The "Miracle" of Monarch Migration

Every year an estimated 100–200 million monarch butterflies migrate two thousand to three thousand miles between the United States/Canada and Mexico. While there are other populations of monarchs, including in western North America, South America, the Caribbean, and Australia, the population in eastern North America is the best known because of its amazing migration.

Monarch Butterfly

For example, they're the only butterfly species known to make a two-way migration.

They can travel between 50 to 100 miles a day during their 3000 mile journey to Oyamel fir forests in the Mexican mountains nearly two miles above sea level.

They roost in the trees in a dozen or so of these mountain areas from October to March, often returning to the same tree in which their ancestor roosted the previous year.

In late summer in northeastern North America dwindling food supply and shorter days trigger the Monarch's migratory impulse. A generation that has hatched after mid-August begins the trek south for wintering grounds they've never been to before. Most summering Monarchs live for about two to six weeks, but this migrating generation can live up to nine months.

The migrants travel during the day and roost at night, often in the same trees that previous generations used as roost sites during their migration.

During the summer their range covers close to 400,000 square miles, but when they finally arrive in Mexico they squeeze into territories of less than half a square mile.

Monarch's roosting in Mexican Oyamel fir trees

One of the most amazing aspects of this is that these butterflies, with brains the size of a pinhead, can navigate so unerringly across thousands of miles of terrain. Researchers believe that they use a complex system which involves ultraviolet sunlight, a magnetic compass, the position of the sun and an internal clock.

Their internal clock tells them the time of day. In the morning when the sun is rising they navigate to the west of it. At noon they fly toward it and in the afternoon they fly to the east of it. This strategy keeps them flying due south as depicted in these figures:

Another amazing fact is that the generation that made the long trip from the northeast and over-wintered in Mexico is not the generation that returns to the northeast. This generation begins the trip back in the spring but they reproduce and die along the way.

The second generation continues the migration, but they, too, reproduce and die along the way. It's the third generation that makes it back to the summering grounds in the northeast, but they also reproduce and die, so it is their offspring that begin the cycle all over again in August.

There's an interactive feature here that shows the Monarch's pattern of migration. All of this raises questions:

How does each year's crop of butterflies "know" the route to take to get back to the same trees in Mexico that their ancestors left from when they've never done it before?

How do those butterflies born along the return trip "know" to continue the migratory flight and "know" which direction to take?

What is the source of the information needed for these insects to complete this astonishing journey?

And how would all this have come about through a blind, purposeless process like natural selection and genetic mutation?

Comparisons of migratory monarch genomes with the genomes of non-migratory monarchs has revealed that some five hundred and thirty genes are involved in migratory behavior so that means that in the history of the species there must have been a minimum of five hundred thirty genetic mutations, all of which were random but which fortuitously produced the ability to successfully make this migration.

Moreover, Monarchs are believed to have evolved about two million years ago so the migrating variety must've split off from the ancestral stock sometime thereafter. Thus, at the most, those 535 mutations must've accumulated within the last two million years, a very short time for all that evolution to have taken place - at least it's a very short time if the evolution were unguided by any outside intelligence.

If this all came about naturalistically that would be almost miraculous, which is ironic since naturalism discounts miracles.

It's possible, of course, that this migratory behavior could've evolved by unguided, purposeless processes, in the same sense that it's possible that elephants could've evolved the ability to fly, but it takes a king-sized portion of blind faith to dogmatically insist that it did.

Media Disinformation

Gerard Baker at WSJ offers a catalogue of stories that have been promoted by the progressive media in recent years, all of which turned out to be false.

According to so much of what we read and heard:

• Kyle Rittenhouse is a domestic terrorist.
• Brett Kavanaugh is a rapist.
• Donald Trump won in 2016 only because he colluded with the Kremlin.
• Nick Sandmann, the boy from Covington Catholic High School on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, was an entitled white bigot.
• Mr. Trump said the neo-Nazis at Charlottesville were “good people.”
• Last year’s riots were mostly peaceful.
• Unarmed black men are routinely shot in huge numbers by police officers.
• The discovery of Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian plot.

Every one of these assertions by the media was false. So were these:

• Inflation isn’t a problem.
• Andrew Cuomo was America’s greatest governor.
• Republican-run states are killing people with their anti-science Covid policies.
• A white man killed a succession of Asian-Americans in Georgia in a fit of racist rage.
• Russians offered cash bounties to the Taliban to kill American soldiers.
• Anyone who suggested the pandemic started in a Chinese laboratory was a racist.
• Mr. Trump’s postmaster general was stealing mailboxes.

Baker could've added many more examples, including the media's willingness to believe Jussie Smollett and, in 2006, Crystal Magnum in the Duke lacrosse case.

The stories were false and the media that perpetrated them often knew they were false, but they kept pushing them anyway. If it were the case that this only happened occasionally and that when it did the media were quick to correct their story, that would be forgivable, but that's obviously not what usually happens.

As in the Trump/Russia collusion case the media pushes the falsehood until they can no longer sustain it and then they quietly move on to the next fabrication. No apology, no regret, and usually no retraction.

It's why the late Rush Limbaugh often likened them to drive-by shooters who leave their victims bleeding in the street while they speed off to find their next victim.

Why do they do this? There seem to be three possible answers. Either they're simply not very bright, or they're not very honest, or they're maliciously trying to tear people, and our institutions, down by any means necessary.

A fourth possibility is that they're actually all three.

In any case, it'd be folly to naively accept whatever we hear on network or cable television, or read on social media and in the major leftist journals. Too many of these people are unconstrained by any sense of a duty to tell the truth.

It may be hard to believe that they would lie to us so deliberately and so earnestly, yet when it happens over and over again with rarely, if ever, any sign of remorse or indication of professional embarrassment one has to be at least suspicious that the falsehoods are deliberate and that we are being purposely deceived.

Perhaps the best response is not to give up trying to know what's going on in the world but rather to develop a healthy skepticism, especially toward those sources of information which have a track record of promoting stories and allegations which later are shown to have been false.

Credibility, after all, is something that must be earned and scrupulously maintained. Too much of our media has squandered any reputation they may have had for integrity and forfeited the trust of honest, thinking people.

Another Gift Suggestion

Yesterday I urged readers to consider my novel In the Absence of God (2012) as a Christmas gift for friends and family and mentioned in passing its companion novel Bridging the Abyss which came out four years ago.

Bridging is, in part, the story of the search for a young girl who has disappeared off the streets of Baltimore, MD and is believed to have been abducted. Members of the girl's family as well as those involved in the search are forced to confront the tension between a secular view of life which offers no ground for thinking any act "evil" and the obvious evil of which some men are capable.

Here's an excerpt from the Prologue:

In 1948 philosopher W.T. Stace wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly, a portion of which serves as an appropriate introduction to the story which follows in these pages. Stace wrote:

"The real turning point between the medieval age of faith and the modern age of unfaith came when scientists of the seventeenth century turned their backs upon what used to be called "final causes" …[belief in which] was not the invention of Christianity [but] was basic to the whole of Western civilization, whether in the ancient pagan world or in Christendom, from the time of Socrates to the rise of science in the seventeenth century …. They did this on the [basis that] inquiry into purposes is useless for what science aims at: namely, the prediction and control of events.

"…The conception of purpose in the world was ignored and frowned upon. This, though silent and almost unnoticed, was the greatest revolution in human history, far outweighing in importance any of the political revolutions whose thunder has reverberated around the world….

"The world, according to this new picture, is purposeless, senseless, meaningless. Nature is nothing but matter in motion. The motions of matter are governed, not by any purpose, but by blind forces and laws….[But] if the scheme of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man is purposeless and meaningless too. Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless. A man may, of course, still pursue disconnected ends - money, fame, art, science - and may gain pleasure from them. But his life is hollow at the center.

"Hence, the dissatisfied, disillusioned, restless spirit of modern man….Along with the ruin of the religious vision there went the ruin of moral principles and indeed of all values….If our moral rules do not proceed from something outside us in the nature of the universe - whether we say it is God or simply the universe itself - then they must be our own inventions.

