Readers who are fans of the Beatles may be interested in this video of a 1995 appearance of John Lennon singing his famous "Imagine." Only the small-minded will quibble that Lennon had in fact died fifteen years earlier.
Actually, the message of his song is much more sophisticated in this later rendition than in the 1970's version.
Click on the video to play the song and scroll down to read the lyrics.
Thanks to Byron for the tip.
RLC
A white blood cell chases down an invading bacterium in this fascinating video clip. We might pause to marvel at all the systems and structures which need to be present in this microscopic cell in order for it to carry out its function as a seek and destroy mechanism to guard the body against infection.
It has to have an apparatus that enables it to detect the presence of an invading microbe, it has to be able to distinguish the invader from other cells in the blood stream, and it has to have an apparatus that enables it to home in on its prey and to pursue and ingest it. All of these systems are doubtless very complex, requiring many specialized proteins, all of which require assembly mechanisms and instructions. That assembly, in turn, requires other structures to coordinate the timing and location of the necessary proteins, and all of these things arose blindly and purely by accident, according to the Darwinian narrative.
Well, maybe, but we can hardly help being skeptical. Our credulity can grant to chance and purposeless processes only so much capability before it collapses under the enormous weight the Darwinian view places upon its shoulders. After a while it just seems like we're being asked to believe in a fairy tale.
RLC
Gene Expression poses ten questions to Heather Mac Donald, a conservative writer who has become something of a curiosity since she came out and declared herself an atheist in The American Conservative last summer.
MacDonald is always interesting, even when I think her to be mistaken, and the Gene Expression piece does not disappoint. Give it a look.
We examined the support Ms MacDonald gives for her atheism in the American Conservative essay here and here.
RLC
Nick Bromell, a childhood friend of Scooter Libby, tells us more about himself than he probably intended and also something about his idea of what it means to be a modern liberal. Little of what he says is flattering to either himself or liberalism. Here are some excerpts from a much longer essay:
So, for six years I've been obsessed with Scooter. Every time I read a newspaper, I see Scooter and me hunched over a game of Stratego (which he usually won), or I see him faking right before hooking left so I can hit him with a pass in the end zone. Walking my dog through the woods around our house, I chant the mantra of questions I literally ache to ask him: How could you work for an administration that denies global warming and supports tax breaks for large SUVs? How could you work for an administration that cuts funding for birth control to the poorest people in our country and the world? How could you so brazenly exaggerate the threat of Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction, and how could you so foolishly imagine that American troops would be welcomed in Baghdad with cheers and flowers?
In my hotter moments-I have fewer and fewer cool moments these days-I ask Scooter whether his political identification with homophobia is distinguishable from a political identification with racism or anti-Semitism. And convinced that it is not, I sit down at my desk to do it: to write the letter telling Scooter that I can no longer be his friend, not even in the rather distant way we have been friends for all these years.
You'd think that as friends Bromell would at least extend Libby the benefit of the doubt on these issues rather than portraying them so unfairly. No one, for example, denies global warming. What is questioned is the cause, the importance, and the permanence of the rise in the earth's temperature. No one, not even the censorious Mr. Bromell, knows the answers to these questions.
Nor is it homophobia to oppose gay marriage. To compare opposition to gay marriage to racism and anti-semitism is either ignorant, foolish, or dishonest.
Today, my old friend is under indictment for obstructing justice by lying about his knowledge of the Valerie Plame affair. Unless his lawyers manage to engineer a miracle, he will be tried in court early in 2007. There he will face the distinct possibility of public disgrace and a career-terminating jail sentence. So what should I hope for, I ask myself: my old friend's acquittal or his conviction?
Why wouldn't any decent human being hope that his friend would be innocent of the chages and thus acquitted? Why isn't hoping for his friend's acquittal a no-brainer for Mr. Bromell? Is it that punishing people one disagrees with politically is a higher priority for this self-described liberal than the obligations of friendship?
