Gallagher on Presenting Our History

Gary W. Gallagher - Professor History Emeritus at The Univ. of Virginia "The Enduring Civil War" I believe in the academic professional study of history and not the amateur popular presentation of history. I am a student of American history. I am not a "history buff." Hence, there is no evidence of "black men" serving in the Confederate army, fraudulent claims to the contrary. Gettysburg and Vicksburg were important but did not determine the outcome of the war. The Shelby Foote contention that Northern victory was inevitable from the outset is nonsense. Grant was less the "butcher" than Lee. The Gettysburg Address, so deservedly admired today, did not suddenly turn the war into a war of liberation and "a new burst of freedom." Etc.

The Drama Builds

This will be THE presidential election in my lifetime. The polls look good for Biden but, of course, they looked good for Hillary in 2016. Here's hoping Biden wins so conclusively that no Republican shennigans can change things.

Is Texas in Play?

If only Texas would go for Biden that alone would seal the deal. We read how Texas is slowly trending blue. May this be the historic year.

Anxious

Anxious to get this election over with. The polls look good for Joe. I hope it's a clean overwhelming victory for the good guys.

No Stoic

Ruthie insults me this morning. "Fred, you talk like a Stoic!" "Ruthie, you know I am not a Stoic. I don't have the inner fortitude to be a Stoic. I am too wild and unpredictable. Besides, you know I'm an Epicurean---seeking pleasure constantly is my middle name. Which reminds me: when are we going to start taking those ballroom dancing lessons that you promised?" "Well, I don't know, Fred. I think you might be too much for me." "True, but what say we give a whirl?" She's still thinking about it. I hate waiting for an answer from a woman, don't you guys?

