JAMES LILEKS DOESN’T UNDERSTAND THE WORSHIP OF NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON, and deconstructs one of his patented “dude – might wanna lay off the bong for a while” tweets:
Had to wait in line to renew a Passport allowing me to visit members of my own species across artificially conceived borders.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) February 5, 2015
Artificially conceived is meant to connote a a falseness, a violation of Natural Things. But the major accomplishments of civilization are artificially conceived. Why, even some really fine people were artificially conceived.
Wouldn’t a Man of Science know that borders have perfectly reasonable reasons for being where they are? Like, say, rivers. Or mountains. Or large bodies of water we laymen call “oceans.” Stay with me here, because this gets tricky – sometimes these borders are drawn for cultural reasons. People on one side, for the most part, speak one language and have a certain set of folkways; people on the other speak a different language, and have different traditions. This may seem to argue against the universality of man, the idea that we are all brothers and sisters, and I would suggest that it seems that way because the universality of man is a rather useless concept on which to base your understanding of the world as it is today. I have a lot in common with fellow members of my species, but the differences are what we grapple with. And the differences not only lead to borders, they require them.
Didn’t G.K. Chesterton preemptively respond to Tyson’s tweet 85 years ago with his famous paradox of the wall?