The first reading assignment for the Scripps class is a prelude to my opening lecture, it
self titled “From Copernicus to Colbert: A Brief History of Science Communication.” To get the students ready to think historically about what science communication is, and how it has changed over time (due in significant part to changing communication technologies), I had them all read Chapter 8 of a fascinating little book entitled the Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, penned in 1794 as the French Revolution turned bloody by one of the last of the philosophes, the Marquis de Condorcet.
The Sketch is Condorcet’s grand and impassioned argument for why science and reason must triumph in the long term against superstition and tyranny, and its author hangs much of the case on the power of one particular communication technology–the printing press. In particular, Condorcet’s Chapter 8–really, his “Eighth Stage,” as the book is organized in “Stages” along the path to full enlightenment–is entitled “From the invention of printing to the time when philosophy and the sciences shook off the yoke of authority.” It contains some powerful stuff; here are a few passages.
On the ability of printing to help science and reason triumph:
A new sort of tribunal had come into existence in which less lively but deeper impressions were communicated; which no longer allowed the same tyrannical empire to be exercised over men’s passions but ensured a more certain and more durable power over their minds; a situation in which the advantages are all on the side of truth, since what the art of communication loses in the power to seduce, it gains in the power to enlighten. The public opinion that was formed in this way was powerful by virtue of its size, and effective because the forces that created it operated with equal strength on all men at the same time, no matter what distances separated them. In a word, we now have a tribunal, independent of all human coercion, which favors reason and justice, a tribunal whose scrutiny it is difficult to elude, and whose verdict it is impossible to evade.
Later Condorcet elaborates on precisely why it is that this “tribunal” is so friendly to truth, so devastating to error:
Any new mistake is criticized as soon as it is made, and often attacked even before it has been propagated; and so it has no time to take root in men’s minds. Those fallacies which are imbibed in infancy, becoming in some way identified with the reason of the individual, and which weaker characters cling to out of terror or hope, have now been eradicated for this reason alone–that it has become impossible to prevent their being openly discussed, to disguise the fact that they can be attacked and rejected, or to maintain them against the progress of truth which by argument must ultimately reveal them as absurd.
And still, Condorcet is only building up steam to what I think is the most powerful passage about printing and the Enlightenment:
The instruction that every man is free to receive from books in silence and solitude can never be completely corrupted. It is enough for there to exist one corner of free earth from which the press can scatter its leaves. How with the multitude of different books, with the innumerable copies of each book, of reprints that can be made available at a moment’s notice, how could it be possible to bolt every door, to seal every crevice through which truth aspires to enter? For though this was difficult enough even when it was only a question of destroying a few copies of a manuscript to annihilate it for ever, of proscribing a book or an opinion for a few years to consign it to eternal oblivion, has it not become impossible today when it would be necessary to maintain an absolutely ceaseless vigilance and an unresting activity? For even if it were possible to suppress those truths which only too obviously and directly injure the interests of the inquisitors, how would it be possible to suppress those other truths which secretly or by implication contain the forbidden truths within them, and which one day would lead mankind back to them?
And so forth.
The class discussion that I hope we will have of this text will focus on just how realistic Condorcet’s vision is of print as a vessel for delivering a reasoning populace–especially in light of what we know now, and in light of how media has dramatically changed since 1794.
Feel free to post comments here if you don’t get to raise them in class, or want to add to whatever is said there…
August 10th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
Condorcet was a mathematician as well as a philosopher. I think that some of his most interesting work is related to majority decision making. One of his proposals was a design to simulate elections by matching pairs of candidates in an election (for example by ranking candidates in order of preference). This is related to “Condorcet’s paradox” in which he noted that it is possible for the public to vote for proposal 1 over proposal 2 , 2 over 3, and yet support the third proposal over the first one. Implementations of his voting method or methods like his, vary in how they handle the paradox (which can result in no clear “winner”).
Our current elections, in which the highest vote getting (but quite possibly non-majority) candidate wins, can favor well organized minorities. Political power has a tendency to flip between either extreme of the idealogical spectrum precisely because we don’t take into account an in depth mathematical analysis of what constitutes a true majority. Other voting methods, such as that of Condorcet, would probably tend to favor coalition making and the middle ground.
This sort of analysis would also be quite useful when considering issues related to science, which rarely boil down to simple, one step, yes or no decision making.
Chris, thanks for bringing the historical, yet currently relevant, progressive ideas of Marquis de Condorcet back into the conversation for those of us unable to attend the class!
August 10th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
A possibly interesting note:
Chris, you state that the above work was “penned” by Condorcet in 1794. According to what I could determine online, his death in prison occurred in March of that year.
His wife, Sophie Grouchy, was also a leading intellectual and responsible for French translations of works by authors such as Thomas Paine and Adam Smith. His wife, and later his daughter are responsible for the publication of his works after his death. She held much the same political views as her husband. In the “second wave” (1970’s) feminist history class I attended, attempts were made to attribute much of his work to her.
Any historians out there? What are current views on this? Is Sophie Grouchy actually a co-author?
August 10th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
Gaythia -
It’s quite possible he wrote this in prison and it was smuggled out by either his wife or by friends and mutual acquaintances prior to his execution.