Fathers

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 many things in that book that needed to be said, especially 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.

Tomorrow is Father's Day in the U.S. 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.

Meanwhile, Dennis Prager offers some excellent insights of his own in this short video:

Is the World an Illusion?

King’s College philosopher of physics Alexander Franklin wishes to stress that “everyday reality is not an illusion. There really is a world outside our minds." Perhaps so, but there's a more interesting question, I think, concerning the world of which he speaks. More on that in a moment.

Here's an excerpt from a piece at Mind Matters on Professor Franklin's argument:

Popular science often tells us that we are radically deceived by the commonplace appearance of everyday objects and that colour and solidity are illusions. For instance, the physicist Sir Arthur Eddington distinguished in 1928 between two tables: the familiar table and the scientific table, while the former is solid and coloured, the scientific table “is nearly all empty space”.

Eddington then makes the striking claim that “modern physics has by delicate test and remorseless logic assured me that my second scientific table is the only one which is really there”.

Franklin’s essay in response is a plea for Emergentism (the reality we experience emerges from more basic principles), as opposed to what he calls “Illusionism,” the popular belief that it is all an illusion. Along the way, he offers a useful interpretation of the empty space “table,” in terms of quantum physics (the behavior of elementary particles).

Franklin argues that, according to quantum mechanics, an electron in orbit around an atomic nucleus actually occupies the entire orbit, more like the surface of a hollow ball than like a solitary planet orbiting the sun. Thus, there really is no empty space in the orbit and therefore the table's solidity is not an illusion.

This is a bit misleading, though. The atom is in fact mostly empty space. Even if the electrons can be thought of as existing everywhere in their orbits at once, there's a relatively enormous amount of space between orbits. If, for instance, the nucleus of a hydrogen atom were made the size of a bb and placed on second base in a major league stadium, it's lone electron would be orbiting out around the upper deck.

If our hydrogen atom, represented by the bb on second base, was bonded to another hydrogen atom, the nucleus of the second atom, or bb, would be out in the parking lot somewhere. That's a lot of empty space.

Nevertheless, the more interesting question, at least for me, is not whether the solidity of Eddington's table is an illusion but rather how much of what we experience when we observe the table is objectively there in the table and how much of what we observe is actually a creation of our minds.

For example, suppose the table is painted green. We'd say that the table is green, but, of course, the table itself is not any color at all. The sensation of green is in our brains or minds. The paint merely reflects light energy of a certain wavelength to our eye and our visual sense in concert with our brain/mind translates that energy into a sensation of green.

The same is true of the sensations we have of sound, taste, warmth, smell, etc. The stimuli which give rise to these sensations may be generated by objects, but the sensations they produce are in us.

In other words, were there were no perceivers, no one to observe the world, there would be no color, flavor, sound, warmth or odor - just colorless, tasteless, odorless, soundless matter and energy flying about. Just as there'd be no pain if no one felt it, there'd be no color or sound if no one saw or heard it.

This being so, we might ask what is the world in itself really like apart from our perception of it? How much of what we call reality do our senses/brains/minds actually create and how much is objectively independent of our perceptions?

We might also wonder how much of our understanding of the world is a function of our size? Suppose the table appears smooth to us. Would it appear smooth to a bacterium? The table appears solid to us, but pace professor Franklin, it certainly doesn't appear solid to a neutrino, tens of thousands of which pass through every square inch of everything on earth (including us) every second.

Here's another question: How much different would the world appear to us if we had six or seven senses? A man born blind has no concept of light or color. How much different would this world appear to him were he suddenly able to see? Likewise, what experiences would the world present to us if we had the additional senses with which to experience them?

We go through life thinking that the world is just the way we perceive it to be, but why should we think such a thing? The world may be far stranger, far different, than our five senses can discern.

Representational Drift

Here's a puzzle for any materialistic view of our cognitive experience, i.e. any view that posits the material brain and sense organs as the sole entities responsible for cognition and sensation. The puzzle has to do with something called "representational drift." An article in The Atlantic elaborates:

Neuroscientists have held the view that different sensations, smell, sight, taste, etc., stimulate specific groups of neurons in the brain. These patterns of neural firing - called representations - were thought to remain the same from one moment to the next.

The group of neurons that fired when you smelled a rose yesterday are the same group of neurons that will fire when you smell the rose again today.

The explanation found in neuroscience textbooks is that specific groups of neurons fire when their owner "smells a rose, sees a sunset, or hears a bell. These representations—these patterns of neural firing—presumably stay the same from one moment to the next."

But a team of researchers at Columbia University have discovered a strange thing. The researchers...

allowed mice to sniff the same odors over several days and weeks, and recorded the activity of neurons in the rodents’ piriform cortex—a brain region involved in identifying smells. At a given moment, each odor caused a distinctive group of neurons in this region to fire.

But as time went on, the makeup of these groups slowly changed. Some neurons stopped responding to the smells; others started. After a month, each group was almost completely different.

Put it this way: The neurons that represented the smell of an apple in May and those that represented the same smell in June were as different from each other as those that represent the smells of apples and grass at any one time.

...other scientists have shown that the same phenomenon, called representational drift, occurs in a variety of brain regions besides the piriform cortex. Its existence is clear; everything else is a mystery.

[The researchers] don’t know why it happens, what it means, how the brain copes, or how much of the brain behaves in this way. How can animals possibly make any lasting sense of the world if their neural responses to that world are constantly in flux?

If such flux is common, “there must be mechanisms in the brain that are undiscovered and even unimagined that allow it to keep up. Scientists are ... in this particular case, ... deeply confused. We expect it to take many years to iron out.”

How does the brain know, the article asks, what the nose is smelling or what the eyes are seeing if the specific neurons which respond to smells and sights are continuously changing?

A deeper question, perhaps, is how and why would such complexity of function arise in a purely materialistic world in which blind Darwinian processes like genetic mutation and natural selection are responsible for the structure and function of our brains? What survival value would it have?

This kind of multi-functionality is the sort of thing we see intelligent minds design, but it's not what we'd expect to result from random accidents like genetic mutations.

I don't want to draw too many conclusions from all this, but I will say that it seems like every discovery scientists are currently making about our world and about living things makes it harder to cling to both materialism and the naturalism (the belief that the natural world is all there is) that undergirds it.

Dawkins Knocked Sideways

Andrew McDiarmid at Evolution News recently came across a pretty stunning tweet by atheist biologist Richard Dawkins. Dawkins admits he was knocked "sideways with wonder at the miniaturized intricacy of the data-processing machinery in the living cell.”

