Premoderns and Postmoderns (Pt. III)

This is the third in the series of reflections on Joseph Bottum's essay titled Christians and Postmoderns. See here and here for the two previous posts on his essay.

Bottum writes that:

Believers should not become entangled in the defense of modern times. This is the key - the postmodern attack on modernity is right: without God, essences are the will to power. Without God, every attempt to call something true or beautiful or good is actually an attempt to compel other people to agree.

Of course believers are tempted, when they hear postmodern deconstructions of modernity, to argue in support of modernity. After all, believers share with modern nonbelievers a trust in the reality of truth. They affirm the efficacy of human action, the movement of history towards a goal, the possibility of moral and aesthetic judgments. But believers share with postmoderns the recognition that truth rests on a faith that has itself been the sole subject of the long attack of modern times. The most foolish thing believers could do is to make concessions now to a modernity that is already bankrupt (and that despises them anyway) and thus to make themselves subject to a second attack-the attack of the postmodern on the modern. Faithful believers are not responsible for the emptiness of modernity. They struggled against it for as long as they could, and they must not give in now. They must not, at this late date, become scientific, bureaucratic, and technological; skeptical, self-conscious, and self-mocking.

Premoderns are torn between modernity and postmodernity precisely because they share so much in common with both. They bristle at the withering assaults of the postmoderns on the modern belief in objective truth, particularly truth about morals. Yet they are in fundamental agreement with the postmodern critique of the futility of modernity's attempt to ground meaning and truth in the shifting sands of positivism, or the scientific method, or whatever. They recognize that modernity reduces man to a machine and thus robs him of his dignity and worth and inevitably his human rights.

We live in a tragically empty age, one in which the promises of secular reason to usher in a golden era of enlightenment and knowledge were dashed on the rocks of two world wars and the bloodiest century in human history. Postmoderns rightly ridicule the impotence of reason, it's utter inability to offer human beings meaning or to lead us into a humanist nirvana, but they offer nothing in its place other than subjectivity and nihilism.

We can't go back to the premodern era, of course, nor would many of us want to. Modernity, despite its failures and shortcomings, has made the physical burdens of life immeasurably easier to bear. Perhaps, though, we could, if we really set our minds to it, import the crucial assumptions of the premodern age about the necessity of a transcendent foundation for knowledge, meaning, morals and human nature into our present era.

RLC

How to Stop Obamacare

A number of strategists, including John Hawkins at Right Wing News, have laid out a simple plan Republicans could follow in 2011 to effectively neuter Obamacare without having to achieve a supermajority in the Senate. They would, though, have to recapture the House.

Here's Hawkins:

The problem with doing a full repeal of Obamacare is that it will take a majority in the House, the presidency, and 60 votes in the Senate.

Were I a betting man, I'd say condition one is very likely by 2012, condition 2 is definitely possible, but condition 3 is basically out of reach given that we only have 41 Senators right now. By 2014? Maybe, but under any circumstances, getting to 60 Senators is always extraordinarily difficult. Of course, we may be able to peel off some Democratic votes, but there's no guarantee that will happen.

So, how do we kill Obamacare?

The IRS might have to hire as many as 16,000 new employees to enforce all the new taxes and penalties the bill calls for! And that doesn't include all the other government jobs from the 159 new agencies, panels, commissions and departments this bill will create.

What does it take to fund all those government jobs, agencies, panels, and commissions? Tax dollars.

Now, who controls the purse strings? Congress. How many votes do we need via reconciliation to make budget changes? 51.

Hawkins suggests that if the GOP controls the House they could effectively end Obamacare even without a senate supermajority, and even with President Obama still in office, simply by refusing to fund the bureaucracy that sustains it. Read the rest at the link.

The most important thing, though, is to continue explaining to the American people exactly how this bill will harm Americans as it is implemented, and to convince them through clear, calm argument why it needs to be reversed, and to persuade them that they can help by voting for people in November who'll work to reverse it.

RLC

Restoring Faith in Politicians

I had a conversation with my neighbor the other day in which we both agreed that were it not for the fact that we each wanted to be able to vote in primary elections we'd be tempted to register as Independents. Even as I was agreeing with him, though, I was thinking that there really are a lot of good people in the party with which I'm affiliated (the GOP), people that I think are the future both of the party and of our nation, and that perhaps I shouldn't give up on the Republican party just yet.

One of these points of light is Congressman Paul Ryan who has been very impressive throughout the health care debate in arguing that the bill that has just been signed into law is an irresponsible, even disastrous, piece of legislation.

Here's Ryan making his case to Politico's Mike Allen:

Paul Ryan is a nightmare for the Democrats. He's bright and knows what he's talking about. Here's more of Politico's interview with him:

Like I said, he's an impressive guy. People like him are such a refreshing change from the sort of politician who's always walking right on the edge of ethical propriety, who's more concerned with winning than with doing what's right. If the American people ever have their faith restored in politicians it'll be because of men and women like Congressman Ryan.

RLC

Personally Opposed, But ...

You've doubtless heard politicians justify their support for an unlimited abortion license by saying something like this, "I'm personally opposed to abortion, but I wouldn't want to stand in the way of someone else who wanted to have one."

Robert P. George once did a clever riff on this rather odd rationalization. Here's what he wrote:

I am personally opposed to killing abortionists. However, inasmuch as my personal opposition to this practice is rooted in a sectarian (Catholic) religious belief in the sanctity of human life, I am unwilling to oppose it on others who may, as a matter of conscience, take a different view.

Of course I am entirely in favor of policies aimed at removing the root causes of violence against abortionists. Indeed, I would go so far as to support mandatory one-week waiting periods, and even non-judgmental counseling, for people who are contemplating the choice of killing an abortionist. I believe in policies that reduce the urgent need some people feel to kill abortionists while, at the same time, respecting the rights of conscience of my fellow citizens who believe that the killing of abortionists is sometimes a tragic necessity - not a good but a lesser evil.

In short I am moderately pro-choice.

So here's the exit question: If the "personally opposed but..." argument is adequate justification for allowing a woman to abort for whatever reason she chooses, why is it not also a justification for refusing to condemn the murder of abortion providers?

Just asking.

RLC

Premoderns and Postmoderns (Pt. II)

I'd like to continue our look at the First Things essay (Christians and Postmoderns) by Joseph Bottum that we began yesterday.

Bottum writes that:

[T]he massive scientific advance of modernity reveals how easy it is to discover facts, and modernity's collapse reveals how hard it is to hold knowledge. We have an apparatus for discovery unrivaled by the ages, yet every new fact means less than the previously discovered one, for we lack what turns facts to knowledge: the information of what the facts are for.

Precisely so. Modernity offers us no satisfying interpretive framework for assigning meaning to the facts discovered by science. It attempts to supply the need for such a framework by interpreting everything in terms of evolutionary development, but the view that each of us is just a meaningless cipher in the grand flow of time and evolution fails somehow to quench our deepest longings. According to the modern worldview there really is no purpose for the existence of anything. The facts discovered by science, as important as they may be for the furtherance of our technology, don't really have any metaphysical significance. Like everything else, they're just there.

And so "we must learn to live after truth," as a group of European academics wrote in After Truth: A Postmodern Manifesto. "Nothing is certain, not even this . . . The modern age opened with the destruction of God and religion. It is ending with the threatened destruction of all coherent thought." Nietzsche may have been the first to see this clearly .... But, even in the fundamental thinkers of high modernity, hints can be found that knowledge requires God: Descartes uses God in the Meditations in order to escape from the interiority where the cogito has stranded him; Kant uses God as a postulate of pure practical reason in order to hold on to the possibility of morality.

What believers have in common with postmoderns is a distrust of modern claims to knowledge. To be a believer, however, is to be subject to an attack that postmoderns, holding truthlessness to themselves like a lover, never have to face. The history of modernity in the West is in many ways nothing more than the effort to destroy medieval faith. It is a three-hundred-year attempt to demolish medieval (especially Catholic) claims to authority, and to substitute a structure of science and ethics based solely on human rationality.

But with the failure to discover any such rational structure-seen by the postmoderns-the only portion of the modern project still available to a modern is the destruction of faith. It should not surprise us that, in very recent times, attacks on what little is left of medieval belief have become more outrageous: resurgent anti-Semitism, anti-Islamic broadsides, vicious mockery of evangelical preaching, desecrations of the Host in Catholic masses. For modern men and women, nothing else remains of the high moral project of modernity: these attacks are the only good thing left to do. The attackers are convinced of the morality of their attack not by the certainty of their aims-who's to say what's right or wrong?-but by opposition from believers.

