Posted on 07/30/2014 8:24:22 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
‘My great fear,” Neil deGrasse Tyson told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes in early June, “is that we’ve in fact been visited by intelligent aliens but they chose not to make contact, on the conclusion that there’s no sign of intelligent life on Earth.” In response to this rather standard little saw, Hayes laughed as if he had been trying marijuana for the first time.
All told, one suspects that Tyson was not including either himself or a fellow traveler such as Hayes as inhabitants of Earth, but was instead referring to everybody who is not in their coterie. That, alas, is his way. An astrophysicist and evangelist for science, Tyson currently plays three roles in our society: He is the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the New York Science Museum; the presenter of the hip new show Cosmos; and, most important of all perhaps — albeit through no distinct fault of his own — he is the fetish and totem of the extraordinarily puffed-up “nerd” culture that has of late started to bloom across the United States.
One part insecure hipsterism, one part unwarranted condescension, the two defining characteristics of self-professed nerds are (a) the belief that one can discover all of the secrets of human experience through differential equations and (b) the unlovely tendency to presume themselves to be smarter than everybody else in the world. Prominent examples include MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry, Rachel Maddow, Steve Kornacki, and Chris Hayes; Vox’s Ezra Klein, Dylan Matthews, and Matt Yglesias; the sabermetrician Nate Silver; the economist Paul Krugman; the atheist Richard Dawkins; former vice president Al Gore; celebrity scientist Bill Nye; and, really, anybody who conforms to the Left’s social and moral precepts while wearing glasses and babbling about statistics.
The pose is, of course, little more than a ruse — our professional “nerds” being, like Mrs. Doubtfire, stereotypical facsimiles of the real thing. They have the patois but not the passion; the clothes but not the style; the posture but not the imprimatur. Theirs is the nerd-dom of Star Wars, not Star Trek; of Mario Kart and not World of Warcraft; of the latest X-Men movie rather than the comics themselves. A sketch from the TV show Portlandia, mocked up as a public-service announcement, makes this point brutally. After a gorgeous young woman explains at a bar that she doesn’t think her job as a model is “her thing” and instead identifies as “a nerd” who is “into video games and comic books and stuff,” a dorky-looking man gets up and confesses that he is, in fact, a “real” nerd — someone who wears glasses “to see,” who is “shy,” and who “isn’t wearing a nerd costume for Halloween” but is dressed how he lives. “I get sick with fear talking to people,” he says. “It sucks.”
A quick search of the Web reveals that Portlandia’s writers are not the only people to have noticed the trend. “Science and ‘geeky’ subjects,” the pop-culture writer Maddox observes, “are perceived as being hip, cool and intellectual.” And so people who are, or wish to be, hip, cool, and intellectual “glom onto these labels and call themselves ‘geeks’ or ‘nerds’ every chance they get.”
Which is to say that the nerds of MSNBC and beyond are not actually nerds — with scientific training and all that it entails — but the popular kids indulging in a fad. To a person, they are attractive, accomplished, well paid, and loved, listened to, and cited by a good portion of the general public. Most of them spend their time on television speaking fluently, debating with passion, and hanging out with celebrities. They attend dinner parties and glitzy social events, and are photographed and put into the glossy magazines. They are flown first class to university commencement speeches and late-night shows and book launches. There they pay lip service to the notion that they are not wildly privileged, and then go back to their hotels to drink $16 cocktails with Bill Maher.
In this manner has a word with a formerly useful meaning been turned into a transparent humblebrag: Look at me, I’m smart. Or, more important, perhaps, Look at me and let me tell you who I am not, which is southern, politically conservative, culturally traditional, religious in some sense, patriotic, driven by principle rather than the pivot tables of Microsoft Excel, and in any way attached to the past. “Nerd” has become a calling a card — a means of conveying membership of one group and denying affiliation with another. The movement’s king, Neil deGrasse Tyson, has formal scientific training, certainly, as do the handful of others who have become celebrated by the crowd. He is a smart man who has done some important work in popularizing science. But this is not why he is useful. Instead, he is useful because he can be deployed as a cudgel and an emblem in political argument — pointed to as the sort of person who wouldn’t vote for Ted Cruz.
