America has a long history of superstar entrepreneurs becoming gurus, motivational speakers, or even politicians. Very few of them become public intellectuals. But that’s more or less what Peter Thiel is. Though perhaps that’s not quite fair to him. You might just as well say that he was an intellectual who took a detour through business and became spectacularly wealthy.
Thiel’s book, Zero to One, might seem like an improbable best seller, but it really isn’t. He doesn’t write very often, but when he does, it’s always insightful. See, for instance, his long essay “The End of the Future,” from National Review. Or “The Education of a Libertarian.” And when you listen to him talk, it’s clear that his mind is curious and nuanced-see this interview with Francis Fukuyama and the even more in-depth interview he did with the Boss in the latest episode of Conversations with Bill Kristol.
Now I don’t often agree with Thiel–for instance, his Wall Street Journal essay on the benefits of monopoly strikes me as being correct in only the narrowest cases. But public intellectuals aren’t useful because they tell you things you agree with. They’re valuable because they have interesting minds and the intellectual horsepower to make compelling arguments-irrespective of whether or not you ultimately agree with them. The value-add, as they’d put it in Thiel’s tech world, of a public intellectual is that he’s able to force you to look at something differently than you would otherwise. For instance, here’s Thiel linking four very different things-the crisis in credit, the slowing of technological progress, the tech bubble of the ’90s and the housing bubble of the ’00s-in “The End of the Future”:
This analysis suggests an explanation for the strange way the technology bubble of the 1990s gave rise to the real-estate bubble of the 2000s. After betting heavily on technology growth that did not materialize, investors tried to achieve the needed double-digit returns through massive leverage in seemingly safe real-estate investments. This did not work either, because a major reason for the bubble in real estate turned out to be the same as the reason for the bubble in technology: a mistaken but nearly universal background assumption about easy progress. Without fundamental gains in productivity (presumably driven by technology), real-estate values could not go up forever. Leverage is not a substitute for scientific progress.
And here’s how he extrapolates from there to concern about the fragility of our political order:
Right, wrong, or somewhere in between, it’s interesting. You may be convinced that the collapse of technological progress over the last 40 years is the root of our cultural, political, and economic malaise. Or you may not be. Regardless, it’s worth unpacking what Thiel has to say. Which is why I’d argue that he’s one of America’s more important public intellectuals, even if his official job title is “venture capitalist.”
Thiel’s thoughtfulness is even more striking when you look at a man whose actual job description is “public intellectual”: Neil deGrasse Tyson.
If the course description for Carl Sagan was something like “Stephen Hawking for poets,” then Neil deGrasse Tyson has always been Carl Sagan Lite. That is, he functions as a Talisman of Science-capital “S”-for the tens of millions of Americans who majored in English, or political science, or social justice, and tapped out of math after the second year of calculus.
That’s fine. Nothing wrong with that. Even History majors should be allowed to glimpse the majesty of the physical sciences. Besides, science is a lot more fun when you can consume it in bite-sized morsels without having to understand any of the complicated stuff. And when you’re not getting tested on it. That helps, too.
So here we have Neil deGrasse Tyson, who’s supposed to be one of America’s premiere public intellectuals. Except that it now seems as though his primary interest is in telling people things with which they already agree. Even if he has to make these things up.
Last week, the Federalist‘s Sean Davis published a series of articles pointing to problematic utterances from Tyson. The first was about a “newspaper headline” Tyson often uses to highlight how journalists know nothing about math. The quote seems to have been made up or, to put it more charitably, apocryphal. Then it turned out that another quote Tyson often cites-this one by a supposed member of Congress-is also made up. And finally, Davis found a line that Tyson frequently uses about George W. Bush:
TYSON: Here’s what happens. George Bush, within a week of [the 9/11 terrorist attacks] gave us a speech attempting to distinguish we from they. And who are they? These were sort of the Muslim fundamentalists. And he wants to distinguish we from they. And how does he do it? He says, “Our God” – of course it’s actually the same God, but that’s a detail, let’s hold that minor fact aside for the moment. Allah of the Muslims is the same God as the God of the Old Testament. So, but let’s hold that aside. He says, “Our God is the God” – he’s loosely quoting Genesis, biblical Genesis – “Our God is the God who named the stars.”
Like his made-up quotes from the newspaper and the congressman, this story is meant to highlight the benighted intellectual inferiority of People Who Are Not Neil deGrasse Tyson. And like those other two quotes, it’s a fake. Here’s Davis again:
As you have probably already guessed, every single claim is false. Every one! Then there’s Tyson’s aside that Bush’s quote was a “loose quote” of the book of Genesis. Yep, that’s false, too. Add embarrassing biblical illiteracy to Tyson’s list of accomplishments on his CV.
First off, Bush never uttered the quote attributed to him by Tyson. He did, however, include a separate but similar phrase in a February 2003 speech immediately following the Columbia space shuttle disaster:
“In the skies today we saw destruction and tragedy. Yet farther than we can see, there is comfort and hope. In the words of the prophet Isaiah, ‘Lift your eyes and look to the heavens. Who created all these? He who brings out the starry hosts one by one and calls them each by name. Because of His great power, and mighty strength, not one of them is missing.’
“The same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today. The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth; yet we can pray that all are safely home.”
I don’t have a Ph.D. in physics, but I’m pretty sure February 2003 did not happen in the week after 9/11.
Tyson butchered the quote. He butchered the date. He butchered the context. He butchered the implication. And he butchered the biblical allusion, which was to the prophet Isaiah, not the book of Genesis (you can tell Bush was alluding to Isaiah because he explicitly said he was referencing Isaiah).
Bush’s statement about the Creator had nothing to do with making “us” look better than “them”: it was an attempt to comfort the families who lost loved ones in the crash. They weren’t nameless creatures who passed anonymously; their ultimate Creator, the one who knit them together in their mothers’ wombs, mourned them by name. Heck, that same Creator even gave up his one and only Son that those lost souls might one day be reconciled to God through Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. It was a message of hope and unity, not a message of division authored in the fog of war.
In short, Neil deGrasse Tyson is to science as Jon Stewart is to news. He’s there to flatter his audience by bestowing his agreement on them. By any means necessary.
When it comes to public intellectuals, I’ll take Peter Thiel every day of the week.
