National Review Declares War on Nerds

[redheadbaker]

www.salon.com/2014/07/30/national_review_declares_war_against_the_nerds/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

National Review declares war against the nerds
Why are conservatives so annoyed by Neil DeGrasse Tyson? Because, you know, science
by Andrew Leonard

If you prick a nerd, does he not bleed? If you wrong us, shall we not revenge? Like fire ants boiling out of their underground lair, overcome with rage at whatever dastard disturbed their slumber, nerds everywhere are taking to the streets, apoplectic at the most foul attack on entitled smarts this nation has seen since Dwight D. Eisenhower called Robert Oppenheimer a pencil-necked geek.

OK, I don’t actually have a link for that Eisenhower thing. Maybe it didn’t happen. But I do have a link for National Review’s cover-story assaulting nerd-dom, “Smarter Than Thou.” A cover story that begins by attacking none other than Neil DeGrasse Tyson — the Holy Roman Nerd-Emperor himself! — as the “the fetish and totem of the extraordinarily puffed-up ‘nerd’ culture that has of late started to bloom across the United States.”

Oh boy, them’s fightin’ words. I can tell you, nerds are spitting mad. They’ve got the torches and pitchforks ready to hand. They’re going to burn some shit down!

Well, actually, probably not. What they’re really going to do is craft some sarcastically amusing tweets, because you know, they’re nerds. That’s how nerds roll. And maybe they’ll write a clever smartphone app that can be deployed to mock people who don’t accept the science of climate change. Because, contra National Review’s Charles Cooke, who seems to believe that the new primacy of the nerd is some kind of collectivist scam by Ezra Klein and Nate Silver and Rachel Maddow and “anybody who conforms to the Left’s social and moral precepts while wearing glasses and babbling about statistics,” the cultural ascendancy of the nerd has nothing to do with who wears horn-rims on TV and everything to do with the massive technological transformation of society over the last 20 years. Nerds used to be 90-pound weaklings who never got the girl. Then nerds built the Internet and personal computers. Now nerds rule the world. Or at least, that part of it that isn’t controlled by retrograde politicians. The primacy of nerd culture is not an Ezra Klein affectation; it’s fallout from the fact that nerds are making an awful lot of money these days.

Cooke, after leading off with Tyson, fatally exposes his hand by defining the leaders of the new nerd menace as a group that, oddly, all share politics that National Review doesn’t approve of.

Prominent examples include MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry, Rachel Maddow, Steve Kornacki, and Chris Hayes; Vox’s Ezra Klein, Dylan Matthews, and Matt Yglesias; the sabermetrician Nate Silver; the economist Paul Krugman; the atheist Richard Dawkins; former vice president Al Gore; celebrity scientist Bill Nye…

Later, Cooke says 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.” I’m not sure it’s all that smart to attack the likes of Dawkins or Krugman, (or even Bill Nye, a mechanical engineer who worked for Boeing) as lacking scientific training. But Cooke’s real problem is that the “real” nerds — the ones that aren’t on MSNBC, also, by and large, share the political beliefs he scorns.

Cooke never mentions Silicon Valley, which is odd, because the fact that the world’s greatest preponderance of nerds also happens to be the United States’ most formidable bastion of left-wing progressive politics would seem to support his thesis that nerds are pinkos. (And yes, I know, there are a lot of libertarian nerds — but guess what, those guys believe in science too!) There’s a reason for Cooke’s omission. Acknowledging that nerds — you know, the guys and gals who invented the microchip and the PC and the smartphone — actually do have a grasp of scientific fact, which leads them to take seriously the problem of historically unprecedented carbon dioxide emissions and the idiocy of rewriting school science textbooks to include dogma about creationism and intelligent design, is a disastrous dead end for conservatives.

If Cooke honestly wanted to grapple with the cultural cachet of nerd-dom, he’d have to answer questions such as why a poll by the Pew Research Service found that in 2009 that only six percent of scientists identify as Republican. He’d have to grapple with the true reasons for Tyson’s popularity, which have much more to do with how grateful a significant portion of this nation is for someone who can rebut ignorance and religious propaganda with humor and clarity than with any political identification. He’d have to face up to the sobering reality that the majority of people who understand how the world works in terms of biology and physics and mathematics also think that our overheating globe is a serious problem.

Instead, Cooke argues that leftists are embracing the nerd-designation because it says to the world what they are 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.”

