The Global Lab: Inequality, Technology, and The Experimental Movement Adam Fejerskov Full Chapter Instant Download

The Global Lab: Inequality, Technology,
and the Experimental Movement Adam

Fejerskov
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-global-lab-inequality-technology-and-the-experim
ental-movement-adam-fejerskov/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...
Poverty, Inequality, and Innovation in the Global South

Oliver Mtapuri
https://ebookmass.com/product/poverty-inequality-and-innovation-
in-the-global-south-oliver-mtapuri/
The Coronavirus Pandemic and Inequality: A Global

Perspective Shirley Johnson-Lans
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-coronavirus-pandemic-and-
inequality-a-global-perspective-shirley-johnson-lans/
Academic Knowledge Production and the Global South:

Questioning Inequality and Under-representation 1st ed.
Edition Márton Demeter
https://ebookmass.com/product/academic-knowledge-production-and-
the-global-south-questioning-inequality-and-under-
representation-1st-ed-edition-marton-demeter/
Catching Fire: Women's Health Activism in Ireland and

the Global Movement for Reproductive Justice Beth
Sundstrom
https://ebookmass.com/product/catching-fire-womens-health-
activism-in-ireland-and-the-global-movement-for-reproductive-
justice-beth-sundstrom/
Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate
Technology Anu Bradford
https://ebookmass.com/product/digital-empires-the-global-battle-
to-regulate-technology-anu-bradford/
Talking About Global Inequality: Personal Experiences

and Historical Perspectives Christian Olaf Christiansen
https://ebookmass.com/product/talking-about-global-inequality-
personal-experiences-and-historical-perspectives-christian-olaf-
christiansen/
The Insentient Adam Hill
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-insentient-adam-hill/
The Ascent Adam Plantinga
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-ascent-adam-plantinga/
The Wretched Atom: America's Global Gamble with

Peaceful Nuclear Technology Hamblin
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-wretched-atom-americas-global-
gamble-with-peaceful-nuclear-technology-hamblin/
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 25/04/22, SPi
The Global Lab

The Global Lab

Inequality, Technology, and the New
Experimental Movement
A DA M F E J E R SKOV
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,

United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Adam Fejerskov 2022
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2022
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022930161
ISBN 978–0–19–887027–2
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198870272.001.0001
Printed and bound in the UK by
Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
Preface
During the 1990s, I lived a carefree life in the small Greenlandic town of
Qeqertarsuaq, just north of the Arctic Circle and bordering the western edges
of the ice sheet. The winter months were long and dark, the sun rarely rising
and the depression of darkness always seemingly ready to creep in. But in
summer, the world turned on its head and the magic of the midnight sun kept
us awake for days before sleep eventually found us. I was seven when my par-
ents brought me and my younger brother from our native Denmark and
Copenhagen to the 800-something small town in the beautiful icy wilderness.
A large plane carried us to Kangerlussuaq, and a propeller further north to
Ilulisat, where we encountered the highlight of the trip: the great round-nosed
Sikorsky helicopter. Far from the military macho tales of Black Hawk Down,
this Sikorsky brought us across a pristine (if deadly, I would learn) blue and
green ocean of icebergs and crystal-clear water. Despite the regular school
fights in Greenlanders-versus-Danes fashion, my years in western Greenland
was a privileged life of dog sledding, eating seal blubber for lunch in the
mountains, and catching ammassat, a small fish that arrives by the millions on
the banks of the black and icy beaches, once a year. But such privilege was not
common in Qeqertarsuaq, a town low on jobs and suffering from hardship.
Greenland was my first memory of meeting poverty and a striking testament
to how the destructive force of colonialism permeates as far North as one can
make it on this planet.
It was the inequality of power inherent in any colonial relationship that
drove Denmark, supported by both Save The Children Denmark and the
Danish Red Cross1, to remove a group of twenty-two Greenlandic children
from their homeland in 1951 and install them in Denmark. In a social experi-
ment meant to lay the ground for a new bilingual school system, the children,
all of them the same age as me when I first arrived in their country, were
taken from their parents and sailed to Denmark where they would be indoc-
trinated to learn the Danish language and culture. Destined to be pioneers of
a new Greenland that distanced itself from its Inuit heritage and embraced
Denmark as its self-image of modernity. As one of the involved politicians
formulated the intentions: ‘we wish to create from the Greenlander a good
Danish citizen’. It didn’t take long for the involved parts to see that the
vi Preface
experiment failed to produce positive results, and the children were either
offered away for adoption or placed in orphanages, none of them returned to
their parents. One of the only remaining children has since told of how meeting
her parents again a few years after her removal was a devastating experience.
She had forgotten the language of her people, her parents not understanding a
word she said to them. Like the other children, she was seen as a traitor of
culture, embracing the ways of the colonial ruler, despite having no say in her
removal.
The story of the Greenlandic children and their removal is close to my
heart, framing and shaping my own understanding of what my privileged
presence in their country meant. But also because of its nature as a historical
testament to how ideals of modernity, progress, and the pursuit of a greater
good, may derail in the sacrifices made to seek such. Experimentation is a
powerful methodology and mindset that has driven discoveries and break-
throughs across sciences and industries over the past millennia. It is a strong
political and moral force that structures and shapes both the present and
future for people around the world. Rarely deterministically and often instead
in ways we may not understand or imagine from the outset. That uncertainty
and unpredictability is also why we must remain focused on explicating and
disentangling the hierarchies of knowing, influence, and power that may arise
as experimentation is manifested in practice. Which is what I attempt to do
here. The inspiration for this book originates from years of research on con-
temporary private foundations, in particular the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation, where I first encountered a strong combination of practices of
experimentation and ideas of technological innovation. It is from observing
those very same narratives and trajectories across other fields and among
actors where I would otherwise not have expected them – and from spending
extensive time at their imagined point of origin, Silicon Valley, and at their
sites of manifestation – that I pursue an aim here of opening up what experi-
mentation looks like today and what are its implications. The book builds on
extensive research that has taken me around the world, where observations
and interviews have provided insights into practices of experimentation by a
diverse cast of actors. A large fieldwork grant from the Carlsberg Foundation,
contributing solely to writing this book, specifically made possible visits to
the US, East Africa, and South Asia.
Throughout the writing of the book, I have insistently been reminded that
none of us can think to stand outside science (and sciences of experimentation
not least) and judge it to be good or evil: we are it and it is us.2 Hence, any
criticism must begin with ourselves. An outsider’s perspective such as that
Preface vii
I have pursued here may be seen as easy and a way of escaping the pointing of
any fingers inwards. The book, much likely due to my own blindness, has
obviously been constructed from and with my Western epistemic privilege.
I have tried not to preserve or convey any sensation of a hierarchy of centre
and periphery in my own interpretation of the both constructed and prac-
tised relationship between what I refer to as the Global North and the Global
South. While serving the purposes of explanation and simplicity, these two
concepts of differing spatial, social, political, and cultural contexts and materi
alities should visibly not be taken as absolutes. In the same way that I only
concern myself with a fraction of what can be said to represent the Global
South (along the way undoubtedly reproducing unfortunate stereotypes of
this part of the world as one of despair and destitution), the approaches and
makings of the book’s movement should not come to be taken as an absolute.
The categories of Global North and Global South, and their use, quickly run
into forms of essentialization that obscures the plurality of these two vast and
elusive concepts. I use them here as tools to explain positionalities within
power relations.3 And just as discourses of Western dominance in themselves
risk a eurocentrism that neglects the agency of the Global South,4 the per-
spectives furthered by me also risk victimizing people who may not want to
be victimized. Experimental situations are not settings where individuals
either have agency or they do not—being the two extremes of these subject
positions—but ones in which we must acknowledge the complexity of the
relations of power we are all part of. That is exactly what merits a study of
contemporary experimental practices and ideas.
What ensues, with all the ignorance and mistakes that come from trespass-
ing disciplines and geographies as I do here, is all my responsibility and fault.
Even so, I am inspired by the excellent works of colleagues who are too many
to cite here, but whose ways of thinking and writing can certainly be found
throughout the book. I am grateful to international colleagues, whether in
academia, journalism, or in the professional fields I explore in the book, who
have aided me, sometimes in my writing and other times by opening crucial
access to places, people, and organizations. I am also grateful to my Copenhagen-
colleagues—in particular Luke Patey—who have been with me throughout
the process of publishing this book, as well as Ole Winckler Andersen, Rens
van Munster, Johannes Lang, Lars Engberg- Pedersen, Tobias Hagmann,
Rasmus Hundsbæk Pedersen, Marie Kolling, Erik Lundsgaarde, Dane Fetterer,
Hayel Celik-Graversen, Therese Bostrup, Kirstine Lund Christiansen, Karl
Møller, Thomas Glud Skjødt, Maiken Bjerrum, Lars Kristian Mathiesen,
Annette Holm, Augusta Janum, Clara Johansen and many others who have
viii Preface
encouraged me and supported the project. At Oxford University Press I’m

grateful for the support I’ve received from Katie Bishop, Henry Clarke, Adam
Swallow, and not least Erin O’Reilly, for wrestling with the manuscript and
displaying their sense of detail.
Towards the end of writing this book, the world suddenly found itself in
one of the most striking experiments in decades, as we attempted to respond
to the Covid-19 pandemic. A dire reminder of what some people have and
what others do not—what difference it makes where you are born, and to
whom—the pandemic has been a failure of multilateralism and global
cooperation. At the same time, for many, it has been a return to mutualism
and the progressive nature that is afforded by what is close to us, whether in
our neighbourhoods or in our families. For me, it was a reminder of the
source from which everything that truly matters flows, and I’m forever grate-
ful to my family, and in particular to Janni, Bror, and not least Billie who was
born into a world of chaos and everyday experimentation, for their unrelent-
ing support and love.
Notes
1. In 2010, Save the Children and the Red Cross both apologized for their participation
in the experimental programme, and so too did the Danish Government in 2020. See
Rud, S. 2017. Colonialism in Greenland: Tradition, Governance and Legacy. Palgrave
Macmillan.
2. As Louise Amoore skilfully reminds us in Amoore, L. 2020. Cloud Ethics: Algorithms
and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others. Duke University Press.
3. Fonseca, M. 2019. Global IR and western dominance: moving forward or Eurocentric
entrapment? Millennium 48(1): 45–59.
4. See Alejandro, A. 2018. Western Dominance in International Relations? The Inter
nationalisation of IR in Brazil and India. London: Routledge.
Contents
1. The Global Lab 1

