The What Newspaper in the World?
I want to answer Norm’s answer – but later. I have – all these things to do, and more keep coming in. Meanwhile I’ve been wanting to say a few acid words about that ridiculous Deborah Solomon interview with Daniel Dennett.
She starts the stupidity with the very first question. (And that’s the kind of thing that always makes me marvel at the way the Times [NY version] is always calmly informing us that it is the best newspaper in the world – that dopy mediocrity. Why have someone interview Dennett who will ask such silly, ill-informed questions? What is the point of it? Why not do better? Because it would be ‘elitist’ to get someone with a clue to ask the questions? But then – if you’re taking that route, then you don’t get to call yourself the best newspaper in the world, do you. You can’t do both.)
How could you, as a longtime professor of philosophy at Tufts University, write a book that promotes the idea that religious devotion is a function of biology? Why would you hold a scientist’s microscope to something as intangible as belief?
Look at all that – what a train wreck. His book ‘promotes the idea’ as opposed to arguing; it’s religious ‘devotion’ that he’s talking about (she should have called it devout religious devotion, just to make sure); she expresses bovine incredulity at the idea that something ‘intangible’ could be a function of biology. Best newspaper in the world.
But your new book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, is not about cathedrals. It’s about religious belief, which cannot be dissected in a lab as if it were a disease.
And not only can it not be dissected, it cannot be considered rationally or investigated at all. Nor can depression, or schizophrenia, or memory, or perception, or attention, or language – and bang goes a century of research.
Yet faith, by definition, means believing in something whose existence cannot be proved scientifically. If we knew for sure that God existed, it would not require a leap of faith to believe in him.
Yes. And if we knew for sure that anything existed, it would not require a leap of faith to believe in it. Therefore what? We should believe in anything and everything? Couldn’t you have done better than that?
No, obviously she couldn’t. Dennett is polite – which is heroic of him.
That strikes me as a very reductive and uninteresting approach to religious feeling.
Does it! Compared to all the fascinating, rich questions you’ve been asking! Best newspaper in the world.
Traditionally, evolutionary biologists like Stephen Jay Gould insisted on keeping a separation between hard science and less knowable realms like religion.
What does she think she’s talking about? ‘Traditionally’? Nonsense! Gould made that argument a few years ago, but what’s traditionally got to do with it? And why does she generalize from that to ‘evolutionary biologists like’ Gould? She just means Gould, so that’s what she should have said. And, as Dennett hints (tactfully), she has the widespread idea that Gould was some sort of president of the biologists, but that’s a mistake.
So that’s the world’s best newspaper – assigning a clueless hack to ask questions on a substantive subject. What on earth is the point? Why not either do it right or refrain from doing it at all?
I feel your pain.
Read the ‘interview’ myself on the train home from NY (after seeing the new Darwin exhibit.) Read it twice, actually. Could not figure out why the questions were so damn simple.
It was like the reverse of a soft-ball interview.
Ok, so Deborah Solomon’s an idiot. So are lots of people. I think the names of the people who sent her to do the interview and agreed to print what she handed in ought to be discovered and made embarrassingly public. Complete and utter disgrace.
I think Solomon does that interview thing as a regular assignment for the Times Magazine. Usually she interviews celebrities of some sort or other; obviously she is way out of her depth interviewing a philosopher, especially an atheist philosopher.
In fact, I don’t know of anyone on the Times staff that has the intellectual background to reach the level of a Dennett; whenever they try to tackle a philosophical subject they make fools of themselves. Well, now that we can read nearly every important news/opinion organ in the world with the click of a mouse, we don’t need to bother so much with poseurs like the NY Times any more.
OB, frankly, I don’t think this is just about religion and Dennett. I don’t know if you’ve written for papers before. I have — I’ve written for the Wall Street Journal, for the SF Chronicle, for Newsday, for a lot of papers. And one’s experience with editors when writing about anything above an eight grade level is pretty discouraging. They redline any expression that might refer to anything written before, say, 2000, as much too esoteric. If you present an argument with, say, two steps, forget it. You might as well strip it, the editor is going to not either pretend not to be able to follow it or really not be able to follow it. And if you do something perverse, like avoid the current media cliche (viz the contrast “intangible/dissection”), the editing process will eventually force you to give it up. The slow retreat back to what they sent you out to say in the first place is painful, and eventually — why resist? They want their cliche.
The constraints and rules are as rigid and traditional as Kabuki theater, and I think what is interesting about Solomon’s interviews is that she applies them to people who are, apparently, not used to them (people who aren’t stars, or best selling authors, or talking heads). The joke here is to see them fumble and actually try to break away from the format. There is a word for people who break away from the format. Losers. The Dennett thing is a set up from the get go. You can’t lose on that. You affirm an earnest, but hard to pin down spirituality. You will never, repeat never, have a reporter from the NYT interview a religious figure from an atheistic viewpoint. You have to be out of your mind to even think that. You show this prof with the white beard. You provoke him into using some three syllable word — at which point, if he isn’t an economist explaining some reform designed to take away people’s pensions and up the price of medical care for the poor (they are allowed to use three syllable words), you’ve dropped your dime. You’ve made your figure of fun, you’ve reassured your editor, who has, he thinks, pleased the saps who read the thing, and everybody is happy. You’ve got what your editors want. When they send you out to get the story, they mean it — the story. The story is pre-given. New details here and there — freaky prof, funny scientist, hilarious Chomskyian lefty, etc, etc — put the particular clowns in the clown show, but they are, after all, just variables.
