Ether Wave Propaganda – Page 21 – History and Historiography of Science

Systems-Thinking and Robert Redfield

Robert Redfield (1897-1958) earned his degree in sociology and anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1920. More than any anthropologist of his generation, argues Clifford Wilcox, Redfield adopted a “pronounced sociological approach to anthropology.” According to Wilcox, two broad intellectual currents influenced Redfield’s development: “the deep-seated critique of civilization that emerged among European and American intellectuals following World War I,” and “his father-in-law, University of Chicago sociologist Robert E. Park ” (Social Anthropology, xiv.)

In contrast to the assertive Victorian belief in progress, in the period following the First World War, intellectuals began to “question the nature not only of Western civilization, but of civilization itself, particularly the equation of civilization with progress.” Among those who penned withering critiques of civilization were Oswald Spengler and Edward Sapir.

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Technocracy in the UK

Having managed to get settled pretty well at Imperial College London and in my new place in Shepherds Bush, I am now starting my new project in earnest. After a few days of preliminary research, I have found myself knee-deep in the historiography of British agricultural science, which already is pretty fascinating. In the earlier part of the century, the agricultural experimental stations (and this is something historians of this stuff know well) turn out to be caught between problems of improving agricultural yield, studying the nutritional requirements of plants and livestock, suggesting how agriculture can best meet the nutritional requirements of the nation, but also doing academic research in the nascent field of genetics.

The key figures immediately turn out to be politically interesting, as agricultural science is hyped heavily for its social relevance. At the same time the science becomes a central battleground over the question of the “planning” of fundamental science when the genetics of Lysenko become a scandal. John Boyd Orr — director of the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen from 1914 to 1945, and first director-general of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization — turns out to be an advocate for world government who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1949. (World government, by the way, is a topic explored in respect to airpower and atomic weapons in the thesis of recent Imperial PhD Waqar Zaidi)

But all this is getting ahead of myself, and there will be more details to come. What I’d like to do now is introduce the broader research program of which all this is a part. The title of my project is “British State Expertise in Food, Construction, and Defence, 1945-1975”.

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Paul Ceruzzi’s Internet Alley

Not too long after I arrived in Washington, DC for my post-doc at AIP, I gave a talk on some of my work on operations research and systems analysis at the National Air and Space Museum. Afterward NASM curator Paul Ceruzzi (who is, by the way, the primary contributor to the IT History Society blog) told me about the role that these fields took in his book Internet Alley: High Technology in Tysons Corner, 1945-2005 (MIT Press, 2008).

Tysons Corner is an area in the Virginia suburbs just outside of Washington. While I worked at AIP, I lived in the city and commuted out to Maryland on the DC Metro. Nevertheless, I did cross the Potomac River into Virginia from time to time, and, when I went to Dulles Airport or the Leesburg outlet mall, I traveled through the region that is the subject of this book.

On the surface, the place is a typical stretch of the American suburbia that can be found in most metropolitan regions: highway, surrounded by housing subdivisions, chain stores in strip malls, and unremarkable office buildings. Ceruzzi is a longer-term resident of DC, and, in the opening to his prologue, he describes how this same scene captured his curiosity:

Many of the buildings had the names of their tenants displayed in bold lettering on the top floor. Some names suggested high technologies: names ending in ‘-tronics,’ ‘-ex,’ or the like. Others consisted of three-letter acronyms, few of which I recognized. As I drove by, all I could think of was the famous line from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: ‘Who are those guys’?

This question, really, is the essence of “positive portraiture”, giving the development of knowledge about the past priority over interpretation of the past. As a regional study, Ceruzzi’s book has no particular topic aside from identifying a clear phenomenon — the presence of these buildings — and then studying the confluence of various contexts, which can explain that phenomenon.

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Narrow and Broad Historiography and Self-Interested History

At the beginning of the year, I posted on the “instrumental uses of history”, intending the post to set the tone for this year’s blogging. It referred to the polemical and heuristic uses to which history is put, and the likely distorting effect these uses have on historical portraiture. The post supposed the inevitability of this state of affairs and the futility of sustained work against it.

