Ideas Have Consequences

The Times Online has an excellent article by David Sewell on the moral implications of a Darwinian worldview. It's fascinating stuff, but I'm a little surprised that it passed editorial scrutiny. Perhaps the Brits are more open-minded about such things, but I can't imagine an article like this appearing in, say, The New York Times.

Sewell starts off by noting the eerie and strangely underreported fact that overt Darwinian tropes recur among serial killers. Eric Harris wore a t-shirt that extolled natural selection as he gunned down classmates at Columbine High School, and Pekka-Eric Auvinen, a Finn, murdered his teacher and a number of his fellow students on the basis of their lack of "evolutionary fitness."

Although Darwin himself would have been appalled by such horrors, they are the logical consequence of his ideas. Sewell writes:

One conclusion implicit in evolutionary theory is that human existence has no ultimate purpose or special significance. Any psychologically well-adjusted person would regard this as regrettable, if true. But some people get a thrill from peering into the void and acknowledging that life is utterly meaningless.

Darwin also taught that morality has no essential authority, but is something that itself evolved - a set of sentiments or intuitions that developed from adaptive responses to environmental pressures tens of thousands of years ago. This does not merely explain the origin of morals, it totally explains them away. Whether an individual opts to obey a particular ethical precept, or to regard it as a redundant evolutionary carry-over, thus becomes a matter of personal choice. Cheerleaders celebrating Darwin's 200th birthday in colleges across America last February sang "Randomness is good enough for me, If there's no design it means I'm free" - lines from a song by the band Scientific Gospel. Clearly they see evolution as something that emancipates them from the strict sexual morality insisted upon by their parents. But wackos such as Harris and Auvinen can just as readily interpret it as a licence to kill.

The American conservative controversialist Ann Coulter is one of Darwin's fiercest critics, lambasting him in her book Godless and via cable TV. Coulter claims she is not surprised that psychopaths gravitate towards Darwin's ideas. "Instead of enshrining moral values," she says, Darwin "enshrined biological instincts." Coulter believes Darwin's theory appeals to liberals because it "lets them off the hook morally. Do whatever you feel like doing - screw your secretary, kill Grandma, abort your defective child - Darwin says it will benefit humanity".

Today's evolutionary scientists go some way towards Coulter's view when they describe ethics as merely an illusion produced by genes. From a Darwinian perspective, there is nothing objectively wrong with shooting your classmates; it's just that most of us have an inherited tendency to kid ourselves that it's wrong - and that's something that helps our species in the longer run by keeping playground massacres to an acceptable minimum.

Not only does a Darwinian worldview lead to the conclusion that life is ultimately pointless and that morality is an illusion "fobbed off on us by our genes" as E.O. Wilson puts it, but Darwin himself believed that his ideas led to racial purification:

Darwin looked forward to a time when Europeans and Americans would exterminate those he termed "savages". Many of the anthropomorphous apes would also be wiped out, he predicted, and the break between man and beast would then occur "between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon; instead of as now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla". He took a sanguine view of genocide, believing it to be imminent and inevitable. "Looking to the world at no very distant date," he wrote to a friend in 1881, "what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world."

For many years after his death, Darwin's racial theories remained the consensus position of the international scientific community. In 1906, the director of the Bronx Zoo decided to give New Yorkers an object lesson in human evolution by putting a 23-year-old Congolese pygmy on public display in his monkey house. The pygmy, Ota Benga, shared his cage with an orang-utan. The spectacle drew enormous crowds. Before long, they were asking the questions the exhibitors hoped they would: was Ota Benga an ape or a man? Or, as the zoo-keeper himself speculated, was this perhaps a transitional form between the two, the elusive missing link?

When a group of African-American clergymen objected to a human being being put on show, they were told that Darwin's theories were now accepted scientific facts, that the "lower races" were psychologically closer to pigs and dogs than to human beings, and that a different value should be put on their lives. Truths that the founders of the United States had held to be self-evident - that all men are created equal and had certain inalienable rights - were being denied by the promoters of Darwinian science. By the end of the first world war, it was not only blacks who were deemed genetically inferior by many of America's top geneticists and biologists, but Italian, Greek and Jewish immigrants too.

Nowhere was the toxic doctrine of racial superiority more enthusiastically taken up than in the Third Reich. The Nazis believed that the Aryan race was already the most highly evolved, but could evolve further if defective genes could be eliminated. To purify the German gene pool, they decided to exterminate all the physically and mentally handicapped.

Darwin summed up his moral philosophy by saying that a man who believed neither in God nor an afterlife could "only follow those ideas and impulses that seem best to him". Darwinian ideas - eugenics and its corollary, eugenic euthanasia - were accepted by the mainstream of the German scientific and medical professions, but also by many of the educated elite in the United States in the first four decades of the twentieth century. It wasn't until the ghastly crimes of the Nazis came to light in the mid-1940s that eugenics acquired a bad odor among American progressives.

Ideas have consequences, and when we no longer hold fast to the idea that man is made in the image of God then no longer will we find anything about us that has any intrinsic worth. Man thus devalues himself, losing his dignity in the process and reducing himself to a simple brute, a mass of mere protoplasm. What almost inevitably follows are genocidal holocausts such as those of the 20th century in atheistic regimes in Germany, the USSR, China, Cambodia, Rwanda, and elsewhere. Darwin's theory was a powerful impetus to the spread of atheism and a powerful justification, or rationalization, for those seeking scientific warrant for the depersonalization of their victims. The 20th century was simply Columbine High School writ large.

