I was reading Merchants of Doubt and came across this passage: “Seitz, like his mentor Eugene Wigner (a Hungarian refugee) was ardently anti-Communist. (Wigner in later years lent his support to Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, eventually feeling that any enemy of Communism was his friend.)”
Wow. I’d only known Wigner as a famous theoretical physicist (not that I had any idea what he actually did in that area) and as the author of the classic article, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.”
According to Wikipedia, Wigner not only supported the Moonies, he also was “credited as a member of the advisory board for the Western Goals Foundation, a private domestic intelligence agency created in the US in 1979 to “fill the critical gap caused by the crippling of the FBI, the disabling of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the destruction of crucial government files.”
Wow.
In the grand scheme of things, this is no big deal. Lots of mid-twentieth-century scientists, from Oppenheimer and Haldane on down, had Communist sympathies, Ronald Fisher had a soft spot for Nazis, and Max Planck signed the notorious Manifesto of the Ninety-Three German Intellectuals.
Scientists are just people, and people have a range of political beliefs, including some on the far extremes. So it’s no surprise that if you look into the actions and writings of a bunch of scientists, or a bunch of physicists, or a bunch of Nobel prizewinning physicists, or whatever, you’ll get some wackos. I’d just never known about Wigner, that’s all. My generic image of a mid-twentieth-century physicist is someone like Enrico Fermi, who I don’t think would’ve endorsed the Unification Church in a million years. But who knows? Maybe I’m wrong about that.
Actually and empirically, Wigner’s behavior outside of theoretical physics should not be surprising to people who have read this blog over the years. For example, Imre Lakatos, a perennial favorite in these pages, has a terrible, unsavory history of ratting on his friends to the communist authorities even if his philosophy of mathematics is much admired.
Turning today’s blog on its head, there are many wonderful people in this world who are totally admirable, but mathematically/statistically ignorant to a shocking degree. Worse yet, some of these people are sort of proud of their ignorance.
Paul:
Sure, but Lakatos was known to be disagreeable in his professional as well as his personal life, so it wasn’t such a shocker that he’d done these things.
This really raises a crucial issue: why is science different? Specifically, science is a progressive institution in the sense that, over the long haul and despite stubborn pockets of junk stuff, it gets better and better. Today’s physics is, almost across the board, better than that of 50 years ago, and 50 years from now wiill be better than today’s. That’s a great human achievement.
The same can’t be said for most other areas of human endeavor. Visual arts, writing, music all get more complex over time, but better? And politics shows almost no secular trend, at least for the last couple of centuries or so. The arc bends toward justice for a while and then bends away.
Someone like Wigner illustrates this dichotomy in a single life. He pushed physics forward and participated in the recurring muck of really dumb politics. Same guy, so it was structure, not agency. What is it about science that makes it different in this way? And, if we could figure that out, could we take some of it and slip it into our politics too?
In science, overall, one is rewarded for being correct. In politics, overall, one is rewarded for being popular.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” -Upton Sinclair
+1. Politics is also about the distribution of power and resources. Those in power want to keep their power at all costs.
You can use science (of a kind) to figure out how power is distributed, and to change it. (See Noam Chomsky’s work.) You can also use science to serve the ends of power. (See the Los Alamos weapons laboratory.) Science is a tool.
But the Moonies have never been popular. And even if they had been, the question would be pushed back to why there is no progressive element to popularity — no long term culling of erroneous or counterproductive political beliefs. No evidence of learning.
[moving the threading up for convenience]
The Moonies were in fact quite popular during their heyday, in a certain niche. Maybe they weren’t a household name across the country, but they had influence from a substantial number of people.
But to get the meat of the question, it’s a matter of how we cognitively divide up the world, and appealing to that can be done in many ways. Unfortunately, they’re all only loosely connected to reality, if connected at all.
Social Media is extremely clear on this, because you can see the themes in very blunt and raw form, e.g.
“That bad person is a sexual deviant”
“The outsiders are threatening your children”
“We must protect our own tribal members from attacks by other tribes”
Part of Trump’s success is, to be descriptive, he’s really really good at working these themes, and counter-strategy is a big problem for intellectuals.
“And politics shows almost no secular trend”
I’d say you’re confusing science and the subject it studies.
Physicists study elementary particles, their behaviour stays the same over time, but our knowledge of them increases over time.
Political scientists / historians study politicians, their behaviour stays the same over time, but our knowledge of them increases over time.
Robert:
Political scientists don’t just study politicians, any more than economists just study businessmen. Also, people’s behavior does not stay the same over time. Behavior depends on circumstances, and circumstances change.
