Boundary work

I came across the term "boundary work" in a book entitled The Limits of Matter: Chemistry, Mining, and Enlightenment (U Chicago P) by Hjalmar Fors, a Swedish researcher in the history of science. The book caught my eye because of the word "mining" in the title. I have written (see here) on Goethe's interest in mining and in mineralogy, which led to his first "scientific" writings. The impetus for learning about these subjects was his appointment to head a commission to investigate whether the ancient Ilmenau mine could again be made workable and produce some revenue for the duchy.

The Limits of Matter has several subjects. One is to draw attention to the role that Sweden played in the creation of "transnational knowledge" in the 17th and 18th centuries, particularly scientific knowledge. France and England are generally seen as the main centers of Enlightenment thought, but this "centrist historiography," as Fors calls it, marginalizes other actors. He wishes to enlarge this narrative. As he writes, “One cannot be content with discussing over and over again the relative importance of the familiar group of well-known heroes that is routinely called up in the older histories of science.”

The copper mine at Falun, Sweden

Sweden’s rulers controlled the Bureau of Mines, which oversaw Europe’s largest (until ca. 1750) export-oriented iron industry. The mines were of course highly dependent on the production of minerals, and mining officials were encouraged to seek ways to improve the flourishing mining concern. As Fors writes, these officials traveled extensively in the Holy Roman Empire, England, and the Netherlands. (I wasn't aware that the Netherlands possessed mines of any importance, but maybe the officials went there because it was a center of publishing.)

Well known, at least in histories of science, are the Swedes Georg Brandt, for his 1735 discovery of cobalt, and Axel Fredrik Cronstedt, who discovered nickel in 1751. But Fors' other subject is the way that the new science of chemistry, especially as it developed in identifying and classifying metals and metallic elements, contributed to Enlightenment rationality. For "chymists" in earlier centuries the material world had been considered malleable, shape-changing, transmutable: think alchemy, but also think fairies, trolls, and gnomes. By the late 17th century, however, "all over Europe powerful state actors, driven by economic and political concerns, instigated changes and reforms in mining, smelting, industry, and manufacture,” with the result that "chemists" (as they would be called) excluded all subjects that could not be mechanically known. Fors quotes historian of science Lorraine Daston on the way that phenomena that had earlier interested "natural scientists" became unfashionable, due to their lack of utility: “A new ethos of utility replaced the old one of curiosity … the stabilization of physical phenomena [was understood] as the necessary, if not sufficient, condition for practical applications.”

The process by which this exclusion occurred Fors refers to as boundary-work, a coinage of sociologist Thomas F. Gieryn (see “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists,” American Sociological Review, 48, 6 [1983]: 781-95). Boundary work, as defined by Gieryn, "describes an ideological style found in scientists' attempts to create a public image for science by contrasting it favorably to non-scientific intellectual or technical activities." Fors applies this description to the transition from "chymestry" to "chemistry." In the early period, “interested scholars and learned magicians usually held magic to be within the bounds of nature, and as acting through and within laws of nature." Skepticism against such phenomena as magic and transmutation was still limited, but by the 1760s “an array of entities and phenomena previously conceived of as natural were defined as outside of nature,” and “self-proclaimed enlighteners found the courage to voice public skepticism.”

For Gierkyn, boundary-work is concomitant with discipline formation, as scientists in their various fields attempt to establish the parameters of the discipline. But he adds something that I find of interest, especially in the modern world, which is so fraught with political correctness: “Boundary-work is also a useful ideological style when monopolizing professional authority and resources in the hands of some scientists by excluding others as ‘pseudo-scientists.’” In other words, the circulation of knowledge itself closes off acceptable subjects of discourse.

Two things about the above show Goethe as a denizens of two eras. The first concerns world literature, a very modern idea, which concerns the circulation of ideas beyond national boundaries, indeed the very circulation that Fors describes as occurring among scientific thinkers in the 17th and 18th centuries. One is surprised that Goethe, because of his own considerable scientific writing, did not include in his conception the rise of scientific progress that was occurring because of the travels of and among savants.

The other obvious Goethe connection is the subject of witchcraft. As Fors writes: “Witchcraft accusations and the weight they were given in juridical evidence serve as a powerful reminder that people of the late 17 century defined reality quite different” from those of us who live today. And think here of Mephisto: “The early modern body was subject to many influences. Not only could it fall ill and become the victim of sudden physical violence. It could also be bewitched and shape-shifted, even squeezed into a keyhole."

