Another Bad Week for Media Credibility

Our American media has churned out yet another round of fake news this week. Two recent stories illustrate our media's sad and maddening descent to the level of supermarket tabloids.

The first was the feeding frenzy among cable news talking heads sparked by a BuzzFeed story claiming that there was incontrovertible evidence that President-elect Donald Trump ordered his lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about his real estate projects in Russia.

Media commentators on almost every network were giddy with excitement over Mr. Trump's manifest subornation of perjury and his inevitable impeachment. Until, that is, Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller issued a denial that any such evidence was in hand. With that, crestfallen news reporters began their by now regular and reluctant walkback of their earlier stories.

Even so, the damage had been done and large portions of the population, including even Democratic senator Kirsten Gillibrand, remained convinced that the story was true despite Mueller's disclaimer.

Then came the orgy of media outrage arising from the completely phony revelation of a bunch of teenagers from Covington Catholic High School harassing a native-American demonstrator during a protest in Washington, D.C. The students, who had been participating in the March for Life (which you probably didn't even know occurred if you only get your news from mainstream sources), were waiting for their bus when they were approached by a group from an organization called Black Hebrew Israelites who began hurling racist, homophobic slurs and taunts at them.

Because the media falsely made the students out to be the aggressors in this incident they and their families are being threatened, their school has been vilified, social media nitwits are doing everything they can to ruin these kids' lives, and the whole thing was a lie amplified by a media with a ravenous appetite for scandal involving anyone who can be tied to President Trump (some of the students were wearing MAGA hats).

One gentle soul who works for something called Vulture declared that “I just want these people to die. Simple as that. Every single one of them. And their parents.” The students, this beacon of comity averred, were “white slugs.”

Well, they were also the innocent party in this sordid episode, and the secular puritans, both left and right, who were so quick to condemn them have behaved at best irresponsibly and at worst reprehensibly. And, of course, the walkback has begun.

For a full account of what actually happened go here. For a description of the execrable behavior exhibited by the boys' critics see this article at PJ Media.

There was a time when journalists occasionally cared about the effect their reporting might have on the lives of the people they reported on. There was a time when journalists demanded that a story be independently corroborated before they'd publish it.

Today that standard has been abandoned and replaced with one which allows for the public airing of almost anything that reflects poorly on the president or his supporters, and any innocent bystanders who suffer are just written off as collateral damage.

Retractions can always come later, if need be, after public perception of the president has been ratcheted down a few more notches and public hatred for him and his voters boosted a few degrees higher.

Not all journalists have the ethics of a mob hit man, of course. Some of them are still old-fashioned enough to believe they have a professional responsibility to make sure their reports are true before they put them before the public, but it's hard today to find any of those dinosaurs on CNN or MSNBC.

Little wonder so many Americans agree with President Trump when he accuses the media of persistently trading in "fake news."

A Challenge to the Moral Argument (Pt. III)

This is the final installment in a series of posts on objections raised by philosopher Erik Wielenberg to the moral argument for the existence of God (scroll down for the previous two posts). Recall that Wielenberg couches his challenge to the moral argument in the form of three questions:

1. Why think that only Divine Commands are sufficient by themselves to generate moral obligations?
2. How can God's commands impose obligations on those who are unaware of divine authority behind such commands?
3. Why would God command people to do things He knows they won't do anyway, since issuing such commands only introduces pointless evil into the world?

In the previous post we looked at question #1 to determine how persuasive it was as an objection to the claim that if objective moral duties exist, God must exist. Today we'll look at questions #2 and #3.

One response to #2 is to point out that in fact our fundamental moral obligations to do justice and show compassion and mercy are known by everyone, atheist and theist alike. The apostle Paul writes that "they [unbelievers] show the work of the [moral] law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness, and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them." (Romans 2:15).

In other words, everyone has a basic sense of what's right and what's wrong, but if there's no transcendent ground for this sense then there's nothing obligatory about following it. It can easily be explained away as a product of social conditioning or evolution and then we're back to the argument of our first post in this series.

In response to #3 it's hard to see how commanding people not to, say, commit murder actually introduces more evil into the world. Wielenberg seems to think that murder is evil because God prohibits it, but that's silly. Murder isn't evil because God forbids it. God forbids it because it's evil. People would still murder others had God never proscribed it. In fact there'd probably be more murder had God not forbidden it and therefore there'd be more evil.

Even if not everyone heeds the command forbidding murder surely most people do, and therefore God's command reduces the amount of killing and human suffering rather than introducing more of it.

We can conclude this series of posts with this observation: If the God of traditional theism exists He is perfectly good, He transcends human subjectivity, and He is able to hold us accountable for what we do. Only such a being could serve as an adequate ground for the existence of objective moral duties.

When people seek to live what would be considered a "good moral life" while denying the existence of the only adequate basis for their moral values, they're in fact piggy-backing on theism while at the same time claiming to reject the theism on which their moral life depends.

That doesn't seem to make much sense.

Celebrating an American Hero

Today is the day we celebrate Martin Luther King's birthday and it would be well to focus on why we do. King was a man of great courage who was resolutely committed, not just to racial equality under the law, but to harmony among all the racial factions in America.

His commitment to achieving justice under the law for every American was rooted in his Christian faith as his Letter From a Birmingham Jail makes clear, and it was that faith which made him a transformational figure in the history of our nation.

It's sad that though his dream of racial equality has been largely realized - the law no longer permits distinctions between the races in our public life - his dream of racial harmony has not.

One reason it has not is that his dream that his children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character has been inverted so that the color of one's skin is often the only thing that matters, at least in those precincts of our society still in thrall to identity politics.

For example, students are still accepted into colleges and given scholarships on the basis of their race without having to meet the same standards as those with a different skin color. The same is true of civil servants like police and firemen who are often hired and promoted on the basis of test performance but who sometimes receive preferential treatment based on race. The Obama Justice Department refused to prosecute blacks who denied others their civil rights, and any criticism of our previous president was interpreted by some as a racist reaction to his skin color rather than reasoned opposition to his policies.

Sadly, people are judged by the color of their skin rather than by the content of their character as much today, perhaps, as at any time in our history, but that's precisely contrary to Martin Luther King's dream.

Nor do I think he would have been happy that we celebrate black history month as if it were somehow separate from American history rather than, as Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby argues, an integral part of American history. The civil rights movement was not merely a black movement, it was an American movement in which the American people realized that we were not living up to the ideals of equality and liberty upon which America was founded.

It was a time when the nation realized that we were not living consistently with the deepest convictions we held as Christians, namely that we are all brothers and sisters, children of the same God.

Martin Luther King persistently and bravely upheld these ideals and convictions before the American people, he refused to allow us to avoid their implications, and repeatedly urged us to live up to what we believed deep in our souls to be true. And the American people, many of whom had never really thought about the chasm between what we professed and what we practiced, responded.

It was an American achievement that involved the efforts and blood of people not just of one race but of all races. Thinking of the great sacrifices and advances of the civil rights era as only a success story of one race is divisive. It carves out one group of people from the rest of the nation for special notice and tends to exclude so many others without whom the story would never have been told.

On Martin Luther King day it would be good for us to try to put behind us the invidious distinctions we continue to make between white and black. It would be good to stop seeing others in terms of their skin color, to give each other the benefit of the doubt that our disagreements are about ideas and policies and are not motivated by hatred, bigotry, or moral shortcomings. It would be good to declare a moratorium on the use of the word "racist," unless the evidence for it is overwhelming, and, in any case, to realize that racism is a sin to which all races are prone and is not exclusive to the majority race.

Let's resolve to judge each other on the content of our character and our minds, and not on the color of our skin. As long as we continue to see each other through the lens of race we'll keep throwing up barriers between groups of people and never achieve the unity that King yearned for and gave his life for.

There is perhaps no better way to honor Doctor King today than to take the time to read his Letter From a Birmingham Jail and to watch his "I Have a Dream" speech (below) and then to incorporate his words into our own lives as Americans.

A Challenge to the Moral Argument (Pt. II)

In yesterday's post we outlined one version of the moral argument for the existence of God. It goes like this:

1. If God does not exist then objective moral duties do not exist.
2. Objective moral duties do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

We also mentioned that in a debate with theistic philosopher William Lane Craig, atheistic philosopher Erik Wielenberg challenged the first premise of the argument and therefore rejected the conclusion.

Wielenberg's challenge was packaged in a series of three questions:

1. Why think that only Divine Commands are sufficient by themselves to generate moral obligations?
2. How can God's commands impose obligations on those who are unaware of divine authority behind such commands?
3. Why would God command people to do things He knows they won't do anyway, since issuing such commands only introduces pointless evil into the world?

