Freeman Dyson Optimistic Rebel - Road to the Middle Class

PHYSICIST Freeman Dyson makes a cameo appearance in Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Dawkins takes him to task for accepting an award from the pro-Christian Templeton Foundation. Dawkins makes it clear that organizations like the Templeton Foundation should be named and shamed. They should not be allowed to appropriate the authority of an eminent physicist.

Now Freeman Dyson has a book out, The Scientist as Rebel, and he talks to Benny Peiser at TCSDaily.

Asked about the growing pressure on scientists to follow the “scientific consensus,” he replies

Certainly the growing rigidity of scientific organizations is a real and serious problem. I like to remind young scientists of examples in the recent past when people without paper qualifications made great contributions.

For instance there’s the mule-driver who ended up as astronomer and second-in-command to Edwin Hubble at the Mount Wilson Observatory.

But don’t worry about the future, Dyson advises.

Amateurs and small companies will have a growing role in the future of science. This will compensate for the increasing bureaucratization of the big organizations. Bright young people will start their own companies and do their own science.

Then he talks about a new development in genetic science, a gene sequence called Human Accelerated Region 1.

In “the genomes of mouse, rat, chicken and chimpanzee” it is strictly preserved. But in the human genome it “appears grossly modified with eighteen mutations.” What is going on here?

And get this. He attributes the current gloom-and-doom mood to the British class system. No, not the division between the bosses and the workers. We are talking about the class war in the middle class!

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status. As a child of the academic middle class, I learned to look on the commercial middle class with loathing and contempt. Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher, which was also the revenge of the commercial middle class. The academics lost their power and prestige and the business people took over. The academics never forgave Thatcher and have been gloomy ever since.

Yes. Margaret Thatcher, grocer’s daughter. There must be some mistake!

And the worst of it is that the British welfare state, the only child of the academic middle class, is self-destructing as we speak.

Go on. Read the whole thing!

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Francis Fukuyama, Trust

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[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

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Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

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Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

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Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

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Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

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