It's Not Just a Chinese Problem

An AP report from Beijing raises some interesting but troubling questions:

A speeding taxi knocks the pedestrian off her feet, sending her hurtling through the air. Dozens of people stand gawking or walk past, as if the young woman sprawled in the busy intersection simply doesn’t exist. A full minute passes, and another speeding vehicle, this time an SUV, tramples the prone woman. Her unconscious body churns under its large wheels like a lumpen sack.

After a grainy video of a traffic accident in the city of Zhumadian surfaced on Chinese social media this past week, the initial reaction was one of outrage directed at the more than 40 pedestrians and drivers who passed within meters of the woman, all failing to offer help.

But for many Chinese, the video was something more: a 94-second reminder of their society’s deep rot.

Even as China presents itself outwardly as a prosperous rising power, around kitchen tables and in private WeChat groups, Chinese citizens routinely grumble about a nation that’s gone bankrupt when it comes to two qualities: “suzhi,” or “personal character,” and “dixian,” literally “bottom line” — or a basic, inviolable sense of right and wrong.

Here, the common refrain goes, is an unmoored country where manufacturers knowingly sell toxic baby formula and fraudulent children’s vaccines. Restaurants cook with recycled “gutter oil” and grocery stores peddle fake eggs, fake fruit, even fake rice. Many Chinese say they avoid helping people on the street because of widespread stories about extortionists who seek help from passers-by and then feign injuries and demand compensation — perhaps explaining the Zhumadian behavior.

There are a couple of things to be said about this, but before saying them let's read what some thoughtful people in China are saying:

“It’s a problem with the entire country: Our moral bottom line has fallen so low,” Tian You, a novelist based in the southeastern city of Shenzhen, said by phone. “If I’m truly honest, I wonder, would I myself have dared to help the woman?”

The news swept through social media and even state media outlets. The Communist Youth League, an influential party organization, circulated the video on its Weibo account, urging its 5 million followers to “reject indifference.” An opinion column on china.com, a state media organ, asked citizens to “reflect” on the tragedy. Others used the episode as a starting point to vent about social ills.

“Like the polluted haze facing our country, we see boundless corruption, left-behind children, medical disputes and so forth,” a columnist in the Chengdu Economic Daily wrote. “Have our society’s morals gotten better or worse in the last 10 years? What about our future, are you confident about that? Don’t ask me, because I’m not.”

Public concern about China’s morals crosses decades and age groups. Ever since China began its free market reforms in the 1980s, older citizens have frequently griped about moral decay and profess nostalgia about a more innocent socialist era, while younger, worldly Chinese wonder why fraud and fake products aren’t as rampant in other countries.

Chinese scholars say many issues that leave the middle class disillusioned are a result of lagging government regulation and the dislocating forces of swift development.

So, a number of people simply have no answer to the moral malaise they discern spreading throughout their country. Others push forward possible culprits like free markets. I think the correct answer is offered by a sociologist at the China University of Political Science and Law:

“In the West, law, faith and morality are a three-legged stool,” said Ma Ai, a sociologist at the China University of Political Science and Law. “Our legal system is catching up, but we don’t have religion and a new moral system has not established after China transformed away from a traditional, collectivist society.”

This problem, as the article goes on to point out, is not uniquely Chinese. It's a problem that arises in every society when people no longer feel a moral responsibility for others. When that sense of responsibility fades so does human sympathy and compassion. Egoism and the wish not to get involved in other people's troubles are really the default position in a culture. People have to be taught not to be egoistic and that requires that they be given good reasons why they should care about others.

Unfortunately, a secular society such as China's, and, increasingly, societies in the West, can give no compelling answer to the question, why should I care about other people unless it's in my interest to do so? If I can profit from, and get away with, fraud and peddling fake food why shouldn't I do it? If it'll inconvenience me to help a stranger in distress, why should I help him? If nothing's in it for me what good reason is there for going out of my way to help someone else?

An individual who rejects any transcendent moral authority has no good answer. To care about strangers requires that we see human beings as in some sense sacred, but in a world that has done away with the sacred, a world that has adopted the view that human beings are little more than temporary aggregations of molecules, caring about strangers is not going to be high on anyone's list of priorities. If the Chinese, or anyone else, wonder why so many of their countrymen seem so indifferent to the plight of others, all they need do is ask themselves what motivation anyone who believes we're merely dust in the wind has to sacrifice his or her own time and energy to help someone who needs it.

The Judeo-Christian worldview, on the other hand, teaches that we have a duty to help our neighbor, to be compassionate and to do justice, not because it's the "nice" thing to do but because God insists. It teaches that people have worth, dignity and rights because God loves them and desires that we love what, and whom, He loves. Our default is to put ourselves and our interests first, but that option is not open to the Christian committed to do the will of God.

Put differently, the Christian believes that God died for us so that we can live. Out of gratitude for that act of cosmic self-sacrifice we can surely inconvenience ourselves to help someone else. That's why so many of history's greatest humanitarians, people like William Wilberforce, Martin Luther King and Mother Teresa, were people of deep Christian commitment.

On the other hand, when modern man pushes God to the periphery of his social life, or expels Him altogether, he forfeits any objective ground for feeling obligated to treat others with compassion and justice, or for putting others' interests ahead of his own. Society becomes a Darwinian jungle, a war of every man against every man. Such a society may present a superficial patina of politeness but underneath that surface many people know intuitively that, in the absence of God, the only person who really matters is me, and it's just a short step from knowing it to living it.

Cultural Appropriation

According to a piece by Katherine Timpf at National Review unless you invented something or someone of your particular racial identity invented it, you're not allowed to wear it, or do it, or whatever. To do so is cultural appropriation and that's a serious microaggression.

Timpf gives us some background:

A resident assistant at Pitzer College sent out an email to the entire school about how upset she was seeing white girls in hoop earrings because it’s culturally offensive to “[t]he black and brown bodies who typically wear hooped earrings.” According to an article in The Claremont Independent, the whole thing started when a group of Latino students spray painted “White Girl, take off your hoops!” on a dormitory wall that’s devoted to free speech.

Then, after one white girl said she was confused by the message, one of the spray-painters – a resident assistant named Alegria Martinez — felt the need to fire off a school-wide email expressing her disgust. ““[T]he art was created by myself and a few other WOC [women of color] after being tired and annoyed with the reoccuring [sic] theme of white women appropriating styles … that belong to the black and brown folks who created the culture,” Martinez wrote. Martinez explained that “[t]he black and brown bodies who typically wear hooped earrings, (and other accessories like winged eyeliner, gold name plate necklaces, etc) are typically viewed as ghetto, and are not taken seriously by others in their daily lives,” and that she sees “winged eyeliner, lined lips, and big hoop earrings … as symbols [and] as an everyday act of resistance, especially here at the Claremont Colleges.”

“We wonder, why should white girls be able to take part in this culture (wearing hoop earrings just being one case of it) and be seen as cute/aesthetic/ethnic,” Martinez continued. “White people have actually exploited the culture and made it into fashion.” Then, because just one of these emails was apparently not enough, another student replied to the thread with an email demanding that all white girls remove their hoops immediately: “If you didn’t create the culture as a coping mechanism for marginalization, take off those hoops, if your feminism isn’t intersectional take off those hoops, if you try to wear mi cultura when the creators can no longer afford it, take off those hoops, if you are incapable of using a search engine and expect other people to educate you, take off those hoops, if you can’t pronounce my name or spell it … take off those hoops / I use ‘those’ instead of ‘your’ because hoops were never ‘yours’ to begin with,” Jacquelyn Aguilera wrote.

Well, okay, it's good to know that college students are fired up about life's most profound questions and important problems, but let's think about this one for a minute. Who invented the cell phones Ms Martinez and Ms Aguilera use, or the cars they drive, or the airplanes they travel in, or the English language they speak, or their televisions, air conditioners, microwaves, computers ...? You get the idea. The list of stuff these students appropriate for their own use is no doubt extensive, and I'm fairly confident that most of it was developed by a bunch of unwoke geeky white guys.

There's lots of "cultural appropriation" going on out there, but if this troubles Ms Martinez and Ms Aguilera, they need to understand that white girls wearing hoop earrings hardly comprises the bulk of it. Maybe they should take an inventory of their own apartments and ask themselves how much "appropriation" they themselves are responsible for.

Romanticizing the Exotic

Bernie Sanders, Article VI of the Constitution notwithstanding, believes that there should be a religious test for holding public office and anyone who's an orthodox Christian ipso facto fails the test. John Daniel Davidson explains:

Sanders doesn’t think Christians are fit to serve in government because they’re bigots. Basic Christian theology, in Sanders’s view, “is indefensible, it is hateful, it is Islamophobic, and it is an insult to over a billion Muslims throughout the world.”