2. Humanitarian Machine Dreams 29
3. Randomistas 57
4. The Gates Effect 87
5. Experimental Bodies 115
6. The Silicon Valley Way 143
7. Experimental Futures 167
References 189
Index 199
1
The Global Lab
‘This year’s prize is about alleviating poverty’ Professor Göran Hansson,

Secretary General of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences explains to the
room of journalists and continues in Swedish: ‘the Academy has decided to
award the prize for 2019 to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael
Kremer’. In honour of Alfred Nobel, the three professors are awarded the
highest honour for economists ‘for their experimental approach to alleviating
global poverty’ that is radically ‘changing how public bodies and private
organisations work’. The Academy explains further that ‘this year’s Laureates
have shown how the problem of global poverty can be tackled by breaking it
down into a number of smaller—but more precise—questions at individual or
group levels. They then answer each of these using a specially designed field
experiment. Over just twenty years, this approach has completely reshaped
research in the field known as development economics’. British news media
The Guardian chipped in with their interpretation of the Academy’s award as
well: ‘The Academy said the winners had shown there was a need to adopt
new approaches in the fight against poverty that were based on field trials
rather than prejudice or the failed methods of the past’.1 The three Nobel-
recipients are the intellectual and institutional spearheads of a group of
economists known in equal part collegially and satirically as the randomistas.
The group is so named for their unrelenting affinity for conducting random
ized controlled trials (RCTs), a pronounced form of scientific experiment,
among poor people in the Global South. In her ceremonial interview, Esther
Duflo, the group’s scientific superstar, laid bare their grand ambitions: ‘Our
goal is to make sure that the fight against poverty is based on scientific evi-
dence’, and ‘the three of us stand for hundreds of researchers who are part of a
network, . . . and thousands of staff and of course all of the partners and the
NGOs and governments that we have worked with. So, it really reflects the
fact that it has become a movement, a movement that is much larger than us.’
This book is about a movement that prescribes to logics of experimentation
as it practises the Global South as a laboratory, with profound social and political
ramifications. A movement that is propelled by the present accomplishments
2 The Global Lab
of the randomistas, but whose web extends far beyond, as a whole host of
organizations and companies are experimenting with new drugs, emerging
technologies, biometric humanitarian solutions, and radical pol icies and
methodologies for social change in the Global South. Some of these pursue
promises of great revenue in the global bioeconomy while others are in the
business of doing good, but they are bound together by a strong mindset of
experimentation. Throughout the book, we will meet at least four main pro-
tagonists, together making up the core of the movement: philanthropists,
economists, pharmas, and humanitarians. Private foundations such as the Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation experiment with new technologies and rad
ical change as they test innovative toilets or condoms or attempt to alter social
norms in poor communities, basing their actions on what they see as objective
models of change emerging from experiments, reducing the messy real world
to formulae. Pharmaceutical companies have moved their experiments with
new drugs to ‘emerging markets’ that provide abundant human subjects ready
to partake in clinical trials to overcome diseases for which they often cannot
afford treatment, pushing both experimental methodologies and stabilizing
experimental practices as everyday care. The randomista economists likewise
conduct randomized controlled trials and similar methodologies brought in
from the natural sciences to experiment with solutions for social problems,
driven by similar scientific desires of reducing complex realities to a set of
logical causal chains. Finally, humanitarian actors, including private charities
and United Nations (UN) organizations, pursue what they see as radical and
innovative approaches to saving lives in disasters and emergencies through
new technologies, from testing cargo drones and big data, to the registration
and ordering of refugees through biometric data, iris scans, and blockchains-
this is an introduction of emerging technologies that essentially functions as
experimentation.
It was during periods of living on the US West Coast that I was initially
familiarized with this emerging movement of experimentation. From entre-
preneurial engineers in the heart of Silicon Valley and overtly optimist pro-
gramme officers working in Seattle for the Gates Foundation, I heard repeated
dreams of using experimentation to radically change the lives of the world’s
poor. These were complemented by harsh criticism of existing ways of com-
batting poverty that were seemingly based on old-fashioned and ideological
concerns that were the opposite of the clean scientific nature of the new
experimental project. I remember I found the fervour and commitment with
which these people argued both fascinating and worrying. Still, it was not
until I began to meet experimental proponents and subjects, from East Africa
The Global Lab 3
to South Asia that I began to realize both the extent of a movement on the rise
and the deep relationship between experimentation, uncertainty, and inequal
ity. All experiments are caught between, on the one hand, the uncertainty of
knowing the potential consequences or the ignorance that lies in not being
able to imagine these, and, on the other hand, choices about how to proceed
and conduct experiments. Sometimes unwisely acted upon through a veil of
ambiguity, sometimes through a troubling logic of subordination. The book
examines the imagined universal and sometimes unquestioned value of sci-
entific and technological progress to show the inequality inherent in experi
mental practice. It explores the political and social ramifications of scientific
efforts, no matter how value neutral, objective, or apolitical these see them-
selves as being, and in particular the construction of difference and the
inequality of experimentation that is found in the erection of imaginary walls
between us and them, between living and dead laboratories. And between
development and inertia. We will follow a movement that is on the rise across
fields that may seem distant from each other but that are in fact bound
together. Across its diverse endeavours runs a common thread: a belief in the
necessity of conducting scientific and technological experimentation for the
sake of progress. The movement’s actors are inspired not least by core logics
emanating out of Silicon Valley about the need for fast-paced radical change,
societal disruption, and technological innovation as progress.
Today then, practices of experimentation have emerged as a major force in
the pursuit of progress and modernization. This book explores a newfound
interest in the practice of experimentation in the Global South at the intersec-
tions of polity, biology, knowledge, and the circumstances of material, social,
and digital life. It aims to explore the oft-hidden geometry of power relations
between those who aim to help and those who receive, sometimes wilfully
and at other times forcefully.2 We will meet a peculiar mix of protagonists,
from Bill Gates and Silicon Valley idealists who see it as their call to push
exponential technologies to the boundaries of the possible, to economists
whose uncompromising views on science lead them to hold experiments as
the only source of truthful evidence, to organizations who specialize in enrol
ling, organizing, or monitoring vulnerable populations. They may represent
different worlds and industries, but they converge around experimentation in
the Global South conducted in the name of notions of development, science,
and policy.3 We will move across geographies and scales, from Southeast Asia
and Africa to Silicon Valley, in order to explore the interplay between global
forces, ideas, and local circumstance and consequence, addressing questions
of what experimentation looks like today in the Global South, who practises
4 The Global Lab
it, and to what ends? What types of progress are imagined through it, and
who benefits from these futures?
*
One of the earliest and most widely discussed disputes on the nature and
impact of experimentation took place between the seventeenth- century
philosophers Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle. Boyle belonged to a group of
British scientists that would eventually form the Royal Society, the UK’s
national academy of sciences today. A devout advocate and central historical
face of experimentation, Boyle and his fellows saw the matter of fact as the
foundation of knowledge; as absolute, permanent, and as holding what they
called ‘moral certainty’. Facts were like holding up a mirror against nature to
simply see that which is given and beyond dispute. And only obtainable
through experimentation. His own famous experimental programme was
that of the air pump, allowing him to explore the nature of air, the vacuum,
and the relationship between pressure and volume of gas in closed systems.
Thomas Hobbes’ innate scepticism drove him to become a critic of Boyle’s
work and approach, challenging the legitimacy of the experiments and the
view that they created unquestionable matters of fact. But his views were
largely discredited as the experimentalists and their newly founded Royal
Society gained widespread prominence in the European scientific commu-
nity. Reduced to its core, the dispute between Hobbes and Boyle almost four
hundred years ago encapsulates contemporary discussions on the form and
ambitions of experimentation. Their intellectual debate was not only one of
science but one of social order and assent in Restoration England, Boyle’s
experimental practice taking the form of an ideological programme as much
as a scientific one, deeply situated in the social and political context of the
time.4 Should authority emerge from a more democratic public sphere or
through the isolated centralized character that was the monarch, they impli
citly struggled over. The present experimental movement we explore here in
the same way sets forth not just a scientific but a political and moral vision for
development and progress in the Global South and beyond.
What is an experiment—is it a method, a logic, or a course of action? Ex
comes from the latin ‘out of ’ and ‘periculum’ has the meaning ‘a (dangerous)
trial’. Expiri also means to try something, in the same category of experience.
Fifteenth-century British philosopher Francis Bacon was among the earlier
thinkers to ponder over the nature of the experiment, but he didn’t make a
clear distinction between observation as experience and experimentation as a
method,5 which has since become a dominant way to consider experiments.
The Global Lab 5
In the sciences that see themselves as hard, experimentation is about looking

