What Is Social Justice?

As anyone who has been on most college campuses during the last couple of years can attest, the term "social justice" has achieved an almost iconic status. It's a term that glides easily from the lips of young college progressives, but it's a term which often defies attempts by those who invoke it to explain.

What exactly is social justice? Jonah Goldberg, a writer for the American Enterprise Institute, National Review magazine and the author of two excellent books, Liberal Fascism and Suicide of the West, offers us a succinct explanation in this brief video from Prager U.:

Simply put, social justice is at best an empty progressive shibboleth and at worst a code word for a recrudescent communism which is too embarrassed by its manifold failures to go by its real name.

It's not "justice" at all but rather its opposite. There's no justice in taking what one person has worked hard for all his life and giving it over to another who may not be willing to work at all.

We've seen this form of justice played out in once prosperous Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) where farms that had been in the family of white farmers for generations were simply confiscated from them and handed over to black Zimbabweans who had no knowledge of farming. Not only was the confiscation of the property a terrible injustice, but the result has been disastrous for Zimbabwean agriculture.

Now South Africa, having failed to learn the lessons of its neighbor's foolish policy, is about to embark on the same ill-considered policy itself, all in the name of social justice.

One wonders how many of the more academically successful of those students who are demanding "social justice" would think justice had been served if their GPA was reduced by the college so that some of the points they earned could be distributed to students who didn't do as well.

I'll bet not many.

What's Wrong with the 81%?

Historian John Fea has written a book titled Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump in which he seeks to understand why so many people who call themselves evangelical Christians voted for Donald Trump and at the same time chastise them for so doing.

Fea is himself an evangelical Christian who teaches at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, but he's "shocked", "saddened", "frustrated" and "angry" that 81% of his fellow Evangelicals pulled the lever for a man whose moral character should've disqualified him among voters who believe that the nation's leaders should be above reproach.

Fea is rightly critical of Christian "leaders" who, in one way or another, sought during the campaign to excuse Mr. Trump's well-documented prevarications, debaucheries and vulgarities. He also offers some interesting, although perhaps not entirely relevant, historical insight into the oft misunderstood role of Christianity in the nation's founding, as well as the sometimes embarrassing relationship between Christian leaders and the White House.

In assessing the book these can all be set on the positive side of the ledger. On the negative side, unfortunately, there's much in Fea's book that I think is unfair to those in the 81% who, distressed by the choice between two very flawed candidates, chose to vote for the one whose political promises most closely aligned with their own hopes.

On page 73 he relates an incident in which a lady approached him after a lecture on this topic and said that she herself was a member of the 81% and she wanted Fea to tell her, given what we knew about the moral shortcomings of both candidates, how an evangelical could select between them if character was to be the deciding factor.

This was, I think, the salient question facing many Christians in November of 2016, and for reasons I elaborated upon in a couple of posts written around the 2016 election (See here and here), many saw the moral issue as a wash and chose instead to cast their ballot for the candidate whose policies were, if implemented, most likely to lead the nation out of the morass, both social and economic, it had fallen into during the previous decade.

Fea seems to recognize this motivation but chose to give it little attention, perhaps because he doesn't believe it's the chief reason why so many evangelicals lent their support to Trump. He may be right about that, but to lump those for whom it was a major consideration with those for whom it wasn't strikes me as somewhat simplistic and unfair.

In any case, he writes on page 7 of the Introduction that:

For too long, white evangelical Christians have engaged in public life through a strategy defined by the politics of fear, the pursuit of worldly power, and a nostalgic longing for a national past that may have never existed in the first place. Fear. Power. Nostalgia. These ideas are at the heart of this book, and I believe they best explain that 81%.

In succeeding chapters he unpacks these three ideas in a way that sometimes makes them seem ignoble or unseemly motivators for Christian action. He suggests, for example that fear - of change, of the future - belies a lack of trust in God's providential control over the doings of men. "Fear," he quotes author Marilynne Robinson, "is not a Christian habit of mind."

Be it as it may that fear shouldn't be a mental habit, it's nevertheless difficult to agree with Fea that fear, in the sense I understand him to be using the word, is always an unbecoming motive for a Christian or an indicator of a lack of trust in God. In fact, I suspect, that Fea doesn't think this either.

After all, he himself must've been fearful - fearful for the future of the country - when he realized on election night that Trump was going to win the election. Otherwise, why be frustrated and angry with the 81% of evangelicals who voted for the president-elect? In fact, why else write such an impassioned book if not motivated by fear for what Christian support for Trump was doing to the church's witness?

Fea says that fear has no place in the life of one who trusts God, but if he truly believes that then when he realized on election night that Trump was going to prevail why did he not just trust that this was God's will and that He had everything under control? Why get angry with those Christians who gave Trump his victory? There seems to me a dissonance between his standard for the 81% and his own reaction to Trump's election.

Fear, though it shouldn't control us, is even so a perfectly reasonable and appropriate response to certain threats. The question is whether a particular threat or set of threats justify a fearful response. The 81% saw the threats posed by liberal progressivism, some of which Fea himself agrees are ominous, as ample justification for their fear of a Hillary Clinton presidency. Fea disagrees, though, that the threat reached a sufficiently high level of seriousness to warrant support for Trump, but he doesn't satisfactorily explain why a Clinton presidency should not arouse fear among Christians while the threats he believes to be posed by a Trump presidency should.

Fea strongly and, to a large extent, rightly criticizes Christians for aspiring to positions of power within the current administration. This aspiration can certainly be both disreputable and dangerous. It has seduced some evangelical "leaders" into excusing or rationalizing some of Mr. Trump's egregious behavior, behavior that should never be excused and which was rightly and roundly condemned by these same "court evangelicals", as Fea aptly labels them, when similarly engaged in by President Clinton.

In pointing out this hypocrisy Fea is excellent, but his analysis of "power seeking" when applied to the broader mass of the 81% is vague, and his use of the word "power", at least when applied to the hopes of the majority of Christian Trump voters, is unfair and gratuitously pejorative. "Influence" would've been a more charitable word choice, I think.

In other words, setting aside the court evangelicals - the handful of prominent leaders who have in some cases sold their souls for a mess of pottage - the average evangelical voter, like everyone else, hoped to gain some influence over the policies issuing forth from Washington, and surely there's nothing dishonorable with wanting to influence today's leaders, any more than there's anything dishonorable with wanting to teach history and write books to influence tomorrow's leaders.

Indeed, if the desire for influence is somehow nefarious then no Christian should ever run for political office, but surely Fea would not endorse such a principle.

The Trumpian slogan "Make America Great Again" is Fea's springboard for his critique of evangelical nostalgia. He focuses on the word "again" and rightly points out that any past era to which one directs one's gaze may have been "great" for some but not so great for others. As much as whites might pine for the "good old days" of the fifties, Fea observes, most African Americans would not be particularly nostalgic for those years, nor wish to return to them.

True enough, but I think this misses the point. It's not a particular era to which anyone wants to return in toto, it's rather particular qualities of the past that many, both blacks and whites, would like to recover while retaining the best of the present.

For instance, there was a time, prior to the 1960s, when for both blacks and whites families were stronger, neighborhoods were more secure and more communal, drugs were a much less serious problem, public education (even in segregated schools) was in many ways better, movies and music were less coarse and vulgar, babies in the womb were safer, the economy was sound, and religious liberty was not under assault.