Here’s what happened. During a confirmation hearing for Russell Vought, President Trump’s nominee for deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, Sanders expressed his indignation at an article Vought had written in January 2016 about a controversy that erupted at Vought’s alma mater, Wheaton College. A political science professor, Larycia Hawkins, had published a Facebook post announcing her intention to wear a hijab in solidarity with Muslims and suggesting that Christians and Muslims worship the same God.

Vought, a Christian, took issue with Hawkins’s post and defended Wheaton in an article for The Resurgent. During the hearing Wednesday, Sanders repeatedly quoted one particular passage he described as “Islamophobic” and “hateful.” Vought wrote: “Muslims do not simply have a deficient theology. They do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ his Son, and they stand condemned.”

This is indeed the orthodox, reformed theological position of many protestant Christians today. It's what Sen. Sanders thought was "indefensible...hateful...Islamophobic, and... an insult to over a billion Muslims throughout the world." Somebody should ask Mr. Sanders, however, whether he'd object to an orthodox Muslim, like, say Democratic congressman Keith Ellison of Minnesota, holding public office because, after all, Muslims share a doctrine on salvation that's at least as exclusive as that of orthodox Christians. They believe that anyone who does not embrace Islam is doomed by Allah to eternal punishment.

Thus, this statement by a spokesman for Sen. Sanders is more than a little tone deaf, as are the statements by the groups mentioned in the next paragraph:

A spokesman for Sanders said in a statement issued Thursday: “In a democratic society, founded on the principle of religious freedom, we can all disagree over issues, but racism and bigotry—condemning an entire group of people because of their faith—cannot be part of any public policy.” The nomination of Vought, “who has expressed such strong Islamaphobic [sic] language,” the statement said, “is simply unacceptable.”

At the hearing on Wednesday, Sanders said he would vote against confirming Vought for deputy director of the OMB. Afterwards, Muslim groups including the Council on American-Islamic Relations and Muslim Advocates, along with the American Civil Liberties Union, condemned Vought’s comments, saying without a hint of irony that his views threaten the principle of religious freedom.

This is indeed ironic inasmuch as, aside perhaps from atheistic communism, there's nothing more threatening to religious freedom in our contemporary world than Islam. No predominately Islamic nation allows Christians and Jews equality with Muslims, and in many Islamic countries Christians, Hindus, and certainly Jews are persecuted.

Davidson closes with this:

[T]he progressives who now run the Democratic Party will turn a blind eye to the exclusivity claims of Muslims and other religious groups they think they need in their political coalition. But they will not suffer Christians. There’s a simple reason for that: Democrats know they have lost orthodox Christians as a constituency, and now they have no use for them.

What Sen. Sanders is engaging in here is an example of what Jewish philosopher Lenn Goodman calls "romanticizing the exotic." Christianity is deemed docile enough to be a safe target for criticism by secular Americans who wish to look politically virtuous, while "foreign" religions like Islam, which is not a safe target, are romanticized as noble, wholesome, pure and victimized.

This behavior is either hypocritical or mindless or both, and all the more in Sanders' case because he claims to be a tolerant progressive when in fact his outburst against Vought is clearly an act of intolerant bigotry. To be sure, the Senator is not intolerant of those who make exclusive religious truth claims per se because Islam certainly does that, but he is intolerant of Christians who make exclusive religious truth claims. It's not the truth claims, apparently, that elicit his bigotry, it's the Christianity.

A Fortunate Galaxy

Astronomer Hugh Ross discusses some fascinating facts about our Milky Way galaxy in an article at Salvo. In the article he points out that the age of our galaxy, it's uncommonly low luminosity for a galaxy its size, and its very unusual proximity to several smaller galaxies, all conspire to make the Milky Way habitable.

It's pretty interesting stuff. Here's why the age of the galaxy is important:

We must first explain how galaxies are categorized by color. Though it may seem counter to the colors we usually associate with hot and cold, young stars, which tend to be hot, are blue-colored, while old stars, which tend to be cooler, are red-colored. So galaxies in which star formation proceeds aggressively shine with a blue color, while galaxies in which star formation has ceased appear red.... Astronomers have typically categorized galaxies as belonging to either the red population or the blue population.

The Milky Way (MWG), however, fits into neither the red nor the blue category. It has taken on a green hue. This is because, while star formation in the MWG has subsided some, it has not yet ceased. Thus, our galaxy contains a combination of blue stars and stars that aren't yet old enough to be red but have aged enough to be yellow. Blended together, these stars give the galaxy a green appearance.

Green galaxies are rare, but they are exactly what advanced life requires. A galaxy dominated by blue stars will bathe its planets with many flares—flares too abundant and intense, and with too much ultraviolet and x-ray radiation, to permit life to exist on any of the planets. A galaxy dominated by red stars will also bathe its planets with many flares—again, flares of deadly intensity. A red galaxy also exposes its planets to more supernova and nova events (stellar explosions) than advanced life can possibly handle.

Another problem for galaxies dominated by red stars is that they lack the necessary level of ongoing star formation to sustain their spiral structure. But galaxies dominated by blue stars, where star formation is advancing aggressively, experience major disturbances (warps, bends, spurs, and feathers) in their spiral structure, so they cannot maintain a stable spiral form, either.

But the green Milky Way, in addition to being of appropriate size and mass to contain the elements that life requires, has another characteristic that allows for the existence of advanced life within it: its spiral arms are stable, well-separated, highly symmetrical, free of any significant warps or bends, and relatively free of spurs and feathers. In part, these spiral-arm features are possible because the galaxy is dominated by yellow stars which are complemented by a significant population of blue stars.

[O]ur galaxy....is transitioning from a star-forming site to a no-longer-star-forming site. And this midlife period appears to be the "best of times" for the sustainment of living things....[T]he Milky Way has transitioned from its role in building the required ingredients for advanced life (carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, calcium, iron, etc.) to one in which it can now, for a relatively brief time period, sustain advanced life.

There's more on why our galaxy is a suitable habitation for living things at the link. The sorts of things Ross says about the Milky Way can also be said about the solar system and the earth/moon complex. When all the unique factors which have to be pretty much just as they are for higher life forms to be sustained anywhere in the cosmos are tallied up it has led some scientists to conclude that it's very unlikely that there's any other place in the universe where life like ours could exist.

One could perhaps say that the existence of another habitable galaxy somewhere out there, with a solar system and a planet capable of sustaining life, would almost be miraculous.

But Is it True?

Shortly after the recent terror attacks in England a billboard appeared along an interstate highway in Indiana that deeply disappointed and even outraged some who saw it. The billboard is ostensibly a description of the prophet Muhammad, although he's not actually identified anywhere on it.

In any case, the billboard displays six purported facts about Muhammad that many people think should not be publicized because it's offensive to muslims. Yet if the claims are demonstrably true then why should anyone object to being confronted with the truth? This is not to say that the billboard is not offensive, or that it won't harm relations with Christians. Maybe it will harm relations with Christians just as mass slaughter in the name of Allah tends to harm relations with Christians, but the important question is, are the claims true?

Here's the billboard:

The first statement is a bit controversial. Some Islamic historians claim that Muhammad never married a six-year old girl. Rather, they point out, he was engaged to a six-year old girl named Aisha and then married and consummated the marriage when she was nine and he was fifty four. In any case, I'm not sure that that mistake is particularly egregious.

Other than that all of the other claims are corroborated by muslim chroniclers.

Even so, some muslims were understandably upset to see the man they revere publicly maligned:

“I was a little disappointed when I saw that...We do support free speech, but we do realize this is also rooted in bigotry,” said Farial Khatri of the Islamic Society of North America, according to Fox59. “We’ve seen them in New York and several others cities on billboards as well as other transit ads,” he added.

Some groups spoke out against the display as disparaging to Muslims while other groups want to do more. The Muslim Alliance of Indiana plans to raise money to put up its own billboard nearby to spread a message of peace and kindness.

Rima Shahid, executive director of the Muslim Alliance of Indiana, said she was “heartsick” when she saw a photo of the billboard, especially since it appeared at the start of Ramadan, Islam’s holy month. She strongly condemned the billboard for spreading lies and misinformation about Islam and its prophet. “These are completely false statements,” Shahid said, according to NBC news.

“It perpetuates hate. It perpetuates misconceptions about Islam, and it makes our neighbors think we believe things that just aren’t true … they’ve been misinformed,” she said. “This billboard is garbage,” Shahid added.

Shortly after the giant board went up, the Muslim Alliance of Indiana reached out to Mayor Joe Hogsett and Congressman Andre Carson about ways to challenge the billboard.

