Once truth has a history …

Steven Shapin published A Social History of Truth (SHOT) twenty-five years ago to acclaim and controversy. Not least among the splashes it made was a series of vitriolic exchanges that appeared in the pages of Isis that charged Shapin with breaching the etiquette proper to the historian's craft. Shocking as the fury of these imbroglios on the frontiers of discipline and identity were, they were not long-lived, fading in the face of SHOT’s widely favourable reception, and Shapin's well-deserved reputation as a scrupulous and erudite scholar. Recently, a more oblique critique of Shapin's enterprise has emerged, implicating him – and his scholarly fellow travellers – in an anything-goes relativism that has undermined the very foundations of the subject, Truth, that he purports to study. And not in a figural academic sort of way, but on the ground and in practice. Indeed, according to this view, once truth has a history, a social location, an ideology, a context, it is no longer Truth at all.Footnote ²

We have, it seems, because of books like Shapin's, become irredeemably tribal, living our lives next to one another whilst living in villages worlds apart, with different experiences, different facts, and different truths. Dickens could write this novel, this history, this experimental report. We are credulous, and we are suspicious to a sceptical fault; we believe that vaccines cause autism, and we believe in studies that prove they don't; we believe the world was created by God in six days six thousand years ago, and in the data of geochemists armed with mass spectrometers that establish its age at 4.567 Ga (giga-annums); we believe that climate change is a hoax and we are convinced that it's only a matter of years before there's no turning back.

Call it what you will, confirmation bias, pig-headedness, or pervasive anti-intellectualism; evidence, it seems, no longer has the power to persuade and convince. Demarcation criteria have evaporated before our very eyes. One truth appears as good as another, one spokesperson as credible as the next, leaving science powerless to compel or enlist belief. Speed, repetition and ubiquity; the charisma of the speaker; or extreme – and very loud – scepticism with regard to alternatives, these are what make and unmake truth, not evidence produced by legions of white-coated experts.

Could the authority of science always have been a sham, a conspiracy of so-called ‘elites’ seeking to drown out perfectly valid ‘alternative’ facts?Footnote ³ Perhaps the third of millennials who aren't sure that the Earth is round have reason to doubt: the truth is no longer what it used to be.Footnote ^{4 ‘}Fake news’. ‘A Hoax’. ‘Sad’.Footnote ⁵ Latour, it seems, was right, we have never really been modern. How else are we to explain the daily reports of witch hunts?Footnote ⁶ Or the alarming frequency of warnings that we are living in the end times?Footnote ⁷

Aside from ascribing immense transformative power to the work of scholars like Shapin, such a view surely mistakes description for causality. If guilty of anything, it's of being too sanguine that shared belief in the credibility of experts, in experience, and in the authority of institutions, would win out in a world filled with less opaque and sexier alternatives. Dreaming in our hearts of a linear teleology of progress, we wake up instead riding the ever-abbreviated swings of a pendulum being drawn ineluctably into the orbit of what Richard Hofstadter has called our paranoid style: the power of the ‘good’ story, the viral meme, the conspiracy theory, the slogan and the strong man.Footnote ⁸ Truth, as we are daily reminded, is not about facts and experience, but about the gut, about feeling, about knowing in the heart, what Stephen Colbert has called ‘truthiness’: ‘the quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true’.Footnote ⁹

It's not just the heart that's at the heart of truth, of course, but also an almost boundless will to power. The senior Bush 2 adviser (said to be Karl Rove) put this in its starkest form: ‘People like you’, he said to the journalist interviewing him,

Perhaps Rove owes as much to the Ficciones of his favourite writer, Jorge Luis Borges, as to his own hubris.Footnote ¹¹ His words, however, also describe well the plot of SHOT, with Robert Boyle playing the part of the ‘empire-building’ Rove, and Shapin taking on the role of the humble academic who judiciously studies him.Footnote ¹²

Exclusions’ ghosts

With an empirically born science whose neutrality was assured by the strict segregation of human interest and desire from the realm of facts, the tribe of Boyle forged an empire. Yet empires, as Borges (if not history) teaches us, fray at the edges and rot from the inside. A decade before the publication of SHOT, Leviathan and the Air-Pump warned that the settlement Boyle had helped found was beginning to unravel. ‘We have written’, Shapin and his co-author, Simon Schaffer, explain at their book's end,

The irony, of course, is that we appear to be just catching up with something Hobbes understood over four hundred years ago, begging the question whether the seventeenth-century settlement was ever anything more than arrogance, credulity, or faith. Indeed, maybe Boyle – in forging an empire in the best Rovian sense – was right too; as good Borgesians, however, none of us should be surprised that this world – this settlement – could ever be more than a provisional, temporary, bound-to-run-down-and-fall-apart kind of thing. What intrigues is how the localization of the loser in this story – the bad-mannered Mr Hobbes – has distracted us from the manifold ways that the social, cultural and epistemic worlds that contributed to his recognition of the ‘conventional and artefactual status of our forms of knowing’ also deeply touched Robert Boyle's search for a ‘settlement’. SHOT’s anthropology serves as a corrective in this sense, focusing our attention on the culture from which Boyle was able to solve the tautological riddle that entangled social power and epistemic authority. Indeed, how could they be entirely reliant upon one another, whilst seeming to be entirely separate at the same time?

For Latour, the mutual exclusion of politics from science, and science from politics, was the lynchpin of modernity. Writing in 1991 he sketches out his view of the settlement:

Latour, however, was perhaps too parsimonious in his critique. Given the prestige and honour we traditionally accord to founders, in this case Hobbes and Boyle, it is little wonder that he focused on the borders separating (Boylean) science from (Hobbesian) politics. But it is well known that founding fathers are not always the most savoury or stable of characters. Moreover, they rarely act alone (though that's one of the stories most frequently told about them); they have many human and non-human antecedents and enablers that live and make cultures that are far more diffuse and complicated than the judicious studies that scholars write about them. Settlements are all about making and policing frontiers, but borders are never secure, no matter how high the walls or strict the immigration quotas; ambassadors, refugees and tourists aside, there are always illegal, undocumented, unsanctioned and clandestine border crossings.

