Helen Craig’s previous work for The Toast can be found here.
There’s a post going round Facebook that you might have seen. On one side, there’s a group of people, mostly male, many long dead. Kim Kardashian stands to their right. The caption reads: “If you don’t know who these people are, but you know who this is? Congratulations. You’re what’s wrong with the world.”
I have never had very strong feelings about Kim Kardashian, but this rubbed me the wrong way. Who are you to judge who I should and should not know about? Looking for the source of the meme, I found another version. It features Snooki from the Jersey Shore, so celebrity carbon dating would suggest that it popped up around 2010.
And Snooki’s not the only thing to have changed – in the older version, Newton, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Galileo have become Christopher Hitchens, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and someone in an oil painting that I don’t immediately recognize.
There’s something interesting going on here, in addition to the obvious fact that I am, indeed, what is wrong with the world. Both the writers who appear in the Snooki version are forthright and gifted, but they’re also controversial — and not as widely known outside the activist or atheist scene. It’s possible their presence made the users of the meme feel bad, because they too weren’t sure who these people were, or knew them but did not agree with them.
Scientists are seen as acceptable Good Things. Sure, we love them mad and bad in our films, but the real-life ones are often celebrated. Academics have noticed this, too. Dr. Patricia Fara, a historian of science, tells me that when she was writing her book, Newton: The Making of Genius, she noticed the way his biographers and fans started to place him above all others. She thinks we have begun to cast geniuses to perform the role in society that saints used to fill.
I’ve noticed this is often combined with presentism, the tendency to view the past through our own morals and beliefs, and use it to validate them. There’s a word for uncritical, moralistic biographical stories: hagiography, named after the biographies of saints in early Christian churches. I think our particular hagiography of scientists is a problem. Whatever else they were, at least the medieval saints were a commendably mixed-sex group, hailing from a wide range of cultural backgrounds that took in everyone from peasants to princesses. In contrast, our science heroes tend to be the Great Men of European history.
Is there another way to talk about the history of science? Dr. Fara has dedicated much of her writing to finding out. She is a champion of not including champions. One person I sought advice from on Twitter claimed that her Science: A Four Thousand Year History is probably the only attempt to write a long history of science without great men. “The rest of us,” said my source, “are too scared to try.”
In her book, Dr. Fara gleefully challenges the heroic narratives of, well, almost everyone. The book is not about geniuses or heroes, but real people: “men (and some women) who needed to earn their living, who made mistakes, who trampled down their rivals, or even sometimes got bored and did something else.” It’s full of great stories, including one in which she calls out Newton for his hypocrisy – campaigning for accurate measurement, yet so wedded to the Greek harmonic universe that he decided to divide the rainbow into seven colours to make it fit a harmonic musical scale. (It’s usually stated that he fudged it by including both indigo and blue, but I’m most skeptical about orange.)
Science is shaped by the beliefs of those who practice it; the book points out that science owes much to society: “In a sense, the history of science is a history of everything…modern science, technology and medicine are interwoven, intimately bound up in a giant knotted web with every other human activity all over the globe.” And the best scientist is the one who can convince other people that she or he is right, not the one who just gets it right. Knowledge is never fixed, and there is “no guarantee that the cutting edge science of today won’t become the discredited alchemy of tomorrow.”
So why do we keep telling stories with scientists as heroes?
When I asked about science heroes on Twitter, someone recommended a fantastically named paper by Prof. David Miller: “The ‘Sobel Effect’: The Amazing Tale of How Multitudes of Popular Writers Pinched All the Best Stories in the History of Science and Became Rich and Famous while Historians Languished in Accustomed Poverty and Obscurity, and how this Transformed the World. A Reflection on a Publishing Phenomenon.” The paper is a slightly tongue-in-cheek lament over the simplified popular science of books like Dava Sobel’s Longitude – books in which, according to a quote from Kathryn Hughes, “a decent, working-class boffin beavers away for years in the eighteenth-century equivalent of a garden shed, while a bunch of toffs in wigs do everything they can to make sure that he doesn’t get the credit for his brilliant break- through.”
Prof. Miller concludes that there is a place for exciting narrative history, but that professional historians should try to bring some of their own views into the public eye, in works that fall somewhere between the “serious scholarly monograph and the airport bookshop bestseller.” Things have indeed progressed in that direction in the years since he wrote his paper, and there are now many projects and prizes to encourage the study of the history of science. But his conclusion about the impact of worshipful popular science books still rings true today: “The overall messages…are fairly clear. They are that science is the product of individual genius, that scientific discovery is an heroic process, and that science leads to technology, has impacts and transforms the world.”