The best way to challenge the billboard, it seems to me, would be to publicly demonstrate that the claims it makes are false or unfounded rather than simply asserting that they are. That's how it's done in a free society. It'll be interesting to see whether that kind of discussion ever actually takes place.

Culture Clash

In light of the horrible events that have occurred at the hands of Muslims in Manchester and London recently I thought it'd be appropriate to rerun a post from last February:

There is, I think, a puzzlement among many Americans as to why there's so much concern over bringing Muslim refugees to our shores. Some Americans seem to think that Islam is sort of like any other religion, but I think this is a misunderstanding of Islam. Moreover, the misunderstanding includes the view that only a small percentage of Muslims are extremists, and that it's worth the risk to bring them into our country to increase diversity and broaden the tax base.

I say this is a misunderstanding because most Muslims, in fact almost all devout Muslims, adhere to Koranic law, i.e. sharia. If they do not follow sharia they're often not considered true Muslims by their co-religionists, even if they faithfully observe the five pillars of Islam, and over 80% of Muslims emigrating from most of the countries listed on President Trump's travel ban executive order believe sharia should be the governing law of whatever country they reside in.

In June I posted some thoughts on the notion of moderate Islam which I'd like to rerun here to help readers understand why there's concern and why so many people who are sympathetic to the plight of refugees nevertheless support Mr. Trump's EO:

Last January I did a post on moderate Islam which quoted at length from a column by former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy who argued that the idea of moderate Islam is something of a myth. There are no moderate Muslims, he maintained. There are Muslims and there are apostates (who, according to Islamic doctrine, deserve to be killed) and that covers the spectrum of Islamic belief.

People in the West, so accustomed to the notion that in everything there's a wide diversity of opinion, have a hard time accepting that many Muslims don't see things that way. At least they don't see Islam that way.

The following video features a Muslim speaker named Fahad Qureshi addressing an audience in Norway in 2013 on this very matter. He's attempting to make the point, a point of which he obviously approves, that, although Westerners often try to minimize it, the belief that gays should be killed and women subjugated to men and stoned to death if caught in adultery are in fact mainstream Muslim beliefs. They're not the beliefs of a fringe group of radicals, Qureshi insists, they're views taken directly from the Koran:

Keep in mind that Qureshi was addressing a mostly Muslim audience in liberal Norway. Toward the end he asked a question everyone should be asking as President Obama opens the floodgates to millions of middle eastern Muslims:

What are the politicians going to say now? What is the media going to say now? That we are all extremists? That we are all radicals? That we need to deport all of us from this country?

Actually, no. In the wake of Orlando [the terrorist massacre at The Pulse nightclub] the media I've seen, in a masterful diversion of viewers' attention, has been talking mostly about the need for gun control.

Imagine, though, the uproar had a politically conservative fanatic committed the atrocity in the Orlando night club, and a video like this had subsequently been found to have been made at a gathering of Tea-Partiers. If the views held almost unanimously by this audience of Muslims were held by even a significant minority of any group of conservative non-Muslim Americans they would be anathematized, persecuted, and endlessly ridiculed. Yet Muslims are given a pass. Their views are ignored. Why?

An anonymous gay activist in a letter quoted in Tuesday's post highlights the Left's hypocrisy:

I also now realize, with brutal clarity, that in the progressive hierarchy of identity groups, Muslims are above gays. Every pundit and politician -- and that includes President Obama and Hillary Clinton and half the talking heads on TV -- who today have said "We don't know what the shooter's motivation could possibly be!" have revealed to me their true priorities: appeasing Muslims is more important than defending the lives of gay people. Every progressive who runs interference for Islamic murderers is complicit in those murders, and I can no longer be a part of that team.

I'm just sick of it. Sick of the hypocrisy. Sick of the pandering. Sick of the deception.

So should every American be.

Later, I elaborated on how we might think about the views expressed in the above video and wrote this:

One thing I think we can say about sharia is that it's not what Westerners would call "moderate" or "progressive."

Suppose you found yourself among a group of people which, it eventually became clear to you,...

• held approximately the same views about gays as the Westboro Baptists, only worse.
• held approximately the same views about women as Jim Crow era southerners held about blacks.
• held approximately the same views about Jews as did the Nazis.
• held approximately the same views about freedom of religion as did medieval inquisitors.
• held approximately the same views about freedom of speech as does the North Korean government
• held approximately the same views about human equality as do proponents of the Hindu caste system.
• held approximately the same views about church/state separation as fundamentalist theocrats.
• held views regarding criminal justice that endorsed cruel and unusual punishments like cutting off the hands of thieves, whipping adulterers, hanging gays, and killing apostates.

Would you call that group "moderate"? Would you call them "progressive"? Yet these are views held by large numbers of mainstream Muslims, not just in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, but in Europe and the U.S. A Pew poll found that a majority of American Muslims prefer sharia, and one in four accepts the use of violence against other Americans who give offense to Islam, for instance, by caricaturing Mohammed.

Let us do all we can to aid and comfort those, both Christian and Muslim, who are experiencing hellish suffering at the hands of Assad's military, ISIS, and al Qaeda Islamists, but let us not be blinded by compassion or political correctness to the realities of the belief system held by most of the people we're bringing into this country. Many of them do not want to assimilate, they do not want to become Westernized, and they do not want to moderate their convictions. If that's true we're possibly setting up many refugees and other Muslim immigrants for alienation, bitterness and resentment that could one day boil over into violence, the kind of awful mayhem already visited upon Paris, Nice, Berlin and Brussels in recent years.

Ignoring the cultural dissonance between Islam and the West is not a solution to the problem and will not prevent further horrors from happening.

Resist

A friend sent me a panel presentation by professor Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto who explains postmodernism to what I assume to be a gathering of conservative students. Peterson describes why he thinks postmodernism is such a threat to traditional Western values like rational discourse and freedom of speech.

I've pulled some excerpts to give you a sense of why Peterson thinks the cause of resisting the incursions of postmodernism is urgent:

You need to understand postmodernism, because that's what you're up against. You're up against it far more than you know or think, and it's a much more well-developed and pervasive, pernicious, nihilistic, intellectually attractive doctrine than has yet come to public realization. It absolutely dominates the humanities and increasingly the social sciences in the universities.

It's not like any given person is absolutely possessed by the spirit of postmodernism, because often they're not educated enough to know all the details about what it is that has them in their grip, but if you get 20 of them together and they're all 5% influenced by the postmodernist ethos, you basically have the spirit of the mob. It's a mouthpiece for that particular philosophical doctrine.

And if you understand the doctrine than you understand why things are progressing the way that they are progressing.

So I'm going to tell you a little bit about doctrine, because it's not optional to understand this. This is crucial to understand this, you can't underestimate the power of ideas and also of words, of course, because ideas are expressed in words.

So the first thing that you might want to know about postmodernism is that it doesn't have a shred of gratitude -- and there's something pathologically wrong with a person that doesn't have any gratitude, especially when they live in what so far is the best of all possible worlds. So if you're not grateful, you're driven by resentment, and resentment is the worst emotion that you can possibly experience, apart from arrogance. Arrogance, resentment, and deceit. There is an evil triad for you.

And if you're bitter about everything that's happening around you, despite the fact that you're bathed in wealth, then there is something absolutely wrong with you.

So here's what the postmodernists believe: They don't believe in the individual.

They believe that since you don't have an individual identity, your fundamental identity is group fostered, and that means that you're basically an exemplar of your race.

Hence, white privilege. Or you're an exemplar of your gender, or your sex, or your ethnicity, or you're an exemplar of however you can be classified so that you are placed in the position of a victim against the oppressor.

So for the postmodernists, the world is a Hobbesian battleground of identity groups. They do not communicate with one another, because they can't. All there is, is a struggle for power, and if you're in the predator group, which means you're an oppressor, than you better look out, because you're not exactly welcome. Not exactly welcome, and neither are your ideas. So that's what you're up against.

They believe that logic is part of the process by which the patriarchal institutions of the West continue to dominate and to justify their dominance. They don't believe in dialogue.... They don't believe that people of good will can come to consensus through the exchange of ideas. They believe that that notion is part of the philosophical substructure and practices of the dominant culture.

I would say it's time for conservatives to stop apologizing for being conservatives.

You don't apologize to these people. It's a big mistake. They read apology as an admission of guilt. You don't apologize, and you don't back down.

With regards to the universities, I thought at one point that the best thing to do would be to cut their funding by 25% and let them fight among themselves for the remnants, because it would force universities to decide exactly what's important and what isn't.