Quite apart from Craig's response, I'd like to venture a reply myself to Wielenberg's questions.

Taking them in order, I understand Wielenberg to be asking in #1 why there could not be other sources of moral obligation besides God. Why, he's asking, must we think that only God is a sufficient source of moral duty?

In reply it seems appropriate to ask what else could be an adequate source of moral obligation if not God? Several possibilities may perhaps suggest themselves: Social consensus, evolution and collective human reason are three, but there are serious shortcomings with each of these.

If the consensus of a society serves as a moral authority then, as was argued in yesterday's post, whatever a society deems to be right is right. Thus, if a society countenances slavery, oppression of women or child abuse those things would be morally proper.

Furthermore, if someone were to dissent and insist that slavery, say, is wrong, and if the dissenter happens to be in the minority in his or her society, then the dissenter must of necessity be holding a morally incorrect opinion. The dissenter is wrong by definition. The consensus of society is otherwise, and if the consensus is right ab defino then the minority opinion is always wrong.

And, if that's so, how would a society ever experience moral improvement since moral progress is almost always initiated by people holding a minority opinion?

Well, what about the evolutionary possibility? It's sometimes argued that we have evolved traits like sympathy for our fellow human beings and that we're therefore morally obligated to treat others sympathetically or kindly, but it's hard to see how this conclusion follows from the premise.

The fact that a behavioral trait has evolved is hardly a reason to consider ourselves morally obligated to behave accordingly. After all, as philosopher David Hume pointed out 250 years ago, just because human beings are a certain way, it doesn't follow that we should be that way.

In addition, if behavioral traits are the products of evolution then selfishness, male aggression and male dominance of females, among other unsavory aspects of human nature, are all evolved traits. Should we therefore consider ourselves obligated to be selfish, violent and oppressive?

And if all our behaviors have the same evolutionary provenience how do we arbitrate between our sympathy for others and our contempt for others? Why is sympathy right and good and contempt wrong and bad if evolution has produced them both?

Finally, we might ask how a blind, impersonal process like evolution could ever impose a moral obligation upon us in the first place. Obligations can only be imposed by personal beings with minds. Impersonal processes like natural selection and genetic mutation cannot make selfishness and greed, violence and hatred, morally wrong, nor can they forbid them and impose on us a duty to refrain from them.

Some would argue that human reason is the source of moral obligation, but it's difficult to see how human reason can impose a duty to do something like sacrificing one's goods to help anonymous poor people in a distant continent. Why would I be wrong to refrain from helping those people? What does it even mean to say that it would be wrong not to help them?

Human reason seems to me to lead not to some Kantian kingdom of ends in which we act in ways that we would want all people to act. Rather reason tells me to put my own interests first, ahead of the interests of others. The moral imperative produced by a secular human reason is "Look out for #1."

Indeed, another atheist philosopher, the Canadian Kai Nielsen expressed deep disappointment with the inability of philosophers to find a way to base a moral system on reason:

We have not been able to show that reason requires the moral point of view, or that all really rational persons, unhoodwinked by myth or ideology, need not be individual egoists or amoralists….Reason doesn't decide here….The picture I have painted is not a pleasant one. Reflection on it depresses me….Pure reason will not take you to morality.

Richard Rorty, also an atheistic philosopher, declared that:

...if you do not believe in God you would do well to drop notions like “law” and “obligation” from the vocabulary you use when deciding what to do.

Very well, then, but about Wielenberg's questions #2 and #3?

We'll consider those next week.

A Challenge to the Moral Argument (Pt. I)

Two philosophers, William Lane Craig and Erik Wielenberg, met last February to debate (see the video here) what's called the Moral argument for the existence of God. Simply put, the argument they debated goes like this:

1. If God does not exist then objective moral duties do not exist.
2. Objective moral duties do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

Craig, who is a theist, argued on behalf of the soundness of this argument and Wielenberg, who is an atheist, argued against it.

Generally, those who seek to evade the conclusion that God exists either 1) deny the first premise and argue that even though God does not exist objective moral duties do exist. Or, they 2) deny the second premise and claim that God does not exist and that there are no objective moral duties either. Any moral obligations that exist are merely subjective - self-chosen and self-imposed.

Those who adopt the first tactic have a difficult time explaining where objective moral duties could possibly come from if not from God. What entity could have the moral authority, the right, to impose a moral obligation upon us to, say, love our fellow man. The state can, of course, impose legal duties to refrain from harming others, but it cannot impose a moral duty to not hate others or to not be selfish or greedy. The state can control human behavior through the civil law, but it has no authority over the human heart.

Moreover, if the state could impose such a duty, if the state was in fact the highest moral authority, then whatever the state sanctioned would be ipso facto right. So if the state, as it has done historically, endorsed genocide, or human sacrifice, or chattel slavery, or denial of the right to vote to women all of those would be morally right and proper, and one who denied that they were right would be, by definition, wrong.

Those who opt for the second tactic, on the other hand, find it very difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile their belief that no objective moral duties exist with the way they actually think and live their lives.

For example, if there are no objective duties then no one can say that anything anyone else did was objectively wrong, yet almost everyone, theist and atheist alike, agrees that child abuse, raping a toddler, molesting altar boys, or beating a crying infant are all morally wrong. And almost everyone would agree that anyone who refuses to make that judgment is at best morally stunted and at worst morally depraved.

This short video illustrates the moral argument:

Wielenberg agrees that objective moral duties do exist, he accepts the second premise, but he denies that God exists. In other words, he rejects the first premise of the moral argument and, thus, he rejects the conclusion.

He summarizes his objection with three three questions:

1. Why think that only Divine commands are sufficient by themselves to generate moral obligations?
2. How can God's commands impose obligations on those who are unaware of divine authority behind such commands?
3. Why would God command people to do things He knows they won't do anyway, since issuing such commands only introduces pointless evil into the world?

We'll consider this challenge to Craig's argument in tomorrow's post.

The Relevance of Philosophy

Robert Tracinski has written some wise words on the topic of the importance and relevance of philosophy in these times.

Whether we're consciously aware of it or not each of us adopts a particular philosophical view of life and the world. We do this as individuals and we do it corporately as a society. To study philosophy is to consciously examine the views we're adopting and to ask ourselves and others whether those views make sense.

Here's a portion of what Tracinski writes:

The primary purpose of philosophy is to offer guidance for one’s life. It asks questions like: How do we distinguish truth from falsehood? How do we know what is right or wrong? What is the moral purpose of our lives? Do we have a choice over our personality and control over our destiny? When we say philosophy talks about “the meaning of life,” that’s not an understatement. These are the kinds of questions that, depending on the answers, can give meaning and coherence to the course of our lives.

They also make a tangible difference in how we live it. If you don’t think you have control over your life — if you think everything is determined by your genes, upbringing, God or “the system, man” — then you’re not likely to take much action to improve your life. So the questions philosophy deals with are the kind of questions that really matter.

What philosophy does for a single person’s life, it also does for the political life of a nation. If we want to make America great again, for example, we need to know what “greatness” is and how to achieve it. We need to know what government can do, ought to do, and shouldn’t do. All of these questions have huge, life-and-death consequences.

Politics is about ideas and power. Philosophy asks us to follow our ideas to their logical conclusion to see whether those endpoints are really best for ourselves and our nation. It helps us to consider how power should be exercised in a society that aspires to justice.

Tracinski continues:

In that regard, there are whole schools of philosophy — including the ones dominant today — that undermine the role of philosophy itself. They are helping to turn us into an unphilosophical country with an unphilosophical political culture.

The dominant schools today are essentially subjectivist. They encourage you, Oprah-style, to assert “your truth,” which is valid because you feel it, so there’s no need to listen to anyone else. The subjectivists have cultivated a reputation for being “open-minded” and freewheeling, but this actually shuts down discussion. ... this is how we get the peculiar dogmatism of political correctness [according to which]...[t]here is no universal truth, just your ‘perspective,’ as a trans person of color or a left-handed lesbian tugboat worker, or whatever.

And no one else is entitled to question your perspective. It’s true because it’s true for you. If you are aggrieved, the very fact of your grievance validates itself.

If that’s the case, what’s the point of discussing any of it? It’s not for others to question or for you to explain. You just scream out your rage and frustration, and they have to cave.

