Do We Have Free Will?

Florida State University philosophy professor Alfred Mele has an interesting piece on the topic of free will at Big Questions Online.

He looks at the neuroscientific experiments, such as those by Benjamin Libet, which have been adduced in support of the view that free will is an illusion and finds the evidence inconclusive. One of the distinctions he draws in his piece is between what he calls the "modest conception" of free will and the "ambitious conception."

Here's an excerpt from his article:

Why do you care about free will? I doubt that the ability to make spontaneous, unreasoned choices in experiments of the kind I’ve been discussing has a prominent place in your answer. Whatever answer you give will tell me something about what you mean by “free will.”

In my own research and writing, I’ve worked with two different but overlapping ways of understanding what “free will” means. One is more modest than the other, and I keep them both on the table; I don’t choose between them. As I see it, both encompass the ability to learn from our successes and mistakes and the ability to improve our behavior in light of what we learn. These abilities are important not only for personal development but also for social cohesiveness. Success and failure often depend on how other people respond to our actions.

According to a modest conception of free will, as long as you’re able to make rational, informed, decisions when you’re not being subjected to undue force and also are capable of acting on the basis of some of those decisions, you have free will – at least at those times. (Being threatened with a loaded gun is a good example of undue force.) According to a more ambitious view, something crucial must be added to these abilities: If you have free will, then alternative decisions are open to you in a way requiring that the natural laws that govern your brain activity sometimes give you at most a probability of deciding one way and a probability of deciding another way.

Imagine someone who is seriously considering cheating on his taxes while filling out his 1040. The ambitious view says that he can’t make a free decision about this unless there is a real chance – left open by the combination of everything that has already happened and the laws of nature – that he will decide to cheat and a real chance that he will decide to be honest.

People tend to find ambitious free will more exciting than its modest counterpart. So I focus on it here. Most people assume that the future is open in a certain way. As they see it, not only don’t we know now exactly what we will do next week, but it also is not determined now exactly what we will do then. What will happen is partly up to us in a way that it could not be if all our actions were already in the cards, as it were.

The existence of ambitious free will depends on the truth of this assumption. Have neuroscientists shown that the assumption is false? Absolutely not.

Mele goes on to explain this assertion. It's an interesting piece, especially for the philosophically inclined.

One thing he doesn't really get around to giving a satisfactory answer to, however, is the question he poses at the outset of the passage quoted above. Why is free will important to us?

I think the answer is, at least partly, this: If there is no free will (in Mele's "ambitious" sense) then several very unpleasant consequences follow. First, if our choices are determined for us by forces outside our control then no one deserves to be praised or blamed, rewarded or punished. Desert only is warranted to the extent that we are responsible for what we do, and we can only be responsible if we are in some sense able to choose.

Secondly, there can be no moral duties or obligations if we do not freely choose our actions. Right and wrong become meaningless, at least as moral terms, in a deterministic world. To say that one ought to do X is to imply that one can do X, but unless we are in some sense free we can only do what we are determined by our environment or our genetics to do.

Thirdly, there's no ground for human dignity. Our dignity, as the existentialists insisted, is rooted in our ability to choose our destiny. Take that ability away and we have no more dignity than any other mammal.

This doesn't mean that there aren't problems with free will. There certainly are. Perhaps the biggest is trying to understand what a genuinely free choice is like. Surely a free choice is not uncaused, but what causes it, does that cause determine it, and is that cause itself determined?

Despite such vexing questions, if we wish to hold on to notions of personal responsibility, moral duty, and human dignity we have to believe that in some sense, at some moments, there really is more than one possible future. There's a lot at stake.

The Closing of the Liberal Mind

When I was working my way through my undergraduate years universities were considered the one place you could go in our society where you could be sure debate was free and open and all ideas were appropriate topics for consideration. That, however, was then and this is now and now universities are rapidly earning a reputation as the most closed-minded citadels of bigotry in our culture.

Harvard professor Ruth Wisse elaborates in a column in the Wall Street Journal:

There was a time when people looking for intellectual debate turned away from politics to the university. Political backrooms bred slogans and bagmen; universities fostered educated discussion. But when students in the 1960s began occupying university property like the thugs of regimes America was fighting abroad, the venues gradually reversed. Open debate is now protected only in the polity: In universities, muggers prevail.

Assaults on intellectual and political freedom have been making headlines. Pressure from faculty egged on by Muslim groups induced Brandeis University last month not to grant Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the proponent of women's rights under Islam, an intended honorary degree at its convocation. This was a replay of 1994, when Brandeis faculty demanded that trustees rescind their decision to award an honorary degree to Jeane Kirkpatrick, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In each case, a faculty cabal joined by (let us charitably say) ignorant students promoted the value of repression over the values of America's liberal democracy.

Opponents of free speech have lately chalked up many such victories: New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly prevented from speaking at Brown University in November; a lecture by Charles Murray canceled by Azusa Pacific University in April; Condoleezza Rice, former secretary of state and national-security adviser under the George W. Bush administration, harassed earlier this month into declining the invitation by Rutgers University to address this year's convocation.

Most painful to me was the Harvard scene several years ago when the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, celebrating its 50th anniversary, accepted a donation in honor of its former head tutor Martin Peretz, whose contributions to the university include the chair in Yiddish I have been privileged to hold. His enemies on campus generated a "party against Marty" that forced him to walk a gauntlet of jeering students for having allegedly offended Islam, while putting others on notice that they had best not be perceived guilty of association with him.

Universities have not only failed to stand up to those who limit debate, they have played a part in encouraging them. The modish commitment to so-called diversity replaces the ideal of guaranteed equal treatment of individuals with guaranteed group preferences in hiring and curricular offerings.

There's much more at the link. The left uses the American commitment to free speech and the first amendment like the Greeks used the wooden horse at Troy. Free speech is nothing more than a tool to be used as long as it's useful, but as soon as the left has acquired sufficient power they discard the tool and deny it to everyone else. It's a classically fascist tactic and it's rampant on the left.

It'll strike some as strange, perhaps, that one place you can go today and advance almost any idea, as long as it's done respectfully and tastefully, is almost any Christian church. Generally speaking churches are among the most open venues for the free exchange of ideas in our culture, and the reason is not hard to discern. When one believes that those with whom one disagrees are nevertheless people loved and created by God in his image, one is duty-bound to treat them and their ideas with respect.

Moreover, when one has been inculcated with the ideals of humility and kindness, when one believes that God expects this of them in their dealings with others, one is less likely to be arrogant and insulting.

