The Twilight of Masculinity

A couple of articles highlight, from different perspectives, the changing nature, or, more precisely, the disintegration, of masculinity in our society. The first is an interview with feminist scholar Camille Paglia who asserts that our civilization is committing suicide by trying to erase traditional masculinity. Here are a few excerpts:

"What you're seeing is how a civilization commits suicide," says Camille Paglia.... When Ms. Paglia, now 66, burst onto the national stage in 1990 with the publishing of "Sexual Personae," she immediately established herself as a feminist who was the scourge of the movement's establishment, a heretic to its orthodoxy. Pick up the 700-page tome, subtitled Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, and it's easy to see why. "If civilization had been left in female hands," she wrote, "we would still be living in grass huts."

But no subject gets her going more than when I ask if she really sees a connection between society's attempts to paper over the biological distinction between men and women and the collapse of Western civilization.

She starts by pointing to the diminished status of military service. "The entire elite class now, in finance, in politics and so on, none of them have military service—hardly anyone, there are a few. But there is no prestige attached to it anymore.

That is a recipe for disaster," she says. "These people don't think in military ways, so there's this illusion out there that people are basically nice, people are basically kind, if we're just nice and benevolent to everyone they'll be nice too. They literally don't have any sense of evil or criminality."

Ms. Paglia argues that the softening of modern American society begins as early as kindergarten. "Primary-school education is a crock, basically. It's oppressive to anyone with physical energy, especially guys," she says, pointing to the most obvious example: the way many schools have cut recess. "They're making a toxic environment for boys. Primary education does everything in its power to turn boys into neuters."

She is not the first to make this argument, as Ms. Paglia readily notes. Fellow feminist Christina Hoff Sommers has written about the "war against boys" for more than a decade. The notion was once met with derision, but now data back it up: Almost one in five high-school-age boys has been diagnosed with ADHD, boys get worse grades than girls and are less likely to go to college.

By her lights, things only get worse in higher education. "This PC gender politics thing—the way gender is being taught in the universities—in a very anti-male way, it's all about neutralization of maleness." The result: Upper-middle-class men who are "intimidated" and "can't say anything. . . . They understand the agenda."

Politically correct, inadequate education, along with the decline of America's brawny industrial base, leaves many men with "no models of manhood," she says. "Masculinity is just becoming something that is imitated from the movies. There's nothing left. There's no room for anything manly right now." The only place you can hear what men really feel these days, she claims, is on sports radio. No surprise, she is an avid listener. The energy and enthusiasm "inspires me as a writer," she says, adding: "If we had to go to war," the callers "are the men that would save the nation."

A key part of the remedy, she believes, is a "revalorization" of traditional male trades—the ones that allow women's studies professors to drive to work (roads), take the elevator to their office (construction), read in the library (electricity), and go to gender-neutral restrooms (plumbing).

Actually, I'm not sure why she says there are no models of manhood. The Obama team a couple of weeks ago famously offered, presumably for our emulation, a stirring example of its paradigm of American manhood:

On the other hand, there is much to what Paglia says. When boys are suspended from elementary school for shaping a pop tart like a gun or kissing a girl on the hand then its clear that maleness is being suppressed and boys are being taught that to be a normal boy is somehow inherently bad.

The title of the second article states that men are, or are becoming, obsolete, but the article itself, written by Hannah Rosin, argues for a more modest proposition. She maintains that traditional masculine roles are no longer the norm in American society, a fact in which she seems to take no little delight.

She gives five reasons in support of her thesis and elaborates on each in her essay. Here are her reasons for believing that we're witnessing the end of men:

1. It’s the end of men because men are failing in both school and the workplace and women are succeeding.
2. It’s the end of men because the traditional household, propped up by the male breadwinner, is vanishing.
3. It’s the end of men because we can see it in the attitudes of single mothers in the working and middle class who decline to marry because a husband would be "just another mouth to feed."
4. It’s the end of men because men have lost their monopoly on violence and aggression.
5. It’s the end of men because men, too, are now obsessed with their body hair.

Rosin adds this:

Obsolete does not mean worthless. It means outmoded. The twin combustion engine made the bicycle obsolete but that doesn’t mean we hate the bicycle. We just use it the way we want to, while recognizing the necessity of efficiency and change. We don’t have to turn men into eunuchs. We can keep whatever we like about manhood but adjust the parts of the definition that are keeping men back.

Now what do you suppose the reaction would be were a man to write a paragraph like this about women? Would the media not be filled with apoplectic shrieks and howls about a "war" on women? Yet Rosin can write this about men and her readers wistfully picture Pajama Boy and smile knowingly at Rosin's description of outmoded maleness.

Here's her closing thought:

I dedicated my book to my son because he is one of those boys who gets in trouble a lot, who thinks the institutions are rigged against him. I see my job as accepting him as he is, and teaching him how to adapt to the world as it is.

When I think of the world after the end of men, I think of the world my son will inherit, where, if he chooses to take his kids to a playground at 3 in the afternoon on a Tuesday, no one will look at him funny, no one will wonder if he’s out of work, no one will think, “What a loser,” and no one will think he’s from Portland or Toronto, they will just walk on by and not think anything of it at all. He can be his own lovely obnoxious self and also be at home in a new world.

I wonder if Rosin's son has a father around. If not, that might explain a lot.

Presidential Precedents

President Obama has established a number of very dangerous precedents for future presidents, precedents in the setting of which the media have been willing accomplices and for which the media has essentially sold its birth-right for a mess of pottage.

Victor Davis Hanson indicts both the President's conduct and the media's complicity in an essay at NRO in which he poses a series of penetrating questions. I've included more of Hanson's piece here than I probably should have, but his indictment is so powerful I wanted you to get the full effect. Please go to the link for the rest:

Will there be a scandal [in a future administration] if the new political appointees at the IRS sic their auditors on Moveon.org? What will the Washington Post say should the new president keep Guantanamo Bay open for five more years, quadruple the number of drone missions, or decide to double renditions? Will it say that he was shredding the Constitution, or that he found the terror threat too great to honor past promises?

Will NPR run an exposé on our next president should she tap into Angela Merkel’s cell phone, or monitor the communications of Associated Press reporters — and their parents? Will investigative reporters go after the president should he falsely claim that an ambassador and three other U.S. personnel died in the Middle East during a video-sparked spontaneous riot? Or if he then jails the filmmaker for a year on a trumped-up parole-violation charge?

In other words, because for the past five years the members of the Washington press corps have abdicated their traditional adversarial role as watchdogs of the executive branch, can we still have watchdogs at all in 2017? If the next president falsely swears that his new health-care program will not affect citizens’ current coverage, what consequences could possibly follow? If the New York Times went after such perfidy in 2017, would the new president just say, “Where were you when Obama did it?”

If a conservative should be elected, and his Justice Department decided not to enforce federal gun laws in certain cities, would not the president say to his critics, “You were happy to ignore the flouting of federal immigration law in sanctuary cities, so why not exempt gun control too?”

Or if the new attorney general were Asian, and called his fellow Americans “cowards” over their inability to address past discrimination, or referred to Chinese- or Japanese-Americans as “my people,” how could African-American activists or any other group possibly object?

If, in 2017, we begin another five years of 7-plus percent unemployment, will the media call it a “jobless recovery” — as they have not since 2009, but most surely did in 2004 when George W. Bush ran for reelection with a jobless rate of a little over 5 percent?

What will court watchers do should the next president weigh in on pending trial cases — claiming, for example, that the son he never had would have resembled a murdered young man, or arguing that the police acted stupidly when they arrested a favorite of the president’s?

If our next president says there is a red line, ignores infractions of it, and then says he never said it, will the press go after her as it went after George W. Bush in 2003 when the promised stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction did not turn up in Iraq? If a debate moderator interrupts our next president’s reelection debate to incorrectly point out that his challenger is wrong about the facts, will we chastise her as unprofessional and ban her from further debates?

If a conservative president is elected, will the media object should he editorialize about personal success and wealth — suggesting that novice entrepreneurs should build their own businesses without federal help, reminding the struggling that they have not yet reached a point where they have made enough money, chiding some that we need to create wealth, not spread others’, or advising us that it is always the time to profit? Would the press object that the president’s serial and unsolicited sermonizing was proving a bit much? Or would he have to accuse doctors of lopping off limbs and ripping out tonsils for profit to win rebuke?