Of course, the political and the scientific worlds were entangled, despite understandings to the contrary, but so too were myriad other exclusions across many other supposed divides. Thus, while experimental natural philosophy might have drawn on resources supplied by the gentlemanly identity of men like Boyle, this culture found much of its distinctiveness in a series of exclusions having to do with faith, gender and class. Shapin certainly recognizes this, as evinced not only by his careful treatment of Boyle's ‘invisible technicians’ and his analysis of the social and epistemic exclusion of women, but also with regard to his close attention to the complexities of the historical worlds he describes.Footnote ¹⁵ Having said this, my concern here is less with these exclusions, and the distinctions they enabled, than with their surreptitious returns. In this respect, a social history of truth, rather than documenting the building of walls and the enactment of embargoes, might also consist in charting translations back and forth across these putative frontiers.

Following from this, as a heuristic strategy, I think it would be interesting to try to understand how Boyle and Co. used and reacted to, repressed and cathected, that which they sought to exclude. By charting the movements of exile and return across the contested frontiers of class, gender and faith, we can perhaps fruitfully complicate our understandings both of truth and of truthiness, of matters of fact and of matters of the heart. Put another way, by taking care to investigate the sociology of truth and the anti-rationalism of the gut together as integrally connected in the making and enacting of gentlemanly culture and the culture of experimental natural philosophy, we can push Shapin's insights regarding the settlement further to explicate not only how it came into being, but how it has begun to fall apart.

The touchstone of ‘If’ in the land of ‘Elsewhere’

The culture of civility from which the settlement emerged was mapped onto a series of exclusions based upon judgements of relative dependency and freedom. For Boyle and Co., the economic circumstances of the lower classes rendered them ignorant and credulous – they were ‘slaves to their senses’; they thus lacked the independence of mind either to understand or to speak credibly about matters of truth.Footnote ¹⁶ Similarly, women were entirely subservient, quixotic beings, incapable of acting without the support and guidance of men; thus they too were marked by their dependency.Footnote ¹⁷ Gentlemen, on the other hand, had wealth, education and virtue. As such, they possessed the independence requisite of credible tellers of the truth. This was to become, says Shapin, the defining feature of a gentleman's identity. ‘A gentleman's word was his bond’, and to doubt or challenge it was ‘to give him the lie’.

To give the lie was among the gravest insults imaginable to a gentleman's honour; it bordered on the terroristic in its capacity to infect an already volatile world with uncertainty.Footnote ¹⁸ For Shapin, the social practices associated with civility and civil conversation vaccinated against these dangers, building roadblocks to confrontation, and redirecting the potential violence associated with certain knowledge into polite conversation amongst gentlemen; that is, into a setting where the stakes were found in the continuance of courteous talk rather than the adjudication of winners.Footnote ¹⁹ For men of the Boyle tribe, talk was to be diffident, charitable and tolerant; it was aspirationally organized against dogmatism and certainty, and directed instead toward what Touchstone, the fool, in Shakespeare's As You Like It, called the ‘Ifs’ of the social world of men and – by Boyle's extension – the natural world of things.Footnote ²⁰ It is worth quoting Shapin at length:

The colonists sent out by the gentlemanly culture of Boyle could only found their ‘settlement’ of ‘If’ in the natural world with the support of the mother country of ‘Elsewhere’ located in the social world of gentlemen. Armed with well-rehearsed rituals of civility, as found, says Touchstone, in ‘books for good manners’, experimentalists like Boyle could build their settlement.Footnote ²²

This culture, however, was riven with tensions, ambiguities and uncertainties; it was a thing in the making, traduced and transformed by all manner of trading, and all manner of returns – from duty-free shops, dark alleys and black markets, to ambassadors, immigrants, smugglers, pirates and refugees. Indeed, ‘Elsewhere’ had to come from ‘somewhere’ too. It grew in the borderlands where gentlemen and experimentalists encountered those they sought to exile: women, the ‘lower’ orders, dogmatic schoolmen, raving enthusiasts and nature herself.

The order of lies

Boyle was a man of his time; in many ways, he can't simply be put in the ‘box’ of gentle culture. He was wealthy – among the wealthiest men in England – but he was also the seventh son of a robber baron whose noble ancestors were, quite literally, works of fiction.Footnote ²³ Not all gentlemen were alike; a gentleman could be a gentleman by birth, by (chivalrous) deed, by education or by money.Footnote ²⁴ These ‘types’ of gentility were often mixed, but even so, there was a clear hierarchy that distinguished a gentleman who could trace his family history into the distant and venerable past and the more recent parvenu. With ‘the accelerating and at times uncontrolled recruitment of new men to the gentry’, however, etiquette loosened these distinctions, allowing for the translation of mean parentage into gentility through acts of valour and virtue.Footnote ²⁵ The prescriptive aspirations of the gentle documented in books of courtesy and politesse aimed to provide solutions to ease this transition by creating a language by which to navigate a complex and rapidly changing social world.

Civility (and the kinds of learning associated with it) worked to moderate and redirect the violence of older noble traditions towards a more diplomatic and politic game of words that aimed (as an ideal) at the continuance of civil conversation amongst like-minded gentleman. This social settlement, however, was anything but settled. Indeed, gentle status, if was to be had, still had to be proven, in this case by the touchstones of erudition, learning, wit and manners – that is, by the ability to parlay written and spoken signs into the distinction of credibility.Footnote ²⁶

Words, however, were not always to be trusted; as Feste in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night said to his mistress Viola, they ‘are grown so false, I am loath to prove reason with them’.Footnote ²⁷ Nor, perhaps, could they prove an effective touchstone for social status. Indeed, words could be bought, learned, rehearsed and recited. The studied deployment of the ‘flowers’ and ‘schemes’ of rhetoric, like the wearing of fine clothing or the performance of stylized manners, might suggest that so-called gentlemen were actually imposters (counterfeits), or as Castiglione characterized them, ‘untowardly Assheades, that through malapertness thinke to purchase them the name of a good Courtier’.Footnote ²⁸