The sort of message that Miller has noticed coming from popular media seems egalitarian, but what it’s really saying is that systematic prejudice is nothing compared to the pure power of truth. Sadly, that is not always the case, and making it seem as though it’s easy for anyone to be a scientific hero fuels the fire of those who like to argue that women are fundamentally less skilled scientists.
Miller thinks that the glut of science heroes occupy the snarled territory between science history and science communication. Historians of science and those who communicate effectively about science often share common loves — and sometimes common goals — but they are very different. An historian usually wants to challenge a straightforward, heroic view of the past, and usually her only payment is the credit of her peers. A science communicator just wants to tell a good story and get people excited about science; communicators are credited with making an idea popular. But what happens when this means sticking to the same old, worn-out stories, about the same old, worn-out (white and male) protagonists?
One option is to find more obscure heroes. Chances are, if you’ve heard of Giordano Bruno, it was because of the new Cosmos TV series, a worthy piece of science communication which opened with a short animated film about the 16th-century thinker. His introduction makes him sound almost like a hard-boiled superhero: “There was only one man on the entire planet who envisaged an infinitely grander cosmos. And how was he spending New Year’s Eve of the Year 1600? Why, in prison, of course.”
Burnt at the stake in 1600 for multiple heresies, Bruno certainly was a rebel. He believed that the sun was at the centre of the galaxy, that there was a plurality of worlds, and that an infinite universe reflected the infinite glory of God. Cosmos wins grumpy historian points by mentioning other thinkers who contributed to his ideas, and by never calling him a scientist – as no one was, officially, until the word was coined in 1834 or thereabouts. But the story unmistakably casts him as a martyr and a hero, when in fact the real man was far more complicated. Bruno was a philosopher, but also a magician, a theologian, and a religious zealot. His beliefs about the world came from visions and dreams and old books. He happened to hit on what we today believe to be “right,” but isn’t that just presentism coming back to bite us? Corey S. Powell of Discover magazine argues that another man, Thomas Digges, is more deserving of celebration. Digges was a sensible man, unglamorously compromising to make the new planetary ideas of Copernicus seem sensible and acceptable to his peers. Powell states that raising Giordano Bruno up as a hero ignores the importance of collaboration and cumulative effort in science.
Dr. Fara would also point out that there’s a bit of intellectual snobbery involved in hailing the ones who got it “right,” when the ones who got it wrong were often using the best data, resources, and explanations available at the time. We have a poorer view of the past if we only look to it to affirm our own heroes and our own reflections. The pages of The Four Thousand Year History are filled with stories of people who held “modern” views at surprising times — like Aristarchus, who in the 3rd century B.C.E. maintained that the Earth went around the Sun. But what does it matter, if these individuals could not explain their thoughts or their work and persuade others of what they believed? “When thinking about how Greek philosophers influenced the future, the concepts that count are ones their successors adopted,” Dr. Fara writes. “Whether modern scientists now judge them to be good or bad is irrelevant.”
The people who work in areas viewed as less “glamorous” or “important” end up shortchanged by history. Thomas Digges had more impact in his time than Giordano Bruno. But there’s always that little voice that whispers in your mind, saying that what Digges did hardly beats being burnt at the stake, does it? It’s hard to remain immune to the lure of a good story.
Yet by ignoring collaboration, and sticking with the science “A-List,” we’re also, for the most part, ignoring women. In another book, Pandora’s Breeches, Fara points out: “In well-intentioned pastiches of the past, scientific women emerge as cardboard cutouts – the selfless helpmate, the source of inspiration, the dedicated assistant who sacrifices everything for the sake of her man and the cause of science. On the other hand, over-compensation – glorifying women as lone pioneers, as unrecognized geniuses – also has its drawbacks.” The work of translators, teachers, and assistants may not be the focus of many histories, but that doesn’t make their roles any less important.
So what should we talk about when we talk about science? Maybe we should just aim not to diminish anyone’s work. Dr. Fara brings up the example of the plaque outside the Eagle Pub in Cambridge, commemorating the moment when Crick and Watson announced that they had “discovered the secret of life.” But of course, she says, we have not discovered the secret of life, and we probably never will. I can’t help but agree with her. To say that Crick and Watson figured out the meaning of life ignores the contributions of others, from the famous Rosalind Franklin to co-Nobel winner Maurice Wilkins and hundreds of others. And it also presumes that anything can be truly solved once and for all; that the world of science isn’t a wonderful, ever-moving stream of new discoveries and new work, driven by the human beings who have decided to solve these problems amongst all the other cares of their lives.
