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.
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How about “The Benjy Compson award for a Tale Told by an Idiot, Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing”
Maybe I’m just a dumbass, but what does “Straw is Tasty” mean in this context?
Lord Duppy,
“strawman”
“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.
In the category of meaningless arguments, I’d like to nominate John Derbyshire for consideration by the Academy.
“The other night I sat at dinner next to a gentleman of some age. We got to talking, and he told me he had been a bomber pilot in WW2, had served on thirty-odd missions over Europe, including the firestorm-bombing of Dresden in February 1945.”
“I asked this very pleasant and personable old gentleman whether, in all the time he served on bombers, he and his comrades ever spoke about the morality of mass aerial bombing of German cities. No, he said, it never came up. Not even once? No, he replied emphatically, not once. Did he, himself, ever think along those lines? No, not at all. Did he think that perhaps one or two of his comrades might have thought about such issues? “Possibly, but I doubt it. Nobody was thinking like that, nobody I knew anyway. It was a war. They were the enemy. Our missions were very dangerous –I was lucky to survive so many. Some of my friends were killed or captured. We just wanted to end the war, and one way was to bomb the enemy into submission. Which we did –and a good thing too.”
http://www.nationalreview.com/derbyshire/derbyshire200501310749.asp
I’m not sure I understand why Derbyshire related this little ditty. If someone else had written it, I might have thought the writer was vilifying this World War II veteran, but it isn’t someone else–it’s Derbyshire. I think he’s suggesting that because this World War II veteran doesn’t give a shit about all the civilians he killed in Germany, we shouldn’t give a shit about all the civilians we’ve killed in Iraq.
…I’m just shootin’ blind though–anybody else’s guess is as good as mine.
“[Reverend] Soandso [believes he] can impose his will on the rest of us because he believes a prayer is worth making, 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 religion. For example, praying for a stay of execution for a convicted murderer could save a human life. But our laws limit what can be done with prayer manipulating our judicial system precisely because ethics and morality matter and are as important to a free and modern society as is religion.”
Of course if God does not exist or is indifferent to our pleas, thus making prayer effective only as an internal emotional soother that may happen to give motivation to those within communicative range, rather than inciting deities to actively alter the course of human lives; then the above analogy would perhaps not be applicable here.
“most-consecutive-banalities”
How about the John Kerry Award or would that necessitate the banality to be long-winded?
“[Reverend] Soandso [believes he] can impose his will on the rest of us because he believes a prayer is worth making, 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 religion. For example, praying for a stay of execution for a convicted murderer could save a human life. But our laws limit what can be done with prayer manipulating our judicial system precisely because ethics and morality matter and are as important to a free and modern society as is religion.”
Of course if God does not exist or is indifferent to our pleas, thus making prayer effective only as an internal emotional soother that may happen to give motivation to those within communicative range, rather than inciting deities to actively alter the course of human lives; then the above analogy would perhaps not be applicable here.
Can you ask Sully if y’all can license the Derb award?
Ken,
I had to go to the article to see if you missed something, but nope, you pasted the whole thing in full.
Huh.
I’m betting your guess is correct. Either that or he’s explaining why/how it doesn’t bother the soldiers to kill civilians?
How about the ‘Dubya Speechify Talking A-Ward’?
He never seems to say anything of substance. Or is it fair to include politicians? They are the professionals, afterall.
‘Dubya Speechify Talking A-Ward of Freedom?
The Deepak Chopra Prize?
The Tony Robbins prize?
The Dick Cheney, for the speaker who keeps a straight face above and beyond the call of duty.
Then that speaker be able to keep a straight face while he tells someone, “Well I have a Peabody but I’m especially proud of my Dick.”
Then that speaker will be able to….
Maybe you could inaugurate the “Andrew Sullivan Hissy Fit Award.” I think it’s self-explanatory.