As the modern university drifts further and further from these ideals we might expect that it will become more and more intolerant while, ironically enough, defending its intolerance in the name of tolerance.

Life After Life

Here's a question for you to mull over: Whatever your view of global ontology, i.e. the ultimate nature of reality, what would it do to that view if you encountered very persuasive evidence that many young children - as young as two years of age - show signs of remembering having had a past life? Suppose further that the persons they remember being were real individuals and that the child "remembered" details of the person's life that would have been impossible for the child to have heard or learned in any other way.

I was extremely skeptical of such a possibility until I started reading the book Return to Life:Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives by Dr. James Tucker. Tucker is a psychiatrist on the faculty of University of Virginia (see his CV here) and has researched thousands of such cases. He talks about some of them in this book in such sober, non-sensationalistic tones that the cumulative effect is to cause one to think that whatever the explanation of these cases is, it's not fraud and it's not childhood fantasy.

One case he investigated was of a four year-old boy who showed signs at the age of twenty two months of remembering being a pilot named James who was shot down at Iwo Jima in WWII. By the time the boy was four his parents had documented that their son had stated the pilot's name, the kind of aircraft he flew, where the plane was hit, the ship it flew from, and the name of other men on the ship. He had recurring nightmares about being trapped in the burning plane as it crashed into the sea.

When Tucker met the parents they admitted to being highly skeptical about all this. The father had deep Christian religious beliefs that were at odds with such phenomena and judged them at first to be spurious. By the time they met with Tucker they were no longer so sure.

As Tucker pursued the case he found that all of the details, and more, checked out or were very close to the historical facts. Reading Tucker's description of his investigation was uncanny.

I subsequently came across a piece in last November's Scientific American by a skeptical materialist named Jesse Bering who examined the work of Dr. Tucker's mentor in this field, a man named Ian Stevenson who died in 2007. Bering had to admit that the phenomenon Stevenson studied was so widespread and so startling that, although he's not yet convinced, he finds it very difficult to discount the possibility that somehow the mind of deceased persons can inhabit, at least for a time, the body of a child.

It should be noted that as impressive as Stevenson's work was Tucker's is apparently even moreso.

Even though I'm not a materialist I find myself in much the same position as Bering. I'm reluctant to believe in what amounts to a kind of limited reincarnation, but I'm too impressed by the evidence to rule it out. I'd welcome any thoughts from anyone who has read Tucker's book.

Here's the link to the Sci Am article.

Goldilocks Planet

Did you know that were there no moon, or if the moon we have were not the size it is, life would not exist on the earth?

Did you know that on a rocky planet with no plate tectonics life could not develop into an advanced form?

You probably knew that were there no water life would not exist, but do you know that water is necessary for life in a multitude of ways having nothing to do with hydrating our bodies?

Biochemist Michael Denton summarizes a few of the ways in which all of these factors are necessary for life and why at least some scientists think that planets that can support life might prove to be extremely rare in the cosmos in an article at Evolution News and Views. Life requires so many properties of a planet to be just right that the earth is sometimes referred to as a Goldilocks planet, because it meets all of these requirements.

The article is not long and it's very informative. Denton is the author of the book Nature's Destiny which goes into a lot more detail on the myriad ways the earth and the chemical properties of carbon, water, and oxygen are so ideally suited for life. Were the properties of these substances different from what they are in any number of very minor ways life simply could not exist.

The post at the link is good. The book is great.

Boko Haram

The president is responding to the atrocity committed by the Islamist Boko Haram in Nigeria in what is probably the most appropriate fashion. Boko Haram kidnapped and is selling into slavery almost 300 Nigerian schoolgirls, most of whom are Christian.

One would like to see a couple of teams of special ops sent there to hunt these savages down and rescue the girls, but Nigeria certainly isn't the only place in the world where atrocities are being committed against children. In Syria they're being gassed and murdered every day by their government, and yet I think it would be a grave mistake to get involved in Syria, so how would we justify getting militarily involved in Nigeria?

One difference, of course, is that we have a chance of succeeding in Nigeria in a way that we don't in Syria. In Syria whichever side wins we lose. There are other powers - Russia, Iran - supporting the government in Syria who would have to be confronted should we help the rebels. Moreover, the rebels are aligned with al Qaeda, so helping the rebels would be helping al Qaeda. It's a mess. In Nigeria it's much more clear-cut. No one supports Boko Haram except al Qaeda.

President Obama is sending forensics resources to assist the Nigerian military in tracking down the perpetrators of this and other horrors in Nigeria, but he's not sending troops (as far as we know) and at this point that seems about right, at least to me.

What's not right, and, in fact, is very unfortunate, is that several years ago the FBI, CIA and others in the intelligence community urged the State Department under Hillary Clinton to place Boko Haram on the list of terrorist organizations, but Ms Clinton refused to do it. Had she done so, more resources would have been brought to bear earlier to curtail the activities of this group.

Her failure to see the threat posed by this organization is not unlike her failure to see the threat posed to our embassy personnel in Benghazi.

Now Ms Clinton is going around calling for an international push to find these girls. One might ask, "What difference, at this point, does it make?"

Poor Business Climate

The liberal Brookings Institute has come out with a study that shows that in the last six years, for the first time in history, more businesses have gone belly up than have started up.

From the link:

Business churning and new firm formations have been on a persistent decline during the last few decades, and the pace of net job creation has been subdued. This decline has been documented across a broad range of sectors in the U.S. economy, even in high-tech.

In short, we confirm that the previously documented declines in business dynamism in the U.S. overall are a pervasive force throughout the country geographically.

In fact, we show that dynamism has declined in all fifty states and in all but a handful of the more than three hundred and sixty U.S. metropolitan areas during the last three decades. Moreover, the performance of business dynamism across the states and metros has become increasingly similar over time. In other words, the national decline in business dynamism has been a widely shared experience.

While the reasons explaining this decline are still unknown, if it persists, it implies a continuation of slow growth for the indefinite future, unless for equally unknown reasons or by virtue of entrepreneurship-enhancing policies (such as liberalized entry of high-skilled immigrants), these trends are reversed.

Okay, far be it from me to tell economists that they're being slightly disingenuous when they say that the reasons for the poor business performance are unknown, but maybe the onerous regulations on business, high taxes, and high costs of health care might be at least part of the reason more businesses fail than start up. The government's regulatory regime sets so many hurdles, presents entrepreneurs with so many hoops to jump through, and imposes so many costs, that it's very difficult for many of them to make a go of it.