Writers of books of courtesy, more often than not, doubled down on the border they drew between truth and the lie, continuously hammering home the point that dishonesty was discrediting, while truthfulness was the defining quality of a gentleman's honour.Footnote ²⁹ At the same time, these writers also explicitly provided explications and examples of social behaviour that could be imitated, enacted, played and performed. As Touchtone said, ‘O sir, we quarrel … by the book’.Footnote ³⁰

This was the express purpose of works of courtesy and good manners – to teach, mould, reform and transform readers into gentlemen. The gentleman was to be – like the books he read – a collection of dispositions, pre-scripted clichés, tropes, maxims and rules that could inform his social improvisations.Footnote ³¹ Clement Ellis summed this up nicely in his The Gentle Sinner: ‘You may call him [the Gentleman] a Volume of Methodicall Errataes bound up in a gilt Cover, and his onely commendation is this, that his disorders seem to be orderly; and his Errors not Casuall but Studied’.Footnote ³² Indeed, who was to say that the lie well told was not a lie, that authenticity could not be feigned, that truth was not simply a successful performance? ‘Most Men are the contraries to that they wou'd seem’, said the Restoration playwright William Wycherley.Footnote ³³ Or as Philip Stubbes put it in his Anatomy of Abuses, it is ‘verie hard to knowe, who is noble, who is worshipfull, who is a gentleman, who is not … This is a great confusion & a general disorder, God be merciful vnto vs’. Or, as Ellis succinctly put it, ‘To give you My sense of the Gentleman in a word, He is, I know not what’.Footnote ³⁴

What kind of settlement was this? It seems that the ‘gentlemanly practices’ developed to ensure moral order were dangerously inadequate to the task. Or were they? For all the stress on honesty and truth held between the covers of the guidebooks to the land of ‘If’, the troubled borders distinguishing them from lies and counterfeits were perpetually in dispute. These frontier wars were a valuable resource in making the settlement precisely because of their constant threat to undermine it. Put another way, solutions to problems of social order were the problems that needed to be solved.Footnote ³⁵

Honest dissimulation and the glow worm

The defining principle of genteel culture was not truth; it was the tension between truth and the lie. Francis Bacon, for example, while pointing out the immorality of dissimulation, notes its practical necessity: ‘the best Composition, and Temperature of a man’, he said, ‘is to have Opennesse in Fame and Opinion; Secrecy in Habit; Dissimulation in seasonable use; And a Power to faigne, if there be no Remedy’.Footnote ³⁶ The pretense that dissimulation might only be employed ‘seasonably’ was for many problematic. Indeed, the ‘If’ of tolerance might easily swing charitable civil discourse into the self-serving hypocrisy of the flatterer. Guazzo's Civil Conversation, for example, rather than denying, ignoring or attacking this tension, welcomed it, elevating dissimulation to the status of a prudential virtue, as ‘all persons to the intent to avoide contention, and to bee acceptable in companie, sooth one an other, not onelie by speaking, but by holding their peace, and seeming to consent to other mennes sayings’.Footnote ³⁷

There was real danger here. The learned and performative aspects of elite identity skated a precarious frontier between respectability and fraud. Explicit border-patrol exercises extolling the truth and condemning the lie were paralleled by their qualification, as the hard edges distinguishing one from the other were softened and blurred by invocations to charitableness, sprezzatura, modesty and diffidence. Even so, some openly acknowledged – and embraced – the divide between dissimulation and authenticity. Guazzo, for example, explicitly argued for the importance of feigning and dissimulation, especially with regard to flattery, which, in his opinion, was what made the world go round: ‘hee, which should take flattery out of the worlde, should take away al humanitie and curtesie’.Footnote ³⁸ Torquato Accetto took this cognitive dissonance to symphonic levels in his treatise on ‘honest dissimulation’ (Della dissimulazione onesta); dissimulation was, for him, a synonym of ‘If’ insofar as it was tasked with ‘preserving virtue by concealing truth’.Footnote ³⁹

Yet the mask veiling this tension was difficult to maintain. As Giovanlorenzo Malpiglio in Tasso's well-known treatise On the Court admitted, ‘I think that it will be very difficult for me to seem to be what I am not and to hide what I am’.Footnote ⁴⁰ This kind of uncertainty is, pace Goffman, characteristic of social interaction in general, but this was especially so amongst the socially mobile of early modern England. Robert Boyle's self-conscious and extreme gentlemanly rectitude was perhaps an artefact of this tension.Footnote ⁴¹ After all, his own father was the veritable personification of the new man in a culture that valued men who were not made but always were.Footnote ⁴²

Boyle's father, Richard, 1st Earl of Cork, was a rapacious thief and unscrupulous manipulator who made his fortune in the colonization of Ireland, rising from a penniless adventurer to become one of the wealthiest men in England. As his contemporary, Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, said of him, he was ‘never known to deliver one truth’.Footnote ⁴³ The psychosocial instabilities balanced by gentlemen like Boyle must have been difficult indeed.Footnote ⁴⁴ Surely, Boyle's comments on a glow worm in his Occasional Reflections speak to the prison of elite sociability where he found himself:

The mask worn by the gentleman was moulded into an artful and discreet display of authenticity capable of giving the lie to the accusation that identity was, or ever could be, merely a performance. ‘Tolerance’, in this respect, might be construed, simply, as an absolute and unproblematic correspondence between performance and identity. The mask is who one is. Just as often, however, performance was left unacknowledged, disguised or repressed. To call it out was to risk far more than death by duel. It is thus not surprising that these stakes were raised most explicitly in hyperbolic and satirical terms. Courtesy literature grew in this tension, as both a symptom and a solution.

The conventions of genteel culture betrayed a keen awareness of the performative nature of the social, and the realities of power, birth and wealth. Appearance, contrivance, rehearsed and practised social displays of belonging and distanciation, these were the artifices catalogued and naturalized by books of courtesy and manners lived by Boyle and judicially studied by Shapin. To give the lie to them was to give the lie to social order itself. It was this lack of surety – the insecurity, ambiguity and anxiety about status, truth and authority – that provoked the intrepid settlers that Shapin describes to set off into the social fiction of artful dissimulation and the tolerance of the ‘If’ as well as into the empirical world of particulars.

