Optimistic Nihilism

As I've discussed with my students, it's my opinion that metaphysical naturalism entails nihilism. Naturalism is the view that the natural world is all there is, that nothing else exists beyond the physical, material world of atoms and molecules.

It's the view, in the words of Carl Sagan, that "The cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be." Nihilism is the view that nothing in life matters, there's no meaning nor value, especially moral value, to be found because there's no basis for it if naturalism is true.

A student linked me to a short, six minute video in which the producer takes note of viewer complaints that the nihilism of his previous videos was too existentially depressing. He therefore seeks in the present video to offer a more optimistic, upbeat version of nihilism. It's not clear that he succeeds, or that he even could succeed.

The first three minutes or so are given to an elaboration upon the reasons for thinking, on naturalism, that life is meaningless. The narrator then gives the viewer a "pep talk" on how we should respond to our bleak existential condition. In short, the message is that there's no real point to anything we do in this godless universe, but we should try to make the best of it anyway:

The points made throughout the video, once one gets beyond the happy talk and thinks seriously about them, are melancholy. Here's a recap:

Nothing we do matters, the narrator asserts, but that means that all of our mistakes, blunders and bad acts don't matter (3:50). If this is true, what follows is that there's no reason not to yield to temptations to do bad things. None of those bad acts, acts which harm others, for example, really matters and there's no eternal accountability for how we live so why should we not do what we desire to do?

The video claims (4:05) that our individual life is all that matters, but, if so, what's being offered to us is a justification for egoism, the view that I should always put my own interests ahead of the interests of others. On egoism what's right is what gives me happiness, satisfaction and pleasure and what's wrong is whatever diminishes my happiness, satisfaction and pleasure.

Every tyrant was an egoist, every act of barbarism and evil was done by people who were putting their own interests first. If our life is all that matters then might makes right and whatever someone has the power to do would not be objectively wrong to do no matter how much it harmed others.

This egoism is evident in the narrator's rather preposterous claim (4:15) that we dictate the purpose of the universe.

The narrator goes on to insist that life doesn't matter, but that we can insert meaning into it by having good feelings, and experiencing nice things like music, friends, and video games (4:30). We should take consolation from the fact that we are part of the universe, the thinking part, but how this can be consoling is hard to see.

It's a bit like encouraging a dying friend to take comfort in knowing that soon as his body disintegrates his atoms will be recycled into the earth and perhaps eventually be taken up into some other living thing.

In sum, do good things, have fun, be happy and try to make others happy (4:55). Do whatever makes you feel good, and you get to decide whatever this is (5:45). Of course, if this is so, then no one can say that the person who feels good by raping, torturing, stealing, and lying is doing anything wrong. After all, we get to decide what makes us feel good and none of our bad deeds matter anyway.

Such is the world that the "optimistic nihilist" would have us inhabit, but, in fairness to him, it is indeed the best he or anyone could come up with if naturalism is true.

The Next Phase

An interesting article in the LA Times gives readers some insight into the progress of the war against Islamic extremists in the Middle East. As more ISIL-controlled cities like Mosul and Tal Afar in Iraq have fallen to U.S. backed forces an enormous trove of intelligence data has been seized which has in turn revealed much about the terrorists' command structure, personnel and aspirations for future terrorist acts in Europe and elsewhere.

The author of the article, W.J.Hennigan, writes:

U.S. intelligence analysts have gained valuable insights into Islamic State’s planning and personnel from a vast cache of digital data and other material recovered from bombed-out offices, abandoned laptops and the cellphones of dead fighters in recently liberated areas of Iraq and Syria.

In the most dramatic gain, U.S. officials over the last two months have added thousands of names of known or suspected Islamic State operatives to an international watch list used at airports and other border crossings. The Interpol database now contains about 19,000 names....

Not only is this intelligence cache massive, it has the further advantage of being reliable. Interrogations of captured prisoners doesn't always produce accurate or complete information but phone logs and video aren't fabricated or intended to deceive anyone.

U.S. officials said they have gleaned planning ideas and outlines of potential operations rather than ongoing terrorist plots. But they also have gathered details into the group’s leadership and the hierarchy of fighters under command.

The biggest windfall came from what officials said were meticulous Islamic State records about the foreign fighters who arrived since convoys of black-flagged militants first stormed out of northern Syria and into Iraq in 2014, capturing large parts of both countries and the world’s attention.

The records include their names, aliases, home countries and other personal information....

A phone from the pocket of a dead fighter often includes phone numbers that can assist counter-terrorism investigations far afield. Indeed, intelligence recovered from the battlefield since 2015 has led to arrests or broken up plots in at least 15 countries in Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America and Canada, officials said....

The data has also given analysts a good indication where ISIL will try to make their last stand:

U.S. officials say Islamic State has lost 60% of the territory it captured in 2014, and its force has been halved to about 15,000 fighters. The recent intelligence indicates that they are concentrating forces and shifting their operations base to the Middle Euphrates River Valley, which lies between Iraq and Syria.

An estimated 8,000 fighters have moved to the valley, which stretches more than 150 miles from Deir el Zour in eastern Syria down to Rawa in western Iraq. They include most of the group’s leaders and their families, as well as key aides for administrative functions.

A U.S. special operations task force tracked and killed three leaders, who allegedly oversaw weapons research and drone operations, in the valley this week, officials said. In all, more than 35 military commanders, weapons production experts, financial facilitators and external attacks plotters have been killed there in the past year.

Unfortunately, it's very unlikely that when ISIL is defeated that the war against Islamic terror will be at an end. The Islamists are convinced that Allah is on their side and that any defeats are just temporary. They believe they have a Koranic mandate to kill the infidels wherever they find them, and, since so many refugees have been admitted into Europe, where they find them is potentially almost every city in Western Europe and North America.

This conflict will last until either the West surrenders or until Muslims convince their co-religionists that their jihad is un-Islamic. Neither alternative, but especially the second, seems likely to happen any time soon.

Indeed, between the two, it seems much more probable that the West would weary of the constant fighting and capitulate to the will of Islamic political influences already in their midst.

Fine-tuning and the Multiverse

A couple of years ago Dennis Prager wrote a fine piece on the multiverse theory at National Review Online. I commented at the time that I thought it interesting that a social commentator has written a column on an esoteric metaphysical/scientific topic in a political journal of opinion like NRO. Perhaps it's indicative of the broad relevance of this hypothesis to everyone interested in matters deeper than the name selected by Kim and Kanye for their baby.

Prager starts with this:

Last week, in Nice, France, I was privileged to participate along with 30 scholars, mostly scientists and mathematicians, in a conference on the question of whether the universe was designed, or at least fine-tuned, to make life, especially intelligent life. Participants — from Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Berkeley, and Columbia, among other American and European universities — included believers in God, agnostics, and atheists.

It was clear that the scientific consensus was that, at the very least, the universe is exquisitely fine-tuned to allow for the possibility of life. It appears that we live in a “Goldilocks universe,” in which both the arrangement of matter at the cosmic beginning and the values of various physical parameters — such as the speed of light, the strength of gravitational attraction, and the expansion rate of the universe — are just right for life. And unless one is frightened of the term, it also appears the universe is designed for biogenesis and human life.

This is indeed indisputable. Prager cites several scientists on the matter:

Michael Turner, astrophysicist at the University of Chicago and Fermilab: “The precision is as if one could throw a dart across the entire universe and hit a bullseye one millimeter in diameter on the other side.”

Paul Davies, professor of theoretical physics at Adelaide University: “The really amazing thing is not that life on Earth is balanced on a knife-edge, but that the entire universe is balanced on a knife-edge, and would be total chaos if any of the natural ‘constants’ were off even slightly.

Roger Penrose, the Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, writes that the likelihood of the universe having usable energy (low entropy) at its creation is “one part out of ten to the power of ten to the power of 123.” That is “a million billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion zeros.”

Steven Weinberg, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics, and an anti-religious agnostic, notes that “the existence of life of any kind seems to require a cancellation between different contributions to the vacuum energy, accurate to about 120 decimal places.” As the website explains, “This means that if the energies of the Big Bang were, in arbitrary units, not:

100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

But instead:

100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001

There would be no life of any sort in the entire universe.”

How do those at pains to attribute all this to serendipity account for it? Some say that one cannot posit an Architect of the universe who designed it this way intentionally because such an explanation is not scientific. This is a dodge of course. It can only be true if we equate science with metaphysical naturalism, but if science is the pursuit of truth wherever the evidence leads then it's foolish, as the philosopher William James once noted, to discount some truths, if they're really there, just because we're following a rule that doesn't allow us to see those kinds of truths. Prager puts it this way:

Unless one is a closed-minded atheist (there are open-minded atheists), it is not valid on a purely scientific basis to deny that the universe is improbably fine-tuned to create life, let alone intelligent life.

