Progressivism in Academia

Once upon a time a liberal education meant that one studied, and desired to study, the best that had been thought and written in the humanities. One was deeply enriched by his or her encounter with the classics in literature, philosophy, history, etc. Times have changed, however. The term "liberal education" has taken on a rather different signification today than it had a few decades ago. Take Oberlin College, for example, a liberal arts school in Ohio where students a couple of years ago submitted a list of 50 "non-negotiable" demands to the administration described in a New Yorker column.

The Daily Caller has distilled the New Yorker's essay to a few of the more absurd aspects of the students' "concerns." Here is a sample of their complaints (The text in italics is from the Daily Caller, the rest is my commentary):

This institution [Oberlin] functions on the premises of imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and a cissexist heteropatriarchy. In addition to wondering what some of this actually means, one might also wonder what the school would look like if it "functioned" on the basis of the contraries of these premises.

The students' demands included a request for an $8.20-an-hour "activism wage," the firing of nine Oberlin employees deemed insufficiently supportive of black students, and the tenuring of black faculty. How, exactly, does one demonstrate "insufficient support"? Are the students saying that if these nine employees don't agree with their concerns they should therefore be fired? Is it the students' idea of justice to deprive someone of their livelihood because they don't agree with their opinion? If so, it is Stalinesque.

A student wanted trigger warnings on required reading. The book which triggered the demand for triggers was Antigone. This student activist had wrestled with suicidal tendencies and so does Antigone. One can sympathize with the student's apprehensions while nevertheless thinking that "trigger warnings" are, in general, a concession to emotional adolescence. Any student can google any book and find out what its basic themes are if he's concerned that he might suffer an emotional or psychological ambush while reading it.

The students wanted the removal of a “harmful” multicultural mural. The former chair of the Student Union Board reports that students ordered a mural featuring people of a number of different races destroyed because they feared that it “exoticized” minorities. I'm not sure what it is to be "exoticized," but it sounds bad. Whatever it is, though, it's hard to imagine a depiction of anyone which could not be said to "exoticize" that individual, or his or her race, gender, or class.

A Jewish student was told he cannot have certain opinions because his “culture has never been oppressed.” After he criticized a sexual harassment policy that would have classified “flirtatious speech” as harassment, Aaron Pressman reported, “A student came up to me several days later and started screaming at me, saying I’m not allowed to have this opinion, because I’m a white cisgender male.” He feels that his white maleness shouldn’t be disqualifying. “I’ve had people respond to me, ‘You could never understand — your culture has never been oppressed.'” Pressman laughed. “I’m, like, ‘Really? The Holocaust?'”

This criticism of Pressman was odd in light of the fact that one Oberlin professor reportedly posted anti-Semitic messages on Facebook. “[Her] posts suggested, among other things, that Zionists had been involved in the 9/11 plot, that Isis was a puppet of Mossad and the C.I.A., and that the Rothschild family owned “your news, the media, your oil, and your government.” This professor wasn’t terminated and perhaps shouldn't have been, but evidently had she been as insufficiently supportive of black students' concerns as she apparently is of Jewish students' concerns, there'd have been calls for her dismissal.

In any case, the notion that unless you belong to a group that has suffered you cannot understand their angst and are not entitled to speak out about their problems is one of the oddest flowers in the ideological greenhouse. Besides, who cannot lay claim to membership in some group that at some point in history has been "oppressed"?

One student leader is “tired” of listening to dissenting opinions. “I do think that there’s something to be said about exposing yourself to ideas other than your own, but I’ve had enough of that after my fifth year,” she said. Apparently she thinks there should be a statute of limitations on free speech and dissent. Perhaps students should have to suffer disagreeable opinions for four years and then after that grace period every opinion should agree with hers.

Students wanted to eliminate bad grades. “More than thirteen hundred students signed a petition calling for the college to eliminate any grade lower than a C for the semester, but to no avail.” According to the New Yorker they didn't want their grades to decline while they were devoting their time to activist causes.

They hate capitalism at Oberlin. A student leader stated that higher education is a “tool of capitalism” that “can’t be redeemed,” even though capitalism is closely associated with the kind of free speech that allows students to become activists in the first place. Meanwhile, socialist and communist countries — think Mao’s China or Lenin's Russia — frequently throw dissenters in jail, although many of these students may not even know this, given how open they seem to learning new things.

These students don't see their university years as a wonderful opportunity to learn but rather as an opportunity to vent. They wish to turn universities into summer camps for radicals where they can gather to rage against the machine and all that. And when they graduate what will they have prepared themselves to do in life, other than to become themselves poorly educated college professors who will continue the cycle of educational malfeasance and decline?

Permit me to suggest a modest proposal for disaffected students. It's similar to the course of action what people are advised by progressives to follow if they find that they don't like salacious television programming, or movies, or the laws regarding abortion. It's this: "Don't watch, don't go, don't have one."

University students who don't like the curriculum, who don't like a college's atmosphere, who don't like having to pass courses, simply should not go to a school which features these characteristics in the first place, or, having made the mistake of enrolling, they should transfer out.

Better yet, they should realize that their anxieties often appear peevish, self-absorbed, and childish to those who work for a living or who don the nation's uniform, that to these folks many of the concerns expressed by the Oberlin students seem akin to a child's fear of the goblin under the bed at night, and that the students should work harder to outgrow these preoccupations.

Why Talk of White Privilege Is Harmful

I had a student last semester who wrote a very thoughtful response to a post she found on VP on what's come to be called "white privilege." She ably defended her conception of this sociological dogma, and I felt that I should explain to her my objection to the concept.

I replied to her with this (slightly edited):

My problem with the emphasis on white privilege in the academy is that it's divisive and breeds resentment and bitterness among both blacks and whites. When people are taught that one group, of which they're not a member, has advantages that they'll never have simply because of their race it fosters bitterness among the "disadvantaged" group and generates resentment toward those who are perceived to have the unfair advantage.

This causes us as a society to be further divided into us/them categories which I think is exactly what we don't need.

It also breeds resentment and bitterness among those in the "privileged" group because they resent being made to feel guilty simply because of their skin color.

Not only does talk of "white privilege" encourage these effects, I think it's psychologically harmful to blacks and other minorities in that it's dispiriting for people to believe that no matter how hard they work they'll always be at a relative disadvantage.

Not only is such a belief dispiriting, it's also false. Too many minorities have done well in this country to think that being a member of a minority group ipso facto puts success out of one's reach. Those who promote the white privilege meme are, whether they realize it or not, handing those who never succeed because they never try a convenient rationalization for their both to succeed and to try. As such, it's insidious.

It's insidious also because it's so divisive. When people who've worked hard to achieve are told that they succeeded largely because of their race it can cause them to feel either enormous guilt or enormous resentment. The first is socially and psychologically crippling while the second creates a lot of social animosity. Indeed, one reason Donald Trump is president today is because many people resent having to apologize for things for which they bear no personal responsibility.

Some might say that if white privilege exists then we should talk about it regardless of the consequences, but I don't think those who'd say this really mean it. If they did then they'd have to apply the principle across the board that no racial issues should be quarantined because of their consequences, and that would mean that the question of relative intelligences among the races would be open for serious discussion, but it clearly is not.

Anyway, it's past time to relegate talk of "white privilege" to the trash bin of "very unhelpful ideas." Talking about it does no good and does much harm.

Philosophical Fashion

A piece in Aeon by J. Bradley Studemeyer makes the case that philosophy as a discipline is often subject to the whims of fashion, not fashion as in wearing apparel but as in fashionable ideas. He writes:

The rise and fall of popular positions in the field of philosophy is not governed solely by reason. Philosophers are generally reasonable people but, as with the rest of the human species, their thoughts are heavily influenced by their social settings. Indeed, they are perhaps more influenced than thinkers in other fields, since popular or ‘big’ ideas in modern philosophy change more frequently than ideas in, say, chemistry or biology. Why?

The relative instability of philosophical positions is a result of how the discipline is practised. In philosophy, questions about methods and limitations are on the table in a way that they tend not to be in the physical sciences, for example. Scientists generally acknowledge a ‘gold standard’ for validity – the scientific method – and, for the most part, the way in which investigations are conducted is more or less settled.

Falsifiability rules the scientific disciplines: almost all scientists are in agreement that, if a hypothesis isn’t testable, then it isn’t scientific. There is no counterpoint of this in philosophy. Here, students and professors continue to ask: ‘Which questions can we ask?’ and ‘How can we ask, much less answer, those questions?’ There is no universally agreed-upon way in which to do philosophy.

Given that philosophy’s foundational questions and methods are still far from settled – they never will be – it’s natural that there is more flux, more volatility, in philosophy than in the physical sciences. [T]his volatility... is [similar to] changes of fashion.

When thinking about fashion in philosophy, there are four basic categories under which texts, thinkers and ideas can be grouped. By considering the interrelation of these groups, we can begin to glean how an idea becomes fashionable. The four categories are the fashionable, the foundational, the prohibited, and the unfashionable.