“Ignorance,” a popular Tyson meme holds, “is a virus. Once it starts spreading, it can only be cured by reason. For the sake of humanity, we must be that cure.” This rather unspecific message is a call to arms, aimed at those who believe wholeheartedly they are included in the elect “we.” Thus do we see unexceptional liberal-arts students lecturing other people about things they don’t understand themselves and terming the dissenters “flat-earthers.” Thus do we see people who have never in their lives read a single academic paper clinging to the mantle of “science” as might Albert Einstein. Thus do we see residents of Brooklyn who are unable to tell you at what temperature water boils rolling their eyes at Bjørn Lomborg or Roger Pielke Jr. because he disagrees with Harry Reid on climate change. Really, the only thing in these people’s lives that is peer-reviewed are their opinions. Don’t have a Reddit account? Believe in God? Skeptical about the threat of overpopulation? Who are you, Sarah Palin?
First and foremost, then, “nerd” has become a political designation. It is no accident that the president has felt it necessary to inject himself into the game: That’s where the cool kids are. Answering a question about Obama’s cameo on Cosmos, Tyson was laconic. “That was their choice,” he told Grantland. “We didn’t ask them. We didn’t have anything to say about it. They asked us, ‘Do you mind if we intro your show?’ Can’t say no to the president. So he did.”
One wonders how easy it would have proved to say “No” to the president if he had been, say, Scott Walker. Either way, though, that Obama wished to associate himself with the project is instructive. He was launched into the limelight by precisely the sort of people who have DVR’d every episode of Cosmos and who, like the editors of Salon, see it primarily as a means by which they might tweak their ideological enemies; who, as apparently does Sean McElwee, see the world in terms of “Neil deGrasse Tyson vs. the Right (Cosmos, Christians, and the Battle for American Science)”; and who, like the folks at Vice, advise us all: “Don’t Get Neil deGrasse Tyson Started About the Un-Science-y Politicians Who Are Killing America’s Dreams.”
Obama knows this. Look back to his earlier backers and you will see a pattern. These are the people who insisted until they were blue in the face that George W. Bush was a “theocrat” eternally hostile toward “evidence,” and that, despite all information to the contrary, Attorney General Ashcroft had covered up the Spirit of Justice statue at the Department of Justice because he was a prude. These are the people who will explain to other human beings without any irony that they are part of the “reality-based community,” and who want you to know how aw-shucks excited they are to look through the new jobs numbers.
At no time is the juxtaposition between the claim and the reality more clear than during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which ritzy and opulent celebration of wealth, influence, and power the nation’s smarter progressive class has taken to labeling the “Nerd Prom.” It is clear why people who believe themselves to be providing a voice for the powerless and who routinely lecture the rest of us about the evils of income inequality would wish to reduce in stature a party that would have made Trimalchio blush: It is devastating to their image. Just as Hillary Clinton has noticed of late that her extraordinary wealth and ostentatious lifestyle conflict with her populist mien, the New Class recognizes the danger that its private behavior poses to its public credibility. There is, naturally, something a little off about selected members of the Fifth Estate yukking it up with those whom they have been charged with scrutinizing — all while rappers and movie stars enjoy castles of champagne and show off their million-dollar dresses. And so the optics must be addressed and the nomenclature of an uncelebrated group cynically appropriated. We’re not the ruling class, the message goes. We’re just geeks. We’re not the powerful; we’re the outcasts. This isn’t a big old shindig; it’s science. Look, Neil deGrasse Tyson is standing in the Roosevelt Room!
* * *
Ironically enough, what Tyson and his acolytes have ended up doing is blurring the lines between politics, scholarship, and culture — thereby damaging all three. Tyson himself has expressed bemusement that “entertainment reporters” have been so interested in him. “What does it mean,” he asked, “that Seth MacFarlane, who’s best known for his fart jokes — what does it mean that he’s executive producing” Cosmos? Well, what it means is that, professionally, Tyson has hit the jackpot. Actual science is slow, unsexy, and assiduously neutral — and it carries about it almost nothing that would interest either the hipsters of Ann Arbor or the Kardashian-soaked titillaters over at E!
