The Greater Evil

In Sudan a woman suspected of prostitution is treated much differently than she would be in a civilized society not run by brutes. The punishment the woman in this video is subjected to is horrible enough, but to laugh at her agony, as one of her tormenters does, is simple savagery. Which is worse, we might ask, to commit prostitution or to sadistically whip a woman fifty three times for the offense? Which is more evil, prostitution or a law that demands such barbaric sentences?

Be advised that this is not easy to watch:

CNN has the details.

It tells us something about the ideological quirkiness of the left, I suppose, that here and abroad leftists were horrified and outraged by revelations that the United States had waterboarded three murderous terrorists in hopes of saving thousands of innocent lives, among whom, no doubt, were many women. Meanwhile, cruel atrocities such as we see on this video are perpetrated daily in cities and villages throughout North Africa and the Middle East, wherever Sharia law is strictly enforced, and the world's leftists just turn their heads and yawn.

When the U.S., in order to prevent mass murder, uses an interrogation technique which causes no real pain nor permanent harm, it is roundly condemned. It's told that it is just creating more terrorists, and that it is committing crimes against humanity. But when genuine torture is used in an Islamic, African country, not to save lives, but as punishment for a non-violent offense, one hears scarcely more than a quiet tsk, tsk from the left.

Why is that? Is it that, with the exception of a few intrepid voices like those of Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman, the left is afraid to criticize the behavior of Muslims? Or is it black Africans whose behavior they can't bring themselves to condemn? Or is it both?

Anyway, don't hold your breath waiting for this video to get the sort of play on the world's evening news programs that Abu Ghraib received.

Life's Meaning and the Death of God

Sean Kelley is the chair of the Harvard philosophy department, and he's written an essay on, as far as I can tell, the meaning of life now that God is dead. Or something like that. I'm not sure because the piece isn't entirely clear, which may, of course, say more about my comprehension skills than Kelley's writing ability.

At any rate, Kelley seems to be saying that even in the absence of God life can still be pretty meaningful:

The meaning that one finds in a life dedicated to “the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country,” these are genuine meanings. They are, in other words, completely sufficient to hold off the threat of nihilism, the threat that life will dissolve into a sequence of meaningless events. But they are nothing like the kind of universal meanings for which the monotheistic tradition of Christianity had hoped.

Indeed, when taken up in the appropriate way, the commitments that animate the meanings in one person’s life ─ to family, say, or work, or country, or even local religious community ─ become completely consistent with the possibility that someone else with radically different commitments might nevertheless be living in a way that deserves one’s admiration.

The death of God therefore, ... leads not to a culture overtaken by meaninglessness but to a culture directed by a rich sense for many new possible and incommensurate meanings.

Well, maybe, but I doubt it. After all, just because someone considers their life meaningful doesn't make it so. The question I'd like to see Professor Kelley address is this: If death is the end of our existence, if the fate of every living being is annihilation, why and how does anything we do really matter?

Almost everything we do in our day to day lives we do in order to stay alive, and we strive to stay alive so that we can perform those day to day tasks. We're inescapably caught in a cycle of meaninglessness. Even the pleasures that some are able to enjoy before they die are like a prisoner's last steak before he's executed. None of what we do matters unless it lasts forever, but unless there's a God nothing lasts forever. A couple of generations from now 99% of the people who have ever lived, along with everything they did in their lives, will be utterly forgotten. How can any of it have meaning? What does it matter that you went to college, worked at a job, had a family, loved your dog, collected stamps, baked cookies, suffered an illness, and ultimately died? What difference does any of it make once we're gone and forgotten?

At the blog The Philosopher's Magazine there's an essay on this topic titled Meaning Machines. The commenters weigh in with their views on what the purpose of an individual life is, and from these folks we learn that it's in fact nothing more than reproducing and "creating protein".

That's where atheism leads us. Man can't live without meaning, but according to the atheist there just isn't any meaning to be found. There are only activities that we enjoy while we wait around to die - like condemned men playing checkers to pass the time until they're marched to the gallows. Atheists themselves can't live with this. Their reason tells them there's no meaning to their life, but, unable to bear the existential burden of nihilism and wishing to avoid despair, they abandon reason and live irrationally as if there's some point to it all.

Writers like Kelley are simply doing philosophical cosmetology. They're trying to cover and soften the ugly truth by pretending that it's not really there. Perhaps the following quotes will give a sense of the despair felt by some of those who are willing to face the consequences of the "death of God" honestly:

• Life is a short day’s journey from nothingness to nothingness. – Ernst Hemmingway
• All we are is dust in the wind. – Kansas
• The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless. - Woody Allen (from Hannah and Her Sisters)
• God is empty and so am I – Smashing Pumpkins (Zero)
• In all of our searching the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other. – Carl Sagan (Contact)
• There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. – Albert Camus (Myth of Sisyphus)
• The only plausible answer to the problem of the meaning of life is to live, to be alive and to leave more life. – Theodosius Dobzhansky
• Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear – and these are basically Darwin’s views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death…There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will… - Cornell biolgist Will Provine
• The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference. - Richard Dawkins
• Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal. - Jean Paul Sartre
• Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. - Albert Camus
• Life is an unpleasant interruption of nothingness. – Clarence Darrow
• Neither the existence of the individual nor that of humanity has any purpose. – Bernard Rensch
• Life is a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is seen no more. It is a tale told by an idiot; full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. – William Shakespeare (Macbeth)
• If death ends all, if I have neither to hope for good nor to fear evil, I must ask myself what am I here for….Now the answer is plain, but so unpalatable that most will not face it. There is no meaning for life, and [thus] life has no meaning.” Somerset Maugham (The Summing Up)
• I was thinking…that here we are eating and drinking, to preserve our precious existence, and that there’s nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing. Jean Paul Sartre (Nausea)

The worldview of the atheist is pretty bleak. Modern man is dying of spiritual inanition, and the atheist offers him a piece of dry leather to chew on. Indeed, that's all he can offer him. It's all he has.