RLC

The Real Victim at Fort Hood

David Brooks at The New York Times puts his finger on a quirk of American psychology:

When Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan [murdered and maimed dozens of helpless victims] in Fort Hood, Tex., last week, many Americans had an understandable and, in some ways, admirable reaction. They didn't want the horror to become a pretext for anti-Muslim bigotry.

So immediately the coverage took on a certain cast. The possibility of Islamic extremism was immediately played down. This was an isolated personal breakdown, not an ideological assault, many people emphasized.

Major Hasan was portrayed as a disturbed individual who was under a lot of stress. We learned about pre-traumatic stress syndrome, and secondary stress disorder, which one gets from hearing about other people's stress. We heard the theory (unlikely in retrospect) that Hasan was so traumatized by the thought of going into a combat zone that he decided to take a gun and create one of his own.

A shroud of political correctness settled over the conversation. Hasan was portrayed as a victim of society, a poor soul who was pushed over the edge by prejudice and unhappiness.

There was a national rush to therapy. Hasan was a loner who had trouble finding a wife and socializing with his neighbors.

This response was understandable. It's important to tamp down vengeful hatreds in moments of passion. But it was also patronizing. Public commentators assumed the air of kindergarten teachers who had to protect their children from thinking certain impermissible and intolerant thoughts. If public commentary wasn't carefully policed, the assumption seemed to be, then the great mass of unwashed yahoos in Middle America would go off on a racist rampage.

Worse, it absolved Hasan - before the real evidence was in - of his responsibility. He didn't have the choice to be lonely or unhappy. But he did have a choice over what story to build out of those circumstances. And evidence is now mounting to suggest he chose the extremist War on Islam narrative that so often leads to murderous results.

The conversation in the first few days after the massacre was well intentioned, but it suggested a willful flight from reality. It ignored the fact that the war narrative of the struggle against Islam is the central feature of American foreign policy. It ignored the fact that this narrative can be embraced by a self-radicalizing individual in the U.S. as much as by groups in Tehran, Gaza or Kandahar.

It denied, before the evidence was in, the possibility of evil. It sought to reduce a heinous act to social maladjustment. It wasn't the reaction of a morally or politically serious nation.

Indeed. One might have gotten the impression, listening to some of the commentary on this atrocity, that Nidal Hasan was an unfortunate victim of forces beyond his control. The excuses and rationalizations that were being offered for his heinous act almost made me think that the people I should be angry with in this incident were the cops that shot this poor, pathetic man.

Such are the times in which we live.

RLC

Back to Nature

George Will weighs in on the climate change debate and observes that it is passing strange that there is such terror about the threat to our environment posed by a warming earth when, in fact, the earth's mean temperature hasn't changed in over eleven years. Such details, however, are mere nuisances to climate change true believers who, when they rise in the morning and go to bed at night, reverently recite their mantra: "Al Gore said it, I believe it, that settles it."

Will, however, holds to the peculiar view that our policy should be based on data and there simply is no data to support the eco-alarmists. To get a sense of the sheer weirdness of the Democrats' determination to save us from an environmental catastrophe for which there is scarcely any unambiguous evidence think about what Will says here:

[Unfortunately], the crusade against warming will brook no interference from information. With the Waxman-Markey bill, the House of Representatives has endorsed reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to 83 per-cent below 2005 levels by 2050. This is surely the most preposterous legislation ever hatched in the House. Using Energy Department historical statistics, Kenneth P. Green and Steven F. Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute have calculated this:

Waxman-Markey's goal is just slightly more than 1 billion tons of greenhouse-gas emissions in 2050. The last time this nation had that small an amount was 1910, when there were only 92 million Americans, 328 million fewer than the 420 million projected for 2050. To meet the 83 percent reduction target in a nation of 420 million, per capita carbon-dioxide emissions would have to be no more than 2.4 tons per person, which is one quarter the per capita emissions of 1910, a level probably last seen when the population was 45 million-in 1875.

If you're young it might be a good idea to buy stock in bicycle manufacturers. It's hard to imagine how we could meet such draconian emission standards and still maintain anything approximating a modern life-style. This is not to say that we couldn't use energy more efficiently, but to reduce our carbon footprint to the level Waxman-Markey requires would require us to abandon most of modern technology and become a third-world nation.

Who votes for these people?

RLC

How to Win an Argument

I wonder if this guy is any relation to Louis "Skip" Gates. He certainly needs a lesson in how to dialogue with people with whom he disagrees, and he also needs a lesson on how to treat women:

Police busted Lionel McIntyre, 59, for assault yesterday after his bruised victim, Camille Davis, filed charges. McIntyre and Davis, who works as a production manager in the school's theater department, are both regulars at Toast, a popular university bar on Broadway and 125th Street, sources said.

The professor, who is black, had been engaged in a fiery discussion about "white privilege" with Davis, who is white, and another male regular, who is also white, Friday night at 10:30 when fists started flying, patrons said.

McIntyre, who is known as "Mac" at the bar, shoved Davis, and when the other patron and a bar employee tried to break it up, the prof slugged Davis in the face, witnesses said. "The punch was so loud, the kitchen workers in the back heard it over all the noise," bar back Richie Velez, 28, told The Post. "I was on my way over when he punched Camille and she fell on top of me."

The other patron involved in the dispute said McIntyre then took a swing at him after he yelled, "You don't hit a woman!"

"He knocked the glasses right off my face," said the man, who would only give his first name as "Shannon." "The punch came out of nowhere. Mac was talking to us about white privilege and what I was doing about it -- apparently I wasn't doing enough."

