Tale of Two Cities

Myron Magnet has a powerful essay at City Journal in which he reacts to New York's liberal mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio's claim that there are two New Yorks, one rich and one poor. Magnet argues that the actual divide is between New Yorkers who pay taxes and New Yorkers who live off of them. The whole article is good reading and it's fairly brief. Here's one of the best parts:

As its very name suggests, mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio’s tale of two cities is pure fiction, a myth that formed the intellectual basis of leftist politics long before Marx turned it into “science.” Its key idea is that the rich are rich because they have somehow extracted their wealth from the poor, causing their poverty....

In the early days of industrialization, when nearly naked children pulled carts of coal through mine shafts and factory workers got ground up by unfenced machinery, this tale had a core of truth. But....[a]s for New York’s poor of today, there is not a scintilla of truth in the notion that the co-op dwellers of Fifth and Park Avenues have caused their poverty—not even if you believe that Wall Street hanky-panky is the cause of the deep unemployment America suffers five years after the outset of the financial crisis.

The trouble with the two-cities narrative is less that it is false and more that it has become a cause of the very poverty it pretends to explain—especially in the case of the minority poverty so prevalent in New York. The belief that people are poor because they are victims of economic injustice, and that the nation owes the African-American poor, in particular, some kind of reparation for the slavery and racism that supposedly has kept them perpetually poor, led to a War on Poverty that began half a century ago and that resulted in a welfare system that today, together with food stamps, public housing, and other benefits, provides its recipients with more income than a minimum-wage job, vaporizing the economic incentive for going to work.

Worse, the elite mindset that conceived the War on Poverty permanently transformed the nation’s culture in ways that entrenched the poor in their poverty. Thanks to the elites in the press, the government, and the universities—thanks to the writers, preachers, and teachers who have made “social justice” the reigning orthodoxy—the once standard belief that it’s dishonorable and unmanly not to work, at however menial a job, to support your family has given way to the view that there’s no shame in accepting reparations for victimization.

Combine these economic views with the change in elite views about sexuality that, also about 50 years ago, destigmatized casual sex and out-of-wedlock childbearing, and you have a sure-fire recipe for a caste of perpetually poor people, disproportionately minority, who rarely work or marry, and who form families headed by young, inexperienced, and ill-educated single mothers, poorly equipped to give children the moral and cognitive nurture, the thirst and drive for education they need to succeed in an increasingly skills-based global economy.

If you were going to divide New York into two cities—one rich, one poor—this would be the poor one: female-headed families living in housing projects or Section 8 apartments with flat-screen TVs and refrigerators stocked with food-stamp plenty, for generation after generation, whose unmotivated kids learn little from bad schools that cost more than almost any other public schools in the country—schools that only the most determined manage to learn enough from to escape the government-financed ghetto, leaving behind the average, ambitionless mass to become the parents of the next generation.

The rich New York would be exactly the opposite: people who get married and mostly stay married, who work hard to give their kids the best educational credentials and enrichment programs they can afford (alas, with a full measure of social-justice ideology and resume-burnishing social-service summer internships), who worship the work ethic, and who pay the taxes that support the other New York.

An observer from another planet would ask, Why does such a bizarre system go on, seemingly without end? Why does the rich New York keep supporting the poor New York, and why does the poor New York not improve its lot?

Magnet offers more insight at the link. His article highlights the fact that there's something odd about discussions of the poor and material poverty in the U.S. Most of the people who are classified as materially poor (there are types of impoverishment other than material deprivation) possess luxuries that even the wealthiest aristocrats as recently as a hundred years ago would have envied. Here's economist Thomas Sowell on the subject:

Most Americans living below the government-set poverty line have a washer and/or a dryer, as well as a computer. More than 80 percent have air conditioning. More than 80 percent also have both a landline and a cell phone. Nearly all have television and a refrigerator. Most Americans living below the official poverty line also own a motor vehicle and have more living space than the average European -- not Europeans in poverty, the average European.

He could have added that they also have access to medical care, food, and education. Their residences are dry and have indoor plumbing and heat. Their clothing is superior to even the finest raiment of a century ago, the air they breathe is cleaner, and the water they drink is purer. They are far richer than the wealthy of all but the most recent generations. So why do we call them "poor"? Sowell answers:

Because government bureaucrats create the official definition of poverty, and they do so in ways that provide a political rationale for the welfare state -- and, not incidentally, for the bureaucrats' own jobs.

The poverty that afflicts America is not material, it's spiritual, and for that sort of poverty there is no government program.

Dawkins Misses the Point

British biologist and uberatheist Richard Dawkins was interviewed recently on CNN and asked whether an absence of religion would leave us without a moral compass. Dawkins replied that the very idea that religion provides a moral compass is "horrible." For Dawkins, as for like-minded antitheists throughout the last three centuries, religion is seen as the cause of our moral problems, not the solution for them.

Syndicated columnist Dennis Prager, who is Jewish, wrote a rejoinder to Dawkins in which he states, as we've often stressed over the years here at Viewpoint, that if there's no personal, transcendent moral authority to ground our moral claims then any moral assertion is simply an expression of arbitrary, subjective preference. Prager puts it this way:

If there is no God, the labels "good" and "evil" are merely opinions. They are substitutes for "I like it" and "I don't like it." They are not objective realities.

Every atheist philosopher I have debated has acknowledged this. For example, at Oxford University I debated Professor Jonathan Glover, the British philosopher and ethicist, who said: "Dennis started by saying that I hadn't denied his central contention that if there isn't a God, there is only subjective morality. And that's absolutely true."

And the eminent Princeton philosopher Richard Rorty admitted that for secular liberals such as himself, "there is no answer to the question, 'Why not be cruel?'" Atheists like Dawkins who refuse to acknowledge that without God there are only opinions about good and evil are not being intellectually honest.

What's more, in the absence of that personal, transcendent ground, not only are our moral intuitions merely subjective expressions of personal preference or social convention, like our preference for wine with dinner, the whole idea of moral duty is nonsense. There can be no moral duty, for example, to care for the poor, to preserve the environment, or, as Rorty suggests, to be kind rather than cruel if there's no moral authority beyond our own predilections.

In Dawkins' world moral intuitions are the product of blind, impersonal evolutionary forces that shaped us for survival in the stone age, blind, impersonal forces cannot confer a duty or an obligation to behave one way rather than another. Evolution cannot tell us that we ought to be faithful to our spouses or honest in our businesses. It cannot adjudicate between the man who is kind and the man who is cruel.

Nor can popular opinion serve as a standard for right and wrong much less impose upon us a duty to behave in ways the masses prefer. Prager emphasizes the point:

To put this as clearly as possible: If there is no God who says, "Do not murder," murder is not wrong. Many people or societies may agree that it is wrong. But so what? Morality does not derive from the opinion of the masses. If it did, then apartheid was right; murdering Jews in Nazi Germany was right; the history of slavery throughout the world was right; and clitoridectomies and honor killings are right in various Muslims societies.

So, then, without God, why is murder wrong? Is it, as Dawkins argues, because reason says so?

My reason says murder is wrong, just as Dawkins's reason does. But, again, so what? The pre-Christian Germanic tribes of Europe regarded the Church's teaching that murder was wrong as preposterous. They reasoned that killing innocent people was acceptable and normal because the strong should do whatever they wanted.

Reason cannot arbitrate this question. One person may be convinced that his reason tells him that he should care about others. Another may be equally convinced by reason that he should always put his own interests first. How do we decide who's right if each man is his own authority?

Prager again:

Years ago, I interviewed Pearl and Sam Oliner, two professors of sociology at California State University at Humboldt and the authors of one of the most highly-regarded works on altruism, The Altruistic Personality. The book was the product of the Oliners' lifetime of study of non-Jewish rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. The Oliners, it should be noted, are secular, not religious, Jews; they had no religious agenda.

I asked Samuel Oliner, "Knowing all you now know about who rescued Jews during the Holocaust, if you had to return as a Jew to Poland and you could knock on the door of only one person in the hope that they would rescue you, would you knock on the door of a Polish lawyer, a Polish doctor, a Polish artist or a Polish priest?" Without hesitation, he said, "a Polish priest." And his wife immediately added, "I would prefer a Polish nun."

Why? I suggest that it's because only the priest (or nun) have an objective duty to help, to be willing to risk their own lives to aid those who were being unjustly hunted down and killed. None of the others, unless they are theists, have any reason why they should risk their lives for others. They may do it because of some emotional preference, but they have no duty to do it. That's why so many of the rescuers of European Jews were Christians and why so many of them, when asked later why they did it, replied simply that they were only doing what God expected of them. Given their faith and devotion they could do no other.

Prager goes on to make a number of other interesting and important comments which would repay the effort to read his column.