Additionally, it is atheistic dogma, not science, to dismiss design as unscientific. The argument that science cannot suggest that intelligence comes from intelligence or design from an intelligent designer is simply a tautology. It is dogma masquerading as science.

So what other moves are available to the naturalist who blanches at the prospect of a finely-tuned universe?

They've put forward the notion of a multiverse — the idea that there are many, perhaps an infinite number, of other universes.

If there are an infinite number of universes and if all logically possible laws of physics are exemplified in that ensemble then every possible universe, no matter how improbable, must exist somewhere in that infinite assortment. Ours is a possible universe, of course, so, no matter how unlikely, it exists. No big deal. But, as Prager observes, there is not a shred of evidence of the existence of these other universes — nor could there be, since contact with another universe is impossible.

Therefore, only one conclusion can be drawn: The fact that atheists have resorted to the multiverse argument constitutes a tacit admission that they have lost the argument about design in this universe. The evidence in this universe for design — or, if you will, the fine-tuning that cannot be explained by chance or by “enough time” — is so compelling that the only way around it is to suggest that our universe is only one of an infinite number of universes.

There are several ironies in this. One is that scientists who demand empirical evidence for the claim that a Designer exists avoid the evidence, the fine-tuning of the cosmos, by embracing a hypothesis for which there is not only no empirical evidence but for which there couldn't be empirical evidence.

Another irony is that trying to negate astronomical improbabilities by invoking astronomical numbers of worlds pretty much destroys the ability of science to rule out anything on the basis of probability.

For example, suppose there is a one in a quadrillion chance that someone playing a roulette wheel will pick the same number ten times in a row and win all ten times. Which is more likely, that the game was rigged or that the player defied the odds? If we live in a multiverse consisting of far more than a quadrillion universes it could be that we live in a universe in which the one in a quadrillion event actually happens. We cannot conclude that the wheel was probably rigged because in the multiverse anything that is possible to happen will happen in some world, so how do we know that our world isn't the one in which this event happens?

In other words, in the multiverse, unless something is logically impossible it's inevitable that it occur somewhere. Why not here? Ironically, for the atheist who takes refuge in the multiverse in order to avoid the Fine-Tuner, miracles, the bete noire of atheists, are inevitable in some world so why think ours is not that world?

Moreover, as critics of the multiverse hypothesis have pointed out, there's no known mechanism for pumping out these universes but if something is generating them it must itself be fine-tuned. Since this universe-maker transcends the worlds it creates it must be super-natural so how is it any more fit as an object of scientific speculation than an Intelligent Designer?

If you have the time you might want to watch this lecture by Robin Collins, one of the world's foremost philosophers working on cosmic fine-tuning and the multiverse theory.

Letter to a Young Woman

Over the years I've run this post several times and it has proven to be very popular. Since the young woman to whom it was originally written is getting married today I thought it might be appropriate to run it again on her wedding day.

Hi Princess,

I've been thinking a lot about the talk we had the other night on what happiness is and how we obtain it, and I hope you have been, too. I wanted to say a little more about it, and I thought that since I was going to be away, I'd put it into a letter for you to read while I'm gone.

One of the things we talked about was that we can't assess whether we're happy based on our feelings because happiness isn't just a feeling. It's more of a condition or quality of our lives - sort of like beauty is a quality of a symphony. It's a state of satisfaction we gain through devotion to God, living a life of virtue (honesty, integrity, loyalty, chastity, trustworthiness, self-discipline), cultivating wholesome and loving relationships with family and friends, experiencing the pleasures of accomplishment in career, sports, school, etc., and filling our lives with beauty (nature, music, literature, art, etc.).

One thing is sure - happiness isn't found by acquiring material things like clothes and toys. It's not attained by being popular, having good looks, or being high on the social pecking order. Those things seem like they should make us happy, especially when we're young, but they don't. Ultimately they just leave us empty.

To the extent that happiness is a feeling we have to understand that a person's feelings tend to follow her actions. A lot of people allow their feelings to determine their actions - if they like someone they're friendly toward them; if they feel happy they act happy - but this is backwards.

People who do brave things, for instance, don't do them because they feel brave. Most people usually feel terrified when in a dangerous situation, but brave people don't let their feelings rule their behavior, and what they do is all the more wonderful because it's done in spite of everything in them urging them to get out of danger. If they do something brave, despite their fear, we say they have courage and we admire them for it.

Well, happiness is like courage. You should act as if you're happy even if you don't feel it. When you do act that way your feelings change and tend to track your behavior. You find yourself feeling happier than you did before even though the only thing that has changed is your attitude.

How can a person act happy without seeming phony? Well, we can act happy by displaying a positive, upbeat attitude, by being pleasant to be around, by enjoying life, by smiling a lot, and by not complaining. Someone who has a genuine smile (not a Paris Hilton smirk) on her face all the time is much more attractive to other people than someone whose expression always tells other people that she's just worn out or miserable.

One other thing about happiness is that it tends to elude us most when we're most intent on pursuing it. It's when we're busy doing the things I mentioned above, it's when we're busy serving and being a friend to others, that happiness is produced as a by-product. We achieve it when we're not thinking about it. It just tags along, as if it were tied by a string, with love for God, family, friends, beauty, accomplishment, a rewarding career, and so on.

Sometimes young people are worried that they don't have friends and that makes them unhappy, but often the reason they don't, paradoxically, is that they're too busy trying to convince someone to be their friend. They try too hard and they come across to others as too insecure. This is off-putting to people, and they tend to avoid the person who seems to try over-hard to be their friend. The best way to make friends, I think, is to just be pleasant, friendly, and positive. Don't be critical of people, especially your friends, and especially your guy friends, either behind their backs or to their faces. A person who never has anything bad to say about others will always have friends.

Once in a while a critical word has to be said, of course, but it'll be meaningless at best and hurtful at worst, unless it's rare and done with complete kindness. A person who is always complaining or criticizing is not pleasant to be around and will not have good, devoted friends, and will not be happy. A person who gives others the impression that her life is miserable is going to find that after a while people just don't want to hear it, and they're not going to want to be around her.

I hope this makes sense to you, honey. Maybe as you read it you can think of people you know who are examples of the things I'm talking about....

All my love,

Dad

DACA

The president has received a great deal of criticism from Democrats and even from some Republicans for winding down President Obama's 2012 executive order which granted temporary resident status to young immigrants brought illegally into this country. The program was called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and affects almost 800,000 people. For an excellent summary of what DACA does and why President Trump has rescinded it see this piece at CNN.

The criticism of President Trump's decision is misplaced as Rich Lowry argues at National Review. It is not the president's prerogative to circumvent Congress in creating immigration law, which is precisely what President Obama did when he made DACA official policy. Indeed, he did it after acknowledging on numerous occasions that he lacked the legal authority to do so, which makes his criticism of President Trump's order to undo DACA awfully hypocritical.

President Obama also stressed that what he was doing in creating DACA was only temporary and that eventually Congress would have to pass legislation to resolve the status of the so-called "Dreamers."

All President Trump has done is to tell Congress that Obama's original order was expiring, and that it's time for them to do their job by passing legislation that addresses the situation that the Dreamers find themselves in. The president, after all, is not a monarch who can create law through arbitrary exercises of executive power. We're a nation of laws, a Republic in which the people decide through their elected representatives what our immigration policy should be.

Trump ended DACA because he promised in the campaign that he would and because a number of states were threatening to sue the federal government over DACA, a suit they would very likely have won because DACA was, according to most analysts, an unconstitutional executive usurpation of Congress' authority by President Obama. That even liberal Democrats recognize this was made clear on a segment of a show on MSNBC, which is probably the most progressive/left of the cable news outlets.

On the show the host repeatedly challenged a Democrat congressman who supports DACA to explain how it meets constitutional muster. The congressman could not, or would not, answer the question:

The DACA young people, some of whom are actually in their thirties, are in a tough spot and Congress should find a compassionate way to resolve their predicament without doing an injustice to all those who seek to come into this country the proper way. Congress would find a lot of support for leniency in this country if they also insured that our immigration laws would henceforth be rigorously enforced.

A good start would be to cut federal funding to any municipal entity or school that prevents immigration authorities from doing their jobs.

Asking the Wrong Question

An article by Brandon Withrow at The Daily Beast broaches a topic we've been discussing in my classes recently, but unfortunately the article asks, and answers, the wrong question. The question it asks is whether one can be good without God.

