Cosmic Insignificance

Irish Philosopher Nick Hughes contemplates how teensy tiny we are compared to the vastness of the cosmos and wonders whether we have any significance sub specie aeternitatis:

Humanity occupies a very small place in an unfathomably vast Universe. Travelling at the speed of light – 671 million miles per hour – it would take us 100,000 years to cross the Milky Way. But we still wouldn’t have gone very far. By recent estimates, the Milky Way is just one of 2 trillion galaxies in the observable Universe, and the region of space that they occupy spans at least 90 billion light-years.

If you imagine Earth shrunk down to the size of a single grain of sand, and you imagine the size of that grain of sand relative to the entirety of the Sahara Desert, you are still nowhere near to comprehending how infinitesimally small a position we occupy in space. The American astronomer Carl Sagan put the point vividly in 1994 when discussing the famous ‘Pale Blue Dot’ photograph taken by Voyager 1. Our planet, he said, is nothing more than ‘a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam’.

And that’s just the spatial dimension. The observable Universe has existed for around 13.8 billion years. If we shrink that span of time down to a single year, with the Big Bang occurring at midnight on 1 January, the first Homo sapiens made an appearance at 22:24 on 31 December. It’s now 23:59:59, as it has been for the past 438 years, and at the rate we’re going it’s entirely possible that we’ll be gone before midnight strikes again. The Universe, on the other hand, might well continue existing forever, for all we know. ...our time on this mote of dust will amount to nothing more than a blip. In the grand scheme of things we are very, very small.

For Sagan, the Pale Blue Dot underscores our responsibility to treat one another with kindness and compassion. But reflection on the vastness of the Universe and our physical and temporal smallness within it often takes on an altogether darker hue. If the Universe is so large, and we are so small and so fleeting, doesn’t it follow that we are utterly insignificant and inconsequential?

This thought can be a spur to nihilism. If we are so insignificant, if our existence is so trivial, how could anything we do or are – our successes and failures, our anxiety and sadness and joy, all our busy ambition and toil and endeavour, all that makes up the material of our lives – how could any of that possibly matter?

Well, it doesn't. At least it doesn't given both Hughes' and Sagan's atheism. Significance cannot be conferred on humanity by the cosmos any more than it can be conferred on us, to borrow Hughes' comparison, by a pile of rocks. It can only be conferred by a person who values us, but then we are only significant to that person (and to ourselves, too, I assume). For humanity as a whole to have significance it must have value to a person who stands outside humanity.

Hughes suggests that this is at least part of the appeal of theism. If there is no God then humanity has no more significance than a swarm of bacteria in a fetid pond. If, however, there is a God who created us and all else then how big we are and how big the cosmos is by comparison are simply irrelevant facts, as are the facts about how distressingly short our life span is. What matters is that we have value, and therefore significance, to the God who made us.

Hughes doesn't believe there is a God, though, so he's understandably reluctant to accept this solution to his problem:

The pessimistic view, then, is that, because we occupy such a small and brief place in the cosmos, we and the things we do are insignificant and inconsequential. But is that right? Are we insignificant and inconsequential? And if we are, should we respond with despair and nihilism?

Nihilism and despair would seem to be a rational, though not very attractive, response, but Hughes spends the balance of his essay trying to avoid it. He mentions, but doesn't agree with, an analogy put forward by Guy Kahane, a philosopher at Oxford:

A single diamond sitting on display in a huge empty warehouse might be small by comparison with its surroundings, but that doesn’t mean that it’s insignificant or that it merits no attention. Since, Kahane argues, the primary source of value is intelligent life, it follows that our cosmic significance depends on how much intelligent life there is out there. If the Universe is teeming with it, if we are just one diamond among millions or billions of others, many of which are just as large and bright, or more so, then we are indeed cosmically insignificant. If, however, we are the sole exemplars of intelligent life, then we are of immense cosmic significance: we are a single diamond shining forth, surrounded by nothingness, like an incandescent beacon of light in the Stygian night.

This seems wrong to me. The only reason a solitary diamond has any significance at all is because we assign it value. If a solitary diamond were surrounded by an endless void it would have no significance at all, and if we're surrounded by nothing but mindless, impersonal atoms then neither do we.

Hughes concludes his essay on a melancholy note. I think he intends it to be a brave affirmation of significance, but it sounds more like whistling past the graveyard. He concedes that we might be insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but we still have things that matter to us,

[T]he things that we care about most – our relationships, our projects and goals, our shared experiences, social justice, the pursuit of knowledge, the creation and appreciation of art, music and literature, and the future and fate of ours and other species – do not depend to any considerable extent on our having control over a vast but largely irrelevant Universe.

Yes, these things matter to us, or at least some of us, but why should they? If we're all just doomed specks of dust what does our music and social justice matter? Is not our insistence on the significance of these things like the insistence of a condemned man that it's important that he make the bed in his jail cell before being led off to the gallows? The significance we give these things is little more than an arbitrary valuation. They are valuable because they divert our minds from the sheer pointlessness and emptiness of human existence - a condition that lies at the logical endpoint of Hughes' naturalism.

Can the Brain Explain it All?

Michael Egnor is a neuroscientist and neurosurgeon who has long been haunted, in his words, by the question whether our material brains are all that's responsible for our cognitive experience or whether in addition to the material brain we also possess an immaterial mind. In an article at First Things he describes a disconcerting experience he had while operating on a patient who was talking to him while he was in the process of removing her frontal lobes.

He writes:

Francis Crick, neuroscientist and co-discoverer of the helical structure of DNA, expressed the widespread view that the mind is a function of material stuff: “A person’s mental activities are entirely due to the behavior of nerve cells, glial cells, and the atoms, ions, and molecules that make them up and influenced them.”

But, Egnor goes on to ask, if that materialist view is true, "How is it possible to converse with someone while removing the large portions of her brain that serve thought and reasoning?"

Egnor explains why he's skeptical that the materialist view is correct:

I’m a neuroscientist and professor of neurosurgery. The mind-brain question haunts me. Neurosurgeons alter the brain on a daily basis, and what we find doesn’t fit the prevailing view that the brain runs the mind as computer hardware runs software.

I have scores of patients who are missing large areas of their brains, yet who have quite good minds. I have a patient born with two-thirds of her brain absent. She’s a normal junior high kid who loves to play soccer. Another patient, missing a similar amount of brain tissue, is an accomplished musician with a master’s degree in English.

How can this be? It wasn’t until I read Thomas Aquinas that I began to understand.

The human soul also has intellect and will, powers of a wholly different kind. With our intellect, we can think of universal concepts, such as mercy and justice and abstract mathematics. With our will, we can act on abstract principles. Because thinking of abstract concepts entails thoughts removed from particular things, Aquinas reasoned, intellect couldn’t be a material thing. Intellect and will are immaterial powers.

Aquinas taught that our soul’s immaterial powers are only facilitated by matter, not caused by it, and the correlation is loose. His insight presaged certain findings of modern neuroscience.

Wilder Penfield, an early-twentieth-century neurosurgeon who pioneered seizure surgery, noted that during brain stimulation on awake patients, he was never able to stimulate the mind itself—the sense of “I”—but only fragmented sensations and perceptions and movements and memories. Our core identity cannot be evoked or altered by physical stimulation of the brain.

Relatedly, Penfield observed that spontaneous electrical discharges in the brain cause involuntary sensations and movements and even emotions, but never abstract reasoning or calculation. There are no “calculus” seizures or “moral” seizures, in which patients involuntarily take second derivatives or ponder mercy.

