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| Henri Matisse La leçon de musique (The Music Lesson) 1917 Barnes Foundation, Merion, |
The Role of Science in Popular Culture
Throughout the 20th Century, the elitist approach of history of science shifted to the study of science in popular culture. Elitist analysis of history of science, such as the “Scientific Revolution”, the “Renaissance”, and the “Enlightenment”, studied the popularization and diffusion of science among certain elite groups. Roger Cooter and Steven Pumfrey encouraged the study of science in popular culture in order to understand the meaning of science for ordinary people, middle-classes, and minorities, such as women and marginal members of society. Science in popular culture was interested in cultural resistance, struggle, and appropriation. Robert Darnton, Paolo Rossi, Edgard Siszel, Stephen Pumfrey, Maurice Slawinki, William Eamon, and Sarah Schechner Genuth attempted to understand science in popular culture emphasizing the different roles that science played in the Sixteenth Century. .Darnton explains the role of science as a means of both social mobility and political radicalism in the 1780s in France. Due to the popular appeal of science in the late Eighteenth Century a group of bourgeois supported mesmerism so as to improve their social status. These bourgeois lacked “birth” and “title” had been rejected by the elitist scientific institutions of France’s late Eighteenth Century despite their wealthy and education. (Therefore, their strategy was to counterbalance their lack of birth and connection with their education and their wealth). They joined the “Harmonique Sociétés” that adhered to mesmerism. Mesmerism was an alternative system to understand and explain natural phenomena, particularly physical human being’s illnesses. This group of bourgeois moved from a medical circle that embraced mesmerism to a political radicalism that participated actively in the French Revolution. Their political radical emerged once they broke up with Mesmer because these bourgeois did share Mesmer’s purposes. Mesmer attempted to win a place within French leading scientific institutions, however he found he could become wealthy and popular within the upper and middle-classes. The group of bourgeois’s purpose was political rather than social and economic. Thus, the “Harmonique Sociétés” achieved political and social relevance in France’s “campagne”, particularly in the south-east of France, from Strasbourg, Lyon, Grenoble, Nîmes to Montpellier. Darnton argued that the political radicalism based on the “scientific idea” of mesmerism was an alternative and competing system of understanding the world to the “Enlightenment ideas” spread by elitist proponents, such as Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Carit Condorcet, Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Jean Le Rond D’Alambert. Mesmerism’s revolutionary message was to reform institutions by physically regenerating Frenchmen. According to mesmerism, the improvement of bodies would elevate the morality of the Frenchmen, and better morals would produce political effects. The elite’s ideas of “Enlightenment” were rooted on the relationship between physical-moral causality which from Darnton’s point of view would keep the status-quo rather than lead to social and economic change.
Rossi, Pumfrey, Slawinki and Zilsel altered the understanding of the Scientific Revolution. For the first time in history, natural philosophers began to take notice of the activities of the artisan’s workshops, and the methodology of craftsmen provided a model for an entirely new experimental approach to the study of nature that culminated in the philosophy of Francis Bacon. They argued that there were changes in the institution, the role, and the social need of “scientists”.[1] Rossi and Zilsel demonstrated how the scientific activity shifted from universities to princely courts, formal urban academies, and organized scientific societies in the Sixteenth Century. Scientist became courtiers that had to meet the needs and whims of their patron. These authors analyzed were authority lied in the Sixteenth Century and the arguments to legitimate scientific endeavors.
William Eamon embraces Rossi and Zilsel’s argument of how craftsmen were active actors in the construction of scientific knowledge. Eamon argued that the relationship between natural philosophers and craftsmen led to the Baconian method. Eamon also argued that the scientific elite denied the craftsmen’s contribution to their new physical understanding of natural phenomena. They did not want to make explicit that they were engaged in “pseudoscientific” activities and denied that they had appropriated craftsmen’s traditional knowledge. Eamon argued that both the empiricism and experience of the Baconian method have their origins in craftsmen’s traditional way of solving problems. The “Book of Secrets” illustrated how widespread empiricism and experience were among craftsmen. The “Book of Secrets” have nothing to do with magic, the supernatural, or occultism; on the contrary, it is the emergence of a new genre based on a set of “recipes” that tell ordinary people how to solve everyday problems of the Sixteenth Century. The “Book of Secrets” was written by the urban intelligentsia of diverse social status. The intention of the authors was to acquire fame, and to advertise their recipes as a means of redefining their social status by using science and noble features. They did not confront the social or political organization of the Sixteenth Century. Therefore, their range of interests was limited, restricted to those arts which did not come into conflict with aristocratic sensibilities. Because of this, mechanical arts were not among their interests. Their attitude towards arts was that one of “virtuosity”. Their ultimate goal was to construct a new model of nobility that was more appropriate to urban classes that lacked both birth and title, while possessing wealth and education. Therefore, the urban intelligentsia aspired to redefine the urban nobility in terms of virtue and personal merit. The “Book of Secrets” illustrated how widespread and appealing empiricism and experience were among ordinary people. And the bourgeois people capitalized on their large audience in order to elevate their social status. At the very end, the authors did not want to overthrow the social, political, and economic structure of the Sixteenth Century. They merely pursued to find their role within the urban learned elites of the Italian cities of the Sixteenth Century. .
Schechner Genuth argued that ancient folklore, religious ideas, magic and popular beliefs influenced the learned elite’s development of cosmology. She challenges the traditional explanation that Newton and Halley swept away the superstitious beliefs of comets in two ways. First, she argued that neither scientific theories nor philosophical debates were sufficient to dispel the widespread belief in commentary divination. Second, she showed that natural philosophers – such as Newton - retained something of the traditional lore because they never linked comets with changes in the state or the church. The “Scientific Revolution’s” ideas were conservative because they did not challenge the social or political order but rather reinforced important values, behaviors, and beliefs of those structures. Schechner Genuth analyses the meaning of comets in the Seventeenth Century. The roots of those beliefs lied in ancient folklore, which had been appropriated by both early Christians that interpreted folklore as signs of God’s wrath, and the “Reformation.” She explores the interplay between the superstitious dread of comets shared throughout the ages by peoples at all levels of society, and the role of comets in the birth of cosmology. She also highlighted the contradictory meaning of comets in the Seventeenth Century, while Newton gave comets a benign purpose; ordinary people acknowledged the catastrophic consequences to be expected if a comet were to collide with the earth. Nineteenth and Twentieth Century ideas about comets conformed to the naturalistic and uniformitarian principles that governed geology. Meanwhile, popular comet lore retained its own power that was shown by the fear, uncertainty, and vulnerability that learned and non-learned people shared towards the effects of Halley’s Comet in 1910. Schechner Genuth carries on an excellent and knowledgeable historical study of cultural responses to comets from the Antiquity to the present.
Department of History
[1] The use of scientist for the eighteenth is an anachronysm that Rossi and Silzel should pay attention to by redefining his concept of scientist.
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