Ship of Fools Page 8
…has a common core of research methods, which are all based on collecting empirical observations—those we can observe with at least one of our senses—and putting them together with the help of mathematical tools. (283)
This is a nineteenth-century view of what science does, whereas the really distinctive feature of modern science is that it tests theory by experiment , and does not simply collect empirical observations. On why modern science developed specifically in Europe Harari has the following explanation:
The key factor was that the plant-seeking botanist and the colony-seeking naval officer shared a similar mindset. Both scientist and conqueror began by admitting ignorance—they both said “I don’t know what’s out there.” They both felt compelled to go out and make new discoveries. And they both hoped that the new knowledge would make them masters of the world. (316-17)
Botany was actually of quite minor importance in the early stages of modern science, which was dominated by studies of terrestrial and celestial motion (Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton), and by chemistry which involved the revival of Greek atomism. And Columbus, to take a useful example of “a colony-seeking naval officer”, knew quite well what was out there. He knew that the earth is round, and concluded that if he sailed west for long enough he would find a new route to the East Indies. So when he reached the islands of the Caribbean he was convinced that their inhabitants were “Indians” and never changed his mind. I think we can perhaps do a little better than Harari in explaining the European origin of modern science.
Greek science was dominated by the belief that reason, and particularly mathematics, was the true path to knowledge and its role was to be the tutor of the senses, not to be taught by them. The idea of performing an experiment did not really exist, and the great Alexandrian engineer Hero, for example believed that water pressure does not increase with depth. He defended this belief with an ingenious theory from Archimedes, but ignored the practical experiment of taking a glass down to the bottom of a pool where it could easily have been seen that the water rises higher inside the glass the deeper it is taken. Aristotle’s theories of terrestrial and celestial motion, and Ptolemy’s elaborate geometrical model of the heavens, for example, were seen as triumphs of reason, and were inherited by the medieval European universities who began a critical study of them. The importance of Greek science, however, was not that it was right—it contained fundamental errors—but that it presented a coherent theoretical model of how the world worked that stimulated thought and could be tested.
The Islamic world had transmitted much of Greek science to medieval Europe, and Aristotle in particular was greatly admired by Muslim scholars as “The Philosopher”. But under the influence of the clerics Islam eventually turned against reason and science as dangerous to religion, and this renaissance died out. In rather similar fashion, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian closed the philosophy schools of Athens in 529 AD because he considered them dangerous to Christianity. But while in the thirteenth century several Popes, for the same reason, tried to forbid the study of Aristotle in the universities, they were ignored and in fact by the end of the century Aquinas had been able to publish his synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology in the Summa Theologica .
This illustrates a vital difference between Europe and the other imperial civilisations. Whereas the Caliph and the Byzantine Emperor had the authority to impose intellectual orthodoxy, in Europe the Popes could not enforce their will on society, and neither could the secular authorities, because there were too many competing jurisdictions—of the Holy Roman Emperor, of kings, of free cities, of universities, and between church and state themselves. Another vital difference was that in the other imperial civilisations there was that basic gulf between scholars and artisans and between merchants and the rest of the upper classes to which I referred earlier. Medieval European towns and cities, however, were run by merchants, together with the artisans and their guilds, so that the social status of artisans in particular was very much higher than in other cultures, and it was possible for them to interact socially with learned scholars. This interaction with scholars occurred in the context of a wide range of interests that combined book-learning with practical skills: alchemy, astrology, medicine, painting, printing, clock-making, the magnetic compass, gunpowder and gunnery, lens-grinding for spectacles, and so on. These skills were also intimately involved in the making of money in a commercially dynamic society.
It is highly significant that this interaction between scholars and artisans also occurred in the intellectual atmosphere of “natural magic”, the belief that the entire universe is a vast system of interrelated correspondences, a hierarchy in which everything acts upon everything else. Alchemy and astrology were the most important components of this tradition, but by the thirteenth century Roger Bacon, for example, was arguing that by applying philosophy and mathematics to the study of nature it would be possible to produce all sorts of technological marvels such as horseless vehicles, flying machines, and glasses for seeing great distances. It was not therefore the admission of ignorance that was truly revolutionary, but the idea that science could be useful in mastering nature for the benefit of Man.
By the time of Galileo, whom Harari does not even mention, the idea that science should be useful had become a dominant idea of Western science. Galileo was very much in the natural magic tradition and was a prime example of a man of learning who was equally at home in the workshop as in the library—as is well-known, when he heard of the Dutch invention of the telescope he constructed one himself and ground his own lenses to do so. But Galileo was also enormously important in showing the crucial part that experiment had in the advancement of science. He was keenly interested in Aristotle’s theory of terrestrial motion and is said to have tested the theory that heavier bodies fall faster than light ones by dropping them from the leaning tower of Pisa. This is somewhat mythical, but he certainly carried out detailed experiments with metal balls by rolling them down sloping planks to discover the basic laws of acceleration. He did not simply observe, but designed specific experiments to test theories. This is the hallmark of modern science, and it emerged in the circumstances that I have just described so that reason and the evidence of the senses were thus harmonized in the modern form of natural science. (On the origins of science see Hallpike 2008: 288-353; 396-428.)
