Last Lecture

I recently read Randy Pausch's Last Lecture. It's a poignant book written by a Carnegie Mellon Computer Science professor who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given just a few months to live. In the book Pausch talks about his life and some very simple lessons he's learned that he passes along to his children and to the rest of us.

The chapters are brief but Pausch packs a lot into them. My three favorites, I think, are the chapters on Thank You Notes, Gratitude and Apologies. Anyone who has teenage children will find what Pausch has to offer here worth passing on to their kids.

For example on apologies he says this:

Apologies are not pass/fail. I always told my students: When giving an apology, any performance lower than an A really doesn't cut it. Half-hearted or insincere apologies are often worse than not apologizing at all because recipients find them insulting. If you've done something wrong in your dealings with another person, it's as if there's an infection in your relationship. A good apology is like an antibiotic; a bad apology is like rubbing salt in the wound.

He goes on to give examples of two classic bad apologies:

1. "I'm sorry you feel hurt by what I've done." (This is an attempt at an emotional salve but it's obvious you don't want to put any medicine in the wound.)

2. "I apologize for what I did, but you also need to apologize to me for what you've done." (That's not giving an apology. That's asking for one.)

And then he offers this:

Proper apologies have three parts:

1. What I did was wrong.

2. I feel badly that I hurt you.

3. How do I make this better.

Good stuff. If you've ever gotten a huffy "Well, I'm sorrrrry" from a teenager when you were hoping for a sincere apology then you'll immediately see the value of Pausch's little homily.

RLC

Without God (VII)

Another aspect of the human condition which is much easier to understand given theism rather than atheism is that we are burdened with a deep sense of moral obligation. As human beings we strive to ground morality in something more solid than our own subjective preferences, but if there is no God there is nothing else upon which to base it. In a purely material world morality is nothing more than whatever feels right to the individual.

This is not to say that the non-theist cannot live a life similar in quality to that of a theist. She can of course, but what she cannot say is that what she does is morally good or right. There simply is no moral good unless there is an objective, transcendent standard of goodness, and the existence of such a standard is precisely what non-theists deny. Consider these two quotes from some well-known atheists:

"In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. The way our biology forces its codes is by making us think that there is an objective higher code, to which we are all subject." E.O. Wilson

"Life has no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind indifference." Richard Dawkins

For the atheist moral judgments can be little more than expressions of personal preference, and no one's preference is any more authoritative than anyone else's. This leads ineluctably toward a might makes right egoism, either on the level of the individual or the level of the state. Whatever those who control power do is not morally right or wrong - even if they commit torture or genocide - it just is.

Moreover, unless there is a transcendent moral authority there is nothing whatsoever which obligates us to act in one way rather than another. What could possibly obligate me, in a moral sense, to act in the interest of the collective rather than in what I perceive to be my own interest? Given naturalism, there is nothing which obligates us to care for the poor, nothing which makes kindness better than cruelty, nothing, indeed, to tell us why the holocaust was wrong.

Given atheism, morality is either subjective, and thus arbitrary and personal, or it doesn't exist at all, and our sense, our conviction that it does is simply self-deception. If God exists, however, then, and only then, does our intuition that objective moral value and obligation also exist make sense.

Related to the matter of moral obligation is the question of guilt. We experience feelings of guilt, and have a sense that guilt is not just an illusion, but without an objective standard of morality before which we stand convicted there can be no real guilt. Human beings are no more guilty in a moral sense than is a cat which has caught and tortured a bird. The feeling of guilt is merely an evolutionary epiphenomenon which arose to suit us for life in the stone age and which, like our tonsils, we no longer need. Indeed, it's a vestige of our past that we should suppress since it bears no relation to any actual state of affairs.

On the other hand, if there is an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good Creator of the universe, then our sense that we are actually guilty has an explanation. We feel guilt because we have transgressed the moral law instituted by the Creator before whom we stand and to whom we must give an account.

It is this Creator who imposes upon us moral obligation. Take away God and there's no moral law, there's no moral obligation, there's no transgression, and there's no moral guilt. As Dostoyevsky put it, if God is dead then everything is permitted.

RLC

Decapitating Al Qaeda

Bill Roggio at The Long War Journal provides some background on the recent American Special Forces raid into Syria that eliminated much of al Qaeda's leadership in the region. His report opens with this:

Al Qaeda leader Abu Ghadiya was killed in yesterday's strike inside Syria, a senior US military intelligence official told The Long War Journal. But US special operations forces also inflicted a major blow to al Qaeda's foreign fighter network based in Syria. The entire senior leadership of Ghadiya's network was also killed in the raid, the official stated.

Ghadiya was the leader of al Qaeda extensive network that funnels foreign fighters, weapons, and cash from Syria into Iraq along the entire length of the Syrian border. Ghadiya was first identified as the target of the raid inside Syria late last night here at The Long War Journal. The Associated Press reported Ghadiya was killed in the raid earlier today.

