The fear is real

When I was in graduate school, my friends and I would jokingly classify the utility of research in terms of the order the researcher would be killed after the revolution. So, for physics, if you were working on say galaxy formation in the early universe you would be killed before someone working on the properties of hydrogen at low temperatures, who would be killed before someone working on building a fusion reactor. This was during the cold war and thus the prospect of Stalin and Mao still loomed large. We did not joke this way with fear or disdain but rather with a somewhat bemused acknowledgment that we were afforded the luxury to work on esoteric topics, while much of the world still did not have running water. In those days, the left-right divide was between the small government neoliberals (conservatives in those days who advocated for freer and more deregulated markets) and the bigger government New Deal liberals (those for more government action to address economic inequities). We certainly had fierce debates but they were always rather abstract. We never thought our lives would really change that much.

By the time I had finished and started my academic career, it was clear that the neoliberals had prevailed. The Soviet Union had collapsed, AT&T was broken up, and the Democratic president proclaimed the era of big government was over. Francis Fukuyama wrote “The End of History and the Last Man” arguing that western liberal democracy had triumphed over communism and would be the last form of government. I was skeptical then because I thought we could do better but I really didn’t consider that it could get worse.

But things got worse. We had the bursting of the dot com bubble, 9/11, the endless wars, the great recession, and now perhaps the twilight of democracy as Anne Applebaum laments in her most recent book. We can find blame everywhere – globalization, automation, the rise of China, out of touch elites, the greedy 1%, cynical politicians, the internet, social media, and so forth. Whatever the reason, this is an era where no one is happy and everyone is fearful.

The current divide in the United States is very real and there is fear on both sides. On one side, there is fear that an entire way of life is being taken away – a life of a good secure job, a nuclear family with well defined roles, a nice house, neighbors who share your values and beliefs, a government that mostly stays out of the way but helps when you are in need, the liberty to own a firearm, and a sense of community and shared sacrifice. On the other side, there is the fear that progress is being halted, that a minority will forever suppress a majority, that social, racial, and economic justice will never be achieved, that democracy itself is in peril, and that a better future will always be just out of reach.

What is most frustrating to me is that these points of view are not necessarily mutually exclusive. I don’t know how we can reconcile these differences but my biases and priors incline me to believe that we could alleviate some of the animosity and fear if we addressed income insecurity. While I think income inequality is a real problem, I think a more pressing concern is that a large segment of the population on both sides of the the divide lives continuously on a precipice of economic ruin, which has been made unavoidably apparent by our current predicament. I really think we need to consider a universal basic income. I also think it has to be universal because suspicion of fraud and resentment is a real issue. Everyone gets the check and those with sufficient incomes and wealth simply pay it back in taxes.

How science dies

Nietzsche famously wrote:

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”

This quote is often used as an example of Nietzsche’s nihilism but it is much more complicated. These words are actually spoken by a madman in Nietzsche’s book The Gay Science. According to philosopher Simon Critchley, the quote is meant to be a descriptive rather than a normative statement. What Nietzshe was getting at is that Christianity is a religion that values provable truth and as a result of this truth seeking, science arose. Science in turn generated skepticism of revealed truth and the concept of God. Thus, the end of Christianity was built into Christianity.

Borrowing from this analysis, science may also have have a built-in mechanism for its own doom. An excellent article in this month’s Technology Review describes the concept of epistemic dependence, where science and technology is so complicated now that no single person can understand all of it. In my own work, I could not reproduce a single experiment of my collaborators. Our collaborations work because we trust each other. I don’t really know how scientists identify new species of insects, or how paleontologists can tell what species a bone fragment belongs to, or all the details of the proof of the Poincare conjecture. However, I do understand how science and math works and trust that the results are based on those methods.

But what about people who are not trained in science? If you tell them that the universe was formed 14 billion years ago in a Big Bang and that 99% of all the stuff in the universe is completely invisible, why would they believe you. Why is that more believable then the earth being formed six thousand years ago in seven days? In both cases, knowledge is transferred to them from an authority. Sure you can say because of science, we live longer, have refrigerators, cell phones, and Netflix so we should believe scientists. On the other hand, a charismatic conman could tell them that they have those things because they were gifted from super advanced aliens. Depending on the sales job and one’s priors, it is not clear to me which would be more convincing.

So perhaps we need more science education? Well, in half a century of focus on science education, science literacy is not really very high in the general public. I doubt many people could explain how a refrigerator works much less the second law of thermodynamics and forget about quantum mechanics. Arthur C. Clarke’s third law that “All sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” is more applicable then ever. While it is true that science has delivered on producing better stuff it does not necessarily make us more fulfilled or happier. I can easily see a future where a large fragment of the population simply turns away from science with full knowledge of what they are doing. That would be the good outcome. The bad one is that people start to turn against science and scientists because someone has convinced them that all of their problems (and none of the good stuff) are due to science and scientists. They would then go and destroy the world as we know it without really intending to. I can see this happening too.