The Privileged Theory

The culture wars have finally arrived in our humble county. A local school board has balked at adopting a high school biology textbook because it gives short shrift to any metaphysical alternatives to Darwinian evolution. Our evening newspaper, always on the look-out for controversy, has decided to create one by opining that the school board's recalcitrance somehow flies in the face of Supreme Court decisions which forbid teaching Creationism in schools.

There are so many confusions here that one scarcely knows where to begin to try to clarify. It is true that the Supreme Court found in Edwards v. Aguillard (1987) that it's unconstitutional to require that creationism be taught in public schools, but in his majority opinion Justice Brennan wrote: "The [Louisianna act mandating Creationism] does not grant teachers a flexibility that they did not already possess to supplant the present science curriculum with the presentation of theories, besides evolution, about the origin of life. Indeed, the Court of Appeals found that no law prohibited Louisiana public school teachers from teaching any scientific theory. As the president of the Louisiana Science Teachers Association testified, 'any scientific concept that's based on established fact can be included in our curriculum already, and no legislation allowing this is necessary.'"

It is not clear, therefore, why a school board would be in violation of Edwards in wishing to furnish district students with textbooks that present evidence of other explanations of origins besides the Darwinian account. Edwards struck down an attempt by a state legislature to enact a law requiring that a view of origins which is based upon a particular interpretation of the Biblical book of Genesis be taught by all schools. A school board, however, is not a state legislature. It is the task of a school board to select texts they deem suitable for their students and which will help them attain the best possible education. The board, in carrying out this responsibility, may exercise poor judgment, may be mistaken, may be unwise, but it's hard to see how it violates Edwards.

In rendering his opinion in the Edwards case Justice Brennan sites the three prong test established in Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971). He writes: "First, the legislature must have adopted the law with a secular purpose. Second, the statute's principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion. Third, the statute must not result in an excessive entanglement of government with religion. State action violates the Establishment Clause if it fails to satisfy any of these prongs."

One thing seems clear about this. Lemon addressed a law enacted by a state legislature, it's not clear that it applies to a school board displaying a preference for one textbook over another.

Brennan also writes that: "Families entrust public schools with the education of their children, but condition their trust on the understanding that the classroom will not purposely be used to advance religious views that may conflict with the private beliefs of the student and his or her family. Students in such institutions are impressionable and their attendance is involuntary."

Just so. The problem that Justice Brennan and the editorial writer for my local paper don't see is that neither Darwinian evolution nor "Scientific Creationism" are scientific in the classic Baconian sense of the word. Darwinian evolution is the belief that blind, purposeless processes, acting over long periods of time, gave rise first to living cells, and then ultimately, to all the diversity of life which inhabits this planet. The theory insists that all life, indeed all of space-time, can be explained solely in terms of material causes. Darwinism goes on to assert that the universe is closed to any non-material interference from any entities existing "outside" of it.

Now whatever this is it's not an empirical theory. It's not science. It's a philosophical assumption that some scientists make about ultimate reality. As such it is pure metaphysics masquerading as science, and as Justice Brennan implies, teaching this to a captive audience of impressionable young people is seen by many parents as a betrayal of the trust that they placed in the school when they enrolled their children.

In my view, the proper approach for a concerned, conscientious school board to take is not to look for a book that teaches Creationism because Creationism is indeed a view based upon a particular religious interpretation of the Bible. It holds that the world and life were created by God in six days some ten thousand years ago. This may well be the case metaphysically, but it is hard to see how it can avoid the charge of being a religious dogma dressed up in scientific drag.

A much better way to present a balanced approach to the issue and to truly educate our children without entangling public tax dollars in sectarian controversy is that employed by Intelligent Design theorists. What they advocate is that a teacher be encouraged to present to his/her students the standard Darwinian model and then explain the evidence both for and against it. There is no constitutional objection to this methodology. It's what education should be and the way many of the best teachers, going all the way back to Socrates, have taught. As Darwin himself said in the Origin of Species, "A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question."

There are many scientific, empirical challenges to Darwinism, but the major challenge is philosophical. Philosophers and scientists have been telling us for some time that there is a mounting body of empirical evidence that leads to the conclusion that the universe, including the biosphere, is richly endowed with information. They argue that since we have a uniform experience of information being produced solely by intelligent minds, it is reasonable to assume, in lieu of evidence to the contrary, that the information contained in, for example, the elaborate and intricate cellular assembly line machines that generate proteins, is an artifact of intelligence, of a mind. Teachers should teach the biochemical facts of cellular machinery, ID theorists insist, and explain the emergence of this machinery in terms of blind, undirected, mechanical processes, if they wish. But we need to recognize that the claim that this machinery came about through impersonal, unintelligent agency is no less metaphysical, nor any more scientific, than the claim that it came about through personal intelligent agency. Therefore, if teachers are to be free to explain the origin of life, the emergence of cellular machines, and the appearance of consciousness in terms of mechanistic processes, and they should be, school boards certainly should have it within their purview to provide students with textbooks which also present arguments for the contrary view that these phenomena can best be explained in terms of intelligent agency.

Claims as to exactly who, or what, the intelligent agent is, or was, are not apposite. It could be the God of the Christians and Jews. It could be Allah. It could be Zeus. It could be aliens from a distant galaxy. Neither need there be controversy over how long ago the original biogenetic event took place. Whether it was 10,000 yrs. ago or 3 billion years ago is irrelevant to the fundamental question at issue. Likewise, there need be no debate over what means the intelligent agent used to bring higher life forms about. It could, indeed, have been a long process of evolution. Intelligent Design theorists are methodological agnostics on all these matters. The only question of concern to them as professional scientists and philosophers is: Do living things show the impress of design or are they the sorts of things that could plausibly be generated by physical forces and serendipity?