1968 All Over Again

THE LONG VIEW What the Tumultuous Year 1968 Can Teach Us About Today Oct. 24, 2020 Marshall Frady saw what was coming. It was the spring of 1968, and Frady, a writer for Newsweek, The New Yorker and Harper’s, was finishing a slim, evocative portrait of George C. Wallace, the once and future governor of Alabama who’d taken his segregationist platform national as a third-party candidate for president. “He has come virtually out of nowhere to intrude himself into the most vital political process of this country, at one of the most perilous moments in this country’s history,” Frady wrote in April of that tumultuous year. “For some time now — perhaps since the assassination of John F. Kennedy — there has been the sense of a certain dishevelment in the national life; in some subtle but fundamental way things seem to have become ungeared. It has been a season of anarchic happenings: a natural time for a bizarre happening like Wallace.” In our own chaotic political moment, the literature of 1968 repays attention, for many of the forces then in evidence — surging white populism, racist politics and an ambient sense of doom — are in play anew. The year had opened with the Tet offensive in Vietnam and descended ever deeper into bloodshed and madness. More than 500,000 American troops were deployed in Southeast Asia, and American combat deaths averaged 46 a day, for an annual total of 16,899. A single week in the spring brought the end of Lyndon Johnson’s storied political career, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and ensuing riots across America. In June Robert Kennedy was murdered, followed later that summer by the violence at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. And November brought the election of Richard Nixon — with a strong 13.5 percent popular-vote finish by Wallace, who carried five states in the Electoral College. Wallace had come to power in Alabama as an unapologetic defender of segregation. (After losing the 1958 race for governor to a Klan-backed candidate, Wallace had reportedly promised that he’d never be “out-nigguhed again,” and he wasn’t.) In January 1963 Wallace pledged “segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever,” and in June of that year he showily attempted to block federal officials seeking to desegregate the University of Alabama. His base appeal to racism and assorted white anxieties about status was elemental. In his book WALLACE, Frady relates the story of a state senator, Kenneth Hammond, who, in the fall of 1965, rose in the Capitol — not far from the spot where Jefferson Davis had taken the oath as president of the Confederacy — to denounce Wallace’s “Nazi tactics.” To Hammond, the bantamweight, cigar-chewing governor was “one of the greatest political manipulators this century has known”; anyone who questioned Wallace was attacked as “a nigguh-lover, a pinko or a Communist.” The governor’s goal, Hammond said, was to “destroy democracy at its best,” and it wasn’t going to stop in Alabama. “In order to pick up support,” Hammond said of Wallace, “he is going to pit the white race against the minorities in this country” in “the same way Adolf Hitler pitted the master race against the Jews.” ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story In 1968, Wallace took his act on the road. As Stephan Lesher wrote in his GEORGE WALLACE: AMERICAN POPULIST, the Alabama Huey Long was at once a maker and a mirror of white anxieties. “You know,” Wallace told a group of police officers in Bethany, Okla., “there’s nothing wrong with this country that we couldn’t cure by turning it over to the police for a couple of years. You fellows would straighten it out.” Elsewhere, Wallace remarked: “Folks are mad about law and order and about schools. … Race mixing doesn’t work. Show me a place where it’s worked.” ImageMartin Luther King Jr. marching in Memphis, March 28, 1968. Martin Luther King Jr. marching in Memphis, March 28, 1968.Credit...Jack Thornell/Associated Press In late February 1968, the REPORT OF THE NATIONAL ADVISORY COMMISSION ON CIVIL DISORDERS indicted structural racism as the underlying cause of the terrible riots that had stretched from Watts in 1965 to Newark in 1967. “What white Americans have never fully understood — but what the Negro can never forget — is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto,” the commission, led by the Illinois governor Otto Kerner and the New York City mayor John