The “public sage” of 1950s Britain saw industry’s benefits; Tyson sides with the anti-tech Greens.
Right up front I want to confess: I’ve known Neil Tyson since 1996, and I like him. I don’t agree with his politics, but I certainly don’t see him as the wild-eyed leftist radical that some of his critics depict. No one with his positively Nixonian taste for good Bordeaux could ever really be all that radical.
Twenty years ago his wit was perfectly displayed when he eviscerated astrology in his book Universe Down to Earth. More recently he waged rhetorical jihad against those who wish to retain Pluto as the ninth planet in our solar system — but he did so with humor and a willingness to give the other side its due. (One astrophysicist from the opposing camp quipped that “Neil is a great guy, but he can’t count higher than eight.”)
It’s sad to see that Tyson has succumbed to the lure of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Even worse, he’s been spending time with Bill Nye “The [supposedly] Science Guy,” whose attitude toward American conservatives and climate skeptics brings to mind George Galloway’s pronouncement about Israeli Jews: “I don’t debate with Israelis.” Tyson’s once-sparkling sense of humor now has a nasty partisan edge, and he seems to have lost the generous spirit he once had. Oh, well — to paraphrase De Gaulle — middle age is a shipwreck.
Tyson’s role as a lionized center-left public intellectual recalls that of the “public sage” of Britain in the 1950s and ’60s: C. P. Snow, who in 1959 delivered a Cambridge lecture entitled “The Two Cultures.” A genuine though undistinguished scientist specializing in infrared spectroscopy, Snow was a fully paid-up member of the British mandarin class: a senior civil servant, a novelist, and a member of the board of the English Electric Corporation. In the early Thirties, Snow had come under the influence of the Stalinist physicist J. D. Bernal and, along with his circle, had, as Noel Annan in Our Age put it, “staked out a claim that scientists should replace politicians as the effective rulers of the country.”
The theme of Snow’s soon-to-be-famous lecture was the unbridgeable divide between the England’s literary intellectuals and her scientists. What began as a plea for mutual recognition devolved rapidly into a call to demote the humanities in general and literature in particular. The humanities should no longer dominate British higher education, Snow held; science should be enthroned in their place. In the aftermath of the panic that hit much of the West when the Soviets launched the first Earth-orbiting satellite, Sputnik, Snow’s paean to science was not unreasonable. Moreover, it was clear by the Fifties that the British Empire had passed its prime. But “The Two Cultures” was much more than a simple plea for educational reform. Snow called into question the whole of Britain’s traditional culture and educational system. He urged scientifically trained men (at the time, women hardly counted) who had “the future in their bones” to take the lead in fashioning Britain’s new role.
Snow’s “The Two Cultures” lecture generated much debate and controversy. The Cambridge literary high poobah F. R. Leavis published an attack on Snow in 1962 that was so violent, personal, and over the top that even Lionel Trilling (who was somewhat sympathetic to Leavis’s thesis) took issue with it, writing, “It is bad in a personal sense because it is cruel — it manifestly intends to wound.”
Snow nonetheless went on to enjoy a fruitful career, appearing on the BBC and collecting honorary degrees. He did live long enough to see the first scientifically educated prime minister of the modern age take office: Margaret Thatcher. Yet, in spite of his perhaps excessive zeal for science, Snow was at heart pro-human. He memorably and unfashionably defended the Industrial Revolution for the quality-of-life benefits it provided:
It is all very well for one, as a personal choice, to reject industrialization — do a modern Walden, if you like, and if you go without much food, see most of your children die in infancy, despise the comforts of literacy, accept 20 years off your life, then I respect you for the strength of your aesthetic revulsion. But I don’t respect you in the slightest if, even passively, you try to impose the same choice on others who are not free to choose.
The Koch brothers could not have put it better.
This emphasis on how ordinary people’s lives are greatly improved by industry is the most important difference between Snow as a center-left public intellectual and Neil de Grasse Tyson. For the most part, Tyson can be counted on to support the leftist party line, and today the party line is that industrialization, which since 1989 is identical with industrial capitalism, is killing the planet. It’s therefore up to the experts, leftists say, to impose a “green” future on humanity whether humanity wants it or not.
There are of course plenty of examples of the way so called green policies add to the sum total of human misery: The ban on DDT has led to millions of unnecessary malaria deaths in Africa; the EU’s policy on genetically modified organisms makes life much harder for farmers in Africa and elsewhere; high electricity prices in Europe, especially in Britain and Germany, are making it harder and harder for lower-middle-class people to make ends meet.
Though Tyson is, like Snow, a technological optimist at heart, believing that many or even most of our problems can be solved through the proper application of science and engineering, he makes common cause with some of the most vicious of America’s anti-technology crowd: the Greens, and particularly “Earth First!”
Industrialization, one must recognize, can make people miserable. China today finds that it must take drastic measures to cope with uncontrolled air and water pollution. (Note that, as in the Soviet Union, a government-controlled economy poisons the Earth far more than a capitalist one does.) But Tyson and his allies are also calling for the impoverishment of billions when they insist that the world’s governments impose radical limits on human economic activity to combat “global warming” or “climate change” or whatever they are calling it these days. Tyson makes these demands, although he knows very well that ever since the Earth has existed, its climate has been changing, and that ever since man invented agriculture during the Neolithic Age, human activity has been shaping the environment.
In Universe Down to Earth, Tyson explained why scientists gave up on decreeing “laws”:
The beginning of the 20th century saw the end of labeling successful theories as laws. This change of vocabulary came when new experimental domains revealed the predictions of previous physical laws to be incomplete. The change was the physicist’s humble recognition that data from newer and better equipment might provide a deeper realization of the physical world.
The Left does not seem willing to apply this to the evidence in the debate over global warming.
In 2014, the two cultures of which C. P. Snow once spoke have faded into near oblivion. Literary culture has become a branch of poststructuralist theory. Science as Snow defined it is losing its old authority, thanks in part to the bitter politics of the global-warming debates. After all, when one side in a debate calls for the imprisonment of its intellectual opponents — as Robert F. Kennedy recently did in an interview with Climate Depot on the occasion of the recent People’s Climate March in New York City — they are not practicing science. What people are really arguing about, then as now, is politics.
On one important issue Tyson is, I suspect, in his heart of hearts, a genuine heretic to the Left. He apparently holds views, quietly, on the feasibility of space-based missile defense — Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars — that are incompatible with those of the leftist establishment. If he were to proclaim such views openly, he might well find himself banished forever from the paradisiacal gardens of Stewart and Colbert.
The sad dilemma is that Tyson wants to be judged as a scientist and presents himself as a wit. Without doubt he is both, but by mixing the two categories he weakens his authority in each. He has willingly assumed the role of guardian angel to all those on the left who need to borrow the authority of “science” to support their policy preferences. In the spirit of the younger Tyson, I’d like to remind him of these lines from Orwell:
. . . Come off that cloud,
Unship those wings that hardly dared to flitter,
And spout your halo for a pint of bitter.
— Taylor Dinerman is the author of Subway Lists and Other Writing from the iPhone Era and has written about space for the Wall Street Journal, the Space Review, and many other publications.