A People's History of Science, by Clifford D. Conner
Originally transcribed 9/11/08, then added to later in April 2010 - JH
Conner, Clifford D. 2005. "A People's History of Science: Miners, Midwives, and "Low Mechanicks." New York: Avalon.
130 - Finally, a people's history of science would be remiss if it failed to explicitly refute the insinuation of nineteenth-century "racial science" that the black people of sub-Saharan Africa were incapable of creating civilizations. The history of Kumbi Saleh--not to mention Gao, Jenne, Timbuktu, and any number of other African cities--is sufficient to counter that falsehood. More than a thousand years ago Kumbi Saleh was a thriving commercial city in West Africa, in the Kingdom of Ghana, with a population of fifteen to twenty thousand people. Neither London nor Paris was anywhere near that size until hundreds of years later.
It must also be emphasized that no sharp line can be drawn between the history of early Egypt and that of sub-Saharan Africa. Bernal maintained that "Egyptian civilization is clearly based on the rich Pre-dynastic cultures of Upper Egypt and Nubia, whose African origin is uncontested."40 The prehistoric origins of Egyptian civilization came from far south along the Nile River, which is to say from the heart of the African continent. Sub-Saharan Africans constituted a significant part of the Egyptian population in the age of the pharaohs, and they frequently rose to the pinnacle of political power. Statues, wall paintings, and documents make it clear that there were black African Pharaohs--Pepys I, for example, circa 2360 B.C.E.--and that there were periods during which all of Egypt was ruled by the territories along the southern stretches of the Nile.
Herodotus, who traveled extensively in Egypt in the fifth century B.C.E., said of the Egyptian people that "they are black-skinned and have wooly hair."41
[40. M. Bernal, Black Athena, p. 15
[41. Herodotus, History, book II, 104
144 - In fact, Plato believed that government was only possible on the basis of a lie, and he "devoted his life to the elaboration" of that lie.72 To uphold that falsehood, Plato urged that the books of the Ionian materialists be destoyed and "that his own fradulent book [the Laws] should be imposed by the State as the one and only obligatory source of doctrine."73 For dissenters who objected to his plans, he advocated the death penalty. This was Plato's idea of a political utopia, as he spelled it out in the Republic. [. . .]
What was the famous "noble lie" that Plato wanted to impose as the official doctrine of the state? Here is how he described it. Written in dialogue form, he had one of his interlocutors ask him: "How then may we devise one of those needful falsehoods of which we lately spoke--just one royal lie?" He answered:
I propose to communicate [the audacious fiction] gradually, first to the rules, then to the soldiers, and lastly to the people. . . . Citizens, we shall say to them in our tale, you are brothers, yet God has framed you differently. Some of you have the power to command, and in the composition of these he has mingled gold, wherefore also they have the greatest honor; others he has made of silver, to be auxiliaries; others again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he has composed of brass and iron; and the species will generally be perserved in the children.75
[72. Farrington, Science and Politics in the Ancient World, p. 126
[73. Ibid. p. 127
[74. Ibid., p. 94
[75. Plato, The Republic, book III, chapter 8, 1074b
145 - Plato's "noble lie," then, was the ultimate ideological justification of elitism: that social hierarchies are immutable because they were created by God, and that the ruling class deserves to rule because God made its members out of superior material. The aristocrats are the Golden Men, whereas the farmers and artisans are composed of brass and iron. As part of this ideological program, Plato promoted two separate religions--a sophisticated, abstract one for the intelligentsia, and a cruder one, with the traditional anthropomorphic gods and goddesses, for the masses. To ensure the continued observance of the latter, Plato proposed sentencing disbelievers to five years in prison for a first offense and death for a second. [. . .]
Platonic elitism, unfortunately, is not merely a matterof ancient history; it is stil drastically afflicting the human race even in the twenty-first century. The architects of American foreign policy who carried out the imperialist asaults on Afghanistan and Iraq are known to be zealous disciples of political philosopher Leo Strauss, an admirer of Plato. "The effect of Strauss's teaching is to convince his acolytes that they are the natural ruling elite," said Shadia Drury, who has written extensively on Strauss's ideas and their consequences.78 "Leo Strauss," she continued, "was a great believer in the efficacy and usefulness of lies in politics" who "justifies his position by an appeal to Plato's concept of the noble lie."
[78. See Shadia Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss; and Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right.