In other words, so much of what passes for "dialogue" today is merely emotive venting (see the video here, for example). People often are unable or unwilling to give a rational defense of what they believe so they substitute yelling, name-calling, intimidation, censorship, and/or violence, all of which are tacit admissions that they have no good reasons for their beliefs and cannot persuade others to accept them but can only impose them on others by refusing others the opportunity to analyze, debate and promote an alternative point of view.

We see this often whenever matters of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, evolution, climate change, or politics arise in the classroom or in informal discussions. As soon as an opinion is raised which clashes with conventional orthodoxy, especially the orthodoxy of the left, the dissenter is treated like a heretic or a social leper.

In some cases on university campuses where the heretics have been grad students they've been expelled from their degree programs, and when they've been faculty members they've sometimes been denied tenure or their classes have been disrupted. In cases where the dissenters from the approved opinion have been invited speakers they've often been disinvited or shouted down or even assaulted.

Tracinski concludes:

When we disregard philosophy, when we don’t used reasoned debate to examine our moral and political assumptions, then all that’s left is some kind of appeal to emotion. When you appeal to emotion, as most people do these days, then the only people you can gather to your side are those already inclined to feel the same emotions you do. You end up appealing only to people like you, to those with the same background and upbringing.

College-educated blue-staters will agree with college-educated blue-staters. Blue-collar red-staters agree with blue-collar red-staters.

Actually, in today’s politics, the responses are even narrower, because so much of the political debate is based on an appeal to our emotions about a particular person. Do you love or hate Hillary Clinton? Do you love or hate Donald Trump? That’s all you need to know to determine where you stand in a partisan fight, and even on public policy.

The end of the road for the appeal to emotion is the kind of tribalism and cult of personality we see in today’s politics.

The only cure for it is philosophy.

Well, maybe not the only cure but the ability to think philosophically is certainly an essential part of any cure.

Eternal Life, Maybe

David Goldman, writing at PJ Media, makes an interesting point. Some of the same secular folk who scoff at the Judeo-Christian concept of a God-granted immortality of the soul nevertheless believe that such immortality is possible through technology, and they're excited by the prospect.

He introduces his thoughts by referencing the belief of ancient elites, particularly in Egypt, that they'd live forever:

What was the upshot of Egyptian idolatry? The ruling elite wanted to live forever, and enslaved my ancestors to build grand tombs in which their mummified bodies would migrate to another life, surrounded by their wealth and some conveniently dead servants. A remarkably large part of Egypt’s economic output fed the fantasies of the Pharaohs, at which we laugh today.

The desire for eternal life is not new, and hardly unique to Jews or Christians. Neanderthals buried their dead with grave gifts. Gilgamesh, the Babylonian hero, set out to find eternal life. The pharaohs built pyramids with [Jewish] sweat and blood.

Contemporary secular elites are too sophisticated for such superstitious nonsense. Their belief in eternal life relies on advances in technology, but it turns out to be at least as "faith-based" as some traditional views:

Today our progressive opinion-makers ridicule the concept of an eternal God and a world to come, but they believe that we soon will upload our minds to the Internet where our consciousness will continue intact.

We laugh at the idea that the blessed would spend eternity strumming harps while seated on clouds, but enlightened opinion now believes that we shall maintain our conscious minds in Google’s cloud. Add to this a robotic body, and supposedly we can live forever. A lot of Silicon Valley billionaires take this seriously.

According to Wikipedia, mind uploading may potentially be accomplished by either of two methods: Copy-and-transfer or gradual replacement of neurons. In the case of the former method, mind uploading would be achieved by scanning and mapping the salient features of a biological brain, and then by copying, transferring, and storing that information state into a computer system or another computational device.

The biological brain may not survive the copying process. The simulated mind could be within a virtual reality or simulated world, supported by an anatomic 3D body simulation model. Alternatively the simulated mind could reside in a computer that is inside (or connected to) a (not necessarily humanoid) robot or a biological body.

That is not science, but science fiction. The urge to escape death, though, remains as powerful today as it was when Moses confronted Ramses.

A tech startup now offers a method to preserve the chemical arrangement of your brain until such time as it can be uploaded, with the minor side-effect that you will have to die in the process.

It's not uncommon to hear materialists declare that they're satisfied with the one life they have and have no desire to live on forever. What they apparently mean is that they have no desire to live forever if that means that they must come to terms with God. If eternal life can be accomplished otherwise, then they're all in.

If they're promised that they can bypass God and find eternal life through technological advances they'll grab hold of that shred of possibility like a drowning man grasping at a piece of flotsam.

There's more in Goldman's article, but this, I think is noteworthy. Comparing our modern elites to the ancient pharaohs who expended huge quantities of both money and human life to achieve immortality for themselves he writes:

Our new pharaohs believe in methods to achieve immortality as silly as the old ones. And they entertain such fantasies for the same reason: They want to make themselves into immortal gods who have no more constraint on the satisfaction of their appetites than the rapacious, concupiscent and murderous gods of ancient paganism.

Well, as long as none of it involves God.

The Resistance Boomerang

There was much rejoicing and jubilation when the Democrats officially took control of the House of Representatives earlier this month. Finally, we were assured, the Democrats will steer this country in the general direction of, if not all the way to, the sunny uplands of socialism.

Rather rudely, however, the Washington Free Beacon's Matthew Continetti has made himself the pooper at the party by injecting a sobering dose of reality into the midst of the Democrats' merriment.

To alter the metaphor somewhat, he throws a wet blanket on the Democrats' exultations by reminding them that what lies ahead is almost certainly disappointment and disillusionment.

He concedes that there are some things they can do as the majority party in the House to make themselves a pesky nuisance for the president, but these irritations will not amount to much. Speaker Pelosi will soon find herself reduced to irrelevancy.

Here's why:

Yes, they can fire their subpoena cannon at the White House. They can interrogate cabinet officials, subpoena Jared and Ivanka, leak scoops to reporters, maybe force a cabinet official or two to resign, if any are left. When Mueller delivers his findings, they could begin impeachment proceedings. But impeachment, like progressive legislation, won't get far.

A decade ago [When the Democrats last controlled the House and Nancy Pelosi was Speaker] the House could pass bills and hope that Harry Reid would persuade his Democratic Senate majority to support them. All Pelosi had to worry about was President Bush's veto. Now, Pelosi has to deal with Mitch McConnell's Republican Senate even before her policies reach Donald Trump.

Republican control of the Senate is but the first difference between the 116th and 110th Congresses. The second is within the Democratic Party itself. Not only must Pelosi balance the progressives against members from swing districts. She has to manage her comrades during a rowdy and unpredictable presidential primary.

Hillary fighting Obama was nothing compared to the coming rumble. Already Bernie is leaking against Beto, Warren is downing beers on Instagram, and someone reminded the New York Times of accusations of sexual harassment within Bernie's campaign. "We're headed for disaster," frets Michael Tomasky.

Very soon, news from the [campaign] trail will overtake the goings-on in Congress. House Democrats won't just have trouble changing laws. They also will have difficulty promoting their message. Especially considering the third and greatest difference between 2007 and 2019: the presence of Donald Trump.

There's no evidence that Pelosi has any better an idea of how to deal with him than her predecessors. Whenever Trump focuses his attention on reelection, and sets the agenda of cable news coverage by attacking his rivals on Twitter, Pelosi will be less than powerless. She will be irrelevant.

The partial government shutdown is a prelude to an unpredictable two years of conflict, deadlock, breakdown, acrimony, dissatisfaction, and annoyance. At the end, Democrats will be reminded that, thanks to congressional delegation of authority, the House doesn't count for much. What matters is the presidency. Ask the GOP.

In other words, like a boomerang launched to knock out of the air as many presidential initiatives as they can hit, the Democrats' policy of resistance and obstruction is likely to arc back and strike them squarely in the kisser.

That policy has surely drained the GOP of any desire to cooperate with the Democrats on anything, and it's therefore hard to think of any successes to which congressional Democrats can look forward as long as the GOP controls both the Senate and the Executive.

Why Trump Will Win

The media is making much of the inconveniences to, and suffering of, government workers caused by the government shutdown (although they've been glaringly delinquent in interviewing people and relatives of people who've been victimized in one way or another by illegal aliens).

The takeaway of their coverage is supposed to be that this awful state of affairs is all the fault of Donald Trump, but anyone who thinks about it will have to ask why the blame should be imputed to Trump when Trump has expressed willingness to compromise on the sticking point, i.e. $5.7 billion for a border barrier, and Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have flatly rejected the possibility of any compromise.

David Marcus at The Federalist thinks that the Democrats' adamantine refusal to accept compromise has ensured that Trump will be holding all the cards in this high stakes poker game.