"Thus it came to be believed that moral rules must be merely an expression of our own likes and dislikes. But likes and dislikes are notoriously variable. What pleases one man, people, or culture, displeases another. Therefore, morals are wholly relative."

This book, like my earlier novel In the Absence of God, is a story of people living in the wake of the revolution of which Stace speaks. It's a portrait of a small slice of modern life, a glimpse of what it is like to live in a world in which men live consistently, albeit perhaps unwittingly, with the assumptions of modernity, chief among which is the assumption that God does not exist or is in any case no longer relevant to our lives.

A world that has marginalized the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition is a world which finds itself bereft of any non-arbitrary basis for forming moral judgments, for finding any ultimate meaning in the existence of the human species as a whole or the life of the individual in particular, and for hope that the human yearning for justice could ever be satisfied.

Modern man dispenses with God and believes that life can go on as before - or even better than before - but this is a conceit which the sanguinary history of the 19th and 20th century confutes. A world that has abandoned God has abandoned the fountain of goodness, beauty and truth as well as the only possible ground for human rights and belief in the dignity of the individual.

Modernity has in some ways of course been a blessing, but it has also been a curse. History will ultimately decide whether the blessings have outweighed the curse. Meanwhile, Bridging the Abyss offers an account of what I believe to be the only way out of the morass into which widespread acceptance of the assumptions of modernity has led us.

If you'd like to read more about either novel click on the link at the top of this page, and if you're looking for a gift for someone who likes to read and who thinks like W.T. Stace, both Absence and Bridging might be just the thing. I hope you'll give them a look. They're available at Hearts and Minds Bookstore, a great little family-owned bookshop, and in both paperback and e-book at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

A Modest Christmas Gift Suggestion

Is there someone on your Christmas shopping list you think might enjoy reading a novel which blends philosophy, religion, and a crime story all together on a college campus during football season? If so, you might consider giving them a copy of my book In the Absence of God.

I know the foregoing sounds like a shameless plug, but Absence encapsulates a recurring theme throughout our seventeen years here at Viewpoint. It's a fictionalized argument for the proposition that naturalism affords little or no basis for either moral obligation or ultimate meaning and renders a host of other human needs and yearnings absurd.

Naturalism, to put it succinctly, is an existential dead-end, for unless there is a God, or something very much like God, then life really is, as Shakespeare described it, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

In the Absence of God is set on a mid-sized university campus in New England at the beginning of the fall semester sometime in the early years of the last decade.

The main plot line involves a professor named Joseph Weyland who's forced by the events swirling around him, as well as the challenge presented by a young nihilist in one of his classes, to come to grips with the implications of his materialistic worldview. As he wrestles with the issues his materialism raises he's engaged in an ongoing series of dialogues with a colleague and friend named Malcolm Peterson, and also with the pastor of his father's church, Loren Holt.

Meanwhile, the campus has been terrorized by an apparent serial rapist, and several young student-athletes find themselves thrust into the role of both victim and pursuer of the individual perpetrating these crimes.

Over the course of three weeks in late August and early September the lives of these students become intertwined with those of Weyland and Peterson in ways none of them could have foreseen when the semester opened.

In the Forward to the book I write this:

This is not a book about football, though it may at first seem to be. Neither is it a crime novel, though it ends that way. Nor is it just a book about people sitting around talking, although I'm sure some readers will think so.

In the Absence of God is a novel about ideas concerning the things that matter most in life. It's a tale of three different worldviews, three different ways of seeing the world and of living our lives in it. It's the story of how for a few short weeks in September these three views come into conflict on a college campus in New England and how that clash of ideas forces people on campus to think seriously about the implications of their deepest convictions.

It's often said that ideas have consequences, and nowhere is this more true than in one's personal philosophy of life - one's beliefs about God.

It's my hope that in reading this book you'll be stretched to think about things you perhaps hadn't thought about before, or that you'll at least think about your own beliefs in new and different ways. I hope that whatever your convictions about the matters taken up in this book may be, by the time you close its covers you'll agree that those convictions matter, and matter more profoundly than any other opinions you hold.

< /br> You can read more about In the Absence of God by following the link at the top of this page. It's available at my favorite bookstore, Hearts and Minds, and also at Amazon (paperback and kindle), where reviewers have given it 4.5 stars, and at Barnes and Noble (paperback and nook).

I hope you'll consider putting it and/or it's companion novel Bridging the Abyss (about which more tomorrow) on your Christmas shopping list.

Gratitude

The Thanksgiving holiday which Americans observe today is a beautiful celebration, not least because it reminds us of the importance of gratitude in our lives - gratitude to family, friends, neighbors, and God.

It's been said that gratitude is the most fragrant of the virtues and ingratitude one of the ugliest of character defects, and that certainly seems true.

Those who are grateful for what others have done for them have about them a sweetness and loveliness not exuded by any other personality trait, while those who take all their blessings for granted, or think of them as things to which they're entitled, or who are otherwise unappreciative for what others have done for them, project a self-centeredness or ignorance that's thoroughly unpleasant to be around.

Anyway, here are a few quotes for your contemplation that reinforce the significance of gratitude:

• “Entitlement is such a cancer because it is void of gratitude.” — Adam Smith
• “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues but the parent of all others.” — Cicero
• "It's not happiness that brings us gratitude, it's gratitude that brings us happiness." - Anonymous
• “Showing gratitude is one of the simplest yet most powerful things humans can do for each other.” — Randy Rausch
• “Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.” — William Arthur Ward
• “Gratitude is the sign of noble souls.” — Aesop
• “The more grateful I am, the more beauty I see.” — Mary Davis
• “When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity.” — Elie Wiesel
• “Make it a habit to tell people thank you. To express your appreciation, sincerely and without the expectation of anything in return. Truly appreciate those around you, and you'll soon find many others around you. Truly appreciate life, and you'll find that you have more of it.” — Ralph Marston
• “In ordinary life, we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I hope that for all our readers (including even those outside the U.S. who don't celebrate the holiday) today will be a day filled with gratitude, love and joy.

How Thanksgiving Became Official

Ever since the presidency of George Washington Americans had been celebrating days of thanksgiving, but they had been declared mostly by the states for the states. However, on September 28th, 1863 a 74 year-old magazine editor named Sarah Hale wrote to President Abraham Lincoln urging him to declare a nation-wide observance.

During his administration President Lincoln had issued many orders similar to this. For example, on November 28, 1861 he had ordered government departments closed for a local day of thanksgiving. Hale, though, wanted him to have the "day of our annual Thanksgiving made a National and fixed Union Festival," an observance for which she had campaigned in her magazine, Godey's Lady's Book, for 15 years.

She explained, "You may have observed that, for some years past, there has been an increasing interest felt in our land to have the Thanksgiving held on the same day, in all the States; it now needs National recognition and authoritive fixation only to become permanently an American custom and institution."

Prior to this, each state scheduled its own Thanksgiving holiday at different times, mainly in New England and other Northern states. President Lincoln responded to Mrs. Hale's request immediately, unlike several of his predecessors, who ignored her petitions altogether.

According to an April 1, 1864 letter from John Nicolay, one of President Lincoln's secretaries, the actual proclamation was written for President Lincoln by Secretary of State William Seward. A year later the manuscript, in Seward's hand, was sold to raise money to benefit Union troops. Here's Lincoln's proclamation:

Washington, D.C.
October 3, 1863
By the President of the United States of America.
A Proclamation.

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God.

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.

Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore.

Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things.

They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People.

I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.

And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the Unites States the Eighty-eighth.

By the President: Abraham Lincoln
William H. Seward,
Secretary of State

In some respects the proclamation reads quite as if it could have been written today, particularly the penultimate paragraph.

I hope we all give thanks tomorrow for our many blessings, remembering especially as we express our gratitude to God and to each other those who suffer and grieve and that our thanksgivings make tomorrow a wonderful and meaningful day.

Ms. Pelosi's Ethical Misunderstanding

In a press conference last Thursday, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi declared that there's "a moral obligation for us to hand this planet over to the next generation in a responsible way."

“For me," she stated, "it’s a religious thing: I believe this is God’s creation, and we have a moral obligation to be good stewards.”

