Science of Air Projects And Experiments With Air And Flight Book

The overwhelming impression I got while reading this book is of an old man endlessly puttering with his small figurines, gewgaws, and doodads. And as he arranged the tchotkes, he drank, the evening wearing on and him growing more and more bold in his assertions—understanding the world through the organization he finally achieved. Some of what he says is clichéd, some crazy, and some insightful, despite everything.

Like Jacques Barzun is a character in a Bruce Chatwin novel.

Barzun is here interested in the role of science in civilization. (He would probably capitalize those words himself). The twelve chapters—based on lectures he gave—move through the argument, from acknowledging science’s service, contemplating its problems, and offering a way forward.

He begins with a consideration of C.P. Snow’s famous dictum that the West had been divided into two cultures—the culture of science and the culture of humanities (which only a few great men could bridge, conveniently including Snow himself). Barzun dispenses with the idea, arguing that our lives are part of one culture, but the culture has many parts. Science is merely one part of this general culture, although one with ambitions to subsume it all. While being careful to avoid the easy “science is religion” trope, he compares science to Medieval theology, in terms of how it is a central tenet of thought, something everything else is constantly measured against.The problem with this argument from today’s perspective is obvious. We are all part of the same culture? what do you mean by “we,” kemosabe? Whose culture? Whose civilization? The easy dismissal of primitive society and celebration of Western civilization cannot stand in light of fifty years of subsequent scholarship.

Barzun argues—correctly, I think—that science as science did not come into being until the middle of the nineteenth century. It was a social force, another special interest, so to speak, given prestige by its connection to technology, progress and abundance. But—and here I begin to differ with him—its heyday ended wight he dawn of the twentieth century, as it fragmented into many small subjects. Afraid to err, afraid to overgeneralize, respectful of other professionals, scientists came to speak only about the small par tot the universe they studied. There was no longer a unifying vision. This specialism—not specialization, which is a useful focusing, but instead an ideology of remaining committed to one’s subject—has ruined science and modern life, in Barzun’s opinion. Specialism doesn’t really make sense to me—and certainly not the fears that are supposed to sustain it: in other parts of the book Barzun is quick to point out that some scientists are more than happy to overgeneralize. Regardless, it is true that science certainly fragmented as it grew.

Barzun then stops to consider the role of technology—or techne, as he calls it. (Jacques Ellul had offered a similar redefinition ten years earlier, but Barzun weirdly does not cite it.). Technology is related to science, but is not the same thing, and is not derivative of science—indeed, he argues, science is often pushed forward by advances in technology. The machine—techne—is a symbol of love and hatred in modern society he says, unoriginally even for the time. Technology is often beautiful and makes our lives easier. But it also destroys the meaning of Work (capitalized again), leaving people with meaningless jobs. Technology provides conveniences, he says—in one of his more useful aphorisms—but not comfort: comfort is a different feeling, alien to technology. There is an unintended cycle, of machines creating new realities that themselves have problems which need to be solved by more technology. This leads to alienation and irritation—although his examples are hysterically dated: he complains about the Zip code (several times, actually), the need to dial all the digits in a phone number, and IBM punched cards. To his credit, Barzun does not pine for an escape backward: technology causes problems, no doubt, but its not like human dignity was particularly valued 300 years ago. More people are better off under the current system, even if this system is not sustainable and not nourishing.

He then turns to a similar critique of science which, again, in general was not new even in 1964, even if some of his insights were. He argues that most people don’t actually know much about science—thus belief in science is a kind of credulity—and that includes scientists. The study of science has become a career, possible for those of even modest intellectual endowment (this is his claim), who specialize in their little area. Indeed, there is a connection between the growth of science and the growth of the middle class, as both involve quantification, abstraction, and profressionalization, he says. Which means that scientists should not be accorded oracular status—although he predicts more and more political debates will have a scientific guise (and points as an example debates over the fluoridation of water). The tendency in science is to hide messy reality behind abstractions—as a counterexample he cites James Watson’s description of the discovery of DNA’s structure, and this from lectures since Watson’s book had not yet appeared. By contrast, the only universal scientists remaining were scientific publishers and science fiction writers.

“The truth is,” he says in the titular chapter [100-101], we have lost Nature. In handing it over to the men of science, we hoped to receive it back augmented, transfigured, and full of light. They were indeed its faithful guardians for several generations and they still talk of it in their public//101//utterances as a unified power which ‘acts’ or ‘yields secrets’ or ‘responds’ to them in the course of their work. But when the name and the capital letter is not an evasion of logic or metaphysics, it is nothing. Nature is but a vast blank screen upon which the experimenter throws his abstractions and hypotheses, seeing no more—as modern man and specialist—than the minute system of its metaphors and his inferences. It is ultimately from this atomization of Nature that for modern men the vagrant despair comes, and not from the hurts to their vanity supposedly caused by Newton, Darwin, and Freud.”

