Starving Children

None of the answers given by the presidential candidates to the problem of high gas prices really addresses the problem. Simply put, the problem is that there's not enough supply to meet the global demand. As long as this imbalance exists, prices at the pump will continue to rise and the cost of food will rise with it, and reducing the federal tax on gas and other palliatives will only help temporarily.

Moreover, as long as corn and other grains are in demand as a source of ethanol the cost of those grains, including what is grown in poor countries, will also rise. While people starve, grain raised in their own country will be exported rather than used locally because the growers will get far more money for it if they export it than if they sell it domestically.

Unless we're prepared to see starvation on a large scale in the world's poorest countries we need to use grain for food, not fuel, and we need to increase the supply of oil and gasoline. No medium term solution that omits these will avoid the looming disaster.

RLC

Truth Hurts

Paul Shaheen criticizes Hollywood for presenting too many stereotypical images of Arabs and Muslims. He has praise for the movie Babel, which is much deserved, but he criticizes The Kingdom for making Arabs out to be bad guys. This makes me wonder whether he even saw the movie. The film is about terrorists in an Arab country. Mr. Shaheen may not have read any newspapers lately, so someone might tell him that this actually happens. Some very bad people are Arab Muslims, and it's to Hollywood's credit that they didn't shrink from portraying this reality. Moreover, one of the heroes of the film is an Arab.

Nevertheless, Mr. Shaheen seems miffed that every now and then Hollywood goes against its instincts and actually portrays things as they happen to be.

It is, no doubt, people who think as Mr. Shaheen does who have declared use of the words jihadist, mujahedeen, and Islamo-fascism to be henceforth unacceptable language in the U.S. State Department. There's a fear among the experts at Foggy Bottom, you see, that using words correctly and accurately will offend the delicate sensibilities of Muslim moderates.

See Andy McCarthy at NRO for more on this peculiar development.

You might also listen to what Robert Spencer has to say about the, ah, you-know-who who are waging world-wide you-know-what against Western civilization:

RLC

Galaxies in Collision

NASA has released some pics of galaxies interacting with each other taken with the Hubble space telescope. Amazing photos.

Bear in mind that each of these galaxies is roughly similar to our Milky Way and that if our sun were in the picture it would be so tiny it probably wouldn't be visible. The earth would most definitely not be visible.

RLC

The Case for Civility

I've met and spoken with Os Guinness on several occasions and even shared a meal with him once. He's a fine man, a brilliant speaker and a prolific author. He's also dismayed at the current state of discourse in this country, and his dismay is certainly warranted. Out of that concern has emerged yet another book from a man who has already authored or edited over two dozen of them.

The Case for Civility And Why Our Future Depends on it is one of the most important of the many themes he has addressed over his long career as a public intellectual, but unfortunately it's not one of his strongest efforts.

Os urges us to elevate the level of our discourse and disagreements. He's dismayed by the "culture wars" raging in the U.S. over issues like abortion, stem cell research, gay marriage, Iraq, etc. He calls for leadership from our politicians in promoting a civil public square. In all of this I cheer him on, but he cripples his case in the very beginning of the book, and continues to do so sporadically throughout its 175 pages, by taking precisely the kind of cheap shots at President Bush, though not always by name, that irritate people like me who think that this President has been one of the most civil, longsuffering, and least vindictive men ever to hold the office of president.

Bush has been relentlessly, and sometimes viciously and unfairly, vilified in the press by the Democratic opposition and even by some Republicans, yet he has never once, so far as I know, responded in kind, at least not publicly. He has tried repeatedly to demonstrate good will toward his political opponents only to be whacked in the head for his trouble. Nevertheless, rather than hold him up as an exemplar of the very attitude Os urges upon the rest of us, rather than cite his willingness to turn the other cheek as an example of how civility might work itself out in our politics, Os seizes whatever opportunities present themselves to take a few whacks himself.

On pages 5 and 6, for instance, he says: "I write as a longtime European admirer of the United States, with the deep conviction that the quest for civility in world affairs has to begin in America; but also with a growing sadness that America's recent leadership has not matched up to her global responsibilities." How so? In what way has our leadership failed to exercise civility on the world stage? Is this a reference to Afghanistan or Iraq? If so, in what sense do these ventures demonstrate an unfortunate lack of civility? They can do so only if they were inexcusably misguided, but if Os thinks they were then he needs to make that case because it's certainly not self-evident.