So far, so good. It's a standard Christian theological position that the creation has been placed under man's stewardship and that we have a duty to properly care for it.

But then Ms. Pelosi added that those who don't share her belief that God has laid upon humanity the duty to care for the earth nevertheless still have an obligation to do so: “If you don’t share that view you must share the view that we have an obligation to future generations."

Here, regardless of what we think about climate change, green energy, etc., we might raise a philosophical eyebrow. Speaker Pelosi believes that God has imposed a moral obligation upon us to keep the planet healthy, but what has laid that obligation upon us if those who don't share the view that it was imposed by God are correct?

What is the source of a moral duty to future generations if not God? Why should people today not just live for themselves, maximize their own comfort and well-being and let future generations fend for themselves?

Indeed, we might harbor a deep concern for our great, great grandchildren's well-being but from whence comes an obligation to do so?

Ms. Pelosi makes a common mistake in her press conference. She assumes that God is just one source among others of objective moral obligations whereas in fact, God is, and can be, the only source of objective moral obligations (An objective moral obligation is one which exists whether or not we believe it does).

If God doesn't exist or is irrelevant to how we live, then living just for oneself is not wrong in any moral sense. There's no obligation to sacrifice for others, especially others who will not be born for another hundred years.

If one believes that we do have such obligations as Ms. Pelosi describes, then, like her, one should be a theist since objective moral obligation does not sit at all comfortably or consistently in a naturalistic worldview.

The Speaker would've been on firmer ground had she said something like, "I believe God obligates all humanity to care for the planet and that God will hold us responsible for how we treat the planet. You may not share that belief but God obligates you nonetheless."

That may've sounded a unpleasantly dogmatic to contemporary ears, but it would've had the merit of making more sense than assuming that there could be some other source of a duty to care about the well-being of future generations.

Ten Lies about Rittenhouse

As protests break out in cities across America in the wake of the Kyle Rittenhouse acquittal one wonders how many of the protestors have fallen for one or more of the falsehoods about the case that have been perpetrated by our media.

In a column written before the verdict was announced, Miranda Devine at The New York Post wrote about ten false claims that have appeared in either print, broadcast or social media, all of which were debunked in court.

She opens with this: Of all the willful lies and omissions in the media’s coverage of the Steele dossier, Brian Sicknick, the Covington kids, Jussie Smollett, the Wuhan lab, Hunter Biden’s laptop and so on, nothing beats the evil propaganda peddled about Kyle Rittenhouse.

They try to make the Rittenhouse case about race, but it’s about class, punching down at the white working-class son of a single mother because they don’t see him as fully human, and it makes them feel good.

They lie about him because they can.

The central media narrative is that Kyle Rittenhouse is a white supremacist whose mother drove him across state lines with an AR-15 to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters. All lies.

“A white, Trump-supporting, MAGA-loving Blue Lives Matter social media partisan, 17 years old, picks up a gun, drives from one state to another with the intent to shoot people,” was typical from John Heilemann, MSNBC’s national affairs analyst.

Here's Devine's list. Every one of these claims, to which she provides links, has been shown to be false. Read her column for her explanations:

1. He killed two black BLM protesters.
2. He lived out of state and had no connection to Kenosha.
3. He illegally took an AR-15 across state lines.
4. He illegally possessed the rifle he used.
5. His mother drove him across state lines to the riot.
6. He was an “active shooter” who took his gun to a riot looking for trouble.
7. He's a “white supremacist,” as then-candidate Joe Biden labeled him in a tweet showing the teenager’s photograph.
8. He “flashed white power signs” with Proud Boys.
9. He wore surgical gloves “to cover his fingerprints.”

Right up there among the most ridiculous allegations Devine lists is her last, that the judge in the case, Judge Bruce Schroeder, "is a 'Trumpy' racist biased toward the defense." Here's what Devine says about this canard:

This slur is based on the fact he would not let the prosecution use the term “victim” — common practice when the jury has not ruled on a case.

He told a lame joke about Asian food for lunch being held up by the supply-chain crisis, and his phone’s ring tone sounds like a 1980s ditty played at Trump rallies. Ridiculous.

In fact, Schroeder is a Democrat, has run as a Democrat for the Wisconsin Senate and was first appointed by a Democratic governor.

Bias was also perceived in what the Chicago Tribune said was his “highly unusual” decision to allow Kyle to draw names randomly out of a container at the end of the trial to determine which 12 of the 18 jurors would decide his fate. [But that's] something this judge always does, he told the court.

Devine makes an interesting point in her conclusion:

On the second day of jury deliberations Wednesday, the judge railed against media distortions, although he seemed most aggrieved about attacks on his reputation, rather than Kyle’s. He threatened to stop trials from being televised, but that’s exactly the wrong solution.

Only because the public was able to hear the evidence for themselves did they become aware of the malevolent dishonesty of the media coverage, which has threatened a fair trial and ensured riots if Kyle is justly acquitted.

It's contemptible, actually, that so many supposed professionals in the media are apparently more interested in smearing people they don't like, even if they ruin the life of an 18 year-old kid, than in reporting the truth, but I guess we shouldn't be surprised. It's the same thing they did to high school student Nicholas Sandmann two years ago, the Duke lacrosse players before that and numerous others in between. One might almost think that there are a lot of people in our media who hate young, white, right-leaning males.

Penfield's Dualism

The debate over whether what we call "mind" is actually an immaterial substance that's not reducible or explicable in terms of matter (i.e. the brain) or whether the term "mind" is simply a term of convenience that's merely used to describe the function of the brain has very accomplished advocates on both sides.

Materialists or physicalists (those who believe that every phenomena in the universe has an ultimate explanation in some material substance or some physical law) hold that mind is either something produced by the brain or is just a function of the brain, much like digestion is a function of the stomach.

Dualists believe that the mind is a completely distinct substance that somehow interfaces with the material brain but is not reducible to, or explicable in terms of, brain function.

One neuroscientist/neurosurgeon in the mid-20th century who started out as a materialist and, as a result of his professional experience, was moved to become a committed dualist was a man named Wilder Penfield who was one of the preeminent scientists studying the brain.

Contemporary neurosurgeon Michael Egnor writes about him in an essay in which he describes two lines of evidence which led Penfield to abandon materialism: Penfield .... pioneered the surgical treatment of epilepsy using stimulation and recording from the surface of the brain in awake patients undergoing brain surgery. This was possible because the brain itself feels no pain, and the scalp can be anesthetized with Novocain-like drugs to render the surgery painless. This surgery is still being done today.

Penfield was especially interested in the relationship between the brain and the mind. He began his career as a materialist and he ended it as a passionate dualist. He based his dualism on two observations:

1. There are no intellectual seizures: Seizures are sporadic electrical discharges from the brain and they cause a variety of symptoms, from complete loss of consciousness to focal twitching of muscle groups, sensations on the skin, flashes of lights or noises, smells, and even intense memories or emotional states.

Penfield could record these electrical discharges from the surface of the brain. Penfield noted that there are no intellectual seizures. That is, there has never been a seizure in medical history that had specific intellectual content, or abstract thought. There are no mathematics seizures, no logic seizures, no philosophy seizures, and no Shakespeare seizures.

If the brain is the source of higher intellectual function, as is widely believed, why in medical history has there never been a seizure that evoked abstract thought? This fascinated Penfield, and he inferred quite reasonably that the reason there are no intellectual seizures is that abstract thought does not originate in the brain.

2. Free will cannot be simulated by stimulation of the brain: Part of Penfield’s research was to stimulate the motor areas of the brain, which caused patients’ limbs to move during surgery.

He was the first surgeon to map the motor areas of the brain in this fashion. In doing this, he noticed that patients always knew the difference between stimulated movements and movements that they freely caused themselves.

Penfield would ask patients to move their limbs freely whenever they chose, and he would (without telling them) stimulate their limbs to move. Patients always knew the difference between movements freely chosen and movements caused by the surgeon.

Penfield could never find a region of the brain that simulated free will. He concluded that free will is not in the brain — it is an immaterial power of the mind.

