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| Home > Reviews > Godless: The Church of Liberalism by Ann Coulter |
| Godless: The Church of Liberalism by Ann Coulter | | Date Created: Aug 05, 2006, 06:04 PM |
 Godless -- The Church of Liberalism by Ann Coulter
This is a tough one.
I'm a closet Ann Coulter fan. I don't agree with her about everything -- Terry Schiavo, the death penalty, abortion -- to name a few. She's a hardcore conservative of the dogmatic religious variety and I'm a libertarian. George Will (see piece on his speech at Cato) turns out to be my kind of conservative, not Ann.
But I've read most of her previous books (Treason, Slander, and How to Talk to a Liberal) and she's got it pegged more often than not. Sure she's too sarcastic and playing to an audience (or preaching to the choir) and this latest book is even more so, but you have to be provocative to get noticed these days and liberals aren't going to read her books anyway. In fact, the way Coulter drives liberals crazy and how they respond to her is one of her most endearing features. One can learn a lot about the liberal worldview from the way they react to Coulter. They'd be better off ignoring her.
Godless forms a sort of trilogy with Treason and Slander. I suppose there could be another volume on the subject but Coulter is all about explaining and exploring the liberal worldview and those that hold it with her accusatory and provocative style.
It occurred to me and I went on record some time ago with the idea of liberal bias and worldview acting like a religion or religious belief. The extremes of the religious right wing are very much like the extremes of the liberal left in terms of blind bias, dogmatic thinking, victimology, wishful thinking, authoritarian solutions, and failure to deal with reality. Coulter took this same idea and made a book out of it -- the left's religion has no God like the religious right's does -- hence the name.
Apparently, based on TV interviews, Coulter thought the idea of a godless religion that liberals adhere to would be the most provocative thing she wrote. The liberals and their media supporters thought otherwise. They damned her for her comments about the 9/11 wives. Ann had already responded in the book: The Democrats default argument is accusing someone of racism. Or as she quotes Peter Brimelow, A "facist" is "someone who is winning an argument with a liberal".
So I was looking forward to a book length expansion of the concept of liberal worldview acting like a religion. The book jacket blurb gave it away. The last five chapters out of eleven are an amazing patented Ann Coulter treatment of evolutionary science as crackpot pseudoscience advanced by liberals. It's like our Ann fell off the rails. I mean she's really lost it here and she is suddenly clueless.
The first six chapters stretch the analogy of liberal worldview as a religion without a God a bit too far and she's getting too sarcastic by a half at least. But she's right about liberal's treatment of religions and religious people, treatment of criminals, the Willy Horton episode, "sobbing hysterical women", and teachers. She's wrong about abortion but makes some good points about liberal hypocrisy. And then she gets into creation "science" and "Darwinists" as if they're a liberal conspiracy and evolution is a bunch of hogwash.
I don't have the time or inclination to defend evolutionary science and detail why Coulter is way off base here. There's certainly an element of "whose ox is gored" and I would have to admit that it calls into question everything else Coulter has analyzed and expounded on. She uses some of the same tactics on science that liberals use on right wingers like The Republican War on Science, which she even mentions. She's amazingly well read.
The two most interesting aspects of Coulter's fanatical rejection of evolutionary science are both aspects of liberal worldview from the point of view of the extreme right. Obviously Coulter doesn't understand science in general and most people don't. Science is hard. It's much easier to have a belief system that has no and requires no scientific rigor. Science doesn't disprove Ann's religious belief. It may displace it in areas that science can explain and some religious belief is obviously wrong, but the problem is using science for political purposes. Science has paradigms that act somewhat like religious dogma but science is self-correcting over time and religious belief is not. Politicized science doesn't care. This is the intersection of liberal dogma and religious dogma. Liberals always have a hidden agenda and so does Coulter -- using science to score political points or attacking science for the same reason.
The fundamental philosophical aspects that are shown in Coulter's rejection of evolutionary science is the same one that makes it impossible for liberals to understand how free markets work. Religious fundamentalists can't understand how complex organisms including humans could be created without a force to guide and direct such development, and liberals can't understand how competition and free market transactions can make an economy without a central authority to oversee and control it. In relation to creationists, Richard Dawkins, noted science writer, calls this the "argument from personal incredulity".
The other, related but more subtle, foundation of Coulter's argument against liberal's use of science is the mirror opposite of what the liberal left sees as the problem with the religious right. Both sides cannot accept that there can be morality without a central authority. For the right it's God's word -- there can be no morality without it. For the left it's a central authority such as government (with a liberal running it). Liberals cannot be trusted because they're godless and the religious right can't be trusted because of God's word as dogma. Both are dealing with a belief system that is ultimately run by and interpreted by man and comes down to political power over others. Both feel that people cannot be trusted.
Science has no truck with either side. Scientific understanding isn't run by consensus -- politics is. Science only cares about best explanations and how the world really works. The left and right are concerned with how the world should work.
Being biased myself, I can say that libertarians make good scientists because libertarians accept humans and human nature for what they are and want to know what works based on prior experience and examination of present conditions rather than ignoring the past and trying to manipulate present conditions for dogmatic and political agendas.
So Ann Coulter finally shows her true liberal self. For the usual Ann Coulter approach, read the first six chapters of her book. To see what an approach that's common to liberals and their "religion" and Ann and her religion looks like, read the last five chapters.
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