The Trouble with Science Is That It Has Never Been Tried

I'm not yet quite halfway through Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative Account of Philosophy (Princeton, 2004), but so far it's very impressive, though disturbing in many ways.  At the point I've reached, Neiman shows that Enlightenment philosophers like Voltaire, Kant, and David Hume were trying, not to vindicate Science and Reason as the legitimate heirs to religion, but to show that Science and Reason could not make sense of the world any more than religion does, and that the Enlightenment critique of religion was invalid in many important respects.

Hume, for example, wrote in The Natural History of Religion (1757):

Even at this day, and in EUROPE, ask any of the vulgar, why he believes in an omnipotent creator of the world; he will never mention the beauty of final causes, of which he is wholly ignorant: He will not hold out his hand, and bid you contemplate the suppleness and variety of joints in his fingers, their bending all one way, the counterpoise which they receive from the thumb, the softness and fleshy parts of the inside of his hand, with all the other circumstances, which render that member fit for the use, to which it was destined. To these he has been long accustomed; and he beholds them with listlessness and unconcern. He will tell you of the sudden and unexpected death of such a one: The fall and bruise of such another: The excessive drought of this season: The cold and rains of another. These he ascribes to the immediate cooperation of providence: And such events, as, with good reasoners, are the chief difficulties in admitting a supreme intelligence, are with him the sole arguments for it [quoted by Neiman, 153].

The Argument from Design* has filtered down to the "vulgar" in our day: people who've never studied philosophy have invoked it to me, though usually as a reason why I should believe in an omnipotent creator, not why they believe in one.  As Neiman observes, "These sorts of claims concern psychology" (154), that is, why people find religious or other claims convincing, rather than the validity of the arguments used.  Natural religion, or natural theology as it was also called, was a somewhat confused philosophical project.  It was the work of educated people, rather than the "vulgar," intended to provide rational support for belief in God, though this generally led to a God who wasn't the god of Christianity.  But it was also meant, as Neiman shows, to produce a new religion, a rational religion, free of superstition and miracles and priests, that a modern rational person could accept.

This should sound familiar. When I was criticizing the philosopher Philip Kitcher's book Living with Darwin a few years ago, I connected him to nineteenth-century liberal Christianity, which was true enough; I forgot that he is also the heir to the philosophes a century earlier, who also thought that Reason and Science could govern the world much better than religion had.  But Hume seems not to have shared that illusion; he was, Neiman tries to show, as interested in demolishing the pretenses of Reason as he was those of Revealed Religion.

He described the innocent heathen's view of the doctrine of the Real Presence to suggest that mythological reasons do less violence to intellect.  Later he attacked most any form of conventional worship by suggesting that all ascribe to God "the lowest of human passions, a restless appetite for applause [Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion]".  But traditional dogma was an easy target in England.  The Dialogues were bolder.  They proceeded to show that the natural religion allegedly founded on common sense is in fact less reasonable than other hypotheses.  As myths go, monotheism is not only less salutary but less scientific than alternatives.  Natural inductive procedures will lead us to polytheism [Neiman, 156].

Hume, like Voltaire before him, showed that the world does not make sense, and that Reason is of limited use in dealing with its senselessness.  (That he used Reason to demonstrate that isn't self-contradictory; that a tool is only of limited use doesn't mean it's of no use whatever.  I can't build the Great Pyramid using only a hammer, but that doesn't mean I can't use it to drive a nail.)  This is the road where modern non-theist scientists and philosophers generally prefer not to follow Hume.  They're happy to applaud his demolition of revealed religion, but they mostly have great faith in reason.  So we get revivalists like Neal DeGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye arguing that science can resolve moral problems like abortion, or how to govern a society.  In a free country they're as entitled to bloviate as any minister or Pope, but they have no authority in these subjects and shouldn't be taken seriously.  G. K. Chesterton famously declared, "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried."  But as the Christian writer Graham Shaw riposted in The Cost of Authority (SCM / Fortress, 1982) , this is "glib deceit." 

It gains its plausibility from the guilty awareness of all believers of the distance between profession and life, but if true it would be a devastating verdict on Christianity.  Few ideals have so preoccupied the imagination of men, or inspired more utter devotion.  If therefore the ideals are still untried, it may well be that they are inadequate to guide men through the complexities of life.  The same simplicity which gives them their imaginative power to haunt and obsess may also condemn them to ineffectiveness in actual life [5].

