More On the Unvaccinated

A recent VP post highlighted a column by Jim Geraghty in which he noted that claims that the unvaccinated are mostly MAGA folks are unsupported by the evidence. In fact, there's quite a lot of evidence, cited in the post, that the unvaccinated are largely either Democrat voters or non-voters. Yesterday Geraghty added a few statistics to that column.

In addition to the cities cited in the previous post, cities in which the unvaccinated far outnumber the number of Trump voters, there are these:

• Alexandria, Va. is only 58 percent fully vaccinated, with 67 percent having one shot.
• Washington, D.C. is only 53 percent of D.C. residents are fully vaccinated, and 62 percent are partially vaccinated.

Trump didn't do well in either city so most of the unvaccinated are likely Democrats or non-voters.

Jonah Goldberg adds some acerbic thoughts to this:

And while it’s true that the average hardcore Trump voter is more likely to be vaccine-resistant than the average Democrat, the places where vaccine hesitancy poses the greatest problem aren’t in rural America.

They’re in largely blue cities and counties across America, because that’s where the population density is (30 percent of a highly populated area has a lot more people in it than 70 percent of a sparsely populated one). And most of those people aren’t Trump voters.

When urban and suburban minorities resist vaccination, it’s an indictment of American structural racism or some such nonsense—and it is mostly nonsense. When rural whites resist vaccination, it’s proof Republicans want to kill people. It’s all such partisan garbage.

But even if you disagree with that, it’s just idiotic to single out white Republicans for your scorn and condescension. As Jim Geraghty notes, 40 percent of New York City’s Department of Education employees aren’t vaccinated. Where was the media’s ridicule of that before this week?

Indeed, according to elite liberal logic, the Fox-besotted flyover people don’t know any better. Well, what’s the excuse for metropolitan healthcare workers who have lagged in getting vaccinated? As much as anything it’s the failure of these people to get vaccinated that’s causing the new wave of mandates coming down the pike.

Additionally, neither of the nation's largest teachers' unions, another heavily Democratic constituency, are particularly insistent that their members be vaccinated:

So far, the nation’s two largest education unions, The National Education Association and the AFT, have declined to call for vaccine mandates. Instead, the NEA says that teachers should be given the option of weekly testing, while the AFT says it should be decided in contract negotiations between the workers and the company.

Geraghty concludes with a quote from Jay Caruso:

You cannot work yourself into a frenzy denouncing unvaccinated rural Americans and Trump voters as a bunch of ignorant, tin-foil-hat-wearing lunatics who are extending the pandemic and the suffering it has caused for everyone and then shrug when a bunch of teachers refuse to get vaccinated.

The fact that these unions — powerful allies of the Democratic Party — are going to get little to no grief for their position that their members don’t need to get vaccinated if they don’t want to reveal that the vast majority of pro-vaccination rhetoric is really just political tribalism, dressed up in the rhetoric of public health.

Meanwhile, what's the actual risk to the vaccinated population? The New York Post runs this graphic to illustrate (via Hot Air):

The risk to vaccinated people of suffering serious illness or death from Covid, Alpha or Delta, is miniscule. Marc Thiessen's perspective at the Washington Post is a fitting conclusion:

[Y]our chance of dying from a lightning strike is .0007 percent, and your chance of dying from a seasonal flu is 0.1 percent. If you’re vaccinated, you have a much greater chance of dying from a hornet, wasp or bee sting, a dog attack, a car crash, drowning, sunstroke, or choking on food than you do of dying from covid-19.

The Darwinian Roots of Racism

A few days ago I wrote on VP that modern racism owes a great deal of its animating force to the work of Charles Darwin and his epigones in the 19th and 20th centuries who propagated the idea that white Europeans were more evolutionarily advanced than "savage" races like the Africans.

This belief coupled with the idea of a struggle for existence among species and races and the popularization of the slogan "survival of the fittest" provided the rationale and justification for much of the horrific treatment of blacks in the Americas and as much or more in Africa.

It's estimated, for example, that between the years 1885 to 1908 the Belgians under Leopold II were responsible for the deaths of ten million Congolese. These indigenous people were systematically tortured and slaughtered as though their existence meant nothing.

Men, women and children had their hands amputated when the quota of rubber was not met. Others were shot for sport. Countless more starved to death in slave labor or died from diseases.

Robert Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness (1899) conveys something of the vicious attitude of the Europeans toward the indigenous people of the Congo and the horrific treatment to which they were subjected. Conrad has the main character of the story, Charlie Marlowe, accidentally come upon a group of sick and dying Africans who had been impressed by the Europeans into labor gangs, languishing in a grove of trees:

Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair....[Meanwhile] the work was going on. The work! And this was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die.

They were dying slowly - it was very clear....they were nothing earthly now - nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom....Brought from all the recesses of the coast ...lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest.

These moribund shapes were as free as air - and nearly as thin.

David McCullough's account of the early efforts by the French to build the Panama Canal with black labor brought in from the West Indies in his book Between the Seas tells a similar tale of the late 19th century attitude of the Europeans toward blacks.

My point is not to indict whites as uniquely evil, as the Critical Race Theorists would have it. I'm quite sure that, even though it couldn't be proven, if the circumstances were reversed and blacks had the same power over others in the 19th century as did whites, they would've been every bit as cruel as were the Europeans.

Cruelty is an inherent trait of the human condition. It's not, contra the Critical Race Theorists, the exclusive vice of any particular race.

My point is rather to observe that the attitude among Europeans of racial superiority and their belief that black Africans were less valuable even than their livestock, and certainly more expendable, was a direct consequence of the widespread acceptance in the late 1800s of Darwinian evolution.

On naturalistic Darwinism there's really no reason why anyone who is inclined to treat others as inferiors, to treat them cruelly, and who has the power to do so, shouldn't. Naturalistic Darwinism offers no basis for a moral objection to racism. It renders moral sentiments no more authoritative than any other vestige of our evolutionary history.

Moreover, according to the accepted Darwinian intellectual climate shaped by Darwinism, some races really were superior and others really were inferior, and Darwin himself wrote in The Descent of Man (1871) that the savage races would one day be extirpated by the superior races in the struggle for survival. Europeans simply saw themselves as carrying out nature's imperative.

Anyone who doubts that Darwinian assumptions in the 19th and early 20th century led to utterly cruel and inhumane treatment of Africans and other peoples from around the world would do well to watch this 50 minute documentary on the subject:

There's nothing in Darwinian naturalism that makes racism and cruelty wrong. The only basis that exists for condemning these evils is the belief that everyone is equal in the eyes of God in whose image we all share and who holds all of us accountable for how we treat each other. Take that belief away and we're back to an amoral dystopia like the Belgian Congo or Panama in which might makes right - the strong flourish and the weak perish.

Taking Consciousness Seriously

When you look at grassy lawn and see a green expanse or when you place sugar on your tongue and have an experience of sweet, have you ever wondered what, exactly, this green or sweet sensation actually is?

If all that's going on when you see the grass or taste the sugar (or hear music or smell a flower or feel a pain) is that electrochemical reactions are occurring in the material brain, where and what are the actual sensations they produce? If you could observe the interior of a brain you wouldn't observe "green" or "sweet" anywhere so how do movements of molecules across synapses translate into sensations?

The problem of explaining exactly what a sensation of color, taste, sound or pain is is just one aspect of what's called the "Hard Problem" of consciousness. There are a half dozen or so others.

The problem wasn't attracting much attention among philosophers until the mid-nineties when a young Australian philosopher named David Chalmers read a paper at a conference in Tucson, Arizona. His talk focused attention on what is one of the deepest mysteries in all of science and philosophy: the nature of consciousness.

A piece at Mind Matters describes the meeting, its effect on the attendees and quotes from an article in The Guardian in 2015 which calls that meeting the day philosophers began taking consciousness seriously:

The brain, Chalmers began by pointing out, poses all sorts of problems to keep scientists busy. How do we learn, store memories, or perceive things? How do you know to jerk your hand away from scalding water, or hear your name spoken across the room at a noisy party?