Dawkins, of course, wouldn't attribute this miniaturized intricacy to an intelligent engineer of life, but McDiarmid asks, why not? Why does the technology we use every day naturally prompt us to marvel at the genius of intelligent agents, but the far more fantastically advanced biological machinery in the cell does not. He writes:

These days, we surround ourselves with technology to stay in touch, to keep ourselves informed, and to manage the challenges of our daily lives. We also recognize in our devices and machines all the hallmarks of design, understanding reflexively that they express the ingenuity of engineers or software developers.

Our appreciation for applied intelligence comes as second nature to us — we intuitively recognize the work of other minds.

But what happens when we look up from our technology and survey the world of nature? When we look up at the movement of the planets, or into the eyes of our children, or when we peer through a microscope into a living cell? Do we see signs of minds in those places? Do we sense intelligence and forethought?

Or does our intuition of design stop at the iPhone and the jet airplane?

In a recent tweet, the world’s most famous scientific atheist, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, confessed to being knocked “sideways with wonder at the miniaturized intricacy of the data-processing machinery in the living cell.”

Dawkins wrote the tweet after watching an animation produced by an Australian medical institute showing how cells store and copy the vast amounts of digital information present in DNA.

The digital information technology found in living cells (as depicted in this and other animations) has raised profound questions about an enduring scientific mystery: how did the very first life begin? And did a mind or intelligent designer play a role?

Dawkins, for his part, has steadfastly maintained that living organisms exhibit only “the appearance” or illusion of design, not evidence of actual design — despite being knocked “sideways with wonder” at the information technology at work in living cells.

As he put it in his most famous book The Blind Watchmaker,“[b]iology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” The claim that life was not designed, even though it looks designed, may seem contradictory.

Yes, indeed it does.

Here's the three minute video that so impressed Dawkins. As you watch it ask yourself where the information comes from that choreographs these processes and how the whole ensemble of processes could've arisen by blind chance in the earliest life.

It knocks me sideways to think that some very intelligent people believe it all to be a lucky accident:

A 2022 Backlash?

Charles Kolb served as Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy from 1990-1992 in the George H.W. Bush White House. In a piece at The Daily Caller he lists a number of reasons why he thinks the Democrats will face a voter backlash in 2022. Here's his list:

• Biden’s immigration and border policies have brought an unprecedented influx of illegal immigrants, eviscerating border security.
• Ransomware attacks against major American companies and cities are increasing.
• Violent crime is surging.
• “Defund the Police” initiatives are increasingly unpopular with citizens of all races.
• Inflation (which may not be temporary) is rising rapidly in commodities, housing, groceries, and elsewhere.
• Biden proposes massive new federal spending and record deficits while taking a huge gamble that interest rates will remain near zero.
• “Woke” policies on college campuses, in schools, hiring, the media and elsewhere are contrary to how most Americans view themselves and our nation.
• Critical race theory is prompting more American parents to abandon public schools in favor of greater parental choice, including charter and religious schools.
• Recent polls show more and more Hispanic voters shifting away from the Democrats’ agenda.
• The vaguely defined “diversity, equity and inclusion” efforts underway in many workplaces are raising new questions about whether Americans want equality of opportunity or equality of results.
• If the civil-rights movement evolves into a demand for reparations based on the sins of slavery, Americans will become further divided.

Kolb could've mentioned more, I think, but perhaps the biggest liability the Democrats face in 2022 is that their leadership simply doesn't inspire. Biden and Harris won in 2020 because Biden wasn't Trump and many who voted for him thought he'd be moderate and competent. He's turned out, however, to be neither of these, and his running mate seems almost a political non-entity.

Without Trump on the ticket to arouse Democrats' passions will enthusiasm for Biden and Harris be enough to motivate Democratic voters to turn out to cast their ballot for congressional candidates? A follow-up question, assuming the Republicans take back the House and maybe the Senate in 2022, is how much harm will this administration's lurch to the far left do to the country before that happens?

Why Much of the Media Can't Be Trusted

When a significant portion of the American media decided to give up the attempt to be professional news organizations and instead become a partisan arm of the Democratic Party they forfeited any claim they may have had on the nation's trust. During the Trump presidency some outlets became indistinguishable from supermarket tabloids in their disregard for truth and objective fact-checking.

When President Trump referred to these news organs as "fake news" he may have been impolitic, but he was not incorrect.

The Daily Caller's Brianna Lyman lists eight examples - out of the many that could be listed - of news stories about Trump that were enthusiastically promoted and perpetuated by the liberal media and politicians despite being objectively false.

Here are the eight:

Trump ordered protesters to be tear-gassed for a photo-op: CNN and several leading Democrats, including Joe Biden, pushed this canard, and people still believe it to this day despite an NBC report showing it to be false.

Trump's suggestion that Covid 19 escaped from a Wuhan virology lab was false, racist and had been "debunked" by his own intelligence agencies: It turns out that the theory has not been debunked and is credible.

Trump ignored Russian bounties on US soldiers: Both Biden and Harris criticized Trump for not confronting Putin about the claim that Russia was paying for dead Americans and the Washington Post essentially accused Trump of lying when he denied there was significant evidence to support the allegation. Nevertheless, he seems to have been right.

Trump told Georgia officials to ‘find the fraud’: Trump was accused by the WaPo of telling Georgia's Secretary of State Frances Watson to "find the fraud" and she'd be a "national hero" if she turned up the evidence of cheating. Two months later, the Georgia Secretary of State released an audio recording of Trump’s phone call. It revealed that, based on information provided by an unreliable source, The Post misquoted Trump’s comments on the call. Trump had said nothing about finding fraud nor did he say that Watson would be "a national hero."

Trump said white supremacists were ‘fine people’: This myth has had a distressingly long shelf life despite being patently false.

What Trump actually said was, “Excuse me, they didn’t put themselves down as neo-Nazis, and you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group – excuse me, excuse me, I saw the same pictures you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name....I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists because they should be condemned totally.”

Despite the obvious meaning of his words - that many of the demonstrators were not extremists or trouble-makers - the comment is still cited as proof of his sympathies for white nationalists and neo-fascists.

Trump referred to illegal immigrants as ‘animals’: When asked by someone about MS-13 gang members crossing the southern border he replied, “We have people coming into the country … You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals.” He was clearly talking about MS-13, and his description of them is accurate, but liberal politicians and media accused him, falsely and absurdly, of referring to all immigrants.

It's still considered by his critics of evidence of his racism.

Trump lied when he alleged that his campaign was wiretapped: CNN reported in 2017 that Trump “flat-out lied” when he claimed the Obama administration wiretapped Trump Tower before his presidential victory, with CNN citing the Justice Department for proof. “Trump, for his part, has offered zero evidence to back up his initial claim because, as we now know conclusively, there was no evidence. To sum up: The current President of the United States flat-out lied about the then-sitting president issuing a wiretap of his campaign headquarters.”

