When did the New Yorker become a magazine written by and for people who are deeply ignorant but imagine they are terribly bright? I can remember, as a boy in the 1970s, reading the magazine occasionally and thinking it was very clever. Yes, I mostly admired the cartoons, and yes, I was, well, just a boy, and pretty ignorant myself. But the magazine seemed to me to be somehow both breezy and smart, with an appearance of learning and culture lightly tossed about its writers’ shoulders like a comfortable old sweater.
But as a number of people on Twitter have pointed out, this blog post at the New Yorker’s site, by Adam Gopnik, is one of the dumbest things published anywhere in a very long time. Gopnik manages to get absolutely everything wrong on which he thinks of commenting. He thinks, following “the Roman Catholic Andrew Sullivan” (the adjective is gratuitous and misleading, but that’s why Gopnik used it) that there is a “necessary distinction between politics and religion, between state and church,” as though the two pairs of counterparts were simply interchangeable. He thinks that John F. Kennedy’s 1960 Houston speech expressed the classical American understanding of the proper relationship between “faith and public service,” and so he thinks Paul Ryan’s remark in the vice presidential debate that “our faith informs us in everything we do” is a remark worthy of an Iranian mullah. He thinks that one’s conscience is active only in one’s “chapel” and must not be carried into the public square.
But Gopnik is only warming up. Next he ventures into embryology and the metaphysics of the human person, and only proves himself a complete fool. Paul Ryan told viewers of the October 11 debate that he and his wife saw their first child’s sonogram and thereafter called her (to this day) “the Bean.” His point, of course, is that while she looked like a bean at that early fetal stage, she was in fact his daughter, fully present at that moment–and of course, much earlier too, from the moment of her conception.
Gopnik finds this confidence of Ryan’s, that he can see a human being when there is one before his eyes, to be appalling. Gopnik insists that what Ryan saw really was only a “bean,” by which he means “a seed, a potential, a thing that might yet grow into something greater, just as a seed has the potential to become a tree. A bean is not a baby.” And so he meanders into his own altogether too confident imaginings of what “real science” shows about when that “bean” becomes a baby whose life commands our respect. But what Gopnik imagines to be scientific thinking–which turns out to be so uncertain, on his account, that we must permit arbitrary decisions by anxious pregnant women to determine which unborn children live or die–is actually not science of any kind, but only inept moral philosophizing. “It is conscious, thinking life that counts,” he avers. It is not the lives of all members of the species radically endowed with the capacity for conscious, thinking life–it is all those actually presently enjoying the conscious life.
How he can claim to know this at all; how he can claim to know it from “science” rather than unexplained moral premises; how he can peg which among us, in utero or ex utero, are among those who “count” on this criterion; how many human beings he has just consigned to be sacrificed to the interests of others, at the beginning of life, the end of life, and at countless vulnerable moments in between–none of these things can he tell us, nor is he interested in trying. Gopnik is only interested in rejecting, with all the force he can muster, any reasoned moral challenge to his own unreasoning partisan commitment to the unfettered abortion license throughout the entire term of pregnancy.
This is the New Yorker today: smugly stupid, vulgarly anti-scientific, passing off crude partisanship as philosophy. The only things worse than Gopnik’s post are the comments of the regular readers, who cheer him on as though he had just scored a great, witty, easy victory over that blinkered Republican Paul Ryan. Egad. Harold Ross would be appalled.
October 13th, 2012 | 9:34 pm
The decline began when Tina Brown was hired. Please see:
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1998-03-10/news/9803100023_1_new-yorker-magazine-newhouse
October 13th, 2012 | 9:46 pm
We could go on a long time on this , but I found Mr. Ryan’s and Mr. Biden’s differing takes on their Catholic Faith perspective very enlightening. For example, on the Life issue, Mr. Ryan began with his experiential perspective, which clearly informed his position. His was the pro-life position. Mr. Biden gave a nuanced position not found in Tradition or Scripture, which clearly informed his position. The language used by Mr. Biden is Pre-Vatican II: the Church teaching is this so I accept it. Mr. Ryan’s language is emblematic of a Catholic raised in the post-Roe wasteland. Wonder at the creation of a new life and thankfulness that our Church defends it. This is what Vatican II is truly about – engaging and rediscovering the ancient truths of the world as if they are new. “Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer” G.K. Chesterton once wrote. I was not any kind of a Catholic when I first reared in horror at the vicious dismemberment of a baby. It helped me become a Catholic that the Church reared in horror also. It is sad to say the Catholic education of Biden, Pelosi, Cuomo and many other “public” Catholics was done in an age generally romanticized by faithful Catholics. It does show the wisdom of The Holy Spirit, working through Pope John XXIII, to call for a new way of engaging this hostile and guilty world. That Vatican II was hijacked is indisputable, but we are reclaiming it now. The old way of speaking, so distorted by Mr. Biden, is commonly heard from our parish and chancery staffers uncomfortable with the Church’s radical call for defense of human life against contraception and abortion. The old way of thinking allows for the dodge of “keeping one’s beliefs to oneself”. This we are not called to do. If it is truth it is for all people, not just Catholics. We proclaim it again: Abortion is not wrong because the Church opposes it. The Church opposes it because it is wrong.