Politics pretending to be science, on the other hand, is current, and it is chic.
It’s useful, too. For all of the hype, much of the fadlike fetishization of “Big Data” is merely the latest repackaging of old and tired progressive ideas about who in our society should enjoy the most political power. Outside of our laboratories, “it’s just science!” is typically a dodge — a bullying tactic designed to hide a crushingly boring orthodox progressivism behind the veil of dispassionate empiricism and to pretend that Hayek’s observation that even the smartest of central planners can never have the information they would need to centrally plan was obviated by the invention of the computer. If politics should be determined by pragmatism, and the pragmatists are all on the left . . . well, you do the math.
All over the Internet, Neil deGrasse Tyson’s face is presented next to words that he may or may not have spoken. “Other than being a scientist,” he says in one image, “I’m not any other kind of -ist. These -ists and -isms are philosophies; they’re philosophical portfolios that people attach themselves to and then the philosophy does the thinking for you instead of you doing the thinking yourself.” Translation: All of my political and moral judgments are original, unlike those of the rubes who subscribe to ideologies, philosophies, and religious frameworks. My worldview is driven only by the data.
This is nonsense. Progressives not only believe all sorts of unscientific things — that Medicaid, the VA, and Head Start work; that school choice does not; that abortion carries with it few important medical questions; that GM crops make the world worse; that one can attribute every hurricane, wildfire, and heat wave to “climate change”; that it’s feasible that renewable energy will take over from fossil fuels anytime soon — but also do their level best to block investigation into any area that they consider too delicate. You’ll note that the typical objections to the likes of Charles Murray and Paul McHugh aren’t scientific at all, but amount to asking lamely why anybody would say something so mean.
Still, even were they paragons of inquiry, the instinct would remain insidious. The scientific process is an incredible thing, but it provides us with information rather than with ready-made political or moral judgments. Anyone who privileges one value over another (liberty over security, property rights over redistribution) is by definition indulging an “-ism.” Anyone who believes that the Declaration of Independence contains “self-evident truths” is signing on to an “ideology.” Anyone who goes to bat for any form of legal or material equality is expressing the end results of a philosophy.
Perhaps the greatest trick the Left ever managed to play was to successfully sell the ancient and ubiquitous ideas of collectivism, lightly checked political power, and a permanent technocratic class as being “new,” and the radical notions of individual liberty, limited government, and distributed power as being “reactionary.” A century ago, Woodrow Wilson complained that the checks and balances instituted by the Founders were outdated because they had been contrived before the telephone was invented. Now, we are to be liberated by the microchip and the Large Hadron Collider, and we are to have our progress assured by ostensibly disinterested analysts. I would recommend that we not fall for it. Our technology may be sparkling and our scientists may be the best in the world, but our politics are as they ever were. Marie Antoinette is no more welcome in America if she dresses up in a Battlestar Galactica uniform and self-deprecatingly joins Tumblr. Sorry, America. Science is important. But these are not the nerds you’re looking for.
“You can only be considered a super-intelligent liberal if you agree to stifle any intellectual rigor in the formation of your worldview and accept the platter of provided opinions without question.”
And when we counter attack this by telling them they are closed minded and intolerant, they’d either have no clue what we’re talking about or wallow in denial.
Ironically enough, what Tyson and his acolytes have ended up doing is blurring the lines between politics, scholarship, and culture — thereby damaging all three…. Politics pretending to be science … is current, and it is chic….
Perhaps the greatest trick the Left ever managed to play was to successfully sell the ancient and ubiquitous ideas of collectivism, lightly checked political power, and a permanent technocratic class as being “new,” and the radical notions of individual liberty, limited government, and distributed power as being “reactionary.” A century ago, Woodrow Wilson complained that the checks and balances instituted by the Founders were outdated because they had been contrived before the telephone was invented.
Thank you so very much, 2ndDivisionVet, for posting this article by Charles C. W. Cooke. I read it last week in NR’s print edition, and thought it splendid.