V. Lindsay, said. “White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it and white society condones it.” As Lesher indicated, Wallace and the Kerner report forced Richard Nixon to the right. “In what was to be a major turning point in Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign,” Lesher wrote, “the former vice president used the Kerner Commission report as a springboard for embracing as his own the pith of George Wallace’s powerful appeal. … As the campaign wore on, Nixon espoused more and more of Wallace’s core campaign; in addition to the Wallace positions on crime, Nixon spoke out against school busing, federal enforcement of school desegregation, antiwar activists and the federal judiciary.” In Washington, D.C., meanwhile, Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy and others were mounting a Poor People’s Campaign to bring attention to many of the same issues the Kerner Commission had highlighted. As the photographer Jill Freedman quoted in her moving collection RESURRECTION CITY, 1968 — a series of images of the encampment of the dispossessed built on the Mall — King was clear about what must be done. “Now we are tired of being on the bottom,” King had said. “We are tired of being exploited. We are tired of not being able to get adequate jobs. We are tired of not getting promotions after we get those jobs. And as a result of our being tired, we are going to Washington, D.C., to the seat of government, and engage in direct action for days and days, weeks and weeks, and months and months if necessary, in order to say to this nation that you must provide us with jobs or income.” King’s focus on economic justice — including a guaranteed basic income — was evident in his 1967 book WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE: CHAOS OR COMMUNITY? King’s murder in Memphis in the first week of April was one of the inflection points that led the British journalists Lewis Chester, Godfrey Hodgson and Bruce Page to title their book AN AMERICAN MELODRAMA: THE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN OF 1968. To them, the Wallace campaign was like an iceberg — you could see only a part of it. A vote for Wallace, the Democrat Lawrence O’Brien told Chester, Hodgson and Page, was “the vote a guy doesn’t tell the pollsters about — the mean vote a guy keeps in his gut, until he goes in that booth, and sees red and pulls that lever.” With keen eyes, they saw, too, that Ronald Reagan, the actor-G.E. spokesman turned California governor, was “no ordinary political phenomenon. He is, as Goldwater was, a symbol of the old values of God, Home and Country. His appeal is visceral.” Reagan fell short in a challenge to Nixon for the Republican nomination that year, but he would be back. “He is for lean government, low taxes and flag-waving patriotism,” Chester, Hodgson and Page wrote. “He is against civil-rights legislation, university radicals and expenditure of government funds in the ghetto.” Editors’ Picks When Start-Ups Go Into the Garage (or Sometimes the Living Room) How the Designer of Milly Broke Free His Fingernails Were Purple but Didn’t Hurt. What Was This? Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story The hopes of the decade that had begun with John Kennedy’s call for a mix of public-spirited idealism and Cold War realism unraveled as the year wore on. Still, the veterans of those wars at home and abroad tried to keep the flame alive. “The ’60s, after all, were not a unique and isolating episode in the American chronicle,” Richard N. Goodwin wrote in his memoir, REMEMBERING AMERICA: A VOICE FROM THE SIXTIES. “At our very beginning, Washington admonished that the fate of liberty and democracy were ‘deeply … finally staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.’ America as ‘experiment’ — the guiding theme of two centuries, has recurred to dominate the life of the nation during every shaping period of our history. The ’60s were the latest stage in that great experiment. Turbulent, violent, laced with corrupting digressions, it was also a time when most Americans felt the future could be bent to their wills. … The ’60s, so filled with promise, came to an end. Not a failure, but abandoned. Never given a chance.” These books suggest such chances are vanishingly rare, and must be grasped, and grasped firmly, on those few occasions when they present themselves. Jon Meacham is the author, most recently, of “His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope.”

