A Mini-Ice Age

Having scared the wits out of us for twenty years with dire predictions of global warming, rising sea levels, desertification, wildlife extinctions, large-scale starvation, and massive demographic dislocation, scientists are now telling us that, well, maybe not. We may instead be headed for a mini-ice age such as hasn't been seen in over three hundred years.

According to an article in the UK Daily Mail the sun appears to be on track to reach a minimum of solar activity by 2030 although the effects of the trend may be felt well before that. Here's the gist:

The new model of the Sun's solar cycle is producing unprecedentedly accurate predictions of irregularities within the Sun's 11-year heartbeat. It draws on dynamo effects in two layers of the Sun, one close to the surface and one deep within its convection zone.

Predictions from the model suggest that solar activity will fall by 60 per cent during the 2030s to conditions last seen during the 'mini ice age' that began in 1645, according to the results presented by Prof Valentina Zharkova at the National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno.

The model predicts that the pair of waves become increasingly offset during Cycle 25, which peaks in 2022. During Cycle 26, which covers the decade from 2030-2040, the two waves will become exactly out of synch and this will cause a significant reduction in solar activity.

The last time the sun experienced this type of minimum was 1646 - 1715, a period which has been called a mini-ice age during which England's River Thames froze over for the only time in its recorded history.

If this global cooling actually does come to pass perhaps we'll be reading about how fortuitous it is that the atmosphere is laden with greenhouse gases keeping the planet insulated against the cold. We may even be treated to the spectacle of frantic environmentalists and politicians demanding increased production of atmospheric carbon dioxide to reverse the effects of the solar minimum before agricultural production around the globe is diminished by the lower temperatures and much of the northern latitudes become uninhabitable.

Petty Tyrants

You may recall the frightening - and sickening - abuse of power exercised by Wisconsin prosecutor John Chisolm against supporters of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. We discussed it here. You are also doubtless familiar with the frightening - and sickening - abuse of power exercised by the IRS' Lois Lerner against conservative advocacy groups. Both were attempts to use state power to silence and punish political opponents, attempts which are toxic to a free people but applauded by the progressive left.

Anyway, it turns out that there's a fascinating coincidence connecting these two outrages. Mr. Chisolm's "enabler," a fellow by the name of Kevin Kennedy who heads up something called the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (GAB), and Ms Lerner, would you believe it, are long-time BFFs. Hot Air has the story of this remarkable happenstance here.

The left's aversion to freedom of opinion and conscience and the conviction that the way to prevail in a democracy is to squelch opposing voices, impose your views by force, and punish whomever has the temerity to disagree reminded me of the story of a friend who was a Resident Assistant (RA) during his undergrad days at the hyper-progressive University of Wisconsin. Here's his account of what happened:

I was an RA (or as they call it at UW-Madison, "House Fellow") from 2000-2002. I was also a member of the UW-Madison College Republicans and part of the Knights of Columbus. At first I was quite excited when I found out that I got the House Fellow position. The post paid for my university housing, provided a food stipend, and also provided a nice paycheck for an out-of-state undergrad.

One of our principal responsibilities as House Fellows, according to our training (or as I called it the second time around - indoctrination) and official handbook, was to "promote an inclusive community" among the students living in the residence halls. I witnessed the ugly reality of that phrase throughout much of my junior year in 2001.

It turns out an "inclusive community" is exclusively one that supports and promotes a homosexual lifestyle. One afternoon after class I checked my House Fellow mail. Upon walking into the office, I immediately noticed what appeared to be a campaign button in my mailbox. There were actually two buttons - one with a rainbow on it, the other black with a pink triangle on it - both promoting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered (LGBT) activities and lifestyle.

I was informed by an accompanying letter that I was supposed to display these buttons prominently, either on my person, on my hall door, or on my backpack. I noticed that my immediate supervisor (or "Residence Life Coordinator") was in her office, so I asked her simply "do we have to wear these, are we required to wear these?" She responded no, but that we would have to talk about why at a later time. In her plain view, I put the buttons back in the bag that had at least 25 others in it and walked out of the office.

To make a long story short, that decision quickly made the rest of my year a personal living hell. I eventually filed a discrimination complaint against a female co-worker (who happened to live directly above me in our dorm), citing her private and public displays of making me feel uncomfortable due to my race (Caucasian), gender (male), sexual orientation (heterosexual), religion (Roman Catholic), as well as political affiliation (conservative Republican).

Turns out that she was in the office with my supervisor when I asked about the buttons, and she took offense to my (in)action. Residence hall leaders surprisingly took my complaint seriously enough to hold a series of small, closed door meetings. The meetings got quite uncomfortable, as my co-worker submitted testimony that I later found out she gained by listening through the floor vents of her room. She found instances of my disciplining my own residents to be "disturbing displays of domineering, masculine power."

One incident occurred about 3:30am on a Thursday morning, a couple of my male residents were screaming drunk down the hall after returning from a night on the town. In response I just opened my door and stood there in my boxer shorts and muscle t-shirt. I said nothing, only stood there. They looked at my face and my bed hair, immediately apologized, and went to their room. We spoke the next morning on the incident when I returned from lecture, and they apologized again. I commented in my testimony that I thought it was a sign of "powerful mutual respect" that I had built with my residences. It seems all my co-worker caught was the "powerful" part and took it from there.

That whole year I prayed a lot, and thank God I got through it. There were moments, though, when I actually called home to Pennsylvania fearful that I would lose my job. I kept my mouth shut about the situation around my non-House Fellow friends because most of them lived in the dorms. I could not tell my girlfriend anything, because she, too, lived in the same dorms that I did. My House Fellows, friends I worked with, confided in me that I was right, but they did not feel comfortable sticking their necks out like they thought I was.

The co-worker was politely asked to leave at the end of the year. I got transferred to another building with increased responsibilities, meaning instead of 50 residents the following year I had over 100 and the second largest student/House Fellow ratio on campus. By luck my immediate supervisor was moving to another residence hall location on campus.

I found over the deliberations, however, I had "gained a name" for myself among the residence hall leadership. One administrator in particular later made it his mission to provoke me into a fire-able offense. After letting a trouble-making resident of mine off the hook for "only smoking marijuana," he admonished me for disciplining my residents according to "my conservative beliefs." He informed me that I "should have been doing better things like busting people for drinking" rather than "imposing my values" on my resident.

After informing him that marijuana possession is not just against housing regulations but also federal law, I asked him to explain to me what he meant by "conservative beliefs." Turns out that as an openly-gay activist, he considered conservatives hateful homophobes. I immediately informed him that my own beliefs did not reflect that characteristic, citing John Paul II "condemn the sin, not the sinner." I then went on for the next five minutes outlining my personal worldview, supporting it with the words of such notables as Ronald Reagan, C.S. Lewis, St. Augustine, even G.K. Chesterton (although I doubted he ever heard of him).

I noticed that he increasingly blanched throughout, then turned very red in anger. He told me that the meeting was over. I ended the meeting by telling him that I guess I was not what he defined as his average "token conservative."

When I first read my friend's story it occurred to me that if conservatives choose to attend a school like the University of Wisconsin they better either keep their mouth shut or have a parent who's a lawyer. I thought at the time that it was deeply distressing that the very institutions which are supposed to be temples of free speech and independent thinking are actually training grounds for censorship and petty tyranny. I wondered what kind of nation our children will inherit if people like some of those with whom my friend had to deal were ever to ascend in large numbers to positions of political leadership?

Lo and behold, fourteen years later many of them have. You can read about some of the more odious examples at the links.

All for Show

Jonah Goldberg is, in my opinion, one of the most entertaining political writers on the current scene. He's very bright and witty, has a phenomenal memory for cultural allusions, and is politically conservative. In his most recent column he explains in his inimitable way why Donald Trump supporters are making an understandable, but nevertheless grave, mistake.

He starts off the piece with a humorous riff on various issues that may at first glance seem tangential to why conservative support for Trump is misplaced:

There have been times in the past when I’ve gotten crosswise with certain segments of the conservative base and/or with the readership of National Review. And, because, like the Elephant Man, I am a not an animal but a human being, I have always had at least some self-doubt. That’s as it should be. People who share principles should not only hear each other out when they disagree; they should be able to see each other’s points and hold open the possibility that one’s opponents have the better argument.

This is not one of those times, at least not for me.

I truly, honestly, and with all my heart and mind think Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters are making a yuuuuuuge mistake. I think they are being conned and played. I feel like a guy whose brother is being taken advantage of by a grifter. I’m watching helplessly as the con artist congratulates him for taking out a third mortgage.