Subsequent posts have focused on the importance of taking the history of polemics seriously, as well as on the history of science community’s strong interest in the history of polemics. I have argued that this interest relates to how those polemics are seen as arising from, and revealing of, how science and technology operate in society: by securing the cultural and political, as well as intellectual, assent.

I have argued that these ideas are thought to run contrary to past and popular historiography, which is imagined to render systematically invisible not only these polemics, but the social and material circumstances that so often give rise to polemical encounters. In this way, the past and popular historiography is thought to depend on a false (or at least deeply selective) image of science, technology, and society to assemble its history. The image is one wherein the final form of ideas and the criteria on which they are judged acceptable are taken-for-granted in specifically self-interested ways. Accordingly, recovery of a realistic image of science is thought to be not only an imporant historiographical task, but also a form of portraiture with innate virtues (as I argued at Whewell’s Ghost).

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Talks in London on the 28th

If you happen to be in London these days, and you are free on the 28th, you could make your way over to Greenwich, and pay six-to-eight quid to hear Simon Schaffer’s talk, “Acting at a Distance: The Venus Transit Expeditions and the Establishment of Empire” at the National Maritime Museum. It is part of the Royal Society’s lecture series, Science and the Maritime Nation, which is running this month.

Or, you could skip the obligatory inspirational lesson on “how fraught and fragile” the transit expeditions’ “attempts to make science and empire work together” were, download his Tarner lectures on astronomy, hear/read his take on the transit expeditions here, read Thony C’s very nice summations of the frustrations of an 18th-century transit expedition here, and then feel free to come and see me, free-of-charge, at Imperial College in South Kensington, as part of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine’s seminar series.

My talk will be entitled “Some Facets of the 20th-Century-Problem in Historiography: Scientists, Policymakers, Experts, and Analysts”, and will be at 4:15pm, Sherfield Building, 5th Floor Seminar Rooms. Hopefully drinks afterward. My talk will begin with an overview of my work on operational research, policy analysis, and decision theory, and some of the new conclusions I was able to draw from that research. However, it will then move into the difficulties of studying very big topics (i.e., the “20th-century problem” which is a term that has gained a modicum of traction in discussions around here), the dangers of adhering to classical historiographical expectations of what tensions will inhabit those topics (science! politics! where-oh-where will the boundaries be drawn this time?) and some possible strategies for dealing with this historiographical problem, i.e., the internet. I will discuss blogs as a way of keeping the historiographical pot stirred, and ACAP as an example of addressing a big topic in a preliminary way. This will lead into an introduction of my brand new research project: a broad survey of forms of expertise used in the British state, 1945-1975, on which much more anon. It’s a whirlwind, but I figure it will be more interesting than a boring old lecture on a single topic.

By the way, Whewell’s Ghost contributor Rebekah Higgitt will be doing a lecture, “The Admiralty’s Observatories: Greenwich, Cape, Rossbank” on November 4th at the NMM. I will not be lecturing on that day, so by all means do go and check it out.

Is There a Conflict of Interest between STS and History of Science?

A brief satire:

Q: If you’re an STS scholar, how do you participate in a policy debate?

A: (1) Identify some place where somebody can plausibly be accused of over-certainty and reductionism in their assertion of a solution to a policy problem. (2) Deploy your meta-knowledge of how controversies work to accuse participants in policy debates of over-certainty and reductionism. (3) Feel increasingly satisfied with your meta-knowledge that over-certainty and reductionism are the root causes of policy failure.

If aversion to reductionism is indeed the central critical feature of Science and Technology Studies (STS, occasionally “Science, Technology, and Society”), the danger of reductionism is taken to be augmented by the prospect that science and technology carry a certain public authority that can potentially disguise this reductionism. This authority is thought to be based on the prospect that science and technology enjoy a certain separateness or distinction from the rest of culture and politics. The central authority-based failure to detect reductionism is taken to lead to follow-on varieties of failure, particularly: the structural failure of formal methodologies to cope with suitably complex and uncertain phenomena, the moral failure of methodologies to take into account divergent social and intellectual perspectives and values, and the failure of methodologies designed to resolve social problems and controversies to transcend controversy themselves.

