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In the name of Darwin, Marx, and the postmodern Inquisition
There’s a story told about a distinguished cardiac surgeon who, about to retire, decided he’d like to take up the history of medicine. He sought out a historian friend and asked her if she had any tips for him. The historian said she’d be happy to help but first asked the surgeon a reciprocal favor: “As it happens, I’m about to retire too, and I’m thinking of taking up heart surgery. Do you have any tips for me?”
The story is probably apocryphal, but it displays a real asymmetry between two expert practices. The surgeon knows that his skills are specialized and that they’re difficult to acquire, but he doesn’t think that the historian’s skills are anything like that. He assumes that writing history is pretty straightforward and that being a 21st-century surgeon gives you a leg up in documenting and interpreting, for example, theories of fever in the 17th century. Yet not every kind of technical expertise stands in this relation with the telling of its history. Modern installation artists don’t think they can produce adequate scholarly studies of Dutch Golden Age paintings, and it’s hard to find offensive linemen parading their competence in the writing the history of rugby.
Mr. Weinberg reckons that the history of science is far too important to be left to the historians, and “To Explain the World” is the kind of thing that might tempt academic historians to lose their cool. They’d remind him that the great thinkers of 17th-century science commonly considered themselves to be reforming natural knowledge to be Christianity’s handmaid. Figures like Newton and Boyle discerned divine purpose throughout nature, and not, as Mr. Weinberg implies, just because they were taking an unfortunate detour from properly scientific behavior. What counts as “natural” and what as “super-natural” turns out to be historically variable. Historians might insist that “science” is not a self-evidently stable category: the practices called “natural philosophy,” “mathematics,” and “natural history,” for example, were thought to be very different types of knowledge, while the notion of “science” in the past simply designated some idea of systematic knowledge.
The historians might also thump the table, insisting that searching for anticipations and foreshadowings is both wrong and illogical—”ahistorical” as they’d say. They’d wonder that a history written by a working scientist should be so little concerned with the messy day-to-day practices of getting experiments to succeed, getting calculations right, and persuading others of their truth and accuracy. They’d express bemusement at Mr. Weinberg’s insistence that science advances by rejecting teleology, even as he depicts its history as a triumphal progress from dark past to bright present.
Table-thumping isn’t interesting—whoever does it. Mr. Weinberg identifies his account as a personal view, and there’s no reason why people shouldn’t want to know how an eminent modern scientist (and public intellectual) thinks about all sorts of things. What is interesting is that these different stories about the historical development of science persist, with no prospect that professional historians of science will ever own their subject as, say, art historians own the history of art. Science remains almost unique in that respect. It’s modernity’s reality-defining enterprise, a pattern of proper knowledge and of right thinking, in the same way that—though Mr. Weinberg will hate the allusion—Christian religion once defined what the world was like and what proper knowledge should be. The same circumstance that gives science its immense modern cultural prestige also ensures that there will be an audience for its idealization and celebration. “To Explain the World” is for that audience.