Several US helicopters entered the town of town of Sukkariya near Abu Kamal in eastern Syria, just five miles from the Iraqi border. US commandos from the hunter-killer teams of Task Force 88 assaulted the buildings sheltering Ghadiya and his staff.

The Syrian government has protested the attack, describing it as an act of "criminal and terrorist aggression" carried out by the US. The Syrian government claimed eight civilians, including women and children, were killed in the strike. But a journalist from The Associated Press who attended the funeral said that only the bodies of seven men were displayed.

The US official said there were more killed in the raid than is being reported. "There are more than public numbers [in the Syrian press] are saying, those reported killed were the Syrian locals that worked with al Qaeda," the official told The Long War Journal. "There were non-Syrian al Qaeda operatives killed as well."

Those killed include Ghadiya's brother and two cousins. "They also were part of the senior leadership," the official stated. "They're dead. We've decapitated the network." Others killed during the raid were not identified.

The strike is thought to have a major impact on al Qaeda's operations inside Syria. Al Qaeda's ability to control the vast group of local "Syrian coordinators" who directly help al Qaeda recruits and operatives enter Iraq has been "crippled."

There's more at the link.

RLC

Either For Us Or Against Us

Megyn Kelley is quickly turning into a cult hero of the right. She's nothing if not feisty. I like how the Obama spokesman apparently thinks that the best way to deal with concerns about Obama's desire to take from those who work and produce and give to those who don't is to blast FOX News. FOX must be out to do harm to the Democratic candidate, he apparently thinks, because they ask uncomfortable questions. For Team Obama you're either for them or against them. Nice.

This could be called the Joe-the-Plumber tactic: If people ask questions that tend to put the beloved candidate in a bad light, a recommended response is to obfuscate the matter by criticizing and/or talking over the person asking the questions.

RLC

A Plot to Kill Obama

Two moral and intellectual mutants have been arrested in what has been labeled by the press a plot to assassinate Barack Obama. Actually, reading the story, the threat to Obama does not seem to have been very serious. A more sickening element of their intent was to attack an all-black school and kill children. Their designs on Obama sound like an afterthought that they didn't have planned out and didn't expect to be able to pull off in any event.

Nevertheless, the attack on the school students would have been relatively easy and is as frightening as it is loathsome. These two deserve to be put away for many, many years.

Having said that there's something else about this story that bears mentioning because it's very likely to be misrepresented by the media. The two men involved, Daniel Cowart, 20, of Bells, Tenn., and Paul Schlesselman 18, of Helena-West Helena, Ark., are identified by the police as neo-nazis. This fact will probably trigger howls of righteous indignation in certain precincts about the sickness and violence that reside on the political right in this country, but such accusations, if they materialize, would be a mistake.

Nazi fascism is widely, and incorrectly, believed to be a right-wing phenomenon resting at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum from communism. Notwithstanding the pervasiveness of this belief it is false. As Jonah Goldberg instructs us in his excellent study of fascism titled Liberal Fascism, communism and fascism, so far from being polar opposites, are in fact fraternal twins. They're both forms of socialism. They're both ideologies of the left.

The main difference between them is that communism tends to be an international version of socialism whereas fascism is more nationalistic and militaristic. Fascists are also usually content to allow business to remain in private hands provided that owners and managers use their enterprises to promote the ends of the state.

Perhaps the best way to picture ideological relationships is to visualize a line or a spectrum. At the far right of the spectrum is libertarianism, the view that individuals should be as free of government interference as possible. Toward the center lies conservatism which shares the libertarian desire for individual freedom but which assigns a more significant role for government than libertarians do. As we cross the center of the spectrum and move leftward we find socialism or statism, the view that government should own or control all important elements of the economy and society. Statists believe that the rights of the individual should be subordinated to the welfare of the collective. The individual lives to serve the state.

Socialism comes in two forms, democratic and totalitarian. Many moderate liberals are democratic socialists, but it's among the totalitarian socialists that we find communists and fascists, and it's here that many of those in the modern left find their ideological home. They don't usually call themselves communists or fascists, of course, preferring instead to identify themselves as progressives or leftists, but their sympathies with the goals and methods of the totalitarians make the label they apply to themselves moot.

Some of those sympathies include a predilection for totalitarian government, economic socialism and egalitarianism, anti-Christian secularism, tribalism or identity politics, and subordination of the family and individual to the state. More can be found on this topic on a postfrom last spring which discussed Goldberg's book. RLC

The Evolution of Richard Dawkins

Melanie Phillips attends an Oxford debate between the mathematician John Lennox and atheistic biologist Richard Dawkins and discerns some subtle shifts in Dawkins' thinking.

Dawkins is the author of The God Delusion, the popularity of which seems to be inversely proportional to the cogency of its arguments (See the review in the Hall of Fame on the left margin of this page). In Delusion and elsewhere Dawkins insists that there is no god of any kind and flogs philosopher Antony Flew for abandoning a life-long atheism in favor of a kind of almost Christian deism (I know, that's an oxymoron. Yet in his debate with Lennox he remarks that a strong case can be made for precisely the position Flew has adopted. Are Dawkins' views evolving?