at the evidence, proposing a hypothesis that explains the evidence, creating a
trial that tests the ability of the hypothesis to confirm, predict, or explain the
evidence, and use the results of the trial to refine the hypothesis. This is a
scientific method, as positivists such as Karl Popper would put it, designed to
falsify theories. In the medical realm, where it is perhaps most widely prac-
tised, an experiment is seen as ‘an act whereby the investigator deliberately
changes the internal or external environment in order to observe the effects of
such a change’, as the World Medical Association describes it. For the French
physiologist Claude Bernard, who is credited with initiating modern experi
mental medicine with his 1865 Introduction to Experimental Medicine, the
basis for science and knowledge was the experiment and in particular the
method of comparison accentuating the difference between what one expects
to see and what one then finds through trialling.
Andrew Conway Ivy, known in his time as the ‘conscience of U.S. science’
and appointed representative of the American Medical Association at the 1946
Nuremberg Trials that saw Nazi doctors prosecuted for inhumane experiments
during the war, articulated a similar approach to experimentation and know
ledge production: ‘All science or knowledge has two aspects, the descriptive
and the experimental. Knowledge is obtained by describing and systematizing
things and processes which are observed to occur in Nature and by designing
and executing experiments to reveal the nature of things and processes
observed’.6 In practice, the medical approach came to be to trial both subjects
taking a specific experimental therapeutic and subjects not taking it, to object
ively study the effects of the intervention. The clinical trial was born from
such ideas and would come to be known for its use of methods such as the
selection of control groups, the randomization of subjects, and the blinding of
scientists to make them unaware of which patients received a placebo. But
crucially also its post processing evolved, using mathematical and statistical
methods to control for change. The word clinical, fundamentally meaning a
process conducted as though in a clinic, has developed to informally denote
something performed with excellence and precision.7 In a hierarchy of the
quality of practices, proponents of the clinical trial and the closely related
RCT thus see it forming a golden standard, the scientific method par excellence
taking precedence over everything else; the pinnacle of not just biomedical
but all forms of research design.8
It is perhaps of little surprise then that experimentation has travelled from
clinical medicine to almost all other sciences over the past hundred years and
more, just as we will see its migration across organizations and professional
6 The Global Lab
worlds. Not least facilitated by its focus on, at heart, causation and finding the
relationship between cause and effect. Beyond observation, experiments see
the researcher inducing a change and then observing the outcome and conse-
quences of that change. The burden of proof is on the researcher to show that
she can separate and manage variables in such a manner that the effects of
these are not spoiled by confounding factors. British philosopher and utili-
tarianist John Stuart Mill, who formulated his own ideas on experimentation
around the same time as Claude Bernard, held that to understand either cause
or effects, we must isolate one or the other and change the circumstances to
see the consequences. Mill maintained that we could either observe or experi-
ment our way to such knowledge, and that while both hold value, the problem
with observations is that observing b to follow a does not necessarily mean
that a actually causes b. Correlation does not imply causation, as the first
teaching of 101 statistics classes goes. This problem is also referred to as
internal validity, meaning uncertainty surrounds the isolated case. In theory,
experiments make up for this by allowing scientists in their labs to have some
degree of control over the circumstances. In certain experiments, this is the
oretically sufficient to make claims of causality valid, such as when a clinical
study is meant to tell us something about the effects of a cancer treatment in
blood cells. But in cases where experiments are meant to say something about
or affect people in the real world, so-called external validity becomes a prob-
lem for the experimenters, simply because the laboratory context does not
mirror the real world.
Real-world experimentation was key in facilitating the migration of experi
mental practices to the social sciences. Political scientist Harold Gosnell
famously pioneered field experiments in the 1920s by trialling the determin-
ing factors of voter turnout in Chicago. In the same city and around the same
time, sociologists who were part of what would become known as the Chicago
School conducted experiments on programmes of social work, later helping to
spur the so-called golden age of experimentation in US social policy during
the 1960s. Albion Small, the first Professor of Sociology at the University of
Chicago famously claimed that ‘All life is experimentation. Every spontaneous
or voluntary association is an experiment. . . . Each civilization in the world today,
each mode of living side by side within or between the several civilizations is
an experiment.’9 These words were repeated in the late twentieth-century
work of sociologists such as Ulrick Beck and Bruno Latour, who both held
that the world itself is a laboratory. To Beck, science had long since forfeited
its exclusive right to judge what signifies an experiment, as research left the
The Global Lab 7
laboratory and spilled out into society.10 As it moves out of the laboratory,
modern science transfers both risks and potential gains directly into society.
Experimentation, in this view, not only forms a method but may be under-
stood as a distinguishing feature of modern society, breaking with forms of
knowledge discovery existing prior to the seventeenth century.11 The transfer
of randomized experiments from medicine to the social sciences is not without
its issues though, Latour held. In clinical trialling, the so-called confounding
factors are easier to identify and remove than they are in the social sciences.
While a certain protein or a protein level for a subject can be manipulated and
measured to have been so in a clinical trial, it is difficult to ensure that a vari-
able has been completely ruled out in the social world. The same can be said
for a treatment given in an experiment. While a medical doctor can control
the treatment by changing the dosage or the specific drug, social scientists
have a harder time ensuring a streamlined treatment because of human agency
and understanding.12
In reality then, experiments are not clean, clinical, and ordered scientific
processes, whose results form a mirror against nature to expose given truths.
As we were taught decades ago, science and the scientific process—which to
the outsider appears logical, ordered, and coherent—in fact constitute a con-
stant struggle to produce order from disorder.13 There is no control inherent
in scientific methods, only tools that help to assemble or build a performance
of control. In the laboratory, these efforts to produce order are one thing, but
in the field, in the real world, they are something else entirely. There are scien-
tific words for why field experiments possess an even higher degree of chaos
to be ordered than lab experiments: problems of compliance, deviation from
assignment, self-selection, or interference between units.14 Taken together,
what these record is simply the story of how the real world does not easily
offer itself up for the kind of manipulation that a lab perhaps does. People are
not machines, and even in medicine, there is little stability. Returning to
Andrew Ivy, even after the therapy of a disease is discovered ‘its application to
the patient remains in part experimental. Because of the physiological vari
ations in the response of different patients to the same therapy, the therapy of
disease is, and will always be, an experimental aspect of medicine’.15
Despite the way historical accounts of experimentation often situate the
scientist as a lone explorer of truth and knowledge—an individualized author-
ity and miracle man—we appreciate today the messy and complex interlink-
ages, networks, and knowledges that together often form the hybridity of
experimentation. Such appreciation concerns the construction and execution
8 The Global Lab
of an experiment as much as it does its implications. Experiments are not just

open-ended explorations of scientific issues, but instead they are vested with
strategic interests and purpose.16 This perception feeds a core question asked
here—whom do the experiments benefit? RCTs and other experiments are
deeply political and whenever the experimental movement talks of a ‘golden
standard’, these are attempts to render hierarchic the structures of knowledge,
challenging relativism or pluralism. But experiments and all that they prod
uce, as for all other methodologies, can be as biased as any other form of
knowledge. They, too, work as symbolic assets or instruments of communica-
tion that deliver knowledge, carry value, and produce authority across their
many different forms and shapes.
The different forms of experimentation that this book covers also move
across a spectrum. Some are deliberately done for the purpose of inferring
knowledge; others are simply done on the fly with little systematic or scien-
tific thought given to them. Some are expansive in that their immediate suc-
cess generates larger and larger experimentation, and some are narrow or
isolated. Some of the experiments in the book are social, aiming to study how
local systems, norms, or practices can be most effectively disrupted, often
based on a belief that a community or social group is maintaining a harmful
or undesirable practice. Some are economic or political, pursuing systematic
evidence on how to increase employment or the likelihood that local farmers
will adopt new varieties of genetically modified seeds. Central to many of the
experiments we will encounter is technology, borne out of the idea that expo-
nential or radical technologies can bring social and economic progress swiftly
and effectively. Technologies—whether biomedical, humanitarian, or digital—
that are not dead but very much alive, are sometimes given life by those who
use them in experiments or aim to introduce them, and sometimes assume a
life themselves as shapers of future political goals. All of the book’s experimen-
tal practices then share the common denominator that they are conducted for
something more than just scientific purposes. They are done for commercial
ends, to influence social and economic policy, or perhaps to render more
bureaucratically effective the management of vulnerable populations.
Because of these tangible social and political effects of experimentation, we
must approach it from a perspective broader than that pertaining only to a
scientific method. We can call it a political programme, a higher-order logic,
or just a mindset. The purpose is to say that methods are alive and that beyond
its practicality of scientific technique, experimentation is a structuring way to
perceive the world’s being and our understanding of it. Not does it only shape
The Global Lab 9
and produce science, but also social, economic, and political life. When World
Bank economists run a trial to find the most effective measure for forcing
tenants to pay for water in Nairobi slums, they not only conduct an experiment
in which thousands of vulnerable people have their vital access to water
cut off but may also end up legitimizing such measures going forward.17
Experimentation then forms a vocabulary of action and discourse; a set of
shared values about knowledge, change, and about social and political life.
And specific material practices such as RCTs give way for broader assump-
tions about what knowledge has legitimacy, and how social and political work
ought to be shaped. By approaching experimentation as something much
broader than a scientific method, we can include experimental implementa-
tion that may not be conscious of or explicit about its experimental nature.
Not all social experiments are acknowledged as such,18 just as those involved
may not understand their participation as experimental. But that does not
mean they cannot be fundamentally experimental, perhaps even extending
those risks into society.
We must therefore move our analytical gaze from narrow conceptions of
the experiment as a scientific method to experimentation as a political prac-
tice, fundamentally shaped by uncertainty and ignorance, as a trial or a ven-
ture into the unknown.19 Uncertainty means multiple future possibilities for
outcomes; that not everything can be known. As we move towards a know
ledge society, we don’t deterministically reduce unknowns but instead see
surprises and unexpected events increase.20 More new knowledge also means
more ignorance. In the lab, uncertainty means repeated attempts at constru-
ing the experiment to ensure satisfactory results or negate unforeseen conse-
quences between chemical agents. When involving vulnerable populations in
practices of experimentation, uncertainty is added a further dimension of
the risk of human harm. Many of the experimental practices explored here
may come with good intentions—to understand how to incite economic
growth, increase school attendance, or treat diseases. But the interventions
themselves may be experimental to a degree that shows a devaluation of other
peoples. Through the book, we will see the risk here in retaining the Global
South as a laboratory of inequality where subjects are easily accessible and
legitimated by scientific aims, often because they are caught in poverty or
otherwise disadvantaged. Trials may become the only available medical treat-
ment for disadvantaged groups, and experiments in one country suddenly
structure access to education and health in another very different place. The
tension between abstract notions of progressing science or knowledge, and
10 The Global Lab
respect for the individual subject who may not see any immediate or longer-
term benefit from experiments, looms large. It matters very much, then,
where, how, by, and on whom experimentation is conducted.
*
In a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated
from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase, I kept my workshop
of filthy creation; my eyeballs were starting from their sockets in attending
to the details of my employment. The dissecting room and the slaughter-
house furnished many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn
with loathing from my occupation, whilst, still urged on by an eagerness
which perpetually increased, I brought my work near to a conclusion.21
Mary Shelley gives surprisingly little attention to the laboratory of the perhaps
most famous fictional scientist, Victor Frankenstein, in her 1918 novel. Still,
we are left with the gist of laboratory life. The lab is removed from the rest of
society by way of both a gallery and a staircase, separating what goes on inside
and who can enter from everyone who is not a scientist. The work of the sci-
entist is solitary and even as he is startled by the discoveries and experiments,
he conducts (the laboratory is certainly a ghastly kitchen, as Claude Bernard
described it), Frankenstein has an inborne fervour to reach scientific absolut-
ism; to bring his work to conclusion.
Historians of science tell us that laboratories are traditionally seen as the
where of science, the realm in which the scientist roams, uncovering the
truths of nature and man piece by piece. The laboratory is where observations
and experiments are made into scientific facts and lifted above questions of
falsification,22 providing a ‘consequence free’ space in which the implications
of the manipulation and the research cannot escape the premises and entail
real-world consequences.23 As truth-spots,24 laboratories are often taken to
purport a controlled space, allowing for procedures that can be manipulated
by scientists, and whose placeless form allows them to replicate the same
methods everywhere.25 The same inputs produce the same outputs because of
the, in theory, stable qualities of the lab.26 It thus contrasts both uncontrolled
spaces and the inexistence of a specified procedure of producing knowledge.
The laboratory is nowhere, and it is everywhere, as a homogenous, universal-
ized space, removed from geographical place. This perceived objective local-
ity is seen to give way for generalization and replication, the two cornerstones
of what the laboratory is thought to produce. While sometimes private and
secret, for experimental scientists such as Boyle whom we have just met, it
The Global Lab 11
was also theatrical, open to spectators, important to the general acceptance of

