We’ve seen this one before.
As gleefully announced by Eric Cantor (R – Faust) Congressman Adrian Smith, (R-Torquemada Nebraska), a member of the House Science and Technology is kicking off the GOP “YouCut Citizen Review” of federal agencies with an assault on that known threat to American values and good governance, the National Science Foundation. [Warning: that link leads to Cantor’s website.]
In keeping with the tradition of both Joe McCarthy and that insufferable grandstander, William Proxmire, Smith and Cantor target the usual suspects. Those dread “university academics” (Oh! the ignominy! — and for my part, I’d have to say: “it’s a fair cop, guv’nor”) who received $750K to work on computer models of what Smith called “the on-field contribution of soccer players.” (Say whut? A missing object, I fear — ed.)…
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… Or that wasted $1.2 * 10^6 (I write it that way just to piss Cantor and Smith off, of course) used to “model the sound of breaking objects for the video game and movie industries.”
Yo — John. Are you listening?
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They’re coming after your Cataclysm. Just sayin.
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If Smith leaves any doubt about what’s going on here in his video message, (I mean, he could be a Truman-esque patriot merely seeking to make government work better for all citizens, right? Right?), the text on Cantor’s site to GOP supporters removes that mite of ambiguity.
How should you identify suspect federally-funded science one may ask? Well, writes Cantor (or rather, his web gnomes),
In the “Search Award For” field, try some keywords, such as: success, culture, media, games, social norm, lawyers, museum, leisure, stimulus, etc. to bring up grants.
I guess I gotta fess up here. If this witch hunt is retrospective, I’m in trouble. My last NSF-funded project featured a collaboration with the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, which (as the proposal detailed) formed a network of science museums to help folks grasp ideas about the making of knowledge about phenomena removed from us by distance of space and/or time. So if they come for any of us, I guess they may come for me.
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Seriously though, this is thought-police stuff. Smith concedes that there is good science — physics, chemistry, the hard stuff — or rather, in this climate, the safe kind … for now.
But of course nothing is safe. Cosmology gives us insight into deep time, godless origins, and, more corrosive than any other thought, the realization that humankind does not occupy a privileged place in the universe. That’s obviously not on.
And so on. When you get down to it, it’s not the funky, more-than-an-elevator-pitch-to-explain research that’s the problem. It is, rather, that you can apply reason and formal methods to elicit facts from the material circumstances of our existence that puts the sand in the vaseline down at GOP HQ. Independent authority is unacceptable.
I’m going to go somewhere a bit dangerous here. Godwinizing is a touchy game, and calling examples down from between-the-wars-Germany down on someone named Cantor risks a predictable response. But hell, I answer to Levenson so I’ll take the plunge.
Here’s the background:*
In 1920, just as he reached the first full rush of his fame, Albert Einstein attended a public meeting of the Arbeitgemeinshaft deutcher Naturforsher zur Erhaltung reiner Wissenshaft — the Working Group of German Scientists for the Preservation of Pure Science .
As he sat, silent, in the audience, he heard speaker after speaker denounce relativity as hostile to true Germans and true scientists.
One speaker termed relativity the scientific equivalent of Dada…
…while another, the experimentalist Ernst Gehrcke had already described the acquiescence of his fellow scientists in Einstein’s work was “an interesting case of mass suggestion in physics.”
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Einstein laid low that evening, but he had no doubt about what was really being said. He responded a few days later in one of Berlin’s dailies by writing, “I have good reason to believe that other motives besides a search for truth underlie this enterprise,” he wrote, and it was clear what they were: there would have been no problem, “had I been a German national with or without swastika instead of a Jew with liberal international opinions then…
The controversy did not end there. Later in 1920, the autumn meeting of the Society of Society of German Scientists and Physicians pitted Einstein against Philip Lenard, a Nobel laureate whose work, ironically, had led to Einstein’s early breakthrough on the quantum theory of light.
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Lenard’s role in the ongoing reaction to Einstein was a critical feature of the debate, for at first he ignored the anti-Semitism of some of his allies and spoke simply as one who objected to the corrosive consequences of Einstein’s approach to physics. Relativity theory, with its reckless assault of space, time and motion, “offended the common sense of a scientist.”
