Ideas Have Consequences

Mike Metzger of the Clapham Commentary writes an insightful piece on the connection between one's philosophical worldview and one's way of life. Here are the first couple of paragraphs:

...Today also marks the anniversary of the birth of Adolf Hitler in 1899. Hitler, Columbine and Virginia Tech share a common ancestor - Friedrich Nietzsche. But who cares what a German philosopher said?

We're like Andy Sachs, the young assistant to Miranda Priestley in The Devil Wears Prada. Skeptical that Paris fashion trends dictate her wardrobe choices, Andy smirks at the fancy belts that "all look the same to me." Miranda, one of New York's biggest fashion magazine editors, overhears the remark and wheels around to Andy who backpedals by saying she's "still learning about this stuff." Oops. "This... "stuff?" asks Miranda, "Stuff?" "Oh ... okay. You think this "stuff" has nothing to do with you. You ... go to your closet and select - I don't know - that lumpy blue sweater for instance because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that sweater is not just blue, its not turquoise ... it's not lapis ... it's actually cerulean. And you're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002 Oscar De la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Eves Saint Laurent who showed cerulean military gowns ... and then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it filtered down through the department stores ... and then trickled on down to some tragic Casual Corner where you no doubt fished it out of some clearance bin. However that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs ... and its sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of ... stuff."

Too many Christians dismiss Nietzsche because he wrote "stuff." We see no connection between philosophy and terrorism - between worldview and way of life. Yet Nietzsche predicted unending horrors like Hitler and Columbine and Virginia Tech. He said people cannot believe in moral codes without simultaneously believing in a God who points at us with his fearsome forefinger and says "Thou shalt" or "Thou shalt not." Yet God is dead, Nietzsche said. Our problem is not seeing the inevitable consequences. Without God, life has no meaning or morality. Might makes right. Whoever has the biggest gun wins.

Metzger is exactly right except I think he might include Darwin's influence along with that of Nietzsche. Darwin saw the biological world as one vast, pululating struggle for survival where the fittest squeeze out the less fit in the battle for resources.

Stir together Darwin's concept of survival of the fittest with a dose of Nietszche's atheism and his might makes right ethic, and the toxic vapors of Nazism and nihilistic killers like Cho Seung-Hui quickly condense in the flask of our culture.

Read Metzger's entire essay. It's very good.

RLC

Now it All Makes Sense

In an interview recently, Christopher Hitchens, a writer of considerable ability, and an atheist, was asked:

Has anyone in the Bush administration confided in you about being an atheist?

His answer was:

Well, I don't talk that much to them - maybe people think I do. I know something which is known to few but is not a secret. Karl Rove is not a believer, and he doesn't shout it from the rooftops, but when asked, he answers quite honestly. I think the way he puts it is, "I'm not fortunate enough to be a person of faith."

We suspect that this revelation has tongues wagging in the editorial offices of Sojourners. Jim Wallis and his staff are perhaps thinking that that explains a lot about this administration.

RLC

Lucy

I once heard it said that if you wait long enough sooner or later every fossil that is touted upon its discovery as another link in the chain of human evolution will be discredited. The discovery of the fossil is invariably front-page news, and its evolutionary significance is thoroughly explored, but its fall from favor, if it is reported at all, is consigned to the more obscure sections of the paper.

I thought of this when I came across this report about Australopithecus afarensis better known as "Lucy." Lucy was discovered in Ethiopia in 1974 by a team led by Donald Johanson and immediately hailed as an evolutionary common ancestor of the great apes and man. Now it turns out, thirty three years later, that researchers are doubtful that Lucy was ancestral to man at all.

An entire generation has been taught that Lucy was a missing link in human evolution. Now that the link to man seems to have been an illusion the perception still remains, like the grin of the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland, that there is nevertheless much fossil evidence that humans evolved from ape-like ancestors. It may be that we indeed have a common ancestor with the apes, but the evidence in support of that hypothesis seems about as substantial as the cat's grin.

Don't look for this story to get nearly as much play in the media as did the account of Lucy's discovery and the excitement in the scientific community over the confirmation they thought it provided of the evolutionary model of man's descent. Evidence of evolution is news, the debunking of that evidence is not.

RLC

Virtual Wall

Mexican President Felipe Calderon has likened the barriers that the U.S. is erecting along its southern border to the Berlin Wall. Does that mean that Mexico is like East Germany?