He also writes on page 6 that, "Like a later American president's 'Mission Accomplished' in Iraq, Allenby's rash claim was soon to be contradicted..." This is simply uncharitable. The Navy suggested the "Mission Accomplished" sign after deposing Saddam and the completion of the aircraft carrier's mission to Iraq. The White House okayed it, but Bush probably wasn't even informed of it. The President even said in his speech aboard the ship that the mission had to continue and that the work was not done. One can understand, perhaps, why partisans might exploit this opening to insult Bush, but why would a man calling for more civility in our politics do so? If the sign has to be mentioned at all why not try to put the best construction on it rather than the worst?

The book also suffers from a lack of specificity. Os bemoans "culture warring" throughout the work, particularly on pages 16 and 17, but he's never clear about exactly what he has in mind by the term. He talks about the need "to wrest back the culture wars from the domineering pundits and activists who have become the warlords of American public life," but who are these people and in what ways are they domineering and what's wrong, exactly with being an activist?

He warns us not to remain passive before the bullying of the culture warriors, but the reader has no idea what or whom he's talking about.

On page 18 he conflates the two biggest weaknesses of the book, his lack of specifics and his predilection for taking swipes at Bush: "The tie-in between the religious right and the person and policies of George W. Bush, has provoked a mounting backlash that has made the liaison a severe liability for both."

Is Os criticizing Bush's "person" here? What is it about Bush's person that makes him so odious? Which of his policies should Bush have not pursued? Appointing qualified pro-life judges? Opposing federal funding for embryonic stem cell research? Doing more than any president in history to help alleviate the suffering of the poor in Africa? What exactly?

Guinness adds that "...certain Christians form the bulk of one of the two great extremes in the American culture wars and are stirring up against themselves some of the most vehement antireligious animosity in the modern world." Who are these Christians? How are they stirring up animosity, and why is this bad? If the world hates Christians for taking a stand against modern social trends why is that the Christians' fault? Os doesn't explain.

He laments the militancy of atheists like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins and seems to blame it on the Religious Right (p.18) as if had Jerry Falwell never existed Dawkins would never have felt the need to write The God Delusion. Could it not be argued just as easily that the Religious Right is the backlash and that the debasement of our culture by the secularists is the stimulus?

He also gets a little too full of himself on page 19 where he writes that he's "setting out a vision of civility in the American public square that, if realized, could be the key to resolving the cuilture wars, could be a stunning tribute to the brilliance of the 'great experiment' devised by the American founders, and also could stand as an encouragement and as a model for public civility in other parts of the world." He sounds here like he's campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize.

There needs to be made a case for civility, and I thank Os for keeping that need before us. I just wish he'd be more specific and civil himself.

After a historical longuer on the first amendment and the challenges of pluralism, Os gets to the heart of his topic in Chapter 4.

He sees two impediments to a more civil discourse in this country. First, is the desire by some (don't expect him to name names or cite examples) to try to sacralize the public square. Here he steps into a trap to which many fair-minded commentators seem prone. In trying to be credible he wants to pronounce a pox on both the houses of the left and the right which implies a kind of moral equivalence between them. Thus he either has to dredge up some specific example of right-wing perfidy or continue to speak in mind-numbing nebulosity. He chooses to do both:

"As one who holds the Hebrew prophets in the highest esteem, I am outraged by the false prophets of fundamentalism, who violate the biblical canons of prophecy and pronounce in the name of the Lord what is theologically obscene and historically untrue.... I am appalled by the way the Religious Right attacks its fellow believers and demonizes its enemies. Shame on the scurrilous attacks in much Christian direct mail, and on fundamentalist pastors and their followers who hold placards in public such as 'God Hates Fags,' 'Thank God for Maimed Soldiers,' and 'God Hates You.'"

This sort of behavior is indeed deplorable and I join Os in deploring it, but who's doing it and what wickedness does the direct mail contain? Without that information we're left in the dark as to whether this really is a significant phenomenon. Is it limited to people like the dozen or so family members who comprise the Westboro Baptist Church or is it much more typical of the Christian right?

He complains (p. 94) that "many in the Religious Right are more obviously fundamentalists than they are Christians." This may well be true, but it would help if he would give us examples of what he means so that we can judge whether it's true that "many" religious conservatives are actually guilty of the charge.

