The Ledge

My friend Matt calls our attention to a film titled The Ledge just released last weekend. The movie explicitly endorses atheism and is an attempt to portray disbelief in a positive light. According to CNN's Belief Blog, The Ledge is "a story of religion, love and revenge that pits a conservative Christian husband against an atheist who has seduced the religious man’s Christian wife."

I suppose seducing another man's wife may pass for positive light among some, but let's not dwell on that. The film is written and directed by Matthew Chapman, an outspoken atheist who says that it's Hollywood’s first offering to feature an openly atheist hero in a story about religious conflict.

According to the article at the link,

Chapman's mission is to help create a more positive image for atheism, which he says is often misunderstood and maligned, for audiences who may otherwise not be exposed to it.

“My hope was to make an emotional appeal,” Chapman says. He hopes it’s a “Brokeback Mountain” moment for nonbelievers.

This is understandable. An appeal to peoples' emotions to persuade them to accept atheism is bound to be much more efficacious than appealing to their reason since there simply are no good rational arguments for atheism. Perhaps the following assertion, in which Chapman displays an wincingly inadequate understanding of what religious faith is, indicates why Chapman is wise to stick to emotional, rather than rational, appeals:

"This suspicion about people whose only crime is not believing in things until they're proven seems weird," Chapman said. "To me, there is something much more terrifying about voting for someone who accepts things on faith without any evidence whatsoever."

In the first place, no one, believer nor unbeliever, demands proof for epistemic justification, and for Chapman to assert that they do is to reveal a disappointing shallowness in his grasp of how and why people believe.

Secondly, it's just ludicrous to imply that Christians believe "without any evidence whatsoever". The evidence for the existence of God, for example, is very strong and the evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus is also strong enough to impress anyone who's not a priori opposed to the possibility of such an event. I'm somewhat surprised that a man who has undertaken to make a movie on the subject is apparently oblivious to this evidence.

The CNN article, which has a lot of other interesting material on the film, closes with this:

Chapman wants to open a conversation about people who don’t believe in God. Whether filmgoers will see his portrayal of Christianity as insulting is yet to be seen.

I hope that in the course of this conversation someone will think to ask those who don't believe to explain how atheism offers a superior view of the world than does Christianity. Which worldview, the Christian or the atheistic, offers the best explanation for the deep yearning people have for meaning in their life, for the universal desire for justice, for our conviction that selflessness is morally superior to selfishness, or for our belief that human beings have dignity, worth and inherent human rights.

None of these yearnings, desires, or beliefs make any sense on the supposition that atheism is true.

There's no room in an atheistic worldview for belief in an ultimate meaning to life, there's no foundation for moral obligation or moral judgment, and there's no reason to think that justice will, or could, ever prevail. Nor is there anything upon which to base a belief in human dignity or human rights. There's not even a good argument for believing that human reason is trustworthy, and there's certainly no basis for hope that any of these circumstances could ever be otherwise.

But don't take my word for it - although I do commend to you this paper in which I develop the argument at greater length - rather listen to what two of the most prominent of the "New Atheists", Will Provine of Cornell and Richard Dawkins of Oxford, have to say on the matter. Here's Provine:

"There are no Gods, no purposes, and [thus] no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death...no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will."

And Dawkins:

"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."

Given that atheism offers us such a bleak view of life I wish Mr. Chapman good luck with his emotional appeal and his attempt to portray atheism in a positive light. I'm afraid, though, that to the extent that he's honest about atheism he'll only depress those in his audience most disposed to his point of view.

Double Standards

For those who savor irony: Israel has been roundly condemned by the world community for building a wall to keep Palestinian terrorists from infiltrating the country and killing civilians. International observers have loudly complained that this wall works a hardship on the Palestinian people, and no doubt it does.

Now comes word, however, that the Palestinians are building a wall of their own to keep out terrorists seeking to infiltrate Gaza from Libya and Egypt.

The following is excerpted from a debkafile report:

While complaining to the world about the Israeli and Egyptian blockade of the Gaza Strip, four days ago, Hamas began building fortifications to block the territory's western boundary with Egyptian Sinai, debkafile's military sources report. Hamas is said to be anxious to ward off the spillover of post-revolutionary chaos from Egypt and Sinai into the Gaza Strip and curtail the new influx of fighters and smugglers from Libya and Sinai Bedouin affiliated with al Qaeda. These groups have gone into the smuggling tunnel business on their own and are causing mayhem.

Our sources report that a work force, building materials and equipment are working overtime to throw up a fortified earthworks barrier 10-12 meters high and 14 kilometers long, running from the Rafah crossing up to the Mediterranean 50 meters inside Gaza territory. The side facing Egypt is densely cloaked with barbed wire to stop climbers. Earthmoving equipment is flattening its top surface, presumably for watchtowers.

A bizarre situation has developed: While Hamas continues its smuggling operations underground, illicitly importing munitions, rockets and explosives for terrorist use, on the surface, it is putting in place a mechanism for blockading its own border.

Do you suppose the world will be as outraged by the construction of this barrier to block the flow of terrorists into Gaza as it was over the Israeli wall designed to block the flow of terrorists into Israel, or do you think that's a silly question?

Where No Man Has Gone Before

Take a trip to the outermost reaches of our universe and back again all in about six minutes:

The Centrality Of Earth In The Universe - Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation - The best bloopers are a click away

Materialist scientists are fond of pointing out the vastness of space and asking why God would have created the universe so big and so old just for us. The fact is that according to the consensus cosmological view, in order for living things to exist at all the universe had to go through a long process of stellar evolution in which all the elements needed for life were forged in the cores of stars and then scattered throughout the cosmos when the star died and exploded.