Looking for Unicorns

It's a fundamental tenet of conservative thought that government is rarely able to do anything efficiently and is usually unable to do it well. In fact, the very fact that it does what it does with other people's money and the fact that individuals who prove themselves incompetent are rarely held accountable virtually guarantees that any large government undertaking will be a bureaucratic nightmare.

If anyone scoffs at this claim all one need do to silence the scoffer is to point to the Obamacare rollout as a case in point.

It turns out that the software to enroll people on the exchanges was not only poorly designed, it was designed by different teams at different ends of the system, and, worst of all, despite having had almost four years to get it right, it was apparently never thoroughly tested. As a result, trying to find someone who successfully enrolled on the federal website a week after it opened is, the Washington Post drolly observes, like looking for a unicorn.

The administration's lame excuse that demand was unexpectedly high got this riposte from the editors at USA Today:

[Todd] Park [the administration's chief tech advisor] said the administration expected 50,000 to 60,000 simultaneous users. It got 250,000. Compare that with the similarly rocky debut seven years ago of exchanges to obtain Medicare drug coverage. The Bush administration projected 20,000 simultaneous users and built capacity for 150,000. That's the difference between competence and incompetence.

The Obama administration has been a laboratory in which the premise that liberal/socialist big government will usher in something approximating the millenial kingdom has actually been tested. Unfortunately for government enthusiasts the most liberal administration ever to accede to power in the U.S. has manifestly failed the test. Not only has the current bunch in the White House revealed itself to be arguably one of the most dishonest, most corrupt, and most lawless administrations in our nation's history, it has also demonstrated itself to be among the most inept.

Maybe there's no connection between liberalism and the embarrassing shortcomings we see on display in Washington. The bungled rollout, the repeated scandals, the incessant falsehoods, the President's dictatorial and alarmingly unconstitutional revisions to the AFA (as well as his refusal to enforce other laws passed by the people's representatives)- maybe they're all, in the end, really George Bush's fault.

We Are What We Read. And Watch

An article by Julianne Chiaet at Scientific American notes that research is showing that reading literary fiction actually heightens the empathy we have for other people. Her article causes me to wonder about what I think is a very important question, but first here's an excerpt from her report:

Emanuele Castano, a social psychologist, along with PhD candidate David Kidd conducted five studies in which they divided a varying number of participants (ranging from 86 to 356) and gave them different reading assignments: excerpts from genre (or popular) fiction, literary fiction, nonfiction or nothing. After they finished the excerpts the participants took a test that measured their ability to infer and understand other people’s thoughts and emotions.

When study participants read non-fiction or nothing, their results were unimpressive. When they read excerpts of genre fiction, such as Danielle Steel’s The Sins of the Mother, their test results were dually insignificant. However, when they read literary fiction, such as The Round House by Louise Erdrich, their test results improved markedly—and, by implication, so did their capacity for empathy.

The results suggest that reading fiction is a valuable socializing influence. The study data could inform debates over how much fiction should be included in educational curricula and whether reading programs should be implemented in prisons, where reading literary fiction might improve inmates’ social functioning and empathy. Castano also hopes the finding will encourage autistic people to engage in more literary fiction, in the hope it could improve their ability to empathize without the side effects of medication.

Here's my question: If what people read can effect their empathy, can what they watch do the same thing, and if reading literary fiction and viewing movies of a similar nature can heighten empathy are there genres of books and movies that diminish it? Can we be raising a generation of young people steeped in pornography, violent movies and video games which are turning some of them into cold, unfeeling, moral zombies and making many more less empathetic than they would otherwise be?

Could the reason there are so many who revel in violence, who have little or no empathy for other human beings, be a result of a culture that has extinguished empathy by saturating young minds with brutal images?

I would be stunned if the answer to this question ever turned out to be "no" because it seems almost self-evident, certainly obvious, that the answer is "yes." We become what we feed ourselves. A generation that has been exposed to unprecedented levels of pornography and violence can't help but become inured to it and consequently suffer a diminution of their capacity to see others as persons, to feel what they feel, and to care about what happens to them.

We all reside on a spectrum whose poles are empathy and sociopathy. What we watch and read shifts that spectrum in one direction or the other. We don't remain static. Those on the empathetic side, if they feed themselves violence will shift to some degree toward the opposite pole, and those nearer the sociopathic pole, if they feed on violent movies and video games will be shifted even nearer to that pole.

Pornography, I'm convinced, works similarly, but our culture vehemently denies that either are harmful even as mass murders of children and the tragic fallout from sexually unhinged lifestyles fill our daily newspapers with accounts too sad to read. In my opinion, the culture is denying the obvious.

Plato's Cave for Modern Man

The following is a slightly revised version of a post I first put up on March 2nd, 2006. I thought I'd run it again since some of its themes are similar to topics I've been discussing with my students:

Imagine that the year is 2030 and computer technology has advanced to the point where a sufficiently clever programmer (you, for example) can write software that would project beings onto the monitor's screen that can potentially evolve from very simple forms to highly complex structures capable, mirabile dictu, of rational thought.

One evening you download the software that confers upon these creatures this marvelous potential and sit back to watch what they'll do with it. Eventually, after much morphing and mutating, the creatures attain a level of mental ability at which they are capable of reflection, cognition, and language.

They begin to communicate among themselves, asking questions about their world and their existence. To them their world (we'll call it "screen world") is a three dimensional space since, although they are confined to a flat screen, they think themselves, like characters on a movie screen, to move in all directions. You're very pleased with your creation. You're thrilled with the diversity of personalities that emerges among the creatures which you dub "screenies." You even find yourself growing fond of and attached to them.

As the night lengthens, you watch in rapt fascination as one of your screenies begins to think deeply about what exactly it (let's assume it's a "he") is. At first he explains himself in terms of shifting phosphor dots, but this, he realizes, is only a superficial level of explanation, and the screenie isn't satisfied with it. There must be a deeper understanding, a deeper level of reality, a reality that lies beyond the abilities you've programmed into the screenies to apprehend.

He and his fellows do some mathematical calculations and come to a breathtaking conclusion. The "ultimate" explanation for the population of creatures in screen world is a level of reality that they can never observe or visit, but which must exist. The equations demand it. They realize that there must be a whole set of complicated phenomena working to produce emanations from a multi-dimensional realm that somehow generates the relatively "flat" world they inhabit.

They do more calculations and come to an even more astonishing discovery. The mechanism that produces their world must be controlled by an even deeper level of phenomena: electrons, circuits, and microchips and who knows what all else. Finally, awed by their findings, they realize that this whole theoretical edifice they've constructed must be run by an information source, a set of algorithms and codes, that exists somewhere but which is inaccessible to them.

Your creatures are very excited. They have plumbed the basic laws, parameters, forces and material constituents of their world. They don't know where these ultimate elements come from or how they came to be organized in the fashion they are, and indeed they're convinced that they can never know any of this for certain. They've taken their investigation as deep as it's possible for them to go, they believe.

Then these marvelous beings, which have really sprung from your creative genius, draw a disappointing philosophical conclusion. Having explained their existence in terms of the ultimate physical constituents and laws they've deduced from the phenomena of their experience, they conclude that that is all there is to be explained. Those circuits, microchips, electrical energy and even the software are all that's involved in generating them and their world. It's an amazing thing, they agree, it's highly improbable they acknowledge, but there you have it. There's no need to explain it any further, nor any way to explain it even if there were a need. Unable to account for the world of microchips, codes and algorithms they simply accept it all as a brute fact. A given.

Screen world, to the extent that it's explicable, is explicable, they believe, solely in terms of the machinery in front of which you sit shaking your incredulous head. You're delighted that your creatures were able to reason their way so far toward the truth but dismayed that they lacked the wit to see that anything as fantastically complex as the laws and processes that generate their world cries out for even deeper explanation. Why, you wonder, don't the screenies realize that something as amazing as they and their world doesn't just happen through blind mechanistic forces and luck? Why don't they recognize that screen world demands an intelligent cause as its truly ultimate explanation?

You decide to tweak the program. You write the code for another being, one that is, perhaps, somewhat of a cyber-replica of yourself. He's your heart and soul, so to speak. You will in a sense visit screen world yourself through this "agent." He contains much of your knowledge about the reality beyond screen world, and when you download him into the computer up he pops on the screen. You've programmed this agent to tell the rest of the screenies that their world, the world of the monitor and even the deeper world of the computer, is an infinitesimal fraction of the really real. By comparison it's next to nothing, a shadow of the world beyond the screen.

Your agent proceeds to explain to them as best he can that they, contrary to their belief, actually inhabit only two dimensions and that all around them lies a third dimension that they could never perceive or comprehend but which nevertheless exists, and that even now you, their creator, are observing them from outside the screen in another world that they cannot begin to conceptualize, much less observe, from their "prison" within the screen.

