The Discoverers

...Boorstin seems not to be aware, however, that for most of his working life Needham was, and perhaps still is, a committed Marxist-Leninist...

...It was probably just as well...

...There are, nevertheless, many other cases where we can find no reason to believe that there was anyone other than the actual first discoverer working on the lines which he thus showed to be fruitful...

...And, in the end, their misgivings proved better founded than were Columbus' hopes...

...That moral--and it cannot be reiterated too often--is that anyone wanting to achieve or maintain high rates of discovery must become a friend both of economic pluralism and of the open society...

...Yet many people do fail to realize how much we need, in order to be sure that we have correctly identified the crucial factors i n - - s a y - - t h e growth of modern science in Western Europe, to be able to examine other cases where some but not all of these supposedly crucial factors were present, yet without producing anything like the particular effect for which we have to account...

...It is that, whereas both the Marxist and the para-Marxist have to pretend that every major discovery was bound to be made in (roughly) the place and at (roughly) the time where and when it actually was made, Boorstin, seeing every s u c h discovery as " a n episode of biography," is free to recognize that there is no such universal guaranteeing necessity...

...1944...

...In The Discoverers, Part III of Book I, "Time," deals with "The Missionary Clock...

...In Part XIV, "Opening the Past," Boorstin brings out that critical history too began in Europe, in Classical Greece...

...The whole apocalyptic philosophy of history presented in the Communist Manifesto is in the same way paradoxically providential...

...By that standard, he has no monument at all...

...It was not enough to have had "the longest continuous past and the most copious written record...

...This applies most obviously to those which have in fact 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1984 given rise to priority disputes...

...Certainly there have been particular discoveries, even major discoveries, about which such a claim can be plausibly made...

...When in 1484 Columbus put his plans for "The Enterprise of the Indies" before the most likely supporter, King John II of Portugal, he referred them to an expert committee...

...So what is the present particular relevance of all this...

...But these are petty faults in a splendid book, a book whose only substantial fault is its failure to make the moral explicit...

...F i n a l l y - - t h a t readers may have confidence in their reviewer--two rather petty corrections...

...Here, following Needham's "non-pareil Science and Civilization in Ancient China," Boorstin explains "why the mother of machines proved so infertile there...

...Boorstin forgets that it was the French, not the British, who, under the subsequent Treaty of Paris, ceded Quebec in order to retain Guadaloupe...

...An affirmative response to the second question--such as was so confidently returned by G.V...

...Plekhanov', the doyen of pre-Leninist Russian Marxism--is perhaps less clearly required...

...That is both true, and kind...

...His peak of celebrity had passed, and he would have become a pest--the Eleanor Roosevelt of the GOP, if not the Henry Wallace...

...Although the responsible bureau was not actually called Minitrue, it was directed to produce " V e r i t a b l e Records," with, of course, and at the same time, "appropriate concealment...

...about the human body before Paracelsus and Vesalius and H a r v e y . . . " The second is an eagerness to ask, and to try to answer, questions about why certain developments were so long delayed, or did not occur at all: "Why didn't the Antony Flew is emeritus professo~.t~ r philosophy at the University a~f Reading and professor of philosophy at New University, Toronto...

...He was a proper gent-very easy to mix with...

...A better tribute came from a regular at the Old Chesterfield Arms, a London pub where he had stood a round during the blitz...

...Under the T'ang dynasty, in the seventh century, "A History O f f i c e was establ i s h e d . . , and thereafter controlled all the accessible past...

...Remember that his darling project was to discover: not the American continent--no one had ever thought there might be an undiscovered continent there--but instead a Western sea route first to Japan ("his Isle Cypango") and then from there on to China...

...Maybe it is obvious to everyone that we cannot have an adequate understanding o f any achievement without appreciating the obstacles overcome...

...For, in seeing things this way, Boorstin is implicitly adopting what must surely be correct positions on manifestly factual albeit much disputed issues about the role of the individual in history...

...Does the occasion, or the movement, always find or produce the leaders who are needed...

...about the past before Petrarch and Winckelmann, Thomsen and Schliemann...

...For millenia Chinese history was written by bureaucrats and for bureaucrats...

...The Discoverers is indeed " a mystery story played by a vast cast #n an ever-changing stage...

...For in the thirteenth century Marco Polo had found China, in almost every direction, technically more advanced than his native Venice...

...I f men ask where is his monument," said his eulogist, "let them but look at a w o r l d . . , one in a passionate dedication to freedom like that which consumed him...

...These apt and suggestive headings are perfectly representative of the swinging yet scholarly style of the whole work...

...He has to ask, as Boorstin does, why it did not all happen, and sooner, in China...

...They are resolved, as we must be, that there is no more place for imperialism within their own society than in the society of nations...

...It really does tell " a tale of discoveries and beginnings," in which Boorstin "sees every discovery as an episode of biography...

...Certainly, whenever that response is given, we have yet one more paradoxical example of atheist providentialism...

...And so on...

...Ssu-ma Ch'ien (145-87...

...This, although the point is never in The Discoverers made explicit, is no mere matter of one personally preferred perspective among several others all equally valid...

...Boorstin himself never offers any rationale for either his biographical emphases or his concern to ask why developments occurred where they did, not in other places...

...dared to defend an unsuccessful general against a false charge of cowardice...

...He died in 1944...

