Derbyshire on Ben Stein's Expelled: FAIL

John Derbyshire is a conundrum - uncommon broad-swathe sense wrapped in occasional fits of pique that make him go unsensible when the topic turns to things like Immigration or Race. If you step back, one can see that his good and bad come from the same place, a reverence for Western Civ. Attack its achievements, and he makes sense as he whittles a hole in the attacker's bucket. Ponder too long it's failures or compare and contrast too much with other cultures and he teeters on the abyss. Here he is being ruthlessly sensible...

National Review Online

The “intelligent design” hoax is not merely non-science, nor even merely anti-science; it is anti-civilization. It is an appeal to barbarism, to the sensibilities of those Apaches, made by people who lack the imaginative power to know the horrors of true barbarism. (A thing that cannot be said of Darwin. See Chapter X of Voyage of the Beagle.)

And yes: When our greatest achievements are blamed for our greatest moral failures, that is a blood libel against Western civilization itself. What next, Ben? Johann Sebastian Bach ran a slave-trading enterprise on the side? Kepler started the Thirty Years War? Tolstoy instigated the Kishinev Pogrom? Dante was a bag-man for the Golden Horde? Why not go smash a few windows in Chartres Cathedral, Ben? Break wind in a chamber-music concert? Splash some red paint around in the Uffizi? Which other of our civilizational achievements would you like to sneer at? What else from what Waugh called “the work of centuries” would you like to “abandon … for sentimental qualms”? You call yourself a conservative? Feugh!