Science, then, is not exactly Harari’s strong point, so we need spend little time on the concluding part of his book, which is taken up with speculation about where science and technology are likely to take the human race in the next hundred years. He concludes, however, with some plaintive remarks about our inability to plan our future: “we remain unsure of our goals”, “nobody knows where we are going”, “we are more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with all that power” (465-66). He has just written a book showing that mankind’s social and cultural evolution has been a process over which no-one could have had any control. So why does he suddenly seize upon the extraordinary fiction that there ought to be some “we” who could now decide where we all go next? Even if such a “we” existed, let us say in the form of the United Nations (!), how could it know what to do anyway?
Throughout the book there is also a strange vacillation between hard-nosed Darwinism and egalitarian sentiment. On one hand Harari quite justifiably mocks the humanists’ naive belief in human rights, for not realising that these rights are based on Christianity, and that a huge gulf has actually opened up between the findings of science and modern liberal ideals. But on the other hand it is rather bewildering to find him also indulging in long poetic laments about the thousands of years of injustice, inequality and suffering imposed on the masses by the great states and empires of history, and our cruelty to our animal “slaves” whom we have slaughtered and exterminated in such vast numbers, so that he concludes, “The Sapiens reign on earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of.” But a consistent Darwinist should surely rejoice to s
ee such a fine demonstration of the survival of the fittest, with other species either decimated or subjected to human rule, and the poor regularly ground under foot in the struggle for survival. Indeed, the future looks even better for Darwinism, with nation states themselves about to be submerged by a mono-cultural world order, in which we ourselves are destined to be replaced by a superhuman race of robots. It has been rightly said that:
Harari’s view of culture and of ethical norms as fundamentally fictional makes impossible any coherent moral framework for thinking about and shaping our future. And it asks us to pretend that we are not what we know ourselves to be—thinking and feeling subjects, moral agents with free will, and social beings whose culture builds upon the facts of the physical world but is not limited to them. (Sexton 2015: 120)
Summing up the book as a whole, one has often had to point out how surprisingly little he seems to have read on quite a number of essential topics. It would be fair to say that whenever his facts are broadly correct they are not new, and whenever he tries to strike out on his own he often gets things wrong, sometimes seriously. So we should not judge Sapiens as a serious contribution to knowledge but as “infotainment”, a publishing event to titillate its readers by a wild intellectual ride across the landscape of history, dotted with sensational displays of speculation, and ending with blood-curdling predictions about human destiny. By these criteria it is a most successful book.
References
Chrisomalis, S. 2010. Numerical Notation. A comparative history . Cambridge University Press.
Claessen, H.J.M., and Skalnik, P. 1978. The Early State. The Hague: Mouton.
Diamond, J. 1997. Guns, Germs and Steel . London: Vintage.
Everett, D. 2008. Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes. Life and language in the Amazonian Jungle . London: Profile Books
Hallpike, C.R. 1979. The Foundations of Primitive Thought . Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hallpike, C.R. 1986. The Principles of Social Evolution . Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hallpike, C.R. 2008. How We Got Here. From bows and arrows to the space age. Bloomington, Indiana: AuthorHouse.
Hallpike, C.R. 2016. Ethical Thought in Increasingly Complex Societies. Social structure and moral development. New York & London: Lexington Books.
Mair, L. 1962. Primitive Government . London: Penguin.
Momigliano, A. 1975. Alien Wisdom. The limits of Hellenization . Cambridge University Press.
Needham, J. 1956. Science and Civilisation in China . Vol. 2. Cambridge University Press.
Sexton, J. 2015. “A reductionist history of humankind”, The New Atlantis , No. 47, 109-120.
Tomasello, M. 2009. Why We Co-operate . MIT Press.
Trigger, B. 2003. Understanding Ancient Civilizations . Cambridge University Press.
Chapter IV: René Girard’s world of fantasy
The celebrated René Girard (1923–2015) spent the formative years of his academic career in the study of literature and literary theory, and when he retired in 1995 was still Professor of French Language, Literature and Civilization at Stanford University (Townsley 2003: 1). His literary researches, into ancient Greek mythology and drama as well as French and other modern European literature, also stimulated him to become a “philosophical anthropologist”. In this capacity he became famous for his theory that communal violence, or the fear of it, underlay all human culture, and that sacrificial scapegoating, as the antidote to this violence, was the basis of all primitive religion, myth, ritual, and taboos. Unlike Claude Lévi-Strauss, he had little influence on social anthropologists, but he was nevertheless a major academic figure, especially in literary theory and religious studies. Author of around thirty books, he received many honorary degrees, was elected to the Académie Française and made a Knight of the Légion d’Honneur, and was described by one colleague as “the new Darwin of the social sciences”. We are not, therefore, dealing with an obscure crank but with an important contemporary thinker with impressive credentials.
