“Hoping for a big tent in which it is understood that disagreement is the price to be paid for exploring important ideas.”
This is conceived as an informal and spontaneous annex to my more extensive blog, Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon.
Subscribe to the Grand Strategy Newsletter for regular updates on work in progress.
Discord Invitation
Properly Scientific Civilization
In several posts I have discussed the possibility of a scientific civilization. These posts, inter alia, include:
- David Hume and Scientific Civilization
- The Relevance of Philosophy of Science to Scientific Civilization
- Types of Scientific Civilization
- The Central Tension of Scientific Civilization
- Scientific Civilization: The Economic Perspective
- Scientific Civilization: The Central Project
- Another Counterfactual Civilization with Science as its Central Project
- Scientific Civilization and the Politicization of Science
- The Industrial Revolution and Scientific Civilization
- The limits of science are the limits of scientific civilization.
- Folk Concepts of Scientific Civilization
It now occurs to me how I can treat scientific civilization in accordance with my definition of civilization, which is something I did in regard to spacefaring (in contradistinction to science) in my Centauri Dreams post, Indifferently Spacefaring Civilizations, in which I schematically laid out the different kinds of spacefaring civilizations that there could be based on permutations of my model of civilization.
I take civilization to be an economic infrastructure joined to an intellectual superstructure by a central project. Thus there are three over-arching institutions that jointly constitute civilization (each of which has distinctive relationships to the others), and each of these three institutions is composed of countless less comprehensive institutions that fall under these umbrella institutions.
In regard to a scientific civilization, then, the permutations are as follows:
- The Null Case: science is not present in any of the elements that constitute a given civilization. This is a non-scientific civilization.
- Economically scientific civilization: science is integral to the economic infrastructure; also called intellectually indifferent scientific civilization.
- Intellectually scientific civilization: science is integral to the intellectual superstructure of civilization; also called economically indifferent scientific civilization.
- Economically and intellectually scientific civilization: science is integral to both the economic infrastructure and the intellectual superstructure of a civilization, but is absent in the central project; also known as morally indifferent scientific civilization.
- Properly scientific civilization: science is integral to the central project of a civilization.
The three additional permutations – 1) science as central project but absent elsewhere, 2) science integral with central project and economic infrastructure but absent in the intellectual superstructure, and 3) science integral with central project and intellectual infrastructure but absent in the economic infrastructure – are non-viable institutional structures and must be set aside. Because of the role that a central project plays in a civilization, whatever defines the central project is also, of necessity, integral to economic infrastructure and intellectual superstructure.
With this analysis I can clear up a few things I have previously said about scientific civilization. Without realizing I was doing so, when I was thinking about scientific civilizations I was thinking about what I above called properly scientific civilization, i.e., civilizations that take science as their central project, or as an integral constituent of a multi-faceted central project. The scenario that I wrote about in Another Counterfactual Civilization with Science as its Central Project
is a clear instance of an economically indifferent scientific civilization.
Our civilization today, with science present in (though perhaps not fully integral to) the intellectual superstructure, and essentially bound up in the economic infrastructure (because of the place of science in the STEM cycle that drives industrialized civilization), but not present as the driving force in the central project, clearly represents a morally indifferent scientific civilization.
Perhaps we could say that our civilization has approximated a properly scientific civilization, or that we have at least experienced intimations of a properly scientific civilization, as in the painting above by
Henri Testelin
of
Colbert Presenting the Members of the Royal Academy of Sciences to Louis XIV in 1667. More often the experience of science has been like that of the painting of Faraday, below, by
Harriet Jane Moore, working alone in his laboratory, without the gorgeous trappings of a royal court.