He gives some advice to Christians on this page that is worth repeating. In talking about how Christians sometimes portray themselves as victims of secular persecution he enjoins us to, in effect, get a grip. He reminds us that what Christians are facing in the U.S. is nothing compared to what they're facing in China, North Korea, Burma, and Sudan.

He makes another interesting point on page 96 where he points out that it is a bit of a mistake to think that the genocidal tendencies of Islam are a throwback to the 7th century. He writes: "Its view of its advocates as a revolutionary vanguard, and their belief in the power of violence to remake humanity are highly modern ideas and closer to the views of the nineteenth century anarchists and nihilists than to those of their Muslim forebears. As such Islamism is truly a modern reaction to the modern world."

He's also helpful when he notes on page 102 that, "whichever side it comes from, politicized preaching is faithless, foolish, and disastrous for the church." These are words that should be meditated upon by the Jesse Jackson's, Jeremiah Wrights and Al Sharptons of the world as well as those normally thought to be on the Religious Right.

The best line in the book comes in his chapter on saying no to the naked public square when he says that he finds it "curious to be treated by Muslims as a second-class citizen and by atheists as a second-class thinker - a dhimmi to one and a dummy to the other."

He's at his best in defending the open public square and this chapter (Chapter 5) is worth the price of the book. Unfortunately, he never overcomes his penchant for vague generalizing and thus never brings himself to explaining exactly what civil discourse would or should look like (perhaps because it might look too much like G.W. Bush). On pages 150-152 he talks about what it is not, but leaves us to form our own opinions as to where the boundaries of civil discourse actually lie.

Nevertheless, Os is to be commended for directing our attention to the need and importance of civil disagreement, and we would all do well to keep in mind that we do nothing to advance our own causes when we resort to aspersions, name-calling and attempts to embarrass and humiliate those with whom we disagree.

RLC

Ten Ways

Joe Carter has a good series of posts on Ten Ways Darwinists Help Intelligent Design at Evangelical Outpost. If you're interested in the controversy go to the link and scroll down.

RLC

He Who Hesitates

Nine days ago "Mookie" al Sadr threatened a third uprising unless coalition forces stopped forcing his Mahdi militiamen to obey the law. Since then 186 of those militiamen have died trying to kill Americans and Iraqis. Mookie better soon get on with the uprising or else he won't have anyone left to uprise with.

RLC

Rove's Fingerprints

If Reverend Jeremiah Wright was working for the Clinton campaign he probably wouldn't do anything differently than he has been over the last four days. His speeches seem to be deliberately designed to sabotage Obama's candidacy. There's speculation that Wright feels betrayed and embittered by Obama who dissed him by relegating him to the basement during the announcement of his candidacy and who has consistently tried to distance himself from Wright's views ever since.

When Wright opined that Obama is just saying that he disagrees with the Chicago preacher because as a politician he has to say that sort of thing, he effectively called the Illinois senator a liar and implied that Obama really does share his radical, racialist, paranoid views.

It's true that the simplest explanation for what Wright has been doing is that he's very angry at the treatment he's received from his protege and is resolved to make him pay for the lese majeste. I admit, though, that it is possible he's been turned by the Clinton machine. They're like that.

But my own opinion is that thirty years ago the perfidious Karl Rove foresaw this whole scenario unfolding and planted Reverend Wright as a GOP sleeper in Trinity Church to destroy the candidacy of any potential presidents that might emerge from that congregation. I wouldn't put it past him.

I can see lefty heads everywhere nodding knowingly in agreement.

RLC

McGovern or Carter?

Is Senator Obama more like George McGovern (1972) or Jimmy Carter (1976)? Andrew Busch at No Left Turns thinks it's Carter:

Like Carter, Obama is a substantively vacuous charmer with minimal big-time experience. Carter had four years in the Georgia governor's mansion; if he is elected, Obama will have had four years in the U.S. Senate.

Like Carter, Obama has based his campaign on a general promise of change and a general posture of piety.

Like Carter, Obama is devoted to "healing" the nation after a harsh period of divisiveness.

Like Carter, Obama has suffered gaffes, but has maintained a reservoir of support that refuses to desert him. Like Obama waxing eloquent about the benighted folks in small-town Pennsylvania, Carter uttered his comment about maintaining the "ethnic purity" of neighborhoods in the weeks leading up to the Pennsylvania primary. Carter won Pennsylvania; Obama lost but retained his national lead in delegates and polls.