As we endeavor not to diminish anyone’s contribution, we should also remember the fallibility of our heroic narratives. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s never quite felt enthusiastic about those lists of inventions by women: Did you know that a woman invented the windscreen wiper? At the same time, I’ve realized that every story of invention is a reach. The biographers of James Watt or Isaac Newton were working just as hard as the “women in science” listicle writers to create an image of the world (and the scientists) they’d like to see. And created heroes often leave a trail of historical devastation in their wake.
So maybe heroes are the villains here? If you know who these people are, and admire them…congratulations, you’re what’s wrong with the world. Please report to your local library for a historiography textbook.
When we spoke over the phone, Dr. Fara told me that there’s no one particular reason to study or write the history of science — she does it because it’s just so fascinating, and because by looking at the past, we can better understand how we got to the present and use that knowledge to inform our future. In the same way, it’s clear that there is no one particular aim behind the stories we tell. Some people do deserve to be remembered, and you’ll always have your favourite characters in a tale. Perhaps it’s enough if we try to remember that our heroes aren’t known to us by accident, and acknowledge the sheer number of people who’ve had a hand in shaping our heroes and deciding who’s important and who’s not.
With thanks to Prof. Miller, Dr. Fara, The Sleepless Reader’s review of Pandora’s Breeches, @steve_x, @thrustvector and @JamesBSumner on Twitter, and commenters briliantmistake and SarcasticFringehead. Any mistakes are my own.
Tags: helen craig, history of science, saints, science
As a lady studying biology, this was awesome to read and I’m always looking for more scientific contributors outside of the white, male, and often Western ‘heroes’ of science. I like how you included that it’s important to recognize people who had correct theories about certain phenomena, but no really accurate way to test them.
Thanks! I also love all people who did amazing work to understand the world, even if they got answers we see today as “wrong”
Our model of how scientific achievements happened is so simplistic. Great Man discovers theory, makes predictions, predictions are proven correct, Great Man becomes hero. I’d love to read a history of science that said a little more about the politics and backbiting and drama involved in getting a Big Idea accepted by the scientific community.
You should definitely read Fara, especially on Pasteur and the rest!
I am so excited about reading the 4,000 year book!
Oh man even more excited after reading the Amazon reviews. “Four-hundred page hissy fit”! “Less political correctness please”! I cannot wait.
I freaking loved that review. I’ve never seen such missing the point!
Did you read the review somebody copied & pasted into the first comment? Because if you’re looking for a hissy fit, I think that fits the definition a little better. And any time that particular flavor of Skeptic hates a book that much, it’s a pretty good indication that it’s right up my alley.
It’s from Skeptic magazine, whose editor-in-chief is Michael Shermer (trigger warning on the linked material), so yeah I’m with you on that.
Ooh. “Outlandishly Pecksniffian.”
OMG I NEED TO READ THIS
There is no better antidote for the hero-worshipping Great Men model of scientific discovery than actually working in science, I’ve found. So many assholes, so much collaboration (or reliance on poorly paid grad students as “collaboration”), so many people being constantly wrong. Unless, of course, your ego is strong enough to ignore all these things, in which case you’re probably one of the unpleasant tenured self-considered-“Great Men” in my field. (*Is bitter and in the process of leaving science, so please ignore her.*)
I sumpathise! To be fair to them, a lot of scientists I’ve met hate the great man model. (Normally it’s because they’re worried unless feel they mention everyone who funded their work, but still!)
Oh, that is entirely fair! (Most of my feelings on science right now are decidedly unfair, hehe.)
I’m just finishing up a graduate course in science and technology studies (STS) and sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK, which is also slip, slip, knit, which has afforded me no end of amusement this semester) and there’s a ton of interesting writing on this topic. Bruno Latour, Boris Hessen, and Robert Merton (and hella others – our course was unfortunately dude-heavy, but we did read some Haraway so there’s that) are a good place to start.
This may be totally not the right thing but I really liked Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution by Holly Tucker. It is about the discovery/invention/?? of blood transfusion, and in it the author solves (probably) a 300+-year-old science-based cold case. I found it a quick and enjoyable read.
