Work in Progress: Is there some viable form of civilization that is optimal for science?
Friday 09 December 2022
In last week’s newsletter I wrote “As long as Enlightenment ideology reigns within Western civilization, no truly scientific civilization can emerge.” A couple of correspondents questioned me about this claim. It is, admittedly, rather sweeping, which is what makes it interesting. Further reflecting on this I stumbled on to some related questions which point to interesting lines of inquiry.
My preferred definition for a truly scientific civilization (what I call a properly scientific civilization) is a civilization that takes science as its central project. However, over the years of thinking about this problem I have hit upon a great many ways to define scientific civilization, all of which overlap and none of which perfectly coincide. (I wish that I had kept a separate file on my computer to copy all of my possible definitions of a scientific civilization so I had them all in one place and didn’t forget about the earlier ideas.)
Recently I thought of a yet another way to define scientific civilization, and wrote this in my notebook:
One way, inter alia, to define scientific civilization is when conflicts among scientists and other social groups are overtaken by conflicts within the scientific community.
The idea here is that, once a social group achieves dominance in a given society, presumably by triumphing in a contest with other social groups within the same society, the internal cohesion that obtained when that social group was not in ascendancy will give way to internal conflicts as the victors fight over the spoils.
There is already fighting among factions within science, and I doubt this has ever been entirely absent in the scientific community since the scientific revolution, but the fighting has not reached the level of conflict with out-groups, and that is why I formulated the above in terms of out-group conflict being overtaken by in-group conflict. In past newsletters I have discussed how Ernst Mayr publicly attacked SETI funding, which is a good example of in-group fighting among scientists for funding. I suggest that despite such funding conflicts, there is more fighting between science and non-scientific interests than there is within science, though I have no numbers to prove this claim.
I have written several blog posts about claims that contemporary western civilization is already a scientific civilization. My preferred definition does not acknowledge scientific civilization as a fait accompli, and indeed it seems likely that no human civilization could fully center itself on science. However, that may be less interesting than the possibility that civilizations largely scientific could come into being. By “largely scientific” I mean a civilization in which science is part of the central project, but in which science is not the sole element in the central project. One could call this a mixed central project; most central projects are mixed to some degree.
As I have noted many times, the schematization necessary to a scientific treatment of civilization results in oversimplified abstractions, and the idea (or ideal) of a properly scientific civilization is one of these ideas, whereas in actual history what we would expect to find is some individual civilization approximating a scientific civilization, i.e., a civilization that largely prioritizes science, but which also values activities other than science, and these other activities are not entirely excluded from the constituent thematic motives of the civilization.
Taking even this looser idea of a largely scientific civilization, I still don’t think that this is exemplified by contemporary Western civilization, but it is not a form of civilization that is, or would be, impossible to implement. So, if properly scientific civilization is likely off the table, and largely scientific civilization is possible but unlikely and therefore rare, the interesting question is how closely any extant civilization approximates (or could approximate) a largely scientific civilization, and whether there is some kind of civilization that is compatible with significantly greater scientific knowledge than other kinds of civilizations. Another way to formulate this question is as follows: is there some viable form of civilization that is optimal for science?
I have already suggested (again, in the previous newsletter) that traditional pre-modern civilizations are less compatible with science and scientific knowledge than is contemporary Enlightenment civilization. But now that Enlightenment civilization has shown the possibility of a central project not based on some traditional religious institution, we can consider the possibility of other forms of secular civilization and their degree of compatibility with science. Science itself, as an activity, an institution, and an ideal already touches on many aspects of human life and so presents itself as a potentially viable central project. (One could say that religion also is an activity, an institution, and an ideal, and so touches on a similar range of human interests.) But if science alone is too far from the human heart to serve as the focus of the hopes and aspirations of a society, then there must be something else that can serve in this role, and this something else would then be a central project, and central projects could be tested for their degree of compatibility with scientific inquiry and their ability to assimilate scientific knowledge.
I have also written a number of posts on possible forms of central projects, but, honestly, the candidates are thin on the ground, because there aren’t that many central interests that are familiar to human beings and sufficiently universal to serve as the basis of a civilization. Among the few candidates today for a secular central project of a nascent civilization is the environmental movement. I have often said that environmentalism is the only viability ideology to emerge in the second half of the twentieth century. I can’t remember if I have discussed this or not, but it occurred to me in the past year or so that, according to my own framework, a properly planetary civilization would be a civilization that takes a planet — presumably its homeworld — as its central project.
I was working on a long essay on the idea of planetary civilization (I haven’t finished this essay), and the more I worked on it the more I realized that I had started with the idea that a planetary civilization is one that reaches its natural limits by fully occupying its homeworld. I still think that this is an interesting idea with important ramifications for civilization understood on a cosmological scale, but, like I said, by my own approach to the question a planetary civilization should be a civilization that takes a planet as its central project. It is then only a small step from a properly planetary civilization to an environmentalist civilization that takes its homeworld as its central project, under the aspect of environmentalism.
As I understand it, the taxon of planetary civilizations could include several different kinds of civilizations, all of which would take a planet as a central project, but a planet might be thematized in various ways, of which the environmentalist thematization is but one. Indeed, one possible form of a largely scientific civilization would be a properly planetary civilization that takes its homeworld as its central project, but under the aspect of scientific inquiry rather than under the aspect of environmental conservation or preservation.