Will NBC object if our next president plays 150 rounds of golf in his first five years in office? Would it seem at all excessive to ABC if our next chief executive were declared a “god” by colleagues in the press corps, or if the president promised to lower the level of the seas and cool the planet?

In 2017, if the next president attempts to freeze new drilling on federal lands, only to brag that more oil and gas have been produced (on private land) during her tenure than ever before, how would CBS respond to such disingenuousness?

For that matter, in 2017 will novels again be written about killing the president, and prizes once more be awarded for docudramas about his assassination — and will he be called a “Nazi” and “Brown Shirt” by his political opponents, as President Bush was?

During the next presidency, will the filibuster still be bad, or will it suddenly be good again? Will there be a nuclear option again? Recess appointments? Executive orders? Signing statements? Votes against extending the debt ceiling? Are these again to be excesses, or is it a case of “It depends”?

What will the media do if the next president hires lobbyists, ignores the revolving door, or wins record donations from Goldman Sachs — while promising to run the most transparent administration in history? Will minority activists hound the next president should their constituents’ employment rate and income nosedive? Or is the answer to be, “It depends on the president’s race”?

If in 2017 the chief executive urges his supporters to “punish our enemies,” what will be the media reaction?

Will the Los Angeles Times object should the next president borrow $6 trillion in his first term? If we have four more years of zero interest, will that policy be deemed reckless and inflationary?

The predictable answer, of course, to all these questions is, again, “It depends.” If a liberal like Hillary Clinton wins, then the same exemptions will almost surely continue, even in the absence of the race card. But if a conservative should be elected, then the old hypocrisy will reappear and we will be treated to the damnation of a Christie, Paul, Rubio, or Cruz as “the worst president ever” or an “amiable dunce” or one of the other sorts of boilerplate disparagement accorded Reagan and the two Bushes.

.... we are entering a new period in presidential history, and it may be difficult to go back to the status quo ante 2009, when reporters were not state megaphones and the president paid a price for not telling the truth.

More likely, the members of the national press corps do not even now quite get it that they have been completely discredited. Whether they toady up to a liberal president or revert to standard criticism of a conservative, I doubt anyone will much care any more. If the next scandal is an open-mike slip to Putin, a linguistic flub like “corpse-man” for a Navy corpsman, a barefaced lie like swearing the president never spoke to his own disreputable uncle, or a complete distortion such as bragging of the energy production that she sought to stifle, the media will face a novel situation: If they object, then the public will wonder, “But why now all of a sudden?” If they keep silent, the public will shrug, “Oh, more of the same.”

Nor have we fully appreciated that a president who has supposedly taught constitutional law has done more to damage the Constitution than did Richard Nixon — and, so far, without consequences of any sort. The next president in theory can tap the communications of his opponents, pick and choose which laws are to be enforced and which are mere suggestions, and use federal agencies to monitor the politically suspect. He can go to, ignore, undermine, or praise the U.N. as he sees fit. He can bypass Congress to bomb a foreign country, and give pressure groups amnesty from any federal law he chooses. If the next president’s chief adviser claims that liberal Democrats are analogous to the mass-murdering Jonestown cult, would it really matter?

So we are living in scary times. The nation has grown used to the idea that what the president says is probably either untrue or irrelevant — and yet it does not really any more care which.

The people also assume that it doesn’t matter if our pundits talk of the person in the White House as a “messiah” who prompts tingling legs, or if they take notice of perfect pant-leg creases, or, of course, if they declare that he is the smartest president ever.

The result, in the Age of Obama, is a deeply rooted cynicism that works out something like the following: The president of the United States is now an iconic figure and thus cannot be held to the minimal standards of veracity demanded of other Americans. The press is an advocate of his agenda and picks and chooses which scandals can be half-heartedly pursued without endangering their shared vision.

How could the media possibly repair its sullied reputation without appearing abjectly hypocritical or artificially zealous? How can the next president resist assuming the extra-constitutional prerogatives of the current one?

I don't think the media can restore its reputation, nor do I think future presidents will feel the same constitutional constraints upon their power that past presidents have. When Barack Obama said in 2008 that he wanted to fundamentally change the country we had no idea the extent to which he would do so, but he has, and it will take us generations to recover from the precedents he has established, if in fact, we ever do.

For its part, the mainstream liberal media, having flung aside all pretense of integrity, objectivity, and veracity in its slavish, obsequious devotion to the Obama administration, will probably continue its long slide into obscurity and irrelevance.

Is the Debate Over?

Nina Munk has written a book titled The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty. Her book is critical of the idea, promoted by Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, that poverty could be meliorated by simple technological fixes such as bed nets to prevent malaria-spreading mosquito bites, wells to provide clean water, hospitals to treat curable diseases, fertilizer to increase yields of food crops, etc.

William Easterly reviews Munk's book at Reason.com. He writes:

[Sachs believed that ending poverty] was just a matter of raising enough money to pay for the right combination of known technical solutions to poor people's problems. Sachs would provide a slam-dunk demonstration project by deploying these comprehensive tech fixes in a dozen or so "Millennium Villages" in Africa. Success would build upon success, and advocacy money would flow, until poverty was eliminated from the poorest continent.

The Idealist, Nina Munk's brilliant book on Sachs' anti-poverty efforts, chronicles how his dream fell far short of reality. Munk, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, follows Sachs around as he supervises the experiment. She also goes out on her own to the Millennium Villages, especially Dertu, in the ethnic Somali region of Kenya's arid north, and the more centrally located settlement of Ruhiira, Uganda. What she finds in these villages reveals much about the future of the aid and development debate.

Sachs' technical fixes frequently turned out to be anything but simple. The saga of Dertu's wells is illustrative. Ahmed Mohamed, the local man in charge of the effort, discovers that he needs to order a crucial part for a generator that powers the wells. The piece takes four months to arrive, and then nobody knows how to install it. Eventually a distant mechanic arrives at great expense. A couple of years later, Munk returns to find Mohamed struggling with the same issues: The wells have broken down again, the parts are lacking, and nobody knows how to fix the problem.

A little more than a year after that, the wells are up and running again, and the Millennium Villages blog celebrates Dertu as having "the most reliable water supply within the region." Yet by 2011 the wells have run completely dry due to a drought—a not-uncommon occurrence in the arid region.

Such examples multiply in Munk's book, showing that purely technological answers to poverty fall well short of Sachs' promises. It turns out that technology does not implement itself; it requires the assistance of real people subject to widely varying incentives and constraints in complex social and political systems.

Munk relates successes as well as failures. Sachs' project spent $1.2 million on health in Ruhiira, hiring two doctors and 13 midwives. Now many fewer mothers in Ruhiira are left to their own resources to give birth, and the prevalence of malaria has fallen dramatically. But too often, the failures seem to offset these small victories. In recent years, Munk has found herself chronicling a rising chorus of criticism. Three months before the release of Munk's book, Foreign Policy published a harsh critique of the project, offering negative verdicts from an impressive roster of experts in the development field.

New York University economist Jonathan Morduch told Foreign Policy that Sachs' "big-package approach is an anachronism relative to the ideas that development economists have gravitated toward.... Sachs ... hoped to show that properly delivered aid could bring about the end of poverty. His critics rarely mention this aspect of his work. The notion of such sweeping change is apparently so implausible to today's development economists that they do not consider it worth refuting. The big aid debate that Sachs initiated is already over.

We can now see that aid and development are two distinct topics that should each have their own separate debates....his idea that aid could rapidly bring the end of poverty was wrong. It's time to move on.

I'm certainly no expert on poverty or the aid/development debate, but I pose this question to those who are: Can we successfully and permanently reduce or eliminate poverty in places like Chad or Haiti without first changing the culture? And if not, how do we 1. change a culture, 2. justify doing so in an age when such attempts are condemned as chauvinistic and imperialistic, and 3. what do we change it to?

It seems to me that a culture cannot be altered without destroying the people who have lived it for centuries or millenia, but even if we could alter a failing culture I doubt there'd be a will to do so given the aversion to cultural imperialism and the embrace of cultural relativism that exists in much of American society.

And yet apart from fundamentally changing the culture I don't see how we can do anything more than bring temporary and minimal relief to the most blighted parts of the world. Aid is just economic aspirin and development requires building an entire infrastructure and network of interlocking institutions that evolve over long spans of time and which are undergirded by attitudes and ways of thinking that are alien to many stuck in poverty today. Can those kinds of changes happen? Can they happen without somehow changing the hearts and the mindset of a people?