Speaking of barriers along the border the story linked to above says that most of them are going to be "virtual walls" which should detect 95% of those trying to cross into this country illegally. It'll consist of lights, sensors, cameras and more agents and will essentially halt illegal crossings along the Arizona border, the busiest section for clandestine entries.

Officials expect to complete 28 miles of the high-tech system in Arizona by June, and by next year it should run into New Mexico and parts of Texas.

The only problem with a virtual wall is that, unlike a real wall, it only works if the political leadership in Washington make it clear that they want the laws against illegal entry enforced by the border patrol. At this point there's not much reason to think they do.

RLC

Thank Heavens for Sen. Leiberman

Senator Joe Lieberman respectfully, politely, and powerfully grinds the arguments advanced on behalf of the Iraq war funding resolution by Harry Reid and the Democrats into fine powder. In the process he respectfully and politely exposes Senator Reid as an utter buffoon.

Here's an excerpt of Leiberman's speech yesterday on the floor of the senate, but one should read it in its entirety. It's a marvelous example of well-reasoned argumentation.

In his speech Monday, the Majority Leader described the several steps that this new strategy for Iraq would entail. Its first step, he said, is to "transition the U.S. mission away from policing a civil war-to training and equipping Iraqi security forces, protecting U.S. forces, and conducting targeted counter-terror operations."

I ask my colleagues to take a step back for a moment and consider this plan.

When we say that U.S. troops shouldn't be "policing a civil war," that their operations should be restricted to this narrow list of missions, what does this actually mean?

To begin with, it means that our troops will not be allowed to protect the Iraqi people from the insurgents and militias who are trying to terrorize and kill them. Instead of restoring basic security, which General Petraeus has argued should be the central focus of any counterinsurgency campaign, it means our soldiers would instead be ordered, by force of this proposed law, not to stop the sectarian violence happening all around them-no matter how vicious or horrific it becomes.

In short, it means telling our troops to deliberately and consciously turn their backs on ethnic cleansing, to turn their backs on the slaughter of innocent civilians-men, women, and children singled out and killed on the basis of their religion alone. It means turning our backs on the policies that led us to intervene in the civil war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the principles that today lead many of us to call for intervention in Darfur.

This makes no moral sense at all.

It also makes no strategic or military sense either.

He's just getting started.

RLC

Dobbs on Illegals

CNN's Lou Dobbs wonders why we're not being told the truth about illegal immigration:

The mainstream media report as if America would no longer be a welcoming nation if we stopped illegal immigration. Nothing could be further from the truth. Why do the national media conveniently and routinely neglect to report that the United States brings in more lawful immigrants than the countries of the rest of the world combined? Each year, we accept 2 million immigrants legally. We give a million legal immigrants permanent residency every year. We bestow citizenship on 700,000 people a year and provide almost half a million work-related visas a year.

Illegal immigration, in fact, has the potential to change the course of American history: Demographers at the Brookings Institution and the Population Reference Bureau paint a troubling picture of the future of our democracy. As more illegal aliens cross our borders and settle in large states like California, Texas and Florida, congressional seats will be redistributed to these bigger states following each decennial Census. States with low levels of immigration will ultimately lose seats as a result. Unfortunately for American citizens, this seismic shift in political representation will be decided by noncitizens that cannot vote.

Congress will soon take up so-called comprehensive immigration reform, and a bipartisan House bill would probably admit 400,000 guest workers a year. And since any plan calling for eventual legalization would include family members who live outside the United States, the legislation would open our borders to tens of millions of people. The Heritage Foundation's Robert Rector estimated that the 2006 version of the McCain-Kennedy bill would have added an additional 66 million immigrants over the next 20 years. The bill may change, but that estimate has yet to be refuted.

There's no question this type of mass immigration would have a calamitous effect on working citizens and their families. Professor Carol Swain, professor of law and political science at Vanderbilt University and author of "Debating Immigration," would like to see more people speak up for the sectors of society most affected by illegal immigration.

"How many African-American leaders have you seen come out and address the impact that high levels of illegal immigration [are] having in the communities when it comes to jobs, when it comes to education, when it comes to health care?" she asked. "And often, these low-skilled, low-wage workers compete in the same sectors for jobs."

Let's have a vigorous open debate on illegal immigration in this country, and let's begin with the facts. Estimates of illegal aliens in this country range from 12 million to 20 million people. Why doesn't our government know how many there are?