A liberal, as I use the term, is someone who never gives up trying to see the other person's point of view. A liberal never stops doubting himself, for self-doubt is precisely what allows us to make room in our minds for someone else's views and to keep the possibility of communication between us alive. A fundamentalist, on the other hand, is someone to whom the very idea of point of view is immaterial, or worse-the foundation of relativism. A warrior who pledges fealty to the god of one Truth, a fundamentalist searches for personal conviction, not mutual understanding.
By his own definitions I'd say Mr. Bromell shows himself to be more of a fundamentalist than a liberal. He's not making much of an effort in this article to see Scooter Libby's point of view. His description of a fundamentalist, in fact, sounds very much like a description of his own tone in the first two paragraphs above.
What I want to ask Scooter today is how the United States can shape "the international security order in line with American principles and interests" if those principles include-as the document implies-the right of a nation to seek preeminence. After all, if we aim to shape the world in accordance with that principle, aren't we inviting the other nations of the world to emulate us and thereby to seek preeminence themselves?
For Mr. Bromell it is nefarious for nations to strive for greatness. It's chauvinistic to think that one's principles are superior to those of others. Mr. Bromell would apparently prefer that all nations remain equal in their shared mediocrity. Rather than getting out in front and pulling others along in our slipstream, if people like Mr. Bromell had their way all nations would be stalled at the same level of achievement as the most laggard third world economic basket case.
In my own experience, this pernicious trend resolves itself finally into the matter of whether I should remain Scooter's friend and what verdict I should hope for at his trial. There's a part of me that wants to see him get nailed. There's a part of me that wants to end the endless imagined conversations I've been having with him, that wants to stop peppering him with "How can you?" questions, that wants to arrive at the Zen clarity of the warrior who focuses on one thing only: victory.
But there's another part of me-call it the lingering liberal part-that tries to be fair to Scooter's point of view, that doesn't want to consign him to the camp of "the enemy," that wants to keep lines of communication open.
Would remaining Scooter's friend be the surest way I have of remaining true to the principles of liberalism, as I understand that word? Or would it just be an excuse for my failure to face a difficult situation, and one that makes me a sucker as well? Would recognizing Scooter as my enemy be the honest thing to do, and the only thing he would truly respect?
In other words, rather than loving his friend unconditionally, he agonizes over whether his liberal principles might require him to hope his friend's life is ruined. This makes liberalism sound more like a fringe fundamentalist religion than a set of political principles.
I know that terrorists aren't out to grab American assets. What they hate is a certain image of America, America as a cultural chauvinist trying to impose its principles and interests on the rest of the world.
This is remarkably naive. What terrorists hate about America is the fact that we are not Muslim and that we protect Israel. They hate us, too, because our success, in spite of our being infidels, is an indictment of their own ineptitude and of the religion that has stultified their progress for a thousand years.
If I .... [am] correct, then the best way for the United States to combat the religious fundamentalism that underwrites terrorism is to remain a liberal state guided by liberal principles. The worst thing we can do is precisely what the Bush administration has promoted: become a fundamentalist nation that mirrors bin Laden's fantasies back to him and thus confirms them.
Presumably one of those liberal principles is to treat Islamo-terrorists as criminals rather than as a military foe whose aim is to utterly destroy us and our way of life. How long would our liberal principles last if we refused to fight against this threat?
And Cheney would be right. We liberals do want to hold onto the word true because we know that behind our policy proposals lurks a deep sense of right and wrong, a deep instinct about what makes life valuable and meaningful. But we do not fully articulate these beliefs, and we seldom even admit that we have them. Because they rest at bottom on conviction, not reason, and therefore cannot be justified without circularity, we hesitate to bring them into the open. We are nervous about admitting that in this sense our politics are as faith-based as those of any fundamentalist.
I'm not sure what he's getting at in the preceding paragraph except to admit that liberal principles rest on little more than a subjective preference. If that's what he's saying it's quite an admission. It is an acknowledgement that at bottom liberalism is a non-rational choice that people make simply because it makes them feel good.
