David Lowenthal and the Quest for the Unity of Knowledge

This book, David Lowenthal’s last, grew out of a series of lectures in September 2012 hosted by the then newly started KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory in the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. The final lecture became the first of what is now an ongoing series of annual Stockholm Archipelago lectures in environmental humanities, just then taking off as an intellectual field (Rose et al. 2012; Sörlin 2012). The lecture has since been held by an anthropologist, a historian, a writer-journalist, a philosopher, and two geographers, Laura Pulido and Noel Castree.

Lowenthal was expressly not expected to write a new book, which was, of course, what he did. He just needed to finish his revision of The Past Is a Foreign Country (Lowenthal 2015) and Michael Williams’s (2014) biography of Carl Sauer. All lectures were transcribed, but he would rather write with notes, from scratch: “It will be better then.” When he passed away in September 2018, he had seen but not corrected the proofs.

The Necessity and Cost of Giving in to Temptation

The quest for the unity of knowledge, David Lowenthal says in this remarkable book, is a temptation. Like all temptations, it comes at a cost. Perhaps the cost has become too high. The book ends with an observation made by Natalie Angier about microbial suicide. Bacteria in a petri dish, if fueled by sugar, will grow so quickly that they all die from the acidic waste they produce. Their systemic properties have grown beyond their own capacity. “Our petri dish is the whole world,” Lowenthal notes, and “we” are nothing less than humanity (p. 196). In distinction from microbes, we can’t claim we didn’t know.

Bringing all knowledge under the same formula is a temptation—and one that we should allow ourselves, Lowenthal says in this book. He did himself, in his uniquely encyclopedic fashion, as did Descartes, Newton, Galilei, Alexander von Humboldt, and Auguste Comte, all the way up to what Lowenthal calls the mid-twentieth-century Harvard–MIT synthesizers—systems thinkers, cyberneticians, joining matter, energy, and space with love, god, faith, and soul.

As soon as Lowenthal has demonstrated the allure of unity, however, he has another treasure trove of quotes that ridicules the quest and throws you back to love of detail, “the diversity of insight,” (p. 192) as he calls it, often argued from the humanists: a Carlyle, a Kierkegaard. Then he goes back to unity again, then defending diversity, back and forth, ad infinitum. Although perhaps you sense that deep in his heart he ultimately stays with the diversifiers, those who take apart and critique, find the exception, rather than build the utopian pan-sophias.

Lowenthal is connecting dots, all over the world, through all ages, although mostly the modern period and especially the last 200 years. He covers islands, continents, and landscapes. The untrained reader might think it is all random, but the experienced scholar diving in deeply figures the pattern out. One could think impressionist, even ­pointilliste—but with the master’s brush a wonderful, ­hologram composition emerges.

The book is short, less than 200 pages of text—and a very long index because there is so much in it! Marxism is there. Margaret Thatcher is there. The Anthropocene is there. There are 1,600 other entries, making up what seems almost like an aggrandized version of Jorge Luis Borges’s version of the Emperor’s Library, a strange taxonomy of everything—assembled over a life span of ninety-five years.

The index speaks to what we might call a technology of writing in Lowenthal’s later work, in this book as well as in The Past Is a Foreign Country, in both its incarnations (Lowenthal [1985] 2015). I don’t know exactly his reasoning behind this; perhaps it is a quest for the brevity of knowledge, or, you could say, a humanities’ Occam’s razor: Only what is absolutely necessary should be provided. This means that his captivating prose moves forward with infinite care, on a sentence-by-sentence, quote-by-quote model. This also explains the density of the index; every paragraph of the book provides an average of three entries.

He cites with amusement economists and physicists—and certainly geographers—who worship numbers beyond the reasonable. He also finds humanists in the same camp. Historian J. B. Bury professed his loyalty to progress in his 1903 Cambridge inaugural: “History is a science, no less and no more” (p. 16). Some unifiers would mathematize in God’s name: “We were scientists and scientists were God’s own people, if they weren’t God himself” (p. 16).