Presumably, the intent of the question is to inquire whether one can be good without believing in God. The answer to that, of course, is a qualified, "of course," but that's neither a particularly interesting nor a particularly controversial question. The interesting question is not whether belief in God is necessary for people to act this way or that but rather whether God's existence is necessary for there to be moral good and bad, right and wrong, in the first place. Michael Egnor, commenting on the Daily Beast article, puts it like this:

If God does not exist, you cannot be good. You cannot be evil. You can’t conform or fail to conform to any transcendental standard, because if there is no God, there are no transcendental standards. There is no Moral Law if there is no Moral Lawgiver.

If there is no God, there are merely opinions and consequences of acting on opinions. We may label certain opinions “good,” but that’s just our opinion. What we really mean by calling something “good” is that we like it. Which is fine, as long as we understand that “good without God” is just a metaphor for “something I (or we) like.” If there is no God, all of our “moral” decisions are just opinions — perhaps opinions we like, or opinions we don’t like — but neither good nor bad.

If God does exist, but you don’t believe in Him, then of course you can be “good without God”, in the sense that you can be good without believing in God. It is central to the moral theology of all the great faiths that non-believers may act in accordance with Moral Law without belief in God and even without knowing Moral Law in any formal sense. The Moral Law is written in our hearts, theists universally agree, and we feel the weight of morality whether we believe in God or not.

But even this doesn't say quite enough. The heart of the matter is this: If God does not exist anyone can adopt whatever values please or satisfy them. If they wish to live kind, honest, peaceful lives they certainly can, but the crucial point is that had they chosen to live by the opposite values - to be selfish, cruel, deceitful, and violent - they wouldn't be wrong. They'd just be different than they are.

As I discuss with my students, without an objective standard or reference point of moral right and wrong we're like astronauts floating in outer space trying to ascertain which direction is up. With no objective referent there simply is no up or down and likewise, without an objective standard there's no moral good or evil. This is what needs to be stressed in columns like Withrow's at The Daily Beast, but unfortunately in such columns it's distinction that's usually missed entirely.

Instead the focus is on questions like whether serial killers are more likely to be theists or atheists, but this is a question of relatively minor importance. After all, just because one is a theist doesn't mean he/she will know what's right. Nor does it mean that even if they know what's right that they'll do it.

What's important is that if their belief about God is correct then there is something that is right, but if their belief is incorrect then right and wrong have no objective significance. To say something is wrong is to say nothing more than that the individual doesn't like it. Murder is no different for human beings than it is for a cat that kills a mouse. It's neither moral nor immoral. It's just the way things are.

In the absence of God morality is simply an expression of personal preference or taste. It matters not whether the act is something like rape, racism, child abuse, or whether it is an act of self-sacrificial kindness, the act itself has no objective moral content unless there really is an objective moral authority which has the power not only to promulgate moral laws but also the power to enforce them.

Lenin, Yes; Nietzsche, No

A piece by Blake Neff at The Daily Caller a few years ago gave us a good illustration of how the left views freedom of speech and the free exchange of ideas on campus. The provocation that inspired Neff's column was a report that the student government of the University College of London (UCL) had denied recognition of the school's Nietzsche Club. The club was thereupon prohibited from advertising its meetings or using facilities controlled by the University College of London Union (UCLU).

Here are some excerpts from Neff's piece:

Posters for the group had advertised discussions of Nietzsche, as well as fellow philosophers Alain de Benoist, Martin Heidegger and Julius Evola. That, according to UCLU, was unacceptable.

“The aforementioned philosophers and thinkers are on the extreme-right, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, homophobic, anti-Marxist, anti-worker and have had connections, direct or indirect, with Italian fascism and German Nazism,” the UCLU’s motion said.

“Fascism has no place at UCL or UCLU, and ... any attempts by fascists or the far-right to organize on campus must be met with unconditional resistance,” they continued.

The Union is certainly correct about the connection of these philosophers to fascism. Heidegger was a member of the Nazi Party and Nietzsche's writing, pace his apologists, played right into the aspirations of those who wished to create a master race and suppress or eliminate all others. His exalted descriptions of the will to power, his praise of savagery, cruelty, and the moral overman, and his hatred for Judeo-Christianity resonated with the Hitlerians who saw themselves as the embodiments of Nietzschean virtue.

But the leftists who would stifle any group wishing to promote thinking that would reinforce fascist ideology have, hypocritically enough, no qualms about promoting ideas which reinforce communist ideology, an ideology whose consequences have been even more horrific than those of Nazism:

While thought characterized as right-wing or “fascist” is evidently unacceptable, the UCLU clearly sees no trouble with the far left, with the motion also citing the group’s commitment to ”the program of a socialist transformation of society” as a reason for the club’s abolition. The motion is peppered with numerous other instances of leftist rhetoric, and occasionally veers off into complaining about modern political issues.

“Fascism is used by the ruling class to divide workers… and thus weaken their effectiveness as a force and undermine their resistance to policies of austerity, attacks on living standards and public services, and other consequences of the crisis of the capitalist system,” the motion says.

In a follow-up statement released Friday, UCLU said their actions were necessary for student safety.

“UCLU recognizes the existential threat that the fascist movement poses to our members, and we believe that it is therefore necessary to prevent and disrupt the ability of fascists to organize — on our campuses, on our streets and in our society,” the organization said. “This is not a question of petty or bureaucratic ‘meddling’ but of protecting ourselves as students and members of society from the real dangers posed by the fascist movement.”

The proposer and seconder of the approved motion, Sam Bayliss and Timur Dautov, are both members of the recognized group UCLU Marxists. Among other activities, the group holds regular reading groups on the writings and thought of revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, who killed and suppressed millions while imposing communism on Russia.

Indeed, as noted in yesterday's post, Marxist-Leninism was responsible for the murders of more than 100 million people in the 20th century and the terrible suffering of countless others. So, who will protect the students of the University College of London from the Leninists?

The Hammer and Sickle and the Swastika

There's a misconception perpetrated by many progressives that the group Antifa is comprised of people who are not only hostile to fascism but are the antithesis of the fascists.

In fact, Antifa, being putatively an organization of far-left socialists, has more in common with fascism than most of its progressive supporters are willing to admit. Indeed, far-left socialism, or communism, has always had something of an ideological kinship with fascism even though there's a great deal of sibling rivalry and even hostility between the two.

Both are totalitarian and oppressive, both are based on socialist economies, both use anarchy and chaos to acquire power, and both promote and are typified by hatred. The differences between them are fairly insignificant. Fascists generally tend to be more nationalistic and focus their hatreds on those of different ethnicities from themselves. Communists tend to be more internationalist and direct their hatreds toward those in the upper socio-economic classes and adherents to theistic religions.

Because both are forms of socialism it's misleading to call the fascists "far-right." They are, in fact, leftists, and their antipathy toward communist socialists is the hatred spawned between ideological brothers who disagree on relatively minor matters regarding their inheritance.

I discuss all this in more detail here, but the important point to be made in the present post is that the distinctions between Antifa and the Nazi-style white supremacists they despise are minor. They're two faces of the same evil and no decent person should associate with or defend either of them.

An interesting piece by Tyler Stone at The Federalist explains some of the history between the Nazi fascists and the Soviet communists. Were it not for Hitler's betrayal of Stalin, Germany and the Soviet Union might well today share global hegemony.

After recounting the sordid history of cooperation between the communists and the fascists in the late 30s and early 40s Stone concludes with this:

The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany desired the same goals: to defeat democracies, independent Republics, and individual freedom throughout Europe (and the world). Communism and Nazism are just different sides to the same totalitarian coin....

Communism stood side by side with Nazism, and marched with it across Europe. As Friedrich Hayek in his book, “Road to Serfdom,” states: “[t]o both [Nazis and Communists], the real enemy, the man with whom they had nothing in common, was the liberal of the old type.”

If the left wants to remove offensive objects from history, then perhaps they should start by acknowledging that the hammer and sickle is just as hateful and oppressive as the swastika.

It's an interesting historical fact that communists in the United States, prior to Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, were very supportive of Hitler and his demands. As long as the fascists and communists were allies the left in the U.S. insisted that the United States remain neutral in the conflict unfolding in Europe, but once Germany invaded the U.S.S.R. American communists did a complete turn-about and beat the drums for war against Germany.