The question whether we have an immaterial mind (or soul) is not just an academic issue. If materialism is true, if we are purely material beings, then it becomes harder to justify a belief that there's anything about us that survives the death of our bodies. It also becomes harder to believe that we have free will, and thus moral responsibility and human dignity.

Ideas have consequences and the consequences of where we stand in the debate between dualism and materialism are profound.

The Rotting Fish

First Things editor R.R.Reno has a column (paywall) in the latest issue in which he outlines why so many Americans are very concerned about the future. He traces the trajectory of our decline in foreign, economic and cultural policy and puts the blame squarely on the elite ruling class.

Concerning the decline of our culture he says this:

In 1960, 8 percent of births were illegitimate .... Today, the rate is 40 percent. Liberalization of laws in the 1970s led to dramatic increases in divorce. Today, divorce is somewhat less common, but that’s only because fewer people are getting married in the first place.

Yet, as Charles Murray has documented [In his excellent book Coming Apart], the destructive trends in family life do not characterize the upper classes.

A neo-traditional ethic holds firm for people at the top, even as they promote the next stages of liberation, which will further disintegrate social norms.

Moral deregulation does most of its damage to middle-class and working-class Americans. If your mother has only a high school diploma and you were born in 2021, the odds are against your being raised in an intact home.

A similar class divide can be seen in chronic unemployment, lack of social involvement, and substance abuse. Our leadership class has worked overtime to liberalize attitudes, even to the point of enforcing a punitive political correctness.

The well-educated and well-off have the resources and resilience to navigate the new cultural landscape. The less fortunate are shipwrecked.

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 100,000 people died from drug overdoses in 2020. It is telling that our policy response to COVID-19 was to shut down the country and spend trillions of dollars to ease the damage.

Meanwhile, our policy response to 100,000 dead from drug overdose—an epidemic that has killed nearly a million people since 1999—has been to legalize marijuana.

At this juncture, a bipartisan consensus obtains in our ruling class.

The rich and powerful believe that we live in a degraded and broken country filled with dependent and dysfunctional people. It’s interesting to note that angry voters agree.

They just differ about whom to blame for the all too real and very deep problems facing our country. And I submit that ordinary people, not the well-credentialed people running things, have the more accurate political philosophy. They see that a country becomes de-industrialized, degraded, and dysfunctional because its ruling class has failed.

Put simply: A fish rots from the head down.

Strong words, but it's hard to argue with them especially if one has read Coming Apart.

It's the frustration of the middle and working classes that produced Trump's victory in 2016 and that frustration has surely increased given the sheer incompetence on display over the past ten months by the current administration.

Little wonder that Democratic analysts fear a disastrous mid-term election a year from now.

Darwinism and the Fossil Record

The latest video in the Science Uprising series tackles the question of whether the fossil record actually supports Darwinian evolution.

Darwinian evolution, or more properly, Neo-Darwinian evolution, posits that all living things evolved into their present form through a long, gradual and purposeless process of random genetic mutations, natural selection and genetic drift, a process that was completely unguided.

In other words, Neo-Darwinism is a materialistic and naturalistic explanation.

The following video, however, makes the point that there just wasn't enough time for this to have happened, at least not naturalistically. Nor does the fossil record, which is characterized by numerous sudden leaps, provide evidential support for any gradualistic theory of evolution.

So, if human beings and other species of living things did get here through an evolutionary process, that process was neither random nor unguided. And if that process was directed and guided then it must've been superintended by a Mind.

It's really hard to escape that conclusion, but watch this 9 1/2 minute video and decide for yourself:

Living with the Incoherence

Readers of Viewpoint are doubtless well-aware that I think the question of how we ground our moral beliefs is of paramount importance.

They're doubtless aware, too, that we live in an era in which some secular folk are extremely judgmental of the behavior of others, to the extent that they're willing to destroy the careers of those who deviate from what the censorious deem morally acceptable opinions or behavior.

One of the ironies of this is that the most judgmental people in our society are often secularists or non-theists yet these are the very folks who should be the most non-judgmental of all.

I say this not because I think that non-theists (or naturalists) are more noble than others but because a naturalistic worldview, which naturalists presumably embrace, offers them no basis for making any judgment at all about the moral rightness or wrongness of other people's behavior.

Here's why:

Humanity, generally speaking, shares a basic moral understanding (i.e. that loyalty is good, betrayal is bad; kindness is good, cruelty is bad; honesty is good, dishonesty is bad, etc.). This understanding seems to be inherent in human beings as though it were somehow inscribed on our DNA.

Granting that this is so, how do we explain the existence of this basic moral understanding?

There are, it seems, two possibilities. Either we've acquired this understanding through an impersonal, unguided, naturalistic process like Darwinian evolution, or we've acquired it through the intentional act of a creator (i.e. God).

There's no plausible third option. It seems that naturalism and theism exhaust all the possibilities.

Suppose then, that the answer is that we've evolved this moral understanding naturalistically. If so, then what makes acting against this understanding "wrong"? How can blind, purposeless, impersonal processes like gene mutation, the accidents of genetic drift, and natural selection impose an obligation on us today to live according to a moral understanding that evolved to suit us for life in the stone age?

Moreover, if evolution is the source of our moral sentiments then it's also the source of our propensity for selfishness, violence, and tribal hatreds. That being so, if a propensity for kindness and a propensity for cruelty have both evolved in human beings, why should we assume that it's right to be kind and wrong to be cruel?

If we insist on making that assumption then we must be comparing kindness and cruelty to some higher standard that transcends our evolutionary history, but naturalism admits of no such higher standard.

On the other hand, if that moral understanding - call it conscience - is instilled in us by a perfectly good, all-knowing creator of the universe who both loves us and has the authority to insist that we act in accord with that moral understanding, and if that creator also possesses the power to hold us accountable for how we live, then we have a good reason for thinking that we have an objective duty to live according to what our conscience tells us is good and right.

On naturalism we can certainly intuit that we should be kind rather than cruel, selfless rather than selfish, but we have no obligation to follow those intuitions. Human nature being what it is we're often pulled and tugged in a direction opposite to what we think we should go, and in a naturalistic universe there's no compelling reason why we should resist those tugs. It's not morally wrong to yield to them.

In sum, if naturalism is true then ethics is just a bunch of socially fashionable and arbitrary conventions which have no real moral binding force.

If theism is true, though, there can be genuine moral right and wrong and genuinely objective moral obligations.

Anyone who believes that we have a moral obligation to do justice and to show compassion to the poor and oppressed should, if they're consistent, be a theist.

If they're a non-theist and nevertheless maintain that there are objective moral obligations they're irrationally importing those beliefs from an alien worldview (theism). Their own worldview offers no basis for them.

It's one of the more remarkable features of our times that so many secular people who pride themselves on their intellectual perspicacity either don't see this or don't mind living with the incoherence.

How to Wreck an Economy

Prior to the pandemic Americans were enjoying one of the best economic environments in our history. Then the plague hit and knocked everything cattywampus. Eventually, we started to climb out of the pandemic and the economy began to regain its footing. Then came the election of 2020 and economic progress came to a screeching halt.

Now it looks like we're headed for one of the worst economic periods in our history.

Our supply chain appears broken, store shelves are barren, employers can't find workers, and worst of all, inflation, all but negligible for the last decade, is skyrocketing, negating whatever wage gains workers have made over the last several years.

The Biden administration seems helpless to do anything to meliorate the situation and oddly determined to make the problem by worse by hamstringing the energy industry.

Tristan Justice at the Federalist comments:

From day one President Biden has done everything in his power to suppress home oil and gas production leading to the price shocks Americans are coping with today.

Biden took an axe to the Keystone XL Pipeline, put pressure on Wall Street to cease investment on new projects, banned drilling in the Arctic, and suspended new oil and gas leases on federal land.

At the same time, Biden gave the green light to a new Russian pipeline into Germany, repeatedly begged OPEC to raise output, and demanded American oil producers lower costs after the administration’s cascade of expensive regulation. It’s not that Biden has no plan to bring down power prices, it’s that Biden is implementing a plan to keep them going higher.

The administration admitted this week another pipeline supplying more than half of Michigan’s propane needs is on the chopping block, even as propane users face the steepest spike in heating prices this winter.

