Petition to Cut Harrison Butker

A gentleman by the name of Willard Harris has started a petition calling upon the Kansas City Chiefs to dismiss their place-kicker, Harrison Butker, from the team for remarks he made during a commencement speech at Benedictine College. In his address Butker praised traditional family arrangements which has apparently outraged the left. You can read the speech for yourself here.

Harris begins his petition with this:

The harmful remarks made by Harrison Butker, kicker of the Kansas City Chiefs, during his commencement address at Benedictine College were unacceptable. His comments were sexist, homophobic, anti-trans, anti-abortion and racist. These dehumanizing remarks against LGBTQ+ individuals, attacks on abortion rights and racial discrimination perpetuate division and undermine human rights.

These three sentences raise a lot of questions. How was what Butker said "harmful"? Did it hurt anyone physically or did it just make someone feel bad? Moreover, what is it exactly that Butker said that was racist? And what's wrong with being against killing babies? How did he dehumanize anyone?

And while we're at it, what does Harris base "human rights" on? Where does he think such rights come from? If they're just arbitrary conventions then what does it matter if they're undermined?

He goes on:

These comments reinforce harmful stereotypes that threaten social progress. They create a toxic environment that hinders our collective efforts towards equality, diversity and inclusion in society. It is unacceptable for such a public figure to use their platform to foster harm rather than unity.

It's hard to see how commending Catholic doctrine to the graduates of a Catholic college is creating "a toxic environment." If someone outside the campus finds Butker's opinions offensive, why, they can just not read his speech. Harris is apparently all in favor of diversity, equality and inclusion except for those whose opinions differ from his. That kind of diversity and inclusion is evidently unacceptable for Harris, and people who hold those opinions should not be granted equal standing in the society that Harris would have us live in.

It's important to note that these types of discriminatory attitudes contribute significantly towards societal issues such as hate crimes which have been on the rise in recent years (source: FBI Hate Crime Statistics). Furthermore, they can lead to increased mental health issues among targeted communities (source: American Psychological Association).

In other words, advocating traditional marriage and family contributes to hate crimes and mental health problems. How, exactly? What's the connection? Harris doesn't tell us. He just assumes that everyone knows that there is one.

We demand accountability from our sports figures who should be role models promoting respect for all people regardless of their race, gender identity or sexual orientation. We call upon the Kansas City Chiefs management to dismiss Harrison Butker immediately for his inappropriate conduct.

It's significant, I think, that Harris doesn't include a single excerpt from the speech in his petition so that potential signers could see what was disrespectful and inappropriate. I wonder if Harris even read the speech himself.

Please sign this petition if you stand with us against discrimination and believe in fostering an inclusive society where everyone is treated with dignity and respect.

Everyone is to be treated with dignity and respect, except, that is, those who hold viewpoints which conflict with those of Mr. Harris. Harris must have adopted a peculiar definition of "inclusive society" if his society excludes the opinions of probably the majority of Americans as well as excluding those Americans who hold them.

Anyway, almost 220,000 people have signed this petition. One wonders how many of these signers are fans of the Kansas City Chiefs' opponents fed up with seeing Butker's field goals deprive their team of a chance to beat the Chiefs. The rest perhaps are closed-minded, intolerant anti-Catholic bigots who can't abide anyone voicing any opinion that doesn't conform to or support their own group-think.

Mob Tyranny

Robert Kaplan, writing for the Wall street Journal a couple of years ago, discussed a 1960 book by a scholar named Elias Canetti who, Kaplan says, "may have written the most intuitive book about the crisis of the West over the past 100 years."

The book is titled Crowds and Power, and it discusses among other things the role of technology in accelerating the decline of the West.

Kaplan points out that the mass movements of the 20th century, Nazism and communism, would've been impossible without the technological advances that made mass communication possible:

It’s impossible to imagine Hitler and Stalin except against the backdrop of industrialization, which wrought everything from tanks and railways to radio and newsreels. Propaganda, after all, has a distinct 20th-century resonance, integral to communications technology.

Kaplan then notes that,

The mass ideologies of the 20th century, Nazism and communism, represented a profound abasement of reason. Yet those ideologies reveal more than we’d like to admit about our own political extremes....Nazism and communism shared two decisive elements: the safety of the crowd and the yearning for purity.

Condemning others, destroying others, compensates for one's own inadequacies and spiritual impoverishment. It fulfills one's need for power, self-importance, self-righteousness and purpose. It's a need that the individual is unable, by himself, to gratify but which can be satisfied by one's participation in "the crowd."

Here's Kaplan:

The crowd, Canetti says, emerges from the need of the lonely individual to conform with others. Because he can’t exert dominance on his own, he exerts it through a crowd that speaks with one voice. The crowd’s urge is always to grow, consuming all hierarchies, even as it feels persecuted and demands retribution. The crowd sees itself as entirely pure, having attained the highest virtue.

Thus, one aim of the crowd is to hunt down the insufficiently virtuous. The tyranny of the crowd has many aspects, but Canetti says its most blatant form is that of the “questioner,” and the accuser. “When used as an intrusion of power,” the accusing crowd “is like a knife cutting into the flesh of the victim. The questioner knows what there is to find, but he wants actually to touch it and bring it to light.”

There are strong echoes of this in Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and George Orwell’s “1984,” and particularly in Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” But Canetti isolates crowd psychology as an intellectual subject all its own.

Crowds have existed since the dawn of time. But modern technology—first radio and newspapers, now Twitter and Facebook —has created untold vistas for the tyranny of the crowd. That tyranny, born of an assemblage of lonely people, has as its goal the destruction of the individual, whose existence proves his lack of virtue in the eyes of the crowd.

Social media amplifies the individual's sense of power. It amplifies all the worst characteristics of crowds (or mobs) which no longer need to be comprised of people physically present to each other as they did in the previous century. By folding solitary persons into a like-minded mass of anonymous individuals modern social media enables the otherwise impotent individual to slake his thirst for significance and meaning.