I take Bottum to be saying here that modernity, in its death throes, wishes only to finish the business of killing off God, or at least belief in God. Modernity has nothing else to offer. It cannot give answers to any of life's most gripping existential questions. Nowhere in the writings of the anti-theists at large today do we find an answer to any of the following: Why is the universe here? How did life come about? Why is the universe so magnificently fine-tuned for life? Where did human consciousness come from? Why do we feel joy when we encounter beauty? How can we prove that our reason is reliable without using reason to prove it? How can we account for our conviction that we have free will? What obligates us to care about others? Why do we feel guilt? Who do I refer to when I refer to myself? What gives human beings worth, dignity, and rights? If death is the end justice is unattainable, so why do we yearn for it? Why do we need meaning and purpose? What is our purpose?

Ask the Richard Dawkins' of the world those questions and all you'll get in reply is a shrug of the shoulders or a recitation of the historical crimes of the Church. They dodge the question because they have no answer. This is a bit ironic: Neither modern nor postmodern atheism has an answer to the most profound questions we can ask. The only possible answer lies in the God of the "premodern" and this is the one solution to man's existential emptiness that the modern and postmodern atheist simply cannot abide.

More tomorrow.

RLC

The Bright Side

"Longer wait times, fewer doctors, more bureaucracy, massive IRS expansion, explosive debt, the end of the Pax Americana, and global Armageddon. Must try to look on the bright side." Mark Steyn commenting at NRO on the consequences of passing Obamacare.

The bright side, if you can call it that, is that Americans got what they voted for in the last two elections. In choosing to reward Democrats with power we declared ourselves eager for higher taxes, higher spending, greater debt, bloated bureaucracy, a corrupt political process, and a weaker military. This is, of course, what the Democrat party has stood for ever since the sixties, but they've never had enough political clout to put their most radical ideas into practice. Now they do, and, unless the most recent incarnation of those ideas, Obamacare, is repealed, we'll be paying for it for the rest of our lives.

There've been lots of predictions over the last several weeks of a massive defeat of Democrats in the next two election cycles, given the ugly manner in which they passed an enormously unpopular bill. The party leadership demanded that the rank and file fall on their political swords for the sake of the cause, and many of them dutifully obliged. The voters, we've been assured, will hold them accountable:

Even so, I'm not so sure. A lot can happen in the next two years that may cause hostility toward the Democrats to wane. Here's my prediction, for the little that it's worth: If the economy turns around the Democrats will weather this current storm and their losses in November and in 2012 won't be quite as severe as they're being projected to be. If the economy doesn't improve, however, then resentments over Obamacare will exacerbate the electorate's distaste for Democrat policies, and the party will suffer major losses at the polls, especially this Fall.

In the meantime I think the town hall meetings will afford great entertainment this summer.

RLC

Premoderns and Postmoderns (Pt. I)

There are in the West three ways to look at the world, three worldviews which serve as lenses through which we interpret the experiences of our lives. Those three worldviews are essentially distinguished by their view of God, truth, and the era in which they were dominant among the cultural elite. We may, with some license, label these the premodern, modern, and postmodern. The premodern, lasting from ancient times until the Enlightenment (17th century), was essentially Christian. The modern, which lasted until roughly WWII, was essentially naturalistic and secular, and the postmodern, which has been with us now for a couple of generations, is hostile to the Enlightenment emphasis on Reason and objective truth.

I recently came across a wonderful treatment of the tension between these three "metanarratives" in an essay written by medieval scholar Joseph Bottum for First Things back in 1994. FT has recently reprinted his article in an anniversary issue (Bottum is now editor of the journal), and I thought it would be useful to touch on some of the highlights.

Bear in mind that although the terms premodern, modern and postmodern refer to historical eras there are people who exemplify the qualities of each of these in every era, including our own. Thus though we live in a postmodern age due to the dominance of postmodern assumptions among the shapers of contemporary thought, there are lots of premoderns and moderns around. Indeed, outside the academy I suspect most people are either premodern or modern in their outlook.

About a quarter of the way into his essay Bottum, writing on behalf of the Christian (premodern) worldview, says this:

We cannot revert to the premodern, we cannot return to the age of faith, for we were all of us raised as moderns.

And yet, though we cannot revert, we nonetheless have resources that may help us to advance beyond these late times. The modern project that attacked the Middle Ages has itself been under attack for some time. For some time, hyper-modern writers have brought to bear against their modern past the same sort of scarifying analysis that earlier modern writers brought against the premodern past. These later writers, supposing the modern destruction of God to be complete, have turned their postmodern attacks upon the modern project of Enlightenment rationality.

The postmodern project is, as Francois Lyotard put it, a suspicion of all metanarratives based on reason. It rejects the Enlightenment confidence that human reason can lead us to truth about the world, particularly truth about the important matters of meaning, religion and morality. Indeed, postmodern thinkers are skeptical of any claims to a "truth" beyond simple empirical facts.

Bottum continues:

In some sense, of course, these words premodern, modern, and postmodern are too slippery to mean much. Taken to refer to the history of ideas, they seem to name the periods before, during, and after the Enlightenment, but taken to refer to the history of events, they seem to name the period from creation to the rise of science, the period from the rise of science until World War II, and the period since the war. It is tempting to define the categories philosophically, rather than historically, around the recognition that knowledge depends upon the existence of God. But the better modern philosophers (e.g., Descartes and Kant, as opposed to, say, Voltaire) recognize that dependence in some way or another. Perhaps, though definitions based on intent are always weak, the best definition nonetheless involves intent: it is premodern to seek beyond rational knowledge for God; it is modern to desire to hold knowledge in the structures of human rationality (with or without God); it is postmodern to see the impossibility of such knowledge.

In other words, premoderns believe we can have knowledge of God through direct experience apart from reason. As Pascal put it, "The heart has reasons that reason can never know." Moderns believe that knowledge can only come through the exercise of our reason. Postmoderns hold that moderns are deluding themselves. None of us can separate our reason from our biases, prejudices, experiences and so on, all of which shape our perspective and color the lenses through which we view the world. For the postmodern there is no such thing as objective reason or truth.

Bottum again:

The premoderns said that without God, there would be no knowledge, and the postmoderns say we have no God and have no knowledge. The premoderns said that without the purposefulness of final causation, all things would be equally valueless, and the postmoderns say there is no purpose and no value. The premoderns said that without an identity of reality and the Good, there would be no right and wrong, and the postmoderns say there is neither Good nor right and wrong. Though they disagree on whether God exists, premoderns and postmoderns share the major premise that knowing requires His existence. Only for a brief period in the history of the West-the period of modern times-did anyone seriously suppose that human beings could hold knowledge without God.

Here is an interesting insight. Christians hold in common with modern atheists that there is objective truth, that there is meaning to life, and that there is moral right and wrong. At the same time they hold in common with postmodern atheists (not all postmoderns are atheists, it should be stressed) that none of those beliefs can be sustained unless there is a God. Does this, as Bottum alleges, put Christians closer to postmoderns than to moderns?

More tomorrow.

RLC

Re: Real School Reform

Our post last Wednesday on Real School Reform generated a lot of comment, much of it thoughtful. The responses tended to fall into two groups: Those who are taxpayers with children in school and those who are still pursuing an education degree with hopes of some day being a teacher. The former group tended to agree with the basic theme of the post, the latter group tended to be outraged by it. The former group were fairly uniform in saying that they don't want their child in a classroom where the teacher cannot teach. Those in the latter group generally expressed the view that disruptive students should be viewed as a challenge, that it would be reprehensible to just give up on them, and that any teacher who felt that such students should be expelled from school is not worthy of being in the classroom.

To the extent that this second group volunteered the information they were often elementary ed majors, and I certainly did not intend to suggest that I think elementary children should be expelled, unless they are very deeply troubled and a danger to their classmates. My post was directed, though, at a serious problem among high school students, a group with which I've had some experience.

What we need to do as a society, I guess, is have a conversation about what we want our schools to accomplish and what the order of priorities should be. Do we want our schools to be educational facilities? Do we want them to be athletic mills? Do we want them to be social rehabilitation centers? Whatever our highest priority is all else should be subordinated to that goal. If the priority is to give our young people the best education we can provide for them then we need to remove, to the extent we are able, everything that prevents us from achieving that goal.

Taxpayers are paying teachers to be educators, not to be social workers. When a student is chronically disruptive, disrespectful, violent, or threatening, he brings education to a grinding halt, he cheats his fellow students out of a better future, he robs taxpayers of their investment in the school, and he demoralizes good teachers who entered the profession excited about teaching. Such students are the biggest reason our schools have difficulty turning out academically accomplished graduates, and nothing else we do to reform education will make any significant difference until these barriers to academic success are removed from the classroom.

