One Reason We're Divided

One thing we can all agree on in the current political climate is that political discourse has become so toxic and vile that we're creating almost irreparable breaches between conservatives and progressives and even within these groups.

President Trump has set a poor example for us with his childish, insulting Twitter rants, but he's far from the only person in our culture whose Twitter messages demean and degrade our national conversation.

Indeed, demeaning and degrading others is a deliberate tactic employed by left-wing acolytes of the late activist Saul Alinsky, and one step that may go some distance toward nurturing a more cordial and civil polity would be for responsible people in the Democratic party to dissociate themselves from the malign influence that Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals (1971) has had on left-wing political activism.

They don't have to renounce the entire book. Not everything in it is corrosive, but certainly it would be a salubrious development if more Democrats would disavow Alinsky's rules #5, #11, and #13.

Here are the rules I have in mind:

5. Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. There is no defense. It's irrational. It's infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.

11. If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive. Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog.

13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.

Alinsky's book has been something of a catechism for left-wing activists throughout the almost fifty years since it first came out, whether those who employ Alinsky's methods are aware of it or not, but a book that urges its disciples to ridicule their opponents, to provoke their opponents to violence, and to personalize disagreements by insult and isolation, is not likely to bring people together or to enhance comity. Indeed, Alinsky promotes polarization in #13.

Some of the remainder of Alinsky's thirteen rules are also of dubious value if we're serious about improving the quality of our political discourse. #4, for example, says that the activist should,

Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules. If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.

Notice the language. Those who disagree aren't just "opponents," they're "enemies." Enemies. Moreover, the goal is to make people who may be decent, sincere human beings vulnerable to a phony charge of hypocrisy.

Throughout the book Alinsky urges that activists discredit and smear, not just their opponents' ideas, but their opponents themselves. People who stand in their way don't just need to have their ideas defeated, they need to have their reputations ruined and their careers destroyed.

Appropriately enough, Alinsky dedicated his book to Lucifer. Ever since its initial publication those who live by it have had a divisive, malignant effect upon our nation.

Division is what the book advocates, and it's what its votaries want, but if anyone on the left is sincere about cleansing the political environment of the toxicity that currently permeates it, they'd do well to unambiguously repudiate Alinsky and his Rules.

The Dire Cost of Raising the Minimum Wage

I frequently remind my students of Richard Weaver's (1948) famous epigram that ideas have consequences. I also like to point out that often the consequences are the opposite of what might have been hoped. So often is this the case that the phenomenon has been dubbed a "law" - the law of unintended consequences.

We see one example of this law at work in attempts to improve the lot of minimum wage workers by mandating an increase in the minimum employers must pay their employees.

Flouting the law of unintended consequences, Democrats, led by the socialist senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, recently introduced a bill to raise the minimum wage wage from $7.25 an hour to $15 by 2024, while also eliminating the tipped wage credit by 2027. "The current $7.25 an hour minimum wage is a starvation wage," he said. "We're going to have a minimum wage that is a living wage."

Unfortunately, things are not that easy. Raising the minimum wage is likely to hurt the very workers it's intended to help. From the link:

Prof. David Macpherson, chairman of Trinity University's economics department, said that such an increase would be unprecedented, but not in the manner Sanders describes. While only 3 percent of hourly workers work under the minimum wage today, the increase would instantly bring 44 percent of them under that umbrella.

Despite that large increase, it would not alleviate the poverty rate as employers, particularly small businesses, eliminated jobs to offset the increased costs. Macpherson, using Congressional Budget Office methodology, found that 2 million jobs would be lost under a $15 rate with the most heavy losses coming in poorer states.

Heidi Mann, who operates a small franchise business of Subway restaurants in Washington state, said that the threat of lost jobs and shuttered businesses is real. She was forced to lay off four of her seven employees at a Seattle location after the city passed a $15 minimum wage and shortened the business hours to make do.

Her Seattle location will most likely shutter by March of 2020 as customers go elsewhere. She expects the same thing will happen across the country if the $15 rate becomes the law of the land.

Workers will bear the burden, she said, pointing to the fact that she can no longer take a gamble on inexperienced employees. Most workers at her suburban Kirkland location are teenagers, compared to the pair of middle aged workers that staff her Seattle Subway.

"These significant [increases] will not only lead to job loss, but our workers will lose out on building their work experience," she said. "It's been frustrating and deflating to watch."

Susan Kochevar, the owner of 88 Drive-In Theatre in Colorado, said her business has already taken a hit since the state raised the minimum wage to $12 an hour. She has been forced to cut her workforce to deal with increasing labor costs and payroll taxes. The move to $15 an hour could prove fatal for small business owners.

"The tax cuts … really helped a lot of small businesses in Colorado, and that will help us ride that minimum wage increase, but to increase it again will [hurt] small businesses," she said. "My labor expenses have already gone up, and I've had to get by with fewer people."

The restaurant industry would be especially hard hit:

Valerie Graham has worked in restaurants for more than 20 years and is a bartender at Jack Rose Saloon in Washington, D.C. She helped organize restaurant workers to oppose a referendum to eliminate the tipped credit in D.C. in 2017.

After voters approved the measure, she successfully lobbied the Democratic City Council to overturn the results and preserve the current rates. She said the $15 wage rate would cause a "massive upheaval" for restaurants and force businesses to close.

"It is one of the few fields where someone without a high school diploma or experience … can earn a middle class life," she said. "The most vulnerable people in our industry will not be helped by the reckless disruption of our industry."

The irony of this is that these workers often support the very politicians and political party whose efforts will ultimately cost them their jobs.

Of course, the workers don't realize that. They just know that they'd like very much to be making more money and that politicians like Sanders, and Ocasio-Cortez are trying to get it for them. They unfortunately never stop to think, as Ms Graham did, of what the unintended consequences of raising their wages would be.

So, they'll keep voting for progressive candidates while grousing that nobody seems to be hiring anymore and never thinking to make the connection between the two.

Human Exceptionalism

Biologist Ann Gauger holds the heretical opinion, at least it's heretical in today's cockeyed culture, that among all life forms, human beings are exceptional. Here's a quick summary of some of the traits she lists as making us not just different from other mammals but radically, qualitatively different:

We have specific traits that are well outside the norm, so far outside the norm that some scientists see the gaps as unbridgeable. These include abstract thought, foresight, speech, art, music, sociality, theory of mind, manipulation of the material world, charity, wickedness, and religion.

There may be others I haven’t thought of. We see rudiments of these things in animals, but human abilities are orders of magnitude higher than animals (or lower in the case of wickedness). Our specific abilities are greater than are necessary for survival, so unless they are linked to other traits why should we have a Mozart or an Einstein or a Galileo? What we do as scientists is pretty esoteric, right? Is there a selective advantage to any of it?

Maybe at low levels, but being Shakespeare or understanding the molecular dynamics of ribosomes or however you would describe your work is purely gratuitous.

In other words, it's hard to see how or why natural selection would have sorted out from among our primordial ancestors a few who possessed the capacity to do calculus.

One of the most inexplicable uniquely human traits is our capacity for language. Gauger quotes the late psychologist David Premack who challenged anyone to:

...reconstruct the scenario that would confer selective fitness on recursiveness. Language evolved, it is conjectured, at a time when humans or proto-humans were hunting mastodons…Would it be a great advantage for one of our ancestors squatting alongside the embers, to be able to remark, ‘Beware of the short beast whose front hoof Bob cracked when, having forgotten his own spear back at camp, he got in a glancing blow with the dull spear he borrowed from Jack’?

Human language is an embarrassment for evolutionary theory because it is vastly more powerful than one can account for in terms of selective fitness. A semantic language with simple mapping rules of a kind one might suppose that the chimpanzee would have, appears to confer all the advantages one normally associates with discussions of mastodon hunting or the like.

For discussions of that kind, syntactical classes, structure-dependent rules, recursion and the rest, are overly powerful devices, absurdly so.

Gauger also cites an abstract from a scientific article on language evolution at the website Scorched Earth which concludes that there's simply no evolutionary explanation for human language:

We argue ... that the richness of [speculations about how language evolved] is accompanied by a poverty of evidence, with essentially no explanation of how and why our linguistic computations and representations evolved.

We show that, to date,

(1) studies of nonhuman animals provide virtually no relevant parallels to human linguistic communication, and none to the underlying biological capacity;

(2) the fossil and archaeological evidence does not inform our understanding of the computations and representations of our earliest ancestors, leaving details of origins and selective pressure unresolved;

(3) our understanding of the genetics of language is so impoverished that there is little hope of connecting genes to linguistic processes any time soon;

(4) all modeling attempts have made unfounded assumptions, and have provided no empirical tests, thus leaving any insights into language's origins unverifiable.

