The Radical Secularist

In a fairly recent Op-Ed–or was it a miscategorized Obituary?– New York Times columnist and political ‘pundit’, David Brooks announced the “End of (Moral) Philosophy.”  (Click here for link to article.)  As many commentators have been quick to point out, Mr. Brooks’s breaking news of moral philosophy’s demise had been based on rumors greatly exaggerated.  But as philosophers and students of philosophy were clamoring in defense of moral philosophy, often, unfortunately, by engaging rather than shaming the ravings of a journalistic buffoon (Click here for one example.), few seemingly found time or had vision enough to read between the lines of his numerated niceties of the “evolutionary approach” to morality.  While passing from one inane line to the next, I quickly found myself reading not the confused ramblings on the end of moral philosophy but a clear, even if unwritten, articulation of the end of another discipline: journalism.   Brooks’s uninformed and unreasoned Op-Ed was not an isolated instance of unrestrained journalistic stupidity, but is symptomatic of how the growing “punditization” of journalism is slowly sucking the discipline of its lifeblood: information.  When journalists are given license to editorialize, comment upon, interpret or otherwise express their “expert” opinions, feelings or delectations about information pertaining to subjects in which they have little or no expertise–as has become increasingly the case–they actively contribute to the spread of misinformation.  It does not take a person of extraordinary logical talents to see how this might threaten journalism the life and health of which depend on its circulation of credible information.  Although evolutionary psychology has not, as Brooks incredibly claims, brought an end to moral philosophy, one ought not be surprised if in leafing through a future edition of the New York Times one were to stumble upon an Obituary the headline of which reads: JOURNALISM IS DEAD: DIES BY SUICIDE. 

JPM