It also enables him to manifest his bitterness and vent his hatreds in politically effective ways.

Kaplan again:

There is a difference, however, between the 20th and 21st centuries. The 20th century was an age of mass communications often controlled by big governments, so that ideology and its attendant intimidation was delivered from the top down. The 21st century has produced an inversion, whereby individuals work through digital networks to gather together from the bottom up.

But while the tyranny produced has a different style, it has a similar result: the intimidation of dissent through a professed monopoly on virtue. If you don’t agree with us, you are not only wrong but morally wanting, and as such should be not only denounced but destroyed. Remember, both Nazism and communism were utopian ideologies.

In the minds of their believers they were systems of virtue, and precisely because of that they opened up new vistas for tyranny.

The need to parade one's own "virtue" is a major impetus behind "cancel culture." To condemn the sins of others, to humiliate them for their transgressions, is a means of drawing attention to one's own moral superiority. Social media mobs offer unprecedented opportunities for moral preening.

The lust for purity combined with the tyranny of social-media technology in the hands of the young—who have little sense of the past and of tradition—threatens to create an era of the most fearsome mobs in history. The upshot of such crowd coercion is widespread self-censorship: the cornerstone of all forms of totalitarianism.

This ultimately leads toward a controlled society driven by the bland, the trivial and the mundane, wearing the lobotomized face of CNN weekday afternoon television. Outright evil can surely be dealt with, but a self-righteous conformity is harder to resist. Left unchecked, this is how the West slowly dies.

As Victor Davis Hanson writes in the introduction to his book The Dying Citizen:

...everything that we once thought was so strong, so familiar, and so reassuring about America has been dissipating for some time....Contemporary events have reminded Americans that their citizenship is fragile and teetering on the abyss....

If we soon tumble over the edge of that abyss it'll be hate-filled crowds of shriveled souls on social media who'll be largely responsible.

The Lonely Activist

A note by R.R. Reno in First Things sheds a bit of light on the psychological makeup of those who engage in political activism. Reno cites a study by the American Enterprise Institute that reveals a strong correlation between political activism and personal loneliness.

He writes:

An American Enterprise Institute study of loneliness (“AEI Survey on Community and Society: Social Capital, Civic Health, and Quality of Life in the United States”) indicates that loneliness and political activism are strongly correlated.

Here is a summary of results penned by Ryan Streeter and David Wilde:

Political volunteers [for campaigns], for example, are less embedded in the social and communal environments that produce trust and social capital.

They are more than twice as likely as ordinary Americans, and three times more likely than religious Americans, to say “rarely” or “never” when asked if there are people they feel close to.

They are five times more likely than religious joiners to say they rarely or never have someone they can turn to in times of need. And they are also more likely than other joiners to say their relationships are superficial.

Streeter and Wilde speculate that lonely people are attracted to the ersatz fellowship of feverish political agreement. “Lacking regular community, political joiners compensate ideologically. Eighty-seven percent report that their ideology gives them a sense of community, compared to 63 percent of ordinary Americans.”

I'll go out on a limb and guess that the correlation is stronger the more radical the activists are. People who commit their lives to political causes are often seeking a substitute religion to compensate for the lack of meaning and community that pervades contemporary secular life.

As our families become increasingly fragmented, our neighborhoods increasingly transitory, and our churches increasingly empty there are fewer places people can find a sense rootedness, a sense that they belong to something significant.

Joining with others in a political cause affords not only a sense of community but also a sense of purpose and fulfillment, both of which are hard to come by in a secular culture in which so much of what engages our attention seems ultimately empty, pointless, and boring.

Nature's Designs

The BBC has a couple of short one to two minute videos that point, each in a different way, to intelligent design in nature.

The first video explains how the morphology and effectiveness of the beak of a bird called the kingfisher attracted the attention of Japanese engineers trying to solve a problem with their bullet trains. The fact that nature's designs solve human engineering problems is at least suggestive of something more than random chance and blind forces behind those designs.

Kingfisher

The second video illustrates what might be called supererogatory design, i.e. designed systems in nature that certainly give the appearance of being both unnecessarily elaborate and intentional. The video shows the amazing underground communication system employed by trees that allows them to assist as well as wage "war" on each other.

It's fascinating to be sure, but the question that comes to mind is how such a system would arise simply through undirected, mechanistic processes.

This is not to say that it couldn't have, of course. Such a feat is within the realm of the logically possible, but it seems that very nearly every new discovery in the biological and cosmological sciences is more compatible with the hypothesis that the mind of an intelligent engineer is behind the phenomena we see than that these phenomena are all, in their billions and perhaps trillions of examples, just a lucky coincidence.

In fact, the conclusion that there's a mind responsible for it all would seem to be almost psychologically inescapable unless that conclusion were rejected a priori, but what rational grounds are there for ruling out an explanation just because one doesn't like its metaphysical implications?

Thanks to Evolution News for the tip and photo.

The Anxious Generation

I recently finished what I think will be one of the most talked about books of the decade. The book was written by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and is titled The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. There's a thorough review of it by V. Susan Villani, a board-certified child and adolescent psychiatrist, in the Baltimore Sun.

Haidt's book is about how social media, the internet, and over-protectiveness of children are rewiring adolescent brains in ways that make it difficult for the young to function in the real world and which lead to serious dysfunctions.

Villani writes:

What have we done? First, we abandoned children to television, then to video games, and now to the internet and social media.

If anyone doubts the harm done to children by the internet and social media, then Jonathan Haidt’s must-read book, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” will convince you otherwise.

Haidt presents powerful data about the emerging epidemic of anxiety and depression since 2010, when smartphones became easily available and soon were in the hands of most adults and many children. And while children were being over-protected in the real world by parents afraid to let them outdoors, they were under-protected in a virtual world, which was consuming them and rewiring their brains.

