Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Jews into contact with the framework of values in place within the more
general public sphere, they began to pour into the scientific professions.
50
We would not presume that this process of secularization provided the
specific intellectual attractions that drew Jews to scientific work any more
than Puritanism did for their Gentile counterparts in earlier centuries. But
it was needed in order to bring public motives into accord with personal
vocational ones.
What made the mass migration of Jews into science different from the
earlier Protestant migration was the fact that in the secular world they were
now entering, the value of the scientific role was already well established.
Jewish intellectuals only awaited a sea change in the orientation of their
own public culture to open this door. But prior to the seventeenth cen-
tury, there simply was no clearly established societal role that even Gentiles
who wished to practice scientific research could step into. Such an identity
needed to be created, but it could only be fashioned from symbolic materi-
als already available in the public sphere. This of course would seem to
make a religious rationale for science inevitable. In a society where political
and sacred space so consistently overlapped, the politics of science were
also the politics of the church. If English men and women were willing to
enter into a civil war because changing assumptions about the character of
religious life could no longer be reconciled with traditional conceptions
of kingly power, it is hardly surprising that science's public legitimacy should
have been won on religious grounds as well.
In this regard, perhaps greater clarity may be achieved by substituting
for Merton's “spur” metaphor the language of “roles” employed by Ben-
David.
51
The notion of a Puritan spur has tended to suggest that Merton
was claiming a direct and personal correspondence between Puritan the-
ology and scientific work. This confusion has been compounded by the
fact that an important part of his argument consisted of demographic evi-
dence showing that English Puritans had a much larger representation in
the Royal Society than other religious groups—as if to suggest that Puritan
beliefs simply “caused” individuals to take up science. But this was not what
Merton was really arguing, and so critics miss the point of this “spur” when
they object to the fact, for instance, that prominent scientific figures such
as William Harvey, Robert Boyle, John Wilkins, and Seth Ward were not
Puritans per se.
52
Even when not derived from the individual worldview of
the persons who enact it, a role remains attractive by virtue of the place it
gives individuals in some larger social realm. From such a viewpoint, the
efficacy of science's alignment with such a Puritan role did not depend on