results produced there, and through the witnessing of experiments.27 That
does not mean it was an inclusive space, quite the opposite, often reserved for
doctors, most of whom were white men. And although surely in use for mil-
lennia in the form of workshops (Aristotle likely had his own), laboratories as
we think of them today rose together with experimental medicine and the
quest for comparisons, not least through the controlled manipulation of
animals, giving scientists a comparability they didn’t have with autopsies.
Formal scientific laboratories emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, quickly
becoming a hegemonic space for the production of scientific knowledge and,
by World War II, the laboratory had become a regular site for the systematic
testing and development of therapeutics and bioweapons alike.
If the laboratory is artificial, ordered, and inconsequential in idealized sci-
entific theory, the field is seen as natural, disordered, and consequential.28
Such is not the reality, of course.29 The knowledge produced in even the most
hermetically closed labs will surely escape the premises, if not in the form of
an infected rat, then perhaps more likely in the hands or through the reports
of scientists, something that has equally real consequences. Across scientific
fields, from economics to biomedicine to political science, experiments
increasingly take place outside the laboratory, a development captured by the
growing volume of published research applying the term ‘field experiment’ to
its efforts. In 1990, some six hundred pieces of research included this specific
term, growing to more than twenty thousand over the next few decades. The
ambition in field experiments is to have science face the real world outside the
artificial lab, employing manipulation and random assignment in investigat-
ing behaviours in naturally occurring contexts. If observational scientists
study a card game as spectators, experimental scientists in the field take on
the role of dealers, manipulating events.30 At the very least, this puts to the
test ideas about reproducibility; the contexts and conditions of formal labora
tory settings may perhaps be reproduced, but what happens when experi-
ments are conducted out in the social world, with its inherent complexities
and factors that we do not see or are able to explain? Researchers are biased,
but methods never lie, is the argument to counter such questions. They are
transparent, replicable, and decontextualized.
Even so, in environments not wholly controlled by the researcher, the lines
between anticipated and unforeseen consequences are fluid. Not least because
in the real world, science forms a social practice rather than a dead mechanical
scheme. Knowledge does not float around in the contexts where it is pursued,
waiting to be found. It is constructed by those who venture out, and shaped by
12 The Global Lab
historical and social factors bound to any place and time. Through the diverse
interventions considered in the book, scientific or not, but surely experimen-
tal, we see how treating the real world as a laboratory fit for experimentation
often works to exacerbate existing power dynamics. Experiments may change
the life-courses of people, both for the better and the worse, and equally for
those directly or indirectly involved. Historically, the real-world environ-
ments or labs of experimentation have inherently been unequal and coercive
ones, conducive to identifying, recruiting, and exploiting human subjects. The
prison, itself an experiment of social reform and punishment, was a popular
laboratory of accessible experimental subjects, from supporting state efforts of
war to fulfilling the commercial aims of pharmaceutical companies. The
colonial realms of African lands were treated this way too. With the rise of
germ theory, in itself stigmatizing the poor by cultivating an understanding
that certain diseases resided overwhelmingly with the ugly classes, colonies
became the setting for large-scale disease eradication campaigns by author
ities such as the French Pasteur institution. West Africa, French Indochina, or
Tunisia formed colonial theatres of proof as experimental medicines were
tested for their efficacy, the results compared and confirmed before being
brought back to Europe,31 where there was no guarantee they would be pub-
lished or used scientifically. Local communities were seen as ‘reservoirs of
disease’ with ample subjects from which to extrapolate scientific findings. But
as for anyone looking behind the closed doors of the ordered laboratory, colo-
nial rulers and doctors quickly realized that the control they had envisioned
was not so easy to acquire. Resistance, defiance, and the natural complexity of
life stood in the way for their dreams of experimentation, and not only in
medicine, but with instruments of government at large: fingerprints, identifi-
cation documents, and other methods introduced to govern and organize
spaces and people.
In employing the Global South as a laboratory of experimentation today,
no matter whether the aim is commercial or to directly inform policy and
practice, fundamental notions of race, bodies, and ethics take centre stage.32
We cannot, for one, consider experimentation by predominantly Western
organizations and companies around the world without paying attention to
race as a social category of difference and of hierarchy. The idea of race did
not travel from some objective discipline of science but was rather a concept
picked up by scientists from folk or popular ideas about human differences.33
The human differences that biological conceptions of race attempt to make
spill over into economic, social, and cultural differences of race that we as
humans all too easily fall into, and these are supported by medical practices,
The Global Lab 13
institutions, and some parts of ‘science’ that equate race with social groups,
who share norms and values. The concept of race has been through different
processes of scientification by way of disciplines such as anthropology or
craniometry,34 tied to the nexus between categorization, census, and empire.35
Race was the meeting with others that Europeans made during colonialization,
employed as a way to describe the difference between majorities and minorities
in society, shaping privilege, hierarchies, as well as power and conflicts between
groups. But until the seventeenth century, race was mainly used to describe
families or nations, perhaps entire regions, or continents, or to denote all of
mankind, as in ‘the race of man’. By the eighteenth century, race was increasingly
employed to describe biologically different kinds of humans as ethnologists
applied taxonomy to study people, derived from research on animal breeding
and a growing understanding of animal subspecies. The Swedish ‘naturalist’
Carl Von Linné famously categorized Africans as Homo afer, arguing that black
men had a separate evolutionary track from white that saw them ‘ruled by
caprice’. Homo sapiens americanus, native americans, were ‘ruled by supersti-
tion’; Homo sapiens asiaticus, Asians, were ‘ruled by ritual’; and Homo sapiens
europaeus, Europeans, were ‘ruled by intelligence’. These efforts formed part
of a general order of science and attempts to organize and hierarchize the world
from a polygenist perspective. And the racist and racialized views were
strengthened by the rise of the late nineteenth-century eugenicists, increasingly
institutionalizing ideas of race and difference into bureaucracies from ‘science’.
The way race is used in epidemiological or clinical research today as a clas-
sification of population, sometimes maintained by funders or by history, has
little to do with the idea of ancestry just as it is held by many that the limited
biological variances between such constructed categories can likely not justify
their use.36 Such categories are not only descriptive but importantly attributive.
By actively employing them, certain groups are ascribed specific qualities,
making racialization real and informing the wider construction of diseases in
clinical research. Consider an example in which the prevalence of a disease is
investigated in a particular region of a country. If one of the main race cat-
egories consists mainly of immigrants living in a precarious situation or in
poverty, then those ‘environmental’ factors are sure to influence the prevalence
of the disease. But if these factors are not taken into account by the researchers,
the entire racial category can easily be attributed a greater prevalence of the
disease, not because of environmental factors but because of racialized ones.
Biogenetic material then will always be infused with social meaning, and
scientists are not objective carriers of truth but co-constructors of socioeco-
nomic and historical understandings of race.37 Subpopulation descriptors
14 The Global Lab
such as ‘Asian woman’ or ‘black man’ can help draw attention to important
social differences in the name of fostering equality, but they are also categor
izations that may be used towards political aims of ordering or exclusion.38
The exclusion dilemma—that overinclusion can mean exploitation while full
exclusion can come to imply indifference or failure of representation—is
pertinent for discussions of experimentation and something we will return to.
Race may be a human invention and a social construct, but it persists to
permeate all sides of contemporary social, cultural, and economic life, from
biology books to birth certificates and blood tests,39 and there is little truth to
any perceived difference between the biological being ‘real’ and the social
being constructed. At the heart of race, then, are ideas about difference. And
not just about what types of differences, but what the differences give way for,
what they legitimize, so to speak.
Similar perceptions of difference apply to discussions of bodies.
Pharmaceutical market strategies often revolve around constructing the
body as abstracted so as to establish a collective need across the human
race for a specific medicine. This abstraction then supports the purposes of
experimenting—since medication is seen as benefiting the body in abstracted
form (i.e. all of us) its exploration is both laudable and necessary. In reality of
course, some bodies are worth more than others to the industry, and the out-
come post-trial never becomes access in the same abstracted way the body is
seen when justifying global trials. Post-trial, the body once again becomes
co-constructed with socioeconomics: if you cannot afford the medicine, you
are likely not granted access to it. In contrast to these pharmaceutical views,
others have argued that there is no abstracted body. Only this body or that
body; mine or yours. Bodies may be ‘real’ and share organs and tissue and flesh,
but that does not make them alike,40 and they certainly don’t experience the
same implications of poverty, medicine, or social experimentation.
Throughout history, the body of the colonized was both a body of difference
and a body of experimentation. Embodied extraction and the collection and
accumulation of research material for scientific experiments was widespread,
as white doctors gladly risked their lives to extract intimate fluids and samples
from local populations. In colonial Africa during the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, samples of blood, tissue, or limbs became part of a sprawling
bioeconomy in which local populations had their bodies exploited by medical
doctors who could use the research material for their own careers, for the
empire, or commercially by selling it to third parties. Subjects obviously received
no cut of the business, as if it was a business they even wanted to become
involved in in the first place. The work seldom led to therapeutic discoveries, and
The Global Lab 15
if it did, hardly ever ones accessible to the local population who had facilitated
those results. In Tanganiyka, present-day Tanzania, experimentation—often
involving the drawing of blood as well as post-mortems—came to be associated
with the nocturnal, witchcraft, and black magic. When rumours of cannibalism
spread in the aftermath of a German doctor arriving in the Kingdom of Kiziba,
part of German East Africa at the time, to draw samples from plague-infected
victims, the doctor summoned the person suspected responsible for spreading
the rumour and had him hanged.41 The research material collected was
essentially data and in theory not very different from the dozens of items of
personal information that corporations today can crowdsource from social
media to commercialize. The material and the social body are mutually
constitutive,42 but today, this relationship also includes the digital body. What
happens in the digital realm has physical or biological consequences and vice
versa. When refugees are asked to give up their biometric characteristics upon
arrival in refugee camps, a denial to let their biological body be digitized
could have consequences for the receipt of life-saving aid.
This situates issues of ethics at the centre. Over the past hundred years,
early German ethical rules (disregarded during the two World Wars, obvi-
ously) helped develop the Nuremberg code,43 which inspired the Declaration
of Helsinki and other ethical protocols such as the guidelines of the Council
for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS), the Convention
on Human Rights and Biomedicine, and the famous Belmont report. Today,
we understand the core concerns of these frameworks as pertaining to non-
maleficence, beneficence, respect for autonomy, and justice in experimentation.
These are notions that obviously go through many layers of translation as they
are inscripted into (or disregarded in) experimental protocols. Informed con-
sent is one such material practice of ethics that stands as almost unbreakable,
fundamentally concerned with making sure that subjects understand exactly
what they are getting into when agreeing to partake in experiments. ‘Respect
for persons’ is sometimes translated in reductionist terms and taken to mean
that consent mainly requires ‘information that a rational person would need’.44
But what is a rational person? One who is cut loose from the constraining
conditions of circumstance and not influenced by concerns such as poverty
or lack of access to health treatment? What does it mean to volunteer in coun-
tries with little or no basic health care and can that consent ever be ‘free’ or
made with ‘respect for persons’?
There are many pertinent questions when experiments are taken to con-
texts where there is no need for coercion, as the structural conditions of
inequality themselves facilitate voluntariness. Social or economic conditions
16 The Global Lab
greatly influence the risk tolerance of individuals, and while some experi-
ments may be limited to consequences for the individual, larger experiments
may also put a collective at risk through consequences that were not foreseen.
Principles of justice that remain in some ethical codes are interesting for
the way they address access, arguing that subjects should have access to the
medicines or treatments once experimented with. Likewise, justice denotes
how the benefits of the research should not befall disproportionately to a class
or race that does not participate in the research. Nonetheless, we will see here
that some groups are systematically incorporated in experimentation because
of their relative availability, enabled through pronounced inequalities.
Methodological integrity becomes scientific integrity becomes human integ-
rity. So, who partakes in experiments and who benefits from the potential
treatment? How much risk is tolerable, and who gets to decide this? There
might not be any immediate health risks associated with taking a given
experimental drug that is being trialled. But what if the perceived treatment is
placebo, or if the trial is cancelled after two months, after which the subject
cannot afford access to another form of treatment, making trialling the only
de facto accessible treatment. There are many questions of ethics at play that
experimenters must juggle as they not only wield power over subjects directly
in the research but also through the conclusions they draw on the basis of
experiments. The conclusions from the trial may very well go on to influence
resource allocation at a political level, affecting the local population in ways
the experiments do not or could not know. Beginning to understand the nature
of experimental practice and conceptions of the Global South as a laboratory,
the ensuing question becomes exactly what it is experimentation can produce
and what types of knowledge it gives prominence to. In short, why the move-
ment depicted here sees experimentation as such a strict necessity.
*
Do worms affect attendance in schools? In what is now a famous experiment
in the randomista movement, Berkeley Professor Edward Miguel and Nobel
Prize laurate Michael Kremer trialled the effects of treatments for intestinal
worms in schools in Kenya in the mid-1990s. Their findings were astounding—
a deworming treatment at the cost of only 49 cents per year proved able to
bring down absenteeism in the Kenyan schools trialled by 25 per cent. This
was seemingly so because worm infections among the children often occurred
on their way to school, walking bare footed in places where infected children
had defecated. The findings were so authoritative, the authors wrote as they
published them, ‘that they fully justify subsidizing treatment’.45 At the time,
The Global Lab 17
the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT or J-PAL as it is known for
short today, quickly plotted the findings against other programmes to show
that the cost per extra year of education for deworming was a mere $3.50
compared to more than $6,000 in the otherwise successful Mexican Progresa
programme that aimed to increase children’s education and health through
cash transfers. Inaugurated in 2003, J-PAL has since developed immensely
and now spearheads the randomista movement. The institution has grown
from four affiliated professors and a few projects during its inception year to
more than 160 professors and engagement in over 1,000 experiments across
the world today. Expanding on the aforementioned experiment ten years later
in 2014, French-Indian economist duo and J-PAL leads Abhijit Banerjee and
Esther Duflo noted that, based on the available cost-evidence, deworming is
twenty times more effective for school attendance than hiring an extra teacher.46
One must simply look at the numbers, the evidence, to understand that some
programmes are much cheaper than others. But their most important conclu-
sion was that policymaking should be about the efficacy of programmes—and
that to learn about such we need to cast away a priori knowledge and base
ourselves solely on experiments, and ideally multiple experiments at the same
time on the same population.
Some of the ideas implicitly or explicitly given weight above mirror the way
many organizations of the experimental movement think and work. Questions
about ‘the evidence’ are as frequent as any I have heard while interviewing
employees of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation through the years—what
does the evidence show? Is the evidence ‘solid’ and systematic? At a meeting
with a foundation senior programme officer (PO) in its Seattle headquarters,
the talk about her field of work immediately moved to the lack of ‘evidence’
being produced. When I pushed the subject by asking what in fact constitutes
good evidence, the senior PO was very clear: ‘we have too much anecdotal
knowledge and qualitative work that doesn’t tell us enough about the big
picture; what works and what doesn’t? What is most effective compared to
other interventions? We need to gather systematic evidence’. ‘Can’t a dozen
observational cases be seen as systematic’, I probed, ‘if there are certain similar
findings across them?’, ‘No, we need to know the exact effects and we need to
replicate those effects elsewhere to make sure that the conclusions we reach
are valid’ she responded and ended with the short answer to my final question
of how we do that: ‘RCTs!’.47
The battle for what is scientific evidence and what is not, appears as real
today as it was four hundred years ago when Robert Boyle’s Royal Society
experimentalists came together to confront competing methodological regimes.
18 The Global Lab
Experimentation is seen by its proponents to give way for quantification,

