Click here to listen to the episode on Spotify
In the forty-third episode of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with David N. Livingstone, Professor of Geography and Intellectual History Emeritus at Queen’s University Belfast. Livingstone opens by detailing the sufficiencies and insufficiencies of maps. As finite constructs devised for specific purposes, some maps, for example, may do a good job of offering expedient directions between two points. What those maps may lack, however, is the ability to note the cultural transitions people may experience while traveling between those points. Ream and Livingstone then transition to discussing Livingstone’s education and career in Belfast. Arching across much of the season known in Northern Ireland as The Troubles, Livingstone notes that although academic life at Queen’s University Belfast occurred relatively uninterrupted, daily life came to include observing security measures that became second nature. They also discuss a sample of Livingstone’s books including Dealing with Darwin, Livingstone’s widely cited Putting Science in Its Place, and Livingstone’s recently released The Empire of Climate. Ream and Livingstone then close their conversation by discussing the academic vocation, the virtues it demands, and the university’s responsibility for nurturing the commitments that define such a vocation.
- David N. Livingstone’s The Empire of Climate: A History of an Idea (Princeton University Press, 2024)
- David N. Livingstone’s Dealing with Darwin: Place, Politics, and Rhetoric in Religious Engagements with Evolution (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014)
- David N. Livingstone’s Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2003)
- David N. Livingstone’s Nathaniel Southgate Shaler and the Culture of American Science (University of Alabama Press, 1987)
Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.
—
Our guest is David N. Livingstone, Professor of Geography and Intellectual History Emeritus at Queen’s University Belfast. Thank you for joining us.
To begin, if I was at University College Dublin and wanted to visit Queen’s University Belfast, I’d need directions. And in the age in which we live, I may use Google Maps. Doing so, Google Maps would share that the best route is 172 kilometers, would take an hour and 55 minutes by car, 3 hours and 47 minutes by bus, 10 hours by bicycle, or if I was truly adventurous, 2 days by foot. It also tells me that I would cross a country border, pay tolls, and encounter construction along the way.
In your opinion, what am I learning when I’m using Google Maps? But then also, what am I not learning when I use a navigation platform such as Google Maps?
David Livingstone: Well, I don’t regularly use that particular route map since I know my way to University College Dublin and to Trinity College, of course. Well, I think the first thing to think about, Todd, here is that all maps are produced for a particular purpose. That is to say that they aren’t sort of omniscient. They don’t tell you everything that there is on, and that is not to make a criticism of them. It’s just to say that the function for which they are produced is different from one map, maybe to another.
So what you’ve talked to me about here is a roadmap and Google maps are pretty good for that purpose. They tell you how far it is. They give you an estimate of the length of time, possibilities of where there might be bottlenecks and where there will be freewares and where there are tolls and things of that sort.
But it would be a mistake to think that that’s the only significant thing that there would be in moving from Dublin’s capital to Ireland’s capital in Dublin to Belfast. For example, the map probably doesn’t have many landscape features, physical landscape features. I mean, you might get that in a printed map and you can infer when you’d be going through upland regions, whether you’re going along the coast and things of that sort, nor does it have, I imagine much about the cultural landscape, landscape that has been transformed by human occupants.
So right from the start, you can see that there are many things about that journey, cultural and physical, that the roadmap, which it does, it does its job very well, but it won’t do things of that sort. Um, you probably will have a sense that you would be crossing some sort of international boundary. It’s a strange international boundary, of course, because there’ll be very little by way of stopping and no checking of passports and things of that sort.
You might not also have a sense that you’re moving from a part of the European Union into a part of the United Kingdom that is not part of the European Union. If you want to come to Belfast and spend some money, you might need to know that there’s operating a different currency north of the border compared with the south. We still use sterling rather than the Euro and so on.
In this particular case, there’s unlikely to be language differences, but there were the Irish spoken at least in some parts of the Irish Republic. And you’ll find many signs that are in Irish rather than in English or more frequently both together. Now that has become a contested issue in Northern Ireland, where some would like there to be double signage and some parts of the community are very unhappy about that.
So this is all a roundabout way of saying that there are significant differences in how people have occupied the landscape, in what they understand their territory to be, where they understand a foreign nation to begin, where their own nation ends, and things of that sort.
And to generalize, and I’m not sure if this is really where you want to go with this question, Todd, but to generalize about this, I would refer to a now deceased historian of cartography by the name of Brian Harley. And Brian Harley wrote a lot of significant works, articles, and so on, on the general theme of maps, silences, and secrecy.