Extending Unemployment Compensation

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air explains that the tax rate deal between the GOP and President Obama which includes extending unemployment compensation for 13 months does not mean that unemployed persons who now get federal unemployment for 99 weeks will receive it for another 13 months:

There seems to be some continuing confusion over exactly what form the unemployment extension takes in the Obama-GOP tax deal. On every occasion where I have discussed this, people have understood it to mean that unemployment benefits are being extended past the 99-week limit, allowing people to collect another 13 months of unemployment checks. That’s not actually the case.

The extension in this case applies to the entire program, not individual benefits.

See the link for his explanation of what exactly the extension does. It's very helpful.

Middle Class Values

How might we distinguish between those in America who do well and those who don't? Rich Lowery at NRO suggests that two major factors are education and marriage:

The unemployment rate for people with a college degree or higher is 5 percent. If that were the rate for everyone, it’d be the 1990s again. But college graduates are only 30 percent of the country. For the rest of the population, the jobs picture is grimmer. For people without a high-school degree, the unemployment rate is more than 15 percent. If that were the rate for everyone, it’d be the 1930s again.

But unemployment is only part of the difference between the well-educated and the moderately educated.

University of Virginia scholar Brad Wilcox details how the college-educated have embraced traditional mores and habits — especially the formation of stable families — while they erode among everyone else.

Our elites, broadly defined as the top third of our society, aren’t nearly as decadent as advertised. According to Wilcox’s data, the highly educated (with a college diploma or higher) are less likely to divorce, less likely to have children out of wedlock, and less likely to commit adultery than the moderately educated (high-school degree or some college) and the least-educated (no high-school diploma).

The moderately educated might be called the lower-middle class or upper-working class. Wilcox refers to them as the “solid middle”: “They are not upscale, but they are not poor. They don’t occupy any of the margins, yet they are often overlooked, even though they make up the largest share of the American middle class.” He documents an equally disturbing separation between the top and the rest, and a convergence between the middle and the bottom.

In the 1970s, 73 percent of both the highly and moderately educated were in intact first marriages. That figure plummeted across the board, yet the moderately educated (45 percent in intact first marriages) are now closer to the least-educated (39 percent) than to the highly educated (56 percent).

The number for out-of-wedlock births is starker. From 1982 until today, the percentage of non-marital births among the moderately educated exploded from 13 percent to 44 percent. That figure is close to the least-educated (54 percent) and a vast distance from the highly educated (only 6 percent). Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation compares the dynamic to a carpet unraveling from the bottom, as illegitimacy first took hold among the poor and now works up the income scale.

Lowery goes on to explain why this spells disaster for the middle class, but the reasons aren't difficult to see. As the middle class adopts the social values of the underclass it gravitates toward the underclass leaving us with a socioeconomic hourglass society, a bulge at the upper and lower ends with little in between. Moreover, the difference between the two classes becomes enormous with one valuing marriage, education and work and the other indifferent to them.

As long as single parenthood and lack of education were confined to the very poor, it was a tragedy, but it wasn't a calamity for the rest of society. If these dysfunctions continue to spread through the middle class, however, it will mean the end of the American dream. It's not hard to imagine that we'll eventually come to look, in relative socio-economic terms, like the France of 1788.

Xmas and Christmas

Some people get a little miffed during the Advent season over the use of Xmas rather than Christmas. There's no need to, as R.C. Sproul explains:

People seem to express chagrin about seeing Christ’s name dropped and replaced by this symbol for an unknown quantity X. Every year you see the signs and the bumper stickers saying, “Put Christ back into Christmas” as a response to this substitution of the letter X for the name of Christ.

First of all, you have to understand that it is not the letter X that is put into Christmas. We see the English letter X there, but actually what it involves is the first letter of the Greek name for Christ. Christos is the New Testament Greek for Christ. The first letter of the Greek word Christos is transliterated into our alphabet as an X. That X has come through church history to be a shorthand symbol for the name of Christ.

The idea of X as an abbreviation for the name of Christ came into use in our culture with no intent to show any disrespect for Jesus. The church has used the symbol of the fish historically because it is an acronym. Fish in Greek (ichthus) involved the use of the first letters for the Greek phrase “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.” So the early Christians would take the first letter of those words and put those letters together to spell the Greek word for fish. That’s how the symbol of the fish became the universal symbol of Christendom. There’s a long and sacred history of the use of X to symbolize the name of Christ, and from its origin, it has meant no disrespect.

This is interesting, but I'm sure nevertheless that a lot of people use Xmas to avoid saying Christmas and who have no idea what the etymology of the word is.

War of Attrition

Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail reports on what's happening in the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. To the extent that Afghanistan makes the news the reports are usually about whether and when we're going to pull out and how bad things are going there. Thus it's good to get the insight of people like Roggio who follow the day to day grind of the conflict. Here's his summary:

Coalition and Afghan special operations teams have hit hard at the Taliban and allied groups' leadership and rank and file during more than 7,000 raids throughout Afghanistan over the past six months.

Approximately 7,100 special operations counterterrorism missions have been conducted between May 30 and Dec. 2 of this year, the International Security Assistance Force told The Long War Journal. More than 600 insurgent leaders were killed or captured. In addition, more than 2,000 enemy fighters have been killed, and over 4,100 fighters have been captured.

