Google boss Eric Schmidt is right to call for the UK to reintegrate science and art, but it's harder than he realises
Last weekend, Google chief Eric Schmidt told an audience in Edinburgh that Britain was in danger of becoming a technological backwater. He complained of a "drift to the humanities" and urged the UK to return to "the glory days of the Victorian era … [A] time when the same people wrote poetry and built bridges". He proposed that the UK do more to teach computer programming in schools and match the ambition of President Obama, who has pledged to train an extra 10,000 engineers per year. The message: Britain needs to invest in science, like the Victorians did, if it is to survive.
Schmidt asks too much of modern Britain. The mass enthusiasm felt for science in the Victorian era was unique to a particular place and time. The nature of our current society, and the nature of the scientific profession itself, makes it practically impossible to replicate.
Government investment had next to nothing to do with the excitement science generated in the 19th century. George Stephenson, the son of a colliery fireman and the man who built the first railroad to use a steam engine, was an unschooled illiterate until the age of 18. Thomas Telford, whose roads still crisscross Britain today, was the son of a shepherd and a self-taught stonemason. Of course, public universities expanded in the 1800s and donors poured money into schools that trained minds to produce new technologies. But the motivation wasn't a grand, national project to educate and enlighten, as Schmidt envisions for contemporary Britain. Much of the motivation was pecuniary, but science was also imbued with Romanticism. For the Victorians, science wasn't just allied with art. It was an art.
Today, we see science as an amoral tool. Victorians saw it as a thing of visceral joy and dark danger. For example, Darwin's theory of evolution had a profound impact on the visual arts, reflected in anthropological sketches and a popular obsession with paintings of insect and plant life. The art critic John Ruskin wrote essays on "The Relation to Art of the Sciences of Organic Form" and social reformer Charles Kingsley composed anatomical studies of birds. The lack of formal scientific qualifications among both men is significant. Their aesthetic appreciation for the beauty of nature qualified them to write about it, not a government-funded PhD from Imperial College.
Both presumed that science was a practical branch of ethics. "Truth", said the geologist Adam Sedgwick in 1845, "is most delightful when it reaches us in the form of some great abstraction which links together the material and moral parts of nature." They thought that if they stripped away the skin or voyaged to the moon, they might find God. The frontiers of the mind and body were crossed with such speed and imagination in this era (think of the ambitious designs of Dr Frankenstein or Dr Jekyll) that science quickly graduated to religion. The Victorians presumed that once they had conquered the physical they could encounter the supernatural – hence the popularity of books on demons and speaking to the dead. Arthur Conan Doyle, remember, was a trained physician who believed in fairies.
This passion play is missing in contemporary society, and the scientific establishment of Britain would probably resent it should it return. It existed partly because the Victorian world had so much more mystery in it than ours. The oceans, the colonies and space had yet to be explored. Once they were, a little of the wonder of science died. Now that God is gone and science has been separated from art, technology is functional and dull. Whereas the Victorians strove outwards into the realms of nature and the supernatural, modern research has turned inwards to the atom and the molecule. Schmidt might not believe it, but computer programming is not nearly as interesting as fairy hunting.
The solution to Schmidt's problem is to try to find a new Romantic edge to popular science. The exploration of other worlds might provide that. But more importantly, science must not degrade or ignore the religious impulse. Scientists should engage more with the meaning of life, not just its physical processes. If they do, their audience will return.
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/01/eric-schmidt-google-art-science
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