When candidate Trump spoke of making America great again a lot of evangelicals reflected on how far we'd strayed from this historical reality and saw in Trump a hope that we might get some of it back. To suggest that MAGA was a "dog whistle" or "code" for reinstituting Jim Crow or undoing all the salutary social progress that's been made in America over the last fifty years, as some of Trump's critics have done, is simply specious and unfair.

Finally, Fea approvingly cites University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter's call for Christians to refrain from becoming activists in the culture war. In his introduction, he writes that, "Christians were never meant to change this world; instead they are called to .... [be] a 'faithful presence' in their local communities and neighborhoods."

This sounds a lot like a veiled call to Christians to surrender meekly to the forces of cultural decay and degeneration sweeping over our society. I wonder whether Fea would've urged William Wilberforce and the Clapham sect to abstain from fighting for the abolition of slavery, or for Martin Luther King and others in the American civil rights movement to have declined to fight for the right to vote for politicians who would advance the cause of racial justice, or for Christians today who fight on behalf of immigration reform or environmental causes to desist from their protests and political efforts.

I doubt it, but surely these are all as much cultural issues as are abortion, pornography and gay marriage.

I'm quite sure that Christians who campaigned for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were not seen by Professor Fea as doing anything untoward. Why is it that it's only when Christians involve themselves in what are seen as conservative political or social issues that they're accused of bringing disrepute to the name of Christ? Why is it only conservative Christians who are called upon to be conscientious objectors in the culture wars?

Fea argues that had evangelical Christians spent as much money on simply being a faithful witness for the sanctity of human life rather than dirtying themselves in the political mud pit by seeking to elect politicians who would overturn Roe they'd be a lot more effective and compelling ambassadors for Christ, but this is a false alternative. There's no reason Christians shouldn't do both, and indeed they are doing both.

There's nothing wrong with Christians working to overturn unjust laws and to scrub some of the social toxins from our culture, but, to be sure, this is a task that must be undertaken as irenically and with as much integrity, civility, and winsomeness as possible.

If the world remains nonetheless repelled by such activism and advocacy then that's the world's problem, not the church's. So, too, was the world repelled by the ancient prophets.

How Did This Ever Evolve?

The problem, of course, is not with explaining how the phenomenon in the video could have evolved, but rather how it could have evolved as a result of a blind, undirected, purposeless process.

Doubtless the phenomenon could have been designed by an intelligent engineer, just as intelligent engineers have evolved computers from abacuses and fighter jets from Flyer, the first plane flown by the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk.

But it's hard to imagine how fighter jets could have evolved from Flyer (or, a forteriori, how Flyer itself could have evolved) through sheer serendipity.

Anyway, watch the video. It's pretty amazing.

The Source of Our Estrangements

Some time ago I wrote a post on the sheer stupidity of political correctness. The post was based on an incident involving the writer Naomi Riley, and it's worth revisiting:

A week ago I commented on the case of Naomi Schaeffer Riley who was fired from her position as blog writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education because she offended a number of readers in the academy by stating the obvious, i.e. that much of black studies scholarship isn't scholarship at all.

Riley has leveled similar criticisms at other academic fields as well, but that didn't matter. You can say what you want about other disciplines, but if you say anything critical about black studies it's a thought crime - ipso facto proof of racism. Any criticism of the quality of any scholarship associated with any approved minority, whether racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual orientation, is heresy and must be expunged lest thoughtful people be impressed by the truth of it.

So I thought it amusing the other night watching a talk show on which Riley appeared as a guest describing her encounter with liberals who no doubt perceive themselves as deeply committed to tolerance and the diversity of speech and ideas. It was amusing because the host of the show, recounting the allegations of racism made against her by her detractors, invited her husband, a Wall Street Journal editor who was sitting in the audience, to join them on the stage to defend her against the indictment.

The audience laughed as her husband made his way to the stage. The racist Ms Riley was married to a black man and has two biracial children.

Liberal political correctness isn't just insufferable. It's stupid. It's a form of holier-than-thou self-righteousness embraced by people who substitute formulas for thought because thinking is too taxing, who latch on to the slightest deviation from orthodox speech and behavior as proof that someone is a heretic.

They're people so filled with their own prejudices that they just assume everyone else is also, and proof is just a matter of catching the other guy saying something that could be twisted by the witless to indicate a deviation from orthodoxy.

They're the modern descendants of those who burned witches at the stake in the fourteenth century because the hapless women made some innocuous but careless remark. They're kin to those self-righteous prigs in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter who, though filled with their own sins, nevertheless sternly punished anyone who gave them the merest warrant for doing so. They're cut from the same cloth as the communist totalitarians who use mind-numbing reeducation camps and "snitches" to eradicate "deviationism" among the people.

They are stereotypical ideological puritans and if given enough power they'll eventually deaden all thought and discourse, which is doubtless their goal.

Political correctness came to mind again recently as I was contemplating allegations that President Trump is responsible for the social alienation and estrangement we're experiencing in our national life.

Well, perhaps he is responsible for some of it, though I doubt it's much. I think the bulk of responsibility lies with the left's penchant for identity politics, two significant and related constituents of which are political correctness and victimhood.

In their pursuit of power the left seeks to persuade everyone, or at least every minority, that they're a victim, but as Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson has said, "As soon as you see yourself as a victim that breeds thoughts of anger and revenge."

By encouraging everyone to see themselves as a victim of some sort of oppression the left fosters bitterness and resentment toward whomever the oppressors are alleged to be (usually straight white Christian males).

It's that hostility, conceived in a perceived victimhood, that's tearing us apart from each other, that's making dialogue between opposing viewpoints extremely difficult and which is spawning an incivility in our public life that's unprecedented since the Civil War.

Just ask Naomi and Jason Riley.

Where Have All the Great Writers Gone?

Armando Simon has written an interesting column at New English Review in which he asks why the west is no longer producing great literature. He focuses primarily on the United States but also includes England in his analysis. Here's his lede:

Something very, very odd is going on in our culture: the quality of literature appears to be fast declining. Whereas, before now, the United States could boast of a whole constellation of living first-rate writers, nowadays the number of excellent writers can be counted in the fingers of one’s hand—and those writers are on their last legs.

Nor can we take any consolation in thinking that the same phenomena may be at work that has been seen in the case of music and art, wherein geniuses have been overlooked, only to be discovered and appreciated later (e.g., Melville, Schubert, Van Gogh, Renoir). If anything, innovative, or controversial, writers, such as Joyce, were read and discussed while they lived and wrote.

Nor, again, can we take comfort in the attitude that has prevailed in Western society within the past three or four decades that, “there is nothing good, nor bad, only opinion” (with its corollary, “there is no right, or wrong, only opinion”), which has been an excuse for the proliferation of truly abysmal “art” by self-important, neurotic, talentless mediocrities.

Simon goes on to divide American history into fifty year increments starting with 1800 and then lists all the great American fiction writers who achieved their greatest work during each increment. When he does so he finds a fascinating result. The pattern that emerges is a bell-shaped curve peaking in the 1901-1950 increment and fading to near zero in the present era.

