Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
This is a familiar pattern for social movements. As radical ideas suc-
ceed, they are integrated into social establishments not entirely unlike those
they once hoped to bring down. In the middle decades of this century of
revolution, Baconian reforms were taken up by a political and religious fac-
tion that was willing to commit regicide in order to realize its vision of
a Christian commonwealth. But a generation later, as Sir Isaac Newton's
remains were interred alongside those of England's kings in Westminster
Abbey, Britain was giving the scientific figure who epitomized this Puritan
vision the most conspicuous place among its most conspicuous dead. Of
course if the thesis of this topic has any merit, we should expect to find
reversals of this sort. If scientistic ideologies are inspired by the patronage
needs of scientific practitioners, they are likely to have deep-seated societal
bases that their radical appearances might seem to be belie. The justifica-
tions for change offered up by social movements are never so completely
different from the establishment notions they target as to be incapable
of being integrated into them. The notions of black power enunciated by
Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X that shocked white Americans in the
1960s hardly get a rise out of my students now. For those who have grown
up in a society now more likely to champion the ideals of racial “diversity”
than the ideals of “integration,” the resentments of these civil rights lead-
ers will seem instantly compelling. But diversity was no less valued when
their parents were in college; it was merely couched in different terms like
“independence” or “liberty” and dramatized in narratives that worked to
exonerate established interests. Something analogous to this was true of
the Puritanism that came to be linked with science after Bacon's death. The
already widespread belief of Protestants that the Bible was the sole basis of
religious authority could certainly validate a shift toward patronage of a
radical empiricism that insisted on the solitary witness of natural fact, but
the deeper Protestant bases of this association ensured that it would persist
even as moderate groups once again gained an upper hand.
What this says is that a change in any subculture, such as the scientific
one that found its ideals expressed in Bacon's philosophical works, must
occur in step with whatever developments are occurring in the general cul-
ture it depends upon for support. The bonds between science and society
that secure both the symbolic and material support that makes scientific
inquiry possible could not be broken during this process. They needed to
evolve in tandem. In supposing that the Puritan-Baconian ideology was the
ancestor to evolutionism in such a process, I am merely stretching the scope
of this claim by applying it to a longer (but still relatively short) period of