Anger Is Not an Argument

Now, before I go on, let me clarify a few things. I get it. The base of the party is angry. They’re angry about Obama’s lawless chicanery on immigration. They’re angry about the GOP’s patented inability to cross the street without stepping on its own d*ck and then having to apologize for it. They’re angry that the Left’s culture warriors are behaving like an invading army that shoots the survivors even after they’ve surrendered. They’re angry that Republicans have to bend over backward so as not to offend anyone, while Democrats have free rein (and at times free reign) to do and to say as they please.

Enter Trump, stage left. He makes no apologies. He’s brash. I can understand why some see him as a breath of fresh air. If you want to give him credit for starting a worthwhile debate about sanctuary cities and illegal immigration, fine. I think that argument is way overdone, but certainly reasonable enough.

Maybe you just like him. On that, we can respectfully disagree, as there is no accounting for taste. Perhaps you just like his musk and the way it assaults your nostrils, which is fitting, given his line of cologne. Fine.

I, on the other hand, find him tedious, tacky, and trite. He’s a bore who overcompensates for his insecurities by talking about how awesome he is, often in the third person. Jonah can’t stand that.

You see the next Teddy Roosevelt and all I see is someone who talks big and carries a small schtick.

‘Sup Britches?

In words George Will shall never write, this is a good moment to talk about my pants. Earlier this week, Donald Trump attacked Charles Krauthammer and me. By the way, I don’t blame Trump one bit for his hostility. I’d hate me too, if I were him. Still I do marvel at how this supposed Master of the Universe can be unnerved by such criticism. If it takes so little effort for me to set up shop in his head, by all means, let’s give him thermonuclear weapons.

Anyway, when asked about me, he said:

I’m worth a fortune….I went out, I made a fortune, a big fortune, a tremendous fortune… bigger than people even understand….Then I get called [a failure] by a guy that can’t buy a pair of pants, I get called names?

As the intern said to Bill Clinton, this puts me in a weird position. I don’t like to brag, but I’m actually quite adept at buying pants. I don’t enjoy it. But I can do it. It never occurred to me to put it in my bio or anything — “Jonah Goldberg is a senior editor of National Review, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a successful pants-buyer” — but maybe I should.

Now, I will say that I sometimes choose not to wear pants, and not just because I’m so fond of my spaghetti-strainer codpiece (which affords me the satisfaction of telling really attractive women, “Hey, my eyes are up here. Thank you very much.”) But these are my choices. If I want to identify as a pantless American, who are you to say otherwise?

More to the point, what I find so gaudy about Trump is his constant reference to the fact that he made a lot of money, and his expectation that it somehow makes him immune to criticism or means that he’s a better person than his GOP competitors, never mind yours truly.

Following this excursis Golberg lays out the reasons for thinking that Trump is in fact a progressive masquerading as a conservative. It's well-worth reading, especially if you're attracted to Trump because you find some of his rhetoric refreshingly un-PC. If Goldberg is right, the rhetoric is all for show. It's not what he truly believes. Read it and in between laughs decide for yourself.

Information Degradation

One reason for the growing persuasiveness of arguments for an intelligent architect behind the structure of the universe and of life is that modern technology affords some very helpful analogies to design arguments. For example, living organisms are coded for by information systems - including, but not limited to, the DNA/RNA complex - which in many respects are similar to computer software programs. This creates difficult conceptual problems for naturalists since the principle that like effects can be assumed to have like causes leads to the conclusion that information, which is always in our experience the product of intelligent agency, points to an intelligent provenance.

Another difficulty biological information poses for naturalism is the problem of information degradation. In an article at Evolution News and Views Dr. Kirk Durston, who holds advanced degrees in biophysics and philosophy explains how this phenomenon militates against any naturalistic view of life's origin. Here's the centerpiece of his argument:

In the neo-Darwinian scenario for the origin and diversity of life, the digital functional information for life would have had to begin at zero, increase over time to eventually encode the first simple life form, and continue to increase via natural processes to encode the digital information for the full diversity of life.

An essential, falsifiable prediction of Darwinian theory, therefore, is that functional information must, on average, increase over time.

Interestingly, a prediction of intelligent design science is quite the opposite. Since information always degrades over time for any storage media and replication system, intelligent design science postulates that the digital information of life was initially downloaded into the genomes of life. It predicts that, on average, genetic information is steadily being corrupted by natural processes. The beauty of these two mutually incompatible predictions in science is that the falsification of one entails verification of the other. So which prediction does science falsify, and which does science verify?

Ask computer programmers what effect ongoing random changes in the code would have on the integrity of a program, and they will universally agree that it degrades the software. This is the first problem for neo-Darwinian theory. Mutations produce random changes in the digital information of life. It is generally agreed that the rate of deleterious mutations is much greater than the rate of beneficial mutations. My own work with 35 protein families suggests that the rate of destruction is, at minimum, 8 times the rate of neutral or beneficial mutations.

Simply put, the digital information of life is being destroyed much faster than it can be repaired or improved. New functions may evolve, but the overall loss of functional information in other areas of the genome will, on average, be significantly greater. The net result is that the digital information of life is running down.

Durston goes on to cite research showing that the information for both bacteria and humans, so far from increasing as would be expected on Darwinian principles, is actually decreasing. He closes with this:

We continue to discover more examples of DNA loss, suggesting that the biological world is slowly running down. Microevolution is good at fine-tuning existing forms within their information limits and occasionally getting something right, but the steady accumulation of deleterious mutations on the larger scale suggests that mutation-driven evolution is actually destroying biological life, not creating it.

This is hardly a surprise, as every other area of science, except for evolutionary biology, grants that natural processes degrade information, regardless of the storage media and copying process. For neo-Darwinian macroevolution to work, it requires something that is in flat-out contradiction to the real world.

The naturalistic evolutionist may be able to come up with ad hoc answers to these apparent falsifications of their theory, of course, but the problem is that informational degradation is a direct prediction of almost any intelligent design theory, especially those that involve "front-loading," but is contrary to what one would expect on the basis of Darwinian naturalism.

This result is reminiscent of the finding that much of what's been labelled as "junk" DNA clogging up the nucleus actually turns out to have a function in the living cell as predicted by ID theorists and formerly scoffed at by Darwinians. It's fascinating that where the two theories generate opposite predictions which can then be tested ID's predictions keep being confirmed.

So Is Trump Wrong?

Set aside for the moment your personal feelings about Donald Trump and/or the party whose nomination for the presidency he seeks. Set aside any squeamishness you might have at hearing something said that may sound even faintly un-PC. Set aside for a moment, too, Mr. Trump's inartful imprecision and, like Supreme Court Justices contemplating Obamacare, consider just what he meant to say and not what he actually did say. Then reflect objectively on this question: In what sense is the following Trump statement wrong:

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

His comment and subsquent follow-ups have created a media feeding frenzy as well as difficulties for other GOP candidates who want to talk about almost anything other than Donald Trump and immigration. One of the problems Trump has created for the GOP is that voters who have yearned for someone in politics to say unapologetically, without deferential genuflections to political correctness, exactly what they mean are giving Trump a second look, and he's sucking all the media attention away from everyone else (Not that Hillary minds not having any media attention on her, though).

So, the question is in what extent, if any, was Trump right? Breitbart has done some homework and here's what they've turned up

While illegal immigrants account for about 3.5 percent of the U.S population, they represented 36.7 percent of federal sentences in FY 2014 following criminal convictions, according to U.S. Sentencing Commission data obtained by Breitbart News.

According to FY 2014 USSC data, of 74,911 sentencing cases, citizens accounted for 43,479 (or 58.0 percent), illegal immigrants accounted for 27,505 (or 36.7 percent), legal immigrants made up 3,017 (or 4.0 percent), and the remainder (about 1 percent) were cases in which the offender was either extradited or had an unknown status.

Broken down by some of the primary offenses, illegal immigrants represented 16.8 percent of drug trafficking cases, 20.0 percent of kidnapping/hostage taking, 74.1 percent of drug possession, 12.3 percent of money laundering, and 12.0 percent of murder convictions.

One GOP aide expressed shock at the numbers, emailing Breitbart News, “These statistics blew me away, and they blow a hole through the oft-repeated line that people only want to come to America to work. It’s tragic so few politicians are willing even to acknowledge the true extent of this problem, but until more do, more Americans will keep getting harmed.”

The USSC data only deals with federal offenders sentenced under the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 (SRA) and does not include other categories like state cases, death penalty cases, or “cases initiated but for which no convictions were obtained, offenders convicted for whom no sentences were yet issued, and offenders sentenced but for whom no sentencing documents were submitted to the Commission.”

The data does include immigration violations, of which illegal immigrants represented by far the greatest number of cases: 91.6 percent, or (20,333 cases), out of a total 22,204 cases.

Eliminating all immigration violations, illegal immigrants would account for 13.2 percent of all the offenders sentenced in FY14 following federal criminal convictions — still greater than the 3.5 percent of the population illegal immigrants are said to make up.

