The Scrapbook has always had great admiration for scientific achievement. However, in recent years we’ve been repeatedly hectored about whether we are sufficiently reverential towards “Science,” which has become a term of art on the left and is less about empirical discovery for the betterment of mankind and more about proving one’s intellectual and moral superiority over those with retrograde political and religious views.
The most prominent figurehead for this liberal cult of Science is the ubiquitous astronomer Neil -deGrasse Tyson, who has taken all of Carl -Sagan’s annoying traits and turned them up to 11. (Tyson was even -behind the reboot of Sagan’s Cosmos series that aired a few years back.) When Tyson’s not hectoring us about atheism, he’s usually on social media griping about inaccuracies in sci-fi films or explaining science in ways that only marijuana enthusiasts would find edifying. Sample tweet: “If there were ever a species for whom sex hurt, it surely went extinct long ago.” We’d say our mind was blown by this speculative nugget, but we’re still trying to figure out how Tyson has never heard of black widow spiders.
In any event, we were delighted to come across a glorious rant from Sam Kriss last week, “Neil deGrasse Tyson Is a Black Hole, Sucking the Fun Out of the Universe.” Even more astonishing is that this article was published by Wired magazine, which is normally a vehicle for technological and scientific triumphalism. Along with eviscerating Tyson, Kriss does a fine job outlining the basic problem of conflating smug with science:
A few years ago, Tyson got caught concocting a handful of quotations. For instance, he was habitually spreading a George W. Bush quotation that didn’t exist and misquoting the Bible to score cheap points about the former president’s alleged dis-respect of science and religious views. It took weeks of shaming Tyson to get a response, and in the meantime the Daily Beast actually accused conservatives of declaring “war” on Tyson for demanding accuracy. Well, Kriss provides additional damning examples of Tyson playing fast and loose with facts:
Indeed, Neil deGrasse Tyson is a walking, talking reminder that having a Ph.D. doesn’t make you a good scientist, let alone morally superior. If even Wired thinks Tyson’s shtick is tired, maybe he’ll decide to zip it for a while and spare us his offensively trite lectures about “Science.”