This process took billions of years, during which time the universe was continuously expanding. Thus, if the cosmologists are correct, the age and size of the universe are not just happenstance. The universe had to be as old as it is and thus as big as it is if living creatures were going to exist anywhere in it.

It may very well be that it all exists just for us. We certainly wouldn't be here were it not this old and this vast.

Thanks to a commenter at Uncommon Descent for the link to the video.

"Trust Me"

Our president certainly seems intent upon burnishing his reputation as a flim-flam man. As Stephen Hayes notes at The Weekly Standard, two years ago the president was insisting that the last thing government should do in a troubled economy is raise taxes on the people who create jobs and manufacture goods.

Now he's blaming the Republicans for the stalemate in resolving the debt ceiling "crisis" because they refuse to go along with his plan to do exactly what he said was the worst thing to do two years ago. Here's Hayes:

In a 75-minute meeting Sunday night, President Obama once again demanded that more than $1 trillion in tax increases be part of any deficit reduction package attached to a vote on the debt ceiling. In the session, Obama rejected a Republican proposal to seek $2.5 trillion in spending cuts and reforms, and insisted on higher taxes on businesses and wealthy individuals.

It’s a curious position, given the anemic economic growth and rising unemployment. And it’s even more curious considering that Obama himself has warned about the deleterious effects of raising taxes in a struggling economy.

In August 2009, on a visit to Elkhart, Indiana to tout his stimulus plan, Obama [said that] ... "Normally, you don’t raise taxes in a recession, which is why we haven’t and why we’ve instead cut taxes....You don’t raise taxes in a recession. We haven’t raised taxes in a recession.”

Obama [went on to reiterate] his opposition to tax hikes during a recession and making an argument about timing. “We have not proposed a tax hike for the wealthy that would take effect in the middle of a recession. Even the proposals that have come out of Congress – which by the way were different from the proposals I put forward – still wouldn’t kick in until after the recession was over. So..., the last thing you want to do is raise taxes in the middle of a recession because that would just suck up – take more demand out of the economy and put business further in a hole.”

In the president's defense it's possible that he doesn't see the current economy with its 9.2% unemployment and less than 2% growth as troubled. However, economic growth was actually better in August of 2009 (at about 6%) than now, and unemployment (9.7%) wasn't too much worse, so I don't know why he would think that the economy can better sustain a tax increase now than it could then.

It's puzzling why Mr. Obama was against raising taxes before he was for it, and I wish someone in the media would ask him to explain.

But that's not the only part of the debt limit debate that he has done a back-flip on. In 2006 he was totally opposed to raising the debt limit at all, a move which he now says is absolutely necessary. On March 16, 2006 Senator Obama said this:

The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.

Now he wants us to have confidence in his leadership and trust that he knows what he's doing. I don't think that's a good idea. Mostly because of his policies our debt problem today is far worse than it was in 2006 and, we've arguably had an even greater failure of leadership in the last two and a half years than we did in any presidency in the last eighty years.

Book-Banners

Via Hot Air: The website Rebel Pundit conducted an experiment at a Chicago literature festival asking people which of a group of books they would like to see banned. One assumes that the attendees of a book fair would provide a good cross-section of the most well-read and reasonably well-educated folks in Chicago, which makes the results of this unscientific sampling all the more disconcerting:

Since the results showed that those who participated voted overwhelmingly to ban conservative books it would appear that the book-banners were mostly liberals. The sun seems to be setting on the day when liberals stood foursquare for freedom of the press and freedom of speech and the right to say things which they may personally find offensive. Nowadays it seems that the many on the left couldn't care less about the First Amendment, at least to the extent it protects those with whom they disagree.

Or maybe these folks are just dunces who don't comprehend what they're saying by participating in this "survey". Of course, if that's the case it's still pretty distressing, especially when you consider that roughly 40% of the electorate is comprised of liberals in whose ranks are people too dumb to realize what a horrific statement they're making by voting to ban books they don't appreciate.

One more thought: What else does it say about these people that so many of them preferred to see books by Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Ann Coulter banned before they would have banned Mein Kampf?

Spinning in Her Grave

Edward Little is an Episcopalian bishop who owes a lot, he explains, to Ayn Rand. It's because of Rand that Little became a Christian. Those familiar with Rand's hostility to Christianity may find this somewhat perplexing, yet, as C.S. Lewis observed (and Little affirms) a young man who wishes to remain an atheist cannot be too careful about his reading. Here's the introduction to Little's story:

Ayn Rand changed my life. When I embraced her philosophy, Objectivism, the conversion was far more dramatic than my decision, several years later, to follow Jesus Christ—more dramatic, but in the end transitory. Yet Rand, the novelist, philosopher, and uncompromising atheist, inadvertently opened a door for the gospel. I don't believe dead people spin in their graves, but if they did and she could read these words, I imagine Rand would be twirling violently.

As many have noted, Rand's ethic of rational self-interest is incompatible with the gospel, and leads to social as well as spiritual disaster. "Most observers see Rand as a political and economic philosopher," wrote Gary Moore last year in Christianity Today. "I believe that she was first and foremost an anti-Christian philosopher." A six-foot dollar sign wreath towered over her casket, Moore pointed out, an icon of the false gospel she labored to proclaim. I agree entirely that Christianity and Objectivism are utterly incompatible. But my gratitude to Rand remains profound.