CNN issued a correction two years later and confirmed that former campaign manager Paul Manafort was wiretapped under a secret court order before and after the election.

Trump removed the MLK Jr. bust from the Oval Office: Just hours into Trump’s presidency, TIME White House Correspondent Zeke Miller reported that Trump had removed the bust of Martin Luther King Jr., from the Oval Office, but it was discovered later that the bust was still there but “obscured by a door and an agent.”

Miller subsequently issued numerous apologies for the error, but once the story was out few people were made aware of the apologies. Even when retractions are issued they're usually a one-time statement that hardly registers with a public which had been subjected to the false narrative being pounded into their psyches for months or years.

The persistence of these myths in our national consciousness is due either to sloppy thinking, sloppy reporting or simple dishonesty by people who earnestly wanted their stories to be true. In any case, one can scarcely be blamed for doubting the credibility or professionalism of anyone or any organization that pressed them incessantly onto the American people.

Lyman's article has more information on each of these eight myths as well as links to the rebuttals.

Why the Universe Must've Had a Beginning

One of the key arguments for the existence of God is based on the premise that the universe had a beginning. The argument goes like this:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause of its existence.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore the universe had a cause.

Since the universe is the totality of space, time and matter whatever caused the universe must be non-spatial, non-temporal, immaterial, enormously powerful and enormously intelligent. In other words, the cause of the universe was either God or something very much like God.

But critics of the argument have offered challenges to the two premises, and philosopher William Lane Craig rebuts those challenges in a thirty minute video that can be viewed here. As part of his defense of the second premise he shows a five minute video which addresses the philosophical reasons, as opposed to the scientific reasons, for maintaining that the universe cannot be infinitely old, or past eternal, and must therefore have had a temporal beginning.

If the universe were infinitely old then there would've been an infinite series of events leading up to the present moment, but there are numerous philosophical reasons for doubting the possibility that an actual infinite series of events is possible.

The video explains some of those problems.

Matter, Mind and Memory

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor raises an interesting question, one that many of us might never think to ask. What, exactly, is a memory? A secondary question might be how does a materialist metaphysics account for memories?

Egnor begins by arguing that contrary to popular belief, and even the belief of many neuroscientists and philosophers, the brain doesn't actually "store" memories. In fact, he claims, it can't store memories:

It's helpful to begin by considering what memory is -- memory is retained knowledge. Knowledge is the set of true propositions. Note that neither memory nor knowledge nor propositions are inherently physical. They are psychological entities, not physical things. Certainly memories aren't little packets of protein or lipid stuffed into a handy gyrus, ready for retrieval when needed for the math quiz.

The brain is a physical thing. A memory is a psychological thing. A psychological thing obviously can't be "stored" in the same way a physical thing can. It's not clear how the term "store" could even apply to a psychological thing.

But what about storage as an engram, a pattern of electrochemical energy or proteins, that acts as a code for the information? Egnor doesn't think this explanation works either:

[C]onsider a hypothetical "engram" of your grandmother's lovely face that "codes" for your memory of her appearance. Imagine that the memory engram is safely tucked into a corner of your superior temporal gyrus, and you desire to remember Nana's face. As noted above, your memory itself obviously is not in the gyrus or in the engram. It doesn't even make any sense to say a memory is stored in a lump of brain.

But, you say, that's just a silly little misunderstanding. What you really mean to say is that the memory is encoded there, and it must be accessed and retrieved, and it is in that sense that the memory is stored. It is the engram, you say, not the memory itself, that is stored.

But there is a real problem with that view. As you try to remember Nana's face, you must then locate the engram of the memory, which of course requires that you (unconsciously) must remember where in your brain Nana's face engram is stored .... So this retrieval of the Nana memory via the engram requires another memory (call it the "Nana engram location memory"), which must itself be encoded somewhere in your brain.

To access the memory for the location of the engram of Nana, you must access a memory for the engram for the location for the engram of Nana. And obviously you must first remember the location of the Nana engram location memory, which presupposes another engram whose location must be remembered. Ad infinitum.

Now imagine that by some miracle...you are able to surmount infinite regress and locate the engram for Nana's face in your superior temporal gyrus (like finding your keys by serendipity!).

Whew! But don't deceive yourself -- this doesn't solve your problem in the least. Because now you have to decode the engram itself. The engram would undoubtedly take the form of brain tissue -- a particular array of proteins, or dendrites or axons, or an electrochemical gradient of some specific sort -- that would mean "memory of Nana's face." But how can an electrochemical gradient represent a face?

Certainly an electrochemical gradient doesn't look like grandma -- and even if it did, you'd have to have a little tiny eye in your brain to see it to recognize that it looked like grandma.

The engram is a code, but if so, we need a key to decode it. How do we access the key? How do we remember where the key is stored in the brain? That memory must itself be coded somewhere in the brain which would require yet another memory to decode it, and so on:

And if you think that remembering your grandmother's face via an engram in your brain entails infinite regress, consider the conundrum of remembering a concept, rather than a face. How, pray tell, can the concept of your grandma's justice or her mercy or her cynicism be encoded in an engram?

The quality of mercy is not [stored], nor can it be encoded. How many dendrites and axons for mercy?

You see the difficulty. We remember things all the time, but how often have we ever paused to ask ourselves what's going on when we remember? And whatever it is that's going on, how did such a highly specified and complex system evolve by random mutation and natural selection? And how are memories, like other aspects of consciousness (self-awareness, qualia, intentionality, free will), accounted for by a purely material entity like a brain?

How then, you reasonably ask, can we explain the obvious dependence of memory on brain structure and function? While it is obvious that the memories aren't stored, it does seem that some parts of the brain are necessary ordinarily for memory. And that's certainly true....In some cases the correspondence between brain and memory is one of tight necessity -- the brain must have a specific activity for memory to be exercised.

But the brain activity is not the same thing as the memory nor does it make any sense at all to say the brain activity codes for the memory or that the brain stores the memory.

For reasons such as Egnor calls to our attention some philosophers are rejecting the materialistic monism that has prevailed for the last century and a half and are returning for answers to some form or another of dualism. Dualism comes in many varieties, but what they all share in common is the view that the material aspect of a human being - the brain in particular - is not all there is to us.

Something else seems to be somehow involved in the phenomena of consciousness and remembering. That something else may well be an immaterial but conscious mind.

If that's true then not only is materialism false but the Darwinians' explanatory difficulties have significantly increased. How can something immaterial be subject to the physical evolutionary mechanisms that are postulated to explain the development of the human species? How can an immaterial mind be produced by matter and physical influences? It's an enigma.

At least it is for the materialist committed to the belief that everything that exists is a manifestation of material substance and nothing else.

