Physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson was widely lampooned after he called for the establishment of a virtual state, Rationalia, with a one-line constitution.
Academics, scientists, public intellectuals and writers mocked the proposal.
Law professor Stephen E. Sachs of Duke Law School thought Tyson’s model would make an excellent theoretical example of how not to write law.
Author and editor Charles C.W. Cooke tweeted a rendering of revolutionary France, which made the worship of the goddess “Reason” the state’s civic religion.
James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal reworked a famous excerpt of George Orwell’s “1984,” in which a fictitious omniscient super-state committed to empiricism lied brazenly to its people about which country they were at war with, arguably because the lie was the government’s most rational course of action.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, a writer and fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, accused Tyson of holding a dogmatic commitment to anti-dogmatism.
The New York Post’s Seth Mandel pointed out pure rationalism is often hindered by rapidly changing facts.
Others pilloried the proposal in long form. Kelsey Atherton, writing in Popular Science, said the Tyson approach “would lead to vast human suffering and stifle the progress of knowledge.” National Review’s Kevin Williamson described in convincing detail the practical impossibility of such a model, invoking computer science professor Dr. Melanie Mitchell, and Noble Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek.
Tyson’s Twitter has been silent since the #Rationalia tweets.
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