"Control"

Aksel Waldemar Johannessen, Actors at Norwegian theater during an interval (1918)

The title today is taken from the essay of that title by E.B. White from December 1942. Back then, as at the present moment, there was a revolt at the powers-that-be by "the common man," as White refers to the ordinary American who does the work but is not part of the spoils system. And "control" in the 1942 context means the intrusion of "government" into the private life of the common man.

Jim Richardson (photographer), Card players in Kansas

The essays opens with White, a practicing farmer as well a writer, going out to his barn and finding two men from "the State," one of whom had put a hook in his cow's nose "and was pulling hard, [while] the other was poised with a needle, about to draw a sample of blood from her neck." The two men were conducting a test for Bang's disease. White thoroughly approved of the test, but, as he writes, "I also thoroughly approve of the old idea that a man's home is his castle and that anyone who arrives with a needle is expected to knock before entering."

After discussing the controls by the State, which "seem unable to make or lives more agreeable in some particulars without making them insupportable in others," he goes on to the "most challenging control that occupies the attention of our social architects and designers," namely, the control of wealth. Private enterprise is not a system in which all can participate and take their chances and thereby contribute to the general wealth; rather, the common man works and dies, but never participates. Instead, the century is being constructed for him. It is agreed that he "must be secure. He must hold insurance. He is not to be permitted to starve to death, or run up hospital bills, ... or to be buried without proper rites. ... The century has gone to the cutter."

David Carlins (photographer), Rickshaw drivers in Delhi

"The true shape of man," he continues, "is an elusive thing." Man, he believes, is a natural born gambler, whose instincts are constantly frustrated, one who is less interested in security "than in gain, less in safety than in risk, and he has always been a fool for anything that gave him a chance at the jackpot." Thus, "the terrible urge of the multitudes to participate in the chancy side of life" -- pinball games, bingo, race horses, stock markets, lotteries -- and thereby recover the gift that they are cheated by the State, by its wish to make all activities of men flat and unchangeable "in a world that is neither flat nor unchangeable." The common man will even grab at cards for a game of solitaire, "to restore himself and taste the wine of luck."

What White saw occurring in 1942 has progressed by leaps and bounds, and the present American -- and, indeed, Western -- political moment seems to be exploding with the unrest of the so-called common man, who sees more and more of his life controlled and his money being collected for who knows what, in any case, for a politics in which he has little participation. People who complain at the low voter turnout misunderstand the situation; most people feel their vote doesn't matter.

The 18th-century Enlightenment thinkers urged man to take his freedom in his own hands and to jettison the restrictions mandated by traditional institutions, primarily the Church and the Crown. Those institutions molded people's thoughts and actions in a way that people accepted as the way of the world or justified by divine sanction. The philosophers urged: "Take your destiny in your own hands!" Instead, traditional institutions have been succeeded by the rationalist structures of the State. The State justifies its actions by insisting that it has our security and our interests at heart. Who can object to that? Thus, the notion that each of us can craft our own destiny is ever more in doubt.

Picture credits: Aksel Waldemar Johannessen; Jim Richardson; National Geographic; Young Americans for Freedom

The West and the Rest

This post elaborates on ideas discussed in the previous post on the nature of tolerance. Tolerance is something we all need in order to navigate daily life: for instance, when we are put on hold while phoning to make a dental appointment, or when we have to put up with snarky customers if we are a salesperson. Marriage and family teach us to put up with others, even those we don't care for. We don't tell people, especially lowly employees, that they are bloody fools.

But the contemporary version of tolerance is different. It means not judging, no matter how ludicrous or suspicious someone's behavior. The classic example would be Pontius Pilate. This version of tolerance, which has become part of our modern Western moral code, was evidently abhorrent to the lady I wrote about in my previous post. She saw evil in our ways and wanted to return to old-fashioned truth telling on subjects like good and evil, words that have no purchase among the tolerant. She is not alone.

Tolerance is a liberal idea that emerged in the West in the course of the early modern period. Although the thinkers of the Enlightenment are given credit for spreading this idea, tolerance is what Reinhold Niebuhr called the "highly contingent achievement" of a culture that we have taken to be "the final form and norm of human existence." It is easy to be tolerant, to be non-judgmental, when you have a roof over your head and enough to eat. It is thus a phenomenon of advanced societies, and you don't even have to be a particularly rich person to be tolerant in the non-judgmental sense. If you live in Tucson or Indianapolis and eat Thai or Indian food, if you like to shop at Whole Foods (rather than at the local, lower-priced corporate supermarket), if you don’t mind subtitles with your movies, you are half way to being tolerant of every new "progressive" idea that comes down the road. And if you listen to TED talks and know the difference between Tom Stoppard and Andrew Lloyd Weber, it’s a good chance that you are the real thing, except when it comes to American evangelicals.