October 14th, 2012 | 2:30 am
“Abortion is not wrong because the Church opposes it. The Church opposes it because it is wrong.”
Hear, hear, hear, hear!
So far as I am concerned the *scientific* case against this abomination is an absolutely solid lay down misere.
October 14th, 2012 | 9:47 am
As pointed out by many (Robert George springs to mind), isn’t it quite ironic that the “anti-science” pro-lifers continually point to the facts of embryology, while the “scientific” pro-choicers are forced into philosophical contortions to justify some arbitrary point at which a “human” becomes a “human person”?
October 14th, 2012 | 10:53 am
When did the New Yorker become a magazine written by and for people who are deeply ignorant but imagine they are terribly bright? . . . . This is the New Yorker today: smugly stupid, vulgarly anti-scientific, passing off crude partisanship as philosophy.
Matthew J. Franck,
The New Yorker has some of the finest writers writing on medicine today—for example, Atul Gawande, Jerome Groopman (both on staff), Oliver Sacks, and Sherwin Nuland.
Michael Specter (also on staff) is a distinguished science reporter and the winner of multiple awards. Elizabeth Kolbert (also on staff) won the 2006 National Magazine Award for Public Interest, the 2005 American Association for the Advancement of Science Journalism Award, and the 2006 National Academies Communication Award. Malcolm Gladwell (also on staff) is a bit controversial and not to everyone’s taste, but one could hardly call him “vulgarly anti-scientific.”
I can understand why the Adam Gopnik piece (which is merely a blog post, not even an article in the magazine) made you angry, although I think there is much in it that is defensible, but characterizing The New Yorker as “a magazine written by and for people who are deeply ignorant but imagine they are terribly bright” is not reasoned criticism but intemperate venting.
October 14th, 2012 | 12:20 pm
I just finished reading your article in the Sept. IMPRIMIS. Unfortunately I could not find a way to contact you through the Simon Center, so I hope that you read this short comment. About halfway down on the left page 4 you state: “In truth and charity, we must give those responsible for the policies I’ve described the benefit of the doubt, as acting on some vision of the good”.
I have read your article above and I am wondering why you take a firm stand against the NEW YORKER, a view which I share, and decline to do so against those who “make policy” counter to the CONstitution. The caps in the word constitution are on purpose as I believe that the document known as the Constitution is the document which lead us to the current train wreck of our country today. In the short 13 years from the Declaration of Independance we went from a leadership which called upon the God of the Christian Bible to the Constitution in which He is only mentioned in the date of the document. Ben Franklin, when questioned about the form of gov’t. established in the Constitution, said,” A republic, if you can keep it. Which form of gov’t. is suitably fit ONLY (emph. mine) for a Christian people.
The establishment of a gov’t. based upon “We the People” is frankly a humanist gov’t. The “We the People” being substituted for YHWH God. The lack of prayer during the document creation was deliberate by force of vote NOT to have prayer. We reap what we sow. The removal of YHWH God as our Leader was established in 1789 and now we are paying the price as Christians have submitted to the current false god of “Christian tolerance”.
October 14th, 2012 | 12:54 pm
“It is conscious, thinking life that counts,”
In which case, Gopnik holds it is not murder to smash in someone’s skull in his sleep, because that’s not conscious thinking life.
October 14th, 2012 | 2:49 pm
“anti-science” pro-lifers continually point to the facts of embryology, while the “scientific” pro-choicers are forced into philosophical contortions
For pro-lifers, the “facts of embryology” are pretty much as follows. A human sperm and a human egg unite to form a human zygote which, if all goes well (which it usually doesn’t) will develop into a human embryo, then a human fetus, be born as a human baby, and eventually become a human child and a human adult. You can call that “embryology” if you want to, but the knowledge is almost 200 years old.