Haidt makes such a strong case for this that to deny his conclusions seems irrational.

The re-wiring process occurs in the adolescent brain through constant exposure to social media which employ algorithms intentionally designed to release dopamine and generate addiction.

Haidt also writes about the importance of play, which involves risk, fear, and excitement that are gradually mastered, producing the self-confidence and competence needed for the challenges of adulthood. Young adults who lack the skills acquired in play become more fearful, anxious, and withdrawn. Time spent on media displaces time that otherwise would have been spent interacting with other children and adults.

The constant use of smartphones during childhood harms them in at least four ways. It deprives them of sleep, face-to-face social interaction, the ability to concentrate (attention fragmentation), and it addicts them. Haidt is adamant that schools become phone-free to allow both education and social-emotional growth to take place. This would not require legislation and could be adopted as policy by every school district.

Haidt makes dozens of suggestions for helping both girls and boys to escape the avaricious manipulations of the people who design the smartphone and the apps that the phones can access, but the basic themes are these:

1. No smartphones before high school
2. No social media before age 16
3. Phone-free schools
4. Far more unsupervised play and independence for children

You'll have to read the book to understand his rationale for these measures, and every parent, teacher, school administrator, and pastor/priest/rabbi/imam in the Western world should consider it required reading this summer.

How Physics Refutes Common Sense

Yesterday's post looked at some of philosopher Bruce Gordon's thoughts on the philosophical theory called idealism.

Idealism holds that the world is real, but it's subjectively real. Its reality is like that of pain. Pain is real, but it's completely in the mind of the one who's experiencing it. It's reality is subjective. If there were no creatures on earth whose nervous systems could create the sensation of pain, pain would not exist.

The common sense view, of course, is that most of the world is objectively real. It exists independently of whether or not anyone is experiencing it. The moon is there whether anyone sees it or not. This common sense view is called realism.

Realism is the view that there is a world outside our minds existing independently of our minds and perceptions, whereas idealism holds that the world is created by our minds by means of the observations we make. Idealism is a philosophical expression of the ideas popularized by the movie The Matrix.

Idealism strikes most of us as at best counter-intuitive. We're accustomed to think of matter as the fundamental reality (a view called materialism). Matter, we assume, is objectively real and exists whether we perceive it or not. On this view, whatever mind is it's somehow a creation or function of our material brains. Idealism turns this view on its head and declares that mind is actually the fundamental reality and that matter only exists as a subjective experience in our minds.

As I said, this view is counter-intuitive, but it's the view held by a lot of physicists who study the fundamental quantum structure of the world. This video gives a pretty clear idea of the thinking of many physicists, some of whom think that idealism is not only correct but that it leads to the conclusion that there is a God, or something very much like God.

The video's a bit long (17 minutes) and moves quickly. It also discusses some arcane physics at points along the way. Nevertheless, you don't have to understand the physics in order to follow the narrative. The science really only illustrates the basic idea which is that mind is fundamental and that matter is downstream, as it were, from mind.

Give it a click, kick back and savor how mysterious is the world in which we live and move and have our being:

A Philosopher Discusses Idealism

Bruce Gordon is one of the most brilliant and accomplished thinkers alive today. Among other things he's a historian and philosopher of science and was interviewed recently by another scientist, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, on a number of topics, including philosophical idealism.

Gordon is one of a growing number of philosophers who find idealism a compelling hypothesis. The interview begins with Dr. Gordon explaining George Berkeley's (1685-1753) version of idealism:

Michael Egnor: What is idealism?

Bruce Gordon: There are a lot of different varieties of idealism, and rather than go through a laundry list of its variations, let me just start with the kind of idealism that I would be an advocate of, which is an ontic theistic idealism, essentially a form of idealism that is probably most closely identified with the Anglican Bishop, George Berkeley.

George Berkeley 1727

Basically, it’s the idea that material substances, as substantial entities, do not exist and are not the cause of our perceptions. They do not mediate our experience of the world.

Rather, what constitutes what we would call the physical realm are ideas that exist solely in the mind of God, who, as an unlimited and uncreated immaterial being, is the ultimate cause of the sensations and ideas that we, as finite spiritual beings, experience intersubjectively and subjectively as the material universe....So we are, in effect, living our lives in the mind of God.

And he is a mediator of our experience and of our inner subjectivity, rather than some sort of neutral material realm that serves as a third thing between us and the mind of God, so to speak.

The discussion then turns for a bit to Plato's notion of idealism as expressed in his theory of Forms.

Plato believed that every particular thing that exists has an ideal essence or form that exists in some abstract realm of reality. Every chair, for example, is recognizable as a chair because it "participates" in the perfect abstract form of "chairness," every tree is recognizable as a tree because it "participates" in the perfect form of "treeness."

Likewise with everything, including humans.

Later Christian Platonists argued that these essences, or forms, or ideals existed not in some abstract realm but rather as ideas in the mind of God, and this, it seems, is Gordon's view as well.

Michael Egnor: There are, I believe, other kinds of idealism. For example, idealism by German philosophers. And how does that differ from Berkeleyan idealism?

Bruce Gordon: Well, .... [Immanuel] Kant (1724-1804) advocated a kind of epistemic, as opposed to ontic, idealism. Kantian idealism is entirely compatible with the existence of material substances, even though they are inaccessible as things in themselves.

So for Kantian idealism, you’ve got a self that .... precedes and grounds all of our experience. And our perception of reality, then, is governed by the innate structure of the human mind.

Immanuel Kant 1768 

What Gordon is saying here is that Kant believed that a material world existed but that everything we know about it is based on our sensory perceptions which produce ideas or sensations in the mind. Our mind is so structured as to create these ideas, but they may be nothing at all like the thing they represent.

