IV
If the sciences are to be cultivated anew with respect for a definite hierarchy of human values, it seems to me that the sciences must be focused again upon particular local communities, and the problems which they offer for solution. Just as geometry in Egypt arose out of the need for annually surveying the boundaries that the Nile wiped out, and as astronomy developed in Chaldea in order to determine the shift of the seasons for the planting of crops, as geology in modern times developed out of the questions that a practical stone mason, like Hugh Miller, found himself confronted with—so may the sciences which are today incomplete and partial develop along the necessary lines by a survey of existing conditions and intellectual resources in a particular community.
On one hand, science must be in contact with the whole idolum of scientific thought—with that vast overworld of scientific effort which is the product of no single place or people or time. On the other hand, it must he related to the definite local community, limited in time and in space, in which its researches and its speculations will be realized and applied. Out of these surveys of existing conditions we should find, I believe, that in social psychology, in anthropology, in economics there are a vast number of facts and relations which remain to be described; and that, similarly, certain departments like craniology and jurisprudence and folklore have been vastly overcultivated in proportion to any genuine importance that their researches may have upon our control over the community’s development. Such an investigation would bring out, above all, the weakness of contemporary sociological thought, with its diabetic flatulence of special sociologies, and its lack of any general agreement as to the field which is to be cultivated.
Apart from its great function as a plaything, science is valuable only to the extent that its researches can be brought to bear upon the conditions in a particular community, in a definite region. The difference between science as a plaything and science as an instrument for enabling us to establish more effective relations with other men and with the rest of our environment, is the difference between firing a shot at a target and firing at a buck for provender. The practice one gets in firing at a target is great fun, and incidentally it improves one’s marksmanship; such idle sport is perhaps one of the stigmata of a civilized community. Nevertheless, unless one’s skill can be definitely brought home it remains a personal achievement; and the community as a whole is not a pound of meat the better for it. If science is to play the significant part that Bacon and Andreae and Plato and the other great humanists desired it to, it must be definitely brought home and realized in our here and now.
The need for this humanization of science has already been perceived in Great Britain. During the last decade a movement has gathered headway in the schools and extended itself to associations outside the schools. The title of this movement is “Regional Survey,” and its point of origin is, I believe, the Outlook Tower in Edinburgh which was well described more than two decades ago as the “world’s first sociological laboratory.”
The aim of the Regional Survey is to take a geographic region and explore it in every aspect. It differs from the social survey with which we are acquainted in America in that it is not chiefly a survey of evils; it is, rather, a survey of the existing conditions in all their aspects; and it emphasizes to a much greater extent than the social survey the natural characteristics of the environment, as they are discovered by the geologist, the zoologist, the ecologist—in addition to the development of natural and human conditions in the historic past, as presented by the anthropologist, the archeologist, and the historian. In short, the regional survey attempts a local synthesis of all the specialist “knowledges.”
Such a survey has been conducted in the Southeastern counties of England under the auspices of various local scientific societies; and the result of it is a complete description of the community’s foundations, its past, its manner of working and living, its institutions, its regional peculiarities, and its utilization of physical, vital, and social resources. Each of the sciences draws upon its general body of knowledge to illuminate the points under observation; and when problems arise which point definitely to the lack of scientific or scholarly data, new trails are opened and new territory defined.
In looking at the community through the Regional Survey, the investigator is dealing with a real thing and not with an arbitrary idolum. In so far as the local community has certain elements in common with similar regions in other countries, or has absorbed elements from other civilizations, these things will be given their full value, instead of being disregarded because they weaken the identity of the local community with that precious myth, the National State. The greater part of the data that is thus brought to light may be plotted on a map, graphically presented in a chart, or photographed. In Saffron Walden, England, there is an admirable little museum devoted to such an exhibition of its region; and in the Outlook Tower, at Edinburgh, there used to be a library and an apparatus of exhibition by which one could begin at the point where one was standing and work outwards, in thought, to embrace the whole wide world. Knowledge that is presented in this fashion is available so that whoever runs may read; it has every feature, therefore, of popular science as it is purveyed in the cheap newspaper and magazine, whilst it remains real science and is not presented as something that verges from a miracle to a superstition.
The knowledge embodied in the Regional Survey has a coherence and pithiness which no isolated study of science can possibly possess. It is presented in such a form that it can be assimilated by every member of the community who has the rudiments of an education, and it thus differs from the isolated discipline which necessarily remains the heritage of the specialist. Above all, this knowledge is not that of “subjects,” taken as so many water tight and unrelated compartments: it is a knowledge of a whole region, seen in all its aspects; so that the relations between the work aspect and the soil aspect, between the play aspect and the work aspect, become fairly simple and intelligible. This common tissue of definite, verifiable, localized knowledge is what all our partisan utopias and reconstruction programs have lacked; and lacking it, have been one-sided and ignorant and abstract—devising paper programs for the reconstruction of a paper world.
Regional survey, then, is the bridge by which the specialist whose face is turned towards the library and the laboratory, and the active worker in the field, whose face is turned towards the city and region in which he lives, may come into contact; and out of this contact our plans and our eutopias may be founded on such a permanent foundation of facts as the scientist can build for us, while the sciences themselves will be cultivated with some regard for the human values and standards, as embodied in the needs and the ideals of the local community. This is the first step out of the present impasse: we must return to the real world, and face it, and survey it in its complicated totality. Our castles-in-air must have their foundations in solid ground.