Though on the surface ‘trust in truth-telling was understood to be the cement of society, [and] untruthfulness was seen as a potent social solvent’, it was also to be found in the unspoken truth and the unacknowledged lie that maintained and regulated social order.Footnote ⁴⁶ Montaigne seems to have understood the stakes quite well, locating in the solution offered by elite sociability an escalation of the instability it sought to avoid. As he put it,

Hobbes's insights regarding ‘the conventional and artefactual status of our forms of knowing’ were, for most, too terrible and too dangerous to acknowledge openly. For Montaigne, roadblocks to potential conflict – the ‘Ifs’ of social and epistemic dissimulation – were responsible for ratcheting up the very tensions they sought to circumvent. Confidence in the harmony between inner virtue and its social expression could only be maintained as a negative counter to an alternative of deceit, fraud and artifice. Elite sociability thus provided, at best, a partial solution, a mask, to cover over the tensions that its own contradictions provoked. This mask exposed its wearers to the ever-present possibility of losing face, raising the stakes in terms both of the possibility of ‘giving the lie’ and of Boyle's feint – the crafting (sublimation?) of his donned visage into the formulation of a rhetoric of anti-rhetoric, modesty, and charitable humility – a selfless-self worthy to blazon the Royal Society's motto: nullius in verba.Footnote ⁴⁸

Womanly words and manly deeds

The cultured display of gentlemanly civil conduct traced fine – and fraught – lines between truth and affectation, manly deeds and the ‘flowers’ of rhetoric, the virility of the knight and the effeminacy of the fop. Boyle embodied genteel culture; he also embodied many of its contradictions. He was the subject of the fawning praise of his contemporaries, but he was also mercilessly mocked and ridiculed – e.g. by Shadwell, Butler, Behn and Swift – for his vain virtuosity, his pretensions to useful knowledge, his affected mannerisms and his credulity.Footnote ⁴⁹ The persona of the ‘Dul and Melancholick’ gentleman, the elaborate and mannered rituals that comprised his bearing and his speech, wavered Boyle, and gentlemen like him, toward the women that they were so concerned to exile from the possibility of speaking credibly about the truth. Indeed, the painted masks and the coloured ceremonies associated with the gentleman had a distinctly female face.

Women, it was generally acknowledged, were the motive force behind the civilization of the barbaric men of ‘Elsewhere’ – softening the hard edges of their animality, and teaching them, through their example, manners, politesse and civility. As Swift said, ‘If there were no other use in the conversation of ladies, it is sufficient that it would lay a restraint upon those odious topicks of immodesty and indecencies, into which the rudeness of our northern genius is so apt to fall’.Footnote ⁵⁰ The danger of going native in the land of ‘If’, of identifying too closely with the colonial agents of feminine civility, was ever-present and greatly feared. The affected and studied pomp of the gentleman as represented in the plays of Wycherley, Etheredge, Shadwell and Congreve, or made popular in court and anti-court literature, frequently transgressed the borders separating gentlemen from hermaphroditic courtiers. This danger haunted elite sociability. As Castiglione warned, a courtier should never be

The characteristics distinguishing traditional elite identity – the hunt, the duel, valour in war, manly acts of daring and violence – were in the process of being translated into the ability to manipulate – and appropriately display – written and spoken signs.Footnote ⁵² Words were the tools of the trade for upwardly mobile new men. However, both affect and rhetoric provoked accusations of effeminacy. One mask covered the other, concealing behind the obvious dangers of crossing the border between new men and old nobles the dangers of crossing the frontiers dividing men from women. Women, and the dispositions associated with them, posed the profound threat of feigned duplicity.Footnote ⁵³ Insofar as this was the case, the commonplace maxim ‘Words are Womanly, Deeds are Male’ would need to be transformed to align better with new notions of elite status to become instead, ‘A Gentleman's Word is His Bond’.Footnote ⁵⁴

The modulation of elite identity amongst old nobles and new men, country gentleman and courtiers, sword-wielding rakes and fopping fops, was also a modulation amongst violence and effeminacy, masculine action and womanly learning. As Richard Braithwaite said in The English Gentleman, ‘For who knows not (if he know any thing) how the Gentry of this age, through a depraved effeminacie, must be in custome with the fashion, to purchase him the title of Gentleman’.Footnote ⁵⁵ It took more than money to solidify one's move up the ladder of social hierarchy; one needed fashion, panache and carefully studied, and chosen, words. Such social climbing through decorous wit, politesse and erudition could be viewed as a sign of status achieved; it could also be construed as a cunning performance. That's why it was so important to draw a line firmly in the sand between rhetoric and what Glanville described as the ‘manly spirit and genius, that playes not tricks with words’.Footnote ⁵⁶

Women were widely understood to be unreliable. They were, in the view of the fencing master Joseph Swetnam, ‘vngratefull, periured, full of fraud, flouting and deceit, vnconstant, waspish, toyish, light, sullen, proud, discurteous and cruell’.Footnote ⁵⁷ As such, they didn't so much need to be civilized, as they needed to be carefully policed. Similarly, truth was in need of protection from the pernicious effects of feigned civility. Words needed to be recalibrated as masculine deeds; they needed to be moderated, stripped of ornamentation, invigorated and made manly.Footnote ⁵⁸ To lie was to betray oneself as being womanly – a painted performer, a dissimulator, an artificial man, an effeminate fraud. Sprezzatura, modesty, plain-speaking and humility distinguished the truly gentle from the foppish, the effeminate, the parvenu. At the same time, the supposed humility of speech and action, the ‘If’, if you will, of gentlemanly civil conversation, was intricately entangled with the exclusionary discourse of modesty that was applied to gentle women as a disciplinary condition of their inclusion in polite society. Hannah Woolley, for example, gives advice to her gentle woman that might easily have been taken by Boyle's experimental philosopher:

The gentleman just couldn't catch a break; even whilst living modestly in the man cave of his laboratory, it seems that women were lurking behind every corner of his psyche.Footnote ⁶⁰ In response, gentlemen weren't shy either about their misogyny or their powers of denial. This was surely at the heart of what Thomas Sprat, in his History of the Royal Society, called the ‘Masculine Arts of Knowledge’, just as it was a defining feature of the modesty exemplified by Robert Boyle's pious virtuosity.Footnote ⁶¹

The social repertoire that defined the place of women in gentle society was self-consciously translated into ‘masculine’ rhetoric by early apologists of the Royal Society. Modesty of body became modesty of mind, chastity became piety, and timidity became charitable tolerance.Footnote ⁶² In each case, prescriptions to the weak (that is, to women) were inflected, modified and turned into the defining strengths of men. However, the fragility behind the masculine mask – the fear of effeminacy, and the multiple forms of dependency it implied – haunted purveyors of newly christened manly words.Footnote ⁶³ The virtue of ‘If’ could easily cross from manly confidence into territories best occupied by the womanly characteristic of flattery. Montaigne, once again, recognized, and warned against, this tendency:

For Montaigne, ‘the most fruitful and most natural exercise of our minds is conversation. I find the practice of it the most delightful activity in our lives’.Footnote ⁶⁵ He lamented that in his day it had been infected by the artful politesse of feminine sociability. He therefore sought less acrobatic and more direct translations of chivalric noble codes into questions having to do with the adjudication of knowledge and credibility.Footnote ⁶⁶ The Boylean settlement, on the other hand, wasn't so cavalier, taking pains to draw clear borders between the virtue of ‘If’ and the search for certainty, while at the same time blurring the boundaries between the male and the female. Civil conversation was truly the pharmakon, at once providing a potential antidote to the instabilities infecting the social world, while also producing both lists of likely enemies and a social milieu that was in a constant state of hyper-masculine readiness against the threat that insult might derogate honour or status.Footnote ⁶⁷

The literati's bifocals

The settlement inaugurated by Boyle and Co. was a strategic retreat from abstract theoretical debates that could be better managed by polite conversation with plain-spoken, stripped-down, modest and ‘masculine’ words than by Montaigne's conversational duels. These manly words could, in turn, be enchained to nature, as neutral and transparent mediums of things, thus demarcating the frontiers between society and manly lands of matter and experimental philosophy. As Thomas Sprat promised, the Royal Society would ‘reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style: to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver'd so many things, almost in an equal number of words’.Footnote ⁶⁸ This rhetoric of anti-rhetoric was meant to tie the world of particulars securely to the experimentalists, while also arming him with a pointed weapon to wield against the vagaries of elite sociability and potential derogation of honour, whether with regard to masculinity or to parentage.

How to be a ‘new man’ was a complicated business. The pecking order of the Restoration glow worm was negotiated by family, wealth, valour, knowledge of courtesy and knowledge of how best to display it (what courtesy books called prudence, discretion or dissimulation). Prudence required self-knowledge, and knowledge of others based on careful and close reading. It also required an education in these arts. Armed with this knowledge, John Locke presumed one could see the true man behind the mask. A good tutor in such a world, he said, would teach his pupil ‘skill in men, and their manners; pull off the mask which their several callings and pretences cover them with, and make his pupil discern what lies at the bottom under such appearances’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Jonathan Swift, on the other hand, was less interested in essences and true men, than in what he saw as the perversion of education into a veritable art of ‘seeming’. Thus, he lamented, young divines, fearing accusations of pedantry, had given up their studies at university for ‘Polite Conversation; knowing the World; and Reading Men instead of Books’.Footnote ⁷⁰

Politesse choreographed a society of watching, observing, weighing and measuring based on careful reconnaissance and constant surveillance. Social place and credibility were finely balanced against minute, frequent, complex and fine-grained observations and judgements. The cognitive habits rehearsed in courts, stately homes and coffee houses could not be bounded by the walls of elite sociability; they found expression not only in the writing of books of courtesy, but also in books about rhetoric, grammar and natural philosophy, and in practices associated with cabinets of curiosity, making and using mathematical instruments, performing anatomies and doing experiments.Footnote ⁷¹ Social performance, in this sense, provided the opportunity to develop cognitive skills (objectification/distanciation, focused observation, collection, systematization, judgement) that could also be applied to interactions with the natural world. In other words, it wasn't just courtesy as a formal attribute of the culture of gentility, or the practice of civil conversation, that was translated into the new experimental philosophy, but also the cognitive skills and habits of observation inculcated by civility in practice.

The new experimental philosophy cannibalized the court of Elsewhere, growing strong through its incorporation of its hyper-vigilant and always observant eyes. ‘Knowledge about people’, as Shapin says,

Perhaps we should go even further here in noting that this art of decorum trained and attuned the eye to an examination of the ‘human’ and ‘natural’ worlds through up-close and far-away empirical observations, through acts of distanciation (ascriptions of social and cognitive distance); experiential observation; and refined judgements of quality, reliability and credibility.Footnote ⁷³ Indeed, knowledge of things and knowledge of people, like the literatures and practices of courtesy and natural history, grew in the matrix of a common cognitive style.

Religious instability and social struggle animated the articulation of this congruence.Footnote ⁷⁴ The definition of the gentlemen was by no means settled in the seventeenth century, as Shapin amply documents.Footnote ⁷⁵ The references upon which authority relied – family, land, tradition, money, civility, God – were a shifting, contradictory and volatile mix; the addition of observations and meditations upon the particulars of nature paralleled efforts to stabilize the contours of a social hierarchy under constant threat of violent dissolution. On the one hand, through books by (and the practices associated with) courtesy and civility, e.g. Erasmus, Castiglione, Guazzo, Peacham, Braithwaite, etc., and on the other hand, through works by Boyle, Petty, Wilkins, etc. Indeed, men like Sprat were quite explicit in establishing nature as the ‘elsewhere’ of social status. Experimental philosophy was, he argued, germane

Touchstone hadn't so much abandoned courtesy for the manly land of things, as he had become a kind of experimenting courtly medium, a gentleman and a natural philosopher, a Literatus in the Language and Sense of Society and a ‘Literatus in the Language and Sense of Nature’.Footnote ⁷⁷