While I want the Bush administration to be held accountable for its blunders and its lies, I also want my friend Scooter to be proven innocent and to go home to his family. In short, I want things both ways.
Well, then. Why all the anguish over what he ultimately wants. And how would convicting a minor figure really be punishing the Bush administration anyway? Mr. Bromell sounds like a very mean-spirited and vindictive man who comes close to being willing to sacrifice his friend if it will, even in small measure, somehow hurt Bush.
I wonder if his sense of justice wants Bill Clinton's administration held accountable for its blunders and lies? Does he, for example, insist that Sandy Berger be prosecuted for stealing documents from the National Archives and destroying them? Or is that crime justified because it served the interest of Democrats?
If this attitude involves me in self-contradiction, so be it. The risk of a seeming inconsistency is one that liberals must take if we are to meet the complexities of the world as we know it. But we should undertake this risk agonizingly, not flippantly, taking the full measure of what is at stake as we make up our minds.
Mr. Bromell makes here another confession. Liberalism, at least as he understands it, is inconsistent with the way the world is. The inconsistency, however, is mostly within himself. He wants to see anyone associated with the Bush administration destroyed, but he can't reconcile that with his obligation to love his friend. The problem is more with Mr. Bromell's character, perhaps, than with his ideology.
How is it inconsistent, whether one is a liberal or a conservative, to desire to see justice done while hoping that one's friend is innocent? Mr. Bromell is so blinded by his hatred for Bush that any twinge of human sentiment and common sense that interferes with his desire for punishment seems to him to raise the specter of a contradiction.
Most of the liberals I know are good, kind people who are not at all the obsessed, vindictive Captain Ahabs Mr. Bromell paints himself as being. They would have no trouble loving their friend and praying for his acquittal, even if they disagreed in every neuron in their bodies with the Bush administration's policies. But the liberalism Mr. Bromell displays really is something very ugly.
RLC
Bill Roggio has more than has been reported in the MSM on the recent battle between Iraqi forces and a large insurgent force near Najaf that cost the insurgents at least 250-300 killed and hundreds wounded and captured.
RLC
We linked to this video a couple of months ago, but it's worth doing again for our newer readers. The next time you hear someone insist that life is solely the product of chance and physical law, that it arose through purely mechanical processes acting blindly through trial and error, think of this computer representation of just a couple of the processes that occur constantly in every cell of every human being. Then ask yourself whether the engineering and complexity of these systems is something that could plausibly result from sheer accident, as the Darwinian true believers would have it.
You can read about the technical aspects of producing the video here.
RLC
A Pew Survey of "Generation Nexters" (18-25 yr. olds) reveals that 81% of them believe that getting rich is either the highest or second highest priority of their generation. Fifty one percent rated getting famous as the highest or second highest goal.
The good news in this otherwise depressing result is that if the Nexters are successful in achieving their goals us aging boomers won't have to worry about social security running out. With Democrats in power taxes on the rich are bound to go up, especially those taxes designed to underwrite entitlements like SS and Medicare.
Some reports of distressing shallowness among the young can indeed be cause for rejoicing.
RLC
We've been offering our thoughts on an article by anti-theist Sam Harris at Edge in which he seeks to persuade us that most of what people believe about atheists and atheism isn't true. He discusses in the piece ten "myths" about atheism that he wants to debunk. In this post we'll respond to what he says about myth number 8:
Atheists believe that there is nothing beyond human life and human understanding.
Atheists are free to admit the limits of human understanding in a way that religious people are not. It is obvious that we do not fully understand the universe; but it is even more obvious that neither the Bible nor the Koran reflects our best understanding of it. We do not know whether there is complex life elsewhere in the cosmos, but there might be. If there is, such beings could have developed an understanding of nature's laws that vastly exceeds our own. Atheists can freely entertain such possibilities. They also can admit that if brilliant extraterrestrials exist, the contents of the Bible and the Koran will be even less impressive to them than they are to human atheists.