I would add to Marcus' argument the fact that the Democrats have embarrassed themselves by offering up transparently silly reasons for their recalcitrance and indeed have had to flip-flop like a beached trout from positions on border security they held staunchly up until November 8th, 2016.

When Speaker Pelosi avers, for example, that a border wall is "immoral" but won't say what it is about a wall that makes it immoral, or won't tell us what the significant difference is between locking the doors of one's house to keep people from entering one's home illegally and erecting a barrier on the border to keep people from entering the country illegally, she tacitly demonstrates that she has no good reason for refusing funds for the wall.

Her actual reason is, evidently, that she simply recoils from the thought of handing President Trump a "win" and allowing him to keep another campaign promise.

Here are a few excerpts from Marcus' column:

We all like to knock and mock Trump’s braggadocio claims that he is the best negotiator ever. But in this case, he really has outflanked his opponents. Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have painted themselves into a corner. They have said, “No funding for a wall.” They say this despite the fact that they have supported barrier funding in the past. So in essence they have given themselves no fallback position.

The Democrats have made this a zero-sum game. If Trump gets any money for the wall, he wins. That’s a really fantastic position for him. He can go on TV, whether in a controversial network roadblock or an appearance on the southern border, and say, “Hey, I’m up for a compromise.” Meanwhile, Chuck and Nancy have to slam the door shut on getting 800,000 federal employees back to work.

A president always has an advantage in a government shutdown. The executive branch speaks with a single voice, while Congress is divided between parties. Trump is clearly pointing to and offering a solution. The House Democrats aren’t. And their intransigence is highlighted by the fact that Republican members of Congress are calling them out.

So here we are. What reason does President Trump possibly have to cave? You could point to the legitimately troubling stories of federal employees unable to pay the rent, as major networks have done, but as troubling as those stories are, can we really place the blame squarely on the one person who is open for a compromise?

In lieu of any compelling argument to justify the Democrats refusal to compromise, an argument more persuasive than simply the implied "We hate Trump," Marcus' conclusion seems amply warranted:

Pelosi will have to fold here. There is no benefit to Trump for folding, and plenty of benefit for her. She played it wrong. Fair enough: she can live to fight another day, but this time, on this fight, Trump is beating her soundly and will get his wall funding. It’s only a matter of time.

The Identity Politics Tar Baby

Mark Lilla is an academic, a liberal and a man contemptuous of Donald Trump's presidency.

After stating that he's an academic the rest of that description may sound redundant, but it's worth stating in order to clarify that Lilla is no closet Republican out to undermine the Democratic Party. He's written a book titled The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics, in which he diagnoses what he perceives to be a deep problem in contemporary liberalism and ergo in the Democratic Party.

Peter Berkowitz writes about Lilla's book in a piece at Real Clear Politics. Lilla's thesis, in a word, is that the Democrats embrace of identity politics is a betrayal of true liberalism and has estranged Democrats from the people who have traditionally been their main constituency.

It's interesting, parenthetically, that liberals once upon a time appealed to blue-collar workers and disdained the fat cat corporate CEOs. Today fat cat CEOs are frequently among the biggest donors to the Democratic party and blue-collar folks are wearing MAGA hats.

Anyway, Berkowitz writes that:

Last November, shortly after the election, [Lilla] called in the New York Times for fellow liberals to face up to their party’s portion of responsibility for Trump’s victory, which Lilla traced to the rise [of] “identity liberalism.” His contention that “American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing” provoked outrage on the left.

The outrage is understandable. Some on the left have committed their entire lives and reputations to promoting identity politics. To have a supposed ally declare, in the New York Times, no less, that their life's work has been a misguided calamity is not a message likely to be received with equanimity, even if it's true.

In “The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics,” Lilla elaborates on his thesis, providing a short, elegant polemic exposing the profound harm that identity liberalism has caused to the Democratic Party.

A professor of humanities at Columbia University, and a regular essayist at the New York Review of Books, Lilla uses the term “liberal” to denote those who identify with the achievements of the New Deal, which summoned Americans to “a collective enterprise to guard one another against risk, hardship, and the denial of fundamental rights.”

Identity liberalism divides Americans into groups — women, African-Americans, Latinos, LGBT Americans, Native Americans, Asian-Americans, and on and on. It nourishes a “resentful, disuniting rhetoric of difference” that defines membership in terms of distinctive narratives of victimhood, and confers status in proportion to the magnitude of the oppression one claims to have suffered under the hegemonic sway of white, male structures of power.

Propelled by America’s colleges and universities — which, Lilla observes, have replaced political clubs and shop floors as the incubators of liberal political leaders —identity liberalism has abandoned the political mission of bringing fellow citizens together in favor of the evangelical one of extracting professions of faith and punishing heretics, apostates, and infidels.

These are powerful words indeed. An ideology as divisive as modern liberalism has become can scarcely unite the country except perhaps through the exercise of various forms of compulsion, which is certainly the direction in which today's liberalism seems to be headed. So, what's to be done?

Disappointingly for an author whose purpose is to rouse fellow liberals to action, Lilla offers no proposal for reforming our colleges and universities, which he blames for indoctrinating students in identity politics dogma. But he does sketch the larger political goal: a “more civic-minded liberalism” that cultivates a shared appreciation of the rights and responsibilities that all American citizens share and which encourages individuals to undertake “the hard and unglamorous task of persuading people very different from themselves to join a common effort.”

This is a noble goal, but one that can be reached only by people who focus on the things they share in common, not the things that make them different. Diversity, notwithstanding its status as an idol on the left, is much overrated as a public good, especially when those who worship it are incessantly celebrating the things that make us different and thus dividing us from each other.

In any case, as Berkowitz has noted, Lilla's argument, both in his Times column of last November and in his book, has received a chilly reception on the left:

The reply from the establishment left to Lilla’s brief for less victim politics and more retail politics was swift and sure. To mark publication last week of “The Once and Future Liberal,” the New York Times published a review by Yale University History Professor Beverly Gage that dismissed Lilla’s critique as “trolling disguised as erudition.”

Finding nothing bad to say about identity liberalism except to wonder why it hasn’t generated more marchers, Gage sent Times readers on their way with a clear conscience to continue to exhaust themselves in venting fury against Trump’s daily outrages.

Nevertheless, Berkowitz finds several elements in Lilla's presentation of his case to criticize. First, Lilla himself falls into the same pit that he urges liberals to avoid, and second he fails to recognize that what he's advocating, a return to classical liberalism, is, in fact, a plea to liberals to adopt a cluster of conservative principles.

Indeed, modern conservatism is in many respects an expression of the ideas of classical liberalism. Berkowitz writes:

The serious criticism of Lilla is twofold.

First, while holding aloft the idea of a common citizenship, he lapses from time to time into an illiberal politics of friends and enemies revolving around a fundamental antagonism between right and left. Conservatives, in Lilla’s account, are simple-minded, selfish, and anti-political; indifferent to the plight of those not like them; and oblivious of the claims of culture and nation.

To assert that “a vote for Trump was a betrayal of citizenship, not an exercise of it” is — in lockstep with the purveyors of identity liberalism — to smear nearly half of your fellow citizens as traitors.

Second, Lilla propagates a basic misunderstanding about the liberalism he laudably sets out to save. That liberalism is not the antithesis of conservatism, or, at least of that conservatism devoted to liberty, limited government, and democratic politics.

Despite his best efforts to ignore or conceal it, the liberalism that he labors to restore has a decisively conservative element, because, as Lilla rightly recognizes, the enduring ground of citizens’ solidarity in America is a shared commitment to a constitutional order that equally protects the individual rights of all.

Identity politics has for the Democratic party become a tar baby from which they can't come unstuck because their base, the progressive left, simply won't allow it. The last thing progressives seem to want these days is liberty, limited government and a commitment to the Constitution. If that's what Lilla is calling for it's no wonder they despise his book.

All Depends on Who Said it

It's an unfortunate fact concerning our political intercourse that two individuals can make exactly the same politically incorrect claim, and the people hearing it will condemn one and not the other depending on whether the speaker has an R or a D after his or her name.

We're so blinded by our political and personal antipathies that it seems next to impossible to be objective and fair in our judgments.

An illustration of this shortcoming of our human nature was occasioned by a recent visit to American University by Campus Reform's Cabot Phillips who asked students their opinions on three quotes from President Trump on the need for stronger control of our borders. The three quotes were these:

1. “Illegal Immigration is wrong, plain and simple. Until the American people are convinced we will stop future flows of illegal immigration, we will make no progress.”
2. “We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented and unchecked.”
3. “I voted numerous times...to spend money to build a barrier to try to prevent illegal immigrants from coming in. And I do think you have to control your borders.”

