The Intellectual Life

In an interesting - and rather unusual - piece in First Things Paul Griffiths gives advice to young people aspiring to the intellectual life. He lists and discusses four requirements of such a life. The first three are these:

1. The aspiring intellectual must choose a topic to which he or she can devote his or her life. Just as one might fall in love with another, so, too, does one often fall in love with an idea or question.

2. An intellectual must have time to think. Three hours a day of uninterrupted time. No phone calls, no texts, no visits. Just thinking and whatever serves as a support for thinking (reading, writing, experimenting, etc).

3. Anyone taking on the life of an intellectual needs proper training. This may involve university study, but it may not.

What Griffiths has to say about each of these is interesting, but the most interesting part of his essay to me is what he says about the fourth requirement. One who aspires to the life of the mind must have interlocutors, i.e. people with whom one can share ideas. He writes:

You can’t develop the needed skills or appropriate the needed body of knowledge without them. You can’t do it by yourself. Solitude and loneliness, yes, very well; but that solitude must grow out of and continually be nourished by conversation with others who’ve thought and are thinking about what you’re thinking about. Those are your interlocutors.

They may be dead, in which case they’ll be available to you in their postmortem traces: written texts, recordings, reports by others, and so on. Or they may be living, in which case you may benefit from face-to-face interactions, whether public or private. But in either case, you need them.

You can neither decide what to think about nor learn to think about it well without getting the right training, and the best training is to be had by apprenticeship: Observe the work—or the traces of the work—of those who’ve done what you’d like to do; try to discriminate good instances of such work from less good; and then be formed by imitation.

Very well, but such people are not easy to find. Most people don't care at all about the things that fascinate and animate an intellectual. Most people are too preoccupied with the exigencies of making a living and raising a family to care overmuch about ideas or the life of the mind.

Where are such interlocutors to be found? The answer these days, as you must already know, is: mostly in the universities of the West and their imitators and progeny elsewhere. That, disproportionately, is where those with an intellectual life are provided the resources to live it, and that, notionally, is the institutional form we’ve developed for nurturing such lives.

I write “notionally” because in fact much about universities (I’ve been in and around them since 1975) is antipathetic to the intellectual life, and most people in universities, faculty and students included, have never had and never wanted an intellectual life. They’re there for other reasons. Nevertheless, on the faculty of every university I’ve worked at, there are real intellectuals: people whose lives are dedicated to thinking in the way I’ve described here....If you want living interlocutors, the university is where you’re most likely to find them.

Griffiths adds this:

You shouldn’t, however, assume that this means you must follow the usual routes into professional academia: undergraduate degree, graduate degrees, a faculty position, tenure. That’s a possibility, but if you follow it, you should take care to keep your eyes on the prize, which in this case is an intellectual life.

The university will, if you let it, distract you from that by professionalizing you, which is to say, by offering you a series of rewards not for being an intellectual, but for being an academic, which is not at all the same thing. What you want is time and space to think, the skills and knowledge to think well, and interlocutors to think with. If the university provides you with these, well and good; if it doesn’t, or doesn’t look as though it will, leave it alone.

The university’s importance as a place of face-to-face interlocution about intellectual matters is diminishing in any case. Universities are moving, increasingly, toward interlocution at a distance, via the Internet. This fact, coupled with the possibility of good conversation with the dead by way of their texts, suggests that for those whose intellectual vocation doesn’t require expensive ancillaries (laboratories, telescopes, hadron colliders, powerful computers, cadres of research subjects, and the like), they should be one place among many to look for interlocutors.

You should, in any case, not assume that what you need in order to have an intellectual life is a graduate degree. You might be better served by assuming that you don’t, and getting one only if it seems the sole route by which you can get the interlocution and other training you need. That is rarely the case....

Here's his conclusion:

And lastly: Don’t do any of the things I’ve recommended unless it seems to you that you must. The world doesn’t need many intellectuals. Most people have neither the talent nor the taste for intellectual work, and most that is admirable and good about human life (love, self-sacrifice, justice, passion, martyrdom, hope) has little or nothing to do with what intellectuals do.

Intellectual skill, and even intellectual greatness, is as likely to be accompanied by moral vice as moral virtue. And the world—certainly the American world—has little interest in and few rewards for intellectuals.

The life of an intellectual is lonely, hard, and usually penurious; don’t undertake it if you hope for better than that. Don’t undertake it if you think the intellectual vocation the most important there is: It isn’t. Don’t undertake it if you have the least tincture in you of contempt or pity for those without intellectual talents: You shouldn’t. Don’t undertake it if you think it will make you a better person: It won’t.

Undertake it if, and only if, nothing else seems possible.

There's a lot of wisdom in all of this.

Truth vs. Fact

KellyAnne Conway was roundly mocked in 2017 for having observed that there were "alternative facts" concerning the size of the crowd at President trump's inauguration, and former vice-president and current leader in the race for the Democratic nomination for president Joe Biden has been similarly mocked for asserting the other day that "We [presumably meaning Democrats] choose truth over facts."

Media guffaws notwithstanding, Conway was completely correct when she referred to the possibility of alternative facts. For any given claim facts can be adduced which count both for the claim and against the claim. These may reasonably be considered alternative facts, and anyone with common sense understands that.

Nor was Mr. Biden completely deserving of the derision that has come his way for his assertion that Democrats choose truth over facts, for as odd as his words sound they are completely in keeping with the current understanding of truth among our elite cognoscenti.

Most of us would say that a proposition - for instance the proposition that Mr. Biden is 76 years old - is either true or false. If it's true, it's a fact. If it's false, it's not a fact. That's the simple, common sense understanding of the relationship between truth and fact, but in our contemporary culture common sense no longer reigns and truth has been divorced from fact, as Mr. Biden suggests.

In our postmodern era truth is a matter of how one feels about things, and facts don't necessarily have much to do with it. As philosopher Richard Rorty once put it, "Truth is whatever your peer group will let you get away with saying."

When someone with male anatomy, for example, insists that he feels female then, if others are willing to accept his claim, that becomes his truth. He's a female regardless of the objective anatomical facts of the matter. Gender becomes a matter of psychology, not physiology.

Parenthetically, it's an interesting question as to how psychology has come to be privileged over physiology, but it has.

Or, if someone feels strongly that President Trump committed treason with the Russians or that Justice Kavanaugh is a vicious sexual molester then the actual facts simply don't matter. Guilt is based on how others feel, not on what Trump or Kavanaugh actually did.

In her book Total Truth Nancy Pearcey notes that some middle school curricula teach that there are no wrong answers in mathematics, only different perspectives. She adds that truth is being presented to generations of college students as wholly relative to particular interpretive communities and that all knowledge claims are social constructions at best and power plays at worst.

It was philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's view that everyone has a different perspective, sees things differently and no one can claim the privilege of having the "correct" perspective. Thus, different individuals and different groups - racial, sexual, religious, economic - all have different truths. Truth is no longer thought to be out there waiting to be discovered, rather it's an entirely subjective construct. We create it, we don't discover it.

All of this follows, according to Rorty, from the loss of belief in God. Rorty argues that the idea of an objective truth, "is a remnant of the idea that the world is a divine creation, the work of someone who had something in mind, who Himself spoke some language in which He described His own project."

In other words, if God exists then there's at least one objective truth, at least one ontological fact. And further, if God has spoken to man then what He spoke is also objectively true, and it is the belief that God has spoken to human beings that is the source of our intuitive belief that truth is objective and that what is true is factual.

Take away God, however, and it becomes much harder to hold on to the belief that truth and facts are anything more than subjective preferences which happen to be popular with one's peer group at the time. Truth is little more than a fashion.

Now Mr. Biden was probably not thinking at all along these lines when he made his odd-sounding statement, but let's give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he was. If so, then we can take him to mean that Democrats do not believe in objective truth and don't accept the relationship of identity between truth and facts.

This may put him in good stead with progressive elites in academia, but I doubt that the average Democrat voter really agrees with this view of truth. At least I hope not.

If truth is severed from facts then there is no truth at all, and Biden's statement itself cannot claim to be true.