The same pattern appears if the same analysis is applied to British writers. Simon concludes that "Good literature is flatlining" and offers a couple of possible explanations for this phenomenon, some of which seem anodyne and some of which are more worrisome. Here's an example of each:

Wherefore this decline in great writers? It may very well be that the ravenous film and television industries have absorbed them. It has to be admitted that many television series and specials, and the cinema, have been superb (just as most others have also been mediocre, as in literature and art) and one cannot but wonder if those same screenwriters would not have written excellent fiction.

More troubling is the possibility that the bell-shaped distribution of great writers is an instance of a characteristic of intellectual endeavor in general. Simon cites technological discovery as an example:

In modern times, scientific innovations of a technological nature have surprisingly followed an identical bell curve pattern (telegraph, radio, television, cars, tanks, machine guns, rubber, steam engine, refrigerators, nuclear reactors, light bulbs, trains, cameras, rockets, airplanes, computers, etc.).

All subsequent innovations in our time have simply been constant refinements on those crucial, nascent inventions.

He offers more possibilities in his article which is relatively brief and which should definitely interest anyone who cares about literature.

Gratuitous Beauty

One of the core principles of traditional evolutionary theory is that physical traits evolve in a population because they help the organism to adapt to their environment and enjoy reproductive success as measured in the production of greater numbers of offspring.

One problem with this hypothesis is that it simply doesn't explain the extravagant diversity and beauty found in the living world, an extravagance that seems totally superfluous and unnecessary for the survival of the species.

This beautiful video, featuring Australian geneticist Michael Denton and titled Biology of the Baroque, presents numerous examples of this phenomenon in nature. It's twenty minutes long but the footage is so gorgeous that once you start watching you'll want to keep on to the end.

The theme of the video is that the superabundant beauty found in living things seems unnecessary for the survival of the species and inexplicable on a Darwinian account of life. It's wholly gratuitous, and, so far from suggesting a genesis in blind chance and purposelessness, points us rather to the artistry of an Intelligent Designer.

Watch it and see what you think:

Post-Postmodernity

Students have sometimes asked me what I thought would come after the postmodern (po-mo) infatuation which some say we're currently experiencing. Postmoderns tend to deny that there are objective truths about meanings or values and place the emphasis instead on "what's true for me". Truth is subjective. Right and wrong are whatever I or my peer group decides to accept as right or wrong. There are no objective facts, as Nietzsche said, only one's own feelings and interpretations.

My own "feeling" is that what will follow this unstable and untenable stage will be either a cultural and intellectual apocalypse or a return to more traditional views of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True.

Philosopher Crispin Sartwell of Dickinson College has given us his interesting take on what's coming next in the New York Times' Opinionator column. There he declares us to be on the cusp of "popomo," a post-post modern period in philosophy which will, in fact, amount to a return to realism.

His whole column is worth reading and the reader can get a sense of it in his summation. After discussing the postmodern anti-realism of thinkers like Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty, Sartwell says this:

But the ‘80s heyday of Rorty and Fish is beginning to seem like a long time ago, and a backlash seems to be in progress. More recent work in philosophy includes various forms of realism about the world: the idea that reality is not the product of consciousness, or of human perceptual structures or languages or interpretive communities, but exists independently.

We don’t make the world, as one might put it; the world makes us. Where for decades or even centuries, philosophy has focused on our representations and descriptions of the world, on human consciousness and cultural systems, many are now turning to the external features of the world that constitute the content of our experiences and the context of our social practices.

Let’s call this phase after postmodernism post-postmodernism – “popomo” for short....

Some of the motivation for the realist turn has been ecological: Climate change isn’t just in our heads or in our descriptions, but a real-world situation that requires real-world physical transformations. Others have been political: defenses of the urgent truth of justice, or of the importance of material economic conditions and the treatment of physical human bodies.

And I think that, as our experience becomes in many ways increasingly mediated or virtual, we've simply started yearning toward the old-fashioned physical environment, which was always available and still is, and on which whatever we see on a screen depends utterly. Ideas are always an index of longings.

The period after the period after the end is the popomo era. But the “post” was always itself a symptom of a sense of decline and ending, and I do hope and think that our period of inquiry doesn’t just come after something, but that it is itself something, and that it comes before something.

The problem with realism is that it seeks to make the physical world, as well as human moral and aesthetic values, objectively real entities. The former, however, seems to be undercut by quantum physics and the latter seems to be undercut by naturalistic metaphysics.

Quantum physics seems to point to mind as being the fundamental reality and naturalistic metaphysics entails, in my view, an inescapable subjectivity of moral and aesthetic value. It'll be interesting to see how Sartwell's last line ultimately plays out.

Defending Racism at the Times

Last week the New York Times let their ideological mask slip by hiring a woman of Korean ancestry named Sarah Jeong, an openly racist writer, to their editorial board.

Jeong has several times in the past couple of years tweeted her contempt for whites in general and white men in particular, but evidently race hatred only stunts your career among liberal progressives such as those who populate the Times' upper echelons if it's expressed by whites against any other group.

If you're a "minority", on the other hand, you can say the vilest things about white people and be rewarded with a plum contract at the nation's "paper of record".

Andrew Sullivan includes a sampling of Ms Jeong's thoughts on white folks in this paragraph in a piece at The New York Magazine:

A little more disturbing is what you might call “eliminationist” rhetoric — language that wishes an entire race could be wiped off the face of the earth: “#cancelwhitepeople.” Or: “White people have stopped breeding. you’ll all go extinct soon. that was my plan all along.”

....[H]ere’s another gem: “Dumb..s f...ing white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs p...ing on fire hydrants.” Or you could describe an entire race as subhuman: “Are white people genetically disposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins.”

And then there’s this simple expression of the pleasure that comes with hatred: “oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.” I love that completely meretricious “old” to demean them still further. And that actual feeling: joy at cruelty!

Ms Jeong's new employer, the folks who would ostensibly have us believe that they deplore the culture of incivility that has descended like smog upon our politics over the past two decades, have enthusiastically defended her bigoted comments. Sullivan, however, does a fine job of dismantling what is, in fact, an astonishingly tendentious apologia.

The defense of Jeong is predicated on the left's insistence that racism is a blight which afflicts all and only white people. Thus, Ms Jeong, being Asian, cannot possibly be a racist ab defino.

The definition is, of course, a perversely moronic and self-serving bit of special pleading, but it's widely adhered to by Ms Jeong's fellow-travelers who insist that she did nothing wrong to post odious, hateful tweets about whites and that it's a form of bigotry to criticize her, an Asian woman, for having done so.

Here's Sullivan:

[Jeong] blames her ugly tweets on trolls whose online harassment of her prompted her to respond in turn. She was merely “counter-trolling.” She says her tweets, which were not responses to any individual, were also “not aimed at a general audience,” and now understands that these tweets were “hurtful” and won’t do them again.

The New York Times also buys this argument: “her journalism and the fact that she is a young Asian woman have made her a subject of frequent online harassment. For a period of time, she responded to that harassment by imitating the rhetoric of her harassers.”

Let me explain why I think this is the purest of bulls..t. If you want to respond to trolls by trolling them, you respond to them directly. You don’t post slurs about an entire race of people (the overwhelming majority of whom are not trolls) on an open-forum website like Twitter. And these racist tweets were not just a function of one sudden exasperated vent at a harasser; they continued for two years.

