Reculer pour mieux sauter
HHC © last revised November 2004
Draft in Progress
PS.01 As the global knowledge-based economy rushes forward fuelled by seemingly endless waves of technological innovation, it is appropriate to step back before leaping forward into the future, or, in the language of analytic psychology: reculer pour mieux sauter. Some fifty years after Francis Bacon published Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning Divine and Humane in 1605, Robert Boyle formulated a theological apology allowing the institutionalization of the experimental method as the Royal Society Of London For The Promotion Of Natural Knowledge in 1660.
PS.02 Boyle’s apology was finally published in 1663. Like Justice Yates’ ferae naturae or wild animals as ideas, it roamed free in the public domain (see 8.0 Rights to Know, para. 8.09). Some Considerations touching the Usefulness of experimental natural philosophy argued God imposed order on Matter from outside Nature at Creation. Since then, Matter has behaved mechanically, not spiritually. God withdrew. The mechanism was set in motion, ran and continues to run according to laws of Nature fixed by God into Matter, i.e., the ultimate in hard-tooled knowledge. It freed Experimental Philosophy from Church authority – Anglican, Catholic and Protestant. In England, of course, this also meant freedom from the State. The apology, however, allowed for two exceptions to Boyle’s Christianized “Epicurean atomism” (Jacob 1978, 213). These were the human soul and angels which he argued, continued, to be spiritually motivated in ascending order towards God.
PS.03 This compromise answers a question surrounding Robert Merton’s very resilient hypothesis connecting Puritanism with the rise of modern science (Merton 1984). The Merton Hypothesis asserts that a coincidence of interests occurred in early seventeenth century England between the religious and moral values of the Puritans (more accurately some sects of the Puritan movement) and the emerging experimental sciences (Merton 1938). In essence, the Puritans claimed God’s meaning was revealed not just in the Bible (by then available in the vernacular) but also in his other book – the Book of Nature. Rather than simply accepting the arguments and authority of popes, bishops and philosophers, one should seek God’s meaning through the experimental method. The unique environment of the Commonwealth established by Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) allowed, Merton argues, the experimental sciences to take root in England rather than in Galileo’s Catholic Italy where they were subject to the Inquisition.
PS.04 Unanswered by the Merton hypothesis, however, is how the experimental method could take root given the end of the Commonwealth and Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660? What may be called the ‘Jacob Hypothesis’ concerning Boyle’s Anglican or ‘Latitudinalist’ compromise, I believe, provides the answer (Jacob & Jacob 1980). Ironically, perhaps, of the founders of the Royal Society, the most prominent who did not accept Boyle’s apology was Isaac Newton who continued to believe in alchemy, miracles and divine intervention until the day he died (Harrison 1995). [A]
PS.05 Arguably, the Experimental Method has now realized Bacon’s dream of human dominion over Nature granted to the first Adam before the Fall. And today, the Natural & Engineering Sciences reach out not just to the planets and stars but to the tree of life and death itself. This time, however, the tree bears not fruit but questions of abortion, capital punishment, euthanasia, DNA, genomics, proteomics, stem cell research, et al because, we have, after all, already eaten of the tree of the knowledge. But what of the human soul and of angels?
PS.06 Arguably in the secular West, Natural Philosophy mutated into the Natural & Engineering Sciences whose very success shattered the old Moral Philosophy. A shard called the Social Sciences broke off promising reductive understanding, control and engineering of the human world. Another piece, called the Humanities, hinged at the edges to the new Social Sciences, now ponders non-natural philosophies like ethics, epistemology, etymology, history, languages and linguistics. And under the hard hammer of the natural sciences, Aesthetics and the Beaux Arts broke off from Metaphysics and Theology as Baumgarten’s new “science of the sensuous” replacing religious Revelation by the intuition of an avant garde Arts shockingly expressed during the Culture Wars of the 1990s through Maplethorpe’s homoerotic photography and Serrano’s – god in a jar - Piss Christ.