Even liberals like those who run New York state believe this. Recently the state has been running radio advertisements encouraging businesses to start up in New York by offering temporary low tax rates as an incentive. And, of course, businesses are flocking to Texas because the tax climate there is so favorable to businesses and indivduals. Texas has no corporate income tax and no individual income tax, and it's thriving.

There should be a lesson in this for our politicians in Washington and elsewhere, but for some reason not enough of them seem to be able to grasp it.

The Left and the Poor

Caleb Rossiter is a bona fide leftist and, his ideology notwithstanding, an adamant global-warming skeptic. He's also perplexed at his fellow lefties' claims to care about the poor while at the same time opposing fossil fuel development. He makes a good case. Here's part of it:

I've spent my life on the foreign-policy left. I opposed the Vietnam War, U.S. intervention in Central America in the 1980s and our invasion of Iraq. I have headed a group trying to block U.S. arms and training for "friendly" dictators, and I have written books about how U.S. policy in the developing world is neocolonial.

But I oppose my allies' well-meaning campaign for "climate justice." More than 230 organizations, including Africa Action and Oxfam, want industrialized countries to pay "reparations" to African governments for droughts, rising sea levels and other alleged results of what Ugandan strongman Yoweri Museveni calls "climate aggression." And I oppose the campaign even more for trying to deny to Africans the reliable electricity—and thus the economic development and extended years of life—that fossil fuels can bring.

The left wants to stop industrialization—even if the hypothesis of catastrophic, man-made global warming is false. John Feffer, my colleague at the Institute for Policy Studies, wrote in the Dec. 8, 2009, Huffington Post that "even if the mercury weren't rising" we should bring "the developing world into the postindustrial age in a sustainable manner." He sees the "climate crisis [as] precisely the giant lever with which we can, following Archimedes, move the world in a greener, more equitable direction."

I started to suspect that the climate-change data were dubious a decade ago while teaching statistics. Computer models used by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to determine the cause of the six-tenths of one degree Fahrenheit rise in global temperature from 1980 to 2000 could not statistically separate fossil-fueled and natural trends.

Then, as now, the computer models simply built in the assumption that fossil fuels are the culprit when temperatures rise, even though a similar warming took place from 1900 to 1940, before fossil fuels could have caused it. The IPCC also claims that the warming, whatever its cause, has slightly increased the length of droughts, the frequency of floods, the intensity of storms, and the rising of sea levels, projecting that these impacts will accelerate disastrously. Yet even the IPCC acknowledges that the average global temperature today remains unchanged since 2000, and did not rise one degree as the models predicted.

But it is as an Africanist, rather than a statistician, that I object most strongly to "climate justice." Where is the justice for Africans when universities divest from energy companies and thus weaken their ability to explore for resources in Africa? Where is the justice when the U.S. discourages World Bank funding for electricity-generation projects in Africa that involve fossil fuels, and when the European Union places a "global warming" tax on cargo flights importing perishable African goods? Even if the wildest claims about the current impact of fossil fuels on the environment and the models predicting the future impact all prove true and accurate, Africa should be exempted from global restraints as it seeks to modernize.

Mindful of the benefits, the Obama administration's Power Africa proposal and the World Bank are trying to double African access to electricity. But they have been hamstrung by the opposition of their political base to fossil fuels—even though off-grid and renewable power from the sun, tides and wind is still too unreliable, too hard to transmit, and way too expensive for Africa to build and maintain as its primary source of power.

Rossiter closes with this:

In 2010 the left tried to block a World Bank loan for a new coal-fired plant in South Africa. Fortunately, the loan was approved (with the U.S. abstaining). The drive to provide electricity for the poor has been perhaps the greatest achievement of South Africa's post-apartheid governments....How terrible to think that so many people in the West would rather block such success stories in the name of unproved science.

One can try to help the poor or one can oppose fossil fuels, but one cannot do both, at least not effectively.

One need not even think about the effect leftists' energy policies have on African poor. Consider how the less well-off in America would fare if the left had their way and limited fossil fuel production even more than they have already by refusing to grant drilling permits on federal lands and offshore.

When fossil fuels are limited their cost goes up. That raises the price of everything that relies on gasoline either in its production or its delivery, which is just about everything. When the price of fuel goes up everything becomes more expensive - food, heating, transportation, rent - and those who live on the margin with very little financial cushion are hurt the most by any increase in prices. The best way to help the poor is to bring down energy costs and the best way to do that is to increase supply.

Not only would this be a boon the world's poor, it would remove our dependence on foreign (Arab) oil, it would enable us to supply Europe's need in the event Russia cuts them off, and it would go a long way to paying down our national debt.

The left maintains that green energy can supply the needs of the poor in Africa and elsewhere, but green energy is even more expensive than fossil fuels. Either the left is so short-sighted that they haven't taken into account the effect of their policies on the poor, or their professed concern for the poor is a sham, or both.

When Putin Looks at the U.S.

Some wonder why Vladimir Putin is emboldened now, at this point in history, to seize Crimea from Ukraine and to threaten to seize the entire country of Ukraine, to be followed, perhaps, by Moldova and who knows what else.

The answer is, I think, that he's doing it because he can. He looks about him and sees nothing to stop him. Europe was never much of a factor in deterring Soviet and Russian ambitions, but a United States of enormous economic and military power once was. Unfortunately, under the current administration, the U.S. is fading as a power in both respects, and Putin is well-aware of the fact.

He sees us threaten Iran, and do nothing. He sees us threaten Syria, and do nothing. He sees us threaten the perpetrators of the Benghazi attack, and do nothing. He sees us cutting our military and incurring crushing debt, and he rightly calculates that we lack both the clout and certainly the will to contest his moves in Eastern Europe.

In other words, when Putin looked at America under Mr. Bush he, perhaps, saw this:

Now, it seems, Putin looks at America under Mr. Obama and sees this:

If I were Ukrainian I don't think I'd feel much confidence in Pajama Boy's desire or ability to dissuade Mr. Putin from carrying out his designs on my country.

It's remarkable that the lesson seems so hard to learn, but perhaps Mr. Obama is finally learning it. Weakness invites conflict. The best way to deter people from depredating their neighbors is to send the message that such behavior will be costly, and to be economically and militarily powerful enough to make the threat credible. The best way to prevent war is to be prepared for it.

When muggers know that their potential adversary looks like the top photo they behave circumspectly. When they know that their adversary looks like the bottom photo they hold him in derision.