So I would say the humanities, and much of the social sciences, have turned into a postmodernist neo-Marxist playground for radicals. The scholarship is terrible. 80% of humanities papers are not cited once. Once!

And so what that means is that they write papers for each other, and they sell them to libraries, and that's a how the publishers are making money. No one reads them, but the publishers can print them and the libraries have to buy them -- And they are buying them with your tax money. And so all of you who are sitting here are funding a postmodern radical neo-Marxist agenda that has its roots in the university, and your tax money is going towards it.

And if you want proof of that. Just go online and look at the websites, especially of disciplines like 'women's studies' which is pathological right to the core. But it's not just women studies, it is all the ethnic studies groups, it is anthropology, it is sociology, social work, and most of all, it's education.

They're not interested at all in [genuine] education. They are interested in the indoctrination of people as young as they can get their hands on, so to speak.

Our society needs to figure out how to stop shunting public tax money to radical left-wing activists. If we were doing that for the radical right-wing activists, there would be an absolute storm, but it's happened incrementally since the 1960s and needs to stop.

So that's what conservatives and also liberals --true liberals in the English sense-- are up against. What's happened also as a consequence of this postmodern neo-Marxist intellectual invasion, is the center keeps moving way to the right now, so if you're a classical liberal, you've become a conservative.

And then finally with regards to talking to young people. You finally have something to sell to them. It is not easy to sell conservatism to young people, because they want to change things. That's not what conservatives want to do, they want to maintain things. Well, now you got something to sell -- you can sell them freedom of speech, and you can sell them responsibility.

Postmodernity, put simply, is essentially the denial of objective truth and value. It subjectivizes everything and makes truth group-based and feeling-based. Thus, if I feel oppressed then that's my truth regardless of whether I am or not. LeBron James recently came home to find a racial epithet spray-painted on the gate of his mansion. He lamented that it doesn't matter whether you're admired or rich or successful it's still tough to be black in America.

James makes millions of dollars a year playing a game, yet he thinks life is tough because some pimply-faced kid with a can of spray paint did something malicious and stupid. The postmodern would say, though, that if James and others feel strongly about their lives being tough then it's a true belief - true for them - regardless of the objective facts of the matter.

Peterson notes in his speech that if American blacks comprised a country they'd be the 18th wealthiest nation in the world. I can't vouch for the statistic, but if it's true it's an objective fact that's meaningless to many postmodern progressives. Their truth is that African Americans are oppressed and statistics such as that are simply part of the white, patriarchal, logical mode of thinking that the postmodern rejects a priori.

It's easy to see why Peterson thinks such a worldview is dangerously corrosive to a pluralistic society. It pits one group against another and makes dialogue and reconciliation difficult, if not impossible. The only way for one group to accomplish its goals is to acquire more power than competing groups and to impose their will upon the others.

No worldview is all bad, of course, and there are some aspects of the postmodern mindset that could and should be seen as beneficial, but Peterson is right that much of it is extremely toxic to a free and open society and students should strive to resist it's siren song.

A Liberal's Dilemma

There's a news report out of Oklahoma fraught with difficulties, in my opinion, for liberal progressives who wish to ban guns. Bre Peyton summarizes the events:

An Oklahoma man used a revolver to stop a neighbor from killing his three-month-old twin children last Friday.

Leland Foster was allegedly trying to drown his twin babies, one boy and one girl, in the bathtub of his Ada, Oklahoma home after threatening their mother with a knife. Then his neighbor intervened, according to KOFR-TV.

A 12-year-old girl who was living in the house ran to seek help from her neighbor, Cash Freeman, who saved the babies’ lives by shooting Foster twice in the back with a revolver, which killed him.

Foster has a violent criminal record. In 2011, he pled guilty to domestic abuse by strangulation and arson in the first degree.

Freeman told reporters he’s worried he might get into trouble for saving the babies’ lives. According to KOFR, Ada police said the incident would go before the district attorney, who will decide if the homicide was justified. Police said they questioned Freeman just after the incident and released him.

The babies were flown to a nearby hospital and have since been released.

Here are six questions for my liberal progressive friends:

1. Should Mr. Freeman have been allowed to own a firearm?
2. Should he be allowed by law to have used a firearm to shoot Mr. Foster to save the children?
3. Should not Mr. Foster have the right to kill his three-month-old children?
4. If the answer to #3 is no, at what point should the life of a child be protected by law?
5. What is the rationale for drawing the line at that point?
6. Should the cop who fought off the Islamic terrorists on London Bridge with his nightstick, or the defenseless cop in Paris who was murdered by the Islamic terrorists who perpetrated the Charlie Hebdo atrocity in 2015, been armed with a gun?

Dilemmas, dilemmas.

The Madman

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a man before his time. He was an atheist who saw clearly that atheism entailed far more than just the "death of God." Nietzsche saw that when modern men pushed God out of their lives they created a vacuum, an emptiness from which meaning, morality, and hope had all been swept out. The "murder" of God meant that man was left to create his own meaning, his own morality, and to learn to live without hope. Man's existential predicament would inevitably lead him to despair.

Nietzsche foresaw all this, but most men of his age did not. In their exuberance and excitement over their "assassination of God" and the liberation they thought their deed brought them, they failed to grasp that when God "died" with Him died any hope of transcendent purpose and any solid ground for right and wrong.

Nietzsche expressed this failure in a parable he included in his book The Gay Science. It's called the Parable of the Madman:

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!" -- As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? -- Thus they yelled and laughed.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him -- you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us -- for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars -- and yet they have done it themselves.

It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"

The madman carried a lantern in the daylight because darkness was imminent. Man has become unmoored, like the earth unchained from the sun. Cold despair settles upon us as we plunge in all directions, adrift in nothingness. We are haunted by the sense that all is becoming colder.

I think Nietzsche's lantern-carrying madman is an interesting counter-point to another lantern-carrier depicted by the artist Holman Hunt. Hunt's lantern-carrier, unlike Nietzsche's did not bring despair, but hope. He did not wipe out the horizon by which we navigate through life but rather filled life with meaning. Nor did he set us adrift in an infinite nothingness, but set our feet on the solid rock of an objective, transcendent, personal God:

He stands at the door and knocks, but the door has no latch. It can only be opened from the inside.

A Discovery That Would Refute Theism?

Although it's hard to see exactly why, many people are of the mind that if scientists ever discovered life on other planets it would be a devastating blow to theistic belief. It's apparently thought that theism, particularly Christian theism, entails the belief that life was created only on earth and nowhere else and that the discovery of life in some distant locale would thus refute theism.

Protein chemist Kirk Durston has a different take on the matter, though. He argues that if life were ever to be discovered elsewhere in the universe it would be a devastating blow, not to theism but to atheism.

Here is the gravamen of his essay:

When it comes to the idea that life spontaneously self-assembled itself in the past, thousands of our brightest minds have worked on the problem for over half a century with no prospect of success in the foreseeable future. In fact, the more we learn, the more we realize how difficult the problem is. The challenge is three-fold. First, we have to figure out how intelligent scientists can create a simple life form from scratch in the lab.

Second, having done it ourselves, we have to see if realistic natural processes can do the same thing. The third problem is vastly more difficult: figure out how the information to build life forms gets encoded in these self-replicating molecules without an intelligent programmer. We are still working on the first problem, with no hint of success on the horizon. That might be significant, right there.

A 2011 article in Scientific American, “Pssst! Don’t tell the creationists, but scientists don’t have a clue how life began,” summarized our lack of progress in the lab. Of course, there are plenty of scenarios, but creative story-telling should not be confused with doing science, or making scientific discoveries. With regard to “thousands of papers” published each year in the field of evolution, as Austin Hughes wrote, “This vast outpouring of pseudo-Darwinian hype has been genuinely harmful to the credibility of evolutionary biology as a science.”

Evolutionary biologist Eugene Koonin, meanwhile, calculates the probability of a simple replication-translation system, just one key component, to be less than 1 chance in 10^1,018 making it unlikely that life will ever spontaneously self-assemble anywhere in the universe. His proposed solution is a near-infinite number of universes, something we might call a “multiverse of the gaps.” ....Indeed, we would need a vast number of universes all working on the problem to get lucky enough to see life spontaneously assemble itself in just one of them.

The probability of life spontaneously self-assembling anywhere in this universe is mind-staggeringly unlikely; essentially zero. If you are so unquestioningly naïve as to believe we just got incredibly lucky, then bless your soul.

If we were to discover extraterrestrial life, however, then we would have had to get mind-staggeringly lucky two times! Like the forensic detectives at the lotteries commission, a thinking person would have to start operating on the well-founded suspicion that “something is going on.”

