The working class hero in arts and letters continues to capture the modern imagination, whatever your political bent. It’s rarer to see in the logical sciences, where pure a priori judgements are prized, those that insist on a kind of hands-off knowledge independent of experience.
The writings of J. B. S. Haldane seem to be an exception. Richard Dawkins describes him in The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing as a “pugnacious” man who “believed in bringing science to working men” (2008, 53). Knowing this, it’s hard not to see in Haldane’s science writing a subtext that advances a working class poetics.
For instance here is how Haldane ‘right sizes’ the dimensions of a 60-foot man which he estimates to be about the height of Giant Pope and Giant Pagan from the illustrated Pilgrim’s Progress of his childhood:
“These monsters were not only ten times as high as Christian, but ten times as wide and ten times as thick, so that their total weight was a thousand times his, or about eighty to ninety tons. Unfortunately the cross-sections of their bones were only a hundred times those of Christian, so that every square inch of giant bone had to support ten times the weight borne by a square inch of human bone. As the human thigh-bone breaks under about ten times the human weight, Pope and Pagan would have broken their thighs every time they took a step. This was doubtless why they were sitting down in the picture I remember. But it lessens one’s respect for Christian and Jack the Giant Killer” (“On Being the Right Size,” in Dawkins, ed.).
What the passage signals overtly is a shift in the greater weight of faith from 17th century religious allegory to the truth of physical forces, but I wouldn’t reduce this to a ‘loss of faith’ so much as its tempering or even an extending of the ways a spiritual journey may be mapped, assuming spirit and science aren’t opposed to each other. A second meaning is based on the view that the giants Pope and Pagan symbolize two religious extremes, “a dogmatic, highly structured religious organization on the one hand, and a godless free-for-all on the other hand” (ThinkingWest.com). Haldane’s math demonstrates these are two unsustainable excesses, making unnecessary and equally excessive any heroic slaying. This brings into view the question of a sustainable collective with respect to a shared set of beliefs and values and whether these are similarly ‘mappable.’ If multitudinous excess effectively cancels itself out by collapsing under its own weight, what purpose can be envisioned for a collective, and how to accurately gauge its dimensions?
Where Haldane writes “gravity is a terror” for a large animal, he explains that a small animal is less likely to suffer a fatal fall owing to its greater ability to overcome resistance, due to a reduction in surface area in proportion to its bulk. “(T)he resistance to falling in the case of the small animal is relatively ten times greater than the driving force” (55). Here he divides to demonstrate. “Divide an animal’s length, breadth, and height each by ten; its weight is reduced to a thousandth, but its surface only to a hundredth.”
On the other hand, where the amount of surface is limited, involutions and outfoldings are what’s needed, as with the development of human lungs or the gills of a fish. The point about surface area in terms of the question of a sustainable collective would have to do, I would say, in part with the development of a sense of interiority. The whole story of the struggle to increase surface area is the story of comparative anatomy itself, Haldane writes. As well, with respect to the sustaining institution, its largeness as a limit can be overcome by dividing. The lesson to take from that would not be an administrative carving up of territory in order to divide and conquer, rather a dividing up that lends itself to a multiplicity of diverse experiences.
But what is meant by interiority is also complicated. If it has to do with “subjective necessity” in the Kantian sense, this doesn’t mean the best judgement is one that accords with necessity, as what anyone in the same position would be compelled to do. That would amount to a sentimental response to a mathematical proposition made ‘coherent.’ It contains and conceals a judgement that a change must not only issue from necessity but that the result be thought in terms of there being something left behind. Correcting for this would give a sense of interiority that doesn’t get reduced to an absolute presenting itself as relative. And, since it has to do with the extraction of a judgement and bringing it into consciousness, it’s another way to overcome resistance without the use of physical force, abstention from which can be extended to the problem of flight in the physical world. Here Haldane again draws from the fantastical to say excessive force or musculature can produce ‘eagles as large as tigers’ and other monstrosities besides:
“An angel whose muscles developed no more power weight for weight than those of an eagle or a pigeon would require a breast projecting for about four feet to house the muscles engaged in working its wings, while to economize in weight, its legs would have to be reduced to mere stilts” (57).
If the faculty of the imagination understood as a power (Maxine Greene) is a better solution to limitations of power than a device that extends the reach and capacity of physical force, it would not be a flight of escape so much as a balancing with what is actual, something like what can be seen in nature. “Actually a large bird such as an eagle or kite does not keep in the air mainly by moving its wings. It is generally to be seen soaring, that is to say balanced on a rising column of air” (Haldane in Dawkins, 57).
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