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That is, relativity being counter-intuitive, ought to be false. It would be more comfortable if it were not true, less troubling to the soul.
Put that way, Lenard’s was a pathetic argument but not an actually malicious one. (After all, Einstein himself would experience the emotional cost that a radical discovery can impose on those who have lived happily with the older, outmoded set of ideas.)
But Lenard did not rest there. By 1922, the grounds of his objection shifted; now, he denounced Einstein as a false German, decried Jewish habits of disputation, and called for the reassertion of a “sound German spirit” in science, whose revival would ensure the destruction of “the alien spirit…which is so clearly seen in anything that relates to the ‘relativity theory'”
Lenard’s justification for this claim went like this: step one: Einstein’s science made no sense. Step two: therefore, it had to have been produced out of a malign desire to undermine the clarity of science and the certainty of its conclusions. Finally, the ultimate step in this catechism, Einstein’s evil impulse here was born of the inherent Jewishness of relativity’s author.
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The epilogue? In 1932, Einstein left Germany, weeks ahead of Hitler’s ascension to power. Lenard became one of the Nazi’s favorite physicists, with the title “chief of Deutche Physik.”
And how did the Nazi preference for allegiance and national origin over scientific competence work out for them?
Not so well, thankfully, as we know.
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Leap now from 1922 to 2010: are Smith and Cantor denouncing particular research grants because of the ethnic or religious affiliation of the researchers?
No.
Are they setting up the conditions in which the question of whether or not a given piece of research is “American” enough?
Yes. They are.
Is this dangerous?
Well, duh.
A last note, just to make myself clear: I don’t think that this latest witch hunt is (yet) a direct threat to people interested in inappropriate ideas. It does make us dumber, day by day. Pace every invocation of American exceptionalism, there is no particular reason, as readers of this blog know better than most, that the US of A will remain the undisputed king of all disciplines forever. There is some uncertainty, however, about how fast our competition will arrive, and how likely it will be that we slip beneath the top rank of scientific and technologically innovative national leaders.
And there, the answer is — if Smith and Cantor have their way — sooner and more grievously than we think.
*The Einstein/”German physics” material is slightly edited from one of my earlier, published works. No link-mongering here. If you are interested in more, dig for it.
Images: Sebastian Stoskopff Still-Life of Glasses in a Basket,” 1644.
Theo van Doesburg, Poster Small Dada Soiree, 1922.
Walker
That is the work of one of my colleagues in the department. It is some awesome, groundbreaking stuff.
The problem with Googling games, is that it is such a major portion of our economy now that it makes return-on-investment sense for the NSF to support research in this area. Indeed, they are not supporting as much of it as some of us would like.
Yutsano
First of all the Pacific Science Center is da shiznit. It’s one of those things that never makes it on to tour guides that really is an amazing place. Fortunately it’s in Seattle Center right next to the Space Needle so it’s relatively easy to stumble upon.
Second, none of this is shocking. They truly believe government should fund the military and cops and nothing else. And cops are only there to keep out the
brown folkundesireables from their McMansion lawns. Anything else is instant waste to them. Well, unless it directly benefits a wealthy benefactor. Then it’s in the public interest by default.Mark S.
I thought I’d try something titillating, so Cantor would have something to go on TV with. I first tried “blowjob,” but that didn’t turn anything up, so I tried “oral sex” and came up with this:
Hornworm hawkmoths? That’s not sexy. Fuck you, Cantor. Find someone else to do your grunt work.
DFS
Yeah, I went to the Science Center countless times growing up outside Seattle. Saw tons of great IMAX movies there, when it was still mainly just a format for documentaries and educational-type stuff. A tremendous resource.
cmorenc
One of the most ignorantly pernicious things about going after scientific research projects (and their funding) based on their sometimes humorously arcane or goofy-sounding titles is that quite often, the actual substance of the project is quite scientifically valuable, even perhaps laying the eventual groundwork for practically/economically valuable applications, and not necessarily quixotic at all.
For example, “developing resistance in mice from mold” sounds like a weirdly useless study to fund, unless you realize that the potential substantive worth of the study is toward developing polio vaccine.
Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
I’ve often thought of the irony of the Nazis denouncing “Jewish science”, while the physicists at Los Alamos, many of them Jewish refugees (it was a multi-national effort: a historian said “it was American insofar that the Americans ran the cafeteria) came up with a world-changing weapon while Heisenberg chased his tail.
Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
“One of the most ignorantly pernicious things about going after scientific research projects (and their funding) based on their sometimes humorously arcane or goofy-sounding titles is that quite often, the actual substance of the project is quite scientifically valuable, even perhaps laying the eventual groundwork for practically/economically valuable applications, and not necessarily quixotic at all.”
Like Bobby Jindal mocking funding for Vulcanology, ‘cos there’s no chance a volcanic eruption could, like, paralyze a continent’s air travel or something like that.
Jewish Steel
But why on earth would anyone want to do scientific research that wasn’t profit driven?
So that’s where my evil impulse comes from. Mystery solved. Thanks, science blogger dude.
Jewish Steel
But why on earth would anyone want to do scientific research that wasn’t profit driven?
So that’s where my evil impulse comes from. Mystery solved. Thanks, science blogger dude.
Hal
In related news:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/education/07education.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=homepage
Though I have to say, Chinese student excelling in math and reading doesn’t shock me at all…
El Cid
I guess you never thought that maybe we don’t need all yer damn fancy “science” studying all kind of weird stuff nobody done never needed and wasting our hard-earned dollars just so somebody can write a bunch of crap in a book.
pjcamp
Then there’s this guy:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Robert_Sungenis
Who recently had himself a conference:
http://www.catholicintl.com/galileowaswrong/index.html
full of experts and everything.
Tom Levenson
@El Cid:
My life, summarized and disposed of.
I can just get to drinking now, can’t I?
Sly
@Sock Puppet of the Great Satan:
I think Palin’s criticism of fruit fly research and a call to use the money for more important research, like cognitive disorders / autism, trumps Jindal’s “Gee willickers, studying volcanoes sure is stoopid” goofball shit.
Hint: Scientists study fruit flies to find out more about cognitive disorders… especially autism. It has lead to major breakthroughs in identifying genetic risk factors for ASD.
sherifffruitfly
Eh, who cares. America and its people have decided that stupidity is really what they want – from parents, to teachers, to the rest of the population, stupidity is the thing Americans will fight hardest to maintain.
If you want something other than stupidity, China would seem to be an ok place to go – if you can put up with them talking to you with exaggerated slowness because you’re so stupid compared to them:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/education/07education.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=general
Xecky Gilchrist
Do they let you propose cuts to two dumb wars that cost 1,000,000 times what the video game research did?
Ash Can
Question, because I honestly don’t know, and am too tired to look this up myself: Can the House Republicans unilaterally cut NSF funding? Or is it just the possibility of them using it as a bargaining chip that makes their ignorance dangerous? Or both?
freelancer
@Jewish Steel:
Wow, but you could have just as easily typed TL;DR.
OMG, as an empirically based, reasoned atheist, I take offense on behalf of all atheists and believers in modern Cosmology for Levenson saying that it’s “Obviously not on.”
Fuck you, link me!
Dr. Drang
Shocking that they’re not going after ONR or the other military research offices, innit?
Dollared
It is so cool that 400 years after Galileo, we can still have this culture that simultaneously wraps millions of lives around the parables of lives lived (or not lived) and miracles performed (or not performed) 2000-6000 years ago, while utterly dependent on science for all daily activities.
Yet people who couldn’t get out of bed in the morning without relativity and quantum physics (IC’s in the alarm clock, for example), can deny that evolution occurs or that it is possible to measure the earth’s average temperature accurately.
Fucking magnets, you know?
thomas Levenson
@freelancer: And I thought you’d never ask ; )
The missing link would be Einstein in Berlin.
Suffern ACE
@Sly: I agree with Sarah on this one. I think humans should be involved more directly in the early phases of research, especially highly speculative research. Humans are relatively easy to produce, we have too many of them, and it just doesn’t make sense that mice and fruit flies have any connection to human beings.