And what he was after was asking about any map where is it silent? You’re not going to find a map of the distribution of where for example, nuclear dumps are, because that would be controversial. And you probably won’t get a map of all the blue front doors in Northern Ireland, because it’s not considered too important. So there are judgments that always go into any piece of cartography.
And of course there are things that are deliberately kept secret. And of course, there is a tradition of using maps often in warfare for propaganda purposes so that the map will artificially overemphasize some particular feature at the expense of others, precisely for propaganda purposes. So those are generally some of the things that I would say in answer to that question. And I hope that’s scratching where your itch is about cartography and maps.
Todd Ream: Yeah, no, thank you. Well, my hope is to make that trip one day and to be aware that it may be more, not necessarily complicated in terms of just the directions of travel, but more complicated in terms of what I should stop and appreciate along the way and take in as I make the transition from one country to the next even though the drive is less than two hours in that regard. Because I’m not adventurous enough to do it by foot, probably.
David Livingstone: Well, I think that’s one of the very wise things you’ve just said to me this afternoon or this morning for you.
Todd Ream: Thank you. When thinking about the themes that define your work as a geographer and an intellectual historian, I encountered your argument that the relationship between location and locution is complicated and matters greatly. I also encountered your argument that the relationship between place and protocol is complicated and matters greatly.
Would you please unpack what you mean when you argue those relationships matter and are complicated?
David Livingstone: Well, the sort of thing that I have in mind can be at least initially looked at from the perspective of someone like myself who has spent his life in, in, in Northern Ireland. And given that Northern Ireland has been a place of political contestation and contestation with respect to identity, political allegiance, and things of that sort, I think that I grew up with an awareness of this, that you need to know who you are speaking to when you’re voicing opinions about controversial political matters.
So, things that you might say in one particular arena, and you might feel quite comfortable about saying those, might not be the case in another arena where your audience might be antagonistic or your audience might not be sympathetic to what you’re saying. Now I think I can generalize from that to a whole range of other issues to do with speech and space and what people can or cannot say or feel that they can say in different arenas. Let me make a couple of comments here.
For example, I think it’s perfectly possible for individuals to project different senses of their own self, their own selves, depending on the arenas in which they are working so that they kind of rig up maybe unconsciously, a model of the kind of person they want to project in one arena, as opposed to another arena.
Now, this means, of course, that in different venues, different locations, there are acceptable and unacceptable modes of speech. For example, take a courtroom. There is an appropriate set of vocabularies and behaviors that go along there. A person might be in a courtroom, that might be very different from how they would behave in a club, whether it might be a golf club or a nightclub or whatever, might be very different from the kind of speech that they would be accustomed to or would be expected in a church environment.
So in all of these environments, I think people develop quite a sensitivity, quite a fine sensitivity to what is appropriate to say. And that’s exactly what I mean about the relationship between, I think what you called place and protocol. There are appropriate ways of speaking in certain venues that there are, aren’t in others.
Now, I pursued this idea in several different arenas, as best I could. And when I use the word speech here, of course, when you work as I did in periods like the 19th century, you don’t go back and actually literally hear the speech, but you have records of what were said or written about and so on.
So when I was doing some work on the relationship between particularly, Presbyterian or Calvinist communities and how they encountered the theory of evolution that had been put forward by Charles Darwin and others, I began to discern that different attitudes prevailed in different locations. And part of the reason for that was that there were different kinds of cultural pressures, different cultural circumstances that pertained, say for example, in Belfast, which was very different from what was the case in Edinburgh. Or in the United States case, very different, say, in the old American South, compared with, say, somewhere like Princeton in the North.
I worked through these ways of thinking and speaking and conversing about Darwin and discerned that even though these communities very largely shared the same intellectual kind of furniture, their theological structure, would’ve signed up to the Westminster Confession of Faith. There were local particularities that impinged on what they felt they could say, what was acceptable to their communities, and therefore what their attitudes to somebody like Charles Darwin and Darwinism would be.
And let me just add one other final thing about this. I encountered this in the life of Charles Darwin himself. Darwin had a very interesting set of correspondences with the celebrated botanist, Hooker, in the 19th century. And in their letters, one of the issues that came up was what they would say about religion in their own family spaces.