On the Apostasy of the New Atheists

In an article at Salon an atheistic philosopher by the name of Phil Torres expresses his indignation at his atheistic fellow-travelers because too many of them are guilty of what Torres considers unpardonable breaches of moral etiquette.

Torres names names - Sam Harris, Michael Shermer, Laurence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, James Lindsey, Peter Boghossian, David Silverman and Steven Pinker - a Who's Who taken from the pantheon of what's called the New Atheism. Torres catalogues the offenses of each of these luminaries in his article, and to be sure, some of these men have certainly sullied themselves in their boorish behavior toward women.

But what seems to irk Torres the most is that many of them have also promoted positions on matters of race, gender studies, the cancel culture, the threat of Islam, free speech and "wokeness" in general that are disturbingly close to positions held by conservatives.

For a progressive atheist like Torres this is not just disappointing and disillusioning, it's grounds for public chastisement of the malefactors, but therein lies a problem with Torres' critique.

The gravamen of his complaint is that these men have committed serious moral faults, either with women or in their ideological predilections and public pronouncements, but as atheists why should any of them, including Torres, think there's anything objectively wrong, in a moral sense, with any of the offenses Torres imputes to them in his indictment? How does an atheist justify a moral judgment of another man's behavior?

That Torres sees the failings of these men as moral failings is clear from passages like these:

New Atheism appeared to offer moral clarity, it emphasized intellectual honesty and it embraced scientific truths about the nature and workings of reality. It gave me immense hope to know that in a world overflowing with irrationality, there were clear-thinking individuals with sizable public platforms willing to stand up for what's right and true — to stand up for sanity in the face of stupidity.

Pinker, Shermer and some of the others like to preach about "moral progress," but in fighting social justice under the misleading banner of "free speech," they not only embolden fascists but impede further moral progress for the marginalized.

Another way to understand the situation goes like this: Some of these people acted badly in the past. Others don't want to worry about accusations of acting badly in the future. Still others are able to behave themselves but worry that their friends could get in trouble for past or future bad behavior.

So, aside from the fact that it's unclear what he means by the term "moral progress," what's the problem? It's this: unless there's an objective standard of right and wrong, "bad behavior" is nothing more than a reflection of one's own subjective tastes and preferences, and it's just silly to assert that anyone else's tastes and preferences are "wrong."

Indeed, the word wrong has no meaning other than as an emotive expression of one's own disapproval. It has the same content as "ugh!" It's just a behavior that some people don't like.

Moreover, unless there's a God there can be no objective standard for right and wrong. For an atheist, then, there is no objective standard of morality, only individual subjective preferences.

Nor is there any ultimate accountability for how we choose to behave, and with no ultimate accountability the notion of right and wrong conduct, a moral law, is an empty notion. It's like a law that carries with it no punishment for violating it.

For any act to be wrong in an objective sense there has to be an ultimate and inescapable consequence for doing it. If there is no God then there's no ultimate, inescapable accountability, which is what the great Russian writer Dostoyevsky meant when he has characters in his novel The Brothers Karamazov stress that, "If God is dead everything is permitted."

A Christian, then, can lament humanity's moral failings, but it borders on the ridiculous for an atheist to do it. Unless the atheist doesn't care about living consistently with his atheism, which is also ridiculous.

Ominous Omen for Democrats

William McGurn cites some interesting statistics in an op-ed in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal (paywall). The stats must be very troubling for Democrats who, McGurn writes, are sounding the tocsins:

A May postelection analysis by a trio of left-leaning organizations noted that while Latino turnout in 2020 grew “dramatically” over 2016, Democrats saw a “significant dip in support in places with high concentrations of Latino and Hispanic voters.”

The centerpiece of McGurn's column is a survey taken by the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) of likely Latino voters in battleground states.

The survey asked Latinos to choose between two statements. The first was unadulterated Milton Friedman: “Some people say free-market capitalism is the best form of government because it gives people the freedom to work and achieve.”

The second was what we might call the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez option: “Other people say that socialism is the best form of government because it is more fair and equitable to working class people.” Almost two-thirds (63%) of respondents opted for the Friedman position, against only 17% for the AOC line. Hardly surprising, given that so many Latinos came to the U.S. in the first place to escape socialism.

That Latinos prefer capitalism to the brand of socialism the progressive left is pushing is, McGurn avers, just the beginning of the bad news for Democrats:

• 67% are “very concerned” their kids “won’t have the same opportunities me and my family came here to find.”
• 58% said too many people in America are happy not to work and “just live off government assistance.”
• 80% percent agree that “public schools are failing.”
• 67% agree that too many Americans “are losing our traditional values centered on faith, family and freedom.”
• 57% “oppose Democrat efforts to pack the Supreme Court with liberal judges.”
• 72% agree “we should do what is necessary to control our southern border.”
• 65% oppose the Democrats’ “bill that would make voter ID illegal.”
• 50% agree that “many of the policies that Democrats say help all minorities actually end up hurting Hispanic families.”

McGurn adds that the NRSC concludes that the political future isn’t California — it’s Florida. Florida’s electorate, the report notes, is substantially less white than it was in 2000, yet it is also more Republican than it was 20 years ago.

McGurn goes on to point out how progressive fetishes like Critical Race Theory, defunding the police and opposition to voter ID are all unpopular with a demographic that's largely family-oriented, hard-working, and religiously and socially conservative.

He concludes with this:

The really bad news for Democrats? This was all back when Joe Biden was still selling himself to Americans as a moderate.

To be sure. Now that Mr. Biden has revealed himself to be pliable clay in the hands of the progressive left one wonders what those stats would look like were the survey taken today.

The Democrats had nurtured hopes of turning Texas blue by flooding the state with Hispanics they thought would be docile and dependable Democratic voters. It's one reason they've been so soft on illegal immigration and opposed the border wall.

Now that it appears, however, that Hispanics willing to trek a thousand miles and risk all manner of hazard to get into the U.S. are likely to vote Republican I suppose we'll soon start hearing Democrats demanding that we hurry up with that wall. Their slogan will be that it needs only to be "built back better."

The Causal Inadequacy of Matter

Kinesin is a protein which transports vacuoles along microtubules to different regions of the cell. Watch this three minute video and then see if you can think of a plausible explanation for how such a mechanism could have evolved through blind, unguided processes:

The more scientists learn about life, consciousness, the earth, and the universe the harder it is becoming to cling to the old Darwinian materialism so fashionable in the last century. Indeed, twentieth century materialism is beginning to look something like a philosophical anachronism, a contemporary version of alchemy.

Alchemy seemed right during the medieval period but couldn't be sustained once our knowledge of chemistry began to blossom in the 18th and 19th centuries. So it is with philosophical materialism today.

