Review – The Invention of Air
The Invention of Air, by Steven Johnson
Most of the time, I choose non-fiction by subject. If something comes out on a topic I’m interested in, I’ll pick it up. But there are a handful of authors whose books I’ll read automatically, regardless. Steven Johnson is one of them.
I have no particular interest in the life of Joseph Priestly. But in The Invention of Air that’s who Johnson is writing about, so I’m there.
Priestly, who lived in England and America primarily in the late eighteenth century, is best known as the discoverer of Oxygen. Johnson shows that he had many other achievements, and deserves a far greater reputation than he currently enjoys.
The figure Priestly most resembles is his close friend Ben Franklin. Both were scientists. (Many people today don’t realize how momentous Franklin’s scientific contributions were. His work on the theory of electricity goes far beyond one night of kite flying.) Unlike most scientists today though, both were also central to the political and cultural debates of their day.
In Johnson’s presentation, the achievement Priestly really ought to be most remembered for is nothing less than the discovery of the life cycle on Earth. He was the first to prove that plants emit something vital to the survival of animals (which we now know is oxygen) and the first (with Franklin) to speculate about the dependence of animal life in general on the vegetable kingdom. This was the beginning of ecosystem sciences, the study of life as a whole, from the ‘long zoom’.
It’s in the discussion of ecosystems that Johnson’s real goal in writing about Priestly becomes apparent. What the book is actually about are cultural ecosystems and the nature of scientific achievement.
How it is that some individuals, in some societies, are able to generate whole series of revolutionary ideas, one after the other? It’s not, Johnson writes, just the dialectic of Marx or the ‘normal/revolutionary’ theory of Kuhn. Rather, it’s an ecosystem model wherein factors macroscopic and microscopic interact in complex ways. From the organization of political systems, down through cultural and religious shifts, all the way to the arrangement of neurons in individual brains, all play their part.
It’s a fascinating concept. But it may be so sweeping that it fails to provide much explanatory power. If, to grasp a phenomena, you have to account for everything, the result, in the end, will probably be that you can’t account for anything.
Nonetheless, like all of Johnson’s books, The Invention of Air throws interesting ideas at the reader on nearly every page. Even if, like me, you’ve barely ever heard of Joseph Priestly, if you have any interest in the history of thought, you’ll likely find it an enjoyable, fascinating read.
UPDATE: Here’s an excellent review of The Invention of Air in Salon.
