{"id":332652,"date":"2024-06-12T10:28:23","date_gmt":"2024-06-12T08:28:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=332652"},"modified":"2024-06-12T10:28:25","modified_gmt":"2024-06-12T08:28:25","slug":"vaclav-smil-on-the-two-cultures-and-our-fully-post-factual-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=332652","title":{"rendered":"Vaclav Smil On The Two Cultures And Our \u201cFully Post-Factual World\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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From Robert Bryce\u2019s Substack<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Robert Bryce<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My emails with Smil on C.P. Snow\u2019s 1959 essay, scientific illiteracy and innumeracy. Plus: Kotkin, Gurri, and Teixeira on the elites vs. the “normies”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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C.P. Snow in 1977. Photo:\u00a0Bern Schwartz, National Portrait Gallery<\/a>.<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In 1959, British novelist and physical chemist C.P. Snow gave a now-famous lecture called \u201cThe Two Cultures<\/a>.\u201d Snow argued that there was a growing disconnect between the culture of the sciences and the culture of the humanities and that bridging that gap was critical to understanding and addressing the world\u2019s problems. Snow declared,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I believe the intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups… Literary intellectuals at one pole \u2013 at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Snow then underscored the general public\u2019s lack of understanding of energy. As Snow put it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics<\/a>. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare<\/a>\u2019s?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, while most moderately cultured people will be familiar with the Bard\u2019s A Comedy of Errors<\/em> or The Merchant of Venice<\/em>, the three laws of thermodynamics are considered by most people to be the domain of nerds and wonks. Snow cheekily described them: \u201cYou can\u2019t win. You can\u2019t break even. And you can\u2019t quit the game<\/a>.\u201d(This Khan Academy explanation<\/a> is a good primer.) For most people, fundamental physics seems too troublesome to learn. This apathy towards physics is matched, or possibly exceeded, by the lack of interest in mathematics. Indeed, innumeracy<\/a> is rampant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Snow\u2019s seminal lecture matters today because the divides in our culture are widening. Yes, there\u2019s a divide in the sciences. But that divide doesn\u2019t explain why so many policymakers are being bamboozled by the alt-energy mirage that\u2019s being promoted by the NGO-corporate-industrial-climate complex<\/a> and their myriad allies in media and academia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have written about scientific illiteracy and innumeracy several times, including in my 2010 book, Power Hungry: The Myths of \u201cGreen\u201d Energy And the Real Fuels of The Future<\/a><\/em>. In that book, I cited my 2007 interview with Vaclav Smil<\/a> about energy issues. I asked the Canadian author and polymath why Americans are so easily bamboozled by the rhetoric about alternative energy. He responded:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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There has never been such a depth of scientific illiteracy and basic innumeracy as we see today.<\/strong><\/em> Without any physical, chemical, and biological fundamentals, and with equally poor understanding of basic economic forces, it is no wonder that people will believe anything. (Emphasis added.)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

That 17-year-old interview comes to mind because last week, I published \u201cVaclav Smil Calls Bullshit On Net Zero<\/a>.\u201d That piece, which details Smil\u2019s debunking of the net-zero silliness that is being flogged by the Biden administration, nearly two dozen states, and about 100 cities, has been among the most popular ones I\u2019ve written here on Substack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After it was published, I emailed Smil a link to the piece. He immediately replied with a terse note: \u201cThanks, none of this really matters, this is a fully post-factual world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I emailed Smil back with these questions: To what do you attribute this post-factualism? Is it scientific illiteracy and innumeracy? Tribalism? Purposeful ignorance? I also asked about Snow\u2019s 1959 lecture. He replied:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Yes, even your typical expert is near-utterly ignorant of basics (be they physics, chemistry, or biology) and very few people have actually internalized the difference between million and billion: hard to say which is worse, innumeracy probably.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

He then cited Snow\u2019s lecture:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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All of this goes far, far beyond any two cultures, because now, on mass-scale, we have no particular culture: how else, when people check their mobile 244 [times] a day and spend 3 hours on YouTube and TikTok watching imbecilic videos. Goebbels would be stunned to see with what universal success his slogan of repeating a lie so often it becomes new truth has taken the global root, precisely because the soil is receptive: utterly brainless mass of mobile-bound individuals devoid of any historical perspective and of any kindergarten common-sense understanding.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I didn\u2019t pose any more questions. (What\u2019s left to ask?) While I agree with Smil about the general ignorance of basic science and the prevalence of innumeracy and imbecilic videos, there is another way to think about the two cultures and how the schism in our society has deepened over the past few decades. That schism helps explain, at least in part, the continuing popularity of Donald Trump and the anti-elite populism now sweeping Europe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