But these were all “easy problems”, in the scheme of things: given enough time and money, experts would figure them out.

There was only one truly hard problem of consciousness, Chalmers said.

It was a puzzle so bewildering that, in the months after his talk, people started dignifying it with capital letters – the Hard Problem of Consciousness – and it’s this: why on earth should all those complicated brain processes feel like anything from the inside? Why aren’t we just brilliant robots, capable of retaining information, of responding to noises and smells and hot saucepans, but dark inside, lacking an inner life?

And how does the brain manage it? How could the 1.4kg lump of moist, pinkish-beige tissue inside your skull give rise to something as mysterious as the experience of being that pinkish-beige lump, and the body to which it is attached?

What jolted Chalmers’s audience from their torpor was how he had framed the question. “At the coffee break, I went around like a playwright on opening night, eavesdropping,” Hameroff said. “And everyone was like: ‘Oh! The Hard Problem! The Hard Problem! That’s why we’re here!’”

Philosophers had pondered the so-called “mind-body problem” for centuries. But Chalmers’s particular manner of reviving it “reached outside philosophy and galvanised everyone. It defined the field. It made us ask: what is this that we’re dealing with here?”

The significance of this, or at least part of the significance, is that for a century or more the regnant view among philosophers was materialism, the belief that everything, including human beings, was comprised of a single substance - matter - and that everything about us and the world could be explained in terms of material (physical and chemical) processes and laws.

The conviction that everything was matter or reducible to matter (or energy) left no room for belief in a soul, mind or anything fundamentally immaterial, and if there are no immaterial entities in the universe there was no need to think there were immaterial entities outside the universe either. The idea of immaterial supernatural beings like angels, demons or God became dispensable and untenable.

The Hard Problem has upset all that. As the article at Mind Matters points out we're no closer to solving the difficulty today than we were a quarter century ago, although we have made some interesting discoveries. According to the article we've learned that:

• people in a persistent vegetative state can have active conscious lives
• people can control artificial limbs by thoughts alone
• in, perhaps, the strangest development, the mind can sometimes discover information when detached from a clinically dead brain.

The last is what happens in what are called Near-Death or Post-Death experiences, in which people declared medically dead are nevertheless resuscitated and report knowledge of what had happened during the time their brain was dead.

None of these phenomena are easily explained, or explicable at all, by materialism. Here's a fascinating example of one such experience that defies any materialistic explanation:

Materialism is teetering. There's too much it can't explain (see here and here for more examples).

If and when it finally passes into the archives of discredited philosophical ideas what will take it's place? And if there is something immaterial about us, a mental substance of some sort, how does it work and what are the implications of that for our belief about life after death?

The Unvaccinated

Watching some of the progressive cable shows, most notably MSNBC, one might get the impression that the only thing happening in the world is Covid-19 resurgence with the Olympics maybe coming in second.

The big concern about Covid is that so many people decline to be vaccinated, and some in the media seem to want us to believe that these refuseniks are all MAGA maniacs. Whenever the topic is discussed, which is pretty much continuously throughout the day, someone on the show reminds us that Covid cases are spiking in lots of red states like Texas, Florida and Missouri.

Of course, the fact that the Biden administration has pretty much invited the rest of the world to cross our southern border without so much as a temperature scan might have something to do with the numbers in Texas, but even so, the assumption that conscientious objectors to vaccination are all Trumpsters is quite likely wrong.

Jim Geraghty provides some helpful statistics at National Review. Geraghty suggests that the relevant metric isn't the statewide vaccination rate, but the vaccination rate in our major cities which, of course, are only sparsely populated by Republicans.

He writes:

[S]ignificant percentages of the residents of the deepest-blue cities in America are still unvaccinated, and simple math demonstrates that there just aren’t enough Trump voters around to make up the not-yet-vaccinated-and-in-no-hurry demographic in those places.

For example, as of this weekend, 41 percent of New York City residents were not vaccinated. Trump won 22 percent of the vote in NYC.

• In Chicago, 43 percent of residents are not vaccinated. Trump carried 24 percent of the vote in Cook County.
• In the city of San Francisco, about a quarter of residents are not vaccinated. Trump carried about 12 percent of the vote in the city last year.
• In Los Angeles County, just under 30 percent of residents are not vaccinated; Trump won 26.8 percent in 2020.
• In Maricopa County, Arizona, which includes Phoenix, 52 percent of residents are not vaccinated; Trump won 48 percent of the vote there in 2020.
• In Harris County, Texas, which includes Houston, about 48 percent are not vaccinated; Trump won 43 percent in that county in 2020.
• In Philadelphia, Pa., about 37 percent of residents are unvaccinated. Trump won 17.9 percent of the vote there in 2020.
• In Multnomah County, which includes Portland, Ore., just under 63 percent have at least one dose, meaning that 37 percent are unvaccinated. Trump won under 18 percent in that county in 2020.
• In Milwaukee County in Wisconsin, 61.6 percent have at least one dose, meaning 38.4 percent are unvaccinated. Trump won 29.4 percent of the vote in 2020.
• Detroit has vaccinated just under 40 percent of its residents; Trump carried 5 percent of the vote in that city.

Geraghty goes on to add the obvious:

Even in the absurd hypothetical scenario where every Trump voter from 2020 in these cities and the surrounding counties refused to get vaccinated, the unvaccinated group would have to include significant numbers of people who voted for Biden or other candidates.

Why are we hearing so little criticism of this specific rejectionist demographic? Why are those who lustily criticize Florida, Texas and Missouri largely mute about the numbers of those who disdain vaccination in our major cities? Geraghty opines:

A lot of social-media users who are comfortable — or even enthusiastic about — showing anger and disdain at Republicans in Florida, Texas, or Missouri wouldn’t allow themselves to show the same sentiment toward unvaccinated Biden-supporting or non-voting residents of New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, etc.

A lot of people who sneer or take glee at infections among Trump voters in rural areas would perceive infections among residents of Portland, Milwaukee, or Detroit quite differently.

A lot of America’s remaining unvaccinated live in big cities, but most of the news coverage wouldn’t lead you to that conclusion. There are Democrats and independents in America who are not vaccinated — and not particularly interested in getting vaccinated - and they're at risk, too.

Quite so, but I have a question that's been nagging at me for some time. Why are progressives so adamant about vaccinations, even to the point of talking about making them mandatory? If the vaccines work, and we're told they do, then anyone who wishes to be protected against serious illness can easily receive the inoculation.

Those who choose not to do so are a risk only to themselves and others who, like them, choose not to be vaccinated. And once these folks contract the virus most of them recover and have a measure of immunity.

So why do our liberal nurse Ratcheds demand that those people get the vaccine whether they want it or not?

Perhaps there's a good answer to this, but I haven't heard it explained, certainly not by Dr. Fauci, who never really seems to explain anything, nor by any of the other commentators on television. If you can help me with this please use the contact button above and clear it up for me. Thanks.

Abolition Was a Uniquely Christian Movement

One of the peculiarities of our current cultural moment is that many African Americans, associating Christianity with slavery, repudiate their "Christian" name and adopt an Arabic or Islamic identity.

I say this is peculiar because according to Rodney Stark in his book For the Glory of God, Africans suffered as badly, if not worse, from Islamic slavery as they did from the European variety. This is especially true if Islamic slavery is compared to slavery as it was practiced in North America.

Muslim slave-trading began many centuries before Europeans discovered the New World and carried at least as many Africans into bondage, and probably more, as were shipped across the Atlantic. By 1600 more than 7 million Africans had been transported to Islamic countries, and another 1.2 million more were transported there between 1800-1900.

These numbers only reflect the number of Africans who arrived at the destination. The death toll while being transported (by African slavers, it should be noted) from the interior to the African coast was somewhere between 20%-40%. Another 3%-10% died while waiting to be shipped, and 12%-16% died in transit on hellish slave ships. Altogether, of those initially taken as slaves, 35%-66% died before reaching the Islamic slave markets.