Understand, I'm not talking about a fourth grader who has trouble staying in his seat. I'm talking about the six foot thug who threatens to punch his 100 lb. teacher in her face if she doesn't get off his case. I'm talking about the one or two young men or women in a class who are consistently loud, rude, obscene and insulting to both their classmates and their teachers and who make it impossible for a teacher to present a lesson. I'm talking about the student who has remained unmoved by his teachers' best attempts to help and counsel him about how he can improve his chances at a decent future. I'm talking about the student who has already been suspended three or four times in a school year but whose unacceptable behavior remains unchanged.

When a teacher's day is spent constantly running around the classroom putting out fires that teacher is not teaching. When a teacher's stomach is churning throughout much of her day, when she wakes up every morning dreading her seventh period class, when she checks the absentee roster each morning in hopes that so-and-so is absent that day, she's not going to be nearly as effective as she could be, and her students are inevitably going to be cheated.

A number of readers suggested that teachers of very disruptive young people need to develop strategies for dealing with them. This is the sort of thing students learn to say in their teacher education courses. In real life young teachers quickly learn that very few, if any, of those strategies that sounded so good in their college ed classes actually work. The only strategies many teachers in too many of our schools can hope to develop are strategies for managing their stress and getting them through the day.

Sure, as many readers pointed out, difficult kids often come from dysfunctional homes and can't help being the way they are. That's no doubt true, but it's irrelevant.

One reader, however, responding to a different post said something that is relevant to our original post on school reform. He mentioned that a police chief of his acquaintance once told him that:

"There are three sets of people out in the world. The first is 85% of the population, who you don't really have to worry about, and if you do happen to have a run in with them, you just tell them what they did wrong, and they will never do it again. The second makes up 10% of the population, and these people need a little help with the law and fitting into society appropriately, so we're here just to guide them along. The final group makes up the last 5%. These people are the predators of the world who just need to be locked up behind bars. That is our mission, to find these animals and put them where they belong."

Except for calling them predators and animals (though a few of them certainly are) the same statistics pretty much hold for the population of many of our high schools. The good teachers can guide that 10% in useful directions, but few can do much with that 5%.

Even if one or two of them could be helped by school personnel the commitment of time and resources necessary to achieve even the most modest progress is so great that everyone else in the school suffers. That 1% to 5% of students are obstacles standing in the way of schools fulfilling their mandate, and they need to be removed if we're going to be serious about improving the quality of the education the vast majority of our students deserve.

Some readers seemed to think that showing incorrigible students the door was tantamount to condemning them to a lifetime of dysfunction, but why think that? Many people who were unmanageable while in school suddenly grow up when forced to make their own way in the work world or the military. In some cases, getting them out of the school environment is the best thing we can do for them.

If some other alternative can be found for these kids that the taxpayers are willing to underwrite then fine, but there's no reason to think we're doing anyone, including the problem students themselves, any favors by keeping them in school and constantly recycling them through the principal's office. They're not learning anything while they're in school, and they're preventing others from learning, so what's the point?

RLC

Hail Caesar

Dick Morris argues that Obamacare, which the House is expected to vote on tomorrow, would be fatal to Medicare and consequently to the careers of Democrats who vote for it:

If the House Democratic majority passes Obama's healthcare proposals, one of two things will happen by Election Day, 2010 - and neither one will be healthy for the Democrats seeking re-election.

Either the Medicare cuts will take effect or they will be postponed by a terrified Congress.

If they take effect, physicians' fees will be slashed 21 percent and hospital reimbursements for Medicare patients will be cut by $1.3 billion. Tens of thousands of doctors and thousands of healthcare institutions - hospitals, hospices, outpatient clinics and such - will refuse to treat Medicare patients.

Entire cities could be without one doctor in important specialties who will take care of the elderly on Medicare. Particularly in fields like arthritic and joint pain, doctors will simply refuse to accept the low reimbursement rates they are being offered and hospitals will refuse all but emergency care to Medicare patients.

In effect, the elderly could experience a doctors' strike against Medicare patients.

Obamacare would be very hard on the elderly who would, unless Congress acts to forestall the reimbursement cuts (and thus add to the cost of the bill), be forced to buy expensive medical insurance or go without many of the procedures and checkups that Medicare currently pays for. This is enormously ironic inasmuch as Democrats have been Medicare's biggest supporters ever since it was begun back in the 1960s. It's also ironic because killing Medicare is an act of political self-immolation.

The consensus among people who have studied the bill is that Obamacare will result in higher insurance premiums, less access to health care, lower quality health care, higher taxes, and a higher deficit. And none of this takes into account the crushing effect that the adminstration's plans to grant amnesty to twenty million illegal aliens would have on the system.

Morris, who was an advisor to President Clinton, predicts catastrophe in November's elections:

Either poison - the cuts or the deficit - will be enough to eradicate an entire generation of House and Senate Democrats.

If I were a political cartoonist I think I'd draw a picture of the Roman Coliseum with Congressional Democrats standing en masse in the middle of the arena just before the lions (the voters) are unleashed. The Dems face the emperor, Barack Obama, and with an outstretched arm shout Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant (Hail Caesar, we who are about to die salute you).

RLC

Plantinga and Theistic Materialism

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga has offered several noted arguments against materialism, i.e. the belief that everything is reducible to matter. Materialism denies the existence of immaterial entities like mind or soul or God. Plantinga's argument here is with theists who embrace a kind of local materialism. They believe in God but they hold that everything in the created universe is ultimately material. Plantinga thinks that this is wrongheaded. He argues that if one is a theist one really should be a substance dualist, i.e. one who holds that everything is reducible to at least two fundamental "substances," matter and mind (or soul):

Elsewhere Plantinga has argued cogently against materialism using other arguments. We'll discuss some of those in a day or so. If you believe you are more than just your body, if you believe that something about you survives your body's death, or if you believe you have free will but don't know how that can be if physical matter is all there is, you'll be interested in what Plantinga says.

RLC

Assisting Suicide

Quinn passes along a Newsweek article that raises a host of difficult ethical questions about suicide. The article describes the work of Dr. Lawrence Egbert, the medical director of a group called Final Exit Network (FEN), a right to die organization. Dr. Egbert is facing criminal charges in two states for advising people with terminal illnesses or terrible pain how they can end their lives. Here's Newsweek's summary of the case which has the octogenarian Dr. Egbert facing over thirty years in prison:

In 2006 John Celmer's body began to break down. He was diagnosed with oral cancer and had to undergo surgery to remove the tumor and then radiation therapy to kill off any remaining malignant cells. The radiation ravaged his jawbone and the surrounding tissue, leaving a hole in his chin. Fluid leaked onto his clothes. His teeth began falling out. He had difficulty eating and speaking. As Celmer's jaw began severing from his face, doctors attempted moderate treatments, but all of them failed. So in 2008, they sought to reconstruct his chin and jaw using tissue from his chest and bone from his lower leg. The procedures appeared successful, but five days after the final operation, he was discovered dead in his Cumming, Ga., home.

At first everyone assumed he'd died of natural causes. Yet as Celmer's wife, Susan, sifted through his belongings, she discovered several things that puzzled her: a receipt for two helium tanks, a handwritten note referring to his need to acquire a "hood," an entry on his calendar (May 7, 2008: "Claire here @ 1:30") that mentioned someone she didn't know. Susan also found paperwork referencing something called Final Exit Network (FEN). As she later learned, it was an organization that counseled people with serious ailments on how to commit suicide. She shared her findings with police, who launched an investigation and eventually concluded that the group had helped Celmer kill himself. Susan was devastated-and enraged. What right did FEN have to help usher her husband to his death? "We are not the Creator," she told Newsweek. "We do not give life and don't have the option to take life."

Read the rest of the article and then reflect on the morality of advising suffering people with no real hope of cure, short of a miracle, how they can hasten their death. Here are a couple of questions to get you started:

Do you think Dr. Egbert should be imprisoned (Assuming there's not more to the story than what the article tells us)?

Do you think that people don't have the right to take their own life, under some circumstances? If not, why not? If they do, under what circumstances do they?

If you think people should be able to offer advice and assistance to those seeking to end their pain do you think there's a danger that more and more people will be encouraged to end their life for economic reasons rather than reasons of suffering?

If you oppose helping people end their life why do you think it's compassionate and merciful to have a suffering pet put down but not a suffering grandparent?

RLC

Shock Tv

Back in the 1960s there was a famous experiment in which people were encouraged to apply electric shock to a man if the man answered questions posed to him incorrectly. Those applying the electricity thought they really were administering extreme voltages to the "victim" but, in fact, the victim was an actor.

The point of the experiment was to show how easily people will suppress their moral reservations and submit to the will of an authority figure. Instead of refusing to participate many went along with it.