Based on the current state of evidence, we submit that the most fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of our linguistic capacity remain as mysterious as ever, with considerable uncertainty about the discovery of either relevant or conclusive evidence that can adjudicate among the many open hypotheses.

So, there is no plausible naturalistic explanation for how language arose in human beings, just as there's no plausible naturalistic explanation for the origin of life, or the origin of human consciousness, the origin of biological information or even for biological processes like meiosis, mitosis, metamorphosis, or sexual reproduction.

Nor can naturalism provide us with a satisfactory scientific account of cosmic fine-tuning or moral obligation.

When confronted with the most fundamental ontological questions naturalism simply shrugs its shoulders, and yet we're told by some that naturalism is nevertheless the most rational position to hold. Its chief competitor, the belief that there's an intelligent mind underlying the cosmos and all that it contains, we're told, is mere superstition.

We might be forgiven for suspecting that between these two worldview alternatives - unconscious, purposeless forces or an intelligent purposeful mind - the latter is actually the more rational explanation for the phenomena Gauger lists and the former is the more superstitious.

The Exorbitant Cost of Illegal Immigration

One of the arguments against the border wall is that it costs too much, but the crucial question is not how much a wall would cost but rather what's the cost of not building it.

A website called FairU.S. has run the numbers and the cost is staggering. According to Fair the net cost to the federal government (i.e. the money spent by taxpayers minus the tax revenue paid to the treasury by illegals) far exceeds the $5.7 billion that President Trump has asked for starting construction on the wall, and the fiscal burden incurred by the various state governments is even greater.

The following is from their site:

The Federal government spends $45.8 billion on illegal aliens and their U.S.-born children. This amount includes expenditures for public education, medical care, justice enforcement initiatives, welfare programs and other miscellaneous costs. It also factors in the meager amount illegal aliens pay to the federal government in income, social security, Medicare and excise taxes.

The approximately $46 billion in federal expenditures attributable to illegal aliens is staggering. Assuming an illegal alien population of approximately 12.5 million illegal aliens and 4.2 million U.S.-born children of illegal aliens, that amounts to roughly $2,746 per illegal alien, per year.

For the sake of comparison, the average American college student receives only $4,800 in federal student loans each year.

Since the federal government takes in about 15 billion in tax revenues from illegal aliens the American people pay out approximately 30 billion of goods and services to people who have no legal right to be here. Here's the breakdown:

• Federal Education - $1.6 Billion
• Federal Medical Costs - $17.1 Billion
• Federal Justice Expenditures - $13.1 Billion
• Federal Welfare Programs - $5.8 Billion
• Total Federal Expenditures - $45.8 Billion

But this is just the federal payout. Add in the outlays of the various state and local governments, which come to $88 billion, and the total annual cost to the American taxpayer, not counting the costs to victims of motor vehicle accidents and crime perpetrated by illegal aliens, comes to approximately $116 billion every year.

President Trump asked Congress for a relatively measly $5.7 billion to build a barrier to stem the flow of illegal immigrants across the border in order to relieve this unsustainable expense, and the Democrats, for no discernibly coherent reason, refused.

What's the explanation for this refusal?

If we bracket out cynical explanations for the Democrats' obstinacy - such as they're intent on bankrupting the country, or they just want more Democrat voters in Texas to turn that state blue, or they hate Trump so much that they'll pay any price to avoid helping him - if we eliminate those ignoble reasons then we're left with ........ what?

New York's New Abortion Law

New York State recently passed the most extreme abortion law in the country, essentially allowing a woman to end the life of an unborn child at any point in her pregnancy. Previously, a woman could not get an abortion in New York after the second trimester unless her life was in danger.

Under the new law, she can obtain an abortion after 24 weeks if being pregnant is somehow harming her health, a criterion which is so elastic it can be stretched to cover almost anything.

As one commentator observed, an unborn child a few moments before its birth now has fewer rights in New York than do illegal immigrants.

Matt Walsh at the Daily Wire has a column in which he "argues" that the New York law doesn't go far enough and that it should be expanded to permit post-birth abortions.

Walsh's column is a satire - an effective way to make a very serious point: Any of the reasons used to justify giving women an absolute right to terminate a pregnancy are just as valid as reasons for allowing a woman to "terminate" the life of an already born child.

Three justifications for abortion on demand commonly heard from the lips of pro-choice advocates are:

1. The woman’s autonomy must be respected.
2. The fetus is dependent on his mother and thus not a person.
3. If the fetus is not aborted, it will just become an unwanted child, and we already have enough of those to deal with.

Walsh insists that accepting the legitimacy of these justifications puts us on a slippery slope to justifying not only infanticide but also toddler-cide. He writes:

[A]s I thought more deeply about the issue, I began to see that this law is not quite the victory for freedom and autonomy that I first imagined. It is a good start, but there is much more work to be done. The law allows for a fetus to be terminated at any stage so long as the procedure is needed to protect the life or health of the mother.

This qualification is in itself problematic because it puts someone else — likely a man — in the position of judging whether a woman’s reason for procuring an abortion is “acceptable.” No person other than the woman herself can make such a determination.

Perhaps this is a minor problem. Indeed, “health” can mean anything whatsoever. Emotional health, physical health, psychological health, financial health, spiritual health. An abortion is always a matter of preserving health in some form. The authors of the bill obviously wrote it intending that the “restrictions” would restrict no one. It is an admirable effort, yet there is something else to consider.

If a woman decides to end her pregnancy in the third trimester, she is still (sadly) going to have to deal with labor and delivery. The fetus is treated with a fatal dose of medication administered by an injection into its skull and then, after a few days, the woman gives birth to the now terminated fetus. But how is it in the best interest of the woman to administer this dose to the fetus while it is still inside her?

Isn’t it a further infringement on her autonomy that she be forced to go through such a procedure? And doesn’t it needlessly put her at risk? Wouldn’t it be more consistent with the pro-choice ethic to evacuate the fetus and then administer the treatment? How do we help and respect the woman by arbitrarily subjecting her to such a physically and emotionally taxing process?

It will be objected that a fetus prior to birth is inside the woman while the fetus after birth is outside. Yes, and so? We have already established that the fetus has no rights of its own. Only the mother’s wellbeing matters here, and her wellbeing would be better served by a post-birth procedure.

Read the rest at the link. It'd be funny if the subject matter weren't so grim. If you're pro-life you'll nod in agreement the whole way through. If you're pro-choice it'll make you grind your teeth, but then teeth-grinding is a poor rebuttal.

What pro-choice advocates need to do is explain, if they can, why what Walsh says is wrong.

Puncturing Myths about Western Civilization

I find myself often referring in conversation with friends to Rodney Stark's excellent book titled How the West Won. Like all his books HWW is history that reads like a novel. He argues in the book that all of the progress we've enjoyed in the world since the medieval period has had it's genesis in the West.

His theory, convincingly defended, to my mind, is that progress only occurred in areas with high levels of personal liberty, low taxation, and strong property rights. To the extent these were absent, as they have been in most parts of the world throughout history, progress died in the crib, as it were. He also argues that the crucial soil for progress was a Judeo-Christian worldview in which the universe was seen as an orderly, law-governed, rational product of a personal, non-arbitrary God. Where this belief was absent, as it was everywhere but Europe, science and technology, medicine and learning, either never developed or were never sustained.

Along the way Stark punctures a host of myths that have become almost axiomatic on the left but which are at complete variance with the historical facts. He makes a strong case for the claim that capitalism and even colonialism have been blessings, that the fall of Rome was one of the single most beneficial events in world history, that the "Dark Ages" never happened, that the crusades were not at all the rapacious ventures by murderous Christians of gentle, pastoral Muslims we've been told they were, that historical climate change had many salubrious effects on Western progress, that there was no scientific "revolution" but rather a continual and accelerating unfolding of scientific discovery that began at least as far back as the 13th century and probably earlier.

I urge anyone interested in history to get a copy. Stark includes a lot that he covered in earlier works, but much of it is new and what isn't new bears repeating anyway.

An example of something that's both myth-busting and new was Stark's discussion of the work of Robert D. Woodberry.

Woodberry's research makes it clear that much, if not most, of the progress made around the world is due to the work of Western missionaries who labored a century or more ago.

Here's what Stark writes about the role missionaries played in making life better for millions:

Perhaps the most bizarre of all the charges leveled against Christian missionaries (along with colonialists in general) is that they imposed "modernity" on much of the non-Western world. It has long been the received wisdom among anthropologists and other cultural relativists that by bringing Western technology and learning to "native peoples," the missionaries corrupted their cultures, which were as valid as those of the West....But to embrace the fundamental message of cultural imperialism requires that one be comfortable with such crimes against women as foot-binding, female circumcision, the custom of Sati (which caused women to be burned to death, tied to their husbands' funeral pyres), and the stoning to death of rape victims on the grounds of their adultery.