From the atheist point of view, the world's religions utterly trivialize the real beauty and immensity of the universe. One doesn't have to accept anything on insufficient evidence to make such an observation.
When people state that atheists believe that there is nothing beyond human life and human understanding they are not talking about belief in extraterrestrials. This is a rather droll way to construe the claim. They mean, of course, that atheists believe that there is no existence beyond this one and that there is no reality beyond the material world in which we live. This is the only way to interpret the "myth" that makes any sense, and there is surely no atheist who would deny these assertions.
But the irrelevance of what Harris says aside, how does he know that brilliant extraterrestrials would find the contents of the Bible unimpressive? How could Harris know such a thing unless he knows the Bible is completely false in its claims about God, and how could he, or anyone, know that? It takes surpassing arrogance to claim to know that there is no God and, having insisted earlier in his essay that atheists aren't arrogant, he probably should think better of implying that he's in possession of such knowledge.
Finally, we're left to wonder how, or in what way, Christianity trivializes the beauty and immensity of the universe. Harris enjoys making remarkable claims like this which are apropos of nothing in particular and which he leaves hang in mid-air, unsupported by any evidence or argument. He gives the back of his hand to believers for accepting religious claims on insufficient evidence, but he apparently expects his readers to accept his own claims without the benefit of any evidence whatsoever.
RLC
Suppose that reality actually consists of more dimensions than just the three (four, counting time) that our minds are structured to experience. If so, then the world is, in fact, totally different than it appears to us since we are only perceiving a fraction of a multi-dimensional reality.
In the novel Flatland, written in 1884, Edwin Abbott explored what a two dimensional world would look like to its inhabitants and what three dimensional objects would look like if they invaded a two dimensional world.
The novel helps stretch our imaginations and became a classic. Now it's being made into a movie, the trailer for which can be viewed here.Woody Allen depicted something similar in Purple Rose of Cairo, in which a character (Jeff Daniels) in the two dimensional world of a film on the movie screen suddenly steps out of the screen and into the three dimensional world of a woman (Mia Farrow) viewing the movie all alone in the theater.
Maybe our existence is like that of the characters on the screen. We think that what we perceive is all there is, while all around us there is a wider world of additional dimensions in which people live, and move, and have their being, and we're totally unaware of it because our minds are unable to apprehend those dimensions.
Perhaps at death we, like Jeff Daniels in the Purple Rose of Cairo, step off the three dimensional screen of this world and into a multidimensional reality that we could no more imagine before we experienced it than a child in the womb could imagine the world that it would be entering when it's born.
Perhaps we are surrounded by, and embedded in, a reality which is so much richer than that which we can experience, but we are totally oblivious to it until we take on a "body" with the senses to perceive it.
As Hamlet says to his companion: "There are more things in heaven and on earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Perhaps so.
RLC
Bill Roggio surmises that the attack on American soldiers at Karbala in Iraq was carried out by Iranian commandos. If he's right then the new directive giving American troops the green light to kill or capture any Iranians found in Iraq makes even more sense:
On January 20th, a team of twelve men disguised as U.S. soldiers entered the Provincial Joint Coordination Center in Karbala, where U.S. soldiers conducted a meeting with local officials, and attacked and killed five soldiers, and wounded another three. The initial reports indicated the five were killed in the Karbala JCC, however the U.S. military has reported that four of those killed were actually removed from the center, handcuffed, and murdered.
The American Forces Information Service provides the details of the attack in Karbala. Based on the sophisticated nature of the raid, as well as the response, or cryptic non-responses, from multiple military and intelligence sources, this raid appears to have been directed and executed by the Qods Force branch of the Iranian Republican Guard Corps.
Read the rest of the details that have been made public about this attack at the link.
RLC
Michael Shermer, in reviewing Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion in the journal Science Magazine, closes his review with these surprising words:
"Dawkins' latest book deserves multiple readings, not just as an important work of science, but as a great work of literature."
