Better than the Oscars

Since Andrew Sullivan is going on hiatus, I figure we should borrow a page from his book and inaugurate a few awards. For a while now, I've mentally been handing out the Jedediah Purdy and Allan Bloom Memorial Awards for Outstandingly Turgid Vacuity to liberal and conservative authors (respectively) who drop the most names and produce the purplest, highest-flown prose in service of substantively feeble (and, in truly exemplary cases, literally meaningless) arguments.

But I think we need a distinct award for the most consecutive empty banalities in a short span of text. The first nominee, and a strong candidate for the gold, has got to be this Weekly Standard piece. I posted the other day about research into creating "chimeras," or human-animal hybrids, and as I said there, I'm the first to grant that if we're talking about creating something with a roughly-human consciousness in a partly-animal body, there's serious need for deliberation about whether that's a fate to which it's permissible to deliberately condemn a sentient creature. But does anyone feel the ball's moved forward at all by eye-glazing passages like these?

[Scientist] Weissman [believes he] can impose his will on the rest of us because he believes an experiment is worth conducting, but society has no right to impose its collective will on him…. None of us has the right to do what we want just because we want to do it–no matter how laudable our motives. We live in a society based on ordered liberty that protects individual freedom but prevents anarchic license. Thus every powerful institution has societal-imposed checks and balances placed upon them, including science. For example, using human subjects in dangerous medical research could certainly garner very useful scientific information. But our laws limit what can be done with people in research precisely because ethics and morality matter and are as important to a free and modern society as is science.

Even ignoring the rather idiosyncratic sense of "imposing one's will" employed above, where in this bricolage of fortune-cookie detritus do we find anything resembling useful guidelines? If the author—a fellow at the Intelligent Design–hawking Discovery Institute—just means to argue that science can't be afforded the presumption that "anything goes," including experiments on toddlers, well, great. Straw is tasty. But the reference to "anarchic license" here is as vague as it is platitudinous—deliberately, I suspect. Gliding along at the level of innocuous generality allows him to dodge the burden of making, you know, an actual argument about the cases at hand. The upshot ends up being that we're supposed to consent to bans on research sufficient numbers of people find icky (provided the ick-reaction is characterized as "moral") because, after all, you don't think science is totally exempt from moral constraints, do you Dr. Mengele?

Anyway, the most-consecutive-banalities award needs a title as well. Nominations to be accepted in the comments.