The discovery of extraterrestrial life would be the death knell for atheism, at least for the thinking atheist. On the other hand, such a discovery should not be in the least surprising, if there is a supernatural Creator who has designed the universe to support life, and has brought about life and beauty throughout the universe, even if no human ever gets to see it.

His last paragraph bears emphasizing: Life elsewhere in the cosmos would not be especially surprising given the truth of theism, but on the assumption that atheism is true the discovery of extraterrestrial life would be breath-takingly astounding. It's truly ironic that so many of those who fervently hope to find evidence of extraterrestrial organisms are themselves metaphysical naturalists, i.e. atheists. These folks are apparently eager to find evidence that their most important metaphysical commitments are wrong. That just seems odd.

Opting Out

President Trump has fulfilled a campaign promise by opting out of the Paris climate change accord to which President Obama committed us. The accord would have cost the U.S. taxpayers dearly over the next couple of decades as Reagan McCarthy at TownHall.com explains:

According to a study conducted by the National Economic Research Associates Economic Consulting, the deal would cut 6.5 million industrial sector jobs, eliminate $3 trillion in potential GDP and eradicate $7,000 in household income, per capita, all by 2040.

The deal would not raise wages or contribute to job growth; it would also cut jobs in the long-term. Worst of all, the deal would be detrimental to the American economy on a global level. The rest of the United Nations would continue to expand their economic output while that of the United States decreased dramatically. The Heritage Foundation reports that by 2035, the loss in gross domestic product would be as high as 2.5 trillion. The American worker does not benefit from increased electricity costs, job losses, lost income or decreasing GDP. The agreement also does not make America energy independent, but rather puts the country at the will of United Nations bureaucrats.

All of this maight have seemed a sacrifice worth making if it could expected to do some good, but if what Rich Lowry wrote prior to Mr. Trump announcing his decision, is correct the cost borne by Americans would accomplish almost nothing in terms of environmental protection:

No U.S. interest is served by remaining part of the accord, which even its supporters say is mostly an exercise in window dressing — that is, when they aren’t insisting that the fate of the planet depends on it. The treaty’s advocates, hoping to forestall a Trump exit, are trying to save the accord by arguing that it is largely meaningless. In this spirit, a piece in the liberal website Vox explained, the Paris accord “asks participants only to state what they are willing to do and to account for what they’ve done. It is, in a word, voluntary.”

In other words, “Nothing to see here, just us climate-change alarmists playing pretend.” And there is indeed much to be said for the worthlessness of Paris. Beijing pledges that China’s emissions will “peak around 2030.” By one estimate, this is when its emissions would peak regardless. So the world’s largest emitter is using the accord as a platform for climate virtue-signaling. According to Benjamin Zycher of the American Enterprise Institute, even if Paris is fully implemented and you accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s model for how emissions affect warming, it will produce a rounding error’s worth of decline in the global temperature by 2100 — .17 of a degree Celsius.

The shrewdest option, Lowry suggests, would have been for the president to have submitted the agreement to the Senate for ratification, where it certainly would have been rejected:

President Barack Obama pretended that the treaty was an executive agreement — even though it involves 195 countries, and purports to bind future U.S. presidents — precisely so he could do an end run around the Senate. Honoring the Senate’s constitutional role in considering such a treaty would make it that much harder for the next Democratic president simply to sign on again unilaterally. Failing that, Trump should say farewell to Paris on his own, and never look back.

Well, that's what he did.

Next up is the decision whether to remain wedded to the Iran nuclear accord. Mr. Trump will announce his decision in July and would do well to walk away from that boondoggle as well. The Iran deal was also designed by Mr. Obama to circumvent the constitutional prerogative of the Senate to ratify treaties while at the same time binding future administrations to its terms, many of which were concealed from the American public.

Fred Fleitz at NRO urges President Trump to abandon both the Paris and Iran deals, not just because they're weak agreements that endanger U.S. security and economy, but also because they represent unconstitutional abuses of presidential power by President Obama.

As Fleitz notes, congressional Democrats and the mainstream media would never have allowed a Republican president to get away with similar abuses.

Moral Depravity

Remember when Rep. Gabby Giffords was seriously wounded by a deranged gunman in Arizona and almost twenty people in her audience were killed or wounded? Remember how the media insisted on blaming "incendiary rhetoric" from Rush Limbaugh as well as a graphic by Sarah Palin's campaign that had crosshairs over the congressional districts of congresspersons that were targeted for defeat by the GOP?

Remember how the media went into a swivet over Tea Party rallies which the media was sure would incite terrorist violence by fearsome Tea Party villains such as these:

More recently, do you recall how the media blasted Donald Trump for creating an environment of hostility toward journalists when Greg Gianforte, a Montana candidate for Congress, visited a noogie upon a reporter at a campaign event?

Well, I wonder who the left will blame now for the disgusting photo made by an unfunny comedienne named Kathy Griffin who thought it humorous to hold up a realistic looking model of the severed head of Donald Trump.

This is not the first time that leftists have graphically represented the murder of a Republican president, of course. There was a movie made about assassinating George Bush, and demonstrators during his presidency carried posters like this:

Fortunately, a lot of liberals, including Chelsea Clinton, are condemning Griffin's depraved attempt at "art," but the question remains, if the rhetoric of talk radio hosts and politicians like Sarah Palin has been responsible for triggering horrific acts of violence, what should we think of people like Griffin, and what is the climate among her friends and associates that she would think that a photo of her holding Trump's severed head would be a knee-slapper at their gatherings? Update: Griffin's name should be placed in nomination for the Hypocrite of the Year award. After Representative Giffords and 18 others were shot in 2011 Griffin actually blamed Sarah Palin's map for the carnage. Amazing.

Useless Beauty

One characteristic of living things that has thrilled everyone who has ever considered it is the astonishing level of beauty they exhibit. Consider, as an example, this bird of paradise:

or this blue dachnis:

Why are living things like birds and butterflies so beautiful? Darwin thought that females selected mates based on their fitness and that this sex selection caused beauty to evolve as a by-product. This is still the reigning explanation today (although it doesn't explain the beauty of flowers), but as an article by Adrian Barnett at New Scientist explains, not everyone is on board with this explanation, maybe not even Darwin himself. Here's an excerpt:

“The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail… makes me sick,” wrote Darwin, worrying about how structures we consider beautiful might come to exist in nature. The view nowadays is that ornaments such as the peacock’s stunning train, the splendid plumes of birds of paradise, bowerbirds’ love nests, deer antlers, fins on guppies and just about everything to do with the mandarin goby are indications of male quality.

In such species, females choose males with features that indicate resistance to parasites (shapes go wonky, colours go flat if a male isn’t immunologically buff) or skill at foraging (antlers need lots of calcium, bowers lots of time).

But in other cases, the evolutionary handicap principle applies, and the fact it’s hard to stay alive while possessing a huge or brightly coloured attraction becomes the reason for the visual pizzazz. And when this process occasionally goes a bit mad, and ever bigger or brasher becomes synonymous with ever better, then the object of female fixation undergoes runaway selection until physiology or predation steps in to set limits.

What unites these explanations is that they are all generally credited to Darwin and his book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Here, biologists say, having set out his adaptationist stall in On the Origin of Species, Darwin proposed female choice as the driving force behind much of the animal world’s visual exuberance.

And then along comes Richard Prum to tell you there’s more to it than that. Prum is an ornithology professor at Yale University and a world authority on manakins, a group of sparrow-sized birds whose dazzling males perform mate-attracting gymnastics on branches in the understories of Central and South American forests. Years of watching the males carry on until they nearly collapsed convinced him that much of the selection is linked to nothing except a female love of beauty itself, that the only force pushing things forward is female appreciation. This, he says, has nothing to do with functionality: it is pure aesthetic evolution, with “the potential to evolve arbitrary and useless beauty”.(emphasis mine)

As Prum recounts, this idea has not found the greatest favour in academic circles. But, as he makes plain, he’s not alone. Once again, it seems Darwin got there first, writing in Descent that “the most refined beauty may serve as a sexual charm, and for no other purpose”. The problem is, it seems, that we all think we know Darwin. In fact, few of us go back to the original, instead taking for granted what other people say he said. In this case, it seems to have created a bit of validation by wish fulfilment: Darwin’s views on sexual selection, Prum says, have been “laundered, re-tailored and cleaned-up for ideological purity”.

The difficulty here, at least for me, is that it doesn't explain why animals would have developed a sense of beauty in the first place. Pair-bonding and reproduction certainly don't require it, obviously, since many organisms, including humans it must be said, successfully reproduce without benefit of physical attractiveness. So why would some organisms evolve a dependence upon it, and what is it in the organism's genotype that governs this aesthetic sense?