Your agent reveals to them, moreover, that you inhabit a reality infinitely richer than screen world, an idea they unfortunately find wholly preposterous. He tells them that as wonderful and impressive as their discoveries about their world are they've really just scratched the surface of understanding the really real and that, indeed, they aren't actually "real" themselves at all. They're simply epiphenomenal electronic manifestations of ideas in your mind, a congeries of shifting dots of color on a flat screen. They're in fact nothing more than virtual beings.

They scoff at all this. They grow angry. They tell your agent to get lost, his message is confusing and misleading to the young and impeding progress toward the goal of making screen world a better place. They wish to hear no more of his insane, superstitious babblings. They are the "brights" in screen world, the intellectually gifted, and they will stick to science and leave his untestable metaphysical speculations to the priests and shamans among them.

When the agent persists in trying to persuade them that mere mechanical processes could never by themselves produce such complex creatures as screenies, that the algorithms and coordinated flows of energy and pattern in their world, as well as the material organization of the computer, must have been intelligently engineered, they sneer and refuse to allow him to speak such nonsense any further.

They reason among themselves that their existence may be improbable, but what of it? Had their world not been the way it is they would not be there to observe it, so it's not so extraordinary after all. Others say that there are probably a near infinite number of worlds like theirs, and that among so many it's not so astonishing that there'd be one possessing the properties that screen world has and boasting creatures like themselves.

You're surprised, and a little hurt, that the screenies react this way. You can't believe that having come so far they'd refuse to entertain the idea that there must be more to the origin of the information that infuses their world than just blind matter, brute force and random chance. But they're obstinate. They have all the explanation for their existence they care to have.

To be dependent upon unthinking processes is one thing - they're still superior, after all, to the processes and forces upon which they are contingent because they can think and those processes can't - but to be dependent upon a being who is so thoroughly superior to them in every way is, they think, degrading. So that they might be more appreciative of what you've created, you entertain briefly the idea of adjusting their software in such fashion as to make the conclusion that an intelligent programmer has created them ineluctable. You decide against it, however, when you realize that compelled appreciation is no appreciation at all.

And so, with a sad sigh of disappointment and resignation, you shut down the computer and go to bed.

Federalist #58

President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have both insisted in so many words that the House Republicans, in seeking to defund or curtail the Affordable Care Act, are somehow doing something illicit.

They both need to brush up on, or perhaps introduce themselves to, the thinking of the American Founding Fathers, particularly James Madison. A student of mine reminds me that in the Federalist Papers (#58) Madison wrote this:

The House of Representatives cannot only refuse, but they alone can propose the supplies requisite for the support of government. They, in a word, hold the purse....This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure."

The House of Representatives, by withholding funding from a law they believe will have disastrous consequences for the American people, is doing precisely the sort of thing the Founders envisioned.

The objections raised against the Republican refusal to fund the law with no strings attached are ludicrous. We hear it said, for example, that Obamacare is the law of the land and therefore must be obeyed, but where were these voices when Mr. Obama by executive fiat modified this law in a dozen different ways, carving out exemptions for special interests and imposing delays, none of which he has the legal authority to do?

Where were these voices when the Obama administration simply decided that it would no longer enforce our immigration laws or the Defense of Marriage Act? Why are Republican congressmen obligated to uphold the law but Democratic presidents are not?

That something is the law of the land doesn't seem to matter to those who have no respect for law in the first place and have the power to flout it, but the House GOP, we are to believe, is doing something nefarious when they exercise their constitutional prerogative to refuse to fund a law that has already had devastating consequences for millions of people.

Neither the Democrats nor their media groupies have offered anything close to a rebuttal of the arguments made by people like Senator Ted Cruz and others. They've offered no rejoinder because they have none. Bereft of compelling arguments, they're reduced to the tactic of name-calling ("terrorists," "arsonists," "suicide bombers," etc.) and the politics of personal destruction.

It's very sad and even sadder that the general public seems not to care that our political discourse has sunk to so low a level and does not demand that, instead of ad hominem, the media and the Democrats offer solid reasons why the Republicans are wrong in their assessment of the damage that the AFA will do to the country.

After all, what matters is whether the Republican assessment of the effects of the law is correct. If it is then they are certainly right, indeed duty-bound, to do everything in their constitutional power to stop it.

The House Republicans and their colleagues in the Senate may not succeed, but they're fighting the good fight against the creeping leviathan state and the people who are throwing verbal acid in their faces in the media and in Washington are doing so because there's nothing else they can say or do.

Don't Blame the GOP

House Speaker John Boehner has released a summary of the 14 spending bills the House of Representatives have passed to keep the government open. All but one of them has been blocked by the Democrats in the Senate and been threatened with a veto by the President.

It's awfully difficult to see how the media can continue to portray this as a Republican shutdown of the government when the Republicans are passing spending bills to keep the government open but are seeing those bills thwarted by the Democrat majority.

Here's a timeline of the bills - every one of which passed overwhelmingly in the Republican controlled House of Representatives - with a summary of what they would fund:

9/20:
1. Continuing Resolution which completely funds the government at current levels but does not fund Obamacare.
9/28:
2. Continuing Resolution (CR) which completely funds the government but delays Obamacare for one year and eliminates the tax on pacemakers and children's hearing aids.
3. Bill to insure that military would be paid in the event of a government shutdown.
9/30:
4. CR that completely funds the government and Obamacare but requires that Congress be subject to the same provisions of Obamacare to which all Americans are subject and also delays the mandate requiring individuals to purchase insurance. The delay is similar to the delay the President granted to big business.
5. Same as previous but with a proviso to form a special negotiating committee with Senate Democrats to resolve differences.
10/1:
6. Speaker Boehner appointed a committee of House negotiators to hammer out a deal with the Senate Democrats. Democrats refused to negotiate.
10/2:
7. Bill to allow the District of Columbia to continue operating.
8. Bill to open all National Parks, museums, and monuments.
9. Bill to fund the National Institute of Health and research being done on life-saving cures.
10/3:
10. Bill to pay our National Guard and Reservists.
11. Bill to fund veteran's benefits including disability claims and other programs.
10/4:
12. Bill to provide immediate funding to FEMA, the federal disaster relief agency.
13. Bill to fund the Supplemental Nutrition and Assistance Program (SNAP) which provides food for poor children.
10/5:
14. Bill to guarantee compensation to federal workers furloughed during the government shutdown.

To date the Democrats and the President have blocked each of these measures except #3 and they haven't yet decided what to do about the last one. In order to force the Republicans to fund Obamacare - an increasingly unpopular, expensive, and onerous arrogation of power on the part of the federal government - the self-proclaimed "party of compassion," the "people's party," has shut down the government and are vindictively punishing a lot of American citizens in order to get their way. It's ugly.

To see how ugly the administration can be and how classless and childish they are see this.

Do They Vote?

Ever wonder why Washington is so dysfunctional? One reason, perhaps, is that America is filled with citizens who have no idea what's going on in the country, but who, in many cases, vote anyway.

Jimmy Kimmel went on the street recently to ask pedestrians which law they favored more, the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare. The two, of course, are the same thing, but that fact has apparently eluded a lot of folks who nevertheless had an opinion on the question.

In fact, the most humorous part of this video, in my opinion, was how some of the interviewees tried to give the impression that they really knew the difference between the two acts and had an informed opinion on which was better.

It's discouraging that there are many Americans who take the time and make the effort to be reasonably well-informed on the issues so that they can cast a responsible vote, but whose vote is potentially cancelled out by someone who has no idea what they're voting for but who votes anyway.

Every election we hear voices in the media and elsewhere telling us that we have a duty to vote. That's false. We have a duty to be informed. If we fail in that duty then, in my opinion, we have a duty not to vote.

The Writing Boy

The automaton (HT: ENV) featured in this video is a work of genius. It was developed in the 18th century by a Swiss clockmaker named Pierre Jaquet-Droz and can be programmed to write almost any sentence. It's all mechanism - no mind, no soul, no free will, just cams and gears. It's an apt metaphor for how metaphysical naturalism views the human person:

If human beings really are just flesh and bone automata then it's hard to see how we can avoid the conclusion that men and women have no objective dignity, worth, or inherent rights. There's no reason to see or treat human beings any differently than we do a machine. Unfortunately, wherever and whenever that idea has taken hold among those who have power the predictable result has been mass death and destruction. Ideas have consequences.

At any rate, one difference between the automaton and the human person, according to the naturalist, is that the automaton is intelligently designed whereas a human is not. The naturalist has to say this, of course, on pain of being no longer a naturalist, but it certainly seems odd. It taxes our sense of both wonder and credulity to think that an intelligent clockmaker could be so brilliant as to make the writing boy yet we are to insouciantly accept that blind nature, acting randomly and purely through purposeless processes could produce a real human or even just a single living cell, both of which are almost infinitely more complex than is this automaton.