And Darwin writes to Hooker and is very careful about what he can say, and says, you know, I’ve been very wary of saying certain things that I know would be offensive to many of my dear friends and also to my family. And Hooker replies and says, in his circumstances, it’s exactly the same thing. So a kind of monitoring on what was acceptable in one location. He was free to say these things to Darwin, but he would not feel free to say them to his children or to his other immediate members of his family.
So those are the kinds of things that I was thinking about. And when we do intellectual history, be attentive to the spaces in which people are articulating viewpoints, because they might be different in different venues. I don’t know if that helps, but that’s the sort of thing I was after.
Todd Ream: Yeah, very, very helpful and very insightful and still carries on and continues, in terms of how we think about speech as it’s exhibited today too.
David Livingstone: Well, I think that is exactly the case. For example, quite often now when private emails suddenly are for some reason put into a public arena, people realize that one space is very different from the other, and then they become much more careful about what they’ll say.
Todd Ream: Yeah absolutely. A lesson that I learned as someone who came along early in his career with email so yeah, part of the protocol that I try to follow and learned.
I want to ask you a little bit about the arc of your career now. You earned an undergraduate and then doctoral degree at Queen’s University Belfast, and then you served on the faculty there for the near balance of your career. You’re also a fellow of the British Academy. a member of the Royal Irish Academy, and offered the Gifford Lectures in 2014.
At what point in time did you realize you possessed an abiding interest in geography and then also an abiding interest in intellectual history?
David Livingstone: Well, that’s a very interesting question given my well, my journey, really. I remember when I was leaving high school and I was going to study at the university, I had to determine that I wanted to read English literature. Alongside that, I had an interest in philosophy, though I was conscious that the opportunity for spending your life in a job with philosophy might not have been as strong as teaching English literature in a high school somewhere.
And I remember going to the careers master in my school. And I said, look, I want to do these and I have to find a third subject. Now I know this might be a bit different from the structure in the United States, Todd, but nonetheless. So he said to me, he said, unadventurous as I was and unadventurous as he was, why don’t you just take geography as a third subject just for a year? You’ve done well in this subject and he was kind of saying to me it’s a safe subject. But I really wasn’t as interested in geography as I was in the other two subjects.
Nonetheless, at the end of my first year I was amongst the top ten students and I was invited into the Honours School and I began to think, well, I don’t know. Maybe I should take this. I was doing pretty well in it. And I thought, yeah, there’s still room for geography teachers in the United Kingdom, more so, I think, than in the United States, though, maybe different in Canada. And that’s a whole lot, a whole different story.
But what really became important was that the head of the department, a man called Bill Kirk, taught a two-year program on history of ideas about geographical thought, if I can call it that. It was really a history, an episodic history, I must, must say, of ideas about nature and culture from ancient times, episodic, really up to the 20th century, I was quite captivated by that course.
But the second thing was when I was an undergraduate student and was reading quite a bit of amateur theology, I also came across the work of fairly celebrated Dutch historian, Reijer Hooykaas, and Hooykaas had written a book entitled Religion and the Rise of Modern Science. And again, I was captivated by this. I suppose I had grown up on the assumption that there was an antagonism between scientific thought and Christian conviction.
But Hooykaas demonstrated to me, I think, quite persuasively an intimate connection between religious outlook and the growth of modern science since the 17th century. And basically what happened was I went to this Bill Kirk head of department, to see if there was any chance that I might be allowed to pursue a research project for my doctoral dissertation on religion and the growth of the environmental sciences or whatever.
Now, it took me quite a while to focus down onto a particular topic, as anyone who’s written a doctoral dissertation certainly knows. But from that early stage, geographical thought and intellectual history became very, very closely intertwined. So it’s not as though I was interested in geography and then after a long time I became interested in intellectual history. They kind of were there together from my undergraduate days.
And I, then, discovered an outstanding, wonderful work by an American geographer, Clarence Glacken, who wrote this wonderful book called Traces on the Rhodian Shore, which was the history of ideas about nature and culture from ancient times to the end of the 18th century. This was a huge book, overwhelming scholarship and actually my copy on my shelf behind me somewhere is falling apart.
But that became, for me, an aspiration. Not that I would ever achieve it, but something that I should try to work towards that kind of scholarship. And so I think that’s how they always belong together. But after I’d read like Glacken, works, works like those of Clarence Glacken and I really became committed to thinking, this is what I really would like to do if I can find an academic position for the rest of my career.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. The troubles in Northern Ireland occurred during much of your childhood and the first 15 to 20 years of your career. In what ways, if any, was the focus of your work also impacted by the Troubles, perhaps by an ongoing attempt to explore the complex relationships shared by location and locution, place and protocol, in a space such as Belfast?