Put this way, the debate is not one of religion vs. science rather it is a debate between two different schools within the philosophy of science. It's a debate between those who think the cause of all we find in the world is material and those who think it is mind. It's a debate between those who believe the universe is closed and those who believe it is open. Since these questions are philosophical some may think they have no place in a science classroom, but I think this would be a mistake. Let's have students examine the scientific evidence and let them draw their own conclusions. It would also be a mistake, and an injustice, to arbitrarily privilege one school of thought while excluding the other. This would cheat our children, but it is what Darwinians are all too happy to do to protect their theory and themselves from criticism and to perpetuate their privileged status.

Krauthammer on Reagan

Charles Krauthammer does a nice job making the liberal media look a little silly in their attempt to find an appropriate way to cover the week's memorials to President Reagan. He begins his column by noting that:

"[T]he liberal establishment that alternately ridiculed and demonized Ronald Reagan throughout his presidency is in a quandary. How to remember a man they anathematized for eight years, but who enjoys both the overwhelming affection of the American people and decisive vindication by history? They found their way to do it. They dwell endlessly on the man's smile, his sunny personality, his good manners. Above all, his optimism."

For Mr. Krauthammer this is a ludicrous cop-out:

"Optimism? Every other person on the No. 6 bus is an optimist. What distinguished Reagan was what he did and said."

Krauthammer focusses on Reagan's foreign policy successes in this essay, but he might also have written about how the Gipper healed the nation's sick economy and restored America's confidence in itself after the shattering experiences of Vietnam, Watergate, the Iran hostage crisis and a decade of stagnation and malaise during the seventies. Krauthammer writes:

"Rarely has a president been so quickly and completely vindicated by history. The Berlin Wall came down 10 months after Reagan left office. His policies of unrelenting toughness won the Cold War and brought a new peace. That is because Reagan understood that the key to peace was never arms control. Security had nothing to do with the number of weapons, it had everything to do with the intention and power of those who possessed them."

"This success is an understandable embarrassment to the critics who opposed his every policy. They supported the [nuclear]freeze, denounced [his] military buildup, ridiculed strategic defenses, opposed aid to the Nicaraguan anti-communists and derided Reagan for telling the truth about the Soviet empire."

"So now they praise his sunny smile. Normally, people speak well of the recently deceased to honor the dictum of being kind to the dead. When Reagan's opponents speak well of him now, however, they are trying to be kind to themselves."

As usual, Krauthammer has it pretty much right. Reagan wasn't perfect, of course. His tenure was certainly not uniformly glorious. There were black marks, some of them serious, on his presidency. From a conservative perspective he was remiss in choosing justices for the Supreme Court who lacked a commitment to finding a remedy for Roe v. Wade. Sandra Day O'Conner and Anthony Kennedy, both appointed by Reagan, have been disappointing on those issues, dear to conservatives, which bear on the question of how we shall value human life.

He was also negligent, it seems to some, in not insisting on stricter oversight of the Contras in Nicaraugua. The cause of opposing communism in this hemisphere was right and just, and sometimes, if you want to dance, you have to embrace the only lady in the bar, even if she's not very pretty. But some of the Contras were undisciplined and indiscriminate in their tactics and guilty, evidence indicates, of atrocities which simply should not have been tolerated. To the extent that our tax dollars supported murders of innocent people we should weep in repentance.

Even so, Krauthammer is surely correct that what Reagan did for the United States, a nation sliding deep into the economic and psychological doldrums by the late seventies, and what he did for the world by catalyzing the collapse of totalitarian communism in Europe and Central America, at a time when it seemed as if opposition to communism put one on the wrong side of history, warrants far more than an editorial emphasis on sunny dispositions and warm smiles.

The Religious Divide

Some political science types see the political divide in this country as running between red and blue states, some between rich and poor citizens, but evidence is building that the biggest political separation in this country is between those who are religious, i.e. those who believe in a personal God, and those who are not. Religion, we had been told for the last half century, was dying in the U.S. just as it had been in Europe. Atheism is the wave of the future and will soon extinguish its pre-modern competitor. Be all this as it may, it seems that religion is not going gently into that dark night. At least in the United States it remains a potent political force and will continue to be so for some time to come.

That is not to say that religious belief is thriving everywhere in the U.S. It certainly seems moribund, even despised, among the cultural elites. The late Carl Sagan, an astronomer who achieved celebrity status in the 1970s, was well-known for his claim that "The universe is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be." How Sagan knew this is a mystery to me. It's also a mystery where an atheistic scientist finds philosophical justification for these words: "The world is so exquisite, with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better, it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look Death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides."

If the universe really is all there is then the first sentence in this quote is romantic flummery. The second is metaphysically vacuous. I don't know where Sagan is looking that he sees so much love in the world, but even if his keen eye does discern it in some nook somewhere, on his own principle that nature is the highest metaphysical reality, that all there is can be reduced to matter and energy, then the abundant love he espies is nothing more than a meaningless mixture of chemicals in the brain. It's little else than an interesting arrangement of atoms, ultimately no more significant than, say, digestion. On what grounds, then, does Sagan privilege love over digestion or excretion?

It's true that love stimulates us to desire union with the people we care deeply for, to meld our souls to theirs like the alloy of two disparate metals, but we are existentially doomed to be always other, to be isolated, to be never able to fully realize that oneness we yearn for. The chemicals in our bodies deceive us so that, at least in some instances, we unite only long enough to copulate and perpetuate the species. Big deal. Plants and animals do that without, as far as we know, experiencing love.

As for Sagan's "moral depth" there is no such thing as moral oughtness, and certainly no such thing as moral depth if each of us is nothing more than a biochemical machine. Neither you nor I have any more moral responsibility than does the computer I'm writing this on. Where would moral responsibility come from in a world where everyone is simply the product of Darwinian chance and mutation? Who are we responsible to if the universe is all there is? Why talk about morality at all if life beyond death is just a "pretty story" and if death is in fact utter annihilation? Sagan states that we should be "grateful every day for the brief opportunity that life provides," but to whom should we be grateful? Why should we be grateful? If "nature" is god then nature is cruelly teasing us with this brief taste of life which is, for so many people, a woeful tale of suffering, sorrow, injustice and then death. Even if Sagan could tell us who or what we should be grateful to, why should we be grateful for life as so many experience it?