One objection to the suggestion that we possess an immaterial mind is that interaction between the material and the immaterial seems incomprehensible. That may be true, but that's not a reason to think that they don't interact. After all, we can't comprehend how a material object like a star can warp an immaterial entity like space, but ever since Einstein we believe it happens. Nor can we comprehend how striking our thumb with a hammer, a material action, can cause the immaterial sensation of pain, but we know it does.

Egnor injects a very disturbing bit of research into his essay when he reminds us of the discovery that at least some comatose individuals are actually conscious:

In the past decade, British researcher Adrian Owen has found using fMRI imaging that some patients with such severe brain damage that they are considered to be in a persistent vegetative state are actually capable of sophisticated thought. The “comatose” patients’ brain scans show that, in reply to questions by an examiner, the patients are in fact thinking and imagining.

This is disturbing because it means that at least some people in comas are actually aware and thinking, but completely unable to communicate with the outside world. They're trapped in their bodies, which must be a hellish condition.

Egnor concludes with this asseveration:

Materialism, the view that matter is all that exists, is the premise of much contemporary thinking about what a human being is. Yet evidence from the laboratory, operating room, and clinical experience points to a less fashionable conclusion: Human beings straddle the material and immaterial realms.

If he's correct then it could well be that we are possessed of a mind which very well could be immune to the death of the body. In other words, contrary to the pronouncements of materialists like Francis Crick, and as hard as it may be for some of them to believe, our physical death may not be the end of our existence.

Who Wants to Live Forever?

I sometimes ask my students if they wouldn't want to live forever and often receive the reply, even from students who are religious, strangely enough, that they don't want to live forever. Yet so much that we do in life seems to be an attempt to stave off death.

If you had a terminal illness and a cure was discovered would you not want to avail yourself of the cure? Do not many of us exercise and diet in a perhaps futile effort to extend our years? The idea of eternal life is what gives most major religions their appeal (except for some of my students, apparently) and it's what drives a relatively recent secular movement called Transhumanism.

An article by Philip Bunn in which he discusses a book about transhumanism explains the goals of, and rationale for, the movement. Here are some excerpts:

Mark O’Connell’s excellent new book “To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death” follows the author’s interactions and interviews with self-professed transhumanists.

This eclectic collection of scientists, tech giants, journalists, and enthusiasts are prophets of a coming post-human species that embraces technology as the means to transcend present biological and psychological limitations. ...

The book serves a more important purpose than simply describing transhumanism, however: O’Connell’s interactions with transhumanists show that modern man is not prepared to argue against transhumanism. He must either accept it or find a theological alternative.

It seems that, sociologically speaking, transhumanism springs from the same part of man that desires to create religion. Man fears death, so must overcome it in some way. From this fear, the social scientists tell us, man creates fantasies about deities and paradises, resurrection and glorification. In its own way, transhumanism becomes religious insofar as it represents another in a long line of sets of belief adopted by man in hopes of overcoming his mortality. This time, man seeks help not from mystical transcendent beings but from his own will, instantiated in technology.

Some religious sects like Mormonism have made a place for transhumanist ideas, but transhumanists like Max More have made clear that traditional Christian doctrine and transhumanism are largely incompatible, given the difficulty of reconciling both sets of claims. However, on at least one point, the transhumanist and the Christian agree: death is an enemy to be conquered. The Christian New Testament claims “the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.” Transhumanists concur, and propose that if death can be conquered through technology, death should be conquered through technology.

.... In his research, O’Connell encounters scientists who tell him that living to extreme ages will be possible soon, within his and his child’s lifetime. Some subjects interviewed even theorize that eventually we could theoretically “upload” consciousness and become more machine than man. ...

Like my students, O'Connell himself refuses to accept that an eternal life is desirable:

Despite hearing the arguments and understanding their source, O’Connell refuses to accept transhumanism. This is not because he thinks transhumanist ideals are unachievable, but because he cannot stomach the idea of living forever, or being himself in any other physical form. He ultimately objects not to the practicality of the transhumanist project but to the propriety of it.

O’Connell’s resistance to transhumanism culminates in a fascinating exchange in the book where O’Connell is forced to defend death and mortality as preferable to eternal life and vitality. He mounts standard arguments: Life’s brevity is what gives it value. Impending death makes our continued existence meaningful in some way. Also, life sucks; why extend it?

O’Connell’s transhumanist companions deftly deflect his objections. “There [is] no beauty in finitude,” they say. They argue that O’Connell’s qualms come from an essential human need to grapple with death and somehow justify it as good so we can avoid constant dread and despair. And, O’Connell admits, the transhumanists are right. There is something palpably absurd about defending death as some sort of human good....

Even if, as O’Connell theorizes, “the idea of meaning [is] itself an illusion, a necessary human fiction,” man has continued maintaining that illusion for millennia and seems to persist in preferring life to death. Unless O’Connell and others like him are prepared and able to convince the bulk of humanity that death is a happy end to be embraced, not fought against, it seems a choice has presented itself. This choice is between different religions that offer escape from death. Transhumanism offers the materialist a religion through which to conquer death; other religions offer the same to those who have faith in gods other than technology.

Quite so, but death cannot be conquered completely through technology. Even were we to become machines no machine is indestructible. We will still die through accident, murder and war, and our deaths will be all the more tragic since we could have lived indefinitely longer than we did. A child's death is always much more grievous than that of an elderly person for that very reason.

Moreover, the sense of despair and grief at the death of loved ones would not be alleviated in a transhumanist world because there'd still be no hope, on transhumanism's atheistic materialism, of ever being reunited with those we've lost again. The loss would be eternal.

Perhaps the problem with the transhumanist project isn't the desirability of living forever. The problem is the indefinite extension of a meaningless life. Even if a few generations from now people were to live for two hundred years their lives would be no more meaningful or happier for being longer. Meaning, significance, and purpose are what makes life worth living and these are not qualities we acquire by making ourselves more machine-like. To live just to live would be tedious and boring. Whether we live eighty years or eight hundred years the important question is "what are we living for?"

The philosopher Jean Paul Sartre in his novel The Nausea describes a man sitting in a restaurant thinking to himself, "Here we are eating and drinking to preserve our precious existence, and there's nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing." Living forever would do nothing to fill the existential emptiness in the soul of modern man.

Whether we are materialistic transhumanists or we believe the traditional Christian version of eternal life the eternity to which we aspire must be meaningful and immensely satisfying. Otherwise, it'd be hell.

An Independence Day Meditation

Tomorrow Americans celebrate their Independence Day, the day set aside to commemorate the signing of our Declaration of Independence from the Mother Country and the commencement of our experiment as a constitutional republic.

Citizens of most of the world's nations can point to aspects of their history of which they're justly proud and other aspects which they could wish never happened. Americans are no different. There's much to be proud of and some things we could wish were not part of our history. Even so, the cavils of malcontents primarily in our universities notwithstanding, we have much to celebrate.

America was founded on certain principles which are rarely enough observed, even in this modern era, despite the lip-service often paid to them. Our Founders declared that all men are created equal, a claim that made the eventual emancipation of slaves and full citizenship of women inevitable.

They forged a nation based on the principles that governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed and that human beings are endowed by God with inherent rights that can't be taken away without due process.