I'm not sure Studemeyer is correct in what he says about testability being the litmus test of science. Perhaps it should be, but it often isn't. For example, it's difficult to imagine how some of the hypotheses concerning the origin of life, macroevolution, the big bang, the multiverse, string theory, and so on, could be tested. Yet they're all considered by many scientists to be legitimate science. The notion of a "scientific method," despite the fact that it's in the early chapters of just about every secondary school textbook, is not one that many working scientists actually ascribe to.

Scientists like their theories to be testable, but if they aren't they want them to be elegant, and if they aren't they want them to have expansive explanatory power, and if they don't they want them to at least conform to a materialist worldview, and if they're incompatible with materialism, well, then, they're not science.

In any event, the rest of the article is given to fleshing out Studemeyer's four categories. One of the best parts of the essay is a side-bar question, to which readers are invited to respond, which asks what philosophical ideas are fashionable today but won't be much longer.

Some of the responses are very interesting although they're not all strictly philosophical. My guess is that metaphysical materialism itself might fall out of fashion. It's hard to see how, given all the evidence that's accumulating against it, it can survive among reasonable people. Even so, since the chief alternatives are often compatible with Christian theism, I suppose a lot of philosophers will continue to cling to it no matter how much evidence accumulates against it.

Scandal-Free

In something of a stunner former President Obama averred recently that his administration had been "scandal-free." This is certainly an amusing assertion, one reminiscent of his infamous assurances that Obamacare would not only allow people to keep their doctors but would also drive the cost of insurance coverage down.

His profession of the ethical purity of his tenure could be true only if one defines a scandal as something considered to be such by the media and which is assiduously pursued by the majority of journalists at the major networks and newspapers until it finally dominates the 24/7 news cycle.

In other words, if a scandal is defined as whatever the media decides is a scandal, then the Obama administration was indeed free of any taint of disgrace because no matter what the Obama administration did the majority media would have insisted on either excusing it or looking the other way.

If, however, a political scandal is defined as an event that should bring discredit or disgrace to a person or administration and which should result in significant firings and/or legal jeopardy, even if such consequences never eventuate, then the Obama administration was, as David Harsanyi reminds us, as rife with scandal as any in modern times.

Here's a partial listing of the Obama administration's infamies:

• Fast and Furious, a program devised by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) that put around 2,000 weapons into the hands of narco-traffickers (and an Islamic terrorist), leading to the murder of hundreds of Mexicans and at least one American, border agent Brian Terry.
  
  The body count could have been higher when a homegrown extremist who, with another assailant, attempted to murder the audience at a “Draw Muhammad” contest in Garland, Texas with one of the Fast and Furious weapons, but an off-duty police officer killed both of the attackers.
  
  Attorney general Eric Holder became the first AG in history to be held in contempt of Congress because he refused to cooperate with the congressional investigation into this scandal.
• The administration interfered with law enforcement's attempt to shut down an international drug-trafficking ring run by the terrorist organization Hezbollah because the administration didn't want to upset the Iranians during the negotiations that would culminate in over a billion dollars being shipped to Iran in return for a promise not to build nuclear weapons for ten years.
• The Obama DOJ illegally spied on political reporters and other citizens in order to ferret out the source of White House leaks and then lied about what they were doing.
• The IRS leadership, specifically Lois Lerner, aggressively and prejudicially targeted conservative groups before elections and they subsequently admitted as much in an apology letter. Lerner was held in contempt by Congress for refusing to comply with investigators’ demands. She never answered questions for this genuine attack on democracy.
• Although they knew the assault on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya was a complex terror attack, President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cut television ads to placate radicals in Islamic nations by repeating the claim that a video motivated the attack and they then even apologized for American free speech, which was a scandal in itself.
  
  Worse, however, the administration detained the man who produced the offensively amateurish “Innocence of Muslims” video and initially charged him with lying about his role in its production. This was a blatant attack on free expression. Yet most of the mainstream press continued to take the administration’s word and report that the video was indeed the cause of the “protests.”

Of course there were other scandals that elicited little more than yawns from the media. As Harsanyi says:

Democrats in general just kept pretending that every accusation [against the Obama administration] was merely a partisan, racist plot to undermine the president. Whether it was bypassing process and oversight to fund cronyistic green projects that enriched political and ideological allies with tax dollars, or the Secret Service’s embarrassing debauchery, or Hillary Clinton’s attempts to circumvent transparency or, perhaps the most immoral, the Veterans Affairs’ negligence regarding veterans, they would never admit they faced a scandal.

No one has gone to jail for any of these disreputable acts and few people lost their jobs because of them.

You can read more of the details of each of the above Obama administration scandals at the link. Meanwhile, if you think that any of this wretched misconduct did not really amount to a scandal and that Obama's claim to have run a scandal-free administration is not actually absurd, simply ask yourself what the reaction would've been had Donald Trump and his administration perpetrated or indulged in anything like it.

The media outrage would have been volcanic, and the attempts to destroy this president would have been even more obsessive, compulsive, and relentless than they already are.

Removing the Guardrails

Over at Thought Sifter my friend Mike writes about the recent referendum in Ireland in which a substantial plurality of Irish voted to rescind the constitutional provision which bans abortion in Ireland. He has some interesting things to say about the reasoning behind the pro-choice movement both there and here.

He writes:

The philosophical debate of abortion hinges on the question of when the life which grows in a woman’s womb actually becomes a child and thus acquires human rights. Even if someone rejects the idea proposed by the American founding fathers that people don't “acquire” rights but are “endowed by their Creator” with inalienable rights, it is an irrefutable fact that no one has the ability to discern when the magic moment occurs in the womb when fetal flesh becomes a human being.

So, In the most plain, unembellished language, the right to an abortion is the right of a woman to make a gamble by which she either kills her own child as it grows in her womb or kills a lump of flesh which will soon be her child....

But the right to gamble on killing that which is a baby or soon-to-be baby has all the characteristics of a zealous campaign for justice: shouting protesters, picket signs, demonization of opponents, etc. The part that’s hard on the brain is that the movement is often framed as a fight against oppression, as if to say, “Those heartless, iron-fisted traditionalists aren’t gonna tell me I can’t kill my baby! Nobody’s going to punish me with parenthood just because I had sex!”

Up until this point in history, the ones who kill babies and fight those who want to save them have been thought of as oppressors. How is this no longer the case?

Mike's question is rhetorical, but there's an answer to it even so. It's no longer the case because the supreme value in contemporary society is personal autonomy, particularly in matters related to one's sexual conduct. We've demanded that the guardrails that keep society from careening over the cliff - traditional custom, morality and religion - be removed from the highway's shoulders so that we can be free to go wherever we want.

This is liberating, we're told, it allows us to be free, to be "who I am."

It's seductive, to be sure, but where there are no guardrails, there's no backstop for human recklessness. The end result is often death - not necessarily physical death, though that's common enough, but spiritual, emotional, psychological death. Absolute autonomy ultimately spawns a degenerate culture of morbidity. At least it seems to have done so in the U.S. where our entertainment is filled with themes of death and horror, our laws seem to be moving ineluctably toward broadening the circumstances, both at the beginning and at the end of life, under which life can be terminated, and we're becoming inured to the almost daily news reports of murder and mayhem in our cities and schools.

But we're happier, aren't we? Isn't life more fulfilling when we can do away with all those priggish rules about sex and the value of human life and create our own rules? Well, if we werehappier psychiatry and counseling wouldn't be such popular majors among college students looking for a career.

When players in a game can throw out the rule book and make up their own rules as they go along, the game soon falls apart. Likewise with a society or culture which insists on throwing out whatever traditional rules infringe on personal autonomy. The social fabric frays and individual lives come undone.

Personal autonomy has become an ersatz religion for many otherwise non-religious secularists of our time, and abortion has become something of a sacrament, one of several, by which devotion to the spirit of the age is expressed. That's the way it is, but it's not making us healthier as a culture or happier as individuals. In fact, the opposite seems to be very much the case.

Read more of Mike's thoughts at his blog Thought Sifter.

Follow the Evidence

For the last twenty five years or so, book after book has been published in which various authors have pummeled the orthodoxies of Darwinian evolution. Most recently philosopher of science Stephen Meyer (Darwin's Doubt), philosopher Alvin Plantinga (Where the Conflict Really Lies), geneticist Michael Denton (Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis), novelist Tom Wolfe (The Kingdom of Speech), and molecular biologist Doug Axe (Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed) have released books deconstructing the biological and philosophical underpinnings of the Darwinist paradigm that has ruled the biological and social sciences for a century and a half.

