Firemaker

In a post a couple of days ago on the amazing properties of water it was noted how easy it is to take some very extraordinary things for granted as we go through our everyday lives. Yet when we stop to contemplate the astounding nature of some of those things, like water, it can just take our breath away.

Consider another example - fire.

When we reflect upon all the characteristics of our planet that have to be just so for fire to even exist and then consider all the physical traits of an animal such as human beings that have to be just right for that animal to be able to use fire, and then contemplate what that animal's culture would be like were the animal or the earth even slightly different such that fire could not be made or harnessed, it just leaves one shaking his/her head in amazement.

In this 21 minute video Australian geneticist Michael Denton walks us through the astonishing series of properties and characteristics of the earth, fire, and mankind that have to be precisely calibrated in order for humans to have developed the culture that we have today. Had any of those properties been other than what they are humans might never have survived at all, much less developed an advanced culture.

Someone hearing all this for the first time might well be stunned by how astonishingly fortuitous it all seems.

The book on which the video is based is available here.

What's the Next Election About?

A lot of people are predicting a "blue wave" of Democrat victories this November, especially in Congressional elections, and they may be correct. Historically, the party out of power does well in midterm elections, so it may be that voters will return the Democrats to power in the House of Representatives, but it probably won't be as easy as some seem to think, and it may not happen at all.

Consider some of the obstacles the Democrats must overcome in order to convince voters to return them to the majority in the House.

Love him or loathe him, President Trump has done more for the workers and families of this country than any president in living memory. We're just a year and a half into his first term and have already experienced some of the lowest black and Hispanic unemployment numbers in history and one of the strongest economies the world has ever seen.

Our GDP growth is beyond the dreams of almost all economists prognosticating during the flaccid years of President Obama's tenure, and over-all unemployment is at near record levels for a peacetime economy.

Like the GDP and employment, the stock market is currently bouncing around in record territory. This might be shrugged off by those who think they have no money in the market, but in fact just about everyone who pays into a retirement system is invested in the stock market since that's where those retirement funds are resting. The better the market does the safer their retirement, including social security and medicare, is going to be.

Moreover, Trump's appointments to the federal bench and Supreme Court have consisted of jurists who boast a record of honoring the Constitution and protecting the freedoms guaranteed in the first and second amendments, a fact which makes him extremely popular with a large swath of the American electorate.

His national security team and U.N. ambassador are perhaps the best any president has ever surrounded himself with. As Victor Davis Hanson puts it,

His [Trump's] national-security team at Defense, State, the National Security Council, the CIA, and the UN is better than any seen in prior postwar administrations. Mike Pompeo is not Hillary Clinton, H. R. McMaster and John Bolton have not been Susan Rice, and Jim Mattis is not Chuck Hagel. Nor is Nikki Haley playing the role of Samantha Power at the U.N., or sending in countless requests to unmask the names of those swept in FISA warrants.

Despite the cavils of critics his actions abroad have strengthened American influence and brought common sense to our foreign policy. He has gotten us out of two very bad Obama-era international agreements - the Paris Climate Accords and the Iranian Nuclear deal.

Reimposing economic sanctions on Iran appears to be bringing that state sponsor of terrorism to its knees, and Trump is putting more pressure on North Korea to give up its nuclear missile program than has any president in the last two decades.

His recent trade deal with Mexico is a boon to American workers and is likely to be followed by similar deals with the Canadians, and possibly the Chinese and Europeans.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are handicapped by an almost complete lack of any agenda for the country beyond repealing the Trump tax cuts and reissuing the executive orders rescinded by Trump. The tax cuts which the Democrats have characterized as "crumbs" and the deregulation of businesses are what have produced our amazing economic growth and unemployment, but the Democrats insist on doing away with them anyway.

They also want to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), open the borders to whomever wishes to come in, provide "free" health care to anyone who wants it, and impeach President Trump.

None of this (except impeachment) will be doable unless the Democrats can also take control of the Senate, which is unlikely, but their agenda will appeal to a pretty narrow sliver of the American electorate in any case. Yet, it's all the Democrats have put forward so far.

In fact, one of their biggest advantages is that President Trump will not be on the ballot in November, so Republican turnout might be perilously (for Republicans) low.

The Democrats have to flip only 24 seats in the House of Representatives out of a total of 435, 48 of which are deemed competitive and 25 of which are in districts Hillary Clinton carried in 2016, in order to take control of that chamber.

If they succeed they've promised to begin the work of undoing what Trump has wrought, but it would be astonishing if the Democrats, running on almost no agenda at all, can win those seats and begin the work of thwarting a president who in a year and a half has probably done more for the people of this country, including the poor, than has any other president, Democrat or Republican, since at least WWII.

The Most Amazing Substance in the Universe

We take so much of what's going on all around us, both in our bodies and in the natural world, for granted. In the course of our busy days we rarely stop to think how marvelous the processes necessary for sustaining life are - processes like photosynthesis, cognition, metabolism, DNA replication, the functioning of our immune system and hundreds of thousands more.

Perhaps just as marvelous are the physical properties of substances like carbon, oxygen and other elements necessary for life as well as the physical properties of the sun, moon and earth. Were not all of these countless properties precisely as they are life would not be possible, certainly not higher life forms like human beings.

One of the substances whose properties are so necessary and astonishingly suited for life is water. This seven minute video, based on a book by geneticist Michael Denton, gives us just a glimpse of how amazing a substance water is. The video is as beautiful as it is informative:

Either our planet and the living things it hosts are the result of an unimaginable number of extraordinarily improbable coincidences or they were all specially designed by a transcendent super-intellect. These two alternatives seem to exhaust all the possible options and believing either requires faith. The question is, which alternative requires the greatest leap of faith?

Thinking Critically

Mary Tillotson at The Federalist presents a good lesson in critical thinking. Her immediate context is the application of a critical eye toward news reports and op-eds, but what she says is sound advice for any aspect of life.

She in fact says so many good things about each of the eight points she makes that I've only space enough to consider a couple of them.

Tillotson begins with an anecdote about a grad class she was taking that was engaged in a discussion of thinking critically about issues like "diversity, racism, and fear-mongering." She writes:

I had a hard time believing lack of critical thinking was a big problem until another student said we live in a time when race relations are worse than they ever have been, and everyone just nodded. Having grown up seeing old photographs of drinking fountains labeled “white” and “colored” and learning about the horrors of the antebellum South, I was stunned. There is a huge difference between “needs improvement” and “never been worse.”

When someone says something like what that student said they're probably not really thinking at all, much less thinking critically. In this case the students are likely just agreeing with the rest of the class in order to be congenial, polite or to be recognized by others as holding the right opinions.

Anyway, here's Tillotson's first point:

Know Your Narrative

Everyone has a worldview. Objectivity is a real thing and truth does in fact exist, but the existence of truth doesn’t mean we’re all good at seeing it. If you want to think critically, the first step is to know where you’re coming from.

Indeed, it's also good to know where the other person is coming from. Knowing a writer or speaker's own worldview helps immensely in "reading between the lines" of what they're saying.

Think of something evil that happened recently and consider these questions in that context. How do you explain good and evil behavior in people? Did the perpetrator act because he was a bad person or was he just a person who made a bad choice? Are there “good people” and “bad people,” or are we all prone to evil?

She elaborates on these questions, but one she doesn't mention that I think is helpful is to ask whether one even believes that "evil" exists. If so, what makes an act evil and what are some examples of it in our day?

Our answers to these questions will go far in helping us to understand both ourselves and others.

Predict, But Don’t Trust, Your Emotional Response

My high school psychology teacher passed out slips of paper to our class one day and asked us to raise our hands if we thought the sentence on our slip was true. We read, shrugged, agreed, and all raised our hands. It turned out we didn’t all have the same sentence: half of us had “People who are more cautious than average make better firefighters” and the other half had “People who are less cautious than average make better firefighters.” So we discussed various cognitive biases.

Cognitive biases also exist outside psychology classrooms. When you hear something bad about someone you already don’t like, you’re much more inclined to believe it. Likewise, when you hear something bad about someone you like, you’re more inclined to disbelieve, dismiss, or downplay it. This is called confirmation bias....You can’t eradicate it, but you can be aware of it.

Confirmation bias occurs everywhere and we all fall victim to it, unfortunately. Not only are we more likely to believe something bad about someone we don't like and something good about people we do like, but we're also more likely to believe a claim is true if it supports a political, scientific, philosophical or religious position we already hold than if it doesn't.

Tillotson makes an excellent suggestion about this:

When you hear a fact (or a “fact”) about someone, consider how you would react if that exact same thing were said about someone else. Put the opponent’s name in the sentence and observe your emotions.