The enemy commanders and fighters killed or captured are from various jihadist groups battling Coalition and Afghan forces, including the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, Hizb-i-Islami, al Qaeda, and the Islamic Jihad Group.

The numbers of insurgents killed or captured include only those targeted in special operations raids, ISAF stated. These numbers do not include Taliban and allied fighters killed or captured during conventional counterinsurgency operations, or during massed Taliban assaults on Coalition and Afghan bases.

Within the same time frame, special operations troops also completed more than 2,500 humanitarian operations, including the provision of medical and educational assistance.

This is not to say that things there are rosy, but it does look as if we have the upper hand and that being an insurgent, particularly one eager to climb the leadership ladder, is a very dicey career choice.

Creation Myth for Atheists

Joe Carter at First Things does materialists a great favor by bestowing upon them their very own creation myth. Here's how it starts:

In the beginning was Nothing, and Nothing created Everything. When Nothing decided to create Everything, she filled a tiny dot with Time, Chance, and Everything and had it expand. The expansion spread Everything into Everywhere carrying Time and Chance with it to keep it company. The three stretched out together leaving bits of themselves wherever they went. One of those places was the planet Earth.

For no particular Reason—for Reason is rarely particular—Time and Chance took a liking to this little, wet, blue rock and decided to stick around to see what adventures they might have. While the pair found the Earth to be intriguing and pretty, they also found it a bit too quiet, too static. They fixed upon an idea to change Everything (just a little) by creating a special Something. Time and Chance roamed the planet, splashing through the oceans and sloshing through the mud, in search of materials. But though they looked Everywhere, there was a missing ingredient that they needed in order to make a Something that could create more of the same Somethings.

They called to their friend Everything to help. Since Everything had been Everywhere she would no doubt be able to find the missing ingredient. And indeed she did. Hidden away in a small alcove called Somewhere, Everything found what Time and Chance had needed all along: Information. Everything put Information on a piece of ice and rock that happened to be passing by the former planet Pluto and sent it back to her friends on Earth.

I assume this is original with Carter, but at any rate it's very clever, and the rest of it can be read at the link. As one commenter wrote: "Somewhere there's an atheist saying, 'Hey, that could be true.' "

Libertarianism

In response to the two part post titled An Ideological Primer, I recently received a very well written clarification of the Libertarian position on social issues by a reader named Micah. It's very helpful, and I want to share it with the rest of our readership. Micah writes:

Mr. Cleary has already established where the Libertarian lies in the left/right economic spectrum. Now it is time to examine social issues. But when it comes to social issues, the Libertarian position is much harder to fit into a linear spectrum. This article explains how the Left, the Right, and the Libertarian view various social issues at the state and federal levels.

For argument's and simplicity's sake, I will deal herein with the social issues brought forth in the Ideological Primer, Part II. As a quick review, the Left/Liberals favor gay marriage, abortion, open borders, and gun control, while opposing capital punishment and public religion. The Right/Conservatives take positions opposite those of the Left/Liberals. Both the Left and the Right are so firmly convinced in the absolute correctness of their positions, that they have taken the federal government by storm in order to impose their views on the populace as a whole. But what about the Libertarian?

As an individual, a Libertarian may be either on the Left, the Right, or somewhere between the two extremes when it comes to social issues. The Libertarian is not characterized as much by their social stances as they are by the proper political sphere within which those stances are to be expressed. Since the United States Constitution is the “supreme Law of the Land,” we must turn to this document and its Amendments to ascertain the correct political sphere within which social issues are to be addressed. Recall, also, that the 10th Amendment clarifies and confirms the original understanding of the Constitution. Any power not specifically granted to the federal government has been reserved to the states and the people.

With this Constitutional foundation in place, it is time to search for the mention of social issues in the Constitution. Neither marriage nor abortion has been explicitly dealt with in the Constitution. These two issues, then, are rightfully delegated to the people and the states. This is the Libertarian position. Of course, the Libertarian puts these issues rather more with the people and less with the States. Notice that the Libertarian does not grant federal government influence over or interference in issues it has not been specifically tasked to be involved with.

Naturalization is the process by which citizenship is granted/acquired by a non-citizen of a nation-state. Congress is specifically delegated the power to establish a “uniform Rule of Naturalization,” meaning there is one standard for becoming a naturalized United States citizen. This is as close as the Constitution comes to mentioning border control, or lack thereof. Libertarians, while acknowledging the Constitutional need for a uniform standard, desire a reasonable and fair standard to be applied across the board with a minimal government bureaucracy supporting it.

Gun control is clear cut. The Second Amendment plainly states that “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Being that the Constitution and its Amendments are federal documents, this amendment plainly prohibits federal action when it comes to guns and their ownership. This, too, is an issue that is meant to be dealt with by individuals, local government, or by state government.

“No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury.” This is the extent to which the Constitution deals with capital punishment, via the Fifth Amendment. It only specifies the circumstances and procedure through which capital charges can be brought against a person. While grand juries operate without many of the constraints of the judicial system, they are still bound by the Constitution.

The matter of capital punishment is somewhat complicated by the prohibition of inflicting “cruel and unusual punishments” in the Tenth Amendment. Properly interpreted, the federal government is entitled to determine whether a punishment for a crime, including capital crime, is cruel and/or unusual. Take note that while the Constitution acknowledges the acceptability of capital punishment, it does not decree that such a punishment ever need be used, only that it may be used. As viewed by the Libertarian, capital punishment is an issue that government at all levels is able to weigh-in upon, provided each government does not overstep the bounds set forth in its founding documents.

