Senator Gillibrand's Peculiar Reasoning

It's hard to take someone seriously who makes claims such as the one made by New York senator and Democratic presidential aspirant Kirsten Gillibrand the other day. In an interview with the Des Moines Register in Iowa Senator Gillibrand opined that being pro-life was not much different than being racist.

Three claims in particular highlight simultaneously Ms. Gillibrand's marvelous ability to pander to her audience while also demonstrating an unfortunate inability to think through what she's saying.

Let's begin with this one:

I think there’s some issues that have such moral clarity that we have as a society decided that the other side is not acceptable. Imagine saying that it’s okay to appoint a judge who’s racist or anti-Semitic or homophobic. Telling– asking someone to appoint someone who takes away basic human rights of any group of people in America, I don’t think that those are political issues anymore.

Has it occured to Ms Gillibrand that appointing pro-choice judges would deprive the weakest, most vulnerable group of people in America of their basic human rights? Or does Ms. Gillibrand think, like southern plantation owners did, that only some human beings have human rights?

Moreover, in what sense is telling a mother that she cannot end the life of her child comparable to racism or anti-semitism? Indeed, isn't it more accurate to say that the worst episode of anti-semitism in the history of the world was predicated upon the assumption that millions of people were less than fully human. Isn't that exactly the assumption that Senator Gillibrand is advocating?

The senator next declared that she respects “the rights of every American to hold their religious beliefs true to themselves,” whatever that means, but went on to suggest that the principle of “separation of church and state” demands that “ultra-radical conservative judges and justices” not “impose their faith on Americans.”

Evidently, Ms. Gillibrand fails to recognize that opposition to abortion is not opposed solely for religious reasons. Indeed, someone should inform the senator that there are atheists who are pro-life. Opposition to abortion is motivated by humanitarian reasons which, to be sure, are themselves often motivated by religious convictions.

I wonder if Ms. Gillibrand would've raised an objection to judges "imposing their faith on Americans" when, for reasons of religious principle, many politicos and jurists supported civil rights legislation, welfare laws and sanctuary cities.

But, set that aside. If we take these two passages together an even more peculiar aspect of the senator's thinking emerges. She asserts in the first quote that pro-lifers wish to deny a basic human right to women and in the second quote that pro-lifers should keep their religion out of matters like this.

So, the question presents itself, where does Ms. Gillibrand think human rights come from if not from a fundamentally religious understanding of persons? If she wants to talk about human rights she has to allow for the discussion of religion since religion, or at least theism, is the only ultimate foundation for non-arbitrary human rights that there can be.

Surely secularism offers no sound basis for them. On any non-theistic worldview human beings are simply machines, computers made of meat, as MIT professor Marvin Minsky once put it. Machines have no free will, no dignity, no responsibility and no rights of any kind.

So, either we speak of human rights and allow religious views to be brought to bear on the matter or we banish both religious motivations along with all talk of human rights. We can't have one without the other.

The third passage is equally disappointing for anyone who expects a modicum of philosophical sophistication from a United States senator. Having just declared that religion has no place in the public square she delivers herself of this:

There’s no moral equivalency when it comes to racism. And I do not think there’s a moral equivalency when it comes to changing laws that deny women reproductive freedom.

Now she's talking about morality, and the same principle that we invoked with regard to human rights applies equally to morality. Moral talk is empty nonsense apart from some objective basis for it, and the only objective basis for morality is a transcendent moral authority. Everything else leads to subjectivism of one form or another.

Thus, Ms. Gillibrand has plopped us right back into the realm of religious belief.

It's an inescapable fact that only those people who believe that there's a transcendent moral authority to whom we are all accountable can talk coherently or meaningfully about either human rights or morality. If Ms. Gillibrand wants to expel such people from the public square she should at least have the good sense to also refrain from talking about human rights and morality and just admit that her views on abortion have nothing to do with either.

Put differently, her pronouncements in the Des Moines Register, if we grant that they were heartfelt and not just an instance of Bidenesque political expediency, reflect views rooted in emotion, not logic or reason.

Ms. Gillibrand's comments are vulnerable to other criticisms as well, and Chrissy Clark at The Federalist does a fine job of illuminating some of these.

Abandoning the Mind

In his recently-released book Darwin Devolves biochemist Michael Behe argues that the genome of living things is the product not of material or physical forces, but of a mind. Mind is the ultimate reality and underlies both the cosmos and life.

This is, of course, anathema to materialists who deny there is any such thing as an immaterial mind, whether cosmic or human. Mind, materialists allege, is simply a word we use to describe the function of the brain like we use the word digestion to describe the function of the stomach.

On this view, the brain is like an advanced computer that takes electrochemical inputs and converts them into outputs, but this analogy to a computer surely fails to fully capture what's going on in our cognitive experience.

For example, there are a host of cognitive capabilities and experiences of which humans are capable but computers are not. Human beings are aware, they have beliefs, doubts, regrets, hopes, resentments, frustrations, worries, desires and intentions. They experience gratitude, boredom, curiosity, interest, pleasure, pain, flavor, color, fragrance and warmth.

In addition, they appreciate beauty, humor, meaning and significance. They can distinguish between good and bad, right and wrong. They can apprehend abstract ideas like universals or math. They have a sense of being a self, they have memories which seem to be rooted in the past, either of recent or more remote origin. They have a sense of past, present and future. They have ideas and understand those ideas.

Computers have none of this. There's a vast chasm separating matter and conscious human experience. The robot Sonny in the movie I, Robot notwithstanding, computers don't feel.

Some materialist philosophers like Paul and Patricia Churchland have concluded that since it's difficult to see how these capabilities and experiences can be produced by the mere exchange of electrons amongst atoms arrayed along a neuron it must be the case that these phenomena are actually just illusions of some sort.

The Churchlands write, that "common-sense mental states, such as beliefs and desires, do not exist," but even an illusion is a mental state that's hard to explain in terms of chemical reactions. How does a molecular interaction give rise to an illusion?

Moreover, there's something very odd about philosophers saying that the beliefs they hold, write books about, and teach their students - beliefs about materialism, for example - don't really exist. It's equally peculiar that philosophers would insist that their understanding of materialism is nothing more than chemical reactions in their brains. If that's so, why should anyone think it's true? Chemical reactions are not the sort of thing that can be either true or false.

Philosopher Paul Feyerabend noted once that, "Practically any version of materialism would severely undermine common-sense psychology," and indeed he was right.

As neuroscientist Michael Egnor drolly observes in the video below, materialists "...understand that materialism cannot explain the mind [but] rather than abandoning materialism, they abandon the mind.”