generalized, and systematic evidence, comparison, and replication. There are
important attempts at establishing authority of scientific knowledge in play in
the two illustrations above, from a perspective that not all evidence is equally
valid. Both stories hold a pronounced asymmetry of comprehension—some
understand and are able to produce knowledge, others are not. Those who do
not follow the reason of experimentation simply fail to produce valid and
objective knowledge and evidence. Objectivity is stressed as the epitome of
science, but is there such a thing as a universality of scientific knowledge?
Universal claims certainly have an immediate allure. The laws of nature are
the same everywhere, we often assume. Conditions may change, yet causality
remains. Newton’s laws of motion, as he laid them out in Mathematical
Principles of Natural Philosophy, the very title of which hints at the perceived
objective measure of knowledge, being just one commonly used example of
these. Their designation as laws means they are seen by a scientific commu-
nity as universal and natural. What gives them these traits is agreement that
they have not been invented or constructed by scientists, they have simply
been discovered, as though a mirror has been held up to nature. Objectivity
then, lends authority and forms the height of scientific knowledge in many
disciplines. But it also carries a deeply moral value by connecting itself to the
idea of fairness. Subjective knowledge is seen as biased and thus fundamen-
tally unfair because it will always lean to one side or the other. Fairness in
objective scientific knowledge on the other hand seemingly presents a truth
detached from political, social, or other localized disturbances—it is a way of
making decisions without having to decide. At least it is thought so by its pro-
ponents. The famous positivist Karl Pearson put it bluntly: ‘those who do not
seek truth from an unbiassed standpoint are, in the theology of freethought,
ministers in the devil’s synagogue’.48
If bias is the devil, then quantification may very well be John the Apostle,
Jesus’ most important friend, for the ways in which numbers help experiments
construct their scientific authority. In attempts at rendering society objective
through quantification, mathematics is exceedingly important for the way it is
thought synonymous with rigour and universality. To the American historian
of science Theodore M. Porter, numbers, graphs, and formulae are strategies
of communication, used to convey objectivity and validity, just as they are
deeply connected to community—to social identities and world views expressed
through them. Quantification is a great methodological tool of reductionism
and ordering, of making a complex and nonlinear social world seem orderly
so that we may direct policy and see it achieve expected results in practice.
The Global Lab 19
When Gates Foundation employees longingly tell me of some of the grand