Our present-day open-mindedness is not a virtue; it is an attitude contingent on the prosperity that we in the West have enjoyed for several centuries, an enjoyment stemming from exploiting the resources of non-Western countries. We take it for granted that people should have choices, e.g., be allowed to follow the profession they desire or marry the person they love, not someone chosen by their parents, but for most of the world choice is not and has never been an option. I came across a very minor example of how we take tolerance for granted while searching for images for this post. A site called How to Forgive recommends "Embracing Other People's Freedom." It goes on as follows, with a statement that reeks of being "virtuous": "Everyone has a right to decide what’s good for them and the freedom to make mistakes. It’s not usually worth playing the role of a preacher, teacher, judge, critic or parent in anyone’s life. Freedom allows everyone to focus on their own lives, choices, responsibilities and continual learning." Practically every American college student has absorbed this platitude.

Bien pensant

Not only is such wisdom incomprehensible to most people who have not grown up in a Western country; the attitude underlying it is also historically unprecedented. Historically, human beings did not have the luxury of focusing on their own lives, their own choices, etc. Most people in the world today would love to have our choices, and for that reason they seek to leave the hell holes in which they live. We don't help them by being "tolerant" toward those who wish to put an end to freedom.

As mentioned in the previous post, it has been amusing to observe Donald Trump's "progress." The man has demolished our doctrinaire insistence on not judging, e.g., in the matter of illegal immigrants or whatever. The apoplectic outrage of the bien pensant class indicates that Trump has violated a powerful taboo. There is indeed something anthropological about contemporary tolerance. The chattering class now stands in for the gods who once punished violations of the sacred.

Picture credits: Observations citoyennes; Lone Wolf Base Camp; How to Forgive

"Being an American"

"I want to be an American!"

For me, the most interesting thing about the recent "progress" of Donald Trump has been his demolition of political correctness, especially the notion of tolerance. The present-day concept of tolerance has its origins in the late 17th century with the rise of the Enlightenment in Europe. Like most parts of the earth then (and still so today), tolerance for the manners and mores of other peoples does not come naturally to humans. Indeed, the various European peoples had little tolerance for one another, as can be seen in the vicious wars they have waged against one another, up into the Second World War.

That Europeans are now more "open" toward one another has to do with the fact that, outwardly anyway, there is not much difference between Germans and French and Italians and so on anymore. I mean, of course, different in their material way of life. Remember when Germans used to look like Germans, and French like French, and so on? In the new millennium, we all dress and drive alike, all drink good wine, and all have the same "values."

Who wants to disturb such a good thing? The downside of having "progressed" beyond all the intolerance with which we once greeted the stranger in our midst is that many of us imagine that everyone would like to be like us. Indeed, I do believe (with George W. Bush) that most people in the world would prefer to live in freedom and enjoy our standard of living. Yet, as in the U.S., there are people who are perpetually dissatisfied with the state of the world. There are legions out there that feel this way.

Would anyone thirty or forty years ago have believed that the woman pictured above wanted to be like us? That she wished to be "an American"? If so, as a first step, she would not have been trailing that bearded man behind her. Even as a Muslim, she would not have had to wear that oppressive garment. Everything about her appearance suggests that she did not aspire to be like us. Yet, such is the power of the ideology of tolerance that we seek to deny what our eyes tell us.

Which brings me back to Donald Trump. He has ripped away the "veil of tolerance," so to speak, and asks us to make judgments about what our eyes see. It is going to be interesting to see how things proceed.

Living collectively

Euston Station (London), 1837

Tony Judt is instructive of a certain class of intellectuals whom I call “Socialists Lite.” They are not so blind that they don't recognize that socialism, wherever it has formed the basis of public life, hasn't fulfilled its promises. He even recognizes the delusions of those who hold on to the faith. And, yet ...

A sign that a person is Socialist Lite can be seen in their use of the term “collective purpose” and their lament that such no longer seems to exist in public life. For Judt, our only shared social activity is consumerism, rather than the pursuit of “the common good.” The railways, beginning in the 19th century, exemplify for him “a collective project for individual benefit.” There is a great deal of nostalgia in his two essays on this subject -- “On the Glory of the Rails” and “Bring Back the Rails!” -- and one suspects, as with all of the leftist/liberal persuasion, that aesthetics plays a major role in their thinking.

After all, the train and the train station were the subject of some great art: the paintings of 19th-century French Impressionists, the artful, early 20th-century posters produced by the railway companies to entice people to travel, as well as some great public architecture. And on top of that the railways were also means of mass transit -- in contrast to earlier methods of locomotion -- probably also plays a role.