The Emperor of Maladies has a ton about all the politics and bullying behind the fight against cancer. Also, A Brief History of Nearly Everything, while it does follow the great man theory, talks a lot about people who discovered things first but weren’t connected enough to get anyone to listen to them and so were left out of the history books in favor of the more popular people who discovered it later.
I don’t have time right this moment to read this as thoroughly as it deserves, but I have a *lot* of opinions about Great Man Science, and I am thrilled to bits to see someone tackle the subject. I’ll be back with hopefully a more substantive response, but I just want to applaud this piece, and The Toast’s excellent science coverage in general.
This is terrific. I would happily talk about presentism all day every day, for hours, and this is just awesome.
I want to know what you think on presentism!
Because I am a historian it was a huge part of some of my graduate classes–one of my pet topics is modern stories about historical eras, i.e., historical fiction (but not only books–including movies, art, plays, etc., with historical settings). In a very real way fictional material teaches us about history, totally without intending to–I’ll wager that more people are familiar with Braveheart than are actually familiar with the story of William Wallace, and more people are familiar with a sort of pastiched “Egyptian” history that starts and ends with Cleopatra/Marc Antony/Julius Caesar, maybe Nefertiti and King Tut if you’re lucky, pyramids, gold, incest, that’s about it. I’m not saying that this is done on purpose by authors and artists, and I think authors (and so on) should write whatever they damn well please! But it’s important for us to realize that we absorb a lot of history inadvertently through media, and when that includes presentist attitudes, it does a disservice to our actual understanding of history. But presentism is so popular in historical works because it makes things much more palatable to a modern audience–it’s much more “morally satisfying” in a way to read about an enlightened plantation owner (for example) who pays his workers rather than owns slaves, or whatever, than it is to read a historically-accurate book that doesn’t gloss over the actual horrifying conditions of slavery. But if the former book has a blockbuster movie written about it and the latter sells 200 copies–then the first is shaping public discourse and our understanding of the antebellum South in a very real way!
So basically, presentism in fiction can alter the way we understand history, even in a totally unintentional way, and it’s a dangerous yet rarely-addressed consequence of modern authors writing about historical periods.
Really interesting. I’m remembering all those YA books I loved, like Catherine Called Birdy, that featured heroines who hated bear baiting, wanted to marry for love etc. Maybe makes us judge those who didn’t too harshly?
I think it does, in a lot of ways. (There’s an article in this, somewhere, I just haven’t fleshed it out properly.) The concept of “All right-thinking people adhere to our modern mores, and people who didn’t were dumb and ignorant” was something I loved seeing your article touch on! Because we do forget that most people are working within their best available knowledge, and that we would all be hugely different people if brought up in a different period and culture. Today we can think bear-baiting is animal torture, but if we were being brought up in 14th-century England, we would almost certainly not think that, because it was not part of contemporary social understanding about animals.
Thanks! There can be a real, unsure sense that people back then must have been stupid. But I’m sure almost everyone would have believed some ridiculous things if bought up in the wrong time.
I like to try to keep my presentism in perspective by imagining how people in 2114 (or 2514) will look back and smile and shake their heads at all the “crazy” and “ridiculous” things we believed, both in science and in popular culture in 2014.
This makes me think of a book I read looking at child abandonment in Europe in the medieval period which really brought this home. Firstly, it was pretty common. Secondly, one of the most common arguments as to why you shouldn’t abandon your children was that they might grow up to unwittingly commit incest with a long-lost sibling. If you asked a random modern person (even a random European, Christian person) for a list of reasons not to abandon children, that would probably not be on it.
Presentism. Yes. I love everything about this post.
This is a big topic in medieval studies, or at least it was when I did my MA in 2010-11 and I think it still is now (from the social media of friends still in the field). With Medieval Europe, there’s the added complication that medieval-Europe-inspired-fantasy is at least as popular as straight-up medieval-Europe-historical-fiction and that creates a whole other layer of complications.
E.g. George R. R. Martin isn’t writing *about* medieval Europe; he’s created an independent secondary world. You can’t exactly say he’s getting his history wrong. But at the same time that world clearly owes enough to (some bits of) medieval Europe that Martin’s work still influences how people think about the eras he’s borrowing from. It isn’t helped by the fact that ASoIAF has acquired this reputation for ~historical authenticity~ from somewhere, either.