I guess Mr. McIntyre had exhausted all of his best arguments and felt the need to press his case in a more robust and convincing fashion. I wonder if he'll keep his job. I'm fairly sure that were the races of the people involved in this ugly episode reversed he would not, but I could be wrong. If he does avoid being dismissed, though, perhaps he can claim to have been the beneficiary of black privilege.

Anyway, do you think the media will ask President Obama to comment on this altercation? If they do, do you think he'll dare venture his opinion after the mess he made of the Skip Gates affair? Do you think it's time for another beer summit at the White House?

RLC

PC Blindness

Ralph Peters, like a lot of us, wonders why the Muslim officer, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 13 soldiers at Fort Hood and wounded dozens more, was promoted to major, why his radicalism wasn't uncovered before he committed the crimes, and why this administration is so afraid to use the term "Islamic terrorism."

Government authorities have punctiliously avoided mention of the killer's religion and his associations with radical Islamists in the days following the massacre at Fort Hood. President Obama admonishes us not jump to conclusions, but this sounds a little strange coming from the man who had no trouble jumping to the conclusion that Professor "Skip" Gates was the victim of "stupid" racist cops in Cambridge Massachussetts last summer.

Imagine how quick everyone would be to "jump to conclusions" had a Christian walked into an abortion clinic shooting everyone in the place while shouting "Jesus is Lord." Would President Obama be urging us to withhold judgment about the killer's motivations until "all the facts were in"? If a fundamentalist pastor walked into a gay bar and opened fire would the media recoil from calling the man a domestic terrorist? Would the President say that the killer might have "just snapped," and that we shouldn't assume that the man's religion played a role? I very much doubt it.

There would, in fact, be no end of pontificating on the alleged deep current of misogyny, hatred and bigotry running through American Christianity, but Hasan, we must understand, was a Muslim so we must tread lightly so as not to smear the millions of good Muslims in this country. We must be careful not to assume that he was in fact acting on the same motives that inspire his co-religionists around the world to kill and maim whomever and whenever they can.

There was no reticence whatsoever among our political leaders last summer to portray angry retirees at town hall meetings as terrorists, but we dare not suggest that a Muslim mass murderer is a terrorist until every i is dotted and t crossed even if the man has just perpetrated a classic act of Islamic terrorism.

Of course we should not paint all Muslims as murderers, but we also need to realize that there are a billion Muslims around the world. If only 1% are radical extremists - a conservative figure, perhaps - that's 10 million people out there who are willing to die for the opportunity to kill you and your children. That's a startling number. It's even more startling to realize that there are millions more who, though not killers themselves, would delight to see you and your children blown to bits.

Anyway, Peters concludes that Hasan's victims were in fact victims not only of this looney Islamist, but also of an out-of-control political correctness that infects our political and military leadership as well as our media. Here's part of his column:

It gets worse: On Sunday evening, a ranking officer in Hasan's medical chain of command raced to cover her butt. Asked why the killer was promoted to major after receiving career-killer performance reviews at Walter Reed, the officer claimed that Hasan faced the same promotion board requirements as everyone else.

Liar, liar, uniform on fire: A dirty big secret in our Army has been that officers' promotion boards have quotas for minorities. We don't call them quotas, of course. But if a board doesn't hit the floor numbers, its results are held up until the list has been corrected. It's almost impossible for the Army's politically correct promotion system to pass over a Muslim physician.

Sen. Joe Lieberman, one of the few lawmakers willing to whisper the word "terrorism," needs to call the officers who sat on Hasan's promotion board before the Senate, put them under oath, then ask if Hasan made major because of minority-quota requirements.

This corrupt (and now deadly) affirmative-action system does a severe disservice to the bulk of minority officers, who make the grade on quality and professionalism. It leaves other officers wondering if the new guy who just showed up in the unit is a "real" officer or an affirmative-action baby.

Ditto for our government's unwillingness to take on Muslim extremists on US soil. Blathering about freedom of religion, we foster hate speech. By protecting the fanatics, we betray the peaceful majority of our Muslim citizens, leaving them afraid to speak out, since the feds shield the fanatics in charge of their mosques and communities.

Hasan gave ample evidence that he was unstable and sympathetic to jihad. If an officer of his rank had said the things about blacks or gays that Hasan said about Americans in general and military personnel in particular - He told a gathering of doctors (!), for instance, that infidels (non-Muslims) should all be beheaded and have hot oil poured down their throats - he would have rightly been busted in rank and maybe even drummed out of the service. But in our politically correct age we must pretend that certain people are not what they obviously are. See no evil, hear no evil is the word of the day when a Muslim says what anyone else would be cleaning latrines for saying. Welcome to the Brave New World of Orwellian progressivism.

RLC

Religion Had Nothing to Do with It

IowaHawk puts together a tongue-in-cheek montage spoofing liberal media analysis of the Fort Hood murders. The Left has been blaming everything for this act of terrorism except the most obvious thing - Nidal Hasan's belief that it was his religious duty to kill infidel soldiers.

American liberals seem to possess the peculiar characteristic of being able to look at the sky at noon on a clear day without seeing the sun.

RLC

Slings and Arrows

Uh, oh. Now he's done it. The President gave an otherwise unremarkable speech yesterday at Fort Hood to memorialize the victims of the latest act of Islamic terrorism on our soil, but his speech contained some unfortunate theological allusions which, we've come to learn, is a no-no for American presidents. Mr. Obama actually averred that no just and loving God would condone what Nidal Hasan did in the name of Allah and that the Muslim murderer of thirteen servicemen and women would pay a terrible price for his crime in the afterlife.