In the spring of 1962, an awkward and philosophically oriented 15-year-old raised in an utterly secular home, I read The Fountainhead and then Atlas Shrugged. Those books triggered a philosophical (and, unknowingly, spiritual) revolution. One evening, immersed in Rand's writings, I listened on the radio to a re-broadcast of a lecture she had delivered a year earlier at the University of Wisconsin, during a symposium called "Ethics in Our Time."

Even at a distance of 48 years, I can still hear her heavily accented voice as she quoted from John Galt's speech, the long and detailed summary of Objectivism that appears near the end of Atlas Shrugged: "Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. Yes, you are bearing punishment for your evil …. Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality … but to discover it."

For three years I followed Rand, read every word she published, studied Objectivism and its moral, political, and economic implications, and even tried to imitate the heroes in Rand's novels. Several times, the central character in The Fountainhead, Howard Roark, is accused of staring at people, his piercing eyes making the novel's villains feel judged and found wanting. And so I practiced widening my eyes and keeping them open for extended periods. No one, however, seemed daunted by my gaze.

Because my family lived in New York City, I was able to enroll in a 20-session "Basics of Objectivism" course at the Nathaniel Branden Institute. (Branden, an early Rand associate and a psychologist by training, spent many years teaching Objectivism in partnership with Rand.) The course included sessions on metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and political and economic theory, with a heavy emphasis on laissez-faire capitalism. When Branden finished his lecture, Rand herself would often answer questions.

Among the memorabilia from that period of my life is a scrap of paper with Rand's autograph, the letters sharp and angular. I also enrolled in "Objectivist Economics," taught by a very young Alan Greenspan.

My commitment to Rand and her philosophy, however, did not survive my early years in college. Two figures intervened.

The two figures were Plato and Jesus, and their effect on Little would, he writes, have Rand spinning in her grave. It's an interesting story.

Questioning Patriotism

Timothy Dalrymple at Patheos responds to those who demand that one not question their patriotism with the reply that he's darn well going to question it, and good for him, says I:

When “Don’t question my patriotism!” became the imperative of choice for the stylish liberal in the run-up to the 2004 election, I was a doctoral student at Harvard. The very same faculty who spent half their time indicting the United States as the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism struck an indignant pose when they imagined their patriotism was under review. Whether they were offended at the allegation that they did not love their country, or offended at the suggestion that they should, varied from professor to professor.

Now, I can imagine the outrage of my liberal friends as they prepare to tell me how the Star-Spangled Banner brings a lump to their throats and a soaring feeling to their hearts. So let me clarify that I’m not questioning the patriotism of Democrats. Plenty of Democrats have demonstrated their patriotism beyond reproach. Neither am I attacking all liberals, or all ultra-liberals. I’m not attacking anyone. It’s no sin to be unpatriotic. This is merely an observation that many of liberalism’s intellectual elites are (1) deeply uncomfortable with the concept of patriotism, and (2) find America especially undeserving of love and loyalty.

Exactly so, which is why they have such contempt for middle American Tea Partiers and their like.

The liberal elites of whom I speak witness public displays of patriotism amongst the masses and fear that that kind of patriotism is tantamount to nationalism, and it leads to war and totalitarianism because it persuades the benighted masses to defend their country and support their leaders without question. Flags and lapel pins and the pledge of allegiance, not to mention Memorial Day and Independence Day, are just so many pieces of propaganda that serve to raise children in automatic loyalty to the machinery of the state.

Dalrymple touches upon an interesting irony here. Recall that one of the charges leveled at Tea Partiers by their cultured despisers is that reluctance to ride the Obama social and economic trainwreck is evidence that conservatives actually despise the country. Frank Schaeffer presents us with a paradigmatic example of this peculiar point of view in a recent interview at MSNBC.

So, if you question their patriotism because they seem to harbor little love for this country, its history, its people or its principles they wax indignant at the implication that they're not patriots, but if you disagree with their political ideology they question your patriotism.

At any rate, Dalrymple raises some good questions in his essay. Here are two:

Do some forms of patriotism encourage unquestioning obedience, while others are more salutary? Or, ... what differentiates patriotism from nationalism, or patriotism from idolatry?

Here's another that he might well have asked: How long can a nation survive if no one cherishes anything about it?

There's more good stuff at the link. Check it out.

About Schmidt

One of the ironies of our entertainment culture is that Hollywood keeps turning out movies which powerfully illustrate the utter absurdity, emptiness, and meaninglessness of modern secular life even as they persist in endorsing that very life.

The irony occurred to me again the other night while watching About Schmidt, a film starring Jack Nicholson who portrays a 66 year-old recently retired insurance salesman named Warren Schmidt who realizes at the end of the film that everything about his life is pointless (there is a small moment of redemption at the end to keep the viewer from running out to the nearest high bridge). For me, the climactic scene was when he acknowledges to himself that when he and those who knew him are all dead nothing he did in his life will have mattered.

I'm not a movie aficionado, but it seems to me that films addressing, intentionally or otherwise, the existential vacuum that is modern secular life get made a lot. Films such as American Beauty, Synecdoche, A Serious Man, About Schmidt, or almost any Woody Allen film all raise the question and none of them, in my opinion, offers a persuasive answer: In a world without God, what's the significance of our lives? What does anything we do really mean? About Schmidt opens with those questions (at his retirement dinner) and ends with the realization that our lives don't mean a thing.

(Those who saw the film might object that the bond he forges with Ndugu puts meaning into his life, but personally I don't see that as anything more than a superficial anodyne in the overall pattern of his life).

Why would we be the sort of creatures capable of asking these questions, of experiencing this angst about life's purpose, if there really is no answer to them? Why would nature evolve us to need something that's unattainable, to need meaning? Perhaps our existential yearning for meaningfulness runs so deep because meaningfulness is possible, but genuine meaning is only possible if death does not end our existence. If death is the end then nothing matters and everything is ultimately empty. If it isn't the end then it's possible that everything matters and matters forever.