The video is courtesy of Evolution News and is the second in the series titled Science Uprising.

Three-Headed Monster

Melissa Langsam Braunstein writing at The Federalist wonders whether America is beginning to suffer the same growing anti-semitism that afflicts our European friends:

It’s an unavoidable, even urgent question. After deadly attacks in Pittsburgh and Poway, along with openly anti-Semitic rhetoric in the U.S. Congress and anti-Semitic imagery in The New York Times, the climate has clearly changed.

Braunstein portrays anti-Semitism in the U.S. as a beast with three heads:

The world’s oldest hatred, which began a resurgence in Europe at the turn of the century... is a three-headed monster: it exists on the far-left, the far-right, and among Islamists.

Actually, I don't think it's confined to just the far left. It seems to be mainstream among progressive students and faculty on many university campuses and becoming increasingly so among the Democratic caucus in Congress.

Braunstein quotes a non-Jewish woman who was a lifelong member of the (presumably British) Labour Party who quit the party because of its overt anti-Semitism. Paraphrasing Martin Niemöller, the Lutheran pastor who lived through the Nazi era in Germany, she declared that, "It all started on the campuses, and we did nothing because they were students. We did nothing when they joined the party because it was just the left-wing fringe, and now they’ve taken over my party, and it’s not mine anymore."

Could this be happening here? Many Americans, eager to avoid the appearance of anti-Muslim bias, seem reluctant to speak out against Muslim hatred of Jews. Progressives, not wanting to alienate useful allies on the left, are reluctant to speak out against the haters among their own number. The only anti-Semites who are not being ignored or given a pass are those on the far-right who are generally condemned by both liberals and conservatives.

The insidiousness of race or ethnic hatred must not be tolerated by anyone, however, and to the extent that it is, whether on campus or in the halls of Congress, it's a sign that we are slipping back toward the darkness of another Kristallnacht and 1938.

Three Metaethical Tests

A young friend recently published a paper (You can find it via the Table of Contents here) in the journal Tolle Lege in which he offered a critique of the late Philippa Foot's attempt to derive ethical norms in the context of a naturalistic (atheistic) worldview.

His paper is well-conceived, and in writing to commend him for his work I added some thoughts of my own on the subject. I opined that it seems to me that any ethic, naturalistic or otherwise, has to accomplish three things in order to be credible:

1. It has to avoid David Hume's Is/Ought fallacy (sometimes called, appropriately enough, the naturalistic fallacy). In other words, as the great Scottish skeptic taught us, we cannot say that because things are a certain way that therefore they ought to be that way. Human beings have certain moral feelings, but we cannot argue that those sentiments are right just because we have them.

After all, we also have feelings of hatred, selfishness, avarice, violence, etc., but most of us don't think that behaving in accord with those feelings would be morally proper.

2. It has to explain the sense in which the idea of a moral wrong can be meaningful if there's no ultimate accountability for one's behavior. In other words, if a tyrant is rewarded with great wealth and power and dies old and content in his bed, in what sense was the suffering he caused others wrong? It seems to me that "wrong" as an ontic entity can only exist if there also exists ultimate justice and inevitable accountability in the cosmos, and those can only exist if God exists and naturalism is false.

3. Related to #2 is the problem of explaining what we mean when we say that "X is wrong." Is X wrong merely because other people don't like it, as Hume suggested, or is it wrong because it somehow violates the moral order of the cosmos? If it's the former then "X is wrong" is merely a subjective expression of personal preference or an emotive reaction to something that's personally repugnant, like exclaiming "ugh!"

On the other hand, if X is wrong because it offends against the moral order of the cosmos, an order that somehow mysteriously imposes obligations upon us, then the naturalist has to explain how an impersonal, purely material world can levy such obligations or possess any kind of "moral order" in the first place.

It's hard to see how a naturalistic ethic, based as it is on the assumption that the physical universe is all there is and that human beings are just an ephemeral collection of atoms and molecules, can muster the metaphysical resources to meet any of these tests.

That being so, it follows that when naturalists make moral judgments or use moral language, they're doing nothing more than expressing their own approbation or revulsion, like saying "yummy" at being presented with a dish of one's favorite ice cream, or shuddering at the suggestion of mixing it with tuna fish.

That so few naturalists realize the utter subjectivity, arbitrariness and vacuity of their moral views, whatever those views happen to be, is an interesting sociological phenomenon, as is the fact that so few others ever seem to call them on it.

Analyzing the American Right

Matthew Continetti has written an interesting analysis of contemporary conservatism at The Washington Free Beacon in which he argues that conservatism in the 21st century is not a monolithic movement but, on the contrary, an amalgam of disparate interests, philosophies and worldviews.

He opens his essay with this lede:

I like to start my classes on conservative intellectual history by distinguishing between three groups. There is the Republican Party, with its millions of adherents and spectrum of opinion from very conservative, somewhat conservative, moderate, and yes, liberal.

There is the conservative movement, the constellation of single-issue nonprofits that sprung up in the 1970s—gun rights, pro-life, taxpayer, right to work—and continue to influence elected officials. Finally, there is the conservative intellectual movement: writers, scholars, and wonks whose journalistic and political work deals mainly with ideas and, if we're lucky, their translation into public policy.

It's a common mistake to conflate these groups. The Republican Party is a vast coalition that both predates and possibly will post-date the conservative movement. That movement has had mixed success in moving the party to the right, partly because of cynicism and corruption but also because politicians must, at the end of the day, take into account the shifting and often contradictory views of their constituents. The conservative intellectual movement exercises the least power of all. You could fit its members into a convention hall or, more likely, a cruise ship.

Despite having minimized the importance of conservative intellectuals, of which he is one, the rest of his column is devoted to a taxonomy of this group. He divides them into four groups, each represented by a particular political or media figure.

The four groups or approaches to conservatism he labels Jacksonian, Reformocon, Paleo and Post-Liberal. The distinctions seem awfully subtle to my mind, and there are certainly no sharp demarcations between groups, but his analysis is interesting nonetheless.

The Jacksonians are populists and as such it may seem inappropriate to discuss them in conjunction with intellectual trends. Continetti writes of them that,

Jacksonians are neither partisans nor ideologues. The sentiments they express are older than postwar conservatism and in some ways more intrinsically American. (They do not look toward Burke or Hayek or Strauss, for example.) The Jacksonians have been behind populist rebellions since the Founding. They are part of a tradition, for good and ill, that runs through William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace, Ronald Reagan, Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, Jim Webb, Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, and Donald Trump.