Now my friend Matt sends a video that shows that the French are turning the experiment into a television show:

Apparently, a lot of people think it's okay to cause another person pain as long as an authority figure tells them it's alright. It's no wonder Hitler and others have found it so easy to get the masses to go along with their cruelties. We really are just sheep.

Of course, if our sense of human sympathy is little more than the product of blind, impersonal forces and chance, if human beings are, as we've been told now for three generations, nothing but animals with no soul and answerable to no God, we shouldn't be surprised that our behavior fits that view. Ideas have consequences.

RLC

Grounding Morality

Over at Telic Thoughts commenter Allen MacNeill, a professor of biology at Cornell, criticizes (see comment at 4:22 p.m.) the claim made by Michael Ruse and other naturalists that morality is just an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to enable us to get along with each other. MacNeill writes that:

Ruse believes that moral/ethical principles can be directly derived from the findings of evolutionary biology. This, as several commentators have already pointed out, violates one of the most basic principles of ethical theory: that one cannot derive an "ought" from an "is." The attempt to do so constitutes what is known in ethical theory as the "naturalistic fallacy," and is one of the foundational principles of modern (i.e. post-17th century) ethical theory.

While it is the case that some evolutionary biologists (including Franz de Waal, Mark Hauser, and E. O. Wilson) commit the same fallacy as Ruse, this does not mean that doing so is either universal among evolutionary biologists nor in any way validated by the science of evolutionary biology. On the contrary, anyone with even a passing acquaintance with ethical philosophy would know that attempting to do what Ruse does in his commentary is both invalid and pernicious.

I have to say that I didn't read Ruse the way MacNeill did. I understood Ruse to be saying that morality is an illusion. There really isn't any such thing. MacNeill seems to be saying that Ruse is trying to ground morality in evolution. If this is indeed what Ruse is trying to do then I am in complete agreement with MacNeill that Ruse is engaged in a fool's errand. Unless there is a personal transcendent ground for morality there simply isn't any non-subjective, non-arbitrary basis for moral obligation or moral judgment. Certainly, as MacNeill asserts, evolution can't provide one. He and I part company, however, when he goes on to claim that:

That said, the very same thing can be said of those who try to ground moral and ethical codes in religion....any deity (including most versions of the Judeo-Christian god) is constrained to assert what is good by their nature as deities, rather than the other way around. That is, certain things are good in and of themselves, and not simply because God says so; God as God is constrained to proclaim what is good and abjure what is bad.

In sum: morality/ethics are justified sui generis, and any attempt to justify them via grounding in either science or religion is to commit the same fallacy: the "super/naturalistic fallacy."

This, in my opinion, is a misunderstanding of the attempt to ground morality in God. MacNeill seems to be saying that God is one thing and goodness is another. Some acts, he claims, are intrinsically good independently of God. In other words, God commands us to be kind, for example, because kindness is good in itself and would be good whether God commanded it or not, or indeed, whether God existed or not.

The problem for MacNeill, though, is that he's not coming to grips with the Christian concepts of God and goodness. Goodness, in the Christian view, is not "out there" in some Platonic realm of forms waiting to be accessed by God. Goodness is part of God's very essence. It's an aspect of His nature. It flows from Him like heat and light flow from the sun. Just as heat and light would not exist if the sun didn't exist, so, too, goodness would not exist if God didn't exist. Thus, when God enjoins us to be kind He's not pointing us to some independent form of the good and commanding us to partake of it. Rather He's pointing us to Himself and urging us to be like Him.

Just as logic is woven into the structure of the universe because logic is part of the essence of God, so, too, the moral law is woven into the structure of our hearts because goodness is part of the essence of God.

RLC

Western Civilization and the Irish

Millions of Americans, many of them descendents of Irish immigrants, celebrated their Irish heritage by observing St. Patrick's Day yesterday. We are indebted to Thomas Cahill and his best-selling book How The Irish Saved Civilization for explaining to us why Patrick's is a life worth commemorating. As improbable as his title may sound, Cahill weaves a fascinating and compelling tale of how the Irish in general, and Patrick and his spiritual heirs in particular, served as a tenuous but crucial cultural bridge from the classical world to the medieval age and, by so doing, made Western civilization possible.

Born a Roman citizen in 390 B.C., Patrick had been kidnapped as a boy of sixteen from his home on the coast of Britain and taken by Irish barbarians to Ireland. There he languished in slavery until he was able to escape six years later. Upon his homecoming he became a Christian, studied for the priesthood, and eventually returned to Ireland where he would spend the rest of his life laboring to persuade the Irish to accept the gospel and to abolish slavery. Patrick was the first person in history, in fact, to speak out unequivocally against slavery and, according to Cahill, the last person to do so until the 17th century.

Meanwhile, Roman control of Europe had begun to collapse. Rome was sacked by Alaric in 410 A.D. and barbarians were sweeping across the continent, forcing the Romans back to Italy, and plunging Europe into the Dark Ages. Throughout the continent unwashed, illiterate hordes descended on the once grand Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books. Learning ground to a halt and the literary heritage of the classical world was burned or moldered into dust. Almost all of it, Cahill claims, would surely have been lost if not for the Irish.

Having been converted to Christianity through the labors of Patrick, the Irish took with gusto to reading, writing and learning. They delighted in letters and bookmaking and painstakingly created indescribably beautiful Biblical manuscripts such as the Book of Kells which is on display today in the library of Trinity College in Dublin. Aware that the great works of the past were disappearing, they applied themselves assiduously to the daunting task of copying all surviving Western literature - everything they could lay their hands on. For a century after the fall of Rome, Irish monks sequestered themselves in cold, damp, cramped mud huts called scriptoria, so remote and isolated from the world that they were seldom threatened by the marauding pagans. Here these men spent their entire adult lives reproducing the old manuscripts and preserving literacy and learning for the time when people would be once again ready to receive them.

These scribes and their successors served as the conduits through which the Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the benighted tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruin of the civilization they had recently overwhelmed. Around the late 6th century, three generations after Patrick, Irish missionaries with names like Columcille, Aidan, and Columbanus began to venture out from their monasteries and refuges, clutching their precious books to their hearts, sailing to England and the continent, founding their own monasteries and schools among the barbarians and teaching them how to read, write and make books of their own. Absent the willingness of these courageous men to endure deprivations and hardships of every kind for the sake of the gospel and learning, Cahill argues, the world that came after them would have been completely different. It would likely have been a world without books. Europe almost certainly would have been illiterate, and it would probably have been unable to resist the Moslem incursions that arrived a few centuries later.

The Europeans, starved for knowledge, soaked up everything the Irish missionaries could give them. From such seeds as these modern Western civilization germinated. From the Greeks the descendents of the goths and vandals learned philosophy, from the Romans they learned about law, from the Bible they learned of the worth of the individual who, created and loved by God, is therefore significant and not merely a brutish aggregation of atoms. From the Bible, too, they learned that the universe was created by a rational Mind and was thus not capricious, random, or chaotic. It would yield its secrets to rational investigation. Out of these assumptions, once their implications were finally and fully developed, grew historically unprecedented views of the value of the individual and the flowering of modern science.

Our cultural heritage is thus, in a very important sense, a legacy from the Irish. A legacy from Patrick. It is worth pondering in the wake of St. Patrick's Day what the world would be like today had it not been for those early Irish scribes and missionaries thirteen centuries ago. Buiochas le Dia ar son na nGaeil (Thank God for the Irish), and I hope you had a happy St. Patrick's Day.

Note: This post was originally written as a guest column for the York Daily Record. It appeared on March 15th, 1998.

RLC

Real School Reform

Newsweek magazine argues, in an article by two of its staff writers, that we must fire bad teachers. I don't think anyone outside of the NEA and its affiliates would argue with that, but then Newsweek goes a step too far and lays educational failure in America pretty much entirely at the feet of bad teachers:

[I]n recent years researchers have discovered something that may seem obvious, but for many reasons was overlooked or denied. What really makes a difference, what matters more than the class size or the textbook, the teaching method or the technology, or even the curriculum, is the quality of the teacher. Much of the ability to teach is innate-an ability to inspire young minds as well as control unruly classrooms that some people instinctively possess (and some people definitely do not). Teaching can be taught, to some degree, but not the way many graduate schools of education do it, with a lot of insipid or marginally relevant theorizing and pedagogy. In any case the research shows that within about five years, you can generally tell who is a good teacher and who is not.