The question of when after human conception an embryo or fetus becomes a person is really quite an ancient one. For the Jews, the moment an unborn human becomes fully a person is at the moment of birth. For our legal tradition, the answer is the same. Even for Catholicism, which can lay claim to almost 2000 years of opposition to abortion, it is only quite a recent development that in the earlier stages of pregnancy the developing child has been accorded full personhood—if indeed it actually has, since the moment of ensoulment remains undefined.
So the alleged “philosophical contortions” about whether or when a developing embryo or fetus becomes a human person are not recent inventions of pro-abortionists to justify Roe v Wade. There really are two sides (at the very least) to the debate over abortion, and the issues are very complex. It may be satisfying to condemn the people who disagree with you as ignorant, self-deluded, or evil. But there really are extremely knowledgable, honest, morally serious individuals on both sides of the debate.
October 14th, 2012 | 3:07 pm
David Remnickol,
Your true identity is at last revealed. Don’t you have a magazine to edit?
October 14th, 2012 | 3:21 pm
. . . . he thinks Paul Ryan’s remark in the vice presidential debate that “our faith informs us in everything we do” is a remark worthy of an Iranian mullah.
Here’s another very tough issue. I always remember the 60 Minutes interview with Justice Scalia:
It seems to me that for an American politician to claim his faith informs him in everything he does is more of a pious platitude than anything else. What are we to make of the fact that “Ryan, like other conservative Republicans in the House, has voted for hundreds of millions of dollars in contraceptive funding for low-income women through the program Title X”? Santorum, arguably more aggressively “faith based” than Ryan, stated that he voted for Title X funds as well.
We do have separation of church and state in this country. Our laws must have secular purposes. Exactly how a candidate’s personal religious beliefs should guide his or her perform in office is a complicated matter with few clear-cut answers. Presidents and vice presidents serve the American people, not vice versa.
If Romney/Ryan wins, it will not be up to Romney to try to espouse Mormon positions and Ryan to try to espouse Catholic positions.
October 14th, 2012 | 5:05 pm
When did the New Yorker become a magazine written by and for people who are deeply ignorant but imagine they are terribly bright?
I think Hendrick Hertzberg was hired by them after his discharge from the Navy ca. 1968. After an interim on the White House staff and at The New Republic, he returned there. So, somewhere in that interval.
Harper’s has long been much worse.
October 14th, 2012 | 5:10 pm
Mr. Hinshaw, your comment was an absolute joy to read. Thank you.
October 14th, 2012 | 5:25 pm
William Shawn assured that the New Yorker was utterly literate and utterly readable to anyone with a deep interest in life and a desire to hear interesting ideas expressed in interesting style. But that kind of magazine could barely make a profit by the end of his career. Tina Brown turned it into a smug organ of the monied, privileged urban left. And that proved to be at least marginally successful financially.
The sad fact is that no general interest magazines now exist that are not sharply branded with a narrow political philosophy. There’s no place to go for good writing across the spectrum of opinion or non-opinion.
The New Yorker could once feature lengthy, engrossing pieces about midwestern cafeterias or British rat exterminators. It was the writing that carried the day. That kind of surprising content is long gone.
Now it’s all the style, and central to the style is the leftist echo chamber. The New Yorker now delivers reassurance to its readers: people like you really are better than others, and here’s how you can think, dress and speak so that you can continue to be better than other people.
When I read the New Yorker regularly, I seldom saw a genuinely partisan statement in it. Now, there’s little but . . .
October 14th, 2012 | 6:09 pm
John Hinshaw’s road to the Church is much like mine. And the above Sunday comment by Mr. Franck says the rest.
Apologizing for the New Yorker and for the waste and destruction of a once fine city call for the same qualities as Sgt. Schultz on Hogan’s Heroes: “I see nothing, I hear nothing…” There’s a job opening as publicist for the City Council of Detroit if anyone is interested.
October 14th, 2012 | 6:25 pm
Gopnik’s understanding of potentiality is poorly stated and not very well thought out. He, apparently, is unacquainted with the different senses of “potential” and what role they play in our understanding of being.
A couple of months ago I wrote a little essay on this issue over at The Catholic Thing. Just click my name, and you will arrive there.
October 14th, 2012 | 7:54 pm
“For pro-lifers, the ‘facts of embryology’ are pretty much as follows. A human sperm and a human egg unite to form a human zygote which, if all goes well (which it usually doesn’t) will develop into a human embryo, then a human fetus, be born as a human baby, and eventually become a human child and a human adult.”
Dear David Nickol: This is somewhat puzzling. Are these not the facts of embryology for pro-choicers as well? Do you have some alternative system?
“You can call that ‘embryology’ if you want to, but the knowledge is almost 200 years old.”