What was Mr. Obama thinking? You can bet that he's going to hear about that from the secular left. Editorials will be popping up like overnight mushrooms on op-ed pages across this great secularized continent chastising the President for this unconscionable breach of the wall of separation between church and state. Commentators on the major networks, as well as CNN and MSNBC, will soon be upbraiding him for an inappropriate, unwarranted, and flagrantly unconstitutional injection of religion into our public discourse. As President, Mr. Obama should not be using his office to give support to sectarian dogmas, he'll be admonished, especially those no graduate of Harvard Law School could possibly sincerely believe.

Yes sir, he is about to feel the heat. I know this because that's exactly what happened to President Bush every time he made even the most innocuous religious reference. Once he was asked, in what seemed like a mean-spirited attempt to make him look simple-minded, who his favorite philosopher was. One could almost hear the chortles wafting from the media elites who assumed that Bush couldn't even spell "philosopher" let alone name one, but when he answered "Jesus Christ, because he changed my life," it was as if someone had thrown a snake into the primate cage at the zoo. It drove our secular sachems into a frenzy to hear someone who had risen to such prominence as had Mr. Bush actually affirm something so déclassé.

So, now it's Mr. Obama's turn to play General Custer to our secular Indians. I haven't seen any arrows launched at him just yet, but I bet they'll start flying by tomorrow. It's going to look like that scene in the movie 300 where the Persians shot so many darts at the Spartans that they darkened the sky. Mr. Obama is really in for it now.

Why do you look so skeptical? They did it to Bush, didn't they?

RLC

A Better Way

Dr. Scott W. Atlas is a professor and chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at the university. He's an expert on health care and is very cool to the various health care reform proposals being bandied about by congressional Democrats. To read much of the reportage on the matter one might think health care in America ranks near the bottom of the Western world. In an op-ed piece in the Washington Times, however, Dr. Atlas points out that this simply isn't true:

Inexplicably, the facts published in the world's top medical journals about our system continue to be ignored:

• Americans have the best survival rates from cancer and most serious diseases, and the most rapid decline in breast and prostate cancer deaths despite being hindered with severe obesity and the largest burden of smokers over 50 of any Western nation.
• Americans have the most successful, most available treatment for chronic diseases like high blood pressure and high cholesterol.
• Americans have the shortest wait times for life-changing surgeries, like cataract and hip replacements, that may not increase survival but greatly impact quality of life.
• Americans have the best access to the newest, most effective drugs.
• Americans have the quickest access to the safest, most advanced medical technologies.
• Americans have the easiest access to specialty doctors, doctors of their choice, doctors who lead the world in health care innovation, regardless of what metrics are assessed.

Instead of solely considering costs, shouldn't we ask if Americans are willing to die sooner from cancer, to give up access to specialists, to be refused safer, more accurate diagnostic imaging, to lose the most accessible screening programs, and to lose their autonomy in pursuing treatments for their families? Shouldn't we ask if Americans want to replace the most advanced and successful medical care in history with the restricted care and lower cost social programs of Europe, and insure the less than 5 percent of people who don't buy insurance but receive care anyway?

What needs reformed is certainly not the quality of care. The problem is keeping the quality high while making it cheaper, and nothing the Democrats are proposing will accomplish that:

The Max Baucus plan is paid by massive taxes on existing insurance plans that exceed our government's arbitrary threshold and by significant cuts to Medicare. Its Federal Exchange overtly skews the playing field by subsidizing - directly or indirectly - insurance plans that meet government definitions, and by penalizing existing plans that don't, plans already held by millions of Americans. The House proposals force a government-run "public option" - an option that shifts huge numbers of privately insured Americans to become the burden of an already unsustainable, taxpayer-funded entitlement program that ultimately eliminates private insurance choices.

A public option would interpose bureaucrats between doctors and patients, restricting access to new drugs, to innovative new cures, and to choice of doctors. It is already proven a failure the world over, even by our own Medicaid program, where government-imposed, below-cost payments have created patients who cannot even find doctors to care for them. While Congress and the administration claim otherwise, costs to the taxpayer increase, and choice and access disappear with a public option.

Meanwhile, serious alternative solutions that reduce costs but do not harm the excellence already in our health system are totally ignored, including:

• Allowing people to shop for insurance across state lines at competitive prices.
• Stripping back on costly coverage mandates that most Americans may not value, like acupuncture, massage therapy, in vitro fertilization, and wigs.
• Expanding the availability of high-deductible plans for catastrophic coverage with health savings accounts, making insurance a good value for the millions of Americans who can afford insurance but (perhaps wisely) don't buy it.
• Bold tax reforms like refundable tax credits, cash even for those who pay no income tax, or vouchers instead of tax deductions, to foster personal ownership and control of insurance, creating millions of value-seeking shoppers.
• Forcing doctors and hospitals to post prices, qualifications and outcomes - information that is essential to value-based purchasing and fundamental for stimulating competition.

Atlas could also point out the exorbitant cost of medical malpractice insurance and the expense of a medical school education. Both of these are costs that get passed on to the consumer, but the Democrats' are not inclined to do anything about either. Instead Democrats, if their plan is eventually passed, will make criminals out of those who don't want insurance and choose not to buy it. Under their plan, people who, for whatever reason, don't think they need health coverage will nevertheless be forced to buy it or pay a penalty. If they don't pay the penalty they will go to jail. This is an unprecedented abridgement of individual freedom in this country, but taking a way freedom is simply what progressives do whenever they have the power to do it.