Oh NO! Cooke dares attack nerdish chart-love! That really stings. But you know what? It’s not the fault of liberal nerds that Ken Hamm’s Creation Museum, which claims that dinosaurs were wiped out in a flood 4300 years ago, is in the South. And for better or worse, it’s not the fault of liberal nerds that large swathes of Republican politicians in the South have lined up behind the breath-taking rejection of the scientific method that is symbolized by the Creation Museum.

But this thing about attachment to the past — well maybe Cooke’s got a point there. Nerds love science fiction, in part because we love the promise of the future, a promise of Star Trek abundance and material prosperity for everyone. We look at the past, at centuries that included slavery and child labor and infant mortality and Inquisitions and the lack of female suffrage, and we think, we can do better than that. We can progress.

That’s why we like Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Because we believe that civilization is going somewhere, and that if the future isn’t better than the past, then we’re just wasting our time on this planet.

[Deleted]

As a nerd, I say, "Heck with you, National Review. You haven't been any good since Buckley died." However, it was nice that they completely refunded my money. They didn't have to.

That post was my "revenge of the nerd." :-)

[IIOY]

This entire argument is very GOML. Does this guy eat dinner at 4 and go to bed after Jeopardy?

[Deleted]

That Creationism museum is barely in the South. While it is technically in Kentucky, it's right outside Cincinnati which is definitely the Midwest.

That's all I've got. I think about stopping at the museum and possibly getting kicked out every time I go to Cincinnati.

[CrazyLucky]

I'm not a real scientist, but I work with and have worked with many. I'm surprised that only 6% identify as Republican. I would have guessed much closer to 40% or even more.

[josieposy]

I wonder if it varies by field?

[CrazyLucky]

Aug 1, 2014 9:16:35 GMT -5 Stan said:

Aug 1, 2014 8:50:40 GMT -5 CrazyLucky said:

I'm not a real scientist, but I work with and have worked with many. I'm surprised that only 6% identify as Republican. I would have guessed much closer to 40% or even more.

I don't know any actual science people who identify as Republicans. How can they? Creation in schools, abstinence based sex ed, women's bodies have ways of shutting down rape sperm, global warming, the list goes on.

Well, I worked at IBM with a lot of PhDs.  And now I work with just a few.  But a lot of them are very religious.  So they are conservative because of abortion, abstinence, gay marriage.  Abortion and gay marriage are big ones.  I'm in the south now.

[CrazyLucky]

Aug 1, 2014 9:25:01 GMT -5 Stan said:

Aug 1, 2014 9:22:00 GMT -5 CrazyLucky said:

Well, I worked at IBM with a lot of PhDs.  And now I work with just a few.  But a lot of them are very religious.  So they are conservative because of abortion, abstinence, gay marriage.  Abortion and gay marriage are big ones.  I'm in the south now.

My dad is a physics professor, a liberal, and the most religious person I've ever met. He's prochild/prochoice and pro equality. Religious =\= Republican.

I'm sorry.  I didn't mean to imply that.  I'm religious.  A lot of people IRL think I am the most liberal person they know.  Compared to this board, I'm kind of centrist I think.
There are more liberal and less liberal religions.  The guys I'm working with now are from the less liberal denominations of Christianity.  I don't even bother arguing anymore.  I do not understand why they refuse to admit we are not living in a theocracy.  Even if you do honestly believe God wants only woman/man marriage, it doesn't matter.  Your thoughts on God don't get to dictate the rights of other!
It drives me absolutely nuts when people equate religiousness and conservatism.  There are many pro-gay, pro-choice, pro helping the poor Christians, and I'm one of them.  The GOP does not own Christians.  This is a hot button issue for me and I'm embarrassed that my choice of words made you think I think the opposite of what I do!

[pescalita]

I'm not particularly into nerd culture, but once you come after pivot tables it is ON, brah.

[meshaliuknits]

Aug 1, 2014 9:33:14 GMT -5 pescalita said:

I'm not particularly into nerd culture, but once you come after pivot tables it is ON, brah.

I dismissed them at Neil deGrass Tyson. I love that man and I'd better not hear any Cosby-esque shit about him in ten years!

[wawa]

Aug 1, 2014 9:36:04 GMT -5 meshaliuknits said:

Aug 1, 2014 9:33:14 GMT -5 pescalita said:

I'm not particularly into nerd culture, but once you come after pivot tables it is ON, brah.

I dismissed them at Neil deGrass Tyson. I love that man and I'd better not hear any Cosby-esque shit about him in ten years!

I would cry real tears.