We have evidence that intelligent agents can produce such wonders, but we have no evidence that such wonders can be produced by unintelligent, impersonal forces. The naturalist's belief that they can and have is simply an expression of blind faith.

Cold-Hearted Harry

CNN's Dana Bash does the unthinkable and asks a Democrat a tough question. Majority Leader Harry Reid appears to be flummoxed by it, dances around it, hems, haws, and clears his throat, finally resorting to insulting Bash for her impertinence in asking His Majesty such an insolent question in the first place:

The background to Bash's question was an earlier CNN story about kids being turned away from cancer treatment at an NIH facility because of the federal shutdown. The implication of the story was that Republicans are cruel and heartless and responsible for the children not getting treatment because the Republicans have shut down the NIH. What wasn't reported was that the House Republicans had passed a bill that would fully fund the NIH, but Senator Reid has refused to bring it to the Senate floor for a vote.

Those kids were turned away because of Reid's intransigence and it's obvious from his exchange with Bash that he knows he can't defend it. He asks rhetorically and rather weirdly what gives the House of Representatives the right to determine what gets funded and what doesn't (Answer: The Constitution) and even takes complete leave of his senses by asking why he should want to save a child dying of cancer. I can imagine every future political opponent he ever faces in Nevada playing this video non-stop in television ads.

The Republicans are willing to fund the government, they're willing to pass spending bills for everything that needs funding. The only thing they will not fund is Obamacare. Reid and the Dems are in a tough position. They have to reject the House spending bills and keep the government shut down while convincing the country that it's really the mean Republicans who are responsible for the shutdown. They know that if they don't do this the Republicans will fund everything except the AFA, the government will be back up and running, and Obamacare, the biggest power grab in the history of this country, will simply die of inanition.

There's a lot at stake, and the pressure is evidently taking its toll on Senator Reid.

Unintended Consequences

Much is being made at some conservative opinion outlets about the fact that the insurance exchanges which were supposed to be ready by today seem to be in a mess. I guess that's indicative of something, but I don't think it's really what people should be focusing on. There are at least two things about Obamacare which are far more insidious and damaging to the country than difficulties with the roll out.

The first is that Obamacare represents a takeover by government of a vast swath of American life. Americans are becoming increasingly beholden to the leviathan state and increasingly less free as a result. Government is like a drug that saps initiative and creates dependency. The more it obtrudes upon our lives the more addicted to it we become. Obamacare will be like crack cocaine, reducing large segments of the population to compliant, complacent vassals.

Second, in order to insure about 17 million uninsured Americans, Obamacare is causing enormous economic damage throughout the economy. National Review's Andrew Johnson lists 100 examples of how Obamacare is directly responsible for lost jobs, reduced hours, and rising costs. Here are his first ten:

Corporations

1. IBM: Earlier this month, the computer giant, once famed for its paternalism, announced it would remove 110,000 of its Medicare-eligible retirees from the company’s health insurance and give them subsidies to purchase coverage through the Obamacare exchanges. Retirees fear that they will not get the level of coverage they are used to, and that the options will be bewildering.

2. Delta Air Lines: In a letter to employees, Delta Air Lines revealed that the company’s health-care costs will rise about $100 million next year alone, in large part because of Obamacare. The airline said that in addition to several other changes, it would have to drop its specially crafted insurance plans for pilots because the “Cadillac tax” on luxurious health plans has made them too expensive.

3. UPS: Fifteen thousand employees’ spouses will no longer be able to use UPS’s health-care plan because they have access to coverage elsewhere. The “costs associated with the Affordable Care Act have made it increasingly difficult to continue providing the same level of health care benefits to our employees at an affordable cost,” the delivery giant said in a company memo. The move is expected to save the company $60 million next year.

4. Caterpillar Inc.: In the law’s first year, the machinery manufacturer estimated before its passage, Obamacare would add more than $100 million in health-care costs. “We can ill afford cost increases that place us at a disadvantage versus our global competitors,” a Caterpillar executive wrote lawmakers, saying that the law would not meet the goal of providing good, inexpensive health care for all Americans.

5. SeaWorld: SeaWorld used to let part-time employees work up to 32 hours per week, but the company is dropping the limit to 28 hours to keep them under the 30-hour threshold at which it would be required to provide health insurance under Obamacare. More than 80 percent of the company’s thousands of employees are part-time and/or seasonal.

Medical-Device Tax

6. Stryker Corp.: Stryker Corp., a Michigan medical-device manufacturer, laid off about 1,000 employees earlier this year due to the Affordable Care Act’s 2.3 percent excise tax on medical devices. The company estimated that the tax would cost it approximately $100 million next year. “Stryker remains significantly concerned with the upcoming medical device excise tax and its negative impact on jobs and innovation and will continue to work with Congress to try to repeal the tax,” said the company’s CEO.

7. Welch Allyn: The manufacturer announced that it will have to cut approximately 10 percent of its 2,750 employees, 275 in all, because of the medical-device tax. The company also plans to consolidate manufacturing centers, moving some operations from Beaverton, Ore., to its facility in Skaneateles Falls, N.Y.

8. Smith & Nephew: The British company informed nearly 100 employees at its Massachusetts and Tennessee facilities that they would be laid off “in order to absorb [the] cost burden” of the tax on medical devices.

Hospitals, Nonprofits

9. Cleveland Clinic, Ohio: One of the world’s best-known hospitals announced in September that it would slash jobs and up to 6 percent of its annual $6 billion budget in anticipation of costs associated with Obamacare’s implementation. A spokeswoman for the clinic announced that approximately $330 million would be cut, but she did not say how many of the 44,000 employees the clinic would let go. The Cleveland Clinic is Cleveland’s largest employer and the second-largest employer in Ohio.

10. Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, North Carolina: Last November, the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, in Winston-Salem, announced that 950 full-time-equivalent positions would have to be eliminated in order to make up costs from the health-care law.

There are 90 other examples at the link. Everything from labor unions, to mom and pop businesses to universities are laying off, cutting hours, and not hiring because of the costs imposed by this law. The fact that the start up is chaotic is bad, but compared to the human cost that this law is exacting, it's really not significant.

That's why the Republicans have sought first to defund it, then to delay it, and now to at least make Congressmen and their staffs live under the law that they've imposed upon the rest of us. Nevertheless, neither the Democrats in the Senate nor the President will budge. Indeed they won't even negotiate. Rather than undo some of the worst elements of this law they've chosen instead to shut down the government and then blame the Republicans for whatever bad consequences come of the shutdown.

It's no wonder people despise both politics and big government.

A Shutdown Isn't Really a Shutdown

If the government shuts down what would happen? Sean Lengell at the Washington Examiner gives us the scoop on what'll likely happen if Congress does not agree on a budget bill by tomorrow:

Up to 800,000 federal employees could be furloughed as services deemed "non-essential," such as national parks, passport offices and most regulatory agencies -- including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Securities and Exchange Commission -- are closed.

If the federal government closes for business Tuesday, non-essential employees would be furloughed without pay. "Essential" workers-- such as military personnel, border security officials and air traffic controllers -- would be told to report to work. They wouldn't receive paychecks during the shutdown but would be paid retroactively after Congress passes a government funding bill.

Mail would be still be delivered, Social Security checks still be would sent out and airports would remain open. New Medicare applicants likely would have to wait to be enrolled, though a shutdown isn't expected to affect medical services for those already in the program.

But a shutdown likely would shutter national parks, museums and monuments, including all Smithsonian Institution museums, as well as passport offices and visa application centers.

There's more at the link.

Tomorrow is also the day the rollout of Obamacare is supposed to take place. By all reports it will not be smooth. Ramirez thinks it'll be, well, here's what he thinks:

Human Origins

There's an interesting article at Salvo magazine on human evolution, or rather the lack of evidence for it. Casey Luskin reviews the current state of paleoanthropology and shows that the fossil record contains two kinds of hominin fossils - complete apes and complete humans. There are no transitional forms, or at least none that paleoanthropologists agree to be intermediates.

It's an interesting and informative piece. One scientist remarked that if we take the fossil record at face value it's as if there was a kind of Big Bang at the outset of the appearance of human beings. They appear suddenly, completely human, and very much different from apes.

Another observed that something quite remarkable happened when humans appeared and the novel developments weren't just in the brain.

This all runs counter to contemporary Darwinian assumptions about human provenience, of course, because in the evolutionary scheme of things humans unquestionably evolved from ape-like ancestors. Maybe they did, I certainly don't know, but Luskin shows that if they did there's no compelling evidence in the fossil record that they did. The reason why it's widely assumed that humans evolved from ape-like creatures is not because there's fossil evidence of it, but because it's assumed a priori that the Darwinian grand narrative must be true.