Second Thoughts

Yesterday, I expressed deep concern over an upcoming movie that depicts elitist liberals on holiday literally hunting down and killing Trump supporters. In hindsight and with the advantage of a bit more time to research the film, it seems that I might have been too hasty in portraying the movie's theme.

Evidently, The Hunt is a satire in which the good guys who prevail in the end are actually the hunted "deplorables" and the bad guys are the leftists who relish killing them.

Having said that, I stand by the general claim that violent films (and video games), no matter who is doing the killing, have no place in a sane, morally healthy society.

Human beings, particularly young people, have a way of becoming desensitized to violence, just as they become desensitized to pornography. The more graphic the violence they absorb, whether fictional or in real life, the less horrified they are by it.

We're often told that a person's behavior is not influenced by visual images. If that's true, why do people like Michael Moore make so many movies with political messages and why do corporations spend millions of dollars on visual advertising? The idea that what we consume from the screen does not affect our mental health is as absurd as claiming that what we consume at the dinner table doesn't affect our physical health.

This is not to say that watching violent films turns everyone into a psychopath, but what it does do is erode and diminish our natural revulsion toward violence.

Put differently, human beings reside along a kind of spectrum with complete abhorrence of violence at one end and the celebration of, and participation in, violence at the other end.

Violent entertainment nudges everyone who watches or listens to it or otherwise participates in it incrementally toward the violent end in a kind of psychological red shift. The people already close to the edge get pushed over it, and everyone else gets bumped a little bit closer, especially if they're given a steady exposure to the brutality and killing, and especially if that brutality and killing is glamorized.

I'm glad I might've wrong about the message the movie actually sends, but I'd still rather such movies not be made. The implicit message sent by explicit violence is not one that can conceivably benefit a nation plagued by real and frequent violence.

The Other Mass Shooting, Etc.

It appears that mass shootings are guaranteed to make the news as long as they're perpetrated by one or two white men, as long as the slaughter occurs in a short period of time and as long as the left can use it to their political advantage. If the mass shooting is spread out over several hours, perpetrated by non-whites, or reflects poorly on Democrats then the news media appears to be much less concerned about the horrible loss of life.

Last weekend twenty two people lost their lives in a matter of a few minutes to a single evil individual in El Paso, Texas while during the same time frame another such individual, in mere moments, stole the lives of eleven others in Dayton, Ohio. In both incidents many more were seriously injured.

In the days since, our media has been talking about little else as they look for ways to implicate Trump for the El Paso shooting and ways to avoid implicating Democrats in the Dayton shooting which seems to have been the work of someone who described himself as a leftist who disliked President Trump.

Yet, the media has all but ignored the carnage in Chicago last weekend. In that city eleven people were murdered and sixty three injured in a series of shootings, none of which were conducted by a lone white male. Since the shooters and the victims were black, and there was no way to tie the ghastly death toll to President Trump, the media was apparently disinterested.

Had the shooters been white and the victims black, well, that would certainly have made things different in the eyes of those who only seem concerned about homicidal slaughter when it has a racial or social policy dimension that can be politically exploited.

Progressives, of course, are very, very concerned about inflammatory rhetoric, or rhetoric they can at least portray as inflammatory, as long as it comes from the White House or from the mouth of some Republican, but genuinely inflammatory rhetoric which comes from the lips and fevered brains of their allies they tend to ignore.

For example, Reza Aslan, a contributor to CNN, has ostensibly called for the extermination of Trump supporters. Since this amounts to over half the country, Aslan is essentially calling for mass murder on an unprecedented scale. Yet, as far as I can tell, the folks at CNN and other progressive precincts, are undisturbed by Aslan's genocidal degeneracy.

To see how horrifying and hypocritical is the liberal apathy at Aslan's call for a "final solution," imagine someone at FOX News had in 2011 called for the extermination of Obama supporters. What do you suppose the reaction would've been?

Another example: Universal Studios is coming out with a movie next month titled The Hunt. In this film, sure to win plaudits from the left, rich liberals actually hunt down and slaughter a dozen or so kidnapped Trump supporters for sport.

From the link:

"The violent, R-rated film from producer Jason Blum's Blumhouse follows a dozen MAGA types who wake up in a clearing and realize they are being stalked for sport by elite liberals,” THR’s [The Hollywood Reporter's] Kim Masters wrote. “It features guns blazing along with other ultra-violent killings as the elites pick off their prey.”

According to the Hollywood trade publication, characters in the film refer to the victims as “deplorables,” which is what Hillary Clinton famously dubbed Trump supporters during the 2016 election. The report noted that a character asks, "Did anyone see what our ratf--ker-in-chief just did?"

Lest the message be too subtle for the anticipated audience to grasp, the film was originally supposed to be titled Red State Versus Blue State.

It's an interesting question why liberals would be depicted committing recreational murder with "guns blazing," since liberals abhor firearms, but more seriously, whoever has been involved in any way in the making of this movie is just sick beyond words.

Again, ask yourself what the reaction would be if a film featured a bunch of MAGA hat-wearing good ol' boys hunting down and butchering a group of innocent Obama supporters. Any theater showing the film would be burned to the ground and every progressive (and conservative) news outlet in the country would be expressing their horror that anyone would be so depraved as to make such a film.

So where is the outcry from progressive pundits who otherwise profess deep concern for our toxic cultural climate? Do they see only the mote in the other side's eye and ignore the plank in their own?

It certainly seems so.

Let's Blame Trump

Democrats such as Beto O'Rourke, Joe Biden and others almost too numerous to mention are blaming President Trump for the mass murder in an El Paso WalMart last weekend.

The president's attempts to uphold the immigration laws of this country and to prevent our borders from being overrun by tens of thousands of illegal immigrants is said to be the reason why the young psychopath who gunned down twenty two innocent people did what he did.

He was animated by Trump's rhetoric, the left insists, with absolutely no compelling evidence to support their slander.

Before the bodies had even been removed from the site of the slaughter Democrat politicians were fund-raising off the horrible deaths of the victims and the grief of their families, while also exploiting the tragedy to advance a political vendetta against the president.

This is, of course, despicable, but to actually blame Mr. Trump for the massacre is not only despicable but incredibly stupid.

The Democrats seeking to use the atrocity for their own political advantage seem too dimwitted to understand that if blame is to be assigned it's just as easy to make the case that the young perpetrator was driven to madness by his seething frustration at the abject refusal of Democrats to enforce the laws of the land and secure our nation's borders. It could as plausibly be argued that Democrat contempt for the law stoked the young man's sense of his own helplessness and fueled his hatred and anger, driving him to an act of horrible cruelty and irrationality.

That narrative makes at least as much sense as the left's mindless refrain that "It's all Trump's fault."

It's worth noting in passing that progressives will twist themselves into all sorts of rhetorical contortions to avoid giving Trump credit for the booming economy, but they'll eagerly blame him on the thinnest of evidence or on no evidence at all for the insane iniquities of some evil lunatic.

Meanwhile, some in the media have been lucubrating, as they always do after these massacres, over what the killers all have in common in order that their motivations might be better understood and such terrors more effectively forestalled in the future.

All sorts of possibilities have been adduced: the shooters are invariably male, often white, loners, disaffected, traumatized, alienated, etc.

All of this may be true, but there are two possible commonalities I'd like to see researched but which I have little confidence the progressive media would be interested in pursuing.

I suspect, but don't claim to know, that almost all of the mass shooters, especially the younger ones, firstly, have either a terrible relationship with their father or no relationship with him at all.

I also suspect, but don't claim to know, that they also have a terrible relationship, or no relationship at all, with God.

I'd love to read the statistics on this if anyone has done the digging, but I rather doubt that anyone has. It's not the sort of thing that most of our betters in elite progressive circles care to think about much less investigate.

In the Middle of the Night

A recent survey of British millennials found that a shocking 89% of them believe their lives are meaningless.

Reading that depressing statistic I was reminded of a piece writer James Wood did for the New Yorker a number of years ago which the magazine titled Is That All There Is? The book he reviewed attempted to counter the nagging angst among thoughtful atheists (Wood himself is one) occasioned by the realization that their lives are meaningless and that they're headed for eternal oblivion.