The topic of the debate was "Has Science Buried God?" and Dawkins, realizing perhaps, the hopelessness of being able to successfully defend that thesis shifts the debate instead to the foolishness of believing that Jesus was divine. What this has to do with the debate topic is unclear, but when you're trying to defend the indefensible you grasp at whatever ploy or diversion that comes to hand, I suppose.

Anyway, Phillips' column offers an interesting take on Dawkins' position in the debate.

RLC

What the Dems Hope to Do

A month or so ago I wrote that in the upcoming election voters have to keep in mind one very important fact. We're voting not just for the next president. We're voting for that president's party. A vote for Obama is a vote for Harry Reid, Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, Chuck Schumer, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, John Murtha and a host of other very liberal and far-left Democrats. It's a vote to assist the Democrats in achieving their goals of a socialized, secularized United States.

Specifically, the Democrats and their presidential candidate aspire to do the following (based on what the Democrats have tried to do in the past and what Senator Obama has voted for in the past and said he would do in the future):

• Remove all restrictions on abortion including partial birth abortion
• Alter the meaning of marriage so that it's no longer the union of one man and one woman
• Appoint judges and Supreme Court Justices whose decisions will be based on liberal political fashion rather than on the text of the constitution
• Effect a massive redistribution of wealth from the middle and upper classes to the underclass
• Treat terrorism as a police matter rather than as a global war on western civilization
• Pile onto American business onerous regulations and taxes that will make it impossible to compete in the global market and which will result in higher unemployment and higher costs
• Continue the accelerating secularization of our society
• Open our borders to anyone who wants to take up residence in our country and give illegal aliens the right to a driver's license, health care, and welfare
• Nationalize health care
• Deny parents the choice of where they send their children to school
• Push fuel costs back up so as to force us to conserve and develop alternative energy sources
• Quell freedom of speech, particularly when it is conservative or religious, through vehicles like the Fairness Doctrine
• Downgrade our military preparedness
• Take away the right to own or buy most types of guns or to carry them on one's person
• Strip union workers of the right to a secret ballot in union elections

One or two of these may come to pass under a McCain presidency, of course, but it's almost certain that all, or most of them, will come to pass if the Democrats control both the White House and the Congress. If these measures sound good to you then you should pull the lever for Democrats on November 4th. If , however, you don't think this is what America needs then you should resist the seductions of Hope and Change and vote for McCain. There are other alternatives, of course, for the person who doesn't want to see the above items come to pass but who cannot bring him or herself to vote for McCain, but a vote for any one of those alternatives amounts to a vote for Obama.

RLC

Dancing with the Devil

This is rich. A Marxist terrorist anarchist wearing a Maoist red star on his shirt is pestered by a reporter and invokes property rights (!) to get the reporter to leave him alone. He then calls the police (!), the same public servants he conspired with other Weathermen to murder in the 1970s, to escort him to his car. When it comes to hypocrisy the secular lefties are far and away the champs:

Ayers was annoyed that a reporter would use such tactics to hound him. Maybe it would have been more appropriate if the reporter just set his house on fire like the Weathermen did to a judge and his family.

A lot of people don't know who the Weathermen were and what they did. Here's a video clip that might help with the history (Caution: brief obscenity):

These are the people with whom Barack and Michelle Obama associated until he ran for the U.S. Senate. Imagine if John McCain had associated with people who bombed abortion clinics and the homes of abortionists. Surely, the media would consider that a disqualifier for high public office, and it would be.

RLC

A Child's Horror

Steve Beard at NRO Online reviews Justin Dillon's documentary on child slavery and human trafficking titled Call+Response, and the statistics that emerge in the review and the film give us renewed insight into the depth of human degradation and depravity:

There are 27 million people held in slavery around the world.

Approximately 800,000 people are trafficked across national borders each year. That does not include the millions trafficked within their own countries. "Approximately 80 percent of transnational victims are women and girls and up to 50 percent are minors," states the report. "Human traffickers prey on the vulnerable. Their targets are often children and young women, and their ploys are creative and ruthless, designed to trick, coerce, and win the confidence of potential victims. Very often these ruses involve promises of a better life through employment, educational opportunities, or marriage."

"We're not talking about good or bad business practices or working conditions," former ambassador John Miller testifies in the film. "We're talking about slavery. We're talking about the loss of freedom and the threats of force or the actual use of violence to deprive people of freedom."

As a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador against Trafficking and Slavery, British actress Julia Ormond visits places around the globe suspected of benefiting from slave labor and interviewing those who've been set free. "This is about people being held often at gunpoint, being chained, being electrocuted, being drugged, being thrown out of windows, having their families threatened that they'll kill them," she says in the film.