PS.07 If the Shock of the New (Hughes 1981) unsettled the religious West, the secular West has, in turn, been scandalized by breaches of public trust by the Practices – accountants, lawyers, physicians and priests. One of the world’s five largest accounting firms, Arthur Anderson, shattered under the Enron and associated accounting scandals of 2000. Trial lawyers in the United States are engaged in a fierce political battle over tort reform, i.e., laws governing non-contractual rights and obligations. American business argues that ‘frivolous’ product liability law suits and unconscionable financial settlements by juries are significantly impeding competitiveness in world markets. Similarly, medical malpractice suits (justified and not) are driving American physicians out of business as insurance premiums, for all doctors, soar. Child abuse – sexual and otherwise – has shaken the Roman Catholic and other churches and left priests suspect rather than respected.
PS.08 Even as the music and motion picture industries cry out like the Booksellers' of the 1740s for stronger copyright legislation to preserve the starving artist, they are accused of unconscionable accounting and contracting practices. Multinational communications conglomerates control the copyright on the world’s most prestigious scientific journals written by academics employed by universities and colleges that now must pay unconscionable subscription fees resulting in a shrinking supply of periodical publications for students in all knowledge domains (The Economist, August 5, 2004). And the beat goes on.
PS.09 It is, of course, in the name of the Person that necessary regulatory intervention by a democratic State fuels de Jouvenel’s Minotaur entwining Power ever more deeply into the life of the individual. And, of course, it is the Person who is the ultimate output of a knowledge-based economy, an economy with knowledge hanging out there just waiting to be plucked.
PS.10 In a global knowledge-based economy, however, the public domain also offers poisoned fruit. Today ‘women in belts’ are spreading destruction in Israel, Russia and elsewhere all in the name of Allah - the Islamic answer to women’s liberation. The knowledge is out there. It is wild; it is free; and it cannot foreseeably be re-captured. Of souls that choose to eat such poisoned fruit, Walter Laqueur, co-chair of the International Research Council at the Center for Strategic and International Studies writes: “We are dealing here not with mass movements but small - sometimes very small - groups of people, and there is no known way at present to account for the movement of small particles either in the physical world or in human societies” (Lacqueur 2004). [Q]
PS.11 Arguably, the competitiveness of nations in a global knowledge-based economy involves not just competition with members of the United Nations and the WTO but also the threat posed by much smaller nations of chosen people sharing a vision requiring destruction of the nation-state itself. The current economic cost of this threat is only partially suggested by the price of oil hovering at $50 U.S. a barrel. In Terry Gilliam’s 1999 motion picture, 12 Monkeys, Bruce Willis stars as a ‘time cop’ from the future trying to stop one mad man from taking flight around the world in 1999 to spread a deadly virus that within a few week’s returns humanity to subterranean caves (Gilliam 1999). The answer lies not in greater and greater reductive knowledge of the natural world (although it too may help) but rather more constructive knowledge of the human heart and soul (and perhaps even of angels) or, in the vocabulary of the secular, of the softer sides of competitiveness including the Arts. We need now return to the tree of the knowledge and hope a new Robert Boyle can concoct a new vintage, one that soothes the heart and soul not just the belly of the beast.
A Dieu.
Postscript
[P] HHC: Newton (1642-1727) practiced ‘the Art’ of alchemy until his death and considered his alchemical work more important than that which has since become the foundation of modern science (Dobbs 1982, 1991). In 1936, Sotheby's in London auctioned off a cache of writings by Newton - journals and personal notebooks deemed of no scientific value. The winning bidder was John Maynard Keynes who, after perusing the papers, noted on the tercentenary of Newton's birth, that Newton, the supreme figure of seventeenth century science, was not the first of the Enlightenment but rather “the Last of the Magicians” and “the last wonder-child to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.” (quoted in Thorndike 1953, 704). It is interesting that Shackle refers to the Keynesian process of estimating the marginal efficiency of capital as “psychic alchemy” perhaps recognizing Keynes’ interest in Newton’s ‘lost’ works (Shackle 1967, 129).
[Q] “For the first time in human history very small groups have, or will have, the potential to cause immense destruction. In a situation such as the present one there is always the danger of focusing entirely on the situation at hand — radical nationalist or religious groups with whom political solutions may be found. There is a danger of concentrating on Islamism and forgetting that the problem is a far wider one. Political solutions to deal with their grievances may sometimes be possible, but frequently they are not. Today’s terrorists, in their majority, are not diplomats eager to negotiate or to find compromises. And even if some of them would be satisfied with less than total victory and the annihilation of the enemy, there will always be a more radical group eager to continue the struggle.” (Lacqueur 2004)