RLC

Lots of <i>Assuming</i> Going On

There's an interesting article on human evolution at MSNBC. The piece starts out by claiming that Neanderthals were a separate species from modern Homo sapiens, but everything in the article suggests that Neanderthals and H. sapiens interbred and produced feertile offspring. Since the ability to produce fertile offspring is the distinguishing characteristic of a species the finding that Neanderthals and H. sapiens were interfertile would mean that they're really members of the same species.

Indeed, none of the alleged predecessors of modern humans are actually known to have been unable to breed successfully with H. sapiens. It's simply assumed that sexual unions between them would have been sterile because it's assumed that they were different species. And it's assumed that they were different species because it's assumed that H. sapiens is the culmination of a long evolutionary history with lots of ancestral species leading up to it. But, for all we really know, creatures like H. habilis and H. erectus could have been conspecific with H. sapiens. We simply don't know whether they were capable of producing fertile offspring or not.

Of course, if it were ever found that these members of genus Homo were all the same species it would throw modern human evolution models into a state of complete chaos, so I suppose we have to assume that they really were all distinct species.

RLC

The Day the Music Died

Mark Butterworth observes that there has never been so much talent or ambition in the music world but that that world is on life support. Young and/or unknown artists, particularly writers and composers, simply lack the resources to do quality work. Here's why:

Recorded music costs a lot of money, but recorded music isn't making any money.

Here are a few facts: ... U.S. album sales in 2008: More than 115,000 albums were released, but only 110 sold more than 250,000 copies, a mere 1,500 topped 10,000 sales, and fewer than 6,000 cracked the 1,000 barrier -- further evidence that sales of recorded music are not the way of the future for artists.

Butterworth laments that the production costs of recorded music are so high as to exclude all but the already highly successful artists and even they make little money on their albums. The value of recording them lies in the reknown they bring to the artist who can parlay that fame into sold-out concerts and other venues:

Yes, I know people have home studios and are cranking out tunes by the millions and putting them on their Facebook or MySpace pages, but nearly 100% of them are crap.

Crap, you say? Why? Talent often requires a good deal of instruction, competition, and criticism to develop to the point where it becomes good enough to interest others. Hobbyists don't get that. Hollywood does a good deal of development, and yet 95% of their movies are nearly unwatchable now, and never has so much money been spent on film except for one thing -- the writing. Old Hollywood often spent 25% of a film budget on writing alone. Even the best-paid writers now get nothing like that much.

One hundred thousand or so books a year are published in the USA now, yet millions more are written...and of those 100K, few make money.

So, here are some interesting questions: Assuming he's right about all this, what is the future of music in our culture? Will we be seeing a decline in the quality of our popular music (many would argue that we already have)? Is the decline inevitable? What would it take to reverse it and is it worth reversing? Is a government bailout of the music industry on the horizon?

RLC

Compassion Genes

As part of the discussion of free will and determinism in my philosophy classes we talked about evolutionary psychology and the idea of the "selfish gene." One of the foremost popularizers of this view is Robert Wright who in the lecture below claims that human compassion and the Golden Rule are genetically based and hard wired into our biological nature by evolution.

This view is fraught with problems. For example, Wright seems to argue that because we have the genes for compassion that therefore compassion is good, but then cruelty and selfishness must also be genetic. So, why are they not good? What standard does Wright use to decide that compassion is good and cruelty is not? Unfortunately, he has none other than that he prefers one and not the other. It's a purely arbitrary judgment on his part. He likes what compassion does and dislikes what cruelty does, and so he declares compassion good, and counts on an audience steeped in the subliminal assumptions of a Judeo-Christian heritage to agree with him. He could have made the same argument, though, substituting cruelty, and it would be just as valid. If our genes program us to act cruelly, which they surely must, then cruelty is good.

The first nine minutes or so of the video are the most interesting:

How do we know that we have a "compassion gene" anyway? Such a gene has never been found and its existence is purely speculative, but it leads us to one of the interesting aspects of Wright's hypothesis. The theory that there is a gene for compassion may be testable. If Wright's correct then as we elucidate more and more of the genome we should be able to find genes that program us for compassionate behavior. If we don't the idea of a genetic basis for morality becomes much less likely to be true, and we'll have to look elsewhere for a basis for human moral sentiments.

RLC

Wide of the Mark

I don't like the title on this graph, but the data it reflects are too important to ignore just because the heading is more tendentious than I'd like:

The red line is the actual unemployment rate. The other lines represent what we were promised by the Obama administration. Either these people were lying to us about the effects their massive stimulus package would have or they're just incompetent. I prefer to believe the latter explanation. It's more charitable but no more comforting.

RLC

Leaving the Left

A feminist leftist named Meryl Yourish explains why she has become a feminist conservative. In a nutshell, she realized that the Left is hostile to most of the things she believes in.

Today, I will be voting in the blowout victory of Republican candidate for governor Bob McDonnell, and it's highly likely that I will be voting for pretty much the entire Republican ticket.

Only nine years ago, I voted for Al Gore and the straight Democratic ticket in New Jersey-line A all the way, as the slogan went. (Funny how even though the position of Line A was a coin flip, the Dems had Line A almost every single year I voted in NJ.)

The question is, who changed: Me, or them?

Well, I've changed. I have become more centrist, and less willing to part with my hard-earned dollars because a politician says he can spend my money better than I. I'm definitely tired of state-run charity programs for the perpetually unemployed. Or the state wanting to run my healthcare. (Or, for that matter, auto companies and banks.)