The quantifying spirit grew to an all-time high in the post–World War II decades, fueling unifiers across the disciplinary spectrum. Ultimately Lowenthal even finds himself, of all people, as a valid illustration of his argument, crunching numbers in a 1960s well-funded research project. This was a rare moment of deviation from his literary-based landscape studies, and not one of his finest, he seems to think. Many geographers walked down a similar path. Historians did, too. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, pioneer of a modern climate history, at one point suggested that “history that is not quantifiable cannot claim to be scientific.” A half-century later it sounds at least questionable.

One of the secrets of Lowenthal’s writing is how he manages to get his own opinion across merely by citing those of others. The words are quoted and the facts are borrowed, but the selection, the organization of the elements of the text, and the tone and arc of the narrative is how he exerts his master magic on the reader. He is tacitly critiquing while quoting. It is an exercise of distancing more than sympathizing.

He detests bad writing as much as he denounces false pretense of numbers. He is rarely more passionate than when he can indulge in scholarship that has dried into cryptic scraps of oddities, often marshaled in corrupt grammar. Some disciplines fare worse than others. “Literary criticism dehumanized into semiotics,” noted Gertrude Himmelfarb, “theology into semantics.” Sociology turned into a pretentious “jargon of vehement obscurity,” said George Steiner (pp. 18–19). It was a disease of the quest for unity.

Robert Fogel’s computational analysis of slavery in America was the end of “jargon-free history”—but it won Fogel a Nobel Prize for economics (p. 9). In such statements Lowenthal summarizes much more than what is actually said, and that is true of most of his sentences, in contrast to the betrayal of style and communication that he cites as warnings—of too much belief in the unity or the disunity of knowledge. Clearly, the lovers of the concrete and the detail are victims of similar diseases as the grandiose unifiers.

Verbose, whimsical ruminations are everywhere in academic prose and although sometimes entertaining they often lack any organizing principle. “Words, words, words,” could have been a response by Lowenthal just as well as Hamlet. Imprecision and too many words, he wanted to say, serve as an abuse of social position and of that little bit of specialist knowledge that academics adorn themselves with, failing to see what fools they sometimes make of themselves.

Abnormal Science

Another effect of this volume is that it spares you the effort of having to read the boring parts of all the thousand books that Lowenthal has read for us. He has brought together the best moments so that, for example, he could turn the Alan Sokal hoax and the science wars of the 1990s into a one-page parody. No eye can be dry when reading this hilarious slalom of nonsense in double or triple goose-eyes. Malcolm Bradbury’s parody of Derrida, echoing Sokal’s trick, gave voice to deconstructivist thinker “Henri Mensonge,” who acted as a kind of unifier of knowledge, talking about—“the centreless centre, the presentless present, the writerless writing, the signless sign that would draw everything together and put it into its true lack of relation” (p. 22).

At the other end of the spectrum are the unifying psychologists, in whom he finds cases just as bizarre; for example, Barbara Frederickson’s infamous claim that human emotions appear in a law-like fashion following a Lorenz differential equation. “Love, joy, gratitude, serenity, and hope are more than literary terms. They are also scientific terms that can be … measured with precision” (p. 23).

These are extremes, but there is also “normal” science, to use Thomas Kuhn’s term. Most of us dwell there for most of our time, but nothing is perfectly stable in the worlds of words and not even in those of numbers. This oscillation between the quest for unity and the love of detail is part of everyone working with the pretty demanding task to move the frontiers of knowledge, if only marginally. We are also humans. We are captured by emotions, we wish things to be a certain way, we are seduced by orderly beauty, and we turn away too quickly from the unruly ugly.