The foundation of the vast theoretical edifice that he built is actually quite a simple theory about violence and social control in primitive societies, which is a standard topic familiar to all anthropologists who have done field-work in these societies. A close and detailed knowledge of ethnographic facts is essential to an assessment of Girard’s work, and in this paper I shall therefore draw in particular on my own years of field-work in Papua New Guinea and Ethiopia.
1. Girard’s general theory
He starts from the premise that all human behaviour is learned, and is therefore based on imitation, “mimesis”. Our desires, in particular, are not autonomous but learned from other people, and this typically leads to conflict. To take a simple example, a child notices an object and starts to play with it, whereupon another child sees this and wants to play with it as well. This personal imitation or “acquisitive mimesis” tends to generate violence, because the model and the imitator both want the same thing, and it is hard to restrain the urge to violence that develops: “…it is more difficult to quell an impulse to violence than to rouse it, especially within the normal framework of human behaviour.” (Girard 1977: 1-2) In this situation other individuals are impelled to join in by the same process of mimesis, so this anger generated within the group must be vigorously discharged in some other way, and here the scapegoat enters the picture. “If acquisitive mimesis divides by leading two or more individuals to converge on one and the same object with a view to appropriating it, conflictual mimesis will inevitably unify by leading two or more individuals to converge on one and the same adversary that all wish to strike down.” (Girard 1987: 26)
The group thus choose some arbitrary victim to vent their fury upon, instead of each other, and such victims are typically marginalised outsiders like children, old people, the disabled, women, and in particular, animals. This victim becomes regarded as the cause of all the group’s troubles; their collective rage is discharged upon the scapegoat in the ritual of sacrifice, the fury of the community then seems almost “magically” to cease, and calm is restored. Once the victim is expelled from the community, the myth develops that not only was the scapegoat responsible for the group’s violence, but that by dying it was also their salvation, and therefore god-like. Rituals develop around this mythology, and over time animals take the place of human sacrificial victims. But for the mechanism to work at all, it is essential that the community does not realise that the scapegoat is really quite arbitrarily chosen and has no responsibility for the group’s troubles. If ever they should come to realise this, the whole sacrificial ritual would collapse.
It is important to note that in Girard’s view, the original act of sacrifice was a real event in human history. “Ritual violence is intended to reproduce an original act of violence. There is nothing mythic about this original violence, but its ritual imitation necessarily includes mythic elements” (1977: 281). Surprisingly, Girard evidently supposes that this initial act took place far back in prehistory before humans acquired language. The first scapegoating ritual, being pre-linguistic, was simply based on instinct, and since scapegoating is the substitution of one thing for another it is also the origin of language, since words themselves are also substitutes for things. Sacrifice and the prohibitions associated with it would have created communal peace for early hominid groups and a safe space for mothers and their babies in particular.
The victimising process was therefore the missing link between the animal and human worlds that explains the humanisation of primates, and hunting and the domestication of animals were also motivated by the need for a stock of sacrificial victims. Scapegoating and sacrifice are the basis of all ritual and archaic religion generally, and archaic religion is the basis of all political and cultural institutions. Girard claims that the victimisation process is the rational principle that explains the infinite diversity of culture, and compares it to the principle of natural selection, which cannot be proved experimentally but convinces us by its great explanatory power.
Girard’s belief that scapegoating could have been the source of language because it involves the substitution of the arbitrarily chosen victim faces two major problems, the first of which is a simple matter of evidence, or rather the lack of it. We simply know nothing about the thought processes of early hominids such as Homo erectus . Nor can we imagine what the social relations of pre-linguistic Homo sapiens might have been either, and attempts to do so are pure speculation. Indeed, we actually have no direct evidence for when grammatical language emerged. By “grammatical” I mean, for example, predication—the ability to say that something or someone has certain qualities; distinguishing between acting on and being acted upon; questions; negation, and referring to past and future. This raises the second problem, which is that it is hard to see how any symbolic culture would be possible at all without language. This is because the relation between a symbol and what it stands for, while drawn from nature, is not a representation of it. For example, among the Konso of Ethiopia, white is an inauspicious colour, but without language how could a group of people decide that white rather than black or some other colour should be regarded as inauspicious? (Indeed, how could the very idea of “inauspicious” come to be understood by a group of people without language?) In fact, the Konso regard white as inauspicious because it is the colour of bone, of death, therefore, and also the colour of cotton, which ripens during the hottest and driest part of the year. Black, on the other hand, is the colour of the life-giving rain-clouds and is therefore auspicious. But these are simply one set of symbolic values and other cultures have chosen different ones. In short, Girard does not explain how symbolic culture could have existed in a pre-linguistic society.