This pic and the one below show the horrible conditions to which African slaves
were subjected on slave ships. The filth, heat, and stench would've been overpowering.

It's sometimes said that Africans were treated better by Muslims than they were in the West, but Stark argues that this is dubious. Although roughly equal numbers of Africans arrived in both the West and in the Islamic world there's no substantial black population today in the "land of Islam." This is attributed in large measure to very low fertility due to the practice of castrating black males and of killing any infants who showed black ancestry.

Castration not only meant that black males who survived it couldn't reproduce, it also created a very high mortality rate among males due to infection and blood loss.

Just as science arose only once, so too, did effective moral opposition to slavery, and, like science, it arose only in the West and by Christians. Slavery has existed in every society able to afford it, including Native American societies, but of all the world's religions only Christians developed the belief that slavery was a great sin and must be abolished.

Antislavery efforts began to appear in Christian literature soon after the decline of Rome and eventually led to its disappearance in all but the fringes of Christian Europe by the end of the 16th century. When Europeans subsequently instituted slavery in the New World they did so over strenuous papal opposition. Unfortunately, by this time in history Rome was too weak to exert its influence over slave-owners in the Western hemisphere.

It's an interesting detail that relatively few slaves were imported into North America. From 1626 to 1808 when it became illegal to import slaves in the U.S., the total number of imported African slaves was about 400,000. By contrast, 3.6 million went to Brazil, 1.6 million were imported by the Spanish colonies, and about 3.8 million wound up in the horrific Caribbean sugar plantations.

Eventually, due to the efforts largely of Quakers in North America and the Clapham Sect in England, most notably William Wilberforce, the slave trade was first abolished and then slavery itself was eventually done away with in the West.

There was, however, no similar abolition movement in the Islamic world. Slavery was only ended in the Muslim world because of Western pressure to do so, but it persisted nevertheless well into the 20th century (Saudi Arabia banned it in 1962, Mauritania in 1981).

The British navy embargoed Muslim slave ships and British and French colonial troops intercepted countless slave caravans, freeing the slaves and sometimes executing slave traders on the spot. In North America a catastrophic civil war was fought, primarily over the issue of slavery.

Stark notes how the people who finally ended this moral scourge were acting essentially altruistically. They themselves had nothing to gain from their efforts and some paid dearly for their commitment to the cause of freeing blacks.

He concludes that although a Christian culture was certainly not a sufficient basis for ending slavery, it was nonetheless a necessary one since it was almost solely Christian thinkers and activists, working within a Christian understanding of human rights and equality, who reached anti-slavery conclusions and sought to help the larger culture recognize that they were participating in a great evil.

Perhaps if this history were more widely known fewer African Americans would be inclined to reject their Christian identity in favor of an Islamic one.

Science Is Rooted in a Christian Worldview

In his book For the Glory of God Baylor historian and sociologist Rodney Stark claims that Christian monotheism led to, among other things, both science and the end of slavery. Stark debunks several of the more persistent myths about the interplay and significance of Christianity for both the emergence of modern science and the abolition of slavery.

Ever since the 17th century opponents of Christianity have sought to perpetuate the myth that religion and science have been locked in mortal combat. The myth culminated in the work of Andrew Dickson White, author of A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), a book whose themes are still influential today even though they've been almost entirely discredited by subsequent scholarship.

Stark shows how White's account of Columbus being impeded by religious men in Spain who thought the world was flat is totally false, as is belief in an epoch of "Dark Ages" which descended upon Europe like a shroud over the minds of men. There were no "Dark Ages," nor did anyone with any learning in Columbus' day think the world was flat. His proposal to sail across the Atlantic to India was resisted because it was believed, rightly, that Columbus had seriously underestimated the circumference of the globe and that he would never be able to make it to his destination.

Indeed, he would not have made it had he not serendipitously come upon the New World.

So, too, traditional accounts of the theories of Copernicus and the persecution of Galileo by the Church are often riddled with misinformation intended to make Christianity and Christians look like benighted fools and frame the founders of modern science as secular heroes struggling against an oppressive Church.

The facts are otherwise. As Stark points out, 50 of the 52 men who were most influential in the development of modern science in the 16th and 17th centuries were Christians, and over 60 percent of these were devoutly so, including some of the greatest names in the scientific pantheon: Boyle, Brahe, Descartes, Gassendi, Hooke, Huygens, Kepler, Leibniz, Newton, Pascal, Vesalius, et al.

Stark observes that so far from being inimical to science, the Church made it possible for science to flourish by building and staffing universities where men could pursue learning centuries before the "Enlightenment," but perhaps even more important than centers of scholarship was the pervading worldview in Europe that gave rise to modern science.

The theological assumptions that the cosmos had been created by an intelligent being, that it was logical, law-like and designed, and that its secrets could be unlocked through the application of human reason, all provided the impetus to explore and investigate the world and led to the burgeoning of scientific discovery.

This, Stark argues, is why "science arose only once in history - in medieval Europe - because only there was found a culture dominated by a belief in a rational, conscious, all-powerful Creator," and only in Christian Europe were men free to investigate nature and to "think God's thoughts after Him."

The belief that science and religion are antithetical to each other is a myth perpetuated by some in order to promote a naturalistic, materialistic metaphysics, but metaphysics is not science. The real conflict over the last two centuries has been between teo metaphysical worldviews, theism and naturalism, and scientists, qua representatives of science, have, or should have, nothing to say about either of these.

Theistic Implications Don't Render a Paradigm Unscientific

Opponents of Intelligent Design (ID) often conflate ID with Creationism, perhaps because it confuses the public and enables ID's critics to make the claim that ID is a religious effort and not a scientific enterprise. The conflation is intellectually irresponsible because those who seek to identify ID with Creationism know, or should know, that they're not the same thing.

Creationists, particularly young earth creationists, use a literal reading of the first eleven chapters of the Bible as the interpretive grid which they impose upon the empirical evidence that scientists have uncovered.

ID proponents, on the other hand, base their arguments entirely upon science and philosophy and make no reference to the Bible or any religious text. They argue that the evidence scientists have discovered is best explained in terms of intelligent agency and very poorly explained in terms of purely natural processes and forces.

Whether ID is right or wrong is a question for scientists and philosophers to decide. It's not a religious or theological question.

Those who seek to obfuscate the difference between Creationism and ID either aren't being honest or haven't read any of the substantial corpus of work published by proponents of ID over the last three decades.

One of the most compelling ID proponents on the contemporary scene is philosopher of science Stephen Meyer whose books, Signature in the Cell, Darwin's Doubt, and Return of the God Hypothesis each make a case for the proposition that the origin of the universe, the fine-tuning of the universe, the origin of life, and the infusion of new information necessary for the diversification of body plans during the Cambrian period, taken together make a powerful case for the conclusion that life and the universe were intentionally engineered by an intelligent mind.

Now it's certainly the case that ID has implications for one's metaphysical convictions, but that should hardly disqualify ID from competing in the scientific arena with naturalistic explanations, since naturalistic accounts also have their own metaphysical implications.

In the following seven minute video Meyer discusses the metaphysical implications he sees resulting from the superior explanatory power of ID. He summarizes the argument against naturalistic explanations for the origin of life, the origin of the cosmos and cosmic fine-tuning and concludes that the scientific evidence points to a transcendent intelligent creator. For a much fuller presentation of these arguments check out his book Return of the God Hypothesis, a book that I think would convince anyone whose mind was not already a priori opposed to Meyer's conclusion.

The Most Pressing Question

The last couple of posts have addressed themes touched upon by the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in his book Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times. As we've noted in the previous posts, he talks in the book, inter alia, about our collective lostness - our contemporary forfeiture of objective truth, dignity, freedom, and morality as well as the loss of any ground for human rights.

