An Attitude of Gratitude

Thanksgiving is a beautiful celebration because it reinforces gratitude - gratitude to family, friends, neighbors, and God.

It's been said that gratitude is the most fragrant of the virtues and ingratitude one of the ugliest of character defects.

Those who are grateful for what others have done for them have about them a certain sweetness and loveliness not exuded by any other personality trait while those who take all their blessings for granted, or think of them as things to which they're entitled, or who are otherwise ungrateful for what others have done for them, project a self-centeredness or ignorance that's thoroughly unpleasant to be around.

Here are a few quotes for your Thanksgiving week contemplation that reinforce the point:

• “Entitlement is such a cancer because it is void of gratitude.” — Adam Smith
• “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues but the parent of all others.” — Cicero
• "It's not happiness that brings us gratitude, it's gratitude that brings us happiness." - Anonymous
• “Showing gratitude is one of the simplest yet most powerful things humans can do for each other.” — Randy Rausch
• “Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.” — William Arthur Ward
• “Gratitude is the sign of noble souls.” — Aesop
• “The more grateful I am, the more beauty I see.” — Mary Davis
• “When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity.” — Elie Wiesel
• “Make it a habit to tell people thank you. To express your appreciation, sincerely and without the expectation of anything in return. Truly appreciate those around you, and you'll soon find many others around you. Truly appreciate life, and you'll find that you have more of it.” — Ralph Marston
• “In ordinary life, we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I wish all our readers (including those outside the U.S. who don't celebrate the holiday) a Thanksgiving filled with gratitude, love, and joy.

Another Gift Suggestion

Yesterday I urged readers to consider my novel In the Absence of God (2012) as a Christmas gift for friends and family and mentioned in passing its companion novel Bridging the Abyss which came out three years ago.

Bridging is, in part, the story of the search for a young girl who has disappeared off the streets of Baltimore and is believed to have been abducted. Members of the girl's family as well as those involved in the search are forced to confront the tension between a secular view of life which offers no ground for thinking any act "evil" and the obvious evil of which some men are capable.

Here's an excerpt from the Prologue:

In 1948 philosopher W.T. Stace wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly, a portion of which serves as an appropriate introduction to the story which follows in these pages. Stace wrote:

"The real turning point between the medieval age of faith and the modern age of unfaith came when scientists of the seventeenth century turned their backs upon what used to be called "final causes" …[belief in which] was not the invention of Christianity [but] was basic to the whole of Western civilization, whether in the ancient pagan world or in Christendom, from the time of Socrates to the rise of science in the seventeenth century …. They did this on the [basis that] inquiry into purposes is useless for what science aims at: namely, the prediction and control of events.

"…The conception of purpose in the world was ignored and frowned upon. This, though silent and almost unnoticed, was the greatest revolution in human history, far outweighing in importance any of the political revolutions whose thunder has reverberated around the world….

"The world, according to this new picture, is purposeless, senseless, meaningless. Nature is nothing but matter in motion. The motions of matter are governed, not by any purpose, but by blind forces and laws….[But] if the scheme of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man is purposeless and meaningless too. Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless. A man may, of course, still pursue disconnected ends - money, fame, art, science - and may gain pleasure from them. But his life is hollow at the center.

"Hence, the dissatisfied, disillusioned, restless spirit of modern man….Along with the ruin of the religious vision there went the ruin of moral principles and indeed of all values….If our moral rules do not proceed from something outside us in the nature of the universe - whether we say it is God or simply the universe itself - then they must be our own inventions.

"Thus it came to be believed that moral rules must be merely an expression of our own likes and dislikes. But likes and dislikes are notoriously variable. What pleases one man, people, or culture, displeases another. Therefore, morals are wholly relative."

This book, like my earlier novel In the Absence of God, is a story of people living in the wake of the revolution of which Stace speaks. It's a portrait of a small slice of modern life, a glimpse of what it is like to live in a world in which men live consistently, albeit perhaps unwittingly, with the assumptions of modernity, chief among which is the assumption that God does not exist or is in any case no longer relevant to our lives.

A world that has marginalized the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition is a world which finds itself bereft of any non-arbitrary basis for forming moral judgments, for finding any ultimate meaning in the existence of the human species as a whole or the life of the individual in particular, and for hope that the human yearning for justice could ever be satisfied.

Modern man dispenses with God and believes that life can go on as before - or even better than before - but this is a conceit which the sanguinary history of the 19th and 20th century confutes. A world that has abandoned God has abandoned the fountain of goodness, beauty and truth as well as the only possible ground for human rights and belief in the dignity of the individual.

Modernity has in some ways of course been a blessing, but it has also been a curse. History will ultimately decide whether the blessings have outweighed the curse. Meanwhile, Bridging the Abyss offers an account of what I believe to be the only way out of the morass into which widespread acceptance of the assumptions of modernity has led us.

If you'd like to read more about either novel click on the link at the top of this page, and if you're looking for a gift for someone who likes to read and who thinks like W.T. Stace both Absence and Bridging might be just the thing. I hope you'll give them a look. They're available at Hearts and Minds Bookstore, a great little family-owned bookshop, and in both paperback and e-book at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Shopping on Black Friday?

Is there someone on your Christmas shopping list you think might enjoy reading a novel which blends philosophy, religion, and a crime story all together on a college campus during football season? If so, you might consider giving them a copy of my book In the Absence of God.

I know the foregoing sounds like a shameless plug, but Absence encapsulates a recurring theme throughout our fourteen years here at Viewpoint. It's a fictionalized argument for the proposition that naturalism affords little or no basis for either moral obligation or ultimate meaning and renders a host of other human needs and yearnings absurd.

Naturalism, to put it succinctly, is an existential dead-end, for unless there is a God, or something very much like God, then life really is, as Shakespeare described it, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

In the Absence of God is set on a mid-size university campus in New England at the beginning of the fall semester sometime in the early years of the last decade.

The main plot line involves a professor named Joseph Weyland who's forced by the events swirling around him, as well as the challenge presented by a young nihilist in one of his classes, to come to grips with the implications of his materialistic worldview. As he wrestles with the issues his materialism raises he's engaged in an ongoing series of dialogues with a colleague and friend named Malcolm Peterson, and also with the pastor of his father's church, Loren Holt.

Meanwhile, the campus has been terrorized by an apparent serial rapist, and several young student-athletes find themselves thrust into the role of both victim and pursuer of the person who's perpetrating these crimes.

Over the course of three weeks in late August and early September the lives of these students become intertwined with those of Weyland and Peterson in ways none of them could have foreseen when the semester opened.

In the Forward to the book I write this:

This is not a book about football, though it may at first seem to be. Neither is it a crime novel, though it ends that way. Nor is it just a book about people sitting around talking, although I'm sure some readers will think so.

In the Absence of God is a novel about ideas concerning the things that matter most in life. It's a tale of three different worldviews, three different ways of seeing the world and of living our lives in it. It's the story of how for a few short weeks in September these three views come into conflict on a college campus in New England and how that clash of ideas forces people on campus to think seriously about the implications of their deepest convictions.

It has been said that ideas have consequences and nowhere is this more true than in one's personal philosophy of life - one's beliefs about God.

It's my hope that in reading this book you'll be stretched to think about things you perhaps hadn't thought about before, or that you'll at least think about your own beliefs in new and different ways. I hope that whatever your convictions about the matters taken up in this book may be, by the time you close its covers you'll agree that those convictions matter, and matter more profoundly than any other opinions you hold.

< /br> You can read more about In the Absence of God by following the link at the top of this page. it's available at my favorite bookstore, Hearts and Minds, and also at Amazon (paperback and kindle), where reader/reviewers have given it 4.5 stars, and at Barnes and Noble (paperback and nook).

