Warning: I put on my pro-science hat here.
Thanks to a friend’s generosity, I attended the February 1, 2014 ‘Parallel Realities’ discussion at Arizona State University. This is part of an ongoing series of lectures and other events called The Origins Project: “…an exciting transdisciplinary initiative that fosters new research and dialog, partners to transform university and K-12 education, and advocates for science education and public engagement of science-related issues.”
This round featured a lively, accessible debate between physicists Lawrence Krauss, Wendy Freedman, David Gross, Maria Spiropulu, Brian Schmidt, and Frank Wilczek about our increasing understanding – and different interpretations of – fundamental physics. Dark matter. Dark energy. The Higgs boson. The farthest edges of the universe, or what we can see of it. The immense supercollider projects at CERN, and some of the new telescopes due to come online in the next decade. The perils of assuming an anthropic universe. Heady stuff. Right in my interest zone. I’m sure the debate itself is up on YouTube by now.
But no debate occurs in a vacuum, and this one coincided with some current events in a way that left me alternately wistful and furious. Remember CERN? The Large Hadron Collider? Those vast underground supercollider rings at Geneva, Switzerland? Those could have been built here in the US, in Texas. Where once Americans landed on the Moon, now we seem to be ceding that territory to China and the European Union. Our students, long coached to pass standardized tests, still come short in math, science, and reading comprehension when judged against other First World nations – and some developing countries.
What worries me most is the battle between religion and science, between belief and logic. We should not live in a country where religious fundamentalists like Paul Broun call science ‘lies from the pit of hell’ – and still manage a seat on the House Committee on Science. Along with ‘legitimate rape’ guy Todd Akin.
We seem to be the only major country on earth where scientific literacy among large swathes of the population has gone down in the last twenty years.
We’re also the only major country where equally large numbers of people think human-caused climate change isn’t happening, that evolution isn’t a proven mechanism for species change, and that the world is less than 10,000 years old.
Our greatest glory days didn’t happen in isolationist, anti-science eras, but in times of discovery and expansion.
If I have grave doubts over the sanity of my former Republican brethren, I have equal despair in the ability of progressives to properly steel themselves for the ongoing Culture Wars. To put it bluntly, they’re wimps.
Cheerios released a couple of cereal advertisements recently featuring a rather adorable biracial family. Most viewers thought the first one was sweet. Some bigoted individuals got snippy, with predictably racist and loathsome comments. The Huffington Post article about the May 2013 commercial cites negative comments about the ad: ‘disgusting’, it made viewers ‘want to throw up’, viewers made statements about Nazis and racial genocide, and some even challenged ‘that a black father would stay with his family’.
The second commercial was released for Super Bowl 2014. Perhaps intending to gently mock those adversaries, someone at liberal cable network MSNBC tweeted the following:
“Maybe the rightwing will hate it, but everyone else will go awww: the adorable new #Cheerios ad w/ biracial family.”
The internet blew up with outraged conservatives pointing out they were from, or knew, mixed-race families, and that the MSNBC tweet was an outrage aimed against all conservatives.
MSNBC’s Phil Griffin released an obsequious apology to angry conservatives, and fired the MSNBC staffer responsible for the tweet.
All while the next round of really despicable and rascist comments was building against the Cheerios ad itself, apparently from members of the same conservative groups claiming ‘victimization’ themselves.
I was not happy with MSNBC before that. I’m part of their target demographic. I stopped watching much of their programming a couple of years ago. I’d realized the network was as bad an echo chamber as Fox News, and as beholden to political correctness run amok as Fox was to shameless pandering to the far right.
Griffin and his MSNBC cohorts opted for the cowards’ option and caved to hypocritical outrage from their opponents. What they should have done was double down, show the worst tweets and screen names from both commercial launches, and point out that while not all socially-conservative Republicans and Tea Party members are racist followers of the Southern Strategy, a good many of them appear to be. And seem willing to prove it on social media.