Now comes yet another work by prominent journalist Tom Bethell (Darwin’s House of Cards: A Journalist’s Odyssey Through the Darwin Debates) which discusses why Darwinism seems to be teetering. Uncommon Descent pulls a few quotes from the book:

• The science of neo-Darwinism was poor all along, and supported by very few facts. I have become ever more convinced that, although Darwinism has been promoted as science, its unstated role has been to prop up a philosophy—the philosophy of materialism—and atheism along with it. Page 20
• The scientific evidence for evolution is not only weaker than is generally supposed, but as new discoveries have been made since 1959, the reasons for accepting the theory have diminished rather than increased. Page 45
• Darwin might well have been dismayed if the meager evidence for natural selection, assembled over many years, had been presented to him 150 years after The Origin was published. ‘A change in the ratio of preexisting varieties? That is all you have been able to come up with?’ he might reasonably have asked. It is worth bearing in mind how feeble this evidence is, any time someone tells you that Darwinism is a fact. Page 79
• Natural selection functions in the realm of philosophy, not science. Page 81
• Evolutionists, of course, believe that they are appealing to science, in contrast to the religionists’ reliance on faith. But the truth is that when they utter their two-word incantation, ‘natural selection,’ they are not being remotely scientific. Nor are they expected to provide any details. Page 123
• Darwinian evolution can be seen as a way of looking at the history of life through the distorting lens of Progress. Given enough time, society in general, including human beings, would be transformed into something superior and perhaps unrecognizably different. Page 248

It has been something of an open secret for at least a decade that many biologists have either tacitly or explicitly agreed with what Bethell writes. Many have admitted in so many words that the Neo-Darwinian version of the theory is deeply inadequate and probably wrong, but until there's another scientific theory to put in its place they're stuck with it. Any theory which replaces the old paradigm must rely on physical mechanisms and causes which act solely naturalistically (i.e. with no input from supernatural agency) in order to qualify as a scientific theory, and there's simply no such hypothesis on the horizon.

There's some truth to this, but as long as scientists and philosophers of science cling to the notion that science must exclude non-natural causes they hamstring themselves in their attempt to make headway on the problem of biological origins. If certain phenomena point to an intelligent provenience, as a multitude of biological phenomena do, scientists should be allowed to posit intelligent agency even if they can't explain how that agent worked to bring about the phenomena in question. They should, in short, follow the evidence wherever it leads.

As philosopher of science Del Ratszch once put it, if some future astronaut scientists were to discover a large, perfectly cubical piece of polished titanium on some desolate, uninhabitable planet the scientists may not have any idea who put it there, nor how they managed to get it there, nor why they did it, nor how they made the cube, but they would be perfectly justified in believing that it was the product of an intelligent mind or minds.

There's a passage from William James' 1896 lecture titled The Will to Believe that's apposite here. James insists that, "...a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule. That for me is the long and short of the formal logic of the situation, no matter what the kinds of truth might materially be."

Just so.

Lifting the Poor Out of Poverty

Surveys have revealed that among younger voters capitalism is losing favor and socialism is gaining it. Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont, is a hero, unlikely as that seems, among millenials.

Why is this happening? Objectively, there seems to be little basis for it. Socialist countries like Venezuela and many African countries are economically moribund or worse. Yet, despite the negative effects of socialism in many of the places it's been tried, the blight of poverty is shrinking on a global scale. This improvement in the lives of so many is due not to socialist policies but to free enterprise capitalism.

In his book Suicide of the West Jonah Goldberg offers us some facts about global poverty:

• "Around the world the number of people considered poor has decreased both relatively and absolutely - an incredible feat, given massive increases in population."
• "In 1820, 94.4% of the world's population lived on the equivalent of less than $2 a day, and 83.9% lived on less than $1 a day....As of 2015 only 9.6% of the world's population lived on less than $1.50 a day."
• As recently as 1970, almost 27% of people world-wide lived in abject poverty (less than one 1987 dollar a day). A little more than 5% did as of 2006."
• Between 1990 and 2010, the percentage of the population in developing countries living in poverty fell from 43 to 21 percent, a reduction of almost one billion people.
• In 2015, for the first time in human history, less than 10% of the world's population was considered extremely poor.

What's responsible for this fantastic improvement in the quality of life of so many people? Goldberg makes the case that the answer is economic growth and technological innovation, both of which are much more likely to occur under free-market capitalism than under government controlled economies.

It's hard to understand how anyone who claims to care about poor people could endorse socialist nostrums which inevitably entail bigger, more bloated government and stifling economic regulations, but, in a triumph of feeling over fact, they often do.

This short video, for example, addresses and debunks five myths people believe about free enterprise that cause them to turn to socialism:

The lesson is, if you care about the poor, don't vote for people who, in the name of fairness and equality, would place unreasonable and unneccessary restrictions on free markets and the ability of entrepreneurs to innovate.

Income Inequality

One of the recurring themes among our commentariat is that the disparity in wealth between the haves and the have nots is corrosive to our well-being as a society. The growing gap between the incomes of the rich and the poor, we're often reminded, is a danger to our polity and national cohesion and threatens to result in an upheaval something like the French Revolution.

Well, I don't know what to make of this. I don't know how the disparity between today's rich and poor is relevant or meaningful or particularly disturbing. Wealth and poverty are relative.

To paraphrase Jonah Goldberg in his excellent book Suicide of the West, if everyone was a billionaire except me and I was only a millionaire I'd be poor compared to everyone else, but I think I'd be quite content in my relative impoverishment. Moreover, if everyone's income doubled the gap between us would grow, but I'd still consider myself to be doing pretty well in terms of absolute wealth.

The important consideration is not the gap between us but the benefits of life to which I have access.

What difference does it make, after all, if one person has enough income to be comfortable, but someone else has a hundred times as much? What difference does it make if that gap widens every year as long as the "poorer" person is not regressing in absolute terms?

The inequality that we should be talking about, and rejoicing in, is the inequality between our contemporary poor and those who were wealthy in almost every other period of human history. This inequality is one of the greatest achievements in human history and, though I've written about it before, it bears reiterating.

I say we should rejoice because, although it may sound "insensitive" to say it, our poor are astonishingly wealthy, at least in material goods, compared to almost everyone else who has ever lived, including even the wealthiest aristocrats.

A multi-millionaire from a hundred and fifty years ago may have had enormous wealth but there was relatively little he could buy with it. He actually had a lot less and in many ways his life was a lot harder than is the case for most Americans living below the poverty line today.

The rich had more and bigger houses than do today's American poor, of course, and lived in safer neighborhoods, but that's about it. Those houses were not air-conditioned and often indifferently heated. They didn't have running water or flush toilets. Nor were they blessed with electricity, artificial light, refrigeration, television, radio, or a bevy of labor-saving appliances and devices.

The rich couldn't listen to music any time they wanted nor watch movies or television news. They didn't have telephones much less cell-phones, nor did they have computers or the internet to facilitate communication and learning.

Their clothes were certainly less comfortable and in many ways more poorly crafted. They couldn't get food, paid for by the taxpayer, by walking to the corner supermarket at any time of the day or night, where the choices and variety would astonish someone transplanted from the late 1800s.

They could afford the best medical and dental care of the day, but the best care was nowhere near as good nor as convenient as what is available today, even to our poor, whose bills are paid by medicaid. The poor today have access to a plethora of medications undreamt of by the wealthy of the 19th century - aspirin, penicillin, novocaine, blood pressure medicine, depression medicine, etc. - all of which make life infinitely better than it was for the rich 150 years ago.

Today's poor are much more mobile thanks to public transportation, than were the earlier rich who had to rely on carriages drawn by horses which needed to be maintained, and the roads they traveled were often either ridden with potholes, dusty, muddy, or otherwise treacherous.

The rich had vacation villas, but it took lengthy train and carriage rides in hot, dirty uncomfortable conveyances over those miserable roads to get there. Poor families today often have access to an air-conditioned car that can get them to the beach for a day's recreation in relative comfort, on excellent highways, and with relative speed.

Today's poor have access to free education and public libraries. They're almost all at least somewhat literate, they live longer and much more comfortably than did even the richest people throughout all of human history save the last century or so.

Relative to the wealthier classes today our poor may seem to have little, but they're immeasurably rich relative to the unfortunate "wealthy" wretches who happened to be born a century and a half or more earlier. Indeed, if a contemporary member of the lower economic classes were transported back in time, but able somehow to live like they can live today, their neighbors would marvel at their extravagance and quality of life.

All of this is often simply taken for granted, but it shouldn't be. It's part of what Goldberg calls The Miracle of the last century and a half. Today's poor are, generally speaking, incomprehensibly well off, in material terms, compared to anyone who lived prior to the 20th century.

None of this is to say that modern poor people don't have needs that must be addressed, but it is to say that the claim that our system is unjust because there's a gap between rich and poor is hard to credit.

So, the next time someone in your hearing complains about the unfairness of the disparity between rich and poor in this country you might ask them what it is, exactly, that's unfair about it.

Subjectivism, Relativism, and Emotivism

A commenter at Uncommon Descent, in defense of the view that morality has no objective grounding, since it's rooted in our evolutionary development, delivers himself of this head-scratcher:

Since the moral fabric is man made, all we are doing is seeing it change, as it has done over the centuries. Sometimes history shows that the change has been for the good, and sometimes for the bad. But since civilization is thriving, it is reasonable to conclude that we have had more wins than losses.

What's puzzling about this is that if morality is man-made then what's the standard by which we can tell whether any change is good or bad? Doesn't this comment tacitly assume that there's an objective reference point, a moral horizon, as it were, by which we can tell whether we're flying upside down or right side up?

