Convolutions of Identity Politics

The intellectual contortions and convolutions of Identity Politics make one's head spin. Here's an example:

Yesterday's post mentioned the concept of "cultural appropriation," surely one of the oddest racial grievances on the current menu of social complaints, since it's so obviously self-defeating for those who invoke it. A post at The American Conservative by Rod Dreher caused me to reflect a bit more on the implications of cultural appropriation for the contemporary phenomenon of transgenderism.

Dreher writes about a man who decided to have surgery to make himself look Korean like his favorite celebrity:

Oli London, a mentally disturbed young Englishman who has a bizarre obsession with the K-pop star Park Jimin, has had many plastic surgeries in an attempt to look like his idol. Now he has finished his surgeries (he says), and believes he looks Korean. Thus, he has announced that he is “transracial” — he is no longer an Englishman, but a Korean. A non-binary Korean.

London claims in the video (at the link) that he's actually had 18 surgeries to make his physical appearance comport with his psychological self-identity. It's very sad, but he poses a pertinent question to his social media critics, one that leads to a chain of further questions. He asks, if people can be transsexual why can't they also be transracial, or trans anything, for that matter?

Good question. What's the significant difference? But here's the problem for our Identity Politics friends who might say that there's no difference and that no one should object to either. According to some of them it's "cultural appropriation" for white persons to, for example, wear their hair in dreadlocks, and cultural appropriation is labelled a form of racism according to the pyramid (about 2/3 of the way down the right side) in yesterday's post.

But if it's "cultural appropriation," and thus racist, for a white person to make himself look black, why is it any less an act of cultural appropriation, and thus racist, to make himself look Korean?

Moreover, as London asks, if it's okay, as it certainly is nowadays, for a man to try to make himself into a woman why is it not okay for a white Brit to try to make himself into an Asian? If it's okay to be transsexual, which is an extreme form of sexual appropriation, why is it wrong to be transracial?

Are some forms of appropriation okay and others not? Is it unacceptably racist for a white woman to adopt the black distinctive of hoop earrings, but totally acceptable to pass herself off as a complete black woman as did Rachel Dolezal a few years back? Why would the former be offensive but the latter not?

And if a white person trying to pass as black does constitute cultural appropriation and is therefore racist, why doesn't a man making himself into a woman constitute sexual appropriation and therefore be sexist? Why isn't the entire trans community being repudiated as a bunch of sexists?

No wonder those who adopt the pyramid reject appeals to logic and rational thinking. There certainly isn't much logical consistency in the concept of cultural appropriation nor Identity Politics in general.

Your Racism Is Unavoidable and Ineradicable

Are you a white supremacist? According to something called the white supremacy pyramid employed by some "anti-racist" speakers you really can't help but be. Note that the pyramid is divided into examples of "Overt White Supremacy" and "Covert White Supremacy."

According to "anti-racists" white supremacy, whether overt or covert, is an expression of racism so if any of the views or opinions anywhere on this pyramid describe you, you are a racist white supremacist.

No one would disagree, of course, with those attitudes depicted as overt white supremacy. They're all harmful and most of them are evil and deserve condemnation. The problem for the anti-racist crowd is that they're so rare that if they were the only manifestations of racism in this country it'd have to be acknowledged that America had pretty much resolved its racial problem.

To avoid thinking that the problem has been largely resolved, to keep racial animus alive and perpetuate the idea that white America still owes black America, the anti-racists espy covert racism almost everywhere. This, we're assured, is the real racism that saturates American life and with which black people have to deal every day.

Here's the pyramid:

It's hard to know exactly what some of these things mean, but in any case notice that,

• if you try to look past a person's race (colorblindness) and treat everyone as a human being and child of God, you're a racist. By this measure embracing Martin Luther King's dream of a day when his children would be judged by their character and not their skin color is racist, and so was King for dreaming it.
• if you believe that our culture was derived primarily from the intellectual resources we inherited from Europe and that this inheritance has made this country the freest, most prosperous country in history and that this heritage should be taught to our children, you're a racist.
• if you were, or are, a Trump supporter who believes that America has wandered away from the institutions and values - like strong two-parent families, Judeo-Christian morality, the belief that hard work tends to be rewarded - that make a nation strong and resilient, you're a racist.
• if you believe that all lives are equally valuable in the eyes of God, you're a racist. But if you believe that God values some lives, based on race, more highly than others then you're also a racist.
• if you believe that many blacks need white help (paternalism) either through transfer payments, donations, affirmative action, or other kinds of support in order to help them become self-reliant, you're a racist. But if you believe blacks shouldn't be given this kind of support you're also a racist.
• if you adopt for yourself aspects of what might be called "black culture" (cultural appropriation) you're a racist. This only works one way, though, since virtually everything that blacks use, enjoy and benefit from throughout their lives is a product of white "European" culture. Of course, if you were to refuse to adopt or appreciate something because its a product of black culture, that, too, would be racist.
• if you believe that we should control our borders and regulate who immigrates into the country, you're a racist.
• if you believe you're not a racist then you are a racist, and if you believe you are a racist then, of course, you are a racist.
• if you believe that black people can be as racist as anyone else then you're a racist. If, on the other hand, you believe that black people cannot be racist then you believe they're morally superior to every other race and that's also racist.

In other words, no matter how hard you may try to expunge your soul of the ugly stain of racism, if you're white it's ineradicable and the purging project is hopeless. But if that's the case where does it lead?

If whites cannot help but be racist might not a lot of them conclude that if no matter what they do they're going to be hectored about their white privilege, their white supremacy and their intrinsic moral failure, they may as well stop trying to treat everyone equally and just stick to people like themselves, racially balkanize, resegregate, and let each race take care of their own?

Resegregation might make the anti-racist crowd happy for a while, but it certainly wouldn't work out to the well-being of the vast majority of blacks who've benefited from having integrated into white society.

I guess to think that, though, is paternalism, and that, according to the pyramid, is also racist.

On Faith and the Multiverse

UC San Diego astrophysicist Brian Keating has an interesting if a bit fast-moving seven and a half minute video up on YouTube that compares belief in the multiverse to religious belief. The video explains the use of the concept of falsifiability in scientific theorizing and is very helpful, except for an error he appears to make in his introductory remarks.

Keating adopts for the sake of discussion the stereotype of belief in God as a belief based on the lack of evidence, which of course is indeed the stereotype but which is wildly mistaken. But he then seems to suggest that evidence for God and faith in God are somehow inversely related to each other as though faith in God's existence decreases as evidence for God's existence increases.

This assumes the Dawkinsian definition of faith, i.e. "belief without evidence," but that definition is quite wrong. It's actually the definition of "blind" faith, but that's not what's meant when thoughtful people talk about faith in God.

Faith is not belief without evidence but rather belief without proof, which is, of course, not the same thing. Indeed, the more evidence one has for any proposition the stronger one's faith in the truth of that proposition generally is, even if one can't prove that it's true.

For example, the more evidence you have that your surgeon has in the past successfully performed operations similar to the one you're planning to have, the more faith you have that he will satisfactorily perform the surgery on you. The more evidence you have that an airline pilot has proven proficient in the past the stronger is your faith that he'll fly you successfully to your destination today.

So far from being somehow contrary to faith, evidence actually strengthens faith. The more evidence there is that God exists, and there's actually a great deal, the more robust one's trust in Him and commitment to Him tends to be. And trust and commitment are two essential components of what people mean when they talk about faith in God.

We might express this as a series of entailments where each entailment in the series is "packed into" the one before it:

Faith in God ---> Belief despite the lack of proof that God exists ---> Love for, and trust in, God ---> Commitment to live the kind of life God desires ---> Treating others with compassion and justice.

Thus, when someone says they have faith that God exists they're actually saying, or should be saying, everything that's entailed by that proposition.

Anyway, here's Keating on the multiverse, evidence, faith and falsifiability:

A Guide to CRT

News reports from around the country have revealed a great deal of discontent among parents with their local school board members who've introduced Critical Race Theory into their children's curricula. MSNBC's Joy Reid complained recently that conservatives, and presumably these parents, who criticize CRT don't really know what it is.

She and others of her ideological persuasion would have us believe that CRT is just a benign attempt to educate students about the history of slavery and Jim Crow, etc. It is, of course, much more than that.

