Chapter 11 - Let's Be Fair - Some Writers Liked Science

 Chapter 11 - Let’s Be Fair: Some Writers Liked Science

 

 

Pro-Science and Pro-Technology Currents in Literature and the Humanities, 1870–1940: Celebrating Progress and the Human Spirit of Discovery

Between 1870 and 1940, alongside scepticism toward scientific and technological change, a vibrant countercurrent in the humanities embraced progress as a vital force for human improvement. Far from uniformly hostile, many writers, philosophers, and public thinkers celebrated science not only for its practical benefits but for its imaginative, moral, and emancipatory potential.

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The Late Victorian Enthusiasm for Progress

While Romanticism’s shadows lingered, the final decades of the 19th century saw a confident faith in science as a driver of civilisation. Writers like George Eliot infused novels such as Middlemarch (1871–72) with an awareness of scientific method’s power to deepen human understanding. Herbert Spencer’s popularisation of evolutionary theory in social philosophy inspired reformers to believe that society itself could progress under rational guidance.

Thomas Huxley—“Darwin’s Bulldog”—championed scientific education as the foundation of democracy. His essays argued that science was not a threat to morality but a means of grounding it in reality, a position echoed by American pragmatists like William James and John Dewey. For Dewey, science was the model of problem-solving thought, essential for democratic societies.

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Technological Wonders in Fiction

Jules Verne’s adventure novels—Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas(1870), Around the World in Eighty Days(1873), The Mysterious Island (1874)—transformed engineering feats into sources of wonder and optimism. H.G. Wells, though critical in some works, produced utopian visions like A Modern Utopia(1905) and The Shape of Things to Come(1933), depicting technology as a tool for planetary unity and peace.

Mark Twain marvelled at the telephone, typewriter, and steamboat, weaving technological novelty into American humour and social observation. In Russia, Maxim Gorky wrote admiringly of electrification and industrial modernisation as pathways out of rural poverty.

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Philosophical Advocacy of Science

Positivist and progressive thinkers saw science as civilisation’s engine. Émile Durkheim applied sociological method with scientific rigour, insisting that empirical study could address social ills. Bertrand Russell, in works like The Scientific Outlook (1931), argued that science had liberated humanity from superstition and should guide policy.

Even Henri Bergson, often framed as a critic of mechanistic science, praised its creative capacities when aligned with human intuition. Marie Curie’s public stature—emphasised in biographies and popular journalism—embodied the ideal of scientific heroism.

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The Machine as Muse

Italian Futurism, led by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, glorified speed, industry, and mechanical power. Artists like Fernand Léger painted machinery with reverence. In America, the Machine Age aesthetic of the 1920s saw architects such as Raymond Hood and writers for The New Yorker celebrate skyscrapers and subways as civic triumphs.

Langston Hughes, in poems like “I, Too” and “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” linked technological modernity to social progress and racial equality. Zora Neale Hurston’s anthropological work was rooted in scientific method and aimed at cultural preservation.

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Science in the Service of Humanity

The humanitarian potential of science found expression in the writings of H.G. Wells, who envisioned a “World Brain” of organised knowledge, and in the campaigns for public health by reformers like Florence Nightingale and later, Lillian Wald. The development of antibiotics, sanitation infrastructure, and electrification became recurring symbols in literature and journalism of progress defeating ignorance and disease.

The popular science writing of J. Arthur Thomson and the lectures of Albert Einstein inspired audiences to see physics as a gateway to cosmic awe, blending rational inquiry with a near-spiritual sense of wonder.

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Interwar Optimism and Planning

Even after the devastation of World War I, many intellectuals held that science could avert future catastrophe. The Vienna Circle’s logical positivists—Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap—celebrated the unity of scientific language as a path to clarity and cooperation. Social planners and economists like John Maynard Keynes embraced statistical and technological tools to engineer prosperity.

In Soviet Russia, the literature of the Five-Year Plans often depicted scientists and engineers as heroic figures shaping the future. Writers such as Alexey Tolstoy penned “production novels” portraying industrial expansion as a collective moral enterprise.

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Cinema and the Public Imagination

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), while cautionary, also celebrated the grandeur of technological achievement. The American documentary tradition, exemplified by Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), framed agricultural technology as a national salvation. Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940) incorporated abstract animation that mirrored contemporary scientific imagery, suggesting a harmonious fusion of art and science.

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Conclusion: An Affirmative Vision

From Huxley’s classrooms to Verne’s submarines, from skyscraper skylines to Einstein’s equations, the humanities between 1870 and 1940 often framed science and technology as humanity’s noblest adventure. Where sceptics saw alienation, enthusiasts saw liberation; where critics feared the machine, advocates imagined it as a partner in human flourishing. This current, equal in richness to the anti-science tradition, affirmed that rational inquiry and technical ingenuity could serve beauty, justice, and the expansion of human possibility.