Ten days ago, Laura Helmuth resigned from her position as chief editor of Scientific American. The reason was simple. As brilliantly reported by Michael Shermer, she made the following statements on the social media outlet Bluesky when early results from the U.S. Presidential elections were announced: “Every four years I remember why I left Indiana (where I grew up) and remember why I respect the people who stayed and are trying to make it less racist and sexist. The moral arc of the universe isn’t going to bend itself … Solidarity to everybody whose meanest, dumbest, most bigoted high-school classmates are celebrating early results because fuck them to the moon and back… I apologize to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of fucking fascists.”
Let’s process these statements. Laura is denouncing more than half of Americans who voted differently than she did. This is unamerican. But more importantly, instead of debating on principles to convince others or reach a better understanding of why they have different opinions, she cancels them based on their political identity. For those who cherish the plurality of ideas and open-mindedness, this is unscientific. Altogether, Laura would have been better served as chief editor of a magazine called “Unscientific Unamerican”. Those who were blocked from contributing content to Scientific American over the past 4 years, say that Laura was actively engaged in biasing the content of the magazine towards the political narrative of her intellectual tribe.
I am a practicing scientist who published regularly in Scientific American before Laura’s helm. Why am I deeply troubled by Laura’s recent statements? Because they represent a major trend in today’s journalism and academia of `virtue signaling’ that violates the principles it pretends to protect. This trend reminds me of the party slogan in George Orwell’s 1984: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength”.
The threat to our society is existential. Spreading hate through tribalism is no different than an ideological act of terrorism. In fact, adversarial nations are actively engaged in planting the seeds of self-hate in Americans through social media. The elites of academia and journalism are `useful idiots,’ willing to disrupt scholarship in universities in the name of slogans like “from the river to the sea” which translates to removing all Jews from the land that they inherited during biblical times. The truly indigenous tribe that occupied the land between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea was that of the Israelites, those Jews who occupied Canaan and spoke the same Hebrew language in which the bible was written a few thousand years ago and which Israelis speak today. The social justice warriors who cherish indigenous tribes, should not get their history lessons from TikTok. War is not peace.
For the same reason, those who cherish scientific values should not be dogmatic. Freedom of mind is not slavery. Scientific ignorance is not strength. The existential threat that tribalism poses is not only to the integrity of our society and to national security. It is also a threat to the integrity of science.
When SETI advocates insist that the study of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) should be banned from their conferences, their attitude is unscientific. Why? Because the Director of National Intelligence delivered three reports to the U.S. Congress, making the study of UAP a national priority. Either this class of technological objects are all human made, in which case they are an unrecognized risk to national security like the Chinese spy balloon which was shot down in 2023, or we might be the last generation of humans who know what it is like to feel alone in the cosmos, an option that the Galileo Project studies. I entertained both possibilities at the Munich Security conference on February 16, 2024, followed two days later by a public lecture on “The Next Copernican Revolution” at the birth town of Nicolaus Copernicus of Torun, Poland. To ban a discussion on UAP in SETI conferences is unscientific for the same reason that considering a Wuhan lab leak as the possible origin of the COVID-19 virus is entirely scientific. If scientists cancel specific research topics just because of a cognitive dissonance similar to that exhibited by Laura Helmuth, then the answer to Fermi’s question: “where is everybody?” is in Orwell’s dystopia.
There is a better way. We must not surrender to terrorism of the mind and maintain our open-mindedness in treating life as a learning experience. Yes, others may be wrong but diversity of opinions is absolutely essential in arriving at the truth. Let’s prove Arthur Schopenhauer wrong, and not be guided by tribalism and prejudice to validate his prophecy: “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
There is a more efficient path of arriving at the truth. The alternative path is paved with tolerance to other opinions. By following it, we can find the truth through dialogues out of respect to those who are different from us.
As Alfred Adler noted: “The only normal people are the ones you don’t know very well.” Similarly, soldiers have little regrets in killing enemies during wars because they do not know them on a personal level. The same applies to today’s social justice warriors who act as soldiers of `cancel culture’ without knowing the other side. In contrast to Laura Helmuth, every four years I remember why I love America as the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Are there any better reasons to celebrate the Thanksgiving Holiday this week in the company of family and friends with multiple opinions?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