Naturalism, atheism, and materialism all lead to hopelessness and absurdity. They're worldviews that entail nihilism, which is one reason why so many find it impossible to live consistently with their belief in a godless world.

Rescuing Financially Imperiled Schools

Remember how teachers were saying last spring that the Wisconsin legislators and Governor Scott Walker were going to devastate kids' education by curbing teachers' right to collective bargaining? Well, Byron York at The Washington Examiner finds that, at least for one Wisconsin public school, what the legislature and Walker did has been a blessing:

The Kaukauna School District, in the Fox River Valley of Wisconsin near Appleton, has about 4,200 students and about 400 employees. It has struggled in recent times and this year faced a deficit of $400,000. But after the law went into effect, at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, school officials put in place new policies they estimate will turn that $400,000 deficit into a $1.5 million surplus. And it's all because of the very provisions that union leaders predicted would be disastrous.

In the past, teachers and other staff at Kaukauna were required to pay 10 percent of the cost of their health insurance coverage and none of their pension costs. Now, they'll pay 12.6 percent of the cost of their coverage (still well below rates in much of the private sector) and also contribute 5.8 percent of salary to their pensions. The changes will save the school board an estimated $1.2 million this year, according to board President Todd Arnoldussen.

But that's only part of the story. Under previous bargaining agreements the district was forced to purchase insurance from a company, WEA Trust, created by the teachers union. This year that insurance vendor had informed the district that premiums were going up:

Now, the collective bargaining agreement is gone, and the school district is free to shop around for coverage. And all of a sudden, WEA Trust has changed its position. "With these changes, the schools could go out for bids, and lo and behold, WEA Trust said, 'We can match the lowest bid,'" says Republican state Rep. Jim Steineke, who represents the area and supports the Walker changes. At least for the moment, Kaukauna is staying with WEA Trust, but saving substantial amounts of money.

There's more:

Then there are work rules. "In the collective bargaining agreement, high school teachers only had to teach five periods a day, out of seven," says Arnoldussen. "Now, they're going to teach six." In addition, the collective bargaining agreement specified that teachers had to be in the school 37 1/2 hours a week. Now, it will be 40 hours.

The changes mean Kaukauna can reduce the size of its classes -- from 31 students to 26 students in high school and from 26 students to 23 students in elementary school. In addition, there will be more teacher time for one-on-one sessions with troubled students. Those changes would not have been possible without the much-maligned changes in collective bargaining.

Teachers' salaries will stay "relatively the same," Arnoldussen says, except for higher pension and health care payments.....[T]he money saved will be used to hire a few more teachers and institute merit pay.

None of the predictions of educational disaster that would follow having the public trough yanked away from public employees unions have yet come to pass, and in at least one school district so far, the kids are obvious beneficiaries.

Actually, it was pretty obvious all along to everyone but union leaders and their lackeys in the Wisconsin media and legislature that that would be the case.

Winter's Coming

There's been some news coverage, squeezed, where possible, into the interstices of reportage of the Casey Anthony trial, of the negotiations in Washington over what to do about the debt ceiling. The Democrats want to raise it and go on spending merrily away, like autumn grasshoppers (see below). Republicans want the Democrats to agree to spending cuts in exchange for raising the ceiling, but what happens if we arrive at the point where we have borrowed all the money that Congress has authorized and no additional authorization is granted?

Robinson O'Brien-Bours at No Left Turns gives us a helpful précis of what'll happen in about three weeks:

With less than a month to go until the United States of America reaches its debt ceiling, lawmakers are scrambling to address the crisis. President Obama is addressing it by comparing Members of Congress to schoolgirls and complaining about the rich being rich, Congressional Democrats are screaming about the impending doomsday, and Congressional Republicans are sticking to the "Just Say No to Taxes" mantra (for now).

Meanwhile, the Obama Administration and some intellectuals are looking into the silly notion that the 14th Amendment allows the president to do whatever he wants to ensure that the public debt of the United States is not defaulted on. This follows an even worse vein of logic than the "I don't need to talk to Congress about Libya because dropping bombs on human beings is not being hostile" argument of late.

[T]he United States is fully capable of paying off the interest on its debt if we needed to. As the Washington Examiner points out, defaulting would be a purely political choice. We would have the money to pay our interest payments if it came down to it; the debt ceiling just means that the government cannot accumulate any more debt. By the law of the 14th Amendment, the President would be forced to pay off the interest on our debt with the monies regularly collected by the Treasury Department; he is not legally allowed to let us default on the debt if those funds exist.

However, this would mean an instant end to almost all programs and offices of the federal government in order to pay our interest on the loans. We have the money to pay our interest, but then President Obama would have to choose between things like paying senior citizens their social security checks or paying for dropping bombs on the people in the not-war of Libya. We will not go into default if we hit the debt ceiling; the federal government would just stop most of its work.

And make no mistake on the severity of hitting the debt ceiling. Some people think it will be like when the government cannot pass a budget, as in the 1990s and as was threatened earlier this year-- this is false. In those instances, only nonessential parts of the federal government stop working immediately. If we hit the debt ceiling, everything stops. The FBI, the military, the TSA, Social Security, Medicare, the courts, federal prisons, IRS refunds, and every single employee of the federal government would instantly be forbidden from working. We will have $306 billion in expenses for the month of August, and only $172 billion in revenue.