Reason and Science may not have been as widely popular as Christianity, but they have inspired many, and certainly their devotees would also claim that they have not failed but found difficult and left untried.  But that, to the extent it was true, would also be an indictment of those who claim to speak in the name of Science and Reason, but unscientifically and irrationally; even dishonestly.

Scientists will concede, a bit uncomfortably I think, that science has not been an unmitigated source of Good in the world.  True, Science has given us vaccines and rockets to the moon; it has also given us atomic bombs and eugenic sterilization.  Like Christian apologists, they will protest that it's not their fault or the fault of Science, it's because Men have misused Science to their evil ends.  (That's the Problem of Evil: Why do Men do bad things, and why does Science let them?  Because we don't have free will!) No True Scotsman comes in handy: those who did these bad things were not True Scientists or Christians.  To the extent that this is true, it undercuts the claim that Science (or Christianity) is basically Good; at best they should be judged neutral, without inherent moral content or consequences.  Since Neil DeGrasse Tyson appears to be the big celebrity scientist nowadays, I'm going to focus on his well-intentioned but blundering attempts to deal with this problem.

Tyson told NPR:

You will never find people who truly grasp the cosmic perspective ... leading nations into battle. No, that doesn't happen. When you have a cosmic perspective there's this little speck called Earth and you say, "You're going to what? You're on this side of a line in the sand and you want to kill people for what? Oh, to pull oil out of the ground, what? WHAT?" ... Not enough people in this world, I think, carry a cosmic perspective with them. It could be life-changing.

Here he is saying that "the cosmic perspective" would direct us better than whatever its opposite would be.  Of course, any religious believer could also claim to possess or have access to "the cosmic perspective."  The cosmic perspective on war can be found in the Bhagavad-Gita, and was summed up by whoever said "Kill them all, God will know His own."  Tyson, however, was talking about a perspective that he presumably associates with science.

But he also told a Scientific American blogger,

Lastly, you speak as though all War is bad. I tend to agree with you on a personal level. But I know as a matter of political awareness that not all wars are unjust and some wars are, in fact, worth fighting. Many scientists who serve military interests do so because they believe deeply in the value of their work to the security of our country

So maybe you will find someone with the cosmic perspective leading, or at any rate following, nations into battle.  I think as a description of reality, whether religious or scientific, that's more accurate than Tyson's fantasy about the moral effects of the cosmic perspective.  But the real problem is how we mere laypersons are supposed to tell who truly grasps the cosmic perspective and who doesn't.

This is a more serious problem.  On the one hand Tyson has denounced attempts by religious believers (whom he represents as "a few," though they probably greatly outnumber scientists in the US) to "control the behavior of everyone else." "That's no longer a free democracy," he says, though I wonder if we've ever had one by that criterion.  On the other, Tyson believes that "astrophysicists should be under no obligation to poll the public. I don't care how deeply affectionate you felt for these objects [the former planet Pluto, in this case] that we had talked about."

Still, alas, in America scientists are at the mercy of the dang sheeple.  In theory, at least.  So Tyson told Scientific American, "I can scream at lawmakers without limit, but their duty is to serve their constituents. And so it’s the electorate that I, as a scientist and educator, will always target for my messages."  I've pointed out before how doubtful it is that the lawmakers' constituents are the electorate, but at the moment I'm more interested in how Tyson feels as a scientist about public input into the science budget.  Scientists tend to view any restrictions on funding for their research as an intolerable infringement of their freedom to pursue knowledge wherever it may lead them, no matter how far, and have greatly lamented the decline in government spending on science since the end of the Cold War.  Tyson admits that he directs his persuasive efforts to the electorate, but his successes appear to have been through patronage from our elites. Contrary to liberal Democrats' view of George W. Bush and the Republican Party as anti-science, Tyson told the Daily Beast,

People can say and think what they want, but what matters is whether or not it becomes policy or legislation, and I don’t remember any legislation that restricted science. In fact, the budget for the National Science Foundation went up. What matters is money in Congress. What does Congress do? Allocate money. That’s really what they do. So the science budget of the country went up during the Bush administration, and the budget for NASA went up 3 percent—and it had actually dropped 25 percent in real spending dollars under the eight years of President Clinton. I don’t care what you say or think. I care about legislation, and policy.

Also, he appointed me! There may have been some science that he hadn’t learned yet or didn’t know fully, but he’s not creating legislation based on it. Speeches are politics, so you can’t fault a politician for saying something political.