So far, so obvious. We hardly needed research to tell us that good teachers can make a real difference for kids, or that the ability to teach is more of an innate talent, strongly correlated to personality, than a learned skill. But then the Newsweek writers say this:

Over time, inner-city schools, in particular, succumbed to a defeatist mindset. The problem is not the teachers, went the thinking-it's the parents (or absence of parents); it's society with all its distractions and pathologies; it's the kids themselves. Not much can be done, really, except to keep the assembly line moving through "social promotion," regardless of academic performance, and hope the students graduate (only about 60 percent of blacks and Hispanics finish high school). Or so went the conventional wisdom in school superintendents' offices from Newark to L.A. By 1992, "there was such a dramatic achievement gap in the United States, far larger than in other countries, between socioeconomic classes and races," says Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality. "It was a scandal of monumental proportions, that there were two distinct school systems in the U.S., one for the middle class and one for the poor."

Now surely, incompetent teachers are a problem in many of our schools, but they're not the chief problem, about which more below. I want to note first, though, that most bad teachers reveal themselves long before the five year point mentioned in the article. Many of them are known to be inadequate before they receive tenure, but for a variety of reasons administrators are often reluctant to simply let them go. In other words, to the extent that weak teachers are a problem in our schools it's due more to the failure of administrators who hire them and then afterward fail to cull them from the faculty before they attain tenure.

But the most formidable impediment to successful education, however, is not incompetent teachers. Nor is it lack of funding. It's disruptive, disrespectful students in the classroom. Anyone who wishes to get a glimpse of what it's like in many public schools today should rent the movie The Class. It's a foreign film set in France and subtitled, but teachers who watch it will nod their heads in recognition of the difficulties of teaching in modern urban settings. Others will be astonished that any teacher continues to show up for work in such an environment. Yet The Class captures pretty well the atmosphere that prevails in many classrooms all across this country.

Disruptive students bring learning for everyone in the class to a halt, and too many administrators simply refuse to do anything meaningful to get rid of them. Nor do our courts help this situation by demanding that a district which expels a student pay for alternative education elsewhere. Essentially, the student (I use the term in its loosest sense) squanders the taxpayers' money by making himself impervious to the efforts of his teachers and preventing his fellow students from learning anything, and then the courts and legislatures tell the taxpayers, when the school district has finally had enough, that they still have to foot the bill to place the kid in an alternative school.

The fact is that most teachers today are just as capable, if not moreso, as any who have ever taught in our schools, but they're working in a social milieu much different and much tougher than did their predecessors back in the 50s and 60s. The problems teachers faced two generations ago were not nearly as severe and as intractable as they are today. Moreover, those teachers had support from administrators, parents, communities, and courts that today's teacher can only envy. In many schools when teachers walk into a classroom they're pretty much on their own in dealing with chronically disruptive kids, and if they do try to enlist the aid of an administrator they're often asked, implicitly or explicitly, why they can't control their classrooms on their own.

The way our society dealt with troubled troublemakers in the 50s was to boot them out and let them find a job. The way we deal with them today is to hire a phalanx of teacher's aides, counsellors, police officers, etc., but none of this really solves the problem. The problem is that too many classes are wasted because too many students in too many schools simply don't belong in school, and they make it impossible for even good teachers to teach. When good teachers can't teach they get discouraged and frustrated and often leave the profession, leaving the less talented or less experienced teachers to staff the schools.

If we were really serious about making our schools better places for kids to learn we'd admit that we have a responsibility to teach the students who really want an education. We'd also admit that some students have clearly demonstrated that they don't care about an education and are a serious barrier to the success of those who do. These students should be given their unconditional release so that they can get on with their life's calling of being a burden on society and stop holding back those who want to be a benefit to it.

RLC

Textbook Persons

Philosopher Mike Almeida offers an interesting argument at Prosblogion against the way our society currently regards the unborn child . It goes like this:

Case 1: Consider a possible world which is similar to ours except for the rate at which our counterparts develop into persons. Otherwise, the rate of biological development is not much different, the human counterparts are born on average nine months after conception too. But they are conscious, thinking, and reasoning at a much higher level, much sooner. They are, in short, persons much sooner in something like the textbook sense of 'person'. Suppose they are textbook persons within a week of conception. Here's what's not credible: it is permissible to terminate a textbook person so long as you do so before a week has elapsed. It is just not credible that, on day 5.99999 the being has no particular value, but on day 6 it has great value.

By "textbook person" I take Almeida to mean something like, "A living human being with the capacity to engage in acts of intellect, emotion, and will."

Case 2: But suppose you don't find that incredible. Consider a world in which it takes 30 seconds to develop into a textbook person. It's not credible that I had no moral value .00002 seconds ago, and now I have great moral value. The moral difference in you is negligible over .002 seconds.

Case 3: If you find it incredible that it is permissible to terminate the would-be textbook person in case (1) or case (2), then you should find it incredible that it is permissible to terminate an actual would-be textbook person. Even if you suppose that the predicate 'being a person' is vague, it is true that, at some level of vagueness, a being moves from not definitely all the way up a textbook person to definitely all the way up textbook person in an instant. In an instant, the being moves from being the sort of thing that has hardly any value to the kind of thing that you cannot terminate with doing an extreme moral wrong. But it cannot be true that the natural properties you acquire in a single instant are sufficient to make that great of a moral difference.

Of course, current law (Roe v. Wade) assumes that this is exactly what happens. At some point in the child's development it suddenly acquires the status of a person with the right to life. The child may be aborted before that point but not after. As Almeida's thought experiment makes clear, however, the current law is based on very dubious logic.

RLC

The Progressive Diminishment of Man

Rebecca Bynum of the New English Review authors a fine essay titled The Progressive Diminishment of Man. Her piece is reminiscient of C.S. Lewis' Abolition of Man and offers many good insights into the dehumanization of modern man. I have only two minor quibbles with it.

I think she could have been a bit more clear that the problem is scientism not science. She does say this, but the point needs more emphasis, I think, than she gives it. Nor do I think the rejection of the monistic materialism naturalism, or scientism, entails is a sufficient remedy to the problem. In my view nothing short of an explicit acknowledgement that there exists a personal Creator in whose image we are fashioned will suffice to address the "diminishment" Bynum so skillfully exposes.

But these quibbles are insignificant compared to her overall case. Start with these paragraphs:

In the space of a few short generations, man has descended from seeing himself as a little less than the angels to king of the beasts to nothing more than a complex machine. The effect this has had on culture, on art and literature, has been devastating. For as the essential importance of man has decreased, so has his ability to portray life in anything other than absurd terms.

[L]iterature has been reduced to a prolonged and tedious exploration of the aberrant....Indeed, the importance of human life has been so reduced that certain philosophers argue, with dead seriousness, that it is actually immoral to prefer human life over than the life of an animal.

The high priests of scientism, from Stephen Hawking to Richard Dawkins, argue that given enough time, science will eventually answer all questions, and implied is the idea that science, and science alone, contains all truth. However, upon examination, we find great areas where science has already abdicated. Science cannot, for example, explain the difference between a living and a dead organism in purely scientific terms. Scientists observe the elliptical movements of the planets and the mathematical precision of the orbits of electrons around the atomic proton, and postulate the existence of forces to explain these motions, but they cannot tell us what these forces actually are. For example, science can describe the effects of electricity, but it cannot tell us what electricity is any more than it can tell us what life is or what gravity is.

This is an excellent point. Scientism is the belief that science has all the answers to life's most important questions and any question that science can't answer isn't really worth asking. Yet as Bynum points out, science really can tell us very little. Not only does it not know what a force like gravity or magnetism actually is, neither can it tell us what matter is, what energy is, or how they interact. It can't tell us what a mind is, what an idea is, how we experience sensations like color or sound, what consciousness is, or even what life is. It can not give us a satisfactory explication of moral obligation, it can't tell us what our purpose is or give meaning to life. Nor can it explain why truth matters. It can discover the principles that enable us to build cars, televisions, i-pods, computers, and nuclear weapons, but it can't tell us how these things should be used. We could go on, but I think the point is made. Science can describe what happens when one bit of matter comes close to another, but it cannot tell us much else of importance about life.

Bynum goes on:

[I]t is my contention that even the possibility of exploring the non-material realm of mind has been effectively blocked by the overwhelming consensus of modern science that we live in a meaningless material universe and only the weak-minded would say otherwise. It is because science has progressively diminished man in his own eyes that philosophy has been stunted. We stand dumb in the face of confident Islamic assertions because we long ago abandoned the search for an effective and modern philosophical response to materialism. Islam is, in essence, an extremely materialistic religion with many similarities to secular materialism: both remove human dignity and envision man as a slave.