Materialism, the view that everything that exists is reducible to matter or explicable in terms of material stuff, has serious problems. As Stephen Meyer points out in his new book Return of the God Hypothesis, there are no good material explanations for the origin of the universe, the fine-tuning of the universe or the origin of the information packed into the first life.

The origin of the universe could not have been produced by matter because matter came into being when the universe did. Matter, unguided by any intelligence, could not have fine-tuned the initial conditions of the universe or the constants, ratios of nuclear particles and strengths of the forces. Nor could mindless matter generate the enormous amount of information that allows a cell to function.

Only mind is causally adequate to explain these things. We have experience only of minds fine-tuning and generating the kind of information that allows the kinesin protein to perform its astonishing task.

How does the protein "know" what to do and where to go? Where is the information that choreographs this incredible phenomenon stored? How was the information, especially in the earliest cells, created?

Materialism has no good answers to questions like these, but the alternative explanation leads to God so many modern metaphysical alchemists cling to materialism in hopes that some discovery will someday vindicate their faith. Medieval alchemists clung to the same hope.

For more on the video and others like it go here.

Racism at Yale

There's a certain kind of person - we find them on both ends of the political spectrum - who is so sure that his convictions are correct that he believes himself justified in hating, harming, even killing, those who disagree with him about politics or religion. <br /><br />

This type of person is often a fanatic and is always frightening.<br /><br />

It's distressing that there seem to be so many such people today who are willing to publicly express their hatred, especially their racial hatred.<br /><br />

A while ago I wrote about the theologian who prayed that God would help her hate white people. That was bad enough, but a recent lecture given by a psychiatrist at Yale is an even more stomach-turning example of the kind of vicious racist hatred I'm talking about.  <br /><br />

An article at The Federalist explains:

In an official lecture called “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind,” given by Aruna Khilanani at the Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Child Study Center, Khilanani graphically described her fantasy about killing and burying white people, saying, “I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the heads of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. <br /><br />

Like I did the world a f-----g favor.” 

Khilanani wasn't content with simply describing to her Yale audience her fantasy of murdering whites, she also delivered herself of these heart-warming sentiments:<br /><br />

“White people are out of their minds and they have been for a long time,” and “We keep forgetting that directly talking about race is a waste of our breath. "<br /><br />

"We are asking a demented, violent predator who thinks that they are a saint or a superhero, to accept responsibility. It ain’t gonna happen. They have five holes in their brain.<br /><br />

"It’s like banging your head against a brick wall.”

Believe it or not there's more:

Khilanani’s animus against white people extends into her personal life, as she noted that she had made it her goal to “cut out everything white,” describing her motivation behind cutting off white friends and leaving institutions she considered too white.<br /><br />

“There are no good apples,” Khilanani remarked. “White people make my blood boil.” 

Well, she certainly leaves no doubt about the truth of that last sentence.<br /><br />

Imagine, now, what would've happened had the lecturer been white and had said these despicably odious things about "people of color." Doubtless her academic career would've come to an abrupt end, and she'd be permanently exiled from every social media platform.<br /><br />

But what will happen to Khilanani, who appears to be ethnically Middle Eastern? If she's given a pass or a mere slap on the wrist will that be a manifestation of POC privilege?<br /><br />

One of the silliest claims of the Critical Race Theory crowd is that people of color can't be racist because they're the "oppressed" group. Well, someone who holds a doctorate and is invited to lecture at Yale hardly seems "oppressed." <br /><br 

Hatred and bigotry are evil no matter whose heart they fester in. If Ms Khilanani's not a racist no one is.

Are We Just Very Lucky?

Most people who've studied a little science know that our universe is expanding. Everything in the universe is moving away from everything else. <br /><br />

Eventually, millions of years from now, the stars in the night sky will have moved so far away, and be receding at such enormous speed, that the light from them will not be able to reach earth.<br /><br />

In fact, the current era is the optimal time in the history of the universe for studying the heavens and figuring out how it all came to be. If humans had appeared on earth significantly sooner than they did the night sky would've been so bright (because all the galaxies would've been much closer together) that it would've been impossible to study the heavens.<br /><br />

If humans had appeared significantly later in the universe's history the universe would've been so dark and thinly populated by galaxies that are knowledge of it would've been considerably less.<br /><br />

Likewise, earth is located at the optimal place in the Milky Way galaxy. It's situated in the galactic plane which means that it's shielded by gas, dust and stars from the lethal radiation emanating from the center of the galaxy.<br /><br />

If it were much closer to the center the radiation would make life impossible. If it were further from the center it would not have access to a rich supply of heavier elements that are necessary for life.<br /><br />

Earth is also positioned between spiral arms of the galaxy which means humans have a relatively unobstructed view of the heavens, allowing for scientific discovery and thus the development of technology.<br /><br />

For instance, because humans could see the stars they could navigate the seas which allowed for exploration and  discovery.<br /><br />

But back to the expanding universe. What's causing the expansion appears to be something called dark energy. If dark energy were just a little bit weaker the universe would long ago have collapsed back on itself, and life would've been impossible.<br /><br />

If dark energy were a just a little bit stronger the universe would've long ago gone dark and life would likewise be impossible.<br /><br />

The strength of the dark energy is just right to produce a universe that during part of its existence can support life, but what do we mean by "just right"?<br /><br />

It turns out that the dark energy is fine-tuned to a precision of one part in 10^120 for life to be possible somewhere and at some time in the universe. This is an unimaginably exquisite setting.<br /><br />

If we think of this energy in terms of mass the dark energy could not deviate from its actual value by more than the the mass of a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of the mass of an electron.<br /><br />

We are either very, very lucky or we're the product of an intentionally engineered cosmos.<br /><br />

Back in 1979, before scientists had discovered dark energy and just beginning to discover the dozens of other examples of cosmic fine-tuning, physicist Freeman Dyson observed that,<br /><br />

The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming. 

 

Andrew Sullivan's Critique of CRT

In a recent essay Andrew Sullivan explains his objection to Critical Race Theory. In his view CRT is an attack, not on racism, but on the whole idea of liberal (in the classical sense) society. It's an attack on the principles upon which the United States was founded.

After describing those principles, Sullivan writes:

Here is how critical theory defines itself in one of its central documents. It questions the very foundations of “Enlightenment rationality, legal equality and Constitutional neutrality.” It begins with the assertion that these are not ways to further knowledge and enlarge human freedom.

They are rather manifestations of white power over non-white bodies. Formal legal equality, they argue, the promise of the American experiment, has never been actual equality, even as, over the centuries, it has been extended to everyone. It is, rather, a system to perpetuate inequality forever, which is the single and only reason racial inequality is still here.

CRT holds that the notion of objective truth and free speech are frauds:

Claims to truth are merely claims to power. That’s what people are asked to become “awake” to: that liberalism is a lie. As are its purported values. Free speech is therefore not always a way to figure out the truth; it is just another way in which power is exercised — to harm the marginalized.