Thank you. I will call it “embryology,” since that is what it is. I don’t know why the age of the knowledge is relevant.
“The question of when after human conception an embryo or fetus becomes a person is really quite an ancient one.”
Yes. If you want to go back to medieval science, that’s fine. Just don’t call yourself “scientific.”
“For the Jews, the moment an unborn human becomes fully a person is at the moment of birth. For our legal tradition, the answer is the same. Even for Catholicism, which can lay claim to almost 2000 years of opposition to abortion, it is only quite a recent development that in the earlier stages of pregnancy the developing child has been accorded full personhood—if indeed it actually has, since the moment of ensoulment remains undefined.”
Ensoulment is not the issue. The issue is the nature of the zygote.
“So the alleged ‘philosophical contortions’ about whether or when a developing embryo or fetus becomes a human person are not recent inventions of pro-abortionists to justify Roe v Wade. There really are two sides (at the very least) to the debate over abortion, and the issues are very complex. It may be satisfying to condemn the people who disagree with you as ignorant, self-deluded, or evil. But there really are extremely knowledgable, honest, morally serious individuals on both sides of the debate.”
Well, first of all, if you can find any condemnation of people as “ignorant, self-deluded, or evil” in my post, you qualify for a Supreme Court position. Perhaps you were discovering the emanations of the penumbrae?
Secondly, certainly there are at least two positions. There is the Boethian position, in which personhood depends on the nature of the being, and there is the Lockean position, in which personhood depends on the being’s functional abilities.
The scientific position should point to the nature of the being, as exemplified in its mature status. In order to define personhood according to functional abilities, yes, you need some philosophical contortions. That was the point of my original post.
This is why the language of pro-choicers, over my lifetime, has changed. First the zygote/embryo was just “tissue.” Then, okay, it was “human,” but not a “human being.” Then, okay, it was a “human being,” but not a “human person.” That’s what I call contortion.
October 14th, 2012 | 11:18 pm
It would be extremely difficult to improve on Craig Payne’s excellent comments, so I won’t try to.
I would merely state that, to be on the pro-choice side, with respect to abortion, means that one cannot rely on the science of embryology to defend it. And if one cannot rely on the very scientific discipline that’s the most relevant to abortion, one is, well, in a rather unfortunate position.
When one examines Joe Biden’s remarks, in the VP debate, concerning abortion, one cannot help but be amused at his rather serene acceptance, or ignorance of, the following strangeness in his view: he claims to be a devout Catholic (which I’m sure he believes that he is) and he claims to support the Catholic position on abortion, (which I’m sure that he believes that he does), yet he also believes that he cannot “impose” this belief on non Catholics. (as if the only arguments that one can use to support the prolife view are religious ones. Joe Biden, meet Nat Hentoff.Nat Hentoff, meet Joe Biden. I’ll leave the room while you two get to know each other…). But if one considers the notion that abortion shouldn’t be banned, or even restricted, because it infringes on a woman’s right to control her own body, and if Biden considers this a good argument, why would he belong to a Church that supports the notion that women cannot control their own bodies? And why would pro-choice people, who utilize this argument (that women’s right to control their own bodies are infringed upon, by abortion being denied) accept Joe Biden, a man who believes in the doctrines of a Church that wants to control what a woman does with her body?
And why was Martha Raddatz not asking this question? Ok, I’ll admit to being naive, what can I say?
October 15th, 2012 | 1:36 am
Are these not the facts of embryology for pro-choicers as well? Do you have some alternative system?
Craig Payne,
In the argument over personhood, those who do not believe it begins at conception focus not on conception but on the development of the embryo or fetus. When does it have a brain and nervous system? When might it be called conscious, or self-conscious? When is it capable of feeling pain?
Yes. If you want to go back to medieval science, that’s fine. Just don’t call yourself “scientific.”
In my view, science can’t answer the question of whether a zygote, embryo, or fetus is a person.
First the zygote/embryo was just “tissue.”
No one has ever denied that a human zygote, embryo, or fetus was human. The argument is over whether it is a human. A human heart is human, but it is not a human. It is the leap from human to a human that has been the point of contention.
October 15th, 2012 | 8:08 am
“Your true identity is at last revealed. Don’t you have a magazine to edit?”
What exactly is the point of this comment? Is there some reason a writer feels compelled to mock a commenter? Why not respond to hte substance of the comment? Has blogging just become a place to vent?
October 15th, 2012 | 12:05 pm
Dear David Nickol: Thank you for your measured response. I think you have expressed your position well, and I have expressed my position at least to my satisfaction, so I’ll let it go at that.
