The ivory tower has a bad name: a refuge for unworldly scientists where they devote themselves to useless research with their heads in the clouds.
Fortunately, science today is no longer a fortress behind high walls and deep moats. It has accessible market squares where the products of research are displayed for everyone. But it would be a great loss if the master builders tiled this market square with bricks from demolished towers.
It is high time for an impassioned plea for the ivory tower. A good start is the beautiful essay ‘In Defense of the Ivory Tower‘ from 1957 by the German-Jewish art historian Erwin Panofsky. Like Einstein, he left Germany for the United States in the 1930s. By the way, their sanctuary, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, has been called the penthouse in the ivory tower.
The image of the ivory tower has slowly crumbled over the centuries. Originally a phrase from the Biblical Song of Songs, it was a symbol of noble purity in Christian tradition. In the nineteenth century it became a desirable place for poets and thinkers, away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life and out of reach of the thought police. The negative meaning of privileged unworldliness only came later. And nowadays no one wants to be seen in an ivory tower.
But Panofsky points out that the value of an ivory tower is not just isolation and introspection. The tower also offers a superior vantage point on a possible better future or on an impending danger to our existence or freedom. The tower keeper therefore has an important social function: not the power to intervene, but the duty to warn. This responsibility comes not despite, but because of the exalted position.
Panofsky illustrates this important role of the ivory tower with a passage from the second part of Goethe’s Faustthe famous tragedy about the scientist who sells his soul to the devil. Goethe places Lynceus, the Greek mythological figure with the sharp gaze of a lynx, in the role of tower keeper. If you are born, if you are born, you order (born to see, appointed to look) he sings about the magnificent view of the starry sky and nature.
But to his astonishment, he suddenly witnesses a catastrophe. He sees an advancing fire that threatens to destroy the idyllic cottage of an elderly couple, along with the nearby chapel and lime trees. All this happens on the orders of Faust, who needs their land for a huge construction project that will require people and nature to make way. But no one hears Lynceus’ warning cries. The disaster is literally happening before his eyes.
This story illustrates the blessing and curse of the tower keeper’s existence. The distant view not only brings the unique view of grandiose beauty, but also the powerlessness of seeing impending disaster without being able to intervene immediately.
All these scholars looked further than their contemporaries because they rose above the noise of current events
There are many examples of scientific tower keepers who looked far ahead and who were poorly listened to. The Swedish chemist Arrhenius calculated as early as 1896 that burning fossil fuels would lead to drastic global warming due to the greenhouse effect. His complex calculations predicted that a doubling of the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would increase temperatures by about 5 degrees – an outcome that is surprisingly close to the current scientific consensus.
In 1945, Vannevar Bush, President Roosevelt’s scientific advisor, invented an information machine that looks suspiciously like a current smartphone linked to the Internet. (Yes, he called it a “super secretary”). Bush took the exponential downscaling of computers, cameras and memory storage to its logical conclusion. But he also foresaw the current information overload and the need to organize knowledge and our lives differently.
The American biologist Rachel Carson raised the alarm in 1962 with her book Silent Spring about the disastrous effects of pesticides on people and the environment at a time when the chemical industry and the government completely ignored this. The Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann warned as early as 1955 that in the future climate change would become a greater threat to world peace than nuclear weapons.
All these scholars looked further than their contemporaries because they rose above the noise of current events and reasoned from fundamental knowledge. They had the courage to deliver an unpopular message, often against direct economic or political interests.
The question is whether we still see the value of contemplation and the distant view outside. Whether there is still room for a Lynceus of our time who warns about the dangers of uncontrolled AI, biotechnology or social media. He sees how a modern Faust sacrifices society and nature to his megalomaniac projects out of pure self-interest.
Science is a sensitive radar screen that catches the first echoes of a distant future high in the ivory tower and warns society of impending disaster. This requires the complementary responsibilities and frustrations of the tower keeper and the square resident. The first has the task of watching and warning, but cannot act. The second has a duty to listen and act, but lacks the distant view.
But don’t forget the third party: the master builder who has to keep building ivory towers. So that we do not have to repeat the last words of Lynceus when everything has burned down: “What we enjoyed for centuries has disappeared in an instant.”
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