So I’m all excited that SSAG’s Zuska is going to be leading a virtual course on her blog titled “The Joy of Science,” which will teaching about science from a feminist perspective. I’ve picked up some of the books on her reading list from the library and requested the ones not available here through interlibrary loan. (Hey, books aren’t cheap, and I’m very picky about where I put my cash. I like to try them out first before committing to a purchase, the way my husband downloads MP3s and then buys the CDs of the ones that he likes, directly from the band or the small label if at all possible.)
As it happens, I’d already been reading a book titled A People’s History of Science by Clifford D. Conner. Since I’ve been reading Zuska’s blog I’ve become much more aware of how little I knew about the culture of science when I was in it, and that my notion of it being this pure world where the Truth was the main object was horribly misguided. (I’ll admit, at the same it wasn’t like I was totally pure in what I wanted from science: a good career, a place where I would be validated for what I felt at the time to be my chief talents, an intellectual playground.)
In Conner’s book, the bulk of scientific knowledge came out of the “hunter-gatherers, peasant farmers, sailors, miners, blacksmiths, folk healers, and others who wrested the means of their survival from an encounter with nature on a daily basis.” Some of the discoveries that were credited to “Great Men” were actually taken right out of the folk knowledge. And of course once science began to form its institutions, those were directed towards upholding a certain norm—a norm, of course, that would not rock the boats of those in power.
Conner writes of how the Royal Society, the UK’s academy of sciences and one of the oldest such societies, was formed in 1660 soon after the restoration of the monarchy to the throne after the country had been a republic and then ruled by a dictator over the previous couple of decades:
Although the ruling class in Restoration England was at first unwilling fully to embrace the new science, a new intellectual elite had nonetheless begun its rise to prominence. A major milestone in that process was the creation of the Royal Society, which gave institutional form to a new scientific ideology. Anxious to put the turmoil and divisiveness of the revolutionary years behind them, the society’s leaders explicitly ruled controversy over political, religious, and social problems outside the bounds of the new science. It was “not the business and design of the Royal Society,” Robert Hooke declared, to be “meddling with Divinity, Metaphysics, Moralls, Politicks, Grammar, Rhetoric, or Logick.”
“Enthusiasts” and “fanatics” would not be tolerated in their midst. Radical-minded people were thus excluded from the Royal Society, and the organization of science as a profession was consciously tailored to fit into a new kind of civil society that was rising in England. As the premier historian of the English Revolution explained, “The Society wanted science henceforth to be apolitical—which then as now meant conservative.”
The leaders of the Royal Society believed that by banning ideological discussion they had thereby exorcised ideology from science, but what they had actually accomplished was to assure the monopoly of their own elitist ideology. The neutrality that they promoted as the ideal of scientific objectivity was a fine-sounding abstraction, but in practice some people and some viewpoints were always “more equal” than others.
And this is the root of today’s science culture, in the Anglophone world at least. So much for Truth, huh?
I’m now beginning to feel that there should be a course, perhaps like Zuska’s, which everyone considering going into engineering, science, or math should take to give them a more comprehensive historical and sociological perspective than what they get in the strictly technical instruction. Although twenty years ago as a college freshman I would have dismissed this, I now think that this awareness is mandatory if science is to have any chance at being a more humane place in which people of all genders, colors, and ethnicities can thrive.
It’s a nice illusion while it lasts though, isn’t it? Oddly enough, it was when I started doing literary criticism in graduate school while teaching science writing that I began to see that the world of science was anything but the objective paradise that it pretends to be. There was the same jockeying for position by various competing schools of theory and disciplines, the same political maneuvering for tenure and grants and security. Power and politics and fear and desire color everything humans do, but of course, you can’t say that to most scientists, or if you do, you only get dimissed as a fuzzy thinker.