Reformed Conservatism (Reformocons), Continetti writes,

....began toward the end of George W. Bush's presidency, with the publication of Yuval Levin's "Putting Parents First" in The Weekly Standard in 2006 and of Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam's Grand New Party in 2008 .... Its aim is to nudge the Republican Party to adapt to changing social and economic conditions.

I glean from what else he says about them that many conservative Never-Trumpers belong to this group.

The Paleos include among their number people like talk show host and author Tucker Carlson as well as some of the folks at The American Conservative and The Washington Examiner. Continetti says of Carlson that he "offers a mix of traditional social values, suspicion of globalization, and non-interventionism every weekday on cable television," and he "touched off an important debate with his January 3 opening monologue on markets. 'Culture and economics are inseparably intertwined,' Carlson said. 'Certain economic systems allow families to thrive. Thriving families make market economies possible. You can't separate the two.' "

The Post-liberals reside at journals like First Things. Continetti writes of them that,

The Post-liberals say that freedom has become a destructive end-in-itself. Economic freedom has brought about a global system of trade and finance that has outsourced jobs, shifted resources to the metropolitan coasts, and obscured its self-seeking under the veneer of social justice.

Personal freedom has ended up in the mainstreaming of pornography, alcohol, drug, and gambling addiction, abortion, single-parent families, and the repression of orthodox religious practice and conscience. "When an ideological liberalism seeks to dictate our foreign policy and dominate our religious and charitable institutions, tyranny is the result, at home and abroad," wrote the signatories to "Against the Dead Consensus," a post-liberal manifesto of sorts published in First Things in March.

Despite the fact that Continetti is focussing on conservative intellectuals in this article, and not the Republican party, he nevertheless identifies a Republican senator with each group, although he acknowledges that some of these men might balk at being identified with the particular strand of conservatism to which he attaches them. The senators are Tom Cotton (Jacksonian), Marco Rubio (Reformocon), Mike Lee (Paleo) and Josh Hawley (Post-liberal).

If you're interested in political philosophy or political science Continetti's analysis may help you understand contemporary conservatism. Or it may confuse you.

Darwin Devolves

Biochemist Michael Behe created a huge controversy in the field of evolutionary biology a couple of decades ago when he came out with his book Darwin's Black Box in which he introduced the concept of irreducible complexity (IC) and argued that, although IC is ubiquitous in living things, it cannot be accounted for by any theory that insists that evolution is an unguided process.

Now Behe has again proven himself the bete noir of naturalistic evolutionists with the recent release of Darwin Devolves in which he turns the whole theory of evolution on its head.

I have not yet finished the book and don't know what implications he will draw from the research he has documented so far, but his argument thus far is revolutionary.

As traditionally taught, Darwinian evolution holds that life began as a very simple cell and that gradually, over vast stretches of time, the descendents of that cell increased in complexity, adding new genetic information through mutation and natural selection, eventually culminating in the enormous diversity of living things we see today.

Behe amasses an impressive array of contemporary scientific research to show that that's not what happens at all. The evolutionary process, Behe argues, is actually the reverse of the traditional view. The evidence that has been acquired since the turn of the millenium reveals that when species adapt to their environment and new varieties are formed it's actually by means of a loss of genetic information.

Adaptation is usually a result of genes being "broken or blunted" thus resulting in less genetic diversity than the parent species had but allowing the daughter species to thrive in a particular environment. He writes that, "...the great majority of even beneficial positively selected mutations damage an organism's genetic information - either degrading or outright destroying [genetic function]."

An example is the bacterium Escherichia coli which normally cannot eat citrate in the presence of oxygen. Researchers, however, have found that a mutant strain of E. coli could eat citrate when oxygen was present giving the mutant an enormous advantage over the normal variety.

When the researchers studied the mutant to learn what change in its molecular makeup had triggered this ability they discovered that the gene for a protein that imports citrate into the cell is switched off when oxygen is present, but that in the mutant form the control region for that gene was broken, thus keeping it "on" all the time and continuously producing the protein that imported the citrate.

In other words, in this and every other case of evolutionary change that can be studied at the molecular level, the change is a result of a loss of genetic information, not a gain.

This has stunning implications. If Behe's right it means that the classical evolutionary tale that starts with chemicals in some primordial soup coming together to form a replicating cell and then leading through a long process of mutation and natural selection to increased genetic information and complexity is exactly wrong. In fact, the reverse appears to be the case.

It appears that in the beginning there was an enormous reservoir of genetic information stored in a relatively few basic forms of living things and that over time mutation and natural selection brought about increasing diversity of species by actually diminishing the amount of that information.

If Behe is right it'll surely generate a firestorm in the scientific and philosophical communities since its main thesis is that contemporary science is completely at odds with naturalistic "molecules to man" Darwinism and much more compatible with the traditional view that life is the product of intelligent agency.

Darwin Devolves is not overly technical and will, I think, be must reading for anyone interested in the questions of origins and the philosophical and scientific implications of those questions.

J.S. Mill on Intellectual Virtue

One of my favorite works in philosophy is a book by the English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) titled On Liberty. Throughout this elegantly written essay Mill offers excellent advice on how to think clearly about the proper limits of state coercion and the freedom of the individual citizen.

In chapter two he takes up the related topic of a citizen's responsibility to inform him or herself on important matters like "morals, religion, politics, social relations, and the business of life". In these, Mill suggests, we should make it our practice to follow the example of one of the greatest rhetoricians in history, Marcus Tullius Cicero.

Mill writes:

The greatest orator, save one, of antiquity, has left it on record that he always studied his adversary’s case with as great, if not with still greater, intensity than even his own. What Cicero practised as the means of forensic success, requires to be imitated by all who study any subject in order to arrive at the truth.

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most inclination.

How many people know, for example, the arguments on the other side of the issue from their own on matters like the existence of God, evolution, immigration, climate change, abortion, gay marriage, etc.? If we don't know what the opposing arguments are on such questions how are we justified in dogmatically declaring or believing that our opinion is the only one that it's reasonable to hold?

Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them.

He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of; else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty.

In other words, if we only hear opposing views from those who agree with our position then we're probably not hearing those views presented as cogently as they would be by someone who really believed them. We shouldn't be afraid to read books and listen to lectures by people with whom we disagree. It'll either sharpen our own views or lead us closer to the truth.

Those on college campuses today who seek to shout down speakers they disagree with, or to prevent them from even appearing on campus, are, in addition to revealing their own intellectual primitiveness, doing both the truth and their fellow students a grave disservice.

