Everyone seems to have adopted a pandemic project: learn to bake scones, run a marathon on a treadmill (assuming you have a treadmill, because good luck buying one), write a novel, teach yourself Greek or Gaelic, clean out your closet or your inbox. One of my projects, given that Anne makes Texas’s best scones and we don’t own a treadmill, is to read all 208 of Samuel Johnson’s Rambler essays. Johnson published them from 1750 to 1752, twice weekly on Tuesday and Saturday. To replicate the reading experience as best I could, I’ve also been reading two of them a week, if possible on the appropriate day.

Last Saturday’s fare was no. 24, published by Johnson in June 1750. Rambler 24, at first blush, seems an anti-science rant. “When a man employs himself upon remote and unnecessary subjects,” Johnson writes, “and wastes his life upon questions which cannot be resolved, and of which the solution would conduce very little to the advancement of happiness; when he lavishes his hours in calculating the weight of the terraqueous globe, or in adjusting successive systems of worlds beyond the reach of the telescope; he may be very properly recalled from his excursions by this precept, and reminded, that there is a nearer being with which it is his duty to be more acquainted; and from which his attention has hitherto been withheld by studies to which he has no other motive than vanity or curiosity.”

Johnson then introduces us to Gelidus, “a man of great penetration and deep researches,” who, convinced that “the solution of some problems, by which the professors of science have been hitherto baffled, is reserved for his genius and industry” works away in his study, “into which none of his family are suffered to enter” so that “when he comes down to his dinner, or his rest, he walks about like a stranger that is there only for a day, without any tokens of regard or tenderness.” So absorbed in his studies is he that:

The family of Gelidus once broke into his study, to shew him that a town at a small distance was on fire, and in a few moments a servant came up to tell him, that the flame had caught so many houses on both sides, that the inhabitants were confounded, and began to think rather of escaping with their lives, than saving their dwellings. What you tell me, says Gelidus, is very probable, for fire naturally acts in a circle.

Walt Disney made the absent-minded professor a stock character for popular culture satire. But, of course, Johnson was no ignoramus. He once told Boswell “All knowledge is of itself of some value. There is nothing so minute or inconsiderable, that I would not rather know it than not.” He spoke admiringly of Newton, whom “had he flourished in ancient Greece, would have been worshiped as a Deity.” But Johnson lived just at the moment when the Scientific Revolution turned from theory to practice, and a century before the scientific method became now a way but the way of seeing the world. Johnson reminds us that there are other ways to look at things.

Thus, Johnson takes as the epigram for Rambler 24 the Greek aphorism “Be acquainted with thyself,” often attributed (tentatively) to Chilo of Lacedemon, a 6^th century Spartan philosopher. This “most revered precept of ancient wisdom” (as Johnson calls it) is not an early modern admonition to Paltrowesque self-absorption. Nay, it “may be said to comprise all the speculation necessary to a moral agent.” “For,” Johnson says, “what more can be necessary to the regulation of life, than the knowledge of our original, our end, our duties, and our relation to other beings.” This is a profoundly important concept. Morality, an essentially social concept, is only known through self-knowledge. We are social beings, and to act as if we are not is to betray our own essence, no matter how successful we otherwise might be. Thus, “the great praise of Socrates is, that he drew the wits of Greece, by his instruction and example, from the vain pursuit of natural philosophy to moral inquiries, and turned their thoughts from stars and tides, and matter and motion, upon the various modes of virtue, and relations of life.”

Johnson seems to be nodding towards a Thomistic notion of natural law, moral rules “written on the heart” of even the Gentiles, as Paul says in Romans. But, ever a true Anglican, Johnson, without renouncing Catholic theology, then raises the Protestant objection to natural law: “It is however very improbable that the first author, whoever he was, intended to be understood in this unlimited and complicated sense; for of the inquiries, which in so large an acceptation it would seem to recommend, some are too extensive for the powers of man, and some require light from above, which was not yet indulged to the heathen world.” That is, Scripture.

We would do well to keep Gelidus’s example before us, and Johnson’s admonition in mind, in these troubled times. We live in times of astounding scientific achievement: scientists invented, tested and brought to approval and distribution multiple Covid-19 vaccines, a process that some feared would take a decade. Yet, for every problem solved, many more remain. Some – economic inequality, for example – have been exacerbated, though not caused, by the pandemic. Others – climate change of course, for one – have been there, and remain there, even if the pandemic momentarily distracts us. Knowledge, lots of it, will be necessary to attack these problems. But scientific or economic knowledge will not be enough to solve them, because these are not ultimately (or even primarily) scientific problems. They are moral ones, because they ask questions about our relations with our neighbors (near and far), with future generations, and with our world. How much will we risk economic recession to suppress the virus? What reparations, if anything, do the descendants of slaveholders owe the progeny of slaves? How should we balance the needs of developing countries with the prospects of future generations when we make decisions about climate change? Science and economics can help us understand our options, but they cannot make the hard decisions for us.

“The proper study of mankind is man,” Alexander Pope tells us. Johnson, Pope’s finest critic, tells us the same thing. We are told daily to “follow the science,” but “respect the science” would be a better meme. Johnson tells us to spend our lives on answering questions that will “conduce…to the advancement of happiness.” Science will help us advance happiness, but where true happiness lies, Johnson says, is the more important question, and one that science cannot answer. For Johnson, happiness was a purely social phenomenon. To be alone was miserable; to be in company alone made life tolerable. “There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man,” Boswell reports, “by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.” For, in order to be happy, we should “try and forget our cares and sickness, and contribute, as we can to the happiness of each other.”

Respect the science, then, but honor the emergency room nurses, the mailmen and UPS and FedEx delivery persons, the grocery store stockers and cashiers, the elementary school teachers. These are the people, as much as the scientists, that have looked within themselves, and, finding that our ends are social ends, our duties social duties, and our relations to other beings inextricable from our definition of ourselves, forget their own well-being at risk in order to contribute to ours.