Table Of ContentSCIENTISTS AS PROPHETS
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SCIENTISTS
AS PROPHETS
A Rhetorical Genealogy
Lynda Walsh
1
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Walsh, Lynda, 1971–
Scientists as prophets : a rhetorical genealogy / Lynda Walsh.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references (pages ) and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–985709–8 (hardcover : alk. paper)—ISBN 978–0–19–985711–1
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Science—Social aspects—Forecasting. 2. Scientists—Moral and ethical aspects.
I. Title.
Q175.5.W35 2013
303.48’3—dc23
2012038843
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
CONTENTS
Preface v ii
1. Prelude: Scientists as Prophets and the Rhetoric of Prophecy 1
2. The Delphic Oracle and Ancient Prophetic Ethos 16
3. The Natural Magician and the Prophet: Francis Bacon’s
Ethical Alchemy 38
4. Confi rming Signs: The Prophetic Ethos of the Early Royal Society 58
5. Interlude: Competing Ethical Models and a Catch-22 84
6. J. Robert Oppenheimer: Cultic Prophet 100
7. Rachel Carson: Kairotic Prophet 119
8. Media, Metaphor, and the “Oracles of Science” 136
9. Climate Change and the Technologies of Prophecy 163
10. Postlude: Problems and Solutions 186
Appendix: Key Reception and Constitution Sources 1 99
Notes 2 01
Index 261
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PREFACE
The fi rst recorded proto-scientifi c experiment with a control, as far as I
know, was initiated by the ancient Hebrew prophet Daniel around 600 b.c .
Daniel’s people had been taken captive by Nebuchadnezzar, the king of
Babylon, who chose Daniel and some of his companions to serve him based
on their looks and intelligence. To show his favor, the king fed the Jewish
youths from his own table, but he routinely ate meat and wine that had
been sacrifi ced to the Babylonian gods; this was a dietary practice forbid-
den to Jews by Yahweh. When the steward in charge of the youths noticed
them abstaining, he implored Daniel to eat, arguing that if the young men
turned “haggard,” the king would have his head. Daniel said to the man
(I paraphrase), “I’ll make you a deal: give us 10 more days just eating the
vegetables and water, and at the end of those days, compare us to the young
men who have been eating all of that plus the meat and wine. If you fi nd
that we look haggard, we’ll eat as you direct us from then on. But if we
seem the same as the meat-eaters, or better even, then you must allow us
to observe our traditional diets.” At the end of the ten-day trial, Daniel and
his companions appeared “fatter” than the Babylonian men, so they were
allowed to maintain their diet; thus, the story concluded, God provided for
his people even in captivity (Dan. 1:1–21).
My mother fi rst pointed this story out to me when I was a child. I
think it caught her imagination because she was a practicing chemist at
that time with an interest in nutrition. But she didn’t, and I didn’t, dig
into the story to look for deeper links between prophetic and scientifi c
practice. It wasn’t until I was in graduate school at the University of Texas
that I started remarking the similarities in the two discourses. I attended
a lecture by the biologist Dr. Martin Poenie on the historical development
of science’s cultural authority. He pointed out that beliefs we had once
founded on religious bases were now founded, or overturned, on the basis
of public arguments made by scientists. I don’t remember exactly how
viii • Preface
Dr. Poenie phrased this thesis, but Joseph Ben-David has articulated a
closely related version:
[S]cience has a decisive infl uence on all the cognitive structures
whereby man orients himself in the universe, in nature, and in society.
Its impact began with the overthrow of biblical and classical astron-
omy, which used to place the earth in the center of the universe, and it
continued with the overthrow of the views on the creation of the earth
and man. And science’s impact is perhaps strongest today as a result
of its increasing mastery over illness and the consequent elimination
thereby of one of the sources of permanent anxiety and hope around
which so many religious practices centered. 1
I refl ected on the ways in which I myself paid obeisance to scientists: they
told me sunburns caused skin cancer, and I dutifully started applying sun-
block; they told me a low-fat diet encouraged weight loss, and I ate low-fat
baked goods; they told me that a low-carb diet encouraged weight loss, and I
gleefully starting eating olive oil again but cut out pasta. I did this refl exively,
even religiously—and I, of all people, should have known better. I grew up
completely surrounded by research scientists and knew for a fact that they
were just regular people with foibles and biases, not superhuman geniuses.
