Exponentially increasing bizzareness of the conservative worldview

Law of the Universe: as conservatism increases, bizarreness approaches infinity...

From Brad DeLong:

I was (as penance for my sins) reading back issues of the American Spectator in the Berkeley library, and I came across a marvelously funny column by its Washington correspondent, Tom Bethell: "Doubting Dada Physics," in the August 1993 issue (pp. 16-17). The column's subject is:

...[a] solitary genius [Petr Beckmann]... publish[ing] his own ideas and discoveries at a time of growing intellectual corruption in the academy... [who] undermined Einstein's theory of relativity, and... show[ed] how physics could be returned to the classical foundation from which it was dislodged at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Now three things make the column funny:

• Relativity was not the most important disruption of "classical" nineteenth-century physics. Quantum mechanics provoked a much bigger and much spookier revision of the classical and common sense world view. From Bethell's perspective--given his ultimate political goal--he is shooting at the wrong target.
  
• Special relativity is one of the best-confirmed theories in history. Every time you run an electric motor, every time a cosmic ray particle falls from the sky, every time physicists fire up a particle accelerator, every time you use the Global Positioning System to figure out where you are, you confirm special relativity. Theories that "disagree" with special relativity do so only around its very edges, by making different predictions about the results of experiments that cannot have been run yet, or that we will never be able to run.
  
• Our intuitions about time and space are derived from our own experience, living as we do on a planet and moving at velocities much, much lower than the speed of light. It makes little sense for Bethell to raise these intuitions to the status of "the most basic precepts of science... the alpha and omega of the material world--the irreducible character of time and space": as little sense as it would for someone living on the great plains to deny the existence of oceans.

It is not clear to me from Bethell's column whether Beckmann understands relativity or not; it is clear that Bethell does not understand what he is attacking--and that he is attacking it because of what he presumes are the moral and political implications of relativity physics. He is thus in the position of saying the opposite of Galileo--instead of "And yet it moves," he is closing his eyes to a huge amount of experimental evidence and saying, earnestly if incoherently, "and yet it stands still."

But there are unfunny parts to the column as well.

First, conservatives who dislike Einstein do so for one of two reasons:

• Because the admission that measurements of time and space depend on the motion of the observer is in their minds' somehow tied up with the erosion of traditional cultural "absolutes," and scientific truth should be sacrificed to cultural order whenever necessary. In Bethell's article is a whiff of the silencing of Galileo Galilei, the burning of Giordano Bruno, or Trofim Lysenko's sending Russian geneticists to the GULAG: you get the sense that Bethell would be opposed to the teaching of relativity even if he believed it was true.
  
• Because Einstein was a Jew: the meme of anti-Einstein thought in modern conservatism is a legacy of anti-semitism.
  

Opposition to relativity for politico-cultural reasons and opposition to relativity as a legacy of anti-semitism are usually inextricably mixed. Neither is attractive. In Bethell's article, you can see: (i) the hint that Einstein's purpose in proposing his obviously absurd theory was to attack traditional cultural and aesthetic forms; (ii) the hint of a conspiracy of silence among physicists to prop up Einstein's reputation for sinister purposes; (iii) the claim that relativity's attraction to "intellectuals" arises because it is "abstruse... deliciously disrespectful... marvelously baffling to the bourgeoisie." All three of these have roots in anti-semitic visons of the secret conspiracy of over-clever but deceptive Jews--"rootless cosmopolitans" who lack the earthy common sense and grounding in the soil of the Volk--out to undermine the faith and social order of the simple Christian folk.

If DeLong's interpretation is right, then the conservative worldview is even more bizarre than I could have possibly imagined. So conservatives dislike Special Relativity because A) the word "relativity" sounds liberal, and B) Einstein was a Jew? So would they love the theory if it was called "Absolutivity [of the speed of light]", and if someone pointed out to them that the theory was invented by the non-Jewish Heinrik Lorentz and Henri Poincare (with Einstein merely extending it to the E=MC^2 idea)? And why don't they hate quantum mechanics, which holds that a particle's position and momentum aren't even well-defined, and which actually was largely invented by Jews? (Actually, scratch that, they probably would hate quantum mechanics if they knew the first thing about it.)

(Random note: "relativity" exists in classical mechanics too; velocity and momentum and energy are all relative to your "frame of reference". "Special Relativity" is just a modification of classical relativity to include a constant speed of light, which requires that distance, time, and mass also be relative to the frame of reference. )

The larger point is how modern American conservatism has become a lot like Marxism - an all-pervading ideological worldview that comes up with canonized positions on everything from phonics education to basic physics. In the modern American conservative movement (MACM), the personal is political, and every single argument or issue on the planet is a cosmic struggle between the forces of conservatism and liberalism. They have their own special vocabulary (when I used the word "Islamism" at my sister's wedding, a conservative wedding guest sternly rebuked me: "Islamofascism!" he thundered, as if I had used a taboo term by not saying "Islamofascism").

Increasingly, the intellectual dialogue of conservatives, like that of Marxists, is in code words, whispered back and forth between people who only know what the code means because they've spent a lifetime steeped in the doctrine. Non-conservatives just kind of blankly stare, as the self-enclosed universe of conservative ideology retreats further and further into the cosmos. Somewhere, at the far ends of infinity, that micro-universe will collide with the Marxist one in an ecstasy of absolutism, and Rand and Reagan will line-dance with Marx and Lenin, with Lyndon LaRouche calling the steps.