Chapter 5 - Upending the Academic Hierarchy

 Chapter 5 - Upending the Academic Hierarchy

 

“In the Middle Ages people believed that the earth was flat, for which they had at least the evidence of their senses: we believe it to be round, not because as many as 1 percent of us could give physical reasons for so quaint a belief, but because modern science has convinced us that nothing that is obvious is true, and that everything that is magical, improbable, extraordinary, gigantic, microscopic, heartless, or outrageous is scientific.”

George Bernard Shaw

 

 So enamoured can we be with the technological and social advances of the last 100 years that it might be easily forgotten the revolutionary advances of the *previous* 100 years, and the responses of various parties to those advances.

 

But perhaps the greatest tectonic shift was this:

 

in 1825 geopolitics were uncertain, but the human project was certain. God King/President and Country. 

Yet by 1925 there were no certainties, none left.

 

In particular, the wisdom hierarchy, the epistocracy, of 1825 that had been understood throughout history, with the spiritual at its peak, the philosophers underwriting the spiritual, the poets and pamphleteers rounding out the wordsmiths, with there being no such thing as a professional scientist, with the pioneering scientists of the day being seen as little more than tinkerers with toys, had been unturned by 1925.

 

Fact is, scientists and technologists had achieved so much by 1925 that all the Humanities, such as the theologians and the philosophers, the (newly born) sociologists economists (Marxist or otherwise) and anthropologists, were badgering themselves and each other to *become more scientific* in approach: a shocking perspective shift.

 

Until the 1920s any Arts degree of note necessitated study of

Greek and Latin (so important were these in the 19^th century that medical textbooks included *entire paragraphs* in either of these).

 

Then, a mere five centuries (!) after Bibles were first printed in the vernacular of the people, it was realised Arts degrees could be taught in English as well.

 

In the 1920s opinion leaders in the young discipline of Sociology were conflicted.

Some pined for the good old days of philosophic speculation – of conjecture and debate, of inspired observation and genius inference followed by brilliantly entertaining rhetoric.

Others insisted: we must be more scientific. We must copy the scientists. We must conduct experiments. 

And I can only imagine the bewilderment these admissions caused among such Humanities academics whose forebears had been free to pontificate unchallenged (except by each other) for so many centuries.

Meanwhile in the Vienna Circle the embracing of scientific methodology had gone so far that these “logical positivists” could see no value in any thought whatsoever that was not grounded in empirical experimentation. 

For these, knowledge consisted only of experimental outcomes, and nothing else. 

All else was worthless conjecture.

Other philosophers and social commentators were abandoning, already, the traditionally transcendent and eternally even-handed viewpoint of the profoundly humanist thinker, and were on the bandwagon of jingoistic nationalism. 

Julian Benda’s 1927 book “Treason of the Intellectuals” documents exactly this: that the intellectuals of his time were leading the people into dangerous nationalism. 

He expressly feared, in 1927, that the academic leaders of his time were leading their societies inevitably into another World War … how tragically prescient he turned out to be.

Difficult times for those who revered the spiritual.

Difficult times for those who remembered scientists were once thought of as mere tinkerers, and who remembered the golden years of academic supremacy of the ‘man of letters”.

 

This, then, was the confused and tumultuous intellectual environment into which was born Thomas Kuhn.