The richness of reason part 3: Not so fast -- Margaret Cavendish against the techno-optimists

A bear-man gazing through a microscope, illustration for Margaret Cavendish's Blazing-World by Helen De Cruz

Read earlier installments (on Marin Mersenne and music (part 1) and on Fontenelle and women in STEM)

Will science solve our problems?

Science will solve everything! Any problem you throw at it: climate change, hunger, pandemic, we'll set it straight with science.

The English philosopher Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673) had her doubts, and maybe you do too. The technological solutions to climate change are slow in being implemented and seem to be cancelled out by increasing fossil fuel extraction. Pandemics and epidemics rage in spite of vaccines and pharmaceuticals. People are still hungry, and extreme poverty refuses to be eradicated. If science is so amazing, why does it seem unable to solve some of our most existential problems? Cavendish can give us a glimpse into why.

Experimental philosophy

Cavendish wrote in the very early days of science, when the terms “science” and “scientist” did not even exist. To be more precise, the term “science” or scientia did exist, but it meant knowledge more generally. The term “scientist” was only coined by William Whewell in 1834. At the time, what we now call science was often called “experimental philosophy.” In the mid-seventeenth century when Cavendish was active, we're in the thick of the scientific revolution. Copernicus dropped his bombshell book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres in 1543. In the decades that followed its publication, scientists such as Galileo, Kepler, Newton tried to grapple with its momentous implications. There were huge and significant advances in mathematics and music theory (see here on Mersenne).

Lens technology allowed people to peer into telescopes and microscopes, discovering the vast and the tiny. Early scientists such as Robert Hooke were delighted by these optical wonders.

Robert Hooke and the delights of the microscope

In 1665, the Royal Society published a lavish coffee table book with huge foldout images entitled Micrographia or, some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies made by Magnifying Glasses, with Observations and Inquiries thereupon (1665). The book acquainted its audience (middle class and upper class people) with the world of tiny things. Hooke, a master draughtsman, made the pictures himself so the audience could see the horrors of a larger-than life flea, fascinating urine crystals, mould, and more.

Here are his microscopic images of a needle point, a full stop (dot of ink) on paper, and of a razor blade. These images were counterintuitive. The needle point is blunt, the full stop messy, and the razor… as Hooke comments, “this Edge and piece of a Razor, if it had been really such as it appear’d through the Microscope, would scarcely have serv'd to cleave wood, much less to have cut off the hair of beards.”

Hooke argues in the Preface that scientific instruments not only improve our vision. They correct our human cognitive deficiencies more generally. In seventeenth-century Europe among the largely Christian population, it was common to see those deficiencies as a result of the Fall. The picture was roughly this: God created everything in six days and everything was good. But humans disobeyed God by eating from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. As a result of this disobedience, the whole of humanity not only fell from God's grace, but also suffered the noetic effects of sin. Sin is transmitted from parents to offspring.

Not only did we break our relationship with God, we also broke our formerly great faculties of reason, perceptual abilities, and control over our bodies, (Augustine holds that bodies untainted by the Fall would be able to fart at will, and even musically, this is alas no longer the case).

So, our senses and thinking are deficient and broken. However, as historian Peter Harrison argues in The Fall of Man and the Foundations of science (2009), this belief in deficient senses made science possible, because early scientists such as Hooke believed experimental philosophy (i.e., science) was able to compensate for the bad effects of the Fall.

You can see this very clearly in Hooke's Preface, where he argues that humans have "the power of considering, comparing, altering, assisting, and improving" the works of nature. Through our art and our instruments we can surmount our cognitive limitations. He continues “[by] the helps of Art, and Experience, [...] some Men excel others in their Observations, and Deductions, almost as much as they do Beasts.”

As Hooke speculates, with a transparent reference to the Fall,

there may be, in some manner, a reparation made for the mischiefs, and imperfection, mankind has drawn upon it self, by negligence, and intemperance, and a wilful and superstitious deserting the Prescripts and Rules of Nature whereby every man, both from a deriv’d corruption, innate and born with him, and from his breeding and converse with men, is very subject to slip into all sorts of errors.—Hooke, Micrographia, preface.

How do we make this reparation? With microscopes and other scientific instruments! We should, in Hooke's view,

supply infirmities with Instruments, and, as it were, the adding of artificial Organs to the natural; this in one of them has been of late years accomplisht with prodigious benefit to all sorts of useful knowledge, by the invention of Optical Glasses—Hooke, Micrographia, preface..