I hope you'll consider putting it and/or it's companion novel Bridging the Abyss (about which more tomorrow) on your Christmas shopping list.

Where the Hatred Really Lies

In George Orwell's masterful novel 1984 the government enforces a daily session during which the citizens of the country scream and shout their loathing at a video screen on which the image of their alleged enemy is broadcast. The session lasts two minutes and is called the Two Minutes Hate:

The behavior of today's left, is an unwitting replica of Orwell's vision of how a lobotomized people can be conditioned to act. Consider some recent well-publicized examples:

The Brett Kavanaugh hearings were punctuated by disturbed souls screaming their disdain at Kavanaugh for reasons many of them, if asked, could scarcely articulate.

Television host Tucker Carlson's wife, home alone at night, was verbally assaulted by a group of leftists who surrounded the house, shouted threats, spray painted graffiti on the driveway and banged loudly on the door while screaming their standard epithets at whomever was inside. It was understandably frightening for Mrs. Carlson who was thankful her children weren't home.

This same sort of behavior is occurring regularly now on campuses, in restaurants, on the streets, anywhere leftists can find someone affiliated with politics or politicians they despise. People are being beaten for wearing MAGA hats, speakers on university campuses are shouted down, ordinary citizens are being terrified, and that's exactly what the left-wing thugs hope to accomplish.

The irony is that among the mindless accusations that are hurled at the victims of these deplorable encounters is that they're haters and bigots, when in fact all that these virulent, snarling zombies are doing is attempting to camouflage their own bottomless hatreds by directing the accusation at their target.

The tactic is designed to wrap the shouter in the mantle of righteousness while vilifying the victim. There's never any attempt at dialogue because the screamers know that they could never prevail in a calm, rational airing of ideas. Indeed, they have no ideas. None of this is about ideas. It's about exercising power and intimidating and silencing those with more brains than themselves who, because of their superior intelligence and education, are seen as threats.

Anyone who disagrees with the left is labelled an "extremist" or a "fascist," though few of those who invoke the term could explain what a fascist actually is. If they could define it they might recognize that it's they who are employing the methods of classical European fascism. They call themselves "anti-fascist," but the only substantive difference between them and neo-nazis is that the "antifa" don't sport swastikas.

By branding the opposition as extremists the left seeks to marginalize and discredit them, to exclude them from the public square, notwithstanding that their opponents' ideological, political or philosophical positions might be profoundly compelling. Actually, it's because their opponents' ideas would be seen by fair-minded people as rational and persuasive that those opponents must be shut up.

Another tactic the left likes to employ is to accuse those who disagree with them as being "phobes" of one sort or another. This has the effect of making their opponents seem subject to irrational prejudices and hatreds, to be unbalanced and neurotic, in any case not anyone worth listening to and perhaps not even to be permitted shelter under the umbrella of free speech.

These people would only be irritating naifs, immature emotional adolescents to be dismissed with the advice to come back after they've read some history of the horrors of the leftist revolutions of 1789 or 1917, say, or accounts of the hideous cruelties of the left found in Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago or Valladare's Against All Hope, or novels like Koestler's Darkness at Noon, or Orwell's Animal Farm or 1984, were it not for the fact that historically the left has always opted for violence, repression and tyranny as their power and influence waxed stronger.

Violent, unhinged rhetoric leads ineluctably to violent, unhinged behavior. So far, we've witnessed only isolated cases of extreme, violent derangement, like the shooting of Steve Scalise and others at the GOP baseball practice in June of last year, but as the suppurating infection of left-wing psychosis continues to fester, the violence is likely to become more frequent and more widespread.

We can expect recurrent assaults, insults and attempts at intimidation by the left in the months and years ahead, but hopefully the thugs won't be successful at cowing the rest of society into submission or bending our institutions to their will. If they are successful, though, well, go back and watch that video again.

The Moral Crisis of Our Time

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

Toner writes:

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

Herberg’s thesis was as perceptive as it was succinct: “the moral crisis of our time consists primarily not in the widespread violation of accepted moral standards . . . but in the repudiation of those very moral standards themselves.”

The moral code of the Greeks, based upon reason, and of the Hebrews, based upon Revelation, had atrophied, he wrote, to the point of dissolution. We were “rapidly losing all sense of transcendence.” We were adrift, by choice, in a sea of disorder with no “navigational” standards to consult....

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

Toner continues:

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

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

The only concern is whether one chooses “authentically.”

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

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

We now may be so mired in narcissistic norms that we cannot even understand Herberg’s jeremiad: “No human ethic is possible that is not itself grounded in a higher law and a higher reality beyond human manipulation or control.” The reason of the Greeks and the Revelation of the Hebrews are now replaced by modernist profane worship of man by man: thus, tyranny beckons and awaits.

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

If there is no God (No transcendent moral authority with the power to hold men ultimately accountable) then there can be no objective moral duties.

If there are no objective moral duties then the only duties we can have are subjective duties, i.e. duties that depend ultimately on our own feelings, biases, prejudices and predilections.

A subjective duty is self-imposed, but if it's self-imposed then it can be self-removed.

Thus, if our only moral duties are subjective then there are no moral duties at all since we cannot have a genuine duty if we can absolve ourselves of that duty whenever it suits us. In other words, unless there's a transcendent moral law-giver which (or who) can hold us responsible for our choices in life then there's no such thing as a moral obligation.

As Tolstoy put it:

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

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

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

Toner concludes with this:

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

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

Are We All Egoists?

Here's a question for your Thursday rumination: Does genuine altruism exist in human beings? By this I mean, do human beings, or better, can human beings, act for the benefit of others if there's no benefit in the act for the doer? Do we do what we do for others only because we believe, if even subconsciously, that there's some benefit in the act for us?

Before you answer you should read a brief essay written some years ago by Georgetown philosophy professor Judith Lichtenberg on just this question.

Lichtenberg notes that psychological egoism (PE), the view that all our actions - including those ostensibly done for others - are really done for self-benefit, is impossible to falsify. This means that one cannot imagine a circumstance which, if it obtained, would show PE to be wrong. The inability to think of such a circumstance means that the theory can't be tested, and this is, in fact, a detriment. Immunity to testing is a weakness in a theory, not a strength.

Lichtenberg might have also mentioned that PE is ultimately based upon circular reasoning. To see this consider the case of Wesley Autrey which she discusses in the beginning of her piece. Autrey risked his life in 2007 to rescue a man who had fallen onto the subway tracks in New York City as a train bore down upon him.

To the question, what was in it for Autrey? the PE might reply that Autrey hoped for a reward, either monetary, psychological or perhaps even eternal, for his act of heroism. Suppose, though, that upon being interviewed Autrey denied that any of those considerations ever entered his mind. He didn't have time to think, he attests. He saw the man fall, he saw the train approach, and he reacted.

The PE might then resort to this fallback position: "There must have been some self-benefit in saving the man that Autrey felt, if only subliminally." If asked why there must be such a motive, the PE can only answer, "because saving the man is what he did, and everything people do they do in their own self-interest."

In other words,

1. We always act for our own benefit
2. Cases where people seem to act genuinely for others only seem to be altruistic. There's always a self-beneficial purpose buried somewhere in the person's motivations.
3. We know there must be a self-beneficial motive driving the person's act because we always act for our own self-benefit.

This is a circular argument and circular arguments are logically invalid. Thus, although PE may seem formidable, it's ultimately based on fallacious reasoning, and if PE is fallacious then perhaps altruism is not the illusion that some philosophers have claimed it is.

Anyway, read Lichtenberg's column and see what you think.

Recognizing Incoherence

Consider this sentence: Zebras are heavier spellers than giraffes.

