News
The Royal Society dinner: a new enlightenment
30 July 2010
| Source: | HRN |
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We have the pleasure to reproduce a speech given by Distinguished Professor Dame Anne Salmond at the Royal Society of New Zealand Fellows dinner in May.
Her speech entitled "Royal Society Dinner: a new enlightenment" merits a historical collaboration between the sciences and humanities in New Zealand history and was given at a time when the humanities and Fellows of the New Zealand Academy for the Humanities-Aronui were formally integrated into the Royal Society.
In 1990 Professor Salmond was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand, in 2007, a Fellow of the New Zealand Academy for the Humanities-Aronui, and in 2009, a Fellow of the British Academy.
Transcript
Ko te wai e hora nei, Waitemata; ko te marae e takoto nei, Tane-nui-a-rangi; koutou nga rangatira kua pae nei, tena koutou, tena koutou, tena tatou katoa.
Tonight we’ve come together to celebrate the Royal Society, and the admission of Fellows from the humanities into its ranks. Perhaps it will surprise you to learn that rather than striding into a brave new future, we are going back to our beginnings. In my work on European voyaging in the Pacific, I have come to know and admire the natural philosophers who founded the Royal Society, with their unbounded, outward- facing forms of curiosity, at a time when the experimental sciences and the humanities were still intimately entangled. Indeed, they shaped the beginnings of our shared society in New Zealand. In 1768 when the Royal Society and the Admiralty sent Captain Cook on board the Endeavour to observe the Transit of Venus in the Pacific, his little ship was a travelling sideshow of the Enlightenment, with its scientists, artists, library and lavish array of scientific equipment.
At that time, curiosity ranged across the gamut. The party of scientists and artists on board the Endeavour was interested in everything, from the classics, to philosophy and the arts, to astronomy and magnetic variation, to the tides and currents, to the classification of species of plants and animals, and to the varieties of humankind; and they carried with them the most up-to-date and cutting-edge equipment. As a Fellow of the Royal Society reported at the time to Carl Linnaeus:
"No people ever went to sea better fitted out for the purpose of Natural History ... They have got a fine library of Natural History, they have all sorts of machines for catching and preserving insects; all kinds of nets, trawls, drags and hooks for coral fishing; they have even a curious contrivance of a telescope, by which, put into the water, you can see the bottom at great depth, where it is clear ... In short, Solander assured me this expedition would cost Mr. Banks ten thousand pounds."
Obviously in New Zealand, the link between good science and good funding is nothing new!
The Great Cabin of the Endeavour is my idea of a scientific community – except that no women were admitted. They had zest, and dedication, a passion for discovery, and no respect for disciplinary boundaries. Joseph Banks, the wealthy young botanist who led them, was in his twenties, and his insightful accounts of life in the Pacific helped to pioneer my own discipline of Anthropology – although I must confess that his approach, especially in Tahiti, reminds me of the definition that Ralph Piddington, the founding professor at Anthropology at Auckland, used to offer every year to Stage I students – ‘Anthropology is the study of Man, embracing Women.’
If New Zealand was founded by a scientific expedition, and one equipped with the very best contemporary technology, we can count ourselves lucky that at that time, the sciences and the humanities were not sharply divided. Before Captain Cook set sail from England, the Earl of Morton, then the President of the Royal Society and an astronomer, gave him a set of ‘Hints’ about how he should treat the peoples he might meet during his travels, and these are worth quoting:
“To check the petulance of the Sailors, and restrain the wanton use of Fire Arms.
To have it still in view that sheding the blood of those people is a crime of the highest nature:-
They are the natural, and in the strictest sense of the word, the legal possessors of the several Regions they inhabit.
No European Nation has a right to occupy any part of their country, or settle among them without their voluntary consent.
They may naturally and justly attempt to repell intruders, whom they may apprehend are come to disturb them in the quiet possession of their country, whether that apprehension be well or ill founded.
Therefore should they in a hostile manner oppose a landing, and kill some men in the attempt, even this would hardly justify firing among them, ‘till every other gentle method had been tried.”
