The Things I Have Seen

After a long hiatus, I am ready to finish out my series on the “Great Books” of the Western Culture reading list at Stanford, that list whose alteration was treated by many right-wing and liberal pundits (and a few professors) as the very downfall of Western civilization itself.

The reason for this hiatus is somewhat embarrassing:  I didn’t want to re-read Galileo.  It’s not because I don’t think Galileo is important, and his prose is quite pleasant in translation, so it must be lovely indeed in the original.

It’s simply because I can’t understand Galileo’s verbal descriptions of physical phenomena.  I remembered that very clearly from my first read-through of The Starry Messenger, which was one of the many winter-quarter Western Culture readings anthologized for us in a photocopied reader we bought from Kinko’s for a few dollars.  I remember sitting at my desk in my dorm room, the light of my desk-lamp falling across those acrid photocopied pages, big tears rolling down my cheeks because we were going to be discussing Galileo and I couldn’t make heads or tails of the (very basic) physical science he was patiently explaining.

The lesson I took away from that experience was that I wasn’t smart enough to study Great Books or Great Thinkers.  And despite subsequent experiences and plenty of graduate credit hours to the contrary in the form of systematic theology, historical theology, Greek exegesis, advanced hermeneutics, etc, etc, etc, when I started my PhD program at UT Dallas I had no intention of studying intellectual history.  I told Dan Wickberg I didn’t have the chops for it.  He disagreed, and it turns out that he was right. I can do this.

There may be some people for whom that single epiphany would be enough to allay a lifetime of self-doubt and second-guessing.

I am not one of those people.

I am someone whose inner monologue, when I approach a challenging text, goes something like this: “This is way over your head….You’re not going to understand this….You don’t have the background to know what this guy is talking about….There’s no way you’re going to be able to follow this….You don’t know how to think this way….You’re not going to be able to make heads or tails of this terminology.”

In some ways, Galileo’s Starry Messenger was the Ur-text of that experience.  Oh, of course I had left off studying math as a sophomore in high school; I didn’t go past Algebra II.  (It probably didn’t help that our teacher was the JV football coach.)  But Galileo wasn’t “math”; Galileo was “Western Civilization.” And I didn’t understand his prose. The loftiest thinkers, the greatest thinkers, the Greatest Books, would always be beyond my intellectual reach, I concluded. (This didn’t prevent me from being an English major; there wasn’t a single work of English literature on the core Western Culture reading list.)

Part of this self-doubt came from an upbringing in a religious context that conditioned me to believe that there were some kinds of thinking that girls were inherently ill-equipped for.  Girls could not be engineers, for example, because they were naturally ill-suited for mathematics and spatial thinking.  Nor could girls interpret the scriptures with any authority, because only men could be teachers in the church.  So, really, what could I know?

I am describing for you now what a lot of your women students bring into the classroom today – not just the math classroom or the engineering classroom, when they are brave enough or determined enough or apt enough to keep on with their studies in those fields despite so many cultural expectations to the contrary within and outside those fields, but into the English classroom and the history classroom and the philosophy classroom.

You may have a brilliant woman student who is an insightful reader and a crackerjack of a writer, and she may very well be thinking, “I’m probably wrong, and this isn’t very good, and I bet I’m not cut out for this.”  And I’m here to tell you that she’s probably fighting a lifetime of being told that she is inherently unable to excel, and that if she did excel, she would be rebelling against God’s will for her as a supportive companion to men rather than a teacher of them.

How many of your women students grow up with this kind of messaging?  At least as many as grow up in fundamentalist evangelical churches, I suppose, including a fair number of Black and Latinx students who are also dealing with the racism of the broader culture. Down here in Texas, where I teach, that’s a lot of young women who are growing up with the message that they’re either not smart enough or a little too smart for their own good.

Women outnumber men at the university where I teach – in fact, women outnumber men in higher education more generally (which is problematic, because it means many young men are giving up on higher education).  But history is one of the disciplines where men outnumber women at every level of higher educational attainment.  Even a history program that attained complete parity in enrollments by gender – 50% male, 50% female – would be a program in which women are disproportionately under-enrolled.

There are two ways (at least) to look at this situation:  We can be pleased that history continues to appeal to men as a major, and tout history’s attractiveness as a field of study to male students, compared to many pre-professional degree programs which tend to attract a lot of women students who are looking to leverage their college education into upward class mobility.  Or we can be concerned that even though more and more women are seeking a college education, they are turning to other fields besides history.  I suppose we could do both of these things – though we really ought to make sure that the very things that attract young men to the study of history are not the very things that keep young women from pursuing this field of study.