There's one more thing he argues that we've lost in the modern age that I'd like to focus on today: Meaningfulness.

Sacks tells the sad story of author David Foster Wallace who took his own life at the age of 46 in September of 2008. Wallace once said that the emptiness of modern life manifests itself in a kind of lostness.

He noted that he and his friends were affluent, highly educated and successful in their chosen walks of life, but despite these advantages some of them were deeply into drugs, others were workaholics, others were going to singles bars every night.

They were, he said, "adrift."

He told a magazine in 1993 that "this is a generation that has an inheritance of absolutely nothing as far as meaningful moral values."

Reading his story reminded me of Ernst Hemingway's semi-autobiographical novel The Sun Also Rises written in 1926 and F.Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby written the year before. They both describe a lost generation living lives of not-so-quiet desperation, lives spent in an alcoholic haze, enmeshed in petty squabbles and projects, trying to find something with which to satiate their hunger for meaning and purpose.

Albert Camus' novel The Stranger (1942) is a somewhat similar tale of the ultimate pointlessness of human existence.

The century since Hemingway and Fitzgerald has brought material blessing that those artists could never have imagined, but the emptiness of modern life, despite our comforts and technology, is as painful as ever.

A character in the movie Contact captures our existential anguish well when he says that, "In all of our searching the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other."

The great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy was perhaps ahead of his time when he asked, “What will come from what I am doing now, and may do tomorrow? What will come from my whole life? Otherwise expressed—Why should I live? Why should I wish for anything? Why should I do anything? Again, in other words, is there any meaning in my life which will not be destroyed by the inevitable death awaiting me?”

Filmmaker Ingmar Bergman insisted that, “You were born for no purpose. Your life has no meaning. When you die you are extinguished.”

Why this awful nihilism that has descended upon Western societies like a suffocating smog over the last 100 years?

French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre hints at an answer when he asserted that, "Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal."

Writer Somerset Maugham puts it similarly when he wrote that, "If death ends all, if I have neither to hope for good nor to fear evil, I must ask myself what am I here for….Now the answer is plain, but so unpalatable that most will not face it. There is no meaning for life, and [thus] life has no meaning.”

Death, these men tell us, is the big eraser. It wipes away anything that could possibly make life worth the suffering, the boredom, the terror that existence holds for so many. And as David Foster Wallace observed even those who live in relative comfort, maybe especially those, are not exempted from the ennui and the pain of existential emptiness.

Put differently, unless what we do matters forever, it doesn't matter at all. For this reason, to quote Evelyn Waugh, "Life is unintelligible and unendurable without God."

Sacks cites a New York Times article on the despair evinced by the soaring statistics of depression, suicide and self-harm, especially among the young. The article quotes one person who confessed that, "Drugs and alcohol are the only shining rays of light in my otherwise unbearable existence."

Another admitted that, "I no longer find much of anything meaningful, fulfilling or satisfying. Whatever used to keep me going has gone. I am currently struggling to find any motivation to keep going."

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche foresaw in the 19th century that the loss of God would eventually unmoor mankind and plunge him into a cold, empty void of meaninglessness and despondency. In The Gay Science (1882) he wrote:

"Whither is God?" he [Nietszche's Madman] cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him---you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns?

Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder?

Is not night continually closing in on us? .... God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

Modern man lives by the conceit that he can do away with God and the only consequence of his abandonment is that he's now free to sleep in on Sunday morning. This is very naive.

When we do away with God, as I've maintained over the last several posts, not only have we no longer anything upon which to base objective truth, mutual trust, human dignity, freedom of the will, objective morality, and human rights, but we also become untethered, lost in the cosmos, to borrow from the title of a Walker Percy novel.

We lose all hope of having any lasting meaning, purpose or significance. That's why the question of God is the most pressing question in all of life and why I return to it so often on Viewpoint.

Do Human Beings Have Dignity?

Article I of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948 states that "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights."

Unfortunately, the worthies who composed this statement chose not to explore the deeper question of how being born a human being gives us either equality or dignity. Indeed, where does the idea of human dignity come from? And where do our rights come from?

Dignity (by "dignity" I mean worth, value or significance) derives from our ability to choose between right and wrong actions. Thus, dignity is related to morality. Immanuel Kant writes in his Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals that, "Morality, and humanity in so far as it is capable of of morality, is that which alone has dignity."

But this is at odds with the prevailing worldview of our modern secular society. We may pay lip service to dignity, but in a secular world which no longer believes that God is relevant or even exists why should anyone think that anyone else possesses such a thing?

Psychologist B.F. Skinner titled his most famous book Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) and urged us to get over thinking that we possess either free will or any other specialness that conferred dignity upon human beings.

Cosmologist Stephen Hawking claimed that “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.” If we're just scum from whence do we get the idea we have anything remotely resembling dignity?

The brilliant early twentieth century Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared that "When one thinks coldly I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand." Well, how much dignity do either a baboon or a grain of sand possess?

There's actually only one adequate source of human worth, but it's a source not open to naturalistic thinkers like Skinner, Hawking or Holmes. If it's true that we are in fact, as our Declaration of Independence states, all created equally and also true that we are created in God's image and prized by Him, then human beings do indeed have enormous value and significance.

If, however, there is no God, then it follows that what we call human dignity is a fiction we tell each other to make ourselves feel noble. And, if the notion of dignity is a fiction then so is the idea of human rights for there can be no rights if man has no special worth or significance.

If man has no special value then human rights are just arbitrary words hung on skyhooks; they're like paper money that has nothing of value backing it up.

Put differently, if there is no God, if all there is is the material universe, then Skinner is correct and human freedom is an illusion. We are all in the grip of the physical laws of nature and what we "choose" is what we've been determined by our environment or our genes to choose. And, if there is no freedom, if our choices are the inevitable products of factors beyond our control, then there can be no morality, since morality depends upon the freedom to choose, and if there's no morality there's no dignity, and if no dignity then no human rights.

We are, as Holmes suggested, simply a different species of baboon.

Freedom, morality, dignity and rights are all ontologically dependent upon there being a personal God. One can say, of course, that there is no God, but what he can't say, and be consistent, is that there is no God but that morality, human dignity and human rights all nevertheless still exist.

To say that is to talk nonsense.

The Decline of Civility

There's no doubt that civility in our public discourse has declined, that there's more hostility, more vituperation, greater polarization than at any time within living memory.

In his book Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times, the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes that though there've been raw, rude and raucous periods in the past, especially during elections, in our own day,

... something new is happening: the sense that the other side is less than fully human, that its supporters are not part of the same moral community as us, that somehow their sensibilities are alien and threatening, as if they were not the opposition within the political arena, but the enemy, full stop.

What has brought this about? Sacks offers "four independent but mutually aggravating causes."

First, he avers, is "the deepening individualism of Western societies since the 1960s." When a country has been at relative peace for an extended period of time the sense of togetherness and unity tends to atrophy. Combine this diminishing sense of unity with an increasing sense of individual autonomy and people will often feel less need to be polite to each other.

Second, is "the phenomenon of the internet which has changed the nature of communication and the way we acquire our information about the world." Internet websites, coupled, I might add with cable television, have transformed broadcast news into a "narrowcasting" of news targeted at audiences with specific interests and political ideologies.

This encourages us to listen only to points of view that are compatible with our own and which reinforce our beliefs, and reinforcement tends to push us toward political and/or religious extremes.

Third, this new media has what has been called a disinhibiting effect. Just as motorists are often emboldened to be more rude and abusive when ensconced in the security of their vehicle, the new social media tends to bring out the worst in people who feel secure behind their screens.

This is the result, Sacks claims, of five features of social media:

• It's anonymous. No one has to give their true name or reveal their identity or address.
• It's invisible. No one sees the people they're insulting and they don't see you.
• The communication often isn't done in real time. There's a time gap between you typing out your message and the other party reading it.
• It's unregulated. There are few, if any, rules.
• Finally, it's not face to face. There's something about being face to face with someone that tends to mitigate rudeness and enhance courtesy.