At this point, you may become aware that your emotions are holding different people to different standards. This is an important step toward thinking with your brain and not with your emotions.

We certainly saw this happen a lot in the last election cycle, and it's still happening two months later. Critics of the president-elect, for example, are engaging in discourse that, had similar discourse occurred in the aftermath of Barack Obama's election, would have elicited howls of indignation from the same people.

One of the best intellectual disciplines we can develop is the ability to give people and positions we don't favor the benefit of the doubt and to ask, as Tillotson suggests, whether we would be saying or thinking or doing what we are if the person or position at issue were the person or position we favored.

For example, would those who excused Donald Trump's dishonesty or name-calling during the campaign excused them had it been Hillary Clinton instead of Trump caught in the lie or name-calling? We know in fact that they did not. People on both sides of the electoral divide were far too willing to excuse in their candidate what they saw as reprehensible in the other candidate.

Tillotson has more good advice on how to be a critical thinker, and I urge you to read the rest of her essay at the link.

Evolutionary Ethics Pt. II

In Saturday's post on VP we looked at an essay (paywall) by philosopher of science David Anderson who outlines three views of ethics based on naturalistic evolution.

Anderson considers Larry Arnhart's theory that we have evolved objective moral values to which we should adhere, Michael Ruse's supposition that moral values are an illusion, and Will Provine's view that given naturalistic evolution, there can be no free will, no genuine choices, and therefore no genuine morality.

For Ruse and Provine, moral values are simply matters of subjective preference, like our preference for one flavor of ice cream over another. There's no real right or wrong about the matter.

In the present post I'd like to briefly critique each of these views.

Recall that on Arnhart's theory human beings have evolved twenty core desires which form the basis for objective moral values, but human beings have also evolved many traits that we do not consider "moral" at all. For example, humans have evolved a penchant for violence, aggression, selfishness, promiscuity, cruelty, dishonesty, power, etc., so what are we to make of these? Are these behaviors moral? If not, why not?

If human beings have evolved both kindness and cruelty, what makes us think that kindness is right and cruelty is wrong unless we're subliminally comparing the two to some higher standard, an objective standard, which allows us to discern between them which is right? And if there is a higher objective standard where does it come from? What obligates us to obey that standard? Naturalism has no answer to these questions.

The naturalist just has to assume that we'll all agree that it's better to be kind than to be cruel, but if morality is to be based on the consensus of popular feeling then there are no objective moral values at all. They're all subjective, and no one can be obligated to live according to someone else's subjective values.

In other words, a robust morality imposes duties upon us to live a certain way, but a mindless, natural process cannot impose a duty or hold us responsible for the moral choices we make. Evolution cannot, then, be the source of genuine moral value. It can only be the source of desires and impulses, some of which we like and some of which we don't.

If naturalism is true, then Michael Ruse's position that morality is simply an illusion that we've evolved in order to get us to cooperate with each other, is doubtless correct. But if that's so then there really is no right or wrong, for what could it mean to say that someone who does not cooperate with others is "wrong"? How can it be wrong to refuse to be deluded, or to spurn an illusion? How can anything be wrong to do if there's no real standard of right and wrong nor any ultimate accountability for how we behave?

The naturalist, as Ruse tacitly admits, has no answers to these questions, either.

Will Provine also acknowledges that on naturalism there are is objective moral right and wrong, but his view is equally unsatisfactory. He wants to argue that we are biological machines whose choices are all determined by causal influences over which we have no control. In such machines there's no room for free will, but if we're not in some sense free to choose how we'll behave then there's no way we can be responsible for what we do.

It follows that a man who molests or tortures children, as horrible as that sounds to us, is not responsible, and therefore not accountable, for what he's doing. He's not doing anything wrong, he's only doing things most people don't like, but why should he care what others like and don't like? Why should he not just do what he likes? Naturalism again has no answer.

When people make a commitment to naturalism, a commitment usually motivated by a desire to reject the God of traditional theism, they often do so before they've thought through the implications. It doesn't occur to most people that naturalism, consistently applied, entails moral nihilism, i.e. the belief that there's no real accountability for our behavior, no moral duties, no genuine moral right or wrong.

If they do come to realize this they often just ignore it and go on living as before, not realizing that they've adopted a metaphysical worldview with which they can't live consistently. It's intellectually dishonest but then on naturalism there's nothing wrong with being intellectually dishonest because there's nothing morally wrong with anything.

Evolutionary Ethics Pt. I

It's an interesting fact that when the consensus worldview of a society is unable to explain a crucial aspect of human experience, that failure is often just papered over and ignored rather than allow the basic assumptions that lead to the failure to be challenged.

Such is the case with naturalism (the belief that physical nature is all there is) and morality. Naturalism simply cannot give a plausible account of the kind of robust morality that obligates people to behave in one way rather than another.

Many philosophers recognize this and have concluded that moral claims are either all false (error theorists), neither true nor false (emotivists), or simply the subjective expression of one's own biases, prejudices and preferences (subjectivists).

A worldview that cannot explain morality, however, is quite unsatisfactory since not only does it conflict with our deepest intuitions about the way the world is, but it leads almost inevitably to nihilism. Since naturalists are perforce evolutionists many have tried to rescue their naturalism by grounding morality in evolution, but those attempts are unconvincing.

Philosopher David Anderson discusses three of these attempts in an article at Salvo magazine (subscription required).

The first attempt is to posit the theory that morality arises from our natural desires, and was formed in us by natural selection and random mutation over millions of years. These natural desires serve as the objective standard of morality — the plumb line of right and wrong, as Anderson puts it.

He cites political scientist Larry Arnhart's theory which elaborates on these "universal human desires". These core desires have been possessed by human beings in every culture. They include, "parental care, sexual mating, familial bonding, friendship, social ranking, justice, political rule, war, health, beauty, and ten others." Anderson comments:

In Arnhart's view, an objectively good person is one who satisfies these natural desires insofar as he is able. For example, a man who cultivates friendships, cares for his kids, maintains his physical health, appreciates art, and so on, is a morally good person.

By contrast, a man who alienates his friends, neglects his kids, abuses his body, cares nothing for art or beauty, and so on, is an objectively bad person.

In sum, morality is anchored in universal human desires, and these desires were formed in humans over eons, through descent with modification. Our evolutionary heritage is the wellspring of right and wrong.

A second version of evolutionary ethics, one held by philosopher Michael Ruse, contends that, as a direct consequence of the evolutionary process, humans have developed subjective moral standards that have the appearance of being objective but really are not. They are illusions fobbed off on us by evolution. Here's Anderson again:

That is, evolution has given humans a disposition to believe that there are objective moral values and duties, but in reality there are none; right and wrong are simply matters of personal preference or feeling. This means, for example, that breaking the golden rule is not actually wrong, even though most human beings believe that it is.

Ruse explains: "The evolutionist's claim . . . is that morality is subjective—it is all a question of human feelings or sentiments—but he/she admits that we 'objectify' morality. . . . We think morality has objective reference even though it does not."

According to Ruse, natural selection fooled us into believing in objective morality because such beliefs ultimately help us to survive and reproduce. If we believe we ought to love our neighbor as ourselves, for example, then we cooperate more with others. And the more cooperative a society is, the more successful its members are at surviving and reproducing.

But in reality, morality is ultimately a matter of personal preference and feeling. Since there is no purpose, plan, or goal to evolution, humans are nothing more than the accidental results of a mindless process. We were not designed by God (or anything else) to live in a certain way.

All that's left, then, to build a sense of morality upon is each individual's subjective feelings. Objective moral values and duties are no more real than the tooth fairy.

A third evolution-based view comes to us from the late Cornell biologist William Provine who held that evolutionary theory (and science more generally) supports subjectivism. Anderson remarks that Provine,

...agrees with Ruse that there is no objective standard of morality; rather, each person should do what's in his own best interest.

But Provine adds a twist. He believes modern science has shown that human beings are physical objects—made entirely of things like electrons, quarks, fermions, bosons, and so on. Physical objects obey the laws of physics: electrons do not "decide" what to do, they just mindlessly interact with other phenomena.

Similarly, human beings don't actually make any decisions at all. We think we do, but we are mistaken. We have no more free will than toasters. As Provine says, "What modern science tells us . . . is that human beings are very complex machines.

There is no way that the evolutionary process as currently conceived can produce a being that is truly free to make choices."

Consider a long line of falling dominoes. A given domino can't choose whether to fall or to jump out of the way when struck by another domino; its action is entirely dictated by that of the domino immediately before it (and of the other dominoes before that).

Likewise, no human being has ever made a free decision. Instead, all his "decisions" were really determined by particles and forces set in motion in the distant past. As Provine says bluntly, "free will as it is traditionally conceived . . . simply does not exist."