The United States was,just a year ago, a net exporter of energy. Now we're pleading with the Saudis to increase oil production.

National Review's Jim Geraghty asks how "a country that became a net-energy exporter in 2019 and 2020 and that had cut its dependence on foreign crude oil by more than 50 percent from 2016 to 2020, is reduced to pleading with OPEC to increase production."

A lot of Americans are also wondering "why an administration that so desperately wants other countries to produce more oil seems so implacably hostile to the U.S. producing more oil."

Geraghty elaborates:

More than a few observers have pointed out the irony that a president who campaigned on pledges that “We are going to get rid of fossil fuels,” and “We’re going to phase out fossil fuels” is now calling on Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, and the rest of OPEC to increase oil production.

And unsurprisingly, OPEC likes high prices and is in no rush to bring them down, as the Wall Street Journal reported. In fact, they think prices might go significantly higher by next summer:

Foreign producers are also benefiting from rising prices and fearful of oversupplying the market, giving them little incentive to cooperate.

“We must keep the price. Iraq needs the money . . . for its stability,” Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein said in an interview last week. He predicted oil might go as high as $120 a barrel by next summer, up from about $80 currently.

It’s not just OPEC; Wall Street analysts such as those at Bank of America think gas prices will be 45 percent higher than now by June 2022. That would calculate out to a nationwide average price of about $4.94 per gallon.

$5.00 a gallon gasoline would be catastrophic for many Americans, especially those living on limited incomes. Not only would it affect personal transportation, but since everything we buy, including food, is brought by truck, and since trucks use gas, the price of everything is going to continue to rise.

Moreover,

... people don’t just use crude oil for their cars; home heating oil is another significant use. The EIA projects that “The 4 percent of U.S. households that heat primarily with heating oil will spend 43 percent more — 59 percent more in a colder winter and 30 percent more in a warmer winter.”

But don’t think you’re off the hook if your home uses natural gas or propane:

“We expect that the nearly half of U.S. households that heat primarily with natural gas will spend 30 percent more than they spent last winter on average — 50 percent more if the winter is 10 percent colder-than-average and 22 percent more if the winter is 10 percent warmer-than-average.”

The only homes not getting walloped by price hikes will be those using electricity for heat, but the EIA projects that even those homes will see a 4 to 15 percent price increase.

This is all a consequence of the president's wish to prove his green energy bona fides and appease the progressive wing of his party. He may succeed in getting a pat on the back from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, at least for a time, but he'll do so by devastating the financial well-being of millions of Americans.

Mr. Biden received the votes of more Americans than any candidate in American history, but I'm sure that very few of them thought they were voting to make the U.S. more like Venezuela.

Advice for Millennials and Gen Zers

In a column in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) Mary Eberstadt claims that Millennials and Generation Zers have been robbed. They've been bamboozled by our progressive elites into believing that their country is "an irredeemable cesspool of racism and bigotry."

Consequently, only a third of Millenials and Gen Zers will acknowledge that they're "extremely proud" of their country. She invites these Americans to ask themselves why.

Most of us wouldn’t trash-talk our families. Most of us wouldn’t trash-talk our neighborhoods. Think about that the next time someone trash-talks your national home and neighborhood, your country.

One such figure, impresario of the New York Times’s “1619 Project,” says she has never regarded herself as “particularly patriotic.”

Another, whose sulfurous racialism permeates elite education, says that he has never felt free in the U.S., even as his every grievance is celebrated and subsidized. If they have such a low opinion of America, what makes you think they care about Americans—including you?

This is particularly ironic given that the United States is by almost any measure not only the greatest country in the history of civilization, but it's the greatest country in history in which to be a minority. There's never been any other place in the world where minorities have more opportunity to flourish than they do here.

It's why tens of thousands of Central Americans, Haitians and others from around the globe risk their lives in an arduous trek to get here.

Eberstadt continues, arguing that today's younger Americans have also been robbed of two great sourcees of immaterial wealth, "the consolations and joys of family life" and the rich benefits that accompany religious belief:

Generations of thinkers have disparaged the family as the enemy of utopian schemes. In their depictions, home and hearth amount to a slaughterhouse of dreams and aspirations, especially for women. To the contrary: Unprecedented rates of abortion, fatherlessness and divorce, far from liberating you, have subtracted actual and potential loved ones from your lives. No wonder surveys show that young people are the loneliest Americans....

...[Moreover, religious belief has inspired] the greatest art and science, architecture and music and human creation at large that our species has ever devised. Permanent membership in “none of the above” secularism risks relinquishing your own cultural inheritance: Western civilization.

"This brings us," she declares, "to the political choice before you. Today’s neo-Marxism and identity politics seek to co-opt your youthful energies into a lifetime of performative rancor. Is that what you want?"

Good question. To be permanently angry, to be permanently focused on racial, sexual or LGBTQ identity is to dissipate one's human potential by expending it on relative trifles. It's to spend one's life judging books by their dust jackets.

Eberstadt concludes with this:

Young people are designed by nature to love and to be loved with energy and magnanimity.

Today’s misanthropes tell you the opposite: that humanity is a toxin on the planet, unworthy of reproduction. This counsel couldn’t be more wrong—especially for you. If loneliness is the problem, putting more people in your lives with marriage and children is the self-evident solution.

The left tells you that your fellow citizens are racists, fascists, sexists, bigots and haters. This relentless negativity obliterates youthful hopes. It shrivels the youthful imagination. Worst of all, it shrinks your hearts.

When young people have it constantly drilled into them that their fellow Americans are the odious individuals they're often portrayed as, it makes despising them seem appropriate. So far from treating them with dignity, respect and kindness it becomes much easier to treat them with self-righteous contempt and hatred. Sadly, though, people who choose to live this way will find that Eberstadt is right.

A life spent judging others on the basis of what one perceives to be their politically incorrect sins, a life lived in a semi-permanent state of anger, bitterness, hostility and contempt, is a life in which happiness will prove very elusive.

To Vaxx or Not to Vaxx

Now that vaccines have been approved for children many parents are faced with a difficult decision: Should they get their child vaccinated?

Two eminent physicians, Nicole Saphier and Marty Makary, offer parents some helpful information in a Wall Street Journal (subscription required) article.

Dr. Saphier is an assistant professor at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Weill Cornell Medical College. Dr. Makary is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and editor-in-chief of MedPage Today. They begin with a few interesting facts:

If you’re agonizing about whether to have your young child vaccinated against Covid-19, be reassured: The risk is extremely low either way. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 42% of U.S. children 5 to 11 had Covid by June 2021, before the Delta wave—a prevalence that is likely greater than 50% today.

Of 28 million children in that age range, 94 have died of Covid since the pandemic began (including deaths before newer treatments), and 562 have been hospitalized with Covid infections.

Five hundred and sixty two hospitalizations and 94 deaths are tragic, but out of a population of 28 million it's statistically miniscule. The risk is so low that it causes one to wonder why, if we're "following the science," children in schools across the country are required to wear masks all day and why the Biden administration hasn't ruled out a mandate that children be vaccinated before they can come to school.

The authors of this op-ed aren't opposed to vaccinating children. In fact, they state that "If your child has a medical risk factor for Covid illness (including obesity), or lives with someone who does, the vaccine’s benefit outweighs the risk." What they argue is that there's no scientific basis for mandating vaccination of children.

Nor is there need to vaccinate the 50% of children who've already had Covid:

If a child already had Covid, there’s no scientific basis for vaccination. Deep within the 80-page Pfizer report is this crucial line: “No cases of COVID-19 were observed in either the vaccine group or the placebo group in participants with evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection.”

That’s consistent with the largest population-based study on the topic, which found that natural immunity was 27 times as effective as vaccinated immunity in preventing symptomatic Covid. Natural immunity is likely even more robust in children, given their stronger immune systems. An indiscriminate Covid vaccine mandate may result in unintended harm among children with natural immunity.

In any case, unless children have a medical risk factor there seems to be little reason for elementary school children to be subjected to some of the measures that adults are imposing upon them.

Speaking of the vaccine, there's a good short video going viral (no pun intended) on twitter that shows how they work. You can watch it here.