That means $134 billion worth of government programs and offices would instantly need to be shut down-- and not just tiny ones, but major services that Americans are now used to. If we hit the ceiling, then come August 3rd we will have an instantly balanced budget by the pure fact that we have no choice but to just lay off millions of federal employees.

Obviously, no one is going to let this happen, but to raise the ceiling is to declare that there really is no ceiling. To raise it without imposing serious curbs on more spending is irresponsible, yet this is what the administration would have us do.

For those who may have never read their Aesop I offer this 1934 Disney version of the fable of the ants and the grasshopper to illustrate the difference between the two sides in these negotiations:

Winter's coming.

The Ends Justify the Means

When you're saddled with inferior ideas which, if explained clearly and honestly to people, no one would want to have anything to do with, how do you prevail in the American political system? Well, one way is to simply destroy your opponent's character and reputation. That's what liberal commentator Juan Williams accuses a prominent liberal fact-check organization of doing:

Character assassination isn't the only way many on the left seek to gain power. As we saw in the debate in Wisconsin over budget reform, they're not above physical intimidation, and, of course, there's always vote fraud.

Perhaps such tactics are not confined to the left (although I'm really not aware of an instance where lies, threats, or fraud have been employed in the service of conservative ideas), and certainly not all liberals endorse such methods. Williams, after all, is a liberal.

The problem is that when politics becomes one's god, as it has for many on the secular left, then the end of political success justifies whatever means it takes to achieve it. If character assassination, threats, fraud, and dissimulation work in securing political power, well, then, they're morally appropriate tactics, and not only is there no reason not to employ them, it's actually one's moral duty to employ them.

Luxury Items Create Real Jobs

President Obama continues to display an astonishing lack of understanding about how the rich create jobs for ordinary Americans by purchasing luxuries like jet planes. We discussed this very thing after the president suggested that ATM machines actually reduce jobs, and it's a bit surprising that he would stumble into the same pit again so soon after the last chastening he received.

Anyway, rather than cover the same ground as in the earlier post I'll defer to Michael Ramirez:

These are real jobs, it should be noted, not the artificial, temporary kind favored by Mr. Obama and created with stimulus money at a cost of $238,000 per job.

The Failure of Liberalism

In one short essay at National Review Online Victor Davis Hanson summarizes the complete failure of liberalism both here and abroad. After examining the economic crisis in Europe, precipitated by three generations of leftist policy, he turns his attention to the U.S.:

Here in the United States, we await the imposition of Obamacare, despite the fact that the public does not want it, the nation cannot afford it, politicians regret it, and companies seek exemption from it. Our current pace of $1.6 trillion annual deficits, for all the talk of Keynesian gymnastics, is unsustainable — and even acknowledged as such by those who are most responsible for the latest round of fiscal irresponsibility.

As we near 50 million Americans on food stamps, another year of 9-plus percent unemployment, and the third $1 trillion–plus budget deficit, even statists are beginning to see that statism does not work — a fact brought home not just by the disaster in Greece, but also by the growing divide between a successful red-state paradigm and California-like blue-state doldrums. What saves the United States for now is only the fact that, unlike California, it can print money — plus the fact that there is no red-state version of America to flee to.

On the immigration front, there will still be some quibbling, but the liberal argument for open borders has been lost, both here and in Europe. The United States simply cannot afford any longer the $50 billion that flows to Latin America each year in remittances, coupled with multibillion-dollar costs for providing social services to seek parity for illegal aliens, in addition to vast new outlays in education and criminal justice.

California elites swear that a multimillion-person community of illegal aliens has nothing to do with our near-bottom ranking in public-school math and science scores, but privately even the most die-hard unionist teachers confess that it does. When Los Angeles has more resident Mexican nationals than do most cities in Mexico, and when the liberal paradigm of the salad bowl in lieu of the melting pot is into its fifth decade, then it is logical, not aberrant, that tens of thousands in the Rose Bowl would not merely cheer a Mexican soccer team over a home-team American one (understandable, though regrettable, garden-variety ethnic chauvinism), but trump that by booing even the mention of the United States.

Hanson goes on to describe the failure of liberal foreign policy, education policy, and the fact that many of the most influential liberals don't really believe their own rhetoric:

We live in an age in which advocates do not believe in their own advocacy: A “planet is doomed” Al Gore refuses to fly economy; a statist John Kerry won’t pay taxes on his yacht unless he is caught; an anti-war Barack Obama won’t honor the War Powers Act he once deified; and the liberal congressional and media establishment will not put their children in the D.C. schools that are the reification of their own ideology.

In short, the generation that came of age in the 1960s succeeded in bringing to life the Frankenstein’s monster it designed in its own image — but suddenly it seems terrified of the very thing it created.

Hanson pretty much swishes a three pointer in this column. Like the government functionaries in totalitarian countries whose leader has died but who seek to hide his demise from the people, statism is everywhere in various stages of senescence despite its acolytes' sunny insistence that it's really in ruddy good health.

Disgrace to the Profession

Young teachers having little luck finding a job might consider moving to Atlanta where there's soon likely to be a hundred or more openings for elementary and middle school teachers.

It appears that almost two hundred teachers and administrators have been caught in a massive cheating scandal in which teachers were changing their students' grades on standardized tests in order to render the results less embarrassing to the district. The scandal reaches all the way to the top and includes the district superintendent.

The Atlanta Journal and Constitution reports:

Across Atlanta Public Schools, staff worked feverishly in secret to transform testing failures into successes.

Teachers and principals erased and corrected mistakes on students’ answer sheets.

Area superintendents silenced whistle-blowers and rewarded subordinates who met academic goals by any means possible.