What the voters want, then, doesn't matter much, nor does Tyson think it should.  I can understand his position, but it hardly bespeaks a devotion to either Reason or "free democracy."

Education, including science education, is also accountable to the voters, so it may not be surprising that the general population doesn't accept Science as much as Tyson and other scientists would like.  Large numbers of people, not just the few of whom Tyson speaks, don't believe in non-theistic Darwinian evolution.  That's mostly because of resistance to teaching it in schools below the university level, I know, but I can't help wondering whether part of the problem might also be that science isn't taught all that well.  Rather like history.  Remember that students' ignorance about historical facts has remained the same since the first research into the topic a century ago.  In history class students mostly are forcefed propaganda; in science class they dissect frogs and do basic experiments of the kind that physicists did before Galileo.  Under those circumstances, is it surprising that they don't understand the neo-Darwinian synthesis?  One thing I feel pretty sure of, though: you won't teach evolution or persuade people to accept it by the vitriolic abuse that constitutes so much public discourse on science education by liberal and progressive writers.  Whatever else you can say about it, that rhetoric does not model rationality.  Neither do Neil DeGrasse Tyson's less than coherent ramblings about science and society.

It might be argued that the trouble is scientists' and secularists' failure to be rational; if they were, their counsel would be faithful and true, and we could look to them to lead us infallibly into the future.  Maybe so, but they claim to be rational already, and again I wonder how I am supposed to tell whom to believe and follow.  The same dilemma is presented by religion, even if you limit it to one religion.  There is wide disagreement about what Christianity, for example, teaches about specific issues, a disagreement that goes back to the earliest days of the cult.  There are no authorities on whom we can rely without question.

We might start by teaching critical thinking from elementary school onward, but that course would meet fierce opposition from the religious and the non-religious alike.  Besides, it doesn't seem that reason and science now have the knowledge needed to make decisions, any more than religion does.  Rationalists have faith that someday all will be understood, and all manner of thing will be well; I think that's Pie in the Sky, and it doesn't help us in the meantime anyway.  For now we must recognize the limits of both science and reason.  That doesn't mean abandoning them for religion -- which religion? which minister or pope or mullah or lama?  That Darwinian evolutionary theory has serious problems doesn't mean that Genesis or some other creation myth of your choice is true.  Refusing to admit the limits of one's wisdom and knowledge is a common fault of both religion and science, despite the lip service both pay to that admission in principle.  Reason won't save us, nor will religion; we must make our own decisions and judgments, knowing that we make them from incomplete and inadequate knowledge.

This, I think, is the point of Sartre's existentialism, not the blank-slate vacuousness Mary Midgley ascribes to him.  But I'll go with something like Walter Kaufmann's version, as he developed it in Without Guilt and Justice: we must decide; no one else can do it for us; we must think hard about our choices but in the end we must act (even refusing to act is an act). If we turn out to be wrong we must take responsibility for our action and do our best to repair or ameliorate the damage.  If you have a better idea, let's discuss it.

Which brings me back to Evil in Modern Thought. Modern philosophy emerged, Neiman argues, from attempts to resolve the Problem of Evil.  Christianity can't do it; indeed, the Problem of Evil is a particular stumbling block for conventional Jewish and Christian monotheism, and the rationalist project showed this forcefully.  But that was a negative result; rationalists couldn't prove how we ought positively to deal with the painful finitude of human existence.  I'm looking forward to seeing how Neiman's account proceeds.

*Antony Flew argued, I think correctly, that it would better be called the Argument to Design rather than the Argument from Design, since  involves arguing from the regularities we see in the world to claim that they must be the result of design rather than happenstance; the move from there to a Designer is less of a leap.

His Object All Sublime

In a previous post I wrote:

The idea that it's important to know that the human race will survive somewhere among the stars seems very adolescently romantic to me. Steel-eyed rationalists such as [Stephen] Hawking evidently fancies himself to be still fear their own deaths, which isn't unreasonable, but also the death of the species, which is. I suppose that if cockroaches could think, they'd feel the same way, but that doesn't mean I'd agree that it's important to send a bunch of cockroaches to another solar system either.