Shouldn't this Congress and this president at least recognize that the industries in which illegal aliens are employed in the greatest percentages also are suffering the largest wage declines? And shouldn't there be an economic impact statement researched and delivered to this Congress, this president and the rest of us before any legislation granting amnesty is even considered?

Shouldn't we first bring the facts of illegal immigration out of the shadows?

Well, yes. I'll start. I heard an interesting claim the other day to the effect that ten years ago the average hourly wage in the meat-packing industry was about $19 an hour. Today it's closer to $10 an hour because the industry is able to find so many illegals who will work so much cheaper. The availability of cheaper labor is driving down wages for everyone in the industry.

Why are not the advocates of the poor raising Cain about the effect that illegals are having on wages and jobs in this country?

RLC

For Bibliophiles

If you are a bibliophile (a lover of books) then you'll very much enjoy this essay in Comment by Mark Bertrand who sounds like a biblioaddict. Bertrand begins his tale this way:

Before the package from Amazon UK reached my doorstep, someone had given it a good kicking. The corners dimpled inward and a jagged gash ran like a scar down one side of the box, giving the cardboard a battered, sinister air.

I probably yelped at the sight. I don't remember. It all happened so quickly. I hoisted the package and moved it inside to the dining room table, then rummaged around for a knife to undo its taped edges. I peeled back the damaged layers, afraid of what I might find, only to breathe a sigh of relief upon discovering the contents safely wrapped in a protective sheen of plastic.

About this time, my wife came in, arms crossed, shaking her head at my anxiety.

"We have thousands of books already," she said. "The walls are lined with them. But you still had to order more."

When I lifted my new treasure out of the box, she rolled her eyes. But I paid no attention.

Instead, I was mesmerized by the orange slipcase, about a foot and a half long, and the row of tiny paperbacks contained within it, their spines arranged by color in a spectrum that ran from blue to orange. Seventy slender volumes, printed in honor of Penguin's seventy years in publishing, but to me they represented more than a milestone. This set was the answer to a baffling conundrum, a problem that had kept me up at night. This was my solution. This was my Godsend.

This was my summer reading.

If you love books you'll want to read the entire piece, nodding the while and thinking "That's me he's talking about."

RLC

Reasons for Unbelief (Pt. II)

A week or so ago we began a series of posts on three main reasons why people find belief in God difficult. We listed those reasons as:

1. The problem posed by human suffering
   
2. Christian exclusivism
   
3. Bad experiences with Christians or with a particular church
   

We talked about the last of these reasons in that first post, and I wish to take up the second reason in this one.

Some people find it very difficult to accept the belief, which is orthodox among conservative Christians, that only those who possess a firm belief in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior will have eternal life. Everyone else is pretty much damned to spend eternity separated from God.

This is a very difficult doctrine to explain to non-Christians and one which many of them find not only implausible but also repugnant. Almost everyone has a loved one, a friend or relative, who has died outside the Church. The thought that that person is lost forever pushes people away from accepting a faith that insists that they're doomed.

There are three ways one might respond to this reaction:

The first is to say that the truth cannot be compromised just because people find it unpleasant. One difficulty with this is that the problem is not so much that people find the doctrine unpleasant but rather that they find it unjust.

The second is to argue that exclusivism is incorrect and that salvation is not limited only to Christians. The problem with this is that the primary source book of Christian doctrine, the Bible, seems to say that it is.

The third response is to argue that whatever Christianity teaches about salvation it is not really germane to the question of whether there is a God. In other words, one is behaving irrationally if one rejects belief in God simply because one rejects a particular tenet of Christian theology.

It is of course the case that unpleasant truths are still truths and that the existence of God does not hinge on the truth of the doctrine of Christian exclusivism, but, even so, there have been some Christians, including luminaries like C.S. Lewis, who think that the second option may also be correct. People who believe this are called "inclusivists," and they hold that it is reasonable to believe that young children, the mentally infirm, and some, perhaps many, people who lived prior to the Christian era will have eternal life. Thus, it is possible, they reason, that those in the present era who never heard of Christ, or who for various reasons were psychologically unable to accept the truth of the revelation of God in Christ, might also be embraced by God.

These Christians insist that Christ's death on the cross is crucial because it's the reason why anyone who receives eternal life does so, but they also believe that there may be many who receive the gift without knowing how or why.

