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Burnham, Popular Science, and Popularization

2019; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 110; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/706479

1545-6994

Nadine Weidman,

American History and Culture

Previous articleNext article FreeSpecial Section: Second LookBurnham, Popular Science, and PopularizationNadine WeidmanNadine WeidmanHarvard University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreHow Superstition Won and Science Lost is a mournful story of decline and fall, a tale in which what was once noble and fine became degraded, debased, and vulgarized. The book is also a cutting critique. John Burnham argues that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries science popularization had an important edifying and uplifting function: to summarize, simplify, and translate science for the literate lay public, to present it as a rational, logic-tested, and satisfying framework for understanding the natural world. The popularizers, who were scientists themselves, saw it as their duty to stamp out error and promote skepticism. By the 1960s, however, scientists had ceded the task of popularizing to journalists and educators, and the form and content of popularization changed accordingly. Now it became the servant of ignorance, presenting context-less and disconnected facts, glorifying technical feats and gee-whiz applications rather than ideas, and quoting authorities rather than providing comprehensible explanations. In its new form, popularized science could not be, and was not, clearly distinguishable from pseudoscience; one isolated fact was as good as any other. Because the public could no longer understand it, science became little better than magic. This trivialized version of popularization is what Burnham meant by his broad and pejorative term “superstition.”1In its lament for an age gone by, and its assumption that scientific knowledge “diffuses” from the professionals to the masses, Burnham’s book struck me as irredeemably old-fashioned—and more than a touch elitist. How different it was from the histories of popular science that followed just a few years later. In 1990, the sociologist Stephen Hilgartner argued that the diffusionist model—the very model for which Burnham pined, as the original and proper form of popularization—should not be taken for granted or at face value or—even worse—celebrated. Instead of simply accepting this “dominant view of popularization,” Hilgartner urged historians to analyze its political and rhetorical uses. Since science was replete with many different kinds of “popularization”—from lab shoptalk to mass-market magazines—historians needed to examine how scientists strategically drew boundaries between what they considered “appropriate” popularizations, on the one hand, and oversimplified “distortions,” on the other. “Who deploys which labels and when?” Hilgartner asked. “How are these labels used during controversies?” And how do scientists use them to buttress their own epistemic authority against challenges from outsiders?2 Questions like these would have seemed utterly misdirected to Burnham. His book was itself drawing such a boundary between proper and improper, not analyzing its political uses. He perfectly recapitulated the dominant view and assumed that the purpose of popularization was the diffusion of elite knowledge. Anything that strayed from this normative model was by definition debased and corrupted—it was entertainment or advertisement, but not popularization.In 1994 the historians Roger Cooter and Stephen Pumfrey took Hilgartner’s argument a step further. They deemed problematic the term “popularization” itself, with its inescapable connotation of diffusion: “the very language we use … belongs to a discourse of analysis that is ideologically and culturally loaded.” The diffusion model, they pointed out, contained questionable assumptions: that knowledge “trickled down,” becoming “diluted” in the process. But different metaphors for knowledge in transit were possible: grafting, appropriation, transformation. It followed that popular culture could generate its own ways of knowing, quite different from and even in opposition to elites. Relatedly, the diffusion model assumed that audiences received popularized knowledge passively, in the same form in which the popularizers conveyed it. But this was not necessarily the case: the meanings that the knowledge took on in popular culture could differ markedly from the intended meanings. Cooter and Pumfrey called for a “less static model … in which the relations between science and its publics are configured in a more dynamic interactive fashion.”3 Turning their focus to the relationships of power that exist between elite scientists, popularizers, and their audiences, Cooter and Pumfrey considered the possibility that popular cultures not only absorbed elite knowledge but also appropriated, transformed, and even resisted it. For such an approach, the terms “popular science” or “science in popular culture” seemed productive alternatives to “popularization.” Katherine Pandora’s “vernacular science” continued this direction of thinking. In searching for a substratum of American science made and celebrated by those without professional credentials, but with their own kind of how-how, Pandora made the case that the “masses” were indeed capable of making knowledge independently of what they were taught by their superiors.4These approaches, questioning the dominant view of popularization and looking for alternative sciences among the nonelites, were the ones that inspired me and that I tried to emulate in my own work on the science writer Robert Ardrey.5 In his bestselling books on man’s animal ancestry and its implications for human nature, published in the 1960s and early 1970s, Ardrey aimed to offer science as a framework for understanding the human and natural worlds and to present facts in the context of this framework. The new theories of animal and human behavior emerging from ethology and paleoanthropology were for Ardrey ways of looking at the world anew—for making sense of man’s place in nature and saving civilization from nuclear Armageddon before it was too late. In some ways Burnham might have approved of Ardrey’s project. Although Ardrey was a Broadway playwright and Hollywood scriptwriter by trade—an autodidact and not a trained scientist—he was no purveyor of the disconnected factoids that Burnham so abhorred. Ardrey’s books presented a broad vision of the human sciences and were aimed at changing the way people understood themselves. He also noticed and deplored the withdrawal of scientists from the public sphere and their