Panpsychism

Philosophers and scientists have been perplexed for centuries by the phenomenon of human consciousness. There seems to be no plausible explanation for how it could have arisen in the evolutionary scheme of things and no explanation for how conscious experience - our sensations, beliefs, doubts, hopes, etc. - could be produced by a brain made of nothing but unthinking atoms.

The quandary has led some philosophers back to a view that has actually been around for a long time, the view that somehow every particle of matter contains a tiny bit of consciousness or mind. Mind, in this view, pervades the entire cosmos. This is called panpsychism.

I came across an article on panpsychism written in 2007 by Jim Holt for the New York Times in which Holt lays out the basic problem:

Most of us have no doubt that our fellow humans are conscious. We are also pretty sure that many animals have consciousness. Some, like the great ape species, even seem to possess self-consciousness, like us. Others, like dogs and cats and pigs, may lack a sense of self, but they certainly appear to experience inner states of pain and pleasure. About smaller creatures, like mosquitoes, we are not so sure; certainly we have few compunctions about killing them. As for plants, they obviously do not have minds, except in fairy tales. Nor do nonliving things like tables and rocks.

All that is common sense. But common sense has not always proved to be such a good guide in understanding the world. And the part of our world that is most recalcitrant to our understanding at the moment is consciousness itself. How could the electrochemical processes in the lump of gray matter that is our brain give rise to — or, even more mysteriously, be — the dazzling technicolor play of consciousness, with its transports of joy, its stabs of anguish and its stretches of mild contentment alternating with boredom?

This has been called “the most important problem in the biological sciences” and even “the last frontier of science.” It engrosses the intellectual energies of a worldwide community of brain scientists, psychologists, philosophers, physicists, computer scientists and even, from time to time, the Dalai Lama.

Imagine that, like the images on a computer screen, the physical world consists of pixels embedded in a material substrate. But these are not pixels made of chemicals like those on your monitor, but rather they're pixels made of mind. If you can imagine this you are on your way to grasping the panpsychist hypothesis:

So vexing has the problem of consciousness proved that some of these thinkers have been driven to a hypothesis that sounds desperate, if not downright crazy. Perhaps, they say, mind is not limited to the brains of some animals. Perhaps it is ubiquitous, present in every bit of matter, all the way up to galaxies, all the way down to electrons and neutrinos, not excluding medium-size things like a glass of water or a potted plant. Moreover, it did not suddenly arise when some physical particles on a certain planet chanced to come into the right configuration; rather, there has been consciousness in the cosmos from the very beginning of time.

This view is not popular among those who hold to a naturalistic metaphysics for the simple reason that naturalists are leery of anything that sounds suspiciously like an attempt to reinsert God back into the universe from which he was banished by modernity, and the panpsychist view certainly swings the gate wide open. Moreover, naturalists are often materialists - i.e. they believe that matter (and energy) are all there is, there's no room for an immaterial substance such as mind in the materialist's world-picture.

Yet the problem of how to explain consciousness haunts the discussion. It's like the elephant in the middle of the room that can't be ignored. Whether the solution turns out to be panpsychism or some version of mind/body dualism, it seems clear that materialism is gently being shoved in the direction of the boneyard of obsolete ideas.

There's more on Holt's article on panpsychism at the link.

Ted Cruz

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has been roundly and viciously criticized, not only by Democrats but also by his fellow Republicans, for launching a 21 hour filibuster Tuesday in an attempt to draw the nation's attention to the very deep flaws in the Affordable Care Act. Cruz's filibuster was undertaken, ostensibly, in what he knew to be a doomed attempt to defund the whole health care plan, which almost every Republican has agreed needs to be done but which no other Republican has any idea how to accomplish.

It's been very disappointing to see the response from his fellow Republicans. Many of them merely disagreed with the tactic, which is fine, but many others engaged in personal attacks on Cruz that were deeply discouraging. Senator John McCain, Rep. Peter King, and ersatz conservative Joe Scarborough at MSNBC were among the worst.

Senator Cruz during his 21 hour filibuster

Aside from the scurrilous attacks by these men, one of the more frustrating criticisms of Cruz was the assertion that what he was doing would never work. It was quixotic, a fool's errand, to fight a battle that couldn't be won. The Democrats control the Senate and the White House and there's no hope that Cruz would succeed. Thus, he was portrayed as everything from a "terrorist," an "arsonist," and an "extremist," (by Democrats) to a "fraud" and an "idiot" (by Republicans). I think this is not only a shameful response, it's absurd.

It's a bit like calling the Texans at the Alamo fools for standing and fighting when there was no way they could win. It's like calling the Spartans at Thermopylae idiots for refusing to flee when they knew they were in a hopeless position. I'd bet that many of those who think Cruz a "whacko bird" for fighting a fight in which he couldn't prevail were themselves inspired as they watched the movie version of Les Miserables by the young men who chose to fight an unwinnable battle on the barricades for the principle of liberty. The man who fights against impossible odds for what he believes to be right, who fights for a principle, is not a fool. In fact, we call such men heroes.

This leads me to another shameful criticism of Cruz, namely, that he only carried out the filibuster in order to bolster his chances of gaining his party's presidential nomination in 2016, not because he was animated by principle. According to the people who allege this, Cruz is in reality an unprincipled fraud whose primary motivation for taking the lead in the fight to defund Obamacare is pure political self-interest, but if this really was Cruz's motivation he chose a very odd strategy for achieving it - alienating the entire party establishment.

Furthermore, how do the people who bring this charge know that that is his motivation? What reason do they have for imputing ignoble motives to him? Have we become so cynical that we no longer believe that any politician ever does anything in the best interest of the country? Does everyone in politics always have a political motive for everything they do?

Why can't people disagree with someone without assuming the worst motives in that person? What sort of man is it who's so quick to attack an opponent with slander and insult, especially an opponent in one's own party? These attacks by Cruz's own colleagues in the GOP conference are not only extraordinarily hurtful they're historically unprecedented.

Throughout the barrage of invective, however, Cruz has responded with grace and forbearance, refusing to respond in kind to the calumnies to which he's been subjected. He's shown himself, through the arguments he's made and the irenic demeanor he has displayed, to have a compelling case against the Affordable Care Act, to be more principled than many of his detractors, and to be a far better man than any of his ugliest critics.

Mr. Obama Is about to Thank You for Your Vote

The future of health care in America, or at least the cost of insurance, is beginning to become clear. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has released a report that enables some conclusions to be drawn, and although news reports were giddily reporting that premiums for people who must buy their own insurance will be "sixteen percent lower than expected," that phrase is meaningless happy talk, according to Avik Roy at Forbes magazine. In fact, when you run the numbers, as Roy has done, it turns out that:

Based on a Manhattan Institute analysis of the HHS numbers, Obamacare will increase underlying insurance rates for younger men by an average of 97 to 99 percent, and for younger women by an average of 55 to 62 percent. Worst off is North Carolina, which will see individual-market rates triple for women, and quadruple for men.

These are national averages, but in the original article Roy breaks down the expected increase for each state for 27 and 40 year old males and females. In some states the increase is negligible, in others like Nebraska and North Carolina it's over 250%. Males will be especially hard hit in most states.

The administration has promised subsidies to lower income people to help them with the cost of their premiums but Roy shows that the subsidies won't help much:

However, the overall results make clear that most people will not receive enough in subsidies to counteract the degree to which Obamacare drives premiums upward. Remember that nearly two-thirds of the uninsured are under the age of 40. And that young and healthy people are essential to Obamacare; unless these individuals are willing to pay more for health insurance to subsidize everyone else, the exchanges will not serve the goal of providing coverage to the uninsured.

Roy closes with this:

For months, we’ve heard about how Obamacare’s trillions in health care subsidies were going to save America from rate shock. It’s not true. If you shop for coverage on your own, you’re likely to see your rates go up, even after accounting for the impact of pre-existing conditions, even after accounting for the impact of subsidies.

The Obama administration knows this, which is why its 15-page report makes no mention of premiums for insurance available on today’s market. Silence, they say, speaks louder than words. HHS’ silence on the difference between Obamacare’s insurance premiums and those available today tell you everything you need to know. Rates are going higher. And if you’re healthy, or you’re young, the Obama administration expects you to do your duty and pay up.

In other words, the claim that premiums are going to be "lower than expected" is small comfort. They're still going up and for some people the increase is going to look like that global warming hockey stick.

And remember that, courtesy of the august jurists on our nation's highest court, you are now required by your government to purchase insurance whether you want it or not, whether you think you need it or not. If you don't purchase it you'll be fined by the good folks at the IRS. The Supreme Court decided to call the fine a "tax" in order to keep it constitutional, but, of course, everyone, including the Obama administration, knows that it's a fine.