It's not a very great step from defining racism as a white people's disease to demands for actions like those of the South African parliament which has passed a law to allow for the confiscation of white-owned farms without even compensation to white farmers and whose leaders are even making veiled threats of genocide of white citizens.

If a white person tweeted about blacks anything as vile as Ms Jeong did about whites that person would certainly never be hired by the New York Times or any respectable employer. Yet, Ms Jeong is not only hired, she's praised.

It's worrisome that bright people at the Times don't see how this ugly episode makes them all look like rank hypocrites.

Habitable Zones

An article at Salvo (subscription required) drives a spike into the notion that the galaxy, and perhaps the universe, are filled with habitable planets and that life elsewhere in the cosmos is an inevitability.

The article, by astronomer Hugh Ross, observes that the conviction that there simply must be life out there somewhere and that our earth is not unique in being fit for sustaining life is based on four assumptions:

1. The density and kinds of planets throughout our galaxy and all other galaxies in the universe are roughly the same as what we observe in the vicinity of our solar system.
2. About 20 percent of all planets are habitable.
3. Life inevitably will arise on all habitable planets.
4. The probability of a technologically advanced civilization arising from simple life forms is better than one chance in 10 billion.

Each of these assumptions, especially #3, are deeply problematic, but Ross focusses in this article on #2. The belief that 20% of all planets are habitable is based on the fact that of the 3000+ planets discovered so far, 20% of them lie at a distance from their star that would permit water to exist in the liquid state. Since water is a necessary condition for life, it's assumed that these planets could sustain living things.

Ross points out, however, that though water is a necessary condition for life, it's not a sufficient condition. There are, in fact, nine different "habitable zones" and all nine must overlap in order for life to exist on a planet.

In addition to the water habitable zone there are also the following:

1. Ultraviolet habitable zone
2. Photosynthetic habitable zone
3. Ozone habitable zone
4. Planetary rotation rate habitable zone
5. Planetary obliquity habitable zone
6. Tidal habitable zone
7. Astrosphere habitable zone
8. Electric wind habitable zone

Ross explains each of these zones in his recently released book Improbable Planet, but in the Salvo article he gives this example:

Typically, these zones do not overlap. For example, the distance a planet must be from its host star so that it receives enough ultraviolet radiation to enable the synthesis of many life-essential compounds, but not so much as to kill living things, is rarely the same distance that a planet must be from its host star for liquid water to possibly exist on its surface.

For 97 percent of all stars, the liquid water habitable zone does not overlap the ultraviolet habitable zone.

Thus,

A planet is a true candidate for habitability only if it simultaneously resides in all nine habitable zones....So far, astronomers have measured the characteristics of 3,484 planets. Only one of all these 3,484 planets resides in all nine known habitable zones. That one is Earth.

For all we know there may be other habitable zones in addition to these nine, but there are in any case several conclusions to be drawn from the information Ross provides us. First, the principle of mediocrity - the principle that the earth is not exceptional in any significant way - is ludicrous.

Second, the notion that residence of a planet in the water habitable zone is sufficient to justify hopes that life could exist on that planet is naive.

When the necessity for all nine habitable zones overlapping is combined with the dozens of other parameters that any planet must possess in order to be suitable for life suggests that Earth-like planets are probably extremely rare.

In fact, if it turns out that such planets are not uncommon that finding in itself would be so astonishing as to point to intelligent, purposeful engineering of the universe.

Altruism and Naturalism

Damon Linker argues at The Week that self-sacrifice is inexplicable on naturalism. Naturalism rests heavily upon evolutionary explanations of behavior, but cases like that of Thomas Vander Woude simply don't fit that narrative. Here's Vander Woude's story:

[C]onsider Thomas S. Vander Woude, the subject of an unforgettable 2011 article by the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg. One day in September 2008, Vander Woude's 20-year-old son Josie, who has Down syndrome, fell through a broken septic tank cover in their yard.

The tank was eight feet deep and filled with sewage. After trying and failing to rescue his son by pulling on his arm from above, Vander Woude jumped into the tank, held his breath, dove under the surface of the waste, and hoisted his son onto his shoulders. Josie was rescued a few minutes later. By then his 66-year-old father was dead.

This is something that any father, atheist or believer, might do for his son. But only the believer can make sense of the deed.

Pick your favorite non-theistic theory: Rational choice and other economically-based accounts hold that people act to benefit themselves in everything they do. From that standpoint, Vander Woude — like the self-sacrificing soldier or firefighter — was a fool who incomprehensibly placed the good of another ahead of his own.

Other atheistic theories similarly deny the possibility of genuine altruism, reject the possibility of free will, or else, like some forms of evolutionary psychology, posit that when people sacrifice themselves for others (especially, as in the Vander Woude case, for their offspring) they do so in order to strengthen kinship ties, and in so doing maximize the spread of their genes throughout the gene pool.

But of course, as someone with Down syndrome, Vander Woude's son is probably sterile and possesses defective genes that, judged from a purely evolutionary standpoint, deserve to die off anyway. So Vander Woude's sacrifice of himself seems to make him, once again, a fool.

Things are no better in less extreme cases. If Josie were a genius, his father's sacrifice might be partially explicable in evolutionary terms — as an act designed to ensure that his own and his son's genes survive and live on beyond them both. But this egoistic explanation would drain the act of its nobility, which is precisely what needs to be explained.

We feel moved by Vander Woude's sacrifice precisely because it seems selfless — the antithesis of evolutionary self-interestedness.

But why is that? What is it about the story of a man who willingly embraces a revolting, horrifying death in order to save his son that moves us to tears? Why does it seem somehow, like a beautiful painting or piece of music, a fleeting glimpse of perfection in an imperfect world?

It's an interesting question that Linker raises. Even if we can account for what Vander Woude did in evolutionary terms it's harder to account for why we who read about it think he did something noble and wonderful. Most evolutionists deny that there is such a thing as true altruism, that everything we do has a self-interested motive buried somewhere, but it's hard to see what that would be in the case of Thomas Vander Woude.

Linker believes that such acts of radical altruism give us a fleeting glimpse of something transcendent. Whether one agrees with that conclusion or not it certainly seems that altruism, unlike egoism, is very difficult to account for in a naturalistic worldview.

Why the West Hates Itself

Nirmal Dass asks a provocative question at The Daily Caller:

Why does a civilization, providing peace, stability, prosperity and unimagined freedom to its inhabitants turn to self-hatred? Why do those who richly enjoy the fruits of the West, also agree to abhor it?

To understand this destructive habit of mind, we must first turn to the nineteenth century, when Christianity was finally and fully replaced by collectivism. People were no longer defined by God but by society; that is, individual identity was said to be achieved only through social interaction. Without society, there was no humanity.

Dass gives a rather complex answer to the question but his answer is summarized in this paragraph:

So, why does the West hate itself? Because anything that hinders or denies human reason and the human will must be destroyed. The biggest hindrance is the West’s past, its root: Christianity. Western self-abhorrence is hatred of what stands in the way of a “better” future.

Doubtless he's on to something and you can read the rest of his analysis at the link.

As Dass suggests the West is experiencing an age of self-loathing as a consequence of the secular revolt against Christianity and all that that entails.