White Mythologies

Katherine Timpf wrote a brief piece for NRO a couple of years ago that was so good it's hard to decide what to excerpt and what to leave out.

She described a phenomenon which at the time was incubating in the spawning grounds of ludicrous ideas, i.e. university campuses, which holds that “objectivity” and “meritocracy” are examples of “white mythologies” and have no real existence. They're merely “social constructs.”

This is presumably the sort of thing one must believe nowadays if one is to be a progressive in good standing, but it really is quite silly.

Timpf describes a course that was to be offered at several colleges the following year (2019) in which students will be taught about "white mythologies" which are defined as "long-standing, often implicit views about the place of White, male, Euro-American subjects as the norm against which the peoples of the world are to be understood and judged.”

The class is titled “White Mythologies: Objectivity, Meritocracy, and Other Social Constructions."

She tells us more:

Students [in the course] will explore how systematic logics that position ‘the West’ and ‘whiteness’ as the ideal manifest through such social constructions as objectivity, meritocracy, and race, and as justifications for colonial interventions, slavery, and the subordination of women.

It's hard to take this seriously. Why is the word logic in the above quote cast in the plural? Are "logics" like geometries which can be different depending on whether the surface is a plane or a sphere?

Is there a logic in which the principle of non-contradiction doesn't hold? Is there a logic in which it's not fallacious to beg the question or deny the antecedent of a hypothetical syllogism?

Are the creators of this course suggesting that logical thinking is a talent that only white males can master? If so, isn't that itself a racist assumption?

Timpf continues:

As crazy as this story may sound, this is far from the first time that we’ve seen this kind of thinking on a college campus. In April of 2017, a group of students at Pomona College wrote a letter to the school’s outgoing president claiming that “the idea that there is a single truth . . . is a myth and white supremacy.”

Also last year, a professor at Pennsylvania State University–Brandywine argued that “meritocracy” is a “whiteness ideology.” This year, two University of Denver professors claimed that scientific objectivity works to “spread whiteness ideology.”

This sounds very much like an unintentional rationalization for the dominance of whites (and Asians?) in the sciences. It also sounds ludicrous. Is it part of "whiteness ideology" to insist that earth's gravity objectively accelerates all falling objects at 9.8 m/s2 regardless of whether one believes that it does, or likes the fact, or thinks it's unjust, or believes that there could be lots of differing opinions on the matter?

It's an objective fact, i.e. a truth, that gravity accelerates all objects at the same rate (neglecting factors like air resistance, location on the earth, etc.), and you don't have to be white in order to understand this.

Timpf again:

The idea that objectivity is somehow a myth, or that it has anything even remotely to do with “whiteness,” is so absolutely stupid that I feel like I don’t even have to spend time explaining why. Objectivity isn’t a myth.

For example: In case you didn’t know, water is objectively wet, and that has nothing to do with “whiteness,” or with anything else. Objective truth absolutely does exist — and something that is an objective truth isn’t just dissimilar to a myth, it’s the exact opposite of a myth.

That’s not even just my opinion; that’s an absolute fact based on what words mean.

Things that are objectively true are not made more or less true by factors such as race or sex or class or anything else — they just are; the fact that some things are objectively true is not made more or less a fact by factors such as race or class or sex or anything else — it just is.

The next time you're told by a progressive that the left is the party of science, that progressives live in the world of fact-based reality, ask your interlocutor whether what he/she just told you is objectively true.

People who deny that there is objective truth and argue that, in fact, objective truth is only a "whiteness mythology," are surely not representing the "party of science." They're representing the party of delusion.

Why Not Defend It?

Last month I did a post on Critical Race Theory, a "theory" which has come to be a flash point in schools around the country. CRT, which was originally a purely academic exercise, has in the popular mind become an umbrella term for a number of identity politics offshoots.

Defenders in the media deny that CRT is being taught in schools, which causes one to wonder how that's something these media folks could possibly know, but nevertheless the concern is not whether a topic labeled CRT appears in school curricula but whether the ideas that have spun off from CRT are being taught, officially or unofficially, in the classroom.

The ideas found in books written by people like Robin D'Angelo and Ibram X Kendi include the view that America is racist and oppressive to the core, that the idea of a "color blind" society must be rejected, that objective truth, standpoint neutrality, logical reasoning and fairness are all "white values" and as such are suspect.

They also include the belief that any disparity between whites, Asians and blacks is ipso facto proof of racism, that whites are by nature racist and that ideals such as freedom of speech and blind justice are means by which "white supremacists" keep minorities oppressed.

Further, anyone who benefits from the "structural racism" that pervades the institutions of society is a racist, even if inadvertently, and if you're not actively seeking to topple these racist structures and institutions, you're also a racist.

Folks like D'Angelo and Kendi argue that anyone who benefits from the norms, values and structures of society, regardless of the beneficiary's skin color. If you're black, and you integrate into the white status quo, then you're actually "white" regardless of how much melanin your body produces.

For more read the post at the link and watch the video, but the purpose of this post isn't to reiterate that earlier one, but rather to highlight a question posed by John Daniel Davidson at The Federalist.

Davidson asks, if progressives really believe all this, why are they denying that it's being taught when the evidence seems overwhelming that it is? Why are they acting as if they're embarrassed by these ideas and don't want people to know that they're being promoted in schools? If they really believe that these ideas have not infiltrated our schools why don't they say something like, "This stuff isn't being taught, but it certainly should be."

Instead, they respond to parents who object to what's being served up to their children by either denying that schools are teaching this stuff or insulting parents and others by suggesting that they're racists for objecting to having their children learn about slavery.

Here's Davidson:

By now, most Americans know that critical race theory is real and that it’s being taught widely in public schools. This isn’t a semantics debate. Students are being taught racial hierarchies, along with the idea that the United States was founded on white supremacy, and that the U.S. Constitution, our legal system, and American ideals like freedom and equality all work to perpetuate and sustain systemic racism.

There are mountains of evidence of this. The work of Christopher Rufo and others has exposed critical race theory’s many manifestations, not just in public schools but inside major corporations and even the U.S. military. Yet the left has refused to debate critical race theory on the merits.

Instead, the corporate press, Hollywood, and woke Twitter bluechecks keep insisting that it doesn’t even exist, it’s just a fantasy conjured up by racist Trumpers trying to scare white voters into electing Republicans.

Just look at the left’s response to the historic Republican sweep of Virginia on Tuesday. Glenn Younkin’s campaign, their theory goes, falsely claimed that critical race theory was being taught in Virginia public schools. Racist white Virginians, terrified at the idea their kids would have to learn the truth about slavery and racism in America, elected Youngkin, who is also a racist.

(That these same voters also made history by electing Winsome Sears, a black woman, as lieutenant governor, and Jason Miyares, an Hispanic man, as attorney general, is conveniently ignored in this narrative.)

Their key talking point is that critical race theory isn’t even taught in Virginia schools. Cable news talking heads like MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace incessantly dropped it into her election-night commentary, saying critical race theory, “which isn’t real,” swung the suburbs 15 points to the “Trump insurrection-endorsed Republican.”

Julian Castro called it a “fantasy world.” Larry Sabato called it a “phony issue.” Joy Reid called it a “coded boogeyman.”

The claim that CRT isn't being taught is disingenuous. Just because the exact words "Critical Race Theory" don't appear in a syllabus it doesn't follow that the ideas aren't being purveyed by classroom teachers. Too many students have reported that their teachers are indeed attempting to inculcate these ideas to think that it's a "phony issue."

So why the denials? Do these people not want the public to know what's being taught because they realize that most Americans would find the ideas lumped under the rubric of CRT to be pernicious, corrosive and divisive? Davidson thinks so:

So here’s my question: why doesn’t the left just debate critical race theory on the merits? People like Joy Reid and Wajahat Ali clearly agree with its central tenets. They obviously think America was founded on white supremacy, and that racism pervades our civic life and public institutions.

Why not just come out and say, “You know what? Critical race theory should be taught in public schools, because it’s the best way to expose kids to the truth about America.”