Speaking of young women…

At the age of 49 years, eleven months, and a few days, I have now re-read Galileo’s Starry Messenger.  As expected, I couldn’t picture many of the things he was describing.  I did all right with his explanations of how he knew that the surface of the moon was not smooth and perfectly spherical but rather more rough and uneven than the surface of the earth. “The things I have seen by which I was able to draw this conclusion are as follows,” he wrote, and then he laid out his observations:  how the shadows of craters were pointed toward the sun, how peaks on the dark side beyond the fuzzy line dividing the illuminated half from the shaded half of the moon were visible as small spots of light; why the perimeter of the full moon appears perfectly spherical to the naked eye, even though its surface is carved with valleys and studded with mountains.  For all these things he was able to draw physical analogies to the world that I know – indeed, as a footnote pointed out, likening the moon to the earth was one of many things that eventually got Galileo in trouble.

But before that, when he starts talking about using discs of various sizes to measure the distance between objects viewed through a telescope, or the distance between objects and the earth, I feel myself suddenly a-sea, panicking and dogpaddling through even this plainest-speech explanation of what is, I guess, a basic geometry problem.  (Or is it a physics problem?)  And when he gets into degrees and minutes and seconds of distance between the four moons he observed orbiting Jupiter, he might as well be writing in Sanskrit.  The same goes for his discussion of the moon’s phases, and how it orbits the earth while both earth and moon orbit the sun. I know these things are true; I just don’t understand and can’t quite picture what that looks like or how it works.

How do I know these things are true?  On trust. I trust the centuries’ worth of knowledge about astronomy accumulated since the age of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo. I trust Newtonian physics (and Einsteinian physics, whatever the hell that is).  I trust the empirical observations and mathematical demonstrations of generations of scientific inquirers who have followed Galileo.

But how did Galileo know these things are true?  He observed them for himself.  And he insisted that this empirical evidence, garnered by a process that he would accurately describe to others who could then repeat his research for themselves, was a reliable guide to true knowledge about God’s creation.

That’s what’s important to understand about The Starry Messenger– its momentous empiricist challenge to knowledge as a matter of authority and received tradition.  “All these facts were discovered and observed by me not many days ago with the aid of a spyglass which I devised, after first being illuminated by divine grace.”  For his commitment to describing and explaining the true things that he had seen, Galileo was eventually imprisoned for the remainder of his life.

It is ironic, I suppose, that I must take on authority what Galileo could know by empirical observation and lucid explanation.  But the fact that I can and do take heliocentrism and the orbits of the (roughly) spherical planets and their satellites in space is a testament to the long success of the (long) empiricist turn in Western thought.  And to the extent that science and religion have parted ways, or seem to, it is not scientific knowledge but religious faith that must struggle for legitimacy against the forces of empiricist orthodoxy.

But there’s also empiricist heresy.  The same privileging of observable, visible phenomena that can be experimentally repeated which allowed for the rise of empiricist science may also have planted the seeds for its downfall.  The belief that the earth is flat is on the rise, joining a whole host of other conspiracy theories whose basic premise is that “science is lying” and whose chief proof of such “lies” is the fact that scientific opinion about the shape of the earth, or the age of the earth, or the rocket telemetry of lunar landings, or the orbit of planets around the sun do not match what is plainly visible to peoples’ eyes.  The world does not appear to match astronomers’ descriptions of it.  It looks flat – that is the empirical evidence all can plainly see – so flat it must be.

It will not do to simply claim the authority of science to refute this peculiar idea.  It will probably take a sort of missionary endeavor, a public-facing pedagogy that trains and equips young students of physics and astronomy and geology and mathematics with the basic tools of experimental demonstration and the apologetic acumen to patiently trace the pathway between empirical observation and mathematical modeling.

This may be a job for historians of science. It is certainly a job for physicists and mathematicians, especially those who are training teachers.

It is not a job for me; I know my lane.  Even though I don’t understand Galileo’s explanations, I know why he matters.  For I am a woman who knows her place:  the history of Western thought (yup, the whole thing), particularly the history of American thought and culture.

The discipline of intellectual history could use more women like me — or just more women, like or unlike me — but without all the obstacles so many of us had to overcome to get here.