But there were two major turning points in my march towards the center. The first came on September 11, 2001. The second came in the bloody Israeli spring of 2002. That was when I realized that the left-leaning crowd that I ran with didn't think that Israel had the right to use military means against the Palestinians to stop the terrorists. That was when I realized that the left-leaning crowd that I ran with were justifying Palestinian suicide attacks against Israelis by using the excuse that the Palestinians were oppressed. That was when I realized that the left-leaning crowd I ran with was full of anti-Semites who call themselves anti-Zionists.

You can find the rest of her essay at the link. There really are two kinds of people. There are those who value individual liberty and will fight to keep it, and there are those who hold their liberty cheap and are eager to surrender it to a government whose design is to gain as much control over our lives as it can. Ms Yourish, evidently, belongs to the first group. Most of those in power in Washington today hope you belong to the second.

RLC

Of Course Converts Should Be Killed

Many in America seem to think that Islam is just one religious option among many and that we need to respect and even honor both the religion and those who embrace it. What these same Americans are sometimes unaware of is the systemic violence which saturates Islam and Islamic culture.

Those who live in Muslim societies but who are not Muslims are considered second class citizens, dhimmis, and are often persecuted and expected to pay tribute to their Muslim masters. If they don't truckle to their overlords they're often killed.

If one is gay in Islamic culture one is executed. If a girl gets romantically involved with a man of whom the father doesn't approve she is often killed.

Those who criticize or "blaspheme" the Prophet or the faith are subject to death, and those who wish to leave the faith are also subject to death. People who convert to Christianity often live in fear of their lives.

Byron forwards this article by former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum which offers a glimmer of hope that some of this may be changing and that Muslims may be beginning to realize that we're no longer living in the 7th century. Here's the lede:

Three Muslim students approached me after I had finished a speech at Harvard University. I was there to talk about the threat of radical Islam across the globe, as part of the Ethics and Public Policy Center's Program to Protect America's Freedom.

The students, one man and two women, wore Western-style clothes and spoke English with little or no accent. They disputed my description of Islam as it's practiced in the Middle East, maintaining that al-Qaeda's version of Islam in no way reflects the Islam that is practiced around the world.

So I asked them a question: Should apostates - Muslims who convert to another religion - be subject to execution?

One of the women quickly said no. She insisted that she was free to leave Islam if she wanted to, and that she knew other people who had done so without a problem - in the United States.

I said I wasn't talking about her and others' freedom of religion in this country. What if they lived in a Muslim-majority country?

Silence. Eventually, the young man blurted out, "That's different."

Why? I asked. I recall him saying, "Because in Muslim countries, Islam and the government are one, and converting from Islam is the equivalent of treason against the government, punishable by death." The two women agreed.

The glimmer of hope, obviously, comes later in the article.

It's hard for many Americans to imagine that people still think this way, but they do. To read something like this gives a deeper understanding and appreciation, perhaps, of what our Founding Fathers were trying to avoid as they crafted the Constitution and the doctrine of non-interference by the government in matters of personal religion. It also gives a deeper appreciation of the words of John 8:32.

RLC

Re: Inner Life

Many thanks to Beth for sending us a link to a site which features a frame by frame explanation of what's going on in the video titled Inner Life of a Cell. If you go to the link scroll down about a page or so to find the explanations.

RLC

Ending the Cycle of Poverty

Andrew submits a very thoughtful and perhaps provocative response to a post that appeared on Viewpoint last August titled Why No Supermarkets?. I thought it might be worthwhile to put his reply on the Home page rather than the Feedback page and invite your comments. Here are his thoughts:

Your [Viewpoint's] assessment that the lack of responsible fathers in the inner-city certainly hits on an element of the problem with inner-city populations, but I think that the largest part of the problem goes a little further. This is a tough topic for me because it raises feelings and thoughts that are hard to temper. I should point out that my observations may come off as leaning toward racist; however, I would like to state outright that for any observation I make about the inner-city population, it will almost wholly apply to certain population groups that are Caucasian. My gripe is not against any particular ethnicity, but about the sub-culture that propagates the cycle I am about to describe. Reader be warned, this could get hairy.

We can thank Lyndon Johnson for our society's current state of affairs with the inner-city population. His social programs and desire for a Great Society amounted to a Great Dependence on government for Americans everywhere. Following the lead of his predecessor, FDR, Johnson set forth and accomplished the goal of setting a precedent for the government to help "people in need." The only problem is, the system creates entire generations of people in need from their parents who were themselves people in need.

My wife is a counselor for a large organization that provides counseling for children in inner-city schools. I want to point two things out. The organization only operates in inner-city schools because that is where the kids who have government assistance go to school. Second, as a result of the former, her company does not provide services in non-inner-city schools; not because those children don't have needs but because it is not profitable to operate in a school where each individual insurance company has to approve therapy and certify the counselor. Translation, money for the state is easy to get.

Here is the great trap. No one wants to take from children. I completely understand. Children are the true victims here. But as soon as they cease to be children, they become propagators of the problem. If you get nothing else, walk away with this:

The cycle of systemic dependence hinges on the benefits paid for the continual irresponsible conception of children.

The children that my wife counsels have "diagnosed" disorders. These disorders range from ADHD to aggressive tendencies toward authority. Problem is, I would speculate that most of them are not the product of genetics or genuine medical conditions, but instead the product of being raised in an environment where the child is not nurtured and/or properly cared for.

