By Morris Dean
My wife often tells me about the books she is reading. Which means that she's telling me about a new book roughly every week. But she most recently spoke more often and more excitedly than usual about Alice Dreger's book, Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science, and she devoured it in fewer days than usual, giving me too plenty of time to read it before the library wants it back.
Alice Dreger is a professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics at Northwestern University (where I started but didn't finish a doctoral degree program in philosophy in 1966). Her book, which was published earlier this year, is a first-person account of the controversies she has become involved in as she tries “to understand what happens — and to figure out what should happen — when activists and scholars find themselves in conflict over critical matters of human identity.”
But I'm not here to review the book (I'm only about half way through), although I think I can safely recommend it to readers interested in good writing, science, philosophy, history, medicine, sex, and sociopolitical activism. You can read a short review of the book on Salon.
I'm here to share an excerpt from Dreger's introduction; it is so much in keeping with a theme of Thor's Day: the tension between authority and independent thinking. Writes Dreger, beginning on p. 2:
Besides being intellectuals and knowledge seekers, my parents were also industrial-strength Roman Catholics. They sought out Latin masses and avoided meat on Fridays long after Vatican II declared all that fuss unnecessary. They sent us to public school not only because the local public schools [on Long Island in the 1970s] offered the best education around, but also because the local Catholic school struck them as dangerously liberal in its religious orientation. Their religious devotion manifested itself largely in pro-life activism....In May 1993, Dreger's mother asked her to accompany her on a tour of Italy's Roman Catholic religious sites. As planned, when that tour ended, her mother returned home while she set off to visit a history of science museum in Florence. She writes that she "was excited at the prospect of seeing a set of artifacts that are to a historian of science what Jesus's cross would be to a Christian: Galileo's telescopes." Continuing on p. 12:
Although they were highly obedient to authority in their religious lives, in their political lives my parents were rabble-rousers....
My mother especially embraced her American rights to speak, to assemble, to vote, and to protest, because she knew her life might well have turned out differently. Born in 1935 in Poland, she had somehow survived the Second World War...She let us know, as we were growing up, that she considered American democracy a true wonder, a tool to be used at every chance. The Bill of Rights seemed to her almost as sacred as the Bible....
...They had no trouble sending me to confession one day and renewing my subscription to Natural History magazine the next. But as I grew up, I felt the tension one surely must feel when being simultaneously taught the importance of a specific dogma and the importance of freedom from dogma.
I knew that some people abandoned their parents' religion as a way of asserting their independence. But for me, losing my religion wasn't about rebellion against my parents; indeed, I felt quite forlorn at the idea of disappointing my family by admitting my atheism. Still, my parents' religious faith seemed to me incommensurate with our deeply felt faith in America – a faith in freedom of inquiry, in freedom of thought, in the will and right of the people to collectively discover truth and to make their own rules accordingly.... [pp. 2-3]
When Galileo Galilei was born, in 1564 [the same year as Shakespeare], the world had just started changing in the direction that would ultimately lead to modern science, modern technology, and democracy. The old way – accepting authorities without much question – had just started to develop serious cracks....About that middle finger. As you can read in Wikipedia's entry on Galileo's death and burials, almost a century after he died his body was moved from its original grave to a grave in the main body of the Basilica of Santa Croce – that is, from a heretic's grave to the grave of a hero.
Treating discernible facts as the ultimate authority, Galileo took to doing real experiments, dropping heavy balls down inclined planes to study relative rates of fall, using careful quantification to find predictable, natural patterns in the world....
In the hands of Galileo, the telescope became a tool to investigate not only the stars, but also the human condition. He described a messy universe in which we humans are on just another whizzing planet – not a special, still place made for us by an attentive biblical God – and thus strayed dangerously close to the sorts of heretical ideas that had gotten his contemporary Giordano Bruno convicted of heresy. Bruno ended up burned at the stake for putting forth bold new visions of the universe. But Galileo – in spite of repeatedly attracting the attentions of the Inquisition, in spite of being legitimately scared of being subjected to imprisonment and torture and more – could not seem to stop himself from pursuing Copernicanism, from pursuing what he saw must be true about our vast universe, and especially about the rather negligible place of us humans in it. Moreover, he couldn't stop himself from promoting scientific truth in risky ways, even by making the pope look foolish.
From Wikipedia's entry on Galileo
This period is often considered the beginning of the Scientific Revolution, but you can see why that term doesn't really capture what Vesalius, Copernicus, Bruno, and especially Galileo were doing. What they were doing was much more radical: This was a revolution in human identity. This was not only a shift in ideas about what we can know about the universe, but fundamentally a shift in what we can know about ourselves. This was a journey toward what finally became the Enlightenment....
...Galileo held dear the central idea of the Enlightenment: that we get to know for ourselves who we are, by seeking evidence, using reason, and coming to thoughtful consensus on truth. Science and democracy grew up together in Europe and North America, as twins; it is no coincidence that so many of America's Founding Fathers were science geeks. The "American" freedoms to think, to know, to learn, to speak – these were the freedoms that the radical Galileo had seized, long before they were finally written into our laws. As much as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and George Washington, Galileo Galilei ultimately made our democracy possible. [pp. 12-16]
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| Tomb of Galileo |
A fellow named Tommaso Perelli had provided a Latin inscription: "This is the finger, belonging to the illustrious hand that ran through the skies, pointing at the immense spaces, and singling out new stars, offering to the senses a marvelous apparatus of crafted glass...." [p. 17]Dreger admits that sticking your middle finger up doesn't mean in Italy what it means in the United States, but, after what the Church had put Galileo through, she found the finger's placement amusing.
I mean, of all the remnants, how perfect is it that with his remaining relic, the old man is eternally flipping the universe the bird.I was taken aback that the sentence says the old man was flipping "the universe," and not "the Church"; I think this must surely have been a typesetting error. From what I understand of the book so far, the cover's image would suggest giving the middle finger to anyone who ignores the facts in favor of dogma.
| Copyright © 2015 by Morris Dean |
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