Some thoughts, FWTW:
It ought to be completely obvious to all reasonable persons that not every human problem can be solved by differential equations, let alone the scientific method. (Which nowadays is still mainly on the Newtonian model, despite the revolutionary breakthroughs of General Relativity and Quantum physics, regarding which exactly nothing in Newtonian mechanics, based as it is on presuppositions of causal locality and direct observation, can comprehend or deal with.)
As a student of history, what impresses me most is how little the universal questions regarding human nature and experience change over the millennia. The Neo-Darwinist account of “the evolution of species” neither anticipates, nor can answer, the following type of universally persistent human problems:
… [I]t is evident that the primarily nonsensory modes of experience address dimensions of human experience superior in rank and worth to those sensory perception does: experiences of the good, beautiful, and just, of love, friendship, and truth, or all human virtue and vice, and of divine reality…. Experience of “things” is modeled on the subject–object dichotomy of perception in which the consciousness intends the object of cognition. But such a model of experience and knowing is ultimately insufficient to explain the operations of consciousness with respect to the nonphenomenal reality that men approach in moral, aesthetic, and religious experiences. [Which happen to have phenomenal consequences, or effects.] Inasmuch as such nonsensory experiences are constitutive of what is distinctive about human existence itself — and of what is most precious to mankind — a purported science of man unable to take account of them is egregiously defective. — Ellis SandozIt should be obvious that the “nonphemonenal reality that men approach in moral, aesthetic, and religious experiences” is entirely beyond the reach of methodological science — whose reach extends only to phenomenal reality. What immediately comes to mind: (1) We have seven millennia [at least] of recorded human history that attest to the FACT that historical human beings, cross-culturally, that is to say universally, have ALWAYS been preoccupied by such questions. They happen to be the core questions of universal human experience/existence, in all cultures, at all times. [C.S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, referred to this more-or-less permanent configuration of human interest and experience as the Tao.] (2) It should also be clear that such understandings of human nature and the human condition cannot be reduced to the methods of scientific investigation, which depend on direct observation of objects selected/intended by a subjective consciousness. [See: the observer problem in quantum physics.] (3) WRT selective consciousness, Einstein remarked that, although the “inertial frames” of observers inevitably differ, ALL inertial frames are ultimately subject to the universal laws of physics.
Which leads to the core question: Is there such a thing as “human nature?” Or are the Darwinists right, that nothing in biological nature is fixed, but all is in a process of random, purposeless change. Yet that purposeless change is usually supposed to be “progressive” change; that is to say, Nature, and the Natural Selection “she” imposes — though it operates by purely random means — is always wise enough to see to it that things are always just getting “better.” Therefore, man does not have a given nature (let alone a divinely-endowed one), but is always just a “work-in-progress,” leading to — WHAT???
At this point I ask about this perplexing “WHAT”: Does it lead to devolution of the human to the level of beasts? Or to machines? Or to — perhaps — self-divinization?
The Tysons of this world are very coy in answering such questions: It’s beyond the scope of science, don’t you know….
But that doesn’t mean such questions go away. If you want them to go away, you have to kill, not only God, but all of human history first. (For the reason that human history is always and quite characteristically full of questions relating to man's relationship with the Divine.)
So the strategy of the “science-y types” — who Charles Cooke points out probably could not tell you the temperature at which water boils — somehow become ersatz “experts” in science because they believe what such folks as Neil deGrasse Tyson, or Richard Dawkins, or Richard Lewontin, et al., are spewing as “experts” in the scientific field. Such ignoramuses can just join up with the “nerd herd” and be just as fashionable and “hip” in their own way as Jay Z and Beyonce are in theirs….
And dontcha know, but “fashion” seems to be everything these days. Truth be damned if it gets in the way of “fashionable” points of view.
And that is the key insight that lies at the very heart of Left Progressivism: Finally, it is a cataclysmic revulsion against human nature and experience (history both personal and social).
Must close, but not before noting two additional things: (1) I am definitely a "reactionary." (2) There's nothing "new" about Left Progressivism. Models of this sort of thing date back at least to 500 B.C. — that's what's actually OLD. That model's been tried repeatedly in human history, and it has never worked.
Which brings me to Einstein's definition of insanity: To keep repeating what has been (unsuccessfully) done before on numerous occasions, expecting a new and different outcome from "the same old same old," THIS time....