CRT, its own advocates have written, seeks to radically revolutionize America in the name of ending "oppression." It rejects the values of the earlier Civil Rights movement. The idea, for example, that people can, or should strive to be, "color-blind" is rejected. Race is paramount. To not consider race in any interaction is an instance of "white supremacy."

CRT also repudiates racial integration because, proponents argue, it leads to "cultural genocide" as the minority group is absorbed into, and assimilated by, the dominant (white) group.

It rejects classical liberalism and the notion of equality, substituting instead an emphasis on "equity," i.e. the idea that if there are disparities between races in any metric such as mortality rates, life expectancies, incarceration rates, disciplinary actions in schools, etc. they are necessarily the consequence of racism. No other explanation is allowed.

CRT rejects logical reasoning, objectivity, standpoint neutrality and fairness in discussions about race as "white values" and the attempt to adopt these values by People of Color (POC) is to adopt whiteness and to betray one's own race by tacitly affirming the superiority of white values to the values of the oppressed class.

It furthermore rejects the classical liberal ideals of freedom of speech and the principle of blind justice. These ideals, too, are "white."

Its emphasis is on the subjective "lived experience" of POC. Their stories are self-validating. To question them is to engage in an act of white supremacy or racism. The idea that truth is objective is rejected. Knowledge is experiential.

Science and reason are tainted by "whiteness." Statistics are meaningless if they conflict with what a member of the "oppressed class" feels deep in her soul to be true.

It also teaches that whites, and only whites, are inherently racist, nor can they expunge the stain. All they can do is submit to the moral superiority of the oppressed, do some kind of penance and plead for forgiveness, which, if it is granted at all, is only tentative.

Moreover, according to CRT the structures of our society are irremediably saturated with racism and must be torn down. What will replace them, they don't know or say, but, like the Jacobins in 1789 and the Bolsheviks in 1917, it's enough at this point to destroy the old order. The new non-racist order will somehow arise of itself.

Anyone who benefits from this "structural racism" is ipso facto a racist and if you're not actively seeking to topple these racist structures and institutions, you're also a racist. "Whiteness" refers to anyone who benefits from the norms, values and structures of society regardless of the beneficiary's skin tone. If you're black, but you integrate into the white status quo then you're white regardless of how much melanin your body produces.

But don't take my word for any of this. Instead, watch this video produced by a very bright young man who did his homework and dug into the original sources. His name is Ryan Chapman, and he presents the main points of CRT in a dispassionate, objective fashion that CRT proponents would doubtless dismiss because, after all, Chapman is a white person seeking to be objective, neutral and fair.

Even so, the video is quite good and is a very helpful explication of what the major figures in CRT are themselves saying about it. Maybe Joy Reid should watch it:

Explaining the Origin of the Krebs Cycle

The Krebs citric acid cycle is a complex process that occurs in the mitochondria of most of the cells in our bodies resulting in the production of molecules like ATP (Adenosine triphosphate) which are the fuel that sustains life. Without this tiny ATP molecule our bodies would shut down just like an engine that had run out of gasoline.

Amazingly, the extremely complex series of reactions leading to the production of ATP occurs in even primitive bacteria so it must have evolved early on in the history of life and therefore very rapidly, which is astonishing to think about, given the enormous complexity of the cycle:

The Krebs Citric Acid Cycle

The naturalistic view is that the evolution of this cycle occurred without any direction, without any guidance, without any goal in sight, that all the pieces were assembled from pre-existing chemicals, arranged by random trial and error through the mechanism of genetic mutation and natural selection. It's an almost miraculous defiance of probability.

This is not to say it didn't happen that way. It could have, and lots of very intelligent people think it did even though when they write about it they can't help but use telic language (i.e. language that implies a goal or purpose).

Consider this excerpt from a well-known paper from 1996:

During the origin and evolution of metabolism, in the first cells, when a need arises for a new pathway, there are two different possible strategies available to achieve this purpose: (1) create new pathways utilizing new compounds not previously available or (2) adapt and make good use of the enzymes catalyzing reactions already existing in the cell.

Clearly, the opportunism of the second strategy, when it is possible, has a number of selective advantages, because it allows a quick and economic solution of new problems.

Thus, in the evolution of a new metabolic pathway, new mechanisms must be created only if ‘‘pieces’’ to the complete puzzle are missing. Creation of the full pathway by a de novo method is expensive in material, time-consuming, and cannot compete with the opportunistic strategy, if it can achieve the new specific purpose.

We demonstrate here the opportunistic evolution of the Krebs cycle reorganizing and assembling preexisting organic chemical reactions....

Once the design of a new metabolic sequence is achieved, a refinement of the pathway may be necessary, and then, a further optimization process will move the design toward maximum efficiency by reaching optimal values of rate and affinity constants of enzymes.

Such an optimization process as a result of natural selection is also a well-documented feature of biological evolution.... the design of the pentose phosphate and Calvin cycles can be mathematically derivedby applying optimization principles under a well-established physiological function....

By considering the first stages in the history of life, we may attempt to determine logically under what conditions the Krebs cycle was organized and what its first purpose was.

This language is of course intended to be metaphorical, but the point is that it's exceedingly difficult to describe the origin of pathways such as the Krebs cycle without comparing it to an engineering problem solvable by intelligent agents.

In fact, the metaphorical, telic language often employed by scientists serves the perhaps unintentional purpose of obscuring how improbable it is that this pathway and others like it would have somehow arisen by chance genetic mutations and natural selection.

Here's another metaphor:

Suppose a card dealer shuffles a deck and lays the cards out on the table one at a time. We're assuming that the cards already exist and don't have to be manufactured (though some of the chemicals in the Krebs cycle did not already exist before the Krebs cycle evolved).

Let's also assume that the dealer has a goal in mind (nature had no goals in mind). The dealer's goal is to obtain a sequence in which each suit from ace to king appears in the order hearts, spades, diamonds, clubs.

Let's further assume that whenever he fails to get the ace of hearts as the first card he reshuffles the deck and starts over. When he does get an ace of hearts he then lets it lay and tries for a two of hearts. If he doesn't get a two of hearts on the first attempt he reshuffles the entire deck and starts over. And so on.

How long would it take to get the sequence he has in mind? This is a bit like the difficulty confronting the chance evolution of a complex system like the Krebs cycle, but with the evolution of the Krebs cycle, at least the naturalistic version, there's no goal in mind, and indeed no mind. Just random trial and error, chemicals bumping about, until something useful is hit upon and somehow conserved and eventually added to.

Of course, an intelligent card dealer, even a child, can order the cards in the desired pattern, but desired patterns, goals, and certainly intelligent dealers, are prohibited in naturalistic explanations.

The naturalist declares that he relies on science and not on faith in non-natural intelligent agents, but it seems to me that it takes a lot more faith to believe that the Krebs cycle could have arisen with no intelligent input than to believe that it arose through the agency of a biochemical genius.

On Race and Racism (Pt. II)

Yesterday, we looked at some of philosopher Lawrence Blum's analysis of racism. I'd like today to use some of the ideas he presents as a springboard for further reflection.

Blum states that racism falls into three types or categories:

• Personal racism: Racist acts, beliefs and/or attitudes on the part of individual persons.
• Social racism: Racist beliefs, attitudes and/or stereotypes widely shared within a given population and expressed in social modes such as religion, popular entertainment, advertisements and other media.
• Institutional racism: Racial inferiorizing or antipathy perpetrated by specific social institutions such as schools, corporations, hospitals, banks or the criminal justice system.

Because it's so difficult to find clear-cut examples of personal or social racism in contemporary culture some race theorists have resorted to arguing that the real problem today is not so much individual racism but rather a systemic racism that indelibly stains the structures and institutions of society.

There are, however, at least two problems with this assertion:

First, the evidence that's cited in support of the claim that our institutions are systemically racist usually consists in perceived disparities in how people of different races are treated, but disparities are a very problematic litmus test for detecting racism since they can result from a host of causes that have nothing to do with racism.

To illustrate why disparity is not in itself a good indicator of institutional racism let me cite a couple of examples of how disparities might be thought to show individual racism:

A high school English teacher may find in grading essays that black students are disproportionately less likely to use standard grammar in their writing.