John Stuart Mill

Most people, even educated people, Mill laments, don't really know the arguments against the positions they hold:

Ninety-nine in a hundred of what are called educated men are in this condition; even of those who can argue fluently for their opinions. Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them, and considered what such persons may have to say; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess.

They do not know those parts of it which explain and justify the remainder; the considerations which show that a fact which seemingly conflicts with another is reconcilable with it, or that, of two apparently strong reasons, one and not the other ought to be preferred. All that part of the truth which turns the scale, and decides the judgment of a completely informed mind, they are strangers to; nor is it ever really known, but to those who have attended equally and impartially to both sides, and endeavoured to see the reasons of both in the strongest light.

Of course, few people have the time, let alone the inclination, to thoroughly explore all sides of all important issues, but if we don't then we certainly have no justification for being dogmatic in expressing our opinions. It would be better instead to display a genuinely open-minded intellectual humility which, so far from communicating the message, "I'm right and you're wrong", says instead that, "I might well not know all that I should about this matter, but here's what I think based on what I do know...."

Unfortunately, just as in Mill's time, open-mindedness and humility are two intellectual virtues not conspicuous among those participating in debates on the issues of our day.

Science Uprising

The Discovery Institute has put together a series of short videos titled Science Uprising in which they challenge some of the claims being made nowadays by scientists which aren't really scientific claims at all but rather metaphysical dogma.

The first video in the series challenges the widespread assumption that science requires a materialist worldview. Materialism is the philosophical conviction that everything that exists is either matter or derived from matter (e.g. heat and light are derived from the combustion of material wood).

The view that only matter exists is not one that can be demonstrated scientifically and must be accepted by some sort of faith commitment, ironically enough.

Not only is materialism a metaphysical, rather than a scientific, hypothesis, but it leads to some bizarre consequences. For instance, many materialists deny that there is such a thing as consciousness because consciousness is immaterial. All there are, these materialists assert, is a swirl of chemical reactions occuring in the brain resulting in awareness, ideas and sensations.

Yet ideas are about something. How can anything that results from a material process like an electrochemical reaction be about anything? Moreover, when you have an idea you often understand what you're thinking about. How do molecules exchanging electrons generate understanding?

How, for that matter, do electrons traveling along neurons and jumping across synapses produce a belief, a doubt or a regret? How does a cascade of chemical reactions and electrical signals create pain, a color or a sound out of sheer energy?

Anyway, philosopher Jay Richards, who also appears in episode one of the Science Uprising series, gives us a primer on materialism and some of its shortcomings in this eleven minute video:

Here's episode one of the series:

Thanks to Evolution News for the videos.

Human Rights and Bernie Sanders

Matthew Continetti has a fine essay at The Washington Free Beacon in which he explains why he's doubtful that despite the best efforts of the progressive media to promote the prospects of the leftmost elements in the Democratic party, socialism will not be successful in gaining a foothold with the American people any time soon.

Golden girls like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and golden agers like Bernie Sanders are seen by most Americans as curiosities rather than as serious political figures capable of leading us into the sunny uplands of the social welfare state. Indeed, most Americans really don't know what socialism is since it's advocates are often vague or misleading about what their proposals would actually entail, and when they're told what it is they declare that they want no part of it.

The article is informative and makes for good reading, but there's one passage in it that caught my attention even though it's actually only incidental to Continetti's theme. In it he quotes Bernie Sanders telling an interviewer that,

...socialism "means economic rights and human rights. I believe from the bottom of my heart that healthcare is a human right. … To be a democratic socialist means that we believe—I believe—that human rights include a decent job, affordable housing, health care, education, and, by the way, a clean environment."

This strikes me as a very odd thing for Mr. Sanders to say because according to CNN Sanders is thoroughly secular, i.e. he has no belief in any transcendent source of human rights.

If this be so, has he never wondered where human rights come from or how there could even be such things?

If there's no God from whence comes a "right" to a decent job, affordable housing, healthcare, education and a clean environment? If one has no belief in a divine provenience of our rights, what does it even mean to say that something is a "human right"? Why do humans have rights and how do we decide what they are?

The concept of human rights arose out of the thinking of Christian canonists in the Middle Ages and gradually evolved to its current state of development. It was predicated on the belief that human beings are created by God in His image, that we are loved by God, that we are all equal in his sight and that God demands that we treat each other in accord with those facts of our existence. It was also based upon the belief that we'll be held accountable for how justly we treat our fellow man.

Do away with this suite of theological premises and we're left with nothing upon which to base the notion of human rights except subjective sentimentality. Certainly, there's nothing in the evolutionary process nor any other naturalistic source that's adequate to ground objective notions of equality, dignity and accountability.

On Sanders' secularism human rights are a fiction, an illusion, something we fabricate to make the country easier to govern, but they're no more substantial than a mirage. They're like the arbitrary rules of a game which can be changed, or even dispensed with, by anyone who has the power to do so.

One wishes that the next time he does an interview someone would ask Sanders what he thinks it is which provides the foundation for his belief in human rights, but unfortunately such questions never seem to occur to interviewers, or, if they do, perhaps they're thought impolite or impertinent.

In any case, they never get asked which is a pity.

Wise Words from RR

Somebody started an email that lists some of former president Ronald Reagan's best quotes and they're so good I thought I'd share them on VP. Here they are:

• "Socialism only works in two places: Heaven where they don't need it and hell where they already have it."
• "Here's my strategy on the Cold War: We win, they lose."
• "The most terrifying words In the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'"
• "The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so."
• "Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the US. was too strong."
• "I have wondered at times about what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the U.S. Congress."
• "The taxpayer: That's someone who works for the federal government but doesn't have to take the civil service examination."
• "Government is like a baby: An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other."
• "The nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this earth is a government program."
• "It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first."
• "Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."
• "Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed, there are many rewards; if you disgrace yourself, you can always write a book."
• "No arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is as formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women."
• "If we ever forget that we're one nation under GOD, then we will be a nation gone under."

Good stuff.

The MLK Revelations

Martin Luther King biographer David Garrow has a lengthy column in the British magazine Standpoint in which he makes public some extremely troubling details about the personal character of civil rights icon Martin Luther King.

Stories about King's alleged infidelities and other personal flaws have been in public circulation ever since the 1960s, but Garrow has dug into some long-buried FBI files which, if genuine, not only document sordid personal behavior but also raise even deeper concerns.

One of the most disturbing incidents is summarized in the first paragraph:

Newly-released documents reveal the full extent of the FBI’s surveillance of the civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King in the mid-1960s. They expose in graphic detail the FBI’s intense focus on King’s extensive extramarital sexual relationships with dozens of women, and also his presence in a Washington hotel room when a friend, a Baptist minister, allegedly raped one of his “parishioners”, while King “looked on, laughed and offered advice”. The FBI’s tape recording of that criminal assault still exists today, resting under court seal in a National Archives vault.