In other words, what we know about the "thing in itself" is the sum of the ideas (or sensations) we have of it in our minds. We can't know it as it exists independently of our perceptions of it.

For example, our minds, upon seeing, smelling and tasting chocolate, generate the ideas of a certain color, fragrance and flavor, but these ideas are in our minds, they're not in the chocolate. The chocolate itself doesn't have color, it simply reflects certain wavelengths of light. Likewise, it doesn't have fragrance or flavor. It simply exudes chemicals which interact with our senses to produce the ideas of fragrance and flavor in our minds.

As Kant put it, “You only know me as you see me, not as I actually am."

Bruce Gordon: So we never experience reality in itself, which he called the noumenal world, but only reality as it appears to us, a ... phenomenal reality that is ordered by the innate structures of the human mind.

Kantian idealism and its descendants are, in many ways, an epistemic form of idealism, whereas the Berkeleyan form of idealism is ontic.

By this Gordon means that Kant's idealism had to do with what we can know about the world whereas Berkeley's idealism had to do with the ontology of the world - what was actually real and what reality was like. Gordon adds:

[Berkeley's Idealism is] a denial that there is material substance and [is instead] an embedding of reality in the mind of God, such that it is finite spiritual beings experiencing the reality brought into existence by this unlimited, uncreated, immaterial being.

Berkeley's idealism, then, was different from Kant's. Berkeley held that there was no material world at all. Everything we experience we experience as ideas in our minds, ideas which are presented to our minds by the mind of God.

As Berkeley himself says, “All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth — in a word, all those bodies which compose the frame of the world — have not any subsistence without a mind.” This may seem bizarre at first reading, but according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy “Berkeley’s system, while it strikes many as counter-intuitive, is strong and flexible enough to counter most objections.”

It's interesting that in the last fifty years or so many physicists have embraced idealism. They're persuaded by developments in quantum mechanics that reveal that at the subatomic level many properties of the entities scientists study at that level don't exist until they're observed.

For instance, the 20th century scientist Max Planck, often called the father of quantum mechanics, once stated that,

As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together.

We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.

And Sir James Jeans, in his book The Mysterious Universe, wrote that, "The universe is beginning to look more and more like a great thought rather than a great machine."

Idealism has considerable intellectual appeal for quantum physicists, but I should think it would also be attractive to some thoughtful theologically oriented folks, especially those who are heirs to the Calvinist tradition and its doctrine of predestination and who believe that everything that exists, and thus everything that happens, is in fact predestined by God.

Such a doctrine conforms nicely to the conviction that the reality we experience is fundamentally an idea in the mind of God.

Richard Dawkins, Cultural Christian

Mathematician William Dembski has some wry comments to make about Richard Dawkins' recent conciliatory statements about Christianity. Dawkins is the author of The God Delusion (2006), a book that has done more to extinguish Christianity in the Western world than probably any other book in the last century or so.

Dawkins has said that although he believes Christianity is nonsense he nevertheless considers himself a "cultural Christian" inasmuch as he enjoys the cultural benefits Christianity has conferred and because it's a far better option than Islam, which he utterly deplores.

Dembski writes:

Critics have been quick to jump on the irony here since Dawkins, as the leading voice for atheism in the English speaking world, if not in the world as a whole, has helped bring about this waning of Christian faith. But let’s be careful not to give Dawkins too much credit. Christians, through their own ineffectiveness in Christian education, have been complicit in helping Dawkins’s crusade against the Christian faith.

In any case, here is Dawkins the newly minted cultural Christian:

The current Dawkins is one who has mellowed with age. He no longer seems to be the stark, tough-minded Dawkins that made his reputation. This Dawkins would write in River Out of Eden: “The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”

Or consider how he characterized the God of the Old Testament in The God Delusion: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

....the tough-minded Dawkins of the past was not a cultural Christian. He had no use for religion, period.

Religious faith.... was a pernicious virus that needed to be eradicated. Certainly, he has played his part in helping to undermine religious faith, and Christianity in particular, in Europe and North America.

But there's more. Dawkins seems to realize that if you're going to dispense with Christianity you not only must forfeit Christmas carols and humanitarian institutions like orphanages and hospitals but also "reason, truth, merit, free speech, critical thinking and respect for science in the academy and wider culture." Dembski might also have added objective moral obligations and human rights to the list.

In other words, [Dawkins] laments the turn from modernity to postmodernity, from truth-based inquiry to make-it-up-as-you-go inquiry, from sober, rigorous habits of mind to minds at home in an insane asylum. And yet he’s probably done more than any other current figure to bring about this shift.

Dawkins is these days attempting to stand against the woke subversion of the academy, and of science in particular. Increasingly, Dawkins is casting himself as a defender of traditional academic virtues (reason, merit, free discourse, etc.).

And yet, a compelling case can be made that precisely because of the materialist ideology that he has promoted in the name of science all these years, he has helped bring about the state of affairs in the academy that he is now lamenting — in which woke ideology subverts all that he deems precious in the academy and science (and, as we’ve seen, also in cultural Christianity).

Dawkins has been marvelously successful at advancing scientific materialism, the view that science (especially Darwinian evolution) functions to advance materialism, with Darwin being this atheistic ideology’s principal prophet. And yet, this very scientific materialism is the Pandora’s box that has opened our culture to all the evils that he now laments. What Dawkins seems not to have realized — or perhaps now is realizing too late — is that scientific materialism is the suicide of reason, even undermining science as reason’s most compelling expression.

Scientific materialism attempts to use science as a club to enforce materialism. Yet instead, scientific materialism is a snake that eats its own tail and in the end consumes itself. It destroys itself, collapsing of internal contradiction, and thereby ruining science, as we now see happening in real time.

Dembski fleshes all of this out in his article at the link. It'd be a very good thing if more people recognized that ideas have consequences and that atheism of the sort that Dawkins and his fellow materialists have purveyed for over three decades has consequences that can only be described as pernicious and calamitous for Western civilization.