If she penalizes their papers for this short-coming and black students are consequently not well-represented among the better achieving students in the class, is the teacher's act racist? Should she not hold all her students to the same standard? If she allows black students leeway on their use of substandard English that she would not grant to white students, would not that be racist?

Or, suppose it's found that a school punishes black students for misbehavior more severely than it does white students who commit similar offenses. The disparity in treatment seems to be prima facie evidence of racism, but there are many factors that go into the school's disciplinary decisions beyond just the immediate offense.

When students are confronted by school authorities for their misdeeds some lie, some yell obscenities and threats at the teacher or administrator, some violently resist being removed from the classroom.

The punishment the school administers often takes into account all of these exacerbating factors as well as such matters as the student's prior record of conduct. To ignore these factors while claiming that the disparity in discipline between whites and blacks who committed the same basic offense reveals racism on the part of the school authorities is simplistic, misleading and unhelpful.

Actual genuine disparate treatment on the basis of race is, in any case, illegal. A landlord who seeks ways to avoid renting to blacks, for instance, is culpable before the law and can be prosecuted.

The second problem with the notion of systemic, institutional racism is that institutions can't in themselves be racist, only people can. There's no such thing as "racism without racists." If racism does pervade some institution like banks, realty agencies or churches, it's because the individuals who developed the policies and practices of the institution and who currently carry them out were and are themselves racist.

In other words, institutional or "systemic" racism is merely the outward manifestation of the individual racism of the people employed by the institution.

To seek to perpetuate the notion of a racist America, despite finding so few individual racists, by locating the evil in the structures of society is to make a category mistake. It is to impute to an impersonal entity, an institution, a moral sin of which only persons can be guilty.

Here's another point to consider about the use of the word racism:

People tend to think that anyone who does or says something racially insensitive is a racist. This is an example of what Blum calls "conceptual inflation." Someone who flies the Confederate flag may have no racist motives but be unaware of the significance the flag has for others.

A person is no more a racist because something they said or did was born of ignorance or insensitivity than a person is cruel because they said something hurtful without realizing that it was hurtful.

When considering whether to label something as racist we should bear in mind that motive matters. If there's no intent on the part of one person to inferiorize or express antipathy toward another on the basis of the other's race then it's wrong to call that person a racist, even if their words or deeds were thoughtless or inconsiderate. Being racially insensitive or unaware is not the same thing as being racist.

There's much more in Blum's book that's of interest on this topic, but I want to close with a question posed by the authors of the textbook in which Blum's extract appears. Blum repeatedly asserts that racism is a moral evil worthy of our revulsion and opprobrium, so here's the question the authors of the text ask us to ponder: "How would you explain to someone from Mars why racism is wrong?"

Is racism wrong because it harms people? What about racist beliefs a person holds upon which she never acts and thus never result in harm? Are they not still wrong nonetheless? Why?

And why is it wrong to harm someone anyway? Why was it wrong for the Spaniards to torture and slaughter indigenous people in Central America in the 16th century or for plantation owners in the West indies to work African slaves in the hot sun until they dropped dead from exhaustion and disease? If they had the power to do these things, if they were never called to account for doing them, if they died content in their old age after decades of having caused others to suffer, what makes their acts wrong?

The theist who believes we are all made in the image of a God who loves us and commands us to love and respect each other and who will ultimately hold us accountable for how we treat others has an answer to these questions.

The secular man who believes there is no God or that God is irrelevant has no persuasive answer. For him the only answer to the question "why is racism wrong?" is that, well, it just is, and that answer doesn't, or shouldn't, convince any thinking person.

On Race and Racism (Pt. I)

We're often told that we need to have a serious "conversation about race" in this country, but unfortunately there are complications attendant upon any such conversation.

One is that for all the current talk about race, many scientists believe it to be an artificial category or social construct. They've concluded that there are, actually, no distinct racial types.

For example, University of California professor Tanya Golash-Boza writes that the notion of race has no basis in biology. To be sure, there are obvious physical differences between Kenyans, Swedes and Chinese, but it doesn't follow that the world can be divided into discrete racial groups. There's actually a continuous series of incremental gradations between these groups, and this fact makes it difficult to tell where to draw the line between one group and another.

Even the genetic differences between Kenyans and Swedes are not as great as the genetic variation just among Kenyans. Thus, the claim that race is a social, rather than a biological, construction.

As much as I'd like to accept this myself, preferring as I do to think of humanity as a single "kind" created in the image of God, I'm not sure the gradual gradation argument holds up. It's like arguing that because the color red shades imperceptibly to orange and then to yellow and so on to violet across the spectrum making it hard to know where to draw the line between the various colors, that therefore red, violet and the others are really not distinct hues.

It's also difficult, for that matter, to know where to draw the line between childhood, adolescence and adulthood, but it doesn't follow that there's no significant difference between these stages of life.

And biologists have difficulty knowing where to draw the line between life and non-life, but surely there's a difference.

With regard to race, perhaps it's more reasonable to say that humanity is all one biological species manifesting a spectrum of characteristics that tend to cluster around what we might call discrete racial types than to say that because it's hard to draw the line between one racial group and another that therefore there's no basis for distinguishing between them.

In other words, as much as many of us, myself included, would like to get beyond thinking of people in terms of race, the concept of race is admittedly useful even if it's not grounded in any significant biological distinctions.

A second complication in our discussions about race is the promiscuous use of the word racism.

The word is tossed around rather freely, but its users rarely do us the favor of defining what they mean by it. Perhaps there's a reason for that. It's very difficult to give a clear definition that does the work that many who wield the term want it to do.

In their textbook Philosophy the Quest for Truth Louis Pojman and Lewis Vaughn write this:

Racism begins with the belief that races exist and can be differentiated by significant moral, intellectual or cultural characteristics. This supposition ...however, is not itself racism.

According to philosopher and race scholar Lawrence Blum, what transforms the assumption about race into racism is the addition of the belief that 1) some races are inferior to others in important respects or 2) some races deserve disdain, hatred, or hostility.

Blum labels these two factors inferiorization and antipathy.

Pojman and Vaughn go on to state, "But if inferiorization and antipathy are the heart of racism, then many actions, attitudes, institutions, and people that are being called racist don't deserve the label."

Indeed, as helpful as Blum's criteria are, the inferiorization criterion raises the question of what constitute "important respects." Clearly, moral and intellectual differences would qualify, but why not physical differences? What grounds do we have for saying that a race of pygmies is not inferior to a race of giants?

Does it not depend upon the context in which physical differences are relevant? And if the context matters is it not fair to say that whites and Asians in the U.S. are physically inferior to blacks in ways that suit people for athletic activities like basketball, football and Olympic sprinting?

What grounds do we have for saying that those forms of inferiority are irrelevant, and if they're not irrelevant is it racist to recognize that kind of racial inferiority? And if physical differences are relevant then anyone who's aware of the dominance of blacks in some American professional sports would be a racist according to Blum's inferiorization criterion, because they believe that whites and Asians are physically inferior to blacks in ways that are clearly significant in American culture.

Blum is no doubt correct that racism often does involve inferiorization, but a belief that, generally speaking, one race is superior to another in some relevant respect doesn't necessarily entail that the person holding the belief is racist. If it did, then everyone - black, white and yellow - who acknowledges the physical superiority of blacks on the basketball court or on the track would be a racist, which would render the term useless.

For his inferiorization criterion to be helpful Blum needs to specify what forms of inferiority are relevant in assessing racism, and which aren't, without simply making arbitrary judgments.

Blum's second criterion, antipathy based on race, is perhaps less problematic. He writes that racial antipathy "encompasses racial bigotry, hostility, and hatred" toward a racial group, based on a "faulty and inflexible generalization" about that group.

This, though, presents an irony since much of the race-based bigotry, hostility and hatred we see in our current culture is found in the black population and according to the shibboleths of the day, black people cannot be racist. Nevertheless, pace those who would absolve blacks of the stain of racism, there's no good reason to think that blacks, or any other group, are somehow exempt from this particular human sin or that whites are uniquely afflicted by it.

Surely, when a black theologian prays that God will help her to hate white people she's indulging in racism. When a black murderer tells police he wanted to kill white men surely that's racism. When black speakers tell their audiences that "all white people are racists" that's surely an expression of racial bigotry that rises to the level of racism.