Religion tends to be a particularly tender point in the land of politics. And yet, Congress has been prohibited from establishing a national religion and from interfering with an individual's free expression of their religious beliefs. Separation of religion and state was intended to prevent a religion from running the state and the state from running a religion. Both these ideas are equally valid, though their application in recent history has been toward the end of banning all religious activity, and removing all religious references, from public places and spaces. The Libertarian agrees with the individual freedoms granted by the lack of a national religion and the separation between religion and the state, provided such distinctions are not perverted by government.

The Left and the Right, while ideologically isolated from each other on social issues, nevertheless agree in practice that the federal government is the proper sphere for the dictation and enforcement of social norms, practices, and issues. Libertarians, on a personal level, may be on the Left, Right, or somewhere in between when it comes to social issues. In politics, the Libertarian believes that the Constitution should be followed, and that unless specifically mentioned otherwise, social issues were and are intended to be left up to the people and the states. This is in following with the Libertarian core belief of individual liberty, the free exercise thereof, and the avoidance of interfering with the individual liberties of others.

Kids' Books?

MSNBC has an acute case of PDS (Palin Derangement Syndrome). You can't watch a single program on that network without at some point being subjected to a segment in which the whole point is to ridicule Sarah Palin. It reminds me of the two minutes hate in Orwell's 1984 where all party members in Oceania stop their work for two minutes while their country's enemies are shown on a television screen. For two minutes the party members work themselves into a frenzy, shouting their hate and loathing for the despised enemies on the screen. Then it's all over and they go back to work.

I don't know what the reason for the hatred of Palin is. She hasn't yet declared herself a candidate for President, but the left certainly seems to be as afraid of her as the Oceania apparatchiks were afraid of Emanuel Goldstein in 1984.

A humorous example of this occured on a recent edition of Hardball with Chris Matthews, who never passes up an opportunity to laugh at Palin's intellect but who should himself be much more humble in such matters. His guest, one Richard Wolffe, scoffs at Palin's claim to derive inspiration from C.S. Lewis. The relevant portion starts at the two minute mark:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

All Wolffe knows about C.S. Lewis is that he's the "author of a series of kid's books"? He's never heard of Abolition of Man, On Miracles, The Problem of Pain, Mere Christianity, Pilgrim's Regress, The Great Divorce, Surprised by Joy, A Grief Observed, The Screwtape Letters, The Four Loves, the space trilogy, the Oxford debates, and so much more? And this uninformed man is chuckling at Sarah Palin for finding inspiration in Lewis? Does he not realize that millions of people have found inspiration in Lewis?

It gets worse as Matthews, who obviously doesn't understand how a guide works on a hunting trip, derides Palin for having people around her as she shoots a caribou (it wasn't a moose as Aaron Sorkin, who apparently can't tell the difference, mistakenly claims as he calls Palin a "witless bully").

These people would like everyone to think they're endowed with wisdom, erudition, and sophistication superior to that of the rest of us, but in their adolescent attempts to make Palin look foolish they instead make themselves look like a clique of unpopular middle school girls sneering at the attractive new girl of whom they're profoundly jealous.

Atta Boy

Here's some news to dampen your yuletide spirit. Investors Business Daily had conducted a poll of physicians last year that showed that almost half of them would leave the profession if Obamacare were enacted. Now another poll has come up with similar results. According to the more recent survey 40% of physicians are planning to leave the profession because of concerns over Obamacare. IBD comments:

When we said nearly half of U.S. doctors might close their practices or retire early rather than live under the Democrats' health overhaul, we were heavily criticized. The critics, though, were wrong.

Four in nine doctors responding to an IBD/TIPP poll sent out in August 2009 said they "would consider leaving their practice or taking an early retirement" if Congress passed what has become known as ObamaCare. That means as many as 360,000 physicians have plans to be doing something other than treating the growing number of patients in this country.

The doctors also told us — 67% to 22%, with 11% not responding — that they expected fewer students to apply for medical school in the future if the plan became law.

Given these views, it's no surprise that 71% were doubtful that the government would be able to cover the 47 million uninsured Americans with better care at lower costs, which ObamaCare supporters have promised.

Other findings from our poll of 1,376 doctors included: six in 10 agreeing that the Democrats' plan would strip drug companies of the incentives they need to make lifesaving pharmaceuticals, and 65% believing that a government overhaul would lead to lower-quality care for seniors.

The critics said our poll was not credible, was "shabby" and "garbage." They accused IBD of being partisan, pursuing an agenda, trying to sway gullible readers with shameless journalism.

Now a Merritt Hawkins survey of 2,379 doctors for the Physicians Foundation completed in August has vindicated our poll. It found that 40% of doctors said they would "retire, seek a nonclinical job in health care, or seek a job or business unrelated to health care" over the next three years as the overhaul is phased in.

Of those who said they planned to retire, 28% are 55 or younger and nearly half (49%) are 60 or younger.

There's a lot more on this at the link. As you read you might want to send a big mental "atta boy" to Barack, Harry, Nancy and the gang. They're doing a heck of a job. It can't be easy to destroy the best health care system in the world with a single piece of legislation, but they seem to have managed it unless the Republicans pull us back from the brink of disaster by repealing it next year.

Thanks to Hot Air for the tip.

Po-Mo Narcissists

Jason forwards an article from the WSJ titled Why Narcissism Defines Our Time. The piece is by a professor at USC named Elizabeth Currid-Halkett who argues that it was a mistake to drop narcissism from the list of personality disorders. Narcissism, she observes, is rampant in our culture:

Narcissism is one of the most obvious examples of a personality disorder. We see it everywhere in our culture. Narcissism can explain part of the motivation for participating in reality TV show antics, and Hollywood has always seemed a refuge for beautiful people who need to be the center of attention. We know that not much will change in Hollywood with this announcement. But will it change any other parts of our culture?