It also requires one to agree that tyranny is every bit as desirable as democracy, and that slavery should be tolerated if it accords with local customs. Similarly, one must classify high-infant mortality rates, toothlessness in early adulthood, and the castration of young boys as valid parts of local cultures, to be cherished along with illiteracy. For it was especially on these aspects of non-Western cultures that modernity was "imposed," both by missionaries and other colonialists.

Moreover, missionaries undertook many aggressive actions to defend local peoples against undue exploitation by colonial officials. In the mid-1700s, for example, the Jesuits tried to protect the Indians in Latin America from European efforts to enslave them; Portuguese and Spanish colonial officials brutally ejected the Jesuits for interfering. Protestant missionaries frequently became involved in bitter conflicts with commercial and colonial leaders in support of local populations, particularly in India and Africa....

A remarkable new study by Robert D. Woodberry has demonstrated conclusively that Protestant missionaries can take most of the credit for the rise and spread of stable democracies in the non-Western world. That is, the greater the number of Protestant missionaries per ten thousand local population in 1923, the higher the probability that by now a nation has achieved a stable democracy. The missionary effect is far greater than that of fifty other pertinent control variables, including gross domestic product and whether or not a nation was a British colony.

Woodberry not only identified this missionary effect but also gained important insights into why it occurred. Missionaries, he showed, contributed to the rise of stable democracies because they sponsored mass education, local printing and newspapers, and local voluntary organizations, including those having a nationalist and anticolonial orientation.

These results so surprised social scientists that perhaps no study has ever been subjected to such intensive prepublication vetting....

Protestant missionaries did more than advance democracy in non-Western societies. The schools they started even sent some students off to study in Britain and America. It is amazing how many leaders of successful anti-colonial movements in British colonies received university degrees in England - among them Mahatma Ghandi and Jawaharlal Nehru of India and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya....

Less recognized are the lasting benefits of the missionary commitment to medicine and health. American and British Protestant missionaries made incredible investments in medical facilities in non-Western nations. As of 1910 they had established 111 medical schools, more than 1,000 dispensaries, and 576 hospitals. To sustain these massive efforts, the missionaries recruited and trained local doctors and nurses, who soon greatly outnumbered the Western missionaries....

[Woodberry's] study showed that the higher the number of Protestant missionaries per one thousand population in a nation in 1923, the lower that nation's infant mortality rate in 2000 - an effect more than nine times as large as the effect of current GDP per capita. Similarly, the 1923 missionary rate was strongly positively correlated with a nation's life expectancy in 2000.

These missionaries battled every kind of pestilence, hardship, and deprivation. They were often murdered or died from disease, all in an effort to make life better for people living in miserable circumstances, while leftist academics sit in their comfortable, air-conditioned offices, never having made anything better for anyone, blithely and foolishly condemning those who did for being "superstitious" and "cultural imperialists" who imposed their values on idyllic societies that would be better off if left alone.

Some might call these academics intellectually arrogant or even stupid, but if nothing else they certainly display a moral blindness.

Woodberry's paper can be read in pdf here.

Expanding the Boundaries of Science

An article by two physicists, Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser in the NYT, suggests that science is experiencing an identity crisis. It used to be assumed that what distinguished science from other disciplines was that science was based on testing predictions which were entailed by a theory. This was called the hypothetico-deductive method.

Unfortunately, it seems that some theories in physics and biology have reached the limits of testability. In particle physics, for example, in order to probe more deeply into the structure of matter we have to build particle accelerators that would circle the earth.

Since this is economically and, presumably, technically impractical, particle physics may have reached a dead end. It's not that we know everything there is to know, it's that we may have reached a point where we know everything which can be known, at least about particle physics.

Rather than submit to this glum state of affairs, however, some scientists want to expand the boundaries of legitimate science to include metaphysical speculation. The problem of discerning what to count as science is called by philosophers the Demarcation Problem, and the tendency to blur the lines between science and philosophy (metaphysics) is especially prominent among string and multiverse theorists. Here's part of what Frank and Gleiser have to say about this:

A few months ago in the journal Nature, two leading researchers, George Ellis and Joseph Silk, published a controversial piece called “Scientific Method: Defend the Integrity of Physics.” They criticized a newfound willingness among some scientists to explicitly set aside the need for experimental confirmation of today’s most ambitious cosmic theories — so long as those theories are “sufficiently elegant and explanatory.”

Despite working at the cutting edge of knowledge, such scientists are, for Professors Ellis and Silk, “breaking with centuries of philosophical tradition of defining scientific knowledge as empirical.”

Whether or not you agree with them, the professors have identified a mounting concern in fundamental physics: Today, our most ambitious science can seem at odds with the empirical methodology that has historically given the field its credibility.

[This raises] a philosophical question: How are we to determine whether a theory is true if it cannot be validated experimentally? Should we abandon it just because, at a given level of technological capacity, empirical support might be impossible? If not, how long should we wait for such experimental machinery before moving on: Ten years? Fifty years? Centuries?

Consider, likewise, the cutting-edge theory in physics that suggests that our universe is just one universe in a profusion of separate universes that make up the so-called multiverse.

This theory could help solve some deep scientific conundrums about our own universe (such as the so-called fine-tuning problem), but at considerable cost: Namely, the additional universes of the multiverse would lie beyond our powers of observation and could never be directly investigated.

Multiverse advocates argue nonetheless that we should keep exploring the idea — and search for indirect evidence of other universes.

Similar difficulties seem to be looming in cosmogeny (the study of the origin of the universe), the origin of life and the origin of consciousness, all of which confront researchers with this awkward question: If scientists yield to the desire to include in the discipline of science explanatory theories which are inherently untestable and which are essentially metaphysical, on what grounds can anyone argue against allowing the teaching of Creationism in public school science classes?

Another Bad Week for Media Credibility

Our American media has churned out yet another round of fake news this week. Two recent stories illustrate our media's sad and maddening descent to the level of supermarket tabloids.

The first was the feeding frenzy among cable news talking heads sparked by a BuzzFeed story claiming that there was incontrovertible evidence that President-elect Donald Trump ordered his lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about his real estate projects in Russia.

Media commentators on almost every network were giddy with excitement over Mr. Trump's manifest subornation of perjury and his inevitable impeachment. Until, that is, Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller issued a denial that any such evidence was in hand. With that, crestfallen news reporters began their by now regular and reluctant walkback of their earlier stories.

Even so, the damage had been done and large portions of the population, including even Democratic senator Kirsten Gillibrand, remained convinced that the story was true despite Mueller's disclaimer.

Then came the orgy of media outrage arising from the completely phony revelation of a bunch of teenagers from Covington Catholic High School harassing a native-American demonstrator during a protest in Washington, D.C. The students, who had been participating in the March for Life (which you probably didn't even know occurred if you only get your news from mainstream sources), were waiting for their bus when they were approached by a group from an organization called Black Hebrew Israelites who began hurling racist, homophobic slurs and taunts at them.

Because the media falsely made the students out to be the aggressors in this incident they and their families are being threatened, their school has been vilified, social media nitwits are doing everything they can to ruin these kids' lives, and the whole thing was a lie amplified by a media with a ravenous appetite for scandal involving anyone who can be tied to President Trump (some of the students were wearing MAGA hats).

One gentle soul who works for something called Vulture declared that “I just want these people to die. Simple as that. Every single one of them. And their parents.” The students, this beacon of comity averred, were “white slugs.”

Well, they were also the innocent party in this sordid episode, and the secular puritans, both left and right, who were so quick to condemn them have behaved at best irresponsibly and at worst reprehensibly. And, of course, the walkback has begun.

For a full account of what actually happened go here. For a description of the execrable behavior exhibited by the boys' critics see this article at PJ Media.

There was a time when journalists occasionally cared about the effect their reporting might have on the lives of the people they reported on. There was a time when journalists demanded that a story be independently corroborated before they'd publish it.

Today that standard has been abandoned and replaced with one which allows for the public airing of almost anything that reflects poorly on the president or his supporters, and any innocent bystanders who suffer are just written off as collateral damage.

Retractions can always come later, if need be, after public perception of the president has been ratcheted down a few more notches and public hatred for him and his voters boosted a few degrees higher.

Not all journalists have the ethics of a mob hit man, of course. Some of them are still old-fashioned enough to believe they have a professional responsibility to make sure their reports are true before they put them before the public, but it's hard today to find any of those dinosaurs on CNN or MSNBC.

Little wonder so many Americans agree with President Trump when he accuses the media of persistently trading in "fake news."