Garrow's article contains more repugnant details about King's conduct with women and also reveals an FBI which behaved execrably in their surveillance of King, but what I'd like to focus on is the interesting test for the progressive left that his essay confronts them with.

Progressives have insisted that monuments to historical figures who were revered for their accomplishments should be torn down because these men were morally flawed in one way or another. There's a movement currently afoot, in fact, to expunge the name of Thomas Jefferson from everything that's been named for him.

Progressives were willing, too, on the basis of very meager testimony, to destroy the career and reputation of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh over allegations that as an inebriated high school student, he momentarily laid on top of an unwilling girl at a party and groped her.

Progressives are also willing to condemn Donald Trump because of his boorish attitudes toward women, his infidelities, and his illicit association with the pornographic "actress" Stormy Daniels.

Moreover, progressives are so eager to destroy Mr. Trump's presidency and rid the nation of any vestige of his memory that they're willing to publicize a bogus and discredited dossier, ginned up by people in the employ of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, which alleges that Donald Trump conducted himself treasonously with the Russians and scandalously with prostitutes.

Now, though, our progressive friends must make a decision. Will they apply the same standard to Martin Luther King that they've invoked against other historically venerated Americans and to those they currently consider to be political enemies?

Although the allegations made by Mr. Garrow do indeed paint a loathsome picture of Mr. King, we should bear in mind that we're all sinners, none of us is perfect, all of our heroes are men and women with feet of clay. If Mr. King did the things the article alleges then we may justly feel deeply disappointed and repelled even as we acknowledge that great men are often as deeply flawed in some respects as they are great in others.

None of this should be construed as an attempt to excuse or minimize revolting behavior, but rather to stress that most men are like the Scottish preacher who when complimented by a female parishioner for his moral rectitude replied, "Madam, if you could see into my heart you would spit in my face."

Even so, for people like contemporary progressives who implicitly maintain that no one who has ever said or done shameful things should ever be promoted to high office or places of honor, and must be discredited and ruined if they have been, the course is clear.

Not only must they, if they're to be consistent, renew their calls for the resignation of officials like Virginia's Democratic governor Ralph Northam who once posed for a yearbook photo that seemed to glamorize the KKK and demean African Americans, they must also demand that every street and school named for Martin Luther King be renamed and his monument near the National Mall in Washington, D.C. be removed.

Either that or stop holding their political opponents to a standard they're unwilling to apply to those whom they admire.

Anything short of this will reveal that our progressive friends don't really care that Thomas Jefferson et al. owned slaves, nor that as an intoxicated teenager Brett Kavanaugh got overly aggressive with a woman or that Donald Trump did any of the nefarious things he's accused of.

It will reveal that progressives, or at least many of them, care little about principles, that they care chiefly about the acquisition of political power and will gladly employ whatever tactics help them attain it. If they decline to treat King the way they want Jefferson, Kavanaugh and Trump treated they're tacitly admitting that for them whatever works is right and that their only moral imperative is to win by any means necessary.

Ubiquitous Reason

There's an essay by philosopher Justin E.H. Smith at Aeon in which he seems at pains to somehow show that the faculty we call "reason" is not unique to human beings nor exceptional in the universe.

Why? Apparently because if humans are the exclusive repository of reason then that would make us special and human specialness is much more compatible with a theistic worldview than with the naturalistic worldview Smith is eager to defend:

In answering the where question of reason in this maximally broad way, we are able to preserve the naturalism that philosophy and cognitive science insist upon today, while dispensing with the human-exclusivity of reason. And all the better, since faith in the strange idea that reason appears exactly once in nature, in one particular species and nowhere else, seems, on reflection, to be itself a vestige of pre-scientific supernaturalism....

In order, however, to argue that reason exists everywhere, a kind of panpsychic view of reason, he has to adopt what some might think a rather tendentious definition of the term. "What if reason," he asks, "is not so much an inferential ability, as simply the power to do the right thing in the right circumstances?"

In other words, reason may not involve deliberation at all on Smith's view. It's simply a reactive, reflexive process that everything in nature possesses or is capable of. This is surely a strange definition. If reason is the power to do the right thing in the right circumstances then a rock which falls to earth when released is exercising reason.

Smith makes the point clear in this passage:

Potentially, it’s not just living beings that fall under the scope of this alternative interpretation of reason as the power to move directly to action, rather than the power of making the correct inference. For everything in nature also just does what it does, simply and without deliberation, by virtue of the fact that everything in nature is bound by the same physical laws.

Nature just keeps working smoothly. It never, ever breaks down.

Nature itself is a rational order, on this alternative view, both as a whole and in any of its subdomains. Reason is everywhere, with human reason being only an instantiation or reflection, within a very tiny subdomain, of the universal reason that informs the natural world. So perhaps it is also time to give up the idea of rationality as nature’s last remaining exception.

Smith's odd definition actually empties the word reason of any real content since everything that happens would be reasonable, and if reason is just the way things happen then what need is there for the word at all?

In fact, though, reason is usually understood to be the faculty by which we consciously engage in abstract thought and by which we comprehend that about which we are thinking. Only human beings can do this, and that makes us unique, perhaps unique in the entire universe, a state of affairs repellent to the naturalistic worldview of which Smith is an enthusiast.

If he really believes that reason is just the power to do the thing which, in the biosphere, enhances survival then one very troubling consequence for him is that no one has any justification for thinking that reason can lead them to truth. After all, falsehood can as easily enhance survival as can truth, and believing and pursuing beneficial falsehoods would be rational.

Harvard's Steven Pinker echos many atheist philosophers when he writes that, "Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, sometimes not."

Why then does Smith bother to write an article to try to convince people through an ostensibly rational argument that he's right? On his own terms reason doesn't always produce truth, it's merely doing the "right thing in the right circumstances," and his essay is an exercise in pointlessness.

The need to deny human exceptionalism because of its uncomfortable theistic implications leads naturalists like Smith to embrace some pretty bizarre notions. The idea that reason is ubiquitous and universal in nature is surely among the most bizarre.

No Confidence in His Innocence?

I want to believe that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is a good man, but he keeps making it harder and harder to do so.

The Federalist's Sean Davis pretty much sums up why in his column about Mr. Mueller's peculiar press conference Wednesday.

Mueller revealed himself to be animated by motives much less noble than a duty to find the truth. He showed himself to be willing to employ innuendo and unscrupulous tactics in order to destroy a man against whom he could find no evidence of any crime.