The Washington Post, citing data from 2010, protests that the vast majority of illegals are not felons, but I'm not sure how to interpret that. The vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists, but there are an awful lot who are.

In any case, every one of those crimes committed by an illegal alien, particularly those having been deported multiple times and harbored in "sanctuary cities," every one of the murders committed by an illegal alien and the heartbreak and grief suffered by the victim's families at the loss of their loved one, is on the hands of those politicians, including most prominently the President of the United States, who refuse to enforce our border and immigration laws.

Why Greece Is in Trouble

Jim Geraghty explains at NRO one reason why Greece is in default and why so many in the Eurozone have very little sympathy for their plight. Greece is a vivid illustration of Margaret Thatcher's famous aphorism that the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money. Greece has tried to create a socialist paradise, but has instead shown that there probably is no such thing. Here's Geraghty:

This may seem harsh to the Greeks. But they willingly and knowingly tried to build a society where everyone was allowed to retire early – really early:

Early: “Trombone players and pastry chefs get to retire as early as 50 on grounds their work causes them late-career breathing problems. Hairdressers enjoy the same perk thanks to the dyes and other chemicals they rub into people's hair. Then there are masseurs at steam baths: They get an early out because prolonged exposure to all that heat and steam is deemed unhealthy.”

Really Early: “The Greek government has identified at least 580 job categories deemed to be hazardous enough to merit retiring early — at age 50 for women and 55 for men… The law includes dangerous jobs like coal mining and bomb disposal. But it also covers radio and television presenters, who are thought to be at risk from the bacteria on their microphones.”

Really, really early: “In the public sector, 7.91 percent of pensioners retire between the ages of 26 and 50, 23.64 percent between 51 and 55, and 43.53 percent between 56 and 61.”

Each of these assertions is linked to the original source in Geraghty's article. It's interesting that one of the reasons states like California and Illinois have experienced fiscal difficulties and may continue to do so is that their public employees have been given six figure pensions at tax-payer expense. After a while the number of retirees pulling down these benefits grows to the point where it's simply unsustainable.

Nevertheless, states managed by liberal Democrats refuse to halt the gravy train. As you read this, for example, the Pennsylvania legislature is trying to reform the state's pension system but the governor, a progressive Democrat and therefore beholden to the public employees unions, refuses to go along with any reforms. I hope he's watching the goings on in Greece.

This graphic shows the fiscal health of each state in the U.S.:

Why is it that most of the states in greatest difficulty are "blue" states, i.e. they consistently vote Democratic in presidential elections? Why is it that most of the nation's cities that are in the gravest condition, both economically and socially, are cities run by Democrats? Why is it that so many Americans don't seem to care much about these "coincidences"?

Culture War 4.0

There's an excellent essay at The Federalist on the current state of the struggle on the part of progressives to "fundamentally transform" the culture and on the part of conservatives to try to preserve some vestiges of what it once was. Benjamin Domenech and Robert Tracinski offer an optimistic view of what they call the "culture war" and suggest that the pendulum of popular opinion is even now swinging back toward the side of sanity.

Well, perhaps. Here's their lede:

For those Americans who hoped the culture wars would finally end, the month of June reminded us they’re just getting started. Within hours of the Supreme Court’s resolution of the battle over same-sex marriage—the triumph of a generation of gay-rights activists—some were already calling for further steps to take tax exemptions away from churches, use anti-discrimination laws to target religious non-profits, and crack down on religious schools’ access to voucher programs.

We learned media entities would no longer publish the views of those opposed to gay marriage or treat it as an issue with two sides, and the American Civil Liberties Union announced it would no longer support bipartisan religious-freedom measures it once backed wholeheartedly. A reality TV star pushed the transgender rights movement into the center of the national dialogue even as Barack Obama’s administration used its interpretation of Title IX to push its genderless bathroom policies into public schools. And we learned that pulling Confederate merchandise off the shelves isn’t enough to mitigate the racism of the past—we must bring down statues and street signs, too, destroying reminders of history now deemed inconvenient and unsafe.

On college campuses and in the workplace, across mass media and social media, for American celebrities and private citizens, every comment, act, or joke can make you the next target for a ritual of daily attack by outraged Twitter mobs. It is now an unavoidable fact of life that giving money to the wrong cause, making a “clumsy attempt at humor,” or taking the wrong side on a celebrity, religious debate, or magazine cover can lead to threats of violent death, end your career in an instant, or make you the most hated person in America for 15 minutes—longer if you bungle the apology.

Whether you care about the culture war or not, it cares about you. How did we get here?

What follows is a brief history of the various stages of the "culture war" over the last fifty years. It makes for very interesting reading, and for those who find the current state of affairs alarming, it offers hope that things will not remain as they are.

The piece concludes with the claim that having gone through three iterations of kulturekampf we are now entering culture war version 4.0 which augurs to be the most "bloody":

History teaches us two clear lessons about the ebb and flow of the Culture War: first, that whichever side believes it is winning will tend to overreach, pushing too far, too fast, and in the process alienating the public. The second is that the American people tend to oppose whoever they see as the aggressor in the Culture Wars — whoever they see as trying to intrusively impose their values on other people and bullying everyone who disagrees.

Notice how a triumphalist Left can go from reasonable to totalitarian in what seems like five minutes. Should we take down the Confederate flag at the South Carolina statehouse? You will get a lot of Republicans to agree, including Gov. Nikki Haley. So the Left immediately demands that every last vestige of the Confederacy be wiped from history, from public sculptures to “Gone With the Wind” to educational Civil War games in iTunes. From now on, apparently, only re-educational games will be permitted. Or the Supreme Court mandates gay marriage and #lovewins—followed by an immediate hatefest, with people spitting on priests and demanding we revoke the tax exemption for churches.

If history repeats itself, it is good news for traditional Americans and bad news for the Left, which has taken on the role of Grand Inquisitor so rapidly that overnight civil liberties have become a Republican issue. Slowly but surely, the American Right is adopting the role of the cultural insurgent standing up for the freedom of the little guy. They crowdfund the pizza shop, baker, and photographer; they rebel against the establishment in the gaming media and at sci-fi conventions; they buy their chicken sandwiches in droves. The latest acronym that came out of the Sad Puppies movement says it all. They describe their opponents as CHORFs: cliquish, holier-than-thou, obnoxious, reactionary, fascists. This is their description of the cultural Left.

There is significant potential for a new, diverse coalition that responds to this overreach. The religious Right, libertarians, and even the moderate Left are already being drawn together by their refusal to be cowed into conformity by social justice warriors. The comedians who rebel against an audience that calls every joke racist or sexist, the professors who refuse to be cowed by the threat of Title IX lawsuits, the religious believers who fight for their right to practice their beliefs outside the pew represent a coalition that will reject the neo-Puritanism of the Counterculture, rebel against its speech codes and safe spaces, and reassert the right to speak one’s mind in the public square. Atheists and believers alike can unite in this belief—as we, the authors of this piece, have.

The authors have much more to say that's worth reading, and I commend the entire article to you. I have just a couple of thoughts. As I wrote to the friend who sent me this column I hope Domenech and Tracinski are right, but I wonder if the inertia of the left, the institutional resources at their disposal, and the low state of public character and awareness make it a bit difficult to be optimistic. Even if the left's hostility and aggressiveness were to become unpopular and subside for a while, the proper metaphor for our circumstance is not the pendulum but the ratchet. Every success by the left becomes permanent. There's no undoing it. So even if the next battle is deferred until a decade down the road traditionalists keep losing ground which they never get back and the turf they seek to defend keeps shrinking. We've gone from being a shining city on a hill to being Sodom and Gomorrah in the brief span of two generations.

In any case, I really don't like the term "culture war." It creates the misleading image of two sides locked in mortal conflict when in fact only one side is really waging war. The other side is simply trying to get the leftist aggressors to stop their assault on the traditions and institutions of this country.

What's actually happening is more like serial arson than warfare. The arsonist goes from institution to institution trying to burn them down, and conservatives are like people running out of the buildings shouting at them to put down their torches and gasoline cans and stop what they're doing. The left is lighting the fires and the right is running around with water buckets trying to put them out and this is called a "war"?

Perhaps, if ever the right produces leaders who refuse to be content to fight rear-guard battles, who refuse to accept the status quo established at every turn of the ratchet, who set about educating the American people about the need to actually reverse course, and who have the courage to lead the way, perhaps then there'll be a genuine "clash" of visions of what the culture should be, but to call what has been going on for the last fifty years or so a "culture war" is, in my view, to misunderstand the nature of what's been happening.

About Time

Augustine wrote in his Confessions that as long as no one asked him, he knew perfectly well what time is, but as soon as someone asked him to explain it, he hadn't the faintest idea. I sympathize. Time is a very puzzling thing. Not only is its exact nature an enigma so is the question of the difference between time itself and our measures of time. It's hard to think of time apart from some measurement of it yet it makes sense to ask what it is that we're measuring when we measure time.