Hopefully, Dawkins, at least, is beginning to recognize what a catastrophe he has helped to unleash.

Thanks, Obama

Jim Geraghty, who in my opinion is among the best political commentators, especially among those who churn out a column every day, has a recent piece in which he recounts some of President Biden's liabilities, particularly, his lack of principles, and then engages in a fascinating bit of speculation about all that might have been save for one fateful 50/50 decision made back in 2008:

Back in the summer of 2008, Barack Obama and his top campaign staff had narrowed their options for Obama’s running mate down to two men: Biden and former Indiana governor and senator Evan Bayh. Former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe quoted Obama as calling it a “coin toss” between the two men.

Geraghty goes on to say that,

Every now and then I think about how differently recent U.S. political history would have unfolded had Obama selected Bayh instead of Biden.

You figure this alternate history would have continued about the same as our reality until 2015 or so. A Vice President Evan Bayh, then age 61, would be likely to run for the presidency in 2016, and have a decent shot of knocking off then-69-year-old Hillary Clinton in the primary fight — an even-keeled moderate and reassuring Midwesterner riding Obama’s coattails, against all the Clinton baggage. It’s fair to wonder if Bernie Sanders becomes the phenomenon that he did in 2016 in this scenario.

It’s tough for one party to control the presidency for three consecutive terms, so perhaps the Republican nominee — maybe Donald Trump, maybe someone else — would have won the 2016 presidency. Wasn’t Republican fear of a Hillary Clinton presidency a major factor in the rise of Trump in the 2016 primaries? Without Obama picking Biden, we probably don’t get Hillary, and without Hillary, we might not have gotten Trump.

(We can probably assume that throughout the multiverse, there is no world in which Hillary Clinton won the presidency, at least not by running the way she did in our world in 2016. You can’t just refuse to visit Wisconsin for the final few months of a presidential campaign!)

Assuming Bayh hadn’t won the presidency in 2016, this means that in 2020, he would be in the top tier of candidates in that crowded Democratic field, although it’s possible Democrats would have dismissed him as the guy who lost to the GOP incumbent.

But in this scenario, Joe Biden probably retires from the Senate in 2014 or so. (Remember, Biden won his Senate reelection bid in 2008, while he was winning the vice presidency.) And no one would have been clamoring for a then-79-year-old retired senator to run for president in 2019.

If Obama had picked Bayh, Biden would probably have been an irrelevant afterthought on the political scene for the past decade, instead of the 46th president of the United States.

What’s more, without nominee Biden pledging to pick a woman as his running mate, we probably wouldn’t have ended up with Vice President Kamala Harris.

With different presidents in office since January 20, 2017, does the Covid pandemic turn out differently? Does the investigation into the origin get as forgotten as it has in our world?

Does Afghanistan turn out differently? Without the Afghanistan withdrawal proceeding as disastrously as it did . . . does Russia invade Ukraine in February 2022?

Does Hamas attack Israel the same way on October 7, 2023? Does inflation take off like a rocket starting in 2021? Do we see the same waves of migrants at the U.S. southern border?

The alternative is probably not utopia, just different problems . . . but it would be edifying to see if different choices in leadership would have resulted in better outcomes for the country and the world.

As we used to say, “Thanks, Obama.”

Geraghty's column led me to reflect on how much difference our seemingly insignificant choices make to the future of our families and our communities. We have no way of knowing, of course, but the fact that decisions which seem unimportant at the time can snowball into major consequences in the future should cause us to be a smidge more thoughtful when making them.

Harrison Bergeron

In 1961 Kurt Vonnegut wrote a short story titled Harrison Bergeron which, if written today, would be considered an excellent satire of the contemporary push for equity in all things.

The story was brief, only six pages long, and amazingly prescient. Here's the opening:

The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Some things about living still weren't quite right, though. April for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron's fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.

It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn't think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn't think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter.

Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.

You can read the rest of the story here.

It has always been a goal of the left to do away with merit, which is today labeled a symptom of white supremacy, and force everyone onto the same level. Everyone must be equal whether it be in terms of academics, income, parent/child relationships, and in "every which way."

We don't yet have the equivalent of a "Handicapper General" but if it were ever up to our leftist friends, we probably would, and a lot sooner than 2081, too.

Why Religious Conservatives Support Trump

Back in February of 2020, nine months before the 2020 contest between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, I wrote the following column. Now that we're about to reprise that election in six months I thought I'd post it again, especially since almost everything in it applies just as much today as it did then:

There's recently been a spate of controversy over whether Christians are betraying their principles by supporting Donald Trump. Andrew Walker is an Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Executive Director of the Carl F. H. Henry Institute for Evangelical Engagement who has written a fine response to this concern at National Review.

His article is a bit lengthy but it's worth reading if the question of how a religious conservative can support the president is one that interests you. Here are a few outtakes:

There are two competing interpretations of Trump’s enthusiastic support from religious conservatives: that it is a lesser-of-two-evils transaction based on self-interest, or that it shows a voting bloc compromised by every form of democratic vice, whether racism, nativism, or nationalism.

They will vote not so much for Donald Trump — with his uncouth speech and incessantly immature tweets — as they will vote against the worldview of the Democratic platform. Those who make this calculation are not sell-outs, nor have they forfeited the credibility of their values carte blanche. For blind allegiance does not explain the voting relationship. That religious conservatives are not progressives does. Between Never Trump and Always Trump is a third category: Reluctant Trump.

[A]n event on October 10, 2019 explains the odd-couple relationship of religious conservatives and Donald Trump. That evening, during a CNN townhall on LGBTQ issues, the now-former Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke proclaimed that churches failing to toe the line on gay and transgender rights would lose their tax-exempt status in his administration. O’Rourke’s comments represented a high-water mark of a culture that has jettisoned anything resembling a Christian moral ecology.

