|
|
|
|
|
SOCGRAD MINI-LECTURES
by
This is 3rd in a series on the Sociology of Knowledge in honor of Carl Sagan. It is brought to all graduate students in sociology through the good offices of the Sociology Department of the University of Vermont. These mini-lectures are part of the Transforming Sociology Series of the Red Feather Institute for Advanced Studies in Sociology.
TR Young. Director
Most of you know the remarkable story of Stephen Hawking, a British
Astro-physicist who occupies the Newton Chair at Cambridge. Hawking has been robbed of
both voice and muscle by disease but still has his wonderful brain and enquiring mind.
Oddly enough, his infirmity makes Hawking a most appropriate icon for Modern Science,
removed as it is from the larger human enterprize.
In this story, I will use Hawking as metaphor and icon for modernistic knowledge
processes. He stands at the apex of this remarkable transformation in the sociology of
science and serves well as such. It is particularly appropriate that we do so since the
series honors Carl Sagan...between them, Hawking and Sagan, Astro-physics has been vested
with both passion and compassion. Where Hawking added depth to modern science, Sagan
widened it and democratized it.
THE BEGINNINGS OF SCIENCE: For
most of human history, the knowledge process was oriented and dedicated to the various
religions of humankind. The mission of the knowledge process was to discover the plan of
the gods while the methods of knowledge required one put away desire; strip away the
senses of touch, sight, sound and taste; enter into absolute communion with the Divine.
At some point in human history, mathematics slowly evolved to become central to the
knowledge process. Morris Kline, (1972) in his wonderful 3 volume set on the History of
Mathematics, tells us that Logistica, the use of numbers, began with a people called the
Akkadians about 4500 years ago. The practical problems they faced included re-mapping the
boundaries of fields left flooded with mud and debris after the seasonal floods of the
Tigris, Euphrates and later, the Nile. Then too, as the great hydraulic societies
developed, imperial granaries had to be measured and rationed out through the year. Thus,
both trigonometry and geometry were born.
''Twas quite natural that mathematics was joined to theology. The remarkable order in the
universe; in the tides, the seasonal floods, the comings and goings of the sun and stars
led the priestly mathematicians to assign a remarkable genius and a universal agency to
their gods.
COPERNICUS AND NEWTON. There are many great minds which gave birth to modern
science but by 1543, Copernicus had given the world a modern astro-physics with the sun at
the center of our small cosmos. Then came Newton who gave us both mission and method for
the knowledge process.
The MISSION of the knowledge process was/is to map out the orderliness in physics,
chemistry, physiology, biology, psychology and yes, sociology. The end game was to build
formal, axiomatic theory. That remains the point and purpose of graduate study in the
various disciplines today.
The METHOD of the knowledge process includes logical positivism; the use of akkadian
numbers, Greek/Indian/Arabic mathematics, Aristotelian logic, leibnizian calculus together
with Pascalian laws of probability with which, with the method of successive
approximations, come ever closer to absolute truth. In contrast to pre-modern knowledge
processes, this method requires that one expand and refine the senses; touch, sight,
sound, smell and taste rather than to put them away and merge with super-natural realms.
Every doctoral candidate in physics, chemistry, physiology and sociology is required to
master this method and to adopt this mission.
THE ENGINES OF CHANGE. The
change from pre-modern to modern knowledge missions/methods was driven by human interests
and professional paradigms. It is this story which gives rise to such as Sagan and
Hawking. And it occurs in history. It is the engines which drive the knowledge process
which I want to set forth in this tribute to Sagan. It is sociology which brought us these
two quite different and quite remarkable scientists. I will lay out the progress as I see
it from a critical/post-modern and marxian sociology of knowledge.
Reading History: one reads history through one's knowledge paradigms. Slowly a variety of
religious paradigms have been displaced/supplemented by much secular, much more empirical
paradigms yet all are driven by human desire.
The Calamities of nature continue to drive the knowledge process. Floods, famine, quake
and disease inform desire while desire impels the knowledge quest. The way one understands
this great change in the knowledge process depends upon the lens one uses to organize the
historical data.
Following Foucault, I will assume that all truth-claims now set forth in graduate study
and in science itself are claims for power; empowerment of a discipline; empowerment of a
class; empowerment of a nation or of some other social system.
A. If one is religious, then one see the great change in the knowledge process as
the Will of God who, as Teilhard de Chardin put it, realizes Himself in the World as
Knowledge is improved. Conversely, one could as do many, claim that modern science is a
fraud and an evil conspiracy to defeat the Will of God...their god.
B. If one is a mathematician, one makes much of the discrepancies between pre-modern
myths of creation; of flood, famine and every disease from madness to AIDS. For
mathematicians, such stories are partisan and primitive; scarcely worth the time to tell.
Mathematicians point to the continuing successes of empirical science; hypothesis,
prediction, experimentation and validation. The role of reason and the use of ever more
sophisticated data gathering and data analyzing tools give modern science power and
preference in the knowledge process.
C. If one is an ecologist, one begins the long march to modern science and thence to
the Hawkings and Sagans of the time by looking at the desertification of the Imperial
hinterlands in the centuries before Christ. Both Greece and Rome stripped the hills and
valleys of Turkey and northern Africa in order to get the grain and build the ships of the
imperium.