David Livingstone: You know, I didn’t think much about location and locution in those early days. That sort of came a little bit later. If you like, we can talk about that too.
But when I finished my doctoral work, the question really was, what am I going to do now? And I got a research fellowship which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, a competitive one with a senior professor in the department, an old friend, Fred Ball. And we got a project that was to study attitudinal variation amongst churchgoers in the Belfast area.
Now, of course, when I went to Queen’s University in 1971, that was just two years after the outbreak of the so called Troubles. And the university was relatively insulated from the violence that was common in other parts of the city. And in one sense, the Troubles were a kind of background, but only occasionally impacted on my everyday life.
Although I will say that there was one stage, I think maybe, I was a senior undergraduate, I was sharing an apartment with a friend and there was a pub at the end of our road, which I think had bombs left in it on three occasions. So our windows would be crashed in and then they have to be sort of boarded up for a day or two until the glaziers usually come around and fix it and so on. We also got used, and this was the case, you know, after my wife and I were married to being frisked or our bags checked, going into the city through checkpoints and so on. But it is amazing, Todd, how quickly we became used to, inured to those very strange rituals that at the start seemed so absolutely alien. They really became a second nature to us.
I’ll get back to the Fred Ball story, but I remember when even as late as 1989, when my family and I spent a year in the United States, in Michigan, I remember that when we, we would be going into a store, my wife kind of just automatically opened up her handbag to show to someone at the door, cause they always used to check these to see if there was any hidden incendiary devices or bombs or anything of that sort. And of course, shopkeepers would look at us as if we had two heads, or whatever. It just was absolutely sort of second nature to us. Now when we look back on it, we can see from a distance how curious and strange and alien this really was, but we didn’t experience it much after, after a while.
Anyway, I worked on this project with Fred Ball and the aim of this was twofold initially for Protestant churchgoers, we were interested in exploring the denominational variations and attitudes to all sorts of social questions, questions maybe about abortion, divorce politics, things of that sort. And then later, a cross-community survey with both Protestants and Catholics, in an attempt to see where, if anywhere, were there commonalities, where were there distinctiveness, where were this was, and so on. So it was a kind of conceptual mapping exercise, trying to break up the two monoliths of Nationalist and Unionist or Catholic and Protestant, though they don’t all always map on to one another.
I think that insofar as location and locution was important there, it was really much, much more at the instinctive level than any, any sort of articulate or theoretically thought out possibilities, which actually came later.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you.
As a geographer and intellectual historian, then, how do you understand the significance of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement?
David Livingstone: It’s hard to answer that question. I myself was very supportive of the, and continue to be supportive of the, Good Friday Agreement or as extreme more extreme Unionists will call it the Belfast Agreement, which came out.
I think that a recent play by a man called Owen McCafferty has summarized this very well in a drama that he has written and has been performed in several places, perhaps in the United States called The Agreement. And what this really does is look at the key figures who were involved in hammering out this agreement with much compromise on every side and every side saying of the other we’ve given away too much, or we might give away too much.
Now there’s a distinct geography to some of this because of the pattern of religious segregation that happens both within the city at a fairly granular level and more generally in Northern Ireland, west of the province, tending much more, relatively speaking, towards Nationalism. The east of the province more towards Unionism and so on. So there is a distinct history and a distinct geography.
But I was not working on that kind of dimension of relations in Northern Ireland around the time of the agreement. But as I’ve said, if someone wants to get a good insight into the kinds of stresses and strains and the compromises, I think that Owen McCafferty’s play, The Agreement, is a very interesting analysis with, of course, quite a lot of significance being attached to your own Senator, George Mitchell, who of course was hugely instrumental in sharing those negotiations and indeed bringing them to fruition.
Can I just say that more recently, of course, all of this is still not entirely settled on account of the post-Brexit world that we are living in. And a feeling amongst certain Unionists that with the protocol and the seeming border down the Irish Sea, there are some more extreme Unionists who feel that The Good Friday Agreement does need to be unpicked and maybe rewritten, which of course is something that the European Union was very, very sure that it wanted to keep in place.
Todd Ream: Something I didn’t realize in terms of a point of complexity with Brexit until just recently and how Northern Ireland was understood, in relation to that, not only affecting its relationship with England, Wales, and Scotland but also with the Republic of Ireland and then the rest of Europe.