One student called it “divisive.” Another called it “kind of hateful speech in general.” A third student called it a “rude” way to talk about illegal immigrants. A fourth student said, “there are racial biases kind of deep-embedded in there.” Other terms used to describe the quotes included jingoist, unacceptable, and dehumanizing.

But then Phillips told the students that it wasn't actually Trump who made these statements and revealed to them who did. The students seemed stunned.

It's an amusing video:

University students may be learning a lot during their campus experience, but one thing these students, at least, seem to be missing out on is how to think critically and objectively.

Hopefully, by the time they graduate they'll be better at it, but we probably shouldn't bet on it.

"Free-Loading Atheists"

I recently came across a fine essay by Colgate professor Robert Kraynak in a 2011 edition of The New Atlantis.

The article is titled Justice Without Foundations, and in it Kraynak explores the attempts of two groups of modern thinkers to maintain a moral system based upon values like freedom, justice, autonomy, equality, and dignity while at the same time recognizing that, by rejecting Christianity, they have forfeited any possibility of providing an objective foundation for these values.

With no objective source or ground for such values they're merely subjective preferences invested with an aura of sanctity that has no rational justification.

The two groups Kraynak directs most of his attention toward are postmodern pragmatists, particularly Richard Rorty, and scientific materialists like Daniel Dennett and Stephen Pinker.

He begins with these observations:

The strangeness of our day consists in a strong moral passion for the virtue of justice sitting alongside a loss of confidence in the very foundations for justice, and even an eagerness to undermine them.

People today display extreme moral sensitivity to injustices that they understand as violations of the equal rights and equal dignity of all persons — especially the rights of persons thought to be victims of discrimination and oppression. This sensitivity leads to demands for government policies on behalf of “social justice,” and for changing social customs to protect individuals and groups from insensitive words and actions.

But at the same time that people are asked to become more aware of injustices and indignities, the foundations that might justify such obligations are disappearing from philosophy, religion, science, and culture. In many cases, they are being actively undermined by the scholars and intellectuals who are the most vocal in protesting injustices. Among the leading intellectual currents shaping our culture are moral relativism and scientific materialism, especially Darwinism.

Neither supports very well the demands for moral sensitivity and social justice — understood today in terms of equal respect and equal rights. For the crucial requirement of human equality is a conception of human dignity, which views human beings as having a special moral status in the universe, and individuals as having unique moral worth entailing claims of justice.

What is so strange about our age is that demands for respecting human rights and human dignity are increasing even as the foundations for those demands are disappearing. In particular, beliefs in man as a creature made in the image of God, or an animal with a rational soul, are being replaced by a scientific materialism that undermines what is noble and special about man, and by doctrines of relativism that deny the objective morality required to undergird human dignity.

How do we account for the widening gap between metaphysics and morals today? How do we explain “justice without foundations” — a virtue that seems to exist like a table without legs, suspended in mid-air? What is holding up the central moral beliefs of our times?

These are all important questions, questions to which the modern atheist is ill-equipped to offer a cogent answer.

Kraynak goes on to talk about how atheistic thinkers like Rorty, Dennett, Pinker, et al. are forced by their naturalism to live their lives in what Francis Schaeffer described as a two story building. In the lower story naturalists live their lives as rational beings, but, when they want to make moral judgments, they have to leave reason behind and leap to the upper story where non-rationality reigns.

Rorty is an interesting case because he, at least, recognizes that this is precisely what he's doing and even refers to himself as a "free-loading atheist." I.e. he admits to living off the moral capital of Christianity while denying the God from which that capital flows. Kraynak writes:

The best place to begin the discussion of justice without foundations is with the late American philosopher Richard Rorty, the influential spokesman for “non-foundationalism.” As a professor at the University of Virginia and Stanford, he made a strong impression on students by telling them to stop philosophizing and to live pragmatically on behalf of social justice and human dignity.

His rejection of philosophy was ... elaborated on in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and other writings, describing the futility of reason to grasp the external world of nature, or to provide rational foundations for knowledge, both moral and metaphysical....

He further maintained that political values such as democracy, equal rights, and respect for others are non-foundational commitments that North Americans and Europeans have built into their social conventions. Hence, we do not need philosophy to teach us how to act politically, because the ideals are embedded in our language and traditions; all we need to do is to affirm them by human sympathy and active citizenship.

The problems with Rorty’s position have been noticed by many critics — none more astutely than Peter Lawler in Aliens in America (2002). In developing these criticisms, it is useful to examine a little-noticed 1983 essay of Rorty’s called “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism.”

In that essay, Rorty honestly admits that his moral sensitivities are “postmodern” in the sense of being rationally groundless; yet he asserts that they are still legitimate as borrowings from Judeo-Christian notions of human dignity inherited from the past. With intentional irony, Rorty describes people like himself as “free-loading atheists.”

His justification [for "moral" behavior] is that he is part of a community of moral traditions inherited from Judaism and Christianity, which teaches us to care for a homeless person like the Good Samaritan would do.

Of course, if he had been born into a community that taught the virtues of ethnic cleansing and slavery then those traditions would be justified as well.

For Rorty what's right is whatever your community teaches. Morality is simply a convention, like the rules of grammar. The rules could be different than they are, there's nothing really right or wrong about them, and if the relevant community wanted to change them, whatever they decide would then be the new norm.

There's much more to Kraynak's analysis at the link, and I urge anyone interested in the contemporary intellectual and philosophical climate to spend the time it takes to give it a thorough reading. It's important.

Immoral and Not Us

Nancy Pelosi has claimed that she is unalterably opposed to a border wall on the grounds that such a barrier is immoral. Exactly why a wall is immoral Ms Pelosi didn't deign to say, evidently preferring to have us figure it out for ourselves.

The Daily Caller contacted her office to see if our newly re-elected Speaker of the House, who is by the way a Roman Catholic, would favor us with her opinions on the morality of a few other matters.

She was asked whether, putting aside the question of whether abortion should be legal or not, does Speaker Pelosi think that:

• sex-selective abortions — e.g. aborting an unborn baby solely because she’s a girl — are immoral?
• it’s immoral to coerce Catholic nuns to subsidize birth control?
• it’s immoral for Democratic senators to use membership in a Catholic charitable organization, the Knights of Columbus, as a negative test for judicial office?

Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, Ms Pelosi’s office declined to favor us with any enlightenment as to what the Speaker might think about any of the above questions.

The difference between the border wall and abortion, of course, is that her base opposes the former and considers the latter a sacrament. Thus, the former is ipso facto decidedly immoral and the latter is a topic on which she'd prefer to invoke the Biblical advice to judge not lest you be judged.

The next time you hear someone say that a wall is immoral or that it's not "who we are" ask the individual to explain what it is about putting a wall on the border that makes it immoral. Ask them why a wall to keep people from illegally entering the country is any less moral than locking one's doors at night to keep people from illegally entering one's house.

Ask them what it means, exactly, to say that a wall is "not who we are."

I doubt you'll get a coherent answer, or any answer at all.

Most Trustworthy Professions

Gallup recently took a poll to determine which professions were considered most trustworthy, and it turns out to no one's surprise that nurses rank at the top. The results are shown on this chart:

I'm not sure what to make of this, actually. I don't begrudge nurses the esteem in which they're held, and perhaps I'm just picking nits, but it seems to me that trust matters most when you find yourself in a situation in which you have conflicting interests with other persons, or when the other person has an incentive to be less than truthful or honest with you, or a reason to somehow exploit you for his or her benefit.

It seems to me that that's rarely the case with nurses, or most of the other professions which finished in the top five. Their interests simply don't collide with those of the people with whom they have to deal, so, although it's good that people hold them in such high regard, I don't know how significant it is that they are, as a collective, considered highly trustworthy.

On the other hand, it'd be good for members of those professions whose interests often do conflict with the interests of those who place their trust in them to examine why they don't enjoy a higher level of public confidence than they do and to resolve to raise the level of respect in which their profession is held.

Kristof's Interviews

The New York Times' Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Nicholas Kristof has over the last few years been writing a series of pieces based on interviews with prominent Christians in which he poses to them some interesting questions about orthodox Christian beliefs (e.g. the plausibility of miracles, Christian exclusivism, the necessity of believing in the deity of Christ, etc.).

Last month he had an interesting dialogue with philosopher William Lane Craig.