On reflection, I am considering changing my position.  We should send a bunch of cockroaches to another solar system, if we can find one with a planet that can support life.  It is important that terrestrial life should survive somewhere in the universe if we destroy it here.  Cockroaches have been quite successful in the only terms that matter (objectively!) for Darwinian evolution, so why not let them carry on for us?  We, who have been so destructive of ourselves and the biosphere, have had our chance and should not be given a second one.  I trust no one will protest that cockroaches are pests, and might overrun a new planet as Japanese beetles and other invasive species have done when transported to new habitats.  If that is a consideration, it applies in spades to Homo sapiens.

But I digress.  Neil DeGrasse Tyson put his foot in it recently in an interview with the Daily Beast.  Not in his remarks about Scientology and freedom of religion, which were quite reasonable, but which were taken by the headline writer at DB and a couple of other sites to be 'defending' Scientology.  I just reread the interview and I don't see any defense of Scientology there, even "sort of" or "kind of." He said that if you're going to have freedom of religion, the government can not have the power to decide which religion is a real religion and which is not; he also said that Scientology is not obviously more absurd than older and more respectable religions.  Which is one of the recurring obstacles to freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, and freedom of expression: if you defend the right to hold absurd religious beliefs or express false or hateful opinions, plenty of commissar-clowns will accuse you of defending, supporting, or embracing those beliefs and opinions yourself.  (Noam Chomsky should send Tyson flowers or something in sympathy.)

No, where Tyson went wrong in the interview was in the statements quoted in the meme I found and posted above in this post.  (It was by tracking down the quotation in the meme that I found the interview.)  Frankly, though, I must admit I'm not sure what Tyson was talking about here; even in context he seems to be rambling on autopilot.  There are no "objective truths" for governing a country.  You might be able to claim that the First Amendment is "objective" in the sense that you can find the text in places outside your own head, and there's agreement on the words that make it up, and since it's part of the Constitution, it has authority because it's the supreme law of the land, to which almost all Americans pay lip service.  So we have official freedom of religion in the US not because religious freedom is an "objective truth," but because most of us agree that it's something we should have.  There's a lot of disagreement as to why it's a good idea, and I don't think most people, including Tyson, have thought about that much.  (It's in the Bill of Rights!  It's common sense!  It's freedom, and freedom is a good thing, like equality!)   I also think it's fairly obvious that by "freedom of religion" most people mean freedom for themselves but not for others. (I'll give Tyson credit for knowing better than that in this case.)  Even going beyond that primitive level of understanding, rational people can and do disagree on specific cases.

If that's what Tyson meant by "objective truths," then I don't disagree, but I don't believe that's what he meant.  I think he means that society can best be governed through the application of some "truths," presumably determined by scientists like him, which can't be questioned by the canaille, and that's dubious, to put it gently.  It's how the US got its eugenics laws in the twentieth century: scientists determined that some people should not be allowed to reproduce, American society listened to those wise purveyors of rationality, and voilá: thousands of people were sterilized.  Even if Nazi Germany hadn't given eugenics such a bad name, this would not have been a good thing.  More important, it would not have been dictated by logic, or justified by objective truths.



It's also not an objective truth that scientists should be given vast amounts of money to explore whatever line of research happens to obsess them.   Elsewhere in the Daily Beast interview Tyson says:

So the issue comes about not that there are religious people in the world that have one view over another, it’s if you have one view or another based on faith and you want to legislate that in a way that affects everyone. That’s no longer a free democracy. That’s a country where the few who have a belief system that’s not based in objective reality want to control the behavior of everyone else.

Now, people with religious beliefs are not "a few" in the United States, though they're not as large a majority as they used to be.  Ironically, perhaps, what Tyson wants is for scientists, a few who have a belief system that he claims is based in objective reality, to be able to legislate in a way that affects everyone.  Personally I'm in favor of subsidizing scientific research, though not indiscriminately, and I like the space program and want it to continue, but it's only one concern out of many, and not obviously or objectively more important than taking care of people here on earth with the knowledge and methods we already have.  As with any other faith-based enterprise, taxpayers' money should come with strings attached -- regulation, oversight, accountability -- which many scientists resent fiercely: they want blank checks for whatever they want to do, even if it's misconceived and badly designed.  Tough luck, guys.  Nor is it an objective truth that "we" must travel to the stars and colonize other planets to continue the human race after we've wiped ourselves out on earth.  (With, probably, the wondrous weapons and other means that Science has given us.)  The universe doesn't care whether one more species goes extinct, so it's not an "objective truth" that human survival is any kind of necessity.  I too hope that human life will continue for some time to come, but that's not a rational or "objective" hope, especially since all human individuals die, and all life on earth will end when the sun burns out, if it hasn't gone extinct from other causes before then.  If we're going to argue rationally, I can't see any objective reason for humanity to go on ruining other planets when we've demonstrated that we can't take care of the one we currently inhabit.