The sentence is easily seen to be incoherent. Even though the words all have meaning, and the structure or syntax of the sentence is correct, the words don't fit together in a meaningful way. The proposition is literally nonsense.

Now consider this state of affairs: a colleague walks into the office and reports that it has begun to snow. You look out the window and confirm that it is indeed snowing. Your observation corresponds to your colleague's report.

In both cases something very interesting is going on, usually without us being aware of it. Somehow, we're able to recognize phenomena like incoherence and correspondence, but how? What is actually occurring in our cognitive apparatus when we recognize that words don't cohere or that other words accurately describe what's happening outside?

On the materialist view all that's involved here are electrochemical processes occuring in a lump of living matter in our heads, but how do events like electrons whizzing along neurons and molecules jumping across synapses cause us to recognize incoherence and correspondence?

What's the connection between the physical processes taking place in the brain when we read the sentence or look out the window and the conscious awareness that a particular pattern of words is either absurd or does in fact correspond to an actual state of affairs? Where in the brain does the awareness of incoherence and correspondence reside and what does this awareness "look" like?

Moreover, what would a tiny, miniaturized scientist, navigating her way through a brain which at that moment is recognizing incoherence, observe? She might witness a great deal of electrical activity and notice a lot of atoms jostling about, but how do these physical phenomena translate into an immaterial awareness that a combination of words is nonsensical?

Materialists will often reply that it's true that at this point we have no idea, but that we know too little at present about how the brain works to say how it does what it does. Someday, though, we'll able to explain it, and when we do the explanation will be in completely material terms.

Well, maybe, but there's a pretty serious problem here.

Physical things have weight, occupy space, and are made of atomic particles that possess electric charges. Mental events, on the other hand, share none of these properties. They have no weight or mass, they're non-spatial, they're made of no substance recognizable to science and they don't possess electric charge.

All that being so, it's clear that mental events such as recognizing incoherence and correspondence are not themselves material or physical. They're qualitatively different, so, in the absence of any plausible materialistic explanation, it makes sense to suspect that perhaps these mental events are somehow the product of an immaterial, non-physical element in our cognitive apparatus.

In other words, perhaps the physical brain is not the sole agent in our cognitive life. Perhaps the conscious experience of human beings, and maybe even other animals as well, is also the product of a spaceless, massless, immaterial mind.

Utilitarianism and Egoism

Peter Singer is a philosopher at Princeton who has gained substantial notoriety for invoking his utilitarian ethical principles to justify infanticide and animal rights. In a piece at The Journal of Practical Ethics the editors interview Singer and question whether utilitarians can, or do, live consistently with their own ethical philosophy.

Here's part of the interview:

Editors: Frances Kamm once said...that utilitarians believe in very demanding duties to aid and that not aiding is the same as harming, but they nevertheless don’t live up to these demands, don’t really believe their own arguments....She concludes that ‘either something is wrong with that theory, or there is something wrong with its proponents’.

What do you think about this argument? Why haven’t you given a kidney to someone who needs it now? You have two and you only need one. They have none that are working – it would make a huge difference to their life at very little cost to you.

Singer is a utilitarian. He believes that he has a moral obligation to do the act that would produce the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people. Yet Singer also is a metaphysical naturalist who believes there are no transcendent moral authorities to impose moral duties upon us.

These two beliefs are in tension with each other. To understand why, let's first see how he answers the interviewer's question about donating a kidney:

Peter Singer: I’m not sure that the cost to me of donating a kidney would be “very little” but I agree that it would harm me much less than it would benefit someone who is on dialysis. I also agree that for that reason my failure to donate a kidney is not ethically defensible.... Donating a kidney does involve a small risk of serious complications. Zell Kravinsky suggests that the risk is 1 in 4000.

I don’t think I’m weak-willed, but I do give greater weight to my own interests, and to those of my family and others close to me, than I should. Most people do that, in fact they do it to a greater extent than I do (because they do not give as much money to good causes as I do). That fact makes me feel less bad about my failure to give a kidney than I otherwise would. But I know that I am not doing what I ought to do.

This response raises several questions, but I'll focus on just one. Singer believes it's wrong not to give the kidney, and he feels bad, he feels guilty, about not doing so, yet why should he? In what sense is his violation of utilitarian principles morally wrong? Indeed, why is utilitarianism morally superior to the egoism to which he admits to succumbing?

To put it differently, if Singer chooses to be a utilitarian and donate the kidney while someone else chooses to be an egoist and keep his kidneys, why is either one right or wrong? Given Singer's naturalism, what does it even mean to say that someone is morally wrong anyway? Who or what is to hold him or us accountable for not giving the kidney? On naturalism there's no moral authority except one's own convictions and neither is there any ultimate accountability, so in what way is keeping one's kidneys an offense to morality?

Elsewhere in the interview, Singer notes that his ethical thinking is based on the work of the great 19th century ethicist and utilitarian Henry Sidgwick and mentions that,

Sidgwick himself remained deeply troubled by his inability to demonstrate that egoism is irrational. That led him to speak of a “dualism of practical reason” — two opposing viewpoints, utilitarianism and egoism, seemed both to be rational.

In other words, the choice between utilitarianism and egoism is an arbitrary exercise of personal preference, although Singer doesn't agree with this because he believes evolution affords grounds for rejecting egoism. It's hard to see how this could be the case, however, since blind impersonal processes cannot impose moral duties. Nor is it easy to see how acting against the trajectory of those processes can be morally wrong.

How is one doing anything wrong if he chooses to act contrary to the way mutation and natural selection have shaped the human species? Why should he accept the ethical results of evolutionary history any more than we accept the physical limitations imposed on us by gravity when we go aloft in an airplane or hot air balloon?

The only reason we have for not putting our own interests ahead of the interests of others - as in the example of the kidney - and the only rational reason we would have for feeling guilt over our failure to consider the needs of others is if we believe that such failures are a transgression of an obligation imposed upon us by a transcendent, personal, moral authority.

Singer lacks such a belief and can thus give no compelling explanation for his feelings of guilt nor any compelling reason why one should be a utilitarian rather than an egoist.

One (Partial) Explanation for Why Trump Won

In his recently released book titled Last Call for Liberty, cultural critic and public intellectual Os Guinness observes that the times in which we're living call for statesmen to emerge at the highest levels of government, but that no equivalent of Abraham Lincoln has stepped forward to speak on behalf of the better angels of the American republic. He writes:

If anyone did, their task would be gargantuan, for the present generation has rejected both the vision and the manner of the sixteenth president as decisively as many have rejected that of the founders.There is too little statesmanship to match the gravity of the hour, and too little analysis that goes beyond supporting one side of the other....

Guinness does not explicitly talk about our current leaders by name nor does he engage in political partisanship, but his words about the lack of statesmen aroused in me the thought that, in fact, the American people really don't want to be led by statesmen, and our politics of the last three decades are pretty good evidence of that.

For example, in the 1990s the Republicans nominated George H.W. Bush (1992) and Bob Dole (1996), two fine political eminences, to run for the office of the presidency. The Democrats nominated a scandal-plagued philanderer named Bill Clinton. The American people voted for Mr. Clinton - twice.

In the 2000s, the Republicans nominated John McCain (2008) and Mitt Romney (2012), two very experienced and ideologically moderate political leaders very much in the mold of Bush and Dole. The Democrats nominated Barack Obama, a far-left Alinskyite community organizer with almost no political experience to speak of. The American people elected Mr. Obama - twice.