It basically works like this. A non-working mother with a diagnosed child can get Supplemental Security Income in the amount of about $650.00 for the first child. Now, no one is going to get rich off of $650.00 per month, but a single mother who receives SSI is immediately eligible for Section 8 housing and an entire swath of other government programs from welfare and food stamps to cash assistance.

So the cycle operates like this. Woman has child (or children) before she even finishes high school. With no system of family support she cannot go to work so she goes on welfare and government assistance. Not knowing how to raise children, she treats them like [crap] because it is the only thing she has ever known. Naturally, the children are misbehaved, subsequently diagnosed [with a disorder], and she receives more money from the government. Her children follow her pattern and the cycle continues.

Now, you might be tempted to brush this off as an overly racist, broad stroke stereotype of the inner city. I will concede that, clearly, not all people in the inner city are like this, but I believe that the problem has reached critical mass and is now like a reaction that cannot be controlled... at least not in our current state of affairs. Let me throw out some real-life scenarios.

My wife has a client who has two brothers (all three receive services). The three of them have sixteen cousins from one daddy spread over seven mommies. The government is tossing money at these parents for having kids.

Children in the inner city are starving. My wife's greatest tool in positive reinforcement therapy is KFC. They eat like it's their last meal.

Women who walk their children to school typically drop them off wearing pajamas ... and pick them up six hours later wearing the same slippers and pajamas. Maybe they just work third shift, right?

The mommies who do actually get dressed look like someone you would expect to take 'cash for services'. Hey, let's not knock the hip-hop look... but let's do point out that they dress in designer clothes while their children wear what amounts to barely more than unwashed rags.

On the day before mandatory PA Act 80 half school days, every child has a big, round, bright orange sticker placed on his or her back alerting parents to the fact that the next day is a half day. When the school dismisses early there are anywhere from 50 to 100 children sitting in the hallway outside of the office. Most of them sit there until 3:00 pm.

Children get dropped off from cars with thumping bass and shiny wheels. They come to school hungry, unbathed, and with tattered clothing, [but] there's a playstation or xbox in almost every home.

Drive through any section 8 housing area and count the number of satellite dishes hanging off the side of the building.

If a woman plays her cards right and has children she can receive benefits well into her 50's if her last child is born when she is in her late 30's.

The bottom line is this. The inner city isn't producing fathers capable of raising children. Further, the inner city is systematically producing generation after generation of dependence on government programs.

I have a solution that guarantees that I'll never be elected to office. Here it goes:

For every man/woman [below the poverty line? RLC] that has a child, the government offers a $10,000.00 tax-free check (for each parent) to undergo reversible sterilization (tube-tie and snip-snip). Parents who accept government assistance will be required to be self-sufficient within 10 years. If they are not, their children are taken away. Men who father children but do not pay adequate child support are imprisoned in labor camps that produce certain resources needed for infrastructure (asphalt, etc). These aren't slave labor camps. They work 40 hours per week and receive compensation which is first dispersed to their children, then given to them. They stay in prison until their child turns 18. The 10 year period of government assistance will be accompanied by generous assistance for education or vocational training. The government will require insurance companies to pay for the reversal procedure for a person who becomes self-sufficient and wishes to have more children.

The idea here is to get the cycle below critical mass by causing a decline in the population that is misusing government funds. Only then can social programs function as they were intended. As it stands right now, a man and a woman can multiply themselves by factors of 10 or more causing the cycle of dependence to grow geometrically. By reversibly sterilizing willing participants and imprisoning men who recklessly procreate we can start to send this sub-culture into population decline.

My plan would take decades, but I think it would save money right off the bat. What do you think?

AD

Bad Omen

You know the Democrats are in trouble when self-described liberal journalists are voting Republican. That's what Jonathan Berr did Tuesday and he explains the desperate state of affairs that has brought him to this traumatic pass here. In short, Berr, who knocked on doors for Obama in 2008, is just fed up with high taxes, corruption, inefficient big government, and nasty campaigning, but if that's so, one wonders, why is he a Democrat? Anyway, if liberals are so disaffected that they're voting Republican in deep blue states like New Jersey, the mid-term elections a year from now will be to Democrats something like what the Highway of Death was to the Iraqi army in 1991.

Here's Berr:

The last thing this liberal member of the media elite -- as perceived by many of our readers -- ever expected to do was vote for a Republican like Chris Christie for governor and reject incumbent Jon Corzine. But in my home state of New Jersey, the Democrats are more often part of the problem rather than the solution. My disgust with the party of my registration is a long time coming.

Why should Republicans be the only ones to dislike high taxes, corruption and fiscal mismanagement? Taxes in New Jersey are unbelievable: My monthly tax bill is equivalent to half my mortgage payment. New Jersey's state/local tax burden of 11.8% of income is the highest in the country, well above the national average of 9.7%, according to the Tax Foundation, which says the state's business-tax climate ranks 50th, that is, dead last in the nation. The Star Ledger of Newark reports that the average property tax bill is now $7,045, which eats up about 10 percent of the annual income in the average New Jersey household. The state budget is projected to be $8 billion short for the next fiscal year.

Corruption is horrendous. Dozens of people were recently arrested in one of the biggest scandals in years. In July, former State Sen. Wayne Bryant, once one of the most powerful people in Trenton, was sentenced to four years in federal prison for trading his clout as budget chairman for a job at a state medical school that required little work to boost his taxpayer-funded pension.

Read the rest at the link. It's no wonder Christie won big.