Cities such as Ephesus, once a seaport is now a barren desert far from the sea...topsoil
of a thousand farms flowed to the valley, covered the land and filled the estuary. Now
laying barren in the sun, tourists gaze upon them and wonder why people troubled to build
the coliseums and great market places in such a place.
Ecologists point to such devastation and observe that, as old lands were exhausted by axe
and plow, new lands are sought...and exploration requires both the building and the
sailing of ships to far-away places. It requires the building, training, equipping and
moving of armies from Mediterranean shores north and west...North to Europe and West to
England.
Astronomy, engineering, ballistics, navigation and exploration gets on better with
mathematics than with prayer.
D. If one is an epidemiologist, one makes much of the pestilence which swept Empire.
In Roman times drought brought famine and disease as food supplies failed. The failing of
the Roman Empire left Europe vulnerable to Islam. By the 9th century, Islam had enveloped
the Mediterranean closing off the ancient trade-routes from Persia and China.
In the 15th century Italy, Spain, Portugal, France and England began to look west across
the ocean for another route to the Indies and to China. King Henry of Portugal gave prize
to those who navigated the oceans to find colonies for empire. England gave prize to those
who build the chronometers with which to find the latitude and longitude for ships at sea.
France gave prize to mathematicians who could calculate the interactions of moon, sun and
earth.
All these prizes fueled the modern knowledge process. Science began to solve the four
unanswerable questions put by sacred texts: Who can tell the way of the eagle in the sky;
the way of a serpent upon the rock; the way of a ship at sea and the way of a man with a
maid.
E. If one is a Theologian/sociologist of Religion, cum political scientist, one
explains the advent of modern science and thus of our good Hawking by noting that the
formation of a Holy Roman empire was crucial when Charles Martel defeated Muslims at Tours
in 732...and moonlit Grenada would live again, the glories of yesteryear.
In the years which followed and the knowledge process, the loss of the Holy Land to Islam
fueled desire to recapture Jerusalem. Crusade after crusade was launched from Northern
Europe...again, military concerns required a much better knowledge process...and much
better navigation tools.
More than that, the movement of thousands of crusaders from Europe to Venice to Palestine
concentrated wealth in the hands of merchants who needed ships, and shops and banks and
communications with other banks around Europe. The whole system of commodity capitalism
was greatly enhanced by the crusades.
The crusades brought back mathematics, geometry, algebra, trigonometry and quantification
when crusaders returned. The basic tools of modern science began to be merged with the
emerging political economy of Europe.
F. All these historical events gave birth to economics which in turn, began to give
its own answers which today shape and mis-shape the knowledge process. British, Scottish,
French and German economists began to sing the praises of capitalism and the free
market...and indeed, they have much to praise.
By the 1700's, commodity capitalism transformed into Industrial capitalism...new knowledge
was essential. Knowledge of metals, chemicals, soils, winds, storms and fuels...Knowledge
of prices, costs, demand, value and profit....Knowledge of weapons, soldiers, munitions
and roads...knowledge of geography, anthropology, psychology and sociology. Capitalism
pushed all that was holy aside and replaced it with goods, ads, markets and malls.
G. In all this, astro-physics played a central role. It was thought to be a simple,
basic, exemplar of the knowledge process...a model upon which all other sciences could be
modeled. One could, after Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and Einstein, predict the motion of
a star with a precision which inspires awe...to one foot in 100,000,000,000,000 feet.
Small wonder that newtonian science became the paradigm through which all knowledge must
flow. Think on it; with such predictive tools, we could know with certainty the way of a
man with a maid, the way of the eagle in the air, the way of a murderer in the city and
the way of a thief in the night.
THE END OF STEPHEN HAWKING AND THE
BEGINNING OF STEPHEN PFOHL. By the middle of the 20th century, claims were made
that human beings had reached the end of history, the end of economics and the end of the
knowledge process. All that remained was to fill in the blanks, tidy up the loose ends,
chart out the truth tables and, with the state as the agent of the common people, apply
these truths to the problems of the world.
I'm not sorry to say that the end of the knowledge process is, itself, just another human
myth. As we shall see in the 4th part of this series, there is postmodern knowledge
process just now aborning which will forever change the missions and the methods of the
knowledge process. This third great transformation in human knowledge is built in part
upon the critique of European post-modernists and in part upon the new sciences of chaos
and complexity.
I will not leave you bereft of hope. There is order in the universe and it can be
discovered. Indeed, it can be used to help build a good and decent society...or what is
knowledge for?? The methodological grounding for a new postmodern philosophy of
science is found in Chaos/Complexity research...about which you can find more in this
series of mini-lectures.
With wit, wisdom and an abiding sense of the Holy, we too can contribute to human
knowledge; we too can begin to solve and resolve social problems...that is where Steve
Pfohl comes it...he is the first elected President of SSSP to be invested and immersed in
the postmodern.
This series will conclude with the statement that the human process requires all three
forms of knowledge; pre-modern, modern and postmodern knowledge can be, must be integrated
to serve the human project writ large.
TR Young