On evolutionary terms there is no objective referent. About that the commenter is correct. On evolution morality is all man-made and therefore purely subjective.

If it's claimed that civilizational thriving is a measure of whether practices are good or bad we might ask whether the Aztecs and other civilizations which presumably thrived for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years after they introduced human and child sacrifice were doing something good.

The post at the link cites Lewis Vaughn's Doing Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues which provides an excellent explanation of the differences between relativism, which Vaughn avers can be subjective or cultural, and emotivism. Some might want to quibble with his terminology but it's very helpful nonetheless:

Subjective relativism is the view that an action is morally right if one approves of it. A person’s approval makes the action right. This doctrine (as well as cultural relativism) is in stark contrast to moral objectivism, the view that some moral principles are valid for everyone.

Subjective relativism, though, has some troubling implications. It implies that each person is morally infallible and that individuals can never have a genuine moral disagreement.

Cultural relativism is the view that an action is morally right if one’s culture approves of it. The argument for this doctrine is based on the diversity of moral judgments among cultures: because people’s judgments about right and wrong differ from culture to culture, right and wrong must be relative to culture, and there are no objective moral principles.

This argument is defective, however, because the diversity of moral views does not imply that morality is relative to cultures. In addition, the alleged diversity of basic moral standards among cultures may be only apparent, not real.

Societies whose moral judgments conflict may be differing not over moral principles but over nonmoral facts.

Some think that tolerance is entailed by cultural relativism. But there is no necessary connection between tolerance and the doctrine. Indeed, the cultural relativist cannot consistently advocate tolerance while maintaining his relativist standpoint. To advocate tolerance is to advocate an objective moral value. But if tolerance is an objective moral value, then cultural relativism must be false, because it says that there are no objective moral values.

Like subjective relativism, cultural relativism has some disturbing consequences. It implies that cultures are morally infallible, that social reformers can never be morally right, that moral disagreements between individuals in the same culture amount to arguments over whether they disagree with their culture, that other cultures cannot be legitimately criticized, and that moral progress is impossible.

Emotivism is the view that moral utterances are neither true nor false but are expressions of emotions or attitudes. It leads to the conclusion that people can disagree only in attitude, not in beliefs. People cannot disagree over the moral facts, because there are no moral facts. Emotivism also implies that presenting reasons in support of a moral utterance is a matter of offering nonmoral facts that can influence someone’s attitude.

It seems that any nonmoral facts will do, as long as they affect attitudes. Perhaps the most far-reaching implication of emotivism is that nothing is actually good or bad. There simply are no properties of goodness and badness. There is only the expression of favorable or unfavorable emotions or attitudes toward something.

I'd probably want to say that all three of these are subsumed under the heading of subjectivism, i.e. the view that moral judgments are based on individual preferences and feelings and that cultural relativism is simply subjectivism writ large. Even so, the important point is that any moral assertion not based on an objective foundation is purely illusory. It's just a rhetorical vehicle for expressing one's individual tastes and biases and has no binding force on anyone else.

Moreover, there can only be an objective moral foundation if there is a moral authority which transcends human fallibility and weakness. In other words, unless there is a God there can be no objective moral values or obligations on anyone.

This is why moral claims made by non-theists don't make sense. They wish to deny the existence of God and yet implicitly hold views about morality that can only be true if God exists.

A Memorial Day Tribute

Technically, Memorial Day is set aside to remember those who gave their lives in service to our nation, but it's appropriate, I think, to also honor the sacrifices and bravery of men like those described in these accounts from the war in Iraq:

A massive truck bomb had turned much of the Fort Lewis soldiers’ outpost to rubble. One of their own lay dying and many others wounded. Some 50 al-Qaida fighters were attacking from several directions with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. It was obvious that the insurgents had come to drive the platoon of Stryker brigade troops out of Combat Outpost Tampa, a four-story concrete building overlooking a major highway through western Mosul, Iraq.

“It crossed my mind that that might be what they were going to try to do,” recalled Staff Sgt. Robert Bernsten, one of 40 soldiers at the outpost that day. “But I wasn’t going to let that happen, and looking around I could tell nobody else in 2nd platoon was going to let that happen, either.”

He and 10 other soldiers from the same unit – the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment – would later be decorated for their valor on this day of reckoning, Dec. 29, 2004. Three were awarded the Silver Star, the Army’s third-highest award for heroism in combat. When you combine those medals with two other Silver Star recipients involved in different engagements, the battalion known as “Deuce Four” stands in elite company. The Army doesn’t track the number of medals per unit, but officials said there could be few, if any, other battalions in the Iraq war to have so many soldiers awarded the Silver Star.

“I think this is a great representation of our organization,” said the 1-24’s top enlisted soldier, Command Sgt. Maj. Robert Prosser, after a battalion award ceremony late last month at Fort Lewis. “There are so many that need to be recognized. … There were so many acts of heroism and valor.”

The fight for COP Tampa came as Deuce Four was just two months into its yearlong mission in west Mosul. The battalion is part of Fort Lewis’ second Stryker brigade. In the preceding weeks, insurgents had grown bolder in their attacks in the city of 2 million. Just eight days earlier, a suicide bomber made his way into a U.S. chow hall and killed 22 people, including two from Deuce Four.

The battalion took over the four-story building overlooking the busy highway and set up COP Tampa after coming under fire from insurgents holed up there. The troops hoped to stem the daily roadside bombings of U.S. forces along the highway, called route Tampa. Looking back, the Dec. 29 battle was a turning point in the weeks leading up to Iraq’s historic first democratic election.

The enemy “threw everything they had into this,” Bernsten said. “And you know in the end, they lost quite a few guys compared to the damage they could do to us. “They didn’t quit after that, but they definitely might have realized they were up against something a little bit tougher than they originally thought.”

The battle for COP Tampa was actually two fights – one at the outpost, and the other on the highway about a half-mile south.

About 3:20 p.m., a large cargo truck packed with 50 South African artillery rounds and propane tanks barreled down the highway toward the outpost, according to battalion accounts.

Pfc. Oscar Sanchez, on guard duty in the building, opened fire on the truck, killing the driver and causing the explosives to detonate about 75 feet short of the building. Sanchez, 19, was fatally wounded in the blast. Commanders last month presented his family with a Bronze Star for valor and said he surely saved lives. The enormous truck bomb might have destroyed the building had the driver been able to reach the ground-floor garages.

As it was, the enormous explosion damaged three Strykers parked at the outpost and wounded 17 of the 40 or so soldiers there, two of them critically.

Bernsten was in a room upstairs. “It threw me. It physically threw me. I opened my eyes and I’m laying on the floor a good 6 feet from where I was standing a split second ago,” he said. “There was nothing but black smoke filling the building.” People were yelling for each other, trying to find out if everyone was OK.

“It seemed like it was about a minute, and then all of a sudden it just opened up from everywhere. Them shooting at us. Us shooting at them,” Bernsten said. The fight would rage for the next two hours. Battalion leaders said videotape and documents recovered later showed it was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq fighters. They were firing from rooftops, from street corners, from cars, Bernsten said.

Eventually, Deuce Four soldiers started to run low on ammunition. Bernsten, a squad leader, led a team of soldiers out into the open, through heavy fire, to retrieve more from the damaged Strykers. “We went to the closest vehicle first and grabbed as much ammo as we could, and got it upstairs and started to distribute it,” he said. “When you hand a guy a magazine and they’re putting the one you just handed them into their weapon, you realize they’re getting pretty low. So we knew we had to go back out there for more.”

He didn’t necessarily notice there were rounds zipping past as he and the others ran the 100 feet or so to the Strykers. “All you could see was the back of the Stryker you were trying to get to.”

Another fight raged down route Tampa, where a convoy of six Strykers, including the battalion commander’s, had rolled right into a field of hastily set roadside bombs. The bombs hadn’t been there just five minutes earlier, when the convoy had passed by going the other way after a visit to the combat outpost. It was an ambush set up to attack whatever units would come to the aid of COP Tampa.

Just as soldiers in the lead vehicle radioed the others that there were bombs in the road, the second Stryker was hit by a suicide car bomber. Staff Sgt. Eddieboy Mesa, who was inside, said the blast tore off the slat armor cage and equipment from the right side of the vehicle, and destroyed its tires and axles and the grenade launcher mounted on top. But no soldiers were seriously injured.

Insurgents opened fire from the west and north of the highway. Stryker crewmen used their .50-caliber machine guns and grenade launchers to destroy a second car bomb and two of the bombs rigged in the roadway. Three of the six Strykers pressed on to COP Tampa to join the fight.

One, led by battalion operations officer Maj. Mark Bieger, loaded up the critically wounded and raced back onto the highway through the patch of still-unstable roadside bombs. It traveled unescorted the four miles or so to a combat support hospital. Bieger and his men are credited with saving the lives of two soldiers.

Then he and his men turned around and rejoined the fight on the highway. Bieger was one of those later awarded the Silver Star. Meantime, it was left to the soldiers still on the road to defend the heavily damaged Stryker and clear the route of the remaining five bombs.