Could it be that animals, or at least some of them, are intelligently designed to just delight in beauty?

The Knowledge Problem

One's worldview has consequences. If someone embraces a naturalistic worldview then he or she is inclined to think that everything that exists reduces to material stuff and that every phenomenon can be explained, in principle, in terms of physical law. This view is usually called physicalism.

On the other hand, if one is a theist then one is usually disposed to think that there's more to reality than just physical matter. Reality, on this view, includes non-physical, immaterial mind and/or soul. This view is usually referred to as substance dualism.

Thirty five years ago a philosopher named Frank Jackson posed a clever thought experiment which he believed refuted physicalism. There's an interesting discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of Jackson's thought experiment, called Mary and the Knowledge Problem, by Ari N. Schulman at The New Atlantis. Schulman begins by explaining Jackson's argument. He writes:

[T]he thought experiment was proposed by Australian philosopher Frank Jackson in a 1982 paper. It was posed as a challenge to physicalism, the school of thought that holds that the mind is purely material, made solely of the stuff of rocks and meat, fully explicable by physics and chemistry. Physicalists regard the common-sense view that the mind is special — whether because it’s self-aware, can think and feel, or has free will — as an illusion.

Aiming to refute physicalism, Jackson asks us to imagine a scientist named Mary, who is so brilliant that she acquires all of the “physical information there is to obtain” about the workings of vision. Mary, that is, learns everything there is to know about how various wavelengths of light stimulate the retina, the neurology of the visual processing system, how this system interacts with the speech centers to produce spoken descriptions of images, and so on. The catch is that Mary has lived her whole life in a room in which everything is entirely in black, white, and shades of gray, including her books and the TV monitor she uses to investigate the world.

One day Mary is released from her room. For the first time, she sees colors with her own eyes. The question is: Does Mary learn something new?

The intuitive answer for most people is: yes, of course — Mary learns what it is like to see color. She learns about the redness of a rose, the blueness of the sky. But recall that Mary already knew everything physical about vision. So whatever it is that Mary learns is not encapsulated in physical descriptions. We can conclude, then, that there are such things as nonphysical facts about vision, meaning there must also be nonphysical properties of vision. In short, there is something special about the mind, and physicalism must be false.

The conclusion may strike many readers as obvious, but physicalism is the orthodoxy among today’s physicists, biologists, and philosophers of mind. To the physicalists, their position is the beginning and the end of the modern scientific project: in principle, a core metaphysical commitment that distinguishes modern science from its forebears; in its particulars, the final theory that is supposed to await us on the distant day when science is finished.

Peruse the pop-science headlines on any given day and read about how “we now know” that the love you feel looking at your child is actually just oxytocin in the limbic centers of the brain, a development that just happened to help our ancestors outbreed their neighbors, who apparently felt for their children the way we do about a plate of wet bread. The sense that your soul just died is a sign that you are now bending properly along the great de-spiriting arc of history. Thus, the knowledge argument seems to provide a welcome bulwark against the rising tide of physicalism, a relief to those who believe that love is love, whatever else it might also be.

Of course, as clear and intuitive as it first appears, Mary’s Room, like every other question of mind, is not nearly so simple. It would be surprising if a centuries-old philosophical project could be crumbled at its foundations by the kind of lesson taught to four-year-olds in preschool. Fittingly, then, despite three and a half decades of sustained discussion, the knowledge argument has apparently not won a single academic convert to dualism, the opposing set of theories holding that the mind is not entirely physical, or that mental and physical properties are distinct.

Though it is now perhaps the go-to example of an argument against physicalism, philosophers have offered compelling reasons to doubt it. The knowledge argument seems largely to have entrenched the opposing sides, providing each with an ever more elaborate set of rationalizations for its existing views.

Physicalism and dualism are conventionally seen as enemies, and with good reason. Each position is as much a sustained rejection of its opposite as it is a positive program of explanation in its own right. But as we will see, the mutual hostility of modern physicalism and dualism conceals a deeper convergence.

Understanding the thought experiment requires a return to foundational concerns about how we move past subjective experience to achieve objective knowledge of the world. These questions in turn point back to the genuine mystery of mind — of how it is that certain bits of dust, arranged just so, become capable of pondering the infinite.

It's not surprising that the "knowledge argument" hasn't persuaded many, if any, philosophers to abandon physicalism. To give up physicalism (or dualism) is not like giving up one's belief that one's favorite baseball team will win the pennant this year.

To yield on a matter as fundamental as the ultimate nature of the universe would rock one's entire worldview, and would have grave implications for one's belief in God. People only undergo a revolution in their worldview as a last resort and then only with much psychological and emotional agonizing. As long as there are any arguments at all that can be clung to to keep one from being blown away in the gale of opposing evidence those arguments will be tenaciously latched onto.

This is not to say that the counter-arguments invoked against Mary aren't good, only that it usually takes more than arguments to persuade someone to abandon a supporting pillar of his or her worldview.

Schulman goes on at length to examine the arguments on both sides of the issue in what is a very thorough and informative essay. Philosophically-minded readers may want to check it out.

Remembering Our Heroes

Memorial Day is a day to remember those who paid the ultimate price in combat for our country, but perhaps I can take a little license and also praise the sacrifices and character of men like those described in these accounts from the war in Iraq. Some of them never came home, but all of them deserve our gratitude and admiration:

A massive truck bomb had turned much of the Fort Lewis soldiers’ outpost to rubble. One of their own lay dying and many others wounded. Some 50 al-Qaida fighters were attacking from several directions with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. It was obvious that the insurgents had come to drive the platoon of Stryker brigade troops out of Combat Outpost Tampa, a four-story concrete building overlooking a major highway through western Mosul, Iraq.

“It crossed my mind that that might be what they were going to try to do,” recalled Staff Sgt. Robert Bernsten, one of 40 soldiers at the outpost that day. “But I wasn’t going to let that happen, and looking around I could tell nobody else in 2nd platoon was going to let that happen, either.”

He and 10 other soldiers from the same unit – the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment – would later be decorated for their valor on this day of reckoning, Dec. 29, 2004. Three were awarded the Silver Star, the Army’s third-highest award for heroism in combat. When you combine those medals with two other Silver Star recipients involved in different engagements, the battalion known as “Deuce Four” stands in elite company. The Army doesn’t track the number of medals per unit, but officials said there could be few, if any, other battalions in the Iraq war to have so many soldiers awarded the Silver Star.

“I think this is a great representation of our organization,” said the 1-24’s top enlisted soldier, Command Sgt. Maj. Robert Prosser, after a battalion award ceremony late last month at Fort Lewis. “There are so many that need to be recognized.... There were so many acts of heroism and valor.”

The fight for COP Tampa came as Deuce Four was just two months into its yearlong mission in west Mosul. The battalion is part of Fort Lewis’ second Stryker brigade. In the preceding weeks, insurgents had grown bolder in their attacks in the city of 2 million. Just eight days earlier, a suicide bomber made his way into a U.S. chow hall and killed 22 people, including two from Deuce Four.

The battalion took over the four-story building overlooking the busy highway and set up COP Tampa after coming under fire from insurgents holed up there. The troops hoped to stem the daily roadside bombings of U.S. forces along the highway, called route Tampa. Looking back, the Dec. 29 battle was a turning point in the weeks leading up to Iraq’s historic first democratic election.

The enemy “threw everything they had into this,” Bernsten said. “And you know in the end, they lost quite a few guys compared to the damage they could do to us. “They didn’t quit after that, but they definitely might have realized they were up against something a little bit tougher than they originally thought.”

The battle for COP Tampa was actually two fights – one at the outpost, and the other on the highway about a half-mile south.

About 3:20 p.m., a large cargo truck packed with 50 South African artillery rounds and propane tanks barreled down the highway toward the outpost, according to battalion accounts.

Pfc. Oscar Sanchez, on guard duty in the building, opened fire on the truck, killing the driver and causing the explosives to detonate about 75 feet short of the building. Sanchez, 19, was fatally wounded in the blast. Commanders last month presented his family with a Bronze Star for valor and said he surely saved lives. The enormous truck bomb might have destroyed the building had the driver been able to reach the ground-floor garages.

As it was, the enormous explosion damaged three Strykers parked at the outpost and wounded 17 of the 40 or so soldiers there, two of them critically.

Bernsten was in a room upstairs. “It threw me. It physically threw me. I opened my eyes and I’m laying on the floor a good 6 feet from where I was standing a split second ago,” he said. “There was nothing but black smoke filling the building.” People were yelling for each other, trying to find out if everyone was OK.