Finally, in frustration, rank and file Republicans decided that they'd had enough with nominating moderate statesmen. They concluded that the American electorate doesn't want statesmen, rather they desire in their leaders the same thing they demand in their entertainment: conflict, charisma, afflatus, glamour, scandal, drama, celebrity. The GOP rank and file realized that their party would never win another presidential election if they kept running responsible, straight-arrow grown-ups who didn't embody at least most of the traits of a rock or movie star.

After twenty years of losing (George W. Bush was an anomaly whose elections were abetted by the Democrats, who, forgetting what the Republicans hadn't yet learned, nominated two vanilla politicos, Al Gore (2000) and John Kerry (2004) who, in terms of personality, if not political temperament, could've been Republicans) the GOP base decided that they'd had enough.

They acknowledged that the people who'll get elected to top positions of leadership in twenty-first century United States are people who could have either stepped off the front page of a tabloid or who promise to hand out goodies like Santa Claus.

They recognized that neither experience, statesmanship nor character is important to the majority of American voters, certainly not those who vote Democratic. This sad conclusion was confirmed in the minds of many conservatives when the Democrats proceeded in 2016 to nominate for the presidency a thoroughly corrupt Hillary Clinton, of all people.

Having given up trying to get the voters' attention with fine men like the elder Bush, Dole, McCain and Romney, they finally said "Enough. Let's nominate the sort of man the American people apparently want."

So they nominated Donald Trump, and it proved to be an inspired choice. The Democrats hate him, of course, but only because he's a winner who's reversing the long march toward big brother socialism begun under Franklin Roosevelt and continued under presidents of both parties, but especially under President Obama.

If Trump were still the Democrat he once was, advancing the same policies that Mrs. Clinton would have advanced, the media would be slobbering with adoration and stumbling all over themselves to find excuses for his abrasive, combative style. He'd be the perfect Democrat candidate. They'd love his demeanor were he one of them, and no one would ever hear a peep about his sexual coarseness and legal indiscretions on the evening news.

I have a friend who laments that millions of women are "aching" that we've elected such a boorish individual to be our president, but I wonder whether they ache because of his vulgar talk or because he's a Republican rather than a Democrat. After all, millions of women just like the ones who ostensibly lament Mr. Trump's ascendency, voted for John Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and now Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey who has been credibly accused of sexual congress with underage girls in the Dominican Republic.

So why would women vote for these men but express revulsion and loathing for Donald Trump? Perhaps it's because they all had D's after their names, a circumstance which often wins absolution from female admirers for behavior that'd earn a Republican a trip to the political guillotine.

The point is that the majority of the American electorate really doesn't want moderate statesmen. They want bread and circuses, signs and wonders. If they wanted statesmen some of those four Republican candidates mentioned above would've been elected president.

But, because those men all pretty much got trounced, the frustrated Republican base threw up its collective hands and gave us Donald Trump, and many of the people who excused the behavior of the philanderer ("character doesn't matter" we were told) and swooned at the speeches and the crease in the pants of the community organizer, now profess to be outraged that the American people have ensconced Mr. Trump in the Oval Office.

They have no one to blame but themselves.

Seeing Racists Behind Every Tuba

So, it's happened again.

This time it was four members of a Georgia high school marching band during their halftime show spelling out a racially insulting bit of slang which provoked instant outrage among the unthinking and uncritical. They blamed racism. They blamed Trump. They blamed white people in general.

Here's a sample of the Twitter comments:

• “If I ever seen one of those white band mates at Brookwood in Gwinnett County just know I’ll be [sic] the s**t out of them,” one user wrote. “Those kids need a** whoopings. I have that.”
• “At times I attempt to convince myself that racism isn’t A BIG THING … in youth/HS sports,” another user said. “But then things like THIS happen. Thank you Brookwood HS for showing your True School Spirit!”
• “Brookwood has been a racist ass school forever why is anyone shocked,” another remarked.
• “The hate is real,” one user commented.
• “Inspired no doubt by the words & vitriol spouted by the Great Leader in the WH — what an embarrassment 4 all the good people of Georgia, of Gwinnet [sic] County & of Brookwood High School,” another user said.
• “There should not remain one black student in the band, in the football team, or at Brookwood High School,” another user offered.

As many times as this sort of thing has happened (See here, here and here for other examples), you'd think people would learn to hold their righteous indignation in check until the facts come out, but some people just can't wait to display their virtue to the world by condemning the parties responsible for such unconscionable acts of racial bigotry.

Except, the band members who performed this "prank," it turns out, were two African-Americans, one Asian and one Hispanic, all of whom thought it would be "funny". In a way it was. It was funny to see the knee-jerk reaction of the folks quoted above who literally didn't know what they were talking about.

Perhaps the lesson here is that when political and/or social decorum appears to have been transgressed, and before we begin willy-nilly calling down fire and brimstone upon the offenders, we should at least wait until we know the facts. It would keep us from looking foolish and spare us a lot of embarrassment.

Minds, Computers and Chinese Rooms

There's lots of talk about computers soon being able to "think" like human beings and maybe even bringing about an AI apocalypse. Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor strongly dissents from this view, however.

He grants that humans can use computers to do despicable things but that computers themselves will never be able to think.

Egnor writes:

A cornerstone of the development of artificial intelligence is the pervasive assumption that machines can, or will, think. Watson, a question-answering computer, beats the best Jeopardy players, and anyone who plays chess has had the humiliation of being beaten by a chess engine....Does this mean that computers can think as well as (or better than) humans think? No, it does not.

Computers are not “smart” in any way. Machines are utterly incapable of thought.

The assertion that computation is thought, hence thought is computation, is called computer functionalism. It is the theory that the human mind is to the brain as software is to hardware. The mind is what the brain does; the brain “runs” the mind, as a computer runs a program.

However, careful examination of natural intelligence (the human mind) and artificial intelligence (computation) shows that this is a profound misunderstanding.

Citing the 19th century German philosopher Franz Brentano, Egnor observes that computers lack a fundamental and critical characteristic of all thoughts. They lack "aboutness", or what philosophers call intentionality. Here's what he means:

All thoughts are about something, whereas no material object is inherently “about” anything. This property of aboutness is called intentionality, and intentionality is the hallmark of the mind.

Every thought that I have shares the property of aboutness—I think about my vacation, or about politics, or about my family. But no material object is, in itself, “about” anything. A mountain or a rock or a pen lacks aboutness—they are just objects. Only a mind has intentionality, and intentionality is the hallmark of the mind.

Another word for intentionality is meaning. All thoughts inherently mean something. A truly meaningless thought is an oxymoron. The meaning may be trivial or confusing, but every thought entails meaning of some sort. Every thought is about something, and that something is the meaning of the thought.

Computation, however, is an algorithmic process. It's the matching of an input to an output. There's no meaning to what the computer does. Whatever meaning we ascribe to the process is, in fact, imposed by our minds, it doesn't arise from within the machine.

What computers do, then, is represent the thoughts of the person designing, programming, and/or using it:

Computation represents thought in the same way that a pen and paper can be used to represent thought, but computation does not generate thought and cannot produce thought.

Only minds can think. Machines cannot.

When a materialist thinks about her materialism she's essentially disproving her fundamental belief that the material brain is all that's necessary to account for her thoughts. How can electrochemical reactions along material neurons be about something? Electrons whizzing across a synapse are not about anything. They have no meaning in themselves. The meaning must come from something else.

Nor do computers understand. In 1980 philosopher John Searle published an argument that sought to show that functionalism is wrong and that there's more to a human being's cognitive experience than simple computation. His argument came to be known as the Chinese Room argument and goes like this:

Imagine that you are an English speaker and you do not speak Chinese. You're living in China, however, and have a job working in a booth in a public square. The purpose of the booth is to provide answers to questions that Chinese-speaking people write on small pieces of paper and pass into the booth through a slot. The answer is written on a small piece of paper and passed back to the Chinese person through a separate slot.