WyldPirate
Damn, Tom. You said the word William Proxmire.
I remember back when I was an undergrad and that old gasbag railing about some researchers investigating the “anal architecture of a fruit fly”. I think that was around the time I had just taken a course in classical genetics and then molecular genetics.
A couple of years later was when Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard was really on a role with all of her ground-breaking work in the molecular regulation of development in–among other things–the anal architecture of the fruit fly.
She won the Nobel Prize in 1995 for the genetic control of embryonic development with Eric Wieschaus and Edward B. Lewis.
Good gravy those troglodyte Republicans returning to power is a scary thought.
ETA: By this time, though, Karl Popper had really taken hold in science and sort of shut old codgers like the Germans Einstein had to deal with up (though Einsteins work was theoretical rather than experimental)
thomas Levenson
@WyldPirate: Agreed, but FTR, Proxmire was a Democrat.
Yes, I hang my head in shame.
The moral: grandstanding asshattery may be a GOP speciality these days, but it is not, nor ever has been, a tendency unique to one party.
And on that cheery note, good night, all.
freelancer
@thomas Levenson:
No Kindle? What are you? A Luddite?
WyldPirate
@Sly:
That could be useful as it could reveal clues into Palin’s obvious cognitive deficits.
freelancer
@Dollared:
This. I want to make every person who thinks Biblically, live Biblically. But you go and smash your youngest brother’s HDTV and his iPod, and snap his laptop over your knee and it’s all “You’re an asshole!” or “You owe me money!” or “I should stone you!”.
I mean, where do they get the nerve?
WyldPirate
@thomas Levenson:
Yep, I know Proxmire was a Dem. Hell, I was a Republican back then, too. I was referring to the current generation of Republican troglodytes like Cantor and company.
You’re right in that stupid doesn’t respect political party affiliations (or any others for that matter).
Brain Hertz
Actually, I’m going to disagree with you on this point. Of course it is. Why else would he being doing this? It makes no sense whatsoever from an actual cost saving point of view (eliminating the entire NSF budget would reduce federal expenditures by, what, 0.2%?).
The reason they’re going after science funding is because they’re searching around for an “enemy”, an “other” that can be held up as an example of where all of the budget problems come from. It doesn’t make sense, but facts aren’t important.
Starting out by inviting people to search through lists of grants to “scrutinize” (based on what understanding of the science involved?) the “usefulness” of the research sounds like pretty direct intimidation to me. It’s not like they’re really looking for an honest, fact-based analysis here – they’re looking for targets to be subjected to ill-informed scorn.
Watch out. This can’t end well…
Martin
If the NSF would only fund studies of ‘sound established nautical engineering practices of the Biblical era’, I’m sure a deal could be worked out.
Have so-called scientists ever bothered to figure how many cubits long a Tyrannosaurus is? No. We’re too busy trying to stop global warming from flooding our cities. Hey you stupid fucking scientists! If God is going to flood our cities, he’s going to fucking tell us and get us to build arks that will hold our SUVs, two by two! Go visit a fucking museum and learn something!
thomas Levenson
@freelancer: So not quite good night.
No, I’m not the problem here. Take it up with Bantam. Why they won’t/haven’t Kindle-ized is a mystery — but my next publisher (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) dropped the ball on Kindle publishing my next book (Newton and the Counterfeiter). You can get it electronically now, but you couldn’t for weeks/months after dead tree publication.
Feh.
But I’m glad you’re interested….;)
And now goodnight for real.
Brain Hertz
@ Dollared #20
this. Also.
Dennis G.
Well said. Thanks.
This is something to keep an eye on. Cantor is one of the biggest corruptionists in Congress. Anything he does always bears extra scrutiny.
El Cid
@Tom Levenson: Books is okay if they’s got the right stuff in ’em. Things that people care about, like famous battles of the Civil War, or NFL football legends, or how God wrote the Constushun.
Not the stuff you write about bugs and museums or whatever the hell it is.
stickler
I am going to comment on this without even glancing at the other comments. Very un-scientific, but I teach history, and my colleagues keep telling me we’re in the Humanities, not the Social Sciences, so I can –tonight, at least– avoid things like emprical observation and data sets.
