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In the 20th century, those who tried to move at will between one sector of knowledge and another were repudiated by their own communities (another term which came into vogue). Bertrand Russell, after he had finished his Principia Mathematica, began to write on topics other than logic, and was never after taken seriously by academic philosophers. They sneered at his History of Western Philosophy. ‘Well, I suppose he knew a bit about Leibniz,’ said one don to me, in the tone of a man discussing an autodidact bus-conductor. Others whose interests spanned the divides, like John Maynard Keynes, kept quiet about it. C.P. Snow, when he drew attention to the mutual incomprehension produced by the sharp division between science and the arts, was dismissed as a ‘crank’, a ‘would-be novelist’ and, worse, ‘an aspiring politician’. He was savagely attacked, notably by F.R. Leavis.
Now, however, the barriers are coming down for a variety of reasons, not least the changing nature of knowledge. For instance the enlargement of biology with the advent of genetics and biochemistry has led the mathematicians and, through them, the philosophers to take an increasing stake in the territory of the life sciences. I suppose this process began with J.B.S. Haldane in the 1920s — he came to biochemistry through maths and literae humaniores — but it has now reached the point where some of the most vociferous Darwinian fundamentalists are academic philosophers. The alliance makes some kind of sense since the orthodox Darwinians claim that biology stands right at the centre of human knowledge, and certainly behave as though they have (to use Aldous Huxley’s phrase) ‘the key to the absolute’. One or two of them have learnt to write and, like Russell, discourse on any subject they choose, but without censure by colleagues this time. Richard Dawkins, for example, is a superb journalist and his propagandist skills have brought him an enthusiastic following across the academic spectrum.
But once you start moving the goalposts, the old rules can no longer be enforced, and soon the playing field itself is obsolete and the participants range all over the countryside. The possibilities of astrophysics are so enormous and fantastic that a strong imagination is now becoming an essential part of the skill. Wordsworth and Coleridge would have been delighted by this development — Davy too, perhaps. Not long ago, in this space, I wrote a parody of new developments in the subject, and most readers took it seriously. It is beyond parody, I suspect, and requires a suspension of disbelief which makes religious credulity seem feeble by comparison.
A specific and related cause of change is the refinement in the time factor, and its introduction into areas where physical scientists, who are by temperament slaves to the present, thought they were safe from it. Time, or at any rate time past, is the sphere of the historian. I still get letters saying, ‘You are a historian — don’t meddle in science.’ But this attitude is wildly out of date. I have always felt that science should play a major role in history. I began my history of the 20th century, Modern Times, with Einstein’s general theory of relativity and its verification, and in my history of world society in the 15 years 1815–30, The Birth of the Modern, over 300 of its 1,000 pages are devoted to science and engineering. But now, increasingly I find, scientists have to adopt a historical viewpoint and develop a historian’s skills. To take a simple example: is there such a thing as man-induced global warming? This is becoming less a conundrum of physics, and more a historical problem. Some now argue that human intervention began influencing climate change as far back as 8,000 years ago, with large-scale deforestation. Equally, the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica is revealing interglaciation beginning about 420,000 years ago. And if global warming in the Middle Ages and the later Little Ice Age did take place, then the notorious hockey stick image is invalid. These are historical problems.
History, as a subject, is not just human history. It is earth history and universe history too. The same principles, cast of mind, skills, apply. Sir Flinders Petrie, the great archaeologist, used to say that the difference between historians and other people is that historians can move easily between one plane of time and another, while non-historians are mentally stuck on the present plane. But to understand science it is now necessary to acquire this freedom of movement in time. The newest telescope probes are now picking up signals close in time to the original Big Bang. This is history as much as physics. A student of the Bang has to be able to explain how it is that the furthest objects we can see are 46 billion light years away but only 14 billion years old. That is a historical problem of space-time.
Evolution is, still more, a matter of history. When biologists tell me, as a historian, to get off their turf, my reply is that I have at least as much right to be there as they do. No one disputes that the evolution of life forms took place. But how? Darwinian fundamentalists — by which I mean those who claim natural selection is the sole and exclusive form of evolution — have an obligation to produce a chronology showing how their theory fits into the chronology of life on earth. So far as I can see, it does not fit — natural selection is too slow to be the evolutionary matrix in all cases. It is on this point that Darwinian theory crumbles. And it is a historical point. Clio knows best.
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