Superintendent Beverly Hall and her top aides ignored, buried, destroyed or altered complaints about misconduct, claimed ignorance of wrongdoing and accused naysayers of failing to believe in poor children’s ability to learn.

For years — as long as a decade — this was how the Atlanta school district produced gains on state curriculum tests. The scores soared so dramatically they brought national acclaim to Hall and the district, according to an investigative report released Tuesday by Gov. Nathan Deal.

In the report, the governor’s special investigators describe an enterprise where unethical — and potentially illegal — behavior pierced every level of the bureaucracy, allowing district staff to reap praise and sometimes bonuses by misleading the children, parents and community they served.

The voluminous report names 178 educators, including 38 principals, as participants in cheating. More than 80 confessed. The investigators said they confirmed cheating in 44 of 56 schools they examined.

How can adults teach children that it's wrong to cheat when so many of them do it themselves? If this is the quality of educator that Atlanta's children are learning from it's little wonder that scores are so low that cheating is needed to raise them to meet standards. On the other hand, it seems that to their credit many of the teachers objected to having to change answers but were coerced and intimidated by their administrators into doing so. According to the AJC article a number of those administrators face felony charges:

For teachers, a culture of fear ensured the deception would continue. “APS [Atlanta Public Schools] is run like the mob,” one teacher told investigators, saying she cheated because she feared retaliation if she didn’t.

These people, like their colleagues in Wisconsin who defrauded the taxpayers by securing phony doctor's excuses during the budget debate in Madison last spring, are an embarrassment to public school professionals everywhere and have no business in any position where they work with kids or collect a salary and benefits paid by the taxpayer. They should be fired, decertified, and deeply ashamed of themselves.

Feeding Racism

America has done much, perhaps more than any nation in history, to try to expunge racism from our public life, but all those efforts are eroded every time stories like this one about groups of young blacks beating, robbing and killing appear in the news, which they do with alarming frequency. One rarely reads of white mobs beating black victims, but the reverse seems almost a daily occurrence.

Of course, whites are not supposed to take notice. It's racist, we're told, to observe that such savage behavior is disproportionately a phenomenon indigenous to black communities. We're to pretend that there's no racial correlation, but the fact is that there is, and the problem will only get worse unless people start confronting it and stop calling people racist for pointing it out.

There's something very deeply wrong in the black community and people are tired of being told, after fifty years of bending over backwards to give blacks every advantage, every opportunity, that the problem is white racism. Nobody except a few left-wing fringies really believes that anymore. The problem is the inability of too many blacks to function appropriately in a civilized society and until prominent black leaders start acknowledging the problem and stop blaming the larger society for the barbarisms perpetrated by other blacks, the problem will never be solved.

Moreover, all the progress made in changing white attitudes toward blacks over the last sixty years, the progress made in teaching whites to see blacks as just like themselves and to treat them with the same dignity and respect they want to be treated with, is almost certain to unravel.

The era when blacks are given a pass for behavioral and intellectual inadequacies that would not be excused in a white person is coming to a close. When mobs march through an American city (Peoria) shouting "kill all the white people" more and more angry and exasperated whites are going to ask what's wrong with these people. When that question begins to be asked, and answered, openly racial animosities and prejudices that have been suppressed for fifty years in the white community are going to bubble back to the surface of our common life.

It will be a tragic day in America, to be sure, one that I fervently wish we'd never see, but when it comes it'll be primarily the result of whites being no longer able or willing to ignore the intolerable levels of hatred and violence in the black population.

What the World Needs Now Is More Oxytocin

Patricia Churchland is a philosopher who has written extensively on the philosophy of mind, consciousness, and the insights neuroscience brings to those discussions. She's a philosophical materialist and a metaphysical naturalist (the two often go together) and has written a book, Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality, in which she seeks to explain ethics in light of naturalism. Her view is that what we call morality is really the result of eons of evolution which has produced chemicals like oxytocin which operate in the brain to facilitate social interaction.

Christopher Shea, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, writes an essay on Ms Churchland's ethical thinking and the importance she attaches to neurochemicals as a biological basis for our moral decision-making. Shea says this about Churchland's views:

Oxytocin's primary purpose appears to be in solidifying the bond between mother and infant, but Churchland argues—drawing on the work of biologists—that there are significant spillover effects: Bonds of empathy lubricated by oxytocin expand to include, first, more distant kin and then other members of one's in-group. (Another neurochemical, aregenine vasopressin, plays a related role, as do endogenous opiates, which reinforce the appeal of cooperation by making it feel good.)

From there, culture and society begin to make their presence felt, shaping larger moral systems: tit-for-tat retaliation helps keep freeloaders and abusers of empathic understanding in line. Adults pass along the rules for acceptable behavior—which is not to say "just" behavior, in any transcendent sense—to their children. Institutional structures arise to enforce norms among strangers within a culture, who can't be expected to automatically trust each other.

These rules and institutions, crucially, will vary from place to place, and over time. "Some cultures accept infanticide for the disabled or unwanted," she writes, without judgment. "Others consider it morally abhorrent; some consider a mouthful of the killed enemy's flesh a requirement for a courageous warrior, others consider it barbaric."

It's all very interesting, but what might have been emphasized a bit more in Shea's piece is that what Churchland and others in her camp are doing is reducing morality to a mere illusion. This is, indeed, what all naturalistic attempts to explain the moral sense wind up doing. Shea quotes one colleague of Churchland's who admits as much:

Duke's Owen Flanagan Jr. defends this highly pragmatic view of morality. "Where we get a lot of pushback from philosophers is that they'll say, 'If you go this naturalistic route that Flanagan and Churchland go, then you make ethics merely a theory of prudence.' And the answer is, Yeah, you kind of do that. Morality doesn't become any different than deciding what kind of bridge to build across a river. The reason we think it makes sense is that the other stories — that morality comes from God, or from philosophical intuition — are just so implausible."