A Challenge to the Moral Argument (Pt. III)

This is the final installment in a series of posts on objections raised by philosopher Erik Wielenberg to the moral argument for the existence of God (scroll down for the previous two posts). Recall that Wielenberg couches his challenge to the moral argument in the form of three questions:

1. Why think that only Divine Commands are sufficient by themselves to generate moral obligations?
2. How can God's commands impose obligations on those who are unaware of divine authority behind such commands?
3. Why would God command people to do things He knows they won't do anyway, since issuing such commands only introduces pointless evil into the world?

In the previous post we looked at question #1 to determine how persuasive it was as an objection to the claim that if objective moral duties exist, God must exist. Today we'll look at questions #2 and #3.

One response to #2 is to point out that in fact our fundamental moral obligations to do justice and show compassion and mercy are known by everyone, atheist and theist alike. The apostle Paul writes that "they [unbelievers] show the work of the [moral] law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness, and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them." (Romans 2:15).

In other words, everyone has a basic sense of what's right and what's wrong, but if there's no transcendent ground for this sense then there's nothing obligatory about following it. It can easily be explained away as a product of social conditioning or evolution and then we're back to the argument of our first post in this series.

In response to #3 it's hard to see how commanding people not to, say, commit murder actually introduces more evil into the world. Wielenberg seems to think that murder is evil because God prohibits it, but that's silly. Murder isn't evil because God forbids it. God forbids it because it's evil. People would still murder others had God never proscribed it. In fact there'd probably be more murder had God not forbidden it and therefore there'd be more evil.

Even if not everyone heeds the command forbidding murder surely most people do, and therefore God's command reduces the amount of killing and human suffering rather than introducing more of it.

We can conclude this series of posts with this observation: If the God of traditional theism exists He is perfectly good, He transcends human subjectivity, and He is able to hold us accountable for what we do. Only such a being could serve as an adequate ground for the existence of objective moral duties.

When people seek to live what would be considered a "good moral life" while denying the existence of the only adequate basis for their moral values, they're in fact piggy-backing on theism while at the same time claiming to reject the theism on which their moral life depends.

That doesn't seem to make much sense.

Celebrating an American Hero

Today is the day we celebrate Martin Luther King's birthday and it would be well to focus on why we do. King was a man of great courage who was resolutely committed, not just to racial equality under the law, but to harmony among all the racial factions in America.

His commitment to achieving justice under the law for every American was rooted in his Christian faith as his Letter From a Birmingham Jail makes clear, and it was that faith which made him a transformational figure in the history of our nation.

It's sad that though his dream of racial equality has been largely realized - the law no longer permits distinctions between the races in our public life - his dream of racial harmony has not.

One reason it has not is that his dream that his children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character has been inverted so that the color of one's skin is often the only thing that matters, at least in those precincts of our society still in thrall to identity politics.

For example, students are still accepted into colleges and given scholarships on the basis of their race without having to meet the same standards as those with a different skin color. The same is true of civil servants like police and firemen who are often hired and promoted on the basis of test performance but who sometimes receive preferential treatment based on race. The Obama Justice Department refused to prosecute blacks who denied others their civil rights, and any criticism of our previous president was interpreted by some as a racist reaction to his skin color rather than reasoned opposition to his policies.

Sadly, people are judged by the color of their skin rather than by the content of their character as much today, perhaps, as at any time in our history, but that's precisely contrary to Martin Luther King's dream.

Nor do I think he would have been happy that we celebrate black history month as if it were somehow separate from American history rather than, as Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby argues, an integral part of American history. The civil rights movement was not merely a black movement, it was an American movement in which the American people realized that we were not living up to the ideals of equality and liberty upon which America was founded.

It was a time when the nation realized that we were not living consistently with the deepest convictions we held as Christians, namely that we are all brothers and sisters, children of the same God.

Martin Luther King persistently and bravely upheld these ideals and convictions before the American people, he refused to allow us to avoid their implications, and repeatedly urged us to live up to what we believed deep in our souls to be true. And the American people, many of whom had never really thought about the chasm between what we professed and what we practiced, responded.

It was an American achievement that involved the efforts and blood of people not just of one race but of all races. Thinking of the great sacrifices and advances of the civil rights era as only a success story of one race is divisive. It carves out one group of people from the rest of the nation for special notice and tends to exclude so many others without whom the story would never have been told.

On Martin Luther King day it would be good for us to try to put behind us the invidious distinctions we continue to make between white and black. It would be good to stop seeing others in terms of their skin color, to give each other the benefit of the doubt that our disagreements are about ideas and policies and are not motivated by hatred, bigotry, or moral shortcomings. It would be good to declare a moratorium on the use of the word "racist," unless the evidence for it is overwhelming, and, in any case, to realize that racism is a sin to which all races are prone and is not exclusive to the majority race.

Let's resolve to judge each other on the content of our character and our minds, and not on the color of our skin. As long as we continue to see each other through the lens of race we'll keep throwing up barriers between groups of people and never achieve the unity that King yearned for and gave his life for.

There is perhaps no better way to honor Doctor King today than to take the time to read his Letter From a Birmingham Jail and to watch his "I Have a Dream" speech (below) and then to incorporate his words into our own lives as Americans.

A Challenge to the Moral Argument (Pt. II)

In yesterday's post we outlined one version of the moral argument for the existence of God. It goes like this:

1. If God does not exist then objective moral duties do not exist.
2. Objective moral duties do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

We also mentioned that in a debate with theistic philosopher William Lane Craig, atheistic philosopher Erik Wielenberg challenged the first premise of the argument and therefore rejected the conclusion.

Wielenberg's challenge was packaged in a series of three questions:

1. Why think that only Divine Commands are sufficient by themselves to generate moral obligations?
2. How can God's commands impose obligations on those who are unaware of divine authority behind such commands?
3. Why would God command people to do things He knows they won't do anyway, since issuing such commands only introduces pointless evil into the world?

Quite apart from Craig's response, I'd like to venture a reply myself to Wielenberg's questions.

Taking them in order, I understand Wielenberg to be asking in #1 why there could not be other sources of moral obligation besides God. Why, he's asking, must we think that only God is a sufficient source of moral duty?

In reply it seems appropriate to ask what else could be an adequate source of moral obligation if not God? Several possibilities may perhaps suggest themselves: Social consensus, evolution and collective human reason are three, but there are serious shortcomings with each of these.

If the consensus of a society serves as a moral authority then, as was argued in yesterday's post, whatever a society deems to be right is right. Thus, if a society countenances slavery, oppression of women or child abuse those things would be morally proper.

Furthermore, if someone were to dissent and insist that slavery, say, is wrong, and if the dissenter happens to be in the minority in his or her society, then the dissenter must of necessity be holding a morally incorrect opinion. The dissenter is wrong by definition. The consensus of society is otherwise, and if the consensus is right ab defino then the minority opinion is always wrong.

And, if that's so, how would a society ever experience moral improvement since moral progress is almost always initiated by people holding a minority opinion?

Well, what about the evolutionary possibility? It's sometimes argued that we have evolved traits like sympathy for our fellow human beings and that we're therefore morally obligated to treat others sympathetically or kindly, but it's hard to see how this conclusion follows from the premise.

The fact that a behavioral trait has evolved is hardly a reason to consider ourselves morally obligated to behave accordingly. After all, as philosopher David Hume pointed out 250 years ago, just because human beings are a certain way, it doesn't follow that we should be that way.

In addition, if behavioral traits are the products of evolution then selfishness, male aggression and male dominance of females, among other unsavory aspects of human nature, are all evolved traits. Should we therefore consider ourselves obligated to be selfish, violent and oppressive?

And if all our behaviors have the same evolutionary provenience how do we arbitrate between our sympathy for others and our contempt for others? Why is sympathy right and good and contempt wrong and bad if evolution has produced them both?

Finally, we might ask how a blind, impersonal process like evolution could ever impose a moral obligation upon us in the first place. Obligations can only be imposed by personal beings with minds. Impersonal processes like natural selection and genetic mutation cannot make selfishness and greed, violence and hatred, morally wrong, nor can they forbid them and impose on us a duty to refrain from them.

Some would argue that human reason is the source of moral obligation, but it's difficult to see how human reason can impose a duty to do something like sacrificing one's goods to help anonymous poor people in a distant continent. Why would I be wrong to refrain from helping those people? What does it even mean to say that it would be wrong not to help them?

Human reason seems to me to lead not to some Kantian kingdom of ends in which we act in ways that we would want all people to act. Rather reason tells me to put my own interests first, ahead of the interests of others. The moral imperative produced by a secular human reason is "Look out for #1."

Indeed, another atheist philosopher, the Canadian Kai Nielsen expressed deep disappointment with the inability of philosophers to find a way to base a moral system on reason:

We have not been able to show that reason requires the moral point of view, or that all really rational persons, unhoodwinked by myth or ideology, need not be individual egoists or amoralists….Reason doesn't decide here….The picture I have painted is not a pleasant one. Reflection on it depresses me….Pure reason will not take you to morality.

