An Extraordinary Man

August 14th marked the anniversary of the death of an extraordinary man. He was born Raymond Kolbe in Poland in 1894. In 1910 he became a Franciscan and took the name Maximilian, eventually managing a friary outside of Warsaw which housed 762 Franciscans.

When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, he committed his friary to sheltering thousands of Polish and Jewish refugees. The friars shared everything they had with the refugees. They housed, fed and clothed them.

In May 1941 the friary was closed down and Maximilian and four companions were taken to the death camp at Auschwitz, where they worked with the other prisoners.

On June 15, 1941, he managed to write a letter to his mother:

Dear Mama, At the end of the month of May I was transferred to the camp of Auschwitz. Everything is well in my regard. Be tranquil about me and about my health, because the good God is everywhere and provides for everything with love. It would be well that you do not write to me until you will have received other news from me, because I do not know how long I will stay here. Cordial greetings and kisses, affectionately. Raymond.

One day an SS officer found some of the heaviest planks he could lay hold of and personally loaded them on the Franciscan's back, ordering him to run. When he collapsed, the SS officer kicked him in the stomach and face and had his men give him fifty lashes.

When the priest lost consciousness the Nazis threw him in the mud and left him for dead. But his companions managed to smuggle him to the camp infirmary - and he recovered.

Prisoners at Auschwitz were slowly and systematically starved, and their pitiful rations were barely enough to sustain a child: one cup of imitation coffee in the morning, and weak soup and half a loaf of bread after work. When food was brought, everyone struggled to get his place and be sure of a portion.

Father Maximilian Kolbe however, stood aside in spite of the ravages of starvation, and frequently there would be none left for him. At other times he shared his meager ration of soup or bread with others. At night he moved from bunk to bunk, saying: "I am a Catholic priest. Can I do anything for you?"

A prisoner later recalled how he and several others often crawled across the floor at night to be near the bed of Father Kolbe, to make their confessions and ask for consolation. Father Kolbe pleaded with his fellow prisoners to forgive their persecutors and to overcome evil with good. When he was beaten by the guards, he never cried out. Instead, he prayed for his tormentors.

A Protestant doctor who treated the patients in Kolbe's block later recalled how Father Kolbe waited until all the others had been treated before asking for help. He constantly sacrificed himself for the others.

One doctor, Rudolph Diem, later recalled: "I can say with certainty that during my four years in Auschwitz, I never saw such a sublime example of the love of God and one's neighbor."

All this was extraordinary but what happened next was astonishing:

In order to discourage escapes, Auschwitz had a rule that if a man escaped, ten men would be killed in retaliation. In July 1941 a man from Kolbe's bunker escaped.

The other men of the bunker were lined up.

"The fugitive has not been found!" the commandant Karl Fritsch screamed. "You will all pay for this. Ten of you will be locked in the starvation bunker without food or water until they die." The prisoners trembled in terror. A few days in this bunker without food and water, and a man's intestines dried up and his brain turned to fire.

The ten were selected, including Franciszek Gajowniczek, imprisoned for helping the Polish Resistance. He couldn't help a cry of anguish. "My poor wife!" he sobbed. "My poor children! What will they do?"

When he uttered this cry of dismay, Maximilian stepped silently forward, took off his cap, and stood before the commandant and said, "I am a Catholic priest. Let me take his place. I am old. He has a wife and children."

Astounded, the icy-faced Nazi commandant asked, "What does this Polish pig want?"

Father Kolbe pointed with his hand to the condemned Franciszek Gajowniczek and repeated "I am a Catholic priest from Poland; I would like to take his place, because he has a wife and children."

Observers believed in horror that the commandant would be angered and would refuse the request, or would order the death of both men. The commandant remained silent for a moment. Amazingly, he acceded to the request. Franciszek Gajowniczek was returned to the ranks, and the priest took his place.

Gajowniczek later recalled:

I could only thank him with my eyes. I was stunned and could hardly grasp what was going on. The immensity of it: I, the condemned, am to live and someone else willingly and voluntarily offers his life for me - a stranger. Is this some dream?

I was put back into my place without having had time to say anything to Maximilian Kolbe. I was saved. And I owe to him the fact that I could tell you all this. The news quickly spread all round the camp. It was the first and the last time that such an incident happened in the whole history of Auschwitz.

For a long time I felt remorse when I thought of Maximilian. By allowing myself to be saved, I had signed his death warrant. But now, on reflection, I understood that a man like him could not have done otherwise. Perhaps he thought that as a priest his place was beside the condemned men to help them keep hope. In fact he was with them to the last.

Father Kolbe was thrown down the stairs into a bunker along with the other victims and simply left there to starve. Hunger and thirst soon gnawed at the men. Some drank their own urine, others licked moisture on the dank walls. Maximilian Kolbe encouraged the others with prayers, psalms, and meditations on the Passion of Christ.

After two weeks, only four were alive. The cell was needed for more victims, and the camp executioner, a common criminal called Bock, came in and injected a lethal dose of carbolic acid into the left arm of each of the four dying men.

Kolbe was the only one still fully conscious and with a prayer on his lips, the last prisoner raised his arm for the executioner. His wait was over. A personal testimony about the way Maximilian Kolbe met death is given by Bruno Borgowiec, one of the few Poles who were assigned to render service to the starvation bunker. He told it to his parish priest before he died in 1947:

The ten condemned to death went through terrible days. From the underground cell in which they were shut up there continually arose the echo of prayers and canticles. The man in-charge of emptying the buckets of urine found them always empty. Thirst drove the prisoners to drink the contents.

Since they had grown very weak, prayers were now only whispered. At every inspection, when almost all the others were now lying on the floor, Father Kolbe was seen kneeling or standing in the centre as he looked cheerfully in the face of the SS men.

Father Kolbe never asked for anything and did not complain, rather he encouraged the others, saying that the fugitive might be found and then they would all be freed. One of the SS guards remarked: this priest is really a great man. We have never seen anyone like him.

Two weeks passed in this way. Meanwhile one after another they died, until only Father Kolbe was left. This the authorities felt was too long. The cell was needed for new victims. So one day they brought in the head of the sick-quarters, a German named Bock, who gave Father Kolbe an injection of carbolic acid in the vein of his left arm.

Father Kolbe, with a prayer on his lips, himself gave his arm to the executioner. Unable to watch this I left under the pretext of work to be done. Immediately after the SS men had left I returned to the cell, where I found Father Kolbe leaning in a sitting position against the back wall with his eyes open and his head drooping sideways. His face was calm and radiant.

The date of his execution was 14 August, 1941 at the age of forty-seven years.

Ironically, the escaped prisoner was later found drowned in a camp latrine, so the terrible reprisals had been exercised without cause.

Father Kolbe's body was removed to the crematorium, and without dignity or ceremony was disposed of, like hundreds of thousands who had gone before him, and hundreds of thousands more who would follow.

The cell where Father Kolbe died is now a shrine. Maximilian Kolbe was beatified as Confessor by Paul VI in 1970, and canonized as Martyr by Pope John Paul II in 1981.

Franciszek Gajowniczek died on March 13, 1995, at Brzeg in Poland, 95 years old - and 53 years after Kolbe had saved him. But he was never to forget the ragged monk.

After his release from Auschwitz, Gajowniczek made his way back to his hometown, with the dream of seeing his family again. He found his wife but his two sons had been killed during the war.

Every year on August 14 he went back to Auschwitz. He spent the next five decades paying homage to Father Kolbe, honoring the man who died on his behalf.

It's an amazing story about an exceptional man. To give one's life for a loved one is poignant. To give one's life for a stranger is more than human, it's divine.

Atheism and Moral Duties

Lincoln Mullen wrote a review, a couple of years back, of Peter Watson's The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God.

In the course of his review, Mullen makes a point which I think needs to be clarified. He writes that:

The most common charge that Christians level against atheists is that they have no morals.

He might be correct that this is a common charge, but even so, the moral problem that Christians (and theists in general) have with atheism is not that atheists don't have moral values but rather that they have no ground for making moral judgments beyond their own subjective preferences.

Take a concrete example: A tobacco company lies about the danger its product poses to the consumer. A theist would say that such deception is objectively wrong because it violates the will of the Creator who commands that people be treated with dignity, respect, and kindness - a command that imposes a clear moral duty not to harm people.

The atheist may also be outraged that the tobacco company has lied to people about the hazards of using its product, but the only reason they could have, if atheism is true, for condemning the company's behavior is that they simply don't like it. If an atheist were to respond to this by insisting that it's just wrong to hurt people, the question then needs to be asked, "Why is it wrong?"

If atheism is true then we are here as a result of a blind, impersonal, evolutionary process, and blind, impersonal processes cannot impose a moral duty on anyone to do anything. Nor can such processes prescribe or proscribe behavior, nor pronounce a behavior wrong in any meaningful moral sense.

Lots of thoughtful atheists have admitted this. Consider a few quotes from thinkers, all of whom are, or were, atheists:

• What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler was right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question. ~ Richard Dawkins
• What’s moral is what you feel good after and what’s immoral is what you feel bad after. ~ Ernest Hemmingway
• This philosopher (Joel Marks is speaking of himself) has been laboring under an unexamined assumption, namely that there is such a thing as right and wrong. I now believe there isn’t…The long and short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality…I experienced my shocking epiphany that religious fundamentalists are correct; without God there is no morality. But they are incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is no morality....Even though words like “sinful” and “evil” come naturally to the tongue as, say, a description of child molesting. They do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God…nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no Morality. ~ Joel Marks
• Morality is nothing but the sum total, the net residuum, of social habits, the codification of customs....The only immoral person, in any country, is he who fails to observe the current folkways. ~ Margaret Sanger
• For the secular man there's no answer to the question, why not be cruel. ~ Richard Rorty.
• The attempts to found a morality apart from religion are like the attempts of children who, wishing to transplant a flower that pleases them, pluck it from the roots that seem to them unpleasing and superfluous, and stick it rootless into the ground. Without religion there can be no real, sincere morality, just as without roots there can be no real flower. ~ Leo Tolstoy
• Communism abolishes all eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality. ~ Karl Marx
• One who does not believe in God or an afterlife can have for his rule of life…only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best. ~ Charles Darwin
• As evolutionists, we see that no justification (of morality) of the traditional kind is possible. Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends . . . In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding....Ethics is illusory inasmuch as it persuades us that it has an objective reference. This is the crux of the biological position. Once it is grasped, everything falls into place. ~ E. O. Wilson and Michael Ruse
• Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear – and these are basically Darwin’s views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death....There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will.... ~ Will Provine
• I would accept Elizabeth Anscombe’s suggestion that if you do not believe in God, you would do well to drop notions like “law” and “obligation” from the vocabulary you use when deciding what to do. ~ Richard Rorty

So, the problem atheism has with morality, as the theist sees it, is not that atheists can't choose to adopt the sort of values of which society approves. Of course, they can. The problem is that they wouldn't be wrong in any meaningful sense had they chosen to adopt completely opposite values. Their choice is purely a matter of personal preference, like choosing to paint their house brown instead of green.

Thus, it's puzzling when atheists adopt the view that they hold to a superior morality than that of Christians as Mullen asserts in a later passage:

Listen carefully to the debate on contemporary issues such as abortion and gay marriage, and you will hear moral reasoning on both sides; when atheists, agnostics, or "nones" take a position, they do so out of a conviction that their morality is superior to that of traditional Christianity.

The most the atheist can claim, however, is that, on the Christian's own assumptions, the atheist's views on these issues might be closer to what God wills than are the Christian's views, but in order to make this claim the atheist has to piggyback on the theist's belief that both God and objective moral duties exist.

Moreover, the atheist cannot say that the theist is wrong in holding the views on these issues that perhaps he does. The most the atheist can say is that the theist's views are inconsistent with what he professes to believe about God's moral will.

Of course, it may be true that the theist is not acting consistently with his fundamental moral assumptions, but that doesn't make those fundamental assumptions wrong, and it certainly doesn't make them inferior to the atheist's values which are grounded in nothing more authoritative than his own tastes.

This is the point I seek to make in my novels In the Absence of God and Bridging the Abyss. An atheist, if he's to be consistent, can either give up the pretense of holding to some non-arbitrary moral standard and admit that he's just making his morality up as he goes along, or he can admit that he believes that right and wrong are not merely matters of subjective preference but are real, objective features of the world. If he admits that, however, then, to be consistent, he'd have to give up his atheism and become a theist.

He has to do one or the other, or he could simply do neither and admit that he prefers to live irrationally, which is the option many atheists apparently settle upon.

Alternative Reading Frames

Imagine a software code of 0s and 1s in a long string, and imagine that if you read off each digit in sequence the string coded for a particular meaning, but if you only read off every third digit the string coded for a completely different meaning. Now imagine the improbability of such a code being produced by random combinations of 0s and 1s by completely mindless processes and forces.

If you do this little thought experiment, you get some idea of the complexity of the DNA code in the nuclei of every cell of our bodies, and why so many people not committed a priori to naturalistic materialism believe that the code had to be the product of an intelligent mind.

DNA is not quite like the preceding example, but it does have overlapping codes whose regulation is carried out by a complex of proteins which themselves couldn't have existed until the code for them existed. But the code couldn't have come about until the proteins were available to allow the code to be read.

An article by biologist Ann Gauger at Evolution News discusses this property of what biologists call "alternative reading frames." She uses this graphic to illustrate:

Gauger goes on to explain:

If you look at the figure ... you’ll see the sequence of DNA from a human mitochondrion: AAATGAACGAAA and so on. Above in red you see the nucleotides (ATCG) have been grouped in threes, and a letter assigned to each. Each group of three is a codon, and each unique codon specifies a particular amino acid, indicated by the red letters: K W T K I, etc. That is the protein sequence that the DNA specifies for that particular way of reading the DNA.

That way of reading the DNA, with that set of groups of three, is called a reading frame, because it establishes the frame for the way we read the information in the gene. In this case it encodes the protein ATP8.

If DNA were a human code, then it would be inconceivable to have a code that could be read in more than one frame at a time. By this I mean starting at one nucleotide and getting one sequence and starting at another nucleotide and getting another sequence with a different meaning.

But that is exactly what happens in this stretch of mitochondrial DNA. Look below the nucleotides to a different set of letters in blue. Notice that they are offset from the first reading frame by two nucleotides. This changes the way the nucleotides are read. The first codon is ATG, the second AAC, and so on. And the resulting protein, ATP6, has a very different sequence from that of the first, ATP8.

That's not all. DNA is double-stranded and when the strands separate in order to be read it's possible that both be read simultaneously, one forward and one backward, so that six different proteins can be coded for by a single segment of DNA.

This is an absolutely stupefying level of complex information, and the notion that it could've come about in some primordial environment as a result of eons of blind, undirected chance requires herculean credulity.

The simplest and most plausible explanation for the complexity of the DNA code is that it was engineered by an intelligence.

The only way to avoid that conclusion is to eliminate any possibility of such an intelligence at the very outset, to decide that no such intelligence exists and that therefore the DNA code must have been generated by blind impersonal forces no matter how improbable that would be. But why decide that? What reason can be adduced upon which such a decision might be based? Why assume that no such agent exists when the existence of such a being would explain so much, not just about DNA, but about the world and life generally?

The only reason anyone makes that assumption is that they have a strong preference that no such being exist and they allow their preference to shape everything else they believe.

The conclusion that an intelligent agent must've been involved in the development of the structure of the DNA code certainly seems warranted by the evidence. The big question, then, is what might be the nature of the intelligent agent that designed and created this code? Who or What might it be?

Gauger doesn't address that question, but her article is still very good.

Trump/Hitler

The progressive left often signals desperation when they stoop to comparing their political enemies to Adolf Hitler and throwing around labels such as "Nazi" and "fascist." PJ Media lists seven times (!) when talkers on just a single network, MSNBC, made the Hitlerian comparison in the solitary month of July, and the person being analogized to Hitler was, of course, the nefarious Donald Trump.

There may well be people in this country who deserve to be compared to Hitler. There may be people in this country who are genuine fascists, but almost certainly the majority, if not the totality, of such people in this country are on the ideological left. Nazism and fascism are ideologies of the left, not the right, although ever since Stalin the left has tried to convince the world that the truth is otherwise.

In his excellent 2007 book Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg elucidates the nature of fascism and Nazism and shows beyond any reasonable doubt that these two statist, totalitarian ideologies both fall on the left end of the political spectrum and in fact have much more in common with American progressivism than they do with whatever political philosophy informs Mr. Trump's thinking.

And certainly, Mr. Goldberg argues, neither Nazism or fascism bears any similarity at all to conservatism.

To understand the absurdity of the Trump/Hitler nexus it's helpful to understand that, according to Goldberg, Hitler was driven by four main ideas: 1) power concentrated in himself, 2) hatred of the Jews, 3) faith in the racial superiority of the German people, and 4) the employment of war to secure the other three.

There's no evidence that Trump has any of these traits and much evidence that he has none of them. Taking them in turn, a man who wishes to concentrate power in himself would not undo Obama's executive orders, deregulate industry and appoint constitutionalist judges and justices. Indeed, it's because President Trump is dismantling the consolidation of power that has accrued to the executive and judicial branches of government over the last couple of decades that accounts for the left's virulent hatred of the man and their desperation to get him out of office.

Nor is there a scintilla of evidence that Mr. Trump is anti-semitic. An anti-semite would not have moved our embassy to Jerusalem, would not tolerate a Jewish son-in-law, nor would an anti-semite have such a close relationship with Israel and look with such favor on that nation. For genuine anti-semitism one has to look at certain congressional Democrats and the left's BDS movement which flourishes on American university campuses.

Some have accused the president of Hitlerian racism because he's been critical of political opponents who happen to be people of color. The charge is ludicrous inasmuch as in order for it to be at all credible one has to assume that it's an act of racism to criticize anyone who happens to be a member of a minority race. If this assumption is seen for the absurdity that it is then none of the allegations of racism made against Trump make any sense.

Finally, Mr. Trump has been the least hawkish president we've had since Jimmy Carter. He has repeatedly shied away from the use of military force even when he could've justified its use, such as when the Iranians shot down our drone in international waters. It's absurd to identify a man so averse to military adventures with the man who wallowed in them.

The left has always accused their opponents of the same sins of which they themselves are guilty, and in the attempt to identify Trump with the erstwhile leader of the Nazi party they present us with another instance of this tactic.

The Nazis under Hitler were, like the left, revolutionary, not conservative; they came to power exploiting a socialist, anti-capitalist platform; they emphasized environmentalism, health food and exercise; they sought to diminish or eradicate the influence of Christianity, transcend notions of class and were masters of the practice of identity politics.

They favored universal education, guaranteed employment, increased entitlements for the elderly, expropriation of land and industry, and state health care.

Moreover, their ethics, such as they were, were entirely pragmatic. Whatever worked to achieve their goal was ipso facto the right thing to do. Like postmodern progressives they believed that truth and falsehood were arbitrary terms, that the "truth" of an idea lay in its power to inspire the people. It mattered very little whether the idea was actually true or false.

The only real differences between the Nazis and the communists of the 1930s and their progressive contemporaries and their descendents was that the Nazis were nationalists and the communists/progressives were internationalists. The Nazis divided people by race, the communists/progressives divide them by class. Hitler hated the communists of his day, not because he disagreed with them on economics, he didn't, but because in his paranoia he believed they were a Jewish conspiracy to take over Europe.

So, when progressives hurl the Hitlerian epithet at Donald Trump, they're showing not only an astounding ignorance of who Hitler was and what he believed, they're also revealing an astounding ignorance of their own history and current ideological kinship to the people they claim to deplore.

More on the Mind/Body Problem

Yesterday's post closed with the question of what's at stake in the debate between materialists and dualists. Materialism is the belief that human beings are comprised solely of material stuff and that everything about us can, in theory, be explained in terms of matter (and energy).

Dualists maintain that human beings display certain traits that cannot even in principle be explained in terms of material, physical causes, among which are the phenomena of consciousness. This fact leads them to conclude that there must be something else about us that's involved in our mental life. This something else must somehow be integrated with the material brain yet immaterial and non-spatial and not reducible to the brain.

This something else has traditionally been called the mind or soul.

So why does it matter? Well, if materialism is correct several consequences follow that many consider to be hard to reconcile with our human experience.

For example, if we're just material beings completely in thrall to the laws of physics it's hard to see how there could be anything like free will. All our choices must be the consequence of prior events occuring in our brains over which we have no real control.

But if that's so then we're not really responsible for our choices, in which case there's really no such thing as morality. For morality and moral responsibility to exist individuals must exert some control over the choices they make.

Also, if we have no free will it's hard to see how the notion of human dignity can be anything more than a pleasant illusion. We're just animals like any other. Yes, we have the ability to reason and speak, but some animals have the ability to fly or swim. Why is rationality and speech to be privileged over flight or grace under water?

And if we're just animals what exactly do we mean when we talk about human rights or human equality? Are animals all equal? Do animals have rights? If so, where do they come from?

Moreover, if we're merely a particular arrangement of carbon and assorted other atoms it's very hard to say what we mean when we talk about the self. Can there be a self, an I, if the atoms that comprise our bodies are constantly being replaced by other atoms and the contents of our brains are constantly changing?

We are no more the same self over time than the image of a kaleidoscope is the same image over time.

Finally, if materialism is true and there is no mind or soul it becomes much more difficult to believe that anything about us survives the death of our bodies. The notion of an afterlife becomes increasingly tenuous as does belief that there exists an immaterial being or mind called God.

Ideas have consequences. If we choose to believe the idea that we are purely physical matter then it's hard to see how we can avoid accepting all of implications listed above, and indeed most materialists do accept all of those implications.

If, on the other hand, we believe we're not just a material body but also an immaterial mind then those difficulties evaporate.

Which view, then, conforms most comfortably with our experience of life, a view which entails a denial of free will, moral responsibility, human dignity, human rights, human equality, the self and the hope of God and an afterlife, or a view which is compatible with all of these?

The Mind/Body Problem

Jonathan Westphal is an Oxford philosopher who has written a book on the mind/body problem in philosophy, and the MIT website The Reader has an interesting article by Westphal that's excerpted from his book.

The mind/body or mind/brain problem is essentially the problem of ascertaining whether we are simply a material, physical being, a body, or whether, in addition to our material selves we also have an immaterial mind that's non-physical and non-spatial.

The article begins by giving a description of the problem based on an everyday event such as seeing a cup of coffee:

[T]he physical story is that light enters my eyes from the cup of coffee, and this light impinges on the two retinas at the backs of the eyes. Then, as we have learned from physiological science, the two retinas send electrical signals past the optic chiasm down the optic nerve.

These signals are conveyed to the so-called visual cortex at the back of the brain. And then there is a sort of a miracle.

The visual cortex becomes active, and I see the coffee cup. I am conscious of the cup, we might even say, though it is not clear what this means and how it differs from saying that I see the cup.

It does indeed seem miraculous. No one knows how it happens that chemical reactions in the brain produce an image that seems to be in the brain but which is invisible to any outside observer examining the brain. Only the individual looking at the cup "sees" the image. No one looking at his brain can see what he's seeing. Westphal goes on:

One minute there are just neurons firing away, and no image of the cup of coffee. The next, there it is; I see the cup of coffee, a foot away. How did my neurons contact me or my mind or consciousness, and stamp there the image of the cup of coffee for me?

It’s a mystery. That mystery is the mind-body problem.

Part of the mystery consists in explaining what exactly the image of the coffee cup is and how electrochemical impulses flowing along a neuron could produce it. After all, brain matter is physical matter, it's spatial, but the image is immaterial and non-spatial. We say it's in our brains but if we could peer inside our brains we wouldn't see a picture of a coffee cup anywhere. So how does matter produce an immaterial image?

A number of philosophers have argued that it's inconceivable that two fundamentally disparate substances, such as matter and mind must be, can interact and that therefore we should only posit a single substance responsible for our "mental" phenomena, the physical brain. This view is called materialism.

Westphal quotes the 17th century French philosopher Descartes:

The whole problem contained in such questions arises simply from a supposition that is false and cannot in any way be proved, namely that, if the soul [mind] and the body are two substances whose nature is different, this prevents them from being able to act on each other.

Descartes seems correct about this. If I hit my thumb with a hammer, everything that happens subsequently is physical and material, except the pain. Pain is non-spatial. It's an immaterial sensation, so where does it come from? Indeed, what exactly, is it?

Westphal describes the problem using not pain but color:

We see that the experiences we have, such as experiences of color, are indeed very different from the electromagnetic radiation that ultimately produces them, or from the activity of the neurons in the brain. We are bound to wonder how the uncolored radiation can produce the color, even if its effects can be followed as far as the neurons in the visual cortex.

So how do physical causes produce non-physical effects? Westphal again:

What happens,...for example, when we decide to do even such a simple thing as to lift up a cup and take a sip of coffee? The arm moves, but it is difficult to see how the thought or desire could make that happen. It is as though a ghost were to try to lift up a coffee cup.

Yet, the fact that our immaterial thought, the thought of raising our arm, triggers a cascade of physical effects is astonishing. No one knows how it happens, but that it happens is one of the chief reasons many philosophers today have rejected materialism and embrace the belief that there's more to us than just our physical bodies.

We must, these philosophers are convinced, also possess a non-physical, immaterial mind or soul.

There's more from Westphal at the link, but you might wonder what's at stake in the controversy between those who believe that we're just material beings (materialists) and those who believe we're a composite of matter and mind (dualists).

That'll be the topic of tomorrow's post.

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.