These Christians also insist that this view is compatible both with scripture and with much of the Christian tradition although it must be said that it is a minority view among conservative Protestant theologians, most of whom believe that the Bible squarely rules it out.

In any case, the recent decision of the Catholic church to abandon its teaching on limbo has interesting implications for this issue.

Consider this comment by a Notre Dame theologian:

"If there's no limbo and we're not going to revert to St. Augustine's teaching that unbaptized infants go to hell, we're left with only one option, namely, that everyone is born in the state of grace," said the Rev. Richard McBrien, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame.

"Baptism does not exist to wipe away the "stain" of original sin, but to initiate one into the Church," he said in an e-mailed response."

If McBrien is correct, his words lead logically to the acceptance of Christian inclusivism. If it's true that people are born in a state of grace, or that some people who did not - because they could not - make a conscious decision to accept Christ as their savior, will nevertheless enjoy the "beatific vision," it's very difficult to exclude from that experience others who have, for the same or similar reasons, also not made such a decision.

The mentally infirm, or people in the ancient world, or people in the modern world who never heard the gospel, or, perhaps, people who are aware of Christianity but who for deeply seated psychological reasons have great difficulty believing that the God they love actually became a man and who have such a high view of God that the notion that He was human strikes them as blasphemous, might all, like the child, be psychologically unable to make the decision to believe.

It may be, inclusivists argue, that God saves all who love Him and who want to spend eternity with Him. If so, the essential Christian contribution is the emphasis on the fact that it is only through what God did on the cross in Christ that makes it possible for anyone, Christian or non-Christian, to have eternal life. The difference between Christians and non-Christians in this regard, then, is that Christians have a deeper, more thorough understanding of how God has worked in the world than do their theistic cousins. But that doesn't mean that those others who are non-Christians are necessarily outside the grace of God.

Whether inclusivism will ever be accepted by the majority of Christians remains to be seen. It certainly has a very big hurdle in its way for it has to show that it does not distort the meaning of Scripture and this, its detractors believe, it will never be able to do.

RLC

Feel the Pride

Michael Roberts, a black owner of several television and radio stations, has finally had enough. See the letter he wrote to his employees here. Let's hope that others follow his example.

RLC

White Lies

Novelist Andrew Klavan has a very interesting essay in City Journal which he begins this way:

The thing I like best about being a conservative is that I don't have to lie. I don't have to pretend that men and women are the same. I don't have to declare that failed or oppressive cultures are as good as mine. I don't have to say that everyone's special or that the rich cause poverty or that all religions are a path to God. I don't have to claim that a bad writer like Alice Walker is a good one or that a good writer like Toni Morrison is a great one. I don't have to pretend that Islam means peace.

Of course, like everything, this candor has its price. A politics that depends on honesty will be, by nature, often impolite. Good manners and hypocrisy are intimately intertwined, and so conservatives, with their gimlet-eyed view of the world, are always susceptible to charges of incivility. It's not really nice, you know, to describe things as they are.

This is leftism's great strength: it's all white lies. That's its only advantage, as far as I can tell. None of its programs actually works, after all. From statism and income redistribution to liberalized criminal laws and multiculturalism, from its assault on religion to its redefinition of family, leftist policies have made the common life worse wherever they're installed. But because it depends on-indeed is defined by-describing the human condition inaccurately, leftism is nothing if not polite. With its tortuous attempts to rename unpleasant facts out of existence-he's not crippled, dear, he's handicapped; it's not a slum, it's an inner city; it's not surrender, it's redeployment-leftism has outlived its own failure by hiding itself within the most labyrinthine construct of social delicacy since Victoria was queen.

I don't know that calling these euphemisms "white lies" isn't a bit overstated, but Klavan's point is nevertheless well-taken. We have allowed ourselves to fall into the grasp of a PC culture that makes it a "sin" to use certain words which mask the truth of things. We're so reluctant to appear insensitive or judgmental that we shrink from saying anything that'll make us sound callous or unsophisticated.

What Klavan doesn't tell us, however, is that this is not an exclusive practice of the left, although they are doubtless the biggest offenders in our socio-cultural life, but the right, especially the military, also employs euphemisms, some of which are almost laughable. One example that sticks in my mind was that offered by a military spokesman who, at a news briefing, explained how our troops "addressed" an enemy position with an M-1 Abrams tank.

Anyway, read the whole article.