Building Multiracial/Multicultural Democracy

By Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt Mr. Levitsky and Mr. Ziblatt are political scientists and the authors of “How Democracies Die.” Oct. 23, 2020 586 The Trump presidency has brought American democracy to the breaking point. The president has encouraged violent extremists; deployed law enforcement and other public institutions as weapons against rivals; and undermined the integrity of elections through false claims of fraud, attacks on mail-in voting and an apparent unwillingness to accept defeat. In this, he has been aided and abetted by a Republican Party that has fallen into the grips of white nationalism. The Republican base and its white Christian core, facing a loss of its dominant status in society, has radicalized, encouraging party leaders to engage in voter suppression, steal a Supreme Court seat in 2016 and tolerate the president’s lawless behavior. As a result, Americans today confront the prospect of a crisis-ridden election, in which they are unsure whether they will be able to cast a ballot fairly, whether their ballots will be counted, whether the candidate favored by voters will emerge victorious and whether the vote will throw the country into violence. Yet if American democracy is nearing a breaking point, the crisis generated by the Trump presidency could also be a prelude to a democratic breakthrough. Opposition to Trumpism has engendered a growing multiracial majority that could lay a foundation for a more democratic future. Public opinion has shifted in important ways, especially among white Americans. According to the political scientist Michael Tesler, the percentage of Americans who agree that “there’s a lot of discrimination against African-Americans” increased from 19 percent in 2013 to 50 percent in 2020, driven in the main by changes in the attitudes of white voters. Likewise, a Pew Research Center survey found that the percentage of Americans who believe that the country needs to “continue making changes to give Blacks equal rights with whites” rose from 46 percent in 2014 to 61 percent in 2017. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Polls also show that Americans overwhelmingly reject President Trump’s positions on race and that they increasingly embrace diversity. Last year, about two-thirds of Americans agreed with the statement that immigrants “strengthen the country,” up from 31 percent in 1994. And according to Pew, the percentage of voters who believe that “newcomers strengthen American society” rose from 46 percent in 2016 to 60 percent in 2020. America’s emerging multiracial democratic majority was visible this summer in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The killing set off what may be the biggest wave of protest in United States history. An estimated 15 million to 26 million Americans took to the streets, and protests extended into small-town and rural America. Three-quarters of Americans supported the protests in June, and large majorities — including 60 percent of whites — supported the Black Lives Matter movement. These numbers declined over the course of the summer. As of September, however, 55 percent of Americans (and 45 percent of white Americans) continued to support Black Lives Matter, levels that were considerably higher than ever before in the movement’s history. This is why Mr. Trump’s efforts to resurrect Nixon’s “silent majority” appeals appear to have failed. The majority — seeking not a heavy-handed return to America’s racially exclusionary past but steps toward its multiracial democratic future — continue to sympathize with the protesters. Not only do most Americans disapprove of the way Mr. Trump is handling his job, but an unprecedented majority now embraces ethnic diversity and racial equality, two essential pillars of multiracial democracy. Yet translating this new multiethnic majority into a governing majority has been difficult. Democracy is supposed to be a game of numbers: The party with the most votes wins. In our political system, however, the majority does not govern. Constitutional design and recent political geographic trends — where Democrats and Republicans live — have unintentionally conspired to produce what is effectively becoming minority rule. Our Constitution was designed to favor small (or low-population) states. Small states were given representation equal to that of big states in the Senate and an advantage in the Electoral College. What began as a minor small-state advantage evolved, over time, into a vast overrepresentation of rural states. For most of our history, this rural bias did not tilt the partisan playing field much because both major parties maintained huge urban and rural wings. Editors’ Picks Despite Everything, People Still Have Weddings at ‘Plantation’ Sites Yes, There Will Be an Oscar Season. But What Will It Look Like? He Was a Rising Jazz Pianist. Then His N.Y.C. Dreams Were Shattered. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Today, however, American parties are starkly divided along urban-rural lines: Democrats are concentrated in big metropolitan centers, whereas Republicans are increasingly based in sparsely populated territories. This gives the Republicans an advantage in the Electoral College, the Senate and — because the president selects Supreme Court nominees and the Senate approves them — the Supreme Court. Recent U.S. election results fly in the face of majority rule. Republicans have won the popular vote for president only once in the last 20 years and yet have controlled the presidency for 12 of those 20 years. Democrats easily won more overall votes for the U.S. Senate in 2016 and 2018, and yet the Republicans hold 53 of 100 seats. The 45 Democratic and two independent senators who caucus with them represent more people than the 53 Republicans. This is minority rule. An electoral majority may not be enough for the Democrats to win the