Open letter to the Scientific American Editorial Board
To the Editors of Scientific American
Your chief editor's comments on the election, see below, were beneath contempt. Aside from their being unhinged and deeply unreasonable, they also demonstrated that she has zero political judgement.
More generally, when the scientific community is trying to forge both scientific consensus and then mobilize social and political consensus for climate change policies which will certainly be both painful and unequal in their impacts, this kind of self-righteous virtue signalling is just appalling. Does she not realize that Democrats abusing ordinary people in the fly-over states as ‘deplorable’ or ‘garbage’ or ‘Nazis’ is precisely WHY Trump got the landslide. Every high-profile Laura Helmuth was worth 10,000 votes for Trump.
And frankly, this time round he would have got my vote. When scientists claim not to understand the biological definition of ‘woman’ but call any questions about climate change ‘fascistic’, then any claim to special knowledge and expertise becomes as useful as a trumpet in a Quaker meeting.
People like LH have guaranteed that attitudes towards sustainability break down along a left/right cleavage. It’s now almost impossible to separate climate change from say the issue of abortion, or Israel/Gaza. And yet, you’re the ones who claim to need a massive consensual majority to effect ‘transformative change’. It’s not only offensive, but stupid. It is so stupid that its almost tempting to check her qualifications.
History, theology, philosophy and politics are a little outside her bailiwick, however Dr Helmuth would be well advised to be a little more circumspect with regard to the ‘moral arc of the universe’. Clearly such an ‘arc’ would imply some kind of Natural Law/Telos and probably the existence of the very God in whom those ‘racist/sexist /fascist’ Midwesterners have so much faith. This doesn’t square with her own obnoxious blend of scientific positivism and moral relativism.
But it is also true that iconoclastic rationalists convinced about their capacity to create an earthly heaven have invariably caused more suffering and death than pretty well anyone else in history. Laura is probably convinced that America won’t make progress until the last Republican president has been strangled with the guts of the last pro-life activist, but we have been here – many times. Eric Voegelin quipped that we shouldn’t attempt to ‘immanentize the eschaton’. Helmuth is the reason why this has always been such a bad idea.
This person is clearly convinced that the means justify the ends – and that the ‘ends’ are obvious to any sane/normal person, and that any objection is indicative of insanity/abnormality – and so of a category of person who doesn’t have any automatic right to respect. It’s a short step from this kind of self-righteous contempt to the gulag.
If you don’t sanction her and preferably fire her, then you’re basically just as bad - and a plague on the lot of you. You seem basically to be asking for universities to be defunded.
Are you asking for universities to be defunded?
Yours sincerely
Dr Stephen Quilley
Associate Professor
University of Waterloo
(Personal Capacity)