Staff Sgt. Wesley Holt and Sgt. Joseph Martin rigged up some explosives and went, under fire, from bomb to bomb to prepare them for demolition. They had no idea whether an insurgent was watching nearby, waiting to detonate the bombs. Typically, this was the kind of situation where infantry soldiers would call in the ordnance experts. But there was no time, Holt said.

“You could see the IEDs right out in the road. I knew it was going to be up to us to do it,” Holt said. “Other units couldn’t push through. The colonel didn’t want to send any more vehicles through the kill zone until we could clear the route.” And so they prepared their charges under the cover of the Strykers, then ran out to the bombs, maybe 50 yards apart. The two men needed about 30 seconds to rig each one as incoming fire struck around them.

“You could hear it [enemy fire] going, but where they were landing I don’t know,” Holt said. “You concentrate on the main thing that’s in front of you.” He and Martin later received Silver Stars.

The route clear, three other Deuce Four platoons moved out into the neighborhoods and F/A-18 fighter jets made more than a dozen runs to attack enemy positions with missiles and cannon fire. “It was loud, but it was a pretty joyous sound,” Bernsten said. “You know that once that’s happened, you have the upper hand in such a big way. It’s like the cavalry just arrived, like in the movies.”

Other soldiers eventually received Bronze Stars for their actions that day, too.

Sgt. Christopher Manikowski and Sgt. Brandon Huff pulled wounded comrades from their damaged Strykers and carried them over open ground, under fire, to the relative safety of the building.

Sgt. Nicholas Furfari and Spc. Dennis Burke crawled out onto the building’s rubbled balcony under heavy fire to retrieve weapons and ammunition left there after the truck blast.

Also decorated with Bronze Stars for their valor on Dec. 29 were Lt. Jeremy Rockwell and Spc. Steven Sosa. U.S. commanders say they killed at least 25 insurgents. Deuce Four left the outpost unmanned for about three hours that night, long enough for engineers to determine whether it was safe to re-enter. Troops were back on duty by morning, said battalion commander Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla.

In the next 10 months, insurgents would continue to attack Deuce Four troops in west Mosul with snipers, roadside bombs and suicide car bombs. But never again would they mass and attempt such a complex attack.

Heroics on two other days earned Silver Stars for Deuce Four.

It was Aug. 19, and Sgt. Major Robert Prosser’s commander, Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla, had been shot down in front of him. Bullets hit the ground and walls around him. Prosser charged under fire into a shop, not knowing how many enemy fighters were inside. There was one, and Prosser shot him four times in the chest, then threw down his empty rifle and fought hand-to-hand with the man.

The insurgent pulled Prosser’s helmet over his eyes. Prosser got his hands onto the insurgent’s throat, but couldn’t get a firm grip because it was slick with blood.

Unable to reach his sidearm or his knife, and without the support of any other American soldiers Prosser nonetheless disarmed and subdued the insurgent by delivering a series of powerful blows to the insurgent’s head, rendering the man unconscious.

Another Silver Star recipient, Staff Sgt. Shannon Kay, received the award for his actions on Dec. 11, 2004. He helped save the lives of seven members of his squad after they were attacked by a suicide bomber and insurgents with rockets and mortars at a traffic checkpoint.

He and others used fire extinguishers to save their burning Stryker vehicle and killed at least eight enemy fighters. Throughout the fight, Kay refused medical attention despite being wounded in four places.

For men like these and the millions of others whose courage and sacrifice have for two hundred and fifty years enabled the rest of us to live in relative freedom and security, we should all thank God.

This Happens Much Too Often

It seems that all one has to do nowadays is make an allegation against a law enforcement officer, and if the accuser is a minority and the officer is white his life is thrown into turmoil. The most recent example occurred in Texas where a Texas State Trooper named Daniel Hubbard arrested a woman named Sherita Dixon-Cole.

Dixon-Cole accused the trooper of a number of sordid acts while she was in his custody and the accusations went viral, promoted by reprehensible racial activists like Shaun King and Dixon-Cole's lawyer, S. Lee Merritt. As a result of the incitements of these people on social media thousands of mindless dunderheads have posted death threats against Hubbard and another Texas trooper with the same last name, as well as his family.

Unfortunately for the reputations of both King and Dixon-Cole trooper Hubbard was wearing a body cam and the whole episode was recorded. Every word of the allegations against him turned out to be a lie.

So, a good man doing his job has his life turned upside down by a vicious woman and thousands of unthinking cretins whose first reaction is not to say "Let's wait and see what the evidence is", but rather "Let's kill the guy and his family."

This is the America that has resulted from fifty years of progressivist identity politics, hatred, and Nietzschean ressentiment. Progressivist racial politics have spawned a lynch mob mentality that cares not a bit for facts but which feeds instead on pure emotion and irrational prejudice.

Nor is this the first time that we've seen this scenario play out. The present episode is reminiscent of the 2006 Duke Lacrosse Team case in which a black stripper accused members of the Duke University lacrosse team of assaulting and raping her at a frat party. The District Attorney, a man named Michael Nifong, took her word for it and almost ruined these young men's lives. It turned out that her story was a complete fabrication but until that was demonstrated, the young men suffered grievously.

In any case, besides the fact that there are lots of people with the rational capacities of five year-olds inhabiting the social media world, what other lesson can be gained from this current episode?

One lesson, perhaps, is that the best policy when hearing about these sorts of reports is to approach them with an attitude of open-minded skepticism until the evidence is dispositive that a crime has actually been committed. A steadfast refusal to jump to conclusions would be difficult for many people to implement in their personal lives, of course, requiring as it does a self-discipline beyond the capacities of many who were eager to shout threats, denunciations, and imprecations upon the troopers and their families, but it would save a lot of people a lot of genuine grief and a lot of others a lot of embarrassment.

It'd also be a salutary lesson, as well as condign justice, if the two Hubbard troopers were to sue Dixon-Cole and Shaun King for everything they own for defamation of character or whatever else their lawyers can come up with. Dixon-Cole richly deserves to pay for her mendacity, and King deserves to pay for stupidly endangering the lives of completely innocent people by promoting Dixon-Cole's lies.

Atheism's Coherency Problem

At Uncommon Descent William J. Murray lists ten reasons why atheists are "delusional." I'd prefer the word "inconsistent, or perhaps "irrational," but nevertheless, his ten points make for a compelling case that whichever descriptor one chooses, atheism is intellectually untenable and very difficult, if not impossible, to live out in consistent fashion.

Here are the first four of Murray's ten reasons in italics with my comments added:

1. They [atheistic materialists or naturalists] dismiss morality as nothing more than strongly felt subjective preference, but admit they act as if morality is objective in nature. They tacitly act as if morality is objective, for instance, every time they make a moral judgment of someone else's behavior.

2. They speak, act and hold others responsible for their behaviors as if we all have some metaphysical capacity to transcend and override the deterministic effects of our body’s physical state and causative processing (free will), yet they deny any such metaphysical capacity exists. In other words, if materialism is true there's scant grounds for believing in something like free will, yet every time someone uses the words "ought" or "should" in a moral sense they're implying that a person is free to have done other than what they did.

3. They deny truth can be determined subjectively while necessarily implying that their arguments and evidences are true and expecting others to subjectively determine that their arguments are true. If truth really is nothing more than a subjective preference then there's no point in an argument nor in stating any proposition with the expectation that anyone else should believe it.

4. They deny that what is intelligently designed can be reliably identified when virtually every moment of their waking existence requires precisely that capacity. Put differently, the extremely complex structures and information that must have existed in even the earliest cells they impute to chance but would never attribute to chance the ability to create the even more complex information contained in the operating systems on the computers they use every day.

Follow the link for the last six of Murray's reasons.

I said above that I prefer the word "irrational" because, as Murray points out with his ten reasons, naturalists can't live, or don't live, consistently with their fundamental assumption of atheism. To ignore the logic of one's fundamental assumption and to live as if its contrary were true, i.e. to live as if God exists while denying that he does, is a tacit admission that one's basic metaphysical assumptions are unlivable, if not incoherent. We might call this atheism's coherency problem.

Parenthetically, atheists of both a modern and postmodern predilection have an interesting relationship with reason. Modern man argues that reason is our most trustworthy guide to truth while the postmodern argues that reason is a failure as a guide to truth. Yet both must employ reason in order to make their respective cases. So, the modern has to assume reason is trustworthy in order to argue that it's trustworthy, which is surely question-begging, and the postmodern has to assume reason is trustworthy in order to argue that it's not trustworthy at all, which is surely self-refuting.

In neither case, can it be said that the modern or the postmodern is thinking rationally. We can have confidence that our reason generally leads us to truth, especially metaphysical truth, only on the assumption that God exists, is himself rational, and has created us in his image.

If we assume that God does not exist then we must conclude that our rational faculties are the product of processes which have produced those faculties to suit us for survival, not for the attainment of true beliefs, in which case there's no basis for thinking that they're trustworthy guides to truth. C.S. Lewis was one of the first to point this out as a trio of philosophers discuss in this video:

The same argument is an integral part of philosopher Alvin Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism which he discusses in this video:

Know-Nothings

In a much-cited 2016 essay Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen laments the failure of the older generations to transmit to today's young people the rich cultural heritage to which they are heirs.