In researching his book Not For Sale, professor David Batstone - featured in Call + Response - traveled to Cambodia, Thailand, Peru, India, Uganda, South Africa, and Eastern Europe to investigate modern-day slavery. His findings are breathtaking. "Girls and boys, women and men of all ages are forced to toil in the rug looms of Nepal, sell their bodies in the brothels of Rome, break rocks in the quarries of Pakistan, and fight wars in the jungles of Africa," he writes. "Go behind the fa�ade in any major town or city in the world today and you are likely to find a thriving commerce in human beings."

Indeed, the most difficult imagery in the film is footage of children being exploited in brothels and brick kilns, and on battlefields. The blank stares and soulless facial responses betray an inability to smile - even on the part of some of the rescued children.

Reverend Jeremiah Wright proclaims America to be a fundamentally flawed nation because civil and human rights have, in his view, not advanced to where they should be. Michelle Obama declares that America is a "mean" nation. These people must have very little idea of what the rest of the world outside their neighborhoods is like or they'd never say such foolish things. The United States, like most of the first world, at least for now, is an island of high civilization, a relative utopia, surrounded by a sea of third world degeneracy and barbarism.

I don't know whether Call+Response is available in your area, but while you're waiting for it a couple of other films that'll give you a powerful sense of what it's like to be a child in some parts of the globe are Blood Diamond and Innocent Voices. If you choose to watch Blood Diamond note the parallels between Solomon Vandy and his son to Jesus' parable describing his determination to save the Lost Sheep. The parallels are probably unintentional, but they're there nonetheless.

RLC

Without God (VI)

The previous posts in the series titled Without God have looked at how well the atheistic and theistic worldviews fit with certain physical and psychological facts about the world and about human beings. Most of the remaining posts in the series will look at how well these two competing worldviews harmonize with some of what we might call "existential facts" of human life.

It is typical of the human beings, for example, to desire answers to life's most profound questions. As intelligent, thoughtful men and women we want answers to the deepest, most perplexing questions raised by our existence. In the world as the atheist sees it, however, there are no answers, there's no assurance about anything that matters, except that we'll eventually die. We shout the "why" questions of human existence at the vast void of the cosmos - Why am I here? Why do we suffer? Why do we want from life what we cannot have? - but in a Godless universe there's no reply, there's only silence. The cosmos is indifferent to our yearning for answers. We are all alone, forlorn, as Sartre put it, and our quest for answers is as absurd as the questions themselves.

The atheist must advise us to simply acquiesce to the awful disconnect between our deep need for answers and the impossibility of ever satisfying that need. In the words of biologist Jaques Monod, "Man knows that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity out of which he emerged only by chance."

If, on the other hand, God exists then we're not alone in the cosmos, and it's possible that each of those questions indeed has an answer. Moreover, if there are answers then the fact that we have those questions and desire their answers makes sense. We may not know what the answers are, but we can cling to a reasonable hope that our questions aren't futile or meaningless and that there's a reason why they gnaw at us. The questions are signs or indicators that there's something rational and meaningful about the universe. It's not just a terrifying and impersonal void, but is rather a beautiful, ornate cathedral engineered and constructed by God to house a world on which the creatures he loves can exist.

The theist, and only the theist, is in a position to counsel hope and to rejoice that the mysteries of existence are not forever inscrutable, but are there to serve as clues to point us toward the ultimate answer, God Himself.

RLC

Voting Partnership

Have you heard people say during this election cycle that they're not enthusiastic about either presidential candidate and are really not interested in just voting for the "lesser of two evils"? These folks often say that they'd much prefer to vote their conscience by pulling the lever for a third party nominee but are reluctant to do so because it would help the "greater of the two evils" get elected.

In other words, think of someone who will vote for John McCain only because he fears the thought of a far-leftist like Barack Obama in the White House, but who really would rather vote for, say, the Libertarian Bob Barr. Or think of someone who was wild about Hillary Clinton but who will reluctantly vote for Obama whom she believes to be completely unqualified because she doesn't want a pro-lifer like McCain picking Supreme Court Justices.

Well, my friend Byron passes along a link to a group that offers a simple solution (simple in theory, at least) to this problem. Check it out. Their idea would allow people to vote for a third party candidate (or a write in) without feeling like they're implictly aiding one major candidate or the other by withholding a vote from their rival.

RLC

Hopefulness

Yesterday I posted a piece on Rush Limbaugh in which I lamented the ethos of consumption which is such a prominent part of his daily program. Then, at the behest of my friend Byron, I read an essay by Andy Crouch titled "Why I Am Hopeful" which made a similar point but applied the lesson more generally.

