Neil deGrasse Tyson and the I've-got-science-on-my-side posture

Just why does the Hayden Planetarium director and Cosmos host have such rabidly devout followers?  Charles C. W. Cooke at NRO gave us an insight into that in a July article:

 . . . 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.

Once again, we see what a powerful intoxicant self-congratulation is.

That Tyson delivers it isn't a matter of conjecture.  There's substantiation:

Answering a question about Obama’s cameo onCosmos, 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.”

And it's not just professional pundits:

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. Myworldview 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. 

Anyway, Robert Tracinski at The Federalist came across an interesting YouTube clip of Tyson that shows just how exquisitely hollow this attitude can be.  Tyson, talking at a convention of "skeptics" - that is to say, atheists - offers the hypothetical scenario of a cancer patient consulting three different doctors who give him predictions of months to live that vary within a month of each other.  The patient survives, goes into remission, and is cancer-free within a few years, and then thanks God for being spared.  He could have stopped there, but had to go on to talk about having been a physics lecturer to pre-med students and say, "Not all of them were smart, I assure you."

Tracinski summarizes the position Tyson puts himself in thusly:

Tyson paints himself into a corner where the only alternatives are: either God performs miracles, and doctors are stupid.

Medicine, you see, just doesn't pass the elitist nerd's rigor test the way physics does.  And philosophy certainly doesn't pass it:

 You really have to check this out to believe it: Tyson agrees with an interviewer that philosophers engage in “a little too much question asking” and ridicules them as people who “can’t even cross the street because you are distracted by what you are sure are deep questions you’ve asked yourself.”

It’s almost as if Tyson thinks physicists are the cool kids of academia, who like to make fun of those four-eyed nerds in the philosophy department.

Now, I’ve studied philosophy extensively (it was my major in college), and there is an awful lot of useless lip-flapping in the field, so I understand why scientists—who are used to crisper, more reality-oriented intellectual standards—are often turned off. But there is a big difference between saying that some philosophers and philosophies are useless, versus saying that the discipline as such is useless.

And the irony, of course, is that Tyson could have really found some use for it, because a little training in philosophy might have prevented him from making such a hash of that argument about miracles.

This appeal of this posture among collectivists is why climate-change alarmism hasn't died yet.  Far from it; the Most Equal Comrade is in New York as I write this, prattling on about having science on his side.