David Livingstone: Well, I mean, that’s been absolutely a huge issue. And I think one of significant things and one of the things that I think is one of my pet peeves, if I can say, is that when people were voting about whether they supported withdrawals from the European Union or not, scarcely anyone made reference to the simple fact of the matter that there is only one land border between the European Union and the United Kingdom, or would be, and that was across Northern Ireland. There’s waterways elsewhere and so on.
So the free movement of people from the Irish Republic into Northern Ireland would have been, they thought, a way in which people who should, would be, should be restricted, they felt, by the Brexit agreement. It was a porous border. And so that has led to all sorts of difficulties.
Now, I mean, of course, relations between Belfast and Dublin or Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic are, for infrastructure, it’s hugely important and all sorts, for example, medical treatments are shared between Dublin and Belfast so that surgeries that can be performed in Dublin don’t need to be performed in Belfast and people go across the border and so on.
What happens if you have a hard land border between the two? The European Union has said that nothing should be done to dismantle the Good Friday Agreement and therefore want to keep the border open. But what about goods that come into Northern Ireland that are not permitted to go into England, Wales, or Scotland because we’ve got different sort of arrangements? All of these have now resurfaced in the wake of the Brexit decision, and I think are still an ongoing source of contention.
Now, there has recently been a Windsor Agreement. Whether or not that agreement will stand, I suppose to some degree will be tested in the general election that’s coming along in just a few weeks time.
Todd Ream: Thank you. You’re the author and editor of sixteen books and the author of numerous articles. When you look in particular at the arc of your books, is one of them more definitive of your thinking than others, perhaps more personal, in terms of your vocation as a scholar?
David Livingstone: That is a hard, hard question. And partly I think it’s hard, though I will answer a bit, just allow me to build up to the answer. I will answer it the best I can.
I think that I’ve had somewhat different audiences for some of the books that I’ve written. And so, you know, it’s a question of horses for courses. And for example, one of the books that I’d written on roughly the engagement of Presbyterian communities with Darwin I was referring to earlier, would probably be quite a different audience than say, the book I’ve recently done on climate and the culture of climate thinking and so on.
Let me answer this less immediately in terms of definitive of my thinking than successful. By far, my most successful book was a little book that I wrote entitled Putting Science in its Place. And I think about would it be somewhat definitive of my thinking where I try to bring together scientific knowledge and spatial arenas, where science practice is that practice differently in different locations that are grew up in different different ways and different species spaces, you know?
Was there such a thing as an American Enlightenment? Was that different from a Scottish Enlightenment? Was the French Enlightenment like any of these? You know, so those are the sorts of questions that animated a good deal of, of that. And, and I think that maybe I think that is the most definitive one because I’ve also put it to work on thinking about evolution and responses to religion as well. But I think it’s my most cited book.
I think that all of these, the arc over the lot really is to reveal that histories are much more complex than are conventionally believed to be the case. And I believe that’s the case both within Church communities and outside. So, I think that one of the things that maybe is definitive is trying to instruct communities or trying to help communities to become more aware of the plurality in the history of their own traditions.
Now, in a day when many people don’t care too much about tradition, that might seem to be a mistake. But, nonetheless, for some, I think it can be pastorally beneficial if they see that their tradition has not been so monocular, single, single visioned as that might’ve been the case. So I think that’s maybe what has animated at least quite a bit of the research that I’ve tried to work on.
Todd Ream: You mentioned your most recent book, The Empire of Climate: History of an Idea. And I would argue that it’s perhaps your most ambitious book to date. Published by Princeton University Press in April 2024, this book exhibits your ability to weave together lessons drawn from a myriad of disciplines and sub-disciplines reaching across the natural sciences, the social science, and the humanities. Several critics have already argued that this effort is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the context and the weight of debates concerning climate.
Despite the sheer importance of the topic, what led you to commit to this project? And given one of the things that you said earlier, were the seeds of this, do they go all the way back to, perhaps, your dissertation?
David Livingstone: Yeah. Actually to answer that last question, not in any fully formed way, but yes. I think I do go right back to my dissertation, and my dissertation, which came out as a book from the University of Alabama Press, was about an American earth scientist at Harvard. And I tried to do an intellectual biography of his thinking about environment and earth science and things of that sort.
Let me talk about the book quickly and then some of the things that kept me interested in this. I really started on this book about 10 years ago. I had a Leverhulme major fellowship which brought me out of teaching for three years to work on this work on this project. Now along that way, a number of things intervened, one of which was the Gifford Lectures, of course, dealing with Darwin as, as that became, and that sort of took me out of it for us so I didn’t get the book finished in three years. It took much longer.