There is no longer a unified vision of the cosmos, he complains, noting that int he mid-19th century Humboldt’s book of that name unified all life under the theme of evolution. But modern evolution is too fragmented, he thinks, too materialistic. (No fan of the modern synthesis, he even resurrects Paley’s old Watchmaker argument against it.) Rather than saying yes, than allowing humans to imagine and engage the world—science is always saying no, ruling certain thoughts out of bounds as superstitious or anthropomorphic (even while smuggling in its own forms of anthropomorphism). It is not an accident that he cites approvingly, more than once, that gadfly of science the biochemist Erwin Chargaff.

In its best form, science is a kind of play, a free inquiry. In some sense, science is not teachable—spends a chapter making this point, much too long—but one can only guide someone with native talent—it is like art, then. There should be humor—even mockery. (Why can’t there be a feast of fools for the scientists, he wonders?) People should make fun of scientists for their pretensions, for spending ungodly sums on silly studies. Instead, we have popularizers of science who wants to reduce everything to science and enshrine science as the only way to reach truth.

And this persistent elevation of science has had many baleful effects on the generation of knowledge generally, from the insistence that all research be novel to even disciplines far afield from science—like literary criticism—aping its trappings, breaking and analyzing writings into their smallest bits. (He puts as an example the study of allusions in late Tennyson.) Barzun makes the interesting—meaning, I’m not sure how to take it—claim that academics should not be creative: the two are opposites. There is something to recommend this thought—we want academics grounded in reality and not completely without rules—although creativity has its own rules. Still, I wonder if Barzun applies this to himself. Does he think his critique here is not creative in some sense?

The problem is acutely seen, he says, in the so-called behavioral sciences—sociology, psychology, economics—which Barzun hates with a deep passion. He thinks they are nothing so much as B.S. and politics dressed up in science. An entire chapter is devoted to knocking them down. Another contrasts them with what he calls “The Misbehavioral Sciences”—by which he means the humanities, but calls “history.” History, law, poetry—these use words to capture unrepeatable experiments. They are rooted in experience and stand against abstraction. In another of his useful aphorisms, he contrasts the exactness of the humanities to the precision of the sciences: “What one ought to say, therefore, is that the law is exact, but not precise; science is precise, but not exact. In this sense all the historical disciplines from poetry to law are exact: they grip tight the single particular of the moment and never by chance mean the one next to it.” Along with this bit of wisdom, the reader also gets a long disquisition on the iniquities of current metaphors which rely on science: they are inexact. This bit of the book reads a bit as if it had been written by Abe Simpson: “Old Man Yells at Clouds.”

By this point in the book, Barzun is letting his freak flag fly, dropping the hemming and hawing provisions of the earlier chapters. “During the past hundred and fifty years the one great attempt to stop the dry rot of the soul produced by the conditions of life in the modern world has been the handiwork of the artists of the West,” he writes on page 229. Art is not an alternative to science but a necessary complement, a needed opposite. Art should critique: the Romantic impulse is needed to keep science in check. Already the cycle has played itself out before: after the Enlightenment, the Age of Revolution showed the sophisticates what action was. There was a again a scientific insistence that nature was neither sentient nor alive, which provoked the Romantics. (301). Since then, the model of the universe and humankind as a machine held away again—but with no Romantic response. Artists betrayed the people, he says, led astray by Freud and Frazier (an unlikely pairing). The problem, as Barzun sees it, is that the artists emulated the scientists and tried to create a system based on myth and the unconscious. (He doesn’t name it, but clearly he’s thinking of surrealism, and its spawn abstract expressionism). What is needed, though, is a breaking down of systems, a contending against science, not compromise.

And ad a result of art’s failure, the West is left with the anomie of modernity. He spends a chapter documenting this, though he captures the essence in a single sentence: “Our great and sardonic reward for introducing labor-saving machinery is that it has not lessened but increased servitude” (257). Even in 1964, this criticism was not new. There was no escape from the system, he said— “Nothing is easier nowadays than to believe in the conclusions and also the fantasies of science; nothing harder than to take a simple, unaffected view of the truths of poetry or religion. The predicament of the age is to regain the high ground where the thoughtful man cam be at ease with his repressed intuitions and satisfy through many means his equally many capacities for reason and belief” (286). Only in a few fringe-y corners did the holdouts gather: “From astrology to psychical research, from nature-loving to asceticism, from the scholarship of myth to the public respect for poetry and art, from conscientious drug addiction to the old and new religions of East and West, there are only minority refuges open to the inhabitants of the scientific culture” (294).

The final chapter points toward what is needed, though it resists fleshing out the movement. By this point in the narrative, it is fairly obvious where Barzun will end up. He wants the machine to kneel to human needs. He wants something to oppose abstraction and analysis. He wants a new philosophy—one saturated with meaning, one that gives human life purpose. He wants to preserve different levels of certainty—to make life safe not only for the known but the unprovable and the doubtful, the contradictory: after all, life has all those things, even if science rules them out of bounds. Besides, he says, science is not unified anyway: biology and physics overlap, sharing some ideas, but also diverge. He celebrates the possibility of multiple consciousnesses, many ways of seeing the world, For example, Pascal had his geometry, but also what he called finesse: “the power that seizes on relations by an immediate impression and without literalism” (289-90). It is not precise, but it is exact.

The book, like the old puttering man, is exasperating. I can’t say that I enjoyed the time that I spent with it, but I also have to admit I learned something, and came away changed.