowed slightly to two very different foci.  First, I am very interested in the history of biology and the related life sciences.  Reliving my childhood fascination with dinosaurs, great apes, and cave men has led me to hone in on the historical development of paleontology and anthropology.  I completed my capstone research paper on the challenges of making museum displays about human evolution encountered by anthropologists and artists at the Chicago Field Museum in the 1930s (more on that later?).  At the same time, I find myself equally drawn to the history of medieval science.  Part of this fascination comes from how unsung the medieval period remains.  There is so much wide-open territory to explore: the development of natural philosophy at medieval universities, the transmission and appropriation of ancient Greek science by Islamic civilization, the interaction between science and the Church, etc.  The more you dig, the more the middle ages deserve study as a time of intellectual achievement on par with the Renaissance or Enlightenment.  While these interests currently provide some guidance to my coursework and reading, my blog will probably go beyond them.  Anything related to the cross-section of science and the humanities will be fair game.

Summer Light Reading #1: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

As a currently unemployed/unemployable history of science undergrad with time to kill, I decided to read the 50th anniversary edition of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  The book is arguably one of the foundational texts in both the History and Philosophy of Science, a must read for anyone with even vague interests in how science "really" works.  Of course, pretty much everything that needs to be said about the book seems to have been said; as an undergraduate, I won't even attempt to pretend like my opinion on the book's philosophical worth or historical utility matters.  Instead, I want to record my own reactions to the book as an undergrad reading it for the first time.  As someone familiar with the history of science, much of the books central claims barely raised an eyebrow.  For example, I was not shaken by Kuhn's claim that scientists choose new theories based on persuasion and future promise rather than on a careful comparison of that theory to nature or through logical analysis.  Nor did I find it hard to swallow Kuhn's denial that science constantly progresses closer to a single, underlying truth about nature.  I think my reaction reflects the fact that Kuhn's approach has been incorporated, debated, rejected, and reevaluated so thoroughly by historians of science that many historians no longer really see the book as all that revolutionary.  Instead, Kuhn's approach represents merely one of many ways to view the history of science.  Indeed, many historians--take for example the historian of medicine Harold Cook--view Kuhn's approach as outdated, reflecting the skewed values of logical positivism, which elevated theory over experiment and held physics as the model for all of science.  As a history text, Structure is still worth reading, but more as an example of one of many approaches to the history of science.