We can certainly go further afield with the idea of a planetary civilization as I described it above. We can imagine (if only as a thought experiment) a civilization that takes a planet other than its homeworld as its central project. Suppose that explorers go forth into the cosmos and discover a planet that is so fascinating that devotion to this world becomes something like a religion. Or maybe the planet is so fascinating for scientific reasons that it becomes a central project. Scenarios like these sound like a story from Star Trek, where representatives of the Federation come across some odd civilization that is fodder for one episode.
Another way to further elaborate the idea of a planetary civilization would be the possibility of civilizations that take some cosmological object larger than a planet as its central project. Through a scenario such as described in the previous paragraph, we could imagine some civilization that takes, for example, a black hole as its central project. Could a civilization take a galaxy as its central project? This seems a bit too diffuse to be the focus of interest of a society, but we could imagine, after all other galactic clusters have passed beyond the cosmological horizon, that what remains of our gravitationally bound local cluster could become the focus of a civilization — under these circumstances, the local cluster would be effectively the universe entire, so that taking this local cluster as a central project would be like taking the universe as a central project. Again, this is very diffuse, but we can see traces of this in certain contemporary conceptions that point to the possibility of a largely scientific civilization focused on the universe under the aspect of scientific inquiry.
Returning to the idea of a largely scientific civilization that is compatible with the most science (outside a properly scientific civilization, which would be, by definition, compatible with all scientific inquiry), I touched on this previously in a blog post from 2016, Another Counterfactual Civilization with Science as Its Central Project. I don’t consider this thought experiment to be any more likely in fact than a properly scientific civilization; the purpose of the thought experiment is to explore the possibility space of scientific civilization, and one does this by probing marginal ideas. The example in this blog post was an attempt to get at a scientific civilization that would be decoupled from a large industrial base, and this in turn points to the possibility of a scientific civilization that is largely decoupled from high technology.
Philosopher of technology Don Ihde sometimes uses “technoscience” to highlight the way in which contemporary science is dependent upon and integral with high technology. I have explored this idea extensively in terms of what I called the STEM cycle, in which science produces technologies that are engineered into scientific instruments that allow science to further expand and to produce further technologies. Are there viable alternatives to technoscience? Are there viable socioeconomic structures that do not involve the STEM cycle? In response to the latter question, we have the obvious examples of pre-modern (and, by implication, low technology) societies, so we want to further narrow this down by specifying a society in which science is near to its present level of development, but which is not a result of large-scale industrialization or a large-scale technological infrastructure.
I suspect that a non-technoscience science is possible, but that it would develop differently, with different emphases, than technoscience science, with the result being that a civilization that was compatible with high levels of scientific knowledge but which had not developed large-scale industrialization and high technology would have a distinct sphere of scientific knowledge, but that this sphere of scientific knowledge would overlap considerably with the sphere of scientific knowledge to be found in a civilization that fully embraced technoscience and which was economically driven by the STEM cycle.
The earliest history of science points to some interesting ways in which even a minimal technological infrastructure (pre-industrialization, so that the tools and instruments available are those that can be produced by a craft tradition without mass production) can generate sophisticated scientific knowledge. One obvious example of this is the measurement of the size of the Earth by Eratosthenes. If there had been a scientific community around Eratosthenes that functioned like the modern scientific community, the problem of the size of the Earth could have been taken up and the results of Eratosthenes greatly refined. This not only points to science that can be done with minimal technology, but to the differences between ancient science, which was largely the work of isolated individuals, and modern science, which is a community of researchers engaged in a common scientific research program.
Another interesting example was the ability of early modern science to measure the speed of light. The technological apparatus available to early modern science was not of a degree of precision to measure the speed of light in a laboratory, but this was made possible nevertheless by telescopes, which represent a more advanced technology than what was available to Eratosthenes, but still within the scope of a craft tradition of production prior to industrialization. Early efforts to use the moons of Jupiter as a clock revealed that the observed movements of the moons differed at different times of the year. This was because there are times when Jupiter is closer to Earth, and times when it is farther away, and scientists at the time were able to figure out that the discrepancy was due to the time it took for light to travel, and they estimated the speed of light on this basis. At this time we see the first multi-generational research projects coming into being, so this result was improved over time, rather than being merely the work of one man in isolation.
The STEM cycle places limitations upon scientific civilization, and even upon marginally scientific civilizations (like our own) in which science plays a large role and is integral with an industrialized infrastructure, but these limits, as we have seen, are not absolute. Given that the limits defined by the STEM cycle are not absolute, we can also look to the complementary possibility of a civilization in which technology grows somewhat independently of the growth of scientific knowledge. Again I can refer to an old blog post, Tinkering with Science, in which I suggested the possibility of advanced technology growing out of tinkering rather than from science. Again, I suspect that an advanced tinkering technology would take a different path than the technoscience we have today, which is a function of both science and technology. Either science or technology in isolation from the other, while limited by the STEM cycle, could still experience some kind of growth (under optimal conditions), and these would take their respective societies in different directions.