It’s been a decade since I read Merchants of Doubt, but I think you are missing a point. Oreskes and Conway were wondering why prominent physicists were doubting the science regarding global warming, which is really a kind of applied physics. The answer was that they found the policy implications of anthropogenic climate change unacceptable.
But, yes, scientists are also people, and people are not all that rational. I learned the basic physics of global warming in 1971, and naively thought people would take the problem seriously. Now we have a president who thinks he can just wish it away.
John:
I have no good reason to think that Wigner believed that Sun Myung Moon was a prophet or a divine being or whatever. My guess is that he just agreed with the political goals of Moon’s organization. Which could be ok too, but also the Moonies were a cult.
As it happens, Frederick Seitz, one of the 4 physicists at focus of Merchants of Doubt (MoD), was Wigner’s student (and had been President of NAS and one of the founders of primordial climate-denial think tank George C Marshall Institute, covered in MoD).
In 2023, I was reviewing for NCSE Dave Lipsky’s award-winning book, The parrot and the Igloo-Climate and the science of denial:
https://ncse.ngo/review-parrot-and-igloo-climate-and-science-denial
and in it discovered that Seitz and another of the 4, Fred Singer, were heavily involved with Moon:
“I had known Singer had connections to Sun Myung Moon’s controversial Unification Church, but I was surprised to learn how pervasive they were or that Seitz was equally involved. Lipsky writes:
‘But Frederick Seitz served on the advisory board of eight Moon conventions. He’s right there in the program: as chairman, vice-chairman. And S. Fred Singer — who would sacrifice a lot for a good pre-paid air ticket — hit up ten church conferences. As vice chairman, as speaker. It remains among the enduring Reverend Moon achievements. Matchmaking: bringing the two men together. The first time the two denial grandfathers appeared side-by-side in a magazine story. Nature reported the Freds as “luminaries of the organizing committee at the 1983 event. That’s the start for these two names that would enter history together.” (p. 268)'”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Parrot_and_the_Igloo
https://www.theparrotandtheigloo.com/chapter-notes/13-who-digested-the-scientists 268 cites nature article
(Lipsky has a huge number of annotated endnotes, so published them on website, not in book itself
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Seitz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Singer
Being anti-Communist was not an extreme view. This is not comparable to those supporting Communism.
Roger:
Being anti-Communist was not extreme at all; it was the mainstream view. What was extreme was supporting the Moonies.
“What was extreme was supporting the Moonies.”
Well, not really, actually. In both the US and Japan, the right wing was enamoured of the Moonies from the 1950s or so, for the reason mentioned above: their right-wing views.
In the US, the moonies are ancient history, but they’re still problematic in Japan.
Interestinly, the Moonies are and were an explicitly anti-Japanese organization (it’s in their founding documents, which got released recently due to a trial of their leader in Korea). Their modus operandi in Japan has been to find unhappy folks*, prey on them, and move the money extracted back to South Korea. In addition, they have sleazed their way into the LDP by supporting the local election efforts of (i.e. campaigning for) LDP candidates and then persuading the successful of those candidates to hire Unification Church moles as their assistants. (The Unification Church was brought to Japan by Shinzo Abe’s grandfather, and Abe himself made a video praising the church as recently as 2012. It got him assassinated.)
Japan has largely figured out how obnoxious said church is and has revoked its status as a religious organization. But most of the LDP politicians who were in bed with said church still hold their seats and I’ve not heard of any of said moles being outed, so presumably some are still there.
*: Shibuya Station (on the Yamanote Line) was a mecca/epicenter for religious crazies of various forms in the years preceding the Aum Shinrikyou sarin attack on the Tokyo subways. I lived just outside Shibuya 1986-1990. One day, I hadn’t slept and had to do laundry at the local coin laundry. I was exhausted and irritated. I was attacked by one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen, trying to sell me on some religious group. I managed to keep my wits (and sense of humor) about me, and shooed her away. But, seriously, this is how religious oranizations recruit: they find people who are unhappy and provide what seems to be a support context. And then extract their money.
Prior to the sarin attack, one of the weekly news rags figured out that Aum Shinrikyou was problematic and went after them, reporting agressively on their weirdness and danger. The academic religious studies folks took umbrage with this reporting, arguing that Aum Shinrikyou was just an ordinary legitimate religion. Oops.
I’m not sure how “ancient history” the moonies are in the US. The Washington Times is still going strong and seems to be pretty influential.