In any case, Buzzfeed lists 17 interesting facts about time that perhaps you didn't know. Here are a few of them:

1. A second isn’t what you think it is. Scientifically, it’s not defined as 1/60th of a minute, but as “ the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom”.
2. When the dinosaurs were alive, there were 370 days in a year. The Earth’s spin is getting slower because the moon’s gravity is acting as a drag, so days are getting longer, by about 1.7 milliseconds per century.
3. The smallest standard scientific measure of time is the “ Planck time”. It takes you about five hundred and fifty thousand trillion trillion trillion Planck times to blink once, quickly.
4. There’s no such thing as “now” as far as physics is concerned. Space and time are fluid, affected by gravity and your speed. Einstein put it like this: “For us physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, however persistent.”
5. Because light takes time to reach us, everything we see is in the past. The sun you can see out of the window is 8 minutes and 20 seconds old. The light from our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 4 years old.
6. New experiences really do seem to be longer in the memory than familiar ones. It’s called the “ oddball effect”, and it seems to be why time feels like it’s going faster as you get older – because more stuff is familiar to you.
7. Time passes slower the faster you move. If you flew to the star Sirius at 99% of the speed of light, then flew back again, the people you left behind on Earth would have aged more than 17 years. But you would have aged less than two and a half years.

Philosophers have two different views about what time is like. One theory is called the dynamic view of time. This says that the only existing time is the present moment. The past is gone and the future is not yet. This is the common sense view.

The other theory, the static time theory, holds, like point #4 above says, that all moments of time - past, present, and future - exist simultaneously and that the temporal flow of time is an illusion of our consciousness. Imagine the frames of a movie on a reel of film or the same movie stamped onto a DVD. Every event exists simultaneously with every other event, but our minds experience those events serially.

One of the great questions in cosmology today is whether time had a beginning. On the dynamic theory it seems that it would have, on the static theory perhaps not.

Whatever the case, it is true that, as many scientists and philosophers have noted, the nature of time is one of the universe's greatest mysteries.

America the Beautiful

Here's the Hillsdale College Choir to help make your Fourth of July more meaningful. Given the events in Washington of the last fortnight the lyrics of the second stanza are especially moving:

If you get a chance today, explain to someone why we celebrate on July 4th. Many Americans, particularly younger Americans, have no idea.

Dred Scott Redux

Yesterday's post focussed on Rod Dreher's Benedict Option for conservative Christians whom Dreher, in the wake of the Obergefell decision (inter alia), predicts will soon become exiles, perhaps persecuted exiles, in their own land. On the other hand, Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton Robert George, is not yet ready to capitulate to the Zeitgeist. In a symposium at First Things sparked by the Obergefell decision George writes:

How shall we respond to a lawless decision in which the Supreme Court by the barest of majorities usurps authority vested by the Constitution in the people and their elected representatives? By letting Abraham Lincoln be our guide. Faced with the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, Lincoln declared the ruling to be illegitimate and vowed that he would treat it as such. He squarely faced Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney’s claim to judicial supremacy and firmly rejected it. To accept it, he said, would be for the American people “to resign their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.”

Today we are faced with the same challenge. Like the Great Emancipator, we must reject and resist an egregious act of judicial usurpation. We must, above all, tell the truth: Obergefell v. Hodges is an illegitimate decision. What Stanford Law School Dean John Ely said of Roe v. Wade applies with equal force to Obergefell: “It is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.” What Justice Byron White said of Roe is also true of Obergefell: It is an act of “raw judicial power.”

The lawlessness of these decisions is evident in the fact that they lack any foundation or warrant in the text, logic, structure, or original understanding of the Constitution. The justices responsible for these rulings, whatever their good intentions, are substituting their own views of morality and sound public policy for those of the people and their elected representatives. They have set themselves up as superlegislators possessing a kind of plenary power to impose their judgments on the nation. What could be more unconstitutional—more anti-constitutional—than that?

Be that as it may, there are few politicians of the stature of Lincoln roaming Washington in our day. Republican legislators feel helpless to prevent the Supreme Court from usurping the role of the legislature as long as the Democrats actively support the usurpation, and they do. The only way Democrats can impose their agenda upon the nation is by doing an end-run around the people and getting it passed through the courts, so that's been their tactic for the last half-century or more. As long as the American people continue to vote into office people who hold Constitutional principle in low esteem, or waste their vote on marginal third-party candidates, it's hard to see how there can be a political solution to the problem.

George concludes:

The rule of law is not the rule of lawyers — even lawyers who are judges. Supreme Court justices are not infallible, nor are they immune from the all-too-human temptation to unlawfully seize power that has not been granted to them. Decisions such as Dred Scott, Roe v. Wade, and Obergefell amply demonstrate that. In thinking about how to respond to Obergefell, we must bear in mind that it is not only the institution of marriage that is at stake here — it is also the principle of self-government. And so we must make clear to those candidates for high offices who are seeking our votes, that our willingness to support them depends on their willingness to stand, as Abraham Lincoln stood, for the Constitution, and therefore against judicial decisions—about marriage or anything else—that threaten to place us, to quote Jefferson, “under the despotism of an oligarchy.”

Unfortunately, a "despotism of an oligarchy" is precisely what at least half of the people who take the trouble to vote apparently want. The task ahead is to re-instill in the American soul a love of freedom, and that's a task that, if it succeeds at all, will take generations to accomplish. Have a happy Independence Day.

The Benedict Option

The Obergefell ruling by a 5-4 Supreme Court has a lot of conservatives, particularly Christian conservatives, wondering what can be done to rescue a culture that seems determined to cut itself loose from every philosophical and theological anchor and become completely unmoored. Some think that, short of miraculous intervention, there's nothing that can be done to reverse what has transitioned from a drift in the direction of sexual antinomianism to a headlong rush toward its total embrace. Others think that resistance is possible. An example of the former is journalist Rod Dreher, who advocates what he calls the Benedict Option. An example of the latter is Robert George, a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton.

This post features a recent column by Dreher and will be followed tomorrow by a look at what George has to say. Both men offer some very provocative thoughts on how to respond to the current state of our cultural collapse.

Here's Dreher:

No, the sky is not falling — not yet, anyway — but with the Supreme Court ruling constitutionalizing same-sex marriage, the ground under our feet has shifted tectonically. It is hard to overstate the significance of the Obergefell decision — and the seriousness of the challenges it presents to orthodox Christians and other social conservatives. Voting Republican and other failed culture war strategies are not going to save us now.

I think he's right about that last sentence. Placing our hope in politicians of either party seems futile at this point. Few Republican presidential candidates and legislative leaders seem inclined to do much to stem the current collapse, and most Democrats are actually cheering it on.

Discerning the meaning of the present moment requires sobriety, precisely because its radicalism requires of conservatives a realistic sense of how weak our position is in post-Christian America. The alarm that the four dissenting justices sounded in their minority opinions is chilling. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Antonin Scalia were particularly scathing in pointing out the philosophical and historical groundlessness of the majority’s opinion. Justice Scalia even called the decision “a threat to democracy,” and denounced it, shockingly, in the language of revolution.

It is now clear that for this Court, extremism in the pursuit of the Sexual Revolution’s goals is no vice. True, the majority opinion nodded and smiled in the direction of the First Amendment, in an attempt to calm the fears of those worried about religious liberty. But when a Supreme Court majority is willing to invent rights out of nothing, it is impossible to have faith that the First Amendment will offer any but the barest protection to religious dissenters from gay rights orthodoxy.

Indeed, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito explicitly warned religious traditionalists that this decision leaves them vulnerable. Alito warns that Obergefell “will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy,” and will be used to oppress the faithful “by those who are determined to stamp out every vestige of dissent.”

I'm not a Supreme Court historian, but I can't remember language like this ever being used by the minority to describe a majority SCOTUS ruling. If these Justices are correct, and I fear they are, where do we go from here? Dreher says that first we have to recognize three relatively new realities:

For one, we have to accept that we really are living in a culturally post-Christian nation. The fundamental norms Christians have long been able to depend on no longer exist. To be frank, the court majority may impose on the rest of the nation a view widely shared by elites, but it is also a view shared by a majority of Americans. There will be no widespread popular resistance to Obergefell. This is the new normal.

The culture, though perhaps still nominally Christian, is in fact neo-pagan. That is, it has adopted for all practical purposes an unreflective pagan morality of "to each his own" without really thinking hard about the consequences of that principle.

