Rosaleen Love
The History Of Wrong Ideas, And Their
Future
From: Sohail Inayatullah and
Paul Wildman, Futures Studies: Methods, Emerging Issues and
Civilisational Visions, CDROM, Prosperity Press, 1998.
I come to writing about the future from a deep and abiding interest
in the history of wrong ideas. I am interested in the question of
just what makes an idea a wrong idea. Once it was probably a
'right' idea which contributed to the way people understood their
world, the world of `what is'. Then it becomes an idea which no
longer describes `what is' but instead describes `what can't be'.
In similar vein, the knowledge base of futures studies might be
taken as constituted by ideas, yet to be labelled right or wrong,
about ‘what might be’.
If I make use of the past to speculate upon the future, I do so in
a spirit of fun. Sometimes I write short stories with a science
fiction or fantasy twist, stories which take off from a 'what if?'
premise and play with taking a metaphor literally. This is where
the history of wrong ideas comes in handy. Both the history of
ideas and speculative fiction tell stories of `what is, what might
be, what can't be', whether in the extrapolative, the cautionary,
or the alternate world mode.
Here are some thoughts on how I've come to do what I do.
One theme I've explored in a variety of ways has been the theme of
women and science. In 1982 I wrote a study guide for Deakin
University on Darwin and Social Darwinism. From its origins in
1859, Darwin’s theory of evolution totally transformed our
understanding of our origins, our relationships to each other, to
other animals, to society and to the environment. The theory of
evolution, or gradual change by means of the mechanism of natural
selection, is one of those great `right ideas' nestling as the
kernel of truth amid all kinds of fantastic `wrong ideas'. To talk
about `right' and `wrong' here might seem a bit peculiar, for
historians would rightly argue that all ideas, including our own,
are more properly understood in their social context. It is way
ideas work in practice in context that matters, rather than
retrospective judgment.
Consider the rich variety of ways in which the idea of evolution was
exploited in the years following the acceptance of the broad
features of Darwin's theory. Social Darwinism is the term used to
label various social prescriptions and descriptions on the
relation of the natural to the social world, writing which claimed
the authority of science, even though different social Darwinists
used this authority to come to different, sometimes contradictory
conclusions. One school of thought claimed co-operation was a
social consequence of our biological origins, while another took
ruthless competition between people as 'natural' and hence
necessary for the advance of civilisation. What struck me in the
various histories of social Darwinist thought was that the social
Darwinists seemed to be all men. Where were the views of women? In
the Victorian Age and after in Britain, America and Australia,
surely there must have been some women who adapted evolutionary
thought to their political advantage. When I went looking for
these women in history, I found them (as one does).
I enjoyed reading Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Olive Schreiner, and Louisa
Macdonald, but I wanted more. These late nineteenth and early
twentieth century women relished manipulating scientific theories
of women’s place to their own ends. Each chose the values of
social co-operation over those of social competition. Each wanted
evolutionary science to justify the vote, education, and full
participation in public life for women. Each turned upside down
the words of those who gave a biological rationale for keeping
women as unpaid wives and mothers. They made magnificent use of
their own interpretation of Darwinism, creating a social biology
which they used as a basis for social reform, though their version
of evolutionary biology fits squarely in the category of the
history of wrong ideas. Both Gilman and Schreiner wrote best
sellers for their times, Gilman on Women and Economics (1898) and
Schreiner on Woman and Labour (1911).
I said I wanted more from Gilman and Schreiner. I wanted them, from
their perspective at the end of the nineteenth century, to have
been right in their predictions for the future of women. It hasn't
happened, yet, not the egalitarian outcomes they yearned for.
Still, this disjunction comes in handy for something. It provides
fuel for the satirist. As both a feminist and a satirist of
feminism, I was inspired to write a short story 'Evolution Annie'.
What if it wasn't man the aggressive hunter who led humans along
the path to evolutionary progress, but women the gardener and
camp-site maker? I had fun writing the story. The science was
fanciful, the anthropology highly suspect, but then, so it is in
'man the hunter' stories. I was doing a Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
taking the bits that pleased me and shaping them to my own ends.
The story begins:
You know all those stories of
origins, those myths of our beginnings. `A group of animals lived
in the trees', they start, and continue with the saga of how one
day, down we came, we discovered the plains and the joys of
upright posture we stood up, looked around, and decided to stay.
That wasn't how it happened, not
how it happened at all . . .
Call me Annie, Evolution Annie.
Let me tell you the story of our beginnings.
We didn't decide to come down
from the trees as an act of free choice. We fell out of the trees,
and had to make the best of our new circumstances. It wasn't
Father whom the boys killed and ate one day in the (alleged) first
act of ritual communion. It was Mother who decided someone had to
go, so she ... but that is getting ahead of my story. ...
Satire swings in when exasperation with the status quo gets too
much. Laughter helps when nothing else seems to.
