There was a beginning to it.
There are lots of societies that don’t have it.
It takes very special conditions to support it.
Those social conditions are now getting harder to find.
Of course, it could end.
—Thomas Kuhn
They who are aware do not die;
They who are unaware are as dead.
—The Dhammapada
If you are a member of Jonathan Rauch’s “reality-based community,” this past month has been a rough one. First, the re-election of the premier anti-intellectual in this country to the office of the President of the United States (and most depressing of all by an actual majority of voters this time around). Second, said President-elect’s announcements of his nominees for his Cabinet—including an anti-vaxxer for the Department of Health and Human Services! Third, the CEO of ExxonMobil all but imploring our President-elect to keep the U. S. in the Paris climate accords—and this coming from a company that currently depends for nearly 100% its profits on climate change’s very cause. And fourth, but so subtle that I suspect it flew beneath every radar except NPR’s, the threat of a second Trump presidency to the H-1B visas program.
“The H-1B what?” a reader might ask. Why on earth should a threat to H-1B visas generate despondency in the reality-based community? Simple answer: because the loss of this specific visa program will actually endanger the reality-based community in this country. H-1B visas are how universities, corporations, and engineering firms hire all the highly skilled workers they need (think PhD) to fill all the research positions needed to remain economically viable and competitive. “Foreign-born workers account for about half of the doctoral-level scientists and engineers working in the U.S.” reports NPR, and the reason for this fact is simple: there are simply not enough American-born individuals entering the educational pipeline for these kinds of degrees and scientific fields.
Which means our society’s anti-intellectual streak risks undermining not only our health and physical well-being; it risks damaging the very source of our economic power and standing in the world. If a pissed-off electorate that voted for Donal Trump thinks the price of eggs and rent are too high now, I can only imagine their reaction when major companies close because they don’t have the intellectual capital to compete in the world’s marketplace anymore. As Raymundo Báez-Mendoza of the Leibniz Institute for Primate Research in Göttingen, Germany points out, “a lot of countries in Europe benefited from Brexit, in the sense of capturing really amazing scientists that were working in Britain [because in the world of science] top talent is very mobile.”
Of course, it should not come as that much of a surprise that our country cannot adequately supply its own need for highly skilled workers. Not when we idolize celebrity over the painstaking work of solving an equation. Not when we would rather doomscroll on our phones than read a book that might challenge an assumption. And perhaps most telling of all, not when the brain science clearly shows that the first five years of development are the most critical for wiring a brain that can produce such a worker and yet we pay those responsible for teaching this age SO poorly that 12.3% of them live below the poverty line here in a state with the second highest household income in the country. And where more than a third of Maryland households in this state with an early childhood teacher in them must use at least one (and frequently more!) of the social safety net programs such as Medicaid and SNAP. It is cliché that you get what you pay for, and we as a society simply do not pay to produce the kinds of brains needed to produce highly skilled workers.
Therefore, here I sit, then, a trained biologist, thinking: the CDC is reporting that only around a third of all adults in the U.S. have taken this year’s flu shot and less than 18% have received the latest COVID booster; the childhood disease, measles—one of the most deadly and declared eliminated here in the U.S. more than two decades ago—has already had 16 outbreaks so far this year; and human life expectancy—at least in this country—has actually declined for the first time in centuries. All because, as Dr. Gregory Poland of Atria Academy of Science and Medicine puts it, “as a society right now, we’re in a phase of rejecting expertise, of mistrust of any expert, whether it’s science, meteorology, medicine, government – whatever it is.”
And that causes me to contemplate what I once thought impossible: that Thomas Kuhn may have been right when he suggested that science as a method of studying and understanding the world could actually disappear—perhaps forever.
Science, of course, is the “it” in my epigram from Kuhn as the start of this essay, and the famed historian of science is reported to have said these words in an interview with Scientific American towards the end of his life in the winter of 1991. As the author of one of the single most influential books of the 20th Century, he comes across in the interview as weary of what he perceives as all the misunderstandings people have had about his ideas, and when pushed, he basically states flatly that science as an intellectual endeavor is just as much a social construct as any other such endeavor and, therefore, like any social construct, it can die.
Now I have recognized for some time that any shared sense of truth in this country was—at best—on life support. The firehose of dis- and misinformation modern digital technologies have made possible have all but ensured truth’s demise. But the idea that the one remaining arbiter of truth could be in trouble, that the one arrow left in our collective epistemological quiver could disappear…naively, that thought had never occurred to me before encountering Kuhn’s words amidst the events of the past month. Suddenly, I had gained a small, existential insight into the voices of the many African American women interviewed following the election: “Damn! Please don’t tell me I have to keep fighting yet again a battle that I should not keep losing.”