What a very odd thing to say of a book which is devoted completely to debunking theism. In what sense is this a book of science? And why is a journal devoted to science publishing a review of what is essentially a book on religion?
Mike Gene at wonders:
Isn't it odd how a popular anti-religious book, which reports no new experiments or data, and was not peer-reviewed, has become an Important Work of Science?
Gene sees in Shermer's essay the germ of a trend to expand the definition of science to include anti-religious efforts. The irony of this, of course, is that some of the same people who blanched at allowing Intelligent Design to be taught in public schools because "it's religion, not science" are now calling books on atheism "important works of science."
As Gene says:
Now, science apparently CAN address supernatural causes. Now, science and evolution apparently DO lead to atheism. Now, there is apparently NO difference between methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism.
I'm sure that the next time the ACLU goes to court to smack down some school's effort to teach students that not every scholar is convinced that mechanical processes are sufficient to explain the complexity of life, Shermer's essay will be presented as evidence by the defense. When the ACLU witnesses testify that ID is not science they'll have a hard time explaining why a book which seeks to promote atheism is considered science by reputable science magazines.
See here for yet another example of a journal ostensibly devoted to genes and chromosomes publishing an article in which the author indulges in amateurish theologizing. Apparently religious articles are suitable for publication in scientific magazines and journals when they argue against the existence of a cosmic designer. If they argue for the existence of a designer then they are completely out of bounds. The Important Work of Science seems now to consist of trying to prove that there is no God.
RLC
Christopher Hitchens at City Journal reviews and builds upon the fine work of Mark Steyn in his book America Alone and concludes his column by offering an eight point plan of his own for dealing with Islamo-fascism. His eight points are these:
1. An end to one-way multiculturalism and to the cultural masochism that goes with it. The Koran does not mandate the wearing of veils or genital mutilation, and until recently only those who apostasized from Islam faced the threat of punishment by death. Now, though, all manner of antisocial practices find themselves validated in the name of religion, and mullahs have begun to issue threats even against non-Muslims for criticism of Islam. This creeping Islamism must cease at once, and those responsible must feel the full weight of the law. Meanwhile, we should insist on reciprocity at all times. We should not allow a single Saudi dollar to pay for propaganda within the U.S., for example, until Saudi Arabia also permits Jewish and Christian and secular practices. No Wahhabi-printed Korans anywhere in our prison system. No Salafist imams in our armed forces.
2. A strong, open alliance with India on all fronts, from the military to the political and economic, backed by an extensive cultural exchange program, to demonstrate solidarity with the other great multiethnic democracy under attack from Muslim fascism. A hugely enlarged quota for qualified Indian immigrants and a reduction in quotas from Pakistan and other nations where fundamentalism dominates.
3. A similarly forward approach to Nigeria, S�o Tom� and Pr�ncipe, and the other countries of Western Africa that are under attack by jihadists and are also the location of vast potential oil reserves, whose proper development could help emancipate the local populations from poverty and ourselves from dependence on Middle Eastern oil.
4. A declaration at the UN of our solidarity with the right of the Kurdish people of Iraq and elsewhere to self-determination as well as a further declaration by Congress that in no circumstance will Muslim forces who have fought on our side, from the Kurds to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, find themselves friendless, unarmed, or abandoned. Partition in Iraq would be defeat under another name (and as with past partitions, would lead to yet further partitions and micro-wars over these very subdivisions). But if it has to come, we cannot even consider abandoning the one part of the country that did seize the opportunity of modernization, development, and democracy.