I don't think so, which is why I believe that the most important work being done among the poor is that being done by missionaries who not only bring physical relief to those who suffer but also offer them the spiritual resources to gradually free themselves from lifestyles that chain them to their poverty. Without the liberation that those spiritual resources provide anything else we do is like trying to get an overloaded hot air balloon into the air. It just bumps along the ground until the fuel is exhausted and everything remains just as it was at the outset.

Closing of the Scientific Mind

David Gelernter is a professor of computer science at Yale who has written a very provocative essay for Commentary Magazine on the dehumanization of man that has been wrought by modern scientism. Gerlernter doesn't use the word "scientism" but when he talks of the modern disregard among scientists for any way of knowing other than through the empirical methodology associated with the hard sciences, he's talking about scientism. He writes:

The huge cultural authority science has acquired over the past century imposes large duties on every scientist. Scientists have acquired the power to impress and intimidate every time they open their mouths, and it is their responsibility to keep this power in mind no matter what they say or do. Too many have forgotten their obligation to approach with due respect the scholarly, artistic, religious, humanistic work that has always been mankind’s main spiritual support. Scientists are (on average) no more likely to understand this work than the man in the street is to understand quantum physics. But science used to know enough to approach cautiously and admire from outside, and to build its own work on a deep belief in human dignity. No longer.

The modern view that man is just a flesh and bone machine leads ineluctably to the belief that the human machine can be improved the same way we upgrade our computers: Today science and the “philosophy of mind”—its thoughtful assistant, which is sometimes smarter than the boss—are threatening Western culture with the exact opposite of humanism. Call it roboticism. Man is the measure of all things, Protagoras said. Today we add, and computers are the measure of all men.

Many scientists are proud of having booted man off his throne at the center of the universe and reduced him to just one more creature—an especially annoying one—in the great intergalactic zoo. That is their right. But when scientists use this locker-room braggadocio to belittle the human viewpoint, to belittle human life and values and virtues and civilization and moral, spiritual, and religious discoveries, which is all we human beings possess or ever will, they have outrun their own empiricism. They are abusing their cultural standing. Science has become an international bully.

Nowhere is its bullying more outrageous than in its assault on the phenomenon known as subjectivity.

Your subjective, conscious experience is just as real as the tree outside your window or the photons striking your retina—even though you alone feel it. Many philosophers and scientists today tend to dismiss the subjective and focus wholly on an objective, third-person reality—a reality that would be just the same if men had no minds. They treat subjective reality as a footnote, or they ignore it, or they announce that, actually, it doesn’t even exist.

If scientists were rat-catchers, it wouldn’t matter. But right now, their views are threatening all sorts of intellectual and spiritual fields. The present problem originated at the intersection of artificial intelligence and philosophy of mind—in the question of what consciousness and mental states are all about, how they work, and what it would mean for a robot to have them. It has roots that stretch back to the behaviorism of the early 20th century, but the advent of computing lit the fuse of an intellectual crisis that blasted off in the 1960s and has been gaining altitude ever since.

Gerlernter elaborates on these themes in the rest of the article, which I heartily commend to your reading. Along the way he talks about the shameful treatment dished out to Thomas Nagel for having the temerity to question the ability of Darwinism to account for human consciousness, cognition, and values in his book Mind and Cosmos. He also critiques the "transhumanism" of Ray Kurzweil and his acolytes, as well as various philosophical attempts (eliminitivism, functionalism, cognitivism) to banish consciousness from human ontology. His discussion of the "zombie" problem in philosophy of mind is particularly interesting.

He spends time discussing cognitivism (or computationalism) which is the view that mind is to brain what software is to computers. He concludes by pointing out that the analogy is deeply flawed:

But the master analogy—between mind and software, brain and computer—is fatally flawed. It falls apart once you mull these simple facts:

1. You can transfer a program easily from one computer to another, but you can’t transfer a mind, ever, from one brain to another.
2. You can run an endless series of different programs on any one computer, but only one “program” runs, or ever can run, on any one human brain.
3. Software is transparent. I can read off the precise state of the entire program at any time. Minds are opaque—there is no way I can know what you are thinking unless you tell me.
4. Computers can be erased; minds cannot.
5. Computers can be made to operate precisely as we choose; minds cannot.

There are more. Come up with them yourself. It’s easy.

There is a still deeper problem with computationalism. Mainstream computationalists treat the mind as if its purpose were merely to act and not to be. But the mind is for doing and being. Computers are machines, and idle machines are wasted. That is not true of your mind. Your mind might be wholly quiet, doing (“computing”) nothing; yet you might be feeling miserable or exalted, or awestruck by the beauty of the object in front of you, or inspired or resolute—and such moments might be the center of your mental life. Or you might merely be conscious.

It is indeed easy to come up with qualities of the mind/brain complex that are disanalogous to anything found in the software/computer complex. For example, human minds can hold beliefs and doubts, they can understand, they can appreciate beauty and humor, they can experience frustration, boredom, disappointment, chagrin, interest, etc., they can reflect on their opinions, and much else. Computational machines can do none of these things which suggests to a lot of philosophers that minds are something entirely different from brains and that the software/hard drive analogy is grossly inapt.

Check out Gerlernter's essay. It's a little long, but it does a nifty job of explaining why the heyday of modern materialism. It has simply failed to offer a plausible explanation for our subjective, conscious experience and the explanations that it has offered seem so far-fetched that the credibility of any metaphysical view that relies on them, as materialism does, is severely damaged.

More Guns, Fewer Homicides

It may horrify liberal progressives to read this, but study after study is confirming what people like John Lott have been telling us for years. Disarming citizens increases violent crime and arming them decreases it.

I grant that it's a national embarrassment that in order to create a safer public square we might have to accept seeing ordinary citizens walking about with revolvers strapped to their legs like characters out of a John Wayne western, but until we get over the idea that a healthy society doesn't need fathers, until we reverse policies that tend to disintegrate families, until we return to the idea that traditional values should be instilled in our young by family, church, and school and that a debased culture does nothing to make life in America healthier or more secure, let's give thanks for the second amendment.

From Reason.com:

Quinnipiac University economist Mark Gius has published a new study, "An examination of the effects of concealed weapons laws and assault weapons bans on state-level murder rates," in the journal Applied Economics Letters. From the abstract:

The purpose of the present study is to determine the effects of state-level assault weapons bans and concealed weapons laws on state-level murder rates. Using data for the period 1980 to 2009 and controlling for state and year fixed effects, the results of the present study suggest that states with restrictions on the carrying of concealed weapons had higher gun-related murder rates than other states. It was also found that assault weapons bans did not significantly affect murder rates at the state level. These results suggest that restrictive concealed weapons laws may cause an increase in gun-related murders at the state level. The results of this study are consistent with some prior research in this area, most notably Lott and Mustard (1997).

Even former foes of concealed carry like Detroit's new chief of police James Craig have changed their minds. Craig is now encouraging the good people of Detroit to arm themselves against the thugs and savages who've made Detroit the murder capital of the nation.

Perhaps there's a study out there that correlates concealed-carry laws with an increase in violent crime. If so, I'd like to hear about it.

On GLAAD's Blacklist

Robert Oscar Lopez is a tenured college professor who's African American, Christian (I think), conservative, and gay. He's also a living example of how the left, in this case the homosexual organization GLAAD, plays the politics of personal destruction. If you have a different point of view than theirs they will make your life as difficult as possible and destroy your career if they can. They tried this with Phil Robertson, of course, and failed. They haven't failed with Robert Lopez.

Here's part of Lopez's story (Thanks to Jason for the link):

Readers will have to forgive me for sounding angry, but the recent news involving GLAAD has enraged me. Mark Steyn's most recent piece in National Review sums up some of the worst aspects of the epic saga known as GLAAD v. Duck Dynasty.

Steyn resonates with me on one key point: yes, GLAAD is ridiculous and foolish. We knew this. But some conservatives who should know better are truly pathetic. A National Review editor scolds Steyn for being "puerile," while people on Fox News say that Phil Robertson should have been suspended. Pusillanimous obeisance to false ideology isn't exclusive to left or right.