These two principles were alien to the communist and socialist totalitarianisms of the 20th century, a circumstance which resulted in two world wars, countless smaller conflicts, and over 100 million corpses. Our Founders also guaranteed that we'd have the right to free speech and the freedom to practice our religion, two essential rights without which no society can be truly free.

Yes, there are black marks. We treated the Indians horribly, practiced chattel slavery for seventy years after becoming a nation, and contemporary urban crime and dysfunction is as distressing as it is undeniable, but though it may sound like boastfulness or chauvinism (I truly don't mean it to be), it's hard to think of any nation or empire in history that has been more powerful, brought greater prosperity to its people and those of the world, and has at the same time exceeded America in terms of sheer moral goodness.

The point has been made by others that America is one of the few countries where one can immigrate from anywhere in the world and become an American. What's meant by that is this: Moving to Japan doesn't make you Japanese. Moving to China doesn't make you Chinese. Moving to Mexico doesn't make you Mexican and moving to France doesn't make you French, at least not in the sense that moving to America makes you American.

The very fact that so many people want to come here, that the free world looks to America for leadership - moral, political, and military - is compelling evidence for the conviction that America is indispensable. Indeed, the fact that so many want to come here gives the lie to the left's portrayal of America as irredeemably racist, oppressive, and corrupt.

If America ceased to exist what would be the likely consequence? Europe would eventually become a vassal to an expansionist Russia; North Korea would undoubtedly swallow up South Korea and perhaps Japan; China would certainly grab Taiwan and perhaps Indonesia and the Philippines; India and Pakistan, two nuclear nations, would seek to settle old scores; Radical Muslim groups would turn much of the world into an abattoir; and Israel would be in a fight for its existence against much of the Muslim world, a fight that'd probably also result in nuclear war.

It's not unrealistic to fear that without America much of the world would spiral into a state of darkness and violent chaos, with freedom flickering out almost everywhere.

On this Fourth of July let's humbly and gratefully celebrate the fact that America is still the hope of freedom-loving people everywhere. Let's all work, those of us who are Americans, to keep it that way and to strive continuously to be worthy citizens of this great nation.

Kate's Law

Today marks the two-year "anniversary" of the murder of Kate Steinle. Kate was a young woman walking on a pier in San Francisco with her family when an illegal immigrant named Francisco Sanchez, a man who had been deported five times and had seven felony convictions but who had nevertheless been released from jail onto the streets of the sanctuary city that is San Francisco, walked up and shot her in the back.

She died in her father's arms. Her last words were "Help me, Daddy."

As Attorney Jeff Sessions said on Wednesday:

Lopez-Sanchez should never have been on that pier with Kate. He should have been in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). And he would have been if San Francisco had only notified ICE of his release from the city’s custody, as ICE had requested. But San Francisco refused to do so. The city continues to refuse to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. In fact, it’s city policy.

Kate Steinle

In memory of Kate and all the other victims of illegal aliens in this country, the House of Representatives on Thursday passed legislation called "Kate's Law". Under the bill, if a deported alien reentered the U.S. illegally with a felony conviction or three misdemeanors on their record, he or she would go to federal prison for up to 10 years. Someone who is caught illegally crossing the border after having been deported three or more times would also serve up to 10 years.

The bill passed with a vote of 257 to 157, with one Republican voting no and 24 Democrats voting yes.

An earlier bill that would deny federal funds to "sanctuary cities" which refuse to cooperate with immigration authorities, passed with a vote of 228-195 with 3 Democrats voting yes and 7 Republicans voting no.

Both bills must also be passed by the Senate where they will get very little Democrat support and will likely fail since Democrats have already said they will filibuster them and they already blocked an earlier version of Kate's Law in the Senate last year.

It's very difficult to understand why anyone who cares about the Kate Steinles of this nation would oppose this legislation, but everyone, from President Obama to the mayor and sheriff of San Francisco, who refused to enforce our immigration laws, must share responsibility for her death.

Moreover, responsibility for whatever tragedies befall any American citizens in the future at the hands of illegal aliens must be borne by every legislator who refuses to support legislation that would keep those aliens, especially those with criminal records, off our streets.

Earlier on Wednesday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Thomas D. Homan and U.S. Attorney for Utah John W. Huber made their case for the bills during the White House press briefing.

Huber said 40 percent of Utah’s current felony caseload involves criminal alien prosecutions and the number is increasing.

The bills, Huber asserted, would “advance the ball for law enforcement in keeping our communities safe” and “would give officers and prosecutors more tools to protect the public.

Many immigration rights groups have characterized efforts to crack down on sanctuary cities as “anti-immigrant,” but Attorney General Jeff Sessions says it is not sound policy to allow sanctuary cities to flout federal immigration laws.

According to Homan, ICE already has arrested nearly 66,000 individuals this year that were either known or suspected to be in the country illegally. Of those arrested, 48,000 were convicted criminal aliens.

On Wednesday, President Trump highlighted other cases during a White House meeting with more than a dozen families of people who had been victimized by illegal immigrants, including Jamiel Shaw Sr.

Shaw’s 17-year-old son Jamiel was shot and killed by an illegal immigrant in California in March 2008.

“He was living the dream," Shaw said during the meeting. "That was squashed out.”

Why is it "anti-immigrant" to want to take common-sense measures to lessen the chances that there will be more Jamiel Shaws and Kate Steinles in the future? How many of those who oppose these bills would oppose them had Kate or Jamiel been their own daughter or son?

The Democrats can oppose this legislation if they choose, but it's hard to imagine how doing so will help their candidates running for office in 2018.

A Hero You've Never Heard About Before

Oscar Schindler was a German businessman in the early 1940s who was a member in good standing of the Nazi party. Distressed by the horror of what he saw his government doing to Jews he secretly undertook to save as many of them as he could. His story is recorded in the excellent Steven Spielberg movie Schindler's List which, if you haven't ever seen it, you should.

There's a Jewish businessman in Montreal named Steve Maman who owns a luxury car and motorcycle dealership who has been called the Jewish Schindler. In November 2014, Maman founded the Liberation of Christian and Yazidi Children of Iraq (CYCI) to free hostages from ISIS.

Bradley Martin at The Federalist tells the story of how a wealthy Jewish car dealer in Canada got involved in rescuing Christians and Yazidis.

Here's Martin's lede:

At a high-end car and motorcycle dealership in Montreal, a Canadian-Jewish businessman has made it his mission to save Christian and Yazidi girls from ISIS. What began as just another business venture for Steve Maman, a car dealer specializing in luxury automobiles, would turn into saving the lives of thousands of people.

Born in Morocco and immigrating to Canada at a very young age, Maman describes himself as an Orthodox Jew who grew up with “a great sense of being proudly Jewish.” Maman’s journey began following the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein, sons of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Aside from their horrifying reputations consisting of rape, murder, and torture, the brothers also had a voracious appetite for fine automobiles.“

[Uday and Qusay] traveled the world to collect fine cars,” said Maman. “They had over 500 cars in their collection – the most valuable cars in the world – Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Rolls Royces, you name it. They even had a 1958 Bentley Continental Dropped Coupe, which is worth several million dollars."

At the time, Iraq would not allow any of these cars to leave the country. But Maman’s business inquiries resulted in a close friendship with Canon Andrew White, the former Anglican vicar of Baghdad’s St. George’s Church, known by many simply as “the Vicar of Baghdad.”