Most troubling about not including NPD as a personality disorder is that there is evidence of narcissism in all of our social lives. It’s alarming that in an age when narcissism is so evident, and with new ways for narcissists to get attention so apparent, that it would not be considered a personality disorder. The new world of democratic celebrities—on Facebook, reality TV and Twitter—where there are fewer traditional constraints on runaway narcissism, demonstrates the need to take this personality disorder seriously.

It’s almost tautological to say that celebrity favors narcissistic personalities. Michael Jackson is a tragic example: consumed with a desire to be loved, to stay young and to remain the “King of Pop,” he built a fantasy childhood kingdom at his house and subjected himself to disfiguring plastic surgery. He was particularly vulnerable and unsupported, but his quest for attention isn’t a million miles from Britney shaving her hair off or 80s-era Madonna and her endless and often sacrilegious desire to shock.

However, reality TV and the rise of the 24/7 news cycle (begetting the 24/7 gossip cycle) has enabled a very visual and real-time way to observe the dangers of narcissism. Like Jackson, Heidi Montag, former reality star from The Hills, is so pathologically obsessed with her physical appearance that she underwent plastic surgery multiple times while still in her early 20s. She and her husband, Spencer Pratt, appear to devote many of their waking hours to drumming up publicity for themselves. This past summer, Montag filed for divorce only to reconcile this November, admitting it was a stunt to make money. Pratt remarked in an interview with a tabloid, “Divorcing was the only way to keep Heidi’s career going.”

There's more at the link. It's a pretty good piece, but I had two thoughts as I read Currid-Halkett's essay, one important, I think, the other not so much.

The first was that I was a little disappointed, but not surprised, that the author didn't mention that narcissism is at bottom a moral problem, not just a kind of illness. Our infatuation with ourselves stems from an exaggerated view of our own self-importance and a failure to see others as equally important in the eyes of God. Unfortunately, one of the things our post-modern culture has deprived us of is the ability to make moral judgments. Thus, we'll say that things we think harmful are "disorders", they need "treatment", perhaps, but who's to say that they're actually wrong in a moral sense? That sounds so old-fashioned and judgmental.

Second, I wondered if the author's motivation for using a hyphenated name might not be just a little narcissistic itself.

Dihydrogen Monoxide

Some college students decided to have a little fun at the recent U.N. Conference on Climate Change in Cancun, Mexico. They stood by a water cooler and asked the delegates to sign a petition that would ban the greenhouse gas dihydrogen monoxide. Apparently, every delegate the students approached signed the petition. Dihydrogen monoxide is, well, see if you can figure it out:

It's understandable that someone with little background in chemistry might fall for this ruse, but these delegates are among those who have been trying to persuade us that the science behind anthropogenic global warming is indisputable. It hardly gives one confidence in either their scientific expertise or their judgment that they don't know enough science to realize that they were signing a petition to ban water.

On a side note, there were something like 1240 delegates at the Cancun conference. Last year's event in Copenhagen drew 45,000. What might we conclude from that about the state of the climate change movement? Wesley Pruden of the Washington Times offers some amusing thoughts on the matter here.

More details on the petition prank can be found here. Thanks to Hot Air for the tip.

Temper Tantrum

Thousands of students are protesting, rioting, and assaulting the royal family with shouts of "Off with their heads" (Why do leftists always want to kill their perceived opponents? Why has every left-wing revolution been so bloody? How many millions of innocent men, women, and children were murdered in the French, Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions?), all because parliament has legislated a university tuition hike. Well, how much is tuition going to rise? It's been hard to find a news story that actually tells us. All one hears in most reports is that the cost of a college education is going to triple and that the bill passed in parliament by only 21 votes.

Nevertheless, this CBS News account gives us the figure. British students can now expect to have to pay the astronomical sum of $14,000 a year for their degree, up from about $5000 a year. For this they're rioting in the streets.

Perhaps they need a little perspective. There's no one in the United States, unless they're on some sort of financial assistance program or scholarship, who can get a year's worth of university education for $15,000. Even state funded universities charge more than that and private schools charge more than twice that.

The Brits are still getting a bargain, but when you're used to receiving something almost for free, I suppose you might resent it when the people who've been carrying you on their backs all your life decide they can't do it anymore.

So, to the barricades!

Record-Breaking Recession

Here's a chart that compares the depth and duration of all of the Post-WWII recessions we've suffered. Clearly, our current woes are far worse than anything we've seen heretofore. Each recession is plotted so that the low point of the recession (maximum job losses) is on the mid-line of the chart:

Ed Morrisey at Hot Air comments:

[The chart] demonstrates the folly of the Obama administration’s insistence that we have been experiencing a recovery and any sort of significant growth in job creation. After hitting the nadir of job losses relative to our peak inter-recession employment, we have essentially flatlined for far longer than any other post-recession period. Nothing in the data shows a hint that we will soon break out of that pattern either, and Ben Bernanke says we’ll probably go four to five more years on this same trajectory.

The only way to achieve recovery is to increase job growth. There are in theory two ways to do that. One is to stimulate it through government spending. The Obama team has tried that, and it hasn't worked. The other is by creating a business climate that will encourage employers to hire and invest. That means cutting taxes and easing stifling regulations on business. This the current administration is ideologically opposed to doing.

The words "tax cut" have the same effect upon them as holding a crucifix up to a vampire has on the vampire. So, unless there's a change of heart in the White House, look for that redline to pretty much stay where it is, and good luck to this year's graduating class.