issues they engage in—‘if only there was a model for that’—it expresses a
deeply rooted yearning for making the nonlinear, linear. As we shall see later,
the prestige and power of numbers today cannot be separated from the rise
and development of Silicon Valley.49
When coupled, objectivity and quantification also form a strategy for deal-
ing with distance and distrust. Being able to compare results is a key founda-
tion for producing evidence from experiments, something observations are
thought unable to provide because of bias. Reliance on numbers and quan-
titative manipulation instead reduces the need for personal trust, with
methods seen as easily able to travel beyond the boundaries of locality.
Without a need for trust, it doesn’t matter who produces the data, furthering
impersonality and paving the way for operations on the scale of J-PAL in
which the decontextualization of knowledge and solutions to social problems
reaches an immense height. Neither does it matter where in the world the
data is produced, so long as it addresses the same problem. All that is pro-
duced can then feed into a collective pool of decontextualized knowledge that
may inform decisions anywhere. As Esther Duflo proclaimed when inter-
viewed immediately after winning the Nobel Prize in economics in 2019: ‘We
keep running into the same problem from place to place to place, in India, in
Africa, even in France, we have the same problem. And the solutions, in a
sense, then can be the same’.50 We will return to the question of whether social
problems and solutions can ever be the same across scales of time and place.
*
Some actors in the experimental movement are in the business of doing good,
others are good at doing business but they each deserve a few more words before
we move on to exploring them in the remainder of the book. What follows
here, then, is both an account of the experimental movement’s key actors, and
a primer of how the book’s narrative is structured over the next few hundred
pages. We start with the next chapter’s humanitarians, a group of actors whose
inclusion in these discussions likely forms the most provocative claim exactly
because their ambitions from the outset are both altruistic and laudable. We
are witnessing a massive complexity of protracted conflicts, disasters and
crises, and the number of displaced people is at its highest since World War II. For
the humanitarian industry—across civil society, multilateral organizations,
and private charities—the intent and purpose has always been a stable
foundation: to save human lives, provide emergency relief to the most vulner-
able, and alleviate suffering among those who have been exposed to conflicts
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
public servant and a patriot. And RoBards was bound and gagged
and could not protest or denounce except in his own dark heart.
There was scant salve for his hurts in the low groan of wrath from
Patty as she flung the paper to the floor:
“If he dares come to our house! if he dares!”
But Chalender with that almost infallible intuition of his for
escaping bad quarters-of-an-hour, sent merely a gay little note:
“Dear Papa and Mamma-in-law:
“It grieves me deeply to be unable to call and pay you both my filial
devoirs, but I am to be shipped South at once for cannon-fodder.
“Our dear Immy sent you all sorts of loving messages, which I beg
you to imagine. She is well and beautiful and would be the belle of
San Francisco if she were not so devoted a mother to the three
perfect grandchildren, whom you have never seen.
“‘When this cruel war is over,’ as the song goes, I shall hope to
come tramp-tramp-tramping to your doorstep. Until then and always
be assured, dear Patty and David (if I may be so familiar) that I am
The most devoted of
“Sons-in-law.”
The next day’s paper told of his departure as the lieutenant colonel
of a new regiment. Before the regiment reached the front, he was its
colonel owing to the sudden demise of his superior. People died to
get out of his way!
The next they knew he was shot in the throat as he led a
magnificent and successful charge. He drew a dirty handkerchief
through the red tunnel, remounted, and galloped to the head of his
line and hurdled the Confederate breastworks as if he were fox-
hunting again in Westchester. As soon as possible he was brevetted
a brigadier and with uncanny speed a major general of Volunteers.
His men adored him and while other generals rose and fell in a
sickening reiteration of disasters, his own command always shone in
victory or plucked a laurel from defeat.
His nickname was “Our Harry” or “Harry of Navarre,” but patriot as
RoBards was, he could find no comfort in the triumphs that led the
neighbors to exclaim:
“By gollies, it must make you proud to be the father-in-law of such
a military genius! It’s a shame Old Abe don’t give him a chance like
he gives those blundering butchers he picks out.”
Poor RoBards had to agree publicly that he was proud of New
York’s pet, but Patty would not stoop to such hypocrisy. She would
snap at Chalender’s partisans:
“Surely you can’t expect a good word for the wretch from his
mother-in-law.”
To escape from the irony of these eulogies, Patty and David went
up to Tuliptree, though it kept them longer from the newspapers, and
the daily directories of killed, wounded, and missing which made
almost their only reading.
One day Patty came across a paragraph in one of the
Westchester papers that called Lincoln a “tyrant,” and a “buffoon,”
and the Abolitionists “cowards,” in terms hardly to be expected north
of Mason and Dixon’s line. She read it to RoBards:
“Among the most recent victims of Abe Lincoln’s iniquitous war is
Corporal Gideon Lasher of Kensico, who was murdered at Elmira
while arresting a deserter. He had been previously wounded at
Brandy Station during the advance from Rappahannock.”
Patty looked up from the paper and said:
“Gideon Lasher! Could he have been a brother of the Lasher who
——”
RoBards did not start. He nodded idly. It all seemed so far off, so
long ago as hardly to concern themselves at all. They had almost
forgotten what the word Lasher meant to them.
And when on his way to the railroad station he met Mrs. Lasher he
found her so old and worn-witted that she, too, had almost no nerves
to feel sorrow with. She almost giggled:
“They tell me my boy Gideon’s dead. Yes, sir; he went and got
himself kilt, up yonder in Elmiry. Funny place to get kilt, way up north
yonder! I can’t say as I’ve had much luck with my fambly. Jud—you
remember him likely, sir?—he never came home from sea. Went a-
whalin’, and ne’er a word or sign of him sence I don’t know when. My
daughter Aletty—she’s in town up to some mischief, I s’pose. Well,
it’s the way of the world, ain’t it? Them as has, gets; them as hasn’t,
doosn’t.”
War or no war, RoBards found cases to try. There was a
mysterious prosperity hard to account for in many businesses.
Cases poured in on RoBards. Fees were high. However the tide of
battle rolled in the South, the trades of life went on somehow, and
petty quarrels over lands and wills and patent rights were fought out
as earnestly as ever.
One evening as he set out for the Kensico train, he bought a
paper, and found the name he had been looking for every day in the
list.
He was benumbed by the blow and all the way home sat with his
elbows on his knees and sagged like a bankrupt in the courts. He
could hardly understand what it would mean if his namesake boy
should no more be visible upon the earth. He hardly dared to grieve
as a father must mourn for a lost son; for he thought of Patty and the
necessity for carrying to her the news.
In his heart there was always a great wish that he might never
come to her without bringing some gift of flowers, jewels, or at least
good cheer. And he was always bringing her sorrow!
But that was marriage and it could not be escaped. He must try to
be a little glad that evil tidings should be carried to her by one who
loved her and would share her grief.
She was scraping lint for wounded soldiers when he came in as
usual with the paper that he always brought home from his office.
But there was a look about him, about the way he held the paper that
shook her as if the house were a tocsin smitten with a sledge. Their
colloquy was brief:
“Patty.”
“Has it come?”
“Yes, honey!”
“Keith?”
“No.”
“Junior!”
“Yes, sweet.”
“Wounded?”
“Worse.”
“Oh, not dead?”
“Missing.”
This was the bitterest word to hear, for it carried suspense and
dreadful possibilities. Was he a captive to suffer the horrors of
Southern prison camps where the jailers starved with the prisoners?
Was he lying wounded and perishing slowly under some bush in the
enemy’s lines, in the rain, at the mercy of ants, flies, wounds
uncleansed? Was he shivering with mortal cold and no mother to
draw a blanket over him? Was he among the unidentified slain? Had
he run away in a disease of cowardice? Would he come home
crippled? Insane?
Days and days dragged by before the papers answered their
questions. Then it helped a little to know that, since their boy had
died, he had died quickly, and had brought honor to the family in the
manner of his taking-off.
In a series of bloody charges upon a line of high breastworks on a
hilltop, three standard bearers had been shot down—each snatching
the flag before it struck the earth. The dead were piled up with the
writhing wounded and they were abandoned by the Union troops as
they fell back and gave up the costly effort.
Under a flag of truce they pleaded for the privilege of burying their
dead. Deep in the wall of Northern bodies, they found a boy with his
blouse buttoned tight about him. A glimpse of bright color caught the
eye of the burial party and his story told itself. Evidently Junior had
been shot down with the flag he had tried to plant on the barrier. As
he writhed and choked he had wrenched his bayonet free and sawed
the colors from the staff, wrapped them around his body and
buttoned his blouse over them to save them from falling into the
hands of the enemy. Death found him with his thumb and finger
frozen on the last button.
The hideousness of the boy’s last hour was somehow transformed
to beauty by the thought of him swathed in the star-dotted blue and
the red and white stripes. He had been thinking solemnly, frantically
all his last moments of a flag.
Patty was not so jealous of this mystic rival as she might have
been if he had been found with some girl’s picture in his hand. For
the first time, indeed, the flag became holy to her. In her heart, her
son’s blood sanctified it, rather than it him.
Her sorrow was hushed in awe for a long while and her eyes were
uplifted in exaltation that was almost exultant. Then a wall of tears
blinded them and she saw the glory no more, only the pity of her
shattered boy unmothered in his death-agony.
She clutched her breasts with both hands, clawed them as if they
suffered with her for the lips they had given suck to, the lips that they
and she would never feel again.
She put on the deepest mourning, drew thick veils about her, and
moved like a moving cenotaph draped in black. She became one of
the increasing procession of mothers who had given their sons to the
nation. They had pride, but they paid for it.
She watched other mothers’ sons hurrying forth under the battle
standards slanting ahead and the flags writhing backward, and it did
not comfort other women to see her; for she was a witness of the
charnel their children entered.
The call for three months’ volunteers had been amended to a
larger demand for two years’ enlistments, and then to a larger still for
three years. The failure of the North to uphold the Union bred a
growing distrust of its ability to succeed, a doubt of its right to
succeed, a hatred for its leaders.
And always there was the terror that the next list would carry the
name of the other son she had lent to the nation with no security for
his return. She had Keith’s wife for companion, and they multiplied
each other’s fears. Patty had the excuse of knowing what havoc
there was in war. Frances had the excuse of her condition. She was
carrying a child for some future war to take away from her.
When Keith’s baby was born, Keith was in the travail of a battle
and the baby was several weeks old before the news reached him
that the wife he had not seen for nearly a year had given him a son
that he might never see.
Patty made the usual grandmother, fighting vainly for ideas that
her daughter-in-law waived as old-fashioned, just as Patty had
driven her mother frantic with her once new-fangled notions.
She felt as young as she had ever felt and it bewildered her to be
treated as of an ancient generation. She resented the reverence due
her years a little more bitterly than the contempt.
“I won’t be revered!” she stormed. “Call me a fool or a numskull;
fight me, but don’t you dare treat me with deference as if I were an
old ninny!”
RoBards understood her mood, for he felt once more the young
husband as he leaned over his grandson’s cradle and bandied
foolish baby words with an infant that retorted in yowls and kicks or
with gurglings as inarticulate as a brook’s, and as irresistible.
One day at his office where he sat behind a redoubt of lawbooks,
he glanced up to smile at a photograph of his grandchild, and caught
the troubled look of a young man who was reading law in his office.
“Well?” he said.
“Begging your pardon, sir, there’s a young woman outside wants
to see you. Says her name is—her name is—is——”
RoBards snapped at him:
“Speak up, man. What’s the terrible name?”
“Mrs. David RoBards, Junior.”
This word “Junior” wrenched an old wound open and RoBards
whipped off his glasses shot with instant tears. He snarled less in
anger than in anguish:
“What are you saying? My poor boy had no wife.”
“So I told her, sir. But she insists he did, and—and—well, hadn’t
you better see her? I can’t seem to get rid of her.”
RoBards rose with difficulty and stalked forth. Leaning against the
rail in the outer office was a shabby mother with a babe at her frugal
breast. RoBards spread his elbows wide to brace himself in the door
while he fumbled for his distance glasses.
They brought to his eyes with abrupt sharpness the wistful face of
Aletta Lasher, as he had seen her perched on the rock in the Tarn of
Mystery that day, when she bemoaned her helpless love for his son.
She came to him now, slowly, sidlingly, the babe held backward a
little as if to keep it from any attack he might make. To verify his wild
guesses, he said:
“My clerk must have misunderstood your name. May I ask it?”
“I am Mrs. David RoBards—Junior. This is our little girl.”
“But Junior—my boy Junior—is——”
“I am his widow, sir.”
“But, my dear child, you—he——”
“We were married secretly the day before he marched with his
regiment. He was afraid to tell you. I was afraid to come to you, sir,
even when I heard of his beautiful death. You had sorrow enough,
sir; and so had I. I shouldn’t be troubling you now, but I don’t seem to
get strong enough to go back to work, and the baby—the baby—she
doesn’t belong to me only. You might not forgive me if I let her die.”
The baby laughed at such a silly word, flung up two pink fists and
two doll’s feet in knit socks, and said something in a language that
has never been written but has never been misunderstood. The
purport of its meaning brought RoBards rushing to the presence. He
looked down past the sad eyes of Aletta into the sparkling little eyes
of all mischief. The finger he touched the tiny hand with was moistly,
warmly clasped by fingers hardly more than grape tendrils.
“Come in,” said RoBards. “Let me carry the baby.”
He motioned Aletta to the chair where never so strange a client
had sat, and questioned her across the elusive armload that pulled
his neckscarf awry and beat him about the face as with young tulip
leaves.
Aletta had brought along her certificate of marriage to prove her
honesty and she told a story of hardships that added the final
confirmation, and filled RoBards with respect for her. His new-found
daughter had been as brave as his new-lost son.
But he dared not commit himself. He took the half-starved girl in
his carriage—he kept a carriage now—to St. John’s Park to consult
his partner in this grandchild.
He left Aletta in the parlor and went up the stairs with the baby.
Sometimes when he had a woman for a client he found it best to put
her on the witness stand and let her plead her own case to the jury.
So he took the baby along now.
When he entered Patty’s room she was sitting rocking by the
window gazing into nowhere. Her hands held a picture of Junior, and
as RoBards paused he could see the few slow tears of weary grief
drip and strike.
He could find no first word. It was the baby’s sudden gurgle that
startled Patty. She turned, stared, rose, came to him, smiling
helplessly at the wriggling giggler. Up went two handlets to buffet her
cheeks as she bent to stare. She took the creature from her
husband’s arms, lifting it till its cheek was silken against her own. For
a little while she basked in contentment unvexed by curiosity, before
she asked:
“And whose baby is this?”
“Yours,” said RoBards.
“My baby? What do you mean? Who was it came in with you?”
“Your daughter and mine—a new one we didn’t know we had.
Honey, this is the little daughter of our blessed boy Junior.”
While RoBards was resolving her daze into an understanding of
the situation, the child was pleading away her resentment, her
suspicion. Before she knew the truth she was eager to have it true.
She needed just that sort of toy to play with to save her from going
mad with age and uselessness.
The hungry baby beat at her dry bosom in vain, but shook her
heart with its need.
She felt too weak to trust herself to the stairway and asked
RoBards to bring Aletta up. She waited in that great terror in which a
mother meets a strange daughter-in-law. But when the girl came into
the room, so meek, so pale, so expectant of one more flogging from
life, Patty, who would have met defiance with defiance, set forth a
hand of welcome and drawing the girl close, kissed her.
There were many embarrassing things to say on either side, but
before the parley could begin, the baby intervened with the primeval
cry for milk. There was no talking in such uproar and Aletta, noting
that RoBards was too stupid to retreat, turned her back on him and,
laying the child across her left arm, soon had its anger changed to
the first primeval sound of approval.