The dirty hands of knowledge

The act of recalibrating the touchstone of truth from schoolmen and universals to gentlemen experimentalists and particulars was troubled by the social exclusions upon which gentility was based. Gentlemen were what the lower orders who menially laboured in the world were not: rich, learned, polite, distinguished and allergic to getting their hands dirty. They were not dependent on work for their livelihoods; rather, they were free from the pollution of manual labour. On the other hand, manual labourers were virile and active, and came to represent an important counter to the supposed effeminacy of elites. As Sprat argued, ‘the Wit that is founded on the Arts of men's hands is masculine and durable’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Empiricist epistemology, though potentially polluting to the gentility, was also the means by which the gentle could claim immunity from the corruption of manners attributed to high society. ‘Honor’ (sic), as Thomas Sprat put it in his History of the Royal Society,

But how could the experimental philosopher read the Book of Nature if he couldn't get his hands dirty? Sprat felt the need to address what he called a ‘false conception’ which ‘had got so much ground, that as soon as a man began to put his hands to Experiments, he was presently given over, as impoverish't and undone’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Despite Sprat's objections, the relation of dependence on nature as the ‘elsewhere’ of valid knowledge posed a continuing threat to elite identity. Shapin describes one of the ways that this tension was managed, through what he calls ‘invisible technicians’ – the amanuensis, assistants and servants – that Boyle used to conduct his experiments. Boyle, he explains, relied upon these technicians, while simultaneously distancing himself from their labour. His social distance from the workers labouring in his lab was also an assertion of his cognitive distance over the matters of fact they helped him discover. Yet at the same time as he was borrowing from, abusing and excluding his servants and employees, he also fashioned himself after key elements of their identities.

In addition to being virile and masculine, labourers did more than they thought. They lived in a world with hardly a word. They performed deeds. They didn't sip tea over polite banter. This persona of naked and upfront simplicity was a cudgel used against the overly refined gentleman. Simplicity merged with authenticity, and wisdom with ignorance. The valorization of the plain-speaking and modest commoner has had a long history and a host of incarnations.Footnote ⁸¹ Montaigne, for example, relied on a simple and unlearned servant for an accurate accounting of Villeganon's outpost in France Antarctique. ‘This man’, said Montaigne,

In his essay, Montaigne balances the receptivity of the unlettered commoner to truth, with the construction of his New World avatar, the cannibal who was naked, heroic and wise. The wisdom of the ignorant was vouchsafed by artless, direct, virile and authentic experience; this figuration acted to refute the decadence and corruption associated with high society. Montaigne thus turns the tables on civilization and culture, arguing for the moral and epistemic superiority of workers, peasants and cannibals. ‘They are savages’, he said,

Like Montaigne, Boyle was no commoner, a point he strenuously made with his every utterance and every act; he nevertheless recruited aspects of the tradition that valorized the simple and unlettered and made them his own. For example, in describing himself as a ‘man without much philosophy’ or as a person ‘that professes not rhetoric’, Boyle wasn't simply calling out the arrogance of scholars and pedants, but also the comportment and sociability of elites, and directly, or by implication, the commonly held assumptions that labour was derogating, that truth could be spoken only by an educated elite, and that knowledge of the sublunary world was as inimical to piety as it was to honour.Footnote ⁸⁴ He argued that just the opposite was the case:

The mask of the plain, unassuming, simple and unlettered man, conjoined to experience (to labour), had the virtue of inoculating its wearer against the effeminate traits of overly refined and mannered gentility.Footnote ⁸⁶ Boyle thus took great pains to describe his boyish delight in engaging with, and inquiring into, the most ‘vile’ and ‘despicable aspects of creation, including experiments where he handled excrement with his own precious hands’:

For all these praiseworthy qualities which found their way into Boyle's newly crafted identity of the experimental philosopher, there was still an almost primal need to maintain a suitable distance from the unwashed masses.Footnote ⁸⁸ The knowledge of the ignorant needed be translated ‘into something fit for philosophy’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Who better to undertake this civilizing act, argued Boyle, than gentlemanly experimentalists?Footnote ⁹⁰ ‘Experience’, he intoned, ‘is but an assistant to reason’.Footnote ⁹¹ Those who possessed reason stood on the highest rungs of social hierarchy; those who had experience, not so much. Boyle got around this paradox, which simultaneously distanced and valorized experience as the basis of philosophical knowledge, by transforming the commoners who were the sources of his knowledge into inert machines and experimental apparatus, i.e. into probes and touchstones, instruments that in the right hands could catalogue and register experience without prejudice or judgement. If there were problems or factual errors, no problem, fault could be directed down the social ladder, to the mistakes and accidents caused by the unlettered sources of empirical knowledge, thus saving the gentleman's credibility while at the same time underlining his social distance and cognitive superiority. Either way, gentlemen like Boyle could now have their cake and eat it too, becoming the other, while maintaining social and cognitive distance from this other; labouring without labour, while retaining their manly virility, harnessing God's truth amongst the most ‘vile’ and ‘despicable’ aspects of creation, while keeping their hands clean.Footnote ⁹²

Yet, despite the distance between the gentleman and the vulgar sources of his knowledge, there were also surreptitious returns and unlooked-for appropriations. Put more concretely, gentlemanly experimental philosophers, in mediating the experience of the ignorant and unlettered, not only were translating the ‘unsullied’ and ‘raw’ data of experience from their primitive and barbarous interlocutors; they were also translating and appropriating essential aspects imputed (by elites such as Boyle) to the identity of these excluded and debased others, though, of course, without the pejorative connotations – e.g. work was a pious, masculine and gentlemanly ‘diversion’; knowledge was experiential and probable; rudeness was authenticity; and ignorance was diffidence and modesty.

