Good Grey Bananas

Why is it that the New York Times, a great newspaper, a rich source of information and sensitive criticism in various fields, should be so sterile, so banal, so soporific in its editorials? It isn’t just a matter of being wrong; it isn’t even just a matter of being boring. One feels that the writer is as bored as the reader. Here are two concluding sentences from today’s batch of editorials. “We can, and in this case should, take part in sanctions which curtail the flow of goods, but not the flow of ideas.” If you don’t notice the syntactical muddle of that one, it’s because you’re inured to the equation Interference with Ideas=Bad. But substitute other terms, and the ambiguity of the structure is obvious: “We can, and in this case should, boycott pears, but not bananas.” We can boycott bananas, except in this case? We can never boycott bananas? The writer’s appeal is to liberal reflexes, not to reason. And: “The birth of the new bill is a sad event for the nation’s poor women—and for everyone who believes, as we do, that safe abortions should be available to all women, not just those who can afford them.” Are we to infer that some people “believe” that so-called safe abortions should be legal only so long as they are unavailable to poor women? Or what? Well, we know the answer, not because the writer has given us a clue, but because we know the cliche that animates him—if there is a sense in which a writer who writes such stuff can be described as animated.

We are all Utopians now, as Irving Kristol has said, and the decorum of what is called “public opinion” requires that editorial pages be suffused with an optimism of gaseous indeterminacy. The chief trait of modern liberalism is its irresponsible and formulaic good intentions. In The Unheavenly City, Edward Banfield remarks on the passion to improve society morally even if it means worsening it materially. Results don’t matter: the important thing is to intone the prescribed pieties about the poor, free speech, prejudice, and peace. Public opinion is by no means a consensus or sum of private opinions: it is something more like publicly presentable opinion, and the Times is the Emily Post of such matters. It offers a model of how to appear thoughtful without having to think; a set of plausible incantations for all occasions.

JS

About the Author

Joseph Sobran

Why is it that the New York Times, a great newspaper, a rich source of information and sensitive criticism in various fields, should be so sterile, so banal, so soporific in its editorials? It isn’t just a matter of being wrong; it isn’t even just a matter of being boring. One feels that the writer is as bored as the reader. Here are two concluding sentences from today’s batch of editorials. “We can, and in this case should, take part in sanctions which curtail the flow of goods, but not the flow of ideas.” If you don’t notice the syntactical muddle of that one, it’s because you’re inured to the equation Interference with Ideas=Bad. But substitute other terms, and the ambiguity of the structure is obvious: “We can, and in this case should, boycott pears, but not bananas.” We can boycott bananas, except in this case? We can never boycott bananas? The writer’s appeal is to liberal reflexes, not to reason. And: “The birth of the new bill is a sad event for the nation’s poor women—and for everyone who believes, as we do, that safe abortions should be available to all women, not just those who can afford them.” Are we to infer that some people “believe” that so-called safe abortions should be legal only so long as they are unavailable to poor women? Or what? Well, we know the answer, not because the writer has given us a clue, but because we know the cliche that animates him—if there is a sense in which a writer who writes such stuff can be described as animated.

We are all Utopians now, as Irving Kristol has said, and the decorum of what is called “public opinion” requires that editorial pages be suffused with an optimism of gaseous indeterminacy. The chief trait of modern liberalism is its irresponsible and formulaic good intentions. In The Unheavenly City, Edward Banfield remarks on the passion to improve society morally even if it means worsening it materially. Results don’t matter: the important thing is to intone the prescribed pieties about the poor, free speech, prejudice, and peace. Public opinion is by no means a consensus or sum of private opinions: it is something more like publicly presentable opinion, and the Times is the Emily Post of such matters. It offers a model of how to appear thoughtful without having to think; a set of plausible incantations for all occasions.