One lesson in this, I suppose, is that we should be very careful about being seduced by what groups like Antifa proclaim as their goal. Their agenda is in fact the erection of a totalitarian state and the abolition of individual freedom, and they'll do and say whatever it takes to achieve that end. Indeed, one of their heroes, Vladimir Lenin, said this in a speech in 1920:

We repudiate all morality that proceeds from supernatural ideas....Morality is entirely subordinate to the interests of class war. Everything is moral that is necessary for the annihilation of the old exploiting social order...

Thus began a movement which, before the end of the twentieth century, had murdered approximately 100 million people. Antifa and groups like it are the ideological heirs of people like Vladimir Lenin, and we should put as much distance between them and ourselves as we do between ourselves and the neo-Nazis.

The Fight for Fifteen

On Labor Day it's appropriate to turn our thoughts to the "Fight for $15," that is, the attempt to convince government to legislate a $15 an hour minimum wage. This sounds attractive to those working at low wage jobs, and economists have been debating the pros and cons of raising the minimum wage for years, but common sense tells us it's a very bad idea in terms of its overall effect. Indeed, where it's already been tried it has proven to be a good illustration of the law of unintended consequences.

A recent study has shown that those who have been predicting that raising the minimum wage would result in fewer jobs, fewer businesses, and a greater drag on the economy appear to have been right.

Here's a short video from Prager U. which outlines the reasons why raising the minimum wage hurts a lot of people and helps no one except liberal politicians and a relatively few lucky low wage workers.

Have a nice Labor Day holiday.

The Implications of Scientism

Alex Rosenberg's The Atheist's Guide to Reality is a call to readers to embrace a scientistic view of knowledge. The word "scientistic" does not mean "scientific," rather it describes a view based on "scientism" which is the notion that science is the only reliable guide to truth about the world and human existence. On scientism, if a claim cannot be demonstrated empirically, using the tools of science, then it's not something that we can know, and in fact is not even something we should believe. In Rosenberg's telling, physics "fixes all the facts" about what is and what can be reasonably believed. This is also sometimes referred to as "physicalism."

Not all scientists are scientistic or "physicalists." Many of them hold that there are truths about the world that science is not equipped to discover, but Rosenberg thinks that scientists who believe this are practicing neither good science nor good epistemology.

Rosenberg is no dummy. He's the chairman of the philosophy department at Duke University and demonstrates in his book a considerable breadth of learning. He also strives to be rigorously consistent. Given his belief that physicalism is the only correct way to understand reality it follows for him that there is no God, no miracles, no soul or mind, no self, no real meaning or purpose to life, no meaning to history, no human rights or value, no objective moral duties - all of which leaves us with what he calls a "nice nihilism."

By the term "nice nihilism" Rosenberg means that nature has fortuitously evolved in us a tendency to treat each other well despite the fact that doing so is neither a moral duty nor in any way morally "right." That, for the one who embraces Rosenberg's scientism, is the only glimmer of light in an unrelentingly dark world and even this tiny glimmer is beset with problems. Here's one:

If our niceness is the product of impersonal undirected processes then it cannot have any moral purchase on us. That is, it can be neither right nor wrong to be "nice." Some people are and some aren't, and that's the end of the matter. Evolution has, after all, also developed behaviors that are not "nice." If we are solely the product of evolution then there's really no way to morally discriminate between "niceness" and "not nice," between what we call virtue and rape, torture, lying, racism, etc. All of these behaviors have evolved in our species just as niceness has, and we have no basis for saying that we are morally required to shun any of them. In other words, on scientism, there are no moral obligations and nothing which it is morally wrong to do.

Rosenberg frankly admits all this and insists that we need to face up to the fact that these are the consequences of adopting a scientistic worldview, and a scientistic worldview, in his mind, is the only intelligent option in a world in which there is no God.

I think he's right about this, actually, and argue in my novels In the Absence of God and Bridging the Abyss (see the links at the top of this page) that the sorts of consequences Rosenberg outlines in his book do indeed follow from an atheistic worldview. The atheist who lives as if none of these consequences exist is either in denial or he's living out an inauthentic, irrational delusion, most likely because he can't live consistently with the logical existential entailments of his naturalism.

A belief, though, that leads to conclusions one cannot live with stands in serious need of reexamination.

Professors' Advice

A group of professors from three prestigious universities composed a letter to students recently that shows that not all academics are far left ideologues. The letter is full of good advice to students (and anyone, actually), so I thought it'd be appropriate to present it here in full:

We are scholars and teachers at Princeton, Harvard, and Yale who have some thoughts to share and advice to offer students who are headed off to colleges around the country. Our advice can be distilled to three words:

Think for yourself.

Now, that might sound easy. But you will find—as you may have discovered already in high school—that thinking for yourself can be a challenge. It always demands self-discipline and these days can require courage.

In today’s climate, it’s all-too-easy to allow your views and outlook to be shaped by dominant opinion on your campus or in the broader academic culture. The danger any student—or faculty member—faces today is falling into the vice of conformism, yielding to groupthink.

At many colleges and universities what John Stuart Mill called “the tyranny of public opinion” does more than merely discourage students from dissenting from prevailing views on moral, political, and other types of questions. It leads them to suppose that dominant views are so obviously correct that only a bigot or a crank could question them.

Since no one wants to be, or be thought of as, a bigot or a crank, the easy, lazy way to proceed is simply by falling into line with campus orthodoxies.

Don’t do that. Think for yourself.

Thinking for yourself means questioning dominant ideas even when others insist on their being treated as unquestionable. It means deciding what one believes not by conforming to fashionable opinions, but by taking the trouble to learn and honestly consider the strongest arguments to be advanced on both or all sides of questions—including arguments for positions that others revile and want to stigmatize and against positions others seek to immunize from critical scrutiny.

The love of truth and the desire to attain it should motivate you to think for yourself. The central point of a college education is to seek truth and to learn the skills and acquire the virtues necessary to be a lifelong truth-seeker. Open-mindedness, critical thinking, and debate are essential to discovering the truth. Moreover, they are our best antidotes to bigotry.

Merriam-Webster’s first definition of the word “bigot” is a person “who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices.” The only people who need fear open-minded inquiry and robust debate are the actual bigots, including those on campuses or in the broader society who seek to protect the hegemony of their opinions by claiming that to question those opinions is itself bigotry.

So don’t be tyrannized by public opinion. Don’t get trapped in an echo chamber. Whether you in the end reject or embrace a view, make sure you decide where you stand by critically assessing the arguments for the competing positions.

Think for yourself.

Good luck to you in college!

[Signed by 16 professors]

Blowback

It's exceedingly difficult nowadays to say anything in defense of anything or anyone about which, or whom, the left has withheld its approval without being called all sorts of ugly names and having your life made miserable.

The latest case of people falling afoul of the censorious thought-police in an American university comes to us from the University of Pennsylvania where two law professors committed heresy by writing an encomium to the values commonly held by Americans in the 1950s. Here are some details:

Two law professors have been condemned by University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) students, alumni, and faculty as bigots engaging in "racist and white supremacist discourse," after they wrote a nostalgic op-ed praising America's 1950s "bourgeois culture."

UPenn Professor Amy Wax and University of San Diego's Lawrence Alexander were slammed by a group of 54 UPenn doctoral students and alumni as "promoting hate and bigotry under the guise of ‘intellectual debate'" in their piece titled, "Paying the price for breakdown of the country's bourgeois culture," published earlier this month by the Philadelphia Inquirer.

These two audacious professors are being pilloried for their wholly unexceptional but impertinent claim that some values are better than others and that some ways of living are better than others. It seems like such an obvious notion yet it has sent some of their fellow academicians and students into a politically correct tizzy:

[Wax and Alexander] argued [that] the "[1950s] culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow: Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime."

They conceded that there was "racial discrimination, limited sex roles, and pockets of anti-Semitism," but insisted that the modern "loss of bourgeois habits seriously impeded the progress of disadvantaged groups."

"All cultures are not equal," wrote Wax and Alexander. "Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy. The culture of the Plains Indians was designed for nomadic hunters, but is not suited to a First World, 21st-century environment. Nor are the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-‘acting white' rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants."

I don't know what there is in the foregoing that's false or that thoughtful whites, blacks and browns don't agree with, but apparently the professors at Penn descried sufficient deviations from progressive orthodoxy to give them umbrage:

The UPenn coalition printed a letter on Monday in the school paper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, claiming the professors were "complicit in" and guilty of "normalizing" white supremacy through this op-ed.

The culture Wax and Alexander described, "if understood within their sociocultural context, stem from the very same malignant logic of hetero-patriarchal, class-based, white supremacy that plagues our country today," wrote the coalition. "These cultural values and logics are steeped in anti-blackness and white hetero-patriarchal respectability, i.e. two-hetero-parent homes, divorce is a vice, and the denouncement of all groups perceived as not acting white enough i.e. black Americans, Latino communities, and immigrants in particular."