In summary, the first view holds that we've evolved desires which fit us for survival and therefore we're obligated to live in accord with them.

The second holds that moral values are illusory and don't exist in any objective sense, but we should nevertheless submit to them because things work out better if we do.

The third holds that we're just evolved machines, that free will is an illusion and that since we cannot make genuine choices, there's really no genuine moral responsibility.

We'll take a further look at each of these in our next post.

Discrimination and Disparities

A common assumption on the left today is that any disparity in outcomes or demographic distribution between races is prima facie evidence of racism.

In a short book of only 127 pages the celebrated economist Thomas Sowell explodes this assumption and exposes it as an ideologically-driven myth.

His book is titled Discriminations and Disparities and early on Sowell outlines three different meanings of the word discrimination:

• Discrimination Ia: Basing decisions on evidence about individuals
• Discrimination Ib: Basing decisions on evidence about groups
• Discrimination II: Basing decisions on unsubstantiated notions or animosities

Throughout the book Sowell makes the case that many if not most of the disparities that are almost reflexively imputed to D-II are really rational decisions based on D-Ia or Ib. Moreover, D-I discrimination often works to the advantage of minorities.

Consider this example from a study cited in the book:

...despite the reluctance of many employers to hire young black males, because a significant proportion of them have criminal records (D-Ib), those employers who did criminal background checks on all their employees (D-Ia) tended to hire more young black males than did other employers.

This is because employers knew from the background check that particular young black male applicants had no criminal background and were thus more employable. Had the background check not been given the suitability of these young men would not have been known and employers would've shied away from taking a chance on them.

Nevertheless, there are those who advocate doing away with background checks altogether because they prevent many young blacks with criminal records from being hired. The EEOC has sued employers who use background checks on the grounds that it constitutes racial discrimination even when the background check was given to all applicants regardless of race.

This governmental pressure has the counterproductive effect of actually reducing the number of young black males employers are willing to risk investing in.

Sowell talks about the phenomenon of taxi drivers making a decision not to take customers into or out of certain high-crime neighborhoods at night (D-1b) and the decision of supermarket executives not to open stores in those neighborhoods (D-1b). These decisions are based on risks and costs, yet they're often attributed to racism (D-II) on the part of those who make them, even when the cab drivers are themselves black.

The people hurt by these decisions, of course, are law-abiding residents of these neighborhoods, but the blame should not fall on the decision-makers, it should fall on the criminals who make the risks and costs too high to be acceptable.

Another, related, point he makes on this is that stores and other businesses in these neighborhoods often charge more for their products than do similar stores in more affluent neighborhoods. This, too, is often interpreted as D-II, but stores in high-crime neighborhoods suffer more from vandalism and theft than do stores in other areas. If they don't raise their prices to cover the costs of these liabilities they'll go out of business. If they do raise their prices they're threatened with lawsuits by agencies on the lookout for "racially disparate impacts".

What are these stores and shopkeepers, many of whom are minorities and many of whom operate on tight margins as it is, to do?

Sowell goes on to discuss racial segregation, redlining, the effects of mandated minimum wage, gaps in educational achievement, income inequality and much more that can't be outlined here. Most of the positions, policies and practices he addresses, although the media often sniffs the odor of racism about them, are actually the result of causes that are not at all sinister.

Sowell doesn't deny that there's discrimination (D-II), but in his telling it's largely historical, and so much of what remains today has almost no causal connection to the racial disparities we find in our society.

Discrimination and Disparities is a well-documented, easy book to read and should be de rigueur for everyone who wishes to understand the sociological situation we find ourselves in today and who yearns for greater racial comity in our society.

Butterflies and Metamorphosis

A couple of short videos excerpted from Illustra Media's film titled: Metamorphosis: The Beauty and Design of Butterflies shows the incredible difficulties metamorphosis pose to any account of the process which insists that its genesis be completely unguided and naturalistic.

Why such a process would have ever evolved in the first place and how it could have done so are questions for which the standard Darwinian model has no answer.

There's a bit of overlap in the two videos but not much:

Speaking for myself, the idea that such a process evolved seems possible, maybe even plausible, but the idea that the process evolved unaided by any intelligent, purposeful guidance seems to me quite literally incredible.

Political Incivility

Political violence and incivility are largely a phenomenon exhibited by people who know they cannot prevail in a fair competition of ideas and who feel their only hope of "winning" is by insulting or assaulting their opponents.

The Daily Caller has catalogued a list of over twenty instances of deplorable behavior toward one's political adversaries in just the last seven and a half months. There may be similar examples of people who would call themselves conservatives engaging in such disgusting rhetoric and behavior, but in the cases below the perpetrators happen to be all people on the left.

Even so, if someone were to ask me how often I saw or heard rhetoric of this level of violence and incivility directed at Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or their supporters, my honest answer would be, not very often.

I'm not referring here to the kind of uninformed bluster inflicted upon us by our besotted Uncle Willie at the family picnic, of course. Rather I'm referring to political rhetoric emanating from conservative leaders in politics, the media, or business.

Anyway, here's a selection culled from the Daily Caller's list:

1/12: CNN guest Rick Wilson threatens to “gut” a Trump supporter “like a fish”
3/15: Capitol police arrest Democratic operative for assaulting female Interior Department communications official
5/08: Woman charged with felony reckless endangerment for trying to run Rep. David Kustoff (R-Tenn.) and an aide off the road
5/11: MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace suggests “wringing” Sarah Sanders’ neck
6/20: Kirstjen Nielsen driven out of Mexican restaurant
6/22: Red Hen restaurant owner refuses to serve Sarah Sanders
6/23: Rep. Maxine Waters calls on supporters to harass Trump officials in public, says “God is on [their] side”
6/23: Florida AG Pam Bondi is confronted, spit upon at movie theater
6/29: Feds arrest man threatening to kill Ajit Pai’s children
7/6: Man arrested for making “terroristic threats” against Rep. Zeldin staffer and Trump supporters
7/16: Rep. Cohen tells “military folks” to stop Trump
7/25: Sen. Cory Booker tells people to “get up in the face of some congresspeople”
8/1: CNN’s Symone Sanders says Trump officials getting harassed is the “name of the game”
8/9: Newly uncovered audio reveals Dem Rep. Steve Cohen joking about GOP Rep. Marsha Blackburn jumping off a bridge
8/12: Antifa protesters say they would like to “murder” Trump — “do him like Gaddafi”
8/13: Pearl Jam depicts dead Trump on concert poster for fundraiser for Dem Senate candidate Jon Tester
8/19: Rep. Hastings (D-Fla.): It would be a “catastrophe” if someone saved Trump from drowning.

As bad as some of President Trump's tweets and rhetoric have been, have they really been this bad? To be sure, the president has set an awful example for our citizenry, especially our young, as to how our political discourse should be conducted, but these people on the Daily Caller's list are incentivizing actual violence against people who disagree with them, and that's despicable.

Inflammatory discourse and hatred can only breed resentments and bitterness in our politics and result in more tragedies like the Rep. Steve Scalise shooting. If and when such violence does recur the victims' blood will be on the hands of everyone who dehumanized, or countenanced violence against, their political opponents, even if it was only supposed to be a "joke".

After all, joking about someone's death is only funny to the immature and the mentally deranged.

How We Dehumanize Women

Scanning the news we're often confronted with what seems to be an epidemic of mistreatment of women in our culture. Stories of a campus rape culture, sexually hostile workplaces, spousal abuse, and other examples of violence and degrading behavior perpetrated against women seem to abound, and the question this all raises is "why?". Why do more men today, more than in previous generations, seem to hold women in such low esteem? Why are women so much more likely to be objectified today than in our grandparents' day?

I think a strong case can be made for the claim that the problem is a result of the moral revolution that took place in the 1960s and 70s concerning our attitudes toward sex and violence.

During those decades pornography was mainstreamed, and with the advent of the internet it became easily accessible to adolescents. Three generations of young men have thus been raised on ubiquitous pornographic images. This has likely had several undesirable effects.

First, it has desensitized men to sexual stimuli. A hundred years ago a glimpse of a woman's lower leg was stimulating. It no longer is because now there's much more to be seen anywhere one looks than merely a shapely ankle.

Consequently, men require stronger and stronger stimuli in order to achieve the same level of arousal as someone who's not exposed to the constant barrage of sexual images. Because of this need for ever more erotic stimuli many men want their women to be like the women they encounter in movies, magazines, and online - they want their women to be sexually voracious playthings, and that desire often has a dehumanizing effect on women.

A lot of women simply don't feel comfortable in that role, and that incompatibility can create tension in their relationships. The man feels cheated, the woman feels cheapened and trouble results.

