- The Ancient Mythology of Modern Science: A Mythologist Looks (Seriously) at Popular Science Writing by Gregory Schrempp
This book is an exegetical tour de force and not for those in denial when it comes to acknowledging either the relevance or impact of the great, and sometimes not so great, ideas propounded in theory. It is a brave, ambitious, and admirable work of scholarship. It has enthralled, perplexed, piqued, entertained, and instructed me in turn. It will appeal to folklorists, anthropologists, ethnologists, readers of cultural studies, mythologists, astronomers, natural historians, historians of thought, paleontologists and any number of even vaguely cognate disciplines that harbor genuine curiosity about this world as well as the others out there somewhere, both natural and supernatural. All the old questions are here. Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going? Perhaps too little has been made in places of the timing of William Thoms’s nineteenth-century coinage of the word “folklore.” It is a trademark of the heyday of evolutionist thought, a curious offshoot of the tree of knowledge in all its branches of classification, taxonomy, and genera. Folklore lies in the doldrums of the unscientific. Myth appears to radiate as superfolklore, even better than mere folklore, a hypertext for all human myopia, credulity or, at best, innocence. In the opposite of the round earth’s imagined corners was smug science like the spoiled kid up the street, all new age and gadgets, sucking the breath out of moribund cultures. From the time of E. B. Tylor, James George Frazer, Lewis Henry Morgan, and Herbert Spencer, we are attuned to the well-worn clichés concerning primitive thought and superstition. In Schrempp’s work, the popular science writers—John Brockman labels them as the third culture—are the incumbents, replacing the genteel armchair intelligentsia and literati of the good ole days (p. 13). Beneath the gloss and glitz, there are some [End Page 354] grand theories, but there are also others that are disappointingly shallow and weak.
The bedrock themes of what we call Western critical thought lie at the heart of this work. A mythologist writing about key precepts in scientific writing was always going to be interesting. Gregory Schrempp shows how science positions itself in the avant-garde, making as if to lead people “out of parochial cosmic visions” (p. 104). The Copernican Revolution, however, “a point of grand transformation … between mythic darkness and scientific light,” may itself appear scientifically dark and mythically bright (p. 191). The Ancient Mythology of Modern Science is a detailed explication of technical scientific analysis that focuses on the influence of centrism in intellectual history; anthropocentrism or ethnocentrism or any of a host of divergent or convergent claims to an absolute reality. Schrempp likens the work of cognitive scientist George Lakoff and linguist Mark Johnson to that of Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss. He reflects upon of the origins of thought, of categories and classifications from Aristotle to the present. Science writers use rhetorical techniques, plots, story lines, themes, and metaphors that metamorphose into anthropocentric mythologizing at times. Science ventures “into visions that aspire to grandeur and something like wisdom” (p. 21). The book highlights the scientists wriggling on the Geertzian webs of significance.
Popular science writing also has many of the characteristics of centric or mythic thought (p. 32). Schrempp looks at astronomer John Barrow’s variant of the myth of the origin of fire in The Artful Universe (Oxford University Press, 1995), for example. Homo bourgeois makes an uninvited appearance at the barbecue (pp. 51–9). What emerges is a new variant of the myth of fire. Paleontologist Stephen J. Gould’s Full House (Harmony, 1996) resorts to metaphors of games, sports, and all-too-human quirks. Humanity may be a “glorious accident”; as bacteria adopt the role similar to that of the “folk,” “masses,” or “lower classes,” they are anthropomorphized in a bacteriocentric model. Even the diagram, the bread and butter of bureaucrats, is politicized: the left...