5. Energetic support for all the opposition forces in Iran and in the Iranian diaspora. A public offer from the United States, disseminated widely in the Persian language, of help for a reformed Iran on all matters, including peaceful nuclear energy, and of assistance in protecting Iran from the catastrophic earthquake that seismologists predict in its immediate future. Millions of lives might be lost in a few moments, and we would also have to worry about the fate of secret underground nuclear facilities. When a quake leveled the Iranian city of Bam three years ago, the performance of American rescue teams was so impressive that their popularity embarrassed the regime. Iran's neighbors would need to pay attention, too: a crisis in Iran's nuclear underground facilities-an Iranian Chernobyl-would not be an internal affair. These concerns might help shift the currently ossified terms of the argument and put us again on the side of an internal reform movement within Iran and its large and talented diaspora.
6. Unconditional solidarity, backed with force and the relevant UN resolutions, with an independent and multi-confessional Lebanon.
7. A commitment to buy Afghanistan's opium crop and to keep the profits out of the hands of the warlords and Talibanists, until such time as the country's agriculture- especially its once-famous vines-has been replanted and restored. We can use the product in the interim for the manufacture of much-needed analgesics for our own market and apply the profits to the reconstruction of Afghanistan.
8. We should, of course, be scrupulous on principle about stirring up interethnic tensions. But we should remind those states that are less scrupulous-Iran, Pakistan, and Syria swiftly come to mind-that we know that they, too, have restless minorities and that they should not make trouble in Afghanistan, Lebanon, or Iraq without bearing this in mind. Some years ago, the Pakistani government announced that it would break the international embargo on the unrecognized and illegal Turkish separatist state in Cyprus and would appoint an ambassador to it, out of "Islamic solidarity." Cyprus is a small democracy with no armed forces to speak of, but its then-foreign minister told me the following story. He sought a meeting with the Pakistani authorities and told them privately that if they recognized the breakaway Turkish colony, his government would immediately supply funds and arms to one of the secessionist movements-such as the Baluchis-within Pakistan itself. Pakistan never appointed an ambassador to Turkish Cyprus.
Good ideas all. Let's hope that people in the White House and State Department have also thought of them or are at least reading Hitchens and Steyn.
RLC
Anti-theist Sam Harris, whose Ten Myths About Atheism we have been weighing in the balance here at Viewpoint, and Andrew Sullivan, have been having a debate about religion at BeliefNet. I wish Harris were debating someone a little less hostile to traditional forms of Christianity than Sullivan, but their exchange is interesting nonetheless.
RLC
Parents and their student children know that college isn't getting any cheaper, but at many private schools the tuition alone is more than many parents' annual income. Here are some highlights from an article at Forbes.com which discusses the reasons for the high costs:
Experts cite strong competition for faculty, student demand for state-of-the-art classrooms and facilities, and a decline in federal support for research facilities as the big cost drivers. Basically, classrooms are nicer, registration no longer means standing in line and professors make more money. But there's no real evidence that students are learning more, even as their parents fork over more money.
George Washington University leads the nation with tuition costs of $37,820. This is 82% of the entire median annual family income of $46,326. And that's just tuition.
Nationwide, the median tuition at a four-year school was $7,490 for the 2006-07 academic year, a 2.3% increase over a year ago, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. But that includes many state-run universities, where in-state residents are charged a pittance. The median tuition at private schools was more than twice that amount, weighing in at $15,900, up 3.4% over a year ago. And that figure doesn't come close to the nation's most expensive colleges--121 of them charged more than $30,000 this past year. Add room and board and other assorted fees, and the bill climbs beyond $40,000.
The most expensive public school for in-state residents is Miami University in Ohio, which charged local residents $22,997 apiece this past year. The heftiest bill for out-of-staters comes from the University of Michigan, which hits up non-Wolverines for $29,131 to come to Ann Arbor.
The cheapest four-year school in America? That distinction goes to Northern New Mexico College, which charges only $1,030 a year to in-state residents (outsiders pay $2,206). Still, even that rate is up from $771 at the beginning of the decade, a 34% increase.
See here for a listing of the ten most expensive schools.
RLC
Cox and Forkum wonder what the Democrats' strategy for winning in Iraq might be:
This isn't quite fair. They actually do have a strategy which is to bash Bush's strategy every chance they get.