The coalition called for the UPenn administration to investigate "Wax's advocacy for white supremacy."

So now, cutting through all the pretentious academese, we are to think that it's an expression of "white supremacy" to assert that children who grow up in households with both biological parents present and with both sets of grandparents, and all the resources they can provide, have a better shot at making it in life than those who don't. One may be forgiven for thinking that this was just common-sense, but perhaps common-sense is also a manifestation of white supremacy. Who knows?

Evidently, it's also a sign of malignant "white supremacy" to claim that young people who stay in school until they graduate, who learn while they're in school to read, write, and speak proper English, have a better chance to succeed in life than those who lack an education and a decent vocabulary.

In the febrile minds of the professorial critics of Wax and Alexander it's also an insufferable demonstration of "white supremacy" to affirm that young people who get married before they have children and who stay married afterwards do better by their children and themselves than those who flout this "bourgeois value."

Moreover, it's hateful bigotry to state that those who work hard at their jobs, who stay away from drugs and alcohol, who show up for work every day and on time will have a better chance of eventually moving into the middle class or higher than do slackers.

There's more in the article concerning those who are scandalized by Wax and Alexander's common-sense:

The signees, many from the anthropology department, "each committed to combating white supremacy in our pedagogy," and called on others to focus on discussing racism in the first weeks of the semester.

The day before this letter was published, five UPenn law professors wrote a column for the student paper arguing, "The ‘racial discrimination' and ‘limited sex roles' that the authors identify as imperfections in midcentury American life were in fact core features of it. Exclusion and discrimination against people of color was the norm…"

Last week, the IDEAL Council of the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly at UPenn published a list of demands to the university in response to the "hate speech" in the op-ed. These included, "A policy in place to ensure that tenured faculty with a record of discrimination do not sit on hiring, tenure, or student admissions committees."

Normally in cases like this, the hapless offender grovels penitentially before his inquisitors and begs forgiveness for his transgressions. It was gratifying, therefore, to read that neither Wax nor Alexander have wavered on their views despite the blowback. Their responses have been unrepentant, cutting and much more intelligent than were the criticisms of their original article:

"What the objections boil down to is that the bourgeois virtues are somehow racist, or somehow cause racism—contentions that I and my co-author expressly contest, of course," Wax wrote in an email. "But if, indeed, bourgeois values are so racist, the progressive critics should be out there in the street demonstrating against them, stripping them from their own lives, and forbidding their children to practice them. They should be chanting, ‘No more work, more crime, more out of wedlock babies, forget thrift, let's get high!' … Of course, there's little chance we're going to see anything like that, which shows the hollowness, indeed the silliness, of the critiques."

Alexander said he "would change nothing" about the piece. "The charges of racism, white supremacy, etc. are, sadly, the predictable responses of those who can't refute the claims we made," Alexander said. "And those charges are laughable, given that I was a civil rights marcher and have a multi-racial family. But, of course, when you don't have the facts on your side, you resort to calling names. Pathetic!"

Indeed, "pathetic" is perhaps the very nicest thing one could say about it.

The Fundamental Nature of Everything

An idea that has percolated through this site over the years - because I find it fascinating - is that the universe, contra the materialists, is not fundamentally comprised of material particles, nor, contra the physicalists, is it fundamentally made up of fields and forces. Rather, the idea is that ultimately the universe and everything in it reduces to information.

An article by Philip Perry at Big Think elaborates on this strange sounding notion:

There are lots of theories on what the basis of the universe is. Some physicists say its subatomic particles. Others believe its energy or even space-time. One of the more radical theories suggests that information is the most basic element of the cosmos. Although this line of thinking emanates from the mid-20th century, it seems to be enjoying a bit of a Renaissance among a sliver of prominent scientists today.

Consider that if we knew the exact composition of the universe and all of its properties and had enough energy and know-how to draw upon, theoretically, we could break the universe down into ones and zeroes and using that information, reconstruct it from the bottom up. It’s the information, purveyors of this view say, locked inside any singular component that allows us to manipulate matter any way we choose. Of course, it would take deity-level sophistication ....

Indeed, which is why scientists committed to metaphysical materialism aren't eager to hop on board. The implications of the information hypothesis sound too much like what theists have been saying for centuries.

Following a discussion of the work of Claude Shannon, the creator of classical information theory, Perry notes that most physicists still maintain that matter, material particles, is the fundamental stuff of the universe. But not all scientists agree:

The eminent John Archibald Wheeler in his later years was a strong proponent of information theory. Another unsung paragon of science, Wheeler was a veteran of the Manhattan Project, coined the terms “black hole” and “wormhole,” helped work out the “S-matrix” with Neils Bohr, and collaborated with Einstein on a unified theory of physics.

Scientists in Wheeler's camp argue that:

To look at information theory from a quantum viewpoint, the positions of particles, their movement, how they behave, and all of their properties, gives us information about them and the physical forces behind them. Every aspect of a particle can be expressed as information and put into binary code. And so subatomic particles may be the bits that the universe is processing, as [if it were] a giant supercomputer.

In the 1980s, [Wheeler] began exploring possible connections between information theory and quantum mechanics. It was during this period he coined the phrase “It from bit.” The idea is that the universe emanates from the information inherent within it. Each it, or particle, is a bit. It from bit.

In 1989, Wheeler produced a paper for the Santa Fe institute, where he announced "every it--every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself--derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely--even if in some contexts indirectly--from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits." A team of physicists earlier this year announced research conclusions that would make Wheeler smile. We might be caught inside a giant hologram they state. In this view, the cosmos is a projection, much like a 3D simulation....

If the nature of reality is in fact reducible to information itself, that implies a conscious mind on the receiving end, to interpret and comprehend it. Wheeler himself believed in a participatory universe, where consciousness holds a central role. Some scientists argue that the cosmos seems to have specific properties which allow it to create and sustain life. Perhaps what it desires most is an audience captivated in awe as it whirls in prodigious splendor.

All of which implies not only a mind on the receiving end but also a mind at the generating end. Information is not just recognized by minds, but is the product of a mind. If the universe really is, at bottom, information then there's very good reason to believe that there is a mind of incomprehensible computing power that has produced it. It's a breathtaking implication.

Perry links interested readers to this video for more on information theory as the basis of the universe. If you like slightly zany videos give it a look:

Decapitation Strategy

There's a column at Strategy Page in which the allies' strategy for dealing with ISIL in Syria and Iraq is explained. The plan, largely unreported in the media, is to prioritize the elimination of the people responsible for media propaganda, finance and logistics. The thinking is that these people have technical skills that are very hard to find and thus the loss of these players is even more crippling to the barbaric terror group than even the loss of their military commanders.

Evidently the plan is working. Here's an excerpt from the article:

Three years after ISIL(Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) surprised a lot of people, especially the Iraqis by quickly seizing Mosul in mid-2014 American intel analysts believe that attacks against key ISIL personnel since then played a major and largely unreported role in the defeat of ISIL. These attacks became more frequent and more effective as ISIL lost most of its territory in Syria and Iraq.

This gave key people fewer places to hide and even more importantly forced them to move more frequently and often without the careful planning and preparation they had learned was essential for survival. By early 2017 the impact of the damage was pretty obvious.

While the hunt for the senior leadership got the most publicity, these men, especially ISIL founder and leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, were not the most important target (unless the goal was headlines and maximum media audiences). The key to crippling ISIL as an organization were those leaders responsible for finance, logistics and media.

These were harder to replace and the senior ISIL leaders knew that success at raising huge amounts of cash (mainly via looting and smuggling, but also extortion and ransoms paid to free kidnapping victims and slaves) and maintaining effective communications for the finance and recruiting operations were more important. The logistics included obtaining weapons and explosives and moving them to where they would be most effective.

For example a number of attacks carried out in the months before Mosul fell (and Raqqa was surrounded) in July led to the loss of several key people who managed and ran the ISIL media networks. This included Internet distribution of propaganda and ISIL documents as well as the ISIL Amaq News Agency.

Attacks against these media networks have been going on for nearly three years although the results were often kept secret (short or long term) in order to exploit the confusion these losses created within ISIL. ISIL would often deny accurate reports of their key people dying or being captured in order to maintain morale.

The article goes on to explain how these people are targeted and is pretty interesting. The problem with crushing ISIL, however, is that it's like striking liquid mercury with a hammer - the blow scatters it into numerous globules that run all over the place. Thus, as ISIL suffers ever greater losses of territory cells of terrorists are popping up all over Europe.

