Today we will talk about a losely connected set of topics with no citations. It's blogging in its purest form.
In the history of science we see two conflicting viewpoints. The conflict thesis is the idea that the science grew from its fundamental conflict with religion - that the scientific advancements of early moderns were fundamentally due to their increased freedom from religious oppression. The continuity thesis is the opposite - the idea that the science of the early moderns grew because of religious patronage of scholarship, not in spite of it. Nowdays the most popular views are various "complexity theses" - they do not have a particularly clean definition but can be surmised as the idea that science does not conflict fundamentally with religion, but rather that there were a specific set of social circumstances that led to outbreaks of conflict at specific times. What I find interesting about all these various views is the way in which the fascination with scientific practices becomes a defining focal point for modern identity. Why do we identify so strongly with science? Perhaps the obvious answer is that it represents of the strongest engines of knowledge we have today, but of course people were always creating knowledge. Even if we became much better at this in the 17th century, why would the great leap of scientific progress necessarily have to be due to the ideology of science, be it religious, secular or something in between or completely separate? Isn't the more likely explanation the great expansion of literacy, capital, colonialism, cultural exchange, optics (including glasses), coffee, the nation-state, and the accounting system? Perhaps this is off task, even if the ideology of science is not causative of the progress of science, it clearly is a unique cultural formation that really does matter in direct material ways. In this sense I would propose my own simplistic historical materialist explanation - science by its very nature had to grow from religious systems by the very nature of scholarship and the university. This growth creates contradiction, first leading to more and more heterodox religious thought among scholars, eventually culminating in the idea of science as a completely secular practice. The evolution of scientific ideology makes sense with the shift from church-funded scholars to liberal nobles and landed gentry, eventually to scholarship fully captured as state practice. This is probably a rather stupid view on the matter, but let it stand for now. It's perhaps more important to understand what science means for us today and our place in the history of knowledge before we play historgraphical darts to see what sticks.
Speaking of lawyers, I've found the discussion of the supreme court over the past week both fascinating and lacking. The current discussion focuses around the nascent politicization of the supreme court. While that is true to an extent, it ignores the bigger fish in the room: the fact that an entire branch of legal thought and the judges associated have created a framework in which the law justifies taking us back to the imagined era of jeffersonian democracy. An imagined era in which women have no protected rights and capital takes up all functions that would be left up to the state bureaucracy. On its face, this is absolutely bizarre. One expects that the legal system would act in order to justify the necessary powers of the state to continue its existence. Perhaps we must then take a more instrmentalist view? The half of judges and legal scholars that believe in these bunk theories are acting in the pure, naked interest of the powerful. The elimination of minority proections, of the right to abortion and the right to vote, is a path towards the elimination of the EPA and FDA. One cannot run a modern state without the bureaucracy, but the long term ramifications of the court's actions is unimportant to those few companies that see government regulation as the primary threat to business. And what about the other half of the legal scholars? It's interesting in the sense that the other half of the law serves the traditionally structuralist purpose of ensuring the long term existence and stability of society. This may be more instructive to think about broadly. Is it right to think of the various functions of the state in purely instrmuentalist or purely structural terms? From a basic analysis of the current takeover of the legal system it seems that structural compromise can self-implode in a spectacular fashion. The long term viability of capital, after all, is a lot more of an interest to the state than it is to the members of bourgeoisie that are threatened by state regulation. Of course, both american conservatives and american liberals have their issues, but only one of them wants to destroy the clean air act.