It is because the U.S. leadership is being held in derision by Mr. Putin that Mr. Obama has had to abandon the golf course to take a tour of Asian nations whose leaders are alarmed that we've lost the will to keep our commitments to them. After watching the President renege on one threat after another in the Middle East, the Taiwanese, South Koreans and Japanese must be very concerned that this is a man who makes improvident promises which he shouldn't have made in the first place, but which, once made, he doesn't keep and who therefore can hardly be counted on to keep promises made by previous administrations.

Who can blame them?

Accounting for Fine-Tuning

A physicist at MIT named Alan Lightman, in the course of reviewing a book on science, religion and atheism, discusses the significance of cosmic fine-tuning. He writes:

There is one scientific conundrum that practically screams out the limitations of both science and religion. And that is the “fine tuning” problem. For the past 50 years or so, physicists have become more and more aware that various fundamental parameters of our universe appear to be fine-tuned to allow the emergence of life — not only life as we know it but life of any kind.

For example, if the nuclear force were slightly stronger than it is, then all of the hydrogen atoms in the infant universe would have fused with other hydrogen atoms to make helium, and there would be no hydrogen left. No hydrogen means no water. On the other hand, if the nuclear force were substantially weaker than it is, then the complex atoms needed for biology could not hold together.

In another, even more striking example, if the cosmic “dark energy” discovered 15 years ago were a little denser than it actually is, our universe would have expanded so rapidly that matter could never have pulled itself together to form stars. And if the dark energy were a little smaller, the universe would have collapsed long before stars had time to form. Atoms are made in stars. Without stars there would be no atoms and no life.

So, the question is: Why? Why do these parameters lie in the narrow range that allows life? There are three possibilities: First, there might be some as-yet-unknown physics that requires these parameters to be what they are. But this explanation is highly questionable — why should the laws of physics care about the emergence of life? Second possibility: God created the universe, God wanted life (for whatever reasons), so God designed the universe so that it would allow life. Third possibility, and the one favored by many physicists today: Our universe is one of zillions of different universes with a huge range of parameters, including many different values for the strength of the nuclear force and the density of dark energy.

Some universes have stars and planets, some do not. Some harbor life, some do not. In this scenario, our universe is simply an accident. If our particular universe did not have the right parameters to allow the emergence of life, we wouldn’t be here to talk about it....Unfortunately, it is almost certain that we cannot prove the existence of these other universes. We must accept their existence as a matter of faith.

And here we come to the fascinating irony of the fine-tuning problem. Both the theological explanation and the scientific explanation require faith. To be sure, there are huge differences between science and religion. Religion knows about the transcendent experience. Science knows about the structure of DNA and the orbits of planets. Religion gathers its knowledge largely by personal testament. Science gathers its knowledge by repeated experiments and mathematical calculations, and has been enormously successful in explaining much of the physical universe. But, in the manner I have described, faith enters into both enterprises.

This is true and also ironic because the greater degree of faith must be possessed by the side that claims that it doesn't rely on faith - the naturalist who embraces the multiverse hypothesis (Lightman's third option above). In order to escape the conclusion that the universe is astonishingly calibrated to be life-permitting and thus the product of an intelligent agent, the naturalist latches onto a theory for which there's no empirical evidence. Moreover, it's hard to imagine how evidence of other universes could even be possible.

In science it's always preferable to favor the explanation which is simplest and for which there is the most evidence. The multiverse hypothesis which posits a near infinite ensemble of other universes is neither simpler nor supported by more evidence than the hypothesis that a single intelligent agent designed the universe in which we live.

The skeptic philosopher David Hume taught us that we should always base our beliefs on our experience. We have a uniform experience of fine-tuning being the work of minds. We have no experience of other universes. Thus, reason indicates that belief in a multiverse is irrational given an alternative hypothesis based on experience.

Nor do we have any idea what would be generating these other worlds and where the laws came from that govern their production. In other words, what explains the multiverse?

I doubt very much, though of course I can't prove it, that any scientist or philosopher would promote the idea of a multiverse were it not for the need to avoid the conclusion that a transcendent designer of the cosmos exists. The theory has about it a whiff of ad hocness and the strong scent of desperation.

Judging People by Their Skin Color

Perhaps no group of people in our society is quicker to judge people on the basis of their skin color and ethnicity than liberal academics. In some institutions of higher learning you're discredited and discounted simply by virtue of your race. It's grossly unjust, and you might think that in this day and age we'd know better, but liberals, evidently, are slow learners.

One Princeton freshman named Tal Fortgang has had enough of the stupidity of liberal assumptions about race. He's tired of being admonished by the self-righteous racists on campus to "Check his privilege," and he has chosen to express his contempt for this phrase and those who invoke it in a letter to The Princeton Tory.

It's so good I've copied it here:

There is a phrase that floats around college campuses, Princeton being no exception, that threatens to strike down opinions without regard for their merits, but rather solely on the basis of the person that voiced them. “Check your privilege,” the saying goes, and I have been reprimanded by it several times this year.

The phrase, handed down by my moral superiors, descends recklessly, like an Obama-sanctioned drone, and aims laser-like at my pinkish-peach complexion, my maleness, and the nerve I displayed in offering an opinion rooted in a personal Weltanschauung. “Check your privilege,” they tell me in a command that teeters between an imposition to actually explore how I got where I am, and a reminder that I ought to feel personally apologetic because white males seem to pull most of the strings in the world.

I do not accuse those who “check” me and my perspective of overt racism, although the phrase, which assumes that simply because I belong to a certain ethnic group I should be judged collectively with it, toes that line. But I do condemn them for diminishing everything I have personally accomplished, all the hard work I have done in my life, and for ascribing all the fruit I reap not to the seeds I sow but to some invisible patron saint of white maleness who places it out for me before I even arrive.

Furthermore, I condemn them for casting the equal protection clause, indeed the very idea of a meritocracy, as a myth, and for declaring that we are all governed by invisible forces (some would call them “stigmas” or “societal norms”), that our nation runs on racist and sexist conspiracies. Forget “you didn’t build that;” check your privilege and realize that nothing you have accomplished is real.

But they can’t be telling me that everything I’ve done with my life can be credited to the racist patriarchy holding my hand throughout my years of education and eventually guiding me into Princeton. Even that is too extreme. So to find out what they are saying, I decided to take their advice. I actually went and checked the origins of my privileged existence, to empathize with those whose underdog stories I can’t possibly comprehend. I have unearthed some examples of the privilege with which my family was blessed, and now I think I better understand those who assure me that skin color allowed my family and I to flourish today.