A bunch of people on the left called GLAAD out, and I'm glad they did. Yet a bunch of people on the right are still terrified of GLAAD, or else actually believe that it's defamation to say negative things or think negative thoughts about homosexuality. In case you don't know the full extent of GLAAD's fascism, let me tell you what GLAAD did to me.

I won't hyperlink this, but if you go to GLAAD's website and seek out their "commentator accountability project," you will find my name. This is GLAAD's blacklist. Within hours of GLAAD's publication of my addition to the list, which amounts to an excommunication from polite society, an e-mail was sent to the president of my university, along with dozens of other high officials in California, with the announcement: ROBERT OSCAR LOPEZ PLACED ON GLAAD WATCH LIST.

The e-mail stated clearly that as a result of my being placed on this list, I would never get a direct interview in the United States. (Whoever "they" are, they made good on the threat, because when I was brought onto Al Jazeera, they made sure that I was the only one critical of gay adoption, versus two hosts and two other panelists who were for it, and the host cut my microphone.)

According to the press release sent to my university, any media outlet introducing me would be bound to introduce me as an "anti-gay activist" certified by GLAAD as a bigot. When I read the claims of this e-mail, I wondered if this would be true -- would media in the United States really introduce me by saying I was certified as "anti-gay" by GLAAD?

Well, the answer to that question remains mostly unanswered. Aside from that one fling on Al Jazeera, since GLAAD placed me on their blacklist, no secular media outlet has invited me on its show in the United States. In-depth interviews with me have been broadcast in Chile, Russia, France, Ireland, and a number of other nations. In the United States, Christian broadcasters like the American Family Association and Frank Sontag's "Faith and Reason" show in Los Angeles have interviewed me. And I'd been interviewed, prior to the GLAAD blacklisting, by Minnesota affiliates of NBC, CBS, Fox, and NPR, as well as a number of newspapers. Since GLAAD's blacklisting, none.

Prior to GLAAD's blacklisting, I had received calls from people at universities discussing their interest in having me come to campus and give speeches. Three were working with me to set up dates. Since GLAAD's blacklisting, none. Those who had discussed this with me said point-blank that their superiors did not want to create controversy....

Being blacklisted by GLAAD was the end of my world. (It just so happens I entered a new, happier one, but that doesn't take away from the terror caused by their omerta.) Even though I wrote The Colorful Conservative, I am too colorful for right-wing think-tanks, too vulgar for Beltway Republicans, too much a fan of Sarah Palin for the Big Boys down in D.C. I'm too queer for the legit crowd, and GLAAD basically put the word out to the queers not to talk to me anymore.

Old friends and even some family members took GLAAD's marching orders and have summarily cut me out of their lives. And when I mean cut me out, I mean we will never be in the same room again. One person very close to me, who works in the entertainment industry, was accosted at a dinner and told in no uncertain terms that if he didn't join in denouncing me, he'd have difficulty finding work. I was less important than his shot at getting better contracts -- so gosh, I miss him.

One of the things that amazes me about the current state of our culture, a thing that I can never seem to get used to, is the complete socio-ideological reversal that has taken place since I was in college. Back then I had several lefty professors, one in particular who was my advisor and with whom I spent many hours in conversation (I worked for him on one of his research projects for a couple of summers) who regaled us with stories of how ugly and bigoted conservatives were and how noble and compassionate was the left. The right was all about hatred, censorship and oppression and the left was all about letting a thousand flowers bloom, love, tolerance, free speech and the free exchange of ideas.

I didn't think his take on the matter was quite right, but, being a college student and therefore pretty much uninformed, I was unable to argue otherwise. Even so, granting my advisor the benefit of the doubt, over the following decades the two ideological poles underwent a complete reversal in the nature of their character.

Today, I don't think there's any doubt that most of the bigotry, vitriol, hatred, racism, intolerance, and overall ugliness is on the left. I don't know whether it does any good to point this out, but I sometimes feel compelled to do so. I think people are for the most part reluctant to align themselves with those they perceive to be unpleasant and unkind, and I'm gripped by the hope that by pointing out where that unpleasantness lay, by insisting that ideas which are attractive to the mean-spirited and vulgar, some who might otherwise be drawn to the philosophy of the left might at least think twice about it.

Read the rest of Lopez's article at the link. It's both interesting and important, especially if you think that gays are virtually unanimous in their support for gay marriage and families.

Down-and-Outers

Chris Arnade, who earned a doctorate in physics from Johns Hopkins and then spent a career working on Wall Street, describes in The Guardian how his atheism was shaken by some of the most down-and-out people in America. He begins his story with a flashback to his youth:

They prayed whenever they could find 15 minutes. "Preacher Man", as we called him, would read from the Bible with his tiny round glasses. It was the only book he had ever read. A dozen or so others would listen, silently praying while stroking rosaries, sitting on bare mattresses, crammed into a half-painted dorm room.

I was the outsider, a 16-year-old working on a summer custodial crew for a local college, saving money to pay for my escape from my hometown. The other employees, close to three dozen, were working to feed themselves, to feed their kids, to pay child support, to pay for the basics of life. I was the only white, everyone else was African-American.

Preacher Man tried to get me to join the prayer meetings, asking me almost daily. I declined, preferring to spend those small work breaks with some of the other guys on the crew. We would use the time to snatch a quick drink or maybe smoke a joint.

Preacher Man would question me, "What do you believe in?" I would decline to engage, out of politeness. He pressed me. Finally I broke,

"I am an atheist. I don't believe in a God. I don't think the world is only 5,000 years old, I don't think Cain and Abel married their sisters!"

Preacher Man's eyes narrowed. He pointed at me, "You are an APE-IEST. An APE-IEST. You going to lead a life of sin and end in hell."

Three years later I did escape my town, eventually receiving a PhD in physics, and then working on Wall Street for 20 years. A life devoted to rational thought, a life devoted to numbers and clever arguments.

During that time I counted myself an atheist and nodded in agreement as a wave of atheistic fervor swept out of the scientific community and into the media, led by Richard Dawkins.

I saw some of myself in him: quick with arguments, uneasy with emotions, comfortable with logic, able to look at any ideology or any thought process and expose the inconsistencies. We all picked on the Bible, a tome cobbled together over hundreds of years that provides so many inconsistencies. It is the skinny 85lb (35.6kg) weakling for anyone looking to flex their scientific muscles.

I eventually left my Wall Street job and started working with and photographing homeless addicts in the South Bronx. When I first walked into the Bronx I assumed I would find the same cynicism I had towards faith. If anyone seemed the perfect candidate for atheism it was the addicts who see daily how unfair, unjust, and evil the world can be.

None of them are. Rather they are some of the strongest believers I have met, steeped in a combination of Bible, superstition, and folklore.

You'll have to go to the link to read how these encounters shook his comfortable assumptions. It's an interesting story and has created a bit of a stir on the net. Many of the commenters at the link are critical of Arnade for his disparaging reflections on atheism in general and on Richard Dawkins in particular, but one wonders. What does atheism have to offer the people Arnade encountered?

The truth of the beliefs of these people aside, their faith that God cares for them offers them a tincture of dignity and hope in the midst of a life in which there's not much basis for either. The most atheism can offer them is the assurance that there is no hope, no dignity, no meaning to their misery, and no possibility for redemption. These wretched folk, the atheist must aver, will endure their suffering as long as they can and then they'll die and that'll be the end of it.

I can understand why someone would be an atheist if they were convinced that God didn't exist, but what I don't understand, except as an expression of human perversity, is why so many people would not want God to exist, why they would actually want him not to exist. Why want the world to be the kind of place that offers these street people nothing but despair and hopelessness. It's not only perverse, it's cruel, and yet many people who don't believe that there's a God, or anything like God, will acknowledge that it's not because the intellectual arguments for atheism are compelling that they don't believe, it's because they just don't want there to be such a being.

It's very strange. The atheist, following Freud, criticizes the theist for believing on the basis of "wish fulfillment," i.e. believing in God because they want it to be true, and yet wish fulfillment is precisely the reason many atheists are atheists.

Set aside the question whether one is justified in believing on the basis of wish fulfillment. If both theists and atheists do it, ask yourself this question: Which is more ennobling, uplifting, and inspiring, to want and hope there to be a perfectly good and just Creator who loves us and offers us eternal happiness, or to actually desire and hope that such a being not exist? For my part, I simply don't understand why anyone would choose the latter, yet many do.