abdication of the responsibility to fight error—the very trend that exercised Burnham.But Ardrey’s response to the problem of the scientists’ withdrawal was entirely different from Burnham’s. Instead of harking back, as Burnham did, to a golden age when the hierarchy of knowledge was secure, Ardrey seized the apparatus of scientific knowledge making himself, claiming that the professional scientists hadn’t understood the social meaning, relevance, and implications of their science—hadn’t even clearly seen or understood the facts themselves. He offered a withering critique of elite “specialists,” deploring their penchant for concealing their knowledge in obscure journals that laypeople could not even get access to, let alone understand. In fact, Ardrey flipped the dominant view of popularization on its head. Here, after all, was an untrained layman who claimed his own kind of authority to speak and was not content to learn humbly from the scientists as they diffused their knowledge. Burnham probably would have seen him as an instigator of the corrosive trend toward superstition. But such an approach felt deeply dissatisfying to me. When I looked at Ardrey’s work, I saw instead a mid-twentieth-century exemplar of Cooter and Pumfrey’s popular science: in my view, Ardrey was a champion of science done by the people, for the people. As a means of understanding the functions and uses of science in popular culture, Burnham’s category of “superstition” seemed to me outdated and inapplicable.And yet. When I reread Burnham today, I am struck not by his old-fashionedness, but by his remarkable prescience. Indeed, his book reads like a history of the present, the backstory to our current moment of “science denialism.” Burnham mentioned “creation science” as a premier example of the triumph of superstition, but now we can add to it the manifold forms of denial we encounter on a regular basis: denial that vaccines are safe and effective, denial that cigarette smoking causes cancer, denial that human activity changes our climate for the worse—a veritable smorgasbord of superstition. (The “denial” trope has even been coopted by evolutionary psychologists who caricature the social sciences as being in “bio-denial,” as clinging to a belief that only culture shapes human behavior and refusing to admit any role for biology.6) Burnham’s history shows us that this current moment has been a long time in the making. His book is closer in spirit to the work of the agnotologists Robert Proctor, Londa Schiebinger, Naomi Oreskes, and Erik Conway—closer to their conception that powerful social interests can deliberately make ignorance—than it is to Hilgartner’s focus on the politics of popularization.7Burnham even anticipated another set of critics of “superstition.” In their 1994 polemic Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science, Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt blamed a diverse array of “postmodernist” theorists for making an assault on science’s claim to uncover the truth.8 Although Gross and Levitt lacked Burnham’s historical sophistication and depth, and although they failed to cite him, his book can certainly be seen as paving the way for their critique. It is difficult not to see a portent of the culture wars that tore apart the academy in the mid-1990s in Burnham’s concluding pages, where he castigated the “chic intellectual critics” who “turned their skepticism against the late nineteenth-century ideal of science, not against superstition, mysticism, and commercial exploitation” (p. 261).I conclude that How Superstition Won does not really belong with the slightly later histories of “popular science,” despite the fact that the book presents itself as a history of popularization. Popular science and popularization turn out to be two quite different things—and their histories two quite different enterprises. Burnham’s emphasis on diffusion and the proper role of the science popularizer is a world apart from the social history impulse that motivated Cooter and Pumfrey. Rather, his book is a pioneer of a different genre altogether: the study of the construction, creation, and propagation of ignorance. Present-day critics often point to the failures of STEM education as the cause of our current flourishing culture of denialism. Burnham might have said that the decline of science popularization—the twisting and corruption of its true, original, and proper form—may actually be more responsible than we think.NotesNadine Weidman teaches history of science at Harvard University and Boston College and is Editor of the journal History of Psychology. She is writing a book to be entitled Killer Instinct: The Popular Science of Human Nature in Twentieth-Century America (Harvard, forthcoming). Department of History of Science, Harvard University, Science Center 371, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA; [email protected].1 John C. Burnham, How Superstition Won and Science Lost: Popularizing Science and Health in the United States (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1987). All references to this work are indicated in the text by page numbers.2 Stephen Hilgartner, “The Dominant View of Popularization: Conceptual Problems, Political Uses,” Social Studies of Science, 1990, 20:519–539, on p. 533.3 Roger Cooter and Stephen Pumfrey, “Separate Spheres and Public Places: Reflections on the History of Science Popularization and Science in Popular Culture,” History of Science, 1994, 32:237–267, on pp. 248, 252. The article is an introduction to a special issue on science popularization. Both Hilgartner and Cooter and Pumfrey trace their approaches to Richard Whitley, “Knowledge Producers and Knowledge Acquirers: Popularisation as a Relation between Scientific Fields and Their Publics,” in Expository Science: Forms and Functions of Popularization, ed. Terry Shinn and Whitley (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1985), pp. 3–28.4 Katherine Pandora, “Knowledge Held in Common: Tales of Luther Burbank and Science in the American Vernacular,” Isis, 2001, 92:484–516.5 Nadine Weidman, “Popularizing the Ancestry of Man: Robert Ardrey and the Killer Instinct,” Isis, 2011, 102:269–299.6 See, e.g., Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002).7 Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger, eds., Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 2008); and Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010).8 Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1994). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 110, Number 4December 2019 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/706479 © 2019 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.