Know what you know you don’t know.
It’s one of those paradoxes that help make this such an interesting time: collectively, we know more than ever before; the facts at our fingertips double and redouble at a faster and faster pace, yet ignorance—appallingly smug, triumphal, aggressive—brazenly, stubbornly keeps up. Neal Gabler indulges in hyperbole when he calls the Bush administration a “medieval presidency,” but it’s judicious hyperbole. There’s a blatant disregard for facts (which are bunk and “stupid things”) that get in the way of truth (which you just, you know. Know). Call it an all-too-human turning away from the terrifying spectre of the things we know that we don’t know getting bigger and bigger every year, clinging to signals of our own devising, when signals grow so thick and furious we can’t begin to tell them from the noise. Call it an all-too-mendacious embrace of post-modernism at its slippery worst by a fatherly crew that self-righteously claims to know best. —But you can’t deny it’s true.
Well. I suppose you could. Rather the point, really.
So I commend this post over at The Early Days of a Better Nation to your attention. You might not agree with the conclusions reached by some of these struggling (and ex-) creationists, and you might think the drive to reconcile the Bible and science is doomed from the start, but I’d like to hope you’d be moved by anyone’s honest attempts to seek out the stuff they know they don’t know, to aggressively take in as many facts as they can find and hold their truths up against them and see what they can make of the mess.
Commenting is closed for this article.
As I remarked over on Kos, there's not much that's "judicious" about calling the Bush administration "medieval," unless your regard for historical truth is on a par with, oh, Karl Rove's.
Feudalism was about obligations that ran both ways. The Bush Administration, loyal to no one, is as "medieval" as my iBook. People who use "medieval" as a lazy synonym for "irrational" need to buy a clue. The "Middle Ages" were a moral improvement on classical antiquity, and until we figure this out, we're going to be advancing the agenda of slavery, whether we mean to or not.
"Barbaric," then. Fine. (Though that conjures images of bearded Bush men yammering "Bar Bar Bar" at each other over a barbecue pit, and that's an image I really don't need just before I go to sleep.) But: in that feudal context of mutually supportive obligations, there were rat bastards who took their quid and never made with any quo, much as Bush & Co. run roughshod over a context that hasn't yet tumbled to the fact that they mean it when they say "Bipartisanship is another word for date rape."
Gabler, for good or ill, was using "medieval" to hyperbolic effect. He's tarring the reputation of an entire era with only a few Dunnett and Tuchman fans left to defend it for the sake of a colorful, exaggerated rhetorical figure not meant to be taken literally--but meant to work in the here and now, with all our prejudices and preconceptions. Sure, it's imprecise, even lazy; mental shortcuts tend to be. But it is powerful--moreso than simply calling the presidency "irrational." If Henry II and Louis XI are unfairly slandered by this useage, well, Gabler was actually aiming a kick at the hidebound academics who wouldn't even look through Galileo's telescope to see a Jupiter that conflicted with their irrefutable Aristotle. Surely our mental maps of medievalness are big enough to encompass them all?
--Of course, Gabler rather muffs the kick in his column. That misuse of specific history annoys me much more than his, yes, judiciously hyperbolic use of "medieval."
"In that feudal context of mutually supportive obligations, there were rat bastards who took their quid and never made with any quo, much as Bush & Co. run roughshod over a context that hasn't yet tumbled to the fact that they mean it when they say 'Bipartisanship is another word for date rape.'"
That's a lousy argument for typifying Bush & Co. as "medieval." In all times and places there have been "rat bastards who "took their quid and never made with any quo."
Only if you think the Middle Ages are particularly about such rat-bastardy does this make any sense. In which case you're left with the task of arguing that life was ever so much freer of rat-bastardness during, say, classical antiquity, or in the millennia of water empires preceding even that.
It's not "hyperbole" and it's not "powerful". It's stupid and wrong.
(Note that I'm not getting on your case over the matter of "riding roughshod over a context." I'm just sayin'.)
I'm not trying to argue that rat-bastardy is a good reason to call the Bush presidency medieval, so that's good. I'm trying to point out that ragging on Gabler's use of "medieval" in a scientific context by quibbling with differences in political context subjects a colorful turn of phrase to more stress than it was ever meant to bear.
If he'd said "feudal presidency," I'd be up on the barricades with you. He didn't. "Medieval" is much broader and more flexible in tone and meaning. Gabler used it in one context; it doesn't work so well in another--which he did not use. You're skirting the shoals of arrant pedantry on this one.
But hark! The coffeepot gurgles!