If the Republican majority insists on this kind of anti-knowledge program for the next two years (and add in a dollop of anti-woman and anti-brownpeople grandstanding), then maybe the hope of the 2008 election will come closer to fruition: a politics that helps the common man. Not Wall Street.
Shorter: Obama could be Truman 1948 if the GOP follows Cantor’s lead.
Caveat to Shorter: Truman then got us into (talk amongst yourselves) Korea and screwed his future. But still … 8 years is pretty much what we expect from Presidents.
frosty
@El Cid: Are there any famous battles of the Civil War that the Confederates lost? ‘Cause I ain’t read any in the books that’re on my shelf.
curious
@cmorenc: it’s incredibly sad how little concern this current batch of elected republicans has for the future, and how little value is given to building a national intellectual or physical infrastructure. no science, no art, no roads? this vision of an ideal world will never make sense to me.
Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
Having said that, the research a friend of mine was doing getting fruit flies drunk and stoned was ripe for comedy, albeit important (if only for showing stoned fruit flies get the munchies, and drunk fruit flies get laid more.)
Wait until Palin finds out what they’re calling the fruit fly genes though….
trizzlor
It’s really amazing to watch this flunky recite some lines about the historic advances made possible by the NSF and then propose dismantling it all in one breath. The one area that the US had continued to be a strong leader in was using federal grants to entice international talent to come here and generate high-risk/high-reward research projects that would be spun-off into the private sector for the benefit of the everyone. Now the GOP wants to slash this as well.
And their constituency is equally ignorant; from the YouTube comments: “Perhaps a review board should be set up to screen alll funding requests , if not set up already” and “As far as I know, the entire NSF is unconstitutional.”
… I’m speechless.
bjacques
@trizzlor39: YouTube is unconstitutional!
During the Bush administration’s attempts to shut down any research or even real discussion on global climate change, I was reminded of one Trofim Denisovitch Lysenko, a suitable alternative for anyone uncomfortable with going Godwin when talking about science. Soviet agriculture sat under Lysenko’s brown thumb for *thirty years.*
And I think that’s worth a tag, as in “T.D. Lysenko Chair of Agronomy” (or maybe Lysenko’s Green Thumb) whenever something like this comes up, and especially if–JHVH-1 help us–the GOP take the Senate and/or the White House in 2012.
mclaren
Bruce Sterling wrote the definite article on this stuff: “Suicide by Pseudoscience,” Wired magazine, February 2004.
Tragically, Obama is also guilty of this kind of behavior. See “We’re waiting, Mr. President,” New Scientist, 2010.
New Scientist, 2010, op. cit.
Jewish Steel
@freelancer:
Late to reply but you miss my tone: I make a few little jokes here.
Perhaps the, uh, I’ll say it, shrill tone the site has taken on recently has deafened you to my subtle ways.
THE
Einstein Memorial Washington DC
Thank you America, for giving him a safe haven to hide from the Nazis,
and a place to live out the rest of his life in peace.
Einstein first arrived in the USA on October 16, 1933
He became a citizen of the United States, seven years later, on October 1, 1940.
Craig Pennington
Like Brain [email protected], I’m also going to disagree. Attorney General of Virginia Ken Cuccinelli is using his civil authority to go on a fishing expedition through UVA’s records as part of an obviously politically motivated “fraud” investigation against Michael Mann. This is very much a direct threat to Mann and an indirect threat to current and future scientists who might come to politically incorrect conclusions.
The only distinction between this and your 1920s era examples, as you noted, is that this abuse of civil authority to harass politically incorrect science is not being done on ethnic grounds.
LGRooney
@Brain Hertz:
And, given the complexity of the research and the need to have a deep understanding of the science involved, most people won’t be able to grasp that any given research can lead in surprisingly useful directions. IOW, it’s an easy target to sound bite and provides good short-term benefits for the politicians if one knows the long, long history of anti-intellectualism among the powerful.
matoko_chan
@Levenson
wallah, conservatism has always been at war with science….but now smart people are the enemy too….they are elitist on intelligence.
but there are not very many of us, so it didnt actually matter before.
half the population is within one std of the mean of IQ.
the reason it matters now is the demographic timer, and Salam-Douthat stratification on cognitive ability.