Inside the booth there's a very large book. The book contains every question that can be asked and the corresponding answer -- all written only in Chinese. You understand no Chinese. You understand nothing written in the book. When the question is passed through the slot you match the Chinese characters in the question to the identical question in the book, and you write the Chinese symbols corresponding to the answer and pass the answer back through the answer slot.

The Chinese person asking the question gets an answer that he understands in Chinese. You understand neither the question nor the answer because you do not understand Chinese.

Searle argues that you are carrying out a computation. The booth is analogous to a computer, you are analogous to a CPU, and the information written in Chinese is analogous to an algorithm. The question and the answer written on the paper are the input and the output to the computer.

In other words, the computer, like the person in the booth, has no understanding of what it's doing.

Searle's argument denies that computers "think." They simply follow an algorithm. Since humans do think, however, and we do understand, either our brains are not just computers or functionalism is not true.

Searle points out that the computation performed by the booth and its occupant does not involve any understanding of the questions and answers provided. His point is that computation is an algorithmic process that does not entail or require understanding, but since we do understand when we perform a computation, human cognition is something qualitatively different from mere computation.

Postmodern Assumptions

It's commonly observed that we live in a post-Christian, postmodern culture, and that many of the assumptions of pre-moderns and moderns are no longer viable in today's Western societies. But what does this mean? What are the postmodern assumptions about man and contemporary life that comprise the postmodern worldview?

In his book Flight from the Absolute Canadian scholar Paul Gosselin lists a dozen or so that are most prominent. Here's a partial listing which I've taken the liberty of putting in my own words:

1. Humans are solely the product of evolutionary processes and as such are a part of nature and can claim no special status. This is an assumption postmoderns have borrowed from modernity.
2. Human nature is not fixed but is subject to evolutionary change caused by natural, cultural and political forces.
3. There is no source of objective moral laws, no divine moral authority, and thus no absolute universal moral truth or objective, absolute truth of any kind.
4. Since truth is a cultural construct, all cultures and all religions have their own valid truth perspectives and all should be tolerated and celebrated.
5. Since truth is subjective, one's feelings are as reliable a guide for life as is human reason.
6. The material world is not all there is. The supernatural exists and is worthy of our attention, although traditional Christian doctrines are often too constricting.
7. The idea of Western superiority and the concept of Progress must be rejected.
8. Salvation and the meaning of life is found in individual self-fulfillment. Man is morally autonomous, free to pursue his fulfillment in any fashion he chooses.
9. No behavior, especially sexual behavior, is wrong as long as it's fulfilling to the individual and doesn't hurt others, at least not too much. No one has the right to judge the choices of others, especially their sexual choices.
10. Feelings of guilt should be seen as vestiges of an obsolete past and ignored or suppressed.

Gosselin doesn't mention this, but several of these assumptions appear to contradict each other, yet they're all widely accepted in our culture. To be sure, their acceptance, even given their inherent contradictions, is understandable given the almost universal acceptance of assumption #1 among our cultural elites. Everything else follows, psychologically if not exactly logically, from that assumption. Indeed, it all follows from one word in #1, the word solely.

If man is not just the product of blind natural processes, but rather is the intended product of an intelligent agent, then everything else in the postmodern worldview can be called into question. In fact, it may not be too much to say that the majority of our differences today arise from #1 and the word solely.

It's amazing how much a single, solitary word can entail.

CIA Catastrophe

Michael Walsh has a piece at PJ Media that reveals the worst intelligence catastrophe to hit the U.S. (excluding the failure to detect the 9/11 plot) in decades.

According to Walsh the following story broke on November 2nd. The media, evidently fixated on the pending "Blue Wave" and loath to publicize anything that might tarnish the image of the Obama presidency, has paid it little heed, but if it's true it is a huge bombshell of a story:

In 2013, hundreds of CIA officers — many working nonstop for weeks — scrambled to contain a disaster of global proportions: a compromise of the agency’s internet-based covert communications system used to interact with its informants in dark corners around the world. Teams of CIA experts worked feverishly to take down and reconfigure the websites secretly used for these communications; others managed operations to quickly spirit assets to safety and oversaw other forms of triage.

“When this was going on, it was all that mattered,” said one former intelligence community official. The situation was “catastrophic,” said another former senior intelligence official.

From around 2009 to 2013, the U.S. intelligence community experienced crippling intelligence failures related to the secret internet-based communications system, a key means for remote messaging between CIA officers and their sources on the ground worldwide.

The previously unreported global problem originated in Iran and spiderwebbed to other countries, and was left unrepaired — despite warnings about what was happening — until more than two dozen sources died in China in 2011 and 2012 as a result, according to 11 former intelligence and national security officials.

The disaster ensnared every corner of the national security bureaucracy — from multiple intelligence agencies, congressional intelligence committees and independent contractors to internal government watchdogs — forcing a slow-moving, complex government machine to grapple with the deadly dangers of emerging technologies.

During a two year period starting in 2010 the Chinese and the Iranians, were able to systematically roll up our intelligence assets in these countries and eventually execute more than 30 agents working for the CIA. They were able to do this because the CIA had been using lax, outdated internet communications security.

Much more detail on this fiasco is provided by Walsh at the link.

If the media wants a scandal, and, of course, they always do, they might try forgetting about "Russian collusion" and look more deeply into this failure. It might be helpful if they'd call for congressional investigations into how and why this happened, who was primarily responsible, what the extent of the damage has been and what role, if any, this played in the Obama administration's obsession with closing the Iranian nuclear deal.

What Is a Memory?

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor raises an interesting question, one that many of us might never think to ask. What, exactly, is a memory? A secondary question might be how does a materialist metaphysics account for memories?

Egnor begins by arguing that contrary to popular belief, and even the belief of many neuroscientists and philosophers, the brain doesn't actually "store" memories. In fact, he claims, it can't store memories:

It's helpful to begin by considering what memory is -- memory is retained knowledge. Knowledge is the set of true propositions. Note that neither memory nor knowledge nor propositions are inherently physical. They are psychological entities, not physical things. Certainly memories aren't little packets of protein or lipid stuffed into a handy gyrus, ready for retrieval when needed for the math quiz.

The brain is a physical thing. A memory is a psychological thing. A psychological thing obviously can't be "stored" in the same way a physical thing can. It's not clear how the term "store" could even apply to a psychological thing.

But what about storage as an engram, a pattern of electrochemical energy or proteins, that acts as a code for the information? Egnor doesn't think this explanation works either:

[C]onsider a hypothetical "engram" of your grandmother's lovely face that "codes" for your memory of her appearance. Imagine that the memory engram is safely tucked into a corner of your superior temporal gyrus, and you desire to remember Nana's face. As noted above, your memory itself obviously is not in the gyrus or in the engram. It doesn't even make any sense to say a memory is stored in a lump of brain.

But, you say, that's just a silly little misunderstanding. What you really mean to say is that the memory is encoded there, and it must be accessed and retrieved, and it is in that sense that the memory is stored. It is the engram, you say, not the memory itself, that is stored.

But there is a real problem with that view. As you try to remember Nana's face, you must then locate the engram of the memory, which of course requires that you (unconsciously) must remember where in your brain Nana's face engram is stored .... So this retrieval of the Nana memory via the engram requires another memory (call it the "Nana engram location memory"), which must itself be encoded somewhere in your brain.

To access the memory for the location of the engram of Nana, you must access a memory for the engram for the location for the engram of Nana. And obviously you must first remember the location of the Nana engram location memory, which presupposes another engram whose location must be remembered. Ad infinitum.

