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Werner Heisenberg (19011976), central figure in quantum physics, gave lectures in the 1950s that were published a half-century later as a book of essays, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science. The formulator of the uncertainty principle had some thoughts about what we now call culture wars. Modern physics, he said, is part of a general historical process that tends toward a unification and a widening of our present world. This process would in itself lead to a diminution of those cultural and political tensions that create the great danger of our time.

But it is accompanied, Heisenberg continued, by another process which acts in the opposite direction. The fact that great masses of people become conscious of this process of unification leads to an instigation of all forces in the existing cultural communities that try to ensure for their traditional values the largest possible role in the final state of unification. He went on to express a hope that ultimately many different cultural traditions may live together, but hed pointed out why getting there was so difficult: new technologies and communications were putting contrasting worldviews into direct competition for dominance.

That seems even more relevant now. My reading of it, though, is just happenstance. A friend sent the Heisenberg collection to me along with mathematician Edward Frenkels excellent book Love and Math after shed borrowed and lost my copy of the latter. Then I started perusing the Heisenberg book after watching Frenkel lecture on YouTube about whether infinity is real, a question also explored in Hannah Frys Magic Numbers, a series I recently watched. Infinity and Heisenbergs principle are both areas where the search for definite knowledge ran into obstacles in the 20th century.

If youd asked me, in the 1980s or 1990s, what the 2020s would be like, Id probably have said something about a Mars colony. But Heisenberg was insightful in recognizing the underlying processes whereby a society with any prospect of settling the red planet would also have plenty of red-faced contretemps on Earth.

Heisenberg also was astute in perceiving, at the Cold Wars height, that modern science penetrates into those large areas of the present world in which new doctrines were established only a few decades ago as foundations for new and powerful societies. He specified that he was talking about Communism, as modern science is confronted both with the content of the doctrines, which go back to European philosophical ideas of the nineteenth century (Hegel and Marx), and with the phenomenon of uncompromising belief.

Heisenberg: Since modern physics must play a great role in these countries because of its practical applicability, it can scarcely be avoided that the narrowness of the doctrines is felt by those who have really understood modern physics and its philosophical meaning. He continued that the influence of science should not be overrated; but it might be that the openness of modern science could make it easier even for larger groups of people to see that the doctrines are possibly not so important for the society as had been assumed before.

In Love and Math, Frenkel, who came of age in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, notes that communist ideology controlled intellectual pursuit in the spheres of the humanities, economics, and social sciences. He continues: Many areas of science were also dominated by the party line, for example with genetics having been banned for many years, because its findings were deemed to contradict the teachings of Marxism.

In this environment, Frenkel writes, mathematics and theoretical physics were oases of freedom. Though communist apparatchiks wanted to control every aspect of life, these areas were just too abstract and difficult for them to understand. Soviet leaders also realized the importance of these seemingly obscure and esoteric areas for the development of nuclear weapons, and thats why they didnt want to mess with these areas. In some ways, though, politics did intrude on math and physics education in the Soviet Union, as when Frenkel was barred from attending an elite school because of his partly Jewish ancestry.

The United States has long been the world leader in physics and math, but itd be complacent to assume those subjects well-shielded from our heated-up culture wars. Over the past decade, Common Core standards in math have been a political target, mostly from the right, with much parental resistance arising from a limited grasp of what the standards entail. Recently, gifted education, especially in math, has become a high-profile target for the left, with opportunities for students to tackle advanced topics seen as unfair and inequitable.

Heisenberg was not an optimist about humanity embracing reason. We cannot close our eyes, he lectured, to the fact that the great majority of the people can scarcely have any well-founded judgment concerning the correctness of certain important general ideas or doctrines. Therefore, the word belief can for this majority not mean perceiving the truth of something but can only be understood as taking this as the basis for life. One can easily understand that this second kind of belief is much firmer, is much more fixed than the first one, that it can persist even against immediate contradicting experience and can therefore not be shaken by added scientific knowledge.

Kenneth Silber is author ofIn DeWitts Footsteps: Seeing History on the Erie Canaland is on Twitter:@kennethsilber

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Physics, Math, and Culture Wars - Splice Today

A central issue in the Virginia election that was held last Tuesday was education and the role of parental or governmental censorship.

One of the ads for the Republican nominee, Glenn Youngkin, displayed the mother of a high school senior upset by the assigned reading in his advanced placement, college-level American literature class. She claimed that the graphic depiction of slavery in it was deeply unsettling, even for this advanced student.