Wood opens with this:

I have a friend, an analytic philosopher and convinced atheist, who told me that she sometimes wakes in the middle of the night, anxiously turning over a series of ultimate questions: “How can it be that this world is the result of an accidental big bang? How could there be no design, no metaphysical purpose? Can it be that every life — beginning with my own, my husband’s, my child’s, and spreading outward — is cosmically irrelevant?”

In the current intellectual climate, atheists are not supposed to have such thoughts.

....as one gets older, and parents and peers begin to die, and the obituaries in the newspaper are no longer missives from a faraway place but local letters, and one’s own projects seem ever more pointless and ephemeral, such moments of terror and incomprehension seem more frequent and more piercing, and, I find, as likely to arise in the middle of the day as the night.

The book is titled The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now edited by a scholar named George Levine. Wood explains that,

[T]he book’s aim is to “explore the idea that secularism is a positive, not a negative, condition, not a denial of the world of spirit and of religion, but an affirmation of the world we’re living in now; that building our world on a foundation of the secular is essential to our contemporary well-being; and that such a world is capable of bringing us to the condition of ‘fullness’ that religion has always promised.”

Wood focuses on the book's first essay, written by Columbia philosopher Philip Kitcher, in which Kitcher argues that a theistic worldview founders on a couple of philosophical reefs. If I can summarize Wood's summary, Kitcher argues that two of theism's strongest claims are false.

First, Kitcher believes that the claim that God is necessary for there to be objective moral value and duties is refuted by Socrates' response to this claim from an interlocutor named Euthyphro. This has come to be known as the Euthyphro Dilemma and goes like this:

If an act is good because God commands it then cruelty would be good if God commanded it. If, on the other hand, God commands certain acts because they are good, then goodness is independent of God and we don't need God in order to do what's good.

It's surprising to me that this argument still finds employment in contemporary atheistic writings, having been long ago adequately answered by theistic philosophers.

Very quickly, the reason why any act is good and willed by God is because it conforms to God's essential nature. He is Himself perfect goodness. The more closely an act conforms to the ideal the better it is, just as the quality of a photocopy depends on how closely it reproduces the original.

An act, then, is morally better the more closely it conforms to the nature of God whose nature consists, inter alia, of compassion, mercy and justice.

Thus goodness is neither independent of God nor arbitrarily willed by God, but rather emerges from His being somewhat like light and heat flow from the sun. If God did not exist there would be no objective moral good.

The second claim that Kitcher believes to be in error is that theism (Wood uses the word religion, but I think theism is a better word choice for what he's trying to say) is no better at putting meaning into life than is secularism. In other words, it may be true that life is a pretty bleak business if atheism is true, but God's existence doesn't help matters.

I think this is patently false. Imagine a man imprisoned in a slave labor camp sent out every day to dig ditches. He's told by the authorities that his work is necessary, although any prisoner can do it, and that, not only will he never be released, but when he can no longer perform the work he will be executed.

Another prisoner is given the same tasks but told that if he performs them well he will be released and given all the amenities of a comfortable life. Do you suppose both lives will seem equally significant to the prisoners?

The first prisoner will constantly be wondering, "How does anything I do really matter? Isn't it all pointless and absurd?" But those questions might scarcely occur to the second prisoner who sees his labor as the means to something much greater.

The skeptic might reply that the promise to the second prisoner of eventual release is false. In real life everybody dies in the prison.

Perhaps, but the skeptic doesn't know that. We do know, though, that unless the promise is true there really is no hope and no meaning to either prisoners' toil.

In other words, our human existence can only have genuine meaning if we are created and loved by God and destined to an existence beyond this one. On that point, it seems, Wood might agree. He closes with this:

Thomas Nagel [once] wrote a shrewd essay entitled “The Absurd,” in which he argued that, just as we can “step back from the purposes of individual life and doubt their point, we can step back also from the progress of human history, or of science, or the success of a society, or the kingdom, power, and glory of God, and put all these things into question in the same way.”

Secularism can seem as meaningless as religion when such doubt strikes. Nagel went on to conclude, calmly, that we shouldn’t worry too much, because if, under the eye of eternity, nothing matters “then that doesn’t matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.”

This is impeccably logical, and impishly offers a kind of secular deconstruction of secularism, but it is fairly cold comfort in the middle of the night.

In thoroughly secular England it seems that young people are discovering the hard way that the materialism proffered by a secular society is indeed fairly cold comfort in the middle of the night.

The Nature of the Soul

Usually when people talk about the soul and life beyond the death of the physical body they draw looks of incredulity and even scorn from fashionably skeptical materialists, but when a scientist as prominent as physicist Roger Penrose talks about it, well, then the skeptics should at least listen.

Penrose's theory is that the soul consists of information stored at the sub-atomic level in microtubules in the body's cells. At death this information somehow escapes the confines of the microtubules and drifts off into the universe. He claims to have evidence to support this hypothesis, and perhaps he does.

I haven't seen the evidence, but I'd like to know how the information "knows" that the body has died and what mechanism controls it. I'd also like to know what the information is about, how it functions without a physical body, and what disembodied information leaking out into the universe "looks" like.

Anyway, I'm not altogether skeptical of Penrose's theory. I've long advocated the view that, if we do have a soul (as a substance that's neither physical nor mental - neither body nor mind), that it consists of information. In this I'm in agreement with Penrose.

Where I differ from him is that in my view the soul is the totality of true propositions about a person - an exhaustive description of the person at every moment of his or her existence. It's the essence of the person. But whereas Penrose locates the information in cellular microtubules I posit that the information is located in a vast database, i.e. the mind of God. In God's mind there is, so to speak, a "file" containing a complete description of every person who has ever lived.

Since the information is located in the mind of God it's indestructible - immortal - unless God chooses to destroy it. Each of us is therefore potentially eternal.

To take this line of thinking one more step, perhaps when our physical bodies die our "file" is "downloaded," in whole or in part, into another body situated in a different world, or at least in a different set of dimensions than what we experience in this world. It would be a different kind of body, perhaps, but a body all the same.

On this view, the soul is not something wraith-like that's contained in us, but rather it's "in" God. As with a computer file, he could choose to delete it altogether or to express it in any "format" he sees fit.

In any case, if this hypothesis is at all close to describing the way things are, the death of our bodies is not the death of us, and, if physical death is not the end of our existence, we're each confronted with some pretty serious implications.

In-Group Preference, Out-Group Hostility

Here's a theoretical question: Is it ever okay for a business to discriminate on the basis of ethnicity? No, you say? Then you're not up on the theory of in-group preference/out-group hostility. A piece by Jazz Shaw at Hot Air last spring gives us a nice introduction.

A letter-writer to the New York Times Magazine (paywall) recounts an interesting experience he had in a Chinese restaurant with this bit of Orwellian new-think.

Here's the situation as recounted by Jazz Shaw:

A Chinese restaurant the writer frequents has two menus. There’s a less expensive lunch menu with a lot of specials on it and their more expensive, fancy dinner menu. The writer (who is white) noticed that when Chinese customers showed up, the wait staff (also Chinese) almost always immediately gave them the cheaper lunch menu. But white customers were uniformly given the more expensive dinner menu.

When the writer asked for a lunch menu instead they happily gave it to them, but he’s concerned that other white customers might not know about the cheaper lunch menu and were getting overcharged. The writer wonders if he should intervene by telling other white patrons about the lunch menu.

The letter was answered by a columnist for the Times named Kwame Anthony Appiah, a British-born Ghanaian-American philosopher. Appiah responds:

In the scenario you describe, the restaurant’s Chinese staff members are partial to their Chinese neighbors. They give them special treatment. They don’t have anything against non-Chinese, as they show by happily giving you the lunch menu when you ask for it. So they’re motivated by in-group preference, not by out-group hostility.

Some people think that giving preferential treatment to members of your own ethnic kind is as bad as hostility to outsiders. Others even deny that such a distinction can be drawn. I think that’s wrong.... Partiality needn’t be prejudicial.

Granted, we’d feel very different about white servers favoring white customers. But that’s for two reasons. One is a suspicion that, in our society, behavior of that sort would in fact be motivated by negative feelings toward nonwhites — that is, by racism. Another is that whites are a majority in this country.