Yes, exactly! I can only imagine it’s much worse, because even medieval-European fiction is so fraught with like, I don’t know, shit like the entire works of Philippa Gregory (I know that isn’t truly medieval, or most of it isn’t, but bear with me here), because there’s such a blurring of the lines. And for what I studied (primarily North American/Canadian youth and family studies from about 1815-1945), it’s much less confusing, but ugh. UGH. Who on earth would look to Martin for authenticity or accuracy??? It’s like looking to the Redwall books for authentic discussions of medival power hierarchies. Just no.
But the influence–the most deadly part–is still there. Historical leakage.
I remember reading in undergrad that Southerners at the height of pro-slavery sentiment were super into Ivanhoe. So yeah.
One of my favourite undergrad courses was called History Written With Lightning (the professor teaching it was a meticulous and thorough historian with a secret (not that secret) streak of poetry in his soul). It’s basically what you’re talking about but with film and images rather than books.
The thing that struck me was how much a strong personal story – even if fiction or fictionalised – will colour my perception of an entire era, or social group, or struggle, or whatever. WELL-RESEARCHED memoirs and historical fiction are basically my favourite, but I wish people would draw a sharper distinction between “this person’s internal truth touched me strongly” and “this person’s internal truth is therefore externally valid”.
I really like this piece, thanks for writing it!
“(It’s usually stated that he fudged it by including both indigo and blue, but I’m most skeptical about orange.)”
Thank you! Orange is bullshit.
#CancelOrange
Never. #BanIndigo 4-evar.
We need not limit ourselves.
Every time I go stepwise around a color wheel, I see that at least half of the hues are some kind of grue. Why isn’t there a Teal up in there?
The color of the grass around the well and the water in the well? Lan. 2/3 of the world’s population sees this as a separate color.
Naming of colours is a mind-bending thing to think about. Welsh has llwyd, which covers a whole bunch of hues an English-speaker would call blue, green and/or grey (so, somewhat like lan, I guess).
English up to Early Modern used “purple” to include everything up to what we would now call dark red (blood can be purple in Shakespeare, for example). The Anglo-Saxon word for “red” actually covered a range of things in what we’d now call the dark yellow-to-orange area.
Ooo, or the Himba, who have four colors: there are shades of green in EVERY SINGLE ONE.
Not all-the-way related, but a little rant about the meme, which also vexes me greatly (maybe because I only know 5/9):
Being able to identify scientists by pictures of their faces isn’t very meaningful, anyway. Knowing what Kim Kardashian looks like makes sense, she a large part of what she is known for is how she looks. Knowing what Tesla looks like isn’t what’s important in being a scientifically literate person so much as say, knowing how alternating current works, you know?
THANK YOU, 100%
Well shit when you get down to it someone using the white-impact-slogan-on-black-frame Standard Unified Meme Format to virally accuse you of being ‘what’s wrong with the world’ for being trivial and media-focussed is like Al Capone accusing you of taking two candies out of the ‘please take one’ bowl
EXACTLY. I’m a humanities-brained person. I’ve HEARD OF Tesla, and Darwin, and Einstein, and Galileo, but damned if I could pick them out of a line-up. (Likewise many of the Old White Men of the literary canon. I’d need hints. How the fuck am I supposed to know Thomas Hardy from TS Eliot?)
I visibly recognize more contemporary individuals, but that doesn’t mean I know anything about them. (I do try to learn about individuals who actually DO things, but still.)
Yeah, I got majorly shamed once for not recognizing a picture of Foucault (who was a smartypants and all, but he’s not the only theorist out there, YOU GUYS). I mean, ok, I didn’t exactly learn about him by watching Panopticon on the CW, you know?
WOULD WATCH
Seriously. I am a scientist and I didn’t know who most of those people were. Why would I need to identify a dead science guy from a line up? When will that ever positively contribute to my life or anyone else’s? It’s not like scientific papers come with headshots, there are Big Names in my field I wouldn’t recognize, either, but I sure know their name and what they’ve published.
I… I know how to identify a lot of dead science guys because I got into an intense and far-reaching argument about vampire beards. Scientists: good examples of probable vampire facial hair through the ages.
I absolutely thought this piece was really splendid.
Words cannot describe how much I loved this. Part of it might be because I am still failing to think of any Great Scientists (men or not) that are widely known as being geologists. I think we get the short end of the stick much of the time.
Alfred Wegener!
Well but I’m a geologist by training so maybe not as well-known outside the bubble….
Yeah, he was the one that came to mind as well, but I think that might be the geologist bubble speaking. 🙁
We should change it to a blanket fort probably.