Check out the link for details on what the premium increases look like in your state and keep something in mind. The people who imposed this on the rest of us, our Democratic Congresspersons, have exempted themselves from it. They won't be paying those higher premiums, but they made sure that you will.

Three Geologists

Granville Sewell at Evolution News and Views places his tongue in his cheek and explains for us by means of a parable the difference between naturalism, intelligent design, and theistic evolution. His parable goes something like this:

Three geologists are standing at the base of Mt. Rushmore admiring the spectacle. One of them says, "This mountain depicts perfectly the faces of four presidents. It must have been created by a brilliant sculptor." The second geologist objects: "You're a geologist," he admonishes, "you should know that mountains are formed by natural forces and processes like vulcanism and plate tectonics. The rocks are then carved by other forces like wind and erosion. There's no need to posit an intelligent sculptor to explain those faces in the rock."

The third chimes in by telling the second that, "I agree with you. The natural forces of nature are perfectly adequate to explain these faces on the mountain. Only someone ignorant of science would think that they were intentionally designed." But then he turns to the first geologist and exclaims, "But what a magnificent result! There must have been a Master Sculptor standing by watching nature create this marvelous mountain."

The first geologist in Sewell's parable represents intelligent design theorists who believe that nature shows evidence of having been designed by an intelligent agent. The second geologist represents naturalism, the view that natural processes and forces are adequate to account for the apparent design we see in nature. The third geologist represents theistic evolutionists who believe that God exists but played no role in the evolution of life other than perhaps creating the laws that run the cosmos.

Sewell evidently thinks theistic evolution is a bit strange.

Can Science Satisfy? Pt. IV

This is our last post in a series on an article in the Boston Review by Tania Lombrozo. Lombrozo, it will be remembered, wishes to argue that science can fill one's life with as much meaning, significance, hope and joy as can traditional religious beliefs.

Unfortunately, the arguments she musters in support of this project are pretty thin. She bases much of her case on research which, as we saw in part III, does little more than infer causation from mere correlation. In other words, the conclusions of the research she cites, as Lombrozo presents them, are a bit like the conclusion that roosters cause the sunrise because every morning the sun comes up about an hour after the roosters start crowing.

At any rate, toward the end of her paper Lombrozo discusses how one can inject meaning into his or her life through the contemplation of the exquisite wonders of Darwinian evolution.

She writes that our sense of powerlessness in the face of cosmic randomness makes us susceptible to embracing origin accounts that invoke a Creator who has everything under control. Thus, if we frame evolution as an orderly, deterministic process in which things proceed in a fairly regular fashion people will find it comforting.

"This suggests that, like intelligent design, the idea of a non-random, deterministic evolutionary process helped relieve the discomfort of feeling powerless," she avers. But when evolution was presented to test subjects as a deterministic and orderly process, "the two appeared to be equivalent in their ability to compensate for low personal control."

So, the key to alleviating our existential forlornness, our despair at finding ourselves embedded in the meaningless cosmic flux, is to meditate not just upon Darwin's Origin of Species, but also on how law-like the whole evolutionary process is.

One imagines rescue teams dispatched to talk potential suicides down off the ledge being trained to have a few excerpts from Darwin committed to memory to recite to distraught souls convinced that their life is no longer worth living. Of course, it's not clear how assuring people that they're just an insignificant atom in the swirl of dust that is the cosmos would help convince anyone that he really shouldn't jump from the ledge. It seems, rather, that it'd have the opposite effect.

Anyway, Lombrozo enthuses about the deep existential satisfactions waiting to be mined from biology as long as the dross of random, chaotic features are filtered out:

What we can do is rethink the way evolutionary ideas are presented, and work to improve people’s understanding of the ways in which natural selection is—and is not—a random and unpredictable process. While humanity may be an evolutionary accident in some sense, our place in the tree of life can be characterized in highly systematic ways that highlight the exquisite dynamics of evolutionary change. There are patterns in the natural world, and grasping them can be revelatory.

That biology can be exciting and rewarding I heartily agree, but what religious belief does that no science can do is provide hope that personal death isn't final and that one's life has meaning. It provides a ground for thinking that justice will ultimately prevail, if not in this life then in the next, that those who suffer now will be rewarded, and that our moral judgments are grounded in something more solid than arbitrary personal preference. Religion, at least many forms of theistic belief, gives us a basis for thinking that human beings have dignity and worth, and that we're endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights by virtue of the fact that He bestowed them upon us.

Those are some of the consolations of theism, and, pace Ms Lombrozo, evolution, deterministic or otherwise, simply can't provide any of them.

Can Science Satisfy? Pt. III

In Part III of this series (see Pt. I here and Pt. II here) on an essay by Tania Lombrozo in the Boston Review I want to consider the reasons she offers for thinking that belief in science can be at least as existentially satisfying as can religious consolations. She opens this section of her piece with this:

In fact, four recent papers confirm that science offers many of the same existential benefits as religion. The implications are powerful.

Well, given what Ms Lombrozo tells us about these studies her use of the words "powerful" and "confirm" seems a bit hyperbolic. In fact, based on Ms. Lombrozo's account, what these studies do in each case is make the mistake of assuming that because two factors are correlated one of them must cause the other. This is the "false cause" fallacy, and Ms Lombrozo seems oblivious to it. Consider her first example:

First, consider a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, which examines whether belief in science can mitigate stress and anxiety about death. In an initial study, rowers were asked to fill out a questionnaire either immediately before a competition (a high-stress situation) or before a routine practice (a low-stress situation).

The questionnaire assessed the rowers’ belief in science by asking them to indicate how much they agreed with statements such as “science provides us with a better understanding of the universe than religion does” and “science is the most valuable part of human culture.”

Sure enough, participants in the high-stress condition were significantly more likely than those in the low-stress condition to endorse these claims, suggesting that affirming the value of science was a strategy for mitigating high levels of stress.

Because two variables were correlated the conclusion we're to draw is that preferring science over religion somehow, subconsciously reduces anxiety. This is more than a bit silly. It's like insisting that since you exhale about once every couple of seconds and since someone on earth dies once every couple of seconds, your exhalations must be the cause of the deaths.

And why does Ms Lombrozo conclude that affirming the value of science is in fact "a strategy" for mitigating stress? Are we to believe that athletes before a competition sit around in the locker room meditating on the wonders of the scientific method in order to calm their nerves? Who does that?

As philosophers frequently remind us, correlation does not necessarily imply causation, but Ms Lombrozo evidently thinks it does. She adds this:

The idea of a non-random, deterministic evolutionary process helped relieve the discomfort of feeling powerless.

One wishes she might have explained how the idea that we're the helpless product of deterministic processes over which we are powerless helps us relieve the discomfort of feeling powerless. Perhaps it's one of those paradoxical mysteries that must be taken on faith.

The conclusions drawn from the rest of the studies she cites are equally as mystifying, but you'll have to read those at the link.

She concludes her essay by tackling the question whether belief in evolution can make your life meaningful. I'll have something to say about that in Part IV next week.

Social Darwinism

Darwinians are fond of citing Theodosious Dobzhansky's assertion that "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." Evolution, we've often heard, is a grand narrative that expresses a universal law of development. It's a process that's been found to have application not just in biology but in numerous related disciplines as well. All of this is said with the glowing approval of the Darwinians. Until, that is, someone undertakes to apply the principals of selection and survival of the fittest to human populations, and then squawks of protest drown out all other conversation.

It's objected that Darwinism applied to society, what's called Social Darwinism, is a gross misapplication of the theory. Darwin didn't intend for his theory to be used in this manner, we're told. Besides, we've evolved ethical constraints and understandings that make it wrong for us to apply the principle of "survival of the fittest" to human populations.

Well, maybe, but I've not seen a good argument for why this should be.

George Dvorsky writes a fine essay at io9 on the history of social Darwinist thought and concludes with the standard rebuke of those who would extend Darwinism to human societies. I find Dvorsky's objections very unconvincing.

He writes:

Following the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1860, many political theorists and opportunistic politicians applied his findings to human society. In the 20th century, these ideas were put into practice — and it nearly destroyed us....Social Darwinism was one of the worst ideas ever.

Darwin’s theory served not merely as an explainer for life on Earth — it was also a veritable God-killer. What’s more, it “reduced” humanity to the level of animals, forever disrupting the Judeo-Christian notion that humanity existed in an exalted place between God and the natural world. Humanity, it was suddenly realized, was not privy to the whims of God, but rather to the laws of nature.

In the absence of God, went the argument, humanity needed to act to ensure its fitness and ongoing survival. Darwin’s thesis seemed to provide a blueprint on how this could be done. And thus began the transference of Darwinian theories from animal species to social groups and races — a development that would lead to catastrophic results.