A Few Films from 2013

I'm not one who sees every movie that comes out, nor am I a very good film critic, and I've yet to see some of the year's most popular films, but, even so, here, in no particular order, are nine of the movies I enjoyed in 2013:

• The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug - Marvelous special effects from Peter Jackson make this tale of the conflict between innocence and good on the one hand and abject evil on the other a lot of fun to watch. The popularity of the Tolkien oeuvre in a time when the idea that objective evil actually exists is often treated with derision by our intellectual elites is a hopeful sign that we're finally shedding some of the relativistic, materialistic foolishness that has afflicted us for the last fifty years.
• The Hunger Games and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire - The importance of these films, in my opinion, is the picture they paint of the moral nihilism that descends upon a completely secularized society. There's no mention in Panem of God, right and wrong, good and bad. The people there are interested only in titillation and spectacle and human life has value only insofar as it allows the effete citizens of Panem to indulge their appetites for drama, violence, and death. Whether Suzanne Collins intended it or not, whether young viewers get that lesson or not, it's an important message for them.
• Iron Man III - More of Robert Downey, Jr. saving the world from the bad guys. Good stuff.
• The Iron Lady - The life and work of Margaret Thatcher as played by Meryl Streep. The film spends too much time on Thatcher's late in life dementia but still manages to convey the strength and courage of the former British Prime Minister. Despite being loathed by the left, Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Pope John Paul II will, in my opinion, be viewed by historians as the three most consequential leaders of the last half of the 20th century.
• All the King's Men - Based on the novel by Robert Penn Warren, it's an account of the turbulent life of depression-era pol Huey Long, a populist governor and senator of Louisiana who's life ended in an assassination. The book and movie are obviously about Long although they insert a fictional character, played by Sean Penn, in his stead.
• Moneyball - Brad Pitt plays the brash, unorthodox general manager of the Oakland A's MLB team, Billy Beane, who rescues the feckless A's in 2002 and leads them to the playoffs, despite their roster of low-salaried, unsung players.
• Argo - A dramatic account of the CIA operation in 1979 to rescue American diplomats who were hiding in the Canadian embassy in Tehran from Iranian revolutionaries who had already sacked the American embassy and taken over fifty of its staff hostage. loosely based on actual events, the film is a bit more dramatic than the real history, but that's okay.
• Zero Dark Thirty - The riveting account of the operation to kill Osama bin Laden. Even though you know how it ends it's still a fascinating story.

Let me take this opportunity to wish all of you a safe, healthy, prosperous, and existentially meaningful 2014.

For Your Own Good

Several times during discussions of the various glitches and calamities wrought by the ACA (Obamacare) defenders of the law have informed us, in so many words, that the government knows best what sort of health care people should have and that if you're losing your insurance it probably wasn't a good policy anyway. Their hubris reminds me of a quote from C.S. Lewis in his 1948 collection of essays God in the Dock:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

It is the conceit of modern progressivism that the liberal elites know what's best for you and they're going to impose their will on you for your own good. We see it in New York City where Mayor Bloomberg tried to limit the size of the soft drinks you could buy and the amount of fat in the food you eat. We see it in the attempt to ban smoking even on one's own property and in one's own home. It's always done "for our own good," by people who feel it's their mission in life to oversee your every decision. That's the progressive mindset. It infantilizes people. Lewis had it pegged perfectly:

They (progressives) may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

That in a nutshell is how liberals regard the inferior classes. They see them alternatively as either children to be coddled, animals to be herded, or imbeciles unable to feed and care for themselves and in need of government to make them wash behind their ears and eat their vegetables. The liberal mindset is more than just silly, however, it's insidious because it's dehumanizing. It deprives men of their dignity and their freedom, and enslaves them to tyrannical elitist nannies who presume to know what's best for them better than they do.

They're a milder sort of people, but in the same genus, Camus describes in his book The Rebel when he says that the writer Baudelaire thought that the real saint is the man who flogs and kills people for their own good.

May heaven deliver us from those who seek to run our lives for our own good.

Annotated Booklist for 2013

I hope readers will indulge me in an observance of what has become something of a tradition on Viewpoint. For the last few years I've done a year-end list of books I've read and movies I've watched during the year coming to a close. I'd like to continue that tradition with this list of books, with a word or two of explanation, that comprised my reading in 2013:

1. From Tyndale to Madison - Michael Farris: A fascinating account of the history of of religious freedom in England and the American colonies.
2. Back to Blood - Tom Wolfe: A tale of ethnic tribalism and hedonism set in contemporary Miami. Not Wolfe's best work, in my opinion.
3. The Painted Veil - Somerset Maugham: A story of the undoing of a vain, superficial, and unfaithful wife who realizes too late what a fool she'd been.
4. Introduction to Phenomenology - Robert Sokolowski: An explication of Edmund Husserl's major contribution to philosophical thought.
5. On What Matters Vol. I - Derek Parfit: A technical, meticulously exhaustive study of Kantian deontological ethical thinking.
6. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens: Dickens' classic novel of human relationships, shortcomings, and redemption.
7. Inquiry and Essays - Thomas Reid: The most famous works of the man known as the philosopher of common sense in which he challenges the idealism of Berkeley and the skepticism of Hume.
8. Quiet - Susan Cain: A Fascinating look at introverts and introversion.
9. An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals - David Hume: Hume reduces morality to gaining the approbation of others.
10. The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God - D. A. Carson: Carson inquires into the meaning of the phrase, God is Love and finds it enormously complex and somewhat counterintutive.
11. All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren: The Pulitzer-Prize winning fictional account of depression-era Louisiana politician Huey Long.
12. Abraham Kuyper: A Short and Personal Introduction - Richard Mouw: A summary of the life and thought of pastor, journalist, theologian, and prime minister of Netherlands, Abraham Kuyper.
13. Macbeth - William Shakespeare: The classic story of betrayal and lust for power and its consequences.
14. Our Culture, What's Left of It - Theodore Dalrymple: A critique of British culture, which serves as a synecdoche for all of Western culture.
15. Memoir on Pauperism - Alexis de Tocqueville: An exploration of the causes of poverty by one of the most trenchant of early 19th century political and cultural observers.
16. The Road to Serfdom - F.A. Hayek: A classic analysis of how progressive economic policies lead to impoverishment and the loss of freedom.
17. Darwin's Doubt - Stephen Meyer: Another blow to the edifice of Darwinian dogma. Meyer shows that there simply are no good naturalistic explanations for what's called the Cambrian explosion where all the major phyla appear suddenly and fully developed in the fossil record.
18. The Path Between the Seas - David McCullough: The history of the construction of the Panama Canal. The short version is, it would never have been built today.
19. Going Clear - Lawrence Wright: A fascinating exposé of Scientology. Reading this book will cause you to wonder how anyone could believe what Scientologists evidently believe.
20. Leg Up - Louie Castriota: The inspiring story of how one young couple were motivated to do something for autistic children and the amazing facility and program they've built for these children.
21. God on the Rocks - Phil Madeira: Anecdotes from the life of one of the most prolific songwriters in America.
22. The Last Superstition - Ed Feser: A philosophical smackdown of naturalism by a Thomist philosopher. A bit too nasty in some parts for my taste, but pretty decisively argued, nonetheless.
23. American Exceptionalism - Charles Murray: An explanation of what, exactly, American exceptionalism is and isn't.
24. The Darkest Jungle - Todd Balf: The true story of the 19th century expedition which was the first to cross Panama in search of the best route for a canal. An amazing account of endurance and courage.
25. Killing Jesus - O'Reilly and Dugard: The judicial murder of Jesus told as history.
26. Consciousness and the Existence of God - J.P. Moreland: Moreland makes a compelling argument that consciousness does not fit in a naturalist ontology but fits very well in a theistic ontology. Thus its existence is strong confirmation of theism and disconfirmation of naturalism.
27. Inferno - Dan Brown: Another 24-hour thriller set amid the art and architecture of Florence and Venice. Brown can't seem to decide whether he wants to be a tour guide or a story-teller, nor can he shake himself of his obsessive need to get in his jabs at the Catholic Church, but the book is still entertaining for all that.
28. Out of the Silent Planet - C.S. Lewis: The first of Lewis' space trilogy in which he describes how human hubris corrupts and destroys. Reading it reminded me of Bartholomew de la Casa's Destruction of the Indies, the history of the Spanish war of extermination of the Indians of Caribbean and Central America in the 16th century.
29. Moral Man and Immoral Society - Reinhold Neibuhr: Neibuhr's thesis is that individuals can be selfless and altruistic but societies can only be egoistic. Writing in the period between world wars he explores the justifications for violent revolution.
30. God of the Possible - Greg Boyd: Boyd makes a powerful case for open theism, the view that God's omniscience nevertheless does not mean that he has exhaustive knowledge of the future.
31. Christian Philosophy - Bartholomew and Goheen: A summary of the history of Western philosophy from a Christian perspective. It tries to cover too much ground without explaining much of what it covers to be very helpful.
32. The Fall - Albert Camus: Camus' portrait of the modern egoist whose only value is the gratification of his own ego and desires.