RLC

Evil Molecules

"....if it's difficult to know where God is when bad things happen, it is even more difficult for atheism to deal with the problem of evil. The reason is that in a purely materialist universe, immaterial things like good and evil and souls simply do not exist. For scientific atheists ... Cho's shooting of all those people can be understood in this way - molecules acting upon molecules."

Dinesh D'Souza writing on the Virginia Tech murders.

He's correct, of course. If all we are is a collocation of atoms then what we do is just the product of chemical reactions in the brain. Those reactions follow the laws of physics, and there's no room in this picture for something like morality and no reason to think that what we do is either good or bad. It's just molecules doing what molecules do.

RLC

Biological Animations

Over the last three years Viewpoint has from time to time featured animations of various processes of cell biology that we've come across in our travels around the internet. Now Denyse O'Leary has catalogued the animations and makes a lot of the links available at one location.

Anyone interested in cell biology who would like to use these as a reference or, in some cases, as a means of having your breath taken away, will find this site very useful.

RLC

A Very Merciful Religion

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Dutch refugee of Somali descent who fled the Netherlands where her life was in danger because she renounced Islam. Now in the U.S. subtle threats are being made against her life by imams in this country, particularly one Fouad ElBayly of Pittsburgh, PA:

A community debate over religious freedom surfaced in Western Pennsylvania last week when Dutch feminist author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee who has lived under the threat of death for denouncing her Muslim upbringing, made an appearance at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. Islamic leaders tried to block the lecture, which was sponsored through an endowment from the Frank J. and Sylvia T. Pasquerilla Lecture Series. They argued that Hirsi Ali's attacks against the Muslim faith in her book, "Infidel," and movie, "Submission," are "poisonous and unjustified" and create dissension in their community.

Although university officials listened to Islamic leaders' concerns, the lecture planned last year took place Tuesday evening under tight security, with no incidents.

Imam Fouad ElBayly, president of the Johnstown Islamic Center, was among those who objected to Hirsi Ali's appearance.

"She has been identified as one who has defamed the faith. If you come into the faith, you must abide by the laws, and when you decide to defame it deliberately, the sentence is death," said ElBayly, who came to the U.S. from Egypt in 1976.

Hirsi Ali, an atheist, has been critical of many Muslim beliefs, particularly on subjects of sexual morality, the treatment of women and female genital mutilation. In her essay "The Caged Virgin," she also wrote of punishment, noting that "a Muslim's relationship with God is one of fear."

"Our God demands total submission. He rewards you if you follow His rules meticulously. He punishes you cruelly if you break His rules, both on earth, with illness and natural disasters, and in the hereafter, with hellfire," she wrote.

In some Muslim countries, such as Iran, apostasy -- abandoning one's religious belief -- and blasphemy are considered punishable by death under sharia, a system of laws and customs that treats both public and private life as governable by God's law.

Sharia is based largely on an interpretation of the Quran, the sayings of the Prophet Mohammed, a consensus of Islamic scholars and reasoning, according to the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations. In some countries, sharia has been associated with stoning to death those who are accused of adultery, flogging for drinking wine and amputation of a hand for theft.

One of the most noted cases of apostasy in recent years involved author Salman Rushdie, whose novel "The Satanic Verses" offered an unflattering portrayal of the Muslim Prophet Mohammed. The book prompted Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa -- a religious decree -- in 1989 calling for Rushdie's assassination.

Although ElBayly believes a death sentence is warranted for Hirsi Ali, he stressed that America is not the jurisdiction where such a crime should be punished. Instead, Hirsi Ali should be judged in a Muslim country after being given a trial, he added.

"If it is found that a person is mentally unstable, or a child or disabled, there should be no punishment," he said. "It's a very merciful religion if you try to understand it."

Zahida Chaudhary, a member of the education council and education secretary at the Muslim Community Center of Greater Pittsburgh in Monroeville, insisted that Islam is a peaceful religion.

"The Prophet Mohammed was a peacemaker and a role model for humanity," she said. "My understanding is that he was a peaceful person who believed that religion was a choice. He tried to teach people and bring them into it, not punish them."

Perhaps so, but the peaceful Prophet was also reported to have said "Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him'" (Bukhari 9.84.57). Peace Be Upon Him.

Islam is a merciful religion like Nazism was a compassionate ideology. The mercy and compassion are for members only.