During one of their conversations, White told Maman of the dangerous situation facing the last five Iraqi Jews who lived in Baghdad. With a history stretching as far back as biblical times, the Iraqi Jewish population once numbered 150,000. This remnant celebrated Shabbat at St. George’s Church under White’s protection. White even recounted how they would celebrate Jewish holidays at the American embassy in Baghdad, alongside American Jews serving in the U.S military.

White also spoke to Maman about the genocide taking place against Christians and Yazidis in Iraq. The vicar gave an account of the thousands of women and children ISIS was holding captive. Amidst the beheadings, torture, and other horrors of the genocide, thousands of women were being sold into sexual slavery. Maman knew he had to do something. “From 1939-1945, Jews were being murdered during the Holocaust,” said Maman, “despite the fact that everyone around knew it was going on. It was three years into the genocide [of Christians and Yazidis] yet nobody acted. That is why I did what I did. I didn’t trust anyone else to do it.” In November 2014, Maman founded the Liberation of Christian and Yazidi Children of Iraq (CYCI) to free hostages from ISIS territory.

In early 2015, Maman was part of a delegation that met with then-Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. After his speech, Maman approached Harper, praising him as a hero for his strong pro-Israel stance and “all he had done for Jews.” According to Maman, “Harper had tears in his eyes and was very touched.” During their meeting, Maman then reported of his plans to rescue women and children from ISIS territory.

“Harper loved the idea,” said Maman. “The [Canadian] federal government and [former Canadian minister of National Defense] Jason Kenney provided support to the rescue efforts under his leadership. We will leave it at that.”

When the vicar left Baghdad in November 2014, he left behind a security team that was integrated into CYCI’s rescue operations. Through a variety of methods, Maman set about trying to liberate as many of the estimated 10,000 women who were being sold in Iraqi slave markets as he possibly could. When ISIS terrorists were away from their homes, civilians would be hired to extract enslaved women and bring them to safety. In total, 140 women and girls were liberated.

“When you see a girl being rescued, you cry,” says Maman. “I don’t care how tough you are, you cry.”

Please read the rest of Martin's account at the link.

Steve Maman

Maman and his organization are doing wonderful work, as is the team led by Jeremy Courtney whose organization Preemptive Love I wrote about a year ago. These people and others like them are the real heroes in our world today, but living as we do in a superficial culture infatuated with celebrity and the trivial we rarely hear about them. This post is a small attempt to rectify that.

Who Believes in White Privilege?

Are all whites beneficiaries of white privilege? Are all whites racists? Is it wrong to categorize an entire group of people? Do all African Americans consider themselves victims of white privilege and racism?

Ami Horowitz interviews both white liberals and black "men (and women) on the street" and comes up with what may be some surprising answers to these questions - surprising in the sense that the white liberals and the minority folks in the video have very different takes on the questions. The video was edited, of course, but even so it's interesting, not to mention humorous.

Listen closely:

Frankly, I'm skeptical of the whole "white privilege" meme. It seems to me little more than a convenient hammer used to drive the nail of white guilt into our collective psyches. I share some thoughts about white privilege in more detail here.

Why It's Not a Right

Last month I put up a post on Viewpoint defending the claim that health care (or health insurance) is neither a right nor a privilege. A friend wrote to ask me to expand on my reasons for holding this view, and I thought I'd share on Viewpoint my response to him.

Here's my reply edited and somewhat expanded. The arguments are the same, I think, whether we're talking about health care or health insurance:

If everyone has a right to have health care provided for them then why do we not also have a right to have a home, food, transportation, clothing, etc. provided for us? All of these are just as important as health care to our well-being, but if we maintain that people have a right to these things that implies that others have an obligation to provide them. We may, as compassionate people, choose to provide them for others, but if so, it's an act of personal or corporate charity, not an obligation imposed on us by others.

If we do think of it as an obligation then the recipient need feel no gratitude, nor is the donor being virtuous or compassionate if all he's doing is meeting a state-imposed requirement.

You yourself made a truly wonderful choice a few years ago to donate a kidney to enable someone to live, and what made your decision so marvelous is precisely that you didn't have a duty or an obligation to do it. It was completely gratuitous.

If, however, you had been coerced by the state to provide the organ then compassion would've been no part of your act. There would've been no more virtue in it than there is in paying your taxes. Likewise, though I'm sure the recipient of your kidney was extremely grateful for your sacrifice, if he/she believed that you had a duty to make that donation, gratitude would've been out of place. That's a major problem with our welfare system, by the way, it stifles both compassion and gratitude by making support of the needy something to which they feel entitled.

Parenthetically, if people have a right to health care do people who are in need of an organ have a right to be given that organ? If so, doesn't that mean that we have an obligation to provide our organs to them, at least if, like kidneys, we have more than we need? If they have a right to our money to subsidize their health care why would they not have a right to our organs, especially those organs of which we have a surplus?

Another difficulty is that a "right" to health care is not like other rights that are intrinsic to our being human - rights like the right to life, liberty, etc. Those rights impose no duties upon others beyond obligating them to refrain from impeding us in our exercise of the right (within reasonable limits, of course). A right to health care, however, imposes an obligation on other people to provide it.

Suppose I live an irresponsible lifestyle that causes me to develop diabetes with all its concomitant health complications. Then you, essentially, have a duty to subsidize my irresponsible lifestyle by providing insurance for me against those complications. In my opinion, you should be no more required to pay for my irresponsible lifestyle choices than you should be required to pay my grocery bill or mortgage. You may choose to do so (and you, being the sort of man you are, probably would), but it would be an act of grace, not of duty.

Suppose, too, that society can't afford to pay for health care for everyone and can no longer insure it without bankrupting itself. What are the reasonable limits on one's right to health care? If no money was available to fund it we wouldn't claim that individuals' rights were being denied because their health care was no longer being subsidized, but then health care would be a basic human right only if our nation can afford it.

At what point, then, do we decide that providing health care for others is no longer affordable? Surely, at some point the right to keep one's property overrides another person's right to have health care. If we deny that then we're saying that we must provide health care coverage even if it means confiscating everyone else's property in order to pay for it, or if it means forcing medical professionals to provide care for free.

Health care is like owning a house. We all have the right to own a house - no one can legally prevent us from purchasing one - but we don't have the right to demand that others buy the house for us no matter how badly we might need it. If we can't afford housing then people may wish to provide shelter for us, but we don't have the right to demand it of them.

At least that's how I see it.

Understand, this is not an argument against single-payer or Obamacare. We may as a society comprised of good and generous people decide we want to provide health coverage for everyone, to the extent that a wise, affordable program can be crafted. It is an argument, however, against the assertion that anyone has an inherent human right to such coverage.

OK GO and First Causes

Watch this video of a song titled This Too Shall Pass by a group called OK GO and ask yourself what would have happened if there'd been no first cause to initiate the sequence of events it depicts. Of course, if there were no first cause in the sequence of cause and effect in the video then there'd simply be no subsequent effects. Without a first cause nothing would happen. This is essentially a simple version of the Cosmological Argument for the existence of God called the Kalam Cosmological Argument:

The people shown cheering at the end of the video are the students who designed and constructed the apparatus which leads to another question worth pondering. Could such an apparatus have resulted from the random action of blind chance and natural law or did it require intelligent engineers to put it all together. This question highlights a version of another argument for the existence of God based on the design inherent in the cosmos as well as in living things.