Blum points out that inferiorizing and racial antipathy are distinct. Not everyone who inferiorizes other races has antipathy toward them. They "may have a paternalistic concern and feelings of kindness for persons they regard as their inferiors...."

This is the kind of racism often found among liberals who seem to believe that blacks are helpless unless assisted by white benefactors. it's racism, but it's hardly the virulent sort of racism we normally think of when we hear the word.

"Conversely," he writes, "not every race hater regards the target of her hatred as inferior." In the United States, for example, at least some of the current hostility toward Asians and Jews is driven by resentment spawned by a belief, perhaps subliminal, that the hater is actually in some way inferior to those he hates.

Nevertheless, despite some caveats, Blum's analysis is helpful overall. Inferiorization is often, though not always, a sign of racism, and racial antipathy almost always is.

We'll look at more of Blum's analysis tomorrow.

Two Fighters Named Clay

I've written in the past that despite my opposition to the Antifa and BLM types tearing down statues that mark our historical and cultural heritage there are some statutes that I think should be pulled down. I wrote about one of them here.

I also think there are some people who may not be honored with a statue but should be. One of these is a man whose name, despite being unwisely spurned by a world-famous athlete, will sound familiar to almost any American reader of mature years.

The name is Cassius Clay, and Michael Medved gives us a portrait of this very colorful and courageous abolitionist in a piece in the Wall Street Journal. Here's an excerpt:

Born in 1810, Clay defied his slave-owning and influential Kentucky family when he became an abolitionist during his student days at Yale. A speech by William Lloyd Garrison, the fiery advocate for emancipation, struck him “as water to a thirsty wayfarer.” Returning home after graduation in 1832, he won four terms in the state Legislature despite his unpopular antislavery views.

Clay’s second cousin (and occasional political sponsor) was the state’s most celebrated citizen: Henry Clay, the House speaker and longtime senator.

Clay didn't just argue for abolition and then flee the wrath of his fellow Kentuckians. He was a fighter:

While other antislavery agitators fled the South to escape intimidation and violence, Clay used his inherited wealth to set up an uncompromising abolitionist newspaper in Lexington, named True American. After fighting off a mob of 60 who tried to smash his printing presses, Clay installed two cannons to protect his premises.

He also funded Berea College, a Christian institution that became the first college in the South to welcome black students and women.

Though Clay might have continued in the role of philanthropist and humanitarian, his combative nature pushed him toward provocation and confrontation. Henry Clay’s biographers David and Jeanne Heidler wrote of Cassius: “A venomous pen was his first weapon of choice, a bowie knife his second, and because he was so effective with the one, he found it wise to have the other handy.”

After a heated public debate in 1843, a hired killer assaulted him and aimed a shot directly to his chest. While struggling to remove the bowie knife from the leather scabbard he carried on his belt, Clay unintentionally pulled up the sheath over his stomach. The would-be assassin’s bullet struck the scabbard and lodged itself into the silver blade, before Cash used the knife to slice off his assailant’s nose and an ear.

Six years later, the pro-slavery Turner Brothers—six of them—attacked Clay with cudgels and knives during a public meeting at Foxtown, stabbing him repeatedly in the back before Thomas Turner, the group’s leader, pulled out his revolver. The trigger jammed three times, giving Clay the chance to gut another brother, Cyrus, with his knife, a fatal blow that dispersed his attackers.

                                                      Cassius Marcellus Clay

It's astonishing that this man who risked his life in the anti-slavery cause is not more widely known. Medved tells us more about his military service and personal life and then concludes with this:

[The] “Lion of White Hall” remained active and embattled into extreme old age. To deal with ever-present threats on his life, in his 80s he added two pistols to the bowie knife as part of his personal armament. When he died at 92, his survivors listed the cause of death as “general exhaustion.”

To honor the memory of the famous and fearless abolitionist, one Herman Heaton Clay, whose ancestors had been enslaved by the Clay family, named his own son Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. The young man became world-famous 22 years later with an astonishing, underdog boxing victory against heavyweight champion Sonny Liston.

Shortly thereafter the young fighter jettisoned the name of the old fighter who had inspired his father, and chose to call himself Muhammad Ali, an affirmation of his newfound Muslim faith.

Without any acknowledgment of the daring, dangerous commitment to emancipation that characterized the life of his namesake, the new champ disparaged Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr. as “a slave name.” He said: “I didn’t choose it and I don’t want it. . . . Why would I keep my white slave master’s name visible and my black ancestors invisible, unknown, unhonored?”

Surely Ali didn't know the kind of man his father named him for. I like to think that had he known who Cassius Clay was he'd have been proud to bear the name. As it is, Clay the abolitionist is himself almost invisible, unknown and unhonored.

Self-Defense Is Terrorism

After the 11 day war between Hamas and Israel last month Egypt has been trying to negotiate a long-term truce, but the talks are stalled because Hamas refuses to allow reconstruction aid sent to Gaza to be monitored. Hamas wants to use the aid to rebuild the bunkers and tunnels that Israel destroyed, but the donor countries want it to go to housing and other civilian infrastructure for the Gazan Palestinians.

Strategy Page notes:

During the May bombing campaign it became obvious that Hamas military construction efforts in Gaza since 2014 were made possible by diverting most of the reconstruction aid to building new tunnels, bunkers and other military fortifications. That meant the materials donated for rebuilding housing and infrastructure had no impact on the sorry state of housing and infrastructure in Gaza.

This is one of the reasons Gazans blame (quietly, among themselves) Hamas more than Israel for the current damage and support the construction supervision demands of Israel and Egypt.

Hamas continues to insist its primary purpose is to destroy Israel and rebuilding tunnels and bunkers is part of that. Egypt is losing patience with Hamas but wants to maintain its ability to mediate deals with Hamas.

This is in spite of Hamas openly allying itself with Iran, an archenemy of Egypt and openly calling for the replacement of the current Egyptian government with one more accommodating to the needs of Islamic terrorists and Iran.

Despite the stated aims of Hamas, or maybe because of them, lots of people on the left in the U.S. are openly hostile toward the Israelis for defending themselves. The left, folks like Ilhan Omar and other members of "The Squad," is affronted that Israel refuses to acquiesce in its own destruction.

Six days after hostilities began, New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called Israel an apartheid state, capping off a week of bold statements from progressives including Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, and Betty McCollum, who reintroduced a bill restricting Israel’s use of military aid in April.

House progressives and Senator Bernie Sanders also offered resolutions opposing the sale of $735 million in American weapons to Israel.

Omar tweeted on Monday that: "Israeli air strikes killing civilians in Gaza is an act of terrorism. Palestinians deserve protection. Unlike Israel, missile defense programs, such as Iron Dome, don’t exist to protect Palestinian civilians. It’s unconscionable to not condemn these attacks on the week of Eid."

Evidently, in Omar's muddled thinking, self-defense constitutes terrorism and should be condemned. The article at Strategy Page also had this:

[During the 11-day war with Hamas in Gaza] the Hamas surprise rocket attacks were much less effective than during the 51-day war in 2014. Although Hamas fired over three times as many rockets in 2021 Israeli casualties and losses were much less than in 2014. Hamas losses were higher, especially in terms of tunnels and bunkers located and destroyed, often only after Hamas gunmen or leaders were detected taking shelter in them.

Over the last decade Israel has developed software that performs much more effectively at analyzing aerial digital photos along with data obtained from more abundant and powerful electronic sensors. The use of digital photos made it possible to use software systems to look for threats and even their patterns of operation.

These new technologies made Israeli target detection and target attacks much faster and effective than in the past. The 2021 war demonstrated new Israeli fire control and civil-defense systems as well as new anti-aircraft and missile systems. There were new ELINT (Electronic Intelligence) systems that were only mentioned in passing, without any details.

One sympathizes with the Palestinian people who groan under the brutal oppression of Hamas and suffer as a result of the security measures Israel is forced to take because of the ceaseless machinations of its implacable enemy in Gaza. Nevertheless, to fault Israel for trying to eliminate those who are trying to kill them and their children is ludicrous.

Fathers

When David Blankenhorn's Fatherless America came out in 1995 it became an instant classic on the importance of men to the well-being of the American family.

Blankenhorn said many things in that book that needed to be said, especially after our society had suffered through two decades of radical feminism with its relentless downplaying of the need for traditional two-parent families, and even though the book came out over two decades ago, what he said in 1995 needs saying as much today as it did then.