The hope is, presumably, that once ISIL is completely defeated on the battlefield, the allure of an inevitable caliphate will evaporate and Islamists will find it harder to recruit volunteers for suicide missions for what will seem to be a lost cause.

At least that's the hope, but unless the U.S. and its allies start waging a war of ideas in which the weapons are public arguments made by moderate Muslims against extremist readings of the Koran there will always be a pool of disaffected young men eager to inject meaning into their lives by martyring themselves for what they believe to be the will of Allah.

Identity Politics

Mark Lilla is an academic, a liberal and a man contemptuous of Donald trump's presidency. After stating that he's an academic the rest of the description may sound redundant to some, but it's worth stating in order to clarify that Lilla is no closet Republican out to undermine the Democratic Party. He's written a book titled The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics, in which he diagnoses what he perceives to be a deep problem in contemporary liberalism and ergo in the Democratic Party.

Peter Berkowitz writes about Lilla's book in a piece at Real Clear Politics. Lilla's thesis, in a word, is that Democrats' embrace of identity politics is a betrayal of true liberalism and has estranged Democrats from the people who have traditionally been their constituency.

It's interesting, parenthetically, that liberals once upon a time appealed to blue-collar workers and disdained the fat cat corporate CEOs. Today fat cat CEOs are frequently among the biggest donors to the Democratic party and blue-collar folks are voting for Trump.

Anyway, Berkowitz writes that:

Last November, shortly after the election, [Lilla] called in the New York Times for fellow liberals to face up to their party’s portion of responsibility for Trump’s victory, which Lilla traced to the rise [of] “identity liberalism.” His contention that “American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing” provoked outrage on the left.

The outrage is understandable. Some on the left have committed their entire lives to promoting identity politics. To have a supposed ally declare, in the New York Times, no less, that their life's work has been a misguided calamity is not a message likely to be received with equanimity even if it's true.

In “The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics,” Lilla elaborates on his thesis, providing a short, elegant polemic exposing the profound harm that identity liberalism has caused to the Democratic Party.

A professor of humanities at Columbia University, and a regular essayist at the New York Review of Books, Lilla uses the term “liberal” to denote those who identify with the achievements of the New Deal, which summoned Americans to “a collective enterprise to guard one another against risk, hardship, and the denial of fundamental rights.”

The essential contrast in post-World War II American politics, for Lilla, is between such liberals, who embodied the “Roosevelt Dispensation,” and those who embraced the “Reagan Dispensation” with, according to Lilla, its hyper-individualistic citizens living in their separate communities and its dedication to free markets, economic growth, and the shrinking of government.

Liberals, he argues, must repudiate the politics of identity because it undermines the pursuit of the common good to which American liberalism is properly directed. Identity liberalism divides Americans into groups—women, African-Americans, Latinos, LGBT Americans, Native Americans, Asian-Americans, and on and on. It nourishes a “resentful, disuniting rhetoric of difference” that defines membership in terms of distinctive narratives of victimhood, and confers status in proportion to the magnitude of the oppression one claims to have suffered under the hegemonic sway of white, male structures of power.

Propelled by America’s colleges and universities—which, Lilla observes, have replaced political clubs and shop floors as the incubators of liberal political leaders—identity liberalism has abandoned the political mission of bringing fellow citizens together in favor of the evangelical one of extracting professions of faith and punishing heretics, apostates, and infidels.

These are powerful words indeed. An ideology as divisive as modern liberalism has become can scarcely unite the country except perhaps through the exercise of various forms of compulsion which is certainly the direction in which today's liberalism seems to be headed. So, what's to be done?

Disappointingly for an author whose purpose is to rouse fellow liberals to action, Lilla offers no proposal for reforming our colleges and universities, which he blames for indoctrinating students in identity politics dogma. But he does sketch the larger political goal: a “more civic-minded liberalism” that cultivates a shared appreciation of the rights and responsibilities that all American citizens share and which encourages individuals to undertake “the hard and unglamorous task of persuading people very different from themselves to join a common effort.”

This is a noble goal, but one that can be reached only by a people who focus on the things they share in common, not the things that make them different. Diversity, notwithstanding its status as an idol on the left, is much overrated as a public good, especially when those who worship it are incessantly celebrating the things that make us different and thus dividing us from each other. In any case, as Berkowitz has noted, Lilla's argument, both in his Times column of last November and in his book, has received a chilly reception on the left:

The reply from the establishment left to Lilla’s brief for less victim politics and more retail politics was swift and sure. To mark publication last week of “The Once and Future Liberal,” the New York Times published a review by Yale University History Professor Beverly Gage that dismissed Lilla’s critique as “trolling disguised as erudition.”

Finding nothing bad to say about identity liberalism except to wonder why it hasn’t generated more marchers, Gage sent Times readers on their way with a clear conscience to continue to exhaust themselves in venting fury against Trump’s daily outrages.

Nevertheless, Berkowitz finds several elements in Lilla's presentation of his case to criticize. First, Lilla himself falls into the same pit that he urges liberals to avoid, and second he fails to recognize that what he's advocating, a return to classical liberalism, is, in fact, a plea to liberals to adopt a cluster of conservative principles.

Indeed, modern conservatism is in many respects an expression of the ideas of classical liberalism. Berkowitz writes:

The serious criticism of Lilla is twofold.

First, while holding aloft the idea of a common citizenship, he lapses from time to time into an illiberal politics of friends and enemies revolving around a fundamental antagonism between right and left. Conservatives, in Lilla’s account, are simple-minded, selfish, and anti-political; indifferent to the plight of those not like them; and oblivious of the claims of culture and nation. To assert that “a vote for Trump was a betrayal of citizenship, not an exercise of it” is—in lockstep with the purveyors of identity liberalism—to smear nearly half of your fellow citizens as traitors.

Second, Lilla propagates a basic misunderstanding about the liberalism he laudably sets out to save. That liberalism is not the antithesis of conservatism, or, at least of that conservatism devoted to liberty, limited government, and democratic politics. Despite his best efforts to ignore or conceal it, the liberalism that he labors to restore has a decisively conservative element, because, as Lilla rightly recognizes, the enduring ground of citizens’ solidarity in America is a shared commitment to a constitutional order that equally protects the individual rights of all.

Maybe it's because the left recognizes that Lilla is campaigning for liberty, limited government and a commitment to the Constitution that they despise his critique.

The Phony War Between Science and Religion

You have doubtless heard that ever since the dawn of the Enlightenment science and religion have been at loggerheads - Galileo, and all that. The claim, however, is historical horsepucky as almost all scholars agree and as an article a few months ago by Dr. Justin Taylor adumbrates.

Taylor begins by noting that scholars as diverse as Ronald Numbers (an agnostic) and Timothy Larsen (a Christian theist) agree that the alleged warfare between science and religion was a myth perpetrated for propaganda purposes in the 19th century primarily by two men. He goes on to explain who these two very influential characters were.

The first was Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918), the founding president of Cornell University, and the second was John William Draper (1811-1882), professor of chemistry at the University of New York.

Taylor writes:

In December 1869, Andrew White--the young and beleaguered Cornell president--delivered a lecture at Cooper Union in New York City entitled “The Battle-Fields of Science.” He melodramatically painted a picture of a longstanding warfare between religion and science:

I propose, then, to present to you this evening an outline of the great sacred struggle for the liberty of Science--a struggle which has been going on for so many centuries. A tough contest this has been! A war continued longer--with battles fiercer, with sieges more persistent, with strategy more vigorous than in any of the comparatively petty warfares of Alexander, or Caesar, or Napoleon . . .

In all modern history, interference with Science in the supposed interest of religion—no matter how conscientious such interference may have been--has resulted in the direst evils both to Religion and Science, and invariably.

His lecture was published in book form seven years later as The Warfare of Science.

Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918)

In 1874, Professor Draper published his History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science. His thesis was as follows:

The antagonism we thus witness between Religion and Science is the continuation of a struggle that commenced when Christianity began to attain political power. . . . The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other.

Draper’s work was enormously popular, going through 50 editions in the next half century.

John William Draper (1811-1882)

The conflict these men envisioned existed wholly in their own minds, but the theme was nevertheless popular among secular folk, and their work gained a currency unmerited by it's accuracy. Thanks largely to these two writers the notion of a warfare between science and religion became something of an urban legend and has persisted up to the present day despite having been debunked by numerous historians and other scholars.

Taylor provides a sample of the claims that Draper and White promoted and which have subsequently been shown to be utterly false. They wrote, for instance, that:

1.The church believed for centuries that the earth is flat.