Another writer, Christopher Hitchens, who has the distinction of having written a book about Mother Teresa in which he finds virtually nothing good to say about her, and pretty much calls her a fraud, elsewhere writes this: "I have many political disagreements with all kinds of people, but they are irrelevant compared with the ones between me and anyone who is a religious believer-It's such a disgusting idea-the idea that you would want permanent, inescapable supervision from the cradle to the grave ..and it's a fantastic vanity - 'The universe is about me. God cares what I'm up to' - masked in the most horrible way as modesty and resignation. It's the element in us that is slavish, stupid, childish, superstitious and bigoted...It bids to all the bits of us that are not properly evolved."

Hitchens doesn't explain why it is a vanity to believe that one's life has a purpose and that the purpose is to live in a love relationship with one's Creator. Nor does he explain why it is so horrible to be modest (I assume he means humble) and to hope and trust that, even though the world appears to be going to hell, the Creator will not abandon us. Hitchens considers it slavish and stupid to believe that a world saturated with signs of intelligent agency actually is the work of an intelligent Creator rather than blind, purposeless forces and random chance. Presumably in his world it's much more grown-up and far less superstitious to believe that matter, chance, time, and physical forces can fashion a living cell, a human immune system, a human brain, or, for that matter, a physical force.

According to Hitchens it's bigoted and superstitious to believe that the reason we deeply desire to find meaning in our lives is because there really is true meaning out there. It's bigoted, he apparently assumes, to believe that we think in moral categories because there really is a moral law written into the fabric of the universe. It's superstitious to hope that there really is an ultimate justice, that love is truly meaningful and not just an evolutionary survival mechanism, that peace will someday prevail, that we long to know the answers to life's deepest questions because answers actually exist. In other words, for Hitchens, as for Sagan, it's childish to hope, to believe, that the cosmos is anything but an incredibly improbable, inexplicable freak with no meaning, no purpose, no hope, no justice. The proper view is that life is a crushingly pointless cycle of birth, suffering, terror, and death with now and then a brief flash, perhaps, of a chemical reaction which delights us with a fleeting frisson of joy, to keep us from despairing at the absurdity of it all.

The world of Sagan and Hitchens is as empty and sterile as it is absurd. It is a world which has led many who've accepted it to nihilism and despair. That Sagan and Hitchens would urge us to stop short of this final step says more about the inconsistency of their logic than of the soundness of their metaphysics. In the U.S., at least, we may be grateful that, for now, a large segment of the population evidently isn't paying such as Carl Sagan and Christopher Hitchens much heed.

Gay Marriage and the ELCA

The Lutheran Office for Governmental Affairs (LOGA), Washington D.C., the federal public policy office of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), joined 25 other religious organizations June 3 to urge members of the U.S. Congress to reject the proposed "Federal Marriage Amendment" to the constitution. These groups claimed in a letter to Congress that the proposal threatens individual civil rights and religious freedom since, if adopted, it would restrict marriage to one man and one woman.

Spokesperson Karen Vagley, LOGA director, said the letter was not a statement about the morality of homosexuality or gay marriage but rather merely reflected the church's concern for civil rights. "All of our positions and statements are based on policy statements that have been approved by the church body," she said. "This is a civil rights issue, and our social statement is very clear on civil rights."

LOGA is acting independently of the parent ELCA and justifies its action by arguing that its position is consonant with established ELCA social statements that endorse the protection of civil rights for all citizens. Is LOGA correct, however, in its basic premise that gay marriage is a civil rights issue?

Jeff Jacoby, writer for the Boston Globe, argues that it’s not. Responding to an essay by Frank Rich in the New York Times which supported gay marriage and which was severely hostile and insulting to traditionalists, Jacoby writes:

Rich's essay -- "The Joy of Gay Marriage" -- went on to cast the supporters of traditional marriage as hateful zealots. They are "eager to foment the bloodiest culture war possible," he charged. "They are gladly donning the roles played by Lester Maddox and George Wallace in the civil rights era."

[But] those first four sit-in strikers, like the thousands of others who would emulate them at lunch counters across the South, weren't demanding that Woolworth's prepare or serve their food in ways it had never been prepared or served before. They weren't trying to do something that had never been lawful in any state of the union. They weren't bent on forcing a revolutionary change upon a timeless social institution.

All they were seeking was what should already have been theirs under the law of the land. The 14th Amendment had declared that blacks no less than whites were entitled to equal protection of the law. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 had barred discrimination in public accommodations. But the Supreme Court had gutted those protections with shameful decisions in 1883 and 1896. The court's betrayal of black Americans was the reason why, more than six decades later, segregation still polluted so much of the nation. To restore the 14th Amendment to its original purpose, to re-create the Civil Rights Act, to return to black citizens the equality that had been stolen from them. That was the great cause of civil rights.

The marriage radicals, on the other hand, seek to restore nothing. They have not been deprived of the right to marry -- only of the right to insist that a single-sex union is a "marriage." They cloak their demands in the language of civil rights because it sounds so much better than the truth: They don't want to accept or reject marriage on the same terms that it is available to everyone else. They want it on entirely new terms. They want it to be given a meaning it has never before had, and they prefer that it be done undemocratically -- by judicial fiat, for example, or by mayors flouting the law. Whatever else that may be, it isn't civil rights. But dare to speak against it, and you are no better than Bull Connor.

Ms. Vagley states that,"It is not the task of our government and elected representatives to enshrine in our laws the religious point of view of any one faith. Rather, our government should dedicate itself to protecting the rights of all citizens and all faiths."

But this reveals a misunderstanding of what the Marriage Amendment seeks to do. Its intent is not to enshrine into law the belief of a particular religious faith or denomination but rather to protect and preserve an understanding of marriage that has persisted for thousands of years across many cultures and religions and which experience has shown to be vital for the health of civil society.

