The Human Cosmos: Civilization and the Stars
By Jo Marchant
Dutton, 2020

Before looking at The Human Cosmos: Civilization and the Stars, the new book by award-winning writer Jo Marchant, a quick reminder might be in order: the starlight we see in the sky at night is hundreds of millions or even billions of years old, and the stars themselves are enormous balls of hydrogen and helium billions of miles from Earth, and the combination of these two things means, among other things, that the stars cannot possibly have any direct connection with human beings. The stars do not dispose. The heavens don’t know we’re here. When the light we’re seeing left its original solar systems, Earth was a hot world of microscopic slime. Calling a book “the human cosmos” is at best a bit of poetic license.

“Science has been wildly successful: today’s five-year-olds know more about the history, composition, and nature of the physical universe than early cultures managed to clean in thousands of years,” Marchant writes, and as much as the reader might wish she’d stop right there, she adds: “But it has also dissolved much of the meaning that those cultures found in life.” 

And before that reader can interject with something like, “Yes, science has dissolved much of the meaning those ancient cultures found in their understanding of the universe … because that understanding was wrong. The night sky isn’t a deity’s blanket; stars are not watching demons; thunder is not celestial warfare. Supplanting those mistaken ideas with provable reality is only a good thing” - before a reader can interject anything like that, The Human Cosmos is flowing on, with Marchant giving spirited and well-researched overviews of mankind’s long history of trying to understand the cosmos in art, religion, and the first budding steps of science. 

Those overviews are uniformly superb; Marchant is gifted at telling the stories of artists, prelates, and especially the scientists of earlier centuries. And the book keeps its focus squarely on the many ways all of that understanding, both flawed and sound, filtered outward to ordinary people, always attempting to draw direct connections between the wider world of nature and the intimate world of each individual. The thumbnail explanation of circadian rhythms illustrates the approach:

Doctors are realizing that most medical conditions display daily fluctuations in their occurrence or symptoms, including heart attacks, asthma, bronchitis, cystic fibrosis, strokes, fever, pain, seizures and suicide, to name just a few. The time of day can determine how we’ll respond to an infection or drug, or whether eating exactly the same meal will cause us to gain or lose weight. And even seasonal changes are important: the month in which babies are born affects their later risk of diseases such as dementia, multiple sclerosis and schizophrenia (with opposite patterns in the northern and southern hemisphere). Scientists don’t understand exactly why … but it’s clear that the position of the Earth relative to the Sun at the time you are born has health consequences that last for life.

Marchant relates a comment by Alfred Russell Wallace, effectively co-creator of the Darwinian theory of evolution: “The supreme end and purpose of this vast universe was the production and development of the living soul in the perishable body of man” - and as quaint and crack-brained as such a comment is, it’s also first cousin to some of Marchant’s own implications. Too often for comfort, she resorts to straw men like the one she slips in here:

The traditional scientific view, which underpins our modern society, is that our rational, waking consciousness gives the most accurate and useful view of reality, whether that’s our immediate surroundings or the cosmos as a whole. In areas of life from business and politics to medicine and education, we tend to trust and therefore prioritize rational thought. Meanwhile, we dismiss awe and wonder as childish, and discount transcendent states as meaningless if not downright suspect distortion, a messy artifact of how our brains are wired. But this picture is turning out to be flawed.

She doesn’t specify who dismisses awe and wonder as childish - understandably, since nobody in fact does that. The contrast such straw men sets up - one where a science-based view of reality is characterized as sterile and uninspiring and some view that doesn’t “prioritize rational thought” is by implication desirable. Rational thought shouldn’t merely be prioritized when it comes to our understanding of the cosmos - it should be exclusive. If there’s a benefit to be reaped by taking that rational approach and mixing in some irrationality just to retain a version of the awe or wonder that the Babylonians had four thousand years ago, The Human Cosmos doesn’t make any convincing case for it.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.