Richard Rorty, also an atheistic philosopher, declared that:

...if you do not believe in God you would do well to drop notions like “law” and “obligation” from the vocabulary you use when deciding what to do.

Very well, then, but about Wielenberg's questions #2 and #3?

We'll consider those next week.

A Challenge to the Moral Argument (Pt. I)

Two philosophers, William Lane Craig and Erik Wielenberg, met last February to debate (see the video here) what's called the Moral argument for the existence of God. Simply put, the argument they debated goes like this:

1. If God does not exist then objective moral duties do not exist.
2. Objective moral duties do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

Craig, who is a theist, argued on behalf of the soundness of this argument and Wielenberg, who is an atheist, argued against it.

Generally, those who seek to evade the conclusion that God exists either 1) deny the first premise and argue that even though God does not exist objective moral duties do exist. Or, they 2) deny the second premise and claim that God does not exist and that there are no objective moral duties either. Any moral obligations that exist are merely subjective - self-chosen and self-imposed.

Those who adopt the first tactic have a difficult time explaining where objective moral duties could possibly come from if not from God. What entity could have the moral authority, the right, to impose a moral obligation upon us to, say, love our fellow man. The state can, of course, impose legal duties to refrain from harming others, but it cannot impose a moral duty to not hate others or to not be selfish or greedy. The state can control human behavior through the civil law, but it has no authority over the human heart.

Moreover, if the state could impose such a duty, if the state was in fact the highest moral authority, then whatever the state sanctioned would be ipso facto right. So if the state, as it has done historically, endorsed genocide, or human sacrifice, or chattel slavery, or denial of the right to vote to women all of those would be morally right and proper, and one who denied that they were right would be, by definition, wrong.

Those who opt for the second tactic, on the other hand, find it very difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile their belief that no objective moral duties exist with the way they actually think and live their lives.

For example, if there are no objective duties then no one can say that anything anyone else did was objectively wrong, yet almost everyone, theist and atheist alike, agrees that child abuse, raping a toddler, molesting altar boys, or beating a crying infant are all morally wrong. And almost everyone would agree that anyone who refuses to make that judgment is at best morally stunted and at worst morally depraved.

This short video illustrates the moral argument:

Wielenberg agrees that objective moral duties do exist, he accepts the second premise, but he denies that God exists. In other words, he rejects the first premise of the moral argument and, thus, he rejects the conclusion.

He summarizes his objection with three three questions:

1. Why think that only Divine commands are sufficient by themselves to generate moral obligations?
2. How can God's commands impose obligations on those who are unaware of divine authority behind such commands?
3. Why would God command people to do things He knows they won't do anyway, since issuing such commands only introduces pointless evil into the world?

We'll consider this challenge to Craig's argument in tomorrow's post.

The Relevance of Philosophy

Robert Tracinski has written some wise words on the topic of the importance and relevance of philosophy in these times.

Whether we're consciously aware of it or not each of us adopts a particular philosophical view of life and the world. We do this as individuals and we do it corporately as a society. To study philosophy is to consciously examine the views we're adopting and to ask ourselves and others whether those views make sense.

Here's a portion of what Tracinski writes:

The primary purpose of philosophy is to offer guidance for one’s life. It asks questions like: How do we distinguish truth from falsehood? How do we know what is right or wrong? What is the moral purpose of our lives? Do we have a choice over our personality and control over our destiny? When we say philosophy talks about “the meaning of life,” that’s not an understatement. These are the kinds of questions that, depending on the answers, can give meaning and coherence to the course of our lives.

They also make a tangible difference in how we live it. If you don’t think you have control over your life — if you think everything is determined by your genes, upbringing, God or “the system, man” — then you’re not likely to take much action to improve your life. So the questions philosophy deals with are the kind of questions that really matter.

What philosophy does for a single person’s life, it also does for the political life of a nation. If we want to make America great again, for example, we need to know what “greatness” is and how to achieve it. We need to know what government can do, ought to do, and shouldn’t do. All of these questions have huge, life-and-death consequences.

Politics is about ideas and power. Philosophy asks us to follow our ideas to their logical conclusion to see whether those endpoints are really best for ourselves and our nation. It helps us to consider how power should be exercised in a society that aspires to justice.

Tracinski continues:

In that regard, there are whole schools of philosophy — including the ones dominant today — that undermine the role of philosophy itself. They are helping to turn us into an unphilosophical country with an unphilosophical political culture.

The dominant schools today are essentially subjectivist. They encourage you, Oprah-style, to assert “your truth,” which is valid because you feel it, so there’s no need to listen to anyone else. The subjectivists have cultivated a reputation for being “open-minded” and freewheeling, but this actually shuts down discussion. ... this is how we get the peculiar dogmatism of political correctness [according to which]...[t]here is no universal truth, just your ‘perspective,’ as a trans person of color or a left-handed lesbian tugboat worker, or whatever.

And no one else is entitled to question your perspective. It’s true because it’s true for you. If you are aggrieved, the very fact of your grievance validates itself.

If that’s the case, what’s the point of discussing any of it? It’s not for others to question or for you to explain. You just scream out your rage and frustration, and they have to cave.

In other words, so much of what passes for "dialogue" today is merely emotive venting (see the video here, for example). People often are unable or unwilling to give a rational defense of what they believe so they substitute yelling, name-calling, intimidation, censorship, and/or violence, all of which are tacit admissions that they have no good reasons for their beliefs and cannot persuade others to accept them but can only impose them on others by refusing others the opportunity to analyze, debate and promote an alternative point of view.

We see this often whenever matters of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, evolution, climate change, or politics arise in the classroom or in informal discussions. As soon as an opinion is raised which clashes with conventional orthodoxy, especially the orthodoxy of the left, the dissenter is treated like a heretic or a social leper.

In some cases on university campuses where the heretics have been grad students they've been expelled from their degree programs, and when they've been faculty members they've sometimes been denied tenure or their classes have been disrupted. In cases where the dissenters from the approved opinion have been invited speakers they've often been disinvited or shouted down or even assaulted.

Tracinski concludes:

When we disregard philosophy, when we don’t used reasoned debate to examine our moral and political assumptions, then all that’s left is some kind of appeal to emotion. When you appeal to emotion, as most people do these days, then the only people you can gather to your side are those already inclined to feel the same emotions you do. You end up appealing only to people like you, to those with the same background and upbringing.

College-educated blue-staters will agree with college-educated blue-staters. Blue-collar red-staters agree with blue-collar red-staters.

Actually, in today’s politics, the responses are even narrower, because so much of the political debate is based on an appeal to our emotions about a particular person. Do you love or hate Hillary Clinton? Do you love or hate Donald Trump? That’s all you need to know to determine where you stand in a partisan fight, and even on public policy.

The end of the road for the appeal to emotion is the kind of tribalism and cult of personality we see in today’s politics.

The only cure for it is philosophy.

Well, maybe not the only cure but the ability to think philosophically is certainly an essential part of any cure.

Eternal Life, Maybe

David Goldman, writing at PJ Media, makes an interesting point. Some of the same secular folk who scoff at the Judeo-Christian concept of a God-granted immortality of the soul nevertheless believe that such immortality is possible through technology, and they're excited by the prospect.

He introduces his thoughts by referencing the belief of ancient elites, particularly in Egypt, that they'd live forever:

What was the upshot of Egyptian idolatry? The ruling elite wanted to live forever, and enslaved my ancestors to build grand tombs in which their mummified bodies would migrate to another life, surrounded by their wealth and some conveniently dead servants. A remarkably large part of Egypt’s economic output fed the fantasies of the Pharaohs, at which we laugh today.

The desire for eternal life is not new, and hardly unique to Jews or Christians. Neanderthals buried their dead with grave gifts. Gilgamesh, the Babylonian hero, set out to find eternal life. The pharaohs built pyramids with [Jewish] sweat and blood.

Contemporary secular elites are too sophisticated for such superstitious nonsense. Their belief in eternal life relies on advances in technology, but it turns out to be at least as "faith-based" as some traditional views:

Today our progressive opinion-makers ridicule the concept of an eternal God and a world to come, but they believe that we soon will upload our minds to the Internet where our consciousness will continue intact.

We laugh at the idea that the blessed would spend eternity strumming harps while seated on clouds, but enlightened opinion now believes that we shall maintain our conscious minds in Google’s cloud. Add to this a robotic body, and supposedly we can live forever. A lot of Silicon Valley billionaires take this seriously.

According to Wikipedia, mind uploading may potentially be accomplished by either of two methods: Copy-and-transfer or gradual replacement of neurons. In the case of the former method, mind uploading would be achieved by scanning and mapping the salient features of a biological brain, and then by copying, transferring, and storing that information state into a computer system or another computational device.