And, like Carter, despite his flaws, he is still the odds-on favorite to win the presidency in November. Republicans have not gone into a presidential election facing such stiff headwinds since-well, 1976. On Election Day of that year, Carter squeaked by Gerald Ford after possessing a large set of objective advantages. Obama, should he go on to win the Democratic nomination, will go into the election with at least as large a set of objective advantages.

Busch sees other similarities which you can read at the link.

RLC

Hume on Miracles

My Philosophy of Religion class has been reading and critiquing David Hume's argument against miracles this past week. Those students and others may be interested in perusing this post at Uncommon Descent on that very subject. Some of the comments that follow are also worthwhile.

RLC

Is Wright Wrong

There's been much written in the last day or two about Rev. Jeremiah Wright's recent speeches and his sundry and persistent offenses against reason and common sense, but with it all I haven't seen any comment on something he said at the NAACP speech Sunday night. The Reverend cited research in that speech which shows that whites tend to be left-brained, logical, and analytical while blacks are right-brained, intuitive, and feeling-oriented. The races differ, the preacher intoned, in both their learning styles and their dispositions toward particular modes of thought.

I expected that this disquisition on racial difference would set off a firestorm of protest, especially among African-Americans, because in his attempt to defend the different ways black children learn he tacitly acknowledged that blacks simply can't measure up to whites in the kind of thinking required for careers in engineering, math, physics, etc. The implicit corollary of this is that if there are different types of learning then there may be good reason to resurrect the old and discredited idea of "separate but equal" schools. If blacks and whites have different aptitudes then what works well for whites won't succeed with blacks and vice versa so why not educate them differently? In a single speech Rev. Wright catapulted the racial conversation all the way back to 1953, before Brown v. Board of Education, and inadvertently laid the premise for a return to racial segregation, at least in education.

If Jeremiah Wright is correct then we can never hope to see robust numbers of blacks in fields that require left-brained thinking, and if those fields are to be ceded to whites and Asians as their exclusive domain then how will blacks avoid being tagged with the stigma of intellectual inferiority? If a white speaker had made the point Wright made there would be howls of protest at the inherent racism of the claim, but Wright's NAACP audience appeared to receive the news of black inferiority with enthusiasm.

For the sake of African-Americans let's hope that those at the NAACP meeting didn't realize what they were applauding, and let's hope, too, that Rev. Wright is as wrong about this as he is about so much else.

RLC

The Times They Are a'Changin

Demand for oil, fueled by increasing affluence in India, China, and Russia as well as the production of cheaper cars making it possible for millions of people in these countries to own their own vehicles, will push oil prices as high as $8.00 a gallon within just four years according to this forecast at Breitbart. This will happen, it's claimed, despite the fact that consumption in the U.S. will decline due to high pump prices and flatter economy.

The U.S. can partly mitigate the coming calamity by opening up the Alaskan North Slope and our offshore fields, building more refineries, and constructing nuclear power generating facilities (which even the founder of Greenpeace favors). The question is whether a Democratic congress, thick with people who are averse to nuclear power and who have been calling for years for high gas prices as an environmental and conservation measure, will now reverse themselves. It'll take some strong leadership in Washington, and I don't know who among the current political class has the credibility, talent and political power required to turn the supertanker of state in time to keep it from running aground.

We can also forestall the crisis by developing public transportation and rapid transit infrastructure in some of our fastest growing regions. The sun may be setting on the day of the daily one to two hour round trip highway commute.

Meanwhile, if this prognostication is correct say good-bye to your SUVs, Hummers, and pick-up trucks. Inflationary gas prices will be a major inconvenience to us, to be sure, and will doubtless radically change the way we live, but it will be a total disaster to much of the world's poor who will likely starve to death as a result. It will moreover be very likely to precipitate increased warfare, perhaps even WWIII, as some nations seek to secure an oil supply and others seek to use their oil resources as a weapon.

We can't afford to wait to increase the supply of oil on the world market, but the ball is in the Democrats' court.

Exit question: Why are not any of the presidential candidates being asked what they will do to prevent this looming catastrophe?

RLC

Making Ben Stein's Case

Bill Dembski cleverly descries an irony in Yoko Ono's lawsuit against the producers of the recently released movie Expelled, featuring Ben Stein. She's suing because they used, presumably without permission, a clip from her husband's song Imagine which is copyrighted. The irony is in the lyrics of the song:

Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can. No need for greed or hunger, A brotherhood of man. Imagine all the people, sharing all the world.