Tyson is apparently a good astrophysicist, but that doesn't qualify him to set the conditions by which human beings should govern ourselves.   He clearly hasn't given it much thought in the first place, and so relies on "common sense" clichés of the American scientific subculture -- reason, objective truths, etc.  To cite an example close to me as a queer: those totems were invoked to justify the program of trying to "cure" homosexuality.  And from the point of view of a technocrat-wannabe like Tyson, why shouldn't scientists continue to try to find a way to stop the suffering of homosexuals, even though they've failed consistently for more than a century?  We haven't cured cancer yet either, but we still keep trying, and that's the scientific enterprise -- to keep on trying despite consistent, ongoing failure.  That homosexuality is a disease in need of cure is not an objective truth; but neither is the claim that's it's "normal" and "natural."

Now, understand that I'm not saying that Tyson would agree that homosexuals should be cured, though I doubt he could give any good reasons on the matter.  From the Daily Beast interview again:

As a scientist, does homophobia strike you as particularly odd? There are many species within the animal kingdom that are attracted to the same sex, and perhaps if people were more educated in the sciences instead of religious dogma, then there would be less homophobia.

Well, it almost always entirely stems from religion. But the point here is that if you’re religious, and your religion tells you that being gay is bad, then don’t be gay. But you have to remind yourself that that’s your belief system, and there are other belief systems that don’t agree with that, so you should not be in the position to make legislation that affects other people. 

It's false that "many species in the animal kingdom ... are attracted to the same sex."  Species aren't attracted to anything; what the interviewer presumably meant was that homosexual copulation and pair-bonding occur between individuals of many species.  But what happens in many species doesn't tell us what is good or bad for human beings.  Should human males kill and eat the offspring sired by other males in order to ensure their reproductive advantage, as happens in "many species in the animal kingdom"?  Should human females bite off the heads of their sexual partners after copulation?  Religion is extremely widespread, virtually universal among human beings: would Tyson or the interviewer want to argue that it's therefore good and true?

Tyson blames homophobia -- a bogus clinical entity, by the way -- on religion, relying on the genetic fallacy that you can explain and evaluate anything by looking at its history or genealogy.  Science also "stems from religion" and from magic, for example; I doubt he'd think science is discredited by its origins.  But the claim that homosexual copulation is widespread in non-human species was resisted fiercely by many students of animal behavior, and it's still somewhat controversial.  And scientists took for granted that human homosexuality was a disorder well into the twentieth century; its removal from the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic manual was opposed by "many" professionals, on "objective" grounds.

If Tyson isn't religious himself, then he presumably believes that religion was invented by human beings for their own ends; if so, then he can't claim that religion is the source of anything.  He would have to ask why human beings put homophobia into their religions.  (When he says that "other belief systems" don't object to homosexuality -- another overgeneralization -- what he means is "other religions."  Or does he mean to include science in the class of "belief systems"?)  If "religion" causes human beings to do certain things, why don't all religions have identical values?  For that matter, why do values within any one religion often contradict each other?  I suppose Tyson, like many self-styled rationalists, would like to believe that a rational belief and value system wouldn't have those contradictions.  There's no reason to believe that either, of course, it's just another part of self-interested scientistic common sense: Put us in charge, instead of priests or politicians or lawyers, and we'll solve all your problems by logic and science.

If Tyson "defended" any dubious suspects, it would be George W. Bush, who appointed Tyson to an aerospace commission or two.  Tyson goes quite easy on Bush, yet those who claim falsely that he defended Scientology seem to have missed that.  And purely on factual grounds, Tyson has a point:

People can say and think what they want, but what matters is whether or not it becomes policy or legislation, and I don’t remember any legislation that restricted science. In fact, the budget for the National Science Foundation went up. What matters is money in Congress. What does Congress do? Allocate money. That’s really what they do. So the science budget of the country went up during the Bush administration, and the budget for NASA went up 3 percent—and it had actually dropped 25 percent in real spending dollars under the eight years of President Clinton. I don’t care what you say or think. I care about legislation, and policy.

Also, he appointed me! There may have been some science that he hadn’t learned yet or didn’t know fully, but he’s not creating legislation based on it. Speeches are politics, so you can’t fault a politician for saying something political.