For example, Crouch writes this:

I am not hopeful because I have confidence in whoever will be elected president in 15 days. I have grave concerns, as a Christian and as a citizen, about both candidates and will in all likelihood vote for neither. I am not hopeful because I think we are well prepared for what is ahead of us. We are not. We are a terrifyingly unserious people, our heads buzzing with trivia and noise. This is more true, if anything, of American Christians than the rest of our country. The stark contrast between what I experience among Christians anywhere else in the world-and not just the "Third World," because Canada and Germany and Britain and Singapore come to mind as quickly as Uganda and India-and American Christians is astonishing. We are preoccupied with fads intellectual, theological, technological, and sartorial. Vanishingly few of us have any serious discipline of silence, solitude, study, and fasting. We have, in the short run, very little to offer our culture, because we live in the short run.

I am not hopeful because I think life is going to get easier in America. I am hopeful because I think it is going to get harder, and in a very good way. And I am hopeful because I think this means my children and grandchildren will live in a deeply and truly better world than I would have thought possible a few years ago.

I want to differentiate this hope from a kind of declinism among some of my "progressive" Christian friends, who frankly seem to salivate over the prospect that our capitalist culture may be teetering on the brink of collapse. I don't share their sense of satisfaction, and I don't share their analysis. At the analytical level, I believe liberal democracy and free markets are resilient and beneficial systems of human governance (granted that they are also, as Churchill said, the least bad of the alternatives). They have powerful self-correcting capacities. There is a reason that the American stock market has fallen the least of all the major world exchanges in the past few weeks. We have an impressively transparent economic system that, while certainly not preventing corruption and greed, does reveal it and punish it sooner than any comparable system, and frequently, though not always, rewards effort and innovation more effectively. Our political system is less robust, to be kind, but outside the depressing morass of electoral politics there are public servants of incredible intelligence and character-among whom I would certainly include Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson, and Sheila Bair, along with many of the prospective leaders in an Obama administration. Precisely at times of crisis, as we've seen, the idiocy of politics can still be overcome by credible leadership from civil servants like these. I am deeply proud to live in a country where someone as fantastically wealthy as Paulson spends his days, nights, and weekends doing the largely thankless task of public service. Our markets and our system of government, for all their flaws, are an amazing renewable resource handed on to us by our forebears.

And this is why I can't share the sense of satisfaction I sense in some of my "prophetic" friends. I believe the first step in culture making is not creating (let alone condemning, critiquing, or consuming) but cultivating: keeping what is already good in culture, good. American Christians, on the right and the left, have been painfully bad at cultivating. We want to jump to "transformation" and "impact" (words generally used on the right) or to "resistance" and "revolution" (favored words of the left). We often seem incapable of seeing ourselves first as gardeners: people whose first cultural calling is to keep good what is, by the common grace of God, already good. A gardener does not pull out weeds because she hates weeds; she pulls out weeds because she loves the garden, and because (hopefully) there are more vegetables or flowers in it than weeds. This kind of love of the garden-loving our broken, beautiful cultures for what they are at their best-is the precondition, I am coming to believe, for any serious cultural creativity or influence. When weeds infest the garden, the gardener does not take the opportunity to decry the corruption of the garden as a whole. She gets patiently, discerningly, to work keeping the garden good.

Good stuff. So, why is he hopeful? You'll have to go to the link and read the rest of the essay to learn that.

RLC

How to Strangle an Economy

Senator Obama has frequently assured us that 95% of the people in this country would receive no tax increase under his tax policy. Only the top 5%, those persons, families and businesses making over $250,000 would see their taxes raised. This claim is a little misleading for a couple of reasons:

1. By raising taxes on business he will give businesses a big incentive to either reduce benefits, reduce wages, lay off employees, move offshore, and/or pass the added cost onto the consumer. In any case, the average person is going to wind up paying the tax increase in one way or another whoever Obama imposes it upon.

2. The Democrats plan to let the Bush tax cuts expire in 2010 which means that everyone's taxes will go up automatically. Obama has said that he would keep the lower rates for the middle class in place, but it remains to be seen whether a Democrat congress would agree to this. This also means that the upper income earners and businesses will get hit by another tax increase right after the first one. Obama also wants to raise the capital gains tax. The cumulative effect of these increases will be crushing and although they will not immediately impact those making less than $250,000 the middle class will soon enough be faced with all the consequences noted in #1.

3. In addition, the Democrats are planning to do away with 401k plans and place them in a government run account at 3% interest funded by the sale of government bonds. This would increase the tax liability on everyone's income (if they had a 401k), including employers who had previously contributed to the plan and received a tax break for so doing, and reduce the amount the contributions would have earned over the long term if these accounts had stayed in the market. It will also depress the market even further when the funds are removed.

4. 40% of American filers currently pay no taxes but under Obama's plan they will get a "refund" anyway. These people will essentially get a check from the government paid for by those who do pay taxes. It's essentially welfare. It's one way to "spread the wealth around," I guess.

There's more on what's in store for us after Inauguration Day here, here and here.

I've heard a number of commentators attribute the current bear market, which seems to puzzle many experts, to investors' fears about what Obama and his fellow Democrats will do to the economy once they ascend to power. Maybe they're on to something.