Why pretend something that you fervently agree with doesn’t exist? Why play shell games about how to define critical race theory? Why not just take the broadest definition that all sides can agree to and go from there? Why not make the case for why we should base school curricula on it, why corporations should train their workforces in it, why it should be the legal basis for racial reparations and the mass redistribution of wealth?

If people are confused about what critical race theory is, why not explain what it really is? Why argue that its attendant ideas and policy prescriptions are correct and desirable, and make the case for why they will make America a better, more peaceful, and just society?

These are all good questions. Here's Davidson's answer:

Leftists won’t do that because they know that most Americans find the ideas at the heart of critical race theory repulsive, and rightly so.

This is also why the left never openly debates the merits of, say, mass illegal immigration, which they obviously support. Instead, they pretend to oppose it, or argue that the border isn’t really in crisis. Same with the Black Lives Matter riots last summer, the effects of pandemic lockdowns, the dangers of transgender ideology and bathroom policies.

Whatever the issue, they pretend the thing they support isn’t even real, then call their opponents racists and bigots for insisting that it is.

That tactic didn't work very well for them in Virginia last week. Perhaps they'll abandon it before next November, but if not it's not likely to work for them then either.

Moral Education

High school teacher Paul Barnwell had an article in The Atlantic a couple of years ago in which he expressed deep concern for the lack of moral education in today's public schools.

He noted that, among other things, the emphasis on preparing students for standardized tests has squeezed out opportunities for the addition of ethical instruction to the curriculum, and that the results are reflected in dispiriting attitudes among students toward matters like cheating, bullying, stereotyping, etc.

He wrote:

As my students seemed to crave more meaningful discussions and instruction relating to character, morality, and ethics, it struck me how invisible these issues have become in many schools.

By omission, are U.S. schools teaching their students that character, morality, and ethics aren’t important in becoming productive, successful citizens?

Barnwell goes on to lament that schools are almost devoid of any formal moral instruction, a consequence, no doubt, of the fear of treading into the domain of religion.

Indeed, religion in public schools is taboo, as is any topic that merely hints at having theistic implications. But how can one teach ethics unless one is free to answer the question that inevitably arises in the minds of at least some of the more perceptive students: Why?

For example, a teacher can present to her students the utilitarian concept of maximizing human flourishing, but what does she say when the student asks why he should care about the flourishing of anyone but himself, or in what sense would it be wrong for someone to impede the flourishing of another, or how does his cheating on a test impede another person's flourishing anyway, or what makes humans special that we should maximize human flourishing and not the flourishing of all living things?

As soon as those questions are raised, the discussion is effectively at an end because the only answer that avoids an eventual appeal to one's emotions and feelings - which itself leads to the conclusion that everybody should just do whatever feels right to them - is that there must be a transcendent moral authority whose very nature serves as an objective moral standard for right and wrong and which has the character, power and authority to hold us accountable for breaching that standard.

But that answer, the only answer which could possibly have purchase in a teenager's mind, is the very answer that our courts have forbidden be presented to our young people.

Yet, if there is no such authority then, as the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky asserts several times in his marvelous novel The Brothers Karamazov, everything is permitted. If there is no such authority then there's no ultimate accountability for our behavior, the word "wrong" has no objective meaning, and the only ethical principle is, practically speaking, do whatever you can get away with.

Even if the existence of such an authority is offered to students they still may not know what's right to do, they still might not do what is right, but at least they have an answer to the ultimate question of whether there actually is an objective right and a wrong.

By banishing not only explicitly religious ideas but also any ideas which have religious implications from our public schools we've essentially neutered those schools in terms of what they can do to formally instill in students a sense of virtue and moral character. Then we wring our hands when we read about cyber bullying, violence, cheating, drug use and sexual promiscuity among the young.

Why are we dismayed? What did we expect?

Our Modern Moral Crisis

In early 1968, a year of enormous social convulsion in the U.S. and Europe, philosopher William “Will” Herberg (1901-1977), published an essay entitled “What Is the Moral Crisis of Our Time?”

The essay has become a classic and James Toner offers some reflections on it here. He writes:

As a college senior reading that essay, I was struck by its analytical and prophetic power.

Herberg’s thesis was as perceptive as it was succinct: “the moral crisis of our time consists primarily not in the widespread violation of accepted moral standards . . . but in the repudiation of those very moral standards themselves.”

The moral code of the Greeks, based upon reason, and of the Hebrews, based upon Revelation, had atrophied, he wrote, to the point of dissolution. We were “rapidly losing all sense of transcendence.” We were adrift, by choice, in a sea of disorder with no “navigational” standards to consult....

People have always flouted moral standards, but rarely in the history of Western civilization have we come to the place where we reject the very idea of morality altogether, yet that's where large segments of our culture seem headed in these postmodern times.

Toner continues:

[Herberg] pointed to Jean-Paul Sartre’s advice to a young man living in Nazi-occupied France as an example of the moral bewilderment increasingly held as “authentic” in the 1960s.

The man had asked Sartre if he should fight the Nazis in the Resistance movement or cooperate with them, obtaining a sinecure in the Vichy Regime. The choice hardly mattered, said Sartre, as long as the decision was authentic and inward. If there are no objective standards to govern moral choice, then what is chosen does not matter.

The only concern is whether one chooses “authentically.”

Thus Herberg concluded: “The moral crisis of our time is, at bottom, a metaphysical and religious crisis.”

Herberg prophesied rabid subjectivism, all-pervasive antinomianism, and a soul-searing secularism, what Pope Benedict was much later to call the “dictatorship of relativism.”

We now may be so mired in narcissistic norms that we cannot even understand Herberg’s jeremiad: “No human ethic is possible that is not itself grounded in a higher law and a higher reality beyond human manipulation or control.”

The reason of the Greeks and the Revelation of the Hebrews are now replaced by modernist profane worship of man by man: thus, tyranny beckons and awaits.

The problem that Herberg puts his finger on can be expressed in the following chain of hypothetical propositions:

If there is no God (No transcendent moral authority with the power to hold men ultimately accountable) then there can be no objective moral duties.

If there are no objective moral duties then the only duties we can have are subjective duties, i.e. duties that depend ultimately on our own feelings, biases, prejudices and predilections.

A subjective duty is self-imposed, but if it's self-imposed then it can be self-removed.

Thus, if our only moral duties are subjective then there are no moral duties at all since we cannot have a genuine duty if we can absolve ourselves of that duty whenever it suits us.

In other words, unless there's a transcendent moral law-giver which (or who) can hold us responsible for our choices in life then there's no such thing as a moral obligation.

As Tolstoy put it:

The attempts to found a morality apart from religion are like the attempts of children who, wishing to transplant a flower that pleases them, pluck it from the roots that seem to them unpleasing and superfluous, and stick it rootless into the ground. Without religion there can be no real, sincere morality, just as without roots there can be no real flower.

Part of the price of living in the present secular age is the loss of the ability to discern, evaluate and even talk about good and evil, right and wrong. This is what Herberg saw so clearly coming to fruition in the sixties. It's what Friedrich Nietzsche prophesied in the 19th century in books like Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals.

It's what atheist philosopher Jürgen Habermas meant when he wrote the following:

Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.

Toner concludes with this:

Herberg quotes cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897): “When men lose their sense of established standards, they inevitably fall victim to the urge for pleasure or power."

You can read a PDF of Herberg's original essay here, but unfortunately the quality of the PDF isn't good.

Why the Dems Took a Beating

A lot of commentary about the drubbing the Democrats took in last Tuesday's elections has focused on the electorate's rejection of Democrat priorities and a concern that the issues of most concern to the average voter aren't of particular interest to Democrats.

Indeed, many voters seem to think that the Democrats are actually exacerbating the problems average folks are facing.

For instance, the Democrats' priorities seem to be:

• Climate change
• Universal preschool
• LGBTQ rights
• Weakening law enforcement
• Passing a massive spending bill that the country can't afford
• Forcing everyone to get vaccinated
• Limiting individual freedoms
• Racial hypochondria/Identity politics

Whereas the average voter is probably much more concerned with:

• What their children are being taught in school
• The price of gas and food
• Empty store shelves and understaffed stores and restaurants
• The chaos on our southern border
• Crime in the streets
• Protecting freedom of speech, religion and the right to bear arms

As long as the Democrats continue to obsess over issues that seem irrelevant or threatening to most Americans they can probably expect the electorate in 2022 to treat them just as rudely as they were treated last Tuesday.