Recall Gloria Steinem's aphorism that "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." It turned out that women and children both need men, at least fathers, as much as a fish needs water.

Tomorrow is Father's Day in the U.S. so today might be a good time to remind ourselves of some of the key points Blankenhorn illuminates in Fatherless America.

He tells us, for instance, that men need to be fathers. Fatherhood is society's most important role for men. More than any other activity it helps men become good men. Fathers are more likely to obey the law, to be good citizens, and to care about the needs of others.

Men who remain single are more likely than those who marry to die young, or commit crimes, or both (This is a point also made by George Gilder in his equally fine 1986 book Men and Marriage which I heartily recommend).

Children need fathers as protectors. Eighty-four percent of all cases of non-parental child abuse occur in single parent homes and of these cases, 64% of them occur at the hands of mom's boyfriend. Statistically speaking, teenage girls are far safer in the company of their father than in the company of any other man.

Children need fathers as providers. Fatherlessness is the single most powerful determinant of childhood poverty. Regardless of how poverty is measured, single women with children are the poorest of all demographic groups. Children who come from two-parent families are much more likely to inherit wealth from paternal grandparents, much more likely to get financial support at an age when they're going to school, buying a home, or starting their own families than children from single parent homes.

The economic fault line in this country doesn't run between races, it runs between those families in which fathers are present and those in which they are not.

Children need fathers as role models. Boys raised by a traditionally masculine father are much less likely to commit crimes, whereas boys raised without a father are much more likely to do poorly in school and wind up in prison or dead.

Valuing fatherhood has to be instilled in boys from a young age by a masculine father. Commitment to one woman and to their children is not something that comes naturally to men.

It's almost impossible, for instance, to find a culture in which women voluntarily abandon their children in large numbers, but to find a culture in which men in large numbers voluntarily abandon their children all one need do is look around.

Boys who grow up without fathers are statistically more likely to become louts, misogynistic, abusive, authoritarian, and violent. Girls who grow up without fathers are more likely to become promiscuous. A society in which a father is little more than a sperm donor is a society of fourteen year-old girls with babies and fourteen year-old boys with guns.

Stepfathers and boyfriends (Blankenhorn calls them "nearby guys") cannot replace the biological father. For stepfathers and boyfriends the main object of desire and commitment, to the extent these exist, is the mother, not the child. For the married father this distinction hardly exists. The married father says "My mate, my child". The stepfather and boyfriend must say "My mate, the other guy's child".

Children are a glue for biological parents that serves to hold them together, but they're a wedge between non-biological parents, tending to be a source of tension which pushes them apart.

Fatherhood means fathers teaching children a way of life, which is the heart of what it is to be a father. More than providing for their material needs, or shielding them from harm, or even caring for them and showing them affection, paternal sponsorship means cultural transmission - endowing children with competence and character by showing them how to live a certain kind of life.

One wishes every man - and woman - would read Blankenhorn's Fatherless America. It's loaded with great insight.

Meanwhile, Dennis Prager offers some excellent insights of his own in this short video:

Is the World an Illusion?

King’s College philosopher of physics Alexander Franklin wishes to stress that “everyday reality is not an illusion. There really is a world outside our minds." Perhaps so, but there's a more interesting question, I think, concerning the world of which he speaks. More on that in a moment.

Here's an excerpt from a piece at Mind Matters on Professor Franklin's argument:

Popular science often tells us that we are radically deceived by the commonplace appearance of everyday objects and that colour and solidity are illusions. For instance, the physicist Sir Arthur Eddington distinguished in 1928 between two tables: the familiar table and the scientific table, while the former is solid and coloured, the scientific table “is nearly all empty space”.

Eddington then makes the striking claim that “modern physics has by delicate test and remorseless logic assured me that my second scientific table is the only one which is really there”.

Franklin’s essay in response is a plea for Emergentism (the reality we experience emerges from more basic principles), as opposed to what he calls “Illusionism,” the popular belief that it is all an illusion. Along the way, he offers a useful interpretation of the empty space “table,” in terms of quantum physics (the behavior of elementary particles).

Franklin argues that, according to quantum mechanics, an electron in orbit around an atomic nucleus actually occupies the entire orbit, more like the surface of a hollow ball than like a solitary planet orbiting the sun. Thus, there really is no empty space in the orbit and therefore the table's solidity is not an illusion.

This is a bit misleading, though. The atom is in fact mostly empty space. Even if the electrons can be thought of as existing everywhere in their orbits at once, there's a relatively enormous amount of space between orbits. If, for instance, the nucleus of a hydrogen atom were made the size of a bb and placed on second base in a major league stadium, it's lone electron would be orbiting out around the upper deck.

If our hydrogen atom, represented by the bb on second base, was bonded to another hydrogen atom, the nucleus of the second atom, or bb, would be out in the parking lot somewhere. That's a lot of empty space.

Nevertheless, the more interesting question, at least for me, is not whether the solidity of Eddington's table is an illusion but rather how much of what we experience when we observe the table is objectively there in the table and how much of what we observe is actually a creation of our minds.

For example, suppose the table is painted green. We'd say that the table is green, but, of course, the table itself is not any color at all. The sensation of green is in our brains or minds. The paint merely reflects light energy of a certain wavelength to our eye and our visual sense in concert with our brain/mind translates that energy into a sensation of green.

The same is true of the sensations we have of sound, taste, warmth, smell, etc. The stimuli which give rise to these sensations may be generated by objects, but the sensations they produce are in us.

In other words, were there were no perceivers, no one to observe the world, there would be no color, flavor, sound, warmth or odor - just colorless, tasteless, odorless, soundless matter and energy flying about. Just as there'd be no pain if no one felt it, there'd be no color or sound if no one saw or heard it.

This being so, we might ask what is the world in itself really like apart from our perception of it? How much of what we call reality do our senses/brains/minds actually create and how much is objectively independent of our perceptions?

We might also wonder how much of our understanding of the world is a function of our size? Suppose the table appears smooth to us. Would it appear smooth to a bacterium? The table appears solid to us, but pace professor Franklin, it certainly doesn't appear solid to a neutrino, tens of thousands of which pass through every square inch of everything on earth (including us) every second.

Here's another question: How much different would the world appear to us if we had six or seven senses? A man born blind has no concept of light or color. How much different would this world appear to him were he suddenly able to see? Likewise, what experiences would the world present to us if we had the additional senses with which to experience them?

We go through life thinking that the world is just the way we perceive it to be, but why should we think such a thing? The world may be far stranger, far different, than our five senses can discern.

Representational Drift

Here's a puzzle for any materialistic view of our cognitive experience, i.e. any view that posits the material brain and sense organs as the sole entities responsible for cognition and sensation. The puzzle has to do with something called "representational drift." An article in The Atlantic elaborates:

Neuroscientists have held the view that different sensations, smell, sight, taste, etc., stimulate specific groups of neurons in the brain. These patterns of neural firing - called representations - were thought to remain the same from one moment to the next.

The group of neurons that fired when you smelled a rose yesterday are the same group of neurons that will fire when you smell the rose again today.

The explanation found in neuroscience textbooks is that specific groups of neurons fire when their owner "smells a rose, sees a sunset, or hears a bell. These representations—these patterns of neural firing—presumably stay the same from one moment to the next."

But a team of researchers at Columbia University have discovered a strange thing. The researchers...

allowed mice to sniff the same odors over several days and weeks, and recorded the activity of neurons in the rodents’ piriform cortex—a brain region involved in identifying smells. At a given moment, each odor caused a distinctive group of neurons in this region to fire.

But as time went on, the makeup of these groups slowly changed. Some neurons stopped responding to the smells; others started. After a month, each group was almost completely different.

Put it this way: The neurons that represented the smell of an apple in May and those that represented the same smell in June were as different from each other as those that represent the smells of apples and grass at any one time.

...other scientists have shown that the same phenomenon, called representational drift, occurs in a variety of brain regions besides the piriform cortex. Its existence is clear; everything else is a mystery.

[The researchers] don’t know why it happens, what it means, how the brain copes, or how much of the brain behaves in this way. How can animals possibly make any lasting sense of the world if their neural responses to that world are constantly in flux?

