Gregory Schrempp’s collection of ten essays is meant to explore folkloristic “gestures and genres” at the root of certain forms of popular science writing; not the popular science writing for the elite—the subject of his 2011 book The Ancient Mythology of Modern Science—but the popular science written for the masses. Schrempp’s major contention is that no matter how science is presented in popular writing, it inevitably collapses into the tropes, formulas, motifs, and sensibilities of mythology. In a world immersed in a scientific worldview, mythology is inescapable. Science, Bread, and Circuses is marketed as book of “folkloristic essays,” but I would think that this book would fall at least two deviations from the mean of those books that one might encounter or even imagine as folkloristic.

In chapter 1, “Formulas of Conversion: A Proverbial Approach to Astronomic Magnitudes,” Schrempp considers the proverbial foundations of “formulas of conversion” that one frequently encounters in translating enormously large and small measurements. For example, Hoover dam contains “enough concrete ... to build a four-foot wide sidewalk around the earth at the equator.” Schrempp is undoubtedly right that these formulas are meant to take very great and very small quantities and convey a feeling for the sizes they are meant to express. But their linkage to proverbial language seems stretched. For one thing, these are not pithy sayings and they convey no wisdom. In the case of the Hoover dam comparisons, they may be chained with other conversion formulas such as the quantity of water that runs through the dam’s generators or the thickness of the dam at its base. Although proverbs may often be structured as formulas of equality and inequality—e.g., “time is money,” “a picture is worth a thousand words,” “don’t make a mountain out of a molehill”—these are not really designed to create a feeling for quantity. They are not formulas of conversion. Even “a picture is worth a thousand words” is only meant to suggest that a picture is data rich. In fact, there might be a closer relationship between these formulas of conversion and stories like the one about Sissa ibn Dahir as reported by Ibn Khallikan in the thirteenth century. The story is well known, and relates to King Shiram’s offering to reward Ibn Dahir for inventing chess. Ibn Dahir requested that he be granted one grain of wheat for the first square of the board, two for the second, four for the third, eight for the fourth, doubling the amount for each square. The king, who thought Ibn Sissa was foolishly asking for too little, soon realized that there was not enough wheat in the world to fulfill his request. The story illustrates exponential growth and shows the relation of very big numbers to something familiar and concrete like a chessboard. I am not suggesting that the formulas of conversion that we encounter today are rooted in such stories; only that they deal with matters of scale while proverbs for the most part do not. Nevertheless, this essay sets the theme of this volume as most of the essays are, in some sense, about matters of scale and the commensurability of human and cosmological domains.

Chapter 2, “Leonardo and Copernicus at Aspen: How Science Heroes Can Improve Your Bottom Line,” is about motivational speakers and writers who aim to tap into the resources of an individual in order to help them realize a sense of personal coherence and effectiveness. Like religious preachers, these motivational speakers and writers —most notably, Michael Gelb in his How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day—have recourse to a catalog of saints who are presented as models for contemplation and emulation. These models, however, are secular, scientific “geniuses” who can help individuals think “out of the box”—although perhaps not out of the box from within which these inspiring ideas are presented—and thus realize personal and professional success. Copernicus, Leonardo, Darwin, Freud, Einstein are frequently identified in the top ten exemplars of creative thinkers, and strategies for thinking like these heroes are offered. As Schrempp justly points out, there is a distinctly American inflection to these endeavors. One does not have to reproduce Copernicus’s painstaking astronomical observations or master his careful mathematical calculations in order to be creative. The type of instruction that is being offered is creativity lite; a way to get results like these thinkers obtained without having to actually think (or work) like them. It is one in a long line of examples in American culture of “magical thought.”