“It seemed like it was about a minute, and then all of a sudden it just opened up from everywhere. Them shooting at us. Us shooting at them,” Bernsten said. The fight would rage for the next two hours. Battalion leaders said videotape and documents recovered later showed it was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq fighters. They were firing from rooftops, from street corners, from cars, Bernsten said.

Eventually, Deuce Four soldiers started to run low on ammunition. Bernsten, a squad leader, led a team of soldiers out into the open, through heavy fire, to retrieve more from the damaged Strykers. “We went to the closest vehicle first and grabbed as much ammo as we could, and got it upstairs and started to distribute it,” he said. “When you hand a guy a magazine and they’re putting the one you just handed them into their weapon, you realize they’re getting pretty low. So we knew we had to go back out there for more.”

He didn’t necessarily notice there were rounds zipping past as he and the others ran the 100 feet or so to the Strykers. “All you could see was the back of the Stryker you were trying to get to.”

Another fight raged down route Tampa, where a convoy of six Strykers, including the battalion commander’s, had rolled right into a field of hastily set roadside bombs. The bombs hadn’t been there just five minutes earlier, when the convoy had passed by going the other way after a visit to the combat outpost. It was an ambush set up to attack whatever units would come to the aid of COP Tampa.

Just as soldiers in the lead vehicle radioed the others that there were bombs in the road, the second Stryker was hit by a suicide car bomber. Staff Sgt. Eddieboy Mesa, who was inside, said the blast tore off the slat armor cage and equipment from the right side of the vehicle, and destroyed its tires and axles and the grenade launcher mounted on top. But no soldiers were seriously injured.

Insurgents opened fire from the west and north of the highway. Stryker crewmen used their .50-caliber machine guns and grenade launchers to destroy a second car bomb and two of the bombs rigged in the roadway. Three of the six Strykers pressed on to COP Tampa to join the fight.

One, led by battalion operations officer Maj. Mark Bieger, loaded up the critically wounded and raced back onto the highway through the patch of still-unstable roadside bombs. It traveled unescorted the four miles or so to a combat support hospital. Bieger and his men are credited with saving the lives of two soldiers.

Then he and his men turned around and rejoined the fight on the highway. Bieger was one of those later awarded the Silver Star. Meantime, it was left to the soldiers still on the road to defend the heavily damaged Stryker and clear the route of the remaining five bombs.

Staff Sgt. Wesley Holt and Sgt. Joseph Martin rigged up some explosives and went, under fire, from bomb to bomb to prepare them for demolition. They had no idea whether an insurgent was watching nearby, waiting to detonate the bombs. Typically, this was the kind of situation where infantry soldiers would call in the ordnance experts. But there was no time, Holt said.

“You could see the IEDs right out in the road. I knew it was going to be up to us to do it,” Holt said. “Other units couldn’t push through. The colonel didn’t want to send any more vehicles through the kill zone until we could clear the route.” And so they prepared their charges under the cover of the Strykers, then ran out to the bombs, maybe 50 yards apart. The two men needed about 30 seconds to rig each one as incoming fire struck around them.

“You could hear it [enemy fire] going, but where they were landing I don’t know,” Holt said. “You concentrate on the main thing that’s in front of you.” He and Martin later received Silver Stars.

The route clear, three other Deuce Four platoons moved out into the neighborhoods and F/A-18 fighter jets made more than a dozen runs to attack enemy positions with missiles and cannon fire. “It was loud, but it was a pretty joyous sound,” Bernsten said. “You know that once that’s happened, you have the upper hand in such a big way. It’s like the cavalry just arrived, like in the movies.”

Other soldiers eventually received Bronze Stars for their actions that day, too.

Sgt. Christopher Manikowski and Sgt. Brandon Huff pulled wounded comrades from their damaged Strykers and carried them over open ground, under fire, to the relative safety of the building.

Sgt. Nicholas Furfari and Spc. Dennis Burke crawled out onto the building’s rubbled balcony under heavy fire to retrieve weapons and ammunition left there after the truck blast.

Also decorated with Bronze Stars for their valor on Dec. 29 were Lt. Jeremy Rockwell and Spc. Steven Sosa. U.S. commanders say they killed at least 25 insurgents. Deuce Four left the outpost unmanned for about three hours that night, long enough for engineers to determine whether it was safe to re-enter. Troops were back on duty by morning, said battalion commander Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla.

In the next 10 months, insurgents would continue to attack Deuce Four troops in west Mosul with snipers, roadside bombs and suicide car bombs. But never again would they mass and attempt such a complex attack.

Heroics on two other days earned Silver Stars for Deuce Four.

It was Aug. 19, and Sgt. Major Robert Prosser’s commander, Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla, had been shot down in front of him. Bullets hit the ground and walls around him. Prosser charged under fire into a shop, not knowing how many enemy fighters were inside. There was one, and Prosser shot him four times in the chest, then threw down his empty rifle and fought hand-to-hand with the man.

The insurgent pulled Prosser’s helmet over his eyes. Prosser got his hands onto the insurgent’s throat, but couldn’t get a firm grip because it was slick with blood.

Unable to reach his sidearm or his knife, and without the support of any other American soldiers, Prosser nonetheless disarmed and subdued the insurgent by delivering a series of powerful blows to the insurgent’s head, rendering the man unconscious.

Another Silver Star recipient, Staff Sgt. Shannon Kay, received the award for his actions on Dec. 11, 2004. He helped save the lives of seven members of his squad after they were attacked by a suicide bomber and insurgents with rockets and mortars at a traffic checkpoint.

He and others used fire extinguishers to save their burning Stryker vehicle and killed at least eight enemy fighters. Throughout the fight, Kay refused medical attention despite being wounded in four places.

For men like these and the millions of others whose courage and sacrifice have for two hundred and fifty years enabled the rest of us to live in relative freedom and security, we should all thank God. And for those who never made it back we should ask God's richest blessing on their souls.

Mathematical Ethics?

I'm currently reading the book Hidden Figures, a delightful true story told by Margot Lee Shetterly about a group of African American women in the 1940s and 50s who worked in aeronautics research as mathematicians. The book has been made into a movie and the story of how their math skills, as well as their pluck, enabled these women to overcome racial and gender barriers is compelling. So I was perplexed when I came across this report from Robby Soave at Reason.com about a math curriculum designed by a group called Teach for America that implies that it's somehow an injustice to expect minority students to learn mathematics as it's traditionally taught.

Soave writes:

Teach for America thinks that language is "social justice," and has designed a course that makes some startling claims about math. [For example]:

"In western mathematics, our ways of knowing include formalized reasoning or proof, decontextualization, and algorithmic thinking, leaving little room for those having non-western mathematical skills and thinking processes," the training course claims.

Whoever wrote this should be cashiered on the grounds of nincompoopery. So should whoever approved its publication. There's no such thing as "western mathematics." Math is universal. There's not one set of "mathematical skills and thinking processes" for Europeans, another set for Asians, and still another for Africans. Math is applied logic and the laws of logic are not relative to different cultures as though they were like preferences in food or dress. The law of non-contradiction is not a matter of cultural predilection or opinion.

Soave continues to extract more instances of buffoonery from the Teach for America materials:

"Mathematical ethics recognizes that, for centuries, mathematics has been used as a dehumanizing tool....mathematics formulae also differentiate between the classifications of a war or a genocide and have been used to trick indigenous peoples out of land and property."

Mathematical ethics? What could that possibly be? Are there scholars who teach and write about mathematical ethics? Do they explore the ethical implications of imaginary numbers or the moral ramifications of dividing by zero? Mathematical ethics sounds a bit like astrobiology - they're both disciplines without a subject matter.

The balance of the quoted sentence sounds even more nonsensical, perhaps, than the notion of a mathematical ethics.

But enough. Soave concludes with this:

I'm open to the idea that math—particularly advanced math—is over-valued as a K-12 subject. There's a good argument to be made that high schoolers should be taking less Algebra II and reading more Shakespeare. But if we're going to teach math, I'm not sure we should be teaching that it's mostly just this bad thing Western countries used to subjugate indigenous peoples, as if that's the main thing you need to know about math.

I agree with him completely about this. I question, for example, the need for academically-oriented high school students to take calculus, a math that even many engineers don't use much. Their time would be better spent taking probability and statistics or taking more history/government, literature, or philosophy, and saving calculus, if they need it, for college.

Soave is also correct in pointing to the absurdity of teaching young people that math is somehow a tool of evil oppression. On the contrary, I can think of no better way for young minority kids to improve their socio-economic prospects in life than to master mathematics. It opens a lot of highly remunerative doors for the student who makes the effort. Just ask many of our Asian-American students - who certainly don't seem to have a problem with "western mathematics" - or read Shetterly's Hidden Figures.