Tyson's clearly a politician himself.  That explains a lot.

Go, Little Meme: Marriage Gravity and Viral Ignorance

I haven't bothered to check whether these memes contain authentic quotations from the men whose photographs they use.  What interests me here is that whether or not Tyson and Whedon said these things, some of their fans were happy to believe that they did.

Okay, I did look this one up, hoping for some context.  Who's "we"?  Tyson and his fans?  I can't find a source for it, so it may well be bogus, like this one probably was.  I did find this article, which I haven't read in full yet but it doesn't contain the quotation from the meme.  But again, what interests me is that it's popular among his fans, as something they agree with, so they take for granted that he must have said it.

Ignorance is not a virus, and reason won't "cure" it.  Ignorance doesn't have to "spread," because it's an inescapable part of the human condition.  What we know will always be limited, incomplete, and subject to revision, especially what we know about things much larger or smaller than human beings.  We will always be ignorant about some things, and I believe that our ignorance will always be greater than our knowledge.  The real problem, once again, is not that people are ignorant, it's that they know so much that isn't so.

I recognize that Tyson didn't mean "virus" or "cure" literally.  That's the trouble.  He's preaching, not sharing information.  He's a revivalist, and he's highly selective in his use of reason.  This meme is an altar call, the very opposite of reason.  Tyson's language shows that he belongs to the ancient religious tradition which teaches that if your spiritual eyes are opened, if you are awakened and enlightened all error will immediately fall away.  It isn't true, but a lot of people believe it, because they want to believe it; and of course it's very satisfying to believe that you are one of the enlightened elite, part of the cure, and the ignorant masses, with their myths and superstitions are the problem.  If anything should be cast metaphorically as a malignant virus, it's that belief.

Joss Whedon isn't a scientist, but he's every bit as incoherent as one.  Even if equality were a "necessity," that wouldn't mean it needn't be striven for -- as his penultimate sentence admits: we need equality, but we don't have it, so I would suppose we need to strive for it, "kinda."  But it's not a necessity, since human beings have managed to live without it for millennia.

No one really knows what equality is anyway.  Amartya Sen wrote a useful book on the subject, Inequality Reexamined (Harvard, 1995), which pointed out some of the conceptual problems involved, but Noam Chomsky did a good discussion as well.

Nor is equality like gravity, which is not really a "necessity" either.  Gravity is a fact, but like equality no one really knows what it is; scientists are still trying to figure that out.  Like many basic realities, everybody knows what gravity is until they try to explain or describe it.  Equality is different; rather like justice, or the Good, it refers to what isn't rather than what is.  Its very vagueness is useful, since people can advocate it without having to think very hard about what they mean by it.  But unlike equality, gravity is something that we needn't be bound by.  Many species have found ways to get around it, and human beings tried to do the same for thousands of years.  If we treated gravity the way Whedon wants us to treat equality, we'd reject the very idea of flight, let alone space travel.  When we're trying to get off the surface of the earth, gravity is our (metaphorical) opponent.

Notice too how Whedon loses track of his pronouns and their antecedents.  The "it" in "It is life out of balance" is presumably meant to refer to misogyny, but in context it points to "equality," which is not what Whedon means at all.

It appears that Whedon was talking about sexual/gender equality, though I suppose he didn't mean to exclude other areas.  And I suppose he was extemporizing here, so it's unfair to blame him for getting lost on the way to his thought; but in that case it's unfair to put his ramblings into a meme and send them, naked and unprotected, into the lethal vacuum of the Intertoobz.

Memes like these are part of the reason I've been in a foul mood lately.  I agree about the value of reason.  I think that equality is important.  But too many of the people who are nominally on my side on these issues are depressingly irrational.  I can't blame them.  I know the limits of my own rationality, and I know how hard it is to use reason, to ascertain facts, to talk about reality, to tell the truth.  But the popularity of people like Tyson and Whedon (and even of people like Noam Chomsky, who knows this and tries to resist it) just reminds me that what many people want is a Champion they can cheer for in the great gladiatorial arena, our guy versus their guy.  And it's largely accidental which side they're on.

A Friend of a Friend of a Friend Told Me!

The first question is whether Tyson actually said this.  I still haven't found a real source, as opposed to the blizzard of memes and reposts and reblogs and retweets that come up from a search.

