Neil Degrasse Tyson - Rationalia? More like Stupidia

Neil Degrasse Tyson, who fancies himself a reboot of Carl Sagan, and who really wants you to understand that he's really, really smart, tweeted the other day:

Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) June 29, 2016

He was rightly mocked on Twitter by all sorts of people who could see the errors in his wishful thinking, and many pointed out a little thing called the Reign of Terror that followed a particular revolution that embodied some of these ideas he's thinking of.  An example:

"It's been shown that those who disagree with State scientists are rabble rousers and henceforth will be jailed in work camps."@neiltyson

— David Walsh, Jr. (@jeffersonianguy) June 29, 2016

Alas, History and understanding the actual, um, human condition, are things lost on Tyson, who is the most insufferable of scientists - those who eschew Philosophy, but instead think governing our world (Rationalia?) under the guise of the primacy of science and the supreme intelligence of it's key practitioners (led, of course, by Mr Degrasse Tyson himself) is some kind of new, untried, and even smart, idea.

Kevin Williamson, writing in National Review, was quick to pick up on Tyson's stupidity and jot down a few thoughts in an essay, the bottom line of which comes in the closing (but do read the whole thing):

As men like him have done for ages, Tyson dreams of a world of self-evident choices, overseen by men of reason such as himself who occupy a position that we cannot help but notice is godlike. It’s nice to imagine ruling from an Olympus of Reason, with men and nations arrayed before one as on a chessboard. Down here on Earth, the view is rather different, and the lines of sight inside the epistemic horizon are not nearly so long as our would-be rulers imagine.