For another, LGBT activists and their fellow travelers really will be coming after social conservatives. The Supreme Court has now, in constitutional doctrine, said that homosexuality is equivalent to race. The next goal of activists will be a long-term campaign to remove tax-exempt status from dissenting religious institutions. The more immediate goal will be the shunning and persecution of dissenters within civil society. After today, all religious conservatives are Brendan Eich, the former CEO of Mozilla who was chased out of that company for supporting California’s Proposition 8.

The concern is this: It's no longer a matter of being asked to simply tolerate lifestyle choices one disagrees with. It's that disagreement is now deemed bigotry and will soon be regarded as hate speech. Those who dissent can expect to be the target of vicious verbal attacks and economic punishments. The LGBT community, or at least the more virulent members of it, will demand complete acquiescence and acceptance and they'll be abetted in this effort by compliant judges.

Third, the Court majority wrote that gays and lesbians do not want to change the institution of marriage, but rather want to benefit from it. This is hard to believe, given more recent writing from gay activists like Dan Savage expressing a desire to loosen the strictures of monogamy in all marriages. Besides, if marriage can be redefined according to what we desire — that is, if there is no essential nature to marriage, or to gender — then there are no boundaries on marriage. Marriage inevitably loses its power.

Long time readers will recall that we've been making the argument here for over ten years that if the gender of the people in a union no longer matters there's no non-arbitrary basis for insisting that the number of people in the union matters. The door is now wide open for the legalization of any arrangement any group of people wishes to call marriage and is willing to push through the courts. If five men, or five women, or three men and one woman wish to call their relationship a marriage, there's no longer any rationale for denying them the right to do so. This, of course, means that marriage is no longer a meaningful institution.

This is profoundly incompatible with orthodox Christianity. But this is the world we live in today. One can certainly understand the joy that LGBT Americans and their supporters feel today. But orthodox Christians must understand that things are going to get much more difficult for us. We are going to have to learn how to live as exiles in our own country. We are going to have to learn how to live with at least a mild form of persecution. And we are going to have to change the way we practice our faith and teach it to our children, to build resilient communities.

It is time for what I call the Benedict Option [after] Benedict of Nursia, a pious young Christian who left the chaos of Rome to go to the woods to pray.... Throughout the early Middle Ages, Benedict’s communities formed monasteries, and kept the light of faith burning through the surrounding cultural darkness. Eventually, the Benedictine monks helped refound civilization. I believe that orthodox Christians today are called to be those new and very different St. Benedicts. How do we take the Benedict Option, and build resilient communities within our condition of internal exile, and under increasingly hostile conditions? I don’t know. But we had better figure this out together, and soon, while there is time.

This isn’t the view of wild-eyed prophets wearing animal skins and shouting in the desert. It is the view of four Supreme Court justices, in effect declaring from the bench the decline and fall of the traditional American social, political, and legal order.

Dreher is suggesting a kind of retreat into a pseudo-monasticism to preserve the flame of a Christian heritage that the mindless, hedonistic neo-paganism of the last three decades is trying so hard to extinguish.

He might be right that the situation really is that dire, but perhaps not. Tomorrow we'll look at a different proposal from Robert George.

Plan B

Politico has an interesting piece on the military options available should the nuclear talks with Iran break down completely. You'll have to pardon my cynicism but a) I'm inclined to think that the Politico story was encouraged by the White House in order to try to scare the Iranians into not demanding our complete and utter capitulation to their demands, b ) I don't see this president allowing those talks to fail even if it means ceding to Iran everything between D.C. and Los Angeles, and c) I can't imagine him resorting to these options if those talks do fail.

In any case, here are some of the salient points of the article:

President Barack Obama’s nuclear diplomacy with Iran may yet fail. On Tuesday, exactly one week before a June 30 deadline for an agreement, Iran’s Supreme Leader delivered his latest in a series of defiant statements, setting conditions for a deal—including immediate relief from sanctions, before Iran has taken steps to limit its nuclear program—that Obama will never accept. Secretary of State John Kerry warned last week that the U.S. is prepared to walk away from the talks. And even if a deal is reached, the story is not over. The Iranians may break or cheat on an agreement, and try build a nuclear weapon anyway.

That’s why, at least three times in the past year, a B-2 stealth bomber has taken off from an Air Force base in Missouri and headed west to the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. For these missions, the $2 billion plane was outfitted with one of the world’s largest bombs. It is a cylinder of special high-performance steel, 20 feet long and weighing 15 tons. When dropped from an altitude likely above 20,000 feet, the bomb would have approached supersonic speed before striking a mock target in the desert, smashing through rock and burrowing deep into the ground before its 6,000 pounds of high explosives detonated with devastating force.

“It boggles the mind,” says one former Pentagon official who has watched video of the tests.

Those flights were, in effect, trial runs for the attack on Iran that President Barack Obama, or his successor, may order if diplomacy can’t prevent Iran from trying to build a nuclear weapon. Think of it as Plan B for Iran. The failure of diplomacy might lead the U.S. to turn to a weapon finally ready for real-world action after years of design and testing. The so-called “Massive Ordnance Penetrator,” or MOP, represents decades of military research, dramatically accelerated in recent years, focused on the problem of destroying targets buried deep underground.

                                 Massive Ordnance Penetrator

I've stated on numerous occasions on Viewpoint and elsewhere that I believe an attack on Iran would be the second most calamitous course the United States could pursue. The only thing worse would be to allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons. An attack on Iran may be the prelude to Armageddon. Allowing them to have nuclear devices almost surely will be. It would almost certainly precipitate an arms race in the Middle East and almost certainly result in a nuclear attack on Israel. After a lot of interesting discussion of the development of MOP the Politico article continues:

Imagine that the nuclear talks do collapse. Iran’s Supreme Leader insists that outsiders will never be allowed onto Iranian military bases to conduct spot inspections. John Kerry throws up his hands and flies back to Washington. President Obama issues a grave statement expressing his hope that peace is still possible. Perhaps Iran then begins accelerating its uranium enrichment at Fordow and Natanz, and intelligence reports suggest that Tehran has decided to try and build a bomb faster than the world can mobilize to prevent it. Or perhaps Obama is succeeded in 2017 by a Republican hawk who decides it's time to end the uncertainty about Iran’s program once and for all....

If the order came from the White House, it would most likely summon Whiteman Air Force Base to action. Crews there would load the internal weapons bays of several B-2 bombers with MOPs. The giant stealth planes would then depart for their nearly 7,000-mile flight to mountainous western Iran. By the time the planes actually took off, the mission would likely be old hat to the pilots: A massive flight simulator at Whiteman includes a full-size replica of a B-2 cockpit mounted on hydraulics to mimic flight motion. Its realistic wraparound cockpit computer screen can be preloaded with highly detailed graphics showing the topography and target areas the flight crew would see during the flight, allowing them to practice the bomb run—or even the entire flight—under different weather conditions or times of day.

Once over Fordow at an altitude of 20,000 feet or more, the bombers would release their massive payload. As the enormous bombs fell, they would accelerate to phenomenal speeds of perhaps 700 miles per hour or more. Guided by satellite positioning, flexible tailfins would steer the MOP to a very precise impact point likely identified by the UFAC. The bomb would strike the rock with the tip of its sharply pointed nose. Its supremely reinforced casing would protect the fuse and explosives inside from the initial impact. In effect, a 15-ton, 20-foot nail would pound into the earth at the speed of sound.

Violent as that impact may be, it would hardly be enough to get the job done. The goal is for the MOP to drill dozens or even hundreds of feet through rock before exploding. That is made possible by smart fuses, whose blasts are triggered not by impact but by conditions like time, depth, or the presence of a void indicating that the bomb has broken through an interior ceiling.

Fordow is buried deep enough that a single MOP probably would not penetrate to the centrifuge hall deep inside. That’s why several bombers would likely drop their ordnance in succession, gradually smashing a tunnel of devastation towards mountain’s soft interior. GPS precision would enable several MOPS to be landed on virtually the exact same spot in rapid succession: the most powerful jackhammer in history. “You create a hole and then you drop another one down the hole,” says Long. Ideally, one of the MOPs would break through to the centrifuge hall and completely destroy it. But even short of a bulls-eye, multiple concussions could damage the delicate centrifuge cascades, or even collapse the interior chamber. “Several hitting in the same spot could probably defeat the facility,” Long says.

Let's hope (and pray) this scenario never comes to pass, but let's also hope that if it's the only way to prevent Iran from achieving its ambition to develop nuclear weapons that whoever is the president will have the courage to do what's necessary to prevent what would surely be the first step to nuclear holocaust.

Panic Mode

Kevin Williamson unloads both barrels (can I still say that?) at progressivism and its Democratic party epigones in a scathing but on-the-mark piece at National Review. Progressives, Williamson avers, are in full panic mode and the proof of it is their strangely irrational reactions to the events of the day.