It turns out that the book in question was Beloved by Toni Morrison, a book that won the Pulitzer Prize and is considered a masterpiece of American literature.

Yes, novels are unsettling. Crime and Punishment is unsettling in its examination of the mind of the criminal. Madame Bovary is upsetting in examining adultery. Oliver Twist is disquieting as an examination of class and poverty.

The realistic novels of Eli Wiesel and other Holocaust authors include profoundly troubling accounts of violence. Morisons book is in part a story of the brutality of slavery.

Are stories of the Holocaust, of slavery, too problematic for our advanced students?

Is it not our responsibility to challenge students with provocative readings? Critical Race Theory, the product of hundreds of prominent scholars, offers a significant, if unorthodox, approach to law, civil rights and the role of race in society.

We need not agree with its premises or conclusions, many of us will not, but as open and concerned citizens should we and our advanced students not wrestle with its arguments, along with other outlooks.The culture wars now going on in school boards are deeply troubling. Where might this lead: to censorship and book burning, a favored practice of totalitarians? Or, to a meaningless or false orthodoxy?

Rather than disrupt school board meetings, we must work through elected representatives and those appointed by them for their expertise in education. Populist assaults by angry and often uninformed parents, and the hysteria that they may produce, can become daggers aimed at the heart of American democracy.

Howard Rock

Brevard

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Culture Wars - The Transylvania Times - The Transylvania Times

The brewing culture war over vaccine mandates now threatens to boil over after the Biden administration set a January deadline for all employers with more than 100 employees to require shots or regular testing.

Why it matters: The planned mandates which also include even more stringent standards for health care workers would impact more than 100 million Americans, or more than two-thirds of the workforce.

Driving the news: Lawsuits from 15 GOP-led states rolled in mere hours after the administration last week laid out Jan. 4 as the deadline for vaccine mandates at employers with more than 100 workers.

The other side: U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy took to ABC's "This Week" on Sunday to defend the Biden administration's mandate plan as a workplace safety and economic issue.

But, but, but: NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers took the mantle as a foil to employer vaccine mandates and COVID-19 protocol after it was revealed he was unvaccinated. He'd previously told reporters he was "immunized."

The big picture: A recent Axios-Ipsos poll found six in 10 employed Americans agreed their employer should require COVID vaccinations.

But they do not agree on what should happen for those who don't comply. Support for firing employees was low, at 14%.

Between the lines: As Axios' Jennifer Kingson wrote, employer vaccine mandates have already impacted millions of workers, and rather than leaving in droves most have either decided to get the shot or have taken advantage of wiggle room offered by their employers.

What we're watching: A mandated deadline for about 4 million federal workers coming up on Nov. 22 could give us a glimpse at how the broader mandates may play out.

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Vaccine mandates inflame the culture wars - Axios

These themes structured the Youngkin campaign. In a revealing postelection interview with Politicos Ryan Lizza, two top Youngkin strategists, Jeff Roe and Kristin Davison, outlined their campaign plan, which included, but was certainly not limited to, highlighting critical race theory:

One of our first advertising pieces in the general election and one of the first things we hammered on was that the Thomas Jefferson School in Northern Virginia had lowered their academic standards. It was then literally the first stop, Roe said, moving on to describe the goal of uniting under the Republican banner seemingly disparate constituencies:

If youre an Asian-American family going to Thomas Jefferson School and they lower the standards to let more kids who arent in accelerated math into the best school in the country, thats pretty important to you. Advanced math is a big dang thing. But it also is to the Republicans: Why would you not help and want your children to succeed and achieve? So we were having a hard time; those people dont fit in the same rooms together. You know, having school-choice people in the same room with a C.R.T. person with an advanced math [person] along with people who want school resource officers in every school thats a pretty eclectic group of people.

Achieving this goal received an unexpected lift from Terry McAuliffes now notorious gaffe during a Sept. 28 debate:

As Davison recounted the story to Lizza:

Within three hours of the debate where Terry said I dont think parents should be involved in what the school should be teaching, we had a video out hitting this because it tapped into just parents not knowing. And that was the fight. It wasnt just C.R.T. Thats an easier issue to talk about on TV. Thats not what we focused on here; it was more parents matter. Launching that message took the education discussion to a different level.