Morrissey has some insightful things to say about this at the link.

Materialism and the Hard Problem

Michael Posner at The Globe and Mail writes an interesting piece on the current tiff between materialists and non-materialists over thye nature of human consciousness. The materialists believe that consciousness is simply a bunch of chemical reactions in the brain. For instance, Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule, says in his 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis, that “your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will are, in fact, no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

David Chalmers, author of several books on the subject of consciousness, and one of the foremost authorities on the subject, disagrees. He points out that we need to distinguish between what he calls the easy problem and the hard problem of consciousness. Posner explains Chalmers' argument this way:

Easy problems tend to be phenomena that can be explained by computational or neural mechanisms – recoiling from unpleasant odours, for example, or simply declaring “I am hungry” or some other mental state. The hard problem relates to the subjective qualities of human experience.

For instance, let's say you run into your old friend Jack. You register a moment of physical recognition: “Oh, there's old Jack.” But meeting old Jack also may trigger a series of “Jack” memories, emotions and ideas, all percolating more or less simultaneously. You may perceive that Jack has aged and remember how he once looked. You may recall beautiful music that Jack enjoyed, or the brilliant shade of red of the rose in Jack's lapel. The specific presence of Jack, in short, catalyzes the non-specific emergence of a holistic range of associations, drawn from some hidden well of private experience. You and you alone know what it is like to experience this moment of reconnection. It is literally incomparable. “The hard problem is hard,” says Mr. Chalmers, “precisely because … the problem persists even when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained.”

Science can document all the processes involved in vision – electromagnetic waveforms striking the retina and proceeding electrochemically along the optic nerve to the brain's occipital lobe. But where does the felt experience of what is seen – let's say the colour red – come from? Says Mr. Chalmers: “There is an explanatory gap between the functions and experience.”

There's more at the link. The article is a good summary of the differences between those who believe there is more to us than just our material body and those who don't.

Why Christians Celebrate Christmas

In this season of shopping and feasting it's easy to lose sight of why Christmas is a special day. The following allegory, which we've posted on Viewpoint several times in the past, is a modest attempt to put the season into perspective [Some readers have noted the similarity between this story and the movie Taken. The story of Michael first appeared on Viewpoint over a year before Taken was released so the similarities are purely coincidental.]:

Michael, a member of a top-secret anti-terrorism task force, was the father of a teenage daughter named Jennifer, and his duties had caused him to be away from home much of the time Jen was growing up. He was serving his country in a very important, very dangerous capacity that required his absence and a great deal of personal sacrifice. As a result, his daughter grew into her late teens pretty much without him. Indeed, his wife Judith had decided to leave him a couple of years previous and took the girl with her.

Finally, after several years abroad, Mike was able to return home. He longed to hold his princess in his arms and to spend every possible moment with her to try to make up for lost time, but when he knocked on the door of his ex-wife's house the girl who greeted him was almost unrecognizable. Jen had grown up physically and along the way she had rejected everything Michael valued. Her appearance shocked him and her words cut him like a razor. She told him coldly and bluntly that she really didn't want to see him, that he wasn't a father as far as she was concerned, that he hadn't been a part of her life before and wouldn't be in the future.

Michael, a man who had faced numerous hazards and threats in the course of his work and had been secretly cited for great heroism by the government, was staggered by her words. The loathing in her voice and in her eyes crushed his heart. He started to speak, but the door was slammed in his face. Heartbroken and devastated he wandered the streets of the city wondering how, or if, he could ever regain the love his little girl once had for him.

Weeks went by during which he tried to contact both his ex-wife and his daughter, but they refused to return his calls. Then one night his cell phone rang. It was Judith, and from her voice Mike could tell something was very wrong. Jennifer had apparently run off with some unsavory characters several days before and hadn't been heard from since. Judy had called the police, but she felt Mike should know, too. She told him that she thought the guys Jen had gone out with that night were heavily into drugs and she was worried sick about her.

She had good reason to be. Jen thought when she left the house that she was just going for a joy ride, but that's not what her "friends" had in mind. Once they had Jen back at their apartment they tied her to a bed, abused her, filmed the whole thing, and when she resisted they beat her until she submitted. She overheard them debating whether they should sell her to a man whom they knew sold girls into slavery in South America or whether they should just kill her now and dump her body in the bay. For three days her life was a living hell. She cried herself to sleep late every night after being forced into the most degrading conduct imaginable.

Finally her abductors sold her to a street gang in exchange for drugs. Bound and gagged, she was raped repeatedly and beaten savagely. For the first time in her life she prayed that God would help her, and for the first time in many years she missed her father. But as the days wore on she began to think she'd rather be dead than be forced to endure what she was being put through.

Mike knew some of the officers in the police force and was able to get a couple of leads from them as to who the guys she originally left with might be. He set out, not knowing Jennifer's peril, but determined to find her no matter what the cost. His search led him to another city and took days - days in which he scarcely ate or slept. Each hour that passed Jennifer's condition grew worse and her danger more severe. She was by now in a cocaine-induced haze in which she almost didn't know or care what was happening to her.

Somehow, Michael, weary and weak from his lack of sleep and food, managed to find the seedy, run down tenement building where Jennifer was imprisoned. Breaking through a flimsy door he saw his daughter laying on a filthy bed surrounded by three startled kidnappers. Enraged by the scene before his eyes he launched himself at them with a terrible, vengeful fury. Two of the thugs went down quickly, but the third escaped. With tears flowing down his cheeks, Mike unfastened the bonds that held Jen's wrists to the bed posts. She was weak but alert enough to cooperate as Michael helped her to her feet and led her to the doorway.

