Nerds vs. The Empire

Charles C.W. Cooke is a staff writer for National Review. One of his specialties is penning long, scornful rants against various types of effete upper-class liberals who annoy him (quite a trick for a man who uses two middle initials!). In December 2013 we were treated to a highly entertaining broadside about “Pajama Boy,” a character in an advertisement for Obamacare. Now, Cooke has given us an even longer screed about nerd culture. Some excerpts:

[An] extraordinarily puffed-up “nerd” culture...has of late started to bloom across the United States… 

[Nerds share] the belief that one can discover all of the secrets of human experience through differential equations… 

[The nerds want you to know that they are not] southern, politically conservative, culturally traditional, religious in some sense, patriotic, driven by principle rather than the pivot tables of Microsoft Excel, and in any way attached to the past... 

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. 

Now, we are to be liberated by the microchip and the Large Hadron Collider, and we are to have our progress assured by ostensibly disinterested analysts. I would recommend that we not fall for it. Our technology may be sparkling and our scientists may be the best in the world, but our politics are as they ever were.

Cooke reminds me a little bit of Bishop Berkeley, the 18^th century philosopher who argued that we can’t prove that there is any extant reality, and that we live in a world of pure ideas. The “nerds” Cooke despises are like writer Samuel Johnson, who responded to Berkeley’s argument by kicking a rock and shouting: “I refute it thus!”

In a cruder manner than Berkeley, Cooke is standing up for the notion that a large enough group of like-minded people can create their own reality. This notion was put forth explicitly in 2004 by Karl Rove, who declared: “We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

Eight years later, Rove got to test the strength of the reality his empire had created, in one of the great epistemological clashes of modern history. In the weeks leading up to the 2012 election, election forecaster Nate Silver – whom Cooke identifies as one of the chief “nerds” – had been predicting a solid Obama victory. Legions of conservative writers had lined up to attack Silver, pooh-pooh his methodology, and predict a win for Romney. As the results rolled in, the numbers were eerily close to Silver’s predictions. Karl Rove, standing by on Fox News, was the last holdout, refusing to believe the numbers, declaring stubbornly that Mitt Romney still had a chance. Rove was, of course, wrong, and his on-air meltdown seemed to mark the moment when the bizarre “reality” his empire had created kicked a rock, and found itself refuted thus.

Charles C.W. Cooke is mad at Nate Silver, and mad at all the other “nerds” who cite evidence suggesting that global warming is real and dangerous, that renewable energy is feasible, etc. He does not hold forth on whether the nerds should stop telling us that evolution is real, that inflation is low, etc., but these are all issues on which Cooke’s co-tribalists have attacked the scientific consensus in recent years. Nate Silver may have won a battle against anti-nerd-ism, but the war continues, with the “empire” retreating to ground where the evidence is not quite as overwhelming as an election result. Wherever there is a sliver of doubt, a thin band of standard error, the “empire” of Cooke and Rove makes its stand, disavowing the inconvenient results of science and flinging high-school insults at the effete intellectuals who report those results.

(For a less polite but more trenchant take on the Right's war on reality, see this 2008 piece by John Derbyshire.)

Meanwhile, Cooke’s stand against “nerd culture” is the most recent tug from a very old undercurrent of anti-intellectualism in American society. That attitude continues to hold our country back. STEM education has become an ever more important ticket to success in life, and a skills gap has probably pushed apart the upper and lower middle classes since 1980, but America still lags in teaching its kids to do math. National Review writers throwing casual insults at differential equations, Big Data, and the Large Hadron Collider are not going to kill America’s middle class, of course, but they’re not exactly helping the situation.

The popular “nerd culture” against which Cooke vents his scorn is goofy and superficial, and certainly no substitute for STEM education. It’s pop culture. But its basic message – that it’s cool to think and study evidence and figure things out – is one that America needs to hear. Cooke and the empire he serves are losing their battle against the advancing nerds, but they’re doing collateral damage as they retreat.