That aside, however, Vagley’s insinuation that government has no business intruding into this sphere of life is certainly questionable. Although in principle I am sympathetic to her aversion to government intrusion, it nevertheless seems to me that the representatives of the people have as much right to legislate that marriage shall be restricted to one man and one woman as it does to exclude polygamous or incestuous unions between consenting adults.

If Vagley believes that gay marriage is a civil rights issue, is she also prepared to lend the weight of her office to a campaign to have laws against group marriage or kinship marriage repealed? Would Vagley view legislation designed to prevent large groups of gay men from getting married as an infringement upon their civil rights? If not, why not? If so, then it would be good of her to be up front about it and tell the entire Lutheran Church that the Lutheran Office of Governmental Affairs stands against all government imposed restrictions on who can marry whom and in what combinations.

The Frank Riches of the world like to portray advocates of the marriage amendment as divisive extremists - name-calling, after all, is such a satisfying substitute for argument among those who have no argument - but it’s not those who are seeking to preserve the heritage and tradition of two thousand years who are the extremists. It’s not those who feel that to abandon the definition of marriage that has served the vast majority of the world’s people for millennia who are the zealots. Rather it is those who, following a whim of current political fashion, would pour yet another corrosive acid onto the fabric of a social institution whose integrity and strength are crucial to the social well-being of our nation, who more closely fit the definitions of those terms.

Ms. Vagley is correct about one thing, however. This debate isn’t primarily about the morality or immorality of homosexuality. It’s not about homophobia. It’s about the future of the institution of marriage and, therefore, about the future of the family.

Iraqi Oil and Getting Reagan Right

Power Line has two very worthwhile pieces up today. The first concerns the transfer of control of the oil industry in Iraq to total Iraqi control. It wasn't too long ago, you'll recall, that we were being pepper sprayed with accusations that the war was all about control of the oil wealth of Iraq. Bush went into Iraq, we were repeatedly told, at the behest of his friends in the oil industry. "No blood for oil!" the war protestors shouted. Now it seems that the Bush administration has once again quietly done precisely what it said it was going to do from the beginning and handed control of the industry over to the Iraqi interim governing council.

Let's see how long it takes before those who were quick to impugn the administration's motives a year ago come forward with their apologies. Doubtless, they have it right at Power Line. All those allegations of evil intent will simply be forgotten, as if they never happened, and we'll Move On to the next set of calumnies until those, too, are discredited.

Here's the important stuff about the oil transfer quoted from YahooNews via Power Line:

"Today the most important natural resource has been returned to Iraqis to serve all Iraqis," Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said. "I'm pleased to announce that full sovereignty and full control on oil industry has been handed over to the oil ministry today and to the new Iraqi government as of today."

The announcement came as Allawi and Oil Minister Thamir Ghadbhan toured the al-Doura oil refinery in southern Baghdad. After meeting and shaking hands with the refinery workers, the two ministers thanked oil sector workers. "We are totally now in control, there are no more advisers," Ghadbhan said. "We are running the show, the oil policies will be implemented 100 percent by Iraqis."

Referring to the former regime of Saddam Hussein, Allawi said that "in the past, Iraqi oil was used in building palaces, buying weapons to achieve one person's goals."

The second post at Power Line excerpts Dinesh D'Souza's deconstruction of the liberal critique of Ronald Reagan's presidency, which, distilled to its essence, claims that Reagan was just plain lucky to be in the right place at the right time when the U.S.S.R. collapsed. The fall of the Soviet hegemon was inevitable; Reagan's polcies had nothing to do with it; etc., etc.

D'Souza has this embarrassing bit of history to share on one of the chief proponents of the "lucky" view, historian Arthur Schlesinger:

Writing on Ronald Reagan's achievements in Newsweek, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. notes, "Reagan's admirers contend that his costly re-armament program caused the Soviet collapse. Maybe so; but surely the thing that did in the Russians was that time had proved communism an economic, political and moral disaster."

Funny: Here's Schlesinger in 1982, observing that "Those in the United States who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse" are "wishful thinkers who are only kidding themselves."

Of course, Schlesinger isn't the only Reagan critic made to look foolish by events. Power Line quotes D'Souza:

Many historians and pundits have refused to credit Ronald Reagan's policies for helping to bring about the Cold War victory, blaming communism's chronic economic problems. Yet, like Scheslinger, they failed to describe it as inevitable while Reagan was actually in office.

In 1982, the learned Sovietologist Seweryn Bialer of Columbia University wrote in Foreign Affairs:"The Soviet Union is not now, nor will it be during the next decade, in the throes of a true systemic crisis, for it boasts enormous unused reserves of political and social stability."

But the genius award undoubtedly goes to Lester Thurow, an MIT economist and well-known author who, as late as 1989, wrote: "Can economic command significantly . . . accelerate the growth process? The remarkable performance of the Soviet Union suggests that it can. . . . Today the Soviet Union is a country whose economic achievements bear comparison with those of the United States."

Uh, huh. Check out the Power Line commentary. It's good stuff.

Good News Is No News Dept.

Omar, an Iraqi who manages Iraq The Model, makes an interesting observation that those who insist that Iraq is descending into chaos ought to note. In the course of writing about the recent agreement of the militias to disband, Omar observes that: "The U.S.-led coalition tried to persuade the militias to disband last year but failed because leaders were unwilling to give up their armed fighters at a time of deteriorating security." He adds that: "I guess this indicates an interesting change in the Iraqi parties' evaluation about the security condition in the country."

It does indeed seem that the parties involved must be convinced that the Iraqi police and the American military have the situation well enough in hand to cede to them their right to protect themselves and their families. This is certainly an important implication of the agreement to disband and very good news. I'm sure the major news outlets, eager as they are to find positive stories to report from Iraq, will be quick to draw similar surmises in the days to come. Or not.

