Times not up

I wonder if the NY Times is still held in the high esteem it used to be when it deserved it. There continue to be standards they just don’t meet, or keep. I’ve addressed only a few of them here (and here, and here) in the Forum.

And now Robert T. Miller helps make that case in classic style over at First Things.

Here’s the latest example of a fascinating, though depressing, cultural phenomenon. A fellow who clearly knows nothing about a deep and difficult intellectual problem produces a manuscript purporting to resolve the problem definitively. Such a fellow is a crank, you might think, and will quite properly be ignored. But, no, he actually finds a publisher for his book, and a respected one at that. Even more surprisingly, the New York Times commissions a review of the book from a famous columnist, and, instead of exposing the book for the ignorant twaddle that it is, the columnist writes a glowing review. How does this happen?

I knew right away who he was referring to, and was mighty glad to see it. But…

In case you haven’t guessed yet, the book to which I refer above is Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, just out from Twelve/Warner books, and the review (which can be found here) is that of Michael Kinsley, who writes for Time and the Washington Post.

Good to see this from Professor Miller. Just two nights ago I was channel hopping and came upon Hitchens yet again, this time on CNN, and as testy as he has been on all the other news shows he’s turned up on lately. This time, he was arguing with Eric Metaxas, so I knew this would be good. Except Hitchens hardly let Metaxas get a word in, and wouldn’t listen and respond directly anyway. The video is there at Eric’s website, so you judge. I looked at that and wondered why everyone in the media world seems to be taking Hitchens this seriously and giving him this kind of visibility right now. Seems unearned, given this latest work especially.

Hitchens has solved, he thinks, some of the deepest problems in metaphysics and the philosophy of religion—or, at least, he would say he had if he realized that there were deep problems at stake here. But, unfortunately, he doesn’t even know what the real problems are, for, to Hitchens, Kinsley writes, “It’s blindingly obvious: the great religions all began at a time when we knew a tiny fraction of what we know today about the origins of Earth and human life. It’s understandable that early humans would develop stories about gods or God to salve their ignorance. But people today have no such excuse. If they continue to believe in the unbelievable, or say they do, they are morons or lunatics or liars.”

This is one of the more engaging reviews I’ve read lately. And charitable, at that.

I can understand, just barely, how an intelligent man like Hitchens might make a very bad mistake and write a whole book on a topic without realizing that there is relevant scholarly literature that he ought to have mastered before offering his own views on a subject. I know that I have written some things that I now see to be uninformed, and so I have some sympathy for Hitchens. As to Kinsley, however, in agreeing to review a book, he assumed a responsibility to provide the reading public with an informed and honest judgment, and so in agreeing to review a book that he is obviously incompetent to evaluate he committed more of a breach of trust. I blame him more harshly than I do Hitchens, but let it pass, for perhaps he too somehow never discovered that there is such a thing as the philosophy of religion.

The malfeasance of the editors of the New York Times Book Review, however, is unforgivable. I mean that, if not literally, then at least not merely hyperbolically. For it’s part of an editor’s job, in commissioning a book review, to figure out who’s a competent judge of the book in question. The review of God Is Not Great, along with similar reviews of similar books, shows that the editors at the Times Book Review are not doing their job in a minimally competent way. That means that all their reviews are suspect. The clock at the Times has struck thirteen.

Some time ago, actually.