But for those of us in the sciences, fight we must. We must become the resistance to every effort of the in-coming administration to dismantle the scientific infrastructure in this country. Furthermore, we must do so anywhere and everywhere we can. In labs and research centers. In classrooms and homes. In legislatures and city halls. In movies and museums. Even in the kitchen!1 Put bluntly, all of us in the “reality-based community” must join like-minded individuals such as Hank Green of the Vlogbrothers and Scishow and do everything in our power “to make the truth go viral.”2 It won’t be an easy fight, and I openly confess that I, too, am growing weary of the constant need to battle ignorance and stupidity. But I could never look the generations of children who have come through my classroom in the eye if I didn’t say I tried. How they will judge me only time will see.
Coda
During my morning run today, I was reminded yet again of how spectacularly and especially beautiful this fall has been here in the State of Maryland. Seldom have I seen such rich colors that have lasted for as long, and there is even this one oak on my walk to school where the rays of the rising sun hit it in such a way that I can only shake my head in awe at the metaphor for God chosen by the authors of Exodus—burning bush indeed!
However, this same beauty has made me recall the opening lines from James Stokesbury’s history of World War I which I reread this past August:
The summer of 1914 was the fairest in living memory. Grass had never been greener, nor skies bluer. Europe lay rich and ripening under the warming sun, and from the Ural Mountains to the wave-beaten west coast of Ireland the cows fattened, the newborn animals played in rich fields, and lovers strolled in the country lanes….So beautiful was that summer that those who survived it invested it with a golden haze; it assumed a retrospective poignancy, as if before it, all had been beautiful, and after it, nothing ever was again. It became the summer that the world ended, and it was somehow fitting that it should therefore be the most glorious summer ever (p. 11).
For a whole lot of people—many of whom don’t yet realize it just as many didn’t in 1914—the world as they knew it ended on Nov. 5. Even science itself in this country may have ended, and what keeps me up at night about the looming battle is that while I am not yet truly elderly, I am also clearly no longer young, leaving me with a fraught and fretful question:
Who’s going to take up the mantle when I’m gone?
1For more on science in the kitchen, check out J. Kenji López-Alt’s The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015).
2To learn more about Hank Green and his on-line efforts to debunk falsehoods of all kinds, listen to the Nov. 22 episode of NPR’s On the Media.
References
Center for Disease Control (Nov. 22, 2024; latest update) Measles Cases and Outbreaks. https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html#:~:text=Why%20is%20there%20more%20measles,returning%20to%20the%20United%20States.
Elliott, R. F. (Nov. 12, 2024) Exxon Chief to Trump: Don’t Withdraw From Paris Climate Deal. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/12/business/energy-environment/exxon-mobil-baku-climate-cop29.html.
Hamilton, J. (Nov. 21, 2024) Foreign Nationals Propel U.S. Science. Visa Limits Under Trump Could Change That. NPR Morning Edition. https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2024/11/21/nx-s1-5187926/u-s-science-could-suffer-if-trump-limits-h-1b-visas-again.
Horgan, J. (May 23, 2012) What Thomas Kuhn Really Thought about Scientific “Truth.” Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/cross-check/what-thomas-kuhn-really-thought-about-scientific-truth/.
Johnson, S. (2021) Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer (New York: Riverhead Books).
Kuhn, T. (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Lora, M. (Nov. 11, 2024) Just How Underpaid Are Maryland’s Day Care and Pre-K Teachers? The Baltimore Banner. https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/education/early-childhood/maryland-early-childhood-wages-MAJNPXPOFJGHPJOFZRJ3JJ7TBY/.
Rauch, J. (2021) The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.
Stein, R. & Schmitz, R. (Nov. 27, 2024) As the Respiratory Virus Season Approaches, Where Does the Vaccination Rate Stand? NPR Morning Edition. https://www.npr.org/2024/11/27/nx-s1-5199731/as-the-respiratory-virus-season-approaches-where-does-the-vaccination-rate-stand.
Stokesbury, J. (1981) A Short History of World War I. New York: William and Morrow Company, Inc.
Stolberg, S. G. (Nov. 14, 2024) Trump Picks R.F.K. Jr. to Be Head of Health and Human Services Dept. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/14/us/politics/rfk-jr-trump-hhs.html.
Light a Candle 