Apparently, Yoko's not actually cool with John's dream.

Dembski also recalls Elvis Costello's query in The Other Side of Summer: "Was it a millionaire who said 'imagine no possessions'"?

The funny thing about this is that Yoko and others are trying to stifle a movie which documents the contemporary threat to academic and intellectual freedom. By trying to hamper the film they're unwittingly doing precisely what the movie says they do. You can't buy that kind of publicity.

RLC

FOBs

This will certainly make the Israelis uneasy. A man by the name of Hatem El-Hady, formerly a big fund raiser for Hamas, an organization that specializes in blowing Israeli children to bits, has now devoted himself to raising money for the Barack Obama campaign. El-Hady was chairman of the Toledo-based Islamic charity Kindhearts, until it was closed down by the U.S. government in 2006 for terrorist fundraising.

El-Hady's web page listed three special friends, and one of the three turned out to be none other than Michelle Obama. One wonders what it feels like to be a "special friend" of a man who finances the murders of children. Since the story broke El-Hady has taken his web page down, but Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs has the screen shots if you care to view them.

The FOBs (Friends of Barack) continue to make life difficult for the presidential candidate. One wonders if he has any associates at all who are neither under indictment (Tony Rezko), nor paranoid fabulists (Jeremiah Wright), nor terrorists (William and Bernadine Ayers and now El-Hady).

Senator Obama makes us hope - hope that we don't find out next that he's receiving contributions from Osama bin Laden.

HT: Powerline

RLC

Debt of Gratitude

By now you've probably heard that the CIA has reported to Congress that the Israeli air strike into Syria last September took out a plutonium reactor supplied by North Korea which would have been capable of eventually producing weapons grade fissile material had the Israelis not destroyed it. Once again the world owes Israel a debt of gratitude.

The North Koreans are embarrassed at being caught cooperating with Syria's pursuit of nuclear weapons and the Syrians are afraid there will be further reprisals by the U.S. So, one story has it, Syrian police took one of Saddam's most-wanted henchmen, Izzat Ibrahim, who had been hiding out in Syria, and pushed him across the border into Iraq as a good-will offering of sorts to the U.S.. There's been no U.S. confirmation of this story, but you can read about all of these developments at the DEBKAfile.

RLC

Stalking Horse

Back on April 3rd I opined that if Hillary doesn't win the nomination this time around I expect her to do everything she can, sub rosa, to help McCain win in November. It's in her interest, if she wants to be president in 2012, to see Obama lose this election, but she must appear to be supportive even as she undermines his candidacy by leaking unflattering information about him to the media or to McCain's people.

So, I was interested in this comment by Rick Lowry at National Review:

If Hillary can't win the nomination - and it's clearly very, very hard for her - she's basically a stalking horse for McCain. She's preparing the demographic ground for McCain, by getting white working-class Democrats used to (if you will) not voting for Obama. And she's softening Obama up for McCain, prodding at and exposing her fellow Democrats' weaknesses.

One consequence of staying in the race is that it makes it much harder for Obama to win in November. Lowry doesn't say that she's doing this intentionally, but why wouldn't she? If she stays in the fray there's a remote chance she could win the nomination, but even if she doesn't, by continuing to fight she increases the likelihood that Obama will lose in November which would open the door for her in 2012.

If you wish to understand the Clintons' political thinking, just ask yourself what course of action would be most likely to get her to the White House. It's also helpful to read Machiavelli. I'm sure she does:

UPDATE: Dan Abrams at MSNBC was saying last night that this same thesis is being bandied about by several congresspersons in D.C. I must say that I'm flattered that members of Congress are reading Viewpoint.

RLC

Road to the Holocaust

This is a clip from an early Nazi film seeking to justify forced sterilization on the basis of Darwin's theory of natural selection. Whatever the film says, though, don't fall for that anti-Darwinian humbug that there's any connection between Darwin's ideas and Nazi praxis. Gracious, no. That would be so uninformed of you:

HT: Evolution News and Views.

RLC

What a Country

No Left Turns asks a question that I've also wondered about:

Several blogs have linked to material about William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, noting that Dohrn and Ayers helped Obama start his political career in the 1990s.

