The Enormous Rotten Egg Of Government-Funded Science Has Turned Men Weak

Reminder: The Class will now run at the end of the week.

Here is a passage from The Enormous Egg, by Oliver Butterworth, written in the mid 1950s. A story of a boy whose hen, as the title says, lays a very large egg. So unusual was the egg, it makes the news and stirs the interest of scientists, who come to see it.

The scientists began arriving soon after that. There were all shapes and sizes of them. Some of them were tall and skinny and smoked big pipes, and others were short and had horn-rimmed glasses. They gathered in little circles and started jabbering away about “Mesozoic,” and “Cretaceous,”and “Protoceratops” and “atavism,” and all sorts of words that were way over my head. And then the way they would argue. It was really something. Every one of them had a different theory, I guess, and each one was trying to talk louder and faster than the next man to prove that his theory was right and the others were all wrong. It made quite a racket, even worse than our sixth grade when Miss Watkins leaves the room.

Recall first that stereotypes are almost always true, though their ascribed causes can be wrong. This story for kids expressed a then-common trope: the argumentative scientist. It was used often in popular entertainment, up until (if memory serves) the 1970s or early 1980s. One would see a goateed scientist with his pinched glasses and three-piece suit looming over a lectern reading out a sentence of his paper, glaring at the audience, daring them to disagree. If you’re taking my Class, you’ve seen this (sans goatee).

Scientists then often were portrayed as genius eccentrics, solving problems by magic. Eccentric but saintly, like Professor Jacob Barnhardt (standing in as a wild-haired Einstein), whom the alien Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still seeks out to organize the best apolitical minds of humanity to hear Klaatu’s warning that science was progressing into dangerous territory.

If not saintly, scientists were shown as singularly determined, even manic, not caring what would be uncovered in their dogged pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Like Dr Carrington in The Thing from Another World, who aids and abets the bloodsucking Thing. Carrington notably gives a speech saying it’s the group’s duty to die in service to science.

Both movies came in 1951. Which serves as good a year as any other to represent Peak Scientist.

Now when you have competing theories, only one can be right, or none. Scientists were shown as definite and acerbic when defending their own. Often, the lone scientist, battling against the Consensus, would Save The Day with his radical new theory, scoffed at by the established. Like Admiral Harriman Nelson who insisted a rocket must be launched into the Van Allen belt to keep the earth from frying in 1961’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

Or Dr Cole Hendron who insists, against wounding criticism, a rogue star-plus-planet will barrel into the earth, and that the only solution is rockets to save a remnant of mankind on the new planet, in 1951’s When World’s Collide. Interestingly, Hendron convinced a non-scientist wealthy man to fund his mad efforts, while the government money went the other direction.

Things changed. Scientists were by the 1990s still shown as magically intelligent and of course appropriately diverse and female, but the quarrels faded. By the time of Star Trek: The Next Generation, all we heard were streams of techno-babble with “the” solution found in the nick of time, by committee, or because of the off-chance comment from some neglected character.

Government paid for everything. The secret redoubts of the wealthy (good and bad: think Bond villains) gave rise to officially sanctioned installations, covert or otherwise. The 2000s series Eureka portrays a town of geniuses, with some who have won the mysterious Nobel Prize more than once. This came at a time when only a fraction of could write down, say, Newton’s equation for force.

In days of yore, then, scientists and other thinkers (see Wittgenstein’s Poker; here the word defines the iron fire prod) were fractious and could even come to blows. Insults were nothing. The most common was to dismiss all critics as ignorant, far below oneself in thinkery. Einstein in their arguments over the meaning of time famously did this to Henri Bergson, who started as a gifted mathematician and shifted to philosophy, but was dismissed by Einstein as a numeric numbskull. Yet Einstein was also one of the progenitors of the tactic of crying Victim, a pathetic trick that has only grown in frequency and effectiveness.

I’ve told the story before, but way back in the Pleistocene, when people would give seminars on campus, the atmosphere was combative. This was of course a function of the eminence of the speaker. Prominent men would be questioned, with degrees of politeness depending on the stakes. If the speaker was giving a “job talk”, it was no holds barred, especially if the speaker held one philosophy and a faculty member another. It was not unusual, and even expected, for questions to be peppered in the midst of talks. Active disagreement by the speaker to the faculty member was not held against him, not if the unwritten rules of verbal sparring were held to.

This behavior is not exactly forbidden now, but it is rare in practice. Especially if it is, say, a white male faculty member wanting to take exception to a female or an “of color”. Yet even that “wanting” has faded. Everybody knows it’s better to keep your mouth shut. Unless you’re going to say something nice. If you’re going to speak in a negative tone, it had better be in service to the Consensus, and against whatever newfangled crank idea that dare not be countenanced.

The change from the earlier querulousness to cooperation makes for a nice atmosphere. Nice, but bland science.

This shift happened in part because, as everybody knows, of the introduction of large numbers of women, whose natural ability to police communal standards help keep things nice, and with men not wanting to get involved in any drama, where they know that it’s not what they said but they way they said it that will land them in difficulties. Men learn embrace their softer sides in such environments.

The way science came to be funded almost wholly by government also explains the change. Anything run by committee, which government funding is, is bound to enforce mediocrity and punish risk. It also ensures narrowness. The fewer things to keep track of, the easier the bureaucrat’s job is. Because no spreadsheet slinger takes pointed disagreement well, again the trend is toward Nice—which we must now capitalize.

Those two shifts merged, which accounts for this story from a man who was with the University of Calgary, until the newly formed DIE committee turned down money for a new space telescope because the contract did not have a DIE declaration in it. We saw earlier how much the NSF committed to DIE. Scientists at least had to lie and pretend they loved to DIE. That lying further weakened their argumentative powers. And because lying wounds, it became less painful to agree that at least some of the goals of DIE were worthy. DIE led to greater effeminacy.

DIE is on the ropes, but it’s not knocked out. We learn that to get around now official proscriptions of DIE “A growing trend in academic publishing is ‘positionality statements’ where authors list all their intersectional forms of privilege/oppression. This one is particularly absurd. ‘All authors are cis-gender menstruating individuals who identify as intersectional feminists.'” Menstruating individuals? No wonder they’re in such a bad mood.

It will be tough to purge DIE, because all ideologies die hard. But cutting off their life blood is easy. Just stop paying them. If we want to bring back the confrontational, and fecund, mode of science, we have to ensure there are sides to take, and not just one. Government money has to stop.

I know this is a near impossibility, because the idea sounds so extraordinary that it cannot possibly be believed. Yet if you judge science by New Things Learned That Aren’t Bullshit, the old way was not only superior, it was in an entirely different class apart.

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