Sacks writes at length about the fourth factor contributing to our contemporary incivility, but it can perhaps be summed up by saying that our modern mobility has weakened our sense of community. Many people who read this scarcely know the people who live more than two houses removed from theirs. Many people who read this have probably lived at multiple addresses since leaving high school or college and many of them no longer live in the community in which they grew up.

When we have no roots in a community, when we don't know the people with whom we interact, we find it easier to be discourteous to them. When we have a deep attachment to a community, on the other hand, we feel a bond, almost a kinship, with those with whom we share that community and its values.

And this leads back to what Sacks says in the first quote above. We've become so fragmented as a society that we frequently don't share the same values as others. We may speak the same language, but our worldviews are so divergent that we have trouble communicating. We are almost alien to each other.

The more different people are from each other the more difficult it is to feel a connection with them and the easier it is to feel, and express, animosity toward them when frictions arise.

In closing, I'd like to add two additional causes to the four to which Sacks attributes what we might call our current crisis of civility:

First, people often express opinions that they hold fervently but inchoately. That is, they may have strong opinions and voice them, but when challenged to defend them they find themselves at a loss. The inability to defend one's views when challenged is embarrassing and frustrating and it's easier to just smother one's critic in a fog of contumely, which is what a lot of people choose to do.

Second, and this perhaps lies at the root of most of what was said above, many people, having abandoned the Judeo-Christian worldview and its ethic of loving one's neighbor and living by the Golden Rule, often no longer feel they have a duty to treat others as persons loved by God and deserving of being treated with dignity.

Of course, people who claim to adhere to the Judeo-Christian worldview can be just as offensive as anyone else, but when they are they betray the commandment to love their neighbor. When a secular individual acts uncivilly he's betraying nothing. For the secular man there's no moral imperative to be civil, kind, tolerant or compassionate.

The secular man/woman is morally autonomous, and that's a problem for any society that wishes to maintain a modicum of decency.

Truth and Trust

In 2016, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote in his final book before his death last November (Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times), the Oxford English Dictionary declared the term post-truth to be its "word of the year."

Oxford's dictionary defines post-truth as an adjective denoting the circumstance that objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.

Britain's Lord Hall, director-general of the BBC, warned that the world is facing "the biggest assault on truth since the 1930's." Sacks writes that according to a Pew Research Center report,

A majority of Americans now view fake news as a more serious problem than terrorism, illegal immigration, racism or sexism. Almost seven in ten say it undermines confidence in government. Fifty four percent say it damages people's confidence in one another.

In other words, a majority of Americans doesn't believe that their media is telling them the "real" truth about what they report, but where there's no confidence that what we hear is true there'll surely be no trust.

Our society, Sacks argues, has arrived at the point where our skepticism about the possibility of truth is corroding trust, not just in our media but in all our institutions as well as our interpersonal relationships. This is the legacy of our postmodern age.

When "truth" becomes whatever has appeal to the listener, whatever comports with his or her own beliefs, biases, and predilections, when you have your truth and I have mine, then what basis do we have for trusting each other?

How have we come to such a predicament? Entire books have been written on that question, but perhaps the short answer is, to quote Alexander Solzhenitsyn, we have forgotten God.

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) foresaw the consequences of man's abandonment of God in the second half of the 19th century. He realized, long before it dawned on many of his fellow atheists, that if God does not exist then there's no objective standard for truth nor for morality.

"There is no truth, " Nietzsche declared, "there are only interpretations."

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

Because there is no objective truth, there's no reason why anyone should aspire to be truthful, and if there's no God there's no objective moral obligation to be truthful anyway. The moral duty to be truthful is an anachronism, according to Nietzsche, a holdover from the Christian belief that God imposes the duty of truthfulness upon us: In The Gay Science he writes:

Why have morality at all when life, nature, and history are not moral? .... we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine.

Put differently, in Nietszche's day men had rejected God but they still tried to hold on to belief in truth, especially moral truth. Nietszche saw that you can't do it. You can't have one without the other.

If you want to make moral judgments and discern truth from falsehood then you have to undergird that with a theistic worldview. If you don't want theism, you have to be willing to foresake truth, morality and trust as well.

A world that no longer believes in God will soon enough stop believing in truth, including moral truth, and when truth no longer matters trust will soon die, and when that happens, Rabbi Sacks warns, society will be well on the road to complete disintegration.

Multiple Layers of Information

The theory of naturalistic evolution holds that unguided, unintelligent physical processes like genetic mutation and natural selection have blindly, over vast stretches of time, generated a huge increase in information. Evolution started with simple molecules and has produced the extravagant diversity of complex living things we see all around us, but this theory has a serious conflict with modern genetics.

Biochemist Michael Behe argues in his book Darwin Devolves that much of what is thought to be evolutionary progress is actually devolution from higher levels of information to lower levels. This comes about when genes are broken in one fashion or another, the loss of the broken gene allowing other genes to express themselves differently (See the video series Secrets of the Cell).

This, however, means that for change to have occurred there must have been a greater amount of genetic information at the start than at the culmination which is exactly opposite of what the standard evolutionary model states. Why is it so hard for evolution to proceed in the way normally supposed by the standard theory and which most high school students are taught? Geneticist John Sanford explains:

Most DNA sequences are poly-functional and therefore must also be poly-constrained. This means that DNA sequences have meaning on several different levels (poly-functional) and each level of meaning limits possible future change (poly-constrained).

For example, imagine a sentence that has a very specific message in its normal form but with an equally coherent message when read backwards.

Now let's suppose it also has a third message when reading every other letter and a fourth message when a simple encryption program is used to translate it. Such a message would be poly-functional and poly-constrained.

We know that misspellings in a normal sentence will not normally improve the message, but at least this would be possible.

However, a poly-constrained message is fascinating, in that it cannot be improved. It can only degenerate. Any misspellings which might possibly improve the normal sentence will be disruptive to the other levels of information.

Any change at all will diminish information with absolute certainty....Changing anything seems to potentially change everything!

Thus, almost any change in an organisms DNA would be catastrophic for the organism, but if this is so how did complex organisms with high levels of information encoded in their DNA evolve from simpler organisms with lower levels of information?

The answer we often hear from our Neo-Darwinian friends goes something like this: "It must've happened somehow because we know evolution is true, and we know its true because here we are!"

Well, yes, we might reply, but couldn't there be some other explanation for how we got here? To that query our friends often give an answer something like, "The only other live explanation is that we were created by a supernatural Being, but we know that's false because we know there's no such Creator."

And how do we know there's no such Creator? we might ask. "Because," we're assured, "Darwinian evolution has made such a being unnecessary and irrelevant."

Hmmm. Somewhere in that chain of "reasoning" a circular argument or two seems to be lurking.

Why the Cubans, Mr. President?

I have from time to time made the tongue-in-cheek observation that if the migrants pressing on our southern border could be expected to vote Republican the Democrats would be themselves down there with sleeves rolled up building a barrier to rival the Great Wall of China to keep them out.

Of course, that was just a surmise for which I had no real evidence. Until now. Hot Air's Allahpundit notes that the Biden administration has recently declared that any refugees seeking to enter the United States without proper authorization will be turned away and sent to wait in another country.

He wonders why that policy applies to people arriving by sea but not by land. Why is the Biden administration adopting for Cubans what was essentially Trump's Remain in Mexico policy for migrants seeking to enter the U.S. through the southern border, but not applying it to those migrants arriving through Mexico?

And as others have noted, it's odd (not really) that there's no outrage among Democrats or their media mouthpieces over the "cruelty" of closing our borders to people fleeing the oppression of a communist dictatorship. Yet we were constantly told that Trump's policy of not letting in migrants from across the Rio Grande was "inhumane" and "not our values."

Moreover, isn't it true that many of these potential Cuban refugees would be people of color? Why aren't there protests over the blatant racism of the Biden policy of slamming the door shut so that people of color can't get in? Trump was certainly harangued by cries of racism because he was building a wall that would keep dark-skinned Hispanics out.

