The Probability Broach, chapter 4

Lt. Win Bear has taken a road trip to speak with Vaughn Meiss’ boss, the chair of the physics department at Colorado State University. After being kept waiting for an hour and a half, he’s finally granted an audience:

I wasn’t going to like Dr. Otis Bealls or his little Errol Flynn mustache. A nicotine-stained yellow-gray, it was the only hair he had—except for a scraggly fringe around the back of his head—and appeared to be growing from his nostrils. Affecting baggy tweeds, cheap velveteen waistcoat, and rimless plastic spectacles he fiddled with continuously, he failed to convey the academic impression he aspired to. The whole ensemble reminded me of the proverbial dirty old man who “carved another notch in his gold-handled cane.”

That’s quite an accusation, considering Win told us from his own mouth that he’s inclined to agree with anything a pretty woman says. It takes one to know one, I guess?

Bealls says he’s willing to assist the police in their inquiries, but he has no idea why Win is there; he hasn’t heard about Meiss’ murder. Win begins, “I understand he worked here…”

“Officer, please! Ph.D.’s do not work here! Janitors, stenographers, other menials work here. If I may optimistically exaggerate, undergraduates work here. Professors pass the Torch of Civilization, deliberate our Vast Body of Knowledge. They Labor in the Vineyards of Science, pushing back the Barriers of the Un—”

“Dr. Bealls,” I interrupted. “One of your Laborers won’t be hanging around the Vineyards anymore. He’s lying on a sheet-steel table at the Denver City Morgue, so full of machine gun bullets, he’s gonna need a forklift for a—”

This exchange, as we’ll see, is supposed to be a clue to Bealls’ character. Just like in Ayn Rand novels, any character who talks about abstract ideals like “civilization” and “science” and “knowledge” is an evil socialist who wants to destroy everything decent. You can recognize the good guys because they only care about money.

Win asks if Meiss had any enemies. He wasn’t popular in the physics department, according to Bealls:

“Variant opinions, particularly in these times of economic reappraisal, betray a certain inhumility. Nor have we room for contumacious individualism. Socially Responsible Science cannot proceed in such a manner.”

… “What form did his particular contumaciousness take?”

“He writes letters—wild, irresponsible things, absolutist, subversive! Do you know, he claims this institution would be more efficient run for profit? As if efficiency were a valid criterion in education!”

Obviously, we’re intended to disagree with Bealls. Everything about his character is designed to bias you against him, from his arrogant manner to his pompous speech to his unattractive appearance. His scorn for efficiency is supposed to sound wildly ridiculous and to exemplify how out-of-touch he is.

However, in spite of L. Neil Smith’s best efforts, I don’t entirely disagree. It’s true: education shouldn’t be efficient.

After all, public schools are free and open to everyone, without regard to their likelihood of future success. They even offer therapy, tutoring and other expensive accommodations for students with special needs!

An “efficient” policy, by contrast, would be to only spend our resources on educating those who stand to benefit the most. You could imagine a society that administers a test to children at a young age, sends those who score best to well-funded elite schools, and consigns everyone else to menial labor and serfdom, Brave New World-style. That would be “efficient” in the sense Smith means. But civilized countries don’t do that, and for good reason.

There’s an economic argument for free education, because educated people both earn more and produce more over their lifetimes, contributing more to GDP. But there’s also a moral argument for education. It’s good for a society to have educated citizens. It benefits democracy to have citizens who know history and philosophy and science, so they can understand the issues and vote wisely. The gains from this policy are harder to measure, but they’re at least as important as strictly monetary considerations.

And, ironically, for-profit colleges aren’t the model of efficiency that Smith thinks. The private education industry is riddled with shams and scams. According to whistleblowers, they aggressively target the most vulnerable, encourage them to take out huge loans to attend, hire unqualified instructors and pocket the profits.

Over the last few years, for-profit colleges have been failing left and right, leaving students burdened with massive debt while possessing no degree and no marketable skills. The only thing they’re “efficient” at is extracting money from the gullible.

On top of his distasteful devotion to profit, Bealls says, Meiss was unpopular because he wouldn’t lower himself to the level of his colleagues:

“I mean they frequently complain he goes out of his way to make his professional undertakings vague and esoteric. They—”

“Couldn’t understand what he was doing.”

“I would find other words. He has no right to set himself above his peers.”

Bealls explains that Meiss once pursued experiments of a “sensitive nature”, but he stopped working on them two and a half years ago. He said he had an ethical objection to proceeding any further:

“So why the panic now? That’s a long time, as government secrets go.”

Bealls went into his spectacle-scrubbing bit again. “Understand, sir, he was—considering his mediocre talent—quite far ahead in the field. The price of catering to reckless independence. I’m afraid no one else has been able—and if that weren’t enough, walking around with all that information in his brain—”

I couldn’t help it. “Was he supposed to turn it in? His brain, I mean. The usual practice is to do that before you start working for the—”

This scene shows how in TPB, like in Ayn Rand novels, intelligence sorts neatly by political ideology. Everyone who agrees with the author’s views is a competent supergenius, and everyone who disagrees is a blithering fool or a brutish thug. There are no unintelligent anarcho-capitalists, and there are no brilliant socialists. (Possibly the one exception is Win himself, but he’s the Dr. Watson whose narrative role is to have other characters explain everything to him for the reader’s benefit.)

Putting all the smart, competent, attractive people on the same side is a glaring sign that the author is stacking the deck in his favor. His utopian society functions in-story not because the worldbuilding is especially well-thought-out, but because he’s brainwashed the inhabitants into artificial unanimity, so they’re all willing to play by his rules.

Of course, real life doesn’t work like this. You can’t necessarily predict someone’s IQ from their political affiliation. To the extent that there’s a correlation, it points the other way: people with more education are more likely to be liberal. L. Neil Smith would have had a heart attack if he knew that Albert Einstein wrote an essay titled “Why Socialism?”

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Other posts in this series:

• The Probability Broach