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COMMENTARY
January 23, 2008
Again & again
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Normally the pundit who has committed a factual error leaves the retraction to the shortest possible postscript at the end of his next column. But I've decided to lead with mine today. Not because the mistake was so ghastly -- though it was pretty ghastly -- but because it was instructive.We've been discussing free speech and free press, lately, in the encroaching darkness of “political correction.” In Saturday's column, I touched on the efforts made by various faculty and students at the university called La Sapienza in Rome, to prevent Pope Benedict from delivering an address at the opening of term. I said he was intending to discuss the famous trial of Galileo. I got this little nugget from mainstream media, who gathered it from the anti-papal propaganda. The pope had cancelled his appearance, to avoid a pointless confrontation with people I compared to howler monkeys (see below). But he was publishing the speech so anyone with a genuinely open mind could read it. Imagine my surprise, when the speech came out on the Internet. It did not even mention Galileo. I'd been busily defending the pope, in advance, for something he wasn't even going to say. Disappointed, the more, because I was aware, from a Vatican source, that the pope is aware of a great deal that could be said, given scholarly advances of the last few decades, on the much-misrepresented “trial of Galileo.” This phrase has been used as an anti-Catholic slogan ever since John Milton brought the matter to the attention of Protestants in the 1640s. In the 19th century, and since, the “trial of Galileo” became a propaganda myth for Darwinian atheists, “with Galileo representing all that is free, enlightened and progressive, and the Catholic Church standing for everything dark, superstitious, and oppressive.” (I'm quoting then-Cardinal Ratzinger from 1990.) While this characterization is false, it can only be shown false by a patient examination of the actual history. This, in turn, cannot be done in an environment in which any patient examination of a controversial topic will be shouted down. But mea culpa. Had only I checked with the Vatican, on what the pope's speech was going to be about, I could have avoided the trap of believing what I'd heard from those “howler monkeys.” The lesson, which I thought I'd long since learned, is never take anything at face value, no matter how many times it is repeated in the media. And now, a zoological aside. Howlers, which come in several distinct species, are among the largest New World monkeys, with long prehensile tails, travelling through the upper canopies of jungles, ranging from southern Mexico down to northern Argentina, and back up again to Venezuela (where one of them appears to have become the president). But more to the point, each has an outsized hyoid bone, at the base of its tongue, allowing it to brace tongue against larynx in ways not possible to other animals. In human beings, the more discreet equivalent of this bone makes speech possible. In howler monkeys, it facilitates an excruciatingly loud noise, which is used by male and female alike to announce their territory. These are, according to the Smithsonian Institute (you see, I'm checking everything now), the loudest animals in the world. How loud? You can hear them five kilometres away, through dense tropical foliage. On a modern, wind-swept university campus, you can probably hear them even farther. While mostly frugivorous and folivorous (i.e. their diet corresponds approximately to what you will find in a health food store), many are of a surly disposition, and in addition to the “howling,” have other repulsive habits such as throwing filth when you get too near. Come closer still, and I'm told they hardly ever scratch or bite, but are the world champion slap-down artists. They live in communes, and sleep most of the day; but when they're awake, they're awake. The females, according to one account of “Bolivian reds,” can be more aggressive than the males, and it is an interesting point to speculate on why the males are so considerably outnumbered by the females, among those who reach adulthood. (We've noticed something similar happening in law schools.) Some of the howler monkeys -- one thinks of the capuchins, sometimes kept as pets -- are quite intelligent. They used to assist organ grinders, and are now being trained to help quadriplegics. Amazing what a little civilization can achieve! And likewise I have nothing but hope for the bellow brothers and the shriekie sisters whose vocalizations one so often hears in the contemporary academic environment, declaring their territories against those presumed to be racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, or merely white and male. In groups, they are extremely unpleasant to deal with. But detach them, somehow, from the roving mob, and there's no end of things they could be taught to do. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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