These two essays were among the last written by Judt. They were part of a book on “locomotion” on which he was working and did not live to finish. I wish he has been able to write this book, for the subject ties in with my interest in the subject of world literature, which, in turn, has to do with commerce and the spread of both material and cultural goods across borders.

Judt is such an artful writer that, on first reading, one might tend to agree with him. For instance, he begins the first essay with the statement that all knowledge was “enduringly local, whether cultural, social, or political” before the railway. But from my explorations on world literature, it is evident that knowledge traveled across borders and far afield, even if at 10 miles per hour at the most. It is true that many people never left the village in which they lived, even up until the late 19th century, but by the late Middle Ages there was increasing commerce among the various countries of Europe. After the discovery of the New World, knowledge increased exponentially. The railways did not arise ex initio.

Of course, as Judt points out, there were huge start-up and maintenance costs for early railways, and in the long run they have never been great money makers. Yet I don't think it is the case, as he suggests, that the railways and the railroad stations in particular were “harbingers and emblems of an age of public investment and civic pride.” The first European railways (except in Prussia), after all, were financed by private capital, probably by some form of stock company. It was only later in the century that governments got involved, for instance, in regulating fares, since trains were the major means of transport. (Now the government is stuck with them in most countries.) So, even those great railroad stations were monuments to a confident, perhaps even overweening, capitalist spirit, to the “great men” of the 19th century, e.g., Isambard Kingdom Brunel -- but not to “the public.” Thus, Judt is talking through his hat when he writes that “the railways were and remain the necessary and natural accompaniment to the emergence of civil society. They are a collective project for individual benefit.” He goes on to assert that the market cannot offer such a “practical benefit to individual and collectivity alike.” He even insists that the railways’ lack of profitability is a sign of their “social responsiveness!”

Judt is correct in pointing out the contribution of the railways to the Industrial Revolution and to the very layout of modern cities. But it wasn't the railways that inaugurated timetables and made us time-bound. The first Europe-wide postal system, put into effect by the Habsburg emperor Charles I in 1516, had timetables. Charles transformed a service meant to serve the imperial interests into one that benefited the public by contracting the Taxis family to run it and also to take letters for private clients. (See my post on this subject.)  The Taxis family had to invest in infrastructure: purpose-built postal stations, for instance, thereby relieving postal riders with the necessity of staying in inns. By the 1530s the Taxis had introduced “ordinary post”: fixed service, publicly advertised, leaving on a particular day of the week.

What distinguishes socialists from Socialists Lite is the respect that the latter have for memory and, indeed, for shared history. Socialists want to wipe the slate clean and start all over again, which is what the Soviets tried to do. What the Soviets were most successful at, indeed, was the destruction of civil society. You couldn't even trust your neighbors in the Soviet Union. So much for purposeful collectivity. For Socialists Lite, however, it always comes down to “the government," which is supposed to endow a country with “shared purpose.” Well, Hitler gave the Germans a shared purpose and look where it led them.

So, in the end, Judt's essays on the railways are a form of story-telling, an idealized portrait that is supposed to convince of the virtues of collective purpose.

"Downhill All the Way, 2"

Let me conclude the thoughts expressed in the previous posting. Judt writes that Hobsbawm, at the age of 94 (!), no longer had illusions about the Soviet Union, but that he remained reluctant to deny that it had no redeeming features. The reason: it stood "for a good cause, indeed the only worthwhile cause," which, for many in Hobsbawm's generation, mitigated its crimes. Judt introduces a footnote here, quoting the Polish writer Alexander Wat: "The loss of freedom, tyranny, abuse, hunger would all have been easier to bear if not for the compulsion to call them freedom, just, the good of the people."

I can't help thinking that the Soviets were aware of, indeed even took advantage of, the willingness of the Western intellectual class to believe that good could come out of the Soviet experiment. Successful tyrants play on people's gullibility, and Stalin was certainly a successful one. This gullibility stems from a belief that humanity can be corrected, that the world can be changed for the better, if the right conditions are met, if the right people are in charge. Even before the Soviets took over Russia, there was many a "planned economy" and "planned society" -- utopian communities -- yet not even the most benign stood the test of time.

Judt suggests that Hobsbawm was in the grip of what he calls a "secular faith" and, moreover, that he was not aware that he was. It is a striking fact that the professoriate is mostly liberal or left wing; I would not be surprised if most of them also considered themselves unbelievers or atheists. I can't think of a well-known conservative who is an in-your-face atheist. Which doesn't mean conservatives are necessarily believers. Being conservative, they are instead perhaps agnostic or uncommitted. But conservatives don't expect perfection on earth.

