The American Spectator

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Knowing the Difference

5.5.08 @ 12:01AM

WRIGHT OR WRONG
Re: Jay D. Homnick's All Is Not Wright:

It is at least arguable, as Homnick asserts, that religious people and others in structured disciplines are fools when it comes to political opinion.

But one thinker (Heilbruner?) put it differently. He said that any trained expert (academic specialist) tends to mistakenly think that he-she also has valuable opinions in any other field. After all, he knows he-she is intelligent.

The results -- one might surmise and the thinker seemed to say -- are that the expert might turn out to be more biased than others in that other field or area of human thought or activity, or at least more blindly and stubbornly opinionated.

Even the case of Linus Pauling might not be an exception. He excelled and was honored in several fields of science and also almost won the race to discover DNA besides. But he was badly mistaken, if not obsessive, about Vitamin C as a remedy or preventative for the cold. And -- cf. Homnick, I admit -- his judgment in political matters was at least questionable, though surely extremely strongly held. This adds another angle to the old saw about academics learning more and more about less and less: they don't know what they don't know and think they do know -- Rumsfeld's Unknown Unknowns -- but Thought Known.

Even when it might be argued that a judgment is within one's field, there can be blindness. Jesuit theologian-philosopher Fr. Bernard J.F. Lonergan identified three distinct thought-worlds: theory (in all its forms, including science, theology, and philosophy), common sense, transcendence (religion, Mystery). When the Challenger was launched, common sense might have questioned a launch during bad weather. Reagan drew upon language about transcendence, not about theory or common sense, to help the nation through the tragic explosion. And the contribution about frozen O-rings by a major renegade scientist to the panel investigating the explosion seemed to owe more to common sense than to abstruse scientific theory.

Psychology Today once mentioned a test about who makes the best jurors (best in the sense of more open to the truth). It turned out that scientists tested poorly. They were too biased to be open to the truth. The least biased and most open to the truth? Religious ministers.
-- Richard L.A. Schaefer
Dubuque, Iowa

Mr. Homnick misses the main point of the Rev. Wright controversy. Few informed people, be they of the left or right contingent believe that Mr. Obama shares the views of this extreme cartoon character. However, many feel that for twenty years, Obama used the Rev. Wright and his church to build his political machine in South Chicago and now his disgust for this low-level pastor is evident. We also feel that in the same manner he is now using the media and the American public as he claws his way to money and power. One gets the feeling from his remarks that he and Michelle do not like most of the great unwashed Americans, be they white or black. It is becoming more apparent that he is just another politician, albeit smoother and more clever than most in contorting to the masses expectations.
-- Bill Cramer
Arlington, Texas

Jay Homnick's point, that he, like Barack Obama, knows "a number of people whose religious views and behaviors impress me a great deal, yet they are political fruitcakes," misses a critical point, which he himself makes in his opening paragraph. The issue is not whether we all have friends and acquaintances who hold the occasional bizarre opinion.

The issue is what we do when they express them.

In citing the story of the Jewish law scholar whose students used a parable in order to restrain his asides, Mr. Homnick demonstrates a course of action that never seems to have occurred to Barack Obama, who blithely sat in his pew for over twenty years while the Reverend Wright spewed his venomous harangues. When, exactly, did he attempt to get his pastor to moderate his political rants? What parable did he use to express to Reverend Wright that perhaps the United States government did not deliberately introduce AIDS into minority communities? What story of the Bible did he read to his spiritual mentor in order to show him that America was not a terrorist state, or that God should not be damning us? When did he take a stand against the vicious slanders that his pastor shouted from the pulpit? Where is the record of Sen. Obama's objection to these statements? Where is the video of him standing up in the pew and rebutting his pastor's slanders of the nation? When did he walk out of the church? When did he inform the leadership that the reverend's statements were unacceptable? When did the senator, who is known for his eloquence and passion, bring that eloquence and passion to bear in defense of his country's reputation? That is the issue that Reverend Wright's sermons have raised, and that is the issue that they would very much like us not to discuss.
-- Mike Harris
MAJ, US Army

Jay Homnick suggests, "If a rabbi is wrong about politics, that does not make him a fool." What it makes the rabbi is not so much a fool as an impostor. The fool is probably the student still listening to the rabbi once he ventures from Talmud to politics.

Experts who claim the cover of credentials, while straying from their field of expertise, are deceivers and should be confronted. Nowhere is it more egregious than with men of the cloth, whether rabbi, minister, bishop, lama, swami, or ayatollah. Abusing one's spiritual commission to flog a political agenda goes beyond foolish into sinful. When Jeremiah Wright, or Homnick's rabbi, purports that his religious scholarship makes him an authority on politics (or economics, history, medicine, literature, biology, statistics, etc.), it compounds his foolishness with deception. He is now a charlatan. All honest folk ought to castigate him.

The same goes for Mr. Homnick's friends "of high intellect and moral probity who believe conspiracy theories," of whom he notes, "It takes an effort of will to overlook these craters of bad judgment." Instead of overlooking them, making the same error that Barack Obama did with Wright, Homnick might consider politely inviting his friends to put up or shut up. He may not convince them they are wrong, but allowing them to go unchallenged is enabling behavior, which carries its own burden of responsibility. That Obama is paying a political price for his own enabling role should arouse not empathy, but scorn. He isn't a victim, he's a fool.
-- James Bono

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