94% of scientists are not-republicans.
i suspect over the next decade we are going to see scientific evidence of an emergent between group IQ gap correlated with political affiliation.
matoko_chan
harbingers of Doom.
the conservative elites know this stuff and it scares the piss out of them.
but just like 50 years of racebaiting has made it impossible to turn off embedded racism in the base, 50 years of IQbaiting has made it impossible to turn off anti-intellectualism.
Conservatism: Selection for Stupid.
joe from Lowell
Is this story about Einstein really true?
By the end of 1920, there were about 3000 Nazi Party members in all of Germany, and they were veterans and street fighters, not university professors.
Would his audience in 1920 have known what the swastika meant?
Svensker
Googled. Impressed.
Tom Levenson
@Svensker: Thanks!
@joe from Lowell: Short answer: yes.
Slightly longer — the Nazis were one of many ultra nationalist fringe groups of that period. Many/most drew on Volkisch and anti-Semitic strains that had appeared in Germany in more-or-less modern forms since well before the war. The swastika was a common symbol in that world, and Einstein’s German audience would have known very well what it meant.
HL_guy
Here’s what I sent to Cantor:
Grant number: NSF01-234987
This grant, entitled “Exploratory Research in Empire Building in the Middle East” appears to provide ongoing support, in the form of annually renewable grants of between 60-160 billion dollars, for some sort of experiment in nation-building occurring outside our own country. My understanding is that this experiment has been going on for 10 years now, and the experimental subjects and the region generally are neither more stable nor more democratic than they were when this program began 10 years ago. Never mind that the experimental design appears unsound (2 replicates? Really? Come on), and human subjects protocols appear to have been disregarded…
1 trillion dollars is 100X the entire NSF research budget- imagine what we could with that extra money. We could have located the celestrial position of the Creator, carbon dated Adam’s skull to it’s proper age of ~6000 years, as well as found Noah’s Ark, and every splinter of Jesus’ True Cross.
Rick Massimo
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am.
They aren’t saying “We know where the suspect research is.”
They aren’t even saying “Tell us, based on your firsthand knowledge of the subject matter, where the suspect research is.”
They’re saying “do an Internet search on stuff and tell us what sounds weird.”
Fucking hell.
Judas Escargot
Mob versus Science. That always ends well.
So who wants to set up the similar website tracking all the faith-based government programs and grants to religious organizations?
I’m sure Mr. Cantor will be eager to cut wasteful spending there, too.
henry
Famed conservative columnist Phyllis Schlafly performed this trick of scanning for scary words. There was a teachers conference in the 70’s which she suspected of encouraging liberal school concepts. She pulled out the titles of a few workshops and held them up as evidence of their crimes. One of them I remembered was “Mentor relationships among professional women.”
That left me to wonder. Did she think that “mentor relationship” was a code word for lesbianism, or did she think that “professional women” would have to be prostitutes? Both?
redoubt
@henry: His sister is a thespian and his brother is a practicing homo sapien.
Early-to-mid 1950s, also the time when scientists were “eggheads” (and liberals were “comsymp”). Until Sputnik.
Ian Preston
I guess they’re not aware that “game” is a term of art for any behavioural context involving strategic interaction. If they do that search they’ll find all sorts of applications to economics, political science, biology and so on. If you want to know how individuals actually behave in such contexts you are torn between looking at actual situations where outcomes matter but the rules of the game aren’t transparent and experimental situations where the rules are clearcut but it’s hard to make participants really care. Sports are a case where rules are relatively well-known and outcomes matter to the players and can therefore offer unusual insight into how people resolve strategic issues, how they learn in strategic situations and so on. I’ve perpetrated such research myself.
Why does “success” head their list, by the way? What is frivolous about researching that?
slag
A liberal is a conservative who was mugged by Relativity.
Shell Goddamnit
@HL_guy:
That is VERY good. Nice work HL_guy!
Villago Delenda Est
@Suffern ACE:
May I suggest that Palin volunteer her spawn for that research? After all, it’s not like they’re doing anything productive.