At the same time that pornography exploded, sex was disconnected from marriage and commitment. Many women were perfectly willing to live with men and give them all the benefits of marriage without demanding of them any kind of permanent commitment. This suited many men just fine. When men could have sex without having to bond themselves to a woman, women were more likely to be objectified and used by men who reasoned that there was no sense in buying a cow as long as the milk was free.

People who give us what we want may be popular as long as the benefits keep coming, but they're not respected. Respect may be feigned, of course, as long as the benefit is imminent but when the benefit no longer seems all that novel or exciting a diminution of respect often follows and results in the woman being treated accordingly.

Men are naturally promiscuous, they have to be taught to subordinate their natural impulses and to value instead hearth and family, but our entire culture has conspired in the last forty years to minimize and deride that lesson. So, when many a modern man, unfettered by any profound commitment to a particular woman and children, grows accustomed to the woman he's with she'll eventually begin to bore him, and it won't be long before his eye is cast elsewhere in search of another potential source of sexual excitement.

Along with the decline of traditional sexual morality in the 60s and 70s was the emergence of a radical feminism that castigated the old Victorian habits of gentlemanly behavior. It became quaint, even insulting, for a man to give a woman his seat on a bus or to open a door for her. Men who had been raised to put women on a pedestal - to care for them, provide for them, and nurture them - were told they were no longer necessary for a woman's happiness. In Gloria Steinem's famous phrase "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle."

The more vocal feminists also made it clear that women no longer appreciated being treated differently than men. Thus, our entertainment culture began depicting women in movies as just as raunchy, coarse, and proficient at killing and mayhem as men, and the idea of a woman being an object of special respect and courtesy because she needed male protection and care became risible. This, too, dehumanized women by eroding the esteem in which their gender had formerly been held among men.

As with sex, so with violence. The inclination to violence in the male population follows a Bell curve distribution. At some point along the tail there is a line to the left of which lies the segment of the population which represents men who are violent. Most men sublimate and control their natural inclination to violence, but when they are exposed to it over and over as young men, when they amuse themselves with violent movies and video games, when they immerse themselves in violent imagery and themes, they become desensitized to it and tolerant of it. When they're no longer horrified by violence the population of males undergoes a shift toward that line, spilling many more men onto the other side of the line than would have been there otherwise.

This affects women as much as men, if not moreso, because women are often the victims of male violence. As men become more inclined to violence, as they lose respect for women, as our culture portrays women as sexually insatiable playthings, women become increasingly the victims of male lust, anger and aggression.

It would be well for any young woman who is beginning to get serious about a young man to find out how much of his time he spends on violent movies and computer games and what he thinks about pornography. She'll learn a lot of very valuable information about him if she does.

Weak Reasons

A Pew survey from a year or so ago found that the number of Americans who don't believe in God or who are unaffiliated with any religion is continuing to increase. The survey listed the reasons, and I have to say the reasons seem pretty weak for such an important epistemic commitment:

Consider just the reasons for unbelief (I'm surprised, by the way, that the problem of suffering didn't make this list since it's probably the best reason for skepticism out there.).

1. Learning about evolution. There's no incompatibility between evolution and God. Many theists believe in both. In fact, as philosopher Alvin Plantinga points out, the conflict really lies between naturalism (atheism) and evolution. If evolution is true then our rational faculties have evolved to help us survive, not necessarily to lead us to truth.

Thus, those who believe both atheism and evolution to be true have no basis for trusting their reason to lead them to truth, especially metaphysical truth. But if that's so, then they have no basis for trusting their reason when it leads them to conclude that either atheism or evolution is true. If God exists, however, then we have grounds for thinking that God has caused our reason to evolve in such a way as to make it generally reliable.

2. Too many Christians doing unChristian things. Even if it were granted that many people fall short of what we might expect of them (who doesn't?) what does that have to do with whether or not God exists? God's existence doesn't depend on whether people who believe He exists live consistently with that belief.

3. Religion is the opiate of the people. Even if it were granted that religion misleads or stupefies many people that's also irrelevant to the question whether God exists. The truth of theism is one thing, the truth of a particular religion, or religion in general, is something quite different. It's ironic, parenthetically, that the opiate claim is taken from Karl Marx. If anything has stupefied the masses, as well as the intelligentsia, over the last one hundred years it has been atheistic Marxism.

4. Rational thought discredits religious belief. Even if it were granted that many religious beliefs cannot withstand rational scrutiny that has nothing to do with whether theism itself is rational. The claim that theism is discredited by rational thought is simply false as many, if not most, philosophers, both theist and atheist, have acknowledged.

5. Lack of evidence for a creator. This objection is as puzzling as it is common. There are numerous arguments that constitute evidence for a creator. At least two forms of the cosmological argument (the kalam argument and the argument from contingency of the universe), the argument from cosmic fine-tuning, and the moral argument are all strong arguments whose conclusions assert the existence of God.

6. Just don't believe it. I think this objection might better be stated, "I just don't want it to be true that God exists." If someone doesn't want theism to be true, of course, then nothing will persuade him or her that it is.

In fact, I suspect that #6, this deep desire for a naturalistic world in which people are not accountable for how they choose to live, is the fundamental reason for most unbelief today. The other reasons listed above certainly don't seem to constitute adequate explanations of it.

Sub-Optimal Or Optimal Design?

One frequently employed argument against the theory of intelligent design is that if living things are indeed the product of intelligent agency the designing agent must not be all that competent since some biological structures appear to be quite poorly designed.

The argument goes back at least to David Hume (d. 1776) in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and modern skeptics point to the human eye as an almost paradigmatic illustration of Hume's claim. The light sensitive cells in the eye, it has long been thought, are facing the wrong way in the retina.

Yet, as research on the eye continues it looks more and more as though the eye is, in fact, optimally designed for the role it plays in vision.

Here's a short video which makes this point quite well:

The optimality of the eye's design coupled with the fact that complex eyes have been around since the cambrian and have no fossilized ancestral predecessors, leads to the conclusion that this very complex structure arose with relative suddenness in the history of life and apparently de novo.

That's pretty hard to explain on any naturalistic theory of origins.

A Metaethical Exercise

Here are some questions for you to ponder. Suppose you're talking to someone about something that harms others, say, kidnapping or sexual assault, and you and your interlocutor both agree that actions that cause harm to others are morally wrong.

Very well, but what are you asserting when you claim that X is morally wrong? What does it mean to declare an act wrong (or right) in the moral sense?

If we say that rape or racism are wrong what are we affirming about these things? What does the term "morally wrong" actually mean? Does it mean nothing more than an act that most people don't like? If so, why is that a reason not to do it?

Does it mean that it's an act that one just shouldn't do? If so, why shouldn't one?

An act is legally wrong if it violates the civil or criminal law, but what law is violated when one commits a selfish act like refusing to help someone in need when one could easily do so or when one cheats on one's spouse? Is there an objective moral law similar to the civil or criminal law? If so, where does it come from? What is it grounded in?

If a criminal law carries no sanction, no penalty, nor holds transgressors in any way accountable in what sense is violating it really wrong? Suppose there was no penalty attached to laws prohibiting one from polluting the environment, in what sense would polluting the environment be wrong? What's the point of insisting: "But it's illegal!"?

If there is a moral law is there personal accountability for violating it? If not, how is it wrong to violate it? Who holds tyrants like Fidel Castro or Kim Jung Un accountable for ordering the assassinations and torture of their political enemies?

Even if they were in some way punished, as was Saddam Hussein, how is imprisoning them, or even executing them, any kind of just recompense for the human misery they caused? How is justice achieved when a mass murderer like Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas shooter, takes his own life after murdering dozens of others? Is justice even possible?

The problem is that in secular societies in which large numbers of people have concluded that the idea of God is no longer viable, there's no good answer to any of these questions. If there is no personal God then there is no objective moral law, there's no accountability, there is no justice, and the term "morally wrong" has no real meaning. It serves only to express our personal likes and dislikes and nothing more.

When a society eventually realizes that this is the ineluctable consequence of its predilection for being free of the God of traditional theism its members will almost certainly adopt the slogans "Look out for #1", "Might makes right", and "Anything goes" for these are the logical moral entailments of a society stripped of any ground for objective moral law.

And the next step beyond that is tyranny.

This is the trajectory many Western societies are following, apparently oblivious to where they're headed. Some of the more thoughtful members of those societies, of course, see what lies ahead, but even for many of these a return to traditional theism is too high a price to pay if that's what's necessary to avert the coming reckoning.

They'd rather continue down the road they're on and take their chances with impending moral anarchy.