In these ‘Hints,’ the Earl of Morton made it clear that in the process of exploration and discovery, humanistic values should be upheld, even in the most challenging of circumstances. When Cook and Banks arrived off the coast of New Zealand, they were accompanied by Tupaia, a brilliant high-priest navigator from the Society Islands, who acted as their pilot, interpreter and negotiator during their six-month circumnavigation of these islands. The collaboration between Tupaia, Cook and Banks foreshadowed a cross-cultural approach to epistemology that is truly open to the knowledges of other societies, one that is still vestigial in the Euro-American scientific tradition. In the Earl of Morton’s avowal of the legal rights of indigenous peoples, and in the exchanges between different knowledge systems on board the Endeavour, they were centuries ahead of his time.
There is something fitting about thinking about scientific endeavour, and the humanities, and Captain Cook’s voyages together. As the writer Andre Gide said about creative work, ‘One can’t discover new lands without losing sight of the shore for a long time.’ We need that kind of courage, because given the challenges we face at present, it is likely that that bold epistemological experiments – a new Enlightenment, perhaps – are required. At the Pacific Sciences Congress in Tahiti last year, for example, the sessions dealt with topics such as loss of biodiversity across the Pacific; the acidification of the ocean; the death of coral reefs, and how best to restore them; climate change and its likely implications for the Pacific; and the loss of linguistic and cultural diversity in the region. As I hopped between the sessions, two things became very striking.
On the one hand, many of the natural scientists who were presenting papers at the conference were grappling with phenomena in which human activity was intimately implicated. In their work, they were able to decipher physical dynamics and patterns, but persistently, the causal factors and the possible solutions involved people, breaching the philosophical gap between the natural sciences, and the humanities and the social sciences. When it came to the people side of the equation, the scientists were often stumped. On the other hand, in the sessions involving ‘culture and politics’ in the Pacific, the humanists and social scientists were grappling with questions of cultural and economic survival in which the natural sciences were deeply implicated.
Every now and then, however, there was a paper – usually by a younger scientist or humanist – that moved across the epistemological divide. I remember a young marine biologist from Tonga, for example, whose work involved harnessing the power of inter-village competition to restore stretches of coral reef, getting the villagers themselves to develop the indicators of reef health, and success in reef recovery. Each village was trying to outdo the others, deploying their own intimate knowledge of reef ecology while collaborating with the scientists; and it was working. In striking contrast, there was a paper by a group of marine biologists and other scientists in California, who had released a manifesto about the state of the Pacific ocean – with agricultural and other forms of pollution, over-fishing, warming and acidification of the ocean, and coral reef death and many other signs of ecological distress. The solutions they were proposing were all focused upon metropolitan research, however, without any practical or philosophical engagement with peoples in the Pacific. It was grandiose and detached, and for that reason alone, it didn’t seem very likely that it would work.
If these sessions were anything to go by, over the past two hundred years, as scientific and humanist languages and practices have evolved, becoming increasingly specialised and arcane, they have moved apart from eachother in ways that may not be adaptive. After all, science is a human artefact, and locked together with the social sciences and the humanities at its heart. As others have observed, when that foundational fact is forgotten, the sciences, along with the technologies they engender, can become actively dangerous, not only to human interests but to other forms of life.
At the Pacific Sciences Congress, it seemed that I was watching two quite separate sets of conversations - one among the natural scientists; and another among the social scientists and humanists – that desperately needed to be brought together, somehow. Without some such reconciliation, it seemed impossible that effective ways of tackling the kinds of challenges that they were discussing could be devised.
Its for reasons such as this that I am thrilled that in the Royal Society of New Zealand, we going back to our beginnings, and bringing the sciences and the humanities back together. I look forward to the debates and collaborations that will follow – for its vital that this is not seen as just a diplomatic gesture, but one that can lead to new ways of thinking, over time. I congratulate the Council, and all concerned for their intellectual generosity, and vision.
As a parting shot, let me just note how appropriate it is for us to be discussing these matters over dinner, because if one traces the history of the Royal Society, it began as a dining club – another of the very attractive features of the eighteenth century approach to science!
Na reira, e aku rangatira, ka nui aku mihi aroha ki a koutou katoa.