America\u2019s most important cultural divide isn\u2019t about left versus right, Biden versus Trump, or Democrat versus Republican. The most worrisome divide is the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor. More specifically, it\u2019s the enormous gap between the elites who dominate media, academia, NGOs, and politics, and the working class. Nowhere is that gap more evident than in the policies that promote alt-energy and net zero.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every one of the climate policies being enacted by liberal states and the Biden administration screws the poor and the middle class, and in particular, the poor and middle-class folks who live in rural America.<\/em> You name it \u2014 EV mandates, bans on natural gas stoves and heaters, strict emission cuts on power plants, lavish tax credits for Big Wind and Big Solar, or the latest FERC rule on high-voltage transmission<\/a> \u2014 all of them are, in one way or another, regressive energy taxes that fuck the working class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many other writers are spotlighting this issue. Author and demographer Joel Kotkin has written extensively about the regressive energy policies being enacted by what he calls the \u201cclerisy,\u201d which he defines as \u201ca group that makes its living largely in quasi-public institutions<\/a>, notably universities, media, the non-profit world, and the upper bureaucracy.\u201d While Kotkin, a fellow in urban studies at California\u2019s Chapman University<\/a>, says the clerisy isn\u2019t unanimous in its politics, it \u201cgenerally favors ever-increasing central control and regulation.\u201d The most obvious place to see the climate clerisy at work is in California, where draconian decarbonization policies imposed by the administrative state are driving up housing and energy prices. The result of those regressive decisions are what California-based lawyer and civil rights activist Jennifer Hernandez has dubbed \u201cGreen Jim Crow<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last month, author and former CIA analyst Martin Gurri<\/a> published an essay in The Free Press<\/em> titled \u201cThe Revenge of the Normies<\/a>.\u201d Gurri focuses on the cultural gap between the \u201cnormies\u201d and the \u201celites.\u201d His assessment rhymes with Kotkin\u2019s take:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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On one side we find the normies<\/em>: ordinary people who defend, naively, the historic principles of democracy such as freedom of speech and assembly, the separation of powers, etc. On the other side stand the elites,<\/em> masters of the great institutions of wealth, knowledge, and power, who insist that extraordinary measures must be taken to save a depraved and self-destructive society from its own history and its own people…The normies want to get on with life. They want to work, get married, have children\u2014boring stuff. That\u2019s what normal means. The elites, for their part, wish to change everything: sex, the climate, our history, your automobile, your diet, even the straws with which you slurp your smoothie.<\/strong><\/em> (Emphasis added.)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Gurri continued, saying the normies \u201cfight back by pouring into the streets in frighteningly large numbers and electing politicians loathed by the elites, like Donald Trump in the U.S. and Javier Milei in Argentina.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last year, Ruy Teixeira, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, identified the same elites-versus-working-class dynamic in a trenchant essay titled \u201cThe Working Class Isn\u2019t Down With The Green Transition<\/a>.\u201d He explained:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Nothing defines the Democratic economic strategy more than a single-minded focus on fighting climate change \u2014 an \u201cexistential crisis\u201d as Biden, other top Democrats and a galaxy of Democratic-leaning pundits have termed it…Democratic elites and activists are very, very committed to this approach and are willing to pay high costs to make it happen.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Teixeira cited a Monmouth poll that found \u201cjust one percent of working-class (noncollege) voters in an open-ended question identify climate change as the biggest concern facing their family.\u201d And what about those EVs that Joe Biden\u2019s EPA mandated last month? Teixeira cited a Gallup poll<\/a> which found that \u201cjust 2% of working-class respondents say they currently own an electric vehicle and a mere 9% say they are \u2018seriously considering\u2019 purchasing one.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Teixeira called the gap between Democratic elites and the working class the \u201cGreat Divide.\u201d He concluded by saying, \u201cReally, it\u2019s madness. Biden needs to do more,<\/em> not less, on moving the Democratic Party away from its obsession with renewables.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s plenty more to write about the class divide over net zero, alt-energy, and the growing divide in American politics over climate policy. But if the clerisy and the elites in America want to understand what lies ahead if they continue their headlong rush to impose ever-more-regressive climate policies on voters, they only need to look at the latest elections in Europe. On Sunday, The Guardian <\/em>published an article titled: \u201cGreen party losses in EU elections raise concerns over Green Deal<\/a>.\u201d The nut of the story:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In Germany, a core Green stronghold, the party\u2019s vote share appears to have nearly halved since the last election in 2019. Exit polls suggested it fell 8.5 percentage points from 20.5% to 12%. In France, where the far right was leading and President Emmanuel Macron called snap elections, support for the Greens fell by the same amount. <\/strong><\/em>(Emphasis added.)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, the Associated Press<\/a> called the parliamentary elections in France and Germany \u201cstunning defeats to two of the bloc’s most important leaders: French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.\u201d It added that their defeat \u201ccould well have an impact on the EU’s overall climate change policies, still the most progressive across the globe.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m not predicting the outcome of the November election, but given the European elections, I won\u2019t be surprised if Trump wins. If he does, it might be called the revenge of the normies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Media Hits<\/h3>\n\n\n\n