October 15th, 2012 | 12:54 pm
It is not what the zygote etc. is that is the problem, it is what it will become, a baby. So in a rather ironic way abortion is a projection, only from the future to the present.
To those who would say that we don’t or can’t know where the threshold is for life worthy of defense there is an old philosophical standard,it has a name that I can’t remember, that makes sense to me. I’m in my backyard shooting arrows at a cardboard target with a friend, just as I am set to release an arrow my friend says, “hey I think I just saw someone run behind the target”. I say, “are you sure”. He says “no I’m not, maybe we should check just to make sure”. I say ” ah, there’s probably no one there” and I let fly the arrow.
If there is any question we must err on the side of life.
October 15th, 2012 | 1:46 pm
No one has ever denied that a human zygote, embryo, or fetus was human. The argument is over whether it is a human. A human heart is human, but it is not a human. It is the leap from human to a human that has been the point of contention.
@David Nickol, that’s not correct, especially in light of your appeal to the history of this question. The thoughts of Aquinas on this matter, for example (a favorite reference of Nancy Pelosi), most certainly relate to whether the embryo/fetus was human – whether it was actually just a being with a more limited kind of form. At the least your statement is too broad. It was indeed unclear, in the medieval period and earlier, what sort of a being this thing was: is it a more primitive kind of organism that then becomes human later on? How can a rational form be informing a body that doesn’t have the right kind of organization for it? Must there not be a succession of forms to go with the succession of the kind of material organization? The relevance of more modern embryology is that there’s no question that this is a human thing (to leave it maximally vague) – distinctively human structure is there from the get-go.
But you are also conflating two issues when you link the personhood/consciousness idea to your version of the history: the contemporary appeal to personhood (defined in terms of consciousness or something like that) is not at all the same as the question of whether the embryo/fetus is a human individual in its own right. If you look at the classic pro-abortion articles that take that line (Michael Tooley, Mary Anne Warren, for example) they have nothing to do with whether the fetus/embryo/unborn child is an individual human. They presume (correctly) that it is an individual of the human species, and they then simply argue that that isn’t sufficient: it has to meet this functional bar to qualify as a person.
October 15th, 2012 | 2:02 pm
If there is any question we must err on the side of life.
Michael Currie,
Suppose a woman is in danger of death if she continues her pregnancy (as in the famous Phoenix abortion case). One may be unsure whether the embryo or fetus counts as a person, but one can be virtually certain the pregnant mother is a person. How can there be an argument against saving the one you know is a person? Isn’t that preferable to “erring on the side of life” and letting the mother die along with the unborn child?
In your backyard scenario, note that there is absolutely nothing at stake if you “err on the side of life.” There is absolutely no reason not to refrain from shooting until you are certain no one is in danger. But if you “err on the side of life,” say by not conducting embryonic stem cell research, you may be losing the chance to cure something like Parkinson’s disease.
Also, for some people who may not believe that personhood begins at conception, the question is where to draw the line. In that case, it is easy to err on the side of life by drawing the line well to the early side of pregnancy.
October 15th, 2012 | 3:53 pm
So now that embryonic stem cell research has proven an abject failure to provide even the barest of relief (and no cures) to serious medical problems, how do we gain back the lives lost. To use the logic advanced earlier in the discussion: the “potential” for prolonging life was weighed more important than scientifically verifiable lives destroyed. But, I guess if we spend our lives refusing to address the destruction unborn life we just move along, singing. Culture of Death triumphant (except…except…).
October 15th, 2012 | 5:41 pm
I let my subscription expire a few years ago when Updike died. The only thing I miss are the cartoons.
October 15th, 2012 | 10:20 pm
Pastor,
I couldn’t agree more (I always wanted to win the cartoon caption contest, which I suppose I can still enter online).
In the meantime, folks here might also enjoy our blog’s take on the same pathetic post:
http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2012/10/the_sillyclevers_on_the_subjec.html
October 25th, 2012 | 8:03 pm
[...] as in presidential campaigns, two weeks is an eternity), but I’d like to add something to the very good (though weirdly framed) response by Matthew J. Frank and the even better one by Ross Douthat to this infuriatingly stupid post by a [...]
October 26th, 2012 | 5:49 pm
David Nickol, there is no such being as a thing that is human, just as there is no such being as a place that is human. Since it is true that from the moment of conception, nothing is added to or subtracted from the DNA of that new human being that is created and thus brought into being, every human being, from the moment of conception, being wholly human, and not being a thing or a place, can only be a person.
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