The year's movies will be posted on Monday.

Remarkable Accomplishments and Remarkable Failures

This is making the rounds on the internet:

During the 3-1/2 years of World War II that started with the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and ended with the surrender of Germany and Japan in 1945, the U.S. produced 22 aircraft carriers, 8 battleships, 48 cruisers, 349 destroyers, 420 destroyer escorts, 203 submarines, 34 million tons of merchant ships, 100,000 fighter aircraft, 98,000 bombers, 24,000 transport aircraft, 58,000 training aircraft, 93,000 tanks, 257,000 artillery pieces, 105,000 mortars, 3,000,000 machine guns, and 2,500,000 military trucks.

We put 16.1 million men in uniform in the various armed services, invaded Africa, Sicily, and Italy, won the battle for the Atlantic, planned and executed D-Day, marched across the Pacific and Europe, developed the atomic bomb and ultimately conquered Japan and Germany.

It's worth noting, that during almost the exact amount of time, the Obama administration couldn't build a functioning web site.

Unable to create a web site to enlist people into the health insurance exchanges, the administration nevertheless assures us that government can effectively manage the health care of 300 million people.

During times of national crisis such as WWII, government is best positioned to perform the required feats of productivity recounted above, but, lacking any such emergency, government is typically slothful, inefficient, and incompetent.

If there's one reason why Healthcare.gov was a colossal flop with more disastrous consequences yet to come it is in my opinion because there was no competition and no accountability in its creation, both of which are a matter of course in the private sector but rare in government enterprises. Competition and accountability create powerful incentives to produce the best product possible, and absent these incentives the consumer can expect shoddiness and incompetence.

Here's an example: In 2008 Congress passed the Affordable Care Act on a straight party-line vote, and the President signed it into law, without anyone who voted for it acknowledging having actually studied it. The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, tacitly admitted as much when she famously asserted that "we have to pass the bill to see what's in it."

To vote for a bill of such enormous implications for the country without knowing what it would entail was a stupefying act of governmental irresponsibility and malfeasance, an act for which every single congressional and administrative supporter should be held accountable by the voters. If we refuse to exercise our own responsibility as citizens and dismiss those who serve us so badly then two things will become frighteningly more likely: We will continue to suffer under the yoke of bad laws and worse politicians, and we make it more probable that those who see no possible constitutional redress will take it upon themselves to seek unconstitutional redress. Both of these would be disastrous and both become more likely in a polity in which an apathetic citizenry has resigned itself to ineffective, incompetent, and corrupt leadership.

Social Cannibalism

Destroying people seems sometimes to be a favored pastime among liberals who often engage in the sport with especial gusto and verve. Indeed, as Erik Errickson points out at Red State, they're even eager to do it to each other.

A recent example is the case of the unfortunate young woman named Justine Sacco, a PR executive, who tweeted that she didn't think she'd get AIDS on her upcoming trip to Africa because "she's white."

For that bit of politically incorrect bluntness she has lost her job and achieved infamy among the entire left side of the planet, which, judging by their own tweets, seems to be wallowing in the catnip of self-righteousness. Of course, when this same woman ridiculed actor Kirk Cameron for being outspoken about his Christian beliefs nobody said much of anything by way of objection. On the left blasphemy is punishable by excommunication and the verbal equivalent of stoning, but only matters of race and sexuality are subject to their stringent blasphemy laws.

Errickson compares these thought police to orcs in Tolkein's Lord of the Rings which feed on Hobbits and other such delicacies until that prey is exhausted and then they kill and feed on each other.

The question I have, though, is why, exactly, are people outraged about what Sacco said? Is there something about it that's false? Is it, as some have claimed, that one should never joke about AIDS? If so, why does AIDS enjoy special privilege? Why was it okay for Fred Sanford (Redd Foxx) to get his audience on Sanford and Son howling with laughter as he clutched his chest feigning a heart attack, but it's not okay to make a snarky comment about AIDS? Was Sacco showing any more insensitivity to human suffering than was Redd Foxx?

Maybe Sacco's implication is false that AIDS in Africa is overwhelmingly a problem in black communities and is relatively rare among whites. If so, I've heard no one offer a refutation of it. If what she said isn't false then whence the outrage?

It's the mentality of mobs to hang someone first and then reflect on the reasons for the lynching later. That mentality enjoys a vigorous existence primarily on the left in this country, but it's not found exclusively on the left. Variations of it appeared recently among some conservatives who seemed much too eager to condemn Senator Ted Cruz for doing what he could to spare the country the miseries that Obamacare was about to inflict upon us, and also among some on the right who couldn't wait to tell us how execrable they thought Phil Robertson was for voicing his opinion on the hamartological implications of homosexuality. In neither case were the offenders castigated for saying something demonstrably untrue. Rather the obloquy they've suffered is due entirely to the fact that they did or said something that others just didn't like.

Perhaps there are a few simple rules people might follow when they encounter words or deeds they deem offensive, before they launch a campaign of invective and personal destruction:

First, ask whether what's being said is somehow untrue. If so, then criticize it for being false, but also be prepared to explain why it is false.

Second, if what's being said is not untrue then ask whether it's gratuitously hurtful to someone. If so, then criticize it for being needlessly hurtful, but also be prepared to explain why and to whom it is needlessly hurtful.

If a statement is neither untrue nor gratuitously hurtful it might still be something some people don't like. It might be in bad taste or it might flout political or social decorum, but then explain precisely how it does so and why it's wrong for the offender to have breached these particular standards.

Moreover, one should be prepared to explain why giving some groups offense is taboo but offending others is not. For example, suppose Ms Sacco had tweeted that she was going to meet with a Catholic priest and expressed concern about being molested and then said, "Just kidding, I'm not a young boy," how many of those who tweeted their disgust at her actual comments would have been chortling at her audacious, biting wit?

To simply scream about how awful a person is who would say "such things," and how she should be fired for having said them - without presenting a good reason for thinking that what she said was false or hurtful - is simply irrational and shallow. It's the sort of behavior we find in frenzied, unthinking mobs. It's the stage upon which people unwilling to do the heavy labor of erecting a cogent argument can nevertheless put their own moral rectitude on display for others to see. It's nothing more than moral preening and self-flattery.

Mary

Here's a little something for your Christmas eve:

I wish each of you a very meaningful and special Christmas. May the day take on more significance for you this year than ever before.

Why Christians Celebrate Christmas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally, it was all over, finished.

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

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

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

And that's why Christians celebrate Christmas.

Theories Born of Desperation

Denise O'Leary offers us a nice summary of the multifarious theoretical contrivances dreamed up to explain away the fact that the astonishing fine-tuning of our universe points to the existence of an intelligent designer of the cosmos.

The theories manufactured to avoid that conclusion range from the multiverse, to many-worlds, to the notion that our universe is a simulation developed by a higher intelligence in some other world (Why anyone would argue that there's a transcendent intellect out there powerful enough to create a world and personal enough to create personal beings while at the same time arguing against the existence of the God of theism is a bit of a puzzle).

In fact, there's no empirical evidence for any of these theories. They're embraced because they afford shelter from the dreaded theistic conclusion and because they could be true in the same sense that it's possible that a meteorite will fall from the sky and come to rest perched delicately on the tip of your car's antenna.

Advocates embrace the "It could happen therefore it probably did happen" defense because when in the throes of philosophical desperation any possibility is going to look appealing, even if it means abandoning theoretical criteria held dear by thinkers for centuries.

