I was going to post this before Christmas, but it seemed a little too sour right before the holy day so I refrained. Not that they will notice or care, but my first New Year's Resolution is not to bother any longer reading the WaPo editorial page. This column was the last straw. I don't mind at all that they ran an op-ed defending the Dover ID decision. But check out this opening:
Can you imagine a more faithless pursuit than trying to prove the existence of God?Yet that is what the whole "intelligent design" movement is really about
In just a sentence and half, this guy has dismissed the works of Anselm, Augustine & Aquinas as "faithless" ("proofs" of God's existence factoring pretty heavily in their writing, which helped shape Western civilization). I don't think he thinks those guys are faithless; I think he's never heard of the classic five proofs of the existence of God, Anselm's ontological argument, etc. And he's also shown that he has never read a single work by an actual ID scientist (as opposed to a characterization of their work as appearing in his own newspaper).
Now anyone can write a howler, especially in a tiff (hence the "& Weeds" of this humble blog). But a guy purporting to write authoritatively on a subject for a newspaper writes something over-the-top ignorant and none of his fellow editors take him aside and say, "Eh, Eugene, you might want to re-think your topic sentence?" One can only conclude that the whole dang field of editors is utterly ignorant of the patrimony of the West, and only reading their colleagues' work.
I've blogged previously about a minor epiphany I had years ago when I watched (for the umpteenth time) an actress playing Miranda in The Tempest deliver the line, "O brave new world that has such creatures in it" with a knowing leer and a pelvic thrust. This is utterly false to the innocence Shakespeare's trying to get across. "Why must they sex everything up?" I used to think, as if actors and directors were deliberately spoiling the scene. My epiphany was that they were coming by it honestly. They'd never encountered an innocent person; they truly could not conceive a person not motivated chiefly by eros (as opposed to honor, for example), so this is the only way any actress could think to read the line. The Post editorial page has the same problem: they just talk to themselves and there is no room for engaging a new thought, even to reject it. Ultimately, what do these people have to teach anyone? If someone sends me a link to an op-ed that's must-read, fine. But 'til then, I'm done.