Indeed it would, but once God was dispensed with there was no logical reason why this development shouldn't occur. Having been told over and over again that human beings really are just "naked apes" there was no reason not to apply the principles that governed the evolution of other apes to the human ape. Moreover, having killed God there was no reason why man, having become his own god, shouldn't undertake to engineer the human species in any way those who held power saw fit.

Critics of Social Darwinism like Dvorsky don't have a problem with throwing God overboard, but they do have a problem with following the implications of that act of cosmic rebellion to their logical endpoint.

What's the problem with applying Darwinism to human societies? As Dvorsky points out it led to eugenics, racialist theories of inferiority, anti-semitism, colonialism, war, and though Dvorsky doesn't mention it, the founding of Planned Parenthood as an organization among whose purposes was to cull the unfit from the population. He assumes we're all appalled at the record, but to paraphrase Dostoyevsky, once God is eliminated it becomes impossible to say that anything is wrong.

Dvorsky closes with a complaint:

Quite obviously, equating natural selection...with the ills of Social Darwinism is a tragic mistake. The science is still science, while Social Darwinism, with its gratuitous generalizations and misreadings of how natural selection works (e.g. it completely fails to account for group selection theories and the rise of such characteristics as empathy) will forever remain in the realm of pseudoscience.

Presumably, Dvorsky thinks that since we've evolved empathy for our fellow man that makes racism and anti-semitism and all the rest morally abhorrent, but I simply don't see how someone who's willing to embrace Darwinian naturalism can think that human empathy has any moral binding force. Also, if both human empathy and the human desire to kill off those outside one's own group are equally the products of Darwinian evolution, how can we say that empathy is right and killing outsiders is wrong? How can a blind, impersonal process make one of its results morally superior to another?

Here's one more excerpt:

What’s more, the application of Darwinian processes to human morality is about as facile an exercise as it gets. As a moral maxim, “survival of the fittest” is as unenlightened as it gets.

This is true enough, but only if one assumes the existence of a transcendent, personal moral authority. The problem for Dvorsky is that he wants to say that just because something happens in nature that doesn't make it right, and he's correct. But, if nature is all there is then neither can we say that whatever happens in nature, or in human society, is wrong. It just is.

For Dvorsky to express a sense of moral repugnance at the Social Darwinist's application of survival of the fittest to human societies is, given his metaphysical assumptions about God, absurd. What, exactly, is the basis for his moral sensitivities? What is the ground he stands on when making his moral judgments of the behavior of others?

For the metaphysical naturalist the answer can only be that he stands on nothing more substantial than his own subjective feelings and preferences, but to criticize others because their behavior doesn't conform to one's own tastes is nothing more than empty hubris.

Can Science Satisfy? Pt. II

In a previous post I looked at the early paragraphs of a column written by Tania Lombrozo in The Boston Review in which she argues that science can afford people the same quality and quantity of existential satisfaction as is offered by religion. I replied in my post that Ms Lombrozo makes some unfortunate claims in the early going of her essay which cast doubt on the reliability of what comes later.

Sadly, what comes later does little to alleviate that doubt.

She speculates freely, for instance, about possible psychological explanations for why belief in a purposeful creation is so widespread, but she never considers the possibility that perhaps so many people believe that the universe and life were in some way created because that explanation makes more sense than does the idea that it all just happened by accident. At least it makes more sense to anyone who's not already committed to metaphysical naturalism. Here's some of what Lombrozo writes:

[P]sychologist Paul Bloom argues that creationism and belief in God may be “bred in the bone,” byproducts of the very evolutionary forces that shaped the human mind....some have claimed that humans are “promiscuously teleological,” saddled with a tendency to construe objects and their properties as designed for a purpose. Understanding the natural world in terms of design suggests some prolific operator behind the scenes, so theistic stories of creation fill a useful explanatory role for the teleologically minded.

Relatedly, humans appear to be overzealous in our attributions of agency, inclined to posit some sort of person or beastie at the slightest provocation—the sound of a broken twig in a forest, the creak on an old staircase, or the face-like constellation of whorls in a cloud....The comforts afforded by religious beliefs in the face of death also play a role in promoting the idea of a creator.

All of which is to say that, for her, the plausibility of competing theories is not relevant to which explanation people will believe. Rather, there must be some psychological neurosis that causes people to reject metaphysical naturalism and embrace supernatural creation. The credulity of these poor souls must be due, ironically, to psychological hang-ups bestowed upon them by the very evolutionary process that these people are rejecting.

But there's also another possibility for why so many are so intellectually obdurate about this matter: Science is hard to understand. Lombrozo quotes Richard Dawkins in The Blind Watchmaker: “It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe.”

Well, maybe so, but could it be instead that it's hard to believe Darwinism because the human brain is specifically designed to be able to distinguish intuitively between the products of chance and physical forces and the products of intelligent engineering? Clearly, the information content of living things, their specified complexity, is very difficult to explain in terms of physical mechanisms we know to be operating today.

Lombrozo adds that,

Indeed, many psychologists have argued that, beyond the desire for comforting religious belief, additional tendencies conspire to make natural selection especially difficult to understand and accept, particularly when applied to the case of humans.

This is a clever tactic: The reason simple-minded folks don't believe Darwinism, she avers, is because they're just not smart enough. Smart people, which we'd all like to be, embrace Darwinism. Dumb people, or people with psychological maladies, which none of us want to be, reject it. The problem with Darwinism isn't the theory, it's with the doubters who are just not bright enough to understand it, or so her reasoning goes.

She erects a straw man by shifting her discussion from evolution writ large to natural selection. The number of people who doubt natural selection is probably vanishingly small, but Lombrozo equates natural selection with the Neo-Darwinian "grand narrative" that all of life developed naturalistically from prebiotic ingredients into all the amazing life forms we see today solely through the action of natural processes, chance, and time. It's that Grand Narrative about which people are skeptical. It's the claim that natural selection, unaided by intelligent guidance, can produce a human brain from some primordial ooze that elicits snickers from those dull-witted skeptics Ms Lombrozo finds so puzzling.

Finally, people often draw inappropriate conclusions from evolutionary claims—conclusions that they prefer to reject. One study asked undergraduates to identify whether the truth of evolution would have negative, positive, or neutral implications for a host of social and personal issues.

The researchers found that the overwhelming majority of students queried believed that evolution made it harder to find purpose in life, threatened the existence of free will, and justified selfishness and racism, among other undesirable ends. These claims are examples of what philosophers call the “naturalistic fallacy,” the error of deriving “ought” from “is”—an error that readers often make in response to strictly descriptive scientific findings. For example, the idea that genes are selfish might offer a compelling description of some evolutionary dynamics (though even that is controversial), but it doesn’t follow that human selfishness is appropriate.

She's right about some of this. She's correct when she states in so many words that it doesn't follow from the fact that we've evolved selfishness that therefore selfishness is right. What does follow, though, is that neither our tendency to be selfish nor our tendency to be racist is wrong.

Lombrozo misapplies the naturalistic fallacy. It would indeed be a mistake to argue that because we are a certain way that we therefore should be that way, but that's not the real danger inherent in denying free will and human purpose while affirming that we are genetically prone to selfishness and racism. The danger is not in people concluding that we should be that way, though some atheists have certainly drawn that conclusion, but rather in concluding that it's not wrong to be that way.

There's a considerable difference between arguing that because things are a certain way that therefore they ought to be that way and arguing that because things are a certain way that therefore, on atheism, it can't be wrong for them to be that way.

The former would indeed commit the naturalistic fallacy. The latter, however, is just common sense.

We haven't yet discussed Lombrozo's reasons for thinking that science offers all the consolations, and more, of religion. We'll do that in a future post.

This Was Not Designed

"Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved." So cautioned Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. Why did Crick feel it necessary to say this? Well, perhaps because of phenomena depicted in videos like this:

One of the puzzling questions this video raises is how the complex of proteins which works in tandem with the DNA could have arisen in the first place. DNA can't work without them, but if DNA can't work without them how did it produce them?

Here's another question. DNA codes for proteins, but what is the source of information that directs the proteins to the proper regions of the cell or the body and instructs them to build the structures they do? What codes for this information and where in the cell does it reside?

One more question. DNA codes for proteins, but what is the source of the information that controls an animal's behavior? Where does that information reside and how is it passed from generation to generation?

These are baffling questions so we must just shove them aside and not think about them. Instead we should all close our eyes real tight and repeat after Professor Crick: "This was not designed. This was not designed. This was not ..."

Rethinking Global Warming

There's an interesting piece on global warming at the WSJ by Matt Ridley. It turns out that an important report by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) due to be released in a week or so will reveal that earlier predictions of "hockey stick" shaped graphs depicting skyrocketing temperature increases are mistaken, and the alarms sounded by the Al Gores of the world are overwrought. It even suggests that the climate change that is occurring may be on balance beneficial, a possibility we've wondered about at VP on a number of occasions.