If such flux is common, “there must be mechanisms in the brain that are undiscovered and even unimagined that allow it to keep up. Scientists are ... in this particular case, ... deeply confused. We expect it to take many years to iron out.”

How does the brain know, the article asks, what the nose is smelling or what the eyes are seeing if the specific neurons which respond to smells and sights are continuously changing?

A deeper question, perhaps, is how and why would such complexity of function arise in a purely materialistic world in which blind Darwinian processes like genetic mutation and natural selection are responsible for the structure and function of our brains? What survival value would it have?

This kind of multi-functionality is the sort of thing we see intelligent minds design, but it's not what we'd expect to result from random accidents like genetic mutations.

I don't want to draw too many conclusions from all this, but I will say that it seems like every discovery scientists are currently making about our world and about living things makes it harder to cling to both materialism and the naturalism (the belief that the natural world is all there is) that undergirds it.

Dawkins Knocked Sideways

Andrew McDiarmid at Evolution News recently came across a pretty stunning tweet by atheist biologist Richard Dawkins. Dawkins admits he was knocked "sideways with wonder at the miniaturized intricacy of the data-processing machinery in the living cell.”

Dawkins, of course, wouldn't attribute this miniaturized intricacy to an intelligent engineer of life, but McDiarmid asks, why not? Why does the technology we use every day naturally prompt us to marvel at the genius of intelligent agents, but the far more fantastically advanced biological machinery in the cell does not. He writes:

These days, we surround ourselves with technology to stay in touch, to keep ourselves informed, and to manage the challenges of our daily lives. We also recognize in our devices and machines all the hallmarks of design, understanding reflexively that they express the ingenuity of engineers or software developers.

Our appreciation for applied intelligence comes as second nature to us — we intuitively recognize the work of other minds.

But what happens when we look up from our technology and survey the world of nature? When we look up at the movement of the planets, or into the eyes of our children, or when we peer through a microscope into a living cell? Do we see signs of minds in those places? Do we sense intelligence and forethought?

Or does our intuition of design stop at the iPhone and the jet airplane?

In a recent tweet, the world’s most famous scientific atheist, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, confessed to being knocked “sideways with wonder at the miniaturized intricacy of the data-processing machinery in the living cell.”

Dawkins wrote the tweet after watching an animation produced by an Australian medical institute showing how cells store and copy the vast amounts of digital information present in DNA.

The digital information technology found in living cells (as depicted in this and other animations) has raised profound questions about an enduring scientific mystery: how did the very first life begin? And did a mind or intelligent designer play a role?

Dawkins, for his part, has steadfastly maintained that living organisms exhibit only “the appearance” or illusion of design, not evidence of actual design — despite being knocked “sideways with wonder” at the information technology at work in living cells.

As he put it in his most famous book The Blind Watchmaker,“[b]iology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” The claim that life was not designed, even though it looks designed, may seem contradictory.

Yes, indeed it does.

Here's the three minute video that so impressed Dawkins. As you watch it ask yourself where the information comes from that choreographs these processes and how the whole ensemble of processes could've arisen by blind chance in the earliest life.

It knocks me sideways to think that some very intelligent people believe it all to be a lucky accident:

A 2022 Backlash?

Charles Kolb served as Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy from 1990-1992 in the George H.W. Bush White House. In a piece at The Daily Caller he lists a number of reasons why he thinks the Democrats will face a voter backlash in 2022. Here's his list:

• Biden’s immigration and border policies have brought an unprecedented influx of illegal immigrants, eviscerating border security.
• Ransomware attacks against major American companies and cities are increasing.
• Violent crime is surging.
• “Defund the Police” initiatives are increasingly unpopular with citizens of all races.
• Inflation (which may not be temporary) is rising rapidly in commodities, housing, groceries, and elsewhere.
• Biden proposes massive new federal spending and record deficits while taking a huge gamble that interest rates will remain near zero.
• “Woke” policies on college campuses, in schools, hiring, the media and elsewhere are contrary to how most Americans view themselves and our nation.
• Critical race theory is prompting more American parents to abandon public schools in favor of greater parental choice, including charter and religious schools.
• Recent polls show more and more Hispanic voters shifting away from the Democrats’ agenda.
• The vaguely defined “diversity, equity and inclusion” efforts underway in many workplaces are raising new questions about whether Americans want equality of opportunity or equality of results.
• If the civil-rights movement evolves into a demand for reparations based on the sins of slavery, Americans will become further divided.

Kolb could've mentioned more, I think, but perhaps the biggest liability the Democrats face in 2022 is that their leadership simply doesn't inspire. Biden and Harris won in 2020 because Biden wasn't Trump and many who voted for him thought he'd be moderate and competent. He's turned out, however, to be neither of these, and his running mate seems almost a political non-entity.

Without Trump on the ticket to arouse Democrats' passions will enthusiasm for Biden and Harris be enough to motivate Democratic voters to turn out to cast their ballot for congressional candidates? A follow-up question, assuming the Republicans take back the House and maybe the Senate in 2022, is how much harm will this administration's lurch to the far left do to the country before that happens?

Why Much of the Media Can't Be Trusted

When a significant portion of the American media decided to give up the attempt to be professional news organizations and instead become a partisan arm of the Democratic Party they forfeited any claim they may have had on the nation's trust. During the Trump presidency some outlets became indistinguishable from supermarket tabloids in their disregard for truth and objective fact-checking.

When President Trump referred to these news organs as "fake news" he may have been impolitic, but he was not incorrect.

The Daily Caller's Brianna Lyman lists eight examples - out of the many that could be listed - of news stories about Trump that were enthusiastically promoted and perpetuated by the liberal media and politicians despite being objectively false.

Here are the eight:

Trump ordered protesters to be tear-gassed for a photo-op: CNN and several leading Democrats, including Joe Biden, pushed this canard, and people still believe it to this day despite an NBC report showing it to be false.

Trump's suggestion that Covid 19 escaped from a Wuhan virology lab was false, racist and had been "debunked" by his own intelligence agencies: It turns out that the theory has not been debunked and is credible.

Trump ignored Russian bounties on US soldiers: Both Biden and Harris criticized Trump for not confronting Putin about the claim that Russia was paying for dead Americans and the Washington Post essentially accused Trump of lying when he denied there was significant evidence to support the allegation. Nevertheless, he seems to have been right.

Trump told Georgia officials to ‘find the fraud’: Trump was accused by the WaPo of telling Georgia's Secretary of State Frances Watson to "find the fraud" and she'd be a "national hero" if she turned up the evidence of cheating. Two months later, the Georgia Secretary of State released an audio recording of Trump’s phone call. It revealed that, based on information provided by an unreliable source, The Post misquoted Trump’s comments on the call. Trump had said nothing about finding fraud nor did he say that Watson would be "a national hero."

Trump said white supremacists were ‘fine people’: This myth has had a distressingly long shelf life despite being patently false.

What Trump actually said was, “Excuse me, they didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis, and you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group – excuse me, excuse me, I saw the same pictures you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name....I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists because they should be condemned totally.”

Despite the obvious meaning of his words - that many of the demonstrators were not extremists or trouble-makers - the comment is still cited as proof of his sympathies for white nationalists and neo-fascists.

Trump referred to illegal immigrants as ‘animals’: When asked by someone about MS-13 gang members crossing the southern border he replied, “We have people coming into the country … You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals.” He was clearly talking about MS-13, and his description of them is accurate, but liberal politicians and media accused him, falsely and absurdly, of referring to all immigrants.

It's still considered by his critics of evidence of his racism.

Trump lied when he alleged that his campaign was wiretapped: CNN reported in 2017 that Trump “flat-out lied” when he claimed the Obama administration wiretapped Trump Tower before his presidential victory, with CNN citing the Justice Department for proof. “Trump, for his part, has offered zero evidence to back up his initial claim because, as we now know conclusively, there was no evidence. To sum up: The current President of the United States flat-out lied about the then-sitting president issuing a wiretap of his campaign headquarters.”

CNN issued a correction two years later and confirmed that former campaign manager Paul Manafort was wiretapped under a secret court order before and after the election.

Trump removed the MLK Jr. bust from the Oval Office: Just hours into Trump’s presidency, TIME White House Correspondent Zeke Miller reported that Trump had removed the bust of Martin Luther King Jr., from the Oval Office, but it was discovered later that the bust was still there but “obscured by a door and an agent.”