For a moment I thought I had it, in a link to a National Public Radio story on two "anonymous art students ... who have been creating gorgeous hand-lettered and illustrated chalkboards featuring inspiring quotes from literary and public figures," illustrated with a photo of their chalkboard of the supposed Tyson quotation.  The same page has a link to the quotation, which leads to an interview with Tyson on Fresh Air promoting his remake of the Cosmos TV series.  The text teaser doesn't include the quotation in question, and I don't really feel like listening to the whole program right now.  Maybe later.  The excerpts provided are annoying enough, like this:

If you are one of those people who don't like thinking about astronomy because it makes them feel small, Tyson suggests looking at it a different way: "Our molecules are traceable to stars that exploded and spread these elements across the galaxy," he explains. If you "see the universe as something you participate in — as this great unfolding of a cosmic story — that, I think should make you feel large, not small. ... Any astrophysicist does not feel small looking up in the universe; we feel large."

I think this is apologetic invention, but I say bullshit anyway.  One of the pillars of scientific triumphalism has always been that Man is a worm, that Science puts him in his place, decentering the earth from the center of the universe, toppling Homo sapiens from the crown of creation, and so on.  He confuses the emotional issue, too.  I'm supposed to feel big because I'm an extra in "this great unfolding of a cosmic story"?  I don't believe that people who are concerned about feeling small are going to get much comfort from this.  And greater scientists than Tyson have seen things differently:

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

But c'mon, Tyson is an astrophysicist, not a philosopher!

Tyson also told NPR:

You will never find people who truly grasp the cosmic perspective ... leading nations into battle. No, that doesn't happen. When you have a cosmic perspective there's this little speck called Earth and you say, "You're going to what? You're on this side of a line in the sand and you want to kill people for what? Oh, to pull oil out of the ground, what? WHAT?" ... Not enough people in this world, I think, carry a cosmic perspective with them. It could be life-changing.

Maybe you won't find "people who truly grasp the cosmic perspective ... leading nations into battle", but you will find them building weapons of mass destruction that could wipe out life on the planet.  And Tyson isn't unaware of that; he told a blogger from Scientific American who questioned him about it:

Lastly, you speak as though all War is bad. I tend to agree with you on a personal level. But I know as a matter of political awareness that not all wars are unjust and some wars are, in fact, worth fighting. Many scientists who serve military interests do so because they believe deeply in the value of their work to the security of our country.

It's probably not too surprising that Tyson prefers not to address the politics of these matters; that would be, how you say, bad for business.  And maybe he's learned, as people do, what is safe to say on controversial issues and what isn't.  For example, here's his take on the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Look at how we reacted to September 11, 2001: about three thousand Americans died that day, and, that’s more than who died in the attack on Pearl Harbor. So, one of the most devastating days in American history since the Civil War. Understood, people are pissed off. We want blood. So, we go into Afghanistan, and we would later go into Iraq, and war would be conducted – I remember people kept track of when American servicemen died, and there was the date where more American servicemen died, than who died on September 11, and that was kind of an interesting milestone, to compare, but we just pushed on, and so now many more Americans died in those wars than have died – and countless others died, local citizens. But apart from that, count thirty days from September 11. Thirty days after – by then, in those thirty days, more Americans had died on the highways in car accidents than who died on September 11. Not only that, that number keeps dying every month. So, there’s no outcry for people dying on highways – there is locally, we fixed our drunk driving laws, and there’s enforcement [that’s] very high and taken very seriously in all our public consciousness, but if deaths of Americans is what you care about and protecting the lives of people is what you care about, and you rank all ways Americans die, then terrorist attacks is not high on that list. It’s high on the list because we fear them, because it’s a terror factor, but because of the actual numbers.

Tyson focuses on whether "deaths of Americans is what you care about and protecting the lives of people is what you care about," but as he seems to realize, that's not the real reason for the wars in which the US mired itself starting in 2001.  (Though the roots of the conflicts go much further back.)  Even on his reasoning, it would seem that World War II wasn't worth fighting, because far fewer Americans died at Pearl Harbor than on September 11, 2001 -- but judging from his response to the Scientific American blogger, he considers World War II one of the good wars.  (Or maybe not; he's kind of coy about it.)  It's all very well to have a "cosmic perspective," but from a cosmic perspective, not much that happens on earth -- nuclear war, global warming, the destruction of the rain forests, etc. -- matters very much.  So other values have to be taken into account, and Tyson either doesn't understand that or prefers not to go there.