The biological brain may not survive the copying process. The simulated mind could be within a virtual reality or simulated world, supported by an anatomic 3D body simulation model. Alternatively the simulated mind could reside in a computer that is inside (or connected to) a (not necessarily humanoid) robot or a biological body.

That is not science, but science fiction. The urge to escape death, though, remains as powerful today as it was when Moses confronted Ramses.

A tech startup now offers a method to preserve the chemical arrangement of your brain until such time as it can be uploaded, with the minor side-effect that you will have to die in the process.

It's not uncommon to hear materialists declare that they're satisfied with the one life they have and have no desire to live on forever. What they apparently mean is that they have no desire to live forever if that means that they must come to terms with God. If eternal life can be accomplished otherwise, then they're all in.

If they're promised that they can bypass God and find eternal life through technological advances they'll grab hold of that shred of possibility like a drowning man grasping at a piece of flotsam.

There's more in Goldman's article, but this, I think is noteworthy. Comparing our modern elites to the ancient pharaohs who expended huge quantities of both money and human life to achieve immortality for themselves he writes:

Our new pharaohs believe in methods to achieve immortality as silly as the old ones. And they entertain such fantasies for the same reason: They want to make themselves into immortal gods who have no more constraint on the satisfaction of their appetites than the rapacious, concupiscent and murderous gods of ancient paganism.

Well, as long as none of it involves God.

The Resistance Boomerang

There was much rejoicing and jubilation when the Democrats officially took control of the House of Representatives earlier this month. Finally, we were assured, the Democrats will steer this country in the general direction of, if not all the way to, the sunny uplands of socialism.

Rather rudely, however, the Washington Free Beacon's Matthew Continetti has made himself the pooper at the party by injecting a sobering dose of reality into the midst of the Democrats' merriment.

To alter the metaphor somewhat, he throws a wet blanket on the Democrats' exultations by reminding them that what lies ahead is almost certainly disappointment and disillusionment.

He concedes that there are some things they can do as the majority party in the House to make themselves a pesky nuisance for the president, but these irritations will not amount to much. Speaker Pelosi will soon find herself reduced to irrelevancy.

Here's why:

Yes, they can fire their subpoena cannon at the White House. They can interrogate cabinet officials, subpoena Jared and Ivanka, leak scoops to reporters, maybe force a cabinet official or two to resign, if any are left. When Mueller delivers his findings, they could begin impeachment proceedings. But impeachment, like progressive legislation, won't get far.

A decade ago [When the Democrats last controlled the House and Nancy Pelosi was Speaker] the House could pass bills and hope that Harry Reid would persuade his Democratic Senate majority to support them. All Pelosi had to worry about was President Bush's veto. Now, Pelosi has to deal with Mitch McConnell's Republican Senate even before her policies reach Donald Trump.

Republican control of the Senate is but the first difference between the 116th and 110th Congresses. The second is within the Democratic Party itself. Not only must Pelosi balance the progressives against members from swing districts. She has to manage her comrades during a rowdy and unpredictable presidential primary.

Hillary fighting Obama was nothing compared to the coming rumble. Already Bernie is leaking against Beto, Warren is downing beers on Instagram, and someone reminded the New York Times of accusations of sexual harassment within Bernie's campaign. "We're headed for disaster," frets Michael Tomasky.

Very soon, news from the [campaign] trail will overtake the goings-on in Congress. House Democrats won't just have trouble changing laws. They also will have difficulty promoting their message. Especially considering the third and greatest difference between 2007 and 2019: the presence of Donald Trump.

There's no evidence that Pelosi has any better an idea of how to deal with him than her predecessors. Whenever Trump focuses his attention on reelection, and sets the agenda of cable news coverage by attacking his rivals on Twitter, Pelosi will be less than powerless. She will be irrelevant.

The partial government shutdown is a prelude to an unpredictable two years of conflict, deadlock, breakdown, acrimony, dissatisfaction, and annoyance. At the end, Democrats will be reminded that, thanks to congressional delegation of authority, the House doesn't count for much. What matters is the presidency. Ask the GOP.

In other words, like a boomerang launched to knock out of the air as many presidential initiatives as they can hit, the Democrats' policy of resistance and obstruction is likely to arc back and strike them squarely in the kisser.

That policy has surely drained the GOP of any desire to cooperate with the Democrats on anything, and it's therefore hard to think of any successes to which congressional Democrats can look forward as long as the GOP controls both the Senate and the Executive.

Why Trump Will Win

The media is making much of the inconveniences to, and suffering of, government workers caused by the government shutdown (although they've been glaringly delinquent in interviewing people and relatives of people who've been victimized in one way or another by illegal aliens).

The takeaway of their coverage is supposed to be that this awful state of affairs is all the fault of Donald Trump, but anyone who thinks about it will have to ask why the blame should be imputed to Trump when Trump has expressed willingness to compromise on the sticking point, i.e. $5.7 billion for a border barrier, and Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have flatly rejected the possibility of any compromise.

David Marcus at The Federalist thinks that the Democrats' adamantine refusal to accept compromise has ensured that Trump will be holding all the cards in this high stakes poker game.

I would add to Marcus' argument the fact that the Democrats have embarrassed themselves by offering up transparently silly reasons for their recalcitrance and indeed have had to flip-flop like a beached trout from positions on border security they held staunchly up until November 8th, 2016.

When Speaker Pelosi avers, for example, that a border wall is "immoral" but won't say what it is about a wall that makes it immoral, or won't tell us what the significant difference is between locking the doors of one's house to keep people from entering one's home illegally and erecting a barrier on the border to keep people from entering the country illegally, she tacitly demonstrates that she has no good reason for refusing funds for the wall.

Her actual reason is, evidently, that she simply recoils from the thought of handing President Trump a "win" and allowing him to keep another campaign promise.

Here are a few excerpts from Marcus' column:

We all like to knock and mock Trump’s braggadocio claims that he is the best negotiator ever. But in this case, he really has outflanked his opponents. Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have painted themselves into a corner. They have said, “No funding for a wall.” They say this despite the fact that they have supported barrier funding in the past. So in essence they have given themselves no fallback position.

The Democrats have made this a zero-sum game. If Trump gets any money for the wall, he wins. That’s a really fantastic position for him. He can go on TV, whether in a controversial network roadblock or an appearance on the southern border, and say, “Hey, I’m up for a compromise.” Meanwhile, Chuck and Nancy have to slam the door shut on getting 800,000 federal employees back to work.

A president always has an advantage in a government shutdown. The executive branch speaks with a single voice, while Congress is divided between parties. Trump is clearly pointing to and offering a solution. The House Democrats aren’t. And their intransigence is highlighted by the fact that Republican members of Congress are calling them out.

So here we are. What reason does President Trump possibly have to cave? You could point to the legitimately troubling stories of federal employees unable to pay the rent, as major networks have done, but as troubling as those stories are, can we really place the blame squarely on the one person who is open for a compromise?

In lieu of any compelling argument to justify the Democrats refusal to compromise, an argument more persuasive than simply the implied "We hate Trump," Marcus' conclusion seems amply warranted:

Pelosi will have to fold here. There is no benefit to Trump for folding, and plenty of benefit for her. She played it wrong. Fair enough: she can live to fight another day, but this time, on this fight, Trump is beating her soundly and will get his wall funding. It’s only a matter of time.

The Identity Politics Tar Baby

Mark Lilla is an academic, a liberal and a man contemptuous of Donald Trump's presidency.

After stating that he's an academic the rest of that description may sound redundant, but it's worth stating in order to clarify that Lilla is no closet Republican out to undermine the Democratic Party. He's written a book titled The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics, in which he diagnoses what he perceives to be a deep problem in contemporary liberalism and ergo in the Democratic Party.

Peter Berkowitz writes about Lilla's book in a piece at Real Clear Politics. Lilla's thesis, in a word, is that the Democrats embrace of identity politics is a betrayal of true liberalism and has estranged Democrats from the people who have traditionally been their main constituency.

It's interesting, parenthetically, that liberals once upon a time appealed to blue-collar workers and disdained the fat cat corporate CEOs. Today fat cat CEOs are frequently among the biggest donors to the Democratic party and blue-collar folks are wearing MAGA hats.

Anyway, Berkowitz writes that:

Last November, shortly after the election, [Lilla] called in the New York Times for fellow liberals to face up to their party’s portion of responsibility for Trump’s victory, which Lilla traced to the rise [of] “identity liberalism.” His contention that “American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing” provoked outrage on the left.

The outrage is understandable. Some on the left have committed their entire lives and reputations to promoting identity politics. To have a supposed ally declare, in the New York Times, no less, that their life's work has been a misguided calamity is not a message likely to be received with equanimity, even if it's true.

In “The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics,” Lilla elaborates on his thesis, providing a short, elegant polemic exposing the profound harm that identity liberalism has caused to the Democratic Party.