Miller subsequently issued numerous apologies for the error, but once the story was out few people were made aware of the apologies. Even when retractions are issued they're usually a one-time statement that hardly registers with a public which had been subjected to the false narrative being pounded into their psyches for months or years.

The persistence of these myths in our national consciousness is due either to sloppy thinking, sloppy reporting or simple dishonesty by people who earnestly wanted their stories to be true. In any case, one can scarcely be blamed for doubting the credibility or professionalism of anyone or any organization that pressed them incessantly onto the American people.

Lyman's article has more information on each of these eight myths as well as links to the rebuttals.

Why the Universe Must've Had a Beginning

One of the key arguments for the existence of God is based on the premise that the universe had a beginning. The argument goes like this:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause of its existence.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore the universe had a cause.

Since the universe is the totality of space, time and matter whatever caused the universe must be non-spatial, non-temporal, immaterial, enormously powerful and enormously intelligent. In other words, the cause of the universe was either God or something very much like God.

But critics of the argument have offered challenges to the two premises, and philosopher William Lane Craig rebuts those challenges in a thirty minute video that can be viewed here. As part of his defense of the second premise he shows a five minute video which addresses the philosophical reasons, as opposed to the scientific reasons, for maintaining that the universe cannot be infinitely old, or past eternal, and must therefore have had a temporal beginning.

If the universe were infinitely old then there would've been an infinite series of events leading up to the present moment, but there are numerous philosophical reasons for doubting the possibility that an actual infinite series of events is possible.

The video explains some of those problems.

Matter, Mind and Memory

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor raises an interesting question, one that many of us might never think to ask. What, exactly, is a memory? A secondary question might be how does a materialist metaphysics account for memories?

Egnor begins by arguing that contrary to popular belief, and even the belief of many neuroscientists and philosophers, the brain doesn't actually "store" memories. In fact, he claims, it can't store memories:

It's helpful to begin by considering what memory is -- memory is retained knowledge. Knowledge is the set of true propositions. Note that neither memory nor knowledge nor propositions are inherently physical. They are psychological entities, not physical things. Certainly memories aren't little packets of protein or lipid stuffed into a handy gyrus, ready for retrieval when needed for the math quiz.

The brain is a physical thing. A memory is a psychological thing. A psychological thing obviously can't be "stored" in the same way a physical thing can. It's not clear how the term "store" could even apply to a psychological thing.

But what about storage as an engram, a pattern of electrochemical energy or proteins, that acts as a code for the information? Egnor doesn't think this explanation works either:

[C]onsider a hypothetical "engram" of your grandmother's lovely face that "codes" for your memory of her appearance. Imagine that the memory engram is safely tucked into a corner of your superior temporal gyrus, and you desire to remember Nana's face. As noted above, your memory itself obviously is not in the gyrus or in the engram. It doesn't even make any sense to say a memory is stored in a lump of brain.

But, you say, that's just a silly little misunderstanding. What you really mean to say is that the memory is encoded there, and it must be accessed and retrieved, and it is in that sense that the memory is stored. It is the engram, you say, not the memory itself, that is stored.

But there is a real problem with that view. As you try to remember Nana's face, you must then locate the engram of the memory, which of course requires that you (unconsciously) must remember where in your brain Nana's face engram is stored .... So this retrieval of the Nana memory via the engram requires another memory (call it the "Nana engram location memory"), which must itself be encoded somewhere in your brain.

To access the memory for the location of the engram of Nana, you must access a memory for the engram for the location for the engram of Nana. And obviously you must first remember the location of the Nana engram location memory, which presupposes another engram whose location must be remembered. Ad infinitum.

Now imagine that by some miracle...you are able to surmount infinite regress and locate the engram for Nana's face in your superior temporal gyrus (like finding your keys by serendipity!).

Whew! But don't deceive yourself -- this doesn't solve your problem in the least. Because now you have to decode the engram itself. The engram would undoubtedly take the form of brain tissue -- a particular array of proteins, or dendrites or axons, or an electrochemical gradient of some specific sort -- that would mean "memory of Nana's face." But how can an electrochemical gradient represent a face?

Certainly an electrochemical gradient doesn't look like grandma -- and even if it did, you'd have to have a little tiny eye in your brain to see it to recognize that it looked like grandma.

The engram is a code, but if so, we need a key to decode it. How do we access the key? How do we remember where the key is stored in the brain? That memory must itself be coded somewhere in the brain which would require yet another memory to decode it, and so on:

And if you think that remembering your grandmother's face via an engram in your brain entails infinite regress, consider the conundrum of remembering a concept, rather than a face. How, pray tell, can the concept of your grandma's justice or her mercy or her cynicism be encoded in an engram?

The quality of mercy is not [stored], nor can it be encoded. How many dendrites and axons for mercy?

You see the difficulty. We remember things all the time, but how often have we ever paused to ask ourselves what's going on when we remember? And whatever it is that's going on, how did such a highly specified and complex system evolve by random mutation and natural selection? And how are memories, like other aspects of consciousness (self-awareness, qualia, intentionality, free will), accounted for by a purely material entity like a brain?

How then, you reasonably ask, can we explain the obvious dependence of memory on brain structure and function? While it is obvious that the memories aren't stored, it does seem that some parts of the brain are necessary ordinarily for memory. And that's certainly true....In some cases the correspondence between brain and memory is one of tight necessity -- the brain must have a specific activity for memory to be exercised.

But the brain activity is not the same thing as the memory nor does it make any sense at all to say the brain activity codes for the memory or that the brain stores the memory.

For reasons such as Egnor calls to our attention some philosophers are rejecting the materialistic monism that has prevailed for the last century and a half and are returning for answers to some form or another of dualism. Dualism comes in many varieties, but what they all share in common is the view that the material aspect of a human being - the brain in particular - is not all there is to us.

Something else seems to be somehow involved in the phenomena of consciousness and remembering. That something else may well be an immaterial but conscious mind.

If that's true then not only is materialism false but the Darwinians' explanatory difficulties have significantly increased. How can something immaterial be subject to the physical evolutionary mechanisms that are postulated to explain the development of the human species? How can an immaterial mind be produced by matter and physical influences? It's an enigma.

At least it is for the materialist committed to the belief that everything that exists is a manifestation of material substance and nothing else.

On the Apostasy of the New Atheists

In an article at Salon an atheistic philosopher by the name of Phil Torres expresses his indignation at his atheistic fellow-travelers because too many of them are guilty of what Torres considers unpardonable breaches of moral etiquette.

Torres names names - Sam Harris, Michael Shermer, Laurence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, James Lindsey, Peter Boghossian, David Silverman and Steven Pinker - a Who's Who taken from the pantheon of what's called the New Atheism. Torres catalogues the offenses of each of these luminaries in his article, and to be sure, some of these men have certainly sullied themselves in their boorish behavior toward women.

But what seems to irk Torres the most is that many of them have also promoted positions on matters of race, gender studies, the cancel culture, the threat of Islam, free speech and "wokeness" in general that are disturbingly close to positions held by conservatives.

For a progressive atheist like Torres this is not just disappointing and disillusioning, it's grounds for public chastisement of the malefactors, but therein lies a problem with Torres' critique.

The gravamen of his complaint is that these men have committed serious moral faults, either with women or in their ideological predilections and public pronouncements, but as atheists why should any of them, including Torres, think there's anything objectively wrong, in a moral sense, with any of the offenses Torres imputes to them in his indictment? How does an atheist justify a moral judgment of another man's behavior?

That Torres sees the failings of these men as moral failings is clear from passages like these:

New Atheism appeared to offer moral clarity, it emphasized intellectual honesty and it embraced scientific truths about the nature and workings of reality. It gave me immense hope to know that in a world overflowing with irrationality, there were clear-thinking individuals with sizable public platforms willing to stand up for what's right and true — to stand up for sanity in the face of stupidity.

Pinker, Shermer and some of the others like to preach about "moral progress," but in fighting social justice under the misleading banner of "free speech," they not only embolden fascists but impede further moral progress for the marginalized.

Another way to understand the situation goes like this: Some of these people acted badly in the past. Others don't want to worry about accusations of acting badly in the future. Still others are able to behave themselves but worry that their friends could get in trouble for past or future bad behavior.