RLC

Truth Will Out

Melanie Phillips has a story in the American Spectator which should be read by every American. It's about what happened to the Iraqi WMD, and it's the kind of story which makes both the administration and its anti-war opponents look both good and bad at the same time.

Unfortunately, neither side wants to look bad and neither side wants to make the other look good, so nobody, apparently, is checking to see if the account in the American Spectator is correct. Politics is trumping the national interest which makes both sides look even worse.

Phillips acknowledges that she doesn't know if the story is true, but like she says, somebody should certainly be trying to find out.

RLC

Scientists Should Share

Haldane's dilemma was discovered by the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane in 1957. It states that in a period of ten million years there could only be about 1,670 beneficial mutations in a population of animals that would be ancestral to humans. This is far too few mutations to produce the thousands of adaptations that make humans distinct from their ape-like precursors. In other words, the mutation rate is too slow for humans to have evolved in the time frames normally allotted by evolutionists.

This has been a serious irritant to Darwinian biologists for forty five years, but recently evolutionary geneticist Leonard Nunney claims to have developed a computer simulation that shows that mutations could have occurred much more rapidly than the Haldane limit permits.

This has been hailed as a breakthrough, but there is a problem. Nunney won't share the program with ID critics so there's no way to confirm whether it does what he says it does. Critics are evidently expected to simply take his word for it.

This is truly astonishing. Science is built on being able to repeat the work of others in order to confirm it, but despite Nunney's intransigence, other scientists are touting his work as being a refutation of the Haldane limit and of those who argue that the limit makes human evolution from any proposed ancestor highly dubious.

One wonders what Nunney could possibly fear about sharing his software, and why his colleagues think that he has made a great leap forward when he won't let that leap be examined. One also wonders whether researchers in any other scientific discipline would give a pass to a colleague who wouldn't share data and methodology.

I doubt it.

RLC

Illegal Aliens

Human Events claims that the media are not telling us about the seriousness of the illegal immigration crisis. For example, they cite the following facts that are difficult to find in media stories:

• Only 2 percent of illegal aliens are actually picking fruit and vegetables, but 41 percent are on welfare.
• 1 in 10 babies born in the U.S. are to illegal aliens.
• 60 percent of Housing and Urban Development funds go to illegal aliens.
• 13 Americans are killed each day by uninsured drunk driving illegals.

If you wish to sign a petition that demands that the media fulfill its responsibility to report the story accurately you can find one here.

RLC

Music of the Spheres

Lem passes along a link to a site where the natural internal vibrations of the sun are translated into sound. Stars, were they not suspended in a vacuum, would produce an enormous number of bell-like resonances which would fill the cosmos with music.

Follow the links and you can hear some of the solar resonances. As you listen to them imagine what these would sound like, if they could be heard, coming from billions of stars in a single galaxy.

RLC

Compassionate Conservatism

Rush Limbaugh reports that over the course of one three hour broadcast on Friday his show raised $3 million dollars for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society to assist in their search for a cure for blood cancers (Limbaugh himself donated $320,000). Three million dollars for a charity from an audience of allegedly stingy, tight-fisted mean-spirited, selfish, uncompassionate conservatives is quite a remarkable achievement.

Conservative talk-radio host Sean Hannity has also raised large sums for children of soldiers killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We await results of similar fund-raisers held under liberal auspices. No doubt the Great Souls in the party of compassion, liberality, and generosity have done even better. Or not.

In fact, does anyone know whether similar fund-raisers for charity have ever even been held by any broadcast medium under liberal auspices? Al Franken's bunch at Air America? Keith Olbermann or Chris Matthews at MSNBC? The New York Times or Washington Post? Newsweek or Time? Or is the liberal idea of charitable fund-raising just urging government to raise your taxes?

RLC

The Loss of Moral Clarity

Julian Baggini writes in The Guardian about what he sees as the death of moral clarity at the hands of post-modern philosophers. When the intellectual movers and shakers of our age abandoned the notion of objective truth and replaced it with the idea that all truth is a matter of one's own interpretation and experience, morality took to its death-bed:

Of course, the works of truth-deniers such as Michel Foucault and Richard Rorty are hardly bestsellers. Yet their ideas do filter through to society as a whole. Consider, for instance, how what passes for common sense about morality has been turned on its head. For millennia, most people believed that right was right and wrong was wrong, and that was all there was to it. Now, university lecturers report that their fresh-faced new students take it as obvious that there is no such thing as "the truth" and that morality is relative. In educated circles at least, only the naive believe in objectivity. What was shocking when Nietzsche first proclaimed it at the end of the 19th century became platitudinous by the start of the 21st.