So, where is the outrage from Democrats and the majority of the mainstream media? Why are these “cruel” policies toward potential dark-skinned migrants fleeing economic hardship and brutal oppression at the hands of a tyrannical government not being denounced as cruel racism? The silence, Harsanyi says, is almost deafening.

Well, perhaps we need not look too deeply into these questions to find plausible answers. Jazz Shaw, also at Hot Air, notes:

Compared to other Hispanic minority groups, Cubans tend to be more conservative in their politics and are more likely to register as Republicans. Trump overperformed with Cuban-Americans in 2020, a fact that very likely put him over the top in carrying Florida.

So with the Democrats in charge, it seems that the huddled masses yearning to breathe free and the wretched refuse of your teeming shore doesn’t include the Cubans.

Nor anyone else likely to vote Republican, but if this is the reason for pulling up the drawbridge so Cubans can't get in, it's a shameful disgrace. Yet what other reason could there be?

Some have suggested that Mr. Biden doesn't want thousands of people risking the treacherous 90 mile trip across the Caribbean, but the thousand mile trek across Mexico with heat, cartel coyotes and sundry other thugs is scarcely safer.

Others may be closer to the mark when they point out that Democrats don't want an influx of refugees coming from Cuba because it makes that socialist paradise look bad, and so it does and so it should, but if that's the reason for the difference in policies it's just as ignoble as keeping them out for fear that the Cubans will bolster the GOP in Florida.

Perhaps Mr. Biden will favor us with an explanation, but perhaps not. Perhaps even he realizes that nothing he can say would make what should be a humanitarian decision sound like anything other than a cold, heartless political calculation.

Darwin's Racism and Sexism

I mentioned a few days ago that Allison Hopper's essay in Scientific American was so absurd as to be embarrassing to both her and the journal which published it (See Hopper's Whoppers).

Her thesis was, essentially, that it's somehow racist of Darwin skeptics to reject the evolutionary paradigm. She writes, for instance, that she wants to “unmask the lie that evolution denial is about religion and recognize that at its core, it is a form of white supremacy that perpetuates segregation and violence against Black bodies.”

Yet it was the 19th century Darwinians who provided the very scientific justification seized upon by the racists who came along at the end of that century and the first fifty years or so of the 20th century.

In an article at Evolution News Michael Flannery states that,

Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s indefatigable “Bulldog,” wrote a shameful essay on May 20, 1865, shortly after the conclusion of the American Civil War. He suggested that the South should be relieved given that it was no longer responsible for the care and “protection” of the now-former slaves.

He declared that no rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man.” A reform-minded American Darwinist, Charles Loring Brace, concurred.

Richard Weikart, author of the book From Darwin to Hitler, writes that, contrary to Ms Hopper's allegations,

...the vast majority of white supremacists today embrace Darwinian evolution and use it as evidence for their white supremacy.

In a 2017 article in his Radix journal, Richard Spencer, a leading figure on the white supremacist Alt-Right argued that “Group differences exist as consequences of evolution by natural selection” and “racial differences are a natural and normal consequence of human evolution.”

This is a commonplace view among white supremacists, as you can easily discover by looking at white supremacist websites and print publications.

...most people today who reject evolution, which includes many people of color, are not racists. On the other hand, most of the leading white supremacists today embrace evolutionary theory with alacrity.

In a piece at Science Princeton anthropologist Augustin Fuentes, who is sympathetic to Darwin, nevertheless points out the harmful opinions he expresses in his 1871 book The Descent of Man. Fuentes writes:

...some of Darwin's other assertions were dismally, and dangerously, wrong. “Descent” is a text from which to learn, but not to venerate....“Descent,” like so many of the scientific tomes of Darwin's day, offers a racist and sexist view of humanity.

Darwin portrayed Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia as less than Europeans in capacity and behavior. Peoples of the African continent were consistently referred to as cognitively depauperate, less capable, and of a lower rank than other races.

....yet he still, baselessly, asserted evolutionary differences between races. He went beyond simple racial rankings, offering justification of empire and colonialism, and genocide, through “survival of the fittest.”

This too is confounding given Darwin's robust stance against slavery.

Well, if I may be permitted a quibble, Fuentes seems to be mistakenly assuming that opposition to slavery necessarily entails that one regards the enslaved as in all respects equal to the rest of humanity, but that's clearly not so.

A number of abolitionists who opposed slavery nevertheless thought that blacks were inferior to whites.

One need not think the "races" are in every sense equal to see that chattel slavery is a moral evil. Nor must one think that everyone is in every sense equal to everyone else in order to believe that everyone should be treated equally under the law.

But that aside, Darwin's chauvinism didn't end at race. It extended also to sex. Fuentes notes that:

In “Descent,” Darwin identified women as less capable than (White) men, often akin to the “lower races.” He described man as more courageous, energetic, inventive, and intelligent, invoking natural and sexual selection as justification...

Fuentes acknowledges and laments the influence Darwin has had ever since on public attitudes about race and gender:

Racists, sexists, and white supremacists, some of them academics, use concepts and statements “validated” by their presence in “Descent” as support for erroneous beliefs, and the public accepts much of it uncritically.

So, should Darwin's statues be taken down?

No, but I don't know how activist wokesters can demand that statues of southern slave owners and Confederate generals be toppled while Darwin, whose views actually provided much of the intellectual rationale for 19th and 20th century racism, remains placidly ensconced in Shrewsbury and at the London Museum of Natural History.

Darwin Statue in Shrewsbury, England

Darwin Statue at London Museum of Natural History

William Galston on CRT

Former Clinton administration official and current Wall Street Journal contributor William Galston has a piece in Wednesday's Journal (subscription required) that highlights a few of the most troubling aspects of Critical Race Theory.

Here are some excerpts from his column. The quotes are from two of the seminal CRT thinkers Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado and their book Critical Race Theory: An Introduction:

He [Delgado] writes that critical race theory “questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

This would seem to mean that CRT opposes the idea that all persons should be treated equally under the law and that the law should not aspire to be neutral in regard to the race of those who come under its purview. By questioning the validity of Enlightenment Rationalism it also apparently questions, or more accurately, rejects, the idea that reason and logic should be employed to settle disagreements and to establish policy.

It builds on critical legal studies and radical feminism, the work of European theorists such as Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, and the American radical tradition, including the Black Power and Chicano movements of the 1960s and early ’70s.

Gramsci, of course, was a communist and the Black Power movement was separationist. CRT substitutes race for class in Marxist theory and rejects the ideal of racial integration. Just as Gramsci's Marxism promoted the revolution of the oppressed classes, so, too, does CRT theory require a revolution that would completely overturn the social order. It would essentially seek to make whites the oppressed class.

Citing Delgado and Stefancic Galston proceeds to describe some of the key tenets of critical race theory:

These propositions include the belief that racism is ordinary, “the usual way that society does business,” not aberrational; and that “triumphalist history”—the confidence that the legislation and court decisions of the 1950s and 1960s set the U.S. on the course of irresistible racial progress—neglects social backlash and legal retreat.

Liberal approaches to racism, such as colorblindness and neutral principles of law, can fix only the worst abuses. But if racism is deeply embedded in thought processes and social structures, they say, then only “aggressive, color-conscious efforts” to change the status quo can make a difference.

Or, to quote another theorist Ibram X. Kendi in his book How to Be an Antiracist, "The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination."

Presumably, what Kendi means is that the laws must be tilted to advantage blacks even if this disadvantages whites and Asians, and if blacks are being discriminated against today, whites and Asians must be discriminated against tomorrow.

It's not a prescription likely to engender racial harmony.

Here's Galston,

“White privilege”—the unspoken, unseen advantages that whites enjoy—is a key aspect of these social structures. Changing laws without undoing the “racial subordination” inherent in white privilege will not get us very far.

