Pathways into the Deep Future
A Commentary on Jacob Bronowski’s Comment on Scientific Civilization
I’ve written many posts on the idea of a scientific civilization — David Hume and Scientific Civilization, The Relevance of Philosophy of Science to Scientific Civilization, Types of Scientific Civilization, The Central Tension of Scientific Civilization, Scientific Civilization: The Economic Perspective, Scientific Civilization: The Central Project, Another Counterfactual Civilization with Science as its Central Project, Scientific Civilization and the Politicization of Science, Properly Scientific Civilization, The Central Project of Properly Scientific Civilization, Toward Scientific Civilization — and my conception of a scientific civilization has sharpened as I have worked out more details for my own model of civilization. With my idea of a scientific civilization becoming clearer, I am in a better position to critique the idea when it is used by others, so I am here going to examine the use of “scientific civilization” by Jacob Bronowski.
Near the end of this book The Ascent of Man (and this appears in the television version as well) we find this paragraph on scientific civilization:
“We are a scientific civilization: that means, a civilization in which knowledge and its integrity are crucial. Science is only a Latin word for knowledge. If we do not take the next step in the ascent of man, it will be taken by people elsewhere, in Africa, in China. Should I feel that to be sad? No, not in itself. Humanity has a right to change its colour. And yet, wedded as I am to the civilization that nurtured me, I should feel it to be infinitely sad. I, whom England made, whom it taught its language and its tolerance and excitement in intellectual pursuits, I should feel it a grave sense of loss (as you would) if a hundred years from now Shakespeare and Newton are historical fossils in the ascent of man, in the way that Homer and Euclid are.”
I should start by noting that Bronowski’s book is about the history of science, not an exposition of the concept of civilization, so that above comment is essentially a throw-away line; nevertheless, Bronowski chose to leave in this throw-away line, so he must have thought this was important enough to include in his final statement of the motives and conclusions of his inquiry into the history of science.
In my view, we are not a properly scientific civilization, though I agree with Bronowski that scientific knowledge is crucial to our civilization. Though crucial, science is marginal, perhaps even peripheral, to the central project of civilization as it exists today. Science is crucial to the entire economy that has been created around technology and industrialization, yet the crucial role of science is not widely recognized. How can science be crucial to civilization without that civilization recognizing that science is in fact crucial?
In Five Ways to Think about Civilization I discussed the lack of reflexive self-awareness on the part of civilization. In this post, after suggesting that a scientific civilization is a civilization that knows itself to be a scientific civilization (i.e., a civilization that possesses reflexive self-awareness), I wrote:
“…reflexive self-awareness on the part of agrarian civilizations of the economy that sustained that civilization is not shared by industrialized civilization. Very few today seem to understand that the source of our wealth and productivity is science. This is a failure of collective self-knowledge, and a failure that may have consequences for our very young industrialized civilization. Even the putative ‘leaders’ of contemporary society seem to have little awareness of the centrality of science to the economy, but if the scientific method had not been systematically applied to industry, we would not have progressed more than incrementally beyond the technology and engineering of earlier civilizations. That we have outstripped these earlier civilizations many times over in terms of wealth and productivity is a measure by which the scientific method and the cultivation of scientific knowledge can transform an economy.”
Lack of self-awareness is a disconnect, and that disconnect might have different causes depending on the particular nature of the case. The structures of our civilization are largely opaque to us. Perhaps we could say that they are occluded. The relentless blandishments of consumption, easy credit, entertainment, and all kinds of diversion hide from us the nature of our world. But there is also an important sense in which the structures of our own civilization are too close to us, to familiar to us, for us to see them. Or, if we see them, we do not see them objectively and impersonally, and that makes the effort for a scientific self-knowledge of the civilization we inhabit difficult, though not impossible, to attain.
All of these problems are magnified when it comes to that which is both most important to us and closest to us, which, in the case of civilization, is the central project. Simply put, when we participate in civilization, mostly we have no idea what we are doing. Civilization seems to be a product of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, as it appears as a consequence of individuals pursuing their own self-interest — though this is a self-interest filtered through the conceptual framework available to an individual embedded within a given civilization. The culture into which we are born tells us what we are to do in order to secure our self-interest, and then we do this, further hammering home the lesson; this is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Civilizations do this on a grand scale, not merely on a personal scale, marking its meanings and values with great monuments, and perpetuating stories and rituals that celebrate these meanings and values. Bronowski recognized this, too, after a fashion. Here is the final paragraph in the book:
“We are all afraid — for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do. The personal commitment of a man to his skill, the intellectual commitment and the emotional commitment working together as one, has made the Ascent of Man.”
When Bronowski writes that every civilization has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do, this is precisely the idea of a central project. At the present time, western civilization does do science, but it does a great many other things as well, and at the same time, and it would be misleading to say that science is what western civilization has set itself to do. And I think that if one were to hold a conversation with the shade of Bronowski, he would acknowledge that, while science is crucial to contemporary civilization, it isn’t what our civilization sets itself to do.
Is there a pathway from a civilization in which science is crucial, to a properly scientific civilization? Yes, and probably more than one pathway. But the future reveals to us countless branching paths, and only a few of these arrive at a properly scientific civilization. Many of these pathways lead to entirely other destinations, some of them admirable, others regrettable; I have reviewed some of these regrettable pathways in Suboptimal Civilizations.
In the first passage I quoted from Bronowski he speculates on a time a hundred years hence in which western civilization loses its vanguard position in history. It is already fifty years since Bronowski wrote this, so we could be halfway to such a future, which is one of the countless pathways before us. Bronowski hopefully notes that some other civilization will pick up the slack, but we do not know this to be true. Again, there are many pathways into the deep future, some of which preserve civilization, and some of which do not.
It is one of the most interesting questions in the study of civilization whether the continuous thrust of industrialization since the earliest stirrings of the industrial revolution, which is more than two hundred years of growth in science and technology without serious setback, can continue on to further achievements, whether this initial thrust of industrialization will exhaust itself, and, if it does exhaust itself, whether the energy and the spirit of the industrial revolution can be rekindled after humanity has taken a rest.
Recently I noticed this question on Quora: If our civilization collapsed to a pre-Industrial level, do we have sufficient resources to recover (i.e., to repeat the Industrial Revolution) to high tech? Or do we need to get into space on this go? I gave a short answer there, but this is an important question, and one that would repay effort spent on its elaboration. Again, there are many pathways forward, some of which would get us into space, and therefore a practically unlimited future, and some of which would mean that contemporary industrialized civilization is our only chance to transcend the limitations of our planetary endemism.