RLC

Defending the Indefensible

Thirty two hundred university and college professors recently signed a petition defending William Ayers against those who call him an "unrepentant domestic terrorist" (which he is). Megyn Kelly gets one of them to submit to an interview on FOX News, and she insures he'll never make that mistake again. Be sure to watch the whole thing:

Professor Singer lauds Ayers for being an educational reformer. What he doesn't tell us is the sort of "reform" Ayers, and Senator Obama, have tried to bring about in Chicago schools. Ayers is a Marxist socialist who wants to use public education to create a generation of revolutionaries who will throw off democratic capitalism and usher in a new, North American version of Cuba.

Stanley Kurtz, whose article at NRO is linked to in the previous paragraph, ends his piece with this:

Ayers does not try to hide who he is or where he is coming from. He is a proud leftist revolutionary. His driving idea, in this phase of his career, is that the classroom is the frontline of the revolution. And when he was given the opportunity of a lifetime, a $150 million fund to be doled out as seed money for the kind of programs he thought would advance the cause, the guy brought in to run it was Barack Obama - with whom he worked closely on "change" in the schools for five years.

That's reassuring. In an ideal world there would be at least as many journalists seeking an interview with Bill Ayers as there were seeking to interrogate Joe the Plumber. In such a world these intrepid advocates of the public's right to know would ask Mr. Ayers this question: "Sir, do you think you know Barack Obama fairly well?" If Ayers' answer were yes, then the follow-up question should be: "Does he share the same views about the role of education that you do?" Unfortunately, real journalism appears to be dead, or at least comatose, in this country, so I have no illusions that this fantasy would ever be realized.

On the other hand, maybe FOX will send Megyn Kelly out to Chicago to ask Ayers the questions. Now that would be an interview worth watching.

HT: Hot Air

RLC

Rush and the Patio Man

Mind you, I listen in the car to Rush Limbaugh whenever I can. I enjoy him and am informed by him about the events of the day. I think his views on the issues are mostly correct, and he's not at all the man his critics often portray him to be. He's neither a hater nor a bigot. Like all of us, however, he does have his faults. His egotism is, unfortunately, only partly a pose, though he at least has the virtue of acknowledging it, unlike Sean Hannity who constantly reminds us, implausibly, that he's humbled by his success. Limbaugh's biggest flaw, however, is something else, something much more insidious than his mildly amusing bombast.

Joseph Knippenberg puts his finger on it in a post at No Left Turns in which he discusses a column by David Brooks. Brooks describes for us a "typical" affluent middle-aged American male whom he calls "Patio Man". Patio Man is concerned much more about stability, order, and his 401k than he is about the issues that stoke the fire in the hearts of the political bases of both left and right.

Knippenberg says this:

Patio Man doesn't appear to care much about social issues, according to Brooks. Judging from my neighbors, he's probably right. But that's because he and they wrongly think that you can have economic and social stability without a strong moral foundation. I don't blame proponents of abortion rights and same-sex marriage for the fix we're in. Their attitudes are symptomatic, not foundational. The foundational attitude is the self-indulgence in which we all share, a self-indulgence that is articulated every day on the radio by Rush Limbaugh and that is practiced by Patio Men, Women, and Children, but not so much by their parents and grandparents.

This is exactly right, and it goes to the core of my biggest problem with Rush, who is otherwise a national treasure. Day after day, show after show, Limbaugh champions a lifestyle of consumption and indulgence. Some of this is just intended to tweak the nose of the left, to be sure, but there can be no denying that he really does advocate conspicuous consumption.

I know his defenders will point to the fact that the man gives fortunes to charity and should be permitted his foibles, and I agree that he certainly seems to be generous beyond that to which most people aspire. Even so, his munificence occurs relatively quietly and without much fanfare whereas his self-indulgence is trumpeted publicly and blatantly. The lesson that a lot of people might be taking from his show, then, is not that charitableness is a virtue but that consuming is. I think this is a toxic message to spread abroad and has a pernicious influence on people, especially young adults, the patio men who might better be encouraged to constrain their appetites and to live comfortably but modestly. Indeed, if more of us valued a greater simplicity we probably wouldn't be seeing so much economic volatility and so many home foreclosures.

The idea of living large and boasting of one's excesses is one of the fundamentals, evidently, in Rush's philosophy of life, but it's one I'd be happy to see him push aside. He does a lot of good, in my opinion, but he's in a position to do a great deal more. I think it sad that he doesn't see it that way.

RLC

Without God (V)

As we've compared the compatibility of the theistic and atheistic worldviews with our existential experience I've argued that there's a significant number of facts about the world and about human life that make more sense given the truth of theism than given the truth of atheism.

To those facts we've already considered in our previous posts we can add our sense that we are free to make genuine choices and that the future is open. In the absence of God our intuition that we are free to choose and are responsible for those choices is problematic. In a Godless world we are just a collection of physical particles, and ultimately physical particles have no freedom, they simply move according to unyielding physical laws. In a Godless world our choices are nothing more than the product of chemical reactions occuring in the brain, and the reactions themselves obey the mechanistic laws of chemistry. There's no freedom in chemistry.