Hume's Maxim

The skeptical philosopher David Hume, in arguing against the reasonableness of belief in miracles, famously articulated what might be called Hume's Maxim. He wrote:

A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined....There must, therefore, be a uniform experience against every miraculous event otherwise the event would not merit that appellation. And as a uniform experience amounts to a proof, there is here a direct and full proof, from the nature of the fact, against the existence of any miracle....

Hume's definition of a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature is deeply problematic, but let that go for now (see here for a discussion of some of the problems with that definition). Hume goes on to say that,

The maxim, by which we commonly conduct ourselves in our reasonings, is that the objects of which we have no experience, resemble those of which we have; that what we have found to be most usual is always most probable; and that where there is an opposition of arguments, we ought to give the preference to such as are founded on the greatest number of past observations.

Hume would doubtless be aghast at the implications of this maxim (or rule) for the contemporary controversy over intelligent design. He employed the rule against belief in miracles, arguing that because we have an overwhelming experience against violations of the laws of nature we should reject any report that a "violation" occurred. If we grant Hume his rule (which I don't - the rule only entails skepticism of the report of a miracle, it doesn't warrant outright rejection of it) there's no reason not to apply it to the discovery over the last fifty years that the universe and life are both information-rich.

Couple that discovery with the fact that we have a uniform experience of information, whether in a library, on a hard drive, or wherever, being produced by intelligent minds, and it would seem that Hume would have to grant that we should believe that the information contained in biological cells and organisms must be the product of an intelligent mind. We have no experience, after all, of information being produced by random, impersonal processes and forces. Indeed, we have a uniform experience of random action degrades information and generates disorder.

Philosopher of science Stephen Meyer discusses the problem biological information poses for naturalistic evolution in this video:

Meyer also offers a critique of Hume's definition that a miracle is a violation of the laws of nature in this video:

Why His Approval is Improving

These sorts of statistics set Never-Trumpers' teeth on edge, but here they are nonetheless: The Rasmussen Daily Tracking Poll has President Trump's approval rating at 50%.

CNN's Jeffrey Toobin, like many of his colleagues, is mystified how the president's approval numbers keep climbing despite a non-stop, 24/7 media campaign to discredit him, a campaign in which the president himself often seems to be gleefully supplying the opposition's ammunition.

Nevertheless, President Trump is, at least for now, more highly favored than his predecessor was at the same point in their presidencies.

Why is that? Former president Bill Clinton's consigliere James Carville famously posted a sign in the Clinton campaign war room to focus campaign workers' minds on the paramount concern of voters in any election. The sign read, "It's the Economy, Stupid."

That sign explained why Clinton served two terms despite being mired in scandal. Much else may be irritating, may be regrettable, may even be deplorable, but as long as the economy is percolating along, a large swath of the American electorate will tolerate a lot of shenanigans from our leaders. We certainly did from Clinton, largely because the economy was doing well in the 1990s, and, to the left's chagrin, we probably will from Trump as well.

To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, voters are more disposed to tolerate, as long as evils are tolerable, than to right themselves by abolishing the leaders to which they've become accustomed, and nothing makes "evils" more tolerable than economic prosperity.

Liz Peek at The Hill presents a few economic facts which illustrate the how well things are going under Trump:

• The most recent IBD/TIPP poll shows Americans' “Economic Optimism” index climbing in August to 58, the second-highest mark since January 2004.
• In August, respondents rated their “Quality of Life” at 64.2; the previous all-time high was 63.1, recorded in January 2004.The average under President Obama was 53.7.
• Similarly, the latest reading on “Direction of the Country” hit 50.3, up 13 percent from the prior month, and the highest recorded since 2005. That compares to a 17-year average of 41.6 and an average of 37 during President Obama’s time in office.
• The “Financial Stress Index,” which has averaged 59.4 since it was created in 2007, plunged in August to 47.4, its lowest level ever. As IBD explained, “People are feeling more secure in their finances than they have at least since the early 2000s.”

Add to this the fact that unemployment is at historic lows (3.9% overall), and that black and Hispanic unemployment are likewise at historic lows while tax revenues are at historic highs, and you have the prescription for a popular presidency.

Given all this, one might speculate that the president's approval numbers would be stratospheric if either a) the Mueller investigation into Russian "collusion" never happened or b) the president canceled his twitter account.

Regardless, the economy is benefiting from Trump's tax cuts and his easing of the onerous Obama-era regulations on individuals and enterprise. It's a wonder that more countries haven't gotten the message, but evidently they haven't.

What Is Social Justice?

As anyone who has been on most college campuses during the last couple of years can attest, the term "social justice" has achieved an almost iconic status. It's a term that glides easily from the lips of young college progressives, but it's a term which often defies attempts by those who invoke it to explain.

What exactly is social justice? Jonah Goldberg, a writer for the American Enterprise Institute, National Review magazine and the author of two excellent books, Liberal Fascism and Suicide of the West, offers us a succinct explanation in this brief video from Prager U.:

Simply put, social justice is at best an empty progressive shibboleth and at worst a code word for a recrudescent communism which is too embarrassed by its manifold failures to go by its real name.

It's not "justice" at all but rather its opposite. There's no justice in taking what one person has worked hard for all his life and giving it over to another who may not be willing to work at all.

We've seen this form of justice played out in once prosperous Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) where farms that had been in the family of white farmers for generations were simply confiscated from them and handed over to black Zimbabweans who had no knowledge of farming. Not only was the confiscation of the property a terrible injustice, but the result has been disastrous for Zimbabwean agriculture.

Now South Africa, having failed to learn the lessons of its neighbor's foolish policy, is about to embark on the same ill-considered policy itself, all in the name of social justice.

One wonders how many of the more academically successful of those students who are demanding "social justice" would think justice had been served if their GPA was reduced by the college so that some of the points they earned could be distributed to students who didn't do as well.

I'll bet not many.

What's Wrong with the 81%?

Historian John Fea has written a book titled Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump in which he seeks to understand why so many people who call themselves evangelical Christians voted for Donald Trump and at the same time chastise them for so doing.

Fea is himself an evangelical Christian who teaches at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, but he's "shocked", "saddened", "frustrated" and "angry" that 81% of his fellow Evangelicals pulled the lever for a man whose moral character should've disqualified him among voters who believe that the nation's leaders should be above reproach.

Fea is rightly critical of Christian "leaders" who, in one way or another, sought during the campaign to excuse Mr. Trump's well-documented prevarications, debaucheries and vulgarities. He also offers some interesting, although perhaps not entirely relevant, historical insight into the oft misunderstood role of Christianity in the nation's founding, as well as the sometimes embarrassing relationship between Christian leaders and the White House.

In assessing the book these can all be set on the positive side of the ledger. On the negative side, unfortunately, there's much in Fea's book that I think is unfair to those in the 81% who, distressed by the choice between two very flawed candidates, chose to vote for the one whose political promises most closely aligned with their own hopes.

On page 73 he relates an incident in which a lady approached him after a lecture on this topic and said that she herself was a member of the 81% and she wanted Fea to tell her, given what we knew about the moral shortcomings of both candidates, how an evangelical could select between them if character was to be the deciding factor.

This was, I think, the salient question facing many Christians in November of 2016, and for reasons I elaborated upon in a couple of posts written around the 2016 election (See here and here), many saw the moral issue as a wash and chose instead to cast their ballot for the candidate whose policies were, if implemented, most likely to lead the nation out of the morass, both social and economic, it had fallen into during the previous decade.

Fea seems to recognize this motivation but chose to give it little attention, perhaps because he doesn't believe it's the chief reason why so many evangelicals lent their support to Trump. He may be right about that, but to lump those for whom it was a major consideration with those for whom it wasn't strikes me as somewhat simplistic and unfair.

In any case, he writes on page 7 of the Introduction that:

For too long, white evangelical Christians have engaged in public life through a strategy defined by the politics of fear, the pursuit of worldly power, and a nostalgic longing for a national past that may have never existed in the first place. Fear. Power. Nostalgia. These ideas are at the heart of this book, and I believe they best explain that 81%.

In succeeding chapters he unpacks these three ideas in a way that sometimes makes them seem ignoble or unseemly motivators for Christian action. He suggests, for example that fear - of change, of the future - belies a lack of trust in God's providential control over the doings of men. "Fear," he quotes author Marilynne Robinson, "is not a Christian habit of mind."

Be it as it may that fear shouldn't be a mental habit, it's nevertheless difficult to agree with Fea that fear, in the sense I understand him to be using the word, is always an unbecoming motive for a Christian or an indicator of a lack of trust in God. In fact, I suspect, that Fea doesn't think this either.