He doesn't say it this way, exactly, but when Christianity is rejected, so, too, is any ground for moral judgment, meaning, justice and truth. The rejection of Christianity in favor of a secular materialism leads to a worldview that embraces ethical, metaphysical and epistemological nihilism.

People may not live as utter nihilists, but nihilism is perforce consequent upon their assumption that there's no objective truth, nor meaning, nor right nor wrong.

The modern Westerner claims to be liberated from the shackles of a dead faith to live his/her own life, to create his/her own values, morality and meaning. Their truth is their own, and no one has the right to tell them that they're wrong.

Christianity, however, does precisely this. Christianity claims that there are indeed objective and eternal truths about the world, about human nature, about morality. This claim stands as an indictment against modern amoralism and subjectivism and breeds a profound resentment and hostility in the hearts of contemporary men and women who have embraced secular materialism.

Rather than acquiesce to the Christian view of things, the response of many is to lash out against it, to strive to tear it all down and with it all that has been built upon it, which means most of Western civilization.

This, I suggest, is one reason why so many Westerners are eager to commit cultural suicide by opening their borders to millions of immigrants who despise the West and its values. By flooding Europe and North America with people antipathetic to its cultural heritage that heritage will ultimately be watered down to where it eventually flickers out of existence.

As far as many of those who have nothing but contempt for Western culture and the faith that created it, that day can't come soon enough.

It's Who They Are

Media talking heads have frequently expressed concern (see here for example) that President Trump's characterizations of the news media will somehow lead to violence against journalists.

Yet, although there've been no reported acts of violence against journalists by Trump supporters, there have been plenty of despicable acts of physical and verbal violence by leftists, both in and out of the media, against Trump and those who support him.

Breitbart documents 538 acts of vandalism, threats, physical and verbal assaults, "jokes" about killing either Trump or his supporters, and other forms of dehumanization of either the president or his supporters since September of 2015.

Here are just a few of the more recent examples of behavior which, had the victims been associated with Clinton or Obama and the perpetrators been conservatives or "right-wingers", would have set off a media firestorm that would've raged for months, as it did in the case of the tragic death of the woman struck by a car driven by an alt-right demonstrator in Charlottesville.

Where, though, has the outrage, condemnation or even criticism in the liberal media been when any of the following occurred?:

1. July 25, 2018: Trump’s Hollywood Walk of Fame star destroyed … again.
2. July 24, 2018: Sen Cory Booker (D-NJ) Says Brett Kavanaugh supporters are “complicit in evil”.
3. July 23, 2018: Denver Post Runs Letter to Editor Suggesting Trump Should Be Executed.
4. July 23, 2018: Elizabeth Warren Supporter Shoves Challenger.
5. July 20, 2018: Green-Haired “Gender Fluid” Guy Spits All Over Teen’s MAGA Hat.
6. July 20, 2018: ‘Hang Trump’ Shirt Peddled on Facebook.
7. July 19, 2018: ‘New Yorker’ Kills Trump.
8. July 19, 2018: CA Anti-Trump Protesters Target Legal Immigrant’s Cafe Over Trump Support, Hurl Feces.
9. July 17, 2018: Uber Driver Refuses to Serve Black Conservatives Over MAGA Hat.
10. July 17, 2018: Gory Trump Throat-Cutting Art Decorates Portland Gallery.
11. July 16, 2018: House Democrat Calls For ‘Military Folks’ To ‘Stop Trump’.
12. July 16, 2018: Mob chases pro-Trump group out of Los Angeles bar.
13. July 15, 2018: Anti-Trump Paraglider Who Buzzed Trump Visit Arrested in Britain.
14. July 15, 2018: Former Clinton WH Staffer: It’s ‘Tempting’ to Beat up Rand Paul.
15. July 13, 2018: Anti-Israel protesters harass Jared and Ivanka with loud speakers outside their home.
16. July 13, 2018: 76-year-old man assaulted by anti-Trump thugs in San Diego.
17. July 11, 2018: ABC’s Terry Moran shames Fox News’s Shannon Bream for feeling threatened at SCOTUS protest.
18. July 10, 2018: Protesters arrested, accused of assaulting officer at Portland ICE office.
19. July 10, 2018: Man threatens to ‘curb stomp’ Trump supporter at Disneyland.
20. July 10, 2018: Fox News Reporter Harassed, Threatened And Forced To Leave Supreme Court By Leftist Mob.

The list at the link extends back to 2015 and includes over 500 such incidents with links to the original reports. The record is as shameful as it is long, but this is who the modern left is. They're people consumed by hate and easily provoked to violence, either rhetorical or actual.

One wonders why otherwise fine people who identify as liberals aren't more vocal in condemning this gross incivility, and even barbarism, among their political allies.

Worst President Ever?

Matt Margolis argues that, contrary to the consensus on the left that Barack Obama was a great president, he was actually among the worst we've ever had. He gives six reasons, and elaborates upon them, in a piece at PJMedia:

By now you’ve probably heard of polls that say Americans believe that “Donald Trump is the worst president in history” or that presidential scholars have ranked Trump “dead last.” .... While it may be too early to properly gauge presidential rankings for recent presidents, I am confident that history will ultimately judge Barack Obama as the worst president our nation has ever seen.

The mountain of evidence that condemns his presidency to the bottom of the barrel is overwhelming. In my just re-released book, The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama, I document 200 reasons why history will prove my belief correct in the years to come.

Here are Margolis' six with excerpts from his commentary on each:

6. Weaponizing the government against his enemies
The political use of the IRS to punish administration opponents and spying on the Trump campaign are just two examples of this abuse of power.

5. Obama’s surveillance state
According to the ACLU there was a 64 percent growth in electronic spying by the United States government during Obama’s first term. The Obama administration argued in federal court in 2012 that the public has no “reasonable expectation of privacy” regarding their cell phone location data and that the government can obtain these records without a warrant. Further blemishing Obama’s record on civil liberties, his administration green-lighted a giant government database of information on millions of citizens who weren’t even suspected of terrorism or any crime at all.

In May 2017, we also found out that Obama’s National Security Agency had been conducting illegal searches on Americans for years and was rebuked by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). We didn’t hear about it sooner because the Obama administration covered it up.

4. Purging Gitmo
As a candidate in 2007, Obama promised he would close the terrorist detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (Gitmo), as soon as he was elected. He signed an executive order on January 22, 2009, requiring Gitmo to close within one year. Congress refused to go along, so instead of closing it, he systematically purged the prison of its terrorist inmates, as a sort of end-run around congressional opposition to closure. ...

One retired CIA officer estimated that at least 50 percent of those released from Gitmo returned to battle against American troops, and Paul Lewis, Obama’s special envoy for Guantanamo closure, confirmed that Americans have been killed by released Gitmo detainees.

3. Obamacare
Despite his campaign promise to bring Democrats and Republicans together to reform healthcare, Obama signed a trillion-dollar government takeover of one-sixth of the United States economy with zero Republican votes in the Senate and only one Republican vote in the House. Despite a promise of transparency, Obama and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made sure that the final negotiations were held behind closed doors....

The most insulting part of it all was that despite the high costs of Obamacare, health premiums went up and coverage got worse. Remember “if you like your plan you can keep it”? That was a lie.

