Hans Zinsser
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 145th anniversary of the birth of Hans Zinsser (17 November 1878–04 September 1940), who was born in New York City on this date in 1878.
While the work of William H. McNeill is better known on the relation of infectious diseases to history (in particular, McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples), Zinsser wrote a memorable book on infectious diseases and history, Rats, Lice, and History, originally published in 1934. W. C. Summers, in his sketch of Zinsser’s life, “Hans Zinsser: a tale of two cultures,” also notes the thematic resemblance to McNeill’s later work:
“He traces and recounts many episodes in the history of Western Civilization that directly or indirectly were the result of the specifics of one epidemic or another. This is, of course, the same theme elaborated by William McNeill in his famous and enormously influential book, Plagues and Peoples, written in the early 1970s. While Rats, Lice and History is not decorated with scholarly citations, references to the primary sources, or an exhaustive bibliography, it is profoundly thought provoking, and in many ways exhibits a prescience of things that were to come in Europe at the end of the 1930s. This book is still in print and continues to be read by generations who sense its antiquarian qualities, who may be puzzled by the acerbic references to the literary dandies of the interwar period, but who, nonetheless, are fascinated by the breath-taking brio of Zinsser’s style and by the basic appeal of his central thesis.”
McNeill himself acknowledged Zinsser’s priority in the field of epidemiological history, while pointing out the limitations of Zinsser’s approach as history (in contradistinction to epidemiology, which, I think, was Zinsser’s intention):
“We all want human experience to make sense, and historians cater to this universal demand by emphasizing elements in the past that are calculable, definable, and, often, controllable as well. Epidemic disease, when it did become decisive in peace or in war, ran counter to the effort to make the past intelligible. Historians consequently played such episodes down. To be sure, there were a number of outsiders, like the bacteriologist Hans Zinsser, who played devil’s advocate, picking out instances when disease did make a difference. Thus Zinsser’s eminently readable book, Rats, Lice and History, showed how outbreaks of typhus often upset the best-laid plans of kings and captains. But such books did not try to fit disease experience into any larger picture of human history. For them as for others, occasional disastrous outbreaks of infectious disease remained sudden and unpredictable interruptions of the norm, essentially beyond historical explanation and therefore of little interest to serious professional historians whose job it was to explain the past.”
In Rats, Lice, and History Zinsser revealed a widely ranging mind which perhaps sees the world through the lens of microbiology, but which nevertheless sees the whole world, and the following passages shows that Zinsser was indeed placing his effort in the context of the larger picture of human history:
“In the history of the immense universe, that of our little planet is an isolated and probably unimportant episode. On some older island in the immeasurable spaces, some other evolution may have produced beings so much wiser than ourselves that they can comprehend the origin of life. For there is no just reason to believe that we — transitional creatures in the upward progress of evolution — have reached the highest possibilities. The tragedy of man is that he has developed an intelligence eager to uncover mysteries, but not strong enough to penetrate them. With minds but slightly evolved beyond those of our animal relations, we are tortured with precocious desires to pose questions which we are sometimes capable of asking, but rarely are able to answer. We have learned to dream of conquests of the forces about us; we investigate matter and the energy that moves it, the order that controls the worlds and the sun and the stars; we train our minds inward upon themselves, and discover emotions, ethical desires, and moral impulses — love, justice, pity — that have no obvious relation to mere animal existence. The more we discover, the greater is our hopelessness of knowing origins and purposes. The more our ingenuity reveals the orderliness of the nature about us and within us, the greater grows our awe and wonder at the majestic harmony which we can perceive more clearly with each new achievement of art or of science, but which — in ultimate causes or in goal — eludes us. To feel this awe and to wish to fit into the harmony of natural things, with a vision of the whole, is apparently a definite phenomenon of human psychology; it is the force that has engendered religions, just as the instinct to understand the material environment has produced science, and the impulse to express aesthetic reactions has produced art. It is obvious that religion begins where philosophy takes off from the solid shore of the exact sciences into speculative waters, the shallows of which are metaphysics. It is not entirely sensible in modern times, however, to speak of conflicts between religion and science which, to truly civilized people, have not existed for a long time. When perturbed ministers, like the Reverend Dr. Fosdick, passionately deny such a conflict, they are pounding the table and asserting that the earth is round. They desire to preserve the beneficent social and moral influences of an organized church in a world not yet ready for a purely ethical code. And when distinguished minds, like Millikan and others, take wing from the ultimate peaks of exact science into the stratosphere of an old-fashioned heaven, they illustrate the biological truth that the mind of man possesses ethical desires which the most highly developed knowledge of science cannot satisfy — obviously never will satisfy.”