Chapter 3, “Opening the Two Totes: Mythos and Logos in the Contemporary Agora-sphere,” likewise emphasizes matters of hagiography which unite the practices of two different groups: the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and the Mythic Imagination Institute, both of which sponsor periodic conventions for their followers. But despite the radical differences between the two with regard to their positions on the scientific and the spiritual in the world, they both converge in what Schrempp calls guru dynamics—a resort to charismatic figures to personify the teachings of the group. Joseph Campbell is the guru of the myth seekers, Carl Sagan for the skeptics. Even the skeptics have recourse to myth, according to Schrempp, as Sagan in his famous television series tried to argue for the complementarity of science and ancient wisdom. And both organizations are similarly united in their orientation toward the marketplace in the sale of souvenirs, paraphernalia, and publications, although, surprisingly, the spiritualists seem to outdo the scientists in their commitment to the production of marketable items.

Chapter 4, “Taking the Dawkins Challenge: On Fairy Tales, Viruses, and the Dark Side of the Meme,” takes up the question of those quanta of information that Richard Dawkins claims spread and evolve according to Darwinian principles. Schrempp’s trenchant commentary is directed at the dark side of the meme. The dark side has two aspects: (1) memes are selfish and promote themselves at the expense of everything else; and (2) some memes are regarded as intrinsically bad and promote attitudes and actions that are evil. Folklorists have not made great use of memes in their considerations of folklore, but Jack Zipes claims that fairy tales are memes that promote human adaptation. Evil memes, in both Dawkins’s and Zipes’s view, are not overcome by good memes but rather by acts of human will. Thus individual consciousness somehow stands apart from memetic programming and is capable of criticizing the bad and promoting the good from an independent position. Schrempp sees the problem of evil in memetic theory as drifting into Judeo-Christian moralizing about human freedom. He sees in evil memes a return to an older mythology which externalizes evil in demons or other agents. Of course, the possibility that good and evil memes are just memes, and that the evaluation of memes is likewise memetic, is a position that few are willing to seriously entertain—not Dawkins, and not even Schrempp. I am not too happy about it myself. The reason is not hard to fathom. It leaves humans as bits of matter that operate according to programs that are not of their own creation or even their own choosing. One is reminded of G. C. von Lichtenberg’s (1742-1799) observation that “man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will.”

Chapter 5, “The Biggest Losers: A Sensible Plan for Controlling Your Cosmic Appetite,” explores the idea that the cosmic and the quotidian express the same patterns at different scales much as the configuration of Balinese temples, villages, and houses reflect a greater cosmic order. Schrempp explores the ideas expressed by Joel Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams that it is necessary and good for humans to connect to the cosmos as a home rather than the unending, cold, and inhospitable space described by post-Copernican science. Humans must see themselves as the center of the universe even if this is not topographically correct. Schrempp suggests that the picture of the cosmos provided by science is so counterintuitive that there is no choice but to fall back on conceits drawn from mythology. Primack and Abrams don’t want to return to the mythologies of old, but see them as useful in promoting the veneration of science. (This tactic constitutes the “bread and circuses” of the book’s title.) These conceits are only partial and cannot fulfill the same needs as the mythologies of the past. They are also dangerous in the sense that the metaphorical import may be lost and produce literal conceptions that are contrary to a scientific cosmology.

What is produced, in Schrempp’s view, is a set of strategies not unlike those that have developed to deal with our appetites for food; appetites that developed when our environment was very different and which may no longer be appropriate or even healthy. Schrempp extends this food metaphor to the quest for meaning in an uncaring cosmos. The first strategy is the denial that our appetites are bad: continue to eat red meat or, on the cosmological plane, continue to acquiesce to emotionally-satisfying deities. The second strategy is the modification of the appetite by the addition of nutritional supplements or drugs. I am not exactly sure what this would mean in cosmological terms, and Schrempp isn’t too sure either (58). Perhaps this would mean reducing our dependence on the gods and ingesting greater and greater doses of science but not to the extent that the latter entirely replaces the former. The third strategy is heroic asceticism: extreme exercise along with a radical reduction in food intake. Hunger, after all, can make the little food we do ingest more satisfying. In the cosmological world, it seems a kind of stoicism. There is no real comfort in the world apart from the belief in the virtue of our own actions. The fourth strategy is the sensible scientific plan: the choice of less harmful substitutes as the objects of our once-adaptive desires. Continuing the food metaphor, this last strategy involves eating lighter and healthier diets with new and exotic elements occasionally thrown in to keep things interesting. It is a science-rich diet laced with the occasional mythological motif but with no place for the “unruly, needy, polysaturated pantheons” of the past (59).

