Chapter 12 - The World of Baby Kuhn

 Chapter 12 - The World of Baby Kuhn

 

This, then, was the social milieu in which Thomas Kuhn was raised and developed. 

The advances of science were all around. Improved maternal mortality and infant mortality, universal education, in many places universal suffrage. Antisepsis, anaesthesia, aeroplanes … and while pro-science writers certainly existed and met with success it seems the anti-science side of this equation more fully captured the intelligentsia of the Humanities.

Perhaps there was a man-bites-dog mechanism here – the idea that only the unusual, being unusual, gains initial attention, and in a world suffused more with media than reality the man-bites-dog phenomenon becomes the apparent reality.

Perhaps we are, by some innate fallacy of appreciation, attracted reflexly to the cynic as being the wiser than the credulous.

Perhaps even that itself is a learned response following the cultural and culture-wide disappointment the West must have experienced following Darwin’s de-facto disproof of Genesis.

Or perhaps there was, at the most mundane, simple envy in the ranks of the wordsmiths at the ascending success of the tinkerers.

That said, it *must* remain a role of the wordsmith to imagine, to foresee, and to warn. Thus, certainly the implicit warnings found in the anti-science dystopian literature of this period probably has helped to *prevent* the arising of the very future circumstances the author feared. A society entirely familiar with the implicit warnings of “Brave New World” is entirely unlikely to edge towards creating a society like that there forewarned. Novelists have their place.

(Still, we get nowhere if the novelists then *direct* the science: an outcome even more awful than having only scientists write novels!, As Thucydides wrote, "The nation that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools": we might be similarly horrified at our science being led by the scientifically-ignorant and our novels written by illiterates. Thus: the observations of the Humanities thinkers must be welcomed, and their attempts to control science resisted.)

At any rate young Thomas Kuhn, born only three years after the end of WWI hostilities, found himself, at the age of eight, attending an absurdly wealthy school at a time the rest of his nation was racked in economic depression.

WWI had given the anti-science movement much material with which to bolster their anti-rationalist suspicions. The hedonism of the 1920s and failed social experiment called Prohibition did not reassure the naysayers that rationalism was all that rational, and then when the Depression struck one could be forgiven for wondering – for all this wonderful Progress, where is the progress?

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

  1. JohnSeptember 23, 2025 at 5:15 AM

    A bit short and perfunctory perhaps, but the groundwork has been laid, and here all I do is observe that the last two chapters identify some of the cultural bones that formed the skeleton of the academic cultural world into which Kuhn matured.
    I might be better rearranging these chapters such that, at this point, the reader covers Tom's school days.
    We'll see

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