Upending the Heroic Narrative: We've Done It with Race, but What About Science?

We're questioning Thomas Jefferson's hero status. Are we willing to do the same with science?

I’ve never really been into heroes. That’s probably why I wasn’t super interested in general American history when I was a kid, because pretty much all of the children's history books at the time were heroic narratives. I knew I was supposed to love George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, but—dare I admit it?—they seemed boring, too good to be true. They just didn't sound like real people.

That’s why it didn’t rock my world much in 2020 when people started highlighting the less savory aspects of American history. Thomas Jefferson had slaves? He had sex with at least one enslaved woman? He enslaved the children from that union? Not super surprising. Jefferson was never my hero anyways. Strangely, it actually makes people like that more real to me to learn that they were fallible humans and not godlike heroes.

Though it was a needed correction, the initial backlash against the heroic narrative in 2020 tended to be overly emotional and, in its own way, just as selective as the narrative it was trying to replace. Unilaterally turning all the heroes into villains didn’t quite sit right with me, either, because I knew the reality was more nuanced.

Fortunately, six years later, I’m seeing some good historical scholarship that is finally starting to take a more nuanced perspective. I just read two fascinating new books, This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis and Clark by Craig Fehrman and The Lost Cities of El Norte: Coronado's Quest, the Unconquered West, and the Birth of American Indian Resistance by Peter Stark. What I really like about both books is that they’re not only based on meticulous documentary research, but also incorporate Indigenous perspectives. There aren’t heroes or villains in these books, just real humans who make mistakes and have prejudices like everyone else.

Of course, there are aspects of the heroic narrative that no one is challenging yet. It’s perfectly acceptable—and even expected—to put Thomas Jefferson in a negative light, but the general trend is still to treat scientists and inventors as heroes. Sure, we add in some diversity—George Washington Carver as the token Black scientist and Marie Curie as the token woman—but they’re still framed as heroes.

A major premise of my history of organic farming is that the scientists who shaped our modern world weren’t heroes. They were fallible humans who made mistakes, and some of those mistakes had long-lasting consequences that we are still grappling with today. Organic farmers were some of the first to point out the dangers of scientific and technological “advances” like milling white flour, turning rocks into soluble chemical fertilizers, and spraying toxic synthetic chemicals to kill insects. They called into question not only specific technologies, but the very idea of Progress itself—that new technologies inevitably made the world a better place.

So far, I haven’t seen much critical history questioning the idea of Progress through science and technology. To me, it seems like a logical extension of the new Indigenous history. If you start from the premise that Indigenous American societies were equal in value and intelligence to European ones, even if they had supposedly “lower” technology and less hierarchical social structures, then the logical conclusion is that advanced technology and extreme specialization do not make a civilization “higher” or better. That doesn’t automatically make the scientists villains—but it does take away their hero status. My goal is to look at the history of science and technology with the same nuanced, complex perspective that the newer American histories use for race.

Is America ready to look critically at the heroic narrative of science? Well, ready or not, I’m going to do it!