So, although we might laugh and cry at this parade of follies in the name of science and learning, we must also see ourselves in it. Lowenthal’s book does precisely that. After a while the reader realizes that this madhouse of ideas contains some of the most remarkable thinking that humans have achieved; the index has the names of the foremost men and women in the history of Western ideas. After yet a few more moments, the reader starts realizing that Lowenthal also writes about himself, that this quest and its perils and pitfalls is his own Dantean journey through the spheres of horrors and temptations, led by the light of love but never really certain whether the road taken was the right one.

Seeing Ourselves in the Landscape of Learning

Ultimately, the reader will realize that this eternal quest, and the ceaseless navigation between the ditches on either side, is also about her- or himself. It is a moral lecture, a view from some more enhanced position down on us in the valley, a little bit like a Breughel painting: an entire world of human, albeit mostly Western, endeavor looked at from a distance, as if we were looking at a landscape where we could slow down the individual motions and actions of the moment and bring them to dwell in a “long now.” After all, we are not very different from farmers and huntsmen, or dancers in a village; we might feel as if we were skaters on a frozen ice of theory. We realize that we are part of history, too.

It might seem frightening first, to be dwarfed like that into a mass of ethnography, a prop on the big stage of learning. After some time, though, the scholar and reader somehow accepts this role and finds it comforting, as a sense of belonging.

Another way of seeing it is to think of the world of learning as a Wunderkammer. It is a child’s dream world, so the secret is to remain a child. It will keep you alive for almost a hundred years, and it probably helps if you keep curiosity open. It was said of Eric Hobsbawm, “he knows of everything.” He became a hundred years old. Lowenthal lived with all this knowledge and his sources reveal, as openly as a criminal investigation that he went wherever he needed to find what he was looking for. In that quest for knowledge you can’t help getting into myriads of detail. Over time, though, you can’t help also putting the details together into larger patterns of understanding. I think Lowenthal wanted us to do both, but also to avoid thinking that one was nobler or more helpful than the other.

The Diversity of Insight

Ultimately, in all its appetite, this is a book about a simple and humble creed: We have inherited the world from our ancestors, and not just the physical world, but even more its cultures and societies. History, often mocked by scientists and economists as useless and unscientific, is what we are made of. Émile Durkheim, the sociologist, said it well enough for Lowenthal to quote him: “Each generation inherits a treasury of knowledge that it did not itself amass. We speak a language we did not create; we use instruments we did not invent; we claim rights we did not establish” (p. 157).

That was one of Lowenthal’s deepest credos, the importance of heritage and of history. Still, history taken seriously is very difficult. It is “full of faint glimpses of things that cannot be reached,” as Herbert Butterfield put it. Or, as Flaubert said, “history is like drinking an ocean and spitting a cupful” (p. 158). In a sense, Lowenthal’s last book is that cupful. Most chapters of this book started in some other context, often decades ago. They are themes he lived rather than just researched. They matured in him to this exquisite density and richness.

At the end he reveals his sympathy for the nonverifiers, the “diversity of insight.” It is a fine balance. In the microbial study he finds this insight in the need to weigh the individual quest against the sense and welfare of the collective: “Everywhere in nature as in culture the interplay between community and individual, cooperation and selfishness, has ecological consequences that magnify as processes globalize” (p. 196). These words echo Darwin’s: “we may be all netted together.”

The environmental humanities can take many forms, depending on who is writing. Few authors can approach the subject of the “unity of knowledge”—in the environment, and beyond—from such a rich background as David Lowenthal. His own life history has closely followed the life histories of crucial polymaths. Carl O. Sauer was one. Another was George Perkins Marsh, one of the great nineteenth-century thinkers, whose Man and Nature was a precursor of sorts to the environmental humanities. Lowenthal has written his biography twice—first in 1958 (Lowenthal 1958), and again as George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation in 2000 (Lowenthal 2000).

Rethinking old quests for understanding, for holistic, more-than-disciplinary knowledge that is ethical, meaningful, and inspiring, has created a great polymath for the twenty-first century in David Lowenthal. This book is more than a reflection on the environmental humanities; it is a reflection on a lifetime of questing for the unity of knowledge.

British Academy;