More Hate From the Left

More vitriol from the deep reservoirs of hatred irrigating the American left. In this case the invective comes from the NYT and the Village Voice. Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the tip:

Michael Feingold writing a review of a play by Richard Foreman in The Village Voice states that:

"This opinion is presumably not shared by Foreman; you can gauge the breadth of his imaginative compassion from his willingness to extend it even toward George W. Bush, idiot scion of a genetically criminal family that should have been sterilized three generations ago.... Republicans, whose goal in life is to profit from disaster and who don't give a hoot about human beings, either can't or won't. Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm."

Sullivan also posts this from Tony Kushner writing in The New York Times:"The hegemonic, grim spirit of the age [is] incarnate in our thought-disordered, bloody, greedy, little plutocrat-slash-soulless-theocrat of an unelected president."

I wrote yesterday about the need to revisit the Geneva Conventions' strictures on the treatment of prisoners taken in war. Perhaps we need a new Geneva Convention to cover political warfare. The left seems to think that no toxin is too poisonous to use against its enemies. No language is too ugly or cruel to be considered beyond the pale of human decency.

Imagine for a moment, though, the pandemonium that would break out on the evening news if a conservative were to say anything half as contemptible as this nugget of human kindness posted by Matt Drudge who quotes British writer Greg Palast on the occasion of Ronald Reagan's passing: "Killer, con-man, coward. Good riddance, Gipper.... [You're] More proof that only the good die young."

What sorts of people talk like this, and why? Perhaps it is in part a symptom of the madness which sometimes settles upon those who are infuriated that men they believe to be much inferior to themselves control the levers of power and history. At any rate, their souls must be terribly barren and sour that they feel compelled to sacrifice all human decency by making such patently false and spiteful claims, and for no better purpose than to damage and hurt another human being? What cold, bitter, unpleasant people these must be, consumed as they apparently are by implacable angers and resentments. The very fact that so many individuals of this kind align themselves in opposition to President Bush is eo ipso justification enough to support him, one is tempted to think, even if sufficient other reasons were lacking.

Toby and the Nuge

Hugh Hewitt has a very interesting e-mail from a marine in Fallujah describing a visit from Toby Keith and Ted Nugent. Great stuff, especially if you're a fan.

Is Torture Always Bad?

Question: A terrorist has planted a nuclear device somewhere in New York City (or Washington, D.C.). The terrorist has been apprehended and interrogated but will say only that the device will go off in 12 hours. It will kill at least several million people and destroy the economic hub of the United States. He will not say where it is. Should he be forced by whatever means necessary, including torture, to divulge the information? The scenario is frighteningly plausible, and the question is urgent. Under the current Geneva Accords torture is explicitly prohibited as a means of extracting information no matter how desperate the circumstances:

"This convention bans torture under all circumstances... In particular, it declares that no state of emergency, other external threats, nor orders from a superior officer or authority may be invoked to justify torture."
(See Part I Article I of UN Convention Against Torture).

We need a national discussion on whether the rules proscribing torture, drawn up in 1949 for a world which knew nothing of suitcase nuclear bombs or biological weapons, should be revised, and we need it soon. Next year may be too late. We need also to reexamine the definition of torture itself. The Geneva Convention defines torture as:

"Any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind..."

This definition seems to leave a lot of unanswered questions. Is the use of chemicals which cause no pain or suffering considered torture under this definition? What about sleep deprivation which, though it causes suffering, inflicts no permanent injury? Was what our soldiers did at Abu Ghraib torture? Should the army officer who threatened an Iraqi with his sidearm and then fired it beside his head to frighten him into revealing information about the location of roadside bombs have been dismissed from the service? His action saved the lives of his men and did no lasting injury to the prisoner. To be sure, it entailed some mental distress on the part of the terrorist suspect, but if imposing mental suffering constitutes torture shouldn't solitary confinement also be banned? Or, for that matter, why shouldn't forced confinement of any sort be proscribed? Surely such confinement causes serious mental anguish in many prisoners.

Of course torture should be prohibited as a means of punishment, as should any application of pain carried out for trivial reasons, but saving human life is orders of magnitude more serious than these. Exceptional cases require exceptions. The possibility for abuse is inherent in any exception, but the imperative of saving lives far outweighs, or should outweigh, the squeamishness we might feel at the prospect that someone might abuse those exceptions.

Alan Dershowitz, of all people, makes some important suggestions about the rules of warfare in general, and about torture in particular, in a column he wrote for the Baltimore Sun on May 28th. His key points:

First, democracies must be legally empowered to attack terrorists who hide among civilians, so long as proportional force is employed. Civilians who are killed while being used as human shields by terrorists must be deemed the victims of the terrorists who have chosen to hide among them, rather than those of the democracies who may have fired the fatal shot.

Second, a new category of prisoner should be recognized for captured terrorists and those who support them. They are not "prisoners of war," neither are they "ordinary criminals." They are suspected terrorists who operate outside the laws of war, and a new status should be designated for them - a status that affords them certain humanitarian rights, but does not treat them as traditional combatants.

Third, the law must come to realize that the traditional sharp line between combatants and civilians has been replaced by a continuum of civilian-ness. At the innocent end are those who do not support terrorism in any way. In the middle are those who applaud the terrorism, encourage it, but do not actively facilitate it. At the guilty end are those who help finance it, who make martyrs of the suicide bombers, who help the terrorists hide among them, and who fail to report imminent attacks of which they are aware. The law should recognize this continuum in dealing with those who are complicit, to some degree, in terrorism.

Fourth, the treaties against all forms of torture must begin to recognize differences in degree among varying forms of rough interrogation, ranging from trickery and humiliation, on the one hand, to lethal torture on the other. They must also recognize that any country faced with a ticking-time-bomb terrorist would resort to some forms of interrogation that are today prohibited by the treaty.

It's worth reading the whole thing.

