now & forever
Q has given me a fantastically good book about Cicero. Reading it, I find myself coming back to the oft-considered idea that the narrative of historical progress is largely a myth. I am struck by the fact that the Roman Republic, even in decline, would in many ways have been surprisingly familiar to us today: warring political factions, questions of the role of populism in the governing of the democratic state, issues to do with citizenship, courtroom trials and legalistic loopholes, land reform, taxation structures, professional sports, class woes, and on and on and on. The debates and problems of Cicero's Rome are precisely the sorts of debates and problems that I could easily imagine preoccupying Congress today. Some of them give me a ridiculous sense of déjà vu; redistributing somebody else's land to soldiers as a reward for and incentive to service is a common feature of both ancient Rome and modern Zimbabwe, while a political rival's decision to raze Cicero's home on the Palatine Hill and to replace it with a state-sponsored temple smacks to me of the common tactic of using eminent domain to further one's political ties to friendly, well-connected developers--or, even more, it makes me think of the recent politically-motivated attempt to seize Justice Souter's home in order to teach him a political lesson.It's not just the politics and psychology of ancient Rome that we would have found familiar, however. There were physical similarities (if also great differences), and we would recognize everything from sports arenas to the library. There weren't really recognizable banks, but people did give loans and there was even a legally-mandated maximum interest rate. There were tenement blocks, single-family houses, homeowners, renters, and even occasional running water. Roads had mile markers. Girls had dollhouses.
It's not surprising that one can paint an engaging picture of Cicero and his life, either. It's got to be relatively easy to write a book about the historically distant politician--after all, we have his extensive correspondence, his books, and his speeches (improved for publication), just as we have for somebody as recent as Adams or Einstein.
But this is not meant to be a lament for progress in the world, or even an exposition of the lack thereof. I do think there are some ways in which we have undeniably learnt, built, created, and improved over the years. Modern medicine comes readily to mind, as does space exploration. Perhaps the development and use of the internet is another major progressive step, though I am somewhat skeptical. At any rate, I feel comfortable saying that there exist, simply put, new things that we can do now that we could not, and did not, do before, and that these things bring about real change in the way the human life is lived or the way that we think about ourselves and our place in the world; medicine and space exploration are some of those things. Moreover, these are things we understand now that we did not understand before, too. Voila! Progress.
The worldview I am presenting, then, is not one in which I descend into a chaotic postmodern narrative of human development in which we never learn and in which quality of life never improves, and during which we can never hope (as a species, or a nation, or a family, or any other group) to achieve any great goal or to approach any knew sort of objective knowledge; I emphatically find such a worldview to be false. At the same time, though, I do tend to approach narratives of progress with a major grain of salt. We can move forward, but it is hardly the inexorable march to modernism imagined by Marx or anybody else. (I'm not saying that such an idea is particularly Marxist, just that he is the proponent of it who comes most immediately to mind.)
Tangentially, I note here that I have just rhetorically placed myself somewhere between modernism and postmodernism, which is sort of amusing. Perhaps I can coin a new "ism" halfway between the two: "stmodernism," or "osmodernism," or something else with only half of the "post" included.
The thing is, it seems to me that most of our tangible improvements (both "hard" improvements like the development of pacemakers and heat-efficient buildings and fiberoptic cables as well as the more theoretical "soft" improvements in understanding, like our knowledge of how synapses work and why heat rises) are scientific. To be sure, the random legislator has at least as much and, generally speaking, probably a lot more, power over an individual's life and happiness than does a random scientist. But the legislator is doing exactly what legislators before him did, trying to balance the same forces, encouraged by the same kinds of promises and ambitions, and plagued by the same kind of difficulties. There may be different sorts of political leaders today (a king here, a Congressman there), but both seem to me to be practicing old methods of governance, necessarily rehashing again and again what has already gone before.
This is not a bad thing. I use the word "necessarily" with care; we need governance, social work, an economy, and literature and story as much now as ever anybody did then. (The "then" being some unspecified time in the past, I know, I know.) But these things are at once ephemeral and repeating; we will play them out now, and people will replay them over and over again into the future; and they played out in various permutations in the past as well, wherever and whenever there have been people out there (I imagine).
The work of science--at least some of the work of science--is different. It is not ephemeral, but timeless: we can forget a discovery, but it cannot be less true in the future (whereas the best way to run a society may very well change as the people change). This is complicated, of course, by the way that philosophical arguments turn into scientific investigations--but I think that that is not so difficult for us to understand intuitively. We know that Aristotle's physics and our own are different sorts of beasts; we know that Descartes talking about the mind is not the same as Harvard Med School studying the brain while looking at the output of a PET scan.
But that is, again, tangential. In the end, where I mean to be going is here: I think that all of this presents to me a sense of who one is helping when one prefers a political, social, religious, or literary calling over a scientific or mathematical one (or vice versa). In their noblest form, the former kinds of work engage in the eternal struggle to make life better for today's people (though, in more ignoble form, they can of course be used to make life worse, or to make the power-hungry happy, or for other nefarious but short-lived purposes). By contrast, scientific work is forward-looking, more about the good it can bring to people and the world in the future than about solving present and pressing problems (or doing harm--this, too, can be seen from a more nefarious flip-side). Even the person looking for an AIDS vaccine, very much with a mind to helping her world today, is learning something which will be useful and lifesaving even more in the future than it will be during her own time. Politics is not primarily about making the world better for all time, but shepherding one's compatriots pleasantly through the present. No politician is under the illusion that she will broker a lasting and permanent peace for all people. A scientist, however, is precisely under the impression that, if successful, she will discover (or create) something forever relevant to everybody.
This does not make the social sciences more parochial than the hard sciences, nor does it make the hard sciences more divorced from today's reality than the social sciences. But it does clarify a continuing tension in my own mind. I studied history and government in school (because I loved the former, at least, and was good at both); I believe in the public service of politics; I think history and story are deeply important, underappreciated, and excitingly able to give people a sense of themselves in the world, of cultural affinities, of analytical yet abstract thought, and even of right, good, and decency, all while being straightforwardly fun. I have occasional crises of conscience, however, in which I consider that I should devote my life to science--especially privileging medicine, physics, certain kinds of engineering, and math (don't ask). I would not be as good a physicist as I am an historian, but I wouldn't be too shabby--and it seems, on occasion, that that would be the best way to do good in the world. The question of how to make my world a better place is idealistic and perhaps even silly, but it does deeply matter to me nonetheless; it is helpful to think of these two kinds of pursuits as so explicitly complimentary, then, and so equally necessary. (I mean, we say that all the time, but we hardly ever act that way...)
posted by Skay @ 10:19 AM
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