The focus on Obama, and whether there is any significance to his connection (whatever it is) with Ayers, has obscured the real scandal here. Both Ayers and Dohrn are now faculty members in good standing at Universities in the Chicago area. Their views are virtually unchanged from those they held in their younger days. Moreover, their views are probably hard to distinguish from those held by a significant number of their colleagues. The scandal, in other words, is that no one has asked why that is the case, and how we might change it. Are our colleges and universities damaged beyond repair?

William Ayers teaches education courses to prospective teachers at University of Illinois at Chicago, a taxpayer funded school, by the way, and his wife teaches at Northwestern. Ayers was a self-confessed terrorist who bombed a number of buildings back in the sixties and tried to kill police. He would have gone to jail for attempted murder except for a technical mistake in the investigation which got him off. He has said recently that he wishes he had done more. His wife did go to jail for about a year for aiding and abetting the Weather Underground in a number of their crimes and according to Powerline has publicly and enthusiastically approved of the Charles Manson folks for their grisly murders of a pregnant movie actress and her companions. Today she teaches law at Northwestern.

One wonders whether the schools which employ Ayers and Dohrn would hire someone who bombed abortion clinics or the editorial offices of The New York Times. One wonders especially whether they would be permitted to teach education and law. I have a hard time picturing it.

Meanwhile, Guillermo Gonzalez, an astronomer who is by all accounts a fine man with a number of academic distinctions to his credit, was denied tenure by Iowa State University because he commited the grievous sin of thinking that the universe shows evidence of having been intentionally planned. So he's out of a job, and while he searches for a position through which he can make a positive contribution to society these two unrepentant psychopathic terrorists are being paid to teach our children to destroy their society, and the administrators and state legislators of Illinois are evidently fine with that.

What's more, this pair of violent felons is evidently chummy with the man who may well be the next president of the United States.

God help us.

Michelle Malkin has much more on Mr. and Mrs. Ayers and others who are connected to the man who promises us hope and change.

RLC

Solipsism

Abby passes along this cartoon which I thought I'd share for the benefit of those students who find the idea that "my" mind is all that exists a trifle amusing:

RLC

Three Cheers for Elitism

Senator Obama is being called an elitist by both Republicans and Democrats alike for his remarks concerning bitter Pennsylvanians who cling to guns, religion and xenophobia. I think this is a bit unfair, actually, because although it might be that he actually does think people who embrace religion, own firearms, and oppose illegal immigration are motivated by bitterness, one can not logically infer that from what he said. In other words, people who are bitter may do X,Y, and Z, but it doesn't follow that those who do X,Y, and Z are bitter.

Anyway, it's the assumption that elitism is somehow a bad thing that I'd like to consider in this post. Like prejudice and discrimination, whether elitism is an undesirable character trait depends a lot on the kind of elitism we're talking about. To explain what I mean I've dredged up a column I wrote for the local paper about ten years ago and which I've revised only slightly:

The current election campaign has spotlighted a rift between races in this country and sparked some agonizing over what should be done about it. Perhaps I'm naive, but I can't help wondering how much of the apparent gulf between Americans is a function of race and how much of it is actually a function of class. I'm willing to be proven wrong, but I suspect that for many people of all colors, the great social fault line in our society runs between classes; classes as defined not by one's income, but as defined by the moral principles which inform and govern an individual's life and conduct. And surely Americans of every hue populate both sides of this divide.

Unfortunately, use of the word class distresses some who complain that it is just an insidious code word for race, and that when people try to justify distinctions based on class they're really trying to rationalize old-fashioned racial bias. This criticism is valid, however, only in the unlikely event that all members of a given race hold identical moral convictions so that to mention their race is to identify their values. Failing that, the objection reduces to the rather disingenuous ploy of defining another's words to mean whatever one wants them to mean.

Other critics will point out that in our politically correct post-modern world "everyone knows" that no individual's values are any better than anyone else's and that to think otherwise is to be guilty of elitism; to which the appropriate response is: So what.

In The Moviegoer, novelist Walker Percy puts it somewhat differently, if no less bluntly, when he has a Louisiana matriarch named Aunt Edna address herself to this very issue. She says:

"I'll make a little confession. I am not ashamed to use the word class. I will also plead guilty to another charge. The charge is that people in my class think they're better than other people. You're damn right we're better. We're better because we do not shirk our obligations to ourselves or to others. We do not whine. We do not organize a group and blackmail the government. We do not prize mediocrity for mediocrity's sake....Ours is the only civilization in history which has enshrined mediocrity as its national ideal....They say out there that we think we're better. You're damn right we're better and don't think they don't know it."