presidency this year either. According to the FiveThirtyEight presidential model, if Joe Biden wins the popular vote by one to two points, there is an 80 percent chance that Mr. Trump wins the presidency again. If Mr. Biden wins by two to three points, Mr. Trump is still likely to win. Mr. Biden must win by six points or more to have a near lock on the presidency. Senate elections are similarly skewed. For Democrats today, then, winning a majority of the vote is not enough. They must win by big margins. Michelle Alexander on the power of this summer’s protests Opinion | Michelle Alexander America, This Is Your Chance We must get it right this time or risk losing our democracy forever. June 8, 2020 The problem is exacerbated by Republican efforts to dampen turnout among younger, lower-income and minority voters. Republican state governments have purged voter rolls and closed polling places on college campuses and in predominantly African-American neighborhoods, and since 2010, a dozen Republican-led states have passed laws making it more difficult to register or vote. Minority rule has, in turn, skewed the composition of the Supreme Court. Under Mr. Trump, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh became the first two Supreme Court justices in history to be appointed by a president who lost the popular vote and then be confirmed by senators who represented less than half the electorate. Amy Coney Barrett is likely to become the third. In America today, then, the majority does not govern. This disjuncture cries out for reform. We must double down on democracy. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story This means above all defending and expanding the right to vote. HR-1 and HR-4, a package of reforms approved by the House of Representatives in 2019 but blocked by the Senate, is a good start. HR-1 would establish nationwide automatic and same-day registration, expand early and absentee voting, prohibit flawed purges that remove eligible voters from the rolls, require independent redistricting commissions to draw congressional maps, and restore voting rights to convicted felons who have served their time. HR-4 would fully restore the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was gutted by the Supreme Court’s Shelby County vs. Holder ruling in 2013. Doubling down on democracy also means reforms that empower majorities, such as eliminating the Senate filibuster. The filibuster, which was rarely used during much of the 20th century, has turned into a routine instrument of legislative obstruction. There were more Senate filibusters over the last two decades than in the previous eight. All meaningful legislation now effectively requires 60 votes, which amounts to a permanent minority veto. A democratic reform agenda should also include an offer of statehood to the District of Columbia and to Puerto Rico, which would provide full and equal representation to nearly four million Americans who are currently disenfranchised. And it should include elimination of the Electoral College. The House last voted in favor of a constitutional amendment in 1969, but the proposal died in the Senate, at the hands of old segregationist interests. (As Senator James Allen of Alabama put it: “The Electoral College is one of the South’s few remaining political safeguards. Let’s keep it.”) Not only would ending minority rule be inherently democratic, but, importantly, it would also encourage the Republican Party to abandon its destructive course of radicalization. Normally, political parties change course when they lose elections. But in America today there is a hitch: Republicans can win and exercise power without building national electoral majorities. Excessively counter-majoritarian institutions blunt Republicans’ incentive to adapt to a changing American electorate. As long as the Republicans can hold onto power without broadening beyond their shrinking base, they will remain prone to the kind of extremism and demagogy that currently threatens our democracy. There is ample precedent for democratic reform in America. A century ago, like today, the United States experienced disruptive economic change, an unprecedented influx of migrants and the growth of behemoth corporations. Citizens believed that their political system had become corrupt and dysfunctional. Progressive reform advocates like Herbert Croly argued that Americans were living in a democracy with antiquated institutions designed for an agrarian society, which left our political system ill-equipped to cope with the problems of an industrial age and vulnerable to corporate capture. The response was a sweeping reform movement that remade our democracy. Key reforms — then regarded as radical but now taken for granted — included the introduction of party primaries; the expansion of the citizen referendum; and constitutional amendments allowing a national income tax, establishing the direct election of U.S. senators and extending suffrage to women. American democracy thrived in the 20th century in part because it was able to reform itself. Critics of reform assert that counter-majoritarian institutions are essential to liberal democracy. We agree. That’s what the Bill of Rights and judicial review are for: to help ensure that individual liberties and minority rights are protected under majority rule. But disenfranchisement is not a feature of modern liberal democracy. No other established democracy has an Electoral College or makes regular use of the filibuster. And a political system that repeatedly allows a minority party to control the most powerful offices in the country cannot remain legitimate for long. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Democracy requires more than majority rule. But without majority rule, there is no democracy. Either we become a truly multiracial democracy or we cease to be a democracy at all. More from Levitsky and Ziblatt on democracy’s woes