You’re absolutely right. It was in one sense, crazily ambitious, and so I live in some trepidation that there will be experts in all sorts of corners of this book who know far more about what happened in the 16th century than I do but I judged that the risk was worth taking, in order to get an overview of a kind of cultural history of climate. So it’s not just about climate change. It is rather more about climate as a cultural category and how we think about it.
Now, I also had a longstanding interest in what I really call the morality of climate. And through reading in that 19th century figure I mentioned and others in the 19th century, it became quite clear to me that certain parts of the world tended to be pathologized because of their climate. Even think of the words. The tropical world is called the torrid zone. It would be torrid morally maybe sexually, maybe in a whole range of other ways, whereas the temperate zone speaks to temperaments that are temperate uh, to characters that are temperate and so on.
And therefore, I became interested in the way in which such ideas were mobilized, say, for racial purposes, to regard the inhabitants of torrid zones to be in a pernicious environment, morally inferior, racially inferior as well. So I began to think of what I called the morality of climatology.
Now, part of this was then also motivated by ascertaining to try and take the measure of what I call scientific racism, the use of science to try to justify racial hierarchies. And lo and behold, one of the great explanations for that was climate. It was used to justify various aspects of imperialism, various aspects of colonialism, and there’s a long history also of climate being used as the explanation par excellence of the American Civil War. Namely, northerners could not work the fields because of the climate, their anatomy was not adjusted to the sorts of conditions that would be required, therefore, slavery was a kind of climatic imperative.
Now, all of this deeply, deeply disturbed me. So, in a sense, what I am trying to do in this book is to have a look at the history, often the dark history, of the way in which such ideas have been mobilized as a warning to us in our very, very significantly challenged climatic crisis, that we don’t too easily lapse into ways of thinking that had pernicious effects over many generations since the time of the ancient Greeks, as a matter of fact. So roughly that’s what I was beginning to work on and it emerged as the book that you’ve just shown.
Todd Ream: Well, thank you, yeah, my hope is that that history becomes more part of our conscious reflection.
David Livingstone: Me too.
Todd Ream: And grapple with these concerns that are becoming more pressing than simply part of our subconscious and have left us to seem to scratch our heads why we can’t seem to make headway in terms of the needed agreements and such, because we’re just not aware enough of them. They haven’t been brought forward and hopefully that will be the case now and we’ll begin to have these kinds of conversations at a deeper level.
David Livingstone: Well, I hope so too, obviously.
Todd Ream: I have to ask, with a work as complex as this, you’ve done interdisciplinary work your entire career but when you’ve decided to take on a topic such as this, how do you organize the information that’s needed and then weave it together into a common story?
You mentioned that there may be particular scholars in various fields or subfields who may know more about one portion of the story that you’re talking about, but what they don’t have is the ability then to tell that story in a larger way in terms of how it relates to other critical components of that were coming to bear at the time and are pressing today.
So how do you organize the information, but then also how do you weave it together into a common story?
David Livingstone: You know, Todd, I’m not sure I can answer that question. I mean, there, there was no tried and trusted methodology.
Todd Ream: Here’s proof that it’s happened.
David Livingstone: Well, maybe my critics will think it actually hasn’t happened. We’ve got to wait to hear what they’ve said. I can tell you how I went about, about this, about organization, first of all.
And I committed to what some people might think of the cardinal sin of historians, that is to say, looking at the present to guide how I would think about the past, and I’ve railed against what’s called presentism or Whiggish history myself. I mean, I’ve railed against this. But I want to defend it here because, in one sense I think that most of our listeners today would agree that there are several topics that in an era of unprecedented anthropogenic climate change often appear in the news headlines.
One, for example, would be the effects of climate change on our health. We’re going to get more problems with certain types of diseases. We’re going to get problems with certain types of high temperatures having an effect on our minds and so on. So, you know, one was to do with health. Also, in the newspapers quite often and in scientific journals we see things like, climate change will bring about much greater national insecurity and civil wars and things of that sort.
And then I think there are things to do with wealth. What effects will climate change have on production rates? What effects will climate change have on the growth of wealth? And can climate help to explain why certain parts of the world have dominated the others because of growth and wealth and so on? So my first way of organizing this was to think, there are three or four key narratives here. I wonder how long thinking has been devoted to climate and war, climate and health, climate and wealth, climate and the human mind.