For years, religious conservatives predicted that the sexual revolution would eventually affect government policy and directly threaten churches. They can now point to O’Rourke and other examples as evidence of a massive cultural shift that has realized their predictions. Even the most convinced progressive should sympathize with religious conservatives who are concerned about federal law possibly turning against them.

Consider the Democrats’ garish and unapologetic devotion to abortion in the latest stages of pregnancy. Anyone who wonders why religious conservatives cannot bring themselves to vote for Democrats simply does not understand the religiously formed conscience that shudders at America’s abortion regime.

This sentiment was intensified during last week’s State of the Union address, when Democrats sat stone-faced at President Trump’s call for banning late-term abortion. A moment of such moral contrast demonstrates why religious conservatives do not care about the endless think pieces criticizing them as soulless hypocrites. They will endure that criticism if it means the chance to end abortion through Supreme Court appointments.

Martin includes a description of a friend of his who is doubtless typical of many religious conservatives:

To understand this complexity, take my real-life friend. Let’s call him Steve. Steve is a white evangelical in his forties, a middle-school teacher, the father of two daughters, and a deacon at his Southern Baptist church. These are identities that media narratives depict as culprits for Trump’s ascension: White, male, Christian, middle-class, husband, father. He’s the token “white evangelical” that the media depicts as red-state reprobates.

But there is more to Steve. Steve serves the homeless, sees diversity as a pillar of God’s creation, and helped an Iraqi refugee family resettle in his own hometown. I daresay he cares more about justice in real life than those who preen about it on Twitter.

Steve voted for Trump, and will again. Why? For one, he thinks abortion is America’s Holocaust, and will not support any party that supports abortion on demand. Whatever Trump’s eccentricities are, Steve won’t vote for a progressive, even if the media tells him that to do so would save America and its institutions.

For Steve, saving abstractions like “America” and its “institutions” can make America a lot less worthy of survival if abortion on demand continues apace. To the average religious conservative, in fact, saving America means saving it from the scourge of abortion.

Martin then adds some concluding thoughts:

Those are the stakes that many religious conservatives live with. My advice to progressives is that, if they want religious conservatives to let go of their devotion to the Republican Party’s platform, progressives should weaken their commitment to unfettered abortion access. The same goes for their support for gender fluidity, and opposition to any person or institution that does not affirm such things as gay marriage.

Until that happens, complaining about “white evangelicalism” and ascribing to it every imaginable authoritarian impulse will be like shouting into a void; no one will listen.

Donald Trump is not the savior of American Christianity. At best, he’s a bed of nails on the road, temporarily halting secularism’s advance. Yet the choice for so many religious conservatives is between someone who is crude and profane but who will defend their values and an eloquent politician who will undermine their faith and advance an agenda they see as barbaric and unjust.

Here’s my plea from one religious conservative to other religious conservatives in 2020. If the majority of us vote for Trump, let’s do so not because he’s a Protector of the Faith or a champion for “taking America back.” He’s neither. Instead, view him as a flawed, complex political figure whose admixture of vanity and pragmatism is resulting in a political agenda that is less hostile to Christianity than its alternatives.

Indeed, it's fair to say that this administration's political agenda is not just "less hostile" to all expressions of religious faith, it's actually, contrary to the alternatives, not hostile at all.

What was the alternative in 2016? Voters were given a choice between two morally compromised candidates, the policies of one were seen by religious conservatives as an almost certain disaster for the country and the policies of the other as possibly salutary. Which one should a religious conservative have voted for?

What's the alternative in 2020? Voters are given a choice between a party which is willing to demand that taxpayers subsidize and oversee the annual slaughter of a million unborn babies and an incumbent who, despite his character flaws, has appointed judges and jurists who will protect our freedoms and who may eventually end the slaughter. Which one should a religious conservative vote for?

Religious conservatives care about the poor and the marginalized, or at least they should. No president in history has done more to help the poor - by lowering minority unemployment to record lows, increasing blue collar wage growth, establishing enterprise zones in poor communities and implementing criminal justice reform - as this president. So who should a religious conservative vote for?

For many religious conservatives their support for Trump is tentative. It's contingent upon his conduct in office. As long as he does nothing Clintonian to disgrace the office and continues to uphold the First Amendment and appoint jurists who'll do so, they're willing to suffer his childish, neurotic outbursts and offer him their support.

He may be only a bed of nails on the road to a totally secular state hostile to traditional economic, social, civic and moral values, but sometimes a bed of nails in the road can force a change in direction. Meanwhile, I think most religious conservatives will prefer to vote for the bed of nails than for life in the fast lane to a secular nirvana.

Stephen Meyer and Piers Morgan

One of the foremost philosophers of science today is Stephen Meyer, author of three books on Intelligent Design and a very articulate advocate of the view that the evidence is overwhelming that the origin and fine-tuning of the universe and the origin of life are all the result of the agency of an intelligent mind.

Meyer has recently been on Joe Rogan's show and also been interviewed by Piers Morgan on Morgan's Uncensored podcast. The podcast is 33 minutes long, but anyone interested in the controversy surrounding naturalistic materialism and intelligent design will find it interesting and informative.

Check it out:

Russian Losses

From time to time the British Sun publishes assessments of the British intelligence agencies regarding Russian losses in Ukraine. Their most recent summary is shocking:

According to British intelligence Putin's forces have lost 450,000 soldiers killed, wounded or captured since their invasion began. The Sun states that this is 100,000 more than the previous UK estimate shared in February by Britain’s Defence Intelligence.

The article continues:

And Russia's losses have surged to 1,300 troops a day in just the last two months.

The eye-watering casualty figures don’t include mercenary groups like Wagner who were famously slaughtered during “human wave” assaults in the meat grinder battle of Bakhmut last year.