Once life appeared on earth then perhaps it could have proliferated and diversified via mutation and natural selection, but how did the first living things, cells far more intricate and complex than the Rube Goldberg apparatus in the video, ever come to be in the first place? Are blind, purposeless processes a sufficient explanation or do those first life forms, like the Rube Goldberg device, require the input of an intelligent agent?

For a simple explanation of the Kalam argument you might want to watch this video (although the video doesn't use the word "Kalam," it's the Kalam version of the Cosmological Argument that it's describing.):

Wrong About Everything

Matthew Continetti at The Washington Free Beacon has some sage advice for consumers of news in our hyper-politicized, hyper-partisan media culture.

He writes:

Events are turning me into a radical skeptic. I no longer believe what I read, unless what I am reading is an empirically verifiable account of the past. I no longer have confidence in polls, because it has become impossible to separate the signal from the noise. What I have heard from the media and political class over the last several years has been so spectacularly proven wrong by events, again and again, that I sometimes wonder why I continue to read two newspapers a day before spending time following journalists on Twitter. Habit, I guess. A sense of professional obligation, I suppose. Maybe boredom.

The fact is that almost the entirety of what one reads in the paper or on the web is speculation. The writer isn't telling you what happened, he is offering an interpretation of what happened, or offering a projection of the future. The best scenario is that these theories are novel, compelling, informed, and based on reporting and research. But that is rarely the case. More often the interpretations of current events, and prophesies of future ones, are merely the products of groupthink, or dogma, or emotions, or wish-casting, memos to friends written by 27-year-olds who, in the words of Ben Rhodes, "literally know nothing." There was a time when newspapers printed astrology columns. They no longer need to. The pseudoscience is on the front page.

There's much more of interest in Continetti's column at the link and I encourage you to read it. For my part, I think he's right, even though I suppose what he says could apply to Viewpoint as much as any other blog. The difference is, I think, that this blog is clearly a platform for opinions, not news, and I don't pretend it's anything else.

In any case, I don't think we should give up on trying to be informed by our media, but we do need to be very critical readers, viewers and listeners. This is especially the case if we get our information from cable news shows and talk radio. Not every show on either of these venues is overly biased, but both are populated with programming and personalities who are committed advocates of a particular ideology. Even when I think the people I'm listening to are correct in what they're saying I'm often dismayed by the manner in which they say it.

For just one example, hosts on both left and right on television and radio will make criticisms of their opponents (i.e. Trump or Obama) which could just as well apply to their preferred heroes (i.e. Trump or Obama) whom they wouldn't dream of criticizing. This is not only tendentious, it seriously diminishes their credibility, not to mention that it makes it extremely hard to refrain from turning them off in disgust.

On occasion hosts on one of these venues will have someone of a contrary viewpoint on their program, but they'll frequently step all over their guest, interrupting and talking over the guest, to prevent him or her from being heard. Chris Matthews at MSNBC and Sean Hannity at Fox are particularly egregious examples of the type.

It's probably a good rule of thumb whenever we read or hear some personality make a criticism of someone to ask oneself what evidence they're offering to buttress the criticism, and does the criticism they're making apply with equal force to their own political champions. If the answers to those questions are "not much" and "yes." then tune them out. They're not informing you, they're propagandizing you.

Continetti closes his piece with a quote from the late Michael Crichton: "Like a bearded nut in robes on the sidewalk proclaiming the end of the world is near, the media is just doing what makes it feel good, not reporting hard facts. We need to start seeing the media as a bearded nut on the sidewalk, shouting out false fears. It's not sensible to listen to it."

Sadly, for much of the media - and not just cable and talk radio, either - this is good advice.

Powerful Indictment

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and founder of the AHA Foundation. Asra Q. Nomani, an author and former Wall Street Journal reporter, is a co-founder of the Muslim Reform Movement.

Ali has written several books about her life as a female Somali refugee from Islam and its attendant horrors. She has been the target of credible death threats because she's been an outspoken and eloquent critic of sharia in particular and Muslim beliefs in general.

Ali and Ms Nomani were invited recently to testify as scholars before the U.S. Senate about Islamic ideology, but both of them were completely ignored by the feminist senators on the Intelligence Committee prompting them to write an op-ed in the New York Times about their experience. Here's the heart of their column:

Last week, Senator Kamala Harris, a Democrat from California, made headlines when Republican senators interrupted her at a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee while she interrogated Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The clip of the exchange went viral; journalists, politicians and everyday Americans debated what the shushing signified about our still sexist culture.

[Nevertheless] the Democrats on the panel, including Senator Harris and three other Democratic female senators — North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp, New Hampshire’s Maggie Hassan and Missouri’s Claire McCaskill — did not ask either of us a single question.

Just as we are invisible to the mullahs at the mosque, we were invisible to the Democratic women in the Senate.

How to explain this experience? Perhaps Senators Heitkamp, Harris, Hassan and McCaskill are simply uninterested in sexism and misogyny. But obviously, given their outspoken support of critical women’s issues, such as the kidnapping of girls in Nigeria and campus sexual assault, that’s far from the case.

No, what happened that day was emblematic of a deeply troubling trend among progressives when it comes to confronting the brutal reality of Islamist extremism and what it means for women in many Muslim communities here at home and around the world. When it comes to the pay gap, abortion access and workplace discrimination, progressives have much to say. But we’re still waiting for a march against honor killings, child marriages, polygamy, sex slavery or female genital mutilation.

Sitting before the senators that day were two women of color: Ayaan is from Somalia; Asra is from India. Both of us were born into deeply conservative Muslim families. Ayaan is a survivor of female genital mutilation and forced marriage. Asra defied Shariah by having a baby while unmarried. And we have both been threatened with death by jihadists for things we have said and done. Ayaan cannot appear in public without armed guards.

In other words, when we speak about Islamist oppression, we bring personal experience to the table in addition to our scholarly expertise. Yet the feminist mantra so popular when it comes to victims of sexual assault — believe women first — isn’t extended to us. Neither is the notion that the personal is political. Our political conclusions are dismissed as personal; our personal experiences dismissed as political.

That’s because in the rubric of identity politics, our status as women of color is canceled out by our ideas, which are labeled “conservative” — as if opposition to violent jihad, sex slavery, genital mutilation or child marriage were a matter of left or right. This not only silences us, it also puts beyond the pale of liberalism a basic concern for human rights and the individual rights of women abused in the name of Islam.

There is a real discomfort among progressives on the left with calling out Islamic extremism. Partly they fear offending members of a “minority” religion and being labeled racist, bigoted or Islamophobic. There is also the idea, which has tremendous strength on the left, that non-Western women don’t need “saving” — and that the suggestion that they do is patronizing at best. After all, the thinking goes, if women in America still earn less than men for equivalent work, who are we to criticize other cultures?

This is extreme moral relativism disguised as cultural sensitivity. And it leads good people to make excuses for the inexcusable. The silence of the Democratic senators is a reflection of contemporary cultural pressures. Call it identity politics, moral relativism or political correctness — it is shortsighted, dangerous and, ultimately, a betrayal of liberal values.

The hard truth is that there are fundamental conflicts between universal human rights and the principle of Shariah, or Islamic law, which holds that a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man’s; between freedom of religion and the Islamist idea that artists, writers, poets and bloggers should be subject to blasphemy laws; between secular governance and the Islamist goal of a caliphate; between United States law and Islamist promotion of polygamy, child marriage and marital rape; and between freedom of thought and the methods of indoctrination, or dawa, with which Islamists propagate their ideas.

