The Humanities and the Plague

We have to make sure that our youth are taught “the totality of sciences and arts,” nurturing their imaginations, memory, and common sense before introducing the Modern method. (Robert P. Crease on Giambattista Vico)

Preparation

If you missed the lecture, read the blog page What Our Case Studies Reveal.
Read three short sections of René Descartes: Workshop Thinking, Ch. 3 of The Workshop and the World by Robert P. Crease. [30 min]
- The untitled introductory section (pp. 69-70).
- Expert Thinking (pp. 79-82)
- Sequestration (pp. 82-83).
Read the first part (pp. 93-104) of Giambattista Vico: Going Mad Rationally, Ch. 4 of The Workshop. [30 min] The reading on Vico will be our first opportunity to think about the science and technical education occurring in secondary school and institutions of higher education. What are the relative merits of humanistic and technical education? What is the role of humanistic education in creating a public, a society with a modicum of civic values and virtues?
This weekend I would like you to begin thinking about a choice of book for your Midterm Project.
As preparation for discussions of pandemics and vaccination, watch Plague (I): Pestilence as Disease (Lecture 3) and Plague (II): Responses and Measures Lecture 3 (Lecture 4) of Epidemics in Western Society Since 1600 with Frank Snowden. [50 min. each]. If you prefer to read, the same material (and more) is covered in Chs. 3-5 of Epidemics and Society: From the black death to the present by Frank Snowden. The eBook is available to W&M students via [SWEM Online]. These videos will provide some historical and sociological perspective on pandemics, beginning with the plague. This is “deep background” for our upcoming discussion of how science & authority play out with respect to contagious disease and vaccination. Pay attention to the dramatic and terrible scope of suffering of unmitigated pandemic (the costs of doing nothing). Pay attention also to the role of authorities in public health interventions (the costs of doing something).

Discussion: Thinking Inside and Outside the Workshop

Crease on René Descartes

Descartes has been read in two very different ways. The way that Descartes is all-too-frequently taught in survey courses is to look only at his concepts. This version of Descartes thinks that the mind and the body cannot interact, has trouble knowing that other minds exist, and supposes that philosophy aims to develop a disinterested, detached, disengaged perspective – a “view from nowhere,” in later philosophical language – on the world. This caricatured Descartes, in short, has moved from the lifeworld into the workshop for good. The more philosophically sophisticated way to read Descartes is to look at what motivated his concepts and distinctions, and at the ends to which he was putting them. This Descartes is motivated, as the philosopher Robert Scharff notes [ in How History Matters to Philosophy ], “by the desire to retrain his own mind – that is, to discard the orientation of an ordinary believer for that of a disciplined knower.” The Meditations, Scharff says, is the first description of expert training. (Crease, pp. 87-88)

Crease on Giambattista Vico

Bacon’s New Atlantis was a sunny and optimistic story: when humanity turns to science, it liberates itself and creates a new Garden of Eden in which the benefits of science are obvious to and welcomed by all. He had not seen any significant dark sides to science. Vico lived in a world that Bacon helped to make possible, and saw dangers that Bacon did not. Reflection, so encouraged by the Modern methods, involves the ability to reject tradition and act only for self-interest. Paradoxically, the very force humanity finds so liberating – science and reason – if overused makes social bonds dissolve and alienates humans from each other. Just as Modern educational methods can lead individuals to go mad rationally, on a social level they lead to a slide back into individualism and egotism. European history, like that of the Roman Empire, planted the seeds of its destruction in the success of its sciences. (p. 111-12).

Modern methods are wildly successful in the sciences, but their success deceived the Moderns into thinking that they can be universally applied even to areas where Descartes had not. … Vico found this educationally destructive. The geometrical method focused on thoughts that can be reduced to simple and abstract form and insisted that these thoughts be connected without any suspicion of error. This had the effect of placing history, philosophy, language, all subjects taught in the ars topica, in the same category as knowledge that is false or uncertain. (p. 100)

Dazzled by Modern methods, Vico wrote, “we pay an excessive amount of attention to the natural sciences and not enough to ethics.” If this continues, our modern youth will grow up “unable to engage in the life of the community, to conduct themselves with sufficient wisdom and prudence.” We have to make sure that our youth are taught “the totality of sciences and arts,” nurturing their imaginations, memory, and common sense before introducing the Modern method. Before we become pioneers looking for where we might go, we need to become prospectors, finding out where we already stand. (p. 101)

Frank Snowden on antiplague measures and the modern state

“…[T]here seems little reason to doubt that the power of the early modern state to impose rigorous measures of segregation through quarantine played a significant and perhaps decisive role in the passing of the second pandemic. The antiplague measures were also enormously influential because they seemed to be effective and to provide solid defensive bulwarks against the disease. [Similar reactions by] political and public health authorities in later centuries is therefore intelligible. When new, virulent, and poorly understood epidemic diseases emerged, such as cholera and HIV/AIDS, the first reaction was to turn to the same defenses that appeared to have worked so effectively against plague. It was unfortunate that antiplague measures, however successfully deployed against bubonic plague, proved to be useless or even counterproductive when used against infections with profoundly different modes of transmission. In this manner the plague regulations established a style of public health that remained a permanent temptation, partly because they were thought to have worked in the past and because, in a time of uncertainty and fear, they provided the reassuring sense of being able to do something. In addition, they conferred upon authorities the legitimating appearance of acting resolutely, knowledgably, and in accord with precedent.”

“Plague regulations also cast a long shadow over political history. They marked a vast extension of state power into spheres of human life that had never before been subject to political authority. One reason for the temptation in later periods to resort to plague regulations was precisely that they provided justification for the extension of power, whether invoked against plague or, later, against cholera and other diseases. They justified control over the economy and the movement of people; they authorized surveillance and forcible detention; and they sanctioned the invasion of homes and the extinction of civil liberties. With the unanswerable argument of a public health emergency, this extension of power was welcomed by the church and by powerful political and medical voices. The campaign against plague marked a moment in the emergence of absolutism, and more generally, it promoted an accretion of the power and legitimation of the modern state.” (p. 81/82, Snowden, 2019)

Discussion

What are examples of non-coercive approaches to public health?

APSC 453 Science & Authority

a 400-level capstone course at William & Mary

The Humanities and the Plague

Preparation

Discussion: Thinking Inside and Outside the Workshop

Crease on René Descartes

Crease on Giambattista Vico

Frank Snowden on antiplague measures and the modern state

Discussion

Further Reading