Why the panic? Because once the current president has betaken himself to the world's golf courses and his lovely wife no longer junkets around the globe on the taxpayers' tab, adding tonnages of CO2 to the atmosphere, there's a good chance that the left will find itself in the political equivalent of cryogenic mummification with a whole lot of institutional and cultural destruction left unwrought. Indeed, the decisions of the Supreme Court this past week have been cause for much rejoicing on the left, but the Obamacare decision can be neutered by a Republican president, as can the Disparate Impact decision (perhaps a worse decision even than King v. Burwell).

The Same Sex Marriage ruling will not be overturned without a very unlikely constitutional amendment, but if a Republican congress passes a First Amendment Defense Act and a republican president signs it some of the sting can be taken out. The real problem with Same Sex Marriage would then be the long-term impact it will have on laws prohibiting polyamory and incest. Justice Roberts was right, on this issue at least, when he expressed this concern.

The left seems to sense all this, Williamson believes, and thus in the midst of the general jollity he discerns apprehension and angst. Here's his lede.

If it seems to you that the Left has, collectively, lost its ... mind as the curtain rises on the last act of the Obama administration, you are not imagining things. Barack Obama has been extraordinarily successful in his desire to — what was that phrase? — fundamentally transform the country, but the metamorphosis is nonetheless a good deal less than his congregation wanted and expected. We may have gone from being up to our knees in welfare-statism to being up to our hips in it, and from having a bushel of banana-republic corruption and incompetence to having a bushel and a peck of it, but the United States of America remains, to the Left’s dismay, plainly recognizable as herself beneath the muck. Ergo, madness and rage.

We have seen an extraordinary outburst of genuine extremism — and genuine authoritarianism — in the past several months, and it will no doubt grow more intense as we approach the constitutional dethroning of the mock messiah to whom our progressive friends literally sang hymns of praise and swore oaths of allegiance. (“I pledge to be a servant to our president” — recall all that sieg heil creepiness.)

There is an unmistakable stink of desperation about this, as though the Left intuits what the Right dares not hope: that the coming few months may in fact see progressivism’s cultural high-water mark for this generation. If there is desperation, it probably is because the Left is starting to suspect that the permanent Democratic majority it keeps promising itself may yet fail to materialize. The Democrats won two resounding White House victories but can hardly win a majority in a state legislature (seven out of ten today are Republican-controlled) or a governorship (the Democrats are down to 18) to save their lives, while Republicans are holding their strongest position in Congress since the days of Herbert Hoover.

The Democrats have calculated that their best bet in 2016 is Hillary Rodham Clinton, that tragic bag of appetites who couldn’t close the deal in the primary last time around. “Vote for me, I’m a lady” isn’t what they thought it was: Wendy Davis, running for governor of Texas, made all the proper ceremonial incantations and appeared in heroic postures on all the right magazine covers, but finished in the 30s on Election Day. With young people trending pro-life, that old black magic ain’t what it used to be.

The rest of the piece, especially his treatment of the Confederate flag contretemps is very much worth reading. Here's how he concludes:

Young people who have heard all their lives that the Republican party and the conservative movement are for old white men — young people who may not be quite old enough to remember Democrats’ boasting of their “double-Bubba” ticket in 1992, pairing the protégé of one Southern segregationist with the son of another — see before them Nikki Haley, Bobby Jindal, Susana Martinez, Carly Fiorina, Tim Scott, Mia Love, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Elise Stefanik (and Ted Cruz).

None of those men and women is bawling about “microaggressions” or dreaming up new sexless pronouns. None belongs to the party that hoisted Dixie over the capitol in South Carolina either. Governor Haley may be sensitive to the history of her state, but she is a member of the party of Lincoln with family roots in Punjab — it isn’t her flag. What’s going to happen between now and November 8 of next year will be a political campaign on one side of the aisle only. On the other side, it’s going to be something between a temper tantrum and a panic attack. That’s excellent news if you’re Ted Cruz, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, or Carly Fiorina. It’s less good news if you live in Baltimore or Philadelphia.

In other words, the choice in 2016 will be between perhaps the most ethnically diverse menu of candidates in American history, a menu that features bright, young black and white GOP men and women, and two old, superannuated socialist war-horses in Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. Sanders, though, is at least not corrupt and stands for something besides his own self-aggrandizement.

Call for a New New Atheism

Patrick O'Connor is an atheist who offers a critique of current iterations of atheism at The Business Insider. The crux of his essay is that New Atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Alex Rosenberg, et al. are presenting a form of atheism that does not address the existential needs of modern people, and O'Connor thinks this risks rendering atheism irrelevant in contemporary society. He writes:

Atheism is so often considered in the negative: as a lack of faith, or a disbelief in god; as an essential deprivation. Atheism is seen as being destitute of meaning, value, purpose; unfertile ground for growing the feelings of belonging needed to overcome the alienation that dogs modern life.

In more extreme critiques, atheism is considered to be another name for nihilism; a fundamental negation of existence, a noxious blight on creation itself.

Yet atheists – rather than flippantly dismissing the insights of theologians – should take them seriously indeed. Humans, by dint of being human, are confronted with baffling questions about meaning, belonging, direction, our connection to other humans and the fate of our species as a whole . The human impulse is to seek answers, and to date, atheism has been unsatisfactory in its response.

This is true enough for the simple reason that atheism as such has no response to give that would satisfy these yearnings, nor could it produce one. O'Connor finds Dawkins unduly bleak as in this well-known passage:

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.

But Dawkins is hardly the only atheist who recognizes the dark implications of atheism. Listen to Nobel laureate in physics Steven Weinberg:

[T]he worldview of science [i.e. atheism] is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature, .... we even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years. And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair.

And 20th century atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell, who lived and wrote two generations before the new atheists came on the scene, is no more upbeat:

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.

Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

Quotes from famous atheists read as though they were surreptitiously inserted into the larger culture by prozac manufacturers to enhance the sale of their product. O'Connor, though, continues, determined to persuade his fellow atheists to be more optimistic about the benefits of atheism:

Atheist values are typically defined as humanistic. If we look to the values of the British Humanist Association, we see that it promotes naturalism, rational debate, and the pre-eminence of evidence, cooperation, progress and individual dignity. These are noble aspirations, but they are ultimately brittle when tackling the visceral and existential problems confronting humanity in this period of history. When one considers the destruction that advanced capitalism visits on communities – from environmental catastrophes to war and genocide – then the atheist is the last person one thinks of calling for solace, or for a meaningful ethical and political alternative.

Precisely so, if we ignore the swipe at capitalism and ignore, too, that the wars of the 20th century which costs millions of lives were instigated by atheists in states some of which were officially atheistic. But setting that aside, why would anyone call upon someone for a meaningful ethical alternative to the evils of the modern world whose worldview undercuts the possibility of any meaningful morality at all?

In the brutal economic reality of a neo-liberal, market-oriented world, these concerns are rarely given due consideration when debating the questions surrounding the existence or non-existence of god. The persistent and unthinking atheist habit is to ground all that is important on individual freedom, individual assertions of non-belief and vacant appeals to scientific evidence. But these appeals remain weak when confronting financial crises, gender inequality, diminished public health and services, food banks, and economic deprivation.

O'Connor just doesn't seem to realize that atheism lacks the resources to address any of these issues. There's simply no basis on atheism for saying that anyone ought to act against his or her own self-interest.

His essay takes a stunning turn when he advocates that atheism abandon humanistic values and embrace the thinking of Nietzsche, Marx, and Sartre:

Instead, we can look to a different breed of atheism, found in the work of continental, anti-humanist philosophers. For example, we can turn to Nietzsche to understand the resentments generated by human suffering. Meanwhile, the Marxist tradition offers us the means to understand the material conditions of unsustainable capitalism. Existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus allow us to comprehend our shared mortality, and the humour and tragedy of life in a godless universe. There is a whole other philosophical vocabulary for atheism to explore. Both Nietzsche and Sartre observe a different atheism, one embedded in the context of genuine questions of cruelty, economic alienation, anxiety and mortality.

Okay, but if you want a lodestar by which to guide your ethics in the modern world, embracing a man who praises cruelty (Nietzsche) and a man who insists upon the meaninglessness of human existence (Sartre) is going to have a lot of people wondering how this is any better than the empty hopelessness offered by Weinberg and Dawkins.

Here's a sample of Nietzsche: “To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle [....] Without cruelty there is no festival.”

And here's Sartre in a nutshell: "Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal."

The unpleasant truth is that if atheism is true then, as many atheists themselves tells us, it's also true that there is no good reason to think that human beings have free-will, a self (or soul), dignity, or a meaning for their existence. Nor is there any reason to think that there's a basis for human rights, hope, a belief in consciousness, ultimate justice, or objective moral duties.