After a while of pride at the vigorous notes of smacking and
gulping, Patty murmured:
“What’s its name?”
“She has no name but Baby,” Aletta sighed. “I have been so alone,
with nobody to advise me that I—I didn’t know what to call her.”
Patty hardly hesitated before she said with a hypocritical modesty:
“I don’t think much of ‘Patty’ for a name but Mist’ RoBards used to
like it.”
Aletta gasped: “Oh, would you let my baby have your name?”
“Your baby is too beautiful for a name I’ve worn out. But how
would you like to call her by the name that was my last name when I
was a girl like you? ‘Jessamine’ is right pretty, don’t you think?”
“Jessamine RoBards!” Aletta sighed in a luxury, and added with a
quaint bookishness. “It’s another term for Jasmine. I had a little
jasmine plant at home. Oh, but it was sweet, and fragrant! My poor
mother always said it was her favorite perfume. She used almost to
smile when it was in bloom.”
This mention of her mother, their neighbor once so despised, since
so dreaded, gave Patty and David a moment’s pause. But only a
moment’s, for the little pink link that united the Lasher with the
RoBards stock, as if accepting the name she had waited for so long,
began to crow and wave her arms in all the satisfaction of being
replete with the warm white wine of a young mother’s breast.
And the grandparents embraced each other and their new
daughter as they meditated on the supine quadruped that filled their
lonely house with unsyllabled laughter.
When later Mrs. Keith RoBards came round to call with her richly
bedizened and bediapered son, Patty had such important news to
tell her, that Keith Junior’s nose would have been put out of joint if it
had been long enough to have a joint.
In gratifying contrast with Frances’ autocratic motherhood, Aletta
was so ignorant, or tactfully pretended to be, and so used to being
bullied, so glad of any kindness, that Patty took entire command of
the fresh jasmine-flower and was less a grandmother than a
miraculously youthful mother—for a while, for a respite—while before
the world renewed the assaults it never ceases long to make upon
the happiness of every one of its prisoners.
CHAPTER XLVII
HAVING lost one son in the war and expecting to hear at any
moment that her other boy was gone, Patty was bitter now against
the mothers who kept their sons at home, as she had tried to keep
hers.
The fear grew that the war, which had already cost her so dear,
might be lost for lack of men to reinforce the Federal troops. Those
whom the first thrill had not swept off their feet, found self-control
easier and easier when they were besought to fill the gaps left by the
sick, the crippled and the dead in the successless armies.
Their apathy woke to action, however, when the hateful word
Conscription was uttered by the desperate administration. The draft
law was passed, and it woke a battle ardor in those who cling to
peace whenever their country is at war. For there has always been
about the same proportion of citizens who are inevitably against the
government, whatever it does. Sometimes they prate of loyalty to a
divinely commissioned monarch or a mother country, as in
Washington’s day; sometimes they love the foreigner so well that
they denounce a war of conquest, as in the Mexican war; sometimes
they praise the soft answer and the disarming appeal of friendly
counsel, as in this war with the fierce South.
Now, when the draft lowered, the New York pacifists mobilized, set
the draft-wheels on fire and burned the offices and such other
buildings as annoyed them. They abused Lincoln as a gawky Nero,
and, to prove their hatred of war, they formed in mobs and made
gibbets of the lamp-posts where they set aswing such negroes as
they could run down.
They killed or trampled to death policemen and soldiers, insulted
and abused black women and children, and, in a final sublimity of
enthusiasm, grew bold enough to charge upon the Negro Orphan
Asylum on Fifth Avenue near the Reservoir. Somebody led the two
hundred pickaninnies there to safety through the back door while the
mob stormed the front, and burned the place to ashes.
For three days the city was a monstrous madhouse with the
maniacs in control. Thousands descended on the central police
station and would have destroyed it if a few hundred police had not
flanked them with simultaneous charges down side streets, and
clubbed them into a stampede.
Editors who supported the government would have joined the
black fruit ripening on the lamp-posts if Mr. Raymond’s Times had
not mounted revolving cannon in its defense and Mr. Greeley’s
Tribune had not thrust long troughs out of its upper windows as
channels for bombshells to drop into the rabble.
Troops came hurrying to the city’s rescue and sprinkled canister
upon certain patriots to disperse them. Then and only then the war-
hating wolves became lambs again. The Seventh was recalled too
late to defend the city from itself, but Keith did not come home with it.
He had been commissioned to another regiment. A thousand lives
had been lost in the Draft Riots, but the rioters were unashamed.
The Governor had called them “my friends” and promised them
relief; the draft had been suspended and the city council had voted
two millions and a half, so that those who were too poor to afford
substitutes could have them bought by the city ready-made at six
hundred dollars apiece.
In Westchester County rails had been torn up, wires cut, and
drafting lists set ablaze, and mobs had gone wandering looking for
Republicans.
But fatigue brought order and the sale of volunteers began. A
Lasher boy of sixteen earned a fortune by going as a substitute. The
war was already a war of boys on both sides. The hatred of Lincoln,
however, was so keen that Westchester County gave two thousand
majority to General McClellan in his campaign for the Presidency
against Lincoln. That harried and harrowing politician barely carried
the state, and served only a month of his new term before he was
shot dead. He looked very majestic in his coffin and those who had
laughed at him wept with remorse. In his death he won to the lofty
glory his good homeliness had earned, though it brought him
contempt while he lived. But that apotheosis was as yet months
away, and unsuspected.
Toward the last of the war, RoBards had noted that Patty was
forever holding one hand to her heart. He assumed that it was
because a canker of terror was always gnawing there on account of
Keith, always wandering somewhere through the shell-torn fields
where bullets whistled, or the devils of disease spread their gins and
springes.
This pain was never absent, but there was another ache that she
hardly dared confess to herself. She thought it petty selfishness to
have a distress when so many thousands were lying with broken
bodies and rended nerves in the countless hospitals.
She put off troubling the doctors. Few of them were left in the city
or the country and they were overworked with the torn soldiers
invalided home.
Finally the heartache grew into a palpable something, and now
and then it was as if a zigzag of lightning shot from her breast to her
back. And once when she was reading to her husband about the
unending siege of Petersburg where the last famished, barefoot
heroes of the South were being slowly brayed to dust, a little shriek
broke from her.
“What’s that?” cried RoBards.
“Nothing! Nothing much!” she gasped, but when he knelt by her
side she drooped across his shoulder, broken with the terrible power
of sympathy, and sobbed:
“Mist’ RoBards, I’m afraid!”
CHAPTER XLVIII
WITHIN the silken walls of Patty’s body, still beautiful as a jar of rose
leaves, a secret enemy was brooding, building. A tulip tree, a tree of
death was pushing its roots all through her flesh.
There had been no pain at first and nothing to warn her that life
was confusedly conspiring against itself.
Then there were subtle distresses, strange shafts of anguish like
javelins thrown from ambush. Her suspicions were so terrifying that
she had feared to see a doctor.
But now RoBards compelled her to go with him to consult an
eminent surgeon. She endured his professional scrutiny, his rude
caresses. At last he spoke with a dreadful kindliness and did not
rebuke her as of old for indiscretions or neglects. He told her that
there was trouble within that needed attention as soon as she was a
little stronger. She smiled wanly and went out to the waiting carriage.
To RoBards who lingered for a last word, Dr. Marlowe whispered:
“For Christ’s sake, don’t tell her. It’s cancer!”
If death could have come to him from fright, RoBards would have
died then. He toppled as if he had been smitten with the back of a
broadsword.
He turned eyes of childlike appeal to the dismal eyes of the
physician, who was more helpless than his victims since he knew
better than they how much woe is abroad.
Dr. Marlowe laid a hand on RoBards’ shoulder as a man might
say: “I will go to the guillotine with you. The only dignity left is
bravery. Let us not forget our etiquette.”
But to be brave for another’s doom! To be plucky about the fact
that his wife, his sweetheart, the infanta of his love, was to be torn to
pieces slowly by the black leopard of that death—this was a
cowardly bravery to his thinking. He was brave enough to confess
his utter, abject terror. He went through what thousands had once felt
when their beloved were summoned to the torture chamber.
He fought his panic down lest Patty be alarmed. He wrestled with
the mouth muscles that wanted to scream protests and curses; and
he made them smile when he went out and sank in the carriage
beside her and told the driver “Home!” as one might say “To the
Inquisition!”
And Patty smiled at him and hummed:
“We-e-e-eave no mo-o-ore silks, ye Ly-y-ons loo-oo-oo-ooms.”
She knew that the doctor was glazing over his fatal discovery. She
knew that her husband’s smile was but the grimace of one poisoned
with the sardonic weed. She was afraid, though, to reveal her
intuition lest she lose control of her own terrors, leaping and baying
like mad hounds at the leashes of her nerves.
The only hope the coupled humans had of maintaining a decent
composure was in keeping up the lie. They were calm as well-bred
people are when a theatre catches fire and they disdain to join the
shrieking, trampling herd.
They had tickets for a play that night. It seemed best to go. The
play was sad at times and Patty wept softly. RoBards’ hand hunted
for hers and found it, and the two hands clung together, embracing
like the Babes in the Wood with night and the wild beasts gathering
about them.
After a dreadful delay, there was a more dreadful operation, and
once more RoBards blessed the names of Morton, Jackson, and
Wells for the sleep they gave his beloved during the nightmare of the
knives. But only for a while, since the pain, after a brief frustration,
flowed back like a dammed river when the dam gives way.
When he demanded more of the drug, the physician protested:
“We must not be careless. It is a habit-forming drug, you know.”
But pain was a habit-forming poison, too. The operation was too
late to do more than prolong the day of execution.
All over the world men were delving into the ancient mystery. But
nobody knew. Nobody could find out a why or a wherefore. Some
day somebody would surely stumble on the cause and then the cure
would turn up. The answer would be simple perhaps.
But it would be too late for Patty.
What followed was unspeakable, too cruel to recount, beyond the
reach of sympathy. Minutes seemingly unbearable heaped up into
hours, hours into mornings, afternoons, slow evenings, eternal,
lonely nights. Days and nights became weeks, months.
The doctor, weary of the spectacle of Patty’s woe, gave the drug
recklessly. It had passed the point of mattering whether it were habit-
forming or not.
And then immunity began. As the disease itself was the ironic
parody of life, so the precious gift of immunity became the hideous
denial of relief.
The solace in drugs lost all potency. The poor wretch was naked
before the fiends. The hell the Bible pronounced upon the non-elect
was brought up to earth before its time.
Dr. Chirnside slept now with his fathers, but his successor called
upon Patty to minister comfort. He was a stern reversion to the
Puritan type that deified its own granite. When he was gone, Patty
was in dismay indeed. For now the torture was perfected by a last
exquisite subtlety, the only thing left to increase it: the feeling that it
was deserved. Remorse was added to the weapons of this invisible
Torquemada.
From Patty’s blenched, writhen lips, between her gnashing teeth
slipped the words:
“Honey, it’s a punishment on me for my wickedness.”
“No, no, no! What wickedness have you ever done?”
“Oh, you know well enough. You cried hard enough once. And
there have been so many cruel things I have done, so many mean
evil thoughts, so many little goodnesses I put off. God is
remembering those things against me.”
“You make God more cruel than man. How could he be? It’s
blasphemy to blame him for your misery.”
He thought, of course, of Harry Chalender. Harry Chalender!—
Harry Chalender, who had never repented a crime, never reformed,
never spared a home or a virtue or failed to abet a weakness. Yet he
was hale and smirking still at life, an heroic rake still fluttering the
young girls’ hearts, garnering the praises of men. If God were
punishing sin, how could he pass Harry Chalender by, and let him
live untouched?
But Patty’s head swung back and forth:
“God can never forgive me, I suppose. But you do—don’t you,
honey?—you forgive me?”
“I have nothing to forgive you for. You have been my angel always.
I adore you.”
She clenched his hand with gratitude and then she wrung it as a
throe wrung her. It was RoBards that cried, screamed:
“Oh, I don’t want you to suffer. I don’t want it! I don’t want it! I can’t
stand it!”
He was in such frenzy of sympathy that she put out her pale,
twitching hand and caressed his bowed head, and felt sorry for his
sorrow.
But night and day, day and night!
She groaned: “The worst of it is, honey, that there’s no end of it till
there’s an end of me. If I could only die soon! That’s the only remedy,
dear heart. I pray for death, but it won’t come. I used to be so afraid
of it, and now I love it—next to you.”
Again and again the surgeons took her away, and brought her
back lessened. Sometimes she pleaded with RoBards against a
return to that table, clinging with her flaccid little fingers to his sleeve,
imploring him not to let them hurt her, if he loved her. And his love of
her made him drive her back.
She sighed again and again in a kind of aloofness from herself:
“Oh, my pretty body, my poor little, pretty, pretty body, how sorry I
am for you!”
And once, as they carried her along the corridor she whispered to
her husband:
“I always wanted to be good, honey. And I tried to. I always
wanted to be all that you wanted me to be; and you always wanted
me to be everything that was—wonderful. But somehow I couldn’t be
—wonderful. You forgive me, though, don’t you? I always loved you.
Sometimes it must have seemed as if I cared more for somebody
else. But that was just weakness—restlessness—something like a
fever or a chill that I couldn’t help. But all the time I loved you. And
you have loved me gloriously. That is all the pride my poor body and
I have left—that we were loved by so good a man as you.”
She suffered most perhaps because of the flight of her beauty
before the ravages of her enemy.
But underneath the mask of her pain, RoBards could always see
the pretty thing she was when she was a bride asleep against his
shoulder on the long drive up to Tuliptree Farm. And when at last
they let her go back there to escape the noise of the city, he rode
beside her again behind slow-trotting horses. But now they were in
an ambulance lent them by one of the military hospitals.
They were far longer than then in getting out of the city into the
green, for the city had flowed outward and outward in a tide that
never ebbed, never surrendered what fields it claimed.
But as the last of the city drew back into the distance, she sighed
wearily:
“Good-by, New York. I always loved you. I’ll never see you again.”
He remembered how she had bidden it farewell on that first flight
from the cholera. She had married him in terror, but he was glad that
she was not the wife of that Chalender who was still in the battle
front, winning more and more fame while Immy languished on the
Pacific coast, and Patty here. RoBards owned Patty now. He had
earned her love by a lifetime of devout fidelity. And she was won to
him.
As he looked down at the pallid face on the pillow it was still that
winsome face in the scuttle hat, that pink rose in the basket, jostling
against his shoulder while she slept.
She sighed often now: “I’m not nice any more. I’m terrible. Go
away!”
But the lavender of memory kept her sweet.
CHAPTER XLIX
THE old house gathered her in and comforted her for a while. But
chiefly it comforted her because it let her cry out without fear of
notice from passers-by in the street or the neighbors in St. John’s
Park.
And there she abode until the war was over, and the troops came
home, saddened in their triumph by the final sacrifice of poor Mr.
Lincoln.
When the regiment whose colonel was Keith flowed up Broadway,
Patty was not there to run out and kiss his hand, as she would have
done if she could have seen him on his horse with his epaulets
twinkling on his shoulders, and his sword clinking against his thigh.
His father watched him from a window and then hurried up side
streets to meet and embrace him when he was free of his soldiers.
RoBards had to wait, of course, until Keith had hugged his wife and
tossed aloft the child he saw now for the first time. Then the author
of all this grandeur came meekly forward and felt small and old and
foolish in the great arms of this famous officer.
“Where’s mother!” Keith cried.
“Up at the farm.”
“Why couldn’t she have come down to meet me?”
“She’s not very well of late.”
Keith’s pique turned to alarm. He knew his mother and he knew
that nothing light could have kept her from this hour. But Frances
turned his thoughts aside with hasty chatter, and dragged him home.
The next day he obtained leave from the formalities of the muster-
out and was ready for a journey to Kensico. His father, who had to
be in town for his business’ sake and to gain new strength for Patty’s
needs, went with him.

