Come on, it's rhetorical. Silver complains about the columnists being stuck in or ignorant of their so-called "priors", and isn't Wieseltier making your exact p

Come on, it's rhetorical. Silver complains about the columnists being stuck in or ignorant of their so-called "priors", and isn't Wieseltier making your exact point against him? That is, saying "well, what's the alternative?" He is also sarcastically criticizing the smug application of a technical term ("prior") to a domain where it doesn't hold nearly as much value as Silver accords to it.