Ronald Reagan: 1911 - 2004

A great man has passed. Not only was Ronald Reagan instrumental in reversing the tide of Marxist/Leninist totalitarianism in the twentieth century, but he, perhaps more than any other politician of the last sixty years, changed the course of political philosophy in the United States.

After Reagan, conservatism emerged as a philosophy of vigorous ideas and tremendous appeal for many who had grown up under the influence of the liberal orthodoxies of the sixties and seventies. After Reagan, liberalism was exposed as a philosophical Wizard of Oz, full of promise and good feeling but hollow inside. Bereft of any ideas that hadn't been discredited by human experience, bereft of political appeal, the only chance a liberal national candidate had, and still has, of being elected to office was to camouflage his liberalism, which is what Clinton did in 1992, perhaps a major reason why he was able to defeat George H.W. Bush.

The amiable, polite Reagan stood in sharp contrast to many of his detractors who, with few good ideas to offer, often substituted insults, mendacity, and aspersions in their place. Indeed, this mode of political discourse has been amplified in the intellectually barren precincts of the leftward end of the political spectrum, until it is virtually the only form of expression one hears from some of the key contemporary spokesmen of the secular left.

Reagan showed us a better way, a way based on courtesy and respect for one's domestic opponents, and strength against one's foreign foes. He was supremely confident in himself, his principles, and his cause, and that confidence was contagious. He was a beacon on a hill for many in a generation that had come of age amidst the chaos of the sixties and seventies and who had grown disillusioned with the social and moral revolutions of that era and with the impotence America seemed to unnecessarily project in the face of deadly challenges from our enemies abroad. He will long be remembered. Perhaps there's still enough room on Mt. Rushmore.

Machiavelli's Disciples

Reading and listening to the Democrats as they've come increasingly undone in the last month or so has brought to mind Niccolo Machiavelli's little book The Prince, a classic essay on how to attain and keep political power. What, for example, are we to make of the ridiculous shrieking in speeches by Al Gore, Howard Dean, Teddy Kennedy and their left-wing allies attacking the Bush administration in recent weeks? Their irrational screeds remind one of an ignorant medieval mob, convinced they've caught themselves a witch and, having worked themselves into a frenzy of mindless excitement, are determined to commit her to the flames. Yet one can't help feel that with the Democrats the whole thing is a manipulation, a fraud, designed to work the faithful into the ever higher levels of political ecstasy needed to cement their irrational resolve to thrust Bush onto the pyre.

The pathetically phony hysteria, the hyper-strident outrage and ludicrous allegations of betrayal, extremism, lies, Nazism, and so on, ad nauseum, are all intended to accomplish exactly what? Do they really believe this rhetoric? Then they are fools or lunatics. Are they merely seeking political advantage? Then they are contemptible hypocrites, destroying a man in order to advance their own interests. In their mind, however, that's not necessarily a bad thing. To understand why, recall Machiavelli:

"In the actions of men, and especially of princes (i.e. Democrat politicians)...the end justifies the means. Let a prince aim at conquering and maintaining the state (i.e. acquiring political power), and the means will always be judged honorable and praised by everyone, for the vulgar is always taken by appearances...and the world consists only of the vulgar, and the few who are not vulgar are isolated when the many have a rallying point in the prince."

Like billionaire George Soros who is prepared to shed his fortune in order to unseat George Bush, Democrats like Gore, Dean, and others seem happy to shed their dignity for the same cause. After all, no price is too high to pay to regain the throne of power, certainly not the price of honor, nor of truth, and the "vulgar" masses on the left just eat the stuff up anyway. The more outrageous the allegations the more they howl for Bush's blood. Machiavelli again:

"It is necessary to be able to disguise this character (i.e. that of being deceitful) well, and to be a great feigner and dissembler; and men are so simple and so ready to obey present necessities, that one who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived."

Just for the sake of discussion imagine that GWB had, subsequent to 9/11, done what the Democrats are insisting he should have done, which is essentially nothing. Suppose Bush had perhaps rattled a few sabers with tough talk and rattled a few Iraqi aspirin factories with a cruise missile or two, but other than that had done nothing. What would the Democrats be doing right now? I can't say with complete certainty, of course, but I feel reasonably sure that they would be flaying Bush alive for putting the nation at risk by not taking decisive action to depose Saddam in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan. John Kerry, who perhaps thinks he is following the apostle Paul's example of being all things to all men in order that he might save some, or at least win their votes, would, in his sonorous, somnolent, soporific way, be running as a war-hawk reminding us at every opportunity how he didn't pussy-foot around in Vietnam where he won a silver star for apparently killing a wounded and helpless Vietcong.

If Bush were to plead in his defense that he didn't think it wise to act unilaterally in Iraq, but that the U.N. was dragging their feet, the Democrats would be roasting him for his timidity and for entrusting our security and our sovereignty to a corrupt United Nations. One may think this an ignoble, immoral way to do politics, but the left in general and Democrats in particular, though they may be ethical relativists and subjectivists in their personal lives, are in politics guided by a Machiavellian pragmatism. Whatever works is right, and it must work toward the end of the acquisition and maintenance of political power. Whatever Bush might have done, the Democrats would have attacked him for not doing the opposite. Their Machiavellian value system would have demanded it:

"A man who wishes to make a profession of goodness in everything must necessarily come to grief among so many who are not good. Therefore it is necessary for a prince, who wishes to maintain himself, to learn how not to be good, and to use this knowledge and not use it, according to the necessity of the case."*

In preempting Saddam, however, Bush also preempted the war-hawk prong of the Democrat strategy and enabled them instead to condemn Bush as a militaristic cowboy determined to go to war no matter what Saddam did, and to assert that what is called for in these parlous times is calm, reasoned negotiations with people like Saddam and bin Laden. In other words, to assert that what is called for is doing nothing.