The idea that a theory can be proven or disproven by the empirical process is itself a white supremacist argument, denying the “lived experience” of members of identity groups that is definitionally true, whatever the “objective” facts say. And our minds and souls and institutions have been so marinated in white supremacist culture for so long, critical theorists argue, that the system can only be dismantled rather than reformed.

The West’s idea of individual freedom — the very foundation of the American experiment — is, in their view, a way merely to ensure the permanent slavery of the non-white.

In other words, "truth" is whatever a member of the oppressed class feels strongly about. If you were to insist that their feelings don't align with objective facts then you're just seeking to perpetuate oppression. You're "marginalizing" those you believe to be racially inferior.

Even to object to CRT, to write an essay like Sullivan's based upon a reasoned critique of it, is itself considered a form of oppression, another manifestation of white supremacy.

To point out that something like The 1619 project is riddled with historical errors simply confirms that the critic is an oppressor and that his criticism is therefore irrelevant. The 1619 project speaks "truth" because it reflects the "lived experience" of blacks in America.

Sullivan comments:

[The 1619 Project] doesn’t just expose some of the hideous past we’d rather forget. It insists that “white supremacy” is the definition of the United States, that its true founding was therefore 1619, that its core principle from the get-go was not freedom but slavery, that slavery is the true basis for American wealth, that the police today are the inheritors of slave patrols, that only black Americans fought to end slavery, and so on.

It insists that the Declaration of Independence was “false”, not merely imperfectly implemented, and designed to obscure the real project of racist oppression. And its goal is the dismantling of liberal epistemology, procedures, ideas and arguments in order to revolutionize what cannot by definition be reformed.

The logic of [CRT] — it denies the core liberal premises of all the other schools and renders them all forms of oppression — means that it cannot long tolerate those other schools. It must always attack them.

Critical theory is therefore always the cuckoo in the academic nest. Over time, it throws out its competitors — and not in open free debate. It does so by ending that debate, by insisting that the liberal “reasonable person” standard of debate is, in fact, rigged in favor of the oppressors, that speech is a form of harm, even violent harm, rather than a way to seek the truth.

It insists that what matters is the identity of the participants in a debate, not the arguments themselves. If a cis white woman were to make an argument, a Latino trans man can dismiss it for no other reason than that a white cis woman is making it. Thus, identity trumps reason. Thus liberal society dies a little every time that dismissal sticks.

Liberal society dies a little every time racial identity or "lived experience" is made the supreme arbiter of truth to which everyone must accede, and in today's culture liberal society is doing a lot of dying.

Sullivan says much more about CRT in his essay than I can include here. Check it out.

He concludes with this:

This debate is not about whether you are a racist or an antiracist. The debate is about whether, in your deepest heart and soul, you are a liberal or an anti-liberal.

And of those two options, I have no doubt where I stand. Do you?

God and the Big Bang

In his excellent new book, Return of the God Hypothesis, philosopher of science Stephen Meyer argues that three developments in science over the past seventy years or so, give powerful support to the belief that the universe and life are the product of an intelligent, personal agent, i.e. God.

The three developments are 1) the strong evidence that the universe had a beginning, 2) the astonishing degree of fine-tuning of the parameters, forces, constants and initial conditions of the universe which make it a suitable habitation for life, and 3) the enormous amounts of information encoded in every living cell.

Taking just the first of these, if the universe did have a beginning then it must have had a cause. That cause must itself be something that transcends the universe since if it were part of the universe then the universe would've caused itself, which is absurd.

Since a beginning of the universe entails that all the space, time, matter, energy and physical laws that exist in our universe today came into being in the finite past, whatever caused these must itself be non-spatial, non-temporal and immaterial. It must be the source of all the energy and physical laws which exist. It must also be incomprehensibly intelligent and powerful.

In other words, a beginning to the universe is strong evidence for the existence of God.

If one holds to the view called naturalism, however, one would not expect the universe to have had a beginning because naturalism holds that the universe is all there is. There's nothing outside the universe that could bring it into being.

The fact that, on naturalism, a beginning to the universe is both unexpected and unwelcome is one chief reason why so many naturalistic scientists resisted the evidence for the Big Bang until that evidence became overwhelming in the 1960s, and it's what seems to motivate some scientists today to find some alternative explanation that would enable them to avoid a cosmic beginning.

Meyer talks about it in this brief video:

Meyer puts the word "before" in quotes in the video because time comes into existence when the universe does. Thus, since "before" is a temporal preposition it technically makes no sense to talk about what existed "before" the Big Bang since there was no time and no "before."

Anyone who has an interest in the intersection of science and theology will find Meyer's book a very rewarding read. It's thoroughly researched, winsomely written and cogently argued. Put it on your summer reading list. You can order it from my favorite bookshop Hearts and Minds Bookstore.

The Epidemic Myth

On a recent VP post I mentioned that the notion that there's an epidemic of killing of unarmed black men by racist white police is a myth, that in fact, more unarmed white men are killed by police than are unarmed black men. To flesh this out a bit here are some stats from the Washington Post.

The following data only reflects deaths by shooting. I could find no racial breakdown on deaths by other means such as chokeholds, tasers, etc. The data should also be seen against the backdrop of the fact that approximately 1000 people are fatally shot by police each year so the number of unarmed men, both black and white, killed by police is a very small percentage:

• In 2015 36 unarmed blacks were killed by police compared to 31 whites, but since then the number of shootings of both unarmed men and women has dropped and the ratio of black to white has reversed.
• In 2016, police killed 22 unarmed whites and 19 unarmed blacks.
• In 2017, 30 unarmed whites were killed compared with 20 unarmed blacks.
• In 2018 police had killed 18 unarmed people by May of that year, with 10 whites and seven blacks among them.
• In 2019 there were 19 unarmed white persons killed and 9 unarmed black victims.

Yet if one were to take to our media seriously one would think that not only were the numbers of unarmed men killed by police much higher, one would also think that unarmed black men were being massacred in far greater numbers than unarmed whites.

One response to the inconvenient fact that police kill more unarmed white men than they do unarmed black men is that blacks only make up 13% of the population. When the demographic difference is factored in, we're told, blacks are actually killed at more than twice the rate of unarmed whites.

The disparity is cited as evidence of police racism and it would certainly be persuasive were the circumstances surrounding these deaths similar, but they're not.

Most hostile interactions and confrontations between police and civilians occur in communities where crime, particularly violent crime, is highest. There are about 7,300 black homicide victims nationwide each year, not to mention the rates of other violent criminal acts. According to black author Voddie Beacham in his book Fault Lines, a National Academy of Sciences study found that when race-specific violence is considered the disparities between white and black victimhood disappears or is reversed.