There’s Humboldt, but that guy did EVERYTHING.
Polymaths. They ruin it for everyone.
William Smith!
John Wesley Powell? At least here in Arizona. You can’t go five feet in northern AZ without running into a sign about the guy. Though a lot of them fail to mention he was a geologist…
Also, he was kinda really a huge douchecanoe.
I want details! He gets such a rah rah treatment in… probably Cadillac Desert? One of the dad books about water in the American West that my dad had me read?
I had first heard about Powell’s less-than-heroism in Over the Edge: Death in the Grand Canyon (in case you need another reason to read it! Which you should because I think it might be Toast required reading). Powell basically treated his Grand Canyon exploration team, including his younger(?) brother, like shit. Most people think this is the reason why three of the men on the team left the expedition and hiked out of the canyon (only to be murdered by Mormons or die of heat stroke or something).
Oh and I just found this on his Wikipedia page: “Powell firmly believed that the inhabitants of the North American continent before Columbus were in all instances barbaric and any evidence supporting a civilized society before that time should be discarded. This belief was known as the Powell doctrine and as a director of the Smithsonian he was in a position to enforce this view.”
Literally every book I’ve read up to this point has pretty much glorified Powell and everything he’s done (including my parental unit’s book). So yeah, the guy kinda fits into the whole Great Man story pretty well.
Anyway, go read Death in the Grand Canyon. It has a nice long chapter on the drama-filled shitstorm that was the John Wesley Powell expedition.
Geologist are the worst, they slow down every hike. (I kid, I kid, since the rest of us stop every time there are mating slugs or some cool lichen or we need to chase down a lizard.)
My dad is a geologist, and a hiking machine: there’s a family joke that all we have to do to slow him down is gasp out “What kind of rock is this?” and he’ll launch into a discussion of ultramafics.
Marie Tharp who worked with Bruce Heezen to map the sea floor and came up with proof of and mechanisms for sea floor spreading and continental drift?
Humboldt! But that may be because I had a relative callled Humboldtina…
If I had basic internet meme-making skills I would make one of these in which Snooki/Kardashian was replaced by Christopher Hitchens and the People You Ought To Know Or You’re The Problem would be a collection of wicked icons like Queen Liliuokalani, Dolores Huerta, Sylvia Rivera, Audre Lorde, Yuri Kochiyama, Emma Goldman, Angela Davis and Urvashi Vaid. I’m skewing American here so Americans can’t claim that they don’t know these women because they don’t study non-American history.
DO THIS
“If you don’t know who these people are, but you know who this is? Congratulations. You’re the product of a perpetually poorly-funded public US education system which cannot afford adequate textbooks on the History of Science or Western Art. Or you don’t care for Hitchens and his ilk.”
this! or you don’t have a good memory for faces, or all white dudes look the same to you…
The inclusion of Hitchens especially galls me because, IMO, he just didn’t…do as much as the other people featured. His work is not nearly as important to the way we live today as Newton’s, Curie’s, or Einstein’s. He wrote streams of incendiary rhetoric that generated some debate and made the “new atheist” community feel like its members were a cut above everyone else, but that’s it. He wasn’t even as good a popularizer of science as Sagan–his tactic was, “If you can’t science you’re evil and stupid” vs. “Nature is beautiful and exciting! Now let’s science!” Knowing about gravity and radioactivity is actually fundamental to understanding the world, so it follows that you’d want to learn about (but not mythologize) the people who researched that stuff. Knowing about the life and opinions of one of thousands of recently deceased writers? Not so much.
This got rant-y–I’m sorry.
But ’twas a good rant!
This was fantastic! I have never encountered Fara’s work before, so I am very excited to get my hands on her books.
This was absolutely wonderful and thought-provoking, and now I have lots of reading to add to my list, so win-win.
And yet sometimes, that heroic narrative is true. Here’s what the late Lily Kay, someone not at all sympathetic to the ‘great man’ view of history, wrote about Nirenberg and Matthaei’s breakthrough in cracking the genetic code in 1961: ‘the breaking of the code by Nirenberg and Matthaei was one of the most stunning events in the history of modern science. It represented a victory of material ingenuity over the Pythagorean ideals and is a David versus Goliath tale of an obscure young scientist defeating the eminent gray matter of physicists, mathematicians, biochemists, and geneticists, some of them Nobel laureates.’ (Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life, pp. 254–55).