The reinvigoration of Western culture must include the restoration of man to a place of dignity in a meaningful universe. The first step must be to restore mind to a level of reality, not illusion, otherwise meaning and values cannot be considered to be real. If mind is not real, then all of man's knowledge and all his finest accomplishments in art and science are as nothing and the Muslim designation of the fruits of our culture as worthless jahiliyya would be justified. Perhaps it is time to revisit the works of Kant, Descartes, Aristotle and Plato and recognize that the banishment of mind from the realm of reality has not necessarily been wise. For without mind, where is will? and without will, where is freedom? Let us restore man to his proper and dignified place in a meaningful and thus mind-filled universe. One may even assert that in mind, we live, move and have our being.

By quoting Paul (Acts 17:28) Bynum is apparently tip-toeing up to the suggestion that though the reassertion of the dignity of man and a meaningful universe requires a restoration of the belief in mind (or soul) that in itself is not enough. We need to see the universe as the palette upon which God is painting a beautiful picture. We need to see human beings as being precious in the eyes of their Creator. Nothing less will afford us a basis for thinking man has any genuine dignity or worth. Nothing else can serve as a basis for human rights.

Anything less than a full-blooded acknowledgement of this metaphysical truth will prove ineffectual in restoring man to the exalted status Bynum rightly and eloquently calls us to reclaim.

RLC

Wallis Throws Down on Beck

Jim Wallis of Sojourners' issues a challenge to talk radio host Glenn Beck to debate him on whether the Bible obligates governments to engage in social justice (i.e. social welfare programs). Beck won't do it, of course, but I wish he would. Wallis is miffed at Beck because Beck has claimed that there is no such mandate in the Bible and that, in fact, the rubric of social justice has been used by fascists, communists, nazis, and socialists of all stripes throughout the 20th century to justify their aggrandizement of centralized power.

Here's Wallis being interviewed by Stephanie Miller:

I'm afraid that Wallis, not to mention Miller, misses the point here. Beck isn't saying that Christians shouldn't care for the poor. What he's saying, I think, is that there's nothing in Scripture that makes such care a responsibility of government. The Biblical imperatives enjoin individuals to help the poor. The Bible leaves it to those individuals to decide whom they will help and how much. Nowhere, as far as I'm aware, do they say that government has the duty or right to take property from one person to give it to others.

When government assumes the responsibility of caring for the poor then such care quickly becomes a right. So the poor have a right to food, education, heating fuel, and now to health care. By what logic can they be denied a right to a house (or at least home insurance), a tv, air conditioning, and a car (or at least auto insurance)? And if they have a right to all those things then their fellow citizens - you and I - have a duty to provide them. Should government be permitted to seize the property you work hard to earn and build in order to provide all these benefits for those who can't, or won't, work for them themselves?

Wallis says yes, Beck says no. I'm with Beck.

RLC

This Too Shall Pass

Imagine as you watch this OK Go video that you were told that the system designed for the video had somehow been erected by mindless forces acting by chance and you'll get some idea why so many people just feel intuitively that life is the work of an intelligent Engineer. After all, a single cell in your body is far more sophisticated and carries far more information than this amazing contraption:

Remarkable, no? But I suppose that given a couple million years the parts and the precise arrangement of this system could have accidentally been constructed. I mean, it's possible - in the same way that a bullet fired at random into outer space could possibly hit a dime-sized target on the other side of the universe - and according to a lot of Darwinians, as long as something's possible that's the same as being inevitable.

RLC

Texas Textbooks

Conservatives won a skirmish in the culture wars last week when the Texas school board adopted standards for all public school social studies textbooks used in the state. According to a New York Times report by James McKinley the new standards stress "the superiority of American capitalism, question the Founding Fathers' commitment to a purely secular government and present Republican political philosophies in a more positive light."

The vote was 10 to 5 along party lines, with all the Republicans on the board voting for it which makes wonder if the five Democrats think capitalism is not a superior economic system and that the Founders really were thoroughgoing secularists.

McKinley, who seems to be barely able to conceal his own disappointment with the success of the conservative faction on the board, goes on to note that the new standards include a change in "the teaching of the civil rights movement to ensure that students study the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers in addition to the nonviolent approach of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It also made sure that textbooks would mention the votes in Congress on civil rights legislation, which Republicans supported."

The Board also approved an amendment saying students should study "the unintended consequences" of the Great Society legislation, affirmative action and Title IX legislation. The new standards will also mention that Germans and Italians as well as Japanese were interned in the United States during World War II, to counter the idea that the internment of Japanese was motivated by racism.

The new standards also cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone.

I don't know whether Aquinas deserves more notice than Jefferson, but I do think John Locke does. Jefferson's thinking on revolution was largely influenced by Locke whose Second Treatise on Government provided the philosophical framework for Jefferson's Declaration of Independence.

At any rate, it's a consolation to read that there's at least one influential state determined to do what it can to insure that high school students aren't simply fed a fetid porridge of half truths and untruths about the history of their country. Perhaps other states will be emboldened to follow Texas' example.

Thanks go to Jason, who happens to teach history in Texas, for the link.

RLC

Media <i>Schadenfreude</i>

The liberal media have been having a feeding frenzy this past week at the expense of the hapless and strange Democrat from New York, Eric Massa. Mr. Massa, who has resigned his congressional seat, has admitted to participating in "tickle fights" with his assistants, as well as other behaviors most of us might consider somewhat unusual for a fifty year old husband and father. He's also been accused of making unwelcome sexual advances on male subordinates both in Congress and while serving as an officer in the Navy.

So much for the sad story of Eric Massa. What I'd like to focus on is the peculiar response to this episode by the liberal media which has been relishing and abetting the spectacle of this poor man humiliating and debasing himself in nationally televised interviews. They can't seem to get enough of the sordid details. My question for the media progressives, then, is what, exactly, do they consider Mr. Massa's offenses to be that he so richly merits their derision and contempt?

Are they scandalized by his alleged unwelcome gropings and advances? If so, where were they when Paula Jones, Kathleen Willy and Juanita Broaddrick were making the same, or worse, sorts of allegations against President Clinton? Back then the media couldn't do enough to discredit the women who were making the charges and to protect the President from their "slanders." In what significant way is Mr. Massa's behavior any different from President Clinton's? Indeed, it could be argued that it was not nearly as bad. Juanita Broadderick, after all, accused Mr. Clinton of having raped her and Kathleen Willey accused him of having molested her in the Oval Office. All of these women were subsequently subjected to smears, aspersions, and intimidation, and the liberal media happily piled on. Rather like Mr. Massa's friends were said to pile on him to celebrate his fiftieth birthday.

Perhaps, then, it's the homosexual nature of Mr. Massa's advances the media finds so titillating. But haven't they been instructing us for a generation now that gay sex should be looked upon in the same way we view "straight" sex? To ridicule Massa because his frolics were homo- rather than heterosexual is to violate one of the major tenets of 21st century liberal sexual orthodoxy. Why would enlightened liberals be snickering at Mr. Massa's conduct as though it were a degrading perversion, unless, of course, they're hypocrites?

Well, we don't want to think that so maybe the media are amused simply by the fact that this pathetic man is making a public fool of himself. But, again, if that's what has set them all to chortling why aren't they rolling on the floor in laughter over Nancy Pelosi's steady flow of inanities? This woman makes a fool of herself almost every time she opens her mouth. The other day she told us that Congress had to pass the health care reform (HCR) bill so that we could know what was in it. No sooner did we get done scratching our heads over that one than she followed it up with soothing assurances that if the measure is passed those of us who wish to be artists or writers won't have to worry about having to keep a job to pay for our insurance since our neighbors will be required to pay for it for us. Isn't that swell? If you decide to leave your job to go splatter paint on a canvas can you expect your neighbor to buy you your food and gas, and pay your mortgage, too?

Anyway, the liberal media's treatment of Massa is not about his sexual gropings. If it were they would've been outraged by Bill Clinton. Nor is it about the fact that his romps were homoerotic because liberals profess to see nothing wrong with that. Nor is it about his embarrassingly ridiculous attempts to justify his behavior in televised interviews for if it were they'd be scoffing merrily at Nancy Pelosi's vacuous attempts to justify HCR.

No. Under the pretense of illuminating Mr. Massa's ethical and moral transgressions the media is trying to destroy him because, despite being one of the most progressive members in the House of Representatives, he was a "no" vote on HCR. If he'd been a "yes" they would've had scarcely a word to say about his ethical problems, just as they've been loath to say much about Chris Dodd's or Charles Rangel's problems or those of the late Jack Murtha.

Perhaps the best explanation for the liberal media's conduct in this case - other than that, like bullies, they take pleasure in kicking people who are down (vide their delight in exposing every sleazy and harmful detail of Tiger Woods' personal life) - is that, perhaps unconsciously, they want to make Massa look as weird as possible so that the public will come to associate opposition to HCR with total weirdness.