The best questions, though, were among those he asked of Pastor Tim Keller two years ago. In that interview he opened with this:

NK: As a journalist, I’ve found skepticism useful. If I hear something that sounds superstitious, I want eyewitnesses and evidence. That’s the attitude we take toward Islam and Hinduism and Taoism, so why suspend skepticism in our own faith tradition?

TK: I agree. We should require evidence and good reasoning, and we should not write off other religions as ‘superstitious’ and then fail to question our more familiar Jewish or Christian faith tradition.

But I don’t want to contrast faith with skepticism so sharply that they are seen to be opposites. They aren’t. I think we all base our lives on both reason and faith. For example, my faith is to some degree based on reasoning that the existence of God makes the most sense of what we see in nature, history and experience.

Thomas Nagel recently wrote that the thoroughly materialistic view of nature can’t account for human consciousness, cognition and moral values. That’s part of the reasoning behind my faith. So my faith is based on logic and argument.

In the end, however, no one can demonstrably prove the primary things human beings base their lives on, whether we are talking about the existence of God or the importance of human rights and equality. Nietzsche argued that the humanistic values of most secular people, such as the importance of the individual, human rights and responsibility for the poor, have no place in a completely materialistic universe.

He even accused people holding humanistic values as being “covert Christians” because it required a leap of faith to hold to them. We must all live by faith.

NK: I’ll grudgingly concede your point: My belief in human rights and morality may be more about faith than logic. But is it really analogous to believe in things that seem consistent with science and modernity, like human rights, and those that seem inconsistent, like a virgin birth or resurrection?

TK: I don’t see why faith should be seen as inconsistent with science. There is nothing illogical about miracles if a Creator God exists. If a God exists who is big enough to create the universe in all its complexity and vastness, why should a mere miracle be such a mental stretch? To prove that miracles could not happen, you would have to know beyond a doubt that God does not exist. But that is not something anyone can prove.

Science must always assume that an effect has a repeatable, natural cause. That is its methodology. Imagine, then, for the sake of argument that a miracle actually occurred. Science would have no way to confirm a non-repeatable, supernatural cause.

Alvin Plantinga argued that to say that there must be a scientific cause for any apparently miraculous phenomenon is like insisting that your lost keys must be under the streetlight because that’s the only place you can see.

I think that Kristoff's last question contains an error that should be highlighted. Belief in human rights, though it's certainly popular among moderns, is not at all consistent with the assumptions of modernity. If there is no God, then man is not created in His image nor loved by Him. If human beings do not contain the Imago Dei, nor are the objects of God's love, then there are no moral obligations to treat each other with dignity and respect.

We can pretend there are, but it's only pretense. Nothing in the modern naturalistic worldview requires it nor offers a basis for it. In fact, it's quite the opposite. If we're simply the products of materialistic evolutionary processes, then selfishness, exploitation and egoism are fundamental ethical principles, ingrained in our genes, and there's nothing morally wrong with them.

On the other hand, if one believes we do have objective moral obligations to help the poor, to not exploit the earth, to avoid war, etc. then one is logically compelled to be a theist. If one is not a theist then it's irrational to insist that anyone has any objective duties at all.

The next question in the interview is, in my opinion, one of the most difficult for Christian theists to answer. Kristof prefaces the question by stating that what he admires most about Christianity is the "amazing good work it inspires people to do around the world."

This is true enough, and again, there's nothing in naturalism which inspires anyone to do anything for anyone to whom they have no emotional attachment. Why, on naturalism or atheism, would it be wrong in a moral sense for people in the first world to refuse to help those languishing in misery in the third world? What reason can the atheist give for why we should do with less to help others have a bit more?

Kristoff then follows with these words:

But I’m troubled by the evangelical notion that people go to heaven only if they have a direct relationship with Jesus. Doesn’t that imply that billions of people — Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, Hindus — are consigned to hell because they grew up in non-Christian families around the world? That Gandhi is in hell?

It seems to me that both Craig and Keller could've done better with this question. My favorite reply is that of C.S. Lewis in his book The Great Divorce. That story is an extended and imaginative answer precisely to Kristof's challenge, but it unfortunately doesn't sit well with many orthodox Christians.

Anyway, the exchange with Craig elicited a lot of comment, some of which, as one has come to expect in these times, was both rude and uninformed. You can read Craig's polite response to his critics here.

Brilliant Feats of Micro-Engineering

I show this video to some of my classes because it's so well done. Drew Berry is an animator who creates computer generated animations of cellular processes. The processes he depicts here are occurring all the time in each of the trillions of cells in your body. As you watch it keep in mind a few questions:

1. The proteins which work with the DNA to produce other proteins were themselves produced by DNA. So which came first? How did the DNA produce the helper proteins before the helper proteins existed to guide the process?

2. How did unguided processes like mutation and genetic drift produce such coordinated choreography? How did blind, unguided processes produce the information which tells the proteins where to go and how to function?

3. How does this information get processed by mindless lumps of chemicals and how is it passed on from generation to generation?

And notice how the motor proteins are structured in such a way that enables them to "walk" along microtubules carrying various items to locations where they're needed. How do these motor proteins "know" how to do this, and how did they evolve in the first place? Perhaps we'll eventually discover naturalistic, materialistic answers to these questions, but it seems that the more progress we make in biology the more implausible naturalistic explanations sound to all but the irrevocably committed and the more it looks like the living cell has been intelligently engineered by a mind.

If you don't have time to watch the whole video start at the 2:54 mark:

The Worst Enemy of Black People

A short piece by economist and syndicated columnist Walter E. Williams appeared recently in The Meridian Star and is getting a lot of play on social media.

The essay is titled The Worst Enemy of Black People and it starts off recounting how, despite his very controversial legacy, Malcolm X is very much respected in the African American community.

Malcolm has been called one of the most influential black Americans and schools and streets bear his name in cities across America. Yet despite the homage he has received over the years since his assassination in 1965, Williams writes, there's one thing he strongly believed that has been quietly ignored.

Remember as you read this that as Williams, who is himself black, notes, during the 1960s the word "Negro" was still a respectable term for, and among, blacks.

Malcolm X said: “The worst enemy that the Negro has is this white man that runs around here drooling at the mouth professing to love Negros and calling himself a liberal, and it is following these white liberals that has perpetuated problems that Negros have. If the Negro wasn’t taken, tricked or deceived by the white liberal, then Negros would get together and solve our own problems.

I only cite these things to show you that in America, the history of the white liberal has been nothing but a series of trickery designed to make Negros think that the white liberal was going to solve our problems. Our problems will never be solved by the white man.”

Williams goes on to cite some deeply troubling facts:

Malcolm X was absolutely right about our finding solutions to our own problems. The most devastating problems that black people face today have absolutely nothing to do with our history of slavery and discrimination. Chief among them is the breakdown of the black family, wherein 75 percent of blacks are born to single, often young, mothers.

In some cities and neighborhoods, the percentage of out-of-wedlock births is over 80.

Actually, “breakdown” is the wrong term; the black family doesn’t form in the first place. This is entirely new among blacks.

According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, that year only 11 percent of black children were born to unwed mothers. As late as 1950, female-headed households constituted only 18 percent of the black population. Today it’s close to 70 percent.

In much earlier times, during the late 1800s, there were only slight differences between the black family structure and those of other ethnic groups. In New York City in 1925, 85 percent of kin-related black households were two-parent households.

Welfare has encouraged young women to have children out of wedlock. The social stigma once associated with unwed pregnancy is all but gone. Plus, “shotgun” weddings are a thing of the past. That was when male members of a girl’s family made the boy who got her pregnant live up to his responsibilities.

The high crime rates in so many black communities impose huge personal costs and have turned once-thriving communities into economic wastelands. The Ku Klux Klan couldn’t sabotage chances for black academic excellence more effectively than the public school system in most cities.

Politics and white liberals will not solve these and other problems. As Malcolm X said, “our problems will never be solved by the white man.”

Indeed, liberal policies and attitudes are largely responsible for the erosion of the black family. Every urban region with a substantial black population is governed by liberal Democrats, nowadays often black but nevertheless supported by the larger white liberal consensus in the Democratic party. Liberalism has done nothing to reverse the decline of the family in general and the black family in particular and has, on the contrary, done much to accelerate it.

Malcolm X saw this clearly, but too few African Americans see it at all today.

The Case for Dualism

Philosophical materialists maintain that the brain is all that's involved in our cognitive experience and that there's no need to posit the existence of an immaterial mind or soul. Moreover, given that brain function is the product of the laws of physics and chemistry, materialists argue that there's no reason to believe that we have free will.

For materialists mind is simply a word we use to describe the function of the brain, much like we use the word digestion to refer to the function of the stomach, but just as digestion is an activity and not an organ or distinct entity in itself, likewise the mind is an activity of the brain and not a separate entity in itself.