Incrementalism is a bankrupt strategy; “everything must change at once.” The logical conclusion is that to overcome racism, we need a cultural revolution.

The case against affirmative action, we are told, rests on “an implicit assumption of innocence on the part of the white person” this policy displaces. The guilty parties are the beneficiaries of affirmative action who take what does not rightfully belong to them.

But if racism is “pervasive, systemic, and deeply ingrained,” as critical race theorists insist, then “no white member of society seems quite so innocent.” Because all whites benefit from a system of unearned advantage, race-conscious remedies simply rectify that injustice.

This “pervasive, systemic, and deeply ingrained” racism is, however, notoriously difficult to pinpoint. The burden of proof that it exists despite being invisible rests on the person making the claim, and mere racial disparities are not even compelling evidence, let alone proof of systemic racism.

Galston concludes with this:

I have barely scratched the surface of this complex movement in these paragraphs. But one thing is clear: Because the Declaration of Independence — the founding document of the American liberal order — is a product of Enlightenment rationalism, a doctrine that rejects the Enlightenment tacitly requires deconstructing the American order and rebuilding it on an entirely different foundation.

Yes, and those who advocate teaching this to our children are advocating teaching our children to despise both their nation and its history, their own "whiteness," and ultimately their own selves.

Little wonder that parents all across the nation are outraged that both the NEA and the AFT have endorsed teaching CRT (see the link) and thousands of teachers have pledged to teach it in defiance of state laws which prohibit it.

The Culture War Is a Long War

Tanner Greer has written a very interesting essay at a site called Scholar's Stage titled Culture Wars Are Long Wars.

Although he doesn't mention philosopher Thomas Kuhn and his classic work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, his essay could be seen as an application of Kuhn's idea of paradigm shifts in science to the sphere of culture and politics.

Greer begins with this lede:

We are told that conservatives “lost the culture war.” I dissent from this view: American conservatives never waged a culture war. Conservatives certainly fought, there is no denying that.

They fought with every bit of obstruction and scandal their operatives could muster. But this was not a culture war. Rather, America’s conservatives fought a political war over culture.

Republicans used cultural issues to gain—or to try to gain—political power. Their brightest minds and greatest efforts went into securing control of judiciary, developing a judicial philosophy for their appointees, securing control of the Capitol, and developing laws that could be implemented in multiple state houses across the nation.

No actual attempt to change the culture was attempted.

Greer believes that politics is downstream from culture, to use the late Andrew Breitbart's phrase, and as such the political fight that Republicans have waged is really the wrong fight. Unless the culture is changed political remediation will only be effective around the margins.

I have to register a minor disagreement at this point. It seems to me that what's needed in the present day is actually a two-pronged attempt to change both the culture and the left-wing ideology that dominates so much of our politics because culture and politics are both influenced and changed by the other.

The law is a teacher, and when laws are changed the people are instructed and the culture is changed. The Civil Rights acts of the fifties and sixties were imposed on a majority population that was largely ignorant of, or indifferent to, the plight of black people in America, but the law roused the majority from their slumbers.

Aristotle lends his considerable authority to this view when he writes that,

The main concern of politics is to engender a certain character in the citizens and to make them good and disposed to perform noble actions....Lawgivers make the citizens good by inculcating (good) habits in them...if he does not succeed in doing that his legislation is a failure.

Anyway, Greer continues:

Cultures can be changed; movements can be built. But as these examples all suggest, this is not a quick task. Culture wars are long wars. Instilling new ideas and overthrowing existing orthodoxies takes time—usually two to three generations of time. It is a 35-50 year process....

This is all true although I wish Greer would've explained how a culture - and politics - can be changed apart from a religious awakening.

With regard to religion he offers this insight which is also on the mark:

America’s future is godless not because the God-fearing were convinced of the errors of their faith, but because their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren never adopted their faith to start out with.

Cultures do not change when people replace old ideas with new ones; cultures change when people with new ideas replace the people with old ones.

This is Kuhn's paradigm shift. Kuhn writes that scientific theories are rarely overthrown by the generations which initially championed them. What happens instead is that too many discoveries accumulate that the theory can't explain. The younger generation of scientists that doesn't have the professional and emotional investment in the theory that their elders have, become skeptical.

As the older generation retires and dies away their younger successors are freed up to promote a new theoretical paradigm which accounts for most of the anomalies and which ultimately supplants the old theory.

I think this is happening today with intelligent design which will, I think, eventually supplant a clunky, arthritic Neo-Darwinism as the old line Neo-Darwinists shuffle off the stage.

Greer elaborates on the cultural paradigm shift in the following:

....almost all “social” or “value laden” attitudes are established early in life and are then maintained throughout it. The “formative events” of one’s youth truly are formative.

The ideas, attitudes, and social pressures of one’s youth have a similar impact on one’s worldview, even after the conditions that created these pressures have long disappeared.

Cultural insurgents win few converts in their own cohort. They can, however, build up a system of ideas and institutions which will preserve and refine the ideals they hope their community will adopt in the future.

The real target of these ideas are not their contemporaries, but their contemporaries’ children and grandchildren. Culture wars are fought for the hearts of the unborn.

Future generations will be open to values, religious, political and cultural, that the current generation rejects outright.

This will not be apparent at first. Beneath the official comings and goings of the cohorts above, a new consensus forms in the cohorts below. Ideas will fester among the young, but their impact will be hidden by the inability and inexperience of youth.

But the youth do not stay young. Eventually a transition point arrives.

Sometimes, this transition will be marked by a great event the old orthodoxy cannot explain. At other times it is simply a matter of numbers. In either case, the end falls swift: the older cohorts suddenly find themselves outnumbered and outgunned, swept up in a flood they had assumed was a mere trickle.

Greer cautions against hoping for a quick change. He's right to do so. Our present cultural circumstances did not develop overnight. They've been some sixty years or more in the making and have still not run their complete course.

Most of us, like the generation of ancient Israelites that fled Egypt, will not live to see the promised land:

.... as culture wars are long wars, there are no quick victories. If you reject the quickly crystalizing orthodoxy of America’s millennials, your short-term options are limited. The millennials are a lost generation; they will persist in their errors to the end of their days.

Theirs is a doomed cohort—and for most of the next two decades, this doomed cohort will be in charge.

But like all orthodoxies, theirs will eventually stumble. Today’s orthodoxy will meet events it cannot explain. Today’s hopes will be the source of tomorrow’s sorrows. When those sorrows arrive, a rising generation will be looking for alternatives.

The job of today’s insurgents is to build a coherent critique of this orthodoxy, a compelling vision of a better way, and a set of networks that can guard the flame until the arrival of that happy day.

This sounds very much like Rod Dreher's prescription in both The Benedict Option and Live Not by Lies.

Greer is optimistic that the day will come when the current soft totalitarianism (Dreher's term) collapses. My concern, though, is that it'll only come if there's a revitalization of the Judeo-Christian faith that underpins the values to which he'd like to see us return.

Until we see signs of that revitalization I'm afraid the paradigm shift toward which Greer looks will be postponed indefinitely into the future. Anyway, read his essay. It's very good and there's much more to it than I can write about here.

Intellectual Virtues

One of my favorite works in philosophy is a book by the English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) titled On Liberty. Throughout this elegantly written essay Mill offers excellent advice on how to think clearly about the proper limits of state coercion and the freedom of the individual citizen.

In chapter two he takes up the related topic of a citizen's responsibility to inform him or herself on important matters like "morals, religion, politics, social relations, and the business of life". In these, Mill suggests, we should make it our practice to follow the example of one of the greatest rhetoricians in history, Marcus Tullius Cicero.

Mill writes:

The greatest orator, save one, of antiquity, has left it on record that he always studied his adversary’s case with as great, if not with still greater, intensity than even his own. What Cicero practised as the means of forensic success, requires to be imitated by all who study any subject in order to arrive at the truth.

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.

The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most inclination.