Perhaps it’s the privilege my grandfather and his brother had to flee their home as teenagers when the Nazis invaded Poland, leaving their mother and five younger siblings behind, running and running until they reached a Displaced Persons camp in Siberia, where they would do years of hard labor in the bitter cold until World War II ended. Maybe it was the privilege my grandfather had of taking on the local Rabbi’s work in that DP camp, telling him that the spiritual leader shouldn’t do hard work, but should save his energy to pass Jewish tradition along to those who might survive. Perhaps it was the privilege my great-grandmother and those five great-aunts and uncles I never knew had of being shot into an open grave outside their hometown. Maybe that’s my privilege.

Or maybe it’s the privilege my grandmother had of spending weeks upon weeks on a death march through Polish forests in subzero temperatures, one of just a handful to survive, only to be put in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where she would have died but for the Allied forces who liberated her and helped her regain her health when her weight dwindled to barely 80 pounds.

Perhaps my privilege is that those two resilient individuals came to America with no money and no English, obtained citizenship, learned the language and met each other; that my grandfather started a humble wicker basket business with nothing but long hours, an idea, and an iron will—to paraphrase the man I never met: “I escaped Hitler. Some business troubles are going to ruin me?” Maybe my privilege is that they worked hard enough to raise four children, and to send them to Jewish day school and eventually City College.

Perhaps it was my privilege that my own father worked hard enough in City College to earn a spot at a top graduate school, got a good job, and for 25 years got up well before the crack of dawn, sacrificing precious time he wanted to spend with those he valued most—his wife and kids—to earn that living. I can say with certainty there was no legacy involved in any of his accomplishments. The wicker business just isn’t that influential. Now would you say that we’ve been really privileged? That our success has been gift-wrapped?

That’s the problem with calling someone out for the “privilege” which you assume has defined their narrative. You don’t know what their struggles have been, what they may have gone through to be where they are. Assuming they’ve benefited from “power systems” or other conspiratorial imaginary institutions denies them credit for all they’ve done, things of which you may not even conceive. You don’t know whose father died defending your freedom. You don’t know whose mother escaped oppression. You don’t know who conquered their demons, or may still be conquering them now.

The truth is, though, that I have been exceptionally privileged in my life, albeit not in the way any detractors would have it.

It has been my distinct privilege that my grandparents came to America. First, that there was a place at all that would take them from the ruins of Europe. And second, that such a place was one where they could legally enter, learn the language, and acclimate to a society that ultimately allowed them to flourish.

It was their privilege to come to a country that grants equal protection under the law to its citizens, that cares not about religion or race, but the content of your character.

It was my privilege that my grandfather was blessed with resolve and an entrepreneurial spirit, and that he was lucky enough to come to the place where he could realize the dream of giving his children a better life than he had.

But far more important for me than his attributes was the legacy he sought to pass along, which forms the basis of what detractors call my “privilege,” but which actually should be praised as one of altruism and self-sacrifice. Those who came before us suffered for the sake of giving us a better life. When we similarly sacrifice for our descendents by caring for the planet, it’s called “environmentalism,” and is applauded. But when we do it by passing along property and a set of values, it’s called “privilege.” (And when we do it by raising questions about our crippling national debt, we’re called Tea Party radicals.) Such sacrifice of any form shouldn’t be scorned, but admired.

My exploration did yield some results. I recognize that it was my parents’ privilege and now my own that there is such a thing as an American dream which is attainable even for a penniless Jewish immigrant.

I am privileged that values like faith and education were passed along to me. My grandparents played an active role in my parents’ education, and some of my earliest memories included learning the Hebrew alphabet with my Dad. It’s been made clear to me that education begins in the home, and the importance of parents’ involvement with their kids’ education—from mathematics to morality—cannot be overstated. It’s not a matter of white or black, male or female or any other division which we seek, but a matter of the values we pass along, the legacy we leave, that perpetuates “privilege.” And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Behind every success, large or small, there is a story, and it isn’t always told by sex or skin color. My appearance certainly doesn’t tell the whole story, and to assume that it does and that I should apologize for it is insulting. While I haven’t done everything for myself up to this point in my life, someone sacrificed themselves so that I can lead a better life. But that is a legacy I am proud of.

I have checked my privilege. And I apologize for nothing.

If more people had Fortgang's moxie political correctness would be a much less insidious feature of our culture. I imagine that the man who dreamed of the day when we'd all be judged by the content of our character rather than the color of our skin is very disappointed in the way things have turned out.

Graduation Gift

Are you pondering what to get a friend or family member who's graduating this spring? Are you planning on going to the beach and want to take along some good beach reading? Let me humbly recommend my novel In the Absence of God. It's a fine gift for the graduate who enjoys reading, especially if the graduate is of a philosophical frame of mind.

In the Absence of God is a book about students and their professors. It's a book about sports. It's a love story. It's a crime story. It's a book of philosophical ideas about God and the consequences of eliminating God from our lives.

An acquaintance of mine told me the other night that once he got about halfway through the book he couldn't put it down. It kept him up until 3:00 a.m.

A student told me a few weeks ago that she was completely surprised by the story line and found herself dialoguing with the characters as they dialogued with each other.

You can read more about the book by clicking on the link at the upper right side of the page. You can find it at Amazon and at Barnes and Noble (It's available in paperback, kindle, and nook) and also through my favorite bookstore Hearts and Minds.

If you've already read it and you liked it (how could you not?) please tell others about it. Also, if you're in the Mid-Atlantic area of the U.S. and would like me to come and speak about the book please feel free to contact me through the "Contact Us" button above. Thanks.

Joe Klein?!

Joe Klein is a very liberal reporter from Time Magazine and even he is frustrated by the state of journalism at liberal television outlets like CNN and MSNBC:

The audience squirmed when Klein stated that Fox is the only place you can go at 6:00 to get straight news, but the audience reaction simply reflects the fact that so many people have never actually watched Fox. It really is the only one of the cable networks that presents the news as it should be presented.

It's true that the shows that come after 6:00 slant conservative either somewhat or a lot, and that some of the hosts are pretty hard to watch, even if the viewer is conservative (I'm thinking of Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity in particular), but Fox's news shows are pretty much straight down the middle. Besides, as bad as Hannity and O'Reilly are they're certainly no worse than Chris Matthews, Ed Shultz, and the execrable Al Sharpton at MSNBC.

