A scholar's serendipity
THE SOCIOLOGIST Robert K. Merton, who died a year ago this month at the age of 92, had a genius for plucking fascinating phenomena out of thin air, giving them names, and changing the way we see the world.
Without Merton, there would be no "self-fulfilling prophecies," no "role models," no "focus groups." (Merton watched with sadness as the latter, a tool he developed to plumb the depths of public opinion, was adopted by political consultants -- not that it kept him from wishing aloud that he received royalties.)
The longtime Columbia University professor was no mere phrasemaker, however. His 1938 paper "Social Structure and Anomie," which he wrote as a graduate student at Harvard, is one of the most cited articles ever written in sociology, and it remains clarifying today. In it, Merton argued that societies became explosive and unstable when they instilled expectations and ideals in their young people but provided no path for achieving those goals. He was thinking of Weimar Germany; we might think of the Arab world today.
Merton might well have had his name linked to one more concept, "serendipity," but for a peculiar decision of his. He wrote a book on the subject in the 1950s, together with Elinor G. Barber, a Columbia University researcher. Then he had second thoughts and stuffed the manuscript in a drawer.
Now, as a capstone to the man's brilliant career, Princeton University Press has brought the abandoned book out into English for the first time, under the title "The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity" -- complete with a new afterword, Merton's final piece of writing. (An Italian publisher brought out a version two years ago, sans forward, with Merton's permission.)
Why Merton failed to publish the book earlier is unclear. But in an intelligent introduction, James L. Shulman, executive director of ARTstor, a nonprofit seeking to use digital technology to improve education in the arts and an acquaintance of Merton's in his last years, suggests that Merton simply got swept up in his next project, "On the Shoulders of Giants" (1965), a classic study of scientists' often uneasy attitudes toward their predecessors. Psychologically, "Serendipity" may have seemed to Merton like a dry run for that book.
As a word, mellifluous "serendipity" is everywhere these days. A Nexis search shows almost 1,000 uses in the last three months alone. A survey of boat owners in 2000 found it to be the 10th most popular name for pleasure cruisers. But a hundred years ago, its appearance in print would have caused head-scratching.
Merton first stumbled on it in the Oxford English Dictionary as a graduate student in the 1930s. He'd never seen it before. But as he pondered its meanings, it struck him that serendipity was a key element in the sociology of science, and he decided to chart the term's odd career.
As the new book explains, "serendipity" was coined in 1754 by the English novelist and art collector Horace Walpole. He derived it from the title of a fable called "The Three Princes of Serendip," whose heroes, Walpole explained, "were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of."
The word lay dormant for 80 years, until Walpole's selected letters were published, but it remained largely unused for many more decades. That was partly because, Merton speculates, utilitarian Victorians had no use for the concept of the happy accident, the fortuitous mistake. But as the 20th century unfolded, "serendipity" started to leak from the writings of literary dilettantes into the vocabulary of scientists. Researchers thought it captured something they knew was true: Their work wasn't all about brains, logic, and methodical exploration.
The role of luck in research has long vexed scientists. "Chance favors the prepared mind," Louis Pasteur once said. But Merton also quotes a more anxious, unnamed Nobel Prize winner, who fretted, "I got it for a purely accidental discovery. Anybody could have done that."
Ever the sociologist, Merton didn't think scientific serendipity was a matter of random lightning strikes. Laboratories that place scientists working on related projects in close proximity increase the odds that a stray remark by one will spark a breakthrough by another. (Watson and Crick had several of these uncredited "collaborators" as they labored to crack the code of DNA.) Merton called this "institutionalized serendipity," which humans have some control over, and speaks of a "serendipity pattern."
These days, dictionaries tend to describe serendipity as "a natural gift for making useful discoveries by accident," Merton laments in his afterward. The phrase "natural gift" shifts the emphasis away from social structures and happenstance back to something people are more comfortable with: lone, heroic genius, forging from one planned problem to the next.
Merton's afterword also includes a moving autobiographical sketch that remarks on the serendipity of a working-class boy from Philadelphia growing up down the street from a well-stocked and intelligently staffed public library. Without that library, he suggests, there might have been no "role models," no "focus groups" -- and no "Travels and Adventures of Serendipity."
Christopher Shea's column appears in Ideas biweekly. E-mail: critical.faculties@verizon.net.