According to Appiah there's nothing wrong with a member of a minority giving preferential treatment to a fellow minority, that's simply "in-group preference." The problem arises when whites do it because then it's obviously not in-group preference but rather "out-group hostility."

Jazz Shaw follows up:

What’s the difference you might ask? Well, as the author goes on to explain in the next paragraph, it’s based on your skin color. It’s perfectly fine to treat white customers differently than Asian diners if you are Asian because you simply have a preference for your “in-group.”

But if you’re a white person behaving in the same fashion, you’re exhibiting “out-group hostility” which is racist. But if you’re not white, as Appiah writes, “partiality needn’t be prejudicial.”

So, once again we see that racism - whatever that very malleable word might mean nowadays - is a disease only white people are afflicted with. This is the sort of fatuous double standard that has soured so many folks on the whole subject of race in America.

If the word "racism" has come to mean "anything white people do" then the word is a tendentious absurdity, reminiscent of Alice's discussion with Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass:

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master — that's all."

Democrat Macho Men

There was a time, it seems so long ago now, when folks on the left flattered themselves to think that they were kind, gentle and non-violent and that it was those "right-wingers" who were mean-spirited and violent.

But history has a way of reversing such things and turning them all topsy-turvey. The violence and mean-spiritedness now, especially of the rhetorical sort, but also actual physical violence, emanates far more often from the left than from the right. Just ask Rep. Steve Scalise or almost anyone who has the chutzpah to wear a MAGA hat in most urban, and many suburban, precincts.

Take, for example, just one form of this violence, the expressions of desire among prominent people in our politics and culture to do physical harm to President Trump. It really is an unprecedented phenomenon, and it's as frightening as it is repugnant.

Victor Davis Hanson mentions a number of instances of this in a recent article at National Review. He writes that the continued litany of threats to physically assault or kill a president will haunt the country long after Trump is gone, and claims, rightly, I think, that such rhetoric is not only ugly in itself, but diminishes the psychological inhibitions that would ordinarily prevent deranged souls from acting on such fantasies.

For example, former vice president and current presidential candidate Joe Biden has bragged on two occasions that he'd like to punch Mr. Trump. As Hanson describes it:

In March 2018, Biden huffed, “They asked me would I like to debate this gentleman, and I said no. I said, ‘If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.’”

More recently the aging Mr. Biden boasted that,

“The idea that I’d be intimidated by Donald Trump? . . . He’s the bully that I’ve always stood up to. He’s the bully that used to make fun when I was a kid that I stutter, and I’d smack him in the mouth.”

What a man! If we were electing Mr. Testosterone instead of Mr. President who could not vote for Joe Biden?

Hanson asks us to imagine the media response had Dick Cheney ever said such a thing about Barack Obama. Yet Biden says it about Trump, and all we hear are the sounds of silence.

Speaking of testosterone, Senator Corey Booker (D., N.J.), another presidential candidate, felt it necessary to let us know that he's every bit as macho as Mr. Biden:

Trump is a guy who you understand he hurts you, and my testosterone sometimes makes me want to feel like punching him, which would be bad for this elderly, out-of-shape man that he is if I did that. This physically weak specimen.

Booker should hope, should he live long enough to reach his seventies, that he has even half the stamina Mr. Trump apparently has.

These odious asseverations of one's machismo - from representatives of a party, no less, many members of which bewail "toxic masculinity" - are actually just a political version of what we've been hearing from our Hollywood celebrities.

Hanson mentions another septuagenarian on Ageless Male, actor Robert De Niro, who has repeatedly expressed a desire to physically assault Trump. A month before Trump was elected, De Niro said of him, “I’d like to punch him in the face.” Since then, and presumably because De Niro has been thwarted in carrying out his fantasies only by the diligence of the Secret Service, he has settled for a series of “F*** Trump” outbursts.

Representative Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), just hours after she was sworn in, claimed at a rally that she had promised her young son that “we’re going to impeach the motherf***er.” I hope the rally wasn't for mothers seeking tips on how to be good role models for their children. Her willingness to employ such vulgar language with her son tells us much more about the sort of person Ms. Tlaib is than the sort of person Mr. Trump is.

Hanson goes on to write:

On the day Trump was inaugurated, the pop music star Madonna told a large crowd outside the White House that she had thought of blowing it up.

A few months later, comedian Kathy Griffin issued a video where she held up a bloody facsimile of a decapitated Trump head.

Since then, Hollywood and the entertainment industry have been in constant competition to imagine the most gruesome way of killing off Trump: stabbing, blowing up, burning, shooting, suffocating, decapitating, or beating.

Celebrities such as Johnny Depp, Snoop Dogg, George Lopez, Moby, Rosie O’Donnell, Mickey Rourke, and Larry Wilmore seem to relish the media attention as they discuss or demonstrate what they seem to think are creative ways to kill the president.

This didn't start with Trump's election, though, as Hanson reminds us:

We saw something similar to the current climate of threatened violence during the reelection campaign and second presidential term of George W. Bush.

A few columnists, documentary filmmakers, and novelists went well beyond the boilerplate invective of calling Bush a fascist, racist, Nazi, and war criminal, and imagined his assassination in a variety of ways.

Whenever attempts have been made on the life of a politician over the last twenty years or so, Democrats have been quick to blame (absurdly) rhetoric coming from conservative talk radio and other venues for creating a climate of hate, fear and division. Yet no prominent conservative figure ever spoke about any Democrat, much less a president, with the rhetorical violence many Democrats are employing against President Trump. Where are the liberal newspaper editorials condemning the hate speech that's practically gushing from the left nowadays? As Hanson says,

[T]he current climate is becoming scary. Those who brag of wanting to violently attack the president should worry about where their boasts will finally lead if any of the thousands of James Hodgkinsons in America take such threats seriously and act on them.

Donald Trump is a controversial president, no doubt. He replies to his critics with strong, often inflammatory invective. Yet the continued litany of threats to physically assault or kill a president is lowering the bar of assassination, and it will haunt the country long after Trump is gone.

The juvenile chest thumping of such as Messers. Biden, Booker and De Niro is certainly deplorable and disgusting but most of all it's dangerously irresponsible.

Langdon Gilkey's Disillusionment

Langdon Gilkey was a theologian and philosopher who, as a young man with a degree from Harvard, went to China to teach English and philosophy. While he was there WWII broke out and the Japanese invaded China. Gilkey was detained and held in a facility with 2000 others under very trying conditions.

He writes about his experience in his 1966 memoir titled Shantung Compound. In the book he describes himself at the time as holding the belief that human reason would enable him and his fellow prisoners to transcend their conditions and build a community based on their common humanity and solidarity. He also believed that religion was a "frill" that wasn't necessary for people to seek to advance the common good, a goal that "any unbelieving naturalist (atheist) can easily avow."

For a while his optimistic humanism was affirmed, but as time wore on he began to experience disillusionment. His worldview, his view of his fellow man, suffered a series of blows, but one in particular was especially jarring.

Gilkey was chosen by his fellows to head up the committee in charge of housing. Conditions were extremely cramped and the closeness led to a lot of friction. One particular housing unit had eleven inmates in a room that could comfortably accommodate only half that number, and Gilkey learned that an adjacent unit of exactly the same size had only nine inmates. The unit with nine was crowded but not as badly as the unit with eleven.

Gilkey thought that there was an obvious and rational solution: Send one of the inmates from the more crowded unit to the less crowded unit and both would have ten inmates and be on equal terms. This was a just and moral solution, he thought, that any reasonable person would accept.

But he was disappointed to find that the less crowded unit refused to accept a tenth inmate. They told Gilkey in so many words that it was not in their self-interest to make their quarters more crowded than they already were. Gilkey argued passionately that they were being irrational and unfair, but his appeals fell on deaf ears. They even threatened Gilkey with physical violence if he persisted.

He concluded from this that if rationality conflicts with self-interest men will often choose self-interest. Rationality and logic were insufficient to move men to promote the greatest good for the greatest number.