RLC

Call Us Ishmael

Kevin Ferris of the Philadelphia Inquirer has penned a helpful summary of what's wrong with the President's plan for health care reform. His column is, in fact, a recap of the points made by congressman Paul Ryan at the Health Care Summit convened a couple of weeks ago by President Obama.

Ferris writes:

[O]ne thing was missing in the summit and in the 10 days since: answers to the sharp criticisms raised about the Obama/Reid/Pelosi health-care bills. Yet Obama and congressional Democrats charge ahead: We must have reform. Now. And it must be this Obama/Senate bill.

The public has been skeptical all along, doubting Congress' veracity and its accounting skills. Last week, a CNN poll showed only 25 percent in favor of the current Democratic plans, while 48 percent say start over.

Yet opposition and legitimate criticisms have been largely dismissed, and this was true at the summit, too, when raised by U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) and others. So let me join Investor's Business Daily's Feb. 26 issue and others who have repeated Ryan's concerns, so these serious flaws can be addressed before "reform" is jammed down our throats:

"If you take a look at the CBO analysis, analysis from your chief actuary, this bill does not control costs; this bill does not reduce deficits. Instead this bill adds a new health-care entitlement, at a time when we have no idea how to pay for the entitlements we already have."

This bill "is full of gimmicks and smoke and mirrors."

"The bill has 10 years of tax increases of about one-half trillion dollars, with 10 years of Medicare cuts of one-half trillion dollars to pay for six years of spending. What's the true 10-year cost of this bill? In 10 years, it is $2.3 trillion.

"When you strip out the double-counting and what I call the gimmicks, the full 10-year cost is a $460 billion deficit. The second 10-year cost of this bill has a $1.4 trillion deficit."

"It takes $52 billion in higher Social Security tax revenues and counts them as offsets, but that is really reserved for Social Security. So either we are double-counting them or we are not planning to pay those Social Security benefits."

"It takes $72 billion and claims money from the Class Act, that's the long-term-care insurance program. It takes the money from premiums that are designed for that benefit and instead counts them as offsets. The Senate Budget Committee chairman said this is a Ponzi scheme that would make Bernie Madoff proud."

"It treats Medicare like a piggy bank. It raids a one-half trillion dollars out of Medicare . . . not to shore up Medicare solvency, but to spend on this new government program."

"The chief actuary of Medicare . . . is saying as much as 20 percent of Medicare providers will go out of business or stop seeing Medicare beneficiaries. Millions of seniors who have chosen Medicare Advantage will lose the coverage they now enjoy. You can't say that you are using this money to extend Medicare solvency and also offset the cost of this new program. That's double-counting."

"We don't think we should cut [Medicare reimbursements to] doctors 21 percent next year. . . . It was in the first iteration of all these bills, but because it was a big price tag, and made the score look bad, it has been taken out of this bill and is going along in stand-alone legislation. But ignoring these costs does not remove them from the backs of taxpayers. Hiding spending does not reduce spending. . . . "

"Are we bending the cost curve down or bending the cost curve up? If you look at your own chief actuary at Medicare, we're bending it up. He's claiming we are going up $222 billion, adding more to the unsustainable fiscal situation we have."

"We are all representatives of the American people. We all do town hall meetings. We all talk to our constituents. And I've got to tell you the American people are engaged. If you think they want a government takeover of health care, I would respectfully submit, you are not listening to them."

"What we simply want to do is start over, work on a clean sheet of paper, move through these issues step by step, and fix them, and bring down health-care costs and not raise them."

Ryan speaks as the author of a health-care plan that would cut costs, extend coverage, and not add to the deficit. Obama has continually made the same three promises, but while all Democratic plans extend coverage, they increase costs and the deficit.

Their response to Ryan thus far: We must have reform. Now. And it must be the Obama/Senate bill.

They're half-right. We must have reform. But it most definitely should not be this bill.

Democrat pollsters Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen bemoan that their party is committing political suicide by pursuing the great white whale that is their plan for health care reform. Like the insane Captain Ahab, the Democrats' refusal to listen to any other opinion and their obssession with passing the Senate plan will end in them destroying themselves and taking as many of us with them as they can.

Does this sound like anything else you've ever heard of?

Ramirez thinks so:

RLC

Millenial Fury

Most members of the Baby Boom generation are beginning to realize, if they hadn't already, that their retirement will not be the bowl of cherries they'd planned. Medicare and social security are probably going to be scaled back and retirement funds are worth only a fraction of what they were a few years ago. Factor in inflation over the next ten years or so and there'll be a lot of bitterness toward the people responsible for the Boomers' dashed plans for a pleasantly smooth sail into their dotage.

The Boomers will be angry, to be sure. Many of them already are, which is why we have the Tea Party mobvement. But the group who'll be most furious, according to The Washington Examiner's Mark Tapscott, is the children and grandchildren of the Boomers, the group he calls Millenials. Why will they be angry? Because they're the ones who'll be compelled to make up the shortfalls through higher taxes, lower wages and a lower standard of living.

Tapscott describes the Millenials' future:

Their federal taxes will hit unprecedented levels as Washington props up Social Security, Medicare and other federal entitlement programs. So will state and local taxes, thanks to similarly generous pensions for teachers, cops, firemen, and bureaucrats.

Good health care will be harder to get for middle class Millennials and their kids, thanks to government rationing of medical services.

With a no-growth, high-tax, "green economy," entrepreneurial opportunities will be scarce, new jobs rare, and standards of living falling for the first time in American history. Most things will cost more, everyday tasks like getting to work and grocery shopping will be more tedious, and the general quality of life will be noticeably less pleasant.

In the process, millions of Millennials will have to take in their aging Boomer parents or otherwise care for them, and do so with fewer personal resources and under far greater economic pressures than those faced by perhaps any previous American generation since before the Great Depression.

Upon whom will the Millenials vent their anger and frustration? Tapscott prognosticates that it'll be profligate Progressive Democrats like Obama, Reid and Pelosi who sought to bloat the role of federal control over everyone's life and who borrowed and spent the country into a state of economic servitude to our creditors:

First, the dominant values of Millennials are inimical to centralizing, top-down, command-and-control government at the heart of the Progressive vision. Millennials grew up in a decentralized digital world of endless choices, limitless opportunity, and transparency in everything.

Think about that: Where Obama and the progressives dispatch reams of bureaucratic edicts, legions of bureaucrats, and tons of tax dollars to solve a problem, Millennials reach for their laptops, Internet creativity, and collaboration with each other. They don't need officious, over-paid GS-14s in Washington to tell them what to do. And they know it.

Second, it will be crystal clear who caused the entitlement crisis. Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are seeing to that now in their mad rush to pass Obamacare, even if means doing so over unanimous Republican opposition.

So, trust me, when the entitlement crisis hits home in full force during the next two decades, the Millennials will be hit hard and they will know exactly who to hold responsible. There will be hell to pay, with no grace period, no more bailouts and no more patience for politicians peddling lies about what government will do for them.

Perhaps this partly explains why we no longer see young people swooning as President Obama dispenses his oratorical flourishes. People in our land of Oz are peeking behind the curtain to catch a glimpse of the wizard and are discovering that the wizard is sadly something of a fraud.

We're justified in feeling bitter at having been duped by the intoxicating campaign rhetoric. It's understandable that people are disillusioned that Barack Obama turns out to be more like Jeremiah Wright than Denzel Washington. Our anger at what the Democrats are doing to the economic health of our nation is completely warranted, but before we submit to bitterness, disillusionment and anger we should pray for these people. Perhaps it's not too late for the horses pulling the wagon of state to back away from the brink of the abyss, or at least, if they're determined to rush headlong over the cliff themselves, to at least unhitch the wagon first.

RLC

Facts and Crack

Cornelius Hunter finds himself amused at the insistence of the Darwinians that their theory is a fact as well-established as the fact of gravity. I myself have read this claim on occasion and always thought it odd. Darwinism may be true, in the sense that it's certainly possible that things actually transpired in the way Darwinists claim, but the idea is hardly testable. I.e. the insistence that natural processes are sufficient to explain the diversity of life and all the appurtenances of living things is not amenable to falsification.

You can test the existence of gravity a hundred times every day before breakfast but try to imagine testing the truth of the claim that nothing but physical processes generated and diversified life. A Nobel Prize to whoever comes up with a way to do it.

Anyway, Hunter has this to say:

[E]volution has an ontological status that transcends the scientific details. There is the fact of evolution, and then there is the theory of evolution. This fact-theory dichotomy is a key apologetic in evolutionary thought. Notice that it decouples evolution from the evidence and makes the theory immune to the facts of biology. You can point out all the evidential problems you want--they don't affect the facthood of evolution.

