Why 'nihilistic' of all things to describe Neil DeGrasse Tyson? His season of Cosmos, probably his magnus opus, was the opposite, a diverse, touching and in-depth examination of the methods of science and history of the world. Utterly necessary then, as next year's 2nd season will be. Maybe it owes its triumph to Ann Druyan and others, but still. I bristle because it smacks of dismissiveness towards climate change scientists and atheists, and I hope that's not what you mean.
Tyson conveniently cloaks himself in the flag of ScienceTM for precisely this reason: Criticizing him is seen as an attack of science itself, as if science is an attitude instead of a process where we look at the probabilities of the observable world. Science, though, has little place in philosophy, politics, the social sciences, or art. When it does have a place there, it’s a piece of the whole, one of the support beams at your disposal. Tyson never acknowledges this. Science, to him, is a book you can open and shut to win the argument, whether your opinion is asked for or not. Science as Tyson wields it is a nice shortcut to a sense of certainty, satisfaction and self-righteousness–the, um, opposite of what skeptical scientists strive for. But Tyson considers science the pinnacle of all knowledge, and that assumption has its own faults:
Earlier critics of scientism, like the economist Friedrich Hayek, looked at the way in which so-called “soft sciences” (i.e., the social or moral sciences) adopted the scientific method in order to acquire the patina of objectivity, as if things like human action, motivation and consciousness itself could be measured as quantifiably as an apple bonking someone on the head. The modern pop science preached by Tyson and others poses a similar threat: privileging the hard, the quantifiable, the unproblematically knowable at the expense of other disciplines. (X)
Basically, Tyson doesn’t know much about these other disciplines, and so he talks about them as if they’re kind of pointless. All that matters is what science has to say, and it’s always phrased in a really reductive way. Tyson’s idea of discussing stories or society or philosophy goes like this:
“Do you know we could get so much more done if we stopped caring about football?”
“Did you know New Year’s Day doesn’t really have any significance, astronomically speaking?”
“Did you know that BB-8 couldn’t really roll over sand?”
Now, he can say whatever he wants on his own blog. He’s probably trolling half the time. But his position as a scientist gets him in trouble because he makes mistakes all the time and never corrects himself. Whether he’s talking about sex, helicopters, or George Bush, he gets things wrong. And yet, he’s GOT to be right because … he IS Science (he actually capitalizes it omg).
Tyson’s problem is simply this: He cannot fathom a world where we talk to one another, exchanging subjective impressions of what matters, or plumbing the depths of human hearts, or caring about anything that doesn’t somehow push us forward into progress. He must interrupt–please, allow him–to gently, smugly remind us that we’d all better off leaving behind our little emotions. If anyone gets mad at him for being overly simplistic, they’re just too up in their feelings, really. And whether he means to or not, this flattens out the human experience.
Or, as this post puts it, it “squashes curiosity and wonder.”
The conversation must always turn to science–because that’s the only thing that’s important–and yes, that is a kind of nihilism. A subtle kind (maybe more deconstructionist than nihilist, if you like), but one that explains why I bristle at the way he talks. We are all just something. Sports are just what we do to past the time. Stories are just poorly designed experiments with no basis in physics. Bad Politics is just what happens when people don’t listen to Good Science. Birthdays are just arbitrary markers of the time you’ve spent on this speck of a planet. And then when people say he’s full of it, or that he should at least consider what other people have to say, all he has to do is blink and say, “Gee, don’t you care about Science?”
Science is not just right to Tyson, it’s good. We’d be better off existing in a utopia like Rationalia, where all decisions are based on scientific evidence (X). Right? Of course it’s right. It’s Science.
Well, Neil. That’s how we get eugenics. Not that I would expect him to think about that, since his sense of history is all the fuck over the place.
Tyson doesn’t ask the questions that need to be asked to support his ideas. He doesn’t ask them because he’s oblivious to anything that doesn’t touch upon his area of expertise, and even when he has nothing to contribute to the conversation, well, he’ll make something up. And so he blunders into mistakes again and again, stampeding over people who actually know what they’re talking about. He’s not the best the scientific community has to offer, not even close, and he doesn’t bring any of the needed rigor to scientific problems, let alone moral/social/philosophical ones.