Picture credits: UK Media Watch; Quotehd

"Downhill All the Way"

The above is the title of an essay by Tony Judt, reviewing The Age of Extremes: A History of the World 1914-1991 by the Marxist historican Eric Hobsbawm. It appears in the posthumously published volume When the Facts Change: Essays 1995-2010. I picked up the volume at my local library, because it contains an essay that I had earlier come across in The New York Review of Books on the connection between modernity and the growth of railroads.

Ling Jian, Communist Sisters: Tears of Idealism

Even back in my undergraduate days, in the 1960s, Hobsbawm's writings figured on the edges of my consciousness, but, not being a history major, I never read him. Increasingly over the years I have become aware of his committed communism, and, as a committed conservative, this aspect of his writings made it unlikely that I would ever read him. The following, from the obituary in The Guardian on his death in 1912, speaks to my negative reaction:

"Hobsbawm was never to leave the Communist party and always thought of himself as part of an international communist movement. For many, this remained the insuperable obstacle to an embrace of his writing [!]. Yet he always remained very much a licensed free-thinker within the party's ranks. Over Hungary in 1956, an event which split the CP and drove many intellectuals out of the party, he was a voice of protest who nevertheless remained."

It can also be imagined that I would not have much sympathy for a scholar who wrote, in his 94th year, How to Change the World, what The Guardian called "a vigorous defence of Marx's continuing relevance in the aftermath of the banking collapse of 2008-2010." I have very little tolerance for people who believe they know how to change the world.

Okay. Not that I am unfamiliar with Marxist thought, and in fact it has been a great influence on my own ideas, especially the role that capitalism and the ensuing prosperity have played in creating Liberalism. (More to that topic at another time.) I learned a lot from Judt's essay, especially about left-wing intellectuals.

Judt begins by placing Hobsbawm as a scholar who had a great effect on a generation of historians from about 1959 to 1975, especially for his works on what might now be called social history, especially "a world of rural protest in Europe and overseas," as in his 1959 book Primitive Rebels. His writings unearthed an earlier tradition of British radical historiography and drew attention to labor and to workers and artisans. What Judt terms Hobsbawm's "most enduring imprint on our historical consciousness" are three volumes on the "long 19th century," beginning with The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848 (1962), followed by The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 (1975) and The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (1987). Judt's essay, a review of the fourth volume in this series, made me think I should take a look at the second volume in particular.

Although Judt is an admirer of Hobsbawm for his erudition and breadth of "vision," what interests me about the review is his critique of Hobsbawm's shortcomings (which, although Judt doesn't say so, is really a critique of Marxist shortcomings). In a sense, Hobsbawm's allegiance to communism always remained that of the enthusiast for a vision that he embraced in his youth. Thus, the Spanish civil war, which united so many intellectuals in the anti-Fascist cause, remained for Hobsbawm "the only political cause which, even in retrospect, appears as pure and appealing as it did in 1936." The same can be said for many of my generation who came of age in 1968 and for whom the experience still represents something holy. This is a self-centered view of history and explains why so many of them, now receiving Social Security and benefiting from their IRAs, refuse to indict the anti-liberal attitudes of contemporary college students. In a similar way, Hobsbawm failed to indict Stalin's use of the Spanish conflict to "settle local and international scores under the guise of supporting an anti-Fascist war."

Beers sold in a Spanish supermarket

Judt also makes a fascinating observation, namely, that Hobsbawm, in this new book, fails to consider that Lenin's revolution was "above all the first and greatest of the 'third world' coups d'etat that he describes so well elsewhere, in which revolutionary modernizers capture the capital city and forcibly seize power in an archaic society." I guess that this explains why so many third world nations after World War II fit so easily in the Soviet camp. In a similar way, according to Judt, Hobsbawm misses the extent to which Hitler effected "a major European revolution," transforming Central and Eastern Europe in a way that prepared the way for the "Socialist" regimes of the postwar years, which built on what Hitler had brought about, "notably the destruction of the intelligentsia and urban middle class of the region, first through the murder of the Jews and then as a result of the postwar expulsion of Germans from the liberated Slav lands." Because Hobsbawm wishes to downplay any revolutionary tendencies in Fascism, he does not recognize the irony that Hitler paved the way for Stalin. This, to Judt, seems "a consequence of continuing to see the world the way it seemed at the time, when both ideologically and militarily Fascism and Communism were in total conflict, and Stalin represented the 'left wing' of the victorious forces of the Enlightenment."

I go on too long today, but I will have more to say on this subject, as it concerns my own interpretation of the current intellectual climate, a climate entrenched in the vision of Hobsbawm.

Picture credits: Christies; Affaritalini; Karen Salmonsohn