In other words there's not much there to offer people looking to satisfy the existential emptiness of life in a post-Christian world. O'Connor's call for an atheism that gives answers is like a call for cool water in the desert. It's just not in the nature of thing to provide what's being asked of it.

Follow-up to Friday's Post

A friend and I have had some back and forth over Friday's post (Lukewarmism) on the article by Matt Ridley which critiques attempts to convince the world that global warming is not only real and anthropogenic but also that it's dangerous. Ridley thinks that those insisting that it's dangerous not only exaggerate what we know, but are relying on questionable methodology and, in some cases, repression of evidence and contrary interpretations. My friend disagrees. As part of our exchange I wrote this:

In any case, my purpose in doing a post on this wasn't to challenge the reality of global warming but rather to discourage the credulity with which we seem to be accepting the most dire pronouncements of scientists rather than doing ourselves what scientists and others should be doing which is trying to falsify the claims that the IPCC and others are making.

That's what good science (and a good citizenry) does. Someone reports a finding in a paper and other researchers calmly and objectively try to duplicate the reported results, or to pick apart the original methodology, or otherwise show that the work doesn't withstand scrutiny. If the reported findings do hold up to the best efforts to falsify or refute them then they become part of accepted scientific thinking, at least tentatively.

Unfortunately, we've abandoned the traditional methodology and replaced it with ideological confirmation. Claims are now to be accepted uncritically and doubt is to be prohibited if the claim conforms to ideological fashion and fits our preconceptions.

Fashion and popular opinion should have no influence on our intellectual judgments, but we've not only allowed these factors to sway us, we've allowed it to the point where anyone who seeks to exercise the proper sort of skepticism is considered a crank, and some even demand that the person who's seeking to ascertain whether the emperor really is clothed be thrown in jail to shut him up. We've become a society that lurches from one hysterical reaction to another - e.g. We rush to take the confederate flag out of stores, even out of Gettysburg NP(!), while leaving swastikas unmolested - rather than doing the hard work of rationally and objectively challenging and probing what we're being told by the scientific establishment for inconsistencies, errors, and fraud.

In the late sixties, a biologist by the name of Paul Ehrlich wrote a book titled The Population Bomb in which he predicted that the earth would run out of food and other natural resources by the 1990s, and the apocalypse would be upon us. Like so many similar prognostications it never happened, and the lesson we should take from past experiences such as this is that it's appropriate to be skeptical of such forecasts until we have very good reason to trust the research and the researchers. Ridley's article, which formed the basis of Friday's Viewpoint, suggests that in the climate change controversy we're not there yet.

Maybe the alarmists are right and we are headed for eco-catastrophe, but we shouldn't assume they're right just because they're scientists, and since so much is at stake we should be sure that what they're telling us is supported by facts and is not just a product of self-interested motivation or sloppy professional practice. On the matter of climate change the motivations and procedures of at least some proponents still seem open to question.

Marketplace of Ideas

When it comes to hypocrisy and muddled reasoning it's often hard to top the progressive left. Consider John Micek, op-ed editor of the Pennsylvania newspaper the Harrisburg Patriot-News, who immediately after the Supreme Court handed down its Obergefell ruling on Friday, declared that no op-eds or letters to the editor critical of same-sex marriage would henceforth be permitted.

Mr. Micek's reasoning, if such it could be called, was stunning.

As a result of Friday's ruling, PennLive/The Patriot-News will very strictly limit op-Eds [sic] and letters to the editor in opposition to same-sex marriage. These unions are now the law of the land. And we will not publish such letters and op-Eds [sic] any more than we would publish those that are racist, sexist or anti-Semitic.

The comparison is bogus, of course. Mr. Micek assumes that opposition to same-sex marriage is a form of bigotry, like racism, but this is like saying that people who oppose, say, the establishment of a tavern in their neighborhood are motivated by hatred against the people, perhaps including their own family members, who'd patronize it. Just as there may be very good reasons to oppose the tavern, there may be very good reasons to oppose gay marriage, but a plurality of one lawyer on the Court has said that gay marriage is now legal, and for folks like Mr. Micek its new-found legality has closed the debate over whether it should be legal.

To see the hypocrisy of the Patriot-News' policy, though, simply note that the Court also made abortion on demand the "law of the land" in 1973. Does the Patriot-News censor op-eds and letters which dissent from the current abortion regime? Moreover, the Court has made it the "law of the land" that it's legal to view pornography, to own firearms, and for corporations to make large contributions to political figures. Does the Patriot-News prohibit objections to these activities from appearing in its pages? If not, why carve out an exception for gay marriage? Where, exactly, does Mr. Micek draw the line between what's suitable for discussion and what's not?

Liberal/progressive/leftists consider freedom to express one's opinions a very dangerous thing. Dissent, disagreement, and freedom are intolerable because they impede social progress, as the liberal defines progress, and their knee-jerk reaction to it is to suppress it everywhere they can. Mr. Micek affords us a fine example of the mind-set.

Update: Micek has since tried to backtrack from his initial comments, which have apparently created a national firestorm, but he hasn't rescinded the policy.

Lukewarmism

Matt Ridley, zoologist, science journalist, member of the British House of Lords has a brilliant piece at The Quadrant Online in which he dissects the current climate change debate. The picture he paints is not pretty, but it's crucially important. In his article he discusses the poor science, fraud, gestapo tactics, grubby motivations, and sheer incompetence of many prominent climate change alarmists.

Ridley himself was once a believer in warming, but disillusioned by so much of what he saw close-up in the climate-change community he has partly left the faith. Here's his explanation:

[T]he great thing about science is that it’s self-correcting. The good drives out the bad, because experiments get replicated and hypotheses put to the test. So a really bad idea cannot survive long in science.

Or so I used to think. Now, thanks largely to climate science, I have changed my mind. It turns out bad ideas can persist in science for decades, and surrounded by myrmidons of furious defenders they can turn into intolerant dogmas.

This should have been obvious to me. Lysenkoism, a pseudo-biological theory that plants (and people) could be trained to change their heritable natures, helped starve millions and yet persisted for decades in the Soviet Union, reaching its zenith under Nikita Khrushchev. The theory that dietary fat causes obesity and heart disease, based on a couple of terrible studies in the 1950s, became unchallenged orthodoxy and is only now fading slowly.

What these two ideas have in common is that they had political support, which enabled them to monopolise debate. Scientists are just as prone as anybody else to “confirmation bias”, the tendency we all have to seek evidence that supports our favoured hypothesis and dismiss evidence that contradicts it—as if we were counsel for the defence. It’s tosh that scientists always try to disprove their own theories, as they sometimes claim, and nor should they. But they do try to disprove each other’s. Science has always been decentralised, so Professor Smith challenges Professor Jones’s claims, and that’s what keeps science honest.

What went wrong with Lysenko and dietary fat was that in each case a monopoly was established. Lysenko’s opponents were imprisoned or killed. Nina Teicholz’s book The Big Fat Surprise shows in devastating detail how opponents of Ancel Keys’s dietary fat hypothesis were starved of grants and frozen out of the debate by an intolerant consensus backed by vested interests, echoed and amplified by a docile press.

This is precisely what has happened with the climate debate and it is at risk of damaging the whole reputation of science. The “bad idea” in this case is not that climate changes, nor that human beings influence climate change; but that the impending change is sufficiently dangerous to require urgent policy responses.

Ridley now describes himself as a "lukewarmer:"

These scientists and their guardians of the flame repeatedly insist that there are only two ways of thinking about climate change—that it’s real, man-made and dangerous (the right way), or that it’s not happening (the wrong way). But this is a false dichotomy. There is a third possibility: that it’s real, partly man-made and not dangerous. This is the “lukewarmer” school, and I am happy to put myself in this category. Lukewarmers do not think dangerous climate change is impossible; but they think it is unlikely.

I find that very few people even know of this. Most ordinary people who do not follow climate debates assume that either it’s not happening or it’s dangerous. This suits those with vested interests in renewable energy, since it implies that the only way you would be against their boondoggles is if you “didn’t believe” in climate change.

There's much more at the link. His catalog of scandals among climate-change promoters, his comparison of the treatment of those who dare commit climate-change heresy with the way Islamists treat "heretics," and the egregiously sloppy science that underlies much of the popular discourse on climate-change are well-worth reading. Here's a good example to conclude with. Ridley begins it by citing some recent claims by politicians about the threat of global climate change:

“Doubt has been eliminated,” said Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Prime Minister of Norway and UN Special Representative on Climate Change, in a speech in 2007: “It is irresponsible, reckless and deeply immoral to question the seriousness of the situation. The time for diagnosis is over. Now it is time to act.” John Kerry says we have no time for a meeting of the flat-earth society. Barack Obama says that 97 per cent of scientists agree that climate change is “real, man-made and dangerous”. That’s just a lie (or a very ignorant remark): as I point out above, there is no consensus that it’s dangerous.