Here's a picture of the type of microscope Hooke used from the Science Museum:

Cavendish's criticisms

We can read Cavendish's criticisms about Hooke's claims in her Observations upon experimental philosophy and her Blazing-world. To put it bluntly (as blunt as a razor's edge under a microscope), she’s not impressed with Hooke and his fine lenses. She's not impressed by telescopes either. She likens astronomers and proto-biologists peering through lenses to

boys that play with watery bubbles, or fling dust into each others’ eyes, or make a hobby-horse of snow, are worthy of reproof rather than praise, for wasting their time with useful sports, so those that addict themselves to unprofitable arts spend more time than they reap benefit thereby. (From Gwen Marshall's edited volume of Cavendish's Observations)

She thinks that telescopes and microscopes are not useful, and that scientists could spend the time more profitably doing other things. The razor's edge illustrates this problem. We see a very rugged surface, and yet, we know that it is capable of cutting the hairs of beards. So what gives?

In short, magnifying-glasses are like a high heel to a short leg, which if it be made too high, it is apt to make the wearer fall, and at the best, can do not more than represent exterior figures in a bigger and so in a more deformed shape and posture than naturally they are.” (From Gwen Marshall's edited volume of Cavendish's Observations)

We see similar reservations in Cavendish's utopian novel The Blazing-world (1666). In that story, an unnamed woman is abducted by a merchant who has unrequited feelings for her, and he takes her on a ship. The ship, near the North Pole, goes into a parallel universe, the Blazing-world where the woman meets the citizens (talking animals) of a vast empire. The emperor is so impressed he marries her, and puts her in charge of his empire. The new empress surveys, as the new enlightened despot, all the scientific specialists. She wants science to be useful and puts different creatures in charge of disciplines, such as bear-men who work with microscopes and telescopes, and ape-men who are chemists.

The bear-men watching blazing-srars (comets) through their telescopes, drawing by Helen De Cruz

The Empress begins to have doubts about the use of microscopes when interrogating the bear-men

But after the Empress had seen the shapes of these monstrous Creatures [mosquitos and fleas], she desir'd to know, Whether their Microscopes could hinder their biting, or at least shew some means how to avoid them? To which they answered, That such Arts were mechanical and below the noble study of Microscopical observations (excerpt from Cavendish's Blazing-world)

The Empress, having seen how the bear-men begin to quarrel over astronomical interpretations following their observations through the telescopes, orders them to break their glasses: “your Glasses are false Informers, and instead of discovering the Truth, delude your Senses; Wherefore I Command you to break them, and let the Bird-men trust onely to their natural eyes, and examine Cœlestial Objects by the motions of their own Sense and Reason.”

The bear-men, however, maintain their glasses compensate for the limitations of human vision and even reason, arguing that “she [the Empress] did not know the vertue of those Microscopes: for they never delude, but rectifie and inform the Senses.” This is almost directly a quote from Robert Hooke.

Eventually, the bear-men are allowed to keep their lens technology provided they stop bickering.

Was Cavendish too pessimistic?

It would seem that Cavendish was too pessimistic about the power of telescopes and microscopes. While the microscope didn't directly stop mosquitos from biting us, microscopic technology has played a crucial role in our understanding of micro-organisms, and our development of pharmaceutical technologies.

However, Cavendish's broader point is that science cannot correct human deficiencies the way Hooke hoped. We will have to be thoughtful about how we use the resources of science. Our elected governments, like Cavendish's fiction Empress, have to be mindful of how to employ science in society in a way that is beneficial.

If you can believe some techno-optimists (Musk, Bostrom, Gates etc) scientific advances will usher in a new age and will solve all of our problems. The fact that those problems persist, even when science has ready solutions, due to lack of implementation or willpower, should give us pause. We still cannot stop the malaria-infested mosquitos from biting, in spite of steady advances in technology. Solar panels are becoming more and more efficient, but gains from solar technology are drowned out by the continued pumping of oil and gas out of the earth.

Science is just a tool, it's not a panacea. It does not stop us from making choices or asking hard questions. It will not come to save us. We will have to save ourselves. That was Cavendish's insight on the nature of science, which is still relevant today.