This is surely correct. If the "God hypothesis" is implausible then morality is just chemical reactions in the brain, and decisions about whether to help one's fellow man or kill him are no different than decisions about whether or not to build a bridge across a river.

As we've argued here on previous occasions, one who holds to this view must perforce embrace some form of ethical subjectivism, and the most compelling candidates are egoism or nihilism.

If helping the poor gives you an oxytocin high, well, then do it. If ignoring the needs of others in order to advance your own welfare is what elicits the flow of neurochemicals then it's not wrong to do so. There's no reason to think treating others cruelly or selfishly is anything more than behavior some find rewarding and others find distasteful. Like putting mayonnaise on a peanut butter sandwich, it's neither right nor wrong, it's just a matter of taste.

I wonder whether Ms Churchland has followed her convictions to their logical conclusion and forswears all moral judgments about other peoples' behavior, which, indeed, she must do if she believes that morality is just the percolations of chemicals through neurons. I wonder if she really looks at sex trafficking, torturing for amusement, and the long-term destruction of our planet as simply cases of different strokes for different folks.

Perhaps, but I doubt it. The only people who call themselves materialists who actually live as though they really believed materialism is true are nihilists and egoists, and Ms Churchland strikes me as neither.

Zombies

Bob Hope gets in a zinger in this old clip I came across at No Left Turns:

Pretty funny.

Hot and Cold

Proponents of the hypothesis that the earth is getting warmer have been insisting that the warming is occuring because we're polluting the atmosphere with CO2 and that the mean global temperature is spiking. It has turned out, however, that the earth is not warming, and that the prognostications of impending disaster have been wrong. Why?

Evidently climatologists overlooked another factor. Developing nations like India and China are pumping tons of sulfur into the atmosphere by burning coal. Atmospheric sulfur cools the earth and offsets the effects of CO2, but if we remove the sulfur, we're told, the earth will warm very fast.

So how do we know that the climatologists know that? Well, we have to take their word on it. We have to trust them and place our faith in their competence.

They tell us it's science, but it sounds a lot like religion. Here's an excerpt from the Reuters article linked above:

Smoke belching from Asia's rapidly growing economies is largely responsible for a halt in global warming in the decade after 1998 because of sulphur's cooling effect, even though greenhouse gas emissions soared, a U.S. study said on Monday.

The paper raised the prospect of more rapid, pent-up climate change when emerging economies eventually crack down on pollution.

World temperatures did not rise from 1998 to 2008, while manmade emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuel grew by nearly a third, various data show.

The researchers from Boston and Harvard Universities and Finland's University of Turku said pollution, and specifically sulphur emissions, from coal-fueled growth in Asia was responsible for the cooling effect.

In other words, there is no global warming. What there is is an increase in both CO2 and sulfur emissions. The above article notes that warming will be unimpeded when third world countries crack down on sulfur pollution, a prospect that the article implausibly implies is inevitable and imminent.

Reading this, one wonders why climatologists aren't alarmed by the global cooling that will occur if developed countries limit their CO2 output while the third world continues to churn out sulfur. Isn't this really the most likely scenario?

One reason for their reticence, I'll bet, is that the climatological community knows that if they now start expressing alarm over imminent global cooling after all the panic over "hockey stick" increases in global temperatures they'll become a laughingstock and no one would ever believe another word they said.

Is it Ever Right to Lie?

Note: I just returned from a week in Guatemala and found that in a couple of the posts I had prepared to have my brother Bill post for me while I was away entire sections were transposed, rendering them incoherent.

Some readers may be tempted to opine that incoherence is nothing new here on Viewpoint, but, be that as it may, this was worse than usual, and was entirely my fault. In my rush to prepare for the trip I simply got careless.

Anyway, I'm reposting below the corrected version of what was, I hope, the most severely distorted one.

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When a group called Live Action used deception and subterfuge to surreptitiously record Planned Parenthood personnel violating the law there was some debate over the ethics of their tactics. Live Action members posed as prostitutes and pimps and lied about their purposes to PP staff in order to record the staffers giving advice that was clearly in violation of the law, but is it ever right to lie, in the service of what many consider to be a good cause, i.e. saving the lives of unborn children?

Catholic ethical philosopher Janet Smith argues at First Things that the answer is yes. This answer puts her in uncomfortable conflict with Thomas Aquinas (and also, though she doesn't mention him, with Immanuel Kant), nevertheless I think she's clearly correct.

There's a lot of solid thinking in her essay and the reader interested in the morality of lying should read the entire article. Here's a sample of her disagreement with Aquinas:

Aquinas has zero tolerance for false signification [communication], even to save an innocent life. According to his principles, it would be wrong to say to a Nazi seeking to kill Jews hiding in an attic: “There are no Jews in the attic.” He also maintained that it was wrong to cause someone to have a false opinion by telling the truth.

Thus I believe that it would violate Aquinas’ principles to use true speech to mislead Nazis. Someone who had no Jews in his attic, but who answers the door of his neighbor’s house where Jews in fact are hidden, cannot morally say, “There are no Jews in my house,” since he would be leading the Nazi to think falsely about reality. Similarly, a soldier can hide in the bushes to ambush his enemy, but he cannot place his empty tent strategically to deceive the enemy about his whereabouts, for that would be to lead another to think falsely about reality.