After all, he himself must've been fearful - fearful for the future of the country - when he realized on election night that Trump was going to win the election. Otherwise, why be frustrated and angry with the 81% of evangelicals who voted for the president-elect? In fact, why else write such an impassioned book if not motivated by fear for what Christian support for Trump was doing to the church's witness?

Fea says that fear has no place in the life of one who trusts God, but if he truly believes that then when he realized on election night that Trump was going to prevail why did he not just trust that this was God's will and that He had everything under control? Why get angry with those Christians who gave Trump his victory? There seems to me a dissonance between his standard for the 81% and his own reaction to Trump's election.

Fear, though it shouldn't control us, is even so a perfectly reasonable and appropriate response to certain threats. The question is whether a particular threat or set of threats justify a fearful response. The 81% saw the threats posed by liberal progressivism, some of which Fea himself agrees are ominous, as ample justification for their fear of a Hillary Clinton presidency. Fea disagrees, though, that the threat reached a sufficiently high level of seriousness to warrant support for Trump, but he doesn't satisfactorily explain why a Clinton presidency should not arouse fear among Christians while the threats he believes to be posed by a Trump presidency should.

Fea strongly and, to a large extent, rightly criticizes Christians for aspiring to positions of power within the current administration. This aspiration can certainly be both disreputable and dangerous. It has seduced some evangelical "leaders" into excusing or rationalizing some of Mr. Trump's egregious behavior, behavior that should never be excused and which was rightly and roundly condemned by these same "court evangelicals", as Fea aptly labels them, when similarly engaged in by President Clinton.

In pointing out this hypocrisy Fea is excellent, but his analysis of "power seeking" when applied to the broader mass of the 81% is vague, and his use of the word "power", at least when applied to the hopes of the majority of Christian Trump voters, is unfair and gratuitously pejorative. "Influence" would've been a more charitable word choice, I think.

In other words, setting aside the court evangelicals - the handful of prominent leaders who have in some cases sold their souls for a mess of pottage - the average evangelical voter, like everyone else, hoped to gain some influence over the policies issuing forth from Washington, and surely there's nothing dishonorable with wanting to influence today's leaders, any more than there's anything dishonorable with wanting to teach history and write books to influence tomorrow's leaders.

Indeed, if the desire for influence is somehow nefarious then no Christian should ever run for political office, but surely Fea would not endorse such a principle.

The Trumpian slogan "Make America Great Again" is Fea's springboard for his critique of evangelical nostalgia. He focuses on the word "again" and rightly points out that any past era to which one directs one's gaze may have been "great" for some but not so great for others. As much as whites might pine for the "good old days" of the fifties, Fea observes, most African Americans would not be particularly nostalgic for those years, nor wish to return to them.

True enough, but I think this misses the point. It's not a particular era to which anyone wants to return in toto, it's rather particular qualities of the past that many, both blacks and whites, would like to recover while retaining the best of the present.

For instance, there was a time, prior to the 1960s, when for both blacks and whites families were stronger, neighborhoods were more secure and more communal, drugs were a much less serious problem, public education (even in segregated schools) was in many ways better, movies and music were less coarse and vulgar, babies in the womb were safer, the economy was sound, and religious liberty was not under assault.

When candidate Trump spoke of making America great again a lot of evangelicals reflected on how far we'd strayed from this historical reality and saw in Trump a hope that we might get some of it back. To suggest that MAGA was a "dog whistle" or "code" for reinstituting Jim Crow or undoing all the salutary social progress that's been made in America over the last fifty years, as some of Trump's critics have done, is simply specious and unfair.

Finally, Fea approvingly cites University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter's call for Christians to refrain from becoming activists in the culture war. In his introduction, he writes that, "Christians were never meant to change this world; instead they are called to .... [be] a 'faithful presence' in their local communities and neighborhoods."

This sounds a lot like a veiled call to Christians to surrender meekly to the forces of cultural decay and degeneration sweeping over our society. I wonder whether Fea would've urged William Wilberforce and the Clapham sect to abstain from fighting for the abolition of slavery, or for Martin Luther King and others in the American civil rights movement to have declined to fight for the right to vote for politicians who would advance the cause of racial justice, or for Christians today who fight on behalf of immigration reform or environmental causes to desist from their protests and political efforts.

I doubt it, but surely these are all as much cultural issues as are abortion, pornography and gay marriage.

I'm quite sure that Christians who campaigned for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were not seen by Professor Fea as doing anything untoward. Why is it that it's only when Christians involve themselves in what are seen as conservative political or social issues that they're accused of bringing disrepute to the name of Christ? Why is it only conservative Christians who are called upon to be conscientious objectors in the culture wars?

Fea argues that had evangelical Christians spent as much money on simply being a faithful witness for the sanctity of human life rather than dirtying themselves in the political mud pit by seeking to elect politicians who would overturn Roe they'd be a lot more effective and compelling ambassadors for Christ, but this is a false alternative. There's no reason Christians shouldn't do both, and indeed they are doing both.

There's nothing wrong with Christians working to overturn unjust laws and to scrub some of the social toxins from our culture, but, to be sure, this is a task that must be undertaken as irenically and with as much integrity, civility, and winsomeness as possible.

If the world remains nonetheless repelled by such activism and advocacy then that's the world's problem, not the church's. So, too, was the world repelled by the ancient prophets.

How Did This Ever Evolve?

The problem, of course, is not with explaining how the phenomenon in the video could have evolved, but rather how it could have evolved as a result of a blind, undirected, purposeless process.

Doubtless the phenomenon could have been designed by an intelligent engineer, just as intelligent engineers have evolved computers from abacuses and fighter jets from Flyer, the first plane flown by the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk.

But it's hard to imagine how fighter jets could have evolved from Flyer (or, a forteriori, how Flyer itself could have evolved) through sheer serendipity.

Anyway, watch the video. It's pretty amazing.

The Source of Our Estrangements

Some time ago I wrote a post on the sheer stupidity of political correctness. The post was based on an incident involving the writer Naomi Riley, and it's worth revisiting:

A week ago I commented on the case of Naomi Schaeffer Riley who was fired from her position as blog writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education because she offended a number of readers in the academy by stating the obvious, i.e. that much of black studies scholarship isn't scholarship at all.

Riley has leveled similar criticisms at other academic fields as well, but that didn't matter. You can say what you want about other disciplines, but if you say anything critical about black studies it's a thought crime - ipso facto proof of racism. Any criticism of the quality of any scholarship associated with any approved minority, whether racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual orientation, is heresy and must be expunged lest thoughtful people be impressed by the truth of it.

So I thought it amusing the other night watching a talk show on which Riley appeared as a guest describing her encounter with liberals who no doubt perceive themselves as deeply committed to tolerance and the diversity of speech and ideas. It was amusing because the host of the show, recounting the allegations of racism made against her by her detractors, invited her husband, a Wall Street Journal editor who was sitting in the audience, to join them on the stage to defend her against the indictment.

The audience laughed as her husband made his way to the stage. The racist Ms Riley was married to a black man and has two biracial children.

Liberal political correctness isn't just insufferable. It's stupid. It's a form of holier-than-thou self-righteousness embraced by people who substitute formulas for thought because thinking is too taxing, who latch on to the slightest deviation from orthodox speech and behavior as proof that someone is a heretic.

They're people so filled with their own prejudices that they just assume everyone else is also, and proof is just a matter of catching the other guy saying something that could be twisted by the witless to indicate a deviation from orthodoxy.

They're the modern descendants of those who burned witches at the stake in the fourteenth century because the hapless women made some innocuous but careless remark. They're kin to those self-righteous prigs in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter who, though filled with their own sins, nevertheless sternly punished anyone who gave them the merest warrant for doing so. They're cut from the same cloth as the communist totalitarians who use mind-numbing reeducation camps and "snitches" to eradicate "deviationism" among the people.

They are stereotypical ideological puritans and if given enough power they'll eventually deaden all thought and discourse, which is doubtless their goal.

Political correctness came to mind again recently as I was contemplating allegations that President Trump is responsible for the social alienation and estrangement we're experiencing in our national life.

Well, perhaps he is responsible for some of it, though I doubt it's much. I think the bulk of responsibility lies with the left's penchant for identity politics, two significant and related constituents of which are political correctness and victimhood.

In their pursuit of power the left seeks to persuade everyone, or at least every minority, that they're a victim, but as Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson has said, "As soon as you see yourself as a victim that breeds thoughts of anger and revenge."

By encouraging everyone to see themselves as a victim of some sort of oppression the left fosters bitterness and resentment toward whomever the oppressors are alleged to be (usually straight white Christian males).

It's that hostility, conceived in a perceived victimhood, that's tearing us apart from each other, that's making dialogue between opposing viewpoints extremely difficult and which is spawning an incivility in our public life that's unprecedented since the Civil War.