....in November 2015, the percentage of people who reported delaying medical care over costs was higher than it was before Obama even took office. So, people were forced to buy insurance even if they didn't want it, and they still couldn't afford to seek medical care because of the higher premiums.

2. The worst economic recovery
There have been eleven recessions since World War II, each of which was followed by a recovery. Even Obama experienced an economic recovery… it just happens to be the worst one. All jobs lost in post-World War II recessions were recovered after about twenty-five months on average. But, it took seventy-seven months for employment to return to pre-recession levels, making Obama’s recovery the slowest recovery of them all—and by a wide margin....

Obama is also the only president in U.S. history to have never had a single year of 3.0 percent or greater GDP growth.

1. The largest deficits in history

Go to the link to read the rest of Margolis' remarks about each of these six.

Off the top of our heads we could add to Margolis' list the Iran deal which may have been the worst deal ever made by an American president, the Fast and Furious scandal, the Veterans Administration scandal, the mediocre judicial and SCOTUS appointments, the abrogation of American leadership around the world, and the empowerment of ideological progressives to undermine the principles and traditions upon which this nation was built.

There are, in my opinion, only two facts that will distinguish the Obama presidency in the eyes of future generations: Mr. Obama was the first person of color to rise to the presidency and his presidency was among the most disappointing in the modern era.

Scruton on Conservatism

Sir Roger Scruton is a writer and philosopher who has published more than 40 books in philosophy, aesthetics, and politics. He was interviewed recently by Madeleine Kearns for National Review about his latest book which is titled Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition, and he has some pithy things to say.

Here are some excerpts from the conversation with a few thoughts of my own interspersed:

Madeleine Kearns: In your most recent book, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition, you provide a distilled synthesis of modern conservative thought. First, I’d like to begin with your book’s last chapter, “Conservatism Now,” in which you reference William F. Buckley Jr.’s first book, God and Man at Yale (1951).

In that book, which arguably launched the conservative movement in America, a 24-year-old Buckley wrote: “I believe that if and when the menace of Communism is gone, other vital battles, at present subordinated, will emerge to the foreground. And the winner must have help from the classroom.”

Do you think Buckley was correct? If so, what are these “other vital battles”?

Sir Roger Scruton: Yes, Buckley was right. There is the vital battle to defend fundamental institutions, such as marriage and the family, and to counter the censorship of all opinions that express an attachment to our cultural and political inheritance.

MK: What is the difference between a reactionary and a conservative?

SRS: A reactionary is fixed on the past and wanting to return to it; a conservative wishes to adapt what is best in the past to the changing circumstances of the present.

MK: Why do many on the left consider conservatism to be inherently evil (rather than cuddly)?

SRS: The principal reason is that people on the left have illusions about human nature and think they prove their virtue by broadcasting those illusions. Anyone who punctures those illusions is therefore not just a spoilsport but a threat. What the self-declared “virtue” of the left amounts to can be witnessed in what happens to ordinary humanity when the left takes power.

I think here I would add to what Scruton says. A big part of the left's hatred for conservatives, IMO, stems from the fact that The left bases their policy prescriptions on emotivism and conservatives base theirs on reason and experience. For example, the left believes in their heart that socialism should work, but reason and experience demonstrate that it doesn't.

Thus, when people are shown that the ideas that they've invested their lives in are utterly wrong, it generates resentment, bitterness and ultimately hatred for those who show them to be wrong.

MK: Can one be a hopeful conservative without God?

SRS: Yes, but it helps to believe in God, since then one’s hopes are fixed on a higher reality, and that stops one from imposing them on the world in which we live.

Actually, I don't know how anyone can be a hopeful anything without God.

If there is no God what is there to hope for? What difference does it make what the world will be like after our deaths? Hoping that our descendents have a pleasant world to live in is a nice sentiment, but a couple of generations down the line you and they are utter strangers to each other, and their lives are just as pointless as are ours today. What does it matter to anyone living today whether the world's a better or worse place in 2100? If there is no God, hopefulness seems quaint, meaningless, and out of place.

MK: You mention a reluctance on the part of some conservatives to self-identify as such. Surprisingly, perhaps, you include George Orwell and Simone Weil in this category. Can you explain why they, too, belong to the “great tradition”? How can you spot a conservative?

SRS: I try to explain this in my book. Conservatives reveal themselves through their care for ordinary human things, and their recognition of the fragility of decency and the need to protect it.

MK: How is Islam to be best accommodated in Western democracies?

SRS: By engaging Muslims in discussion and explaining to them that we live under a rule of law which is man-made, not God-bestowed.

I'm not sure why Islam should be specially accommodated at all. Western democracies have freedom of religion; that's all the accommodation the state should make for any religion.

If there's to be accommodation it should run the other way. Muslims should accommodate themselves to living in a country that holds constitutional values that their religion may make no allowance for.

In other words, the Muslim should accommodate him or herself to the laws and values of the land in which he/she chooses to live, not vice-versa.

Spiders

Here's a short but interesting introduction to one of the most fascinating creatures on the planet - spiders. How and why did spiders evolve the ability to produce three different kinds of silk and the ability to not only extrude it, but also the "knowledge" required to construct sometimes elaborate webs? Moreover, how does it happen that every spider of the same species "knows" what specific pattern of web it is to build?

How is that information encoded in the individual spider and passed on from generation to generation? Is it in the spider's genes or somewhere else in the organism? And how does random mutation and natural selection produce new information in the first place?

These are all questions evolutionary biologists struggle to answer. Of course, information, as far as we have experience of it, is always the product of a mind, never of chance. Why, then, should we think that the information in living things is the product of a lucky concatenation of atoms repeated millions of times in the history of the species?

Anyway, think on these questions as you watch the video:

An Atheist's Dilemma

Alfredo Metere is a senior research scientist at the International Computer Science Institute, and the University of California, Berkeley.

In an article at Cosmos he argues that the laws of physics leave no room for free will, that the universe is a deterministic system, and that all human choices were made inevitable by the initial conditions which prevailed at the Big Bang.

Here are some key excerpts from his argument:

One of the major fundamental questions in physics concerns the presence or absence of free will in the universe, or in any physical system, or subset, within it.

Physics is based on the idea that nature is mechanistic, which means that it works like a machine. A machine is just a system, and therefore, by definition, it is a collection of elements, each of them with a specific, possibly different function, all working together to achieve a specific purpose, general to the whole machine.

If we believe in the Big Bang Theory – and the universe’s continuous expansion is a strong indication that such theory must be correct – the initial state of the universe was a single point (known as a singularity) that then expanded to the cosmos we know and perceive today, which, of course, includes us.

If so, there is a causal relationship between the Big Bang and us. In other words, free will is not allowed, and all of our actions are just a mere consequence of that first event. Such a view is known as “determinism”, or “super-determinism” (if one finds it productive to reinvent the wheel).

Set aside the objection to Metere that according to quantum physics the universe is fundamentally indeterminate (See the argument developed at Evolution News by Michael Egnor), and bear in mind that most metaphysical naturalists are inclined to agree with Metere's analysis. Naturalism entails, though perhaps not strictly, a materialist view of reality, and materialism entails, though perhaps not strictly, a determinist view of human volition.

Atheism, materialism and determinism all cluster together so that those who hold one view, generally hold the other two as well. If they don't, they have to somehow reconcile what appears prima facie to be an inconsistency.