RLC
Steven Pinker has written an interesting, if rather lengthy, essay on the nature of consciousness and the problems researchers in the field are seeking to solve. Pinker is a substance monist, a materialist, who believes that consciousness is explicable purely in terms of brain function. I think he's probably wrong about that but his article is worth reading for the insight it gives into the controversy. Here are a few early paragraphs:
What remains is not one problem about consciousness but two, which the philosopher David Chalmers has dubbed the Easy Problem and the Hard Problem. Calling the first one easy is an in-joke: it is easy in the sense that curing cancer or sending someone to Mars is easy. That is, scientists more or less know what to look for, and with enough brainpower and funding, they would probably crack it in this century.
What exactly is the Easy Problem? It's the one that Freud made famous, the difference between conscious and unconscious thoughts. Some kinds of information in the brain--such as the surfaces in front of you, your daydreams, your plans for the day, your pleasures and peeves--are conscious. You can ponder them, discuss them and let them guide your behavior. Other kinds, like the control of your heart rate, the rules that order the words as you speak and the sequence of muscle contractions that allow you to hold a pencil, are unconscious. They must be in the brain somewhere because you couldn't walk and talk and see without them, but they are sealed off from your planning and reasoning circuits, and you can't say a thing about them.
The Easy Problem, then, is to distinguish conscious from unconscious mental computation, identify its correlates in the brain and explain why it evolved.
The Hard Problem, on the other hand, is why it feels like something to have a conscious process going on in one's head--why there is first-person, subjective experience. Not only does a green thing look different from a red thing, remind us of other green things and inspire us to say, "That's green" (the Easy Problem), but it also actually looks green: it produces an experience of sheer greenness that isn't reducible to anything else. As Louis Armstrong said in response to a request to define jazz, "When you got to ask what it is, you never get to know."
The Hard Problem is explaining how subjective experience arises from neural computation. The problem is hard because no one knows what a solution might look like or even whether it is a genuine scientific problem in the first place. And not surprisingly, everyone agrees that the hard problem (if it is a problem) remains a mystery.
Toward the end he lays his materialist cards on the table:
Whatever the solutions to the Easy and Hard problems turn out to be, few scientists doubt that they will locate consciousness in the activity of the brain. For many nonscientists, this is a terrifying prospect. Not only does it strangle the hope that we might survive the death of our bodies, but it also seems to undermine the notion that we are free agents responsible for our choices--not just in this lifetime but also in a life to come. In his millennial essay "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died," Tom Wolfe worried that when science has killed the soul, "the lurid carnival that will ensue may make the phrase 'the total eclipse of all values' seem tame."
Having written six pages he apparently gets a little giddy, and allows himself to make the ludicrous suggestion that recognizing that other people have brains like ours makes for a better basis for morality than does belief in eternal life.
We'll have more to say about the last page of Pinker's article tomorrow.
RLC
One of the books listed by George Weigel as among the five best books for understanding Christianity was The Sources of Christian Ethics by Servais Pinckaers, O.P. (Catholic University of America, 1995). Weigel says this about Pinckaers' book:
Christianity--classic Christian morality in particular--is frequently pilloried as dour and nay-saying. Father Servais Pinckaers offers a different, more humane and more accurate perspective: the Christian moral life as a process of growing in "freedom for excellence," the freedom to choose the good as a matter of habit.
Weigel is, of course, correct about the perception of Christian ethics as dour and negative, but I think this is a stereotype due largely to the fact that too many people have not really thought about Christian ethics beyond a simple perusal of the Ten Commandments.
Jesus tells us in Matthew 22 that the whole ethical teaching of Scripture is summed up in two positive imperatives: We are to love God (Commandments 1-4) and love our fellow man (Commandments 5-10). What can be more affirmative, liberating, and upbeat than that?