159 - Before leaving this subject [alchemy-JH], a word about its "dark side"--the mystical aspect--is in order. Alechemy has, throughout the ages, been closely linked with mysticism, an association that was especially strong in Hellenistic Alexandria. The seemingly miraculous transformations that the artisans were able to produce in their firey furnaces had such a powerful effect on the imagination of Neoplatonic philosophers that it induced the latter to spin fanciful metaphysical systems from alchemical metaphors. As a result, "to the already confused terminology of alchemy was added a still greater mass of philosophical speculation, using chemiccal terms, but with almost no chemical content." The mystical philosophers scorned the practical alchemists as mere "puffers" (an allusion to their use of bellows to stoke their fires). However, it was the practical alchemists "who preserved and advanced alchemy as a science until it became chemistry, while the others lost in a cloud of obscure nomenclature and speculation, contributed nothing further to chemistry."123
[123. Leicester, Historical Background of Chemistry, p. 47
161 - Arabic-Islamic scholarship was not simply a passive reflection of previous Greek triumphs; it also received major inputs from Persia, India, and China was itself a source of original contributions to scientific culture. That can be seen most clearly (but not only) in the field of mathematics. Whereas Greek mathematicians kept almost exclusively to geometry and scorned arithmetic as a tool fit only for lowly practical pursuits, Muslim mathematicians adopted the base-ten, position-value number system from India and utilized it to further mathematical knowledge in ways unimaginable to their Greek predecessors. [. . .]
162 - But Muslim scholars were not simply translators and copyists; they added extensive critical commentaries, sometimes based on their own scientific investigations, to the corpus of Greek science. When scholarship in Europe begain to revive in the twelfth century, the works of Aristotle and Galen recovered from Arabic sources had been refracted through the interpretive lenses of Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Ibn Sina (Avicenna), al-Razi (Rhazes), and many others. The new learning, however, rapidly hardened into an orthodoxy that hindered further acquisition of knowledge of nature.
262 - Leonardo da Vinci is today hailed as the supreme example of a Renaissance man who mastered many diverse fields of knowledge and combined achievements in the beaux arts and in science to a degree attained by no individual before or since. Ironically, however, in his own time he was denied the prestige of a fully learned man because he lacked a classical education and was not literate in Latin. His originality, one leading historian of science has written, "was partly due to his ignorance and his lack of academic ambitions."
455 - The important lesson to be learned from all this is that the social meanings attributed to biological theories are "not logically inherent in the theories themselves."16 Whether evolution proceeds slowly or in bursts has nothing whatsoever to do with the way political struggles unfold. Nor is the red-in-tooth-and-claw competition of biological evolution a model human societies should aspire to emulate. In general, attempts to reduce the laws of the science of society to the laws of biology is bad science that encourages bad social policy.
[16. Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution, p. 378
473 - The privatization of science was greatly facilitated by the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980, which allowed universities and small businesses to patent the findings produced by federally funded research. As surely as night follows day, major corporations were certain eventually to gain the same priviledges, which they did in 1987. The boundary lines separating government, industrial, and academic research have increasingly blurred. The upshot is that public dollars pay universities to produce knowledge that becomes the private property of corporations.
Conner, Clifford D. 2005. "A People's History of Science: Miners, Midwives, and "Low Mechanicks." New York: Avalon.
130 - Finally, a people's history of science would be remiss if it failed to explicitly refute the insinuation of nineteenth-century "racial science" that the black people of sub-Saharan Africa were incapable of creating civilizations. The history of Kumbi Saleh--not to mention Gao, Jenne, Timbuktu, and any number of other African cities--is sufficient to counter that falsehood. More than a thousand years ago Kumbi Saleh was a thriving commercial city in West Africa, in the Kingdom of Ghana, with a population of fifteen to twenty thousand people. Neither London nor Paris was anywhere near that size until hundreds of years later.
It must also be emphasized that no sharp line can be drawn between the history of early Egypt and that of sub-Saharan Africa. Bernal maintained that "Egyptian civilization is clearly based on the rich Pre-dynastic cultures of Upper Egypt and Nubia, whose African origin is uncontested."40 The prehistoric origins of Egyptian civilization came from far south along the Nile River, which is to say from the heart of the African continent. Sub-Saharan Africans constituted a significant part of the Egyptian population in the age of the pharaohs, and they frequently rose to the pinnacle of political power. Statues, wall paintings, and documents make it clear that there were black African Pharaohs--Pepys I, for example, circa 2360 B.C.E.--and that there were periods during which all of Egypt was ruled by the territories along the southern stretches of the Nile.
Herodotus, who traveled extensively in Egypt in the fifth century B.C.E., said of the Egyptian people that "they are black-skinned and have wooly hair."41
[40. M. Bernal, Black Athena, p. 15
[41. Herodotus, History, book II, 104
144 - In fact, Plato believed that government was only possible on the basis of a lie, and he "devoted his life to the elaboration" of that lie.72 To uphold that falsehood, Plato urged that the books of the Ionian materialists be destoyed and "that his own fradulent book [the Laws] should be imposed by the State as the one and only obligatory source of doctrine."73 For dissenters who objected to his plans, he advocated the death penalty. This was Plato's idea of a political utopia, as he spelled it out in the Republic. [. . .]
