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| Roger Ebert at the CWA | | Date Created: Apr 04, 2005, 10:05 PM |
 Roger Ebert is my favorite liberal. Not all liberals are idiots and not all idiots are liberals. Ebert has amazing depth of knowledge, is articulate, and just fun to listen to. Plus I tend to agree with his opinions of movies. How many liberals can I say that about?
Ebert attends the Conference on World Affairs (CWA) held in Boulder, CO every year (both the conference and Ebert). I've seen him several times and again today, the first day of this year's conference. He was so good I had to stop at B&N and buy his latest book, Roger Ebert: The Greatest Movies II.
But Ebert wasn't talking about movies at the session I saw. (For devotees of Ebert at the CWA, the movie he was dissecting this year in his inimitable style was La Dolce Vita). The Conference on World Affairs specializes in offbeat, provocative, and reasonably balanced titles for its sessions and puts three or four panelists and a moderator up on the stage for an hour or two. The panelists get to say their piece, discuss or debate with each other and take some questions from the audience. And it's all free of admission.
In recent years the conference (sponsored by CU and a CWA organization) has drifted, perhaps inevitably in the People's Republic of Boulder and the home of Ward Churchill, to a leftist bias, but they still make some effort to be diverse both in topics and panelists. Last year, Walter Olson, of Overlawyered.com was a panelist.
So the topic of the panel Roger Ebert was on today was, "Creationism Versus Evolution" held in the big Macky Auditorium on the CU campus. Can you imagine? The other three on the panel were unknowns and rookies at CWA. I did know the moderator, a wonderful anthropology professor at CU, Paul Shankman. But Roger Ebert on evolution? Would he be the creationist on the panel?
Turns out there wasn't one although two of the panelists were warmed over pop psych and new age types trying to find something non-evolutionary that wasn't creationism (creationism is religious dogma trying to hide under the guise of scientific theory -- the latest version is called "intelligent design"). Ebert led off and just blew me away. I felt like I could leave. There was nothing more to say.
Turns out he knows evolutionary science inside and out and could not only quote it but could explain it in an organized fashion that was as if Carl Sagan or Stephen Jay Gould had come back to life. He would have none of the other panelist's namby-pamby fuzziness or non-scientific terminology and definitions. He followed the trail up to what creationism really is and identified the problem as religious belief that is actually insulting to a god even if there is one behind the universe. He even told the story of Stephen Hawking's reply to a questioner who was certain the universe is on the back of a cosmic turtle.
But then in the questions he tried to tie this into right wing religious groups and influence. This is a mistake for a couple of reasons. One is that, as he showed, religious belief and the science of evolution can get along just fine. Not all religious folks are right wing and not all try to influence politics with their religious beliefs. The other thing he's missing (and I know he's a liberal from previous talks) is that left wing politics acts just like a religious dogma or ideology in the same sense. He should have stayed off the political connections and he would have been fine.
Still. It's fun to hear someone who knows so much of what he's talking about even on a subject other than what he's known for and who can say it so well. Two thumbs up for Roger Ebert.
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