Since 2006 he has hosted the educational science television show NOVA scienceNOW on PBS, and has been a frequent guest on The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Real Time with Bill Maher, and Jeopardy!. It was announced yesterday he will be hosting a new sequel to Carl Sagan's Cosmos: A Personal Voyage TV series.
In case you weren't sure, based on all of this background ... the dude is pretty damn intelligent. And busy. What you might not have been able to ascertain is that the astrophysicist is personable, witty, and anything but shy. He is also anything but non-controversial; he has argued intelligent design (which credits complex, yet-to-be-understood phenomena in nature to a higher intelligence) thwarts the advance of scientific knowledge. An agnostic, he has written and broadcast extensively about his views of religion, spirituality and the spirituality of science itself.
Additionally, as director of the Hayden Planetarium, Tyson bucked traditional thinking to keep Pluto from being referred to as the ninth planet in exhibits at the center, explaining he wanted to look at commonalities between objects, grouping the terrestrial planets together, the gas giants together, and Pluto with like objects and to get away from simply counting the planets. He has stated on several TV appearances, including on The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, and BBC Horizon, that this decision resulted in large amounts of hate mail, much of it from children.I'm followed (off and on, not really consistently) Tyson's recent successes. This basically means I've caught him on TV a few times, read an interview or two, and even perused his website on occasion (Earth to Neil: your website has a few tabs in need of updating!). His commentary on various scientific (and non-scientific) topics captures and energizes me. This was reinforced on last night's episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, in what turned out to be (IMHO) one of the best, most engaging episodes of the show ever.
Some background: Tyson was part of Maher's panel, which also included Joan Walsh (Editor-at-Large of Salon.com) and film producer Stephen K. Bannon (whose latest film is the Sarah Palin documentary The Undefeated). Chef Anthony Bourdain, host of the Travel Channel’s Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, also joined the trio (and Maher) midway through the program.
Several things that marvel me about the show include: (1) Maher's guests run the gamut - while some are what might be considered "traditional" late-night talk show guests, others are definitely not your run-of-the-mill celebrities; and (2) while Maher is definitely on the liberal side of the political aisle, his guests are all over the place. For example: last night, Walsh opined from the liberal viewpoint, Bannon supported the Tea Party platform, Bourdian discussed the idea of food as general political viewpoints (stating he had dined with a number of worldly individuals from multiple political viewpoints, and was constantly amazed that they could share food while often having nothing in common politically), and Tyson pushed not so much a political ideology but a pragmatic one based on science and statistics.
It was Tyson's comments on two specific topics last night that truly grabbed my attention. One of his observations (not a huge surprise, to be honest) was that the US Congress is comprised of a lot of attorneys, who are used to being polished speakers in trials and through debate skills, but don't always understand the details of what they are selling:
You know what my concern is about Congress? I checked these numbers: 57 percent of the Senate, 38 percent of the House cite "law" as their profession. And, when you look at law, law … doesn't go to what's right, it goes to who argues best. And there's this urge, the entire profession is founded on who the best arguers are. [Each side arguing, with the truth somehow emerging is] the premise; however, the practice, which, for example, is bred in debating teams, for example, where you know the subject, but you don't know which side you're going to be put on to argue. And so the act of arguing, and not agreeing, seems to be fundamental to that profession, and Congress is half that profession.
I realized this when I was 12; I said, "I wonder what profession all these Senators and Congressmen were." Law, law, law, law, businessman, law, law. And I said, "There's no scientists? Where are the engineers? Where's the rest of life represented?" And so when I look at the conflicts, the argumentative conflicts, I just sit back and say, ya know, "Can I buy an engineer, please? Or scientist?" Put somebody … a businessman … a business person, who knows how to make a hard but significant financial decision because at the end of the day they've got to make their books work. I'm screaming, I'm sorry.
I wasn't sure if I should be proud or depressed about this statement. On one hand, I agree, there should be much more diversification in terms of who represents the interests of the people - and this goes across the board: professional background, financial status, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, the works. On the other hand ... hey, I am a debate teacher, and Tyson's statement about the premise of the legal profession is so very true, and what I teach my students: you need to be able to argue both sides of a topic, because you never know which side you will be in in a specific round.
The second comment he made regarded the recent Congressional/Presidential debt battle, which basically boiled down to "taxes do/don't need to be raised" because "more revenue is/ins't needed" and "spending does/doesn't need to be decreased." (OK, it was a bit more complex than this, but you get the gist.) Anyway, the topic of TARP/stimulus money was (naturally) part of the discussion, and Tyson - bringing the conversation into the science arena - noted that the $850 billion (before interest) TARP bank bailout money "is greater than the entire 50-year running budget of NASA." He then added the following:
"It's not that you don't have enough money, it's that the distribution of the money that you're spending is warped in some way that you are removing the only thing that gives people something to dream about tomorrow."
Yes, he was talking about NASA, but the logic can be equally applied to almost all areas of government spending. And this blows me away. Because in the rhetoric spewed from all sides of the political landscape recently, I don't recall anyone stating so succinctly the obvious. I heard tons of argumentation about the need for more revenue (specifically, raising taxes on the rich and cutting tax loopholes pertaining to corporations). I heard an equal number of claims that we needed to cut spending instead of increasing the tax base. But I honestly cannot recall anyone stating what Tyson did during the entire debate: that it's not so much the need for more income, or the reduction of current spending (although, to be honest, both are probably needed), but how we, as a nation, spend what we spend, in terms of the future, not the "now."
Let's be honest: despite the financial mess we are in, does anyone truly believe the US won't send financial aid to the Middle East, Japan, Mexico, Europe? Does anyone doubt whether we will still assist people across the world impacted by natural disaster? Please. The answer is obvious - we will always spend overseas, because it's what we do best ... even when we are so far in debt, it's refuckingdiculous.
Let's face it - government, in general, is reactive, not proactive. Tyson is a proactive thinker. That's why I love listening to him, and that's why, unless there is a major paradigm shift in logic on Capitol Hill, the "dreaming about tomorrow" won't be any sort of reality.
No comments:
Post a Comment