Davis opens with this:

If there were any doubts about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s political intentions, his unprecedented press conference on Wednesday should put them all to rest. As he made abundantly clear during his doddering reading of a prepared statement that repeatedly contradicted itself, Mueller had no interest in the equal application of the rule of law.

He gave the game, and his nakedly political intentions, away repeatedly throughout his statement.

The weirdest statement in his presser, which was itself very strange given that Mueller claimed that he has nothing to add to his 400+ page report, was his assertion that if his team had confidence in President Trump's innocence they would've said so.

Here's Davis on this astonishing declaration:

Referring to indictments against various Russian individuals and institutions for allegedly hacking American servers during the 2016 election, Mueller said that the indictments “contain allegations and we are not commenting on the guilt or innocence of any specific defendant.”

“Every defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.” Had he stopped there, he would have been correct. But then he crafted a brand new standard.

“The order appointing the special counsel authorized us to investigate actions that could obstruct the investigation. We conducted that investigation and kept the office of the acting attorney general apprised of our work,” Mueller said. “After that investigation, if we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.”

According to Mueller and his team, charged Russians are presumed innocent. An American president, however, is presumed guilty unless and until Mueller’s team determines he is innocent.

Such a standard is an obscene abomination against the rule of law, one that would never be committed by independent attorneys who place a fidelity to their oaths and impartial enforcement of the law ahead of their political motivations.

Mueller wasn't tasked with finding evidence of Trump's innocence. How could there be evidence of such a thing? Imagine trying to adduce evidence, for example, that President Obama was not an Iranian secret agent. It's hard to imagine what such evidence might even look like.

The duty of an investigator is not to demonstrate innocence, it's to find evidence of guilt. If that evidence is lacking then the person is presumed innocent and is officially exculpated. Mueller's claim that they had no basis for indictment but that they could not exonerate Trump is not only a legal absurdity, it's morally reprehensible since it deliberately leaves a stain on a man's character and encourages continued harassment of him by his foes.

Davis had a lot more to say about Mr. Mueller's shortcomings and anyone interested in learning more about why Mr. Mueller is in need of ethical remediation is encouraged to read the rest of his column.

The Middle East's Perpetual War

Ever since its founding in 1948 the Israelis have been fighting a defensive war against their neighbors, particularly the Palestinians. Their neighbors attack and Israel responds until the attack is repulsed and their enemies are too weakened to continue.

Then the world prevails upon Israel to relent, to show restraint, and retreat from the field which, of course, allows their enemy to recover, regroup, resupply, and at some future date restart the whole cycle all over again.

It seems like an exercise in endless futility, but this is the status quo in the Middle East, and it will continue until Israel's foes, who have sworn its destruction, ultimately wear it down and destroy it. It often seems that this would not bother the West overmuch, which perversely views the stronger more civilized side in a dispute to be ipso facto the evil aggressor and oppressor.

Nevertheless, the prospect of their ultimate destruction should at least bother Israel, one would think, unless, like the rest of the West, they've succumbed to the notion, promoted by the left for the last eighty years or so, that the civilized nations of the world just don't deserve to survive.

Roger Simon at PJ Media once made a shocking suggestion as to how perpetual war in the Middle East might be ended. He opined that perhaps it's time for Israel to create a new status quo. Perhaps it's time to eliminate Hamas in Gaza:

A permanent truce, i.e., genuine peace, does not seem part of the vocabulary of jihadists whose sworn goal is to make the world Islamic, sooner or later, like it or not. They just take a time out when it looks as if they could be in trouble, like a hockey player with a twisted ankle.

As an example, Hamas is known for its hudnas, cooling down (or pretending to) and then heating up again as soon as possible to do what the beginning of its charter always promised it would do — destroy Israel.

For years the bien pensant of the West (Europe, the U.S.) have urged, actually put strong pressure on, Israel to play the hudna game with Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad and the rest of the sociopathic Islamofascist crew. The Israelis, from a humanistic tradition and anxious to be thought well of, have acquiesced, even when they have the extreme whip hand.

The results have been as one would predict: another war, another hudna and on and on. This has been going on since the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 - even before that really. In other words, for a long while.

Maybe it’s time for a different approach. How about just...winning?

Whether one agrees with Simon or not it's true enough that what many Israelis realize but many other Westerners seemingly don't is that radical Islam is in a state of permanent war with the world. It's a war that's been raging since the 7th century and will continue until Islam is the only religion in the world (actually it will continue beyond that as Muslims will be killing each other to decide which sect of Islam will be the only sect in the world).

We will never be safe from this threat. To think that it's at an end, or that we have somehow made peace with the Islamists, is to confuse their temporary tactic of hudna with a genuine desire for peace.

The world shouts "peace, peace" but there is no peace. The Islamists don't want peace, they want total victory. That's why it often seems that there's no pacific solution to the conflict in the Middle East and no realistic prospect of compromise.

Tragically, any clear-eyed American foreign policy must take that as its starting point. To do otherwise is to substitute wishful thinking and self-delusion for objective reality.

A Unique (?) Galaxy

Astronomer Hugh Ross discusses some fascinating facts about our Milky Way galaxy in an article at Salvo. In the article he points out that the age of our galaxy, it's uncommonly low luminosity for a galaxy its size, and its very unusual proximity to several smaller galaxies, all conspire to make the Milky Way habitable.

It's pretty interesting stuff. Here's why the age of the galaxy is important:

We must first explain how galaxies are categorized by color. Though it may seem counter to the colors we usually associate with hot and cold, young stars, which tend to be hot, are blue-colored, while old stars, which tend to be cooler, are red-colored.

So galaxies in which star formation proceeds aggressively shine with a blue color, while galaxies in which star formation has ceased appear red.... Astronomers have typically categorized galaxies as belonging to either the red population or the blue population.

The Milky Way (MWG), however, fits into neither the red nor the blue category. It has taken on a green hue. This is because, while star formation in the MWG has subsided some, it has not yet ceased. Thus, our galaxy contains a combination of blue stars and stars that aren't yet old enough to be red but have aged enough to be yellow. Blended together, these stars give the galaxy a green appearance.

Diagram of the Milky Way Galaxy showing the location of our sun

Green galaxies are rare, but they are exactly what advanced life requires. A galaxy dominated by blue stars will bathe its planets with many flares—flares too abundant and intense, and with too much ultraviolet and x-ray radiation, to permit life to exist on any of the planets.

