Naomi versus Naomi, again

So let us turn back to the conflict between Naomi Wolf and Naomi Klein, as I outlined it on Tuesday.

Do I have a preference? Other than Naomi Campbell of course (talking about the beauty myth!).

It is hard to say. Just weeks ago, when I still saw myself as an anarcho-capitalist, I would not have mentioned this, except as a sample of how the control-freaks of the world might fall out with each other to the incidental benefit of liberty. Nowadays I cannot give such a wise assed answer. So ... what CAN I say.

As I indicated Tuesday, I approve of the fact that Wolf, though surely left of center in American political concerns herself, goes off the reservation. She thinks for herself. With regard to Klein, I know of no similar self-assertiveness at the expense of orthodoxy. I'd love to see it.

On the other hand, my relatively slight sampling of both authors indicates to me that Klein is a scholar, careful about sourcing. Wolf, though, is an aficionado of various scholarly fields, not a scholar herself. She can be slapdash about sourcing, and that fact has come back and bit her more than once in her career.

Example: anorexia. People die of malnutrition because they refuse to eat. Most of these people are women. Those two facts fit neatly with Wolf's excoriation of the beauty myth. Wolf casually mentions in her book on that subject the figure of 150,000 women dying every year from anorexia. That is an impressive number and would be stunning were it true. But it is not. Wolf's source seems to have taken the figure from a secondary source, who seems in turn to have gotten it by misreading an authoritative source. The authoritative source was actually giving 150,000 as the number of anorexia SUFFERERS, not the number of annual deaths.

That's very different.

The split of the Naomi's may be a lesson for public intellectuals in two different ways of going wrong: rigidity on the one hand and looseness on the other.

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