Some people object that the Biblical emphasis on sin is negative and oppressive, but this opinion is, I think, based on a faulty view of what sin is. Because we are enjoined by Christ to love, to fail to do so is a moral fault. Any act which is harmful to oneself or another is wrong, or "sin," because it violates the command to love. The Biblical text simply elaborates on all the ways that people do harm and enjoins us to avoid those. It also gives us the "Golden Rule" as a guideline for knowing whether a particular act is just or compassionate.
Thus, so far from being dour and negative, the moral teaching of the Bible is extremely positive. The command to love others expresses itself in at least two ways: The Old Testament emphasizes the need to love by doing justice to others, and the New Testament emphasizes the need to love by showing compassion to others.
Of course, it's not always easy to know the right thing to do in a given situation, and even when we know what's right, it's often not easy to do it. Christian ethics, as laid out in the Bible, is not a strait jacket or a code of law. It's a simple guideline, and it's our responsibility to try to apply that guideline in our existential circumstance as honestly as we can.
It's also often difficult to discern how we can best balance the need for justice with the imperative to be compassionate. Sometimes it seems as if the two conflict and one of the moral responsibilities of the Christians community is to work out how best to resolve that conflict in a particular case. Even so, despite the difficulties, together these two imperatives form an ethical system unsurpassed for its simplicity and beauty.
RLC
College freshman are becoming slightly more ideological according to this study which finds that conservatism, while still not the majority stance among college undergrads, is embraced by more freshmen today than at any time in the history of the survey:
When asked to characterize their political views, 43.3 percent of college freshmen identified as "middle-of-the-road," dropping 1.7 percentage points from 2005 to the lowest value since this was first measured by the CIRP in 1970. Both "liberal" (28.4 percent) and "conservative" (23.9 percent) each increased by 1.3 percentage points from 2005 (an increase of 16,900 students nationally). Not only is the percentage of students identifying as "liberal" at the highest level since 1975 (30.7 percent), but the percentage identifying as "conservative" is at the highest point in the history of the Freshman Survey. This indicates that freshmen are moving away from a moderate position in their political viewpoints.
For the students' answers to specific questions see the study at the link.
RLC
Benny Morris tells us what he believes the intermediate future will be for Jews in Israel:
The second Holocaust will not be like the first. The Nazis, of course, industrialized mass murder. But still, the perpetrators had one-on-one contact with the victims. They may have dehumanized them, over months and years of appalling debasement and in their minds, before the actual killing. But, still, they were in eye- and ear-contact, sometimes in tactile contact, with their victims.
The second Holocaust will be quite different. One bright morning, in five or 10 years' time, perhaps during a regional crisis, perhaps out of the blue, a day or a year or five years after Iran's acquisition of the bomb, the mullahs in Qom will convoke in secret session, under a portrait of the steely-eyed Ayatollah Khomeini, and give President Ahmadinejad, by then in his second or third term, the go ahead.
The orders will go out, and the Shihab III and IV missiles will take off for Tel Aviv, Beersheba, Haifa, and Jerusalem, and probably some military sites, including Israel's half-dozen air and alleged nuclear missile bases. Some of the Shihabs will be nuclear-tipped, perhaps even with multiple warheads. Others will be dupes, packed merely with biological or chemical agents, or old newspapers, to draw off or confuse Israel's anti-missile batteries and Home Guard units.
With a country the size and shape of Israel, an elongated 8,000 square miles, probably four or five hits will suffice: no more Israel. A million or more Israelis, in the greater Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem areas, will die immediately. Millions will be seriously irradiated. Israel has about 7 million inhabitants. No Iranian will see or touch an Israeli. It will be quite impersonal.
Read the rest of Morris' piece at the link.
And of course it's not just Israel which is at grave risk. Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is now threatening to destroy the U.S. and he's working on the nuclear weapons that will give him the capability to do it. If the belief that Saddam had WMD was sufficient reason for the Democrats to vote to topple the leadership in Iraq, how much more convinced must they be that Iran must be dealt with similarly?
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