A galaxy dominated by red stars will also bathe its planets with many flares—again, flares of deadly intensity. A red galaxy also exposes its planets to more supernova and nova events (stellar explosions) than advanced life can possibly handle.

Another problem for galaxies dominated by red stars is that they lack the necessary level of ongoing star formation to sustain their spiral structure. But galaxies dominated by blue stars, where star formation is advancing aggressively, experience major disturbances (warps, bends, spurs, and feathers) in their spiral structure, so they cannot maintain a stable spiral form, either.

But the green Milky Way, in addition to being of appropriate size and mass to contain the elements that life requires, has another characteristic that allows for the existence of advanced life within it: its spiral arms are stable, well-separated, highly symmetrical, free of any significant warps or bends, and relatively free of spurs and feathers.

In part, these spiral-arm features are possible because the galaxy is dominated by yellow stars which are complemented by a significant population of blue stars.

[O]ur galaxy....is transitioning from a star-forming site to a no-longer-star-forming site. And this midlife period appears to be the "best of times" for the sustainment of living things....[T]he Milky Way has transitioned from its role in building the required ingredients for advanced life (carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, calcium, iron, etc.) to one in which it can now, for a relatively brief time period, sustain advanced life.

There's more on why our galaxy is a suitable habitation for living things at the link. The sorts of things Ross says about the Milky Way can also be said about the solar system and the earth/moon complex. When all the unique factors which have to be pretty much just as they are for higher life forms to be sustained anywhere in the cosmos are tallied up the improbability of it all has led some scientists to conclude that it's very unlikely that there's any other place in the universe where life like ours could exist.

One could perhaps say that the existence of another habitable galaxy somewhere out there, with a solar system and a planet capable of sustaining life, would almost be miraculous.

Free Speech for Me But Not for Thee

One of the ironies of our ideological evolution over the course of the last fifty or sixty years has been the transformation of the Left as a putative champion of free speech and defender of unpopular ideas in the sixties and seventies into their greatest foe today.

Anyone today who undertakes, particularly on many college campuses, to advocate social, scientific, religious or political ideas at odds with the current leftist orthodoxy can expect to be shouted down, physically assaulted, fired and/or smeared. The left today has become a stalwart proponent of closed-mindedness, group-think and willful ignorance.

It's as if those who wield power in the media and on campus sense that their ideas cannot withstand rational examination and must therefore be insulated from challenge.

Two generations ago, at a time when their ideas were still often unpopular, they championed free speech in order to get their views a hearing, but once their worldview became mainstream they sought to deny the same freedoms to their critics and shut down any and all opposition.

Like the old communist commissars of the 20th century, they know that leftist ideology, if ever the masses understood it, would be widely and soundly rejected so anyone who criticizes it must be forcibly shut up so that its manifold flaws will never be exposed.

This was the strategy of both communist and fascist totalitarians around the globe in the 20th century, and it's the strategy of their ideological heirs in the 21st century.

Katherine Timpf at National Review Online mentions just a few examples of how campus administrators and others suppress the free and open exchange of ideas and speech by exerting enormous pressure on students and faculty to conform to the party line. Her examples merely scratch the surface.

Conservative speakers are being deplatformed on social media and disallowed to speak at many universities. Faculty who promote alternatives to Darwinism or who express skepticism about anthropogenic climate change are often punished professionally. Christianity, especially Catholicism, is often mocked in the classroom by professors, and students who seek to speak up for their faith often see their grade suffer for it.

To be overtly pro-life in some spheres of academia is to risk physical assault, and heaven help the student or faculty member who dares to express support for Donald Trump.

Why has this change occurred? Perhaps because aside from a few notable exceptions like the late Nat Hentoff (author of the book Free Speech for Me But Not for Thee) the left's professed devotion to the First Amendment was insincere from the start.

Appeals to First Amendment freedoms were a handy tool for propagating their ideology and arrogating power, but once that power had been achieved the tool was dispensed with. Free and open democratic elections were and are touted and praised by the left until they're voted into office, often under the banner of socialism, and then they use their newly acquired power to make those freedoms disappear.

Philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) set out the blueprint for all this back in the 60s in what he called "repressive tolerance." Here's Ben Shapiro's adumbration of Marcuse's thought in The Right Side of History:

Marcuse suggested that certain forms of speech had to be barred so that they could not emerge victorious, toppling critical (leftist) theory itself. According to Marcuse, "the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to politics, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed."

Freedom, Marcuse said, was "serving the cause of oppression"; oppression, therefore, could serve the cause of freedom. Speech could be labelled violence....In essence, "Liberating tolerance, then would mean intolerance against movements form the Right and toleration of movements from the Left..."

The marketplace of ideas had to die, since it was "organized and delimited by those who determine the national and individual interest."

Minority groups had to be given special privileges to shut down opposition: "liberation of the Damned of the Earth presupposes suppression not only of their old but also of their new masters."

"The roots," Shapiro adds, "of sexual liberation, victim politics, and political correctness had been laid." And now, some sixty years later they're bearing their fruit.

It's ironic that in the left's political economy tolerance of contrary opinions has to die, but as the famous physician and counsellor Paul Tournier once wrote, "Tolerance is the natural endowment of true convictions."

The corollary would be that intolerance is a pretty good indication of false convictions.

Remembering, Honoring and Thanking

Memorial Day is a day to remember those who paid the ultimate price in combat for our country, but perhaps I can take a little license and also praise the sacrifices and character of men like those described in these accounts from the war in Iraq. Some of them never came home, but all of them deserve our gratitude and admiration:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For men like these and the millions of others whose courage and sacrifice have for two hundred and fifty years enabled the rest of us to live in relative freedom and security, we should all thank God. And for those who never made it back we should ask God's richest blessing on their souls.

Conservatism Is Liberalism

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

Doubtless this is part of the reason for the misunderstanding, but there are other reasons as well. For instance, the popular misunderstanding is due in no small measure to the distortions of the media which seems to have the unfortunate ability to get almost everything that involves subtle distinctions wrong.

It's also due, in part, to the fact that conservatism and liberalism are culturally relative. For example, as Jonah Goldberg at National Review Online, observes:

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

In Saudi Arabia the conservatives want to preserve a strict form of Islam. Indeed, ISIS is a conservative movement. In the antebellum South conservatives wanted to preserve slavery, and in modern Russia it's the conservatives who wish to return to the days of the Soviet Union.

In the modern American context, however, conservatism is essentially the desire, as paradoxical as it may sound, to preserve classical liberalism. It's the desire to hold fast to what has been proven through the ages to work - religiously, politically, economically, morally, and socially. It's a reluctance to change just for the sake of change. It recognizes that if something ain't broke it's foolish to try to fix it, and if it is broken the fix is often worse than the original brokenness.