Definitely, there are amazing people doing amazing things out there. I suppose it’s just that you shouldn’t expect that, or rewrite your narrative to make it happen?
I’ve decided that a snide reference to “Kardashians” is one of the fastest ways to tell that someone is full of shit. “Oh, those vacant idiots who watch reality TV. Everyone who watches reality TV obviously takes it really seriously and doesn’t consume any other form of media. I should know, because I spend all my waking hours reading Christopher Hitchens, which I take REALLY seriously. It’s the only way to engage with media, I’m telling you.”
This is akin to all the snide reviews about grownups reading YA or ladies reading books with pink covers or what have you. As if you have to pick one genre and swear total fidelity and allegiance to it for eternity…
Or “I don’t read books by women,” or whatever.
I take perverse pleasure in defending Kim Kardashian to those douchcanoes. “She’s famous for doing NOTHING,” they say. And I respond, “Yes, so it’s particularly admirable that she’s managed to become a hugely profitable and recognizable brand. She must be an excellent self-promoter and businesswoman!”
Thank you for writing this, and I might have to get Dr Fara’s book. Books.
“She thinks we have begun to cast geniuses to perform the role in society that saints used to fill.”
This is really true, and it scares me. I’ve never seen it put so succinctly before. Thank you.
Thanks, though please don’t be scared! If anything, this just confirms that we’ve always needed people with idealised stories we can look up to (ideally handily martyred so they can’t embarass us by turning out to be just like us.) And the lack of action on climate change and antibiotic resistance shows that we’re not in any danger of listening to scientists too much!
Yep. “Why are they even famous?” “Well, because people like you keep using them as metrics to show just how much more Intellectual and Serious you are than the great unwashed.”
There’s a form to be famous, and it’s really confusing, but they managed to fill it out correctly.
Those narratives are sort of demanded, though, aren’t they? There’s no millennial cabal making sure everyone knows Achilles didn’t do shit to take Troy while the carpenters who made the Ithacan fleet languish in obscurity, or suppress the tale of the time it was really a committee of forty who drew up the charter to steal the sun and Coyote was just a fame-seeking leech who was barely involved at all; those stories were always more or less available just as we could all easily know Kardashian’s marketing team… but we don’t, and don’t particularly want to, and as far as I’ve seen no civilization has ever particularly wanted to. Heroic narratives do have longevity and motivating power over humans that a statistical analysis of fundamental economic forces doesn’t, even if the latter is a more factual, and not just because they’re what we’ve been told. Irrespective of field or subject matter they’re something we seem to need, and in the absence of one create it.
I think that’s an interesting and important point – we do crave these narratives, they fill an important role and I don’t think we should do without them. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t also damaging when they appear by doing things like downplaying the role of women and minorities and distorting processes that work in different ways.
Aye, it’s true, and I’d like to think I’m sympathetic to that in the article (it IS more impressive to be burned at the stake,whatever the backstory, and of course that’s the story you’re going to be drawn to.) But, you know, we have the Iliad and we have Greek History, whereas there’s a danger in popular science history that all we get are the hero narratives. And straight hero narratives can also be really boring, and not engaging to people you’d like to tell the story to – would everyone care about Achilles so much if we didn’t have him sulking in his tent first, and wouldn’t a carpenter be more interested in the carpenter’s story?
I guess it’s a question of roles, I just sort of group pop-history more with the storytelling tradition than a science, since after all that’s what people are getting them for. It’s not just an elementary-school version of the same thing as you’d look for on JSTOR, it’s a different beast with a different purpose – and maybe we could do a better job of making that clear, since you do run into the dudes who consider themselves subject-matter authorities because they read a readers digest biography of some guy or people thinking you don’t need to fund science because the Wrights built a plane out of bike parts in a garage and great discoveries are just something that happens to tinkering cranks from time to time.
I hear you on the standard canon of heroes not doing it for everyone, but Achilles sulking and messing around with his lover are still a basic component of a quintessential hero narrative, and I think that drive for something different or more specifically appealing to a group is exactly where you get the Internet ‘herstories’, or folk legends, or more niche icons – I have no idea who’d be a legend to carpenters, but photographers sure as shit have Robert Capa, metalworkers have Albert Paley, there’s Great Men and Women for every field of endeavor I do know anything about who tend to come with their own little homilies and morality plays. Maybe we just have to know its place, and accept that in order to do their job these household saints are not going to be a one-size-fits all standard or a comprehensive picture of the truth, and we’ve all got our little house cults. Nobody really works like Saint Galileo from the middle school parable on dogmatism did, but not even the other astrophysicists want to hear a story about spending eight years doing calculations to cowrite an AGU report slightly correcting the figures on geomagnetic inductance on Encedalus either.
