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."