This rigorous view extends to the social uses of falsehood as well. Aquinas condemns all false representations of reality, including saying something false for the sake of amusement, ruling out what is known as a “jocose lie.” The same holds for dissimulation designed to smooth over awkward social situations or designed to calm the immature or deranged.

This does not mean that Aquinas holds that all false significations are mortal sins. Lying to the Nazi at the door, exaggerating a story for entertainment, and pretending to enjoy a meal that does not please all fall under the category of a venial sin. Nonetheless, by his way of thinking all false signification is a sin, and as such can never be employed.

Aquinas’ rigorism about uttering falsehoods is certainly cogent, but hard to reconcile with some of his other positions. Aquinas (and the Church) approve of killing someone for the sake of protecting innocent life as well as commandeering or destroying the property of another to protect other goods. Thus the question: Why shouldn’t Aquinas (and the Church) permit false signification uttered in order to protect innocent life and other important goods?

Good question. Consider this variation of an example that Kant employs: A man walking on a city street witnesses an attempted murder. The victim manages to break away and flee past the witness up an alley where she hides. The thug, knife in hand, pursues. When he gets to the witness he grabs him and demands at knifepoint that he tell him where the victim has gone.

Kant (and presumably Aquinas) insists that if the witness says anything he must tell the truth. It's absolutely wrong to lie. Now, suppose that the witness realizes that the victim is his teenage daughter. I submit, that it's morally preposterous to obligate the witness in such an instance to tell the thug where his daughter is hiding or to remain silent.

Anyway, despite my overall agreement with Smith I think she's mistaken about one part of her analysis. She draws a distinction between lying, which she thinks is absolutely wrong, and false signification, which she thinks may sometimes be justified:

Can the defense of some false signification be squared with the traditional absolute prohibition of lying? A close consideration of the analogy with the use of lethal force and the taking of property should help us see that the absolute prohibition can be retained. Neither Aquinas nor the Church understands the use of lethal force in defense of innocent life to be an “exception” to the prohibition of murder.

Nor does the taking or destroying of property belonging to another when necessary to avert some great evil function as an “exception” to the prohibition of theft. Murder is the direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being. Theft is taking something against the reasonable will of the owner, and a reasonable owner would approve of taking property to protect important goods.

Therefore, properly stated, although killing and the taking of property are sometimes morally permissible, the norms against murder and theft remain absolute, without exception. Similarly, I believe that the telling of some falsehoods and other forms of false signification are compatible with the absolute prohibition of lying.

The problem here, it seems to me, is that the examples she gives of killing/murder and taking/theft really are not analogous to the examples of false signification/lying. Not all killing is murder, but if one knowingly tells the Nazis there are no Jews in the attic when there are that is a lie. If a guest tells the host that he enjoyed the meal when he didn't that is a lie. Not only is it a lie, but, it seems to me (and to Smith) that it's the right thing to do. If so, then lying cannot be absolutely wrong.

One final thought tangential to the main theme of this post. Smith inadvertently raises a theological conundrum when at one point she uses an example of false signification from the Bible. She cites the account (Jn. 7:8-10) of Jesus leading his followers to believe that he was not going to attend the Feast of the Tabernacles and then, after they went without him, he went.

Did Jesus lie or did He change His mind? Christians will reject the former, but if they endorse the latter then it seems they also have to accept that Jesus in his human incarnation did not have exhaustive knowledge of the future. This will not sit well with those who believe that since Jesus was fully divine He was omniscient even though incarnated in a human body.

Perhaps there's a third alternative. I leave it to readers to suggest one.

All Men Are Created Equal

As I write this my neighborhood is awash in the sights and sounds of fireworks as Americans here and across the nation celebrate the anniversary of our independence and, by extension, the principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.

This is as it should be, of course, and yet there are two propositions in the Declaration that modern, secular Americans are implicitly celebrating but whose celebration makes no sense, at least not for them. The first is the claim that all men are created equal and the second is the claim that all men are endowed with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I say that these make no sense in a secularized, post-Christian nation because both of them are nonsense unless, as Thomas Jefferson insisted, we really have been created by a Creator. The only reason I can think of that would explain why so many who've abandoned the notion of a Creator nevertheless still cherish these ideas is that few people are willing, thoughtful, or consistent enough to follow their secularism to its logical endpoint.

Suppose we accept the prevailing view among our cultural elite that we're not intentionally created beings but rather the product of purely material forces acting randomly and blindly over long periods of time. Upon what, then, would we base a belief in the equality of all men or a belief in human rights?

Why should we think that all men are equal? The only sense in which people could be equal is in the eyes of God. If we're simply a product of chance and the laws of chemistry the idea that we are somehow equal, even under the law, is risible.

Moreover, where does the notion of inherent human rights come from? Why should we think that a human being has any rights at all other than what the state arbitrarily deigns to give him? Where do inherent rights come from? Why is any government, or indeed, anyone who has power, obligated to respect them?

Once the Creator has been banished to the nether regions of historical fantasy people will eventually come to believe that equality, dignity, and rights are all just as mythical and superstitious as the God in which they were grounded.

In other words, the belief in human equality, human dignity, and human rights cannot be supported and sustained by any worldview other than one that sees man as the purposeful creation of a personal God who deliberately endows us with those rights.

We can choose to abandon this God if we wish, as much of the West seems happy to do, but we do so at great peril. Let's not pretend that the choice to push God out of our public life will be free of consequences. Ask anyone who lived under communism or nazism in the 20th century what happens to equality and rights when a state seeks to live consistently with its atheism.

Such states always promise to replace the heaven in the hereafter with a heaven on earth. What they deliver, however, is almost always much more like hell.