In my work I also explore current issues in science and technology,
again with particular reference to women. From 1980-1990 women
were invited to contribute, both as panel members and
participants, to the nascent public consultation process in
Australia. At last there seemed to be a place where the voices of
concerned citizens could feed constructively into government
decision-making on large science and technology projects. I
studied inquiries where women were active as observers, recipients
and critics of science, for still today there are comparatively
few women working as scientific professionals. I wanted to explore
women's visions of `what might be' in Australia.
Public consultation processes were set up in the Powerline Review
Panel of 1985, and the 1990 inquiry by the Australian House of
Representatives Standing Committee on Industry, Science and
Technology into the release of genetically modified organisms into
the environment. The 1980s were an exciting time in experiments in
public consultation. At last there was recognition of the fact
that no professional ever has full knowledge, that the local
knowledge of a community might add to expert knowledge to mutually
productive ends. The virtue of consultation is that it lessens the
partial view of the world that is an essential part of the
explosion in scientific specialisms, and at last it seems as if
that aspect of the information explosion was being formally
recognised. With the trend towards a more democratic system of
technical decision making, it appeared as if women might at last
enter the public life of science as 'community experts' working
towards a safer future.
My guiding image was of a country woman hanging out clothes to dry
on the line. She may use one of the environmentally friendly
detergents, so labelled, and the washing may be clean enough, at
least to start with, but as she hangs it out, the pesticide drift
descends from the aerial spraying of crops. She sees the spots on
her washing, and wonders about what else is happening in her
community. Disease clusters, of leukemia, or cleft palate
malformations in babies, have occurred in country Australia, in
Emerald, Coffs Harbour and Wangaratta. The connection between
aerial crop spraying and disease clusters is hotly contested, and
not easily made in one conceptual leap from the washing on the
line. Yet these incidents lead to important questions about
present technological practices more broadly, whether in
agriculture or energy use, or the consumption of non-renewable
resources. Alongside general environmental concerns, the public
perception that there are risks associated with pesticides lends
itself to a grass roots epidemiology, which should no longer be
discounted as `radical fringe'.
It could be argued, what would a woman hanging out the clothes know
about health risks, compared with the established knowledge of
medicine, statistics, and chemistry? Yet there is something in the
common sense intuitive reaction, that what is bad news for pests
is likely to be bad news for other non-target species, including
humans. It has proved a short step for some women from hanging out
the washing, to full scale environmental activism.
There were some victories in the 1980's. The powerline was
re-routed, for example, so that it would no longer pass over a
school yard. But with the changes in government in Australia, both
state and federally, the policy of public consultation was put on
hold. Consultation is a herky-jerky process, says James Masters,
who was invited to Australia to provide advice, as Director of the
Center for Community Futures at Berkeley, California, just before
the 1992 change of government in Victoria. He was right. In this
case, it was one step forward, then two back. Still, the vision of
community futures which include the public consultation process
and the multi-disciplinary panel of review remains, and gives an
idea of how technocratic decision making might one day become a
more radically democratic process. There will be new ways of
theorising the nature of science and technology and their
interactions with other human institutions, and with that great
non-human institution, nature.
I finished my article on `Doing the herky-jerky' with a few
paragraphs on 'imagining the future for women', words which rose
from frustration at the way I could see the consultation process
grinding to a halt, at least where I live. I find release in
satire. Satire, I believe, can rise above the charge often
levelled at it, that it uses mockery in defence of a conservative
status quo. It's not the conservative status quo I want. That is
what I send up. Rather, satire in its fantastic guises builds on
subjunctivities, the notion that `things could be otherwise'. To
know what is the case often means to know very well what is not
the case, what or who the present way of doing things is
excluding. Often policy processes exclude the voices of women.
Fantasy helps here, adding a `negative subjunctivity'. Fantasy is
fantasy because it contravenes the real. Yet it's still there, the
actual world, still constantly implicit in fantasy, by negation.
In writing fantasy I like to spin off from 'what is' to all the
possibilities the real world excludes. Women do not really become
'old bats' as they age, but what if they did? In what ways might
metamorphosis provide new energy for the older, discarded woman?
The world is everything we can imagine, and imagining
metamorphosis from old woman to bat can make us laugh at women,
men and bats.
I want to help create a future world in which there will be more
possibility for laughter.
References
Samuel L. Delany 1971, About Five Thousand One Hundred and Seventy
Five Words, in Thomas D. Clareson (ed) SF: The Other Side of
Realism, Bowling Green University Popular Press, Bowling Green,
Ohio, pp. 130-46.
Rosaleen Love 1983, Darwinism and Feminism: The `Woman Question' in
the Life and Work of Olive Schreiner and Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
in D. Oldroyd and I Langham (eds) The Wider Domain of Evolutionary
Thought, D. Reidel Publishing Company, Amsterdam, pp. 113-131.
Rosaleen Love 1992 The public perception of risk, Prometheus, Vol. 10, pp. 17-29.
Rosaleen Love 1993, Doing the Herky-Jerky: Women in the Public Life
of Science, in Farley Kelly (ed) On
the Edge of Discovery. Australian Women in Science, The Text
Publishing Company, Melbourne, pp. 179-198