This proud woman wasn't about to apologize for the obvious political incorrectness of her "elitist" sentiments. Neither should anyone else. Elitism based upon moral principle, so far from being some awful sin, is in fact a virtue, a salutary antidote to the infection of moral relativism currently metastasizing within our culture. This may scandalize those who feel that nobody should be so chauvinistic as to think his principles to be actually better than the next person's, but the irony needs to be noted that those who feel this way evidently believe their own moral egalitarianism to be preferable to my moral elitism.

Aside from those enumerated by Aunt Edna, though, what exactly are the virtues which distinguish her "better" class of people? Without attempting an exhaustive list, it's probably correct to say for starters that, no matter what their race, men and women of this class take a great deal of pride in their work, their property, and their character. They assume responsibility for their actions. They strive to be cordial, courteous, and considerate of others. They're dependable, trustworthy, and temperate, willing to defer short-term gratification for long-term benefit. They're frugal, faithful to their spouses, and committed to the well-being of their families. They're mindful of the fact that children do not raise themselves very well and that properly ushering a child into adulthood requires an enormous investment of time, energy, and self-sacrifice. They enjoy and appreciate excellence, especially in the arts and other forms of entertainment. They esteem education, especially for their children, and possess at least a modest appreciation for the life of the mind.

Why should anyone shrink from affirming the pre-eminence of these qualities and from regarding those who share them to be of superior moral timber to those who don't? And why should the social levelers among us be allowed to succeed in making people feel there is something wrong with choosing to avoid the society of those whose lives and habits are the very antithesis of these values?

It must be said again that this is not a matter of race or economics. People of all colors and incomes cherish these virtues and feel uncomfortable around those who don't. Indeed, it is perhaps true to say that many people who share them feel more comfortable in each other's company, regardless of their ethnicity, than they do in the company of members of their own race who don't share them.

Moreover, when people are made to feel guilty for believing their convictions to be more noble than their contraries, or when substantial numbers of people are persuaded that the precepts one lives by are merely arbitrary preferences, none of which is any better than any other, then, as with money, the worse will inevitably drive out the better. The lowest moral classes will eventually succeed in establishing the behavioral norms of the culture, and the principles, or lack of them, which govern their own lives and which are in large measure responsible for their being lower class in the first place, will eventually percolate upward, like some toxic gas, and permeate the rest of society.

The denouement will be a social unraveling, corruption and disintegration that will substantially diminish the quality of life of everyone.

Three cheers, therefore, for Aunt Edna.

RLC

Genealogy of the Holocaust

The Darwinists are in high dudgeon over the implication in the documentary Expelled that the Nazis were among the intellectual heirs of Charles Darwin.

Nevertheless, if people believe that all morality is subjective; that humans are simply animals with no soul; that there's no imago Dei; that we are locked in a struggle for survival one species against another, one race against another; that some races are more gifted by nature than others, and others more debased; and that killing and extinction are part of nature's grand scheme - then it's easy to see how those people might come to see a genocidal holocaust as consistent with the way the world is and not at all "wrong" in any moral sense.

Darwin believed all of these things and though he himself would have doubtless recoiled from any genocidal implications, some of those who were influenced by him were prepared to follow the logic all the way to its grisly end. Darwin's ideas, as distinct from his own character, were completely compatible with the thinking of the Nazis. Given the truth of Darwinian materialism might makes right and there is simply no inconsistency in promoting the "final solution."

On the other hand, it's hard to see how the holocaust could ever come about in a world in which people believe that there is an objective, transcendent right and wrong; that man is created in the image of God and that all men are equally loved by God; who believe that there is no innate competition between races or species but all were created to live in harmony with each other; that death is an evil intrusion into the created order rather than part of the normal order of things and that deliberately killing innocent women and children is morally abhorrent.

Had the Nazis and the German people fervently held those convictions the holocaust would never have happened, and had that set of convictions prevailed anywhere else that there have been similar genocides before and since the German atrocities, none of them would have ever occured either.

Genocide, at least in the West, has almost always been carried out by people who hold to the same worldview as Charles Darwin did. Maybe there's something wrong with the worldview.

RLC