A professor of humanities at Columbia University, and a regular essayist at the New York Review of Books, Lilla uses the term “liberal” to denote those who identify with the achievements of the New Deal, which summoned Americans to “a collective enterprise to guard one another against risk, hardship, and the denial of fundamental rights.”

Identity liberalism divides Americans into groups — women, African-Americans, Latinos, LGBT Americans, Native Americans, Asian-Americans, and on and on. It nourishes a “resentful, disuniting rhetoric of difference” that defines membership in terms of distinctive narratives of victimhood, and confers status in proportion to the magnitude of the oppression one claims to have suffered under the hegemonic sway of white, male structures of power.

Propelled by America’s colleges and universities — which, Lilla observes, have replaced political clubs and shop floors as the incubators of liberal political leaders —identity liberalism has abandoned the political mission of bringing fellow citizens together in favor of the evangelical one of extracting professions of faith and punishing heretics, apostates, and infidels.

These are powerful words indeed. An ideology as divisive as modern liberalism has become can scarcely unite the country except perhaps through the exercise of various forms of compulsion, which is certainly the direction in which today's liberalism seems to be headed. So, what's to be done?

Disappointingly for an author whose purpose is to rouse fellow liberals to action, Lilla offers no proposal for reforming our colleges and universities, which he blames for indoctrinating students in identity politics dogma. But he does sketch the larger political goal: a “more civic-minded liberalism” that cultivates a shared appreciation of the rights and responsibilities that all American citizens share and which encourages individuals to undertake “the hard and unglamorous task of persuading people very different from themselves to join a common effort.”

This is a noble goal, but one that can be reached only by people who focus on the things they share in common, not the things that make them different. Diversity, notwithstanding its status as an idol on the left, is much overrated as a public good, especially when those who worship it are incessantly celebrating the things that make us different and thus dividing us from each other.

In any case, as Berkowitz has noted, Lilla's argument, both in his Times column of last November and in his book, has received a chilly reception on the left:

The reply from the establishment left to Lilla’s brief for less victim politics and more retail politics was swift and sure. To mark publication last week of “The Once and Future Liberal,” the New York Times published a review by Yale University History Professor Beverly Gage that dismissed Lilla’s critique as “trolling disguised as erudition.”

Finding nothing bad to say about identity liberalism except to wonder why it hasn’t generated more marchers, Gage sent Times readers on their way with a clear conscience to continue to exhaust themselves in venting fury against Trump’s daily outrages.

Nevertheless, Berkowitz finds several elements in Lilla's presentation of his case to criticize. First, Lilla himself falls into the same pit that he urges liberals to avoid, and second he fails to recognize that what he's advocating, a return to classical liberalism, is, in fact, a plea to liberals to adopt a cluster of conservative principles.

Indeed, modern conservatism is in many respects an expression of the ideas of classical liberalism. Berkowitz writes:

The serious criticism of Lilla is twofold.

First, while holding aloft the idea of a common citizenship, he lapses from time to time into an illiberal politics of friends and enemies revolving around a fundamental antagonism between right and left. Conservatives, in Lilla’s account, are simple-minded, selfish, and anti-political; indifferent to the plight of those not like them; and oblivious of the claims of culture and nation.

To assert that “a vote for Trump was a betrayal of citizenship, not an exercise of it” is — in lockstep with the purveyors of identity liberalism — to smear nearly half of your fellow citizens as traitors.

Second, Lilla propagates a basic misunderstanding about the liberalism he laudably sets out to save. That liberalism is not the antithesis of conservatism, or, at least of that conservatism devoted to liberty, limited government, and democratic politics.

Despite his best efforts to ignore or conceal it, the liberalism that he labors to restore has a decisively conservative element, because, as Lilla rightly recognizes, the enduring ground of citizens’ solidarity in America is a shared commitment to a constitutional order that equally protects the individual rights of all.

Identity politics has for the Democratic party become a tar baby from which they can't come unstuck because their base, the progressive left, simply won't allow it. The last thing progressives seem to want these days is liberty, limited government and a commitment to the Constitution. If that's what Lilla is calling for it's no wonder they despise his book.

All Depends on Who Said it

It's an unfortunate fact concerning our political intercourse that two individuals can make exactly the same politically incorrect claim, and the people hearing it will condemn one and not the other depending on whether the speaker has an R or a D after his or her name.

We're so blinded by our political and personal antipathies that it seems next to impossible to be objective and fair in our judgments.

An illustration of this shortcoming of our human nature was occasioned by a recent visit to American University by Campus Reform's Cabot Phillips who asked students their opinions on three quotes from President Trump on the need for stronger control of our borders. The three quotes were these:

1. “Illegal Immigration is wrong, plain and simple. Until the American people are convinced we will stop future flows of illegal immigration, we will make no progress.”
2. “We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented and unchecked.”
3. “I voted numerous times...to spend money to build a barrier to try to prevent illegal immigrants from coming in. And I do think you have to control your borders.”

One student called it “divisive.” Another called it “kind of hateful speech in general.” A third student called it a “rude” way to talk about illegal immigrants. A fourth student said, “there are racial biases kind of deep-embedded in there.” Other terms used to describe the quotes included jingoist, unacceptable, and dehumanizing.

But then Phillips told the students that it wasn't actually Trump who made these statements and revealed to them who did. The students seemed stunned.

It's an amusing video:

University students may be learning a lot during their campus experience, but one thing these students, at least, seem to be missing out on is how to think critically and objectively.

Hopefully, by the time they graduate they'll be better at it, but we probably shouldn't bet on it.

"Free-Loading Atheists"

I recently came across a fine essay by Colgate professor Robert Kraynak in a 2011 edition of The New Atlantis.

The article is titled Justice Without Foundations, and in it Kraynak explores the attempts of two groups of modern thinkers to maintain a moral system based upon values like freedom, justice, autonomy, equality, and dignity while at the same time recognizing that, by rejecting Christianity, they have forfeited any possibility of providing an objective foundation for these values.

With no objective source or ground for such values they're merely subjective preferences invested with an aura of sanctity that has no rational justification.

The two groups Kraynak directs most of his attention toward are postmodern pragmatists, particularly Richard Rorty, and scientific materialists like Daniel Dennett and Stephen Pinker.

He begins with these observations:

The strangeness of our day consists in a strong moral passion for the virtue of justice sitting alongside a loss of confidence in the very foundations for justice, and even an eagerness to undermine them.

People today display extreme moral sensitivity to injustices that they understand as violations of the equal rights and equal dignity of all persons — especially the rights of persons thought to be victims of discrimination and oppression. This sensitivity leads to demands for government policies on behalf of “social justice,” and for changing social customs to protect individuals and groups from insensitive words and actions.

But at the same time that people are asked to become more aware of injustices and indignities, the foundations that might justify such obligations are disappearing from philosophy, religion, science, and culture. In many cases, they are being actively undermined by the scholars and intellectuals who are the most vocal in protesting injustices. Among the leading intellectual currents shaping our culture are moral relativism and scientific materialism, especially Darwinism.

Neither supports very well the demands for moral sensitivity and social justice — understood today in terms of equal respect and equal rights. For the crucial requirement of human equality is a conception of human dignity, which views human beings as having a special moral status in the universe, and individuals as having unique moral worth entailing claims of justice.

What is so strange about our age is that demands for respecting human rights and human dignity are increasing even as the foundations for those demands are disappearing. In particular, beliefs in man as a creature made in the image of God, or an animal with a rational soul, are being replaced by a scientific materialism that undermines what is noble and special about man, and by doctrines of relativism that deny the objective morality required to undergird human dignity.

How do we account for the widening gap between metaphysics and morals today? How do we explain “justice without foundations” — a virtue that seems to exist like a table without legs, suspended in mid-air? What is holding up the central moral beliefs of our times?

These are all important questions, questions to which the modern atheist is ill-equipped to offer a cogent answer.

Kraynak goes on to talk about how atheistic thinkers like Rorty, Dennett, Pinker, et al. are forced by their naturalism to live their lives in what Francis Schaeffer described as a two story building. In the lower story naturalists live their lives as rational beings, but, when they want to make moral judgments, they have to leave reason behind and leap to the upper story where non-rationality reigns.

Rorty is an interesting case because he, at least, recognizes that this is precisely what he's doing and even refers to himself as a "free-loading atheist." I.e. he admits to living off the moral capital of Christianity while denying the God from which that capital flows. Kraynak writes:

The best place to begin the discussion of justice without foundations is with the late American philosopher Richard Rorty, the influential spokesman for “non-foundationalism.” As a professor at the University of Virginia and Stanford, he made a strong impression on students by telling them to stop philosophizing and to live pragmatically on behalf of social justice and human dignity.

