At no time is the juxtaposition between the claim and the reality more clear than during the White House Correspondents' Dinner, which ritzy and opulent celebration of wealth, influence, and power the nation's smarter progressive class has taken to labeling the "Nerd Prom." It is clear why people who believe themselves to be providing a voice for the powerless and who routinely lecture the rest of us about the evils of income inequality would wish to reduce in stature a party that would have made Trimalchio blush: It is devastating to their image. Just as Hillary Clinton has noticed of late that her extraordinary wealth and ostentatious lifestyle conflict with her populist mien, the New Class recognizes the danger that its private behavior poses to its public credibility. There is, naturally, something a little off about selected members of the Fifth Estate yukking it up with those whom they have been charged with scrutinizing--all while rappers and movie stars enjoy castles of champagne and show off their million-dollar dresses. And so the optics must be addressed and the nomenclature of an uncelebrated group cynically appropriated. We're not the ruling class, the message goes. We're just geeks. We're not the powerful; we're the outcasts. This isn't a big old shindig; it's science. Look, Neil deGrasse Tyson is standing in the Roosevelt Room!
IRONICALLY enough, what Tyson and his acolytes have ended up doing is blurring the lines between politics, scholarship, and culture--thereby damaging all three. Tyson himself has expressed bemusement that "entertainment reporters" have been so interested in him. "What does it mean," he asked, "that Seth MacFarlane, who's best known for his fart jokes--what does it mean that he's executive producing" Cosmos? Well, what it means is that Tyson has hit the jackpot. Actual science is slow, unsexy, and assiduously neutral--and it carries about it almost nothing that would interest either the hipsters of Ann Arbor or the Kardashian-soaked titillaters over at E!. Politics pretending to be science, on the other hand, is current, and it is chic.
Useful, too. For all of the hype, much of the fadlike fetishization of "Big Data" is merely the latest repackaging of old and tired progressive ideas about who in our society should enjoy the most political power. Much of the time, "It's just science!" is a dodge--a bullying tactic designed to hide a crushingly boring orthodox progressivism behind the veil of dispassionate empiricism and to pretend that Hayek's observation that central planners can never have the information they would need to centrally plan was invalidated by the invention of the computer. If politics should be determined by pragmatism, and the pragmatists are all on the Left ... well, you do the math.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2014-07-28 05:44 am (UTC)At no time is the juxtaposition between the claim and the reality more clear than during the White House Correspondents' Dinner, which ritzy and opulent celebration of wealth, influence, and power the nation's smarter progressive class has taken to labeling the "Nerd Prom." It is clear why people who believe themselves to be providing a voice for the powerless and who routinely lecture the rest of us about the evils of income inequality would wish to reduce in stature a party that would have made Trimalchio blush: It is devastating to their image. Just as Hillary Clinton has noticed of late that her extraordinary wealth and ostentatious lifestyle conflict with her populist mien, the New Class recognizes the danger that its private behavior poses to its public credibility. There is, naturally, something a little off about selected members of the Fifth Estate yukking it up with those whom they have been charged with scrutinizing--all while rappers and movie stars enjoy castles of champagne and show off their million-dollar dresses. And so the optics must be addressed and the nomenclature of an uncelebrated group cynically appropriated. We're not the ruling class, the message goes. We're just geeks. We're not the powerful; we're the outcasts. This isn't a big old shindig; it's science. Look, Neil deGrasse Tyson is standing in the Roosevelt Room!
IRONICALLY enough, what Tyson and his acolytes have ended up doing is blurring the lines between politics, scholarship, and culture--thereby damaging all three. Tyson himself has expressed bemusement that "entertainment reporters" have been so interested in him. "What does it mean," he asked, "that Seth MacFarlane, who's best known for his fart jokes--what does it mean that he's executive producing" Cosmos? Well, what it means is that Tyson has hit the jackpot. Actual science is slow, unsexy, and assiduously neutral--and it carries about it almost nothing that would interest either the hipsters of Ann Arbor or the Kardashian-soaked titillaters over at E!. Politics pretending to be science, on the other hand, is current, and it is chic.
Useful, too. For all of the hype, much of the fadlike fetishization of "Big Data" is merely the latest repackaging of old and tired progressive ideas about who in our society should enjoy the most political power. Much of the time, "It's just science!" is a dodge--a bullying tactic designed to hide a crushingly boring orthodox progressivism behind the veil of dispassionate empiricism and to pretend that Hayek's observation that central planners can never have the information they would need to centrally plan was invalidated by the invention of the computer. If politics should be determined by pragmatism, and the pragmatists are all on the Left ... well, you do the math.