Just ask Naomi and Jason Riley.

Where Have All the Great Writers Gone?

Armando Simon has written an interesting column at New English Review in which he asks why the west is no longer producing great literature. He focuses primarily on the United States but also includes England in his analysis. Here's his lede:

Something very, very odd is going on in our culture: the quality of literature appears to be fast declining. Whereas, before now, the United States could boast of a whole constellation of living first-rate writers, nowadays the number of excellent writers can be counted in the fingers of one’s hand—and those writers are on their last legs.

Nor can we take any consolation in thinking that the same phenomena may be at work that has been seen in the case of music and art, wherein geniuses have been overlooked, only to be discovered and appreciated later (e.g., Melville, Schubert, Van Gogh, Renoir). If anything, innovative, or controversial, writers, such as Joyce, were read and discussed while they lived and wrote.

Nor, again, can we take comfort in the attitude that has prevailed in Western society within the past three or four decades that, “there is nothing good, nor bad, only opinion” (with its corollary, “there is no right, or wrong, only opinion”), which has been an excuse for the proliferation of truly abysmal “art” by self-important, neurotic, talentless mediocrities.

Simon goes on to divide American history into fifty year increments starting with 1800 and then lists all the great American fiction writers who achieved their greatest work during each increment. When he does so he finds a fascinating result. The pattern that emerges is a bell-shaped curve peaking in the 1901-1950 increment and fading to near zero in the present era.

The same pattern appears if the same analysis is applied to British writers. Simon concludes that "Good literature is flatlining" and offers a couple of possible explanations for this phenomenon, some of which seem anodyne and some of which are more worrisome. Here's an example of each:

Wherefore this decline in great writers? It may very well be that the ravenous film and television industries have absorbed them. It has to be admitted that many television series and specials, and the cinema, have been superb (just as most others have also been mediocre, as in literature and art) and one cannot but wonder if those same screenwriters would not have written excellent fiction.

More troubling is the possibility that the bell-shaped distribution of great writers is an instance of a characteristic of intellectual endeavor in general. Simon cites technological discovery as an example:

In modern times, scientific innovations of a technological nature have surprisingly followed an identical bell curve pattern (telegraph, radio, television, cars, tanks, machine guns, rubber, steam engine, refrigerators, nuclear reactors, light bulbs, trains, cameras, rockets, airplanes, computers, etc.).

All subsequent innovations in our time have simply been constant refinements on those crucial, nascent inventions.

He offers more possibilities in his article which is relatively brief and which should definitely interest anyone who cares about literature.

Gratuitous Beauty

One of the core principles of traditional evolutionary theory is that physical traits evolve in a population because they help the organism to adapt to their environment and enjoy reproductive success as measured in the production of greater numbers of offspring.

One problem with this hypothesis is that it simply doesn't explain the extravagant diversity and beauty found in the living world, an extravagance that seems totally superfluous and unnecessary for the survival of the species.

This beautiful video, featuring Australian geneticist Michael Denton and titled Biology of the Baroque, presents numerous examples of this phenomenon in nature. It's twenty minutes long but the footage is so gorgeous that once you start watching you'll want to keep on to the end.

The theme of the video is that the superabundant beauty found in living things seems unnecessary for the survival of the species and inexplicable on a Darwinian account of life. It's wholly gratuitous, and, so far from suggesting a genesis in blind chance and purposelessness, points us rather to the artistry of an Intelligent Designer.

Watch it and see what you think:

Post-Postmodernity

Students have sometimes asked me what I thought would come after the postmodern (po-mo) infatuation which some say we're currently experiencing. Postmoderns tend to deny that there are objective truths about meanings or values and place the emphasis instead on "what's true for me". Truth is subjective. Right and wrong are whatever I or my peer group decides to accept as right or wrong. There are no objective facts, as Nietzsche said, only one's own feelings and interpretations.

My own "feeling" is that what will follow this unstable and untenable stage will be either a cultural and intellectual apocalypse or a return to more traditional views of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True.

Philosopher Crispin Sartwell of Dickinson College has given us his interesting take on what's coming next in the New York Times' Opinionator column. There he declares us to be on the cusp of "popomo," a post-post modern period in philosophy which will, in fact, amount to a return to realism.

His whole column is worth reading and the reader can get a sense of it in his summation. After discussing the postmodern anti-realism of thinkers like Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty, Sartwell says this:

But the ‘80s heyday of Rorty and Fish is beginning to seem like a long time ago, and a backlash seems to be in progress. More recent work in philosophy includes various forms of realism about the world: the idea that reality is not the product of consciousness, or of human perceptual structures or languages or interpretive communities, but exists independently.

We don’t make the world, as one might put it; the world makes us. Where for decades or even centuries, philosophy has focused on our representations and descriptions of the world, on human consciousness and cultural systems, many are now turning to the external features of the world that constitute the content of our experiences and the context of our social practices.

Let’s call this phase after postmodernism post-postmodernism – “popomo” for short....

Some of the motivation for the realist turn has been ecological: Climate change isn’t just in our heads or in our descriptions, but a real-world situation that requires real-world physical transformations. Others have been political: defenses of the urgent truth of justice, or of the importance of material economic conditions and the treatment of physical human bodies.

And I think that, as our experience becomes in many ways increasingly mediated or virtual, we've simply started yearning toward the old-fashioned physical environment, which was always available and still is, and on which whatever we see on a screen depends utterly. Ideas are always an index of longings.

The period after the period after the end is the popomo era. But the “post” was always itself a symptom of a sense of decline and ending, and I do hope and think that our period of inquiry doesn’t just come after something, but that it is itself something, and that it comes before something.

The problem with realism is that it seeks to make the physical world, as well as human moral and aesthetic values, objectively real entities. The former, however, seems to be undercut by quantum physics and the latter seems to be undercut by naturalistic metaphysics.

Quantum physics seems to point to mind as being the fundamental reality and naturalistic metaphysics entails, in my view, an inescapable subjectivity of moral and aesthetic value. It'll be interesting to see how Sartwell's last line ultimately plays out.

Defending Racism at the Times

Last week the New York Times let their ideological mask slip by hiring a woman of Korean ancestry named Sarah Jeong, an openly racist writer, to their editorial board.

Jeong has several times in the past couple of years tweeted her contempt for whites in general and white men in particular, but evidently race hatred only stunts your career among liberal progressives such as those who populate the Times' upper echelons if it's expressed by whites against any other group.

If you're a "minority", on the other hand, you can say the vilest things about white people and be rewarded with a plum contract at the nation's "paper of record".

Andrew Sullivan includes a sampling of Ms Jeong's thoughts on white folks in this paragraph in a piece at The New York Magazine:

A little more disturbing is what you might call “eliminationist” rhetoric — language that wishes an entire race could be wiped off the face of the earth: “#cancelwhitepeople.” Or: “White people have stopped breeding. you’ll all go extinct soon. that was my plan all along.”

....[H]ere’s another gem: “Dumb..s f...ing white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs p...ing on fire hydrants.” Or you could describe an entire race as subhuman: “Are white people genetically disposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins.”

And then there’s this simple expression of the pleasure that comes with hatred: “oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.” I love that completely meretricious “old” to demean them still further. And that actual feeling: joy at cruelty!

Ms Jeong's new employer, the folks who would ostensibly have us believe that they deplore the culture of incivility that has descended like smog upon our politics over the past two decades, have enthusiastically defended her bigoted comments. Sullivan, however, does a fine job of dismantling what is, in fact, an astonishingly tendentious apologia.

The defense of Jeong is predicated on the left's insistence that racism is a blight which afflicts all and only white people. Thus, Ms Jeong, being Asian, cannot possibly be a racist ab defino.

The definition is, of course, a perversely moronic and self-serving bit of special pleading, but it's widely adhered to by Ms Jeong's fellow-travelers who insist that she did nothing wrong to post odious, hateful tweets about whites and that it's a form of bigotry to criticize her, an Asian woman, for having done so.

Here's Sullivan:

[Jeong] blames her ugly tweets on trolls whose online harassment of her prompted her to respond in turn. She was merely “counter-trolling.” She says her tweets, which were not responses to any individual, were also “not aimed at a general audience,” and now understands that these tweets were “hurtful” and won’t do them again.

The New York Times also buys this argument: “her journalism and the fact that she is a young Asian woman have made her a subject of frequent online harassment. For a period of time, she responded to that harassment by imitating the rhetoric of her harassers.”

Let me explain why I think this is the purest of bulls..t. If you want to respond to trolls by trolling them, you respond to them directly. You don’t post slurs about an entire race of people (the overwhelming majority of whom are not trolls) on an open-forum website like Twitter. And these racist tweets were not just a function of one sudden exasperated vent at a harasser; they continued for two years.