An article at The Manhattan Institute states that,

Much of modern policing is driven by crime data and community demands for help. The African American community tends to be policed more heavily because that is where people are disproportionately hurt by violent street crime.

In New York City in 2018, 73% of shooting victims were Black, though Black residents comprise only 24% of the city’s population. Nationally, African Americans between the ages of 10 and 34 die from homicide at 13 times the rate of white Americans, according to researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Justice Department. (italics mine)

Where and when police are significantly more likely to encounter violent people it's no surprise that there will be more lethal confrontations. Moreover, just because an unarmed man is shot by police it doesn't follow that the shooting was unjustified. Again, from The Washington Post:

A review of the shootings of unarmed people shows that officers were reported to be under physical attack in about 40 percent of the cases. The remaining 60 percent involved a variety of circumstances, including individuals’ making provocative movements or verbal threats (31 percent) or fleeing, or being shot unintentionally or in undetermined circumstances, according to a review of news reports and video of the incidents

. Clearly, some killings of unarmed men by police are unjustified - Eric Garner, Philando Castile and George Floyd come to mind - but the notion perpetuated by our media that there's an epidemic of unarmed black men being killed by police is simply false.

Retiring Infinity

MIT physics professor John Brockman advances a surprising, perhaps even heretical, thesis: The idea of infinity should be retired from physics. Why? Because it causes too many problems. Here's an excerpt from his lede:

The assumption that something truly infinite exists in nature underlies every physics course I’ve ever taught at MIT—and, indeed, all of modern physics. But it’s an untested assumption, which begs the question: Is it actually true?

There are in fact two separate assumptions: “infinitely big” and “infinitely small.” By infinitely big, I mean that space can have infinite volume, that time can continue forever, and that there can be infinitely many physical objects. By infinitely small, I mean the continuum—the idea that even a liter of space contains an infinite number of points, that space can be stretched out indefinitely without anything bad happening, and that there are quantities in nature that can vary continuously.

The two assumptions are closely related, because inflation, the most popular explanation of our Big Bang, can create an infinite volume by stretching continuous space indefinitely.

The theory of inflation has been spectacularly successful and is a leading contender for a Nobel Prize. It explains how a subatomic speck of matter transformed into a massive Big Bang, creating a huge, flat, uniform universe, with tiny density fluctuations that eventually grew into today’s galaxies and cosmic large-scale structure—all in beautiful agreement with precision measurements from experiments such as the Planck and the BICEP2 experiments.

But by predicting that space isn’t just big but truly infinite, inflation has also brought about the so-called measure problem, which I view as the greatest crisis facing modern physics.

Physics is all about predicting the future from the past, but inflation seems to sabotage this. When we try to predict the probability that something particular will happen, inflation always gives the same useless answer: infinity divided by infinity.

The problem is that whatever experiment you make, inflation predicts there will be infinitely many copies of you, far away in our infinite space, obtaining each physically possible outcome; and despite years of teeth-grinding in the cosmology community, no consensus has emerged on how to extract sensible answers from these infinities.

So, strictly speaking, we physicists can no longer predict anything at all!

This means that today’s best theories need a major shakeup by retiring an incorrect assumption. Which one? Here’s my prime suspect: ∞.

Brockman goes on to discuss this problem and to cite mathematicians who dismissed the idea that an actual infinite could exist.

Philosophers, or at least some of them, have long disdained the idea of infinities because of the paradoxes to which they lead. For example, Hilbert's Hotel, the brainchild of mathematician David Hilbert who imagined a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, leads to the paradox that even if every room was occupied there'd still be an infinite number of rooms available.

You could have an infinite number of rooms occupied and an infinite number unoccupied in the same hotel:

One consequence of removing infinity from the physicist's tool box is that it also removes an objection to one of the most famous families of arguments for the existence of a creator of the universe. The arguments are collectively called the Cosmological argument and one version, put simply, goes something like this:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. Nothing causes itself to exist.
3. The universe is not infinite and therefore began to exist.
4. Therefore, the universe has a cause outside of itself.

With the addition of a few more premises it can be shown that the cause is very much like the God of traditional theism, but that's a discussion for another time. The point here is that an objection to this argument is the claim that premise 3. is a false assumption.

It's been more difficult to sustain this objection, of course, since the 1960s when Big Bang cosmogeny was pretty much confirmed, but there have nevertheless been attempts to deflect the force of the above argument by insisting that there have been an infinite number of big bangs in the history of the universe which has been oscillating between phases of expansion and collapse forever.

Of course, if the universe has been banging on forever we never could have arrived at the present bang. It'd be like trying to climb out of an infinitely deep hole.

Infinity is also employed against the argument for God from the fine-tuning of the universe. The argument here is that even though it seems astronomically improbable that a universe like ours, suitable for human life, should exist solely by random chance, nevertheless, given that there are an infinite number of different universes (at least hypothetically) every possible universe must exist. Thus, ours exists.

In other words, infinity has been an escape hatch for those who wish to avoid the conclusion that the universe is a product of a transcendent creator. By invoking it they've been able to justify, at least to themselves, their refusal to accept the conclusion of arguments such as the above.

It's interesting, then, to read a prominent physicist calling for the retirement of the concept.

Honoring Our Heroes

Memorial Day was originally established to honor those who lost their lives in service to our country in time of war, but it's appropriate on this day to remember not only the sacrifice of those who never came home, but also the sacrifices and character of men like those described in these accounts from the war in Iraq:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For men like these and the millions of others whose courage and sacrifice have for two hundred and fifty years enabled the rest of us to live in relative freedom and security, we should all thank God.

Perpetuating the Myth

Friday's Wall Street Journal featured an op-ed by former Democratic National Committee Chairman Donna Brazile. Brazile's column was a condemnation of anti-semitic bigotry in which she compares anti-semitism to the sort of prejudice blacks have faced in this country.

In the course of her essay she says this:

As a black woman, I’ve experienced plenty of discrimination, though far less than my ancestors suffered. And in the past year I’ve watched the same videos and read the same accounts that millions of people around the world have seen—images of police killing unarmed black people in American cities.

I cried over these horrific killings, as I cried for the victims gunned down at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston.

There are a couple of things about this passage that are problematic, but one of them is that she, perhaps inadvertently, perpetuates the myth that unarmed black people are uniquely victimized by white police. Despite the strenuous efforts on the part of the left/liberal media, politicians and celebrities to convince us that this is so, it simply isn't.

In his book Fault Lines, black pastor Voddie Baucham cites several examples of prominent individuals and media reinforcing the myth:

NBA player Lebron James: "We're [black men] literally hunted EVERYDAY/EVERYTIME we step foot outside the comfort of our home."