Chapter 6, “It’s A Wonderfully Conflicted Life! The Survival of Mythology in the Capra-Corn Cosmos,” is an interesting examination of the science-education films produced by Frank Capra in the late 1950s. People my age should (vaguely) remember some of these: Our Mr. Sun, Hemo the Magnificent, The Strange Case of Cosmic Rays, and The Unchained Goddess. Noting that others have commented on the amalgamation of science and religion in these films, Schrempp chooses to focus on the mythology and the grand cosmogonic story’s relation to everyday ideology. Some of these films are populated with mythological or literary characters incarnated as cartoons or puppets. Yet the films are about the opposition of science and mythology; the way that past mythological understanding is supplanted by scientific understanding. The mythological characters at first oppose the view presented by the scientist (a character played by a human being), until the scientist is able to reveal some deep secret about the phenomenon under scrutiny: the sun, the blood, weather, cosmic rays. The mythological figures in the film are reduced to art as they capture aspects of human experience in relation to nature and the human condition. But religion is not so diminished. The films acknowledge that science only addresses questions of matter and is not sufficient for questions of spirit. Questions of spirit demand a religious orientation, but whatever that religious orientation is, it does not include the gods of the old mythologies. The scientist in Cosmic Rays says, “The more we know of creation, the closer we get to the Creator” (78). Like science, religion is true; presumably a revealed truth. But in trying to reconcile science and religion, Capra invokes mythology, if only as art.

Chapter 7, “Departures from Earth I: The Ferris Wheel and the Deep-Space Probe,” deals with moments of peak experience or epiphanies; “intense, transcendent, harmonizing personal experience” that Schrempp calls “cosmic moments” (84). These moments are recounted both in popular scientific writing and literature. Schrempp compares an experience that Garrison Keillor describes on a Ferris wheel at a state fair with Carl Sagan’s description of the Voyager photograph of earth as that spacecraft passed beyond the solar system. Keillor absorbs the sensations of the fair experience and muses on the relations between generations past, present, and future. Sagan, in contemplating the Voyager photograph, cannot resist describing the pale blue spot that is earth as “home”: “On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you’ve ever heard of … lived out their lives…. Every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there” (88). Both Keillor’s and Sagan’s descriptions are similarly concocted although they are of different scales. And both are suffused with similar sentimentalities about our place in a greater scheme of things.

Chapter 8, “Departures from Earth II: The Reason(s) for the Tragedy of Space Shuttle Columbia,” is an effort to parse William Langwiesche’s account of the causes and failures lying behind the disintegration of space shuttle Columbia in 2003. Schrempp analyzes the inanimate, the bureaucratic, and the human dimensions of the account and explores the conflicts within and between each of these spheres. The inanimate sphere unfolds as a largely cool and dispassionate assessment of the physics and engineering of the disaster. The bureaucracy appears as a structure with some of the same attributes of any complex organism: hierarchical, inbred, and defensive. The human sphere unfolds in terms of particular personalities and the account assumes something of the form of a detective story. Scientists, like churchmen, can be ruled by faith. This chapter never reaches the cosmological level of the previous chapters. In his concluding paragraph, Schrempp claims that there exists a “cosmic flaw” in that human life is the same and different from the rest of the cosmos, and, consequently, there are instances of both alignment and misalignment which are the basis for both unity and disaster (110). The analysis of the account is interesting enough, and the general principle may be true, but I am not sure that the Columbia disaster is the necessary, or even the best, way, to illustrate it.