Racism, Real and Imagined

The nation is all aflutter over Cliven Bundy, Donald Sterling, and American racism. I'd like to throw in my two cents:

First, it's amazing to me that some people are concluding that the United States is still a racist country. How they can say this when the condemnation of Sterling has been virtually universal is beyond me. If the United States was a racist country then a lot of people would have just yawned. The outrage suggests that racism, at least public racism, is no longer tolerated in this society.

The lefty media, nevertheless, seems so desperate to find racism in American culture that they seized on the perfectly innocent but awkward sentiments of an elderly rancher named Cliven Bundy as an example of it. This was an exercise in absurdity. Bundy's only offense was social maladroitness. He's labelled a racist because he used the word "Negro" and "Mexicans," and wondered, clumsily to be sure, whether poor blacks were better off under slavery than they are if they're being subsidized by the government.

This was certainly an inept way to frame the question, but the essence of the query itself is legitimate: Are poor blacks as a whole better off today after sixty years of a war on poverty than they were before so many of them became wards of the state? In many ways the answer is surely no, and that's what Bundy was trying to say. The media, however, tried to burn him at the stake of political correctness for the sin of being terminologically unfashionable.

To criticize him for calling blacks "negroes" or calling Mexicans "Mexicans" is asinine. Martin Luther King called his co-racialists "negroes" and Mexicans are, well, Mexicans. People who made a big deal out of this, including some on the right like Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck, need to grow up.

As racists go, Donald Sterling, on the other hand, is the real deal, at least if the tape of his tirade with his girlfriend is genuine. If it is, Sterling's views are as bizarre as they are outrageous, but all they really demonstrate is that there are still among us a few octogenarian white racists with a lot of money, just as there are octogenarian black racists with a lot of money.

The fascinating thing about the Sterling brouhaha is that his racial views have been an open secret for years, but the media never said much about it. Indeed, he was to be awarded an NAACP lifetime achievement award in May even though he was a known bigot.

Why was he allowed to get away with his bigotry for so long? One reasonable guess is that he once supported Democrat candidates and causes. As anyone can attest who has observed the relatively forbearing media reaction to the fatuous remarks by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid - and the explicitly racist remarks by then Senator Joe Biden - about candidate Obama, as well as Bill Clinton's one man war on women, being on the right team earns one a lot of grace among liberals.

Media Finally Faces Reality

Michael Goodwin at The New York Post recounts the media's role in creating and propping up a failed presidency. After citing a few examples of critical stories in a formerly fawning media, Goodwin says this:

These accounts and others like them amount to an autopsy of a failed presidency, but the process won’t be complete unless it is completely honest. To meet that test, the Times, other liberal news organizations and leading Democrats, in and out of office, must come to grips with their own failures, as well.

Obama had a free hand to make a mess because they gave it to him. They cheered him on, supporting him with unprecedented gobs of money and near-unanimous votes. They said “aye” to any cockamamie concept he came up with, echoed his demonization of critics and helped steamroll unpopular and unworkable ideas into reality.

Some of his backers knew better, and said so privately, but publicly they were all in. Whether it was ObamaCare, his anti-Israel position or the soft-shoe shuffle around the Iranian nuke crisis, they lacked the courage to object.

They said nothing as Obama went on foreign apology tours and stood silent as our allies warned of disastrous consequences. Even now, despite protests from a succession of Pentagon leaders, former Democratic defense hawks are helping Obama hollow out our military as Russia and China expand theirs and al Qaeda extends its footprint.

A king is no king without a court, and Obama has not lacked for lackeys. The system of checks and balances is written into the Constitution, but it is the everyday behavior of Americans of good will that makes the system work.

That system broke down under Obama, and the blame starts with the media. By giving the president the benefit of the doubt at every turn, by making excuses to explain away fiascos, by ignoring corruption, by buying the White House line that his critics were motivated by pure politics or racism, the Times and other organizations played the role of bartender to a man on a bender.

Even worse, they joined the party, forgetting the lessons of history as well as their own responsibilities to put a check on power. A purpose of a free press is to hold government accountable, but there is no fallback when the watchdog voluntarily chooses to be a lapdog.

The sycophancy was not lost on other politicians and private citizens. Taking their cue from the media, they, too, bit their tongues and went along as the president led the nation astray and misread foreign threats.

From the start, support for Obama often had a cult-like atmosphere. He sensed it, began to believe it and became comfortable demanding total agreement as the price for the favor of his leadership.

That he is now the imperial president he used to bemoan is no long­er in dispute. The milking of perks, from golf trips to Florida to European vacations for the first lady, is shockingly vulgar, but not a peep of protest comes from his supporters.

The IRS becomes a political enforcer, but that, too, is accepted because nobody will risk their access by telling Obama no. You are either with him or you are his enemy.

Out of fear and favor, they abdicated their duty to the nation, and they must share the burden of history’s verdict. After all, America’s decline happened on their watch, too.

Mr. Obama, we were assured by a starstruck media, would be the political equivalent of Jackie Robinson, but Robinson earned his way into baseball history through his talent. Mr. Obama is not Jackie Robinson. He's more like Chauncey Gardner in the movie Being There. This is not so much a criticism of Barack Obama as it is of a media that elevated him to a role for which he was singularly unprepared.

The media was instrumental in getting a man elected to our nation's highest office who had no qualifications for the job and whose resumé, what he was willing to reveal of it, showed no genuine accomplishments. He had never been in a leadership position, never run anything, lacked any real experience in government or foreign policy, and never even had a serious job in the private sector. It was almost inevitable that he would founder and make a mess of both our relationships abroad and our economic and social life at home. The media by promoting him as a political messiah set him up for failure.

Now they seem to be giving up on Mr. Obama and preparing to do the same thing all over again with Hillary Clinton. What a country.

Punish the Rich

The new tome by Thomas Picketty, a French economist, has created a flurry of excitement on the Left because, inter alia, Picketty endorses a confiscatory tax on wealth in order to meliorate the huge disparity in income between the rich and everyone else.

I haven't read Picketty's book - it's 600 pages long - but apparently the 80% tax rate he endorses is not designed to bring in new revenue to the treasury since he acknowledges that it won't. Its intent, he admits, is to insure that there aren't any rich people.

Daniel Shuchman reviews Piketty's book at The Wall Street Journal. He writes:

So what is to be done? Mr. Piketty urges an 80% tax rate on incomes starting at "$500,000 or $1 million." This is not to raise money for education or to increase unemployment benefits. Quite the contrary, he does not expect such a tax to bring in much revenue, because its purpose is simply "to put an end to such incomes." It will also be necessary to impose a 50%-60% tax rate on incomes as low as $200,000 to develop "the meager US social state." There must be an annual wealth tax as high as 10% on the largest fortunes and a one-time assessment as high as 20% on much lower levels of existing wealth.

