Canadian Store (CAD)
You are currently shopping in our Canadian store. For orders outside of Canada, please switch to our international store. International and US orders are billed in US dollars.
The following is excerpted from The Ancient Mythology of Modern Science: A Mythologist Looks (Seriously) at Popular Science Writing by Gregory Schrempp.
“It’s just matter”: this comment has stayed in my mind for over three decades now. I and a favourite uncle (a researcher at a pharmaceutical firm, and also the son of a Methodist minister) had been discussing the headline-grabbing story of an airliner that crashed in a snowstorm, leading the stranded survivors to eat the flesh of those who had died before rescue arrived. My uncle’s serene initial response to the incident – “it’s just matter” – reduced modern cannibalism to clinical truth. Almost immediately, however, he frowned and compromised this learned response with another, psychologically more primal, reaction. Noting that he himself probably would not have partaken of the meal, his reasoning was again terse: “it’s taboo.” In the space of several seconds, my uncle had tried out two opposing assessments – one obviously more professional, the other more personal (or at least intoned as such) – encapsulated by the words “matter” and “taboo.” While the man of science resolved a provocative quandary by categorizing the episode under a label – “matter” – that connotes moral distance and neutrality, the man of myth shuddered at the desperate breach of human decorum – a decorum that resists the levelling effect of this same label. The existence of taboos, their origin, and the consequences of their violation are popular themes in mythologies worldwide. Taboos are typically accompanied by a conviction that violations will produce cosmic repercussions, a belief which instances, in another form, the principle that the cosmos mirrors the settlement. By a modern society, “mythology” is typically regarded as the expression of a pre-scientific world in which the substance and structure of the cosmos are infused, irrationally, with deep human anxieties and hopes. “Science” connotes the opposite: in the interest of objectivity, the purging of such anthropocentric conceit from the idea of nature. The antinomy embodied in mythology and science has been felt profoundly by many individuals, and, continually evading closure, it has left a long trail in Western analytical thought.
Infused with this antinomy, popular science writing as a genre exhibits a strained hybridism of content and purpose. As writers like Smolin report the most exciting developments of contemporary scientific research, the ancient devices and strategies creep into their narratives even amidst proclamations of the triumph of science over myth. But while these devices are ancient, the context into which they are deployed is new and allegedly modern. We encounter, in popular science writing, not a mythologizing of the cosmos as it was perceived by purportedly naive, archaic peoples (an idea that has given rise to countless fables about our intellectual origins), but rather – and this is what makes the venture interesting – an attempt to mythologize the cosmos of matter, that is, the cosmos of de-mythologized, impersonal substance.
To learn more about The Ancient Mythology of Modern Science, or to order online, click here.
Media inquiries: Jacqui Davis, MQUP Publicist
No comments yet.