Weapons and Hope

What is the purpose of maintaining a website like this?  To most, it may seem trivial.  At best, it may seem like a collection of thoughts that are (hopefully) interesting but may nonetheless have no impact on mainstream discourses and actual policies.  After all, a website like this is the work of an amateur.  But let us not forget the importance of amateurs.

In his chapter “In Praise of Amateurs” in The Scientist as Rebel, Freeman Dyson describes the importance of amateur contributions to scientific inquiry by elaborating on the “ancient clash between two visions of the nature of science.”  According to its historical pathway in modernity, science has been characterized by two conflicting visions of practice.  The first is known as Baconian, named after Francis Bacon.  Baconian science seeks to examine every element and fact of nature as individual pieces of knowledge to be increasingly accumulated.  In contrast is the second type of science, Cartesian science, named after René Descartes.  Cartesian science seeks the grandeur of unified and finite laws of nature under which all natural phenomena can be explained.  According to the Dyson, both types of science are essential as they are complementary to each other within the overarching pursuit of scientific knowledge:

Francis Bacon

Baconian science is interested in details, Cartesian science is interested in ideas…We need Baconian scientists to explore the universe and find out what is there to be explained.  We need Cartesian scientists to explain and unify what we have found.

Dyson traces the evolution of individual fields of sciences as a three-phase transformation between Baconian and Cartesian science.  Roughly speaking, in the first phase of scientific inquiry within an individual field, Baconian science is dominant as the most important responsibility is that of simple discovery: figuring out what is there to explore.  In this phase, individual amateur scientists play the most important role.  In the second phase, Cartesian science takes over.  Professionals are called in to establish organizations and institutions to codify and unify the discoveries into comprehensive theories.  Finally, the third phase features a mixture of Cartesian and Baconian science, where “amateurs” are re-empowered to probe the frontiers of individual discovery while “professionals” continue to build upon and their unified theories.  The breaking into the third phase has much to do with technological advances enabled by the second phase:

René Descartes

In the third phase, cheap and powerful tools [arising from the second phase] give scientists of all kinds freedom to explore and explain.  The most important of the new tools is the personal computer, now universally accessible and giving amateurs the ability to do quantitative science.

Dyson describes astronomy as the paramount (and first) example of a field of science that has passed through the first two phases and broken into the third.  This is evidenced by the importance of amateurs in contemporary astronomy, who have alternative daytime jobs and moonlight as individual and personally motivated astronomers.  It is this collection of astronomers that creates a system of constant surveillance over the entire sky and leads to timely discoveries of transient astronomical phenomena, such as passing comets and cosmic collisions.

But it is not only astronomy in which this three-phase evolution can be seen.  Dyson explains that chemistry and physics are stuck for now in the second phase, but he predicts at the time of writing his essay that contemporary biology will be the next field of science to break into the third phase.  His prediction seems to be coming to fruition: as technology becomes cheaper and knowledge disseminates, the practice of genetic engineering has made its way into the private homes of amateurs.  The Wall Street Journal and Scientific American both released interesting articles (here and here) this year discussing these newly arrived amateur “biohackers.”

The Wall Street Journal describes the ease in which these amateurs can now enter the field in their own unique way, giving as an example the following:

She’s got a DNA “thermocycler” bought on eBay for $59, and an incubator made by combining a styrofoam box with a heating device meant for an iguana cage. A few months ago, she talked about her hobby on DIY Bio, a Web site frequented by biohackers, and her work was noted in New Scientist magazine.

Though the discussion of whether or not these at-home genetic engineers presents a threat to national and international security is certainly relevant, there is no doubt that these individual Baconian discoverers have much to contribute to the field.  The multitude of well-funded university and corporate research programs exploring the depths of molecular and genetic biology may dominate the field’s trajectory, but amateur biologists present to possibility of exploring specific phenomena that the official programs miss or are not funded to look at.  Scientific American cites Mackenzie Cowell, who started the DIY Bio blog in which “biohackers” share their information.  Cowell notes:

Perhaps this new breed of enthusiasts will create new interest and ideas for a field that has traditionally been the province of folks working in large, well-funded labs.

But is it just within the hard sciences that this Baconian-Cartesian complementary duality can be seen?  This duality also seems present in the areas of politics, national defense, and international security discourses.  It is useful to understand the Baconian-Cartesian duality as somewhat of a dichotomy, but as with all dichotomies, continuums or spectrums of understanding more accurately reflect reality.  In the field of politics, national defense, and international security, a multifarious collection of actors span the entire Baconian-Cartesian spectrum—from individual bloggers to think tanks to government agencies to the final-word policy makers.  And just as in the world of hard science, each of these approaches to topics in politics, defense, and security are complements to each other in intricate ways.  The Baconian “amateurs” explore into new ideas and areas of understanding and look for trends.  The Cartesian “professionals” are tasked with unifying the facts, trends, ideas, claims, and evidence into policy.

The Internet is the prime tool of amateurs in this third phase.  Just as the discovery of a comet or a new genetic sequence by an individual amateur scientist represents a contribution to an entire field of science, a single article or published viewpoint, when injected into the discursive arena presents the possibility, however large or small, of generating (or contributing to) an impact on the collective network of thought.

Such an impact is not only an extension of the Baconian-Cartesian duality, but also a feature of an open, deliberative democratic society.  Individuals are empowered to present their own viewpoints, understandings, and claims.  Within the micro-dynamics of discursive power, individual voices build upon and cut into each other in idiosyncratic ways to form final conceptual structures.  Even when some voices are stronger than others, it is the synthesis of all the voices that forms the final word.  The professionals may decide what that final word is, but the amateurs play an important role giving it shape.