But still . . .
I refl ected then on the scientifi c voices that were the loudest in the media:
at the time, they were Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, and Stephen Jay Gould’s.
I noticed then how frequently these science celebrities mentioned “God” even
though they were avowed atheists or agnostics. I noticed how similar their
speech patterns were to the biblical prophecy I had read in Daniel and heard
in church as a child. Something was going on here: something about the
immense cultural authority of scientists was linked to the way they imitated
prophets when they spoke to the public. That gestalt was the genesis of this
project.
I think I need to say that I am not arguing, nor do I believe, that all scien-
tists profess a sort of religious faith in science. First of all, in this book I am
not examining scientists in their daily interactions with each other. Rather, I
am considering how they address the public when we call on them to do so
through media outlets or our elected representatives. So, I am treating a special
role called the “science adviser” rather than the “scientist” proper. Even with
this distinction made, I need to stress that I do not think all science advisers
are evangelical, out to convert everyone to rational materialism. Versions of
that argument have been made recently by David Tietge, Brian Appleyard, and
Preface • ix
in a more restricted sense, by Thomas Lessl in his study of the “priestly” e thos
of evolutionists like Richard Dawkins. While I respect this work, I have drawn
a diff erent conclusion from the data. As I have delved into the prophetic ethos,
what has impressed me is how adaptable it is. In a nutshell, the prophetic
ethos manufactures political certainty in times of crisis . This role can be played
by anyone who has privileged access to knowledge and can use that lever-
age to start a dialogue about public values. Scientists frequently step up into
the “bully pulpit” of this ancient ethos, but so do social and environmental
reformers, politicians, preachers, and sometimes even professors. I am inter-
ested in the prophetic ethos of science advisers because I was brought up right
at the crossroads of these two discourses, with one in each ear and marveling
at how similar they sounded at times.
If those were the roots of this project, I can mark its sprouting 13 years ago
with a paper I wrote in Davida Charney’s Rhetoric of Science seminar on the
prophetic discourse of Sagan, Gould, and Hawking. That eff ort branched into
a study of the Delphic oracle for Rosa Eberly’s A ncient Rhetorics seminar and
kept growing from there. I am indebted to these women for their indulgence
of my scholarly obsession, and I hope they see in this book after all this time
both the fruit of their guiding wisdom and my abiding gratitude for it and for
them.
Those thank-yous begin a necessarily long list of them because no project
of this magnitude grows to fruition without a great deal of tending on all sides:
fi rst, to my family for many discussions over these long years; especially to my
husband Patrick, whose sanity, if not his very safety, was tested by teetering
stacks of books all over the house. I don’t know how he managed to listen to
my thousandth anecdote about Oppenheimer without falling asleep in front
of me, but I’m so grateful to him for that I can’t say. Next, thank you to my col-
leagues and friends who have sustained me intellectually during the research
and writing of this book, particularly Jane Detweiler, Cheryll Glotfelty, Eric
Rasmussen, David Fenimore, Erin James, James Mardock, Anupama Mohan,
Justin Giff ord, Chris Coake, Stephanie Lauer, Amy Fitch, Fiona Murphy, and
Steve Gehrke. A shout-out to Ben James, too, for technical assistance. I am
indebted to Dan Seward, Cathy Chaput, Aim é e Kendall Roundtree, Harold
Delaney, and Thomas Lessl for reading chapter drafts. By a freak of research
nature, I read Lessl’s work a fter I had completed the greater part of my analy-
sis. While I regret this accident because of how much time I wasted reinvent-
ing substantial parts of Lessl’s wheel, yet I fi nd my independent replication of
many of his results to be heartening. Our accounts have key diff erences, as I
mentioned above, but in the end I count the similarities between them to be
more telling.