Thus for the atheistic materialist there can be no free will. There is only the inexorable laws of nature. At any given moment there is actually only one possible future, if there is no God, and our belief that we can freely create the future is pure sophistry and illusion. The future has been fixed since the Big Bang.

Consider the words of atheist Will Provine, an evolutionary biologist as he summarizes the views to which his Darwinism has led him: "There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death ... There is no foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will."

If there's no free will in the atheist's world then an atheist who faults me for writing this post would be acting inconsistently with his own assumptions. If there is no God I am driven to write by causes beyond my control and for which I am not responsible. Indeed, if there is no God, it's hard to see how anyone could be ultimately responsible for anything they do.

An atheist should be a determinist, but this puts him in a bind. If determinism is true then those who believe it do so for reasons unrelated to its truth, and those who disbelieve it should not be criticized for their disbelief since their skepticism is mostly a function of their genes and environment, over which they have no control. Should a determinist argue that he believes determinism because it's true he's pretty much denying the belief he claims to hold. If someone believes in determinism it's because he was determined by his life's experiences and/or his genetic make-up to believe in it. The truth of determinism is irrelevant or, at best, incidental to whether we believe it or not.

RLC

Can't Buy Me Love

Nicholas Kristoff at the New York Times sees a lot of positives arising out of the current financial distress. For example:

Income doesn't have much to do with happiness. Americans haven't become any happier as they have prospered in the last half-century. And winning the lottery doesn't make people happier in the long term.

This is called the Easterlin Paradox: Once they have met their basic needs, people don't become happier as they become richer. In recent years, new research has undermined the Easterlin Paradox, yet it's still true that happiness has less to do with money than with friendships and finding meaning in a cause larger than oneself.

"There's pretty good evidence that money doesn't matter much for how you feel moment to moment," said Alan Krueger, a Princeton University economist who is conducting extensive research on happiness. "What seems to matter much more is having good friends and family, and time to spend on social activities."

There's lots else for which to be grateful that we're headed into a recession (I'm kidding). Read Kristoff's column to find out what some of the other "benefits" are.

RLC

Childhood Dualism

Paul Bloom is a developmental psychologist and an atheistic materialist. In a fine essay at Edge he tackles the question of whether we have a soul, and although he believes we don't he says some fascinating things about that topic as well as the development of such beliefs in children.

He writes, for instance, that:

I think children are dualists from the start. Even babies start off with this sort of body-soul split. To put it somewhat differently, they start off with two distinct modes of construal, or systems of core-knowledge, one corresponding to bodies, the other to souls. Because these systems are distinct, common-sense dualism emerges as a natural by-product.

For much of our recent intellectual history, in philosophy and psychology, this claim about babies would be thought to be utterly ludicrous. Total madness. It was said that babies and young children know nothing about bodies, and know nothing about souls. They are blank slates. Rousseau called the baby a perfect idiot. And Jean Piaget, the Swiss psychologist who got developmental psychology going in the last century, was adamant that babies have no notion of what an object is, and no notion of what a person is.

But over the last two decades there is decisive evidence showing that this minimalist perspective is wrong. In fact, babies, before they hit their first birthday, have a rich and intricate understanding of bodies and of souls.

First, there is a lot of research from psychologists like Elizabeth Spelke, Renee Baillargeon and Karen Wynn showing that young babies have a powerful understanding of physical objects. They understand that physical objects obey gravity. If you put an object on a table and remove the table, and an object just stays there - because there's a hidden wire - babies are surprised, they expect the object to fall. They also expect objects to be solid, and that objects should move on continuous paths over space, And, contrary to Piaget, they don't think that once you look away objects go out of existence. They understand that objects persist over time even when they aren't being observed. Show a baby an object, and then put it behind a screen. Wait a little while and then remove the screen. If the object is gone, babies will be surprised.

Karen Wynn showed that babies can even do addition and subtraction, of a rudimentary sort. You put an object down, a screen rises to hide it, and then you put another object behind the screen. Then the screen drops, and there is one object, two objects, or three objects. If there's one object there, babies are surprised. If there are three objects, babies are surprised. They know one plus one equals two.

I wonder what the implications of all this are for the belief that we are hard-wired with certain kinds of knowledge, knowledge that we have a priori. Discoveries like those Bloom adumbrates would seem to be fatal all by themselves to an empiricist epistemology.

Second, even young babies are social creatures. They prefer to look at faces over just about anything else. They quickly come to recognize different emotions-anger, fear, happiness. They imitate people. As soon as they begin to move their bodies in different ways, they can do clever things to manipulate emotions and behaviors of other people.