Now imagine that by some miracle...you are able to surmount infinite regress and locate the engram for Nana's face in your superior temporal gyrus (like finding your keys by serendipity!). Whew! But don't deceive yourself -- this doesn't solve your problem in the least. Because now you have to decode the engram itself. The engram would undoubtedly take the form of brain tissue -- a particular array of proteins, or dendrites or axons, or an electrochemical gradient of some specific sort -- that would mean "memory of Nana's face."

But how can an electrochemical gradient represent a face? Certainly an electrochemical gradient doesn't look like grandma -- and even if it did, you'd have to have a little tiny eye in your brain to see it to recognize that it looked like grandma.

The engram is a code, but if so we need a key to decode it. How do we access the key? How do we remember where the key is stored in the brain? That memory must itself be coded somewhere in the brain which would require yet another memory to decode it, and so on:

And if you think that remembering your grandmother's face via an engram in your brain entails infinite regress, consider the conundrum of remembering a concept, rather than a face. How, pray tell, can the concept of your grandma's justice or her mercy or her cynicism be encoded in an engram? The quality of mercy is not [stored], nor can it be encoded. How many dendrites and axons for mercy?

You see the difficulty. We remember things all the time, but how often have we ever paused to ask ourselves what's going on when we remember? And whatever it is that's going on, how did such a highly specified and complex system evolve by random mutation and natural selection? And how are memories, like other aspects of consciousness (self-awareness, qualia, intentionality, free will), accounted for by a purely mechanical entity like a brain?

How then, you reasonably ask, can we explain the obvious dependence of memory on brain structure and function? While it is obvious that the memories aren't stored, it does seem that some parts of the brain are necessary ordinarily for memory. And that's certainly true....In some cases the correspondence between brain and memory is one of tight necessity -- the brain must have a specific activity for memory to be exercised.

But the brain activity is not the same thing as the memory nor does it make any sense at all to say the brain activity codes for the memory or that the brain stores the memory.

For reasons such as Egnor calls to our attention some philosophers are rejecting the materialistic monism that has prevailed for the last century and a half and are returning for answers to some form or another of dualism. Dualism comes in many varieties but what they all share in common is the view that the material aspect of a human being - the brain in particular - is not all there is to us. Something else seems to be somehow involved in the phenomenon of consciousness. That something else may well be an immaterial but conscious mind.

If that's true then not only is materialism false but the Darwinians' explanatory difficulties have significantly increased. How can something immaterial be subject to the physical evolutionary mechanisms that are postulated to explain the development of the human species? How can an immaterial mind be produced by matter and physical influences? It's an enigma. At least for the naturalistic materialist.

Just Made it All Up

After all the media did to destroy Justice Kavanaugh you'd think they could find a few minutes to devote to this revelation, but, alas, evidently they're too preoccupied chasing down the next shiny object in their hyper-attenuated field of vision.

It turns out that one of the women who accused Judge Kavanaugh of having raped her is now admitting to having made the whole thing up. The following is from the link:

Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley has referred another one of Brett Kavanaugh’s accusers to the FBI for possible criminal prosecution after she admitted to Committee investigators that she made up allegations that Kavanaugh had raped her in a car.

This referral stems from an anonymous “Jane Doe” letter that the committee received in September that, in graphic detail, claimed that Justice Kavanaugh had raped the letter writer ...“several times...” in the back of a car.

The accuser, a woman whose name, it later turned out, is Judy Munro-Leighton, sent an anonymous letter detailing the accusation to Senator Kamala Harris, who forwarded it to Senate Judiciary Committee investigators.

The letter was signed "Jane Doe" from Oceanside, CA and contained highly graphic sexual-assault accusations against Judge Kavanaugh. Here's more from the link:

The anonymous accuser alleged that Justice Kavanaugh and a friend had raped her “several times each” in the backseat of a car. In addition to being from an anonymous accuser, the letter listed no return address, failed to provide any timeframe, and failed to provide any location — beyond an automobile — in which these alleged incidents took place.

But the Committee took the letter seriously and even questioned Justice Kavanaugh under oath about the allegation.

They read him the letter in full as part of the questioning. In response to the anonymous allegations, Judge Kavanaugh unequivocally stated: “[T]he whole thing is ridiculous. Nothing ever — anything like that, nothing . . . . [T]he whole thing is just a crock, farce, wrong, didn’t happen, not anything close.”

Later that day, September 26th, the Committee publicly released the transcript of that interview with Judge Kavanaugh, which included the full text of the Jane Doe letter.

Then, on October 3, 2018, Committee staff received an email from a Ms. Judy Munro-Leighton with a subject line claiming: “I am Jane Doe from Oceanside CA — Kavanaugh raped me.” Ms. Munro-Leighton wrote that she was “sharing with you the story of the night that Brett Kavanaugh and his friend sexually assaulted and raped me in his car” and referred to “the letter that I sent to Sen. Kamala Harris on Sept. 19 with details of this vicious assault.”

She continued: “I know that Jane Doe will get no media attention, but I am deathly afraid of revealing any information about myself or my family.” She then included a typed version of the Jane Doe letter.

But, as it turns out, the woman who claimed she underwent such a horrific sexual assault by Brett Kavanaugh never experienced any such thing. She simply made the whole thing up in order to try to destroy Kavanaugh. Committee investigators were able to track her down and discovered that she was a left-wing activist who is decades older than Judge Kavanaugh and lives neither in Washington, D.C. nor in California, but in Kentucky:

She further confessed to Committee investigators that (1) she “just wanted to get attention”; (2) “it was a tactic”; and (3) “that was just a ploy.” She told Committee investigators that she had called Congress multiple times during the Kavanaugh hearing process – including prior to the time Dr. Ford’s allegations surfaced – to oppose his nomination.

Regarding the false sexual-assault allegation she made via her email to the Committee, she said: “I was angry, and I sent it out.”

When asked by Committee investigators whether she had ever met Judge Kavanaugh, she said: “Oh Lord, no.”

So, where does Justice Kavanaugh go to get his reputation back? How do those who went along with the disgraceful charade at the confirmation hearings, who screamed like lunatics from the gallery, who gleefully dissected every salacious accusation on the media talk shows, who delighted in destroying this man's reputation and devastating his family - how do they look at themselves in the mirror without being overcome with nausea and self-loathing?

Maybe their consciences are so numbed by an "ends justifies the means" ethic that they simply shrug, laugh and blithely move on, indifferent to the wrecked lives they've left in their wake.

Fine people, these are.

The Metastasizing Cancer of Anti-Semitism

In the wake of the horrible slaughter of Jews in the Tree of Life synagogue last week in Pittsburgh there has been no shortage of condemnations of neo-nazi anti-semitism - which condemnations all decent people will endorse - but there has been almost total silence about the hateful rhetoric emanating from two of the most toxic sectors of anti-semitism in our country today: Muslim clerics and university leftists.

Why does our media only see hate on the far right? Why are they blind to the even more vicious and depraved rhetoric coming from other quarters? Perhaps one explanation is that progressives in the media see the far-right as the political enemy and see campus leftists and Muslim imams as political allies.

Like a cancer, anti-semitic hatred has metastasized to sectors of our culture far beyond its traditional locus in the far-right.

In July 26th of 2017 I ran a post on VP titled Hate Speech in which I wrote this:

Imagine that a prominent Christian pastor, speaking from the pulpit, called for the annihilation of gays. Imagine, too, that he referred to them as filth, and that his sermon was put up on YouTube for all the world to see. What do you suppose would be the reaction? Is it unreasonable to think there'd be nationwide 24/7 condemnation of that pastor's bigotry and his hateful speech?