Defending universal principles against Islamist ideology, not denying that these conflicts exist, is surely the first step in a fight whose natural leaders in Washington should be women like Kamala Harris and Claire McCaskill — both outspoken advocates for American women.

There may be reasons why progressives are reluctant to criticize a set of beliefs which, when espoused by other groups such as the Westboro Baptists, the KKK, male chauvinists, Christian fundamentalists, and others, they have no difficulty ridiculing and condemning in the harshest tones. Whatever those reasons may be, however, I doubt that any of them are good, and they're certainly not consistent with the liberal ideology they profess.

Sloppy Argument

John Zeigler at Mediaite has written a column castigating Donald Trump, a column so sloppily argued that it's hard to take it seriously. Zeigler is upset that more conservatives are not also upset that Trump "lied" about having taped his conversation in the Oval Office with James Comey.

He begins with some background:

To the shock of no one with a functioning and objective brain, it was finally revealed today that President Donald Trump, contrary to previous public statements, does NOT have any tapes of his conversations with then FBI Director James Comey. This official revelation should be a rather big deal, but much like nearly everything involving Trump, it likely won’t be.

Let’s be very clear about what really happened. After Trump suddenly fired Comey and was stunned by the backlash, word began to “leak” out about Comey’s version of their conversations. Trump then tweeted that Comey “better hope there are no tapes” of those discussions. We now know that Trump (unless he is a complete imbecile) knew when he made that pronouncement that no such tapes existed, and yet he waited several weeks, dodging many opportunities to clarify, before finally admitting that it was all just a bluff.

Zeigler then gives three reasons why Trump's tweet about the tapes is so outrageous:

First, there is the issue of Trump strongly suggesting something that he knew to be untrue and purposely allowing people, including Comey, to believe it for several weeks. I don’t know what that is called in this post-truth era, but where I come from that is still a lie. To a few people (I think/hope), lies by the President of the United States still matter, at least a little.

This is just silly. Trump didn't suggest that the tapes actually exist. That's an interpretation of his words that hostile interpreters have read into them. Nor is it a lie to say that "Comey better hope there are no tapes". A proposition, to be a lie, must be false, and there's no sensible reading of Trump's words that can turn them into a false proposition. If people have jumped to the conclusion that Trump was claiming that tapes definitely exist that's their fault, not Trump's.

....Even more nefariously, Trump was clearly trying to intimidate Comey, a likely key witness in a criminal investigation, into being afraid to offer specific details of their discussions because it might not match with tapes, which he was using the credibility of his office to strongly suggest existed. It is not hard to imagine that, in Trump’s mind (he didn’t know about Comey’s memos at that time) this would greatly chasten Comey in what he might say or testify to because he would fear being contradicted by audio evidence.

This is also silly, if not incoherent. What Trump was obviously doing was attempting to insure that Comey told the truth about their conversation. It'd hardly be helpful to Trump to frighten or intimidate Comey into saying anything that would be contradicted by tapes, if they existed. Why would Trump even raise the possibility of tapes unless he was trying to convince Comey of the need to be truthful in his statements about his conversations with the President?

Third, the practical impact of Trump shooting his mouth off about these non-existent tapes could end up being catastrophic to his presidency. Because of the “tapes” tweet, Comey let the cat out of the bag about his memos and, in turn, this helped provoke the naming of Robert Mueller as special counsel. Much like with his “Muslim Travel Ban,” it sure seems like Trump’s own words turn out to haunt him in the legal arena more than just about anything else possibly could.

This may or may not be correct, but it assumes that Comey would not have discussed his memos if Trump hadn't mentioned the possibility of tapes. How Zeigler knows that Comey would've kept the existence of the memos secret he doesn't say. An assertion like this should be supported with at least a little bit of evidence, but Zeigler gives us none.

One thing I agree with Zeigler on, though, is that Trump's tweets have often been unhelpful to his presidency, but in this instance the only reason to think that Trump did something that should arouse the ire of all decent persons is to impose on his tweet words and intentions that simply aren't there.

One need not be a Trump apologist to insist that weak, sloppy arguments against him - by those on both left and right - are not only unfair to the president but also diminish the credibility and stature of the people who make them.

Too Little Time

Ann Gauger, co-author of Science and Human Origins, and senior scientist at the Biologic Institute, argues in this video, and in her book, that the time necessary to fix the number of mutations necessary to evolve a human from a chimp-like predecessor is greater than the age of the universe.

In other words, even if it were possible to coordinate the needed mutations so that they would bring about the desired effect, it would take billions of years for these mutations to occur in just the right sequence, at least if they were to occur by chance.

Gauger is not saying that man did not arise from an ape-like ancestor, but rather that if he did, it is astronomically improbable that his evolution was driven solely by physical mechanisms like chance mutations, genetic drift, and natural selection. In order to make such an evolution plausible there must be something else, something in addition to the physical processes, that can drive biological change toward a goal, something that has foresight and engineering genius. A mind.

Apart from a mind behind the process, or something like mind, there's very little reason to think that Darwinian evolution is anything more than a materialist fairy tale.

Gauger's book is a good read and very informative, especially her chapter in which she discusses all the changes that would need to take place to derive a human from an ancestral ape.

Where's the Beef?

Readers of a certain age will recall that back in the 1980s the Wendy's hamburger chain ran a television ad in which they challenged their competitors to compare the amount of beef in their burgers to the amount in Wendy's. Their question to their competitors, "Where's the beef?" became a pop culture slogan for implying that something lacked any real substance.

David Brooks at the New York Times has implicitly raised that question of the Democrats in a recent column in which he called attention to a fact that a lot of people have been wondering about for some time. Despite all the talk about President Trump having colluded with the Russians to swing last November's election his way there's been almost zero evidence adduced by anyone to substantiate that any such collusion has taken place.

It's interesting that Brooks would highlight this little detail since it runs counter to his employer's (i.e. the NYT) obsessions, and it's never a good thing to challenge one's employers nor their obsessions.

In any case, Jack Crowe at The Daily Caller quotes from Brooks' column:

New York Times columnist David Brooks challenged the paper’s dominant narrative in a Tuesday op-ed in which he cautioned critics of President Donald Trump to show restraint in light of the absence of evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials.

“There may be a giant revelation still to come. But as the Trump-Russia story has evolved, it is striking how little evidence there is that any underlying crime occurred — that there was any actual collusion between the Donald Trump campaign and the Russians,” Brooks wrote.

Brooks’ explicit admission that there is no evidence to suggest the Trump campaign colluded with Russian officials to interfere in the 2016 presidential election represents a significant departure from what has been the New York Times editorial position since the multiple ongoing investigations began.

Brooks examines one of the central arguments that Trump’s critics, his own New York Times colleagues among them, have introduced in an effort to implicate him in nefarious activity and quickly dismisses it.

“There were some meetings between Trump officials and some Russians,” Brooks wrote. “But so far no more than you’d expect from a campaign that was publicly and proudly pro-Putin. And so far nothing we know of these meetings proves or even indicates collusion.”

He goes on to admit Trump has made a number of missteps, including firing former FBI director James Comey and subsequently crafting an ill advised tweet hinting at the existence of recordings of his conversations with Comey.

While he says firing Comey was a mistake, he pushes back against the claim that the firing is evidence of obstruction on Trump’s part, pointing out that if a “democratically unsupervised, infinitely financed team of prosecutors” was unleashed on “a paragon of modern presidents,” like Abraham Lincoln, even he might be tempted to fight back.