What was the famous "noble lie" that Plato wanted to impose as the official doctrine of the state? Here is how he described it. Written in dialogue form, he had one of his interlocutors ask him: "How then may we devise one of those needful falsehoods of which we lately spoke--just one royal lie?" He answered:
I propose to communicate [the audacious fiction] gradually, first to the rules, then to the soldiers, and lastly to the people. . . . Citizens, we shall say to them in our tale, you are brothers, yet God has framed you differently. Some of you have the power to command, and in the composition of these he has mingled gold, wherefore also they have the greatest honor; others he has made of silver, to be auxiliaries; others again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he has composed of brass and iron; and the species will generally be perserved in the children.75
[72. Farrington, Science and Politics in the Ancient World, p. 126
[73. Ibid. p. 127
[74. Ibid., p. 94
[75. Plato, The Republic, book III, chapter 8, 1074b
145 - Plato's "noble lie," then, was the ultimate ideological justification of elitism: that social hierarchies are immutable because they were created by God, and that the ruling class deserves to rule because God made its members out of superior material. The aristocrats are the Golden Men, whereas the farmers and artisans are composed of brass and iron. As part of this ideological program, Plato promoted two separate religions--a sophisticated, abstract one for the intelligentsia, and a cruder one, with the traditional anthropomorphic gods and goddesses, for the masses. To ensure the continued observance of the latter, Plato proposed sentencing disbelievers to five years in prison for a first offense and death for a second. [. . .]
Platonic elitism, unfortunately, is not merely a matterof ancient history; it is stil drastically afflicting the human race even in the twenty-first century. The architects of American foreign policy who carried out the imperialist asaults on Afghanistan and Iraq are known to be zealous disciples of political philosopher Leo Strauss, an admirer of Plato. "The effect of Strauss's teaching is to convince his acolytes that they are the natural ruling elite," said Shadia Drury, who has written extensively on Strauss's ideas and their consequences.78 "Leo Strauss," she continued, "was a great believer in the efficacy and usefulness of lies in politics" who "justifies his position by an appeal to Plato's concept of the noble lie."
[78. See Shadia Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss; and Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right.
159 - Before leaving this subject [alchemy-JH], a word about its "dark side"--the mystical aspect--is in order. Alechemy has, throughout the ages, been closely linked with mysticism, an association that was especially strong in Hellenistic Alexandria. The seemingly miraculous transformations that the artisans were able to produce in their firey furnaces had such a powerful effect on the imagination of Neoplatonic philosophers that it induced the latter to spin fanciful metaphysical systems from alchemical metaphors. As a result, "to the already confused terminology of alchemy was added a still greater mass of philosophical speculation, using chemiccal terms, but with almost no chemical content." The mystical philosophers scorned the practical alchemists as mere "puffers" (an allusion to their use of bellows to stoke their fires). However, it was the practical alchemists "who preserved and advanced alchemy as a science until it became chemistry, while the others lost in a cloud of obscure nomenclature and speculation, contributed nothing further to chemistry."123
[123. Leicester, Historical Background of Chemistry, p. 47
161 - Arabic-Islamic scholarship was not simply a passive reflection of previous Greek triumphs; it also received major inputs from Persia, India, and China was itself a source of original contributions to scientific culture. That can be seen most clearly (but not only) in the field of mathematics. Whereas Greek mathematicians kept almost exclusively to geometry and scorned arithmetic as a tool fit only for lowly practical pursuits, Muslim mathematicians adopted the base-ten, position-value number system from India and utilized it to further mathematical knowledge in ways unimaginable to their Greek predecessors. [. . .]
162 - But Muslim scholars were not simply translators and copyists; they added extensive critical commentaries, sometimes based on their own scientific investigations, to the corpus of Greek science. When scholarship in Europe begain to revive in the twelfth century, the works of Aristotle and Galen recovered from Arabic sources had been refracted through the interpretive lenses of Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Ibn Sina (Avicenna), al-Razi (Rhazes), and many others. The new learning, however, rapidly hardened into an orthodoxy that hindered further acquisition of knowledge of nature.
262 - Leonardo da Vinci is today hailed as the supreme example of a Renaissance man who mastered many diverse fields of knowledge and combined achievements in the beaux arts and in science to a degree attained by no individual before or since. Ironically, however, in his own time he was denied the prestige of a fully learned man because he lacked a classical education and was not literate in Latin. His originality, one leading historian of science has written, "was partly due to his ignorance and his lack of academic ambitions."
455 - The important lesson to be learned from all this is that the social meanings attributed to biological theories are "not logically inherent in the theories themselves."16 Whether evolution proceeds slowly or in bursts has nothing whatsoever to do with the way political struggles unfold. Nor is the red-in-tooth-and-claw competition of biological evolution a model human societies should aspire to emulate. In general, attempts to reduce the laws of the science of society to the laws of biology is bad science that encourages bad social policy.
[16. Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution, p. 378
473 - The privatization of science was greatly facilitated by the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980, which allowed universities and small businesses to patent the findings produced by federally funded research. As surely as night follows day, major corporations were certain eventually to gain the same priviledges, which they did in 1987. The boundary lines separating government, industrial, and academic research have increasingly blurred. The upshot is that public dollars pay universities to produce knowledge that becomes the private property of corporations.
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