How many people know, for example, the arguments on the other side of the issue from their own on matters like the existence of God, evolution, immigration, climate change, Critical Race Theory, abortion, transgenderism, etc.? If we don't know what the opposing arguments are on such questions how are we justified in dogmatically declaring or believing that our opinion is the only one that it's reasonable to hold?

Mill continues:

Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them.

He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of; else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty.

In other words, if we only hear opposing views from those who agree with our position then we're probably not hearing those views presented as cogently as they would be by someone who really believed them. We shouldn't be afraid to read books and listen to lectures by people with whom we disagree. It'll either sharpen our own views or lead us closer to the truth.

Those on college campuses today who seek to shout down speakers they disagree with, or to prevent them from even appearing on campus, are, in addition to revealing their own intellectual primitiveness, doing both the truth and their fellow students a grave disservice.

John Stuart Mill

Most people, even educated people, Mill laments, don't really know the arguments against the positions they hold:

Ninety-nine in a hundred of what are called educated men are in this condition; even of those who can argue fluently for their opinions. Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them, and considered what such persons may have to say; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess.

They do not know those parts of it which explain and justify the remainder; the considerations which show that a fact which seemingly conflicts with another is reconcilable with it, or that, of two apparently strong reasons, one and not the other ought to be preferred.

All that part of the truth which turns the scale, and decides the judgment of a completely informed mind, they are strangers to; nor is it ever really known, but to those who have attended equally and impartially to both sides, and endeavoured to see the reasons of both in the strongest light.

Of course, few people have the time, let alone the inclination, to thoroughly explore all sides of all important issues, but if we don't then we certainly have no justification for being dogmatic in expressing our opinions.

It would be better instead to display a genuinely open-minded intellectual humility which, so far from communicating the message, "I'm right and you're wrong", says instead that, "I might well not know all that I should about this matter, but here's what I think based on what I do know...."

Unfortunately, just as in Mill's time, open-mindedness and humility are two intellectual virtues not conspicuous among many of those participating in debates, especially online, on the issues of our day.

Closing the Door to the Divine Foot

One of the most fascinating fields of study in biology is the field of embryology - the study of how a zygote develops into an adult organism. For most animals our knowledge of their ontogenetic development is still incomplete, but a team of scientists has worked out the complete developmental history of a nematode called C. elegans and has won a Nobel Prize for their achievement.

The ontogeny (the development of an organism from fertilized egg to adult) of this tiny worm, so small that you need a microscope to see it, is programmed to follow a specific pathway, but several mysteries surround attempts to determine what it is that controls that ontogeny as well as attempts to elucidate how undirected processes could ever have produced such a control system in living things.

Philosopher of biology Paul Nelson discusses some of the problems in this 10 minute video.

Perhaps there's a materialist explanation for embryological development such as we see in C. elegans and even more astonishingly in higher organisms, but if there is itmust be a closely guarded secret.

What we see in this presentation seems to point to a teleology that many scientists insist on ruling out a priori because teleology, the notion that there are ends or purposes in nature, doesn't fit into their naturalistic worldview. After all, if there's a goal or end toward which an embryo strives there must've been an intelligent agent which established it. Goals do not result from naturalistic processes.

Yet I wonder if these scientists aren't missing something by refusing to admit the possibility of teleological explanations into their scientific work.

I've quoted before in this context a passage from William James that I think is particularly apt. James wrote that, "Any rule of thought that would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth, if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule." If the purpose of science is to discover truth why rule out ahead of time certain kinds of explanations just because they're incompatible with a particular metaphysical commitment?

The refusal to permit the hypothesis that a mind may be somehow responsible for what we see in C. elegans reminds me of another quote, this one from the late geneticist Richard Lewontin who just passed away last week at the age of 92. Lewontin once wrote that,

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural.

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.

Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

Scientists used to declare that they were committed to following the evidence wherever it leads, but now that there seems to be much evidence that leads away from naturalism and toward a creative mind as the fundamental explanation for nature and the cosmos, that declaration is apparently no longer operative.

Who's Responsible for the Culture War?

One of the aspects of our modern politics that's particularly galling is the brazen dishonesty of the political class. President Trump's tenuous connection to the truth was well-documented, but those on the left are equally as bad, if not worse.

For more than three years the progressives lied to us about the Russian collusion business. More recently, Democratic spokespersons have, with a straight face, told us that it's not Democrats who want to defund the police, it's Republicans. Truth is often MIA in the culture war.

Speaking of the culture war, another mendacity that the left often foists upon us is that conservatives are the aggressors in the contemporary culture war, and that it's the political right which is responsible for the polarization of our politics and culture. This is so obviously absurd that it'd be funny were it not so serious.

The fact is that the left has for almost a century been seeking to tear down virtually every institution and value that have traditionally glued our diverse society together. The left has relentlessly attacked the family, the church, law enforcement, the military, our educational system, our economic system, our history, our traditional understanding of sexuality - almost everything one can think of - while conservatives have been waging a defensive struggle, trying to preserve what's good against the leftist onslaught.

Nevertheless, as soon as conservatives resist the left's assaults on our institutions and moral values, their opponents accuse them of being the aggressors in the culture war. Conservatives find themselves in the position of a man being repeatedly slapped in the face who puts his hands up to fend off the blows and is thus accused of being provocative, hostile and aggressive.

A good example of this is the left's response to conservative parents who protest against their children's schools for teaching their students that they're racists and ladening them with guilt for being white. The left professes dismay that parents would resist teachers inculcating Critical Race Theory and its racist offshoots in their classrooms, and it's the parents who are called racists for opposing this supposedly "antiracist" indoctrination.

Kevin Drum, himself a progressive, has a helpful set of graphs at his website which show quite clearly that our contemporary polarization is a result, not of conservatives moving further to the right, but of Democrats moving further to the left.

Drum analyzes six issues that divide progressives and conservatives, five of which might be considered cultural and one economic, and finds that on each issue Democrats have moved leftward in far greater numbers than Republicans have moved toward the right. For example, on immigration he notes that:

The Republican view of immigrants has bounced up and down a bit and is now up by maybe five points or so since 2000. The Democratic view has gone up by 35 percentage points.

(Note that by "up" I mean that the percentage share of partisans who hold the conventional partisan opinion has gone up. For Republicans, it means the share of Republicans who endorse the right-wing position has gone up. For Democrats it means the share of Democrats who endorse the left-wing position has gone up.)

In other words, Republicans (which should not be confused with conservatives, but which may serve as a stand-in for the purposes of this illustration) have become slightly more opposed to immigration over the last two decades than they were in 2000 whereas Democrats (liberals and progressives) have become more amenable to immigration by 35 percentage points.

On abortion the numbers are similar:

Among Republicans, the most extreme view on abortion (always illegal) has gone up by about two points since 2000. Among Democrats, the most extreme view (always legal) has gone up by 20 points.

On same sex marriage:

Democratic support for same sex marriage is up 50 points. Republican support is down 39 points (that is, they've moved 39 points away from the conservative position).

Republicans have become much more "liberal" on this issue but nearly as liberal as Democrats have.

On guns:

Among Republicans, the conservative point of view has gone up about 10 points. Among Democrats, the liberal point of view has increased by about 20 points.

On taxes:

The Republican view of taxes has gone down about ten points (probably due to the Bush tax cuts). The Democratic view of taxes has gone up by about 20 points.

Again, Republicans have moved somewhat toward the liberal position on taxes (high tax rates), but Democrats have moved in even greater numbers toward that position.

On religion:

Among Republicans, religiosity hasn't changed at all. Among Democrats, it's gone down by nearly 15 points.

Check out Drum's website to see his actual graphs.

The point that Drum is making is that the polarization we see in our politics and the aggressiveness we see in our cultural conflicts in general is largely a result of more Democrats moving further to the left while conservatives (Republicans) remain for the most part where they've always been. Although in some cases Republicans have moved a bit leftward, there's no case in which Democrats have move toward the right.