There is a lot going on in this long paragraph. I was, for example, immediately reminded of a famous quote from J. B. S. Haldane:
“Our only hope of understanding the universe is to look at it from as many different points of view as possible. This is one of the reasons why the data of the mystical consciousness can usefully supplement those of the mind in its normal state. Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” (This is from the final paragraph of Haldane’s essay “Possible Worlds,” included in most editions of Possible Worlds and Other Essays, however, many editions of the book do not include this passage.)
Zinsser in arguing that our intelligence is sufficient to fire our curiosity but not sufficient to answer the questions raised by our curiosity, also suggests that the world is queerer than we can suppose, but, in looking at the world from the perspective of microbiology and infectious diseases, Zinsser has opened up another point of view on the universe, and thus contributed to the expansion of our perspective in a way that suggests that the questions that current perplex us will not necessarily always lie beyond our comprehension.
I also found myself reminded of Kant’s famous conclusion to his Critique of Practical Reason:
“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within. I have not to search for them and conjecture them as though they were veiled in darkness or were in the transcendent region beyond my horizon; I see them before me and connect them directly with the consciousness of my existence.”
And Zinsser, in noting that there are moral appetites that cannot be fulfilled by science — entirely parallel to the epistemic appetites that cannot yet be fulfilled by science — connected his awe inspired by the natural world to his consciousness of the conflicted human condition. Interestingly, while Kant experienced admiration and awe at starry heavens above, Zinsser experienced awe in the presence of life and the contemplation of its origins. One could even reformulate the famous Kantian line in terms of the complexity of biology within and the moral law above, and it would still make sense.
The conception of history in Zinsser is one of tensions between “the possibilities and limitations of modern science” (a reference that appears a couple of paragraphs after the above quote). Science inspires us to pursue understanding, but this inspiration cannot be completely fulfilled because of our limitations. This limitation propels us forward with the inspiration intact, but always groping after something that we cannot fully comprehend. The ideal remains, continuing to fill us with awe, even as it is repeatedly frustrated and disappointed by our experiences. In former ages, other ideals similarly inspired us to know and to act on the basis of conceptions that we could not fully comprehend, and there too we were disappointed, but our disappointment did not necessarily cause us to abandon our ideal. The scientific ideal is, in this context, a continuation and an extension of this human striving after an unreachable ideal. The universe may be stranger than we can suppose, but that does not prevent us from continuing the attempt at understanding.
This tension in science (or indeed within the human pursuit of any ideal) plays into McNeill’s claim in the above quote that the historian seeks to make history intelligible — but what is it that makes history intelligible? McNeill implies that it is a nomothetic account of events, but surely this is a minority position among historians: Hegel is relentlessly criticized for implying that history is the unfolding of a rational process in accordance with laws knowable by human reason, i.e., Hegel is found wanting precisely because of his insistence upon a nomothetic understanding of history. Zinsser implies that it would be scientific understanding that would make history intelligible, but we have seen that scientific understanding is also an ideal that cannot be fulfilled, and we can then see that past ideals also suggested interpretations of history that could make history humanly comprehensible. The providential conception of history we find in, for example, Saint Augustine and Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, is an ideal that cannot be fulfilled by human understanding. The theistic response that divine understanding comprehends what human understanding cannot is just, but it does not satisfy the scientific approach to human understanding — but, of course, science itself does not satisfy this longing either.
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