In other words, although Gilkey doesn't put it in these terms, he was confronted with a conflict between utilitarianism and egoism, and he found to his dismay that egoism frequently prevailed, even among otherwise rational men.

I disagree, though, with his conclusion that these men were being irrational. I think they were acting perfectly rationally. Gilkey simply assumed that utilitarianism is the rational ethical stance, that we should always seek to promote the greatest good for all, but why should we? Why should anyone care about the well-being of others? Why is it not rational to promote the greatest good for oneself? This is indeed the default position in a secular society. In the absence of any transcendent source of moral imperatives the rational course is to look out for #1, to put one's own interests ahead of the interests of others.

This could only be wrong if there actually is a transcendent moral authority with the power to hold us accountable for our choices and who demands that we care about others at least as much as we care about ourselves. If no such authority exists then egoism makes perfect sense.

People who are repelled by this conclusion and who are convinced that we have a moral obligation to do what is fair for all are tacitly making a case, whether they realize it or not, for the existence of God because such an obligation can only exist if God imposes it upon us.

This is not to say that those who do not believe that God exists will necessarily be egoists. People can certainly choose arbitrarily to live any way they wish. What it means, though, is that there's nothing in atheism that requires one to care about the welfare of others. On atheism egoism is perfectly rational, and any other ethical outlook is purely a matter of subjective preference.

Atheists who think this repugnant should probably rethink their atheism.

Indulging in Make-Believe

Joseph P. Carter is a philosopher and materialist who believes that matter and energy is all there is. On the materialist view there's nothing that cannot be reduced to material stuff - there's no immaterial mind, no soul and, usually, no God.

Carter once wrote about human purpose from a materialist perspective at the NYT's The Stone, and his conclusions, though somewhat subtly stated, are pretty bleak. Here are some excerpts which will help illustrate why:

Purpose is a universal human need. Without it, we feel bereft of meaning and happiness....

But, where does purpose come from? What is it? For over two millenniums, discerning our purpose in the universe has been a primary task of philosophers....

In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle tells us that our purpose is happiness or eudaemonia, “well-spiritedness.” Happiness is an ordered and prudent life.

I’m certainly no Aristotelian. Not because I reject happiness. Rather, as a materialist, I think there’s nothing intrinsic about the goals and purposes we seek to achieve it. Modern science explicitly jettisons this sort of teleological thinking from our knowledge of the universe. From particle physics to cosmology, we see that the universe operates well without purpose....

What follows from this, whether Carter intends it or not, is the conclusion that whatever means we employ to achieve happiness are justified if they enable us to successfully attain our goal.

In other words, on materialism there are no intrinsically right or wrong means, only those that work and those that don't. If it brings happiness to someone to rape, pillage and murder, such behaviors aren't wrong because the universe knows nothing about value judgments.

Just as the temperature of the coffee and air equalizes, the Earth, our solar system, galaxies and even supermassive black holes will break down to the quantum level, where everything cools to a uniform state.... Eventually everything ends in heat death....

What’s the purpose in that, though?

There isn’t one. At least not fundamentally.... [T]he universe as we understand it tells us nothing about the goal or meaning of existence, let alone our own. In the grand scheme of things, you and I are enormously insignificant.

But, Carter stresses, we're not completely insignificant. We can invent pretend purposes and meanings that occupy and divert our attention enough to enable us to stave off nihilism and existential despair.

We can be important to each other, he insists, we can do things that give us the incentive to get out of bed in the morning, we can even pretend there's real purpose to our lives even though we know there isn't because evolutionary benefits accrue to those who make themselves believe it.

This is depressing, but it's really all that materialism can offer. A materialist can either accept that his life is nothing more than a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing", or he can reject materialism. What he can't do is remain a consistent materialist while pretending that somehow life matters.

Jean Paul Sartre observed that "Life ceases to have any meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal." Or, to put the same thought differently, unless what we do matters forever it doesn't really matter at all.

Carter, as one would expect, disagrees with this assessment:

An indifferent universe also offers us a powerful and compelling case for living justly and contentedly because it allows us to anchor our attention here. It teaches us that this life matters and that we alone are responsible for it. Love, friendship and forgiveness are for our benefit. Oppression, war and conflict are self-inflicted.

This seems to me to be a case of whistling past the graveyard. What an indifferent universe does is impress upon us the fact, contrary to Carter's assertion, that there's no compelling case for living justly if living unjustly confers upon us the pleasures and other desiderata of life that we seek. It tells us that we are just dust in the wind and nothing we do will last or matter ultimately. It tells us that love and the rest are merely chemical reactions in our brains and that though they may benefit some people, others may benefit just as much from oppression, war and conflict.

Atheist materialist Richard Dawkins famously wrote that the universe exhibits no design, no purpose, no evil and no good. Just blind pitiless indifference. In such a universe right and wrong, good and bad, are entirely subjective. What's right and good for one person may be wrong and bad for another.

When we ask what’s the purpose of the recent gassing of Syrian children in the Idlib Province or the torture and killings of Chechnyan homosexual men, we ought not simply look to God or the universe for explanations but to ourselves, to the entrenched mythologies that drive such actions — then reject them when the institutions they inform amount to acts of horror.

Notice Carter doesn't say we should judge these acts to be evil. On the materialist's view there is no genuine moral evil. Carter avers instead that we can "reject" such deeds, but why, on materialism, should we reject them if they bring us happiness? Why is it wrong for men to treat other men cruelly if they believe it advances their well-being and flourishing? It's hard to see how a materialist would answer that question.

He concludes his article with these words:

One day I will die. So will you. [Everything in the universe] will decay ... as the fundamental particles we’re made of return to the inert state in which everything began.

Perhaps so, but if that's true then nothing we do on this tiny speck of a planet in the extraordinarily brief moment of time we spend here really matters.

Materialism offers no hope, no meaning, no basis for moral action, no reason for enduring the pain and suffering of life. To insist otherwise, as Carter does, is simply to indulge in make-believe.

Defining Racism Down

President Trump has been getting hammered by his progressive opponents for a series of tweets he sent out last weekend criticizing Rep. Elijah Cummings for allowing his congressional district to become "a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess."

Here's what the president tweeted in response to Cummings' criticisms of some of his policies:

Rep, Elijah Cummings has been a brutal bully, shouting and screaming at the great men & women of Border Patrol about conditions at the Southern Border, when actually his Baltimore district is FAR WORSE and more dangerous. His district is considered the Worst in the USA......

....As proven last week during a Congressional tour, the Border is clean, efficient & well run, just very crowded. Cumming District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place

Well, this sent the left into orbit. Somehow, these words were perceived, either sincerely or disingenuously, as a racist attack, presumably because the neighborhood Trump referred to is predominately African American or because Cummings is.

It has sadly come to pass in our society that any criticism, regardless of its veracity, levelled at anything or anyone even remotely associated with an African American is ipso facto racist in the minds of today's progressives. How else could what Mr. Trump tweeted be construed as racist unless racism is now to be defined as any negative or disparaging action or remark made about a black person and/or his or her neighborhood?

You didn't vote for Barack Obama? That's interpreted as a sure sign of your racism. You wonder why our jails are filled with young black males? It's because our police and courts are racist. You worry about single motherhood in black communities? You wouldn't if you weren't racist, etc.

The Baltimore Sun printed one of the most vile editorials published by a major newspaper in the modern era in response to Trump's remarks. MSNBC and other progressive outlets repeatedly and with no explanation referred to Trump's tweets as self-evidently racist.

It didn't take long, though, for folks to do a little a digging and discover that Trump's comments were essentially identical to those of Baltimore's previous mayor, Catherine Pugh, herself a black woman:

Is Pugh a racist? Perhaps the definition of racism might be amended to describe racism as any negative or disparaging action or remark made by a white person about a black person and/or his or her neighborhood. That way racism is only a character taint that white people possess. How convenient.

This is apparently the definition accepted by Joy Behar who stated the other day that it's "outrageous and stupid to call a black man a racist":

What's "outrageous and stupid," of course, is the notion that only white people hate others because of the color of their skin.

Well, then it turned out that Trump's characterization of the Baltimore neighborhood in Cummings' district was also essentially identical to how presidential candidate Bernie Sanders described it in 2016 when he compared it to a third world country. Is one of the leftmost Democratic candidates for the presidency in 2020 also a racist?