As she passed into the hall with Michael behind her the third abductor appeared with a gun. Michael quickly stepped in front of Jennifer and yelled to her to run back into the apartment and out the fire escape. The assailant tried to shoot her as she stumbled toward the escape, but Michael shielded her from the bullet, taking the round in his side. The thug fired twice more into Michael's body, but Mike was able to seize the gun and turn it on the shooter.

Finally, it was all over, finished.

Slumped against the wall, Mike lay bleeding from his wounds, the life draining out of him. Jennifer saw from the fire escape landing what had happened and ran back to her father. Cradling him in her arms she wept bitterly and told him over and over that she loved him and that she was so sorry for what she had said to him and for what she had done.

With the last bit of life left in him he gazed up at her, pursed his lips in a kiss, smiled and died. Jennifer wept hysterically. How could she ever forgive herself for how she had treated him? How could she ever overcome the guilt and the loss she felt? How could she ever repay the tremendous love and sacrifice her father had showered upon her?

Years passed. Jennifer eventually had a family of her own. She raised her children to revere the memory of her father even though they had never known him. She resolved to live her own life in such a way that Michael, if he knew, would be enormously proud of her. Everything she did, she did out of gratitude to him for what he had done for her, and every year on his birthday she went to the cemetery alone and sat for a couple of hours at his graveside, talking to him and sharing her love and her life with him. Her father had given everything for her despite the cruel way she had treated him. He had given his life to save hers, and his love for her, his sacrifice, had changed her life forever.

And that's why Christians celebrate Christmas.

Why Are They Happier?

Polls and other studies in recent years have consistently found that conservative Americans are happier than liberal Americans. Lots of people have held forth on why this should be so, and Dennis Prager adds his thoughts to the mix in a column at the Washington Times. He writes:

Liberals respond [to the findings] this way: "If we're unhappier, it's because we are more upset than conservatives over the plight of those less fortunate than ourselves." But common sense and data suggest other explanations.

For one thing, conservatives on the same socioeconomic level as liberals give more charity and volunteer more time than do liberals. And as regards the suffering of non-Americans, for at least a half-century, conservatives have been far more willing to sacrifice American treasure and American blood (often their own) for other nations' liberty.

Both of these facts refute the liberals-are-more-concerned-about-others explanation for liberal unhappiness. So, let's look at other explanations.

Prager goes on to consider four possible reasons for the gap. Here's the fourth:

A fourth explanation for greater unhappiness among liberals is that the more people allow feelings to govern them, the less happy they will be. And the further left one goes, the more importance one attaches to feelings....

A couple of years ago, I gave a speech on happiness to the students and faculty of a prestigious high school in the Los Angeles area. The subject was the need to act happy even when one isn't feeling happy -- because it is unfair to others to inflict our bad moods on them and because we will never be happy if we allow our feelings to dictate our happiness.

From what I experienced that day and learned later, liberal students and faculty generally loathed my speech; conservative students generally loved it (there was no conservative faculty to speak of). Why? Because conservatives are far more likely to be comfortable with the idea that feelings are not as important as behavior.

Those who know that feelings must not govern us, but that we must govern our feelings, are far more likely to be happy people.

I think there's a lot to what Prager says here. When people measure their happiness by their feelings they're bound to be disappointed because our feelings are so mercurial. It's much better to act as if we're content with life, regardless of how we're feeling at the time, because our feelings tend to follow our actions. That is, our minds tend to make our feelings conform to our behavior. Unfortunately, we often choose to act according to the way we feel, but this, in my opinion, is not a good practice.

If we consistently allowed our feelings to dictate our behavior, fewer people would stay married, far fewer people would show up for work on Monday morning, fewer people would sacrifice to help people they don't know, and no one would perform acts of great courage. All of these things - staying married, going to work in the morning, sacrificing for strangers, acting bravely - are things people do even though they often don't feel like doing them. If they acted according to their feelings they wouldn't do them, so allowing our feelings to dictate our conduct tends to make us less virtuous than we otherwise might be.

We're a lot better off, and we'll live much more virtuous and happy lives, if we make our will the master of our feelings rather than making our feelings the governor of our will.

Anyway, Prager has more interesting ideas on the topic of why conservatives are apparently happier than liberals in the article. Check it out.

Good Bad News

The good news in this report is bad for the credibility of the climate change community, I suppose, but the bad news in the report may actually be pretty good for the rest of the world, at least I think so. Here's the good news:

Alarming predictions that global warming could cause sea levels to rise 6ft in the next century are wrong, it has emerged. The forecast made by the influential 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which would have seen cities around the world submerged by water, now looks ‘unlikely’.

A Met Office study also rules out the shutdown of the Atlantic Ocean’s conveyor belt, which would trigger Arctic winters in Britain like those seen in the film The Day After Tomorrow.

However, the report says the IPCC was right to warn of a sea level rise of up to 2ft by 2100, and that a 3ft rise could happen.

Well, President Obama did tell us in his primary victory speech that that would be the day when the rise of the oceans would begin to slow, so maybe he was prescient.

In any case, this blow to the IPCC's credibility comes on the heels of news reports that the organization was sloppy in forecasting that the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035, so although it's good news for us, it's perhaps not so good for the credibility of the IPCC.

The report, however, also has what the Daily Mail article calls bad news. It says there is new evidence that the Arctic will become largely free of ice during most summers sooner than the IPCC warned, and that the Greenland ice sheet is more likely to melt in centuries to come than previously thought.