...What was in dispute was whether the range of any ships yet built was sufficient to make the proposed voyage...

...Why were people so slow to learn that the earth goes round the sun...

...Augustine, solidly guaranteed as the inexorable will of a Being who cannot be frustrated...

...Reluctantly, on the advice of these sober and in fact most excellently qualified experts, the King turned Columbus down: " . . . the committee seems to have been troubled by Columbus' gross underestimate of the sailing distance westward to Asia...

...The promise of the dust jacket--for once perhaps written by a thorough reader--is fully fulfilled...

...For the most elegant of refutations of that two-part answer, see Sidney Hook's The Hero in History...

...Nor was Columbus peculiar in believing that the earth is spherical: Aristotle himself had argued for this conclusion, which was generally accepted by the educated European contemporaries of Columbus...

...It's not on the mark either, but at least it recognizes that those who have power aren't likely to give it up, and that the power of good intentions is finite...

...Boorstin depends for his answers, as we all must, mainly on " t h e phenomenal Joseph Needh a m . . , who has achieved one of the great intellectual ambassadorial enterprises of modern times...

...The theoretical scheme which he proposed, "for all its aesthetic appeal," fitted the then "observed facts no better" than did the established, Ptolemaic alternative...

...The first is a concern always with "the obstacles that had to be overcome: the illusions held about the continents and the seas before Columbus and Balboa and Magellan...

...nor could it have developed in statist China...

...Are all historical developments determined by collective social forces, or do some particular individuals make significant and substantial differences...

...For the promised and allegedly inevitable ir o f the secular Kingdom of God on earth is not there, as it is in St...

...Like his isolationist opponents, he believed in America as the last, best hope of mankind...

...Boorstin gives due attention both to the growth of the scientific community and to the growth within that community of competition to achieve and to demonstrate priorities...

...First, while 'Ptolemy' was the name of "the indisputable father of modern g e o g r a p h y . . , and incidentally that of one of Alexander the Great's closest companions," it is wrong to add that "Another P t o l e m y . . . founded the Ptolemaic dynasty, which ruled Egypt for three c e n t u r i e s . . . " King Ptolemy I was the same person as the Son of Larus, one of the Companions...

...Both men were in fact working on lines opposite to what was suggested by the best evidence available to them: "The more we become at home in the Age of Copernicus, the more we can see that those who would remain unpersuaded by Copernicus were simply being sensible...

...and Voltaire who congratulated his compatriots on getting the best of the bargain...

...So this also had to be "tightly controlled...

...Control of the calendar, and hence of the calendar science of astronomy, was a vital matter of state: "This meant, of course, that Chinese astronomy became increasingly bureaucratic and esoteric...

...One of the first, most remarkable o f Chinese achievements," however, "was a wellorganized, centralized governm e n t . . , with a vast hierarchy of bureaucrats...

...The scrupulous historian of modern science has, therefore, no choice but to make the most of the only partly parallel case we have...

...This increases the significance of various judgments which are, as it were, forced out through clenched teeth...

...Willkie, then as twenty years before, had "religious convictions" instead...

...The same commentator picks out two further general features of Boorstin's treatment, in addition to that emphasis upon the individual as opposed to the collective...

...But "the technology of the clock was the technology of astrological indicators...

...Willkie deduced that we must raise them to our level...

...Second, Boorstin, reproaches my ancestors for failing to accept, after Wolfe's 1760 conquests, Franklin's advice "that Canada would be incomparably more valuable in the long run" than "the tiny sugar-rich islands of Guadaloupe...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1984...

...The fate of the man who might have become the Chinese Herodotus was decisively discouraging...

...Thus, in The Grand Titration, Needham a d m i t s that capitalist pluralism was essential to this historic Great Leap Forward...

...Maybe any book, written in the hopes and fears of wartime, was bound to be stupid...

...In Europe clocks were from the beginning genuinely public, and soon private and unofficial people began to possess their own...

...an obtusely stubborn insistence, in defiance of every evidence to the contrary, that the Universe must in fact be as it might indeed have been were it the creation of a Marxist Deity...

...Nor could he predict the position of the planets with anything like the demonstrated accuracy of the-older system...

...He was therefore condemned for "defaming the Emperor," who in the end graciously commuted the mandatory death sentence to castration...

...Yet I once found, in a secondhand shop, a yellowing copy of Carl Becker's How New Will the Better WorldBe...

...Here the first chapter is "Open Sesame to China," the second "Mother of Machines," and the third "Why It Happened in the West...

...Chinese discover America...

...indeed, that they wished it...

...For Becker, these were probably truisms...

...The case of Columbus is even clearer: He was fortunate in that there were in Western Europe several possible backers to whom he could, and did, make successive applications, until at last he found someone whom he could persuade to finance his expedition...

...Any Marxist, or indeed any adherent of any similarly ambitious philosophy of history, has to answer the first, two-part question with-respectively--a yes and a no...

...D r . Boorstin, Librarian of Congress, has produced another immense book, continuously instructive yet consistently fascinating...

...Take, for example, the cases of Copernicus and of Columbus, cases to both of which--quite rightly--Boorstin gives special attention...

...His exertions four years earlier may have undermined his health...

...They deduced from this that we dare not mix with Europeans and other wogs...

...The third general feature o f Boorstin's always exciting treatment is that he "sees every discovery as an episode of biography...