Perhaps the definition should go through one more iteration and be amended to read that racism is any negative or disparaging action or remark made by a white Republican about a black person and/or his or her neighborhood.

Once we realize that this is in fact the working definition adopted by progressives like Behar and the folks at MSNBC and CNN then their response to Trump's transgressions will begin to make sense, even if their definition doesn't.

Benny Johnson of Turning Point USA did a walking tour of the worst part of the district and interviewed a number of residents. They all pretty much agreed with Trump's assessment. The neighborhood is a disaster.

Some of the residents were white, some black. Were the white residents racists and the black residents not?

The Sun's editorial mentioned above was largely as irrelevant as it was venomous.

The claims it made about Baltimore's attractions (Inner Harbor, Johns Hopkins) are completely beside Mr. Trump's point about the worst parts of Cummings' district, and the language it used to describe the president was far worse than anything Mr. Trump has employed against any of his political adversaries, and certainly worse than anything he said about Cummings.

But the Sun is a left-wing paper and unfortunately the left seems to have found a home in the polemical sewer. They wrote this:

Finally, while we would not sink to name-calling in the Trumpian manner — or ruefully point out that he failed to spell the congressman’s name correctly (it’s Cummings, not Cumming) — we would tell the most dishonest man to ever occupy the Oval Office, the mocker of war heroes, the gleeful grabber of women’s private parts, the serial bankrupter of businesses, the useful idiot of Vladimir Putin and the guy who insisted there are “good people” among murderous neo-Nazis that he’s still not fooling most Americans into believing he’s even slightly competent in his current post. Or that he possesses a scintilla of integrity. Better to have some vermin living in your neighborhood than to be one.

All because President Trump said about one Baltimore neighborhood what everybody who lives there or has visited there has said about it. When it comes to Trump and/or race the left shows more than a little evidence of having completely lost its collective mind.

Godel, Escher, Bach

Philosopher Walter Myers notes that August will mark the 40th anniversary of the publication of Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. In the preface to the 1999 edition Hofstadter clarifies his purpose in writing the book. Myers writes:

The three luminaries [mathematician Kurt Godel, artist M.C. Escher, composer Johann Sebastian Bach] are not the central figures of the book. The book was intended to ask the fundamental question of how the animate can emerge from the inanimate, or more specifically, how does consciousness arise from inanimate, physical material?

As philosopher and cognitivist scientist David Chalmers has eloquently asked, “How does the water of the brain turn into the wine of consciousness?”

Hofstadter believes he has the answer: the conscious “self” of the human mind emerges from a system of specific, hierarchical patterns of sufficient complexity within the physical substrate of the brain. The self is a phenomenon that rides on top of this complexity to a large degree but is not entirely determined by its underlying physical layers.

In other words, Hofstadter argued that human consciousness is what philosophers call an emergent property. Just as wetness emerges when hydrogen and oxygen combine in a certain way, so, too, does consciousness emerge whenever brain matter reaches a certain level of complexity.

Myers explains that Hofstadter believes this happens in both humans and in the artificial intelligence of computers although he has no theory as to how it does so. Nevertheless, his conviction is that if computers could be designed to model the neural networks of the brain then consciousness will arise.

The models he suggests are very complicated, and, as Myers points out, we're a long way away from generating an artificial analogue to consciousness. Computers still lack the capacity, for example, to understand what they're doing.

Not only do computers not understand in the sense that humans understand a concept or idea, there is a host of cognitive capacities and experiences of which humans are capable that computers would have to achieve in order to be conscious.

Computers would have to be capable, for example, of holding beliefs, of having doubts, regrets, hopes, resentments, frustrations, worries, desires and intentions.

They would have to somehow be programmed to actually experience gratitude, boredom, curiosity, interest, guilt, pleasure, pain, flavor, color, fragrance and warmth - not just detect some sort of stimulus but to actually experience these phenomena.

Are those working in the field of AI confident that within the foreseeable future they'll build a machine capable of appreciating beauty, humor, meaning and significance? Will machines ever be able to distinguish between moral good and evil, right and wrong, or apprehend abstract ideas like universals or mathematics (as opposed to just doing computations)?

Unlike machines, human beings have a sense of self, they have memories which seem to be rooted in the past, either recent or remote. Indeed, they have a sense of past, present and future. Will the machines of the future be capable of any of this?

To be conscious in the human sense a machine would have to be able to do all of this, it would have to be able to feel. The robot Sonny from the movie I, Robot notwithstanding, machines don't feel. A computer can be programmed to say "I love you," it can be programmed to act as if it does love you, but do AI proponents believe that they'll ever be able to design a computer that actually feels love for you?

Another problem arises in reading Myers' account of Hofstadter's ideas. The complexity of the neuronal systems that give rise to consciousness in human beings is so profound that one wonders how it could ever be accounted for in terms of blind, random evolutionary processes like genetic mutation and natural selection. How did an undirected, random reshuffling and mutation of genes over millions of years produce an organ capable of doing all of the things mentioned above?

As Myers observes, human consciousness is unique among animals. "There is," he writes, "quite simply, no mechanical explanation of how the human mind has emerged from brawling chimpanzees over the course of millions of years of evolution."

The common response that, "Well, regardless whether we can explain how such a prodigy could've happened, it must have done so because, after all, here we are" is really an admission that there's no answer at all.

Why Do Tyrants Ban the Bible?

Eric Metaxas, wrote a column at USA Today several years back in which he suggested some answers to a couple of interesting questions: Why do tyrants almost always ban the Bible, and why do so many secular folks fear it?

Whether one believes that the Bible is the authoritative word of God or is convinced that it's merely a compilation of the literary and historical musings from a long dead civilization, the questions should have resonance, in fact they should have special piquancy for those who hold the latter view.

After all, why would a book of ancient fables and superstitions be feared by those who seek to exercise mind-control over the people? Why not treat it like they would treat Aesop's Fables?

Anyway, here are some excerpts from what Metaxas says:

Every single year the Bible is the world’s best-selling book. In fact, it’s the number one best-selling book in history. But recently it made another, less-coveted list: the American Library Association’s “top 10 most-challenged books of 2015.” This means the Bible is among the most frequently requested to be removed from public libraries.

But what’s so threatening about it? Why could owning one in Stalin’s Russia get you sent to the Gulag, and why is owning one today in North Korea punishable by death? What makes it scarier to some people than anything by Stephen King?

We could start with the radical notion that all human beings are created by God in His image, and are equal in His eyes. This means every human being should be accorded equal dignity and respect. If the wrong people read that, trouble will be sure to follow. And some real troublemakers have read it.

One of them was George Whitefield, who discovered the Bible as a teenager and began preaching the ideas in it all across England. Then he crossed the Atlantic and preached it up and down the thirteen colonies until 80 percent of Americans had heard him in person. They came to see that all authority comes from God, not from any King, and saw it was their right and duty to resist being governed by a tyrant, which led to something we call the American Revolution.

Another historical troublemaker was the British Parliamentarian William Wilberforce. When he read the Bible, he saw that the African slave trade — which was a great boon to the British economy — was nonetheless evil. He spent decades trying to stop it. Slave traders threatened to have him killed, but in 1807, he won his battle and the slave trade was abolished throughout the British Empire. In 1833, slavery itself was abolished.

In the 20th century, an Indian lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi picked up some ideas from the Bible about non-violent resistance that influenced his views as he led the Indian people to independence. And who could deny the Bible’s impact on the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., who said the Bible led him to choose love and peaceful protest over hatred and violence?

He cited the Sermon on the Mount as his inspiration for the Civil Rights movement, and his concept of the "creative suffering," endured by activists who withstood persecution and police brutality, came from his knowledge of Jesus’ trials and tribulations.

It could be added to these examples that a book that teaches that no earthly authority is ultimate, that men must obey God's law when it conflicts with man's law, that tyrants who abuse their power, which they all do, will answer for their evil, a book that says all that is not going to find favor with dictators.