I'm no economist but you don't have to be one to predict what such thievery by the government would do. Every one of those wealthy targets would take their money offshore. There would be an enormous flight of capital which would mean less money for capital improvements and paying employees. Unemployment would rise and the nation's economic infrastructure would deteriorate. All this not to help anyone, but just to punish people. Seizing the wealth of the rich has been the Left's dream ever since Marx, and they'll keep bringing it up, just like they have done with socialized medicine, until they someday achieve the political power to implement it. Achieving what's best for the country is not their goal. Their goal is to destroy the rich for no reason other than they're rich.

Picketty's candid admission quoted above is shared almost universally among leftists. For them it's a moral crusade although why people who are mostly secularists think there's anything "wrong" with being rich is an interesting question in itself.

Meanwhile, Paul Krugman, a southpaw economist who writes for the New York Times, who decries income disparity, who praises Picketty's book, and who himself dreams of "redistributing the wealth," has taken a sinecure at CUNY for a hefty $225,000 a year.

These folks on the Left must be tone deaf to both hypocrisy and irony. The role for which Krugman will be paid such a princely sum, a stipend the average New Yorker would have to work years to accumulate, is ostensibly to study, of all things, income inequality.

He'll certainly be well-situated to research it, and he can be depended upon to declare what a terrible thing it is while happily perpetuating it.

Craig-Carroll Debate

A couple of weeks ago Christian philosopher William Lane Craig debated naturalist cosmologist Sean Carroll on the question whether theism or atheism is the best explanation for the existence and nature of our universe. It was a fascinating exchange, sometimes a bit too technical, but often accessible enough to laypersons to make it edifying.

If you're not inclined to watch the whole thing I recommend Craig's initial presentation of the kalam cosmological and the teleological arguments. His presentation is succinct and lucid.

Craig usually makes short work of his debate opponents but Carroll was much more formidable than anyone I've seen Craig debate in the past. Even so, I don't think Carroll, for all his brilliance and eloquence, really came to grips with Craig's arguments, but others will certainly have a different take on it.

White Privilege, White Guilt

Dennis Prager opens a recent column at NRO with a provocative image:

When Americans over the age of, let us say, 45 look at any of the iconic paintings of America’s Founders — the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the signing of the Constitution, George Washington crossing the Delaware, any of the individual portraits of the Founders — what do they see?

They see great men founding a great country.

If you ask many recent college graduates what they see when they look at these paintings, the chances are that it is something entirely different.

They are apt to see rich, white males who are not great and who did not found a great country. And for many, it is worse than that. These men are not only not great; they are morally quite flawed in that they were slaveholders, or at least founded a country based on slavery. Moreover, they were not only all racists — they were all sexists, who restricted the vote to males. And they were rich men who were primarily concerned with protecting their wealth, which is why they restricted the vote to landowners.

In the past, Americans overwhelmingly saw the images of our Founders as pictures of greatness. Increasingly, only conservatives do. More and more Americans — the entire Left and many of those who attended universities and were indoctrinated by left-wing professors — now see rich, white, self-interested males.

The left-wing trinity of race, gender, class has prevailed. The new dividing lines are no longer good and bad or excellent and mediocre but white and non-white, male and female, and rich and poor. Instead of seeing great human beings in those paintings of the Founders, Americans have been taught to see rich, white (meaning by definition selfish, bigoted, racist, sexist) males.

In colleges throughout America students are taught to have disdain for the white race. I know this sounds incredible, or at least exaggerated. It is neither.

Prager supports this claim with several examples. Here's one:

Regarding white privilege, last year, three academics at the University of Rhode Island wrote in a letter to the editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education:

The American Psychological Association’s educational goals for the psychology major include sociocultural and international awareness, with learning outcomes regarding mastery of concepts related to power and privilege. Other professional organizations, including the American Sociological Association, have developed similar learning goals for teaching in higher education. Instructors have been charged with teaching their white students to understand their own privileged positions in society relative to those of marginalized groups.

The key point here is that the word “values” never appears. Instead of asking what values made America’s Founders great, the Left asks what race, gender, and class privileges enabled them to found America. Instead of asking what values does the white majority (or, for that matter, on some campuses, the Asian majority) live by in order to succeed, and how can we help inculcate those values in more less-successful people of all racial and ethnic groups, the Left asks what privileges whites have that enable them to get into colleges and graduate at a higher rate than blacks and Latinos.

Prager is correct to point to the indifference toward values which are, in any case, considered to be merely an atavism of white male patriarchy, but I think there's something else just as insidious at play in all this. It's the attempt to make white students feel guilty for being white. Make a man feel guilty and you can dominate him, and that's the goal of the Left. Make whiteness a mortal sin for which the bearer must seek repeated absolution from the politico-cultural priesthood, which is invariably leftist, and he'll be putty in your hands.

Moreover, it's an attempt to somehow rationalize the inadequacies of those who cannot compete in an academic setting. By focusing on race, gender, and privilege the message is sent to those who find themselves languishing in academic purgatory that it's not their fault, they're victims of a racist, sexist, classist society. This is a toxic message to send to young people, but it's the message the Left reinforces in a multitude of ways every day.

Prager goes on to give a particularly disturbing example of the rejection of values and rules rooted in "white ways of doing things." This rejection, it seems to me, is a tacit admission of inadequacy and incompetence. When people can't compete by playing by the rules they'll mask their failure any way they can. Unfortunately, some on the Left think this is as it should be. You can read about the farce to which I refer at the link.

Some years ago I wrote a response to a student who displayed precisely this sense of guilt at what she thought was her privileged status. The response is here.

Saletan's Modest Proposal

A friend once asked why I opposed disclosing and publicizing political donations. I replied that such disclosures make targets of people for those who would destroy them because of their political convictions. The recent resignation of Brendan Eich at Mozilla is a fine example of how this works. The LA Times published a list of people who donated money to groups fighting to keep the definition of marriage what it has always been and Eich's name turned up on the list. The employees of Mozilla and the board of directors felt that such a man could not lead their company despite his many other virtues, and they forced his resignation.

Will Saletan at Slate is evidently not satisfied. In a column he later said was supposed to be a satire he calls for similar measures against everyone who opposes gay marriage. The column may be a satire, but if so, it's a very poorly written example. Satire is obviously satirical, and Saletan's column is not at all obvious. Here's some of what he said. You decide:

Some of my colleagues are celebrating. They call Eich a bigot who got what he deserved. I agree. But let’s not stop here. If we’re serious about enforcing the new standard, thousands of other employees who donated to the same anti-gay ballot measure must be punished.