Early Morning Rain

I'm rereading and thinking about E.B. White's classic essay "Once More to the Lake" in which he recounts visiting a lake from his childhood in Maine which brings back memories of childhood which allows him to consider both the impermanent things of life and the permanent things of life. My visit to the lake this morning is early morning rain in Pelham where I live. There is no great philosophical substance to early morning rain as far as I can discern. But it is one of the permanent things of our life that can invite reflection if the rain is not spoiling your day, ruining some plans you may have. My take on the early morning rain falling on my house is that it normally doesn't rain much in October where I live, but I see a slow, drizzling rain this morning that looks like it might last all day. This has been an unusual year, hasn't it? Perhaps an early morning rain in a normally dry month breaking up the usual Indian Summer is just what we need. I see the rain as a sign of hope rather than resignation, a slow soaking of the earth that keeps us active and engaged. Let it rain. I have nowhere to go today. I am free to reflect. The rain does not bring back any childhood memories like the lake did for White, but the continuing regularity of nature is something to calm the soul.

Gallagher on Vicksburg

The Enduring Civil War: Reflections on the great American crisis Gary W. Gallagher / UVA historian emeritus. Having driven across the river twice in recent months Vicksburg has been much on my mind. I have this big volume on Grant's Vicksburg campaign by Donald L. Miller which has been near the top of my never-ending pile of must-read books. Even though the details of military battles does not interest me (I hated ROTC in college---I've been waiting for years for a chance to say this) I was thinking that maybe I should read the latest and greatest on Vicksburg to stay up to speed in Civil War historiography. That tension has eased somewhat as Prof. Gallagher tells me that Vicksburg is important in understanding the War with General Scott and his Anaconda Plan (surely you remember this), but its importance has been exaggerated. The Yankees took New Orleans in May of 1862 and that may have been more important than Vicksburg. I have decided that I can live without understanding the details of Grant's siege of Vicksburg and famous taking of that seemingly impregnable Confederate fortress in July of 1864 which broke the back of the Confederacy along with Gettysburg. Details matter most to those people who have a compulsion to actually do the math. That's not me. I just want to understand conceptually and let you actually do the math. The same with understanding the significance of the outcome of battles rather than understanding the details of who shot whom and when.

Gallagher on Shelby Foote

The Enduring Civil War: Reflections on the great American crisis Gary W. Gallagher / UVA historian emeritus Everybody remembers Shelby Foote from the Ken Burns series on the Civil War. Gallagher gives backhanded compliments to Shelby Foote while dissing him as an historian. Foote was a great stylist writing Ernest Hemingway like prose with short, choppy sentences. Foote is a great read! Foote did his homework, but was not thorough the way professional historians would be. Foote proudly says, "I am a Mississippian" and his views reflect a Lost Cause mentality. "I don't think the South ever had a chance to win that war." The North won because of overwhelming resources and manpower. This is a common misconception about the war reflective of historical ignorance. Only historians with a Southern bias would agree with Foote. I can picture Shelby Foote and Bill Faulkner sipping bourbon in the backyard at Rowan Oak agreeing on everything about the war.

Message of Hope

Friends As a Saturday message of hope and inspiration to those of you heading to a post-65 life, I can say from experience that once you get past the first wave of increasing awareness of your mortality, the finitude of life, regrets about the past, lost opportunities, and failed ambitions the psychology of the post-65 life is fulfilling. You have much to look forward to once you get past the above obstacles. In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect wood-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. -Ernest Hemingway

The Knowledge Machine

 BOOKS OF THE TIMES

Modern Science Didn’t Appear Until the 17th Century. What Took So Long?

By Jennifer Szalai

• Oct. 7, 2020

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The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman once recalled a friend, an artist, who would say that he could properly appreciate the beauty of a flower, while a scientist like Feynman always insisted on taking the flower apart and making it dull. Of course, Feynman disagreed. “I can imagine the cells inside, which also have a beauty,” Feynman wrote, calling his friend’s prejudice “nutty.” “There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower.”

I thought of Feynman’s good-natured defense while reading “The Knowledge Machine,” a provocative and fascinating book by the philosopher Michael Strevens that mostly enthralled me, even as a couple of parts set my teeth on edge. But that’s just the nature of opinion and disputation, something that Strevens would surely understand, given his argument that opinion and disputation play an essential role in the scientific world. While modern science is built on the primacy of empirical data — appealing to the objectivity of facts — actual progress requires determined partisans to move it along.

Science has produced some extraordinary elements of modern life that we take for granted: imaging devices that can peer inside the body without so much as a cut; planes that hurtle through the air at hundreds of miles an hour. But human civilization has existed for millenniums, and modern science — as distinct from ancient and medieval science, or so-called natural philosophy — has only been around for a few hundred years. What took so long? “Why wasn’t it the ancient Babylonians putting zero-gravity observatories into orbit around the earth,” Strevens asks, “the ancient Greeks engineering flu vaccines and transplanting hearts?”