In December the UK said 20,000 of Wagner's soldiers had been killed and another 40,000 had been injured.

The latest figures also don't account for the humiliating “tens of thousands” of soldiers who have deserted Putin's armed forces.

They refer to the Russian soldiers taken out of battle by death or injury at the hands of Kyiv's impressive and resilient army.

Armed Forces Minister Leo Doherty also estimates Moscow has lost almost 3,000 tanks – up from 2,000 a year ago. The Sun exclusively revealed in February that Putin had lost almost all of his valuable tank force since invading Ukraine.

All this carnage, death, and destruction and for what? Where are the protestors at our universities demonstrating against the war crimes committed by Russia against Ukraine?

Campus Nihilism

From a short essay by Carl Trueman at First Things:

Now, expressing criticism of Israeli military action is of course entirely legitimate in a democracy like the United States. There is a right to dissent and a right to protest.

But the nature of these particular protests reveals something very disturbing. It is clear that they are not motivated by legitimate concern for Arab and Muslim lives, whatever the rhetoric. If they were, then Israel would hardly be the only, or even primary, target.

The death toll from over a decade of government-led bloodshed in Syria is catastrophic but has not gripped the imagination of campus activists. The slaughter there continues to this day, though one could be forgiven for not knowing this, given the lack of media and student interest in the conflict. Rather, these campus protests are motivated by hatred of Jews.

One can offer the specious dodge that Hamas’s 2017 manifesto speaks of Zionists rather than Jews as the enemy. But Hamas thinks Israel is the result of a Jewish conspiracy. To replace “Jews” and “Judaism” with “Zionists” and “Zionism” is thus to change words but not to change direction.

Anti-Semitism is the motivation of both Hamas and the student activists who care only for Muslim lives when they are threatened by Israeli rather than Syrian bombs.

This also points to the nihilism that lurks just below the surface. When one notes the craziness of some of the protests—queers professing solidarity with Palestine, for example, or a drag queen leading children in pro-Palestinian chants—it becomes clear that, for all of the blather about “human rights,” these people share no common vision about what it means to be human.

The thing that unites these groups is neither concern for Arab lives nor a respect for Islamic culture. They are united only in wanting to tear down. In short, these protests are a manifestation of the Mephistophelean spirit of negation or, in religious terms, the spirit of desecration.

To borrow from Marx, all that is holy must be profaned. What is to replace it—Shariah law, drag queen story hour, Judith Butler reading groups—is anybody’s guess. There is no agreed moral vision here. There is only consensus on a hatred of Jews, of Israel, of America, and of what is. And ironically, it comes from those who enjoy some of the greatest privileges that America has to offer.

The ignorance of these protestors and their faculty abettors concerning the history of the region as well as the nature of Islam in general and Hamas in particular, is appalling. But then the point isn't to rectify wrongs or get the history right. These protests are just one battle in a long war to destabilize and destroy the institutions and culture of the West, and Israel is just one battleground on the front lines in that war.

Lincoln's Proclamation

In 1863 President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed April 30th to be a National Day of Prayer, and the nation has observed that day ever since. Last Tuesday marked this year's observance, and in honor of the day the John 10:10 Project produced a short video recounting Lincoln's proclamation.

It's a powerful speech, so much of what he said sounds as though he were speaking to us and our culture today. Here it is:

Materialism Is a Superstition

John Zmirak offers an acerbic critique of Woke culture in an essay at The Stream and wonders how we've come to the place where so many highly educated Americans have been reduced "to a Stone Age level of fanatical superstition." His answer is, "In a word, Darwin."

He explains:

[Darwinism] insists that the existence of the universe itself is a meaningless cosmic accident. No purpose or mind lies behind it. Likewise the emergence of life, which Darwinists believe by some secular miracle leapt fully-armored from the mud like Athena from Zeus’s head.

Mere chance somehow engineered not just the baroque complexities of the humblest bacterium, but the vast, elaborate rococo of higher mammals, then primates. Natural selection can explain the survival of the fittest, but not their arrival.

But somehow this combination of infinitesimally unlikely genetic mutations, and ruthless natural selection red in tooth and claw produced … human beings with brains perceptive and reliable enough to generate Modern Science.

I'd quibble that it may be more accurate to use the term naturalistic materialism, of which Darwinism is one expression, for what follows, but no matter. Zmirak continues:

Even though this Science tells us that we’re meaningless epiphenomena of random cosmic burps and vicious competition, somehow we also have dignity and rights, including the right to Equity. (Insert stolen premises from the biblical worldview here.) But the science that teaches us about that dignity and those rights - theology - should curl up and die once we’ve taken ... the gold fillings out of its teeth.

The Woke folk will decide what “Equality,” “Equity” and “Justice” mean. And they’ll do so with all the arbitrary, random, irrational whimsy that the universe showed in mutating us into existence. They’ll enforce their capricious verdicts with all the ruthlessness of Natural Selection, throwing their failed competitors onto the fossil heap of history.

True enough. Once a substantial percentage of the educated population comes to believe that life, including human life, is all a big accident, that there's no meaning to any of it, that death is the end of existence, then the only ethics that makes sense is an egoistic form of might makes right.

In a world devoid of purpose there can be nothing that's wrong in any meaningful sense, and thus there's nothing wrong with destroying, either literally or figuratively, people who disagree with them.

So, in the universe of the naturalistic materialist, whatever it takes to make my own existence more pleasant - including using others as means to my ends and imposing my will upon them - whatever I have the power and desire to do, I might as well do.

In this purposeless world, whoever has the loudest voice and the most political heft makes the rules, and it's pointless for the less powerful to object that the rules make no sense or are immoral. Sense and morality depend upon the existence of objective truth about human nature, and in a Godless, Darwinian world there is no objective truth about human nature that binds us or constrains us.

Human nature is malleable. It's whatever humans are able to make it. What rules there are, about morality and about human nature, we make for ourselves.