Now, just by using those four anchor points as the places to begin, I’m perfectly well aware that that doesn’t cover everything about the history of climate. I’m sure there are many, many other areas, and I’m just simply going quite pragmatically from some of the ones that seem to me to be dominant on our own horizon and then say I wonder what the cultural history of those ideas are.
Now, as for how you go about synthesizing here, I was fairly aware of some of the literatures that were written about this. So, for example, I was already aware from just various readings and work that I’ve done that there was quite a lot of what you might call medical climatology, particularly the tropical world, the growth of tropical medicine, the use of medicine to cure tropical diseases, to be sensitive to the psychological impact of a changed environment, particularly on military and colonial personnel. For example, the growth of hill stations in tropical zones in order to get colonial officialdom away from the quotes infested lowlands into a cooler environment surrounded by their own cultural artifacts and buildings and so on. So I was quite aware of that sort of literature.
And so, I simply began trekking through these. I mean, you start trekking through these, then you see who’s relying on whom. You go back and look at that and you sort of build up your story that way. I was also very, very aware of the scientific racism side of things. So it was quite easy for thinking about wealth to begin, for example, with colonial dominance of certain areas, the use of slavery.
And then I found my way more into other, you might think, more empirical studies, but things like what impact does a higher temperature have on work productivity? So I began to look at that kind of arena. And then what about immigration? And I found quite a particularly in Australia, certain climate zones were considered to be unsuitable for certain racial types, but certainly suitable for others.
And then whenever you, then I was a bit aware of things like seasonal affective disorder, and I began to think, what about the relationship between climate and psychology? And I just then was led instinctively from one to the next, to the next, always trying to see, okay, I wonder, can this fit into my four part, quadrilateral, if you like, my organizing quadrilateral. And this is my best effort. And it’s only an effort.
Let me tell you another kind of humorous story, which undergirds my hesitation about all of this. And it’s just an effort. I was at a conference some, oh, seven or eight years ago, and I had been asked to speak, actually there was a little celebration of a book that I’d written 25 years ago, and there was, you know, some conversation about this and I was lecturing on. And then there was another one. And it was about this book by Clarence Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, which was a history of environmental ideas and so on.
And during the course of this, I’m sitting, listening to all their speakers. And before I get up to say my piece, one of them then said, nobody could write a book of that scale these days. I mean, it would be intellectually impossible, and of course it would be politically very dangerous, because unless you can speak like about 40 languages, who would do it?
And I sort of thought, goodness me. I am embarked, not trying to copy Clarence Glacken, I never would be capable of that. But trying to write something that was not a micro study, that tried to do, I use the analogy, tried to do a map on a continental scale, rather than producing a map that is really a house plan, if you know what I mean.
So I was just aware of the dangers of this, and I’m living with that fear. I don’t know if it succeeded or not, but I think now that I’m retired, no one can fire me and I thought the risk, Todd, was worth taking.
Todd Ream: Well, again, I think it’s a truly impressive work, a very important work. And as you were echoing, it’s an effort that my hope inspires lots of others to come and shifts the way that we think again, about all those things that we may implicitly be aware of, but are living in such a way that they’re complicating our conversations, but not in a way that we can formally address and perhaps we can get them to the point of being able to be addressed there.
David Livingstone: Well, I think that’s right. I mean, a lot of the book is orientated towards the rhetoric that people use when they’re talking about climate and climate’s influence. And I’m just appealing for an awareness of the history of where some such rhetorics have tended to move. And if I can map the kind of toxic territories that we shouldn’t go down in our mapping of this empire and indicate some of the better ones, if I even do that a little bit, I’d be well pleased.
Todd Ream: Thank you. In the time we have left, I want to ask you about your sense of vocation. We’ve talked about how you’ve exercised it but I want to ask you now about how you understand it, in particular, what are the commitments that define it and that animate it?
David Livingstone: Well, I think I’m better at those kinds of animated in the sense of aspiration. I’m not saying that I been able to achieve all of those aspirations or, or whatever. But I think that in scholarship, there are some virtues that perhaps not as practiced as frequently as perhaps they should be.
And I mean, one of these is the need for humility. I mean, just the need to know that maybe I’ve got something wrong, the need to know that I’m not omniscient by any means. Now we all are sort of fragile about things of that sort. But I think that that’s a virtue. And I think it’s also a virtue to and I’ve seen this in one or two people, to be less concerned with posturing and more concerned with honesty and integrity and so on. So those are some of the positive virtues.