2.The church opposed the use of anesthetics in childbirth since Genesis promised that childbirth would be painful.

On the first myth, Lesley B. Cormack, chair of the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta, writes that “there is virtually no historical evidence to support the myth of a medieval flat earth. Christian clerics neither suppressed the truth nor stifled debate on the subject.”

On the second myth, Larsen states that:

No church has ever pronounced against anesthetics in childbirth. Moreover, there was no vocal group of ministers who opposed it. In fact, the inventor of chloroform received fan mail from ministers of the major denominations thanking him for helping to alleviate the suffering of women in labor.

Rather, the opposition to anesthetics during childbirth came from medical professionals, not from ministers, and for scientific, not religious, reasons.

So why, Taylor asks, did men like White and Draper--along with English biologist T. H. Huxley, who championed Darwinism and coined the term “agnostic”--manufacture these historical myths and this overall legend of perpetual conflict?

He cites Larsen's answer:

The purpose of the war was to discredit clergymen as suitable figures to undertake scientific work in order that the new breed of professionals would have an opportunity to fill in the gap for such work created by eliminating the current men of science. It was thus tendentiously asserted that the religious convictions of clergymen disqualified them from pursuing their scientific inquiries objectively.

More to the point, however, was the fact that clergymen were undertaking this work for the sheer love of science and thus hindering the expectation that it would be done for money by paid full-time scientists. Clergymen were branded amateurs in order to facilitate the creation of a new category of professionals.

This may be true as far as it goes, but I think there's a more fundamental reason for the conflict thesis. To wit, it has been an effective weapon in the arsenal of those atheists who wish to discredit religious belief altogether. If students and others who know that science has been enormously successful are convinced that science and religion are incompatible, then obviously there's not only no need for religion, but it's also positively pernicious to the extent that it impedes the progress of science.

As we've pointed out on Viewpoint numerous times over the years, and as Alvin Plantinga masterfully explains in his book Where the Conflict Really Lies, there's no conflict between religion and science, but there is a conflict between religion, particularly theistic religion, and metaphysical naturalism. Opponents of religion sometimes blur the distinction between naturalism and science to make it appear as if there's an incompatibility between science and religion, but this is a bit of polemical sleight-of-hand that simply obscures the truth.

It is naturalism, the belief that physical nature is all there is, which is at war with theism which is, of course, based on the belief that nature is not all there is. There is a supernature as well.

This belief and science are, contrary to those who wish to perpetuate the warfare thesis, perfectly sympatico.

Monumental Insanity

A few days ago I did a post titled "Slippery Slope" in which I joined the swell of voices who believe the destruction of Confederate statues is the first step onto a slippery slope that leads to utter insanity. A friend wrote to explain why he thought taking down statues of Robert E. Lee and like-minded Confederates is wholly justified and does not have to result in wholesale obliteration of our history. His argument is a good one. Here's part of what he wrote:

I don’t believe that removing Confederate monuments from public spaces through legal means puts us on a slippery slope at all. Let’s remember that many of these monuments were erected during the Jim Crow era as an homage to the cause of slavery and segregation – and as part of an ongoing, vicious campaign to intimidate those who thought differently.

The people memorialized by these monuments are not American heroes. Robert E. Lee was a brilliant general. He was also a traitor to this country who waged a war not only to preserve slavery but to expand it. Had he prevailed, the United States likely would not have become the greatest country in the world and the indignities of slavery would have been perpetuated.

Lee was an unapologetic advocate of slavery who thought the Emancipation Proclamation was an abomination. During his lifetime, plenty of people recognized that slavery was a terrible sin against God and humanity, so it’s not as if he was a victim of his times who didn’t know better. He chose to enable the oppression of an entire race and consequently sent tens of thousands of his fellow Southern soldiers, not to mention Union ones, to their deaths. That was his choice; we don’t need to give him monuments to affirm it.

I recently toured the Gettysburg battlefield with my family, a few weeks before the Charlottesville incident. It struck me, as we walked across the fields and through the museum, how many lives were needlessly lost because Lee chose to fight for the South and slavery. Had he applied his military genius in service of the Union and on behalf of human rights, the war probably would have been over before it even started. He has an extraordinary amount of blood on his hands, and it was all through his own choosing.

And this gets to the central difference between Lee/other Confederate leaders and our Founding Fathers. When Trump wonders where it all ends with the tearing down of monuments, this isn’t all that complicated either. Yes, Washington and Jefferson had slaves, and that is a serious stain on their legacies. Nevertheless, it wasn’t the defining aspect of their contributions to our country. They also brought the world’s greatest form of government into being. They are the Founding Fathers of our country, and their positive contributions to the world are enormous.

For Lee and his fellow Confederate leaders, it’s hard to say what they contributed beyond a lot of unnecessary suffering and death in their defense of an entirely indefensible institution. None of that deserves monuments. Their cause was not noble and neither was Lee.

I agree with much of what my friend has written here. I've never been a fan of Lee, and I, too, have reflected on how many lives were shattered and lost because he used his talents on behalf of the Confederacy. If, after calm rational debate, the citizens of a town voted to remove statues of Lee and others on the basis of arguments like my friend articulates there'd be little reason to object.

But, in my opinion, the left is not demanding that the statues come down because Lee et al. were traitors to their country. Indeed, for some on the left that'd be to their credit. Rather, they want the statues gone because Lee is a symbol of the institution of slavery and that sin trumps whatever virtues he might have possessed.

Yet, once we countenance pulling down monuments of slave-owners who made no good contribution to the country, the next step will be to pull down monuments of slave-owners regardless of their other contributions. In fact, their other contributions will be eclipsed by the fact that they will be seen as racists, which fact will obviate, in the minds of many, everything else they've done. At that point there'll be no stopping the madness.

This isn't hypothetical. We're seeing it today. People on tv are calling for monuments to Washington and Jefferson to be purged. Even Lincoln's monuments are being vandalized, presumably because he pardoned the Confederates in order to promote national healing and also proposed that ex-slaves might wish to be sent to Liberia.

An article in the Washington Times summarizes some of the nuttiness:

Baltimore in the middle of the night removed its Confederate-tied monuments. North Carolina thugs in Durham tore down a Confederate soldier statue and kicked and spat on it. A pastor — a man of Christ — called for the renaming of Washington Park in Chicago, as well as the removal of its George Washington statue and the renaming of Jackson Park. Why? The names conjure images of slavery, he said.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan removed the Taney statue from the State House — a step aimed at appeasing those offended by the fact it showed the likeness of the very U.S. Supreme Court justice, Roger B. Taney, who wrote the famous 1857 Dred Scott decision upholding slavery and denying citizenship to blacks.

Democrats in Congress called for an all-out cleansing of Confederate-tied statues, monuments and structures from Statuary Hall, a Capitol Hill fixture and popular tourist draw that contains dozens of contributions from individual states.

“The Capitol is a place for all Americans to come and feel welcomed, encouraged and inspired,” said Sen. Cory Booker, New Jersey Democrat. “Confederate statues do the opposite.”

This, from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi: “The Confederate statues in the halls of Congress have always been reprehensible. If Republicans are serious about rejecting white supremacy, I call upon Speaker [Paul] Ryan to join Democrats to remove the Confederate statues from the Capitol immediately.”

... The left’s only warming up. This insanity is not going to end any time soon. The train still has to ride over the Washington, D.C., monuments of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Al Sharpton’s already called on Congress to defund the Jefferson Memorial in the District, saying Jefferson “had slaves and children with the slaves” and that tax dollars that are used to fund this monument are an affront.

“When you look at the fact that public monuments are supported by public funds,” Sharpton told Charlie Rose in a recent televised interview, “you are asking me to subsidize the insult of my family.”

Keep going. The journey’s not over. Next stop: The documents of these so-dubbed racist Founding Fathers. The Declaration of Independence. The U.S. Constitution. And the question that looms — the question that’s to be posed by the left: How can these documents represent the freedoms of all, when they were penned by those with racist mindsets?

Once it’s admitted into U.S. society that Jefferson and Washington have no business being represented in the public memorials of America, it’s only a small, very small step to say the same of their writings? But what are we going to do, rip up the original Declaration of Independence — tear the Constitution to shreds? What would that accomplish?

The bit about Al Sharpton objecting to spending federal tax dollars to support maintaining the Jefferson Memorial is especially funny. Sharpton's taxes are, or were, $4.5 million in arrears. Evidently not many of Reverend Al's tax dollars are going to the Jefferson Memorial in any case.

