I glanced at the front page of the New London Day’s Perspective section and there was an article titled “Biologist who Challenges both Evolution and Religion”. (I have despaired of finding a link on the Day’s website, but you can read it here, where it originally appeared in the Times). Where, I thought, had they managed to find this figure of fantasy, a Broderesque man in the middle between the two extremes of reason and irrationality? This person, I thought, must be a crackpot of a truly unique variety.
As soon as I started actually reading, my preconceptions were dashed. The man in question was Richard Dawkins. I had already read the article, which itself is unobjectionable, when it originally appeared in the Times. But the Day authored headline rankled. I have read many, if not most, of Richard Dawkins’ books of popular science. No reasonable person can say that he “challenges” evolution. He has stoutly defended it for scores of years. The fact that he has suggested different ways of looking at the evolutionary process (e.g., “The Selfish Gene”) and that he takes part in debate within the community of evolutionary biologists, does not change that fact in the least. To say he challenges evolution is like saying the Pope challenges religion because he’s not a Protestant. Lest anyone say I quibble, bear in mind that many people merely scan most articles in the newspaper, so the headline may be the only thing they read. A casual, uninformed reader might conclude, or have the view reinforced, that there is reason to doubt both evolution (not so) and religion (for sure), just as they are encouraged to doubt the reality of global warming by the careful balancing of mountains of scientific evidence with the opinions of deep thinkers such as Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry.
To the media in this country, the truth always lies in the middle between any two extremes, and by placing Dawkins in the non-existent middle between reason and faith, the person of little brain who wrote this headline no doubt intended to compliment Dawkins. There’s been no real harm done to Dawkins, but this is yet another illustration of the harm that the media does to rational discussion in this country by defining truth as the mid point between two contrary positions. In real life, the truth rarely occupies that point. It’s made worse, of course, by the media’s willingness to let the political and religious right constantly shift one end of the argument ever farther to the right, to the point where the “moderate” position on so many political issues would have been considered extreme a few decades ago.
I do want to modify one point I made above. I said the media defines truth as the mid point between two contrary positions, no matter how crazy one of those positions might be. It might more accurately be said that the media defines that midpoint as the point that should be occupied by “serious people”, like the people who shilled for the Iraq War and are now seriously invested in the proposition that deficits and inflation are, despite all evidence, our primary economic problem. Truth, in other words, is irrelevant. A false moderation is all.