His lede sounds like an insulting indictment of today's students, but it's not. It's actually an indictment of today's elders who have failed to demonstrate sufficient appreciation of, and gratitude for, the cultural inheritance that was bequeathed to them (us) to strive to instill it in our successors.

Deneen writes:

My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture.

It’s difficult to gain admissions to the schools where I’ve taught – Princeton, Georgetown, and now Notre Dame. Students at these institutions have done what has been demanded of them: they are superb test-takers, they know exactly what is needed to get an A in every class (meaning that they rarely allow themselves to become passionate and invested in any one subject); they build superb résumés. They are respectful and cordial to their elders, though easy-going if crude with their peers. They respect diversity (without having the slightest clue what diversity is) and they are experts in the arts of non-judgmentalism (at least publicly).

They are the cream of their generation, the masters of the universe, a generation-in-waiting to run America and the world.

But, Deneen alleges, unless they're majoring in one of these disciplines they're disturbingly ignorant of history, literature, politics, science, religion and philosophy. They lack the background knowledge necessary to place current controversies into context.

Whether they've never been taught much in high school or whether they've just never been compelled to learn it, I don't know, but his experience tracks my own albeit I teach at less prestigious schools. The students I work with are, in the main, wonderful kids and I love them, but few of them arrive at college knowing much beyond the limits of their major and pop culture.

Perhaps it has always been this way, but I don't think so. Deneen goes on to identify the root of the problem as he sees it. In his view, the failure to teach the young is intentional:

Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement. Efforts by several generations of philosophers and reformers and public policy experts — whom our students (and most of us) know nothing about — have combined to produce a generation of know-nothings.

The pervasive ignorance of our students is not a mere accident or unfortunate but correctible outcome, if only we hire better teachers or tweak the reading lists in high school. It is the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide. ... Broadly missing is sufficient appreciation that this ignorance is the intended consequence of our educational system, a sign of its robust health and success.

Read the article at the link for more of Deneen's critique of the damage wrought on contemporary students by an educational system that no longer sees it as its task to transmit the best that has been thought and written but rather is more interested in building self-esteem, teaching respect for others, achieving social justice and having fun.

He closes with this:

I love my students – like any human being, each has enormous potential and great gifts to bestow upon the world. But I weep for them, for what is rightfully theirs but hasn’t been given. On our best days, I discern their longing and anguish and I know that their innate human desire to know who they are, where they have come from, where they ought to go, and how they ought to live will always reassert itself.

But even on those better days, I can’t help but hold the hopeful thought that the world they have inherited – a world without inheritance, without past, future, or deepest cares – is about to come tumbling down, and that this collapse would be the true beginning of a real education.

It's What Conservatives Do

A recent column in the New York Times took Republicans to task for political inaction:

[If] the economy and foreign policy have boosted the president’s fortunes, the most important boost may be coming from inside his own party, in the form of the totally nonexistent agenda that congressional Republicans have put forward since the tax bill passed.

That nonexistence is, of course, an indictment of the G.O.P., but politically it’s vastly preferable to the deeply unpopular legislation that the Republicans might otherwise be pursuing, if they were to reattempt Obamacare repeal or pursue some other item from the zombie-Reaganite playbook.

A core fact of our era is that the national Republican Party is politically effective only as a vehicle for anti-liberalism, a rallying point for all the disparate groups who feel threatened by having our cultural elite in full control of government. Which means the G.O.P. is often more popular the less it attempts to legislate at all.

The Times intends this as a criticism but a lot of conservatives are apt to read it and say that this is precisely what conservatives do. Conservatives conserve, they don't enact reams of new legislation which only make government bigger and more overbearing. This is not to say that scaling back Obamacare wouldn't be a good thing, but legislative efforts such as that would make government smaller, less intrusive and less ponderous.

To the extent that the GOP is the home of modern conservatives, it should be a bastion against liberal pie-in-the-sky innovations.

There is today, I think, a lot of misunderstanding as to what conservatism and liberalism are in the contemporary political landscape. Both terms have evolved over the centuries and mean different things today than they did two hundred years ago.

Doubtless this is part of the reason for the misunderstanding, but there are other reasons as well. For instance, the popular misunderstanding is due in no small measure to the distortions of the media which seems to have the unfortunate ability to get almost everything that involves subtle distinctions wrong. It's also due, in part, to the fact that conservatism and liberalism are culturally relative. For example, as Jonah Goldberg at National Review Online, observes:

A conservative in America wants to conserve radically different things than a conservative in Saudi Arabia, Russia, or France does. Even British conservatives — our closest ideological cousins — want to preserve the monarchy, an institution we fought a revolution to get rid of. In the Soviet Union, the “conservatives” were the ones who wanted to preserve and defend the Bolshevik Revolution.

In Saudi Arabia the conservatives want to preserve a strict form of Islam. Indeed, ISIS is a conservative movement. In the antebellum South conservatives wanted to preserve slavery, and in modern Russia it's the conservatives who wish to return to the days of the Soviet Union. In the modern American context, however, conservatism is essentially the desire, as paradoxical as it may sound, to preserve classical liberalism. It's the desire to hold fast to what has been proven through the ages to work, religiously, politically, economically, morally, and socially. It's a reluctance to change just for the sake of change. It recognizes that if something ain't broke it's foolish to try to fix it, and if it is broke the fix is often worse than the original brokenness.

Goldberg elaborates on the relationship between conservatism and classical liberalism:

America’s founding doctrine is properly understood as classical liberalism — or until the progressives stole the label, simply “liberalism.” Until socialism burst on the scene in Europe, liberalism was universally understood as the opposite of conservatism. That’s because European conservatism sought to defend and maintain monarchy, aristocracy, and even feudalism.

The American Founding, warts and all, was the apotheosis of classical liberalism, and conservatism here has always been about preserving it. That’s why Friedrich Hayek, in his fantastic — and fantastically misunderstood — essay “Why I am Not a Conservative” could say that America was the one polity where one could be a conservative and a defender of the liberal tradition.

Classical liberals, unlike their modern progressive counterparts, stood for freedom - freedom of the individual to believe what he wished and to speak his mind without suffering persecution from an intolerant government or social institutions. They also believed in the ability of free markets to maximize economic well-being, in the deadening effect of taxation, and in the dangers of big government. They believed in the inherent tendency of men toward evil and, for the most part, in the salutary effect of Christian belief on man's most destructive impulses.

So, I join with Goldberg when he says at the end of his piece that "It’s also why I have no problem with people who say that American conservatism is simply classical liberalism. As a shorthand, that’s fine by me."

Would Discovering Extra-Terrestrial Life Refute Theism?

Although it's hard to see exactly why, many people are of the mind that if scientists ever discovered life on other planets it would be a devastating blow to theistic belief. It's apparently thought that theism, particularly Christian theism, entails the belief that life was created only on earth and nowhere else and that the discovery of life in some distant locale would thus refute theism.

Protein chemist Kirk Durston has a different take on the matter, though. He argues that if life were ever to be discovered elsewhere in the universe it would be a devastating blow, not to theism but to atheism.

Here is the gravamen of his essay:

When it comes to the idea that life spontaneously self-assembled itself in the past, thousands of our brightest minds have worked on the problem for over half a century with no prospect of success in the foreseeable future. In fact, the more we learn, the more we realize how difficult the problem is. The challenge is three-fold. First, we have to figure out how intelligent scientists can create a simple life form from scratch in the lab.

Second, having done it ourselves, we have to see if realistic natural processes can do the same thing. The third problem is vastly more difficult: figure out how the information to build life forms gets encoded in these self-replicating molecules without an intelligent programmer. We are still working on the first problem, with no hint of success on the horizon. That might be significant, right there.

A 2011 article in Scientific American, “Pssst! Don’t tell the creationists, but scientists don’t have a clue how life began,” summarized our lack of progress in the lab. Of course, there are plenty of scenarios, but creative story-telling should not be confused with doing science, or making scientific discoveries. With regard to “thousands of papers” published each year in the field of evolution, as Austin Hughes wrote, “This vast outpouring of pseudo-Darwinian hype has been genuinely harmful to the credibility of evolutionary biology as a science.”

Evolutionary biologist Eugene Koonin, meanwhile, calculates the probability of a simple replication-translation system, just one key component, to be less than 1 chance in 10^1,018 making it unlikely that life will ever spontaneously self-assemble anywhere in the universe. His proposed solution is a near-infinite number of universes, something we might call a “multiverse of the gaps.” ....Indeed, we would need a vast number of universes all working on the problem to get lucky enough to see life spontaneously assemble itself in just one of them.

The probability of life spontaneously self-assembling anywhere in this universe is mind-staggeringly unlikely; essentially zero. If you are so unquestioningly naïve as to believe we just got incredibly lucky, then bless your soul.