As neurosurgeon Michael Egnor discusses in this fifteen minute video, however, the materialist view is not shared by all neuroscientists and some of the foremost practitioners in the field have profound difficulties with it.

Egnor explains how the findings of three prominent twentieth century brain scientists point to the existence of something beyond the material brain that's involved in human thought and which also point to the reality of free will.

His lecture is an excellent summary of the case for philosophical dualism and is well worth the fifteen minutes it takes to watch it:

What Are Their Reasons?

A puzzling aspect of the debate over the border wall is this: Mr. Trump has often articulated why we need a barrier between the U.S. and Mexico. He and others who share his conviction that a wall should be erected have claimed that we need to control who comes into the country to minimize the risk that criminals, terrorists and other unsavories will gain easy access.

They've insisted that we can't afford to allow masses of poor people to overwhelm our social welfare network nor our institutions and resources. Nor can we allow our culture to be extinguished by waves of illegal immigrants whose presence in the country would profoundly alter the nation as it has existed for 250 years.

You may disagree with these reasons, but the point is they're out there to be argued about.

The Left in general and Democrats in particular, however, never seem to argue that the reasons are false. They simply deny them and act as if their denials are sufficient to refute them. Nor do they themselves offer with much conviction reasons why they oppose a wall.

More precisely, whatever reasons they give seem so silly, even to their advocates, that they're usually advanced only half-heartedly.

Here are a few examples you may have heard:

1. $5 billion is too expensive.
2. A wall won't work.
3. A wall would be too easy to circumvent.
4. A wall does not represent "who we are."

Maybe there are some others, but these are some of the most frequently stated reasons for refusing to grant the president the money needed to begin construction of a wall along our southern border.

Let's briefly consider each:

1. This objection is raised by Democrats who think nothing of wasting enormous sums on projects that accomplish nothing, but that aside: There have been tens of thousands of Americans killed, either by deliberate murder or by motor vehicle accidents caused by illegal aliens. Tell the families of those victims that the lives of their loved ones were not worth a relatively tiny fraction of our federal budget.

2. This is an odd objection for two reasons: First, it's obvious that the wall built by the Hungarians has worked to keep refugees from flooding Hungary, and the wall built by the Israelis has worked to keep Palestinians from crossing illegally into Israel. Terrorism in Israel has dropped sharply since their wall was built.

Second, saying that walls don't work is like saying that locks on doors don't work. Of course, people who are determined to get into the country might find a way to defeat the wall, just as people who are determined to get into your house will find a way to do it, but that's not an argument against putting locks on your doors.

The real reason progressives oppose the wall is that they fear it will work, not that they think it won't.

3. This objection is similar to the last. Drug smugglers will tunnel under a wall, we're told. Others will ladder over it. Ironically, many of the people who think this argument makes sense have placed walls and fences around their homes, including former president Obama.

Again, no wall will stop every single illegal entry, but the more difficult it is to gain entry the fewer people there are who will try it, and the more resources that can be devoted to stopping those who do try.

4. It's hard to say exactly what this objection actually means, but regardless, anyone who says that we should be the kind of people who allow anyone in who wants to come in should be asked if they have adopted the same policy for their home. When they leave their house or car do they lock the doors? If so, why? Isn't that being selfish, depriving others who may be in need of the accumulated resources safeguarded behind those locked doors? If they have a dinner party in their home do they allow anyone to come who wants to join in? If not, why not?

The left won't often come out and say it, but what they really want is a borderless world.

This would, of course, be a calamitous absurdity. Imagine that the U.S. had no border and a foreign government decided to move an armed force into our country and occupy, say, California. What grounds would we have for telling them they can't do this? What would it even mean to declare such a move an act of war?

If we had no border there'd be nothing illegal with what that foreign government would be doing. Anyone could go anywhere and live anywhere they wish.

Even if we thought there was something wrong with such an occupation, we could only repel the invasion with an armed force of our own, but not having any borders to defend why would we even have an armed forces?

No nation could continue to exist for long without borders which means that there would ultimately be one government for the entire world, and it would perforce be totalitarian.

It's a progressive's dream, to be sure, but it's a realist's nightmare.

New Year's Prayer for You

I want to wish all our readers a safe and meaningful new year. It's my prayer for you that wherever you live in the world, whatever your vocation in life, whatever your ideological, political and religious convictions may be, 2019 proves to be a year filled with peace, good health, satisfying work, and much joy.

Thank you for your readership and may God bless you and the ones you love in the coming year.
Sincerely, R.L. Cleary

On the Reading of Good Books

I'd like to share a delightful post sent by a friend. It was written by a man named Bob Trube, and in his post he talks about reading, particularly what he calls "reading well". Trube writes:

Among the resolutions people make each new year is some variant on “read more books.” That’s certainly a goal that I can applaud when the average number of books read by adults is twelve a year (a number skewed by avid readers; most people read about four a year). But I have a hunch that many of these resolutions fare no better than those of losing weight or exercising more, and probably for the same reasons: lack of specific goals that are realistic, forming a habit, social support and a good coach. I will come back to these but I want to address something I hear less about – reading well.

For a number who read this blog, I don’t have to convince you about the value of reading, and in many cases, you already have good reading habits and exceed that book a month average. And even if you don’t, you probably sense that reading isn’t about numbers of books but part of a well-lived life. You read not only for amusement or diversion but to better understand your world and how to live one’s life in it. That can be anything from understanding the inner workings of your computer and how to use it better to a work of philosophy or theology or even a great novel that explores fundamental questions of life’s meaning, living virtuously, or the nature of God.

Trube goes on to list four aspects of reading well:

1. Reading well is an act of attentiveness. We read well when we read without external and internal distractions. A place of quiet and a time when we are not distracted with other concerns helps us “engage the page.” It also helps to turn off the notifications on your phone or tablet, or better yet, put the electronics in another room. Read on an e-reader without other apps if you prefer these to physical books.
2. Visual media often encourages us to passively absorb content. Books of substance require our active engagement–noticing plot, characters, and the use of literary devices like foreshadowing, allusions and more. Non-fiction often involves following an argument, and paying attention to the logic, the evidence, and whether the argument is consistent. Reading well can mean jotting notes, asking questions, or even arguing with the author. Above all it means reflecting on what we read, and how the book connects with our lives.
3. Reading well over time means choosing good books to read. What is “good”? I’m not sure there is one good or simple answer. There are a number of “great books” lists out there and they are worth a look. You might choose one of those to read this year. One test of a book’s worth is whether people are still reading the book and finding value in it long after its author has passed. Also, in almost any genre, there are reviews, websites, and online groups. Over time, you will find sources of good recommendations.
4. Finally, I’d suggest choosing something to read off the beaten path. Reading authors from other cultures, or a genre you don’t usually read can stretch your horizons. This year, I want to work in some poetry and get around to the Langston Hughes and Seamus Heaney that I’ve had laying around.

He closes with a few thoughts "For those who simply want to read more and get into the reading habit." I encourage you to go to the link and check them out.

I sometimes wonder if reading isn't becoming a lost art, like knitting. Our lives are so full of work and other obligations that we don't have much time to read. Even during what leisure we may have we're constantly plugged in to some device or other that distracts us and makes reading seem boring by comparison. Yet good books are like vitamins and minerals for the mind. They nourish and enrich us in ways that last for a lifetime.

If you're one who would like to read more, but just can't seem to get into it, check out the tips that Trube gives at his blog. They're very good.

Abandon Religion, Embrace Superstition

There's an odd phenomenon apparently unfolding among millenials. As belief in God declines, belief in the efficacy of astrology is growing.

In other words, there's evidently a longing among young adults for transcendence, for something more than what materialism can offer them, but unwilling to return to the religious beliefs of their forefathers, they've been casting about among the occult for something else to serve as a substitute.

Denyse O'Leary wrote about this phenomenon some time ago at Mercatornet.

She noted that polls reveal belief in astrology at about 25% of the population in North America and Britain and that superstitious beliefs in general, e.g. belief in ghosts and witches, are increasing especially among liberal-minded young adults. Indeed, top liberal websites like Buzzfeed, Bustle and Cosmo feature much more superstitious content than do conservative sites.

Moreover, an education in science is no proof against an inclination toward superstition:

[I]nterestingly, “sciencey” types who lack scepticism about Darwin are often superstitious, despite the longstanding dismissal of occult beliefs from science.

The 2003 study, done at a British science fair, found that twenty-five percent of the people who claimed a background in science also reported that they were very or somewhat superstitious.