All of this follows from the embrace of an antitheistic materialism by our cultural elites. Our ivy educated betters scorn what they like to call "religious superstition," but they adopt instead all manner of other superstitions - superstitions about human nature, race, gender and evolution to name just a few.

As G.K. Chesterton famously observed, "When people no longer believe in God they don't believe in nothing. They believe in anything."

Spring Migration

Long time readers of VP know that I enjoy birds. It's something of a hobby of mine, and the spring migration is a great time to get out and try to get a good look at some of the beautiful bits of feathered fluff passing through on their northward trek.

Here are a few of my favorites from this past week. All of these pics are of males of the species. Females are often more drab, and, in the case of the last two species, they look much different than the males:

The bird above is a Magnolia warbler. It's the bird that inspired a young teen-ager named Roger Tory Peterson to take up birding which led to a lifetime of painting birds and a whole series of nature field guides. Peterson saw the Magnolia warbler in New York's Central park and was immediately hooked on birds.

The Blackburnian warbler is in my mind one of the most striking birds in all of North America. When the sunlight hits the bird's throat it's as if it has been set aflame.

The Cape May warbler nests in boreal forests in the U.S. and Canada and is only found in Cape May, NJ during migration. It was first described by ornithologist Alexander Wilson in Cape May, NJ but not seen there for a hundred years afterward. The Cape May warbler's tongue is unique among warblers. It's tubular, like the hummingbird's tongue, and enables the bird to sip nectar from flowers on its wintering grounds in the Caribbean.

The Prothonotary warbler is famous, those who've read about the "Red Scare" of the early 1950s might recall, for being instrumental in convicting Alger Hiss on charges of spying for the Soviet Union. You can read about it here. The Prothonotary warbler got its name from the bright yellow robes worn by papal clerks, known as prothonotaries, in the Roman Catholic church.

The bird pictured above is an Indigo bunting. Here's an interesting fact about birds that many people have a hard time believing. Birds do not have blue pigment in their feathers. The blue color found in many birds is due to the way their feathers refract sunlight. The Indigo bunting is common in eastern North America but is often overlooked because it's small, and the dazzling blue color only shows up in good light against a proper background.

The Rose-breasted grosbeak is a handsome woodland species that occasionally visits sunflower feeders during migration. The female looks like a large brown sparrow.

Bird migration is one of the most astonishing phenomena in nature and it's occurring this week across much of the United States. Since it happens largely after dark most people aren't very much aware of the amazing spectacle that's occurring in the skies above them most nights at this time of year.

Even so, millions of birds are traveling each night from their winter haunts in Central and South America to their breeding territories in North America. The migration involves birds of all types, hundreds of different species, navigating their way north to find a mate, establish a territory, breed and return south again in the Fall.

To help give a sense of the movements of birds during migration, the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology has produced a fascinating animated feature that shows the annual migration pattern of 118 different North American species. The migration animation can be viewed here.

There's also a link on the page which takes you to a similar animation which shows the particular species of bird that's being represented. If you love nature you're sure to enjoy this.

Here are a few questions to ponder while you're watching: How and why did migration, not just in birds but also in butterflies, fish, turtles, whales, dragonflies and numerous other creatures, ever evolve in all these different groups through mindless, unguided processes like random mutation and natural selection? Did it evolve through mindless, unguided processes?

How do these animals know how to navigate their way back and forth, often returning to the exact patch of territory they departed from six months before? How do the young of the year, which have never made the trip before, know how to do it? How did that ability evolve through mindless, unguided processes?

Birds truly are a marvel.

What's Important to the Voters?

Jim Geraghty consults the recent CNN poll to see what issues are of greatest concern to voters. It turns out that what voters care about is not at all what either presidential candidate seems to care about:

Joe Biden would love for this year’s election to be about forgiving student loans, union jobs, climate change, gun control, abortion, those oh-so-plausible tales of him saving six people from drowning as a lifeguard, how he was arrested for standing with a black family during protests of desegregation, and how he was “runner-up in state scoring” in football . . . until his teenage asthma kept him out of the draft for Vietnam.

Donald Trump wants this election to be about how unfairly he’s been treated and how he’s being persecuted for his political views, how he was the real winner in the 2020 presidential election, and how he embodies “retribution” for his supporters.

So what are the major concerns of the electorate?

The average American voter is desperately yearning for a candidate who would just focus on fighting inflation and getting the cost of living under control. Yes, American voters have other priorities, but that is the most-often-mentioned priority by a wide margin.

Don’t take it from me, take it from this weekend's CNN poll which had Trump ahead of Biden, 49 percent to 43 percent:

In the new poll, 65% of registered voters call the economy extremely important to their vote for president. . . .

Considering other issue priorities for the upcoming election, 58% of voters call protecting democracy an extremely important issue, the only other issue tested that a majority considers central to their choice.

Nearly half call immigration, crime and gun policy deeply important (48% each), with health care (43%), abortion (42%) and nominations to the US Supreme Court (39%) each deeply important to about 4 in 10 voters.

At the lower end of the scale, just 33% consider foreign policy that important, 27% climate change, 26% the war between Israel and Hamas, and 24% student loans.

You get slightly different answers when Americans are asked which issue is their top priority, compared to whether an issue is important to their vote for president; more on that in a moment.

The average American doesn’t lose any sleep thinking about climate change, gun control, LGBTQ+ rights, DEI initiatives, or whether the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have access to enough food. This is not to say that if the average American doesn’t think about an issue very much, it doesn’t matter.

In other words, neither the issues pressed by Mr. Biden's progressive handlers nor Mr. Trump's grievances are foremost in the minds of most voters. It'll be interesting to see how the candidates seek to deal with his fact once the campaign gets underway in earnest this summer.

Meanwhile, check out the rest of Geraghty's column at the link.