A Labor Day Post

Note: This post was originally written before the Covid19 pandemic devastated the restaurant industry:

On Labor Day it might be appropriate to revisit the debate over raising the minimum wage.

On the surface raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour seems like a simple solution to help unskilled, poorly educated workers struggling with poverty, but, like most simple solutions, raising the minimum wage has unintended consequences that hurt the very people it's supposed to help.

An article by Ellie Bufkin at The Federalist explains how raising the minimum wage has actually harmed many workers, especially in the restaurant industry.

New York state, for example passed a law several years ago requiring that businesses offer mandatory paid family leave and pay every employee at least $15 an hour, almost twice the previous rate. The results were predictable and indeed were predicted by many, but the predictions went unheeded by the liberal New York legislature.

Bufkin uses as an illustration a popular Union Square café called The Coffee Shop which is closing its doors in the wake of the new legislation. The Coffee Shop employs 150 people, pays a high rent and under the Affordable Care Act must provide health insurance.

Now that the owner must pay his employees twice what he had been paying them he can no longer afford to stay in business:

Seattle and San Francisco led New York only slightly in achieving a $15 per hour minimum pay rate, with predictably bad results for those they were intended to help.

As Erielle Davidson discussed in these pages last year, instead of increasing the livelihood of the lowest-paid employees, the rate increase forced many employers to terminate staff to stay afloat because it dramatically spiked the costs of operating a business.

Understaffed businesses face myriad other problems [in addition to] wage mandates. Training hours for unskilled labor must be limited or eliminated, overtime is out of the question, and the number of staff must be kept under 50 to avoid paying the high cost of a group health-care package. The end result is hurting the very people the public is promised these mandates will help.

Of all affected businesses, restaurants are at the greatest risk of losing their ability to operate under the strain of crushing financial demands. They run at the highest day-to-day operational costs of any business, partly because they must employ more people to run efficiently.

In cities like New York, Washington DC, and San Francisco, even a restaurant that has great visibility and lots of traffic cannot keep up with erratic rent increases and minimum wage doubling.

When the minimum wage for tipped workers was much lower, employees sourced most of their income from guest gratuities, so restaurants were able to staff more people and provided ample training to create a highly skilled team. The skills employees gained through training and experience then increased their value to bargain for future, better-paying jobs.

Some businesses will lay off workers, cut back on training, not hire new workers or shut down altogether. A Harvard study found that a $1 increase in the minimum wage leads to approximately a 4 to 10 percent increase in the likelihood of any given restaurant folding.

How does this help anyone other than those who manage to survive the cuts? When these businesses, be they restaurants or whatever, close down it's often in communities which are "underserved" to start with, and the residents of those communities wind up being more underserved than they were before the minimum wage was raised.

Moreover, raising the minimum wage makes jobs heretofore filled by teenagers and people with weak qualifications more attractive to other applicants who are at least somewhat better qualified.

Workers who would've otherwise shunned a lower wage job will be hired at the expense of the poorly educated and unskilled, the very people who most need the job in the first place and who were supposed to be helped by raising the minimum wage.

Despite all this our politicians, at least some of those on the left, still think raising the minimum wage is a social justice imperative, even if it hurts the people it's supposed to help.

Or perhaps the politicians know it's a bad idea, but they see advocating a mandatory increase in wages as a way to bamboozle the masses into thinking the politician deserves their vote.

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 Griffith 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.

Naturalism's Incompatibility with Evolution

One of the interesting philosophical developments of the 20th century was the increasingly widespread recognition among philosophers and other thinkers that metaphysical naturalism actually saws off the epistemological branch upon which it had been perched comfortably for the previous three centuries.

Ever since the Enlightenment philosophers inclined toward a naturalistic worldview had touted their devotion to reason and derided those whose beliefs seemed to them to be irrational. They were convinced that they were occupying the intellectual high ground, but in the latter part of the 20th century many thinkers, both naturalists and theists, noting that a naturalistic view of the world entailed a Darwinian account of the origin of human reason, recognized that on Darwinism there's no good basis for trusting our reason to lead us to truth.

According to naturalism, evolution, unguided by any intelligent agent, has selected for cognitive faculties in human beings that lead to survival, but survival doesn't necessarily require truth. Indeed, survival could just as easily be enhanced by falsehoods as by truths.

Consider, for instance, a prehistoric society in which a gene mutation causes some people to believe that the more children they produce the greater will be their reward in the afterlife. Those who carry the mutation would tend, on average, to generate more children than those who don't, and since the mutant gene would be passed on to offspring the belief would spread through the population. It would have very high survival value despite its being completely false.

As Barry Arrington at Uncommon Descent notes, this is an awkward state of epistemic affairs for naturalists to find themselves in, but, even so, there are lots of examples of naturalists admitting that natural selection, at least naturalistic natural selection, entails precisely the conclusion that reason has evolved to aid our survival not to discover truth, and especially not metaphysical truth.

Arrington offers a sampling of such quotes:

“[Our] brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.” Steven Pinker

“Sometimes you are more likely to survive and propagate if you believe a falsehood than if you believe the truth.” Eric Baum

“According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.” Donald Hoffman

"We are anything but a mechanism set up to perceive the truth for its own sake. Rather, we have evolved a nervous system that acts in the interest of our gonads, and one attuned to the demands of reproductive competition. If fools are more prolific than wise men, then to that degree folly will be favored by selection. And if ignorance aids in obtaining a mate, then men and women will tend to be ignorant." Michael Ghiselin

“[N]atural selection does not care about truth; it cares only about reproductive success” Stephen Stich

“Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing is advantageous so long as it is geared to the organism’s way of life and enhances the organism’s chances of survival. Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.” Patricia Churchland

“We are jumped-up apes, and our brains were only designed to understand the mundane details of how to survive in the stone-age African savannah.” Richard Dawkins

Of course, a further irony in all this is that if the naturalist cannot trust her reason to lead her to truths about her deepest metaphysical beliefs then she has no good grounds for believing that naturalism, which is itself a metaphysical belief, is true in the first place.

Anyone interested in reading more about the problem of reconciling naturalism with a belief in the trustworthiness of human reason might check out a book by Alvin Plantinga, one of the foremost philosophers of the 20th century. The book is titled Knowledge and Christian Belief, and it's a more accessible version of his earlier, more technical treatment of the same subject titled Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism.

Why Life Is Absurd

My classes are discussing the view, held by both atheistic and theistic existential philosophers alike, that human existence and the world in which that existence is lived out are both fundamentally absurd.

Both theists and atheists believe, albeit for different reasons (see below), that the world is fundamentally incompatible with many of our deepest yearnings as human beings. Tragically, we are like square pegs trying to fit into a round hole.

Here are ten examples of this incompatibility:

1. We long to live, but we know we're going to die.
2. We desire answers to life's deepest questions, but they often elude us or seem to be unattainable.
3. We yearn for justice, but many evil men never pay for their deeds and many who suffer in life are never compensated.
4. We want union with those we love, but we are always alienated, separated at the deepest levels of our being from what and whom we love.
5. We hope to find meaning and purpose in our lives, but death seems to erase whatever projects and purposes we cultivate. Ultimately, there is no purpose. As Duke University philosopher Alex Rosenberg puts it, "What is the purpose of the universe? There is none. What is the meaning of life? Ditto."
6. We need to ground morality and human rights in something beyond ourselves, but there is nothing which can support them.
7. We strive for happiness, but the world is filled with tragedy, grief, suffering, and pain. Individual happiness can only be achieved by ignoring the existential condition of others who are suffering.
8. We crave peace, but the world is filled with incessant conflict.
9. We want to be treated with dignity, but the cosmos tells us that we are nothing more than “dust in the wind.” We have no freedom, no dignity, no enduring self.
10. We have no reason to trust the ability of reason to lead us to truth. What we call reason evolved to enable us to survive, not to enable us to find the truth. Yale professor Steven Pinker writes that, "Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive sometimes not." Or, as philosopher Patricia Churchland tells us, evolution selects for survival, and “Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.”

Theists might not agree with all ten of these, but they'd probably agree with some of them. For the theist the world is incompatible with our deepest yearnings because, she believes, it's not the world for which we were designed and intended.

For the atheist the world is absurd because there's no hope for any rescue from this awful existential predicament. The world is one way, we are another, and there's no God to make it right. Man is forlorn, to use Jean Paul Sartre's term for the haunting sense of aloneness which besets thoughtful people.

Both the theist and the atheist agree that the human story is a tragedy and that life is suffering. Most theists, however, particularly Christian theists, believe that the story will ultimately have a "happy" ending. Atheists believe there is no happy ending.

The atheist agrees with Shakespeare's Macbeth when he laments that, "Life is a passing shadow, a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is seen no more. It is a tale told by an idiot; full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Who's right?

A Just Society

Can we achieve a just society solely through the exercise of our reason? Since justice, being a matter of how we treat people, is a moral issue, the question is really whether reason alone can provide a basis for morality.

The famous 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume didn't think it was possible since he believed that morality is simply a matter of good feeling others have about what you do.

In his An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, he writes, "Morality is determined by sentiment. It defines virtue to be whatever mental action or quality gives to a spectator the pleasing sentiment of approbation, and vice the contrary." (italics his)

In other words, if society approves of what you do then it's moral. If they disapprove, it's vice. Or, as we might say today, morality is culturally constructed. If that's so - if Hume is correct - then justice is whatever treatment we dispense to others that society approves of, and injustice is whatever it disapproves of.

A little thought will show that this view of justice is completely inadequate. After all, societies have approved of all sorts of things we consider to be unjust - chattel slavery, the oppression of women, infant sacrifice, the Hindu caste system, torturing enemies, to name a few.

If we insist with Hume that these things are just or acceptable because society approved of them then there'd never be any motive or reason to change them. They are morally right and abolishing them would be morally wrong.

We might go one step further and point out that if justice (morality) is a matter of the subjective whims of society, then there can be no objective human rights since such rights are predicated upon a standard of justice that transcends societal norms.

The 19th century atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argued that, because the Christian God doesn't exist there's no basis for belief in human equality, rights nor dignity, and that all of his contemporary atheists and liberals who prize such values are really piggybacking on Christianity without acknowledging it and probably without realizing it.

In order for there to be human rights there has to be justice, and in order for there to be justice there has to be an objective obligation to do it. The problem for modern man, however, is that having abandoned God he has left himself no objective obligation to do justice and no objective standard for defining it.

He has cast himself adrift at sea in a raft with no anchor nor compass, and oddly enough, he seems scarcely aware of his predicament.

An Amusing Incoherence

A piece of "fake news" at the satirical site The Babylon Bee does a fine job of pointing out the incoherence of many postmoderns who reject the existence of objective moral absolutes and yet complain about dishonesty and corruption in politics and the media.

Here's the Bee's faux news report:

Sources from within the United States confirmed Friday that American society, while typically rejecting concepts like absolute truth and objective moral standards, is suddenly showing grave concern for the rise of fabricated news stories after a reported uptick in fake news during the recent election season and President Trump’s habit of using the term to describe many mainstream media outlets.

One Oregon man, who rejects the idea that humanity can even be sure the universe exists in any meaningful sense, was nonetheless disturbed by the idea that websites could publish completely false information, for anyone in the world to read.

“It’s just absolutely wrong, in my opinion,” said the man who doesn’t believe in absolute ideals of right and wrong at all. “What if someone reads the information and gets like, deceived? That just seems totally wicked.”

“It just doesn’t seem right that they can publish stuff that’s just blatantly not true,” added the man, who also noted his firm belief that everyone has the right to define their own version of truth.

Other Americans agreed, stating that the idea that shady news sites could get away with reporting completely inaccurate information was “disturbing” and “evil,” before stressing their belief that no one individual’s notions about morality are absolute or binding in any meaningful sense.

Tech conglomerates such as Facebook and Google have vowed to meet the trend head-on, assuring the public that they are taking bold steps to filter out any news that contradicts the version of truth that they decide is acceptable.

The Bee is making a humorous jab at a serious incoherence in our contemporary society. If there are no objective moral rights and wrongs then moral outrage at lies and injustice is an absurdity.

We might wonder about all those folks demanding justice and equitable treatment on the streets of our cities whether they accept the idea that all moral claims are simply subjective preferences, matters of taste, and if so, why they think anyone should heed their call to accept their particular subjective moral preferences.

How to Disagree

We are now deep into the next election cycle in the United States. Campaigns for the 2020 presidential election are underway, the conventions have been held, money is being raised, debates will soon take place and positions are being staked out. It seems like the political season never ends, but even so, here we are.

This means that, as disputatious and ornery as the last three years have been, the next couple of months will likely be worse.

As we enter this period in our nation's political life it would be good for those of us who engage in the to and fro of political discussion with friends, family and acquaintances to keep in mind that there are more important things than proving ourselves right on this or that issue.

It would be good in the weeks ahead to keep in mind that those who disagree with us will not be won over to our way of seeing things if our demeanor is arrogant, scowling and angry. They certainly won't find our opinions compelling if we resort to insulting them or their ideas.

The most effective way to disagree in any discussion is with a humble attitude, acknowledging to ourselves and to the other person that we could be wrong about whatever it is we are debating. A winsome approach, seasoned with humility and humor, is likely to be far more persuasive than pummelling one's interlocutor with rhetorical body blows.

In almost every instance, it'll be more important that we respect the person we're engaged in conversation with than that we win an argument with them. After all, as an old aphorism has it, "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still."

If the other person gets angry and insulting then it's better that we change the subject to something less contentious. What good can come of continuing it under those circumstances anyway?

If we can respect and love those with whom we disagree, if we can say, "I don't think you're correct, but you're more important to me than my being right," I think we'll be much more attractive to those who differ with us and much more effective in presenting our views and gaining them a hearing.

Political, as well as religious and philosophical, differences are important, in many cases extremely so, but they're not the most important thing. The most important thing is that we treat each other with dignity, respect and kindness.

Our politicians probably won't treat each other that way, but we should.

Best President for Minorities Since Lincoln

It's hard to see how the left can run against Donald Trump on policy. On two of their biggest issues, opposition to war and ameliorating the condition of the poor, especially African American poor, Trump has been extraordinary.

On the matter of war and peace, libertarian senator Rand Paul in his speech at the RNC the other night averred with good reason that President Trump has been the most antiwar commander-in-chief in a generation.

On the question of helping minority poor it can honestly be said that it's hard to think of any president since Abraham Lincoln who has done more to benefit African Americans.

Consider this from Kimberley Strassel at the Wall Street Journal (paywall): [I]t’s passing strange that the GOP president who has been relentless in promoting policies that benefit minorities is the one the media brands most racist of them all.

There was the First Step Act, which reformed [criminal] sentencing laws; more than 90% of those who have had their sentences reduced are black Americans. The president in 2018 made historically black colleges and universities a priority, putting new money into loans and funding. His tax law created opportunity zones that funnel private investment to inner cities.

He has doubled down on school choice, an issue with 68% support among blacks and 82% among Latinos, according to a Federation for Children poll. His economic policies produced record-low black and Hispanic unemployment.

That last fact is perhaps the most significant of all. Next to strong families, having a job is the surest way to get out of poverty. Strassel points out that Trump's policies toward blacks and Hispanics may swing the election:

In 2016 he scored only 8% of the black vote, 28% of Hispanics, and 27% of Asian-Americans. Yet the polls also show a growing awareness and frustration among minorities that the Obama-Biden years didn’t deliver for their communities. Despite his putative lead nationally, Mr. Biden has less black and Hispanic support at this point in the race than Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama did.

Does that softness translate into a giant Trump minority pickup? No. But it doesn’t have to. Democrats like to point out that Mr. Trump won the election by a margin of 80,000 votes across three swing states. The Trump campaign knows that increasing its support—even a little—among minority communities in those and other key battlegrounds could prove huge.

Take Michigan, one of the three, where Mr. Trump won an estimated 6% of the African-American vote in 2016. A recent Trafalgar poll showed his current support at nearly double that, which would translate into tens of thousands of votes. Recent polls have also shown Mr. Trump doing better with Latinos, with one Marist poll showing him up 11% over 2016. Consider what that might mean in Arizona or Florida.

Whether all this translates into a Trump victory in November or not it's simply not credible for his opponents to accuse him or his administration of being "racist," not when he has done more to improve the state of black life in America than any president since Lincoln.

Hitler the Darwinian

About eight years ago Richard Weikart published a study on the roots of the moral thinking of Adolf Hitler, a review of which is posted at Evolution News and Views. Here's an excerpt:

One of the most controversial parts of the movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed was the segment where Ben Stein interviewed the history professor Richard Weikart about his book, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany.

Darwinists were apoplectic, deriding Stein and Weikart for daring to sully the good name of Charles Darwin by showing how Hitler, and German scientists and physicians, used Darwin's evolutionary theory to justify some of their atrocities, such as their campaign to kill the disabled.

Some critics even denied that the Nazis believed in Darwinism at all. Weikart challenges his critics to examine the evidence in his fascinating sequel, Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress, which examines the role of Darwinism and evolutionary ethics in Hitler's worldview.

In this work Weikart helps unlock the mystery of Hitler's evil by vividly demonstrating the surprising conclusion that Hitler's immorality actually flowed from a coherent ethic. Hitler was inspired by an ethic based on the evolutionary history of man to pursue the utopian project of biologically improving the human race. Hitler's evolutionary ethic underlay, or influenced, almost every major feature of Nazi policy: eugenics (i.e., measures to improve human heredity, including compulsory sterilization), euthanasia, racism, population expansion, offensive warfare, and racial extermination.

It's a tragic historical fact, demonstrated repeatedly throughout the last two centuries, that once people reject the idea that morality is rooted in an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent and transcendent personal being the next logical step is to abandon the idea that there's any objective moral right and wrong at all.

This step is inevitable since nothing else but such a being as described in the previous sentence could possibly provide a basis for objective morality, and once this step is taken it leads inevitably to moral arbitrariness and subjectivity. In other words, what's right is whatever feels right to me. Moral subjectivism in turn leads directly to egoism, i.e. the belief that one should put one's own interests ahead of the interests of others, and egoism leads ineluctably to the ethic of "might makes right".

Hitler's "morality" was completely consistent with his rejection of a belief in a transcendent moral authority, a God.

Indeed, Hitler was what every atheist would be if a) he or she had the power Hitler had and b) he or she were logically consistent.

Thankfully, few of those who reject belief in a transcendent moral authority are both powerful and consistent, but in the 20th century some were. Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot and Hitler all were atheists who had complete power within their sphere and acted consistently with their naturalistic, materialistic worldview. The horrific consequences were completely predictable.

Being Intellectually Honest

The old adage is that in any social gathering it's bad manners to introduce either religion or politics into the discussion. It may be true that these two topics are unwelcome, yet it's hard to imagine anything that could be more important to discuss. That they're considered taboo says more, perhaps, about the shallowness of much of our social interaction than it does about the topics themselves.

In any case, those who do engage in serious conversation and debate, one would hope, are paramountly concerned with finding and sharing the truth about whatever it is that's being deliberated, but they're often tempted to adopt a number of less-than-helpful tactics that do more to bring discredit upon themselves and the views they advocate than they do to promote the truth.

Some years ago I came across a blog post titled Ten Signs of Intellectual Honesty which listed ten good rules to follow when participating with others in dialogue.

Since the link to this post no longer works I'll take the liberty to list the ten rules along with some brief thoughts on them. They're very much worth heeding for anyone who wishes to participate in the conversations, especially those bearing on religion and/or politics, that are occurring in our public square.

Here they are:

1. Do not overstate the power of your argument. One's sense of conviction should be in proportion to the level of clear evidence that most people can assess. If someone portrays his opponents as being stupid or dishonest for disagreeing, intellectual dishonesty is probably in play. Intellectual honesty is most often associated with humility, not arrogance.

2. Show a willingness to publicly acknowledge that reasonable alternative viewpoints exist. The alternative views do not have to be treated as equally valid or powerful, but rarely is it the case that one and only one viewpoint has a complete monopoly on reason and evidence.

3. Be willing to publicly acknowledge and question one's own assumptions and biases. All of us rely on assumptions when trying to make sense of the world, and all of us bring various biases to the table. We should be open and honest about it.

4. Be willing to publicly acknowledge where your argument is weak. Almost all arguments have weak spots, but those who are trying to sell an ideology will have great difficulty with this point and would rather obscure or downplay any weak points. Refusing to admit a weakness in your argument damages your credibility. People are more likely to warm to your view if you're honest about where it falters.

5.Be willing to publicly acknowledge when you are wrong. Just as we should be open about weak spots in our convictions we should be willing to acknowledge that we were wrong about something if, in fact, we were. Ideologues, especially, find this a very difficult thing to do because admitting to being wrong undercuts their rhetoric and the image they're trying to promote. You get small points for admitting to being wrong on trivial matters and big points for admitting to being wrong on substantive points. You lose big points for failing to admit being wrong on something trivial.

6. Demonstrate consistency. A clear sign of intellectual dishonesty is when someone extensively relies on double standards. We see this a lot in our news media and political debates. Typically, an excessively high standard is applied to the perceived opponent(s), while a very low standard is applied to the ideologues' allies.

7. Address the argument instead of the person making the argument. Ad hominem arguments are a clear sign of intellectual dishonesty. When someone resorts to insulting his opponent, often by relying on stereotypes, guilt-by-association, and superficially innocent-sounding "gotcha" questions, they're revealing the inadequacy of their own arguments and trying to deflect attention away from that inadequacy.

8. Be careful not to misrepresent your opponent's argument. Misrepresenting an argument in order to make it look weaker and easier to defeat is called the "straw man" fallacy. Straw man often occurs when people are quoted out-of-context or are paraphrased incorrectly. When critiquing an argument one should show that one has made a good faith effort to both understand it and to represent it in its strongest form.

9. Demonstrate a commitment to critical thinking. It's important that we assign a high level of importance to evidence. Someone who holds adamantly to their position but who can give no reason for their tenacity nor allow evidence-based reasons to count against their position, is not a critical thinker and will not be taken seriously.

10. Be willing to publicly acknowledge when one's opponent has made a good point or criticism. If someone is unwilling to admit that his opponent has made a telling point or an incisive criticism it demonstrates an unwillingness to honestly engage in the give-and-take of dialogue.

My own experience has been that even when I think I'm doing the best I can to abide by the rules described above I still sometimes find myself teetering close to the boundary. Luckily, I have friends and students among my readers who are not shy about calling me on it when they think I've transgressed. Sometimes I think they're wrong, but sometimes not.

I think it's wise to keep in mind that none of us is perfect and to watch carefully how we express ourselves in discussions on matters we feel strongly about. Years ago I printed out these Ten Signs of Intellectual Honesty and have them posted over my computer.

Maybe it would be a good idea for all of us to do that.

Is Math a Coincidence?

Earlier this month I posted on the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" (Nobel winner in physics Eugene Wigner) to explain the world. Today's post is something of a follow-up to that earlier post which I recommend interested readers to revisit.

We often take for granted that the operations of nature can be explained in terms of mathematical equations. We learned in high school physics (if we took physics) that all physical phenomena are describable mathematically.

Mathematical patterns are ubiquitous in nature from quantum mechanics to the Fibonacci sequence in the whorls of disc flowers of a sunflower to the trajectories of planets in their orbits around the sun. Indeed, it's hard to think of any scientific phenomenon that can't be described mathematically.

What few of us ever do, though, is stop and ask why this should be so. Why is mathematics able to so accurately describe the world?

As the following five minute video points out, naturalism has no good answer to this question. The only satisfactory answer is one that involves an intelligent engineer, a mathematical genius who designed the universe according to a mathematical blueprint.

If some wish to say that this is just the way the universe is and that there's no need of deeper explanation they have to acknowledge that they're essentially admitting that they have no answer to the question, that it's just a bizarre coincidence.

Perhaps, but that requires a lot of faith in blind coincidence.

Can Trump Pull it Off?

As the Republicans begin their nominating convention this week the polls are showing incumbent president Donald Trump trailing challenger Joe Biden by double digits. Many Democrats are confident that they'll defeat Trump in November, but Wayne Allyn Root at Townhall writes that their optimism may be misplaced.

He gives several reasons for thinking that the November election is shaping up to be a Trump victory and begins his column with this:

Democrats behind the scenes are scared and getting more desperate by the day because there are so many signs of a coming Donald Trump victory. The signs are everywhere.

Whether he's right or not about Democrats being scared and desperate I have no idea, but he does provide us with some interesting facts. Here are some of the signs Root thinks point to a Trump victory:

1. Polls show an overwhelming majority of Americans oppose calls to defund police, including 80 percent of black voters. This does not augur well for Joe Biden and the Democrats who have the defund anchor hanging around their necks.

2. Polls also show that 83 percent of Americans support the decision by President Trump and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Dr. Ben Carson to end former President Obama's program designed to fill the suburbs with high-density, low-income housing, bringing crime and drugs to the neighborhoods of suburban families. This a good sign for Republicans.

Root asks:

Do you think these millions of suburban American homeowners who don't want to see their home value destroyed or their neighborhood turned into war zones like Chicago, Detroit or Baltimore are going to vote enthusiastically for Joe Biden when Biden's presidential platform actually puts in writing his goal to supercharge Obama's "destroy the suburbs" program?

Trump wants to protect your neighborhood. I wonder who suburban moms and dads will vote for.

3. People are fleeing Democrat-controlled cities to escape the crime and dysfunction of those cities. According to Rasmussen, 72 percent of likely voters are concerned about the growing violent protests nationwide. Sixty-two percent say it will affect their vote.

This is another bad omen for Democrats who have expressed overt support for some of the radical movements responsible for the riots and who minimize or ignore the violence in our streets. The people fleeing deep-blue Democratic cities for the safety of red Republican suburbs, Root argues, aren't doing it just so they can vote for Biden and the Democrats.

4. Gun and body armor sales are up by over 80% in NYC compared to the same period in 2019, and in many cities gun stores are backlogged with orders. Those people seeking to protect themselves are unlikely to be voting for the party which refuses to condemn the riots, is in many cases coddling the rioters, and whose presidential and vice presidential candidates want to restrict their right to own the firearms they're buying.

5. Root claims that there was a 21 point shift among non-whites away from Biden when he picked Kamala Harris as his running mate. He doesn't cite where he got that statistic, nor have I seen it anywhere else, but if it's even half-true it would be a disaster for Biden and the Democrats.

6. Surprisingly, after the orgy of Trump-bashing at the Democratic convention, the president's approval rating, according to one poll (Rasmussen), actually went up from 47% to 51%.

Anyway, I'm not sure that Root's not being a bit pollyannish in this piece. It could be that all that he says is indeed happening, but it still may not be enough to produce a Trump win. Even so, Democrats would be wise not to be overconfident.

He closes his column with this reminder:

Remember when then-President Jimmy Carter led Republican nominee Ronald Reagan by 10 points during the summer of 1980? Reagan won in a historic landslide.

Remember when Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis was up by 17 points over Republican nominee George H.W. Bush after the Democratic convention? Bush won the electoral vote 426 to 111.

It's not beyond imagining that we could witness a similar reversal this November.

How Obama/Biden Handled an Epidemic

The Democratic National Convention will doubtless go down in history for a number of things, but one of them won't be for setting a high standard of political honesty.

Particularly disappointing was the willingness of speakers to accuse Donald Trump of being a racist on the basis of an innocuous, and true, comment he made in the wake of the Charlottesville protest in which a woman was killed and several were injured and the blame they heaped on the president for the deaths of those who've succumbed to Covid-19.

Kimberley Strassel at the Wall Street Journal (paywall) reminds us that the Obama/Biden response to a similar challenge ten years ago was significantly less impressive than that of the Trump administration to the Covid plague and that for Democrats to scorn Trump while giving Biden a pass hardly engenders confidence in their rhetoric.

Strassel opens with a recap of some of the allegations:

Is it reasonable to blame a single politician for the spread of a highly infectious virus, especially in a free country with 50 states and 330 million people? Joe Biden is lucky that wasn’t the standard a decade ago.

If the Democratic convention produced one theme it’s that Donald Trump is personally at fault for every coronavirus death. The message is that crazy, that blunt. Kamala Harris: “Donald Trump’s failure of leadership has cost lives.” Barack Obama: “Donald Trump hasn’t grown into the job because he can’t. And the consequences of that failure are severe: 170,000 Americans dead.”

Democrats even claim Mr. Biden saved lives in 2014. Michelle Obama: “Our leaders had worked hand in hand with scientists to help prevent an Ebola outbreak from becoming a global pandemic.” Ms. Harris last week: “Remember that pandemic? Barack Obama and Joe Biden did their job. Only two people died in the United States.”

Ebola is a terrifying disease, but outbreaks tend to happen only in very poor nations, and if caught early the virus is difficult to transmit outside hospitals. Anthony Fauci said in 2014 that a U.S. outbreak was “very, very, very unlikely.” Mr. Obama told Americans to chill out: “Ebola is actually a difficult disease to catch. It’s not transmitted through the air like the flu.”

The reference to Ebola is a feint. The Obama/Biden response to Ebola isn't the proper comparison to the Trump response to Covid. The relevant comparison is to a different disease, the H1N1 swine-flu outbreak of 2009-10. No one knew how deadly H1N1 would turn out to be, but the Obama administration's response to it was far more laid-back than the Trump approach to Covid-19.

Here's Strassel:

H1N1 began much like corona, with panicked stories in late April 2009 about a novel “hybrid” flu strain in Mexico that was popping up in the U.S. It was even more alarming, in that it especially affected children. Yet the new administration began with a muddled message. Mr. Obama encouraged calm, while Mr. Biden rambled a warning about staying off airplanes and public transport—prompting backlash. “Biden’s flu gaffe a headache for Obama,” read one headline.

Within days, some 30 states had suspected cases, and by April 27 the U.S. had its first death, a 23-month-old child. Other countries started shutting facilities, telling citizens to stay home, quarantining visitors.

The Obama administration still had no idea how deadly the disease was, though the World Health Organization called the outbreak a threat to “all humanity,” and health experts predicted hospitals would be overloaded.

The administration nonetheless took a resigned approach to its spread. Mr. Obama didn’t close the Mexican border, saying that would “be akin to closing the barn doors after the horses are out.” His officials did declare a health emergency (Mr. Obama was golfing that day) and distributed the national stockpile (which they never replenished).

The administration recommended schools “consider” closing if experiencing an outbreak, though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention chief said this might not help with spread and warned about taking kids out of classrooms.

No one considered a national lockdown, especially not an administration focused on a fragile economic recovery. Mr. Obama promised to “control” the “impact” of the virus—not the virus itself. He asked Congress for all of $1.5 billion.

The Trump administration has been severely criticized for not having enough resources on hand to deal with the current plague in its initial stages, but its response was much more aggressive than the modest Obama/Biden response to H1N1:

Team Obama promised 100 million doses of vaccine by mid-October. (A flu vaccine is easier to produce than a coronavirus vaccine). But government setbacks in production, manufacturing and dosing protocols resulted in only 11 million doses, prompting national outrage. By that point, the CDC estimated 22 million Americans had been infected, 36,000 children hospitalized, and 540 kids had died.

It was just sheer luck that H1N1 wasn't as virulent as Covid-19:

Before Covid-19, Democrats were willing to admit they’d dodged a bullet. Former Biden chief of staff Ron Klain said at Texas A&M in 2019: “We did every possible thing wrong. Sixty million Americans got H1N1 in that period of time, and it is just purely a fortuity that this isn’t one of the great mass-casualty events in American history. [It] had nothing to do with us doing anything right; just had to do with luck.

If anyone thinks that can’t happen again, they don’t have to go back to 1918. Just go back to 2009, 2010. Imagine a virus with a different lethality, and you can just do the math.”

Strassel points out that had the H1N1 virus turned out to have the lethality of Covid-19 the death toll would have been catastrophic, approaching two million, considerably more than the 170,000 who have died thus far from Covid. And it bears repeating that no one knew at the time how lethal H1N1 would be.

The H1N1 virus struck ten years ago and time and a complicit media have largely effaced it from our memory, but it's simply dishonest for the Democrats to try to make political hay over the alleged failures of the current administration while assuring us that a Biden administration would be much more competent. We saw what a Biden administration would do a decade ago and it wasn't encouraging.

She concludes with this:

The Trump administration response has been flawed—in particular its initial testing delays. But let’s acknowledge (as Democrats once did) that there is only so much government can do to “control” a germ. As for distributing equipment, providing antivirals and developing a vaccine, the current response has so far met or exceeded 2009-10.

Mr. Biden is free to argue he’s a better man for the White House; he shouldn’t get to rewrite history, or virology.

Nor should Mr. Obama.

Bad Predictions

When scientists and others predicted a decade or two ago that global warming was going to make our planet uninhabitable by the year 2020 or so, many people took them at their word and were willing to support all sorts of economically destructive policies that would've ruined the lives of millions of people had they been enacted. Indeed, those who support the "Green New Deal" are still determined to foist those policies upon us.

Nevertheless, predictions about the future, even when coming from the lips of eminent scientists, should be understood as extrapolations based on the assumption that all the variables that are factored into the prediction will remain constant or on the same trajectory as when the prediction is made. In fact, however, the trajectory of those variables frequently fails to remain constant.

For instance, in 1968 ecologist Paul Ehrlich of Stanford wrote a book titled The Population Bomb in which he predicted that global population would exceed food resources by the end of the century, and the world would suffer vast starvation and world wars due to mass migrations. It never happened.

In 1971 an organization of scientists called The Club of Rome predicted that the world standard of living would peak in 1990 and then decline inexorably.

Here's an excerpt from the link:

Their doomsday manifesto was translated into 30 languages and sold more than 12 million copies. Their solution to the impending economic collapse was for world governments to reduce the world supply of food by 20 percent so that people would be forced to have fewer children, or starve.

They simply assumed that the world’s supply of resources is fixed while the demand for resources grows at a compound rate—which guarantees that demand will exhaust resources. They completely ignored the fact that humans have been endlessly creative in thinking of ways to substitute more plentiful resources for less plentiful ones. We have figured out how to use nuclear fuels and solar energy in place of fossil fuels, e-mail in place of snail-mail, and plastic in place of wood, metal, and glass.

In the 80s and 90s prognosticators were predicting either a shortage of photographic film or a shortage of silver because silver was being rapidly consumed in the production of photographic film. The shortage never came about because within a few years digital technology made film obsolete.

Similar predictions were made during the 70s and 80s that demand for paper would soon outpace paper production making paper exorbitantly expensive, but digital technology emerged that dramatically reduced paper use. Likewise, we were told back in those decades that we were rapidly running out of oil and that by the end of the century our standard of living would suffer serious decline because fuel would be so scarce. That was before the discovery of new oil deposits, the development of fracking and other technological advances opened up vast supplies of fossil fuels.

Currently, we're being told that global warming caused by the use of those fossil fuels will force multitudes of people to migrate from torrid climes to more temperate latitudes crowding masses of humanity into ever shrinking living spaces. However, if global warming occurs on the scale that folks like Al Gore have been predicting, which is doubtful, vast regions in Canada, Alaska, Russia and Greenland will become habitable that aren't habitable now.

Examples of similarly failed predictions could be multiplied, but the point is that no one knows what the future will bring. Scientists are not prophets. No one knows what inventions will be developed in the years ahead.

History teaches, though, that doomsday predictions, especially when they forecast disaster several decades down the road, have a very poor track record for accuracy, and that it's wise to be skeptical of such predictions when they're thrust upon us by a sensationalist media and "experts" who should be more cautious.

Is it Possible to Know That God Does Not Exist? (Pt. II)

I ended yesterday's post on Gary Gutting's interview with UMass philosopher Louise Antony with the claim that there are dozens of good reasons for believing that God exists. One such reason is the modern argument from design, but Professor Antony tries to anticipate that argument in the interview:

Many theists think they’re home free with something like the argument from design: that there is empirical evidence of a purposeful design in nature. But it’s one thing to argue that the universe must be the product of some kind of intelligent agent; it’s quite something else to argue that this designer was all-knowing and omnipotent.

Why is that a better hypothesis than that the designer was pretty smart but made a few mistakes? Maybe (I’m just cribbing from Hume here) there was a committee of intelligent creators, who didn’t quite agree on everything. Maybe the creator was a student god, and only got a B- on this project.

The problem with this objection is that the concession that the designer exists but is a bit incompetent is that it concedes too much. Once we grant the existence of a designer (or a committee of designers), even if the designer(s) seems to be unable to create a perfect world, then the atheist has essentially lost the argument. She's conceding that something beyond this universe exists which is powerful enough and intelligent enough to create this universe, even though the creation is imperfect.

That's a concession that an atheist cannot afford to make. It puts her on a very slippery slope to theism since it'd be plausible to believe that any designer of the universe would have to have the minimal qualities of transcending space, time and matter, be unimaginably powerful and unimaginably intelligent. It might also be plausible to assume that this creator is personal, since it would've created personality embodied in beings like you and I. If so, we're getting pretty close to the God of traditional theism. Too, close, certainly, for the comfort of most atheists.

Even a less than perfect designer is still a designer that transcends this universe and possesses the traits listed in the last paragraph. Even a team of designers are still designers which possess those traits.

Such a designer is not the God of theism, to be sure, but the existence of a transcendent designer(s) of any sort is certainly much more compatible with theism than it is with the naturalists' claim that the universe is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be. Moreover, if there's a plausible answer to the problem of an imperfect creation, theism becomes even more likely.

For an example of some plausible responses to this problem watch the following five minute video:

Gutting's interview continues:

G.G.: Would you say, then, that believers who think they have good reasons for theism are deceiving themselves, that they are actually moved by, say, hopes and fears — emotions — rather than reasons?

L.A.: I realize that some atheists do say things like “theists are just engaged in wishful thinking — they can’t accept that death is the end.” Theists are insulted by such conjectures (which is all they are) and I don’t blame them. It’s presumptuous to tell someone else why she believes what she believes — if you want to know, start by asking her.

When atheists allege that theism is an expression of wishful thinking it should be noted that if so - and I have little doubt that that's at least part of why many theists hold to their convictions - it must also be the case that atheism is also an expression of wishful thinking. If wishful thinking lies behind the faith of some believers then it also lies behind the lack of faith manifest in many unbelievers. In other words, many atheists disbelieve because they simply don't want there to be a God.

You can read a couple of very bright atheists admitting this themselves here.

The claim that theism is just wishful thinking is a two-edged sword that cuts both ways. As such it reminds me a little of mathematician John Lennox's retort to atheist biologist Richard Dawkins in a debate between the two. Dawkins averred that theists believe in God because they're afraid of the dark. Lennox responded by saying that atheists disbelieve in God because they're afraid of the light.

We'll conclude our look at Gutting's interview tomorrow.

Is it Possible to Know That God Does Not Exist? (Pt. I)

At the Opinionator philosopher Gary Gutting of Notre Dame interviews atheist philosopher Louise Antony, a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

The interview is interesting for a number of things Ms Antony asserts, including her claim that she knows there is no God:

Gary Gutting: You’ve taken a strong stand as an atheist, so you obviously don’t think there are any good reasons to believe in God. But I imagine there are philosophers whose rational abilities you respect who are theists. How do you explain their disagreement with you? Are they just not thinking clearly on this topic?

Louise Antony: I’m not sure what you mean by saying that I’ve taken a “strong stand as an atheist.” I don’t consider myself an agnostic; I claim to know that God doesn’t exist, if that’s what you mean.

G.G.: That is what I mean.

L.A.: O.K. So the question is, why do I say that theism is false, rather than just unproven? Because the question has been settled to my satisfaction. I say “there is no God” with the same confidence I say “there are no ghosts” or “there is no magic.” The main issue is supernaturalism — I deny that there are beings or phenomena outside the scope of natural law.

With due respect to Ms Antony, I simply don't see how anyone can know such a thing. It's a bit like saying that one knows there are no living beings elsewhere in the universe. One can believe this, one can be skeptical or doubtful that there are any such beings, but how one can know that a transcendent mind does not exist is not at all clear, at least not to me.

Nevertheless, she doubles down on her claim a bit further on in the interview:

G.G.: O.K., .... But the question still remains, why are you so certain that God doesn’t exist?

L.A.: Knowledge in the real world does not entail either certainty or infallibility. When I claim to know that there is no God, I mean that the question is settled to my satisfaction. I don’t have any doubts. I don’t say that I’m agnostic, because I disagree with those who say it’s not possible to know whether or not God exists. I think it’s possible to know. And I think the balance of evidence and argument has a definite tilt.

But a "definite tilt" to the evidence, even if such a tilt existed, hardly warrants a claim to knowledge. Gutting goes on to ask her what sort of evidence she has in mind:

L.A.: I find the “argument from evil” overwhelming — that is, I think the probability that the world we experience was designed by an omnipotent and benevolent being is a zillion times lower than that it is the product of mindless natural laws acting on mindless matter.

Prof. Antony is surely speaking here of a psychological probability rather than a statistical probability since the latter is impossible to measure. Nevertheless, it's true that evil and suffering often make it difficult to believe that God exists, and if that were the only evidence we had then the existence of a benevolent, omnipotent deity would seem unlikely.

But the evil in the world is not the only evidence we have. It's only one element in what philosophers call our evidential set.

Imagine, for example, that every Chinese man you met on a trip to China was under six feet tall. If that experience was the only relevant evidence you had you might be justified in doubting that there are seven footers in China. But suppose you subsequently acquired several other bits of evidence. You learn, for example, that some Chinese play basketball, that some have even played in the NBA, and that some have even played center in the NBA. Perhaps you also read about a man named Yao Ming. As your evidential set expands, the force of the original piece of evidence begins to diminish.

Likewise with the argument from evil. Evil is only one element in our evidential set. There are dozens of good reasons for thinking that a God exists, and there are also ways of answering the argument from evil which greatly lessen its force. When considered as just one part of the entire body of evidence the existence of evil is not nearly as dispositive as Ms. Antony suggests.

We'll talk more about Gutting's interview with Professor Antony on tomorrow's Viewpoint.

Justice and Critical Theory, Pt. II

Yesterday's post summarized Tim Keller's analysis of critical justice theory. Keller goes on to discuss seven criticisms of this postmodern view of justice, but we'll mention just two. Keller, a prominent theologian, philosopher, writer and pastor in New York City, first points out how the notion that truth is a conditioned product of one's socio-economic status refutes itself. He writes:

If all truth-claims and justice-agendas are socially constructed to maintain power, then why aren’t the claims and agendas of the adherents of this view subject to the same critique? Why are the postmodern justice advocates’ claims that “This is oppression” unquestionably, morally right, while all other moral claims are mere social constructs? And if everyone is blinded by class-consciousness and social location, why aren’t they?

Intersectionality claims oppressed people see things clearly—but why would they if social forces make us wholly what we are and control how we understand reality? Are they less formed by social forces than others?

And if all people with power—who “call the shots” socially, culturally, economically, and control public discourse—inevitably use it for domination, then if any revolutionaries were able to replace the oppressors at the top of the society, why would they not become people that should subsequently be rebelled against and replaced themselves? What would make them different?

The postmodern account of justice has no good answers for these questions. You cannot insist that all morality is culturally constructed and relative and then claim that your moral claims are not.

This is, by the way, a difficulty that afflicts just about every non-theistic (or naturalistic) account of justice and morality in one way or another. In the absence of God there's no basis whatsoever for objective morality and thus no ground for saying that we ought to treat our fellow man fairly or respectfully. Every moral claim uttered by naturalists, postmodern or otherwise, is nothing more than an expression of his or her emotional state. It's simply a verbalization of their feelings.

Thus, if naturalism is correct, there's no compelling reason why anyone should listen to, much less give credit to, anyone else's moral pronouncements.

Many of the critical theorists in academia reject logic and rationality as a patriarchal manifestation of white privilege. Yet, their own claims cannot avoid relying on logic and rationality. They can't get away from it, and it's a peculiarity of critical theory that its advocates must employ reason in their attempt to debunk reason.

It's also ironic that they fancy themselves to be sophisticated intellectuals, but their repudiation of reason is in fact the signature characteristic of the barbarous anti-intellectual.

Keller's next criticism (which is actually the last of his seven) is that,

This theory sees liberal values such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion—as mere ways to oppress people. Often this view puts these “freedoms” in scare quotes. As a result, adherents of this theory resort to constant expressions of anger and outrage to silence critics, as well as to censorship and other kinds of social, economic, and legal pressure to marginalize opposing views.

The postmodern view sees all injustice as happening on a human level and so demonizes human beings rather than recognizing the evil forces–“the world, the flesh, and the devil”–at work through all human life, including your own.

Adherents of this view also end up being utopian — they see themselves as saviors....

This is precisely how totalitarians always see themselves. If only they could be given total control over what Kant called the "crooked timber" of human nature they'd be able to end all inequality and oppression. That's how they start out, but they almost invariably wind up as mass murderers. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Kim Jung Un and many lesser thugs and butchers sought to establish economic justice and all ended up murdering thousands and millions.

Like the mythological inn-keeper Procrustes, they found that the limbs of human nature had to be bent and severed to make them fit into the bed of their Marxist vision.

Tragically, their epigones in Antifa, Black Lives Matter and university faculty rooms, those who embrace critical theory, are cut from the same amoral cloth, and, if given the power, many of them would doubtless commit the same atrocities.

Justice and Critical Theory, Pt. I

What are we to understand by the term "social justice"? How can we seek to achieve it until we can define it, and whose definition of justice are we tacitly adopting when we talk about social justice?

Tim Keller has written an interesting essay on justice in which, leaning heavily on the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, he notes that there are at least four ways to look at the term. He illustrates them with this diagram:

Activists on the progressive left usually think of justice as defined by postmodern critical theory in which, following the thinking of Karl Marx, society subverts the power of dominant groups in favor of the oppressed. Keller writes that this view of justice has at least six main elements.

To understand why people today often talk past each other, if they talk to each other at all, it's helpful to understand that these six elements are widely accepted among people on the left and they determine how they see the world. Here's Keller's description:

First, the explanation of all unequal outcomes in wealth, well being, and power is never due to individual actions or to differences in cultures or to differences in human abilities, but only and strictly due to unjust social structures and systems. The only way to fix unequal outcomes for the downtrodden is through social policy, never by asking anyone to change their behavior or culture.

Second, all art, religion, philosophy, morality, law, media, politics, education and forms of the family are determined not by reason or truth but by social forces as well. Everything is determined by your class consciousness and social location. Religious doctrine, together with all politics and law are always, at bottom, a way for people to get or maintain social status, wealth, and therefore power over others.

Third, therefore, reality is at bottom nothing but power. And if that is the case, then to see reality, power must be mapped through the means of “intersectionality.” The intersectionality categories are race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity (and sometimes others). If you are white, male, straight, cisgender then you have the highest amount of power. If you are none of these at all, you are the most marginalized and oppressed–and there are numerous categories in the middle.

Most importantly, each category toward the powerless end of the spectrum has a greater moral authority and a greater ability to see the way truly things are. Only powerlessness and oppression brings moral high ground and true knowledge. Therefore those with more privilege must not enter into any debate—they have no right or ability to advise the oppressed, blinded as they are by their social location. They simply must give up their power.

Fourth, the main way power is exercised is through language—through “dominant discourses.” A dominant discourse is any truth-claim, whether grounded in supposed reason and science or in religion and morality. Language does not merely describe reality—it constructs or creates it. Power structures mask themselves behind the language of rationality and truth. So academia hides its unjust structures behind talk of “academic freedom,” and corporations behind talk of “free enterprise,” science behind talk of “empirical objectivity”, and religion behind talk of “divine truth.”

All of these seeming truth-claims are really just constructed narratives designed to dominate and, as such, they must be unmasked. Reasoned debate and “freedom of speech” therefore is out—it only gives unjust discourses airtime. The only way to reconstruct reality in a just way is to subvert dominant discourses—and this requires control of speech.

Fifth, cultures, like persons, can be mapped through intersectionality. In one sense no culture is better in any regard from any other culture. All cultures are equally valid. But people who see their cultures as better, and judge other cultures as inferior or even people who see their own culture as “normal” and judge other cultures as “exotic”, are members of an oppressive culture. And oppressive cultures are (though this word is not used) inferior—and to be despised.

Finally, neither individual rights nor individual identity are primary. Traditional liberal emphasis on individual human rights (private property, free speech) is an obstacle to the radical changes society will need to undergo in order to share wealth and power. And it is an illusion to think that, as an individual, you can carve out an identity in any way different or independent of others in your race, ethnicity, gender, and so on.

Group identity and rights are the only real ones. Guilt is not assigned on the basis of individual actions but on the basis of group membership and social/racial status.

According to critical theory, then, a just society is one in which these thought forms dominate the thinking of the masses and are reflected in the institutions of the culture.

If you're not accustomed to thinking along these channels then you're probably not very progressive, but it's good to understand how so many of the more vocal people in our society do think. These are, after all, certainly the thought forms of many of those who have taken to the streets of our cities to protest and/or riot in recent weeks.

Keller goes on to offer a seven point critique of critical theory. We'll discuss two of his criticisms in tomorrow's post.

What Gives Life Meaning?

A one minute excerpt from a discussion between Tucker Carlson and author Eric Metaxas dovetails so nicely with what my students and I will be talking about in class next week that I thought I'd share it.

The topic of their conversation was why Americans aren't having more children, and the whole six minute segment is worth watching, but at the 1:50 mark Carlson asks: “Then what’s the point of life [if people don't want to have children and families]? Going on more trips? Buying more crap? Clothes? I’m serious. What is the point?”

Metaxas' answer is, I think, exactly right:

Nobody really says this because it’s too ugly, but if you actually believe we evolved out of the primordial soup and through happenstance got here, by accident, then our lives literally have no meaning. And we don’t want to talk about that because it’s too horrific. Nobody can really live with it.

But what we do is, we buy into that idea and we say, “Well then, what can I do? Since there’s no God, I guess I can have guilt-free pleasure. And so I’m going to spend the few decades that I have trying to take care of Number 1, trying to have as much fun as I can. By the way, having kids requires self-sacrifice. I don’t have time for that. I won’t be able to have as much fun.”

In other words, given the lurch toward metaphysical naturalism in the Western world, there's really no reason to think it's wrong to just live for oneself, to put one's own interests first, to seek to squeeze as much personal enjoyment out of this otherwise pointless existence as possible before we die.

Carlson responds to Metaxas' analysis with this,

But what a lie. What a lie. As you lie there, life ebbing away, you think, “I’m glad I made it to Prague.” Actually people don’t think that as they die.

True enough, but when they're alive and in the full bloom of life people often do think that the more things they can accumulate, the more sights they can see, the more pleasure they can experience the more meaningful their life will be. Carlson says that they're believing a lie.

Here's the video of the exchange:

Metaxas is, of course, not the first person to say what he says here. Philosophers have been making this same observation about the emptiness of modern life for decades. Two twentieth century French thinkers, Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, serve as examples.

Sartre wrote that, "Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal," and Camus declared that, "...for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful."

If that's the way things are, multitudes of moderns have concluded, then why not just live for oneself and make the best of a bad situation. What sense does it make, they reason, to sacrifice the only life we have for other people, for kids and a family.

Their conviction is that matters is personal prosperity, power and pleasure and anything that interferes with the acquisition of those is best avoided.

Kamala Harris, Sarah Palin and Progressive Hypocrisy

Women's groups are preparing to counter what they think will be the inevitable sexist slurs and racial epithets that'll be directed at Kamala Harris, Joe Biden's choice to be his running mate. I wonder how many genuine slurs and epithets Harris will actually have to endure. Compared to, say, what Sarah Palin experienced I suspect Harris won't have much to bear on the matter of insults.

I wonder where these women's groups were when Palin was selected by John McCain as his running mate against Barack Obama in 2008 and was subjected by the progressive left to the most vile and vicious assault ever bestowed on a woman in politics.

Federalist Political Editor John Daniel Davidson recounts the history of Sarah Palin's ordeal, and it's worth reading for anyone concerned that Kamala Harris might be called a naughty name by some internet troll.

What ensued after Palin's selection, Davidson writes,

was the greatest persecution of an American political figure in modern times. Palin, a mother of five who had recently given birth to a baby boy prenatally diagnosed with Down's Syndrome, became an object of hate for the media. Nothing has come close in its ugliness, its mendacity, its complete lack of restraint and, given Palin’s status as the second woman ever to appear on a major-party presidential ticket, the abject hypocrisy of a media establishment that purports to champion women’s rights and equality.

Here's a partial list of the insults that were directed at Palin:

She has been called a ‘freak show,’ a ‘joke,’ an ‘extreme liability,’ a ‘turncoat b*tch,’ an ‘insult,’ a ‘fire-breather,’ ‘xenophobic,’ a ‘sitcom of a vice-presidential choice,’ a ‘disaster movie,’ a ‘shallow’ person, ‘chirpy,’ a ‘provincial,’ a ‘disgrace to women’ who was ‘as fake as they come,’ a ‘nauseating,’ ‘cocky wacko,’ a ‘jack in the box,’ ‘Napoleon in bunny boots,’ ‘extreme,’ ‘radical,’ a ‘vessel,’ a ‘farce,’ ‘Bush in drag,’ ‘not very bright,’ ‘utterly unqualified,’ a ‘bimbo,’ ‘Danielle Quayle,’ the ‘new spokesperson for bellicosity and confrontation,’ a ‘fatal cancer,’ ‘like a really bad Disney movie,’ ‘laughable,’ an ‘odd combination of Chauncey Gardiner from Being There and Marge from Fargo,’ ‘dangerous,’ a ‘bully,’ the ‘biggest demagogue in America,’ the ‘Paleolithic Princess of Parsimonious Patriotism,’ the ‘anti-Wonder Woman,’ ‘judgmental’… ‘dictatorial’ with a ‘superior religious self-righteousness,’ a ‘racist’ who was ‘absurd,’ ‘scary,’ and a ‘token,’ a ‘bantamweight cheerleader,’ an ‘airhead,’ an ‘idiot,’ a ‘librarian in a porn film,’ a ‘Jesus freak,’ a ‘man with a vagina’… a ‘Drama Queen,’ a ‘Republican blow-up doll’ who ‘ideologically’ is ‘their hardcore pornographic centerfold spread,’ an ‘opportunistic anti-female,’ a ‘true Stepford candidate, a cyborg,’ a ‘quitter,’ and—this list is by no means exhaustive—a ‘bonbon.’

And these don't include the sundry obscene epithets to which she was subjected. Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic concocted a bizarre theory about Palin's Down syndrome child:

Sullivan, with the blessing of his editors at The Atlantic, descended to depths rarely seen in American political journalism: he helped hatch and then relentlessly pursued a sleazy conspiracy theory that Palin’s infant son with Down's Syndrome, Trig, was not her own, that he was really her teenage daughter’s, that the public presentation of Trig as Palin’s son was an elaborate political ruse, and that Sullivan could prove it by analyzing photos of a pregnant Palin and applying his apparently newfound expertise in obstetrics.

Sullivan "repeatedly demanded that Palin’s doctors release medical records proving she gave birth to her son, Trig." The same media that waxed apoplectic at the suggestion that Barack Obama may not have been born in America both approved of, and heartily participated in, the vile attempt to destroy Sarah Palin. One writer, Joe McGinnis, even went to Alaska and rented a house next door to Palin so he could spy on her for a book he was writing to try to ruin her politically and personally.

The progressive media, Davidson avers, has sown the wind and will reap the whirlwind. He concludes with this:

Now they come forward under the guise of calling out sexism in politics with a thinly-veiled attempt to preempt all legitimate criticism of Harris. It won’t work. Republicans and conservative media are not likely to treat Harris the way Palin was treated, but when Democrats and the media inevitably cry out that Trump is being sexist, that conservatives are being unfair, and that in retrospect they regret how they treated Palin, no one will be able to hear them above the whirlwind.

Davidson is correct. Everytime the media responds to some criticism of Harris with allegations of sexism or unfair treatment of a "woman of color" the response should be, "Do you remember Sarah Palin? Do you remember what you and your colleagues said and did to her?" Nothing that will be said about Harris will be anything near as revolting and as cruel as what was said about Sarah Palin and her family by progressive Democrats.

Davidson has more at the link, including mention of a classy congratulatory note to Harris Palin posted on Instagram. Indeed, Palin has more class than do many of her erstwhile critics.