The Democrats' reasoning seems to be that Hillary couldn't possibly have lost the election unless it were rigged. Trump is a despicable character and must therefore have rigged the election. Thus, the fact that there's no evidence of collusion means we just have to dig deeper because it must be there since Trump must have rigged the election.

So, like Ahab insanely pursuing Moby Dick to the detriment of all aboard The Pequod the Democrats refuse to be diverted from their monomaniacal pursuit of Donald Trump despite what that pursuit does to the credibility of their party or to the well-being of the nation.

Trump tweeted that "They made up a phony collusion with the Russians story, found zero proof, so now they go for obstruction of justice on the phony story. Nice"

“Unless there is some new revelation, that may turn out to be pretty accurate commentary,” Brooks wrote referring to Trump’s tweet.

One wonders what the Democrats will come up with if and when the obstruction of justice investigation also comes up empty. At some point the Democrats have to choose between the good of the country and their manic pursuit of Moby Trump.

What's the Difference?

Here are three or four questions to ponder today:

1. Should a doctor who believes that it's immoral to perform a surgery on someone who insists she wants to be crippled because she doesn't want to be guilty of "ableism" be required to perform the surgery? Should the doctor be subject to a lawsuit or fine if he or she refuses to perform the surgery to deliberately cripple the patient?

2. Should a doctor who believes it's a form of child abuse to mutilate a young girl in what's called female circumcision nevertheless be required to provide the service? Should the doctor be subject to a lawsuit or fine if he or she refuses to perform the surgery to deliberately desensitize the girl?

3. Should a doctor who believes abortion is immoral nevertheless be required to perform the procedure on a woman who demands that he do so? Should the doctor be subject to a lawsuit or fine if he or she refuses to perform the procedure?

If the reader answers any of these questions "yes" then it's fair to say that the reader doesn't hold individual freedom and freedom of conscience in very high regard.

If the reader answers any of these questions "no" then that raises a fourth question:

4. Why should bakers and florists be required to provide a service that they believe would be immoral? Should these businesspersons be subject to a lawsuit or fine if they refuse to participate in, say, a gay wedding?

There may be a good answer to this question, but I'm not sure what it would be, at least not if the reader answered "no" to any of the first three questions. What's the salient difference, after all, between #4 and #1-3?

Why Fathers Matter

When David Blankenhorn's Fatherless America came out in 1995 it became an instant classic on the importance of men to the well-being of the American family. Blankenhorn said so many things in that book that needed to be said after our society had suffered through two decades of radical feminism with its relentless downplaying of the need for traditional two-parent families, and even though the book came out over two decades ago, what he said in 1995 needs saying as much today as it did then. Recall Gloria Steinem's aphorism that "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." It turned out that women and children both need men, at least fathers, as much as a fish needs water.

Yesterday was Father's Day so today might be a good time to remind ourselves of some of the key points Blankenhorn illuminates in Fatherless America.

He tells us, for instance, that men need to be fathers. Fatherhood is society's most important role for men. More than any other activity it helps men become good men. Fathers are more likely to obey the law, to be good citizens, and to care about the needs of others. Men who remain single are more likely than those who marry to die young, or commit crimes, or both (This is a point also made by George Gilder in his equally fine 1986 book Men and Marriage which I heartily recommend).

Children need fathers as protectors. Eighty-four percent of all cases of non-parental child abuse occur in single parent homes and of these cases, 64% of them occur at the hands of mom's boyfriend. Statistically speaking, teenage girls are far safer in the company of their father than in the company of any other man.

Children need fathers as providers. Fatherlessness is the single most powerful determinant of childhood poverty. Regardless of how poverty is measured, single women with children are the poorest of all demographic groups. Children who come from two-parent families are much more likely to inherit wealth from paternal grandparents, much more likely to get financial support at an age when they're going to school, buying a home, or starting their own families than children from single parent homes.

The economic fault line in this country doesn't run between races, it runs between those families in which fathers are present and those in which they are not.

Children need fathers as role models. Boys raised by a traditionally masculine father are much less likely to commit crimes, whereas boys raised without a father are much more likely to do poorly in school and wind up in prison or dead.

Valuing fatherhood has to be instilled in boys from a young age by a masculine father. Commitment to one woman and to their children is not something that comes naturally to men. It's almost impossible, for instance, to find a culture in which women voluntarily abandon their children in large numbers, but to find a culture in which men in large numbers voluntarily abandon their children all one need do is look around.

Boys who grow up without fathers are statistically more likely to become louts, misogynistic, abusive, authoritarian, and violent. Girls who grow up without fathers are more likely to become promiscuous. A society in which a father is little more than a sperm donor is a society of fourteen year-old girls with babies and fourteen year-old boys with guns.

Stepfathers and boyfriends (Blankenhorn calls them "nearby guys") cannot replace the biological father. For stepfathers and boyfriends the main object of desire and commitment, to the extent these exist, is the mother, not the child. For the married father this distinction hardly exists. The married father says "My mate, my child". The stepfather and boyfriend must say "My mate, the other guy's child".

Children are a glue for biological parents that serves to hold them together, but they're a wedge between non-biological parents, tending to be a source of tension which pushes them apart.

Fatherhood means fathers teaching children a way of life, which is the heart of what it is to be a father. More than providing for their material needs, or shielding them from harm, or even caring for them and showing them affection, paternal sponsorship means cultural transmission - endowing children with competence and character by showing them how to live a certain kind of life.

One wishes every man - and woman - would read Blankenhorn's Fatherless America. It's loaded with great insight.

Apples and Apples?

I wrote a post the other day in which I offered several examples of what seem to me to be inconsistencies in the thinking of people on the left. I suggested that it's inconsistent of people who think that we should pay more in taxes, be willing to sacrifice jobs to reduce our carbon output, and prohibit private gun ownership to be taking tax deductions, jetting around the globe in private jets, and owning guns of their own.

Well, I came across another example of this sort of inconsistency among liberals written by a young philosopher and law student named C'Zar Bernstein. Bernstein writes about Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria and begins with this:

Over the last few decades, hundreds of thousands of people from one country have illegally moved themselves into another country’s territory. They have settled the land, using its resources, creating cultural and ethnic enclaves, and changing (probably irrevocably) the demographics of the land into which they’ve migrated.

What’s more, many of them regularly point out that the land they’ve settled was once theirs and had been illegitimately taken from members of their nation in the past. On one side, these settlers’ supporters don’t see anything wrong with what they’ve done. On the other side, opponents call them “illegal” and demand their deportation. Every U.S. president in the last few decades has tried and failed to resolve this conflict.

I’m thinking, of course, of Mexicans.

He has a point. Many of the folks who condemn Israelis for moving into Palestinian land are equally ardent about opening American borders for any Mexican and Central American immigrants who wish to settle here. It seems hard to reconcile the two positions.

Bernstein anticipates the objection that he's comparing apples and oranges:

Leftists are almost invariably opposed to Jewish “settlements” in Judea and Samaria, including East Jerusalem, where there have been Jews from time immemorial. They declare that Jewish settlements are both immoral and illegal. (Note leftists use the word “illegal” rather than “undocumented.”)

They demand that these Jews be deported back to Israel proper. They worry that Jews living in Judea and Samaria are a demographic threat to the Arabs. In summary, leftists are virulently against (allegedly) illegal Jewish immigration into lands once occupied and controlled by their ancestors and support their forced expulsion back to the country from which they emigrated.