The pastor would become a pariah, and Christianity would be discredited, don't you think? The left, especially, would be marching outside that pastor's church, demanding that he be removed from the pulpit.

Well, recently that very thing happened, sort of, and there's been almost no reaction to the preacher's hatred and bigotry whatsoever. Perhaps, you'll understand why when you read the details. You see, it wasn't a Christian pastor calling for the annihilation of gays in a sermon, it was a Muslim imam calling for the annihilation of Jews in a lecture:

In a July 21 lecture ... Muslim preacher Ammar Shahin spoke in English and Arabic about how all Muslims, not only Palestinians or Syrians, will be called upon to kill all the Jews on "the last day."

Shahin is an Egyptian who has been in the U.S. since 1999. His mosque isn't in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, it's in Davis, California.

In a video translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Shahin also stressed that the Hadith (oral tradition of sayings attributed to the prophet of Islam) does not say where the final battle will take place. "If it is in Palestine," for example, "or another place," hinting at the possibility that such a battle could happen in the United States or Europe as well.

He also prayed that the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem be liberated from "the filth of the Jews."

Here's the relevant clip:

This sort of rhetoric would not be tolerated were it to be delivered by a representative of any other religion or political party. Why is it tolerated when it's delivered by Muslims? Why are Muslims excused from standards of behavior we expect of everyone else in a tolerant, civilized society?

Shahin should be free to cite his beliefs, as repugnant as they are, but that doesn't mean that everyone else should just shrug and say, "Well, that's just what Islam teaches". Hatred of this sort, taking delight in the prospect of mass slaughter, should be exposed and roundly condemned, as it would be were it to come from any other source.

To the extent that Shahin accurately represents mainstream Islamic belief, and according to the article at the link he teaches Sunni Islam to Westerners, it sure makes it difficult to accept the notion that Islam is a religion of peace.

The situation among leftists on university campuses is in some ways worse because the virus of hate is reaching a much broader audience. The anti-semitism of students and faculty masquerades as a political critique of the state of Israel (anti-Zionism), but in fact, it results in a virulent hatred of Jews (anti-semitism) and anyone who supports them.

The following video explains what's going on. It's roughly 30 minutes long, but it offers a valuable perspective on how some university campuses in the New York area are cultivating the same sorts of poisonous hatreds that led a depraved individual to murder and maim last week in Pittsburgh.

Given what you'll see in this video you can be sure that similar crimes will happen again until we stop turning a blind eye to the cesspools of hate not only among neo-nazis but in our mosques and on our university campuses.

Quick Quiz

Quick, answer the following: Which prominent American politician said this (I paraphrase):

[T]here are some areas that the federal government ... should address and address strongly. One of these areas is the problem of illegal immigration. After years of neglect, I will take a strong stand to stiffen the protection of our borders. I will increase border controls by 50 percent and increase inspections to prevent the hiring of illegal immigrants. I will also sign an executive order to deny federal contracts to businesses that hire illegal immigrants.

I want to be very clear about this: We are still a nation of immigrants; we should be proud of it. We should honor every legal immigrant here, working hard to become a new citizen. But we are also a nation of laws.

If you said Donald Trump give yourself an F. If you ascribed the passage to any Republican at all give yourself another F. The correct answer is President William Jefferson Clinton in his 1996 State of the Union address. You can see the video here.

It's funny that there was no apoplexy on the left when President Clinton promised to crack down on illegal immigration, but when President Trump, or anyone else for that matter, criticizes the Democrats for opposing the securing of our border and ultimately allowing millions of illegal entrants into the country, progressives respond as though Trump had endorsed torturing puppies.

There's an interesting psychology at play in this double standard that can perhaps be summed up this way:

When a liberal Democrat says we need to enforce our immigration laws he's principled. When a moderate Democrat says we need to enforce our immigration laws she's practical. When a Republican says we need to enforce our immigration laws he's a pig-headed bigot.

Or, to say the same thing, whether people agree with what's being proposed or done depends foremost on who it is who's proposing or doing it.

This is, unfortunately, a kind of tribal thinking typical of adolescents and intellectual primitives, but it should have no place among voters in a free society nor among those political figures who lead our nation nor among those in the media who influence our nation's policy.

Five Things

In his new book Scientism and Secularism, philosopher J.P.Moreland lists and discusses five things that naturalistic science cannot account for or explain but which fit comfortably into a theistic worldview. The five phenomena are these:

1. The Origin of the Universe: That the universe had a beginning is the consensus view among cosmologists, but if it had a beginning what could have caused it. If the universe encompasses all of space, time and mass-energy then all of this exists only when the universe comes into being, which means that the universe came into being out of nothing. How? The answer to this question lies outside the purview of science.

2. The Origin of the Laws of Physics: As with the universe in general, the fundamental laws of physics exist only insofar as the universe does. Apart from a universe there are no such laws. An explanation of why just these laws exist and have the properties that they do is not an explanation that science is equipped to provide. Science can only tell us what the laws are and what they entail. It can't tell us why they are.

3. The Fine-Tuning of the Cosmos: As we've written on VP numerous times in the past the fundamental forces, parameters and constants which form the fabric of the universe are calibrated to unimaginably precise values such that an infinitesimally tiny deviation in the settings of any one of several dozen examples would make either the existence of the universe impossible or the existence of any kind of significant life impossible. Possible explanations for this extraordinary state of affairs, such as the multiverse hypothesis, even if they're credible, are metaphysical conjectures which lie outside the realm of science.

4. The Origin of Consciousness: Mental states such as holding a belief, understanding a joke, doubting a proposition, feeling pain, sensing red, recognizing the meaning of a text are phenomena which defy a scientific explanation. On the scientific view there was nothing but atoms, molecules and chemical compounds for eons of time until one day a completely different phenomenon, consciousness, emerged. How does physical matter produce conscious experience? Science has no plausible answer.

5. The Existence of Objective Moral Laws: Science can tell us what is the case in the natural world, but it cannot tell us what ought to be the case. It can explain why people have subjective moral sentiments, perhaps, but it cannot explain how objective moral duties could arise, where they would've come from, why they're binding on us, and so on. Indeed, any such explanation, even were one possible on naturalism, would be philosophical, not scientific.

These five phenomena come from Moreland's book, but the summaries of them are mine. Moreland's treatment of each is much more detailed than what I've provided here, and he argues that each of these is more compatible with a theistic ontology than any of them are with naturalism.

I enthusiastically recommend his book to anyone interested in the philosophy of science, the explanatory limits of science, and/or the interface of science and theism.

Cultural Mindlessness

In the mid-1980s a sociologist by the name of Neil Postman wrote a book that was destined to become a classic in cultural criticism. The book was titled Amusing Ourselves to Death the thesis of which was that television dumbed down everything and that our politics would eventually be transmogrified by the electronic medium from a serious exercise in selecting the people who would guide our national destiny into little more than a frivolous spectacle.

A couple of years ago journalist Paul Brian wrote a column at The Federalist which amplified Postman's prescient prognostication and in which he argued that television is corrupting not just our politics but our very ability to think. Here are some excerpts:

Postman saw today’s click-craving, faux-outrage 24/7 news cycle slouching over the field of satellite dishes to be born from decades away. Even though the Internet Age was not yet upon him, he saw where the path of everything-as-entertainment was leading: to people having shorter average attention spans than goldfish, to a continuous present where contradictions and context are just minor details of no great interest.

“With television we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present,” Postman writes. “In a world of discontinuities, contradiction is useless as a test of truth or merit.”

In foreseeing the climate that would pave the way for pure-celebrity candidates like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Ventura, and Donald Trump, not to mention the elevation of politicians like President Barack Obama to celebrity status, Postman surely deserves his reputation as the Nostradamus of the digital age.