The NYT is arrogant about applying the format. They aren’t that different.
“So that’s the world’s best newspaper …”
Why would anyone think *that* ?
Roger. I think I may throw up.
“Why would anyone think *that*?”
Why indeed? But – I’m not making this up – the Times itself is always solemnly telling us that. Without a shred of irony or apology. Much as if we all went around wearing sweatshirts that said ‘I am the best person in the world.’ During the Jayson Blair thing for instance – it kept saying, on its own pages, things like ‘how could such a thing happen at the best newspaper in the world?’ I know that seems incredible, but it’s the flat truth.
Roger, thanks for elaborating on the process by which “journalism” reduces thought to pablum. The thing that really gets me about the NY Times is that they pretend to be a very sophisticated Manhattan (the center of Enlightenment in the U.S.A.!)-based rag, but when you look even half-way closely at their product, its one big advertisement for impossibly expensive consumer products that most of its readers probably will never be able to afford in their lives.
I think that we are rapidly developing into two cultures: one in which people still think that outfits like the NY Times (WaPo, etc.) are normative institutions which should set the standards for how they think about the world, and people who have discovered that there are a huge number of intellectual fora (most especially including B&W) which are far more interesting, intellectually stimulating, and informative that can be reached with the click of a mouse. I don’t even understand what’s going on in the heads of the former group any more.
Roger, no, I know it’s not just about religion and Dennett, that was part of what I was saying – it’s also very much about the mediocrity and vanity and presumption of the Times. No, I’ve never written for papers before, or after either, but I have no trouble at all believing what you say, if only because I’ve read some here and there. But as for ‘why resist?’ – well, because it’s a bad thing, that’s why. Even if resistance is (apparently) hopeless, it’s worth a try.
“You provoke him into using some three syllable word — at which point…you’ve dropped your dime. You’ve made your figure of fun”
I know, I know. Which is exactly why I find it so infuriating when actual intellectuals – people with PhDs, who can sling a few polysyllables themselves, and do when they feel like it – play the same game.
Quick comment, on the run: I have written for papers, not the NYT, and I have experienced both good and bad, the bad being, as described above, an insistence on mediocrity and worse, with the lowest common denominator the only group catered for. The best things were editors with genuine principles, who, I regret to say, were all too often jettisoned at the first opportunity by power-brokers with nothing but sales and political expediency on their minds.
Found some. Evidence, confirmation. Sort of – not in the Times itself, because their archive is subscription, but in extracts I cut and pasted at the time (2003). That means the confirmation is only as good as your acceptance that I did cut and paste them at the time – but that’s a start, anyway.
In this N&C, a quotation not from the Times but from The New York Observer:
“Why had a promising 27-year-old reporter with a career in high gear at the most respected news organization in the world thrown it all away in a pathological binge of dishonesty?”
I mocked that claim – ‘the most respected news organization in the world’ – with some violence at the time. It seems to be a classic example of what Hitchens excoriates as the evaluation of work by reputation rather than the other way around. But anyway, tragically, some people or organizations do think or at least say that.
As vitriolic against Deb Solomon as you were, you weren’t harsh enough! I just read the whole interview and now I feel dirty.
Notice how in every question what she actually does is try to show off her own knowledge? And how all her ‘knowledge’ is complete chud? And how they seem to be talking past each other in some twisted Eugene Ionesco play? It is a train wreck not worthy of Parade let alone NYT.
“Notice how in every question what she actually does is try to show off her own knowledge?”
Yes – I wished afterward I had mentioned that – the smug ‘notice how deep I am’ tone of her every question, the way she spoke from a great height.
And Parade crossed my mind, too.
Solomon’s interviews at the front on the NYT magazine have been a bad joke from the beginning. There have been several where she’s clearly exasperated her subjects – why the paper continues to run these is a depressing subject to think about.
Deborah Solomon’s viewpoint, that the existence of God is not provable, is far from universal. In fact, there is a long tradition that states that the existence of God and other such doctrines are provable, and in its First Vatican Council, the Catholic Church had even made the provability of God’s existence one of its dogmas.
OB, I should avoid the temptation, but… this isn’t just about Deborah Solomon. Like I said in my comment, the NYT has the story already written:
“The Dennett thing is a set up from the get go. You can’t lose on that. You affirm an earnest, but hard to pin down spirituality. You will never, repeat never, have a reporter from the NYT interview a religious figure from an atheistic viewpoint. You have to be out of your mind to even think that. You show this prof with the white beard. You provoke him into using some three syllable word…”
It was nice to see the NYT prove my point so quickly, in Charlie McGrath’s profile of Kripke in the Saturday paper:
“In many circles, Mr. Kripke, who in 2001 was awarded the Schock Prize, philosophy’s equivalent of the Nobel, is thought to be the world’s greatest living philosopher, perhaps the greatest since Wittgenstein. Mr. Kripke is actually superior to Wittgenstein in at least two respects. Wittgenstein did not accomplish some of his most important work while still in high school. And unlike Wittgenstein, who was small, slender and hawklike, Mr. Kripke looks the way a philosopher ought to look: pink-faced, white-bearded, rumpled, squinty. He carries his books and papers in a plastic shopping bag from Filene’s Basement.”
You provide the material, we provide the cliches — the NYT, the newspaper you’ve come to love for confirming all of your biases!
Nah, roger, you shouldn’t resist the temptation. On the contrary! That’s called ‘evidence’.