She closes with these observations:

Superstition feeds on itself. Like a drug habit, it at once satisfies and creates an appetite for more -- in this case, an appetite for occult knowledge, as opposed to transparent knowledge. That appetite can affect a person's perception of everyday reality.

It’s not science that holds superstition in check in Western society. It’s traditional Western religion, which insists on transparent truths (truths that all may know) and forbids attempts at occult, secret truths.

It's puzzling that people who scoff at the possibility of miracles and the existence of a supernatural God are nevertheless open to the possibility of an occult world of ghosts and demons, etc. Why is the latter any more plausible than the former?

The early twentieth century British writer G.K. Chesterton once said that, "When people cease to believe in God they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything." Perhaps we're seeing evidence of the truth of Chesterton's claim in the early twenty first century.

TDS

Why does the left hate Trump? Their disdain is so visceral, so seemingly irrational that some have called it Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). After all, given his accomplishments you'd think progressives, particularly those in the media, would be at worst neutral toward him, if not actually in love with him.

Yet when he announces that the United States is pulling out of Syria, a move that the left would slobber all over were it made by President Obama, the progressives at the cable shows have suddenly, like Bruce Banner transmogrifying into the Incredible Hulk, metamorphosed into war hawks, deriding the decision to pull out of a quagmire as a foreign policy blunder.

When the president gets a criminal justice reform bill through the legislature with 87 Senators voting for it, a bill for which the left has been pushing for decades, the progressives scarcely can bring themselves to notice that it was Jared Kushner and Donald Trump who were the key movers of the measure.

When it's announced that the Trump economy has generated the lowest minority unemployment numbers in history the left quibbles that that achievement germinated under Obama. Yet it's hard to point to anything the Obama administration did that would have produced these results.

When the president adopts protectionist trade policies, long a progressive desideratum, he's harshly castigated for starting a tariff war with China.

The left was embittered by Trump's temerity in defeating the lackluster Hillary Clinton in 2016 and hopeful, in what is perhaps an interesting case of psychological projection, that he will soon be implicated in some plot with the Russians to have stolen the election.

Yet despite the Stakhanovite efforts of Robert Mueller's team of Democratic prosecutors to leave no stone unturned they've apparently failed to turn one over that reveals any evidence of "collusion."

In fact, the inability (so far) to find any evidence that Trump and Putin have been holding hands has deflated progressives' hopes for impeachment and actually incensed them even further.

Of course there are policies the president has implemented or is pursuing that the left opposes - tax cuts, a border wall, a freeze on immigration from countries in which terrorism is spawned - but these seem hardly the sorts of issues that might be expected to generate the arrant hostility the left has shown toward the man.

After all, taxes were cut drastically under the sainted Democrat John Kennedy and a border wall and restrictions on immigration were popular among many liberal Democrats until less than a decade ago.

Of course, Trump also refuses to be bound to unwise agreements entered into with other nations by his predecessors. He's renegotiated NAFTA to make North American trade fairer for all parties, pulled out of the nuclear agreement with Iran which was mostly ineffective in halting Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons, and walked away from the Paris climate accords.

The latter is especially galling to the left since climate change has for liberals the status of a religious dogma, but the data on climate change is disputable, and subsequent events in France should give the left at least some reason to think that it might be a good thing we're no longer bound by those agreements.

Some will point to Trump's boorish, uncouth attitudes toward women as the root of the left's contempt for the president, but it's hardly credible to think that people who would gleefully vote for the Kennedy brothers, Bill Clinton, Robert Menendez, et al. are sincerely upset over Donald Trump's sexually dubious biography.

Others accuse him of racism and bigotry, but the allegations are usually stand-alone assertions, lacking in any hard supporting evidence, suggesting that perhaps there just isn't any.

In sum, the degree of hatred on the left seems wildly excessive, over the top, unfounded, and irrational, but maybe the explanation for it has nothing to do with any of the sorts of things mentioned above. Maybe the reason has to do with a growing desperation incited by what Trump is doing to the judicial branch of government.

In the past, the left could always count on activist courts to circumvent refractory legislatures and implement progressive policies, but Trump is quietly appointing dozens of judges to the federal bench who believe that their role is to interpret the law, not to make it.

Moreover, he's already appointed two Justices to the Supreme Court who seem to share that judicial philosophy, and, if he's re-elected in 2020, and if the Senate remains in Republican hands, he's almost certain to name one or two more.

This would change the ideological direction of the Court for at least another generation and constitute a potential disaster for progressives. It could halt, and perhaps even reverse, the left's long, steady slog toward a socialist, statist nirvana that they've assumed was just around the corner. Their long march through the institutions will have goose stepped right into quicksand.

Thus, the left's hope and sense of urgency that Trump be removed from office or otherwise politically neutered. The left fears that many of the progressive gains of the last thirty years or so are grievously threatened by a conservative judiciary, perhaps irretrievably, and in their panic they're saying and doing some remarkable, some absurd, some almost insane things.

Despite the fact that President Trump is doing much that they wished President Obama would've done, his reshaping of the judicial branch has made progressives desperate, and fear and desperation have apparently spawned in their liberal breasts an implacable hatred for the president.

Is an Israeli/Palestinian Peace Possible?

Every administration since Truman's has wrestled with the question of how to secure peace in the Middle East between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Some believe that there'll never be peace until one or the other side is exterminated or driven from the region.

Others think that the Palestinians really do want to live peacefully alongside their Israeli neighbors and that the key is persuading the Israelis to make enough concessions to Palestinian demands that the Palestinians will be mollified.

A recent poll taken among Palestinians is, however, a splash of cold water in the face of optimists who believe that peace is attainable and just over the horizon. The Washington Free Beacon provides a summary of the poll's findings:

• If a new presidential election was held today between the current president, Fatah's Mahmoud Abbas, and the leader of the terrorist group Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas would beat Fatah 49 percent to 42 percent.
• 88 per cent said that Palestinians who sell property to Jews are traitors. 64 percent said the punishment for selling property to Jews should be the death penalty.
• Palestinians oppose the concept of a two-state solution, 55 percent to 43 percent.
• "A large minority of 44 percent thinks that armed struggle is the most effective means of establishing a Palestinian state next to the state of Israel while 28 percent believe that negotiation is the most effective means and 23 percent think non-violent resistance is the most effective."
• In lieu of negotiations, "54 percent support a return to an armed intifada," i.e. terrorism.
• 50 percent of Palestinians reject in principle the holding of negotiations in order to resolve the conflict.

When such large percentages of people are opposed to any genuine rapprochement it's hard to see how there can be any peaceful solution to the "Palestinian Problem." It causes one to wonder whether the last seventy years of low grade conflict interspersed with intense spasms of open warfare won't be the template for the next seventy years as well.

For a concise, five minute overview of the problem watch this Prager U. video:

The Moral Crisis of Our Time

In early 1968, a year of enormous social convulsion in the U.S. and Europe, philosopher William “Will” Herberg (1901-1977), published an essay entitled “What Is the Moral Crisis of Our Time?” The essay has become a classic and James Toner offers some reflections on it here.

Toner writes:

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

Herberg’s thesis was as perceptive as it was succinct: “the moral crisis of our time consists primarily not in the widespread violation of accepted moral standards . . . but in the repudiation of those very moral standards themselves.” The moral code of the Greeks, based upon reason, and of the Hebrews, based upon Revelation, had atrophied, he wrote, to the point of dissolution.

We were “rapidly losing all sense of transcendence.” We were adrift, by choice, in a sea of disorder with no “navigational” standards to consult....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• If there is no God (No transcendent moral authority with the power to hold men ultimately accountable) then there can be no objective moral duties.
• If there are no objective moral duties then the only duties we can have are subjective duties, i.e. duties that depend ultimately on our own feelings, biases, prejudices and predilections.
• A subjective duty is self-imposed, but if it's self-imposed then it can be self-removed.
• Thus, if our only moral duties are subjective then there are no moral duties at all since we cannot have a genuine duty if we can absolve ourselves of that duty whenever we wish.

Unless there is a transcendent moral law-giver which (or who) can hold us responsible for our choices in life then there is no such thing as a moral obligation.

As the great Russian novelist Tolstoy put it:

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

The price we pay in a secular age is the loss of the ability to discern, evaluate and even talk about good and evil, right and wrong. This is what Herberg saw so clearly coming to fruition in the sixties. It's what Friedrich Nietzsche prophesied in the 19th century in books like Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals. It's what atheist philosopher Jürgen Habermas means by the following:

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

Toner continues:

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

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