In this respect, Boyle follows Montaigne in finding repose in the tensions between ignorance and truth, credulity and scepticism, the common man and reason. On the one hand, Montaigne belittled the testimony of ignorant commoners, women, children and the ill; ‘The more empty a soul is and the less furnished with counterweights’, he argued, ‘the more easily its balance will be swayed under the force of its first convictions … That is why children, the common people, women and the sick are more readily led by the nose’. But then, ‘on the other hand’, he continued, ‘reason has taught me that, if you condemn in this way anything whatever as definitely false and quite impossible, you are claiming to know the frontiers and bounds of the will of God and the power of Nature our Mother … We ought to judge the infinite power of … Nature’, he counseled, ‘with more reverence and a greater recognition of our own ignorance and weakness’.Footnote ⁹³ This is why Montaigne again and again returned to the figuration of the simple, the rude and the ignorant common man as a touchstone for credibility. As he put it in his essay ‘On Presumption’, ‘it seems to me that the sorts of men who are simple enough to occupy the lowest rank are the least worthy of contempt and that they show us relationships which are better ordered. The morals and the speech of the peasants I find to be more in conformity with the principles of true philosophy than those of the philosophers’.Footnote ⁹⁴

Though Boyle typically erased explicit mention of the mediums – the ‘invisible technicians’ – that he employed to produce his experimental knowledge, he nevertheless valorized them in absentia for many of the same reasons as Montaigne. For Montaigne, like Boyle, God's absolute power rendered human knowledge, at best, probable. What other response could there be to the radical contingency of God's infinite power and inscrutable will than to retreat to a position of modesty, humility and diffidence; that is, to a position of dependency? In this regard, the same distance that characterized Boyle's relation to his amanuensis, and to the lower orders more generally, also characterized his relation to God, ‘the most free and powerful Author of nature’.Footnote ⁹⁵ For Boyle, the investigation of nature was conducted along the porous frontiers between dependency and mastery; on the one hand, with reference to his ‘invisible technicians’, and on the other, to God's works (to Nature). To paraphrase Bacon, man is but the servant and interpreter of nature that can only command (vincitur) by obeying.Footnote ⁹⁶

Nothing that is so, is so

Elite sociability might have been a way of negotiating complex and confused relations to truth; it also provoked widespread (negative) reactions. The settlements it proposed as a solution to the problem of the new – new worlds, new peoples, new customs, new technologies and the new men – were never very settled. Indeed, the centrality of words, manners, dress and comportment characteristic of evolving notions of elite identity aggravated an already widespread perception that things weren't quite right on the frontiers separating ‘seeming’ from ‘being’.Footnote ⁹⁷ As Shakespeare's Feste said, ‘Nothing that is so, is so’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Indeed, who was noble? What constituted sure knowledge? How could one know God? There was no consensus as to how to best answer these questions. Boyle looked to the material world of particulars, written like ‘Aegyptian Hieroglyphicks’ in the Book of Nature, to provide possible solutions.Footnote ⁹⁹

Boyle's dream was realist, to conflate words and things, and become a transparent medium for Nature and God; his reality, such as it was, was nominalist, because the world of things was entirely contingent on God's indecipherable and all-powerful will, restrained only by the principle of non-contradiction and his Covenant with Man.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ God's reasons were beyond the scope of human understanding. Though the causes animating the particulars shaping reality could not be known, they could nevertheless be carefully observed with the goal of discovering probable regularities amongst them. This was to be done by studying the Book of Nature, and studying men like books.Footnote ¹⁰¹

The shift from universals and essences to particulars inaugurated by the via moderna was, for men like Boyle, infused with tremendous emotional and psychic significance – not as a theological or intellectual movement, but as a visceral response to vertiginous social and epistemic change. Born of a fallen, contingent, world were new observational and taxonomical practices; these were applied to the labour of commoners and craftsmen, to the lives and customs of New World peoples, to the behaviour of elites, and, of course, to the sublunary world of nature. In all these cases, the goal was to experiment upon, take stock of, collect, classify and register the particulars of the natural and social worlds; by this means, new men such as Boyle sought to secure the foundations of their knowledge, and to establish their status as legitimate representatives of truth and of right, moral, action.Footnote ¹⁰²

These efforts, however, were riven with tension in so far as they embraced both the radical contingency of the world of particulars, and the unquenchable desire to establish sure connections between nature, God and social authority. This instability was balanced on the point of God's word; that is, His redemptive promise as instantiated in potentia ordinata dei.Footnote ¹⁰³ God was all-powerful, and could contravene the order of nature at any moment. One could never be sure, but by studiously investigating the signs He inscribed in the Book of Nature, His will could (provisionally) be known.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Boyle's persona as an experimentalist – modest, chaste and pious – characterized his submission to – and faith in – nature and its Author; the mastery he performed over the social world, on the other hand, relied on his identification with God's creative freedom as the universe's ‘most free Agent’. ‘If’, in this sense, conjoined the decorum of courtesy with a pious deference to – and channelling of – God's power within the confines of his potentia dei ordinata. The creative freedom to act within the brackets of ‘If’, as the power to recalibrate ‘traditionally constituted schemes of plausibility’, grew, as an ontological possibility, at the intersection of potentia Dei absoluta, potentia Dei ordinata, Boyle's imitatio Christi, and the vicissitudes of elite identity.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Matters ‘physico-theological’, thus charted and reflected upon, would act to restrain and channel words and thought by binding them firmly to the nexus of material things. As Boyle put it, without ‘Channels many and deepe enuf for them all to flow <run> in’, thought would turn to raving; that is, to ‘vnlikely or vseless suppositions <hypotheses> … nothing but a Play or a Romance personated’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ For Boyle, faith and reason were to be held together in the same way that God's potentia absoluta was to be held in check by potentia dei ordinata; that is, by reference to His word materialized in matters ‘physico-theological’. As with Boyle, God's Word was his Bond.