Now consider the awkward dilemma this places an atheist (metaphysical naturalist) in.

If atheism is true then materialism follows. Everything is ultimately reducible to, and explicable in terms of, material particles and the forces between them. And if materialism is true then determinism is true. There's no locus for free will in a purely material substrate like the brain.

Our choices are chemical reactions in our brain, and those reactions are caused by other chemical reactions, and so on back to the Big Bang.

All of those reactions are determined, so as Metere says, there's a causal relation between us and the Big Bang, and there's no room for any "choice" occurring outside that causal chain. But, if determinism is true then our beliefs are the product of non-rational chemical reactions, a coupling and decoupling of particles.

If that's so, then the belief that atheism is true is alo non-rational, so why should anyone believe it? Some people have the appropriate chemical reactions that lead to atheistic belief and others don't, but in neither case does the objective truth of things factor into the picture.

It might be objected that our beliefs are formed by reasons which stimulate the appropriate chemical reactions, but this is also problematic.

Our reasons are themselves ultimately determined by chemical reactions, so if our reasons are determined then we don't necessarily hold them because of their truth value, but because of a host of other causes, most of which are unknown and unknowable, and perhaps all of which are non-rational.

Moreover, reasons are ideas, and ideas are immaterial. How does a materialist account for the efficacy of immaterial ideas acting on material atoms and molecules to produce an immaterial belief?

Metere closes with this:

[O]ne can be tempted to interject that if free will does not exist, why do we punish criminals? It is not their fault, after all. A counter-argument to that is that punishment is the natural response to crime, such that global equilibrium can be sustained, and therefore punishment is just as unavoidable as the commission of wrongdoing.

In other words, the criminal commits a crime because he was determined to do so by the initial conditions of the Big Bang, and society's authorities punish him because they were determined to do so also by the initial conditions of the Big Bang.

If this is true then there's no real culpability, no moral responsibility, no right or wrong, and, if there is no God, no ultimate accountability. On this view, whatever is, is right, or at least not really wrong. In fact, on this view right and wrong simply mean what people with power like and what people with power don't like. That road leads to slavery and Auschwitz.

I wonder, if someone were to rape his daughter or torture his son to death, if Metere would think that it wasn't really objectively wrong. Perhaps he would, I don't know.

Metere is a very bright guy, so I'm sure he has answers to these questions. I just wish he would have included them in his essay.

Three Questions for Moderate Muslims

A story in The Guardian from two years ago relates how the family of Adel Kermiche, the young man who slit the throat of a French priest who was saying mass, had struggled to keep him from jihad. Kermiche had twice been stopped trying to get to Syria to join ISIS and had been placed in prison, but he had persuaded a gullible French judge that he was a moderate Muslim and no threat.

The judge, against the recommendation of prosecutors who knew better, released him from jail. In consequence a priest was horribly murdered and others were seriously injured.

Moderate Muslims insist after incidents like this that we must not blame Islam, that Kermiche was psychologically troubled, and that, despite the testimony of his schoolmates and others who said he talked religion all the time, it wasn't his religion which drove him to commit his terrible crime.

David Wood is a man who seeks to engage Muslims to examine what the Qu'ran and Hadiths teach about violence. It may seem presumptuous for a non-Muslim to undertake such a mission, but apparently many Muslims, like many Christians, don't really know what their holy books actually say.

In any case, Wood poses three questions in this short video to those who consider themselves moderate Muslims. His questions are intended to highlight the overall question why it is deemed racist or bigoted to be concerned about the spread of a religion that seems to spawn such horrific acts of violence as has Islam.

So, is Wood missing something?

Liquid Modernity

Brian Murray at Law and Liberty reviews a posthumously published collection of essays by the Italian scholar and novelist Umberto Eco. The essays are given largely to Eco's ruminations on our postmodern condition which Eco, following the Polish social theorist, Zygmunt Bauman, calls liquid modernity.

Murray writes:

The term, which has a certain currency among European intellectuals, aims to convey the sense of fluidity and flux that has characterized life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, a period often described with the umbrella term “postmodern.”

Postmodernism, Eco notes, “signaled the crisis of ‘grand narratives,’ each of which had claimed that one model of order could be superimposed on the world; it devoted itself to a playful or ironic reconsideration of the past, and was woven in various ways with nihilistic tendencies.” But it “represented a sort of ferry from modernity to a present that still has no name.”

Bauman, though, thought the word “liquidity” captured the nature of our current state, one of lost moorings and lost meanings, where the only constant is change. In the liquid society people often find themselves afloat, aware of the collapse of once-powerful institutions and ideologies, and without the consolation of the beliefs or traditions that provided ballast for centuries.

What is notable, Eco observes, is an “unbridled individualism” prompting people in the liquid society to “move from one act of consumption to another in a sort of purposeless bulimia: the new cell phone is no better than the old one, but the old has to be discarded in order to indulge in this orgy of desire.”

Eco opines that Twitter is a symptom of this liquidity. Twitter is like a bar room where everyone is talking over everyone else and no one really pays much serious attention to anything anyone else is saying.

In the liquid society many millions bid for attention, apparently driven by the sheer pleasure and excitement of being noticed. In the past, says Eco, people assumed recognition or praise was somehow earned, attached to the display of some skill or virtue widely prized. Now, however, it generally doesn’t take much to merit a legion of “followers,” a profusion of “likes.”

It often just means laying claim to a parcel of media space.

In a 2002 piece Eco already spotted this trend, pointing to the endless procession of untalented people rushing to appear on television reality shows to air their scandals and sins; or who, when a camera appears in public, jostle to position themselves before its lens, eager to “wave ciao ciao” to those watching at home.

This exhibitionism, Eco suggests, stems from anomie and fear of anonymity. In a 2010 piece he cites his friend, the Spanish writer Javier Marías, who posited that such desperate public displays must owe, at least partly, to a widespread loss of religious faith.

“At one time,” Eco writes, people “were persuaded they did have at least one Spectator,” the “all-seeing eye, whose gaze” brought meaning to all human lives, however lowly or great. The disappointed mother, thus, could tell her ungrateful child: “God know what I’ve done for you.” The abandoned lover could proclaim: “God knows how much I love you.”

When this “all-seeing Witness” is gone, being seen on a video screen is for many “the only substitute for transcendence,” one’s best shot at pseudo-immortality.

With the ear of God no longer there, one “seeks the eye of society, the eye of the Other, before whom you must reveal yourself so as not to disappear into the black hole of anonymity, into the vortex of oblivion, even at the cost of choosing the role of village idiot who strips down to his underpants and dances on the pub table.”

Though he himself was not a believer he lamented the loss of religious belief in Europe. Murray writes:

Eco was a traditionalist, of a sort — a left-leaning, sometimes cranky agnostic who nonetheless understood Western culture and loved its marvelous and often religiously inspired accomplishments, its literature and art.

As an Italian he registers with displeasure a growing disrespect for Christian symbols like the Crucifix, which is now commonly used as a piece of jewelry, seen “nestling in the chest hairs of Italian Lotharios” or dangling from the necks of young women “who go about with their bare navels and skirts around their groins.”

He points to the religious illiteracy of many schoolchildren in his country who, faced with a painting by Fra Angelico or some other Renaissance master, can’t begin to understand why a young woman is depicted “in conversation with a winged youth,” or why an “unkempt old man” is pictured “leaping down a mountain carrying two heavy tablets of stone and emitting rays of light from two horns.”