Then there's a lot of recent work from people like David Premack and Gyorgy Gergely and also from my own lab, that before children learn how to talk, they can make sense of social interaction. A typical experiment involves showing them movies where a character moves in a way that makes sense from an adult perspective-pursuing a goal, moving away from something-or in a way that doesn't make sense from an adult perspective. What we find is that even children before their first birthday get it. They expect people to act in certain ways. They expect people to pursue goals.

Bloom goes on to explain why he thinks we are predisposed to believe in substance dualism (the belief that the world is comprised of at least two disparate essences, matter and mind, or soul)and that this belief appears early on in childhood.

It's a fascinating essay, but it suffers from one drawback. it seems to me that the problem that must be settled before we can even begin to talk about whether we have a soul is the problem of what exactly the soul is. Until we know what it is that we either have or don't have we can't say much about whether we have it or not.

Unfortunately, Bloom doesn't see fit to define what he means by the soul except to say that it's an immaterial substance. he does seem to imply that the soul is, in his view, identical to what most people call a mind. In any event, Bloom, being a materialist doesn't believe there is anything immaterial about us, yet he seems enchanted by the universal belief, present from birth, evidently, that there is more to us than just the matter that makes up our bodies.

For my admittedly speculative view of what the soul might be see this post.

RLC

Without God (IV)

Related to the matter of qualia, which we discussed in the previous post in this series, is the question of beauty, or more precisely, why it is that gazing at or listening to something beautiful should fill us with delight, or even rapture. It's possible, I suppose, to formulate some convoluted ad hoc hypothesis in terms of purposeless physical forces acting over billions of years on dozens of fortuitous mutations to produce response mechanisms to certain stimuli in our neuronal architecture. But why? Why should a sunset fill us with wonder and a mountain range fill us with awe? Why and how would blind, unintentional processes produce such responses? What urgency would such seemingly gratuitous responses have in the struggle for survival that the whole panoply of mutations and selective pressures would be brought to bear to cultivate them?

A simpler explanation for such phenomena, perhaps, is that our encounters with beauty, like our encounters with good, are intimations of God. Beauty is one means by which God reveals Himself to us in the world. Our encounters with beauty are glimpses He gives us of Himself, and the delight we feel in them is a prelude to heaven.

Yet another aspect of the world that is better explained in terms of a theistic rather than an atheistic or naturalistic worldview is our sense that reason is a trustworthy guide to truth. It seems that the atheist has no warrant for this belief. If matter, energy, and physical forces like gravity are all there is then everything is ultimately reducible to material, non-rational particles. If so, all of our beliefs are just brain states that can be completely explicated in terms of non-rational chemical reactions, but any belief that is fully explicable in terms of non-rational causes cannot itself be rational.

Therefore, if materialism is true, none of our beliefs are rational, reason itself is a non-rational illusion, and both truth and the reliability of scientific investigation are chimerical. The atheistic materialist is in the intellectually unenviable position of having no rational basis for believing that materialism, or anything else, is true.

As Stephen Pinker of MIT has said, "Our brains were shaped [by evolution] for fitness, not for truth."

In other words, if there is no God then our reason is a product of evolution, and evolution selects traits for their survival value, not their ability to lead to truth.

Only if our reason is an endowment from a good and omniscient Creator do we have actual warrant for placing confidence in it. We may, if we don't believe that there is a Creator, decide to trust reason simply as an act of faith, but it's very difficult to justify the decision to do so since any justification must itself rely upon rational argument. And, of course, employing reason to argue on behalf of its own trustworthiness is itself irrational.

Thus the theistic hypothesis not only makes better sense of beauty than does atheism, but it's the only hypothesis upon which we can logically suppose that our cognitive faculties are reliable guides to truth.

RLC

Why Not Obama?

Hot Air has an excellent "video essay" by two young journalists (plus Ed Morrissey) who work for major news organs and who explore in their piece the qualifications Barack Obama brings to his candidacy for the presidency. The column is well-documented and brings together a number of themes that have caused people to have serious reservations about the man who may well be our next Commander-in-Chief. Their summary provides a good introduction to their case, and I urge everyone who plans to vote on November 4th to read their entire argument at the link.

Here's the summary:

All three of us have written many, many times on all of these issues. Taken individually, most of them would create doubt about the readiness and honesty of any political candidate. Put together as a narrative, we believe this paints the picture of a man who has few real credentials for the office he seeks beyond the Constitutional minimum, and a politician who has succeeded in obfuscating his hard-Left ideology.

Perhaps if Barack Obama had taken more time to build his resum� - especially with executive experience - he might have made a more compelling candidate, and might have demonstrated at least a little of the moderation he has claimed. Instead, Democrats want America to support at once the most radical and least qualified candidate for President in at least a century. They have tried to conceal this with the complicity of a pom-pom-waving national media that has shown much more interest in the political background of a plumber from Ohio than in a major-party candidate for President.

America deserves better than that. Voters deserve the truth from the press, not vague cheers of "hope" and "change" while willfully ignoring or air-brushing Obama's record. We hope to set that record straight with our essay.

RLC