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Technological Determinism, Scientific Reasoning, and Leslie White

For the French philosopher Jacques Ellul, the sum of technological accomplishments in contemporary civilization formed the “Technique,” which was the “new and specific milieu in which man is required to exist” and which replaced “nature.” This milieu was artificial, autonomous, self-determining, not directed towards any specific end but only established through specific means, and interconnected to such a degree that all of its elements are impervious to analysis by its constituent parts ( In Philosophy and Technology, ed. Carl Mitcham, Robert Mackey, 86.)

Technology, according to Ellul, had become the all-pervasive material reality and rationality which defined the superstructure of contemporary society. Culture or politics, according to Ellul, does not determine the growth and development of technology. Rather, it is technology or technique which determines the culture or political life of a society. Nor was the understanding of technology as autonomous rationality a concern of French philosophers. German philosophers were as concerned with interaction of technology and human freedom and were as anxious to establish its roots in the philosophic and scientific thinking of the West.

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Human Geography and Environmental Determinism: The Arguments of Ellsworth Huntington and Ellen Semple

In the literature detailing the foundation of the discipline of human geography, it is widely argued that the opening decades of the 20th century saw this developing enterprise in the throes of “environmental determinism.”

Such determinism, furthermore, developed a series of propositions which defended racial superiority through a utilization of the guise of the objective, scientific geographer. Thus, David Livingston, in his The Geographical Tradition (1993,)concludes that Huntington, in his Character of the Races (1924) conjoined “ethnic constitution” to “climactic circumstance,” which argued that “racial character was spatially referenced and could thus be presented in cartographic form.” This “cartographic enterprise” in which the distributions of genius, health, and civilization were conveniently tied to the percepts of “cultural imperialism,” exactly those eschewed by Franz Boas. In Huntington’s scheme, climate influenced health and energy, which in turn influenced civilization (225-6.) Mark Blacksell in his Political Geography (2005,) notes that, “For a time in North America, in the first half of the twentieth century, environmental determinism held greater sway, largely through the writings of Ellen Semple and Ellsworth Huntington, but its intellectual dominance there was short-lived, not least because of the racist conclusions the philosophy frequently spawned (140.)

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Boundaries, Interests, and Traditions in the Management Thereof

When I posted on boundary studies in the history of science earlier this summer, I had in mind narratives focusing on epochal conflicts between groups, and the likelihood that we will learn little from the conflict that will help us understand the groups themselves. In reaction to that, Amy Fisher (a PhD student from the University of Minnesota who has been doing some work for us at the AIP History Center) told me that for her the most interesting boundary problems were “on a smaller scale, as it connects to issues of identity.” This was a good point, and I have had to go through a number of other posts before I felt I had my thoughts in order enough to address it adequately.

ropebridge — What boundary? This bridge has been here for years!

These smaller-scale boundary problems usually deal with individuals attempting to build lives, careers, or ideas, and having to situate their actions and beliefs within the strains of competing interests. Natural philosophers might have had to reconcile their arguments about nature with their beliefs about religion. Museum exhibitors might have to reconcile their desire to educate the public about certain kinds of scientific knowledge with the interests and expectations of that same public. In the twentieth century, physicists might have had to reconcile their desire to pursue their research interests with their ability to acquire funding by appealing to military, government, or industrial patrons. Etc.

My response here is that in these cases the most relevant boundaries are not necessarily well-portrayed by the historiography. Historians will typically portray actors as having to “negotiate” a compromise position on their own through a sort of an ad hoc process. I would argue that it is here where historians’ aversion to reconstructing various long-term traditions is damaging, because it does not take into account established patterns of identity development and institution-building, which become models for a successful and legitimate resolution to the many many situations in which conflicts of interest arise.

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Book Review: Randall Wakelam’s The Science of Bombing

The following book review appears in Isis 101 (September 2010): 671-672.

Randall T. Wakelam.
The Science of Bombing: Operational Research in RAF Bomber Command. ix + 347 pp., illus., apps., index. Toronto/London: University of Toronto Press, 2009. $55 (paper).

William Thomas

During World War II, scientists worked for the British, Canadian, and American military services to study plans, tactics, training, and procedures to see whether military practices made sense in light of up‐to‐date information from the field. The manner of this work varied from conducting special investigations, to parsing statistics, to building sophisticated mathematical models of such military operations as hunting for U‐boats. This work was known in Britain as “operational research” (OR) and was later established as its own profession.

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