Science and Modernity
The modern world is born of the nexus between human creativity and the discoveries of modern science and technology. That nexus has created, and is creating, a world that prospers no longer by the sweat of our brow and the strength of our backs, but by the educated creativity of people. (By educated I mean read, write and do basic arithmetic. That opens the door)
Societies achieving a strong flow of educated creativity will prosper; those failing, will not, and will fall into eclipse. That flow will not come from people systematically repressed, suppressed, and exploited. It will come from populations secure in self-governance, rich in opportunity for innovation and its implementation, and able to project a rewarding life for all.
The societal, institutional and conceptual structures of all previous human history have been, and are under, assault by a new reality whose birth travail has vexed the last three hundred years. The sheer prodigality of outcomes becomes defining: such potentials are released for both creative and destructive outcomes that we must be keenly aware of the power and responsibility that devolve upon us.
Modernity is about our increasing mastery of material reality. It is not wisdom (except of a particular sort), and it is not spiritual elevation, or moral accomplishment. It remains for us to inform the modern world with those achievements.
The above attempts to distill a message from the long arc of the human story. It seeks to define where we are now. Before laying out the particular understanding of history which leads to it, I want to make it clear that I do not comprehend some steadily winnowing dialectic working its will through history. A Grand Narrative of sorts, perhaps, but nothing like a relentlessly evolving storyline. Rather think of change under the aegis of some great transformative pulse, followed by a period of adjustment, and a rich elaboration of consequences.
We are social creatures. We live in mutually interactive, mutually supportive societies. Our first model for social organization was the tribe, structured around the wisdom of the ancestors and the laws and customs of the tribe. For tens of thousands of years we survived by inhabiting this planet as tribes. Between five and ten thousand years ago, to seize the advantages inherent in large-scale domesticated agriculture, we transitioned into far larger, far more extensively and intensively organized societies. What was required was enduring control of fertile land, and people constantly on that land to work it. What emerged were division of labor constructs, ruled from a narrow base of military, governmental and religious elites via a severely hierarchical top down authoritarianism. Coercive force could, and largely did, suffice. The vast majority of people could be assured of the necessities of life, but their grasp upon them was tenuous. Most of the human beings in these new societal constructs were “division of labored” into some form of peasantry, peonage, serfdom, or slavery; that is to say, an efficient organization of the sweat of our brow and the strength of our backs. But we got an unintended consequence: Civilization.
It was no easy time for tribal societies as they came up against these new Civilizational ones. The strengths of the new constructs proved to be both wide and deep. Tribal territory was seized through the disciplined application of force by a professional military, and tribes were variously disrupted, displaced, and (or) dispersed. Not infrequently they were enslaved. On occasion, tribes would take their revenge by assaulting and overthrowing a (usually) declining Civilizational society. More often than not, however, a newly triumphant tribe would, in a generation or two, became more Catholic than the Pope with respect to what they had overwhelmed. They would be conquered by their conquest! So powerful and persuasive were the possibilities which opened to this new societal paradigm.
For the next several thousand years we circled within this paradigm, elaborating upon it in many ways. Many distinct civilizations, rich in culture and accomplishment, arose and prospered. But the bedrock minimum remained the same: an efficient organization over time of simple human physical tasks - any ten peasants could tend the fields and mind the herds as well as any other ten peasants. Coercive power was decisive.
Eventually, the unintended consequence – Civilization – got around to a new idea. A second pulse. It was Newton’s idea. It may not have been entirely original with him, and aspects of it are certainly apparent in thought, and trends of thought leading far back into recorded history, but it is incontestably Newton’s formulation of the idea (in the Principia of 1687) that leads to its implantation in the fertile soil of post Renaissance Europe. Its subsequent rooting and exfoliation leads directly to modern science and technology, and on to the modern world.
Newton does not simply set forth that there is a gravitational attraction between bodies, but formulates it as a precise mathematical relationship. The force is directly proportional to the product of masses of the attracting bodies, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance separating them. The force is calculable! Precisely and exactly calculable! And a like conceptualism might be thought to extend to all of physical reality. The natural world is encompassed by a regime of mathematical rigor. Material reality can be described by universal, discoverable, mathematically exact expressions of causality.