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The Scientific Revolution of the 17th century yielded the figure of the modern scientist, single-mindedly dedicated to collecting empirical evidence and testing hypotheses against it. Strevens, who studied mathematics and computer science before turning to philosophy, says that transforming ordinary thinking humans into modern scientists entails “a morally and intellectually violent process.” So much scientific research takes place under conditions of “intellectual confinement” — painstaking, often tedious work that requires attention to minute details, accounting for fractions of an inch and slivers of a degree. Strevens gives the example of a biologist couple who spent every summer since 1973 on the Galápagos, measuring finches; it took them four decades before they had enough data to conclude that they had observed a new species of finch.

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Michael Strevens, author of “The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science.”Credit...Jessica Herman

This kind of obsessiveness has made modern science enormously productive, but Strevens says there is something fundamentally irrational and even “inhuman” about it. He points out that focusing so narrowly, for so long, on tedious work that may not come to anything is inherently unappealing for most people. Rich and learned cultures across the world pursued all kinds of erudition and scholarly traditions, but didn’t develop this “knowledge machine” until relatively recently, Strevens says, for precisely that reason. The same goes for brilliant, intellectually curious individuals like Aristotle, who generated his own theory about physics but never proposed anything like the scientific method.

According to “The Knowledge Machine,” it took a cataclysm to disrupt the longstanding way of looking at the world in terms of an integrated whole. The Thirty Years’ War in Europe — which started over religion and ended, after killing millions, with a system of nation-states — made compartmentalization look good. Religious identity would be private; political identity would be public. Not that this partition was complete in the 17th century, but Strevens says it opened up the previously unfathomable possibility of sequestering science. The timing also happened to coincide with the life of Isaac Newton, who became known for his groundbreaking work in mathematics and physics. Even though Newton was an ardent alchemist with a side interest in biblical prophecy, he supported his scientific findings with empirical inquiry; he was, Strevens argues, “a natural intellectual compartmentalizer” who arrived at a fortuitous time.

So modern science began, accruing its enormous power through what Strevens calls “the iron rule of explanation,” requiring scientists to settle arguments by empirical testing, imposing on them a common language “regardless of their intellectual predilections, cultural biases or narrow ambitions.” Individual scientists can believe whatever they want to believe, and their individual modes of reasoning can be creative and even wild, but in order to communicate with one another, in scientific journals, they have to abide by this rule. The motto of England’s Royal Society, founded in 1660, is “Nullius in verba”: “Take nobody’s word for it.”

Strevens’s book contains a number of surprises, including an elegant section on quantum mechanics that coolly demonstrates why it’s such an effective theory, deployed in computer chips and medical imaging, even if physicists who have made ample use of it (like Feynman) have said that nobody, themselves included, truly understands it. Strevens also has some pretty uncharitable things to say about the majority of working scientists, painting them as mostly uncreative drones, purged of all nonscientific curiosity by a “program of moralizing and miseducation.” The great scientists were exceptions because they escaped the “deadening effects” of this inculcation; the rest are just “the standard product of this system”: “an empiricist all the way down.”

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He may well be right, but from a book about the history of science, I wanted more proof. Then again, “The Knowledge Machine” is ultimately a work of philosophy, and should be considered an ambitious thought experiment. Strevens builds on the work of philosophers like Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn to come up with his own original hypothesis about the advent of modern science and its formidable consequences. The machine in Strevens’s title has scientists pursuing their work relentlessly while also abiding by certain rules of the game, allowing even the most vehement partisans to talk with one another.

And Strevens doesn’t even leave it at that. Climate change, pandemics — he comes up to the present day, ending on a grim but resolute note, hopeful that scientists will adapt and find a better way to communicate with a suspicious public. “We’ve pampered and praised the knowledge machine, given it the autonomy it has needed to grow,” he writes. “Now we desperately need its advice.”

Follow Jennifer Szalai on Twitter: @jenszalai.

The Knowledge Machine
How Irrationality Created Modern Science
By Michael Strevens
Illustrated. 350 pages. Liveright. $30.