Can the History of Science Help Us Predict the Future of Society?
This question is exceptionally timely (pardon the pun) in this season of primaries, caucuses, and non-stop election predictions. Political wonks are cautioned against calling the race before Super Tuesday, as time and again history has shown us that the candidate in the lead at the beginning of the nomination process is rarely in the race two months later. Nevertheless, we cannot help ourselves! Clinton was supposed to be a shoe-in, Trump should have flaked out before the debates started, Sanders was way too liberal to fund a campaign (much less make a showing), and Cruz was a foreigner. A FOREIGNER!
Millions of Americans got it wrong in 2016, but instead of learning a lesson about prudent prognostication, the media is in full tilt as we ramp up to the midterm elections. It’s all too exciting, important, and fascinating to stay cool and wait and see as it plays out, so we make our predictions and look to history to support our claims. And therein lies the problem: history is not a lens whose focal point can be inverted to predict a future event. It is more like a mirror that we can look into to see everything in its view, and we must consider the entire image on its plane, not just the pretty things we want to see. And yet, the temptation to cherry-pick the forces and trends of the past to support our hopes for the future is overwhelming, and even intuitive. But when done in a thoughtful and somewhat exhaustive way, history can prove a great indicator of future possibilities and reveal underlying dynamics of current events.
History as a Useful Guide
Historiography is naught more than trivial entertainment when it is written without situating and analyzing its social relevance. The quality of an historical account won’t be found in lists of dates and names and events, but in its ability to tie the exceptional moments in time to the daily routine of the human condition. History serves as a useful guide when it is mapped through the eternal struggles that span time, cultures, classes, and persons.
The history of (Western) science offers a slightly more straightforward lens through which to view history and culture than other areas of historical inquiry, perhaps. At least, the desire of its early practitioners to document their ideas and efforts provides a body of source materials that other historians may envy. But with respect to classifying epochs, trends, and revolutions, the science historian is subject to as much criticism and ridicule as the pundit of contemporary culture. For instance, internalist history accounts of science trace its origin to the Greeks, who endeavored to describe nature within the framework of Socratic and Aristotelian natural philosophy. While such accounts are not inaccurate, they lack relevance to modern science, but they shouldn’t. A more thoughtful and deeply scholarly analysis can reveal the nuanced and subtle threads that span millennia, as with Lindberg’s analysis of Aristotle’s “middle road” approach to understanding physics through mathematics. Almost 2500 years later, the cutting edge of physics still struggles to find the balance the reductive, dimensional mathematical descriptions of the universe with the stochastic, dynamic universe of its quantum properties. Biagioli’s account of Galileo using the legitimacy and influence of the Medici to garner fame his astronomical instruments and patronage for further research; which hardly seems different from the networking approach adopted by senior scientists like Linus Pauling, who advanced their research by securing important funding and partnerships through influential institutions like Rockefeller, Cal Tech, and Science magazine. Lisa Jardine’s analysis of international collaborative astronomical, cartographic, and navigational projects in the 17th-18th centuries is just as relevant today, as the US coordinates with global partners on disease surveillance, climate change, and natural disaster response.
These histories show us that successful research looks very similar across time and cultures, and their authors document the conditions and relationships that fostered those successes. Further, it is possible and even advisable to take an externalist account of the social, economic, and political climates that led to historical successes (and failures!) and compare them to their contemporary counterparts when considering policy and investment decisions, or when rooting out solutions to grand social problems.
The Pitfalls of Using History to Predict the Future
Kuhn’s paradigm somewhat encapsulates the quandary of referring to the traditions and knowledge of the past to inform solutions for and approaches to the future. Specifically, the body of knowledge upon which any scientific discipline is necessarily based has (presumably) sufficient rigor to claim its contemporary inquiries as legitimate enough to garner funding, achieve peer-reviewed publication, and stake a claim in some department in academia; but of course the ontological basis of that discipline is surely rooted in some medieval riddle that has almost certainly never been parsed out and empirically tested. Kuhn lamented the impossibility of this Sisyphean endeavor by way of a series of schematics, which immediately revealed the rabbit hole of assumptions that each prior assumption is based upon. So perhaps parsing out all these assumptions is not the normative route to take, and Kuhn made no such recommendation. Instead, he described the stranglehold that a body of disciplinary assumptions engenders (i.e., its paradigm), and the threshold of new ideas and new knowledge that is needed to break out of it (i.e., a scientific revolution).
This is but one specific pitfall of relying on the past to inform the future, but it seems that the real pitfall that Kuhn rails against is inelegant (and possibly lazy) scholarship. I think it is likely that using history to predict future outcomes falls short when whole segments of society are ignored or dismissed out of convenience, expediency, or bias. In other words, it is not enough to write the history one wants to read; for the past to have meaning and provide wisdom, a deep investigation into the myriad influences on any given event must be considered.
