From an American novelist, keen observer of the social scene:
He had seen enough of music and the
stage to know that, as a matter of
course, the people connected with them
reached heights of conceit and pretentiousness, that painters and writers, for
instance, hardly dared dream of.
-- James Gould Cozzens, Ask Me Tomorrow (1940)
People outside the arts will be surprised. Tiens
-- Are musicians actually more self-involved than are painters? One had not known.
But such occupational psychological fault-lines exist indeed. As: To
anyone on the “Marketing” side of the Dilbert Divide, or in the arts scene, tech guys are simply a vague gray mass of computer-nerds,
whether they be in software or hardware. Yet my own observations working in the R&D half of Franklin Computer revealed such a subtle scission. While as a group overall,
engineers are generally more relaxing and enjoyable to work with than are
academics, hardware engineers are notably straightforward and devoid of
drama-queenery; while software
engineers, though sometimes more interesting intellectually and with a better
sense of humor, include a certain number of cranks and unclubbables within their ranks.
My present place of employment has a huge range of
specialties -- soldiers and civilians, mathematicians and cyberneticians,
pen-pushers and policy-wonks. Most
are splendid, a few do bad things.
But when it comes specifically to preening and whining -- alas! -- thát
you find among my own tribe -- the linguists.
There are likewise a spectrum of stereotypical personality
patterns among chemists versus physicists -- nay, experimental physicists
versus theoreticians -- and many others. When shrewdly observed, these lead to the best of all
genres of jokes based on disciplines. As,
“A soldier, a sailor, an airman and
a marine walk into a pet-store…”
or
(for some reason, both of those crucially involve cows).
[Update:
Scientists and Cows ] This
just in! -- Well, just-in to my ken; the joke actually dates back to the Sputnik days, back in the
‘fifties. First, those pesky
Ruskies put up a satellite. And
then:
The next satellite had a dog. And there was a joke: the next one’s going to be a cow, and
then they’re going to put up several cows, and the joke was, it’ll be the first
herd shot round the world.
 |
| [Photo credit: NASA] |
[Quoted from Ann Finkelbeiner, The Jasons, 2006.]
~
There have been some memorable journalistic portraits of the
relatively healthy and bracing atmosphere in engineering start-ups (e.g. Soul
of a New Machine). A
more recent, low-key but rewarding study is by Tom Wolfe, “Two Young Men Who
Went West”, printed (reprinted?) in Hooking Up (2000).
For a still more recent account of what happens when an
engineering firm is handed over to a narcissist, try this:
[Appendix] Hey cows turn out to look really cool in outer space, here's another one:
 |
| Cow in its natural element |
~
Back to the correlation to narcissism, of various scientific
disciplines.
It is beyond contest, that (say) chemists and civil
engineers have a reputation for very low doses of Drama, compared with (say)
physicists. But what are the
traits that gave physicists such a rep?
It is seldom really narcissism, for that is a matter of
individual, personal psychology.
If there is self-regard, that among physicists is more that of the guild
-- a corporative trait, which might
strike outsiders as arrogant.
Ann Finkelbeiner, in her fine history of the elite advisory
group known as the Jasons (who were overwhelmingly physicists), gives an
anecdote from an oceanographer (p. 138), recalling an uncharacteristic foray
into oceanography by the Jasons:
I did resent this “the ocean is a
wonderful summer playground for smart physicists who can do it in their spare
time”. You may know this thing
called physics arrogance. It’s
real.
Indeed, Finkelbeiner reveals (p. xvii) that at one point “I
wanted to call this book The Arrogance of Physicists.”
Now, arrogance can co-exist with narcissism, and flavor
it; but they by no means
need be co-present. Thus, the
eponym, Narcissus himself, was not arrogant in the least: he was dreamily, solipsistically
folded-in on himself.
Consider the humble confession of quantum wizard Wolfgang
Pauli in 1925:
At the moment, physics is again terribly confused. In any case, it is
difficult for me, and I wish I had been a movie comedian or something of the
sort, and had never heard of physics.
Yet many anecdotes are told about Pauli’s arrogance -- within physics : e.g. “What Professor
Einstein says” (he concedes) “is not so stupid”. Or the damning phrase “Not even wrong” (recently the title
of a book attacking the very integrity of String Theory). Or consider this joke (quoted by
Ann Finkelbein in The Jasons, 2006):
A physicist gets to heaven and God
asks him if there’s anything he’d like to know, and the physicist says, “Yes,
please. Why is the Fine Structure
Constant 1/137?” God gives him the
explanation, and the physicist says, “No, that’s wrong.”
Ironic note:
Any such explanation from God
would in fact have
been wrong
-- since (as we now know) the value of the Fine Structure Constant, though
close to 1/137, is not exactly that, and
thus is not a ratio of (small) integers at all:
it’s just one of those boring physical parameters that drone on and on,
and could (for all we know) just as well have been somewhat different.
The conjecture that it might actually be a pure integer
ratio
caused a certain amount of
numerological excitement back in the day, but that turned out to be a false
alarm.
~
We have frequently written about the related but distinct
notions of
depth versus
difficulty
(in math and science).
This
comparison/contrast of narcissism versus arrogance (the former being key to our
American culture, the latter to our politics) may likewise prove fruitful.