For instance, these hypotheses flout one of the prime criteria for a "good" scientific or philosophical explanation, the principle of simplicity or parsimony. This is the principle that requires that a proffered explanation explain the relevant data more simply than its competitors if it is to be preferred to its competitors. There's nothing simple, however, about trying to explain the existence of our highly fine-tuned world by positing an infinity of other worlds, particularly when the alternative is to posit a single intelligent agent.

There are numerous other difficulties with these theories as well, as we've discussed from time to time at this site. For one last example we might ask if there really are an unimaginable number of worlds comprising the multiverse, what produced them? From whence did they arise? No one has any idea. Indeed, if there were not the need to somehow avoid the "God conclusion" it's doubtful that these theories would be entertained for more than a few seconds by anyone other than science fiction writers.

Anyway, for a good overview of the current state of desperation among naturalistic scientists and philosophers check out O'leary's column.

Pajama Boy and Duck Dynasty

Evidently, this is the Obama administration's image of millenials - androgynous metrosexuals sitting around their parents' Manhattan apartments in their plaid pajamas sipping hot chocolate and looking mildly cynical and bemused?

I'm not making fun of the young man who posed for the picture, but rather of the liberal idealization of the typical American under thirty. Even the liberals at Morning Joe have trouble containing their mirth at the notion that an ad putatively designed to persuade young Americans to sign up for health insurance would try to have them identify with a guy who looks like he just walked off the set of Big Bang Theory wearing his "onesie" zip-up jammies and nursing a latte:

Maybe if the administration wants to reach the vast number of Americans with their message they should enlist these guys, even though the suggestion would probably make many of them blanch.

Speaking of Duck Dynasty, which I guess we now are, it's a sad thing that someone can be asked his opinion of homosexuality in a magazine interview and be censured and essentially fired by his employer for saying that he thinks it's a sin. This was, and I would argue still is, the mainstream opinion throughout most of the world for the last six thousand years. Why is it now deemed an unspeakably reprehensible view?

It's ironic, I think, that Phil Robertson (at the left in the photo above) was suspended by A&E for giving an opinion in response to an interviewer's question that differs probably not at all from that held by the man just named Time magazine's "Person of the Year"?

I heard a guest on a radio show this morning say that he thought what Robertson said was "vile hate speech" because Robertson equated homosexuality with raping animals (bestiality). This is absurd. Here's what Robertson said:

Robertson described in the interview how sin is becoming acceptable in America and that the country needs to turn back to its Christian values.

“Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men,” Robertson told GQ. “Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers—they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right.”

Despite his beliefs, the Duck Commander founder says he doesn’t judge others.

“We never, ever judge someone on who’s going to heaven, hell. That’s the Almighty’s job,” Robertson told GQ. “We just love ‘em, give ‘em the good news about Jesus – whether they’re homosexuals, drunks, terrorists. We let God sort ‘em out later.”

Robertson is saying, it should hardly need pointing out, that homosexuality is a sin in Christian (and Jewish and Muslim) theology, just like adultery and worse forms of sexual transgression are sins. It's simply irrational to conclude, as Robertson's critics have, that because he says homosexuality is a sin and bestiality is a sin that therefore homosexuality is the same thing as bestiality. That'd be like saying that because lying is a sin and murder is a sin, therefore lying is the same thing as murder.

No matter. When the left sees a chance to punish someone for their religious beliefs, especially if the beliefs are evangelical Christian, they're not going to let a little thing like logic, or giving the guy the benefit of the doubt, stand in their way.

I've only ever watched Duck Dynasty once, and I don't call myself a fan, but I hope the Robertson clan leaves A&E and takes their sponsors and eleven million viewers with them. It'd be a condign outcome for the bigots in the A&E front office, who only had to issue a disclaimer if they wanted to dissociate the network from Robertson's views. To suspend him for honestly answering the question put to him by the GQ interviewer is to implicitly announce that traditional Christian belief is unacceptable and will not be tolerated on their network.

False Messiahs and Liberal Faith

If it weren't so sad it'd be funny. Liberals have a hard time putting faith in the transcendent but blindly placing one's faith in the immanent? No problem.

Not only is her faith in Barack Obama apparently unfalsifiable, it's contrary to common sense. What makes her think that after five years of economic stagnation, foreign policy blunders, and incontestable mendacity that anything will be different in the next three years? Why think that competency and integrity will suddenly blossom in an administration that has had five years to demonstrate these virtues without having evinced any discernible success?

The sad part of this is that non-liberals had taken the measure of Mr. Obama about thirty minutes after he'd stepped on to the national stage. They knew he was totally unqualified for the job, they knew his ideology would lead to disaster, they knew, in short, that he was an empty suit. They marveled that people like Barbara Walters could be so easily seduced, and they tried to convince the electorate to resist the vacuous sirens' song of Hope and Change, but it was all to no avail.

It tells us something about the liberal mindset that many of them were so eager to place their faith in a charismatic human savior that they plighted their allegiance to a man they scarcely knew, one whose mysterious personal history included spending his formative years surrounded by men and women who despised this country, but who, they nonetheless believed, could and would lead a nation as vast and sprawling as the U.S. into the promised land.

Naiveté is cute in children, tolerable in young adults, but risible in mature adults and especially so at the moment of revelation when the adult realizes how blind she'd been.

Russell Saltzman writes of his own growing disillusionment with the incumbent president at First Things in a fine piece titled The Selfie President.

Sagan's Argument from Religious Experience

Religious believers are often criticized for holding beliefs they can't empirically demonstrate to be true or at least probable. If no scientific evidence can be adduced in support of the belief then it's discounted as mere superstition. This was a popular view among skeptical philosophers from about 1870 to about 1980. It's called evidentialism and Philosopher Alvin Plantinga has a great deal of fun dismantling it in his book titled Warranted Christian Belief.

Plantinga asks, inter alia, why our beliefs should be considered guilty until proven innocent. Why should beliefs not be counted innocent until proven guilty?

He wonders, too, why a person of sound mind, convinced in her heart that God exists, and who has never been confronted with an antitheistic argument that she found compelling, should be required to nevertheless suspend her belief until she has acquired overwhelming evidence that her belief is true.

Suppose, for instance, that you were accused of a crime. There's substantial evidence against you and little that you can offer to offset it. Even so, you're convinced you're innocent. You know you're innocent. You can't explain the contrary evidence, but it doesn't matter. You just know you didn't commit the crime. Should you, despite this assurance, acknowledge anyway that you're guilty because you cannot mount an argument to explain why you're certain of your innocence?

Many people believe in God on the basis of a totally subjective experience that they can't document or prove but which leaves them with an assurance that they could not deny even were they so inclined. The experience of former atheist Kirstin Powers, a liberal journalist who appears on various shows on FOX News, provides us with a good example.

(See here for a full account of her experience.)

I was recently reminded by a student of a scene from the movie Contact, which was, ironically, based on a book by atheistic astronomer Carl Sagan. In the movie the character played by Jodie Foster, a scientist named Ellie Arroway, travels to the center of the galaxy, but upon her return is unable to offer any evidence that she actually left earth. None of the data collected by her colleagues from her transporter confirm that the experiment worked. Yet she's convinced that she in fact experienced all that she claims to have experienced.

Is she justified in holding that belief? If her belief is the product of properly functioning cognitive faculties belonging to a scientist not given to imaginative flights of hysteria, is what she says in this exchange with an interrogator discredited by her inability to present evidence?

Michael Kritz: "Wait a minute, let me get this straight. You admit that you have absolutely no physical evidence to back up your story."

Ellie Arroway: "Yes."

Michael Kitz: "You admit that you very well may have hallucinated this whole thing."

Ellie Arroway: "Yes."

Michael Kitz: "You admit that if you were in our position, you would respond with exactly the same degree of incredulity and skepticism!"

Ellie Arroway: "Yes!"

Michael Kitz: [standing, angrily] "Then why don't you simply withdraw your testimony, and concede that this "journey to the center of the galaxy," in fact, never took place!"

Ellie Arroway: "Because I can't. I... had an experience... I can't prove it, I can't even explain it, but everything that I know as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real! I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever... A vision... of the universe, that tells us, undeniably, how tiny, and insignificant and how... rare, and precious we all are! A vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater than ourselves, that we are not, that none of us are alone! I wish... I... could share that... I wish, that everyone, if only for one... moment, could feel... that awe, and humility, and hope. But... That continues to be my wish."

