Chapter 14 - Resentments with Deep Roots

 Chapter 14 — Resentments with Deep Roots

 

The scene in London in 1965 was not an intellectual lightning bolt from a clear sky. The applause for Kuhn — the relief, even — had been building for decades. By the time he walked onto the stage, a long, subterranean resentment toward science had been flowing beneath the foundations of the humanities.

 

To understand this hostility, we need to rewind the clock to the late 19th century, when the balance of prestige between the humanities and sciences began to shift. Before 1870, the great universities of Europe and America were dominated by classics, theology, and philosophy. Latin and Greek were not optional; they were the spine of an educated mind. A gentleman of letters might dabble in “natural philosophy,” but true intellectual refinement meant grappling with Aristotle, Cicero, and the canon of humanistic learning.

 

Darwin’s Earthquake

 

Then, in 1859, Darwin detonated a conceptual bomb under the feet of traditional scholarship with On the Origin of Species. This was not simply a new scientific theory — it was a frontal assault on the teleological and theological frameworks that had, for centuries, undergirded moral philosophy and the humanities at large. It was an announcement that life could be explained without reference to divine purpose or vital essence. For many humanities scholars, Darwin was not just explaining biology — he was trespassing into metaphysics and throwing out the furniture.

Theologians fought him openly. Literary men fought him obliquely, casting evolutionary thought as mechanistic, cold, and reductive. But their arguments were already on the defensive, forced to respond to a theory that had the full force of empirical evidence behind it. The tone was set: science could win public authority by explaining the world more convincingly than the prose and sermons of humanists.

 

The Prestige Shift

 

From the 1870s onward, the sciences began not only to explain but to transform the world in visible, tangible ways: railways, telegraphs, electric lighting, the germ theory of disease. In the same decades, humanities departments were producing fewer practical marvels. A historian might write a stirring biography; an English professor might produce a fine edition of Shakespeare. But scientists were curing cholera and stringing up electric grids. The comparison was brutal.

 

By 1900, physics and chemistry departments were expanding. Laboratories were the new temples of progress. Funding followed. Governments invested heavily in scientific research; newspapers breathlessly reported on new discoveries. Humanities scholars, meanwhile, found themselves explaining why the classics still mattered — a defensive posture that would become their default stance for the next century.

 

World War I and the Moral Indictment

 

Then came the Great War. Science, which had promised to make life better, delivered poison gas, machine guns, and artillery capable of reducing towns to dust in minutes. For the humanities, here was a chance to regain the moral high ground: the scientists, they argued, had unleashed horrors they could not control, in the service of governments and generals who cared little for ethics.

Writers like Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, though not philosophers, embedded in their poetry a deep suspicion of the “technicians of death.” Philosophers such as Oswald Spengler (The Decline of the West, 1918–1922) declared that Western civilisation had been betrayed by its fixation on scientific-technical domination, leading to spiritual and cultural exhaustion.

 

Yet even this moral indictment was double-edged. The war had also demonstrated science’s power to decide the fate of nations. Airplanes, tanks, cryptography — these were decisive, and they carried prestige. The humanities’ critique of science was thus tinged with jealousy: science could be damned for its destructiveness, but also envied for its potency.

 

Photography and the Painter’s Retreat

 

If Darwin had humiliated metaphysics, the camera humiliated realist painting. Until the 1850s, painters and portraitists had been the guardians of visual truth. Their skill in capturing likeness, texture, and light was the gold standard. Then, suddenly, a device could do it in seconds with greater accuracy.

 

The artistic pivot to Impressionism, and later to abstraction, has often been celebrated as liberation from mere representation. But it can also be read — more cynically — as an admission of defeat. The same retreat from reality would, in the 20th century, find its analogue in certain strains of literary theory, where the “text” ceased to refer to any external truth and became a self-referential game. The humanities had begun to embrace forms that were immune to being outdone by machines — precisely because they no longer competed to represent reality in the first place.

 

Between the Wars: The Philosophical Turn

 

In the interwar period, critiques of science intensified among certain philosophers. Martin Heidegger warned that modern technology was not neutral but a mode of “enframing” — reducing the world, and humanity itself, to raw material for manipulation. José Ortega y Gasset lamented in The Revolt of the Masses (1930) that technical specialists had become powerful but narrow, lacking the breadth of vision that the humanities claimed as their own.

 

At the same time, the sciences made advances that further unnerved humanists: quantum mechanics, with its indeterminacies and probabilities, threatened commonsense notions of causality; Freudian psychology — for all its pseudoscientific excesses — painted human reason as a thin veneer over irrational drives. In short, the 1920s and ’30s were a period in which the humanities could portray science as destabilising certainty itself, even as they feared being rendered irrelevant by its sheer problem-solving success.

 

World War II: Science Ascendant, Science Accused

 

The Second World War brought the tension to a peak. Radar, penicillin, codebreaking, and — most of all — the atomic bomb, demonstrated science’s unparalleled capacity to change the course of history. Scientists became war heroes and post-war celebrities.

 

But the mushroom cloud also became the central moral symbol of the age. In lecture halls and novels alike, the humanities cast the bomb as the ultimate proof of science’s danger: the cleverness of physicists had outstripped the moral wisdom to use their discoveries well. In this framing, the scientist was not the noble seeker of truth but the archetypal Faust — making a bargain for knowledge at the cost of humanity’s soul.

 

By 1945, resentment toward science in the humanities had matured into a coherent moral-political critique, fertilised by decades of loss of prestige and sharpened by the catastrophes of modern warfare. When Kuhn arrived on the scene two decades later, this resentment was not only ripe — it was hungry for an intellectual champion who could challenge science on its own epistemic turf.