Thirty years ago, How Superstition Won and Science Lost broke important ground as the first systematic history of science popularization. John Burnham identified a set of problems that continue both to interest and to vex us: How do we convey the fruits of modern science in ways that nonscientists can understand? In this era of debates over fake news and anti-vaxxers, his critique of science popularization is surprisingly relevant—while at the same time profoundly limited by its moral assumptions. The interpretive arc that Burnham lays out in How Superstition Won is one that many scholars, including me, have found useful. Based on an impressive array of primary and secondary sources, the book explores popularization in three specific areas: health, psychology, and the natural sciences. Although each field had distinctive twists, they passed through similar stages: diffusion, popularization, dilution, and trivialization. Initially, nineteenth-century “men of science” assumed that knowledge could simply be “diffused” to the public; in their view, “science did not need condensation, simplification, and translation.” Finding that the public was hard to enlighten, men of science then tried to “popularize” a more simplified “religion of science” centered on correct ideas and practices. As science popularization moved into the hands of educators, journalists, and advertisers, it lost coherence and became “diluted,” setting the stage for the final declension into “trivialization,” in which “popular science” was reduced to “potent snippets of news” easily deployed in the name of commercial gain. Burnham leaves the reader in no doubt that this evolution has been a loss for all concerned. Put simply, How Superstition Won is a tale of good science gone wrong, in which the ideals of rational inquiry were corrupted by the inexorable forces of commercialism and “consumer culture.” In a 1988 review in Science, the historian Neil Harris quite rightly described the book as a “powerful and intense jeremiad.” As such, it illustrates the features of Burnham’s work in general: deep research and bold argument delivered with a simmering sense of moral indignation. Significantly, both Katherine Pandora and I found interpreting How Superstition Won in the tradition of the American jeremiad to be a useful way to understand its argument and tone. Jeremiads are of course not an exclusively American phenomenon. As Andrew Murphy wrote in his 2009 book Prodigal Nation, “narratives of decline, chastisement, and renewal appear across time,

中文翻译：

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美国耶利米亚人：约翰·C·伯纳姆和科学普及史

三十年前，《迷信如何得胜，科学失落》作为第一部系统的科普史开创了重要的局面。约翰·伯纳姆 (John Burnham) 确定了一系列既让我们感兴趣又让我们烦恼的问题：我们如何以非科学家可以理解的方式传达现代科学的成果？在这个关于假新闻和反疫苗者争论不休的时代，他对科普的批判出奇地相关——同时也受到其道德假设的深刻限制。Burnham 在 How Superstition Won 中阐述的解释弧线，包括我在内的许多学者都发现它很有用。该书基于一系列令人印象深刻的主要和次要资源，探讨了三个特定领域的普及：健康、心理学和自然科学。虽然每个领域都有不同的曲折，它们经历了相似的阶段：扩散、普及、淡化和平凡化。最初，19 世纪的“科学家”认为知识可以简单地“传播”给公众；在他们看来，“科学不需要浓缩、简化和翻译。” 发现公众难以启蒙，科学家们试图“普及”一种更简单的“科学宗教”，以正确的思想和实践为中心。随着科普到教育者、记者和广告商的手中，它失去了连贯性并被“稀释”，为最终退化为“平凡化”奠定了基础，其中“科普”沦为“有力的新闻片段”。 ”以商业利益的名义轻松部署。伯纳姆让读者毫不怀疑，这种演变对所有相关人员来说都是一种损失。简而言之，《迷信如何获胜》是一个关于优秀科学出错的故事，其中理性探究的理想被商业主义和“消费文化”的无情力量所腐蚀。在 1988 年的《科学》评论中，历史学家尼尔·哈里斯 (Neil Harris) 非常正确地将这本书描述为“强大而强烈的耶利米亚”。因此，它从总体上说明了伯纳姆作品的特点：深入的研究和大胆的论点，伴随着沸腾的道德愤慨。重要的是，Katherine Pandora 和我都发现在美国耶利米德的传统中解释迷信如何获胜是理解其论点和语气的有用方法。Jeremiads当然不是美国独有的现象。