After Newton, the Physicist Bernoulli, observing that the flow of air over a surface curved on top and flat on the bottom produces an uplift, can calculate what flow of air, over what surface of wing, will produce exactly what lift per unit area of wing. You can build a plane and know that it will fly! A child can observe steam displace a heavy iron lid from a pot. The grown James Watt can, after Newton, calculate precisely what pressure of steam against what piston head can, when translated through the mechanical apparatus of the piston, produce exactly what turning force on a wheel or crankshaft: the steam engine.
With Newton, science transforms from a cottage industry of inspired eccentrics into an ever broadening, ever deepening, universal human endeavor. Over the next three hundred years, the constant and rigorous pursuit of scientific knowledge has yielded up a cornucopia of opportunity for human creativity as both invention and enterprise to feast upon. And feast it has.
A new age comes upon us and everything changes – as it did with the Agricultural Revolution and the birth of Civilization. The first great consequence of the Scientific Revolution was the Industrial Revolution. That, and the continuing advances flooding in its wake, so dominate us with their dazzling transformation of our material circumstances, that we generally fail to be aware of the changes in human societies that have accompanied the process. Consider, three hundred years ago there were no democracies (Pace Switzerland). Today a great portion of the world’s people live in democracies, and those societies are incontestably the most vital and prosperous we have. Three hundred years ago, if you had proposed that you had to educate all of a society’s children, you would have been laughed at. Today, throughout the developed world, it is the accepted commonplace. There is more to the modern world than a plane in the skies, and the channel changer in your hand.
The work by which the world prospers has changed. Slowly and inexorably, a world has been emerging that prospers by the educated creativity of its people. People with only a basic education - read, write, and do simple arithmetic –encounter a vast range of opportunities to make a life for themselves and their families – a level of possibilities unprecedented in all previous human history. The success of enterprises and societies becomes driven by efforts that can no longer be usefully obtained by main force, by standing over people with a whip. It is a new reality that has reshaped the world – an emergent process that has created wealth on an altogether staggering scale.
Societies have been, and are, transforming themselves in accommodation. As noted above, a strong flow of educated creativity will arise from populations secure in self governance, rich in opportunity for innovation and its implementation, and able to realize a satisfactory life for all: The New Paradigm.
Historically, that’s our story! The Grand Narrative (of sorts). Two pulses and two periods of adjustment, the first seemingly so far distant that we are generally only vaguely aware of it; until, of course, we reflect on the fate of Native Americans. The second pulse comes only three hundred years ago, with the rooting and exfoliation of Newton’s idea. The putative Man from Mars, looking back on the human story, would see - I believe well above all - these two things: our transition to Civilizational societies, and the advent of modern science and technology. In between: periods of adjustment, and an exploration of possibilities within a general given, gradually enriching a matrix from which the next pulse might come.
From this it becomes apparent that we are currently in the midst of a period of profound worldwide re-adjustment - a perilous passage. Critically, it suggests a stance with which to approach things: Mutually undergoing a change as vast and sweeping as any we have ever encountered, we need less to confront one another as to work together to meet the common difficulties of the passage. We are all in it together, and such intelligence as we can muster, and such wisdom as we can achieve become our greatest necessities.
Top down, authoritarian, governance becomes progressively less and less viable because it does not foster, and cannot secure over time the work by which the modern world prospers. Savagely exploitative economic relationships cannot be supported over time because they will alienate, even cripple, those whose genuine creative engagement is required by the very nature of the work to be accomplished.
Twin intertwining threads: the active committed intelligence of individuals engaged in a technologically advancing marketplace, and the commitment of individuals secure in self governance to their society, define the basis for prosperity in this “second phase” of Civilizational societies.