Also, I really do want to hear the story of Kardashian’s PR team – those people have like B-movie mad-science level powers of mind control, I’m basically picturing the alchemist’s cabal from The Holy Mountain
The Wrights read ALL the literature, and then decided that some of the data on wing shapes must be wrong and built a wind tunnel with Chanute’s money. They started out tinkering in their garage, and they had a brilliant insight that’s based on watching how other flying things fly and also steering bikes, but they sure as hell had outside funding.
In fact, they did science much the way I end up doing science: saying something is dumb and wrong in a loud voice at a conference, and then putting a great deal of time and money where my mouth was.
yeah, right, next you’ll be telling me George Washington could tell a lie
They must be very interesting people! (And she must be too, she’s obviously done amazingly at building her brand.)
I hear what you’re saying. I suppose it comes down to what I said at the end of the article, you just have to bear in mind that all the narratives you’re reading are created by someone else, or even created by your own need to have heroes, and not take them them at face value (as so many people do, there’s more idiots out there than you think who will argue that science, or whatever, doesn’t need funding because, IDK, facebook and Tesla or something.
Thank you for this great piece! I’m adding Dr. Fara’s book to my reading list right now. I have a foot in science studies (if you couldn’t tell from my username!), so I love reading and thinking and talking about the social processes that shape science and narratives about science.
Really enjoyed this piece and the comments. Thanks!
same, i really enjoyed this piece.
I agree wholeheartedly, and I’d like to add that we generally dismiss any kind of contribution from non-Western cultures. Either it’s, “Oh, pfft, that wasn’t science,” or a white guy stole the discovery and claimed it in his name.
So thanks for writing this.
One more for the Toast reading list: Harkness’ _The Jewel House_, about non-heroic, internationalist inquiry in London — flourishing until nativists got nervous and coopted it into the Royal Society.
Thanks, that sounds brilliant!
I had similar thoughts about that image – inasmuch as we ought to be venerating something in the history of science, it is great accomplishments, not great men (or women, for that matter). That’s the whole point of scientific endeavor, really, that it’s bigger than any one person’s opinions or prejudices, that it’s a great collaboration across countries, cultures, and eras. Treating scientists like celebrities is not really different from treating celebrities like celebrities, in that what we care about is not what anyone did but simply that they got to be famous for it.
So, who cares if you can pick out a portrait of Newton or Lavoisier out of a lineup (I couldn’t tell Newton any ponce with a wig, for example). The important bit is what they have to teach us, the basis of optics and gravitation and mechanics and thermodynamics. But if the left side of that image had a bunch of equations instead of pictures the kind of people who like and share viral memes on Facebook would probably feel insulted.
Just finished reading ‘Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything’ by Phillip Ball. I think it’s an excellent example of how to write a popular history of science without falling into some of the traps mentioned in the article. The chapter on the Academy of the Lynx, in particular, is great.
What a great article! Thank you!
I knew there was a reason I had taken Felicity as my confirmation name!
Oooh, you beat me to the post on llwyd, my favorite Welsh color. I always think of it as “every color that water could possibly be.”
The ground-breaking study of anorexic female saints is Holy Feast and Holy Fast by Caroline Walker Bynum (1987).
I like to try to keep my presentism in perspective by imagining how people in 2114 (or 2514) will look back and smile and shake their heads at all the "crazy" and "ridiculous" things we believed, both in science and in popular culture in 2014.
Oh, I know a very large number of people (not all of them women) who have substituted food for religion. It's always amusing when they side-eye me for believing in God and then solemnly tell me how a low-salt vegan diet "absolutely changed my life."
Beside the point of course, but in case you were interested the feller in the oil painting is Thomas Paine.
This was great!
This post does a beautiful job articulating some of my complex feelings about the way science is viewed in modern society. Ideas are declared truth or bullshit, without the humbling recognition that “Knowledge is never fixed.” Figures are geniuses or quacks, and the people are either intellectual or idiotic. It’s a smug narrative that lacks awareness and nuance. I am so grateful there are scientific historians aiming to offer a more complex and nuanced portrait of the Great Men of Science; it seems like a way to infuse more thoughtfulness into our discussions. Thank you for a lovely read!