Perhaps the most powerful idea to filter through from the universities to the streets was articulated by Foucault, who adapted and popularised the Nietzschean idea that what passes for truth is actually no more than power. There are no facts, only attempts to impose your view on the world by fixing it as "The Truth". This idea is now so mainstream that even a conservative like Donald Rumsfeld could complain about those who lived in the "reality-based community", arguing "that's not the way the world really works anymore ... when we act, we create our own reality."

Some philosophers, such as Bernard Williams and Simon Blackburn, have waded into the public debate in an attempt to put the relativist genie back into the bottle. Books such as Why Truth Matters, by my colleagues Jeremy Stangroom and Ophelia Benson, have also tried to stem the tide. But this is not really a highbrow academic debate about whether there is Truth with a capital T - it is about how abstract ideas relate to the business of everyday life.

Richard Rorty, for example, argues against Truth brilliantly, and it is far from clear that he is simply wrong. The problem is that he does not concede as unequivocally as he should that in practice his theories usually leave the world more or less as it is. Rorty believes as much as anyone else that the Holocaust happened more or less as described in history books, he just refuses to use an allegedly outmoded vocabulary of truth to say so.

Ironically, like many left-leaning intellectuals, Rorty thinks that denying objectivity and truth is politically important, as a way of liberating people from the ways of seeing the world promoted as the Truth by the powerful. However, it turns out that Rorty and his ilk seriously misjudged what happens if intellectuals deny truth stridently and frequently enough. Far from making liberal openness more attractive, such denials actually make it appear empty, repugnant and weak compared to the crystalline clarity and certainty of dogma.

They owe us an apology for failing to either see themselves, or make it clear to others, that in the everyday world we can and must distinguish truth and falsity, right and wrong, even if on close examination these terms do not mean what we thought they did. Science may not be God-like in its objectivity, but it is not just another myth. Moral values must be questioned, but if discrimination against women, homosexuals or ethnic minorities is wrong here, then it is wrong anywhere else in the world. Truth may not be the simple phenomenon we assume it to be, but falsehoods must be challenged.

Unless we can make a convincing case that the choice is not between relativism or dogmatism, more and more people will reject the former and embrace the latter. When they do, those who helped create the impression that modern, secular rationality leaves everything up for grabs in the marketplace of belief will have to take their share of the blame.

That last sentence is puzzling. Modern, secular rationality does indeed leave everything up for grabs, at least in terms of ethics. There can be no right or wrong unless people are morally obligated to do one thing rather than another, but in a secular world there is no moral obligation to do anything. Nothing obligates us, and there's no one to say that what we do is moral or immoral, right or wrong.

Nor am I sure I agree with Baggini when he says that the choice is between relativism and dogmatic certainty. The choice, rather, is between relativism (more accurately, subjectivism) and the belief(not the certainty)that there is objective truth about morals, and that Truth does exist.

If one denies the existence of objective moral truth, as one must if one also denies the existence of God, then one is left with a subjectivism that means the end of any meaningful ethical discourse. Right and wrong become matters of personal taste and preference, like questions about whether one likes Pepsi or Coke. In such a world morality is an anachronism and the idea that there are moral "falsehoods" and that moral "values should be questioned" is absurd. It would be like questioning someone's preference for Coke over Pepsi or saying that their preference for Coke is "false."

RLC

A Decent Interval

While the casualties at Virginia Tech were still being ambulanced to the hospitals The Nation's John Nichols was fulminating about how the NRA would despicably seek to spin and exploit this tragedy:

Do not doubt that the National Rifle Association is preparing its "this-had-nothing-to-do-with-guns" press release. The group has no compunctions about living up to its reputation for being beyond shame -- or education -- when it comes to peddling its spin on days when it would be better to simply remain silent. But the NRA will not be alone in responding in a self-serving manner.

Nichols then spent the rest of his article doing himself exactly what he predicted the low-lifes at the NRA would be doing - peddling his own spin in a self-serving manner on a day when it would be better to remain silent. Evidently people like Nichols see nothing wrong with criticizing others who might engage in the same behavior he does engage in.

He succeeds, in other words, in making himself look shameless and ridiculous both at once. Kudos.

RLC