Bad Language
I suppose you saw that shockingly bad review by Leon Wieseltier of Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell in the NY Times last Sunday? It’s so awful I keep blinking with surprise when I read it. It’s not just that it’s incompetent, as Brian Leiter points out, it’s that the tone is so unpleasantly abusive, spittle-flecked, bad-mannered. It is, to use a pompous term that nevertheless seems to fit, inappropriate.
For a sorry instance of present-day scientism, it would be hard to improve on Daniel C. Dennett’s book…In his own opinion, Dennett is a hero. He is in the business of emancipation, and he reveres himself for it…Giordano Bruno, with tenure at Tufts!…Dennett is the sort of rationalist who gives reason a bad name…Dennett flatters himself that he is Hume’s heir…In this profound sense, Dennett does not believe in reason. He will be outraged to hear this, since he regards himself as a giant of rationalism…What this shallow and self-congratulatory book establishes most conclusively is that there are many spells that need to be broken.
It’s downright childish. It’s embarrassing. And that’s even apart from the substance; just the stupid schoolyardy ‘he thinks he’s such a big deal’ taunting makes Wiesltier look – completely ridiculous, and loutish besides. What can he have been thinking? Did he have a fever? And what was the Times thinking?
Indeed, what can the Times have been thinking!?
I’m a third of the way into Dennet’s meticulously prepared book. I find it delightful and engaging, and it goes to enormous pains to accomodate objections like those of Mr. Wieseltier.
It’s absurd that Wieseltier makes no reference to this and doubly absurd that the NY Times would publish such shoddy work. Trebly absurd would be if TNR keeps the man on their staff now. I bet you he is preparing to jump ship because in the US left’s re-examination of religion, TNR is not “respectful” enough to suit him. At least I hope so.
Even Brian Leiter’s generous assertion that, “Perhaps it is correct that the ‘question of the place of science in human life’ is a philosophical, not scientific question,” goes too far.
After all, “science” is nothing more nor less than the name we give to our efforts to understand and explain things. If we apply logic and evidence to a question then it is science. If we don’t apply logic and evidence to a question that has to do with the real world, then we don’t get anywhere with it. We only turn assumptions over and over in our heads endlessly, and any agreement reached has no call on meaning beyond those agreeing on it because there’s nothing to replicate.
“Religion” is a particular set of assumptions about certain things. No one can say they are false, false false. But one can say, I’m not convinced.
Can you believe Leon Wieseltier says,
and then this?
How? How? What can he be thinking, what can be going on in that mind for him to think those two statements are consistent? Does he see philosophy as fact-free but still “rational” argument? I think he is subsconiously owning up to intellectual dishonesty.
This is the worst piece I can remember seeing in the NY Times, but then it has become such a rag in recent years that I haven’t been paying it the attention I used to.
“This is the worst piece I can remember seeing in the NY Times, but then it has become such a rag in recent years that I haven’t been paying it the attention I used to.”
Exactly; same here, on both points.
I love this bit:
“But we also have creeds, and the ability to transcend our genetic imperatives….This fact does make us different…But it is itself a biological fact, visible to natural science, and something that requires an explanation from natural science.”
Fair enough you’d think, but no, apparently humans lie outside natural science.
I know. I could not for the life of me figure out what Wieseltier was trying to say in quarreling with that bit.
He was trying to say that any attempt to talk about ‘culture’ or the ‘social’ in humans in biological terms, or indeed in terms of the natural sciences, is ‘reductionism’, and therefore very very bad.
Yeah, I got that much, but he also seemed to be accusing Dennett of a contradiction, and I couldn’t see the dang contradiction.
I don’t think he is able to conceive of a social or cultural phenomenon that could have a biological basis.
It just occured to me that Wieseltier’s nastiness is typical of religious people’s response to being treated like any other ideology. In that sense it is of a piece with the Muslim reaction to the cartoons. Even the mainstream response was extreme: ban them!
Of course, only the real extremists in the Muslim response were nasty. Likewise, Wieseltier is part of the West and so it doesn’t occur to him to call for Dennett to be banned. But I think his nastiness exposes his intellectual fragility as an adherent of an irrational ideology.
Maybe both these events bring out the fact — certainly they bring out the fear — that religion can’t live without the protection of the taboo against exposing it to reason.
“But I think his nastiness exposes his intellectual fragility as an adherent of an irrational ideology.”
Yeah. And you’d think he’d realize that. The nastiness just seems weird in the NYTBR – it makes him look – silly. Flamey. You’d think he would find that beneath him.