RLC

New Edition of <u>Origin</u>

Ray Comfort is a writer who likes to engage atheists in debate. He has recently published an edition of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species that has thrown his opponents into a tizzy. They're not upset so much with the text of the book that he has had reprinted because that is left as Darwin wrote it, except for the omission of several chapters. Instead they're mostly up in arms over his introduction in which he quotes some of Darwin's beliefs about race and women.

Dan Gilgoff blogs at U.S. News & World Report and he's carrying a back and forth between Comfort and National Council on Science Education executive director Eugenie Scott, a stout Darwinian and atheist. Comfort's initial salvo is pretty interesting. Here he is on his provocative introduction to Darwin's famous work:

Why are many atheists so angry? Why are they talking about book burnings, threatening to resist the giveaway and rip out the Introduction, etc.? Why was richarddawkins.net encouraging people to collect copies and rip out the Introduction? Professor Dawkins himself said that even though "a lot of people seem to be very worried about this," he wasn't at all worried. Why did he then tell Toronto university students to tear out the Introduction? There have been more than 140 different editions of On the Origin of Species, many with special Introductions, so what's the big deal with this one? If I am (as Professor Dawkins says) "an ignorant fool," why are so many feeling threatened by what I've written? Surely, the Introduction will be ignorance and foolishness, and simply confirm the students' presuppositions that intelligent design isn't worthy of even a first look.

There's a reason that they are deeply concerned.

The Introduction quotes Charles Darwin saying that blacks are closer to gorillas than whites and that natural selection has left men more intelligent than women. It also has quotes from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf showing Hitler's undeniable links to evolution. Of course, Hitler also used Christianity to further his political agenda, but my point is that Nazi Germany was the natural outcome of what Darwin called "one general law." Darwin said the law of natural selection is "Let the strongest live and the weakest die" (Chapter Seven, "Instinct"). Adolf Hitler put the theory of Darwinism into practice.

The Introduction also defines an atheist as someone who believes that nothing created everything-which is a scientific impossibility. Professor Dawkins believes that nothing created everything, and his belief is a big intellectual embarrassment to his followers.

For her part Scott chastises Comfort for the aforementioned omission of several chapters and for misrepresenting evolution by overplaying the paucity of fossilized transitional forms in his Introduction. I think Scott's being a little misleading here, but read her for yourself, and let's wait for Comfort's reply to see how he answers her.

RLC

Inner Life

The visual titled Cell Size and Scale moved Dave Kurz to write to remind us of another fascinating video that we've featured in the past but which is worth running again. It's titled The Inner Life of the Cell (produced by Harvard University), and it's a computer sim of just a few of the processes that occur 24/7 in each of the trillions of cells in our bodies.

It's simply breathtaking to see on this incredibly tiny scale such exquisite complexity and organization. Notice especially the marvelous protein transport mechanism that looks and works like a stick-figure Atlas carrying the world on his shoulders.

Now that you've watched this you might need to be deprogrammed. After all, some find the temptation to think that this was all intentionally designed by an intelligent agent to be irresistable. So, to avoid falling prey to superstitious nonsense, close your eyes real tight and repeat ten times: "This all came about by chance. This all came about by chance...."

RLC

Religious Defamation

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance and nowhere is that more true than at the United Nations. Secretary Hillary Clinton deserves praise for giving what some described as a tough statement opposing a move in the U.N. to enact an anti-defamation resolution that would be binding on all member nations. This may sound like a good thing on the face of it, but in fact such policies would restrict freedom of expression and freedom of religion. The following is from a Christianity Today report:

The United Nations General Assembly is expected to vote soon on a pending anti-defamation resolution sponsored by the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

"Some claim that the best way to protect the freedom of religion is to implement so-called anti-defamation policies that would restrict freedom of expression and the freedom of religion," Clinton said at a press conference on Monday. "I strongly disagree."

"The protection of speech about religion is particularly important since persons of different faiths will inevitably hold divergent views on religious questions," Clinton said. "These differences should be met with tolerance, not with the suppression of discourse."

Experts consider the UN anti-defamation effort mostly a reaction to the 2005 publication of cartoons in a Danish newspaper that depicted the prophet Muhammad. Carl Moeller, president of Open Doors USA, is lobbying against the resolution this week because he fears people could be criminalized for converting from Islam or speaking against Islamic teachings.

Nina Shea, director of the Center for Religious Freedom of the Hudson Institute, expressed concern over another Human Rights Council resolution on freedom of opinion and expression passed in early October: "[The council] expresses its concern that incidents of racial and religious intolerance, discrimination and related violence, as well as of negative racial and religious stereotyping continue to rise around the world ... and urges States to take effective measures, consistent with their obligations under international human rights law, to address and combat such incidents."

The resolution, proposed by the United States and Egypt, does not include the term "defamation of religion," but Shea worries that such language could criminalize preaching that another religion is false.

"They're introducing language about religious hatred or negative religious stereotyping that is quite new and immediately seized upon by some of the restrictive governments in the world," Shea said.

There's more at the link. We in the U.S. often take our freedoms for granted, but we need to realize that there are those both here and abroad who find the freedoms we treasure to be a decadent blight on society. We need to realize that the freedoms to discuss ideas and to practice whatever religion we choose are fragile and despised and could be easily lost should we cease to be vigilant.

If it ever came to pass that we allow ourselves to become apathetic about the what's going on in the world around us then we would be proven unworthy of those freedoms. Thomas Jefferson once observed that a nation that expects to remain ignorant and free expects what never was and never will be. He was right, and that's why we must never think that politics and world affairs are for other people to worry about.

RLC