Yascha Mounk, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, captured the problem with a common progressive analysis of the Virginia election in You Cant Win Elections by Telling Voters Their Concerns Are Imaginary, a Nov. 3 Atlantic essay the idea that Youngkin, an extremist posing in the garb of a suburban dad, was able to incite white backlash by exploiting fake and imaginary fears about the teaching of critical race theory in public schools.

The truth, Mounk continued, is rather different. Youngkin capitalized on a widespread public perception that Democrats are out of tune with the country on cultural issues.

The idea that critical race theory is an academic concept that is taught only at colleges or law schools, Mounk continued, might be technically accurate, but the reality on the ground is a good deal more complicated. He noted that across the nation, many teachers have, over the past years, begun to adopt a pedagogical program that owes its inspiration to ideas that are very fashionable on the academic left, and that go well beyond telling students about Americas copious historical sins.

In some elementary and middle schools, Mounk wrote,

Students are now being asked to place themselves on a scale of privilege based on such attributes as their skin color. History lessons in some high schools teach that racism is not just a persistent reality but the defining feature of America. And some school systems have even embraced ideas that spread pernicious prejudices about nonwhite people, as when a presentation to principals of New York City public schools denounced virtues such as perfectionism or the worship of the written word as elements of white-supremacy culture.

While just under half of respondents (49 percent) described themselves as very or extremely familiar with critical race theory in a June Fox News poll, the theory and arguments based on it have become commonplace throughout much of American culture.

On Sept. 9, 2020, for example, Larry Merlo, then the chief executive of CVS, held a Company Town Hall, at which he invited Ibram X. Kendi to lead a discussion on what it means to be antiracist. Merlo asked Kendi to explain what it means to be a racist.

Kendi replied:

I first have to define a racist idea, which I define as any concept that suggests a racial group is superior or inferior to another racial group in any way, and also to say that this is whats wrong with a racial group, or whats right, or whats better, or worse, or connotations of superiority and inferiority. And a racist policy is any measure that is leading to inequity between racial groups.

The Racial Equity Institute offers programs lasting from 18 months to two years to battle racism, a fierce, ever-present, challenging force, one which has structured the thinking, behavior and actions of individuals and institutions since the beginning of U.S. history.

The institute, which cites the work of scholars like Kendi, Tema Okun and Richard Delgado, lists more than 270 clients including corporations, colleges and schools, foundations, hospitals and health care facilities, liberal advocacy groups and social service providers.

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Opinion | Republicans Are Once Again Heating Up the Culture Wars - The New York Times

Janet Jackson, etc. in 2004Photo: JEFF HAYNES/AFP via Getty Images

The last few years have seen a persistentand welcomere-evaluation of the way the media and the wider world treated the female pop stars of the 1990s and 2000s. (I.e., the realization that pretty much every aspect of said treatment was shot through with misogyny on a frankly staggering number of levels.)

Nowon what is also, coincidentally or not, the same date as the end of one of the enduring symbols of that period, the conservatorship of Britney SpearsFX has released a trailer for a new documentary tackling another milestone in our collective crappy cultural treatment of women superstars: Malfunction: The Dressing Down Of Janet Jackson.

In case the title didnt somehow give it away, the New York Times-produced doc is centered on the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show, during which Justin Timberlake ripped off part of Janet Jacksons costume, briefly exposing her body to camerasan event for which the vast majority of blame, outrage, and general nation-wide freaking out was somehow assigned to Jackson.

And while the documentary talking heads might be going a bit overboard by describing the wardrobe malfunction as the 9/11 of the culture wars, that second or so of footage has undeniably been hugely influential on the world that followed. (This is where we note the standard anecdote that the foundation of YouTube was at least partially inspired by co-founder Jawed Kawims inability to find an online copy of the clip.)

Malfunction is being directed by Jodi Gomes, who previously filmed Jacksons brothers Jermaine, Jackie, Marlon, and Tito for A&Es docuseries The Jacksons, which aired six months after Michael Jacksons death. Her most recent film was One Child Left Behind, a documentary about the Atlanta Public Schools testing scandal from the late 2000s.

It doesnt look, from the trailer, like either Timberlake or Janet Jackson were involved in the production of Malfunction, although a press release does note that it features new reporting from The Times, which also produced both Framing Britney Spears,and follow-up Controlling Britney Spears.

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Malfunction debuts on November 19 on FX.

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FX tackles the "9/11 of the culture wars" with trailer for Janet Jackson doc Malfunction - The A.V. Club