Authenticity and the artless immediacy of presence

The trope of the unlettered common man as a reliable speaker of the truth was employed to inoculate the experimentalist and the gentleman against critiques of aristocratic immorality and to firmly draw the boundaries between the feigned performance of ‘romance personated’ and the real thing. This figuration grew along the axes of ‘class’ and ‘gender’, but it also tracked closely to contemporaneous condemnations of learning and ritualism – of ‘reason’ – in the propagation of the faith. Boyle masked this tension by analogy, comparing the veracity of his low-born and humble informants to Christ's Apostles. ‘Oftentimes’, he said,

The capacity to give reliable testimony of God, like the capacity to give reliable testimony of nature, was not owing to the superior reasoning power of the low-born illiterate, just the opposite was the case; ignorance presented a tabula rasa to God and the world. For the experimentalist, common men were the perfect probes by which to register matters physico-theological. On the one hand, the experimental philosopher was to be a ‘distanced’ and reasoned adjudicator of his informants’ intelligence. On the other, he was to adopt key elements of their identity; as Sprat described it, ‘preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants, before that, of Wits, or Scholars’. The wisdom of the ignorant, in this sense, presented a kind of distorted speculum principis, a ‘primitive’ anti-rhetorical mirror that reflected gentlemanly experimentalists as seen through the image of common ‘experienc'd Men of the most unaffected, and most unartificial kinds of life’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Used in polemics against arid school philosophers, the wisdom of the unlettered simple man also served to challenge the hubris that conflated eloquence and erudition with real knowledge. In this sense, it produced a figure that stood as a potent critique both of the scholastic tradition and of the performance of elite sociability.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ It relegated God to the world of absolute power, while leaving men to labour in the weeds of the particular. It warned against idleness and promoted the virtues of hard, manly work. It spoke across the via moderna of nominalist theology to an ontology that recognized the post-lapsarian disjunction between words and things, while promoting, at the same time, not only the intractable unruliness of the libertine – who ‘took pleasure in the constant exposure of polite social life as “dissembling”, “hypocrisy”, and “artifice”’ – but also efforts to ground both language and social place in new empirical philosophies of particulars in the hope that the hard cold facts of nature could touch the heart with the same kind of inspiration as God's revealed word.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In this regard, the intuitive knowledge associated with women and unlettered manual labourers was refracted across religious debates having to do with the proper role of knowledge and the propagation of the faith.

For the truly pious ‘enthusiast’, the intellect was a barrier to knowledge of the Divine. God was to be found intuitively through emotion and faith, not by study or reason. Such anti-rationalist critiques had immense appeal across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as evinced by successive waves of Millenarians, Anabaptists, Seekers, Ranters, Quakers, radical Puritans, etc.Footnote ¹¹¹ They can also be located in critiques of elite comportment and morality for too closely following the scriptures of courtesy books like Touchstone's. God did not care for the pretensions of human knowledge, for ritual, status, fine clothes or tea. He was absolutely powerful, and could not be approached with such a faulty instrument as the intellect; rather, it was to the spirit that God would be revealed. For some enthusiasts, ignorance was believed to be the window to unmediated grace. As William Dell put it, ‘Ignorance is more fit and ready to receive the Gospel then Wisdom. And a Shepherd, and a Plowman will sooner receive the Gospel and submit to it, then a Scholar who lives in the strength of Humane Wisdom and Reason’.Footnote ¹¹² Or as one of Anne Hutchinson's followers recounted, ‘I had rather hear such a one that speekes from the meere motion of the spirit, without any study at all, then any of your learned Scollers, although they may be fuller of Scripture’.Footnote ¹¹³ Learning would only hinder faith. God, rather, was to be known by intuition and understood by the heart.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Boyle and his early Royal Society fellow travellers sought to cordon off their experimental philosophy from these irrational extremes by adopting, taming and transforming many of its key attributes.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Nature, like true faith, was to be biased against the biased. Those who claimed to read much or study long, or who were rhetorically ostentatious, would not be admitted to her Church. This was an odd paragon to be created by men who read widely; who had a literary style that was practised, erudite and well thought out; and who took such great care to transform their rhetoric into something that was not supposed to be rhetoric at all.Footnote ¹¹⁶ John Wilkins connects the dots between critiques of aristocratic morality and knowledge of God's truth: ‘it will not become the Majesty of a Divine Embassage’, he said,

Wilkins, ‘principal! Reviver of Experimental Philosophy (secundum mentem Domini Bacon)’, can here be found patrolling the same fraught borders as Boyle.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Though he believed that preaching God's word was an art that needed to be studied rigorously, he was careful to distinguish the ‘substance’ of the ‘heart’ from the rhetorical dross (the affected eloquence) of elite identity. The unstable balance between faith and learning with regard to knowledge of God was here paralleled by the precarious balancing act between authenticity and performance amongst the glow worms of Restoration England.

The extremes represented by Levellers, Diggers, Grindletonians and Quakers in the Old World, and the likes of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson in the New, pushed the boundaries between faith and reason to the breaking point. This was especially the case in America, where, Hofstadter avers, ‘tension between the mind and the heart, between emotion and intellect’, found particularly fertile ground upon which to grow.Footnote ¹¹⁹ ‘Under American conditions’, he explains, ‘the balance between traditional establishments and revivalist or enthusiastic movements drastically shifted in favour of the latter’.Footnote ¹²⁰ The Atlantic, however, was a porous frontier when it comes to voyages of the spirit and the intellect. Indeed, the anti-intellectual and radically egalitarian evangelical enthusiasts of early New England shared common roots with Boyle and the propagandists of the early Royal Society. The former did battle against Puritan elites and an erudite clergy to directly access the word of God. The latter took their plain-spoken manly rhetoric of anti-rhetoric as an antidote to the corrupting influence of women, learned pedants, ostentatious gentlemen, and abstract theoretical knowledge in order to translate the knowledge of the faithful into the faithful, probable and practical empiricism of the diffident (dissimulating) and decorous gentleman investigating nature.Footnote ¹²¹ If we had any doubts about the early Royal Society's Rovian designs in the face of these border disputes on the frontiers of seeming and being, we need only look over Samuel Hartlib's shoulder as he read the advice of his (and Boyle's) friend and colleague, William Petty: avoid, he warned, those ‘who are tickled only with Rhetoricall Prefaces, Transitions, & Epilogues, & charmed with fine Allusions and Metaphors’, and cultivate, rather, ‘Reall Friends to the Designe of Realities’.Footnote ¹²² But as Borges, if not Rove and Boyle, well knew, the borders of ‘If’ are always difficult to secure, even within the walls (or ‘the steel slat barriers’) of reason.Footnote ¹²³