If we were to discover extraterrestrial life, however, then we would have had to get mind-staggeringly lucky two times! Like the forensic detectives at the lotteries commission, a thinking person would have to start operating on the well-founded suspicion that “something is going on.”

The discovery of extraterrestrial life would be the death knell for atheism, at least for the thinking atheist. On the other hand, such a discovery should not be in the least surprising, if there is a supernatural Creator who has designed the universe to support life, and has brought about life and beauty throughout the universe, even if no human ever gets to see it.

Durston's last two paragraphs bear emphasizing: Life elsewhere in the cosmos would not be especially surprising given the truth of theism, but on the assumption that atheism is true the discovery of extraterrestrial life would be breathtakingly astounding.

It's truly ironic that so many of those who fervently hope to find evidence of extraterrestrial organisms are themselves metaphysical naturalists, i.e. atheists. These folks are apparently eager to find evidence that their most important metaphysical commitments are wrong. That just seems odd.

Losing Their Minds

Liberal media and politicians seem to be doing all they can to demonstrate that Trump's contempt for them is amply warranted. Let's let Andrew Klavan describe the latest example of media mendacity:

At a sit-down with California officials worried about sanctuary laws, Trump was questioned by Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims. The sheriff complained that the laws kept her from holding the vicious, brutal, murderous members of the MS-13 gang for deportation. "There could be an MS-13 member I know about — if they don’t reach a certain threshold, I cannot tell ICE about it," the sheriff said.

And the president, sympathizing and obviously referring to the gangsters, answered, "You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals."

CNN, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, the New York Times and even C-SPAN rushed to tweet this comment in such a way as to make it sound as if Trump were referring to illegal immigrants in general. "Trump lashed out at undocumented immigrants during a White House meeting, calling those trying to breach the country’s borders 'animals.'" Well, yes, except they left out the descriptor: "But only those immigrants who beat children to death with baseball bats and cut their enemies' hearts out and are animals."

This was such an obvious distortion of the President's words that even they realized that their comments made them look either dishonest or stupid so they rushed to change the narrative to something like the following: Well, okay, Trump wasn't talking about all immigrants but still it's simply awful to dehumanize these gang members who rape, murder, and terrorize - who commit acts of unspeakable savagery. Even though their behavior is bestial, it's simply deplorable that Trump would call them animals.

It's obvious to anyone with a scintilla of common sense that Mr. Trump was speaking metaphorically not literally, but metaphor is apparently too subtle for some to grasp.

According to the Daily Caller (See here for additional examples):

CNBC’s John Harwood claimed, “however repugnant their actions, MS-13 gang members are human beings,” and Vox’s Dylan Matthews argued, “What if MS-13 members are still human and it’s bad to call them animals.”

Well, of course they're still human. It's obvious to anyone not consumed by a visceral hatred of the President that he was employing a metaphor. It's obvious to anyone not blinded by Trump Derangement Syndrome that he meant that the vicious and inhumane behavior that characterizes MS-13, their view of both life and other human beings, is accurately and fairly described as that of predatory, conscienceless, amoral beasts.

For the left to make an issue of this seems symptomatic of a loss of all perspective, a loss of their collective mind.

Even so,

BBC reporter Anthony Zurcher insisted, “Referring to any humans as ‘animals’ edges toward the language of genocide.”

This is nonsense. In fact, refusing to condemn savage behavior in the strongest possible terms is to edge toward moral paralysis.

CNN personality Ana Navarro ...said the president was dehumanizing these poor MS-13 members, which put him in the same category as Nazis and slave owners.

The President did no such thing. Those MS-13 members have dehumanized themselves. Trump is simply pointing out that these are people who've chosen to diminish and set aside their own humanity.

In a textbook illustration of hypocrisy, Navarro wanted her viewers to know how reprehensible it was for Trump to allegedly dehumanize someone by calling them an animal and yet in a tweet a couple of years ago she herself used the same language to disparage Mr. Trump:

Regular CNN commentator Ana Navarro joined the crowd attacking President Donald Trump for referring to MS-13 gang members as “animals,” apparently forgetting that she had used the same terminology to attack Trump during the 2016 campaign. Just after the release of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, Navarro tweeted her disgust with then candidate Trump.

“Should Donald Trump drop out of the race? Yes,” she tweeted Oct. 10, 2016. “He should drop out of the human race. He is an animal. Apologies to animals.”

Here's another example of a journalist condemning Mr. Trump for doing pretty much the same thing she did not too long ago:

Jennifer Rubin, the self-described “conservative blogger” at the Washington Post, called President Trump’s comments “disgusting,” but in August of 2017, Rubin also compared the president to an “animal” in an opinion piece that appeared in the Chicago Tribune:

“Only 24 hours after he read a serious speech off a teleprompter committing to send more young men and women to fight in Afghanistan, President Donald Trump reverted to form, delivering a rambling, rage-filled, 77-minute harangue that was alternately defensive, angry, accusatory and just plain weird. Like a trapped animal, he lashed out in every direction, trying unsuccessfully to draw blood.”

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi also criticized the President for not recognizing that each of those MS-13 killers, as she put it, holds within himself the "spark of divinity."

These are odd words from a Roman Catholic who is nevertheless staunch in her support of the right to use abortion as birth control. Don't those babies also have the spark of divinity in them? Which is worse, calling someone who has done everything he could to snuff out that spark of divinity within himself an animal or actually snuffing out the spark of divinity in a baby by treating it as just a blob of tissue?

All humans are created in the image of God, but that doesn't mean that they can't become so degraded and cruel as to transmogrify themselves into moral monsters. It's a symptom of how perverse the left has become in their hatred of Trump that they're now reduced to coming to the defense of the humanity of extremely evil men, denying the obvious inhumanity of their behavior, and castigating Trump for clearly articulating it.

Why does MS-13 warrant President Trump's opprobrium? Breitbart offers a list of eleven of their more heinous crimes. It's worth reading and mulling over whether "animals" is really an inappropriate description of these people.

Meanwhile, here's an interesting interview with Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen on the criticism of President Trump and his "animals" remark:

An amusing aspect of all this is to consider that had Navarro, Pelosi and the rest ever discovered that MS-13 was a branch of the alt-right they themselves would be happy to declare them savages and animals.

Their indignation is not really that Mr. Trump has called the nation's attention to the depravity of this gang by labeling them what they in fact are. Their indignation is with Mr. Trump himself who has had the temerity to not only win an election they thought they had sewn up but also to keep all the promises he made during the campaign, undoing much of Mr. Obama's legacy in the process.

That's what's causing them to act as if they're losing their minds.

Leaving the Left

Yesterday's post on socialism and the four socialist candidates selected by Democratic voters to run for Congress in Pennsylvania this November highlighted the growing infatuation among progressives for far left ideological solutions to the nation's problems.

To be sure, the growing support for far-left ideology and politicians such as Bernie Sanders, especially among millenials, isn't limited just to economics.

In his new book Suicide of the West Jonah Goldberg cites some disappointing statistics. Support for liberty, Goldberg writes, is dying out:

Among those born in the 1930s, 75% of Americans and 53% of Europeans say living under democratic government is "essential." Among those born in the 1980s, the number drops to the low 40s in Europe and the low 30s in America. Only 32% of millennials consider it "absolutely essential" that "civil rights protect people's liberty."

The younger you are the less likely you are to support free speech rights. Forty percent of 18 to 34 year-olds ... thought that speech offensive to minorities should be banned.

A survey of college students in 2015 found that a majority of students favor speech codes for both students and faculty. More than six in ten want professors to provide students with "trigger warnings" before discussing or presenting material some might find offensive.

This is especially silly, of course. It would mean that we'd end up banning all speech since everyone is a member of some minority group or other - racial, religious, ethnic, gender, sexual orientation, political ideology, body morphology, age, socio-economic class, pet owners, whatever - and everyone is offended by something.

Finally, there's this disconcerting stat:

Thirty percent of self-identified liberal students said they believe the First Amendment is outdated.

The silver lining is that the progressive abrogation of liberty is beginning to disillusion a lot of liberals. An example is journalist Dave Rubin of The Rubin Report who formerly identified as a progressive, but who has since realized that progressivism is leading us to totalitarian fascism. Here's his story:

The Democrats Embrace Socialism

In Tuesday's Pennsylvania primary election four socialist candidates running on the Democratic ticket won their party's nomination for Congress, and two of them are guaranteed to win in November since they'll be running unopposed.

It's remarkable that the Democratic party continues to move leftward despite the fact that socialist policies have such a problematic historical track record. Almost every economic basket case in the world is a socialist economy. Venezuela was a rich nation until it embraced socialism and now many of its people who were formerly middle class are starving and/or fleeing to other countries in South and Central America.

Socialists want a guaranteed income, a guaranteed job, and have both free health care and free education. It sounds very appealing on the surface, but these allurements all need to be paid for, and the only way to do that is by raising taxes and imposing mandates and regulations on businesses. This crushes an economy, especially an economy which has to maintain a strong military.