And I think that I need to think of those also in juxtaposition to the vices. And I think the vices of the academy are manifold. An old friend of mine who actually was dean of the Harvard Divinity School until recently, remembered he used to be in Belfast. He and I used to talk about these things many years ago. And he said, you know, academics have indeed fragile egos. You know, you read a review of your last book and there’s the hint, the hint, mere hint of a criticism where someone says something. And you are cast in the doldrums for the rest of the day, whereas, it really isn’t all that significant, you know?
And I think that’s because our identities get very much intertwined with what we’re doing. And I think our identities really do belong elsewhere, though they’re important as far as academic life is concerned.
You know, I also think that a lot of academic life is stunningly insensitive. People are insensitive in certainly the context that I’ve worked to the sentiments of others frequently ride roughshod over them, not least seeking for promotion and always making comparisons with the other guy. And I mean, a lot of that has been animated by the various measures that universities go through to give them a score for how good the research is or how great their environment is and so on.
And some, including myself, feel—and I participated as a judge in some of these—goes right against the rhetoric of collegiality and interdisciplinarity and teamwork that at the same time, these institutions are trying, they say they’re trying to, to encourage. So, you know, those are some of the virtues and vices, and I’m sure that I have been as guilty of some of those vices as others, but I think, I try to be animated by resisting, as best I can, some of those pressures.
And I think it’s even more difficult for young academics now coming into the university system than it was in my day because the competition for funding, the competition for rising in the league tables, all of these can be very destructive and inclining people towards anxiety, depression and things of that sort. So I think we need some of those virtues to be more widely recognized and rewarded than perhaps they frequently have been in the academy.
Todd Ream: Thank you. For our last question then today, in your estimation, when we talk about these virtues and the awareness that we need to have about addressing the vices that can creep in, what responsibility do you believe the university, writ large, has for cultivating an understanding and commitment to the academic vocation, especially for our junior colleagues who are beginning their journeys in the profession?
David Livingstone: Yeah, I just don’t think there’s an easy answer, but I think that the universities have a huge responsibility to cultivate responsible scholarship, not just eye-catching research that will go on their webpages, that will go on their advertising brochures, and things of that sort.
You know, there’s a huge snare about league tables, institutional competition, and funding. And I think it’s important that universities do not become simply technical institutes where we think that what we’re doing is providing a preset sort of set of skills that people can transfer out into the working world. What we should, we should be doing is cultivating intellectual commitments, where following an argument, pondering on the consequences of something, seeking for wisdom is much more important.
I chaired for a long time at Queen’s University, something called the Religious Studies Forum. And in this forum, I brought together people from right across the university to think about the role of religion and theology in a university that actually by statute, was thought not to allow the teaching of theology since its founding in 1848.
I also tried to use this as a forum where people who are either scientists or medical practitioners, engineers, could discuss with humanities people, philosophers, and so on questions to do with ethics, questions to do with meaning, my kind of resistance to reductionism, where instead of reducing everything to a single explanation, and people would be open to multiple explanations or a conjunction of explanations.
And I don’t know if that was successful or not. I ran this for about twelve or fourteen years, and sometimes we would get upwards of 100 people coming to a secular university, to at least listen to some of these things. It was necessarily interdisciplinary.
And what I tried to avoid, and I’m not saying I always succeeded, was, I tried to avoid lectures being given by visitors who were so specialist, that they really could only talk to other specialists. What I was interested in is an old-fashioned way of thinking—back in the 19th century in the United States and in Princeton, which I became particularly interested in students could not graduate from the university without taking a final year capstone course on moral philosophy.
Now, I suspect, I suspect vice chancellors and presidents would shudder at such a thing in, on our own day. But if we were thinking of educating people, not just for the workplace but for responsible citizenship, for people who we want to responsibly behave and think in true democracies, I think it’s essential that some of those questions that would be encountered before we let them out loose upon the world. So those are just some of my rambling thoughts about this. Um, it’s a good question, Todd, and I suspect that your answer to that question would be at least as valuable as mine.
Todd Ream: I appreciate that. Thank you. I think in the terms of those presidents and vice chancellors, reminding them, too, that it was their predecessors who more often than others taught those courses and were responsible for, for their leadership. Yes, thank you.
Our guest has been David N. Livingstone, Professor of Geography and Intellectual History Emeritus at Queen’s University Belfast. Thank you for sharing your insights and your wisdom with us.
David Livingstone: Thank you, Todd.
—
Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.
