Sybilla Oritur

One of my new favourite blogs is Inverse Square: a leftist daily column dealing with a wide smattering of topics in politics, science and the arts that i am interested.

One of the many things i learned, when working at CIJR last summer is that I HATE BEN STEIN. Which is, of course, amusing as we share a last name. Shhh… please don’t tell the directors of CIJR that. Such a sentiment would be enough to get me condemned as an anti-semite by a certain person there whom i lovely dearly except for his irrational, over-the-top Zionism (and i have nothing against some moderate Zionism) and still use as a reference letter for applications.
(breathe… that was one long sentence)
Ben Stein may be the New Christ. LOL.

I just remembered my really horrible Jews for Jesus joke last summer… haha. I am so dorky.

Anyways… i like not being alone in my criticism of Ben Stein.

I rip this unabashedly of Inverse Square because it is advertising… maybe i will take it down in a week. Maybe i will tell the writer.

That is to say…I never in my wildest dreams thought I would link approvingly to John Derbyshire and The Corner (online stuff from Bill Buckley’s old shop, for those who don’t have the pleasure of dipping into the right-wing blogosphere).

But, man, is Derbyshire right about this. He slams Ben Stein for asserting that science caused the holocaust, while reaching this conclusion:

Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people.

Such oleaginous piety while channeling tropes from the Protocols is grotesque. Fortunately Derbyshire calls him on his anti-science stupidity with one of the greatest Enlightenment quotes I never knew till now:

I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark in search of the savages of Canada, because the maladies to which I am condemned render a European surgeon necessary to me; because war is going on in those regions; and because the example of our actions has made the savages nearly as bad as ourselves.

(Voltaire to Rousseau on reading the latter’s The Social Contract.)

The most interesting part of Derbyshire’s comment is the hint of dawning realization that the anti-science nonsense for which he indicts Stein is in fact a deeply woven thread within modern American conservative politics. The fact that it has evoked the kind of morally bankrupt holocaust denialism of Stein’s current ravings has woken Derbyshire up; will it be enough to lead to a broader break with the dangerous anti-rational strain in the broader movement to which he has long pledged allegiance?