More than 35,000 people gave money to the campaign for Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot measure that declared, “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” You can download the entire list, via the Los Angeles Times, as a compressed spreadsheet. Each row lists the donor’s employer. If you organize the data by company, you can add up the total number of donors and dollars that came from people associated with that company.

The first thing you’ll notice, if you search for Eich, is that he’s the only Mozilla employee who gave to the campaign for Prop 8. His $1,000 was more than canceled out by three Mozilla employees who donated to the other side.

The next thing you’ll notice is that other companies, including other tech firms, substantially outscored Mozilla in pro-Prop 8 contributions attributed to their employees. That includes Adobe, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, and Yahoo, as well as Disney, DreamWorks, Gap, and Warner Bros.

Thirty-seven companies in the database are linked to more than 1,300 employees who gave nearly $1 million in combined contributions to the campaign for Prop 8. Twenty-five tech companies are linked to 435 employees who gave more than $300,000. Many of these employees gave $1,000 apiece, if not more. Some, like Eich, are probably senior executives.

Why do these bigots still have jobs? Let’s go get them.

To organize the next stage of the purge, I’ve compiled the financial data into three tables.

Saletan follows with charts which show the donations of employees of various organizations which donated to pro-prop 8 organizations. He closes with this:

If we’re serious about taking down corporate officers who supported Proposition 8, and boycotting employers who promote them, we'd better get cracking on the rest of the list. Otherwise, perhaps we should put down the pitchforks.

Whether he was serious or not, not a few of his commenters took him seriously. It reflects an inquisitorial mindset that refuses to tolerate opinions which differ from one's own. If the dissenter can be punished, he must be. That's why I think political donations should be just as secret as one's ballot. There is in our society, particularly on the left, a broad streak of fascism, people who agree with Saletan's "modest proposal" and who would seek vengeance on those who think otherwise. We need to be protected from them.

"You Can't Keep Your Crappy Plan"

Jay Cost at The Weekly Standard lays out five reasons why so many people oppose Obamacare. Each of these is explained in detail at the link.

#1: Obamacare has no legitimate funding mechanism.
#2: Obamacare has created a socially perverse array of winners and losers.
#3: Obamacare restricts choices and increases costs.
#4: Obamacare hurts businesses.
#5: Obamacare is probably unsustainable ... in the long run.

Cost concludes his piece with this comment:

[A]ny one of these objections would merit virtually uniform opposition from conservatives to Obamacare. But take them all together, and most American conservatives have arrived at the same conclusion: this law is fatally flawed, must be repealed entirely, and replaced with something that is sustainable and not overly burdensome to taxpayers, middle class families, or businesses. After all, fixing each of these problems would result in a new law that bears only the faintest resemblance to Obamacare as it is today.

Moreover, a lot of conservatives believe that liberals have the exact same opinion. While publicly applauding the expansion of coverage, some of them must understand the grave problems inherent to this law. This helps explain the sense on the right that, for liberals, this is simply a stalking horse for single payer: first, sign up new people under a federal entitlement that cannot practically be taken away, then deal with the various harms to middle class voters, burdens on businesses, and extreme cost overruns … by proposing “Medicare for all.”

Cost's argument is impressive for its depth and rigor, so how do supporters of the Affordable Care Act answer it? Well, in some liberal enclaves, like MSNBC, the response looks like this.

"You can't keep your crappy plan so just deal with it." You go girl. That'll get a lot of people on your side come November.

Not Born That Way

Are gays and lesbians born that way? Surprisingly, at least to me, many LGBT scholars are answering with a resounding "No." David Benkoff, who is himself a gay writer, has an interesting piece on this featured at The Daily Caller. Here's his lede:

Virtually no serious person disputes that in our society, people generally experience their gay or straight orientations as unchosen and unchangeable. But the LGBT community goes further, portraying itself as a naturally arising subset of every human population, with homosexuality being etched into some people’s DNA.

Are gays indeed born that way? The question has immense political, social, and cultural repercussions. For example, some of the debate over applying the Constitution’s equal protection clause to gays and lesbians focuses on whether gayness is an inborn characteristic. And the major argument gays and lesbians have made for religious affirmation has been, “God made me this way.”

Thus, if it’s proven sexual orientations are not innate, much of the scaffolding upon which today’s LGBT movement has been built would begin to crumble. Given the stakes, most gays and lesbians are dismissive or hostile toward anyone who doesn’t think being gay is an essential, natural characteristic of some members of the human race. But a surprising group of people doesn’t think that – namely, scholars of gay history and anthropology. They’re almost all LGBT themselves, and they have decisively shown that gayness is a product of Western society originating about 150 years ago.

In what follows Benkoff reviews much of what these scholars are saying about whether homosexuality is innate or socially constructed and concludes that overwhelming evidence supports the latter.

He writes:

Journalists trumpet every biological study that even hints that gayness and straightness might be hard-wired, but they show little interest in the abundant social-science research showing that sexual orientation cannot be innate. The scholars I interviewed for this essay were variously dismayed or appalled by this trend.

For example, historian Dr. Martin Duberman, founder of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, said “no good scientific work establishes that people are born gay or straight.” And cultural anthropologist Dr. Esther Newton (University of Michigan) called one study linking sexual orientation to biological traits ludicrous: “Any anthropologist who has looked cross-culturally (knows) it’s impossible that that’s true, because sexuality is structured in such different ways in different cultures.”

While biology certainly plays a role in sexual behavior, no “gay gene” has been found, and whatever natural-science data exists for inborn sexual orientations is preliminary and disputed. So to date, the totality of the scholarly research on homosexuality indicates gayness is much more socio-cultural than biological.

Homosexuals, both male and female, as well as their sympathizers, are likely to resist arguments like Benkoff's. If homosexual behavior is not genetically determined but is freely chosen then it has a moral dimension and this is problematic for a lot of gays. Indeed, one reason why some gays are hostile to the Catholic church (and some protestant denominations) is because they insist on holding gays morally accountable for their behavior, and they persist in viewing that behavior as sinful.

Benkoff thinks there's nothing wrong with being gay, of course, but if he's correct that homosexual behavior is chosen and not genetically determined then those who wish to say that there's something morally deficient in it have been handed a victory in at least that aspect of the overall controversy.

Read the rest of his article at the link.