Chapter 9, “‘Goodbye Spoony Juney Moon’: A Mythological Reading of Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers,” is a thought-provoking reading of Stoppard’s play. Stoppard’s works often concern themselves with mathematical, linguistic, or philosophical matters. (But is Stoppard really a popular science writer, and are his plays really for the “masses”?) Schrempp attempts to unravel the various topoi of the play—domestic, socio-criminological, political, cosmological—much as Claude Lévi-Strauss attempted to analyze the geographic, economic, sociological, and cosmological levels of the Tshimshian “Story of Asdiwal.” The play involves, among other things, a murder, an attempt to unravel Zeno’s paradoxes about Achilles and the tortoise and arrows in flight, and a political revolution, and is set against a backdrop of a British lunar landing in which one astronaut is deliberately left behind. The play, according to Schrempp, explores the relation of moral absolutism to moral relativity.

Chapter 10, “Is Lucretius a God? Epic, Science, and Prescience in De Rerum Natura,” looks at Lucretius’s famous book as a kind of popular scientific writing of the first century, writing not fundamentally different from the science writing of today. Schrempp is concerned with the formulas and strategies of such writing and focuses particularly on the ways that such writing inevitably exploits the very mythological and religious ideas that it claims to supplant. Schrempp recognizes that these strategies can be used for different reasons and do not necessarily proceed from a commitment to a mythological worldview. The mythological intrusions may serve for proselytizing comparison (i.e., a strawman argument), as literary metaphor, or as a kind of heroizing that dramatizes the significance of science. Nevertheless, popular science writing, whether by Titus Lucretius Carus or Richard Dawkins, ultimately tries to read moral lessons from scientific observations and theories and these are mythological in a substantive, and not merely a rhetorical or stylistic, sense.

Schrempp’s observations and analyses in various chapters of the book are interesting enough, but the demonstration that mythology inevitably rears its head in science writing—even if mythology is ostensibly what that writing is designed to refute—does not seem to be much of a trick. Schrempp never offers a definition of mythology (or of religion for that matter). Mythology, however, is not merely stories of the old gods, or cosmological or sociological foundation stories, or even symbolic constructions that confer a sense of social or religious identity. For Schrempp, mythology resides in almost any anthropomorphizing or anthropocentrizing gesture. Like the comparative mythologist Max Müller, who claimed—although for very different reasons—that merely in saying “Good morning” one was committing a solar myth, Schrempp seems to suggest that astronomers who refer to planetary bodies of a certain mass that orbit around other stars as “super-earths” are likewise committing a solar myth. Dead and distant matter is translated onto a human scale. Carl Sagan’s rhapsody on the earth as that place in which everything and everyone we have ever known resides is mythological because it is apprehended, even at a distance of billions of miles, in terms of human familiarities and human caring. The point of popular science writing, however, is to make science popular, to describe that knowledge in relation to the interests and concerns of people. Writers must humanize scientific knowledge, and in doing so, anthropomorphic and anthropocentric tropes become inevitable.

Humans are puny, insignificant creatures in—from a scientific point of view—a seemingly infinite and uncaring universe. (Is the description of the universe as “uncaring” anthropocentric and mythological as well? Is there a paradox in an uncaring universe giving rise to matter that does care and would seem to have no choice but to care?) “Man is the measure of all things” because man, as far as we know, is the only measurer of all things. For humans, things—the discoveries of science—matter, and in that word matter is the curious conjunction of distanced materiality and objects of human concern. Schrempp, in uncovering mythological turns in popular science writing, is playing with a stacked deck. Schrempp knows that he is, so we are, perhaps, to be excused for being less impressed in turning over a straight flush when we know the hand is dealt from a deck consisting solely of spades.

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[Review length: 3089 words • Review posted on August 25, 2015]