The traditional military/police coercive powers are rendered helpless against even the first, industrial enterprise/assembly line, phases of this. Coercive power can assert control over modern industrial enterprises, but cannot run them day to day. The critical labor which runs a modern economy lies with its entrepreneurial elite. Entrepreneurs are skilled in unique ways, and are not infinitely replaceable. They are a new presence which can neither be compelled nor readily co-opted by the old elites. But the entrepreneurs themselves cannot hold power indefinitely against their need for increasingly educated and motivated employees. This does not mean that power inevitably devolves such that the individual realizes the benefits of his or her real position in the scheme. Indeed, grave, often explosive, instabilities result from exactly that failure. In the end, however, those benefits must be realized, or the enterprise will break down, or fail competitively against those in which benefits and power are reasonably aligned, and which reap the continuing rewards of effective commitment.
Realize that we confront something new. The history we might search for insight remains largely the history of a now dying paradigm; one in which coercive power alone could be, and most often was, decisive – a paradigm attuned to, and successful in, an earlier reality.
Lincoln: “the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. We must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves.”
A world that prospers by the educated creativity of its people may sound quite promising, and, in the main, it has proven so; but the story of the past three hundred years has hardly been a walk to the paradise garden. The West, the first beneficiary of modernity, was also its first victim: the “satanic mills”, wars, revolutions and turmoil of the past two hundred plus years testify to enormous disruptions. All around the world societies coming to modernity experience a revolutionary change in their material circumstances, and, at the same time, feel a gravitational pull towards a radically new societal paradigm. It is all an invitation to upheaval and uncertainty, and we have had it: the period adjustment to a great transformative pulse.
The steadily increasing dependence of modern societies on the freely given talents and abilities of their people is inexorable, and yet the benefits native to that dependence are only fitfully realized. Turmoil ensues. And it is not simply a matter of resistance by the elites being displaced. For the people themselves, it is a new world, and they have to learn how to be comfortable in it, to feel secure in it. The possibilities for exploitation by narrow and particular interests within societies, and for dangerous and widely held misunderstandings by the broad base towards which power is moving, are great. The whole of the dark history of the 20th century might be understood to lie beneath the dark wing of that last sentence.
Our primary task becomes managing the passage to a new paradigm - for to make the passage seems inevitable, barring such catastrophe as, unfortunately, modernity itself makes it all too easy to envision. Tribal societies could not, did not, and perhaps their people ultimately did not wish to, decline the transit to a new reality. Today’s people face a similar problem with regard a transition they can clearly see possesses great capacities for a better life, but which also immerses them in a new and profoundly different world, with which they have had, at best, limited experience. With the best will in the world, whatever those who have substantially made the passage, America, Western Europe, Japan and the Pacific Rim, may attempt (and we must make the attempt) will be inseparable from the power of the modern world to both enthrall and disrupt. A volatile blend of envy, frustration and resentment is both inevitable and understandable. Our universal charge becomes finding mutually constructive outcomes.
The very nature of modernity opens vast possibilities for improvement in the material well-being of all peoples everywhere, but it also enables conflict no longer with sticks and stones and blades, but with nuclear tipped missiles and vials of contagion. This prodigality of outcomes, both constructive and destructive, becomes possibly the essential point. Recourse to violence begins to take on the aspect of striking matches in a dynamite factory, and peace becomes mutually beneficial for all, including parties to previously intractable conflicts. Make peace and you can move on, prospering by the educated creativity of your people.
It seems obvious, to me at least, that over the next one hundred years or so the human race will make such choices as will define our future for the next several hundred years, or perhaps even our entire fate as a species - in so far as that is ours to determine. We can either chose a path of comity and cooperation, of peaceful resolutions to tensions, opening the way to a full flowering of our (now demonstrably) enormous constructive and creative powers. Or we may choose a path of persistent and pervasive contention, lashed to the wheel of conflict, trapped in the exchange of murderous stroke and counterstroke, and opening ourselves to all the impending disasters.
I believe in people, in both their ability and desire to make wise and constructive choices. But this is rendered likely only in a world at peace. Threatened, we too easily become creatures of our fears and not our hopes.
This transformation can work to beneficent ends, but the passage is hazardous. It is for us, now, rather to facilitate that passage, to seek its realization with ever diminishing pain. To do all we may to assure emergence of what can be a far richer and more hopeful world than any we have known. It would be my hope that, from the perspective herein, we come to engage this process consistently, creatively, compassionately. We have seldom had a greater or more urgent task, or more golden an opportunity.
11:00:56 AM 
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