High taxes and regulations stifle business innovation and job creation, raise unemployment, and actually reduce the amount of money the government takes in since fewer people have jobs and pay taxes. When the government runs health care the patient sacrifices the freedom to choose the care they want, wait times for tests increase, and the quality of care erodes just as we saw happen in our government-run veterans' hospitals.

On the other hand, we've recently seen a vivid lesson on how lowering tax rates and reducing regulations produces more benefits for more people. Tax revenues to the federal government have been at record highs since tax reform passed last year and President Trump relaxed many Obama era regulations on business. Moreover, minority unemployment is at record lows, over a million people have left the welfare rolls, personal income has risen, and the economy has boomed.

So why would anyone want to undo and reverse all this? Perhaps it's because socialism sounds compassionate to those who'd rather feel than think. Feeling is easy, thinking is hard. Thinking requires us to examine evidence and set aside prejudices.

Here are a couple of videos which show what socialism has accomplished in two South American countries, Venezuela and Brazil, both of which were prospering until they elected socialist governments:

Despite the chaos and destruction wreaked upon these countries by socialist governments many Democrats in the U.S. still vote for it. Why?

Creating Life

There are fundamentally two possible explanations for the origin of life in the universe. One is that life arose through the fortuitous conflation of natural forces, chemical principles and sheer chance unaided by any intelligent input. The second is that life is somehow the product of intelligent agency.

The problem with the first is that it's so astronomically improbable that unguided processes could somehow produce the information necessary to construct a living, reproducing cell that it seems absurd. It's like believing, in Fred Hoyle's famous metaphor, that a tornado sweeping across a salvage yard could leave in its wake a fully functional 747 jet airliner.

This is an extremely difficult problem for metaphysical naturalism, the view that nature and its laws are all that exists, but all is not lost. Perhaps the probabilistic resources required for such an amazing feat as naturalism posits can be found in the multiverse.

In other words, if there are an infinity of salvage yards and an infinity of tornadoes eventually one will leave a jet plane in its wake, just as if you're dealt enough hands of cards eventually you'll get a royal flush. Or to use a more familiar metaphor, if an infinite number of monkeys are set to hammering away blindly on an infinite number of computers, eventually one of them will churn out the complete works of Shakespeare.

This is the naturalist's conviction, and although it's logically possible, it's so fantastically improbable as to place it beyond the credulity of not only those of common sense but even of most philosophers.

The mere logical possibility of such a prodigy does little to establish confidence in its having happened, so some have cast an envious glance at some form of intelligence as the cause. The problem with this is that it immediately raises the prospect of you know Who, and that's one solution that any dutiful metaphysical naturalist adamantly refuses to consider. Eyes shut, fists clenched, as C.S. Lewis once put it, the metaphysical naturalist would rather be burned at the stake than seriously entertain that possibility.

Even so, the evidence for design is powerful, so maybe intelligent engineering could be invoked in the origin of life without having to allow a divine foot in the door. So, ever resourceful, scientists and philosophers have come up with a pair of possibilities.

One is that life on earth is just a computer simulation designed by some very advanced life form in some other universe. This, however, is just a version of the multiverse gambit, since it assumes the existence of other universes, and in addition to the problems inherent in the multiverse hypothesis - namely the lack of evidence for the hypothesis and the inability to put it to any meaningful test - it simply pushes the problem back a step. If there are other universes with intelligent beings in them, how did those beings arise?

Moreover, it's not at all clear that conscious experience, i.e. the sensations we have of pain, pleasure, sound, color, etc., could be simulated by a computer.

The second possibility is something called panpsychism. It's the belief that the intelligent agent is the universe itself. On this view every particle of matter has at least a rudimentary consciousness and that if matter is aggregated together in just the right pattern and amount it'll reach a critical mass at which point consciousness arises, the universe becomes conscious and intelligent and proceeds to design life somewhere within itself.

As far as I'm aware these possibilities pretty much exhaust the philosophical landscape when it comes to accounting for the origin of life and the presence of the enormous amount of functional information contained in each cell of any living organism. Life originated as a result of either a blind stroke of incredible luck, a computer simulation originating in some other world, universal, panpsychic consciousness, or God.

The only way the last option can be adjudged to be less likely than any of the others is if it's decided apriori that God doesn't exist, but that assumption, of course, begs the question. Whether God exists, or whether His existence is more probable than any of the alternative explanations for life, is precisely what's at issue.

You can read more on the state of origin of life research here or you might be interested in this video which discusses what scientists mean when they talk about functional information in a living organism:

Why Obama's Iran Deal Was Ended

In 2015 the United States and several other nations made a deal with Iran that offered the Iranian government $150 billion and an end to economic sanctions in return for which Iran pledged to postpone its nuclear weapons program for ten years.

It was a terrible deal for a host of reasons, not the least of which is that President Obama didn't even submit it to the Senate for ratification but made the agreement entirely on his own. President Trump has taken some heat for letting the agreement lapse on May 12th, but he really couldn't have done otherwise.

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reaffirmed last week, the Iranians, the world's worst terrorist state, have been lying all along when they've denied having nuclear weapons aspirations. In any case, the agreement would not prevent them from restarting their program in 2025 and developing the capability of mounting nuclear warheads on missiles within a few years or even months.

In other words, the Iran deal allowed the world to sleepwalk toward Armageddon, deluding itself into thinking that peace had been purchased, as if Islamic fanatics could be bought off with money. In fact, if Iran is allowed to continue its nuclear weapons program Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan will all insist on building their own nukes, and it's almost inevitable that those weapons would be used.

Back when the deal was made with Iran Dennis Prager put together a video which explains in just a few minutes why this was such a terrible agreement. It's worth watching so as to better understand why President Trump chose to take the step that he did.

Avoiding a Cosmic Beginning

Ross Pomeroy has a brief column at Real Clear Science in which he argues that the Big Bang theory of cosmogenesis (the origin of the universe) was resisted by many scientists because they harbored an anti-religious bias that rendered any theory of a beginning of the universe apriori repugnant.

A beginning to the universe implies a transcendent act of creation, which sounds too much like Genesis 1:1, and that sort of thing has no place in science, we've been told ad infinitum.

There were problems with the Big Bang to be sure, but as time wore on evidence accumulated that the universe was expanding which meant that if scientists extrapolated back in time they would come to a point at which all the universe was compressed into an infinitely dense point.

In other words, the universe arose out of nothing which is what theologians had been saying for thousands of years. Atheistic scientists were chagrined. After all, science was supposed to debunk religious beliefs, not confirm them.

Then, in the 1960s, two scientists working for Bell laboratories, looking for something else entirely, accidentally confirmed a prediction of the Big Bang theory. They discovered the remnant energy from the initial "Bang". This discovery of what's called the cosmic background radiation rocked the scientific world.

Pomeroy writes:

Today, the Big Bang model of cosmology is pretty much taken for Gospel, and for good reason. For more than fifty years, evidence gathered from all manner of sources has supported the notion that the Universe as we know it expanded from an infinitely dense singularity.

But things didn't always look so certain for the Big Bang. In its most nascent form, the idea was known as the hypothesis of the primeval atom, and it originated from an engineer turned soldier turned mathematician turned Catholic priest turned physicist by the name of Georges Lemaître. When Lemaître published his idea in the eminent journal Nature in 1931, a response to observational data suggesting that space was expanding, he ruffled a lot of feathers.

As UC-San Diego professor of physics Brian Keating wrote in his recent book Losing the Nobel Prize, "Lemaître's model... upset the millennia-old orthodoxy of an eternal, unchanging cosmos. It clearly implied that everything had been smaller and denser in the past, and that the universe must itself have had a birth at a finite time in the past."

Besides questioning the status quo, Lemaître's primeval atom also had some glaring problems. For starters, there were hardly any means of testing it, a must for any would-be scientific theory. Moreover, it essentially suggested that all the matter in the Universe came from nothing, a flabbergasting claim. It also violated an accepted notion known as the perfect cosmological principle, which suggested that the Universe looks the same from any given point in space and time.

For these reasons, English astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle gathered with a few colleagues to formulate the Steady State theory of the cosmos. The idea kept the observable universe essentially the same in space and time, and it accounted for evidence suggesting that the universe is expanding by hypothesizing that matter is instead being created out of the fabric of space in between distant galaxies.

Steady State didn't have the problems inherent to the notion of a primeval atom, and, as Keating wrote "it sure as hell didn't look like the creation narrative in Genesis 1:1."

As Keating continued, anti-religious sentiments provided underlying motivation to debunk Lemaître's theory.

Many atheist scientists were repulsed by the Big Bang's creationist overtones. According to Hoyle, it was cosmic chutzpah of the worst kind: "The reason why scientists like the 'big bang' is because they are overshadowed by the Book of Genesis."

When a man is dead set against the evidence that God exists there's not much that can persuade him to believe otherwise. Hoyle remained adamantly opposed to the Big Bang until his death in 2001. Many modern cosmologists are searching for a theory of cosmogenesis today that will allow them to avoid a cosmic beginning.

Maybe they'll find one, but there seems to be something strange about people who insist that religious belief has no place in science being motivated by their own religious belief to spend their lives in search of a way to escape a theory just because that theory has religious implications.