The Global Lab: Inequality, Technology, and The Experimental Movement Adam Fejerskov Full Chapter Instant Download

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Global Lab: Inequality, Technology, and The Experimental Movement Adam Fejerskov Full Chapter Instant Download

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Global Lab: Inequality, Technology, and The Experimental Movement Adam Fejerskov Full Chapter Instant Download

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Global Lab: Inequality, Technology,

and the Experimental Movement Adam

Poverty, Inequality, and Innovation in the Global South

The Coronavirus Pandemic and Inequality: A Global

Academic Knowledge Production and the Global South:

Catching Fire: Women's Health Activism in Ireland and

Talking About Global Inequality: Personal Experiences

The Insentient Adam Hill

The Ascent Adam Plantinga

The Wretched Atom: America's Global Gamble with

The Global Lab

The Global Lab

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,

encouraged me and supported the project. At Oxford University Press I’m

1. The Global Lab 1

‘This year’s prize is about alleviating poverty’ Professor Göran Hansson,

2 The Global Lab

The Global Lab 3

4 The Global Lab

The Global Lab 5

In the sciences that see themselves as hard, experimentation is about looking

6 The Global Lab

The Global Lab 7

8 The Global Lab

of an experiment as much as it does its implications. Experiments are not just

The Global Lab 9

10 The Global Lab

The Global Lab 11

was also theatrical, open to spectators, important to the general acceptance of

12 The Global Lab

The Global Lab 13

14 The Global Lab

The Global Lab 15

16 The Global Lab

The Global Lab 17

18 The Global Lab

Experimentation is seen by its proponents to give way for quantification,

The Global Lab 19

When Gates Foundation employees longingly tell me of some of the grand

You might also like

1. The Global Lab 1