The New York Times quoting a protest organizer: "I'm just as likely to die from a cop as I am from COVID."

A Washington Post headline: "Police Killing Black People Is a Pandemic, Too."

The media also reinforces this myth every time they use the phrase "unarmed black man." NPR for instance, used the phrase 82 times in 2020 when reporting on the deaths of black men at the hands of whites. The phrase was used 65 times in the 187 days after Ahmand Arbery was killed in Georgia by two white men (who were not police officers).

In that same 187 day period the phrase "unarmed white man" was not used once even though 11 unarmed white men were killed by police during that stretch.

We hear a lot about the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile and other innocent victims of police brutality, mistakes or incompetence. But when the victim is black and the officer is white the killing is automatically imputed to racism.

Baucham points out, however, that for every case like those mentioned in the previous sentence there are numerous similar cases which never make it onto the evening news. For example, Tony Timpa's case is much like George Floyd's but we never heard about it. Timpa was white.

Tamir Rice was shot and killed because the police thought that a toy gun he brandished was real. It was a national story because Rice was young and black, but in 2016 the Washington Post reported that over a two year span police killed 86 people under similar circumstances, 54 of whom were white and 19 of whom were black.

Baucham describes similar circumstances with regard to almost all of the killings that have achieved notoriety in recent years. Yet the myth persists. Baucham writes:

In a recent man-on-the-street interview conducted by Prager University, three young black men were asked how many unarmed black men the police killed in 2019. "About a thousand," said one. "At least a thousand," said the second. The third estimated "Fourteen hundred." When asked how many unarmed white men were killed by police that same year, their answers ranged from four to fourteen.

The young men were astonished to learn that only nineteen white men and nine black men had been killed by police in 2019....

I suspect a lot of others would be surprised, too, given how disgracefully tendentious and pernicious our news reporting on these incidents has been.

The Demise of Literature

Those readers who've attended college, or who've been involved in academia for a while may have noticed that enrollment in Humanities disciplines in general and English in particular have plummeted in recent decades.

Mark Bauerlein at First Things has an interesting essay on why he thinks this has happened. He writes:

Today’s job market is beyond depressing. Openings in English dropped by 55 percent between 2007–08 and 2017–18—from 1,826 listings to 828—and undergraduate demand for the services of the lucky few who obtain a job continues to decline. From 2011 to 2017, the number of English bachelor’s degrees fell by more than 20 percent.

In the sixties, the opposite was happening....The number of institutions of higher education climbed from 2,008 to 2,525 during the same period. Mass hiring of professors took place, with the number of instructors increasing from 281,506 in 1959–60 to 551,000 in 1969–70.

English was a major beneficiary of the growth. In 1959–60, 20,128 graduates earned bachelor’s degrees in English; ten years later, the number had nearly tripled, to 56,410. One year after that, the number of English majors earning a four-year degree hit 63,914—one out of every thirteen students....General education requirements typically included semesters of freshman composition, foreign language, Western Civilization, and a separate literature course, making literary studies a centerpiece of everyone’s formation.

But then disaster struck. Teachers of literature became enamored of French deconstructionism and theorists like Jacques Derrida and Michael Foucault:

The popularity of English was a luxury enabling American disciples to be almost mischievous in their admiration of the difficulty of the new theorists. Derrida’s dense dialectical presentation in Of Grammatology wasn’t going to make many wavering sophomores decide to major in English or French. Foucault’s treatment of torture and prison wouldn’t lead parents and alumni to become donors.

Their vocabulary reduced the audience for academic criticism. American undergraduates couldn’t understand it, but so what? The obscurity wouldn’t be a problem as long as resources and students were pouring in. If classes were full, the American scholars who embraced the new theorists could welcome a foreign discourse steeped in Hegel, Freud, Heidegger, and European linguists that only a few sub-sub-specialists had mastered.

Why bother with reader-friendly prose if research funds and outlets are plentiful?

But the indulgence in a form of literary criticism that no one could understand had a baneful effect on student enrollment. Bauerlein cites a typical passage from the work of one deconstructionist:

A choice must then be made: either to place all texts in a demonstrative oscillation, equalizing them under the scrutiny of an in-different science, forcing them to rejoin, inductively, the Copy from which we will then make them derive; or else to restore each text, not to its individuality, but to its function, making it cohere, even before we talk about it, by the infinite paradigm of difference, subjecting it from the outset to a basic typology, to an evaluation.

Such gibberish turned students off. As Bauerlein notes: Students majored in English because they’d read Shakespeare in a freshman course or Hemingway on their own and found in these and other works satisfying reflections of themselves and their lives. They identified with Odysseus and Nick Adams, and they wanted their classes to help them refine their enthusiasm and appreciation for works of literature.

But deconstructionism forced students to ignore the skill of the author and the truth the author sought to convey and focus instead on the authors' "center":

Derrida pushed a radical skepticism that targeted the very idea of core meaning, original intention, or truth in or behind or before or under the work itself....Claims to true interpretation, Derrida said, rested upon a “center,” something outside the work that explained constituents of it—an author’s psychology, his religion, his class relations, and so on.

Race and gender were soon to be included. Interpreting and appreciating the writing itself was secondary to the status of the writer. Everything must be interpreted in light of that status and that interpretation was open-ended. The interpreter or reader never arrived at any final conclusions:

This embrace of the heroic role of the endless interpreter swept everyone away. The search for the central truth of a literary work was over. The rehearsal of the forever-deferred and “problematized” truth of the work took its place. No more truth, only “reading.”

This model was never going to attract very many American sophomores, who thrill to literature for its love and hate, intrigue and action, conflict and lyricism. It did not impress the literary reading public, either, the individuals who had season tickets to local theaters and subscribed to the Book-of-the-Month Club.

Sophomores today who want teachers who will teach them that Faulkner has special insight into the human psyche and that Pope’s couplets are the height of verbal refinement won’t easily find them. When I finished graduate school in 1988, those kinds of evaluations were already off the table. Theory had made everyone cannier, or so we thought.

You had to be careful not to “privilege” literature. You did not permit yourself overt enthusiasm for great novels or poems. You submitted “texts” to analysis—you “performed” a “reading.”

A well-written novel was no longer considered a work of art in itself. It was only important in light of what it said about the author's "center." This may be of interest to sociologists and psychologists, but many lovers of literature found it sterile, arcane and disappointing.

In any case, there's more to Bauerlein's essay at the link.

Not being in the field of literature myself I can't say whether Bauerlein's analysis of the decline of English as an academic discipline is correct or not, but it's certainly interesting and seems plausible. I would add, though, that the dearth of career opportunities in which a degree in deconstructive literary criticism is helpful is doubtless also a factor in the decline of the number of students who choose to major in English.