Accidental Blogger

In her guest contribution to the NYT Opinionator column, Barbara Herrnstein Smith does a better job than even Stanley Fish of teasing out the dynamics of the needless quarrel between SCIENCE (writ large, if vaguely) and RELIGION (ditto),
and given her background she could probably do the same for SCIENCE and the HUMANITIES. Fish had addressed the topic in his prior column. I
think her focus on "cognitive tendencies," however, is misplaced, and
the rest of her column supports my view. Proponents of one "side" or the
other of the "debate" aren't necessarily clinging to their beliefs,
which anyway is just another way of saying that they haven't been
persuaded. Smith thinks she's explaining a phenomenon by renaming it. As I see it, the opponents in the debate are just not listening carefully to its terms.
When I rail against proponents of science (my shorthand for folks who
produce popular scientific literature of the sort that pretends to have
comprehended work in, say, the arts, or that pretends to be able to do
science artistically or art scientifically), I don't usually oppose the
substance of their arguments so much as the way in which they express
those arguments. Call it, as Ruchira often does, their "style."

Look at those comments to Smith's column. Some readers have completely missed her
point. One defends science against an example she makes using violin
playing, her analogy utterly failing to make its meager point to the reader. She's simply saying that, for the most part, the two areas of human behavior have no quarrel with each other. One can imagine a situation in which practicing law and playing violin conflict: in a courtroom, for instance. For the most part, though, they dwell together peacefully. But the reader goes ballistic and generalizes–perfectly
unscientifically–about the innocuousness of devoted violin players and
the devious sickness of people who go to church on Sunday. This is crazy,
yet I find this point-missing to be commonplace to both "sides."