But why is it often banned from public libraries in countries which ostensibly have freedom of speech? Perhaps one reason is that the Bible defies the secularist orthodoxy that "the cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be" to quote Carl Sagan.

Any book that says otherwise, any book which claims that the physical world is just a shadow of the really real, is simply not to be tolerated, even by those who claim to make a virtue of tolerance. These folks may not be tyrants of the sort who rule North Korea, but they share some aspects of the tyrannical spirit all the same.

To paraphrase Pascal, they despise the Bible, they hate it and fear it may be true.

The Marvelous Hummingbird

If you live in the Western hemisphere, perhaps you've seen hummingbirds flitting about in a garden or at a feeder this summer. You have to be in the Western hemisphere to see these tiny marvels, at least in the wild, because they only occur in this part of the world.

Hummingbirds are among the most beautiful and amazing creatures on earth. They're the smallest birds and the only birds which can fly backwards.

Another fascinating thing about these tiny creatures is how they feed. You can't really see it with the naked eye because it happens so fast and their beaks are buried deep in a flower when they feed, but their tongues are amazingly engineered to take up nectar.

This short video clip illustrates how they do it:

If you see a hummingbird feeding this spring or summer remember what's going on inside that little bird's beak and tongue. You'll likely come away with a much deeper appreciation for these diminutive gems.

This BBC clip gives lovely close-ups of the amazing phenomenon of hummingbird flight. Note how the hummingbird can fly both backwards and sideways. They can also fly upside down, and are the only kind of bird in the world that can do all this. Their wings beat an astonishing 70 times a second in normal flight and they weigh about as much as a penny.

Some additional interesting facts about these birds include the following:

• The bright radiant color on hummingbirds comes from iridescent coloring like on a soap bubble or prism.
• They're very smart and they can remember every flower they've visited and how long it will take a flower to refill.
• They have little to no sense of smell.
• They have very weak feet and can barely walk. They prefer to fly.
• They do not mate for life.
• They have an average life span of about 5 years but can live for more than 10 years.
• A hummingbird will visit an average of 1,000 flowers per day for nectar.
• They eat small, soft bugs for protein.
• A hummingbird will lap up nectar at a rate of about 13 licks per second.
• There are more than 300 types or species of hummingbirds. Most of which are found in South America.
• There are more than fifteen species of hummingbirds that breed in the United States.
• Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds, the only species which breeds in the eastern U.S., have been known to travel 500 miles over the Gulf of Mexico to their breeding grounds, a 20 hour non-stop trip.

If you're interested in learning more, the article at the link gives some additional facts about these incredible birds.

The Genesis of Language

Stephen Barr is a physicist at the University of Delaware who writes on science-related topics. A couple of years ago he composed a review of a book by the famous MIT linguist Noam Chomsky and Chomsky's collaborator Robert Berwick.

The book is titled Why Only Us: Language and Evolution and in it Berwick and Chomsky make some claims which are not only interesting but startling.

After noting that rationality has arisen only in man and that attempts to discover animal analogues to human rationality have largely failed, Barr states:

[Why Only Us] is a breathtaking intellectual synthesis. Using an array of sophisticated arguments based on discoveries in linguistics, neuroscience, genetics, computer science, evolutionary theory, and studies of animal communication, [the authors] develop a set of hypotheses about the nature and origins of human language, which will (if they hold up) have far-reaching implications.

As the title of their book implies, Berwick and Chomsky argue that only human beings have language. It is not that there are other animals possessing it in germ or to a slight degree; no other animals, they insist, possess it at all. The language capacity arose very suddenly, they say, likely in a single member of the species Homo sapiens, as a consequence of a very few fortuitous and unlikely genetic mutations.

It is indeed breath-taking that Berwick and Chomsky have concluded that language, the sine qua non of rational beings, appeared first in a single human being. We'll return to this thought in a moment, but first Barr elaborates on the distinctions Berwick and Chomsky draw between human language and animal communication:

Animal communication can be quite intricate. For example, some species of “vocal-learning” songbirds, notably Bengalese finches and European starlings, compose songs that are long and complex. But in every case, animal communication has been found to be based on rules of linear order. Attempts to teach Bengalese finches songs with hierarchical syntax have failed. The same is true of attempts to teach sign language to apes.

Though the famous chimp Nim Chimpsky was able to learn 125 signs of American Sign Language, careful study of the data has shown that his “language” was purely associative and never got beyond memorized two-word combinations with no hierarchical structure.

Having argued that language is unique to the human species, Barr returns to the difficulties inherent in thinking that it evolved gradually over eons of time. The genetic mutations necessary to produce the changes which gave rise to language must have been so sudden and so extensive that Berwick and Chomsky acknowledge they must have occurred in just a single individual. Barr quotes from Why Only Us:

Such a change takes place in an individual — and perhaps, if fortunate, in all of [his or her] siblings too, passed on from one or (less likely) both parents. Individuals so endowed would have advantages, and the capacity might proliferate through a small breeding group over generations.

In other words, a sudden, extensive discontinuity is hypothesized to have occured in a single generation of a species. A unique being was produced with a genetic capacity radically exceeding that of his/her parents.

Even so, what good is being capable of language unless there are lexical precursors ready at hand to be exploited by this novel ability? Here's Barr:

This brings us to a deep puzzle, which Berwick and Chomsky are brave enough to point out. The Merge procedure [a technique for forming language] requires something “to work on,” namely the “word-like atomic elements,” which they also call “conceptual atoms of thought,” “lexical items,” “atoms of computation,” “symbols of human language and thought,” and simply “human concepts.” Where did these originate? They write,

The atomic elements pose deep mysteries. The minimal meaning-bearing elements of human languages — word-like, but not words — are radically different from anything known in animal communication systems. Their origin is entirely obscure, posing a very serious problem for the evolution of human cognitive capacities, language in particular.

So, let's digest this. Human rationality, and the capacity for language that makes rational thought possible, first arose in a single individual which found the constituent elements of language already laying about, as it were. This is far more astounding, I think, than Barr's measured prose would suggest.

Indeed, it sounds very much like modern secular linguistic anthropologists are advancing a theory which is, in some significant respects, very similar to the Biblical account of the origin of the human race.

Barr concludes with this:

Is there an ontological discontinuity between humans and other animals? Berwick and Chomsky arrive, on purely empirical grounds, at the conclusion that there is. All animals communicate, but only humans are rational; and for Berwick and Chomsky, human language is primarily an instrument of rationality.

They present powerful arguments that this astonishing instrument arose just once and quite suddenly in evolutionary history — indeed, most likely in just one member of Homo sapiens, or at most a few. At the biological level, this involved a sudden upgrade of our mental machinery, and Berwick and Chomsky’s theories of this are both more plausible than competing theories and more consistent with data from a variety of disciplines.

But they recognize that more than machinery is involved. The basic contents and meanings, the deep-lying elements of human thought — “word-like but not words” — were somehow there, mysteriously, in the beginning.

Mysterious indeed, and fascinating.

The Left's Great White Whale

In the wake of yesterday's testimony before Congress by Robert Mueller, National Review's David French wrote that there was a moment, early in the testimony,

that stood at least some small chance of altering the inexorable momentum against impeachment. It came in the course of questioning by California Democrat Ted Lieu.

“I’d like to ask you the reason, again, that you did not indict Donald Trump is because of OLC [Office of Legal Counsel] opinion stating that you cannot indict a sitting president, correct?” Lieu asked Mueller.

Mueller responded simply, “That is correct.”

Combined with Mueller’s testimony that the president could be charged after he left office, this exchange created an implication that only the presidency was saving Donald Trump from a criminal charge that any other American citizen would face. This was an unambiguous, explosive claim.

And then Mueller walked it back. Early in the afternoon, he told the House Intelligence Committee, “I want to go back to one thing that was said this morning by [Representative Ted] Lieu, who said, and I quote, ‘You didn’t charge the President because of the [Office of Legal Counsel] opinion.’

That is not the correct way to say it,” Mueller said. “As we say in the report, and as I said at the opening, we did not reach a determination as to whether the President committed a crime.”

And just like that, Democratic dreams of impeachment died. Again.

And all across the nation progressive hearts sank and hopes of ridding themselves of this president were dashed once more. Love him or loathe him President Trump has taken on the aspect of the Great White Whale Moby Dick in Herman Melville's classic novel, and all the Trump-haters are, with each day that goes by, looking more and more like Captain Ahab.

Ahab, you'll recall, was in the grip of an obsession to slay Moby Dick, and his irrational obsession, a fixation that would brook no demurral, led to the total ruin of his ship and the deaths of almost his entire crew, as well as himself.

In the climactic scene Moby Dick rams the ship, sinking it. Ahab is entangled in the ropes from the harpoons that have been launched against the huge beast and finds himself hopelessly strapped to the whale's body. As the whale rises from the water, the drowned captain's free arm motions involuntarily, as if beckoning others to follow him to their deaths in the depths of the sea.

The fixation the left, and some on the right, have with Donald Trump's destruction often seems as monomaniacally bizarre as Ahab's pursuit of Moby Dick.

Over and over, one hears on MSNBC and CNN how President Trump is destroying the country, how the harm he's doing will take years to repair, yet it's never explained exactly what harm he's actually doing.

Is it economic harm? We're enjoying the best economy in the last sixty years. Is he embroiling us in foreign wars? If anything, he has demonstrated remarkable restraint and patience in the face of provocations. Is it that he's an inarticulate boor? That hardly accounts for the degree of hatred he elicits in his foes. Is it that he's a racist bigot? The entire evidence for that charge is the left's persistent misrepresentation of a single awkward sentence Trump uttered in the wake of the Charlottesville tragedy.

No, the reason for the left's deranged rage is none of these, rather the reasons they're frantic to get him out of office distill to two that they rarely mention, except among themselves, because they know that these reasons would not win them much sympathy with the masses.

The first is that Mr. Trump is in the process of undoing all the progress they've made since the sixties in fundamentally changing this country. The left has for over a century had as its goal the destruction or reshaping of many of the institutions, traditions and cherished values that Americans have embraced since before its founding, and they've made substantial progress in achieving this transformation.

Indeed, the end was in sight and they seemed to be pushing against an open door, even when Republicans were in the White House.

Their chief ally has been a compliant judiciary, including the Supreme Court, that could be counted on to circumvent the will of the people and codify the will of the progressive minority. But Trump and senate Republicans led by Mitch McConnell have in two short years not only stalled the progressive cause but have begun to unravel its accomplishments through the appointment of jurists who believe in the rule of law and the wisdom of the Constitution.

This is why there was such desperate eagerness to destroy the career and reputation of Brett Kavanaugh and why there'll be even worse to come if another Supreme Court vacancy arises within the next year.

The second reason for their hatred is that by undoing President Obama's executive orders and freeing up the economy Mr. Trump has allowed the markets and average household income to rise, unemployment to drop to historic lows for all ethnic groups, and welfare rolls to shrink.

This not only makes his predecessor look incompetent, it also discredits for all to see the progressive economic nostrums - high taxes and onerous regulations - that had kept our economy in the doldrums for so long.

In other words, the Trump presidency is a standing rebuke and indictment of the left that could be seen as metaphorically similar to the crippling of Ahab by his earlier encounter with Moby Dick, and just as losing his leg to the whale fueled Ahab's dementia so, too, Trump's blow to the left, as well as his imperviousness to their assaults against him, have stoked the fires of a white hot, irrational rage against him.

And, like Ahab, nothing will stop those driven by their hatred until either they destroy, politically, their Great White Whale or they destroy, politically, themselves.

A Throw of the Dice

From time to time we've talked about the argument for an intelligent designer of the universe based on cosmic fine-tuning (okay, maybe a little more often than just "from time to time").

Anyway, here's a four minute video by Justin Brierly on the subject that serves as a nice primer for those not wishing to get too bogged down in technical aspects of the argument:

Brierly is the host of the weekly British radio show Unbelievable which is available on podcast. Each week Justin brings together believers and unbelievers to talk about some issue related to matters of religious faith. The discussions are almost always pleasant, informative, and Justin does an excellent job moderating them. They're usually what such conversations should be like, but too often aren't.

If you'd like to sign up for the podcast or browse the archives of past shows which have featured discussions on almost every topic related to religious belief you can go to the Unbelievable website here.

For those readers who might prefer a slightly more elaborate explication of the argument for Intelligent Design try this post and the debate it links to.

What's Good for the Goose

For those who enjoy reading about instances of political schadenfreude there's a particularly amusing instance unfolding in the presidential campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

Sanders, who owns three homes and has made himself wealthy on a senator's salary despite being an arrant socialist and claiming to champion the poor and downtrodden, has demanded that employers pay workers at least $15 an hour.

Now his own campaign workers have publicly complained that they themselves were being paid less than $15 an hour by the senator.

The Washington Post provides us the details:

Unionized campaign organizers working for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential effort are battling with its management, arguing that the compensation and treatment they are receiving does not meet the standards Sanders espouses in his rhetoric, according to internal communications.

Campaign field hires have demanded an annual salary they say would be equivalent to a $15-an-hour wage, which Sanders for years has said should be the federal minimum. The organizers and other employees supporting them have invoked the senator’s words and principles in making their case to campaign manager Faiz Shakir, the documents reviewed by The Washington Post show.

Sanders has made standing up for workers a central theme of his presidential campaigns — this year marching with McDonald’s employees seeking higher wages, pressing Walmart shareholders to pay workers more and showing solidarity with university personnel on strike.

The independent from Vermont has proudly touted his campaign as the first presidential effort to unionize its employees, and his defense of the working class has been a signature element of his brand of democratic socialism and a rallying cry for the populist movement he claims to lead.

There's much more on the story at the link.

The campaign organizers are actually making about $13/hour while working 60 hour weeks. So what has the Sanders campaign done to rectify this injustice?

As Tyler O'Neil at PJ Media writes:

Forcing companies to pay a higher wage leads employers to seek out less expensive automation, fire increasingly expensive workers, or cut the hours employees can work. Sanders opted for the third choice.

Rather than pay his workers more Sanders opted to cut back on their hours. How this helps minimum wage workers achieve sustainability is not clear, but if you're a progressive you don't have to be consistent or able to give a rational defense for your actions.

You just have to have your heart in the "right place."

Racial Privilege

A recent Rasmussen poll found that one-in-three Democrats actually believe it’s racism any time a white politician criticizes a politician of color. This is both stunning and depressing.

To be sure, this is not as high as the percentage of Democrats (51%) who believed George W. Bush was somehow complicit in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Towers, but it does reflect the same curious deficiency in common sense.

Commenting on the Rasmussen poll, Matt Margolis at PJ Media writes:

Let’s put this another way: A third of Democrats believe that minority politicians should be immune from criticism by white politicians. Their policies can’t be challenged without there being an inherent racist motive. This is what a third of Democrats actually believe.

If you’re a white politician and oppose raising taxes, you can debate higher taxes with another white politician, but if you have the same debate with a minority politician, you’re racist.

Just so. The term "racist" has been used so promiscuously by folks on the left that it no longer carries the opprobrium it once did. If it's racist for white politicians to criticize the words and policies of minority politicians then the concept of racism has been debased to the point of being little more than a joke.

Moreover, we're evidently abandoning the ideal of racial equality, an ideal that has been tacitly rendered obsolete, at least in the minds of a third of Democrats. After all, if minority politicians have to be protected from criticism by granting them some sort of race-based privilege or immunity then the implication is that they're not really mature, intelligent adults, but are rather like children with such fragile self-esteem that they must not be held responsible by members of another race for anything they say or do, no matter how silly.

It's fatuous nonsense, of course, but that's the world the intersectional left is creating for the rest of us to live in. In that world skin color is a totem to be venerated, an idol to be worshipped.

If we want to realize the dream of those who fought and died for the cause of racial equality in this country we need to reject any notion that anyone of any color is immune to criticism, and reaffirm the idea that all men and women of whatever race or ethnicity should be held to the same standards of reason, logic, behavior and treatment from others.

Otherwise, we will continue to generate ever increasing resentments among ever more isolated racial groups in this nation, but then that may be precisely what some on the left (and right) would very much like to see happen.