The game show sets upon which our candidates stage their debates, the sporting event atmosphere that the media creates, the melodramatic "countdowns" to the debates and elections, the fascination with sexual scandal, the focus on whether some trivial development will help or hurt a candidate rather than on whether it's really even relevant to the issues that should concern us, all conspire to stifle thought.

Campaigns are no longer vehicles for helping voters understand issues and discern truth so much as extravaganzas exploited by the media to attract viewers who wish merely to be entertained.

Serious discussion of issues requires thinking and the strenuous exercise of reason, but that's not a promising way to garner ratings among the unthinking masses of television viewers. Better to package campaigns and candidates in a political version of Survivor:

We now live in a political climate where politicians embrace fame. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau makes national news for being photographed shirtless. Trump hires a media provocateur as his campaign CEO, prompting speculation his plan is to form a media empire if his presidential run doesn’t pan out. Hillary Clinton’s supporters fret that her appearance on Kimmel received lower ratings than reruns of Teen Moms and Friends (but she’s trying to increase star power by hanging out with Justin Timberlake).

Amusing Ourselves to Death essentially champions Aldous Huxley’s vision of the future in Brave New World over George Orwell’s vision in 1984.

“Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacity to think,” Postman writes.

To extend the Big Brother metaphor: Is he so funny/annoying/brilliant/stupid/crazy/ridiculous that you can’t look away? Good news: because of the high ratings he’ll be back with all-new episodes next season.

“In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours,” Postman prophesies with dark humor. Orwell saw a future where books were banned, Huxley one in which there was no need to ban books because nobody wanted to read them in the first place.

The media beguiles us into focusing on which candidate has made the most serious gaffe or committed the greatest outrage against social orthodoxy or articulated the cleverest put-down. We receive constant reminders as to who looks old, who looks tired, who looks frumpy. What the candidate would actually do if elected is barely given a thought by a media determined to seduce us with breathless reports of a candidate's eloquence, style, charm, and afflatus, but rarely analyzing in any serious way the quality of a candidate's ideas. They seem determined to amuse us to death.

Postman endeavors to prove that in the Age of Typography (elsewhere he calls it the Age of Exposition), when books and print newspapers were the sole source of information, discourse was “generally coherent, serious and rational.” But in the Age of Television (elsewhere he calls it the Age of Show Business), political discourse in particular has become “shriveled and absurd,” reliant on context-free snippets of information and entertaining spectacles and gaffes.

And it's not just our politics which suffers from this infatuation with the trivial and mindless. Sporting events are turned into multimedia assaults on the senses and intellect with halftime rock bands and fireworks and meaningless sideline interviews involving vacuous questions posed by witless "reporters."

Nor is religion immune. Too many church services feature epilepsy-inducing strobe lights, artificial stage fog, deafeningly high decibel "worship" music, and flamboyant preachers whose message, even if it's occasionally worth hearing, is often obscured by the medium in which it's presented.

One example of mind-dulling news reportage, albeit one of minor importance, is the radio news report that features a snippet of often unintelligible background noise from some foreign trouble site. Sometimes it's screaming sirens, or machinery noise, or people yelling in a foreign tongue. Listeners aren't supposed to ask what the actual purpose of playing that particular sound bite could possibly be, they're just supposed to allow it to anesthetize them into an acquiescence to the pointlessness of it.

Postman and Brian, I think, are right. We are not a people who want to think. We're a people who want to be able to avoid thinking, especially about politics. We really want only to be distracted and entertained. Brian quotes Postman:

“Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice,” he writes. “The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.”

There's more good stuff from Brian's article at the link.

Making Themselves Look Foolish

In the wake of the tragedy in Pittsburgh on Saturday in which a lunatic hater broke into a synagogue and murdered eleven Jewish congregants and wounded a number of others, some in the liberal media saw in this horrific slaughter an opportunity to score political points against President Trump.

Were the context surrounding their effort to smear the president not so tragic the effort itself would be amusing for its sheer absurdity.

Numerous attempts were made by commentators in liberal media outlets to accuse Mr. Trump of being an anti-semite whose rhetoric has nurtured a climate of hate so virulent that the more looney among his supporters feel justified in taking up weapons to kill Jews.

One wonders how intelligent people can sincerely make such an allegation given several widely known facts: First, the man who committed this crime was known to despise Donald Trump. He regarded the president as being too sympathetic to Jewish interests.

Second, the president's daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner are both followers of the Jewish faith.

Third, the president is a hero among Israeli Jews who have even named streets and plazas after him in Israel.

Fourth, President Trump has repeatedly condemned anti-semitism (see here and here) and all forms of bigotry.

Nevertheless, the progressive left is unfazed by any of this. They see a chance to discredit the president and they're not going to pass it up, even if it means making themselves look foolish and desperate.

If rhetoric has a causal effect on actions then we might ask when the left is going to start holding Louis Farrakhan, Linda Sarsour, et al. accountable for their hateful rhetoric toward Jews.

When are they going to hold people like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton accountable for legitimizing people like this by being seen in their company? And when are liberals going to demand that universities clean up the left-wing anti-semitic garbage dumps that exist on some of our campuses?

Julia Ioffe in the Washington Post cites some ambiguous quotes and ads for which alleges Mr. Trump bears ultimate responsibility as proof that he has stoked ethnic resentments among the morally sick far right groups. She writes:

Trump has had enough to say about the Jews that his supporters may easily make certain pernicious inferences. During the campaign, he joked at a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition that it wouldn’t support him “because I don’t want your money.” A campaign-era tweet about Hillary Clinton superimposed a Star of David over dollar bills. He said the white-supremacist marchers at Charlottesville last year were “fine people.”

After I published a profile of Trump’s third wife, Melania, that displeased her — and his supporters — the alt-right deluged me with anti-Semitic insults and imagery, culminating in clear death threats — such as an image of a Jew being shot execution-style or people ordering coffins in my name. When Trump was asked to condemn these attacks by his supporters, he said, “I don’t have a message” for them.

Aside from the fact that Ioffe's claim that Trump averred that the white-supremacists at Charlottesville were fine people is dubious (A more charitable rendering is that he was referring to the fact that there were many people present at the Charlottesville protest who were not affiliated with the extremists of either left or right) her examples prove exactly what?

Surely, the fact that people can read into such things whatever they wish to support their own prejudices is no warrant for the conclusion that Mr. Trump is himself a Jew-hater or sympathetic to those who hate Jews. Mr. Trump is no more responsible for what this man did in Pittsburgh, and indeed arguably much less responsible, than Bernie Sanders is responsible for the actions of one of his campaign workers who shot up a GOP baseball practice and nearly killed Rep. Steve Scalise.

But none of this matters to our friends on the left. They seem determined to blame President Trump for anything and everything that goes wrong. If a meteorite strikes the earth causing widespread devastation the progressive media will somehow manage to convince themselves that Mr. Trump bears responsibility for the catastrophe.

Perhaps the electorate will be swayed in November by the left's metronomic imputation of blame and their incessant moral outrage, or perhaps people will just tune it all out as so much sound and fury, signifying nothing. We'll see.

Meanwhile, here's something to consider. November 5th will be the one year anniversary of the deadliest attack on a house of worship in American history. On that date last year Devin Patrick Kelley walked into First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas and killed 26 worshippers, including the pastor's daughter, and wounded dozens more. Kelley was an atheist who held Christianity and Christians in contempt.

Does the media hold prominent atheists who have written of their contempt for Christianity - people like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris - responsible for this atrocity? Of course not, nor should they, but doing so would be far more justifiable than holding Donald Trump somehow responsible for the murders of eleven Jews in Pittsburgh on Saturday.