The left has a long history of this sort of hypocrisy. In the early years of WWII when Hitler and Stalin had signed a non-aggression pact, the left bitterly opposed those who said we should get into the war to help Europe against the fascists. As soon as Hitler betrayed Stalin, however, by invading the Soviet Union, the left dropped all pretense of pacifism and demanded that we come to the aid of the "allies" against the axis powers.

The lesson here is that the left usually has a political motive for any position they take. They may cloak it in the language of morality in order to befuddle the "vulgar," but their positions are not based upon principles that most people would regard as moral or honorable. When we realize this we'll better understand why, when Bush sneezes, like chimps at the zoo, the whole cage goes berserk with screams, howls, and name-calling. When we understand this we'll also recognize this strident behavior for what it is: desperate acts of shameless men, arising not out of a principled opposition to the policy of the Bush administration, but out of a bitter resentment at having been deprived of the political power to which they feel they are entitled and for which they have an unbounded lust.

* To understand the modern secular left read Machiavelli's The Prince, to better understand George W. Bush read Terry Eastland's article in the Weekly Standard of March 1st entitled Bush's Gospel.

Iraqi Oil

Iraq The Model has a very interesting proposal from an American reader as to how the oil wealth of that country might be put to excellent use. I don't know what the liabilities of this plan would be, but the benefits of it, both for Iraq and for America's standing in the world, seem extraordinarily impressive.

More on Fallujah

Major David Bellon in Iraq has been sending regular e-mails to his father about the situation there. They make fascinating reading for anyone interested in what the military is accomplishing. Go to The Greenside to read his latest (June 2nd) on combat around Fallujah. Thanks to Hugh Hewitt for the tip.

Osama's Choice

The Belmont Club has the second part of the Memo to Osama up. It's a must read for anyone wishing to get inside the twisted minds of Islamofascist terrorists. If you haven't read the first one yet, begin with it before reading Part 2.

Speaking of the Belmont Club's Memo to Osama, it has been broadly bruited by the media and others that the Islamofascists will try to strike a severe, maybe even catastrophic, blow within the U.S. sometime between now and November. It also appears to be widely assumed that the chief purpose of such a strike would be to tilt the election in favor of Senator Kerry, in the manner of the Madrid train bombing. This should deeply trouble Kerry supporters, to the point, one might think, that the sensible ones among them would abandon his candidacy. After all, many of them are convinced that the terrorists are preparing an attempt to kill thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of Americans in what would amount to one huge political endorsement for John Kerry. The Senator, it seems, is so much more to their liking than GWB that they are prepared to murder untold numbers of our children in hopes of getting him elected. Shouldn't it give pause to Kerry supporters to know that their guy is the candidate of choice of al Qaeda? One wonders how it can be that people of sound mind can continue to support the man who those who are trying to destroy our civilization believe is best suited for their purposes.

Accentuating the Positive

Andrew Sullivan gets it precisely right on Iraq:

"If someone had said in February 2003, that by June 2004, Saddam Hussein would have been removed from power and captured; that a diverse new government, including Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, would be installed; that elections would be scheduled for January 2005; and that the liberation of a devastated country of 25 million in which everyone owns an AK-47 had been accomplished with an army of around 140,000 with a total casualty rate (including accidents and friendly fire) of around 800; that no oil fields had been set aflame; no WMDs had been used; no mass refugee crises had emerged; and no civil war had broken out... well, I think you would come to the conclusion that the war had been an extraordinary success. And you'd be right. Yes, there are enormous challenges; and yes, so much more could have been achieved without incompetence, infighting and occasional inhumanity. But it's worth acknowledging that, with a little perspective, our current gloom is over-blown. Stocks in Iraq have been way over-sold. I even regret some minor sells myself. Now watch the media do all it can to accentuate the negative."

Fallujah

Ever wonder what happened in the battle for Fallujah? Me too. There hasn't been much in the news about it lately so we might surmise that things are going pretty well there, despite early media prognostications of terrible and imminent woe. To find out exactly how well things are progressing read Brad Miniter's outstanding column in the Wall Street Journal.

Moby Bush

A few days ago I wrote that regardless of whether or not you think we did the right thing in going into Iraq every American should be united in hoping for a successful establishment of a free and prosperous Iraq. To do otherwise, I wrote, is to implicitly hope for further bloodshed and is morally reprehensible. Yet there appear to be people so consumed by hatred for GWB that they really are yearning for failure in Iraq so that the President will be defeated in November. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, simply despicable. That anyone could actually wish that more Americans and more Iraqis lose their lives just so the Democrat party can regain political power and the object of their obsessions be banished from the White House is reprehensible beyond words. Nevertheless, No Left Turns has a piece taken from an article in the U.K. Spectator which is absolutely stunning for the moral poverty of the journalist it describes. The key passage:

In the column, Toby Harden relates an encounter he had with an American magazine journalist with impeccable credentials. Here is a key excerpt from their discussion: "Not only had she 'known' the Iraq war would fail but she considered it essential that it did so because this would ensure that the 'evil' George W. Bush would no longer be running her country. Her editors back on the East Coast were giggling, she said, over what a disaster Iraq had turned out to be. 'Lots of us talk about how awful it would be if this worked out.' Startled by her candour, I asked whether thousands more dead Iraqis would be a good thing. She nodded and mumbled something about Bush needing to go. By this logic, I ventured, another September 11 on, say, September 11 would be perfect for pushing up John Kerry's poll numbers. 'Well, that's different - that would be Americans,' she said, haltingly, 'I guess I'm a bit of an isolationist.' That's one way of putting it."

I'm reminded of the scene in Herman Melville's Moby Dick where the whaling ship Rachel pulls along side the Pequod and the Rachel's captain pleads with Ahab to help them find his son who has been lost at sea. Ahab, consumed by his hatred for the great white whale, has no room in his heart for human compassion. Every human sentiment must be subordinated to the singular purpose of killing Moby Dick. Every moment must be dedicated to his pursuit. Every moral consideration is secondary to the insane lust for revenge which so perverts Ahab. No loss of human life is too great if it results in the consummation for which he will ultimately, and vainly, give his own life. Melville must have had some contemporary Democrats in mind when he sketched out the demented character of Captain Ahab.

