By Rayaan Chawla
The familiar picture of genius is a solitary one. Cultural depictions have long converged around the device of a wise, but unsociable, “man[1] of science,” in desperate pursuit of research excellence, who is occasionally burdened by the presence of those of common intelligence. “I don’t do people well,” says Russell Crowe, twice, while playing a celebrated mathematician in A Beautiful Mind (2001)[2]—albeit with the musculature of a Gladiator (2000).[3] Abjuring tedious social niceties, these modern Promethei offer mawkish panegyrics to the path of seeking absolute truth, which they insist must be walked alone.
A book by Lorraine Daston rails against the self-certain solipsism of this narrative. She insists that the vanguard of naturalist inquiry has never been sparsely populated and, indeed, only continues to broaden at the top.[4] Her argument appears persuasive enough, at least as to the present state of science. The figures she quotes (like that of the 800 technical commissions coordinating 25,000 precise industrial and technical standards out of a single building in Geneva)—to the extent they do not beggar belief—evoke a contemporary concert that spans the Globe. Scientists today, the account goes, collaborate extensively and do so in the same ways and for the same purposes as their forerunners from the latter half of the second Millenium.
Whatever be the truth of this narrative, on which it is more suitable for historians to opine, it is at least misleadingly incomplete. The noble, public spirited mutualism Daston finds in the work of the contemporary scientist is belied by the encroachments of narrow corporate and political interests on their work. After all, with most of the 25,000 standards precisely coordinated in Geneva require purchase with a not-insignificant fee, before even the most mundane of applications can be undertaken. [5]
As Daston herself acknowledges, though in little more than a paragraph, “nature’s scale dwarf[s] all individual human efforts.” Part of the problem traces to the nature of contemporary research itself. With increased specialization has come a need for more intensive education, more precise equipment and more complex computing machinery. A modern scientist can hardly bear the expense of a particle collider alone, as a means to satisfy idle curiosities born of amateurish passion and of interest to them alone. Nor can they complete all the necessary calculations or accumulations of data necessary to make any informative inference. It may well be that what engenders a collective effort is not a recognition of one’s own doctrinal insufficiency, but the paucity of one’s own resources—both intellectual and material. The investment being great and the potential outcome uncertain, the management of cost requires a distribution of risk. The draw of well-funded, if exploitative, for-profit research agreements, then, is hardly obscure. Consequently, the university, the research institute or the military department, for instance, emerges as the entity responsible for the inputs.
Of course, it just so happens that said entity is also often the one who commissions the research and for whose benefit the question sought to be answered is both framed and investigated. This too does not square with the account Daston presents, with scientists as modern magi jointly seeking deliverance for us all from unreason and ignorance. What she fails to consider is that, instead of springing from a unity of noble purpose, their bonds, such as they are, may just as easily be born of contingent historical accidents that may unravel at any time. But this is beside the point.
Daston’s portrayal is flawed in a distinct, yet related, sense when it comes to her reading of history. In the early-Modern “Republic of Letters,” she tells us, were figures engaged in epic conflicts for intellectual ascendancy. These protagonists, every bit as Romantic(-ized) as the lone genius, would risk the status of their “Academies” on the validity of the acerbic critiques they undertook of the works of “étrangers” across the Continent. Though certainly not collaborative, these efforts would supposedly supply the underpinnings for the numerous attempts at internationalization in the 19th and 20th Centuries.
It is the stakes she presents for these “warring savants” that ring of untruth. If her account is to be believed, each time a member of the Republic took to criticize the work of another, they threatened to tear apart the collaboration that conjoined their academies. She even goes so far as to describe it as a “Hobbesian state of savage freedom.” Ignoring the impropriety of imposing the decidedly pre-social world of Hobbes onto a specific stratum of early modern society, one is still tasked with identifying what damage these savants could really inflict on one another. Even assuming the extent of their collaboration to be as significant as Daston describes, it is not as though the death of the Republic was a grave danger in the minds of any of these naturalists. With many of these thinkers being wealthy nobles themselves and most enjoying the patronage of their respective monarchs, the threat of a diminished collaboration with a pen pal halfway across the Continent does not sound quite in the distress Daston assumes.