Does that sound familiar? It should, for that position is indistinguishable from one of President Trump’s positions on illegal Mexican immigration. And what’s the leftist response to the president’s previous proposal of deportation? Racism! Bigotry!

If so, leftists also deserve these indictments, for they support the mass expulsion of (allegedly) illegal Jewish immigrants. If the fact that someone is here illegally isn’t, by itself, sufficient to morally justify his expulsion from this country, then the mere fact that Jewish settlers are illegal isn’t, by itself, sufficient to morally justify their expulsion. And if Jews can be permissibly expelled only because their presence in Judea and Samaria is illegal, then illegal aliens can be permissibly expelled only because their presence in the United States is illegal.

The Left is happy to see millions of illegal alien “settlers” set up their cultural enclaves with relative impunity. Illegals are fine so long as their descendants will vote for the Democrat Party, but if they’re Jews who want to live in their historic homeland and near their holiest sites, then the land must be cleansed of their presence, with force if necessary. This is rank hypocrisy.

There is one important dissimilarity, though, between the two situations:

Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not claiming that opposing illegal Mexican immigration is analogous to opposing Jewish settlements. On the contrary, the latter is much more morally objectionable. The so-called settlements in Judea and Samaria are not illegal, whereas Mexican illegal immigrants are here illegally.

The piece of international law the Left cites in defense of their position is from Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, according to which ‘[t]he Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.’

The implicit premise connecting this text to the conclusion that the settlements are illegal must be that the state of Israel (i.e. “the Occupying Power”) has transferred hundreds of thousands of Jews into Judea and Samaria, a proposition that is manifestly false. Jews have, like many Mexicans, transferred themselves. If self-transfer is the same as state-transfer, then Trump was right after all about Mexico sending many of its criminals to the United States!

So, if Bernstein's analogy is tight, and it seems so to me, those who oppose Israeli settlements and demand that the Israelis leave Judea and Samaria should also be demanding that illegal immigrants leave this country. Yet, so far from making the same demand they make of the Israelis, some anti-settlement people support sanctuary cities for illegal immigrants in the U.S. even while dumping Israeli stocks from their investment portfolios because some Israelis have essentially chosen to do pretty much what some Mexicans and others have done in the U.S.

A view of life and the world that doesn't require one to be logically consistent can be pretty attractive to people, I guess.

Rules for Radicals

Over the course of the two days following the attempted assassination of Republican congressmen by a left-wing lunatic there's been lots of talk about restoring civility to our political discourse. The talk won't last, unfortunately.

The President is probably not going to stop calling his opponents "bad people," nor are folks like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton likely to cease referring to their opponents as bitter clingers and "deplorables." Others appear to be so addicted to vile, violent, and hate-filled rhetoric that pleas directed to them for civility are probably futile.

Even so, one step that may go some distance toward a more cordial and civil polity would be for responsible people on the left to repudiate and renounce the malign influence that Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals (1971) has had on left-wing political activism. They don't have to renounce the whole book. Not everything in it is corrosive, but certainly it would be a salubrious development if more of them would separate themselves from Alinsky's rules #5, #11, and #13.

Here are the rules I have in mind:

5. "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon." There is no defense. It's irrational. It's infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.

11. "If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive." Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog.

13. "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.

Alinsky's book has been something of a catechism for left-wing activists throughout the almost fifty years since it first came out, whether those who employ Alinsky's methods are aware of it or not, but a book that urges its disciples to ridicule their opponents, to provoke their opponents to violence, and to personalize disagreements by insult and isolation, is not likely to bring people together or to enhance comity. Indeed, Alinsky promotes polarization in #13.

Some of the remainder of Alinsky's thirteen rules are also of dubious value if we're serious about improving the quality of our political discourse. #4, for example, says that the activist should,

"Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules." If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.

Notice the language. Those who disagree aren't just "opponents," they're "enemies." Enemies. Moreover, the goal is to make people who may be decent, sincere human beings vulnerable to a phony charge of hypocrisy. Throughout the book Alinsky urges that activists discredit and smear, not just their opponents' ideas, but their opponents themselves. People who stand in their way don't just need to have their ideas defeated, they need to have their reputations ruined and their careers destroyed.

Appropriately enough, Alinsky dedicated his book to Lucifer. Ever since its initial publication those who live by it have had a divisive, malignant effect upon our nation. Division is what the book advocates and it's what its votaries want, but if they're serious about cleansing the political environment of the toxicity that currently permeates it, they'd do well to unambiguously renounce Alinsky and his book.

Was He a Gun Owner?

James Hodgkinson, the 66 year-old shooter who tried to massacre Republican lawmakers as they practiced for a ball game against Democrats, was a Bernie Sanders supporter and campaign worker. He was also a big fan of Rachel Maddow, Bill Maher and other left-wing television personalities.

Given his ideological affinities, I think it's safe to presume that he was himself a down the line left-winger, which, if true, raises an interesting question. One of the key issues on the liberal social agenda is the elimination of firearms, so why did Hodgkinson own not only a semi-automatic rifle but a handgun as well?

Did he, like many others of his political stripe, think that the policies they endorse are meant only to limit the rights of others and not themselves? How many other opponents of the right to private ownership of guns own their own firearms even as they strive to deny firearms to everyone else?

It reminds me of the debates over taxes which liberals think we need to pay more of. Very well, we can disagree on the merits of tax increases, but if liberals think that all of us should be paying more taxes, why do many of them take all the tax deductions the law allows them? Why don't they send the IRS as much of their paycheck as their income would warrant? On the contrary, many of them, it's safe to say, pay their accountants and tax preparers handsomely to figure out ways to avoid having to pay what would otherwise be due.

It also reminds me of the Affordable Care Act which was passed by Democrats without a single Republican vote. They passed a law which required everyone to live under its burdens, but they exempted themselves. They impose laws on us which they don't have to live under, which is exactly how Martin Luther King defined an unjust law in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail.

It reminds me, too, of liberal climate change proponents who want to curtail our carbon footprint even if it costs jobs and raises taxes while they fly to speaking engagements and vacations all around the world in their private jets, pumping tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere from their engines.

In the wake of yesterday's attempted massacre, a massacre prevented only because the House Majority Whip, Steven Scalise was at the practice and, being in congressional leadership, had a security detail which returned fire and killed Hodgkinson, there'll be the usual demand by liberals for gun confiscation and control. When our politicians start lecturing us on the subject, though, the first question they should be required to answer is whether they themselves own a weapon. If the answer is yes, we should just tune them right out.

Actually, the very first thing that liberal progressives should be asked to explain is, what is it about the left that seems to attract so many hate-filled, violent people? Every presidential assassin and would-be assassin in the twentieth century, to the extent he or she was ideological at all, was a person of the left.

In recent weeks we've witnessed not only the gruesome antics of Kathy Griffin, but college professors and others calling for Republicans to be shot, a play in New York depicting the assassination of Donald Trump, a pop singer (Madonna) declaring that she's thought about blowing up the White House, a round of approbation on Twitter from progressives applauding what Hodgkinson tried to do, and so on.

This stuff goes beyond legitimate political disagreement. It reveals a profound, dehumanizing hatred on the part of these people for those with whom they disagree.

You can't keep stoking that hatred, you can't keep demonizing the other, calling them irremediably evil and deplorable, without someone eventually taking the incendiary rhetoric to its logical conclusion.

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.