Goldberg elaborates on the relationship between conservatism and classical liberalism:

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

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

Classical liberals, unlike their modern progressive counterparts, stood for freedom - freedom of the individual to believe what he wished and to speak his mind without suffering persecution from an intolerant government or social institutions.

They also believed in the ability of free markets to maximize economic well-being, in the deadening effect of taxation, and in the dangers of big government. They believed in the inherent tendency of men toward evil and, for the most part, in the salutary effect of Christian belief on man's most destructive impulses.

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

Existential Yearning

Yesterday's post addressed humanity's existential yearning for meaning and cited a number of thinkers who've concluded that nothing in life simply can satisfy that yearning except temporary and imaginary palliatives.

Human life, it turns out, is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. We're one way and the world is another, and the world is incompatible with our deepest longings, perhaps chief among which is the longing for meaning.

"Man can't live without meaning," wrote Holocaust survivor and psychologist Victor Frankel. This need for meaning explains why so many in the 20th century committed themselves unreservedly to causes like naziism and communism which have inflicted so much suffering on the world. It explains why so many were so willing to perpetrate unimaginable horrors on their fellow man in service to a "Cause." The Cause, whatever it is, gives their lives purpose and fulfillment.

At least they believe it does, and it's the need to find this fulfillment in the promotion of a Cause that animates so many today to behave so zealously and often so brutally toward those who disagree with them.

However, as Ben Shapiro writes in The Right Side of History (which I discussed in a post here):

After WWII the West "got freer, richer, more prosperous than ever. Human wealth expanded exponentially. Life spans increased. But there remained a hole at the center of Western civilization: a meaning-shaped hole. That hole has grown larger and larger in the decades since - a cancer, eating away at our heart. We tried to fill it with action; we tried to fill it with science; we tried to fill it with world-changing political activism. None of it provides the meaning we seek.

Shapiro could've added that we sought also to fill the emptiness with pleasure, fame, power, drugs and alcohol, but none of these kept their promise to satisfy us either.

The fact is that if we're here simply as a result of some cosmic accident, a flukish perturbation in the vast quantum flux, then there can be no meaning to our existence. We can only have purpose if we were somehow intended by a mind, and even then we can only have meaning if our existence is permanent.

If, though, our lives are like the light of a firefly, random and ephemeral, then there's no sense to any of it, the slaughter and suffering of millions is neither right nor wrong, neither good nor bad. As Richard Dawkins suggests, there is in the universe "no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference."

Thus, our lives, our strivings, our sufferings and our pleasures are all a grand absurdity. In the words of Shakespeare they are "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

This is the bleak, inescapable consequence of the Enlightenment's rejection of the Judeo-Christian worldview. It leaves us with nothing to hope for, nothing to believe in, nothing to fill the emptiness, nothing to satisfy our existential longings. It leaves us with nothing except inevitable death.

Yet for many, existential emptiness and despair is a burden they seem willing, even happy, to bear if the alternative is to place one's trust in a God. Maybe, as a friend of mine says on his blog, it's "not that atheists have a distorted concept of meaning, but that they have a distorted concept of atheism. They don't understand the implications of their own beliefs."

Perhaps so.

Follow-Up to Metaxas Post

Toward the end of last month I wrote a post for VP based on a claim by Eric Metaxas when he appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight that “If you actually believe we evolved out of the primordial soup and through happenstance got here, by accident, then our lives literally have no meaning.”

David Klinghoffer at Evolution News has written a follow-up to Metaxas' statement in which he quotes a number of people who responded to a query at another site soliciting opinions on whether the respondents, mostly atheists, believed their lives had no meaning.

Typical of the responses were these:

• "My life has no purpose, my life has no meaning, but I do not care!"
• "There is meaning and purpose within my life, but my life itself has no meaning or purpose."
• "...meaning and purpose do exist, but only insofar as one’s desires create them."

In other words, these respondents acknowledge that there's no objective meaning to human existence but believe they can contrive subjective meanings that animate them and give them motivation to get up in the morning.

Their life's purpose, on this view, becomes something like alcohol. It may dull the pain of an empty life, it may give a sense of comfort and solace, but it's all illusory.

One can, however, find a multitude of more clear-eyed views on the matter, such as these from atheists (mostly) who have thought deeply about the problem of human meaning and purpose:

• "What is the purpose of the universe? There is none. What is the meaning of life? Ditto." Philosopher Alex Rosenberg
• “ If you believe science provides no basis for God, then you are almost obligated to conclude that science provides no basis for meaning and, therefore, life doesn't have any." Neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi
• “Unless the point of life is to suffer, there is no point.” Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer
• "The meaning of meaning - the meaning of all these particular meanings - is lacking." Philosopher Luc Ferry
• "There's no me, there's just things happening...You've got to admit, this (all we do) is completely meaningless." Actor Jim Carrey
• "I don't want to kill myself because I'm sad or depressed," he told them. "It's because I don't like people. I don't see a point in life, like you're just going to die and there's nothing after that, I think, so what's the point?" School shooter Robert Gladden
• "The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference." Biologist Richard Dawkins
• "Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal." Philosopher Jean Paul Sartre
• "Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful." Novelist Albert Camus
• "Life is an unpleasant interruption of nothingness." Lawyer Clarence Darrow
• "Man knows … that he is alone in the universe’s unfeeling immensity out of which he emerged only by chance." Biologist Jacques Monod
"Neither the existence of the individual nor that of humanity has any purpose." Biologist/philosopher Bernard Rensch
• "Life is a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is seen no more. It is a tale told by an idiot; full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." William Shakespeare
• "If death ends all, if I have neither to hope for good nor to fear evil, I must ask myself what am I here for….Now the answer is plain, but so unpalatable that most will not face it. There is no meaning for life, and [thus] life has no meaning.” Novelist Somerset Maugham

Klinghoffer quotes Kirk Durston who was among the theists who responded to the query about whether life has meaning:

No one disputes that atheists can make up a meaning for their lives … we make up stuff all the time …. fairies, unicorns, and so forth. I trust, however, that when we apply reason and rational thinking that we all realize that we just made that stuff up …. including the belief that life has meaning and purpose. Making up a meaning and purpose is quite a bit different from their actually being objective meaning and purpose.

Just so. It may be that there is no God who purposefully created mankind, but if there isn't then neither does anything we do in this life really matter. Only if what we do matters forever does it have any genuine, objective meaning. Only if what we do matters forever does it really matter at all.