But if the facts of biology can't hurt evolution, then they can't help either. How then do we know evolution is a fact? If evolution is not an empirical fact, and we cannot infer it from the evidence without substantial speculation and heroics, then why are evolutionists so sure?

The answer, of course, is that the only live alternative to evolution, or, more precisely Darwinian evolution, is intelligent design and that's a metaphysically repellant option to anyone who has committed his or her life to a naturalistic worldview. It's like waving a crucifix in front of a vampire (no offense intended to my Darwinian readers). People who have invested their lives in a worldview find it just as wrenching to relieve themselves of it as does an addict who tries to kick his addiction "cold turkey." Darwinism is to a naturalist what crack is to an addict. Take it away and their world is thrown into unbearable turmoil and pain. Darwinism must be true, it has to be true. The alternative is just unthinkable.

RLC

Nancy the Mad Hatter

Maybe Ramirez read our post yesterday titled Nancy in Wonderland.

Don't laugh, he could have:

RLC

Making Babies Cry

The E-Trade ads are better, but these are still pretty good:

Thanks to Hot Air.

RLC

Time and the Multiverse

Wired Magazine has an interview with physicist Sean Carroll in which he discusses his research on the nature of time. His work has led him to conclude that there are other universes, or more precisely, other regions of space that are closed off to our region - a version of the multiverse hypothesis. Carroll is not a theist but when he describes the origin of our space-time as a splitting off from a parent universe he seems to be describing God:

HT: Telic Thoughts

Wired.com: Can you explain your theory of time in layman's terms?

Sean Carroll: [T]he particular aspect of time that I'm interested in is the arrow of time: the fact that the past is different from the future. We remember the past but we don't remember the future. There are irreversible processes. There are things that happen, like you turn an egg into an omelet, but you can't turn an omelet into an egg.

Basically, our observable universe begins around 13.7 billion years ago in a state of exquisite order, exquisitely low entropy [disorder]. It's like the universe is a wind-up toy that has been sort of puttering along for the last 13.7 billion years and will eventually wind down to nothing. But why was it ever wound up in the first place? Why was it in such a weird low-entropy unusual state?

That is what I'm trying to tackle. I'm trying to understand cosmology, why the Big Bang had the properties it did. And it's interesting to think that connects directly to our kitchens and how we can make eggs, how we can remember one direction of time, why causes precede effects, why we are born young and grow older. It's all because of entropy increasing. It's all because of conditions of the Big Bang.

Wired.com: So the Big Bang starts it all. But you theorize that there's something before the Big Bang. Something that makes it happen. What's that?

Read the interview to see how Carroll answers the question. One of the things he says that I think he's mistaken about is this:

Even in empty space, time and space still exist. Physicists have no problem answering the question of "If a tree falls in the woods and no one's there to hear it, does it make a sound?" They say, "Yes! Of course it makes a sound!" Likewise, if time flows without entropy and there's no one there to experience it, is there still time? Yes. There's still time. It's still part of the fundamental laws of nature even in that part of the universe. It's just that events that happen in that empty universe don't have causality, don't have memory, don't have progress and don't have aging or metabolism or anything like that. It's just random fluctuations.

First, whether the tree makes a sound when there are no observers present depends on whether we define sound as a sensation or as compressions propagating through the air. The falling tree generates compression waves, to be sure, but the sensation of sound is produced by our hearing apparatus, not the tree. Sensations require senses, if there are no senses present there is no sensation, just energy.

Likewise with time in completely empty space. Time requires events, as Carroll acknowledges, but what events would there be in an empty space? If time exists despite the complete lack of events then what is it that's existing? It's not material, it's not energy, it's not a substance of any kind, so what could it be? If it's simply a dimension similar to the three dimensions of space we might wonder whether the idea of time apart from events makes any more sense than the idea of space apart from material objects makes sense.

The interview concludes with Carroll acknowledging that so far his view is merely speculative:

If you think you understand the rules of gravity and quantum mechanics really, really well, you can say, "According to the rules, universes pop into existence. Even if I can't observe them, that's a prediction of my theory, and I've tested that theory using other methods." We're not even there yet. We don't know how to have a good theory, and we don't know how to test it. But the project that one envisions is coming up with a good theory in quantum gravity, testing it here in our universe, and then taking the predictions seriously for things we don't observe elsewhere.

If this is all that his theory is, if there's no way to test it, then in what sense is it science? Why would it be okay to discuss Carroll's ideas in a science class but not the ideas of intelligent design theorists? Is it because Carroll's ideas are not a threat to metaphysical naturalism but the implications of ID are?

RLC

The View from Britain

Simon Heffer of the Telegraph U.K. wonders aloud if it's not the end of the road for Barack Obama's presidency. His column opens with this:

It is a universal political truth that administrations do not begin to fragment when things are going well: it only happens when they go badly, and those who think they know better begin to attack those who manifestly do not. The descent of Barack Obama's regime, characterised now by factionalism in the Democratic Party and talk of his being set to emulate Jimmy Carter as a one-term president, has been swift and precipitate. It was just 16 months ago that weeping men and women celebrated his victory over John McCain in the American presidential election. If they weep now, a year and six weeks into his rule, it is for different reasons.

Despite the efforts of some sections of opinion to talk the place up, America is mired in unhappiness, all the worse for the height from which Obamania has fallen. The economy remains troublesome. There is growth - a good last quarter suggested an annual rate of as high as six per cent, but that figure is probably not reliable - and the latest unemployment figures, last Friday, showed a levelling off. Yet 15 million Americans, or 9.7 per cent of the workforce, have no job. Many millions more are reduced to working part-time. Whole areas of the country, notably in the north and on the eastern seaboard, are industrial wastelands. The once mighty motor city of Detroit appears slowly to be being abandoned, becoming a Jurassic Park of the mid-20th century; unemployment among black people in Mr Obama's own city of Chicago is estimated at between 20 and 25 per cent. One senior black politician - a Democrat and a supporter of the President - told me of the wrath in his community that a black president appeared to be unable to solve the economic problem among his own people.

Mr. Heffer goes on to suggest that it's not premature to be writing Mr. Obama's political obituary, but perhaps there are a couple of problems with his analysis. First, he seems prone to exaggeration as for example when he states that FOX News "pours out rage 24 hours a day." There are, maybe, two hours of programming a day in which one could say that the network expresses something more than mere displeasure with the Obama administration. To aver that it "pours out rage" is to discredit one's case.

Mr. Heffer also seems to underestimate the fickleness of the American people who, though they may be abandoning Mr. Obama in droves today, might well return to him in droves tomorrow if the economy, despite the President's best efforts, turns around and jobs reappear.

Mr. Heffer also misses the mark somewhat when he notes that:

A thrashing of the Democrats in the mid-terms would not necessarily be the beginning of the end for Mr Obama: Bill Clinton was re-elected two years after the Republicans swept the House and the Senate in November 1994. But Mr Clinton was an operator in a way Mr Obama patently is not. His lack of experience, his dependence on rhetoric rather than action, his disconnection from the lives of many millions of Americans all handicap him heavily. It is not about whose advice he is taking: it is about him grasping what is wrong with America, and finding the will to put it right.

Mr. Obama's problem, however, is not that he lacks the will to put things right. His problem is that his view of what is wrong and what can be done to fix it are both obfuscated by the left-wing lenses through which he views the world. You can't fix a problem if a) you don't know what the problem is and/or b) you do know what the problem is, but your remedy is greater government control, higher taxes, and deeper debt.

During the Vietnam war the Left hooted in derision when some general justified bombing a village that harbored the enemy by opining that sometimes you had to destroy a village in order to save it. Today the Left's avatar, Mr. Obama, has adopted the same philosophy concerning the country. He seems to believe that he must destroy it in order to save it.

RLC

Nancy in Wonderland

It's hard to believe that someone who has climbed all the way to the rarified heights of political accomplishment attained by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and who has maintained even a minimum level of consciousness throughout the battles over Health Care Reform that have ebbed and flowed across the nation over the past year would say something as bizarre as Ms Pelosi said yesterday.

In a speech to the National Association of Counties the Speaker intoned:

You've heard about the controversies within the bill, the process about the bill, one or the other. But I don't know if you have heard that it is legislation for the future, not just about health care for America, but about a healthier America .... It's going to be very, very exciting.

But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy. (Emphasis mine)

Isn't this exactly backwards? Shouldn't we know what's in the measure before we pass it? Do the congresspersons who'll be voting on this 2000 page monstrosity of a bill really know what's in it, or are they, too, waiting until they pass it so they can find out? Is there any significant difference between Congress and Lewis Carroll's Wonderland?

Here's the incriminating video of the Speaker articulating her political dyslexia:

It's no wonder Americans think so little of their politicians. The Mad Hatter is more sensible.

RLC