Aristotle Shrugged

THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR

Reader Mail                                   Published 1/10/2008

UNEVOLVED CONSERVATIVES SPEAK
Re: George Neumayr's Standing Athwart Huckabee, Yelling Stop:
Mr. Neumayr...admits that Huckabee is a "heterodox Republican on some issues," but asks, "So what? Who isn't amongst the leading contenders in this primary race?"

It's no great compliment to Huckabee.... In addition, Huckabee's rejection of Darwinism is supposedly too much for sophisticated conservatives.

...As a conservative and Christian, I reject the truth-claims of Darwinism. It might be said that 99 percent of scientists believe in the theory, and that conservatives shouldn't disagree with scientists. My reply would be that 99 percent of scientists are insane -- one percentage point behind mathematicians.

...that's neither here nor there. I do not ask what a candidate thinks of Darwinian claims, any more than I care what he thinks of Britney Spears's musical talents...it was Leibniz who said that this is the best of all possible worlds. The deity could not have created a better world, given the materials he had to work with. He had to make do.

Politics is a lot like that, too.
-- C. V. Crisler
Gilbert, Arizona

Six more letters in a similar vein precede mine:

Before George Neumayr sought to establish disbelief in science as a Conservative precept in your pages --

"Against an immutable standard of conservatism, Mike Huckabee is hardly impeccable. I find some of what he says silly and unpersuasive (for example, his support for Global Warming theory)."

-- he asked readers of The American Thinker: "What would Aquinas make of Darwin?"

Though he now castigates the Reverend Huckabee's heretical adherence to "global warming theory, " his own declaration of allegiance to Aristotle's Physics may be more to the point. Without it, who would suspect that, having lost 100 pounds, Huckabee would arrive at the bottom one third later, were he and Neumayr to go jump off a cliff?

Fear of a computer meltdown prevents me listing more examples on this warm January day. Those who accept the works of The Master Of Them That Know as a counterblast to Godless liberal materialist science will appreciate my predicament.  Aristotle teaches that the silicon dioxide insulating my laptop's electronic guts is just another polymorph of ice, like quartz, diamonds and pearls. 

Who are we to argue with the wisdom of the ancients?
-- Russell Seitz
Cambridge, Massachusetts

This correspondence suggests a double blind experiment
Let Taser-armed representatives of some ethical polling firm randomly select and haul off 100 members of the audience at the next meeting of The American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the first 100 of the Reverends Hagee and Falwell Jr.'s  congregants who confess to relying on The American Spectator for their science news

Miss Spears, as a disinterested party, will be invited to administer a battery of sanity tests to both, and the test scores tabulated by machine, the use of mathematicians being precluded by Crisler's Hypothesis.

Any American Spectator readers thus certified as sane will be given subscriptions to Science , and the lone sane scientist  a subscription to The American Spectator, and both cohorts locked safely away for a year with nothing else to read.  If, at the end of that time, any have not turned into raving lunatics, the experiment will be turned over to The American Political Science Association ,to determine if it has uncovered the savior whose coming H.L. Mencken predicted during the Harding administration: ‘Some great and glorious day the plain folks of this land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."  

FULL DISCLOSURE: When The American Spectator was under (very) different management in 1988, I , being part of the Defense, served as its America's Cup correspondent.