It’s no secret we have a lot of problems in the United States. Crime, poverty, poor public health, crumbling infrastructure, protracted and arguably now-pointless wars. In the face of all this it may seem trivial to rail about something as ethereal as anti-intellectualism, but this trend is directly material to resolution of all the other aforementioned maladies.
Every time I look at President Obama, I see either President Clinton without the folksy charisma or Adlai Stevenson II, with a better smile. Either way, his capacity for considered thought, incisive explanation and balanced policy binds him to the American public in the way hot wax bound Icarus’ wings. He is a thinker and we have little tolerance for that kind of thing. We prefer action. We want “Mission Accomplished” banners and cowboy finger waging. Never mind the fact that posturing and pushiness drive a spike between us and the rest of the world.
Of course many people will insist our reputation abroad is of little consequence. To an extent that position is valid. Fat with enough lopsided trade dollars most of our international partners find their tolerances expand.
If not for the sake of being better global citizens, a renewed appreciation for deeper thought has benefits for decidedly selfish reasons. You’re reading this column because a cranky intellectual tinkerer named Edison paved the way for a technological revolution. We could list thousands of other equally plodding, ineloquent and socially awkward people who wouldn’t have made handsome portraits or formed pithy sound-bites, but who nonetheless changed our world for the better.
Why then is it that we can’t countenance demonstrably intellectual leaders. This anti-intellectualism has especially dangerous consequences when Congressional dullards try to out budget cut one another. A perennial head on the federal chopping block is NASA. I suspect this is due in larger part to the fact that most people don’t really understand what NASA does or why it might matter.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
NASA administrators own that they have a public relations gap. On the agency website they take a self-effacing dig at themselves, “One of the common complaints from NASA’s advocates is that the agency does not publicize enough of the practical benefits of what it does. It is perhaps an especially daunting task for its engineers and lends credence to the old joke, “How do you tell an introverted NASA engineer from an extroverted one? The extroverted one looks at your shoes when he’s talking.”
So what has NASA done for you lately? How about improved weather forecasting, better breast cancer screening, CAT scans and MRIs, safer highway construction, cordless power tools, scratch resistant lenses, TV satellite dishes, enhanced water purification, more nutritious baby food, better golf balls… even the venerable lubricant WD 40. Of course this is a woefully incomplete list. Despite a half century of incontrovertible good for humanity, Congress makes NASA beg for scraps. World-renown astrophysicist, Neil Degrasse Tyson, speaking on Bill Maher’s talk show, put NASA’s budget in perspective, “First let’s clarify what the NASA budget is… the bank bailout [of 2009], that sum of money is greater than the entire fifty year running budget of NASA.”
We were willing to give failed and arguably criminal bank executives the most golden of parachutes despite their avaricious ruination of the American economy, but we get a sudden spike of thrift when scientists put out their collective hand. Nowhere do we see this more acutely than the non-debate over the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the aging Hubble. At a cost of approximately $8.8 billion over 20 years, the scientific community is united in the central importance of this project. The great ironic tragedy of killing projects like JWST is that scientists, deprived of its eye into the history of our universe, will have little option other than the navel gazing anti-intellectuals so fervently criticize. If you want a better world, NASA is one of the few sure bets. Of course NASA is just chocked full of “Big Bang Theory” uber-nerds, so you’ll just have to deal with it. Live long and prosper.
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Matthew Pate, a Pine Bluff native who holds a doctoral degree in criminal justice, is a senior research fellow with the Violence Research Group at the University at Albany. He may be contacted via pate.matthew@gmail.com