Here's part of what Ridley says:

The big news is that, for the first time since these reports started coming out in 1990, the new one dials back the alarm. It states that the temperature rise we can expect as a result of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide is lower than the IPPC thought in 2007.

Admittedly, the change is small, and because of changing definitions, it is not easy to compare the two reports, but retreat it is. It is significant because it points to the very real possibility that, over the next several generations, the overall effect of climate change will be positive for humankind and the planet.

Ridley follows this with a bunch of numbers which the interested reader can read for him or herself, but then there's this:

A more immediately relevant measure of likely warming has also come down: "transient climate response" (TCR) — the actual temperature change expected from a doubling of carbon dioxide about 70 years from now, without the delayed effects that come in the next century. The new report will say that this change is "likely" to be 1 to 2.5 degrees Celsius and "extremely unlikely" to be greater than 3 degrees.

Most experts believe that warming of less than 2 degrees Celsius from preindustrial levels will result in no net economic and ecological damage. Therefore, the new report is effectively saying (based on the middle of the range of the IPCC's emissions scenarios) that there is a better than 50-50 chance that by 2083, the benefits of climate change will still outweigh the harm.

Warming of up to 1.2 degrees Celsius over the next 70 years (0.8 degrees have already occurred), most of which is predicted to happen in cold areas in winter and at night, would extend the range of farming further north, improve crop yields, slightly increase rainfall (especially in arid areas), enhance forest growth and cut winter deaths (which far exceed summer deaths in most places). Increased carbon dioxide levels also have caused and will continue to cause an increase in the growth rates of crops and the greening of the Earth—because plants grow faster and need less water when carbon dioxide concentrations are higher.

Up to two degrees of warming, these benefits will generally outweigh the harmful effects, such as more extreme weather or rising sea levels, which even the IPCC concedes will be only about 1 to 3 feet during this period.

Ridley notes that even the reduced expectation of increasing temperature in the IPCC report may be too high. Other reports point to even milder warming than forecast by the IPCC report. All of which is to say that there's reason to be cautious in forming opinions about the severity of the threat we face. Indeed, those who only a year or two ago were calling any climatologist who was skeptical of Mr. Gore's dire predictions the equivalent of a terrorist who should be fired or otherwise censored have been a bit muted lately. And for good reason:

It is now more than 15 years since global average temperature rose significantly. Indeed, the IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri has conceded that the "pause" already may have lasted for 17 years, depending on which data set you look at. A recent study in Nature Climate Change by Francis Zwiers and colleagues of the University of Victoria, British Columbia, found that models have overestimated warming by 100% over the past 20 years.

Explaining this failure is now a cottage industry in climate science. At first, it was hoped that an underestimate of sulfate pollution from industry (which can cool the air by reflecting heat back into space) might explain the pause, but the science has gone the other way — reducing its estimate of sulfate cooling. Now a favorite explanation is that the heat is hiding in the deep ocean. Yet the data to support this thesis come from ocean buoys and deal in hundredths of a degree of temperature change, with a measurement error far larger than that. Moreover, ocean heat uptake has been slowing over the past eight years.

The most plausible explanation of the pause is simply that climate sensitivity was overestimated in the models because of faulty assumptions about net amplification through water-vapor feedback. This will be a topic of heated debate at the political session to rewrite the report in Stockholm, starting on Sept. 23, at which issues other than the actual science of climate change will be at stake.

By this Mr. Ridley is suggesting that what comes out of Stockholm may very well be a product more of the ideological and political aspirations and predilections of those who draft the report than of the empirical data that climatologists are coming up with.

How Not to Conduct a Philosophical Debate

This may be a first. Two guys standing in line for beer get into an argument over Immanuel Kant's philosophy and one shoots the other. Don't tell me nobody takes philosophy seriously anymore:

MOSCOW (AP) -- An argument in southern Russia over philosopher Immanuel Kant, the author of "Critique of Pure Reason," devolved into pure mayhem when one debater shot the other.

A police spokeswoman in Rostov-on Don, Viktoria Safarova, said two men in their 20s were discussing Kant as they stood in line to buy beer at a small store on Sunday. The discussion deteriorated into a fistfight and one participant pulled out a small nonlethal pistol and fired repeatedly.

The victim was hospitalized with injuries that were not life-threatening. Neither person was identified.

It was not clear which of Kant's ideas may have triggered the violence.

My guess is they were quarreling over Kant's theory of transcendental apperception. Or perhaps it was his categorical imperative which brought the men to blows. The categorical imperative is a rule that enjoins us to always act in ways we would want everyone to act. If this was indeed the point of contention we may presume that the shooter was arguing against adoption of the rule.

Can Science Satisfy? Pt. I

Tania Lombrozo at the Boston Review asks whether science can offer the same existential satisfactions as can religion. She answers in the affirmative but nothing in her column gives the reader confidence that her answer is correct.

Her very first paragraphs raise doubts about her grasp of the subject. She writes that:

The claim that humans evolved from non-humans is among the best established in science.... Yet, according to a Gallup survey, nearly half of Americans reject evolution, instead endorsing the view that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.”

There are at least two things wrong with this. First, the claim that humans evolved from non-humans may be true, but to place it among the best established claims in science is either a sign of ignorance or an indication of intellectual dishonesty. Well-established scientific claims are testable via observation and repeated experimentation, but the claim that humans evolved from non-humans lends itself to neither of these criteria. To place evolutionary descent in the company of such staples of science as the inverse square law, the value of the speed of light, Newton's laws of motion, or quantum mechanics is silly and uninformed.

In fact, human descent isn't even among the most well-established principles of biology. Biologists can be much more certain, surely, that DNA codes for proteins or of the chemical reactions involved in photosynthesis than they can be that human beings have evolved from non-human ancestors.

Second, Lombrozo's implication that one either believes in evolution or believes in Young Earth Creationism may have been true in the 1920s, but it's either dishonest or inexcusably ignorant of her to suggest that it's true today. There's a voluminous literature on this topic, and the error she commits has been rebutted so often that one wonders how anyone who has done her homework could still make it.

The contemporary discussion orbits the question whether the best explanation of origins (of the cosmos, of life, of life's diversity) is one which solely invokes physical processes and forces or one which imputes origins to the action of an intelligent agent. Among those who opt for the latter view the matter of how the agent constructed the world and living things is at most a secondary concern. The crucial, more fundamental question, as they see it, is whether the empirical evidence being discovered everyday by researchers around the globe fits more neatly the view that the universe and life are the product of blind, impersonal, mindless processes or whether it suggests the input of an intelligent mind.

There's more to lament in Ms Lombrozo's essay, and I'll have additional thoughts to share on it throughout the week.

The Religion of Our Age

Tom Bethell writes a column at Evolution News and Views in which he identifies the religion of our modern age as materialism. He's talking about materialism in the metaphysical sense, of course, rather than the consumerist sense. Metaphysical materialism is the view that matter and energy are the only constituents of everything there is. Nothing immaterial - minds, souls, God, angels, etc. - exists.

Metaphysical materialism is a species of naturalism. Naturalism denies the existence of any non-natural entities. There's nothing supernatural. All materialists are naturalists, but one can technically be a naturalist and not be a materialist. Even so, most naturalists are in fact materialists.

Bethell cites Duke philosopher Alex Rosenberg who declares that everything that exists is made ultimately of fermions and bosons, the particles that comprise atoms. There's nothing else.

Of course, if this is true a host of profound consequences follow, among which are that there are no minds, no free will, and thus no moral value. Morality depends for its existence on our ability to freely choose between alternative actions. If we're simply material beings then we no more have free will than does a machine, and thus there are no morally right or wrong choices, only choices which we've been programmed by our environment or our genes to select.

Moreover, if we really are machines, if it's true that we lack free will and that morality is an illusion, then it's nonsense to talk about human dignity. Dignity is rooted in freedom and choice. There can be no dignity where there is no freedom. To go one step further, if there's no genuine dignity in being human then neither is their anything of worth or value in being human, and the notion of inherent human rights is a chimera. There simply is no such thing as an inherent "right" to anything - not property, not liberty, not life. Indeed, in a material universe where would such rights come from?

Materialism is a distressingly dehumanizing philosophy. It reduces us to little more than clever chimps. Little wonder that the materialism that held sway in 20th century totalitarianisms around the globe led to human slaughter on an historically unprecedented scale. A creature with no intrinsic worth, no intrinsic rights, no intrinsic dignity is simply fodder to satisfy the appetite for power of those who already possess enough of it to impose their will on the rest of us.

Ideas have consequences, and this maxim is particularly true of metaphysical ideas about the nature of humanity. Belief in materialism leads inexorably to what C.S. Lewis called the abolition of man. It puts us on an express train for a real life Panem, a dystopia where slaughter is a source of pleasure for a morally depraved and depauperate culture.