Memo to Osama

Check out the Memo to Osama at the Belmont Club for excellent insight into what al Qaeda must be thinking right now.

Gay Marriage and Slippery Slopes

A Dahlia Lithwick article posted a couple of weeks ago on Slate was dismissive of the case against gay marriage based upon the metaphor of a "slippery slope". A slippery slope argument tries to show that, in some cases, once a concession is granted to one's opponent there is no logical basis for stopping with just that single concession. Consistency demands that the next point of contention also be conceded, and so on, until one finds oneself slipping helplessly toward an unacceptable endpoint, unable to gain a firm handhold anywhere along the way to stop the slide.

As regards the issue of gay marriage the slippery slope is invoked to argue that once marriage is no longer limited to a man and a woman we have no compelling reason to stop at restricting marriage to just two people of any gender. Pressure would doubtless arise to extend marriage rights to any combination of people who consent to be married, no matter the number, gender, or biological relationship of the intendeds, and the courts would have no basis for opposing the wishes of plaintiffs who would almost certainly challenge laws against such unions.

Lithwick is having none of this sort of reasoning, however. After spending much time ridiculing those who fear that redefining marriage may ultimately lead to state sanction of conjugal relationships between humans and their pets and other such perversities, she addresses the more immediate and plausible concern that marriage rights will eventually be extended to groups of people. Lithwick doesn't see this as a likely consequence of allowing gays to marry. Her reason is that there is a rational basis for states to ban polygamous and polyamorous marriages because historically these have resulted in imbalances of power, coercion (particularly of young girls), and an enormous financial burden to the state.

But these seem to be tenuous grounds for resisting state approval of polygamous unions, since the first two are not necessarily inherent in those unions, and the third, despite Lithwick's denial in her article, would make polygamous unions no different than gay couplings (See here, for example). If the liabilities she mentions were removed or mitigated, what grounds would remain for states to proscribe such relationships? Lithwick's argument seems to entail that if these reasons were to be found unpersuasive by the courts then polygamy would indeed be legally inevitable.

She does mention one additional reason for pooh-poohing the slippery slope argument. She notes that the constitutional right to privacy, which some justices imagined they descried in the Griswold case of 1965 and upon which they based their Roe decision of 1973, is an intimate right, between two consenting partners.The desire of a group of seven people to marry simply does not intuitively fit into that binary sphere of intimacy.

In other words, extending marriage rights to two gays is just not the same as extending similar rights to multiple partners because the latter combination is not intuitively intimate whereas relationships between couples are. Courts may, then, on the basis of intuitive intimacy, refuse to polygamists what they grant to homosexuals. How does Lithwick propose, however, that courts assess the degree of potential intimacy residing in a particular group of would-be spouses? Would the criterion of intuitive intimacy, in the interest of equal treatment under the law, be extended to heterosexual couples who appear to some official to be insufficiently affectionate toward each other? Do we want judges and legislators making decisions about matters of law on the basis of their personal understanding of intimacy?

It seems pretty clear that, pace Lithwick, once gender is no longer relevant to marriage there will be no compelling reason to keep the number of people involved relevant either. Whether this would mean the end of marriage or not and what the long term social effects would be, who can say, but it would certainly be another body blow to an institution that has been severely rocked by liberalized divorce laws, liberalized views on cohabitation, and liberalized sexual mores over the last thirty five years.

Enemies of Moral Progress

Evidence that intellectual brilliance is no safeguard against appalling silliness:

"I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world."
Bertrand Russell in Why I Am Not a Christian.

No doubt this was an effective applause line when the famous philosopher and mathematician gave the speech upon which his book is based in 1927, and variants of it are often heard still today. Nevertheless, it suffers the misfortune of being gratingly out of tune with the facts. In the ancient Greco-Roman world, not to mention other civilizations since, infanticide, child abandonment, abortion, suicide, slavery, human sacrifice, and death sports were all widely practiced and approved. Christian influence, derived from the conviction that human life was sacred, was instrumental in curtailing or ending each of these barbarisms.

Many ancient societies, and some contemporary ones, regarded women as property. Daughters were bought and sold, wives legally beaten, even put to death. Sexual double standards were accepted so that female infidelity could be severely punished, but male philandering was winked at. Female infanticide was common, as were suttee (burning a wife on her husbands funeral pyre) among Hindus, foot binding of girls in the orient, and genital mutilation in Muslim societies in Africa and the Middle East. Wherever Christianity exerted influence these practices were legally proscribed.

As a consequence of the Christianization of Europe mental asylums were created in the 4th century, as were homes for the sick. Poorhouses were started around the same time and homes for the aged and the blind were instituted a century later. Most hospitals of all types were, until modern times, begun by Christians as an expression of their belief that it was their moral duty to care for the sick and the poor. The same has been true of organizations of mercy like the Red Cross and Mother Teresa's ministry in India as well as charitable institutions like The Salvation Army and Habitat for Humanity. If this is how enemies of moral progress behave, the world could do with a lot more such enemies.

I wonder if Russell would think this record of moral accomplishment inferior to that of the state atheisms of the twentieth century (i.e. Communism and National Socialism) which presided over the murders of hundreds of millions of people in the bloodiest one hundred year period in human history. I wonder if he would think the moral legacy of the Christian Church inferior to that of the vast Arab world for whom murder, war, and honor killings are what baseball and bowling are for Americans, mere sport and amusement. Indeed, I wonder if Russell was even thinking at all when he made the claim quoted above. How, for instance, can an atheist, especially a positivist like Russell, even speak in moral terms? But that's a question for another post.

For a much more detailed treatment of the impact of Christianity, both moral and otherwise, throughout the last two millennia see Alvin J. Schmidt's Under the Influence: How Christianity Transformed Civilization. The book can be ordered through our friends at Hearts and Minds Bookstore.