His rejection of philosophy was ... elaborated on in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and other writings, describing the futility of reason to grasp the external world of nature, or to provide rational foundations for knowledge, both moral and metaphysical....

He further maintained that political values such as democracy, equal rights, and respect for others are non-foundational commitments that North Americans and Europeans have built into their social conventions. Hence, we do not need philosophy to teach us how to act politically, because the ideals are embedded in our language and traditions; all we need to do is to affirm them by human sympathy and active citizenship.

The problems with Rorty’s position have been noticed by many critics — none more astutely than Peter Lawler in Aliens in America (2002). In developing these criticisms, it is useful to examine a little-noticed 1983 essay of Rorty’s called “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism.”

In that essay, Rorty honestly admits that his moral sensitivities are “postmodern” in the sense of being rationally groundless; yet he asserts that they are still legitimate as borrowings from Judeo-Christian notions of human dignity inherited from the past. With intentional irony, Rorty describes people like himself as “free-loading atheists.”

His justification [for "moral" behavior] is that he is part of a community of moral traditions inherited from Judaism and Christianity, which teaches us to care for a homeless person like the Good Samaritan would do.

Of course, if he had been born into a community that taught the virtues of ethnic cleansing and slavery then those traditions would be justified as well.

For Rorty what's right is whatever your community teaches. Morality is simply a convention, like the rules of grammar. The rules could be different than they are, there's nothing really right or wrong about them, and if the relevant community wanted to change them, whatever they decide would then be the new norm.

There's much more to Kraynak's analysis at the link, and I urge anyone interested in the contemporary intellectual and philosophical climate to spend the time it takes to give it a thorough reading. It's important.

Immoral and Not Us

Nancy Pelosi has claimed that she is unalterably opposed to a border wall on the grounds that such a barrier is immoral. Exactly why a wall is immoral Ms Pelosi didn't deign to say, evidently preferring to have us figure it out for ourselves.

The Daily Caller contacted her office to see if our newly re-elected Speaker of the House, who is by the way a Roman Catholic, would favor us with her opinions on the morality of a few other matters.

She was asked whether, putting aside the question of whether abortion should be legal or not, does Speaker Pelosi think that:

• sex-selective abortions — e.g. aborting an unborn baby solely because she’s a girl — are immoral?
• it’s immoral to coerce Catholic nuns to subsidize birth control?
• it’s immoral for Democratic senators to use membership in a Catholic charitable organization, the Knights of Columbus, as a negative test for judicial office?

Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, Ms Pelosi’s office declined to favor us with any enlightenment as to what the Speaker might think about any of the above questions.

The difference between the border wall and abortion, of course, is that her base opposes the former and considers the latter a sacrament. Thus, the former is ipso facto decidedly immoral and the latter is a topic on which she'd prefer to invoke the Biblical advice to judge not lest you be judged.

The next time you hear someone say that a wall is immoral or that it's not "who we are" ask the individual to explain what it is about putting a wall on the border that makes it immoral. Ask them why a wall to keep people from illegally entering the country is any less moral than locking one's doors at night to keep people from illegally entering one's house.

Ask them what it means, exactly, to say that a wall is "not who we are."

I doubt you'll get a coherent answer, or any answer at all.

Most Trustworthy Professions

Gallup recently took a poll to determine which professions were considered most trustworthy, and it turns out to no one's surprise that nurses rank at the top. The results are shown on this chart:

I'm not sure what to make of this, actually. I don't begrudge nurses the esteem in which they're held, and perhaps I'm just picking nits, but it seems to me that trust matters most when you find yourself in a situation in which you have conflicting interests with other persons, or when the other person has an incentive to be less than truthful or honest with you, or a reason to somehow exploit you for his or her benefit.

It seems to me that that's rarely the case with nurses, or most of the other professions which finished in the top five. Their interests simply don't collide with those of the people with whom they have to deal, so, although it's good that people hold them in such high regard, I don't know how significant it is that they are, as a collective, considered highly trustworthy.

On the other hand, it'd be good for members of those professions whose interests often do conflict with the interests of those who place their trust in them to examine why they don't enjoy a higher level of public confidence than they do and to resolve to raise the level of respect in which their profession is held.

Kristof's Interviews

The New York Times' Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Nicholas Kristof has over the last few years been writing a series of pieces based on interviews with prominent Christians in which he poses to them some interesting questions about orthodox Christian beliefs (e.g. the plausibility of miracles, Christian exclusivism, the necessity of believing in the deity of Christ, etc.).

Last month he had an interesting dialogue with philosopher William Lane Craig.

The best questions, though, were among those he asked of Pastor Tim Keller two years ago. In that interview he opened with this:

NK: As a journalist, I’ve found skepticism useful. If I hear something that sounds superstitious, I want eyewitnesses and evidence. That’s the attitude we take toward Islam and Hinduism and Taoism, so why suspend skepticism in our own faith tradition?

TK: I agree. We should require evidence and good reasoning, and we should not write off other religions as ‘superstitious’ and then fail to question our more familiar Jewish or Christian faith tradition.

But I don’t want to contrast faith with skepticism so sharply that they are seen to be opposites. They aren’t. I think we all base our lives on both reason and faith. For example, my faith is to some degree based on reasoning that the existence of God makes the most sense of what we see in nature, history and experience.

Thomas Nagel recently wrote that the thoroughly materialistic view of nature can’t account for human consciousness, cognition and moral values. That’s part of the reasoning behind my faith. So my faith is based on logic and argument.

In the end, however, no one can demonstrably prove the primary things human beings base their lives on, whether we are talking about the existence of God or the importance of human rights and equality. Nietzsche argued that the humanistic values of most secular people, such as the importance of the individual, human rights and responsibility for the poor, have no place in a completely materialistic universe.

He even accused people holding humanistic values as being “covert Christians” because it required a leap of faith to hold to them. We must all live by faith.

NK: I’ll grudgingly concede your point: My belief in human rights and morality may be more about faith than logic. But is it really analogous to believe in things that seem consistent with science and modernity, like human rights, and those that seem inconsistent, like a virgin birth or resurrection?

TK: I don’t see why faith should be seen as inconsistent with science. There is nothing illogical about miracles if a Creator God exists. If a God exists who is big enough to create the universe in all its complexity and vastness, why should a mere miracle be such a mental stretch? To prove that miracles could not happen, you would have to know beyond a doubt that God does not exist. But that is not something anyone can prove.

Science must always assume that an effect has a repeatable, natural cause. That is its methodology. Imagine, then, for the sake of argument that a miracle actually occurred. Science would have no way to confirm a non-repeatable, supernatural cause.

Alvin Plantinga argued that to say that there must be a scientific cause for any apparently miraculous phenomenon is like insisting that your lost keys must be under the streetlight because that’s the only place you can see.

I think that Kristoff's last question contains an error that should be highlighted. Belief in human rights, though it's certainly popular among moderns, is not at all consistent with the assumptions of modernity. If there is no God, then man is not created in His image nor loved by Him. If human beings do not contain the Imago Dei, nor are the objects of God's love, then there are no moral obligations to treat each other with dignity and respect.

We can pretend there are, but it's only pretense. Nothing in the modern naturalistic worldview requires it nor offers a basis for it. In fact, it's quite the opposite. If we're simply the products of materialistic evolutionary processes, then selfishness, exploitation and egoism are fundamental ethical principles, ingrained in our genes, and there's nothing morally wrong with them.

On the other hand, if one believes we do have objective moral obligations to help the poor, to not exploit the earth, to avoid war, etc. then one is logically compelled to be a theist. If one is not a theist then it's irrational to insist that anyone has any objective duties at all.

The next question in the interview is, in my opinion, one of the most difficult for Christian theists to answer. Kristof prefaces the question by stating that what he admires most about Christianity is the "amazing good work it inspires people to do around the world."

This is true enough, and again, there's nothing in naturalism which inspires anyone to do anything for anyone to whom they have no emotional attachment. Why, on naturalism or atheism, would it be wrong in a moral sense for people in the first world to refuse to help those languishing in misery in the third world? What reason can the atheist give for why we should do with less to help others have a bit more?

Kristoff then follows with these words:

But I’m troubled by the evangelical notion that people go to heaven only if they have a direct relationship with Jesus. Doesn’t that imply that billions of people — Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, Hindus — are consigned to hell because they grew up in non-Christian families around the world? That Gandhi is in hell?

It seems to me that both Craig and Keller could've done better with this question. My favorite reply is that of C.S. Lewis in his book The Great Divorce. That story is an extended and imaginative answer precisely to Kristof's challenge, but it unfortunately doesn't sit well with many orthodox Christians.

Anyway, the exchange with Craig elicited a lot of comment, some of which, as one has come to expect in these times, was both rude and uninformed. You can read Craig's polite response to his critics here.