The Wonder of Science
Why don't social scientists talk about their wonder more often?
There’s a mode of writing about science and scientists that situates their curiosity about the world as their defining trait. Think of the tropes about astronomers gazing up at the heavens or naturalists observing apes in some misty jungle, or even hackneyed cliches about physicists seeking to understand the universe with math (if you can believe!)—all of these portrayals insist upon the driving force of wonder as leading scientists into their professions.
Idly, I wonder if, despite their resolutely secular subjects, such portrayals owe rather more to the hagiographies of saints than their creators would admit or even notice. Such narratives center the self-denying withdrawal from the world to arrive at a deeper understanding of the world via contemplation and disputation—rather as one might write the lives of the Church Fathers, for instance.
Less idly, I note that such depictions of the E.O. Wilsons of the world suffer from the same commonplace biases of any view of a field from its summit. The sacrifices and slights of the early careers of our chosen victors look like worthy self-abnegations when viewed in the knowledge that some crowning triumph will soon be at hand to redeem such burdens. Yet for every Nobelist (especially these days) there are surely a score or scores of equally worthy careers unrecognized, and hundreds if not thousands of researchers toiling in all but local anonymity whose careers were identical to the laureates until some stroke of luck revealed them as the elect to be celebrated.
These reflections were triggered—somewhat unfairly!—by reading Alexandre Antonelli’s The Hidden Universe: Adventures in Biodiversity, which I believe you can also buy cheaply from the University of Chicago Press during their sale. The book is quite good in most regards, and is strongest when it presents an interpretation of contemporary researchers’ understanding of diversity in species, diversity of species, and diversity within and between ecosystems. It is a memoir and a lament: a memoir of a life inspired by encounters with the natural in places such as the Amazon that are now being reduced to monoculture. (Like nearly all books that aim to present interpretations of what we know as the basis for recommendations for action, it slips in the final chapter regarding how we should preserve all this.
I say somewhat unfairly because it was one line of Antonelli’s that triggered my musings on odes of writing about “science”:
Despite many years working as a researcher, professor, curator, ad science leader—which gave me ample opportunity to deep-dive into biodiversity—I’m just as curious and astonished at the natural world today as I was in my early years, and I have never stopped asking the most fundamental questions. Here I seek to answer these questions for you, which together explain the building blocks of all natural life on this planet. I hope that it will in turn inspire you to share my passion for our precious wildlife—our hidden universe.
In my experience, and perhaps it’s limited, STEM folks are more likely to talk about their subjects like this than are social scientists. Political scientists, and perhaps especially within them international relations scholars, seem rather more likely to insist upon the utility and the moral worth of what they study. Even public-facing exponents of international relations scholarship center how understanding this or that concept from IR scholarship (and it’s amazing, really, how tricky technical concepts developed over decades of scholarship can be conveyed in the space of a single tweet—surely nothing is lost in translation!) can help policymakers do their job better (or, at least, help audiences demand better policymakers, or even more cynically help folks signal their superior worth over incumbent policymakers). More rarely, however, do social scientists describe their motivations as being ones arising out of the mix of curiosity and wonder that physicists and astronomers reach for.
Perhaps this is defensiveness on both sides. For most people, the actual practice of STEM is rather boring. Why withdraw from the world into the lab or observatory, sacrificing one’s twenties (and increasingly thirties) in the quest for an academic position and perhaps even a meaningful advance in knowledge (as the former substantially outnumber the latter), when the world itself—with its beer, puppies, and all-inclusive resorts—is rather interesting on its own? Yet the utility of the STEM disciplines is rarely in doubt by any aside from students forced to take college algebra: I’m writing this on a fantastically complex computer connected to every other computer in the world, QED.
By contrast, the social scientists’ utility is (unfairly) more often cast into doubt. Unfairly, because rather a lot of what folks actually do in the world, from management to social networking, is just applied social science; plausibly, because we social scientists have probably not yet had our Newton or Einstein moment. Quite a lot of ink has been metaphorically spilled exhorting policymakers to take us more seriously.
As a result, though, modes of talking about social science often fall into the missionary in that some new advance, concept, or insight serves as the basis for what can only be described as evangelism: have you heard the good news about rational choice theory or big data or realism or … ? There’s an old (very old!) political science joke about how such “math can fix this” adherents can often get over their skis; it refers to an earnest and sincere essay along those lines about how political-science equations could help fix Mexico’s cartel wars. That has proven somewhat exaggerated.
The Enlightenment faith that study will bring useful insights that will manifest in good works is touching and also a good way to justify grants. Yet I wonder why we can’t just say bluntly that politics (or whatever social science we are doing) is worthy of wonder and study on its own terms more often. Focusing on our practical worth has the effect, however unintentional, of letting the {air quotes} scientists {end air quotes} talk about how they study the most fundamental questions (look again at Antonelli’s passage!).
Yet this is bizarre. There is literally no star, no galaxy, no chemical reaction that is as interesting as the biography of the most humble person. How humans relate to each other is not just of practical interest: their relations contain—indeed, define—beauty, awe, cruelty, savagery, indifference, and every other concept by which we navigate the world in which we exist. The goings-on of some remote town council, the jockeyings for prestige amount Instagram models, the arrangement of supply chains, the formation of international organizations—all of these are phenomena about which we should not have to justify our curiosity one whit. (Our research designs or claims on grantable funds—well, those we have to justify.)
Because it deals with people and their interactions, social science deals with the most important topics in the universe. Copernicus and Galileo may have convinced us that we’re not the center of the physical universe, but humanity does occupy a place at the center of our moral universe—and at the center of our imagined universe, the network of relations and ideas in which we exist. Sherlock Holmes was right in that regard to insist that it made no matter whether the earth revolved around the moon or vice versa, except insofar as that mattered for his work. We may not have fundamental answers, but we have the fundamental topics.