The Harder Path--Shifting Gears

Abstract

Introduction This essay deals with old science practices and the development of innovative practices that are a mixture of theory, research, and practicality. Americans have an extraordinary record in starting up projects, but they have trouble shifting gears. Some say we have created a world where everything changes, but nothing moves. Professional mind-sets, crises, incremental change, and leapfrogging are part of the story. So too is culture-science culture, political culture and the production of knowledge. In a book about the biological constraints on the human spirit, anthropologist Mel Konner (1982: xii) opened with the following observation: problem is not that we know more about less and less. The problem is that we know more and more about more and more, and although we will never know everything about everything the time will come when we know so much about so many things that no one person can hope to grasp all the essential facts...needed to make a single wise decision. Knowledge becomes collective in the weakest sense and science becomes like men and women in a crowd, looking for one another, each holding a single piece of a very expensive radio. A. L. Kroeber said much the same about just plain people in 1948 (p. 291): the total culture is thereby varied and enriched, it also becomes more difficult for each member of the society really to participate in most of its activities. He begins to be an onlooker at most of it, then a by-stander, and may end up with indifference to the welfare of his society and the values of his culture. He falls back upon the immediate problems of his livelihood and the narrowing range of enjoyments still open to him, because he senses that his society and his culture have become indifferent to him. Such Kroeberian observations stem from an anthropological frame of reference that reaches deep into the human past in order to comprehend the moment in which we live. A long time perspective includes recognition of cumulative knowledge, knowledges gathered in real life conditions (Nader 1996). As others have noted, the inventors of myth also invented fire, and the means of keeping it. They domesticated animals, bred new types of plants, kept varieties separate to an extent that exceeds what is possible in today's scientific agriculture. They invented rotation of fields and developed an art now sought after on the western market. They crossed oceans in vessels more seaworthy than modern vessels of comparable size, and demonstrated a sophisticated knowledge of navigation. Native Americans maintained a continuity of occupation in California and Nevada for over 8000 years, and as my colleague Robert Heizer reminded me, no complex civilization can make such a boast, not yet anyways. Anthropologists have learned that civilizations are fragile. We have achieved an individual life expectancy, but social life expectancy-that is a more elusive accomplishment. Anthropologists understand that civilizations rise and collapse which indicates of course that sciences too wax and wane. The evolutionists know that in the history of human existence we are but a tiny speck in time. However, we also live in an era in which the technological capacity to obliterate the whole chain of human evolution by catastrophe or by cumulative action is a possibility. Yet, if we look around us, there seems to be little urgency. When a long time perspective is absent, humility is often in short supply. The capacity of the human species to change the entire globe in irreversible ways was limited until recently, and decisions impacting on group survival must have been shared for most of our existence. We evolved and survived as hunters and gatherers for some 1.5 million years; there's not much hierarchy among hunters and gatherers. Those who think about this long past wonder, will civilizational society be able to survive for 1.5 million years? Throughout most of human existence when people made disastrous environmental decisions the scale of destruction was relatively small, even if at times overwhelming for individual groups. …