“It’s virtually impossible,” Eco writes, “for people to understand, let us say, three quarters of Western art unless they are familiar with the Old and New Testaments and the lives of the saints.”

He mentions Benedetto Croce’s well-known remark that “we cannot not call ourselves Christians” - referencing all Europeans, practicing or not, whose civilization retains such deep Judeo-Christian roots.

At the very least, for children, a more rigorous schooling in the history of religion would seem to be in order, particularly since the media environment that envelopes them “is now transmitting less and less useful information, and more and more that is entirely useless.”

It is indeed grievous to see the cultural roots of our civilization withering away. How long one wonders, can the tree of culture continue to be fruitful and verdant after the roots have died?

Murray concludes his review with this:

It’s not hard to detect the melancholia in this final Eco collection—a kind of nostalgia for the past mixed with worry about what’s ahead for a world “with no points of reference, where everything dissolves into a sort of liquidity.” .... where, as Eco himself puts it, too many people “are inclined to talk without pausing to think.”

Amazing Data Storage Device

The journal Science reports some fascinating facts about information storage:

Humanity has a data storage problem: More data were created in the past 2 years than in all of preceding history. And that torrent of information may soon outstrip the ability of hard drives to capture it. Now, researchers report that they’ve come up with a new way to encode digital data in DNA to create the highest-density large-scale data storage scheme ever invented.

Capable of storing 215 petabytes (215 million gigabytes) in a single gram of DNA, the system could, in principle, store every bit of datum ever recorded by humans in a container about the size and weight of a couple of pickup trucks.

DNA has many advantages for storing digital data. It’s ultracompact, and it can last hundreds of thousands of years if kept in a cool, dry place. And as long as human societies are reading and writing DNA, they will be able to decode it.

“DNA won’t degrade over time like cassette tapes and CDs, and it won’t become obsolete,” says Yaniv Erlich, a computer scientist at Columbia University. And unlike other high-density approaches, such as manipulating individual atoms on a surface, new technologies can write and read large amounts of DNA at a time, allowing it to be scaled up.

It is astonishing that blind, purposeless processes like random chance and natural selection could have produced a data storage apparatus with this degree of capacity. If brilliant engineers bringing to bear all the genius of the human species can't develop storage media that can even come close to what nature has produced by lucky accident, shouldn't we be asking the question, was it really an accident?

Anyway, here's a video which gives a brief explanation of the sort of research being done on using DNA as a data storage medium:

Actions Speak Louder

Mikheil Saakashvili knows whereof he speaks when he talks about Russia. Saakashvili was the president of Georgia when the Russians invaded and annexed twenty percent of his country in 2008. He declares that far more important than Mr. Trump's words at the recent Helsinki Summit is what he has actually done, and far more significant than what Mr. Trump said is what his predecessor failed to do.

Here's part of Saakashvili's column:

I consider it unfair that Trump’s performance in Helsinki has garnered harsher criticism than other incidents in recent memory. In 2012, for example, a hot microphone at a global nuclear security summit picked up then-President Barack Obama assuring Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he would have “more flexibility” to negotiate with Putin after the presidential election.

During a debate with GOP opponent Mitt Romney the same year, Obama casually dismissed the Russian threat, quipping: “The 1980s called; they want their foreign policy back.” Although Trump could certainly have been more forceful by condemning Putin’s crimes, his statements at the Helsinki press conference were nowhere near as concerning as his predecessor’s remarks about Russia.

This brings me to my second point: Trump’s actions toward Russia speak louder than words—and so did his predecessor’s. Indeed, the Obama administration’s foreign policy undermined America’s credibility in my region, which Putin considers Russia’s “backyard.” There are many opinions about Trump’s rhetoric on Crimea, but it is a fact that the Russian land grab in Ukraine happened on Obama’s watch.

How, exactly, did this happen? During and after Ukraine’s revolution of 2014, which ousted a Kremlin-backed dictator, on a daily basis the United States cautioned Ukraine not to escalate in response to Russian aggression. Thus, Putin saw an opportunity to annex Crimea without risking a direct confrontation with the West—and he seized it. Putin is a bully, but not a fool.

Rather than changing his course after Moscow redrew the borders of Europe by force, Obama doubled down. Despite bipartisan consensus in favor of selling lethal defensive weapons to Ukraine, and vocal support from his own administration officials (including Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton), Obama repeatedly refused to authorize the sales.

Instead of anti-tank weapons, the Ukrainians defending their territory from Russian invasion received hot blankets and canned goods from the Obama administration. At the same time, Obama asserted that the Ukraine conflict had “no military solution.” With these words—and more importantly, these actions—he was perceived by some on the Russian side as accepting the Kremlin’s sphere of influence in Ukraine.

Despite my warnings, the Obama administration also essentially turned a blind eye to Russian meddling in Georgia’s 2012 elections. The result was devastating not only for Georgia, but for American interests: A Kremlin-backed oligarch (who has substantial interests in Russian energy firm Gazprom) ascended to power in a strategic U.S. ally (i.e. Georgia). Moreover, Russia’s meddling in Georgia’s elections functioned as a proving ground for information operations later used in the United States.

By contrast, Trump authorized the sale of lethal defensive weapons to both Ukraine and Georgia in 2017. The Trump administration went beyond the congressional mandate in sanctioning Russian authorities involved in the annexation of Crimea. Earlier this year, the United States imposed the harshest sanctions yet, targeting Russian oligarchs as well as government officials.

Trump’s rhetoric on energy at the Helsinki summit, which has been largely overlooked, is also a reason for optimism. The backbone of the Russian economy is energy, and Russia’s dependence on fossil fuels is Putin’s Achilles heel. At Monday’s press conference, Trump stated that U.S. liquefied natural gas exports would “compete” with Russian gas in Europe.

This reflects Trump’s comments at the NATO summit, where he criticized Germany for supporting the Nord Stream II pipeline. Trump was correct to call attention to this project, which will enrich the Kremlin at the expense of struggling pro-Western allies like Ukraine.

Saakashvili goes on to outline other interesting options the United States has at hand to punish further Russian misbehavior, but the important aspect of this essay to me was the utter silence on the part of some of the same Democrats when Putin steamrolled Obama contrasted with their cries of treason now when Trump doesn't take as firm a public stand against Putin as he could have.

Whether one thinks Obama's policy was right or Trump's policy is right is not the point. The point is the hypocrisy of the criticism of Trump's words by those who supinely accepted Obama's actions. If one believes President Obama's lassitude in the face of Russian aggression was the correct course of action, how can one now criticize President Trump for conciliatory words?

I wonder how much the progressives in the media and the Democratic Party really care about Russia anyway. Given their silence during the Obama years it's not unreasonable to assume that they probably don't care much.

Concern over Russia, it seems, is simply a convenient cudgel with which they can clobber Mr. Trump in order to distract the American people from the ongoing revelations of Democrat malfeasance during the 2016 campaign and the booming economy that has resulted from the Trump tax cuts and deregulations.

No one who was silent when Obama allowed Putin to seize chunks of Crimea and Ukraine has any credibility now when they condemn Trump for not being sufficiently bellicose.