Thanks again for posting this great article, 2ndDivisionVet.
True... most humans can’t seem to be able or willing even to get out of the box...
And if accidentally they peer out of the box... are afraid to come out..
the box is much too comfortable and “cozy”... and “safe”...
If he did otherwise, his professional career would be over. That's the miserable point: How corrupt "peer-reviewed science" has become. And obtaining money — research grants, etc. — is the compulsive cause.
All this shows is that certain science followers are not immune from the seductions of the Cult of Celebrity, just as popular singers, actors, athletes, authors, and pretty much everyone else sucked into the maw of popular culture. Serious people have more serious things to worry about.
"Witch burners" with nicer sounding titles..
Oh, I have no doubt that is true. The treatment a friend of mine received at The Journal of Theoretical Biology has removed all doubt. Among other things, the main "juror" evaluating my friend's submission was a "hired gun," a non-acedemic popular science writer who specializes in the promulgation of neo-Darwinst doctrine (arguably, as does this journal itself). On his recommendation, the submission was denied. [I actually got to read the rejection letter, which struck me as inane: The sender admitted he hadn't even read the work. Sigh....]
As if that were not bad enough, when my friend's rejected paper was eventually published elsewhere, this juror followed him. The format in which the paper appeared allowed for follow-up "dialogue" in order to accommodate dissent. So the "juror" appeared, to show that my friend's ideas were incompatible with the findings of current, state-of-the-art science. [The paper in question was about a mathematical issue, assessing the algorithmic complexity of biological systems. I don't know why such a question should be regarded as irrelevant to biological questions, straight out of the gate....]
An actual dialogue between the two of them ensued, and made the pages of the final book.
In the end, I thought my friend whupped the other guy. Much to my gratification....
HUGS dear 'pipe!
The so-called conservative one and the so-called liberal one..
Been proved beyond doubt “liberals” could care less about facts..
Only ones that remotely care about facts are conservatives..
Conservatives arguing with liberals on some “fact” is merely a diversion.. they cannot win..
Many scientists are “liberals”.. therefore arguing with them is a gambit by them looking for advantage..
Conservatives can never “WIN” with them..
Sooo... my logic suggests a discussion on POLITICS is ALWAYS a prerequisite to a scientific discussion..
What are "THEY" politically first, scientifically second..
ELSE; the conservative IS A MORON!... set to fail.. out foxed..
"A man, MUST, know his limitations"- Dirty Harry..
Qualification of this statement: Only a sane man is capable of recognizing that he has limitations.
This qualification would definitely put our "sitting president" beyond the pale of sanity....
And NOBODY seems to know what to do about it.
True... the stalemate is palpable... you can feel it, see it, even read it..
America is in a Stalemate but won’t STOP playing the game..
The whole country NEEDs TO BE.. (( Slapped ))...
Their HYPNOTIZED... bewitched.. the “GAME” is over..
A NEW game needs to be started..
First and foremost? No, I'd say it's more of a class thing. If went to certain posh colleges and are under a certain age you might identify yourself as a nerd. It happens that most of the people who go to those colleges are liberal, but you can find conservatives who cultivate the same image: Tucker Carlson, Byron York (to judge by the bowties), any number of NR writers. Maybe even ueber-nerd George Will, if he wants to be trendy. Dinesh may not self-identify as a nerd, but he'd qualify too. I get the point, though, that it's mostly liberals who are pushing phony political nerdism and that MSNBC has taken it to a whole new level.
It is no accident that the president has felt it necessary to inject himself into the game: That’s where the cool kids are.
Well, kind of. But there's a lot of irony an confusion involved with just who the "cool kids" are. Are Washington nerds cool kids pretending to be uncool or uncool kids pretending to be cool? And outside of Washington and Ivy League circles elsewhere is anybody really fooled by any of this Washington nerdism?
I wouldn’t call myself an Obama supporter, I’m just not as violently repelled by him as some, so I went ahead and kept watching the first episode of Cosmos and the whole first season.
You should give it a chance. I honestly believe Neil Tyson would have let Bush or Reagan do an intro to the show had it aired during their presidencies.
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