In his encyclical Fides et Ratio (“Faith and Reason”), John Paul II made the following observation: “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to contemplation of the truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth — in a word, to know Himself — so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.”
John Paul II meant that human beings need to live in the real world and apply their reason to human problems and the scientific reality of their existence and the world around them, but we also need to have faith in the transcendent. We have to acknowledge that there are still mysteries in the world if we are truly to understand ourselves.
So what happens when two wings represent either all faith or all reason, but not both? As the Washington Post has just proven, the subject spirals into a death plunge of ignorance.
On May 31, the Washington Post published three pieces on the front page of the Style section. Taken together, they reveal an editorial vision that is skeptical of conservatism but puts faith in the most extreme and destructive leftist political philosophy. It questions a conservative as it sanctifies a communist — and offers a glib dismissal to a deeply soulful piece of popular music.
Perhaps the time for anger is over, and it’s time to just feel sorry for the Post, whose financial problems continue to mount. The Post’s editors really don’t know what they are doing. As John Dean once said of the Watergate burglars and their leaders: you have to realize, these people are just not that intelligent.
For several years, my complaint about the Post — and the rest of the media — has been twofold:
1. The popular music criticism sucks. Rock and roll is a profound and dynamic form of modernist art that is spiritual to the core. Hipster rock critics have become taxonomists incapable of writing about the soul in the way that their forefathers like Lester Bangs could. They miss the central heart of the music in favor of glib clichés.
2. Coverage of conservatives. Do I really need to explain this? To the Post, conservatives are freaks. They are to be ignored. If that is not possible, they are to be treated as freaks and given the kind of tough questions that deified liberal subjects are not.
In short, the Post has atheistic secular hipsters covering a spiritual art form, and true believing religious liberal dogmatists covering politics. To be sure, reason plays a part in any kind of criticism, even rock and roll criticism, and there are elements of the religious in politics. But if you cannot have the other wing represented, the wing of faith for the atheist and the wing of reason — and with it, doubt — for the political disciple, you wind up lost.
How else to explain the Style section on May 31? There are three stories on the section’s front page. One is a profile of Herman Cain, the conservative running for president. The second is a profile of 86-year-old poet and self-described communist Ernesto Cardenal. The third is a review of the new album by the superb and sublime band Death Cab for Cutie.
The profile of Cain starts by noting that Cain is dismissed by a lot of mainstream Republicans, but nonetheless, writes Jason Horowitz, his candidacy offers some questions: “Who’s calling the shots in the Republican Party — the elite establishment or the grass-roots activists? What does the popularity of a black tea party hero say about he movement’s relationship with race? Is the goal of the upstarts in the Republican field the presidency or a cushy Fox News gig? And in the Tea Party era, do quixotic candidates tilt at windmills or reap electoral windfalls?”
If you weed out the gotcha questions, the ones about the cushy Fox gig (Horowitz never proves that Cain cares the slightest about this) and the supposed Tea Party racism — a red herring — there is some signs of intelligence here. Horowitz is asking some good questions, even if he leaves out the matter of whether Herman Cain is right about anything — if his facts about specific issues are sound. Instead, there is a rehash of Cain’s botched answer to a question about Palestine. But still, Horowitz’s brain is working, even if it’s in first gear.
Below the Cain story, however, things are different. In the profile “Radical Beat Goes On,” Manuel Roig-Franzia dispatches a valentine to Ernesto Cardenal. Cardenal, 86, is a dying breed, the hippie radical. He supported the Marxist revolution in Nicaragua in the 1980s, and worked for the Sandinista government. He is a disciple of “liberation theology,” the attempt to wed communism to Christianity.
And suddenly, and just a few inches away from the Cain story, the skepticism that Jason Horowitz showed to Herman Cain is gone. Roig-Franzia describes liberation theology as a movement “centered on wresting the poor from unjust social conditions.” It was, in fact, a Marxist movement that preached a heretical form of Christianity. Where Herman Cain receives hard questions and analysis about the conflict between him and other conservatives, Ernesto Cardenal is bathed in praise for his poems and his so-called radicalism. Suddenly, the Washington Post is a paper that is not afraid to show a little faith. Why bother researching liberation theology, what the Church says about it, or asking if this man feels any doubt about supporting a philosophy that murdered a hundred million people, not a few of whom were priests and nuns? He’s a cool old lefty ex-priest! He says sex perverts can go to heaven!
Lastly, the May 31 Post offers a review of “Codes and Keys,” the new album by Death Cab for Cutie. Reviewer David Malitz describes the group this way: As opposed to more gregarious bands, “Death Cab was the musical inverse, playing inward-gazing confessionals with front man Ben Gibbard chirping sad-sack laments over exquisitely textured atmospheric indie-pop.”
What absolute, utter crap. And what an insult to Ben Gibbard and his band. Death Cab for Cutie write brilliant, evocative songs about the drama of being human — how we respond to love, the courage it takes to overcome the fear of death, the small moments that define us as spiritual creatures. To ignore all that in deference to a snarky rock-crit taxonomy about genres, not to mention a personal attack on Gibbard, is pathetic. Worse, it’s inaccurate.
The Washington Post seems to have perfected a formula to have the truth of things exactly backwards. People who deserve scorn and shame are lionized; people who have arguments based on reason and life experience are dismissed via emotional attacks and appeals to the pseudo-religion of liberalism; and genuinely soulful poets are treated like logarithms that need to be analyzed.
I know, I know — just let them die. Don’t bother. They passed their prime years ago. I realize that. But I grew up in Washington and came of age during Watergate. For a small part of me, it’s still painful to watch the Post, once a strong creature that proudly hovered over the American cultural landscape, spiral and plunge to its death.
Mark Judge is the author of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock ‘n’ Roll.