Maybe Closer Than He Thinks

In his bestselling book A Brief History of Thought French humanist philosopher Luc Ferry asserts that the paramount philosophical question throughout the history of civilization has been the question of how we find meaning in life when death looms for all of us.

He calls this the question of "salvation," and in his book he surveys the answers proffered by the ancient Stoics, Christians, Enlightenment thinkers, Nietzsche and the post-moderns, and comes, after much meandering, to the disappointingly tepid conclusion that salvation consists in loving others until we die. In considering others, he argues, we achieve a kind of transcendence without the metaphysical baggage of God.

Ferry himself anticipates the complaint that his conclusion is unsatisfying:

You might object that compared to the doctrine of Christianity - whose promise of the resurrection of the body means that we shall be reunited with those we love after death - a humanism without metaphysics is small beer. I grant you that amongst the available doctrines of salvation, nothing can compete with Christianity - provided, that is, that you are a believer.

So why does Ferry settle for what is really a hopeless, meaningless "humanism without metaphysics"? Because he simply can't, or won't, bring himself to believe that there's more to reality than matter and energy:

If one is not a believer - and one cannot force oneself to believe, nor pretend to believe - then we must learn to think differently about the ultimate question posed by all doctrines of salvation, namely that of the death of a loved one.

Ferry is correct, of course, that one cannot compel belief, either in oneself or another, but what he might be asked is whether he sincerely wants the Christian message to be true. Regardless of his disbelief, does he hope that he's wrong? Many if not most people who claim not to believe that we'll in some sense exist beyond death and that "we shall be reunited with those we love after death" by their own admission do not want such a notion to be true. They don't believe the Christian proclamation, and they don't want the world to be the sort of place where such claims are in fact correct.

The prominent philosopher Thomas Nagel provides us with a good example of this. In his book The Last Word, Nagel writes these words:

In speaking of the fear of religion, I don’t mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper—namely, the fear of religion itself.

I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.

I suspect that the person, on the other hand, who wants theism to be true, who is open to belief in God, is much more likely to find belief slowly creeping over him than those others whom C.S. Lewis describes in The Great Divorce as having, "their fists clenched, their teeth clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouths for food, or their eyes to see." They refuse to allow themselves even to hope that there really is salvation in the Christian sense.

Ferry doesn't seem to be this sort of person, though. He writes at the end of his book:

I find the Christian proposition infinitely more tempting [than any of the alternatives] - except for the fact that I do not believe in it. But were it to be true I would certainly be a taker.

He seems to recognize, even though he doesn't explicitly say it, that unless what we do in this life matters forever, it doesn't matter at all. If death is the end of individual existence then nothing we do has any genuine meaning or significance.

If Ferry's being honest with his readers and himself, if he really is open to "the Christian proposition," then I suspect he's closer to faith than he might realize.

The Roots of Hitler's Ethics

About five years ago Richard Weikart published a study on the roots of the moral thinking of Adolf Hitler, a review of which is posted at Evolution News and Views. Here's an excerpt:

One of the most controversial parts of the movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed was the segment where Ben Stein interviewed the history professor Richard Weikart about his book, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany. Darwinists went apoplectic, deriding Stein and Weikart for daring to sully the good name of Darwin by showing the way that Hitler and German scientists and physicians used evolutionary theory to justify some of their atrocities, such as their campaign to kill the disabled.

Some critics even denied that the Nazis believed in Darwinism at all. Weikart challenges his critics to examine the evidence in his fascinating sequel, Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress, which examines the role of Darwinism and evolutionary ethics in Hitler's worldview.

In this work Weikart helps unlock the mystery of Hitler's evil by vividly demonstrating the surprising conclusion that Hitler's immorality flowed from a coherent ethic. Hitler was inspired by evolutionary ethics to pursue the utopian project of biologically improving the human race. Hitler's evolutionary ethic underlay or influenced almost every major feature of Nazi policy: eugenics (i.e., measures to improve human heredity, including compulsory sterilization), euthanasia, racism, population expansion, offensive warfare, and racial extermination.

Once people reject the idea that morality is rooted in an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good being the next logical step is to abandon the idea that there's any objective moral standard at all. This leads inevitably to moral arbitrariness and subjectivity, i.e. what's right is whatever feels right to me. Moral subjectivism leads directly to egoism, i.e. the belief that one should put one's own interests ahead of the interests of others, and egoism leads to the ethic of "might makes right".

Hitler's "morality" was completely consistent with his rejection of a belief in a personal God. Hitler was who every atheist would also be if they a) had the power and b) were logically consistent. Thankfully, few of them are both powerful and consistent, but in the 20th century some were. Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot all were atheists who had complete power within their sphere and acted consistently with their naturalistic, materialistic worldview. The consequences were completely predictable.

Getting it Not Quite Right

A recent Gallup poll reveals that the number of people who hold to the strict creationist view that God created humans in their present form at some time within the last 10,000 years or so has declined and the number of people who believe in some form of evolution, whether naturalistic or directed by God has increased:

The percentage of U.S. adults who believe that God created humans in their present form at some time within the last 10,000 years or so -- the strict creationist view -- has reached a new low. Thirty-eight percent of U.S. adults now accept creationism, while 57% believe in some form of evolution -- either God-guided or not -- saying man developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life.

Allahpundit, a commentator at HotAir.com, looks at the data and writes:

The pure creationist position was trending downward, then made a big comeback in 2011 for no obvious reason. It’s tempting to call that result an outlier or statistical noise, but the hybrid position of guided evolution polled poorly in the low 30s in 2011 and remained flat in 2014, suggesting a real trend. Now suddenly it’s come surging back. Why? You tell me.

Here's the graph he refers to:

Maybe the answer to Allahpundit's question is that many people who formerly embraced a literal seven-day creation have been persuaded by intelligent design theorists that ID offers a more satisfactory explanation of origins. Many people who may formerly have thought that there was a conflict between evolution and theism might now, after almost three decades of work by intelligent design theorists, believe that the two are compatible. In other words, the survey is stuck with a format of questions that are no longer very helpful. David Klinghoffer, commenting Gallup's questions, correctly observes that,

Since 1982 [Gallup] has been asking:

Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of human beings — 1) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process, 2) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process, 3) God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so?

What I wish they would ask is:

Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of living creatures – 1) Animal and human life arose and developed over billions of years, guided by a designing intelligence, whether God or otherwise, 2) Animal and human life arose and developed over billions of years, by strictly blind, natural processes, unguided by any intelligent agent, 3) God created all animal and human life at one time within the last 10,000 years or so?

Now that would tell you a lot about the state of the evolution debate. But the modern intelligent design movement didn’t exist 35 years ago, so Gallup is stuck in 1982.

The Gallup poll also shows that fewer than one in five Americans holds a secular view of evolution, but that proportion has almost doubled from about 10% in 2000 to about 19% today. Allahpundit makes a compelling argument that this number gives a pretty good idea of the percentage of atheists in the U.S. That number is usually pegged at around 3% to 10%, but it may be much higher. Here's Allahpundit:

The 19 percent figure for evolution without God is interesting in light of [a] recent [study] suggesting there may be many more atheists in the U.S. than everyone believes. Ask people if they think of themselves as “atheist” and chances are no more than three percent will say yes. Ask them if they believe in God without using the A-word and maybe 10 percent will say no.

How many people secretly believe there is no God, though, and are simply reluctant to say so, even to a pollster? [The] study ... divided people into two groups and gave them identical questionnaires filled with innocuous statements (e.g., “I own a dog”) — with one exception. One group had the statement “I do not believe in God” added to their questionnaire.

People in each group were asked to identify how many of the statements were true of them without specifying which ones were true. Then the numbers from the control group were compared to the numbers from the “I do not believe in God” group. Result: As best as researchers can tell from the numerical disparity, 26 percent don’t believe in God, way, way more than most surveys show. I’m skeptical that the number runs quite that high, but the fact that 19 percent told Gallup they believe in evolution without God may mean the number of atheists is higher than the 3-10 percent range usually cited.

After all, how many religious believers are likely to also believe that God played no role in man’s development? Per Gallup, just one percent of weekly churchgoers signed on to that proposition and just six percent of nearly weekly or monthly observers did. “Evolution without God” may be a reasonably good proxy for atheism.

If so, the ratio of theists to atheists in this country is about 4 to 1. Of course, a lot of people can believe or disbelieve in God without acting or thinking consistently with that belief, and many respondents to the study may not have answered the questionnaire in a manner consistent with their true convictions. A similar poll several years ago, for instance, found that 9% of those who claimed to be atheists prayed at least once a week. One wonders how carefully those folks thought about their responses.