So, aside from the fact that it's unclear what he means by the term "moral progress," what's the problem? It's this: unless there's an objective standard of right and wrong, "bad behavior" is nothing more than a reflection of one's own subjective tastes and preferences, and it's just silly to assert that anyone else's tastes and preferences are "wrong."

Indeed, the word wrong has no meaning other than as an emotive expression of one's own disapproval. It has the same content as "ugh!" It's just a behavior that some people don't like.

Moreover, unless there's a God there can be no objective standard for right and wrong. For an atheist, then, there is no objective standard of morality, only individual subjective preferences.

Nor is there any ultimate accountability for how we choose to behave, and with no ultimate accountability the notion of right and wrong conduct, a moral law, is an empty notion. It's like a law that carries with it no punishment for violating it.

For any act to be wrong in an objective sense there has to be an ultimate and inescapable consequence for doing it. If there is no God then there's no ultimate, inescapable accountability, which is what the great Russian writer Dostoyevsky meant when he has characters in his novel The Brothers Karamazov stress that, "If God is dead everything is permitted."

A Christian, then, can lament humanity's moral failings, but it borders on the ridiculous for an atheist to do it. Unless the atheist doesn't care about living consistently with his atheism, which is also ridiculous.

Ominous Omen for Democrats

William McGurn cites some interesting statistics in an op-ed in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal (paywall). The stats must be very troubling for Democrats who, McGurn writes, are sounding the tocsins:

A May postelection analysis by a trio of left-leaning organizations noted that while Latino turnout in 2020 grew “dramatically” over 2016, Democrats saw a “significant dip in support in places with high concentrations of Latino and Hispanic voters.”

The centerpiece of McGurn's column is a survey taken by the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) of likely Latino voters in battleground states.

The survey asked Latinos to choose between two statements. The first was unadulterated Milton Friedman: “Some people say free-market capitalism is the best form of government because it gives people the freedom to work and achieve.”

The second was what we might call the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez option: “Other people say that socialism is the best form of government because it is more fair and equitable to working class people.” Almost two-thirds (63%) of respondents opted for the Friedman position, against only 17% for the AOC line. Hardly surprising, given that so many Latinos came to the U.S. in the first place to escape socialism.

That Latinos prefer capitalism to the brand of socialism the progressive left is pushing is, McGurn avers, just the beginning of the bad news for Democrats:

• 67% are “very concerned” their kids “won’t have the same opportunities me and my family came here to find.”
• 58% said too many people in America are happy not to work and “just live off government assistance.”
• 80% percent agree that “public schools are failing.”
• 67% agree that too many Americans “are losing our traditional values centered on faith, family and freedom.”
• 57% “oppose Democrat efforts to pack the Supreme Court with liberal judges.”
• 72% agree “we should do what is necessary to control our southern border.”
• 65% oppose the Democrats’ “bill that would make voter ID illegal.”
• 50% agree that “many of the policies that Democrats say help all minorities actually end up hurting Hispanic families.”

McGurn adds that the NRSC concludes that the political future isn’t California — it’s Florida. Florida’s electorate, the report notes, is substantially less white than it was in 2000, yet it is also more Republican than it was 20 years ago.

McGurn goes on to point out how progressive fetishes like Critical Race Theory, defunding the police and opposition to voter ID are all unpopular with a demographic that's largely family-oriented, hard-working, and religiously and socially conservative.

He concludes with this:

The really bad news for Democrats? This was all back when Joe Biden was still selling himself to Americans as a moderate.

To be sure. Now that Mr. Biden has revealed himself to be pliable clay in the hands of the progressive left one wonders what those stats would look like were the survey taken today.

The Democrats had nurtured hopes of turning Texas blue by flooding the state with Hispanics they thought would be docile and dependable Democratic voters. It's one reason they've been so soft on illegal immigration and opposed the border wall.

Now that it appears, however, that Hispanics willing to trek a thousand miles and risk all manner of hazard to get into the U.S. are likely to vote Republican I suppose we'll soon start hearing Democrats demanding that we hurry up with that wall. Their slogan will be that it needs only to be "built back better."

The Causal Inadequacy of Matter

Kinesin is a protein which transports vacuoles along microtubules to different regions of the cell. Watch this three minute video and then see if you can think of a plausible explanation for how such a mechanism could have evolved through blind, unguided processes:

The more scientists learn about life, consciousness, the earth, and the universe the harder it is becoming to cling to the old Darwinian materialism so fashionable in the last century. Indeed, twentieth century materialism is beginning to look something like a philosophical anachronism, a contemporary version of alchemy.

Alchemy seemed right during the medieval period but couldn't be sustained once our knowledge of chemistry began to blossom in the 18th and 19th centuries. So it is with philosophical materialism today.

Materialism, the view that everything that exists is reducible to matter or explicable in terms of material stuff, has serious problems. As Stephen Meyer points out in his new book Return of the God Hypothesis, there are no good material explanations for the origin of the universe, the fine-tuning of the universe or the origin of the information packed into the first life.

The origin of the universe could not have been produced by matter because matter came into being when the universe did. Matter, unguided by any intelligence, could not have fine-tuned the initial conditions of the universe or the constants, ratios of nuclear particles and strengths of the forces. Nor could mindless matter generate the enormous amount of information that allows a cell to function.

Only mind is causally adequate to explain these things. We have experience only of minds fine-tuning and generating the kind of information that allows the kinesin protein to perform its astonishing task.

How does the protein "know" what to do and where to go? Where is the information that choreographs this incredible phenomenon stored? How was the information, especially in the earliest cells, created?

Materialism has no good answers to questions like these, but the alternative explanation leads to God so many modern metaphysical alchemists cling to materialism in hopes that some discovery will someday vindicate their faith. Medieval alchemists clung to the same hope.

For more on the video and others like it go here.

Racism at Yale

There's a certain kind of person - we find them on both ends of the political spectrum - who is so sure that his convictions are correct that he believes himself justified in hating, harming, even killing, those who disagree with him about politics or religion. <br /><br />

This type of person is often a fanatic and is always frightening.<br /><br />

It's distressing that there seem to be so many such people today who are willing to publicly express their hatred, especially their racial hatred.<br /><br />

A while ago I wrote about the theologian who prayed that God would help her hate white people. That was bad enough, but a recent lecture given by a psychiatrist at Yale is an even more stomach-turning example of the kind of vicious racist hatred I'm talking about.  <br /><br />

An article at The Federalist explains:

In an official lecture called “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind,” given by Aruna Khilanani at the Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Child Study Center, Khilanani graphically described her fantasy about killing and burying white people, saying, “I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the heads of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. <br /><br />

Like I did the world a f-----g favor.” 

Khilanani wasn't content with simply describing to her Yale audience her fantasy of murdering whites, she also delivered herself of these heart-warming sentiments:<br /><br />

“White people are out of their minds and they have been for a long time,” and “We keep forgetting that directly talking about race is a waste of our breath. "<br /><br />

"We are asking a demented, violent predator who thinks that they are a saint or a superhero, to accept responsibility. It ain’t gonna happen. They have five holes in their brain.<br /><br />

"It’s like banging your head against a brick wall.”

Believe it or not there's more:

Khilanani’s animus against white people extends into her personal life, as she noted that she had made it her goal to “cut out everything white,” describing her motivation behind cutting off white friends and leaving institutions she considered too white.<br /><br />

“There are no good apples,” Khilanani remarked. “White people make my blood boil.” 

Well, she certainly leaves no doubt about the truth of that last sentence.<br /><br />

Imagine, now, what would've happened had the lecturer been white and had said these despicably odious things about "people of color." Doubtless her academic career would've come to an abrupt end, and she'd be permanently exiled from every social media platform.<br /><br />

But what will happen to Khilanani, who appears to be ethnically Middle Eastern? If she's given a pass or a mere slap on the wrist will that be a manifestation of POC privilege?<br /><br />

One of the silliest claims of the Critical Race Theory crowd is that people of color can't be racist because they're the "oppressed" group. Well, someone who holds a doctorate and is invited to lecture at Yale hardly seems "oppressed." <br /><br 

Hatred and bigotry are evil no matter whose heart they fester in. If Ms Khilanani's not a racist no one is.