Writing to the Scientific American blogger, Tyson took the easy way out, blaming the electorate for voting for politicians who make scientists do bad things: "I can scream at lawmakers without limit, but their duty is to serve their constituents. And so it’s the electorate that I, as a scientist and educator, will always target for my messages."  Do lawmakers serve their constituents?  That's open to some dispute.  It's also debatable whether the massive government subsidy of high-tech research and development was the work of lawmakers.  David F. Noble showed, in his book Forces of Production, that the reality was complex and tangled.  Scientists, engineers, corporate interests, the American military, political appointees, and Congress were all involved, and their interests didn't necessarily agree.  The taxpayers, the electorate, had little idea what their tax dollars were paying for, as usual, but the need for the US to be what Tyson calls "an innovation nation" was part of the sell.

Like many scientists, Tyson is ambivalent about the hoi polloi.   He was a lightning rod for the reclassification of Pluto as an unplanet, and the criticism he drew obviously nettled him: "So astrophysicists should be under no obligation to poll the public. I don't care how deeply affectionate you felt for these objects that we had talked about. Now that's not arrogance, that's just simple common sense about what it is to move a frontier and the sensitivities you need on that frontier to classify or not."  I sympathize, and agree to a point, but notice the irony here.  Tyson is very big on educating the public on science, but a major part of his approach is an appeal to emotion.  He wants to get kids excited about science in the same way it was done in the 1950s and 1960s, with carefully-managed spectacles involving rockets thrusting into the unknown, heroic astronauts, the lure of adventure, and competition with other superpowers to Get There First.  This may be effective in motivating people, but it has nothing to do with what science is supposed to be about: the quest for knowledge and truth and shit.  (As far as I listened in the Fresh Air interview, his take on SETI is conventionally emotional, based on whether it makes sense to think we're Alone.)  The people who objected to Pluto's 'demotion' were people who'd been fossicked up by just such an approach: science for them was a spectator sport, with teams to root for and a personalization of all issues: if Pluto stopped being a planet, its feelings would be hurt, the scientists were just being meanies, and people had to stand up for the underdog.  That's what happens when you personalize issues that have nothing to do with people.  But if you don't use that approach, how are you going to get the voters to pressure their lawmakers to fund a manned mission to Mars?  Mars is waiting for us; it's so lonely, all alone out there, and it's so stupid that it should be alone.

Anyway, back to the meme in question.  Whether or not Tyson said it, it's an odd thing for a scientist to say.  In the NPR interview he says, "If you're a scientist and you have to have an answer, even in the absence of data, you're not going to be a good scientist."  There are a lot of bad scientists running around, then.  But that's as close as I can find to a sentiment like the one attributed to Tyson in this meme, and it's not very close.  It's an article of faith among scientists that the universe does make sense, if you study it hard enough and interpret the data correctly -- which is basically what fundamentalists believe about their scriptures.  I say "an article of faith" because it's an animating premise of the scientific quest, not a conclusion based on a coldly rational evaluation of all the data.  I think it's a fine article of faith as such things go, but for me it's a presumption, a starting point which can be proven false.

Even more, the statement in the meme is one that many religious believers would agree with, at least as far as lip service: they'd just substitute "God" for "the Universe."  The practice, for the spiritual as for the devotee of science, is more ambivalent: on one hand we are nothing, mere dust in the cosmic perspective; on the other, we have been granted insight and knowledge by the Most High.  The religiosity of the sentiment doesn't prove that Tyson didn't say it, of course, but that a scientist said it doesn't make it true either.

Sunday Afternoon Mashup

The comments under this meme slobbering over two celebrity scientists are about what you'd expect.  I wrote sourly that if elected they'd probably put the entire federal budget into the space program and other high-tech industry, while abolishing social services for mere humans.  The earth is already destroyed!  Who cares?  We're going to the stars! ... Well, not all of us.  Just the rational elites.

I don't really know anything about their politics in general; one commenter complained that Nye has spoken negatively about home schooling, so maybe he's a socialist.  But I know that Tyson fantasizes about a return to the Cold War space program, which indicates a willed historical ignorance that would suit a Republican very well.  I commented to that effect, and another person who'd already endorsed the ticket ("Merica would be fixed in like two minutes!") replied, "Exactly!"  I'd like to think he was being sarcastic too, but after reading the other comments I'll take nothing for granted.

Though I'm also taking time out for daily reflection with Skeletor Is Love.  The Culture of Therapy loves you.  And finally, for no particular reason: