Greed

On his Substack page my friend Mike Mitchell gives one good reason why corporations are so often despised by the common people.

Citing a PBS documentary titled Age of Easy Money he explains that the "easy money" being referred to is a result of the Federal Reserve's attempt to stimulate economic expansion by lowering the interest rate businesses have to pay when they borrow money.

At low interest rates, the hope is, businesses will be incentivized to borrow money to expand operations, provide more and better goods and services and in the process create jobs.

Unfortunately, that's not quite how it has worked out. Mike writes:

According to the documentary....Large corporations definitely took advantage of the opportunities to borrow large sums of money with little cost, but instead of using it to create jobs and build better infrastructure (that is, for the sake of their country and fellow citizens), many used the money to buy back large portions of their own stock to raise their companies’ net worth.

He goes on to quote a number of reporters and other experts in support of this claim and interested readers are urged to go to the link and read the quotes for themselves, but I'll share one quote from a Wall Street Journal reporter named Dion Rabouin:

As a corporation you realize all that matters is the stock price. So what do we have to do to increase the stock price? And more often that is buying back the stock.

So it used to be the Fed would lower interest rates. Businesses would then take on more debt. They would use that debt to hire more workers, build more machines and more factories.

Now what happens is the Federal Reserve lowers interest rates, businesses use that to go out and borrow more money, but they use that money to buy back stock and invest in technology that will eliminate workers and reduce employee headcounts.

They use that money to give the CEO and other corporate officers big bonuses and then eventually issue more debt and buy back more stock. So it's this endless cycle of things that are designed to increase the stock price rather than improve the actual company.

One reporter Mike cites says she “can’t fault the companies much,” but Mike says that she should. He comments:

She also says, “this [low] interest rate environment creates very strong economic incentives to do exactly what [businesses are] doing.” Yes, but only if “what they’re doing” is driven by the principle of profit maximization as the priority around which all business operations are oriented.

The more common word for profit maximization as the top priority is “greed.” I know that claim will evoke some eye rolling and accusations of naïveté from hard-nosed business types, but that’s probably just greed in self-defense mode.

There is a sense of inevitability in saying we can’t fault the corporate executives in such an “interest rate environment” for spending on themselves and forgetting about the millions of their fellow citizens whose financial priorities are rent and food rather than second homes and diversified portfolios. But this is not inevitable.

Mike closes with a quote from our second president, John Adams, in 1798. Here's part of it:

Because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by…morality and Religion. Avarice [and] Ambition…would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Indeed, a society untethered to a moral sensibility anchored in the will of a transcendent God who will hold us accountable for how we treat our fellow man and how we use the blessings that we've been given, is a society in which anything goes.

Any policy is right as long as it works, and in this case "works" means "makes me wealthy."

A culture marinated in 165 years of Darwinian evolution can't help but learn the lesson that it's all about survival of the fittest. It's all about amassing wealth for oneself and, if there is no God, if we've all evolved up out of the slime with no higher purpose than to survive and pass on our genes, why are the corporate panjandrums wrong to think this way?

What's Woke?

Ever since Bethany Mandel, a conservative and co-author of a book that devotes a chapter to defining "woke," was unable to define it herself during an interview on The Hill’s online program called Rising, the left has been scoffing and conservatives have been coming up with their own definitions.

The problem with defining the word as it's used today is that "woke" is like "pornography." As Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said in 1964, he may not be able to define it but "I know it when I see it."

One of the criticisms of Mandel is that anyone who writes a book about something ought to be able to define it, but tens of thousands of biology books have been written on the subject of "life" yet no biologist can define what it is. Should they be mocked for writing about something they can't define?

An irony of folks on the left snickering at a conservative who struggled to define "woke" is that progressives like Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, like many progressives, is unable to define what a "woman" is.

It would seem that defining "woman" would be a far easier task than defining a protean concept like "woke," but the left seemed unfazed by Judge Jackson's consternation at being asked to explain in her confirmation hearing what is meant by the word.

The word "woke" gained currency among African Americans during the Civil Rights era when it was used in reference to the need for people to "wake up" to racial injustice. Those who were alert to the social and political situation were said to be "woke."

Earlier in this century it took on a broader meaning, encompassing a set of attitudes that combine progressive/left positions on race, climate, LGBTQ+, transgenderism, feminism, diversity, identity politics, etc. Conservatives latched onto the word as a term of derision for both the policies and the people who promoted them.

The conservative critique of "wokeism" focuses not only on the destructive and sometimes ridiculous nature of the policies themselves (e.g. allowing men to compete in women's sports, allowing them to enter private female spaces, insisting that men can become pregnant, paying millions of dollars in "reparations" to people who were never enslaved, and so on), but also on the behavior of those at whom the pejorative "woke" is directed.

For example, those who are so labeled are often closed-minded to arguments with which they disagree. They're often intolerant of dissent, preferring to shut down discussion by calling the dissenter a racist or homophobe, or just shouting the hapless dissenter into silence. Indeed, the "woke" often see every political statement with which they disagree as "code" for racism or a "dog-whistle" for racists.

Moreover, a lot of dissenters have lost their jobs because they disagree with the positions held by their "woke" colleagues or employers. "Cancel culture," the attempt to destroy a person's livelihood and/or their reputation because the person refuses to conform to progressive orthodoxy, is a phenomenon associated with the "woke."

When progressive orthodoxies are transgressed there's usually no forgiveness, no grace, but sometimes if the offenders are obsequious enough, if they debase themselves and grovel at the feet of their "woke" superiors in abject repentance they may be granted a tentative absolution.

Finally, "wokeness" is often characterized by embarrassing efforts at virtue-signaling - attempts to demonstrate to the wider public that the wokester is a morally superior human being and eager to flaunt his moral superiority at every opportunity so that everyone will stand in awe and admiration of the wokester's sheer goodness.

This moral preening manifests itself in universities and government institutions which trip over each other in their zeal to demonstrate that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) is part of their institutional lifeblood.

Nor is our military exempt from "woke" virtue-signaling. While China is building a military to fight successful wars against us, our military is funding seminars to train recruits in proper pronoun usage.

Corporations are investing enormous amounts of money promoting "stakeholder" interests in causes like climate change that have nothing to do with giving shareholders a return on their investment.

Professional sports teams sanctimoniously signal their racial righteousness with messages in their stadiums, on the playing field and on their uniforms that display their piety for all the world to see and esteem.

Television shows and commercials take extraordinary pains to feature representatives of every racial and LGBTQ+ group - even featuring plus-size women in exercise clothing - in order to ensure that the viewer not miss the point that the advertisers are on the cutting edge of "woke" moral excellence. They don't though, seem to feel the need to feature positive portrayals of diversity in either religion or political ideology.

The super woke, in order to demonstrate that they are Olympian caliber moral athletes, are going beyond the concerns of their more pedestrian brethren and are throwing themselves into the struggle to secure legal rights for fish, insects and even rivers. It's remarkably noble of them, but one can't help wonder why their concern for rights usually stops short of rights for unborn humans.

I guess even the most virtuous of the "woke" saints have to draw the line somewhere.

Genuine Inclusivity

Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York, makes an appeal in the Wall Street Journal (paywall) for genuine inclusiveness in our society rather than the ersatz variety promoted by those whose idea of inclusivity seems to be more about excluding than including.

Here's what Cardinal Dolan writes:

I am proud that my country and my church are both committed to the noble ideal of inclusion. Everyone should feel loved and respected. All people must share in all rights. We couldn’t dare to claim to be “one nation under God” if it were otherwise.

Yet society and the church are falling short of this noble ideal. By accepting one dominant cultural narrative that presumes to define those who are “excluded,” we are ignoring those who don’t tidily fit into the prevailing cultural story line. Want some examples?

• Moms and dads in lifelong, life-giving marriage, cherishing a large number of children, who are routinely ridiculed and regularly stereotyped as threatening to the planet.

• Fragile unborn babies, who have no legal protection in most states, with all of us forced to pay for the taking of their lives.

• Parents, especially struggling ones, who must pay constantly increasing taxes to support monopoly government schools and who are denied the right to use tax dollars to send their children to the schools of their choice.

• Citizens who for ethical reasons can’t obey the tidal wave of bureaucratic decrees on healthcare and are forced to choose between their consciences and their jobs.

• A gay person trying his best, with God’s grace, to live according to biblical teaching, who hears church leaders call that morality unjust and oppressive.

• Immigrants who came to this country eager to work in the belief that America was a sanctuary but who can’t get a labor permit and are treated with scorn.

• A woman who chooses to give birth to a baby while worried by hints and even outright threats that she’ll lose her job.

• Young people who are spiritually thirsty for a sense of awe, reverence and transcendence but who have difficulty finding a church to satisfy their needs.

• Relief agencies labeled as lawbreakers by members of Congress for welcoming, feeding and housing refugees.

• Our beloved elders near the end of life, who are coaxed into feeling useless, a burden, with euthanasia the answer.

• Folks who want only inspiration, encouragement and clear teaching from their pastors and religious leaders, but who instead must listen to dissent every Sabbath.

• Cops who face danger daily, who see their colleagues killed and wounded, their resources shrinking, and the criminals they apprehend released in an hour.

• Elderly people who are scared to take the bus or subway, or to walk down the block for milk and bread.

• Parents who worked two jobs and saved for decades to send their children to college, and struggled to pay back the loans they had to take, only to see their neighbors with weekend homes have their loans forgiven.

These good people tell us they are also marginalized and excluded. Rarely do I find them bitter, angry or judgmental. They, too, want a society that is inclusive—not merely for the groups now chic to defend, but for all.

I wonder how many of the bureaucrats and school administers assigned to monitor "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" ever give a moment's thought to the millions of people marginalized in our culture because they don't fit into the privileged pigeon-holes chosen by our progressive elites.

Becoming a Butterfly

A couple of short videos excerpted from Illustra Media's film titled: Metamorphosis: The Beauty and Design of Butterflies highlight the incredible difficulties faced by any purely unguided and natural account of the origin of metamorphosis.

Why such a process would have ever evolved in the first place and how it could have done so are questions for which the standard Darwinian model has no plausible answer.

The standard Darwinian account, remember, maintains that this process evolved through an unguided, purposeless series of genetic mutations combined with natural selection. No intelligent agency was involved.

There's a bit of overlap in the two videos but not much:

Speaking for myself, the idea that such a process evolved seems possible, maybe even plausible, but the idea that the process evolved unaided by any intelligent, purposeful guidance seems to me quite literally incredible.

St. Patrick

Millions of Americans, many of them descendents of Irish immigrants, will celebrate their Irish heritage by observing St. Patrick's Day today. We're indebted to Thomas Cahill and his best-selling book How The Irish Saved Civilization for explaining to us why Patrick's is a life worth commemorating.

As improbable as his title may sound, Cahill weaves a fascinating and compelling tale of how the Irish in general, and Patrick and his spiritual heirs in particular, served as a tenuous but crucial cultural bridge from the classical world to the medieval age and, by so doing, made Western civilization possible.

Born a Roman citizen in 390 A.D., Patrick had been kidnapped as a boy of sixteen from his home on the coast of Britain and taken by Irish barbarians to Ireland. There he languished in slavery until he was able to escape six years later.

Upon his homecoming he became a Christian, studied for the priesthood, and eventually returned to Ireland where he would spend the rest of his life laboring to persuade the Irish to accept the Gospel and to abolish slavery.

Patrick was the first person in history, in fact, to speak out unequivocally against slavery and, according to Cahill, the last person to do so until the 17th century.

Meanwhile, Roman control of Europe had begun to collapse. Rome was sacked by Alaric in 410 A.D. and barbarians were sweeping across the continent, forcing the Romans back to Italy and plunging Europe into the Dark Ages.

Throughout the continent unwashed illiterate hordes descended on the once grand Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books. Learning ground to a halt and the literary heritage of the classical world was burned or moldered into dust. Almost all of it, Cahill claims, would surely have been lost if not for the Irish.

Having been converted to Christianity through the labors of Patrick, the Irish took with gusto to reading, writing and learning. They delighted in letters and bookmaking and painstakingly created indescribably beautiful Biblical manuscripts such as the Book of Kells which is on display today in the library of Trinity College in Dublin.

Aware that the great works of the past were disappearing, they applied themselves assiduously to the daunting task of copying all surviving Western literature - everything they could lay their hands on.

Book of Kells

For a century after the fall of Rome, Irish monks sequestered themselves in cold, damp, cramped mud or stone huts called scriptoria, so remote and isolated from the world that they were seldom threatened by the marauding pagans. Here these men spent their entire adult lives reproducing the old manuscripts and preserving literacy and learning for the time when people would be once again ready to receive them.

Irish scriptoria

These scribes and their successors served as the conduits through which the Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the benighted tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruin of the civilization they had recently overwhelmed.

Around the late 6th century, three generations after Patrick, Irish missionaries with names like Columcille, Aidan and Columbanus began to venture out from their monasteries and refuges, clutching their precious books to their hearts, sailing to England and the continent, founding their own monasteries and schools among the barbarians and teaching them how to read, write and make books of their own.

Absent the willingness of these courageous men to endure deprivations and hardships of every kind for the sake of the Gospel and learning, Cahill argues, the world that came after them would have been completely different. It would likely have been a world without books. Europe almost certainly would have been illiterate, and it would probably have been unable to resist the Muslim incursions that beset them a few centuries later.

The Europeans, starved for knowledge, soaked up everything the Irish missionaries could give them. From such seeds as these modern Western civilization germinated. From the Greeks the descendents of the Goths and Vandals learned philosophy, from the Romans they learned about law, from the Bible they learned of the worth of the individual who, created and loved by God, is therefore significant and not merely a brutish aggregation of matter.

From the Bible, too, they learned that the universe was created by a rational Mind and was thus not capricious, random, or chaotic. It would yield its secrets to rational investigation. Out of these assumptions, once their implications were finally and fully developed, grew historically unprecedented views of the value of the individual and the flowering of modern science.

Our cultural heritage is thus, in a very important sense, a legacy from the Irish - a legacy from Patrick. It's worth pondering what the world would be like today had it not been for those early Irish scribes and missionaries thirteen centuries ago.

Buiochas le Dia ar son na nGael (Thank God for the Irish), and I hope you have a great St. Patrick's Day.

No Center, No Cause

Contemporary cosmologists - scientists who study the origin and structure of the universe - believe that the universe has no center and had no cause.

These are two strange claims.

We often think of the expanding universe like an exploding firework whose fragments all radiate out from the rocket, but that's evidently not the best way to think of what's going on in our universe.

Imagine instead a child blowing soapy film in a plastic ring.

Now imagine the plastic ring shrinks to a diameter so tiny it can't be seen, and the bubble emerging from this tiny aperture pinches off and breaks free of the ring.

As the bubble floats in the air it continues to expand, but - and this is the point - there's no central point from which the expansion grows. The whole bubble expands as if every point were the center.

This is something like what scientists have in mind when they say that the universe has no center. The universe is, strangely enough, like the surface of the bubble, and it's unimaginably vast.

Watch this five minute video to get an idea of how immense it is:

When scientists say the universe had no cause they mean that it had no physical cause in space and time. It arose out of nothing and there's no scientific explanation for how it happened.

It's not that we don't know the scientific explanation, but rather that there can't be one. This is because until there was a universe there was no space, time nor matter, nor were there any physical laws that could have mediated its creation.

Science can't operate in a scenario in which there are no parameters, no laws and no forces. Apart from these, science has nothing to work with and nothing to investigate.

Thus, either the universe was uncaused or, if it did have a cause, its cause was beyond space, time and matter. In either case, science can't say anything about it, although theology can since a cause beyond space, time and matter powerful enough and intelligent enough to create a vast, finely-tuned universe sounds very much like God.

Of course, one who believes the universe is uncaused can side-step the conclusion that God created it, but rejecting the principle of causality merely to avoid the God conclusion is intellectually regrettable.

If, on the other hand, you accept the principle that whatever comes into existence must have a cause of its coming into being then you're acknowledging that the cause of the universe's coming into being must either be God or something very much like God.

It's hard to imagine any other plausible option.

To put it simply, God is a little bit like the girl in the picture producing the bubbles.

Young, Liberal and Depressed (Pt.II)

Yesterday's post addressed the sense of hopelessness that, according to surveys, seems to be afflicting the young, particularly liberal, or progressive, young people.

This "nihilism index," as it was called in yesterday's post, is much more pronounced among young females than young males and to a greater extent among young progressives than young conservatives.

According to an article at slowboring.com,

[L]iberal girls have the highest increase in depressive affect and conservative boys have the least. But liberal boys are more depressed than conservative girls, suggesting an important independent role for political ideology.

Why should this be? One possibility suggested in the article is that "progressive institutional leaders have specifically taught young progressives that catastrophizing is a good way to get what they want.

The article quotes a podcaster named Jill Filipovic who writes that she is increasingly convinced that,

there are tremendously negative long-term consequences, especially to young people, coming from this reliance on the language of harm and accusations that things one finds offensive are “deeply problematic” or even violent.

Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel they are the chief architects of their own life — to mix metaphors, that they captain their own ship, not that they are simply being tossed around by an uncontrollable ocean — are vastly better off than people whose default position is victimization, hurt, and a sense that life simply happens to them and they have no control over their response.

This makes sense. Young progressives are often see themselves as perpetually oppressed and victimized. They often believe the world is soon going to end in climate catastrophe, and they find it very difficult to maintain much of a sense of humor.

They're often bitter, angry and judgmental. Such individuals can hardly help being depressed.

Filipovic continues:

That isn’t to say that people who experience victimization or trauma should just muscle through it, or that any individual can bootstrap their way into well-being.

It is to say, though, that in some circumstances, it is a choice to process feelings of discomfort or even offense through the language of deep emotional, spiritual, or even physical wound, and choosing to do so may make you worse off.

Leaning into the language of “harm” creates and reinforces feelings of harm, and while using that language may give a person some short-term power in progressive spaces, it’s pretty bad for most people’s long-term ability to regulate their emotions, to manage inevitable adversity, and to navigate a complicated world.

It's also a pretty reliable way to make oneself feel miserable, angry and perhaps bitter, and other people don't usually enjoy spending much time around someone who's miserable, angry and bitter unless they themselves are also miserable, angry and bitter. And when the only people who care to spend time with a person are people who are themselves miserable, angry and bitter then everyone's misery, anger and bitterness is amplified and reinforced.

Why, though, are girls more affected than boys? Perhaps it's because girls are more sensitive to all the things mentioned above than are boys, and being more sensitive they're more vulnerable to them.

I don't know, but whatever the case, it does seem that progressivism is a very unhealthy mindset. At least it is if one wishes to be a happy person.

Young, Liberal and Depressed (Pt. I)

The statistics are alarming. Rusty Reno writes about them in the recent First Things (Paywall):

According to a recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report, 57 percent of high school girls say they persistently feel sad or hopeless. That’s up from 36 percent a decade ago. For boys, what might be called the nihilism index went up from 21 percent to 29 percent.

Not surprisingly, the number of teenagers reporting that they have seriously considered suicide has also increased, reaching 30 percent for girls.

Why? Reno doesn't think much of what usually passes as reasons for this slide into despair. Instead he argues that it's a consequence of overweening secular progressivism:

[T]oday’s cultural propaganda forbids our acknowledging the obvious fact that the last decade has seen the imposition of gay marriage, “shout your abortion,” transgender ideology, and lots of Rainbow flag-waving. During the same ten years, marijuana has been legalized and “white privilege” has been demonized. Black Lives Matter announces that our country is hopelessly racist; environmental activists tell us we’re on the brink of extinction.

In short, we’ve created a toxic culture.

He goes on to claim that,

The nihilism index should include more than the percentage of teens reporting despair and contemplating suicide. Marriage and fertility rates belong as well, as do drug overdose deaths, murder rates, and mass shootings.

Other factors are relevant, too: workforce participation, civic involvement, religious attendance.

I invite social scientists to give rigorous formulation to a nihilism index, a much-needed measure of how bad secular progressivism has made life for so many people.

Over the last fifteen years, the United States has gone from hosting no pediatric gender clinics that facilitate “transitions” to hosting more than one hundred. Over the same period of time, mental health for young people has declined and the rate of teen suicide has increased.

We have gone from no pot shops to thousands of them—and from 27,000 drug overdose deaths per year to more than 100,000.

Correlation does not prove causation, but it demands investigation.

Whatever you think of the particulars of Reno's indictment it seems plain that for many modernity has drained the meaning out of life.

People used to find meaning in family, church, community and work, but today many families have disintegrated, church no longer seems a realistic option, and neighborhoods are rarely comprised of people who have a generational attachment to them.

All that's left is work, and work by itself doesn't usually satisfy our yearning for purpose, especially when so many work from home, isolated from meaningful human contact.

Indeed, we're evolving into a nation of social isolates, atomized individuals with few, if any, emotional connections to other people.

A sense of loneliness, emptiness and pointlessness is pervasive, and people, including the young, have turned to ersatz emotional and psychological fixes - facebook "friends," drugs, alcohol, pornography, gaming, progressive causes, even bullying - but none of these satisfy the deepest hungers in the human psyche.

Which is why the needle on the "nihilism index" is pointing to the red.

More tomorrow.

Who Perpetrated the Violence on January 6th?

Just as we were apparently not told the truth about "Russia Collusion" and the origins of Covid, neither have we been given all the information about the January 6th riots of which many in Congress were aware.

Apparently, the stories that had circulated after the riots that provocateurs such as Antifa had infiltrated the crowd and were responsible for much of the violence - stories which until now were difficult to assess - have now been confirmed by a series of videos that have recently come to light.

The videos, with commentary, can be seen here.

A government that consistently lies to its citizens for partisan reasons is illegitimate. It's not much different than totalitarian governments throughout the last hundred years which have sought to manipulate their citizens in order to consolidate and retain their own power and oppressive policies.

When people talk about draining the swamp it is ensconced bureaucrats in our law enforcement agencies like the Department of Justice and elsewhere in the executive branch which need to be drained.

Too many of these folks live by a pragmatic ethic that holds that whatever works to accomplish their aims - whether those aims be destroying their political opponents or imposing their preferred policies on the nation - is right and moral, but pragmatic ethics are incompatible with justice and have no place in a healthy republic.

If you're interested in what many on the House of Representatives January 6th committee must have known but refused to share with you, watch the videos.

Meanwhile, kudos to those in Congress who are now seeking to make transparency a reality.

Policy Has Consequences

I often remind my philosophy students that ideas have consequences in the real world. Victor Davis Hanson reminds us in his latest column that public policy also has consequences, and the consequences of a lot of the policies enacted by federal, state and local authorities today are calamitous.

In his lede he comments on a video of shoplifters in Portland confronted by a man who urges them to return their purloined merchandise:

Recently there were some remarkable online videos of a Portland, Oregon good Samaritan confronting shoplifters and forcing them to dump loads of their pilfered goods.

More stunning, however, was the sheer outrage — of the thieves!

They pouted. They screamed. They resisted. How dare anyone stop them from stealing anything they wished.

The criminals entertained no fear of any consequences for walking out with bags of things that were not theirs.

They had no care that mainstreaming their habits would undermine the entire fabric of society.

What is common to the pandemic of smash-and-grab, carjacking, fighting on airliners while in flight, and deadly Saturday night shoot-outs is this same apparent assurance there will be no consequences.

Hanson argues that the failure of authorities to prosecute crime is a contagion spreading across the urban landscape of our nation.

That expectation of exemption is why the Antifa thugs in Atlanta were so bold in their latest violent attacks on the police.

And why not, after the 120 days of rioting, looting, arson, and assault in the summer of 2020 which resulted in few Antifa indictments, fewer convictions, and almost no imprisonments?

But it's not just the urban underclass who know that their behavior will not be prosecuted. Our elites know it, too:

Former FBI Director Andrew McCabe admittedly lied on four occasions to federal investigators, apparently with the prescient expectation he would never be prosecuted.

The same hubris was true of former CIA Director John Brennan, who admittedly lied under oath to Congress — twice — with absolute impunity.

The former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper not only lied under oath to Congress, but crowed that he gave the “least untruthful” answer. He too faced zero consequences.

Read his column. There's much more in it and it's quite good.

Liberal/Progressives who dominate both our federal Department of Justice as well as city council members and District Attorney's offices in most of our major municipalities seem to be under the impression that the best way to reduce crime is to decline to punish it.

They're apparently guided by the deeply counterintuitive notion that if criminals know they won't be held accountable for their crimes then, by golly, they won't commit them.

The possibility that this delusion is rampant among progressives charged with enforcing the law is one explanation for what we see happening, but it's not, in my opinion, the most plausible explanation. These people, after all, are not stupid. They know what they're doing.

A more plausible explanation is that a significant number of progressives are Marxists or heavily influenced by Marxist theory. They would rarely acknowledge it publicly, but many of them hate this country as it's currently constituted.

They see the United States as irredeemably racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic. They despise capitalism and the freedoms granted in the Bill of Rights, especially in the first two amendments.

They'd love to reconstruct the nation along Marxist lines through the ballot box, but that seems too difficult to accomplish given the inherent conservatism of the American people, so the only way to "fundamentally transform" the nation - to quote Barack Obama - is to overload the structures and institutions of society to the point of collapse.

If crime is rampant, if people are living in fear, if the institutions that serve as glue holding society together - government, police, schools, hospitals - are so overburdened that they cannot function, then the people will be ripe for revolution - preferably peaceful (liberals) but violent if necessary (leftists).

The Marxist model is to disarm the populace (repeal the 2nd amendment), control and manipulate the public discourse (cancel culture and the Twitter files), emasculate the church and destroy the nuclear family.

Marxists strive to reduce people to atomized individuals who believe themselves to be solitary voices standing in the path of an ideological behemoth and helpless to resist it. Once the left has secured their political hegemony they'll be able to impose their will on society, just as they did in the 20th century in the Soviet Union, Communist China, North Korea, Cuba and numerous lesser states.

Then the flame of freedom will flicker and go out and the hapless ciphers who comprise the citizenry will find themselves inhabiting a bleak totalitarian dystopia.

That's the implicit consequence of the policies of the contemporary left. They will not admit this, of course, and many perhaps would not even admit it to themselves, but the policies they enact are leading ineluctably in this direction, whether they're willing to acknowledge it or not.

Turning Hume on His Head

The skeptical philosopher David Hume, in arguing against the reasonableness of belief in miracles, famously declared that,

A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined....There must, therefore, be a uniform experience against every miraculous event otherwise the event would not merit that appellation.

And as a uniform experience amounts to a proof, there is here a direct and full proof, from the nature of the fact, against the existence of any miracle....

Hume's definition of a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature is deeply problematic, but let that go for now (see here for a discussion of some of the problems with that definition).

Hume goes on to say that,

The maxim, by which we commonly conduct ourselves in our reasonings, is that the objects of which we have no experience, resemble those of which we have; that what we have found to be most usual is always most probable; and that where there is an opposition of arguments, we ought to give the preference to such as are founded on the greatest number of past observations.

Having written those lines, the great Scottish philosopher would doubtless be aghast at the implications of this maxim (or rule) for the contemporary controversy over intelligent design. He employed the rule against belief in miracles, arguing that because we have an overwhelming experience against violations of the laws of nature we should reject any report that a "violation" occurred.

If we grant Hume his rule (which I don't - the rule only entails a reasonable skepticism of the report of a miracle, it doesn't warrant outright rejection of it) there's no reason not apply it to the discovery over the last fifty years that the universe and life are both information-rich.

Couple that discovery with the fact that we have a uniform experience of information, whether in a library, on a hard drive, or wherever, being produced by intelligent minds, and it would seem that Hume would have to grant that we should believe that the information contained in biological cells and organisms must be the product of an intelligent mind.

We have no experience, after all, of information being produced by random, impersonal processes and forces. Indeed, we have a uniform experience of random, unguided processes degrading information and generating disorder.

Hume intended his maxim to be a knockout blow to the idea that there's a personal deity at work in the world, but if we take the maxim seriously it actually leads to the conclusion that such a deity must, in fact, exist.

Philosopher of science Stephen Meyer discusses the problem biological information poses for naturalism in this video:

Collapsing Bird Populations

A column by Carl Zimmer in the New York Times a couple of years ago bears the alarming news that scientists studying the populations of over 500 species of birds in North America reported that the number of individual birds has fallen by 29% since 1970.

There are almost 3 billion fewer birds in North America today than there were fifty years ago.

If this is correct it's deeply disturbing. I don't doubt that habitat loss, both in the birds' breeding grounds and in their wintering grounds in Central and South America have taken a toll.

It's interesting that among the species hardest hit were grassland species in the midwest (717 million fewer birds) where vast tracts of grassland acreage have been sacrificed to development and agricultural production.

I do have a concern about the methodology of the study, however. It relies heavily on estimates of numbers by amateur observers, and among the species showing severe declines are blackbirds (440 million fewer since 1970) which are so numerous and which in the non-breeding season throng together in flocks numbering in the thousands, that accurate counts are very difficult to obtain.

Much more distressing than the drop in numbers of abundant species like blackbirds, though, is the decline in woodland species like warblers which breed in the boreal north. The warbler population has shrunk, according to the study, by some 617 million birds since 1970.

Cape May Warbler

Oddly, however, vireos, which are similar to warblers and which share similar habits and habitat, have shown a jump of 53% in their population. Why that should be is apparently a mystery.

Whatever the explanation, it seems obvious that habitat loss, and perhaps diseases like West Nile virus, wind turbines, collisions with skyscrapers and even feral house cats are taking a toll. Every new shopping center and housing development eliminates acres of habitat, and every new highway is a killing field for birds and other wildlife.

But if these stressors really are what's causing the collapse it's very hard to imagine a solution.

Wisdom and Good Intentions

A column from a few years ago by Dennis Prager contains a lot that's worth pondering.

For instance in the column he offers the reader six rules of life that we'd all do well to memorize:

• Ingratitude makes happiness impossible.
• Corrupt people think everyone else is as corrupt as they are.
• Human nature is not basically good.
• Feelings are far less important than actions.
• Most men need a woman to mature.
• Most women need a man to mature.

Each of these deserves a column of its own, but Prager has other fish to fry. He writes that there's another rule that accounts for many of the horrors of the 20th century. It's this:

GI - W = E (Good Intentions minus Wisdom leads to Evil).

Prager explains what he's getting at as follows:

Communism, the greatest mass murder ideology in history, was for almost all its rank-and-file supporters rooted in their desire to do good. (This was rarely true for its leaders, whose greatest desire was power.)

The many millions of people all over the world who supported communism did not think they were supporting unprecedented levels of mass murder and torture or an equally unprecedented deprivation of the most fundamental human rights of a substantial percentage of humanity.

They thought they were moral, building a beautiful future for humanity -- eliminating inequality, enabling people to work as hard or as little as they wanted, providing their fellow citizens "free" education and "free" health care.

They were convinced that the moral arc of history was bending in their direction and that they were good because their motives were good.

Convinced of their own goodness such folk often have nothing but contempt for those who oppose them. After all, to oppose the good requires that the opponent must be bad ab defino.

That's why Hillary Clinton could condemn those who could not bring themselves to vote for her as "deplorables," and it is, Prager makes bold to assert, the position of virtually every editor and columnist at The New York Times.

Be that as it may, he goes on:

The problem with communists and with leftists who don't consider themselves communists is not that none of them mean well. It's that they lack wisdom. There are wise and foolish liberals, wise and foolish conservatives; but all leftists are fools.

....This is not, however, a description of their totality as a human being. Fools may be personally kind and generous, may be loyal friends and devoted spouses, and of course, they may be well-intentioned. But in terms of making the world worse, there is little difference between a well-meaning fool and an evil human being.

Why does he call them "fools"? That language seems unnecessarily strong and insulting, and causes those of us who wish for a more civil public discourse to cringe, but Prager explains his meaning:

Tens of millions of well-intentioned Westerners supported Stalin. The Westerners who supplied Stalin the secrets to the atom bomb were not motivated by evil. They were simply fools. But few evil people did as much to hurt the world as they did.

They are fools partly because they believe good intentions are all that matter. Therefore, they never ask perhaps the most important moral question one can ask: What will happen if my policy is enacted? Leftist supporters of communism never asked.

I'd prefer he had said that they were "foolish" rather than call them "fools," but admittedly that will probably seem to most readers to be a distinction without a difference. In any case, Prager elaborates:

Democrats who push the country-bankrupting Green New Deal provide a contemporary example. They not only deny the economy and society-crushing consequences of the Green New Deal, they deny any price will be paid. Every home, office, hospital, school and business will be forced to stop using fossil fuels, yet only good [they say] will come from that.

Giving that amount of coercive power to the state is of no consequence to leftists. In their make-believe world, no one will suffer.

On the contrary, America will become richer, and millions of jobs will be created while we destroy our economy. Poor Africans trying to electrify their countries will be told not to -- yet they, too, will somehow become rich using only wind and sun.

If the Green New Deal is enacted, the American economy will tank -- and with it, much of the rest of the world. Tyrannies like China and Iran will be emboldened, as will dictatorships like Russia.

About all of this he's surely correct. The Green New Deal would be a disaster which is why even Democrats who said they supported it withheld their support when it came up for a vote in the Senate.

Prager concludes with this:

The left pushes for a Palestinian state although even Israelis on the left know this would mean a Hamas-Hezbollah state on the Israeli border. But they know they mean well.

They routinely label the beacon of freedom on Earth [U.S.A.] racist, misogynistic, homophobic, imperialistic, genocidal; cheapen the label "Nazi"; promote all-black dorms and graduations; promote preteen boys' performing drag shows; tell young women career is more important to happiness than marriage; believe a country can remain a distinct nation with open borders; condemn parents who try to reassure their 3-year-old son that he is a boy; and ruin the university, the arts, late-night comedy, pro football and religion.

But they mean well.

That's quite an indictment. Is he right or does he overstate his case? What do you think?

Mind Or Mindlessness

One of the many strengths of the concept of intelligent design is that it's a superior explanation to Darwinian naturalism for the existence of information in the cells of living organisms.

A software program or a textbook is loaded with information, but no one would think that the information came to be there by some sort of random shuffling of symbols. Rather, information is a product of intelligent minds - not mindless, impersonal forces - and the biosphere is shot full of it.

Information is especially prominent in the tiny protein machines that mediate and choreograph many of the cell's functions. When we watch a video, such as the one below, that uses animation to illustrate how just a few of these machines work, we have to ask ourselves how blind chance could've produced them.

How, before there were any reproducing cells and thus no natural selection, could these machines have evolved? How, before the information coded in DNA ever existed, could these machines have arisen since that information is necessary to create them? And how, before these machines appeared in living cells, could DNA have created them since DNA needs these machines to do what it does?

It would seem that both the information-rich DNA as well as the entire suite of molecular machines necessary for DNA to function must've all arisen simultaneously, but to believe that this actually happened requires an enormous exertion of blind faith in the capacities of blind chance.

Watch the video and see what you think:

Moral Depravity

The graphic below, taken from The Sun, shows the horrific losses suffered by Russia to date in their senseless war in Ukraine. Now Russian generals are adding to the carnage by throwing waves of young Russian boys against Ukrainian forces holding out in the town of Bakhmut, and every inch of territory the Russians gain is coming at an enormous cost in lives lost.

The battles are taking Ukrainian lives as well, but Russia has far more men under arms than does Ukraine. The Russian strategy, apparently, is to simply overwhelm the defenders to the point they're forced to withdraw from the town and forfeit it to the Russians. Russian President Vladimir Putin can then proclaim to the people back home that their sons have won a glorious victory.

The slaughter is as unconscionable as it is unnecessary, but Putin and his generals evidently don't care about the lives they're destroying and the grief they're causing. They're intent on conquering Ukraine no matter how many Ukrainians and Russians have to die to satisfy their ambitions.

If wantonly committing mass murder is a moral evil then Vladimir Putin and his civilian and military leaders certainly qualify as evil men in the same league as Napoleon and Hitler. They're responsible for enormous crimes against humanity and their names should forever be synonomous with moral depravity.

You Don't Really Have Free Will (Pt. II)

Yesterday we looked at an argument by philosopher Stephen Cave that can essentially be stated thus:

1. Materialism entails determinism
2. Materialism is true
3. Therefore, determinism is true

The argument hinges, of course, on the second premise, but the truth of that premise is by no means obvious. It's an assumption based on a commitment to a naturalistic metaphysics. At any rate, ideas have consequences and Cave next addresses the human and social consequences of a widespread belief in the truth of determinism. They're not good:

Determinism, to one degree or another, is gaining popular currency....This development raises uncomfortable—and increasingly non-theoretical—questions: If moral responsibility depends on faith in our own agency, then as belief in determinism spreads, will we become morally irresponsible? And if we increasingly see belief in free will as a delusion, what will happen to all those institutions that are based on it?

Believing that free will is an illusion has been shown to make people less creative, more likely to conform, less willing to learn from their mistakes, and less grateful toward one another. In every regard, it seems, when we embrace determinism, we indulge our dark side.

Some philosophers have suggested that given the consequences of living consistently with an awareness of the truth of determinism that the philosophical elites ought (strange word in this context) to deceive the masses and just not tell them about it. The elites should foist upon the public a kind of Platonic Noble Lie. Cave, however, demurs:

[F]ew scholars are comfortable suggesting that people ought to believe an outright lie. Advocating the perpetuation of untruths would breach their integrity and violate a principle that philosophers have long held dear: the Platonic hope that the true and the good go hand in hand.

This is a peculiar reaction, it seems, for if determinism is true, why should scholars be uncomfortable promoting a lie? What would make such a tactic morally wrong if they really had no choice in employing it? They're only doing what they've been determined by their genes and/or their social and professional environment to do.

Saul Smilansky, a philosophy professor at the University of Haifa, in Israel, has wrestled with this dilemma throughout his career and come to a painful conclusion: “We cannot afford for people to internalize the truth” about free will.

Smilansky advocates a view he calls illusionism—the belief that free will is indeed an illusion, but one that society must defend. The idea of determinism, and the facts supporting it, must be kept confined within the ivory tower.

There's something very odd about a metaphysical view - physicalism - the implications of which are so destructive that they can't be shared even among many of those who accept the view. If a belief is such that one cannot live with it consistently there's probably something deeply wrong with the belief.

Physicalism - the belief that everything is reducible to the laws of physics - does entail determinism, however, and as Cave points out in his essay, the consequences of determinism are bleak. In addition to those Cave mentions, determinism also has the following consequences:

• Praise and blame, reward and punishment, are never deserved since these assume that the recipient could have acted otherwise than he or she did act.
• There are no moral obligations, no moral right and wrong, since morality is contingent upon uncompelled free choice.
• There's no human dignity since dignity is predicated on the ability to make significant choices.

It's hard to see how people could live with a belief which has these consequences without falling into nihilism and despair. Yet that's where physicalism - and the closely related views called naturalism and materialism - leads.

Philosopher John Searle offers an antidote to the determinism described by Cave in this Closer to the Truth interview:

You Don't Really Have Free Will (Pt. I)

Philosopher Stephen Cave wrote in The Atlantic a few years ago that the idea that human beings have free will is dying out among scientists.

The results of the experiments of neuroscientists, he argues, all seem to support the notion that at any given moment there's only one possible future. Our "choices" are determined by causes of which we may be completely unaware but which make our decisions ineluctable.

I've excerpted parts of Cave's essay below and follow the excerpts with critical comments.

Cave observes that,

In recent decades, research on the inner workings of the brain has helped to resolve the nature-nurture debate—and has dealt a further blow to the idea of free will.

Brain scanners have enabled us to peer inside a living person’s skull, revealing intricate networks of neurons and allowing scientists to reach broad agreement that these networks are shaped by both genes and environment.

But there is also agreement in the scientific community that the firing of neurons determines not just some or most, but all of our thoughts, hopes, memories, and dreams.

It should be noted that the agreement to which he refers is a tacit consequence of a metaphysical assumption shared by many researchers - the assumption that there are no non-physical, non-material factors at play in the universe or in human beings. Of course, if physicalism or materialism are true then determinism follows, but there's no good reason to think that either are true and good reasons to think they're not.

He goes on to say that,

We know that changes to brain chemistry can alter behavior—otherwise neither alcohol nor antipsychotics would have their desired effects. The same holds true for brain structure: Cases of ordinary adults becoming murderers or pedophiles after developing a brain tumor demonstrate how dependent we are on the physical properties of our gray stuff.

Quite so, but it doesn't follow from the fact that changes in the physical brain cause changes in behavior that therefore the physical brain is all that's involved in behavior. A viewer can change the physical settings on his television and thereby change the image on the screen, but it would be foolish to conclude that therefore the image can be completely explained in terms of the workings of the television set, while ignoring the role played by the broadcast or cable station.

Many scientists say that the American physiologist Benjamin Libet demonstrated in the 1980s that we have no free will. It was already known that electrical activity builds up in a person’s brain before she, for example, moves her hand; Libet showed that this buildup occurs before the person consciously makes a decision to move.

The conscious experience of deciding to act, which we usually associate with free will, appears to be an add-on, a post hoc reconstruction of events that occurs after the brain has already set the act in motion.

This is a misreading of Libet's work, a clarification of which can be read here. Libet himself believed that human beings had free will. It would've been peculiar of him to hold this view after he had proven that the view was wrong.

The challenge posed by neuroscience is more radical: It describes the brain as a physical system like any other, and suggests that we no more will it to operate in a particular way than we will our heart to beat. The contemporary scientific image of human behavior is one of neurons firing, causing other neurons to fire, causing our thoughts and deeds, in an unbroken chain that stretches back to our birth and beyond.

In principle, we are therefore completely predictable. If we could understand any individual’s brain architecture and chemistry well enough, we could, in theory, predict that individual’s response to any given stimulus with 100 percent accuracy.

If the system which produces our choices is indeed "a physical system like any other" then determinism is very probably true, but the assumption that our choices are solely the product of physical causes is an unprovable metaphysical faith-claim. If we are also possessed of an immaterial, non-physical mind or soul, as many philosophers believe, that faculty could possibly function as a locus of free choice.

The only reason for thinking that such minds don't exist is an apriori commitment to materialism, the belief that there are no immaterial substances such as minds in human beings or anywhere else in the world. More on Cave's essay tomorrow.

The Marvelous Brain

James Le Fanu, a medical doctor and science journalist, describes an interesting puzzle associated with how the brain works. in a forward to the book Restoration of Man, Le Fanu writes that the simplest of stimuli like the words chair or sit cause vast tracts of the brain to "light up" which prompts "a sense of bafflement at what the most mundane conversation must entail."

The sights and sounds of every transient moment are fragmented into "myriad separate components without the slightest hint of the integrating mechanism" that ties them all together into a coherent, unified experience of the world.

Le Fanu quotes Nobel Prize-winner David Hubel of Harvard who observes that, "The abiding tendency for attributes such as form, color and movement to be handled by separate structures in the brain immediately raises the question how all the information is finally assembled, say, for perceiving a bouncing red ball. They obviously must be assembled - but where and how we have no idea."

It is an astonishing thing. Consider how much the brain must organize in order, for example, for a batter to hit a baseball. The brain must calculate the velocity and trajectory of the ball and initiate and coordinate all the movements of the various parts of the body necessary to execute the swing, and do it all within a fraction of a second.

If all of these functions are being carried out in different regions of the brain how are they integrated so precisely that the ball is successfully struck? What structure or mechanism carries out the integration function?

That question leads to others. Is there more to our mental experience than can be accounted for by the material organ called the brain? Do we also have an immaterial mind? If we knew all the physical facts about how the brain works would our knowledge be complete or would there still be something left over? How did random, purposeless genetic accidents produce an organ with such amazing capabilities?

A Nobel Prize is waiting for anyone who discovers the answers to any of these questions and can empirically demonstrate the truth of the answers beyond reasonable doubt.

The Uniqueness of Human Language

Yesterday I did a post titled Why Humans Are Exceptional in which I noted that many researchers investigating the uniqueness of human language have concluded that it defies any naturalistic explanation for its origin.

That post sent me back to one I did a couple of years ago on the last book written by the late Tom Wolfe which was also on the mystery of human language and I thought I'd repost it.

Here it is:

I've been enjoying Tom Wolfe's new book, The Kingdom of Speech, and heartily recommend it to anyone interested in the history of the theory of evolution and/or the history of the study of linguistics. Michael Egnor at Evolution News concurs with this commendation, and goes even further. Rather than me telling you what the book is about, I'll quote Egnor:

Tom Wolfe has a new book, The Kingdom of Speech, and it's superb. Wolfe's theme is that human language is unique and is not shared in any way with other animals. He argues forcefully that evolutionary stories about the origin of human language are not credible.

In the first chapter of his book, Wolfe describes an article in the journal Frontiers of Psychology from 2014, co-authored by leading linguist Noam Chomsky and seven colleagues. Wolfe declares that:

"The most fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of our linguistic capacity remain as mysterious as ever," [the authors] concluded. Not only that, they sounded ready to abandon all hope of ever finding the answer. Oh, we'll keep trying, they said gamely... but we'll have to start from zero again.

One of the eight was the biggest name in the history of linguistics, Noam Chomsky. "In the last 40 years," he and the other seven were saying, "there has been an explosion of research on this problem," and all it had produced was a colossal waste of time by some of the greatest minds in academia....

One hundred and fifty years since the Theory of Evolution was announced, and they had learned...nothing....

In that same century and a half, Einstein discovered the ...the relativity of speed, time and distance... Pasteur discovered that microorganisms, notably bacteria, cause an ungodly number of diseases, from head colds to anthrax and oxygen-tubed, collapsed-lung, final-stage pneumonia....Watson and Crick discovered DNA, the so-called building blocks genes are made of...and 150 years' worth of linguists, biologists, anthropologists, and people from every other discipline discovered...nothing...about language. What is the problem? What's the story?...What is it that they still don't get after a veritable eternity?

Wolfe provides a précis of his argument:

Speech is not one of man's several unique attributes -- speech is the attribute of all attributes!

Yet despite almost two centuries of speculations and hypothesizing we're no closer today to being able to explain what language is or how we come to have it than we've ever been. Indeed, Darwin and his votaries tried to come up with a plausible explanation and failed so utterly that scientists gave up for almost eighty years trying to explain it. Says Wolfe:

It is hard to believe that the most crucial single matter, by far, in the entire debate over the Evolution of man - language - was abandoned, thrown down the memory hole, from 1872 to 1949.

It's also hard to believe that it's been 67 years since 1949 and still no progress has been made on this question. Egnor writes:

And yet, as Wolfe points out, Darwinists are at an utter loss to explain how language -- the salient characteristic of man -- "evolved." None of the deep drawer of evolutionary just-so stories come anywhere close to explaining how man might have acquired the astonishing ability to craft unlimited propositions and concepts and subtleties within subtleties using a system of grammar and abstract designators (i.e. words) that are utterly lacking anywhere else in the animal kingdom.

Egnor, who is himself a neuroscientist, closes his piece with these words:

I have argued before that the human mind is qualitatively different from the animal mind. The human mind has immaterial abilities -- the intellect's ability to grasp abstract universal concepts divorced from any particular thing -- and that this ability makes us more different from apes than apes are from viruses. We are ontologically different. We are a different kind of being from animals.

We are not just animals who talk. Although we share much in our bodies with animals, our language -- a simulacrum of our abstract minds -- has no root in the animal world.

Language is the tool by which we think abstractly. It is sui generis. It is a gift, a window into the human soul, something we are made with, and it did not evolve.

Language is a rock against which evolutionary theory wrecks, one of the many rocks -- the uncooperative fossil record, the jumbled molecular evolutionary tree, irreducible complexity, intricate intracellular design, the genetic code, the collapsing myth of junk DNA, the immaterial human mind -- that comprise the shoal that is sinking Darwin's Victorian fable.

The charm of Wolfe's book is that it reads like a novel, which is the metier for which Wolfe is famous. It's free of scientific jargon, it's funny and contains some fascinating insights into several of the major figures in the history of the search for an explanation of the origin and nature of language. Plus, it's only 169 pages long.

All in all a great read.

Why Humans Are Exceptional

Biologist Ann Gauger holds the heretical opinion, at least it's heretical in today's cockeyed culture, that among all life forms, human beings are exceptional. Here's a quick summary of some of the traits she lists as making us not just different from other mammals but radically, qualitatively different:

We have specific traits that are well outside the norm, so far outside the norm that some scientists see the gaps as unbridgeable. These include abstract thought, foresight, speech, art, music, sociality, theory of mind, manipulation of the material world, charity, wickedness, and religion.

There may be others I haven’t thought of. We see rudiments of these things in animals, but human abilities are orders of magnitude higher than animals (or lower in the case of wickedness). Our specific abilities are greater than are necessary for survival, so unless they are linked to other traits why should we have a Mozart or an Einstein or a Galileo? What we do as scientists is pretty esoteric, right? Is there a selective advantage to any of it?

Maybe at low levels, but being Shakespeare or understanding the molecular dynamics of ribosomes or however you would describe your work is purely gratuitous.

In other words, it's hard to see how or why natural selection would have sorted out from among our primordial ancestors a few who possessed the capacity to do calculus.

One of the most inexplicable uniquely human traits is our capacity for language. Gauger quotes the late psychologist David Premack who challenged anyone to:

...reconstruct the scenario that would confer selective fitness on recursiveness. Language evolved, it is conjectured, at a time when humans or proto-humans were hunting mastodons…Would it be a great advantage for one of our ancestors squatting alongside the embers, to be able to remark, ‘Beware of the short beast whose front hoof Bob cracked when, having forgotten his own spear back at camp, he got in a glancing blow with the dull spear he borrowed from Jack’?

Human language is an embarrassment for evolutionary theory because it is vastly more powerful than one can account for in terms of selective fitness. A semantic language with simple mapping rules of a kind one might suppose that the chimpanzee would have, appears to confer all the advantages one normally associates with discussions of mastodon hunting or the like.

For discussions of that kind, syntactical classes, structure-dependent rules, recursion and the rest, are overly powerful devices, absurdly so.

Gauger also cites an abstract from a scientific article on language evolution at the website Scorched Earth which concludes that there's simply no evolutionary explanation for human language:

We argue ... that the richness of [speculations about how language evolved] is accompanied by a poverty of evidence, with essentially no explanation of how and why our linguistic computations and representations evolved.

We show that, to date,

(1) studies of nonhuman animals provide virtually no relevant parallels to human linguistic communication, and none to the underlying biological capacity;

(2) the fossil and archaeological evidence does not inform our understanding of the computations and representations of our earliest ancestors, leaving details of origins and selective pressure unresolved;

(3) our understanding of the genetics of language is so impoverished that there is little hope of connecting genes to linguistic processes any time soon;

(4) all modeling attempts have made unfounded assumptions, and have provided no empirical tests, thus leaving any insights into language's origins unverifiable.

Based on the current state of evidence, we submit that the most fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of our linguistic capacity remain as mysterious as ever, with considerable uncertainty about the discovery of either relevant or conclusive evidence that can adjudicate among the many open hypotheses.

So, there is no plausible naturalistic explanation for how language arose in human beings, just as there's no plausible naturalistic explanation for the origin of life, or the origin of human consciousness, the origin of biological information or even for biological processes like meiosis, mitosis, metamorphosis, or sexual reproduction.

Nor can naturalism provide us with a satisfactory scientific account of cosmic fine-tuning or moral obligation.

When confronted with the most fundamental ontological questions naturalism simply shrugs its shoulders, and yet we're told by some that naturalism is nevertheless the most rational position to hold. Its chief competitor, the belief that there's an intelligent mind underlying the cosmos and all that it contains, we're told, is mere superstition.

We might be forgiven for suspecting that between these two worldview alternatives - unconscious, purposeless forces or an intelligent purposeful mind - the latter is actually the more rational explanation for the phenomena Gauger lists and the former is the more superstitious.