Perhaps, though, the award for the most risible piece of insanity connected to this whole business has to go to ESPN which has decided that they can't have an Asian-American named Robert Lee announce a football game played by the University of Virginia because his name is the same as that of the odious general.

I once had a student named Jeff Davis. I wonder if he's decided to change his name yet.

If men who transgressed liberal ideas of righteousness in some areas of their lives, even though they may have done much good otherwise, deserve to be expunged from our national memory, who will be left? As another friend told me recently, if we're going to remove the statues of everyone who was in some way morally flawed there'll only be one statue left, the one that overlooks Sao Paulo, Brazil. That won't make a lot of folks on the left happy either.

Tale of Two Cities Redux

Several years ago Myron Magnet wrote a powerful essay at City Journal in which he reacted to the claim by New York's liberal mayoral candidate at the time Bill de Blasio that there are two New Yorks, one rich and one poor. Magnet argued that the actual divide is between New Yorkers who pay taxes and New Yorkers who live off of them. Because the whole article is such good reading (and fairly brief) I thought I'd rerun the post I did on it when it first came out. Here it is slightly edited.

One of the best parts of Magnets column is this:

As its very name suggests, mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio’s tale of two cities is pure fiction, a myth that formed the intellectual basis of leftist politics long before Marx turned it into “science.” Its key idea is that the rich are rich because they have somehow extracted their wealth from the poor, causing their poverty....

In the early days of industrialization, when nearly naked children pulled carts of coal through mine shafts and factory workers got ground up by unfenced machinery, this tale had a core of truth. But....[a]s for New York’s poor of today, there is not a scintilla of truth in the notion that the co-op dwellers of Fifth and Park Avenues have caused their poverty—not even if you believe that Wall Street hanky-panky is the cause of the deep unemployment America suffers five years after the outset of the financial crisis.

The trouble with the two-cities narrative is less that it is false and more that it has become a cause of the very poverty it pretends to explain—especially in the case of the minority poverty so prevalent in New York. The belief that people are poor because they are victims of economic injustice, and that the nation owes the African-American poor, in particular, some kind of reparation for the slavery and racism that supposedly has kept them perpetually poor, led to a War on Poverty that began half a century ago and that resulted in a welfare system that today, together with food stamps, public housing, and other benefits, provides its recipients with more income than a minimum-wage job, vaporizing the economic incentive for going to work.

Worse, the elite mindset that conceived the War on Poverty permanently transformed the nation’s culture in ways that entrenched the poor in their poverty. Thanks to the elites in the press, the government, and the universities—thanks to the writers, preachers, and teachers who have made “social justice” the reigning orthodoxy—the once standard belief that it’s dishonorable and unmanly not to work, at however menial a job, to support your family has given way to the view that there’s no shame in accepting reparations for victimization.

Combine these economic views with the change in elite views about sexuality that, also about 50 years ago, destigmatized casual sex and out-of-wedlock childbearing, and you have a sure-fire recipe for a caste of perpetually poor people, disproportionately minority, who rarely work or marry, and who form families headed by young, inexperienced, and ill-educated single mothers, poorly equipped to give children the moral and cognitive nurture, the thirst and drive for education they need to succeed in an increasingly skills-based global economy.

If you were going to divide New York into two cities—one rich, one poor—this would be the poor one: female-headed families living in housing projects or Section 8 apartments with flat-screen TVs and refrigerators stocked with food-stamp plenty, for generation after generation, whose unmotivated kids learn little from bad schools that cost more than almost any other public schools in the country—schools that only the most determined manage to learn enough from to escape the government-financed ghetto, leaving behind the average, ambitionless mass to become the parents of the next generation.

The rich New York would be exactly the opposite: people who get married and mostly stay married, who work hard to give their kids the best educational credentials and enrichment programs they can afford (alas, with a full measure of social-justice ideology and resume-burnishing social-service summer internships), who worship the work ethic, and who pay the taxes that support the other New York.

An observer from another planet would ask, Why does such a bizarre system go on, seemingly without end? Why does the rich New York keep supporting the poor New York, and why does the poor New York not improve its lot?

Magnet offers more insight at the link. His article highlights the fact that there's something odd about discussions of the poor and material poverty in the U.S. Most of the people who are classified as materially poor (there are types of impoverishment other than material deprivation, of course) possess luxuries that even the wealthiest aristocrats as recently as a hundred years ago would have envied. Here's economist Thomas Sowell on the subject:

Most Americans living below the government-set poverty line have a washer and/or a dryer, as well as a computer. More than 80 percent have air conditioning. More than 80 percent also have both a landline and a cell phone. Nearly all have television and a refrigerator. Most Americans living below the official poverty line also own a motor vehicle and have more living space than the average European -- not Europeans in poverty, the average European.

He could have added that they also have access to public transportation, medical care, food, and education. Their residences are dry and have indoor plumbing and heat. Their clothing is superior to even the finest raiment of a century ago, the air they breathe is cleaner, and the water they drink is purer. They are materially far richer than the wealthy of all but the most recent generations. So why do we call them "poor"? Sowell answers:

Because government bureaucrats create the official definition of poverty, and they do so in ways that provide a political rationale for the welfare state -- and, not incidentally, for the bureaucrats' own jobs.

The poverty that afflicts America is not material, it's spiritual, and for that sort of poverty there's no government program.

Brooks' Inadvertent Description of Conservatives

New York Times columnist David Brooks assays to describe the distinctive characteristics of political moderates, but I think he manages instead to give a pretty good description, inadvertently, of political conservatives.

He lists eight ideas that, he says, moderates tend to embrace. In fact, for the most part he's describing political conservatives. Of the eight traits Brooks discusses three are ideologically neutral but five are actually characteristics which define conservatives. Wherever he uses the term "moderate" the reader can more accurately, I think, substitute "conservative". Here are the five in boldface with my comments:

1. Politics is a limited activity. Zealots look to the political realm for salvation and self-fulfillment. They turn politics into a secular religion and ultimately an apocalyptic war of religion because they try to impose one correct answer on all of life. Moderates believe that, at most, government can create a platform upon which the beautiful things in life can flourish. But it cannot itself provide those beautiful things. Government can create economic and physical security and a just order, but meaning, joy and the good life flow from loving relationships, thick communities and wise friends. The moderate is prudent and temperate about political life because he is so passionate about emotional, spiritual and intellectual life.

This is why conservatives argue incessantly for limited, decentralized government and for more autonomy for communities and families, Edmund Burke's "little platoons" of society.

2. In politics, the lows are lower than the highs are high. The harm government does when it screws up — wars, depressions — is larger than the benefits government produces when it does well. Therefore the moderate operates from a politics of skepticism, not a politics of faith. He understands that most of the choices are among bad options (North Korea), so he prefers steady incremental reform to sudden revolutionary change.

Conservatives are not opposed to change, but they are opposed to change for the sake of change. All change should be tempered by experience and traditions which have proven themselves reliable guides over long periods of time. Conservatives are very suspicious of revolutions, whether political, cultural or social. Sudden, rapid change rarely makes things better and usually makes them worse.

3. Truth before justice. All political movements must face inconvenient facts — thoughts and data that seem to aid their foes. If you try to suppress those facts, by banning a speaker or firing an employee, then you are putting the goals of your cause, no matter how noble, above the search for truth. This is the path to fanaticism,....

For precisely these reasons conservatives are the strongest advocates of free speech and the free flow of ideas in our culture. Those who prohibit or restrict this freedom are taking us down the road to Big Brother totalitarianism.

4. Partisanship is necessary but blinding.....Moderates are problematic members of their party. They tend to be hard on their peers and sympathetic to their foes.

This helps explain why conservatives are such a thorn in the side of Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan and why conservatives are among President Trump's strongest critics. The Democratic party is disciplined and unified largely because it has no conservatives in it.

5. Humility is the fundamental virtue.....The more the moderate grapples with reality the more she understands how much is beyond our understanding.

Precisely because of the humility Brooks describes, conservatives tend to be skeptical when authorities in various fields speak apodictically about phenomena like climate change, biogenesis, morality, religion, and what's best for our children. Conservatives often suspect that neither we nor they know enough to warrant their certainty.

Brooks finishes with this:

Moderation requires courage. Moderates don’t operate from the safety of their ideologically pure galleons. They are unafraid to face the cross currents, detached from clan, acknowledging how little they know.

In fact, the people who must have courage today are those who stand against the Zeitgeist, who are legally hounded for their religious beliefs, who are shouted down in the university, who are threatened with violence and who lose their jobs, businesses and friends because of their beliefs. Most of these folks today aren't moderates, they're conservatives.