It's not a very great step from defining racism as a white people's disease to demands for actions like those of the South African parliament which has passed a law to allow for the confiscation of white-owned farms without even compensation to white farmers and whose leaders are even making veiled threats of genocide of white citizens.

If a white person tweeted about blacks anything as vile as Ms Jeong did about whites that person would certainly never be hired by the New York Times or any respectable employer. Yet, Ms Jeong is not only hired, she's praised.

It's worrisome that bright people at the Times don't see how this ugly episode makes them all look like rank hypocrites.

Habitable Zones

An article at Salvo (subscription required) drives a spike into the notion that the galaxy, and perhaps the universe, are filled with habitable planets and that life elsewhere in the cosmos is an inevitability.

The article, by astronomer Hugh Ross, observes that the conviction that there simply must be life out there somewhere and that our earth is not unique in being fit for sustaining life is based on four assumptions:

1. The density and kinds of planets throughout our galaxy and all other galaxies in the universe are roughly the same as what we observe in the vicinity of our solar system.
2. About 20 percent of all planets are habitable.
3. Life inevitably will arise on all habitable planets.
4. The probability of a technologically advanced civilization arising from simple life forms is better than one chance in 10 billion.

Each of these assumptions, especially #3, are deeply problematic, but Ross focusses in this article on #2. The belief that 20% of all planets are habitable is based on the fact that of the 3000+ planets discovered so far, 20% of them lie at a distance from their star that would permit water to exist in the liquid state. Since water is a necessary condition for life, it's assumed that these planets could sustain living things.

Ross points out, however, that though water is a necessary condition for life, it's not a sufficient condition. There are, in fact, nine different "habitable zones" and all nine must overlap in order for life to exist on a planet.

In addition to the water habitable zone there are also the following:

1. Ultraviolet habitable zone
2. Photosynthetic habitable zone
3. Ozone habitable zone
4. Planetary rotation rate habitable zone
5. Planetary obliquity habitable zone
6. Tidal habitable zone
7. Astrosphere habitable zone
8. Electric wind habitable zone

Ross explains each of these zones in his recently released book Improbable Planet, but in the Salvo article he gives this example:

Typically, these zones do not overlap. For example, the distance a planet must be from its host star so that it receives enough ultraviolet radiation to enable the synthesis of many life-essential compounds, but not so much as to kill living things, is rarely the same distance that a planet must be from its host star for liquid water to possibly exist on its surface.

For 97 percent of all stars, the liquid water habitable zone does not overlap the ultraviolet habitable zone.

Thus,

A planet is a true candidate for habitability only if it simultaneously resides in all nine habitable zones....So far, astronomers have measured the characteristics of 3,484 planets. Only one of all these 3,484 planets resides in all nine known habitable zones. That one is Earth.

For all we know there may be other habitable zones in addition to these nine, but there are in any case several conclusions to be drawn from the information Ross provides us. First, the principle of mediocrity - the principle that the earth is not exceptional in any significant way - is ludicrous.

Second, the notion that residence of a planet in the water habitable zone is sufficient to justify hopes that life could exist on that planet is naive.

When the necessity for all nine habitable zones overlapping is combined with the dozens of other parameters that any planet must possess in order to be suitable for life suggests that Earth-like planets are probably extremely rare.

In fact, if it turns out that such planets are not uncommon that finding in itself would be so astonishing as to point to intelligent, purposeful engineering of the universe.

Altruism and Naturalism

Damon Linker argues at The Week that self-sacrifice is inexplicable on naturalism. Naturalism rests heavily upon evolutionary explanations of behavior, but cases like that of Thomas Vander Woude simply don't fit that narrative. Here's Vander Woude's story:

[C]onsider Thomas S. Vander Woude, the subject of an unforgettable 2011 article by the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg. One day in September 2008, Vander Woude's 20-year-old son Josie, who has Down syndrome, fell through a broken septic tank cover in their yard.

The tank was eight feet deep and filled with sewage. After trying and failing to rescue his son by pulling on his arm from above, Vander Woude jumped into the tank, held his breath, dove under the surface of the waste, and hoisted his son onto his shoulders. Josie was rescued a few minutes later. By then his 66-year-old father was dead.

This is something that any father, atheist or believer, might do for his son. But only the believer can make sense of the deed.

Pick your favorite non-theistic theory: Rational choice and other economically-based accounts hold that people act to benefit themselves in everything they do. From that standpoint, Vander Woude — like the self-sacrificing soldier or firefighter — was a fool who incomprehensibly placed the good of another ahead of his own.

Other atheistic theories similarly deny the possibility of genuine altruism, reject the possibility of free will, or else, like some forms of evolutionary psychology, posit that when people sacrifice themselves for others (especially, as in the Vander Woude case, for their offspring) they do so in order to strengthen kinship ties, and in so doing maximize the spread of their genes throughout the gene pool.

But of course, as someone with Down syndrome, Vander Woude's son is probably sterile and possesses defective genes that, judged from a purely evolutionary standpoint, deserve to die off anyway. So Vander Woude's sacrifice of himself seems to make him, once again, a fool.

Things are no better in less extreme cases. If Josie were a genius, his father's sacrifice might be partially explicable in evolutionary terms — as an act designed to ensure that his own and his son's genes survive and live on beyond them both. But this egoistic explanation would drain the act of its nobility, which is precisely what needs to be explained.

We feel moved by Vander Woude's sacrifice precisely because it seems selfless — the antithesis of evolutionary self-interestedness.

But why is that? What is it about the story of a man who willingly embraces a revolting, horrifying death in order to save his son that moves us to tears? Why does it seem somehow, like a beautiful painting or piece of music, a fleeting glimpse of perfection in an imperfect world?

It's an interesting question that Linker raises. Even if we can account for what Vander Woude did in evolutionary terms it's harder to account for why we who read about it think he did something noble and wonderful. Most evolutionists deny that there is such a thing as true altruism, that everything we do has a self-interested motive buried somewhere, but it's hard to see what that would be in the case of Thomas Vander Woude.

Linker believes that such acts of radical altruism give us a fleeting glimpse of something transcendent. Whether one agrees with that conclusion or not it certainly seems that altruism, unlike egoism, is very difficult to account for in a naturalistic worldview.

Why the West Hates Itself

Nirmal Dass asks a provocative question at The Daily Caller:

Why does a civilization, providing peace, stability, prosperity and unimagined freedom to its inhabitants turn to self-hatred? Why do those who richly enjoy the fruits of the West, also agree to abhor it?

To understand this destructive habit of mind, we must first turn to the nineteenth century, when Christianity was finally and fully replaced by collectivism. People were no longer defined by God but by society; that is, individual identity was said to be achieved only through social interaction. Without society, there was no humanity.

Dass gives a rather complex answer to the question but his answer is summarized in this paragraph:

So, why does the West hate itself? Because anything that hinders or denies human reason and the human will must be destroyed. The biggest hindrance is the West’s past, its root: Christianity. Western self-abhorrence is hatred of what stands in the way of a “better” future.

Doubtless he's on to something and you can read the rest of his analysis at the link.

As Dass suggests the West is experiencing an age of self-loathing as a consequence of the secular revolt against Christianity and all that that entails.

He doesn't say it this way, exactly, but when Christianity is rejected, so, too, is any ground for moral judgment, meaning, justice and truth. The rejection of Christianity in favor of a secular materialism leads to a worldview that embraces ethical, metaphysical and epistemological nihilism.

People may not live as utter nihilists, but nihilism is perforce consequent upon their assumption that there's no objective truth, nor meaning, nor right nor wrong.

The modern Westerner claims to be liberated from the shackles of a dead faith to live his/her own life, to create his/her own values, morality and meaning. Their truth is their own, and no one has the right to tell them that they're wrong.

Christianity, however, does precisely this. Christianity claims that there are indeed objective and eternal truths about the world, about human nature, about morality. This claim stands as an indictment against modern amoralism and subjectivism and breeds a profound resentment and hostility in the hearts of contemporary men and women who have embraced secular materialism.

Rather than acquiesce to the Christian view of things, the response of many is to lash out against it, to strive to tear it all down and with it all that has been built upon it, which means most of Western civilization.

This, I suggest, is one reason why so many Westerners are eager to commit cultural suicide by opening their borders to millions of immigrants who despise the West and its values. By flooding Europe and North America with people antipathetic to its cultural heritage that heritage will ultimately be watered down to where it eventually flickers out of existence.

As far as many of those who have nothing but contempt for Western culture and the faith that created it, that day can't come soon enough.