Now I don't know why we should assume that the melting of the ice, particularly in Greenland, will be a bad thing. Greenland is a vast, uninhabited land mass. If the ice which covers it melts away a whole new continent-sized territory will become available for colonization. The ice-free land might also prove to be rich in natural resources, and if Greenland thaws out so, too, will much of the rest of the near-arctic (northern Canada, northern Alaska, and Siberia). The Daily Mail might think this is bad news, but it sounds more like the kind of news that could, in fact, be a boon to the entire world.

Winning Through Fecundity

An interesting meme that has been circulating for a couple of years now is that secularism will die out not because religious folk defeat it either in the battle of ideas or by virtue of political power, but through the inexorable pressure of the demographic facts of life. Vjtorley at Uncommon Descent summarizes the thinking of Phillip Longman and a book by Eric Kaufmann, both of which address this issue.

According to Longman:

“[I]n countries rich and poor, under all forms of government, birth rates are declining across the globe. But they are declining least among those adhering to strict religious codes and literal belief in the Bible, the Torah, or the Koran.”

“Indeed, the pattern of human fertility now fits this pattern: the least likely to procreate are those who profess no belief in God; those who describe themselves as agnostic or simply spiritual are only somewhat slightly less likely to be childless. Moving up the spectrum, family size increases among practicing Unitarians, Reform Jews, mainline Protestants and ‘cafeteria’ Catholics, but the birthrates found in these populations are still far below replacement levels.

Only as we approach the realm of religious belief and practice marked by an intensity we might call, for lack of a better word, ‘fundamentalism,’ do we find pockets of high fertility and consequent rapid population growth.”

“When confronted with the fact that they are being outbred, secularists often respond that many if not most children born into highly religious families will grow up to reject the faith of their fathers,” but “[a]mong fundamentalist families, it turns out, the apple does not fall far from the tree. And the more demanding the faith, the more this rule applies. Only five percent of children born to the most conservative Amish, for example, move on to other faiths or lifestyles.”

Kaufman's book is titled, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century. The product description of the book says this:

“Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have convinced many western intellectuals that secularism is the way forward, but most people don’t read their books before deciding whether to be religious. Instead, they inherit their faith from their parents, who often inoculate them against the elegant arguments of secularists.

And what no one has noticed is that far from declining, the religious are expanding their share of the population; in fact, the more religious people are, the more children they have. The cumulative effect of immigration from religious countries and religious fertility will be to reverse the secularization process in the West. Not only will the religious eventually triumph over the non-religious, but it is those who are the most extreme in their beliefs who have the largest families.”

Vjtorley points out the irony in these predictions that believers will swamp non-believers by out-reproducing them - a purely Darwinian strategy for biological success. He also believes that the secular elites are aware of this, but are in a bind, because they have only three options for combatting the rising percentage of believers. They can have more children themselves, they can seek to undercut the religious beliefs of believers' children, and they can prevent believers from having children.

The first is anathema to most secularists because they're generally among those who believe the earth is over-populated as it is, and that everyone should limit themselves to just two children.

That leaves the second and third options, and vjtorley lays out the measures that he thinks we might soon see advanced which, deliberately or not, will have the effect of diminishing the strength of religious belief both here and abroad.

Read what he thinks lies in store for religious folk in both the near and middle future at the link. It's both fascinating and chilling.

Darwinian Conservatives

John West, in an article at First Principles, identifies a somewhat surprising epiphenomenon in today's ideological culture wars - Darwinian conservatism. I say it's surprising because most conservatives, especially social conservatives, are very skeptical of the claims of the Darwinians. There are some, however, who are not. West begins by preparing the ground. Here are some excerpts:

“Darwinian” conservatives claim that Darwinism can be used to defend traditional morality, economic freedom, limited government and even religion. They further contend that the science behind Darwinism is so overwhelming that conservatives must embrace it or be doomed to irrelevance. I think they are wrong on all counts.

So do I. He continues:

It should be made clear from the outset that the term “Darwinism” does not refer merely to “change over time” or even to the idea that all living things share a common ancestor. Instead, in its modern formulation, Darwinism refers primarily to the claim that the mechanism of evolution is an undirected material process of natural selection acting on random mutations, and furthermore to the reductionist corollary of this view that seeks to understand mind, morality, and religion as fully explicable by such a blind material process.

In other words, the Darwinian holds that natural processes are all that's necessary to account for living things.

Charles Darwin thought he had explained the origin of the appearance of design throughout nature through a process that did not have the design of particular organisms or biological structures in mind. The only “purpose” of natural selection is immediate survival. Natural selection is blind to the future, and thus in no sense are particular organisms or biological features—say the wings of a butterfly—to be considered the “purposeful” result of evolution. This truth applies even to the development of human beings. In the famous words of Harvard paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, “Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.”

It is important to understand that the rejection of teleological evolution was Darwin's own view, not something grafted onto his theory by others. As Darwin himself emphasized: “No shadow of reason can be assigned for the belief that variations . . . were intentionally and specially guided.” It is equally important to understand that Darwin thought his theory provided a reductionist explanation for the development of mind, morality, and religion, and that he believed his theory had implications for social policy.

Having clarified the meaning of Darwinism, we are ready to scrutinize the claims of Darwinian conservatives in five key areas: Does Darwinism support or subvert traditional morality? Does it erode or reinforce the basis of capitalism? Does it promote or undermine limited government? Does it nurture or weaken religious faith? Finally, is the evidence for Darwinism so overwhelming that all rational people must accept it?

In the discussion which follows West makes the case that naturalistic, materialistic Darwinism is incompatible with all of these and thus with conservatism. His treatment will be helpful to anyone who's interested in the impact of Darwinism on culture. It's worth close examination and study.