So where’s the outrage from scientists at this presidential distortion? It’s worse than that, actually. The 97 per cent figure is derived from two pieces of pseudoscience that would have embarrassed a homeopath. The first was a poll that found that 97 per cent of just seventy-nine scientists thought climate change was man-made—not that it was dangerous. A more recent poll of 1854 members of the American Meteorological Society found the true number is 52 per cent.

The second source of the 97 per cent number was a survey of scientific papers, which has now been comprehensively demolished by Professor Richard Tol of Sussex University, who is probably the world’s leading climate economist. As the Australian blogger Joanne Nova summarised Tol’s findings, John Cook of the University of Queensland and his team used an unrepresentative sample, left out much useful data, used biased observers who disagreed with the authors of the papers they were classifying nearly two-thirds of the time, and collected and analysed the data in such a way as to allow the authors to adjust their preliminary conclusions as they went along, a scientific no-no if ever there was one.

The data could not be replicated, and Cook himself threatened legal action to hide them. Yet neither the journal nor the university where Cook works has retracted the paper, and the scientific establishment refuses to stop citing it, let alone blow the whistle on it. Its conclusion is too useful.

No wonder Ridley fears for the reputation of science.

Simply Inexplicable

The Supreme Court has ruled 6-3 in King v. Burwell that when the Affordable Care Act says plainly that people are eligible for federal health insurance subsidies in those states in which the state has set up insurance exchanges, the Act really means that people will receive subsidies whether the state has established exchanges or not.

This is a simply inexplicable reading of the Obamacare law. The Court is saying, in effect, that it doesn't matter what the law says we're going to make it say what we think it should have said. This is very disconcerting inasmuch as it makes clear that we live in a country where words and laws don't matter, a country that is no longer of, by, or for the people, a country which it may not be far-fetched to think is teetering frighteningly close to the brink of judicial tyranny.

A common-sense ruling by the Court, whose job it is to determine whether laws are consonant with the Constitution, would have been to determine that Congress employed sloppy language in writing the law, that if they intended subsidies to be available to people regardless of whether the state in which they reside had set up exchanges, then that's what they should have said and then handed the law back to Congress to fix it. That would've been the proper exercise of their judicial responsibility and constitutional authority. Instead, they usurped the prerogative of Congress and undertook to fix it themselves, a task that's beyond their constitutional purview.

"But," some will object, "the law was passed by a Democratic congress. The current Republican congress would not have fixed it, and failure to do so would've made the Affordable Care Act unsustainable." Perhaps so, but that's what it means to have a government by the people. The voters evicted the Democrats from office in 2010 and 2014 largely because they don't want Obamacare and want the law changed. The legislature expresses the voice and the will of the people. If the Republican congress allowed Obamacare to die then the people's will would've been done. The six Justices who voted to fix the law themselves are not accountable to the people and had no business in deciding what the people's will in this matter should be, particularly since there were no constitutional issues at stake.

There are several other matters very much worthy of our concern in their decision. One is the precedent it sets. It's bad enough that the president frequently circumvents the laws of the land by executive order, but if the Supreme Court also bypasses the legislature when the legislature passes a law of which they disapprove then no law is really binding. Congress has been gelded, everyone will feel entitled do what is right in his own eyes, and there's nothing to guide or constrain those at the helm of state except current ideological fashion and social pressure.

Another matter that's rarely mentioned but which is deeply troubling is that four of the Justices on the current Court are expected as a matter of course to decide in accord with the wishes of Mr. Obama on anything of importance to him. It's taken for granted by the media that Justices Sotomayor, Ginsburg, Kagan, and Breyer will always give Mr. Obama what he wants. In other words, we've come to accept with little more than a shrug that the concept of judicial independence is a sham, that it's ideology which rules on the Court, that it's members, or some of them, are little more than partisan hacks, and neither the law nor the Constitution are allowed to trump political necessity.

Justice Scalia's dissenting opinion in King is brilliant, by the way, and should be read by everyone who cares about the future of the country. Ed Morrissey provides a helpful summary of both Scalia's dissent and the profoundly unconvincing reasoning of the majority at Hot Air.

Philosophy: What's the Use?

Notre Dame philosopher Gary Gutting addresses a question in the New York Times section called The Stone that a lot of students ask: What's the use of philosophy? Here's part of what he says:

Almost every article that appears in The Stone provokes some comments from readers challenging the very idea that philosophy has anything relevant to say to non-philosophers. There are, in particular, complaints that philosophy is an irrelevant “ivory-tower” exercise, useless to any except those interested in logic-chopping for its own sake.

There is an important conception of philosophy that falls to this criticism. Associated especially with earlier modern philosophers, particularly René Descartes, this conception sees philosophy as the essential foundation of the beliefs that guide our everyday life. For example, I act as though there is a material world and other people who experience it as I do.

But how do I know that any of this is true? Couldn’t I just be dreaming of a world outside my thoughts? And, since (at best) I see only other human bodies, what reason do I have to think that there are any minds connected to those bodies? To answer these questions, it would seem that I need rigorous philosophical arguments for my existence and the existence of other thinking humans.

Of course, I don’t actually need any such arguments, if only because I have no practical alternative to believing that I and other people exist. As soon as we stop thinking weird philosophical thoughts, we immediately go back to believing what skeptical arguments seem to call into question. And rightly so, since, as David Hume pointed out, we are human beings before we are philosophers.

Gutting goes on to assert that we don't need arguments or evidence to believe much of what we do believe. We're perfectly justified and rational, for instance, to believe that we're not in the Matrix, or that we had cereal for breakfast this morning (if we remember that we did), or that I'm experiencing a toothache, or seeing blue, or that other people aren't mindless zombies, or that the world is more than five minutes old. These beliefs are "properly basic" and we're rational to hold them until someone can give us a good reason to think we're mistaken (what philosophers call a "defeater").

Even though basic beliefs on ethics, politics and religion do not require prior philosophical justification, they do need what we might call “intellectual maintenance,” which itself typically involves philosophical thinking. Religious believers, for example, are frequently troubled by the existence of horrendous evils in a world they hold was created by an all-good God. Some of their trouble may be emotional, requiring pastoral guidance. But religious commitment need not exclude a commitment to coherent thought. For instance, often enough believers want to know if their belief in God makes sense given the reality of evil. The philosophy of religion is full of discussions relevant to this question.

Similarly, you may be an atheist because you think all arguments for God’s existence are obviously fallacious. But if you encounter, say, a sophisticated version of the cosmological argument, or the design argument from fine-tuning, you may well need a clever philosopher to see if there’s anything wrong with it.

In addition to defending our basic beliefs against objections, we frequently need to clarify what our basic beliefs mean or logically entail. So, if I say I would never kill an innocent person, does that mean that I wouldn’t order the bombing of an enemy position if it might kill some civilians? Does a commitment to democratic elections require one to accept a fair election that puts an anti-democratic party into power? Answering such questions requires careful conceptual distinctions, for example, between direct and indirect results of actions, or between a morality of intrinsically wrong actions and a morality of consequences.

The "intellectual maintenance" Gutting talks about requires providing replies to defeaters that are adduced against one's beliefs, as well as supplying defeaters against the beliefs of others which are incompatible with our own. This may entail drawing out the conclusions of a belief to show that if followed logically the belief leads to conclusions that the person holding it would not want to embrace.

For example, Alvin Plantinga, whom Gutting mentions in his essay, has shown that there is indeed a conflict between science and religion, but it's not the conflict many suppose. The conflict, ironically enough, is between science and naturalism (the belief that nature is all there is). If, Plantinga argues, our cognitive faculties are indeed the product of a long evolutionary process then those faculties have evolved to enable us to survive, they have not evolved to enable us to apprehend truth.

Knowing what's true may sometimes enhance survival, but if so, it does so only coincidentally. Survival of one's genes can as easily be enhanced by false beliefs. Primitive reason might've led early hominids to believe, for example, that great heavenly rewards await those who sire dozens of children, or that it's right to kill off those rivals who belong to clans and tribes other than one's own. Both of these beliefs would lead to the survival and propagation of the cognitive abilities of those who hold them even though they're both false.

One only has a basis to trust the deliverances of one's thinking processes if one is a theist who believes that God gave us those processes and abilities to enable us to discover truth. The naturalist on the other hand, is in the awkward position of having to affirm that evolution causes those thinking processes to develop in order to make survival, not the discovery of truth, more likely.

Thus, if naturalism is true, the naturalist who believes in evolution (virtually all of them) has no basis for believing that his reason has reliably led him to his belief that naturalism is true. In other words, evolution is incompatible with the conviction that naturalism is true, but a theist who believes that God used evolution in order to produce cognitive faculties geared toward discovering truth has no problem reconciling his theism with evolution.