Ellie Arroway, in Sagan's telling of the tale, had what amounts to a religious experience. If she's warranted in believing her experience was veridical despite the lack of proof, or even any objective evidence, why are Christians faulted, by people just like Sagan, for believing in God on the basis of a subjective assurance similar to that expressed by Arroway?

Indeed, far more people have had an experience like Kirstin Powers than have had an experience like Ellie Arroway. If Arroway is justified in believing that she actually encountered a different world why would people like Powers not be similarly justified?

Just as it would be foolish to expect Ellie to discount her experience because she can't empirically prove that she had it, so, too, it's foolish of skeptics to think that the only warrant for a belief is the ability to provide objective, physical evidence that it's true.

It's Complicated

David Dobbs at Aeon discusses how evolution is a far more complex process than you were taught in high school.

In fact, in reading this article one wonders how such complexity - complexity that can only be explained in terms of metaphors that trade on intelligent guidance - could ever have arisen in the first place.

Dobbs focuses on the complexity of the genome (the genetic blueprint of an organism) and how the popular understanding of the gene as the unit of inheritance is to the actual state of affairs as a playground one-on-one basketball game is to an NBA contest.

It's turning out that the classical view of evolutionary change, which held that genetic mutation causes phenotypic alterations (alterations in the physical appearance or behavior of an organism) which are then sifted by the environment according to the "fitness" they conferred, is backwards. Actually, it looks like changes often occur in the phenotype first and are fixed in the genome generations later. Here's Dobbs' lede:

A couple of years ago, at a massive conference of neuroscientists — 35,000 attendees, scores of sessions going at any given time — I wandered into a talk that I thought would be about consciousness but proved (wrong room) to be about grasshoppers and locusts. At the front of the room, a bug-obsessed neuroscientist named Steve Rogers was describing these two creatures — one elegant, modest, and well-mannered, the other a soccer hooligan.

The grasshopper, he noted, sports long legs and wings, walks low and slow, and dines discreetly in solitude. The locust scurries hurriedly and hoggishly on short, crooked legs and joins hungrily with others to form swarms that darken the sky and descend to chew the farmer’s fields bare.

Related, yes, just as grasshoppers and crickets are. But even someone as insect-ignorant as I could see that the hopper and the locust were radically different animals — different species, doubtless, possibly different genera. So I was quite amazed when Rogers told us that grasshopper and locust are in fact the same species, even the same animal, and that, as Jekyll is Hyde, one can morph into the other at alarmingly short notice.

Not all grasshopper species, he explained (there are some 11,000), possess this morphing power; some always remain grasshoppers. But every locust was, and technically still is, a grasshopper — not a different species or subspecies, but a sort of hopper gone mad. If faced with clues that food might be scarce, such as hunger or crowding, certain grasshopper species can transform within days or even hours from their solitudinous hopper states to become part of a maniacally social locust scourge. They can also return quickly to their original form.

In the most infamous species, Schistocerca gregaria, the desert locust of Africa, the Middle East and Asia, these phase changes (as this morphing process is called) occur when crowding spurs a temporary spike in serotonin levels, which causes changes in gene expression so widespread and powerful they alter not just the hopper’s behaviour but its appearance and form. Legs and wings shrink. Subtle camo colouring turns conspicuously garish. The brain grows to manage the animal’s newly complicated social world, which includes the fact that, if a locust moves too slowly amid its million cousins, the cousins directly behind might eat it.

How does this happen? Does something happen to their genes? Yes, but — and here was the point of Rogers’s talk — their genes don’t actually change. That is, they don’t mutate or in any way alter the genetic sequence or DNA. Nothing gets rewritten. Instead, this bug’s DNA — the genetic book with millions of letters that form the instructions for building and operating a grasshopper — gets reread so that the very same book becomes the instructions for operating a locust. Even as one animal becomes the other, as Jekyll becomes Hyde, its genome stays unchanged. Same genome, same individual, but, I think we can all agree, quite a different beast.

Why?

Transforming the hopper is gene expression — a change in how the hopper’s genes are ‘expressed’, or read out. Gene expression is what makes a gene meaningful, and it’s vital for distinguishing one species from another.

The same DNA in both insects is "read" differently in different environmental conditions producing radically diverse animals. It's as if one could read Crime and Punishment by reading every third word of Brothers Karamazov. Such a novel would be a sign of unimaginable genius in the author and yet we're all expected by our cultural betters to believe that such a phenomenon arose in living cells purely by blind, purposeless, serendipitous happenstance.

The article is long but it's must-reading for anyone interested in biology.

Time's Person of the Year

Time magazine has named Pope Francis its "Person of the Year." Fr. Robert Barron is delighted with the selection but not so much with Time's explanation of their choice.

Here are some excerpts from Fr. Barron's thoughts on the matter:

[T]here is something that has been bothering me ever since Francis became Pope, and it's on rather massive display in the Time article, namely, a tendency to distinguish radically between this lovely Franciscan emphasis on mercy and love for the poor and the apparently far less than lovely emphasis on doctrine so characteristic of the Papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. There is actually a good deal of dangerous silliness in this way of characterizing things.

If I might cite the much-maligned Benedict, the Church does essentially three things: it cares for the poor; it worships God; and it evangelizes. Isolate any of the three from the other two, and distortions set in. Indeed, without deep care for the poor and for social justice, the worship of God can become lifeless ("liturgical fussiness") and evangelizing can devolve into cultural criticism or mere intellectual debating.

But isolate care for the poor from the other two and equally problematic distortions ensue. Without the worship of God and evangelization, the Church deteriorates in short order into one more social service institution among many, a mere "NGO" in Francis's own language. Now listen to the authors of the Time article: "In a matter of months, Francis has elevated the healing mission of the church -- the church as servant and comforter of hurting people in an often harsh world -- above the doctrinal police work so important to his recent predecessors." And "his vision is of a pastoral -- and not doctrinaire -- church." This is so much nonsense.

It's nonsense not only when imputed to Francis but to the Christian church as a whole. Christian faith is expressed in three ways: Worship, service to others, and evangelization, all of which are undergirded by doctrinal convictions and make no sense apart from those convictions. Without fundamental creedal commitments everything about the Christian faith would be hollow and unsustainable.

Barron attributes the popular misconception of Christianity as a merely ethical system akin, perhaps, to Confucianism to the pernicious effects of Immanuel Kant's 18th century attempt to reduce all religious expression to morality:

The source of a good deal of this mischief is the 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant, whose influence on the modern sensibility can scarcely be overstated. Kant famously held that religion is reducible to ethics. By the Enlightenment period, the doctrinal claims of the great religions had come to seem incredible to many, and worship a pathetic holdover from a more primitive time. For Kant, therefore, authentic, grown-up, enlightened religious people would see that morality is the heart of the matter, both doctrine and worship serving, at best, to bolster ethics. It is always a source of amazement to me how thoroughly modern people have gone down the Kantian autobahn in regard to this issue. How we take the following for granted: it doesn't really matter what you believe, as long as you are a good person.

But the Kantian construal is simply repugnant to classical Christianity. In point of fact, Christians have been, from the beginning, massively interested in both worship and doctrine. How could you read any of the Gospels or any of the letters of Paul and think otherwise? Moreover, the great figures of the Church -- Irenaeus, Chrysostom, Jerome, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Newman, etc. -- have taken doctrine with utmost seriousness. No one doubts that Francis of Assisi himself loved the poor and marginalized, but how many realize that one of his principal concerns was for liturgical propriety?

Not only is Time incorrect in minimizing the role of doctrine in Christianity in general and Pope Francis in particular, but the editors contradict themselves in their own write-up:

Toward the end of the Time piece, the authors mention two features of Francis's life which effectively undermine their central argument. The "Person of the Year" spends huge swaths of his day at prayer. Rising at five, he prays until seven and then celebrates Mass. And after dinner, he spends several more hours before the Blessed Sacrament. As has been the case with so many of the Church's saints, his love for the poor flows from an intense worship of God. The article closes with a look at one of the Pope's Wednesday general audiences. The topic of Francis's remarks that day was the resurrection of Jesus. After declaring the Church's age-old doctrine, the Pope looked up from his text and asked the crowd, "do you believe it?" When they responded, "yes!" he said again, "do you believe it?" This is not a man who is unconcerned with clarity of dogma.

I might add in closing that I wonder if the folks at Time realize that the man they've chosen to celebrate on their cover is also profoundly pro-life and opposed to gay marriage. Just wondering.