The Left Eats Its Own

When the late Arizona senator John McCain bucked his party he was called a "maverick" and feted by the progressive media, but when one of Arizona's current senators, Kyrsten Sinema, bucks her party she's called every name in the left's very thick thesaurus of insults.

Kimberley Strassel at the Wall Street Journal (paywall) provides the details:

Like Saturn, the revolution devours its children. And like clockwork, the progressive mob has set on Kyrsten Sinema. Next time the left lectures on unity, women’s rights or Joe Biden’s decency, lock your door.

The Arizona senator continues to infuriate her fellow Democrats, who are frenzied to impose their $3.5 trillion social revolution. Ms. Sinema reportedly has issues with the cost of the package as well as its tax proposals and some programs.

She’s conducted dozens of meetings with the White House and key players, though has also made clear she won’t be jammed and won’t negotiate with the public. Her refusal to bow to the left’s price tag and timeline has incensed colleagues and activists alike.

So the party member has now officially been declared an enemy of the party cause—fair game for the tactics the left long ago honed for use against the right.

What are some of those tactics?

"We’re committed to birddogging” Ms. Sinema, vowed Our Revolution Executive Director Joseph Geevarghese to Politico this week. “We’re going to make her life unpleasant or uncomfortable” until she follows orders.

The group—which spun out of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign—gathered shock troops this week outside Ms. Sinema’s Phoenix and Tucson offices to make a start on that threat. Only the left gets away with warnings like this. Suburban parents who grump at school boards are labeled (by the same progressives) “domestic terrorists.”

The Arizona Working Families Party and the Sunrise Movement arrayed Monday at the Boston Marathon with plans to accost the senator as she ran (an injury prevented her from taking part). An activist confronted her on a flight to Washington. Progressives stalked her after she landed, hounding her for responses.

This was after activists at Arizona State University chased her into a bathroom and videotaped her there. Liberal groups are running ads in Arizona trashing her. Democratic operatives last month launched the Primary Sinema PAC (using “primary” as a verb).

The press—which spent several years worrying that MAGA hats were triggering — has licensed and encouraged the mob. “What’s Wrong With Kyrsten Sinema?” demanded the New York Times. The Nation called her the “Senate’s newest super villain,” while the New Republic branded her a “traitor.” Jezebel, the “feminist” blog, tweeted: “Absolutely Bully Kyrsten Sinema Outside Of Her Bathroom Stall.”

"Until she follows orders"!? Aren't United States senators supposed to do what they genuinely believe to be best for the country? Wasn't McCain a hero to the left for refusing to "follow orders"? (Well, he was a hero until he ran against Barack Obama in 2008.)

One might expect that Sinema's female colleagues would express outrage at the treatment being meted out to her by the very folks who profess to champion independent women and who in other cases condemn the harassment of women.

Yet the party’s women have been largely silent—never mind the outrage if any group dared similar moves against, say, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (AOC once even objected to Nancy Pelosi’s mild, private rebuke of the Squad, saying it amounted to “singling out” “women of color,” which could inspire “death threats.”)

And about the only male Democratic senator willing to say anything about Ms. Sinema was Mr. Sanders—who accused her of “sabotage.” Wisconsin Democratic Rep. Mark Pocan sneered that he was waiting for Ms. Sinema to show the party “something other than a designer purse.”

If her female colleagues won't defend her one might think President Biden, who was elected largely because many voters thought he'd bring decency to the Oval Office, would tell his party to back off. But in his only public comment on the matter, Mr. Biden delivered himself of a lapidary bit of callousness, shrugging that the treatment of Sinema is just "part of the process."

None of this behavior is a surprise to the right. The left more than a decade ago began embracing intimidation as a basic political tool.

Think of the Internal Revenue Service targeting conservative nonprofits, or Barack Obama browbeating the Supreme Court, or activist boycotts of companies that supported Republicans. By giving license to this behavior, senior Democrats allowed it to escalate dramatically in the Trump years.

Remember Rep. Maxine Waters cheering when White House press secretary Sarah Sanders was run out of a restaurant and telling followers to do the same to others, to “create a crowd” and “tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

Ms. Strassel concludes with this:

If leaders think these kinds of campaigns will stop at the doors of “centrists” like Ms. Sinema or Sen. Joe Manchin, they need to crack the history books. An unleashed progressive left will use the same tactics against anyone unwilling to bend to its rule—right, center, left, far left. Revolutions eat their own. And this revolution is now headed toward Democrats themselves.

She's right. Left wing revolutions going back to the French Revolution in 1789 were usually led by idealists, but once the revolution succeeded the idealists were deemed no longer useful to the ruthless tyrants in the movement. The idealists were soon shunted aside or, more often, sent to the guillotine, the firing squad or the gulag.

The left always seems to wind up eating its own.

Odd, Dumb or Both

Perhaps you've heard that Republican businessman Glenn Youngkin was elected governor of Virginia on Tuesday in a huge upset victory over Democrat Terry McAuliffe. Perhaps you've also heard, if you listen to NBC, MSNBC or CNN that Youngkin's victory was handed him by "white supremacists" and other racial bigots in Virginia.

Youngkin ran on a number of issues. McAuliffe ran on one, the assertion that Youngkin was just a nicer version of Donald Trump.

One of the issues that Youngkin ran on was his determination to get Virginia public schools to stop teaching racially divisive content, particularly that all whites are ineradicably tainted by racism and are racial oppressors. This is what McAuliffe and the media have seized upon to justify their allegations that Youngkin was elected by a bunch of white supremacists.

Apparently, if one objects to having one's children taught that they're inherently evil by virtue of being white one is ipso facto a white supremacist.

The claim is odd, if not plain dumb, for several reasons, but it's become the standard response from progressives who are bereft of ideas and unable to mount an intelligent analysis of an election. Indeed, whenever the left encounters opposition to their ideas they start promiscuously tossing about the "R-word" as if they had an uncontrollable tic.

Here are a few examples from yesterday of this standard reaction:

Former ESPN sports reporter Jemele Hill tweeted, that "This country simply loves white supremacy.”

Joy Reid on MSNBC declared that white parents concerns about education are a kind of code for white parents who don’t like the idea of their children being taught about race. "You have to be willing," she opined, "to vocalize that these Republicans are dangerous.”

MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace, in the words of Sanford Horn at The Federalist, "piled on with a lie that has been running rampant in progressive circles, that 'critical race theory, which isn’t real, turned the suburbs 15 points.' ”

"Of course, critical race theory is real," Horn continues, "and Virginia schools have boasted about teaching it. But not for long, should Youngkin fulfill his promise of banning the racist ideology designed to conquer and divide school children into indelibly permanent classes of victim and victimizer."

Perhaps the main reason for my assertion that accusing the Virginia electorate of racism is odd if not plain dumb is this: There were three major offices at play in the Virginia election - governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general. They were all won by Republicans. Youngkin, who is white, won the governorship. The lieutenant governor's race was won by a former Marine, a woman named Winsome Spears.

Here's Spears' picture from Tuesday evening's victory celebration:

Spears with her husband, who is also a Marine, and two adult daughters.

The attorney general's race was won by Jason Miyares who is Hispanic. Ms Spears, who received over 1.66 million votes from all those Virginian white supremacists, will become Virginia's first African American lieutenant governor, and Miyares will be the state's first Hispanic attorney general.

Here's another reason the condemnation of those who elected Youngkin and Sears is odd. The outgoing governor, Democrat Ralph Northam and his attorney general Mark Herring both appeared in blackface when they were young men.

When the news came to light in 2019 the left actually excused them, but now they're telling us that a vote for a white businessman, a black woman and a Hispanic politican is somehow indicative of a strain of evil racial bigotry running through the body politic.

Like I said, the accusation that Virginia citizens who voted Republican were largely racists is either odd or dumb, but actually it's hard not to think it's both.