Her reading of history only exemplifies a dangerous tendency of which all historians must be wary: just because something occurring in the past was essential for the world to exist as it does today, it does not follow that that thing was in the contemplation of everyone involved in its occurrence. To put it another way, people are not aware that they are making history as they go about making it. The Republic may well not have existed were it not that its members returned criticism with grace and understanding, but those offering such criticism showed no bravery of the type Daston eulogizes—for the simple reason that they were not and could not be aware of the world that would not have existed were their overtures not to be received in a constructive spirit. In representing their exchanges in this way, Daston egregiously displaces these historical figures from their temporality and imbues them with a foresight no human being can possess.
More crucially, whatever charm there may be in a peerage system where only wise men may bestow upon their kind the titles reflecting their abilities, there can be no serious contention that the early modern naturalists saw value in their work only as a means to garner the respect of their colleagues similarly engaged, no matter how far flung they may have been. Being respected by the étranger across the Channel may have been a feather in one’s cap, but surely the withholding of such respect had no impact on one’s standing within the Parisian Royal Academy.
To suggest, then, a Hobbesian state is foolish, for the foundation of any such parallelism is the possibility of the infliction of harm. Every agent in the state of nature (and the Republic, Daston would have us believe) is imbued with a fundamental, atemporal freedom. Their actions are constrained by nothing more than the vicissitudes of their own narrow self-interest and that of everyone around them. That is precisely what renders the Hobbesian state feral and terrible, and brings out the inherently, viscerally oppositional nature of human freedom. Where there is no possibility of harm, i.e., if the “warring savant” on the other edge of the world can deliver unto me no harm that I have reason to fear, I have no constraint from their activity—we may as well not be in the same savage forest. Such is the case where a naturalist enjoys the favor of their aristocratic audience and peers.
Indeed, the central error in Daston’s book is the little room she leaves for historical accident. There is a grand design that prevails over the linear narrative of a book; a Whiggish reading of history tells the tale of scientific collaboration going successively from discovered exigency to newfound collaborative strength. And yet no allowances are made for the event of the 19th and 20th centuries—the desolations of global wars, the rise (and fall) of colonial empires, the economic upheavals of the Industrial Revolution and the (tragically impermanent) cementing of liberal democracy as dominant mode of government the world over. Are not there contingencies that have unfolded over the course of the Earth’s history that have forced knowledge-seekers together against their will, just as much as there have been high-minded and keen-spirited overtures from one analyst to another? Until such vicissitudes of fate are fully explored and analyzed, no history of science has anything to tell us about the intentions of scientists today or of the bonds that connect their works to one another.
Notes
[1] And it is almost always a man depicted.
[2] Akiva Goldsman, screenplay of A Beautiful Mind (2001), directed by Ron Howard (Los Angeles, CA: Universal Pictures, 2000), 6, 104.
[3] This, too, is no accident. In the era of popular cinema, the unaesthetic malformations of the Drs. Moreau and Frankenstein must be shorn off (imagine rooting for a hero that is both arrogant and ugly), but their irascibility remains front and center.
[4] See Lorraine Daston, Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate (New York, NY: Columbia Global Reports, 2023).
[5] For example, the standardization materials on the mechanical properties of “[b]olts, screws and studs with specified property classes,” a riveting subject, currently sell for CHF 194 (~$214).
“ISO 898-1:2013 – Mechanical Properties of Fasteners Made of Carbon Steel and Alloy Steel – Part 1: Bolts, Screws and Studs with Specified Property Classes – Coarse Thread and Fine Pitch Thread,” International Organization of Standards, accessed March 20, 2024, https://www.iso.org/standard/60610.html?browse=tc.